"Insufferably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exclaimed the author, "on long winter evenings, or perhaps when you are laid up with a strained ankle—a thing that might happen to any one; or if you were staying in a house- party with persistent wet weather and a stupid hostess and insufferably dull fellow-guests, you would just make an excuse that you had letters to write, go to your room, light a cigarette, and for three-and-ninepence you could plunge into the society of Beatrice Lady Cullumpton and her set. No one ought to travel without one or two of my novels ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... of Christ, therefore, earnestly incited by the example of its king, thinking indeed that the holy places are much more impiously and insufferably polluted by the infidels than when defiled by merchants, abide in the holy house with horses and with arms, so that from that, as well as all the other sacred places, all filthy and diabolical madness of infidelity being driven out, they may occupy themselves by day and by night ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... handkerchiefs that were declared superior to anything heretofore seen. But the little entertainment was to come to an abrupt conclusion. So engrossed had they been in its progress that they had not noticed that the sky had clouded over, and that it had suddenly grown insufferably oppressive. ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... the remark, and the khan orders them to sing no more. Over a country that consists chiefly of trailless hills and intervening strips of desert, we wend our weary way, the bicycle often proving more of a drag than a benefit. The weather gets insufferably hot; in places the rocks fairly shimmer with heat, and are so hot that one can scarce hold the hand to them. We camp for the first night at a village, and on the second at an umbar that suggests our approach to Persia, and in the morning we make an early start with ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... schemes for her redemption, when she espied, at a short distance from her own gates, the solitary figure of Teen, with her hand shading her eyes, looking anxiously down the road. She had found life at Bourhill insufferably dull without its mistress. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... in this was is iron plied alone, But mighty masses and whole bulwarks fall, And top of tower, huge piece of bastion, And with much toil disrupted, solid wall; While streams of boiling water pouring down, Insufferably the advancing paynims gall: An ill-resisted rain, which, in despite Of helmet, makes its ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... imbecility, of petty, genteel conservatism. As for Newton, he would be more utterly odious, if possible, as he grew up, than he was already; in fact, he would not grow up at all, but only grow down, if his mother should continue her infatuated system with him. He was insufferably forward and selfish; under the pretext of keeping him, at any cost, refined, Adeline had coddled and caressed him, having him always in her petticoats, remitting his lessons when he pretended he had an earache, drawing him into the ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... who was shrewd, industrious, and often amusing, was not to be despised in her opinion; so she showed her fair young handmaiden a certain amount of respect. She had engaged companions before, who being entertaining were not trustworthy, or being trustworthy were insufferably dull. She could trust Dolly with the most onerous of her domestic or social charges, she found, and there was no fear of her small change disappearing or her visitors being bored. So the position of that "young person" became an ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rose equally fast in both the vessels, and likewise equally high; so that about the same quantity remained unabsorbed by the water. One of these kinds of air, however, was exceedingly sweet and pleasant, and the other insufferably offensive; one of them also would have made an addition to any quantity of common air, with which it had been mixed, and the other would have diminished it. This, at least, would have been the consequence, if the mouse ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... was obliged to live like a servant wench, and do the most menial offices in the family. But his funeral was no sooner performed, than she assumed the fine lady, and found so many people of both sexes to flatter, caress, and instruct her, that, for want of discretion and experience, she was grown insufferably vain and arrogant, and pretended to no less than a duke or earl at least for her husband; that she had the misfortune to be neglected by the English quality, but a certain poor Scottish lord was then making interest to be introduced ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... "packed" into the arm above us, it was not disagreeably chilly. The thermometer stood at fifty-nine degrees in our cabin. Indeed, were it not for the great bodies of ice, these extreme northern summers, where the sun hardly sets for months, would get insufferably hot,—too hot to be endured ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... a thing about it until I received their wedding-cards. It was just like Rachel not to tell me, and it was insufferably stupid in me not to use the few wits I am possessed of, and see how matters stood. But my fears and tremors were that Frankie Taliaferro would get him, so I have watched her all this time. Percival laughed almost scornfully when I told him this, and said I had been barking ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... home I am a democrat. A republic, a true republic, seems not improbable, a fighting dream. Yet beholding the back of the ears of a trotting man I perceive it to be impossible—the millennium another million years away. I grow insufferably superior and Anglo-Saxon. I am sorry, but what would you? One is what ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... start for home you will always think of it. Our reporters demand of the foreigner, barely he has stepped ashore, what he thinks of the United States; and then nearly every one he meets helps to form the opinion that we are insufferably underbred. Ours is not studied incivility; it is worse than that; it ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... malignant fever, cholera morbus, or dysentery; while, at the same period, in the interior, particularly on the windward side, the air is temperate and salubrious. For six months in the year, from November to April, the town of St. Louis is insufferably and noxiously hot; scarcely any one but the slaves could be induced to remain there, the free inhabitants departing for the interior. Then again, the dry months at Port St. Louis are the rainy ones ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... merriment. The topic gradually vanishes as the drolleries of the parasite Gelasimus usurp the boards. He in turn gives way to the hilarious buffoonery of the two slaves. The result is a succession of loose-jointed scenes[177]. The Aul. too is fragmentary and episodical. The Trin. is insufferably long-winded, with insufficient comic accompaniment. The Cis. is a wretched piece of ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... quickly as he could. The young people opposite him were insufferably dull. Apparently they had never met each other before and were at a loss to make conversation to suit the occasion. Accordingly, they listened intently to the string band while the young man smoked a long cigar, and in the natural course of things, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... It was, however, a little quieter in the vestibule when Flett had banged the door. He next opened the inner door that led to the smoking compartment of the Colonist car. In spite of its roominess, it was almost insufferably hot and very dirty; the sunlight struck in through the windows; sand and fine cinders lay thick upon the floor. A pile of old blue blankets lay, neatly folded, on one of the wooden seats, and on those adjoining ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... and a bell. The cars are like shabby omnibuses holding thirty, forty, fifty people. In the centre of the carriage there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal, which is for the most part red hot. It is insufferably close, and you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other object you may ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... considered. Designed for forty-nine parts. Part Third, consisting of a preface, a postscript, and a little something between, by Gabriel Johnson; enriched by a faithful account of his ideal voyages, and illustrated with poems by several hands, as likewise with other strange things not insufferably clever, nor furiously to the purpose; printed in the year 17," etc. [The phrase mentioned first is perhaps less remarkable than Scott's apparent forgetfulness of its ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... miserable condition, gravely assured me that exercise was a capital thing as a preventive or cure for seasickness, and advised me to try the pump. I followed his advice: a few strokes brought up the bilge water, than which nothing at that time could have been more insufferably nauseous! I left the pump in disgust, and retiring to the after part of the quarter-deck, threw myself down on a coil of rope, unable longer to struggle with my fate. There I remained unnoticed and uncared for for several hours, when, the wind having changed, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... at her aunt's door on his way to market. He would sell Miss Joliffe eggs and butter at wholesale prices, and grinned in a most tiresome way whenever he caught sight of Anastasia. The Rector patronised her insufferably; and though old Mr Noot was kind, he treated her like a small child, and sometimes patted her cheek, which she felt to ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... thinning of John Whitaker's grayish hair, and felt better. In irresponsibility he read, agreeably, needful temperament. And his romantic attitude toward the truth was merely a brilliant overplus of imagination without which life would be insufferably dull. ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... upon the other, our heads hanging out at one door and our feet at the opposite one. If you have never heard that Miss Dawes has been married these two months, I will mention it in my next. Pray do not forget to go to the Canterbury Ball; I shall despise you all most insufferably if you do. ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... gentleman asked Barbara for permission to pay his respects to her when he returned to the metropolis; this had been accorded by Barbara, who, on her return to Pentonville, for the first time found that comfortable home 'insufferably dull and stupid.' Edward Leslie, too—how dull and stupid even he was, after the chattering perfumed loungers of the elysium she had just quitted! Yet Edward was never considered either dull or stupid by competent judges; but, quite the contrary—a sensible, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... clothes, at eight o'clock, at noon, four o'clock in the afternoon, and in the evening; to be well received at every embassy, and to cull the short-lived flowers of superficial, cosmopolitan friendships; to be not insufferably handsome, to carry your head, your coat, and your name well; to inhabit a charming little entresol after the pattern of the rooms just described on the Quai Malaquais; to be able to ask a party of friends to dine at the Rocher de Cancale without ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... the indifferent languor of a Spanish duchess to sweep from the room, but in passing him and noting him still absorbed in his book, her hot blood flushed her cheek, her eyes glittered with angry fire. Her slight pause caused him to look up and, seeing the anger on her face, he smiled amusedly, insufferably. The next second she sprang at him like a cat and slapped him across his insolently smiling face, and then flung Spanish oaths at him with such force and heat that they seemed to splutter in falling upon the chill of the air. Then she ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... grinding flour and sawing timber; and in a word, all the concomitants of a large and flourishing city. I should, however, except the public streets. These are still unpaved, and consequently in wet weather, in some places, impassable, and in dry weather insufferably dusty. I have spoken of the sudden squalls which arise often in the Bay. Whilst one of these prevails, clouds of dust are carried from the streets so dense that you cannot see half a yard before you. If you are exposed to the whirlwind, and chance to wear clothes of a dark colour, you issue from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... compelling him to approach. He tuned it, he played on it. All night long, until the gray and spectral dawn rose out of the depths of the midnight, he sat and played, and I lay smoking by the window listening. Wild, unearthly, and sometimes insufferably painful, were the improvisations of Blokeeta. The chords of the instrument seemed breaking with anguish. Lost souls shrieked in his dismal preludes; the half-heard utterances of spirits in pain, that groped at inconceivable distances from anything lovely or harmonious, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... left hand walked the Story Girl, her red cap on her jaunty brown head. She scattered her words along the path like the pearls and diamonds of the old fairy tale. I remember that I strutted along quite insufferably, for we met several of the Carlisle boys and I felt that I was an exceptionally lucky fellow to have such beauty on one side and ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... She sprang from the bed and, her heart beating insufferably, felt her way to the window. From the wing opposite the message had come—a soft, ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... are situated in a small outwork on the western side of the fortress, immediately above the Dhondha gateway. They are called "nau chauki", or "the nine cells", and are both well lighted and well ventilated. But in spite of their height, from fifteen to twenty-six feet, they must be insufferably close in the hot season. These were the State prisons in which Akbar confined his rebellious cousins, and Aurangzeb the troublesome sons of Dara and Murad, as well as his own more dangerous son Muhammad. During these times the fort was strictly guarded, and no one was allowed to enter ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Des Esseintes had had the curiosity to read those of Madame Swetchine, the Russian, whose house in Paris was the rendezvous of the most fervent Catholics. Her writings had filled him with insufferably horrible boredom; they were more than merely wretched: they were wretched in every way, resembling the echoes of a tiny chapel where the solemn worshippers mumble their prayers, asking news of one another in low ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... perilous luxury of defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle disdain? Life in Venetia must be very dull: no more explosion of pasteboard petards; no more treason in bouquets; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls—it must be insufferably dull. Ebbene, pazienza! Perhaps Victor ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... praises of a country life, but acknowledged that he quite agreed with him in disliking, pastorals—excepting always that beautiful drama, "The Gentle Shepherd." Mr. Percy said, that, in his opinion, a life purely pastoral must, if it could be realized, prove as insufferably tiresome in reality, as it usually is found to be in fiction. He hated Delias and shepherdesses, and declared that he should soon grow tired of any companion with whom he had no other occupation in common but "tending a few sheep." There was a vast difference, he thought, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the Brontes, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their mother's death the little fatal room was known ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... does it not make an impression?" asked Yourii. Ivanoff shook his head vaguely, and began to tell Ilitsch about Semenoff's last moments. It was now insufferably close in the room. Yourii watched Ivanoff, as his red lips sipped the vodka that shone in the lamplight. Everything seemed to be going round ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... couple seem so well suited,"—"they are real affinities et cetera," all of which started me out on my bridal trip sixteen years ago. I shall never witness another wedding as long as I live—it is too insufferably ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... character; while Thersander shows himself in this respect fully a match for his reverend antagonist, and, moreover, reiterates with fresh violence his previous charge against Leucippe. The debates are protracted to an insufferably tedious length; but the character of Leucippe is at last vindicated by her descent into a cavern, whence sounds of more than human melody are heard on the entrance of a damsel of untainted fame. The result of this ordeal is, of course, triumphant; and Thersander, overwhelmed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... brother-in-law—Sis's husband. Insufferably old-timy. Don't think of anything but business. Used to look at me through his horn-rimmed glasses and say I was entirely too young to be receiving attentions from a man as old as Mr. Warren; but he didn't ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... poets have another way. That prolixity at the beginning of many primitive epics, their wordy deliberation in getting under way, is probably intentional. The Song of Roland, for instance, begins with a long series of exceedingly dull stanzas; to a reader, the preliminaries of the story seem insufferably drawn out. But by the time the reciter had got through this unimportant dreariness, no doubt his audience had settled down to listen. The Chanson d'Antioche contains perhaps the most illuminating admission of this difficulty. ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... fancy was for an island. Perhaps boyhood's glamour hung still round sea-girt rocks, and "faery lands forlorn" still beckoned me; perhaps I felt that London was too full, the Highlands rather fuller, the Swiss mountains most insufferably crowded of them all. "Money can buy company," and it can buy retirement. The latter service I asked now of the moderate wealth with which my poor cousin Tom's death had endowed me. Everybody was good enough to suppose that I rejoiced at Tom's death, whereas I was particularly sorry for it, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... not render it less unjust. Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in the harem of an Oriental: they do not complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely it is that even men complain of the general order of society; and how much rarer still would such complaint be, if they did not know of any different order existing ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... bewilder him with some new enigma. To her he seemed to be what he was not, simply a sham, a heavy piece of hypocrisy. Formalism and ostentatious piety she recognized as part of the business of a Nonconformist minister, in whom they were excusable, as his grave garb would be, but they seemed insufferably out of place when adopted by a layman and a man of the world, who ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... bright young Belgian, was at dinner with us, and the conversation turned upon the illiberal policy of the new Belgian Government. Most of the guests at table were landowners and extreme reactionaries. The conversation took that insufferably brutal tone of repression at all hazards which is the first thought of the governing classes of a despotic country, when alarmed by the spread of ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... wiser than you knew. You escaped an infliction. It was insufferably dull. We all smiled and smiled, till there were 'miles and miles of smiles'; and we were all bored to ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... underwent the ceremony of having our pocket-books searched for papers and letters, and our trunks rummaged for knives and fire-arms. This done, we were shown to the lodging I have described, and the poor priests, already insufferably crouded, were obliged almost to join their beds in order to make room for us.—I will not pain you by a recital of all the embarrassments and distresses we had to surmount before we could even rest ourselves. We were in want of every thing, and the rules of the prison ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... "This is insufferably hot," said Miss Crawford, when they had taken one turn on the terrace, and were drawing a second time to the door in the middle which opened to the wilderness. "Shall any of us object to being comfortable? Here is a nice little wood, if one can but get into it. What happiness if the door ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... do anything very extraordinary to-day?" asked Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as seemed to him insufferably insolent. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... peevishness or obstinacy spent in uneasiness.' Notes and Queries, 6th S., v. 324. More than twenty years later he said in Miss Burney's hearing:—'I am always sorry when I make bitter speeches, and I never do it but when I am insufferably vexed.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 131. 'When the fray was over,' writes Murphy (Life, p. 140), 'he generally softened into repentance, and, by conciliating measures, took care that no animosity should be left rankling in the breast of the antagonist.' See ante, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... away," the extravagance of his joy knew no bounds. He would have been as invaluable to a tailor as was to the Parisian decrotteur the poodle instructed by him to sully with his paws the shoes of the passengers; for, in the exuberance of his gladness, he but too often rent insufferably the vestments of the hapless pedestrians in his line of fire. Sometimes he would turn his assaults upon me, and, springing suddenly at my "wide-awake," take it from my head, trailing it wildly away through the mud, and dropping it in some place where it would be difficult to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... then beat about for two weeks of increasing misery, when 'hides were thought very good meat, and rats, cats, mice, and dogs, parrots and monkeys that were got at great price, none escaped.' The Minion was of three hundred tons; and so was insufferably overcrowded with three hundred men, two hundred English and one hundred negroes. Drake's little Judith, of only fifty tons, could have given no relief, as she was herself overfull. Hawkins asked all the men who preferred ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... parts can be got by heart, and hence, in an Italian theatre, we hear every piece as it were twice over; the prompter speaking as loud as a good player elsewhere, and the actors in order to be distinguished from him bawling most insufferably. It is exceedingly amusing to see the prompter, when, from the general forgetfulness, a scene threatens to fall into confusion, labouring away, and stretching out his head like a serpent from his hole, hurrying through the dialogue before the different speakers. Of all ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... peace for him. In comes Mallerie—and with insufferably haughty gait and countenance, brushes by. Hall tries a pleasant saunter around Poules with his friend Master Woodhouse: "comes Mallerie again, passing twice or thrice by Hall, with great lookes and ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... Carter would like to see her. Harriet glanced at a mirror; her brassy hair was as smoothly moulded as its tendency to curve and ring ever permitted, and she wore a thin old transparent white gown that looked at least comparatively cool on this insufferably hot evening. With hardly an ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... much. I will only say, therefore, that the "sensation" produced in me by this novel is one of the most disagreeable I ever experienced. The characters are, for the most part, inordinately dull, preposterously conceited, and insufferably brutal. As for Dick Heldar, the hero, no more disagreeable and hateful bully-puppy ever thought and talked in disconnected gasps through ninety-seven pages. The catastrophe moves no pity. Mr. KIPLING seems to despise the public, "who think with their ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... rude," she would say to Dora,—"insufferably so. She told Madame A. that she looked like an apple-tree; which might have been taken for a compliment, had not the saucy little sprite explained herself by pointing to that old tree in the garden which the flowering shrubbery has decked with every variety of blossom: Mrs. A. is extremely ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... the same way with me. You began it by criticizing my friend, Henry Hammond, and invited him to the judge's house party for the express purpose of humiliating and insulting him. The boys of your crowd gave him the cold shoulder when he tried to be friendly and Grace was insufferably rude to him on two ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... and everything national or local that I could lay my hands upon. Now that I have got my German Burns, I lean a good deal upon him for opening a conversation, and read a few translations to every yawning audience that I can gather. I am grown most insufferably national, you see. I fancy it is a punishment for my want of it at ordinary times. Now, what do you think, there was a waiter in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to night, as my informant said with a shrug at the recollection) what but 'S ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Byron's poetry so exquisite that fifty or five hundred years hence they will be read, felt, and adored throughout the world. I grant that Wordsworth is very pure, very holy, very orthodox, and occasionally very elevated, highly poetical, and oftener insufferably obscure, starched, dowdy, anti-human, and anti-sympathetic, but he never will be ranked above Byron, nor classed with Milton.... I dislike his selfish Quakerism, his affectation of superior virtue, his utter insensibility to the frailties, the beautiful frailties of passion. I ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Yegorushka felt it insufferably stifling and uncomfortable lying down. He got up, dressed, and went out of the hut. Morning was beginning. The sky was overcast, but it was no longer raining. Shivering and wrapping himself in his wet overcoat, Yegorushka walked about the muddy yard and listened to the silence; he caught ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of Adelaide and her lover, Walter of Gloucester, are so insufferably tedious that Scott doubtless decided to "leave to conjecture" their interminable vicissitudes. The names of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may be garnered by those who will, from such works as Living Authors (1817), or from the four volumes of Watts' elaborate compilation, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... difference. I do not care about such things; and I never go into the laboratory when he is there; so I do not know whether Marian lets him be familiar with her or not. She is rather easygoing; and he is insufferably conceited. However, if she wants to learn electricity, I suppose she must put up with him. He is no worse, after all, than the rest of the people one has to learn things from. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... into thousands, as they might sometimes do, this plan would be insufferably tedious. In that case we are driven back upon the astronomical method. In consequence of the movement which is commonly called the precession of the equinoxes, though it might more accurately be described as a kind of second rotation of the earth, the angle between the equator and the ecliptic steadily ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... floods a flood a pasture. A longing to be mother, Anna's longing was! A longing to be mother, to hold a tiny scrap against her breast; to have her heart, bursting for such release, torn out by baby fingers; to have her design of God, insufferably overpacked within her by the remorseless pressure of instinct through a million ages, relieved, discharged, fulfilled by motherhood. Poor Anna! Ah, piteous! "Oh, God, thou knowest how hard it is to be a woman." Poor, piteous Anna, ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... not speak of the enthusiasm excited by actresses, improvisatrici, female singers,—for here mingles the charm of beauty and grace,—but female authors, even learned women, if not insufferably ugly and slovenly, from the Italian professor's daughter who taught behind the curtain, down to Mrs. Carter and Madame Dacier, are sure of an admiring audience, and, what is far better, chance to use what they have learned, and to learn more, if they ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... slender and pale, languid of movement, languid of eye, languid of speech. His eyes drooped, half-closed beneath blond brows; a long wiry hand lazily twisted a rather affected blond moustache, his voice drawled his speech in a manner either insufferably condescending and impertinent, or ineffably ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... excitement with the bishop, but the bishop had been too plain spoken and sincere for her. The Primeros had been odious; the Hepworths stupid; the Longestaffes,—she had endeavoured to make up a little friendship with Lady Pomona,— insufferably supercilious. She had declared to Henrietta 'that Carbury Hall was ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... not the engagement, but the severe cold with which I perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably damp. They ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... hay-sled, we were whirled completely over. There was no fun in this, at such a time. I fell head foremost into deep snow, getting a lump in my right eye, which completely blinded me for a time. My forehead, eyebrows, and the bridge of my nose were insufferably painful. On reaching Matarengi I found my nose frozen through, and considerably swollen. The people were in bed, but we went into the kitchen, where a dozen or more were stowed about, and called for the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... any charms in her. "We are kind to her," the Misses Osborne said, a pair of fine black-browed young ladies who had had the best of governesses, masters, and milliners; and they treated her with such extreme kindness and condescension, and patronised her so insufferably, that the poor little thing was in fact perfectly dumb in their presence, and to all outward appearance as stupid as they thought her. She made efforts to like them, as in duty bound, and as sisters of her future husband. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of the same subject. They have always done so and will always do so. But while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... sunburnt than those of the ordinary toilers of Lyvern. His hands were hidden by large gardening gloves stained with coal dust. Lyvern laborers, as a rule, had little objection to soil their hands; they never wore gloves. Still, she thought, there was no reason why an eccentric workman, insufferably talkative, and capable of an allusion to the pen of the poet, should not indulge himself with cheap gloves. But then the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... cannot tell their friends what really interested them. Ugly things and very dull things are prominent in their story, as in the tales of American humorists. The general impression they convey is of something tiresomely extensive, distractingly miscellaneous, and yet insufferably monotonous. But that is not what they mean. They had better not seek to express themselves by too definite instances. They will be understood and believed when they say that to them America, with its vast spaces from ocean to ocean, does present itself as one country, not less ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... so much laughter I'm coming in, we're all so insufferably political out here. And, besides, I came to see the ladies, and I can only stay a ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... last three days had been insufferably hot, and my forehead and face were blistered painfully. It was altogether a new experience to have my nose blistered on one side by the sun, and on the other by a frost-bite. During my first winter in this country my nose was particularly tender. I could scarcely go out ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... something about this assertion that infuriated Lowes-Parlby. In the first place, it was so hopelessly wrong and so insufferably asserted. In the second place, he was already smarting under the indignity of being shown up about Lisbon. And then there suddenly flashed through his mind the wretched incident when he had been publicly snubbed by Justice Pengammon about the very ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... she asked with a little flush of confusion. "Mrs. Sartin will be. She always expects him to marry a duchess at least. She is so insufferably ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... make of so much importance. As for Mr. Gray, he is a man of whom any woman might feel proud; for he combines intelligence with courteous manners and a fine person: while this Hambleton is, to me, insufferably stupid. And no one, I am sure, can call his address and manners any thing like polished. Indeed, I should pronounce him downright boorish and awkward. Who would want a man for a husband of whom she would be ashamed? Not ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... colour. These do not pass lower than Toro; but below that there are infinite small ones, which like the other are bred in and go about the sea[324]." While between Toro and Suez, though the days were insufferably hot, the nights were colder than any I ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... many lands. In one country he learned one thing, and in another country he learned another thing. There was no country or kingdom so small or poor that it did not have something to teach the prince. And the prince, though he had been so insufferably stupid at his books, learned the lessons of his journey with ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... to ascribe a portion of his grossness to it. Voltaire is said by his loose talk to have driven Pope's good old mother from the table at Twickenham; Walpole's language not only in his home at Houghton, but at Court, was insufferably coarse; and Pope wrote to ladies in language that must have disgusted modest women even in his free-speaking day. His foul lines on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had formerly written in a most ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... our existence, and still more when we have arrived at its final term, we should regret its transitory nature, and lament that we have made no more effectual use of it. And yet the periods and portions of the stream of time, as they pass by us, will often be felt by us as insufferably slow in their progress, and we would give no inconsiderable sum to procure that the present section of our lives might come to an end, and that we might turn over a new leaf ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... little on one side, twinkles at you with the shrewdest complacency, as if he were looking right into your eyes, and twigged something there which you had half a mind to conceal from him. He keeps this look so pertinaciously that you feel it to be insufferably impertinent, and bethink yourself what common ground there may be between yourself and a stone image, enabling you to resent it. I have no doubt that the statue is as like Mr. Wilberforce as one pea to another, and you might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... that number of really consecrated workers that she can spare for the primary class, while to find twenty who can be spared for that room one would need to go to paradise I am afraid. Now I know, Dr. Dennis, that such talk sounds as if I were insufferably conceited; but I don't believe I am; I simply know what I am willing to try to do; and, to a certain extent, I know what I can do. Why should I not? I have tried it ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... read aloud to her mother part of the time, and for the other part sat by the window with her crochet in her hand, but to-day she wandered about perpetually. She even opened the piano and began to sing her merriest old songs, but that soon ceased. She found the novel they were reading insufferably stupid, and took up a volume of Shakespeare for refreshment, but it opened naturally to the 'Merchant of Venice,' and, to the ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are fortunately of the finest— otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to linger and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... That's just his misfortune, that there's no character in him... But that's not the point. I want to speak of what is good, of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do you remember, Sasha, once when I was talking to you about him, I blamed ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... excuses. She appeared to be a spoiled child, and her manners were insufferably offensive. I should have known she came from New York, even if I ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... ten days that I spent in Saigon I stayed at the Hotel Continental. I shall remember it as the place where they charged a dollar and a half for a highball and fifty cents for a lemonade. It was insufferably hot. I can sympathize now with the recalcitrant convict who is punished by being sent to the sweat-box. Battalions of ferocious mosquitoes launched their assaults against my unprotected person with ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... from the extreme heat and closeness of the weather; the thermometer ranged night and day between 85 and 89 degrees, and when the breeze was light or the weather calm the air was insufferably hot and close, and affected us all very much, but happily without any very ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... too wet and blowy to spread the linen, and Denas felt the morning insufferably long and tedious. Her father, who had been on the sea all night, dozed in his big chair on the hearthstone. Joan was silent, and went about her duties in a tiptoeing way that was very fretful to the impatience of Denas. Denas herself was knitting a guernsey, and as ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... his doings! always the same old story, and woman always to be treated either as a toy or as a beast of burden, or at any rate as an incubus. Why not sing of woman also as she is when she is unattached and free from the trammels and persecutions of this tiresome tyrant, this insufferably self-conceited bore and ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... Freiherr's eager grasping after riches now appeared to be due not so much to avarice strictly speaking as to the desire to make one dear to him forget the more beautiful country she was relinquishing for his sake. Otherwise he could not acquit the Baron of being avaricious, or at any rate insufferably close-fisted, seeing that, even though rolling in money and even when gloating over the old Fredericks d'or, he could not help bursting out with the peevish grumble, "I know the old rascal has ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... anything was pulling up on the bit and doing something or talking of doing something or other for the country. It was already assured that the season would be insufferably dull—from a social standpoint at least. Evelyn could not suppress a certain resentment. She was not one of those who had found an element of thrill in the suddenly altered perspectives. Her plans for the spring season had been laid; engagements had been accepted or declined, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... made myself and can make another—certainly—the coal I paid dearly for by fatigue, but I can get another lump, and send it home by coach, yes; then why am I so uncomfortable. I looked at the glowing fire which was getting insufferably hot, and gave it a passionate poke, exclaiming, I wish I could stop your draught. Draught! draft, I repeated, what has become of my draft that I received yesterday for my last paper? I began to recollect myself where I had laid it, and quickly came to the awful ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... something to marry a niece of Lady Jane, and I dare say Miss McPherson will make the girl her heir; so I will welcome her as my daughter, and perhaps she will brighten up the house, which is at times insufferably dull, with your father growing more and more silent and gloomy every day. I should not wonder if he were to become ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... Dinard as Mohammedans whisper sacredly of Mecca, is like meeting celebrities. You wonder what under the sun—what in the world—how in the name of Heaven such ugly, stupid, uninteresting, heavy, dull, and insufferably ordinary persons are allowed to become famous by an overruling and beneficent Providence! I have met many celebrities, and I have been to Dinard. I have had my share ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... was insufferably hot and stuffy. Chauvelin, finical and queasy, turned away with a shudder of disgust. There was nothing to be got now out of a prolonged interview with his captured foe. He had seen him: that was sufficient. He had seen the super-exquisite Sir Percy Blakeney ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... titles and incomes to compete with. People were willing to worship the Golden Calf, but allowed themselves a choice of altars. No one could justly say that the Shalems were either oppressively vulgar or insufferably bumptious; probably the chief reason for their lack of popularity was their intense and obvious desire to be popular. They kept open house in such an insistently open manner that they created a social draught. The people who accepted their invitations ...
— When William Came • Saki
... zenith and had begun to sink in the west. Then, again, on foot or donkey-back, we visited the different parts of the oasis, returning in time for a six-o'clock dinner; after which, the room usually becoming insufferably hot, we once more sought our open-air drawing-room and took our evening coffee by the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... long row of them on each side of the caravan, a narrow passage up the middle, and a door at both ends. In the centre of the carriage there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal; which is for the most part red-hot. It is insufferably close; and you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other object you may happen to look at, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... the heat has overcome him," she said, after a quick examination; and truly the cabin was insufferably hot, thanks to the machinery and the fervid rays of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... the "withdrawing chamber," which opened only into a guardroom always occupied by soldiers. Bertram was permitted access to the Princess's drawing-room at her pleasure, and her pleasure was to admit him very frequently. She found her prison-life insufferably wearisome, and even the scraps of extremely local news, brought in by Bertram from the courtyard, were a relief to the monotony of having nothing at all to do. She grew absolutely interested in such infinitesimal facts as the arrival of a barrel of salt sprats, the ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... began to find out why spacemen didn't seem to fear dying or turning pariah. The tube quarters had grown insufferably hot during the long blast, but the main tube-room was blistering as Ben led the men into it. The chief handed out spacesuits and ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... one whose imperfections were therefore lightly dwelt upon. So the returned prodigal had his own suite of rooms, his own servants, his own bank account, drank, smoked, and was merry. For five or six months he thought himself in Paradise. Then he began to find his life insufferably weary. The burden of hypocrisy is very heavy to bear, and Rex was compelled perpetually to bear it. His mother demanded all his time. She hung upon his lips; she made him repeat fifty times the story of his wanderings. She was never tired of kissing him, of weeping over ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... are excellent," said Ling affably. "On this occasion, however, the public square will be so insufferably thronged with the number of timorous and credulous villagers who have pressed into the town that insufficient justice would be paid to your entrancing display. In consequence of this, we will select for the purpose some convenient spot in the neighbourhood. The proceedings will ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... day in Washington. Even at early morning, while the sun was yet level with the faces of pedestrians in its broad, shadeless avenues, it was insufferably hot. Later the avenues themselves shone like the diverging rays of another sun,—the Capitol,—a thing to be feared by the naked eye. Later yet it grew hotter, and then a mist arose from the Potomac, and blotted out the ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... I'm here at last. I've been for some weeks so insufferably busy,' and he laid his white hand lightly over his eyes, as if they and the brain within ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... explain, and you probably would not understand. Besides, you might take it—really, you might take it for a declaration. But it has nothing to do with you personally; it's what you represent. Fortunately you don't know all that, or your conceit would increase insufferably." ...
— The American • Henry James
... the days became insufferably warm, but the nights were glorious. Talbot and I liked to sleep on the deck; and generally camped down up near the bitts. The old ship rolled frightfully, for she was light in freight in order to accommodate so many passengers; and the dark blue sea appeared to ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... sprites, and warriors of Hell, the black wardens of the gloomy pandemonium, I all the time crouching very carefully within my veil. We entered the frightful and awful edifice, every corner of which abounded with horror. The walls were immense rocks of glowing adamant, the pavement of an insufferably sharp flint, the roof of burning steel, meeting like an arch of greenish- blue and dusky-red flames, and in its size and its heat, resembling an immense vaulted ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... soon? I thought you were intending to spend the summer," said one of her old admirers; and with a scornful toss of her head, she replied, "It is getting so insufferably dull here, that I can't ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... the staring glass, and from the centre of the dome was suspended a large jewelled lamp. It was from this that all the light in the studio proceeded at present, and though there was no fireplace, the room was warm—indeed, insufferably hot. This fact, taken together with the studio's proximity to the tower, made me feel more certain than before that some flue in this modern portion of the house had caught fire. I searched the panels for a bell, but found none, and ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... commonest enjoyments would keep them in working order being a constantly recurring problem,—the necessity of drivers and overseers,—the ever-necessary whip, first, last, and only argument,—the whole thing was insufferably disgusting and loathsome to me; and when I thought of my mother's estimate of one poor human soul, it became ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... unrevealable burden, and she rose, rejoicing that Clotilde had happened to be out of eye-and-ear-shot. The scanty fire in the fireplace was ample to warm the room; the fire within her made it too insufferably hot! Rain or no rain, she parted the window-curtains and lifted the sash. What a mark for Love's arrow she was, as, at the window, she stretched her two arms upward! And, "right so," who should chance to come cantering by, the big drops of rain pattering ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... sat and looked at him, Mrs Jervis in her black Mother Hubbard, placid and haughty, and Teresa, anxious to smile whenever she caught his eye, while the trader gossiped insufferably. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... Allan, and declared jocosely that he understood now why his friend's morning walks were always taken in the same direction. He asked her questions about her mother, and cut short the answers she gave him by remarks on the weather. In one breath, he said she must feel the day insufferably hot, and in another he protested that he quite envied her ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... again. "Have I failed in politeness by not doing so? I fear you would find me an insufferably dull companion." ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... so oppressively, so insufferably hot in the hall! Each one felt the crushing influence, and in spite of the importance of the occasion, the proceedings every now and then came to a stand-still and then were hurried on again with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... every one to see. But of course there are many ways in which a book, sermon, or essay may be bad without being Vealy. It may be dull, stupid, illogical, and the like, and yet have nothing of boyishness about it. It may be insufferably bad, yet quite mature. Beef may be bad, and yet undoubtedly Beef. And the question now is, not so much whether there be a standard of what is in a literary sense good or bad, as whether there be a standard of what is Veal and what is Beef. And there is a great difficulty here. Is a thing to be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... hear read: I have forgot all about it. His 'Memorials' were insufferably tiresome to me. You don't speak of Tichborne, which I never tire of: only wondering that the Lord Chief Justice sets so much Brains to work against so foolish a Bird. {170} The Spectator on Carlyle is very ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... was so. Here Oswald looked the whole world in the face, proud indeed! One hand rested upon the beast's kneecap in a proprietary caress. Oswald looked too insufferably complacent. It was the look to be forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born. If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... dressed with more brilliancy than at any rout I ever was at, as most of them were going to the Duchess of Cumberland's, and attired for that purpose. just behind me sat Mrs. Hampden, still very beautiful, but insufferably affected. Another lady, in full dress, and very pretty, came in soon after, and got herself a chair just before me ; and then a conversation began between her and Mrs. Hampden, of which I ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... me, my dear, insufferably vain? But 'tis what they were pleased to say. 'Twas their goodness to me, and shewed how much they can excel in generous politeness. So I will proceed. "Why this," continued the countess, "must be born dignity—born discretion—Education ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... lady of noble birth, who had lost fortune and friends through the fraud and dissipation of those connected with her, came to board for a short time in her father's family. This lady was forty years of age, insufferably proud of her pedigree, and in her manners stiff and repulsive. She was exceedingly illiterate and uninformed, being unable to write a line with correctness, and having no knowledge beyond that which may be picked up in the ball-room and ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... in a crowded room, and a good per cent. of the women present will begin to fan themselves. The room has suddenly become insufferably close. After we have read half a hundred times that Ivory soap floats, a fair proportion of the population is likely to be seized with desire for a soap that floats,—not because they have any good ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... planned) Had reached the End of Book Eleven, And he was nearing Forty-Seven. Admirers had not long to wait; The last Book came at Forty-Eight, And should have been the Heart and Soul— The Crown and Summit—of the whole. But now the oddest Thing ensued; 'Twas so insufferably crude, So feeble and so poor, 'twas plain The Writer's Mind was on the wane. Nothing could possibly be said; E'en Friendship's self must hang the head, While jealous Rivals, scarce so civil, Denounced it ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... wives, rather than for husbands, is but weakly conjectured, and is manifest the extreme shift of a huddled exposition ... Palpably uxorious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for woman, and that a husband may be injured as insufferably in marriage as a wife. What an injury is it after wedlock not to be beloved, what to be slighted, what to be contended with in point of house-rule who shall be the head, not for any parity of wisdom (for that were something reasonable), but out of a female pride! 'I suffer not,' saith Saint ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the sun, upon a dry and sandy country, makes the air insufferably hot. Ali having robbed me of my thermometer, I had no means of forming a comparative judgment; but in the middle of the day, when the beams of the vertical sun are seconded by the scorching wind from the desert, the ground is frequently heated to such a degree as not to be borne by the naked foot. ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park |
