"Dreary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lighter stories? Why are the women always freckled, the men predominantly red and watery in the eye? Why is the country so flat, so foggy, so desolate; and why are the peasants so lumpish and miserable? Russia before the Revolution could not have been so dreary as this; the prevailing grimness must be due to some mental obfuscation of her writers. I do not refer to the gloomy, powerful realism of the stories of hopeless misery. There, if one criticizes, it must be only the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... invalid could now write only with the greatest difficulty. Then Mrs. Fullerton liked to have a chat, to hear what was in the papers, what was going on in the neighbourhood, and to discuss all sorts of dreary details, over and over again. Books that Hadria would sometimes bring were generally left unread, unless they were light novels of a rigidly conventional character. Mrs. Fullerton grew so excited in her condemnation of any other kind, that it was dangerous ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... historian, poet,—he would but have entered his golden prime, rich in promise, fruitful in performance. Yet Alfonso, uniting in himself all these vocations, seemed at his death to have left behind him a wide waste of opportunities, a dreary dearth of accomplishment. Looking back, however, it is seen that the balance swings even. While his kingdom was slipping away, he was conquering a wider domain. He was creating Spanish Law, protecting the followers of learning, cherishing the universities, restricting ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... ARLINGTON.—Visitors to this noted place are so frequent that his appearance attracted no attention. He walked through the dreary hall, and looked in on the wide, vacant rooms, and passing to the front, stood for some time gazing out over the beautiful panorama, with its one great feature, the new dome of the old capitol, surmounted by a bronze statue of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... appeared to be only a ridge of low hills and we were surprised to find ourselves on the summit of a bed of broken mountains, which, as far as the weather would permit us to see, declined rapidly to some low country ahead, presenting a dreary and savage character; and for a moment I looked around in doubt on the wild and inhospitable prospect, scarcely knowing what road to take which might conduct us to some place of shelter for the night. Noticing among the ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... with people. Priests were passing in processions, beating their dreary tambourines; police and custom-house officers with pointed hats encrusted with lac and carrying two sabres hung to their waists; soldiers, clad in blue cotton with white stripes, and bearing guns; the Mikado's guards, enveloped in silken doubles, hauberks ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... that his neighbours' applause and delight are called forth, in the main, by more or less obnoxious prejudices on the subject of honour, glory, religion, patriotism, sacrifice, liberty, or love—or perhaps by some feeble, dreary poetical effusion. None the less, he will find himself affected by the general enthusiasm; and it will be necessary for him, almost at every instant, to pull himself violently together, to make startled appeal ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... console, Nor melt the ice, to which The genial current of thy soul Was turned, by private envy, princely hate; And then, by Love abandoned, life's last dream! To thee, nought real seemed but nothingness, The world a dreary wilderness. Too late the honors came, so long deferred; And yet, to die was unto thee a gain. Who knows the evils of our mortal state, Demands but death, no ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... the tired girls finished the two rooms. They got a dreary bite in the kitchen and intended to wash the dishes at once. But Faith happened to pick up a new story-book Di Blythe had lent her and was lost to the world until sunset. Una took a cup of rank tea up to Carl but found him asleep; so she curled herself up on Jerry's bed ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a dreary night at Russell. All the afternoon the telegraph instrument at headquarters was clicking away with details of the brief and sudden fight upon the Rosebud, and the officers read in silence the description ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... sollar to sollar towards the level where he worked, he would set his teeth grimly that he might not curse aloud—an oath underground being an invitation to the Evil One—but in his heart the muffled curses were audible enough. And when he was at work in the dreary level, with the darkness lying on his shoulder like a hand, and the candles shining unsteadily through the gloom, like little evil winking eyes, he brooded so moodily over his bondage to Poverty, that he desired to break ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... the door to which, when once flung back, never can be reclosed again! When joy and gladness but tarried a little while to dispute their prior right to revel undisturbed in that buoyant heart of thine, and then went tearfully forth, leaving for aye a dreary void, and a deep, dark shadow, where all had been but brightness and beauty before! Oh, why must the night-time of sorrow come to thee, thou gentle and pure-hearted one? Thou for whom such fervent and fond prayers have ascended, as should, methinks, have warded off from, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... he left that dreary place, rode through the mist to Redgauntlet Castle, and with much ado he got ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... Since the drought came they drift about in a throng, Like autumn leaves blown by the dreary winds. ...
— The Countess Cathleen • William Butler Yeats
... horizon. Dense and choking, from beneath the whirring wheels the dust-clouds rose in tawny billows that enveloped the rearmost coaches and, mingling with the black smoke of the "double-header" engines, rolled away in the dreary wake. East and west, north and south, far as the eye could reach, hemmed by low, dun-colored ridges or sharply outlined crests of remote mountain range, in lifeless desolation the landscape lay outspread to the view. Southward, streaked with white fringe of alkali, the ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... the Universities, I should indeed fear that Mill's prophecies might come true, and that the intellect of Europe might drift into dreary monotony. The Universities always have been, and, unless they are diverted from their original purpose, always will be, the guardians of the freedom of thought, the protectors of individual spontaneity; and it ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, tired but cheery, Over many an optimistic record of War Office lore; Whilst I worked, assorting, mapping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of someone rudely rapping, rapping at my Office-door. "Some late ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... falling on our old roof; the cicalas are mute; odors of wet earth reach us from the gardens and the mountain. I feel terribly dreary in this room to-night; the noise of the little pipe irritates me more than usual, and as Chrysantheme crouches in front of her smoking-box, I suddenly discover in her an air of low breeding, in the very worst sense of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... is certain those who are being killed at this moment will not have to pay their landlord. On reaching the Rond Point I can distinctly perceive a compact crowd round the Triumphal Arch, and I meet some tired National Guards who are returning from the battle. They are ragged, dusty, and dreary. "What has happened?"—"We are betrayed!" says one.—"Death to ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... the confines of a dreary region, sixty miles in extent, called "The Sands," in comparison with which the prairie ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... heart rebelled at the dull emptiness of her days. As she watched the evening dusk deepen into the darkness of the night, and the outlines of the familiar landscape fade and vanish in the thickening gloom, she felt the dreary monotony of the days and years that were to come, blotting out of her life all tone and color and forms ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... for my new journeys detained me two or three weeks longer. Although the comforts of European civilization were pleasant, as a change, after the wild life of the Orient, the autumnal rains of England soon made me homesick for the sunshine I had left. The weather was cold, dark, and dreary, and the oppressive, sticky atmosphere of the bituminous metropolis weighed upon me like a nightmare. Heartily tired of looking at a sun that could show nothing brighter than a red copper disk, and of breathing an air that peppered my face with particles of soot, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... Yet, however dreary life is, it must go on. The brave-hearted cannot drop daily duty. On the second day the doctor went to his office again, and Antonia arranged the meals and received company, and did her best to bring the ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... assisted by foreign agencies—it all sounds like a voice from ancient history. One rubs one's ears at it. Eventually militant Socialism wearies John as much as academic torpor had done, and to escape from both he marries a wife. More atmosphere, this time of a dreary little seaside town and its so-called society. But John fares no better here; and at last, on his return from a walking holiday, he finds that Mrs. John, unable to put up with him any longer, is putting up without him at a London hotel in company ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... were, into the very midst of darkness, the Shumiro-Accads did not fancy him as either asleep or inactive, but on the contrary as still engaged in his everlasting work. Under the name of NIN-DAR, he travels through the dreary regions ruled by Mul-ge and, his essence being light, he combats the powers of darkness in their own home, till He comes out of it, a triumphant hero, in the morning. Nin-dar is also the keeper of the hidden treasures of the earth—its metals and precious stones, because, according to ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... sight of the valley of the Chimbo, and find ourselves in a wilderness of crags and treeless mountains clothed with the long, dreary-looking paramo grass called paja. But we are face to face with "the monarch of the Andes," and we shall have its company the rest of the day. The snowy dome is flooded with the golden light of heaven; delicate clouds of softest hues float around ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... Abel; "but with the dreary winter coming on one can't help feeling a bit depressed. I say, I'm very glad we never sent a message to old Tregelly and his mates to come and ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... see the bright sunshine. She noticed how green the grass grew on the path behind and on each side of her. Wherever she set her foot at once there rose a flower: violets and roses bloomed along the wayside; the grass and the corn began to grow with ten times their usual quickness to make up for the dreary months when Mother Ceres had forbidden ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... unequivocal proof of the subject which engaged her heart. Their friends, of course, endeavored to console and sustain them on both sides; and frequently succeeded in soothing them into a childlike resignation to the necessity that occasioned the dreary period of absence that lay before them. These intervals of patience, however, did not last long; the spirits of our young lovers were, indeed, disquieted within them, and the heart of each drooped under the severest of all its calamities—the pain of loss for that object which is dearest ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... said, "Does this interest you, Dorothea? Shall we stay a little longer? I am ready to stay if you wish it,"—it seemed to her as if going or staying were alike dreary. Or, "Should you like to go to the Farnesina, Dorothea? It contains celebrated frescos designed or painted by Raphael, which most persons think it worth ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... excellent reason why Frenchmen spend just as little time in them as they possibly can. Half the cafes in Paris would promptly put up their shutters if Parisian homes could all at once turn themselves into something like English or American ones. As for La Lierre, it was even more dreary and bare and tomblike than other country-houses, because it was, after all, a sort of ruin, and had not been lived in for fifteen years, save by an ancient caretaker and his nearly as ancient wife. And that was, perhaps, ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... arbor that Frederic had assisted her to erect and adorn, and where she had passed those most delightful moments in human existence, the days of the first love, and first courtship, of two young, affectionate, and virtuous beings. Blessed moments! that occur but once in the dreary threescore years and ten, and fade away before we have time to enjoy them, and we only become conscious of their existence from the certainty that they ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... their darling buried in a little grave in a cemetery miles away from their own home, and then they returned, desolate and bereaved, to the deserted city, which seemed empty indeed to them. The house had never looked so very dark and dreary before. Yet from time to time old Oliver forgot that Dolly was gone altogether, and could never come back; for he would call her in his eager, quavering tones, or search for her in some of the hiding-places, where she had often ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... "It is ever the same," she said, "through this long, dreary year—ever the same! Let us forget it all for this one night. Let us ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... accompanied by Hrothgar and many a good warrior. They were able to follow the witch's tracks right through the forest glades and across the gloomy moor, till they came to a spot where some mountain trees bent over a hoar rock, beneath which lay a dreary and troubled lake; and there beside the water's edge lay the head of Asher, and they knew that the witch must be at the bottom ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... place out of doors, but is full of life and merriment within. Playing at knights and ladies last year, a jade of a charming creature must needs send me out for a piece of ice to put in her wine. It was evening and a hard frost. I shall never forget the cold, cutting, dreary, dead look of every thing out of doors, with a wind through the wiry trees, and the snow on the ground, contrasted with the sudden return to ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... heartiness, all save M. Roussillon, who was kept in close confinement and bound like a felon, chafing lugubriously and wearing the air of a martyr. His prison was a little log pen in one corner of the stockade, much open to the weather, its gaping cracks giving him a dreary view of the frozen landscape through which the Wabash flowed in a broad steel-gray current. Helm, who really liked him, tried in vain to procure his release; but Hamilton was inexorable on account of what he regarded as duplicity ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... complain? Did I tell this, who would believe me?" said Isabel, as she went toward the dreary prison where her brother was confined. When she arrived there her brother was in pious conversation with the duke, who in his friar's habit had also visited Juliet and brought both these guilty lovers to a proper sense of their fault; and unhappy ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... slender figure, and hurried through the crowd. She came at last to a miserable small house. The low narrow door seemed unfriendly, inhospitable, as if it would permit no one to pass its threshold and enter its dreary, deserted rooms, from which no sound of life proceeded. But this small, quiet dwelling ought to have been a house of labor and occupation, and would not have been so poor and pitiful looking if the large iron bell hanging over the door had been oftener ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... heart. The time was to be so short! Still Polly would not spoil to-day with to-morrow's nor next day's troubles, and she summoned brave smiles and gay responses, until she half forgot the dreary fourth-floor flat where she had ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... Stant," that his career was already over. There was also the question of ways and means. Just enough to live on with the reviewing and a column for an American paper and Clare's income, but if the books were all of them to fail as this one had failed—why then it was a dreary future for ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... planters, on account of two countries which he neither found nor permanently colonized. He was a great admiral, who commanded in chief on one expedition alone, and that miserably failed. He had in him the making of a great soldier, though his exploits are lost in the dreary darkness of intestine French and Irish savageries. He was a master of policy, and his loftiest office was that of Captain of the Guard. None could be kinder, or more chivalrously generous, and he practised with complacency in Munster treachery and ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Peachy did not shriek these words with maniacal despair. She did not whisper them with dreary resignation. She breathed them with the rapture of one who looks through a narrow, dark tunnel to measureless reaches of sun-tinted ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... dreary place, all right," the tall runner went on to say, as he looked to the right, and then to the left. "Why, I didn't know there was such a desolate stretch of woodland within twenty miles of Riverport. Some of it's good farming ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... and spread abroad the dear home feeling. (O hearth-fire, good genius of home, with thee a log-cabin is cheery and bright, without thee the palace a dreary waste!) ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... from home to school Was often hard and weary. It did my youthful ardour cool And made my childhood dreary. ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... others St. Alban's Head. From afar ships were running in. It was a race for refuge. Southwards the darkness thickened, and clouds, full of night, bordered on the sea. The weight of the tempest hanging overhead made a dreary lull on the waves. It certainly was no time to sail. Yet the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... The dreary age wore on. Louis slept! The little brother sat with his chin in his hands, his heart cold, his ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... has been censured for setting her tale in a clumsy framework, but she tells us in her preface that she began with the words: "It was on a dreary night of November." This sentence now stands at the opening of Chapter IV., where the plot begins to grip our imagination; and it seems not unfair to assume that the introductory letters and the first four ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... anybody by thy side, thou shalt wander through diverse countries, O wretch, thou shalt have no place in the midst of men. The stench of pus and blood shall emanate from thee, and inaccessible forests and dreary moors shall be thy abode! Thou shalt wander over the Earth, O thou of sinful soul, with the weight of all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Montezumas." Thither he had gone,—a camp-follower of the American army—and had accumulated an enormous fortune by keeping a gambling-table for the officers. He did not live long to enjoy his evil gains. The "vomito prieto" caught him at Vera Cruz; and his dust is now mingled with the sands of that dreary shore. ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... the kitchen where she sat a dreary while before her stove, leaning forward in her unlovely, ruminating pose. Through the open draft of the stove the red coals within it glowed, casting three little bars of light upon the floor. Now and then a stick burned in two and settled down, showering sparks through ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... one grew before, and thus to render you indeed benefactors. Skill in the use, and ingenuity in devising and constructing implements, serve to render labor productive, and relieve it of its most dreary drudgery. It is this mechanical ingenuity which has compensated for the high price of labor among us, and aided in the development of resources which makes our country the greatest of the earth. Blest by soil, climate and government, if we are, as claimed, ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... door in the apartment, which opening disclosed a rude, dreary, and dilapidated room, with a low plank ceiling, much discoloured by the smoke which hung suspended in heavy masses, descending within a few feet of the ground, and completely obscuring the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume III. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... floor, unconscious that she still knelt; seeing only the suffering woman in that dreary attic across the river, where sunken feverish eyes watched for ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... beast and dreary, Where is Brown, the young, the cheery, Smith, the pride of all his friends and half the Force? You were at that last dread dak We must cover at a walk, Bring them back to me, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... dreary waste of "historical" and arbitrarily composed landscapes, even in the simpler honest productions of the Dutch preceding this century, nearly all were painted from drawings; color had been applied according to recipe; the brown tree was rampant through all the seasons ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... began talking with me one day in a dreary sort of way. I couldn't get at the difficulty for a good while, but at last it turned out that somebody had been calling him an old man.—He didn't mind his students calling him the old man, he said. That was a technical expression, and he thought that he remembered hearing it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... he did not know, which did not show at ordinary times. But when the wind blew extremely strong as it did to-night, the tree leant over before the blast, and thus opened the crack. The fox, listening at the crack, heard the voice lamenting the long years that had passed, the darkness and the dreary time, and imploring every species of vengeance upon the head ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... the time, we travelled along the bleak and sandy shore between Ardrossan and Kilbride hill without the interchange of conversation. The wind came wild and gurly from the sea,—the waves broke heavily on the shore,—and the moon, swiftly wading the cloud, threw over the dreary scene a wandering and ghastly light. Often to the blast we were obligated to turn our backs, and, the rain being in our faces, we little ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... in those old words. For man's natural thought of death is that of a dreary ending in decay and dissolution. And from his standpoint he is right: death as the punishment of sin is ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... the word "bourgeoisie" which has been used to death by the apostles of a new social order,) slowly increased its hold upon the government, and the conditions of industrial life in the large cities continued to transform vast acres of pasture and wheat-land into dreary slums, which guard the approach of every modern ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... everywhere, Drowsy drone of distant workers, and the cheering Hum of honey-seeking bees in all the air; Then my sorrow took swift wings and rose and left me; And I knew no more the aching of despair; Came again to me the joy that seemed bereft me, And for hope I changed the dreary weight of care. With the winter tempests pass'd the storms of feeling, Soon and surely did their power to pain me cease, And the sunshine-lighted summer rose revealing With the coming of the green leaves there ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... his own forming. At the head of 1200 men, consisting chiefly of New Englanders, he traversed the inhospitable deserts of the northern states into Canada; deserts which had never previously been trodden by the foot of a white man. Owing to the obstacles he encountered in his dreary journey, he did not reach the first Canadian settlements on the river Chaudiere, which flows into the St. Lawrence, until the 3rd of November. On arriving there his troops were famished, having been long ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... cold and dreary, school duties seemed to increase, and the girls were beginning to talk of the coming examinations, and to look forward to the ...
— Ruth Arnold - or, the Country Cousin • Lucy Byerley
... his private cheque-book, sir, the counterfoils of which are not filled in," was the somewhat dreary admission. ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and by, not heavily, but a slow, dull, seeping fall that was inexpressibly dreary, and the thick, clammy darkness, shot with mists and vapors from the lake, rolled up to the very edge of the fires. Robert might have joined the sleepers, as he was detached from immediate duty, but his brain was still too much heated to admit it. Despite his experience ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... spreading horns, Whose taper tops refulgent gold adorns." The heroes pray'd, and Pallas from the skies Accords their vow, succeeds their enterprise. Now, like two lions panting for the prey, With dreadful thoughts they trace the dreary way, Through the black horrors of the ensanguined plain, Through dust, through blood, o'er ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... into the pumpkin coach. When he had closed the door, he yet stood beside the lowered glass, his arm, sleeved in fine green cloth, laid along its rim, his strong face, clear cut and dark, smiling in upon his old friend. In his mind was the long and dreary stretch of his boyhood when she and Adam Gaudylock were the only beings towards whom he had a friendly thought. He was one of those men whose minds still hold communion with all the selves that they have left behind. Each in its day had been a throbbing, vital thing, and though at times he ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... in his pocket, and wishes to pass out, but sees Petushkv] Stupid! Vile! Dreary, dreary! Senseless. [Wishes ...
— The Live Corpse • Leo Tolstoy
... conductor, who was fat and hearty and looked as if he never willingly missed his meals; "where in the world are we to get food? They cut the diner off at the Junction, and there probably isn't a farmhouse or station along this dreary ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... cut close at the back and sides of his head, and allowed to grow long above his forehead, where it was combed up to form a single curl, which ran straight across the top of his head, from brow to crown. The peculiar nature of this curl had beguiled the time of dreary sermons for many a youthful sinner; for, like Melchisedek, it appeared to have its beginning and ending in nothing, and there was a certain fascination in tracing its placid course above ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... chop wood with any advantage to oneself or profit to others, one should not be able to describe the process. In point of fact the natural life is the unconscious life. Stevenson merely extended the sphere of the artificial by taking to digging. The whole dreary book has given me a lesson. If I spend my future life reading Baudelaire in a cafe I shall be leading a more natural life than if I take to hedger's work ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... Charlotte's absence was extremely inconvenient. What other woman would ever have endured his perpetual complaints? Who would administer his powders and tisanes. He was afraid, too, to be alone, and made some one, Hirsch or another, sleep on a sofa in his room. The evenings were dreary because he was environed by disorder and dust, which all women, even that foolish Ida, contrive to get rid of in some way. Neither the fire nor the lamp would burn, and currents of air whistled under all the doors; and in the depths of his selfish nature D'Argenton sincerely regretted his ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... gloomily, not altogether without a strange dreary pathos. And amidst all his just scorn and anger, the large human heart of Guy Darrell was for the moment touched. He was silent—his mind hesitated; would it not be well—would it not be just as safe to his own peace, and to that of the poor child, whom, no matter what her ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... companionship he felt his strength supported. But it could not be; he was the spectator of their fate, while his own was still held at a distance before him. He witnessed the agonies of Ridley; and the long imprisonment, the perpetual chafing of Soto the Spanish friar, {p.245} and the dreary sense that he was alone, forsaken of man, and perhaps of God, began to wear into the firmness of a many-sided susceptible nature. Some vague indication that he might yield had been communicated to Pole by Soto before ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... last victory—grief and loss were now to be his portion. The death of his two friends, Chibiabos and Kwasind, weighed on his mind, and, hardest of all, a long and dreary winter, bringing the specters of famine and fever in its train, came upon the land and robbed Hiawatha of his dearest treasure, ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... day, and nearly always over wide, dreary, dusty plains. Now we'd pass a few muddy paddy-fields, or come upon a river, but not often; and I many a time used to laugh grimly to myself, as I thought what a very different place hot, dusty, dreary India was, ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn
... with unseen dangers. The way led through a trackless forest, the route merely indicated by blazed trees. Bears, wolves, and wild-cats were numerous. The distance was impossible to be traversed in a single day; these young girls must spend the night in that dreary wilderness. Worse than danger from wild animals, was that to be apprehended from Indians, who might kill them, or capture and bear them away to some distant tribe. But undauntedly they set out on their perilous journey, carrying twenty pounds of powder. They reached ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... by Lucy. It was only on Sundays that their dinner-table was graced by the male member of the family, and now he was driven away. "I am sorry that you are going to desert us, Frederic," said Lady Fawn. Lord Fawn muttered something as to absolute necessity, and went. The afternoon was very dreary at Fawn Court. Nothing was said on the subject; but there was still the feeling that Lucy had offended. At four o'clock on that Sunday afternoon Lord Fawn was ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... days seem dreary, And hope begins to wane, My thoughts run back and I wonder— Will we ever ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren
... wastes, to a point far beyond the usual limits of civilised habitations. In their front were stretched those broad plains, which extend, with so little diversity of character, to the bases of the Rocky Mountains; and many long and dreary miles in their rear, foamed the swift and turbid waters of ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... stevedores lounge against posts as only those that follow the sea can do. I had some beef and bread, in the Dutch midday manner, in the upper room of an inn overlooking the harbour, while two shipping-clerks played a dreary game of billiards. Beyond the dyke lay the empty grey sea, with Texel or Vlieland a faint dark line on the horizon. Nothing in the town suggested the twentieth century, or indeed any century. Time ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... conflict of banners, the clash of spears, the meeting of heroes, and the rustling of weapons, which they on the field of slaughter played with the sons of Edward. The northmen sail'd in their nailed ships, a dreary remnant, on the roaring sea; over deep water Dublin they sought, and Ireland's shores, in great disgrace. Such then the brothers both together king and atheling, sought their country, West-Saxon land, in right triumphant. They ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... every boy whose chances of successful performance are small should be encouraged to have a definite hobby; for an occupation which the mind can remember with pleasure and anticipate with delight supplies the food for the restless imagination, which may otherwise become dreary from inaction, or tainted by thoughts of baser pleasure. A schoolmaster only salves his conscience by supplying a strict time-table and regular games. A house master ought to be most careful in the case of boys whose work is languid and proficiency ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... of fuel," he writes, "and at this high altitude, eleven thousand six hundred feet, it is hard to keep any warmth in our bodies between the scanty meals. We have nothing to read now, having left behind our little books to save weight, and it is dreary work lying in the tent with nothing to read, and too cold to write ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... it cannot dry. Consumed by the strength of the sorrow which ever dwelt in her heart, the poor woman was slowly wasting, worn out by the regrets of the past, the vain desires of the present, and the dreary prospect of the future. And now she had been openly insulted, her feelings as a mother wounded to the quirk; and her husband's uncle, instead of defending and consoling her, could give only cold counsel ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... at peace as predicted by psychometry, and the dreary history of royal government assumes a more pleasing aspect to-day. Victoria is an improvement on her predecessors, for she has but drifted along with parliamentary government, and doing neither good nor harm, has behaved with decorum, and preserved ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... I have a most dreary prospect of weather and roads for my journey. I set off on Saturday morning, and much fear that it will take two or three days to get ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... need to outline here the dreary record of Soviet obstruction and veto and the unceasing efforts of the Soviet representatives to sabotage the United Nations. It is important, however, to distinguish clearly between the principle of collective security embodied in the Charter and the mechanisms of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... 'What shall I do after dinner?' And I thought of the long evening in this provincial town, of the slow, dreary walk through unknown streets, of the impression of deadly gloom which these provincial people produce on the lonely traveller, and of the whole oppressive ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... appetites at a reconciliation dinner which Colonel W. had with the 44th, and where he was as perfectly stupid and correct as Prince Prettyman need be. Hang him! He has no faults, and that's why I dislike him. When he marries that widow—ah me! what a dreary life she ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... slave, is worthy of all 'consideration,' even to the uttermost farthing; 'public opinion' is omnipotent for her protection; but when the food, clothing, shelter, fire and lodging, medicine and nursing, comfort and entire condition and treatment of her poor blind slave throughout his dreary pilgrimage, is the question—ah! that, says the mouthpiece of the law, and the representative of 'public opinion,' 'CANNOT BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION.' Protection of slaves ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... not out of heaven; None gave me my saintly white; It slowly grew in the blackness, Down in the dreary night, From the ooze of the silent river I won my glory and grace; While souls fall not, O my poet, They ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... "The garden looks rather dreary and empty, now that she has left, doesn't it?" she asked. "Yet it looked jolly enough before her advent. And see—the lizards (there are four of them, aren't there?) that whisked away from the dial at her approach, have come back. Well, your work's cut out. I suppose it wouldn't be possible for ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... with an almost masculine neatness. "Yes," she continued, "she's perfectly sweet. Her husband is a senior Post-captain, and there isn't an atom of 'side' or snobbishness in her composition. She is just as sweet to that hopelessly dull and dreary Daubney woman as she is to—well, to charming and well-bred attractions like ourselves!" The speaker laughingly blew a cloud of smoke and turned to Betty. "In a sense, this war has done us good. You've never lived in a Dockyard Port, though. ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... most perfectly dreary, dreadful way of living I ever heard of," said Mrs. Ferguson, with unwonted energy. "How I pity people who know so ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... know her. What do the others care? Not much. This is your story—'An 18-year-old girl who dreamed of a Prince Charming to come and carry her away from a monotonous life behind a store counter and a dreary third-floor-back room, took her ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... FORERUNNER.—As the traveller emerges from the dreary wilderness that lies between Sinai and the southern frontier of Palestine—a scorching desert, in which Elijah was glad to find shelter from the sword-like rays in the shade of the retem shrub—he sees before him a long line of hills, which is the beginning of "the hill country of ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... season followed, at least for the two ladies, who led a very secluded life at the dreary old stone house on the ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... power of night which engulfed all in its dark flood. The mass of pale faces, pressed close together at the foot of the tower, flashed into view during momentary gleams of light but were soon lost again in dreary blackness. The storm tore at their hats and coats, blew hair into their faces, struck them with flapping garments and pelted them with glistening drops of snow, as if it wanted to make them atone for the wounds it received when ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... spoke with dreary conviction. "I am fairly sure Kieff's at the back of it, but—it was Guy who did it, thanks to ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... west Bavaria and the Upper Palatinate, and thus Bohemia was flooded with Germans from three sides at once. For years these Germans had been increasing in power, and the whole early history of Bohemia is one dreary succession of bloody wars against German Emperors and Kings. Sometimes the land had been ravaged by German soldiers, sometimes a German King had sat on the Bohemian throne. But now the German settlers in Bohemia had ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... Cortlandt, "that no paradise or heaven described in anything but the Bible compares with this. According to Virgil's description, the joys on the banks of his river Lethe must have been most sad and dreary, the general idleness and monotony apparently being broken only by wrestling matches between the children, while the rest strolled about with laurel wreaths or rested in the shade. The pilot Palinurus, who had been drowned by falling overboard ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... violent but learned throughout, and deals not only with the Jewish patriarchs from Moses on but with the church fathers and Christian Princes down to the contemporary defenders of the faith. After a rather one-sided account of the most dreary characters and events in Christian history, Holbach concludes: "Tel fut, tel est, et tel sera toujours l'esprit du Christianisme: il est ais de sentir qu'il est incompatible avec les principes les plus videns de la morale et de la ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... he served, the last and the most interesting was St. Philip's, Stepney, to which he went from Hoxton in 1864. It was a parish of 16,000 souls, lying between Whitechapel and Poplar, not far from the London Docks. Dreary though the district seems to us to-day—and at times Green was fully conscious of this—he could re-people it in imagination with the men of the past, and find pleasure in the noble views on the river and the crowded shipping that passed so near its streets. But above all ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... mused the storm, which had threatened all the afternoon, broke. The swash and patter of the rain against the windows, and the moaning of the trees on the lawn, made a dreary accompaniment to his melancholy musings. It grew chill, and a footman entered, put a match to the laid fuel, and lighted the gas. Then John Campbell made an effort to shake off the influence which oppressed him. ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... swollen, and considerably vertiginous. I got out, and mixing some soda-powders, drank them off. This brought on temporary relief. I returned to bed; but grew sick and sorry once and again. Took more soda-water. At last I fell into a dreary sleep. Woke, and was ill all day, till I had galloped a few miles. Query—was it the cockles, or what I took to correct them, that caused the commotion? I think both. I remarked in my illness the complete inertion, inaction, and destruction of my ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... give us one song more before you go to roost. Laugh out, old jackass; till you fetch an echo back from the foggy hollow. Up on your bare boughs, it is dripping, dreary autumn: but down here in the vineyard, are bursting the first green buds ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the bedside rose, and, recognizing the visitor, whispered a few words to him and left the room. He pulled the cord of the Venetian blind so as to admit a few rays of daylight. The great chamber looked dreary and bare, as carpet and hangings had been removed to lessen the chance of future infection. John Girdlestone stepped softly across to the bedside and sat down by his ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... out at that, saying it was love she wanted, to be petted and cared for—money she could do without. When he showed himself again in front, he was stiffer and more solemn than ever, and said 'Home,' in a dreary way which made ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... sent word to all the white men to come to him. It was a cold, dreary day. The chief sat waiting in the Kgotla[47] while the white men came together before him. Hepburn, the missionary, sat by his side. Those who knew Khama saw as soon as they looked into his grim face that no will on earth could turn him from his ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... back to Skole was strung with the brush and timber shelters in which the Russians had camped—the first of thousands of cut-up pine-trees we were to see before we left Galicia. All the drab and dreary side of war was in that little mountain town—smashed houses; sidewalks, streets, and fences splashed with lime against cholera; stores closed or just keeping alive, and here and there signs threatening spies and stating that any one found carrying ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... sentimental side. Think of those dreary, egotistic, awful evenings, when, for more than twenty years this infernal hypocrite kept himself company and tried patiently to deceive God by flattering Him about religion! It is impossible. Why thought ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... and the stream of people was flowing inwards through the gates of the terminus, London's workers returning to those dreary rows of villas in the suburbs, which, probably, seemed delightfully peaceful, almost rural, by comparison with the noise and grime of the City. Some were closing dripping umbrellas; others, having no umbrellas, shook the rain out of the brims ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... baptismal name for the first time. She spoke with a felicitous mixture of submissiveness and boldness that touched and at the same time enchanted him. "What should I have done? They come and talk to you, and spin their nets about you; and at home it is so dreary and lonely, and your heart is so empty and Father is so mean, you haven't got anybody else in the world to talk to." Such was her defence, effective even if ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... to accomplish which Germans require a special dictionary. When engaged on the Civil War he routed up a whole shoal of obscure seventeenth-century papers from Yarmouth, the remnant of a yet larger heap, "read hundredweights of dreary books," and endured "a hundred Museum headaches." In grappling with Friedrich he waded through so many gray historians that we can forgive his sweeping condemnation of their dulness. He visited all the scenes and places of which he meant ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... plaint of the wind on the moor, Crying at dawning, and crying at shut of the day, And the call of the gulls that is eerie and dreary and dour, And the sound of the surge as it breaks on the ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... for hours with that note beneath his eyes before he could bring himself to answer it. Could it really be that she desired to see him again? That she, in her splendour and first glow of prosperous joy, would wish to encounter him in his dreary, sad, deserted misery? And why could she wish it? and, ah! how ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope |
