"Loveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the fountain of domestic sweets, Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced. Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendear'd, Casual fruition; nor in court amours, Mix'd dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenade, which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... art thou, To bind the loveless joyless vow, The heart from pleasure to delude, To join the gentle ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... the sunshine, and love in the air; Youth, hope, home, companionship, spring, everywhere. There was youth, there was spring in her blood; yet she only, In all the great city, seemed loveless and lonely. ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... so low that I could scarcely hear. But all at once to leave me at the last, More at the wonder than the loss aghast, With huddled, unintelligible phrase, And frighten'd eye, And go your journey of all days With not one kiss, or a good-bye, And the only loveless look the look with which you pass'd: 'Twas all unlike your great ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... raise her hand to her cheek—weighing the cost of rebellion. That gesture had become a driving force in Mary-Clare's life. She must overcome that which lay like a hideous menace between Larry and Noreen! She was accountable for it; out of her loveless existence Noreen had birth—she was a living evidence of ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... yawned once or twice, then he took up a candle in one hand, and with the other languidly sought his wife's neck for the usual embrace; but Julie stooped and received the good-night kiss upon her forehead; the formal, loveless grimace seemed hateful to her at ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... she would put into his hand for the work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the calls ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... worse fate can befall a man in this world than to live and grow old alone, unloving and unloved. To be lost is to live in an unregenerate condition, loveless and unloved; and to be saved is to love; he that dwelleth in love dwelleth already in God. For God is Love. The Greatest Thing ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... this. He crushed her to him, and lifted her arms round his neck, and fell to kissing her with all the starved hunger of his lonely loveless years on the ranges. She was not proof against this. It lifted her out of her weakness, of her abasement to a response that swept away all fears, doubts, troubles. For the moment, at least, ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... is a spot of painting, A lifeless, loveless hue; Though your heart be sick to fainting It says not a word to you; A bird knows nothing of gladness, Is only a song-machine; A man is a reasoning madness, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... verity Pisias makes us to side with Daphnaeus by his extravagant language, charging marriage with being a loveless intercourse, and one that has no participation in divine friendship, although we can see that it is an intercourse, if erotic persuasion and favour fail, that cannot be restrained by shame and fear as by bit and bridle." Thereupon Pisias said, "I care little about his arguments; but I see ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... let it be that one who is used to suffering. I have never been the darling of my parents, like you; I have not been used at home to the kindness and the love that you remember. A life without sweetness and joy has well fitted me for a loveless future. And, besides, you are worthy of him, and I am not. Mrs. Gallilee is wrong, Carmina, if she thinks I am your rival. I am not your rival; I never can be your rival. Believe nothing else, but, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... as equally the selection of chance. And so it came that Richard grew up and continued without an attachment or a friendship or a purpose; and with a distrust of men in the gross promoted to feather-edge. Altogether he should be called as loveless, not to say as, unlovable, a character as any you might encounter, and search ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... we are ever to know the depth of our own evil, we must measure it by His wonderful tenderness. We must set our 'sins in the light of His countenance,' and contrast that supreme sacrifice with our own selfish loveless lives, that the contrast may subdue us to penitence and melt us ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Silencieux. Never will I look on your face again. You are an evil dream that has stolen from me the truth of life. I have broken a true heart that loved me, that would have died for me—for your sake; just to watch your loveless beauty, to hear the cold music of your voice. You are like the moon that turns men mad, a hollow shell of silver drawing all your light from the sun of life, a silver shadow of the ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... she tried, but an early engagement might be the only means of saving Lilias from the injurious effect of flattering and worldly friends. So the mother had reasoned with herself; but her arguments would lose all their force if Lilias herself had no love in her heart for her future husband. A loveless marriage is a catastrophe for any girl, but for Lilias it would mean moral suicide: a deliberate settling down into a selfish, self- seeking life! Was it possible that she had accepted Ned for no higher motive than a love of excitement, and the puny triumph of making the first marriage in the family? ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... were foes, while Mary lived, are fled; One laurel-crowned abides in heaven, and one Beneath the earth has fared, a fallen sun, A light of love among the loveless dead. The first is Chastity, that vanquished The archer Love, that held joint empery With the sweet beauty that made war on me, When laughter of lips with laughing ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... a loveless land, Without lair or nest on either hand: Only scorpions jerked in the sand, Black as black iron, or dusty pale; From point to point sheer rock was manned By ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... infants of my love, Minerva-like, brought forth without a mother; Present the image of the cares I prove, Witness your father's grief exceeds all other. Sigh out a story of her cruel deeds, With interrupted accents of despair; A monument that whosoever reads, May justly praise and blame my loveless Fair; Say her disdain hath dried up my blood, And starved you, in succours still denying; Press to her eyes, importune me some good, Waken her sleeping pity with your crying: Knock at her hard heart, beg till you have ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... man for whose arrival she had been looking with such mingled feelings. Little need was there now for mingled feelings. She knew well with what feeling to expect him. She had at times within the depths of her heart formed an idea that her life would not be loveless; but now—but now—This man who was her husband, and the only one to whom she could look for love—this man turned from her in horror; he hated her, he loathed her—worse, he looked upon her as a Hindu—worse still, if any thing could ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... she suspected and deplored. She had no notion at all, said she, that such evil as he described could walk abroad and unshamed in the good world, and she wondered what old mischief of his youth had informed him; and she would die a maid, loveless and childless, she declared, rather than have the guilt of a deception of such magnitude on her soul. Moreover, where were the means to be procured for executing the enormity? There was nothing of the sort, she was sure, in Trader Tom Jenkins's shop at Scalawag Run. There ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... the rocks below seemed to take up the refrain—would this woman be wife of his? Never, never, never; the play was played out. Down through the vista of years he looked, and saw her the wife of the man he hated—the man who was to him the very incarnation of hypocrisy and cant He saw the hard, loveless life; he saw the lines growing in the fair, young face that was so dear to him; he saw stern Duty take the place of Love; he saw her life grow hard and narrow; he read in her face the bitterness of unfulfilled hopes, and the longing, the unutterable longing for something that might not ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... delight; Keep the waters in thy sight. Love hath made me strong to go, For thy sake, to realms below, Where the water's shine and hum Through the darkness never come: Let, I pray, one thought of me Spring, a little well, in thee; Lest thy loveless soul be found Like a dry and ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... to know sin in reference to the obligation to be perfectly holy, it is with vividness and hopelessness. He sees distinctly that he ought to be a perfectly good being instantaneously. This point is clear. But instead of looking up to the hills whence cometh his help, he begins, in a cold legal and loveless temper, to draw upon his own resources. The first step is to regulate his external conduct by the Divine law. He tries to put a bridle upon his tongue, and to walk carefully before his fellow-men. He fails to do even this small ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... to the end of her loveless life, and saw the neighbors coming virtuously to perform the last rites, and wondered why it all had to be. She was unaware of all her years of sacrifice, glorious patience, loving toil. Her life seemed to have been so without point, so useless heretofore; ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... replied with sweet irony, "but where the poor and loveless fight an ever losing battle is still a better place for me to practise my godless creed and my ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... Henri that Jules picked up whatever French he learned, and it was from Henri also that he had received the one awkward caress, and the only one, that his desolate little heart had known in all the five loveless years that he ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... had an odd effect on the loveless Ferris. It was the first voluntary mark of affection he had encountered for longer than he liked to remember. It set ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... not?—fails Just this first night out of so many nights? Loving is done with. Were he sitting now, As so few hours since, on that seat, we'd love No more—contrive no thousand happy ways To hide love from the loveless, any more. I think I might have urged some little point In my defense, to Thorold; he was breathless For the least hint of a defense: but no, The first shame over, all that would might fall. No Henry! Yet I merely sit and think The morn's deed o'er and o'er. I must have crept Out of myself. ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... that if injury came to the Malplaquet, while under my charge, that I should be dismissed. She was my last chance as she was your own. But what to me were risks? I had lost my love, and my country had dishonoured herself in my eyes. I was nameless, loveless, countryless. All had gone, and life ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... ofttime this morn, how they would seem Loved but unloving?—Nay the world's too sweet That we the ghost of such a pain should meet— Behold, she goes, and he too, turning round, Remembers that his love must yet be found, That he is King and loveless in this story Wrought long ago for ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... there the absolute blackness of darkness, the positive negation of bliss, the recoil of self to devour itself, and forever. The consciousness of being was intense, but in all the universe was there nothing to enter that being, and make it other than an absolute loneliness. It was, and forever, a loveless, careless, hopeless monotony of self-knowing—a hell with but one demon, and no fire to make it cry: my self was the hell, my known self the demon of it—a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... the Grey Lady quietly, when Philippa paused. "It is easier to forgive one's own wrongs than those of others. I think your heart is not quite so loveless as you would ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... she had planned? Was it not a nobler aim than the gratification of self that urged the easier way? Yet would it be the easier way? Was she not really in her heart shrinking from the difficulty and sadness that this loveless marriage would bring? Was it not cowardice that prompted a supposed nobility of thought that now appeared ignoble? She wrung her hands in desperation. Had she no courage or steadfastness at all? Was the weakness of purpose that had ruined her father's life to be her curse ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... out, "Sweetheart, sweetheart!" Sang his song for three months running, For the young and loveless maiden, Resting ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... their life through, and then went whither? And were one to the end—but what end who knows? Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? What love was ever as deep as a grave? They are loveless now as the grass above them ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Bronte consists in the fact that she makes love so splendid and glorifying a thing, and that she does not waste her powder and shot upon the poor in spirit. The loveless man or woman, after reading her book, may say, "What is this great thing that I have somehow missed? Is it possible that it may be waiting somewhere even for me?" And then such as these may grow to scan the faces of their ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... live an hour by Cydnus' side Where all the heirs of evil swarmed. And yet—with every swelling spring Each pollen-scented zephyr's breath Repeats the patient news to ears Made dull by dreams of loveless years, "It is of life, and not of death That ye shall ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... could hit, Winged with as forceful and as faithful wit: No truer a tragic depth and heat of heart Glowed through the painter's than the poet's art. He lit and hung in heaven the wan fierce moon Whose glance kept time with witchcraft's air-struck tune: He watched the doors where loveless love let in The pageant hailed and crowned by death and sin: He bared the souls where love, twin-born with hate, Made wide the way for passion-fostered fate. All English-hearted, all his heart arose To scourge with scorn his England's cowering foes: And Rome and Spain, who bade their scorner be ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of a verse, which conveyed strong consolation to his weary spirit; the words were, 'my love' (Song 4:1). From these words the minister drew the following conclusions:—1. That the church, and so every saved soul, is Christ's love, even when loveless; 2. Christ's love is without a cause; 3. They are Christ's love when hated of the world; 4. Christ's love when under temptation and under desertion; 5. Christ's love from first to last.[93] Now was his heart filled with comfort and hope. 'I could believe that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... suited to a period in which it would be difficult to say whether faith or love predominated most; but even then it by no means prevented the existence of extreme poverty, for we read frequently in the Acts and Epistles of the collections made for the Christian churches. But in our faithless, loveless, selfish, sin-drowned century, such an attempt at community of goods would not only annihilate all morality completely, but absolutely degrade us back from civilisation and modern Catholicism into the rudest and most meagre barbarism. The apostles ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... prejudice regarding the personal character of Goethe refuses to credit him with any moral worth accordant with his bodily and mental gifts. It figures him a libertine,—heartless, loveless, bad. I do not envy the mental condition of those who can rest in the belief that a really great poet can be a bad man. Be assured that the fruits of genius have never grown, and will never grow, in such a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... and he was very handsome then. At least, I thought him the very perfection of manly strength and beauty and goodness. True, it was the mature, warm beauty of the Indian summer, for he was more than middle-aged; but it was very genial to the chilly, loveless morning of my own early life," said Marah, dropping her head upon her hand and sliding ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... build for Godhead a mighty fortress, complete with hall and chapel, tower and bell, for the sake of the homesteads that will grow up in security round that church-castle. This only, however, whilst the golden age lasts. The moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions, the gods are face to face with destruction; since Alberic, able with invisible hunger-whip to force the labor of the dwarfs and to buy the services of the giants, can outshine all the temporal shows and splendors of the golden age, and make ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... you. You looked so little, so young, so helpless, all huddled up there by the fire. Kathrien, you've never had to think for yourself. You don't know what you are doing in going on with this blasphemous, loveless marriage. Why, dear, you are making the most terrible mistake possible to a woman. Marriage with love is often a tragedy. Without love it is a hell. A horror that will deepen and grow more dreadful ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... Meldon—"in fact, I'm tired telling you—that she hasn't got to kill him until after she's married him. You don't surely want her to be guilty of one of those cold-blooded, loveless marriages which are the curse of modern society and end in the divorce court. She ought to have some feeling of affection for him before she marries him, and I think it is probably aroused in her now. No woman could possibly see a man treated as I treated Simpkins this ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... Duchesse de Longueville, sister of the Grand Conde, and heroine of the Fronde. Her lovely blue eyes, with their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings," turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman and priest. We trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth, her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for La Rochefoucauld, the final shattering of all her illusions; and when at last, tired of the world, she bows her beautiful head in penitent prayer, we too love and forgive her, as others have ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... company of beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart is cold and loveless." ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... his shoulders. "Bloody of purpose, and yet bloodless. Lustful of purpose, and yet loveless. In his prisons many wait for death, but none perish; for the King has sworn that none shall die before the fool Diogenes, and we cannot find the fool. The loveliest women of Sicily have been torn from their homes to his palace, but ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... kissed her amorously, and gave her a look that would have overcome any scruples. The Regent, by means of time, which respects not queens, was, as everyone knows, in her middle age. In this critical and autumnal season, women formally virtuous and loveless desire now here, now there, to enjoy, unknown to the world, certain hours of love, in order that they may not arrive in the other world with hands and heart alike empty, through having left the fruit of the tree of knowledge untasted. The lady of Beaujeu, without appearing to be astonished while ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... of a careless and supercilious coquetry which plays with the heart as the fisherman plays with the salmon? Read "Clara Vere de Vere." Would you know the dull heartache of a loveless married life, growing at times into an intolerable anguish which no marital fidelity can do much to medicate? Read "Auld Robin Gray." Who but a poet can interpret the pain of a parting between loving hearts, with its remorseful recollections of the wholly innocent ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... in any natural affinity to her. On his part, their marriage had been a loveless and selfish union, based on the desire for an heir that he might found a family and cancel the unfair position of a younger son. But the sin he committed against the fundamental law, that marriage shall be founded only in love, brought ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... rule, matters lie more favorably. The two accommodate themselves mutually, and a modus vivendi is established. They want no scandal, and regard for their children compels them to avoid any, although it is the children who suffer most under a cold, loveless life on the part of their parents, even if such a life does not develop into enmity, quarrel and dissension. Often accommodation is reached in order to avoid material loss. As a rule it is the husband, whose conduct is the rock against which marriage is dashed. This ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... for the murmur of his hard renown, Year after year he shambled through the town, — A loveless exile moving with a staff; And oftentimes there crept into his ears A sound of alien pity, touched with tears, — And then (and only ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... fond of solitude such a short time ago. She was afraid of herself—afraid to think—afraid of that dim future that was drawing so very near. Every feeling of heart and soul revolted at the thought of that loveless marriage—the profanation of herself seemed ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... thoughts ran on. "Hollow, shallow, inconsistent—loveless. Catholicism equals a modern refinement of pagan principles with all the old deities on their best behaviour thrown in; while Protestantism is an ecclesiastical system ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... passed to Hades untimely, in her seventh year, before her many playmates, poor thing, pining for her baby brother, who at twenty months old tasted of loveless Death. Alas, ill-fated Peristeris, how near at hand God has set the sorest ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... hardly say what turn the rising tide of my impressions and opinions took about this time. To one who had passed from the cheerless, loveless guardianship of a worldly step-mother, into the tender hands of patient and devoted sisters, to become, instead of a wandering, uncared for waif, the object of the truest and holiest solicitude that ever animated Christian hearts, this hollow mockery of fashionable life ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... 1832 six agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench, who decided that they must work for whatever their masters ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... offered his father to abandon his rights of succession to the throne on her account. This King Frederick-William would not permit, and William was compelled to wed Goethe's pupil, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar. A loveless match in every sense of the word, for he remained until the day of Princess Elize's death her most devoted friend and admirer, seeking her advice in many a difficulty, to the great annoyance of Prince Bismarck, who detested her, and after her death the old emperor ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... formal ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life, with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death—and condemned by the human instinct in her to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Yasodhara sank to his feet and wept, Sighing, "Hath not my Lord comfort in me?" "Ah, Sweet!" he said, "such comfort that my soul Aches, thinking it must end, for it will end, And we shall both grow old, Yasodhara! Loveless, unlovely, weak, and old, and bowed. Nay, though we locked up love and life with lips So close that night and day our breaths grew one Time would thrust in between to filch away My passion and thy grace, as black Night steals The rose-gleams from you peak, ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... the fiercer thing, The aweless soul, within man's breast inhabiting? Who tell, how, passion-fraught and love-distraught The woman's eager, craving thought Doth wed mankind to woe and ruin fell? Yea, how the loveless love that doth possess The woman, even as the lioness, Doth rend and wrest apart, with eager strife, The link ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... railroad station, and she was trying to persuade him that there would be months and years in which to make up for the loveless blank, before sane speech found its opportunity. And even then there ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... just as bad—perhaps worse!" cried Joyce, thinking of the possibility of a loveless reunion with Ray, if she stayed away too long! In that case she would have no compensation for ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... thy wise laws have here, among savages, a less brutal application. For one who dies loveless (and as the Sakais are not given to strong passions, and are chaste by nature, this is not a very great sacrifice) many are saved from unhappiness and a whole race ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... strained to his breast he trembled at the fierce hopelessness in her voice. In a moment he recognized that a crisis was coming; that she was utterly irresponsible, utterly beyond reasoning. Like a spectre her loveless childhood had risen and confronted her; and now that there was no longer even hope, she had turned desperately upon herself with the blank despair of a wounded animal. End it all!—that was her one impulse. He felt it already taking shape; she ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... end he let us choose the men we loved and gave us the material help in money which enabled us to marry them. I find exactly the opposite plan adopted by most parents: they sacrifice their children to loveless marriages as long as they know there is enough money for no demand ever to be ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... rather superficial metaphysician, but the warm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deep respect for the man. He talks of the absurdities of women's education; draws a bitter picture of a woman's fate in a loveless marriage of convenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, but asks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from a schooling in folly; assails the practice of gallantry, and the fashionable conjugal infidelities of his day; writes with real indignation ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... "You cannot understand my story entirely. Wanting a full explanation, you might fairly ask me why I married with this drawback. I did not know of it, but my wife believed I did. We were both most cruelly deceived, it does not matter now. She is condemned to a loveless, joyless life; so am I. With a wife beautiful loving, young, I must lead a most solitary existence—I must see my name die out for want of heirs—I must see my race almost extinct, my life passed in repining and misery, my heart broken, my days without sunshine. ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... beneath Impossible willows; the wide-throated hearth Bristling with faded pine-boughs half concealing The piled-up rubbish at the chimney's back; And, in sad keeping with all things about them, Shrill, querulous-women, sour and sullen men, Untidy, loveless, old before their time, With scarce a human interest save their own Monotonous round of small economies, Or the poor scandal of the neighborhood; Blind to the beauty everywhere revealed, Treading the May-flowers with regardless feet; For them the song-sparrow ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... You can wander up here along the purple ridges, hand locked in hand with those you love, without fear of harm to yourself or your comrade. No Bloom of Ninon here, but fresh cheeks like the peach-blossom where the sun has kissed it: no casual fruition of loveless, joyless harlots, but life-long saturation of your own heart's desire in your own heart's innocence. Ozone is better than all the champagne in the Strand or Piccadilly. If only you will believe it, it is purity ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... her marriage. It had been loveless on her part, but she had cared a little, believing that love on her husband's part would suffice. Was it love, ever at all? Is love possible where tenderness, courtesy, consideration do not exist? Time going on, daily she had suffered his incivility, the despite he did ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... the first time on his black, loveless face. "What is it?" he enunciated distinctly, looking at ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... the key to many parts of her story which Shakspeare left unexplained, and delicately enough has made us understand how Henry's affections, if he ever had any for her—faithfully as he had kept (with one exception) to that loveless mariage de convenance—may have been gradually replaced by indifference and even dislike, long before the divorce was forced on him as a question not only of duty to the nation, but of duty to Heaven. And that he did see it in this latter light, Mr. Froude ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... crushed its fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labour and drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood. But what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the glass and hot blood in ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... the world. It is the love of God that is working this mighty transformation. The world was cold and loveless before Christ came. Of course there always was love in the race,—father-love, mother-love, filial love, love for country. There have always been human friendships which were constant, tender, and true, whose stories shine in bright lustre among the records of life. Natural affection there ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... Jehu," he pursued, warming to the subject matter, "I find the oppression of women in your time to be quite appalling. You seemed to think that the liberation of women consisted in transforming them into loveless, materialistic thugs, into workaholics whose only desire is wealth, into aggression driven beings that possessed little shred of real humanity, into, in a word, men. I think it would have been a much better endeavor to have attempted to change men ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell almost incessantly to avoid running over them. As I do not travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung. Two or three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large and beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a snake ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... Harman. I didn't think that matters could be settled by such arrangements. It's sane, I know, it's comfortable and kindly. But I thought—Oh! I thought of different things, quite different things from all this. I thought of you who are so beautiful caught in a loveless passionless world. I thought of the things there might be for you, the beautiful and wonderful things of which you are deprived.... Never mind what I thought! Never mind! You've made your choice. But I thought that you didn't love, that you couldn't love—this man. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... he was obliged to remonstrate with her for the silly trick of eating her meals on the floor instead of at table,—and yet she was a warm-hearted, affectionate girl, and like many another princess of that time, she deserved a happier fate than the loveless marriage that had been arranged for her. Our memories are quite fresh about Bianca and her sorrows, because an accommodating tourist, who had Mrs. Ady's "Beatrice d'Este" with her, has loaned it to us for reading in the evenings—at least ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... is loveless to-night, Since he is departed whose smile made it bright: I mourn, but the sigh of my soul shall be brief, The pathway is short to the ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... had brought matters to a crisis. Something must be done, Angela told herself, and quickly, to set her right with her sister, and in her own esteem. She had to choose between a loveless marriage and the Convent. By accepting one or the other she must prove that she was not the slave of ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... and a plain funeral after a useful, unselfish life, than a grand mausoleum after a loveless, selfish life." ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... had held only love and beauty—sorrow, as he had seen it, being but a solemn and poetic form of beauty. The change in such a world made by the discovery that his being an adopted son set him apart in a class different from other boys—a class unlovely and loveless—had been great, had stolen much of the joy from living; but he was very young then, and the joy of mere living and breathing was strong in his blood, and he had gradually become accustomed—hardened, if you will—to the idea ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... when a girl she had been "crossed in love," for her single maidservant she always trained to a sober and loveless life like her own, and as soon as a girl cast an eye upon a likely ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... remained there mute, not daring to speak, experiencing all the tortures of remorse and retribution. Of what avail had been ambition? How had it overleaped content and ease of mind! Into what a nest of stings and thorns his loveless marriage had plunged him! And now but the black shadow remained; he walked in the darkness of unending isolation. So he should continue to walk straight to the door ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... perfection in industry as the Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's words about 'the intolerable sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of the mass of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings, with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or workhouses. But they often look as if they were, and they resemble them ...
— Progress and History • Various
... much as named one," responded Mrs Dorothy, with a little laugh. "Sure, you are not one of those foolish maids that think they must be loveless and forlorn without they ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... myself, without being tied to a watch-dog, whose baying would serve much the same purpose as that picture in mosaic in the House of the Tragic Poet. I have a very sincere affection for you, Alma, but the day on which you sell yourself in a loveless marriage, will strain hard on ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... grown old, These words shall speak your spirits moody: "Unhappy one! What heaps of fun I've missed by being goody-goody! Oh, that I might have felt the hunger Of loveless age when I ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... parish, had naturally called upon Sir Peter, and as naturally invited him to his house. His visits had begun by his coming to lunch one day, and we had speculated about him a little in advance, half jestingly, raking up old stories, and attributing to him various evil qualities of a hard and loveless old age. But after he had gone, the verdict of Stella and myself was, "Much worse than we expected." He was different from what we had expected. Perhaps that annoyed us. Instead of being able to laugh at him, we ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... feeling is for themselves, and such things as have power to move them through the flesh only. I would almost rather sin on the impulse of a generous but misguided nature, and have the power to appreciate and the will to be better, than live a perfect, loveless woman, caring only for myself, like these. I ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud— Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... Giaflaug, Giuki's sister: "Lo upon earth I live most loveless Who of five mates Must see the ending, Of daughters twain And three sisters, Of brethren eight, And abide ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... seems to make me fade away, Rank plug, that navvies smoke in loveless clay, I know not which is ranker, ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... Saint-James, a few evenings in the back of a box at some small theatre, behind the grating where forbidden, shamefaced pleasure conceals itself,—those were the only memories bequeathed to her by that liaison of two weeks, that loveless sin, wherein not even her pride had succeeded in satisfying itself by the notoriety of a scandal in high life. The fruitless, ineffaceable stain, the senseless fall into the gutter of a woman who cannot walk, and upon whom ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... aspirations identical. In pleasant and profitable companionship we can certainly indulge as heretofore, and it would greatly pain me to be deprived of it in future, but this can be ours without the sinful mockery of a marriage—for such I hold a loveless union. I feel that I must have your esteem and your society, but your love I neither desire nor ever expect to possess; for the sentiments you cherish for me are precisely similar to those which I entertain toward you. Mr. Manning, we shall ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... is the source of all happiness. Pray to God each morning that He may give you strength to live as a woman who respects her responsibilities and duties; for the punishment you would otherwise incur is terrible: you would lose your love. Oh! to live loveless, to tear flesh from flesh, to belong no more to the one who is half of your very self, to live on in pain and agony, bereft of the one you have loved! In vain would you stretch out your arms to him; he would turn away ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... day realising her young strength she held him firm in her grip and threatened to throw him into a pond if he persisted in his attempted chastisement. Since then he had respected her person, but to the day of his death he had cursed her for anserine stupidity. An unlovely, loveless and unloved old man. Why should Blanquette have wept over him? She had not the Parisian's highly strung temperament and capacity for facile emotion. She was peasant to the core, slow to rejoice, and slow to grieve, and she had the peasant's remorseless logic in envisaging the elemental facts of ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... as she whirled. "SAM!" she shrieked, and hurled herself at him with all the pent-up ardor and longing of two hundred thirty-four meticulously counted, husbandless, loveless days. ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... of the deadly sin—the treachery, the perjury, the sacrilege; oh! and the dreadful degradation of such a loveless marriage?" ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... admit her, and he drew her in, darkening the windows and locking the door. On the whole, it was not so bad as he expected; at least, there was less violence and more despair. She covered her face with her hands, and writhed in anguish, when she said that she had utterly degraded herself by this loveless marriage. She scarcely mentioned her husband. She made no complaint of him, and even spoke of him as generous. It seemed as if this made it worse, and as if she would be happier if she could expend herself in hating him. She spoke ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... "I had a stepmother," and his face involuntarily became harder as he recalled that long stretch of loveless years—the father had never quite understood the shy and sensitive child—during which he had been neglected, suppressed, lonely, with no one to care that he did well at school and college, and that later he was getting on in the world, with no place in the world ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... with true simplicity and naturalness of living. Excessive meat eating, strong spices and condiments, alcohol, coffee, tea, overwork, night work, fear, worry, sensuality, corsets, high heels, foul air, improper breathing, lack of exercise, loveless marriages, race suicide, all of these and many other evils of hypercivlization have contributed their share in creating the universal degeneracy of civilized nations commented upon ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... ago had developed into a charming, gentle-mannered maid; and while he rejoiced in gaining so sweet a daughter, he disliked to lose the wild, untamed elf who had so suddenly blossomed into a young lady before he could in any measure atone for the unhappy years of her loveless childhood. He would have kept her a little girl all her life, had he been able; but here she was springing up into the beauty of a glorious womanhood before his very eyes. So he sighed as he thought of his lost opportunities, then abruptly asked, ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... gone out into the garden where his little cousin was tending some of his favourite flowers, and while standing near and watching her he had amused himself with comparing fair youth, delicate and attractive, with shrivelled eld, livid and loveless, and in jestingly repeating to a smiling girl the vinegar discourse of a cankered old maid. Once on such an occasion Caroline had said to him, looking up from the luxuriant creeper she was binding to its frame, "Ah! Robert, you do not like old ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of our kindness done. "Alas! what wilt thou do? how shalt thou bear The cruel world, the sickening still despair, The mocking, curious faces bent on thee, When thou hast known what love there is in me? O happy only, if thou couldst forget, And live unholpen, lonely, loveless yet, But untormented through the little span That on the earth ye call the life of man. Alas! that thou, too fair a thing to die, Shouldst so be born to double misery! "Farewell! though I, a god, can never know How thou canst lose thy pain, yet time will go Over thine head, and thou mayst mingle ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... find a teacher. It is most true that the living and the dead are still one family, for of course there are no "dead," unless we most correctly put into this category the dull of hearing, the dull of heart, and the loveless who still walk this earth. But if we deem the pioneers defunct and inarticulate, then it is little likely that we shall comprehend the reality and the naturalness of this interplay and inspiration. If we ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... ever repented, though one was a coward and the other a condemned and public criminal before the law, and both had suffered? Was not the true sin, as is suggested, the source of all this error, the act of the physician who had first violated Hester's womanhood in a loveless marriage as he had now in Arthur's breast "violated in cold blood the sanctity of a human heart"? "Thou and I," says Arthur, "never did so." The strange words follow, strange for Hawthorne to have written, but better attesting ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... said—"what force there is in a storm of opinion! The fiercest gale that ever blew down strong trees and made havoc of men's dwellings is a mere whisper compared with the fury of human minds set to destroy one heaven-aspiring soul! Think of the petty grudge borne by the loveless against Love!—the spite of the restless and unhappy against those who have won peace! All this you will have to bear,—for the world is envious—and even a friend breaks down in the strength of friendship when thwarted or rendered jealous by a greater and more resistless ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... lonely or loveless than the ill-starred and ill-favoured Queen Mary. She had no near relatives in England except Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, by the irony of fate, was worse than a stranger to her. The awful solitude of a throne excluded her, even more than her own ill-health and ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... came with singular devotedness to the rescue. He took on their insolent pride the revenge of the purest charity—housing, caring for, befriending them, so as no son could have done it more tenderly and efficiently. The mother—on the whole a good woman—died blessing him; the strange, godless, loveless, misanthrope grandmother lived still, entirely supported by this self-sacrificing man. Her, who had been the bane of his life, blighting his hope, and awarding him, for love and domestic happiness, long mourning and cheerless solitude, he treated with the ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... roughened his manners, slave-driving had made his voice coarse. Possibly, also, his princess had recovered from her disappointment. Maybe she had been married off to some nobody of Portugal, or France, or Austria, for state reasons, and had entered on the usual loveless life of royalty. Or she may have beguiled her maidenly solitude by drinking much wine of Oporto, Madeira, and Xeres with her dinner, thereby acquiring that amplitude of girth, that ruddiness of countenance, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... long musings. If he had been rather older, he would have read happy memories blended with thoughts of repentance, the whole story of a woman's life in that sublime face—the careless childhood, the loveless marriage, a terrible passion, flowers springing up in storm and struck down by the thunderbolt into an abyss from which ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... even of regard, by the domestic hearth of most of the commercial houses of Paris, had set to work with all her superior and active intelligence, to make the fortune they hoped for. And so her life had flowed on, uniform, peaceful and respectable, but loveless. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... patient. For Diana Paget, childhood had been joyless, and girlhood lonely. That blank and desolate region, that dreary flat of fenny waste ground between Vauxhall and Battersea, on which the child's eyes had first looked, had been typical of her loveless childhood. With her mother's death faded the one ray of light that had illumined her desolation. She was shifted from one nurse to another; and bar nurses were not allowed to love her, for she remained with them as an encumbrance and a burden. It ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... years had borne away now returned to him. The silent pressure of the hands recalled nights of distraction. He half shut his eyes, a sudden madness overcame him, although he was sufficiently calm to say to himself that she had an end in view, this woman's coming to him, loveless, to speak of love to him, herself unmoved by the senses, to awaken vanished feelings, to offer herself with the irresistible skill of desire: a dead passion ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie |
