Word: dullness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...lack the vital spark which makes for communication of ideas. Yet some can play through the grind of procuring a doctorate and remain sane, interesting. Not even three years, when they should be broadening their minds, spent in fitting an esotericism in scholarship to their mental decorations can completely dull these men. Furthermore, they like university life. It means the companionship of cultivated minds. It means refuge from the mechanical efficiency of a complacent world. But they are human. They want wives, families. And they want for those wives and families some measure of what other men are getting...
...England to the Puritan eye which first sighted the rocks of an uncongenial coastline from the small but purposive "Mayflower" was a gray land. The Puritan mind was a gray mind. But Harvard College owes its existence to that gray land, to that gray mind. For out of the dull, hard labor of founding a home, a church, a college upon the rugged, seldom cooperative soil of New England grew the heritage which is Harvard's respect for the responsibility of freedom. Perhaps that responsibility is gray to others. It cannot be gray to the Harvard student. The colors...
House of Ussher-Well acted revival of a dull play on domestic intrigue...
...still muttering her lament. Occasionally a barrel stave or water-logged tomato was carried to her feet by the surf. In the lift of one wave she thought she saw her son, lying on his side with arms beseeching; but the vision passed as the wave fell in a dull smother. The next wave was empty. Mrs. Ravmitzky watched its cruel curve and pounding explosion, when, in the hissing sheet of dirty foam that moved toward her, she saw her son again, face down this time, legs askew, as if he were sleeping. The foam sucked back. The apparition...
Below, cities and countryside became indistinguishable. The earth looked "dull-colored, concave, saucer-like." Mist intervened and the plane droned up, isolated in boundless space. At 4,500 metres, Pilot Callizo clapped an oxygen tube to his mouth, fed his motor the same combustion-sustaining gas. At 11,500 metres the mer cury of his thermometer vanished from sight at 58° below zero...