"Humdrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not Mimile demolish a lock as easily as one rolls a cigarette? He was daring to a degree, and, as soon as his time in the army was up, he began to earn his living as an aviator, and rightly, for he had become an able airman. Nevertheless, Mimile become Emilet, had aspired to greater things: a humdrum honest livelihood was ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... to be charmed with a play, instead of being nearly set to sleep by discourses in Latin from a pulpit. There were some purple, and some gold, some robes and some wigs, a great crowd, and some stir at times, while a deal of humdrum speaking and dumb show was followed by the noisy demonstrations of the students, as they applauded or condemned the honours bestowed; but in the main I tired of the heat and the mob, and the worry of these mornings, and so, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... reality so framed, the bare and sober truth. Hence the frequency, in our new poetry, of pieces founded deliberately upon, as Mr. McDowall points out, paradox: the breaking in of some utter surprise upon a humdrum society, as in Mr. de la Mare's Three Jolly Farmers, or Mr. Abercrombie's End of the World, or Mr. ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... in the nineteenth, you know. You can't live on air or fly without wings. I shall be curious to see what approach, to the Christian ideal the condition of civilization admits of. Yet I don't know what your religious friends and the humdrum herd will think of you—mad probably, or at least weak and childish and perhaps even a hunter after easy popularity. But good-night, and God bless you in, your people's ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... that is about you; my life has been humdrum enough, we all know; but you seem marked out for exceptional fates—and ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... existence have not much prospect of anything so peaceful. And then domestic comfort is often so sure that nothing but its own virtue could have purchased such an exemption from the ills of life. The Warren had been a few months ago a pattern of humdrum peacefulness. The impatience that sometimes lit up a little fire in Mrs. Warrender's eyes was so out of character, so improbable, that any one who suspected it believed himself to have been deceived; for who could suppose ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... predicted that only when he were "laid within the church-yard cold and grey" would his lady begin to pity him, seemed to the Duke rather ridiculous; but not half so ridiculous as the Warden. This fictitious love-affair was less nugatory than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the warbler was perhaps expressing a genuine sentiment. Zuleika herself, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... death—nothing interested me—living the most commonplace, humdrum, unromantic existence imaginable. Teas and dances, dances and teas, clubs and theatres, theatres and clubs, motors and yachts, yachts and motors. It was horrible, and I can't help thinking it was all my dear old governor's fault. He had no consideration ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house—this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... settled down to the humdrum but profitable task of laying the foundations for the great metropolis of the Farther Southwest. Since then, an occasional sporadic case of triggerfingeritis has developed in El Paso, usually in an acute ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... of blessing might that be?" scouted Katrina. "When you've got to drudge as a servant, one day is as humdrum as another." ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... quieter as Isa's words droned on. It was, for all her commotion, a very humdrum thing ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... again, and absent in manner, and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... talk with us and we with them; nothing of the kind of those dim but familiar ghosts, often grotesque rather than heroic, who come to us from out of the books, the daubed portraits of times nearer our own, and sit opposite us, making us laugh, and also cry, with humdrum stories and humdrum woes so very like our own. No; such ghosts the Renaissance has not left behind it. From out of it there come to us no familiars. They are all faces—those which meet us in the pages of chronicles and in the frames of pictures: ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... an atmosphere less remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of Men and Women. The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... and Spot the dog were in the back pasture one day, where the Muley Cow had strayed. And as Johnnie paused to pick a few blackberries he thought what a humdrum place Pleasant Valley was, anyway, and how he would like to go off where there were real buffaloes, ...
— The Tale of the The Muley Cow - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... to poor Sellers to see the work on his darling enterprise stop, and the noise and bustle and confusion that had been such refreshment to his soul, sicken and die out. It was hard to come down to humdrum ordinary life again after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, shorn of its aforetime gaudy ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... 'frequently. I can't sleep on one side all night. I'll tell you, Brother Peters,' says he, 'I'm going to start a poker room. I don't seem to care for the humdrum in swindling, such as peddling egg-beaters and working off breakfast food on Barnum and Bailey for sawdust to strew in their circus rings. But the gambling business,' says he, 'from the profitable side of the table is a good compromise between swiping ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... here, and it was hours afterward when Isabelle's thought came back to these words and dwelt on them. 'The real thing!' Of course, that was what it was to be, her marriage,—the woman's symbol of the Perfect, not merely Success (though with John they could not fail of worldly success), nor humdrum content—but, as Alice said, the real thing,—a state of passionate and complete union. Something in those misty brown eyes, something in the warm, deep voice of the older woman, in the prayer-like form of the wish, sank deep ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... well that here he was more fortunate than most. A great many of his friends had to begin on small salaries in indoor positions of humdrum and mechanical duty. He had started on a congenial out-of-door occupation of great interest and picturesqueness, one suited to his abilities and promising a great future. Nevertheless, he had now been in the business five years. He was beginning to see through ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... humdrum life at the shop! And he, elegant, brilliant, coming from far cities! They together, side by side, strolling up the road towards the Moorthorne ridge! There was nothing quite like this in ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... not those who come to me grow indignant as they listen, saying: "This rascal tells us but a humdrum story, where nothing is as it should be;" for I warn all beforehand that I tell but of things that I have seen. My villains, I fear, are but poor sinners, not altogether bad; and my good men but sorry saints. My princes do not always ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... no pretensions to that kind of inspiration—that critical second sight (as the Highland Scotch call it) but are fain to judge by the mere humdrum human means of reason and experience, we felt it to be our duty to see the character entirely performed by Mr. Dwyer before we ventured to form an opinion on his acting it; and we are free to confess ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... that the complaints of his affectations in ordinary society were as much exaggerated as I am sure that the opposite complaints of the humdrum character of his letters are. Somebody talks of the "wicked charm" which a popular epithet or nickname possesses, and something of the sort seems to have hung about "The Apostle of Culture," "The Prophet of Sweetness and Light," and the rest. He only deserved his finical ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... be any other man for her but him. Her love for him is like a flame, transforming her. I could never have called forth such passion from her. I see clearly now how foolish it was in me to have hoped it. There was nothing in the humdrum, commonplace brotherly affection which she thought I gave her to arouse the romance which I know slumbers under that calm, ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... moonlight walk along the sands, and one was there, under the old tower and the woods. The sands were dangerous, people said. There were quicksands among them, and one must know the paths. Ah! well—she smiled. Humdrum trains and cabs were good enough ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... her close. The stars shone still more brightly and beckoned anew. Vagabonds, all of them! Like the gypsies of old, but with vastly more territory to roam. The humdrum routine of his old life seemed very far behind. He wondered what Courtney Davis would say if he could see him now. Wordless happiness had come to him, and he let his thoughts wander out into the limitless expanse of the heavens. Star ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... The humdrum duties and the easy pleasures of garrison life had no lasting charms for the future poet, who was as yet unconscious of his latent power, but was restlessly reaching out for a wider and deeper experience. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... a poor business thus to mix sentiment with one's humdrum daily affairs; but—well, and so it is. After mature reflection, I can think of but one extenuating plea: I was only twenty-six ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... officer present. They gave three cheers for their gallant leader, and another rouser for the service they belonged to, which made the walls of their mess room ring again, so delighted were they at the prospect of leaving their quiet, humdrum quarters for the dash and excitement ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... a second in front of an archaic Apollo of no great merit—because it reminded her of the unknown; and she wished with all her might something new and swift and rushing might come into her humdrum life. ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... adore; so men actually begin to seek out, and adore and make themselves happy and wretched about women from whom they can hope only social distinctions; and this purely aesthetic passion goes on by the side nay, rather on the top, of their humdrum, conjugal life or loosest libertinage. Petrarch's bastards were born during the reign of Madonna Laura; and that they should have been, was no more a slight or infidelity to her than to the other Madonna, the one in heaven. Laura had a right to only ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... the defects of his qualities, my dear. The same people can often rise to great heights and sink to great depths. They can do worse things—and better things—than we humdrum folk, who jog along the middle of the road. We must forgive such people for doing things we wouldn't do, and remember their power to do ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... knew the sharp discipline of waiting. He knew what it meant to be going a commonplace, humdrum, tread-mill round while the fires are burning within for something else. He knew, and forever cast a sweet soft halo over all such labor as men call drudgery, which never was such to Him because of the fine spirit breathed ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... goods and taking off hides; and though we were always in the water, the surf hardly leaving us a dry thread from morning till night, yet we were young, and the climate was good, and we thought it much better than the quiet, humdrum drag and pull on board ship. We made the acquaintance of nearly half California; for, besides carrying everybody in our boat,— men, women, and children,— all the messages, letters, and light packages went by us, and, being known by our ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... those five years of my life spent in the W.B. Lead Office, but I must not weary my readers with that which would be at best a humdrum tale. My education went on apace. In the evenings I took lessons at home, and during the day, when I was not otherwise engaged, I had always a book or a pen in my hand. How high one's aspirations soar in that season when everything seems possible to the unfledged ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... supplies the public with recreative reading. To the masses of the people—hard-worked and living humdrum lives—the novel comes as an open door to an ideal life, in the enjoyment of which one may forget, for a time, the hardships or the tedium of the real. One of the best functions of the public library is to raise this recreative reading of the community to higher and higher levels; to replace ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... leading, and invited me to remain outside. It was already dark. An early touch of frost in the November air rendered it exhilarating. I walked along the decorous, residential roads of St. John's Wood feeling less remote from my kind, more in sympathy with the humdrum dramas in progress behind the rows of lighted windows. Now and then a garden gate opened and a man in evening dress, and a woman, a vague, dainty mass of satin and frills and fur, emerged, stood for a moment in the shaft of light cast by the open hall-door beyond, which framed the white-capped and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... and Mary Rabbit, and always used to sleep side by side. But after a few weeks they must have felt tired of their humdrum life; for one bright morning they ran away. I hope they are living happily together in the fragrant woods from which they ...
— The Nursery, July 1877, XXII. No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... to me, and I was able to creep up close and kneel within two feet of the hole. The main nest was twenty feet away, and this was a special exit made for the occasion—a triumphal gateway erected far away from the humdrum leaf traffic. ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... of the time. It was not the day of electric light and central heating and the telephone; hardly of lawn tennis, certainly not of golf and hockey; while motor-cars and militant suffragettes were alike unknown. Instead of these delights the Princess, as she then was, was content with the humdrum life of a German country mansion, with rare excursions into the great world beyond the park gates, with her religious observances, her books, her needlework, her plants and flowers, and her share in the management ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... clad what that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false; his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants, heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making humdrum and workaday over to his heart's desire. The Venetian in his book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough. These grew with him, it might be said—and indeed in his lifetime was often said—into wonders without a foot upon earth. ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... in the Forno-Populo (which he did not believe), his wife was far too innocent even to suspect it. She would not know evil if she saw it, he said to himself proudly; and then there was no chance that the Contessa, who loved merriment and gaiety, could long be content with anything so humdrum as his quiet life in the country. Thus it will be seen that Sir Tom had got himself innocently enough into this imbroglio. He had meant no particular harm. He had meant to be kind to a poor woman, who after ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... No gentle dawdles through the lanes after school, with occasional excursions into hedge or spinny after wild creatures, or the chance of a nice creepy adventure in the darkness of some winter's evening. The whole business, Tom thought, was humdrum ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... for she had never written or said a word to him that might not have passed between any two college friends. Such thoughts occupied him, until finally, as often fortunately happens in our mental crises, a humdrum, domestic voice, the supper bell, called him, and leaving his garments strewn about the ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... in a clear and pellucid stream. I discover a thirst for the surprising and experimental, for situations, dilemmas, and emergencies, sustained by the most sublime recklessness as to consequences. Then I see a dread of sinking into humdrum—the impulse never to be at rest; deeper than all this, I find a secret dissatisfaction with myself, a vague longing to use the best that is in me to some true purpose; a desire to leave the tangled skein, ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... special gusto into the character of a heartless reprobate. He must have felt a certain piquancy in writing down the most atrocious sentiments in his own respectable parlour. He would show that the quiet humdrum old tradesman could be on paper as sprightly and audacious as the most profligate man about town. As quiet people are apt to do, he probably exaggerated the enormities which such men would openly avow; he fancied that ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... children are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows, Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink, When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come back again, Chee, ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... much as though it were a stout set of palings with "No Right of Way" written across them in large letters. Outside, the waves of emotion might surge in vain, while within, she and Roger would settle down to the humdrum placidity of married life. But the dull, ceaseless ache at her heart made her sometimes question whether anything in the world could keep at bay the insistent ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation. Housewives with perambulators and oilcloth shopping bags. Children on roller-skates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unboarded all summer, and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak and mess ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... called, bringing Mr. ——. He is a good sort of humdrum parson enough, and well fitted to increase the stock of manuscript sermons, of which there must be a fearful quantity already in the world. Mr. ——, however, is probably one of the best and most useful of his class, because no suspicion of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... unfortunately, as the college years fly by, into a very exaggerated sense of your own capacities. Even the good, old, white-haired Squire, for whom you once entertained so much respect, seems to your crazy, classic fancy a very humdrum sort of personage. Frank, although as noble a fellow as ever sat a horse, is yet—you cannot help thinking—very ignorant of Euripides; even the English master at Dr. Bidlow's school, you feel sure, would balk at a dozen problems ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... certain ignoramuses—that I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose obvious moral there can be no question whatever, since ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... they were out again into the gloom of wings and then on to the white, incredible humdrum of the side street, standing there beside the little door marked "Private," Bruce at her side, rather quivery at the flanges and mopping constantly at the damp ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a different ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... so in public life. It is not genius, it is not extraordinary subtlety, or acuteness of intellect, that is important. The things that are important are the rather commonplace, the rather humdrum, virtues that in their sum are designated as character. If you have in public life men of good ability, not geniuses, but men of good abilities, with character,—and, gentlemen, you must include as one of the most important elements ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... the season with them being a little later than on the stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold. Neither had the creek here any such eventful and startling career. It led, indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the roots and fallen treetops and among the loose stones. At rare intervals it beamed upon us from some still reach or dark cover, and won from us our ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... see the sheet, which you wish me to look at. Now I am so completely a gentleman, that I have sometimes a little difficulty to pass the day; but it is astonishing how idle a three weeks I have passed. If it is any comfort to you, pray delude yourself by saying that you intend "sticking to humdrum science." But I believe it just as much as if a plant were to say that, "I have been growing all my life, and, by Jove, I will stop growing." You cannot help yourself; you are not clever enough for that. You could not even remain ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Casino the Grandmother seemed to be expected, for no time was lost in procuring her former place beside the croupier. It is my opinion that though croupiers seem such ordinary, humdrum officials—men who care nothing whether the bank wins or loses—they are, in reality, anything but indifferent to the bank's losing, and are given instructions to attract players, and to keep a watch ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss Rachel about her jewel, I doubt if he spoke ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... ennui. [of journalistic articles] MEGO, my eyes glaze over. Adj. wearying &c v.; wearing; wearisome, tiresome, irksome; uninteresting, stupid, bald, devoid of interest, dry, monotonous, dull, arid, tedious, humdrum, mortal, flat; prosy, prosing; slow, soporific, somniferous. disgusting &c v.; unenjoyed^. weary, tired &c v.; drowsy &c (sleepy) 683; uninterested, flagging, used up, worn out, blase, life-weary, weary of life; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... ultimately, with the girl of his choice. There is nothing wonderful about his keeping his word. But any other youth I ever heard of would have consoled himself variously, and variedly. Almo's austere celibacy is a portent in our world and altogether marvellous. It lifts his affair with you out of the humdrum atmosphere of to-day and puts it on a level with the legendary stories of heroic times, with the life-long ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... and their deeds, and that, instead, they are depriving us of the refreshment of our forty winks, they would show a correct understanding of the situation. If they cannot be altogether silent, they might at least give their noise another pitch, and direct it into some humdrum monotone that would not jar upon our slumbers. Do their worst, however, they cannot take from us the delicious consciousness that it will be two years before another Presidential campaign. Panoplied in that reflection, we can stand a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the model couple in the "New Heloisa" is one of humdrum, conscientious respectability. It is a country life, fairly simple and without ostentation; but it is as far removed as possible from all that can be connected with the noble savage. Julie and Monsieur de Wolmar, her husband, rule ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Britain—more it would be impossible to say—and they have produced types of daring, endurance, and shrewdness like the 'Silver Kings' of Nevada which testify to the exceptional powers always developed by the Irish in exceptional circumstances. But in the humdrum business of everyday life in the United States they suffer from defects which are the outcome of their devotion to mistaken political ideals and of their subordination of industry to politics, which are not always purely American, but are often influenced by considerations of the ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... comfort from any of the usual consolations under such circumstances. I could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever, or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror, to be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less, since, although I was not exactly ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... situation. Here have I been thinking myself the only man in the place capable of appreciating its beauties properly—the only poetic and artistic temperament amongst you all—and I gradually awake to find myself but a humdrum, commonplace man of the world, who has dropped into a nest of sweet things: earth, sea, and sky combining to form pictures of beauty; picturesque rural life; an interesting and mysterious host; an idyllic ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... found liberty, and those same rakes and libertines felt highly flattered at being chosen by his highness for his companions in an enterprise which at least was something out of the beaten track of the rather humdrum amusements of the Louvre. Why the king particularly wanted to visit the fair of Neuilly on that particular day of that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. It was enough for them that the king, ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... do know, perfectly well, that Mae Madden, naughty, idle, and silly, may be, after all, not so stupid; but get me good, industrious and wise, and it will take all of my time when I'm not asleep to keep so. No, there'll be nothing to say about me any more. I'll be as humdrum as—" ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... women." Annie was continuing her lecture. "I dare say Tom Robinson will do very well—all the better, perhaps, because he has no ambition, and is content to make money in the most humdrum way as a tradesman." ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... to her again; for Di fell into literature, and Laura into love. Thus engrossed, these two forgot many duties which even blue-stockings and innamoratas are expected to perform, and slowly all the homely humdrum cares that housewives know became Nan's daily life, and she accepted it without a thought of discontent. Noiseless and cheerful as the sunshine, she went to and fro, doing the tasks that mothers do, but without a mother's sweet reward, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must have been a set of little snobs ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... think of Lily herself as of a great treasure which he had won,—as of a treasure which should, and perhaps would, compensate him for his misery. But there was the misery very plain. He must give up his clubs, and his fashion, and all that he had hitherto gained, and be content to live a plain, humdrum, domestic life, with eight hundred a year, and a small house, full of babies. It was not the kind of Elysium for which he had tutored himself. Lily was very nice, very nice indeed. She was, as he said to himself, "by odds, the nicest girl that he had ever ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... their unfavourable opinion.' 'I do not go into the dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for the disagreement that seems to subsist among them.' 'The families of the two lightkeepers here agree very ill. I have effected a reconciliation for the present.' 'Things are in a very HUMDRUM state here. There is no painting, and in and out of doors no taste or tidiness displayed. Robert's wife GREETS and M'Gregor's scolds; and Robert is so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty. I told him that if he was to mind wives' quarrels, and to take them up, the only ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has to a great extent become the pastime of King Moneybags. And there is no place for ancient crusaders like Old Man Curry, so he has taken the remnants of his stable and gone back to the farm or merged into the humdrum and neutral tinted landscape which always designates the conventional ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... how nearly the two characterisations approach one another; and yet they leave, as we shall see, a great deal of room for difference. Steadiness with honesty; the danger for a national spirit thus composed is the humdrum, the plain and ugly, the ignoble: in a word, das Gemeine, die Gemeinheit, that curse of Germany, against which Goethe was all his life fighting. The excellence of a national spirit thus composed is freedom from whim, flightiness, ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... are the persons who will not gladly escape from humdrum routine by losing themselves in an exciting tale of adventure. The thrilling exploits in real life of the engineer, the explorer, the soldier of fortune, the pioneer in any field, hold us spellbound. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... all the girls would envy me—and they just living along their humdrum, everyday existence with fathers and mothers already married and living together, and nothing exciting to look forward to. For really, you know, when you come right down to it, there aren't many girls that have got the ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... pleasing glamor; it generally deals with love or heroic adventure; and it generally locates its scenes and characters in distant times and places, where it can work unhampered by our consciousness of the humdrum actualities of our daily experience. It may always be asked whether a writer of Romance makes his world seem convincingly real as we read or whether he frankly abandons all plausibility. The presence ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... he had no sooner built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and practise ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... of the edifice that rises above ground, there appear to be two subterranean stories below the surface. From Somerset House we pursued our way through Temple Bar, but missed it, and therefore entered by the passage from what was formerly Alsatia, but which now seems to be a very respectable and humdrum part of London. We came immediately to the Temple Gardens, which we walked quite round. The grass is still green, but the trees are leafless, and had an aspect of not being very robust, even at more genial seasons of the year. There were, however, large quantities of brilliant ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... very well for you good people to sit there and lecture—or, at least, say 'things,'" "Lord" Bill went on. "A man must have excitement. Life becomes a burden to the man who lives the humdrum existence of ranch life. For the first few years it is all very well. He can find a certain excitement in learning the business. The 'round-ups' and branding and re-branding of cattle, these things are fascinating—for ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... silent, is mightier than all lightnings. The Spirit, which is the 'Spirit of love,' is therefore 'the Spirit of power.' The true type of Christian character, which the gospel has brought into being, looks modest, inconspicuous and humdrum, by the side of the more brilliant and vulgar beauties of the world's ideals. Just as the iridescent hues on a dove's neck, and the quiet blue of its plumage, look modest and Quaker-like beside gaudy parroquets ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and Mrs. Bingle stepped into a new and hitherto unsuspected world the instant they entered Pierre's. They stepped out of it at ten o'clock that night and into a very commonplace, humdrum sort of automobile and were whisked homeward by an astonished, unbelieving chauffeur. They had drunk the health of Napoleon the present, Napoleon the past, and Napoleon the future, and they had done it from cobwebby, mouldy bottles out of the uttermost depths of Pierre's cellars. They were pleasantly, ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... quiet; hundreds of thousands of people retired at a prudent hour, got up early, and went to work. In Petrograd the street-cars were running, the stores and restaurants open, theatres going, an exhibition of paintings advertised.... All the complex routine of common life-humdrum even in war-time-proceeded as usual. Nothing is so astounding as the vitality of the social organism-how it persists, feeding itself, clothing itself, amusing itself, in the face of ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... had come down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there would be no surprises in his visit. But he had found that humdrum world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become the most fatal epoch of his life. The next morning he felt so harassed with the nightmare of consequences—he dreaded so much ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... modern heroine says 'yes' to the first man who asks her to marry him in a fit of spleen, because she will be Grace Danton's step-daughter, and must retire a little into the background, and look forward to the common humdrum life ordinary mortals lead. She doesn't ask help where help alone is to be found; so in the hour of her trial there is no light for her in earth or Heaven. Oh, my child! stop and think what you are going to do before it is ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... recently acquired book knowledge. When I thought of the number of scholars who could treat this part of the question infinitely better than myself, I realized how much wiser it would be—though the task is more humdrum—to deal with the present possibilities of story-telling for our generation of parents ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... precipitately, as the desires of the untutored usually are, but uncomplexly. As she fondly contemplated her husband the next morning, she did not realize that in one swift day she had accomplished the main drama of her existence and henceforth must be content with the humdrum course of life. Archie was scarcely more ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... those celebrities whom Elsie had made the most of. And how she would play off the Count against the captain! They ought to be at daggers drawn long before the Straits of Magellan were reached. Certainly she never expected such sport on board such a humdrum ship as ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... and, once ordered there, he had so little to do and was so comparatively sure to be undisturbed that the old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent as an empty church; but this night "Number ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... felt when, four years ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... scanty,—enough anatomical reconstruction for to-day...." And now he was thinking, as he sat opposite Foster, "If I had only picked up another bone or two, I might really have put together the domestic organism. Yet why should I trouble? It would all be plain, humdrum prose, no doubt. Glamour doesn't spread indefinitely. ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... if we weren't applying a salve to somebody's sore; and I suppose that's what almost all work amounts to—salving somebody's sore, easing the wheels of life somewhere," was that gentleman's reply. "And the humdrum drudging of a schoolboy, in learning and unlearning, is but the easing the ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... very sincerely felt religious interest; and who will deny that to trace the influence of religion upon human character is one of the [57] legitimate functions of the novel? In truth, the modern "novel of character" needs some such interest, to lift it sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as men's horizons are enlarged by religion, of whatever type it may be—and we may say at once that the religious type which is dear to Mrs. Ward, though avowedly "broad," is not really the broadest. Having conceived her work thus, she has brought a rare instinct for probability ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... steady work to do with exhortations to increasing love? Not much, apparently; but may not the link be, 'Do not suppose that your Christianity is to show itself only in emotions, however sweet; the plain humdrum tasks of a working man's life are quite as noble a field as the exalted heights of brotherly love.' A loving heart is good, but a pair of diligent hands are as good. The juxtaposition of these two commands preaches a lesson which we need quite as much as the Thessalonians ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that she was doing her duty in life broadly, "in that station where Providence had called her." 'She was sure that she was a good wife, a good daughter, a good mother. And now she meant to be more than these humdrum things,—she meant to be Somebody, she ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... feels that she has only very humdrum stories to tell in return for these; but she ekes out her letters pretty well, after all, and what they lack in novelty is made up ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... gayety that had once distinguished their small household had vanished with the loss of Elsa's money. Their son, and idol, had been defrauded of a rich future for which they had toiled, and life now seemed to them but an irksome round of humdrum duties, to be gotten through with as easily as possible. Over the cabin hung an air of neglect which even Samson was swift to note, and most significant of all, Elsa's knitting had fallen to the floor and become the plaything of a kitten, which evoked no reprimand, tangle ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... tramping over the mountains with him, an eager and alert listener to all his talks about geology and clouds, and ten to one Bobbie would have made friends of every peasant they met, every fellow traveler on the road, and taught Ruskin in turn a good bit about humdrum, picturesque mankind. And he would have made him laugh! Possibly you think it incongruous, impossible, the picture of happy-go-lucky, ridiculous Bobbie, with his slang and his grin and his outlook on life, and Ruskin, the great critic, the master of style, the intellectual giant. But then you reckon ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... that she did not seem to tire of him: and he would often wonder what this lovely myth, so skilled and potent in arts wherein he was the merest bungler, could find to care for in Jurgen. For now they lived together like any other humdrum married couple, and their occasional exchange of endearments was as much a matter of course as their meals, and hardly ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... said that she could not rehearse that night, but I told her you wished it and she came like a lamb. I often wonder if I did a wise thing in introducing them to you. Your sort of culture-an'-refinement' may rather upset them when the play is over and we all settle back to the humdrum." ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... This was like a picnic in the humdrum life of the farm hand. Except when the circus came to town, or there was a Harvest Home day, poor Felix knew little beyond the eternal grind of getting up before dawn, and working until long ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... miss us terribly, dear old soul! He is very fond of having us here, and is always bemoaning our departure. I think it will make a great difference to him and to his humdrum hard-working life, as we are always cheery and have never had a difficulty or annoyance of ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... feelings he listened. He could not but acknowledge that such a life was better suited to one of Fulvia's gifts and ambitions than the humdrum existence of a Swiss town; yet his first sensation was one of obscure jealousy, of reluctance to think of her as having definitely broken with the past. He had pictured her as adrift, like himself, on a dark sea of uncertainties; and to learn ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... tears in her eyes, that she knew Rose thought her as hard as iron. "But what can I do?" she said. "I promised papa." She makes herself miserable, and it's no use. I wish the little wild thing would get herself well married. She's not meant for this humdrum place, and she may kick ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... experience. It belongs to that infancy of the world, when the happy guileless human being still holds that somewhere there is a flower to be plucked, a lamp to be rubbed, or a form of words to be spoken which will reverse the humdrum laws of Nature, call up unwilling spirits bound to incredible services, and change all this brown life of ours to scarlet and azure and mother-of-pearl. Little by little, even our children are losing this happy gift of believing the incredible, and that class of writing which ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... to enter it, an unlimited field for self-indulgence. But, Sir, as every one will acknowledge who was brought into daily contact with him in the sphere of affairs, his duty to the State always came first. In this great business community there was no better man of business, no man by whom the humdrum obligations—punctuality, method, preciseness, and economy of time and speech—were more keenly recognized or more severely practised. I speak with the privilege of close experience when I say that wherever he was, whatever may have been his ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... to what more worthy purpose could a man devote himself? When I landed here yesterday—when I walked again through these old streets—I was a being without purpose; I was like a battery that had dried up. All these petty affairs of life seemed so useless, so humdrum, so commonplace, I knew I could never settle down to them again. Then last night from some unknown source came a new idea—an inspiration—and presto! the battery is re-charged, life again has its purposes, and I am eager to be ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... out in society," she said, with sparkling eyes, "and meet lots of people, and go to balls and receptions and all those affairs every day of my life. That's what I call living,—not this stupid, humdrum school life; and I 'll have them all, too, some day, see if I don't," she ended, with a toss of her head and a little conscious laugh. Nora knows she's pretty; that's one of the ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... your late treasure, who is now merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to take ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... experience of these depot and ammunition companies provided the Marine Corps with an interesting irony. In contrast to Negroes in the other services, black marines trained for combat were never so used. Those trained for the humdrum labor tasks, however, found themselves in the thick of the fighting on Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and elsewhere, suffering combat casualties and winning combat ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... forth in their traces and followed in the snow-shoe trail. There was something imposing about it all, something that struck deep within him and roused strange thoughts. This that he saw was not the mere labour of man and beast; it was not the humdrum toil of life, not the daily slaving of living creatures for existence—for food, and drink, and a sleeping place. It had risen above that. He had seen ships and castles rise up from heaps of steel and stone; achievements of science and the handiwork of genius had ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... colonel, "you are a queen, if ever there was one. And that you should think of such a simple thing when we had all given up! They would not have touched Umballa. Kit, Kit, whatever will you do when you return to the humdrum life ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... prettiness in which she had found such refreshment; there would be here no river and no opposite shore, and no pleasant country around with grass and trees and a flower garden. There would be no garden at all, and no view, except of a very humdrum little street, built up and inhabited by mechanics and tradespeople of a humble grade. But then—no debt! And Esther remembered that in her daily prayer for daily bread she had also asked to be enabled to 'owe no man anything.' ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... bored. I was growing tired of my humdrum existence. So I'm ready to run risks.... ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, at anchor, with the ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... seconded Button. "And you owe it to the poor untraveled animals to give out some of your experiences to them, to enliven their humdrum lives and tell them about the outside world. Just see what a lot of pleasure the Dog and Cat Club give those stay-at-homes who have never been outside the suburbs of New York City—and most of them have never ventured ten blocks from where they ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... understand why the numerous body of teachers, who easily drift into mechanical methods, has a preference for formal studies. They are comparatively easy and humdrum and keep pupils busy. Real studies, if taught with any sort of fitness, require energy, interest, and versatility, besides much outside ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... TIM "(short for Timon),—" I am off you see—gone like a shot. Alfred and I intended to be married in this way almost from the first; we never meant to be spliced in the humdrum way of other people; Alfred has too much spirit for that, and so have I—Dieu merci! Do you know, Alfred, who used to call you 'the dragon,' has seen so much of you during the last few months, that he begins to feel quite friendly towards you. He hopes you won't miss him now that ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... But in so great a body of men who had lived sword in hand for years, and had fattened on the spoils of the commerce of a great nation, it was inevitable that there should be many utterly unable to return to the humdrum life of honest industry. Many drifted down to that region of romance and outlawry, dear to the heart of the romantic boy, the Spanish Main, and there, as pirates in a small way and as buccaneers, pursued the predatory life. For a time the war which sprung up between England and France seemed ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... compatriots), they can never be mistaken for mere figures of sawdust and plaster such as people extensive realms of Western fiction. It is the reality of the characters, coupled with their eccentric demeanour (the most humdrum Slav appears wildly original to the inexperienced ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... christening is shown off in a splendid robe, very much belaced and embroidered, and it is to be feared that it is a day of disturbance for him. Babies should not be too much excited; a quiet and humdrum existence, a not too showy nurse, and regular hours are conducive to a good constitution for these delicate visitors. The gay dresses and jingling ornaments of the Roman nurses are now denounced by the foreign ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... pleasure to find a plodding, humdrum-seeming man with a poet's heart in his breast; and a little of the same delighted surprise is felt by every one, I imagine, when he learns for the first time that our little brown creeper is a singer. What life could possibly ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... in the sitting-room, with its semi-official air of being used for serious work, and Hartley fulfilled his avocation by bringing Coryndon back from strange places into the heart of sane humdrum existence. Surely if some men are pillars, and others rockets, and more poets, professors and preachers, some are hand-rails, and only the man who has just been standing on a dizzy height looking sheer into ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... proposes to 'personally conduct' his army of readers on a grand tour of the world, there will be a terrible scramble for excursion tickets—that is, the opening volume of the 'Globe Trotting Series.' Of one thing the boys may be dead sure: it will be no tame, humdrum journey; for Oliver Optic does not believe that fun and excitement are injurious to boys, but, on the contrary, if of the right kind, he thinks it ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... and of some recent practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word, until it bursts the bonds of all definition. Plays have been written, and have found some acceptance, in which the endeavour of the dramatist has been to depict life, not in moments of crisis, but in its most level and humdrum phases, and to avoid any crispness of touch in the presentation of individual incidents. "Dramatic," in the eyes of writers of this school, has become a term of reproach, synonymous with "theatrical." They take their cue from Maeterlinck's famous essay ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... times it is difficult not to believe that Carlyle, notwithstanding his piety, loves it all the more on that account. It is strange that an example so salutary and stimulating to the poorest and meanest of us should be set by an unbelieving king, and that my humdrum existence should be secretly supported by "Frederick ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... fell back into being humdrum and jog-trot. Take this stanza, from his poetical flight entitled Tamerton ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... Margaret was determined that her nurselings should miss nothing that she could give them. The duty letters which she insisted on their writing, once a month, to their father told of happenings that seemed strangely remote from the humdrum life of London. "By Jove, the old lady gives those youngsters a good time!" Mark Rainham would comment, tossing them across the table to his wife. He did not guess at the dull rage that filled her as ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... cruise of the good old whaling barque CACHALOT, as far as whaling is concerned, comes to an end. For all practical purposes she becomes a humdrum merchantman in haste to reach her final port of discharge, and get rid of her cargo. No more will she loiter and pry around anything and everything, from an island to a balk of drift-wood, that comes in her way, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... and his knowledge of human nature is not worth a fig. If they had not been two prominent scoundrels, what earthly business should we have in detailing their histories? What would the public care for them? Who would meddle with dull virtue, humdrum sentiment, or stupid innocence, when vice, agreeable vice, is the only thing which the readers of romances care ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a woman who never looked beyond the range of the kitchen and larder, or thought beyond the humdrum prayers of your Manual. I wish to see my children established; I wish to see them gain station in the world; I wish to make them the first of their family; and I do assure you, Nancy, that it is not such a trifle as the difference between popery on the one hand, ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... husband to join her in her Sabbath devotions, assured that he would claim an invalid's privilege to stay at home. He had very rarely attended the parish church with his wife, affecting to despise such humdrum and conventional worship. He had just that thin smattering of modern science which enables shallow youth to make a merit of disbelief in all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of mankind as the latest development of time and matter, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... once more, the spirit of work was lacking. Theodora was domestic, and she found it good to take up her household cares again, so for a month after her return she turned a deaf ear to her publisher while she and her husband revelled in their coming back to humdrum ways much as a pair of children play at housekeeping. Then Theodora's conscience asserted itself, with the discouraging result that she became undeniably cross and, over his paper of an evening, Billy watched her in respectful silence. ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... and dignity which one always finds in living within one's income. Frugality, exactitude in business, faithfulness to all engagements, great or small, punctuality, that economy of time, are usually set down among the minor moralities of life, more humdrum than heroic; but under how many circumstances and conditions do they reveal themselves as cardinal virtues, as things on which depend the comfort and dignity of life! It seems that these things were so impressed ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... a beautiful, interesting life—if, for instance, I had been struggling for the emancipation of my country, or had been a celebrated man of science, an artist or a painter; but as it was it would mean taking her from one everyday humdrum life to another as humdrum or perhaps more so. And how long would our happiness last? What would happen to her in case I was ill, in case I died, or if we simply grew ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... come to the story of what was, perhaps, one of the strangest of all the adventures which have befallen me in the course of a life that so far can scarcely be called tame or humdrum. ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... how intense if the woman should take a little handkerchief edged with black and thrust it into her dancer's cuff with some little murmur implying that she wishes him to keep it. To whomsoever these things happen life becomes a song. A little event of this kind lifts one out of the humdrum of material existence. I suppose the cause of our extraordinary happiness is that one is again, as it were, marching in step; one has dropped into the Great Procession and is actively doing the great Work. There is no denying it, that in these moments of sex one does feel more conscious than at any ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... contribution to the building of the embankment at Rotzis, near Wusterhausen, have left behind in me no sentimental regrets for my sphere of work in those days. Renouncing the ambition for an official career, I readily complied with the wishes of my parents by taking up the humdrum management of our Pomeranian estates. I had made up my mind to live and die in the country, after attaining successes in agriculture—perhaps in war also, if war should come. So far as my country life left me any ambition at all, it was that of a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... they thought it waste of time to read, the minds of his father and mother had sunk into such a narrow sluggishness that they could interest themselves only in trivialities. Their thoughts were occupied by their neighbours and the humdrum details of the life about them. Flattering themselves on their ideals and their high principles, they vegetated in stupid sloth and in a less than animal vacuity. Every topic of conversation above the ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... as the "cradle of the Confederacy," the sudden access of population therefrom, the probable erection of furnaces, factories and storehouses, with consequent disbursement of millions—all these gave the humdrum town a new value and importance, even to its humblest citizen. Already small merchants saw their ledgers grow in size, to the tune of added cash to fall jingling into enlarged tills. In fact, the choice of the Capital had turned ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... effective method of driving good citizens "out of politics" could hardly be devised. It called to the front a large class of men of coarse moral fibre who greatly preferred the excitement of speculating in politics to earning an honest living by some ordinary humdrum business. The civil service of these states was seriously damaged in quality, politics degenerated into a wild scramble for offices, salaries were paid to men who did little or no public service in return, and thus the line which separates taxation from robbery ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... origin in a supposed debauchery; a man is preached instead of a God; an execution is an object for gratitude; the preachers daub themselves with the blood, like a troop of assassins, and pretend to admire the brilliancy it gives them; they preach a humdrum sermon on the merits of the execution; then praise Jesus Christ for being executed, and condemn the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... perfectly well, that Mae Madden, naughty, idle, and silly, may be, after all, not so stupid; but get me good, industrious and wise, and it will take all of my time when I'm not asleep to keep so. No, there'll be nothing to say about me any more. I'll be as humdrum as—" ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... them with my mallet and see the pieces fly was more like play than work. Oh, then it was April and I felt the rising tide of spring in my blood, and a bit of free activity like this under the blue sky suited my humour. A boy likes almost any work that affords him an escape from routine and humdrum and has an element of play in it. Turning the grindstone or the fanning mill or carrying together sheaves or picking up potatoes or carrying in wood were duties that were a drag upon ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... course there is something precarious in such a business as mine;—but I am endeavouring to make it less so from day to day, and hope very shortly to bring it into that humdrum groove which best befits a married man. Should I ask further assistance from you in doing this, perhaps you will not refuse it if I can succeed in making the matter clear to you. As it is I thank you sincerely for what you have done. I will ask ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... was much eager speculation among us as to the vessels which would have the good fortune to sail with him. I hoped with all my heart that the Falmouth would be one of them, for I was weary of the humdrum life of idling on shore or aimless sailing up and down the channel. The admiral's was a peaceful mission, and no fighting was expected, but I felt a great curiosity to behold new scenes. To my vast delight, when the admiral came down from London, Captain Vincent told me that the Falmouth was ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... he cannot afford, as we know, to cultivate her society, twice ruinous as it is for him. Sooner or later that woman will throw over this dear brother of ours, but not before she has spoiled him for hard work, and given him a taste for luxury and a contempt for our humdrum life. She will develop his love of enjoyment, his inclination for idleness, that debauches a poetic soul. Yes, it makes me tremble to think that this great lady may make a plaything of Lucien. If she cares for him sincerely, he will ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... hearts that are burning for each other. If Mr. Margari had respectfully solicited the hand of her lady-companion, there is no reason to suppose he would have sued in vain; but Clementina was far too romantic for anything so humdrum as that. She insisted that he should abduct her, at night too and through a window, although she had the key of every door ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai |
