"Disillusionment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the bookseller, tossing it down again. "Give me 'Ars ne Lupin'." And he paid two sous for a paper-covered, dog-eared, much-thumbed copy of the famous detective story, not because he intended to read it, but in payment for his hour of disillusionment. Then he slung his pack over his shoulders and tramped out into the country. He laughed aloud at the thought of Helen and her idolaters. A poetic hoax. Overripe words. Seductive ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... earnest men, who with a limited horizon fulfilled their daily duties in the city. It ends in the rapt vision, the magical music of a singer, who seemed as he sang to soar beyond the range of human ears. The hope passes from the confident expectation of instant change, through the sobrieties of disillusionment and the recantations of despair, to the iridescent dreams of a future which has taken wing and made its home in ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... the stamp on the package of tobacco, the Pipe-tube coiled on the floor, and the odds and ends of tobacco and confectioner's tartlets which were littered about. "Truly," I thought to myself in my dejection and disillusionment, "I cannot be quite grown-up if I cannot smoke as other fellows do, and should be fated never to hold a chibouk between my first and second fingers, or to inhale and puff smoke through ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... For Lilienthal's disillusionment came apace, and he finally recognized the error of his ways. In his book, My Travels in Russia, published both in English and in German, he admits that the opponents of the schools he advocated were after all in the right. Education ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... cold, the early hours and few holidays: all these experiences act as a rude shock upon the ill-balanced refinement of the Irish immigrant. Not seldom, he or she loses heart and hope and returns to Ireland mentally and physically a wreck, a sad disillusionment to those who had been comforted in the agony of the leave-taking by the assurance that ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... songster chants with livelier tone, And lambkins leap and cloudless skies are blue, And all is gay and cheerful:—I alone Am singularly sad; Mine erstwhile happiness and calm content Yields to a sense of sorrowful surprise: Things that I thought were thus, are otherwise: And all is grief, and disillusionment. ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... own bright life had been enshrouded by pain and rendered to me degraded by an intolerable sense of bondage; and here was my helpless, sinless babe tortured for weeks and left frail and suffering. The smooth brightness of my previous life made all the disillusionment more startling, and the sudden plunge into conditions so new and so unfavourable dazed and stunned me. My religious past became the worst enemy of the suffering present. All my personal belief in Christ, all my intense faith in His constant direction of affairs, all my habit of continual ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... responsibility. It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders of humanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everything themselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment with mankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike in personal and public affairs—the position of the man who has lost faith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if we could only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almost ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... There are moments of disillusionment in the lives of men from which the sensitive recorder shrinks. Suffice it to say that the good thing fell down. Sleeve-links finished in the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... hotel in Charleston. On the second morning following the happenings of the foregoing chapter they were having breakfast served in Irene's little sitting-room. In the light from the window he was struck, as he had been struck before, by her listless mien and the thickening shadows of disillusionment in her eyes. He had to remind her that the coffee-urn was at her elbow, and that he would not take his coffee from any hand but hers before she filled his cup. Her eggs and bacon she had barely touched. He saw her hands quiver as she passed his cup. He tried to enliven her ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... the shocks of early disillusionment! It was not until long after the hare was skinned, roasted, served as CIVET and as PUREE that I discovered the truth. I was not at all grateful to the gentlemen of the chateau whose dupe I had been; was even wrath with my dear old 'Maman' for treating them with extra ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the scenes, disgusted and angry with the players because their performance is not spontaneous. If she had stopped to reason about the matter she would have been less uncompromising. But in the shock of disillusionment she felt only that the man was working upon his audience like a sleight-of-hand performer; and the longer she observed, and the stronger his spell over the others, the deeper became her contempt for the "charlatan." He seemed to her like one telling a lie—as that one seems, while telling ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Later, when some wonderful children's parties were given in the villa where she lived, which were arranged with great skill and were veritable works of art, she became still more restless and cynical, almost as if she were suffering from some disillusionment. One day she called an orphan child from Messina, who was one of our children who had come from the school in the Via Giusti, and took her away into a quiet corner, asking her to repeat the Lord's Prayer. The orphan recited it, while the rich child gazed at her eagerly. Then, as if in obedience ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... knowledge darkened all Shakespeare's later thinking. Naturally, when youth passed from him and disillusionment put an end to dreaming, his melancholy deepened, his sadness became despairing; we can see the shadows thickening round him into night. Brutus takes an "everlasting farewell" of his friend, and goes willingly to his rest. Hamlet dreads "the undiscovered country"; but unsentient ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... turned his back on Germany at the first opportunity. Each met in Italy with bitter disillusionment and an untimely fate. ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires, to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities of life can be built—duty. When this rock has been faithfully clung to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the noble resolution has been clung to never to base personal happiness on a broken trust or another's pain, I have over and over again known the, most imperfect marriage prove ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. Therein, everything so carefully built up during the preceding four centuries was tried as by fire, and each failed—save the indestructible qualities of personal honour, courage and fortitude. Nothing corporate, ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... soon as she had seized the significance of Monjardin's verses, had grown deathly pale; stricken by sudden disillusionment, she felt a glacial chill overwhelm her body to the very marrow; she feared that she would faint straightway and provide a spectacle for the guests, who were all drinking her health, their eyes focussed upon her. A veil of tears spread before her sight.... In vain she tried to repress ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... streets had been magic-built. Was it his youth, or had Francey, dancing before him, her head lifted to catch unearthly harmonies, thrown a spell over his judgment? She had gone, and he was older—but he had a feeling that the disillusionment was not only in himself. It was in the atmosphere about him—in the stale air, stamped on the stereotyped gilt and plush of the shabby theatre and on the faces of the people. He wondered whether they had all grown too old. Perhaps the ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many met the stern realities of the New World with a sinking sense of disillusionment, finding the material conditions of life harder and the spiritual peace less satisfying than they had imagined? And many there were who had never been touched by the Puritan ideal. "Men being to come over into a wilderness," says the kindly Bradford, "in which much labour and servise was to ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... the ground. Sydney Smith caricatured the delusive hopes excited by the passing of the Reform Bill of 1832, when he said that all the unmarried young women thought that they would at once get husbands, and that all the schoolboys expected a heavy fall in the price of jam tarts. A process of disillusionment may confidently be anticipated in Ireland if the Home Rule Bill becomes law, and the fairy prospects held out to the Irish people by Mr. Redmond and the other stage managers of the piece are chilled by ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... true, what you tell me—if Manley himself is another disillusionment—if beyond his selfishness and his carelessness he is a drunken brute whom I can't even respect, then I'm done with my ideals. I want to see him just as he is. I want to see him once without the halo I have kept shining all these months. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... in her mind all her life since she ceased to be a child—fifty years of disillusionment and suffering. She thought first of her happy, peaceful childhood, her grandfather's blind affection, the pure joys of her days of innocence, the exciting games with her little sister and tall cousins. Then she shuddered at the earliest thought of marriage, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... you," he said appreciatively. "I certainly am enough of a wizard to save your Peter man any disillusionment ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the primitive, accounting for the phenomena by devising a mind more powerful than his own. The childhood view of the omnipotent parent, reality's disillusionment, the parent substitute, the creation of a god in his parent's image without the weakness of his parent, so that he might go on in perpetual irresponsibility since he could now place ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness, and brutalized with pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate mouth is set for ever in the disillusionment of death. Death is the complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the whole body and being, over the suffering and weariness ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... nature was to be studied, enjoyed, and used, but it was not as to Keats a realm of enchantment; or as to Wordsworth the realm where alone the divine and the human could pass the boundaries of sense and meet; or as to Matthew Arnold a refuge from pain and disillusionment. Browning regards the world about him more in the sane, unsentimental, straightforward, intelligible way of Chaucer or of Shakespeare. The mystical elements in Wordsworth's feeling for nature were foreign to Browning's mind. An instructive comparison might be made ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... That's all I can do! And I do it, Nina," said Richard in a softer tone, "I do it to hasten the inevitable, my dear! I do it to bring you back to your father sooner instead of later; to give you only one year of disillusionment and suffering, instead ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... trains of thought, the outcome of characteristic moods, by the babblings and wayward wanderings of brooks and rivulets. The appeal, therefore, is to a wide experience. Can we be satisfied to join with Tylor in his sense of disillusionment? Or shall we strive to get yet nearer to the heart of things? If we cling to the deeper view, to us, as to the men of old, the running stream will sing of the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the great disillusionment!" laughed Will. "Hassan! Go forward, and show us where that hoard of ivory ought ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... watching her carelessly in the dimly lighted room, began to think.... "Disillusionment already. The dream has died in her. A child's brain overstuffed with slogans, it begins now to ache and grow confused. Tyranny, injustice, seem far away and vague. The revolution in the streets has blown the revolution out of her heart. There will be many like that to-morrow. The over-idealized ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... 1821, and the missionaries of Kerikeri soon realised that they had a different Hongi to deal with. For a time he held aloof from them, and when he did speak he showed great reserve. Some allowance must of course be made for the inevitable disillusionment of such a return. After the palaces of the bishops by whom he had been entertained in England, the mission stations must have appeared even startlingly humble. But the real grievance was the cessation of the trade in firearms. The ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... standing very nearly still too; and that all your exertions are only enabling you to creep on at the pace of a crushed snail, and that it's the water that is going the pace. It's a most quaint and unpleasant disillusionment. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... mystified her friends and her foes. She had foes. Men, and women, too, who looked askance at her. The less they knew, the more they had to invent. The proprieties of the Forest were being outraged. The women who envied Mary-Clare her daring fell upon her first. From their own misery and disillusionment, they sought to defend their position; create an atmosphere of virtue around their barren lives, by attacking the woman who ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... should read in the words "fed up" a sign that our tenacity is giving out, he reads it wrong; grim will be the disillusionment of any hopes he may build upon his misreading, and even grimmer the anger of those ...
— Fragments From France • Captain Bruce Bairnsfather
... Lincoln's first call for volunteers, issued on April 15, 1861, limited the number to 75,000, put their term of service at three months, and prescribed their duty as the enforcement of the law against combinations too powerful to be overcome by ordinary judicial process. Disillusionment swiftly followed. The terrible defeat of the Federals at Bull Run on July 21 revealed the serious character of the task before them; and by a series of measures Congress put the entire man power of the country at the President's command. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... enough after this to see Will Crooks fathering one of those very Bills for the interference with family life which Chesterton most hated. But, indeed, the years that followed the 1906 election are a story of a steadily growing disillusionment with the realities of representative government ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... his puzzled stare as he watched Miss Deane, and struggled to fix that tantalising suggestion of likeness to some one he knew; his flash of illumination as he solved the puzzle and turned with that gentle, winning smile of his to herself; and then the progress of his disillusionment as, day by day, he realised more plainly the intriguing similarities of expression and gesture, until he felt that he was making love to the spirit of an aged spinster temporarily disguised behind the appearance ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... eyes, made wholesome by the fires of patriotism, stalked the grim God of War. Knowing nothing yet of the motive that inspired these people, I could feel no enthusiasm, but only disillusionment at this discovery of the ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... man's face, as he sat sipping his ginger-ale in the club-house smoking-room, there was a look of disillusionment. "Never again!" ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... know just what kind of a father he has had and just how worthy of respect and veneration that father has been. A little boy is credulity itself and everything tends to make him believe in his father. But as he grows older he will surely know. Woe be it to the parent who when disillusionment comes falls below the standard the child has set. Some time the boy will know. If he has never had the pleasure that was his due, if he has never had the fun in his home that he had a right to expect, his estimate of his ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... recognition of the facts that the Earth continued to exist, and that the Roman Empire and not the New Jerusalem was the dominant power therein. But though the Church as a whole was guided safely through the crisis of disillusionment, it nevertheless remains unfortunate that the compiler of the Sermon on the Mount should have made the false assumption. For the picture which he presents of the perfect man and the ideal society ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... rights and privileges are vouchsafed to all men without regard to nationality, position, or possessions; where there is no faintest hint of the caste system; and where there are no possible lines of demarcation. Their disillusionment on that train was swift and severe, and the observer could not but wonder what was their conception of a democracy as they walked about the streets of the city or gave attention to their bruised faces. Their dreams of freedom and equal rights ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... youth does not listen and cannot listen, but just goes on its eager way, trying its own experiments, believing in the delight of triumph and success, determined, at all events, to test all for itself. All this confession of disillusionment and disappointment is true, but only partially true. The struggle, the effort, the perseverance, does bring fine things with it—things finer by far than the shining crown and the loud ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... amount to a row of pins in civil life." Something of that sense of bitter disillusionment, of blasted idealism, which is the immediate aftermath of war, had crept into his voice. "The only thrill I ever got out of its possession was in the service. My colonel was never content merely with ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... absolute reserve amid all his amiability. Therefore Frank would have done anything to win his esteem, while Beatrice was deferential to him. Mr Allport was tall and broad, and thin as a door; he had also a remarkably small chin. He was naive, inclined to suffer in the first pangs of disillusionment; nevertheless, he was waywardly humorous, sometimes wistful, sometimes petulant, always gallant. Therefore Vera liked him, whilst Beatrice mothered him. Mr Holiday was short, very stout, very ruddy, with black hair. He had a disagreeable voice, was vulgar in the grain, but officiously ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... to things around him, so that people thought poorly of his intelligence, and the nurse shook her head and said it was a "bad sign when they took no notice." Gradually, very gradually, his features settled into an expression of disillusionment, curious in one so young. Perhaps he bore in his blood reminiscences, forebodings of that wonderful and terrible world he had been in such a hurry to enter. He was Tyson's ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... through poor adaptation." I have known several immigrant young men as well as girls who became deranged during the first year of life in America. A young Russian who came to Chicago in the hope of obtaining the freedom and self-development denied him at home, after three months of bitter disillusionment, with no work and insufficient food, was sent to the hospital for the insane. He only recovered after a group of his young countrymen devotedly went to see him each week with promises of work, the companionship at last establishing a sense of unbroken association. I also ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... last the disillusionment that precedes death came to him. The artificial slipped from both men and a nearness like that of brothers, joined them. They spoke not of the future but of the past. Years slipped aside and left them back in the midst ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Each man is a sieve through which life sifts experiences, leaving the garnering of grain and the blowing away of chaff to the man himself. Peter had garnered courage to face with a quiet heart things as they are. He had never accepted the general view of things as final, therefore he escaped disillusionment. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... of historical and biblical interest did we see in our wanderings, but I think the memory of our first real glimpse of the Land of Goshen will ever remain the most vivid. Disillusionment came later, as it does everywhere in the East, yet on that spring morning Khan Yunus, shining like an emerald, came as balm to eyes weary with the aching ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... first moment of wakening she could not distinguish realities from dreams. All the experiences of the night before seemed for the moment only the adventures of a nightmare. But disillusionment came quickly. She opened her eyes to view the cabin walls, and the full dreadfulness of her situation swept ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... lived over like a vivid nightmare her married life down to the least detail,—the time of golden hopes and aspirations, Paris and Europe, her disillusionment, the futile scurry of their life in New York, which she realized was a compromise without much result.... It ended in a choke rather than a sob. ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... disillusionment. With a partial return to the academic calm of his normal life Bernard Graves candidly told himself that the actual basis of his resentment against Shelby was trivial; that the editor's outlook on politics was Quixotic, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Zoology and chemistry will be just as far from their end as now, and all contemporary scientific work consists in increasing these numbers. I saw through this trick when I discovered the 35,001-st and felt no satisfaction. Well, I had no time to suffer from disillusionment, as I was soon possessed by a new faith. I plunged into Nihilism, with its manifestoes, its 'black divisions,' and all the rest of it. I 'went to the people,' worked in factories, worked as an oiler, as a barge hauler. Afterwards, ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... The unknown El {108} Dorado is always invested with a fabulous glamour that draws to ruin the reckless and the unfit. Before the road was built adventurers had arrived in Cariboo expecting to pick up pails of nuggets at the bottom of a rainbow. Their disillusionment came; but there was an easy way back to the world. They did not stay to breed crime and lawlessness in the camp. 'The walking'—as Begbie expressed it—'was all down hill and the road was good, especially for thugs.' While there were ten thousand ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... the little band along the path of disillusionment, and gives some brilliant flashes of light on one side ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... play at the time, and was rehearsing its successor. Meanwhile, I—fell in love with her, I suppose, and she certainly encouraged me in the belief that she might accept me. I did eventually propose marriage. Then she told me she was married already. It was a painful disillusionment—at the time. I only saw her, to speak ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... and far happier, in her eternal youthfulness of heart, in that divine life of the imagination where he must always be with her as she had known him briefly at his best, than in the blunt commonplaceness of daily existence, the routine and disillusionment of the world. Perhaps—who knew?—he had, after all, given her the best that man can offer to a woman of exalted nature; instead of taking again with his left hand what his right had bestowed; completed the great gift of life with the priceless ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... 22nd I awoke, as I had lain down to sleep, in high hopes. No evil foreboding of coming events had visited me in dreams; but it was not many hours later that the disillusionment began. I started by motor in the very early hours of a beautiful August morning to visit General Lanrezac at his Headquarters in the ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... Wedekind is said to figure as Robert, who is a reclame agent—was attached to circuses, variety theatres, and fairs, was an actor in tingletangles, cabarets, and saw life on its seamiest side, whether in Germany, Austria, France, or England. Such experiences produced their inevitable reaction—disillusionment. Finally in 1905 Director Reinhardt engaged him as an actor and he married the actress Tilly Niemann-Newes, with whom he has since lived happily, the father of a son, his troubled spirit in safe harbour at last, but not in the least changed, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... are those extraordinary verses under the title Colloque Sentimental which trouble one's imagination with so penetrating a chill of shivering disillusionment. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... thought of this undying loveliness he contrasted bitterly with our feverishly sad and short life. When, by the power of imagination, he had left the world behind him and was absorbed in the vision of beauty roused by the bird's song, he longed for death rather than a return to disillusionment. ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... was not a poem, but an eloquent and extravagant composition in prose, in which Evelyn invested Charles II with every conceivable virtue and all wisdom. This was no doubt written with sincere enthusiasm, though Evelyn suffered a profound disillusionment in later years; and if he ever read his effusion again it must have caused him some distress. The Panegyric is now reprinted for ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... exchequer, the second son procured an extension of furlough and sped to Paris. There at the close of 1787 he spent several weeks, hopefully endeavouring to extract money from the bankrupt Government. It was a season of disillusionment in more senses than one; for there he saw for himself the seamy side of Parisian life, and drifted for a brief space about the giddy vortex of the Palais Royal. What a contrast to the limpid life of Corsica was ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... response from Coralie. I was obliged to conclude that she considered her marriage a success; at least that it was doing what she had expected from it. At this moment she yawned in her old, pretty, lazy way. Certainly there were no signs of romantic misery or tragic disillusionment about her. Again I asked myself whether my sympathy were not more justly due to Struboff—Struboff, who sat now smoking a big cigar and wobbling his head solemnly in answer to the emphatic taps of Wetter's forefinger on his waistcoat. The question was whether human tenderness ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... forgotten cap pistols. He told of lions, tigers, elephants, bears, and buffaloes, all of enormous size and strength of lung, so that before many days had passed he had debarred himself, by whole-hearted lying, from the very possibility of joining the expedition and seeing the disillusionment of his public. With true artistic spirit he omitted all mention of confining house or cage and bestowed the gift of speech upon all the characters, whether brute or human, in his epic. The merry-go-round he combined with ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... far as the insurrection of labour goes, American conditions differ from European, and the process of disillusionment will probably follow a different course. American labour is very largely immigrant labour still separated by barriers of language and tradition from the established thought of the nation. It will be long before labour in America speaks with the ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... returned home. The need for chaperonage was over, and it was abundantly evident that Pixie was in no need of consolation. The first shock of disillusionment over, it was pre-eminently relief that she felt—relief from a bond which had weighed more and more heavily as time passed by. If Stanor had come home, looking his old self, caring for her, depending on her as he had done during the days of their brief ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... dealing with the establishment of a Socialistic Colony upon a deserted island off the coast of California. The way of disillusionment is the course over which ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... his sensations, that "box of compacted sweets". He even forefeels a ghostly landscape where two shall go wandering through the night, "alone". So the faith that broke its chrysalis in the first disillusionment of boyhood, in "Second Best", beautiful with the burden of Greek lyricism, ends triumphant with the ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... Young Remington's groan of utter disillusionment came a sound from the street, formless and clumsy, but brought to a sharp climax with the crash of ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... she sat by the fire, half undressed, her immature thin arms hanging loosely, her sombre eyes staring at the fire. She wished this night might go on for ever, this time of ecstasy between a promise and its fulfilment. She had seen disillusionment in another and did not laugh at its possibility for herself; it would come to her, she thought, as it had come to her mother, who had hoped her daughter would find happiness in love; and Henrietta wondered if that gentle spirit was aware of what ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... for me. Things might then have adjusted themselves quite naturally. The idea, however, of a sensitive woman suffering on my account was exceedingly distasteful to me. If, I decided, I could bring about her complete disillusionment my conscience would be at rest. Also there would then be no necessity to cut myself off from the Warringtons, and give up my pleasant discourses with Henry. Thus, I felt, I was taking the most ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... thoughts she revolved towards the vanishing point of life which is the total loss of sympathy. She felt with no one but herself. She belonged to that, alas, numerous type which, with large expectations unrealised, cannot accept disillusionment with the gentle laughter it deserves. She resented the ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... ripe lips drooped with a child's pathos of disillusionment. Her nose delicately marked disgust at the heavy air and the discord of scents around her. Having lost her money she could afford to survey with scorn the decorous yet sordid greed of the crowded table. There was not a gleam of gaiety ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... little thorns out of my hand, and sat for a time on a boulder of rock. My muscles were quivering, and I had that feeling of personal disillusionment that comes at the first fall to the learner of ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... at her with a question in his eyes, and it cost Agatha an effort to meet them. She was not prudish or over conscious of her own righteousness, but once or twice after the shock of her disillusionment in regard to him had lessened she had dreamed of the possibility of enduing him little by little with some of the qualities she had once fancied he possessed, and, as she vaguely thought of it, rehabilitating him. Now, however, the thing seemed impossible, and, what was more, the ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... desolation, disaster, disillusionment overwhelmed me. I sat on the bench and burst out crying and Narcisse jumped up and ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... proposition, the present writer is disagreeably aware that in this matter he has expressed views entirely opposed to those he now propounds; and in setting forth the following body of considerations he tells the story of his own disillusionment. At the outset he took for granted—and, very naturally, he wishes to imagine that a great number of other people do also take for granted—that the future of London, for example, is largely to be got as the answer to a sort of rule-of-three sum. If in one hundred years the population ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... is interesting to note that Euphues embodies many of the characteristics of the Byronic hero—his sententiousness, his misogyny, his cynicism born of disillusionment, and his rhetorical flatulency; but he is no rebel like Manfred because he finds consolation in his own pre-eminence in a world of platitude. Conscious of his dearly bought wisdom, he makes it his continuous duty, if not pleasure, to rebuke the over-amorous Philautus, who was at least human, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... her for his office she missed him, and her heart warmed toward him till he came home again. He always brought new disillusionment with him. He spent his hours out of office in bewailing his luck, celebrating the hardness of the times, and proclaiming the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... recall that crowd! It took much time to get our train, and, as we waited, almost unconsciously I began to take mental notes of what I saw. Soon my interest was fastened. I observed individuals with quickened attention from the very sharpness of my disillusionment. Incidents burnt themselves into my memory, not in themselves of great importance, but surely significant. I was being dragged back face to face with many questions difficult to solve. What impressed me ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... British workingman has gone in for political action and will have a try at that before he listens to the Anarchists. Slow of thought and used to compromise, he is a stern taskmaker and will exact a rigid account of the stewardship entrusted to those who sought his suffrage. When the disillusionment comes, as it surely will, real progress may come. The process of disillusionment does not come with geometrical precision. To some it comes over night, to others it is a process of years, and to some it is denied altogether. For years the Anarchists have been scoffed ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... angry with me for my hazarded demur. In an atmosphere of disillusionment and moral miasma she clung undauntedly to her ideals. Never was such a brave spirit, so determined in goodness, so upright in purity, and I blessed her for her unfaltering words. "May such sentiments as yours," I prayed, "be ever mine. In doubt, despair, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... has been a tendency both in England and in America to look at this history upside down. The epoch of the Revolution and the Constitution has been regarded as a heroic age—wherein lived the elder Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, Claelia and the rest—to be followed by almost continuous disappointment, disillusionment and decline. A more pleasing and more bracing view is nearer to the historic truth. The faults of a later time were largely survivals, and the later history is largely that of growth though in the face of terrific obstacles and many influences that favoured decay. The nobility of the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the only countries that were showing signs, in 1914, of having indulged too freely in the opportunities given them by the eagerness of English and French investors to place money abroad. It looked as if in many parts of the earth a time of financial disillusionment was dawning, the probable result of which would have been a strong reaction in favour of investment at home. Then came the war with a short sharp spell of financial chaos followed by a halcyon period for young countries, which enabled them to ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... shock, to the present, to the weeping walls, the discoloured deal table, the ghastly breakfast litter—all the visible symbols of the life I had pledged myself to. Disillusionment was making rapid headway when Davies returned, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... conventional unctuous voice, and gestures to suit; and the apathy of the people who, dressed out in their best, came to listen,—how early I divined its hollowness,—and how deep was my disappointment, and how cruel the disillusionment—oh! the disheartening formalism of it all! The very appearance of the church disconcerted me: it was a new cityfied one, meant to be pretty without, however, meaning to be too much so; I especially recall certain little efforts at wall decoration which I held in the ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... sure, the pessimists do not depend wholly upon such general arguments, but point out in great detail that there is much suffering in the world, and that the fulfillment of desire, when it is attained, often results in disillusionment. But the fact remains that life, such as it is, is desired by men and other creatures generally; desired not as an exception, and under a misapprehension, but, as a rule, even by ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... had known had developed since the last time they had met, Amy now took Ethel about to get her "clothes fit to be seen in." And as with intent little glances she kept studying "Ethel's type" in order to set off her charms, the slightly bored expression, the look of disillusionment left Amy's pretty countenance. For Ethel's freshness had given to Amy new zest and belief in her own life, in its purpose and importance. To get Ethel clothes, to show her about, to find her friends, to ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... with a rather weary interest. He was, indeed, trying to put himself in Graham's place, at Graham's age. He remembered once, at twenty, having slipped off to see "The Black Crook," then the epitome of wickedness, and the disillusionment of seeing women in tights with their accentuated curves and hideous lack of appeal to the imagination. The caterers of such wares had learned since then. Here were soft draperies instead, laces and chiffons. The suggestion was not to the eyes but to the ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Ten days after Skippy Bedelle had seen the gilded fabric of his future greatness collapse with the failure of the Foot Regulator to revolutionize the bathtub industry the spirit of invention had risen triumphantly from the ashes of first disillusionment. After all, there were other services to render to humanity, and the mind that at the age of fifteen could have reasoned so brilliantly in theory must inevitably express itself with profit to the race and to his own individual ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... gradual discovery of what he was—or of what he wasn't—this truer estimate, this partial disillusionment, merely served to deepen and intensify the feeling he had aroused in her; to heighten, likewise, the sense of her own value by confirming a belief in her possession of certain qualities, of a kind of fibre he needed in a helpmate. She dwelt with a woman's fascination upon the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is often called disillusionment; and it is a sad enough business for people who only look at one side of the medal, and who brood over the fact that they have been disappointed and have failed. For such as these, there follow the faded years of cynicism and dreariness. But that disillusionment, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Liane flatly to understand that he saw through her and couldn't be taken in by all her blandishments. At the end of twenty-four hours, however, the conviction seemed somehow to have insidiously penetrated that only a man of his ripe wisdom and disillusionment could possibly have any appeal to a woman like Liane Delorme. It wasn't long after that the engine room was illuminated by Liane's pretty ankles and Mr. Mussey was beginning to comprehend that there ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... to be the latest victim of The Great Aviation Hoax, and we shall watch the progressive stages of its disillusionment with sympathetic interest, or the development of its newest cult with sincere commiseration. Like many other phenomena, good and bad, this gigantic flam, it will be remembered, took its rise in the east. Its genesis was ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... indifferent air, but what the butler had told him was in the nature of a great shock. He felt suddenly quite sick with disillusionment. Had he been a fool all along, completely wrong in his estimate of this girl? Was she simply like so many others, possessed of two sides, one which she kept for him, and the other, perhaps, not quite so restrained? ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... sharp impression—content us. Many a beautiful picture is spoilt by the artist who cannot be satisfied that he has made the best of his subject, and retouching his canvas to bring out some subtle charm which made the work a success loses it altogether. So in going back, the result of the inevitable disillusionment is that the early mental picture loses something of its original freshness. The very fact that the delightful place or scene was discovered by us made it the shining place it is in memory. And again, the charm we found in it may have been in a measure due to the mood we were in, or to the peculiar ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... and we may excuse him if, at the last, he was no less embittered than his younger rival. He was not cursed, it is true, with Tasso's incurable idealism; but, if in consequence he exposed himself less to the buffets of disillusionment, he likewise lacked its sustaining and ennobling power. Tasso used the pastoral machinery to idealize the court; Guarini accepted the pastoral convention of the superiority of the 'natural' life of the country, and used it as a means of pouring out his bitterness of soul. The Aminta, it should ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... otherwise have gone to the Republican candidate for President went in 1892 to Grover Cleveland, who ran on an anti-protective tariff issue. It is not unlikely that the latter's victory was materially advanced by the disillusionment brought on by the ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... accompanied by the Reverend John Carroll, whose twelve days of disheartening experience with the leading French-Canadian clergy had convinced him that they were impervious to any arguments or blandishments emanating from the Continental Congress. It was a sad disillusionment for the commissioners, who had expected to be settling the affairs of a fourteenth colony instead of being obliged to leave the city from which they were to have enlightened the people with a free press. In their first angry ignorance they laid the whole blame ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... figure on foot like ourselves, leading his horse. He was in armour, yet unarmed. His steel glittered cold and blue; his fingers hung ungauntleted; and on his pale face dwelt a look never happy warrior wore yet. He seemed a man Mars lends to Venus out of war to unhappy idleness. The disillusionment of age was in his face: yet he was youthful, I suppose; scarce older than Mercutio, and once, ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... Mother, had no root in fact. These early weeks only served to reduce, bit by bit, her belief in her own knowledge. How slender this was, and of how little use to her in her new state, she did not dare to confess even to herself. Her disillusionment had begun the day after her arrival, when Dr Pughson, the Headmaster, to whom she had gone to be examined in arithmetic, flung up hands of comical dismay at her befogged attempts to solve the mysteries of long division. An upper class was taking a lesson in Euclid, and in the intervals between ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... disillusionment—a city of rain and plagues and stinks! The food in barracks was maggoty. We breathed foul air and yearned for the streets; yet, once in the streets, we yearned to be back in barracks. Aye, sahib, we saw more in one day of the streets than we thought good for us, none yet understanding the ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... group of learned men, that a sudden outburst of surprise and amusement will break into the recital of the tale; but in the room upstairs they are wont to grow quiet and speak in lowered voices, for they seem to feel the pathos there of the final disillusionment. It is the room where at the end of a laborious day Mrs. Alcott, with tired eyes, sewed and sewed, night after night, by the light of her one flickering lamp, and where Bronson Alcott, deserted by his followers, lay in his bed, with his face turned to the wall, and in his despair over the bitter ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... treaty stipulations and the solemnly pledged words of the great Christian nations of the world to imagine that their own whole national existence and liberty could be jeopardized overnight, and on a pretext so shallow and farcical as to excite world-wide ridicule. Their disillusionment came too late. The trap had been unwittingly set by hands that made unexpected moves on the European chessboard, and the Bear's paw had this time been skilful enough to spring it at the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... out of all this except as one of us after another reaches the Metanoia, the new point of view as regards God. Other ways have been sought, and have been found no more than blind alleys. Much reference is made nowadays to the disillusionment of those who hoped that the war would lead to social and spiritual renovation; but any such hope was doomed in advance, so long as the Caucasian concept of God was unchanged. When you cannot trust God you cannot trust anything; and when you cannot trust anything you get the condition of ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... "Oh!—disillusionment again. I thought my troubles were over. Practically I thought I had impunity to do whatever I chose, everything—save to give away my secret. So I thought. Whatever I did, whatever the consequences might be, was nothing to me. ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... preceding that ill-omened day, a few moments after Frantz had stealthily left his room on Rue de Braque, the illustrious Delobelle returned home, with downcast face and that air of lassitude and disillusionment with which he ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... pay for a while, it will, I am sure, prove a disastrous policy in the long run. The poet unborn shall, I am certain, rue it. The next generation of poets (or, indeed, writers generally) will reap a sorrowful harvest from the gratuitous disillusionment with which the present generation is so eager to indulge the curiosity, and flatter the mediocrity, of the public. The public, like the big baby it is, is continually crying 'to see the wheels go round,' and for a time the exhibition of, so to say, the 'works' ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... Daniel's disillusionment with regard to Richard Mutimer did not affect his regularity of attendance at the Socialist lectures, in most things a typical English mechanic, he was especially so in his relation to the extreme politics ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... the Women's Foreign Mission Committee was also a disillusionment. Her friend, Dr. Robson, was in the chair, and his opening prayer was an inspiration, and lifted the proceedings to the highest level. Nothing could have been kinder than her reception, which delighted ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... dim distance the white, pontifical figures moving gravely through the ritual, to hear the low tones, enthralled and stirred him; but he shrank from entering the sacristy, with its loud-voiced priests describing perfunctorily the relics: that was a disillusionment not to be ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... I had found now seemed to me of infinitely greater value than that yellow metal I had missed finding, with all its possibilities. My wish now was to rest for a season at this spot, so remote and lovely and peaceful, where I had experienced such unusual feelings and such a blessed disillusionment. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... do live in a beautiful dream; but that dream is the actual, the present,—not cold, but warm; not bare, but furnished with a thousand blessings. The very evil which the poet supposed would be a cruel disillusionment is necessary to the fullest knowledge of joy. Only by contact with evil could I have learned to feel by contrast the beauty of ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... innate wildness, the incomprehensibleness, extent, and deviation of her desires and virtues. That which, in spite of fear, excites one's sympathy for the dangerous and beautiful cat, "woman," is that she seems more afflicted, more vulnerable, more necessitous of love, and more condemned to disillusionment than any other creature. Fear and sympathy it is with these feelings that man has hitherto stood in the presence of woman, always with one foot already in tragedy, which rends while it delights—What? And all that is now to be at an end? And the DISENCHANTMENT of woman is in progress? The ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of the Department, Chang, knew enough to know that if his young Director confessed inability to meet certain demands it was because there was more wrong with the demands than with the engineer. But the real fly in the ointment soon began to make itself visible. It was not a disillusionment on the part of the Chinese officials in connection with their foreign expert, but a disillusionment on his part in regard to his real position and opportunities for accomplishing something for China. He began more ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... accustomed to triumph over Chief Secretaries, rejoicingly welcomed a new victim in Mr. Balfour. They found, for the first time, a master. Never was such a tragic disillusionment. He armed himself with anew Crimes Act, which had the special merit of not expiring at a fixed period, but of enduring till it should be repealed, and he soon taught sedition-mongers, Irish and English, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... weakness and discontent had yielded her a ready victim to the showy promises and good looks of Hervey Garstaing. But the road they had had to travel since had been by no means easy. It had been full of disillusionment for the silly woman. They had lived in fear of the law, in fear of Steve, for over two years. And the grind of it, for the pleasure-loving wife who had buoyed herself with dreams of gaiety and delight which her life in the North had denied her, had driven her ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... very severe critics of the doings of their family; and Balzac, cursed with the sensitiveness of genius, and smarting under the bitter disappointment of disillusionment and of thwarted and compressed powers, was not likely to be an indulgent critic; but making due allowance for these facts, it does not appear that his home was a particularly comfortable place at this time. Old M. de Balzac ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... fountains of learning, | nay to have such a fountain of | learning in himself, in a king, | and in a king born, is always a | miracle.' And it would appear | that he hopes at the beginning | of James's reign—long before | he suffers disillusionment | respecting his sovereign's | interest in the advance of | 'solid' knowledge—that, | whether or not he can obtain a | greater position of state | beyond that alloted to him by | Elizabeth, he may ...
— Valerius Terminus: of the Interpretation of Nature • Sir Francis Bacon
... disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... thing and called down blessings and kisses upon our heads; and for a time we even deceived a small boy who had been watching us eagerly. But only for a time. "Lumme," he said aloud to himself, "there's anuvver of 'em wiv knock-knees," and disillusionment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... very real love can survive smiling through that period when, from almost maudlin appreciation, a husband gradually sinks into the commonplace mood of taking his soul's mate "for granted." Only real friendship can live through the disillusionment of irritable temper, lack of imagination, and boredom so often revealed while travelling in the company of friends. More than half the mutual life of lovers and friends is spent behind masks—for masks ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... His own dream is of a beautifully centralised control, directing all our traffic agencies (save tramways and shipping) into the most convenient channels; and he won't be happy till he gets it. But judging by some of the speeches that followed he too may have a frigid disillusionment when the Bill comes up against the "interests" in Committee. Mr. T.P. O'CONNOR, on behalf of Liverpool, described it as the product of "an old bureaucracy and a young Parliamentarian," and Mr. RENWICK declared that, if it passed, the Manchester Ship Canal would be "between ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... interests it intensely. It pretends to be a physical disease, when primarily it has nothing to do with the body; and the person most deluded is the one who "owns" the symptom. Its purpose is to avoid the pain of disillusionment and to furnish relief to a distracted soul which dares not ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... times The marble which was chiseled for me— A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. In truth it pictures not my destination But my life. For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment; Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid; Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances. Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life. And now I know that we must lift the sail And catch the winds of destiny Wherever they drive the boat. To put meaning in one's life may end in ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... to be a little hard on the women of Elisabeth's type, who idealize their fellows until the latter lose all semblance of reality; for experience, with its inevitable disillusionment, can not fail to put their ideal lovers and friends far from them, and to hide their etherealized acquaintances out of their sight; and to give instead, to the fond, trusting souls, half-hearted lovers, semi-sincere friends, and acquaintances who care for them only ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... view, if not actually beautiful. Goodliness being largely contingent upon apparel, it follows that Mary dresses for John—up to the marriage-day. He who descries signs of slatternliness in his beloved prior to that date, may well be shocked to disillusionment. As a girl in a home where the mother takes upon herself the heaviest work, and spares her pretty daughter's hands and clothes all the soil and wear she can avert, Mary must be indolent or phenomenally indifferent to ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... princes, have respectfully kept silence on the subject of their discomfiture—it appears that terrible mortifications were in store for the militant royalists who approached the emigrant leaders. D'Ache did not escape disillusionment, and though he did not disclose the incidents of his stay in London, we know that at first he was thrown into prison, and that for two months he could not succeed in obtaining an interview with the Comte d'Artois, much ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... palaces I had built up for myself have turned out to be pasteboard, gilt, and rubbish; I have been robbed of all my jewels, or they have shown themselves to be shingle stones. In this condition of shame and disillusionment I am now resolved to escape at the same time from the world and from myself, for I am tired of both alike, and already I feel as if a great weight had been lifted ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... with an amiable smile. "Keep on. But I doubt if you'll be so well amused as you may imagine. Going to the devil isn't as it's painted in novels by homely old maids and by men too timid to go out of nights. A few steps farther, and your disillusionment will begin. But there'll be no turning back. Already, you are almost too old ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... sufferings which exceptional natures must needs derive from too close a contact with this commonplace world. It was not his lot—as it has been the lot of so many poets—to move amongst mankind at once as an intimate and a stranger; to travel from disillusionment to disillusionment and from regret to regret; to construct around him a world of ideal beings, who crumble into dust at his touch; to hope from them, what they can neither understand nor accomplish, to lavish on them what they can never repay. Such pain, indeed, may become ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... had very glorious times after that return. They determined they would not go to a Pleasure city nor waste their days rushing through the air from one part of the world to the other, for in spite of one disillusionment, their tastes were still old-fashioned. They furnished their little room with quaint old Victorian furniture, and found a shop on the forty-second floor in Seventh Way where printed books of the old sort were still ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... involuntarily cried out that he did not love her! But that made things no easier for her. She sat perfectly still; it seemed as though waves of darkness without a ray of light had closed over her head, and she had gone down cold and dumb to the depths. The first disillusionment is painful for every one; but for a sincere heart, averse to self-deception and innocent of frivolity or exaggeration, it is almost unendurable. Natalya remembered her childhood, how, when walking in the evening, she always tried to go in the direction of the setting sun, where ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... and eight months old to-day," Eleanor wrote, "and I have had the kind of experience that makes me feel as if I never wanted to be any older. I know life is full of disillusionment and pain, but I did not know that any one with whom you have broken bread, and slept in the same room with, and told everything to for four long years, could turn out to be an absolute traitor and villainess. Let me begin at the beginning. For nearly a ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... Carmela was quite an important event in its way. At first sight it bore the semblance of a mere disillusionment such as any girl might experience under like circumstances. She had been taken from Las Flores to occupy a palace at Rio de Janeiro, and was driven from the palace to the hotel life of the Continent. During two years she had not seen either father or lover; and lovers of ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... flimsy. Only two of the Ward Leaders were in their room, when presently he repaired thither, the Hall of the Atlas seemed empty. He fancied a change in the bearing of the attendants in the outer rooms. A sombre disillusionment darkened his mind. She looked at him anxiously when he ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... We all expected disillusionment. Brown, who was under no delusion as to his share in the venture, scoffed openly at the idea of finding anything buried, in a land where every living "crittur," as he put it, was a thief from birth. But Hassan led on in, fearless now that ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the inevitable disillusionment FitzGerald delighted in the company of the illiterate fisherman. Whether he took his protege cruising with him on the Scandal, or sat with him in his favourite corner of the kitchen of the old Suffolk Inn at Lowestoft, or played "all-fours" with him, or sat and "mardled" with him and his wife ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... who followed Sir John French, inherited the disillusionment of armies who saw now that war on the western front was to be a long struggle, with enormous slaughter, and no visible sign of the end beyond a vista of dreadful years. Sir Douglas Haig, in his general headquarters at St.-Omer, and afterward at Montreuil, near the coast, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... glad he had told her about that story, even if it revealed him in an unfavourable light. "If she ever cares for me, and God help me if she doesn't—she must care for me as I really am, an ugly devil with some brains and a queer temper. I'll risk no disillusionment afterwards. She must see plenty of other chaps first—confound them; but if any one out of the lot shows signs of making a dart I'll cut in first, I won't wait another minute, I'm damned if ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... Marcia began then changed her mind. Disillusionment would do no good. She must play on the man's illusion that he was the master of his own will. "Very well," she went on, "Yours be the decision! No woman can decide such issues. We are all in your hands— Cornificia and Galen—all of us—aye, and Rome, too—and even Sextus ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... face took on an expression of deep disappointment, disillusionment, and sorrow, until seeing his own sorrow mingled with alarm reflected on his wife's face, he presently announced that they would depart on their wedding journey by boat for Mackinac ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... temperament corresponded to his own in gravity, he conceived that radiant and romantic conception of Courts, as the only fit places of abode for men of noble birth and eminent abilities, which no disillusionment in after life was able to obscure. We cannot blame him for this error, though error it indubitably was. It was one which he shared with all men of his station at that period, which the poverty of his estate, the habits ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... different keys, and each time her blood jumped. Her eyes had not tricked her, then—though it was not the first time she had trembled to see a sorrel horse gallop down that hill, and then turned numb when came disillusionment. Would those children never start home? By degrees their shrill voices sounded further away, and the place grew still. But the schoolma'am ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... all that she said, there was not even the slightest mention made of love; on the contrary, her language seemed rather to express an austere feeling with regard to the allurements of the passions, and to breathe the accents of disillusionment ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... than to seek confirmation, that is, reinforcement or guidance, at all events, companionship. That Frederick von Kammacher's new intellectual companion was Max Stirner, was the result of a profound disillusionment. He had been disillusioned in his deep-seated altruism, which until ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... make necessary small talk, to arrange for breakfast and other household details. Now she was alone, and the floods of her bitterness were unloosed. She broke down and wept passionately, for she was facing her first great disillusionment. She had lost a friend, one in whom she ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... forgotten, she could never forget, she had merely been successful temporarily in banishing from mind that bitter disillusionment which had poisoned what should have been ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... Obligation The Arbiter of the World Arbitration versus War The Challenge of Thor The Conflict of War and Peace A Congress of Nations The Cost of Militarism The Cost of Peace The Crucial Parallelism The Dawn of Peace The Dawn of Universal Peace Democracy and Peace Diplomacy and Peace Disillusionment The Dominant Ideal The End; and the Means The Evolution of a Higher Patriotism The Evolution of Justice The Evolution of Law The Evolution of National Greatness as a World Peacemaker The Evolution of World Peace The Fallacy of the Economics ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... must not be astonished to find a disparity between the hero's private life and his "elevating" art or romantic and idealistic gospel. As long as people will admire heroic attitudes more than heroism, such disillusionment is bound to be the price of their error. In a truly great man, life-theory and life-practice, if seen from a sufficiently lofty point of view, must and do always agree, in an actor, in a romanticist, in ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... devil of a laugh, mostly made of chuckles that seem to bubble off a Bell-brew of disillusionment, and you get the impression that he is laughing at himself—cynically laying bare the vanity and fallibility of his own ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... beliefs would bring chaos into our spiritual and moral life, that it would extinguish hopes which often alone make life bearable, that it would issue for society at large in such a grey, meaningless, uninspired existence as Mr. F. W. Myers prognosticates in his admirable essay on "The Disillusionment of France," [2] all this and much more makes it our interest, if not our duty, to cling to such convictions at all costs. "If these things are not true, it might be said, then life is chaos; and if life be chaos, what does truth matter? Why may not such useful ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... horse, and rubbed his nose with her small and gentle hand. The creature drooped under the caress and let its lower lip, with a few stiff white hairs, hang and quiver bitterly. It half-closed its one useful eye, a pale eye of intense, colorless disillusionment. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... ultimatum which preceded the preliminary Treaty of Buftea had also to be altered chiefly on the Dobrudsha question, as Bulgaria was already talking of the ingratitude of the Central Powers, of how Bulgaria had been disillusioned, and of the evil effects this disillusionment would have on the subsequent conduct of the war. All that Count Czernin could do was to obtain a guarantee that Roumania, in case of cession of the Dobrudsha, should at least be granted a sure ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... no lamp! Crestfallen, I returned to my guru. He was now laughing heartily, without compunction for my disillusionment. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... colours and conditions our experience, but draws us inevitably towards those works of art in which it scents sympathy and approval. To a reflective moralist Wordsworth will always mean more than a yellow primrose meant to Peter Bell. In our moments of bitter disillusionment it is such a comfort to jest with Pope and His Lordship that we lose all patience with the advanced politician who prefers Blake. And, behold, we are in a world of personal predilections, a thousand miles from ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... that followed on that double disillusionment were like one long afternoon in a rich house on a rainy day. It was not merely that everybody believed that nothing would happen; it was also that everybody believed that anything happening was even duller than nothing ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... alone. Clayton was, finding his club a more comfortable place than his home, in those days of his wife's disillusionment and hesitation about the future. Many weak creatures are curiously armed for the unequal conflict of existence—some with fleetness of foot, some with a pole-cat weapon of malignance, some with porcupine quills, some with a 'possumlike instinct for "playing dead." Of these ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... eating habits of the American people has been brought about by disillusionment respecting the importance of meats. Fifty years ago, every physiologist taught that the liberal consumption of meat was essential. This idea was based, first, upon the supposition that protein, the chief constituent ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... autobiography, as it appeared in serial form, have been made the subject of a grave editorial in a Boston newspaper, in which the writer regretted Miss Keller's apparent disillusionment in regard to the value of her college life. He quoted the passages in which she explains that college is not the "universal Athens" she had hoped to find, and cited the cases of other remarkable persons ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... vibrate. He could not bring back, even in retrospect, the emotions inspired by Josephine Derry. Those strings had been tuned to other love-harmonies. To remember Fran's mother was to bring back not the rapture of a first passion, but the garrish days of disillusionment. He even felt something like resentment because she had remained faithful—her search and unending love for him made so much more of his desertion ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... it was true. He knew that Anne loved him, and always would love him. But he also knew that every vestige of love and respect for her had gone out of his heart long ago and that he now felt only the bitterness of disillusionment so far as she was concerned. He was not afraid of her. She had lost all power to move a single drop of blood in his veins. But he ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... in a fresh branch of knowledge much followed quickly. Under my questionings, Messer Gambara very readily made me acquainted through his unsparing eyes with that cesspool that was known as the Roman Curia. And my horror, my disillusionment increased at every word ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... are people who take salt in their coffee. They say it gives it a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment which you must experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is like the weakness in the character ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham |
