"Coarsened" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into a room on the right of the long passage. A woman was standing by the fireplace. She was no longer in her first youth, and the beauty she undeniably possessed was hardened and coarsened. In her youth she must have been dazzling. Her pale gold hair, owing a slight assistance to art, was coiled low on her neck, her eyes, of a piercing electric blue, seemed to possess a faculty of boring into the very soul of the person ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... to feel that that brutal noise had, somehow, coarsened her, and she actually half shrank from me as I gave her ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... became glued to it. In the dog-cart sat Everard Constable, now Lord Lossiemouth. She had not seen him for fifteen years, but nevertheless she recognised him instantly. There was no doubt it was he: thickened and coarsened, but still he. He whirled past leaning back in his seat, looking ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... were stirring in his veins, and for a moment his face coarsened and his eyes were gross. He caught her by the two arms and bent his mouth ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... did his teaching. He might even see her at times. They could not talk much of him—she and Fanny always spoke of "him," never of Mr. Snooks—because Helen was apt to say unsympathetic things about him. Her nature had coarsened very much, Miss Winchelsea perceived, since the old Training College days; she had become hard and cynical. She thought he had a weak face, mistaking refinement for weakness as people of her stamp are apt to do, and when she heard his name was Snooks, she said she had expected something ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... sentences, this dull and literal painting of dull and insignificant subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They will say, "Why do you not write a great book? paint a great picture?" If his guardian angel fail him, they may even persuade him to the attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened and his style ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dabbler now, with—as Heine said of de Musset—a fine future behind him, and none but an artist can tell the bitterness of that self-knowledge. Had he kept his faith with Bassett in spirit as in letter, he might have failed just as decidedly; her daily companionship might have coarsened his inspiration, soured him, driven him to work cheaply, recklessly; but at least he could have accused fate, circumstance, a boyish error, whereas now he and his own manhood shared the defeat and the responsibility. Yes, he regretted; but it would never do to let Laura know his ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... anything so definite or pronounced; but they were happy in being together in the world. Esther was untouched by the fret and fury of life; she had lived in sunshine and rain among her silly sheep, and been refined instead of coarsened, while her touching patience with a ramping old mother, stung by the sense of defeat and mourning her lost activities, had given back a lovely self-possession, and habit of sweet temper. I had seen enough of old Mrs. Hight to know that nothing a sheep might do could vex ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... hemp stalk. There was the dust of field and barn on the edges of the thick hair about the ears; dust around the eyes and the nostrils. He was resting on one knee; over the other his hands were crossed—enormous, powerful, coarsened hands, the skin so frayed and chapped that around the finger-nails and along the cracks here and there a little blood ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... saw him as he had looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over her after her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had parted from her that morning—flushed, sneering, a little coarsened, but still boyish, still charming. Well, it was all over now. It had been over so long that she had even ceased to regret it—for she was not by nature one of the women who could wear mourning for ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... to herself that she knew now the worst evil of divorce. She knew that it coarsened whomever it touched, that it irresistibly degraded, that it lowered all the human standard of goodness and endurance, and self-sacrifice. However justified, it was an evil; however properly consummated, it soiled the little group it affected. The disinclination ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... she carried herself among men had always impressed him. Fearless and friendly, and with deep understanding, she created respect wherever she went. Men, toughened and coarsened by danger and hardship, somehow understood that Jane Norman was not the sort to make love to because one happened to be bored. On the other hand, there was something in her that called to every man, as a candle calls to the moth; only there were no burnt wings; ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath |
