Sallow Quotes & Sayings

Harry scanned the table more carefully. Tiny little Professor Flitwick, the Charms teacher, was sitting on a large pile of cushions beside Professor Sprout, the Herbology teacher, whose hat was askew over her flyaway gray hair. She was talking to Professor Sinistra of the Astronomy department. On Professor Sinistra's other side was the sallow-faced, hook-nosed, greasy-haired Potions master, Snape - Harry's least favorite person at Hogwarts. Harry's loathing of Snape was matched only by Snape's hatred of him, a hatred which had, if possible, intensified last year, when Harry had helped Sirius escape right under Snape's overlarge nose - Snape and Sirius had been enemies since their own school days. — J.K. Rowling

So fare thee well, poor devil of a Sub-Sub, whose commentator I am. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm; and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosy-strong; but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poor-devilish, too; and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness - Give it up, Sub-Subs! For by how much more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together - there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses! — Herman Melville

Billy was walking up the hall, buckling his belt. His tanned face was now sallow and wet with sweat. He says there's a bulge in my aorta. Like a bubble in a car tire. Only car tires don't yell when you poke em. — Stephen King

When your job is what defines you, when that is the be-all and end-all of your existence, what does a fake smile and a sallow look matter. You have to save your job to keep body and soul together, don't you? — Andy Paula

Charley's consumption and indigestion had only become more lacerating; his eye sockets were as deep and dark as fistholes in the snow, his gums were strangely purple, he wore extravagant gold rings on every finger and a clove of garlic around his neck according to the guidance of a gypsy named Madame Africa. Bob was skinny, sallow, peevish, his complexion spoiled with so many pimples that some correspondents thought it was measles. — Ron Hansen

Twas a jolly old pedagogue, long ago, Tall and slender, and sallow and dry; His form was bent, and his gait was slow, His long thin hair was white as snow, But a wonderful twinkle shone in his eye. And he sang every night as he went to bed, "Let us be happy down here below: The living should live, though the dead be dead." Said the jolly old pedagogue long ago. — George Arnold

Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pure flame, and even to exalt itself to mastery in the realm of beauty; pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion - to contemplate all these destinies, and many others like them, was to doubt if there is any other heroism at all but the heroism of weakness. In any case, what other heroism could be more in keeping with the times? — Thomas Mann

Poor little thin, sallow, ugly Mary - she actually looked almost pretty for a moment. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

Jemima was not pretty, the flatness and shortness of her face made her almost plain; yet most people looked twice at her expressive countenance, at the eyes which flamed or melted at every trifle, at the rich colour which came at every expressed emotion into her usually sallow face, at the faultless teeth which made her smile like a sunbeam. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Surely such a pure, perfect sound could not be coming from the skinny little girl in the dreadful pink dress? But as he watched Rosanna, he no longer saw her sallow skin, or the way she seemed to be all arms and legs. Instead, he saw her huge, expressive brown eyes and noticed a hint of colour appear in her cheeks as her exquisite voice soared to a crescendo. — Lucinda Riley

Exposed like butt cheeks at a strip club; chicken breasts, fleshy and sallow in the butcher's case; tequila bottle soldiers lined up across the bar's back wall. — Dennis Vickers

Bob, you know something . . ." Luckman said at last. "I used to be the same age as everyone else." "I think so was I," Arctor said. "I don't know what did it." "Sure, Luckman," Arctor said, "you know what did it to all of us." "Well, let's not talk about it." He continued inhaling noisily, his long face sallow in the dim midday light. — Philip K. Dick

Even in broad daylight, he was so sallow, he looked like a black-and-white picture pasted into a Kodachrome world. At night, he was barely even visible. — C.D. Reiss

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,
My tears like vinegar,
Or the bitter blinking yellow
Of an acetic star.
Tonight the caustic wind, love,
Gossips late and soon,
And I wear the wry-faced pucker of
The sour lemon moon.
While like an early summer plum,
Puny, green, and tart,
Droops upon its wizened stem
My lean, unripened heart. — Sylvia Plath

A lawyer art thou? Draw not nigh! Go, carry to some fitter place The keenness of that practised eye, The hardness of that sallow face. — William Wordsworth

As he pushed the shopping cart down the narrow aisles [of Whole Foods]he noted two distinct types: the wild-haird bohemians who worked there, and the middle-aged yuppies who shopped there. Organic food was healthy, yes? So how to explain the unsightly appearance of the patrons--their sallow complexions, their thin and frizzled hair, their shuffling gaits. Many looked like recent victims of accident or disease, limping and wheezing, loading their carts with every sort of vitamin known to the natural world. In Benjamin's opinion they would do better getting a steak and some frozen peas at the Stop & Shop down the street. How much granola and broccoli could one tolerate? Hitler was a vegetarian, he'd learned on the History Channel, and a compulsive farter. — Dan Pope

Step Away from the Mean Girls ...
... and say bye-bye to feeling bad about your looks.
Are you ready to stop colluding with a culture that makes so many of us feel physically inadequate? Say goodbye to your inner critic, and take this pledge to be kinder to yourself and others.
This is a call to arms. A call to be gentle, to be forgiving, to be generous with yourself. The next time you look into the mirror, try to let go of the story line that says you're too fat or too sallow, too ashy or too old, your eyes are too small or your nose too big; just look into the mirror and see your face. When the criticism drops away, what you will see then is just you, without judgment, and that is the first step toward transforming your experience of the world. — Oprah Winfrey

occurred. But there was no denying it now, the evidence was all over him. The pleasantly warm flush to his normally sallow cheeks; the relaxed, almost rubbery way he leaned against the window - a stark contrast to his usual calcified, if slightly hunched posture; and most important — Ben Mezrich

Unstrained, I sit and gaze,
glare,
survey,
stare
through barred windows encased in embroidered steel. Pearly frosted dust obstructs the channels of light, leaving only small pillars of fire, arranged in disordered fragments. The antiquated sallow walls are stained with crimson braids that wreathe and scuttle about the rimes and rifts. — Craig Froman

Who can say which is the greater sign of creative power, the sun with its planet system swinging with governed impetus to some incalculable end, or the gold sallow catkin with its flashing system of little flies? — Mary Webb

Nippers was a whiskered, sallow, and, upon the whole, rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers - ambition and indigestion. — Herman Melville

I have always been suspicious of the phrase, the glow of pregnancy, and my suspicions were only confirmed by Lillian's appearance. Instead of a glow, her whole body seemed to become more and more dull, sallow and sickly sweet and vague, like a candle burning out or a line of smudged writing. — John Burnside

Ransie was a narrow six feet of sallow brown skin and yellow hair. The imperturbability of the mountains hung upon him like a suit of armor. The woman was calicoed, angled, snuff-brushed, and weary with unknown desires. Through it all gleamed a faint protest of cheated youth unconscious of its loss. — O. Henry

One Sallow does not make Summer. — Horace

January snow lay thick on the ground - crusty, pitted, and hardened, some of it like the bubbly honeycomb of air-dried sea foam in the tide wrack down at the beach, the sort of snow that stays so long you get used to the intrusion of that world of uninvited white, a hooded subverted landscape, sparkling in the low flame of a sallow sunrise on a winter morning. — Paul Theroux

In San Francisco one felt the spirit of optimism and enterprise. Los Angeles, on the other hand, was an ugly city, hot and oppressive, and the people looked sallow and anaemic. It was a much warmer climate but had not the freshness of San Francisco; nature has endowed the north of California with resources that will endure and flourish when Hollywood has disappeared into the prehistoric tar-pits of Wilshire Boulevard. — Charlie Chaplin

Dark Jar Tin Zoo's face is sallow, his cheeks sunk in, and he looks like Edvard Munch's "The Scream," only less colorful. — Jarod Kintz

Wintry morning, looking with dull eyes and sallow face upon the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, finds its inhabitants unwilling to get out of bed. Many of them are not early risers at the brightest of times, being birds of night who roost when the sun is high and are wide awake and keen for prey when the stars shine out. Behind dingy blind and curtain, in upper story and garret, skulking more or less under false names, false hair, false titles, false jewellery, and false histories, a colony of brigands lie in their first sleep. Gentlemen — Charles Dickens

His manner was polite; his accent, in speaking, struck me as being somewhat unusual, - not precisely foreign, but still not altogether English: his age might be about Mr. Rochester's, - between thirty and forty; his complexion was singularly sallow: otherwise he was a fine-looking man, at first sight especially. On closer examination, you detected something in his face that displeased, or rather that failed to please. His features were regular, but too relaxed: his eye was large and well cut, but the life looking out of it was a tame, vacant life - at least so I thought. — Charlotte Bronte

Much can they praise the trees so straight and high, The sailing pine,the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspin good for staves, the cypress funeral, The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepest still, The yew obedient to the bender's will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet-bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platane round, The carver holm, the maple seldom inward sound. — Edmund Spenser

What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion
— Thomas Mann

Mrs. Ferrars was a little, thin woman, upright, even to formality, in her figure, and serious, even to sourness, in her aspect. Her complexion was sallow; and her features small, without beauty, and naturally without expression; but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill nature. She was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas; and of the few syllables that did escape her, not one fell to the share of Miss Dashwood, whom she eyed with the spirited determination of disliking her at all events. — Jane Austen

The lady carried upon her upper lip certain reddish demonstrations, which, if the imagination had been assisted by her attire, might have been mistaken for a beard. These were, however, in all probability, nothing more than eyelashes in a wrong place, as the eyes of Miss Brass were quite free from any such natural impertinencies. In complexion Miss Brass was sallow - rather a dirty sallow, so to speak - but this hue was agreeably relieved by the healthy glow which mantled in the extreme tip of her laughing nose. — Charles Dickens

Mrs. Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the apartment Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn't place. Something Eastern European by the sound of it. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.) And especially these days with so many refugees flooding into London. — Kate Atkinson

If I had to wish for something, just one thing, it would be that Hannah would never see Tate the way I did. Never see Tate's beautiful, lush hair turn brittle, her skin sallow, her teeth ruined by anything she could get her hands on that would make her forget. That Hannah would never count how many men there were, or how vile humans can be to one another. That she would never see the moments in my life that were full of neglect, and fear, and revulsion, moments I can never go back to because I know they will slow me down for the rest of my life if I let myself remember them for one moment. Tate, who had kept Hannah alive that night, reading her the story of Jem Finch and Mrs. Dubose. And suddenly I know I have to go. But this time without being chased by the Brigadier, without experiencing the kindness of a postman from Yass, and without taking along a Cadet who will change the way I breath for the rest of my life. — Melina Marchetta