"Blankness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dumbly out of the infirmary and down a bare corridor whose metal floor rang coldly underfoot. An open port near the corridor's end relieved the blankness of wall and let in a flood of reddish Alphardian sunlight; Farrell slowed to look out, wondering how long he had lain unconscious, and felt panic knife at him when he saw Xavier's scouter lying, port open and undefended, ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... wrinkles. She was thirty, perhaps, or younger. Gossip had never touched her, but every man naturally and instantly rose to flirtatiousness when he spoke to her, and every woman watched her with stilled blankness. ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... me more or less according to her mood; but she did not usurp my sitting-room again. I used to sit by the hour at the lantern window, in a sort of greasy blankness, like a meat pudding, and vacantly scrutinize the loiterers who passed by on the hot asphalt of the Parade. Screened by the window curtains, I could see and hear without endangering my own privacy; and many were the odd interchanges of speech that ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... know either," said Betty, humorously and simply, and who shall deny that this blankness of mind, when combined with profusion, mother wit, old wives' tales, haphazard ways, moments of astonishing daring, humour, and sentimentality—who shall deny that in these respects every woman is ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... was spirited away as if by some furious and mighty power that had grown impatient in waiting for it. There remained for a few seconds on the collective retina of the spectators a vision of the inclined car swinging near the roof like the tail of a kite. And then nothing! Blankness! Blackness! Already the balloon was lost to sight in the vast stormy ocean of the night, a plaything of the winds. The spectators became once more aware of the dull booming of the cannonade. The balloon was already perhaps flying ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... in the morning with a headache. My emotion of the previous day had vanished. It was replaced by a dreary sense of blankness and a sort of sadness I had not known till then, as though something had died ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... sound in the forest at all—not the cry of a bird, not the rustle of snow falling from a branch—but there was something deeper and remoter than sound, the approach of night. There was a change on the face of the forest—an effective silence which was not blankness—a voiceless expression of attention as the Newcomer settled into his place. Fanny looked up and saw the labyrinth of trees in the very act of ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... another of the Earth-ships, in quick succession, a new ray reached out—the ray of green radiance that killed all life forms, and ship after ship of that interstellar host was dead and lifeless. Dozens—till suddenly they ceased to feel those beams, as a strange curtain of waving blankness spread out from the ships, and both induction-beam and death-beam alike turned as aside, each becoming useless. From the outsiders came beams, for now that their slowly created screen of blankness was up, they could work through it, ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... going down and down before it, not even putting out her hands to resist or cling by the way, only reading into the young man's very face an immense fatality and, for all his bright nobleness his absence of rancor or of protesting pride, the great gray blankness of her doom. It was as if the earnest Miss Lindeck, tall and mild, high and lean, with eye-glasses and a big nose, but "marked" in a noticeable way, elegant and distinguished and refined, as you could see from a mile off, and as graceful, for common despair of imitation, as the curves of ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... He carried the manuscript about with him, as Goethe did his "Faust," for years, and added to it, or erased, all according to the moods that came to him. And we have reason to believe that the sublime soliloquy in "Cato" was written by Addison when the blankness of his prospects and the blackness of the future had forced the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... she went out. I laid the sketch on the table beside me, and sat thinking. A sudden blankness fell upon me as I stood mentally opposite this new idea that had never presented itself to me in the same form before, that in my former easy, wandering existence I had always welcomed a beautiful model, not ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... child. The shock knocked the strength out of me. I had never thought of anything else but being a soldier, you see, and it's a strange experience to have to face life afresh, with everything that you had expected taken out of it, and nothing ahead but blankness and disappointment. I've been so strong too—as strong as a horse. If it hadn't been for that blow—well, it's over! It's a comfort to me to feel that it was not my own fault. If I'd been lazy or careless, and had failed in the exam., it would have driven ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... blankness of mine. Instead of continuing my early prejudice, which I now recall was preposterously in your favour, I survey you coldly for the first time. You know I'm afraid to look at print for fear I've ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... he was poignantly familiar with; a look which had first dawned in his father's face, flickeringly, intermittently, and which had grown and intensified, week after week, month after month, till it had gone out in the blankness of despair. That was when the elder Dirke heard his sentence of imprisonment. For Aaron Dirke's failure had involved moral as well as ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... flagging hopes of declining years, is both a sad and a perplexing prospect to a thoughtful person. For such a person cannot regard this great change simply in the light of a rest from toil and worry; he will know quite well what a blankness and listlessness and loss of interest in life will come of feeling all at once that you have nothing at all to do. And so it is a great blessing, if your vocation be one which is a dignified and befitting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... baselessness When calm is in the air, The Iris half in tracelessness Hovers faintly fair. Fitfully assailing it A wind from heaven blows, Shivering and paling it To blankness of the snows; While, incessant in renewal, The Arch rekindled grows, Till again the gem and jewel Whirl in blinding overthrows— Till, prevailing and transcending, Lo, the Glory perfect there, And the contest finds an ending, For repose is in ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... it a sense of blankness descended on her. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain hesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy system naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she supposed, in the first moments after death—before ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... remained. Little hills and cliffs and valleys and chalk-pits that had once seemed big had been levelled up, or away, and I lost my bearings altogether, and felt a strange, creeping chill of blankness and bereavement. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... I am thinking merely of the lesser disappointments which commonly attend post-time: the Times not coming when you were counting with more than ordinary certainty on its appearing; the letter of no great consequence, which yet you would have liked to have had. A certain blankness—a feeling difficult to define—attends even the slightest disappointment; and the effect of a great one is very stunning and embittering indeed. You remember how the nobleman in Ten Thousand a Year, who had been refused a seat in the Cabinet, sympathized with poor Titmouse's exclamation ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... an appearance at six o'clock on the fatal evening. He was a short, slight man, with a clean-shaven face mapped with tiny wrinkles, and a pair of colourless eyes the blankness of whose expression defied research. In conversation, especially conversation of a diplomatic nature, Mr. Smith seemed to be looking through his opponent at something beyond, an uncomfortable habit which was a source of ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... very well-known fact, one with which Bulwer Lytton dealt with great power, that an intolerable sadness is the very first experience of the neophyte in Occultism. A sense of blankness falls upon him which makes the world a waste, and life a vain exertion. This follows his first serious contemplation of the abstract. In gazing, or even in attempting to gaze, on the ineffable mystery of his own higher nature, he himself causes the initial trial to fall on him. ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... fine work in marble, or metal? She was a treasure in herself. Altogether the heavens were very dark; and it was scarcely possible for any one who knew well his jovial cast of countenance, to keep from laughing, whatever his real sympathy, at the unusual length and blankness which were suddenly ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... a smooth blankness that passed unnoticed by both Elinor and Patricia, now intent on finishing their ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... A blankness came over the girl's face as a light cloud will cross the moon. She regarded Hilda from behind it with penetrant anxiety. "Did you really enjoy ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the table ticked on, but Martin Eden, his face buried on his arms, did not hear it. He heard nothing. He did not think. So absolutely had he relived life that he had fainted just as he fainted years before on the Eighth Street Bridge. For a full minute the blackness and the blankness endured. Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat pouring ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... when he maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far as he could describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a hideous void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to things in which they believed—it was an article of faith with them that the cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some manner he shocked them, and gave ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... in his own orchard, or an exceptional precious stone, to be admired for its weight and lustre. Berridge accepted the offer mechanically—relieved at the prompt fading of his worst fear, yet feeling in himself a tell-tale facial blankness for the still absolutely anomalous character of his friend's appeal. He was even tempted for a moment to lay the volume down without looking at it—only with some extemporised promise to borrow it of their host and take it home, to give himself to it at an easier ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... Staff Battery, I saw a sight that took away my appetite for breakfast. Pacing slowly to their work to the music of clanking chains was a column of wretched convicts.[A] What haggard faces, with low foreheads, sunken eyes, and dogged moody expression or utter blankness of expression! Purely animal the most of that legion of despair and desperation looked, and sallow and sickly of complexion. They were a blot on the fresh sunshine. How hideous their coarse garb of pied jackets branded with the broad arrow, their knickerbockers ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... was the height of his madness, his despondency is but the extreme of his sanity. Something thus now, to all appearance, with the man in gray. Society his stimulus, loneliness was his lethargy. Loneliness, like the sea breeze, blowing off from a thousand leagues of blankness, he did not find, as veteran solitaires do, if anything, too bracing. In short, left to himself, with none to charm forth his latent lymphatic, he insensibly resumes his original air, a quiescent one, blended of sad humility ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... cried, pulling at his coat, "shegry ain'tgry gotgry agry thinggry." But when the little girl, who knew pig-Latin in all its various dialects, turned angry, scornful eyes upon her, the neighbor woman's daughter sat up and her smile faded to a sickly blankness. ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... Her quick glance rested immediately upon Meyers and the boy. And in that moment some instinct prompted Jock McChesney to shake his head, ever so slightly, and assume a blankness of expression. And Emma McChesney, with that shrewdness which had made her one of the best salesmen on the ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... dear, here we are, all of us—ready for anything in the way of a frolic—what's it to be? Forfeits, games, Puss in the Corner, something to cheer us all up, eh? Won't anyone make a suggestion? [General expression of gloomy blankness. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 27, 1890 • Various
... telephone at Rink's Hotel in a pantry near the barroom and closed the door to insure his privacy. It seemed an interminable interval of waiting, an interval of blankness filled with voices calling numbers on to further voices, before the Club Central answered. Again he waited, tapping with impatience on the table. When the voice came he wanted, it was far away and drowsy. Kenny looked at his watch. It was ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... with his hands crossed, and a look of inexpressible blankness, "the child wants to marry! ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... would have given way. He would have acceded to anything she asked, but she asked nothing. As the time passed her demands of him, even to his help in small matters of the household, grew less. A slight, inscrutable change had come over her: she was less responsive, often held him with an eye whose blankness told of inner imaginings, when he spoke made no answer, concentrated in her reverie. When he watched her withdrawn in these dreams, or in a sudden attack of industry, fashioning small garments from her hoarded ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... held it against her bosom. She did not know that her lips touched his, she was seeking only to learn if he breathed. When his eyes opened blankly, she kissed them till they closed again, because she could not bear to see the dreadful blankness that was in them. When he moaned she fell to rocking gently back and forth, holding his head closer against her breast, and presently began to croon softly. She never once thought of calling for help; it was to her as if there had been no one but ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... there are no lines of union with the ground; the meagre monotony of the lines of shingles and clapboards making subdivisions too small to be impressive, and too large to be overlooked,—and finally, the paint, of which the outside really consists, thrusting forward its chalky blankness, as it were a standing defiance of all possibility of assimilation,—all combine to form something that shall forever remain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... finding words for it—words eloquent of its force and dignity. But before her simple impulsive question I was dumb. A wave of shyness swept over me; not even to her could I divulge my thoughts, not even from her risk the smile of ridicule or the blankness of non-apprehension. I became wretchedly certain that I should be only absurd and priggish, that she would not believe me, would see only excuse and hypocrisy in what I said. It was so difficult also not to seem to accuse her, to charge her with grasping ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... triumphantly into the intent upturned faces into which had crept a look of blankness. There were those who thought vaguely that nitrogen was the scientific name for mosquito, while others confused it with nitre, an excellent emergency ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... she was remembering the tavern on the veld. She was recalling what had been—realising what must henceforth be, in its fullest meaning. She shuddered, and her half-open mouth drew in the air in gasps, and the blankness of her stare appalled him. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... to sleep that night but she did sleep and heavily. When she awoke it was to blankness, a cold throbbing blankness of undefined ill being. Then her Ego, with a sigh, came back from far places; the busy brain shot into focus; all the memories, fears, humiliation of the night before stood forth clear and poignant. She buried her ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... gone, not to return that night or any other night. In a desperate, still fashion she guarded this flaming conviction, peering up from long contemplations of it to learn whether there flickered any light of torment on Hugh's face. But all day, after the queer blankness of face and eyes with which he had first received her news of Sylvie's disappearance, he had been alternately gay and tranquil. All morning he had mended his boat, and in the afternoon he had cleaned his gun; and whenever he could cajole Bella into being his audience, he had talked. ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... the thought of my heart. But my lips were saying, "When I awoke I threw my pistol away." Sheer blankness kept my thoughts silent for a little while; I said empty things. "I am very glad I did not kill you—that you are here, so fair ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... river it is faced by factories and storehouses; within, you find yourself in a labyrinth of brown, narrow streets, that resemble rather rifts in some mud mountain, than anything with which architecture has had to do. Yet here and there the blankness of the walls is relieved and broken by richly worked lattices, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... when a letter came from Julia that stirred me all up again. She said—very casually—that 'Uncle Jervis' had been caught out all night in a storm when he was hunting in Canada, and had been ill ever since with pneumonia. And I never knew it. I was feeling hurt because he had just disappeared into blankness without a word. I think he's pretty unhappy, and I ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... in her brave resolve to quit Harbury, she had not thought how she should feel when all was indeed over. She had not pictured the utter blankness of a world wherein Harold was not. The snare broken and her soul escaped, she knew not how it would beat its broken wings in the dun air, meeting nothing but the black, silent waste, ready once more to flutter helplessly down into ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... dreary silence and blankness, for he had placed himself so that he could see nothing but the sky, and had taken off his silver ears as well as his gold spectacles—what was the use of either when he had no legs with which to walk or run?—up from below there rose ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... day grew outside. Cuckoo, having directed her steps down a blind-alley had, not unnaturally, reached a dead-wall, blotting out the horizon. Lying there, she faced it. She stared at the wall, and the wall seemed to stare back at her. Perhaps for that reason a dull blankness flowed over and filled her mind, and made her widely opened eyes almost as expressionless as the eyes of a corpse. For a long time she lay in this alive stupor. Then Jessie stirred again, and Cuckoo, as she had been before spurred into wakefulness, was stirred into thoughtfulness. She began to pass ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... He looked at me with that blankness of incomprehension that must be maddening in a man after you are married ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... then, once here in this loveliness, with everything so soft and kind and sweet all round, it would be easier to tell him, to try and explain, to ask for something different, for at least an attempt at something different in their lives in the future, instead of the blankness of separation, the cold—oh, the cold—of nothing at all but the great windiness of faith, the great bleakness of works. Why, one person in the world, one single person belonging to one, of one's very own, to talk to, to take care of, to love, to be interested in, was worth ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... desireable after her heavy scourging. She wished for the touches of affection, knowing them to be selfish, but her love of life and hard view of its reality made them seem a soft reminder of what life had been. Alvan had gone. Her natural blankness of imagination read his absence as an entire relinquishment; it knelled in a vacant chamber. He had gone; he had committed an irretrievable error, he had given up a fight of his own vain provoking, that was too severe for him: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... upon the grass in the garden under the shade of a tree. The "office" had been stifling hot, and there had been even less to suggest any hope of possible professional business than the blankness of most days held. There never was any business, but at rare intervals someone dropped in and asked him a question or so, his answers to which, by the exercise of imagination, might be regarded as coming under the head of "advice." His clients ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Bill, in this case, was the blankest of blanks in the lottery of their draw for information. Whether this blankness was real or affected men could not make up their minds. The gambler was so unlike his usual self. The hard, rough, autocratic manner of the man seemed to have undergone a subtle change. He went about full of geniality and a lightness his fellow-citizens had never before observed in him. And, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... murmured Carley. A blankness seemed to wave over her. It extended to the air without, to the sense of the golden sunset. It passed. What should she ask—what out of a thousand sudden flashing queries? ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... days which had passed, the first days of my home-coming after my long absence, I knew, by the blankness of our separation—though I would not admit it to myself—that she was my affinity. I was hers. She, the elegant little wanderer, possessed me, body and soul. I felt for her a strong affection, and affection is the ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... them the eyes of loveliness I had come up to look into didn't show at all the conscious light I had just been pleased to see them flash across the house: they showed on the contrary, to my confusion, a strange, sweet blankness, an expression I failed to give a meaning to until, without delay, I felt on my arm, directed to it as if instantly to efface the effect of her start, the grasp of the hand she had impulsively snatched from me. It was the irrepressible question in this ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... the extremest depth of horror. The book said that he had felt as though his bones were turning to water, and Zaidos had sneered at the description. It flashed into his mind when he looked into the wild, chalky countenance of the man against the wall. He glanced down the line of soldiers. A stupid blankness seemed to envelop them. Pale as death they stared at the shaking creature before them. There was a terrible silence that sounded as loud and beat as fiercely in their ears as the boom of cannon. Things moved with frightful deliberation. It seemed that they stood for hours staring ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... last His life must pay. O, soul so full of sin, So devil tangled, tortured—which not prayer Nor watching could deliver. So I thought To save my soul from murder I must fly— I felt an urging as one does in sleep Pursued by giant things to fly, to fly From terror, death, from blankness on the scene, From emptiness, from beauty gone. The world Seemed something seen in fever, where the steps Of men are muffled, and a futile scheme Impels all steps. So packing up my kit, My Bible in my pocket, secretly I disappeared. Next day took up my life In Barrington, ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... Mr Jobson's prevarications." He turned to the witness. "Now, sir," he said sternly, "you have already told the Court that you have no idea what you were doing on the night of April 24th, 1897. I put it to you once more that this blankness of memory is due to the fact that you were in a state of intoxication on the premises of the Hackney Chess Circle. Can you swear on your oath that ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... Lemuel call; he said they had both said they wished they could paint him. He had himself sustained various characters in costume for them, and one night he pretended that they had sent him down for Lemuel to help out with a certain group. But they received him with a sort of blankness which convinced him that Berry had exceeded his authority; there was a helplessness at first, and then an indignant determination to save him from a false position even at their own cost, which Lemuel felt rather than saw. Miss Carver was foremost in his rescue; she devoted herself ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... She would not look at the future. The cold blankness, the narrow groove, would have chilled her heart. She only took each day as it came, and tried to do ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... face now, as she had often, with a half wilful unconsciousness, seen it, looking at Tante—ah, a fierce resentment flamed up in her at last with the unavoidable clearness of her vision—looking at Tante with a courteous blankness that cloaked hostility; with cold curiosity; with mastered irony, suspicion, dislike. He was, then, a man not generous, not large and wise of heart, a man without the loving humour that would have enabled him to see past the defects and flaws of greatness, nor with the heart ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... be, of rich, unforgotten moments when the cow-punchers had come in off the range and stirred the sluggish town to a full, brief life with their rollicking. Across the street was Rusty Brown's place, with its narrow porch deserted of loafers and its windows blinking at the street with a blankness that belied the things they had looked upon in ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... some dead-as-dust thing laughing at life itself, a shuddering vibrance flooding through my flesh in waves of terrible nausea, a dim glow that grew and grew into terrifying painful brilliance, then paled and died again into the swirling blankness that was not death, but a ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... year after year washing dishes and clothes— only their fingers occupied. They read no good books, think no clean thoughts, are made love to as John Telfer had said, with kisses in a darkened room by a shame-faced yokel and, after marrying some such a yokel, live lives of unspeakable blankness. Into the houses of these women come the husbands at evening, tired and uncommunicative, to eat hurriedly and then go again into the streets or, the blessing of utter physical exhaustion having come to them, to sit for an hour in stockinged feet ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... cried Miggs, folding her hands and looking upwards with a kind of devout blankness, 'I wouldn't lay myself out as she does; I wouldn't be as bold as her; I wouldn't seem to say to all male creeturs "Come and kiss me"'—and here a shudder quite convulsed her frame—'for any earthly crowns as might be offered. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... proceeding. The sisters found out the hour of the compulsory interview. They covertly looked out for the arrival of the commonplace wooer—anything save their idea of a lover and hero. They keenly took note of him from an upper window as he walked with a certain studied composure, yet with a blankness of aspect, through the shrubbery. They even deigned—Annie as well as Rose and May—surreptitiously to inspect the poor wretch between the bannisters of the staircase, as he ran desperately up the stairs, thrusting one hand through ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... thing I should like to say," Mr. Dassonville went on, "but I am not sure I can put it plainly. It is that you must not try to be too wise." He smiled a little to Peter's blankness. "I believe in Harmony it is called looking on all sides of a thing, but there is always one side of everything like the moon which is turned from us. You must just start from where you are ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... hanging about him. But when John Ball first mounted the steps of the cross a lad at some one's bidding had run off to stop the ringers, and so presently the voice of the bells fell dead, leaving on men's minds that sense of blankness or even disappointment which is always caused by the sudden stopping of a sound one has got used to and found pleasant. But a great expectation had fallen by now on all that throng, and no word was spoken even in a whisper, and all men's hearts and eyes ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... suddenly—there comes a door where should be space, or space where there should be a window—and he is lost, his senses betray him, for the moment he is completely fogged, all bearings lost, possessed with the blankness that ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... armchairs and a lamp or two with shades as mellow as autumn woods! And some perfectly frivolous pictures which aren't in the least inspiring or uplifting,—and every single girl's room shall have a pink pincushion!" Then at their blankness, she softened. "Oh, very well,—you shall have your tubs and your linoleum, if you'll let me humanize the rest of the house,—will you?" She came to her feet with a spring of incredible energy. "Come along, Miss Ellis,—let's have a look upstairs! We don't ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... her in advance for sums which she saw no hope of sending them; and, worse than all, she lived in daily dread lest any of them should be inspired to apply to Theo himself. Look where she would a blank wall confronted her; and in the midst of the blankness she sat, a dainty, dejected figure, with her pitiless pile ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Farquaharson, which had a moment before seemed incapable of any expression beyond lethargic fatigue, underwent so sudden a transformation that the ingenue interrupted her weeping to watch it. There was a prefatory blankness of sheer amazement followed by an upleaping of latent fires into the eyes; fires that held hints of revived hopes and suppressed yearnings. Within the moment this fitful light died again into a pained gravity. What was the use ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... and close in upon the horror; I heard a sort of wolfish yapping. The Black Death disappeared. And then I, too, was falling, falling into infinite blackness and blankness, with one red flash ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... tearing him to pieces. Then he remembered! There was no fortune, no little girl! His dreams were all shattered, the last effort of his life had been in vain. He caught hold of the tumbler with fingers that shook as though an ague were upon him, lifted it to his lips and drank. Then there came the old blankness, and he saw nothing but what seemed to him the face of a satyr—dark and evil—mocking him through the shadows which had surely fallen now for ever. Da Souza lifted him up and conveyed him carefully to a ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... moment Cary was unable to make a syllable of reply. He looked hard at the old man as if to fathom his inmost thoughts. But the latter did not flinch. His countenance wore that expression of utter blankness and conscious unconsciousness which is an attribute of resolute men, and which only kindred spirits ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... 'shakedowns,' as the piles of straw stuffed into bed-ticks are called; but it had nothing whatever beyond these articles. There was not even the remnant of a bedstead; not a cheap print, so common in the hovels of the poor, to relieve the blankness of the rough, whitewashed walls. The bedroom, which was little more than half the size of the other, was that outrage of capital upon poverty known as a 'dark room,' by which is meant that it had no window opening to the outer air; ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... remember nothing of the sort. Only the accident and awakening in the hospital to darkness.... But there was a strange blankness, a hiatus in his memories, that ended with his hated job in the cigar stand. He could not recall his ...
— Second Sight • Basil Eugene Wells
... home with a sense of blankness upon me. Suppose she never came again? Suppose the episode was ended? Not even freedom from the Thing could compensate ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... another direction at that moment, and he did not see the actual meeting between the two. Evan had his back to the light and Anway did not instantly recognise him. Anway's expression graduated from expectancy at the sound of the word friend to blankness as he failed to recognise Evan, and to something ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... fear that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach subsided with her prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance. Her daughter and her successor were therefore left to gaze in united but helpless blankness at all ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... upon your brig like smoke." He pointed to the vessel, and a little way past her I spied a long line of white vapour no higher than Dover cliff as it looked, but as dense as those rocks of chalk too. The sun made steam of it, but if already it was putting a likeness of its own blankness into the sky over it, which seemed to be dying out, as the vapour came along, as the light perishes in a looking-glass upon which you breathe. I ran to the side and saw my boat under the gang-way and the two men in her. The cask was ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... for discussion in the house, and confined the general conversation exclusively to fish. That this thoughtful act was appreciated by the overworked politician it is needless to remark; he settled down to his brief respite with a tranquil contentment and complete blankness of mind which only the cleverest of ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... embrace me now. I may have been a brave man once. But now I am a coward. Let me tell you everything. My wounds were bad, but not desperate. The brancardiers carried me down to Verdun, at night I suppose, but I was unconscious; and so to the hospital at Vaudelaincourt. There were days and nights of blankness mixed with pain. Then I came to my senses and had rest. It was wonderful. I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. Would God it had been so! Then I should have been with my lieutenant. They told me he had passed away in the redoubt. But that hospital ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... to have changed your attitude there in a minute or so. Here's another thing—" Pilch paused a moment, then said, "Night before last, about an hour after you'd gone to bed, you had a very light touch of the same pattern of mental blankness you ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... watching crowds gazed in bewilderment. Almost before they could comprehend the truth, the enemy's goal was just before the Sunrise warriors, and half a minute of time remained in which to play. One more line plunge with Burleigh holding the ball! A film came before his eyes. A sudden blankness of failure and despair seized him. In the grandstand, Elinor Wream stood clutching a pennant in both hands, her dark eyes luminous with proud hope. Amid all the yells and cheers, her sweet voice ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... an open window in the antechamber, the valet procured some iced water. This simple remedy, and the change of atmosphere, proved enough to restore the fainting man to his senses, but hardly—as it seemed to his friends—to his former self. They noticed a change to blankness and stillness in his face, and when he spoke, an indescribable alteration in ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... Norma never knew or cared. The surprising blankness of the disappointment made her almost dizzy; she turned aside blindly, and stumbled into the quiet backwater behind a stairway, where she could recover her self-possession and endure unobserved the first pangs of bitterness. It seemed to her that she would ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... little the conviction was forced upon him that it wasn't as simple as that. At length, when he was well on the way to recovery, he learned to his horror that the interval of mental blankness, instead of being a few hours, or at the most a day or two, had lasted for over ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... on tapestries are as numerous as the marks on china or silver, and the absence of marks confronts the hunter of signs with baffling blankness, as is the case of many very old wares, whether china, silver or tapestries. Also, late work of poor quality is unmarked. Having thus disposed of the situation, it remains to identify the marks when they exist. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... is a breeder of contempt, I find that, in Hamlet's own words, it is the 'Criterion of a Satire,' and I shall assert the unalterable a priori of my belief that the melodious Swan of Stony Stratford, whether judged by his longitude, his versical blankness, or the profoundly of his attainments in Chronology, Theology, Phrenology, Palmistry, Metallurgy, Zoography, Nosology, Chiropody, or the Musical Glasses, has outnumbered every subsequent contemporary ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... been so. When I turned away in my ignorance, with a heavy heart, the dreadful blankness which had twice shut out from me the beings of my own race, was not between me and my dog. The poor little creature filled me with pity; I called him to me. He moved at the sound of my voice, and followed me languidly; not ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... terrible old sorrow; Too numb to weep, too cowardly to pray. Again the blankness of a dread to-morrow Filled me with ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the arms the null had thrust out. Shortly, they would have ambled into a stream and beyond, out of all possible control. Perhaps they might wander for years in the wastelands. Perhaps they and their increase might furnish meat for the pseudomen who lurked inside the swirling blankness. ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... Hyde was much like other fourth-year University men except that he was not egotistical and not shy: he had altered away from his class, but in what direction it was difficult to tell: there was no deciphering the pleasant blankness of his features or the conventional ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... of Knowledge are relative to previous Ignorance; for, although the possession of knowledge is in many ways a lasting good, yet the full intensity of the charm is felt only at the moment of passing from mystery to explanation, from blankness of impression to intellectual attainment. This form of the pleasure is sustained only by new acquisitions and new discoveries. Moreover, in the minor forms of the gratification due to knowledge, we never escape the law of relativity; the "power" ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... shock of knowing that Gianluca was to die, she felt as though she had lost a part of him already, and something she dearly valued seemed to go out of her life. Her instinct was not to go to him and see him while she could, but to look forward to the blankness that would be before her when he should be gone. Something of him was an integral part of her life. But there was something of him for which she felt that she hardly cared ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... stags. Lady Blemley's house-party was not bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, hence there was a full gathering of her guests round the tea-table on this particular afternoon. And, in spite of the blankness of the season and the triteness of the occasion, there was no trace in the company of that fatigued restlessness which means a dread of the pianola and a subdued hankering for auction bridge. The undisguised openmouthed attention of the entire party was fixed on the homely negative personality ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... of attitude, all strength of bearing, which were his chief characteristics, seemed to have gone. There was a look of complete blankness, of hopelessness ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... retrospect the struggle between life and death becomes more and more palpable. The Destroyer has hurled his winds, his frosts, his fires; and gray wastes, broken wastes, black wastes, attest with what signal power. But life follows closely, planting his seeds in the very footprints of death. Where blankness and bleakness seem to reign, a tiny life springs in mosses, rich with promise of better things. Long forked tongues of green are lapping up the dreary wastes, and will presently overpower them with its vivid tints. ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... The utter blankness of astonishment that crept over Winnie's face when he looked down and saw the mug hanging, Mr. Darley might have made a small fortune out of; but the pen of a Cicero could not attempt it. It appeared to be one of those cases when ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... children; they read no newspapers or books, and lack even the mild excitements of church versus chapel, or the vicar's daughter's love-affair, or the squire's latest row with his lady—nothing! Their existence is almost bestial in its blankness. I know them—I have lived among them. For four months in the year they are cooped up in damp dens, not to be called chambers, where an Englishman would deem it infamous to keep a dog—cooped up amid squalor that ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... readiness to seize the first sign of her assent. Precisely at that moment, owing, perhaps, to her vicissitudes of feeling, all sense of love left her, as in a moment a mist lifts from the earth. And when the mist departed a skeleton world and blankness alone remained—a terrible prospect for the eyes of the living to behold. He saw the look of terror in her face, and without understanding its origin, took her hand in his. With the sense of companionship returned a desire, like that of a child for shelter, to accept what ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the canvas was entirely released, and Faith silently held it up before the eyes of the dying man, upon whose face had come a dull, leaden blankness, and whose eyes were painful to watch as they struggled to pierce the film which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... knocking at her door, which roused her, was like a call from the peace of dreams to the desolation of reality. When she had turned on the light she received from the hands of the waiting servant that which had become a most rare visitant in the blankness of her ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... was writing or figuring with blue chalk upon the wall's blankness, and although her heart feared the big rough boy she had "fought," ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... on the broad sill beside him, under his arm, and he could feel the golden collar on the soft fur neck—a wave of perhaps the most hopeless anguish he had yet felt was upon his spirit now. The unutterable blankness—the impossible vista of the endless days to come, with no prospect of meeting—no aim—no hope. Yes, she had said there was one hope—one hope which could bring peace to their crud unrest. But how and when should he ever know? And if it were so—then more than ever he should be by her side. ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... didn't care. And then the class had been dismissed, and there had been friendly good-byes, arrangements for walking home in company or for meeting during the holidays—for all but him; he had gone out alone—and the dull blankness had come over him from which he ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... silly head in the winter evenings when the draughts of cold air would rush in through the thin walls. These and other memories crowded into Charlotte Dexter's brain as she looked around her room, crowded thick and fast, crowded fast and furious, surged, broke, leaving an empty moment of perfect blankness, then crowded again thicker, faster, surged and seethed and then broke again, leaving in the void of perfect blankness this time a fixed idea, a resolve, a determination, seen in the dark like a luminous ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... God. He had hoped to do much for love of his Lord, to carry the message of the Gospel into the Andredsweald, where the kindred of his mother yet lived, and the thought that he should never see their forest glades again was painful. And the blankness of unconsciousness, the fearful nature of the black death, was in itself repulsive; but it had all been ordered and settled by Infinite Love before ever he was born, probably before the worlds were framed, and Martin said with all his heart the words breathed by the Incarnate God, when groaning ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... had passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... absence of Brenda must be a horribly insistent fact to her own family. She was so entirely different from the rest of them. Her vivacity, her spirit must have shown amidst the nervous respectability of this dull and fearful household like the gleam of unexpected water in the blankness of a desert. Her absence must have seemed to them a positive thing. Probably every one at the table was thinking of her at that moment. And the result of this combined thought was producing a hallucination of Brenda in my mind, strong enough to hypnotise me. In any case, her apparition stood at ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... sounded spatting reports of rifles. Casey forgot to dodge into his gravel shelter. He was living a strange, dragging moment—an age. Out shot the car into the light. Likewise Casey's dark blankness of mind ended. His heart lifted with a mighty throb. There shone the gray endless slope, stretching out and down to the black hills in the distance. Shrill wild yells made Casey wheel. The hillside above the cut was colorful and spotted with moving objects. Indians! Puffs of ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... he did so, they were aware, with an emotion like shock, that his whole face mirrored forth a genuine and warm self-satisfaction. The thing was as plain as if he had spoken it aloud: he had gotten out of the interview what he wanted. Their recognition of this fact increased their blankness. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... each other with visages of sevenfold blankness. They next unanimously directed their gaze towards their preceptor, hoping to detect some symptom of jocularity upon his venerable features. Nothing could be descried thereon but the most imperturbable ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... day Chip smoked something like two dozen cigarettes, gazed out across the coulee till his eyes ached, glared morosely at the canvas on the easel, which stared back at him till the dull blankness of it stamped itself upon his brain and he could see nothing else, look where he might. Whereupon he gathered up hat and crutches, and hobbled slowly down the hill to ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower |
