"Mustiness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the heavy tread of Varr himself as he walked through the main office to the small room where his own desk was located. He frowned at the difference, and sniffed discontentedly at the stale air which seemed already to have taken on the peculiar flat mustiness appropriate to closed and deserted habitations. He frowned again when he drew his finger along a desk and noted the depth of the furrow it ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... book-self-consciousness, the unprotected, public-street feeling one has—all these things are very grave and important obstacles which our great librarians, with their great systems—most of them—have yet to reckon with. A little more mustiness, gentlemen, please, silence, slowness, solitude with books, as if they were woods, unattainableness (and oh, will any one understand it?), a little inconvenience, a little old-fashioned, happy inconvenience; a chance to gloat and take pains and love things with ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... close and suffocating in the carriage. The air was filled with the smell of soldiers' clothes, mustiness, and the leather of wet boots. The young gendarme who sat opposite Werner breathed warmly upon him, and in his breath there was the odor of onions and cheap tobacco. But some brisk, fresh air came in through certain clefts, and because of this, ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... stirred and it put a roof over their heads, although, as Clint said, if it rained before morning they'd probably find the roof of little account. On the other hand, it was damper than the outdoors and the mustiness was far from fragrant. They decided, however, to take up their quarters there until morning. Looking for the road was evidently quite useless, and, anyway, they were much too tired to tramp any longer. They found ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... glanced round the dirty room. The place looked as though it hadn't been cleaned for a month. There was a hideous accumulation of unwashed utensils scattered everywhere. The floor was unswept, let alone unwashed. And the smell of stale food and general mustiness helped to add to the keenness of the visitor's nervous edge as he waited for the ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... dismally in the silence which followed. They just stood there. The minutes thudded by; the mustiness enwrapped them. Outside the window a dead piece of branch fell crackling to the ground. Gradually he grew to be unaware of her presence, so sharp and rapid were the currents which successively swept ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to rent—perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odor of unkempt old age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque center of legend ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... his shoulder and placed it near the stairs. Dust lay thick all around him, powdering up and swirling, as he moved down the narrow aisles; a damp, leathery mustiness lived in the air, an odor of mold ...
— Small World • William F. Nolan
... fascinated Barrie, and made her heart beat heavily, as if she were on the threshold of a mystery. It was made up of many odours: a faint, not unpleasant mustiness, the smell of dust, a perfume of old potpourri, and spices, cloves, and camphor for moths, a vague fragrance of rosewood and worm-eaten oak, a hint of beeswax, a tang of ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... slight mustiness the second egg was very palatable indeed. He was getting on to the bottom of it as Miriam came in. He looked up. "Nice afternoon," he said at her stare, and perceived she knew him at once by the gesture and the voice. She went white and shut the door behind her. She looked as though she was ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells |
