"Tedium" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... That history is so intolerably tedious that even the magic of Treitschke's genius has not been able to relieve its dulness, and that before the war no British or French publisher dared venture on a translation of Treitschke's masterpiece. But if the political history of Germany has all the tedium and monotony of parochialism, on the contrary, the personal history of the Hohenzollern is intensely instructive. One would hesitate to call it romantic. Yet there is an element of romance, the romance of business, the interest which attaches to the rise of a family from the humble ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... since then," replied Charles, "and I fear his illness is much more serious than I had any idea of. That being the case, I feel it would be wrong to press any one, even Middleton, to stay and share the tedium ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the Adamses, we find no humor in the next generation. The only relief from the tedium of argument and exhaustless logic is found in the savage sarcasm of John Randolph, which was neither wit ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... made his appearance from among a little group of clerks with whom he had been indulging in a few jokes by way of relief from the tedium of business. "Come this way," he said to Ellen; and sauntering before her, with a rather dissatisfied air, led the way out of the entrance hall into another and much larger apartment. There were plenty of people here too, and just as busy as those they had quitted. Mr. Saunders having ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... senses; and if this power is lacking, his knowledge in relation to the sick man is vanity. The same holds good of the diagnosis of our own conscience; if we are blind and deaf, innumerable symptoms will pass unobserved, and we shall not know on what to found our judgment. The tedium of futile undertakings will oppress us ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the middle watch, when we had nearly run out the south-east trades, I went forward, looking for someone to talk to, or anything to relieve the tedium of my two hours on the lee side of the poop. I found Welsh John sitting on the main-hatch and disposed to yarn. He had been the most intimate with Duncan, harkening to his queer tales of the fairies in Knoidart when we others would scoff, and ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... were lost in the confusion, in the darkness; what was seen of them seemed an encouragement to shout louder. And I give you my word that it was in no wise needed. All those Southerners, whose enthusiasm had been kept at fever heat since morning, excited still more by the tedium of the long wait and by the storm, gave all that they had of voice, of breath, of noisy energy, blending with the national hymn of Provence that oft-repeated cry, which broke in upon it like a refrain: "Vive le Bey!" ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... tedium of beholding the hideousness of all the guests was curiously diminished by the pleasure of seeing ...
— Eastern Shame Girl • Charles Georges Souli
... his hope was that Bauer would steal back after a while and reconnoitre with a view to discovering how matters stood, whether the unwelcome visitor had taken his departure and the way to Rischenheim were open. Wrapping his scarf closely round his face, Rudolf waited, patiently enduring the tedium as he best might, drenched by the rain, which fell steadily, and very imperfectly sheltered from the buffeting of the wind. Minutes went by; there were no signs of Bauer nor of anybody else in the silent street. Yet Rudolf ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... the rice-fields, and plunged into dense forests of the long-leafed pine, where for miles not a house, or any other evidence of human occupation, is to be seen. Nothing could well be more dreary than a ride through such a region, and to while away the tedium of the journey I opened a conversation with the driver, who up to that time had maintained a ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... To the philosophic mind, Dr. Frampton, there should be no such thing as tedium, boredom, ennui, and I trust that mine is philosophic. You were much in my thoughts, sir, between the attacks of sea-sickness. By frequent perusal I had committed your two epistles to memory, and while silently rehearsing their well-turned ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the two chancel scenes, that this side of Gozzoli's art is most fascinating. He has travelled a long way from his master Fra Angelico here: the heaven is of the visible rather than the invisible eye; sense is present as well as the rapturous spirit. The little Medici who endured the tedium of the services here are to be felicitated with upon such an adorable presentment of glory. With plenty of altar candles the sight of these gardens of the blest must have beguiled many a mass. Thinking ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... farce, of course, but underneath the fantastic affectation there was a very real sentiment, that of the intolerable tedium of captivity. Raleigh had been living a life of exaggerated activity, never a month at rest, now at sea, now in Devonshire, now at Court, hurrying hither and thither, his horse and he one veritable ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... expectation naturally produced by our present circumstances, prevents any thing like regular occupation. We do nothing all the day but wander restlessly about among the old haunts which were our favourites in the peaceful time of our early sojourn here. Max has endeavoured to relieve the tedium, and get up an interest of some sort, by renewing his attempts against the great eel. But the patriarch is as wary, and his stronghold beneath the roots of the buttress tree as impregnable as ever, and all efforts ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Macaulay. But in the bustling New York of fifty or one hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally designed to lighten the tedium of idle hours. ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... 'Doubtless the tedium of such a state to a man of the temperament of the gallant commander,' etc., the termination of the article was indulgent. Rosamund recurred to the final paragraph for comfort, and though she loved Beauchamp, the test of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... its peal of pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's fagot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the mountains or amidst the forests feels oppressed as by imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness of that vast and dreary level. But it is green and very fertile, and it has wide horizons that have a certain charm of their own even in their dulness and monotony; and among the ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... when he lunched alone, to relieve the tedium of the meal with the assistance of reading matter in the shape of one or more of the evening papers. Today, sitting down to a solitary repast at the Piccadilly grill-room, he had brought with him an early edition of the Evening News. And one of the first items which met his ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... at the lens, he dutifully replaced the chest and palm clamps and settled down to the tedium of patrol. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... interested in reading or relating what happened from half a century to a century before. We have the best of it. Scenes in which our ancestors thought deeply, acted fiercely, and died desperately, are to us tales to divert the tedium of a winter's evening, when we are engaged to no party, or beguile a summer's morning, when it is too scorching to ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... passage to the station was unmarked by incidents, excepting that they noted with apprehension the thickly clustering tents of Kansu soldiery in the open spaces fronting the vast Temples of Heaven and Agriculture. Once the station was reached a weary wait began, with nothing to relieve the tedium, for the vast crowds which usually surround the "fire-cart stopping-place," to translate the vernacular, all had disappeared, and in place of the former noisiness there was ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... instruct him in seamanship, and make him well acquainted with the dangers of the coast, he thought that, as Newton was fully equal to the charge of the vessel, he might as well indulge himself with an occasional glass or two, to while away the tedium of embarkation. A stone pitcher of liquor was now his constant attendant when he pulled on board to weigh his anchor; which said pitcher, for fear of accidents, he carried down into the cabin himself. As soon as sail was on the vessel, and her course ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... esteem that he bestowed it on the first child he met. Yoshida Kenko, who became a recluse in 1324, is counted among the "four kings" of Japanese poetry—Ton-a, Joben, Keiun, and Kenko. He has been called the "Horace of Japan." In his celebrated prose work, Weeds of Tedium (Tsure-zure-gusa), he seems to reveal a lurking love for the vices he satirizes. These three authors were all pessimistic. They reflected the tendency of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... clairvoyance of nonspiritualistic mediums and particularly in psychometry we obtain communications between one subconsciousness and another and revelations of unknown, forgotten or future incidents which are equally striking, though stripped of the vapid gossip and tedium reminiscences with which we are overwhelmed by defunct persons who are all the more jealous to prove their identity inasmuch as they know that they ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... ninety-six hours of pure tedium. After the first accelerating blasts, the rockets were silent. There was no weight. There was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting electric fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture from breathing ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... idleness or dependence; but there is reason to believe that it was a more stringent compulsion which obliged her, at an advanced period of the year, and in a peculiarly delicate situation, when even peasants remain on shore, to encounter the tedium and perils of a voyage in a sailing vessel. We have heard, in fact, from a quarter which ought to be correctly informed, that she was proceeding to the residence of a near relative of her father, with the intention of remaining there ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... like to hear," cried Simon, delighted; "there will then be at least two of us to bear the tedium of imprisonment. So go, Jenne Marie, take your place for the last time at the guillotine, for I tell you, you will lose your bet; you will have to furnish brandy and cakes, and stay with me here at the Temple to bring up the little ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... the dances by which Washington and his officers and their ladies helped to while away the tedium of long winters during the Revolution, but the story of these has been often told and besides lies outside the limits of this book, as does the dancing at New York ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... itself almost exclusively to biographies of saints, to the legend of Saint Columban, written by the monk, Jonas, and to that of the blessed Cuthbert, written by