"Forlornness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were so sad, and why it was a pleasure to them to sit like this on either side of the fireplace when they were alone in the house. It was a comfort beyond telling. They loved to be near one another that their forlornness might pain them less. A wave of tenderness poured into their hearts; they would fain have ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... could he other than follow? My heart had bidden him follow, Nor had my lips forbidden; and Rome yet glimmered behind me, When my soul yearned towards his from the sudden forlornness of absence. Everywhere his face looked from vanishing glimpses of faces, Everywhere his voice reached my senses in fugitive cadence. Sick, through the storied cities, with wretched hopes, and upbraidings Of my own heart for its hopes, I went from wonder to wonder, Blind to them all, or only ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... me, in a sense quite different from the usual experience of lovers, the only woman in this world. Now that I had become suddenly sensible of the fatuity of the hopes I had begun to cherish, I suffered not merely what another lover might, but in addition a desolate loneliness, an utter forlornness, such as no other lover, however unhappy, ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... the sea well signifies these latter gifts, and the watery path by which they come to her; and the lonely island nymph to whom he presents the wedding-ring, may be intended to refer to the situation and original forlornness of Venice herself, when she sat in solitude amidst the sandy isles of the lagune, aloof from her parental shores, ravaged by the Hun or the Lombard. The pale yellow sunshine on these nude figures and their light transparent shadows, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... imagine what would become of her. She would probably be seen wandering at late night, with bedimmed stars and bedraggled gauze, until some vigorous officer should lead her to the station-house for vagrancy. Thus when fascination and forlornness are at equal discount, when powers and penuries go down together, and common and uncommon sense fail alike, to what natural feeling shall one hope to appeal? There is no sound spot of humanity left to rest upon. It is a dilemma ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... slowly and deeply than was his wont. In spite—or perhaps in consequence—of his abasement, forlornness, and unworthiness, he showed a dignity and impressiveness which were novel in him. The boyishness, vivacity, and motion, had quite vanished. There were a depth and hollowness in his eyes which gave a singular power to his face. There ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... slowly down Granville Street in the blackest mood which had yet come upon him. It differed from that strange feeling of terror which had taken him unaware the night before. He had fallen easy prey then to the black shadows of forlornness. He was still as acutely aware of the barrier which his disfigurement raised between him and other men. But with that morbid awareness there rose also now, for the first time, resentment against the smug folk who glanced at him and hurriedly averted their eyes. Slowly, by imperceptible ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to be perfectly quiet; she had begun very calmly; but at that word, suddenly, her calmness failed her. It was too much; and with a sort of wailing cry, which in its forlornness reached and wrung even Mr. Copley's nerves, she broke into a terrible passion of weeping. Terrible! young hearts ought never to know such an agony; and never, never should such an agony be known for the shame or even the weakness of a father. The hand ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... opened on a terraced garden, with orange trees, vines trained on arched trellises, marble fountains, &c., which, for ten shillings expense, might have been made very gay and attractive; but all was forlornness and disorder, the beds untrimmed, and the walks littered with dirt. Two magnificent plants of Opuntia vulgaris, which flanked one of the windows, the waiter said, were planted there 'per pompa' (for pomp's sake); a motive, unfortunately, so often the leading one ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... comment on this unforeseen meeting in the little house with the marigold-tinted curtains. He manifested no resentment against this familiar angel who had been deputed to bar the gates of Eden to his approaches. He was incapable of surprise. He was obsessed by the solitary idea of his own forlornness. "I knew it. She never did want me." And then, in a rush of self-pity, "No one ever ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... whether or no the terrible adversary of my peace were in the carriage. I persuaded myself that he was. I looked after the equipage, and exclaimed, "There you may see the luxurious accommodations and appendages of guilt, and here the forlornness that awaits upon innocence!"—I was to blame to imagine that my case was singular in that respect. I only mention it to show how tile most trivial circumstance contributes to embitter the cup to the man of adversity. The thought however was a transient one. I had learned this lesson ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... and it seemed to Grange that she was crying in the darkness. Her utter forlornness pierced him to the heart. He leaned towards her, trying ineffectually ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... local postmaster deeply resented. One tourist after another, exclaimed with blank despair: "Alas, poor Mull will get no news from London to-day." "What will Mull do without the London news?" "No news from London, what a misfortune for Mull!" This harping on the forlornness of the island caused the blood of the postmaster to boil with indignation, and he shouted in ire: "It is not Mull I will be sorry for, at all, at all. Mull can do without the London news. But what will poor London do, when she finds she will not be able to ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... poorhouse, the result of centuries of deterrent Poor Law administration, seemed to me not without some justification one summer when I found myself perpetually distressed by the unnecessary idleness and forlornness of the old women in the Cook County Infirmary, many of whom I had known in the years when activity was still a necessity, and when they yet felt bustlingly important. To take away from an old woman whose life has been ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... everything and everybody. Neither she nor any one else should have the satisfaction of being any comfort to him; since he had been shut up as an unclean person, he had better keep himself quite apart from them. He would make his punishment still more hard, and purposely increased his forlornness, kept out of his thoughts everything that was near and dear to him, and dragged the painful things into the foreground. Ellen had of course forgotten him for some one else, and had perhaps turned the children's thoughts from him; they would certainly be forbidden ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... door of his private office opened to admit an important client he happened to glance up. And between the edge of the door frame and his client's automobile-fattened and carefully dressed body, he caught a glimpse of the "poor little forlornness" who chanced to be crossing the outer office. A glint of sunlight on her hair changed it from lifelessness to golden vital vividness; the same chance sunbeam touched her pale skin with a soft yellow radiation—and her profile was delicately fine and regular. Thus Norman, who observed everything, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... fairly good place to begin. Its ugliness and forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,—enormous drab structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes and black smoke. The steel workers ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... at the window, the floor was lighted up, and there were shadows on it. A cricket was chirping. Through the wall Father Sisoy was snoring in the next room, and his aged snore had a sound that suggested loneliness, forlornness, even vagrancy. Sisoy had once been housekeeper to the bishop of the diocese, and was called now "the former Father Housekeeper"; he was seventy years old, he lived in a monastery twelve miles from the town and stayed sometimes in the town, too. He had come to the Pankratievsky Monastery ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... beautiful Christmas, for, aside from being unexpected and in striking contrast to the forlornness we had anticipated, we had been taken into the families of beautiful people, whose home life was an honor and an inspiration ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell |
