"Humdrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Half open, in the topmost chest, Of depth enough, and none to spare, Invited her to slumber there; Puss with delight beyond expression, Surveyed the scene and took possession. Recumbent at her ease, ere long, And lulled by her own humdrum song, She left the cares of life behind, And slept as she would sleep her last, When in came, housewifely inclined, The chambermaid, and shut it fast, By no malignity impelled, But all unconscious whom ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... had been! He had started out in the morning, vaguely hoping to divert his mind with some of those trite little happenings that for lack of a better term we call adventures in this humdrum world. And then, with the miraculous, unbelievable luck of youth, he had stumbled plump into the middle of the most wondrous adventure it was possible to conceive. And yet this wasn't adventure, after all—it was something bigger, finer, more precious. With a suddenness that was blinding he ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... to keep up our standard if this goes on year after year? It is outrageous! And the worst of it is that the "vocation" is catching! The clever ones catch it because they are the most sensitively organised, but not the good, simple, humdrum little women who would be far better at nursing lepers than at a case of appendicitis—and better in heaven than in a leper asylum, for ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... of music while he predicted that only when he were "laid within the church-yard cold and grey" would his lady begin to pity him, seemed to the Duke rather ridiculous; but not half so ridiculous as the Warden. This fictitious love-affair was less nugatory than the actual humdrum for which Dr. Dobson had sold his soul to the devil. Also, little as one might suspect it, the warbler was perhaps expressing a genuine sentiment. Zuleika herself, belike, was in ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... method Hannah, who could only have been developed by forces applied from without, was painstaking, humdrum, and limited; while Rebecca, who apparently needed nothing but space to develop in, and a knowledge of terms in which to express herself, grew and grew and grew, always from within outward. Her forces of one sort and another ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... not turned out as happily as, long ago, he had pictured it to himself. Away from home, and with comparatively few friends, he had felt himself losing somewhat of his freshness and boyish enthusiasm, and settling down rather to habits of a humdrum commonplace official. Books he had very few, and congenial society still less. Quartered as he had been during the first two years in dull country stations, he had grown weary of the routine of everyday life, and longed for the sight of fresh ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... Jean Dwight was the boy of the V, a strong, hearty, happy young woman of fourteen, who succeeded in getting a great deal of enjoyment out of this humdrum, work-a-day world. Her rosy cheeks glowed and her brown eyes shone with health; for Jean was as full of life as a young colt, and vented her superfluous energy in climbing trees, walking fences, and running races, until Aunt Jane and her followers raised their hands and ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... the county paper, but was not specially interested in the questions of the day; and Retty and her husband never went beyond stock, and the crops, and the baby. Ben kept his brother supplied with books that opened a wider outlook for him, and made him a little discontented with the humdrum round. ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... exclaimed, to the astonishment of all:—"Have courage, good Stephanus! Strike! strike! Kill the tyrant!" On that same day, the hated Domitian was assassinated at Rome by a man named Stephanus. The humdrum interpretation of this "miracle" is simply that Apollonius had a foreknowledge of the intended attempt ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... be?" soliloquised he, from his seat on the gate, as he plucked thin branches off from the bare winter hedge, and scattered them. "Old stepfather's wiry yet, he may last an age, and this is getting a horrid, humdrum life. I wonder what he'll leave me, when he does go off? Mother said one day she thought it wouldn't be more than five hundred pounds. She doesn't know; he does not tell her about his private affairs—never has told her. Five hundred pounds! If he left me a paltry ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... afraid not. We cannot all see it, although I must only speak for myself. Can't you appreciate that we are not all possessed of the artistic temperament and gifted with the power of seeing visions? I am a humdrum person who ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... did talk. She was an American girl, she told him, and had studied art a little, but would never be much of a painter. She had been teaching classes in a city high school in the Middle West, when suddenly life there seemed to have gone humdrum and stale. She had a little money saved, not much, but enough if she managed well, and she'd boldly resigned and determined, once at least before she was too old, to follow spring around the world. She had almost given up the idea of painting ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... efficient methods of liberation. In short, whatever we may think of the financial or social services such as were rendered to England in the affair of Marconi, or to France in the affair of Panama, it must be admitted that these exhibit a humbler and more humdrum type of civic duty, and do not remind us of the more reckless virtues of the Maccabees or the Zealots. A man may be a good citizen of anywhere, but he cannot be a national hero of nowhere; and for this particular type of patriotic passion ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... The small tasks have been more than your patience and strength could manage. No doubt great exigencies often call forth great powers that were dormant in the humdrum of ordinary life. But the man who knows himself best will be the most ready to shrink with distrust from the dread possibilities ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... I could derive no comfort from any of the usual consolations under such circumstances. I could not say, for instance, that I had at least an expressive, clever, or refined face, for there was nothing whatever expressive about it. Its features were of the most humdrum, dull, and unbecoming type, with small grey eyes which seemed to me, whenever I regarded them in the mirror, to be stupid rather than clever. Of manly bearing I possessed even less, since, although I was not exactly small of stature, and had, moreover, ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... about it. Of course, he does not like leaving you, but he says that he should like it a thousand times better than, perhaps, having to go into some humdrum office ...
— On the Irrawaddy - A Story of the First Burmese War • G. A. Henty
... man,—but the sense of its duty? And I swear that the eyes of the haughtiest beauty Have never inspired in my soul that intense, Reverential, and loving, and absolute sense Of heart-felt admiration I feel for this man, As I see him beside me;—there, wearing the wan London daylight away, on his humdrum committee; So unconscious of all that awakens my pity, And wonder—and worship, I might say? "To me There seems something nobler than genius to be In that dull patient labor no genius relieves, That absence of all joy which yet never grieves; The humility of it! the ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... at once clear out of one's life. There is no drudgery nor humdrum nor hardship, because everything is for Jesus, and seen through His eyes. Whatever comes in the pathway of his work is gladdest joy, whether an obscure narrow round of home work or shop or store, or leaving home for a strange land far across the sea with a peculiarly ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... and unaccustomed student's life, the two golden visits which she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on just in the same old ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... young lady, I had a mother; I loved her in my humdrum way very dearly. She promised me faithfully not to die till I should be a colonel; and she went and died before I was a commandant, even; just ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... boys who go into the vegetable and flower-raising business instead of humdrum commercial pursuits. The characters and situations are ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... which are sure to be read as long as posterity takes any interest in knowing about the transition of the American West from wilderness to civilization. He shared in all the work of the ranch. He took with a "frolic welcome" the humdrum of its routine as well as its excitements and dangers. He says that he does not believe that there was ever any more attractive life for a vigorous young fellow than this, and assuredly no one else ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... "you are a queen, if ever there was one. And that you should think of such a simple thing when we had all given up! They would not have touched Umballa. Kit, Kit, whatever will you do when you return to the humdrum life ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... payment of his father's, grandfather's, and great-grandfather's debts or mortgages. He spent about a fourth of it annually, and consequently the property was still greatly encumbered and he knew that to reside on it and clear it he would be obliged to live in a very humdrum style, or else add to the burden of debt already incurred. He preferred, remaining in the army, and being a general favourite in society, and having no near relations in Wales, it never occurred to him to spend his furloughs in his native county. He had always some distant ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... the other house," cried Eugenia, "they are terrible people! I don't know what they may do over there. I am a quiet little humdrum woman; I have rigid rules and I keep them. One of them is not to have visitors in the small hours—especially clever men like ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... and heard with the least emotion, perhaps, ever experienced by a soldier. Absorbed in reflections on what I heard, and in fancies of a world of which I knew so little, it is not to be doubted that I constructed ideals far beyond the humdrum reality of home life, impracticable ideals that tended only to separate me more from other men. Their world was not my world; this I knew full well, and I sometimes thought they knew it; for while no rude treatment ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... thought, wouldn't you," T.O. murmured after a while, "that places like this would be humdrum-y and commonplace? But I guess there are 'stories' everywhere. I'm beginning to ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... street, when the system really needed toning up, for the matter of a couple of paltry pounds was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead of being always and ever cooped up since my old stick-in-the-mud took me for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum months of it and merited a radical change of venue after the grind of city life in the summertime for choice when dame Nature is at her spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life. There were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island, delightful ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... laments how isolated he is, mainly by reason of the poverty of his nature, his want of social talent, of animal heat, and of sympathy with the commonplace and the humdrum. "I have no animal spirits, therefore when surprised by company and kept in a chair for many hours, my heart sinks, my brow is clouded, and I think I will run for Acton woods and live with the squirrels henceforth." ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... understand me," she said. "I daresay I might be more like other people now, if—if I had been brought up differently. Not," she added, passionately, "that I want to be like others. Do you never feel, when you have been living a humdrum life for months, that you must break out of it, or ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... at the expense of the King. He and his wife removed to Vienna, where they remained till 1775, when they retired to Venice, Faustina's birthplace. Two years before this Dr. Burney visited them at their handsome house in the Landstrasse in Berlin, and found them a humdrum couple—Hasse groaning with the gout, and the once lovely Faustina transformed into a jolly old woman of seventy-two, with two charming daughters. As he approached the house with the Abate Taruffi, Faustina, seeing ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... someway he did not seem to get on. Men who have managed the finances of a nation often have not been able successfully to control their own; and more than once we have had the spectacle of one who could do the thinking for a world failing in the humdrum duties of a citizen and neighbor. Coleridge tried various things, among others a secretaryship that took him to Malta, but the lack of system in his habits and his absent-mindedness made him the prey ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... very next day the machinery was set in motion for the advance against the French. Colonel Joshua Fry was selected to head the expedition, and Colonel Washington made second in command. Colonel Fry at one time taught mathematics at William and Mary, but found the routine of the class-room too humdrum, and so sought a more exciting life. He had found it along the borders of the frontier, and in 1750 was made colonel of militia and member of the governor's council. Two years later, he was sent to Logstown to treat with ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... that the old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent as an empty church; but this night "Number Five" leaped ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... breast. The least of them interested him, and, too, there were those with whom he always made friends easily, and there were his hereditary enemies whose presence gave a spice to life that might otherwise have become humdrum and monotonous. ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of emperors has to a great extent become the pastime of King Moneybags. And there is no place for ancient crusaders like Old Man Curry, so he has taken the remnants of his stable and gone back to the farm or merged into the humdrum and neutral tinted landscape which always ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... well, that Mae Madden, naughty, idle, and silly, may be, after all, not so stupid; but get me good, industrious and wise, and it will take all of my time when I'm not asleep to keep so. No, there'll be nothing to say about me any more. I'll be as humdrum as—" ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... issued to wagon lines that all surplus kit and stores were to be left behind, as a strenuous time was in store for us, and all ranks responded with a will to the hard work these preparations necessitated. Drivers were elated at the prospect of a change from their humdrum existence, and their enthusiasm knew no bounds. New reinforcing batteries appeared like mushrooms during the night, and lay safely ensconced in their appointed places in readiness for the coming fray, while the neighbourhood behind the lines bristled ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose
... George and Mary Rabbit, and always used to sleep side by side. But after a few weeks they must have felt tired of their humdrum life; for one bright morning they ran away. I hope they are living happily together in the fragrant woods from which ...
— The Nursery, July 1877, XXII. No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... deeds and high positions, away from the pettiness and humdrum of ordinary life. Yet success is not occupying a lofty place or doing conspicuous work; it is being the best that is in you. Rattling around in too big a job is much worse than filling a small one to overflowing. Dream, aspire ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... said, "that I have already wearied your friend. My life must seem so humdrum to him, and to you, who have travelled so far and seen so much. For I, monsieur, as I have told your friend, have lived all my days in one quiet country place, and this journey is a great ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... is! After looking at her I've given up all hope. I suppose all I'm fit for is Mrs Eweword—Mrs 'Dora' Eweword; do my housework in the morning and take one of these sulkies full of youngsters for a drive in the afternoon like all the other humdrum, tame-hen, respectable married women! It's a sweet prospect, isn't it?" she said vexedly, throwing herself ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... if we weren't applying a salve to somebody's sore; and I suppose that's what almost all work amounts to—salving somebody's sore, easing the wheels of life somewhere," was that gentleman's reply. "And the humdrum drudging of a schoolboy, in learning and unlearning, is but the easing the wheels of ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... is also great in argument. He infinitely enjoys a long humdrum, drowsy interchange of words of dispute about nothing. He considers that it strengthens the mind, consequently, he 'don't see that,' very often. Or, he would be glad to know what you mean by that. Or, he doubts that. Or, he has always understood exactly the reverse of that. Or, he can't admit that. ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... government, whenever they chose to drive, they were soon restored to her again; for Di fell into literature, and Laura into love. Thus engrossed, these two forgot many duties which even blue-stockings and innamoratas are expected to perform, and slowly all the homely humdrum cares that housewives know became Nan's daily life, and she accepted it without a thought of discontent. Noiseless and cheerful as the sunshine, she went to and fro, doing the tasks that mothers do, but without a mother's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... think how all the girls would envy me—and they just living along their humdrum, everyday existence with fathers and mothers already married and living together, and nothing exciting to look forward to. For really, you know, when you come right down to it, there aren't many girls that have got the chance ...
— Mary Marie • Eleanor H. Porter
... the spirit of work was lacking. Theodora was domestic, and she found it good to take up her household cares again, so for a month after her return she turned a deaf ear to her publisher while she and her husband revelled in their coming back to humdrum ways much as a pair of children play at housekeeping. Then Theodora's conscience asserted itself, with the discouraging result that she became undeniably cross and, over his paper of an evening, Billy watched her in respectful ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... the Muley Cow and Spot the dog were in the back pasture one day, where the Muley Cow had strayed. And as Johnnie paused to pick a few blackberries he thought what a humdrum place Pleasant Valley was, anyway, and how he would like to go off where there were real ...
— The Tale of the The Muley Cow - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... they had ceased to regard the West with dread. Curiosity, blended with the hope of bettering their condition, turned their faces to that "fresh, unbounded, magnificent wilderness." Accustomed to camp life and scenes of exciting interest, the humdrum days at the old homestead became distasteful. The West was the hunter's paradise. The toil held beneath it the potency of harvests of extraordinary richness, and the soldier who had faced the disciplined ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... upon her, the contrast of her friend's safe and sheltered life. No care for her; no anxiety about ways and means; no need to work for money; and no need to fear for anybody dear to her. Christina's father was her guardian, not she his; he might be a very humdrum man, and no doubt was, but his daughter had no cause to be ashamed for him; had not the burden of his life and character on her own shoulders to take care of. A swift, keen feeling of this contrast would come over Dolly; but she put it ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... have attempted murder. That she was young and pretty made matters worse. Alice Weaver always had worshipped her brother, by the law of opposites perhaps. She was as drab and respectable as Boston. All her tastes ran to humdrum monotony. But turbulent, lawless Buck, the brother whom she had brought up after the death of their mother, held her heart in the hollow of his hard, ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... them. His depression was due to that feeling which takes possession of one before any change of place, a feeling experienced by all melancholy, dreaming people and unknown to those of energetic, sanguine temperaments, who always rejoice at any break in the humdrum of their daily existence, and welcome a change of abode with pleasure. Nejdanov was so lost in his meditations that his thoughts began quite unconsciously to take the form of words. His wandering sensations began to ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... sudden opportunity of saving Evie from moral disaster, he rises to the height of his chance and fulfils his ideals. But he is misunderstood by his wife, who sues him for a divorce but fails to bring conclusive evidence. The book ends happily, and throughout its course is a fine picture of a rather humdrum soul seeking—and reaching—the heights ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... but then Lady Glencora is so much more advanced than we are! After all, we are but humdrum people, as the world ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... end? The first steps in education accomplished, the scholars would be removed to better premises, and to a more advanced course of instruction. But the old school would receive new pupils and go on in the same humdrum way. There would be the same harsh teachers, the same ignorance and obstinacy, the same punishment and suffering. The worst of it is that Mercury does not seem exempt from the general curse of nothingness which seems ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... husband to join her in her Sabbath devotions, assured that he would claim an invalid's privilege to stay at home. He had very rarely attended the parish church with his wife, affecting to despise such humdrum and conventional worship. He had just that thin smattering of modern science which enables shallow youth to make a merit of disbelief in all things beyond the limit of mathematical demonstration. He had skimmed Darwin, and spoke lightly of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... frightened almost out of its wits. Well, but just think of the state of satisfaction and rejoicing that she must be in now at having escaped. Had it not been for that trial she would now have been in her ordinary humdrum condition. I quite agree with Ralph that trials are really a blessing ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... delights of travel, he could not endure the thought of a quiet humdrum life in the little cave at Kyllene, and he besought the King to send him on ...
— Harper's Young People, May 25, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... not smile; I love this kind of thing, These cooped traditions with a broken wing, This freehold nook in Fancy's pipe-blown ball, This less than nothing that is more than all! Have I not seen sweet natures kept alive Amid the humdrum of your business hive, Undowered spinsters shielded from all harms, By airy incomes from a coat ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... all our societies, from the broad-brimmed Society of Friends downwards, have something in them of a homespun, humdrum, plain, flat—not unprofitable, perhaps, but unattractive character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accompanied the career of Clubs. Societies there are, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... acquirement, take courage in the fact that six of our number are reaping the benefits even thus early. Wait patiently; do not let the work end with to-night, and become discouraged because of the same old humdrum duties. Remember that in filling the old post honorably, you are doing the work assigned by the Master who in His own season will send what is for your best good. Add to your store of knowledge from day to day, and be able to say ...
— Silver Links • Various
... reality so framed, the bare and sober truth. Hence the frequency, in our new poetry, of pieces founded deliberately upon, as Mr. McDowall points out, paradox: the breaking in of some utter surprise upon a humdrum society, as in Mr. de la Mare's Three Jolly Farmers, or Mr. Abercrombie's End of the World, or Mr. Munro's ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... large, tranquil way he has, which is like an Indian plain full of ripe corn. "I find it curious," he said, "to compare the process which goes on here in the daily humdrum of trade about this place with that which one would see if one were far up yonder at the northward, in the appalling solitudes of the mountains, where trade has never been and will never be. Have you visited ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... country town. The firm that he worked for saw fit to send him one day on a prosaic business errand to the far city of Vienna, and, having sent him there, continued to keep him there, still engaged in humdrum affairs of commerce, but with the possibilities of romance and adventure, or even misadventure, jostling at his elbow. After two and a half years of exile, however, John James Abbleway had embarked on only one hazardous undertaking, and that was ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... bachelor who, whilst not over ambitious, was nevertheless a brilliant physician. He had worked for the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and had spent several years in India studying snake poisons. His purchase of this humdrum suburban practice had been dictated by a desire to make a home for a girl who at the eleventh hour had declined to share it. Two years had elapsed since then, but the shadow still lay upon Stuart's life, its influence being revealed ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... the maintenance of certain humdrum but necessary human virtues, we are dependent upon these middling rich. It has been frequently remarked that a lord and a working man are likely to agree, as against a bourgeois, in generosity, spontaneous fellowship, and all that goes to make sporting spirit. The right measure of these qualities ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... it dull," she said. Nevertheless, the contrast smote her more and more, between what Mr. Knowlton was accustomed to in his world, and the very plain, humdrum, uneventful, unadorned life she led in hers. And this elegant creature, whose very dress was a sort of revelation to Diana in its perfection of beauty, she seemed to the poor country girl to put at an immense ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... care," said the boy to himself. "Anything for a change. I do get so tired of this humdrum steaming here and steaming there, and going into port to fill up the coal-bunkers. Being at sea isn't half so jolly as I used to think it was, and it is so cold. Wish we could get orders to sail to one of those beautiful countries in the East Indies, or to South America—anywhere ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... Gasparini, the pedlar, selling few volumes, but reaping a rich harvest of stolen pleasure, and revelling in an adventure which added such a new zest to a life sated with more humdrum love-making. But even the Duchess's charms began to pall; the ladies he had left so disconsolate in Paris were inundating him with letters, begging him to return to them—letters, all forwarded to him from his chateau at Richelieu, where he was supposed ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... expect?' he replied. 'My ambition could not endure such a humdrum existence as yours; with these gay-coloured wings of mine I shall soar to higher realms, and be courted ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... a fleeting look at things, but we'll get enough, I hope, to freshen your minds, change the humdrum, and elicit ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... to spring from a strong inner life. Religious life in the Holy Orthodox Church, with its many ordinances and its extraordinary proximity to everyday life, is not allowed to be monotonous and humdrum. Each day at New Athos is beautiful in itself, and if a monk's life were made into a book of such days one would not turn over two pages ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... safety and dignity which one always finds in living within one's income. Frugality, exactitude in business, faithfulness to all engagements, great or small, punctuality, that economy of time, are usually set down among the minor moralities of life, more humdrum than heroic; but under how many circumstances and conditions do they reveal themselves as cardinal virtues, as things on which depend the comfort and dignity of life! It seems that these things were so impressed on the mind and heart of the ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... there are times when he is positively unfit for human society. Last week, for instance, when for three days on end we did not exchange a single word, not even at dinner, where the amenities should come on at least with the walnuts. I grant you that humdrum wears upon the spirit, that the flatness of the daily road may be a harder thing to get over than even Mr. Bunyan's hill Difficulty, but for a man to surrender himself mind and body to solitaire argues weakness. Moreover, it was a ridiculous combination ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... is intermittent. He can be dull and null enough with us sometimes—a mere asker of questions, or drawer of comparisons between this and that brand of cigarettes, or full expatiator on the merits of some new patent razor. A whole hour and more may be wasted in such humdrum and darkness. And then—something will have happened. There has come a spark in the murk; a flame now, presage of a radiance: Comus has begun. His face is a great part of his equipment. A cast of ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... hills and plains graze thousands of head of cattle; whose pastures breed their own cowhorses; whose cowmen, wearing still with a twist of pride the all-but-vanished regalia of their all-but-vanished calling, refuse to drop back to the humdrum status of "farm hands on a cow ranch"; even here has entered a single element powerful enough to change the old to something new. The new may be better—it is certainly more convenient—and perhaps when all is said and done we would ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... and to what more worthy purpose could a man devote himself? When I landed here yesterday—when I walked again through these old streets—I was a being without purpose; I was like a battery that had dried up. All these petty affairs of life seemed so useless, so humdrum, so commonplace, I knew I could never settle down to them again. Then last night from some unknown source came a new idea—an inspiration—and presto! the battery is re-charged, life again has its purposes, and I am eager to be ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... this was accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... they were only lawyers, tradesmen, mechanics, and clerks, living in Jersey City, and going over to New York on their daily, humdrum business. It was not the business that attracted them, but the demon of American restlessness that pushed them on. They went back at night in just the same hurry, and made equally hazardous jumps on the Jersey side. They were mere shuttlecocks ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... now was the very humdrum one of stealing treasure that he was supposed to guard. That he was innocent there is no doubt: whatever the man was, he was no thief. The charge against him was a trumped-up one to get him out of the way. He was painfully in evidence—he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... to the oft-repeated charge of morbidity and pessimism. Gissing understood the theory of compensation, but was unable to exhibit it in action. He elevates the cult of refinement to such a pitch that the consolations of temperament, of habit, and of humdrum ideals which are common to the coarsest of mankind, appear to elude his observation. He does not represent men as worse than they are; but he represents them less brave. No social stratum is probably quite so dull as he colours it. There is usually a streak of ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... neither of which belong to this family. Here every law of health is violated, foresight in providing for the physical comforts of the home is wanting; little attention is given to the education of the children; no sacrifices to-day enrich to-morrow; life is a humdrum, a routine, a dread, with no exuberance, joy, or hope. In time, such a life leads to failure and gloom, to secret, then to open vice, and to a final shipwreck of the home and of the individual. In a similar yet in ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... contrast to the usual unhappy relations of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... unimportant and unsubstantial to her had appeared the events of daily life as compared with the incidents of the world the old books in the musty library opened to her. The life of these magic tomes was the real, and that humdrum state through which her visible pathway lay was the dream. To the imaginative girl, half child, half poet, her marriage had prospectively seemed merely an accident of the trivial outside existence which surrounded without penetrating her true being; and the sharpness of the rude ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... have made up my mind what I will do, and you shall not dissuade me. I will go to New Spain with you. That will be glorious—far better than the humdrum life of sitting at home—and ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... your cobwebs!" she exclaimed, gaily. "A whole skyful, and you can sweep away to your heart's content. You need have no more humdrum days unless you choose." ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the children are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows; Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink; When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come back again. ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... said Holmes, relapsing into his armchair and putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... of finding that there is a moral for everything; that the whole great frame of the Universe has a key, like a box; has been contrived and set going by a well-meaning but humdrum Eighteenth-century Creator. It would be a kind of Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees, ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... kettle boils, watch the dark shadows of the hills take form, perspective, and finally colour, knowing that there is another whole day begun, bright with chance and interest, and free from all cares. All cares—for who can be worried about the little matters of humdrum life when he may be dead before the night? Such a one was with us yesterday—see, there is a spare mug for coffee in the mess—but now gone for ever. And so it may be with us to-morrow. What does it matter that this or that is misunderstood or ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... manners. Charlotte Bronte electrified the world by showing that an infinitely older and more elemental truth could be conveyed by a novel in which no person, good or bad, had any manners at all. Her work represents the first great assertion that the humdrum life of modern civilisation is a disguise as tawdry and deceptive as the costume of a 'bal masque.' She showed that abysses may exist inside a governess and eternities inside a manufacturer; her heroine is the commonplace ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... these words and dwelt on them. 'The real thing!' Of course, that was what it was to be, her marriage,—the woman's symbol of the Perfect, not merely Success (though with John they could not fail of worldly success), nor humdrum content—but, as Alice said, the real thing,—a state of passionate and complete union. Something in those misty brown eyes, something in the warm, deep voice of the older woman, in the prayer-like form of the wish, sank deep into ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... horse's leg, is a question not more appropriate to every teamster than to every Christian worker. Having once got out of the old rut, the next thing is to keep out. There is nothing more killing than ecclesiastical humdrum. Some persons do not like the Episcopal Church because they have the same prayers every Sabbath, but have we not for the last ten years been hearing the same prayers over and over again, the product of a self-manufactured liturgy that has not the thousandth part ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... night, but I told her you wished it and she came like a lamb. I often wonder if I did a wise thing in introducing them to you. Your sort of culture-an'-refinement' may rather upset them when the play is over and we all settle back to the humdrum." ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... at Mr Wodehouse's that night thought it a very agreeable little party, and more than once repeated the remark, so familiar to most persons in society in Carlingford—that Wodehouse's parties were the pleasantest going, though he himself was humdrum enough. Two or three of the people present had heard the gossip about Mr Wentworth, and discussed it, as was natural, taking different views of the subject; and poor Miss Wodehouse took up his defence so warmly, and with such tearful vehemence, that there were smiles to be seen on several faces. ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... natural gift for boxing, and one of the best whips I ever knew—we raced our coaches to Brighton and back for a thousand a side and he beat me by six yards—a splendid all round sportsman—ruined by matrimony! He's buried somewhere in the country and passing his days in the humdrum pursuit of being husband and father. Oh, bruise and blister me! it's all very pitiful, and yet"—here the Viscount sighed again—"I do not quarrel with the state, for marriage has often proved a—er—very present help in ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... death with alarm. What is he to do in this land of ghosts? there is no place for him. Imagine the commonplace liver of a humdrum existence being received into ghostland. He enters nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at school. The old ghosts ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... you can't be serious in what you say. Bonaparte's marshals are great men, who act under the guidance of an omnipotent master-spirit. Your Wellington is the most humdrum of commonplace martinets, whose slow, mechanical movements are further cramped ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... sure I can leave my men. I think I told you in my letter last night that we received a frantic message from our Brigadier-General to expect an attack at 4 p.m. As a matter of fact, there was less fighting than usual, and I lost fewer men. My night's experiences were almost humdrum! Leaving my ruin at 9.15 p.m., accompanied by my bugler and clad in my old waterproof, I sallied out and ran the gauntlet of some snipers from the German lines, then dived into my ditch, floundered up it in mud for about a quarter of a mile, perhaps more, ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... Goethe's criticism:[7] Amid such influences and surroundings, occupied with fads and studies of this sort, lacking all incentive from without to any important activity and confronted by the sole prospect of having to drag out a humdrum existence, men began to reflect with a sort of sullen exultation upon the possibility of departing this life at will, and to find in this thought a scant amelioration of the ills and tedium of the times. This disposition was so general that "Werther" itself exerted a powerful influence, ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... about it something extremely captivating. Not only a long-lost heir—an heir of the melodrama, strutting into your hitherto unsuspected kingdom at just the right moment, loaded up with the consciousness of unguessed merit and of rights so long feloniously withheld—but even to be a common humdrum domestic heir is a profession to which few ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... and tinged with a certain pensiveness, the effect of too much early sorrow and seclusion upon a very sensitive temperament, Edith better loved the solitude of the grand old forest of St. Mary's or the loneliness of her own shaded rooms at Luckenough than any society the humdrum neighborhood could offer her. And when at the call of social duty she did go into company, she exercised a refining and subduing influence, ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... was more like play than work. Oh, then it was April and I felt the rising tide of spring in my blood, and a bit of free activity like this under the blue sky suited my humour. A boy likes almost any work that affords him an escape from routine and humdrum and has an element of play in it. Turning the grindstone or the fanning mill or carrying together sheaves or picking up potatoes or carrying in wood were duties that were a drag ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... absent in manner, and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went out ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... to operate the busy machinery. It was a noisy, monotonous occupation; a stretch of dull, wearisome hours, and frequently the boy and girl were so tired at night they had scarcely energy to move. And yet they toiled at the humdrum task gratefully, rejoicing in their wages which not only kept body and soul together but provided for the feeble mother ...
— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett
... delight, to throw over life a pleasing glamor; it generally deals with love or heroic adventure; and it generally locates its scenes and characters in distant times and places, where it can work unhampered by our consciousness of the humdrum actualities of our daily experience. It may always be asked whether a writer of Romance makes his world seem convincingly real as we read or whether he frankly abandons all plausibility. The presence or absence of a ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... sir, I made no promise," said Mrs. Polly, walking up and down the perch very fast, turning at each end with a graceful and coquettish air. "After such a wonderful story as we have heard, it would quite spoil it to listen to such an old, humdrum affair as mine." ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... had trembled. He had chosen the Right—but the Right was ineffective, impotent, almost ludicrous. It left him shorn, powerless, and in moral revolt. The world had suddenly left him, as the vision of Carrie Wynn had left him, alone, a mere clerk, an insignificant cog in the great grinding wheel of humdrum drudgery. His chance to do and thereby to ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... the youth, with an apologetic air, as if he hardly cared to own such a humdrum relationship. 'Seraphine, the dressmaker, was complaining—wanted to see the colour of Lady Lesbia Haselden's money—vulgar curiosity—asked my old mother if she thought the account was safe, and so on. That's how I came ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... another cousin whose history is quite as good as 'Robinson Crusoe,' and I have engaged him to write it, but he never will. If I lived near him I could gradually get the material out of him; but at a distance I cannot get him even to write rough notes. On the other hand, we literary people are quite humdrum people in our ways of life, and our autobiographies would generally ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the world expects it you know; I do so hate to fulfil people's expectations: it is so commonplace and humdrum! ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... consequence enormously distended. Eventually the strange spectacle is seen of miniature frogs jumping out of their father's mouth. Needless to say we are not citing these methods of parental care as examples of intelligence; but perhaps they correct the impression of amphibians as a rather humdrum race. Whatever be the mental aspect of the facts, there has certainly been some kind of experimenting, and the increase of parental care, so marked in many amphibians, with associated reduction of the number of offspring is a finger-post ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... to the loaves and fishes in the way of scholarships and fellowships, he is compelled, by the laws of his caste, to renounce some of the most sensible and healthful amusements which a university life offers. He must lead a very humdrum sort of life indeed. It is not enough that he should be free from the stains of vice and immorality; that his principles and habits should be those of a gentleman; that he should avoid excesses, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... father, a born soldier, to seek his line in diplomacy; wherein he had no sooner built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose obvious moral there can be no question whatever, since ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... surprised at you! What do you mean by such conduct? What has become of that big room in your heart, which you keep brimful of love for babies and little bits of children? Do you want them to sit humdrum on rainy days, when they are tired of playing with dolls, and tops, and kittens, and have no story book for their kind mammas to read to them? This will never do, Aunt Fanny. Please to ...
— Little Mittens for The Little Darlings - Being the Second Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what he said to Miss Rachel about her jewel, I doubt if he spoke six words or drank so much as a ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... unlimited field for self-indulgence. But, Sir, as every one will acknowledge who was brought into daily contact with him in the sphere of affairs, his duty to the State always came first. In this great business community there was no better man of business, no man by whom the humdrum obligations—punctuality, method, preciseness, and economy of time and speech—were more keenly recognized or more severely practised. I speak with the privilege of close experience when I say that wherever he was, whatever may have been his apparent ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... a low, newspaper, humdrum, lawsuit Country, where a young couple of the same ages Can't form a friendship, but the world o'erawes it. A verdict—grievous foe to those who cause it!- Forms a sad climax to romantic homages; Besides those soothing speeches of the pleaders, And ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... herself before going to sleep, "and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him—like broncho-busting. But is it interesting enough for—for marriage? Wouldn't I get horribly tired? Wouldn't Grant and humdrum be better? less wearying? "And when she awakened she found her problem all but solved." I'll send him packing and take Grant," she found herself saying, "unless some excellent reason for doing otherwise appears. Grandmother was right. Engaging ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... late darling, your late treasure, who is now merely your humdrum wife, leans much too heavily upon your arm while walking on the boulevard, or else says it is much more elegant not to take your ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... England to continue his comparatively humdrum order of advancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangely different and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The Palestine Exploration Fund sent him with another officer to conduct topographical and antiquarian investigations in a country where practical exertions ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton
... antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why one of these flies, as it were, of life should get preserved in amber more than another. Talk, indeed, about luck and cunning; what a grain of sand as against a hundredweight is cunning's share here as against luck's. What moment could be more humdrum and unworthy of special record than the one chosen by the artist for the chapel we are considering? Why should this one get arrested in its flight and made immortal when so many worthier ones have perished? Yet ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... for this event I had been happy and content, but a few days later, after the clubs had fallen back to their normal humdrum level I acknowledged with a sense of hopeless weariness that our huge city had a long way to go before it could equal the small Boston of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Howells. My desire to rejoin my fellows in New York was intensified. "As there is only one London ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... quite continuous advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... its mother has secreted in the woods or in a remote field, charge upon him furiously with a wild bleat, when first discovered. After this first ebullition of fear, it usually settles down into the tame humdrum of its ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... out of the national treasury. But Jackson drew from the experience only gall and wormwood. About the time when the men reached Natchez, Congress definitely authorized the President to take possession of Mobile and that part of Florida west of the Perdido River; and, back once more in the humdrum life of Nashville, the disappointed officer could only sit idly by while his pet project was successfully carried out by General Wilkinson, the man whom, perhaps above all others, he loathed. But other work was preparing; ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Fairfeather. "Here we are spending our lives in this humdrum place, and Spare making his fortune at the Court with two or three paltry green leaves! What would they say to our golden ones? Let us pack up and make our way to the King's palace. I am sure he will make you a lord and me a lady of honour, not to speak of all the fine clothes and ...
— Granny's Wonderful Chair • Frances Browne
... unwholesome competition. The temptation to "rustle" stock, to hold up outfits carrying pay to the soldiers, to live well merely as a gunman for one of the big interests on the river, made the honest business of every-day life a humdrum affair. ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... Prescott, their aunt, Miss Sallie Prescott, with whom they made their home, and their chums, Jess and Jimsy Bancroft, had returned from the Nevada alkali wastes, the red building which engaged their attention that morning had caused a good deal of speculation in the humdrum Long Island village of Sandy Beach. In the first place, coincident with the completion of the building, a new element had been introduced into the little community by the arrival of several keen-eyed, close-mouthed men, who boarded at ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... various matters in Bath he should go down to stay with his sister for a time, joining me in Montague Street later on. While he was away in Birmingham, however, an extraordinary change came into my humdrum life, and when he rejoined me a few weeks later, I—selfish brute—was so overwhelmed with the trouble that had befallen me that I thought very little indeed of his affairs. He took this quite as a matter of course, and what I should have done ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... led a humdrum life for the past month. Marian and Elinor have begun to potter about in my laboratory. They come there every day for an hour to work and study, as they ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... college. In his own opinion, he ought to see something of the world, and have his youthful fling. Later on, when he got ready to settle down, if Blanche were still in the humor, they might marry, and sink to the humdrum level of other old married people. The fact that Blanche Leary was visiting his mother during his unexpectedly long absence had not operated at all to hasten his return to North Carolina. He had been having a very good time at Clarence, and, at the distance of several hundred miles, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Gilmour had taken more care of himself and lived longer?" I would answer: "I don't know. His life was beautiful, and I would not alter it if I could. A few years of such service as he gave Christ are worth a hundred years of humdrum toil. We need the inspiration of such a life as his. Heaven, too, is the richer for such a man and such a life. The pearly gates opened wide, I have no doubt, to receive him. Angels and men gave him glad welcome, and what a smile would light ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... turned on the hail light she saw an envelope on the floor. Evidently it had been shoved under the door. It was unstamped. She opened it, and stepped out of the humdrum into ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... themselves, of such as aim at a high standard of excellence, of such as have in them the makings of striking and eloquent preachers. Dull and stupid fellows never deviate into the extravagance and absurdity which I specially understand by Veal. They plod along in a humdrum manner; there is no poetry in their soul,—none of those ambitious stirrings which lead the man who has in him the true spark of genius to try for grand things and incur severe and ignominious tumbles. A heavy dray-horse, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... milk-pail under the pump. Pleasure softens pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day, that shall gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a dozen comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each one as like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of compensation obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had been left with me, I should have made the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... Orion and Tristram of Lyonesse. Yet not so long as "African Game Trails" and the "Hunting Trips of a Ranchman" endure, to lift the imagination to those noble sports denied to the run of mortals by poverty, feebleness, timidity, the engrossments of the humdrum, everyday life, or lack of enterprise and opportunity. Old scraps of hunting song thrill us with the great adventure: "In the wild chamois' track at break of day"; "We'll chase the antelope over the plain"; "Afar ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... thousands who enter it as brilliant young ladies, and come from it at the end of a few years morbid, harassed, depressed; sunk in all the graces and powers that make a woman's life beautiful and distinct from a man's. The circle in many cases is so narrow that there is no room for growth. The humdrum toils, the petty cares and rude contact with hired help, sink many a charming woman into a domestic ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... Alexander should come over from Hanover and join him at Bath, which was done. Next they wanted to rescue their sister Caroline from her humdrum existence, but this was a more difficult matter. Caroline's journal gives an account of her life at this time that is instructive. Here are a few extracts ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... he records above, he made friends with that chivalric champion of a resurrected South, Henry Grady; here also he obtained fugitive glimpses of a struggling and briefless lawyer, who, like Page, was interested more in books and writing than in the humdrum of professional life, and who was then engaged in putting together a brochure on Congressional Government which immediately gave him a national standing. The name of this ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the ultimate magic of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a number of ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers as a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to light; stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong. This explains the love which Heine, that Paladin of the modern spirit, has for France; it explains the preference ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... literal sense of the words, are entering on a path altogether new and untrodden. But they will be in the minority, and for the most of us the days that were full of new possibilities are at an end, and we have to expect little more than the monotonous repetition of the habitual, humdrum duties of mature life. We have climbed the winding paths up the hill, and most of us are upon the long plateau that stretches unvaried, until it begins to dip at the further edge. And some of us are going down that other side ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of them and so conclude myself escaped which is a small good Fortune in the midste of my Discouragements." * * A burst of gusty laughter still echoes along the crowded deck of the letter-of-marque schooner Success, whose master, Captain Philip Thrash, inserted this diverting comment in his humdrum record of the day's work: "At one half past 8 discovered a sail ahead. Tacked ship. At 9 tacked ship again and past just to Leeward of the Sail which appeared to be a damn'd Comical Boat, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... cruised the shores of the far-famed and much-written-about Barbary Coast; and it seemed to me that in its dun-colored tiresomeness and in its miserable transparent counterfeit of joy it was up to the general metropolitan average—that it was just as tiresome and humdrum as the avowedly wicked section of ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... stopped for a second in front of an archaic Apollo of no great merit—because it reminded her of the unknown; and she wished with all her might something new and swift and rushing might come into her humdrum life. ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... lady politicians, made up as it is of these details and personalities. And the more interested I am in the thing itself, the more angry I am with the nonsense they talk about it, and had rather listen to the most humdrum domestic twaddle. Mind, I mean the regular hardened lady politicians who talk of nothing else, of whom I could name several, but ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... learned how people received, how they set their tables and served them, how they built their houses and furnished them. She learned not only the possibilities but the actualities of splendor and luxury in the town where she had led a retired and humdrum existence for nearly a lifetime. She now thrust her head forth from her dim old cavern, and fed her eyes on the flowers and fields and skies and goodly streams of ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... could run off with a circus! Wouldn't it be great? No more splitting kindling and carrying in coal; no more: "Hurry up, now, or you'll be late for school;" no more poking along in a humdrum existence, never going any place or seeing anything, but the glad, free, untrammeled life, the life of a circus-boy, standing up on top of somebody's head (you could pretend he was your daddy. Who'd ever know the difference?) ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so bitter. And yet—like ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... What a widespread, horrible butchery was being nursed and nourished here in this obscure family of peace? Surely this good folk did not appreciate the meaning of it all. Was it not merely something awfully exciting to talk about, argue about, puzzle over, in the prosaic humdrum at ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... where "man's greatest enemy is man." There is ample room for double the population, and yet a million acres of virgin soil only awaiting the co-operation of husbandman and capitalist to turn it to lucrative account. A humdrum life is incompatible here with the constant emotion kept up by typhoons, shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... at all; only humdrum work. You must not anticipate trouble. Soldiers, you know, jest and laugh even when going into battle, and they are all the better soldiers for the fact. No; I have given you a wrong impression. Nothing has been humdrum to-day. An acquaintance ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... pleasant voice. "We have heard so much of you from Cedric that you seem quite an old friend. I am afraid you will find us very quiet, homely people; but I daresay Cedric will have prepared you for that. He grumbles dreadfully, poor boy, at our old-fashioned, humdrum ways." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the time Paris lives an every-day, humdrum life, makes the best of everything, and ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... humdrum winter, for, as Harry said, "it was hard times for every one." Mr. Dean grew gray with the weight of business cares about which he never spoke; Mrs. Dean, laboring under the delusion that an invalid was a necessary appendage to the family, installed ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... I am asking you to say!" he answered. "My first and main object was to amuse you. Your life seemed so humdrum and lacking in the unexpected. Has it been ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... shouted at her. But there were few interests in Mrs. Quinlan's humdrum existence, and seldom did she have an exciting incident to relate and an eager audience to hang upon her words. She sat down ponderously and prepared to make the most of the ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... for me," he would exclaim every half-hour. He went to see people who were doing things. He went to see people who were doing nothing. In every town he would discover somebody of unusual attainment. He made every town an unusual town. He turned the humdrum travel map into a wonderland. He scolded lazy towns and praised enterprising ones. He stopped young fellows on the streets. "What are you going to do in life?" Perhaps the young man would say, "I have no chance." "You come to Chicago and ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... assumed most of those petty camp tasks which provoke tired trailers, those humdrum duties which are so trying to exhausted nerves, and of course they wore upon him as they wear upon every man. But, once he had taken them over, he began to resent Grant's easy relinquishment; it rankled him to realize how willingly the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... they satisfy her now? They should satisfy her. She'd work harder than ever on jam advertisements and when she had saved a lot of money she'd go to New York and get a big position and some people would have to admit that it would have been a waste to tie her down to a humdrum—what was it Mary Rose had said?—"home for a family." Her lip curled with scorn. Mary Rose was only a child. She didn't know that homes and families were not the most important things in the world. Someone else had ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... She was searching out napkins in the sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people who have no interest ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... retorted Lorna petulantly. "There's no romance in you, Mary. You're just humdrum and old-fashioned and narrow. Think of the beautiful costumes, and the lights, the music, the applause of thousands! Oh, it must be wonderful to thrill an audience, and have hundreds of men worshiping you, and all ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... their spell; hard facts we prize In our humdrum philosophy; But, could we change, who would not be A suitor ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... answered the fairy. "I'm tired of being a humdrum fairy year in and year out. Of course, I do not wish to become a mortal for all time, for that would get monotonous, too; but to live a short while as the earth people do would amuse ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum |
