"Ennui" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stared, in a sort of sinister fascination. He thought that he might stare for ever. At length, after ages of ennui, he loosed himself from the spell with an effort and glanced ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... he grew older. The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society — all these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... la faux respecte; Sans crainte du pressoir, le pampre tout l'ete Boit les doux presents de l'aurore; Et moi, comme lui belle, et jeune comme lui, {272} Quoique l'heure presente ait de trouble et d'ennui, Je ne veux ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... on with our pointless arguments and the other little group of three continued to lay plans for the re-education of Brenda, the depression of a deeper and deeper ennui weighed upon us all. The truth is, I think, that we were all waiting for the possibility of the runaway's return, listening for the sound of the car, and growing momentarily more uneasy as no sound came. No doubt the Jervaises were all very sleepy and peevish, and the necessity of restraining ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... is, and hard of heart, and like to die of ennui at times. And hence it welcomes with pathetic joy all who can bring some new fancy or trick to their castle-building, rejecting all other without remorse. To this World of Fashion Iola had offered herself, giving ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... accident peut etre grave; mais je crois que vous pouvez etre sans inquietude sur les consequences de celui-ci. Mon medecin est un homme habile qui soignera tres bien votre tante, et mes filles lui epargneront un mal tres penible, l'ennui de l'immobilite. ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... expects Piedmont to take possession of Rome Does not think that Naples will submit to Piedmont Wishes of Naples only negative Ampere's reading Execution of three generations Familiarity with death in 1793 Sanson Public executioners The 'Chambre noire' Violation of correspondence Toleration of Ennui Prisoners of State M. and Madame de La Fayette Mirabeau and La Fayette Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette Evils of Democratic despotism Ignorance and indolence of 'La jeune France' Algeria a God-send Family life in France Moral effect of Primogeniture Descent of Title Shipwreck off Gatteville ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... to kill time, and occupies much of it with her embroidery and other fancy works, and after a short period passed amongst the vine-clad hills, sighs once more to return to her dear Paris, complains of ennui, wonders what the fashions will be at the next Longchamp, and whether they will be such as become her or not, but feeling herself bound to wear whatever may be pronounced the modes, and trusts to ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... supper. After supper, cards; and after cards, bed; to rise at noon the next day, and to tread, like a mill horse, the same trodden circle over again. Thus the days of life are consumed, one by one, without an object beyond the present moment; ever flying from the ennui of that, yet carrying it with us; eternally in pursuit of happiness, which keeps eternally before us. If death or bankruptcy happen to trip us out of the circle, it is matter for the buzz of the evening, and is completely ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... in that,' said I; 'we are at the commencement of a philological age, every one studies languages; that is, every one who is fit for nothing else; philology being the last resource of dulness and ennui, I have got a little in advance of the throng, by mastering the Armenian alphabet; but I foresee the time when every unmarriageable miss, and desperate blockhead, will likewise have acquired the letters of Mesroub, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... scatter an irresistible enchantment. He became bored at the long hours in the bright sun, yawned in his wicker chair, smoking pipe after pipe, not knowing what to talk about. Josephina, on her part, tried to drive away the ennui by reading some English novel of aristocratic life, tiresome and moral, to which she had taken a great liking in ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... San Francisco, preceded by a fur coat, a gun-case, two pigskin bags, a hat-box, and a valet. He was tall and slender, and moved with an air of fastidious distinction. He wore a small mustache, a monocle, and an expression of unutterable ennui. His costume consisted of a smart tweed traveling-suit, with cap to match, white spats, and a pair of binoculars swung across his shoulders. In his eyes was the look, carefully maintained, of one who has sounded the depths ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... rasping Bueno after every play. There was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to Walt Whitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was a smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of old towns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. The group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurre brothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by the bronze-colored people and the saffron hills of the province of Segovia. ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... world of good. He looks ten years younger than he did when I last saw him. You really ought to take up your abode here, or live somewhere near him. He mopes dreadfully, and needs nothing so much as the society of an old friend. You could rouse him from his blue fits and ennui, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Gill's sleeve, she allured him. The assistant paused before them. The Spanish girl continued to allure. Merton Gill stared moodily at the half-empty wine glass, then exhaled smoke as he glanced up at his companion in profound ennui. If it was The Blight of Broadway probably they would want ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... found that it numbed his arms, and that the sea air made him sleepy. Motor-cars agreed with him only when driving with a pretty woman. Forced through ennui to fish off the rocks, he soon tired of the sea-perch and rock-cod and the malodours of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... and listlessness, unless when under the influence of the stimulus which brought on the exhaustion. Every scene, however beautiful, is beheld with indifference by such patients, and the degree of ennui they feel is insupportable: this makes them have recourse to the stimulus which has exhausted their excitability, which in some degree removes this languor for a time; but it returns with redoubled strength, and redoubled horror, ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... was a feature of the epoch. In 1877 Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, "Mais, helas! cette piece est en vers, et l'ennui s'y ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... People played the more violent games, or strolled idly. At the hotel there was now a good deal of foolish drinking; foolish, because in this climate it is very bad for the human system, and in these surroundings of much interest and excitement the relief of its exaltation from monotony or ennui or routine ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... life I never suffered ennui as when cooped up in this semi-barbarous town, and almost confined within the walls of its filthy Fonda. I felt it the more that I had so lately enjoyed the company of such free, jovial spirits, and I ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... would warm up beneath the friction of the gravel; how their vain and foolish thoughts, their desponding thoughts, their besetting demons of one kind and another, would drop behind them, unable to keep up or to endure the fresh air! They would walk away from their ennui, their worldly cares, their uncharitableness, their pride of dress; for these devils always want to ride, while the simple virtues are never so happy as when on foot. Let us walk by all means; but if we will ride, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... honored had reference to this life and to the mortal body. It may have recognized the mind, but not the soul, which is greater than the mind. It had no aspirations for future happiness; it had no fears of future misery. Hence the frequency of suicide under disappointment, or ennui, or satiated desire, or fear of poverty, or ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... the seventh week out, their ennui vanished. A ship was picked up by the spec-spanner, and at their delight at the break in routine, they summoned ...
— Unspecialist • Murray F. Yaco
... time. Good health never gives us satisfaction, for we do not give it thought until we lose it, so that can never be an impelling motive; and as for independence, what is that, when one can never be freed from himself? In short, I should say one so circumstanced as you are would die of ennui; that his mind, constantly thrown back upon itself, must, sooner or later, result in a weariness even worse than death itself. However, I am ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... with infinite respect. He, himself, imagined his soul to be crushed by grief. He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing. But his appetite abandoned him, and the difficulty he experienced ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... chance of ennui in the week in London before a voyage; you have packing, shopping, insuring, and buying tickets and general bustling round—what charming occupations for the contemplative mind! Then you throw in visits to friends, and acquaintances call on you, all in the concentrated ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... inconsolable, et dedans sa mmoire Enfermer un ennui, N'est-ce pas se har pour acqurir la ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... in the slang phrase of the little society of the village—a society in which there were no events worth reckoning but betrothals and weddings. In such a place leisure is productive of little except ennui. To get some relief from the fatigue of moving around a circle so small, and to look after his investments, Charley made a visit to New York a month after the death of his mother. His affection for his mother was too fresh for him to neglect her sister, who was the wife of a mechanic ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... and Indian corn and dollars come to light; and half a world of untilled land, where populations that respect the constable can live, for the present without Government: this comes to light; and the profound sorrow of all nobler hearts, here uttering itself as silent patient unspeakable ennui, there coming out as vague elegiac wailings, that there is still next to nothing more. "Anarchy plus a street-constable:" that also is anarchic to me, and other ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... of it. In prehistoric days a man who had to hunt animals or go hungry may often have gone hungry, but he was never bored by the sameness of his meals. A man who traveled on horseback often got to his destination late, but he was not troubled with ennui on the way. In overdrive, Bors's ship traveled almost with the speed of thought, but there was absolutely nothing to think about while journeying. Not about ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... essence, is still divine. Men devoted to the pursuit of mere material well being, have been too long in the habit of regarding poetry and the arts as mere recreations, to be taken up at spare moments, pursued when we have nothing better to do; as a relief for the ennui of idleness, or an ornament for the centre table; without remembering how many good and great men have given up their whole lives to its advancement; without considering into how many hearts it has borne its soothing lessons ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that's rather touching too, his not knowing what to do with himself but fiddle around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough. Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his way through darkest Thibet." She meditated ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... haste mainly, and need of getting through! The very Crown-Prince, I should guess, was as good as indifferent to this antique Cadet of the Hohenzollerns; and looked on Nurnberg and the old white Castle with little but ENNUI: the Princess of England, and black cares on her beautiful account and his own, possess him too exclusively. But in truth we do not even know what day they arrived or departed; much less what they did or felt in that old City. We know only that the ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... It is but a moderate distance from here, and if you can moderate your young footsteps, and your American quick walk, to an old man's pace, I would go there with you some day. In this languor and ennui of my life, I spend some time in local antiquarianism, and perhaps I might assist you in tracing out how far these traditions of yours may have any connection with reality. It would be curious, would ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... deprecier le merite. Cependant je suis convaincu qu'elle en auroit d'avantage encore s'il ne se fut point permis, pour les differens morceaux qu'il y a fait entrer, une traduction trop libre, et surtout s'il s'y fut interdit de nombreux retranchemens qui a la verite nous epargnent l'ennui de certains details peu faits pour plaire, mais qui aussi nous privent de l'inestimable avantage d'apprecier l'auteur et son siecle. Lui-meme, dans la notice preliminaire d'un des voyages qu'il a imprimes, il dit l'avoir tire d'un Latin assez grossier ou il etoit ecrit selon ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... Hampstead. It is as non-edifying as Tunbridge-Walks. The note is struck on the first page, when Captain Smart, who has been trying to read a new comedy entitled Advice to All Parties, flings it down with expressions of ennui; shortly thereafter Deputy Driver, a member of a Reforming Society, appears on the scene to be twitted because while pretending to reform the whole world he can't keep his own wife from gadding; and matters proceed with Smart's project to trick a skittish ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... doubt that it was to her pen that Lady Mary had recourse in her endeavours to overcome ennui. A perusal of the letters written during this first sojourn in Europe shows that nothing escaped her eye, trivial or serious, from the washing of the Rotterdam pavements to the dwarfs at the Court ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... ennui and kindle into attentiveness, then soulfulness as he swayed them with the touch of his fingers on the keys was no mean triumph. To draw men out of lolling ease into tense and unconsidered attitudes; to cause women's lips to part ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... of gentle repetition, and when the body is placed at rest, and the viscera are normal and give rise to no disturbing sensations, consciousness is then suspended, and natural sleep ensues. Either local fatigue of the muscles, or of the heart, or ennui, or exhaustion of some brain center usually leads us to seek those conditions in which sleep comes. The whole organism may sleep for the sake of the part. To avoid sleeplessness, we seek monotony of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... in a thankful spirit, Maitland settled himself as comfortably as he might in the smoker and endeavored to find surcease of ennui in his collection of extras. In vain: even a two-column portrait of Mr. Dan Anisty, cracksman, accompanied by a vivacious catalogue of that notoriety's achievements in the field of polite burglary, hardly stirred his interest. An elusive resemblance ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... espaces imaginaires. Rien ne le frappe ni le reveille que le ridicule, mais il l'attrape en volant; il a de la grace et de la finesse dans ce qu'il dit mais il ne sais pas causer de suite; il est distrait, indifferent; il s'ennuierait souvent sans une tres bonne recette qu'il a contre l'ennui, c'est de s'endormir quand il veut. C'est un talent que je lui envie bien; si je l'avais, j'en ferais grand usage. Il est malin sans etre mechant; il est officieux, poli; hors son milord March, il n'aime rien: on ne saurait former aucune liaison avec lui, mais on est bien ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are many feats harder. 12 Univee was amused. Kerry read "Dorian Gray" and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him as "Dorian" and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and attenuated tendencies to ennui. When he carried it into Commons, to the amazement of the others at table, Amory became furiously embarrassed, and after that made epigrams only before D'Invilliers or a ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... useful occupation is as essential for the happiness and wellbeing of woman as of man. Without it, women are apt to sink into a state of listless ENNUI and uselessness, accompanied by sick headache and attacks of "nerves." Caroline Perthes carefully warned her married daughter Louisa to beware of giving way to such listlessness. "I myself," she said, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... a very bad time—I still recall. I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. I tried Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in this ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... to do! I no longer doubted the truth of little Mr. Rumplestein-O'Grady's story. But what to do about it? I considered going to the warehouse, but the thought of high adventure sends nothing but ennui coursing through my veins. Besides, there was undoubtedly some element of danger in that course. The police! Naturally! They would know how to deal with this situation and perhaps even avenge poor Mr. Rumplestein's death. Filled with ...
— "To Invade New York...." • Irwin Lewis
... a state of profound idleness, which to me is a luxury; and we should all, I believe, have been in a state of high enjoyment, had it not been for the detestable cold gales and much rain, which always gives much ennui to children away from their homes. I received your letter of 13th June, when working like a slave with Mr. Sowerby at drawing for my second volume, and so put off answering it till when I knew I should be at leisure. I was extremely glad to get your letter. I had intended a couple of months ago ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... feared that after the completion of those graceful domiciliary embellishments which have been mentioned Madame M; auunster would have found herself confronted with alarming possibilities of ennui. But as yet she had not taken the alarm. The Baroness was a restless soul, and she projected her restlessness, as it may be said, into any situation that lay before her. Up to a certain point her restlessness ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... looked at than the outside of a book. It is, as I may say, from repeated experience, a pure and unmixed pleasure to have a goodly volume lying before you, and to know that you may open it if you please, and need not open it unless you please. It is a resource against ennui, if ennui should come upon you. To have the resource and not to feel the ennui, to enjoy your bottle in the present, and your book in the indefinite future, is a delightful condition of human existence. There is no place, in which a man can move ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... Hen, Jessie," Mr. Sherwood said decisively. "But a lumber camp is no place for you. Let's see, his mail address is Hobart Forks, isn't it? Right in the heart of the woods. If you weren't eaten up by black gnats, you would be by ennui," ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... life has its own playthings; and I was now chiefly engaged with the deep chasm and the huge boulder. Chasm and boulder had come to have greatly more of interest to me than the delicate berries, or than even that sovereign dispeller of ennui and low spirits, an ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... you know, or of things which you don't know. If you don't know them, to speak is idle." (Here I confess Mr. P. spoke for exactly thirty-eight minutes, about physics, metaphysics, language, the origin and destiny of man, during which time I was rather bored, and, to relieve my ennui, drank a half glass or so of wine.) "LOVE, friend, is the fountain of youth! It may not happen to me once—once in an age: but when I love, then I am young. I loved when I was in Paris. Bathilde, Bathilde, I loved thee—ah, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... correct, is a tendency to break things. If she finds anything in her way, she flings it on the floor, no matter what it is: a glass, a pitcher, or even a lamp. She has a great many dolls, and every one of them has been broken in a fit of temper or ennui. The other day a friend brought her a new doll from Memphis, and I thought I would see if I could make Helen understand that she must not break it. I made her go through the motion of knocking the doll's head on the table and spelled to her: "No, no, Helen is naughty. Teacher is sad," ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Dissolution of the society; boredom; ennui; loss of purpose and direction; growing dissension; power struggle and avoidance of responsibility for trends that were little understood and generally beyond the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... man's vitality ebbs faint and low. There is no blight so fell as the blight of enforced calm. It is in the unworked garden that weeds grow. It is in the stagnant water that disease germs waken to horrid life. Ennui palls upon a brave heart. Ennui is like a long-winded, amiable, but watery-idea'd friend who drops in to see us and dribbles platitudes until every nerve is tapped. Ennui is like being forced to drink ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... doing violence to my feelings,—submitting my will always to that of my superiors, never contentious, never sulky, finishing every work begun, in spite of dislike or ennui. ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... world, rich and thrifty, not very happily married, and fond of the society of ladies. In appearance he was ugly, with a large head, weak eyes, a big nose, a retreating forehead and chin. In temperament he was calm and cheerful. "I have had very few sorrows," he says, "and still less ennui."—"Study has been to me a sovereign remedy against the troubles of life, and I have never had a grief that an hour's reading would not dissipate." He was shy, he tells us, but less among bright people than among stupid ones. Good-natured he appears to have been, and ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... day here! In the sighing of these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in the cool breeze that sings out of these northern mountains; in the workmen, the boys, the maidens you meet,—in the hopes of the morning, the ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon; in the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execution,—behold Charles the Fifth's day; another, yet the ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... and for the rest she resigned herself to her fate. Gradually sinking into extreme old age, her self-repression and her bitterness grew ever more and more complete. She was always bored; and her later letters are a series of variations on the perpetual theme of 'ennui.' 'C'est une maladie de l'ame,' she says, 'dont nous afflige la nature en nous donnant l'existence; c'est le ver solitaire qui absorbe tout.' And again, 'l'ennui est l'avant-gout du neant, mais le neant lui est preferable.' Her existence had become a hateful waste—a garden, she said, from ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... that rises and is gone, Let your own Spirit lift from Dawn to Dawn And so bestartle Ennui that at last Even the Grave will quite forget ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin
... punctuated by nightmares, marvellously woven out of nothing, and with no psychological value—the human part of the book being a sort of picturesque pathology at best, the representation of a series of states of nerves, sharpened by the tragic ennui of the country. There is a cat which becomes interesting in its agonies; but the long boredom of the man and woman is only too faithfully shared with the reader. La-Bas is a more artistic creation, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... scene either, as might have been imagined from the idle ennui of both the young sailors, whom it seemed to have well-nigh bored to death. On the contrary, to an unprejudiced looker-on it was quite the reverse ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... bore for me I shall have to marry an heiress?" the Duke said, pathetically. "Marriage is the most tiresome ennui at any time, but to be forced through sheer beggary to take some ugly woman you don't like and don't want is cruel hard luck, ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... the compositions is so invariably sensational, the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly impressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose all substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these loud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almost insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these pretentious facades, these vast, pompous frescoes ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said, "All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature's revolutions are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... a very tight corner, and I took a short cut out. I married for money and influence. The step brought me all I anticipated, but it brought other things as well, that I had chosen not to remember: nausea, ennui, self-disgust, loneliness, emptiness. I think I should never ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... does sex love maintain itself without marriage and marriage colors over sex love with parental feelings, financial interests, home and its emotions, etc. In sex gratification[1] there is the danger of all sensuous pleasure: that a periodic appetite gratified often leaves behind it an ennui, a distaste,—sometimes reaching dislike—of the ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... tea-drinking, walking, and talking. Mr. Wroth quotes a Frenchman, who, after visiting Ranelagh in 1800, calls it 'le plus insipide lieu d'amusement que l'on ait pu imaginer,' and even hints at Dante's Purgatory. An earlier victim from Gaul thus records his experience of Ranelagh: 'On s'ennui avec de la mauvaise musique, du the et du beurre.' So true is it that the cheerfulness you find anywhere is the cheerfulness you have brought with you. However, despite the Frenchman, good music and singing were at times ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... are, of course, independent of any view of life; but apart from imagination and faith in one another, love does not keep its quality or renew itself in memory, nor can it survive death which always impends to destroy. Men often seek escape from the feeling of imperfection in frivolity, but ennui is the inevitable consequence, and reflection with its doubts ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... jamais mes partitions sans etre gagne par la tristesse et sans penser que de morceaux a retoucher! En composant, je n'ai jamais connu d'autre muse que l'ennui." ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... through corkscrew sand-walks to a vast flat, sparingly scattered over with vegetation. To puzzle myself in such a labyrinth there was no temptation, so taking advantage of the lateness of the hour, and muttering a few complimentary promises of returning at the first opportunity, I escaped the ennui of this endless scrubbery, and got home, with the determination of being wiser and less curious if ever my stars should bring me again to the Hague. To-morrow I bid it adieu, and if the horses but second my endeavours, shall be delivered ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... is stimulated into rather stronger action than usual, as after a copious dinner, and at the beginning of intoxication; and diminished, when it is only excited into somewhat less activity than usual, which is termed ennui, or ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... fatigue; that of eating, by hunger; or that of drinking, by thirst? The pleasure also of loving and being loved is only to be acquired by innumerable privations and sacrifices. Wealth, by anticipating all their necessities, deprives its possessors of all these pleasures. To this ennui, consequent upon satiety, may also be added the pride which springs from their opulence, and which is wounded by the most trifling privation, when the greatest enjoyments have ceased to charm. The perfume of a thousand ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... appertaining to the earth. He does not forget, using his own words, "that in the human species, still more sensitive than curious, more anxious for pleasure than for instruction, nothing pleases generally, or for a long time, unless the style is agreeable; that dry truth is killed by ennui!" Yet Bailly makes few proselytes; and a species of instinct determines men of science to despise the fruits of so persevering a labour; and D'Alembert goes so far as to tax them with poverty, even with hollow ideas, with vain and ridiculous efforts; he goes ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... earth, to the yells of the muleteers, to the deliberate marches of the plodding horse, and the endless rocking of the dromedary that knoweth his master! Farewell, finally, to annoyance without anger, delay without vexation, indolence without ennui, endurance without fatigue, appetite without intemperance, enjoyment ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... featureless country, on which the magnificent cathedral looks down. There is a peculiar dulness and ugliness in a French town of this type, which, I must immediately add, is not the most frequent one. In Italy everything has a charm, a colour, a grace; even desolation and ennui. In England a cathedral city may be sleepy, but it is pretty sure to be mellow. In the course of six weeks spent en province, however, I saw few places that had not more expression ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... narrower place in her affection, but that they saw Chateaubriand installed in a higher and larger place. They feared that her peace would be wrecked in wretchedness by an intimate connection with one so discontented and capricious, a sort of spoilt idol, a hero of ennui, filled with causeless melancholy, voracious of praise, querulous, exacting, his own imperious and inevitable personality ever uppermost. In vain they sought to warn and dissuade her from the new attachment. Montmorency seems to have fancied that the passion ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... a quick and gross feeder. It has a thousand different ways of assimilating things "light as air," or things dull from the ennui which produced them, or things prickly with envy, or slushy, green things born of unconscious jealousy, or unpleasant things born of false pieties, or hard views born of tired experience, or worldly products of incredulity, or directly evil suggestions, or the repulsions of satiated sensuality, ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... case of some of our feelings it is not always possible to ascribe an objective side to them. A feeling of ennui, of impending evil, or of bounding vivacity, may be produced by an unanalyzable complex of causes. But interest, while it is related primarily to the activities of the self, is carried over from the activity to the object which occasions the activity. ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... honor cannot look at another face without yours beginning to scowl. That which you do is unworthy, Monsieur; is inhospitable—is, is lache, yes, lache:" (he spoke rapidly in French, his rage carrying him away with each phrase:) "I come to your house; I risk my life; I pass it in ennui; I repose myself on your fidelity; I have no company but your lordship's sermons or the conversations of that adorable young lady, and you take her from me, and you, you rest! Merci, Monsieur! I shall thank you when I have the means; I shall know to recompense a devotion ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... Rauscher's Confiserie. Four debutantes clattered in. She had felt young and dissipated, had thought rather well of her black and leaf-green suit, but as she watched them, thin of ankle, soft under the chin, seventeen or eighteen at most, smoking cigarettes with the correct ennui and talking of "bedroom farces" and their desire to "run up to New York and see something racy," she became old and rustic and plain, and desirous of retreating from these hard brilliant children to a life easier ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... introduction to the description of it. "C'est un usage qui ne remonte pas plus haut que ce voyage celebre de Gama, qui a fourni au Camoens le sujet de la Lusiade. L'idee qu'on ne scauroit etre un bon marin, sans avoir traverse l'Equateur, l'ennui inseparable d'une longue navigation, un certain esprit republicain qui regne dans toutes les petites societes, peut-etre toutes ces causes reunies, ont pu donner naissance a ces especes de saturnales. Quoiqu'il en soi, elles furent adoptees, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... convention sacrificing to the amour propre of the rest. Every individual really occupied with his own particular role, but all apparently happy, and mutually pleased. Vanity and selfishness, indifference and ennui, were veiled under a general mask of good humour and good breeding, and the flowery bonds of politeness and gallantry held together those who knew no common tie of thought or interest; and when parted (as they soon will be, north, ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... people have of pleasure!) and I have no prospect of touching terra firma for a month at least. Nobody to talk to. Nothing to do. When one has nothing to do, then is the time to correspond with ones friends. You perceive, then, why it is that I write you this letter—it is on account of my ennui and your sins. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... indulge the interest she could not help feeling in him, an interest heightened by the mystery which hung over his birth, and by the fact that she knew that concerning him of which he was himself ignorant. At the same time, as I have already said, she had no little need of an escape from the ennui which, now that the novelty of a country life had worn off did more than occasionally threaten her. She began again to seek his company under the guise of his help, half requesting, half commanding his services; and Malcolm ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... professors only, as might bring them within the views of a just but enlightened economy? I should be happy in a communication of your ideas on this problem, either loose or digested. But to avoid my being run away with by another subject, and adding to the length and ennui of the present letter, I will here present to Mrs. Adams and yourself, the assurance of my constant ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... or two one would feel inclined to say nothing at all, and, during the third moment, only to say, "The devil alone knows what he is!" And should, thereafter, one not hasten to depart, one would inevitably become overpowered with the deadly sense of ennui which comes of the intuition that nothing in the least interesting is to be looked for, but only a series of wearisome utterances of the kind which are apt to fall from the lips of a man whose hobby has once ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... cordially dislikes the country and everything belonging to its unexciting existence, he has always had a very great attachment for Mrs. Arkwright, and perhaps, for so short a time as a week, he may be able to resist the ennui ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of solitude, ennui, and consciousness of his impotence and insignificance—particularly acute by contrast with the sphere of power in which he had so lately moved—and after several marches with the marshal's baggage and the French army, which occupied the whole district, Balashev was brought to Vilna—now ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... cleeks, midirons, and mashies. The woman who thinks it essential to be blond whether she is blond or not, and who regards Forty-second Street as the axle upon which the universe turns, would be likely to die of ennui in a week at Belleair, whereas, in Palm Beach, if she died in that time, it would probably be of delight—with a possibility of alcoholism as a contributing cause. And likewise, though Belleair has plutocrats in abundance, they are not starred ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... is work instead of amusement. I was afraid in the beginning that your relations would assume a grave and measured turn. But perhaps you will only too soon have new pretensions, and the Countess by new disputes will doubtless re-animate your liaison. Too constant a peace is productive of a deadly ennui. Uniformity kills love, for as soon as the spirit of method mingles in an affair of the heart, the passion disappears, languor supervenes, weariness begins to wear, and disgust ends ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... made, nor had any special lady ever been so far honoured in his thoughts as to be connected in them with any vague ideas which he might have formed on the subject. But now it did occur to him that Portray Castle was a place in which he could pass two or three months annually without ennui; and that if he were to marry, little Lizzie Eustace would do as well as any other woman with money whom he might chance to meet. He did not say all this to anybody, and therefore cannot be accused of vanity. He was the last man in the world to speak on such a subject to any ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... a man who has lived for thousands of years. Yes, thousands of years. Men who existed scarcely scores of them invented a feeling of ennui, tedium vitae, which they could never know, at least in all its implacable and vast reality, because it is necessary to have journeyed through all the generations and all the cataclysms to feel that profound surfeit ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... lady's boudoir in 1837,—an exhibition of the contents of many shops, which amuse the eye, as if ennui were the one thing to be dreaded by the social world of the liveliest and most stirring capital in Europe. Why is there nothing of an inner life? nothing which leads to revery, nothing reposeful? Why indeed? Because no one in our day is sure of the future; we are living our lives ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... state of youth, in which health and pleasure kept me from ennui; but he had chosen one of old age. He was a savant, and cared only for science; and thus youth, with its thousand pleasures, would have constantly drawn him from its study. An old man meditates better than a young one. Althotas died a victim to his love ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... call it, a prairie planche), moving from wave to wave over alternate swells and depressions and finally to reach the vast, interminable low prairie that extends itself in front—(be it for hours, days or weeks)—one never tires; pleasurable and exhilarating sensations are all the time felt; ennui is never experienced. Doubtless there are moments when excessive heat, a want of fresh water, and other privations remind one that life is a toil; but these drawbacks are of short duration. There are no concealed dangers—no difficulties of road; a far-spreading verdure, ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... flies, and a carpet of golden sand? Do you want a coal fire and a husband home at six-thirty, or a third-class ticket to the realms of nonsense? Are you thinking of Lane's income, or Smith's cleverness, or the ennui of too ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... The ennui produced by a long halt after a series of consecutive marches had by this time taken such a hold on me, that with delight I heard Omer Pacha's announcement of his intention to send a force with provisions for the town and garrison of Niksich, whose proximity ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... delicate about addressing the irritable infants in public, Christie amused herself by watching Mr. Fletcher as he roamed listlessly about, and deciding, in her usual rash way, that she did not like him because he looked both lazy and cross, and ennui was evidently his bosom friend. Soon, however, she forgot every thing but the shimmer of the sunshine on the sea, the fresh wind that brought color to her pale cheeks, and the happy thoughts that left a smile upon her lips. Then Mr. Fletcher put up his glass and stared at her, shook his head, ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... a cigarette with a sublime air, strolled near the girl. He had on evening dress, a moustache, a chrysanthemum, and a look of ennui, all of which he kept carefully under his eye. Seeing the girl walk on as if such a young man as he was not in existence, he looked back transfixed with interest. He stared glassily for a moment, but gave a slight convulsive ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... surprised to see a line of carriages, with many ladies, drawn up back of the score. Evidently our little matter was to be made a semi-fashionable affair, and used as another expedient to while away ennui-ridden ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... so languid with melancholy or ennui a short while before, now had the glow of pre-determined conquest; his face shone with that resolve; and by this transformation, as well as by the inconsistency of his countenance with the soft tone and playful matter ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... a vixen, sometimes the treasure and delight of an Englishman; the enlivener of his fireside, and his safeguard from ennui, is a phenomenon utterly unknown in Dahomy—that noble spirit, which animates the happier dames in lands of liberty, being here, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... fish-like mouths and eyes. Their habits were as unpollywoglike as their appearance. I visited their micaceous pool again and again; and if I could have spent days instead of hours with them, no moment of ennui would ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... liberty of sending you a new pianoforte sonata with violin or flute, not as anything at all remarkable, but as a trifling resource in case of any great ennui. I only beg that you will have it copied out as soon as possible, and then return it to me. The day before yesterday I presented to Mademoiselle Nanette the sonata commanded by her. I had hoped she would express a wish to ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... and sister were, therefore, forced to sit by the fire of the stove in the dining-room, talking over their former business, trying to recall the faces of their customers and other matters they had intended to forget. By the end of the second winter ennui weighed heavily on them. They did not know how to get through each day; sometimes as they went to bed the words escaped them, "There's another over!" They dragged out the morning by staying in bed, and dressing slowly. Rogron shaved ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the 'Kingdom of the Love of God,' connected to a smaller continent—that of the world—by a narrow neck of land called the 'Isthmus of Charity.' In the continent of the world are shown the 'Mountain of Ingratitude,' the 'Hills of Frivolity,' the territory of 'Ennui,' of 'Vanity,' of 'Melancholy,' and of all the evil moods and vices to which men are liable. Separated from the mainland, and washed by the 'Torrent of Bitterness,' are the 'Rocks of Remorse.' Among the allegorical emblems ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... M. de Spoelberch de Lovenjoul, was dictated by her to Anna's governess, Mlle. Henriette Borel. So she started lightly on the road which was to lead her, the leisured and elegant great lady suffering only from ennui, to the period of her life during which she would toil hour after hour at writing, would be overwhelmed by business, pestered by duns and creditors, overworked, overburdened, and over-worried. She was certainly not very fortunate, for she seems never to have experienced ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... loves me as much as if I were his master, though I can not take him out shooting. While I write he is lying on the hem of my gown and makes a little noise, as much as to tell me that I recall you to his remembrance. Yet you are not to suppose that I am suffering from ennui, or am ungrateful, nor above all must you imagine that I have ceased to love your excellent mother with all my heart. I love her, on the contrary, more than ever since I passed this winter through a great, ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... was quite willing that Ruth should look upon his life-work as a pleasant pastime to save him from ennui. Even to his wife a man is not always eager to exhibit his soul in ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... delightful, but to stay at home with three selfish sisters and a grown-up boy was enough to try the patience of a Boaz," complained Miss Malaprop, after several days devoted to pleasure, fretting, and ennui. ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their capacity for endurance, their inordinate appetite for enjoyment. No generations, hungry, sickly, effete, critical, disillusioned, trod them down. Ennui and the fatigue that springs from scepticism, the despair of thwarted effort, were unknown. Their fresh and unperverted senses rendered them keenly alive to what was beautiful and natural. They yearned for magnificence and instinctively comprehended splendor. At the same ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... being, neither more nor less, ennui (in fact the thought now expressed on his face did resemble ennui), caused, they said, by the sudden cessation of business and the change from an active life to one of ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... of the desert; sometimes half a score were interred at one camp, and of one company over a fourth were thus left beside the prairie road. Now we traverse the self-same track in a day and a night, reclining on luxurious cushions of ease, covering fifty miles while dining in luxury; and we avert the ennui of the journey by berating the railway company ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... Schwatka. He is endowed by nature with robust health and a powerful frame, to which fatigue seems a stranger. A cheerful disposition that finds amusement in the passing trifle, and powers of concentration that entirely abstract him from his surroundings, keep him free from "ennui" that is not the least disagreeable feature of life in this wilderness. And he possesses a very important adjunct, though to the uninitiated it may seem trifling, a stomach that can relish and digest fat. The habit of command gives him a power ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... the one were forgotten, and the comforts of the other became familiar, the demon of ennui again took possession of her vacant mind, and she relapsed into all her capricious humours and childish impertinences. The harpsichord, which, on her first arrival, she had pronounced to be excellent, was now declared quite shocking; so much out of tune that there ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... dark head, where the hair, innocent of crimp or curl, hung in a straight jet fringe low on her wide forehead; and though no lines marred the smooth, health-tinted skin, she was perceptibly "sun burnt by the glare of life," and the dew of youth had vanished before the vampire lips of ennui. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... would take command of the division Boudet. I heard some persons in the suite of General Desaix say that his patience and evenness of temper were rudely tried during his voyage, by contrary winds, forced delays, the ennui of quarantine, and above all by the bad conduct of the English, who had kept him for some time a prisoner in their fleet, in sight of the shores of France, although he bore a passport, signed by the English authorities in Egypt, in consequence ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... from ennui," he answered, yawning. "Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... declaring that in the future state I hoped I should meet none of those who had believed in it here. For how I should be tormented! The pious would crowd about me, saying, 'Were we not right? Did we not predict it? Has it not turned out exactly so?' And thus even up yonder there would be everlasting ennui." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... is a man who absorbs you, he uses up the vital fluid of his neighbor, his ennui is gluttonous: he likes to be amused by those who call upon us, and, after five years of wedlock, no one ever comes: none visit us but those whose intentions are evidently dishonorable for him, and who endeavor, unsuccessfully, to amuse him, in order to earn ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... mus' kill you I shall do so. Otherwise I have sufficient trouble to keep me from ennui. My frien', I am going home to enjoy my property. If you live or die it signifies nothing to me. No! Why, for the pleasure of killing you, should I bring your dirty ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... long?" It was as if she implied that these minutes without him were an eternity of ennui. He grew more and more conceited. He was already despising Don Juan as ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... better description of Lanier's lectures. Longfellow, referring to some lectures on Dante which he had repeated often, said: "It is become an old story to me. I am tired." Lanier knew nothing of this 'ennui'. He fretted at times over the fact that he had to give to work of this kind the time he might have given to his poetry, but there is not in his lectures a single note of weariness; there is always the freshness and exuberance of youth, the joy of discovery, of interpretation, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... moved nervously, each one hoping to be called. Then, as the door into the private offices closed, the ones left behind fell back with sighs to the magazines and illustrated papers with which they sought to distract their fears or their ennui. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... is one long fight against ennui. Danger, excitement, the hazard of my precious life—such pleasures of ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... said Paul; and, seating himself upon a rolled-up bale of carpet, surrendered his mind to ennui. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... without the faintest suspicion of the real state of the case, gradually neglected and ceased to take pleasure in her usual occupations; her books, her music, her needle, and her flowers, all seemed to be equally tiresome and unpleasant. While in this unhappy state of ennui and loneliness of feeling, peculiar to the youthful days, or some portion of them, of both sexes, when the ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... alike to me, men, women, events. This is my true confession of faith, and I may add what you may not believe, which is that I do not care any more for myself than I do for the rest. All is divided into ennui, comedy and misery. I am indifferent to everything. I pass two-thirds of my time in being terribly bored. I pass the third portion in writing sentences which I sell as dear as I can, regretting that I have to ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... system, extrinsic conditions which would have no effect on another individual or would be felt in different ways may produce insanity. In these cases occupation plays a great role. The excitement and privations of war especially in the tropics and the ennui of camps leads to insanity in soldiers; occupations such as that of the baker in which there is loss of sleep and the mental strain of students can all act in the same way. A woman who gives no sign of nervous defect may become insane under ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... interior: and they were all safe in person. The dismay was for the French, when they found only a burning soil, tumbling roofs, and tottering walls, where they had expected repose and feasting after the ennui of a voyage across the Atlantic. For the court ladies, there existed at present only the alternative of remaining on board the ships, of which they were heartily weary, and establishing themselves on the barren island of Tortuga, the home of the buccaneers of former days. They ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... made as to the issue of the trial in all the neighbouring coffee-houses. Ennui, impatience, disgust sat on almost every countenance. The figures passing and repassing, rendered more ghastly by the pallid lights, and who in a slow, sepulchral voice pronounced only the word—Death; others calculating ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... fatality my pen, ink, and knitting were on the pack-mule; it was very cold, the afternoon fog closed us in, and darkness came on prematurely, so that I felt a most absurd sense of ennui, and went over to the cook-house, where I found Gandle cooking, and his native wife with a heap of children and dogs lying round the stove. I joined them till my clothes were dry, on which the man, who in spite of his rough exterior, was really friendly and hospitable, remarked ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... and I want to show my appreciation. I don't know how many times you have saved my life. I sha'n't tell you in just what way you have saved it; I can only say that I should have died long ago of sheer ennui,—if you know what that is,—if it hadn't been for you, old friend. You have been a life-saver, over and over again. And in spite of the many times you have saved my life, I don't seem to have put on any flesh. I remain as skinny as ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... against ennui on rainy days and foggy days and days that were going to clear up later. All these sorts were devised by the malignity of Providence for the confusion of small boys yearning to be on active service, redistributing ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... of philanthropic enterprise. Still, a residue remains even of girls of this class whose own inclinations, or whose family circumstances, lead to an aimless, purposeless existence, productive of much injury to both body and mind, and only too likely to end in hopeless ennui and nervous troubles. It should be thoroughly understood by parents and guardians that no matter what the girl's circumstances may be, she ought always to have an abundance of employment. The ideas of obligation and ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... they come for love of thee! They seek from ennui to be free, To ask some boon, or tell some tale Which, true or false, will rarely fail To ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... act opens with a dance given in honour of Tatiana's birthday. Onegin feels bored and out of sheer ennui he begins to flirt with Olga. The thoughtless girl willingly yields to the young man's attentions and promises to dance the cotillion with him, in order to punish her lover for his jealousy.—This tactless behaviour ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... the resolve of a vain woman. She must exert all her will to keep with her this Indian summer. She must school her nature, govern her passions, drill her mind to accept with serenity what was to come—dulness, delay, the long fatigues of playing a part, the ennui of tent life, of this solitude a deux in the Fayyum. She must not permit this opulence of beauty to be tarnished by the ravages of jealousy; for jealousy often destroys the beauty of women, turns them into haggard witches. But she would not succumb; for, in her creed beauty ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... have been sheer devilry. As it was he could have been sorry for her, though in her infinite apathy she seemed to be placed beyond his pity and her own. With no movement save in her delicate sallow fingers, she sat there like an incarnate Ennui, the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... massacres. When they went after the cows or to hoe the corn, they took their guns with them, and turned no corner without a sharp lookout against ambush. No doubt such a condition of affairs has this advantage, that it makes ennui impossible. There is always something to live for, if it be only to avoid ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... same time the fortuitous circumstances which often originate and prolong this kind of literary labor. In a letter to a friend abroad, written by Prescott soon after he found himself thus congenially occupied, the case is most frankly stated. "Ennui crept over me, when I found myself a perfectly idle man, with nothing to do, and, what made it worse, with eyes so debilitated that I had no power of doing anything with them. However, 'necessity is the mother of invention,' and I resolved ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... an unconquerable ennui oppressed him. Yet he persisted in his excesses and returned to the perilous embraces of accomplished mistresses. But his health failed, his nervous system collapsed, the back of his neck grew sensitive, his hand, still firm when it seized a heavy object, trembled ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... brilliant masquerade; But when of the first sight you've had your fill, It palls—at least it does so upon me, This paradise of pleasure and ennui." ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... ideal to the domestic and material needs. He had abandoned research in order to make Marjorie rich and to surround her with luxury and smugness. The comfortable house, the artistic surroundings, the social pleasures, and the ennui of acquaintances reveal themselves to him as frustrations of the life which man in his more glorious capacity seemed destined to live. He sees the impulses under which men and women seek to escape "from the petty, weakly stimulating, competitive ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention. In spite of the deadly hue of his face, which never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion, ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... me with these plans, that I really believed him insane. Nevertheless, I replied that I would obey him, and to tell the truth, I was not ill pleased at the thought of the change. My life with M. de Chalusse was a monotonous and cheerless one. I was almost dying of ennui, for I had been accustomed to work, bustle, and confusion with the Greloux, and I felt delighted at the prospect of finding myself among companions of ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... down the exact date of a death. It was a day on which the dead seemed enviable. The dull, sodden sky, the dripping, leafless trees, the wet spongy soil, the reeking grass—everything combined to make one long to be in a warm, comfortable grave, away from the leaden ennui of life. Suddenly the detective's keen eye caught sight of a figure that made his heart throb with sudden excitement. It was that of a woman in a gray shawl and a brown bonnet standing before a railed-in ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... flagrantly in the way of the people of to-day living according to plain common sense—spiritual common sense as well as material—is the fact that we are all living in a chronic state of excitement. It is easy to prove this fact by seeing how soon most of us suffer from ennui when "there is not anything going on." It seems now as if the average man or woman whom we see would find it quite impossible to stop and do nothing—for an hour or more. "But," some one will say, "why ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... laden with packages, then went out again, and in the street was assailed by an immense ennui. After an interminable tour of the quays he finally tumbled into a beer hall. He fell on a bench and ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... training as a nurse, she'd go over to Paris and stay, but to use that magnificently courageous tragic city as a source of ideas for a Shuman revue was out of the question. As for the quiet place in the Virginia mountains, which Alice had suggested as an alternative, Rose would die of ennui there within three days. The only thing to do was to stick to her routine as well as she ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... sudden seemed really glad to see him. His slightly tired, aristocratic face lightened; the sunshine of Jocelyn Wray's eyes, the tonic of youth radiating from her, were sufficient to alleviate, if not dispel, ennui or lassitude. ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... with the tedious irony of ennui, "is one indebted for this unexpected honour on the part of the First Under-Secretary of the British Secret Service? Or whatever ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance |
