"Disillusioned" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disillusioned, and bitterly now did she regret the hasty act that had landed her in her present predicament. She must have been mad, she thought gloomily, to have planned and carried out such a brazen piece of imposition; and how could she ever have imagined that she would have ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... He felt disillusioned and robbed. He sat beside his hard couch, waiting without expectancy for the gray dawn of another empty day, and hardly lifting his head at ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... is, that the public is disillusioned and that the management is bankrupt. Another strikingly-contrasted experience of the present generation is this, that, without any decorations whatever, enormous audiences have been assembled together, in the old world and in the new, upon every occasion upon which they have been ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... stir postponed issues. And then of how the symbolic pictures of the leaders gave way, as one by one, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, ceased to be the incarnation of human hope, and became merely the negotiators and administrators for a disillusioned world. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... a disillusioned man's explanation of the country into which he had tried to sink, but which had rejected him. He explains the present by the past. That is reasonable. The dead are the real rulers of Japan, he says. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... the voice of History. I am only describing what I saw. He entered, the heap on the sofa revived slightly, and the Hawley Boy and I came away together. He is disillusioned, hut I felt it my duty to lecture him severely for going there. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... my first modern battlefield and am quite disillusioned about the splendour of war. The splendour is all in the souls of the men who creep through the squalor like vermin—it's in nothing external. There was a chap here the other day who deserved the V.C. four times over ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... the little girl or boy this much you have told him all that he probably cares to know at this time; you have told the truth so that you have nothing to fear about his being disillusioned either as to the story or as to your own trustworthiness; and you have avoided arousing the suspicion that certain subjects are unworthy of understanding. And then you will find that this new conception of his relation to you, as truly ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... bitterly. "'Joy' isn't precisely the word. If he hoped for it, he would soon be disillusioned. You may give him a name, if he wishes it. But let me also give him a few words of advice. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... glistening plaques of ice, through which project a few boulders and several carcases of mutton. The storeman rummages in the snow and discloses a pile of penguins, crusted hard together in a homogeneous lump. Dislodging a couple of penguins appears an easy proposition, but we are soon disillusioned. The storeman seizes the head of one bird, wrenches hard, and off it breaks as brittle as a stalactite. The same distracting thing happens to both legs, and the only remedy is to chip laboriously an icy ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... cousin knows a man attached as liaison officer to the staff of General Joffre, who has given out confidentially that such and such a thing is going to happen I am all ears. I feel that I am sucked into the great whirlpool of Vast Events. I don't care a bit about being disillusioned afterwards. The experience has done me good, made a man of me and sent me back to Wellingsford as an oracle. And if you bring me a man who declares that he does not like being an oracle, I will say to his face that ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... anti-climax; and the droll sound of those anvils, so far above all the voices and instruments in its pitch, thoroughly disillusioned you and restored you finally to your proper entity and proportions. It was the great error of the great Jubilee, and where almost everything else was noble and impressive,—where the direction was faultless, and the singing and instrumentation as perfectly controlled as if they were the result ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... cock-sure disillusioned, large person more delighted than by all the wisdom of Mr. Wilkins or the soothing of Mrs. Sessions. She felt that, except for Walter, it was the first time since she had come to New York that she had found an ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... them my eyes grew misty. Troops who have already fought no longer stir me; they have exchanged their dreams of glory for the reality of sacrifice—they know to what they may look forward. But untried troops have yet to be disillusioned; dreams of the pomp of war are still in their eyes. They have not yet owned that they are merely going out ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... houses, change the name of the edition, and deliberately manufacture new titles on which they print the name of some book club or society. These counterfeits are sold to the unsuspecting book-buyer, who often imagines he has landed a prize. Later, he is likely to become disillusioned. There can be no doubt that the contemptible practice of thus mutilating and garbling books should be defined as a felony and made punishable by fine or imprisonment. Book-buyers, however, can in a measure help the situation ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... She arose, a disillusioned bride, with scarcely spirit enough to cling to hope, and with less taste for Urquhart's motor than she had ever had for any duller task-work. Nothing in the house tended to her comfort. James was preoccupied and speechless; the coffee was wrong, the letters late and stupid. ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. I wanted to cross the footlights and help the slim-waisted Armand in the frilled shirt to convince her that there was still loyalty and devotion in the world. Her sudden illness, when the gaiety was at its height, her ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... The November elections were largely viewed as a referendum on the progress in Iraq. Arguments about continuing to provide security and assistance to Iraq will fall on deaf ears if Americans become disillusioned with the government that the United States invested so much to create. U.S. foreign policy cannot be successfully sustained without the broad support ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... cried Ruby tearfully. "Oh, Clarence, was it that horrid Tuetzi?" for she was effectually disillusioned ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... interpreter. On one of these occasions Dee tried to replace him by training his son, Arthur Dee, as a crystal-gazer; but, try as he might, the boy said he could see in the crystal nothing but meaningless clouds and specks. Had Dee not been thoroughly infatuated this might have disillusioned him, and convinced him that Kelley had simply been preying on his credulity. But the old man—he was now well advanced in years—saw in his son's failure only proof of Kelley's superior gifts, and by dint of great sacrifices contrived to find the money necessary ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... I do not consider a part of the joy of all the earth—the neighbors' dogs. On the next hill-top is an Airedale with a voice like a fog-horn. He is an ungainly creature and thoroughly disillusioned, because his family keep him locked up in a wire-screened tennis-court, where he barks all day and nearly all night. He can watch the motors on the coast road from one corner of his cage, and that seems ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... of make-believe she is far wiser than these grown-ups who insist with obstinate complacency on "seeing things as they are." They take pride in being disillusioned. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... no human being could have a destiny unconditioned by some one else, and though she also saw that this law was the glory as well as the tragedy of life, she rebelled against it now, lest the radiant being whom she loved should be dishonoured or disillusioned. ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised these proximities. The young people married, settled down, children ensued, and father and mother turned their minds, now decently and properly disillusioned, to other things. That to Altiora was the normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the quality of the great bulk of the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... afraid of being disillusioned. She wished to believe that everything for sale in Vanity Fair was worth the advertised price. When she ceased to believe in these delights, she told herself, her pulling power would decline and she would go ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... face the future without a fear, and to cultivate poetry at his leisure. There is no mistaking the meaning of Mackenzie's words, and he had evidently used them with the conviction that something would be done for Burns. Unfortunately, he was mistaken; the poet, at first misled, was slowly disillusioned and somewhat embittered. 'To repair the wrongs of suffering or neglected merit; to call forth genius from the obscurity where it had pined indignant, and place it where it may profit or delight the world—these are exertions which give to wealth an enviable superiority, to greatness and ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... arguments of the deists held a certain fascination for Defoe at this time. Carracioli's deism also has a dramatic function in the story. That on a voyage to Rome a young man like Misson should be converted to deism by a disillusioned "lewd" priest was in harmony with the traditional English belief in the dangers of Italy.[5] That Carracioli should combine the rebellion against organized religion with the revolt against monarchy is indicative of Defoe's keen apprehension of the ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... Domesday Book he applied the method of The Ring and the Book to the material of Starved Rock. The impulse of the first must have been much the same as Mark Twain's: a desire to catch in a stouter net than memory itself the recollections of boyhood which haunt disillusioned men. But as Mr. Masters is immensely less boylike than Mark Twain, elegy and argument thrust themselves into the chronicle of Mitch and Skeet, with an occasional tincture of a fierce hatred felt toward the politics and theology of Spoon River. A story of boyhood, that lithe, muscular ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... three lovely phrases, she did not notice that the young people in the carriage were almost silent. Henry, indeed, had been included against his wish, and revenged himself by observing Katharine and Rodney with disillusioned eyes; while Katharine was in a state of gloomy self-suppression which resulted in complete apathy. When Rodney spoke to her she either said "Hum!" or assented so listlessly that he addressed his next remark to her mother. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... moments Sir Joseph does not rebuke himself more than he regrets the moral myopia of other people. I think he is somewhat disillusioned as to what it is worth to gain a good deal of the world at the risk of a lot of people thinking he has lost his soul. He does not believe that his soul was ever in danger of being lost. Often he goes to rugby games. In this he sees again the virtue of struggle, probably wishing he himself had ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... rule without Parliament began. The heavy hand of an autocratic government fell on all those within reach who upheld the Puritan cause, among whom was John Winthrop, a country squire, forty-one years of age, who was deprived of his office as attorney in the Court of Wards. Disillusioned as to life in England because of financial losses and family bereavements, and now barred from his customary employment by act of the Government, he turned his thoughts toward America. Acting with the approval of the Earl of Warwick and in conjunction with ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... groundswell of unrest was steadily and rapidly rising. The returned soldiers who had failed to readjust themselves to the changed conditions of life and to the changes wrought in themselves by the war, embittered, disillusioned and disappointed, fell an easy prey to unscrupulous leaders and were being exploited in the interests of all sorts of fads and foolish movements. Their government bonuses were long since spent and many of them, through no fault of their own, found themselves facing a situation full of difficulty, ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... immortality and the saving powers which Christians find in Christ, yet those ideas have in them a permanent contribution to the life of man from whose influence the race cannot escape. When we have granted the limitations which disillusioned thoughtfulness suggests concerning progress upon this earth, it still remains true that, in our new scientific control over the latent resources of the earth without and over our own mental and moral processes within, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... fresh, and he has by no means full expectations of pleasure and novelty. Cuthbertson has the lines of sedentary London brain work, with its chronic fatigue and longing for rest and recreative emotion, and its disillusioned indifference to adventure and enjoyment, except as ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... between gentle and simple was doubtless less absolute than the disillusioned Jarrett represents it to have been. Even in the South there were many gradations of wealth, and it was no uncommon thing for a man to rise, as Jarrett did himself, from mean birth to a considerable eminence. Yet in none of the colonies was the distinction altogether unreal. The mass ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Street diagonally opposite the square to the west. By the end of Stevenson's second year, he had, by his characteristic methods, alienated so many of those on whom he had relied mainly for support that Bishop Payne, now disillusioned, was as bitter against Stevenson as he was blindly his champion the year before.[13] Stevenson was removed, but there were those who still believed in his leadership. He refused to accept the appointment given him and organized the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... was now an illustration of the devious ways by which one who feels, rather than reasons, may be led in the pursuit of beauty. Though often disillusioned, she was still waiting for that halcyon day when she would be led forth among dreams become real. Ames had pointed out a farther step, but on and on beyond that, if accomplished, would lie others for her. It was ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... anything like enough tanks to secure an annihilating surprise over the enemy as afterward was attained in the first battle of Cambrai; and the troops who had been buoyed up with the hope that at last the machine—gun evil was going to be scotched were disillusioned and dejected when they saw tanks ditched behind the lines or nowhere in sight when once again they had to trudge forward under the flail of machine-gun bullets from earthwork redoubts. It was a failure in generalship to give away our secret ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... etc., etc. No note is there of failure (that's a tune the croakers sing!) This song's of youth, and strength, and health, and time that's on the wing! Of wealth beyond the hazy blue of far horizons flung— But never of the folk returning, disillusioned, stung! It's a tale of gold and ivory, of plunder out of reach, Of luck that fell to other men, of treasure on the beach— A compound, cross-reciprocating two-way double spell, The low, sweet lure to Heaven, and the ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... genius that no mountains of earth can crush, and who keeps his faith and sweetness all through his life that we learn the baseness of the thought that experience necessarily brings cynicism and selfishness. There is to me in all this world nothing more hateful than this disillusioned worldliness, and nothing makes me angrier than to see it taking the name of wisdom. If I were a man with an art, there is nothing, I think, that I should feel more called to make war upon; it is a very blow in the face of God. Nothing ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... the change in Cherry. There was a certain hardening that impressed Alix at once. There was a weary sort of patience, a disillusioned concession to the drabness of married life. Alix, after meeting some of the other wives at the mine—there were but five or six—saw that Cherry had been affected by them. There was general sighing over the housework, ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... week of March, 1915, bad weather on the waters surrounding the British Isles hampered the operations of German submarines to an extent which led the British public to believe that the submarine warfare on merchantmen had been abandoned, but they were disillusioned when on the 9th of March, 1915, three British ships were sunk by the underwater craft. The steamship Tangistan was torpedoed off Scarborough, the Blackwood off Hastings and the Princess Victoria near Liverpool. Part of this was believed to be the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Mormon, disillusioned hero of three matrimonial adventures, woman-soft where Sandy was woman-shy, he was high-stomached, too stout for saddle-ease to himself or mount, sun-rouged where his partners were burned brown. His pate was bald save for a tonsure-fringe ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... euphonious term for them is "Roberts' Scouts." Men to whom the existence of such insects was once merely a vaguely-accepted fact, and who would have brought libel actions against any persons insinuating that they possessed such things, after having been disillusioned of the idea that they were troubled with the "prickly itch," were calmly, naked and unashamed, searching diligently for their tormentors in their clothes as to the manner born. Being fortunate enough to find an officer's servant with a bottle of Jeyes', I finally washed both myself and clothes ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... disappointed, disillusioned. He had not succeeded in establishing the slightest claim, either upon the country or his party. Without such claim he had no ground for attempting reelection. The frivolity of the Whig machine in ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... "She is very pretty, isn't she? But prettiness alone doesn't count for much on a newspaper. Can she make good? That is the question. She imagines that journalism is her vocation, but I am afraid she is going to be sadly disillusioned. She seems to be a ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... that I plunged in boldly. I told him everything; of my life with my grandfather, of my disgrace at the Academy, of my desire, in spite of my first failure, to still make myself a soldier. And then I told him of how I had been disappointed and disillusioned, and how it had hurt me to find that this fight seemed so sordid and the motives of all engaged only mercenary and selfish. But once did he interrupt me, and then by an exclamation which I mistook for an exclamation of disbelief, ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... distant. One can't, at such places, Accept as credentials good figures or faces. There was an unnameable something about Mrs. Travers which filled other women with doubt And all men with interest. Roger, blase, Disillusioned with life as he was, felt the sway Of her strong personality, there as she sat Looking out 'neath the rim of her coquettish hat With dark eyes on the sea. Few people had power To draw his gray thoughts ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... went out, and a rain-drop, which had been hovering upon a leaf above him, fell with a splash upon the sheet of heavy white paper. He rose to his feet, stiff and chilled and disillusioned. His little ghost-world of fancies had faded away. Morning had come, and eastwards, a single shaft of cold sunlight had pierced ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... an epoch thrown into commotion by the passionate views of romanticism—the epoch of Rene, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types of desperate men; life weary, but by no means weary of talking. "Jacques," she observes, "belonged to this large family of disillusioned thinkers; they had their raison d'etre, historical and social. He comes on the scene in the novel, already worn by deceptions; he thought to revive through his love, and he does not revive. Marriage was for him only ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Braden, worn and disspirited, gave up in despair and prepared for his return to London. He went before an examining board in New York first and obtained his licence to become a practising physician and surgeon, and, with a set expression in his disillusioned eyes, peered out into the future in quest of the fame that was to take the place of a young ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... concentration of perfections which he had only yet enjoyed in detail, the attraction of passion was almost nil with him. Constant satiety had weakened in his heart the sentiment of love. Like old men and people disillusioned, he had no longer anything but extravagant caprices, ruinous tastes, fantasies, which, once satisfied, left no pleasant memory in his heart. Amongst young people love is the finest of the emotions, it makes the life of the soul blossom, it nourishes by its solar power the finest inspirations and ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... kings and princes and other potentates, give the impression that they would enjoy a holiday from their task. They seem to be harnessed to their duties rather than possessed by them; they appear like disillusioned husbands rather than as ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... their bloom, their originality, their modesty. It thrusts the girls into a charnel house of sin, sickness, and death. It shatters the nervous system of nine out of ten, or it leaves them calm, steady, burnt-out women, who have been behind the scenes of life and are disillusioned. When that little pink and white thing sat there and told me of some of the awful situations that she'd been placed in, and over which she was made responsible, the tears rolled down my face. I ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... moving, it is impossible to imagine happiness. It cannot dwell where, as Plato says, continual Becoming and never Being is all that takes place. First of all, no man is happy; he strives his whole life long after imaginary happiness, which he seldom attains, and if he does, then it is only to be disillusioned; and as a rule he is shipwrecked in the end and enters the harbour dismasted. Then it is all the same whether he has been happy or unhappy in a life which was made up of a merely ever-changing present and is now at ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... comment regarding Dawn's probable inability to rise to the demands of smart society. Only inexperience had caused her to make any. Ernest fluttered in the smart set; he and I were familiar with it; Miss Grosvenor was not, therefore we were disillusioned and ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... says our premier poet, 'are the uses of adversity.' The indignity (I will call it no less) to which my fellow-townsmen by their folly, and Sir Felix by his perfidy, have recently subjected me, is not without its compensations. On the one hand it has disillusioned me; on the other it has removed the scales from my eyes. It has, indeed, inspired me with a disgust of public life; it has taught me to think more meanly of mankind as a whole. But while weaning my ambitions— ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... by the mercy of God, there was no more talk between them. She was too hurt and shocked and disillusioned to make the necessary effort to go away. He was too proud to put an end to the position. They sat there apparently absorbed in thought, while all about them the accustomed life of the woods drew nearer and nearer to them, as the splash of their ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... must be opaque with its indifference. It stares beyond the interested visitor, in the way the sad and disillusioned have, to things it supposes a stranger would not understand if he were told. He has reason, therefore, to say we are dull. And Dockland, with its life so uniform that it could be an amorphous mass overflowing a reef of brick cells, I think would ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... bit disillusioned, are you?" she said. "You simply shut your eyes and go it blind. A woman likes that in a man. It's what love ought to be. It's silly of ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... anxiously, "I am afraid that you are destined to sad disappointment. When the novelty wears off you will be disillusioned, and, I fear, when the time comes that you can no longer serve them they will forget your services and ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... Alliance was one of the few fruits of Alexander's visions. His mind is described as passing through a regular series of stages with each influence under which he acted. He ended his life, tired out, disillusioned, "deceived in everything, weighed down with regret;" obliged to crush the very hopes of his people he had encouraged, dying in 1825 at Taganrog, leaving his new Polish Kingdom to be wiped out ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... gay dinner, a memorable dinner. The mere ostensible occasion of its being in celebration of the publication of Steve Armstrong's first novel, "The Disillusioned," would of itself have been sufficient reason therefor. In addition, the resignation, by a peculiar coincidence to take effect the same day, of the former manager of the Traction Company, Darley Roberts, with a recommendation that was virtually ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... when disillusioned, is of revulsive anger at a kind of betrayal. The Amazons recover ground in a wild desire to save their Queen, and they do rescue her, after a parting scene of the lovers. But Penthesilea curses the triumph that snatches her away; the high priestess rebukes ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... letting-down process there is a safe margin left, and confession becomes a luxury with no danger involved; since to see himself retrospectively pardoned by a heart virginally pure has surely restored to many a weary and disillusioned sensualist a better opinion of himself than he could ever have hoped to refurbish by his own efforts. That, oh ye men about town, is a good woman's mission in life; that is what she is for—when the watch has run down she winds it up again and sets it domestically ticking. And that ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... connected with a discovery of his unfaithfulness to her, and meant that she would cast him off forever. A wild hope that this might be so displaced his first despair. If that were all,—a mere ideal fancy which really did her credit,—perhaps she would return disillusioned, convinced of her mistake, and eager to bury its very ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... Kingdom go to say that when peace comes to be negotiated, with the United Kingdom as the chief constituent and weightiest spokesman of the allied nations and of the league of pacific neutrals, the representatives of British aims and opinions are likely to speak in a different, chastened, and disillusioned fashion, as contrasted with what the British attitude was at the beginning of hostilities. The gentlemanly British animus of arrogant self-sufficiency will have been somewhat sobered, perhaps somewhat subdued. Concession to the claims and ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... with all the hunger of her empty heart—she played with the children, who adored her; there was safety with the eyes of housekeeper and governess upon her—but when the eyes of a tired, disillusioned, and lonely man became fixed upon her, it was time for Patricia to flee. But she did not. Instead she gripped her philosophy of "grab"—and really managed to justify it to a certain extent—while ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... devotedly fond of children, and they were fond of him, as many anecdotes attest. His passionate love for Josephine before he learned of her infidelity is almost painful to read of; and even afterward, when he had been disillusioned, and when she was paying Fouche a thousand francs a day to spy upon Napoleon's every action, he still treated her with friendliness and allowed her extravagance ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... happened, which I do not explain, for that I can not. In plain fact, these two were obviously runaway boys, not the first, nor perhaps the last of runaway boys; and I was a man of means, a retired man, supposedly somewhat of a hermit, although really nothing of the sort; lately a lawyer, hard-headed and disillusioned, always a man of calm reason, as I prided myself; subject to no fancies, a student and a lover of science, a mocker at all superstition and all weak-mindedness. (Pardon me, that I must say all these things of myself.) Yet, let me be believed who say it, some spell, whether ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... the society of this over-trained young person left one exhausted and disillusioned with brainy women. I beg you to pay no such price for an education as this young girl paid. I remember you as a robust, rosy girl, with charming manners. Your mother was concerned, on my last visit, because I called you a pretty girl in your hearing. She said the one ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... glorify the carnage at a safe distance and fight the enemy with their lying tongues, are justified. They all are justified. But if, instead of victory, there is defeat, then they tremble lest they should be disgraced and lose their places, lest they should be victims of a disillusioned people's anger, lest they should forfeit their plunder, lest they should be called to account for the lies with which they fooled the masses. Defeat is the defeat of evil, victory is the victory ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... the Turk is a little better than a blood-thirsty individual with a plurality of wives and a paucity of virtues. To read this book is to be pleasantly disillusioned."—Public Opinion. ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... Stories finished in style, yet, as another contradiction in terms, short stories without any end, are rather the vogue nowadays in Magazines. Let me recommend as specimens "Francesca's Revenge" in Blackwood, and "Disillusioned" in ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... like a garden, And the lights are flickering and low; And a Romeo with fat legs, Is telling a Juliet with dyed hair and tired, disillusioned eyes, That love—real love—is the only thing ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... as he sat down beside her. "You are young, and still too inexperienced to be disillusioned of all the charm of the good old times. How can I instruct you in the rights ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... would have exaggerated the slightest imperfection of looks or manner; and she looked like a fairy-book queen—like the queen you used to think of in the nursery when your aunt read stories to you and the illustrated Sunday supplements had not yet disillusioned you as to ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... disillusioned group of Congressmen who gathered in September, 1814, in special session at the President's call. Among those who gazed sadly at the charred ruins of the Capitol were Calhoun, Cheves, and Grundy, whose voices had been loud for war and who had pictured their armies ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... next day or two Mary didn't take the slightest notice of me, and I kept out of her way. Jack said I'd disillusioned her—and hurt her dignity—which was a thousand times worse. He said I'd spoilt the thing altogether. He said that she'd got an idea that I was shy and poetic, and I'd only shown myself the usual sort ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... whom she meets in Paris, in London or Rome, her flirtations (and they are many and varied!) and exciting experiences. Among the letters written to her are slangy ones from an American college boy and some in broken English from a fascinated Russian Prince (or was he disillusioned, when after dining at a smart Parisian cafe with the adorable Polly he was trapped by secret police?); but the chief interest, so far as Polly's affaires d'amour are concerned, centers around the letters from a ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... generally recognized. Before that time his delightful Obiter Dicta had secured for him a wide circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest. What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as pleasantly as he wrote? Well, in due course he appeared, and the questions were soon answered in a sense as laudatory as his friends or even himself could have desired. It was unanimously voted that his conversation was as agreeable as his writing; but, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... man. I seized the reins of power. The survivors—these old men—were disillusioned and docile. I made myself absolute. I brought Moon men and women to Eros to serve us as slaves. But in a few years the last of my father's old compatriots will have died, and thus it was I conceived of conquering Earth and having men to obey me. For fifteen years I have been experimenting ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... incipient insanity," she said, smiling. "I've quite made up my mind to send back to Kentucky for my forgotten church-letter. I've seen all fashionable society in New York can offer and I am weary of its vacuity. I've been disillusioned of a girl's silly dreams, but there are some beautiful ones in my heart I've held. I can't tell you how your church and work have thrilled and interested me. I have never heard such sermons and prayers ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... few Indians who exist to this day on Long Island (rather mixed up with negroes) and admiring the gorgeous golden dunes, and gorgeouser goldener gorse when suddenly bump! bump! The moderately bad road became immoderately awful. At this spot some disillusioned motorist had revengefully printed on a proud sign-post the classic words: "Damn Bad Road." We were forced to believe him. And at that instant, as if to emphasize the description, millions of mosquitoes the size of humming-birds attacked us. How the Indians stood them, goodness knows, ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... spoiled the whole thing. It was her art, not the woman, that interested me. I didn't want to take the chance of being disillusioned. I have been through that experience, and I prefer not to meet the people who act in my pieces. I want their art, not their views on human destiny or the best place to get ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... tends to make young, idealistic physicians become rather disillusioned about treating degenerative conditions because the end result of all their efforts is, in the end, death anyway. The best they can do is to alleviate suffering and to a degree, prolong life. The worst they can do is to ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... were the case, however, Hugh quickly disillusioned the rest of the group. His quick eye had found an explanation ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... hidden by foliage from Lake Constance, her husband slowly drowsed toward dissolution. She herself ripened in the sharp air of the capital and grew almost into another woman in this banal, disillusioned world, sober ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... For life deals thus with Man; To die alone deceived or with the mass, Or disillusioned to complete his span. Thermopylae or Golgotha, all one, The young dead legions in the narrow pass; The stark black ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... cloth, wondering to be just the same as ever and already disillusioned. He was never again to ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the days began to be sad. They studied no longer, fearing lest they might be disillusioned. The inhabitants of Chavignolles avoided them. The newspapers they tolerated gave them no information; and so their solitude was unbroken, their time ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... where one of the settlements came to be called New Iceland—the title given to the last story in this book. Many of these emigrants suffered great hardships, and, as the story tells, several of them became disillusioned with the land of promise. Their descendants, however, have on the whole done well ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... monetary success, and efficacious press-agents, and the adulation, admiration, emulation, and envy of his contemporaries went, he had nothing to complain of. He was lionized, quoted, courted, flattered, reviewed, viewed through rose-colored spectacles; and disillusioned, discontented, cynical, selfish, and, of course, most horribly bored. He was gun-shy of women; he suspected them of wanting to marry him. He was wary of men; he suspected them of wanting to exploit him. He loathed ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... Englishwomen; bejeweled beys and pashas brushing elbows with unperturbed New England school-teachers astray from Cook's; monocled thieves and gamblers and princelings, jaded tourists and skulking parasites—and always the disillusioned and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... hardened. So new truths, when they come, can but break it. Then men will feel distraught and disillusioned, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... They stood; I stood. These two men, however, were adepts. They had the better qualities of American dentists. Obviously they spent their lives in meeting notorieties on inbound steamers, and made naught of it. They were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite, conscientious, and rapid. They knew precisely what they wanted and how to get it. Having got it, they raised their hats and went. Their printed stories were brief, quite unpretentious, and inoffensive—though one of them did let out that the most salient ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... must be perfectly aware that men often kissed a girl who stood to them in her position, without thinking much of it. To make a fuss would be rather absurd. On the other hand, of course, he had to be disillusioned concerning what he apparently supposed would be her feelings ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... years the death of the husband of her own youth who had been romantically, passionately loved, had left her penniless but not disillusioned; with her own living to get and a little daughter with a face like a Luca Della Robbia chorister, and a voice that went with the face, but who had the requirements of other flesh and blood children, to be provided for. This child was the ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... told him the rest and quiet were doing him a world of good. Then—and the desire confused Sandy—he wished Treadwell would cut his visit short. The confession in the study had not drawn Treadwell nearer; it had driven him farther away. It was as if, by keener insight, Sandy had been cruelly disillusioned; had discovered that he, not Lans, was bound to bear a new burden of responsibility. Having confided in his friend, Treadwell, apparently, was eased and comforted; while Sandy was constantly thinking of a certain, ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... conversation of their horses; the dream of M. Jean Marteau, aimless, extravagant, apocalyptic, and of all the dreams one ever dreamt, the most essentially dreamlike. The vision of M. Anatole France, the Prince of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm, indulgent and penetrating, disillusioned and curious, finding treasures of truth and beauty concealed from less gifted magicians. Contemplating the exactness of his images and the justice of his judgment, the freedom of his fancy and the fidelity of his purpose, one becomes aware of the futility of literary watchwords and ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... thine had then Called out the utmost might of men, To make the Union's charter free And strengthen law by liberty. How had that stern arbitrament To thy gray age youth's vigor lent, Shaming ambition's paltry prize Before thy disillusioned eyes; Breaking the spell about thee wound Like the green withes that Samson bound; Redeeming in one effort grand, Thyself and thy imperilled land! Ah, cruel fate, that closed to thee, O sleeper by the Northern ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... loneliness brought home to his bosom for the first time of his life, at an age, thirty-five or thereabouts, when one is mature enough to feel the pang of such a discovery. Angry or simply sad but certainly disillusioned he wanders about and meets the girl one afternoon and under the sway of a strong feeling forgets his shyness. This is no supposition. It is a fact. There was such a meeting in which the shyness must have perished ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... day disillusioned us. I can never forget the night preceding it. I had charge of the night guards from eight to twelve, and from the roof of the building I watched the passing of all man's glorious works. So terrible ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... Balin is "disillusioned," his faith in the Ideal is shaken if not shattered. He rides at adventure. Arriving at the half-ruined castle of Pellam, that dubious devotee, he hears Garlon insult Guinevere, but restrains himself. Next day, again insulted for bearing "the crown scandalous" on his shield, he strikes ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... of course I was disillusioned. When I told her that I loved her more than anything else in the world, she laughed ever so sweetly, and said, 'I'm sure you do!' But when I asked her if she loved me, she laughed again, and said she didn't know what I was talking about—she didn't ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... person myself that her attitude to life, which had appeared to me so romantic and natural when I was eighteen, now appeared irremediably pathetic, visionary, out of touch with reality. Perhaps, however, it was I who had become disillusioned and matter-of-fact. I saw with a kind of pitying wonder that her youthful romance still supplied to her, as it had done since she was nineteen, a certain atmosphere of pensive, prayerful resignation, a background for ethereal day-dreams. Her peaceful days were passed in a kind of picturesque haze, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... angry and disillusioned, but he knew that belligerence would gain him nothing. "In other words," he said, genially, "there's something the matter with everything but the Orpheum, and everybody but me. I congratulate myself. Well, when I do get the job finished, and what does ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... overdone it a bit—women hate to be disillusioned. What you ought to have done, sir, is to describe me as a sort of ass—genial and all that sort of thing, but a ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... a people so disillusioned as the Germans must already be, never has a nation been called upon for so complete a mental readjustment. Neither conclusive victories nor defeats have been theirs, but only a slow, vast transition from joyful effort and an illusion of rapid triumph to hardship, loss and ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... of 1912 the Macedonians were pretty well disillusioned regarding a constitutional Turkey. Many of the old leaders had taken to the hills again, determined to take up the old fight where they had left off. Even that fight seemed more hopeless than ever, for the Turkish army was now being speedily reorganized and rendered ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... back on life, they can afford to see Man for what he really is—at his best a noble plaything for the gods. Yet they look forward, too, a little wistfully. They are of the world, after all, and nowise so tired of it, albeit disillusioned, as to have lost interest in the game or in the young who will carry it on. So Minos and his laws soon get left behind, and the talk (as so often befalls with Plato) is of the perfect citizen and how to train him—of education, in short; and so, as ever with Plato, we ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the musical malady of the century. He is its chief spokesman. After the vague, mad, noble dreams of Byron, Shelley and Napoleon, the awakening found those disillusioned souls, Wagner, Nietzsche and Chopin. Wagner sought in the epical rehabilitation of a vanished Valhalla a surcease from the world- pain. He consciously selected his anodyne and in "Die Meistersinger" touched a consoling earth. Chopin and Nietzsche, temperamentally finer and more sensitive ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked into the house of God in company." The loss of a friend by any of the common means is not so hard, as to find a friend faithless. The trustful soul has often been disillusioned thus. The rod has broken in the hand that leaned on it, and has left its red wound on the palm. There is a deeper wound on ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... love, but now that she frowned had let him go without even a word of friendship. I had been poor myself, and knew what awaited him in the world. He would find that they who fawned on him most would be first to turn their backs on him now. He would be rudely disillusioned regarding the fables of love and friendship, and would become cynical, bitter, and sceptical of there being any disinterested good in human nature. Suffering the cold heart-weariness of this state myself, I felt anxious at any price ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... from the cathedral, she had even destroyed the passion he had. She was glad. He was bitterly angry. Strive as he would, he could not keep the cathedral wonderful to him. He was disillusioned. That which had been his absolute, containing all heaven and earth, was become to him as to her, a shapely heap of dead ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... admitted that in the early days thousands joined the order "for what there was in it;" believing that the organization furnished a means for abolishing the middlemen, and putting ready money into the pockets of the farmers. When these sordid souls were disillusioned, their enthusiasm went down to the zero of activity. They misunderstood, or interpreted too radically, a well-defined, conservative, legitimate purpose of the Grange to co-operate on business lines. The order did believe that farmers could do without ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... the ideals to which the fathers consecrated it,—have we maintained them, realizing them, as each generation must, anew? Are we, in the consciousness that the life of man is pledged to higher levels here than elsewhere, striving still to bear aloft the standards of liberty and hope, or, disillusioned and defeated, are we feeling the disgrace of having had a free field in which to do new things and of not ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... No fear, no remorse, none of that Shakespearean horror after the murder, which, today, sceptic though I am and blase and utterly, utterly disillusioned, sets me shuddering whenever I am alone in a ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... of this as a reactionary period. The description applies to the Russians; among the Jews it was a period of reawakening.[4] They were disillusioned. They saw that Russification without emancipation, as their unsophisticated fathers had told Lilienthal, meant extermination. The first and worst pogroms were perpetrated in those places where the ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... in the week following their instalment. The disillusioned Eve withdrew to her own apartments in anger; and Balzac, whose bronchitis and congestion of the liver had grown worse, remained an invalid in his. They had intended spending only a fortnight or so in Paris, and then travelling south to the Pyrenees and Biarritz; but this ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... far from soon before the doctor returned. Patricia's charges were in bed and asleep. Custard, who had been looking forward to bedtime all day, had retired to his basket—a disillusioned dog. To-night Archibald was finding all the solace needed in a gaily painted Noah's Ark. Miss Kirby was lying down in the sitting-room,—she had not found it a day of unbroken calm,—so that Patricia was alone in the ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... that this was correct and that the Magyars had their foibles, but that they were on the point of sending him recruits. "We hoped," said the Croats, "that in a new world of liberty the Magyars would recognize the other races as their equals. We have been disillusioned, as you will be. And in July when Ferdinand announced, on the advice of Radetzky, that he would continue the operations in the Italian provinces until the bitter end, it became necessary for him ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... on us, when the frenzy is still in our blood, for the time of reaction is surely to be reckoned with by and by. Now we are sustained by the blare of the bands and the flourish of flags, but in the cold, gray dawn of the morning after, we shall count our dead with disillusioned eyes and wonder what was the use of all this bloodshed and waste. Trade conditions are largely a matter of the condition of the spirit, and ours will be drooping and drab when the tumult and the shouting have died and the reign ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... are generated in the rich and leisured classes that intense selfishness of the rising generation so movingly portrayed in M. Hervieu's play, "La Course du Flambeau." No one who has witnessed Mme. Rejane's presentment of the adoring, disillusioned mother can ever ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... which come other chickens and the dreadful cycle is thus made complete. It is all unbelievably complex. Most philosophers must have been raised on chicken farms. One hopes for so much from a chicken and is so dreadfully disillusioned. Small chickens, just setting out on the journey of life, look so bright and alert and they are in fact so dreadfully stupid. They are so much like people they mix one up in one's judgments of life. If disease ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Boev, now both disillusioned and astonished. "Do you really mean to say that that leg of yours is better already? Or do you mean that it never was injured ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... far the most "artistic" as he is the most disillusioned and ironical of Russian writers. With a tender poetical delicacy, almost worthy of Shakespeare, he sketches his appealing portraits of young girls. His style is clear—objective—winnowed and fastidious. ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... attractions of the dignified Marquise, gave her the romantic name of Arthenice, and forthwith the other members of the coterie took some nom de parnasse, by which they were familiarly known. They read the "Astree" of d'Urfe, that platonic dream of a disillusioned lover; discussed the romances of Calprenede and the sentimental Bergeries of Racan. Such Arcadian pictures seemed to have a singular fascination for these courtly dames and plumed cavaliers. They tried to reproduce them. Assuming ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... dreamers had ever come across a shepherdess in real life—dirty, unkempt, ignorant, coarse, immoral—they would themselves have made haste to disavow their heroines and seek less malodorous "maidens" for embodiments of their exalted fancies of love[128]. Richard Wagner was promptly disillusioned when he came across some of those modern shepherdesses, the Swiss dairy-maids. "There are magnificent women here in the Oberland," he wrote to a friend, "but only so to the eye; they are ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... I have never seen Delphine since her marriage. The beautiful statuesque girl occupies a niche into which the blazing and magnificent intrigante cannot crowd. I do not wish to be disillusioned. She has read me a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... 'twas with a most marvellously gluttonous glance that she eyed the roast of fresh meat on the table before me. 'Twas no matter to me, to be sure! for a lad's love is not so easily alienated: 'tis an actual thing—not depending upon a neurotic idealization: therefore not to be disillusioned by these natural appearances. ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... the Shoreham. The cafe looked cheerful, as it always does. We ordered an extensive supper. It was good. There were pretty women in the room, but we looked at them with the austere eyes of disillusioned men, and talked cynically of life. I cannot recall any of the things we said, though I remember thinking at the time that both of us were being rather brilliant, in an icy way. I suppose it was mainly about women. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... with a gasping cry, and her eyes suddenly strained into the distance, as though a vision of some mysterious thing hung before her. The Duchess realised that that temptation, which has come to so many disillusioned mortals, to end it all, to find quiet somehow, somewhere out in the dark, was upon her. She became resourceful ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... begun this next winter? Kloster says impatiently. Oh marry, and get done with it, and that then | I'll be sensible again and able to arrange my debut as a violinist with the calm, I gather he thinks, of the disillusioned. ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... was hidden in her sister's shoulder, and her whole body had drooped against Joanna's side, utterly weary after three days of travel and disillusioned loneliness. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... something transcendent and absolute, like the sign of the cross or the flag of one's country. He spoke in the name of something sacred and precious—the observance of a magnificent form. They were as perfectly apart in feeling as two disillusioned lovers had ever been; but they had never yet separated in act. Isabel had not changed; her old passion for justice still abode within her; and now, in the very thick of her sense of her husband's blasphemous sophistry, it began to throb to a tune ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... and July had brought joy and sorrow, good and ill. Polunin was already disillusioned when he met Alena, and was living alone with his books. He met her in the spring, and quickly and simply became intimate with her, begetting a child, for he found that the instinct of fatherhood had replaced that of passion ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... baulked and disillusioned—bewildered that a man's aim and purpose, which in its accomplishing had cost so immeasurable a price—crushing the whole beauty and savour out of life—should suddenly be destroyed and nullified. In the light of the present, the past seemed ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... no, no," the answer would come. "Not a tchetvertak per copyist, but a rouble, is the fee." "What? A rouble per copyist?" "Certainly. What is there to grumble at in that? Of the money the copyists will receive a tchetvertak apiece, and the rest will go to the Government." Upon that the disillusioned suitor would fly out upon the new order of things brought about by the inquiry into illicit fees, and curse both the tchinovniks and their uppish, insolent behaviour. "Once upon a time," would the suitor lament, "one DID know what to do. Once one had tipped the Director ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... political hack-writer, a lackey of the mind, instinctively subservient to his paper's slightest opinion, hating what it hates, loving what it loves, with the servile adherence of a medieval churchman. As The Record was bitter upon reform, its proprietor having been sadly disillusioned in youth by a lofty but abortive experiment in perfecting human nature from which he never recovered, Bunny lost no opportunity to damn ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... knowing why or wherefore. He bore this consciousness within himself, was proud of it and, without knowing it, was happy in that consciousness. Up to that time he had loved only himself, and could not help loving himself, for he expected nothing but good of himself and had not yet had time to be disillusioned. On leaving Moscow he was in that happy state of mind in which a young man, conscious of past mistakes, suddenly says to himself, 'That was not the real thing.' All that had gone before was accidental and ...
— The Cossacks • Leo Tolstoy
... people. Her first thought was that these ancient enemies, who for ten years had belaboured one another with such a realistic show of bitterness upon the political stage of Westville, had all along been friends and partners behind the scenes. But of this idea she was presently disillusioned. ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... it," she replied, with a harsh nasal accent; "any fool most could do as much." Wilkinson carried the tin pail to the shanty disillusioned, took his drink out of a cup that seemed clean enough, joined his friend in thanking mother and daughter for their hospitality, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... and his chums had an idea they would at once be permitted to depart for "somewhere in France" and begin the work of taking moving pictures of Uncle Sam's boys in training and in the trenches, they were very soon disillusioned. It was one thing to land in England during war times, but it was another matter to get out, especially when ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... there to make his fortune in literature, only too speedily to be disillusioned. Exhibition of manuscripts to a leading literary light merely evoked curt advice to learn a trade or go into business. He would have none of either and studied medicine instead, earning his way by teaching as he learned. In the laboratories, he made ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... old indeed, "older," as a poem by Mr. Sturge Moore begins, "than most sheep"—I thought, being so exceedingly mature and disillusioned, that I knew all the worries of life. Yet I did not; there was still one that was waiting for me round the corner, but I know that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... Southern California resort a world-weary woman, young and beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of living—of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blase woman by this glimpse into a ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... to people disillusioned with standard sprawl is attested by the fact that other developers, having incorporated some of the Reston techniques—some recreational water, some clustering of dwellings with communal open space between, some amenities like underground ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... I was amazed to the point of stupefaction at the corruption those communications betrayed, the shameless and sordid disregard of law and decency, the brutal and cynical indifference to public welfare. At sight of some of the signatures my head swam—I felt saddened, disillusioned, almost in despair for humanity. I suppose Inglesby had thought it wiser to preserve these letters—possibly for his own safety; but no wonder he had locked them up! I looked ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... one of her walks accompanied by her maid, Susan. Through a misapprehension of personalities his lordship addresses a love missive to the maid. Susan accepts in perfect good faith, and an epistolary love-making goes on till they are disillusioned. It naturally makes a droll and delightful little comedy; and is a story that is particularly ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... Thus the young, who have just left the negative faith and innocence of the nursery behind them and stand inexperienced on the threshold of life, are not normally religious; whereas we naturally expect those who have passed through the ordeal, and been disillusioned, to begin to think about their souls, since there is nothing else ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell |
