dead-tinted

Updated: June 21, 2025

But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me with the feeling that human life very much of it is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.

George Eliot - The Mill on the Floss