"Loveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Angelica's thoughts ran on. "Hollow, shallow, inconsistent—loveless. Catholicism equals a modern refinement of pagan principles with all the old deities on their best behaviour thrown in; while Protestantism is an ecclesiastical system ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... that Henry comes not?—fails Just this first night out of so many nights? Loving is done with. Were he sitting now, As so few hours since, on that seat, we'd love No more—contrive no thousand happy ways To hide love from the loveless, any more. I think I might have urged some little point In my defence, to Thorold; he was breathless For the least hint of a defence: but no, The first shame over, all that would might fall. No Henry! Yet I merely ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... feel glad to know this, yet she was not sorry. Somehow it soothed her to know that she was not a forsaken, loveless maiden. It was something to possess the love of so good a man, even if she ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... life are more powerful than even youthful cynicism and youthful heart-break. Prior to devoting herself to a loveless life and the commonplaces of the stoic's tub, Miss Hugonin was compelled by the barest decency to ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... bad—perhaps worse!" cried Joyce, thinking of the possibility of a loveless reunion with Ray, if she stayed away too long! In that case she would have no compensation for her ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... thousand others in Switzerland and America—they can nevermore shake off the horrible dead ordinariness of that life among machines. Future generations will hardly recognise the Italian race from our descriptions. A new type is being formed, cold and loveless, with all the divinity ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... fear the wild Love, but heartily they cherish, and fleetly follow him. Yea, and if any man sing that hath a loveless heart, him do they flee, and do not choose to teach him. But if the mind of any be swayed by Love, and sweetly he sings, to him the Muses all run eagerly. A witness hereto am I, that this saying is wholly true, for if I sing of any other, mortal or immortal, ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... not my earliest vow; Though few the years I yet have told, Canst thou believe I've lived till now, With loveless heart or ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... existence, he had said, must be sacrificed, and doomed to hopeless disappointment, if I persisted in my refusal. I had persisted, and Alice was sacrificed, though to what I knew not; but to some mysterious necessity—to some secret obligation. A loveless marriage—a lonely passage through life—and God only knew what secret trials—what withering of the heart—what solitude of the soul—what measure of that hope deferred, which makes the heart sick—of that craving void which nothing fills, ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... sat in a garret in Fifty-four, To welcome Fifty-five. 'God knows,' said he, 'if another year Will find this man alive. I was born for love, I live in song, Yet loveless and songless I'm passing along, And the world?—Hurrah! Great ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... saw her wondrous loveliness, One moment to great Nature's sacred power He bent and was no longer passionless; But when he bade her to his secret bower Be borne a loveless victim, and she tore Her locks in agony, and her words of flame And mightier looks availed not, then he bore Again his load of slavery, and became A king, a heartless beast, a pageant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... compulsory isolation utterly foreign to her temperament, debarred the fulfilment of her womanhood which her spontaneous, impetuous nature craved, had drooped and pined, gradually losing both her buoyant spirit and her health in the loveless atmosphere to which her husband had ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... strangers to Alaire; they were old and persistent enemies; but of late the prospect of a loveless, childless future was growing more and more unbearable. Even her day dreams failed to give their customary relief; those imaginary figures with whom she took counsel were ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... thy wise laws have here, among savages, a less brutal application. For one who dies loveless (and as the Sakais are not given to strong passions, and are chaste by nature, this is not a very great sacrifice) many are saved from unhappiness and a whole race ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... of the lonely woman's loveless heart, Queen Catherine read in my face what a poor trader might not speak. She reached her hand to me, and when I would have saluted it like any dutiful subject, she took my hand in hers and ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... of purpose, and yet bloodless. Lustful of purpose, and yet loveless. In his prisons many wait for death, but none perish; for the King has sworn that none shall die before the fool Diogenes, and we cannot find the fool. The loveliest women of Sicily have been torn from their homes to his palace, but they have not seen the King, for he will love no woman until ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... excuse than the son's sin against him. The worst sinner in the story is not the son who went wrong, but the son who had never done anything but right, yet had done it in such a way that it had begotten in him a vile, censorious, loveless temper. No one can be just who does not love; and so, once more removing the story into that unseen world which Christ called in to redress the balance of this visible world, we sinful men and women build our hopes upon the great saying that God's forgiveness is God's justice: ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... her each one of the suitors, Indumati bows low in loveless salutation, and passes on. How beautiful is this humble courtesy! They are all princes. They are all her seniors. For she is a mere girl. Had she not atoned for the inevitable rudeness of her rejection by the grace of her humility, the scene ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... did not indulge in the fierce ceremonies. His own igloo built, day after day, night after night, he sat alone. His heart ached with the unrequited and eternal desire of all the loveless and lonely things of the world. Outside, the moon increased in fulness and soared in a low circle about the sky. The dogs crouched low ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... He again took her hand, and this time pressed a kiss upon her slim fingers. And this time she did not withdraw them. Indeed, it seemed to her, in the quick recurrence of her previous sympathy, as if a hand had been put into her loveless past, grasping and seeking hers in its loneliness. None of her school friends had ever appealed to her like this simple, weak, and loving young man. Perhaps it was because they were of her own sex, and ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... say what turn the rising tide of my impressions and opinions took about this time. To one who had passed from the cheerless, loveless guardianship of a worldly step-mother, into the tender hands of patient and devoted sisters, to become, instead of a wandering, uncared for waif, the object of the truest and holiest solicitude that ever animated Christian hearts, this hollow mockery of fashionable life was nothing ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the railroad station, and she was trying to persuade him that there would be months and years in which to make up for the loveless blank, before sane speech found its opportunity. And even then ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... her believe that Tristan has shown his appreciation by wooing her for the king rather than for himself, and when Ysolde murmurs against a loveless marriage, she shows her the magic potion intrusted to her care, which will insure her becoming ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... sighed softly and made no reply. People said that she had had her own romance in her youth and that her mother had sternly repressed it. I had heard that her marriage with Mr. DeLisle was loveless on her part and proved very unhappy. But he had been dead many years, and Aunt Winnifred ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of the report, on which his heart was set, the will to live deserted Dudley Norton. To drop in harness was, as he had said to Quita, a kinder fate than the dismal disintegration of a loveless old age; and the loosening of his grip on life brought reaction sharp and sudden, from which ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... she started up. I saw in her eyes the light of old battles. "Oh, it was a horror!" she cried, beginning to pace the floor. "It seemed to me that I was living the agony of all the loveless marriages of the world. I felt myself pursued, not merely by the importunate desires of one man—I suffered with all the millions of women who give themselves night after night without love! He came to seem like some monster to me; I could not meet him unexpectedly without starting. ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... friendly way with this class and even added one of them to his traveling companions. The parables of the lost coin, lost sheep, and prodigal son were spoken in reply to the slur, "This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them" (Luke 15). The elder brother of the prodigal pictures this loveless and censorious religion. ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... red fires of the artist-flesh to burn within him, while he bemoaned the fact that he had never yet found a woman worthy of his devotion. Loudly did he bewail his over-fastidiousness; in which, nevertheless, he secretly glorified. But now for so long had he mourned his loveless estate, that, since of all the subjects of his brush woman was most congenial to him, he had gradually come to lay every fault of his work, crudeness of coloring, hardness of line, harshness of texture, finally, his very conventionality of conception, to the door of his ignorance of ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... forgive you!" said Patsy, impulsively. "I forgive you all, Aunt Jane; for through your own selfishness you cut yourself off from all your family—from all who might have loved you—and you have lived all these years a solitary and loveless life. There'll be no grudge of mine to follow you to the grave, Aunt Jane. But," her voice hardening, "I'll never touch a penny of the money that was denied my poor dead mother. Thank God the old Dad and I are independent, and can earn our ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... had been otherwise, and you had succeeded in your designs. Would you have been any happier? Would you not have been haunted with the thought that you had ruined her life, besides condemning her to the hell of a loveless marriage?" ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... to modern institutions in general and to marriage in particular, gravely defending the "marriage of convenience." And his amazement is not diminished by the sense that the author of this plea for the loveless marriage, which poets have at all times scorned and derided, was himself beyond question happily, married. The truth is that there are two men in Ibsen—an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... world's delight; Keep the waters in thy sight; Love hath made me strong to go, For thy sake, to realms below, Where the water's shine and hum Through the darkness never come Let, I pray, one thought of me Spring, a little well, in thee; Lest thy loveless soul be found Like ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... their pride or because they dare not refuse, Iseult's parents accept in their daughter's name and prepare everything for her speedy departure. The queen, wishing to save her daughter from the curse of a loveless marriage, next brews a love-potion which she bids Brengwain—her daughter's maid and companion—administer to King Mark and Iseult on ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... have not done," said I. "Would God I had! All this my dear, unfortunate patron has endured without help or countenance. Your own best word, my lord, was only gratitude. O, but he was your son too! He had no other father. He was hated in the country, God knows how unjustly. He had a loveless marriage. He stood on all hands without affection or support—dear, generous, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... full of heaviness and deeply disquieted; desiring I knew well what—some quickening of emotion, some hopeful impulse—but utterly unable to attain it. We had a very sad talk. I tried to make it clear to her how desolate I felt, and to win some kind of forgiveness for my sterile and loveless mood. She tried to comfort me; she said that it was only like passing through a tunnel; she made it clear to me, by some unspoken communication, that I was dearer than ever to her in these days of sorrow; but there was a shadow in her mind, the shadow that fell from the loneliness in ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the deadly sin—the treachery, the perjury, the sacrilege; oh! and the dreadful degradation of such a loveless marriage?" ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... reared in a hardy school; he had been trained to be indifferent to pain. It may well be that his callousness in speaking of Tudor cruelties is to be traced to the influences that surrounded his loveless childhood ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... a loveless waste, Starred by no holiday. And she had wed for roof, and bread; She gave her work in pay. (Oh! the moon-memories, ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... as she whirled. "SAM!" she shrieked, and hurled herself at him with all the pent-up ardor and longing of two hundred thirty-four meticulously counted, husbandless, loveless days. ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... her long musings. If he had been rather older, he would have read happy memories blended with thoughts of repentance, the whole story of a woman's life in that sublime face—the careless childhood, the loveless marriage, a terrible passion, flowers springing up in storm and struck down by the thunderbolt into an abyss from which there is ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... kissed her amorously, and gave her a look that would have overcome any scruples. The Regent, by means of time, which respects not queens, was, as everyone knows, in her middle age. In this critical and autumnal season, women formally virtuous and loveless desire now here, now there, to enjoy, unknown to the world, certain hours of love, in order that they may not arrive in the other world with hands and heart alike empty, through having left the fruit ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides, Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations, the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte-d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her outcast man, madame in rue Git-le-Coeur, canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing's. Spurned and undespairing. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... went. Summer by summer my father brought her to us. Always memory was kindled afresh, always sorrow kept smouldering. Once she came; I lay here; she has not left me since. He,—he also comes; he has soothed pain with that loveless eye, carried me in untender arms, watched calmly beside my delirious nights. He who loved beauty has learned disgust. Why should I care? I, from the slave of bald form, enlarged him to the master of gorgeous color; his blaze is my ashes. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... diffused prejudice regarding the personal character of Goethe refuses to credit him with any moral worth accordant with his bodily and mental gifts. It figures him a libertine,—heartless, loveless, bad. I do not envy the mental condition of those who can rest in the belief that a really great poet can be a bad man. Be assured that the fruits of genius have never grown, and will never grow, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... and had always been scared and modest with those who had pursued her with their overtures. Her absolute chastity, her ardent need of purity, her disgust with things unclean and ignoble loveless sensuality, had been with her always from her childhood on, as a result of the despair and nausea of the sad sights which she saw about her on all sides at home:—and they were with her still.... Ah! unhappy creature! She had borne much punishment!... ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... not withstand this. He crushed her to him, and lifted her arms round his neck, and fell to kissing her with all the starved hunger of his lonely loveless years on the ranges. She was not proof against this. It lifted her out of her weakness, of her abasement to a response that swept away all fears, doubts, troubles. For the moment, ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... or if she had thought that he did not, she would have had the pride to tear her heart clean from love's terrible hands, whole or broken, as might be, and to toss it, with the dead dull weeks into old time's sack of irrevocably lost and useless things, and so to live her life out, loveless, in the still haven of Gianluca's friendship. But, having his love, she had not such pride; and the loyalty she truly had was matched alone against all human nature since ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... was not aware that she was an object of congratulation. It all seemed very stupid and uninteresting. Of real life she knew nothing and of the ordinary ties and attachments of family life less than nothing. Aubrey's cold, loveless training had debarred her from all affection; she had grown up oblivious of it. Love did not exist for her; from even the thought of passion she shrank instinctively with the same fastidiousness as she did from actual ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... proper environment, but it deserves consideration by itself. There is more danger to the race from neglect than from race suicide. It is better that a child should not be born at all, than that he should be condemned to the hard knocks of a loveless home or a callous neighborhood. There is first the case of the child born out of wedlock, often a foundling with parentage unacknowledged. Then there is the child who is legitimately born as far as the law is concerned, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... injury came to the Malplaquet, while under my charge, that I should be dismissed. She was my last chance as she was your own. But what to me were risks? I had lost my love, and my country had dishonoured herself in my eyes. I was nameless, loveless, countryless. All had gone, and ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... thought sermons to be. The young man talked of life here, not hereafter; he showed how a man may live in this world and yet live a lost life; have gold and lands, and yet lose all love and hope and peace and manhood. He pictured the man who gains wealth and grows hard and loveless, and Job thought of Andy Malden; he told of him who plunges into dissipation and drink, and lingers a wreck in the streets, and Job knew he meant Yankee Sam. Aye, he pictured a young life that grasps all the world and forgets right and God and mother's Bible and ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... Pisias makes us to side with Daphnaeus by his extravagant language, charging marriage with being a loveless intercourse, and one that has no participation in divine friendship, although we can see that it is an intercourse, if erotic persuasion and favour fail, that cannot be restrained by shame and fear ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... rebellious?" Cortlandt inquired. "If I were you, then, I wouldn't force her. A loveless marriage is a ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... were foes, while Mary lived, are fled; One laurel-crowned abides in heaven, and one Beneath the earth has fared, a fallen sun, A light of love among the loveless dead. The first is Chastity, that vanquished The archer Love, that held joint empery With the sweet beauty that made war on me, When laughter of lips ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... always resented that," he broke in. "You've hugged that ghost of a loveless marriage to your bosom and sighed for the real romance you'd missed. Well, maybe you did. But you haven't found it yet. I'm very sure of that, although I doubt ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... all. This is a picture which in reality is being reproduced to-day. Amid the shadows and mysteries of suffering and pain the Saviour is standing; about him are gathered those whom sin has stricken with its disease, the sad, the loveless, the lonely, the tempted, the hopeless, the lost. His touch "has still its ancient power." In his mercy he is healing them all, and in ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... time, he had gone out into the garden where his little cousin was tending some of his favourite flowers, and while standing near and watching her he had amused himself with comparing fair youth, delicate and attractive, with shrivelled eld, livid and loveless, and in jestingly repeating to a smiling girl the vinegar discourse of a cankered old maid. Once on such an occasion Caroline had said to him, looking up from the luxuriant creeper she was binding to its frame, "Ah! ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... strange how every one prospers except poor, baffled, loveless me, who have the greatest gift of all. I wonder if it is really Nature's law that the very beautiful must suffer; if this is her way of equalizing the lot of the poor and plain and lowly; her law of compensation to make the splendid ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... however, which, clearly, this report of it has not explained, is that spirit of energetic discontent with her past in which she had entered on her musings. Why such soreness of spirit? Her childhood had been pinched and loveless; but, after all, it could well bear comparison with that of many another child of impoverished parents. There had been compensations all through—and were not the great passion of her Solesby days, together with the interest and novelty of her London ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... world, as he knew it, had held only love and beauty—sorrow, as he had seen it, being but a solemn and poetic form of beauty. The change in such a world made by the discovery that his being an adopted son set him apart in a class different from other boys—a class unlovely and loveless—had been great, had stolen much of the joy from living; but he was very young then, and the joy of mere living and breathing was strong in his blood, and he had gradually become accustomed—hardened, if you will—to the idea ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... negation of bliss, the recoil of self to devour itself, and forever. The consciousness of being was intense, but in all the universe was there nothing to enter that being, and make it other than an absolute loneliness. It was, and forever, a loveless, careless, hopeless monotony of self-knowing—a hell with but one demon, and no fire to make it cry: my self was the hell, my known self the demon of it—a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and empty, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench, who decided that they must work for whatever their masters chose to pay them. The parson, who had at first promised ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... force there is in a storm of opinion! The fiercest gale that ever blew down strong trees and made havoc of men's dwellings is a mere whisper compared with the fury of human minds set to destroy one heaven-aspiring soul! Think of the petty grudge borne by the loveless against Love!—the spite of the restless and unhappy against those who have won peace! All this you will have to bear,—for the world is envious—and even a friend breaks down in the strength of friendship when thwarted or rendered jealous by a greater and more resistless power!" ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... fear can bring; Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord, the King, Her soul aflame with passionate ecstasy. O, hair of gold! O, crimson lips! O, face Made for the luring and the love of man! With thee I do forget the toil and stress, The loveless road that knows no resting place, Time's straitened pulse, the soul's dread weariness, My freedom, and ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... odd effect on the loveless Ferris. It was the first voluntary mark of affection he had encountered for longer than he liked to remember. It set ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... initiated a dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be without her ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... forgiven and purged away, and if we are ever to know the depth of our own evil, we must measure it by His wonderful tenderness. We must set our 'sins in the light of His countenance,' and contrast that supreme sacrifice with our own selfish loveless lives, that the contrast may subdue us to penitence ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... down to the end of her loveless life, and saw the neighbors coming virtuously to perform the last rites, and wondered why it all had to be. She was unaware of all her years of sacrifice, glorious patience, loving toil. Her life seemed to have been so without point, so useless heretofore; and all that could yet be, ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... of his hard renown, Year after year he shambled through the town, — A loveless exile moving with a staff; And oftentimes there crept into his ears A sound of alien pity, touched with tears, — And then (and only then) did ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... you, as it will come,—for no woman with your eyes and your mouth ever yet lived a loveless life!—never forget that it is the biggest thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift. Don't let any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence you, nor the tittle-tattle of ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... breast, he stared blankly over the beautiful bowed head. It was true, then. She loved him. Without meaning it he had won her heart. He whose earnest wish it had been to save her from pain, to console her, to brighten her lonely life, had brought this fresh sorrow on her. To the misery of a loveless marriage he had added a heavier cross, an unhappy, a misplaced affection. No exultant vanity within him rejoiced at the knowledge that, unsought, she had learned to care for him. Only regret, pity for her, stirred in him. ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them—like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols. Gwendolen had that kind of window before her, affecting the distant equally with the near. Some unhappy wives are soothed by ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... and heroine of the Fronde. Her lovely blue eyes, with their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings," turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman and priest. We trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth, her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for La Rochefoucauld, the final shattering of all her illusions; and when at last, tired of the world, she bows her beautiful head in penitent prayer, we too love and forgive her, as others ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... bravely moves through life, Ignoring her pathetic fall;— A loveless, broken-hearted wife; Alas, the pity of ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us—else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man's love is like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman's. Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. You made your false idol of me, ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... Hades untimely, in her seventh year, before her many playmates, poor thing, pining for her baby brother, who at twenty months old tasted of loveless Death. Alas, ill-fated Peristeris, how near at hand God has set ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... reckless, passionate, uncontrollable, unthinking fool without method and moderation, that's what I am—a creature without any sense of right and honour, distrustful, hotheaded, loveless, graceless, crabbed and born crabbed! Yes, yes, I'm everything that I wish some one else was! Is this credible? There's not a viler man alive, a man more unworthy of heaven's kindness, of having a mortal soul love him or come ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... will feel it then. The fire of His love will kindle a fire of loving self-reproach. The weight of a heavy shame to think of the past, and to know now of His beauty, and His love, and His care, care for so careless a soul, love for a soul so loveless,—this will sting with an extreme severity the soul humbled before Him. And here we should do well to remember that, as the characters of each differ almost infinitely, whereby there are innumerable shades and degrees of every conceivable distinction of ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... a little curiously, and then she realised that the girl had lived a loveless life, and that the sudden change to the atmosphere of love and friendship had well-nigh ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... never blacked, of course, but no stockings. They think it quite effeminate to sleep under a roof, except during the severest months of the year. There is a married daughter across the river, just the same hard, loveless, moral, hard-working being as her mother. Each morning, soon after seven, when I have swept the cabin, the family come in for "worship." Chalmers "wales" a psalm, in every sense of the word wail, to the most doleful of dismal tunes; they read a chapter round, ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... Shines in exposing knaves, and painting fools, Yet is, whate'er she hates and ridicules. No thought advances, but her eddy brain Whisks it about, and down it goes again. Full sixty years the world has been her trade, The wisest fool much time has ever made From loveless youth to unrespected age, No passion gratified except her rage. So much the fury still outran the wit, The pleasure missed her, and the scandal hit. Who breaks with her, provokes revenge from hell, But he's a bolder man who dares be well. Her every turn with violence ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... to the woods repentant, back to the mill or the mine, I, the worker of workers, everything in my line. Everything hard but headwork (I'd no more brains than a kid), A brute with brute strength to labour, doing as I was bid; Living in camps with men-folk, a lonely and loveless life; Never knew kiss of sweetheart, never caress of wife. A brute with brute strength to labour, and they were so far above— Yet I'd gladly have gone to the gallows for one little look of Love. I with the strength ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... by his side, even as I stand by yours to-day, and looked once upon his face,—the face of your brother and of the father whom, because of your guilt, I have never seen or known, of whom I have not even a memory! Living, I could never have forgiven you; but here, to-day, in pity for your loveless life and out of the great love I bear that father in his far-away ocean grave,—in his name and in my own,—I forgive you, ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... short; because we must part at last; because yon moon shines on when the nightingale sings to it no more! A little while, and thine eyes will grow dim, and thy beauty haggard, and these locks that I toy with now will be grey and loveless." ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... separate. Soon, all too soon, Waned the white splendour of our honeymoon. We saw it fading; but we did not know How bleak the path would be when once its glow Was wholly gone. And yet we two were forced to follow on - Leagues, leagues apart while ever side by side. Darker and darker grew the loveless weather, Darker the way, Until we could not stay Longer together. Now that all anger from our hearts has died, And love has flown far from its ruined nest, To find sweet shelter in another breast, Let us talk calmly ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Martha Loomis talked much slyly to mothers of young men, and sometimes with bold insinuations to the young men themselves, of the sad lot of poor young Evelina, condemned to a solitary and loveless life, and of her sweetness and beauty and desirability in herself, although she could not bring the old Squire's money to her husband. And once, but no more than that, she touched lightly upon the subject to the young minister, Thomas Merriam, ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... could be settled by such arrangements. It's sane, I know, it's comfortable and kindly. But I thought—Oh! I thought of different things, quite different things from all this. I thought of you who are so beautiful caught in a loveless passionless world. I thought of the things there might be for you, the beautiful and wonderful things of which you are deprived.... Never mind what I thought! Never mind! You've made your choice. But I thought that you didn't love, that ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... methods of Cupid, he had sufficient sense not to examine too minutely into the reasons for this sudden passion. He was in love, and admitting as much to himself, there was an end of all argument. The long lane of his youthful and loveless life had turned in another direction at the signpost of a woman's face, and down the new vista the lover saw flowering meadows, silver streams, bowers of roses, and all the landscape of Arcadia. He was a piping swain and Diana a complaisant ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... and pride. And curiously enough, his last words caused a look of jealousy to pass across the face of the Captain. This look, unnoticed by the Count, and speedily repressed, came to me as a revelation. It seemed to betray a bitter envy of the Count's mere loveless and unloved right of possession; and it bespoke the resolve that, if the Captain might not have her smiles, not even her husband might be content in his rights. Such men will give a woman to death rather than to any other man. As in a flash, then, I saw his ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... here I nothing say - Such loveless kindnesses there are In that grimacing, common way, That old, unhonoured social war. Love but my dog and love my love, Adore with me a common star - I value not the rest above The ashes ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her in, darkening the windows and locking the door. On the whole, it was not so bad as he expected; at least, there was less violence and more despair. She covered her face with her hands, and writhed in anguish, when she said that she had utterly degraded herself by this loveless marriage. She scarcely mentioned her husband. She made no complaint of him, and even spoke of him as generous. It seemed as if this made it worse, and as if she would be happier if she could expend herself in hating him. She ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... cried out, "Sweetheart, sweetheart!" Sang his song for three months running, For the young and loveless maiden, Resting now ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... charm Nor spake—save one sad thing—when wofully Yasodhara sank to his feet and wept, Sighing, "Hath not my Lord comfort in me?" "Ah, Sweet!" he said, "such comfort that my soul Aches, thinking it must end, for it will end, And we shall both grow old, Yasodhara! Loveless, unlovely, weak, and old, and bowed. Nay, though we locked up love and life with lips So close that night and day our breaths grew one Time would thrust in between to filch away My passion and thy grace, as black Night steals The rose-gleams from you peak, ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... she turned her face toward me; her sorrowful eyes looked as if she could never again know sleep or forgetfulness. "I am a coward," she said, "yet I thought that cowardice and my desire for life had both died together. I did not draw back from the knives of the Indians, but now I am afraid of a loveless marriage. We are young. We may live many years. Oh, monsieur, I have not ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... through the maiden's mind. Agnes, the gentle, sacrificing, burrowing like some frantic animal through the ruins of Lisbon, saving her lover, Franklin, by teeth and bleeding hands. Dora, the patient, serving a loveless existence, saving her rival from starvation and destitution. The stern, dark, exiled Florentine poet, with that one silver ray ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... idea of marrying without love. Once she had actually done this thing. Only her own heart knew what had been the consequences to her. But of one thing she had often felt glad. This was that she had not entered into a loveless marriage with a man who had loved her as she had believed Horace did at the time he had so ardently wooed her. From such a wrong as that might she ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... blind, and idiots are found among savages: they are destroyed or left to perish. Sutherland, in studying the custom of killing the aged and diseased, or leaving them to die of exposure, found express testimony to the prevalence of this loveless habit in twenty-eight different races of savages, and found it denied of only one. Lewis and Clarke give a list of Indian tribes by whom the aged were abandoned to starvation (II., Chap. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the broken and blighted tree with a fragrance and beauty not its own. Those feeble feminine plants, are, it sometimes seems to me, the strength and perfection of creation—strength perfected in weakness; the ivy, green among the snows of winter, and clasping together in its true embrace the loveless ruin; and the vine that maketh glad the heart of man amidst the miseries of life. I must not be mistaken, though, for Devereux's talk was only a tender sort of trifling, and Lilias had said nothing to encourage ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Lily could be brought to acknowledge such a change in her heart. But if the thing could be done, Lily would be a happy woman. When once done it would be in all respects a blessing. And if it were not done, might not Lily's life be blank, lonely, and loveless to the end? Yet when Lily came down in the evening, with some light, half-joking word on her lips, as was usual to her, Mrs Dale was still afraid to venture ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... silly trick of eating her meals on the floor instead of at table,—and yet she was a warm-hearted, affectionate girl, and like many another princess of that time, she deserved a happier fate than the loveless marriage that had been arranged for her. Our memories are quite fresh about Bianca and her sorrows, because an accommodating tourist, who had Mrs. Ady's "Beatrice d'Este" with her, has loaned it to us for reading in the evenings—at least for as much time ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life, with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death—and condemned by the human instinct in her ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... brought forth without a mother; Present the image of the cares I prove, Witness your father's grief exceeds all other. Sigh out a story of her cruel deeds, With interrupted accents of despair; A monument that whosoever reads, May justly praise and blame my loveless Fair; Say her disdain hath dried up my blood, And starved you, in succours still denying; Press to her eyes, importune me some good, Waken her sleeping pity with your crying: Knock at her hard heart, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... him and the shores bear part That reared him when the bright south world was black With fume of creeds more foul than hell's own rack, Still darkening more love's face with loveless art Since Paul, faith's fervent Antichrist, of heart Heroic, haled the world vehemently back From Christ's pure path on dire Jehovah's track, And said to dark Elisha's Lord, 'Thou art.' But one whose soul had put the raiment on Of love ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in silence, her stricken face full of trouble. How could she, from her glass house, throw stones at a loveless marriage? But this was different from her own case! Nobody was worthy to marry her hero without giving the best a woman had to give. If she were a girl—a sudden tide of color swept her face; a wild, ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... lived only to scrape and hoard, moidering away her loveless life on the futile energies and sordid aims of a miser's wretched pleasures. But every now and then she had risen up out of the slough into which she had gradually sunk, and had done some grand things that marked her name with so many white stones. While ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... who had sprung to life's full force A breast that loveless dried? But who had sapped it at the source, With scarlet to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as the snows around him sown. He hovers over a fire of pine, Spicy and cheering; toward the line Of the towering peaks he lifts his eyes. "I'd rather have a boy with shining hair, To bear my name, than all your share Of earth's red gold," he said; And died, a loveless, childless man, Before the ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... never, never; the play was played out. Down through the vista of years he looked, and saw her the wife of the man he hated—the man who was to him the very incarnation of hypocrisy and cant He saw the hard, loveless life; he saw the lines growing in the fair, young face that was so dear to him; he saw stern Duty take the place of Love; he saw her life grow hard and narrow; he read in her face the bitterness of unfulfilled hopes, and the longing, the unutterable longing for something that might ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... fancy, and she was bent on marrying him. Her father's assurance that she would bring him disappointment, not happiness, weighed little. Too many men had told her that she was essential to their happiness to permit qualms on this score. Her conscience did shrink, to some extent, from a loveless, business-like marriage, and her preference for Graydon made such a union all the more repugnant; but she was incapable of feeling that she would do him a wrong by giving him the pretty jewelled hand for which so many had asked. Indeed, the question now was, Could she be so self-sacrificing as ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... love in the sunshine, and love in the air; Youth, hope, home, companionship, spring, everywhere. There was youth, there was spring in her blood; yet she only, In all the great city, seemed loveless and lonely. ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... balance between the contemplative and the active Christian life, and felt that they ought to co-exist in every genuine experience. She attached as little meaning to a life of mere raptures as to one of bare, loveless duty. "Christian life," she wrote, "is not all contemplation and prayer; it is not all muscle and sinew. It is a perfect, practicable union of the two. I believe in your joyful emotions if they result in self-denying, patient work for ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... from the scene of her very lonely and loveless life journey. I went to the door again, in time to see the rays of the morning brightening the blue ridge which lay clear ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... night, thinking of her happiness and blushing, even in the darkness, as she remembered Cardo's burning words of love; and he went home whistling and even singing in sheer exuberance of joy. Forgotten his father's coldness; forgotten his bare, loveless home; forgotten even the wrangler who was coming to trouble him; and forgotten that nameless shadow of parting and distance, which had hovered too near ever since he had met Valmai. She loved him, so a fig for all trouble! They had pledged their troth on the edge of the waves, ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... inform you of this, in order—that you may in future change your disposition, and not act so uncharitably towards others. Another bad, bad trick, and you are done for! Do you understand me, you little man, you loveless and partial dog of a critic, you musical snarler [Schnurrbart], ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Richard de Loveless, who was a courtier, and a very well bred man, being observed to hesitate at the words "after our marriage," was thereupon desired to explain himself. He replied by talking very largely of his exact complaisance ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... I have nothing but fees.' What is my destiny? To hear great-grandmothers grumble because I cannot give them back their girlhood for a thousand francs! To devote myself to making other women beloved, while I remain loveless ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... find a teacher. It is most true that the living and the dead are still one family, for of course there are no "dead," unless we most correctly put into this category the dull of hearing, the dull of heart, and the loveless who still walk this earth. But if we deem the pioneers defunct and inarticulate, then it is little likely that we shall comprehend the reality and the naturalness of this interplay and inspiration. If we never seek, information and insight ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... beastly business was money! He thought of his own unestimated wealth. Nothing but money,—horrible, insensate, devastating money! He shuddered as he thought of what his money was likely to bring to him in the end: a loveless wife; avarice in place of respect; misery instead of joy; destruction! How was he ever to know whether a girl was marrying him for himself or for the right to lay hands upon the money his father had left to him when he died? How can any rich man know what he is getting into when he permits a girl ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... from perfection in industry as the Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's words about 'the intolerable sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of the mass of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings, with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or workhouses. But they often look as if they were, and they resemble them in this—that ...
— Progress and History • Various
... so loud in the old, green bowery garden, Your song is of Love! Love! Love! Will ye weary not nor cease? For the loveless soul grows sick, the heart that the grey days harden; I know too well that ye love! I would ye should ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... forty-five when I first knew him, and he was very handsome then. At least, I thought him the very perfection of manly strength and beauty and goodness. True, it was the mature, warm beauty of the Indian summer, for he was more than middle-aged; but it was very genial to the chilly, loveless morning of my own early life," said Marah, dropping her head upon her hand and sliding into reminiscences of ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... man for whose arrival she had been looking with such mingled feelings. Little need was there now for mingled feelings. She knew well with what feeling to expect him. She had at times within the depths of her heart formed an idea that her life would not be loveless; but now—but now—This man who was her husband, and the only one to whom she could look for love—this man turned from her in horror; he hated her, he loathed her—worse, he looked upon her as a Hindu—worse still, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel Waterton—had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and his prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a blameless union of pure affection with a woman who was in every way his moral and ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen |
