"Monotony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... All the life had gone out of his voice. It had an uncanny effect of monotony, as if pitched on two flat notes. To those three, who knew so well the rich beauty of his speaking tones, this change in them was almost more alarming than the change in ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... horizon being invaded by the rocks was thus repeated with the grand monotony of the abyss. The battles of the ocean have the same sublime tautology as the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... arrival at the ladies' parlor dinner was served, and after dinner a Persian merchant was ushered in, closely followed by his servants bearing bales of rare Eastern fabrics. A visit and a dinner at the inn were little events that made a break in the monotony of life at the Hall, and the ladies preferred to visit the merchant, who was stopping at The Peacock for a time, rather than to have him ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child, who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony of poverty. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... saltier than others, Augusta, I admit. But what I was going on to say was that for clear monotony the dinner programmes ever since Paris have beaten the record. Bramley told me how it would be. Consommy, he said—that's soup—consommy, the whole enduring time. Fish frite or fried, roast beef a l'Italienne or mixed up with ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to show. Then, according to the general plan of all these books, in which fierce wars and faithful loves alternate, there is more fighting, and though Artamene is victorious (as how should he not be, save now and then to prevent monotony?) he disappears and is thought dead. Of course Mandane cries, and confesses to the confidante, being entirely "finished" by a very exquisite letter which Artamene has written before going into the doubtful battle. However, he is (yet once more, of course) not ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... call up that phase of feeling it had long since passed, and the house had for a time become to her the very symbol of narrowness and monotony. Then, with the passing of years, it had gradually acquired a less inimical character, had become, not again a castle of dreams, evoker of fair images and romantic legend, but the shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling: the place one came back to, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... men of all ranks, were full of a combative spirit. Life in the castle and hut was alike dull and monotonous, and the excitement of war and adventure was greatly looked for, both as a means of obtaining glory and booty, and for the change they afforded to the dreary monotony of life. ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... operatic pageant. Agostino had done his best to put the heart of the creed of his Chief into these last verses. Rocco's music floated them in solemn measures, and Vittoria had been careful to articulate throughout the sacred monotony so that their full meaning should ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... placed far above him, must be sought as a favour; for that favour he must qualify himself by all knightly virtues, and chief among these, as the position requires, are the virtues of discretion and patience. Hence the poet's ingenuities of adoration; hence often the monotony of artificial passion; hence, also, subtleties and curiosities of expression, and sought-out delicacies of style. In the earlier chansons some outbreak of instinctive feeling may be occasionally present; but, as the amorous metaphysics ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... reading of those pregnant words, all the even and hopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenly erupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, for return to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-widening plans and its obliterating and absolving years of ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... to have known only the simple life, the life of these Arabs! Now they were singing about the camp fires. Queer were the intervals, impossible of notation, but the rhythms might be gathered... a symphony, a defined scheme.... The monotony of the chant hushed his thoughts, and the sleep into which he fell must have been a ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... have now had a long "spell'' of fine weather, without any incident to break the monotony of our lives, I may have no better place for a description of the duties, regulations, and customs of an American merchantman, of which ours ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... without fear or obligation to others, and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in that pavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded. No one, after a few mornings of tacit possession, would have disputed their claim, and there, day after day, in the mild monotony of the December sunshine, they sat and drank their coffee, and talked of the sights which the peasants in the street, and the tourists in the promenade beyond it, afforded. The rows of stumpy palms which separated the road from the walk were not so high ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... the meadow-land, stretching in unbroken monotony to the sky-line; on the other, the brook; beyond ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... week is sufficient to break the monotony of diet and routine, and not often enough to create that insatiable appetite for the glare of lights and the rush of people which makes all family life "deadly dull," as one cafe-haunting ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... refinements than those of mere mechanical perfection. In the Parthenon especially, but also in lesser degree in other temples, the seemingly straight lines of the building were all slightly curved, and the vertical faces inclined. This was done to correct the monotony and stiffness of absolutely straight lines and right angles, and certain optical illusions which their acute observation had detected. The long horizontal lines of the stylobate and cornice were made convex upward; asimilar convexity in the ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... ditches; a few pollard willows, so old that the trunk was, in some, riven asunder, whilst in others nothing but the mere shell remained, together with here and there a stunted thorn, alone relieving the monotony of the surface. ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... on the faces most exposed to the weather. Rising directly from the sea on the west, they cease almost as suddenly on the land side, leaving all the central portion of the island a plain, slightly inclined toward the southeast, where occasional peaks or irregular groups of hills interrupt its monotony. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... moody little stream which Miss Lou was following. She did not go far before she sat down on a rock and watched the murmuring waters glide past, conscious meantime of a vague desire to go with them into the unknown. She was not chafing so much at the monotony of her life as at its restrictions, its negation of all pleasing realities, and the persistent pressure upon her attention of a formal round of duties and more formal and antiquated circle of thoughts. Only as she stole away into solitudes like the one in which ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... fluctuations of the thought. The "Paradise Lost," written in Waller's rhyme, would have been as ridiculous as Waller's love to Saccharissa expressed in Milton's blank verse. The school before Waller were too rugged, but surely there is a medium between the roughness of Donne, and the honied monotony of the author of the "Summer Islands." The practice of running the lines into one another, severely condemned by Johnson, and systematically shunned by Waller, has often been practised with success by poets far ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... his sitting room. Rarely had it seemed so dull and depressing to him as it did then. The photographs on the mantelpiece irritated him. There was no change in them. They struck him as the concrete expression of monotony. His eye was caught by a picture hanging out of the straight. He jerked it to one side, and the effect became worse. He jerked it back again, and the thing looked as if it had been hung in a dim light by an astigmatic drunkard. Five ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... and churches, palaces, and parks, and architectural subjects generally, have occupied so many frontispiece pages of our recent numbers, that we have been induced to select the annexed cuts as a pleasant relief to this artificial monotony. They are Curiosities of Nature; and, in truth, more interesting than the proudest work of men's hands. Their economy is much more surprising than the most sumptuous production of art; and the intricacy and subtlety of its processes throw into the shade all the contrivances of social man: a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... conducting her to any part of the globe; and their courage, of fighting against any equal force. Their lives were a continual alternation between idleness and extreme toil, riotous debauchery and great privation, prolonged monotony and days of great excitement and adventure. At one moment they were revelling in unlimited rum, and gambling for handfuls of gold and diamonds; at another, half starving for food and reduced to a pint of water a day under a tropical sun. ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... geological formation. Occasionally the island winds like a snake through a wilderness of naked granite boulders, round and slippery, and barely high enough out of the water to afford a foundation for a few fishermen's huts, which from time to time break the monotony of their solitude. Sometimes the channel opens out into broad lakes, apparently hemmed in on all sides by pine-covered cliffs; then passing between a series of frightful crags, upthrown, as it were, out of the water by some convulsion of nature, the surging waves lash their way through ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... obligation. He sent flowers to Mrs. Trescott, and found interesting things in books and magazines for Josie. Having known him as a somewhat cold and formal man, Mrs. Trescott was greatly pleased with this new view of his character. He diverted her mind, and relieved the monotony of her grief. Cornish was a diplomat (otherwise Jim would have had no use for him in the first place), and he skilfully chose this sad and tender moment to bring about a closer intimacy than had ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... half a gale. We kept on tacking to make our way eastward, but the broad and keelless Fram can hardly be called a good "beater"; we made too much leeway, and our progress was correspondingly slow. In the journal there is a constantly recurring entry of "Head-wind," "Head-wind." The monotony was extreme; but as they may be of interest as relating to the navigation of this sea, I shall give the most important items of the journal, especially those regarding the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... redwood forests stretching along this portion of the California coast seeming to keep well back, away from the heavy winds, so that very little is seen of them; while there are no deep inlets or lofty mountains visible to break the regular monotony. Along the coast of Oregon the woods of spruce and fir come down to the shore, kept fresh and vigorous by copious rains, and become denser and taller to the northward until, rounding Cape Flattery, we enter the Strait of Fuca, where, sheltered from the ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... conditions the hand of man only is needed in providing good habitations, planting trees, in the culture of the soil, and some irrigation labour, to transform nearly every little farm within five to ten years from a bare pastoral monotony to a really idyllic spot. There are many such already in Basutoland, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal, as well as in the Cape Colonies and Natal—veritable Eden-like places, as it were bits dropped from heaven. ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... Longfellow's poems one would never suspect that they were produced in an age of turmoil. To be sure, one finds a few poems on slavery (sentimental effusions, written on shipboard to relieve the monotony of a voyage), but these were better unwritten since they added nothing to the poet's song and took nothing from the slave's burden. Longfellow has been criticized for his inaction in the midst of tumult, but possibly ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... found to be 112ft. from the ground; while its massive walls, the eastern one 16ft. thick at the base, are in keeping with its large proportions. The variety of outline in the well-set windows, the shadow-casting angle turrets, and the massive machicolations, all serve to relieve the structure of monotony. The red bricks, too, are varied by having others of a dark grey tint introduced in reticulated patterns, which relieve without being obtrusive. As I have observed elsewhere, a geologist of experience states that both the bricks and the locally-termed grouting, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... to lie in Philip's arms and take what he could give. They were two of a kind, she thought scornfully. In her bitterness, the bleak, snow-covered land, with its drooping pines, seemed in its cold monotony a fitting background for ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... missing ones arrived very soon, all right, while the search party got back considerably later, drenched with spray and with their boat half full of water, but the incident gave some relief from the monotony. ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... out of his mind altogether than to become inflamed by the sight of every woman. He believed that was why he had always kept all thoughts of women out of his mind; but it seemed to him now that a wife would break the monotony that he saw in front of him, and were he to meet a woman such as his father seems to have met he might take her to live with him. He thought of himself as her husband, though he was by no means sure that married life was a possible makeshift for the life he sought and was obliged to forgo, ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... the wide spaces, where homes are but scattered oases in the general emptiness, life does not move uniformly, so far as it concerns incidents or acquaintanceships. A man or a ranch may experience complete isolation, and the unbroken monotony which sometimes accompanies it, for a month at a time. Summer work or winter storm may be the barrier temporarily raised, and life resolves itself into a succession of days and nights unbroken by outside influences. They leave their ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the Cave of the Smell his existence alternated with the monotony of a pendulum—was situated midway on the block on the north side of the street. It boasted a front yard fenced off from the sidewalk with a rusty railing: a plot of arid earth scantily tufted with grass, suggesting that stage of baldness which ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... pits, being two miles from the bottom of the shaft. To a novice this is not easy, as you have to walk in a crouching manner most part of the way. Once there, he begins in earnest, and drives at his pick for eight hours, the monotony only relieved by his gathering the products into small railway waggons or tubs to be removed. This is done mostly by boys, but in the larger mines by ponies of the Shetland and other small breeds. The tubs are taken to a part of the mine where, if one may so speak, the main line ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... had known her to make an awkward gesture. This grace, however, like a finished style in writing, was tinged so strongly with her own individuality that it appeared original as compared with the fashionable monotony which characterized the manners of so many of her age. She could not have been much more than twenty; and yet, as Mrs. Alston took pains to inform her cousin, she had long been in society, adding, "Its homage is her breath of life, and from all I hear your friend Munson has had many predecessors. ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... gentle exercise to Christmas was quite sensational to us. He did not mind what stumps and logs were in the way. We did. Our agility was distinctly forced. But it was a charming morning, and Christmas was out for pleasure. In an hour or so the monotony of the picnic began to pall on Christmas, and as Tom began to chirp at him familiarly, if not quite authoritatively, I sat down in the shade to reflect that while Christmas had been violently exercising ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... 1853, Mr. Gray, who was also then postmaster, offered him a position in the Cleveland post-office, which he accepted, and entered upon its duties; but at the end of two months, being dissatisfied with the dull routine and monotony of such an occupation, he threw up his position; and having, on the very day he left the post-office, decided to adopt the legal profession, before night he had secured a position in the law office of Charles Stetson, Esq., then in large and active practice, and had entered upon the study ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... monkey-trick, grimace. monasterio monastery. moneda coin; monedilla (dim.). mono,-a monkey; mono, -a neat, pretty, charming. monolito monolith, column of stone. monologo monologue, soliloquy. monotonia monotony. monotono monotonous. monstruo monster. monta amount; de poca monta insignificant. montana mountain. montar to mount. monte m. mountain; wood. monton m. heap, mass. morabito hermitage. morador ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... up under him on the chair. He was tired and rested his head upon his arms on the table. The silence and the monotony of the regular heavy walking in the room under him, made him drowsy. His little heart ached, though he could not explain why. He tried hard to keep awake, but finally fell asleep, there at the table. At one time he shivered, when ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... or surface; also, that in a bedroom or other small room apparent size will be gained by using a wall covering which is light rather than dark. Some difference of tone there must be in large plain surfaces which lie within the level of the eye; or the monotony of a room becomes fatiguing. A plain, painted wall may, it is true, be broken by pictures, or cabinets, or bits of china; anything in short which will throw parts of it into shadow, and illumine other parts with gilded reflections; but even then ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... not all Eve's, it was probably shared by the majority of the women present. She was the object that conjured their minds from the dull monotony of their daily routine to realms of happy fancy. And the picture was drawn in a setting of Romance, with Love well in the foreground, and the guardian angel of Perfect Happiness hovering over all. No doubt somewhere in the picture a man was skulking, but even in the light of matrimonial ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... procured, quickly read, and which require no learned researches to be understood. They ask for beauties, self-proffered and easily enjoyed; above all, they must have what is unexpected and new. Accustomed to the struggle, the crosses, and the monotony of practical life, they require rapid emotions, startling passages—truths or errors brilliant enough to rouse them up, and to plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst of ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... unmitigated rubbish that the year has produced. I regret that I have not space to criticise the proceedings into which, however, Dr. Montgomery of Texas has injected some bright thoughts, and the displays of learning relieve the general monotony, while considerable intellectual energy is displayed in the discussions; but to see a conclave of learned professors devoting their time to the examination and discussion of Aristotle's writings is about as edifying as to see a geographical society devoting its time to discussing ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... numbers of scenes of the sort quoted above, where the apparent monotony and verbal padding could be converted into coin for laughter by the clever comedian. Amph. 551-632 could be worked up poco a poco crescendo e animato; in Poen. 504 ff., Agorastocles and the Advocati bandy extensive rhetoric; ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... occupied the family farm of one hundred and forty acres, "more or less," according to the loose description of old deeds. Samuel, indeed, had not enough patriotism to sympathize with his son, John Parsons, who finally ran off to the war, as so many boys did, to escape the monotony of farm life. For Samuel, his father, was a plain, ordinary, selfish, and not very thrifty New England farmer, who laid down his fields every year to the same crops of oats and rye and hay, kept a few sheep and hogs and cows, and in the easy, shiftless way of his kind drained the ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... instruments, which between them accomplished only a quick vibratory beating and strumming, in nearly the time of a hearth-cricket's song, but much harsher, and of course louder, and without any sweetness; only in the monotony and unintended aimless construction of it, reminding one of various other insect and reptile cries or warnings: partly of the cicala's hiss; partly of the little melancholy German frog which says "Mu, mu, mu," all summer-day long, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... saw a telegraph in full activity, probably announcing our arrival. The town next came in sight, and with its numerous churches, convents, and handsome houses, rising in an amphitheatre up the side of a mountain, would have offered a noble and pleasing prospect to eyes accustomed to the monotony of a sea view, but that the majestic Peak, that giant among mountains, rearing in the background its snow-crowned head 13,278 feet above the level of the sea, now stood clear and cloudless before us, enchaining all ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... mv second instalment of Christmas fare: six ounces of potatoes, eight ounces of bread and a mutton chop. Being on hospital diet, I had this trinity for my dinner every day for nine months, and words cannot describe the nauseous monotony of the menu. The other prisoners had the regular Sunday's diet: bread, potatoes and suet-pudding. After dinner I went for another short hour's tramp in the yard. The officers seemed to relax their usual rigor, and many of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... of Senor Rey for two days, and did not catch even a second glimpse of Jim Framtree. His hours of darkness and daylight were given over to the old destructive monotony—the dark drifting of his mind, all the constellations of love and labor and life shut off by the black mass of nimbus. His identity became lost to all order; the forces of his being seemed in some process of fermentation. His hours alone were animate ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... "Hohenlinden," and linger with patriotic gratitude over "Yorktown," notwithstanding the absurd prominence given to the French officers; Conde, Turenne, Moreau, Lannes, Massena, and Lafayette fight over again before us the wars of the Fronde, the Empire, or the Republic. The monotony of these scenes of destruction is only relieved by the individual memories of the chiefs; they link a certain individuality with the flame and shroud of war, the fragmentary conquests, and the struggles that make up so large a portion of external history; and we emerge from the crowd ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... returned it so smartly. There was always a delightful uncertainty also as to what she would do next, and the prospect of an exciting interlude by "Yankee Doodle", as she was nicknamed, was felt decidedly to relieve the monotony of the ordinary Briarcroft atmosphere. Not that Gipsy really ever meant to behave badly; but, accustomed as she was to the free-and-easy conduct of her up-country Colonial schools, she found it almost impossible to realize that what would have been ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... itself, and probably have only the vaguest notion of what it is all about, but for them to join the ranks means adventure, comradeship, the open air—all fascinating things; and they hail the prospect with joy as an escape from intolerable dullness—from the monotony of the desk and the stuffy office, from the dreary round and mechanical routine of the factory bench, from the depressing environment ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... day long I would sit still and sing hymns. (Think of it! as reward to a healthy boy for being good.) There would be no breakfast and no dinner, no tea and no supper. One old lady cheered me a little with a hint that the monotony might be broken by a little manna; but the idea of everlasting manna palled upon me, and my suggestions, concerning the possibilities of sherbet or jumbles, were scouted as irreverent. There would be no school, but also there would be no ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... do not now intend to study the plants or the animals, interesting though they are, but rather a group of mud volcanoes, which forms almost the only relief in the monotony of the bare plain. These volcanoes are in no way related to real volcanoes except in shape, for water and mud, instead of fire and lava, have been concerned in ...
— The Western United States - A Geographical Reader • Harold Wellman Fairbanks
... Knight began to weary of the monotony of his existence, and to sigh for fresh adventures and more excitement. The Squire, too, wished for change, and was not altogether pleased with the buffet he regularly got every evening at the termination of ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... season, unusual prominence to the record of similar offenses. Then, self-deceived, they talk about a "wave," or "epidemic" of it. So far is this from the truth that one of the most noticeable characteristics of crime is the steady and unbroken monotony of its occurrence in certain forms. There is nothing so dull and unvarying as this tedious uniformity of repetition. The march of crime is never retarded, never accelerated. The criminals appear to be thoroughly well satisfied ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... flat tables at which sat the recording officials. And on the blank white wall ticked solemnly a big round clock. The second-hand moved forward by a series of swift jerks, but watch as he would Bobby could see no perceptible motion of the other two hands. In the monotony of some of the proceedings ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... have noted the causes of the migration from three of the Southern States. Here we desire to pursue this line of thought a bit farther, though, we hope, not at the risk of monotony, in order to emphasize these causes in such a manner as to give an impression of what was in general back of this movement from all the states involved. In this regard we are to be guided by the testimonies of Mr. W. T. B. Williams, who, under the direction of the U. S. Department of Labor, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... working-day contains 9 hrs. 30 min. Dinner would be served at any time after 6 P.M., and the allowance of liquor be that of the breakfast. An occasional holiday to Axim should be allowed, in order to correct the monotony ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... rotated round to port or starboard as it listed, according as the ship rose or fell on the long heavy rolling swell that undulated over the bosom of the deep; and most of the passengers were in the same somnolent state—when all at once an event occurred that soon broke the monotony of the afternoon, waking up the sleepy ones to fresh vitality, for an object of interest had at last arisen in the uneventful day sufficient for the moment ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... Nothing could be done, she told Io, beyond the administration of the medicine, for which she had full directions. One day an attack would finish it all; meantime, in spite of her power of self-repression, she chafed at the monotony of her imprisonment. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the rank to which she belonged, she had few equals, and scarcely any superior. The variety of humours which is to be found in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately is monotonous, the general effect is not monotony, but a very lively and agreeable diversity. Her plots are rudely constructed and improbable, if we consider them in themselves. But they are admirably framed for the purpose of exhibiting striking ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... interruption this day to the monotony of the journey. Mulrady, who was in front of the others, rode hastily back to report the approach of a troop of Indians. The news was received with very different feelings by Glenarvan and Thalcave. ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... very different stuff from the sand-ocean of the Sahara. The light plays few tricks with it. Its monotony is wearisome rather than impressive, and the fact that it is seldom without some form of dwarfish vegetation makes the transition less startling when the alluvial green is finally reached. One had always half expected it, ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... that have been recorded by Winslow, Bradford and Morton were significant and must have relieved the monotony of life. On January fourth an eagle was shot, cooked and proved "to be excellent meat; it was hardly to be discerned from mutton." [Footnote: Mourt's Relation.] Four days later three seals and a cod ...
— The Women Who Came in the Mayflower • Annie Russell Marble
... a certain malady of the mind induced by too much of one thing. Just as the body fed too long upon meat becomes a prey to that horrid disease called scurvy, so the mind fed too long upon monotony succumbs to the insidious mental ailment which the West calls "cabin fever." True, it parades under different names, according to circumstances and caste. You may be afflicted in a palace and call it ennui, ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... in a state of almost bewilderment. For sixteen years nothing had occurred to break the monotony of her existence. At first occasional angry messages reached her from her father, with orders to join an application to the pope for a divorce; but when it had been found impossible to overcome her steady refusals the messages had at ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... color and texture of the surface are at all points opposed to breadth of effect or harmony with the surroundings. There is neither mass nor elegance; there are no lines of union with the ground; the meagre monotony of the lines of shingles and clapboards making subdivisions too small to be impressive, and too large to be overlooked,—and finally, the paint, of which the outside really consists, thrusting forward its chalky blankness, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... begin to guess at something of complicity on the part of M. Bethune. A malediction on the whole tribe of mountaineers! The thing's like a play; I've seen far more improbable circumstances in a book. I am shot at in a country reputed to be well-governed even to monotony; a sombre host puzzles, a far too frank domestic perplexes; magic flutes and midnight voices haunt this infernal hold; the conventional lady of the drama is kept in the background with great care, and just when ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... After sniffing at the soup and meat and cabbage he would exclaim: "Hebrews, 13-8." We thought it was some jibe about the fat pork, and after he had sprung it every day for a week we learned that he was hitting at the monotony of the diet. The ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... that Chopin's works largely owe their exotic, poetic color. As they open up new possibilities of emotional expression, they have been eagerly appropriated by other composers and have leavened all modern music. To Chopin, therefore, chiefly belongs the honor of having emancipated music from the monotony of the Western European dance-beat by means of the tempo rubato in its ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... days in the hospital with their routine and monotony, creating an incomprehensible break in his life, his memory retained nothing; but the unchanging grief, weighing like a slab of stone on a grave, was ever present in his soul with inexorable and brutal force during these many months. He only half recalled the strange wonders ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... complicated his existence for him. One absurdity more or less in the development did not matter—all absurdity was distasteful to him; but, urbane as ever, he produced a faintly ironical smile, and said in his calm voice, "It certainly will do away to some extent with the monotony of the thing." ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... off debt. He still owed a portion of his share in the Express; also he had been obliged to obtain an advance from the lecture bureau. He dreaded, as always, the tedium of travel, the clatter of hotel life, the monotony of entertainment, while, more than most men, he loved the tender luxury of home. It was only that he could not afford to lose the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... we carry it farther: Tinville himself, in his turn, is doomed, and not to the Guillotine alone. With blackened face, hirsute, horned, a shaggy Satan snatches him not unshrieking; shews him, with outstretched arm and voice, the fire that is not quenched, the worm that dies not; the monotony of Hell-pain, and the What hour? answered by, It is Eternity! (Montgaillard, iv. 218; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... was no eminence that could be dignified by the name of a mountain, yet there were hills in one part of the horizon, and slight undulations in the middle ground sufficient to prevent any idea of monotony. The fields were green, the trees sufficiently abundant, and a not inconsiderable stream winding about, and sometimes losing itself for a while behind a rising ground topped by a quaint old windmill, gave to the scene variety and life. Homesteads and ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... found his bargain no easy one. The gymnasium was open from nine in the morning until eleven at night, and the athletic gentlemen who came there not only ordered him about without ceremony, but varied the monotony of being set at naught by the invincible Skene by practising what he taught them on the person of his apprentice, whom they pounded with great relish, and threw backwards, forwards, and over their shoulders as though he had been but a senseless effigy, provided for ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... reached us, and heightened our eagerness to advance. But Holland is proverbially difficult for any movements but those of a trackschuyt; and the endless succession of narrow roads, the perpetual canals, and the monotony of her level fields, rich as they were, exhausted us, more than if we had marched twice the distance. But the spell of human hearts is excitement, and war is all excitement. All round us was new, and from the colonel to the rank and file, the "general camp, pioneers and all," enjoyed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... aloud both intelligibly and pleasantly, she came to the conclusion that the country-bred girl was an acquisition destined to grow greatly in value, should the day ever arrive—which heaven forbid!—when they would have to settle down to the monotony of a protracted siege. Remarking, at length, that she looked weary, she sent her away to be mistress of her time till supper, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... itself, and forever. The consciousness of being was intense, but in all the universe was there nothing to enter that being, and make it other than an absolute loneliness. It was, and forever, a loveless, careless, hopeless monotony of self-knowing—a hell with but one demon, and no fire to make it cry: my self was the hell, my known self the demon of it—a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and empty, and I longed for a flame ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... the lower mountains depends, as has just been observed, on their tendency to divide themselves into beds. But it will easily be understood that, together with security, such a structure involves some monotony of aspect; and that the possibility of a rent like that indicated in the last figure, extending itself without a check, so as to detach some vast portion of the mountain at once, would be a means of obtaining accidental forms of far greater awfulness. We find, accordingly, that the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... three days' journey. Most of the food supplies and almost everything else had to be brought from Bombay. Around the bungalow the compounds were simply patches of the universal sands surrounded by mud walls. No flowers, no trees, not even a blade of grass, relieved the dull monotony. Altogether the cantonment of Rohar was an unlovely and uninteresting place. Yet it is but an example of many such stations in India, lonely and soul-deadening, some of which have not even its saving grace of sport to enliven ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... Lanslebourg he followed the ascent of Mont Cenis for ten kilometres before he reached the summit of the pass. Within three kilometres he struck the snow-line, and the falling snow continued to the summit. Here he found two douaniers and two gendarmes, who appeared glad enough to have the monotony of their lonely vigil relieved by the advent of an automobile, quite unlooked for at this season of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... unusually well worth knowing, he concluded after a critical survey of Norman and his mother, who sat in the opposite section, entertaining each other with such evident interest that it made him long for some one to talk to himself. Tired by his two days' journey and bored by the monotony of his surroundings, he yawned, stretched himself, and rising, sauntered out to the rear platform of the observation car. Here, some time later, Norman found him smoking and was drawn into conversation with the stranger, who seemed to have a ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... myself, could not be taken in for some days, during which we had to remain at the school: days of shadow and monotony, with occasional ghastly outbreaks of the high spirits which nothing could repress, even in that house ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... Poe and Tschaikowsky occasionally do. His intellectual muscles are too strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky seem to be by the morbidly fascinating—a kind of false beauty obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that he would weave his spell over us—as would the Grimms and Aesop. We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." This is part of the artist's business. The effect is a part of his art-effort in its inception. Emerson's substance ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... came, and made a slight though temporary break in the daily monotony of our life. The kindness of our friends had supplied us with many luxuries; and we were enabled even in the wilds, to participate in the fare of the season: whilst the season itself, and the circumstances ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... visit it was the general opinion of the guests gathered together at Blandings Castle that the place was dull. The house party had that air of torpor which one sees in the saloon passengers of an Atlantic liner—that appearance of resignation to an enforced idleness and a monotony to be broken only by meals. Lord Emsworth's guests gave the impression, collectively, of being just about to yawn and ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... had converted the Louisville goods into one panther, one deer, two bears, and a roll of "wildcat" money. It was not very good stock with which to begin life on a farm, but the monotony was relieved by a hooking, kicking cow, and a horse which ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... What of that? You confess that he became an altered man after his wife's death. He grew eccentric and misanthropical; he affected an utter indifference as to what became of him. What more likely, then, than that he grew tired of the monotony of civilized life, and ran away to those savage gold-fields to find a distraction for his grief? It is rather a romantic story, but by no means an uncommon one. But you are not satisfied with this simple interpretation ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... In the secluded monotony of his life as a scar over memory had exalted Ledscha into the most desirable of all women, and the slaughtered Abus into the greatest ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that nothing had occurred to disturb the monotony of this awful existence: the fact is, there had been a secret in poor Jane's life which had made her father more savage and morose than even nature, pride, and over-feeding had made him. This secret was connected with Miss Wirt, who had a cousin ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of relief. In the same way a soliloquy (comp. the great soliloquies of Shakespeare) cannot be protracted to any great length without wearying the listener. The thoughts of a man in self-communion are apt to run in a certain circle, and to assume a monotony. The introduction of a second person acting powerfully upon the speaker throughout, draws the latter forth into a more complete and varied expression of his mind. The silent person in the background, who may be all the time master of the situation, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... imagining things and that you've been sitting on that asteroid hoping that something would happen to break the monotony. Now leave me the hell alone or I'll put ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... groups of three and four. And then the road again emptied, and the solitude became more and more complete, without a wayfarer or an animal appearing for miles and miles, whilst yonder, at the far end of the lifeless sea, so grandiose and mournful in its monotony, the sun continued to descend from ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... spent most of his time in pacing to and fro in his soft slippers. The very monotony had eased his mind. Now and again he had lain motionless, with his face to the ceiling. He had dozed and had awakened, cold and torpid with dream. He had hardly been aware of the process, but every hour had done something, it seemed, towards clarifying ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... the Mississippi. This region, which resembles one of the immeasurable steppes of Asia, has not inaptly been termed "the great American desert." It spreads forth into undulating and treeless plains, and desolate sandy wastes wearisome to the eye from their extent and monotony, and which are supposed by geologists to have formed the ancient floor of the ocean, countless ages since, when its primeval waves beat against the granite bases of the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... soothed to drowsiness by the hum of insects, and the monotony of passing winds among the foliage around him, when he soon unwarily fell asleep with his gun folded in his arms. But after a while he awoke from his sleep, and for a moment or two still lay in the same position, as it happened, without stirring, when he found that something ...
— A Sketch of the History of Oneonta • Dudley M. Campbell
... reached by a French visitor, who was delighted for five minutes, and then oppressed with satiety and indifference. When the visitor had made the promenade of the Rotunda, there was practically nothing for him to do save make it again. Hence the mill-round of monotony so aptly expressed by the Suffolk village poet, Robert Bloomfield, who was lured to Ranelagh one night shortly before its doors ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... a minstrel show the other night, and the inspired reporter for the Post mentions that "an intermission separated the two parts and broke the monotony." ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... of happiness. And was Louise altogether content with the man of her choice? No, or she had not gathered Wimbledon about her to make merry the midnight hour. People do not give fetes to display their happiness. They give them too often to relieve a tedious monotony, to silence a gnawing discontent, and forget for the moment in hilarious excitement some uneasy foreboding of evil to come, or disquieting conviction that all, even now, is not as it ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... from New York on the 1st of October, 1830. The monotony of a sea voyage, with unscientific people, is tiresome beyond description. The journal of a single day is the history of a month. You rise in the morning, and having performed the necessary ablutions, mount on deck,—"Well ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... labour that to him must have seemed unprogressive, and, to anything young, heart-breaking. Nor did it appear to give him any consolation to be aware of the commotion he was causing on the other side of the wall, where a threshing machine of an antiquated sort responded with multiform movement to the monotony of his round-and-round. ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... the youngster cautiously takes hold of the least sore teat, yanks it suddenly, and dodges the cow's hock. When he gets enough milk to dip his dirty hands in, he moistens the teats, and things go on more smoothly. Now and then he relieves the monotony of his occupation by squirting at the eye of a calf which is dozing in the adjacent pen. Other times he milks into his mouth. Every time the cow kicks, a burr or a grass-seed or a bit of something else falls into the milk, and the boy drowns these things with a well-directed stream—on ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... of logical division? Are we not at the same time describing them both in superlatives, only that we may satisfy the demands of rhetoric? What is that pain which does not become deadened after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as they are keen; of any others which are both intense and lasting we have no experience, and can form no idea. The words or figures of speech which we use are not consistent with themselves. For are we not imagining Heaven under the ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... I was not surprised to find many chestnut-trees along the road that I now took to St. Pantaleon. The country was less barren than that which I had passed over the day before. Although there was much heather, broom and furze, trees and pasture broke the monotony of the moorland. Here was the better Limousin landscape—every knoll and mamelon covered with heather and other moor-plants, woods and meadows in the dells and dips. The numerous clumps of silver birches, and the gorse arrayed in its new flowers of bright gold, added to ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... peplum or that portion of the draperies flung back over the left shoulder, the folds of which hang obliquely (from the left shoulder to the right side of the waist and thence downward almost to the right knee,) thus breaking up the monotony of the perpendicular lines formed by the folds of the tunic beneath. The movement of the uplifted right arm is characterized by a certain elan which, however, does not suggest violence; the carriage of the head is dignified, and so far as one may judge from a variety of prints, the face ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... spirits were affected too much to permit any excess of words. But they came finally to rougher, much more broken country, and they saw a line of trees on the crest of hills just under the sunset horizon. The sight, the break in the monotony, the cheerful trees made them lift ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... that he might lie down and breathe, but a long way and a great snowy wind were betwixt him and rest. He fell into a reverie, and seemed to get on better for not thinking about the exertion he had to make. The monotony of it at the same time favoured the gradual absorption of his thoughts in a dreamy meditation. Alternately sunk in himself for minutes, and waking for a moment to the consciousness of what was around him, he had walked, as it seemed, for hours, and at length, all notion ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... were again slow in coming to the front, and General Lawton did not feel like risking his men when the Filipinos might surrender at any moment. So a delay of several days occurred, with only a little skirmish here and there to break the monotony. ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... silence of Nature all about him, he might plead in lover-like retirement with his refractory Muse, and strive to coax her into a sweeter and more indulgent humor. It was not that thoughts were lacking to him,—what he complained of was the monotony of language and the difficulty of finding new, true, and choice forms of expression. A great thought leaps into the brain like a lightning flash; there it is, an indescribable mystery, warming the soul and pervading the intellect, but the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of the course of the Amazon," says Condamine, "I provided myself with a resource against the ennui of a quiet voyage with nothing to break the monotony of the scenery, though that scenery was new to me. My attention was continually on the strain as, compass and watch in hand, I noted the deflexions in the course of the river, the time occupied in passing from one bend to another, the variations in the breadth of its ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... right down in the midst of my cares and tribulations. A slight drizzling rain began to fall. The stillness of a prairie is a damper to the best of spirits—the entire suspension of all noises and sounds, not even the tick of an insect to break the black, dull, dark monotony, is a wet blanket to cheerfulness. I really think the stillness of a large prairie is one of the most painful sensations of loneliness, a man ever encountered. The sombre and dreary monotony of a dungeon, is scarcely ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... itself. I have seen one plant which condescended to open its spotted blooms, but only one. No orchids, however, give more material for study; on this account Catasetum was a favourite with Mr. Darwin. It is approved also by unlearned persons who find relief from the monotony of admiration as they stroll round in observing its acrobatic performances. The "column" bears two horns; if these be touched, the pollen-masses fly as if discharged from a catapult. C. pileatum, however, is very handsome, four inches across, ivory ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... know unless it's because all their lives they've been tied to such dead monotony that just the exhilaration of motion is bliss to them. But you won't always have to risk your neck and your temper in this fashion, Bertram. Next week my little couple from South Boston comes. She ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... Charlie looked at each other in amazement. They had fully expected that there would be all sorts of amusements to break the monotony of their long voyage, and their disappointment was great. However, when they found that in consequence of their being the only passengers each might have a cabin to himself, their discontent quickly passed away. And when they got well out to sea they had plenty of amusements, for the captain ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... so steadily, so swiftly? Cases are emptied and refilled; bottles are labeled, stamped and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and loaded, and still there are more cases, more jars, more bottles. Oh! the monotony of it, the never-ending supply of work to be begun and finished, begun and finished, begun and finished! Now and then some one cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh; once the mustard machine broke—and still the work goes on, on, on! New girls like ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... 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 of life in the backwoods seclusion of Wyer's Settlement. Before she went away she had been, to use the vernacular of the Settlement, "keepin' company with Jim-Ed A'ki'son;" and now, to her, the young man seemed to unite and concentrate in his person all that she had been wont to persuade ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... by a young French officer. And then, somehow, the note of mystic exaltation died away, to be succeeded by a period of realism. Read "Le Feu," which is most typical, which has sold in numberless editions. Here is a picture of that other aspect—the grimness, the monotony, and the frequent bestiality of trench life, the horror of slaughtering millions of men by highly specialized machinery. And yet, as an American, I strike inevitably the note of optimism once more. Even now the truer spiritual goal is glimpsed through the battle clouds, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... shrink from such a revolution, a beginning might be made by an automatic change of seats by the gentlemen, say one to the right as in the chasse-croise of the Caledonians. Failing this, the only remaining method of avoiding monotony and the chilling separation of the extremes of the board is to follow the example of King Arthur and employ a round table. The round dinner-table is the only way ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... habitations of man, are almost destitute of animal life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of the yellow pine of the West, Pinus ponderosa, remarks: "In the arid and desert regions of the interior basin, we made whole days' marches in forests of yellow pine, of which neither the monotony was broken by other forms of vegetation, nor its stillness by the flutter of a bird or the hum of an insect."—Pacific Railroad Report, vol. vi., 1857. Dr. Newberry's Report ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... landowners who spend the winter in the country; there's so little to do that if anyone is not in one way or another engaged in intellectual work, he is inevitably bound to become a glutton or a drunkard, or a man like Turgenev's Pigasov. The monotony of the snowdrifts and the bare trees, the long nights, the moonlight, the deathlike stillness day and night, the peasant women and the old ladies—all that disposes one to indolence, indifference, and an ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... our strength. Indeed, Harry declared himself perfectly fit; but I still felt some discomfort, caused partly by the knife-wound on my knee, which had not entirely healed, and partly, I think, by the strangeness and monotony of our diet. Harry's palate was ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... had plunged into a tangled labyrinth of abstruse books, not in search of valuable knowledge, but to lose in its mazes the recollection of valueless hours; who had allowed his days to drag on in aimless monotony; who had fallen into melancholy because he lacked a healthy stimulus to rouse his faculties out of their life-deadening torpidity; who had allowed his nervous diffidence to gain such complete mastery over him that it tied his tongue, and ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... such a coast, Nature never confuses her effects—no lively verdure or picturesque landscape intrudes upon the majesty of the sea—only damp mosses and stout creepers veil the harsh outlines of the rocks, and, in the distance, masses of pine trees relieve the gray monotony of the shore—for the rest, everything is left to the sun and the sea. There are a dozen beaches, each distinct in its charm. Some firm, smooth, and white, as a marble walk—others mere waves of sand, which the lightest breeze whirls—and, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... that perpetual and universal coercion, moral and physical, would have brought about a state of universal sameness,—a dismal uniformity and monotony in all life's manifestations. But such monotony existed only as to the life of the commune, not as to that of the race. The most wonderful variety characterized this quaint civilization, as it also characterized ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony of dinner." ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... still. If the former of these two men, the worker, consumes within the year any profit which may have been left him in that year, he is always at the point from which he started, and his destiny condemns him to move incessantly in a perpetual circle, and a monotony of exertion. Labor, then, is rewarded only once. But if the other, the 'gentleman,' consumes his yearly income in the year, he has, the year after, in those which follow, and through all eternity, an income always equal, inexhaustible, perpetual. Capital, then, is ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... with slate roofs, at the edge of a large mining village in Staffordshire. The houses are dingy and colourless, and without relief of any kind. So are those in the next row, so in the street beyond, and throughout the whole village. There is a dreary monotony about the place; and if some giant could come and pick up all the rows of houses, and change their places one with another, it is a question whether the men, now away at work, would notice any difference whatever until they entered the houses standing in the place of those which they had ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... fundamental impressions the Big House gave. Its lines, long and horizontal, broken only by lines that were vertical and by the lines of juts and recesses that were always right-angled, were as chaste as those of a monastery. The irregular roof-line, however, relieved the hint of monotony. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... increased the carriage filled with the persistent music of an intense and sustained activity. This music, and the thoughts of Maurice fought against sleep. He leaned back with open eyes and listened to the song of the train. Its monotony was like the monotony of an irritable man, he thought, always angry, always expressing his anger. Beneath bridges, in tunnels, the anger was dashed with ripples of fury, with spurts of brutalising passion. And then the normal current of dull temper flowed on again ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in the preceding chapters how Spain became dominant in Italy, superseding the rivalry of confederate states by the monotony of servitude, and lending its weight to Papal Rome. The internal changes effected in the Church by the Tridentine Council, and the external power conferred on it, were due in no small measure to Spanish influence or sanction. A Spanish institution, the Inquisition, modified to suit Italian ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... have a Southern air about them, a variety of contour and colour—in some aspects one might almost say a gaiety—unknown to Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. For one thing, the ubiquitous balconies and fire escapes serve of themselves to break the monotony of line, and lend, as it were, a peculiar texture to the scene; to say nothing of the oportunities they afford for the display of multifarious shreds and patches of colour. Then the houses themselves are often brightly, not to say loudly, painted; so that in the clear, sparkling ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... a dark green forest of colossal trees and florid shrubbery, girding it around; while the even valley itself exhibited large tracts of uncultivated fields, fenced in with palisades, and regular, even to monotony, both in size and form. "Large herds of deer, cattle, and horses, were seen in the openings of the forest, and dispersed over the plain, which was also studded with low flat-roofed dwellings of stone, in small detached clusters, or hamlets. Rich patches ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... tears had she devoured in silence since those hours! How many tales of woe had she told her little birds! For once more it was work that had sustained her, desperate, incessant work, which, by its regularity and monotony, by the constant recurrence of the same duties and the same motions, served as a balance-wheel ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the reality somewhat disappointing. Here were acres of straight green lines hardly higher than gooseberry-bushes, and without a single tree to break the monotony or to cast a welcome shade. The bunches of grapes looked inviting enough, hanging among their decorative leaves and tendrils, but they had not been thinned and consequently were smaller than English hothouse grapes, while exposure to ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... her weakness and wrong-doing had entailed on her. If there be a pitiless community in this world, it is a small New England village. Calvinism, in its sternest aspects, broods over it; narrowness and monotony make rigid the hearts which theology has chilled; and a grim Pharisaism, born of a certain sort of intellectual keen-wittedness, completes the cruel inhumanity. It was six years since poor Sarah Little, baby in arms, had come into such an air as this,—six years, and until ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... our right, we never sighted land for two days, nor did we even see a single ship; the one break in the monotony ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... see how that responsibility can be properly discharged under industrial conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull monotony of labor to care for life's finer interests. The welfare of the family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be secured in one part progress ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... the world to offer to an old maid of forty-two? There she is in the empty nest, and not her own nest at that, with all her little nestlings flying over the hills and far away, and the genuine mother-bird varying the monotony by occasionally pecking her ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... and compassionate efforts of Mr. and Mrs. Singleton, some faint reflection of the outside world festivities penetrated the dismal monotony of prison routine; and the hearts of the inmates were softened and gladdened by kind tokens of remembrance, that carried the thoughts of bearded convicts back to Christmas carols in innocent youth, and to the mother's knees where prayers ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... daughter of the Bavarian Elector; ill-tempered by her own confession, self- willed, and a plain speaker to excess; but otherwise a woman of honest German principles. Unhappy she was through a long life; unhappy through the monotony as well as the malicious intrigues of the French court; and so much so, that she did her best (though without effect) to prevent her Bavarian niece from becoming dauphiness. She acquits her husband, however, in the memoirs which she left behind, of any intentional ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... The monotony of wickedness and outrage becomes at length fatiguing to the coarsest and most callous senses; and the historian, even, who caters professedly for the taste which feeds upon the monstrous and the hyperbolical, is glad at length to escape from the long evolution of his insane atrocities, to the ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... Stornham, and that one having, with such extraordinary unexpectedness arrived, should want to look over the desolation of these, was curious enough to rouse anyone to a sense of a break in accustomed monotony. The young lady herself mystified him by her difference from such others as he had seen. What the man in the shabby livery had felt, he felt also, and added to this was a sense of the practicalness of the questions she asked ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the moor was a personality with moods flecking the solid substance of its character, and even Miriam, who avowed her hatred of its monotony, had to admit an occasional difference. There were days when she thought it was full of secrets and capable of harbouring her own, and there were other days when she forgot its little hills and dales and hiding-places ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... the third battalion disembark and getting on board the freight cars that were to carry them down to the Railroad Front. Each man on board was aching to set foot on dry land once more and would gladly have marched to any front in order to avoid the dull monotony aboard ship, with nothing of interest to view but the gleaming spires of the cathedrals or the cold, gray northern sky, but there is an end to all such trials, and late that evening we received word that our battalion was to ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... very little variety along the road through central Russia, but the monotony is of a different character from that of the harsh soil and the birch and pine forests of the north. The vast plains of this tchernozyom—the celebrated "black earth zone"—swell in long, low billows of herbage and grain, diversified ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... marked failings was an inability to estimate the true value of things. He possessed something of the spirit of adventure and a desire to escape from the drab monotony of his early life, but these found expression in betting on the exploits of others on the football field and the turf, a haunting of the music-halls, and the cultivation of acquaintances on the lowest rung of the dramatic profession. All this offered him some ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss |
