"Boredom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a misty dawn in April. But to us they never did come. And the effort to be always ready, with so little hope of ever having any reward, was a real test of discipline—continuing as it did month after month in a country where unrelieved monotony tempted us all to the slackness of utter boredom. ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... worse for her long exposure, and that if she must lie still on a lounge for two weeks, the least the family could do would be to humor her in everything, and spend as much time as possible with her, or she would certainly die of boredom. She passed the entire day in making and unfolding plans, looking up the sailing dates of steamships, and writing letters of introduction for Austin. By night she had the satisfaction of knowing that ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... his pacing up and down that back room in Pall Mall like a caged lion. Like Mr. Galsworthy's Ferrand he hates to do "round business on an office stool." His temperament is entirely dynamic. Everything static and stay-at-home is utter boredom to him. Probably no soldier ever showed the qualities and the limitations of the man of action in more ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... stairs. He skipped two crumbing steps but found another. He was all right now, practically safe; as he neared the bottom he felt a slight boredom. He reached the dining-room —considered the silver—again decided ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... is that of wrestling with the difficult and overcoming it. Every call of duty has its place in this ideal; every irksome job, every wearisome responsibility. The fact that we are not always aware of it in no way annuls the other fact that it is so. Boredom, monotony, drudgery, bereavement, loneliness, all the clamour of unsatisfied ambitions and aching sensibilities, have their share in this divine yearning of the spirit to grasp what as yet is beyond its reach. All of that hacking of the man ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... news on the radio. But mostly he shut it off—out. Until boredom at last began to overtake him—because he had been used to so much more than what was here. Until—specifically—one morning, when the news came too quickly, and with too much impact. It was a recording, scratchy, and ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... no desire to alleviate your confessed boredom. Your persistence would be praiseworthy if well directed. Waters wear away stone, the wind crumbles the marble, but a woman is not moved till she wishes to be. I never thought that I should dabble in an intrigue of this sort, and I am ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... and that his only safety lay in temporary flight. It was a favorite trick of his. In the charting of his course he had often found two other rocks beside Scylla and Charybdis in his way; one was boredom and the other was love. When a woman began to bore him, or he found himself liking her beyond the limit of his philosophy, he invariably found relief in change of scene. Sometimes it was a sick aunt or a persistent ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to do. Most of the theatres were shut. The streets were damp and dirty. It was all very well for the generals, appearing every night in the glare and glitter of the footlights; but for the rank and file the occupation of London spelt pure boredom. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... from Crossmichael deposited Frank Innes at the doors of Hermiston. Once in a way, during the past winter, Archie, in some acute phase of boredom, had written him a letter. It had contained something in the nature of an invitation or a reference to an invitation - precisely what, neither of them now remembered. When Innes had received it, there ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... companion-way. But Lily preferred to enjoy herself and expended on running about the energies which she no longer had to devote to her practising. Her accumulated weariness disappeared under the influence of the sleep and the good meals, which she had not the boredom of having to get ready, as in Fourteenth Street, where Lily, big girl that she was, had to ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... almost a year since I saw them, the Over Lords of the World, and I had forgotten their appearance. Sprawled on the glowing silks of their cushioned couches, eyes closed in languid boredom, they were like huge white slugs. Swollen to tremendous size by the indolent luxuriousness of their lives, the flesh that was not concealed by the bright hued web of their robes was pasty white, and bagged and folded where the shrunken muscles beneath refused support. Great pouches dropped ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... ever uttered. Poets and painters have gloried in the conception of Ajax, on his lonely rock, defying all the gods that be. But what is that compared with this? In the passage whose sublimities awoke the enthusiasm of Macaulay, and delivered him from insufferable boredom, Paul claims to have reached the limits of finality, and he hurls defiance at all the ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... "I hardly know what to tell master. We're certainly seeing some unusual things, and for two months we've had no time for boredom. The latest wonder is always the most astonishing, and if this progression keeps up, I can't imagine what its climax will be. In my opinion, we'll never again ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... imagination, or—Anyway I seem to get furtive and fleeting glimpses which I take to be the weariness and condolence of age; indifference to sights and things once brisk with interest; tasteless stale stuff which used to be champagne; the boredom of travel: the secret sigh behind the public ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... if the salvia, as by a miracle, blossoms on the jasmine? What if the former stifles the latter? Indeed, one can escape boredom, but not love. One can flee the quidnuncs of the salon, but not the questioning perplexity of one's heart. A truce now ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... world was as settled and peaceful, as conscious of its imperial responsibilities, as susceptible to boredom, as greedy of amusement, could show as numerous a leisured class, and believed as firmly in money, as our own. What is more important for our purpose, it was questioning the truth of its religion as we ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... began at breakfast. William descended slightly late, and, after receiving his parents' reproaches with an air of weary boredom, ate his porridge listlessly. He had come to the conclusion that morning that there was a certain monotonous sameness about life. One got up, and had one's breakfast, and went to school, and had one's dinner, and went to ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... of page 5 in his 49,874th letter. I am not sure if I received all the remaining 49,873 letters in the seven years. To meet him and to work for him was to me a great treat. I put up with his eccentricities—real ones, not sham like mine.—I put up with a great deal of boredom, for he was a bore at times, and I worked over seven years with his illustrations, in which the actual working hours would not have occupied me more than seven weeks, purely out of respect for his genius. I treated him as a problem, and I solved him, and had he lived I would ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... poet in the Forum asks the question, "Is Verse in Danger?" 'Tis a wild suggestion! Is Verse in Danger? Nay, that's not the curse; Danger (of utter boredom) is ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 31, 1891 • Various
... house everything was "good." Economy covered every scrap of gilding with green gauze; all the furniture wore holland covers. Though it was impossible to feel a shade of uneasiness as to the wealth of the inhabitants, at the end of half an hour no one could suppress a yawn. Boredom perched in every nook; the curtains hung dolefully; the dining-room was like Harpagon's. Even if Lousteau had not known all about Malaga, he could have guessed that the notary's real life was ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... else! we cheerfully exclaim. But what? No doubt there are always art and science, infinite in their possibilities for joy and enlightenment, infinite also, as we know, in their possibilities of mischief and shallowness and boredom. Let it only be true science and great art, and one man is better than ten millions. To say that is only to echo unconsciously the ancient saying of Heraclitus, "One is ten thousand ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... consider the achievements of Koerner and Heinrich von Kleist in the field of the drama. In this both have been very active, but in order to avoid boredom for a time at least, I shall begin with the analysis of a piece by Kleist, choosing first a tragedy, his Prince of Homburg which, to be sure, is entitled simply "a drama" by its author. I do not know whether he did this because of the circumstances that the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... mutual mockery, masked as mutual praise, Is a great social bond in these strange days. ROCHEFOUCAULD here might gather Material for new maxims keen and cold. They meet, these convives, if the truth be told, For boredom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... every problem solved, every witty thought, whether of his own or another's; and so his mind will have no further aim than to be constantly active. This will be an inexhaustible spring of delight; and boredom, that spectre which haunts the ordinary man, can ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... cold answer was that the party was complete. Then she followed asking questions about the route, etc. at every opportunity. Of course, she had finally to be adopted and taken along much to the boredom of the party, which was a ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... hostess tiresome flights of imagination to answer. Clo was far from regretting her move, however. If Churn were absent long, or if he went out again, Kit said that she would return as an escape from boredom. ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... deep chair in one of the dormers. Paula, her back to the little audience, stood talking to Novelli. Mary allowed herself a faint smile over the expression in those faces that Paula wouldn't look at. The half-concealed impatience, the anticipatory boredom, showed through so unfaltering a determination to do and express to the end the precisely correct thing. Even her father's anger looked out through ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... as he is. You know what I am, my dear Mortimer. You know how dreadfully susceptible I am to boredom. You know that when I became enough of a man to find myself an embodied conundrum, I bored myself to the last degree by trying to find out what I meant. You know that at length I gave it up, and declined to guess any more. Then how can I possibly give you the answer that I have not discovered? ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... less strenuous or less inflamed than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are impossible. Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the reason that they so plainly should not exist. A complacent reader of any of Mr. Sinclair's better ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... correspondents Mr. PHILIP GIBBS contrives to give in his despatches the liveliest sense of the movement, the pageantry and the abominable horror of war. Pageantry there is, for all the evil boredom and weariness of this pit-and-ditch business, and Mr. GIBBS sees finely and has an honest pen that avoids the easy cliche. You might truthfully describe his book, The Battles of the Somme (HEINEMANN), as an epic of the New Armies. He never ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... being brought to bear on such problems as the effect on humans who are deprived of their sensory perceptions, or whose sensory systems are overloaded, or who are exposed to excessive boredom or anxiety or sense of unreality, or who must do their job under hypnosis or ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... the English Channel, misgivings began to crowd in upon her. Adventures which would have presented an amusing and enticing aspect to a better-bred woman aroused in Vanessa only the twin sensations of fright and discomfort. Flies bit her, and she was persuaded that it was only sheer boredom that prevented camels from doing the same. Clyde did his best, and a very good best it was, to infuse something of the banquet into their prolonged desert picnics, but even snow-cooled Heidsieck lost its flavour when you were convinced ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... indulgence, the exercise, the companionship, the discipline, all generated a kind of high spirits that I have known in no other place and at no other time. I used to awake in the morning fresh and alert, free from all anxiety, all sense of tiresome engagements, all possibility of boredom. All staleness, weariness, all complications and conventional duties, all jealousies and envyings, were absent. We were not competing with each other, we were not bent on asserting ourselves, we had just each our own bit of work to do; moreover our spaces of travel had an invigorating ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with him? You don't argue against such evidence, and besides it would have looked as if I had wanted to claim all the merit. Already his gratitude was simply frightful. Funny position, wasn't it? The boredom came later, when we lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don't know. One gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing. But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty he experienced to express the overwhelming nature of his feelings (the most furious ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... place for a colonic every two or three days during the fasting period, the first colonic scheduled for the next afternoon. I'll spare you a detailed description of my first fast with colonics; you'll read about others shortly. In the end I withstood the boredom of water fasting for 17 days. During the fast I had about 7 colonics. I ended up feeling great, much trimmer, with an enormous rebirth of energy. And when I resumed eating it turned out to be slightly easier to control my dietary habits ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... subject upon which he has not something worth while to say. His memory is remarkable; he can quote poet after poet, or compose a poem on anything that crops up at the table. I do not think it can be said that Chesterton is a good listener. This is not in any way conceit or boredom, but is rather that he is always thinking out some new story or article or poem. Yet he is a good host in the niceties of the table; he knows if you want salt; he does not forget that wine ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... experience, very acutely; and after Union with God all earthly consolations must be abandoned: until we abandon these we do not know how we have depended on them, how they have protected us from depression, loneliness, boredom, and discontent. Abandon all these earthly consolations and interests, and at the same time be abandoned by God (sensible Grace is withdrawn), and immediately our sufferings become very severe, though our outward circumstances may appear, and may actually remain, of the very best. ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... ancestors decided to do without Omans. We do our own work and enjoy it. Your Masters died of futility and boredom. What I would like to do, Laro, is take you to the creche and put your disobedient brain back into the matrix. However, the decision is not mine alone to make. How about it, fellows and girls? Would you rather have alleged servants who won't do anything ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... each of the women with strained attention, looking for a guilty smile. But either he did not know how to read their faces, or not one of these women felt herself to be guilty; he read on every face nothing but a blank expression of everyday vulgar boredom and complacency. Stupid faces, stupid smiles, harsh, stupid voices, insolent movements, and nothing else. Apparently each of them had in the past a romance with an accountant based on underclothes for fifty roubles, and looked for no other charm in the present ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... with God. David Livingstone had all these qualities, coupled with the sublime indifference of the truly great to the mere side issues of life. You and I sit down to our comfortable meals, sleep in our well-appointed beds, read our Bibles with perfunctory boredom, and babble an occasional prayer for those who endure hardships—when we are reminded from the pulpit to do so. When we read of some awful calamity, such as has blazoned across the pages of history within the past few weeks, we ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... experienced quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to lie for days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but they arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. Only his mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing; but his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty of expressing the overwhelming horror ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... He was terribly bored at first, but his boredom became a cynical amusement. There were twenty different photographs of ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... at the other end of the town. It happened that Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miuesov, who was staying in the district at the time, caught eagerly at the idea. A Liberal of the forties and fifties, a freethinker and atheist, he may have been led on by boredom or the hope of frivolous diversion. He was suddenly seized with the desire to see the monastery and the holy man. As his lawsuit with the monastery still dragged on, he made it the pretext for seeing the Superior, in order to attempt to settle it amicably. A ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... was evident that Kutuzov despised knowledge and cleverness, and knew of something else that would decide the matter—something independent of cleverness and knowledge. Prince Andrew watched the commander in chief's face attentively, and the only expression he could see there was one of boredom, curiosity as to the meaning of the feminine whispering behind the door, and a desire to observe propriety. It was evident that Kutuzov despised cleverness and learning and even the patriotic feeling ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... SNOBS: does that mean that I was right when I was a child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that the child is not the man's father, but the man? and that I came into the world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom? ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... appears to have been mainly negative, and in some cases deterrent; creating in his mind, not only a very low estimate of the value of lectures, but an antipathy to the subjects which had been the occasion of the boredom inflicted upon him by their instrumentality. With the exception of Hope, the Professor of Chemistry, Darwin found them all "intolerably dull." Forty years afterwards he writes of the lectures of the Professor of Materia Medica that they were "fearful to remember." ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... important part of a drummer's stock in trade. It is by means of the "good story" that the politician makes his way into office; the business man paves the way for a big deal; the after-dinner speaker gets a hearing; the hostess saves her guests from boredom. Such a large place does the "story" hold in our national life that we have invented a social pastime that might be termed a "joke match." "Don't tell a funny story, even if you know one," was the advice of the Atchison Globe man, "its narration will only remind your hearers of a bad one." ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... are "the despair of the emulator." Voltaire said. "If the admirers of Homer were honest, they would acknowledge the boredom which their ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... who had taken a bad cold and needed medicine. Allison hurried away to give Jane her message, and there was nothing for Clive to do but to go to bed and resolve never to spend another Sunday in such boredom. For he "couldn't see" hobnobbing with an "old woman," as he called Julia Cloud, the way the others seemed entirely willing to do. What was she anyway but some poor relation likely who was acting as housekeeper? But at least for once in his life Clive Terrence realized ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... boredom, bred by long months of finicky penny purchasers, vanished. She stooped for one of the packets of fresh stock on the lower shelf. As he broke it open, she readjusted her heavy-rimmed spectacles, and ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... theatre, or court-rooms. The smell of poverty was mingled with the heavy scents of fashionable women, who, in the minority, made their presence felt by their showy gowns, rustling movements, and attitudes of superior boredom. In a vast building like this extremes touch with eagerness on the part of the poor, to whom these furtive views of the rich and indolent brought ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... to Lyndhurst and boredom. An old lady at Twickenham Park has asked me to tea this afternoon, and I have to interview a kitchen-maid at ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... amusing, I agree to that. There are moments of empty and horrible boredom. But they become more and more rare in proportion as one grows older. In short, LIVING seems to me a business for which I was ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... of some four hours across Holland brought me to Vlissingen, as the Dutch call Flushing, and there I spent the afternoon, wandering about in boredom, trying to pass away the slow hours until the boat arrived and I could climb ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... court, an orange and a skin of wine at his side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that had an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity, and usually late at night with the publisher's messenger in the hall, he had half filled his studio with mechanical toys of his own invention, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... quickly, and tired out by the boredom of the evening, quickly fell asleep. Suddenly she awoke with all her senses on the alert, and with a sense of vague danger hovering round. There were sounds of running feet and indistinct oaths and distant cries, and she could have sworn that a pistol-shot had startled her ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... was not in love with the fellow. No, no. He was sure of Elise; he knew the symptoms; you couldn't mistake them. But she might marry Markham, all the same. Out of boredom, out of uncertainty, out of desperation. He was not going to let that happen; he would make it impossible; he would give Elise the ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... Hugh challenged Miss Custer to a game of croquet, and she, with secret reluctance, but a very good grace—being one of those sweetly-amiable people who never speak ill of any one, and never manifest the least boredom, no matter who undertakes the office of entertainer to them—accepted. However, she would make the most she could out of it. She invited the rest of the company to come down and look on and see that she had fair play. Bruce, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... of Mr. Seven Sachs's hand did him good, reassured him, and gave him courage. He was utterly tired of the voyage, and also of the poetical society of Carlo Trent, whose passage had cost him thirty pounds, considerable boredom, and some sick-nursing during the final days and nights. A dramatic poet with an appetite was a full dose for Edward Henry; but a dramatic poet who lay on his back and moaned for naught but soda-water and dry land amounted to more than Edward Henry ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... Higher Life. But imagine a man making a butter-slide and telling everybody it was made with the most expensive butter. Picture an apple-pie bed of purple and cloth of gold. It is not hard to see that such schemes would lead simultaneously to a double boredom; weariness of the costly and complex method and of the meagre and trivial thought. This is the true analysis, I think of that chill of tedium that strikes to the soul of any intelligent man when he hears of such elephantine pranks. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... beautiful and short Homeric epic in prose, called Taras Bulba. His appointment to a professorship in history was a ridiculous episode in his life. After a brilliant first lecture, in which he had evidently said all he had to say, he settled to a life of boredom for himself and his pupils. When he resigned he said joyously: "I am once more a free Cossack." Between 1834 and 1835 he produced a new series of stories, including his famous Cloak, which may be regarded as the legitimate beginning of the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... cannot meet with a soul without plumbing it to the depths. Here we look and pass on. The individual soul hardly exists; it is a mere shell. Beneath that shell, the collective soul, suffering, overwhelmed with fatigue, brutalised by the noise, poisoned by the smoke, endures infinite boredom, drowses, waits, waits unendingly. It is a "waiting-machine." It no longer tries to think; "it has given up the attempt to understand, it has renounced being itself." These are not soldiers, they don't wish to be soldiers, ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... insignificant little woman, who looked as though she were being taken out by her costly furs, while the younger was a girl of some two or three and twenty, of a type of beauty that would have been too imperious had it not been toned down by that air which to the unintelligent means boredom, though the wise know it to spring from something gone amiss in life. Both ladies kept their eyes fixed so exclusively on Diane that they had almost passed before remembering to salute Derek with ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... too much, and I beat a retreat—feigning boredom, or cessation of interest, of course; and absently carrying the still ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... this day belongs to the 8th and 19th Brigades. My own were spectators only; deeply interested, and our own fate might at any moment become involved, but harassed with heat and flies and the unspeakable boredom born of long warfare, which even a battle can disperse only in part. Stories filtered through of the heroic work of the Seaforths and Manchesters and of the 47th and 59th Sikhs. Report persisted that the Seaforths' head quarters had been knocked out by a direct hit, with twelve casualties, and that ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... enemy of ennui or boredom, and the demons of melancholy. It "hath charms," wrote William Congreve (1670-1729), "to soothe the savage breast."[177:1] Orpheus with his lyre was able to charm wild beasts, and even to control the forces of Nature; and because of its wonderful therapeutic effects, which were well known to ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... impecunious, and hence negligible; moreover somewhat notorious of late for a too vivid behavior: the distant bowing acquaintance of many years. This till the moment of indiscretion last May; when, encountering his dashing attractions in the boredom of a dull resort, far from her mother's restrictive eye, she had for an idle fortnight allowed the relation between them to become undeniably changed. Foolish indeed; but really she had thought—or now really thought ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... nothing but wait at table, where he idly flicked away the flies, and as idly changed the plates. He was almost too idle to speak, and when the visitors addressed him he answered in a tone indicating excessive boredom or a guilty conscience. Because he was quiet, never seriously drunk, and did not smoke, his master had made him butler; he was also ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... a hymn to herself as she went about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they had spoken but rarely to each other. She had not even ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... who had killed their man in a fierce brawl or in a dispute over a woman and who formed an aristocracy that disdained the petty thieves, looked upon the bugler as the butt for pranks with which to while away their boredom. ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... an end to his boredom, and, though he was longing to get away from his surroundings, she ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... would just have suited one of those Indian mystics who sit perfectly still for twenty years, contemplating the Infinite, but it reduced Sam to an almost imbecile state of boredom. He tried counting sheep. He tried going over his past life in his mind from the earliest moment he could recollect, and thought he had never encountered a duller series of episodes. He found a temporary ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... eyes fell on Helen, the boredom vanished from his face. It was quite obvious that he called his mother's attention to her and asked who she was. Helen felt that an introduction was imminent. She was glad of it. At that moment she would have ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... wine-red. There we stood hushed, not daring to move; but holding close the one to the other as the feet of the promenaders waxed and waned above us. Their talk of birds and beasts came in wafts of boredom to us, thus ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... the fear of boredom that was behind the apprehension he could already feel touching at his mind. It had not been boredom that had turned Horne into a suicide ...
— The Nothing Equation • Tom Godwin
... is quite true," observed General Epanchin; then, clasping his hands behind his back, he returned to his place on the terrace steps, where he yawned with an air of boredom. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... vanity to go home to his house, one of the finest in Grosvenor Street, and splendidly kept up. Then he had suddenly grown horribly sick of it, longed for freedom in a garret, and now he associated it with no thrill of pride or pleasure, but with boredom, depression, quarrels and lack of liberty. Liberty! Ah! That was it; that was what he felt more than anything else. He had married for money chiefly to get liberty. One was a slave, always in debt—but it was much worse now. The master of the house lost all his vitality, gaiety and ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... herbaceous nonentity, whom nobody knew or cared about. He might have had London at his beck and call, and yet of all that the metropolis might mean to a millionaire, he had been able to think of nothing better than that it should send old Kervick to him, to help beguile his boredom with dominoes and mess-room stories! Pah! He ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... remove the one possible explanation that yet remained for her having been made to drive to Ashbury; and by the time three quarters of the journey had been accomplished, she resigned herself to a mood of mystified boredom. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... mental effort painful, and makes as little of it as possible. And that is the only sort of effort a discarnate individuality can exert. So, unable to endure the fifty or so years needed to make a really good reincarnation, he reincarnates in a year or so, out of pure boredom, into the first vehicle he can find, usually one nobody else wants." Dr. Harnosh dug out the heel of his pipe and blew through the stem. "But nobody will admit his own mental inferiority, even to himself. Now, every machine ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... AUNT—[Pretending boredom but irritated.] Did the sociology you took up at college teach you that—to play the ghoul on every possible occasion, excavating old bones? Why not let your ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... prison. That was another thing I funked. I'd heard such awful things about it, about the dirt, you know. And there wasn't any dirt in my cell, anyhow. And after the crowds of women, after the meetings and the speeches, the endless talking and the boredom, that ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... Felix's heart as he came downstairs to breakfast in the schoolroom. A sensation of feathery lightness was in him, of speed as well: he could rise above every obstacle in the world, only—there were no obstacles in the world to rise above. Boredom, despair, and pessimism, he suddenly realised, meant deficiency of energy merely. "Birds can rise above everything—and so can I!"—as though he possessed a robin's normal ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... with the boredom of convalescence. He felt perfectly well, and they wouldn't let him get up and out; everything forbidden he wanted to eat. And his one solace was the Brackett library. This was an extraordinary ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... but it is fearfully slow in a besieging army. There one sits the whole blessed day within some sort of entrenchment, under a tent, on mud or straw, playing cards from morning till night. Perhaps, from simple boredom, one goes out to watch the bombs ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... expressive through its mere sound alone: one can know a large part of what is going on in the breasts of people who talk in a foreign tongue just by listening to the sound of their voices—their excitement or boredom, their anger, love, or resentment; and one becomes conscious of these emotions, as in hearing music, without knowing what they are all about. All human emotions betray themselves in speech through the rise and fall, range of intervals, loudness or softness, tempo and differences of duration of tone. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... key to popular enthusiasm. It must be bewildering to men brought up, let us say, in the Hanna school of politics. For here is this nation which sixteen years ago vibrated ecstatically to that magic word "Prosperity"; to-day statistical rhetoric about size induces little but excessive boredom. If you wish to drive an audience out of the hall tell it how rich America is; if you wish to stamp yourself an echo of the past talk to us young men about the Republican Party's understanding with God in respect to bumper crops. But ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... by the presence of other factors whose presence has been unnoted. Sometimes this improvement without practice is explained by the fact that at the last practice period the actual improvement was masked by fatigue or boredom, so that disuse involving rest and the disappearance of fatigue and boredom produces apparent gain, when in reality it but allows the real improvement to become evident. Sometimes a particular practice period was accompanied by certain undesirable elements such as worry, excitement, misunderstandings, ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... to her and them—a secret darting of venom which was strongly imaginative. He acquitted himself with all the advantage of a man whose grace of bearing has long been moulded on an experience of boredom—nursed the little Antonia, who sat with her hands crossed and eyes upturned to his bald head, which struck her as worthy of observation—and propitiated Henleigh by promising him a beautiful saddle and ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... day without your wine, Sir! Madam, just one ribbon less, And one wearied child in London from afar your name will bless. Think, ere now you seek your boredom in fresh pleasure-draughts to drown, Three or four benighted Millions still are left behind ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various
... who will be disappointed in Chichester, I shall love it all my days; not so much for these its monuments, but for itself, its curiously sleepy air of disinterested quiet, its strong dislike of any sort of enthusiasm, its English boredom, even of itself, its complete surrender to what is, its indifference to what might be. May it ever remain secure within sight of the hills, within sight of the sea, steeped in the Tudor myth, certain in its English heart, that twice two is not four but anything one likes to make it, nor ever ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... feet long, they would be perfectly willing to pay him fifty pounds for it. This study of the skies was their only form of dissipation, and even if it was a little expensive it enabled them to escape the Pump-Room rabble and flee boredom and introspection. A hunt was taken through London, but no one could be found who would make such an instrument as they wanted for the price they could afford to pay. They found, however, an amateur lens-polisher who offered to sell his tools, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... connubial kiss. If he could manage to rid himself of such suspicions, there would be less public gabble about anesthetic wives, and fewer books written by quacks with sure cures for them, and a good deal less cold-mutton formalism and boredom at the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... a large asteroid with nothing but time and boredom on his hands, Hansen was enjoying the whole situation immensely. He allowed himself the luxury of several dozen fantasies in which his name was mentioned prominently in galaxy-wide reports of the episode. ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... uses every accident of human life is crammed! Here was a piece of pedantry and scepticism, which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation, and some men, from sheer boredom, fall asleep, but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy, as I considered carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things; the kind of way he walks; the kind of face he has; the kind of book he writes; the kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of way in which his works ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... music was light and pleasing, the whole atmosphere of the place was merry. The lights were dazzling, the dresses were gay, the scenery almost magnificent. As a spectacle it would, I suppose, be regarded as gorgeous. Apparently, too, most of the auditors enjoyed it, although a look of boredom was on some faces. As to the revue itself, while one could not help admitting that some of the songs were humorous, and some of the repartee clever, the thing as a whole was cheap ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... friends.' This was more than a statement, it was a request, and Rose shrank from it; but she said lightly, 'We shall be meeting often. You will see more of us than you will care for, I'm afraid. The Malletts are rather ubiquitous in Radstowe. It's fortunate for us, or Caroline would die of boredom, but I don't know how ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... not regard the matter in this light. To her unsophisticated mind Lady Augusta represented nothing more than periodical boredom in the shape of occasional calls, usually made unexpectedly, when the house was at its worst, and nobody was especially tidy,—calls invariably enlivened by severe comments upon the evil propensities ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... dust throwing and mystification, its concealment of its own ineffable insincerity under an air of ineffable candour? Is there not a "lo there!" from that other school with its bituminous atmosphere of exclusiveness and self-laudatory dilettanteism? Is there not enough actual exposition of boredom come over us from many quarters without drawing for new bores upon the imagination? It is true I gave a single drop of comfort. JOHN PICKARD OWEN was dead. But his having ceased to exist (to use the impious phraseology of the present day) did not cancel the fact ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... retiring managers looked cheerful, as is the Paris way. None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom or indifference over his inward joy. You know that one of your friends is in trouble; do not try to console him: he will tell you that he is already comforted; but, should he have met with good fortune, be careful how you ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... article; never in the daily Press, which he despised, nor in the reviews (for he never wrote anything as long as a magazine article), but in a literary weekly he would express in weary and polished phrases the unemphatic boredom or the mitigated approval with which the works of his fellow-men inspired him. He was the kind of man who had nothing in him you could positively dislike, but to whom you could not talk for five minutes without having a vague sensation of blight. Things seemed ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... jumped, and not one was quicker of recovery than wee Bobby. Instantly ashamed, as an intelligent little dog who knew the import of the gun should be, Bobby denied his alarm in a tiny pink yawn of boredom. Then he went briskly about his urgent business of ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... neither (Since, really, I can hardly quite suppose With all your ghostliness you follow me), I feel no such attraction. Or if one Bows to my sympathy for the briefest space, Snap—it is gone! And, worst of all to tell, What broke it is not in the least dislike But utter boredom. Now.... ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... ideas. In description you must reckon with the imaginative faculty, with the possibility that your hearers cannot visualize what you tell them—and you must make your words brief. In narration you must vivify emotional torpor; but lest in your efforts to inveigle boredom you yourself should induce it, you must have a wary eye for signals ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... breathed on my joints and eyelids, sleep hummed in my ears; it reigned in the dim cathedral. The congregation stirred and stretched; they moaned, they groaned aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you may sometimes hear a dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom. In vain the preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and addressed by name particular hearers. I was myself perhaps a more effective excitant; and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my successful struggles against sleep—and I hope they were ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be remembered as strange, if the one who had to make that journey as much as thought of it again; for perhaps to a stranger occupied with more important matters it was passed as being quite relevant to the occasion, ordinary and rather dismal, the usual boredom of a duty. Its strangeness depends, very likely, as much on an idle and squandering mind as on the ships, the River, and the gasometers. Yet suppose you first saw the River from Blackwall Stairs, in the days when the windows ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... few who had not become a military theoretician upon the outbreak of the war, but to my lay mind his plan sounded feasible. Nevertheless, I was more interested in the possible contract for food concentrates than in any strategy, no matter how brilliant. I'm afraid I showed my boredom, for the general abruptly declared it ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... inordinately fond of boats and every kind of water—river, sea, lake, or canal—he never learned to swim. Peacock also notices his habit of floating paper boats, and gives an amusing description of the boredom suffered by Hogg on occasions when Shelley would stop by the side of a pond or mere to float a mimic navy. The not altogether apocryphal story of his having once constructed a boat out of a bank-post-bill, and launched it on the lake in Kensington Gardens, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... She treasured her mother's happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient to think of men again, her ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... And then I asked her what about woman. And then she said with a woman it wasn't fear, it was just boredom. A woman is like a violinist: any fiddle, any instrument rather than empty hands and no ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... jumps that he could but lamely match. The question of his own French had never come up for them; it was the one thing she wouldn't have permitted—it belonged, for a person who had been through much, to mere boredom; but the present result was odd, fairly veiling her identity, shifting her back into a mere voluble class or race to the intense audibility of which he was by this time inured. When she spoke the charming slightly ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... was striking chords on her harp and looking about her with an expression of impatience and boredom. Suddenly Henry got up with a gesture of gloomy resolution and informed her that he was starting for the army and in a few days would ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... by her own unflagging counsel; even the judge became all but inattentive on the point, before it was finally dropped on an intimation from the jury that they had made up their minds about the chains; but no trace of boredom had crossed the keen, alert face of the unknown ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... sweet and good for words. She put the little hired girl on the front seat with the groom, and sat in the body of the waggonette to talk to Guthrie and to take care of his child. There was no awkward shyness on her part now, and no boredom on his. Little Harry fused them. She had remembered to bring fresh milk and rusks for a possibly hungry baby, and he sat on her lap as she fed him, and cooed to her when his mouth was not too full, and seemed to forget that any other foster-mother had ever existed. ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... drinking, after a time, to allay his sheer boredom. And Jud Clark drank with him. At the end of three weeks they were both drinking heavily, and were politely quarrelsome. Bassett could fill that in also. He could see the girl protesting, watching, increasingly anxious as she ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... be obliged to resort to such methods made her angry and humiliated. She was, however, rejoicing at one thing. Her grandfather had fallen asleep several pages of the paper earlier than usual, and she was to be spared from the utter boredom of wading through the leading articles which dealt with subways and Tammany and foreign politics and other matters for which she had a lofty contempt. She was never required to read the notices of new plays and operas and the doings of society, which alone ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... their backs to the wind and the disaster sweeping down upon them, their browned faces upturned to the sleek, carefully groomed man in the light-gray suit, with a flaunting, prairie sunflower ostentatiously displayed in his buttonhole and with his campaign smile upon his lips and dull boredom looking ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... sitting back in an easy chair in his quarters, glancing out of a window with a look of absolute boredom, received a ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... had the consummate tact to keep the taint of the filial from his chivalry. His attentions to Mrs. Scott and Ethel differed in degree, but not in kind, and Mrs. Scott adored him accordingly. One by one, the languid days dropped into the past. Neptune had duly escorted them over the Line, to the boredom of the first-class passengers and the strident mirth of the rest of the ship's colony. Winter was already behind them, and the late December days took on more and more of the guise of summer, as the log marked their passing to the southward. To many on board, the ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... alien pianists had reduced themselves to a Polish sculptor, an Irish novelist and a Scottish portrait-painter. By sitting next to the journalist, Eric saved himself the effort of talking and recuperated at leisure after the exhausting boredom of dinner. He had looked forward to seeing Barbara again, feeling disappointment that she was not in the big shadowy drawing-room when he arrived—(but she would come any moment)—and a little proprietory thrill of pleasure when she walked ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... love me, Sophy. I should then have passed my days in a state of pleasant bewilderment, trying to figure out how the deuce it happened. Or should I, though? H'm! I might have gotten used to being married to you, and that would have spelled boredom. The thought makes ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... rusting of mind machinery in the soldier-workman's life away from the fighting line certain definite considerations must be set. Many soldiers will form a habit of reading—in the new armies the demand for books is great; some in sheer boredom will have begun an all-round cultivation of their minds; others again will be chafing continually against this prolonged holding-up of their habitual mental traffic—and when a man chafes he does not exactly rust; so that, while ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Englishman's own hands, by some prestidigitation of genius, this never becomes boring, though it probably would have become so if either book had been finished; for which reason we may be quite certain that it was not only his death which left both in fragments. In the hands of his imitators the boredom—simple or in the form of irritation—has been almost invariable;[378] and with all his great intellectual power, his tale-telling faculty, his bonhomie, and other good qualities, Diderot has not escaped it—has, in fact, rushed upon ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Being almost incredibly beautiful, she had learned very early in life that the desired (not always the desirable) is powerful to sway men; the possessed begins to lose its sway; the habit of possession easily succumbs to boredom, and then power ceases. Even Commodus, accordingly, had never owned her in the sense that men own slaves; she had reserved to herself self-mastery, which called for cunning, courage and a certain ruthlessness, albeit ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... equally benefited only if those singers are earnestly requested to pronounce those speeches with energy, fire, and determined expression. Where no effect is made no impression can be produced, and where no impression is produced people are bored; but is it right, in order to shorten that boredom, to remove what with a proper expression would produce the necessary effect? In that case it would be better to drop the whole work, which, for want of proper expression, would be in danger of failing to produce the necessary effect. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... a better social state. If we rescue ourselves as a community from poverty and discomfort, we must take care not to fling ourselves into something far more infuriating to a normal human being—and that is boredom. The prospect of a carefully inspected sanitary life, tethered to some light, little, uninteresting daily job, six or eight hours of it, seems to me—and I am sure I write here for most normal, healthy, active people—more awful than hunger and death. It is far more ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... whom the title has descended, am perfectly contented with its fallen fortunes. I have scarcely a thought or taste in common with my aunt. In fact, I must bore her exceedingly. Yet she hides her boredom beneath a radiant countenance and leads me to understand that my society gives her inexpressible joy. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... type-writer or character-sketcher, to assert that the style and matter of most of his work is always tiresome, frequently childish, and the subject often morbid and unhealthy; and, further, that his method is tedious to the last degree of boredom; for, as a writer, if I may judge him fairly by his translators, he is didactic and prosy, and never more tedious than when his dialogue is intended to be at its very crispest. As a playwright his construction is faulty. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... danger would be to the pirates. The three watchers would be put in the bag, and the men from the sea would walk into a neat trap. This reflection seemed to take all the colour out of Heritage's prospect. Peril and heroism were not to be his lot—only boredom. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... by infinite boredom, I went into the smoking-room. He was sitting there in absolute immobility, which was really fakir-like and impressive. I began to wonder what could be the associations of that sort of man, his "milieu," his private ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... reached back with that gesture of toleration and infinite boredom common to his kind ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... present to say that, though not a novelty, it had been, and for the matter of that has been, rarely a success. It has, as was pointed out before, spoilt most classical novels, reaching its acme of boredom in the German work of Ebers and Dahn; and it has scarcely ever been very successful, even in the hands of Charles Reade, who used it "with a difference." But it can hardly be said to have done Salammbo much harm, because the "fusing" process which is above referred to, and to which the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... year of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it was possible to judge from his short notes, suffered terribly from loneliness and boredom. From his wing day and night came the sound of the piano. He rejected wine and tobacco. "Wine," he wrote, "excites desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink good wine alone," and tobacco ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... humility, in professionalism pride. And it is this pride that makes art more ugly and tiresome than any other work of man. Nothing is stranger in human nature than the tyranny of boredom it will endure in the pursuit of art; and the more bored men are, the more they are convinced of artistic salvation. Our museums are cumbered with monstrous monuments of past professionalism; our bookshelves groan with them. Always we are trying to like things because they ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Cathedine a seat, and returned himself to ask Letty whether it was not time to go. He found, however, that she had been carried off by another partner, and could only resign himself to a fresh twenty minutes of boredom. He leant, yawning, against the wall, feeling the ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and hatted alike, was slowly steaming through the green sea-meadows late on a summer afternoon. In the cars, incessant stretching of cramped legs, shifting of shoulders, striking of matches, passing of cigarettes, groans of boredom; occasionally concerted laughter about nothing. Suddenly the train stops short. Clipped heads and tanned faces pop out at every window. The boys begin to moan and shout; what is ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... passionately moving. In the mouth of the clergyman, they were false, indecent. She tried to read. But again the tedium and the sense of the falsity of the spoken word put her off. She went to stay with girl friends. At first she thought it splendid. But then the inner boredom came on, it seemed to her all nothingness. And she felt always belittled, as if never, never could she stretch her length ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... predatory and piratical invaders. A long series of warlike and adventurous peoples—Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Normans—built up England and imparted to it their spirit. The English were, it was said, "a people for whom pain and death are nothing, and who only fear hunger and boredom." But for over eight hundred years they have never been reinforced by new invaders, and the inevitable consequences have followed. There has been a gradual killing out of the warlike stocks, a process immensely accelerated during the nineteenth ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... and me, and two maiden aunts. And we should be very prim, and talk about the weather, and go in a growler for propriety's sake. I know that sort of evening. And after the maiden aunts had seen me safety home, I should simply howl from boredom. My dear boy, I'm respectable enough here. When I'm on my own, I want to go on the loose. Now, I'll tell you what I want to do if ever we are in town together. Will ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... seasons, bearing children, the children Ishmael looked for to inherit the horrid place after him.... Blanche, fond as she still was of him, literally shuddered as she saw where glamour, in company with boredom and desperation, had been about to lead her. After all, she need not despair: there were other men in the world, and she had been silly to expect to meet anyone she could marry at the theatre; it was no sign of waning charm that she had failed there. If only she could think of a good excuse, she ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... letter a lie. After long hesitations he had decided on this step, and it seemed to him clear that no one would suit him so well as Mrs. Byril. By marrying an old mistress, he would save himself from all the boredom of a honeymoon. And sitting in the drawing-room, in the various pauses between numerous licentious stories, they discussed ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... ensuing boredom; if his neighbour at table were garrulous or banale, his face at once betrayed conversational prostration; a lady who often watched him used to say that his pulse ought to be felt after the first course; ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... In order that boredom might not overtake the guests before evening came, a magnificent tea was served from four to six. During the afternoon one could visit the other hotels of the place and usually found some function in progress. We were not expected to breakfast ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... see! New faces constantly, different languages. Not a moment for boredom. Always something to do night and day—the bell ringing, the trains whistling, the omnibus coming and going and all the time the gold pieces rolling into ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... going on at almost every fashionable house in every fashionable quarter. The public restaurants were crammed with luxury-loving men and women,—men and women to whom the mere suggestion of a quiet dinner in their own homes would have acted as a menace of infinite boredom,—and these gilded and refined eating-houses were now beginning to shoot forth their bundles of well-dressed, well-fed folk into the many and various conveyances waiting to receive them. There was a good ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... crowd about the engine, and the grimy-faced engineer leaned from his cab, inspecting them impassively. His general attitude was one of boredom, tinged ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... disloyal in wishing himself in his friend's place, passed, and gave way to dreary doubt. Cuthbert knew, of course, that he himself would have prized—what to Dugald Shaw was a matter of indifference. Yes, that was it, and the worst that Dugald Shaw was suffering now was boredom at hearing ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon |
