"If I go back," he cried, despairingly, looking up to the great building that arose above the stony hills, "they will not take me in." He was absolutely without a refuge, utterly without a destination; he did not have a hope. There was nothing he desired except the surrounding of those four narrow walls between which he had lain at night and dreamed those ever-recurring dreams, -- dreams which were never prophecies or promises, but always the hackneyed history of what he had sacrificed by his crime, and relinquished by his pride.英文原著 · 《A Mountain Woman》
Nevertheless, solitude gradually became intolerable. I wanted to move about, and to communicate to some one all that was lying upon my heart, but not a living creature was near me. The position was the more unpleasant because, willy-nilly, I could hear St. Jerome walking about in his room, and softly whistling some hackneyed tune. Somehow, I felt convinced that he was whistling not because he wanted to, but because he knew it annoyed me.英文原著 · 《Boyhood》
It was an old, hackneyed story, that He knew every man and woman in the world, that He could help them. She had heard it often. Was there any thing in it? Could He help her? Slowly, the nervous twitching of her body quieted, her dulled eyes cleared as if a new power of sight were coming to them. After a long time she heard steps, and Selo calling. She rose. The murder was known.英文原著 · 《Frances Waldeaux》
I declined -- 'TWAS self-denial -- and I lectured him on booze, Using all the hackneyed arguments that preachers mostly use; Things I'd heard in temperance lectures (I was young and rather green), And I ended by referring to the man he might have been.英文原著 · 《In the Days When the World Was Wide》
"She commenced with one of the most tender and graceful, and hereabouts least hackneyed airs of Bellini--the Qui la Voce from I Puritani. Her liquid purity of voice and graceful gliding through its flowery labyrinthine passages was to us not more remarkable than the true but quiet fervor which animated it. Jenny Lind shows no feeling! and excites none! draws no tears! True Art supplies the place of tears by touching the emotions which are deeper and serener, and not a whit less human. But of this more fully when we have room.英文原著 · 《Life of Hon. Phineas T. Barnum》
I don't know how it was,--I hope he did not think me indelicate,--but I asked him, I believe, to sit down, or pointed to a chair. He sat down, and, in- stead of having recourse to observations upon the weather, or hackneyed criticisms upon the theatre, he entered readily into a conversation worthy a man of sense to speak, and a lady of delicacy and sentiment to hear. He was not strictly handsome, but he spoke the language of sentiment, and his eyes looked tender- ness and honour.英文原著 · 《The Contrast》