"Commonplaceness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... effort, which afforded his friend a refuge from his own self-consuming ambition. Cranbrook had always prophesied that Harry would some day wake up and commit a grand and monumental piece of folly, but he hoped that that day was yet remote; at present it was his rich commonplaceness and his grave and comfortable dulness which made him the charming fellow he was, and it would be a pity to forfeit such ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... "Bitter-Sweet" was not this and that and t'other, but, after all said and done, it would remain an obstinately charming little book. It is not free from faults of taste, nor from a certain commonplaceness of metre; but Mr. Holland always saves himself in some expression so simply poetical, some image so fresh and natural, the harvest of his own heart and eye, that we are ready to forgive him all faults, in our thankfulness at finding the soul of Theocritus transmigrated into the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... tentacles of the soul seem brushed by the brutalities of the material fact, and she knows and retreats—or advances. Elizabeth did not know, and so did not retreat. Perhaps one reason for her naive stupidity was the commonplaceness of her relations with Blair. She had known him all her life, and except for that one childish playing at love, which, if she ever remembered it, seemed to her entirely funny, she had never thought of him in any other way than as "Nannie's brother"; and Nannie was, for all practical purposes, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... atmosphere, though it be quite imperceptible where we stand, will be dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and commonplaceness of the prosaic plain. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... first decade of authorship a few effusions in which Mrs. Haywood has succeeded to a degree in motivating, characterizing, or analyzing the passions of her characters, must be exempted from the general charge of commonplaceness. The first of these is "Idalia: or, the Unfortunate Mistress" (1724), the story of a young Venetian beauty—like Lasselia, her charms can only be imagined not described—whose varied amorous adventures carry her over most ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... angular church spires, uninspired statuary, and weary, smoke-darkened trees shed their garments of commonplaceness and shimmered like the mosques and turrets ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the values of prosperity only in plainness of life, recognized no divinity in humanized manners, and sternly but ineffectually called the community back to idealized commonplaceness, and to hear the utterances of rude ploughmen and cobblers in ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... had never stood in the bread-line, if he had never been compelled to clean a saloon gutter artistically, in order to keep from standing in that bread-line, he would surely have gone back to the commonplaceness for which every one except Bone Stillman and Henry Frazer had been assiduously training him all his life. They who know how naturally life runs on in any sphere will understand that Carl did not at ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... feverishly, twisting my hands together. "I have given up the fight! I have been beaten—oh, my God—beaten! Think of those raging hours in the woods, those hours of defiance, of glory! I gazed at commonplaceness and dulness—I mocked at it; and now it has conquered me! I am trampled down, beaten! It is all gone out of me!" And then I cried out in despair and terror: "Oh, no, it can't be! It ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... the meek abasht feelings of a pining anguish and remorse, suddenly starts up nauseous arrogance, vaunting the grandeur of a spoilt capricious heart. O what poor wretches our fellow creatures now seem to us in their commonplaceness, who yet all, as the patient children and drudges of mother earth, are better ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... novel was very popular, and certain causes of its popularity are not difficult to come at. A large measure of the success that Euphues had is due to the commonplaceness of its observations. It abounds in proverbs and copy-book wisdom. In this respect it is as homely as an almanac. John Lyly had a great store of 'miscellany thoughts,' and he cheerfully parted with them. His book succeeded as Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy and ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... of salutations and congratulations the guests rushed toward this extraordinary equipage and the radiant pair who were its charioteers. All regrets over the probable commonplaceness of a small country ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... cynically that perhaps he dreaded cold feet, but her husband ignored this. To what he felt to be the commonplaceness of her outlook he had long since accustomed himself. He ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... stranger who expects to find any exotic features of architecture or custom,— disappoints more, perhaps, than any other tropical port in this respect. Its principal streets give you the impression of walking through an English town,—not an old-time town, but a new one, plain almost to commonplaceness, in spite of Nelson's monument. Even the palms are powerless to lend the place a really tropical look;—the streets are narrow without being picturesque, white as lime roads and full of glare;—the manners, the costumes, the style of living, the system of business ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... height of illimitable loftiness the owner of the cardboard treasury looked down upon the squat commonplaceness of those three lives. The condition of Jane and Genesis and Clematis seemed almost laughably pitiable to him, the more so because they were unaware of it. They breathed not the starry air that William breathed, but what did it matter to them? The wretched things did not even know that they ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... passionately loyal endeavor to prop up a doomed economic and social system; and the loss to the intellectual life of the country cannot be reckoned. Over vast sections of our prosperous and intelligent people of the Mississippi Basin to-day the very genius of commonplaceness seems to hover. Take the great State of Iowa, with its well-to-do and homogeneous population, its fortunate absence of perplexing city-problems, its general air of prosperity and content. It is a typical state of the most typically American portion of the country; ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry |
