"Loveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... love predominated most; but even then it by no means prevented the existence of extreme poverty, for we read frequently in the Acts and Epistles of the collections made for the Christian churches. But in our faithless, loveless, selfish, sin-drowned century, such an attempt at community of goods would not only annihilate all morality completely, but absolutely degrade us back from civilisation and modern Catholicism into the rudest and most meagre barbarism. The apostles of such ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... with love, so he offered a bribe. And the bribe was taken, whether it was a carved amulet or a morsel of game, or a new fashion in furs. And the woman who took it realized that she could escape the drudgery of the other women, could obtain more bribes for her loveless barter ... and so it has ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... cried out, "Sweetheart, sweetheart!" Sang his song for three months running, For the young and loveless maiden, Resting now ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... others of exceptional good repute in the kingdom were unjustly put to death. Then, swiftly, as he penetrated the maze of plot and counterplot, those who had fooled him began to fall before his wrath. He was now, indeed, a forlorn, loveless, and terrible creature. ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... lines of his life-deed We trace the sacred service of a heart Answering the Divine command, in every part Bearing on human weal: His love did feed The loveless; and his gentle hands did lead The blind, and lift the weak, and balm the smart Of other wounds than rankled at the dart In his own breast, that gloried thus to bleed. He served the lowliest first—nay, them alone— The most despised that e'er wreaked vain breath In cries of suppliance in the ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... experienced did she study that never-forgotten expression, study it as a whole—words, tone, look. Then, and not until then, did she know that she had instinctively shrunk because he had laid bare his base and all but loveless motive in ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... myself, without being tied to a watch-dog, whose baying would serve much the same purpose as that picture in mosaic in the House of the Tragic Poet. I have a very sincere affection for you, Alma, but the day on which you sell yourself in a loveless marriage, will strain hard on the cable ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... ever more lonely or loveless than the ill-starred and ill-favoured Queen Mary. She had no near relatives in England except Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, by the irony of fate, was worse than a stranger to her. The awful solitude of a throne excluded her, even more than her own ill-health and brooding ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... know now how dearly she loved you. In spite of herself she clings to you still. Her life, poor soul, has been a barren one; unworthy, miserably unworthy, of such a nature as hers. Her marriage was loveless and childless. She has had admirers, but never, in the higher sense of the word, a friend. All the best years of her life have been wasted in the unsatisfied longing for something to love. At the end of her life You have filled ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... doubtful that love with love did fight, To leave the master loveless, or kill the gallant knight: To put in practice either, alas! it was a spite Unto ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... a verity Pisias makes us to side with Daphnaeus by his extravagant language, charging marriage with being a loveless intercourse, and one that has no participation in divine friendship, although we can see that it is an intercourse, if erotic persuasion and favour fail, that cannot be restrained by shame and fear as by bit and bridle." Thereupon Pisias ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Longueville, sister of the Grand Conde, and heroine of the Fronde. Her lovely blue eyes, with their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings," turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman and priest. We trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth, her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for La Rochefoucauld, the final shattering of all her illusions; and when at last, tired of the world, she bows her beautiful head in penitent prayer, we too love and forgive her, as others have done. Were not twenty-five years of suffering and penance an ample ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... withstand this. He crushed her to him, and lifted her arms round his neck, and fell to kissing her with all the starved hunger of his lonely loveless years on the ranges. She was not proof against this. It lifted her out of her weakness, of her abasement to a response that swept away all fears, doubts, troubles. For the moment, at least, love ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... turn the rising tide of my impressions and opinions took about this time. To one who had passed from the cheerless, loveless guardianship of a worldly step-mother, into the tender hands of patient and devoted sisters, to become, instead of a wandering, uncared for waif, the object of the truest and holiest solicitude that ever animated Christian hearts, this hollow ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... man. It would not have been necessary for her to have loved him—not with passion—only to have relied upon him. Some one to trust, she craved for, more than some one to love; yet she allowed that a loveless marriage is a mock marriage. She did not regret the loss of her conventional faith, but she wished she could join the congregation just for the human fellowship. She felt the need of union, of some central station, a centre of peace, unlike the church, the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... know I didn't always do what is right, but if I deserved to be punished, Siegfried did not. Why did I escape?" After an interval of silence, she began to speak of her past, of conflicts with her husband, who had deceived her. Hers had been one of those loveless matches which are contracted in the customary business fashion. She told Frederick that she was an artist by nature, Rubinstein, for whom she had played when she was eleven years old, having prophesied ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... could think it all out. That must be because it was right and there was no wavering in her purpose.... Poor Vick! he would care most. But he would come to realize how much better it was thus, how much more right really than to go dragging through a loveless, empty life. And when he saw her happy with Tom—but she wished ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... well as work on his own account—to oppress and overreach for his own ends as well as to be honest and benevolent for his own ends, for he will find ill-doing far easier, and more natural, in one sense, and a plan that brings in quicker profits, than well-doing; and so this godless, loveless, every-man-for- himself nation, or sham nation rather, this joint-stock company, in which fools expect that universal selfishness will do the work of universal benevolence, will quarrel and break up, crumble ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us—else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man's love is like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman's. Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... sings, And. life seems better at least to me, The fleeting hours have golden wings, When in that little spot I'm drinking tea. Love? Ah, no, we are far above Such folly. Our time we can better spend. This world is brimming with loveless love, But 'tis rarely enough one ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... from his Palace; he felt the night wind on his face, He loathed, as he left, the embraces, the softness and scent of the place, But, ah, if his night had been loveless, with no one to solace his need, He never had written that sermon which ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... another, thought Laura, listening to the loveless bandying of words—she was unused to the snappishness of the Irish manner, which sounds so much worse than it is meant to be: and she was chilled anew by it when, over the telephone, she heard Georgy holding a heated conversation ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... than to know My selfish joy had been another's woe; Better my grief and my strength to control, Than the despair of her frail-bodied soul; Better to go on, loveless, to the end, Than wear love's rose, whose thorn had slain ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... vouchsafed. There was never yet an aspirant who was unable to find a teacher. It is most true that the living and the dead are still one family, for of course there are no "dead," unless we most correctly put into this category the dull of hearing, the dull of heart, and the loveless who still walk this earth. But if we deem the pioneers defunct and inarticulate, then it is little likely that we shall comprehend the reality and the naturalness of this interplay and inspiration. If we never seek, information and insight will scarcely ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... of Cynddylan is loveless to-night, Since he is departed whose smile made it bright: I mourn, but the sigh of my soul shall be brief, The pathway is short to the grave of ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... liberty, except as regards Mexicans, against whom they are always warned. They are told that they become sick from contact with such men. Never are they forced to contract what would turn out to be a loveless marriage. A beautiful Indian girl was much sought for by a Mexican. He spoke the Tarahumare language very well, and offered to give her a good house and fine clothes and a whole handful of silver dollars. Her brother, who ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... reckless, passionate, uncontrollable, unthinking fool without method and moderation, that's what I am—a creature without any sense of right and honour, distrustful, hotheaded, loveless, graceless, crabbed and born crabbed! Yes, yes, I'm everything that I wish some one else was! Is this credible? There's not a viler man alive, a man more unworthy of heaven's kindness, of having a mortal soul love him or come ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... breast, he stared blankly over the beautiful bowed head. It was true, then. She loved him. Without meaning it he had won her heart. He whose earnest wish it had been to save her from pain, to console her, to brighten her lonely life, had brought this fresh sorrow on her. To the misery of a loveless marriage he had added a heavier cross, an unhappy, a misplaced affection. No exultant vanity within him rejoiced at the knowledge that, unsought, she had learned to care for him. Only regret, pity for her, stirred in him. He was aware now ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... to Alaire; they were old and persistent enemies; but of late the prospect of a loveless, childless future was growing more and more unbearable. Even her day dreams failed to give their customary relief; those imaginary figures with whom she took counsel ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... fosters; Artzibashef suggests that the brutishness should be accepted frankly, cleared of confusion with love, and slowly mastered so that out of passion love can grow. His book has the noble quality of being full of the love of life, however loveless. It cannot possibly give the kind of pleasure sought by those to whom even the Bible is a dirty book. It is too brutal for that. Books which pander to that mean desire are of all books the most injurious. But this is ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... is, that I who always did certainly believe in love, yet was as great a sceptic as you about the evidences thereof, and having held twenty times that Jacob's serving fourteen years for Rachel was not too long by fourteen days, I was not a likely person (with my loathing dread of marriage as a loveless state, and absolute contentment with single life as the alternative to the great majorities of marriages), I was not likely to accept a feeling not genuine, though from the hand of Apollo himself, crowned with his various godships. Especially too, in my position, I could not, would not, should not ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... hear. But all at once to leave me at the last, More at the wonder than the loss aghast, With huddled, unintelligible phrase, And frighten'd eye, And go your journey of all days With not one kiss, or a good-bye, And the only loveless look the look with which you pass'd: 'Twas all unlike ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... sin in reference to the obligation to be perfectly holy, it is with vividness and hopelessness. He sees distinctly that he ought to be a perfectly good being instantaneously. This point is clear. But instead of looking up to the hills whence cometh his help, he begins, in a cold legal and loveless temper, to draw upon his own resources. The first step is to regulate his external conduct by the Divine law. He tries to put a bridle upon his tongue, and to walk carefully before his fellow-men. He fails to do even this small outside thing, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... mistily in this inferno, their heads clear and sinister above the mirk. It was impossible to decide whether an enormous mass of pitchy and Tartarian gloom was being slowly moulded by diabolic invisible hands into a city, or a city, the desperate and damned abode of a loveless race, was disintegrating into its proper fume and dusty chaos. With relief we turned outwards to the nobility of the St Lawrence and the ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... would have been repugnant to his nicely balanced sense of the fitness of things. Nevertheless, he reflected, if her love had been illicit, was it more illicit than that of the woman who enters into a loveless marriage, induced to such action by a sordid consideration of worldly goods and gear? Was her sin in bearing a child out of wedlock more terrible than that of the married woman who shudders at the responsibilities ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... hath made me strong to go, For thy sake, to realms below, Where the water's shine and hum Through the darkness never come: Let, I pray, one thought of me Spring, a little well, in thee; Lest thy loveless soul be found Like a dry and ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... loveless and of heart forlorn, Let him but leave behind his haunted bed, And set his feet toward yonder singing star, Shall have for sweetheart this same secret morn; She shall come running to him from afar, And on her cool breast lay his ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... light for the first time on his black, loveless face. "What is it?" he enunciated distinctly, looking at ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... fell, And the rest fall upon it, not on me: Else should I bear that Henry comes not?—fails Just this first night out of so many nights? Loving is done with. Were he sitting now, As so few hours since, on that seat, we'd love No more—contrive no thousand happy ways To hide love from the loveless, any more. I think I might have urged some little point In my defence, to Thorold; he was breathless For the least hint of a defence: but no, The first shame over, all that would might fall. No Henry! Yet ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... have you thought of the deadly sin—the treachery, the perjury, the sacrilege; oh! and the dreadful degradation of such a loveless marriage?" ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... From loveless youth to uninspected age, No passion gratified, except her rage, So much the fury still outran the wit, That pleasure missed her, and the scandal hit. Moral Essays, Epistle II. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... fountain of domestic sweets, Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced. Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendear'd, Casual fruition; nor in court amours, Mix'd dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenade, which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... his hands, and his strong frame shook as he pictured what might have been, contrasting it with the hideous reality of his loveless and miserable marriage with the banker's daughter, who threatened him with ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... a beautiful young widow attached to colonel Townly. In order to win him she plays upon his jealousy by coquetting with Loveless.—Sheridan, ...
— 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.
... dream, As I ofttime this morn, how they would seem Loved but unloving?—Nay the world's too sweet That we the ghost of such a pain should meet— Behold, she goes, and he too, turning round, Remembers that his love must yet be found, That he is King and loveless in this story Wrought long ago for some dead ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... is used to suffering. I have never been the darling of my parents, like you; I have not been used at home to the kindness and the love that you remember. A life without sweetness and joy has well fitted me for a loveless future. And, besides, you are worthy of him, and I am not. Mrs. Gallilee is wrong, Carmina, if she thinks I am your rival. I am not your rival; I never can be your rival. Believe nothing else, but, for God's ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... outward and possible hope on behalf of that love which is for her the concentration of all light and joy and triumph. Very touching are those heart-wrung pleadings by which she strives to avert the sacrifice; and we are oppressed almost as by the presence of the calm, loveless, hateless Fate of the old Greek tragedy, as Zarca's inexorable logic puts them one by one aside, and leaves her as sole alternatives the offering up every hope, every present and possible joy of the love which is entwined with ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... if injury came to the Malplaquet, while under my charge, that I should be dismissed. She was my last chance as she was your own. But what to me were risks? I had lost my love, and my country had dishonoured herself in my eyes. I was nameless, loveless, countryless. All had gone, and life ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... sketch of her cousin, the Princess Charlotte, who, had she lived, would have been her Queen, and who was in many respects her prototype. It is certain, I think, that Charlotte Augusta of Wales, that lovely miracle-flower of a loveless marriage, blooming into a noble and gracious womanhood, amid the petty strifes and disgraceful intrigues of a corrupt Court, by her virtues and graces, by her high spirit and frank and fearless character, prepared the way in the loyal hearts of the British people, for the fair young kinswoman, who, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... but he also inherited a deformity which made him the butt of ridicule among his vulgar companions. His childhood was made up of neglect which developed a cold, distant nature. He is generally described as a loveless old man, but his biographers seem to forget the influences that surrounded his childhood. Such were the opportunities enjoyed by Girard; such the chance offered to him, but he held that a man's best capital was "industry," and this seemed to have been his main idea to the last; as he willed ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... have stood by his side, even as I stand by yours to-day, and looked once upon his face,—the face of your brother and of the father whom, because of your guilt, I have never seen or known, of whom I have not even a memory! Living, I could never have forgiven you; but here, to-day, in pity for your loveless life and out of the great love I bear that father in his far-away ocean grave,—in his name and in my own,—I forgive you, his brother, even ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... tragedy of a careless and supercilious coquetry which plays with the heart as the fisherman plays with the salmon? Read "Clara Vere de Vere." Would you know the dull heartache of a loveless married life, growing at times into an intolerable anguish which no marital fidelity can do much to medicate? Read "Auld Robin Gray." Who but a poet can interpret the pain of a parting between loving hearts, with its remorseful recollections of the wholly innocent ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... seems not made to fade away, Sweet death, that seems to make us loveless clay, I know not which ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... regret in Dr. Merrick's nature. He was steeled against their suffering. Or again, if Alan had sold his virility for gold to some rich heiress of his set, like Ethel Waterton—had bartered his freedom to be her wedded paramour in a loveless marriage, his father would not only have gladly acquiesced, but would have congratulated his son on his luck and his prudence. Yet, because Alan had chosen rather to form a blameless union of pure affection with a ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... pride. And curiously enough, his last words caused a look of jealousy to pass across the face of the Captain. This look, unnoticed by the Count, and speedily repressed, came to me as a revelation. It seemed to betray a bitter envy of the Count's mere loveless and unloved right of possession; and it bespoke the resolve that, if the Captain might not have her smiles, not even her husband might be content in his rights. Such men will give a woman to death ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... her sterile wit. Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne. Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it, And craved a ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... your wasted hours, You bring me not my Life's Delight, My Star of Stars, my Flower of Flowers! You leave me loveless and forlorn, Pass on, most false and futile night, Pass on, and perish ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... a spot of painting, A lifeless, loveless hue; Though your heart be sick to fainting It says not a word to you; A bird knows nothing of gladness, Is only a song-machine; A man is a reasoning madness, A ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... King Mark's proposals known. Either because such an alliance flatters their pride or because they dare not refuse, Iseult's parents accept in their daughter's name and prepare everything for her speedy departure. The queen, wishing to save her daughter from the curse of a loveless marriage, next brews a love-potion which she bids Brengwain—her daughter's maid and companion—administer to King Mark and Iseult on their ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... cannot fully feel it now, but it will feel it then. The fire of His love will kindle a fire of loving self-reproach. The weight of a heavy shame to think of the past, and to know now of His beauty, and His love, and His care, care for so careless a soul, love for a soul so loveless,—this will sting with an extreme severity the soul humbled before Him. And here we should do well to remember that, as the characters of each differ almost infinitely, whereby there are innumerable shades and degrees ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... ministrations won from loveless hearts (12) are felt to be devoid of grace, and embraces forcibly procured are sweet no longer, so the obsequious cringings of alarm are hardly honours. Since how shall we assert that people who are forced to rise from their seats do really rise to honour those whom they regard as malefactors? ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... mill or the mine, I, the worker of workers, everything in my line. Everything hard but headwork (I'd no more brains than a kid), A brute with brute strength to labour, doing as I was bid; Living in camps with men-folk, a lonely and loveless life; Never knew kiss of sweetheart, never caress of wife. A brute with brute strength to labour, and they were so far above— Yet I'd gladly have gone to the gallows for one little look of Love. I with the strength of two men, savage and shy and wild— Yet ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... in our best selves, in our right to love and be loved, to give and receive happiness, and to toil and be rewarded. And then we should bestow our love, our gifts and our toil with no anxious thought about the returns. If we chance to love a loveless individual, to give to one bankrupt in gratitude, to toil for the unappreciative, it is but a temporary deprivation for us. The love, the gratitude and the recompense will all come to us in time from some source, or many sources. It ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... highest rank awoke suddenly to the discovery that life was given them for nobler purposes than that of frivolous enjoyment and tawdry vanity. Despising themselves; despising the husbands to whom they had been wedded in loveless marriages de convenance, whose infidelities they had too often to endure: they, too, fled from a world which had sated and sickened them. They freed their slaves; they gave away their wealth to found ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... thing—when wofully Yasodhara sank to his feet and wept, Sighing, "Hath not my Lord comfort in me?" "Ah, Sweet!" he said, "such comfort that my soul Aches, thinking it must end, for it will end, And we shall both grow old, Yasodhara! Loveless, unlovely, weak, and old, and bowed. Nay, though we locked up love and life with lips So close that night and day our breaths grew one Time would thrust in between to filch away My passion and thy grace, ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... gates of Troy, and brought with her the dowry of destruction and death. Sorrow she left behind her in her home; the desolate couch and the empty hall, for here, the grace of the shapely statues mocked her husband's grief with the stony stare of their loveless eyes, and there, but the empty joy remained that dwells in the dreams of the night. Aye! and a sorrow she left that was greater than this. For the heroes went forth from the land of Greece, valiant and wise and true; and lo! all that Ares, the ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... settled by such arrangements. It's sane, I know, it's comfortable and kindly. But I thought—Oh! I thought of different things, quite different things from all this. I thought of you who are so beautiful caught in a loveless passionless world. I thought of the things there might be for you, the beautiful and wonderful things of which you are deprived.... Never mind what I thought! Never mind! You've made your choice. But I thought that you didn't ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... returned to him. The silent pressure of the hands recalled nights of distraction. He half shut his eyes, a sudden madness overcame him, although he was sufficiently calm to say to himself that she had an end in view, this woman's coming to him, loveless, to speak of love to him, herself unmoved by the senses, to awaken vanished feelings, to offer herself with the irresistible skill of desire: a ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... trick of eating her meals on the floor instead of at table,—and yet she was a warm-hearted, affectionate girl, and like many another princess of that time, she deserved a happier fate than the loveless marriage that had been arranged for her. Our memories are quite fresh about Bianca and her sorrows, because an accommodating tourist, who had Mrs. Ady's "Beatrice d'Este" with her, has loaned it to us for reading in the evenings—at least for as much time as we can afford ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... Tua, "and it is not for myself I ask. I am fair, I am Amen's daughter, and splendid is my heritage. Yet, O Dweller in Osiris, thou who once didst fill the place I hold to-day, I tell thee that I would pay away this pomp, could I but be sure that I shall not live loveless, that I shall not be given as a chattel to one whom I hate, that one—whom I do not hate—will live to call me—wife. Great dangers threaten him—and me, Amen is mighty; he is the potter that moulds the clay of men; ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... the report, on which his heart was set, the will to live deserted Dudley Norton. To drop in harness was, as he had said to Quita, a kinder fate than the dismal disintegration of a loveless old age; and the loosening of his grip on life brought reaction sharp and sudden, from which he ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... congregated uproar of streets, or in the noise that drifts through wails and windows—you can hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which sounds like the actual voice of the human Heart, singing the lost joys, the regrets, the loveless lives of the people who blacken the pavements, or jolt along ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... minutes—it is rather deep, you know—and so he is coming up to dinner to-night to make a thorough study of it. He feels it is his one last hope, and if it fails him, he is lost in the sea of a loveless marriage." ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... to the end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break down idols on their altars,—saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,—track its hard, loveless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... throbbing world outside. Women do admire beautiful things; but there is something they admire infinitely more. Luxuries do not come first in any real woman's desires. She prefers poverty with love to luxury with an indifferent or loveless husband. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... I take up a morning paper, half-dread, half-delight, I take it up softly. My whole being trembles in the balance before it. The whole procession of my soul, shabby, loveless, provincial, tawdry, is passed in review before it. It is the grandstand of the world. The vast and awful Roll-Call of the things I ought to be—the things I ought to love—in the great world voice sweeps over ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... woe is me! I from my clinging babe was rudely torn; His tender lips a loveless bosom pressed; Can I forget him in my life new born? Oh that my darling ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nature. Such a man could never understand a personality like that of his older son, nor could the son understand the father. Prince Hal, loving life in all its manifestations, joy in all its forms, could find small satisfaction in the rigid etiquette of a loveless court so long as it offered him an opportunity for little more than formal activity. When the rebellion of the Percies showed him that he could do the state real service, he seized his opportunity gladly, gayly, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... believe that that company of beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart is cold and loveless." ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... won, Wilfred," I said. "Supposing it had been otherwise, and you had succeeded in your designs. Would you have been any happier? Would you not have been haunted with the thought that you had ruined her life, besides condemning her to the hell of a loveless marriage?" ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... ran on. "Hollow, shallow, inconsistent—loveless. Catholicism equals a modern refinement of pagan principles with all the old deities on their best behaviour thrown in; while Protestantism is an ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... hall and chapel, tower and bell, for the sake of the homesteads that will grow up in security round that church-castle. This only, however, whilst the golden age lasts. The moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions, the gods are face to face with destruction; since Alberic, able with invisible hunger-whip to force the labor of the dwarfs and to buy the services of the giants, can outshine all the temporal shows and splendors ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... provided employment for her idolent existence and her restless mind. Of affection for Asako she had none at all, but then she had no affection for anybody. She was typical of a modern Japanese womanhood, which is the result of long repression, loveless marriages and ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... of solitude such a short time ago. She was afraid of herself—afraid to think—afraid of that dim future that was drawing so very near. Every feeling of heart and soul revolted at the thought of that loveless marriage—the profanation of herself seemed more than ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... wanted to tell you this story—indeed, I wanted to tell it to you before you made Alice your wife, yet the fear that I would be wrecking the life and reason of my child kept me silent. No doubt if I had told you, and you had been influenced by my experience against a loveless marriage, I should to-day be blaming myself for her condition, which I see plainly now is but the culmination of three generations of hysterical women. But I want to tell you the story and urge you to use it as a warning in your position of counsellor ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... favorably. The two accommodate themselves mutually, and a modus vivendi is established. They want no scandal, and regard for their children compels them to avoid any, although it is the children who suffer most under a cold, loveless life on the part of their parents, even if such a life does not develop into enmity, quarrel and dissension. Often accommodation is reached in order to avoid material loss. As a rule it is the husband, whose conduct is the rock against which marriage is dashed. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... being, may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them—like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes color an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols. Gwendolen had that kind of window before her, affecting the distant equally with the near. Some unhappy wives ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... security then is purchased at the price of their freedom. Their lives become locked up in the small closet of their limited concepts. Their literal and rigid understanding of the Christian church and its faith makes them so loveless that their lives have an alienating effect on others, and they themselves ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... him, and he was very handsome then. At least, I thought him the very perfection of manly strength and beauty and goodness. True, it was the mature, warm beauty of the Indian summer, for he was more than middle-aged; but it was very genial to the chilly, loveless morning of my own early life," said Marah, dropping her head upon her hand and sliding ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Brisson," she replied with sweet irony, "but where the poor and loveless fight an ever losing battle is still a better place for me to practise my godless creed and my ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... catastrophe in which everything was surrendered, and nothing might be reclaimed. The man, too, was some magnanimous hero, riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests together, they galloped by the rim of the sea. But waking, she was able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those who do the most ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... gathered no doubt from general report, as they had not seen him themselves. "From bad to worse! That is their destiny. I see it, but I cannot alter it. The selfishness of a mean and crafty man—the selfishness of an ambitious and silly woman—- the selfishness of a spiteful and loveless child all tend one way, from bad to worse! And you, my darlings, must suffer it awhile, I fear. Yet, when things are at their worst, you can come to me. I can ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... not so bad as he expected; at least, there was less violence and more despair. She covered her face with her hands, and writhed in anguish, when she said that she had utterly degraded herself by this loveless marriage. She scarcely mentioned her husband. She made no complaint of him, and even spoke of him as generous. It seemed as if this made it worse, and as if she would be happier if she could expend herself in hating him. She spoke of him ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... possessing desire had urged Hugh Fraser on to woo and win the helpless French beauty, whom an adverse fate had stranded in England. The mute sacrifice of the wedding was followed by the two years of Valerie's loveless marriage. It was an existence for the two sisters, bought by the sacrifice of one ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... which were inflicted on prisoners by Elizabeth and her ministers. He had himself been reared in a hardy school; he had been trained to be indifferent to pain. It may well be that his callousness in speaking of Tudor cruelties is to be traced to the influences that surrounded his loveless ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... unfortunate patron has endured without help or countenance. Your own best word, my lord, was only gratitude. O, but he was your son too! He had no other father. He was hated in the country, God knows how unjustly. He had a loveless marriage. He stood on all hands without affection or support—dear, generous, ill-fated, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their life through, and then went whither? And were one to the end—but what end who knows? Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? What love was ever as deep as a grave? They are loveless now as the grass above them Or ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... lie is living?" Many a lie has filled its maw! "Better illusion tho than giving Faith to a fatal loveless Law?" There is a certain Socratean Saying that swine of their ditch are sure; Yet do they prove by their ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... responsibility in the matter, of what their love meant to them both. Wolf had his claim, true; but what was truly the generous thing for a woman to do toward a man she did not love? Wasn't a year or two of hurt feelings, even anger and resentment, better than a loveless marriage that ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... that night, thinking of her happiness and blushing, even in the darkness, as she remembered Cardo's burning words of love; and he went home whistling and even singing in sheer exuberance of joy. Forgotten his father's coldness; forgotten his bare, loveless home; forgotten even the wrangler who was coming to trouble him; and forgotten that nameless shadow of parting and distance, which had hovered too near ever since he had met Valmai. She loved him, so a fig for all trouble! They had pledged their troth on the edge of ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... did she deem the act a task, Nor look for great reward; She only thought of His great love, And felt her gift was small For Him who left His home above To suffer death for all. But her blest Lord more highly prized The loving heart that gave; For loveless gifts are e'er despised, Yet men oft seek to pave The way that leads to glory land With deeds devoid of grace; But only those who love can stand Approved ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... world, it is her life, her animating principle, without which she must droop, and, if the plant be very tender, die. Except under its influence, a woman can never attain her full growth, never touch the height of her possibilities, or bloom into the plenitude of her moral beauty. A loveless marriage dwarfs our natures, a marriage where love is develops ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... of Arno: and the air in Florence was painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Those feeble feminine plants, are, it sometimes seems to me, the strength and perfection of creation—strength perfected in weakness; the ivy, green among the snows of winter, and clasping together in its true embrace the loveless ruin; and the vine that maketh glad the heart of man amidst the miseries of life. I must not be mistaken, though, for Devereux's talk was only a tender sort of trifling, and Lilias had said nothing to encourage him to risk more; but she now ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... said Patsy, impulsively. "I forgive you all, Aunt Jane; for through your own selfishness you cut yourself off from all your family—from all who might have loved you—and you have lived all these years a solitary and loveless life. There'll be no grudge of mine to follow you to the grave, Aunt Jane. But," her voice hardening, "I'll never touch a penny of the money that was denied my poor dead mother. Thank God the old Dad and I are independent, and can earn our ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... was always you—always! Never, never did I think of him, not even for loveless marriage, save once for a little while, when... when that theatre girl came into your life, and then..." She broke off, shrugged, and turned her head away. "I thought of following ambition, since there was nothing left ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... initiated a dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... respectable length of some eight hundred lines.[342] I may be allowed, however, to note that echo verses, suggested by Ovid, are introduced and handled with more than usual ingenuity; and further to quote two characteristic passages. In one of these the nymphs Florida and Clois court the affections of the loveless hero. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... still. He recalled scattered fragments of her life—the first luxurious little menage, and the second. How many more would there be? She was only in her twenties still. Uneasily he tried to see into the years ahead for her, and he thought he saw a lonely old age, childless, loveless, cynical, hard. But this fear soon fell from his mind. No, whatever happened, she would do it gracefully, an artist always, to the end. He sighed and gave up the effort. For he could not think of Laura as ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... advocate for loveless, and least of all for mercenary marriages, but I think we want some via media between the French mariage de convenance and our English and American method of leaving so grave a question as marriage entirely to ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... had been looking with such mingled feelings. Little need was there now for mingled feelings. She knew well with what feeling to expect him. She had at times within the depths of her heart formed an idea that her life would not be loveless; but now—but now—This man who was her husband, and the only one to whom she could look for love—this man turned from her in horror; he hated her, he loathed her—worse, he looked upon her as a Hindu—worse still, if any thing could be worse, his hate and his ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... art thou, To bind the loveless joyless vow, The heart from pleasure to delude, To join the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... of happy love is this; To make us loving to the loveless ones; Willing indeed to halve our meed of bliss, If our sweet plenty others' want atones: Of love's abundance may God give thee store, To spend in love's sweet ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... Loveless marriage was reprobated by Tennyson, and Mr. Hughes goes into ecstacies over the tremendous fact. Like the Psalmist, he is in haste; he cannot point to a poet who ever hinted the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... will not get out of your way; by and by in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell almost incessantly to avoid running over them. As I do not travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung. Two or three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large and beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a snake ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... felt that her duty lay beside a woman whom Fate had treated so ill; that duty demanded that an effort must be made to bring a little brightness into so solitary and loveless ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... rather superficial metaphysician, but the warm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deep respect for the man. He talks of the absurdities of women's education; draws a bitter picture of a woman's fate in a loveless marriage of convenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, but asks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from a schooling in folly; assails the practice of gallantry, and the fashionable conjugal ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford |
