"Boredom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... those dreadful and much-to- be-avoided exactions and remissions of "forfeits," that plunge everybody into embarrassing situations, and destroy, instead of creating, sociability; none of those stock—so-called—"drawing-room entertainments;" in fact, which always result in hopeless boredom. But, we had a little music and part-singing: a little lively, general chit- chat, in which all could join and each take a share: a few anecdotes well told—a complete success, to be brief, in making us all feel perfectly natural and at ease, for we were allowed ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... words, civilization as compared with barbarism," I suggested. "It is true that there cannot be much boredom among barbarous tribes who are always scalping their enemies or being scalped themselves; those things help ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... "genteel" classes and Mrs. Grundy. He never aped aristocracy in his household. He would go to a tavern for his oysters and a glass of punches simply as they did in Ben Jonson's days; and I have heard of his doing so from a sensation of boredom at a very great house indeed,—a house for the sake of an admission to which, half Bayswater would sell their grandmothers' bones to a surgeon. This kind of thing stamped him in our polite days as one of the old school, and was exceedingly refreshing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... women and women with men. There were thousands of women who were bitter in heart at cooking and making beds who would be happy as linnets in offices and shops; and thousands of men who were dying of boredom in offices and shops who would be in their element cooking ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... town to be married. Nor was his letter a lie. After long hesitations he had decided on this step, and it seemed to him clear that no one would suit him so well as Mrs. Byril. By marrying an old mistress, he would save himself from all the boredom of a honeymoon. And sitting in the drawing-room, in the various pauses between numerous licentious stories, they discussed ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... lessons in astronomy, and he had given one to Nancy on the night of his Senior Prom, the night of the cooky contest. He had looked out and seen that the summer stars were up, and had spoken of it, to the boredom of Mary and Teddy Roberts. But Nancy wanted Scorpio pointed out, and from Scorpio they naturally progressed to the others until Nancy sneezed and the kitchen window had to be shut. Then, as it was getting ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... whole which was quite startlingly handsome and attractive. The three girls looked back at him with undisguised admiration and vied with one another in animated conversation, in return for which he drawled out slow replies in a tone of languid boredom. ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... broken up, and the political members had just entered, and in clusters, some standing and some yawning, some stretching their arms and some stretching their legs, presented symptoms of an escape from boredom. Among others, round the fire, was a young man dressed in a rough great coat all cords and sables, with his hat bent aside, a shawl tied round his neck with boldness, and a huge oaken staff clenched in his left hand. With ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... Humperdinck or Leoncavallo, he exhibits this quality in suffusion. Above all, he is not original. If Mascagni had only followed the example of Single-Speech Hamilton, he would have spared himself many mortifications and his admirers much boredom. The new men, such as Wolf-Ferrari, Montemezzi, Giordano, and numerous others are eclectics; they belong to any country, and their musical cosmopolitanism, while affording agreeable specimens, may be dismissed with the comment that ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... late, I sat by myself. Of course I could not forget the conversation I had with Brierly, and now I had them both under my eyes. The demeanour of one suggested gloomy impudence and of the other a contemptuous boredom; yet one attitude might not have been truer than the other, and I was aware that one was not true. Brierly was not bored—he was exasperated; and if so, then Jim might not have been impudent. According to my theory he was not. I imagined he was hopeless. Then it was ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... welcome as the circumstances permitted, and he sat on the sand under a huge umbrella while the girls frolicked in the water. The boys came back for luncheon, and helped to divide the boredom of the newest arrival, though they made uncomplimentary remarks behind his back, and Betty was in constant fear lest some unpleasant incident should occur. She had to remember that she was ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... making calls, and it was when I set out to pay my respects and thanks to Minister Bar for my amnesty that I trod the familiar streets of Dresden again. My first impression was one of extraordinary boredom and emptiness, for I had last seen them filled with barricades, in which fantastic condition they had looked so unusually interesting. I did not see a single familiar face on the way. Even the glover, whom I had always patronised and whose shop I now had occasion to revisit, ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... anything else. This mill-round of work and exercise is maintained like a religion. The gymkhana represents the "compulsory games" of a public school. It is part of the "white man's burden." He plays, as he works, with a sense of responsibility. He is bored, but boredom is a duty, and there's ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... and good for words. She put the little hired girl on the front seat with the groom, and sat in the body of the waggonette to talk to Guthrie and to take care of his child. There was no awkward shyness on her part now, and no boredom on his. Little Harry fused them. She had remembered to bring fresh milk and rusks for a possibly hungry baby, and he sat on her lap as she fed him, and cooed to her when his mouth was not too full, and seemed to forget that any other foster-mother had ever existed. ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... original interest in his sister's talk was relapsing into boredom because it seemed unlikely to lead to anything of the slightest importance ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... decided to do without Omans. We do our own work and enjoy it. Your Masters died of futility and boredom. What I would like to do, Laro, is take you to the creche and put your disobedient brain back into the matrix. However, the decision is not mine alone to make. How about it, fellows and girls? Would you rather have alleged servants who won't do anything ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... it—from Jeekes and to hand it to Robin Greve would, thought Bruce, restore his prestige as an amateur detective, at any rate in his own eyes. Moreover, a chat with Jeekes over the whole affair seemed a Heaven-sent exit from the impasse of boredom into which he had drifted ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... fritter away such capacities for culture as Providence gave her in the sterile nothingnesses which are called feminine accomplishments. She did not paint figures out of drawing in meagre water-colours; she had not devoted years of her life to the inflicting on polite audiences the boredom of Italian bravuras, which they could hear better sung by a third-rate professional singer in a metropolitan music-hall. I am afraid she had no other female accomplishments than those by which the sempstress or embroideress earns ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... all rites and ceremonies and called on Mrs. John Hatton for advice. Jane was alone when the visit was made, and the heaviness and boredom of mid-afternoon was upon her. Mrs. Harry's card was a relief. It would please John very much, she reflected, and so looking in her mirror and finding her dress correct and becoming, she had Lucy brought to her private sitting-room. She met her sister-in-law with a kindness that astonished ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Balzac. The Opera with its lemans, the pink boudoir and its flossy hangings, the feast and its surfeits; we have even seen Moliere's doctor reappear, such need has this man of sarcasm and grotesqueness. The further you advance in the Shagreen Skin—vices, lost virtues, poverties, boredom, deep silence, dry-as-dust science, angular, witless scepticism, laughable egotism, puerile vanities, venal loves, Jewish second-hand dealers, etc.—the more astonished and pained you will be to recognize that the nineteenth century in which you live is so made up. The Shagreen Skin is Candide ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... return to Lyndhurst and boredom. An old lady at Twickenham Park has asked me to tea this afternoon, and I have to interview a kitchen-maid at ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... car wheeled abruptly round a corner below Thirty-fourth Street, slid half a block or more east, and came to a palpitating halt. Maitland, looking up, recognized the entrance to his apartments, and sighed with relief for the brief respite from boredom that was to be his. He rose, negligently shaking off his duster, and stepped ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... with the difficult and overcoming it. Every call of duty has its place in this ideal; every irksome job, every wearisome responsibility. The fact that we are not always aware of it in no way annuls the other fact that it is so. Boredom, monotony, drudgery, bereavement, loneliness, all the clamour of unsatisfied ambitions and aching sensibilities, have their share in this divine yearning of the spirit to grasp what as yet is beyond its reach. All of that hacking of the man to fit the job rather than the shaping of the ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... in their embraces. There is a sort of love that is egotistical lust almost regardless of its partner, a sort of love that is mere fleshless pride and vanity at a white heat. There is the love-making that springs from sheer boredom, like a man reading a story-book to fill an hour. These inferior loves seek to accomplish an agreeable act, or they seek the pursuit or glory of a living possession, they aim at gratification or excitement or conquest. True love ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... of his pacing up and down that back room in Pall Mall like a caged lion. Like Mr. Galsworthy's Ferrand he hates to do "round business on an office stool." His temperament is entirely dynamic. Everything static and stay-at-home is utter boredom to him. Probably no soldier ever showed the qualities and the limitations of the man of action ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... her embarrassment lest others should understand, and her own marked ignorance of the language, she found great difficulty in making a free translation. "Upon my word, I wish you understood French, or some other tongue, so that we could escape from this boredom. Does the poor little prisoner have much of this to endure? Cannot we escape to the music-room, and ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... she would interrupt him, a love-bird on her finger and its beak at her lips, with: "Look, isn't he sweet?" thereby throwing him out of gear; it is true that she yawned and frankly confessed her boredom, as she had done for many years when the talk of Andrew and Bakkus went beyond her intellectual horizon; but—que voulez-vous?—even a great war cannot, in a few months, supply the deficiencies of thirty uneducated ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Claggett," he said, and his high-pitched voice managed to be saturated with sarcasm. "This is the one thing that is keeping me from unutterable boredom, while you go into your interminable fight." He paused to give Claggett Chew a cutting look. "You know how I feel about piracy—too terribly degrading, though I can see it has its excitement and rewards. But it ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... of it as possible. And that is the only sort of effort a discarnate individuality can exert. So, unable to endure the fifty or so years needed to make a really good reincarnation, he reincarnates in a year or so, out of pure boredom, into the first vehicle he can find, usually one nobody else wants." Dr. Harnosh dug out the heel of his pipe and blew through the stem. "But nobody will admit his own mental inferiority, even to himself. Now, every machine operator and field hand on ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... continually came across a little band of, say, twenty or thirty men and a couple of officers stationed near some culvert or bridge. Their tents were pitched on a bit of stony ground, with not a trace of vegetation near it, and here they stayed for months together, half dead from the boredom of their existence. Nevertheless such work was quite essential to the success of the campaign, for the attitude of the Dutch colonists up-country has been throughout the war an uncertain factor, and if these long lines ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... inside her they were passionately moving. In the mouth of the clergyman, they were false, indecent. She tried to read. But again the tedium and the sense of the falsity of the spoken word put her off. She went to stay with girl friends. At first she thought it splendid. But then the inner boredom came on, it seemed to her all nothingness. And she felt always belittled, as if never, never could she stretch her length ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... pass on to consider the achievements of Koerner and Heinrich von Kleist in the field of the drama. In this both have been very active, but in order to avoid boredom for a time at least, I shall begin with the analysis of a piece by Kleist, choosing first a tragedy, his Prince of Homburg which, to be sure, is entitled simply "a drama" by its author. I do not know whether he did this because of the circumstances that the Prince, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... to say. His memory is remarkable; he can quote poet after poet, or compose a poem on anything that crops up at the table. I do not think it can be said that Chesterton is a good listener. This is not in any way conceit or boredom, but is rather that he is always thinking out some new story or article or poem. Yet he is a good host in the niceties of the table; he knows if you want salt; he does not forget that wine is the symbol ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... new guide-book (oh, how it blossoms in my head as I write!) would further describe what trains go to what places, and in what way the boredom of them can best be overcome, and which expresses really go fast; and I should have a footnote describing those lines of steamers on which one can travel for nothing if one puts a sufficiently ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... as by a miracle, blossoms on the jasmine? What if the former stifles the latter? Indeed, one can escape boredom, but not love. One can flee the quidnuncs of the salon, but not the questioning perplexity of one's heart. A truce now ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and deadly uninteresting place this planet would be without the differentiation of the races! What if the whole united world were Irish or German, Russian, or even loudly pervading, assumptive American! What an awful element of boredom would be added to our existence; and yet there are people so blind to this most wonderful expression of God's Providence, that they limit their sympathetic regards to a chosen few, and virtually cast all other peoples into outer darkness. This applies especially to religious prejudices ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... somewhat notorious of late for a too vivid behavior: the distant bowing acquaintance of many years. This till the moment of indiscretion last May; when, encountering his dashing attractions in the boredom of a dull resort, far from her mother's restrictive eye, she had for an idle fortnight allowed the relation between them to become undeniably changed. Foolish indeed; but really she had thought—or now really thought ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... she had acquired infinite wisdom and complete disillusionment. But in all her "petting parties" on the "Mayflower" and in Plymouth she had found no Puritan who held her interest beyond the first kiss, and she had lately reverted in sheer boredom to her boarding school habit of drinking gin in large quantities, a habit which was not entirely approved of by her old-fashioned aunt, although Mrs. Brewster was glad to have her niece stay at home in the evenings "instead", as she told Mrs. Bradford, "of running around with those boys, and ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... Devonshire, Marienbad, Scotland, London again, following with patient feet wherever the unconscious royalties led, meeting the same people, listening to the same music, talking the same talk, eating the same dinners—would no one ever invent anything new to eat? The inexpressible boredom of riding up and down the Row every morning, the unutterable hours shopping and trying on clothes, the weariness of all the new pictures, and all the concerts, and all the operas, which seemed to grow less pleasing every year, as her eye and ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... ever was. You do yourself less than justice. It is said that men are only interested in themselves. The truth is that, as a rule, men are interested in every mortal thing except themselves. They have a habit of taking themselves for granted, and that habit is responsible for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on the face of ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... We're bored to death by standing about this infernal little village. There is nothing to do—except trail after a small number of slatternly young women we despise and hate. I don't, Daddy. And I don't drink. Why have I inherited no vices? We had a fight here yesterday—sheer boredom. Ortheris has a swollen lip, and another private has a bad black eye. There is to be a return match. I perceive the chief horror ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... would have been disgusted by any mention of it. If he had been obliged, he would have alluded to it distantly; he would have muttered that it was a bore not to do the proper thing. He was usually bored—for one reason or another; but this particular form of boredom he found more intense than all the rest. He would take endless pains to avoid it. Of course, the whole thing was a nuisance—an obvious nuisance; and everyone else must feel just as he did about it. And yet people seemed to have got it into their heads that he had some ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... their race can be. Their hearts were divided between Fanny Fitz and the cook, the rest of them appertained to the Misses Harriet and Rachael Fitzroy, whom they regarded with toleration tinged with boredom. ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... to be lain at the door of opportunity, and idleness in youth, and ennui and boredom in middle ages. Rawson-Clew was in the borderland between the two, and did not consider himself open to the temptations of either. He was not idle, he had things to do; and he was not bored, he had things to think about; but not enough ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... neither his conversational powers nor his stoicism could protect himself or us." It speaks highly for the matter of Coleridge's allocutions that such incessant outpourings during a mountaineering tramp appear to have left no lasting impression of boredom behind them. The holiday seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed by the whole party, and Coleridge, at any rate, had certainly earned it. For once, and it is almost to be feared for the last time in his life, he had resisted his besetting tendency to dispersiveness, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Because my soul cries out with boredom before every Christmas, boredom with all the books that are all written the same way. I had even the intention of writing in dialect, so as to be truly Norwegian; but when I saw you understood the country's language also, I gave up writing in dialect ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... the way of possessions, or even what he may be in the eyes of the world. An intellectual man in complete solitude has excellent entertainment in his own thoughts and fancies, while no amount of diversity or social pleasure, theatres, excursions and amusements, can ward off boredom from a dullard. A good, temperate, gentle character can be happy in needy circumstances, whilst a covetous, envious and malicious man, even if he be the richest in the world, goes miserable. Nay more; to one who has the constant delight of a special individuality, with a high ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... upon no ceremony, had drawn his hat a trifle lower over his eyes and turned his shoulder upon them, continuing along the street in his slouching walk. Elmer, summoning youth's supreme weapon of an affected boredom, yawned, stifled his little cough and went with Virginia to ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... is often due to bad ventilation of the room, more often still to boredom. A good plan in this case is to raise the pitch a semitone; it is often just as easy for singing, and invariably ...
— Music As A Language - Lectures to Music Students • Ethel Home
... I—on the whole. And then I asked her what about woman. And then she said with a woman it wasn't fear, it was just boredom. A woman is like a violinist: any fiddle, any instrument rather than empty hands and ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... really, to suppose I was ill. As far as I knew I was simply bored—horribly bored. But it was part of my boredom—I remember—that I was feeling so uncommonly well, and didn't know how on earth to work off my surplus energy. I had come back from a long journey—down in South America and Mexico—and had settled down for the winter near New York, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... pounds, and I sat back with the comfortable feeling of a man who will shortly have a small legacy to expend. At the moment which I had calculated to be most auspicious I suddenly threw off the semblance of boredom, rose up, lurched across the carriage and pulled the communication cord. (For the benefit of those who have not done this I may say that the cord comes away pleasantly in the hand and, at the same time, gives one a piquant feeling of unofficial responsibility.) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... eyelids, sleep hummed in my ears; it reigned in the dim cathedral. The congregation stirred and stretched; they moaned, they groaned aloud; they yawned upon a singing note, as you may sometimes hear a dog when he has reached the tragic bitterest of boredom. In vain the preacher thumped the table; in vain he singled and addressed by name particular hearers. I was myself perhaps a more effective excitant; and at least to one old gentleman the spectacle of my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a skin of wine at his side, blue mountains towering behind; but who lived by drawing domestic scenes and lovers' meetings for a weekly magazine that had an immense circulation among the imperfectly educated. To escape the boredom of work, which he never turned to but under pressure of necessity, and usually late at night with the publisher's messenger in the hall, he had half filled his studio with mechanical toys of his own invention, and perpetually increased their number. ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... Schwirtz and Sanford Hunt and Sam Weintraub and Todd faded. She treasured her mother's happiness at their Christmas dinner with the Sessionses. She encouraged the Sessionses to come up to the flat as often as they could, and she lulled her mother to a tolerable calm boredom. Before it was convenient to think of men again, her school-work ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and everybody knows it most accurately. Nobody would say that it is burdensome, and yet everybody knows, again, that a large group of evil deeds spring from ennui. It is not the same as idleness; I may be idle without being bored, and I may be bored although I am busy. At best, boredom may be called an attitude which the mind is thrown into because of an unsatisfied desire for different things. We speak of a tedious region, a tedious lecture, and tedious company only by way of metonymy—we always mean the emotional state they put ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... expressive through its mere sound alone: one can know a large part of what is going on in the breasts of people who talk in a foreign tongue just by listening to the sound of their voices—their excitement or boredom, their anger, love, or resentment; and one becomes conscious of these emotions, as in hearing music, without knowing what they are all about. All human emotions betray themselves in speech through ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... sitting all this time in a state of absolute boredom. Little Christian Frederick had gone out with his nurse, and the street was uninteresting, dusty, hot, and thronged by country people making their Saturday purchases. She did not care to look out of the window, ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... Theatre de l'Opera Comique—the Salle Favart, as it was then called—there began a new and brilliant period for the history of French art. It is a significant fact, and one which goes far to prove how closely the foundation of opera comique was connected with a revolt against the boredom of grand opera, that the most successful composers in the new genre were those who were actually innocent of any musical training whatsoever. Monsigny (1729-1817) is a particularly striking instance of natural genius triumphing in spite of a defective ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Jeannie's instructions to the letter, and after the women had left the dining-room had relapsed into a state of supreme boredom. It had not been a difficult task; his boredom was quite genuine, for he did not in the least wish to talk to Victor Braithwaite or to listen to Jim Crowfoot, or pass the wine to two or three other men. He wanted to tell ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... boredom] Oh, that! Men do fall in love with me. They all seem to think me a creature with volcanic passions: I'm sure I don't know why; for all the volcanic women I know are plain little creatures with sandy hair. I don't consider human volcanoes respectable. And I'm so tired of the ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... footman threw open the door of the carriage, and a lady's maid, with a jewel case in her hand, stared at him with undisguised curiosity. The lady bade him goodbye kindly, yet with a note of final dismissal in her tone. He had occupied her time for an hour or two, and saved her from absolute boredom. The matter was ended there. Nevertheless, from a quiet corner of the station he watched her stand listlessly on the platform while her things were being collected—a tall, distinguished looking figure, and very noticeable amongst the motley ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... Homestead was at its best. The entire demesne was without a weed, and the blooming berry patches, the sprouting asparagus beds and the budding grape vines all come in for the eminent sculptor's enforced inspection, until at last with a yawn of unconcealed boredom he turned away. "You seem to like your slavery," he remarked to Zulime, a note of comical accusation ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... asphyxiate. Oh, I'm so tired of it all—so tired—and he doesn't see, doesn't understand! He puts me on a pedestal, and burns incense at my feet, and believes that I am as interested as himself, and all the time—all the time I am smothered with boredom and impatience. I don't know why I am saying all this to you. Yes, I do. I saw in your eyes that you saw through me, and knew what I really felt. Now I suppose you ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that we see too much of one another; then why do you want to drive our acquaintance to the last limits of boredom?" ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... Conseil replied, "I hardly know what to tell master. We're certainly seeing some unusual things, and for two months we've had no time for boredom. The latest wonder is always the most astonishing, and if this progression keeps up, I can't imagine what its climax will be. In my opinion, we'll never again ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... somehow was always on stereotyped lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart. He kept his ship in apple-pie order, which would have been seamanlike enough but for a finicking touch in its details. His officers affected a superiority over the rest of us, but the boredom of their souls appeared in their manner of dreary submission to the fads of their commander. It was only his apprenticed boys whose irrepressible spirits were not affected by the solemn and respectable mediocrity ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... education. Indeed, the influence of the Edinburgh professoriate appears to have been mainly negative, and in some cases deterrent; creating in his mind, not only a very low estimate of the value of lectures, but an antipathy to the subjects which had been the occasion of the boredom inflicted upon him by their instrumentality. With the exception of Hope, the Professor of Chemistry, Darwin found them all "intolerably dull." Forty years afterwards he writes of the lectures of the Professor of Materia Medica that they were "fearful to remember." The ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... life cannot satisfy man; he is a contemplative being, and he must find some all-inclusive whole, of which he is a part. If he fails to find it, life for him must become a blank, and he must fall a prey to boredom and satiety. Man's life is not to be confined to his own particular sphere, his life must extend far beyond that—he must concern himself with the infinite in the universe; "He must view life—nay, more, he must live it—in ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... Boredom gave way to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... the different characters, and even contriving for a time to impart by his expressive reading a fictitious interest to the dull, tedious tragedy. Gradually, however, the feeling of disappointment and boredom among his audience communicated itself to him. He lost confidence; his beautiful reading began to decline in pathos and interest; and when at last he finished, and, glancing at the downcast faces round him, found ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the pleasure that we take from places is nothing more nor less than the pleasure we put into them. A person predisposed to boredom can be bored in the very nave of Amiens; and a person predisposed to happiness can be happy even in Camden, New Jersey. I know: for I have watched American tourists in Amiens; and once, when I had ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... melancholy. It was played by a man with a three-cornered face and a very bald head, who gazed at the ceiling as if in a kind of swoon—a swoon that might have been induced either by tender ecstasy or acute boredom. ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... slowly, with great boredom. Jonas made contact twice with Claerten, who told him over and over to wait, to do nothing: "The next move is coming soon; do nothing to hurry it. You can only upset ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... but boredom slays; My mind from out this office strays And takes me back to the spacious days When I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... he sings particular songs, the publisher of the song in question being his paymaster. Of this type of song a contemporary Musical Journal states:—"Every serious musician knows it, and, scenting the boredom, tries to avoid it. It is highly sentimental, it moves within a limited scope, emotionally and technically, and it deals with a few well-worn subjects. Gardens, spring, sunshine, flowers—these are favourite themes. If only, the singer ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Bulba. His appointment to a professorship in history was a ridiculous episode in his life. After a brilliant first lecture, in which he had evidently said all he had to say, he settled to a life of boredom for himself and his pupils. When he resigned he said joyously: "I am once more a free Cossack." Between 1834 and 1835 he produced a new series of stories, including his famous Cloak, which may be regarded as the legitimate beginning ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the chief function of government is inhibition. Their available energy and ability is taxed to the utmost in maintaining the fighting line, and it is sheer greed for direction that has led to their systematic thwarting of civilian co-operation. Let me warn them of the boredom and irritation they are causing. This is a people's war, a war against militarism; it is not a war for the greater glory of British diplomatists, officials, and people in uniforms. It is our war, not their war, and the last ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... Alice, who looked very graceful and handsome, although also, to a discerning eye, a little sulky, and bored with a curious, abstracted boredom. ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ghostliness you follow me), I feel no such attraction. Or if one Bows to my sympathy for the briefest space, Snap—it is gone! And, worst of all to tell, What broke it is not in the least dislike But utter boredom. Now.... ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... broken-backed chair. Question after question she put, which cost her hostess tiresome flights of imagination to answer. Clo was far from regretting her move, however. If Churn were absent long, or if he went out again, Kit said that she would return as an escape from boredom. ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Sieur Raymond, grinning placidly,—"with every imaginable civility. Niece," he continued, "here is a gentleman who offers you a heartful of love, six months of insanity, and forty years of boredom in a leaky, wind-swept chateau. He has dreamed dreams concerning you: allow me to present to ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... not so much as the slightest predilection left. I assure you I attach not the least importance to any opinions. The result of the varieties of boredom I have undergone, is a conviction (unless conviction is too industrious a word for the lazy sentiment I entertain on the subject), that any set of ideas will do just as much good as any other set, and just as much harm as any other set. There's an English family with a charming Italian motto. What ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... of the efficacy of prayer. I was a little fascinated by it—and then, could I have argued with him? You don't argue against such evidence, and besides it would have looked as if I had wanted to claim all the merit. Already his gratitude was simply frightful. Funny position, wasn't it? The boredom came later, when we lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of inadvertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don't know. One gets attached in a way to people one ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... go at once then. How the time has gone!" Reluctantly enough they hunted up Goliath, who in thorough boredom had returned to his place on the hearth-rug in the big bedroom, gathered together their candles, and found their way to the cellar. Cynthia had thoughtfully requested a tin biscuit-box from the grocer, and in this they packed their candles, thus protecting ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... increased if she could have seen the face of the seeress. Now that the match was close to the fuse, Madalena had a wild impulse to draw back. It was not too late. Nothing irrevocable had been done. Ruthven Smith's acceptance of the invitation to Valley House would mean only a few days of boredom for his fellow guests, unless—she herself made the next move ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... secretly envious of Bland as an aviator did not add to his mental comfort. Bland could speak with slighting familiarity of "the game," and assume a boredom not altogether a pose. Bland had drunk deep and satisfyingly of the cup which Johnny, to save his honor, must put away from him after a tantalising sip or two. Not until Bland had said, "Wait till you've been in the game as long as I have," had Johnny realized to ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... AUNT—[Pretending boredom but irritated.] Did the sociology you took up at college teach you that—to play the ghoul on every possible occasion, excavating old bones? Why not let your ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... with a deep chuckle, "if I didn't have lives to play with—other people's lives—I'd die of boredom. You're young," he continued with a sudden touch of bitterness. "You're still able to draw upon the old illusions to maintain your interest in life. Ambition, work, achievement, success—Love! You're inexperienced ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... request, and Rose shrank from it; but she said lightly, 'We shall be meeting often. You will see more of us than you will care for, I'm afraid. The Malletts are rather ubiquitous in Radstowe. It's fortunate for us, or Caroline would die of boredom, but I don't know how it ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... only remaining Red Hat, saves his soul from boredom by keeping all the H.Q. departments open and conducting, on his own, a brisk correspondence between them. As there are about thirty of these and he conducts them all himself it will be understood that this entails a certain amount of movement on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... so, and in the hours I describe it seems sure indeed, he will have to continue his labour. Man was born to labour, as the oldest texts say; he must continue to drive his furrow to the end of the field, otherwise he would lie down and die of sheer boredom, or go mad. He asks himself why he became a maker of idols. "An idol-maker, an idol-maker," he cries, "who can find no worshippers for his wares! Better the sailor before the mast or the soldier in the field." His thoughts break away, and he begins ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... a child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that the child is not the man's father, but the man? and that I came into the world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom? ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... syllable of the word "Company," with a view to bestowing a royal salute likewise. Instead, the Captain extended the hand of friendship to the General as he approached. The look of nil admirari boredom slowly faded from the face of the smart and dapper Brigade-Major, and for a while it ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... don't know her," he said, rumpling his hair with an air of boredom. "An old society woman! What's the good of that to me? What have I to do with dowagers? ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... time there was a murderer who got off with a life-sentence. What impressed him most, when he had time to think, was the frank boredom of all who took ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... steps, those milestones upon time, Those tombstones of dead selves, those hours of birth, Those moments of the soul in years of earth. They mark the height achieved, the main result, The power of freedom in the perished cult, The power of boredom in the dead man's deeds Not the bright moments ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... was in the care of Mrs. Burton, alternately quarrelling vigorously with little Cedric Burton whose intellectual leanings provoked her most ardent contempt, and teasing the luckless Scooter out of sheer boredom till all the animal's ideas in life centred in a desperate desire ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... by some frenzied assistant director, and he, after a little, would cease to be frenzied and fall to loafing calmly with the others. Merton Gill's education in his chosen art was progressing. He came to loaf with the unconcern, the vacuous boredom, the practised nonchalance, of ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... represented that he was a mythic character, a delusion, and a snare. I recounted how, the last time I found him, I found him at a dinner party behind a wall of white cravat, with an inconclusive opinion on every possible subject, and a power of silent boredom absolutely Titanic. I related how, on the strength of our having been together at "Old Doylance's," he had asked himself to breakfast with me (a social offence of the largest magnitude); how, fanning my weak embers of belief in Doylance's boys, I had let him in; and how, ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... oppressed by infinite boredom, I went into the smoking-room. He was sitting there in absolute immobility, which was really fakir-like and impressive. I began to wonder what could be the associations of that sort of man, his "milieu," his ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... she felt a savage glory in their loveliness, as if it would taunt Grandcourt with his indifference to her and them—a secret darting of venom which was strongly imaginative. He acquitted himself with all the advantage of a man whose grace of bearing has long been moulded on an experience of boredom—nursed the little Antonia, who sat with her hands crossed and eyes upturned to his bald head, which struck her as worthy of observation—and propitiated Henleigh by promising him a beautiful saddle and bridle. It was only the two eldest girls who had known him as a continual presence; ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... enormous wealth as a company promoter, while I, on whom the title has descended, am perfectly contented with its fallen fortunes. I have scarcely a thought or taste in common with my aunt. In fact, I must bore her exceedingly. Yet she hides her boredom beneath a radiant countenance and leads me to understand that my society gives her inexpressible joy. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... know the moves." "Would you like a game?" he asks, and I say, "I don't think I will, thanks very much. I hardly ever play." And there the business ends. But once in two years, or it may be three, circumstances are too strong for me. I meet a man so keen or a situation so dull that politeness or boredom leads me to accept. The board is produced, I remind myself that the queen stands on a square of her own colour, and that the knight goes next to the castle; I push forward the king's pawn two squares, and we are ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... and looked distrait or had shown in some such trivial manner that he was bored, which so exasperated Schloezer that he barred him out, and invited Mr. Bayard instead, who perhaps loved music less, but showed no outward signs of boredom. ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... grief. He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing. But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty he experienced ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... of the stage. He had once had a tail. But that was a long story: added to which there was not time to tell it. Little Sally St. Leonard played his wife, and Robina was his mother-in-law. So much depends upon one's mood. What an ocean of boredom might be saved if science could but give us a barometer foretelling us our changes of temperament! How much more to our comfort we could plan our lives, knowing that on Monday, say, we should be feeling frivolous; on Saturday ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... browned faces upturned to the sleek, carefully groomed man in the light-gray suit, with a flaunting, prairie sunflower ostentatiously displayed in his buttonhole and with his campaign smile upon his lips and dull boredom looking out ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... "I'll be perfectly delighted to see you," she said. "I was actually thinking of taking to my bed out of sheer boredom. Are ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... to be a prodigy, but those who know me do me the justice to admit that where I am it is very difficult for boredom to find ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... Lady Mary, who was with child, suffered much from ill-health, and this was to some extent aggravated by intense boredom, although of that boredom ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... than he and can keep up his pitch neither of activity nor of anger; but this is no proof that such an inquiry is impertinent or that answers are impossible. Indeed, the chances are that the proportions of this boredom and the animosity resulting from it will depend upon the extent to which grievances do exist about which it is painful to think for the reason that they so plainly should not exist. A complacent reader of any of Mr. Sinclair's better books can stay complacent only by shutting up the book ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... mention of that name Katie's manner changed instantly and utterly. From languor, from indifference, and from boredom, she started up erect with wild excitement and terrified interest. In her face there was a perfect anguish of fear and apprehension. Her eyes stared upon him in utter horror; she gasped for breath, and it was not until some time that she ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... a latent boredom piercing Sir Basil's affability. Great truths uttered by some lips might be made to seem very unefficacious. She proposed to him that she should show him the wonderful display of mountain-laurel that grew ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... however, her mother's silence seemed to remove the one possible explanation that yet remained for her having been made to drive to Ashbury; and by the time three quarters of the journey had been accomplished, she resigned herself to a mood of mystified boredom. ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... themselves the greatest challenge ever uttered. Poets and painters have gloried in the conception of Ajax, on his lonely rock, defying all the gods that be. But what is that compared with this? In the passage whose sublimities awoke the enthusiasm of Macaulay, and delivered him from insufferable boredom, Paul claims to have reached the limits of finality, and he hurls defiance at all the ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... it. And having been nourished to its satisfaction from young Master Bartender's silver-mounted bottle (which John Fairmeadow then secretly slipped into his pocket)—and having yawned in a fashion so tremendous that Mrs. Bartender herself could never hope to equal that infinite expression of boredom—and having smiled, and having wriggled, and having giggled, and cooed, and attempted—actually attempted—to get its great toe in its mouth without extraneous assistance of any sort whatsoever—even ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... broke across the babel of shrill bargaining, every man in the place jumped, and not one was quicker of recovery than wee Bobby. Instantly ashamed, as an intelligent little dog who knew the import of the gun should be, Bobby denied his alarm in a tiny pink yawn of boredom. Then he went briskly about his urgent business ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... rusting of mind machinery in the soldier-workman's life away from the fighting line certain definite considerations must be set. Many soldiers will form a habit of reading—in the new armies the demand for books is great; some in sheer boredom will have begun an all-round cultivation of their minds; others again will be chafing continually against this prolonged holding-up of their habitual mental traffic—and when a man chafes he does not exactly rust; so that, while the naturally lazy will have been made more ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... worried over the possibility of his having had another tilt with the Scotch and sodas. He relieved her of that fear, and she restrained her curiosity until boredom seized her. The silence and the scratching of his pen began to grate ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of thought. Being almost incredibly beautiful, she had learned very early in life that the desired (not always the desirable) is powerful to sway men; the possessed begins to lose its sway; the habit of possession easily succumbs to boredom, and then power ceases. Even Commodus, accordingly, had never owned her in the sense that men own slaves; she had reserved to herself self-mastery, which called for cunning, courage and a certain ruthlessness, albeit ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... the only contents of the mind at time of fatigue. Feelings are present also, usually of a very unpleasant kind. They are related partly to the sensations mentioned above, which are essentially painful, and they are feelings of boredom and ennui. We have yet to examine the ideas in mind and their behavior at time of fatigue. They come sluggishly, associations being made slowly and inaccurately, and we make many mistakes. But constriction of ideas ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... just one short lifetime in which to see it! I am fully conscious of the difficulty of conveying to others impressions which remain intensely vivid to myself, and am also acutely alive to the fact that matters which appear most interesting to one person, drive others to martyrdoms of boredom. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton |
