"Humdrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grown quieter as Isa's words droned on. It was, for all her commotion, a very humdrum thing that had ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... a host, caring individually for each guest, and bringing the special qualities of each into full notice and prominence, putting the very shyest at his or her ease, making the best of the most humdrum, and never ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... herself to him so long ago gained a more priceless value with every moment's thought, "Ah, sweet Madge! I'm the blessed idiot you loved and toiled for at Santa Barbara! I shouldn't have believed that such a thing could happen in this humdrum world." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... everyday, The tiny humdrum things, May bind my feet when they would stray, But still my heart has wings, While red geraniums are bloomed against my window-glass, And low above my green-sweet hill the gypsy ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... they were already one family. The proceeding, considering the nature of it,—that a young lady, acknowledged to be of great beauty and known to be of good birth, had on the occasion been asked and given in marriage,—was carried on after a somewhat humdrum fashion, and in a manner that must be called commonplace. How different had it been when Crosbie had made his offer! Lily for the time had been raised to a pinnacle,—a pinnacle which might be dangerous, but which was, at any rate, lofty. With what a pretty speech had Crosbie been greeted! How ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... Tell me all about it. My own life has been humdrum enough in all conscience. As a budding politician, I have to browse ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... the beginning and the beginning as the end? The first steps in education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... elsewhere. In Seattle, as all along the line, the talk a year ago had been almost entirely on gold hunting. Every storekeeper advertised Klondike goods, but these signs were now rusty and faded. The fever was over, the reign of the humdrum was restored. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... and the reputation he had gained in the vicinity gave weight to his words; and "The Band" subsided into the most humdrum farmers of the region. Rita had ample information of his safety, for it soon became known that he had killed two of the most active and daring of the guerillas and captured three others; and she worshipped the hero of her girlish fancy all the ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... Feuillet, that still seemed running, like a great emotion, through her veins. The tragic leap of Julie, as she sets her horse to the cliff and thunders to her death, was always in Hester's mind. It was so that she herself would like to die, spurning submission and patience, and all the humdrum virtues. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it's this humdrum life. Here we live, with no books and no fun, day after day, month after month, year after year. Why, I shall be twenty at midsummer, and I have only been to Bristol twice, and to Wells once by the coach. Oh, Bet, I might as well be a ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... The Dark Continent, in his map, ran out on the one side to the south-east of China, and on the other to the indefinite west, though there was here no hint of America or an Atlantic continent. It was a triumph of learned imagination over humdrum research. Science under Hadrian was ambitious to have its world settled and known; it was not yet settled or fully known; and so a great student constructed a melange of fact and fancy mainly based on a guess-work ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... to England to continue his comparatively humdrum order of advancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangely different and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The Palestine Exploration Fund sent him with another officer to conduct topographical and antiquarian investigations in a country where ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... sometimes hazardous combat support duty. The experience of these depot and ammunition companies provided the Marine Corps with an interesting irony. In contrast to Negroes in the other services, black marines trained for combat were never so used. Those trained for the humdrum labor tasks, however, found themselves in the thick of the fighting on Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and elsewhere, suffering combat casualties and winning combat citations for ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... true, is introduced; but, as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred other ways. Otherwise the tale runs on, with little exception, in that humdrum course of daily monotony, out of which some people coin materials to act, and others excuses to doze, just as their ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... life, the two golden visits which she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on just in the same ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... trustworthy, no one more thoroughly devoted to another than she was to her niece. But then she was not only old, but old-fashioned. She was prudent, and Caroline also was prudent; but their prudence was a different kind. There was no dash, no ambition about aunt Mary's prudence. She was rather humdrum, Caroline thought; and, which was worse, though she liked George Bertram, she did not seem to understand his character at all in the same light as that ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... depression was due to that feeling which takes possession of one before any change of place, a feeling experienced by all melancholy, dreaming people and unknown to those of energetic, sanguine temperaments, who always rejoice at any break in the humdrum of their daily existence, and welcome a change of abode with pleasure. Nejdanov was so lost in his meditations that his thoughts began quite unconsciously to take the form of words. His wandering sensations began to ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... you. The small tasks have been more than your patience and strength could manage. No doubt great exigencies often call forth great powers that were dormant in the humdrum of ordinary life. But the man who knows himself best will be the most ready to shrink with distrust from ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... Loving what was beautiful, hating what was sordid, drawn by nature towards all that was romantic and uncommon, but doomed by my straitened position and the loneliness of my widowhood to spend my days in the weary round of plain sewing, I had begun to think that the shadow of a humdrum old age was settling down upon me, when one morning, in the full tide of my dissatisfaction, Mary Leavenworth stepped across the threshold of my door and, with one smile, changed the whole tenor ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... of the young man's life were passed as a ship broker in New York City, but this work-a-day career soon became too humdrum, and he looked about for something that promised more adventures. He had not to look far. Colonel William Walker and his filibusters were about to start on the celebrated expedition against Nicaragua, and with them Ward determined to ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose obvious moral there can be no question whatever, since he who runs may read it in the large capitals ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... except for bringing heavy goods and taking off hides; and though we were always in the water, the surf hardly leaving us a dry thread from morning till night, yet we were young, and the climate was good, and we thought it much better than the quiet, humdrum drag and pull on board ship. We made the acquaintance of nearly half California; for, besides carrying everybody in our boat,— men, women, and children,— all the messages, letters, and light packages went by us, and, being known by our dress, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... came to an end in October 1796; and it may astonish some wise people, accustomed to regard Scott as a rather humdrum and prosaic person, who escaped the scandals so often associated with the memory of men of letters from sheer want of temptation, to hear that one of his most intimate friends of his own age at the time ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... cheap churns, cheap clocks, always something of which one can sell many and much,—such are the objects which claim the labor of genius now. Fools grieve that Art is dead; 'lives at best only in imitation;' and that we have chanced on a godless, humdrum, steam and leather age—one of prose and dust, facts and factories. Sometimes come gasping efforts—sickly self-persuasions that all is not so bad as it seems. Mr. Slasher of the Sunday paper is quite certain that the Creek ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... days to her, for something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few small pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier. "I can't do it. I wasn't meant for a life like this, and I know I shall break away and do something desperate if somebody doesn't come and help me," she said ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... atmosphere of the three women—two seen and one unseen. How extraordinarily different all of them were from Agg! They reminded him acutely of his deep need of luxury. After all, the life lived by those two men about town, George and Everard, was rather humdrum and monotonous. In spite of Everard's dash, and in spite of George's secret engagement, neither of them met enough women or enough sorts of women. George said to himself: "I shall see her to-night. We shall go up to the flat. She isn't in bed. I shall ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... over his crude bombs. For by it he taught the great mass of citizenship who still retained their simple ideals of reason and respect that there existed a social caste, worshipers of the golden calf, to whom the simple, humdrum virtues were quite unendurable, and who, utterly devoid of conscience, would quaff champagne and dance on the raw, quivering hearts of their fellow-men with glee, if thereby their jaded appetites for novelty and entertainment might ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... fumbling with his sheet of music while he predicted that only when he were "laid within the church-yard cold and grey" would his lady begin to pity him, seemed to the Duke rather ridiculous; but not half so ridiculous as the Warden. This fictitious love-affair was less nugatory than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the warbler was perhaps expressing a genuine sentiment. Zuleika herself, belike, was ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... most flourishing—as Paris, Reims, and Chartres—the general tendency was towards relapse. In High Germany it was even worse. In spite of all efforts of the clergy by the extension of secular schools, the laity preferred the excitement of chase and camp to the quiet humdrum of the schoolroom. Religion seemed to be regarded rather as a profession than a principle, quite right in its place, i.e. the Church and the monastery, but unsuited for active life. The wealthy land-owners, therefore, did not cease ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... contains no "oil magnates" or "steel kings" or "railroad manipulators"; nearly all the industrial giants of ante-bellum times—as distinguished from the socially prominent whose wealth was inherited—had heaped together their accumulations in humdrum trade. Perhaps Peter Cooper, who had made a million dollars in the manufacture of isinglass and glue, and George Law, whose gains, equally large, represented fortunate speculations in street railroads, faintly suggest the ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as the European ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... inopportune, a little excitement in that. It was very well they were gone, she acknowledged; for Mr. Caruthers might have come to like her too well, and that would have been inconvenient; and yet it is so pleasant to be liked! Upon the sober humdrum of Lois's every day home life, Tom Caruthers was like a bit of brilliant embroidery; and we know how involuntarily the eyes seek out such a spot of colour, and how they return to it. Yes, life at home was exceedingly pleasant, but it was a ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... what feelings he listened. He could not but acknowledge that such a life was better suited to one of Fulvia's gifts and ambitions than the humdrum existence of a Swiss town; yet his first sensation was one of obscure jealousy, of reluctance to think of her as having definitely broken with the past. He had pictured her as adrift, like himself, on a dark sea of uncertainties; ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... "If Ruth Schuyler did live two lives it's easily understood why. Because that brute of a man allowed her no gayety, no pleasure, no fun of any sort compatible with her youth and tastes. He let her do nothing, have nothing, save in the old, humdrum ways that appealed to his notion of propriety. But he himself was no Puritan! He ran his own gait, and, unknown to his wife and sisters, he was a roue and a rounder! Whatever Ruth Schuyler may have done, she was ...
— Vicky Van • Carolyn Wells
... hand to the village, than to fill a basket from some far-famed and well-stocked water. It is the unexpected touch that tickles our sense of pleasure. While life lasts, we are always hoping for it and expecting it. There is no country so civilized, no existence so humdrum, that there is not room enough in it somewhere for a lazy, idle brook, an encourager of indolence, ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... humdrum," said Miss Katy. "They never talk about anything but honey and housekeeping; still, they are a class of people one ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... thrown upon the strand there; or possibly it would mean an isolated post out on the frontier, or down in the equally heroic field of the mountains of the South. He might leave some of you just where you are, in a commonplace, humdrum spot, as you think, when your visions had been in other fields. He might make you a seed-sower, like lonely Morrison in China, when you wanted to be a harvester like Moody. Here is the real battlefield. ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... of a season, that such an event as the appearance of a Kentish farmer in search of Mrs. Daker, afterwards Mrs. Trefoil, and the connexion of Captain Bertram with her name, is food for a few days only. This is a very quiet humdrum story, when it is compared with the dramas of society, provincial and Parisian, which the Gazette des Tribunaux is constantly presenting ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... a dream, imagining herself with a maid—ordering her about deliciously—saying to the handsome footman, 'My maid has my wraps'—and then with the next jolt of the carriage waking up to the humdrum and unwelcome reality. And David might be as rich as anybody! Familiar resentments and cravings stirred in her, and her drive became even less of a pleasure than before. As for David, he spent the whole of it in lively conversation with the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... two breakfasts upstairs in triumph. I enter the bedroom like no mere humdrum son, but after the manner of the Glasgow waiter. I must say more about him. He had been my mother's one waiter, the only manservant she ever came in contact with, and they had met in a Glasgow hotel which she was eager to see, having heard of the monstrous ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... very secluded and humdrum life. She will have to make home an ever-cheery place, an ideal that means hard work and self-sacrifice through lonesome years in which her nobility will be ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... answered the youth, with an apologetic air, as if he hardly cared to own such a humdrum relationship. 'Seraphine, the dressmaker, was complaining—wanted to see the colour of Lady Lesbia Haselden's money—vulgar curiosity—asked my old mother if she thought the account was safe, and so on. That's how I came ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... for a second in front of an archaic Apollo of no great merit—because it reminded her of the unknown; and she wished with all her might something new and swift and rushing might come into her humdrum life. ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... should satisfy her. She'd work harder than ever on jam advertisements and when she had saved a lot of money she'd go to New York and get a big position and some people would have to admit that it would have been a waste to tie her down to a humdrum—what was it Mary Rose had said?—"home for a family." Her lip curled with scorn. Mary Rose was only a child. She didn't know that homes and families were not the most important things in the world. Someone else had ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... fairly shouted at her. But there were few interests in Mrs. Quinlan's humdrum existence, and seldom did she have an exciting incident to relate and an eager audience to hang upon her words. She sat down ponderously and prepared to make the ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... personalities, making their several marks on the circumstances that revolved around them; they did well or ill, or in most cases indifferently, and were criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or tolerated, or given way to. In any case, humdrum or outstanding, they had their spheres of importance, little or big. They dominated a breakfast table or harassed a Government, according to their capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... country boys and girls are given work at which they not only earn their living, but can get an education while doing it. Next to this is the natural curiosity to know how a large and successful business can be built up in a plain, humdrum village by simply using the talent and materials that are at hand, and so I am going to tell now how the Roycroft Shop came to start; a little about what it has done; what it is trying to do; and what it hopes to become. And since modesty ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... snappish old pug was destined to be a trial. On the other hand, the change from a free and easy home life, with a mother as merry-hearted as himself and a father who was more of a boy at forty than he had been at twelve, to that humdrum routine would have been trying to wiser ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... one. He talked now out of Marco Polo and he clad what that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false; his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants, heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making humdrum and workaday over to his heart's desire. The Venetian in his book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough. These grew with him, it might be said—and indeed in his lifetime was often said—into wonders without a foot upon earth. ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... "that before sailing you had expressed the hope that something really exciting and adventurous would befall the party—that you were tired of the monotonous humdrum of twentieth-century existence—that you regretted the decadence of piracy, and the expunging of romance from ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... paused, and then in a different voice, exclaimed, to the astonishment of all:—"Have courage, good Stephanus! Strike! strike! Kill the tyrant!" On that same day, the hated Domitian was assassinated at Rome by a man named Stephanus. The humdrum interpretation of this "miracle" is simply that Apollonius had a foreknowledge of the intended attempt upon the ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... "are prosaic natures; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithy descriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we see on yonder side of the Channel those bourgeoisie novels arise, wherein the petty humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted." But Scott appeared, and effected a restoration of the balance in fiction. As Cervantes had introduced the democratic element into romances, so Scott replaced the aristocratic element, when it had disappeared, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... about, you may be sure there are others not far away, for, except in the nesting season, its habits are distinctly social, its friendliness extending to the humdrum brown creeper, the chickadees, and the nuthatches, in whose company it is often seen; indeed, it is likely to be in almost any flock of the winter birds. They are a merry band as they go exploring the trees together. The kinglet can hang upside down, too, ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... could you have guessed that Mr. Jones's placid countenance and rotund frame concealed an imagination that was almost boyish in its unsatisfied craving for adventure? Humdrum year had succeeded humdrum year, yet he had never despaired. Some day would come that great moment when the limelight of the world's wonder would centre on him, and he would hold ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... midste of my Discouragements." * * A burst of gusty laughter still echoes along the crowded deck of the letter-of-marque schooner Success, whose master, Captain Philip Thrash, inserted this diverting comment in his humdrum record of the day's work: "At one half past 8 discovered a sail ahead. Tacked ship. At 9 tacked ship again and past just to Leeward of the Sail which appeared to be a damn'd Comical ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... could run off with a circus! Wouldn't it be great? No more splitting kindling and carrying in coal; no more: "Hurry up, now, or you'll be late for school;" no more poking along in a humdrum existence, never going any place or seeing anything, but the glad, free, untrammeled life, the life of a circus-boy, standing up on top of somebody's head (you could pretend he was your daddy. Who'd ever know the difference?) and your leg stuck up like five ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... only boy who "had the stuff in him"; his comrades declared that he was a "real painter," and in their iconoclastic enthusiasm compared his inexperienced works with those of the recognized old masters—"poor humdrum artists" on whose bald pates they felt obliged to vent their spleen in order to show the superiority of ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... not skill in the hawking and hunting languages now-a-days, I'll not give a rush for him: they are more studied than the Greek, or the Latin. He is for no gallant's company without them; and by gadslid I scorn it, I, so I do, to be a consort for every humdrum: hang them, scroyles! there's nothing in them i' the world. What do you talk on it? Because I dwell at Hogsden, I shall keep company with none but the archers of Finsbury, or the citizens that come a ducking ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... much-written-about Barbary Coast; and it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general metropolitan average—that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the avowedly wicked section of any ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... stories cover the period passed since the Royal North-West Mounted Police and the Pullman car first startled the early pioneer, and sent him into the land of the farther North, or drew him into the quiet circle of civic routine and humdrum occupation. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Paso settled down to the humdrum but profitable task of laying the foundations for the great metropolis of the Farther Southwest. Since then, an occasional sporadic case of triggerfingeritis has developed in El Paso, usually in an acute form; but never once since the ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... there doesn't I shall be disappointed! We're all eager for adventures, and that's why I took this long, roundabout way to the ranch. We could have gone there in next to no time, by rail, but that's too humdrum a thing. Anyhow, I bow to Miss Milliken's prejudices for the time being. We shall be in sight of each other all the time, I expect, and meet at Roderick's for our suppers and beds! All off for San Leon that's going!" cried Mr. Ford, in imitation of a steamboat steward, and taking ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... "that I have already wearied your friend. My life must seem so humdrum to him, and to you, who have travelled so far and seen so much. For I, monsieur, as I have told your friend, have lived all my days in one quiet country place, and this journey is ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... a fierce, defiant, Greedy, grumpy, grizzly giant In the pages of a picture-book, and he Sometimes screamed, in sudden rages, "I must jump out from these pages, For this life's a much too humdrum one for me! Fiddle-dee! Yes, this life's a quite ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein
... interrupted as little as possible in his pursuit of learning, he engaged a room in a famous monastery some miles away from his own home. The only inhabitants of this monastery were a dozen or so of Buddhist priests, who, except when they were engaged in the daily services of the temple, lived a quiet, humdrum, lazy kind of existence which harmonized well with the solitude and the majestic stillness of the mountain scenery by ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... to-day...." And now he was thinking, as he sat opposite Foster, "If I had only picked up another bone or two, I might really have put together the domestic organism. Yet why should I trouble? It would all be plain, humdrum prose, no doubt. Glamour doesn't spread ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... times it is difficult not to believe that Carlyle, notwithstanding his piety, loves it all the more on that account. It is strange that an example so salutary and stimulating to the poorest and meanest of us should be set by an unbelieving king, and that my humdrum existence should be secretly supported by "Frederick ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... passed, Gasparini, the pedlar, selling few volumes, but reaping a rich harvest of stolen pleasure, and revelling in an adventure which added such a new zest to a life sated with more humdrum love-making. But even the Duchess's charms began to pall; the ladies he had left so disconsolate in Paris were inundating him with letters, begging him to return to them—letters, all forwarded to him from his chateau at ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... counting-house!" cried Savinien, bitterly; "there's the sore point. Now look here; my friend, do you think that an organization like mine is made to bend to the trivialities of a copying clerk's work? To follow the humdrum of every-day routine? To blacken paper? To become a servant?—me! with what I ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the criterion, Rachel proved a prophet One and all did say ay. Lady Enville was enchanted with both schemes. Jack averred that life at home was a very humdrum kind of thing, and life might be worth having in London, and at Court. And Lucrece, in her demure style, softly declared that she was thankful for Sir Piers' goodness, and would gladly accept his offer, though she felt ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... is a phantasy world. With the rising of the curtain we forget our outside life; we live the part of the hero or the heroine. To this day I always leave a theatre with a vague depression of spirits; everyday humdrum life chills me when I come out to the street. Reality is always difficult to face. The great popularity of the cinema is due to this human desire for make-believe. Cinema-going is a regression to the infantile; we return to the childish phase where the wish ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of Men and Women. The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry. Its blankness answered too well to the desolate regard which in the early 'Sixties he turned upon life. The women are homely, even plain, like James Lee's wife, with her "coarse hands and hair," and Edith in Too Late, with her thin, odd features, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... task of fanning the general English dislike of the Revolution into a panic rage of anger and fear, the progressive camp in its turn was gradually captured by the "intellectuals," and passed from a humdrum demand for political reform into a ferment of moral and social speculation. Societies grew up in all the chief centres of population, always with the same programme. "An honest Parliament. An annual Parliament. A Parliament wherein each individual will have his representative." Of these the most ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... after this tragical episode, where they were oddities among the humdrum tradesmen's sons. Victor, thoughtful and taciturn, rhymed profusely in tragedies, "printing" in his books, "Chateaubriand or nothing!" and engaging his more animated brother to flourish the Cid's sword and roar ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... were young men, sometimes of good family, who found life in the older towns and settlements prosaic and uninteresting, and when {11} they went to the interior did not care to be tied down to the humdrum existence of the trading forts. Instead of requiring the Indians to bring their furs down to some fort, these enterprising rovers of the forest went into the Indian country. Sometimes they took light trading goods with them to barter with the redskins for furs, but oftener ...
— Pathfinders of the Great Plains - A Chronicle of La Verendrye and his Sons • Lawrence J. Burpee
... prospect of anything so peaceful. And then domestic comfort is often so sure that nothing but its own virtue could have purchased such an exemption from the ills of life. The Warren had been a few months ago a pattern of humdrum peacefulness. The impatience that sometimes lit up a little fire in Mrs. Warrender's eyes was so out of character, so improbable, that any one who suspected it believed himself to have been deceived; for who could suppose the mother to be tired of her quiet existence? And the girls were not impatient; ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Anne soon showed a dislike for the humdrum life on a plantation, and meeting with a young sailor, who owned nothing in the world but the becoming clothes he wore, she married him. Thereupon her father, who seems to have been as hot-headed as his daughter, promptly turned her out of doors. ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... fairly burned with desire to go off and do something great. His soul was on fire with patriotic ardor. How could he stay quietly in Woodstock, and lead a humdrum life, when the soldiers of the tyrant were threatening all the Americans held most dear? But his friends at home did not encourage his practical patriotism. He was told that he must stay at home, and work on ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... at him, and suddenly, for the first time in all his humdrum existence, Romance gripped Mr. Daney. He was riotously happy—and courageous! He thrust a finger under the girl's chin and tilted it in a most familiar manner, at the same time pinching ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... cruise of the good old whaling barque CACHALOT, as far as whaling is concerned, comes to an end. For all practical purposes she becomes a humdrum merchantman in haste to reach her final port of discharge, and get rid of her cargo. No more will she loiter and pry around anything and everything, from an island to a balk of drift-wood, that comes in her way, knowing not the meaning ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... of contrast swept in upon her, the contrast of her friend's safe and sheltered life. No care for her; no anxiety about ways and means; no need to work for money; and no need to fear for anybody dear to her. Christina's father was her guardian, not she his; he might be a very humdrum man, and no doubt was, but his daughter had no cause to be ashamed for him; had not the burden of his life and character on her own shoulders to take care of. A swift, keen feeling of this contrast would come over Dolly; but she put it away as instantly, and would not see or hear anything ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... I discover a thirst for the surprising and experimental, for situations, dilemmas, and emergencies, sustained by the most sublime recklessness as to consequences. Then I see a dread of sinking into humdrum—the impulse never to be at rest; deeper than all this, I find a secret dissatisfaction with myself, a vague longing to use the best that is in me to some true purpose; a desire to leave the tangled skein, ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... light in the windows disappeared, for "Dinky," the church sexton, was in a hurry to get around to Matty's stationery store to complete his humdrum but patriotic duty of throwing up a wooden railing to keep the throng in line ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... everywhere acknowledged, but someway he did not seem to get on. Men who have managed the finances of a nation often have not been able successfully to control their own; and more than once we have had the spectacle of one who could do the thinking for a world failing in the humdrum duties of a citizen and neighbor. Coleridge tried various things, among others a secretaryship that took him to Malta, but the lack of system in his habits and his absent-mindedness made him the prey and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... said, "and the fact that I must leave England within a few hours, which forced this story from me. Tomorrow Wingrave will be free! Listen, Aynesworth," he continued, turning towards him, "and the rest of you who fancy that it is I who am leaving a humdrum city for the world of tragedies! I leave you the legacy of a greater one than all Asia will yield to me! Lady Ruth is married to Lumley, and they hold today in London a very distinguished social position. Tomorrow Wingrave takes a hand in the ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "No. She's a bad correspondent, always was. I write by every mail, and of course, if there were anything I ought to know, she would write too. But they are leading a fairly humdrum existence just now. She can't have much to ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there would be no surprises in his visit. But he had found that humdrum world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become the most fatal epoch of his life. The next morning he felt so harassed with the nightmare of consequences—he dreaded so ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... while he grew quiet again, and absent in manner, and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... and I have come to believe that they are fully as trustworthy as similar witnesses have been in any age. The very keenness of their rivalry is some guarantee for truth. Doubtless competition for good "copy" occasionally leads to artful embroidering on humdrum actuality; but, after spending much time in scanning similar embroidery in the literature of the Napoleonic Era, I unhesitatingly place the work of Archibald Forbes, and that of several knights of the pen still living, far above the delusive tinsel of Marbot, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... of; be tired of, be sick of, be tired with &c adj.; yawn; die with ennui. [of journalistic articles] MEGO, my eyes glaze over. Adj. wearying &c v.; wearing; wearisome, tiresome, irksome; uninteresting, stupid, bald, devoid of interest, dry, monotonous, dull, arid, tedious, humdrum, mortal, flat; prosy, prosing; slow, soporific, somniferous. disgusting &c v.; unenjoyed^. weary, tired &c v.; drowsy &c (sleepy) 683; uninterested, flagging, used up, worn out, blase, life-weary, weary of life; sick of. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... so little to do and was so comparatively sure to be undisturbed that the old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent as an empty church; but this night "Number Five" leaped ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... to her again; for Di fell into literature, and Laura into love. Thus engrossed, these two forgot many duties which even blue-stockings and innamoratas are expected to perform, and slowly all the homely humdrum cares that housewives know became Nan's daily life, and she accepted it without a thought of discontent. Noiseless and cheerful as the sunshine, she went to and fro, doing the tasks that mothers do, but without a mother's sweet reward, holding fast the numberless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... stood there now on the model stand, gazing dreamily from his busy hands to his lean, intent features, it occurred to her that this day had not been a sample of their usual humdrum relations. From the very beginning of their business relations he had remained merely her employer, self-centered, darkly absorbed in his work, or, when not working, bored and often yawning. She had never come to know him ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... up-and-down artery of street, repeating itself, mile after mile, in terms of the butcher, the baker, and the every-other-corner drug-store of a million dollar corporation. Housewives with perambulators and oilcloth shopping bags. Children on roller-skates. The din of small tradesmen and the humdrum of every city block where the homes remain unboarded all summer, and every wife is on haggling terms with the purveyor of her evening roundsteak ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... above, he made friends with that chivalric champion of a resurrected South, Henry Grady; here also he obtained fugitive glimpses of a struggling and briefless lawyer, who, like Page, was interested more in books and writing than in the humdrum of professional life, and who was then engaged in putting together a brochure on Congressional Government which immediately gave him a national standing. The name of this sympathetic acquaintance ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... out its character. The villagers of Assababad are simple-hearted people, and both men and women clap their hands like delighted children to have so rare a novelty suddenly appear upon the scene of their usually humdrum and uneventful lives. Quilts are spread for me on the sunny side of the village wall, and they gather eagerly around to feast to the full their unaccustomed eyes. A couple of the men round up a matronly goat and exact from her the tribute of a bowl of milk; others contribute ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... particularly require their flattering attentions.... Gloria did not expect to marry Archie or Teddy or Mr. Gratton; she had no thought of being any one's wife; that term, after all, at Gloria's age, is a drab and humdrum thing. She did not dream of Mark King as a possible husband; another unromantic title. She merely hungered for male admiration. It was the wine of life, the breath in her nostrils. As it happens to be to some countless millions of other girls.... All of which is so clearly ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... dignity which one always finds in living within one's income. Frugality, exactitude in business, faithfulness to all engagements, great or small, punctuality, that economy of time, are usually set down among the minor moralities of life, more humdrum than heroic; but under how many circumstances and conditions do they reveal themselves as cardinal virtues, as things on which depend the comfort and dignity of life! It seems that these things were so impressed on the mind and heart of the young Victoria by her careful, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... from the fish-basket, was of another mind. He went in chase of the fugitive, ran him to earth, and brought him again triumphantly home, submissive but unrepentant. It was quite clear that the boy would never settle down to the humdrum life of home and school, and, with his father's permission, Mr Foster took the restless youth for a long visit to the West Indies, where it seemed that at last he was cured of his passion for straying. A few years later we find him back in England, a model of stability, a student and a scholar, ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... her head, and have her sweet little darling frightened almost out of its wits. Well, but just think of the state of satisfaction and rejoicing that she must be in now at having escaped. Had it not been for that trial she would now have been in her ordinary humdrum condition. I quite agree with Ralph that trials are really a blessing ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... spontaneously retained—what I saw and heard; saw and heard with the least emotion, perhaps, ever experienced by a soldier. Absorbed in reflections on what I heard, and in fancies of a world of which I knew so little, it is not to be doubted that I constructed ideals far beyond the humdrum reality of home life, impracticable ideals that tended only to separate me more from other men. Their world was not my world; this I knew full well, and I sometimes thought they knew it; for while no rude treatment marked their intercourse with ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... felt the pecuniary advantages to be derived from this new acquirement, take courage in the fact that six of our number are reaping the benefits even thus early. Wait patiently; do not let the work end with to-night, and become discouraged because of the same old humdrum duties. Remember that in filling the old post honorably, you are doing the work assigned by the Master who in His own season will send what is for your best good. Add to your store of knowledge from day to day, and be able to say with ...
— Silver Links • Various
... his wife was far too innocent even to suspect it. She would not know evil if she saw it, he said to himself proudly; and then there was no chance that the Contessa, who loved merriment and gaiety, could long be content with anything so humdrum as his quiet life in the country. Thus it will be seen that Sir Tom had got himself innocently enough into this imbroglio. He had meant no particular harm. He had meant to be kind to a poor woman, who ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... green-grocer's draperies or a milkman's cloak or a beggar's rags are part of the composition, distinctly related to it in line and colour, and where the natural unstudied attitudes of the human body are correspondingly harmonious, however humdrum the acts it is engaged in. The discovery, to the traveller returning from the East, robs the most romantic scenes of western Europe of half their charm: in the Piazza of San Marco, in the market-place of Siena, where at least the robes of the Procurators or the gay tights of Pinturicchio's ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... expression depends upon the eyes. With his face turned to the point from which the sound came, his upper lip a little curved, and quivering with agitation, and with a colour which surprise and pleasure had brought at once into his faded cheek, he exchanged the humdrum hornpipe which he had been sawing out with reluctant and lazy bow, for the fine ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... envied them both; a chance for them to dash out into a new channel and make some headway, not the everlasting humdrum ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... men were immoral; the mass, despite religious dogma and fol-de-rol theory imposed from the top, was generally so. Was it not rather due to his inability to control without dominating personally—without standing out fully and clearly in the sight of all men? Sometimes he thought so. The humdrum conventional world could not brook his daring, his insouciance, his constant desire to call a spade a spade. His genial sufficiency was a taunt and a mockery to many. The hard implication of his eye was dreaded by the weaker as fire is ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... made it his duty to attend me; he has become my shadow. From the humdrum experience of a respectable house servant he has become the very spirit of reckless adventure—he has journeyed to New York, to ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... careful reading of the report. There was really nothing very remarkable about it—nothing exciting nor sensational. It was indeed no more than a humdrum narrative of a vulgar crime. But it was necessary that he should know all about it, and be able to summarize it, and so he read it over with unusual care. It was a very plain story—there were no complications. ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... help from her; and he cannot afford, as we know, to cultivate her society, twice ruinous as it is for him. Sooner or later that woman will throw over this dear brother of ours, but not before she has spoiled him for hard work, and given him a taste for luxury and a contempt for our humdrum life. She will develop his love of enjoyment, his inclination for idleness, that debauches a poetic soul. Yes, it makes me tremble to think that this great lady may make a plaything of Lucien. If she cares for him sincerely, he will forget everything else for her; or ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... similar incidents, crowding thick and fast one upon another, relieved the humdrum routine of the pressed man's passage to the fleet, and either made his miserable life in a measure worth living or brought it to a summary conclusion. Of minor incidents, all tending to the same happy or unhappy end, there was no lack. Now he sweltered beneath a sun so hot as to cause the ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... about them. We talk glibly of ourselves and our personality and our conscience, as if every man's nature were a smooth, round, white thing, like a chuckie-stone. But I believe there are two men-perhaps more-in every one of us. There's our ordinary self, generally rather humdrum; and then there's a bit of something else, good, bad, but never indifferent,—and it is that something else which may make a man a saint ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... she could not even imagine herself near him. What she saw made her feel as if her idol were miles away, and she could never draw nigh him again. How should the familiar associate of such splendid creatures care a pin's point for his humdrum wife? ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... winter days. It required a man with a big conception and patience and authority to carry it through, and recruits with an unflinching sense of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. "Are you learning to think in big numbers?" was Lord Kitchener's ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... success, that Granville, who was very much in love, regarded her disappointment as a proof of her affection instead of resentment for an offence to her self-conceit. After all, could he expect a girl just snatched from the humdrum of country notions, with no experience of the niceties and grace of Paris life, to know or do any better? Rather would he believe that his wife's choice had been overruled by the tradesmen than allow himself to own the truth. If he had been less ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... or not to be?" soliloquised he, from his seat on the gate, as he plucked thin branches off from the bare winter hedge, and scattered them. "Old stepfather's wiry yet, he may last an age, and this is getting a horrid, humdrum life. I wonder what he'll leave me, when he does go off? Mother said one day she thought it wouldn't be more than five hundred pounds. She doesn't know; he does not tell her about his private affairs—never has told her. Five hundred pounds! If he left me a paltry sum such ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... whining, creeping, submissive courtship, that I now expect nothing but whine and cringe from him: and am so little moved with his nonsense, that I am frequently forced to go to my harpsichord, to keep me awake, and to silence his humdrum. Whereas Lovelace keeps up the ball with a witness, and all his address and conversation is one continual game ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... was bored. I was growing tired of my humdrum existence. So I'm ready to run risks.... Here's ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... embankment at Rotzis, near Wusterhausen, have left behind in me no sentimental regrets for my sphere of work in those days. Renouncing the ambition for an official career, I readily complied with the wishes of my parents by taking up the humdrum management of our Pomeranian estates. I had made up my mind to live and die in the country, after attaining successes in agriculture—perhaps in war also, if war should come. So far as my country life left me any ambition at all, it was that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... reduced to one level; we all have taken to the uniform black coat by way of mourning for a dead France. There is no love between equals. Between two lovers there should be differences to efface, wide gulfs to fill. The charm of love fled from us in 1789. Our dulness and our humdrum lives are the outcome of the political system. Italy at any rate is the land of sharp contrasts. Woman there is a malevolent animal, a dangerous unreasoning siren, guided only by her tastes and appetites, a creature no more to be trusted than ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... she underwent some exalting religious experiences; and in 1822 she was assigned to her place in the "established social order" by her marriage at seventeen to M. Dudevant. After a few years of rather humdrum domestic life in the country, she became aware that this gentleman, her husband, was behaving as we used to be taught that all French husbands ultimately behave; he was, in fact, turning from her to her maids. The young couple had never been strongly united— the impetuous ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... engrossed were the ants that they paid no attention to me, and I was able to creep up close and kneel within two feet of the hole. The main nest was twenty feet away, and this was a special exit made for the occasion—a triumphal gateway erected far away from the humdrum ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... he worked feverishly, possessed by a pleasant thrill of excitement, somewhat similar to that conceivably enlivening the humdrum existence of Captain Kidd. Dick was far from surprised when his spade struck something hard, and, his hands trembling with eagerness, he lifted out a tin box of the kind commonly used ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... quivering with eagerness. This was like a picnic in the humdrum life of the farm hand. Except when the circus came to town, or there was a Harvest Home day, poor Felix knew little beyond the eternal grind of getting up before dawn, and working ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... form plans, and develop theories of educational betterment that have to be tried out, out in the open. A firing line has to be formed, a place where new things are to be done different from the regular conventional activities. The humdrum, prosaic, traditional, everyday work goes on, in the main, all around but at these points where some advances are being tried, a new and it is hoped better program tested. All eyes are centered, all minds eager. The analogy ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... impossible literary feat of showing us one person who is happy all the time, but he does what is more obvious, he makes us see a great many people who have snatches of good cheer in the midst of their humdrum lives. He lets us see another obvious fact, that happiness is more a matter of temperament than of circumstance. It is not given as a reward of merit or as a mark of distinguished consideration. There is one ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... a straw what they thought of him. It was a little hard, however, to think that Matthew Blackett would be going back to his beloved school and studies, while he, also a Peterite, was engaged in such a humdrum task as weighing coal ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead |
