"Characterless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did not move. She kept her grey eyes upon Oakley Street where the evening mist from the river drew mournful perspectives into view. It was late October. We heard the omnibuses thundering across the bridge. The monotony of that broad, characterless street seemed more than usually depressing. Even in June sunshine it was dead, but with autumn its melancholy soaked into every house between King's Road and the Embankment. It washed thought into the past, instead of ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... handsome face becoming drawn, as swift conviction mastered him. He felt that the black words which had fallen from his friend's lips—from the lips of Diana Welldon's brother—were the truth. He looked at the plump face, the full, amiable eyes, now misty with fright, at the characterless hand nervously feeling the golden mustache, at the well-fed, inert body; and he knew that, whatever the trouble or the peril, Dan Welldon ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... thoroughfares the luxury of grass-grown "front gardens," untrodden by the foot of man save as to the path from the gate to the hall door; but blighted by an intolerable monotony of miles and miles of graceless, characterless brick houses, black iron railings, stony pavements, slaty roofs, and respectably ill dressed or disreputably poorly dressed people, quite accustomed to the place, and mostly plodding about somebody else's work, which they would not do if they themselves could help ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... sickness, as it permitted them to alternate them without a moral struggle. Such is the wickedness of the Renaissance: not a superhuman fury of lust and cruelty, like Victor Hugo's Lucrezia Borgia; but an indifferent, a characterless creature like the Lucrezia Borgia of history: passive to surrounding influences, blind to good and evil, infamous in the infamous Rome, among her father and brother's courtesans and cut-throats; grave and gracious! in the grave and gracious Ferrara, among the Platonic ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... is not always easy to choose for every part of the design the thickness which will look the best. For instance, sometimes the leading will be too strong and overwhelm the picture; again it will be too weak and render the window characterless." ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett
... at him; he was very handsome, and looked so to her, after the broad, blunt, characterless faces of the Walloon peasantry around her. He walked with an easy grace, he was clad in picture-like velvets, he had a beautiful poetic head, and eyes like deep brown waters, and a face like one of Jordaens' or Rembrandt's ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... degenerating into feeble prettiness, and this he did by an insistence on character in his figures, particularly his men. His draperies also are always beautifully drawn and full of variety, never feeble and characterless. The landscape backgrounds are much more lacking in this respect, nothing ever happened there, no storms have ever bent his graceful tree-trunks, and the incessant gradations might easily become wearisome. But possibly the charm in which we delight would be lost, did the ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... a silent, characterless man, taking the lead from his wife with admirable docility, and asking nothing from fortune but regular work and time to read the newspaper. He had worked for the same firm since he was a boy, disliking change; but since his second marriage he had been dragged from one house to another. Sometimes ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... upon a yellow ground. The hands emerge from this mantle, are crossed upon the breast, and grasp the Ankh, or Tau-cross, symbolic of eternal life. The heads are portraits. The faces are round, the eyes large, the expression mild and characterless. Each is crowned with the flat-topped cap and lofty plumes of Amen or Maut. We cannot but wonder for what reason these huge receptacles were made. The two queens were small of stature, and their mummies—which were well-nigh lost in the cases—had to be packed round with ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... The king, more and more absolutely the head of the church, as in England, did not hesitate to punish even prominent reformers when they opposed him. The reign of Gustavus's successor, Eric XIV, [Sidenote: Eric XIV, 1560-8] was characterless, save for the influx of Huguenots strengthening the Protestants. King John III [Sidenote: John III, 1569-92] made a final, though futile, attempt to reunite with the Roman Church. As Finland was at this time a dependency of Sweden, the Reformation took practically ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... briskly towards her hotel, traversing those wide characterless streets which are typical of a Russian town. The pavements were empty, the houses shuttered and dark; save for the broad back of the coachman perched before her, she sat in a solitude. Thus it was that the sound which presently she heard ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... no notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African ...
— Progress and History • Various
... poems. But in neither case is there any vestige of literary or poetical endowment. Few, indeed, are the Parish Magazines which could not show among their contents poems and articles greatly superior to the weak and characterless effusions of the father of the Brontes. The fact seems important; because in this case not one member of a family, but a whole family, is endowed in more or less degree with faculties not derived from ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing—'A bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long blunt characterless nose—the whole visit the most unutterable stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered, farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... Catulle Mendes is his counterpart in France,—but the pallid Portuguese Jew with his Christ-like face, and his fascinating fervour is more interesting than the spectacled Scotchman. Both began with volumes of excellent but characterless verse, and loud outcries about the dignity of art, and both have—well ... Mr. Robert Buchanan has collaborated with Gus Harris, and written the programme poetry for the Vaudeville Theatre; he has written a novel, the less said about ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... as bare, square, and characterless as other hotel rooms; nevertheless, its occupant may have left a hint or two of himself about, which would be of use to us. There are no trunks or other luggage; evidently he will be on his way again to-morrow. The window is shut, although the night is warm and clear. The door ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... announced, and I shook myself mentally, and looked up smiling at my Mining Engineer, who was truly a man worth knowing and a most pleasant gentleman besides, and went to dinner with him determined that if I must look characterless I would not be characterless, nor make my companion long ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond |
