"Colourless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... up medicine, and, silent and unoccupied, as though she were a prisoner, spent the remainder of her youth in colourless apathy, with bowed head and hanging hands. The only thing to which she was not completely indifferent, and which brought some brightness into the twilight of her life, was the presence of her brother, whom she loved. She loved him himself and his programme, she was full of reverence for his ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... has to be met. "Are you forgetting about colour?" someone inquires. Certainly not; my term "significant form" included combinations of lines and of colours. The distinction between form and colour is an unreal one; you cannot conceive a colourless line or a colourless space; neither can you conceive a formless relation of colours. In a black and white drawing the spaces are all white and all are bounded by black lines; in most oil paintings the spaces are multi-coloured and so are the boundaries; you cannot imagine ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... differ in almost every way: in the act of combination the properties of elements (except weight) disappear, and are superseded by others in the compound. If, for example, mercury (a heavy, silvery liquid) be heated in contact with oxygen (a colourless gas), oxide of mercury is formed (red precipitate, which is a powder). This compound presents very different phenomena from those of its elements; and hence Mill called this class of cases "the heteropathic intermixture of effects." Still, in chemical action, the effect is not (in ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... good, she would make a splendid wife for a country doctor of his years. [A pause] I can understand how the poor child feels. She lives here in this desperate loneliness with no one around her except these colourless shadows that go mooning about talking nonsense and knowing nothing except that they eat, drink, and sleep. Among them appears from time to time this Dr. Astroff, so different, so handsome, so interesting, so charming. It is like seeing the moon rise on a dark ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... answer. No mere rushing of clouds and whirl of dry and colourless leaves could match the storm of disappointment that was beginning to rage ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... a queer little fellow, healthy but colourless, with strangely beautiful grey eyes which, on first seeing them, almost startled one with their intelligence. He was shy and almost obstinately silent, but when I talked to him on certain subjects ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... small and undeveloped. She was seventeen and looked hardly fifteen. Her large dark eyes looked pathetic in her thin sallow face. Her lips were thin and colourless, her hair straight and dull brown. No prettiness at all belonged to her. Only ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... virtue, and I might almost say, of regal or priestly quality to white; a quality which suits it to the act of restoring our bodies with food and wine, above all, to the act of spiritual purification, the passing through the cool, colourless, stainless, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... stand thus stooping over the sunfish in its nest, the edges of the dorsal and caudal fins have a singular dusty golden reflection, and its eyes, which stand out from the head, are transparent and colourless. Seen in its native element, it is a very beautiful and compact fish, perfect in all its parts, and looks like a brilliant coin fresh from the mint. It is a perfect jewel of the river, the green, red, coppery, and golden reflections of its mottled sides being the ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... done Peep O'Day, in a perfectly colourless and unsympathetic voice, bade him good-by—not good night but good-by! And, going inside the house, he closed the door behind him, leaving his newly returned relative ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... exceedingly long-winded document, which seemed to commit the Liberal Party to nothing in particular. Verbosa et grandis epistola, said Mr. John Morley. "An old man's manifesto," wrote the Pall Mall. By contrast with this colourless but authoritative document, Mr. Chamberlain's scheme became known as "The Unauthorized Programme," and of that programme I was a ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Metaphors are her stuff: examine Language; what, if you except some few primitive elements (of natural sound), what is it all but Metaphors, recognised as such, or no longer recognised; still fluid and florid, or now solid-grown and colourless? If those same primitive elements are the osseous fixtures in the Flesh-Garment, Language,—then are Metaphors its muscles and tissues and living integuments. An unmetaphorical style you shall in vain seek for: is not your very Attention a Stretching-to? The difference lies here: ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... at fault. The Mediterranean had surely never bred such a breed; nor had Scandinavia. They were not blonds. They were not brunettes. Nor were they of the Brown, or Black, or Yellow. Their skin was white under a bronze of weather. Wet as was their hair, it was plainly a colourless, sandy hair. Yet their eyes were dark—and yet not dark. They were neither blue, nor gray, nor green, nor hazel. Nor were they black. They were topaz, pale topaz; and they gleamed and dreamed like the eyes of great ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... still grey-hued, the world still colourless and mysterious, the house a long black bulk against a slowly lightening sky. Only the earliest sparrows were twittering; in the trees only the most wakeful rooks were uttering tentative caws. The outburst of joy and life and music which ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... tetrabromide, C{2}H{2}Br4, which is very conveniently prepared by passing acetylene into cooled bromine, has a density of 3.001 at 6 C. It is highly convenient, since it is colourless, odourless, very stable and easily mobile. It may be diluted with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... told of a woman living in a quiet little New England village who complained of her loneliness there, where the quilting bees were the only saving features of an otherwise colourless existence. She told the interested listener that in this out-of-the-way hamlet she did not mind the monotony much because there were plenty of "quiltings," adding that she had helped that winter at more than twenty-five quilting bees; besides this, she had made a quilt for ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... receded a trifle in obedience to Japanese canons of beauty, was thrust vigorously forward; and the curved lips in their Cupid's bow seemed moulded for kissing by generations of European passions, whereas about Japanese mouths there is always something sullen and pinched and colourless. The bridge of her nose and her eyes of deep olive green, the eyes of a wildcat, gave the lie ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... watched the boy. He was evidently poor, and rather cunning. A stiff bit of hair stood straight off his forehead, the rest fitted close to his meagre head. He was pale and colourless. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... resplendent arch in the heavens, encircling, and issuing from a centre of fire. In proportion as the day advanced, the brilliant light of these separate rays was gradually dimmed—or rather, they were blended together, and composed the colourless light of day. Then the moon, which still shone overhead, 'paled her ineffectual fire,' and melted away in the general illumination of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... life of the English agricultural labourers there is absolutely no poetry, no colour. Even their marriages—times when if ever in life poetry will manifest itself—are sober, dull, tame, clumsy, and colourless. I say sober in the sense of tint, for to get drunk appears to be the one social pleasure of the marriage-day. They, of course, walk to church; but then that walk usually leads across fields full of all the beauties ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... sees in a world of sun. The men in the hospital had been pale, but that had seemed less striking for one is used to pale faces in a hospital. It came to me with a sense of something lost that my own countenance blanched in the mine and hospital would so remain colourless like the faces of the men who now stole by me in their felted footwear with ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... enmity or alarm or astonishment in the colourless eyes that were fixed composedly on mine, nothing but courtesy in ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... who prefer Bunyan to Spenser, others who place Sterne, Voltaire, and Byron before both, and not a few who have emerged with profit and without pollution from the perusal of the labours of Rabelais and Aretino. There is a literal deluge of moral and colourless works, on the contrary, from which even the average modern reader comes away only with an uncomfortable sense of waste of ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... spheres carries them round, and they have a vision of the world beyond. But the others labour in vain; for the mortal steed, if he has not been properly trained, keeps them down and sinks them towards the earth. Of the world which is beyond the heavens, who can tell? There is an essence formless, colourless, intangible, perceived by the mind only, dwelling in the region of true knowledge. The divine mind in her revolution enjoys this fair prospect, and beholds justice, temperance, and knowledge in their everlasting essence. ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... her head hung limply back. Her golden hair made an aureola of light around the colourless face with ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... unattainable. He discoursed of the hidden potent properties of nature, unknown only to those who seek not to know them; of the splendid virtue inherent in all things, like the green and violet flames in the clear colourless raindrops which are seen only on rare occasions. Of life and death, he said that life was of the spirit which never dies, that death meant only a passage, a change of abode of the spirit, and the left body crumbled to dust when the spirit went out of it to continue ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Evan had her heart, worthy or unworthy; she could not take it back; there was nothing left for her but to be a cold shadow walking beside this good man who was so full of all gentle and noble affections. Well, she was glad, since he wanted her, that she might lead her colourless existence by his side. That was the last feeling with which ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... character. More men are saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of gain. Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul's law, and these are of a better sort; but most fortunate are ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... chiefly a patriot and you are concerned for the flag and country with which your emotions have interwoven. You find that the Socialist talks constantly of internationalism and the World State, and that presents itself to your imagination as a very vague and colourless substitute for a warm and living reality of England or "these States" or the Empire. Well, your patriotism will have suffered a change, but I do not think it need starve under Socialist conditions. It may be that war will have ceased, but ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... and partly from the wear of heavy traffic, the road was very bumpy. The man above me was in terrible agony, and every fresh jolt made him groan. The light of the autumn afternoon was wearing away rapidly. Through the open door at the end of the ambulance, as we sped onward, I could see the brown colourless stretch of country fade in the twilight, and then vanish into complete darkness, and I knew that the great adventure of my life among the most glorious men that the world ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... young, and had a tall graceful figure, and strange colourless hair that looked as though it ought to have been golden, only the gloss had faded out of it; but it was lovely hair, fine and soft as ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... large number of questions subsidiary to Ars Poetica, and containing no few selections of illustrative verse, many of the author's own. As far as style goes both Webbe and Puttenham fall into the rather colourless but not incorrect class already described, and are of the tribe of Ascham. Here ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Geoffrey Lovell, Knight, and Dame Agnes Lovell, and is now seventeen years of age; rather under the middle height, slenderly formed, with an appearance of great fragility and delicacy; her complexion is very fair, of that extreme fairness which often betokens disease, and her face almost colourless. Her features are regular, and classical in their contour; her eyes are a clear grey— honest, truthful eyes, that look straight at you; and her hair, which is almost long enough, when let down, ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt
... opposite one which has clasped nothing. When thin transverse slices of the two are placed under the microscope their difference is conspicuous: the side of the petiole which has been in contact with the support, is formed of a layer of colourless cells with their longer axes directed from the centre, and these are very much larger than the corresponding cells in the opposite or unchanged petiole; the central cells, also, are in some degree enlarged, and the whole is much indurated. The exterior ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... peace and sanctity pervading the pretty room; the same lights dancing through the painted window on the silk coverlet; the same face, which had all the colourless reality of death, without any of its ghastliness—a smiling repose, such as is seen only at the beginning and end of life's tumult—in the cradle and in the coffin. Its effect upon Agatha was instantaneous. Her trembling ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... against outside interference. Even here the etymological sense is still sufficiently felt to create an involuntary jar and leads to a change of the construction; but finally all sense of it is lost, and the expression becomes quite colourless: "to fill the hand " means simply "to consecrate." In Ezekiel not only the priest but also the altar has its "hand filled" (xliii. 26); in the Priestly Code the abstract milluim ["consecrations"] is chiefly used, with subject and object left out, as the name of a mere ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... colourless younger sister, Anne, the latter now long dead, had settled down at Beechfield in the nineties of the last century. When both over thirty years of age, they had selected Beechfield as a dwelling-place because of its quiet charm and nearness to London. Also because Rose Cottage, ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... to me to be colourless in mind as well as in feature. She impressed me neither favourably nor the reverse. She was a nonentity. It was easy to see that she was passionately devoted both to her husband and to her little son. Her light grey eyes wandered continually from one to the other, noting every ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... the age which instituted the modern study of history. He taught it to be critical, to be colourless, and to be new. We meet him at every step, and he has done more for us than any other man. There are stronger books than any one of his, and some may have surpassed him in political, religious, philosophic insight, in vividness ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... day Mrs. Tompkins leisurely sips her cocoa as she breaks her fast in the pretty morning room at No. —— Eaton Square, her step-daughter, an American born and bred, is her companion, a tiny young woman all pale tints, colourless face, sharp features, sharp little eyes always watery, always with a red rim about them giving the paleness of their blue a pink shade. When off guard the mouth is resolute, the eyes wearing a stealthy cunning look; the mask on, 'tis an old-child ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... what Donal took for a sign to ring the bell. He did so, and Simmons came. The moment he entered, and saw the state his master was in, he hastened to a cupboard, took thence a bottle, poured from it something colourless, and gave it to him in water. It brought him to himself. He sat up again, and in a voice ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... risings, the removal of all symbols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenched the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. A race of literary men had sprang up in Edinburgh who, as to national feeling, were entirely colourless, Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The (p. 197) thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotticism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... sent to their place in Ireland, and to be sent to Castle Clare is almost like being sent to the Bastille. She'll never get out alive. She'll have to stay there and see herself grow thin instead of slim, and colourless instead of fair. Her little nose will grow sharp, and she will lose ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... strangely perfect old house had been. It was Milly—not that sinister figure that Pegler thought she had seen—whose form ought to haunt Wyndfell Hall. But there survived no trace, no trifling memento even, of the dead woman's evidently colourless personality. ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... said, his gray face bent over his colourless hands as he twisted the papers, "shall we not tell Mr. Griggs what is to be done? Afterward he can lie in the tent and sleep until evening, for he is weary and needs to recruit ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... converted into white brandy or rum. This is a simple process. The raw liquid is first boiled, and the steam which generates passes through a complication of sinuous tubing until it reaches a single tap, where it spirts out in fits and starts into the cold colourless spirit called 'aguardiente.' A glass valve is connected with the tap, and by means of this the degrees of strength formed by the spirit are gauged. The distillers are already at work, as the operations in this department are ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... in a diagonal line across the plateau toward the mountains of Erkoweet, a silent company on a plain still more silent. It was eleven o'clock. The sun rose toward the centre of a colourless, cloudless sky, the shadows of the camels shortened upon the sand, and the sand itself glistened white as a beach of the Scilly Islands. There was no draught of air that morning to whisper amongst the rich foliage, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... I stood alone in the street, up which yellowish wreaths of fog were beginning to roll. It had been quite clear and bright when I entered the house, but now the sky was settling down into a colourless grey, the light was failing and the houses dwindling into dim, unreal shapes that vanished at half their height. Nevertheless I stepped out briskly and strode along at a good pace, as a young man is apt to do when his mind is in somewhat of a ferment. In truth, ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... softly as might be, And moving through the chamber quietly, She gat the lamp within her trembling hand, And long, debating of these things, did stand In that thick darkness, till she seemed to be A dweller in some black eternity, And what she once had called the world did seem A hollow void, a colourless mad dream; For she felt so alone—three times in vain She moved her heavy hand, three times again It fell adown; at last throughout the place Its flame glared, lighting up her woeful face, Whose eyes the silken carpet did but ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... satisfied, which is indeed the invariable consequence of weakness, for the love of vulgar popularity was the weakness of our eminent chief, so deeply respected on other accounts. This same weakness caused him to end his days as a Deputy of the most colourless opinions. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... unspoken instincts, my vague suspicions, suddenly took shape and centred upon the naturalist. In that impassive, colourless man, with his straw hat and his butterfly-net, I seemed to see something terrible—a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling face and ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... the New World they were seeking. Probably, considering the land they were leaving was one of volcanoes and desert wastes, they hoped for better things. Their Icelandic life must indeed be hard and colourless, so hard as to have taken from them all pleasure in existence. To judge by their apathy, these questions did not seem to have been taken much into account by them; possibly when the sight of green fields, and Nature's abundance, break upon their view, dormant will, and ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... delighted and could scarcely let them go. Their mother says she will send to me their photographs, and I will send them to thee, as they seem children from another world. They are much prettier, in my eyes, than the foreign children, with their white hair and colourless, blue eyes, who always seem to be clothed in white. That seems not natural for a child, as it is our mourning colour, and children should wear gay colours, as they are symbols of joy ...
— My Lady of the Chinese Courtyard • Elizabeth Cooper
... to her many trials with becoming modesty. She was a dull, colourless woman whose sole distinction lay in the visitations of affliction, and it is not too much to affirm that she was proud of them. She was sewing, not too rapidly, on a very long seam, which occupation was typical of ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... speaking of this circumstance affirms however that he remained during this period in a cave, where his mother conveyed to him intelligence and necessaries, and that, when he came once more into light and air, he appeared so emaciated and colourless, that he might well be believed to have come ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... with her just as she reached Barbara. Barbara leant no more against the wall, but lay huddled at the foot of it. Weariness and hunger had overcome her; she was in a faint, her lips colourless and her eyes closed. Nell dropped beside her, murmuring low, soft consolations. I stood by in awkward helplessness. These matters were beyond ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... time the travellers had reached the dreary waste called by the inhabitants Hammerton Heath. At some seasons of the year it was golden with gorse or purple with ling, but in this drear winter season it was bare and colourless, and utterly desolate. The outline of dark forests could be seen all around on the horizon; but the road led over the exposed ground, where not a tree broke the monotony of the way. Cuthbert was glad enough to have a companion to ride by his side over the lonely waste, ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... advanced, and rose for a moment to receive me. I thought her, then, still more colourless and thin than when I had seen her last; the flashing eyes still brighter, and the ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... one of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, as we were clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window in that house of mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice of language. It was a pair of very colourless urchins that fled down the lane from this remarkable experience! But I recall with a more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... measure, which permeate one another and of which the succession in la duree has nothing in common with side-by-sideness. But the moments at which we thus grasp ourselves are rare; the greater part of our time we live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost—a colourless shadow which is but the social representation of the real and largely concealed Ego. Hence our life unfolds in space rather than in time. We live for the external world rather than for ourselves, we speak rather than think, we ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... caste far and wide, but would also impoverish him for the rest of his life. He lived quietly and comfortably, like a country squire, surrounded by his relatives and descendants. He seemed fond of good living, and his wife was an excellent housekeeper. In the midst of a somewhat colourless Christian population, wearing trousers and slovenly dresses, using enamel pots and petrol-lamps, Agelan and his household were a genuine relic of the good old times, and no one could have pretended that his home was less pleasant than those around him. These things are ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... so cleverly casual that no one could have guessed the girl's consuming interest in the answer. But its cleverness had overshot the mark, for so colourless was the tone in which it was asked that Mary did not notice it at all. Instead she retreated steadily ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... heroes are women in disguise, or mere lay-figures, walking gentlemen who parade tolerably through their parts, but have no real vitality. On the other hand, the heroines of male writers are for the most part unnaturally strained or quite colourless; male hands are too heavy for the delicate work required. Milton could draw a majestic Satan, but his Eve is no better than a good-managing housekeeper who knows her place. It is, therefore, remarkable that Richardson's ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Hottentot's tale as I picked it up from his laconic, colourless, Dutch patois sentences, then and afterwards; a very wonderful tale I thought. But for him, his fidelity and his bushman's cunning, where should I have found myself before ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... silence or a human foot left its impress on the soil; but when I remember that what I see in this sweep of force and beauty is largely what I myself put into the vision, that Nature without the human ear is soundless, and without the human eye colourless, I understand that what lies spread before me never was until a human soul confronted it and became its interpreter. This radiant world upon which I look was without form and void until the earliest man brought to the vision of it that creative power within himself ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... company about his grave; but I confess the spectacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step forward and raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and the spire of the Assembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky with the colourless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be desired from a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the world's beauty relieves a mind from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as the phrase goes, he was a startling object to look at, with his colourless face, his sunken cheeks, his wild black eyes, and his long black hair. The first question he asked me about himself, when he could speak, made me suspect that I had been called in to a man in my own profession. I mentioned to him my surmise; and he told ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... alcohols of this formula are known; two of these are primary, one secondary, and one tertiary (see ALCOHOLS). Normal butyl alcohol, CH3.(CH2)2.CH2OH, is a colourless liquid, boiling at 116.8 deg., and formed by reducing normal butyl aldehyde with sodium, or by a peculiar fermentation of glycerin, brought about by a schizomycete. Isobutyl alcohol, (CH3)2CH.CH2OH, the butyl alcohol ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... frightened like fledglings suddenly surprised by a cuckoo, stirred Maggie's sympathy. She disliked Miss Avies from the very first moment. Miss Avies had a pale, thin, pointed face with no eyebrows, grey eyes dim and short-sighted, and fair colourless hair brushed straight back under a ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... had ever witnessed anger in him, and all said he had the patience of Job. He was even timid of policemen, freight agents, and conductors, though he was not afraid of them. He was not afraid of anything, any more than was he enamoured of anything save Swedenborg. He was as colourless of character as the neutral-coloured clothes he wore, as the neutral-coloured hair that sprawled upon his crown, as the neutral-coloured eyes with which he observed the world. Nor was he a fool any more than was he a wise man or a scholar. He gave little to life, asked little of life, ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... with that quiet, earnest, melancholy cast peculiar to deformity, were yet regular, almost pretty. Her head was well-shaped, and from it fell a quantity of amber-coloured hair—pale "lint-white locks," which, with the almost colourless transparency of her complexion, gave a spectral air to her whole appearance. She looked less like a child than a woman dwarfed into childhood; the sort of being renowned in elfin legends, as springing up on a lonely moor, or appearing by a cradle-side; supernatural, ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... mysterious blend of blue and green. The red-brown bricks of the wall glowed with all the October tints of strong ruby and tawny wines. The sun seemed to set each object alight with a different coloured flame, like a man lighting fireworks; and even Innocent's hair, which was of a rather colourless fairness, seemed to have a flame of pagan gold on it as he strode across the lawn towards the one tall ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... not look exactly the stuff to make a glee-maiden of, nor even the beauty for whom to sacrifice everything, even liberty and respect. She was substantial in form, and broad in face and mouth, without much nose, and with large almost colourless eyes. But there was a wonderful look of heartiness and friendliness about her person and her house; the boys had never in their lives seen anything so amazingly and spotlessly clean and shining. In ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... perception of something lurking there. The red of the fire grew deeper and deeper, grey scales spread upon it, its vertical column of smoke became more and more visible, and up and down the gorge things that had been unseen grew clear in a colourless ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... was at this time just over forty. He was a tall, loosely built man, with rather a colourless face, with an expression negative in repose, and faintly humorous when speaking. He was rich and supposed to be lazy; he knew his world and had lived it in and for it systematically. Some one had said that ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... there, beyond, the eye traversed a great plain, its limit the blending of earth and sky in lurid cloud. A ray of yellow sunset touched the height and its crowning ruin; at the zenith shone a space of pure pale blue save for these points of relief the picture was colourless and uniformly sombre. Far and near, innumerable chimneys sent forth fumes of various density broad-flung jets of steam, coldly white against the murky distance; wan smoke from lime-kilns, wafted in long trails; reek of solid blackness from pits and forges, ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... plain and smooth Plates, heaped up, or incumbent on each other. Next, that the parts of this body are much more manageable, to be divided or joyned, then the parts of a Peacocks feather, or any other substance that I know. And thirdly, because that in this we are able from a colourless body to produce several coloured bodies, affording all the variety of Colours imaginable: And several others, which the subsequent ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... idea of a man who has lived one hundred and fifty years is to me a more realistic curiosity than the idea of a man twenty-five thousand years old. But I caught a glimpse, as it were, of strange figures, moving about in a colourless background, with calm gestures, slow speeches, silences perhaps a year in length. The familiar outline of London crumbled suddenly away, the blotches of shadow and the coloured shafts of light striking between the gaps in the crowds, the violet-lit tubes, the ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... Aunt Emmy, who represented in my somewhat colourless orphaned existence the beautiful and romantic side of life. Aunt Emmy looked romantic, and the contrast between her refined, gentle self-effacement and the commonplace egotism of her two men was of the glaring nature which appeals ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... as point after point revealed some change in the dazzling diorama, uncertain which was finest, and whether something still grander might not be in store. But at last Nordkyn drew nigh, and at three o'clock the light became that of day, white and colourless. The north-east wind blew keenly across the Arctic Ocean, and we were both satisfied and fatigued enough to go to bed. It was the most northern point of our voyage—about 71 deg. 20', which is further north than I ever was before, or ever wish ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... the voice of Chatellerault, in tones that were perfectly colourless, "you come to me that I may present ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... Before him the jagged peaks of the Sierra came out all black in the clear dawn. Here and there a muffled lepero whisked round the corner of a grass-grown street before the ringing hoofs of his horse. Dogs barked behind the walls of the gardens; and with the colourless light the chill of the snows seemed to fall from the mountains upon the disjointed pavements and the shuttered houses with broken cornices and the plaster peeling in patches between the flat pilasters of the fronts. The daybreak struggled with the gloom under the arcades on the Plaza, with no ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... outline upon the colourless background, a close observer might have seen that it was small. This was all that was positively discoverable, though it ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... of the family circle, in these years, Hugh's relations were affectionate but colourless. With his natural reticence, he shrank from speaking of the thoughts which predominated in his mind; especially while there was an abundance of interesting and uncontroversial topics which afforded ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... purse. The rooms of his house became a sort of harbour of refuge in which several strange battered hulks found their last moorings. There were the blind Mr. Levett, and the acidulous Mrs. Williams, and the colourless Mrs. De Moulins, all old and ailing—a trying group amid which to spend one's days. His guinea was always ready for the poor acquaintance, and no poet was so humble that he might not preface his book with a dedication whose ponderous and sonorous sentences bore ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a chemical substance discovered in 1863 by A. Geuther, who showed that the chief product of the action of sodium on ethyl acetate was a sodium compound of composition C6H9O3Na, which on treatment with acids gave a colourless, somewhat oily liquid of composition C6H10O3. E. Frankland and B. F. Duppa in 1865 examined the reaction and concluded that Geuther's sodium salt was a derivative of the ethyl ester of acetone carboxylic acid and possessed the constitution CH6CO.CHNa.COOC2H5. This ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... flowers have almost certainly become more or less completely peloric through reversion. Corydalis tuberosa properly has one of its two nectaries colourless, destitute of nectar, only half the size of the other, and {59} therefore, to a certain extent, in a rudimentary state; the pistil is curved towards the perfect nectary, and the hood, formed of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... significance; and in some way lose that rich and mellow colouring that characterized the bygone performers. So marked is this, that some of the old dramatic characters are abandoned altogether, because in the hands of the Realists they fade away into ineffective and colourless forms. The Sir Peter Teazles and Sir Anthony Absolutes of the old comedy require indispensably the resources of the old art, and no thin, water-gruel realism, so-called, can personate them. In avoiding the declamatory Kembletonianism of the old school, our actors are right enough; but they ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... saffron, of sulphur, of the clove, and of the rose. The lustre was like that of satin; on the lighter hues there seemed to float an efflorescence; a solemn bloom appeared on the more dark. The light itself was the ordinary light of morning, colourless and clean; and on this ground of jewels, pencilled out the least detail of drawing. Meanwhile, around the hamlet, under the palms, where the blue shadow lingered, the red coals of cocoa husk and the light trails of smoke betrayed the awakening business of the day; along the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a lover's keenness, to read Alice's moods in the most colourless wording of her notes. She was rather apt to write him notes, taking back or reaffirming the effect of something that had just passed between them. Her note were tempered to varying degrees of heat and cold, so fine that no one else ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... better his position, wishing to have an individuality of his own in her regard; but he could not change the colourless role which she assigned him. So he became silent, speaking only when some remark was obviously intended for him, and watched her face and expression. He had always told himself that her dominant characteristic was ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... spirit rebels against her fate. Such weaknesses as the opera contains are principally attributable to the libretto, which is ill-constructed, and cold and formal in diction. Rinaldo is rather a colourless person, and the other characters are for the most part merely lay-figures, though the grim figure of Hate is drawn with extraordinary power. But upon Armida the composer concentrated the full lens of his genius, ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... light coloured beard; his eyes were large and blue, and had an intent look about them, yet that heavy expression which some people affirm to be a peculiarity as well as evidence, of an epileptic subject. His face was decidedly a pleasant one for all that; refined, but quite colourless, except for the circumstance that at this moment it was blue with cold. He held a bundle made up of an old faded silk handkerchief that apparently contained all his travelling wardrobe, and wore thick shoes and gaiters, his whole ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... destined to be fulfilled, as the first person to cross the threshold of Oldstone Cottage after Ann's arrival was Caroline Tempest, the rector's sister. "Miss Caroline," as she was invariably called by the villagers, was a flat-chested, colourless individual with one of those thin noses which seem to have grown permanently elongated at the point in the process of prying into other people's business. Her hair, once flaxen, was now turning the ugly yellowish grey which is the fair woman's curse, ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... replica, in fact, of that fashionable gathering upstairs; a ghost that haunts every house where balls and good suppers are given; a picture drawn with white chalk on grey cardboard, dull and colourless, now that the bright silk dresses and gorgeously embroidered coats were no longer there to fill in the foreground, and now that the candles flickered ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... "absolutely impartial," though his view of the facts had to be corrected again and again by Sir Edward Clarke: he went on to regret that the charge of conspiracy should have been introduced, as it had to be abandoned. He then pointed out that he could not give a colourless summing up, which was "of no use to anybody." His intelligence can be judged from one crucial point: he fastened on the fact that Oscar had burnt the letters which he bought from Wood, which he said were of no importance, except that they ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... the Chapel by a private entrance, which communicated from the royal apartment. The Bishop of Winchester, in his pontifical dress, stood beside the altar; on the other side, supported by Monna Paula, the colourless, faded, half-lifeless form of the Lady Hermione, or Erminia Pauletti. Lord Dalgarno bowed profoundly to her, and the Prince, observing the horror with which she regarded him, walked up, and said to ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... into brief life, the mysterious orchid, severed just above the soil, fell from the tub. Dr. Cairn stamped the swelling buds under his feet. A profusion of colourless sap was pouring out upon ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... The crags were colourless and shimmering in the heat. The harbour was calm and greeny-blue. One by one, with our haversacks and water-bottles, belts and rolled overcoats, we went down the companion-way into the waiting surf-boats. Again and again these boats, roped together and tugged by a little launch, ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... two afterwards, her husband came up to Andrea and taking his arm with much effusion, began asking particulars about the duel. He was a youngish man, slim, with very thin fair hair and colourless eyes and projecting teeth. He had ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... him and saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair, close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent, sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full, ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... colourless voice, "try to get all you can out of your school. I haven't sufficient means to educate you in drawing and in similar accomplishments. So get all you can out of your school. Because, some day, you will have to help yourself, and ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... great Henry—'capable de tout,' beside whom 'ce coquin d'Habacuc' was mild indeed and usual!" And straightway to my stultification, I find myself translating paragraphs of pathos and indignation, in which a colourless old gentleman of the Academy is sympathized with, and made a doddering hero of, for no better reason than that he is old—and those who would point out the wisdom and comfort of his withdrawal ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... used alone in its colourless condition, will possibly have, when dry, too much glare upon its surface, but the colouring matters put into it may oppose ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... contains certain morphological elements. It contains a substance, fibrine, which appears as fibrillac when the blood clots, and red and colourless blood corpuscles. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... the foreign company that relieves its thirst. Clear virgin water, such as will course down the tunnels to bubble up in the Gaditanian fountains, is the greatest luxury of life here; "Agua fresca, cool as snow," is the most welcome of cries in the summer, and temperate Spain is as devoted to the colourless liquid that the temperance lecturer Gough and his compeers call Adam's ale, as ever London drayman was to Barclay's Entire. Success, then, to the Cadiz Waterworks Company: we drank the toast on ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... chapel exists in the window over the altar, the mullions and tracery of which have been removed to make way for dull colourless copies in painted glass of West's designs. Instead of —"blushing with the blood of kings, And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings"—steeping the altar in rich suffusion, chequering the walls and pavement with variegated hues, and filling the whole sacred spot ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... forehead, and thy lips Draw near and nearer to mine own; But when the vision from me slips, In colourless dawn ...
— The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems • William Morris
... me dyurr, that ye can't hearr 'em now? Kape your tongue silent and listen!" A good, full brogue permits speech that would offend in colourless Saxon; and Mrs. Tapping made no protest, but listened. Sure enough the rousing, maddening "Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire!" was on its way at speed somewhere close at hand. It grew and lessened and died. And Mrs. Riley was triumphant. "That's a larrudge fire, shure!" said she, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... to an officer sitting at a table in the room we were shown into, addressing him as Major. He was a thin, elderly man, with calm grey eyes and a colourless face, and looked like a gentleman. After hearing a few words from Alday, he turned to me and said courteously that he was sorry to tell me I should have to remain in El Molino till the General's return, when I could give an account ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... in to view. In the spaces between these veins lie many fine veins. All the veins run parallel from the base to the apex. At the base of the blade the veins get into the leaf-sheath and therefore the sheath becomes striated. Just above the ligule and at the base of the leaf-blade there is a colourless narrow zone. This is called ...
— A Handbook of Some South Indian Grasses • Rai Bahadur K. Ranga Achariyar
... whale blubber. Generally, the fish is cooked in the usual native ground-oven as quickly as possible, care being taken to wrap it closely up in the broad leaves of the puraka plant—a species of gigantic taro—in order that none of the oil may be lost. Thinking that the oil, which is perfectly colourless and with scarcely any odour, might prove of value, I once "tried out" two of the largest fish taken, and obtained a gallon. This I sent to a firm of drug-merchants in Sydney; but unfortunately the vessel ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... the image of her father, only in her case the defects were more accentuated: her face was still more pinched, and absolutely colourless, and the large blue-gray eyes were out of proportion to the other features. A fringe of red hair, curled very stiffly, and set round the small face like a large frill, gave her a curiously weird look. Some woman's hand must have curled it and tied the wide limp ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was going to provide for his three daughters, for Providence had endowed them with such very plain features that it seemed extremely unlikely that any gay wooer would ever stop before the door of Elibank. Meg, the eldest, was especially plain-looking. She was pale and thin, with colourless eyes, and a long pointed nose, and, to make matters worse, she had such a very wide mouth that she was known throughout the length and breadth of four counties as "Muckle-Mou'ed Meg ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... not be a colourless reflection of public opinion for the time being. It will certainly not be a Party organ, and that for sufficient reason. Neither Party has at this moment any distinctive body of doctrine, any well-conceived system of faith, which would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... energy in his gestures, and frenzy in his aspect. It was now the appearance of a corpse. He was brought in in a chair, unable to stand, fatigued and almost destroyed by the journey he had just taken. His visage was colourless; his limbs destitute of motion, almost of life. His head reclined upon his bosom, except that now and then he lifted it up, and opened his eyes with a languid glance; immediately after which he sunk back into his former apparent insensibility. He seemed ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... May, tall, colourless young women, presently came down. They noticed Martie's shoe-lacings and the frill of muddy petticoat, the ungloved hands and the absurdity of her having removed her hat, and told Rodney about these things later. At the time they only made her ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... to those who see him only as a zealot of fiery controversy, so carried out of himself that his very visions of Beelzebub acquired all the vividness of reality. Yet there are times when another spirit is upon him, when his reasoning is cool and colourless as that of a Greek philosopher. The misfortune of Luther is that he could not, as a Melancthon in large measure could, amalgamate the best elements ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... low-spoken words as they had never vibrated to thunder. I looked at Mr. Rochester; I made him look at me. His face was colourless rock; his eye both spark and flint; he seemed as if he ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... trees on the side nearest to the road, and commanding in the opposite direction a grandly desolate view over the broad brown wilderness of the moor. The clouds had gathered, within the last half hour. The light was dull; the distance was dim. The lovely face of Nature met us, soft and still colourless—met ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... our faces and arms were covered with blisters. And all through that interminable day we toiled on and on at the oars, with not a shred of cloud to be seen in any direction, the blazing sun scorching us remorselessly, and the sea all round us a polished, shining, gently undulating, colourless plain, unbroken by so much as a solitary ripple, save those created by our oar blades, the passage of the gig through the water, the occasional dash of half a dozen flying-fish out of the sea under the ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... be owned, described Julius as remarkably ugly. But he did not strike Katherine thus. His heavy black hair, beardless face and sallow skin—rendered dull and colourless, his features thickened, though not actually scarred, by smallpox, which he had had as a child,—his sensitive mouth, and the questioning expression of his short-sighted brown eyes, reminded her of a fifteenth-century Florentine portrait that had always challenged her attention ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... was in khaki, but the contrast between the two officers was very striking. The one was lean and athletic in every line of his figure, with laughing grey eyes in a handsome face; the other, a stolid, fair-haired Fleming, whose square visage would have been rather colourless and commonplace but for the pleasant smile which ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... clearly to be true that on the appearance in literature of the obscene,—I use the word in a colourless and technical sense to indicate the usually unseen or obverse side of life, the side behind the scenes, the postscenia vitae of Lucretius, and not implying anything necessarily objectionable,—it at once for most ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... rather a colourless way of stating it,' the man called Trent replied, as he dissected a sole. 'I should prefer to put it that I have come down in the character of avenger of blood, to hunt down the guilty, and vindicate the honour of society. That is my line of business. Families waited on at their private ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... enough to justify their use here as class texts. So I shall now turn to the subject of dragon-flies. Here we must again be very brief. References to dragon-flies are common throughout English poetry, but the references signify little more than a mere colourless mention of the passing of the insect. However, it so happens that the finest modern lines of pure description written about any insect, are about dragon-flies. And they also happen to be by Tennyson. Naturalists ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... pomegranates, and at last lectuaries, suspiciously like what we call jams; and "alexandrine gingerbread"; after which they drank various drinks, with or without spice or honey or pepper; and old moret, which is thought to be mulberry wine, but which generally went with clairet, a colourless grape-juice, or piment. At least, here are the lines, and one may translate ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... so that involuntarily I drew the lapels of my thin jacket together and buttoned the garment from throat to waist. Quickly, yet by imperceptible gradations, the lightening of the eastern sky spread and strengthened, the soft, velvety, star-lit, blue-black hue paling to an arch of cold, colourless pallor as the dawn asserted itself more emphatically, while the stars dwindled and vanished one by one in the rapidly-growing light. As the pallor of the sky extended itself insidiously north and south along the horizon, a low-lying bank of what at first ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... a phantom Mrs. Bodiham appeared, gliding noiselessly across the room. Above her black dress her face was pale with an opaque whiteness, her eyes were pale as water in a glass, and her strawy hair was almost colourless. She held a large ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... A less colourless account, one full of interesting facts and free from conventional newspaper sentiment and enthusiasm, we find in a ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... such only, as have the thinnest and most transparent skins, and are occasioned by the rays of the sun, striking forcibly on the mucous substance of the face, and drying the accumulating fluid. This accumulating fluid, or perspirable matter, is at first colourless; but being exposed to violent heat, or dried, becomes brown. Hence, the mucosum corpus being tinged in various parts by this brown coagulated fluid, and the parts so tinged appearing through the cuticle, or upper surface of the skin, ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson |
