"Lonesomeness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the distances and the lonesomeness, it was the pleasant habit of candidates to make their electioneering tours together. In seeking reelection in 1838, Lincoln was accompanied by Mr. Ewing. They stopped at one country house about dark, when the good wife was going a-milking, while her husband was still a-field. Intent on securing ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... who had tried to instruct his wife at home and celebrate the fact of her having reared a soldier for the army, he failed himself to stand the trial: he began to feel the pangs of longing and lonesomeness. The imminent parting with his son, to take place on the morrow, seemed to depress ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... depends upon this machinery that one must always take it into consideration when reckoning the pleasures and even the comforts of life anywhere, and this is especially true in the country. We have such a lot of people about that our servants cannot sing the song of lonesomeness that makes dolor for most suburbanites. They are "churched" as often as they wish, and we pay city wages; but still it is not all clear sailing in this quarter of Polly's realm. I fancy that we get on better than ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... had learned to like big cities. 'I'd always be miserable in a city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here. Father Kelly says everybody's put into this world for something, and I know what I've got to do. I'm going to see that my little girl has a better chance than ever I had. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... then,—narrow water—courses which my horse followed in mid stream, and, more interesting yet, goatherds with their flocks, Mexicans all, who seemed to understand no English, but were picturesque enough to look at and a welcome break in the extreme lonesomeness of ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... them evil, princess? My friends all believe me dead. Can they mourn for me forever? They can forget me, alas! more easily than I in my lonesomeness ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... when I prefer lonesomeness to the only company available," Danvers returned, and he raised his eyes from the cards and looked Montrose full in the eye ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... great droves, and, before my ammunition was exhausted, I had secured plenty of meat. But at that, I came near dying before I learned that one who lives upon a strictly meat diet must measure carefully the proportions of lean and fat. Someway, I learned. And somehow, starving, freezing, half-mad of lonesomeness, I got through the winter, but I am glad you did not see me when the first wild geese came north. If ever there was a wild man, dressed in skins and dancing in the sun, it ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... out what was in his own heart when she resumed, "It's the lonesomeness of it. We are having success. But, what ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... on his journey, except the military scarecrow, he felt a touch of lonesomeness and was glad when he gradually approached near enough to see that this person was a kindly looking German who had the wondering air of a sight-seer. In their leisurely itineraries they at last met in front of a small bronze copy of ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... Unc' Billy wanted his family, whom he had left way down in "Ol' Virginny." Finally he told Jimmy Skunk all about it, and for once Unc' Billy had forgotten how to grin. Yes, Sir, Unc' Billy had forgotten how to grin. Instead he just wept, wept great big tears of lonesomeness. ...
— The Adventures of Unc' Billy Possum • Thornton W. Burgess
... seals and the bears and white foxes coming south on the moving ice are signs of spring. There is a stir in the air as if the people as well sensed that the back of the long winter was broken. How it has flown! You cannot fancy my sensations of lonesomeness when I think that I shall never spend another in this country. You cannot describe or analyze the lure of the land and its people, but it is there, and grips you. I have grown to love it, and you will welcome home an uncomplimentary homesick comrade ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... year Cassowary was a sort of king in the locality of his birth, though this rank brought him no isolation. Now he is without rank and grim in his lonesomeness. True to the sentiments of his race, the men and women who knew him when he was strong and lusty strive to make him comfortable in his dotage; but he is repellent. His surliness does not vex them. They pity and excuse and endeavour to soothe. To strangers whom Cassowary ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the girl in a low voice, "do you-uns b'lieve ef thar war passin' continual on a sure enough county road that thar cur'ous white light would kem on the old witch's face in the night-time? Ain't that a sort'n spell fur the dark an' the lonesomeness ter tarrify a few quaking dwellers round about? Surely many folks comin' an' goin' wouldn't see sech. Ghostful things ain't common in a crowd." She moved a little nearer her brother, and laid a hand ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Europe; or a college education for the boy; or a musical career for the daughter. It does not matter what it is, the "it" is the thing itself, and, having found it, the world for you has changed. The lonesomeness, and the hopelessness, and the wretchedness of life have disappeared. There is always in the future the "it"; no matter how dark and gloomy the road may be, it is illuminated at the far end with the realized "it." It is the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... bordered the opposite shore of the river—solemn sentinels guarding the beauty and purity of this virgin land. Near her were sloping hills, dotted with thorny cactus and other prickly plants, and now rose a bald rock spire with its suggestion of grim lonesomeness. In the southern and eastern distances were the plains, silent, vast, unending. It seemed she had come to dwell in a land deserted by some cyclopean race. Its magnificent, unchanging beauty had ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of nerves and fancies. What he needs now is a friend—his own sort—some one that speaks his own tongue. He thinks the decent world will have none of him,—a weak, pitiful thing isn't worth the saving. Fair perished with the lonesomeness, he is. 'I used to know women,' he was telling me, 'pretty women, clever ones; I miss them—the sound of their voices and the look of their white hands and their making tea, and the light, gay talk we'd be having!' ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... "That's lonesomeness and a crick in the neck!" was the flippant denial. "My woman would stand where her brains entitle her to stand, beside her husband, looking into his eyes, working for him, working with him, being together with him straight through everything. That's ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... sat a pale, sad man. His apparent lonesomeness interested us deeply. We could not imagine what he was there for. Every once in a while he would get up and leave the orchestra, and dive down under the stage, and appear behind the scenes, where ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... fro before his mouth, rhythmically twanging the tongue of a Jew's-harp, upon which he was playing "To My Sweet Sunny South Take Me Home." He breathed heavily and irregularly. His eyes were on the big white clouds in the blue sky, and his heart was filled with the poetry of lonesomeness that sometimes comes to boys in pensive moods. For the days when he had lived with his father, a nomad of the creeks that flowed by half a score of waterways into the Mississippi, were upon the far horizon of his consciousness, and the memory of those days made him ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... and puts into more homely words the feeling of 'lonesomeness' that is looked upon as almost the worst of evils by the Irish countryman, as we see by his proverb: 'It is better to be quarreling than to be lonesome.' 'I would be lonesome in it,' is often the reason given for a refusal to go from bog or mountain cabin to some crowded place 'where there is not ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... for some time. Studying her face, he saw an expression of lonesomeness gather and strengthen and deepen until she looked so forlorn that he felt as if he must take her in his arms. When she spoke it was to say dubiously: "Back to New York—to keep house ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... of a time," said Phil scornfully. "There'll be one or two quilting parties, I suppose; and all the old gossips will talk you over to your face and behind your back. You'll die of lonesomeness, child." ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... glad to be alone. The lonesomeness of the Big Vacuum was getting grimed into him. When he saw the return name and address on the package, and the two hundred-ten dollar postage sticker, he thought, Cripes—that poor kid—what did I start? Then the awful wave of ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... nearly dead with lonesomeness. Wouldn't you like to go for a ride? I would so like to ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... being dressed up to make two or three visits since the wedding, and so prolong the holiday. The light of the sunset softened her plain features, and gave her a gentler look than was her wont. Was it that, and an air of lonesomeness akin to his own, that made Hanford stop and ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... want you to have change, rest, and for that matter a little lonesomeness won't be a bad thing. You'll be in just the right mood then to put it all to him when you come back. He'll be in just the right ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... terribly busy one, at times, and it's idleness that leads to the ink-pot. I'm still trying to make the best of a none too promising situation, and I'll thole through, as Whinstane Sandy puts it. After breakfast this morning, in fact, when Pauline Augusta was swept by one of those little gales of lonesomeness to which children and women are so mysteriously subjected, she climbed up into my lap and I rocked her on my shoulder as I might have rocked a baby. Dinky-Dunk wandered in and inspected that performance with a slightly ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... Ashton! Glad to see you!" he said with hearty hospitality. "Hope you've come to ease up our lonesomeness by a month or ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... must say that a feeling of lonesomeness fell upon me after he went; his conversation had been so scientific and interesting that I ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... of hotness, who, with reedlike breast, Makest meridian music, long and loud, Accentuating summer!—Dost thy best To make the sunbeams fiercer, and to crowd With lonesomeness the long, close afternoon— When Labor leans, swart-faced and beady-browed, Upon his sultry scythe—thou tangible tune Of heat, whose waves incessantly arise Quivering and ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... what I don't want. In my lonesomeness, after my mother's death, I thought once that maybe a young girl from the West, nice girl with her mother from Ohio—but I—funny thing, now I come to think about it—I never once mentioned my little mother's sable coat to her. I couldn't have satisfied a young girl like that, ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... shacks were up, the Happy Family had taken possession, so that now Andy was alone, stuck down there in the coulee out of sight of everybody. Pink had once named One Man coulee as the lonesomest hole in all that country, and he had not been far wrong. But at any rate the lonesomeness had served one good purpose, for it had started Andy to thinking out the details of their so called land-pool. Now the thinking had borne fruit to the extent that he felt an urgent need of the Happy Family in council upon ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... energetic and independently thinking elements from the country into the towns, and rob the former of its forces. So that the progress of modern economic life has the effect of increasing the desolation and lonesomeness of the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... as in the nature of a health-seeking holiday, and who was sustained by the knowledge that she had wealthy relations at Kennard to whom she could return. Far different, indeed. At the thought of the homesickness that at times Ruth must know, of the lonesomeness of mountain and mesa from which she must suffer, of the deprivations, the hard bareness of the life, the moments of despair, he had a sensation of the bitter unfairness of things and a desire to snatch her safe away from the harsh pass in ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... The land stretched out on all sides—a vast lonesomeness of rolling green and red, broken here and there by towering rocks, grotesque in shape and twisted by erosion into a thousand fanciful sculptures. But at the bottom of a dry wash, Kid Wolf received ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... for sports and pastimes. But when he was still very small, his grandmother, lately widowed and on her way to a new abode, stopped a night with her married daughter, and begged that she might bring home one of the grandchildren with her, "just to take the could edge off her lonesomeness," a request which could not well be refused. And Con seemed the appropriate person to go, as the old woman considered that "the dark head of hair he had on him was the moral of his poor grandfather's afore it turned white." Therefore the swiftly running mysteriously murmuring river ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... your mind by that time," observed Seth. "This ain't no place for a chap with your trainin', and I know it. It does well enough for an old derelict like me, with nobody to care a hang whether he lives or dies, but you're different. And even for me the lonesomeness of it drives me 'most crazy sometimes. I've noticed you've been havin' blue streaks more often than when you first came. I cal'late that by fall you'll be headin' somewheres else, Mr. 'John Brown,'" with ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... porch and looked down at the miniature hill she was making, her lips set queerly. Ruth had already noticed that she was dressed almost as she had been at their first meeting—a slipover apron that Ruth had given her being the only new garment. It was the lonesomeness, of course, Ruth reflected, and perhaps a vision of the dreary future, prospectless, hopeless, to be filled with the monotony of the past. Her arm stole out and was placed on ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... transports are the days that vary the monotony. As the procession of big mail-wagons rumbles down the Escolta to the post-office, as the letters from America are opened, as the last month's newspapers and magazines appear in the shop-windows, comes a moment of regret and lonesomeness. But as the transport, with its tawny load of soldiers and of joyful officers, pulls out, the dweller in Manila, long ago resigned to fate, takes ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... with the nester, who was half dead with lonesomeness, so that even a German looked good to him, and wrote to his uncle in Cincinnati for money to buy the place. And now I'd better hurry over and see it, because it was Wagner's Sylvan Glen, with rowing, bathing, fishing, and ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... piazza, as their beach, and the blown down of dandelions is wafted like the spray, and the purple of the mountains is just the purple of the billows, and a still August noon broods upon the deep meadows, as a calm upon the Line; but the vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic, and the silence and the sameness, too, that the first peep of a strange house, rising beyond the trees, is for all the world like spying, on the Barbary coast, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... soon ready, and up to Brussa I passed through a country that was doubly charming after the lonesomeness of Roumelia, which had been all I had seen for six months. Everything is under cultivation, planted less with corn than with vines and mulberry trees. The latter, which serve as food for the silkworms, are trimmed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Pyncheon!" was the cry, an' lookin' up through my tears I saw neighbor King a-standin' by me. "I was goin' up the road," he said, "an' thought I'd stop an' say good-mornin'. Where's Micah? In the field, an' you a-cryin' for lonesomeness?" ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... in all the serenity and lonesomeness of solitude, away off here amid the hush of the forest, alone, or as I have found in prairie wilds, or mountain stillness, one is never entirely without the instinct of looking around, (I never am, and others tell me the same of themselves, confidentially,) for somebody ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... pavement of the street; the marks of drinking-vessels on the stone counter of the wine-shop; the amphorae in private cellars, stored away so many hundred years ago, and undisturbed to this hour—all rendering the solitude and deadly lonesomeness of the place, ten thousand times more solemn, than if the volcano, in its fury, had swept the city from the earth, and sunk it in ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... ceaselessly to those human hearts tuned to its messages: hostile and harsh, it draws and urges; repellent, it profligately awards health and wealth; inviting, it kills. And always it keeps its own counsel; it is without peer in its lonesomeness, and without confidants; it heaps its sand over its secrets to hide them from ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... in such lonesomeness, Lad would gladly have tossed aside all prejudices of caste,—and all his natural dislikes, and would have frolicked in mad joy with the veriest stranger. Anything was better than this drear solitude throughout ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... implored Grace. "I'm sure we will find that little fairy out to-day, and I promise you, Madie, I won't do anything rash. Come along, there's a dear," and Grace slipped her arms around the girl who threatened to come down with a fit of lonesomeness. "Come on, maybe we'll meet Andy's ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... without a glance passing between them the Senior Surgeon held out his hand to her once more, as though the absence of her hand in his was suddenly a lonesomeness not to be endured again while ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... of Robinson Crusoe on his desert island was nothing compared to the lonesomeness of Pee-wee on that Saturday morning. He might have attached himself to any of the three patrols and had a day's pleasure, but his pride had stood ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... in it, big barn, sheds, and one thing or 'nother, and perched right on top of a hill with five or six acres of ground 'round it. And how the March wind did whoop in off the sea and howl and screech lonesomeness through the pine trees! You take it in the middle of the night, with the shutters rattling and the old joists a-creaking and Jonadab snoring like a chap sawing hollow logs, and if it wan't joy then my name ain't Barzilla Wingate. I ...
— Cape Cod Stories - The Old Home House • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of the bell could be heard clearly enough now—the uncertain, hesitating clang of a bell-buoy rocked in the tideway—with its melancholy note of warning. Indeed, there are few sounds on sea or land more fraught with lonesomeness and fear. Behind it and beyond it a faint "tap-tap" was now audible. Barebone knew it to be the sound of a caulker's hammer in the Government repairing yard on the south side. They were drifting past the mouth ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... that the boy was lost his heart was aflame with anguish; he could all but feel the desert fire in the little boy's blood, the cactus barbs in the bleeding little feet, and the great lonesomeness of the desert in the little boy's heart; and as from afar the man heard a wailing little voice in his ears calling, 'Father, father!' like a lost sheep. But it was only a seeming, and the house where the little boy ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... in writing. Shall I believe you, this time? Do it, and shame the Devil! I really am persuaded it will do yourself good; and to me I know right well, and have always known, what it will do. The gaunt lonesomeness of this Midnight Hour, in the ugly universal snoring hum of the overfilled deep-sunk Posterity of Adam, renders an articulate speaker precious indeed! Watchman, what sayest thou, then? Watchman, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... one you wouldn't go so very far," said Mrs. Theodora, darkly significant. "And, anyhow, I'd put up with any amount of lonesomeness rather than have an old maid in the family. It's all very fine now, when you're still young enough and good looking, with lots of beaus at your beck and call. But that won't last much longer and if you go on with your dilly-dallying you'll wake up some fine day to find that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... up waver in the breathless air as if something were moving sinuously through them. And always the odor of humid decomposition. Farther on, the road looks wilder, sloping between black rocks, through strange vaultings of foliage and night-black shadows. Its lonesomeness oppresses; one returns without regret, by rusting gate-ways and tottering walls, back to the old West Indian city rotting in ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn |
