"Monotonous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one, two, three!" Mr. Price ejaculated; "how it wearies the mind! Society has sacrificed its most varied, wholesome, and graceful recreation—dancing—to this monotonous one, two, three!" ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... travels are continuous, he does not, like most other wanderers, furnish us with a journal of every day's proceedings. He was too well aware that many, perhaps most, days on a journey are monotonous or uninteresting; and that many of the details of a traveller's progress are wholly unworthy of being recorded, because they are neither amusing, elevating, nor instructive. He paints, now and then, with all the force of his magical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... had left for the Mountain House, as she intended doing the last of June. And Marian, reading this note, guessed at more than Katy meant she should, and with a bitter sigh laid it in her basket, and then resumed the work, which seemed doubly monotonous now that there was no more listening for the little feet tripping up the stairs, or for the bird-like voice which had brought so much of music and ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... with rain, its shutters drearily flapping in the wind, and the floor bearing the imprint of many boots burdened with the red clay of the region. The sound of slow strolling feet in the brick-paved hall was monotonous and somnolent. ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... into green arcades by thickly-clustering garlands of vines; the dark masses of foliage and verdure which every where appear, melt insensibly, as he advances, into a succession of shady bowers that invite him to their depths; the scenery is monotonous, and yet ever various from the richness of its sylvan beauty, possessing all the softness of forest glades without their gloom. Towards Bologna, the landscape roughens into hills, which grow into Apennines, but Arcadia still breathes from slopes and lawns of tender green, which take their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... combined, is a very large, well-lighted, well-ventilated room. This room is constantly kept sweet and comfortable by electric fans. The work is light, and never monotonous. Only two, of the six hours devoted to kitchen duty, are spent in the active work of dish washing. During the remaining hours, the washers take lessons in cookery, from the chief and the two assistants. These ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... the setting Sun. Slowly He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous as the former.' ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... 246.) The Australian custom for women, especially widows, is to mourn by scratching the face and branding the body. As for the grief itself, its quality may be inferred from the fact that these women sit day after day by the grave or platform, howling their monotonous dirge, but, as soon as they are allowed to pause for a meal they indulge in the merriest ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... was becoming an old story and, as such, decidedly monotonous. The glamour had passed by, and Squantown Paper Mill had ceased to be an enchanted palace and become a prosaic place of daily toil. Such disenchantments are always more or less painful, and Katie's high spirits declined proportionally. ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... lights of the Swanson cottage and slowed down to a walk. His fears for the girl's safety were apparently groundless. The valley lay before him, steeped in moonlight. No sound disturbed the stillness save the far-off cry of the screaming gulls and the monotonous murmur of the distant sea. Walking slowly down the road, grown high on both sides with sage and cactus, he caught a glimpse of a bulky figure ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... chimneys of the house were already beginning to crumble, and birds and squirrels lived in their crevices and flitted about their lofty tops. At some distance an old negro was singing,—it must have been Milton himself, still unbesought by his dependents, and the song was full of strange, monotonous wails and plaintive cadences, like a lament for war itself, and all the misery that follows in ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... lay wide lakes, stretching from side to side of the valley; but the lake behind followed us as steadily as the one before us receded. It was only the mirage that tantalizes travellers in these scorched valleys, all the long eight months of the rainless season. It seemed beautiful at first, then monotonous; and long before the day was out we hated it with a most cordial and ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... side of it. I took the wrong turning round one of them and found myself in the doorway of an immense ward. From somewhere inside there came loud and lacerating screams, high-pitched but appallingly monotonous and without intervals. I thought it was a man in delirium; I even thought it might be poor Fisher, of whose attacks we had been ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... answer was given in the same monotonous, listless voice—not a trace of indignation over the outrage. Women with suckling babies had no rights that anybody was bound to respect—not up in Pineyville; certainly not the gentlemen with brass shields under the lapels of their coats and ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the only one of which he would not have boasted himself. As a triumph of Dickens, at least, it is not of great importance. But as a sample of Dickens it happens to be of quite remarkable importance. The very fact that it is for the most part somewhat more level and even monotonous than most of his creations, makes us realise, as it were, against what level and monotony those creations commonly stand out. This book is the background of his mind. It is the basis and minimum of him which was ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... an iron rule of repression and cheerlessness. Instead of leisure to ripen, of a full summing of our powers, of the exhilaration of new truth, we have disclosed to us a stunted individuality treading a dull and monotonous round of existence. And all this, because if the people are trusted with more power they will tyrannize life down ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... has made the world infinite. The days of the old pagan, "suckled in some creed outworn," are regretted in Wordsworth's sonnet; for the old pagan held to the poetical view that a star was the chariot of a deity. The poor deity, however, had, in fact, a duty as monotonous as that of a driver in the Underground Railway. To us a star is a signal of a new world; it suggests universe beyond universe; sinking into the infinite abysses of space; we see worlds forming or decaying and raising at every moment problems of a strange fascination. ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... with broad branches. They stand thickly together, broken, stunted, spongy with rot, straight, and ugly, with ragged tops and shattered arms, seemingly decayed, but still ever renewing themselves with the rapid, moist life of luxuriant forest vegetation. Nothing to my eyes is sadder than the monotonous desolation of such scenery. We in England, when we read and speak of the primeval forests of America, are apt to form pictures in our minds of woodland glades, with spreading oaks, and green, mossy turf beneath—of scenes than which nothing that God has given us is more charming. ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... fate to a monotonous and cheerless existence often acquire all sorts of little habits and preferences. Pyetushkov liked to have a new white roll with his tea every morning. He could not do without this dainty. But behold one morning his ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of their herding was perfect. At each side entrance along the way stood one of the ghastly soldiers, jaws clashing with monotonous deadliness. Now and again several of the monsters appeared straight ahead, barring the avenue, and leaving no choice but to turn to right or left into off-branching tunnels. Small chance here of missing the path! ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... grass and thistles," he added, "gets to be rather monotonous at last; but I never weary of the feeling of immensity and freedom which it inspires. ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... driven to the infantry barracks at Manila. Parrington, deeply touched, pressed his comrade's hand. The insurrection of the Filipinos! In Manila the bells of the Dominican church of Intra muros rang out their monotonous call to early mass. ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... attractive, and in many cases so beautiful as to be beyond verbal description. In many other parts of the river the scenery is grand, though occasionally there are long stretches of flat country which are inclined to become monotonous and barren ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... the realms of Equity; but what should interest us more to-night is the fact that the greater part of "Pickwick" was written in Furnival's Inn, which, as Dickens describes it, was "a shady, quiet place echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers there, and rather monotonous and gloomy ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... monotonous sound is the breathing of the patient in the next room, under the new narcotic which has none of the bad effects of opium. The nurse is there watching him, and wondering whether it will be a week, or twenty-four hours. She derives an impression from something ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... accustomed to their prison, they seemed to be too familiar with wretchedness to heed it, and to take everything as it came. Yet a certain frank light-heartedness was not lacking in their faces; and on a closer view, their monotonous life, the lot of so many a poor creature, well-nigh seemed an enviable one. Trouble had set its unmistakable mark on them, but petty cares had left ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... both my mother and myself (persons of exceptional impatience of disposition and irritable excitability of temperament) should have taken such delight in so still and monotonous an occupation, especially to the point of spending whole days in an unsuccessful pursuit of it. The fact is that the excitement of hope, keeping the attention constantly alive, is the secret of the charm of this strong ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... illustration of the class of difficulties described, let us ask how we are to interpret the development of the musical faculty; how came there that endowment of musical faculty which characterises modern Europeans at large, as compared with their remote ancestors? The monotonous chants of low savages cannot be said to show any melodic inspiration; and it is not evident that an individual savage who had a little more musical perception than the rest would derive any such advantage in the maintenance of life as would secure the spread of his superiority by inheritance of the ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... is doubtful economy to omit them, except in times of extreme high prices. They are not essential in all desserts and saving in their use should begin at that point. Eggs may be cooked in many ways so that they need never become a monotonous fare. All kinds of fish are an excellent substitute for meat, and, as prepared for the table, nearly equal beef and mutton, in the amount of protein, which is the element missed in a non-meat diet, ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... pleasing. But, ah it would be of no use, we think, to make any effort in the dull old circle of our familiars, who can produce no effect on us, and on whom we, in turn, can produce no effect. And thus life in the home becomes monotonous, torpid, and vacant. Worlds of love are every day destroyed by indifference and repulse. If the same pains were taken to invigorate and perpetuate the domestic affections as to secure the good-will of other persons whom we admire or depend on, it could scarcely fail ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... And even in matter of visits, to a certain degree,—their life is so monotonous that novelty has a great charm. Reuben used to go and read to them almost every day on his way from school, but I found it best to make my coming ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... the character, are unmarked by any notable events. A steady, orderly routine, a gradual progression, perseverance in hard work, often do more to educate and form than a varied and eventful life. Erica's two years of exile were as monotonous and quiet as the life of the secularist's daughter could possibly be. There came to her, of course, from the distance the echoes of her father's strife; but she was far removed from it all, and there was little to disturb her ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... This monotonous-looking heath is not without beauty; indeed, it has a melancholy charm for those who dwell on it. The children love it when the heather is in bloom, and spend happy days gathering berries from out of the gorgeous purple carpet. The great stacks of peat drying in the sun denote that ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... successor to Mr. Macaulay, and as representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, gave force to what he said. His son, Matthew ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... an end. The coming of the Watchman, who has evidently been aroused by the noise, is foretold by his horn. The crowd is seized with a panic. All the brawlers disappear behind doors. The sleepy Watchman stares about him in amazement, rubs his eyes, sings the monotonous chant which publishes the hour of the night, continues on his round, and the moon shines on a quiet street in ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... usual number, but only because of their cost, for the shepherd has very little money for bells or anything else. Another told me that he had "only thirty," but he intended getting more. The sound cheers him; it is not exactly monotonous, owing to the bells being of various sizes and also greatly varying in thickness, so that they produce different tones, from the sharp tinkle-tinkle of the smallest to the sonorous klonk-klonk of the big, copper bell. Then, too, they ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... nature, because, however strong be the professional bias or however overmastering the ruling passion, real people are always more complex and many-sided, having other modifying and counteracting elements of character which prevent their speech and actions from being completely monotonous and mechanical. Nevertheless, we can again acquit the comic writer of falsification, because we understand the method which he is employing, the trick of his trade. He deceives no one. On the contrary, he enables us to perceive ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... not to inattentive ears that Tennyson read his poems. His reading was most impressive, but I think he read Browning's "Ride from Ghent to Aix" better than anything of his own, except, perhaps, "The Northern Farmer." He used to preserve the monotonous rhythm of the galloping horses in Browning's poem, and made the words come out sharply like hoofs upon a road. It was a little comic until one got used to it, but that fault lay in the ear of the hearer. It was the right way and the fine way to read this ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... held the work firmly while the stitching was done by hand; they grew very quick at this work, and turned out the gloves with beautifully even stitches, but I don't think they could earn much at it in a day, and it must have been rather monotonous. ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... at Ravenna—all bearing, throughout, the true marks both of affection and passion. Such effusions, however, are but little suited to the general eye. It is the tendency of all strong feeling, from dwelling constantly on the same idea, to be monotonous; and those often-repeated vows and verbal endearments, which make the charm of true love-letters to the parties concerned in them, must for ever render even the best of them cloying to others. Those of Lord Byron ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... with his first breath. I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one. And, after all, there is that handful of "characters" from various ships to prove that all these years have not been altogether a dream. There they are, brief, and monotonous in tone, but as suggestive bits of writing to me as any inspired page to be found in literature. But then, you see, I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist, also. And as that charge, ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... on a straw bed, with a blanket thrown over it. He could see that the man was dying. A woman clad in a long cloak was sitting by the bedside, and moistening at times the lips of the man with some liquid. She was singing a low monotonous strain. ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... he had reached his room, and had had his bath and change, Griswold sat at his writing-table with his head in his hands, thinking in monotonous circles. As in those other stressful moments, the importunate devil was at his ear; now mocking him for not having left the drowned enemy as he was; now whispering the dreadful hope that age and the shock and the drowning might still re-erect the barrier of safety. The eyes of the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... place, though what the nature of that new art would be, it is hazardous to guess. One may, however, assert that journalism in its highest development will only thrive so long and so far as the march of events continues, in the eyes of the majority, to be a dull, monotonous and funereal procession. The insensible hack may trust himself to present attractively an occurrence or a man that all the world concedes to be inherently attractive; but it needs a heaven-born artist, trained in the subtleties of his craft and gifted with ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... thinking no more of it, he began to sing his song again. The song told, in monotonous couplets, the complaint of a linen weaver whose lover in a distant war prolonged his absence. It was written in that mysterious Euskarian language, the age of which seems incalculable and the origin of which remains unknown. And little ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... time, sir," the man interrupted me, speaking in the emotionless, monotonous voice which I had ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... humor after the sisterly remonstrance to which he had just been compelled to listen, he seated himself near the entrance of the gallery, where the gypsy band was playing one of their alluring waltzes, of a cadence so different from the regular and monotonous measure of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Mr. Finlay, "that he adopted a very simple and even monotonous tone, when he had to say any thing not quite in the ordinary style of conversation. Whenever he had begun a sentence which showed that the subject interested him, and which contained sublime thought, he would check himself suddenly, and come to an end without concluding, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... these corpses that had stumbled to their fate, and he remembered; with Lolita in those trees all day, he had forgotten for a while. He pointed to the wide-strewn sight, familiar, monotonous as misfortune. "There will be many more," he said. "Another rainy season is gone without doing anything for the country. It cannot rain now for ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... no attempt made here to trace in any detail the monotonous years of Hugh's professional life, because they seemed to him to have been in one sense lost years; there was at all events no conscious growth in his soul. His spirit seemed to him afterwards to ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Previous to this, however, early on the 3rd May, a special mourner arrived. He came with the anklets which are worn on these occasions, composed of rows of hollow seed-vessels, fitted with rattling pebbles, and in low monotonous chant sang, whilst ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... manner evidently impressed his congregation, who were usually accustomed to the somewhat monotonous reading of his uncle, and to his ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... having opened or taken off the top of his box, that the curious spectator may behold the mystery of his too quiet music—the revolving barrel, the sobbing bellows, and the twelve leaden and ten wooden pipes—he turns his monotonous handle throughout the live-long day, in the all but vain appeal for the commiseration of his fellows. This is really a melancholy spectacle, and one which we would gladly miss altogether in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... who have fears on this point may be encouraged by contrasting the varied and ever-changing methods of labour we should pursue, with the monotonous and uninteresting grind of many of the ordinary employments of the poor, and the circumstances ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... in the foregoing views (which may have been materially modified by their channel) I do not accept them as a finality. That a brooding spiritual power has to do with all development and progress I do not doubt. But this power is not necessarily a monotonous and universal influence like gravitation or caloric. There is no reason to forbid special acts of the creative spiritual energy, for we observe to-day the production of plants and of beautiful fabrics by spiritual power where the necessary conditions exist. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... not know. Without the element of surprise life would be unbearably monotonous. That element I deliberately carry with me in my breast pocket. When a dull moment comes I empty my pockets. It ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... column of the porch, her hands clasped about her knees, smiling, smiling, always smiling. Sometimes she would hum a sort of low tuneless chant—it sounded like a pagan ritual of some sort, all repetitions, rising and falling in a monotonous, haunting drone. And once, as I stood watching her curiously, the word for that noise flashed suddenly into my mind—incantation. ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... many of them, render the adapting of a brief and satisfactory note, in many cases, an impossibility. As it is, however, little merit is claimed for them; and if they are found to be of no aid in facilitating an interpretation, they will, at least, tend to relieve the monotonous or catalogue effect, so to speak, which is apt to be felt by many readers when perusing works arranged in alphabetical order. In all cases where the compiler could adapt a quotation or parallel proverb, he did so in preference to inserting an original note. To apply a proverb from the collection, ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... one piece of wood and worked—or played— with both hands. Dr. Baumann says it is customary on bright moonlight nights for two lines of men to sit facing each other and to clap—one can hardly call it ring—these bells vigorously, but in good time, accompanying this performance with a monotonous song, while the delighted women and children dance round. The learned doctor evidently sees the picturesqueness of this practice, but notes that the words of the songs are not "tiefsinnige" (profound), as he has heard men for hours singing ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... advertised in the Times as to be let furnished, and promising all the comforts and refinements of a home. It was situated in a highly-respectable, though not altogether fashionable quarter; as I judged by the gloomy, monotonous rows of buildings which I could see from my windows: none of which were shops, but all private dwellings. The people who passed up and down the streets on line days were all of one stamp, well-to-do persons, who could afford to wear good ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... rain. The dampness pervaded the gardens, and the outer halls smelled musty, like tombs; the gray sky oppressed me intolerably. I left the place as it was and went abroad, determined to try anything which might possibly make a second break in the monotonous ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... benevolent an old dame as you can possibly imagine; really, you would never know it was the same person. These annual breathing spells do her a world of good, she tells me; for incessant wickedness is just as monotonous and wearisome ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... it all," she said, her eyes starry with hope. "I understand it's not like ours. I can see how monotonous our quiet life must seem to you, how much more stirring yours must be. It must be like the biological change you told me about when the second sex was introduced—a far greater movement, constant change, with new possibilities ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... carried out in the provinces with monotonous regularity and all attempts at rising ruthlessly suppressed. In Peking the infamous Chih Fa Chu or Military Court—a sort of Chinese Star-Chamber—was continually engaged in summarily dispatching ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... pay me, sir," replied the captain, "and I thank you for it. Well, I'm glad to have met you, sir, and it is a break in rather a monotonous life. Don't apologise, sir, I know it is a very heavy price for the craft, and of course it is on account of her having fittings that not one gentleman in ten would think of putting in a yacht. You were quite welcome to see her, and as for anything ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... not formidable in the flesh, the evil that he does lives after him. Freeman's view of Froude is not now held by any one whose opinion counts; yet still there seems to rise, as from a brazen head of Ananias, dismal and monotonous chaunt, "He was careless of the truth, he did not make history the business of his life." He did make history the business of his life, and he cared more for truth than for anything else in the world. Freeman's biographer has given no clue to his imperfect sympathy ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... little chest, and gave it a sounding thump as he rose, and, rolling up his shirt-sleeves to the shoulder, seized an oar. Gaff took the other, and both sat down to the slow, dreary, monotonous toil ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... parents, while Jean had been taken, when a mere babe, after his parents had been killed and scalped by Indians. Madame Roussillon, a professed invalid, whose appetite never failed and whose motherly kindness expressed itself most often through strains of monotonous falsetto scolding, was a woman of little education and no refinement; while her husband clung tenaciously to his love of books, especially to the romances most in vogue when he took ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... ask you to forgive me," he said, in a loud but monotonous voice, like a lesson learnt by heart. Having said these words he became confused; but immediately came the thought that, if he felt ashamed, it was all the better; he had to bear this shame, and he continued in a ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... that day we run through much prettier scenery than the cornland, which has become very monotonous, and at night-time arrive at a place called Port Arthur, where we are going to leave the train and explore the Great Lakes. Well may they be called "Great"! In Lake Superior, the largest of the five, you could put the whole of your native land, Scotland, and ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... have him say that his child disgraces him," replied Mrs. Maynard, in the low, husky, monotonous murmur in which she ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the political history is almost monotonous, for it relates simply to the advance or retreat of the house of Habsburg, which still holds all but the whole of the northern portion (the exception is the small bit in the north-west that belongs to Bavaria) of that region. The Habsburgers, whose original ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... We've been waiting for it a long time, but the chance is here at last. We've had enough of the trenches. It's a monotonous life at best. Ah, I take your pawn, the one for which I've been lying in ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... casual song of the lark in a fresh morning, of the blackbird and thrush at sunset, or the monotonous wail of the yellow-hammer, the silence of birds is now complete; even the lesser reed-sparrow, which may very properly be called the English mock-bird, and which kept up a perpetual clatter with the notes of the sparrow, the swallow, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... can bring them if you like," the master said, ungraciously, "but I warn you it will be useless. You English cannot paint, even the best of you. You have no soul, you are monotonous, but ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... that brick maze of small streets that had once been Clark's Field. At this the Californian's mobile face expressed frank contempt, not to say disgust. Even on this beautiful May morning, Clark's Field, with its close-packed rows of lofty tenements, its narrow, dirty alleys, and monotonous blocks of ugly brick facades, was dreary, depressing, a needless monstrosity of civilization. And all this had come about in a little over ten years, as the judge carefully explained to the mason. ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... rolling like a sea, with glints of winding rivers, the grey spots of villages, and here and there a clearing, like an islet of light amongst the dark waves of continuous tree-tops. A brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous landscape; the light fell on it as if into an abyss. The land devoured the sunshine; only far off, along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and polished within the faint haze, seemed to rise up to the sky ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the satin frost-glow of the moon; Their eyes the fire of Sirius. They circled, and droned a monotonous ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in a model mining-village of red brick houses and terra cotta tiles, where every door is just like the one next to it and the whole place gives the impression of monotonous sameness relieved here and there by a shell-shattered roof, a symbol of sorrow and wanton destruction. In this place of an evening children may be seen out of doors listening for the coming of the German shells and counting the number that fall in the village. ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... Lower School mutiny had subsided, Gipsy began to find the life more than a trifle dull. She had an adventurous temperament, and her roving life had given her a taste for constant change and variety, so the prim regime of the English boarding school seemed to her monotonous in the extreme. She chafed against the confinement and the ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... Life of Jesus with an elaborate table of descents through forty-one generations, and then to show that the forty-second had no real connection with the forty-first, strikes us as irrelevant. Clause after clause comes the monotonous 'begat,' till the very last, when it fails, and we read instead: 'Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus.' So, then, whoever drew up this genealogy knew that Jesus was not Joseph's son. Why, then, was he at the pains to compile it, and why did the writer ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... those of employees in stores, telegraph offices, etc., in which the two sexes are closely associated in their work, constitute from this point of view a double-edged sword. Other unhealthy and monotonous occupations, combined with bad conditions of food and lodging, and with all kinds of seduction—factory hands for example—have a positively deleterious effect on sexual life, which becomes absolutely depraved when the two sexes work together. The situation ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... plebeian population might have been reduced to a state of mere dependency, and the history of Rome might have presented a repetition of monotonous severity, like that of Sparta or of Venice.[38] But it was ordained otherwise. The distress and oppression of the plebeians led them to demand and to obtain political protectors, by whose means they were slowly but surely raised to equality of rights and privileges ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... Dervishes sat around cross-legged, forming an oval. Presently they began to say some phrase, presumably Turkish (it sounded like es "klabbam vivurah"), which they repeated and repeated and repeated with the same endless, uniform, monotonous intonation, swaying from right to left and from left to right, till I felt the whole universe was this phrase, and nothing else would happen till the end of the world, and the world would never end. At last, when I had reconciled myself to living for ever ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the landscape stretches bare, The bleak fields lying far and wide, Monotonous, with here and there A lone tree on a lone hillside. No more the land is glorified With golden gleams of ripening corn, Scarce is a cheerful hue descried— The leaves are ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... laneways, places where children screamed about the road, where there was a scent of soapy water, where women came to their doors and looked at him with eyes that expressed a slow resentment, their arms bare above the elbows, their hair hanging dankly about their ears, their voices, when they spoke, monotonous, and always sounding a note ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... losing hope, simply because she could not believe that the subject itself could fail to interest any one in his senses. It was her own fault a good deal, she tried to think; she did not tell the story right, or her voice was too monotonous,—Papa was always telling her to put more colour into her reading,—or something. The history itself could not be ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... began to break up; and the story goes that when his feet touched the sand he fell forward and died, for the swimming had burst his heart. But have you never heard the song about it?" Vashti sank her voice and began to chant, and low though the strain was, and monotonous, the children had never heard such ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... as late as six in the evening, one finds classes of boys or girls being catechised and instructed by priests and nuns. The visitor on pushing open the swing door of an entrance will frequently be met by a monotonous voice that echoes through the apparently empty church. As he slowly takes his way along an aisle, the voice will cease, and suddenly break out in a simple but loudly sung Gregorian air, soon joined by a score or more of childish ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... entered a stretch of open country. A few spindly pines grew near the river. To the north and west, as far as the eye could reach, was a prairie, covered with a sparse growth of grass. Small circular islands of palmetto scrub dotted the monotonous scene and at rare intervals a clump of somber cypress told of the presence of water. In a nearby bunch of palmetto a pair of horns were visible; and a herd of wild cattle, incredibly thin and fleet, leaped with a snort into the open, stared an instant at the intruders and sprang ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... men youth is thought an inferiority. There is nothing to imagine on an innocent face. I laugh frankly, and that is wrong; to captivate I ought to play off the melancholy half-smile of the fallen angel, who wants to hide her yellowing teeth. A fresh complexion is monotonous; some men prefer their doll's wax made of rouge and spermaceti and cold cream. I am straightforward; but duplicity is more pleasing. I am loyally passionate, as an honest woman may be, but I ought to be manoeuvring, tricky, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... complaint, and have already treated with much success a large number of my Tin Soldiers suffering in the same way. This, then, is my prescription for your malady: plenty of fresh air; exercise in moderation; early hours and plain diet. But don't let your diet become monotonous. For example, a rice pudding one day, sago the next, tapioca the third. And a little gentle amusement every now and then to keep up your spirits; Christy Minstrels; a pleasant, little musical gathering of friends; ...
— Adventures in Toyland - What the Marionette Told Molly • Edith King Hall
... are buried, it was determined to sleep at Senlis, which was only four posts further, the little town that we visited with so much satisfaction in 1827. This deviation from the more direct road led us by Gonesse, and through a district of grain country, that is less monotonous than most of the great roads that lead from Paris. We got a good view of the chateau of Ecouen, looking vast and stately, seated on the side of a distant hill. I do not know into whose hands this princely pile has fallen since the unhappy death of the last of the Condes, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... they are trimmed, than in the positive form; some being trimmed with chicorees, wreaths of gauze ribbon, or knobs of ribbon edged with a festooned open-work encircling a simple round of tulle, or what is perhaps prettier, a cluster of lace. A pretty form, differing a little from the monotonous round, is composed of a round forming a star, the points being cut off; these points are brought close together, and are encircled with a narrow bavolet, the front part being formed so as to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... while Septima energetically piled the white fluted laces in the huge basket—piled it full to the brim, until her arm ached with the weight of it—the basket which was to play such a fatal part in the truant Daisy's life—the life which for sixteen short years had been so monotonous. ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... words still came with the old dash and the old power, and the audience always hung upon them, the applause invariably rising like the rattle of rifle-fire. They had started at daylight, hurrying across the monotonous Western plains, in a dusty and uncomfortable car, stopping for a half-hour speech here, then racing for another at a second little village, and then a third race and a third speech, and so on. Nor was this the first day of such labors; it had been so week after ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... crowding and lowing around the water troughs in the loading pens, the herdsmen shouting their monotonous, melancholy urgings as they crowded more famished beasts into the enclosures. Judge Thayer regarded the dusty scene with ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... still hoping to find, in some one of its mysterious recesses, my lost lady of the marble. The sunny afternoon died into the loveliest twilight. Great bats began to flit about with their own noiseless flight, seemingly purposeless, because its objects are unseen. The monotonous music of the owl issued from all unexpected quarters in the half-darkness around me. The glow-worm was alight here and there, burning out into the great universe. The night-hawk heightened all the harmony and stillness with his oft-recurring, discordant jar. Numberless unknown sounds ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... flute stirs somewhere in some tent, not an officer's,—a drum throbs far away in another,—wild kildeer-plover flit and wail above us, like the haunting souls of dead slave-masters,—and from a neighboring cook-fire comes the monotonous sound of that strange festival, half pow-wow, half prayer-meeting, which they know only as a "shout." These fires are usually enclosed in a little booth, made neatly of palm-leaves and covered in at top, a regular native African hut, in short, such as is pictured in books, and such ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... an old woman now," replied Aunt Charlotte with an almost youthful blush. "But I've had a peaceful life if rather a monotonous one, and I've nothing to complain of. It is very good of you to have remembered me, and I'm more glad than I can say to see you again. It's a quarter of a century ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour
... conclusion that sausages and mashed potatoes, twopence a plate, were the best food. Now, sausages once or twice a week for breakfast are not unpleasant. As lunch, even, with mashed potatoes, they become monotonous. At dinner they are impertinent. At the end of three days Dick loathed sausages, and, going, forth, pawned his watch to revel on sheep's head, which is not as cheap as it looks, owing to the bones and the gravy. Then he returned to sausages ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Silurian age, when there were no elevations higher than the Canadian hills, when water covered the face of the earth with the exception of a few isolated portions lifted above the almost universal ocean, how monotonous must have been the conditions of life! And what should we expect to find on those first shores? If we are walking on a sea-beach to-day, we do not look for animals that haunt the forests or roam over the open plains, or ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... eleven miles south-west of Salisbury, near the Roman road from Old Sarum (Sorbiodunum) to Dorchester in Dorset.[2] Here you may search in vain for vestiges of the native art or of that delight in artistic ornament which characterizes it. Everywhere the monotonous Roman culture meets the eye. To pass from Glastonbury to Woodcuts is like passing from some old timbered village of Kent or Sussex to the uniform streets of a modern city suburb. Life at Woodcuts had, no doubt, its barbaric side. One writer who ...
— The Romanization of Roman Britain • F. Haverfield
... all the cellos in motion when the girl answered, "Cela ou bien tout autre chose?" I suffered because of the divorce of the orchestra and singers, uniting perhaps at the end of the scene. It was speaking through music, no more, monotonous as the Sahara, league after league, and I lost amid sands. A chord is heard in "Lohengrin" to sustain Elsa's voice, and it performs its purpose; a motive is heard to attract attention to a certain part of the story, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... difference between two thousand years before Christ and two thousand years afterward. Still disasters fall upon our lives, sometimes as swift in their assault as wild beasts leaping from an unsuspected ambush. Still troubles come, long drawn out and wearying, like the monotonous dripping of water with which old torturers used to drive their victims mad. Still sins bring shame to the conscience and tragic consequence to the life, and tiresome work, losing the buoyancy of its first inspiration, drags itself out into purposeless effort ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... had a lovely view of green fields and trees. The moment you put your foot inside the court, you felt the atmosphere of peace and cheerfulness, though it was a hospital. The nuns all looked happy and smiling—they always do, and I always wonder why. Life in a cloister seems to me so narrow and monotonous and unsatisfying unless one has been bred in a convent and knows nothing of life but ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington |
