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Frustration   /frəstrˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Frustration

noun
1.
The feeling that accompanies an experience of being thwarted in attaining your goals.  Synonym: defeat.
2.
An act of hindering someone's plans or efforts.  Synonyms: foiling, thwarting.
3.
A feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Frustration" Quotes from Famous Books



... magistrates about a pauper, a superficial observer might have seen little difference, beyond his superior shrewdness, between the Vicar and his bucolic parishioners; for it was his habit to approximate his accent and mode of speech to theirs, doubtless because he thought it a mere frustration of the purposes of language to talk of 'shear-hogs' and 'ewes' to men who habitually said 'sharrags' and 'yowes'. Nevertheless the farmers themselves were perfectly aware of the distinction between ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... buttoned in the breast of his doublet. The keen air of the February afternoon fanned his face. His heart was full of tender thoughts of Cherry and her sweet affection for him. How soon would it be possible, he wondered, to claim her as his own; and what would Martin Holt say to the frustration of ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green

... under Emil's gaze of acute pathos—human life aware of its present frustration. Then suddenly Emil became once more an animated and hungry monkey with no care but for ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... [Footnote: Cf. Charles E. Merriam, The Present State of the Study of Politics, American Political Science Review, Vol. XV. No. 2, May, 1921.] His data are uncertain, his means of verification lacking. The very best qualities in him are a source of frustration. For if he is really critical and saturated in the scientific spirit, he cannot be doctrinaire, and go to Armageddon against the trustees and the students and the Civic Federation and the conservative press for a theory of which he is not sure. If you are ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... London. He could not live there: he could not contain himself. The cottage was shut-up—or lent to friends. He went down sometimes to work in his garden and keep the place in order. Then with the empty house around him at night, all the empty rooms, he felt his heart go wicked. The sense of frustration and futility, like some slow, torpid snake, slowly bit right through his heart. Futility, futility: the horrible marsh-poison went through his veins ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence

... see that we get much ahead by trying to sentimentalize the situation," he said, with a gesture that seemed one of frustration. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... sufficiently cultivated their gifts, or that they have not done their best to bring them into use? Or may they not have wanted to use them for ends of their own and not of God's? I feel as if I must stand up against every difficulty lest God should be disappointed in me. Surely any frustration of the ends to which their very being points must be the person's own fault? May it not be because they have not yielded to the calling voice that they are all their life a prey to unsatisfied longings? They may have gone picking and ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... I am glad you brought Sophy home in such good time. For I'm in a state of perfect frustration this afternoon. Here's a bride gown and bonnet to make, and a sound of more ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr

... will complete this romantic episode. The next long vacation I spent in London, bent, needless to say, on a happy issue to my engagement. How simple, in the retrospect, is the frustration of our hopes! I had not been a week in town, had only danced once with my FIANCEE, when, one day, taking a tennis lesson from the great Barre, a forced ball grazed the frame of my racket, and broke a blood ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... around to making approved lists of music yet, though you'd surely never hear Mozart in a public place. Lancaster got a cigar from the humidor and collapsed his long gaunt body across chair and hassock. Smoke, whiskey, good music—they washed his mind clean of worry and frustration; he drifted off in a mist of unformed dreams. Yes, it wasn't ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson

... strange new blossoms we call Faith, and Hope, and Charity. For Folly cried, 'I know not, but I believe'; Squalor, 'I am vile, but I hope'; and the oppressed, 'I am despised, but I love.' That was the Christian Trinity, the echo of man's frustration, as the other was the echo of his accomplishment. Yet both he needs. For because he grows, he is dogged by imperfection. His weakness is mocked by those shining forms on the mountain-top. But Faith, and ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... and an attendant was closing the piano. The foyer was crowded with people waiting to get out. The word passed that it was raining heavily. I wondered how I should find my cab. I felt very lonely and unknown; I was overcome with sadness—with a sense of the futility and frustration of my life. Such is the logic of the soul, and such the force of reaction. Gradually the ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... in which this can hardly be so. A man of sense can bear cheerfully the frustration of the romantic fancies of childhood and youth; but not many are so philosophical in regard to the comparatively reasonable anticipations of more reasonable years. When you got married at five-and-forty, your hopes were not ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... is the outward cosmos, fettered to the law of periodic recurrence. Its chains had been dissolved forever by the Persian seer through his self-realization. "How oft hereafter rising shall she look . . . after me-in vain!" What frustration of search by a frantic universe for ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... burghers have foreseen that the entire country would be laid waste in any case as the war proceeded, nothing could have saved the mines. But the devastation of Boer homesteads was not to begin until a much later period, and to this fact the "Destroyers" no doubt owed the frustration of their schemes. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... accept an invitation from his uncle, to accompany him through Spain to Lisbon. The reader has had cause to believe that Mr. C. himself had relinquished this wild plan, but it was by implication, rather than by direct avowal. Perhaps, in the frustration of so many of his present designs, a latent thought might linger in his mind, that America, after all, was to be the fostering asylum, where, alone, unmingled felicity was to be found. The belief is hardly ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... frustration, stamped her foot, and dashed away into the mess hall. Chuckling, Alan followed and found his seat at the bench assigned to Crewmen ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg

... Fai, with a reassuring glance, "it is a detail that is not essential to the frustration of Fang's malignant scheme, for already well on its way towards Hien Nan may be seen a trustworthy junk, laden with two formidable crates, each one containing fivescore plates of the justly ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... active opponent, long enough to have disheartened our nation, if it was as easily to be discouraged by the difficulties and dangers, now past, as it is in some quarters represented again to be by the problems arising out of the war and its conquests. Such discouragement, perplexity, and consequent frustration of the adversary's purposes are indeed the prime function of a "fleet in being,"—to create and to maintain moral effect, in short, rather than physical, unless indeed the enemy, yielding to moral effect, ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan

... strong modern school of writers care only to talk of misery and gloom and frustration, I retain a taste for joy and sweetness and kindliness. Life has so many sharp crosses, so many inexplicable sorrows for us all, that I hold it good to snatch at every moment of gladness, and to ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman

... the blast struck us suddenly out of a sunny sky. We live again the slow months of enforced vacation, and the brief spell of apparent security, broken by the second stroke. We recall the slow and painful sickening of hope, amid the frustration of attempted remedies; the watchings and communings by late firesides; the morning questionings and bulletins; the deepening of fears, until the moment when the sharp pressure of calamity became the liberating touch, and made a hazardous ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine

... children went now and then, refusing to go back on Vera. Frances did not like it, but she had not interfered with their liberty so far as to forbid it positively; for she judged that frustration might create an appetite for Mr. Stephen's society that otherwise they might not, after ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... arriving in the north) Foch had the high command of the German army as completely thwarted in its design as it had been at the Marne. It had fallen to Foch to defeat the German plan on the east (Lorraine), in the center (Marne) and on the west (Ypres). And the consequences of this frustration that he dealt them in Flanders were calculated to be "at least equal to the victory of the Marne." Colonel Requin calls that Battle of the Yser "like a preface to the ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... to postpone "Rienzi" till May. We shall invite Tichatschek for it. All that IS POSSIBLE will be done, but I am annoyed that the result will again be very small. Fischer of Dresden writes me a very sad letter about the frustration of his hope of producing "Reinzi" there in the course of the winter. He and Tichatschek and many others are cordially devoted to you, and we shall certainly not fail to do our duty as far as in ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... telephone in its cradle and turned again to the Master Selector. Among the kaleidoscope of voices and figures not all were scenes of frustration and discontent. Yet enough of them were so that Mrs. Mimms was seriously disturbed. Then again, the apparatus had its indiscriminate faults: at one scene Mrs. Mimms blushed deeply and flicked the dial to another ...
— The Amazing Mrs. Mimms • David C. Knight

... desk, his hands trembling. He wasn't sure just when the last straw had been added, but he was sure that he had had enough. The restrictions, red tape, security measures of these government laboratories seemed to close in on his mind in boiling, chaotic waves of frustration. What was the good of his work, all this great installation, all the gleaming expensive equipment in the lab around him? He was alone. None of them seemed to share his problem, the unctuous, always correct Gordon, the easy-mannered, unbearable Mason, all of them gave him a feeling ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon

... of frustration. Rudin is destroyed by his own temperament. The heroes of "A House of Gentlefolk" and "Torrents of Spring" are ruined by the malign machinations of satanic women. Bazarov is snuffed out by a capriciously evil destiny. Insarov's splendid mind and noble aspirations accomplish nothing, because his ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... distinguished, he was not the only representative of the anti-Rabbinic school in the neo-Hebrew literature. The decline of liberalism in official state circles, and the frustration of every hope of equality, had their effect in reshaping the policy pursued by educated Jews. Up to this time they had cherished no desire except for external emancipation and to assimilate with their neighbors ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... force within him. He was young and strong, aching with his desire for life in its fullest sense. And he did not know how he was going to live and endure the manner of life he had to face, a life that held nothing but frustration and denial of all that was necessary to him, which was making him suffer as acutely as he had ever suffered in the field, under the knives of callous surgeons, in the shambles of the front line or the ether-scented dressing stations. There is morphine ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... the crowning evil of whose planning he was partly guilty inasmuch as he had tacitly consented to Joseph's schemes, Gregory called for his daughter. She came readily enough, hoping for exactly that which was about to take place, yet fearing sorely that her hopes would suffer frustration, and that she would ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini

... grown bigger and more complex in America, as the forces that shape our lives seem to have grown more distant and more impersonal, a great feeling of frustration ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... bade the driver return with all speed to Mr. Wilkie's house, setting her mind, during her transit on the frustration of the hopes of her daughter-in-law, against whom she in her heart registered a vow of vengeance. She found her son pacing the dining-room like a madman, and she at once gave him all the particulars concerning her reconnaissance, adding, at the same time, that he must take legal measures to ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer

... but vividly the critical situation of 1780, and tells at length the story of Arnold's treason, its frustration by the capture of Andre and his pathetic fate. This "one romance of the Revolution" is a thrilling tale, and all adornment is given to it. The account of the struggle to save Andre's life gives the interest of controversy, as does the defense of Washington's course. The anecdote and the illustrative ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger

... rashly and without reason. You will remember how I leaned forward and peered into the dark hole when I was stranded on the tiny island in the sea, and how I struck the tree with a limb on the shores of Lake Umquam Renatusum. Likewise, I again did something which would seem illogical and vain: in my frustration, I pushed the table that I happened to be standing against with as much force as I could muster. It slid softly along the carpeting before coming to a halt a few inches from the glass wall. It made no noise or jarring of the floor, but the sudden ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn

... make themselves the consoling companions of human frailty and disappointment through the generations. It is the paradox of such natures that they should express themselves in the very record of their frustration. Amiel may be taken as the type of such writers. In confiding to his Journal his hopeless inability for expressing his high thought, he expressed what is ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... stronger impression of the owner's intellectual quality than the acquisition by him of the finest library could have conveyed. One of the experiences which disgusted him with St. Kitt's was the frustration by its authorities of an attempt he was making to teach a negro boy to read, and the understanding that all such educative action ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... he could be naive he could also be mischievous and even subtle, and he was very swift in grasping a situation, very sharp in reading character, very cunning in the pursuit of his pleasure, very adroit in deception, if he thought that publicity of pursuit would be likely to lead to the frustration ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... field glasses and stood for a full minute filled with a keen frustration. The splitting din about him roared on uninterruptedly, and yet somehow he had been hoping the Vulcan ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling



Words linked to "Frustration" :   annoyance, hindrance, frustrate, vexation, chafe, hinderance, disappointment, interference, letdown



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