"Roomful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... holding her for a while. At any rate Daisy submitted peaceably to the necessity; put her arm over the doctor's shoulder to support herself, and laid her head down; though not to sleep. She watched everything that was going on now. What a roomful of weary and impatient people they were! packed like cattle in a pen, for closeness; and how the rain poured and beat outside the house! The shelter was something to be thankful for, and yet how unthankful everybody looked. Some of the gentlemen showed calm fortitude ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... way from California, transportation and per diem would cost more than the whole business was worth.—and the judge advocate was wishing himself well out of it when, on a sunny Friday morning, the third day of the court, the president rapped for order and the big roomful of spectators was hushed to respectful silence. The defense had made its first request, that the principal witness for the prosecution, Nevins, should be present, and there he sat, nervous and ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... a piece of wood, and the dog crept out with his tail between his legs. Stasiek was left again to his restlessness, alone in a roomful of people. Even his mother was now struck by his miserable face and gave him a piece of bread to comfort him. He bit off a mouthful, but could not swallow ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... precept. His influence has been mainly by isolated ideas of more or less truth and value. It is impossible here to analyze his work. Such is the mixed tissue of his woof that the captive princess who was set to sort a roomful of birds' feathers had scarcely a harder task than one who should try to separate and classify his threads, some priceless and steady, some rotten, false, misleading. Morals, manners, religion, political economy, are mixed with art in every shape—art considered theoretically and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... history does not record. A week or two later the old round of dissipation had apparently set in. "I am now tied down neck and heels by engagements every night this week, or most joyfully would have trod the old pleasing road from Bond to Gerrard Street. I am quite well, but exhausted with a roomful of company every morning till dinner." A little later, and this momentary flash of health had died out; and we find him writing what was his last letter to his daughter, full, evidently, of uneasy forebodings as to his approaching end. ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... white and her eyes were flaming. She dominated the roomful of girls like a little Napoleon. The change in her startled them. Hitherto they had always looked on her as rather an unusually quiet girl. She had always made herself unobtrusively pleasant to them all. They all liked her. But they had never ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... bowed my head in prayer, and it seemed as though the Lord put the words in my mouth. I told that roomful of people of my past life and how God saved and had blessed me for four years. We had a grand meeting and a number were saved that night, and, above all, I received one of the greatest ...
— Dave Ranney • Dave Ranney
... now it was gone. A wilderness, a tension, the familiar face of Frankie Hamel telling her to go to hell one night and stop bothering him with her damned wailing ... and Frankie dying at her feet whispering, "What the devil, Pauline?" Then the trial. Hot and cold hours. A roomful of silent, open-mouthed faces listening to her weep, watching her squirm with proper shame and anguish as she told her story to the jurors ... the details of the abortion. "And then I couldn't stand it. I don't remember what happened. Oh, I loved him! ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... the portiere, disclosing her to her waiting guests. She had no choice but to precede him, doubtless framing an excuse for Nina's absence. If so, she need not have troubled, for Giovanni spoke in her stead, and with such distinct enunciation that the whole roomful heard: ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... with letters to and from him—one of the best by Margaret Fuller, others by Horace Greeley, Channing, &c.—one from Thoreau himself, most quaint and interesting. (No doubt I seem'd very stupid to the roomful of company, taking hardly any part in the conversation; but I had "my own pail to milk in," as the Swiss proverb puts it.) My seat and the relative arrangement were such that, without being rude, or anything of the kind, I could just look squarely at E., which I did a good part of the two hours. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... make idiotic mistakes he does not correct me. I have to find them out, when I repeat them before others. When I made that silly blunder about the brazen serpent, you so kindly put me right. Michael would have smiled and let it pass as not worth correcting; then I should have repeated it before a roomful of people, and wondered why they looked amused! Ah, but what do I care for people, or the world! It is my true place beside Michael I want to win. I want to 'grow up unto him in all things.' Yes, I know that is a text. I am famous ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... be made to feel at home as quickly as possible. Chicken Little hated introducing people and had been dreading the ordeal, but kindly Mrs. Jenkins took Katy by the hand and presented her to the whole roomful ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... one of the men, shaking his head. "He won't be thick-headed. Remember, I seen him work in Elkhead, when he slipped through the hands of a roomful of us." ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... shy person is there who at such a moment would not give a considerable sum to be able to go back to the station and take the first train home? Or who again, as he gives his name to a servant in some brightly-lighted hall, and advances, with a hurried glance at his toilet, into a roomful of well-dressed people, buzzing with what Rossetti calls a "din of doubtful talk," would not prefer to sink into the earth like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and be reckoned ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... said Jimmy, as he unfolded the harrowing details of what had transpired at his meeting with the faculty. "And now," he said, "if you birds love me, keep out of here from now until commencement. There isn't a guy on earth can concentrate on anything with a roomful of you mental ciphers sitting around and yapping about ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Hetty's features at this moment any thing except most cordial good-will and the tender happiness of a bride; but her heart was fighting like a knight in a tournament for rescue of one beset, and she was inwardly saying: "If she dares to refuse speak to her now, I'll expose her before this whole roomful ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... of the man's feet upon the steps was audible long before he reached the waiting roomful. Every eye fastened itself upon ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... got a roomful if you want to see them," said The traveller; "but I don't see the point of spoiling a moorland place with foreign odds and ends. I like homely and native things about me ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... clearly expressed on all faces at the words. The whole roomful began to whisper to each other, and turned their eyes upon the invalid, as though he had given some serious offence. Raphael, who had never quite managed to rid himself of the bashfulness of his early ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Chico! He was free at last! For a moment, dazed by the sudden release, the bird battered his splendid head against the ceiling, then, before the roomful of travelers realized what had happened, he was out in the open, spreading his glorious wings ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... but neither then, nor a little later when she and Calderwell drove hurriedly away from the house, did Billy once remember that Miss Marguerite Winthrop was coming to call that afternoon to see Mrs. Bertram Henshaw and a roomful of ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... now he shot his angry questions, like bullets, from the fireside. "Haven't they done anything yet, eh? How much longer do you reckon that roomful of old women will gabble in Richmond? Why, we might as well put a flock of sheep to ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... example, told him that he had refused a roomful of silver for his services in exterminating the Mongolian bandits Rhodes looked at him in surprise and said: "Why didn't you take it? What is the earthly use of having ideas if you haven't the money with which to carry them out?" Here you have the keynote of the whole Rhodes business policy. A project ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... take you a piece if you want me," she said. "It's so hard to talk when there's a roomful, isn't it? I thought maybe ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... literature, and historical traditions of a man's own country—and this is no very unreasonable application of the word—then this Irish-speaking peasantry has a better claim to the title than can be shown by most bodies of men. I have heard the existence of an Irish literature denied by a roomful of prosperous educated gentlemen; and, within a week, I have heard, in the same county, the classics of that literature recited by an Irish peasant who could neither write nor read. On which part should the stigma of illiteracy set the ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... Tiny by the elbows. 'What's the matter with you girls? Dancing out here by yourselves, when there's a roomful of lonesome men on the other side of the partition! Introduce me ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... A roomful of girls of various sizes and complexions, all very much intent upon their work, and no one thinking just at that moment of a traveled fairy daughter, to adopt and love as her own, sent by a beneficent and tender-hearted northern "Fay." I doubt if Susie ever before ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... "either sex," ran a little thick, as I may say, from my pen. For, although the young man bore a very fair character, and there was no special cause for doubting his discretion, I considered him altogether too good-looking, in the first place, to be let loose in a roomful of young girls. I didn't want him to fall in love just then—and if half a dozen girls fell in love with him, as they most assuredly would, if brought into too near relations with him, why, there was no telling what gratitude ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... think of your husband as a society man? A howling success, eh? He's been sitting for one quarter of an hour by the side of old Mrs. Gillis. And a whole roomful of devoted patients, past and future, looking daggers at him because he ignores them. How's that for business policy, eh? Can't you ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... returned the stranger, speaking very low, for he was conscious that the entire roomful of people was listening. "And you ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... Paul swore softly to himself, for he had no wish to share his good fortune with a roomful ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... the roomful stared in mingled astonishment and glee when old Edouard Dubois, the taciturn and little-liked sheepman from the "Limestone Rim," led Essie Tisdale out upon the floor to ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... over the sideboard, looked from one to another of the strange faces and then began to laugh too, since it seemed to be the proper thing to do. He had one of those delightful, hearty laughs that ring out in a whole roomful of voices. When Mrs. Gray heard it she stopped short, patting her nephew on the cheek; for he was sitting beside her now in a place hastily arranged ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... struck a match, revealing for a moment high-lights on bronzed countenances, and the silhouette of a shading hand. Voices spoke disembodied. As the conversation developed, we gradually recognised the membership of our own roomful. I had forgotten to state that the ranch house included four chambers. Outside, the rain roared with Arizona ferocity. Inside, men congratulated themselves, or swore ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... from the mirror and the butler has pulled back the portieres leading into the drawing room. I follow my wife's composed figure as she sweeps toward our much-beplumed hostess and find myself in a roomful of heterogeneous people, most of whom I have never seen before and whose personal appearance is ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... fears and doubts returned. To sing to a whole roomful of people—she had never done it in her life. It would be as bad as that nightmare fancy which used to haunt her, of being dragged forward to find the ten thousand eyes of a crowded theater all focused upon her, a sensation almost as horrible as ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... his annual gags to the effect that, according to the principle of strict legitimacy, there were in Europe several hundred (we forget the figure) people with a greater right to the British throne than the family at present occupying it. The roomful of students roared with genial mirth, and the unhappy prince blushed in a way that young girls used to in the good old days of ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... rich man's residence, in the front yard of which there stood a marble statue, a bronze deer, a cast-iron dog and a stone rabbit. "Dodd" used to look over to these when he was very tired from sitting up so straight so long, and wish that Miss Spinacher had a roomful of such for pupils. It would have been as well for her and "Dodd" and the rest of the school if she had. Perhaps it would have been better! Yet you all know Miss Spinacher, ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... accident, and acknowledge the difference in her playing. Oh yes, besides seeing them all she wanted them to hear her play.... She must stay... she glanced round the room. It was here, somehow, somewhere, in this roomful of girls, centring in the Germans at her end of the table, reflected on to the English group, something of that influence that had made her play. It was in the sheen on Minna's hair, in Emma's long-plaited schoolgirlishness, ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... Chevancourt who used to sing this, or something very like it, upon a table—entirely for the benefit of les deux americains, who would subsequently render "Eats uh lonje wae to Tee-pear-raer-ee," wholly for the gratification of a roomful of what Mr. Anderson liked to call "them bastards," alias "dirty" Frenchmen, alias les ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... people in a dignified manner and with a slight bow to the general company. "We all do stamp our value on ourselves" is true enough, and our private stamp is never more conspicuous than when we confront a roomful of people. If we show modesty but intense self-respect in our bearing, there is no one who will not raise his personal estimate of us no matter ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... the bond-servant, leaving the sting of innuendo behind him, had turned all eyes toward the traveller, and Bagby but voiced the curiosity of the roomful when he inquired, "What did Fownes call you ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... amongst them seems to have suggested that a sum of 30,000l. was to be gained by taking the Prince prisoner. So complete was Donald's confidence in their honesty that he did not hesitate to say to a roomful of armed militiamen, 'He has only two companions with him, and when I am there I make a third, and yet let me tell you, gentlemen, that if Seaforth himself were here he durst not put a hand to the Prince's breast.' Donald doubtless looked pretty formidable as he ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... doors short of 211th Street. Well, sir, when you blow in there you'll see a roomful of curios. I'm not exactly a connoisseur, but I know enough to tell Japanese work from Chinese. This was made by a Jap. And that reminds me. You said last night that Wong Li Fu put you off your balance by a jiu ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... his swagger as quickly as he could, Gleeson offered to back himself—and had his answer from the roomful. Tap, discriminating and crafty, had exchanged glances with Walker, and guessed ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... Of the roomful, Dike and old Ben were the only quiet ones. The others were taking up the explanation and going over it again and again, and marveling, and ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... early pioneers turned to water? Are we without the nerve any longer to read the writing on the wall?" And the only times that his national pride had been able to raise its head beneath the weight of shame and foreboding were those when he passed the windows of Red Cross Depots and caught sight of a roomful of good and noble women feverishly at work on bandages; when he read of the keen and splendid training voluntarily undergone by the far-sighted men who were making Plattsburg the nucleus of an officers' training corps, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... before, as soon as she had re-entered hurriedly the glowing lodge asprawl upon the hill, the impulse had first come to her—a swift and almost blind desire to turn and escape, if only for a little while, from the roomful of chatter and laughter and bright-eyed badinage loosed upon her immediately after the unmasking, by Dexter Allison's perfectly cadenced announcement of his daughter's engagement. All in a breath the huge room had become stiflingly oppressive; the gaiety ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... oncoming parade drowned his voice. The whole roomful, from Marta down to Willem, were thronging into the bay window. They were all children again. A touch of circus had renewed their youth as by the wave of a magic wand. Willem broke into a cry of utter joy and pointed ecstatically at the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... was a man who could take a whole roomful of warm, vital people, sitting right next to him, pulsing and glowing in their joys and their sins, and with one single heroic motion of an imperious hand drop them softly and lovingly over into Fatuity and Oblivion in five minutes and leave them out of the world before their ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... point—exactly what this was confused a vast roomful of newspapermen—the Senator invented a race of creatures called androids. These androids, it seems, look exactly like Tom Smith down the block except that they'd just as soon ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... studying and voting. There are a good many—if I may judge from letters that occasionally come to me—who are taking, or wish to take, their first lessons in public speaking. Not necessarily very much in public, or before mixed audiences, but perhaps merely to say to a roomful of ladies, or before the committee of a Christian Union, what they desire to say. "How shall I make myself heard? How shall I learn to express myself? How shall I keep my head clear? Is there any school for debate?" And so on. My dear young lady, it does not take much wisdom, but only ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... goblins that would have haunted our dreams; although I was now and then visited by a nightmare-consciousness of being a bewitched princess who must perform some impossible task, such as turning a whole roomful of straws into gold, one by one, or else lose my head. But she blended the humorous with the romantic in her selections, so that we usually dropped to sleep in good spirits, if ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... appointed clerks. There is a roomful of them just over the Secretary's office, and he says they distract him with their noise of moving of chairs ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... the coroner's hand prepared us for what was before us. As he opened it and disclosed again the dainty white bow which, as I have before said, was of rather a fantastic make, the whole roomful of eager spectators craned forward and were ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... looked down over the head of the banister, but she could not have gone back into the living room—better madness than the madness of that clamor.... Up-stairs she fumbled for the electric switch and missed it in the darkness; a roomful of lightning showed her the button plainly on the wall. But when the impenetrable black shut down, it again eluded her fumbling fingers, so she slipped off her dress and petticoat and threw herself weakly on the dry side ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... once retiring Wedderburn, leaning rather gracefully against the window, playing with the blind tassel and talking, apparently, to the five of them. Now, Hill could talk bravely enough and even overbearingly to one girl, and he could have made a speech to a roomful of girls, but this business of standing at ease and appreciating, fencing, and returning quick remarks round a group was, he knew, altogether beyond him. Coming up the staircase his feelings for Wedderburn had been generous, a certain admiration perhaps, a willingness to shake his hand ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... true was proven by his conduct during the time in which it was liable to public comment. Until night he was not seen, and then he came in at a late hour and, walking in silence through the roomful of watchers, shut himself up in an inner chamber and ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... moment of Doret's entrance the occupants of the saloon seemed petrified; they stood rooted in their tracks as if the anger in that menacing voice had halted them in mid-action. 'Poleon, too, turned cold, for it seemed to him that he had opened the door upon a roomful of wax figures posed in theatric postures. Then in the flash of an eye the scene dissolved into action, ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... the remainder. The total utility of atmospheric air is infinite, since the loss of the whole of it would mean the total destruction of animal life; but the specific utility and the value of air is nil, since no one limited part of the supply has any practical importance. A roomful of it might be destroyed with impunity. So the cereal crops of the world, taken as a whole, have almost infinite importance, since their destruction would result in universal famine; but each bushel of grain ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... Christmas feast at Dunraven! It surpassed all the other Dunraven Christmases on record; everybody said so. And at last, when no one could possibly eat more, all the merry roomful, young and old, must have a holly sprig fastened to the coat, or gown, or apron, and the procession was formed to march back to the hall; and Mr. Jack Loughead's stereopticon flashed out the most beautiful pictures, that his bright descriptions explained to the delighted children; and then games ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney
... thought these were good enough to lend. She had no toys or dolls except of home manufacture, but her rag baby and set of broken dishes afforded just as much happiness as children nowadays get from a roomful of imported playthings. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper |
