"Callous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established the fact that ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... forbid." Oh mis'ry! how I shook myself, when he Seiz'd me, and cried, "Thou haply thought'st me not A disputant in logic so exact." To Minos down he bore me, and the judge Twin'd eight times round his callous back the tail, Which biting with excess of rage, he spake: "This is a guilty soul, that in the fire Must vanish.' Hence perdition-doom'd I rove A prey to rankling sorrow in this garb." When he had thus fulfill'd his words, the flame In dolour parted, beating to and fro, And writhing its sharp ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... to look for it," said my brother. "You needn't worry about me. I've got pretty callous. I shall have quarters for nothing here—you're ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... callous to the white, woeful face under one of the bridal wreaths. He set himself to think how most pleasantly to divert the thoughts of Clarice; and the result of his meditations was a request to Father Miles that he would induce ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... more security than she had quite realised from his apparent detachment and impassibility. And, as an indirect consequence, her revolt against God suffered access of bitterness. For not only was He—to her seeing—callous regarding the fate of the many, but He failed to support those few most devoted to His cause. In the hour of their trial He was careless even ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the control of the forces of nature has been carried to the highest pitch of development may furnish a background to the darkest of passions. It may serve as a stage upon which callous indifference, greed, rapacity, gross sensuality, play their parts naked and unashamed. That some men sunk in ignorance and subject to such passions live in huts and have their noses pierced, and others have taken up from their environment ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... "The callous scoundrel told me with his last breath that he was waiting until Penreath was safely hanged before disappearing with the money. When he opened the door to us to-night, he knew that he was at the end of his tether, and he decided to try to bolt. He realised that ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... honor to offer a bribe." Gray laughed. "Pardon my amusement. It sounds callous, I know, but, frankly, your unhappy condition fails to distress me. Well, how much ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... he that's impudent does wear a vizard more ugly and deformed than highway thieves disguise themselves with. Shame is the tender moral conscience of good men. When there is a crack in the skull, Nature herself, with a tough horny callous repairs the breach; so a flawed intellect is with a brawny callous face supplied. The face is the dial of the mind; and where they do not go together, 'tis a sign that one or both are out of order. He that is impudent is like a merchant that trades upon his credit without a ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... here. The children could not understand about the pistol; but only one of them cared what had become of it. For Phillida it was enough to know that the writer of this shameless rigmarole, with its pompous periods and its callous gusto, must long ago have lost his reason. She had no doubt whatever about that, and already it had brought a new light into her eyes. She would pause to discuss nothing else. It was her finger that pointed the way through ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... how it is to be done," interposed Ezra. He was looking very nervous and uneasy. Hard as he was, he had neither the pseudo-religious monomania of his father, nor the callous brutality of Burt, and he shuddered at the thought of what was to come. His eyes were red and bleared, and he sat with one arm thrown over the back of his chair, while he drummed nervously with the fingers of his other hand upon his knee. "You've got some plan in your head, I suppose," ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which, by his abilities natural and acquired, he was well qualified. Mr. Simpson combined with the prepossessing manners of a gentleman all the craft and subtlety of an intriguing courtier; while his cold and callous heart was incapable of sympathising with the woes and pains of his fellow-men. On his first arrival, he carefully concealed from those whom he was about to supersede, the powers with which he was invested; he studied the characters of individuals, scrutinized in secret their ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... the upper deck. The spires and domes of the city faded on my sight till all merged into a gray smoky patch on the horizon. With a dead cigar clenched between my teeth I watched and watched with a callous air, as though there had been no wrench, as though I had not left behind all I loved in the world. And yet I gazed, the keen salt air singing past my ears, till there was nothing but the sea as far as the eye ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... a light, quizzing mockery, or scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt for them. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... bar stronger than the other; but these and other tricks are not to be looked on as the results of natural defects, but as habitual defences against the pain caused by a hard, harsh bearing on the horse's bars; with a smooth and gentle bearing he will not take to them, or will discontinue them. For callous bars Xenophon prescribes gentle friction with oil! and the practice of the Augustan age of the manege, recommended by Berenger was to amputate that part of the tongue which a ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... how callous or ungrateful a son may be, no matter how low he may sink in vice or crime, he is always sure of his mother's love, always sure of one who will follow him even to his grave, if she is alive and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... his letters to older folk, both men and women, qualities for which there was no room in the others arise—the thoughts of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being quite different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes "insolent"[15] worldling who has been so often put in the place of the real Chesterfield. And independently of all this there is present in all these letters—though most attractively in those to his son—a power of literary expression which ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... lead to industrial, business, political and social success. Universal military education for me and mine and all other Americans is his slogan, and his aim is to recreate the America of the early Seventies, which became hardened and callous through the years by reason of resistance to the German menace of autocracy, but ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... lieutenant kept tally on the sheet, and bit the end of his pen and watched the applicant's face. There were a great many applicants, and few were chosen, but none of them had quite the air about him which this one had. Lieutenant Claflin thought Corporal Goddard was just a bit too callous in the way he handled the applicant, and too peremptory in his questions; but he could not tell why Corporal Goddard treated them all in that way. Then the young officer noticed that the applicant's white face was flushing, and that he bit his lips when Corporal ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... to the callous French, who goad The horse that pulls a heavy load! Shame to the Spanish bull-fight! Shame To those who make of death a game! We English are a better race: We love the long and solemn face; We fly from any cheerful ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... in America I was continually attacked in the American Jewish papers as the callous denier of the Jews. It was nonsense, as is most of that which appears in print, but it proves at least that it is not on behalf of my blood but on behalf of my mind that I speak on this occasion. My sympathy is not with the Jews as Jews, but as the ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... off with the dawning of light." At last, moved to pity, I opened the door To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor; But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu," They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you." And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat, These troublesome guests abide with ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... heard that little expression of opinion concerning himself; it might have proved the thorn in a somewhat callous ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... his chief asset is skill. It has been his stocks, his bonds, the pride of his life. Poor as to purse and impoverished in his household; his cupboard bare, his last penny spent on a bread crust, he is not humbled; no, he merely stretches out his ten fingers and two callous palms, exactly as a proud king extends his diamond-tipped sceptre, to show you that which upholds him in his birthright. 'My skill is my portion given to the world,' he says. 'I shall not want. See, I am without ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... a casual one. Life had been so hard with her that she had long since grown callous under the blows of fate and grimly indifferent to other people's feelings. Somewhere she had heard that Jimmy Lufton was a born orator. At any rate, she thought he could carry off the adventure and her ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... They considered that they had performed, to the full, their duty as citizens when they had taken part in the noisy debates of the Assembly, or had sat as paid jurymen in the never-ending succession of court procedures of this most litigious of peoples. Among men even in their better days not callous to the allurements of bribes judiciously administered, it was a logical sequence that corruption should now pervade ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... denunciations against Sir Robert Peel, the government, and free trade. The manufacturers—the creators of wealth, and who sustained so large a portion of the public burdens—were represented as a selfish, callous set of men, eager only to acquire riches, even at the expense of all other classes of the community. They were described as disloyal and revolutionary, and bent upon the destruction of throne and constitution. It would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... was the woman; what now of the man? But pass him. If he comes beneath a heel, He shall be crushed until he cannot feel, Or, being callous, haply till he can. But he is nothing:—nothing? Only mark The rich light striking out from her on him! Ha! what a sense it is when her eyes swim Across the man she singles, leaving dark All else! Lord God, who mad'st the thing so fair, See that I am drawn to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... have missed it for any consideration. That morning she had felt more pain than usual, and had been obliged to have recourse to restoratives; but once more to join the gay and fashionable throng—the very idea braced her nerves, rendered her callous to ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... you see around—poor, ignorant, timid, and a mark for insult and contempt. I had already suffered much; for God, alas! had given me a heart formed to feel and to love; yet long habits of endurance had, in great measure, rendered it callous and insensible, unaided as I ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... your faces set towards the south. Does the Black One live in the south? Well, you will journey to another kraal presently," answered the jovial-looking captain of the party with a callous laugh. ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... daughter?' exclaimed the planter; 'do you think I would marry my daughter to a beggar? No, no, sir, the affair is ended between you—and I insist upon its being utterly broken off.' Such was the action of the heartless gambler, rendered callous to all sentiments of real ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... are cases where shame is the very best possible remedy for juvenile faults. If a boy, for example, is self-conceited, bold, and mischievous, with feelings somewhat callous, and an influence extensive and bad, an opportunity will sometimes occur to hold up his conduct to the just reprobation of the school, with great advantage. By this means, if it is done in such a way as to secure the influence ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... the opinion of Virgil [who speaks of the bitter roots of the endive[840]], the fibres of endive are here extremely sweet, and encircled by their twisting leaves are caked together with a certain callous tenderness[841]. ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... He leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs, and crossed his ankles. "However, attitude itself needn't concern us until it translates itself into anti-social behavior. What cannot be tolerated is this callous attitude toward the dignity and well-being of the workers out here. What did you think of Alhamid's explanation ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... BEGBIE declared himself a whole-hearted supporter of nationalisation. There was something extraordinarily uplifting in the notion of consecrating one's talents to the State. Publishers were too often callous individualists. Here one would be working for humanity. If his interview with the KAISER had been issued under State sanction he believed that the Peace would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... like an uncultivated common. That secret of the Lord, "Enter into thy closet," and "shut the door," is unknown; or if known, neglected. The soil, trodden by all comers, is never broken up and softened by a thorough self-searching. A human heart may thus become marvellously callous both to good and evil. The terrors of the Lord and the tender invitations of the Gospel are alike ineffectual. Falling only upon the external senses, they are swept off by the next current; as the solid ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... and the doctor's words had a good effect. His mind became quieter. He sat down and filled his pipe. After a few puffs he replaced it in his pocket. It seemed too callous to think of smoking now. The doctor was a good fellow, but he did not understand. All the same, he was glad that he had had that whisky. It had certainly put heart into ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... to all that lay around me, where I could not plant a foot without stepping over my brothers or sisters; and the old man, callous as he might be, could not help feeling for—a pinch of snuff. This he found in the right-hand pocket of his waistcoat, and took it very carefully, and made a little noise of comfort; and thus, being fully self-assured again, he stood, with his feet far apart and his head on one side, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Egeria's hallowed grove; not in thumping and pummelling king Amulius's herdsmen. I was sometimes troubled with a rough creature or two from the plough; one, that one should have thought, had worked with his head, as well as his hands, they were both so callous. One of the most agreeable circumstances I can recollect is the Triumvirate, composed ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... the edge of a knife in making a wound, and seems to be owing to the distention of a part of a fibre, till it breaks. A smarting of the skin is liable to affect the scars left by herpes or shingles; and the callous parts of the bottoms of the feet; and around the bases of corns on the toes; and frequently extends after sciatica along the outside of the thigh, and of the leg, and part of the foot. All these may be owing ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... her bed. She was for ever lost in the joys or sorrows of some fictitious person, and, in consequence, remained for the most part completely ignorant of what was going on around her. When she did happen to become conscious of her surroundings, she was callous, or merely indifferent, to them; for, compared with romance, life was dull and diffuse; it lacked the wilful simplicity, the exaggerative omissions, and forcible perspectives, which make up art: in other words, life demanded that ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a suggestion, you see, of apparent value, because it has succeeded with blueberries,—this method of cutting off a ring of bark before the leaves are shed, allowing a ring to callous, then later cutting off this prepared twig and subjecting it to methods for striking roots. It is an extremely interesting suggestion. Just as soon as I heard of this procedure, I went out and prepared about fifty hickory and walnut twigs myself, but that was this autumn, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... tractable, and even this short time had accomplished much. Already the warm, contagious, college comradeship possessed him. Violent attacks of homesickness that made gray the brightest fall days, like the callous spots on his palms, were becoming more rare. The old existence was already a dream, as yet a little sad, but none the less a thing without a substance. The new life was a warm, magnetic reality; the future ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... places—the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also—only a few hard-work'd transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call'd to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little or no ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... held out. And then there came a strange and human turn to the affair. Adele Rossignol—or, to give her real name, Adele Tace, the wife of Hippolyte—had conceived a veritable passion for Harry Wethermill. He was of a not uncommon type, cold and callous in himself, yet with the power to provoke passion in women. And Adele Tace, as the story was told of how Harry Wethermill had paid his court to Celia Harland, was seized with a vindictive jealousy. Hanaud was ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... the shoulders and forced her down over the back of a chair, holding her so with somewhat callous strength of purpose, till with a half-hysterical gasp she begged him to set her free. The colour had returned to her face when she stood up, but those few moments of weakness had bereft her of her self-control. She could ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... she was breaking them. He could not have been fetching and carrying all these years for a woman who could go on wilfully appropriating money that did not belong to her,—who could even speak with callous indifference of the prospect of turning out her niece to a ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a callous heart the effusions of the Belgian damsel. But then I gathered my attention. For the letter went on, 'Notre cher petit bebe—our dear little baby was born a week ago. Almost I died, knowing you were far ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... inordinately selfish, and at all times magnificently arrogant. He had neither patience nor toleration for natural human weakness. While selfish, he was not self-conscious, and it never occurred to him, it was impossible for him to see that he was a giant among men. His heart was callous; his whole nature and character hard and flinty from the buffetings he ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... philosophy. Yet he was thinking of the future of the girl with whom he was, as yet, unacquainted—the girl who had chosen to link her life with that of the merry, careless, but unscrupulous young fellow before him. They were bosom friends, it was true, yet he knew, alas! how utterly callous Ralph Ansell was where women were concerned, and he recollected certain ugly rumours he had heard, even in ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... one day by a callous observation on the lips of old Dr. Bates, a sound practitioner and ordinarily as gentle as the average family doctor one hears so much about. Mr. Thorpe was in greater pain than usual that day. Opiates were of little use in these cruel hours. It was now ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Undertaker's Apprentice, a grim, saturnine figure with his grey face, protuberant eyes, and obsequious solemnity, in which lurked a callous smile. The burial of the great, the execution of the wicked, were alike to him. In him Fate seemed to personify life's revenges, its futilities, its calculating ironies. The flag-draped coffin was just about ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... never offered any one a seat and did not expect such courtesy from others. He was burly and selfish as a hog, and was often so designated by work-weary women, whom he forced to stand while he read his market reports in callous absorption. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... horrors of Indian warfare. The only excuse that can be offered for him is that he was no worse than his age, and that the white loyalist leaders, such as the Butlers, as well as the colonial commanders of the revolutionists, were equally callous regarding the ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... out the coffin eagerly, quietly. Even to the callous and shallow mind of Saul it was a relief to escape a contest with an angry woman. They set the coffin on the cart, and steadied it with a barrel of potash and sacks of buckwheat, which went to make up the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... February. Planting should not be delayed until late in spring, as the percentage of loss will be very materially increased. Preference must be given to the earlier portion of the planting season, as the wounds on the roots will have had time to callous over, and the ground will be firmly packed about the roots by the winter rains. Then, with the opening of the growing season in spring, the trees will be ready to make a good, ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... long to use the most precious words I have for you; but I dare not, fearing I should not be paid with like value. That is why I gave you hard names and boast of my callous strength. I hurt you, for fear you should never ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... with that even poise of the intellect which is demanded by science. I want knowledge pure and simple,—I do not fancy having it mixed. Neither do I like the thought of passing my life in going from one scene of suffering to another; I am not saintly enough for such a daily martyrdom, nor callous enough to make it an easy occupation. I fainted at the first operation I saw, and I have never wanted to see another. I don't say that I wouldn't marry a physician, if the right one asked me, but the young doctor is not forthcoming at present. Yes, I think I might make a pretty ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... stopping-point by the way, Alexander Macdonell dated a letter to a friend in Montreal. The tenor of this letter would indicate that only a portion of the Nor'westers were ready to adopt extreme measures against the settlement. 'Something serious will undoubtedly take place,' was Macdonell's callous admission. 'Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony,' he continued, 'will satisfy some, by fair or foul means—a most desirable object if it can be accomplished. So here is at them with all ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... thank'd thee, BOWLES! for those soft strains, That, on the still air floating, tremblingly Wak'd in me Fancy, Love, and Sympathy! For hence, not callous to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... months over the weak minds which alone can feel it; and the monotony of existence becomes to them exactly what it would have been had they never inflicted a pang upon the unfortunate spectators, whose unaccustomed eyes shrink daily from the impression to which they have not been rendered callous by custom, or ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... greener and bluer than other trees or sky, and who feels a pang, yes, an actual pang, of mingled hope, and joy, and expectation, and terror, when he emerges from Guilford street, descending from the hights of Islington, into those sacred precincts; this very Jones is hard and callous toward the torments of Smith, who adores Miss Robinson, and cannot imagine what the infatuated fellow can see in the girl. So it was with Sir Michael Audley. He looked at his nephew as a sample of a very large class of young men, and his daughter as a sample of an equally extensive class ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... callous of us to have come," Penelope declared. "And yet, if we hadn't, what difference would it have made? Every one else would have been here. Our absence would never have been noticed, and we should have sat at ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... all the efforts of the poor old man, sundry twitchings and screwings of the muscles of the face denoted the exquisite sensibility of these shutters to the windows of his soul, which he was now having repainted. But the artist, with a heart as callous as that of an army surgeon, continued his performance, enlivening his labours with a wild chant, tapping away the while as merrily ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... callous, or paralyzed by consciousness of her crime; or biding her time for a dramatic outburst of vindicating testimony? To her sensitive nature, the ordeal of sitting day after day to be stared at by a curious and prejudiced public, was more torturing than the pangs of Marsyas; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... By degrees he lost all regard for Mr Barlow, and all affection for his friend Harry. At first, indeed, he was shocked at hearing Mr Barlow mentioned with disrespect, but becoming by degrees more callous to every good impression he at last took infinite pleasure in seeing Master Mash (who, though destitute of either wit or genius, had a great taste for mimicry) take off the parson in the ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... respectable editor of the respectable National Review? Has even dulness become revolutionary? From a poem in Mr. Austin's last volume this would seem to be the case. It is perhaps unfair to take our rhymers too seriously. Between the casual fancies of a poet and the callous facts of prose there is, or at least there should be, a wide difference. But since the poem in question, Two Visions, as Mr. Austin calls it, was begun in 1863 and revised in 1889 we may regard it as fully representative of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... sincerity and depth of feeling had suddenly a marked effect on the, apparently, callous Ethel. She turned to Peg and there was a different expression entirely in her look and tone ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... the kitchen, Stott, half-way upstairs, stayed and listened. The house was very silent, the only sound was the hushed clatter made by the nurse in the kitchen. There was an atmosphere of wariness about the place that affected even so callous a person as Stott. He listened with strained attention, his eyes fixed on the half-open door. He was not an imaginative man, but he was beset with apprehension as to what lay behind that door. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... These facts seemed like a foothold in the mad torrent of feeling and shame which had been sweeping her away. She could think of little more than that she was safe—safe because he was brave and loyal—and yes, safe because he wanted her and would not give her up. The heart of a woman must be callous indeed, and her nature not only trivial but stony if she is not deeply ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... know how long it was, nor when it was, that Joseph Chestermarke came. But when he came, he brought his true character with him. I could not have believed that any human being could be so callous, so brutal, so coldly indifferent to another's sufferings. I thought as I listened to him of all I had heard about that ancestor of his who had killed a man in cold blood in the old house at the bank—and I knew that Joseph Chestermarke would kill me with no more compunction, ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... Sheep and cattle were the staple support of the community; and their prices, breeding, and diseases the principal topic of conversation. Now as I, being an outsider, possessed neither the one nor the other, and was utterly callous to the new "dip" and the "rot" and other kindred topics, I found myself in a state of mental isolation, and was ready to hail anything which might relieve the monotony of my existence. Maloney, the murderer, had at least some distinctiveness and individuality in his character, and might act as ...
— My Friend The Murderer • A. Conan Doyle
... was not very clever to live with a man all those years without discovering that he was not likely to change. "You can't change him but you can change your reaction to him. If something keeps hurting your hand, you don't keep on being sore. You grow callous. Isn't it about time you grew a moral ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... make no doubt he'll grow up to be a polisman.' He examines th' phottygraft album an' asks if that isn't so-an'-so. An' all this time ye lay writhin' in mortal agony an' sayin' to ye'ersilf: 'Inhuman monsther, to lave me perish here while he chats with a callous woman that I haven't said annything but ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... his face out for a moment, with the hand that again wandered over his forehead, and then it lowered on Redlaw, reckless, ruffianly, and callous. ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... with the undoubted privations, many of them unnecessary, which our soldiers endured at Waterval near Pretoria, the callous neglect of the enteric patients there, and the really barbarous treatment of British Colonial prisoners who were confined in cells on the absurd plea that in fighting for their flag they were ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... picture for a release date which was already announced had resulted in this haste, without even a day of idleness in respect for the memory of the dead star, yet it seemed cold-blooded and mercenary to me. I thought that success was not deserved by an enterprise so callous of human life, ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... are quite callous to nuisances. A public prosecutor of nuisances is more wanted than a public prosecutor of crime. And this is one of the things that would naturally come under the supervision of a Department of Health. ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... condensing, "till almost every point of that wide horizon, over which the Sun of Righteousness had diffused his cheering rays, was enveloped in a darkness more awful and more portentous than that which of old descended upon rebellious Pharaoh and the callous sons of Ham."—Hints on Toleration, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored afresh ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to pity by representing to them the situation of his innocent family; that he had a wife and three small children at home wholly dependent on him for support. But, alas, the poor man intreated in vain. His appeal was to monsters possessing hearts callous to the feelings of humanity. Having received a heavy blow from one with an ax, he snapped the cords with which he was bound, and attempted an escape by flight, but was met by another of the ruffians, who plunged a knife or dirk to his heart. I stood near him at ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... fish by the tail, he belaboured his partner in business with the scaly carcase, till the long spines of the fish's back caught in the fleshy part of his victim's neck. But Rock Cod's screams only drew callous comment from his persecutor. "You laugha at your mate? I teacha you. Rocka Codda, I teacha you respecta Macaroni. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... unfortunate, for after losing the best of masters on the road, I was likewise forsaken by a mistress who loved me, but did not love me alone, and whose loss nearly broke my heart, coming after that of my good master. It is a mistake to suppose that a man who has received one cruel blow grows callous to succeeding strokes of calamity. Far otherwise; he suffers agonies from the smallest contrarieties. I returned to Paris in a state of dejection almost ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... upon which they exist; the mass of greasy, unwashed rags which hang loosely upon them—such things no longer excite our wonder, or even our pity. We have seen so much of such misery before that I fear we begin to grow callous. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... ever such callous heartlessness in human creature? Was there ever such madness in sane woman? You ask me to prove my convictions, you ask me for the one method by which even you can be convinced, and when I show you how far my new faith ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one. I was convinced that to rob and be punished were inseparable, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... some things that will prevent this tender-heartedness. Just a little feeling of resentment, a little desire for retaliation, or a secret wish for something to befall those who have done us an injury will callous the heart and harden the affections. When we have been slighted by some one or misjudged, oh, how Satan strives to get us to thinking much about this, and to work a "hurt" feeling into our heart. Even to think about the meanness of others will bring a harshness and coldness into the inner ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... young man, and callous and selfish. But there is truly something under his shell. I would relish ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... for some of the canvases, strabismus for some of the draughtmanship; but not for all. There was an ugly deliberation in the glorification of the raw, the uncouth; there was a callous hardness in the deadly elaboration of ugliness for its own sake. And transcendentalism looked ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... treated; they had known nothing of the kind. They had seen little or nothing of the world. They were in very deed men and women of sorrow, and acquainted with grief. Their backs had been made familiar with the bloody lash, so that they had become callous; mine was yet tender; for while at Baltimore I got few whippings, and few slaves could boast of a kinder master and mistress than myself; and the thought of passing out of their hands into those of Master Andrew—a man who, but ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... additional stanzas for both 'Fyttes.' I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times; but 'I have almost forgot the taste of grief,' and 'supped full of horrors' till I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered." In one respect he would ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... a moment, this time scrutinizing the palms of his hands, seemingly interested in some callous spots near the thumb-joint, and then asked: ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... friendship (Scott, Southey, Byron, a hundred others have borne witness to their liking for him), he was a messenger of good-will and peace between his country and ours. "See, friends!" he seems to say, "these English are not so wicked, rapacious, callous, proud, as you have been taught to believe them. I went amongst them a humble man; won my way by my pen; and, when known, found every hand held out to me with kindliness and welcome. Scott is a great man, you acknowledge. Did not Scott's ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has its story to tell. The Bishop had two such dogs. His lordship changed his coachman and groom. Together with his family the Bishop left the Palace for a time, and the dog pined away. His skin now lies by the window. Alas! his more callous wife is still alive in the stable. Two of its offspring are in the safe keeping of a well-known clergyman, who, being in doubt as to what name he should bestow upon his newly-purchased pups, out of gratitude for the invigorating influence ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the arms of the Creator. The duration of her agony was but short, as the under-sheriff, at the request of her friends, had prepared such excellent fuel that she was in a few minutes overwhelmed with smoke and flame. The case of this lady drew a tear of pity from every one who had a heart not callous to humanity. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... nights—for Madeleine and took her to several of the dives that seemed to afford her amusement. He noticed that she drank little, and had a glimmering of the truth. Newspaper men have several extra senses. It was also apparent that the life she had led had not made her callous. As he insisted upon "treating" her she would have none of champagne but ordered ponies ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... away, sir," Mr. Jocelyn began again. "On this, day of rest your duties cannot be pressing. I want to assure you further of the pleasure I have in finding a young man who, so far from being rendered callous and material by hard and rather homely work, is alive to all refining influences. The changes in this place for the better since I was here, and those pretty flowers yonder, all prove that you have an eye for the beautiful as well as the practical. My daughter ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... himself, Philip could not help a shudder, as he listened to the cynical, callous manner in which his companion spoke of their proximity to a dreadful death. Then, bidding him follow, he went on along the gloomy maze towards where he could hear the rumble of trucks laden with coal, the sound of the ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... in Life's Handicap describing the City of Lahore by night. There is great heat in these pages; there is distance also, and the breathless air of streets where the formic swarming of India, her callous fecundity, the tyranny of her skies, and her old faith, prepare us for the House of Suddhu and the ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... waiting. Days passed; but his hour of crisis postponed itself, and all things combined to enervate him. Above all, the callous immensity of London oppressed his mind. His case, that had been so important down there in the village, was absolutely of no account up here in the city. Not a single sympathizer among these millions ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... did not attract my interest specially, as this particular piece of street had been eviscerated so often that I had grown callous to its sufferings. But I paused for a moment to survey the big navvy's muscles, and to wonder how early in the morning it would be necessary to rise in order to catch a small boy with a clean face. The navvy was a fine specimen ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... facility to error characteristic of the unreasoning, it has been one of the opinions of grooms and farriers that this callous, india-rubber-like substance would wear away upon exposure to the action of the road or pavement, and it has been one of their cherished practices to set the horse up upon iron, so that he could by no possibility strike the frog ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... to that hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... apt to grow callous as to his transgressions, therefore the cornet is sounded to arouse him to the consciousness of the time which is passing so rapidly away. "Rouse thee from thy sleep," it says to him; "the hour of thy visitation approaches." The Eternal wishes ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... believed they were taking part in a great mission, not a great proportion would claim to be really devout men, but they all behaved like Christian gentlemen. One Londoner told me he had thought the scenes of war had made him callous and that the ruthless destruction of those things fashioned by men's hands in prosecuting the arts of peace had prompted the feeling that there was little in civilisation after all, if civilisation could result in so bitter a thing as this awful fighting. ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... regarded it as a clever trick; dangerous perhaps, but not dangerous to him; for deeply steeped as he was in numerous villainies he had never yet been called to account for any one of his misdeeds, and long immunity had rendered him utterly hardened and callous to any sentiment ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... over her government and of a constant discussion of all public questions. Englishmen are noted for their unremitting guard of their personal rights. They are not to be compared in this with Brooklynites who, in spite of a callous railroad system, still persist ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... citizen has no option but to render service. The most important of such causes are: the relief of suffering humanity, the conservation of the resources of nature, and the prevention of vandalism. If the American Nation had refused aid to stricken San Francisco, the callous hard-heartedness of it would have shocked the world. If the German army of 1871 had destroyed the art treasures and the libraries of Paris, it would have set the German nation back ten centuries, into the ranks of ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... existence I brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms—the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim I had upon ...
— The Road • Jack London
... goods, take warning by Mr. Levering, and beware how, in a moment of weak yielding, you get a dollar on your conscience. One of two evils must follow. It will give you pain and trouble, or make callous the spot where it rests. And the latter of these evils is that which is most to ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... earnestness, but passed it by. He was seeking information. It was what he and Jeff had come for. The manner of this man was coldly callous, and he knew that every word he uttered was a lash applied to the bruised soul of the man by the window. Irresistible sympathy ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... virtues, in characters she had before disregarded, while chasing the phantoms of elegance and excellence, which sported in the meteors that exhale in the marshes of misfortune. The heart is often shut by romance against social pleasure; and, fostering a sickly sensibility, grows callous to the soft touches ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... and retired again to his window-seat. He was pale with the shock of his sudden disappointment, but was callous to the fresh insult offered him by the king's brother. Still less was he conscious of the titter that was going around at his expense, or of the scornful looks directed to him from the eyes of many who until that day had called ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... them. Where once I saw only terrible wastes of barren ground now I see beauty and something noble. Then, at first, your cowboys struck me as dirty, rough, loud, crude, savage—all that was primitive. I did not want them near me. I imagined them callous, hard men, their only joy a carouse with their kind. But I was wrong. I have changed. The dirt was only dust, and this desert dust is clean. They are still rough, loud, crude, and savage in my eyes, but with a difference. They are natural men. They are little children. Monty Price is one ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey |
