"Dreariness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wine, a poison which would numb his senses, bring him forgetfulness and sleep, and no awakening from that! Was there still any kind of filth, he had not soiled himself with, a sin or foolish act he had not committed, a dreariness of the soul he had not brought upon himself? Was it still at all possible to be alive? Was it possible, to breathe in again and again, to breathe out, to feel hunger, to eat again, to sleep again, to sleep with ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... so immeasurably lonely, with that awful, irretrievable day at Dover behind her, with all its dreariness, its silent solemnity, its weird finish in the vestry, the ring upon her finger, her troth plighted to a man whom she ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... Alick had time to prepare a taunting speech which he knew would be particularly provoking to George. But George also had time to think of Alick, time to recollect what Annie had said about the utter dreariness of going through the world without God; and God, answering George's earnest prayer, caused this recollection to move his heart to the tenderest pity and concern for poor Alick. So when the mocking, provoking speech was ...
— The Old Castle and Other Stories • Anonymous
... glowing with national pride, but too polite to dispute the previous toast, said: "France,—the moon whose mild, steady, and cheering rays are the delight of all nations, consoling them in darkness, and making their dreariness beautiful." ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... stretched away the Long Island meadows, dark, soundless, apparently uninhabited. Only this spot of light broke the monotony of dreariness. A keen, chill, October wind sighed past, stirring the girl's delicate gown as its folds lay unheeded in the dust, fluttering her fur-lined cloak and shaking two or three childish curls from the bondage of her ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram
... strength which Mark wishes to make. Another thing that struck them was its unlikeness to the type of synagogue teaching to which they had been accustomed all their lives. They had got so accustomed to the droning dreariness and trivial subtleties of the rabbis, that it had never entered their heads that there could be any other way of teaching religion than boring men with interminable pedantries about trifles of ritual or outward obedience. This ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... dreariness, the heaviness of a country dinner party! It seems to last four times as long as any other—parish, horses, or crops the only topic of conversation. How can you be interested in old Jane Smith's rheumatism ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... should not see him, and should thus be less distracted and biased, but it was with a sinking heart that she heard that Lady Kenton had called to take her up in the carriage. Grateful as she was for the kindness, which saved her the dreariness of a solitary arrival, she was a strange mixture of resolution and self-distrust, of moral courage and timidity, as had been shown by her withstanding all Miss Lang's endeavours to make her improve her dress beyond what was absolutely necessary ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... for the first time the dreariness of his whole attitude—the dejection of his spare angular body and ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... Nancy's bed, that night, I had several sides of her sad story in mind, but none of them lessened the dreariness of the tragedy. Before my brief acquaintance with her, Nancy was widely known as a travelling-preacher, one who had "the power." She must have been a strangely attractive creature, in those early days, alert, intense, gifted ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... me as I looked up at the frowning battlements, the huge towers, more resembling those of a fortress than of even a prison, the gloomy gates, and the general grim aspect of the whole vast circumference, giving so emphatic a resemblance of the dreariness and the despair within. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... bank where Julien had first told her of his love and remained there, dreaming, scarcely thinking, depressed to the very soul, longing to lie down, to sleep, in order to escape the dreariness of the day. ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... there not something holy in this simplicity, which had been preserved to them by abstinence from all the joys of life? Ah! accursed be he who first had the had courage to attach ridicule to that name of "old maid," which recalls so many images of grievous deception, of dreariness, and of abandonment! Accursed be he who can find a subject for sarcasm in involuntary misfortune, and who can crown gray ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... swing their needle clusters, merrily if the breeze is mild, obstinately if the gale is rousing and seem to proclaim: "Here are we, well and secure. Ruffle and toss, and lash, O winds, the faithless waters, we shall ever cling to this hospitable footing, the only kindly soil amid this dreariness; here you once wafted our seed; here shall we live and ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... quite clear to the inquiring mind why the desperate difficulties of sainthood can be truthfully viewed in the light of a breathless adventure. Learn, then, the great secret. The love of God in the heart is the magical light which touches the dreariness and hardship of self-thwarting with a splendor of sublime Romance. You cannot have holiness without love. Holiness can be either greater nor less than the love of God. Let this love faint or grow cold, there ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... are we to live here?' asked Mrs. Hale in blank dismay. Margaret's heart echoed the dreariness of the tone in which this question was put. She could scarcely command herself enough to say, 'Oh, the fogs in London are sometimes ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... thoughts, and their plannings, out of the lives and souls of them. It will be a great bridge and great things will pass over it." She kissed the faded cheek again. She wanted to sweep Rosy away from the dreariness of "it." Lady Anstruthers looked at her with faintly smiling eyes. She did not follow all this quite readily, but she ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... little thought to the dark dreariness of their surroundings. This party was not so very far north of Cape Evans, and their winter was only about three weeks shorter if measured by the sun's absence below the horizon—the contrast between the "palace" at Cape Evans and the ice-cave ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... relishful pleasure arises. The month formed by the last fortnight of November and the first two weeks of December, is, to me, the saddest of the year. It most nearly produces the sense of desolateness and dreariness of ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... passed through the body of the timid young novice—are surely very finely painted. "I rushed to the shutter, and flung it back: there was no one in the sacristy. I looked into the garden; it was deserted, and the mid-day wind was roaming among the flowers." The dreariness is wonderfully described: only the poor pale boy looking eagerly out from the window of the sacristy, and the hot mid-day wind walking in the solitary garden. How skilfully is each of these little strokes dashed in, and how well do all together ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... understand, for fully one hundred miles above it, nothing but marsh can be seen; so much so that it was difficult along the bank of the river to find a spot dry enough to camp upon, and I was, consequently, obliged to eat and sleep in my boat. The dreariness of this voyage can hardly be realized, and it was with feelings of delight that I landed at the Mission at the Pas where the Rev. Mr. ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... arm. "I am giving you a chance," she reminded him. There was still a dreariness in her voice, but he did not detect it. He returned the pressure, half hopeful that the beginning already ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... that I was forced to hold her. She got none the better for a little drink now and then, and through some years I used to wonder, as I plodded along at the old horse's head, whether there was many carts upon the road that held so much dreariness as mine, for all my being looked up to as the King of the Cheap Jacks. So sad our lives went on till one summer evening, when, as we were coming into Exeter, out of the farther West of England, we saw a woman beating a child in a cruel manner, who ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens
... indefinite sense of uneasiness, found an older face than last evening's on the pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes or ears, and Nelly did not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on our way to our goal, the West Indies; and, as we enjoyed the warmth of the southern latitudes through which our good ship ploughed her way, Mick and I could not help contrasting our surroundings with those of the poor folk at home shivering in all the dreariness of an English mid- winter, when, if it isn't freezing or snowing or hailing, it is bound to be raining—a cold, raw, nasty sort of rain—and damp and foggy and dirty, at all events, such being ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... risen, but the air was so full of vapour that she only succeeded in melting the darkness a little. The sea rolled in front, awful in its dreariness, under just light enough to show a something unlike the land. But the rain had ceased, and the air was clearer. Robert asked a solitary man, with a telescope in his hand, whether he was looking out for the Amphitrite. The man asked him gruffly in return what he knew of her. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... man, just as they were entering a path bordered on either side by wheat-fields, whose luxuriance and early ripeness gladdened the eye. "This field appears to be better cultivated. I see that all is not dreariness and ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... dreariness of durance long and sore, Where fate's relentless hand still holds me fast, My dungeon I have made my treasure-house; its store Is love, and hope ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... the gloomy ground. And lo! 'tis Papsukul, our god of Hope,— With cheerful face comes down the fearful slope Of rugged crags, and blithely strides to where Our hero stands, amid the poisonous air, And says: "Behold, my King, that glorious Light That shines beyond! and eye no more this sight Of dreariness, that only brings despair, For phantasy of madness reigneth here!" The King in wonder carefully now eyes The messenger divine with great surprise, And says: "But why, thou god of Hope, do I Thus find thee in these realms of agony? ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... fortnight's uneventful dreariness with his platoon, Dunshie joined the machine-gunners, because he had heard rumours that these were conveyed to and from their labours in limbered waggons. But he had been misinformed. It was the guns that were carried; the gunners invariably walked, sometimes ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... girl learned soon that the favor of those set in authority over her could only be won at a cost against which her every maidenly instinct revolted. So, she went through the inferno of days and nights in a dreariness of suffering that was deadly. Naturally, the life there was altogether an evil thing. There was the material ill ever present in the round of wearisome physical toil, the coarse, distasteful food, the hard, narrow couch, the constant, gnawing irksomeness of imprisonment, away from light and air, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... to excuse her shook her guarded self-control. She suddenly put her face against his shoulder in a lonely dreariness. He made a backward gesture with his head that he might toss off his hat and lay his cheek ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... of cold dreariness marks The Temple. The exterior is beautiful and graceful in design, the interior cheery and ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... particular evening the scant bushes surrounding the house hung limp and dark in the rain, and amid the prevailing hues of purple, blue-green and blue the bit of scarlet coping running round the black house was wholly ineffective in relieving the general impression of dreariness and desolation. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... induced to risk their money upon such representations?* Oh, the dreariness, the loneliness, of that first night at anchor in the Bay of Biscay! The misgivings that filled my heart! Who was right? What should I find over there? Surely these statesmen, capitalists, journalists, legislators, should know what they ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... the place might have been called a pretty place; but under low, leaden skies, when the reaches of sodden grass-land and rain-bleached stubble had to relieve their grey dreariness only a newly ploughed brown ridge, or the long turnip fields, green still under the rain and sleet of the last November days, even the hills were not beautiful, and the place itself had a ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... too weak to enjoy anything, but lay all day long on his sofa, fidgeting his nurse extremely—while, in her intense terror lest he might die, she fidgeted him still more. At last, seeing he really was getting well, she left him to himself—which he was most glad of, in spite of his dullness and dreariness. There he lay, ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... and lightning and thunder, a superstitious religion based on dreams and saint's bones." True penitence consists in high and holy purposes, in pure and unselfish living, and not in disfigurements and in misery. Dreariness and fear are not the proper manifestations of that perfect love which ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... we have been making history rather rapidly since Diodorus' time. Of the many who have more recently attempted his task, few have improved upon his methods; and the best of these works only shows upon a larger scale the same dreariness that we ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... ascertained the condition of my life, admits of no recal. No doubt it squares with the maxims of eternal equity. That is neither to be questioned nor denied by me. It suffices that the past is exempt from mutation. The storm that tore up our happiness, and changed into dreariness and desert the blooming scene of our existence, is lulled into grim repose; but not until the victim was transfixed and mangled; till every obstacle was dissipated by its rage; till every remnant of good was wrested ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... O Benjie, and could you steel Your thoughts towards one who loved you so?— Solace she seeks in the whirling wheel, In duty and love that lighten woe; Striving with labor, not in vain, To drive away the dull day's dreariness,— Blessing the toil that blunts the pain Of a deeper ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... was possible; Rainham could see no motive for her deceiving him, and yet he believed she was lying. He merely shrugged his shoulders, with a rising lassitude. He seemed to have been infected by her own dreariness, to labour under a disability of doing or saying any more; he, too, gave it up. He wanted to get away out of the dingy room; its rickety table and chairs, its two vulgar vases on the stained mantel, its gross upholstery, seemed ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... air; but he was somewhat disconcerted to find, from the demeanour of his acquaintances there, that he positively had not been missed to any appreciable extent. He decided that the club was a dreary haunt, and could not understand why he had never before perceived its dreariness. The members seemed to be scarcely alive; and in particular they seemed to have conspired together to behave and talk as though humanity consisted of only one sex,—their own. Mr. Prohack, worried though he was by a too acute realisation of the fact that humanity did indeed consist of two sexes, ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... the busy sounds of traffic, resound in it from morn to midnight; but the streets around are mean and close; poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune are pent up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my eyes at least, to hang about the scene, and to impart to it ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... here, and here I shall remain for the autumn and winter. If I can sell my interest in the Loughlinter property I shall do so, as I am sure that neither the place nor the occupation is fit for me. Indeed I know not what place or what occupation will suit me! The dreariness of the life before me is hardly preferable to the disappointments I have already endured. There seems to be nothing left for me but to watch my father to the end. The world would say that such a ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... who is his real centre of inspiration. But first and last it remains a dull business, partly from an entire lack of humour, partly from the absence of any settled plan that might help one to endure the dreariness of the setting. Mr. CANNAN certainly knows his subject, and few novels indeed have given me, rightly or wrongly, a greater suggestion of autobiography. But for once the art of being exhaustive without being exhausting seems to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... desolate, when I could so much more pleasantly employ my reader's and my own mind's eye with that which next presented itself? I confess, so pleasant was the contrast then, that I still, in recalling that scene to memory, prepare myself, by the renewed vision of its dreariness and desolation, for the more grateful reception of an image than which earth contains none lovelier—it was a lovely girl. She fled thither for shelter: I did not see her until she was close by me; but never surely did man's eyes rest on a fairer apparition. ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... the chill and dreariness of a windy day, when it seems as if the very life of all things growing were shrunk to absolute desolation, into the welcome warmth and light and fragrance, the beauty and joy of a glass house full of ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... encourage us, in the midst of our cares and sorrows and loneliness, not indeed to suppress the natural emotion of sorrow, nor to try after a fantastic and unreal suppression of its wholesome signs, but to weep as though we wept not, because beyond the darkness and the dreariness we see the glimmering of the eternal day. He encourages expectation as the antagonist of sorrow, for the curse of sorrow is that it is ever looking backwards, and the true attitude for all men who have an immortal Christ to trust, and an immortality for themselves ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the tower. It was most pitiably forlorn of aspect, with a brick-paved floor, bare holes through the massive walls, grated with iron, instead of windows, and for furniture an old stool, which increased the dreariness of the place tenfold, by suggesting an idea of its ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by a red and purple halo reflected from their own smoke, and beyond that again by a zone of darkness which magnified the extent of the chapel, while it rendered it impossible for the eye to ascertain its limits. Some injudicious ornaments, adopted in haste for the occasion, rather added to the dreariness of the scene. Old fragments of tapestry, torn from the walls of other apartments, had been hastily and partially disposed around those of the chapel, and mingled inconsistently with scutcheons and ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... abandoned herself with a weak luxury to the respite from suffering and anxiety; she made herself the good comrade of the young man whom perhaps she even tempted to flatter her farther and farther out of the dreariness in which she had dwelt; and if any woful current of feeling swept beneath, she would not fathom it, but resolutely floated, as one may at such times, on the surface. They laughed together and jested; they talked in the gay idleness of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Trench, when I was on my way to place a cross over my son's grave in the cemetery at Tara Hill. By this time, the grass was green, the trenches were filling up and in the cloudless blue sky larks were singing. The impression of dreariness was passing away, and the wounds on the breast of ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary. Not for its dampness, though it is very damp. Nor for its desolate condition, though it is as desolate and neglected as house can be. But chiefly for the unaccountable nightmares with which its interior has been decorated (among other subjects of more delicate execution), ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... to the next. Dreary and monotonous their life has been, and it seemed at times as if it might go on so forever. But they are nearing the heavenly land; and some night, perhaps when they are not expecting it, they will leave the dreariness and desolation all behind them; they will awake in a world of beauty such as human fancy ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... actor playing to an empty house when he made his finest turns and she was not there to see them; the latter with the self-reproach of one taking enjoyment abroad while the beloved is sitting in solitude and dreariness at home. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... Even the carpets were gone, and the unstained boards in the middle seemed suggestive of peculiar dreariness. It was really very difficult to believe that these were the rooms where he and Frank had had such pleasant times—little friendly bridge-parties, and dinners, and absurd theatricals, in which Frank had sustained, with extreme rapidity, with the aid of hardly ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... its discolorations as well as its technical treatment indicate. Alongside the rest of the things in this small room it is, in spite of being carried somewhat too far, very forceful and convincing. No matter whether the man succumbed to the dreariness of work or to the malarial fever of the Pontine swamps, all that has ever been said about Millet's man and the terrible fatalism of his facial expression is found ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... they halted at a lonely log-house which served as a sort of inn or resting-place, the proprietor finding compensation for the dreariness of his situation in the large profit derived from an illegal but thriving traffic in liquor. A more unkempt, unattractive establishment could hardly be imagined, and if rumour was to be relied upon, it had good reason to be haunted by ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... lantern, that repulsive creature in spectacles—Goya spectacles; the pattern hasn't varied since his days—these ladies and their companions, especially that anonymous one in a hood, coupled with the desperate dreariness of the background, a country dry and hard as a volcanic cinder, make a formidable ensemble. Zuloaga relates that the beldames screeched and fought in his studio when he posed them. You exclaim while looking at them: "How now, you ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... in my place, staring idly before me, and reflecting that I should be so soon travelling due South over the broad, well-kept French roads, and out of the gloom and dreariness of the English winter, I suddenly became conscious of a familiar face in the crowd ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... pleasure in contemplating the phenomena of nature, a sea voyage may endure many weeks without wearying. Perhaps some may think that the first glance of ocean and of sky shew all they have to offer; nay, even that that first glance may suggest more of dreariness than sublimity; but to me, their variety appeared endless, and their beauty unfailing. The attempt to describe scenery, even where the objects are prominent and tangible, is very rarely successful; but where the effect is so subtile and so varying, it must be vain. The impression, ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... the drifted accumulations of the place a wonderful romance. But that sort of eager freshness we most of us find to be impossible as we grow older; and we are confronted with the problem of how to keep care and dreariness away, how to avoid becoming mere trudging wayfarers, dully obsessed by all we have to do and bear. Can we not find some medicine to revive the fading emotion, to renew the same sort of delight in new thoughts and problems ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... riverside and through a cleft in the rocks. The northern side of this narrow ravine, being in some measure exposed to the southern sun, is clothed with woods; the southern is a great wall of bare rock rising in terraces, or giant steps, that might well suggest the dreariness and desolation of a landscape in the moon. This barren expanse of naked rock is called the Szekler Stone, and was formerly surmounted by the castle of a Hungarian vice-voivode. Its ruins are still to be seen there. The lower ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... only in winter, when the trees exhibited their wintry dreariness, and little boys were skating on the diamond surface of that frozen water. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... toil. It struck him that he had never seen such dull, apathetic faces as these Culm people had. Such utter shiftlessness as everything about the cluster of tumble-downs betokened he had never imagined. Perhaps all this dreariness and desolation made itself more keenly felt because the boy was just from the city, which teemed with life and bustle and energy. In its poorest quarter he had never seen such a lack of tidiness as the interior of Dirk ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... to the subconscious, the sub-conscious to dawning consciousness, until at last we recognise ourselves again. And as it happens to most of us after the night's sleep, so it was with Graham at the end of his vast slumber. A dim cloud of sensation taking shape, a cloudy dreariness, and he found himself vaguely somewhere, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... June. Vanessa immediately began to send him letters which brought home to him the extent of her passion; and she hinted at jealousy in the words, "If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except 'tis what is inconsistent with my own." In his reply Swift dwelt upon the dreariness of his surroundings at Laracor, and reminded her that he had said he would endeavour to forget everything in England, and would write as seldom ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... slowly and painfully along the dreariness and the loneliness increased. The dusk fell, and they stopped, as it seemed, every other minute, and always Peter thought that it must be Salton and prepared to get out. The two boys in his carriage paid no attention to him whatever, and their voices continued incessantly, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... eye-like windows; upon crude, scenic inhospitality, the very magnitude of which overpowered me. I have said it was cold; but there hung over the estate of Eastover an iciness that brought with it a quickening, a sickening of the heart, and a dreariness that, whilst being depressing in the extreme, was, withal, sublime. Sublime and mysterious; mysterious and insoluble. A thousand fancies swarmed through my mind; yet I could grapple with none; and I was loth to acknowledge that, ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... hotels that wall in this broad avenue are mean, and cheap, and dingy, and are better left without comment. Beyond the Treasury is a fine large white barn, with wide unhandsome grounds about it. The President lives there. It is ugly enough outside, but that is nothing to what it is inside. Dreariness, flimsiness, bad taste reduced to mathematical completeness is what the inside offers to the eye, if it remains yet what it ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... can really have sounded the depths of dullness; the interminable hours between the early dinner and the welcome moment when the singing kettle and the jingling of the tea-things break up the spell of dreariness, the solemn silence pervading everything, broken only by the persistent ticking of the old clock on the stairs, Morva had noted them all rather wearily. Even the fowls in the farmyard seemed to walk about ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... people—the mad caprices and horrid deeds of the Romanoffs, who, in centuries gone by, surpassed in restless melancholy and atrocity the insane Caesars, and were more to be pitied, as well as detested, than Tiberius or Nero—the nature of the landscape, the waste of steppes, the dreariness of winter, and the loneliness of summer—the barbaric extravagance of aristocratic life—the red tape, extortion, and cruelty of officers—the sublime patience of the common people—the devotion ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... final turning-point in Oscar Wilde's career. So long as the sunny weather lasted and friends came to visit him from time to time Oscar was content to live in the Chalet Bourgeat; but when the days began to draw in and the weather became unsettled, the dreariness of a life passed in solitude, indoors, and without a library became insupportable. He was being drawn in two opposite directions. I did not know it at the time; indeed he only told me about it months later when the matter had been decided irrevocably; but this ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... the green drives of Cobham Park, the untroubled dreams of happy childhood. And though he could not know this, yet, as he sat amongst the damp straw piled up round him in the inside of the coach, he "consumed his sandwiches in solitude and dreariness" and thought life sloppier than he had expected to find it. And in David Copperfield he has thrown back into those earlier golden days the shadow of his London privations by bringing the little Copperfield, footsore and tired, toiling towards ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... setting from south to north, and striking the western coast about Cape St. Martin. It follows, therefore, that the climate and country become more genial and fertile the further they are removed from the desiccating influence emanating from the western seaboard. The dreariness of the solitudes between Little Namaqualand and Griqualand West, the latter slightly more smiling than the former, attests this fact. But the comparative inhospitality of the Boer States—comparative, that is, to what might be expected from their proximity to ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it—"Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded. . . . In the desert, spirituous ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... can see. It's the simplest thing in the world; just take for granted our right to be happy and brave. What's essentially kinder and more helpful than that, what's more beneficent? But the tradition of dreariness, of stodginess, of dull, dense, literal prose, has so sealed people's eyes that they've ended by thinking the most natural of all things the most perverse. Why so keep up the dreariness, in our poor little day? No one can tell me why, and almost every one calls me names for ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... colour-memory had followed him all through his wanderings. His parents had emigrated to Manchester when he was nine, and when he was sixteen he felt that he must escape from Manchester, from the overwhelming dreariness of the brick chimneys and their smoke cloud. He had joined a travelling circus on its way to the Continent, and he crossed with it from New Haven to Dieppe in charge of the lions. The circus crossed in a great storm; Ned was not able to get about, and the tossing of the vessel closed the ventilating ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... turned and were moving directly eastward. It was two o'clock; the men, after shivering in the rain for two days, were now suffering from the intense heat. The road ascended, with long sweeping curves, through a region of utter desolation: not a house, not a living being, the only relief to the dreariness of the waste lands an occasional little somber wood; and the oppressive silence communicated itself to the men, who toiled onward with drooping heads, bathed in perspiration. At last Saint-Pierremont appeared before them, a few empty houses ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... shuddered. An indefinable apprehension possessed me, something like the vague discomfort of my dreams; then, almost instantly, it crystallized into the blood-curdling suggestion: What if this were divine chastisement? what if all the outer and inner dreariness that had so steadily enveloped me since I had witnessed the tragedy were punishment for my disbelief? what if this water were really holy, and my sacrilege had brought some ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... outward shows, whose unexperienced shape New modes of passion to its frame may lend; Life is its state of action, and the store Of all events is aggregated there 545 That variegate the eternal universe; Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom, That leads to azure isles and beaming skies And happy regions of eternal hope. Therefore, O Spirit! fearlessly bear on: 550 Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frosts may blight the freshness ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... soot and redolent of many blended odors, but after the fusty smell of the shop it was almost health-giving. In the large public-house opposite, with its dirty windows and faded signboards, the gas was already being lit, which should change it from its daylight dreariness to a resort of ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... a gray day, chill and ominous. As the three most interested in the event came together on the road facing the point from which Hazen had decided to make his desperate plunge, the dreariness of the scene was reflected in the troubled eye of the lawyer and that of the still more profoundly affected Ransom. Only Hazen gazed unmoved. Perhaps because the spot was no new one to him, perhaps because an unsympathetic sky, a stretch of ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... regular causes, and is the result of the attractiveness of new modes of inquiry which invited application to the criticism of old truths, to be accepted or rejected after being fully tested; there is something to relieve the dreariness of the prospect. And when we look to the result, there is abundant cause for thankfulness. The agitation of free thought has produced permanent contributions to theology. Extravagant and shocking as some of the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... there was no one to talk to; she had had an easy laugh, but it was gone dumb now; she had been born for comradeship, and blithe and busy work, and all manner of joyous activities, but here were only dreariness, and leaden hours, and weary inaction, and brooding stillness, and thoughts that travel by day and night and night and day round and round in the same circle, and wear the brain and break the heart with weariness. It was death in life; ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... infinitely preferring the fire of his host to the forge of the Cyclops. The ladies also rather shrunk from encountering a second night expedition; but Mr. Southey cordially approved the suggestion, and we ushered forth, in the dreariness of midnight, to behold this real spectacle of sublimity! Our ardour indeed, was a little cooled when, by the glimmering of the stars, we perceived a dark expanse stretched by our path,—an ugly mill-pond, by the side ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... dreariness reigned triumphant at both localities. The calm tranquility that Becker's family formerly enjoyed under similar circumstances had fled. They felt that happiness was no longer to be enjoyed within the ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... whole story of Ethelyn's first love. Nothing was concealed, nothing kept back. Even the dreariness of the day when Aunt Van Buren came up from Boston and broke poor Ethie's heart, was described and dwelt upon with that particularity which shows how the lights, and shadows, and sunshine, and storms which mark certain events ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... his entrance to be emptied, as if the woman he had always known—loving, satirical, clever, kind, observant—had been poured away. The effect upon him was one of indescribable, almost of horrible, dreariness. Omar Khayyam, his mother's black pug, was not in the room as usual, stretched out before ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... with his family—Mrs. Moggs and five juveniles of that name and race—a shop of the miscellaneous order, in which was offered for sale a little, but a very little, of any thing, and every thing—one of those distressed looking shops which bring a sensation of dreariness over the mind, and which cause a sinking of the heart before you have time to ask why you are saddened—a frail and feeble barrier it seems against penury and famine, to yield at the first approach ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... must define it by its distance from Kant's; you must refute your rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you will hark back to the more humane english tradition. American students have ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... King of Egypt, and, after having fought against the Crusaders in defence of those well-known Mohammedan gods, ISIS and OSIRIS, is carried down a trap by exulting demons. An Intolerable Comic Man opens up hitherto unknown wastes of dreariness, and sings a comic song that is positively more tedious than an article from the Nation. The Demoniac Servant is continually shot up through spring traps, in order to remark, "Ha! ha!" and to immediately disappear again. The Aged Mother travels from Flanders to Egypt without changing ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... the Gare de Lyons; and by the afternoon of the next day when they got into Italy, England, Frederick, Mellersh, the vicar, the poor, Hampstead, the club, Shoolbred, everybody and everything, the whole inflamed sore dreariness, had faded to the dimness of ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Mount Auburn has verdant slopes, and deep wild dells, and lakes shaded by forest-trees of great size and beauty; and so silent is it, far removed from the din of cities, that it seems as if a single footstep would disturb the sleep of the dead. Here the neglectfulness and dreariness of the outer aspect of the grave are completely done away with, and the dead lie peacefully under ground carpeted with flowers, and shaded by trees. The simplicity of the monuments is very beautiful; that to Spurzheim has merely his name upon the tablet. Fulton, Channing, and ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... ears to music, that the light and music of the unknown shore might burst upon them as a sudden revelation. They looked not at the stars, lest perchance these should declare a glory which was reserved for other days. Dreary and harsh was the way they trod. But in its very dreariness they found safety. They sought no pleasure, they fought no battles, they wasted no time. In the pushing aside of all temptation, the scorn of all beauty and idleness, they found delight. Against the strength of granite rock they set the force of iron will. Withal, at the bottom ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... There was something almost pathetic to me in this attempt to wrest gayety and excitement out of these dull materials; to fight against the blackness of that wintry sky, and the stubborn hardness of the frozen soil, with these painted sticks of wood; to mock the dreariness of their poverty with these flaunting raiments. It did not seem like them, or rather, consistent with my idea of them. There was incongruity deeper than their bizarre externals; a half-melancholy, half-crazy absurdity in their action, the substitution of a grim spasmodic frenzy ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... visitor to Plymouth," gives us a picture better than that which hangs in the Pilgrim Hall. If the sternest foe of the Pilgrims across the water could have looked upon the exiles in their winter dreariness, hungry, wasted, dying, cowering beneath the accumulation of their woes, he might have regarded the scene as presenting but a reasonable retribution upon a stolid obstinacy in the most direful and needless self-inflictions. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... The Daily Sketch, deplores the dreariness of parish magazines and suggests, with a view to brighten their contents, that clergymen should serve an apprenticeship ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... delight, and we revel in the luxury of mere sensation. But in the depth of winter, when Nature lies despoiled of every charm, and wrapped in her shroud of sheeted snow, we turn our gratifications to moral sources. The dreariness and desolation of the landscape, the short gloomy days and darksome nights, while they circumscribe our wanderings, shut in also our feelings from rambling abroad, and make us more keenly disposed for the pleasures of the social circle. Our thoughts are more concentrated; our friendly ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... portals of the Casino two red posters blazed under the electric lamps, with a cheap provincial effect.—and the emptiness of the quays, the desert aspect of the streets, had an air of hypocritical respectability and of inexpressible dreariness. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... itself in washed-out lettering—three tied horses circled uneasily until they were standing back to the storm, their bodies hunched together with the chill of it, their tails whipping between their legs. They accentuated the blank dreariness of the empty street. The snow was whitening their rumps and clinging, in tiny drifts, upon the saddle skirts ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... to be always gay;"[2256] and he remarks that he must be so because, in France, such is the tone of society and the only mode of pleasing the ladies, the sovereigns of society and the arbiters of good taste. Add to this the absence of the causes which produce modern dreariness, and which convert the sky above our heads into one of leaden gloom. There was no laborious, forced work in those days, no furious competition, no uncertain careers, no infinite perspectives. Ranks were clearly defined, ambitions limited, there was less envy. Man was not habitually dissatisfied, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... adventurer, sunk in gloomy thoughts, absently stroked Sanxi's fair head. Both were silent, for at the bottom of their hearts each knew the other's thoughts, and, no longer able to talk familiarly, nor daring to appear estranged, they spent, when alone together, long hours of silent dreariness. ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARTIN GUERRE • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... remember the dreariness of London, as I entered it on the top of a coach, in the closing darkness of a late Autumn afternoon. The shops were not yet all lighted, and a drizzly rain was falling. But these outer influences hardly got beyond my mental skin, for I ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... but his imagination to support his theory, but it seemed singularly credible to Altsasti, to whom he rehearsed it, finding her seated on the ground before the door of her winter house in great dreariness of spirit, that he should in playing so well have won nothing and ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... nakedness of the rock both surprised and grieved him. On the reefs, in every direction, considerable quantities of sea-weed had lodged, temporarily at least; but none of it appeared to have found its way to this particular place. Nakedness and dreariness were the two words which best described the island; the only interruption to its solitude and desolation being occasioned by the birds, which now came screaming and flying above the heads of the intruders, showing both by their boldness ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... and manners, of the detectives, the "dope-fiends," the hard business men, the heroic boys and lovely girls that people most American short stories. As for variety,— the Russian does not handle numerous themes. He is obsessed with the dreariness of life, and his obsession is only occasionally lifted; he has no room to wander widely through human nature. And yet his work gives an impression of variety that the American magazine never attains. He is free to be various. When the mood of gloom ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... suppression of the desires. To expand the circle of wants is necessarily to multiply temptations and therefore to increase the number of sins.' No material and intellectual advantages, no increase of human happiness, no mitigation of the suffering or dreariness of human life can, according to this theory, be other than an evil if it adds even in the smallest degree or in the most incidental manner to the sins that are committed. 'A sovereign, when calculating the consequences of a war, should reflect that a single sin occasioned by that war, a single ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... loved him and had spoken out, he would not have married her at that time, when even he despised himself; to have done so would have been to drag her down. Still, he could not help speculating as to what she had said and thought on that morning when she awoke in the winter dreariness, and, gazing round the cabin, found that he had vanished. Had she regretted him, and had she sometimes, when Spurling had become intolerable, gone aside and wept? After three years, though he had loved her, he could only recall ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... life and soul, and now that he was away and exposed to the machinations of enemies who were hungering and thirsting after a share of his riches, a gloom settled down upon the place and enveloped it in an ill-befitting aspect of dreariness. Baits and hunting parties were alike abandoned; no one felt in the humour to participate in gaieties, of whatever kind, so long as the baron was away; and the guests who had assembled to witness the tournament had, with few exceptions, ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... she had read until her mouth watered. Yes, let this matter of a conspiracy be set at rest and Geoffrey lodged in prison, and she would go. Her glorious eyes sparkled with interest. She would have done with the platitudes and dreariness of private life. A grand career loomed up before her across the ocean, where men lavished millions at the dictate of imagination and put no limit upon enthusiasm. A fig for the dream of an absorbing love, such as for an hour ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... Chickahominy, and in a hand-to-hand fight with a retiring Federal regiment he and his detachment had acquitted themselves supremely well. As far as this warfare went, he had reason to be satisfied. But he was not so, and as he rode he thought the morning scene of a twilight dreariness. He had no enthusiasm for war. In every aspect of life, save one, that he dealt with, he carried a cool and level head, and he thought war barbarous and its waste a great tragedy. Martial music and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... beauties and subtleties of artistic expression had little charm for him, nor did he set much store by the graces. The most conspicuous illustration of the absence of all idea of art in Comenius is to be found in his school drama. The unprofitable dreariness of that production would make a reader sick were he not relieved by a feeling of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... "it's chiefly because they are terrifying to young ladies that we kill them at all. Yes, there has to be a young lady." He was aware of an accession of dreariness in the certainty that in his case there never could be a young lady. But Miss Dassonville as she began to walk toward the entrance gave ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... and stage coaches. The latter were the surer—but not the more popular. In the wintry months, when the navigation of the river was unimpeded by ice, the condition of the roads was such that, in spite of the dreariness of water transit, at that season, the packets were able to maintain a fair rivalship with the coaches, while, in the summer, the latter stood but little chance in the competition, but were almost entirely deserted. To this result the comfortable cabins of the coasters, ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... debt paid. By that time both of them would have grown old and set in their far separate ways, and even if he ever heard that she was free he would have become wiser and changed his mind. So there was no end to this thing, no awakening and disillusioning, none of the disappointment and dreariness which is likely to attend the translating of a dream into work-a-day life. For that reason it should have been possible to be content, even with the thing which stood between her and realisation—sometimes it almost was, at least she persuaded ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... happy home, and she was left the solitary and neglected inhabitant of the deserted mansion, must have pressed upon her very heart The heaviest tasks of the half year must have been pleasure and enjoyment compared with the dreariness of ...
— Honor O'callaghan • Mary Russell Mitford
... precedes a tempest. But La Tour was obstinate in his resolution; and, as it was important that the vessels should sail in company, Stanhope yielded to his solicitations, and left the fort with that dreariness of heart, which ever attends the moment of parting from ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... remain motionless as well as silent; and when she turned away from the shelf again, she remained standing at some distance from him, stretching her arms downwards and clasping her fingers tightly as she looked with a sad dreariness in her young face at the lifeless objects around her—the parchment backs, the unchanging mutilated marble, the bits of obsolete bronze ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... wait until the autumnal storms were over and winter had settled down in earnest. But, impatient as they were, time no longer hung heavily on their hands, nor did they now regard their place of abode as a prison. Its solitude and dreariness had fled before the advent of half a hundred Eskimo—short, squarely built men, moon-faced women, and roly-poly children, looking like animated balls of fur, all of whom had been brought from the mission to form a settlement on the beach. It was easier to bring them ...
— Under the Great Bear • Kirk Munroe
... problems, and the more incomplete that anything appeared, the more certain was Miss Merry of ultimate perfection. There did not seem any room for humanity, with its varying moods, in her outlook; and yet Howard had the grace to be ashamed of his own sullen dreariness, which certainly did not appear to lend any dignity to life. But he had not the heart to spoil the little lady's pleasure, and engaged in small talk upon moderately abstract topics with courteous industry. "Of course," said his companion ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... returned to Laura with great force as the door of the house on McVane Street was opened to her, and she found herself in a chilly hall, darkly papered and darkly and shabbily carpeted; and when she followed Esther up the stairs,—for it was Esther who had answered her ring,—and noted the general dreariness of the whole, she thought pityingly, "Poor Esther, to be obliged to live ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... land itself could be distinguished from the surrounding ocean, and we discerned hills, shrubberies, and gardens in the vicinity of the town, the appearance of which is not calculated to delight the traveller, for a large desert region of sand girdles both city and gardens, giving an air of dreariness to the ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... Brookes!" said Arctura with a smile. "If it were not for you it would be dour dour.—You do not know, Mr. Grant—mistress Brookes herself does not know how much I owe her! I should have gone out of my mind for very dreariness a hundred times but ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... after a fall of snow, light then, but increasing in depth as they advanced up the country. They were finally obliged to quit the carriage and proceed on horseback. They arrived late at night, the fires were all out, and the servants had retired to their own houses for the night. The horrible dreariness of such a house, at the end of such a journey, I have ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... spoken Steve recognized the slip. Watching Garry's eyes widen he knew that Garry had caught it also. For a moment a torrent of words trembled on the latter's lips. And then he swallowed and nodded shortly. The vague dreariness of his acceptance was fully as electrical as the threatened outburst might ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... then? An' what aboot yersel'?" The keen grey eye searched his face. Maitland was immediately conscious of a vast dreariness in his life. He sat silent ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... brought around by the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... could anyhow take a bit of the Arctic world and float it down into the tropics, the ice would all melt, and the white dreariness would disappear, and a new splendour of colour and of light would clothe the ground, and an unwonted vegetation would spring up where barrenness had been. And if you and I will only float our lives southward ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren |
