"Tedium" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... driven forth to make the purchases; Mr. Pyecroft, under Jack's guidance, went below to forage for the anaesthetic of immediate crumbs; and Mary, tender-heartedly, remained behind to relieve the tedium of and give comfort to the invalid. She straightened up the room a bit; urged the patient to eat, to no avail; then went out of the room for a minute, and reappeared with ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... king was seized with a cruel fit of tedium. To divert himself, he attempted every kind of pleasure; he hunted, he presided over his council, he went to the play and the opera, he received all the state corporations with their wives, he read a Carthaginian novel, and ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... secure for ever. The most precious gift he could give to Pope Innocent III., when he was anxious to win his favour, was six volumes of his own works; and when good old Archbishop Baldwin came to preach the Crusade in Wales, Gerald could think of no better present to help beguile the tedium of the journey than his own "Topography of Ireland." He is equally pleased with his own eloquence. When the archbishop had preached, with no effect, for an hour, and exclaimed what a hardhearted people it was, Gerald moved them almost instantly to tears. He records also that John Spang, the ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis
... dances, The fillings of hot little rooms, The glancings of rapturous glances, The fancyings of fancy costumes; The pleasures which Fashion makes duties, The praisings of fiddles and flutes, The luxury of looking at beauties, The tedium of talking to mutes; The female diplomatists, planners Of matches for Laura and Jane, The ice of her Ladyship's manners, The ice of his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various
... Tedium and inquietude reigned everywhere, and sometimes terror. And the dull and somber city, the stone buildings atrociously lined one against the other, shutting in the temples, were for men a prison, rebuffing ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... friends would miss the constant intercourse with which they had flattered themselves—the only thing that made London endurable to poor Emma. She amused Violet with her lamentations over her gaieties, and her piteous accounts of the tedium of parties and balls; whereas Violet declared that ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal, and as a poet who is too little known has well said in one of his unpublished lyrics, we, by the art ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... for though it might not be seeing all I would like to see, it would be doing something to while away the tedium of waiting, and there seemed a little of the spice of adventure about it that pleased my ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... sailor is easily pleased, for the simple reason that anything is a relief from the tedium of life on ship-board; consequently the coming of the cow was like a half-holiday to them at the wrong end of the day, and they stood about nudging each other, as Dirty Dick trotted up with his bucket, Archy looking on as much amused as ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn
... with something on your mind you are to be forced to speak of in the morning—a compulsion awaiting you as a lion awaiting the debut of a reluctant martyr in the arena of the Coliseum? Did you, so watching, feel—not the tedium—but the maddening speed of the hours, the cruelty of the striking clocks? Were you conscious of a grateful reliance on your bedroom door, still closed between you and your lion, as the gate that the eager eyes of Rome were fixed on was ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... salvation. The remainder followed Cabet to the deserted Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, where vacant houses offered immediate shelter and where they enjoyed an interval of prosperity. The French genius for music, for theatricals, and for literature relieved them from the tedium that characterized most co-operative colonies. Soon their numbers increased to five hundred by accessions which, with few ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... made his appearance from among a little group of clerks with whom he had been indulging in a few jokes by way of relief from the tedium of business. "Come this way," he said to Ellen; and sauntering before her, with a rather dissatisfied air, led the way out of the entrance hall into another and much larger apartment. There were ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... after this he entered with his friend Correa the office of the Direccion de Bienes Nacionales as copyist, at the munificent salary of some $150 a year. The employment was decidedly contrary to his taste, and to amuse his tedium he used often to sketch or read from his favorite poets. One day, as he was busy sketching, the Director entered, and, seeing a group about Gustavo's chair,—for the young artist's sketches were eagerly ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... long catalogue of humorists that frivolity was the prevailing note of the play. But I can give assurances that this was not so. The prevailing note was a high seriousness, culminating in the last Act, when tedium supervened. I attribute my final depression in part to the scene—a bird's-eye view of New York from the roof-garden of the Settlement House. It was impossible to share Quixano's spasm of exaltation in the matter of the Melting Pot as he gazed on this very indifferent example ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... the answer, in the same tone of readiness with which he had responded to Huntington. By keeping his mouth shut, and never taking sides in any of the occasional disagreements and disputes that enlivened the tedium of life in that community, Thompson had established a reputation for neutrality and trustworthiness, and was permitted to ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... bank and watch you doing it. I know what girls in the chorus have to go through. Hanging about for hours in draughts, doing nothing, while the principals go through their scenes, and yelled at if they try to relieve the tedium of captivity with a little light conversation ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... times before they were finally signed, sealed, and delivered to the old man-servant who acted as gardener, coachman, and general factotum to our household, and when we started off my father placed a book in my hands, that I might have something with me to beguile the tedium of the journey. My father accompanied me as far as Salisbury to bespeak the care and attention of the guard on my behalf, but finding that the only other inside passenger was an old gentleman of whom he had some slight knowledge, he commended me to my fellow-passenger's protection, and with many ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... was weaving sweet fancies to beguile the tedium of her uneventful life, a very different scene was being enacted, a few miles away, in the humble home of John Watson, C. P. R. section-man, in the little town of Millford, where he and his wife and family of nine ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... long white hands were bare, he could not touch a toad. It was true that the beast had amused him, and that he had chatted to it; but, after all, this was a piece of childish folly—an unmanly way, to say the least, of relieving the tedium of captivity. What was Monsieur Crapaud but a very ugly (and most people said a venomous) reptile? To what a folly he had been condescending! With these thoughts, Monsieur the Viscount steeled himself against the glances of his topaz-eyed ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... hard; it is hard to avoid a little tedium here, but I think by beginning with the arrival of the three Miss Scarlets hot from school and society in England, I may manage to slide in the information. The problem is exactly a Balzac one, and I wish I had his fist—for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... table had discovered a new amusement with which to enlighten the tedium of waiting while Maggie was in the kitchen foraging for food. The game was called "local color," in honor of Patty Wyatt's famous definition in English class, "Local color is that which makes a lie seem truthful." The object of ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... either get your "stanes" in England and travel out with them, or hire them in the locality. They make the most pleasant travelling companions and at times are the cause of many amusing incidents which beguile the tedium of the journey. Also they often lead to your picking up chance acquaintances. I have known one stone placed in a dimly lighted corridor of a train productive of much merriment and harmless banter. Being of considerable weight ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... African pictures I have given in the last chapter. My story had too much of the bareness of the Greek stage, and I was conscious that landscape, as well as action, was required to mellow the subject and relieve it from tedium. After our dash through the wilderness, let us return to the slow ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... exalt rather than diminish his services. You pointed me to the fact that you had observed that rule in the case of the Louisiana and Carolina troops, and you will not fail to perceive that others find in the fact a reason for the like disposal of them. In the hour of sickness, and the tedium of waiting for spring, men from the same region will best console and relieve each other. The maintenance of our cause rests on the sentiments of the people. Letters from the camp, complaining of inequality ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the West looked out eagerly for the Missouri, hoping to find the valley of the river rich in scenery which would relieve the tedium of the journey. But when we came out upon the river-bank and looked at the dull shores, and the sandy bed, which the scant stream does not cover, but through which it creeps, treacherous and slimy, in half a dozen channels, there was no pleasure to the eye, no relief for the spirit. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... tendencies among the men who had been trained in the pure Tuscan schools, which partly concealed, or adorned, the materialism of their advance; and Raphael himself, after profoundly studying the arabesques of Pompeii and of the palace of the Caesars, beguiled the tedium, and illustrated the spirituality of the converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the Mount of Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two humming-birds on the top of ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... present of an armadillo, or ant-eater, who is certainly a wonderful animal, and well worth studying, in the tedium of a calm between the tropics. The body proper is but about nine inches, but, when stretched at length, he covers an extent of two and a half feet, from head to tail, and is wholly fortified with an impenetrable armor of bony scales. On any occasion of alarm, it is his custom to thrust his long ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... this hint that the Minister of War acted, executing a rare piece of drollery that so enlivened the tedium of ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... realisation was utterly unlike the dream; the marriage was excessively prosaic and eternal, not at all what you expected it to be; and your illusions were dissipated; and games and hobbies had an unpleasant core of tedium and futility; and the ideal tobacco-mixture did not exist; and one literary masterpiece resembled another; and all the days that are to come will more or less resemble the present day, until you die; and in an illuminating ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... who had spent so much of my lifetime in solitude, the tedium of the voyage so much complained of was gaiety itself; with three fellow-passengers besides the captain, the time passed very agreeably. On board these floating palaces a passenger, in fact, finds everything that can contribute to his comfort; the best of accommodation, the best of fare, and the ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... instruction for the young, and, especially, as regards religious services for them. Go back to your own youth, and recollect how little command of attention you had yourself, how volatile you were, how anxious to escape all tedium, how weary of words, how apt to dislike routine. Then see whether you make sufficient allowance for these feelings in dealing with the young; and whether it might not be possible to give them the same holy precepts, to communicate the same extent, or nearly so, of religious ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... atmosphere always had a strange weight of tedium in it, such as was specially perceptible after the joyous ease of the house in the High Street. No one was in the drawing-room, and Harry gazed round at the stiff, almost petrified, aspect of the ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Macaulay. But in the bustling New York of fifty or one hundred years hence the dreamer or the student wishing to feel how the inhabitants of Manhattan lived three or four score years ago, or how we are living today, will not disdain to turn over pages originally designed to lighten the tedium ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... block-house. Since that time the English have retained possession of this much disputed territory; the fort has been unarmed and unoccupied (by military force) since 1850, when the Rifle Brigade were stationed here; but the tedium of garrison life proving still more irksome here, and desertions being frequent, the fort was abandoned as a ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... actually) denser than the Earth's. This would serve to add buoyancy and still further diminish weight, thus making flying quite natural and simple. I certainly do not believe that the Martians are subjected to the tedium of walking. If they do not fly, they will at least make long, swift, graceful hops or jumps of some ten or fifteen feet each. This would require a more hinged development of the lower limbs, like a bird's. It is also ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... exhibitors being of course recognizable by the public, and, if good, serving the purpose of advertisements. Unluckily, Mrs. Jameson proposed accompanying me, in order to lighten by her very agreeable conversation the tedium of the process. Her intimate acquaintance with my face, with which Mr. Pickersgill was not familiar, and her own very considerable artistic knowledge and taste made her, however, less discreet in her comments and suggestions with regard to his operations than was altogether pleasant to him; ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... students, resort to dictation devices. Others, realizing the pedagogical weakness of such teaching, distribute mimeographed outlines of carefully prepared summaries of the lectures. Now the student is relieved of the tedium of note taking, but the temptation to let his mind wander afield is intensified. An outline, scanty of detail, but so devised as to keep the organization and sequence of subject matter clear in the minds of students, is, of course, helpful. But detailed ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the favourite were as follows. He rose early, drove or rode for an hour, and after breakfast transacted business for a time. He then relieved the tedium of that time by witnessing exhibitions of skill and daring by his private matadors, after which he spent about three hours in the society of the Queen. He then devoted the same length of time to the conduct of public business with the King; and the day ended ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... and cartoons bearing on the larger issues of the election. Within doors the telegraph operator was already installed at the ancient table which had graced the grand-paternal distillery, and William Irons was making good the tedium of a dreary day in the deserted office by goggling from the ticking instrument to a consignment of iced champagne just ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of us who knew Dr. Schaff intimately, one of his most attractive traits was his jovial humor and inexhaustible fund of anecdotes. When I made a visit to California—journeying with him to the Yosemite—his endless stories whiled away the tedium of the trip. How often when he sat down to my own, or any other table, would he tell how his old friend, Neander, when asked to say grace at a dinner, and roast pig was the chief dish, very quaintly said: "O, Lord, if Thou canst bless under the new dispensation what Thou ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... employment of capital at home: the only practicable alternative. It knows that war, on its romantic side, is "the sport of kings": and it concludes that we had better get rid of kings unless they can kill their tedium with more democratic amusements. It notes the fact that though the newspapers shout at us that these battles on fronts a hundred miles long, where the slain outnumber the total forces engaged in older campaigns, are the greatest battles known to history, such machine-carnages bore us so ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... a few lines a great deal of valuable professional information is conveyed, at the same time that the tedium of much study is relieved by the harmony. If poetry is yet to be found in our hospitals—a queer place certainly for her to dwell, unless in her present feeble state the frequenters of Parnassus have subscribed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Zola. Not that there is not a place and an hour for him, and others like him; but they are not, if you please, to have the whole world to themselves, and all the time, and all the praise; they are not to turn the world into a dissecting-room, time into tedium, and the laurels of Scott and Dumas ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... mind which is before him to be the subject of his operation, is exactly in the state to be most easily and pleasantly operated upon. The reason now why some teachers find their work delightful, and some find it wearisomeness and tedium itself, is that some do, and some do not take this view of their work. One instructer is like the engine-boy, turning without cessation or change, his everlasting stop-cock, in the same ceaseless, mechanical, and monotonous routine. Another is like the little ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... probable that Sir Archibald Roylance did not altogether believe Dickson's tale; it may be that he considered him an agreeable romancer, or a little mad, or no more than a relief to the tedium of a wet Sunday morning. But his incredulity did not survive one glance at Saskia as she stood in that bleak drawing-room among Victorian water-colours and faded chintzes. The young man's boyishness deserted him. He stopped short in his tracks, and made a profound and awkward bow. "I am at your ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... him beware of creating tedium! Who has not felt the charm of a spoken story up to a certain point, and then suddenly become aware that it has become too long and is the reverse of charming. It is not only that the entire book may have this fault, but that this fault may occur in chapters, in passages, in pages, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... limited itself almost exclusively to biographies of saints, to the legend of Saint Columban, written by the monk, Jonas, and to that of the blessed Cuthbert, written by the Venerable Bede from the notes of an anonymous monk of Lindisfarn, he contented himself with glancing over, in his moments of tedium, the works of these hagiographers and in again reading several extracts from the lives of Saint Rusticula and Saint Radegonda, related, the one by Defensorius, the other by the modest and ingenious Baudonivia, a nun ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... barbaric form, in connection with the cult of Dionysus. He, the god of wine, was also the god of inspiration; and the ritual with which he was worshipped was a kind of apotheosis of intoxication. To suppress for a time the ordinary work-a-day consciousness, with its tedium, its checks, its balancing of pros and cons, to escape into the directness and simplicity of mere animal life, and yet to feel in this no degradation but rather a submission to the divine power, an actual identification with the deity-such, it would seem, was the intention ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... who was taking the tedium of the early morning hours on horseback, was one of these victims of bureaucratic tyranny. Two years previously, a sudden order from the Foreign Office had dragged him from Montpellier, whither he had gone on account ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... must have known some one who had seen Him. "None hath seen Him smile; but many have seen Him weep." It is so like what we should have expected! The days of the joyous pagan gods were passing away, the shadows of tedium and of life-weariness were drooping over a world that was once filled with thoughtless merriment—and then came One who preached the Gospel of Sorrow. He preached that gospel, and a faithless world at first refused to hear Him; but the Divine ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader will smile at the baptism, and turn with greater interest to the terms of the treaty. In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelessly wrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to the religious element in this part of English history, for without it there would never have been any English history at all. And nothing could clinch this truth more than the case of the Danes. In all the facts that followed, the baptism of Guthrum is really ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... finding passages of almost unbearable prolixity. A defence was once made by a great artist for what, to the unregenerate mind, seemed the merciless tardiness of movement in one of Goethe's romances, that it was meant to impress on his readers the slow march and the tedium of events in human life. The lenient reader may give Wordsworth the advantage of the same ingenious explanation. We may venture on a counsel which is more to the point, in warning the student that not seldom in these blocks of afflicting prose, suddenly ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... gaining attention is to relate a short anecdote. Everybody enjoys a good story, and if it is chosen with proper regard for its illustrative value, the argument is sure to be strengthened. On the whole, humorous stories are best. They often relieve the tedium of an otherwise dry speech, and not only serve as persuasion, but drive home a point with greater emphasis than could the most elaborate course of reasoning. This method is so familiar to every one that detailed explanation is unnecessary. ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... to breakfast; for folk are early in the New World, and do not lie a-bed all the forenoon, thinking how to waste the afternoon, and then, when the afternoon comes, try and relieve the tedium thereof by cooking up some project to get over the ennui of the evening. Whatever else you may deny the American, this one virtue you must allow him. He is, emphatically, an early riser; as much so as our own most gracious Sovereign, whose example, if ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... well-meaning young fellow, happily dispositioned, and a great favorite with the tribe at Robinson's Post, whither he had gone in the service of the Department of Agriculture, to assist the local agent through the tedium of ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... pay the rent. A vision of destruction and brokers passed before her mind, and she realized for the first time the immense importance of the step she had taken. Not only was her own future hidden, but the future of those she had left behind. The tedium of her life in Hanley was forgotten, and she remembered only the quiet, certain life she might have led, in and out from the shop to the front kitchen, and up to her workroom—the life that she had been born into. Now she had nothing ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... those rare powers—fruit of nature and of our interchange of thought—treasures whence should issue a unique satisfaction for passion and desire, hours of poetry to outweigh years, joys to make a man serve a lifetime for one gracious gesture,—all this is to be buried in the tedium of a tame, commonplace marriage, to vanish in the emptiness of an existence which you will come to loath! I hate your children before they are born. They ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... in his early cup of tea that Easter Saturday afternoon, Louis had no project whatever in his head, and he was excessively, exasperatingly bored. A quarter of an hour earlier he had finished reading the novel which had been mitigating the worst tedium of his shamed convalescence, and the state of his mind was not improved by the fact that in his opinion the author of the novel had failed to fulfil clear promises—had, in fact, abused his trust. On the other hand, ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... sharp tongue made the bed hard to lie on and the bread difficult to swallow down. Idleness reawakened the propensity to vicious habits which he thought he had outlived, while the rough society of the lumber camps, in which he sought to relieve the tedium of time, extended him the welcome which Falstaff and ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... speedily demonstrated; whereas if merely shamming, discovery overtook him with a certainty that wrote "finis" to his last hope. Nevertheless, for this ordeal, as for his earlier regulating at the rendezvous, the sailor who knew his book prepared himself with exacting care during the tedium of his voyage. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... ninety-six hours of pure tedium. After the first accelerating blasts, the rockets were silent. There was no weight. There was nothing to hear except the droning murmur of unresting electric fans, stirring the air ceaselessly so that excess moisture ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... do not like your look, Your brows are (see the poets) bent; You're biting hard on Tedium's hook, You're jaundiced, crumpled, footled, spent. What's worse, so mischievous your state You have no pluck to try and trick it. Here! Cram this cap upon your pate And come ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... her, the house making itself bright with candles, and this was a broad hint to her to hurry. For they were only kindled on a Sabbath night with a view to that family worship which rounded in the incomparable tedium of the day and brought on the relaxation of supper. Already she knew that Robert must be withinsides at the head of the table, "waling the portions"; for it was Robert in his quality of family priest and judge, not the gifted Gilbert, who officiated. She made good time accordingly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... C. Adams; of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, the opponents of the slave-trade. There is also a very beautiful sketch of the head of William Wordsworth; this study was made by Pickersgill to save the poet the tedium of long sittings for the portrait in the Hall. It was presented to the College by Miss Arundale, a descendant of the painter. The smaller Combination Room contains many engraved portraits of distinguished ...
— St. John's College, Cambridge • Robert Forsyth Scott
... water-lilies; nor was his happiness entirely and solely the essence of his material ease. This was his third morning out of doors, and on each of the two mornings that were gone Hortensia had borne him company, coming with the charitable intent of lightening his tedium by reading to him, but ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... The monotonous tedium of routine slave-labor was very often broken by some scene of cruelty to one or another of the poor blacks, either by the master or his overseer; and woe unto the luckless one if the master should happen to be in a good mood to break bones. Although slaves were worth money in the South ...
— Biography of a Slave - Being the Experiences of Rev. Charles Thompson • Charles Thompson
... copying out some of the phrases and committing them to memory. On landing I found these few phrases extremely useful, and I mention the fact by way of encouragement, and in case any other traveller should be inclined similarly to beguile the tedium of the voyage. He will ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... the planet is favorably situated, to witness an entire rotation of Jupiter in the course of one night, but the beginning and end of the observation would be more or less interfered with by the effects of low altitude, to say nothing of the tedium of so long a vigil. But by looking at the planet for an hour at a time in the course of a few nights every side of it will have been presented to view. Suppose the first observation is made between nine and ten ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... in a mood of exaltation. He had passed the last few days in a condition of intermittent melancholy, consequent on the discovery that he was not the only man on board the Atlantic who desired the society of Ann as an alleviation of the tedium of an ocean voyage. The world, when he embarked on this venture, had consisted so exclusively of Ann and himself that, until the ship was well on its way to Queenstown, he had not conceived the possibility of intrusive males forcing their unwelcome attentions on her. ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... from tedium sought recreation in night attacks. Even Petronius took part in these amusements. Their main object was to seize women and toss each on a soldier's mantle till she fainted. Even Nero himself on occasions called these expeditions "pearl hunts," ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... with looks bold and shy. They had not many objects of thought in common, therefore not many subjects for conversation. There was no poetry in Gordon, and but the flimsiest sentiment in Phemy. Her mind was feebly active, his full of tedium. Hers was open to any temptation from him, and his to the temptation of usurping the government of her world, of constituting himself the benefactor of this innocent creature, and enriching her life with the bliss of loving a noble object. Of course he meant nothing ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... the time, and lightening the tedium of a sea passage to the refugees, we bethought us of getting up a play. This was managed by one of the lieutenants of marines, a fellow of great taste, and some one or two of the midshipmen, who pretended to skill in the Shakespearian art. What ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... in Boston. The recital here will be Saturday evening, which means that they will remain here on Sunday until the evening train East. I shall suggest to my friend that his employer, to while away the tedium of the Sunday, might care to look in upon me in the afternoon and meet a few of our best people. Nothing boring, of course. I've no doubt he will arrange it. I've written him to Portland, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... circumstance, as well as the shape of his head-dress, and his own half-crazed, half-cunning expression of countenance, sufficiently pointed him out as belonging to the race of domestic clowns or jesters, maintained in the houses of the wealthy, to help away the tedium of those lingering hours which they were obliged to spend within doors. He bore, like his companion, a scrip, attached to his belt, but had neither horn nor knife, being probably considered as belonging to a class whom it is esteemed dangerous ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... dawned upon the blase young staff officer that he had met Alan Hawke in certain circles where plunging had chased away the tedium of Indian club life with the delightful sensations of raking ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... burned with shame. She felt humiliated. Evidently he had regarded her merely as some one with whom it might he agreeable to idle away the tedium of a journey—but that was all. It was obviously his intention that that should be the beginning ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... merely a cluster of houses and stores, a shack for a station, a freight house and corral with cattle-chutes, and a long platform on which the uneasy passengers might stroll to relieve the tedium of the wait. ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... acquires a sort of shorthand for one's notes and mind in relation to such special work. I have never taught; nor lectured, that is to say, I have never had to express my thoughts about mechanical things in ordinary everyday language, and I doubt very much if I could do so now without extreme tedium. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... having followed the doctrine of Jesus or the doctrine of the world? He instanced the gambler and the libertine, who willingly confess themselves unhappy, but who, he asked, ever heard of the good man saying he was unhappy? The tedium of life the good man never knows. Men have been known to regret the money they spent on themselves, but who has ever regretted the money he has spent in charity? But even success cannot save the gambler and libertine from the tedium ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... person who utters it but fuses all into a poetic unity. It is life in its largeness, its variety, its complexity, which surrounds us in the "Canterbury Tales." In some of the stories indeed, which were composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman; but taken as a whole the poem is the work not of a man of letters but of a man of action. Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel—a training not of books but of life. And ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... my studies, and a balm for my spirit in the memory of my observations of former years, I should feel little desire for longer life. But so it has been, that this life of obscurity, this vacation from public business, which causes tedium and disgust to so many, has proved a sovereign ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... and settled herself comfortably in a corner of the vehicle, where she slept through the tedium of ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... like a jail. The Little Chaplain, as he thought of it, grew serious, the ivory flash of his smile vanishing from his chocolate-colored face. What a month he had spent there! The professor was driving away the tedium of the vacation by teaching this young peasant, wishing to initiate him into the beauties of Latin letters with the aid of his eloquence and a strap. He wished to make a prodigy of him by the time he took up his classes again, and the blows grew more frequent. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... had performed his duty by sitting on a fence and "righting up" his pockets, to beguile the tedium of his exile. Before his multitudinous possessions could be restored to their native sphere, Thorn was himself again, and ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... defatigation^; lassitude &c (fatigue) 688; drowsiness &c 683. disgust, nausea, loathing, sickness; satiety &c 869; taedium vitae &c (dejection) 837; boredom, ennui. wearisomeness, tediousness &c adj.; dull work, tedium, monotony, twice-told tale. bore, buttonholer, proser^, wet blanket; pill [Slang], stiff [Slang]; heavy hours, the enemy (time). V. weary; tire &c (fatigue) 688; bore; bore to death, weary to death, tire to death, bore out of one's skull, bore out of one's life, weary out of one's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... shrimp and other comestibles, and had put him up, during here and there holidays and later a vacation, when his mother and aunts, with whom he lived, had gone abroad to take inefficacious cures for the tedium of a futile life. Oxford, however, had set him a bit off ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after the other, works regarded as his best: "King Lear," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," not only did I feel no delight, but I felt an irresistible repulsion and tedium, and doubted as to whether I was senseless in feeling works regarded as the summit of perfection by the whole of the civilized world to be trivial and positively bad, or whether the significance which this ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... his devices were as unsubstantial as stage scenery; the besiegers were the villains of the piece who would meet with their deserts before the curtain fell; there was comic by-play in his ways of beguiling the tedium and the lassitude of the siege, in the bantering messages he sent out to the besiegers, and now and then even in his garrison orders. The little garrison was permeated by the exosmose action of his cheery optimism and humour during seven weary months of waiting; ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... day, of ships, of the open ocean,' called up 'an army of anonymous desires and pleasures'? To have the 'golden-tongued Romance with serene lute' for a mistress and familiar is to be fortified against the assaults of tedium. ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... little hound and the two sculptured figures lying, peaceful in death, for ever side by side, touched and captivated Damaris from the first time she set eyes on them. She reverenced and loved them, weaving endless stories about them when, in the tedium of prayer or over-lengthy sermon, her attention, all too ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... from a great variety of sources. I have for a long time been collecting them, and am willing to believe they may prove entertaining and profitable to the railway traveller and the general reader, relieving the tedium of hours when the mind is not disposed to ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... expiating some heavy debts by a forced residence with his parents, and unwilling attention to the office, a most distasteful position, which he never attempted to improve, and which permitted him both the tedium of idleness and complaints against all the employment to which ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... replied I. "The sentry of talk challenges the approaching skirmishers of sleep. The thong of narrative drives off the dogs of tedium. Tell on." And in point of fact I was now too credulous to be anything but astounded.... John ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... indiscretion; for when he ascertained that he was to be kept a prisoner in the cottage until the return of the Wasp, he at once made up his mind to submit with a good grace to what could not be avoided. In order to prove that he was by no means cast down, as well as to lighten the tedium of his confinement, Jo entertained himself by singing snatches of sea songs—such as, "My tight little craft,"—"A life on the stormy sea,"—"Oh! for a draught of the howling blast," etcetera, all of which he delivered in a bass voice so powerful that ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... were later, the coffee was weaker in the morning, the pottage was weaker, the boiled beef less relieved by other diet, the dresses finer, the evening engagements constant. I did not find these visits pleasant. We might not knit, which would have relieved the tedium a little; but we sat in a circle, talking together, only interrupted occasionally by a gentleman, who, breaking out of the knot of men who stood near the door, talking eagerly together, stole across the room on tiptoe, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... no small trouble to secure in the nick of time the game demanded by the huntress who has recently fallen a captive to my net. As assistant-purveyors I have a few small schoolboys, who, released from the tedium of their declensions and conjugations, set out, on leaving the classroom, to inspect the greenswards and beat the bushes in the neighbourhood on my behalf. The gros sou, the penny-piece, if you please, stimulates ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... cages over the fireplace; and the one idea uppermost in my mind was how well the linnets must be seasoned to tobacco smoke if they could sing at all in the atmosphere which those Corydons were so carefully polluting. Corydon, besides his pipe, had adopted nuts and beer to solace the tedium of the quarter of an hour that yet intervened before the Bermondsey bird and its Walworth antagonist were to be "on the nail;" and ever and anon fresh Corydons kept dropping in, until some fifty or sixty had assembled. They were all of one type. There was a "birdiness" ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... relieved the tedium of her trial by using her eyes a little more; if, for example, she had condescended to look twice at the handful of mere spectators beyond the reporters on her right, she could scarcely have failed to recognize the good-looking, elderly man who was at her ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... jokes are few. Surely it might be permitted Lawyer Gooch to mitigate the bore of briefs, the tedium of torts and the prosiness of processes with even so light a levy upon the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... recreations which relieved the tedium of garrison life, was an occasional wolf chase. I am too tender hearted to call it an amusement, but it was exceedingly exciting. The animal having been caught in a box-trap, and not maimed or crippled in any way, was first muzzled, and then let loose for a race for its life over the ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... so little chance of her ever seeing him again! All day she felt weary and disappointed, and, after the merrymaking of the night before, the household work was irksome. But she would soon have got over both weariness and tedium had her aunt been kind. It is true, she did not again refer to Tom, taking it for granted that he was done with; but all day she kept driving Letty from one thing to another, nor was once satisfied with anything she did, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... dark eyes which his daughter had inherited, and which seemed all the more brilliant in contrast with his frosty eyebrows, and said genially, "It is very kind of you to be willing to aid in beguiling an old man's tedium." Turning to his daughter he added a little querulously, "There must be a storm brewing, Grace," and he drew in his breath as ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... defiance spread from prisoner to prisoner with the speed of wings; every face was seen to be illuminated like those of the spectators at a horse-race; and indeed you must first have tasted the active life of a soldier, and then mouldered for a while in the tedium of a jail, in order to understand, perhaps even to excuse, the delight of our companions. Goguelat and I slept in the same squad, which greatly simplified the business; and a committee of honour was accordingly formed of our shed-mates. ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that I went away; and the wanderer's shadow and the longest tedium and the stillest hour—have all said unto me: "It is the ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... unshaken. The interval between the expiry of the period (of three weeks) which with the collective wisdom of all the wizards we had decreed to be a synonym for the Siege's duration, and the morning of the pronouncement relative to the advance of the Column from Orange River, had had its tedium neutralised by a cheerful vituperation of Gladstone's defective statesmanship in the year of 'eighty-one and his wicked efforts at a later date to "give Ireland away too." The move from Orange River had occasioned general rejoicings. Unaccountable delay ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... sung—as during his too short life above them all sang Burns—for Scotland's sake. Dear is the band that ties the humbly educated man to the true national poet. To many in the upper classes he is, perhaps, but one among a thousand artificers of amusement who entertain and scatter the tedium of their idler hours. To the peasant the book lies upon his shelf a household treasure. There he finds depicted himself—his own works and his own ways. There he finds a cordial for his drooping spirits, nutriment for his wearied strength. Burns is his brother—his helper in time of need, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... very hot, nor the tedium of the session, which had been very great, nor the anxiety of Ministers, which was very pressing, had any effect in impairing the energy of Mr. Turnbull. He was as instant, as oratorical, as hostile, as indignant about redistribution as he had been about the franchise. ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... doubt it; but she has recourse to her imagination to dispel the tedium. She has a marvellous talent for procuring herself diversion and for varying her pleasures. Hers is an imagination having many relays: no sooner is one horse exhausted than there is another ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... and the founders of Australia, must quickly run off into a contrast. The primary object of the Pilgrim Fathers, was the enjoyment of opinions in peace. The early denizens of the southern world burned their first church to escape the tedium of attendance. The first pilgrims of New England attempted a community of goods on the plan of the apostles. The first Australians drew their stores from the commissariat, and adopted the traditions ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... any person of adult age, or younger, in a room with nothing to do but think, and you reduce him to abject misery and restlessness. Most of our reading, entertainment, has this object, and if necessity did not spur men on to work steadily, the tedium of their own thoughts would. To reflect is pleasant only to a few, and the need of a task is the need of the average human being. Perhaps once upon a time in some idyllic age, some fabled age of innocence, time passed pleasantly without work. To-day, work is the prime way of killing ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... the same interest oneself. For it is impossible to infect a man with interest when you have no interest to infect with. There is nothing more deadly or boresome than to see how witnesses are examined sleepily and with tedium, and how the witnesses, similarly infected, similarly answer. On the other hand, it is delightful to observe the surprising effect of questions asked and heard with interest. Then the sleepiest witnesses, even dull ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... while he had reached a time of life when they had ceased to have any interest for him. Most of us, if we live long enough, experience that indifference. The birthday emotion vanishes with the toys that awaken it. I remember when life was a journey from one birthday to another, the tedium of which was only relieved by such agreeable incidents as Christmas, Easter, and the school holidays. But for many years I have stumbled up against my birthday, as it were, with a shock of surprise, have given it a nod ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... early days of April the tedium of winter quarters was relieved by the good news of Grant's successes before Petersburg. It was evident that Lee's army was breaking up, and to guard against the possible escape of any fragment of it by the valley highway, on the 4th of April Hancock sent Dwight's division back to ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... this indeed be the girl he had employed, in the old days—the other days of routine and of tedium, of orders and specifications and dry-as-dust dictation? As though from a strange spell ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... now closing round, did not deter him in the least. Andy was not very fresh for the journey to be sure, for he had ridden upwards of thirty miles that day, so the merry whistle, which is so constantly heard from the lively Irish pedestrian, did not while away the tedium of his walk. It was night when Andy was breasting up a low ridge of hills, which lay between him and the end of his journey; and when in silence and darkness he topped the ascent, he threw himself on some heather to rest and take breath. His attention was suddenly caught by ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... a position. He had been seduced down to a dull country house, and had, as a matter of course, taken to such amusements as the place afforded. He had shot the partridges and made love to the young lady, taking those little recreations as compensation for the tedium of the squire's society. Perhaps he had gone a little too far with the young lady; but then no one knew better than the countess how difficult it is for a young man to go far enough without going too far. It ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... naturally produced by our present circumstances, prevents any thing like regular occupation. We do nothing all the day but wander restlessly about among the old haunts which were our favourites in the peaceful time of our early sojourn here. Max has endeavoured to relieve the tedium, and get up an interest of some sort, by renewing his attempts against the great eel. But the patriarch is as wary, and his stronghold beneath the roots of the buttress tree as impregnable as ever, and all efforts to ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... happened by accident to bethink me of a new pack in a morocco case, in my trunk, which I had placed there by mistake, thinking it to be a flask of something. So a party of us conquered the tedium of the evening with a few games and were ready for bed at six bells, mariner's time, the signal for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... down," the Sheriff was a sort of hero in Kiota. I had listened to many tales about him, showing desperate determination veined with a sense of humour, and I often regretted that I had reached the place too late to see him in action. I had little or nothing to do in the office. The tedium of the long days was almost unbroken, and Stephen's "Commentaries" had become as monotonous and unattractive as the bare uncarpeted floor. The heat was tropical, and I was dozing when a knock startled me. A negro boy slouched in ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... Bessie's present life threatened to be the tedium of nothing to do. She could not read, practise her songs, and learn poetry by heart all the hours of the day: less than three sufficed her often. If she had been bred in a country-house, she would have possessed numerous interests that she inevitably lacked. She was a stranger amongst the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the opinion of those adventurers in whom defeat has generated a sense of injury and an instinct of antagonism. Others less fortunate still have found Landor a continent of dulness and futility—have come to consider the Seven Volumes as so many aggregations of tedium. Such experiences are one-sided and partial no doubt; and considered from a certain point of view they seem worthless enough. But they exist, and they are in some sort justified. Landor, when all is said, remains a writers' ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley |
