"Loneliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have had me enter, locked it and cried out at him, saying, "By Allah, an thou open not to me, I will kill thee; for I am none of those whom thou canst cozen!" Quoth he, "What deemest thou of cozenage?" And I said, "Verily, I am affrighted at the loneliness of the house and the lack of any at the door thereof; for I see none appear." "O my lord," answered he, "this is a privy door." "Privy or public," answered I, ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... sills. The fire had gone out and the bitter storm beat against the casements and howled in the chimney, and the dusk of the night began to mingle with the thick white flakes, and brought upon the solitary man a great gloom and horror of loneliness. It seemed to him that his life was done, and his strength gone from him. He had labored in vain for years, for this end, and he had failed to attain it. It were better to have died than to suffer the ignominy of this defeat. It were better never ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... without interruption, and she saw with terror that her miserable light began to flicker with exhaustion. Soon the desolation of darkness would be added to loneliness and hunger. ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... went off like a hero to the war; and my friend—also I think like a hero—stayed on at Bath, enduring as best he could the worst form of loneliness; for undoubtedly there is no loneliness so frightful as constant companionship with an uncongenial person. He had, however, one consolation: the Major's health steadily improved, under the joint influence of total abstinence ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... loneliness crept over me. The setting sun filled the west with its golden splendor. Great yellow bars of sunlight streamed through the railing, and lit up the floor of the piazza. Sitting there I was bathed in its ruddy flood. Happy birds poured forth their evening ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... soft, musical murmur of the Rio Pecos was heard, as it flowed by on his right, and now and then the gentlest possible breath of night-wind disturbed the branches overhead; but nothing else caught his notice. To prevent the feeling of utter loneliness from gaining possession of him, Fred occasionally emitted a low, soft, tremulous whistle, which was instantly responded to from the direction of Mickey. It was the old familiar signal which they ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... that leaves Owen so unaccounted for. Well, they never came, the visitors; they never came; and she died of it. She died of it long before they buried her: I'm certain of that. Those are stone-dead eyes in the picture...The loneliness must have been awful, if even Owen couldn't keep her from dying of it. And to feel it so she must have HAD feelings—real live ones, the kind that twitch and tug. And all she had to look at all her life was a gilt console—yes, that's it, a gilt console screwed to the wall! That's exactly ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... the danger that belong to the ocean, but of those 'ponds,' as our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by summer visitors; beautiful sheets of water from a hundred to a few thousand acres in extent, scattered like raindrops over the map of our Northern sovereignties. The loneliness of contemplative old age finds its natural home in the near neighborhood of one ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I turned up a lane and found myself following the course of the bright little river. I passed first one and then another, then a third, several couples out love- making in the spring evening; and a consequent feeling of loneliness was beginning to grow upon me, when I came to a dam across the river, and a mill—a great, gaunt promontory of building,—half on dry ground and half arched over the stream. The road here drew in its shoulders and crept through between the landward extremity of the mill and a little garden ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one by one they fell off from Annesley's side of the road. He soon felt that no one addressed a word to him. He was, probably, too prone to encourage them in this. It was he that fell away, and courted loneliness, and then in his heart accused them. There was do doubt something of truth in his accusations; but another man, less sensitive, might have lived it down. He did more than meet their coldness half-way, and then complained to himself of the bitterness of the world. ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... looked anxiously at her father and the guest. What was this new idea of providing company for her? She had long been used to loneliness in her upland home. It was true, she had often wished that the Kirsten girls and their friends whom she met at the sewing-school and now and then at the Sperbers' would come up and see her; but then the thought came ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the move last year," continued Nicolovius, pulling at his auburn mustaches, "except that—well, I am more sensitive to my loneliness as I grow older, and the fact was that I lacked a congenial companion to share ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... this state, George IV. died. His constitution, weakened by many years of self-indulgence, had been further depressed by a growing sense of loneliness and by the long struggle with his ministers over catholic emancipation. On April 15 his illness had been made public, and on May 24 it had been necessary to bring in a bill, authorising the use of a stamp, ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... first time he appreciated the full extent of his loneliness; his utter lack of resource in a crisis like this. Most men, however solitary, lay by material things for themselves, build homes and surround themselves with personal possessions from which, or amid which, they can gain some sort of solace in times of trial. But he had not fashioned so much ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... sure, under such skyey influences. The temperature is genial, balmy breezes blow, there is no feeling of chilliness; the sea, bathed in silver, glistens in the moonlight; we sit under awnings and glide through the water. The loneliness of this great ocean I find very impressive—so different from the Atlantic pathway—we are so terribly alone, a speck in the universe; the sky seems to enclose us in a huge inverted bowl, and we are only groping about, as it were, ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... the other turned back; and as the old woman limped blindly by I turned away, for there are sights a man dare not look upon. She passed; and I heard a child's shrill voice say, "I come to look for you, gran"; and I thanked God that there need be no utter loneliness in the world while ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... in Minneapolis when he and his brother Joe were on the verge of death by starvation. He never stopped his flow of pleasing language, ever harping upon the good he had done and would do for Jim, if the latter would only trust him, until forced by sheer friendless loneliness the boy folded his bruised arms around Kansas Shorty's neck and amid heart-broken sobs begged his pardon for having tried to leave him, and while the other hoboes in the room, old as well as young, who had all passed through the same sort of treatment, had a hard time to suppress their smiles, ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... She had returned. The thongs no longer hurt me. The pangs of hunger and thirst disappeared. I realized that it had been loneliness from which I ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... window-sill this frail scent, which seemed part of the dying night, connected itself in his mind with his past life. He drew it in through his nostrils, he thought of it, and vaguely it floated about the long days and nights of his work-filled loneliness, making them sad, yet sweet. He had had an ideal and he had striven to guard it carefully. He had lived for it. To-night he had cast it out in a moment of strange excitement. Had he done wrong? Had he been ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... country was deserted, for the few habitations that once existed in the vicinity of the fort had been abandoned and destroyed when the French fled up the river, and no English settlers had as yet appeared. Amidst their privations and the loneliness of their situation the charms of their own firesides seemed peculiarly inviting. Most probably, too, the fort and barracks were little more than habitable in consequence of the havoc wrought by a terrible storm on the night of the 3-4 November, 1759. This storm was ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... reckoned with awful distinctness, had thirty-one days in it! It is not easy for a man of catholic tastes and healthy appetites to exist for twenty-four days on fifty shillings. Nor is it cheering to begin the experiment alone in all the loneliness of London. Dick paid seven shillings a week for his lodging, which left him rather less than a shilling a day for food and drink. Naturally, his first purchase was of the materials of his craft; he had been without them too long. Half a day's investigations and comparison ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of positively declaring himself lacking in all credit, or at least, lacking in all credit in the way their praises defined it. In truth he had assisted them, but he had been at the time largely engaged in assisting himself, and their coming had been more of a boon to his loneliness than an addition to his care. However, he soon had no difficulty in making his conscience appropriate every line in these hymns sung in his honour. The students, curiously wise of men, thought his conduct quite perfect. " Oh, ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... save her, Mr. Chantrey, if anybody can. It's best for me to tell you at once. She was so ill, and low, and miserable; and the doctors kept on ordering her wine, and things like that; and it was the only thing that comforted her, and kept her up; and she got to depend upon it to save her from loneliness and wretchedness, and now she can't break herself of taking it—of ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... "No man could help being moved and flattered, yes, and tempted by the suggestion. And yet when I think of the loneliness of a man like me in the White House, the loneliness, and the gradual disillusionment such as the President spoke of you, the temptation has ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... thorn, I saw the first, small, dauntless row of buildings Give back the rose and orange of the dawn. Above them swayed the shining green palmettoes Vocal and plaintive at the winds' caress; While, at the edge of sight, the fluent silver Of sea and bay framed the wide loneliness. ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... increased to-day by his sense of the gratitude of his people; that his life had been one of such gifts and blessings as made his person seem in very deed divine to them. Yet the cloud of some reserved internal sorrow, passing from time to time into an expression of fatigue and effort, of loneliness amid the shouting multitude, might have been detected there by the more observant—as if the sagacious hint of one of his officers, "The soldiers can't understand you, they don't know Greek," were applicable always ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... comfort him and give him quiet sleep. The mother-sense in her yearned over him, lying there straight and still, with closed eyes that had never seen love; and, womanlike, she pitied the accomplished loneliness that yet seemed to her the most beautiful thing in the world. The old familiar words were in her mind as she looked down upon this saint uncanonised: "Cleanse the thoughts of my heart by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit!" and she remembered ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... as she was going along one of the lower paths, she perceived at the farther end of it two horses tied to a tree and recognized them at once; they belonged to Gilberte and Julien. The loneliness of the place was beginning to be irksome to her, and she was pleased at this chance meeting, and whipped up ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... miserable winter. Our prison was not unlike the ergastulum at Placentia; ill-designed, damp, cold, filthy, swarming with vermin and crowded with wretches like myself. I was despondent in my loneliness and found harder to bear my shiverings, my fitful half-sleep in my foul infested bunk, the horrible food, the grinding labor, the stripes and blows and insults of the guards and overseers and the jeers of my ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... alone. But through death it may live in the midst of a harvest of golden grains. The man who turns away from the appeal of need will live a lonely life, both here and in the longer life. (Is there anything more pathetic and pitiable than selfish loneliness!) He who feels the sharp tug of need, and can't resist the appeal that calls for his life-blood, rises up through that red pathway into a blessed fellowship with the lives that owe their ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... morn to eve in the garden, and left him, saying she could abide him no longer. At which words, Jesus, Adam sorrowed, and his grief was such that God heard his sighs and asked him for what he was grieving, and he said: I live in great loneliness, for Lilith, O Lord, has left me, and I beg thee to send messengers who will bring her back. Whereupon God took pity on his servant Adam and bade his three angels, Raphael, Gabriel and Michael, to ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... the place where she had bound herself to live, her heart sank. It seemed that she would not be able to support the loneliness; for it would be desperately lonely to live there, lacking the companionship of someone dearly loved. But afterward—afterward she could no more analyze her feeling for the country than for the man who had ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... amongst women. I had no children, but a niece thirty-five years old, devoted to evangelical church affairs, kept house for me, and she had a multitude of female acquaintances, two or three of whom called every afternoon. Sometimes, to relieve my loneliness, I took afternoon tea, and almost invariably saw the curate. I was the only man present. It was just as if, being strong, healthy, and blessed with a good set of teeth, I were being fed on water-gruel. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... fashion of the experiences of a young woman who, to escape from grief and loneliness, goes to work in a settlement school in the ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... Mother, whom loneliness befalls, Knowing not where it is faring, Goes to the door, and its name there calls; Breezes no answer are bearing. This is her thought, that everywhere He and Thou for it always care; Jesus, its little brother, Follows ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... for the crops!" he would say; or again, "Looks like being an extra special harvest this year!" But when he went back to the house there was only himself and loneliness to meet him. "We're better off ourselves than he is ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... case I suppose the first instinct of almost any story-teller would be to lengthen the narrative of her loneliness by elaborating the picture of her state of mind, drawing out the record of expectancy and patience and failing hope. If nothing befalls her from without, or so little, the time must be filled with the long drama of her experience within; the centre of the story would then be cast in her ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... that the lone death-bell Would seem to beat, and pensive smite mine ear Like spirit's wail, now distant far, now near: Then the night-breeze would seem to chill my cheek, And viewless beings flitting round, to speak! And then, a throng of mournful thoughts would press On this, my wild-ideal loneliness. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 274, Saturday, September 22, 1827 • Various
... passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed cane-brakes; they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day, through the deep silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in the scant shade of makeshift awnings, and broiling with the heat; they encountered and exchanged civilities with another party of Indians; and at last they reached the mouth of the Arkansas (about ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it will bring forth fruit even though no one has seen or heard you in your solitude. Believe to the end, even if all men went astray and you were left the only one faithful; bring your offering even then and praise God in your loneliness. And if two of you are gathered together—then there is a whole world, a world of living love. Embrace each other tenderly and praise God, for if only in you two His ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... my loneliness would have been unbearable. His friendship was always there for me to creep to, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. To this day one may always know Dan's politics: they are those of the Party out of power. Always without ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... never attracted her, and flirtations were an abomination to her. She looked through and beyond them with the eyes of a sphinx. But there were very few who suspected the intolerable ache that throbbed unceasingly behind her impassivity—the loneliness of spirit that oppressed her ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... of general alarm; neither have gladness and festivity found a better utterance, than by its tongue; and when the dead are slowly passing to their home, the steeple has a melancholy voice to bid them welcome. Yet, in spite of this connection with human interests, what a moral loneliness, on week-days, broods round about its stately height! It has no kindred with the houses above which it towers; it looks down into the narrow thoroughfare, the lonelier, because the crowd are elbowing their passage at its base. A glance ...
— Sunday at Home (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... felt particularly downcast and desperate. Since the capture of Lew Flapp, he had been without a companion in whom to confide, and the peculiar loneliness among utter strangers was beginning to tell on him. This was one reason why he had told Sack Todd so much ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... cry of the Crucified, sounded solemnly out, the very words of His lips, the awful loneliness of His heart, the ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... the maturity of the nation will come, not in one generation but after many generations, we must be prepared to work in the knowledge that we prepare for a future that only other generations will enjoy. It does not mean that we shall work in loneliness, cheered by no vision of the Promised Land; we may even reach the Promised Land in our time, though we cannot explore all its great wonders: that will be the delight of ages. But some will never survive to celebrate the great victory that will establish our ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... preaching lofty truths to minds which, in religion, are on the level of childhood, yet, in wickedness, have the experience of age. Still they have held on. In perils of journeys; in perils of sickness; in perils of the wilderness; in abundant labours; in privations; in loneliness; they have lived on, if by any means they ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... from large families often suffer greatly from loneliness, whereas, if they were occupied with household affairs, they would not feel so severely the absence of their husbands while attending ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... of a world dying in his mind, the sound of thunder, the sound of a sun splitting, the sound of a goddess giving birth, with pain with agony in loneliness. ...
— Sound of Terror • Don Berry
... sacrifice, a burning and a shining light, to the end of her days. Dearer to her gentle spirit than any martyr's crown, must have been the consciousness that this God-given light had proved a guiding beacon to many a faltering soul feeling its way into the dim beyond, out of the drear loneliness of camp or hospital. With her slight form, her bright face, and her musical voice, she seemed a ministering angel to the sick and suffering soldiers, while her sweet womanly purity and her tender devotion to their wants made her almost an ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... completely smitten by its beauty. It is only about three miles long by one and a half broad, and lies hidden away among mountains, with no dwellings on its shores but some deserted lumberers' cabins.[5] Its loneliness pleased me well. I did not see man, beast, or bird from the time I left Truckee till I returned. The mountains, which rise abruptly from the margin, are covered with dense pine forests, through which, here and there, strange forms of bare grey rock, castellated, or needle-like, protrude ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... since that other carnival evening when I had felt a little weary and a little lonely but at peace with all mankind. It must have been—to a day or two. But on this evening it wasn't merely loneliness that I felt. I felt bereaved with a sense of a complete and universal loss in which there was perhaps more resentment than mourning; as if the world had not been taken away from me by an august decree but filched from my innocence by an underhand fate at the very moment when it had disclosed to ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... with the ruder chiefs around; he did not summon them to his board; nor attend at their noisy wassails. Often late at night, in yon shattered tower, his lonely lamp shone still over the mighty stream, and his only relief to loneliness was in the presence and the song of ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting— "Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul has spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!" Quoth ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... to add a word. Milton's paraphrase is alike copious and ineffective. The universe is, in railway phrase, "opened," but not created; no green earth springs in a moment from the indefinite void. Instead, too, of the simple loneliness of the Old Testament, several angelic officials are in attendance, who help in nothing, but indicate that heaven must be ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... different—like the rattling of chains. This speech, this look and the blow filled the child with such terror that he crawled under the bed, and did not venture forth until he saw that he was alone; then he was afraid of the loneliness, and began to howl and cry. "Mother, mother, don't leave me alone; the souls of the departed come and wail, and try to carry me off!" But nobody came. Suddenly, there appeared on the ceiling a ray of light as if somebody were going through the garden with a lantern. Cupid crawled ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... his only visitor—the only friend who penetrated behind the barrier of loneliness that he had erected for himself. He had sought the place sick at heart and utterly weary of life, desiring only to be left alone. And yet, oddly enough, he did not resent the intrusion of this outsider, who had openly told him that ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... trembling stone, could scarcely breathe the burning air. Twenty-four hours had hardly elapsed, and a few miles had brought us on to a granite soil where we felt even unpleasantly cold; it was no longer the uproar, but the silence, which awoke in my mind the reveries of loneliness. ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... her. As an honorable man he could not marry her, of course. But he would see her and thank her. Then if she should give him a few kind words he would cherish them as a comforting memory in all the loneliness of following years. He felt sorry for himself, and he granted to himself just ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... had never assumed with her any authority, and had always been kind even to petting, but there was nothing about her to make a home for the girl's heart. She felt in her no superiority, and for a spiritual home that is essential. As she learned to know her better, this sense of loneliness went on deepening, for she felt more and more that her guardian was not one in whom she could place genuine confidence, while yet her power over her was greater than she knew. The innocent nature of the girl had begun to recoil from what she saw in the woman of the world, and yet she had ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... that is used is that which has that same way and it darkens that piece which is every piece. It is not the penetration that brings it all about. It is the loneliness that is what is the only way to say that the blue eyes are the same and when there is not any change from ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... at twelve-thirty, taking with her a replenished purse, and a stock of tremluous emotions. One was of dreadful solitude, a fear of loneliness, spineless and enervating; another of defiance; another of excitement; another of bravado; another almost ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... superstitious, but the ruin oppressed me, made me restless and uneasy; yet I was loath to leave. The loneliness of it all filled me with vague apprehensions as I picked my way across the grass encumbered court-yard toward the road again. A thousand haunting fancies of half familiar things thronged from out each dismantled doorway. Faces I all but recognized peered at me through ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... hate it, I think, Miss Norah," he said, "when the loneliness of it comes over me, and all the queer sounds of it bother me and keep me awake. Then I realise that I'm really a good way from anywhere, and I get what are familiarly called the blues. However, that's not at all times, and indeed mostly I love ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... houses, to bridle her torrents and make them light its streets, to tunnel her mountains and plough her seas, the inhabitants of St. Faith's will not willingly venture into the forest after dark. For in spite of the silence and loneliness of the hooded night it seems that a man is not sure in what company he may suddenly find himself, and though it is difficult to get from these villagers any very clear story of occult appearances, the feeling is widespread. One story indeed I have heard with some definiteness, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... wild skies have purified to heaven. There is a beauty past all weeping now In that sweet, crooked mouth, that vacant smile; Only a lonely grey in those mad eyes, Which never on earth shall learn their loneliness. And when amid startled birds she sings lament, Mocking in hope the long voice of the stream, It seems her heart's lute hath a broken string. Ivy she hath, that to old ruin clings; And rosemary, that sees remembrance fade; And pansies, deeper than the gloom of dreams; But ah! if utterable, ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... ceiling with a glance of rapture, and glaring through the boarders at the ladies' school (who sat in the front of the gallery) with orbs which seemed to see not. The young ladies were a little afraid of him, and his pallor and loneliness, and the very reputation he had for oddity, enlisted the sympathies ...
— Cruel Barbara Allen - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... but the speech seemed to come out of vastness and hollow distance; he could not realize it fairly. He felt as if in a dream, far off somewhere in loneliness, with a big, shadowy form looming before him. He heard the chill wind in the thickets round about, and beyond Long-Hair rose ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... In the loneliness of the shadow under which he spent those two days, Hervey would have welcomed the slight glory which a word or two from Tom Slade might have brought him. But Tom Slade said nothing. And it was not in Hervey's nature to make any claims or boasts. He soon ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Teams were moving toward the barns, and barn-hands were watering those which had already returned. There was a general stir everywhere. Certain stock was being corralled and hayed for the night. In the hay corral men were busy cutting and hauling feed. There was no loneliness, no solitude. The business of so great an enterprise as the Obar Ranch involved many hands, and seemingly ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... oaten pipe of hers is mute Or thrown away; but with a flute Her loneliness she cheers; This flute, made of a hemlock stalk, At evening in his homeward ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... him, as she had done to Mrs Greenow, that she believed the old man's hours were well-nigh come to a close. She told him that she had asked her aunt to come to her; "not," she said, "that I think her coming will be of material service, but I feel the loneliness of the house will be too much for me at such a time. I must leave it for you to decide," she said, "whether you had better be here. If anything should happen,"—people when writing such letters are always afraid to speak of death by its proper name,—"I will send you a message, and ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... the great, uninhabited mountains, the dark forests, the immense loneliness and isolation, the thousand subtle and psychic influences which the wilderness exerts over the untried soul. There might be nothing to be scared of, as the man said. Wild animals are harmless, the trails are good. But he could not imagine any of the girls with whom he had acquaintance pushing off ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... gave his instructions. "You see," he continued, "when you run across as few nice women as I do that sort of thing is more than ordinarily disturbing. And then I suppose it was the setting, and her loneliness, and everything. Anyway, I stayed on, I got to be a little bit ashamed of myself. I was afraid that Mrs. Whitney would think me prompted by mere curiosity or a desire to meddle, so after a while I gave out that I was prospecting that part of Arizona, and in the mornings I would take a horse and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... "I got home late and found that Jose had made preparations to lighten my loneliness. Then I saw the light in your window and thought I would come down. You ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... who had treated her on a real equality of girlhood Irene had been placed on a pedestal in Lorna's empty heart. The separation between the two added to the loneliness of the latter's brief half-term holiday. She had never missed school so much before, or hated her surroundings so entirely. The long week-end dragged itself slowly away. Sunday was wet and they stayed all day in the little sitting-room, Mr. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... be hers to love; he was no longer hers to live for. He should found his life on no illusions, as she had founded hers. She must set him free to turn away from her; but when he turned away it would not be to leave her in the loneliness and the terror of heart that she had known; it would be to leave her in the church where ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... nursing under her flank. Here was his new realm peopled at once. Here were followers of his own kind. He stepped briskly down from his hillock and graciously accepted the homage of the ewe, who snuggled up against him as if afraid at the loneliness and the coming on of night. All night he slept beside the mother and her young, in the sheltered hollow, and kept no watch because he feared no foe. But the ewe kept watch, knowing well what perils might steal upon them ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... in his weak and complaining despair, he composed one of his sturdiest works, "Kampf und Sieg." He settled in Munich, and continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him with equal fulness. His loneliness, however, at length told upon his spirits, and gradually ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... The loneliness got on my nerves; at first I grew afraid, only afraid, and then my fears turned into a panic, a wild, mad panic, consisting in the one desire to get where there were human beings—creatures I knew and understood. With this ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... are always egotists, I believe. As to the ladies, your loneliness was the result of circumstances, as ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... sala. Honor had asked him to leave her, but he found that he could not stay away from her; the remembrance of her eyes when she looked at Jimsy was intolerable in the loneliness of his own room. The big living room was empty but he supposed Honor would be back presently, and he sat down in an easy chair and leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. He had arrived, very nearly, at the end of his endurance. He knew it himself and he was husbanding ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... a few scratches of the needle. He turned the prints and withdrew Tobit Blind. In every line of this figure of the wandering old man, tapping his stick upon the pavement, feeling his way by the wall, was blindness, actual blindness—all the misery and loneliness and indignity of it. ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... so much occasion for moralizing; perhaps the neigbhboring Parc aux Cerfs would afford better illustrations of his reign. The life of his great grandsire, the Grand Llama of France, seems to have frightened Louis the well-beloved; who understood that loneliness is one of the necessary conditions of divinity, and, being of a jovial, companionable turn, aspired not ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... and she would have gone her way without regard for her "inferiority complex" had not chance thrown in her way a young woman colleague who saw through her elder's pose and became her friend. My patient drank in this friendship with an avidity the greater for her long loneliness, and she was very happy until the younger woman fell in love with a man and ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... holidays. Now he never went. For years his wife had lived with him and kept his house and prepared his food, and grown, like him, silent and apart from all around. She died at last and he gave her a high-toned funeral; had a coffin from the city and a preacher and all that. She had died of loneliness. He did not know it. She did not realize it. He went on as if it was a matter of course. The old house was kept up carefully; a Chinaman, as silent as himself, kept it for him, and a corps of men kept him ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... are," he laughed, forgetting all his loneliness now. "When I get to be a big man I'm goin' to take ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Country • Laura Lee Hope
... of Emotional Adjustment analyzed everything I told them. Your psycho-graph ran to fifty-seven pages, but it was your desperate loneliness which guided me ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... about the hopelessness of his situation. He was alone. Whatever was to be done he must do single-handed—and there was nothing he could do! But he would not admit to himself that the aching loneliness came to a focus in the memory of a girl's smiling eyes, the touch ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... the forests began to be cleared; smoke was soon seen rising from new cabins; and the sharp crack of other rifles than Daniel's was sometimes heard in the morning. This grieved him sadly. Most people would have been pleased to find neighbors in the loneliness of the woods; but what pleased others did not please him. They were crowding upon him; they were driving away his game: this was his trouble. But, after all, there was one good farmer who came into the region and made his settlement; which settlement, as it turned out, proved ...
— The Adventures of Daniel Boone: the Kentucky rifleman • Uncle Philip
... side. "A 'revelation'—to ME: I've come to such a woman for a revelation? You talk to me about 'distinction'—YOU, you who've had your privilege?—when the most distinguished woman we shall either of us have seen in this world sits there insulted, in her loneliness, by your incredible comparison!" ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... time she loved a country life, she possessed in a lettered taste, in a beautiful and highly cultivated voice, and in a scientific knowledge of music and of painting, all those resources which prevent retirement from degenerating into loneliness. Her foibles, if we must confess that she was not faultless, endeared her to her husband, for her temper reflected his own pride, and she possessed the taste for splendour which was also his native mood, although circumstances had ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... James, her pride, was at sea, Elizabeth, a sweet little maiden of twelve, had left her to take that last voyage beyond another sea, and Abijah, without one word of farewell, with the silence of long years unbroken, he, too, also! had hoisted sail and was gone forever. And now in her loneliness and sorrow, knowing that she, too, must shortly follow, a great yearning rose up in her poor wounded heart to see once more her child, the comfort and stay of her bitter life. And as she had written to him her wish and longing, the boy ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... This wonder must exist somewhere. I love her; I am dying for her; I must have her; I will have her. To a resolute heart nothing is impossible. If you would have me live, let me go in search of her, or before to-morrow I shall be dead of loneliness." ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... In one of his moments of loneliness it had occurred to him that a great many men had wives, and that wives were, undoubtedly, a remarkably ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... scaly clouds in a serene sky or floated like waterlilies on emerald streams. It was of such a beverage that Lotung, a Tang poet, wrote: "The first cup moistens my lips and throat, the second cup breaks my loneliness, the third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some five thousand volumes of odd ideographs. The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration,—all the wrong of life passes away through my pores. At the fifth cup I am purified; the sixth cup calls me to the realms ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... "Its very loneliness makes it safe," was the response, rather indifferently uttered. "Meeting others was the very thing I ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... back here after many years, eager with hopes and plans and not thinking at all of disappointments. And the disappointments have come, and the hopes are all fallen. Is not that so, too? Well, it is something, monsieur—I, who am lonely too, and an old man besides, so that I cannot mend my loneliness, I tell you—it is something that there is a young girl down there with a sweet and gentle face who is sorry for you, who perhaps is looking up from among those lights to where we stand in the ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... how the roses there Will get along without his care, An' how the lilac bush will face The loneliness about th' place; For ev'ry spring an' summer, he Has been the chum o' plant an' tree, An' every livin' thing has known A comradeship that's finer grown, By havin' him from year t' year. Now very soon they'll ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... The cattle are shipped to markets on the Pacific coast in large numbers. Terrace (Utah) was the next resting-place, seven hundred and fifty-seven miles from San Francisco, in the midst of a desert with all its dreary loneliness. Continuing his pace at an average of eight miles per hour—the temperature being very low at an elevation of nearly five thousand feet—Captain Glazier observed a few only of the salient features of the wild country he now passed through, his ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... too great pain to care anything about the loneliness of their position. She was in too great suffering even to be keenly sorry for her own wrongdoing. The one only desire she had was to keep Kitty by her side. But poor Kitty's little heart was full of absolute terror. She had never seen anyone look so ill as Nora. Her face was white; ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... judge. His father was right when he said I took advantage of him. I did. I saw that he was sentimental and self-willed, and all that. I started out to attract him. I was tired of the life I was living, the hard work, the loneliness, and all the rest of it, and I made up my mind to catch him if I could. I didn't think it was wrong then, but I do now. Besides," she went on, "I'm older than he is—five years older. He thinks I'm three years younger, and that he's protecting ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... and there above a lonely chalet or a thread of distant dangling torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath the mist are more strange. The torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and grinds the stones more passionately against its boulders. The cry of shepherds through the fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills. The bleating of penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cowbells, are mysteriously distant and yet distinct in the dull dead air. Then, again, how immeasurably high above our ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... perfect unconsciousness of it—whether prattling to the old nurse, or moving, sweetly grave and softly demure, through the stately figures of the minuet—was already marked off from among the living, already overshadowed by a terrible fate, already alone in the bleak loneliness of the broken heart. Striking the keynote thus, the rest followed in easy sequence. The ecstasy of the wooing scene, the agony of the final parting from Romeo, the forlorn tremor and passionate ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... solved. The multitudes indeed have every right to come, for it is nations, not standing armies, that have won this war. But, personally, one may be glad to have seen these sacred places again, during this intermediate period of utter solitude and desolation, when their very loneliness "makes deep silence in the heart—for thought to do its part." The roads in January were clear, and the Army gone. The only visitors were a few military cars, and men of the salvage corps, directing German prisoners in the gathering up of live shells and hand-grenades, of ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... removals of her family left little chance of forming friendships for the sad little Mary; but she can scarcely have been exactly lonely with her small sisters and brothers, possibly a little more positive loneliness or quiet would have been desirable. As she grew older her father's passions increased, and often did she boldly interpose to shield her mother from his drunken wrath, or waited outside her room for the morning to break. So her childhood passed into girlhood, her senses numbed by misery, till ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... came over a ridge, following a deer path on my way to the lake, and looked down into a long, narrow valley filled with berry bushes, and with a few fire-blasted trees standing here and there to point out the perfect loneliness and desolation of ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... in her friend Cora Muller. Cora's Confirmation had brought the girls into contact with the New York clergy, and had procured them an introduction to the clergyman of Winiamac, the nearest church, so that there was much less sense of loneliness, moreover, the fuller and more systematic doctrine, and the development of the beauty and daily guidance of the Church, had softened the bright American girl, so as to render her infinitely dearer to her English friend, and they were as much united as they could be, where the great leading ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself, to his own welfare alone; at most, to his child's too. The less necessity there is for you to come into contact with mankind in general, in the relations whether of business or of personal intimacy, the better off you are. Loneliness and solitude have their evils, it is true; but if you cannot feel them all at once, you can at least see where they lie; on the other hand, society is insidious in this respect; as in offering you what appears to be the pastime of pleasing social intercourse, it works great ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... imaginative nostril may still detect a faint and tantalizing odor of colonial punch. Opening also on the council-chamber are several tiny apartments, empty and silent now, in which many a close rubber has been played by illustrious hands. The stillness and loneliness of the old house seem saddest here. The jeweled fingers are dust, the merry laughs have turned themselves into silent, sorrowful phantoms, stealing from chamber to chamber. It is easy to believe in the traditional ghost ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Launcelot's guest at Joyous Gard deg.— deg.203 Welcomed here, deg. and here install'd, deg.204 Tended of his fever here, 205 Haply he seems again to move His young guardian's heart with love In his exiled loneliness, In his stately, deep distress, Without a word, without a tear. 210 —Ah! 'tis well he should retrace His tranquil life in this lone place; His gentle bearing at the side Of his timid youthful bride; His long rambles by the shore 215 On winter-evenings, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... ostrich should choose her window to peck at for three nights running seemed fantastic. Irrelatively, one of the children murmured drowsily in sleep, and the little human sound braced the girl's nerves. The sense of loneliness left her, giving place to courageous resolution. She forgot everything save that she was responsible for the protection of the children, and determined that the tapping must be investigated, once and for all. Just as she was stirring, the soft sighing recommenced close to the ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... turned out so very differently from what he had expected that Durnovo was a little off his balance. Things were so sociable and pleasant in comparison with the habitual loneliness of his life. The fire crackled so cheerily, the moon shone down on the river so grandly, the subdued chatter of the boatmen imparted such a feeling of safety and comfort to the scene, that he gave way to that impulse of expansiveness which ever lurks ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... great law, the passing away of the old, may not leave too lasting and keen a wound, had softened her first anguish at her father's death, the remembrance of Clifford again resumed its ancient sway in her heart. The loneliness of her life, the absence of amusement, even the sensitiveness and languor which succeed to grief, conspired to invest the image of her lover in a tenderer and more impressive guise. She recalled his words, his actions, his letters, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that the faults of her upbringing were the inevitable results of her life in the midst of idle people, and that it would be possible to deepen and widen her mind and sensations. If he could only go with her to a desert island, alone with the loneliness of nature, and could live between the heavens and the sea! How soon then could he inspire her thoughts and bring her to his own standpoint. Then the fear would take hold of him that she could not ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... strenuous. At night Market Street was a dazzling alley of light, where stalwart men and handsome women jostled in and out of the glittering restaurants. Yet amid this eager, passionate life I felt a dreary sense of outsideness. At times my heart fairly ached with loneliness, and I wandered the pathways of the park, or sat forlornly in Portsmouth Square as remote from it all as a gazer on his mountain ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... voice had more authority in her ears. She had never before quite disentangled the man that he was from the child that he had been; but now the separation, sharp, sudden, and final, was impressed upon her mind. Under all the loneliness which came upon her, when the musical bells of his team tinkled into silence beyond the hill, there lurked a strange sense of relief, as if her nature would more readily ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... School-teachers who hated the routine of the schools, and who wanted freedom; who were willing to work and wait and forego the little, cheap luxuries which are so dear to women; who would cheerfully endure loneliness and spoiled complexions and roughened hands and broken nails, and see the prairie winds and sun wipe the sheen from their hair; who would wear coarse, heavy-soled shoes and keep all their pretty finery packed carefully away in their ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... to be more to Starr than a friend and protector, did not realize whither this intimate companionship was tending. When he thought of it at all he thought that it was a precious solace for his years of loneliness; a time that must be enjoyed to the full, and treasured in memory for the days of ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... more of amazement than she had yet inspired in him. He thought of that indescribably wild portage trail from the Columbia to the Kootenai. When men crossed it, they preferred to go in company, and this slip of a girl had dared its loneliness, its dangers alone. He thought of the stories of death, by which the trail was haunted; of prospectors who had verged from that dim path and had been lost in the wilderness, where their bones were found by Indians or white hunters long after; of ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Honoria came to look on. And yet he liked George far better than he liked Honoria. Indeed, he adored George, and the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings when George appeared were the bright spots in his week. Lessons were over at twelve o'clock; by one o'clock Taffy had to be home for dinner. Loneliness filled the afternoons, but the child peopled them with extravagant fancies. He and George were crusaders sworn to defend the Holy Sepulchre, and bound by an oath of brotherhood, though George was a Red Cross Knight and he a plain squire; and after the most surprising ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
