"Staleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... autumn at hand the fortunes of the road had in them a grain more of hardship and less of romance, it was to be expected. Brian had tramped to his goal. The staleness was gone. It was time to be up ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... repartees, a last epigram from the Abbe, a court anecdote from the Marquise which might have figured in one of those letters of Madame de Sevigne where the freshness of the haymaker of Les Rochers survives the glare and the terrible staleness of the Versailles of Louis XV., a blunt camp jest from the soldier, a sarcasm from the philosopher, a joyous barcarole, strangely succeeded by a snatch from that lament of woe wrung forth by the fatal field of Flodden, and the company dispersed. The horse's hoofs ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... murderous gamblers with a Quixotic eye to the point of honour, saintly blackguards with superhuman splendours of affection and loyalty revealed in the final paragraph of their history, go on and on in his pages with changeless aspect. The oddest mixture of staleness and of freshness is to be found there. Since he first delighted us he has scarcely troubled himself once to find a new story, or a new type of character, or a new field for his descriptive powers. He took the Spanish mission into ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... strain are new to you; otherwise you will do much more harm than good. I am convinced that, generally speaking, players attend too many meetings. Instead of their play improving, it may deteriorate. They run the fearful risk of staleness—one of the greatest dangers to a lawn tennis player—and they become physically worn out. As soon as you find you are losing interest in the game, when it becomes an effort to go into court, give the game a rest. It is clear you have ...
— Lawn Tennis for Ladies • Mrs. Lambert Chambers
... factory, machine-made in uncostly quantities. Obviously, power needs to make use of no such storage. The property of power is to use phrases, whether strange or familiar, as though it created them. But even more than lack of power is lack of humour the cause of all the rankness and the staleness, of all the Anglo-Saxon of commerce, of all the weary 'quaintness'—that quaintness of which one is moved to exclaim with Cassio: 'Hither comes the bauble!' Lack of a sense of humour betrays a man into that perpetual too-much whereby he tries to make amends ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... after an indeterminate interval, he found himself in the street. The air was cool after the fetid staleness of that room. He was still holding the Negro's hand. And above them the stars burned, remote and calm, like beacon lamps ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... staleness of the thing almost made me sick. Do you remember when we first compared our weird experiences? But I suppose they will go on doing it to the end of time, and it will have as great a charm for the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... enemy of players who play long seasons. It is a case of too much tennis. Staleness is seldom physical weariness. A player can always recover his strength by rest. Staleness is a mental fatigue due often to worry or too close attention to tennis, and not enough variety of thought. Its symptoms are a dislike for the tennis game and its surroundings, and a lack of interest in the ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... first odor of massed cigars began to drift in. It wasn't really a large house, she reflected; on an evening like this the library sometimes grew blue with smoke, and next day one had to leave the windows open for hours to air the heavy staleness out of the curtains. Perhaps this partnership might . . . she began to speculate on a ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... effectless; yet nothing we'll omit That bears recovery's name. But, since your kindness We have stretch'd thus far, let us beseech you That for our gold we may provision have, Wherein we are not destitute for want, But weary for the staleness. ...
— Pericles Prince of Tyre • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... the bald spot on his head, the puff-sacks under his eyes, the sagging cheeks, the heavy dewlap, the general tiredness and staleness and fatness, all the collapse and ruin of a man who had once been strong but who had lived too easily and ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London |
