"Joyless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... three or four stupid-looking, tow-headed children. It was impossible for Phil to conceive how beautiful Mollie could be a member of such a family. Yet the unfortunate girl had told Phyllis that she had known no other than the hard, joyless life she ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... signs of drink he displayed, was no mean partner. His handsome face, head and shoulders above the tall woman he was dancing with, gazed out over the sea of dancers in all the freshness of his youthful joy, and triumph. He danced well, something he had contrived to learn in the joyless country from which he hailed. But there was no reflection of his joy in the faces of the two men gazing down from the shelter of the curtained box. There were only ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... mankind, and had filled his life with shame and trouble? For as Simonides used to say playfully that he always found his money-chest full but his gratitude-chest empty,[833] so the wicked contemplating their own vice soon find out that their gratification is joyless and hopeless,[834] and ever attended by fears and griefs and gloomy memories, and suspicions about the future, and distrust about the present. Thus we hear Ino, repenting for what she had done, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... with her recovered darling, was wholly satisfied, and gave thanks. For she perceived that, in this case, at least, marriage was no legal, conventional connection leaving the heart emptier than it found it—the bartering of precious freedom for a joyless bondage, an obligation, weary in the present, and hopeless of alleviation in the future, save by the reaching of that far-distant, heavenly country, concerning which it is comfortably assured us "that there they neither ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... making bread pills and looking hard at the middle of the table, "I'm glad of course to be able to give you a passage to 'Frisco; one sailor-man should help another, that's my motto. But when you want a thing in this world, you generally always have to pay for it." He laughed a brief, joyless laugh. "I have no idea ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he might realise how unreal was this life they were living, outwardly peaceful and understanding, deluding the world, but inwardly a place of tears. How she dreaded the night and its recurrent tears, and the hours when she could not sleep, and waited for the joyless morning, as one lost on the moor, blanched with cold, waits for the sun-rise! Night after night at a certain hour—the hour when she went to bed at last after that poignant revelation to Eglington—she wept, as she had wept then, heart-broken tears of disappointment, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... magic, that would keep her race alive. So drives the giantess to seek her mate, Joyless and choiceless, since ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... household, and found grateful solace in the occupations which the position involved. She once more began to take an interest in the prosaic affairs of everyday life, and became less addicted to looking forward to a solitary, joyless old age. So that, all things considered, this second bereavement was not to be regarded in the light of an affliction absolutely ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... of light breaking over jagged rocks—these are now beneath my eye—these alone I can detect—not a man—not an animal—not a tree. The great American Desert is a land of milk and honey in comparison with the joyless orb over which we are now moving. However, even yet we can predicate nothing positive. The atmosphere may have taken refuge in the depths of the chasms, in the interior of the craters, or even on the opposite side of the Moon, ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... harlequin, and lo! I stand The painted fool again and kiss my hand With jocund air to Folly's worshippers. So day by day life's bitter bread is earned With lips that smile and frame the mirthless joke, And frailer grows the soul that once was strong,— The joyless soul of one whose trade has turned Life's tragic mantle to a jester's cloak, Life's ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... and are regularly brought around by the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... is one thing I loathe, it is the God and His day that were taught to me when I was a child: joyless, hard, cruel. Fire—humph!—and brimstone for all but a few hundred. I remember. Well, I don't know yet if there is any better," with a vague look. "A man shifts for himself in the next chance as well as now, I suppose. Did you believe what you preached, Stephen?" with an abrupt change. "God! how ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... angered and wrathful against that host which He had crowned before with radiance and glory. For the traitors, to reward their work, He shaped a house of pain and grim affliction, and lamentations of hell. Our Lord prepared this torture-house of exiles, deep and joyless, for the coming of the angel hosts. Well He knew it lay enshrouded in eternal night, and filled with woe, wrapped in fire and piercing cold, smoke-veils and ruddy flame. And over that wretched realm He spread the brooding terror of torment. They had ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... him, in spite of that faint indefinable flavor of absurdity that pervaded his courtly bearing. She would never love him as she loved Capes, of course, but there are grades and qualities of love. For Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether. Much more temperate; the discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant, condescending wife. She had been quite convinced that an engagement with him and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise which distinguishes the ways ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... of whose power I sing, Electric, deathless energy of mind, Harp of the soul, by genius swept, awake! Inspire my strains, and aid me to portray The base and joyless vanities which man Madly prefers to everlasting bliss!— Come! let us mount gay Fancy's rapid car, And trace through forest and o'er mountain rude The bounding footsteps of the youthful bard, Yet new ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... American cousins were almost wholly unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in any section of human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was a satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr. Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... she remembered her bitter years of frustration and failure, and the meanest of mortals had a share of her holy sympathy; she gained her unexampled conquest by resolutely treading down despair, and her brave story should cheer the many girls who find life bleak and joyless. George Eliot was prepared to bear the worst that could befall her, and it was her frank and gentle acceptance of the facts of life that brought her joy in the end. We must also remember such people as Arkwright, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... placed in the hands of creditors, and the owners exiled from their paternal lands. There is an extravagance, I am told, that runs parallel with wealth; a lavish expenditure among the great; a senseless competition among the aspiring; a heedless, joyless dissipation among all the upper ranks, that often beggars even these splendid establishments, breaks down the pride and principles of their possessors, and makes too many of them mere place-hunters, or shifting absentees. It is thus that so many are thrown into the hands of government; and a court, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... duty, when it calls upon you to be a citizen and a parishioner, calls with too piping a voice? There is no rousing note, nothing of the resonance of a clarion call. A suggestion of poverty and the workhouse clings to everything parochial, something of drab and joyless. Is there no way of infusing colour into this depressing greyness, a martial timbre into this anaemic note? If we are to pay the piper let us hear him. Let the tax-collector go his rounds at the head of a brass band, playing patriotic airs. Let brocaded standard-bearers ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... being quick and bright; he believed in God and the church and the Royal Family and himself securely; in the wakeful night time he experienced a different and novel self, a bare-minded self, bleakly fearless at its best, shamelessly weak at its worst, critical, sceptical, joyless, anxious. The anxiety was quite the worst element of all. Something sat by his pillow asking grey questions: "What are you doing? Where are you going? Is it really well with the children? Is it really ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... the sky o'ercast,"[1] The joyless winter day Let others fear, to me more dear Than all the pride of May: The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul, My griefs it seems to join; The leafless trees my fancy ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... I most required a guide, left to the dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was before me.'—Medwin's ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the resolution begins immediately to express itself in movements which are closely dependent upon bodily actions. Even when I suddenly resolve to face some correctly- supposed disagreeable matter, or to think about some joyless thing, a bodily movement, and indeed quite an energetic one, will ensue upon the resolution—I may push my chair back, raise my elbows, perhaps put my head quickly between my hands, push the chair back again, and then begin to look or to think. Such actions, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... was a colorless, forbidding sort of a place. Only one company was stationed there, and my husband was nearly always scouting in the mountains north of us. The weather was severe, and the winter there was joyless and lonesome. The extreme cold and the loneliness affected my spirits, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... publish all these verses in one volume. They produce an impression of grey monotony which is hardly fair to the poet. The individuals change their names, but they pass through the same typical woe of childbirth, desertion, loveless old age, incipient insanity, with eternal joyless toil. One will form a higher opinion if one reads the separate volumes as they appeared, and not too much ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... they must do mischief, and waste their money, if they do not know how to turn it to account. Churches, and shops, and warehouses, and cottages, and small row, and place, and terrace houses, must be built and lived in, however joyless and inconvenient. And it is assuredly intended that all of us should have knowledge, and act upon our knowledge, in matters in which we are daily concerned, and not be left to the caprice of architects, or ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... it that so many professing Christians have such joyless lives as they have? Simply because they do not keep the conditions. If we will love Him so as to set our hearts upon Him, if we will desire Him as our chief good, if we will keep our eyes fixed upon Him, then, as sure as He is living and is the Truth, He will flood our hearts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then suddenly there was a strange alteration in her face; she gave a smile that was more joyless than her gravity—a conscious, insincere smile, and added, "When one has children, it's a ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... the centre of the scene, The white-haired matron, with monotonous tread, Plied the swift wheel, and, with her joyless mien, Sat like a Fate, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... the promise that if the day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... spirit of the season," while the roses are fresh within your hair, and the wine-cup flashes ruby in your hand. Yonder lies Pluto's meagrely-appointed mansion, and filmy shadows of the dead are waiting for you there, to swell their joyless ranks. To that unlovely region you must go, alas! too soon; but the golden present is yours, so drain it ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... After many years of joyless life, the blind grandmother had at last found something to make her happy; her days were no longer passed in weariness and darkness, one like the other without pleasure or change, for now she had always something to which she ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... believing? Her reflections were not suggested by a shrewd guess. She knew that the lot had been resorted to, and that the letters had been written to Elise and Albert which acquainted them with the result; and the peace of her prayerful soul was rent by the thought that a joyless surrender of human will to a higher was, perhaps, no better than the poor helpless slave's extorted sacrifice. The happiness of the household seemed to Benigna in her keeping. If they had gone lightly seeking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... tuft of snow piled on his broad shoulders, a monument of passive endurance. Thus every storm-bound bird seemed more or less uncomfortable, if not in distress. The storm was reflected in every gesture, and not one cheerful note, not to say song, came from a single bill. Their cowering, joyless endurance offered striking contrasts to the spontaneous, irrepressible gladness of the ouzel, who could no more help giving out sweet song than a rose sweet fragrance. He must sing, though ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... itself, along paths that had once echoed to the tread of slippered feet, armed sentries paced, their sharp challenges breaking the stillness of the night. Outside its wrecked fences strange men in stranger uniforms strode in and out of the joyless houses; tired pickets stacked their arias on the unswept piazzas, and panting horses nibbled the bark from the withered trees; rank weeds choked the gardens; dishevelled vines clung to the porches, and doors ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... into matrimony from this very feeling! How many a man whose hours have passed fleetingly at the pleasant tea-table, or by the warm hearth of some old country-house, going forth into the cold and cheerless night, reaches his far-off home only to find it dark and gloomy, joyless and companionless? How often has the hard-visaged look of his old butler, as, with sleepy eyes and yawning face, he hands a bed-room candle, suggested thoughts of married happiness? Of the perils of propinquity I have already spoken; the risks of contrast are also great. Have you ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... with a joyless mien, looking up towards the poop, the host invited his guest to accompany him there, for the benefit of what little breath of wind ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... this way and that he glared around him with his eyes, lest the angry fire should consume him. Then brave Iphicles, eager, methought, to help him, stumbled and fell to earth ere he might reach him, nor could he stand upright again, but lay helpless, like a weak old man, whom joyless age constrains to fall when he would not; so he lieth on the ground as he fell, till one passing by lift him up by the hand, regarding the ancient reverence for his hoary beard. Thus lay on the earth Iphicles, wielder of the shield. But I kept wailing as I beheld my sons ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... counted young at six-and-twenty; but it is those who have been nurtured tenderly in joyous homes. While I have been struggling with the hard world these many years. No wonder I am not as they—that I am quiet and silent, without mirth or winning grace, a creature worn out before her time, pale, joyless, deformed. Yes, let me teach myself that word, with all other truths that 'can quench this mad dream. Then, perhaps knowing all hope vain, I ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... but it is my duty to leave you, so farewell for ever!'—that is what he would have said to her, knowing all the time that life would be utterly joyless to him. Would Cyril, in his hot, untried youth, be capable of a like generosity, or would he cleave to his betrothed with passionate, one-sided fealty, vowing that nothing on earth should separate them as long as they ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... winds were out—a plaguy, blustering crew, driving hither and thither in a frolic that knew no law, buffeting either cheek, hustling bewildered vanes, cuffing the patient trees into a dull roar of protest that rose and fell, a sullen harmony, joyless and menacing. The skies were comfortless, and there was a sinister look about the cold grey pall that spoke of winter and the pitiless rain and the scream of the wind in tree-tops, and even remembered the existence ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... which he worked, and the care with which he conserved every smallest particle of ice, Elmer's motto seemed to be: "Haste not, waste not." But he did not appear to derive any great satisfaction from his task, let alone joy. In fact, Elmer seemed to be a joyless individual; one who habitually looked forward to the worst. On his broad face, of the complexion described in police reports as "pasty," melancholy sat enthroned. His nose was flat and broad, and flat and broad were his cheek bones, too. His hair was cut very short everywhere except ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... was strolling along the beach, biting my pencil reflectively, tremendously impressed by the solitude and the solemn thunder of the surf, a thought occurred to me—how unpleasant it would be if I suddenly stumbled on a summer boarder. As this joyless impossibility flitted across my mind, I ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... she never known a winter? 'Tis the dreary dark time of waitin', the sunless, joyless bit o' all the year, when the singin' birds fly away, the butterflies and flowers die, and the very trees sigh and moan in their bareness and decay. 'Tis an empty bit o' life, when all that makes life sweet falls to ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... noticed that he was indeed "failing." He looked-weary and sad, and the cold or defiant gleam in his steel-gray eyes, was changed into a wistful and painful expression that was very pathetic. I did not dare to invade his reserve with any tender of sympathy. Joyless and hopeless as he might be, I felt instinctively that he would play out his drama alone. Perhaps this was a mistake on my part: he may have been hungry for the word I did not speak. God knows. I was not lacking in ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... talking of the day's battle so destructive of heroes. Having achieved feats exceedingly difficult of accomplishment, Vasudeva and Arjuna, at last, reached the (Pandava) encampment. Then that slayer of hostile heroes, viz., Vibhatsu, beholding the camp joyless and melancholy and everything to be in confusion, addressed Krishna with an agonised heart, and said, "O Janardana, no auspicious trumpet blows today, its blasts mingled with the beat of drums and the loud blare of conchs. The sweet Vina also is nowhere played upon in accompaniment with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... foresee the living death of disease that is waiting close at hand for so many, to know how terrible a proportion of those fair children are walking unconsciously into a weary, wretched, powerless, joyless, useless maturity. Among the myriad triumphs of advancing civilization, there seems but one formidable ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... profound respect for the externals of Mohammedanism, and are sincere in their practice of piety and the obligations of religion and charity; but they have always indulged in the fancies and ideas of the great school of free-thinking philosopher Sofis, whose observance of the ordinances of severe and joyless life ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... well these things in my heart, and ever felt the deepest interest in all that has been written and said upon the subject, and the most profound respect and loving sympathy for those heroic women, who, in the face of law and public sentiment, have dared to sunder the unholy ties of a joyless, loveless union. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... solitude, of life grown weary, Well pleased they see their charms decay. Each day, alas! the past resembling, Time loiters through their halls and bowers; In idleness, and fear, and trembling, The captives pass their joyless hours. The youngest seek, indeed, reprieve Their hearts in striving to deceive Into oblivion of distress, By vain amusements, gorgeous dress, Or by the noise of living streams, In soft translucency ...
— The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems • Alexander Pushkin and other authors
... to the abyss, The cataract of the Nile falls down and dulls the senses Of the joyless folk to every other sound, So stood I too, with spirit all intent Upon the living light, that lights the world; Dead henceforth to all the lesser splendours, While that light shines, let every other thing Be to the voluntary ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... of one who feels, too late, that the sympathies of his nature have avenged themselves upon him. They have prostrated, with a joyless life and the prospect of a reluctant death, my selfish purpose to keep aloof from mortal disquietudes, and be a pleasant idler among care-stricken and laborious men. I have other regrets, too, savoring more of my old spirit. ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... shining ran With peaceful floods, where the soft voice prevails Of building doves in lordly trees set high, Trees which enclose a home where love abides — His love and hers, a passioned ecstasy; Your tone has caught its echo and derides My joyless lot, as face down pressed I lie Upon the shifting sand, and hear the reeds Voicing a thin, dissonant threnody Unto the cliff and wind-tormented weeds. As with the faint half-lights of jade toward The shore you come ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... FAITHLESS SARAZIN. Spenser uses the word Saracen in the general sense of pagan. During the Middle Ages the Saracen power was a menace to Europe, and the stronghold of infidelity. The names of the three Paynim brethren, Sansfoy, Sansjoy, and Sansloy,—faithless, joyless, and lawless,—suggest the point ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... islets, of which some sixty have houses upon them and yield harvests to their inhabitants. The main characteristics of the first two cataracts are repeated with slight variations in the cases of the three which follow,—at Hannek, at Guerendid, and El-Hu-mar. It is Egypt still, but a joyless Egypt bereft of its brightness: impoverished, disfigured, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... calculating, feeling with her fingers for the gold chain, a mere golden-fleshed, rose-flushed hireling, solid and prosaic. The go-between is dimly seen in the background, but the face of the suitor is a strange, ironic study: past youth, worn, joyless, and bitter, taking his pleasure mechanically and with cynical detachment. The "Storm calmed by S. Mark" (Academy) was, in Mr. Berenson's ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... into royal, radiant womanhood, more beautiful than ever, but to whom there comes occasionally an irresistible longing to revisit her old mountain home, for the years of happiness and love have obliterated all bitter memories of the loveless, joyless childhood, and only the ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... opportunity of expressing what you must long ago have suspected. Edna, you know very well that I love you better than every thing else—that I have loved you from the first day of our acquaintance; and I have come to tell you that my happiness is in your dear little hands; that my future will be joyless unless you share it; that the one darling hope of my life is to call you my wife. Do not draw your hand from mine! Dear Edna, let me keep it always. Do I mistake your feelings when I hope that you ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... and looked on, comparing this one fine summer day with all the summer, winter, spring and autumn days that she remembered. She clenched her firm little hands in an effort to keep back the tears, and stared at her father, from whom so much sorrow had come to her life, and thought of the joyless existence ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... Gunnar the war-king cried out o'er the weeping hall: "Wail on, O women forsaken, for the mightiest woman born! Now the hearth is cold and joyless, and the waste bed lieth forlorn. Wail on, but amid your weeping lay hand to the glorious dead, That not alone for an hour may lie Queen Brynhild's head: For here have been heavy tidings, and the Mightiest under shield Is laid on the bale high-builded ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they wear a cold and joyless smile. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... that they can expand in the sunshine of the love which is their due." Ellen Key, similarly, while pointing out (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 14, 265) that the tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within "the whited sepulchre of marriage" is now being broken, exalts the privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there may be a few exceptional cases in which women may withdraw themselves from motherhood for the sake of the other demands of their ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... those who had done wickedness in the world above were imprisoned by her in those gloomy regions. To her came also all those who had died, not on the battlefield, but of old age or disease. And though these were treated kindly enough, theirs was a joyless life in comparison with that of the dead warriors who were feasting and fighting in the halls of Valhalla, under the kindly rule of ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... surrounded by a numerous household of serfs. Her sons were in the government service at Petersburg; her daughters were married; she went out very little, and in solitude lived through the last years of her miserly and dreary old age. Her day, a joyless and gloomy day, had long been over; but the evening of her life ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... young man this seemed such an irrelevant remark that he was silent for some time, striving to fathom its significance. As his head sank lower and lower, and he seemed to lose himself completely in joyless revery, the girl shot occasional glances at him out of the corners of her eyes. She had spent the preceding winter in a factory in a crude but stirring little New England town, and had come back to Nova Scotia ill content with the monotony ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... causes of the barren lifeless shape into which Theology then, for the most part, threw itself. I have never made that department of Ecclesiastical History my study: and who does not turn away from what is joyless and dreary, to greener meadows, and more fertile fields? It shall only be remarked that when the Credibility of Religion is the thing generally denied, Evidences will of necessity be the form which much of the Theological ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... lyre's soft murmurs go, Up from the cold and joyless earth, Back to the God who bade them flow, Whose moving spirit sent them forth. But as for me, O God! for me, The lowly creature of Thy will, Lingering and sad, I sigh to Thee, An ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... as she sat upright in her little bed, with her head bandaged, and her fixed and sightless eyes, she answered meekly and readily to all the questions we put to her. Poor little thing! she was shocking to look at; one of the many innocent beings whose lives are to be rendered sad and joyless by this revolution. The doctor ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... of it. She had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, overwhelmed her with reproaches. For consolation she had but the despair of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... absent a month. Business of a perplexing nature, which it was impossible to explain then, called him from me, but he would shorten as much as possible the days of absence which would be dreary and joyless to him. I was overwhelmed with grief at the thought of his leaving me; my nerves were still weak, and I wept in all the abandonment of sorrow. I feared for him the dangers that beset the path of the traveller—sickness, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... by the right instead of the wrong end. Why are our occasional attempts to deal with the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which regulates the relations of the sexes. A man, by falling ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... tell some droll tale, and another would say something comical in order to make him laugh; and laugh he did, he must laugh; it would never do to let those fellows know what was passing in his mind; so he laughed loud as any of them, but what a laugh!—how empty and hollow, how joyless and unreal, how unlike his former bursts of feeling!—a got-up laugh, which shewed plainer than ever something was wrong. Abe knew it, and he felt it was of no use trying any longer to keep up a sham happiness, and all the time be in torments from a guilty conscience; he therefore resolved ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... me, And it would have been more happy. Had I not been born and nurtured, And had never grown in stature, 220 Till I saw these days of sorrow, And this joyless time o'ertook me, Had I died in six nights only, Or upon the eighth had perished. Much I should not then have needed, But a shroud a span-long only, And of earth a tiny corner. Little then had wept my mother, Fewer tears had shed ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... congenial. We dwelt too much in the happy present to give ourselves up to the historical past; but I do not think one gets the sweetest juices out of Rome unless he gives way to the melancholy vein now and then, and "stalks apart in joyless reverie." ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... longer felt in her heart the bitter resentment toward Olga Vseslavovna that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world where there was such deep ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... and joyless as the wide waste lying hushed around me, unblessed with the verdure of a single hope, a single love; and as I looked down the coming years, my way seemed very solitary, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Whose Bed is undefil'd and chast pronounc't, Present, or past, as Saints and Patriarchs us'd. Here Love his golden shafts imploies, here lights His constant Lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard, Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask, or Midnight Bal, Or Serenate, which the starv'd Lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. 770 These lulld by Nightingales imbraceing slept, And on thir naked limbs the flourie roof Showrd Roses, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... private self-approval, who are ever ready to do harsh and cruel things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize upon religion and turn it into persecution, and upon beauty to torment it on the altars of some joyless vice. We cannot do with such souls; we have no use for them, and it is very easy indeed to step from that persuasion to the belief that God has no use ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... disappointment of Demeter at finding {56} her hopes thus blighted, succeeded in effecting a compromise by inducing his brother Aides to allow Persephone to spend six months of the year with the gods above, whilst during the other six she was to be the joyless companion of her grim lord below. Accompanied by her daughter, the beautiful Persephone, Demeter now resumed her long-abandoned dwelling in Olympus; the sympathetic earth responded gaily to her bright ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... that bore The hardy Byron to his native shore— In horrid climes, where Chiloe's tempests sweep Tumultuous murmurs o'er the troubled deep, 'Twas his to mourn misfortune's rudest shock, Scourg'd by the winds, and cradled on the rock, To wake each joyless morn and search again The famish'd haunts of ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... of feeling or sympathy; yet though she obtruded her grief on none, it was equally true that no gleam of returning cheerfulness ever lightened the gloom which enveloped her. A something there was in the hopeless, joyless expression of her beautiful face, which made the heart ache; yet none offered sympathy, or strove to console her, for she seemed unapproachable, with the cold, haughty glance of other days. Painfully perceptible was the difference between Christian fortitude and perfect hopelessness—gentle, ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... November, and "in March the winter's snow, though much reduced, still lay on a level with the fences, nor was it until April that the ice broke up in Fore River." They were difficult—those days ushered in by the Reverend Joseph Hull. Through long nights and cold winters and an endless round of joyless living, Weymouth expiated well for the sins of her youth. Even as late as 1767 we read of the daughter of Parson Smith, of Weymouth—now the wife of John Adams, of Quincy—scrubbing the floor of her own bed-chamber the ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... beneath thy dread expanse, One hopeless, dark idolater of chance, Content to feed with pleasures unrefin'd, The lukewarm passions of a lowly mind; Who mouldering earthward, 'reft of every trust, In joyless union wedded to the dust, Could all his parting energy dismiss, And call this barren world sufficient bliss? 1584 CAMPBELL: Pl. of Hope, Pt. ii., ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... expectation, none that was mobile, none into which the rhythm and poetry of life had entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reward lie, but in the work itself. If she wins great popularity she is likely to find that there is nothing that shifts so quickly and is such a quicksand. If material wealth is her sole object she will harden into the thing she seeks and add but another joyless barbarian to a modern world congratulating itself that barbarism is a thing of the past, and yet presenting the spectacle of a mammon worship such as has never been seen before. If gold is her end, and not the means to a nobler end, then she will find herself constantly sacrificing higher issues ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... The tempest hissed through all my outstretched boughs, Hither and thither tossed me in its snows, Beneath the joyless heaven. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... deprived of his Juliet; and she clasps his neck in their last agonies, and follows him to the same fatal shore. One strong idea takes possession of the mind and overrules every other; and even life itself, joyless without that, becomes an object of indifference or loathing. There is at least more of imagination in such a state of things, more vigour of feeling and promptitude to act, than in our lingering, languid, protracted attachment to life for its own poor sake. It ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the volcano; hopes extinguished beneath a profound sense of the social annihilation to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind. And by the side of the poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless, self-sustained, drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and of poetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul and brain, stood Lucien, graceful ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... who know no parents' care: Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there. Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, Forsaken wives, and mothers ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... these "forgotten men" were the "forgotten women." "Thin and wrinkled in youth from ill-prepared food, clad without warmth or grace, living in untidy houses, working from daylight till bedtime at the dull round of weary duties, the slaves of men of equal slovenliness, the mothers of joyless children—all uneducated if not illiterate." "This sight," Page told his hearers, "every one of you has seen, not in the countries whither we send missionaries, but in the borders of the State of North Carolina, in this ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... seemed nothing to do. A paternal government had found occupation and pay for all other classes of women, also a franc and a half a day for the soldier's wife or mother, but the daughter of joy was left very joyless indeed, with the cold misery of a room from which she could not be evicted "pendant la guerre." They haunted the cafes, the boulevards,—ominous, pitiful specters of the manless ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... of critical independence and superior self-righteousness. As the new arrivals walked down the main street, half beach, half thoroughfare, their baggage following them in low trolleys drawn by porters at their heels, like a decorous funeral, the joyless faces of the lookers-on added to the resemblance. Beyond them, in the prolonged northern twilight, the waters of the bay took on a peculiar pewtery brightness, but with the usual mourning-edged border of Scotch seacoast scenery. Low banks of cloud lay on the chill ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... rewards—when he most needed its consolations? Hitherto, in that love he had lived in the future—he had silenced the voice of the turbulent human passion by the whisper of the patient angel, "A little while yet, and thy bride sits beside thy throne!" Now what was that future! how joyless! how desolate! The splendour vanished from Ambition—the glow from the face of Fame—the sense of Duty remained alone to counteract the pleadings of Affection; but Duty, no longer dressed in all the gorgeous colourings it took before from glory and power—Duty stern, and harsh, and ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... kind to such as are my second, In spirit and in truth; Have pity on their helpless age And on their joyless youth. Remember them whene'er you feast, And on your downy bed, For the sake of Him who "had not where On earth to ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... reached an advanced age, but his life was joyless. He never married, and at his death Meissen ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... death the funeral flood shall pour. Thou and thy son at least forbear In offerings to my shade to share, For by the plot thy guile has laid His consecration will be stayed. This very day how shall I brook To meet each subject's altered look? To mark each gloomy joyless brow That was so bright ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... years have encompassed with a proletarian suburb, its once noble domain narrowed to the bare acres of a stinted breathing ground, Aston Hall looks forth upon joyless streets and fuming chimneys, a wide welter of squalid strife. Its walls, which bear the dints of Roundhead cannonade, are blackened with ever-driving smoke; its crumbling gateway, opening aforetime upon a stately avenue of chestnuts, shakes as the steam-tram ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... spirit of defiance existed between the king and queen. Both were wretched. Such are always the wages of sin. Ten more joyless years passed away. The rupture between the royal pair was such that they could scarcely endure each other. Louis himself was the first to inform the queen of the news so satisfactory to him, so heart-rending to her, ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... analysed so deeply in his Cite antique. They subsisted in all their strength in Assyria, and must have had all the consequences, all the social effects that they had elsewhere, and yet we find mentioned a home for the dead, a joyless country in which they could assemble in their countless numbers; as Egypt had its Ament and Greece her Hades, so Chaldaea and Assyria had their hell, their place of departed ghosts. We know from the narrative of Istar that they looked upon it as an immense building, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... but he saw no reason why he should be taxed for things which he disliked and disapproved. The result of that evening confirmed him in his resolution. It was a scene of drinking, gluttony, secret fear, endless squabbling, and joyless excitement. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... of which the people had been robbed. "We only ask freedom of speech,—the right to exercise all the franchises conferred by the Constitution upon an American. Can you safely deny us these things?" Mingled also with pathetic appeals were joyless pictures of the ravages of war, and cheerless glimpses into the future of a Republic with its bulwarks of liberty torn away. "We stand to-day," he continued, "amid new made graves; we stand to-day in a land filled with mourning, and our soil is ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... his lips Might shrink half startled, like a guilty man Who wrestles with his dream; as some pale shape Gliding half hidden through the dusky stems, Would thrust a hand before the lifted bowl, Whispering: A little space, and thou art mine! It may be on that joyless feast his eye Dwelt with mere outward seeming; he, within, Took measure of his soul, and knew its strength, And by that silent knowledge, day by day, Was calm'd, ennobled, comforted, sustain'd. It may be; but not less his brow was smooth, And his clear ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Joyless, vacant, barren hours prefigured themselves to me, drifting through my brain, till their vacant shapes crowded it into darkness. I must do something! I would go out; a walk would be good for me. Moreover, wishing to purchase a parting gift for Adelaide and Ann, I would go ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... They two were the dearest persons in the world to her; and both were now gone into the mysterious darkness of the next world, meeting there perhaps with all earthly discords forgiven and forgotten more perfectly than they could have been here. She remembered how her father's dull, joyless face used to brighten when Roland was talking to him—talking with slow, unaccustomed fingers, which the dumb man would watch intently, and catch the meaning of the phrase before it was half finished, flashing back an eager ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... some explanation of this hard, real life; the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... whom worry and anxiety have become habitual likewise lives a discordant life. He looks out of a joyless present, back on a past devoid of interest, and forward into a future ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... be very much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be real he must be joyless—in the United States, at least—is perhaps because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... the thought of a young, bright world for the lovers to enjoy; whilst at the same time it completes the contrast, which the first introduction of the old bedesman suggested, between the old, the poor, and the joyless, and the young, the ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... are those perhaps, in the present assembly, who repute godliness fanaticism, and the sobriety of Christian peace the gloom of a joyless spirit; but who cannot forbear sighing out, with the prophet of mammon, 'Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.' If they proceed no further, their wish will not be granted. None shall die the death of the righteous, ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... upon the fender, her tired, passive face inclined meditatively, her rusty old black gown drawn back by one hand from the snapping sparks. "No," she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling with pride in her voice. "I was ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Saviour, and makes salvation personal; and it is only by studying faiths that many have come at last to an indirect and circuitous acquaintance with Christ. By some such misdirection Bunyan was misled. In quest of faith he went a long and joyless journey, and was wearied with the greatness of his way. It was secretly urged upon his mind, that if he had faith he would be able to work miracles; and passages of Scripture were borne in upon his mind, ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... in my company To seal this severance more fast and sure. A joyless fellowship, i' faith, 'twill be, Yet must we fare together, I and he, Till I shall tread ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... reproached her, he never really blamed her; certainly he never pitied himself. But he carried a heavy heart around with him, and his few smiles were joyless things. ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... soul he sitteth joyless, Mournful in mood. He many times thinks 30 That no end will e'er come to the cares he endures. Then must he think how throughout the world The gracious God often gives his help And manifold honors to many an earl ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... liberty of secluding one's self over the bottle—public opinion sees this, and arrives at the not unreasonable conclusion that the people who submit to such social laws as these are the most stolid, stern and joyless people on the face of the earth. Such are Scotchmen supposed to be, when viewed at a distance. But how do Scotchmen appear when they are seen under a closer light, and judged by the test of personal experience? There are no people more ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... native place, the Isle of Man, where her virtues and accomplishments could best be appreciated. How soon, sweet maid! how like a fleeting dream The winning graces, all thy virtues seem! How soon arrested in thy early bloom Has fate decreed thee to the joyless tomb! Nor beauty, genius, nor the Muse's care, Nor aught could move the tyrant Death to spare: Ah! could their power revoke the stern decree, The fatal shaft had past, unfelt by thee! But vain thy wit, thy sentiment refined, Thy charms ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... state cannot endure for more than a few moments, and passing away, it left me weary and despondent. With dull, joyless eyes I continued gazing for upwards of an hour on the prospect beneath me; for I had now given up all hopes of seeing Yoletta, not yet having encountered a single person since starting for my ride. All about ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... me, to recur to events long buried. It is not essential, however, that I should weary you with the minutiae of circumstances which many years ago smothered the sunshine in my life, and left me in darkness, a lonely and joyless woman. I have resided here long enough to learn the noble generosity of your character, and to you, as a true Christian gentleman, I come for aid,—premising only that what I am about ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... not reform!" With which Parthian shot, delivered with spirit, Miss Theodosia turned her back and Elly Precious' back to the intruder. What was left for him to do but retire, vanquished and diminished? The business of the bath went on, but joyless now. There was no further putting off of the horrid, bothery sleeves that Elly Precious abhorred. He set up indignant wails, and Miss Theodosia's soul wailed ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... been made quite clear to the Britisher that he must go, and it had been made quite clear by the Britisher that he should stay. Always outside the Hotel de Ville at 2.30 of an afternoon was this queue of natives, each waiting his turn to be admitted to the joyless sanctum of the Commissaire, there to receive those illegible documents without which no French home is complete. Never before had a British soldier fallen in with them, and, when requested to dismiss, showed signs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... unpleasing, displeasing; disagreeable, unpalatable, bitter, distasteful; uninviting; unwelcome; undesirable, undesired; obnoxious; unacceptable, unpopular, thankless. unsatisfactory, untoward, unlucky, uncomfortable. distressing; afflicting, afflictive; joyless, cheerless, comfortless; dismal, disheartening; depressing, depressive; dreary, melancholy, grievous, piteous; woeful, rueful, mournful, deplorable, pitiable, lamentable; sad, affecting, touching, pathetic. irritating, provoking, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... aforetime I excelled. But indeed, were it possible to remain unconscious of the change, the life left would scarcely be worth living; but given that there is a consciousness of the change, then must the existence left to live be found by comparison insipid, joyless, a death in life, devoid of life's charm. But indeed, if it is reserved for me to die unjustly, then on those who unjustly slay me lies the shame (since, given injustice is base, how can any unjust action ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... could make her feet go in a one-two-three triangle with approximate accuracy, if she didn't take any liberties with them. She was relieved to find that Todd danced with a heavy accuracy which kept her from stumbling.... But their performance was solemn and joyless, while by her skipped Sam Weintraub, in evening clothes with black velvet collar and cuffs, swinging and making fantastic dips with the lovely Miss Moore, who cuddled into his arms and swayed to ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... wheedling, whimpering she," who once held lord Hastings under her distaff, but her annoying jealousy, "vexatious days, and jarring, joyless nights," drove him away from her. Being jealous of Jane Shore, she accused her to the duke of Gloster of alluring lord Hastings from his allegiance, and the lord protector soon trumped up a charge against both; the lord chamberlain he ordered to execution for treason, and Jane ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... November, 1883, the very year when the Pall Mall Gazette exposure started "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," and the conscience of England was stirred as never before over this joyless city in the East End of its capital. Even then, vigorous and drastic plans were being discussed, and a splendid program of municipal reforms was already dimly outlined. Of all these, however, I had heard nothing but ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... look triumphantly through the solemn, purplish blue eyes of the young martyr, and Beryl knew that her own heart beat under the pamted folds of the diploidion; that she had epitomized in a symbolic picture, the history of her own joyless youth. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... it is not to be wondered at that I should not feel at all sedentary on the Sunday afternoons after church-time. In fact, I affected any position rather than the sitting one. But all the Sundays were not joyless to me. One, in particular, though the former part of it had been passed in sickening fear, and the middle in torturing pain, its termination was marked with a heartfelt joyousness, the cause of ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... had its hideous way with him. Physicians would have given a name to his mental and physical condition. He had heard these names often—applied to men the strain of whose lives had been like the strain of his own, and had left them as it had left him—jaded, joyless, breaking things. Some of them had been broken and had died or were dragging out bruised and tormented days in their own homes or in mad-houses. He always shuddered when he heard their names, and rebelled with sick fear against the mere mention of them. They had worked as he had worked, ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... such possession of his soul that he lost his appetite, was unable to sleep, and day by day grew more and more wasted and languid. His tutor and director noticing how his health was affected and how pale, listless, and joyless he had become, often questioned him as to the cause of his dejection and evident suffering, but his tormentor who had filled his mind with this delusion, being what is called a dumb devil, the poor youth ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... again soon? Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than a fortnight at a time; and he has now been resident eight weeks. If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Lord made anguish a reward, a home In banishment, hell groans, hard pain, and bade That torture house abide the joyless fall. When with eternal night and sulphur pains, Fullness of fire, dread cold, reek and red flames, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... come back from taking them home; and have left them delighted with their day, the recollection of which will long make them happy. This morning I was pitying those whose lives are obscure and joyless; now, I understand that God has provided a compensation with every trial. The smallest pleasure derives from rarity a relish otherwise unknown. Enjoyment is only what we feel to be such, and the luxurious man feels no longer: satiety ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... crypt I left so late, Whose only altar is its rusted grate,— Sepulchral, rayless, joyless as it seems, Shamed by the glare of May's refulgent beams,— While the dim seasons dragged their shrouded train, Its paler splendors were not quite in vain. From these dull bars the cheerful firelight's glow Streamed through the casement o'er the spectral ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... year London society and the ranks of the landed gentry are reinforced by returned Australians and New Zealanders and Cape-of-Good-Hopers and China and India merchants, who feel that their hard labors and long exile have left life empty and joyless until they see the names of their wives and daughters in the Gazette among the presentations at ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... never to know life even in the monotonous, joyless way of the normal worker, they hung there to be dipped into whenever the master that reigned over this inferno, or his immediate underlings, desired some ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... this, that the beauty of a plant or of a tree is a sign of its relation to the earth in which it lives. If its hold is weak—if it loosely finds a place for a weak root—it lies on the ground, helpless, strengthless, joyless. But firmly placed and feeling safe in its security, it gives freely of its blossoms; or, year after year, like a tree, shows us its wonderous mass of leaf, all of it a sign that earth ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... a heathen, and the melancholy, self-tormenting Nazarenes are quite as little to my taste as the dry and joyless Hebrews. May our dear Lady of Sidon, holy Astarte, forgive me, that I kneel before the many sorrowed Mother of the Crucified and pray. Only my knee and my tongue worship death—my heart remains true to life. But do not look so sourly," continued ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... year departed— Felt it of all hope bereft; Restless, joyless, broken-hearted, Then the warring bands he left;— Bade on Joppa's sandy shore Seamen hoist the swelling sail; Swift the bark to Europe bore O'er ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... afraid of death, however; for his life had been a joyless one, a monotonous existence of perpetual toil, unrelieved by any home joys or social pleasures. He was not a bad man, for he was ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... sunk in deep despair, Her garments torn, her bosom bare, Impatient Freedom lies! Her matted tresses madly spread, 40 To every sod, which wraps the dead, She turns her joyless eyes. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... aloud the Te Deum. Wogan looked at her in surprise as the first notes were sung, and the woful appeal in her eyes compelled him to as brave a show as he could make of joining in the hymn. But the words faltered, the tune wavered, joyless and hollow ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... himself upon his bed. The future appeared to him joyless, and he dreaded the inner conflict of the next few weeks; and yet he soon sank into a peaceful slumber. And again there was silence in the house. A plain old house it was, with many angles, and secret holes and corners—no place, in truth, for glowing enthusiasm and consuming ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... strife. What wyrde hath hither my jewel vayned, destiny: carried off. And done me in this del and great danger? sorrow. Fro we in twain were towen and twayned, since: pulled: divided. I have been a joyless jeweller." ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... faculties; I should not have whispered, even inwardly, that I longed for liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by which my heart might have ventured to intimate its distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony and joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its panting desire for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my small bedroom at Mrs. King's lodgings, and they two should have been my household ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... affected a little satisfaction. His mother was somewhat hurt. His behaviour caused her to revert in meditation again and again to the futility of Sophia's career, and the waste of her attributes. She had grown old and hard in joyless years in order to amass this money which Cyril would spend coldly and ungratefully, never thinking of the immense effort and endless sacrifice which had gone to its collection. He would spend it as carelessly as though ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... disappointed in love,—for the truth never approached to my ideal. Nursed early in the lap of Romance, enamoured of the wild and the adventurous, the commonplaces of life were to me inexpressibly tame and joyless. And yet indolence, which belongs to the poetical character, was more inviting than that eager and uncontemplative action which can alone wring enterprise from life. Meditation was my natural element. I loved to spend the noon reclined by some shady stream, and ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... threw too far and the Dwarfs could not throw far enough, while the Asyniur and the Vana threw far and wide of the mark. In the midst of all that glee and gamesomeness it was strange to see one standing joyless. But one stood so, and he was of ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... he'll be callin',' she said, with a great sigh, and a joyless smile. 'Now git ye away i' ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... with dark southern eyes and hair comes from the house. Age about 36. Handsome features, but joyless; dark eyebrows drawn towards one another; mouth set grimly; nostrils large and strained: a face set to one tragic purpose. A man of few words, fewer gestures, and much significance. On the whole, interesting, and even attractive, but not ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... band." Her favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom she elevated into a mystic and a prophet. The ways of the Church of England did not please her. She had nothing but scorn for "a joyless curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips," or for "the Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church" filled with "sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen." But the conclusion of the ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... measured by the relations of man to man. To him, all must end in the "tongueless silence of the dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air. ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... fraud and falsehood thou mad'st me thy wife—that shall be forgotten! Five joyless years have I spent in this house— all shall be forgotten from the day ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... act, but there is no obedience in their wills, nor any cheerfulness in their hearts. The elder brother in the parable could say, 'Neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment,' but his service had been joyless, and he never remembered having received gifts that made him 'merry ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... hath made Can tell the hue of their faces, or their rags by filth o'er-laid: For this hath our age invented—these are the sons of the free, Who shall bear our name triumphant o'er every land and sea. Read ye their souls in their faces, and what shall help you there? Joyless, hopeless, shameless, angerless, set is their stare: This is the thing we have made, and what shall help us now, For the field hath been laboured and tilled and the teeth of ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris |
