"Listlessness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... abridge and select. For many of the elements whose action builds up our human soul, there is no place in his canvas. A great part of the discipline of life arises simply from its slowness. The long years of patient waiting and silent labor, the struggle with listlessness and pain, the loss of time by illness, the hope deferred, the doubt that lays hold on delay—these are the tests of that pertinacity in man which is but a step below heroism. The exhibition of them in the novel, however, is prevented by that rapidity of movement which ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... there one attitude, one movement, one gesture that betrays the joy of freedom now that the day's work is over? Scarcely one. That boy with the long dark hair drooping on his forehead, contrasting so vividly against his sallow skin—you might imagine from the listlessness of his actions that the day's work was just beginning. At lunch time, when the vitality was yet in store, he might have been seen, running out from the building in the gleeful anticipation of an hour's rest. But now, when all the hours of the night ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... few days later, in sheer listlessness of purpose, he found himself again at the White House. The President was giving audience to a deputation of fanatics, who, with a pathetic simplicity almost equal to his own pathetic tolerance, were urging upon this ruler of millions the policy of an insignificant ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... Sunday of our captivity was notable for nothing but the average crop of rumours which had characterised every day of our Siege existence. The listlessness of the people stood out in marked contrast to their sanguine outlook when the Siege was young, and when the folly of prophesying unless one knew remained not only, as it were, unsmoked but outside our pipes altogether. Still—to pursue the metaphor—our pretensions in the ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... easily passable; but as soon as it begins to descend, it presents all those difficulties which have been interestingly described by the early travellers in Peru. The scanty population of the surrounding districts, the native listlessness of the Indians, and their indifference to the conveniences of life, are obstacles to the making of roads which might be passable without difficulty and danger. However, where nature from the state of the country has compelled ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
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