the Venerable Bede from the notes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarn, he contented himself with glancing over, in his moments of tedium, the works of these hagiographers and in again reading several extracts from the lives of Saint Rusticula and Saint Radegonda, related, the one by Defensorius, the other by the modest and ingenious ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... to know. She grasped the literary details more quickly than I had anticipated. I found afterwards that the long months of the voyage had not been entirely taken up with the cooking of bacon and the swabbing of decks; there had been long stretches of tedium beguiled by talk on most things under heaven, and aided by her swift and jealous intelligence her mental horizon had broadened prodigiously through constant association with a cultivated man. . . . When I reached the point in my story where Jaffery ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... naked surface of the stones of which the building was constructed. The cloths thus suspended were at first plain, afterward they began to be ornamented with embroidered borders or other decorations, and at length ladies learned to employ their own leisure hours, and beguile the tedium of the long confinement which many of them had to endure within their castles, in embroidering various devices and designs on the hangings intended for their own chambers, or to execute such work as presents for their friends. Matilda's industry and skill in this kind ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the irritations produced by the objects of lust and hunger, there seems to be a sum of pleasurable affection accompanying the various secretions of the numerous glands, which constitute the pleasure of life, in contradistinction to the tedium vitae. This quantity or sum of pleasurable affection, seems to contribute to the due or energetic performance of the whole moveable system, as well that of the heart and arteries, as of digestion and of absorption; ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... students, resort to dictation devices. Others, realizing the pedagogical weakness of such teaching, distribute mimeographed outlines of carefully prepared summaries of the lectures. Now the student is relieved of the tedium of note taking, but the temptation to let his mind wander afield is intensified. An outline, scanty of detail, but so devised as to keep the organization and sequence of subject matter clear in the minds ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... day—compelled him to stop at home and devote himself to Vera. Mr. Herbert Pryme, however, had no such excuse, real or imaginary, and yet he stands idly by the corridor window, idly, yet perfectly patiently—relieving the tedium of his position by the unexciting entertainment of softly whistling the popular airs from the "Cloches de Corneville" below ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... alternative is dismissed by most responsible statesmen. They declare that they do not wish to destroy the German people or the German nationality or the civilized life of Germany. I will not enlarge here upon the tedium and difficulties such an undertaking would present. I will dismiss it as being not only impossible, but also as an insanely wicked project. The second alternative, therefore, remains as our War Aim. I do not see how the sloppiest reasoner can evade that. As we do not want to kill Germany ...
— In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) • H.G. Wells
... well-groomed, sets out their drinks, instantly perceiving that he serves two of the Three Thousand. He observes that one is a middle-aged man, well-dressed, with a lined and sunken face; the other a mere boy who is chiefly eyes and overcoat. Disguising well the tedium begotten by many repetitions, the server of drinks begins to chant the sanitary saga of Santone. "Rather a moist night, gentlemen, for our town. A little fog from our river, but nothing to ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... veranda but converse at times with its occupants, and even listen to the book which Miss Macy, seated without, read aloud to him. In the evening Bradley would linger by his couch until late, beguiling the tedium of his convalescence with characteristic stories and information which he thought might please the invalid. For Mainwaring, who had been early struck with Bradley's ready and cultivated intelligence, ended by shyly avoiding the discussion of more serious topics, partly because Bradley impressed ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... life was again quickened by the high interests of the Revolution. During these grey years the lonely country and stagnant provincial towns of Russia buried a peasantry which was enslaved by want and toil, and an educated upper class which was enslaved by idleness and tedium. Most of the "Intellectuals," with no outlet for their energies, were content to forget their ennui in vodka and card-playing; only the more idealistic gasped for air in the stifling atmosphere, crying out in despair against life as ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... about my head in swarms. A winter wren at my elbow struck up to sing, going over and over with his exquisite tune; and a scarlet tanager, also, not far off, did what he could—which was somewhat less than the wren's—to relieve the tedium of my situation. Finally, when my patience was well-nigh exhausted,—for the afternoon was wearing away and I had some distance to walk,—a swift flew past me from behind, and, with none of that poising over the entrance such as is commonly ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the care of an English preceptor. Restless and unquiet, he posted with the utmost rapidity through the towns of Italy; and his improvement was such as was to be expected from his mode of travelling and his previous habits. Hoping to find in foreign countries some relief from the tedium and ennui with which he was oppressed, and being anxious to become acquainted with the French theatre, he proceeded to Paris. But he appears to have been completely dissatisfied with everything he witnessed in France and contracted a dislike to its people, which his intercourse ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... prisoner, for his sins (or other people's), was confined in an underground dungeon containing sixty-four cells, all communicating with open doorways, as shown in our illustration. In order to reduce the tedium of his restricted life, he set himself various puzzles, and this is one of them. Starting from the cell in which he is shown, how could he visit every cell once, and only once, and make as many turnings as ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... their Scotch pseudonym, "stanes." To every man two stanes. You can either get your "stanes" in England and travel out with them, or hire them in the locality. They make the most pleasant travelling companions and at times are the cause of many amusing incidents which beguile the tedium of the journey. Also they often lead to your picking up chance acquaintances. I have known one stone placed in a dimly lighted corridor of a train productive of much merriment and harmless banter. Being of considerable weight ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... afternoon, were idly lounging about the butt of the mainmast, evidently awaiting turn on sentry post, and ready enough to welcome any diversion chancing their way which would help to break the dull tedium of the night. I observed likewise, as I made a drunken pause at the foot of the ladder in an apparently vain endeavor to steady myself, that these roisterers of the night-watch were a set of jolly dogs, and had been opening numerous bottles of red wine with which to pass lagging hours ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... sacrificed to love. His intellect found sufficient field for exercise in his domestic circle, whose members, all adorned by refinement and literature, were many of them, like himself, distinguished by genius. Yet active life was the genuine soil for his virtues; and he sometimes suffered tedium from the monotonous succession of events in our retirement. Pride made him recoil from complaint; and gratitude and affection to Perdita, generally acted as an opiate to all desire, save that of meriting her love. We all observed the visitation ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... impel us to travel, to change our sky, as Horace calls it—good motives and bad, selfish and unselfish, noble and ignoble. With some people it is pure restlessness; the tedium of ordinary life weighs on them, and travel, they think, will distract them; people travel for the sake of health, or for business reasons, or to accompany some one else, or because other people travel. And these motives are neither good nor bad, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... said: "Everything has been foreseen and decreed by the old men—the only thing is not to devise anything of your own.... And the chief thing of all is, don't go even as far as the threshold without God's blessing!"—I am bound to admit that deadly tedium reigned in his house, in those low-ceiled, warm, dark rooms which so often resounded from the chanting of vigils and prayer-services,[2] with an odour of incense and fasting-viands,[3] which almost ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... pleasantly enough, with a young fellow who had certainly some reason to be satisfied with his own success thus far in life, and who could relieve the tedium of ship's duty in such society. I cannot say I was in love, though I often thought of Emily when she was not before my eyes, and actually dreamt of her three times, in the first fortnight after the re-capture of the ship. What was a little remarkable, as I conceive, I often found ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... the top of the high pole he would cling protected, seemingly, by some force working in direct defiance of the law of gravity. And now and then, by way of brightening the tedium of their job, he and his gang would call to a girl passing in the street below, ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... that Nero from tedium sought recreation in night attacks. Even Petronius took part in these amusements. Their main object was to seize women and toss each on a soldier's mantle till she fainted. Even Nero himself on occasions called these ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... had foreseen, tongues did wag—those tongues of the countryside, avid of anything that might spice the tedium of dull lives and brains. And, though no breath of gossip came to Winton's ears, no women visited at Mildenham. Save for the friendly casual acquaintanceships of churchyard, hunting-field, and local race-meetings, Gyp grew up knowing hardly any of her own sex. This dearth developed her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that I think you have completely succeeded in what you intended to do. What is poetry may be disputed. These are poetry to me at least. They are concise, pithy, and moving. Uniform as they are, and unhistorify'd, I read them thro' at two sittings without one sensation approaching to tedium. I do not know that among your many kind presents of this nature this is not my favourite volume. The language is never lax, and there is a unity of design and feeling, you wrote them with love—to avoid the cox-combical phrase, con amore. I am particularly ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... way, the wild untenanted stretch was unbroken by any incident; yet I remember no tedium by the way; and I believe that a trip taken with Grandma and Grandpa Keeler through the most trackless desert would inevitably have been made to teem with diversion. Those blessed souls! I smile, looking ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... steadied out, but not dragged, every sail a good rap full, "fast asleep," without the tremor of an eyelid, if I may so style a weather leach, or of any inch of the canvas, from the royals down to the courses. Every condition was as if arranged for a special occasion, or to recompense us for the tedium of the horse latitudes. The moon was big, and there was a clear sky, save for the narrow band of tiny clouds, massed like a flock of sheep, which ever fringes the horizon of the trades; always on the horizon, as you progress, yet ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... weather, which was very hot, nor the tedium of the session, which had been very great, nor the anxiety of Ministers, which was very pressing, had any effect in impairing the energy of Mr. Turnbull. He was as instant, as oratorical, as hostile, as indignant about redistribution as he had been about the franchise. He ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... trays of refreshments and French and Spanish wines. Lady Eleanore Rochcliffe, who refused to wet her beautiful lips even with a bubble of champagne, had sunk back into a large damask chair, apparently overwearied either with the excitement of the scene or its tedium; and while, for an instant, she was unconscious of voices, laughter and music, a young man stole forward and knelt down at her feet. He bore a salver in his hand on which was a chased silver goblet filled to ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the party. It was not quite so fine to discover that the taxicab to which he must entrust himself for the long ride up to West Eighty-fifth Street was a most shabby-appearing vehicle, the driver of which, moreover, as Mr. Leary could divine even as he crossed the sidewalk, had wiled away the tedium of waiting by indulgence in draughts of something more potent than the chill air of latish November. Mr. Leary peered doubtfully into the illuminated countenance but dulled eyes of the driver and caught a whiff of a breath alcoholically fragrant, ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... effect on the surviving subjective appreciation; but this must surely be an error, since our mental image of any period is determined by the character of its contents. Wundt says that when once a tedious waiting is over, it looks short because we instantly forget the feeling of tedium. My self-observation, as well as the interrogation of others, has satisfied me, on the contrary, that this feeling distinctly colours the retrospective appreciation. Thus, when waiting at a railway station for a belated train, I am distinctly aware that each quarter of an hour looks long, not ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... the song ol nightingales beguiled the tedium of waiting, shut within a barrier, for the train from Knin, for one is not allowed to stray about until the train arrives. After a little further climbing, the summit of the range was pierced, and the lovely Riviera ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... To beguile the tedium of their imprisonment, Marco was wont to tell his traveller's tales to his companion, Rusticiano, and this worthy gentleman conceived the notion of writing out the marvellous adventures and observations of his fellow-prisoner. We must bear in mind that the Italian gentry of that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... partly through the German Universities and partly in the Austrian service, during the campaign of Magenta, Solferino, and the siege of Mantua. With a German's fondness for music, he beguiled the tedium of many a long winter evening. With his German education he had imbibed radicalism to its full extent. Thoroughly conversant with the Sacred Scriptures he was a doubter, if not a positive unbeliever, from the Pentateuch ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... of a reflection on the action and seems to bear all the ear-marks of a heritage from the original function of the tragic chorus[138]. It devolved upon the actor by sprightly mimicry to relieve, in these scenes, the tedium that appeals to the reader. So in Cap. 909 ff. the canticum of the puer becomes more than a mere stopgap, if he acts out vividly the violence of Ergasilus; and in Bac. 1067 ff. the soliloquy would acquire humor, if confidentially ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... house, amid a grove of trees, which had been Lord Roberts's headquarters barely a month ago, and from which he had sent the summons to Johannesburg to surrender. All around, indeed, was the scene of recent fighting, and various polite transport officers tried to while away the tedium of our enforced delay by pointing out various faint ridges, and explaining that there the Gordons had made their splendid charge, or, again, that farther back General French had encountered such a ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... Valley had a cloud over it. Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without harvesting its profit. His sister's voice, too, naturally harsh, had, in the course of her sorrowful lifetime, contracted a kind of croak, which, when it once gets into ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... employment of capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the greatest battles known to history, such machine-carnages bore us so horribly ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... present of an armadillo, or ant-eater, who is certainly a wonderful animal, and well worth studying, in the tedium of a calm between the tropics. The body proper is but about nine inches, but, when stretched at length, he covers an extent of two and a half feet, from head to tail, and is wholly fortified with an impenetrable ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... present life threatened to be the tedium of nothing to do. She could not read, practise her songs, and learn poetry by heart all the hours of the day: less than three sufficed her often. If she had been bred in a country-house, she would have possessed numerous interests that she inevitably lacked. She was a stranger amongst the villagers—neither ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... Put any person of adult age, or younger, in a room with nothing to do but think, and you reduce him to abject misery and restlessness. Most of our reading, entertainment, has this object, and if necessity did not spur men on to work steadily, the tedium of their own thoughts would. To reflect is pleasant only to a few, and the need of a task is the need of the average human being. Perhaps once upon a time in some idyllic age, some fabled age of innocence, time passed pleasantly without work. To-day, work is the prime ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... going to school is a joy, management is less of a burden, and learning is easier. Sometimes, perhaps, plays, games, and constructive occupations are resorted to only for these reasons, with emphasis upon relief from the tedium and strain of "regular" school work. There is no reason, however, for using them merely as agreeable diversions. Study of mental life has made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... tedious? There was tedium, rather, in the possession of bodies as durable as metal, as renewable as wax, as insensitive as water. In the fiercest onset of the passions, prolonged to satiety, there was always an element of the unreal. ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... minutes; the marchand de coco with his bell; a regiment of the line with its band; a chorus of peripatetic Orpheonistes—a swallow, a butterfly, a humblebee; a far-off balloon, oh, joy!—any sight or sound to relieve the tedium of those two mortal school-hours that dragged their weary lengths from half past one till half past three—every ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... accustomed to associate with her work, and certainly nothing of the tender sentiment of Persuasion. It is unfair, however, to judge from the first draft of a few introductory chapters, written as they no doubt were to relieve the tedium of long hours of confinement, and written perhaps also to comfort her friends by letting them see that she was still able to work. It is probable, too, that a long step in the downward progress of her condition was ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... cup-like hollow in which the farm lay. She saw, some five hundred feet below her, the house making itself bright with candles, and this was a broad hint to her to hurry. For they were only kindled on a Sabbath night with a view to that family worship which rounded in the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the relaxation of supper. Already she knew that Robert must be within-sides at the head of the table, "waling the portions"; for it was Robert in his quality of family priest and judge, not the gifted Gilbert, who officiated. She made good time accordingly ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had been trying to beguile the tedium of the stormy days by interesting the girls in the lessons they would even now have been studying at Miss Tolliver's school if their houseboat had not sailed away from her anchorage. All the old school books had ...
— Madge Morton's Secret • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... the huge open fire-place at the end of the room. The rudely-carved names and initials on the wall betrayed the labours of an idle hour. Around the ample hearth, during the long winter nights, the war-scarred veterans beguiled the tedium of a soldier's life with stories of battle, siege, and sortie, under Moore and Wellington, in the Peninsular wars; and one or two grizzled old war-dogs had ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... in the dreary little station; or rather it would have been, had not the tedium of it been relieved by the presence of a newly married couple, whose honeymoon was just then at the full. Their delight in each other was exuberant, effervescent, beatific,—what shall I say?—quite beyond veiling or restraint. At first I bestowed upon them ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... go on! If you only knew," her lifted eyebrows confessed the tedium of Calcutta small talk. "But why do you say you are lightly esteemed? Surely the public is a touchstone—and you hold the public in ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the commissary's conduct toward her, Janice entered eagerly into the gaiety with which the army beguiled the tedium of winter quarters. Dislike of Clowes precluded Andre and Mobray from coming to the house, but they saw much of the maiden elsewhere. She and Peggy Chew had been made known to each other by Andre early in the British ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... something on your mind you are to be forced to speak of in the morning—a compulsion awaiting you as a lion awaiting the debut of a reluctant martyr in the arena of the Coliseum? Did you, so watching, feel—not the tedium—but the maddening speed of the hours, the cruelty of the striking clocks? Were you conscious of a grateful reliance on your bedroom door, still closed between you and your lion, as the gate that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... wonder you are not bored, droning on in the same key from morning till night. [Despairingly] I am dying of this tedium. What shall I do? ...
— Uncle Vanya • Anton Checkov
... parson of the other fold is in his library, and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas, beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... (half a peck, five-and-twenty or more, of handles to his little name, if you should ever require it); who, finding matters so backward at Frankfurt, and nothing to do there, has been out, in the interim, touring to while away the tedium; and is here only as sequel and corroboration of Belleisle,—say as bottle-holder, or as high-wrought peacock's-tail, to Belleisle:—of the eminent Montijos I have to record next to nothing in the shape of negotiation ("Treaty" ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Mahabharata, the most majestic work ever produced by the human intellect, a work, too, which is to-day as popular with Indians as when 40 centuries ago it was chanted to instruct the youth and beguile the tedium of the princes of Hastinapura. Unlike all systems of government known to the West, the Hindu system contains no popular element whatever. In it we find no Witanagemote in which the nobles may advise the monarch; still less ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... himself with superstitious rigour. The single thing that was clear in complications was that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentleman—to which was added indeed the perhaps slightly less shining truth that complications might sometimes have their tedium beguiled by a study of the question of how a gentleman would behave. This question, I hasten to add, was not in the last resort Densher's greatest worry. Three women were looking to him at once, and, though such a predicament ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... others, which seemed to be quite natural, though it noticeably piqued Gage. On the part of all three, Gage, Dominick, and Kinsale, it was apparent that they were overjoyed at the return of Norma, which also was quite natural, for even a treasure-hunt has hours of tedium and there could be nothing tedious when she was about. Asta was undoubtedly the more fascinating, but she was wrapped up in Everson. It was not long before Kennedy and I also fell under the spell of Norma's presence ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... Durward, "I'll never wait so long!" but he forbore pressing her further on the subject, knowing that he should have her in the house with him, which would in a great measure relieve the tedium of waiting. ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things. We have seen, too, that this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. Thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... carving and fashioning of this eye and with my initials below it, the which foolish business (fond and futile though it was) served in no small measure to abate my consuming impatience and the dreary tedium. ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... the tedium of garrison life, was an occasional wolf chase. I am too tender hearted to call it an amusement, but it was exceedingly exciting. The animal having been caught in a box-trap, and not maimed or crippled ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... his love continues is he mischievous and unpleasant, but when his love ceases he becomes a perfidious enemy of him on whom he showered his oaths and prayers and promises, and yet could hardly prevail upon him to tolerate the tedium of his company even from motives of interest. The hour of payment arrives, and now he is the servant of another master; instead of love and infatuation, wisdom and temperance are his bosom's lords; but the beloved has not discovered the change which has taken place in him, when he ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... in them both a great knowledge of truth and a defence of it, to the tedium of their friends: a demotion to the beauty of women and of this world; an outspoken hatred of certain things and men, and, alas! a permanent sadness also. All these things the gods gave them in the day when the decision was taken upon Olympus that these ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... prolixity. A defence was once made by a great artist for what, to the unregenerate mind, seemed the merciless tardiness of movement in one of Goethe's romances, that it was meant to impress on his readers the slow march and the tedium of events in human life. The lenient reader may give Wordsworth the advantage of the same ingenious explanation. We may venture on a counsel which is more to the point, in warning the student that not seldom in these blocks of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... you do it alone, but it would be sacrilegious to discuss the price of saucepans with a goddess," he explained. "Are you sure you can face the tedium?" ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... merely a cluster of houses and stores, a shack for a station, a freight house and corral with cattle-chutes, and a long platform on which the uneasy passengers might stroll to relieve the tedium of the wait. ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... among musty law books and threading legal intricacies, with occasional interruptions, caused by fits of impatience and disgust at the detail and tedium of study, until he had at length fought his way through and placed himself in the front rank of his profession. His brilliant achievement in the famous Jenkins case, in the outset of his career, had at once won for him a position at the bar which most ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... couple retired, taking one of those ways which in the neighborhood of Amsterdam are simply called "the ways." That is all they are. Whoever walks there for pleasure must take a good stock of impressions with him, in order to escape tedium. ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... played the old chorals, Dorothea listened quietly, though it could not be said that she was perfect at concealing her tedium. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... grotesque pinnacles, half-way up to the rood of the choir, had been washed, and dusted, and rubbed, and it all looked very smart. Ah! How often sitting there, in happy early days, on those lowly benches in front of the altar, have I whiled away the tedium of a sermon considering how best I might thread my way up amidst those wooden towers, and climb safely to ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... Philosopher,' is one of the few exceptions to the general dreariness and unreadableness of controversial writings in the dialogistic form. The elegance and easiness of his style, and the freshness and beauty of his descriptions of natural scenery by which the tedium of the controversy is relieved, render this not only a readable, but a fascinating book, even to the modern reader who has no present interest in the controversial question. It is, however, by no means ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... The monotonous tedium of routine slave-labor was very often broken by some scene of cruelty to one or another of the poor blacks, either by the master or his overseer; and woe unto the luckless one if the master should happen to ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... which his daughter had inherited, and which seemed all the more brilliant in contrast with his frosty eyebrows, and said genially, "It is very kind of you to be willing to aid in beguiling an old man's tedium." Turning to his daughter he added a little querulously, "There must be a storm brewing, Grace," and he drew in his breath as if ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... descriptive powers of the milliners in splendour and were scarcely eclipsed by the rich brocade and lace of Mrs. White, as she sailed in on Captain Henderson's arm; but her elaborate veil and feathery bonnet hardly concealed the weary tedium of her face, though to the shame, well nigh horror, of her sister, she was rouged. "I must, I must," she said; "he would be vexed if ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge |
