"Commonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Nottingham lace curtains, the olive-and-crimson furniture, the pictures in cheap gilt frames, the heavily gilded wall-paper, and the throws of thin silk over the picture corners must prove to him the standing of her family. She felt an ignoble satisfaction in it, for a certain measure of commonness clung to the girl like a cobweb. She was as yet too young to bloom free of her environment, her head was not yet over the barrier of her daily lot; her heart never would be, and that was her glory. Young Lloyd handed her the roll of valedictory ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... "the sea relieves everything about or near it, from the humiliation of commonness. The stamp of distinction rests on its printless waves. It was the first surface of the earth, and its primal regency has never been lost or forfeited;" a suspicion crossed my mind: "How was it your father spoke of Devonshire. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... dragged her out of her capable and mechanical indifference. It was a pity. Her consistent dullness had had a sort of dignity; but genial, she was merely ridiculous. Animation cruelly displayed her appalling commonness and physical shabbiness. Sophia's demeanour was not chilly; but it indicated that Sophia had no wish to be eyed over as ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... lameness had been a sort of bridge for Peter, a high airy structure which engaged the best of him and so carried him safely over Blodgett's without once letting him fall into the unlovely vein of life there, its narrowness, its commonness. He had known, even when he had known it most inaccessible, that there was another life which answered to every instinct of his for beauty and fitness. He waited only for the release from strain for his entry with it. Now by the shock ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... will be noticed that the remedies we recommend are in almost every case very cheap—even, like hot water, costing nothing, as they are in every house. This very simplicity and commonness has turned many against our treatment. We know, indeed, of one curious case where olive oil was derided and despised by a rheumatic patient, until his friends got it labelled "Poison, for external use only." It was then eagerly applied, and effected ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... and of a piece with the monotony in which they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of loathing. His home was next the house of the Cumberland minister. He approached it tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had always had when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies of living, he experienced all the physical depression which follows a debauch; the ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him—that safety in doubt was not action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very commonness. In his case there was nothing of that—in no case in his life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and his breakfast, in the sense of that ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... the victim; he saw the blood flow. And this building up of circumstance was like a consecration of the man, till he seemed to walk in sacrificial fillets. Next he considered Davis, with his thick-fingered, coarse-grained, oat-bread commonness of nature, his indomitable valour and mirth in the old days of their starvation, the endearing blend of his faults and virtues, the sudden shining forth of a tenderness that lay too deep for tears; his children, Ada and her bowel complaint, and Ada's doll. No, death could ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the trail. She called the insult down to him over her shoulder. But before she had gone a half-mile her eyes were blind with tears. Why did she get so angry? Why did she say such things? Other girls were ladylike and soft-spoken. Was there a streak of commonness in her that made possible such a scene as she had just gone through? In her heart she longed to be a lady—gentle, refined, sweet of spirit. Instead of which she was a bad-tempered tomboy. "Miss Spitfire" ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... only for the ignorant and idle crowd. But those who are conscious of the weight of centuries of past literature, whom nothing satisfies, whom everything disgusts because they dream of something better, to whom the bloom is off everything, and who always are impressed with the uselessness, the commonness of their own achievements—these come to regard literary art as a thing unattainable and mysterious, scarcely to be detected save in a few ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... waving with a wild growth of brambles and chance growths of all kinds. This was the oldest part of all. At a little distance were some very commonplace and disjointed fragments of building, one of them suggesting a certain pathos by its very commonness and the complete wreck which it showed. This was the end of a low gable, a bit of gray wall, all incrusted with lichens, in which was a common door-way. Probably it had been a servants' entrance, a backdoor, or opening into ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... training she owed her skill. He even tried to trace the source of his obligations, to discriminate between the influences which had combined to produce his domestic happiness: he perceived that Haskett's commonness had made Alice worship good breeding, while Varick's liberal construction of the marriage bond had taught her to value the conjugal virtues; so that he was directly indebted to his predecessors for the devotion which made his ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... under the modelling influences of the finished, refined, tender, sweet-tongued, and sweet-thoughted Englishwoman, who, if she had been less of a woman, would have been repelled by his uncouthness; if she had been less of a lady, would have mistaken his commonness for vulgarity. But she was just, like the type of womankind, a virgin-mother. She saw the nobility of his nature through its homely garments, and had been, indeed, sent to carry on the work from which his mother had been too ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... whose every work, one may almost say, its informing, co-ordinating, elevating influence is distinctly to be perceived; but it is always present as a factor, as a force dignifying and relieving from all touch, all taint of the commonness that is so often inseparably associated with art whose absorption in nature is listlessly unthinking instead of enthusiastic and alert. In Rousseau, too, in a word, we have the classic strain, as at least a psychological element, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... Golden, of Panama and the office, did not in the least feel superior to Mr. Eddie Schwirtz's robust commonness. The men she knew, except for pariahs like Walter Babson, talked thus. She could admire Mamie Magen's verbal symphonies, but with Mr. Schwirtz she was able to forget her little private stock of worries and settle down ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... heard the pigeons of the Seven Woods Make their faint thunder, and the garden bees Hum in the lime tree flowers; and put away The unavailing outcries and the old bitterness That empty the heart. I have forgot awhile Tara uprooted, and new commonness Upon the throne and crying about the streets And hanging its paper flowers from post to post, Because it is alone of all things happy. I am contented for I know that Quiet Wanders laughing and eating her wild heart Among pigeons and bees, while that Great Archer, Who ...
— In The Seven Woods - Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age • William Butler (W.B.) Yeats |
