"Inane" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unable to contain himself any longer. "Is this the inane, prosaic existence for which you have given up one of the most brilliant careers the world had to offer a man? It's bad enough to have wrecked that, but for one possessing the wealth you do to waste his life after such fashion; it's simply ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... "Do make some attempt to subdue that inane wit. I fancy you'll feel rather cheap hearing that that thousand dollars is the first payment on ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... the unimportant and the important; to their habit of rising at times into the clouds rather than above the clouds, and of there disporting themselves in regions "close-bordering on the impalpable inane;" to their too conspicuous want of order, system, perspective. The dramatic machinery of "Sartor Resartus" is therefore turned to a third service. It is made the vehicle of much good-humoured satire upon these and similar characteristics ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... fancied any joke perpetrated upon Cousin Albert must be pretty strong or the father would stamp it as inane and without humor. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... freshness of the God-breathed spirit air, Pass through my soul, and make it strong to love; Wither with gracious cold what demons dare Shoot from my hell into my world above; Let them drop down, like leaves the sun doth sear, And flutter far into the inane and bare, Leaving my middle-earth calm, wise, ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... provocative; one seemed to be in converse with Mr. Copley, who was not beyond converse yet, though Rupert saw he had been some time drinking. His face was flushed a little, his eyes dull, his features overspread with that inane stupidity which comes from long-continued and purely sensual indulgence of any kind, especially under the fumes of wine. To the side of this man, Rupert saw Dolly go. She went in, as I said, with a light, quick ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... however, Johnny said we must get ready, so I was provided with a fur-lined leather coat, leather helmet, goggles and a large pair of fur gauntlets. We went over to the aerodrome where our fiery steed was champing its bit as though longing to spring into the "vast inane." Two or three attendants were getting it ready. It was an R.E.8 plane and a machine gun was fixed on one side. Johnny climbed into his position and I took a seat behind him. An attendant came up ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... telephone an order for a pickax, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulfuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... moments of our lives it is always the inane that first suggests itself. It was so likely that Macdonald ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... speaking to Desmond O'Connor, to whom he unburdened himself, "'Gifford will never learn. He believes himself to be a journalistic planet. I don't mind an ordinary honest fool that knows it is a fool, but a fool that regards its own inane folly as the final thing in wisdom ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... they paid no heed to Raoul Beardsley. He had regained his composure, and far down in his eyes something leaped into rapt expression; he adjusted his glasses and peered around cautiously, beaming. He beamed at them all, and had to suppress an inane glee.... ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... stuff a girl was made of. Nothing foolish or nervous or hysterical about her. And then, subsequently, when he had met her on her own ground, she had endeavoured to put him at his ease. Funny that, but he appreciated it, nevertheless. And she could talk. She didn't giggle and ask inane questions. Nor did she treat him as some sort of a natural curiosity, who might be expected to do something shocking but entertaining at any moment. She was sensible as—well—as ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... epitaph of a bright young athlete who had been possessed of health, riches, and all fair prospects. No one warned him; none of those who swilled expensive poisons for which he paid ever refused to accept his mad generosity; he was cheered down the road to the gulf by the inane plaudits of the lowest of men; and one who was evidently his companion in many a frantic drinking-bout could find nothing to say but "He was a fool!" At this moment there are thousands of youths in our great towns and cities who are leading the heartless, senseless, semi-delirious life ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... following the sound of some one just beyond the veranda rail whistling the lively, lilting measures of "There's a Girl Wanted There," "the silly ass" seemed to become a thousand times sillier than ever. He set down his cup, and, turning to Anita, said with an inane sort of giggle, "I say, you know, here's a lark. Let's have a game of 'Slap Hand,' you and I—what? Know it, don't you? You try to slap my hands, and I try to slap yours, and whichever succeeds in ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... eulogized by Burke, and in most men's minds a sort of beatified individual. How glorious, having finished off one's affairs in Bedfordshire, or in fact finding them very dull, inane, and worthy of being quitted and got away from, to set out on a cruise, over the Jails first of Britain; then, finding that answer, over the Jails of the habitable Globe! "A voyage of discovery, a circum-navigation of charity; ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... him. In a self-tormenting mood he allowed the corners of his mouth to droop as if he were playing the part of pantaloon on the stage; disarranged his hair yet more wildly; put out his tongue at his own image in the mirror; croaked a string of inane invectives against himself; and finally, like a naughty child, blew the leaves of his manuscript from the table ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... feelings of Arthur and Angela. He hesitated before her, confused, and she kept her head down over the dog. But presently Aleck, getting bored, moved on, and, as it would have been inane to continue to stare at the floor, she had to raise herself as slowly as she might. Soon their eyes arrived in the same plane, and whether a mutual glance of intelligence was exchanged, or whether their power ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... insincere, imbecile. Its sole function was, and always has been, to help idlers of the upper classes to while away their evenings. The absurd notion of a Platonic music was rivalled by the absurdity of the composition. The inane dialogue was made up of interminable recitative, in the midst of which an occasional chorus—introduced in conformity with supposed classical practice—must have come as a most refreshing relief; for choruses they ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... and high office are always a trifle ponderous when conversing with ladies. Young lieutenants—or, at all events, officers not above the rank of captain—are far more successful at the game. How they contrive to be so God only knows. Let them but make the most inane of remarks, and at once the maiden by their side will be rocking with laughter; whereas, should a State Councillor enter into conversation with a damsel, and remark that the Russian Empire is one of vast extent, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more impure; and instead of seeing God, will at length find yourself face to face with a vast inane—a vast inane, yet filled full of one inhabitant, that devouring monster, your own false self. If for this neither do you care, I tell you there is a Power that will not have it so; a Love that will make you care by ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... Poets of America" was next examined. The general air of gloom—hopeless gloom—was depressing. Such mawkish sentimentality and despair; such inane and mortifying confessions; such longings for a lover to come; such sighings over a lover departed; such cravings for "only"—"only" a grave in some dark, dank solitude. As Mrs. Dodge puts it, "Pegasus generally feels ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... philosophers have declared that truth lies at the bottom of a well;—the well in which the truth in regard to these matters lies would seem to stretch far enough down—reaching, in fact, almost to the kingdom of the Inane. The beautiful simplicity of Bible truths has often become so perverted—so overloaded by the vain works (and words) of man's device—as barely to escape total extinction. Witness 'repentance'; in what a farrago of endless absurdities and palpable ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had never read the inane rat and cat stories of American school "readers" when he wrote that. ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... and his mind is dense, And his lack of saving wit complete; But most amazingly immense Is his inane self-confidence And his innate conceit. But every Glug, and great King Splosh Bowed to Sir Stodge, the fuddled Swank, The muddled Swank of Gosh— The engineering, peeping, peering, Sneering ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient," said Clovis, "but it seems I ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... the habit of "playing 'possum" on the part of our opossum, the trick would seem to be particularly inane. The truth of the matter is, what is attributed to an unusual brilliancy on the part of the creature is positively unusual witlessness. The animal has an exceedingly small brain, as compared with that of a dog of similar size, and to ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... upon comparatively easy words) were greeted with some laughter, and the ridiculed spellers sought their seats with hanging heads. By and by, however, the failures were not all at the bottom of the class; here and there such lists as "inane, profane, humane, insane, mundane, urbane," or, "staid, unlaid, mermaid, prayed, weighed, portrayed" began to pick out uncertain ones the entire length ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... What inane small talk I uttered in the Leslies' big, over-furnished drawing-room I know not. All I remember is that I sat with some insipid girl whose hair was flaxen and as colourless as her mind, sipping my tea while I ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... faith the Greeks had their share; what was crude and inane in it becoming, in the atmosphere of their energetic, imaginative intelligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did but perpetuate the fancy that the sounds of the wind in the trees may be, for certain prepared and chosen ears, intelligible ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... this matchless Venus, that of Medici seems as inane and trifling as mere physical beauty always must by the side of beauty baptized, and made sacramental, as the symbol of that ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... betake myself,—to books, "the immortal children" of "the understanding, courage, and abilities" of the wise and good,—ay! and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity and ignorance,—books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots taught the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are set on that to steady it. At the Last Day they shall disappear "like clouds"; the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off into wreck, and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be named, as the true force, essence ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... labor has been spent in trying to produce human speaking-machines. Words are built up out of letters; short words are grouped into inane sentences such as are never used; and sentences are arranged into unnatural and insipid discourse. To grasp the thin ghost of the thought, the little human spirit must reverse its instinct to reach toward the ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... Halls," as they were called during their first year of existence, but an old-established haunt of those who aimed at "seeing life"—a great resort of ambitious young bloods about town. Not very long before this time, a powerful trust had been formed to confer the stuffy and inane delights of the "Hall" upon that sturdily respectable suburban middle class—the backbone of London society—which had hitherto, to a great extent, eschewed this particular form of dissipation. The trust amassed wealth by striking a shrewd blow at our national character. Its entertainments ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... means satisfied. As to his speech, indeed, though it had the worth just ascribed to it and more, and though masses of it were deliberately put on paper by himself, in prose and verse, and continue to be printed and kept legible, what he spoke has pretty much vanished into the inane; and except as record or document of what he did, hardly now concerns mankind. But the things he did were extremely remarkable; and cannot be forgotten by mankind. Indeed, they bear such fruit to the present hour as all the Newspapers are obliged to be taking note of, sometimes to an unpleasant ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... Saint-Omer," caligraphist[TN-110] and sworn expert in the courts of law. Joseph Prudhomme is the synthesis of bourgeois imbecility; radiant, serene, and self-satisfied; letting fall from his fat lips "one weak, washy, everlasting flood" of puerile aphorisms and inane circumlocutions. He says, "The car of the state floats on a precipice." "This sword is the proudest day of my life."—Henri Monnier, Grandeur et D['e]cadence de Joseph ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... early time, for that matter, the instinct of the right estimate of such values and of its reducing to the inane the dull dispute over the "immoral" subject and the moral. Recognising so promptly the one measure of the worth of a given subject, the question about it that, rightly answered, disposes of all others—is ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... writer of Rome. He never realized the degradation possible to Christianity until he visited "The Eternal City," with its huge shams and ghastly superstitions. He never saw Hinduism with its myriad inane rites and debasing idolatry half so grotesque, idiotic, and repulsive, as in this city of Benares, where one ought to see the religion of these two hundred odd million people at its best, and not ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... blest If Some-one gave his nimble tongue a rest And, turning Trappist, stanched the fearsome gush Of egotistic and thrasonic slush; Or if Lord X. eschewed his daily speeches And took to canning Californian peaches; Or if egregious LYNCH could but abstain From "ruining along the illimitable inane" At Question-time, and try to render PLATO'S Republic into Erse, or grow potatoes; Or if our novelists wrote cheerful books, Instead of joining those superfluous cooks Who spoil our daily journalistic broth By lashing it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... Insurrection did. Much more let prior, and as it were, rehearsal scenes of Federation come and go, henceforward, as they list; and, on Plains and under City-walls, innumerable regimental bands blare off into the Inane, without note from us. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... neighbour sat down, he turned to me with an inane smile which occupied all his face. 'Good evening,' he said, in a baronial drawl. 'Miss Cayley, I gathah? I asked the skippah's leave to set next yah. We ought to be friends—rathah. I think yah know my poor deah old aunt, Lady ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... days we rode comfortably here and there and looked at things. The things could not be spoiled, but their effect was very materially marred by the swarms of tourists. Sometimes they were silly, and cracked inane and obvious jokes in ridicule of the grandest objects they had come so far to see; sometimes they were detestable and left their insignificant calling-cards or their unimportant names where nobody could ever have any object in reading them; sometimes they were pathetic ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... last in her too-splendid bedroom, she put arms and head down on the dressing-table and sobbed. These people were simple where she was complicated and complicated where she was simple. It was all uncomfortable and different. She thought of Jim Nolan's unfrilled conversation, of his clumsy, rather inane compliments, of his primitive amoeba-like type of humor. She saw the whole course of her life of mean shifts and wranglings with her mother; and though its moral niggardliness was unappreciated, its physical meagerness sickened her in contrast to the ease and beauty of these newer scenes. ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... Stops the white cloud on its way, As it drives with driftless drifting O'er the vacant vault of day, And in sounds of soft upbraiding Calls it down the void inane To the gilding and the shading Of the mountain and ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... perusal—that he should buy no faster than as he can read straight through what he has already bought—is a supposition alike preposterous and unreasonable. "Surely you have far more books than you can read," is sometimes the inane remark of the barbarian who gets his books, volume by volume, from some circulating library or reading club, and reads them all through, one after the other, with a dreary dutifulness, that he may be sure that he has got the value ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... ancient serpent, may hiss and rage. Yes, the Roman antichrist in his frantic blusterings may bite off his own tongue, may fulminate all kinds of evils, bans, excommunications, wars, desolations, and burnings, as long and as much as he likes. But if we take refuge with the Lord God, what can this inane, worn-out man and water-bubble do to us?" With more ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... indicated, the characters are those with which the author loves to surround himself. A tuft-hunting county baronet's widow, an inane captain of dragoons, a graceless young baronet, a lady with groundless pretensions to feeble health and poesy, an obsequious nonentity her husband, and a flimsy and artificial young lady, are the personages in whom we are expected to find amusement. Two ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... where spirit identifies itself with every form of life, and assimilates their essences. This cyclic pilgrimage it undertook, foreseeing pain, but "preferring free will to passive slavery, intellectual, self- conscious pain, and even torture, 'while myriad time shall flow,' to inane, imbecile, instinctual beatitude," foreseeing pain, but knowing that out of it all would come a nobler state of life, a divinity capable of rule, a power to assist in the general evolution of nature. It is true in the experience of many that going deep within themselves, an elemental consciousness ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... cab, watched her with growing sympathy. In her very conformity to type, she represented so naturally a real and living unit of humanity. Her poor commonplace prettiness was already on the wane, stamped out by the fear and trouble of the last few months. Yet inane though her features, lacking altogether strength or distinction, there was stamped into them something of that dumb, dog-like fidelity to some object which redeemed them from utter insignificance. Wrayson, as he watched her, found himself thinking more kindly of the dead man himself. In his vulgar, ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... And the inane chorus of pleased laughs that followed Polk Hayes's brainless disposal of the important question in hand made me ashamed of being a woman—though it was funny. Still I bided my time and Polk saw the biding, I could tell by the expression ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... simple manner, at a macer, at what door the judges came out of the court, as he was a countryman, and was curious to see their Lordships dressed in their usual every-day clothes. The request was complied with; and Will, as a stupid gazing man from the Highlands, who wished to get an inane curiosity gratified by what had nothing curious in it, was placed in a convenient place to see the Solomons pass forth on their way to their respective dwellings. They soon came; and Will's lynx eye caught, in a moment, the face of the President, whom, to his great satisfaction, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... preserves something also of the wit and civilisation of the eighteenth century. Lines like "a Muezzin from the tower of darkness cries," or "Their mouths are stopped with dust" are successful in the same sense as "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane" or "Through verdurous glooms and ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... alkalkuli. In en. In front antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. Inability neebleco. Inaccessible neatingebla. Inaccurate neakurata. Inaction senokupo. Inactive senokupa. Inadvertence malatenteco. Inane malplena. Inanimate senviva. Inappreciable netaksebla. Inappropriate nedeca. In as much as tial ke. Inattention neatenteco. Inaudible neauxdebla. Inauspicious nefavora. Incalculable nekalkulebla. Incapable nekapabla. Incapacity nekapableco. Incarnate korpigi. Incarnation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... said to be a mere matter of display and ostentation. Many despise wealth, and contented with little take pleasure in slender diet and inexpensive living. Though some are inflamed with desire for office, many there are who hold it in so low esteem that they can imagine nothing more inane or worthless. Other things too, which seem to some admirable, very many regard as of no value. But all have the same feeling as to friendship,— alike those who devote themselves to the public service, those who take delight in learning ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... the Really Great Love "Mush" Wives Children One of the Minor Tragedies The "Glorious Dead" Always the Personal Note Clergymen Their Failure Work In the East-end Mysticism and the Practical Man Abraham Lincoln Reconstruction Education The Inane and Unimaginative Great Adventure Travel The Enthralling Out-of-Reach The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy Faith Spiritualism On Reality in People Life Dreams and Reality Love of God The ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... rebellio flammis, Nec tulit impietas majus in urbe scelus. Quid tanto vesana malo profecit Erynnis? Ipsa sui testis pignoris extat humus. Crypta manet, memoresque trahit confessio cives, Nec populi fallit marmor inane fidem. Orphana, turba, veni, viduisque allabere saxis, Est aliquid soboli ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... interrogative—and was confined to generalities. But this could not continue long. Hermione was an enthusiastic talker and seldom discussed banalities. From every circle where she found herself the inane was speedily banished; pale topics—the spectres that haunt the dull and are cherished by them—were whipped away to limbo, and some subject full-blooded, alive with either serious or comical possibilities, was very soon upon the carpet. By chance Artois happened to speak of two people ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... more empty, which I would call the vein political, read the speeches of some of our members of Parliament. Only read them, I wish no man so ill an to inflict upon him the torture of hearing them—read them, I say, and you will have taken the very highest degree in the order of inane flippancy. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... English icicles, which only that nation seems able to produce in her public servants. Presumably through a century-long contact with the races of the East, the English diplomat of the Sir Edward Grey type presents the bland, imperturbable, non-committal, almost inane expression of the Oriental that hardly gives one any criterion of the tremendous power of perception ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... Society at Hampstead had long ago missed the faithful, inseparable pair—the pair who never spoke, who sat in the background listening with shy, earnest faces, with innocence that yearned, wide-eyed, after wisdom, while it followed, with passionate subservience, the inane. Arthur had proved himself powerless to keep it up. If an archangel's trump had announced a lecture for that evening, it would not have roused ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair
... understanding what his friend was driving at, and stupidly wondering if he ever had noticed any difference in Joe's ears, J.W. stared with inane bewilderment. "Is one really larger than the ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... would have passed in, gratified to gain That positive eternity of pain Instead of this insufferable inane. ...
— The City of Dreadful Night • James Thomson
... harmless, inane, well-meant question. Poor Mrs. George might well be excused for feeling bewildered over the effect. Romney gathered his long legs together, stood up, and swept the unfortunate speaker a ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... writings of Emerson the spirit of these orders manifests itself. His range of subjects is very wide, ascending to the highest sphere of spiritual contemplation, bordering on that "intense inane" where thought loses itself in breathless ecstasy, and stooping to the homeliest maxims of prudence and the every-day lessons of good manners, And all his work was done, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... that a large portion of the throng in the hall of trial, not venturing to change their judgment, though upon the manifest evidence just given them, awaited in painful suspense the return of the judges, interchanging with an air of mystery and inane importance the usual remarks prompted ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... hidden, yet—to him—subtly revealed, warmth of Mrs. Taine's greeting embarrassed him with a momentary sense of shame. The frothing gush of Louise's inane ejaculations, and the coughing, choking, cursing of Mr. Taine,—whose feeble grip upon the flesh that had so betrayed him was, by now, so far loosed that he could scarcely walk alone,—set the painter struggling for ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... eventually to L4,000 a year (a large income in pre-war days) and of attractive appearance, she had no lack of suitors, even though she thought modern dancing inane, and had little skill at ball-games. I have indicated her appearance by some few phrases already; but to enable you to visualize her more definitely I might be more precise. She was a tall woman rather than large built, like ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... unfailingly, and her Jersey letter was one of the chief events of each week. She was fonder of her daughter at a distance than she had ever been when they were together. "That will be something to tell Violet," she would say of any inane bit of gossip that was ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... at his head, knew that there were a dozen absurd wishes in her heart, none of which could possibly ever become facts. He was so different from the self-assertive young men she knew, with their silly flirtations, their inane small-talk, their capacity for Scotch whisky and long hours. For days she had studied him as through microscopic lenses; his guilelessness was real. It just simply could not be; her ears had deceived ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... scanty white locks and a fringe of white whiskers under the chin, and these framed a smiling face and features that were extremely winning in expression. No one could remember ever seeing Old Hucks when he was not smiling, and the expression was neither set nor inane, but so cheery and bright that you were tempted to smile with him, without knowing why. For dress he wore a much patched pair of woolen trousers and a "hickory" shirt of faded blue, with rough top boots and a dilapidated straw hat that looked as if it ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... to blurt out the fact that she was not my niece at all; that I had no authority over her in any way. But what would be the use? It would lead only to explanations and I did not wish to make explanations. I wanted to get through with the whole inane business and be ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... things for the pleasure-seekers. Let them go to the Falls, and Lake Nyassa, and the Himalayas, and those tourist treasures; but why come and chatter inane banalities about his ruins: his treasured, mysterious relic of perhaps the oldest civilisation the world ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... talk like a man," I said, sternly. "Do you think it is manly to use those mushy and inane forms of address? That man is neither dear nor old ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... understand," said Dr. Belford, "the creature has no strong vices—he is too bloodless and inane for them. Even when he had money it doesn't appear that he gambled, and I don't believe he drinks. He is simply wanting in principle, feeling and everything. Eliza says he has scarcely spoken to his wife, or she to him, since the baby ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... embarrassing; he apologised; but her face was not startled; it was not aware of him; it wore a singular expression of resolution. A very singular expression which, as it were, detained him for a moment. In order to cover his embarrassment, he made some inane remark on the weather, upon which, instead of returning another inane remark according to the tacit rules of the game, she only gave him a smile of unfathomable meaning. Nothing could have been ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... scanning the youth's face with foolishly smiling eyes, noted the flush on his cheek, the odd glitter in his handsome eyes, and even caught a whiff of wine upon his breath. Alarm grew in Garnache's mind, but his face maintained its foolish vacancy, its inane smile. He bowed again and, with a wave of the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... flock to the music and don't come to the service, and that the pieces played are profane, or mundane, or inane, or something—not what ought to be played on Sunday. Of course 'tis Lautmann who ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... was indeed changed, so much so that her old friends who had not seen her for some time could scarcely have known her. She was no longer fat and inane. Her figure had become slim and graceful; her face had become expressive and remarkably pretty, and her manners were those of a well-bred and self-possessed lady. Gildart felt that he could no more have taken ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... you could tell me where my hotel is, officer?" Oliver began. "What hotel?" said the policeman uninterestedly. Oliver noticed with an inane distinctness that he had started to swirl his nightstick as a large blue cat might switch its tail. He wondered if it would be tactful to ask him if he had ever been a drum major. Then he realized that the policeman ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... been so fierce as to be almost like a rap from a policeman's club, and there was an enforced and temporary suspension of the inane chatter. The attendant youth tried to assume the incensed and threatening look with which an ancient gallant would have laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. But some animals and men only become absurd when they try to appear formidable. It was ludicrous to see him weakly frowning ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... of nature, by the aid of the principles of unity (among all kinds of which teleological unity is the highest), while it ought not to attempt to soar above the sphere of experience, beyond which there lies nought for us but the void inane. The critical examination, in our Transcendental Analytic, of all the propositions which professed to extend cognition beyond the sphere of experience, completely demonstrated that they can only conduct us to a possible experience. If we were not ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... thought of impossible things; one after another, he thought of things merely inane and futile, for he was trying to do something beyond his power. Penrod was never brilliant, or even ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... intelligent English journals, and the best-informed English politicians (men with one foot and two ears in the Cabinet) these true things written and repeated, and watched while they died out into the Vast Inane and Immense Absurd from which they ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... tone of fervour and devotion pervading the book that contrasts pleasantly with the trivially inane tone some writers think fit to adopt in writing for and about children. All Sunday-school teachers and parents would do well to lay its ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... proximity to the bold colouring of "The Ambassadors"; so that its own subtle, yet reticent superiority is well-nigh shouted down by its lusty neighbour. It is a picture to be seen by itself; as it must stand by itself in the usual inane gallery of ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... steamed out of his little dock at a quarter before six, and bore straight down for the Patriarch, who happened to be then driving, in an inane manner, through a stagnant account of Bleeding Heart Yard. Pancks instantly made fast to him and ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the struggle over political institutions will be seen no more,—their subject-matter has ceased to be. The study of all such matters will belong to the history of civilization. The vast mass of inane productions—the evidences of a spoiled taste, often possible only through sacrifices at the altar of the author's vanity—are gone. Even speaking from the view-point of present conditions, it may be said without exaggeration that four-fifths of all literary productions ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... made without any claim on serious thought. It is indeed a pleasant tickling of the imagination, this leisurely enjoyment of looking over all those picturesque announcements; it is like passing along the street with its shopwindows in all their lustre and glamour. But this soft and inane pleasure has been crushed by the arrangement after to-day's fashion. Those pages on which advertising and articles are mixed helterskelter do not allow the undisturbed mood. It is as if we constantly had to alternate between lazy strolling and energetic running. ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... some inane misunderstanding, and sprang from my unfamiliarity with the language. For although two nations use the same words and read the same books, intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary. The business of life is not carried on by words, but in set phrases, each with a special ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... motion then to go away, always politely, cleverly suppressing my sense of indignation at their conduct; and they would do so, only to make room for a worse crowd. The town's business stopped; people left their stalls and shops to glare aimlessly at or to ask inane and unintelligible questions about the barbarian who seemed to have dropped suddenly from the heavens. When I addressed a few words to them in strongest Anglo-Saxon, telling them in the name of all they held sacred to go away and leave ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... it.... She overpowered me a little at first. I was slow to realize how one's intents and sensations could be absolutely physical. I could pity, but there was something actually creepy about her. I was inane enough to ask if she could not return for a visit. She sank back and shut her eyes and clenched ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... colonel stared at him for a long moment, then gave an inane giggle. He stepped back and flicked Joe Mauser a salute. "Very well, captain. As a matter of routine, I shall report this use of an aircraft for reconnaissance purposes, and undoubtedly a commission will meet to investigate the propriety of the ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... of economy—adopt and enforce some rules and regulations for the benefit of all; it would be necessary to do so unless the individuals were not only perfect, but also absolutely of one mind on all subjects relating to their welfare. Can the imagination picture existence more inane? ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean beasts in the Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endless depths, or mount to inane limbos, and in either ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... very pretty." Stopping before the dressing-table, Gabriella frowned on the photograph of a young man in a silver frame—a young man with a fascinating smile and inane features. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... hopelessly about him, utterly at a loss for anything to say. The whole thing had been so unexpected, so very opposite to the commonplace ending he had anticipated, that he was too dazed and confused to do anything but smile in an inane and foolish manner. He had rather looked forward to seeing some eccentric individual, some elderly recluse who lived there with a servant or two. And here he was, face to face with the man who, at the present moment, was to him the most interesting ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... it as he hadn't seen it hitherto. It must have given what value there was to her poor little roles in motion pictures. Now that his eye had caught it, it surprised, and to some degree disturbed, him. It was more than the show-girl's inane prettiness, or the comely wax-work face of the girl on the cover of a magazine. With due allowance for her Anglo-Saxonism and honesty, she was the type of woman to whom "things happen." Things would happen to her, Allerton surmised, beyond anything she could experience ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... which radiated from his person. A contingent of Little White Cows, a kind of bodyguard, stood at a respectful distance beyond, intent upon his every movement. The Master never stirred. He sat there to be looked at—accustomed to homage almost divine; beatifically inane. Like the Christians of old, he wore no hat. The head was nearly bald. A long cloak, glistening with grease stains, swathed his limbs and portly belly, on which one suspected multitudinous wrinkles of fat. Two filmy lidless eyes, bulging on a level with his forehead, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Great God! wilt thou leave me all alone here upon earth? O God! for which of my sins dost thou punish me in my children? For mercy's sake, call me home before she also leaves me, who is the joy of my life. And I can do nothing to turn aside this fatality—stupid inane old man that I am! And this Jacques de Boiscoran—if he were guilty, after all? Ah the wretch! I would hang ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... represent the only metamorphosis of this kind that I came across. It was as though there were something in the atmosphere which turned paupers into capitalists and inane milksops into men ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... once was a critic whose bane Was his dread of a style that was plain, So, resolved to refresh us, He strove to be precious, But sank to the nether inane. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various
... anything else but read the parts. They read, crossing back and forth whenever the coach thinks they ought to cross, and it doesn't mean a thing. I watched that very thing in an amateur show not so long ago, and it was inane. Nobody should move from one place on the stage to another without a reason for moving. There is a reason for every inflection of the voice. A person with common sense will read a part intelligently, but only a person with a dramatic spark inside ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... them. Very pretty," said Kit amicably, not knowing the significance of it, but conscious of the wide range one might cover in a few minutes of simple Sonora ranch life. From the tragic and weird to the childishly inane was ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... wickedness! The man will be looking all day long for his heroine in the tin-shop, by the forge or in the factory, in the counting-room, and he will not find her, and he will be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be nerveless, inane, and a nuisance. He will be fit neither for the store, nor the shop, nor the field. A woman who gives herself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be unfitted for the duties of wife, mother, sister, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... our political opinions, we have been grossly misunderstood and misrepresented. There never was a time, even in the re-election of Lincoln, when to differ from the leading party was considered more inane and treasonable. Because we made a higher demand than either Republicans or Abolitionists, they in self-defense revenged themselves by calling us Democrats; just as the church at the time of its apathy on the slavery question ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... upset for several days. For a time I resolutely put all thought of what had occurred from my mind, but as soon as I felt able, I sat down, with the whole matter before me, as it were, and deliberately looked it in the face. I think I never felt more inane in my life than when I remembered my folly, as I now regarded it. All that saved me from utter self-abasement was the fact that it had occurred at a time when I was at such a low ebb physically, by reason ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... craft, I call them—would force us to leave off painting quiet interiors," continued Pelgram, lowering his voice with mournful impressiveness, "because, forsooth, interiors are inane, undramatic things unless relieved by color! Not our color, but the bright, blazing color that roars and raves. Still-lifes they condemn unless they swim in seas of pure emotion. For with them color is emotion, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... inhospitable even in the sunlight. The rock walls rose sheer, the roofs slanted rakishly, the signs scratched on the rock by facetious riders were pointless and inane. Lone picked his way through the crooked defile that was marked MAIN STREET on the corner of the first huge boulder and came abruptly into the road. Here he turned north and shook his ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... wholly to the guidance of his imagination, and the verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted boat in Alastor, with no one at the helm. Vision succeeds vision in glorious but bewildering profusion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." These poems are like the water-falls in the Yosemite, which, tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, are shattered into foam by the air, and waved about over the valley. Very beautiful is this descending ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... medical whites. Unnecessarily, to break the silence with any inane remark, Coffin said: "Going ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... also found. These usually have little blue beads for eyes, and are of the quaintest and naivest appearance conceivable. Here we have an elderly man with a long pointed beard, there two women with inane smiles upon their countenances, here another woman, of better work this time, with a child slung across her shoulder. This figure, which is in the British Museum, must be very late, as prehistoric ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... Macbeth was ruthlessly struck out as containing an obvious allusion to the steersman of St. Peter's bark. Finally, bored and bothered by the political and theological Dogberrys of the day, with their inane prejudices, their solemn stupidity, and their entire ignorance of the conditions necessary for the growth of sane and healthy art, Madame Ristori made up her mind to leave the stage. She, however, was extremely anxious to appear once before a Parisian audience, Paris ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... or else blasts from the other region,—there is perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than yourself,—so pure and still, with intents so charitable; and then vanishing, too, so soon into the azure inane, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... native places slang which would never, in ordinary times, have penetrated there. In the army you will hear a Scotchman doing what he never did before—dropping his aitches. He has caught it from his English comrades. You will hear him say "Not 'arf"—an inane tag which, despite its popularity in London, failed to find any foothold north of the Tweed before the war. "Not 'arf" was mouthed by Sassenach comedians on the music-hall stages of Edinburgh and ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... silver, every day, Dies to gray. There are knots in every skein. Hours of work and hours of play Fade away Into one immense Inane. Shadow and substance, chaff and grain, Are as vain As the foam or as the spray. Life goes crooning, faint and fain, One refrain: 'If it ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... CHAOS next the notes melodious pass, How suns exploded from the kindling mass, 490 Waved o'er the vast inane their tresses bright, And charm'd young Nature's opening eyes with light. Next from each sun how spheres reluctant burst, And second planets issued from the first. And then to EARTH descends the moral strain, How isles, emerging ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... do not. Unspeakable imbroglio of negotiations, mostly insane, welters over all the Earth; the Belleisles, the Aulic Councils, the British Georges, heaping coil upon coil: and here, notably, in that now so extremely sordid murk of wiggeries, inane diplomacies and solemn deliriums, dark now and obsolete to all creatures, steps forth one little Human Figure, with something of sanity in it: like a star, like a gleam of steel,—shearing asunder your big balloons, and letting out their diplomatic hydrogen;—salutes with his hat, "Gentlemen, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to the heavens, "That inane moon, which makes no response, is beginning to get on my nerves," he soliloquised. "Let me see now! There is certainly master Criqueboeuf, but it is a long journey to the quartier Latin, and when ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... volubility of a versifier's tongue! And perchance it will not be considered out of my line of duty if I venture to remind my most illustrious and renowned MASTER—" this with a withering sneer,—"that if he has any more remarkable nothings to dictate concerning this particularly inane creation of his fancy 'Nourhalma,' 'twill be well that we should proceed therewith, for the hours wax late and the sun veereth ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... your inches and carry him single-handed right from the front door. I know he rowed for Cambridge, but, all the same, it was the act of a fool. And I told him so. Of course, he only grinned. You know that inane, irresistible grin of his when he's done something he ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... exerted a powerful influence on the mind of Plato, and, through him, upon succeeding ages; and that, in some of its aspects, it now survives, and is more influential to-day than in any previous age; but this element of immutable and eternal truth was certainly not contained in the inane and empty formula, "that numbers are real existences, the causes of all other existences!" If the fame of Pythagoras had rested on such "airy nothings," it would have melted away before ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... condigno. And yet they bid us doubt whether there be a habit present. How, therefore, do they know whether they acquire merit de congruo or de condigno [in full, or half]? But this whole matter was fabricated by idle men [But, good God! these are mere inane ideas and dreams of idle, wretched, inexperienced men who do not much reduce the Bible to practise], who did not know how the remission of sins occurs, and how, in the judgment of God and terrors of conscience, trust in works is driven out of us. Secure hypocrites always ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... unnecessary noise, for instance, of the clashing of doors, which is so extremely ill-mannered and vulgar, is a direct proof of the dulness and poverty of thought that one meets with everywhere. In Germany it seems as though it were planned that no one should think for noise; take the inane drumming that goes on as an instance. Finally, as far as the literature treated of in this chapter is concerned, I have only one work to recommend, but it is an excellent one: I mean a poetical epistle in terzo rimo by the famous painter ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... careful men and careless women, the latter very scrumptious in their imported frocks. The sight of these Parisianisms abashed Cassy no more than her appearance abashed Paliser. Etiquette, Formality, the Proper Thing, the great inane gods of the ante-bellum heavens, he had never acknowledged and now, though locally their altars remained and their worship persisted, he knew they were forever dead, blown into the dust-bin of the things that were, tossed there in derision by that ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... afternoons—monsieur with his club, his maitresse, his gambling and his debts—the children with their English governess. A villa by the sea, tennis, infants and sand-forts. The annual stupid voyage en Suisse. The inane slavery of it all. You who are a bohemian, you who live—with all your freedom—all my freedom! Non, merci! I have seen all that! Bah! You are as crazy ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... father's, but he looked much older than ever the hale old mountaineer had done, or than his real age; so worn and lined was his face, his skin tanned, his eyelids and temples puckered by burning sun, his hair and beard white as the inane of his old mare, the proud Adlerstein port entirely gone. He stooped even more without his staff than with it; and, when he yielded himself with a sigh of repose to his wife's tendance, she found that he had not merely the ordinary hurts of travelling, but that ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... suppose has formed this determination purposely that he may spend all he can obtain, without being teased by any qualms of conscience. For the destructive system of individual property involves a thousand absurdities; and the proud but inane successor of a Sydney or a Verulam, instead of knowing how difficult the subject of identity itself is, instead of perceiving that man is nothing but a continuity, or succession of single thoughts, and is therefore in reality no more than the thought of the moment, believes there ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... ad congressum incitarit, et horum apud me copiolas elevarit, adversarii perpetuum in Scripturis exponendis ingenium, plenum fraudis, inane prudentiae. Statim haec, philosophi, tangeretis. ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... a perpetual holiday, and that whoever is not born to an independent income is striving for one or longing for one because it gives holidays for life. To which I reply, first, that heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside; and that the genuine popular verdict on it is expressed in the proverb "Heaven for holiness and Hell for company." Second, I point ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... "Click—click—click—tick—tick—tick," so goes the economic clock. And that clock, with its silly face, has shut us out from the stars. It tells us the time; but behind the dial of the hours is now for us no vision of the solemn wheeling spheres, of spirit flames and that ultimate point of light "pinnacled dim in the intense inane." "America is a clock," I said; and then I remembered the phrase, "America is Niagara." And like a flake of foam, dizzy and lost, I was swept away, out into the infinite, out ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... absorb a good deal at Beechwood in four days, chiefly of the machinery of modern wealth. There were the elaborate meals, the drinking, the card-playing, the motors, the innumerable servants, and the sickening atmosphere of inane sentimentalism between the sexes. Everybody seemed to be having "an affair," and the talk was redolent of innuendo. Adelle had occasion to observe the potency of her lamp in this society. She worked it ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... may believe it," with an inane giggle. "I'm going to bring my art class over to Clarendon to revel in your treasures, some day, soon. You'll be at home to them, ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... sight of so much human flesh. At the same time it discouraged her. In the presence of these two she felt insignificant, even while she pitied them. She wished to get away, but instinctive breeding held her in her chair, chatting. She hoped what she said wasn't too inane; she didn't know quite what she ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... insincere"! "Too trivial"! or for an instant pause And doubly damn with negligent applause! Impute, in fine, the prowess of the Vicar Less to repentance than to too much liquor! Find Louis naught! de Gatinais inane! Gaston unvital, and George Erwyn vain, And Degge the futile fellow of Audaine! Nay, sir, no Epilogue avails to save— You're damned, and Bulmer's ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... people and—— Oh yes! old Barking is very kind," he went on, with a change of tone. "Only I wish Lady Louisa would warn him he need not trouble himself to be amusing. He came and sat by me, towards the end of the evening, and told me the most inane stories in that inflated manner of his. Verily, they were ancient as the hills, and a weariness to the spirit. But that good-looking, young fellow, Decies, swallowed them all down with the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... before, and there is a whispering in the moonlit garden, and young people steal off for wholly superfluous glasses of water, and the men give her duty dances, and she is old—ah, so old!—under the rouge and inane smiles and dainty fripperies that caricature her lost youth! No, my dear, you needn't envy this woman! Pity her, my dear!" pleaded Clarice Pendomer, and with a note of earnestness in ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... foreknowledge mans free will! what monster-growth of human brain, What powers of light shall ever pierce this puzzle dense with words inane? ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... filled my heart, to that odious little flirt, Baby Blake, a young damsel that hawked her tender affections about at the beck and call of every male biped who might for the moment be enthralled by her charms! It was like his cool impudence. And then, again, his asking me his stupid, inane questions, as if I cared what man, and how many. Lizzie Dangler or any other girl might have "in tow," as he called it. Idiot! I declare to you I positively hated Horner at that moment, inoffensive and ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... dreariness to contemplate more closely her neighbors on board, but found them scarcely more interesting. Several were playing cards, others moodily staring out of the windows, while a few were laughing and talking with the girls, their conversation inane and punctuated with profanity. One man was figuring on a scratch pad, and Hope decided he must be an engineer employed on the line; others she classed as small merchants, saloon-keepers, and frontier riff-raff. ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... Legation," unostensibly as something very different? Handsome Stanislaus did duly become Lover of the Grand-Duchess; and has duly, in the course of Nature, some time ago (date uncertain to me), become discarded Lover; the question rising, What is to be done with that elegant inane creature, and his vaporous sentimentalisms and sublime sorrows and disappointments? "Let us make him King of Poland!" said the Czarina, who was always much the gentleman with her discarded Lovers ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... glasses deliberately, put them on the pile of papers beside him, and stood waiting. There was a courteous enquiry in his very attitude, although as yet he spoke no word. His head was tilted slightly backward, and his smile might have seemed almost inane in its width and in the impression of permanency which it conveyed, were it not for the intellectuality of the brow, the force of the fine aquiline nose, and the watchful perspicacity ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... A man of colossal force, With a perfectly splendid gift For soaring and moral uplift. For, though nobody so uniquely Can hearten The British Weekly, His readers will cheerfully spare Him to go and remain in the air, Careering along the inane In a Nicoll-plated plane With, to lend him additional fervour, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... in the morning, goes off himself to Mother Redcap's, a favourite tavern—suburban in those days—or house of call for City tradesmen. There he smokes half a pipe and drinks a pint of ale. In the evening at another tavern he smokes a pipe and drinks two pints of cider, winding up the inane day at his club, where he smokes three pipes before coming home at twelve to go to ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson |
