"Grimness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... followed out those plans," Pierce said with a touch of grimness. "As you pointed out, they are attractive. But I changed him. I won't give you personality dynamics, but if you want a list of changes—He's married to Sheila Wesley, that's one change. And instead of going home nights he roisters around ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... could not trust her voice. Kirk knew every shade of it; she could not deceive him. Gaunt and gray the "fine old farm-house" stood its ground before them. Old it assuredly was, and once fine, perhaps, as its solid square chimneys and mullioned windows attested. But oh, the gray grimness of it! the sagging shutter that creaked, the burdocks that choked the stone door-step, the desolate wind that surged in the orchard trees ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... island rose, and into which the point jutted with grand picturesqueness; the light played through the frost-adorned, but still sombre pines, and spread out over deserted fields. Levis and the south shore received not so much of the illumination, and the grimness of the Citadel served as a contrast and a relief to the eye bewildered with the unaccustomed grandeur. But as the sun sank deeper behind the eternal hills, shadows began to fall, and the bright colours toned down to the grey of dusk, stars shone out, the grey was ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... said, with a grimness which probably escaped her. "But how did Mrs. Harman know that I was ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... The grimness of Bassett's face in repose was an effect of his close-trimmed mustache. He was by no means humorless and his smile was pleasant. Dan felt drawn to him again as at Fraserville. Here was a man who stood four square to the winds, undisturbed by ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the bitter cold, the unopened door of an empty house, their future home, left a vivid impression upon the minds of her listeners; not because of its forlornness, but because of the splendid energy and patience which she brought to the occasion and the light she was able to cast over the grimness of circumstance. Of course, at the date in which this is written, it is difficult to conceive anything like grimness as associated with the comfortable and social town of Brunswick, but we must not fail to remember how rapid the growth ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... the grimness of the pale-blue phantom, with cuirass and helmet and eyes shimmering on deadly icebergs, and yet for all the sorrow of the wrong he did against man, the women drowned and the children, and all the good ships gone, yet will the horrified mariners meeting ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... into this captivity. That, of course, cannot mean that revelation makes us sinners, but it does mean that it makes us more guilty, and that it declares the fact of human sinfulness as no other voice has ever done. And then the grimness of the picture is all relieved and explained, and the office ascribed to God's revelation harmonised with God's love, by the strong, steady beam of light that falls from the last words, which tell us that the prisoners have not been bound ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... them and endeavoured to bite them. I asked the man why he kept him, and he replied that they had quite good sport in the trenches when they allowed the hawk to hunt small birds and field mice. Then his expression changing from jovial good humour to grimness, he added, "You know, I call him 'Zepp,' because he kills the little ones," (parcequ'il tue ...
— The White Road to Verdun • Kathleen Burke
... for a long time, the sun still shining and the winds coming fresh and brisk along the crests and ridges. The trail wound about the slopes and steadily ascended. Vegetation ceased, and before them stretched the bare rocks. Harley knew very well now that only the sunshine saved them from grimness and desolation. The loneliness became oppressive. Even Sylvia was silent. It was the wilderness in reality as well as seeming; nowhere did they see a miner's hut or a hunter's cabin, only nature in her ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... at Craigenputtock that he really did lay fast and firm the road to fame. His wife's sharp tongue, and the gnawings of his own dyspepsia, were lived down with true Scottish grimness. It was here that he wrote some of his most penetrating and sympathetic essays, which were published by the leading reviews of England and Scotland. Here, too, he began to teach his countrymen the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... all mounted figures, unless that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol, be finer: but I was not thinking of that; I only found myself staring at the triumphant captain as if he had an oracle on his lips. The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully personal. But he continued to look far over my head, at the red immersion of another day—he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries—and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... hour or so the nausea left me. I felt braced by the grimness of the thing, and during the paroxysms I had no time to think of anything but the mechanical work in hand. It was all that Campion and I, both fairly able-bodied men, could do to keep the puny little tailor in his bed. Horrible shapes menaced ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... as Pescara, he told his rival that there should be "music" was almost comical in its effect of terror: it drove the listener across the line of tragical tension and made him hysterical with the grimness of a deadly humour. His swift defiance to Lord Lovell, as Sir Giles, and indeed the whole mighty and terrible action with which he carried that scene—from "What, are you pale?" down to the grisly and horrid viper pretence ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... in that winter day. She astonished the old keeper of that weary house by the vivacity of her manner, the brightness of her look. For Mrs. Brigg was well accustomed to sad morning moods, to petulant lassitude, and dull grimness of unpainted and unpowdered fatigue, but had long been a stranger to early moods of hope or of gaiety. Mornings in houses such as hers are recurring tragedies, desolating pulses of Time, shaking human hearts with each beat nearer ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... said Mrs. Gilligan, with a grimness that left no room for doubt. "And I'm not given to imagining ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... an indescribably dry, monotonous tone—a tone without vibration or inflection—you felt as if a graven image of some bad spirit were addressing you. But it was all a figment of fancy, a matter of surface. Miss Mann's goblin grimness scarcely went deeper than the angel sweetness of hundreds of beauties. She was a perfectly honest, conscientious woman, who had performed duties in her day from whose severe anguish many a human Peri, gazelle-eyed, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... his foot hard down upon the old serpent, as if his very soul depended upon it, feeling him squirm mightily, and doubting whether the fight were half over yet, and how the victory might turn! And, with all this fierceness, this grimness, this unutterable horror, there should still be something high, tender, and holy in Michael's eyes, and around his mouth. But the battle never was such a child's play as Guido's dapper Archangel seems to ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Martin's, I suppose," said Clemantiny, grasping a broom handle with a grimness that boded ill for the dog. "Mussing up my clean doorstep with his dirty paws ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... And the grimness of his fate lay here—that it was by his best qualities that he was betrayed. If he had been hard and mercenary, like some of those who preyed upon him, there might have been hope. But he was generous and free-hearted, ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... dolt—quadruple fool—prize-winner among idiots! He had nothing to say—he could say nothing. Nor was it the presence of a third person which prevented him. Perhaps, rather, something in Patsy's eye, and, though that he would not acknowledge, a lurking grimness in the smile about the ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... was filling Huish's glass, the bottle escaped from his hand and was shattered, and the wine spilt on the verandah floor. Instant grimness as of death appeared on the face of Attwater; he smote the bell imperiously, and the two brown natives fell into the attitude of attention and stood mute and trembling. There was just a moment of silence and hard looks; then followed ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Helmer's and the audience's stupefaction, and when the agitated pair sit down to "have it out," face to face across the table, then indeed the spectator feels that a new thing has been born in drama, and, incidentally, that the "well-made play" has suddenly become as dead as Queen Anne. The grimness, the intensity of life, are amazing in this final scene, where the old happy ending is completely abandoned for the first time, and where the paradox of life is presented without ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... mean, the sort of people who had crossed one another's paths at the moment of my girl's coming so forlornly into the world? I was taken with the grimness of it. I was obsessed with the Book of the Dead. It seemed to me shocking that a man, cultivated, well-to-do apparently, with good health into the bargain, should be absorbed in so crazy a hobby. And the ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... glad that he had not intimated it. As he looked at the squire, he knew how dangerous it would be. His face was settled into a grimness which showed how perilous it would be for the man who had deceived Phrony, if, as Keith feared, his ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... them down with a furious zest, and did his work with merciless thoroughness, firm in the belief that he thus best served the Lord and the nation. One or two of his deeds illustrate admirably the grimness of the times, and the harsh contrast between the kindly relations of the border folks with their friends, and their ferocity towards their foes. They show how the better backwoodsmen, the upright, church-going men, who loved their families, did ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the same person," said Gwen. She followed the doctor into his parlour, and accepted the seat he offered. He stood facing her, not relaxing his expression, which worked out as a sort of mild grimness, tempered by a tune which his thumbs in the armpits of his waistcoat enabled him to play on its top-pockets. It was a slow tune. Gwen continued:—"But her mind ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the sound of his voice as he spoke to the unruly horse as one would speak to a mischievous child. Then, horse and rider disappeared in the darkness of the valley. The girl stood there in the darkness until the sound of hoof-beats died away. There was a certain rugged grimness in the scene. It was like the moving finger of fate—this silent horseman riding away into the dawn. Her lips moved: "I wish you—luck!" she breathed, "even if—even if—" She stepped from the cabin and glanced up at the paling stars. "Oh, I know!" she exclaimed, ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... had a deal of whipcord fiber in his make-up. He stood the test and grubbed at his books every night until the clock tolled twelve. He was born at a peculiar time, being a child of the Reformation married to the Renaissance. The toughness and grimness of Calvin were united in him with the tenderness of Erasmus. From out of the Universal Energy, of which we are particles, he had called into his being qualities so diverse that they seemed never to have been before or since united in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Lazarus' intense grimness increased with each day that passed. The ceremonious respectfulness of his manner toward Marco increased also. It seemed as if the more anxious he felt the more formal and stately his bearing became. It was as though he braced his own courage by doing the smallest things life ...
— The Lost Prince • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... his cap. Below his crescent moustache there is no lower lip visible: it is tucked and folded in by the rising thrust of the jaw. It is this which gives him the "grim" aspect which every reader of the papers hears about. He is grim, there's no doubt about it, with the grimness of a man going through a tough ordeal. "I can see him all right," squeaked little John Fisher, "but he doesn't see me." The first two rows of seats at the right of the aisle were crammed with generals, two-star ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... There was a grimness as well as fear in his tone. "I've heard of Sears, but not Cordts. Where does this band ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey |
