"Leanness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the form pictured by No. 12 exaggerate the longness and leanness of their faces by wearing their locks like looped curtains. A long nose with two long lines on either side of the cheek seems longer than it is, as the observer may discern three lines instead of only the nasal one, and the impression of ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... door of the theatre and halted in the chilly grey light that struggled through the dusty windows. A figure was crouching before the large grate and by its leanness and greyness he knew that it was the dean of studies lighting the fire. Stephen closed the door ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... generous. They are generally men who are accomplishing things, and who let other people tell about it. Thus, the padre liked Courtlandt's voice, his engaging smile, his frank unwavering eyes; and he liked the leanness about the jaws, which was indicative of strength of character. In fact, he experienced a singular jubilation as he ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... fine-drawn to leanness, heavy lines were scored on his forehead, he had twice been wounded, had taken part in desperate fighting, witnessed many harrowing ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... Ennis's outstretched hand and peered down at her with narrowed eyelids. She received the further impression, an impression she had almost forgotten in the intervening years, of height and leanness, of dark eyes, and dark, crisp hair; a vibrant impression; something like a chord of music struck sharply. Unconsciously she let her hand rest in his for a moment, then she drew it away hastily. He was smiling and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... manner I concluded, that had all these Advertisers arrived to that Skill they pretend to, they would have had no Need for so many Years successively to publish to the World the Place of their Abode, and the Virtues of their Medicines. One of these Gentlemen indeed pretends to an effectual Cure for Leanness: What Effects it may have had upon those who have try'd it I cannot tell; but I am credibly informed, that the Call for it has been so great, that it has effectually cured the Doctor himself of that Distemper. Could each of them produce so good an Instance ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Guinea Negro; the stolid Indian, and ant-like plodder of teeming India,—are but the outward symbols of that contrariety of moral, or rather immoral existence which is the fate of barbarism. They have no equality of beauty nor ugliness, leanness nor obesity, vice nor virtue, but varying differences, such as the spontaneous growth of uncultured nature in different climes exhibits in the vegetable and lower orders of the animal creation. What a contrast is this to that trained, drilled conformation to ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... Nature, and endeavored to overcome sterility of imagination and want of passion by veneering with magniloquent epithets. They padded their ill-favored Muse, belaced and beruffled her, and covered her with garments stiffened with tawdry embroidery to hide her leanness; they overpowdered and overrouged to give her the beauty Providence had refused. I say their Muse, but they had no Muse of their own; they imported an inferior one from England, and tried her in every style,—Pope's and Dryden's, Goldsmith's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... checked itself within a yard of Margaret, and the lady—a stranger—held back long enough to stamp on her hostess a sharp impression of sallowness, leanness, keenness, before she said, in a voice that might have been addressing an unruly committee meeting: "I am Lady Caroline Duckett—a fact I found it impossible to make clear to the young woman who let ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... beech trees, which have also the angular edges of reeds. How different from the harp-strings which form the aerial skeleton of Chartres! No, in spite of all, Beauvais, like Reims, and like Paris, is a fleshy cathedral; it has not the elegant leanness, the perennial youthfulness of form, the Patrician stamp of Amiens, and more ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... shocks; it ran easily on the ice, but when the snow was soft on the ground it was put upon a frame; to make it glide more easily it was rubbed, Esquimaux fashion, with sulphur and snow. Six dogs drew it; notwithstanding their leanness these animals did not appear to suffer from the cold; their buckskin harness was in good condition, and they could draw a weight of two thousand pounds without fatigue. The materials for encampment consisted of a tent, ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... the people who were there, Turning their faces, hurried on their steps, Both by their leanness and their wishes light. ...
— Dante's Purgatory • Dante
... and gaunt in being old: Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast; And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt? For sleeping England long time have I watch'd; Watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt: The pleasure that some fathers feed upon Is my strict fast,—I mean my children's looks; And therein fasting, hast thou made me gaunt: Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as a grave, Whose hollow womb ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... above his companions and bore himself with an air of authority. He was unusually tall, at least six feet three, and very slim, very lithe; he was alert, keen; he was like the blade of a rapier. The leanness of his legs was accentuated by his stiff, starched riding-breeches and close-fitting pigskin puttees, while his face, apart from all else, would have challenged ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... devil Maha-Sohon cause the chin-cough, leanness of the body, thirst, madness, and mad babblings, he will come down at half-past seven, and accept the offerings ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... the dried up leanness of the bronzed Mediterranean. The salt wind more than his years had tanned his face, wrinkling it with deep crevices. A capricious coloring had darkened the depths of these cracks while the part exposed to the sun appeared washed several shades lighter. His short stiff ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... refrained from saluting me, which, as I was plainly dressed and much stained by travel, was in some degree pardonable. By the fire, partaking of a coarse meal, was a fourth man of so singular an appearance that I must needs describe him. He was of great height and extreme leanness. His face matched his form, for it was long and thin, terminating in a small peaked beard which, like his hair and mustachios, was as white as snow. With all this, his eyes glowed with much of the fire of youth, and his brown complexion and sinewy hands seemed still to indicate robust health. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... greased her hands and her eyelids, and drank of a phial, and commenced tugging at a brass ring fixed in the floor, and it yielded and displayed an opening, over which she stooped the upper half of her leanness, and pitching her note high, called 'Karaz!' After that, she rose and retreated from the hole hastily, and in the winking of an eye it was filled, as 'twere a pillar of black smoke, by the body of the Genie, he ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rule, superior to the Irish Terrier in front legs, and feet, but in the direction of these points great improvements have recently been observable. The heads of our Irish Terriers have also been brought nearer to a level of perfection, chiselled to the desired degree of leanness, with the determined expression so characteristic of the breed, and with the length, squareness, and strength of muzzle which formerly were so difficult to find. This squareness of head and jaw is an important point to be considered when choosing an ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... her was imbued with grace, expressive, from the tips of her toes to the tips of her fingers. The demands of the public sometimes forced upon her odious ballet-skirts, sometimes she wasted her talent on the futilities of skirt-dancing; but chiefly she loved the national measures, and her phenomenal leanness made her only comfortable in the national dress. She travelled from place to place in Spain with another woman whom she had taught to dance, and whose beauty she used cleverly as a foil to her own uncomeliness; and so wasted herself in these low resorts, earning hardly sufficient to keep body ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... said Anna, "I am certain that she will be very fat. She will not have so much to do and will have much to eat. She shall fat up at once." She spoke with honest earnestness. Could leanness be against ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... Davison was still awaited, and with interest. He came, and that interest did not appear to be mutual, judging from the Oriental impassivity of his long, brown face, with its narrow, inscrutable eyes. He was tall, slight, sinewy as a Bedouin, his age uncertain, since his dry leanness and the dash of silver at his temples might be the ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... this—Balzac introduces me to a Pole by name Paz, who, loving the wife of his friend, devotes himself to watch over her happiness and her husband's interest. The husband gambles and is profligate. Paz informs the wife that the leanness which hazard and debauchery have caused to the domestic exchequer is due to his extravagance, the husband having lent him money. She does not believe, and Paz feigns an intrigue with a circus-rider in order to lull all suspicions. She says to her adored spouse, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... any rate, that it is something independent of climate and locality, and not at all endemic. Otherwise it might be true that the restless and inquisitive climate of the Atlantic coast, which wears the ordinary Yankee to leanness, and "establishes a raw" upon the nervous system, does soften to acuteness, mobility, and racy corrugation in the breast of its natural ally, the Doctor. For autocratic tempers are bland towards each other, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... sat side by side, with their racquets across their knees, not saying much but smiling slightly all the time. Through the thin white clothes which they wore, it was possible to see the lines of their bodies and legs, the beautiful curves of their muscles, his leanness and her flesh, and it was natural to think of the firm-fleshed sturdy children that would be theirs. Their faces had too little shape in them to be beautiful, but they had clear eyes and an appearance of great health and power of endurance, for it seemed as if ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... "The herb, stamped with swine's grease, wasteth away the kernels by the throat; and women do usually make pottage of Cleavers with a little mutton and oatmeal, to cause leanness, and to keep them from fatness." Dioscorides reported that: "Shepherds do use the herb to take hairs out of the milk, if any ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... gay and grim, Now patches where some leanness of the soil's Broke into moss or substances like boils; Then came some palsied oak, a cleft in him Like a distorted mouth that splits its rim 155 Gaping at death, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... Kendal, six feet of leanness doubled up in an arm-chair. Old Wellington face, shrunk, cheeks burning in a senile raddle. Glassy blue eyes weeping from ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... travellers are struck by the lowness of stature, the leanness and the paleness which present themselves so commonly to the eye at Manchester, and above all, among the factory classes. I have never been in any town in Great Britain, nor in Europe, in which degeneracy of form and colour from the national standard has been so obvious. Among the married ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... afternoon of the reception he felt confident that Horace Endicott had fairly disappeared beneath the new man Dillon. His figure had filled out slightly, and had lost its mournful stoop; his face was no longer wolfish in its leanness, and his color had returned, though melancholy eyes marked by deep circles still betrayed the sick heart. Yet the figure in the glass looked as unlike Horace Endicott as Louis Everard. He compared it with the accurate portrait sent out by his pursuers through the press. Only ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... he sucked out the steaming marrow gazed at his approaching host. Bushy whiskers and yellowish gray hair, stained by camp smoke, concealed most of the face, but failed wholly to hide the gaunt, almost cadaverous, cheeks. It was a healthy leanness, Smoke decided, as he noted the wide flare of the nostrils and the breadth and depth of chest that gave spaciousness to the guaranty ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... is well known to be rare—has probably not occurred before within the memory of living sportsmen." Here, as at the Isles of Shoals, the visitors were at first easily shot (they are not counted among game birds where they are known, on account of their habitual leanness, I suppose); but they had landed upon inhospitable shores, and were not long in becoming aware of their misfortune. In the middle of December one of our Cambridge ornithologists went to Cape Cod on purpose to find them. He saw about sixty birds, but by this time ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... meant to be understood to say, that Miss Effingham was somewhat inclined to embonpoint. I do not pretend to know the reason of this: perhaps leanness and emaciation were not considered genteel when she happened to be educated, as they are unfortunately by too many of my fair countrywomen; perhaps she never thought much about it; for I have always observed that very beautiful women, who prefer revolving in the quiet ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... to wilt under the blight of poverty, and to revive under the fuller harvesting of this world's goods, and Mr. Shelton, Sr., who had, in the days of his leanness, let Polly run wild with all the college boys of Harmouth, became suddenly particular, as his bank account fattened, in regard to the niceties of conduct in his daughters. His scruples even embraced Deena; ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various |
