"Yearning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Elise who had always been so resolute and independent, feeling very small and pathetic, yearning for far-off things—utterly lonesome, and a little inclined ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... and remorse for thee and for slaying thee in haste and for not delaying thy death till I had considered the consequence of such misdeed." And the King persisted in weeping and wailing night and day on such wise. But when the Sworder[FN56] beheld the passion of his lord and his yearning and his calling upon Haykar, he came to the presence and prostrated himself and said, "O my lord, bid thy varlets strike off my head!" Quoth the Monarch, "Woe to thee, what be thy sin?" and quoth the Headsman, "O my lord, what slave ever contrarieth the command of his master ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the slightest. He went to school "by littles," and these "littles" put together aggregated less than a year; but he discerned very early the practical uses of knowledge, and set himself to acquire it. This pursuit soon became a passion, and this deep and irresistible yearning did more for him perhaps than richer opportunities would have done. It made him a constant student, and it taught him the value of fragments of time. "He was always at the head of his class," writes one of his schoolmates, "and passed us rapidly in his ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... had longed for Edgar, his words brought vague yearning and distress, while Felix's very tone gave support. How could Edgar say patient, silent, self-devotion was not to be found except ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hushes the promptings of rage and aversion. I had left this woman in bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and a strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries—to be reconciled and clasp hands ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... so soon to be in his own person such an instance of their truth. They are fit closing words to mark his tragic and pathetic disappearance from the high and animated scene in which his imagination worked. And they record, too, the yearning hope of rest not extinguished by ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... to this movement which is His, it seems to me that in the light of even that brief meditation there would be a throwing away of personalities, there would be a trampling down of silly pride, a casting aside of careless obstinacy, a yearning to have some share in the sacrifice, and to give ourselves, however petty we may be, side by side with that sublime sacrifice which They are making year after year for us, unworthy of Their compassion. And yet nothing less than that is the movement ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a countrystile lest, by her movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and the injunction upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and ineffectually entertained, to place her hand against that part of her person which long usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation. The abnormalities of harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Mother Anastasia it had been my purpose, as soon as I could find or make an opportunity, to declare to Sylvia my love for her. Apart from my passionate yearning in this direction, I felt that what I had done and attempted to say when I had parted from my secretary made it obligatory on me, as a man of honor, to say more, the moment I should ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... bundle of hides, with his filth and his antipathy to water, and his straddled legs, and his odious eyes shaded by his brutal hand, and his cry of 'Qu-u-u-u-aaa!' (Bosjesman for something desperately insulting I have no doubt) - conscious of an affectionate yearning towards that noble savage, or is it idiosyncratic in me to abhor, detest, abominate, and abjure him? I have no reserve on this subject, and will frankly state that, setting aside that stage of the entertainment when he counterfeited the death of some ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... appointing dummies, and establishing foolscap guarantees against his poor fallible and flexible self—as he had the effrontery to call it—with all the gravity, grand benevolence, confidence in mankind (as fools), immensity of yearning for universal good, and intensity of planning for his own, which have hoodwinked the zanies in every age, and never more than in the present age and country. And if France licked the dust, she could plead more than we can—it had ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... they suffer, is the refrain of all the speakers at negro meetings that are held in encouragement and aid of the emigration. It is idle to deny that the varied injustice which the negroes have suffered as voters is accountable for a large part of their universal yearning for new homes, and it will be folly for the responsible classes at the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... times is the unhappy division existing among the professors of Christianity, and from thousands of hearts a yearning cry goes forth for unity of faith ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... of a woman who held a secret. At first I had been conscious that there was something unusual about her, and suspected her to be an adventuress; but now, on further acquaintance, I became convinced that she held possession of some knowledge that she was yearning to betray, yet ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... of a spirit Bowed from its wild pride into shame O yearning heart! I did inherit Thy withering portion with the fame, The searing glory which hath shone Amid the Jewels of my throne, Halo of Hell! and with a pain Not Hell shall make me fear again— O craving heart, for the lost flowers And sunshine of my summer ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... with music, definite words with indefinite tones. Every instrument, as I have just said, has a characteristic emotional tone-color. But the emotions expressed by them are vague and indefinite. A piece of instrumental music can express an eager, passionate yearning for something, but it cannot tell what that something is—whether it is the ardent longing of an absent lover, or the heavenward aspiration of a religious enthusiast. The vocalist, on the other hand, can clearly tell us the object of that ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... She took pleasure in combing the soft, brown hair, that had, hitherto, been twisted into an awkward knot, into pretty, graceful curls, and it would be hard to believe that the little, slender, sable-clad child, with the serious, brown eyes, that always followed Clemence with looks of love in their yearning, amber depths, could possibly be the same wild, sly, little Ruth Lynn, whom we ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... of pity, the yearning of rekindled love, the struggle of silenced memories passed from his face and left a shining calm—foretaste of the perpetual ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... McComb, in "Religion and Medicine,"[16:1] remarks that the efficacy of the amulets and charms of savages depends upon the fact that they are symbols of an inner mental state, the objects to which the desire or yearning could attach itself—in a word, they are auto-suggestions, done into ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... this lassie one day that the next day was his birthday, and she saw the homesickness and yearning in his eyes as he spoke. Immediately she told him she would have a birthday party for him and bake a ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... watchword "Onward," were planning a mission at Linyanti, on the banks of the Zambesi. Mr. Moffat was about to pay a visit to the great Mosilikatse, with a view to the commencement of a mission to the Matebele. As for Livingstone himself, his heart was yearning after his friends the Makololo. He had been quite willing to go and be their missionary, but in the meantime other duty called him. Not being aware of any purpose to plant a mission among them, ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... Infanta. (Fide, for the incident, an American work on the Netherlands, i. p. 263, and the authorities there cited.) It is contemptible on my part to speak thus frivolously of events which will stand out in such golden letters so long as America has a history, but I wanted to illustrate the yearning for sympathy which I felt. You who were among people grim and self-contained usually, who, I trust, were falling on each other's necks in the public streets, shouting, with tears in their eyes and triumph in their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... speech with an approving smile,—"and if I remember right, my dear De Breze, no one was more brilliantly severe than yourself on poor De Lamartine and the Republic that succeeded Louis Philippe; no one more emphatically expressed the yearning desire for another Napoleon to restore order at home and renown abroad. Now you have ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... it for the broken-hearted friends, who, to life's end, will suffer over and over all that their dear ones endured. Pity the mothers who hear their sons' faint calls in dreams, who in many a weary night-watch see them pining and wasting, and yearn with a lifelong, unappeasable yearning to have been able to soothe those forsaken, lonely death-beds. O man or woman, if you have pity to spare, spend it not on Lee or Davis,—spend it on their victims, on the thousands of living hearts which these men of sin have doomed to an anguish ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a side-wind, that the Unions at a general meeting had debated his case, and there had been some violent speeches, and no decision come to; but the majority adverse to him. This discouraged him sadly, and his yearning heart turned all the more toward his haven of rest, and the hours, few but ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... swimming school in London. He promised very aristocratic patronage; and as an opening for money-getting this plan was perhaps the better. Franklin almost closed with the proposition. He seems, however, to have had a little touch of homesickness, a preference, if not quite a yearning, for the colonies, which sufficed to turn the scale. Such was his third escape; he might have passed his days in instructing the scions of British nobility in the art of swimming! He arrived at home, after a tedious ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... mother's feet. Then she flung herself into her mother's arms and clung to her, while the big, beautiful eyes filled with tears. The mother embraced her lovingly; then she tried to thrust her away from her, her own tears running down her face all the time. The child clung piteously, with a yearning love in her eyes. Then she glanced toward that hardened figure still continuing its way, and, O, the awful look of terror on that sweet face! It is that look which continues to haunt me, the look of sweet, yearning love ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... better than action—never felt entirely happy unless matching their wits against those of skulking law breakers—while to sup with danger, and run across all manner of thrilling adventures—that was a daily yearning with them. ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... indicate a want, and even develop an unconscious appetency, but it can not, itself, reveal an object, any more than the feeling of hunger can reveal the actual presence, or determine the character and fitness, of any food. An undefinable fear, a mysterious presentiment, an instinctive yearning, a hunger of the soul, these are all irrational emotions which can never rise to the dignity of knowledge. An object must be conjured by the imagination, or conceived by the understanding, or intuitively apprehended by the reason, before the feeling ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... life-story of that fair, sweet girl who married Audubon. Yearning for her own home, yet finding that her husband would journey a thousand miles and give months to studying the home and haunts of a bird, she gave up her heart-dreams and went with him into the forest, dwelling now in tents, and now in some rude cabin, being a wanderer ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... to have stayed at home. And this feature marked him all over his course. You felt as you listened to his pleadings that sin and salvation were terms brimful of meaning to him. He had traveled this road, and all his pleadings seemed to be summed up in the one yearning cry, "Come with us and we will do thee good." "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." And he would have gone to the end, "of ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... a mission hall. As to the fishermen's singing, one can never talk of it sufficiently. Ferrier was stirred by the hoarse thunder of voices; he seemed to hear the storming of that gale in the cordage once more, and he forgot the words of the hymn in feeling only the strong passion and yearning of the music. Then Fullerton and Blair prayed, and the sceptic heard two men humbly uttering petitions like children, and, to his humorous Scotch intellect, there was something nearly amusing in the naive language of these two able, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Oxford professor, "we find it free from many of the blemishes that offend us in its later phases. The founders of the ancient religions of the world, as far as we can judge, were minds of a high stamp, full of noble aspirations, yearning for truth, devoted to the welfare of their neighbors, examples of purity and unselfishness. What they desired to found upon earth was but seldom realized, and their sayings, if preserved in their original form, offered often a strange contrast to the practice of those who profess to be their ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... spent in mutual explanations, and the young girl, deprived of a mother's love in early life, sent away to learn life's duties of strangers, and yearning during all her brief existence for the affection she had never known, received the brother she had never seen with an outburst of welcome which revealed what she might have been, had her life been spent under ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... of these, however, Phil believed his chum was yearning for a variety in the bill of fare. Quail on toast would strike Larry about right; or even rabbit or squirrel stew; provided the meat for the pot were the product of his ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... where he was happy, and would not be taken away. His mother humoured him, and the old Duca, yearning for his little fair-haired daughter, went alone at last ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Iraine. And he went down to the ramparts to hear the purple guard go by singing of Welleran. And the purple guard came by with lights, all singing in the stillness, and dark shapes out in the desert turned and fled. And Rold went back again to his mother's house with a great yearning towards the name of Welleran, such as men ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... devotee was gone; in his place was a face that, in spite of the ascetic cast of feature, was so lighted up with the fire of love and longing that it might have stood for a Leander or a Romeo. It expressed an eager yearning, that made it seem to be craning out of the picture in the effort to reach that unknown object on which the eyes were ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... London to seek for the most modest livelihood. Bitter experience had taught these disciples of learning that the employment for which they waited could only be gained by bribery; and bribe they certainly could not, owing to their want of means. Some of them already show a true Werther-like yearning for solitude:— ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... on the threshold of a new order of experience—of an ecstasy. Something drew me forth with a sense of inexpressible yearning towards the being of this strange old man in the window seat, and for a moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... be an artist! I will fix my eyes upon the goal; I will watch and wait, and fight the fight day by day. And when at last I am strong, and when my message is ripe, I will earn myself a free chance, and then I will write a book. All the yearning, all the agony of this my life I will put into it; every hour of trial, every burst of rage. I will make it the hope of my life, I will write it with my blood—give every ounce of strength that I have and every dollar that I own; and I ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Ancient Philosophy, p. 119.] "from the mind its mist of fancied knowledge, and, laying bare the real ignorance, produced an immediate effect like the touch of the torpedo; the newly created consciousness of ignorance was humiliating and painful, yet it was combined with a yearning after truth never before experienced. Such intellectual quickening, which could never commence until the mind had been disabused of its original illusion of false knowledge, was considered by Socrates not merely as the index and precursor, but as the indisputable condition ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Occasionally he is epigrammatic "Strong enemies," he says in one place, "are better to us than weak friends. They show us our weak points." Finer and higher is another passage in the same sermon—"The yearning of multitudes is not in vain. After yearning comes impulse, volition, movement." It would be difficult, if not impossible, to better this, unless a great poet cast it in the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... was the turning point in Lucretia's life. If her soul harbored any ambition and yearning for worldly greatness, what must she now have felt when the opportunity to ascend the princely throne of one of Italy's oldest houses was offered her! If she had any regret and loathing for what had surrounded her in Rome, and if longings for a better life were ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... at such a time? I loved this splendid girl, and my heart ached for her. I was almost swept from my balance by a sudden mad yearning to take her in my arms and try to ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... of the desert were nobler in essentials than the polished Persian. To them the ideal was higher than the material, and it was with their backs to the sun and their faces to the central shrine of their religion that they prayed. And how they prayed, these fanatical Moslems! Rapt, absorbed, with yearning eyes and shining faces, rising, stooping, grovelling with their foreheads upon their praying carpets. Who could doubt, as he watched their strenuous, heart-whole devotion, that here was a great living power in the world, reactionary but tremendous, countless millions all thinking ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... swelling within his breast a great longing, a hunger which filled his throat, a yearning that made him faint. For what? Who can tell. The idea of possession was still years distant; the thought of a caress had not yet come to him; the bare notion that Celia could care for him had not as yet ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... not the nature of our race To open deal, when stealth can compass well The object which our surging souls shall seek; For practice which necessity hath caused Hath built a cunning it were hard to meet; But when, impatient of long smould'ring wrongs, We open take the bolo in our hands, With bellies yearning for the blood of those Who long have winked a proud disdainful eye Beware! I say, beware! for mercy then is dead. Francos: But Quezox, hold! Water thy burning thoughts. 'Twere well to bridle firm such wordy steed, For mayhap there be one with list'ning ear, Who wide would publish what were ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... aggrievedness that the eldest-born should cross their plans and wishes; that, after the year-long care and thought they had bestowed on him, he should demand fresh efforts from them; and, again, most harassing of all and most invulnerable, such an entire want of faith in the powers he was yearning to test—the prophet's lot in the mean blindness of the family—that, at times, it threatened to shake his hard-won faith in himself.—But before the winter drew to ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of her step, her silence, her numbed, yearning look across the lawn told Mrs. Westmore of the death of all ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... before he could reply—and, though all his yearning nature strove against his man's resolution to do his duty, it could not prevail: he did not follow her as he wanted to—running after her, crying his love. But duty won out by a mere hazard of a margin because ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... second Sabbath in Sydney I wandered out with a great yearning at heart to get telling my message to any soul that would listen. It was the afternoon; and children were flocking into a Church that I passed. I followed them—that yearning growing stronger every moment. My God so ordered ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... conceive of it, who leave their hands and faces untouched with the pencil on the white clay. The ruddy god of the vineyard, stained with wine-lees, or coarser colour, will hardly recognise his double, in the white, graceful, mournful figure, weeping, chastened, lifting up his arms in yearning [41] affection towards his late-found mother, as we see him on a famous Etruscan mirror. Only, in thinking of this early tragedy, of these town- feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus into Athens, you must suppose, not ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the floor unheeded. She sat there in her ugly nightgown, yearning with every fibre of her for the unknown joy. The flickering light of the candles was answered by the strange fire that burned in her eyes. At last her head drooped forward and, blind with tears, she hid ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... from a two months' visit to her old aunt at Norcombe afforded the impassioned and yearning farmer a pretext for inquiring directly after her—now possibly in the ninth month of her widowhood—and endeavouring to get a notion of her state of mind regarding him. This occurred in the middle of the haymaking, and Boldwood contrived to ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... with the feathery stalks of the asparagus. This is often, too, the timid expression of a tender feeling, under Puritanic repression, which has not sufficient vent in the sweet-william and hollyhock at the front door. This is a yearning after beauty and ornamentation which has no other means ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a soul, nevertheless, is an almost Divine act of faith. How pardonable, surely, the impatience of deformity with itself, of a consciously despicable character standing before Christ, wondering, yearning, hungering to be like that! Yet must one trust the process fearlessly and without misgiving. "The Lord the Spirit" will do His part. The tempting expedient is, in haste for abrupt or visible progress, to try some method ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... touched one of the velvety coils of her hair. And then he stepped back. Shame swept over him. His heart rose and choked him, and his fists were clenched at his side. She had not noticed what he had done, and she seemed to him like a bird yearning to fly out through the window, throbbing with the desire to answer the chanting song that came over the water. And then she was smiling up again into his face hardened with the struggle which he was ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... the morning:—It will come, indeed, As surely as the night hath given need. The yearning eyes, at last, will strain their sight No more unanswered by the morning light; No longer will they vainly strive, through tears, To pierce the darkness of thy doubts and fears, But, bathed in balmy dews and rays ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... Praying Donald read a chapter from the Holy Word, read it in tones that arrested the most careless listener, and even Scotty felt a little tingle go over him at the yearning words: ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... father died, my despair was uncontrollable. I found myself without support. My only adult relation was my stepmother, who was as frigid as ever towards me. I was attacked by that homesick yearning which makes exile more terrible than death. All the country around me was dull and sullen. I longed for the sunshine, the vine, the music, the sweet language of Italy. At twenty-one I had a right to my mother's fortune, and whatever my ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... this ancient civic life, with its arts and arms and long renown, that he reached forth passionate hands of yearning. The intervening tract, whither his younger feet had wandered, almost ceased to exist for him; the paladins and ladies of mediaeval story were the deceitful mirage of the desert; the true life of antiquity lay beyond. In all his allusions to the great themes ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... first time beside the abyss of a precipice. And I have climbed many lofty peaks, but never one without passing these places with the fearful possibilities of destruction. Always the novice has looked with the same unspeakable fear into the yawning depths, with the same unspeakable yearning towards the jewel-crowned heights beyond. This, or something of this, was in the startled attitude of the trembling figure, whose eyes met ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... only sought for them. Doubtless it was one of Bacon's highest hopes that from the growth of true knowledge would follow in surprising ways the relief of man's estate; this, as an end, runs through all his yearning after a fuller and surer method of interpreting nature. The desire to be a great benefactor, the spirit of sympathy and pity for mankind, reign through this portion of his work—pity for confidence so greatly abused by the teachers of man, pity for ignorance which might be dispelled, ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... "My yearning for freedom grew so intense that, in spite of my repugnance, I went to see my chief, a short, bad-tempered man, who was always in a rage. When I told him that I was not well, he looked at me and said: 'I do not believe it, monsieur, but be off with you! Do you think that any office can ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... gaze cleared he noticed two marked differences in her appearance. One of her pale cheeks was streaked with crimson, and the dark eyes were wide not with dread alone. They gazed down at him heavy with the anguish of mingled grief and yearning. He knew that he was looking into the ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... gates of the high-grade literary magazines, to the raw schoolboy, vainly endeavoring to place his first crude compositions in the local newspapers, the whole intelligent public are today seeking expression through the printed page, and yearning to behold their thoughts and ideals permanently crystallized in the magic medium of type. But while a few persons of exceptional talent manage eventually to gain a foothold in the professional world of letters rising to ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... later the tidings that Antioch had been taken by the infidels revived in St. Louis the old yearning for the rescue of the holy places. Cheered by the sympathy of Pope Clement IV, he embarked with an army of sixty thousand in 1270, but a storm drove his ships to Sardinia, and thence they sailed for Tunis. They encamped on the site of Carthage, when a plague broke out. The saintly king was among ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... his perceptions, he was able to recognize that here was a pure and imaginative spirit, strongly yearning after ideal strength, beauty, and goodness. Given such a spirit, it was not unnatural that, turning from sordid or unhappy surroundings as a flower turns from shadow to the full face of the sun, she should have taken a memory of valiant deeds, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... this lass Had a Sunday-school class, At twelve wrote a volume of verse, At thirteen was yearning For glory, and learning To be a professional nurse. To a glorious height The young paragon might Have grown, if not nipped in the bud, But the following year Struck her smiling career With a dull and a sickening thud! (I have shed a great tear at the ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... to dwell on it even in thought. And so that strange, magic, yearning effluence of a soul into a visible projection and shape was ignored, slurred over, and, after ten years of domesticity in the bank premises, is gradually ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Astronomy cherishes the feelings of awe and reverence and praise, because it inspires a continual yearning after additional knowledge, because it reveals to us something of the character of God, we conceive that of all the sciences it affords the purest intellectual gratification. Certainly it is one of the most absorbing. Its attraction seems to be irresistible. ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... the secret of a spirit Bow'd from its wild pride into shame. O! yearning heart! I did inherit Thy withering portion with the fame, The searing glory which hath shone Amid the jewels of my throne, Halo of Hell! and with a pain Not Hell shall make me fear again— O! craving heart, for the lost flowers And sunshine of my summer ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... was harsh and curt he could not help that. It was all he could say and the only possible fashion of saying it. He wanted to cry aloud his pain, the yearning ache that filled him, and he could not, would not—no more than he would have whined under pure physical hurt. But when he heard the faint rustle of her cotton dress and her step outside he put his face on his hands and took his breath ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Raphael is nearly as much overrated as Shakespeare; that it is all nonsense for people to pretend to admire headless trunks and dingy canvases. To them I have nothing to say: they find consolation in their own cleverness. But a great many are left with a mingled sense of disappointment and yearning: they cannot get rid of the thought that they have missed a great pleasure—that a precious secret has remained hidden from them, and that through no fault of theirs. It is to these, who have my sincere sympathy, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... woman miraculously come alive, he could never, at best, go back to France; and as the crime of which he was accused came under the extradition treaty, he would be safe nowhere. He must—as he himself had said—lead "a hunted life," wherever he might be. Neither money, nor influence, nor yearning sister-love, nor—the love of friends who would give their heart's blood to save him, could shield Maxime Dalahaide from the sword of Damocles, ever suspended, ever ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... frozen wastes by a pack of at least a dozen famished wolves. He arose and shot the foremost one, and the others stopped to devour it. But they soon caught up with him, and he shot another, which was in turn devoured. This was repeated until the last famished wolf was almost upon him with yearning jaws, when— ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... caught up into a mood of comradeship and self-suppression which amounts almost to exaltation. Not one but has to fight through moods almost reaching extinction of the very love of life. And shall all this—and the many hard disappointments, and the long yearning for home and those he loves, and the chafing against continual restraints, and the welling-up of secret satisfaction in the "bit done," the knowledge that Fate is not beating, cannot beat him; and the sight of death all round, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... Science but looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual ideals—since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side found light, that struggled through the Storm and on ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... is not the speech which tells, but the impulse which goes with the saying; And it is not the words of the prayer, but the yearning back of ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... feel how weak the skill of poet or painter to fix the sensation of that white-pillared imperial splendor;—and you think you know why creoles exiled by necessity to colder lands may sicken for love of their own,—die of home-yearning, as did many a one in far Louisiana, after the ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... moonlight night; the whole yard was a lovely dapple of lights and shadows. Ellen had a vivid perception of the beauty of it all, and also that unrest and yearning which comes often to a young girl in moonlight. This beauty and strangeness of familiar scenes under the silver glamour of the moon gave her, as it were, an assurance of other delights and beauties of life besides those which she already knew, and along with the assurance came that wild ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... sea-faring passion For what the Lord God shall bestow, be it honour or death. No heart for the harp has he, nor for acceptance of treasure, No pleasure has he in a wife, no delight in the world, Nor in aught save the roll of the billows; but always a longing, A yearning uneasiness hastens him ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... the color of parchment, and his brown eyes looked enormously large and startlingly bright. But what touched me more than his emaciated appearance was the wonderful expression of emotion which shone from those large eyes as we appeared at the bedside; they looked at Val with the yearning affection that one sees sometimes in a faithful dog. The poor fellow put out his white, wasted hand to Val ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... but that has only made them more anxious to go. It is another case of "like father like son." If I had not travelled while young, I am sure I should never have settled down. And the fact that in every place I visited I found scores of Englishmen yearning to return home made me feel that I was a fortunate man to see our distant possessions without being doomed to pass my life in exile. I have sufficient money to keep a home for my children, but I want my sons to be able to earn a living and hold their own by themselves; and I think that, as I have ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... hands were busy in the familiar procedure, readying the ship for combat, checking and re-checking the details that could mean life and death, but his mind watched disembodied, yearning ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... to make allowance for," the countess said gently. "Women can appreciate simple truth, and are not, as men seem to think, always yearning for compliments. Those who are most proficient in turning phrases are not often among those foremost in battle, or wisest in council, and I can tell you that we women value deeds far higher than words. Sir ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... Herbert Rackliff had been collared by Bunk Lander, a big, husky village boy, whose face was ablaze with wrath and whose manner betrayed an almost irresistible yearning to punch ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... number and conciseness of the people's choruses have already been alluded to, and it may easily be shown that the penitential music is brief compared with the love music, besides having a great deal of the love, the yearning love, feeling in it. The list of penitential pieces is exhausted when I have mentioned "Come, ye daughters," "Guilt for sin," "Break and die," "O Grief," "Alas! now is my Saviour gone," and "Have mercy upon me"; and, on the other hand, we have "Thou blessed Saviour," the Last Supper music, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... light to dark, with its suggestion of secrecy and the private talk of lovers, had been a torture to her. But she had not fled from the torture. She had sat listening, and the music as it floated out upon the garden with its thrill of happiness, its accent of yearning, and the low, hushed conversation which followed upon its cessation in that darkened room, had struck upon a chord of imagination in Mrs. Adair and had kindled her jealousy into a scorching flame. Then suddenly Ethne had taken flight. ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... the frail hand she had stretched out to him, then the dark eyes opened slowly, and she gazed on him with a yearning look. ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt
... under any more obligation to read it than he is to see every individual flower and blossoming shrub. Specimens of the varieties would suffice. But a vast proportion of it is the product of immature minds, and of a yearning for experience rather than a knowledge of life. There is no more obligation on the part of the person who would be well informed and cultivated to read all this than there is to read all the colored incidents, personal gossip, accidents, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... large number have already grown up to hold respectable, and, in some cases, prominent places, in the communities which they have joined. Others have pined for the city, until they could no longer resist their yearning for it, and have found their way back to the old, familiar scenes, to resume the former life of suffering and privation. Such is the strange fascination which their lawless and irresponsible mode of life oftentimes exerts upon the minds of these young ...
— Ben, the Luggage Boy; - or, Among the Wharves • Horatio Alger
... schoolgirl has written a reply to it called Dere Bill, which is said to be as good as the original. Now you can hardly imagine a Philadelphia flapper writing an effective companion to Bacon's Essays. But never mind, if the stuff's amusing, it has its place. The human yearning for innocent pastime is a pathetic thing, come to think about it. It shows what a desperately grim thing life has become. One of the most significant things I know is that breathless, expectant, adoring hush that falls over a theatre at a Saturday matinee, when the house goes dark and ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... to him, while he gazed with hungry yearning at her, drinking in her loveliness and marvelling that there should not be a hundred suitors listening there and longing for her ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... thought, that like a wavelet, breaks Upon the surface of life's charmed pool, Circling instinctively, unbidden, takes Form, hue, direction, from that magic rule! What is it but the yearning of the soul Toward one allied to it by heavenly birth? And seeking to unite, blend, melt the whole Into one ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... rebellion against domestic authority. The world was a dangerous, bad world, in which men were dust and women something lower than dust. She would tell herself so very often, and strive to believe herself when she did so. But, for all this, there was a yearning for something beyond her present life, for something that should be of the world, worldly. When she heard profane music she would long to dance. When she heard the girls laughing in the public gardens she would long to stay and laugh with ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... no anchor, and his intellect was left adrift. He has pursued truth, forgetting that truth is a tree, one and mighty, but with innumerable branches; and that it is unsafe to risk the weight of one's salvation upon a single bough. Susan had no part in his life; she was left with that hungry, yearning heart, until the sympathy even of a Clodman seemed food to her perishing nature. Pity her, Horatio, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... there before me with outstretched arms and infinite yearning on her face, stood Mameena, Mameena as I had last seen her after I gave her the promised kiss that she used to cover her taking of the poison. For five seconds, mayhap, she stood thus, living, wonderful, but still as death, the fierce light showing all. Then the flame ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... an obsession that haunts you night and day? To puzzle, at every hour, how to meet this demand and how to shun that one; to deny yourself the necessities of life, and your friends those poor little pleasures that you are yearning to bestow upon them—is it not a mental malady, a fever; is it not damnation itself? The thousand meannesses: how they degrade you; how they suck away your strength, your ambition, your faith! To see no openings before you, save ever darker gulfs of despair! I cannot ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... purple shadow, creeping gradually eastward, had obscurely veiled the sublime legend of the 3-dollar hat with the 5-dollar look. I began to acquire the proper cries and shouts and menaces, and to pass comments on the play which I was assured were not utterly foolish. In my honest yearning to feel myself a habitue, I did what everybody else did and even attacked a morsel of chewing-gum; but all that a European can say of this singular substance is that it is, finally, eternal and unconquerable. ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... the box cars on Kinzie Street, partially because he felt that he was fitted for more dignified employment, and as well for the fact that the railroad company had doubled the number of watchmen in the yards; but there were times when he felt the old yearning for excitement and adventure. These times were usually coincident with an acute financial depression in Billy's change pocket, and then he would fare forth in the still watches of the night, with a couple of boon companions and roll a souse, ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bar; up mounts the piston rod-down it surges again; the revolving wheels rustle the water; the huge craft moves backward easy, and then ahead; a clanking noise denotes the connections are "hooked on," and onward she bounds over the sea. How leaps with joy that heart yearning for freedom, as the words "She's away!" gladden Annette's very soul! Her enraptured feelings gush forth in prayer to her deliverers; it is as a new spring of life, infusing its refreshing waters into desert sands. She seems a new being, with hope, joy, and happiness brightening ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... her's, it was Drusilla's, and yet it was not; the year had made a change. There was a difference in her singing; a new note of tenderness, of yearning, of sadness, of love. Yes, he recognized it now, it had the quality of the Cradle Song that she had listened to so enviously on his phonograph. She had caught it, at last, that secret, subtle something which gives Schumann-Heink her power; and which comes ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... it. "What could have been done more to My vineyard," He exclaims, "that I have not done in it?"(15) Though when He "looked that it should bring forth grapes, it brought forth wild grapes,"(16) yet with a still yearning hope of fruitfulness He came in person to His vineyard, if haply it might be saved from destruction. He digged about His vine; He pruned and cherished it. He was unwearied in His efforts to save this ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question. When a man's heart warms to his viands, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... once let King's hands go, but pressed them tighter and tighter until the circulation nearly stopped and they grew numb. Her own strength seemed endless—to grow rather than to wane in proportion as her yearning to look into the past grew. Her attitude would have been more understandable if she had believed herself and King to be reincarnations of those forgotten conquerors; but she was too original for that. She had said ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... right to show a terrible anger when thwarted by their children, and in this case the father too much resembled the son in wilful impetuosity of temper. Turned out of his first home, Shelley went wandering forth by land and sea,—a reed shaken by the wind, a restless outcast yearning for repose and human sympathy, and in this way encountering the questionable accidents of his troubled, unguarded life, and gathering all the feverish inspiration of his melancholy ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... international communication. The consequences of the Renascence and of the New Learning of the sixteenth century appear in the need for the Dictionaries of Hard Words at the beginning of the seventeenth; the literary polish of the age of Anne begat the yearning for a standard dictionary, and inspired the work of Johnson; the scientific and historical spirit of the nineteenth century has at once called for and rendered possible the Oxford English Dictionary. Thus the evolution ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... The yearning tenderness went to Michael's heart like sweet salve, even in the stress of the moment. They were brothers in sorrow, and their brotherhood saved Sam from ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... Willis, does you infinite credit," said the missionary. "Minister of the Gospel though I be, I fear that I do not possess these qualities to the same extent, for, to confess the truth, I feel an inward yearning to be free, and yet ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... any length, to live apart from his daughter, to refrain from embracing her when they met in the morning, to speak to her in a rough, churlish sort when his heart, maybe, was overflowing with love, and to reconcile himself to a cool, indifferent behaviour on her side, when his very soul was yearning for gentle, tender warmth. And these natural cravings of affection were rather strengthened than stilled by repression, as one's hunger by starving. To add to this, he now saw his Moll more bewitching than ever she was before, the evidence ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... not imagine how the soul of the young boy was filled with inexpressible yearning for the art of music. We know that it was so. His brother, who instructed him, gauged not the nature of the lad. Often and often did the boy's wistful eyes and loving heart covet the possession of a manuscript book kept by his brother in strict reserve, containing a priceless collection ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... for a very old object, in so far as it merely expresses the yearning of the Jewish people for Zion. Since the destruction of the second temple by Titus, since the dispersion of the Jewish nation in all countries, this people has not ceased to long intensely, and hope fervently, for the return to the lost ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained facing each other, divided by the distance that her words had created. Then, abruptly, his ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... is its connection with this ever-memorable journey of the great Apostle of the Gentiles. We can trace the influence of the scenes and objects along the route in all his subsequent writings. He had a deeper yearning for the Gentiles, because he thus beheld with his own eyes the places associated with the darkest aspects of paganism; the scenes that gave rise to the pagan ideas of heaven and hell; the splendid ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... generally, they belonged to the small nobility who fell under the category of the arriere-ban in time of war. In this tower Montaigne had his chapel, his bedroom—to which he retired when the yearning for solitude was strong—and his library. The chapel is on the ground-floor, and is very much what it was in Montaigne's time. It is small, but there was room enough to accommodate his household, which was never a large one. Its little cupola connects ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... days afterwards, humbly and sadly he re-urged a former suit, did Lucille shut her heart to its prayer? Did her pride remember its wound; did she revert to his desertion; did she reply to the whisper of her yearning love, "Thou hast been before forsaken"? That voice and those darkened eyes pleaded to her with a pathos not to be resisted. "I am once more necessary to him," was all her thought; "if I reject him who will tend him?" In that thought was the motive of her conduct; in that thought gushed ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... yearning heart, and afterward clasped his wife and children to his breast, bidding them return with their tale of conquest to Rome. As for himself, he said, ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott |
