"Busyness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indescribably graceful and light-footed. "You couldn't hear the fall of her foot: you never could. Her dancing and circling about the cage seemed to be the most important business of her life; she was always at it, especially in bright weather. I shouldn't have called it restlessness so much as busyness. It really seemed to mean more to her than exercise or irritation at confinement. It was evident also that she was happy when so engaged. She used to sing. She sang also when she was sitting still with Bran; but not with ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... misery. The little amount of tact which he derived from his timidity made him fear to seem ridiculous in concerning himself with such pettiness. And yet those petty things made up the sum of his existence,—that cherished existence, full of busyness about nothings, and of nothingness in its business; a colorless barren life in which strong feelings were misfortunes, and the absence of emotion happiness. The poor priest's paradise was changed, in a moment, into hell. His sufferings became intolerable. ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... I found that B—— was in no hurry and we talked more intimately than in several years. I discovered soon that his hard busyness was no more than a veneer and that his freer self still lived, but in confinement. At least he felt the great lack in his life, which had been given too much to the piling up of things, to the sustaining of position—getting and ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... slowly crawled to the hour of liberation all the girls began to put away their things, so that a real busyness was observable in the room. Sally was apparently no more eager than the others, and yet she could hardly keep herself from running to the window to see if Toby was in the street below. Sedately she prepared to leave, walking down the stairs slowly instead of rushing at them as she wished to ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... plunging on. Do we not often feel, upon this earth whirling through space, like men and women who by some weird chance have found themselves upon a ship, ignorant of their point of departure and of their destination? For all the busyness with which we engage in many tasks, we cannot keep ourselves from slipping back at times to the ship's stern to look out along its wake and wonder whence we came, or from going at times also to its prow to wonder whither we are headed. What do you make ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick |
