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More "Boredom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life—you shall see! New faces constantly, different languages. Not a moment for boredom. Always something to do night and day—the bell ringing, the trains whistling, the omnibus coming and going and all the time the gold pieces rolling into the till—that ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... seen that boy, you'd know that the word 'bore' would perish in his presence like a microbe in hot water. As for me—I don't believe I bored him. He did say once that we would part when we came to the 'turnstile,' meaning the point of mutual boredom, but I can't believe the turnstile was in his sight. I think that his resolution to go ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... on, listen to scraps of conversation, watch the faces of the dancers and of those standing round. It is a study, and I think it shows one of the worst sides of nature. It is quite shocking to see and hear the envy, uncharitableness, the boredom, and the desperate efforts to look cheerful under difficulties, especially among the girls that do not ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... be put in the bag, and the men from the sea would walk into a neat trap. This reflection seemed to take all the colour out of Heritage's prospect. Peril and heroism were not to be his lot—only boredom. ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... allowing him some merit as a type-writer or character-sketcher, to assert that the style and matter of most of his work is always tiresome, frequently childish, and the subject often morbid and unhealthy; and, further, that his method is tedious to the last degree of boredom; for, as a writer, if I may judge him fairly by his translators, he is didactic and prosy, and never more tedious than when his dialogue is intended to be at its very crispest. As a playwright his construction is faulty. Here and there he gives expression to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various
... talk and intercourse is an unreal thing, not the outflow of natural interests and pleasant tastes, but a sham culture and a refinement that is only pursued because it is the right sort of surface to present to the world. One submits to it with boredom, one leaves it with relief. They have got the right people together, they have shown that they can command their attendance; it ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the threshold where he was content to stand and knock, waiting in perfect, reverential patience until the mysterious door ahead of him should open just a very little wider. To the outward eye, he was languid, indifferent, a little cynical and prone to boredom. Underneath it, though, the fires of his enthusiasm, of his ambition to advance, not his own career, but the sum total of scientific knowledge: this fire was burning at white heat. Indeed, it cost him something to bank down the flame upon the side of his nature which lay open to the general view. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... looked wildly down the car. The flapper was beckoning slightly. Her contemptuous boredom had vanished, and she looked a merry child again. I rushed, stumbled, rocked into her place; she sank ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 2, 1917 • Various
... face of the seeress. Now that the match was close to the fuse, Madalena had a wild impulse to draw back. It was not too late. Nothing irrevocable had been done. Ruthven Smith's acceptance of the invitation to Valley House would mean only a few days of boredom for his fellow guests, unless—she herself made the ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... imagined his soul to be crushed by grief. He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing. But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty he experienced to express the overwhelming nature of his feelings (the most furious ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... name was Herbert Streathern—coached the patient but most unhappy Susan line by line, word by word, gesture by gesture, in the little parts she was playing. Palmer traveled with them, making a pretense of interest that ill concealed his boredom and irritation. This for three weeks; then he began to make trips to London to amuse himself with the sports, amateur and professional, with whom he easily made friends—some of them men in a position ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... professoriate appears to have been mainly negative, and in some cases deterrent; creating in his mind, not only a very low estimate of the value of lectures, but an antipathy to the subjects which had been the occasion of the boredom inflicted upon him by their instrumentality. With the exception of Hope, the Professor of Chemistry, Darwin found them all "intolerably dull." Forty years afterwards he writes of the lectures of the Professor ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... never did come. And the effort to be always ready, with so little hope of ever having any reward, was a real test of discipline—continuing as it did month after month in a country where unrelieved monotony tempted us all to the slackness of utter boredom. ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... They feel flattered by it, particularly when they are talking, and in conversation they like to be heard through, not interrupted in mid-passage. That is true whatever their station. Nobody likes to be bored, but fully half of boredom comes from lack of the habit of careful listening. The man who will not listen never develops wits enough to distinguish between a bore and a sage and therefore cannot pick the best company. The vacant stare, the drifting of eyes ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... be-avoided exactions and remissions of "forfeits," that plunge everybody into embarrassing situations, and destroy, instead of creating, sociability; none of those stock—so-called—"drawing-room entertainments;" in fact, which always result in hopeless boredom. But, we had a little music and part-singing: a little lively, general chit- chat, in which all could join and each take a share: a few anecdotes well told—a complete success, to be brief, in making us all feel perfectly natural and at ease, for we were allowed ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Ursula turned to look scornfully over her shoulder. "Yes! Anything to escape from boredom. All that woman talked about while you were in the basement was redecorating the house or about cooking and ...
— The House from Nowhere • Arthur G. Stangland
... up, smiling at the beseeching tone. "Yes? What is it, Katie? Just what brand of boredom are you ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... letter—or, at any rate, a copy of it—from Jeekes and to hand it to Robin Greve would, thought Bruce, restore his prestige as an amateur detective, at any rate in his own eyes. Moreover, a chat with Jeekes over the whole affair seemed a Heaven-sent exit from the impasse of boredom into which he had ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... almost proprietary tenderness he studied the shining goods and trinkets; noted approvingly the clerks who seemed to him specially prompt and obliging to customers; scowled a little at any sign of boredom or inattention. He heard the soft sigh of the pneumatic tubes as they received money and blew it to some distant coffer: this money, he thought, was already partly his. That square-cut creature whom he presently discerned following him was undoubtedly the store detective: he smiled to ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... little lacking in our English ideal of young ladies: and we must be on our guard lest any school ideals of study and bookishness should actually increase this deficiency. Any one, mistress or girl, who makes good education to be associated with dulness and boredom and insipidity is again a traitor to the cause ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... uses every accident of human life is crammed! Here was a piece of pedantry and scepticism, which might make some men weep and some men stamp with irritation, and some men, from sheer boredom, fall asleep, but which fed in my own spirit a fountain of pure joy, as I considered carefully what kind of man it is who denies these things; the kind of way he walks; the kind of face he has; the kind of book he writes; the kind of publisher who chisels him; and the kind of way in which ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... satisfaction all at once. Fogs, storms, and clever ruses played their part on behalf of those who ran the blockade, especially during the first two years; and it was almost more than human nature could stand to keep forever on the extreme alert, day after dreary day, through the deadly boredom of a long blockade. Like caged eagles the crews passed many a weary week of dull monotony without the chance of swooping on a chase. "Smoke ho!" would be called from the main-topgallant cross-tree. "Where away?" would be ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... all our War correspondents Mr. PHILIP GIBBS contrives to give in his despatches the liveliest sense of the movement, the pageantry and the abominable horror of war. Pageantry there is, for all the evil boredom and weariness of this pit-and-ditch business, and Mr. GIBBS sees finely and has an honest pen that avoids the easy cliche. You might truthfully describe his book, The Battles of the Somme (HEINEMANN), as an epic of the New Armies. He never seems to lose his wonder at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... for humanity when I have observed men and women staring through the bars at the splendid African cats in cages, and have also observed that their foolish stare is returned by the lion or tiger with a dull look of infinite boredom. Nor is it pleasant to see small boys pushing sticks through the safe bars, in an endeavour to irritate the royal captives. One remembers Browning's superb lion in The Glove, whom the knight was able to approach in safety, because the regal ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... twenty or thirty men and a couple of officers stationed near some culvert or bridge. Their tents were pitched on a bit of stony ground, with not a trace of vegetation near it, and here they stayed for months together, half dead from the boredom of their existence. Nevertheless such work was quite essential to the success of the campaign, for the attitude of the Dutch colonists up-country has been throughout the war an uncertain factor, and if these long lines of communication had been left unprotected it is more than ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... threw open the door of the carriage, and a lady's maid, with a jewel case in her hand, stared at him with undisguised curiosity. The lady bade him goodbye kindly, yet with a note of final dismissal in her tone. He had occupied her time for an hour or two, and saved her from absolute boredom. The matter was ended there. Nevertheless, from a quiet corner of the station he watched her stand listlessly on the platform while her things were being collected—a tall, distinguished looking figure, and very noticeable amongst the motley crowd who were streaming from the train. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... statement, it was a request, and Rose shrank from it; but she said lightly, 'We shall be meeting often. You will see more of us than you will care for, I'm afraid. The Malletts are rather ubiquitous in Radstowe. It's fortunate for us, or Caroline would die of boredom, but I don't know how ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... service in the great army of bores. But this determination is not all that is necessary. A man must constantly keep a strict guard on himself, lest he should unconsciously deviate even for a few minutes into the regions of boredom. Whatever you do, let nothing tempt you to relate more than once any grievance you may have. Nothing of course is more poisonous to the aggrieved one than to stifle his grievance absolutely. Once, and once only, he may produce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... moulding all business institutions and ideas of prosperity in the interests of scientific evolutionary aims and large human pleasures. As Pigou has said, 'Environment has its children as well as men.' Monotony in labor, tedium in officework, time spent in business correspondence, the boredom of running a sugar refinery, would be asked to step before the bar of human affairs and get a health standardization. To-day industry produces goods that cost more than they are worth, are consumed by persons who are degraded by the consuming; it is destroying permanently ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... Goethe, the ancients are "the despair of the emulator." Voltaire said. "If the admirers of Homer were honest, they would acknowledge the boredom which their ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... theatres were shut. The streets were damp and dirty. It was all very well for the generals, appearing every night in the glare and glitter of the footlights; but for the rank and file the occupation of London spelt pure boredom. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... to greet her mother, Miss Carson passed him and moved on to where the Father Superior stood apart from the others, talking earnestly with the Prince. What he was saying was of an unwelcome nature, for Kalonay's face wore an expression of boredom and polite protest which changed instantly to one of delight when he saw Miss Carson. The girl hesitated and made a ...
— The King's Jackal • Richard Harding Davis
... A collection of funny stories used to be an important part of a drummer's stock in trade. It is by means of the "good story" that the politician makes his way into office; the business man paves the way for a big deal; the after-dinner speaker gets a hearing; the hostess saves her guests from boredom. Such a large place does the "story" hold in our national life that we have invented a social pastime that might be termed a "joke match." "Don't tell a funny story, even if you know one," was the ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... I have been positively longing to have you gratify my curiosity," declared Miss Preston. "You know you do such dear, eccentric things that we couldn't exist without you—at least I couldn't because I should perish of boredom. No, you shan't escape just yet, so stop looking at that beautiful Mrs. Galt. You must tell me first if it is really true that you once carried a woman out of a burning building in your right hand. It is so delightful to be strong, ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... the right to be lampooned and in the end, if his party succeeds, to be introduced into the Cabinet apologetically, as Hays and Daugherty were, on the plea that the President must appoint a number of party workers. To the Senate? It is a body which affords escape from the boredom of small town life for men who have grown rich on the frontier or in the dull Middle West. It carries with it an excuse to live in Washington, some social position there, and a title envied in Marion, Reno, Butte, or Salt Lake City. Senators who start young serve ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... silence. Over in the corner Cyril puffed at his cigar with an air almost of boredom. He had not spoken since his first surprised questioning with the others, "Do you know Billy?" William was still frowning. Even Bertram wore a look that ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... vocalist who receives, maybe, two or three guineas for each dozen times he sings particular songs, the publisher of the song in question being his paymaster. Of this type of song a contemporary Musical Journal states:—"Every serious musician knows it, and, scenting the boredom, tries to avoid it. It is highly sentimental, it moves within a limited scope, emotionally and technically, and it deals with a few well-worn subjects. Gardens, spring, sunshine, flowers—these are favourite themes. If only, the singer tells us, he could ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... false, indecent. She tried to read. But again the tedium and the sense of the falsity of the spoken word put her off. She went to stay with girl friends. At first she thought it splendid. But then the inner boredom came on, it seemed to her all nothingness. And she felt always belittled, as if never, never could she stretch her ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... impression; he couldn't. At Boyd's age you could not imagine death as coming to you; nor were you able to visualize the horrors of an ill-equipped field hospital. Any more than you could picture all the rest of it—the filth, hunger, cold, and boredom with now and then a flash of whirling horses and men clashing on some road or field, or the crazy stampede of other men, yelling their throats raw as they charged into a hell of ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... very acutely; and after Union with God all earthly consolations must be abandoned: until we abandon these we do not know how we have depended on them, how they have protected us from depression, loneliness, boredom, and discontent. Abandon all these earthly consolations and interests, and at the same time be abandoned by God (sensible Grace is withdrawn), and immediately our sufferings become very severe, though our outward circumstances may appear, and ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... Out of boredom, though, he plugged away, walked past the disdainfully-staring eyes of neighbors to the village library, and withdrew dusty microfiles on robotry. Eventually he had acquired a little skill at contemplating ...
— Cerebrum • Albert Teichner
... in that of animals, that this great, manifold, and restless motion is sustained and kept going by the medium of two simple impulses—hunger and the instinct of sex, helped perhaps a little by boredom—and that these have the power to form the primum mobile of so complex a machinery, setting in ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to stay there," Enid said, with grim satisfaction. "It is virtually necessary that Mr. Reginald Henson should not be disturbed. The dogs have a foolish weakness for his society. So long as he shows no signs of boredom ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... fallen fortunes of the title, amassed enormous wealth as a company promoter, while I, on whom the title has descended, am perfectly contented with its fallen fortunes. I have scarcely a thought or taste in common with my aunt. In fact, I must bore her exceedingly. Yet she hides her boredom beneath a radiant countenance and leads me to understand that my society gives her ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... particular about their own meals, used to impose upon children, and which was based upon the idea that everything which a child enjoys is therefore bad for it. We are learning the elements of the physiology of joy. We find that pleasure and boredom have distinct effects upon the body and the mind, notably in the matter of fatigue. Careful study of fatigue in school children has shown that the hour devoted to physical exercise of the dreary kind under ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... in the crowd, and Ellen never knew who had spoken, but for the first time that afternoon her boredom was relieved. It was rather pleasant to have anyone think that Arthur Alce was turning to her from Joanna ... it would be a triumph indeed if he actually did turn ... for the first time she began to take an ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... to herself as she went about her kitchen work. He saw her through the open window. She was sweeping, and had a sort of cap on her head which did not add to the graces of her appearance. He looked at her with a hard glance, recalling as a fresh grievance the ten days of intolerable boredom he had spent cooped up in a ridiculous little tent with her, at the camp-meeting. She must have realized at the time how odious the enforced companionship was to him. Yes, beyond doubt she did. It came back to him now that they had spoken but rarely to each other. She ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... beginning to realize that he had tried his partners sorely in the month that had passed since his return to town; and all for what? He himself had brought out of the foolish experience nothing save a tired nervous system, a sense of boredom such as he had not known for a year, and, especially when he looked at Bangs, an acute mental discomfort which introspective persons would probably have diagnosed as the pangs of conscience. Laurie did not take the trouble to diagnose it. He ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... happy man," she replied. "All the evil in life, it seems to me, comes from boredom and idleness, and spiritual emptiness, which are inevitable when one lives at other people's expense. Don't think I'm showing off. I mean it sincerely. It is dull and unpleasant to be rich. Win friends by just riches, they say, ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... inconvenient wish lasted him all through dinner, notwithstanding that it was his enviable lot to sit by a fast young lady of the period, who rallied him with exceeding good taste on his wife, his house, his furniture, manners, dress, horses, and everything that was his. Once, in extremity of boredom, he caught sight of Maud's delicate profile five couples off, and fancied he could detect on the pale, pure face something of his own weariness and abstraction. After that the fast young lady "went at ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... with the boredom of convalescence. He felt perfectly well, and they wouldn't let him get up and out; everything forbidden he wanted to eat. And his one solace was the Brackett library. This was an extraordinary collection of books. They were seven, and how they got there nobody ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... and stretched himself elaborately, vented his boredom in a long musical yawn, then settled down to sleep again in a more expansive attitude; and Evelyn's French clock struck six ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... William descended slightly late, and, after receiving his parents' reproaches with an air of weary boredom, ate his porridge listlessly. He had come to the conclusion that morning that there was a certain monotonous sameness about life. One got up, and had one's breakfast, and went to school, and had one's dinner, ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... the wrong method, in the wrong manner, and at the wrong time. And yet every one has taken him at his word. I feel that my essay may be scouted as a paradox; but I hope that many may recognise that I am not, out of mere boredom, endeavouring to stop my ears against popular platitude, but rather, in a spirit of real earnestness, to point out to the mob how it has been cruel to George. I do not despair of success. I think I shall make converts. The mob is really very fickle ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... sat in his study after morning class, next morning, the picture of boredom and perplexity. Lists of names, receipt-books, cash- box, bills, and account-books were littered on the table before him. Between these and a cobweb on the ceiling his troubled looks travelled, as he gnawed the end of his pen, and passed ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... actually finds mental effort painful, and makes as little of it as possible. And that is the only sort of effort a discarnate individuality can exert. So, unable to endure the fifty or so years needed to make a really good reincarnation, he reincarnates in a year or so, out of pure boredom, into the first vehicle he can find, usually one nobody else wants." Dr. Harnosh dug out the heel of his pipe and blew through the stem. "But nobody will admit his own mental inferiority, even to ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... "The Seagull" was performed at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg. It was a fiasco. The actors did not know their parts; in the theatre there was "a strained condition of boredom and bewilderment." The notices in the press were prejudiced and stupid. Not wishing to see or meet anyone, Chekhov kept out of sight after the performance, and by next morning was in the train on his way back to Melihovo. The ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... speech gradually, but relentlessly, degenerated, and step by step she slipped down the paths of delicacy and fineness, through the selfishness of her insistent talkativeness. Harrison Orr never intimated that his evenings at home were hours of boredom, but in later years spent much time in the comparative quiet of his club. Few intellects can be so amply stored as to continue brilliant through decades of much speaking, and the sparkle of Mrs. Orr's conversation was gradually ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... crowd about the engine, and the grimy-faced engineer leaned from his cab, inspecting them impassively. His general attitude was one of boredom, ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... a long vigil he had begun, but there was no boredom in it for Billy Magee. He was too great a lover of contrast for that. As he looked around on the ill-assorted group he guarded, he compared them with the happier people of the inn's summer nights, about whom the girl had told him. Instead of these surly ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... England was most deeply submerged in deadly boredom was, the old Duke of Stone said with wearied finality, himself. He had been a sinful young man of finished taste in 1820; he had cultivated these tastes, which were for literature and art and divers other things, in the most richly alluring foreign capitals until ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with its darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not that ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... for his age, light and quick in movement, intent but never deliberate, passing very rapidly from one thing to another, impatient of boredom and dullness, always desiring to do a thing that very minute. He was fair of complexion, with grey-blue eyes and a shock head of light hair, little brushed, and uncut often too long. He was careless of appearances, and wore clothes by preference of great ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... herself to her, and Mr. Schwirtz and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother's happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient to think of men again, her school-work ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... friend as he is. You know what I am, my dear Mortimer. You know how dreadfully susceptible I am to boredom. You know that when I became enough of a man to find myself an embodied conundrum, I bored myself to the last degree by trying to find out what I meant. You know that at length I gave it up, and declined to guess any more. Then how can I possibly give you the answer that I have not discovered? ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... I suppose so." Here the respondent would simulate a slight boredom. "One will have to mix with the most impossible people, of course"—Lady Shaftesbury had won great popularity by insisting that, in a business so truly national, no class distinctions were to be drawn—"but anyhow it will fill up ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that had an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity, and usually late at night with the publisher's messenger in the hall, he had half filled his studio with mechanical toys of his own invention, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... Cathedine a seat, and returned himself to ask Letty whether it was not time to go. He found, however, that she had been carried off by another partner, and could only resign himself to a fresh twenty minutes of boredom. He leant, yawning, against the ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... what Leo said," Dick answered; and he knew that Paula's boredom and nervousness had been banished for some time and that she was listening with an interest almost eager. "In my way of thinking, and in accord with my temperament, the most horrible spiritual suffering I can imagine would be to kiss a woman ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... enemy of ennui or boredom, and the demons of melancholy. It "hath charms," wrote William Congreve (1670-1729), "to soothe the savage breast."[177:1] Orpheus with his lyre was able to charm wild beasts, and even to control the forces of Nature; and because of its wonderful therapeutic ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... voice. For the human voice is emotionally expressive through its mere sound alone: one can know a large part of what is going on in the breasts of people who talk in a foreign tongue just by listening to the sound of their voices—their excitement or boredom, their anger, love, or resentment; and one becomes conscious of these emotions, as in hearing music, without knowing what they are all about. All human emotions betray themselves in speech through the rise and fall, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... said the neighbor, yawning. "Boredom is an ultimate. There's nothing beyond it; consequently, you can't be ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... tail owing to the smallness of the stage. He had once had a tail. But that was a long story: added to which there was not time to tell it. Little Sally St. Leonard played his wife, and Robina was his mother-in-law. So much depends upon one's mood. What an ocean of boredom might be saved if science could but give us a barometer foretelling us our changes of temperament! How much more to our comfort we could plan our lives, knowing that on Monday, say, we should be feeling frivolous; on ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... sort of instance that made me think of you. What would you feel first, let us say, if I mentioned Michael Angelo? For the first moment, perhaps, boredom: such as I feel when Americans ask me about Stratford-on-Avon. But, supposing that just fear quieted, you would feel what I and every one else can feel. It might be the sense of the majestic hands ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... "down and out." He waited on the winter rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of sniping, to the boredom of billets. ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... receiving their guests. The brother and sister were singularly unlike. Sir Aubrey Mayo was very tall and thin, the pallor of his face accentuated by the blackness of his smoothly brushed hair and heavy black moustache. His attitude was a mixture of well-bred courtesy and languid boredom. He seemed too tired even to keep the single eye-glass that he wore in position, for it dropped continually. By contrast the girl at his side appeared vividly alive. She was only of medium height and very slender, standing erect with the easy, vigorous ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... With all your ghostliness you follow me), I feel no such attraction. Or if one Bows to my sympathy for the briefest space, Snap—it is gone! And, worst of all to tell, What broke it is not in the least dislike But utter boredom. Now.... ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... we take from places is nothing more nor less than the pleasure we put into them. A person predisposed to boredom can be bored in the very nave of Amiens; and a person predisposed to happiness can be happy even in Camden, New Jersey. I know: for I have watched American tourists in Amiens; and once, when I had gone to Camden, to visit Walt Whitman in his granite ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... feeling of boredom may be imagined from the way in which his performance of Macbeth was once received. To those who remembered how magnificently Betterton had played the part, the chill formalism of the new aspirant must have seemed presumptuous, and one night the contrast proved too much for a country ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... capable presence that refused to notice temper just then. They reached the main hut and found Gordon seated at the table—his own old table of trading days—looking fit and well, but wearing an air of intense boredom. He rose as they entered, and Vandersee stopped him ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... dreary thoroughfares he came into view of the church, and stood gazing at the spire, dark against a blotchy sky. Then he mocked at himself for acting as if he had an interest in Chatterton, when in truth the name signified boredom to him. Oh, these English provincial towns! What an atmosphere of deadly dulness hung over them all! And people were born, and lived, and died ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... stairs. He skipped two crumbing steps but found another. He was all right now, practically safe; as he neared the bottom he felt a slight boredom. He reached the dining-room —considered ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the day with its hundred phases and divisions, the dresses that went with each phase, the lukewarm emotions and interests and boredom and suppressed hatreds, this thing called the day, which she had first reviewed in the open boat after the wreck of the Gaston de Paris terrified to find it torn from her—this thing had been returned to her that morning in all its futility. It seemed to her, ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... of boredom, bred by long months of finicky penny purchasers, vanished. She stooped for one of the packets of fresh stock on the lower shelf. As he broke it open, she readjusted her heavy-rimmed spectacles, and watched his ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... as that proper to cats and dogs? Children, indeed, when left to themselves to take exercise, show impatience, and are prone to quarrel and cry; older children feel it necessary to invent something whereby they may conceal from themselves the intolerable boredom and humiliation of walking for walking's sake, and running for running's sake. They try to find some object for their exertions; the younger children play pranks. The activity of children thus left to themselves has rarely a good result; it ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the same age, all dressed and hatted alike, was slowly steaming through the green sea-meadows late on a summer afternoon. In the cars, incessant stretching of cramped legs, shifting of shoulders, striking of matches, passing of cigarettes, groans of boredom; occasionally concerted laughter about nothing. Suddenly the train stops short. Clipped heads and tanned faces pop out at every window. The boys begin to moan and shout; what ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... of the ALL-HIGHEST'S dominions), but a good fellow. Anyhow, we liked him, Frobisher and I; liked his bull-mouthed laughter, his drinking songs and full-blooded anecdotes, and, on the occasions of his frequent visits, put our boredom from us, pretended to be on the most affectionate terms, and even laughed uproariously at each other's funny stories. Up at M'Vini, in the long long-ago, the gleam of pyjamas amongst the loquats, and "'Ere gomes ze ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... from Wyossett to Wonder Head, made up parties to visit Selwyn's cottage, which had become known as The Chrysalis; and Selwyn good-naturedly exploded a pinch or two of the stuff for their amusement, and never betrayed the slightest annoyance or boredom. In fact, he behaved so amiably during gratuitous interruptions that he won the hearts of the younger set, who presently came to the unanimous conclusion that there was Romance in the air. And they sniffed it with delicate noses uptilted and ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... Mr. Seven Sachs's hand did him good, reassured him, and gave him courage. He was utterly tired of the voyage, and also of the poetical society of Carlo Trent, whose passage had cost him thirty pounds, considerable boredom, and some sick-nursing during the final days and nights. A dramatic poet with an appetite was a full dose for Edward Henry; but a dramatic poet who lay on his back and moaned for naught but soda-water and dry land amounted to more than Edward Henry ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... not certain defects of his character saved him. Though timid he was impulsive; he was also a little irritable, rather suspicious, and indomitably fussy in response to the call of duty. Temper, fuss, and curiosity saved him from boredom; he was conscientiously industrious, and though there was much that he did not understand he managed to be ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... learned, new individualities to be known, new classifications to be made. The world is so full of a number of things that no man with a grain of either poetry or the scientific spirit in him has any right to be bored, though he lived for a thousand years. Terror or tragedy may overwhelm him, but boredom never. The infinity of things forbids it. I once heard of a tipsy young artist who, on his way home on a beautiful night, had his attention called by a maudlin friend to the stars, where they twinkled like ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... day or two later one of the count's daughters happened to inquire how much I had paid for the carriage, probably in consequence of former experiences, and informed me that I had given just twice as much as any cabman in Tula would have been glad to take. (The boredom of those policemen must have been relieved by another smile—behind our backs.) Then I repeated my conversation with that delicately conscientious izvostchik, nurtured on the "Tales," and mentioned my ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... his soul to be crushed by grief. He experienced quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to lie for days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but they arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. Only his mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing; but his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... possible factor in her plans, filled Lily Bart with envy. She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... inspection, the question, the start of surprise. 'Twas all inevitable, so familiar—so distastefully intrusive, too. 'Twas a boredom hard to suffer, and never would have been borne had not the occasion of it been my uncle's delight. 'Twas always the same: Diamonds? ay, diamonds! and then the gasped "My God!" They would pry into this, by the Lord! and never be stopped by my ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... be disappointed in Chichester, I shall love it all my days; not so much for these its monuments, but for itself, its curiously sleepy air of disinterested quiet, its strong dislike of any sort of enthusiasm, its English boredom, even of itself, its complete surrender to what is, its indifference to what might be. May it ever remain secure within sight of the hills, within sight of the sea, steeped in the Tudor myth, certain in its English heart, that twice two is not four but anything one likes to make it, ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... had been to unpack his heart with words, and that if he told Milly so he should simply be unpacking it some more. He looked at the clear winter day occupying itself out there without him, and wondered why the deuce he couldn't put on snowshoes and tramp off his discontent leaving her to fight her boredom by the fire. She'd brought it on herself, hadn't she? Nobody wanted her to come. Was there some hidden force in women, their apparent vulnerability to the harsh world conditions that were bound to crush out even them in the end? They seemed ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... upon time, Those tombstones of dead selves, those hours of birth, Those moments of the soul in years of earth. They mark the height achieved, the main result, The power of freedom in the perished cult, The power of boredom in the dead man's deeds Not the bright moments of the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate—only last Sunday, my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair, almost hated her own ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... been described as "Months of boredom, punctuated by moments of intense fright." The writer of these sketches has experienced many "months of boredom," in a French military field hospital, situated ten kilometres behind the lines, in Belgium. During these months, the lines have not moved, either forward or backward, but have ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... The result of all this study was a beautiful and short Homeric epic in prose, called Taras Bulba. His appointment to a professorship in history was a ridiculous episode in his life. After a brilliant first lecture, in which he had evidently said all he had to say, he settled to a life of boredom for himself and his pupils. When he resigned he said joyously: "I am once more a free Cossack." Between 1834 and 1835 he produced a new series of stories, including his famous Cloak, which may be regarded as the legitimate beginning ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and told Monsieur de Woeste that there was no prospect of getting back to Brussels the next day. His colleagues, who were there also, impressed upon him the futility of going, and he finally resigned himself to staying, although he kept insisting that he infinitely preferred danger to boredom, which was his lot so long, as he had nothing to do but ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... those long plays of Byron's, and those still longer narrative poems, nothing will induce me to read a line of them again. They have a singularly dusty smell to me; and when I think of them even, I suffer just such a withering sensation of ineffable boredom as I used to experience waiting in a certain ante-room in Tunbridge Wells where lived an aged retired general. I associate them with illustrated travels ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... each repetition, meanwhile letting her eyes wander happily over the circling figures of the dancers. Glamour overspread the scene; she was in the mood to see only the gracious and gay. For the moment the obvious boredom of confirmed pleasure-seekers escaped her entirely; the efforts of spoiled youth and jaded old age to escape from themselves had no place in the pattern of the life she saw before her. No, on the contrary, as she gazed through half-closed eyes, she fancied she saw a multi-coloured ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... in my ears; it reigned in the dim cathedral. The congregation stirred and stretched; they moaned, they groaned aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you may sometimes hear a dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom. In vain the preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and addressed by name particular hearers. I was myself perhaps a more effective excitant; and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my successful struggles against sleep—and I ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... functions, entertainments were going on at almost every fashionable house in every fashionable quarter. The public restaurants were crammed with luxury-loving men and women,—men and women to whom the mere suggestion of a quiet dinner in their own homes would have acted as a menace of infinite boredom,—and these gilded and refined eating-houses were now beginning to shoot forth their bundles of well-dressed, well-fed folk into the many and various conveyances waiting to receive them. There was a good deal of needless shouting, and much banter between ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Public Opinion in this case is simply what he thinks. Even if he takes the opinion of strangers—the waiter who serves him at lunch, the tobacconist, the policeman at the corner—the opinion may be one specially prepared for his personal consumption, one inspired by tact, boredom, or even a sense of humour. If, for instance, the process were to be reversed, and my tobacconist were to ask me what I thought of the strike, I should grunt and go out of his shop; but he would be wrong to attribute "a dour grimness" to ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... Wainwright party; all well. Coleman." The students had struggled to send messages to their people in America, but they had only succeeded in deepening the tragic boredom of ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... a journal. During the hot weather there is no performance in this theatre; but the same story will be taken up again next October and is long enough to last through two winters. It could last longer, but they bring it within reasonable limits by removing some of the boredom. It concludes with the defeat and death of Orlando and ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... as the circumstances permitted, and he sat on the sand under a huge umbrella while the girls frolicked in the water. The boys came back for luncheon, and helped to divide the boredom of the newest arrival, though they made uncomplimentary remarks behind his back, and Betty was in constant fear lest some unpleasant incident should occur. She had to remember that she ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... just what a declared lover might be supposed to choose for conversation. Once or twice, notably toward the end of the week, and when she had been presumably making up her mind for three days, she exhibited signs of irritability and impatience. These Wade construed as evidences of boredom and acted upon as such, cheerfully ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... seemed harder than ever before for him to start early in the black winter mornings and hurry for his train. Then, too, he had what he had never had before, a sense of boredom, of ennui, so intense that it was almost a pain. The deadly monotony of it wearied him. For the first time in his life his harness of duty chafed his spirit. He was so tired of seeing the same train, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... boredom of a blasee woman? Surely it was something deeper than that which she felt. Now, to state her case fairly—to balance the pros and cons—what had she to complain of? Was it reasonless discontent? She hoped not. Why, she ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... it is not so. Not theirs to reason so acutely, not theirs to care so much; to them the two dominant features of this war—death and boredom—appeal with far less force. For both depend so utterly on imagination in their effect on the individual. Death is only awful in anticipation; boredom only an affliction to the keen-witted. So to ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... John Parker's boredom had been cured by a stop-watch. One week after Panchito had given evidence of his royal breeding, Parker's old trainer, Dan Leighton, arrived at the Palomar. Formerly a jockey, he was now in his fiftieth year, a wistful little man ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... be obliged to resort to such methods made her angry and humiliated. She was, however, rejoicing at one thing. Her grandfather had fallen asleep several pages of the paper earlier than usual, and she was to be spared from the utter boredom of wading through the leading articles which dealt with subways and Tammany and foreign politics and other matters for which she had a lofty contempt. She was never required to read the notices of new plays and operas and the doings of society, which alone were interesting ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... inhibition. Their available energy and ability is taxed to the utmost in maintaining the fighting line, and it is sheer greed for direction that has led to their systematic thwarting of civilian co-operation. Let me warn them of the boredom and irritation they are causing. This is a people's war, a war against militarism; it is not a war for the greater glory of British diplomatists, officials, and people in uniforms. It is our war, not their war, and the last thing we intend ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... rowing at Oxford. It is certain that, though inordinately fond of boats and every kind of water—river, sea, lake, or canal—he never learned to swim. Peacock also notices his habit of floating paper boats, and gives an amusing description of the boredom suffered by Hogg on occasions when Shelley would stop by the side of a pond or mere to float a mimic navy. The not altogether apocryphal story of his having once constructed a boat out of a bank-post-bill, and launched it on the lake in Kensington Gardens, deserves to ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... wheeled abruptly round a corner below Thirty-fourth Street, slid half a block or more east, and came to a palpitating halt. Maitland, looking up, recognized the entrance to his apartments, and sighed with relief for the brief respite from boredom that was to be his. He rose, negligently shaking off his duster, and stepped down to ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... prison-camp. As perhaps I need not say, both divisions of the tale are admirably written. It is hardly the author's fault that the earlier half, with its pictures of a genial hunting society in County Cork, is distinctly more entertaining than the scenes of boredom and brutality at Crefeld, well-conveyed as these are and almost over-realistic and convincing. Inevitably too the scheme is one of incident rather than character. One has never any very serious doubt that in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... one else it might have been an evidence of boredom, a sign of indifference; but he, in his occult way, managed to make his immobility appear profoundly responsive, and as full of valuable thoughts as an egg is of meat. What he said at last was nothing more than a "Very interesting," pronounced politely, and not much above ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... abstinence—virtuous. He didn't ride well, he hadn't good hands, and he hadn't good hands for life. He must go hard and harsh, high or low. He was a man who needed BITE in his life. He was exceptionally capable of boredom. He had been bored by London. Social occasions irritated him, several times he had come near to gross incivilities, art annoyed him, sport was an effort, wholesome perhaps, but unattractive, music he loved, but it excited him. The ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Warlock was bored. The worst of the boredom was that it promised to last without limit. They had food and water and physical comfort, but they were exactly in the situation of men sentenced to prison for an unknown but enormous length of time. There was ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... entertainments as custom required, and suffered from suspended animation under the influence of the deadly dulness which prevailed at most of them, but in that she was not peculiar, and she could conceal her boredom more successfully than almost anybody else I knew, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... window started; her apathy vanished; her expression of boredom gave place to one of such lively anticipation as to draw the attention of the two other women. A magic change came over her; she became suddenly animated, alive, atingle in every nerve; her eyes sparkled and a new color flooded her cheeks. The alteration ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... in at the end of the procession and flopped into their seats with the proper air of insupportable boredom. Scotty's first task was to take the measure of his new instructor. At the first glance he was conscious of a distinct sensation of disappointment. He had expected the stranger to be young and callow, but this man had grey hair and was apparently nearing ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... the hours I describe it seems sure indeed, he will have to continue his labour. Man was born to labour, as the oldest texts say; he must continue to drive his furrow to the end of the field, otherwise he would lie down and die of sheer boredom, or go mad. He asks himself why he became a maker of idols. "An idol-maker, an idol-maker," he cries, "who can find no worshippers for his wares! Better the sailor before the mast or the soldier in the field." His thoughts ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the subjugated and the oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their salvation in it. Here the prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of conscience; here the emotion produced by power (called "God") is pumped up (by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as "grace." Here, too, open dealing is lacking; concealment and the darkened ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... the great army of bores. But this determination is not all that is necessary. A man must constantly keep a strict guard on himself, lest he should unconsciously deviate even for a few minutes into the regions of boredom. Whatever you do, let nothing tempt you to relate more than once any grievance you may have. Nothing of course is more poisonous to the aggrieved one than to stifle his grievance absolutely. Once, and once only, he may produce it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... I know the moves." "Would you like a game?" he asks, and I say, "I don't think I will, thanks very much. I hardly ever play." And there the business ends. But once in two years, or it may be three, circumstances are too strong for me. I meet a man so keen or a situation so dull that politeness or boredom leads me to accept. The board is produced, I remind myself that the queen stands on a square of her own colour, and that the knight goes next to the castle; I push forward the king's pawn two squares, and ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... of a morning in consequence, and was ushered into the precincts. On these occasions the Prime Minister was to be found in a big room upstairs; and he was always walking up and down, like Aristotle only that he had his hands in his pockets. His demeanour would be a blend of boredom with the benign. "Whatch-think of this?" he would demand, snatching up some paper from his desk, cramming it into my hand, and continuing his promenade. Such observations on my part in response to ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... of Vandersee's quiet, capable presence that refused to notice temper just then. They reached the main hut and found Gordon seated at the table—his own old table of trading days—looking fit and well, but wearing an air of intense boredom. He rose as they entered, and Vandersee stopped him ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... smiling at the beseeching tone. "Yes? What is it, Katie? Just what brand of boredom are ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... to top of a column of figures more quickly than the fire-engine could run up Oldcastle Street; and his totals were never wrong. His gesture with a piece of blotting-paper as he blotted off a total was magnificent. He liked long hours; he was thoroughly used to overtime, and his boredom in his lodgings was such that he would often arrive at the office before the appointed hour. He asked thirty shillings a week, and Denry in a mood of generosity gave him thirty-one. He gave Denry his ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Mayo was very tall and thin, the pallor of his face accentuated by the blackness of his smoothly brushed hair and heavy black moustache. His attitude was a mixture of well-bred courtesy and languid boredom. He seemed too tired even to keep the single eye-glass that he wore in position, for it dropped continually. By contrast the girl at his side appeared vividly alive. She was only of medium height and very slender, standing erect ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... hoping only to find surcease of boredom; and her head no sooner touched the pillow than oblivion closed down upon her faculties ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... and panting." (Visible discouragement of the bench, boredom of the public, and exasperation of the lawyer for the defense. Dogs again—! ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... welcome as the circumstances permitted, and he sat on the sand under a huge umbrella while the girls frolicked in the water. The boys came back for luncheon, and helped to divide the boredom of the newest arrival, though they made uncomplimentary remarks behind his back, and Betty was in constant fear lest some unpleasant incident should occur. She had to remember ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... at a stretch; then she wanted to be off, to visit the next thing set down for her in her guide-book. As we left each town she murmured mechanically: "Well, we've seen THAT, thank Heaven!" and straightway went on, with equal eagerness, and equal boredom, to see the ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... across a little band of, say, twenty or thirty men and a couple of officers stationed near some culvert or bridge. Their tents were pitched on a bit of stony ground, with not a trace of vegetation near it, and here they stayed for months together, half dead from the boredom of their existence. Nevertheless such work was quite essential to the success of the campaign, for the attitude of the Dutch colonists up-country has been throughout the war an uncertain factor, and if these long lines of communication had been ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... He was a tall man, rather slender, with flat, bland features punctuated only by blond caret-shaped eyebrows. His grey eyes were heavy-lidded now, his mouth an expressionless line as he waited, sunk back into his coat with a long-cultivated air of lifeless boredom. He watched the screen without interest as it bleeped a time or two, then shifted into the familiar scrambled-image pattern. After a moment he muttered the Public Information Board audio-code words, and saw the screen even out into the clear ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... suppose With all your ghostliness you follow me), I feel no such attraction. Or if one Bows to my sympathy for the briefest space, Snap—it is gone! And, worst of all to tell, What broke it is not in the least dislike But utter boredom. Now.... ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... others, that—half Dartie as he was—he should have been perfectly faithful to his young first cousin during the twenty years since he married her romantically out in the Boer War; and faithful without any feeling of sacrifice or boredom—she was so quick, so slyly always a little in front of his mood. Being first cousins they had decided, rather needlessly, to have no children; and, though a little sallower, she had kept her looks, her slimness, and the colour ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hardly know what to tell master. We're certainly seeing some unusual things, and for two months we've had no time for boredom. The latest wonder is always the most astonishing, and if this progression keeps up, I can't imagine what its climax will be. In my opinion, we'll never again ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... indolent face of the younger man, and the spreading, heated face of the elder. George looked like any club-lounger—not unwilling to let it be seen that he is slightly bored, yet ready, with perfect acquiescence, to go through with an hour or a forenoon of the infliction of boredom, as conveyed by a father's presence.... Mr. Piper watched him as he continued tranquilly to pare his nails, the baffled sense of helplessness that exasperated him at the outset of an interview with his son creeping over him as ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... In fact, he applied to his subject the wrong method, in the wrong manner, and at the wrong time. And yet every one has taken him at his word. I feel that my essay may be scouted as a paradox; but I hope that many may recognise that I am not, out of mere boredom, endeavouring to stop my ears against popular platitude, but rather, in a spirit of real earnestness, to point out to the mob how it has been cruel to George. I do not despair of success. I think I shall make converts. The mob is really very fickle ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... on his back, eyes closed, face under the full glare of the reading light. His expression indicated both boredom and physical suffering. ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... Let us love and laugh while spring blossoms. Let us love our babies, the little dears, and kiss our wives. Yes, that is moral and healthy; the world is not a shivering convent, marriage is not a tomb. Shame on those who find in it only sadness, boredom, and sleep. ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... But that was a long story: added to which there was not time to tell it. Little Sally St. Leonard played his wife, and Robina was his mother-in-law. So much depends upon one's mood. What an ocean of boredom might be saved if science could but give us a barometer foretelling us our changes of temperament! How much more to our comfort we could plan our lives, knowing that on Monday, say, we should be feeling frivolous; on ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... emotionally expressive through its mere sound alone: one can know a large part of what is going on in the breasts of people who talk in a foreign tongue just by listening to the sound of their voices—their excitement or boredom, their anger, love, or resentment; and one becomes conscious of these emotions, as in hearing music, without knowing what they are all about. All human emotions betray themselves in speech through the rise and fall, range of intervals, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... probably accounted for his presence at the uttermost, hottermost edge of the ALL-HIGHEST'S dominions), but a good fellow. Anyhow, we liked him, Frobisher and I; liked his bull-mouthed laughter, his drinking songs and full-blooded anecdotes, and, on the occasions of his frequent visits, put our boredom from us, pretended to be on the most affectionate terms, and even laughed uproariously at each other's funny stories. Up at M'Vini, in the long long-ago, the gleam of pyjamas amongst the loquats, and "'Ere gomes ze Sherman invasion!" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... on and smiles with veiled delight. Boredom's best friends are fellows who recite. None like, not many listen, But all must make believe to stand about And watch a man gesticulate and shout, With eyes that glare ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... Fyne caught me up and slowed down to my strolling gait which must have been infinitely irksome to his high pedestrian faculties. I am sure that all his muscular person must have suffered from awful physical boredom; but he did not attempt to charm it away by conversation. He preserved a portentous and dreary silence. And I was bored too. Suddenly I perceived the menace of even worse boredom. Yes! He was so silent because he had ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... our mutual boredom!" The girl's laugh sounded rather hard. "Don't you think," she asked, after a moment, "that we should bore each other even worse ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the armies. If his fighting gets him anywhere the soldier is content. The line has made a gain. What matter wet trenches, discomfort, freezing cold? The line has made a gain. It is lack of movement that sends their spirits down, the fearful boredom of the trenches, varied only by the dropping shells, so that they term themselves, ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and we used him to plan future triumphs for us. Though he thought much he produced but little. We all knew that he was evolving great projects mentally, but somehow he could not get them out in front of the spot-light. His one great achievement was calling a meeting of protest against the Senor's boredom in the smoking-room. The meeting was held and two resolutions were drafted to be read at dinner in the saloon; but somehow no one liked to hurt the Senor's feelings, and they were ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... of imprisonment, the lawyer, as far as it was possible to judge from his short notes, suffered terribly from loneliness and boredom. From his wing day and night came the sound of the piano. He rejected wine and tobacco. "Wine," he wrote, "excites desires, and desires are the chief foes of a prisoner; besides, nothing is more boring than to drink ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... Bitter One would have us believe. In a short article that he wrote about one of the playgrounds of America, he betrayed his own incurable jaundice. In the New York "Independent" for 8 August 1907, Gorki published a brilliant impressionistic sketch of Coney Island, and called it "Boredom." Gorki at Coney Island is like Dante at a country fair. Thomas Carlyle was invited out to a social dinner-party once upon a time, and when he came home he wrote savagely in his diary of the flippant, light-hearted conversation among the men and women about the festive ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... longer dead are ripe; and the oranges of those who died long ago are dry and wizened. There is no night in that blessed land, and no sleep; for the eyes of the spirits are never weighed down with slumber. Sorrow and sickness, decrepitude and death never enter; even boredom is unknown. But it is only the nights, or rather the hours corresponding to nights on earth, which the spirits pass in these realms of bliss. At daybreak they revisit their old home on earth and take up their posts in the cemeteries where they are honoured; then at nightfall they flit away back ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... written thus? Because my soul cries out with boredom before every Christmas, boredom with all the books that are all written the same way. I had even the intention of writing in dialect, so as to be truly Norwegian; but when I saw you understood the country's language also, I gave up writing in dialect because, for one ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... Stevenson who can say: "I never remember being bored;" and one may fairly doubt whether even Stevenson uttered truth when he made that extraordinary statement. None of us escapes boredom entirely: some of us, indeed, are bored during the greater part of our lives. The fact is unpalatable, but it is a fact. Each thinks that his existence is surrounded and hemmed in by the Ordinary; that his vocations and pastimes are ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... the European's boredom whilst watching the Nautch Dance in which the Indian Nautch girl, fully clothed, indeed in high tight bodice and ankle-length, voluminous skirt, will drive her native audience clean crazy with the tapping of her ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... plans for the holidays with apparent willingness. Though almost a child, I was not short-sighted. I knew every boy had a future as well as a present. I gave up my plans, and came here with a smile; but in my heart I hated my grandmother for having power, and so bending me to relinquish pleasure for boredom. I hated her, and I came to her and kissed her, and saw her beautiful white Persian cat sitting before the fire in this room, and thought of the fellow who was my bosom friend, and with whom I longed to be, shooting, or fishing, or riding. And I looked at the ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... ship's company look so frightened. Yes, in this tale of guilt, there was a curious absence of mere criminality, and a touch of that fantasy which is often a part of a seaman's character. It wasn't greed that moved him, I think. It was something much less simple: boredom, perhaps, or a bet, or the pleasure ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... possibility of his having had another tilt with the Scotch and sodas. He relieved her of that fear, and she restrained her curiosity until boredom seized her. The silence and the scratching of his pen began to grate on ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... ensuing boredom; if his neighbour at table were garrulous or banale, his face at once betrayed conversational prostration; a lady who often watched him used to say that his pulse ought to be felt after the first course; and that if it showed languor he should be moved to the side of some other partner. ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... we have been doing infantry work in the trenches. We have been out of work in our trenches; only shrapnel and snipers. Some one described this war as "Months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror." It is sad that it is such a bad country for cavalry. Cavalry work here against far superior forces of infantry, like we had the other day, is not good enough. The Germans are dashing good ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... Forty thousand skilled women had been put out of work in England because luxury was scared by the sudden vista of war, but the black-garbed girl, entrenched in her mahogany bower, was still earning some sort of a livelihood. In a moment, wakened out of her terrible boredom into an alert smile, she had sold to G.J. a bunch of expensive chrysanthemums whose yellow petals were like long curly locks. Thoughtless, he had meant to have the flowers delivered at once to Christine's flat. It would not do; it would be indiscreet. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... trousers, patent-leather boots, and lavender kid gloves, he was a sight worth driving miles to see, and he gave his audiences the best entertainment they had had in many a day, shouting jingles at them in the midst of his speeches and mercilessly ridiculing the Republicans. Here was none of the boredom of most political speeches, none of the long sonorous sentences with classical allusions which the big-name orators of the day poured out. His bold statements, his clipped rapid-fire sentences held the people's attention whether they agreed ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... despatch riders were truly grateful. Sitting the whole day in the tavern, we had all contracted bad headaches. Even chess, the 'Red Magazine,' and the writing of letters, could do nothing to dissipate our unutterable boredom. Never did we pass that tavern afterwards without a shudder of disgust. With joyous content we heard a month or two later that it had been closed ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... Here fretful boredom, to appease The nagging of her long disease, Comes day by day to dabble in This foamy ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... the interests of public order, by command of the authorities, there is kept a cartload of yellow hay, and one government hen struts to and fro. In short, existence in the town of O—— is truly delightful. During the first days of my stay in this town, I almost went out of my mind with boredom. I ought to say of myself that, though I am, no doubt, a superfluous man, I am not so of my own seeking; I'm morbid myself, but I can't bear anything morbid.... I'm not even averse to happiness— indeed, I've ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... my birthday, too. The necessity of celebrating this in utter boredom was a dismal prospect. Now this came upon ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... Pond spat his boredom at these useless questions into a far corner. "He was always a bit of a nib, was Charley. After he'd finished the day's work he'd put on a suit o' dark duds, a white collar, a watch on his wrist, an' all that bunko. Then we'd play poker or billiards ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... only the judiciously spoiled ladies of their race can be. Their hearts were divided between Fanny Fitz and the cook, the rest of them appertained to the Misses Harriet and Rachael Fitzroy, whom they regarded with toleration tinged with boredom. ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... On the first night of The Crusaders this taste was not exactly the taste of the audience. Mr. HENRY AUTHOR JONES seemed to object to be tied to time, and the result was the prompt appearance of that terrible conqueror of things terrestrial, General Boredom. Since the initial performance, it is reported that matters have gone on more smoothly. According to the "usual sources of information" the dramatist has been cheered on leaving his theatre, and heartily congratulated. On one occasion he actually supplemented his piece ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... another boredom, that of the weariness of the body, or its satiety of country air; the longing for the pleasures of the town, the tides of the soul attracted by the moon of habit. The tramp also confesses to that boredom. But when he gets back to the town to enjoy it for a while ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... both would suddenly duck down below the table to hide their merriment. Whatever story, no matter how interesting, was read aloud, they didn't appear to comprehend a word of it, and if a chapter from the Bible was read they either showed elaborate signs of boredom or else they would doze in their seats. Paula would gaze at them sadly—her young heart was grieved ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... all-questioning thought and culture, she had been turning to Evangelical religion for consolation. There was a new minister in a Baptist chapel a mile or two away, of whom she talked, whose services she attended. The very mention of him presently became a boredom to Fenwick. The new influence had no effect upon her jealousies and discontents; but it re-enforced a natural asceticism, and weakened whatever power she possessed of playing on a husband's passion. Meanwhile, Fenwick was partly aware of ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... volumes. The result of all this study was a beautiful and short Homeric epic in prose, called Taras Bulba. His appointment to a professorship in history was a ridiculous episode in his life. After a brilliant first lecture, in which he had evidently said all he had to say, he settled to a life of boredom for himself and his pupils. When he resigned he said joyously: "I am once more a free Cossack." Between 1834 and 1835 he produced a new series of stories, including his famous Cloak, which may be regarded as the legitimate beginning of ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... mutual mockery, masked as mutual praise, Is a great social bond in these strange days. ROCHEFOUCAULD here might gather Material for new maxims keen and cold. They meet, these convives, if the truth be told, For boredom and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... maid, with a jewel case in her hand, stared at him with undisguised curiosity. The lady bade him goodbye kindly, yet with a note of final dismissal in her tone. He had occupied her time for an hour or two, and saved her from absolute boredom. The matter was ended there. Nevertheless, from a quiet corner of the station he watched her stand listlessly on the platform while her things were being collected—a tall, distinguished looking figure, and very ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... cent. it is not so. Not theirs to reason so acutely, not theirs to care so much; to them the two dominant features of this war—death and boredom—appeal with far less force. For both depend so utterly on imagination in their effect on the individual. Death is only awful in anticipation; boredom only an affliction to the keen-witted. So to the ninety, perhaps, the "Why?" does not sound ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... doing anything rather than expire of boredom. She and Rex had been married a year and were living at home. Rex and Mr. Carter helped excavate down in the business district, as the working class wouldn't lift a finger as long as the Government ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... current topic of the day. Sometimes he wrote a short article; never in the daily Press, which he despised, nor in the reviews (for he never wrote anything as long as a magazine article), but in a literary weekly he would express in weary and polished phrases the unemphatic boredom or the mitigated approval with which the works of his fellow-men inspired him. He was the kind of man who had nothing in him you could positively dislike, but to whom you could not talk for five minutes without having a vague sensation of blight. Things seemed to shrivel up in his presence ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... listened to the insidious little tune that grew more captivating with each repetition, meanwhile letting her eyes wander happily over the circling figures of the dancers. Glamour overspread the scene; she was in the mood to see only the gracious and gay. For the moment the obvious boredom of confirmed pleasure-seekers escaped her entirely; the efforts of spoiled youth and jaded old age to escape from themselves had no place in the pattern of the life she saw before her. No, on the contrary, as she gazed through half-closed eyes, she fancied she ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... a half-stifled exclamation of anger. Then she shrugged her shoulders with inimitable contempt and fixed her gaze on the opposite wall, assuming an air of boredom she was ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... neither do they spin; they had nothing to do but float in the warm water and the bright sunshine; their only effort was to open their enormous jaws and yawn luxuriously, in the pure content of living, in absolute boredom. They reminded you only of fat gouty old gentlemen, puffing and blowing in the ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... his wife's heels, scarcely concealing his boredom. He was not a society man. Catrina came forward and exchanged a formal bow with Etta, who took in her plainness and the faults of her dress at one contemptuous glance. She smiled with the perfect pity of a good figure for no figure at all. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Imogen saw a latent boredom piercing Sir Basil's affability. Great truths uttered by some lips might be made to seem very unefficacious. She proposed to him that she should show him the wonderful display of mountain-laurel that grew higher up among the pine-woods. He rose with alacrity, but Mrs. Potts rose too. Imogen ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... sometimes inspired this feeling of boredom may be imagined from the way in which his performance of Macbeth was once received. To those who remembered how magnificently Betterton had played the part, the chill formalism of the new aspirant must have seemed presumptuous, and one night ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... life cannot satisfy man; he is a contemplative being, and he must find some all-inclusive whole, of which he is a part. If he fails to find it, life for him must become a blank, and he must fall a prey to boredom and satiety. Man's life is not to be confined to his own particular sphere, his life must extend far beyond that—he must concern himself with the infinite in the universe; "He must view life—nay, more, he must live it—in the light of this larger whole." A life ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... odd stillness that filled it. The sharpness of sound when it did come, the strangeness of suppressed excitement, the unfamiliar place with Split's quick figure missing, the loneliness of being without her, the boredom of lacking a playmate or a fighting-mate—it all affected Sissy as the prelude of a drama the end of which has something terrifyingly fascinating in it. It must be wonderful to die, thought Sissy, with a swift, satisfying vision of pretty young death—herself ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... Charity had been talking. He had not thought of any one's punishing him for neglecting her. But if Dyckman had enlisted in her cause—well, Cheever was afraid of hardly anything in the world except boredom and the appearance of fear. He answered ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Grundy. He never aped aristocracy in his household. He would go to a tavern for his oysters and a glass of punches simply as they did in Ben Jonson's days; and I have heard of his doing so from a sensation of boredom at a very great house indeed,—a house for the sake of an admission to which, half Bayswater would sell their grandmothers' bones to a surgeon. This kind of thing stamped him in our polite days as one of the old school, and was exceedingly refreshing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... a thing to end forever. I have always hated it, so far that is as my imagination enabled me to realise it; and now that I have been seeing it, sometimes quite closely for a full month, I hate it more than ever. I never imagined a quarter of its waste, its boredom, its futility, its desolation. It is merely a destructive and dispersive instead of a constructive and accumulative industrialism. It is a gigantic, dusty, muddy, weedy, bloodstained silliness. It is the plain duty of every man to give his life and all that ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... challenged Miss Custer to a game of croquet, and she, with secret reluctance, but a very good grace—being one of those sweetly-amiable people who never speak ill of any one, and never manifest the least boredom, no matter who undertakes the office of entertainer to them—accepted. However, she would make the most she could out of it. She invited the rest of the company to come down and look on and see that she had fair play. Bruce, at whom she glanced appealingly, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... nurse Cherry, who had taken a bad cold and needed medicine. Allison hurried away to give Jane her message, and there was nothing for Clive to do but to go to bed and resolve never to spend another Sunday in such boredom. For he "couldn't see" hobnobbing with an "old woman," as he called Julia Cloud, the way the others seemed entirely willing to do. What was she anyway but some poor relation likely who was acting as housekeeper? But at least for once in ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... return to Lyndhurst and boredom. An old lady at Twickenham Park has asked me to tea this afternoon, and I have to interview a ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... firmly memorized. With almost proprietary tenderness he studied the shining goods and trinkets; noted approvingly the clerks who seemed to him specially prompt and obliging to customers; scowled a little at any sign of boredom or inattention. He heard the soft sigh of the pneumatic tubes as they received money and blew it to some distant coffer: this money, he thought, was already partly his. That square-cut creature whom he presently ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... of the pretty widow and that his only safety lay in temporary flight. It was a favorite trick of his. In the charting of his course he had often found two other rocks beside Scylla and Charybdis in his way; one was boredom and the other was love. When a woman began to bore him, or he found himself liking her beyond the limit of his philosophy, he invariably found relief in change of scene. Sometimes it was a sick aunt or a persistent lawyer ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... which is perfectly understood abroad is that a cure must be largely mental; that in consequence boredom retards recovery. So during every hour of the day and evening a different amusement is provided for those who feel inclined to be amused. At Aix, for instance, Colonne’s orchestra plays under the trees at the Villa des Fleurs while you are sipping your ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... par, and there had been signs and symptoms of boredom, reminiscent of Bobby Smart whenever he had been seen in company ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... Alice, who looked very graceful and handsome, although also, to a discerning eye, a little sulky, and bored with a curious, abstracted boredom. ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ambitious young diplomat no chance. But once a minister, always a minister. Having lifted you out of the secretary class we can't demote you. Your days of deciphering cablegrams are over, and if you don't die of fever, of boredom, or brandy, call us up in a year or two and we will see ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... (Excitedly) Man alive! you've got a hymn-book and a piece of soap, what more do you want? You can play anything with that. (Thoughtfully) Oh, I forgot the Olympic games. Standing long jump. And they talk about the boredom of it! ...
— First Plays • A. A. Milne
... a class whose wealth permits them to break through the iron circle of work and boredom, who do picturesque and delightful things, which appeal directly to the imagination; they build a summer residence complete, in six weeks, with furniture and bric-a-brac, on the top of a roadless mountain; they sail in fairylike yachts to ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... Sylvia. She gave him a less warm welcome each time that he came to the house. She made plans to prevent herself being left alone with him, and if by chance the plans failed she listened rather than talked and listened almost with an air of boredom. ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... took the floor. Mike began to realize that, till now, he had never known what boredom meant. There had been moments in his life which had been less interesting than other moments, but nothing to touch this for agony. Comrade Prebble's address streamed on like water rushing over a weir. Every now and then there was a word or two which was recognizable, but ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... Incuriosity. — N. incuriosity, incuriousness &c. adj.; insouciance &c. 866; indifference, lack of interest, disinterest. boredom, ennui (weariness) 841; satiety &c. 639; foreknowledge (foresight) 510;. V. be incurious &c. adj.; have no curiosity &c. 455; take no interest in &c. 823; mind one's own business. Adj. incurious, uninquisitive, indifferent; impassive ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... world was as settled and peaceful, as conscious of its imperial responsibilities, as susceptible to boredom, as greedy of amusement, could show as numerous a leisured class, and believed as firmly in money, as our own. What is more important for our purpose, it was questioning the truth of its religion as we are to-day questioning the truth of ours. Lucian ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... the theatres were shut. The streets were damp and dirty. It was all very well for the generals, appearing every night in the glare and glitter of the footlights; but for the rank and file the occupation of London spelt pure boredom. ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... wherever the unconscious royalties led, meeting the same people, listening to the same music, talking the same talk, eating the same dinners—would no one ever invent anything new to eat? The inexpressible boredom of riding up and down the Row every morning, the unutterable hours shopping and trying on clothes, the weariness of all the new pictures, and all the concerts, and all the operas, which seemed to grow less pleasing every year, as her eye and ear grew ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... this day belongs to the 8th and 19th Brigades. My own were spectators only; deeply interested, and our own fate might at any moment become involved, but harassed with heat and flies and the unspeakable boredom born of long warfare, which even a battle can disperse only in part. Stories filtered through of the heroic work of the Seaforths and Manchesters and of the 47th and 59th Sikhs. Report persisted that the Seaforths' head quarters had been knocked out by a direct hit, with twelve casualties, ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... imagination, or—Anyway I seem to get furtive and fleeting glimpses which I take to be the weariness and condolence of age; indifference to sights and things once brisk with interest; tasteless stale stuff which used to be champagne; the boredom of travel: the secret sigh behind the public smile, the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... ideal of moulding all business institutions and ideas of prosperity in the interests of scientific evolutionary aims and large human pleasures. As Pigou has said, 'Environment has its children as well as men.' Monotony in labor, tedium in officework, time spent in business correspondence, the boredom of running a sugar refinery, would be asked to step before the bar of human affairs and get a health standardization. To-day industry produces goods that cost more than they are worth, are consumed by persons who are degraded by the consuming; it is destroying permanently the raw-material ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... ceased to be—if one may use so fine a word for genteel abstinence—virtuous. He didn't ride well, he hadn't good hands, and he hadn't good hands for life. He must go hard and harsh, high or low. He was a man who needed BITE in his life. He was exceptionally capable of boredom. He had been bored by London. Social occasions irritated him, several times he had come near to gross incivilities, art annoyed him, sport was an effort, wholesome perhaps, but unattractive, music he loved, but it excited him. The defendant broke the sunset ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... be married. Nor was his letter a lie. After long hesitations he had decided on this step, and it seemed to him clear that no one would suit him so well as Mrs. Byril. By marrying an old mistress, he would save himself from all the boredom of a honeymoon. And sitting in the drawing-room, in the various pauses between numerous licentious stories, they discussed ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... was suddenly plunged into the vortex of modern thought. The dictum Insall quoted, that modern culture depended largely upon what one had not read, was applied to her; a child of the new environment fallen into skilful hands, she was spared the boredom of wading through the so-called classics which, though useful as milestones, as landmarks for future reference, are largely mere reminders of an absolute universe now vanished. The arrival of a novel, play, or treatise by one of that small ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of daring marked this siege of Trin; there had been great fatigues and many losses. But of boredom, after De Grammont's arrival, there was never any throughout the army; no more weariness in the trenches, no more dulness among the generals. Everywhere, this ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... possible. And that is the only sort of effort a discarnate individuality can exert. So, unable to endure the fifty or so years needed to make a really good reincarnation, he reincarnates in a year or so, out of pure boredom, into the first vehicle he can find, usually one nobody else wants." Dr. Harnosh dug out the heel of his pipe and blew through the stem. "But nobody will admit his own mental inferiority, even to himself. Now, every machine operator and ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... it is true. . . . But such green, green, green, as flutters in the vineyard down below the windows, that I never saw; nor yet such lilac and such purple as float between me and the distant hills; nor yet in anything, picture, book, or vestal boredom, such awful, solemn, impenetrable blue, as in that same sea. It has such an absorbing, silent, deep, profound effect, that I can't help thinking it suggested the idea of Styx. It looks as if a draught of it, only so much as you could scoop up on the beach in the hollow of your hand, would wash ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... slowly steaming through the green sea-meadows late on a summer afternoon. In the cars, incessant stretching of cramped legs, shifting of shoulders, striking of matches, passing of cigarettes, groans of boredom; occasionally concerted laughter about nothing. Suddenly the train stops short. Clipped heads and tanned faces pop out at every window. The boys begin to moan and shout; ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... Nor did a man of Croy have the size and strength to compel their respect; Cappen's light blade flickered swiftly enough so that no one cared to fight him, but he lacked the power of sheer bulk. Svearek alone had enjoyed hearing him sing, but he was niggardly and his brawling thorp was an endless boredom to a man used to the ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... the mouth of the clergyman, they were false, indecent. She tried to read. But again the tedium and the sense of the falsity of the spoken word put her off. She went to stay with girl friends. At first she thought it splendid. But then the inner boredom came on, it seemed to her all nothingness. And she felt always belittled, as if never, never could she stretch her length ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... been almost a year since I saw them, the Over Lords of the World, and I had forgotten their appearance. Sprawled on the glowing silks of their cushioned couches, eyes closed in languid boredom, they were like huge white slugs. Swollen to tremendous size by the indolent luxuriousness of their lives, the flesh that was not concealed by the bright hued web of their robes was pasty white, and bagged and folded where the shrunken muscles beneath ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... fasting period, the first colonic scheduled for the next afternoon. I'll spare you a detailed description of my first fast with colonics; you'll read about others shortly. In the end I withstood the boredom of water fasting for 17 days. During the fast I had about 7 colonics. I ended up feeling great, much trimmer, with an enormous rebirth of energy. And when I resumed eating it turned out to be slightly easier to control my dietary habits ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... Harkings. To obtain the letter—or, at any rate, a copy of it—from Jeekes and to hand it to Robin Greve would, thought Bruce, restore his prestige as an amateur detective, at any rate in his own eyes. Moreover, a chat with Jeekes over the whole affair seemed a Heaven-sent exit from the impasse of boredom into which he had drifted this ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... Seagull" was performed at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Petersburg. It was a fiasco. The actors did not know their parts; in the theatre there was "a strained condition of boredom and bewilderment." The notices in the press were prejudiced and stupid. Not wishing to see or meet anyone, Chekhov kept out of sight after the performance, and by next morning was in the train on his way back to Melihovo. The subsequent performances ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... nations, in families, in individuals, the jagged lines of evil, so devastating, so horrible, so irremediable; and even worse than evil—which has at least something lurid and fiery about it—the dark, slimy streaks of meanness and jealousy, of boredom and ugliness, which seem to have no use at all but to make things move heavily and obscurely, when they might ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not Deb, was too sweet and good for words. She put the little hired girl on the front seat with the groom, and sat in the body of the waggonette to talk to Guthrie and to take care of his child. There was no awkward shyness on her part now, and no boredom on his. Little Harry fused them. She had remembered to bring fresh milk and rusks for a possibly hungry baby, and he sat on her lap as she fed him, and cooed to her when his mouth was not too full, ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... prejudice," the Prince said on that occasion, "which obliges us to shut ourselves off from the other ranks, and to confine ourselves altogether to our own circle, for monotony and boredom are the inevitable consequences of it. How many honorable men of sense and education, and especially how many charming women and girls there are, who do not belong to the aristocracy, who would infuse fresh life and a new charm into our dull, listless society! I very much wish ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... sort of feeling? which I admit often takes more reasonable forms than these I have suggested. It is the same psychological cause that brings about the changes of fashion in art or dress: which loves 'stunts' and makes the fortunes of yellow newspapers. It is boredom or ennui. We have had too much of A; we are sick of it, we know how it is done and despise it; give us some B, or better still some Z. And after a strong dose of Z we shall crave for the beginning ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... a knotty problem, isn't it?" he continued after a moment. "I might want you to flirt with me in order to avert my suicide in the pond through boredom. . . ." ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... something in this fashion, the Daily Mail crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... little tapers; without the walls encompassing Paris with dancing, love-making, wine-drinking, tobacco-smoking, tomb-visiting, billiard card and domino playing, quack-doctoring, and much murderous refuse, animate and inanimate—only last Sunday, my Lady, in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair, almost hated her own maid for ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the Edinburgh professoriate appears to have been mainly negative, and in some cases deterrent; creating in his mind, not only a very low estimate of the value of lectures, but an antipathy to the subjects which had been the occasion of the boredom inflicted upon him by their instrumentality. With the exception of Hope, the Professor of Chemistry, Darwin found them all "intolerably dull." Forty years afterwards he writes of the lectures of the Professor of Materia Medica that they were ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... present world no longer as a wonderland of experiences, but as geography and history, as the repeating of names that were hard to pronounce, and lists of products and populations and heights and lengths, and as lists and dates—oh! and boredom indescribable. He thought of religion as the recital of more or less incomprehensible words that were hard to remember, and of the Divinity as of a limitless Being having the nature of a schoolmaster and making infinite rules, known and unknown ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... sardonically, what any one of those whom he had caustically defined as her "poodles" would give for an hour or so of similar boredom, if it involved Lilith all to himself. Some of this must have been reflected in his eyes, for Lilith ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... women working with women; whereas, according to Steptoe's psychology, men should work with women and women with men. There were thousands of women who were bitter in heart at cooking and making beds who would be happy as linnets in offices and shops; and thousands of men who were dying of boredom in offices and shops who would be in their element ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... nothing but wait at table, where he idly flicked away the flies, and as idly changed the plates. He was almost too idle to speak, and when the visitors addressed him he answered in a tone indicating excessive boredom or a guilty conscience. Because he was quiet, never seriously drunk, and did not smoke, his master had made him butler; he was also ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... often due to bad ventilation of the room, more often still to boredom. A good plan in this case is to raise the pitch a semitone; it is often just as easy for singing, and invariably ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... was at a loss. He was tired of shooting; he hated yachting; the ordinary country-house visit was nothing but shooting in the daytime and unmitigated boredom in the evening. Really he didn't know what to do with himself. This alarming state of mind might have issued in some incongruous activity of a useful sort, had not he been rescued from it by the sudden discovery that he had a mission. This revelation dawned upon him in consequence ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... of 1712, Lady Mary, who was with child, suffered much from ill-health, and this was to some extent aggravated by intense boredom, although of that ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... a campaign of conquest extremely diverting to observe. To Lanyard it seemed that her methods were crude and obvious enough; but it did something toward mitigating the long-drawn boredom of the cruise to watch them work out, as they seemed to invariably, with entire success; and then remark the insouciance with which, another raw scalp dangling from her belt, Liane would address ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... glittering steps, those milestones upon time, Those tombstones of dead selves, those hours of birth, Those moments of the soul in years of earth. They mark the height achieved, the main result, The power of freedom in the perished cult, The power of boredom in the dead man's deeds Not the bright ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... that we see too much of one another; then why do you want to drive our acquaintance to the last limits of boredom?" ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... is no subject upon which he has not something worth while to say. His memory is remarkable; he can quote poet after poet, or compose a poem on anything that crops up at the table. I do not think it can be said that Chesterton is a good listener. This is not in any way conceit or boredom, but is rather that he is always thinking out some new story or article or poem. Yet he is a good host in the niceties of the table; he knows if you want salt; he does not forget that wine is the symbol ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... nobody endeavours to verify, every one ends by repeating what he learnt at school, till there come to be names and things which nobody would venture to meddle with. For a modern reader the perusal of Homer results incontestably in immense boredom; but who would venture to say so? The Parthenon, in its present state, is a wretched ruin, utterly destitute of interest, but it is endowed with such prestige that it does not appear to us as it really is, but with all its accompaniment of historic memories. ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... changed. The journey had thoroughly exhausted him. The constant presence of a stranger during the last two days, the many fruitless discussions, had completely upset his nerves. A certain bitterness, which was neither boredom nor anger, accumulated mysteriously in the depths of his being. He was annoyed with himself for his lack of courage, but his heart ached. He went up to the window and looked out into the garden. It was an old-fashioned garden, with rich dark soil, ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... exactions and remissions of "forfeits," that plunge everybody into embarrassing situations, and destroy, instead of creating, sociability; none of those stock—so-called—"drawing-room entertainments;" in fact, which always result in hopeless boredom. But, we had a little music and part-singing: a little lively, general chit- chat, in which all could join and each take a share: a few anecdotes well told—a complete success, to be brief, in making us all feel perfectly natural and at ease, for we were allowed to do ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Ester, briefly and truthfully, notwithstanding the fact that she was having her first experience in that boredom. ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... big Miam Devil Special protruding from the holster on his right hip, came briskly back along the corridor. Between fifteen and twenty men, their guns also conspicuously in evidence, were scattered about the entrance hall, expressions and attitudes indicating a curious mixture of boredom and uneasy tension. The eyes of about half of them swiveled around to Quillan when he came into the hall; then, with one exception, they looked indifferently ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz
... the salvia, as by a miracle, blossoms on the jasmine? What if the former stifles the latter? Indeed, one can escape boredom, but not love. One can flee the quidnuncs of the salon, but not the questioning perplexity of one's heart. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... smoking, she inquired after Phoebe's boy. She declared she was "so fond of children" in a tone which compelled credence. She wished to know the colour of Victor's eyes and hair; she listened to Phoebe's marvellous stories of his precocity without the slightest sign of scepticism or boredom. ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... stooped to become one of Rose's adorers. If he had ever flirted with her, he had done it out of boredom. She was beautiful—ah yes, Rose was beautiful; but Dinah was quite convinced she had no brains. And Eustace would never seriously consider ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... conceited at all— he simply regarded himself as a completely exceptional person. He was not elated that he was exceptional, he did not flatter himself because it was so; God had seen fit (in a moment of boredom, perhaps, at the number of insignificant and misshaped human beings He was forced to create) to fling into the world, for once, a truly Fine Specimen, Fine in Body, Fine in Soul, Fine in Intellect. Brandon had none of the sublime ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
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