"Insufferably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have it held from him by a young fellow he so much despised, and who had no entrance into the house but through his own boldness, and no inducement to stay in it but from his own impertinence, mortified him so insufferably, that it was with difficulty he even forbore from affronting him. Nor would he have scrupled a moment desiring him to leave the room, had he not prudently determined to guard with the utmost sedulity against raising any suspicions of his passion ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... taste of a terrestrial couch again our seafarers went to bed early—it was still insufferably hot, and the buzz of the mosquitoes at the open windows might have passed for an audible crepitation of the temperature. "We can't stand this, you know," the young Englishmen said to each other; and they tossed ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... his misfortune, that there's nothing natural in him. . . . I want to speak of what is good; of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! . . . He is not an actor, as I called him, nor a cheat, nor a scoundrel; he lives at other people's expense, not like a ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... hanging out at one door and our feet at the opposite one. If you have never heard that Miss Dawes has been married these two months, I will mention it in my next. Pray do not forget to go to the Canterbury Ball; I shall despise you all most insufferably if ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... him, while she was in this state; for, though he used to surround her with every luxury, and was always hunting out new appliances, and raising the heavens for a trifle, he kept himself carefully out of her sight during the greater part of the winter. I don't know whether she became insufferably lonely, or whether the melancholy wore off, or she conquered it, and decided that it was not right to go crazy for nothing, or what happened. But one cold March evening he set out for his home, dreary, as usual, he thought; and he found the fire blazing and reddening ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... I should say," removing his hat with mock courtesy, and stepping across the threshold. "Not going out without an escort, my dear? Surely not. Really, I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends down town, for boring me so insufferably, else I should have missed ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the ladies of Luxemburg, those excellent persons prayed her to clothe herself as honest girls were wont to do. Above all, the English ladies, who have always made a parade of chastity and modesty, must have considered her so disguising herself monstrous and insufferably indecent. The Duchess of Bedford sent her female attire; but by whom? By a man, a tailor. The fellow, with impudent familiarity, was about to pass it over her head, and, when she pushed him away, laid his unmannnerly hand upon her—his tailor's hand on that hand which had borne the flag of France. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... but it is something to marry a niece of Lady Jane, and I dare say Miss McPherson will make the girl her heir; so I will welcome her as my daughter, and perhaps she will brighten up the house, which is at times insufferably dull, with your father growing more and more silent and gloomy every day. I should not wonder if he were to become crazy, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find a most intolerable stench. Did you ever behold streets so insufferably narrow, or houses so miraculously tall? What gloom their shadows cast upon the ground! It is well the swinging lamps in those endless colonnades are kept burning throughout the day; we should otherwise have the darkness of Egypt in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... descending the landslip. The sun's rays had grown insufferably hot. In front of them, down below in the far distance, Maskull saw water and land intermingled. It appeared that they were travelling ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... to the affront, smirking insufferably across the slumbering street at the wooden Indian proffering cigars before the establishment of Selby Brothers, Confectionery ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... asked with a little flush of confusion. "Mrs. Sartin will be. She always expects him to marry a duchess at least. She is so insufferably proud of him." ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... himself, and took such other insufferably vain and impudent freedoms with your name, that I attempted to give him a little wholesome admonition with this, if his effeminate cries had not brought my lovely Harriet in to prevent me; but the very attempt has proved him to be the basest of dastards. ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... no reply, but very composedly drew from his pocket a handful of silver and gold; at the sight of the money, the landlady's eyes and mouth opened in astonishment—and her manner, from being most insufferably insolent, changed to ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle disdain? Life in Venetia must be very dull: no more explosion of pasteboard petards; no more treason in bouquets; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls—it must be insufferably dull. Ebbene, pazienza! Perhaps Victor Emanuel ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... was the name of the vessel, which smelt most insufferably of gin, and, as our readers may probably have anticipated, was a smuggler, running between Cherbourg and the English coast, soon entered the port, and, having been boarded by the officers of the douane (who made a very proper distinction between smuggling from and ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to appreciate," said the Baron, with a curl of his lip. "He forgets that he has stared most insufferably at me on many occasions, and that now he attempts ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... so exquisite that fifty or five hundred years hence they will be read, felt, and adored throughout the world. I grant that Wordsworth is very pure, very holy, very orthodox, and occasionally very elevated, highly poetical, and oftener insufferably obscure, starched, dowdy, anti-human, and anti-sympathetic, but he never will be ranked above Byron, nor classed with Milton.... I dislike his selfish Quakerism, his affectation of superior virtue, his utter insensibility to ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... liberty, of humanity, of religion'[A]—'so full of benevolence and the hallowed impulses of Heaven's own mercy, that one might, with the propriety of truth, compare its radiant influences to a rainbow, insufferably bright, spanning the sombre clouds of human wrong, that have accumulated on the horizon of our country's prosperity, and beating back, with calm and heavenly power, the blackening storm that always threatens, in growling ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... have made another stupid blunder," said he. "As I have told you plainly before, you are insufferably conceited. You think you know enough for two men, when you know just half enough for one. That's what's the matter. You have made a pretty kettle ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... speak of the enthusiasm excited by actresses, improvisatrici, female singers,—for here mingles the charm of beauty and grace,—but female authors, even learned women, if not insufferably ugly and slovenly, from the Italian professor's daughter who taught behind the curtain, down to Mrs. Carter and Madame Dacier, are sure of an admiring audience, and, what is far better, chance to use what they have learned, and to learn more, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... zenith blaz'd the orb of light; No shade, all sun, insufferably bright! Then the long line found rest [Footnote 1]—in coral groves Silent and dark, where the sea-lion roves:— And all on deck, kindling to life again, Sent forth their anxious spirits o'er the main. "Oh whence, as wafted from Elysium, whence These perfumes, ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... startled at the word, and at the idea, Helen exclaimed, "Oh! Miss Clarendon, how can you say so? anybody may he mistaken. Cecilia mistook—" Lady Cecilia joined them at this moment. Miss Clarendon's face was flushed. "This room is insufferably hot. What can be the use of a fire at this time ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... Esseintes had had the curiosity to read those of Madame Swetchine, the Russian, whose house in Paris was the rendezvous of the most fervent Catholics. Her writings had filled him with insufferably horrible boredom; they were more than merely wretched: they were wretched in every way, resembling the echoes of a tiny chapel where the solemn worshippers mumble their prayers, asking news of one another in low voices, while they repeat with a deeply mysterious ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... speaking as to the desire to make one dear to him forget the more beautiful country she was relinquishing for his sake. Otherwise he could not acquit the Baron of being avaricious, or at any rate insufferably close-fisted, seeing that, even though rolling in money and even when gloating over the old Fredericks d'or, he could not help bursting out with the peevish grumble, "I know the old rascal has ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... To men unschooled in the patience of the whaling trade, it would have been insufferably slow. For they struck fish; and day after day they hung idle on the waves while the trypots boiled; and day after day they loitered on good whaling grounds, when the boats were out thrice and four times between sun's rise and set. If Joel was impatient, he gave no sign. If his desires ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... hours that remain to you, indeed! One would think you were about to be executed, instead of married to an earl. Do not be so insufferably childish," returned her sister, impatiently. "There will be no time to-morrow for you to see Lady Cameron, and it is uncourteous, uncivil to ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... about for two weeks of increasing misery, when 'hides were thought very good meat, and rats, cats, mice, and dogs, parrots and monkeys that were got at great price, none escaped.' The Minion was of three hundred tons; and so was insufferably overcrowded with three hundred men, two hundred English and one hundred negroes. Drake's little Judith, of only fifty tons, could have given no relief, as she was herself overfull. Hawkins asked all the men who ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... and blowy to spread the linen, and Denas felt the morning insufferably long and tedious. Her father, who had been on the sea all night, dozed in his big chair on the hearthstone. Joan was silent, and went about her duties in a tiptoeing way that was very fretful to the impatience of Denas. ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... essence of the Christian religion. Believing the important part of the Gospel to be its ethical precepts, Grundtvig, furthermore, prided himself upon the correctness of his own moral conduct and his ability to control all unworthy passions. "I was at that time," he later complained, "nothing but an insufferably vain and narrow-minded Pharisee." ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... inharmonious family took place in the cell of the elder who had such an extraordinary influence on Alyosha. The pretext for this gathering was a false one. It was at this time that the discord between Dmitri and his father seemed at its acutest stage and their relations had become insufferably strained. Fyodor Pavlovitch seems to have been the first to suggest, apparently in joke, that they should all meet in Father Zossima's cell, and that, without appealing to his direct intervention, they might more decently come to an understanding under the conciliating influence of the elder's ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... ruined, and their confiscated estates had gone to increase the influence and patronage of the king. He being no longer in wholesome fear of Parliament, for the Commons were as yet weak and timid, did pretty much as he pleased, and became insufferably oppressive and tyrannical; raising taxes, for instance, without the consent of Parliament, and imprisoning and executing persons without due process of law. For the hundred years following the Wars of the Roses ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... warriors of Hell, the black wardens of the gloomy pandemonium, I all the time crouching very carefully within my veil. We entered the frightful and awful edifice, every corner of which abounded with horror. The walls were immense rocks of glowing adamant, the pavement of an insufferably sharp flint, the roof of burning steel, meeting like an arch of greenish- blue and dusky-red flames, and in its size and its heat, resembling an ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... no. It is not the engagement, but the severe cold with which I perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably damp. They ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek and a bell. The cars are like shabby omnibuses holding thirty, forty, fifty people. In the centre of the carriage there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal, which is for the most part red hot. It is insufferably close, and you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other object you may happen to ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... fortunately, had a small fortune of his own, independent of his father. But then he was also a spendthrift,—so said Mrs. Atterbury,—keeping a stable full of horses, for which he could not afford to pay; and he was, moreover, the most insufferably idle man who ever wandered about the world without any visible occupation for his hours. "But he hunts," said Adelaide. "Do you call that an occupation?" asked Mrs. Atterbury with scorn. Now Mrs. Atterbury painted pictures, copied ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... of Christ, therefore, earnestly incited by the example of its king, thinking indeed that the holy places are much more impiously and insufferably polluted by the infidels than when defiled by merchants, abide in the holy house with horses and with arms, so that from that, as well as all the other sacred places, all filthy and diabolical madness of infidelity being driven out, they may occupy themselves by day and by night in honorable ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... day in Washington. Even at early morning, while the sun was yet level with the faces of pedestrians in its broad, shadeless avenues, it was insufferably hot. Later the avenues themselves shone like the diverging rays of another sun,—the Capitol,—a thing to be feared by the naked eye. Later yet it grew hotter, and then a mist arose from the Potomac, and blotted out the blazing arch above, and presently piled up along the horizon ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... certainly enables men to retain the unjust privilege some time longer; but does not render it less unjust. Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in the harem of an Oriental: they do not complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely it is that even men complain of the general order of society; and how much rarer still would such complaint be, if they did not know of any different order existing anywhere else. Women do not complain of the general lot ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... of Adelaide and her lover, Walter of Gloucester, are so insufferably tedious that Scott doubtless decided to "leave to conjecture" their interminable vicissitudes. The names of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may be garnered by those who will, from such works as Living Authors (1817), or from the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... minds may be led astray when scope is given to invention in this matter of penal discipline, may be seen in the example of Jeremy Bentham himself. This celebrated man, whose cogitative faculty was assuredly of the most vigorous description, but who had a mode of developing it the most insufferably and needlessly prolix, would have filled our prisons with inextinguishable laughter by the introduction of certain "tragic masks," indicative of various crimes or passions, in which the several offenders were to be occasionally paraded—a quaint device, which would have given a carnival ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... quickly as he could. The young people opposite him were insufferably dull. Apparently they had never met each other before and were at a loss to make conversation to suit the occasion. Accordingly, they listened intently to the string band while the young man smoked a long cigar, and in the natural course ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... "that depends on circumstances. I shall not turn in until I feel that there is some chance of getting to sleep. And if this calm continues I think I shall sleep on deck; it is too insufferably hot altogether for one down here, just at present. Leave the ports open in your cabins, both of you, so that if there is any air stirring you will get the benefit of it. And now I think I will say good night to you both. Good night, sweetheart, and ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... yet in a spirit of inoffensive cordiality I remarked that the alternative was insufferably perplexing, while ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... Harriet glanced at a mirror; her brassy hair was as smoothly moulded as its tendency to curve and ring ever permitted, and she wore a thin old transparent white gown that looked at least comparatively cool on this insufferably hot evening. With hardly an ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... many men, so many fancies. My fancy was for an island. Perhaps boyhood's glamour hung still round sea-girt rocks, and "faery lands forlorn" still beckoned me; perhaps I felt that London was too full, the Highlands rather fuller, the Swiss mountains most insufferably crowded of them all. "Money can buy company," and it can buy retirement. The latter service I asked now of the moderate wealth with which my poor cousin Tom's death had endowed me. Everybody was good enough to suppose that I rejoiced at Tom's ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... country charms. She had endeavoured to get up some mild excitement with the bishop, but the bishop had been too plain spoken and sincere for her. The Primeros had been odious; the Hepworths stupid; the Longestaffes,—she had endeavoured to make up a little friendship with Lady Pomona,— insufferably supercilious. She had declared to Henrietta 'that Carbury Hall was ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... his age, and it would be charitable to ascribe a portion of his grossness to it. Voltaire is said by his loose talk to have driven Pope's good old mother from the table at Twickenham; Walpole's language not only in his home at Houghton, but at Court, was insufferably coarse; and Pope wrote to ladies in language that must have disgusted modest women even in his free-speaking day. His foul lines on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had formerly written in a most ridiculous strain of gallantry, and to whom he is said to have made love,[15] ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... I was puffed out with a sense of my own holiness. I was religiously confidential with my Father, condescending with Miss Marks (who I think had given up trying to make it all out), haughty with the servants, and insufferably patronizing with those young companions of my own age with whom I ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... many lands. In one country he learned one thing, and in another country he learned another thing. There was no country or kingdom so small or poor that it did not have something to teach the prince. And the prince, though he had been so insufferably stupid at his books, learned the lessons of his journey with an ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... monkey, the editor of the Press is "a most amusin kuss." The South never gets angry at that kind of an animal. Occasionally a corrupt Republican administration appoints some ignorant Ethiopian to office who becomes insufferably insolent to his white neighbors and is called down with a six-shooter; but for every negro office-holder "assassinated by Southern savages" at least five white women are dragged from their homes by Northern white-caps ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of self-abasement (it could be nothing else where a Wrandall was concerned), and smiled inwardly. The new idol of the Wrandalls was in love, selfishly, insufferably in love as things went with all the Wrandalls. They hated selfishly, and so they loved. Her husband had been their king. But their king was dead, long live the king! Leslie had put on the family crown,—a little jauntily, perhaps,—cocked over the eye a bit, ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... pictured the subterraneous one of the robbers in Gil Blas. Here we underwent the ceremony of having our pocket-books searched for papers and letters, and our trunks rummaged for knives and fire-arms. This done, we were shown to the lodging I have described, and the poor priests, already insufferably crouded, were obliged almost to join their beds in order to make room for us.—I will not pain you by a recital of all the embarrassments and distresses we had to surmount before we could even rest ourselves. We were in want of every thing, and the rules of the prison ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... was no fun in this, at such a time. I fell head foremost into deep snow, getting a lump in my right eye, which completely blinded me for a time. My forehead, eyebrows, and the bridge of my nose were insufferably painful. On reaching Matarengi I found my nose frozen through, and considerably swollen. The people were in bed, but we went into the kitchen, where a dozen or more were stowed about, and called for the landlord. Three young girls, who were in bed in one corner, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... within their walls. They are located over stores, as a general rule, and the Broadway establishments usually have a number of flashily-dressed, vulgar-looking men about their doors in the day time, who are insufferably rude to ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... It was growing insufferably hot. Blasts of air, as if from a furnace, began to rush up and down past them. And the trail was growing steeper still, and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... praises of a country life, but acknowledged that he quite agreed with him in disliking, pastorals—excepting always that beautiful drama, "The Gentle Shepherd." Mr. Percy said, that, in his opinion, a life purely pastoral must, if it could be realized, prove as insufferably tiresome in reality, as it usually is found to be in fiction. He hated Delias and shepherdesses, and declared that he should soon grow tired of any companion with whom he had no other occupation in common but "tending a few sheep." There was a vast difference, he thought, between ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... bewilder him with some new enigma. To her he seemed to be what he was not, simply a sham, a heavy piece of hypocrisy. Formalism and ostentatious piety she recognized as part of the business of a Nonconformist minister, in whom they were excusable, as his grave garb would be, but they seemed insufferably out of place when adopted by a layman and a man of the ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... begins devouring the food. Returning to himself, the Brahmin, in a rage, runs off into the darkness of the hall. Jasodha pursues him and brings him back. And he begins once more to cook his food. This episode was repeated three times in all its detail, and I confess I found it insufferably tedious. The third time Jasodha scolds the child and asks him why he does it. He replies—and here comes the pretty point of the play—that the Brahmin, in praying to God and offering him the food, unwittingly is praying to him and offering to him, and in eating ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... is by no means a clean place—it is twice as dirty as Lucera: a reposeful dirtiness, not vulgar or chaotic, but testifying to time-honoured neglect, to a feudal contempt of cleanliness. You crawl through narrow, ill-paved streets, looking down into subterranean family bedrooms that must be insufferably damp in winter, and filled, during the hot months, with an odour hard to conceive. There is electric lighting, of course—a paternal government having made the price of petroleum so prohibitive that the use of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... incapable of judging. And the self-satisfied and confident air with which she settles the most difficult questions, and pronounces unfavorable judgment upon people ten thousand times wiser and better than herself, is an insufferably irritating phenomenon. It is a singular fact, that the people I have in view invariably combine extreme ugliness with spitefulness and self-conceit. Such a person will make particular inquiries of you as to some near relative ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... "Besides being insufferably prosy," interpolated plain-spoken Nettie. "They are coming in. Milly, you and I can run away!" and they fluttered ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... peaches that might have been much improved by judicious culture; apples and pears that in England we should have no hesitation in pronouncing execrably bad; and a species of fruit unknown to all of us which the Chinese called Zee-ts, of a sweet sickly taste when ripe, otherwise most insufferably astringent. Some of the gentlemen thought they saw hazel nuts among the shruberry, but it is more than probable they were mistaken. A few bad grapes were sometimes brought to us, but the party who went from ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... that most of us fully expected that the first battle in the Holy Land was about to begin. It was by now high noon and insufferably hot, and the soft alluvial dust churned up by motor bicycles and galloping hoofs rose in suffocating clouds. We were penned in by the high cactus-hedges and not a breath of air could reach us to dissipate the choking dust. We had, it would ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... daylight old Caleb left the house to cross the low creek bed valley and join a working party in a new field which was being cleared of timber. He had been away two hours when without warning the hot air became insufferably close and the light ghost of breeze died to a breathless stillness. The drought had lasted almost four weeks, and now at last, though the skies were still clear, that heat-vacuum ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... subdued; And all unable now to twang the string, Or mount the breeze on many-colour'd wing. But never tawny monarch of the wood His raging rival meets, athirst for blood; Nor thunder-clouds, when winds the signal blow, With louder shock astound the world below; When the red flash, insufferably bright, Heaven, earth, and sea displays in dismal light; Could match the furious speed and fell intent With which the winged son of Venus bent His fatal yew against the dauntless fair Who seem'd with heart of proof to meet the war; Nor Etna sends abroad the ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... a black humor that you would know I am quite myself again and life has resumed for me its natural colors. I destroyed those letters one after the other because, although written with the effort of my whole being to be what you call sweet, they sounded to me insufferably disagreeable. And now whatever I write I shall have to send because if I destroy this letter also I shall not have time to write another before you come to see me as you promised. And the reason for my ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... has often wondered about it herself and expressed her wonder to you. She has insisted on it, so that she has put the idea into your head that I am insufferably pushing. Upon my word I think I have been very discreet. And how completely your aunt must have lost every tradition of sociability, to see anything out of the way in the idea that respectable intelligent people, ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... weaker daily, and the weather was insufferably hot, the thermometer being, in the coolest place, 107 at twelve in the morning, and 109 at three in the afternoon. At his own suggestion I made a couch for him outside the hut, in the shade, and placed a mat for myself by its side. For five successive ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... taking one's coffee at Florian's. It is of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are fortunately of the finest— otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... south, noble indeed—waters, forests, hoary mountains, and in the far distance the sea. But all these fine prospects were a poor compensation for what I underwent: I was scorched by the sun, which was insufferably hot, and my feet were bleeding from the sharp points of the rocks which cut through my boots like razors. At length coming to a stone wall I flung myself down under it, and almost thought that I should give up the ghost. After some time, however, I recovered, and getting ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... man's clothes, at eight o'clock, at noon, four o'clock in the afternoon, and in the evening; to be well received at every embassy, and to cull the short-lived flowers of superficial, cosmopolitan friendships; to be not insufferably handsome, to carry your head, your coat, and your name well; to inhabit a charming little entresol after the pattern of the rooms just described on the Quai Malaquais; to be able to ask a party of friends to dine at the Rocher de Cancale without a previous consultation with your trousers' pocket; ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... planned) Had reached the End of Book Eleven, And he was nearing Forty-Seven. Admirers had not long to wait; The last Book came at Forty-Eight, And should have been the Heart and Soul— The Crown and Summit—of the whole. But now the oddest Thing ensued; 'Twas so insufferably crude, So feeble and so poor, 'twas plain The Writer's Mind was on the wane. Nothing could possibly be said; E'en Friendship's self must hang the head, While jealous Rivals, scarce so civil, Denounced it openly as "Drivel." Never was such Collapse. In brief, The ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... moment, from the sublimity of his pagan virtue, the young man groaned for some pure certain light to guide him: the question whether he was about to do right made him weak. He took Caroline's head between his two hands, and kissed her mouth. The act brought Rose to his senses insufferably, and she—his Goddess of truth and his sole ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one cluster of ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... remarked, as guests will, gentle reader, when our backs are turned, that Howel was insufferably purse-proud and conceited, and his wife as affected and provincial as possible; they did not hear the friendly notices, and were well content to fill the concert room with their party, all in full dress, to the admiration of the townsfolk, and of Mrs ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... patient Bengalis could endure no more; the oxen were done up, the men refused to go farther without a rest. Halting at a hamlet some five miles from the river, they rested and fed till midnight, then set off again. It was not so insufferably hot at night, but on the other hand they were less able to avoid obstructions: and the rest had not been long enough to make up for the terrible ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... of closed windows in preference to invading companies of moths and June-bugs had made the room so insufferably warm that between heat and excitement Betty could not get to sleep. Instead she tossed restlessly about on her narrow couch, listening to the banging of the trolleys at the next corner and wishing she were still sitting on the breezy front seat, as the car dashed down the long hill toward the ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... pass through any of the narrow streets, but kept the widest; the ground and air, smoke and fiery vapor, continued so intense that my hair was almost singed and my feet insufferably surheated. The by-lanes and narrower streets were quite filled up with rubbish, nor could one have known where he was but by the ruins of some church or hall that had some remarkable tower or pinnacle remaining. I then went toward Islington and Highgate, where one might have seen two hundred thousand ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... odd. At home I am a democrat. A republic, a true republic, seems not improbable, a fighting dream. Yet beholding the back of the ears of a trotting man I perceive it to be impossible—the millennium another million years away. I grow insufferably superior and Anglo-Saxon. I am sorry, but what would you? ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... same way with me. You began it by criticizing my friend, Henry Hammond, and invited him to the judge's house party for the express purpose of humiliating and insulting him. The boys of your crowd gave him the cold shoulder when he tried to be friendly and Grace was insufferably rude to him on two ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... into thousands, as they might sometimes do, this plan would be insufferably tedious. In that case we are driven back upon the astronomical method. In consequence of the movement which is commonly called the precession of the equinoxes, though it might more accurately be described as a kind of second rotation ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... line. The word scythesman, for a short poem, is insufferably rough; and furthermore requires the inhalation of a good breath, before it can be pronounced; besides which, as the second objection, by connecting sheaves with scythesman, it shows that the scythe is cutting wheat, whereas, wheat is cut with a hook or ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... heat of the sun, upon a dry and sandy country, makes the air insufferably hot. Ali having robbed me of my thermometer, I had no means of forming a comparative judgment; but in the middle of the day, when the beams of the vertical sun are seconded by the scorching wind from the desert, ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... like a servant wench, and do the most menial offices in the family. But his funeral was no sooner performed, than she assumed the fine lady, and found so many people of both sexes to flatter, caress, and instruct her, that, for want of discretion and experience, she was grown insufferably vain and arrogant, and pretended to no less than a duke or earl at least for her husband; that she had the misfortune to be neglected by the English quality, but a certain poor Scottish lord was then ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... part of it was below the waters of the harbour. The place of his confinement was an arched under-ground and under-water gallery, with a grill-gate at the entrance, through which it received such light and air as it got. Its condition was insufferably foul, and a stranger could hardly breathe in it, or see in it with the aid of a torch. At the upper end of this dungeon, and consequently in the worst position, as being the furthest removed from light and air, the Englishman first beheld him, sitting ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... ventured to quote a little Latin for their edification. Poor simpleton! She thought she had produced quite an impression upon their minds. And, in truth, she had. She had fixed indelibly the impression that she was an insufferably weak and self-conceited girl. She made herself the laughing-stock of the whole company. The moment she was gone, there was one general burst of laughter. And not one of those gentlemen or ladies could ever think of that vain girl afterwards, ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... to you," continued Raymond, "the melancholy particulars. You shall see him, and judge for yourself; although I fear this visit, useless to him, will be insufferably painful to you. It has weighed on my spirits ever since. Excellent and gentle as he is even in the downfall of his reason, I do not worship him as you do, but I would give all my hopes of a crown and my right hand to boot, to ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... sleepless misery. In the day life was tolerable, but in the night—unless he defended himself by working, the losses and cruelties of the war came and grimaced at him, insufferably. Now he would be haunted by long processions of refugees, now he would think of the dead lying stiff and twisted in a thousand dreadful attitudes. Then again he would be overwhelmed with anticipations of the frightful economic ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... something insufferably insulting, both in the tone and in the insinuation concealed in the language, which was not entirely understood by the pure mind of Eveline, but which was maddening ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... usurp the boards. He in turn gives way to the hilarious buffoonery of the two slaves. The result is a succession of loose-jointed scenes[177]. The Aul. too is fragmentary and episodical. The Trin. is insufferably long-winded, with insufficient comic accompaniment. The Cis. is a wretched ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... to be sure, not everybody's amusements, and in an ordinary way they were not those of Mr. Manvers. But he found that his life gained a zest by being threatened with deprivation, and so long as that zest lasted he was willing to oblige Don Luis. The weather was insufferably hot, one could only be abroad early in the morning or late at night—both the perfection of seasons for the ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... cards and handkerchiefs that were declared superior to anything heretofore seen. But the little entertainment was to come to an abrupt conclusion. So engrossed had they been in its progress that they had not noticed that the sky had clouded over, and that it had suddenly grown insufferably oppressive. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... came a tap at the door, and Elizabeth Jane, the housemaid, announced that Parson Endicott had called. "Show him in," ordered Mr. Sam promptly, and at the same time—having suddenly made up his mind—he flung Hester an insufferably confidential glance, which seemed to say, "Never mind him; you and I are in the ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... upright. She sprang from the bed and, her heart beating insufferably, felt her way to the window. From the wing opposite the message had come—a soft, shrouded sound, another ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... days to go anywhere in a ball dress was a simple joy to me, I admired myself; now I feel ashamed and awkward. And then! The doctor.... Then..." Kitty hesitated; she wanted to say further that ever since this change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyevitch had become insufferably repulsive to her, and that she could not see him without the grossest and most hideous ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... of an hour,' answered Urania, meekly; 'but that seems rather long in a broiling sun. You always have such insufferably hot weather on your ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... of date. The apartments nearest to the Radiator are insufferably hot, those farthest away unbearably cold, and those between too changeable ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... detached; and he appeared quite cool. Jan felt the atmosphere to be almost insufferably close, and heaved a sigh of gratitude when he suddenly turned on an electric fan above ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... would have been sheer folly to have given vent—for there was no contending with that unsubstantial feather, that mealy-winged moth—I extinguished my taper, locked my bureau, and left her, since she would not leave me. Small-beer as she was, she had turned insufferably acid. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... "The dance was insufferably stupid." She dropped into a chair and began stripping off her gloves. "The music was awful and you know what the Erskine's ball-room floor is like; domestic champagne, too, with frilly serviettes around the labels and half the boys drank quite too much of ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... sunburnt than those of the ordinary toilers of Lyvern. His hands were hidden by large gardening gloves stained with coal dust. Lyvern laborers, as a rule, had little objection to soil their hands; they never wore gloves. Still, she thought, there was no reason why an eccentric workman, insufferably talkative, and capable of an allusion to the pen of the poet, should not indulge himself with cheap gloves. But then the silk, ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... expressed himself with wit and elegance, and on subjects which interested them all profoundly, illuminating everything he touched, old men and young would lean forward and listen with respect to the wisdom of a young man who was yet an infant in the eyes of the law. How he escaped being insufferably spoiled can only be explained by the ceaseless activity of his brain, and the fact that the essence of which prigs are made was not in him. That he was utterly without commonplace conceit is indisputable, for he was the idol of the family. Harrison christened him "The Little ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... The cell was insufferably hot and stuffy. Chauvelin, finical and queasy, turned away with a shudder of disgust. There was nothing to be got now out of a prolonged interview with his captured foe. He had seen him: that was sufficient. He had seen the super-exquisite Sir Percy Blakeney ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... However, the young gentleman asked Barbara for permission to pay his respects to her when he returned to the metropolis; this had been accorded by Barbara, who, on her return to Pentonville, for the first time found that comfortable home 'insufferably dull and stupid.' Edward Leslie, too—how dull and stupid even he was, after the chattering perfumed loungers of the elysium she had just quitted! Yet Edward was never considered either dull or stupid by competent judges; but, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... local that I could lay my hands upon. Now that I have got my German Burns, I lean a good deal upon him for opening a conversation, and read a few translations to every yawning audience that I can gather. I am grown most insufferably national, you see. I fancy it is a punishment for my want of it at ordinary times. Now, what do you think, there was a waiter in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to night, as my ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that it was so. Here Oswald looked the whole world in the face, proud indeed! One hand rested upon the beast's kneecap in a proprietary caress. Oswald looked too insufferably complacent. It was the look to be forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born. If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... Cunningham in its amendment campaign the executive board paid her expenses to that State and she donated her services. Upon her return to Texas she devoted July and August to field work, averaging two or three speeches a day during these insufferably hot months. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... conversation and address are insufferably full of those really gross affronts upon the understanding of our sex, which the moderns call compliments, and are intended to pass for so many instances of good breeding, though the most hyperbolical, unnatural stuff that can be conceived, and which can only serve ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... dysentery; while, at the same period, in the interior, particularly on the windward side, the air is temperate and salubrious. For six months in the year, from November to April, the town of St. Louis is insufferably and noxiously hot; scarcely any one but the slaves could be induced to remain there, the free inhabitants departing for the interior. Then again, the dry months at Port St. Louis are the rainy ones in the central parts; and, whilst the fiercest hurricanes are ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... notes about the occasions that prompted them. Such a list I am not minded to prepare. The publishers' catalogues exist, and as for the various fetes, one was very much like another; and those folk who do not find accounts of them insufferably tedious can find out about them in one of ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... you with the shrewdest complacency, as if he were looking right into your eyes, and twigged something there which you had half a mind to conceal from him. He keeps this look so pertinaciously that you feel it to be insufferably impertinent, and bethink yourself what common ground there may be between yourself and a stone image, enabling you to resent it. I have no doubt that the statue is as like Mr. Wilberforce as one pea to another, and you might fancy, that, at come ordinary moment, when he least expected ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... themselves in a long narrow cockloft, not more than six feet high at the highest, and insufferably hot. Between the tiles, which sloped steeply on either hand, a faint light filtered in, disclosing the giant rooftree running the length of the house, and at the farther end of the loft the main tie-beam, from which a network of knees and ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... that was its meaning: thereafter flooding all her being as floods a flood a pasture. A longing to be mother, Anna's longing was! A longing to be mother, to hold a tiny scrap against her breast; to have her heart, bursting for such release, torn out by baby fingers; to have her design of God, insufferably overpacked within her by the remorseless pressure of instinct through a million ages, relieved, discharged, fulfilled by motherhood. Poor Anna! Ah, piteous! "Oh, God, thou knowest how hard it is to be a woman." Poor, piteous Anna, and poor, piteous every woman ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... could even think hopefully of Liz, and her mind was full of schemes for her redemption, when she espied, at a short distance from her own gates, the solitary figure of Teen, with her hand shading her eyes, looking anxiously down the road. She had found life at Bourhill insufferably dull ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... of formaldehyde in the forecastle having abated, permission for the crew to sleep on deck had been withdrawn. But the weather as we turned south had grown insufferably hot. The reek of the forecastle sickened me—the odor of fresh paint, hardly dry, of ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... has often been the chief instrument of turning their heads, inflaming their passions, corrupting their hearts. All the world knows, that the possession of arbitrary power has a strong tendency to make men shamelessly wicked and insufferably mischievous. And this, whether the vassals over whom they domineer, be few or many. If you can not trust man with himself, will you put his fellows under his control?—and flee from the inconveniences incident to self-government, to the horrors ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... your old book," Perry would grumble. "Anybody could do that!" Nevertheless, he hearkened and remembered against the time when the conduct of the boat should be handed over to the hands of the efficient second mate. When Joe became insufferably informative Perry blandly asked him questions about the engine, such as, "What's the difference, Joe, between a two-cycle and a four-cycle motor?" or "What happens when the water-jacket becomes unbuttoned?" and was delighted to find that Joe lapsed into silence until he had had time ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... renascent peoples of the East on the other: that we have lost the courage of youth and have not yet gained the courage of desperate humiliations, in taking hold of things. To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a fire-work being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... peculiarities in these young men that you seem to make of so much importance. As for Mr. Gray, he is a man of whom any woman might feel proud; for he combines intelligence with courteous manners and a fine person: while this Hambleton is, to me, insufferably stupid. And no one, I am sure, can call his address and manners any thing like polished. Indeed, I should pronounce him downright boorish and awkward. Who would want a man for a husband of whom she would ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... ended in a complete calm, just as they were a few miles north of a verdant-looking island, whose waving palms, seen above and beyond a broad belt of dingy mangroves, looked particularly tempting to those who had been cooped up so long on shipboard, where, now that the breeze had sunk, it seemed insufferably hot. ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... miserable condition, gravely assured me that exercise was a capital thing as a preventive or cure for seasickness, and advised me to try the pump. I followed his advice: a few strokes brought up the bilge water, than which nothing at that time could have been more insufferably nauseous! I left the pump in disgust, and retiring to the after part of the quarter-deck, threw myself down on a coil of rope, unable longer to struggle with my fate. There I remained unnoticed and uncared for for several hours, when, the wind having changed, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... bright young Belgian, was at dinner with us, and the conversation turned upon the illiberal policy of the new Belgian Government. Most of the guests at table were landowners and extreme reactionaries. The conversation took that insufferably brutal tone of repression at all hazards which is the first thought of the governing classes of a despotic country, when alarmed by the ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... culling them, yet so wonderfully arranged that every one exclaims at their picturesque effect? When you have dull guests,—guests that put me to sleep, or out of patience,—is it not Madeleine who amuses them? How many evenings, that would have been insufferably stupid, have flown delightfully, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... of the spring term. School would close on May twenty-eighth. Already Washington had become insufferably warm, and even Columbia Heights School situated upon its hill, was very trying. The girls were almost too inert to work and spent every possible moment ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... you'd understand just why I was so glad to beat him. He is a most insufferably conceited ass about his golf, for a man who plays as badly as he does; in addition to which he usually beats me. It's not that Paisley plays a better game, but he has a way of making me pull my drive or over-approach ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... I took the liberty to differ in opinion from Mr Bramble, when he observed, that the mixture of people in the entertainments of this place was destructive of all order and urbanity; that it rendered the plebeians insufferably arrogant and troublesome, and vulgarized the deportment and sentiments of those who moved in the upper spheres of life. He said such a preposterous coalition would bring us into contempt with all our neighbours; and was worse, in fact, than ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... treated either as a toy or as a beast of burden, or at any rate as an incubus. Why not sing of woman also as she is when she is unattached and free from the trammels and persecutions of this tiresome tyrant, this insufferably self-conceited ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... Margaret), a curtain lecturer, who between eleven o'clock at night and seven the next morning delivered for thirty years a curtain lecture to her husband Job Caudle, generally a most gentle listener; if he replied she pronounced him insufferably rude, and if he did not he was insufferably sulky.—Douglas Jerrold, Punch ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... along chatting and laughing with Colonel De Craye, young Crossjay's hand under one of her arms, and her parasol flashing; a dazzling offender; as if she wished to compel the spectator to recognize the dainty rogue in porcelain; really insufferably fair: perfect in height and grace of movement; exquisitely tressed; red-lipped, the colour striking out to a distance from her ivory skin; a sight to set the woodland dancing, and turn the heads of the town; though beautiful, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... smallest conversational interest on their loans; he lounged and yawned, he talked loud when he should have talked low, and low when he should have talked loud. Many people, in consequence, thought him insufferably conceited, and declared that he ought to wait till he had something to show for his powers, before he assumed the airs of a spoiled celebrity. But to Rowland and to most friendly observers this judgment was quite beside the mark, and the young man's undiluted ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... hear read: I have forgot all about it. His 'Memorials' were insufferably tiresome to me. You don't speak of Tichborne, which I never tire of: only wondering that the Lord Chief Justice sets so much Brains to work against so foolish a Bird. {170} The Spectator on Carlyle is very ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... love her, and obeyed all her insufferably tiresome behests. But I longed to wreak vengeance upon her all the same. My dearest friend, the fellow with whom I was to have spent my holidays, was leaving at the end of this term which I was missing. He wrote to me furious letters, urging me to come back, and reproaching me for ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Frenchman insofar as that, though he could be lively and engaging when it suited him, he became insufferably dull and wearisome as soon as ever the need for being lively and engaging had passed. Seldom is a Frenchman NATURALLY civil: he is civil only as though to order and of set purpose. Also, if he thinks it incumbent upon him to be fanciful, original, and out of the way, his fancy always assumes ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... complexion and those black puttees who had formed the rear rank, with the aid of The Zulu Himself, upon the arrival of Babysnatcher, Bill, Box, Zulu, and Young Pole aforesaid). Now this same Young Pole was a case. Insufferably vain and self-confident was he. Monsieur Auguste palliated most of his conceited offensiveness on the ground that he was un garcon; we on the ground that he was obviously and unmistakably The Zulu's friend. This Young Pole, I remember, had me design upon the wall ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... myself and can make another—certainly—the coal I paid dearly for by fatigue, but I can get another lump, and send it home by coach, yes; then why am I so uncomfortable. I looked at the glowing fire which was getting insufferably hot, and gave it a passionate poke, exclaiming, I wish I could stop your draught. Draught! draft, I repeated, what has become of my draft that I received yesterday for my last paper? I began to recollect myself where I had laid it, and quickly came to the awful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... imperfections were therefore lightly dwelt upon. So the returned prodigal had his own suite of rooms, his own servants, his own bank account, drank, smoked, and was merry. For five or six months he thought himself in Paradise. Then he began to find his life insufferably weary. The burden of hypocrisy is very heavy to bear, and Rex was compelled perpetually to bear it. His mother demanded all his time. She hung upon his lips; she made him repeat fifty times the story of his wanderings. She was never tired of kissing him, of weeping over him, and of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... husbands, is but weakly conjectured, and is manifest the extreme shift of a huddled exposition ... Palpably uxorious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for woman, and that a husband may be injured as insufferably in marriage as a wife. What an injury is it after wedlock not to be beloved, what to be slighted, what to be contended with in point of house-rule who shall be the head, not for any parity of wisdom (for that were something reasonable), but out of a female pride! 'I suffer ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... graceful and interesting monumental figure. As I left the church, the second (Catholic) congregation was entering for divine worship. Meanwhile the heavens were "black with clouds;" the morning till eleven o'clock, having been insufferably hot and a tremendous thunder storm—which threatened to deluge the whole place with rain—moved, in slow and sullen majesty, quite round and round the town, without producing any other effect than that of a few sharp flashes, and growling peals, at a distance. But ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... tenderness! what majesty! what trifling! what variety! what tediousness!—for tedious to a strange degree, it must be confessed that whole passages are, particularly the earlier stanzas of the fourth canto. I know no man of such general powers of intellect as Brougham, yet I think him insufferably tedious; and I fancy the reason to be that he has such facility of expression that he is never recalled to a selection of his thoughts. A more costive orator would be obliged to choose, and a man of his talents could ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... very light, and after sundown almost ceased. It was insufferably warm, and fore and aft men sought vainly to sleep. The deck was too hot to lie upon, and poisonous vapors, oozing through the seams, crept like evil spirits over the ship, stealing into the nostrils and windpipes of the unwary and causing fits of sneezing ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... scorn for the liberal arts, they all rushed off to enact the whole story, the tale-teller consenting, as occasion required, to take the parts of the wounded smith, the stern judge, or the Cameronian Captain. Hugh John hectored insufferably as Waverley. Sir Toady scouted and stalked as the tall Highlander, whom he refused to regard as anybody but Allan Breck. Sweetheart moved gently about as Alice Bean—preparing breakfast was quite in her line—while Maid Margaret, wildly excited, ran hither and thither as a sort of impartial ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... during the heated term, to take his wife and his daughter to the seaside, and to return when the weather there became insufferably hot. It was supposed that Henry would go, but when the time came he declared that he had in view a piece of work that most not be neglected. Witherspoon recognized the urgency of no work except his own. "What, you can't go!" he exclaimed. ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... factitious dignity, which enabled them to look down upon her with condescension. A lady of noble birth, who had lost fortune and friends through the fraud and dissipation of those connected with her, came to board for a short time in her father's family. This lady was forty years of age, insufferably proud of her pedigree, and in her manners stiff and repulsive. She was exceedingly illiterate and uninformed, being unable to write a line with correctness, and having no knowledge beyond that which ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... minor degree of even the chairs and tables, provoked sleep; they were plainly apoplectic and disposed to snore. There were no staring portraits to remonstrate with you for being lazy; no round-eyed birds upon the curtains, disgustingly wide awake, and insufferably prying. The thick neutral hangings, and the dark blinds, and the heavy heap of bed-clothes, were all designed to hold in sleep, and act as nonconductors to the day and getting up. Even the old stuffed fox upon the top of the ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... with, Mrs. Tubbs belonged to the order of women who are by nature slave-drivers; though it was her interest to secure Clara for a permanency, she began by exacting from the girl as much labour as could possibly be included in their agreement. The hours were insufferably long; by nine o'clock each evening Clara was so outworn that with difficulty she remained standing, yet not until midnight was she released. The unchanging odours of the place sickened her, made her head ache, and robbed her of all appetite. Many of the duties were menial, ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... and slender and pale, languid of movement, languid of eye, languid of speech. His eyes drooped, half-closed beneath blond brows; a long wiry hand lazily twisted a rather affected blond moustache, his voice drawled his speech in a manner either insufferably condescending and impertinent, or ineffably tired,—who could ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... despised in her opinion; so she showed her fair young handmaiden a certain amount of respect. She had engaged companions before, who being entertaining were not trustworthy, or being trustworthy were insufferably dull. She could trust Dolly with the most onerous of her domestic or social charges, she found, and there was no fear of her small change disappearing or her visitors being bored. So the position of that "young person" became an assured and decently ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... expressed. In other words I wanted to write a certain amount of pages in prose, which, strictly speaking, is my proper business. I have attended to it conscientiously with the hope of being entertaining or at least not insufferably boring to my readers. I can not sufficiently insist upon the truth that when I sit down to write my intentions are always blameless however deplorable the ultimate effect of the act may ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... who amounted to anything was pulling up on the bit and doing something or talking of doing something or other for the country. It was already assured that the season would be insufferably dull—from a social standpoint at least. Evelyn could not suppress a certain resentment. She was not one of those who had found an element of thrill in the suddenly altered perspectives. Her plans for the spring season had been ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... so oppressively, so insufferably hot in the hall! Each one felt the crushing influence, and in spite of the importance of the occasion, the proceedings every now and then came to a stand-still and then were hurried ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... came, husband and wife both declared for Ancona, the picturesque little town which dreams out upon the Adriatic. But though so close to the sea, Ancona is in summer time almost insufferably hot. Instead of finding it cooler than Florence, it was as though they had leapt right into a cauldron. Alluding to it months later, Mrs. Browning wrote to Horne, "The heat was just the fiercest fire of your imagination, and I seethe to think ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... in the midst of printing and proof-sheets, which are wearisome in the extreme from the mass of names and statistics I have been obliged to introduce, and which will, I fear, make my book insufferably dull to ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... whom he could make nothing in conversation. A few days after, a gentleman spoke to him about this "superior man," when he received for a reply, "Well, I don't think much of him. I spent the other day with him, and found him insufferably dull." "Indeed," said the gentleman, with surprise; "why, then I see how it is: Lord —— has been positively talking ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... not disagreeably chilly. The thermometer stood at fifty-nine degrees in our cabin. Indeed, were it not for the great bodies of ice, these extreme northern summers, where the sun hardly sets for months, would get insufferably hot,—too hot to be ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the trouble to pick out the people in the world that I have least in common with. Your cousin I have always thought a conceited ass—besides his being the most ill-favoured animal I know. Then it's insufferably tiresome that one can't tell him so; one must spare him on account of his health. His health seems to me the best part of him; it gives him privileges enjoyed by no one else. If he's so desperately ill there's only one way to prove it; but he seems to have ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James |
