"Bored" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his logic; if he could not sow the seed he might plough the ground. This had been repeated two or three times, and Roger had begun to feel it to be disagreeable. But the man was in earnest, and such earnestness commanded respect. And Roger was quite sure that though he might be bored, he could not be injured by such teaching. Then it occurred to him one day that he had known the Bishop of Elmham intimately for a dozen years, and had never heard from the bishop's mouth,—except when in the pulpit,—a single ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... among my readers who have experienced it, perhaps. I cannot describe it; I merely explain that I felt inert, inefficient, and bored ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... Mr. Taynton made his statement, was in manner slow, stout, and bored, and looked in every way utterly unfitted to find clues to the least mysterious occurrences, unearth crime or run down the criminal. He seemed quite incapable of running down anything, and Mr. Taynton had to repeat everything he said in order to be sure that Mr. Figgis got his notes, ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... myself generally to the simple narration of events—seldom pausing to offer my own comments upon the scenes passing before me. Were I to do so, what an enormous volume I should write, and how the reader would be bored! Now, to bore a reader, is, in my eyes, one of the greatest crimes of which an author can be guilty. It is the unpardonable sin, indeed, in a writer. For which reason, and acting upon the theory that a drama ought to explain ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... camp, the father or brother of the deceased, or the husband, if it was a woman, took a club and mauled the body with such violence that he often smashed the bones; further, he generally broke both its legs in order to prevent it from wandering of nights; and as if that were not enough, he bored holes in the stomach, the shoulders, and the lungs, and filled the holes with stones, so that even if the poor ghost should succeed by a desperate effort in dragging his mangled body out of the grave, he would be so weighed down by this ballast of stones that ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... took no more notice of Finn than of the rest of the show. He was supremely bored, and, being perfectly aware that the show lasted three days, his immediate prospect disgusted him. One fancied that on the few occasions upon which he did open his mouth at all, his remark was always the ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... carriage a band of musicians played, and behind it came a number of peasants, all in their best clothes. They wore white cotton gloves and yellow wedding-favours. The man and his wife, who were evidently feeble as well as very old, seemed rather bored, but all the people in the procession were in high spirits, for they were on their way to a good dinner paid for ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Belgium • George W. T. Omond
... calmness seems to have saved him from any bitter animosity. He simply set aside Christianity as not to the purpose, and went on calmly asserting and re-asserting his views to Catholics and Protestants, Whigs, Radicals, and Tories. They agreed in considering him to be a bore, but were bored rather than irritated. Owen himself, like later Socialists, professed indifference to the political warfare of Whigs and Tories. When, at the height of the Reform movement, he published a paper called the Crisis, the title referred not ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Beauseant could not very well shut her door against these visitors, she gave them such a cold reception, and showed so much interest in the study of the ceiling, that no one could fail to understand how much he bored her; and when it became known in Paris that Mme. de Beauseant was bored by callers between two and four o'clock, she was left in perfect solitude during that interval. She went to the Bouffons or to the Opera with M. de Beauseant and M. ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... king of beasts. We hoped he would spring up and roar as he had done in the woods below the Shaker village; but he kept quiet. After all, he did not look very formidable, and he seemed sadly oppressed and bored. ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... you are not even asleep, it is as much as to say that you have not even the consolation of being able to sleep; or, better still, it is precisely the same as telling me that you are getting bored ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... writing books. Hugh was, I think, always the first inclined to produce his work for inspection; but we had a tacit convention which was not in the least unsympathetic, not to feel bound to be particularly interested in each other's books. My books, I felt, bored Hugh more than his bored me; but there was this advantage, that when we read each other's books, as we often did, any critical praise that we could offer was much more appreciated than if we had felt bound to proffer conventional admiration. Hugh once told me that he envied my sostenuto; but ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "you must complete the good work. I am anything but well yet. In fact I am so weak that any shock might cause a relapse. In short, there is only one thing, as far as I can see, to save me from a horrid death—consumption or colic, or some fell disease—and that's marriage. I know you must be bored to death by——No," as the girl tried to stop him, "don't interrupt, you must know all the fearsome truth—a sort of chronic invalid, but if you don't marry me, well, I'll get Joe to bury me somewhere at the crossroads. Look at all the money I've spent in getting ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... lion's share of the conversation conceded him. He threw himself carelessly back on his chair, looked absently at the ceiling, played with his sword-hilt, and uttered curt observations, intended to denote that he was not a little bored. When the captain mentioned that he expected their commander-in-chief to arrive in the morning, and the merchant said in reply, "Your colonel will not be here till to-morrow evening, so at least he said to me when I met him at the station," the demon of pride ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... of a taxicab Dicky was gesturing wildly, while beside him a stately woman sat with a bored ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... Overbon Williams has been administered on. If nothing is paid on it, withdraw the note and send it to me, so that Chandler can see the indorser of it. At all events write me all about it, till I can somehow get it off my hands. I have already been bored more than enough about it; not the least of which annoyance is his ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... struck with the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter deck, and pretty close to the mizzen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole; one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud; Captain Ahab stood erect, looking straight out beyond the ship's ever-pitching prow. There was an infinity ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... as ye deal With "non-professing" frantic teachers; They bored the tongue with red-hot steel, And flayed the backs of "female preachers." Old Hampton, had her fields a tongue, And Salem's streets could tell their story, Of fainting woman dragged along, Gashed by the whip accursed ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... now bored you sufficiently with railway matters: being a literary character, you may like to know how I otherwise employ my time. Imprimis, I have not attended a single debate in the House of Commons. It is quite enough to spell one's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... back seats and looking in their long, white theatre wraps like corpses in their shrouds; it was fashionable then to look as if one had been exhumed. The schoolmaster, whose thoughts were running in another direction, was sure that the ladies must be bored to death and felt no trace of envy. Below the dusty highroad, far out on the sea, the steamers with their flags and brass bands were returning from their pleasure trips; cheers, strains of music and snatches of song were wafted by the sea breezes ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... he makes answer with a massy spear, Out of ten others chosen as the best; And levelling at the buckler of the peer, For greater surety, pierces plate and breast. 'Twixt rib and rib, it bored the cavalier, Issuing a palm behind. To all the rest, The king excepted, welcome was the blow: For ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... with the coronal bone bored through, set up on sticks which were stuck in the mound. Sometimes there was carved on these sticks a number of faces, ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... for twenty-four hours, nor eaten anything since noon of the previous day. Their arms, a mongrel lot, were many of them unfit for combat; old muskets and hunting-pieces, some without flints, and others too small-bored for ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... during that long ride to find out if the young man had known Rosa Rogers before; but he frankly told her that he had just come West to visit his sister, was bored to death because he didn't know a soul in the whole State, and until he had seen her had not laid eyes on one whom he cared to know. Yet while she could not help enjoying the gay badinage, she carried a sense of uneasiness whenever she thought of the young girl ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... remark, abstractedly, in the direction of her neighbour, who only looked at her in a bored and ill-tempered fashion, as befitted one who had gout without arched feet to ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... were bored by the power plant of the ship. The engineer, however, could not repress a thrill at once more standing surrounded by the gauges, valves, and pumps with which he had formerly lived. He strode about, examining and comprehending such appliances ...
— This World Must Die! • Horace Brown Fyfe
... not?" asked the latter. "Really, you know, you are making yourself a nuisance, by keeping guard over me like this. I get bored all by myself; I have told you so over and over again, and you get on my nerves more than ever by waving your hands and creeping in and out in the mysterious ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a thought he bored nine holes in each side, and taking the lacings from his tiny sandals, he split them and strung them into the holes ...
— Classic Myths • Retold by Mary Catherine Judd
... Indians in grimy tents disputed the possession with dense clouds of mosquitoes. But even the appearance of Circle City,[74] once a prosperous mining town and now a collection of ruined log-huts, was hailed with delight by the hopelessly bored passengers in the Hannah, for it meant the end of another ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... and two hundred and fifty fathoms coiled up together looks like a life buoy.[320] In the northwestern Solomon Islands the currency consists of beasts' teeth of two kinds,—those of a kind of flying dog and of a kind of dolphin. Each tooth is bored at the root and they are strung on thin cords. These people also use the small disks of shell, five millimeters in diameter and from one to one and a half millimeters thick.[321] The shell money of New Britain ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... I was bored stiff with the whole thing. And whether she had Van Ruyne's emeralds or not I saw no particular mystery in the Valenka girl's disappearance: she had probably had some one outside who had taken her clear away in a motor car. I said so, ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... that the biggest sort of a lie? Why, Mr. Allen, many a time when I have seen tiresome or disagreeable people coming to our house, I have run away and hid myself, so as not to be found; not in the least because I could not bear the being bored by them, but because I could not bear the thought of the lies I should speak, or at least act, ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... blow quite through his target drove, And bored through his breastplate strong and thick, The tender skin it in his bosom rove, The purple-blood out-streamed from the quick; To wrest it out the wounded Pagan strove And little leisure gave it there to stick; At Godfrey's head the lance ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... respect are as much curtailed as possible, except when wafting with their prayers some spirit of the dead to the realms of bliss above. In such cases it is a matter of business, a question of money; and the unctuous air of solemn faith they then put on contrasts curiously with the bored and sleepy look apparent on their faces as they gabble through a midnight mass, in the presence of some such limited and unimportant audience as a single and ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... bored my readers in thus giving the tiresome details of that ingenuous American pastime which my countrymen dismiss in their epigrammatic way as the "freezing-out process." And lest any reader should question the ethics of ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte
... bad as can be," answered the carpenter. "They've scuttled us most effectually, bored eight holes through her skin, close up alongside the kelson, three of which I've managed to plug after a fashion, but by the time I had done them the water had risen so high that I found it impossible to get at t'others. I reckon that sundown will about ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... things that meet to-day in Jerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen. If they are not important nothing on this earth is important, and certainly not the impressions of those who happen to be bored by them. But to understand them it is necessary to have something which is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston; that sort of living history which ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... the Colonel's area becomes positively draughty, and the sole survivors of his dashing but sanguinary counter-attack, the king and two pawns, have assumed the bored and callous air of a remnant that has fought too long and is called upon to fight again. The Colonel has just unceremoniously pushed his sovereign to the rear with a flick of his nervous irritated little finger. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... whimpering sound, and Seumas had followed this with a sigh, the slightest prolongation of which might have trailed into a sob, and when children are overtaken by tears they do not understand how to escape from them until they are simply bored by much weeping. ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... steady sitters, and one would have thought the early masters would have found them among the first things that they could do, whereas on the contrary they were about the last to be rendered with truth and freedom by the greatest painters. This was probably because rocks bored them; they thought they could do them at any time, and were more interested with the figures, draperies, and action. Leonardo da Vinci's rocks, for example, are of no use to any one, nor yet for the matter of that is any part of ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... (looks very bored, removes the hat and says rather sadly) You are mistaken, my child. Badly mistaken! 'Tis my own hat. 'Twas the only one in the town that I could get that came near fittin' me, and herself, I mean Lady Delahunty, wouldn't ...
— Duty, and other Irish Comedies • Seumas O'Brien
... quite sure now that this was a providential encounter. Only half an hour ago he had been feeling horribly bored. Here was employment the bare thought of which, was righteous self-applause. He took possession forthwith. The first need of this exhausted being was companionship. He flung himself down on the steeply sloping turf beside the motionless seated ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... bars and playing gymnastics. I wanted to run but there was not enough room. The physical thrill I got out of being able to chin myself with one hand wore off after a half hundred pull-ups because it was no great feat for a Mekstrom. I did push-ups and bridges and other stunts until I was bored again. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... claret on the table, and the Major, dull and bored, and resenting the other's vigilance, did not spare it. When he rose to his feet to retire he was heated and flushed, but not drunk. "Where's that young cub?" he ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... of the new mountain men had been for two days cutting up some dead and down trees that encumbered the enclosure at headquarters. They cross-cut the trunks into handy lengths; bored holes in them with a two-inch augur; loaded the holes with blasting powder and a fuse, and touched them off. The powder split the logs into rough posts small enough to handle. These fragments they carried laboriously to the middle of the meadow, where they stacked them rack-fashion ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... she, being as cobwebby as the rest of its furnishings, was never visible. The wharf in front of the house was a free menagerie. There were bears and other beasts behind prison bars, a very populous monkey cage, and the customary "happy family" looking as dreadfully bored as usual. Then again there were whole rows of parrots and cockatoos and macaws as splendid as rainbow tints could make them, and with tails a yard long ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... when you read a work of his, you were startled, first by the light, then by the darkness. It seemed strange that a man who one moment could be so light, the next could be so dull. Soon you began to be irritated. Then you were bored. When you reached the end—if you ever reached the end—you wondered if the man was mad, or if he was merely stupid. But he was neither mad nor stupid. He was a genius, who, so far, declined to allow himself to be managed. ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... earthquakes, floods, and tidal waves. They were impregnable fortresses against rioting negroes and spasmodically aggressive Frenchmen. They even survived the abolition of slavery, and the old gay life went on for many years. English people, bored or in search of health, came for the brilliant winter, delighted with the hospitality of the planters, and to renew their vitality in the famous climate and sulphur baths, which, of all her possessions, Time has spared to Nevis. And then, having ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... was more genuinely impressed and unconsciously bored by Madame Frabelle than by any woman he had ever met. Yet she was not at all extraordinary. She was a tall woman of about fifty, well bred without being distinguished, who could never have been handsome but was graceful, dignified, and pleasing. She ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... smallest degree raised too high; and porcelain is mostly full of small minute pores, through which the gas escapes, especially when compressed by a column of water. For these reasons I procured a tube of brass, which Mr de la Briche got cast and bored out of the solid for me at Strasburg, under his own inspection. This tube is extremely convenient for decomposing alkohol, which resolves into charcoal, carbonic acid gas, and hydrogen gas; it may likewise be used with the same advantage ...
— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier
... Oh! talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the ...
— A Woman of No Importance • Oscar Wilde
... and children remained slaves. If the servant, however, plainly said, "I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: then his master brought him unto the judges, also unto the doorpost, and his master bored his ear through with an awl, and he served him forever." (Ex. xxi. 1-6.) Sir, you have urged discussion:—give us then your views of that passage. Tell us how that man was separated from his wife and children according to the eternal right. Tell us what was the condition of the woman in case ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... so disturbed, with the servants running about distractedly, and the doctors quarrelling with each other, and the courtiers standing about trying not to look bored, that no one took the least notice of the Princess; but she was a pushing young lady, and seeing the palace doors all open, she made her way from room to room until at last ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac
... he likes. He ought to be shown the Cadets, and be given five or six of them to drill. That should be an amusement for him, not a duty. The great point is that he should become fond of military affairs, and the worst that could happen would be if he should become bored with them. He should be allowed to talk to all, to cadets, soldiers, citizens and officers, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... Bay Bend His long-winded sermon quite through to the end, Unmindful there sat in the Somerville pew A stranger whose pale handsome countenance drew All eyes from his own reverend self; nor suspected What Ruth and her brother too plainly detected That the stranger was bored. ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... between syllables. The Windemere family, all with their work, except Mrs. Campbell, who never seemed to have anything to do, were at a little distance—the two young ladies talking to the distinguished traveler previously mentioned, who seemed a trifle bored, and Mrs. Campbell being talked to by a couple of government attaches, whose boyish ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... the Warlock was bored. The worst of the boredom was that it promised to last without limit. They had food and water and physical comfort, but they were exactly in the situation of men sentenced to prison for an unknown but enormous length of time. There was ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... expected that he should long remain unknown, and he was sometimes touched, more often bored, by the forms which this recognition took. Thus two days after his ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... they'd got their riding habits on, and Bella had the watch and chain Starlight had given her. I saw her look over to where he and the other two were, but she didn't know him again a bit in the world. He was sitting there looking as if he was bored and tired with the whole thing—hadn't seen a soul in the church before, and didn't ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... several days later a stranger left the train at the village and looked about him with that bored and commiserating expression with which city men are apt to regard the shallow skyline of a small town. He was of medium height and carefully groomed from his well-tailored clothes to the carnation in his buttonhole and manicured polish of his nails. His face, ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... listless and tired, frankly bored by the clerk. He stared out over the sickle curve of the bay along the Cavite shore, where a line of white beach made a barrier between the water and the green jungle. The red-roofed buildings of Cavite lay out on the end of the sickle like a clutter of bleached bones ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... the bored shrug of the bright, well-born high school child when one suggests that "The prince and the pauper" is quite as interesting a story as the seventh volume of her latest series, a librarian has some feelings about the lines-of- ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... details of the pneumatic connection between the main piston and the hammer, in which packing and packing glands are dispensed with. The hammer, G, is of cast steel, bored out to fit the main piston, F, the latter being also bored out to receive an internal piston, L. A pin, M, passing freely through slots in the main piston, F, connects rigidly the internal piston, L, with ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... the most atrocious weather, we made on horseback the long eight days journey from Rennes to Tours, where we had all sorts of difficulties in setting up the headquarters. We had been told that we would not be there for much more than a fortnight, but we stayed there, bored stiff, for six weary months, while our comrades were disporting themselves in the capital. That was a foretaste of the unpleasant duties which fell to me as a supernumerary aide-de-camp. So ended the year 1800, during which I had undergone so much ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... brings his wife there, and he takes her home; during the interval she has little, if any, of his company. She may be shy, she may be a stranger, she may not be much accustomed to society life, she may feel herself out of place in the gay assemblage, she may be unentertained or bored or annoyed, it matters not to him as long as he is having a good time with the boys, or is encircled by the ladies fair, who unanimously think him the most gallant of men, unrivaled in his wit and ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... were introduced by his son, and received with his usual stile of rustic civility; then turning to signor Macaroni, with a sarcastic grin, 'I tell thee what, Dick (said he), a man's scull is not to be bored every time his head is broken; and I'll convince thee and thy mother, that I know as many tricks as e'er an old fox ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... intrigue. Caring little for love, he longed, above all, for a quiet life, and contented himself with occasional amours such as a young man can always have. All the sentimentality, the attentions, and the tenderness which a well-bred woman exacts bored him. The chain, however slight it might be, which is always formed by an adventure of this sort, filled him with fear. He said: "At the end of a month I'll have had enough of it, and I'll be forced to wait patiently for six months ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... started for home. As he was still dressed in the faded and shattered uniform of a non-commissioned officer, he did not attract any particular notice on the way. He was enabled to pass through Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, without being bored by a public reception, which some less deserving heroes have not been permitted to escape. But the people did not understand that Tom had a second lieutenant's commission in his pocket, and he was too modest to proclaim the fact, which may be the reason why he was suffered to ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... are sometimes proved [Footnote: See Manton on Gunnery.]. Upon examination, I found that what I suspected might be just possible was actually the case with respect to the piece in question—the touch-hole had never been bored through, though the piece was marked as proof! I never shall forget the satisfaction which appeared in the countenance of the humane magistrate, who from the beginning had suspected the evidence, whom he knew from former delinquency. The man was indeed called an ironmonger, but his was one ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... to take them and examine them. What, in fact, struck her gaze was a small box, the contents of which were four sets of silver moulds. Each of these was over a foot long, and one square inch (in breadth). On the top, holes were bored of the size of beans. Some resembled chrysanthemums, others plum blossom. Some were in the shape of lotus seed-cases, others like water chestnuts. They numbered in all thirty or forty kinds, and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Huge bumps and broken limbs made it one in a thousand. On the leeward side of the tree, he thought he noticed a glow of light. He brushed the snow from his eyes, and looked again. This time, he was sure. He guessed that this was an air-hole bored through the wall of the trunk, and that Maria was building a fire inside. For a moment, he envied her coziness. Then, he crawled stealthily forward, until within ten feet of the big hollow pine. The air-holes, he noticed now, were not made on the ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... children." I did not dare to begin my work during the daytime, for fear of attracting attention. But I groped round; and having found the side next the street, where I could frequently see my children, I stuck the gimlet in and waited for evening. I bored three rows of holes, one above another; then I bored out the interstices between. I thus succeeded in making one hole about an inch long and an inch broad. I sat by it till late into the night, to enjoy the little whiff of air that floated in. In the morning ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... Indian priest wore upon his breast "an ornament made of a white conch-shell, with two holes bored in the middle of it, through which he ran the ends of an otter-skin strap, and fastened to the extremity of each, a buck- horn white button." [Footnote: Hist. Am. ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... the roboticist went on. The men were looking pretty bored. They'd come to get a briefing on the reason for the trip, and all they were getting was a ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... carelessnesses, which I meant to point out to you for another edition; but I find I lack the time, and you will remark them for yourself against a new edition. There were two, or perhaps three, flabbinesses of style which (in your work) amazed me. Am I right in thinking you were a shade bored over the last chapters? or was it my own fault that made me think them susceptible of a more athletic compression? (The flabbinesses were not there, I think, but in the more admirable part, where they showed the bigger.) Take it all together, the book struck me as if you had been hurried ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were bored to death, the Count proposed to take a walk around the village. Each one wrapped himself up carefully and the small company set off, with the exception of Cornudet, who preferred to remain by ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... Leh Shin's shop, fiddling sometimes with his ears and sometimes with the soles of his bare feet. He found life just a little dull, and had he been able to express himself as "bored," he would doubtless have done so. Peeling small dry scales of skin off wear-hardened heels is not the most exciting occupation life affords, and the assistant wished more than once that his master would return from either the gambling den ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... "Are you bored, Mr. Hastings? Does the sound of my voice annoy you?" asked Mlle. Nadiboff, as the auto flew over the quiet country roads ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Spies - Dodging the Sharks of the Deep • Victor G. Durham
... the autumn, she insisted on a succession of proper guests, who would shoot the grouse in a proper manner, and amuse her in the evenings. For, as she had no children, life was often monotonous, and when she was bored she had a stately way of making herself disagreeable to Lord Driffield. He therefore did his best to content her. He received her guests, dined with them in the evenings, and despatched them to the moors in the morning. But between those two functions he was his ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... monks that Greek was the invention of the devil. "God knows what misery I suffered with it." He hated French meters, and his teacher vowed he had no soul for poetry. He idled away his time at Bonn, and was "horribly bored" by the "odious, stiff, cut-and-dried tone" of the leathery professors. Humboldt was feeble as a child and "had less facility in his studies than most children." "Until I reached the age of sixteen," he says, "I showed little ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... of this bemoaning And this grumbling and this groaning The mind of Jack, her son and heir, unconscionably bored. His heart completely hardening, He gave his time to gardening, For raising beans was something ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... discussion the old question that is sure to be argued whenever the old world and the new meet—the rival merits of monarchies and republics. The discussion grew warm, though the disputants remained courteous. The viscount grew bored, and gradually dropped out of the argument, leaving the subject in the hands of the President and the minister, who, of course, had taken opposite sides, the minister representing the advantages of a monarchical form of government, and the President contending for ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... brook cuts its way through a sand bank to reach the sea is an ideal nesting ground for a colony of sand martins. The face of the high bank shows a number of clean, round holes indiscriminately bored into the sand, as if the place had just received a cannonading; but instead of war an atmosphere of peace pervades the place in midsummer, when you are most likely to visit it. Now that the young ones have flown from their nests that your arm can barely reach through the tunnelled ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... interest himself in the search, nor did he desert his post in the wireless office. There he did nothing whatever. Jack Warford stayed with him, but immensely bored, it must be confessed. Once he suggested that if Darrow had nothing for him to do that afternoon, he thought he would like to go out for a ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... this view; and it is only fair to admit that in The Professional Prince (HUTCHINSON) he has contrived to give a novel twist to the already well laboured theme. Prince Richard (precise nationality unstated) was so bored with the common round of his exalted duties that, hearing of a convenient double, he engages him, at four hundred a year and pickings, to represent him at dull functions, and incidentally to pay the requisite attentions to the young woman, reported by photograph ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... Heathcroft, Esquire, was not acquainted with the stage, in a professional way, at any rate. He was a slim and elegant gentleman, dressed with elaborate care, who appeared profoundly bored with life in general and our society in particular. He sported one of Hephzibah's detestations, a monocle, and spoke, when he spoke at all, with a languid drawl and what I learned later was a Piccadilly accent. He favored ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... faintly heard the ocean's waves dashing against the rocks on the outside of the place. So, following in the direction of the sounds, they became louder and more distinct, until finally I found myself looking up at the very hole through which I had bored my way so unceremoniously. It was night, and I could easily distinguish the stars in the outer darkness. In making a careful survey of the surroundings, I discovered that it was going to be a much more difficult task to get out than it was to get in this extraordinary grotto. The aperture ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... metamorphosis are completed, when the passage of escape is bored and furnished with its lid of superficial membrane, the female Chalcidian arrives in a busy mood. She inspects the peas, still on the vine, and enclosed in their pods; she auscultates them with ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... him to be pilloried, whipped, burned in the face, and to have his tongue bored through with a red-hot iron. All these severities he bore with the usual patience. So far his delusion supported him. But the sequel spoiled all. He was sent to Bridewell, confined to hard labor, fed on bread and water, and debarred from all his disciples, male and female. His illusions ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... a silent man. He did not dislike conversation if it was kept within decent limits: indeed, he responded to it contentedly enough, but when he had spoken or been addressed for more than an hour he became, first, impatient, then bored, and, finally, sulky or ill-mannered.—"With men," said he, "one can talk or be silent as one wishes, for between them there is a community of understanding which turns the occasional silence into a pregnant and fruitful interlude ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... principles are in conflict with a nature which is far from being utterly bad. The narrative is mainly developed through letters exchanged between Clarissa and her friend, Miss Howe. There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the leisure enjoyed by the eighteenth-century than that society was not bored by a story the length of which seems almost interminable to the reader to-day. The slow movement is sufficient to preclude its present prosperity. It is safe to say that Richardson is but little read now; read ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... sheltered, since 1825, three generations of Derlines; the husbands had all three been lawyers, the wives had all three been virtuous. The three generations had passed there a happy and moderate life, never having any great pleasures, but, also, never being very bored. ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... supposing that I can stop the Prussians with the matchsticks that are being planted on the ramparts." Strangely enough, Paris shut herself in with such a wall of masonry that in driving through it in the Bois de Boulogne, there was barely room for a carriage with two horses. They bored loop-holes in these walls and ramparts, but few doubted that the German artillery would be able to destroy all their defences ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... from Sandhurst and exactly twenty-six. I was barely allowed a familiar reference, and anything approaching a flippancy was met with penetrating silence. I was almost rebuked for lightly suggesting that she must occasionally find herself bored in Peshawur. ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... school let out. The rings were usually marked on the ground with a stick, but when there was a great hurry, or there was no stick handy, the side of a fellow's boot would do, and the hollows for knucks were always bored by twirling round on your boot-heel. This helped a boy to wear out his boots very rapidly, but that was what his boots were made for, just as the sidewalks were made for the boys' marble-rings, and a citizen's character for cleverness or meanness ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... blackguards howling on the bridge of the Holy Trinity in the pure half-moonlight. This is the kind of discord I have to bear, corresponding to your uncongenial company. But, alas! Susie, you ought at ten years old to have more firmness, and to resolve that you won't be bored. I think I shall try to enforce it on you as a very solemn duty not to lie to people as the vulgar public do. If they bore you, say so, and they'll go away. That is the right state ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... it fall as low down as their ancles; the men not farther than the calf of the leg. The latter have a short coloured shirt underneath it, and again beneath that, large flowing trousers. The women wear a long full blouse. Both sexes wear flowers in their ears, which have such large holes bored in them that the stalk can very easily be drawn through. The women, both old and young, adorn themselves with garlands of leaves and flowers, which they make in the most artistic and elegant manner. I have often seen men, too, weaving the same ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... having some darker markings, was of no use for that purpose and had been allowed to live. He had a strange, old-fashioned look, and gave one the impression that he was already tired of life and felt bored. A lark on its little piece of turf, fluttering and looking up for a glimpse of blue sky; a dejected robin, with no tail to speak of, and sundry other sad-looking specimens met my pitying gaze, and I suppose I had caught their sorrowful expression, for I was startled ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... woman. "It is hard to keep a wife whom everyone admires; and if no one admires her it is hard to have to live with her yourself." One of these distractions took the shape of Courts of Love, where the bored but literary chatelaine discussed delicate problems of conduct pertaining to the heart. The minstrel about the lady's castle, for his part, sought her favourable notice not only by his songs but also by giving an object ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... that of my protectors either; I have to be gay, supple, amusing, comical. Virtue makes itself respected, and respect is inconvenient; virtue insists on being admired, and admiration is not amusing. I have to do with people who are bored, and I must make them laugh. Now it is absurdity and madness which make people laugh, so mad and absurd I must be; and even if nature had not made me so, the simplest plan would still be to feign it. Happily, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... how bored I have been since we locked up Colonel Carruthers. My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace, ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... but I can't accept it as the last word either of taste or of tact. When a woman with her prettiness lets her husband stray away she deserves no small part of her fate. I don't wish you to agree with me—on the contrary; but I call such a woman a pure noodle. She must have bored him to death. What has passed between them for many months needn't concern us; what provocation my sister has had—monstrous, if you wish—what ennui my brother has suffered. It's enough that a week ago, just after you had ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... enjoyment nor anything agreeable, not even for himself. "I pity you," said M. de Talleyrand to M. de Remusat, "you have to amuse the unamusable." At the theatre he is abstracted or yawns. Applause is prohibited; the court, sitting out "the file of eternal tragedies, is mortally bored.... the young ladies fall asleep, people leave the theatre, gloomy and discontented."—There is the same constraint in the drawing-room. "He did not know how to appear at ease, and I believe that he never wanted anybody else to be so, afraid of the slightest approach to familiarity, and inspiring ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... metal to turn off the face of the coupling, it is sometimes undiscovered. Having observed several of these cavities, some only when the last cut was being taken off, I have considered it advisable to have holes bored in the end and center of each coupling, as far through as the thickness of the flange; when the shafts are of large size, this is sure to find these flaws out. Another flaw, which has in many cases proved serious when allowed to extend, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... made a sensation in England; it was speedily translated, and repeated its triumph on the other side of the Channel. Comparatively few people could read it now without being bored, but it is famous in the history of literature as the first English novel; that is, a story of a human life under stress of emotion, told by one who understood the tastes of his own age, and who strove to keep his work true to human ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... pillory, for the space of two hours, between the hours of eleven and one on Saturday next—in each of the said places wearing a paper containing an inscription of his crimes: and that at the Old Exchange his tongue shall be bored through with a hot iron; and that he be there also stigmatized in the forehead with the letter B: And that he be afterwards sent to Bristol, and conveyed into and through the said city on a horse bare-ridged, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... such a lively place that I am likely to be bored by you at our first talk together after eighteen years, though you don't seem to have much to say ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... returned with Miss White. She was an extremely attractive girl, slight of figure, but with an air about her that all the imported gowns in New York could not have conferred. They were engaged in animated conversation, so much in contrast with the bored air with which Spencer had listened to Dr. Lith that even I noticed that the connoisseur was completely obliterated in the man, whose love of beauty was by no means confined to the inanimate. I wondered if ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... First I bored a hole in the coin and hung it around Skinny's neck. He was all excited and said, "Now I've got a regular merit ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... moment when she would look at him again. So far, she had pretended to ignore him, but he understood her tactics, and as he observed them, he twisted first one end and then the other of his little light moustache, with a self-complacency not to be concealed. He had been feeling bored all the morning, but now his interest in life revived. He had only the one interest in life, and when the girl on the beach had done all she could to excite it, she glanced at him again, and saw by the look with which he responded that she had succeeded. Then she sat down on ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... and that only because she found me in the hotel and kidnapped me. However,"—Adelaide stood up with determination,—"one good thing is, I have begun to have an effect on my father. He does not like her any more. He was distinctly bored at the prospect of her visit this time. He did not resent it at all when I called her an upholstered old lady. I really think," she added, with modest justice, "that I am rather good at poisoning people's minds against their undesirable friends." She paused, debating how long ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... door could only be opened from within. Neither a fugitive nor a pursuer could make any entrance from the parlour side, unless the wainscoting itself were torn off. Lastly, the crack in the woodwork, corresponding with two minute holes bored in the painted panel, afforded, when the picture was hung exactly straight, a view of the parlour that ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... "As if someone had bored a hole in my leg, and were squirting melted lead into all my veins—right up my leg, sir. It's maddening! It's horrible! It's worse than—worse than—there, I was going to say gout, Lawrence, but I'll say it's worse than being caned. Now, Yussuf, ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... saying, "Well, I will make thee the house." With this, he took the planks, and nailing them together, made a house in the form of a chest, after the measure of the young lion. In this he cut a large opening, to which he made a stout cover and bored many holes therein, leaving the door open. Then he took out some nails of wrought iron and a hammer and said to the young lion, "Enter this opening, that I may fit it to thy measure." The whelp was glad and went up to the opening, but saw that it was strait; and the carpenter said to him, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... of one of Kipling's "Barrack-Room Ballads" which Madeline Ayres had written one morning during a philosophy lecture that bored her, and which the whole college was singing a ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... had their ears bored, and one or two silver rings in each, which they said were esteemed ornaments in their country. The men were black, their hair curled; the women remarkably black, all their faces scarred, deployez, their hair black, their only clothes a large old shaggy garment, flossoye, ...
— A Historical Survey of the Customs, Habits, & Present State of the Gypsies • John Hoyland
... was already twilight and very damp. Perhaps I had been tired, more likely bored—as I always was when I was not being somebody else. I remember that I had found the path interminable. I had been silent, as I mostly was, while the other two had chattered and played about our mother; and when presently I stayed behind for a purpose I remember that I made no effort to catch ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... some wandering horses, and some camels. The camels, who appeared to have lost themselves, did not gallop away like the horses, but came forward and peaceably watched the cavalcade passing, absent-minded, bored ruminants, with something always on their minds. The sobriety of these animals astonished him. "They're not greedy, and they are never thirsty. Of what do they remind me?" And Owen thought for a while, till catching sight of their long fleecy necks, bending like the necks ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... was following Hammer's kind leading, the prosecuting attorney was sitting with his hands clasped behind his head, balancing his weight on the hinder legs of his chair, his foot thrown over his knee. Apparently he was bored, even worried, by Hammer's pounding attempts to make Isom out a man who deserved something slower and less merciful than a bullet, years before he came ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... time, four hours, consumed in the performance, the passages of verse,[13] all demonstrate that Galds put his full will into the elaboration of this drama. The result was disappointing. Audiences were bored, despite their desire to approve. They knew some symbolism was involved, but could not decide upon its character until the author solved the problem in his Prlogo. He there defended the vagueness of his play, as more suggestive than clearness, and explained that ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... Hermonides of Holland levelled low, And for the youth's left flank the stroke intended; But his weak lance was shivered by the blow, And little the opposing Scot offended: But vain was not the spear-thrust of his foe, Who bored his opposite's good shield, and rended His shoulder, by the lance pierced through and through, And good ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... subject of establishing a mission among them. He felt it his duty to have translated the message sent to the Indians by the Missionary Society. The poor savages listened courteously to this long piece of abstruse theological narrative and argument, but they must have been terribly bored, notwithstanding Mr. Bacon's efforts to 'express the ideas in language better adapted to the capacity and more agreeable to their ways of speaking.' No wonder that Little Otter was 'too unwell to attend in the afternoon.' After this ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland |
