"Joyless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves; they must do mischief, and waste their money, if they do not know how to turn it to account. Churches, and shops, and warehouses, and cottages, and small row, and place, and terrace houses, must be built and lived in, however joyless and inconvenient. And it is assuredly intended that all of us should have knowledge, and act upon our knowledge, in matters in which we are daily concerned, and not be left to the caprice of architects, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... courtly bearing. She would never love him as she loved Capes, of course, but there are grades and qualities of love. For Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether. Much more temperate; the discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant, condescending wife. She had been quite convinced that an engagement with him and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise which distinguishes the ways of the wise. It would be the wrappered world almost at ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... weary eyes, Her joyless, weary eyes, Wailed forth a rosary; and her sighs And sobs strung all the beads; The while before her spirit's gaze — Her contrite spirit's gaze — Moved all the mysteries of her days, And ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... must travel in my company To seal this severance more fast and sure. A joyless fellowship, i' faith, 'twill be, Yet must we fare together, I and he, Till I shall tread ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world where there was ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... clustered three or four stupid-looking, tow-headed children. It was impossible for Phil to conceive how beautiful Mollie could be a member of such a family. Yet the unfortunate girl had told Phyllis that she had known no other than the hard, joyless life she ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... "forgotten women." "Thin and wrinkled in youth from ill-prepared food, clad without warmth or grace, living in untidy houses, working from daylight till bedtime at the dull round of weary duties, the slaves of men of equal slovenliness, the mothers of joyless children—all uneducated if not illiterate." "This sight," Page told his hearers, "every one of you has seen, not in the countries whither we send missionaries, but in the borders of the State of North Carolina, in ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... broad-shouldered man, with a heavy forbidding countenance, and a taciturn habit by no means calculated to secure him a large circle of friends. His daughter and only child was afraid of him; his wife had been afraid of him in her time, and had faded slowly out of a life that had been very joyless, unawares, hiding her illness from him to the last, as if it had been a sort of offence against him to be ill. It was only when she was dying that the bailiff knew he was going to lose her; and it must be confessed that he took the ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... of the damned. This delusion took such possession of his soul that he lost his appetite, was unable to sleep, and day by day grew more and more wasted and languid. His tutor and director noticing how his health was affected and how pale, listless, and joyless he had become, often questioned him as to the cause of his dejection and evident suffering, but his tormentor who had filled his mind with this delusion, being what is called a dumb devil, the poor youth ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... stone fortress. The castellan, an old, gloomy man, the more devoted to the young knight from his dark melancholy and wild deeds, hastened to lower the drawbridge. Greetings were exchanged in silence, and in silence did Sintram enter, and those joyless gates closed with a crash ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... their time, and the mere wrecks of what they once were. Men who had gone to that region strong, active, ruddy, enthusiastic, and who, after a few months, returned thus feeble and shattered—some irreparably so; others with perhaps years of joyless life before them; a few with the unmistakable stamp of death already ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... was the victim. She could not have imagined, that, in all the fermentation of civilized depravity, a similar plot could have entered a human mind. She had been stunned by an unexpected blow; yet life, however joyless, was not to be indolently resigned, or misery endured without exertion, and proudly termed patience. She had hitherto meditated only to point the dart of anguish, and suppressed the heart heavings of indignant nature merely by the force of contempt. Now she endeavoured to brace ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I abandon to others—whom ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... so deeply in his Cite antique. They subsisted in all their strength in Assyria, and must have had all the consequences, all the social effects that they had elsewhere, and yet we find mentioned a home for the dead, a joyless country in which they could assemble in their countless numbers; as Egypt had its Ament and Greece her Hades, so Chaldaea and Assyria had their hell, their place of departed ghosts. We know from the narrative of Istar that they looked ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... exempt from levy on execution. The real estate of a married woman is not liable for the debts of her husband. There are eight causes for divorce, so many doors of escape for unfortunate wives from the bondage of a joyless union. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... approached no longer exists; and the few old houses left in the street are disguised in melancholy modern costume of whitewash and cement. Shops of the smaller and poorer order, intermixed here and there with dingy warehouses and joyless private residences of red brick, compose the present a spect of Skeldergate. On the river-side the houses are separated at intervals by lanes running down to the water, and disclosing lonely little plots of open ground, with the masts of sailing-barges rising ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... I said, there is to me an indescribable pathos in these sombre pictures of Nature in our old Beowulf here, — these drear marshes, these monster-haunted meres, that boil with blood and foam with tempests, these fast-rooted, joyless woods that overlean the waters, these enormous, nameless beasts that lie along on promontories all day and wreak vengeance on ships at night — have you not seen them, headlands running out into the sea like great beasts with their forepaws extended? And is it not ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... pieces everywhere: Into the joyless house and in the yard, On narrow streets, and paths, and pathless haunts, Where persecution raves, and menace dumb Chills all away from the pure light and air. The madman's cursed hands hold everything With snares and claws and stones and knives; they ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless war days. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... young and fresh with maidenhood; The ugly ones as well, shall husbands have, And their young lives from shame thus they will save. No aged maids shall pass from yonder throng With bitterness,—their heart's unuttered song For some dear love to end their joyless woe, And longings unallayed that e'er ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... captive to her charms, a most accomplished knight And monarch brave that ever yet had bowed to woman's might Was but a poor and joyless slave, compelled to wear a smile And act a part for which she loathed ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... man. To him, all must end in the "tongueless silence of the dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air. ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... things, whose use for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize upon religion and turn it into persecution, and upon beauty to torment it on the altars of some joyless vice. We cannot do with such souls; we have no use for them, and it is very easy indeed to step from that persuasion to the belief that God has ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... been bowled over the brink by some account of horse colic and its remedy, or of the proper treatment of hoof disease in sheep. I suffered keenly from the horse colic and like troubles and from the many hopes and perils of democracy in my childhood. I found the Bible, however, the most joyless book of all, Samson being, as I thought, the only man in it who amounted to much. A shadow lay across its pages which came, I think, from the awful solemnity of my aunt when she opened them. It reminded me of a dark rainy day made fearful by thunder and lightning. ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... advice, Trevor; quit all thoughts of so joyless and stupifying a trade! Every blockhead can sneer at an author; the title itself is a sarcasm; and Job, who we are told was the most patient of men, uttered the bitterest wish that ever fell from lips: "Oh that mine enemy had written ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Sophy's exquisite, simple virtues, and inborn grace; and, believing her claim to Darrell's lineage, Lady Montfort thought but of the joy and blessing one so good and so loving might bring to his joyless hearth. She was not thinking of morbid pride and mouldering ancestors, but of soothing charities and loving ties. And Lady Montfort, I now suspect, in her scheme for our happiness—for Darrell's—had an ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... woman's nose was peaked and her chin receded. In her bonnet some gaudy imitation flowers nodded a vigorous accompaniment. She did not seem ever to have had pleasure or to have been young, and yet in the child by her side her patient joyless sordid life had ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... to Our Club, the Van Twiller affair, though it was rather a joyless thing, I fancy, for Van Twiller. To understand the case fully, it should be understood that Ralph Van Twiller is one of the proudest and most sensitive men living. He is a lineal descendant of Wouter Van ...
— Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... crypt I left so late, Whose only altar is its rusted grate,— Sepulchral, rayless, joyless as it seems, Shamed by the glare of May's refulgent beams,— While the dim seasons dragged their shrouded train, Its paler splendors were not quite in vain. From these dull bars the cheerful firelight's glow Streamed through the casement o'er the spectral ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... anxiety—to see how it fared with her recovered darling, was wholly satisfied, and gave thanks. For she perceived that, in this case, at least, marriage was no legal, conventional connection leaving the heart emptier than it found it—the bartering of precious freedom for a joyless bondage, an obligation, weary in the present, and hopeless of alleviation in the future, save by the reaching of that far-distant, heavenly country, concerning which it is comfortably assured us "that there they neither marry nor are given in marriage." For the Katherine who came back to her ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... she never known a winter? 'Tis the dreary dark time of waitin', the sunless, joyless bit o' all the year, when the singin' birds fly away, the butterflies and flowers die, and the very trees sigh and moan in their bareness and decay. 'Tis an empty bit o' life, when all that makes life sweet falls ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... with a strange feeling of desolation, mingled with a strong sense of the novelty of my situation, and a joyless kind of curiosity concerning what was yet unknown, that I awoke the next morning; feeling like one whirled away by enchantment, and suddenly dropped from the clouds into a remote and unknown land, widely and completely isolated from all he ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... of the other world were dismal to an extreme. The after-life in Hades was believed to be a shadowy, joyless copy of the earthly existence. In Hades the shade of great Achilles exclaims sorrowfully, "Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death. Rather would I live on earth as the hireling of another, even with a landless ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... now Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,[u] And from his fellow Bacchanals would flee; 'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start, But Pride congealed the drop within his ee:[25] Apart he stalked in joyless reverie,[v] And from his native land resolved to go, And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;[26] With pleasure drugged, he almost longed for woe, And e'en for change of scene would seek ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... little common sense and judgment I had left within me told me that such a course was entirely out of the question. I could not go away with her. I could do no more than to see her safely on her way to the queer little port on the east coast of Italy. Then I should return to my bleak, joyless castle,—to my sepulchre,—and suffer all the torments of the damned for days and weeks until word came that she was actually safe on the other side of ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... shame and trouble? For as Simonides used to say playfully that he always found his money-chest full but his gratitude-chest empty,[833] so the wicked contemplating their own vice soon find out that their gratification is joyless and hopeless,[834] and ever attended by fears and griefs and gloomy memories, and suspicions about the future, and distrust about the present. Thus we hear Ino, repenting for what she had done, saying on ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... you like best to hear," said Dorothea, who told the simple truth; for what she dreaded was to exert herself in reading or anything else which left him as joyless ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... I sighed. Joyless, vacant, barren hours prefigured themselves to me, drifting through my brain, till their vacant shapes crowded it into darkness. I must do something! I would go out; a walk would be good for me. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... forget the impression his countenance made upon me. The features so handsome, the colouring so fine, the person that of a finished gentleman; and yet, all this pleasing combination of form and face marred by that cold, cruel, merciless eye. Its expression so dead, so joyless, sent a chill through my whole frame, and I shrank from encountering its icy gaze, and was about quietly to retire by a back door, when my attention was arrested by the following ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... of it. She had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, overwhelmed her with ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... was strolling along the beach, biting my pencil reflectively, tremendously impressed by the solitude and the solemn thunder of the surf, a thought occurred to me—how unpleasant it would be if I suddenly stumbled on a summer boarder. As this joyless impossibility flitted across my mind, I rounded a ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... succession of years; and some of those which, perhaps, deeply affected me at the time, are, by the mercy of Heaven, forgotten. But enough remains to enable me to give a faint outline of the causes which have changed me from what I was, to the gloomy joyless being I am at length become. There is one scene indelibly impressed upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... individual attachment for the king and queen which would, for a moment, create the illusion that a reaction had commenced in the public mind. One day the queen was sitting in her apartment at St. Cloud, in the deepest dejection of spirits, mechanically working upon some tapestry to occupy the joyless and lingering hours. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. The palace was deserted and silent. The very earth and sky seemed mourning in sympathy with the mourning queen. Suddenly, an unusual noise, ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... of defiance existed between the king and queen. Both were wretched. Such are always the wages of sin. Ten more joyless years passed away. The rupture between the royal pair was such that they could scarcely endure each other. Louis himself was the first to inform the queen of the news so satisfactory to him, so heart-rending to her, that a dagger had pierced ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... light breaking over jagged rocks—these are now beneath my eye—these alone I can detect—not a man—not an animal—not a tree. The great American Desert is a land of milk and honey in comparison with the joyless orb over which we are now moving. However, even yet we can predicate nothing positive. The atmosphere may have taken refuge in the depths of the chasms, in the interior of the craters, or even on the opposite side of the ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... essential to domestic comfort and well-being*, and thus to all the virtues which have their earliest and surest nurture in domestic life. There are homes at once affluent and joyless, groaning with needless waste and barren of needed comfort, in which the idea of repose seems as irrelevant as Solomon's figure of lying down on the top of a mast, and all from a pervading spirit of disorder. In such dwellings there is no love of home. ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... who by rights should be the teachers and who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last—might I not finally teach them—a wiser and more generous-hearted way to ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... failure, and the meanest of mortals had a share of her holy sympathy; she gained her unexampled conquest by resolutely treading down despair, and her brave story should cheer the many girls who find life bleak and joyless. George Eliot was prepared to bear the worst that could befall her, and it was her frank and gentle acceptance of the facts of life that brought her joy in the end. We must also remember such people as Arkwright, Stephenson, ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... rises, and, proceeding along the bank of the stream, approaches him. He tells her that he has done nothing but mourn for the loss of his Pearl, and has been indeed a "joyless jeweller" (p.8). However, now that he has found his Pearl, he declares that he is no longer sorrowful, but would be a "joyful jeweller" were he allowed to cross the stream (p.8). The maiden blames her father for his ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... be like Eden before the Fall; no joyless turbulent passions must enter there"—exclaims the enthusiast RICHARDSON. The home of the literary character should be the abode of repose and of silence. There must he look for the feasts of study, in progressive and alternate ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... gone forth against him, but because of the pact between them, Murrough of the Kine sped him in peace through Iar Connaught, and at length Brian had won home again with joyless heart. ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... on the mountain grow, And six elms where the ground is low. But I, my husband seen no more, My sad and joyless fate deplore. O how is it, I long to know, That he, my lord, ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... the books were written by a perfectly good woman, the wife of an English clergyman, whose friends were greatly scandalized by them. As a sort of atonement she wrote 'Day after Day,' the story of a dismal and joyless orphan, who dies to the sound of angelic music, faint and farheard, filling the whole chamber. A carefuller study of the phenomenon reveals the fact that the seraphic strains are produced by the steam escaping from the hot-water bottles at ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... wretched arts adorn, Betray'd by man, then left for man to scorn; Whose cheek in vain assumes the mimic rose, While her sad eyes the troubled breast disclose; Whose outward splendour is but folly's dress, Exposing most, when most it gilds distress. Here joyless roam a wild amphibious race, With sullen woe display'd in every face; Who, far from civil arts and social fly, And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye. Here too the lawless merchant of the main Draws from his plough th' intoxicated swain; Want ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... wanted some explanation of this hard, real life; the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others—she wanted some key that would enable her ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... had crowned before with radiance and glory. For the traitors, to reward their work, He shaped a house of pain and grim affliction, and lamentations of hell. Our Lord prepared this torture-house of exiles, deep and joyless, for the coming of the angel hosts. Well He knew it lay enshrouded in eternal night, and filled with woe, wrapped in fire and piercing cold, smoke-veils and ruddy flame. And over that wretched realm He spread the brooding terror of torment. They had wrought ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... followed, so mystified, so angered by her composure, that I scarcely knew what I did. She even turned, with pretty courtesy, to hold the light for me at the crypt steps,—a service that I accepted perforce and with joyless acquiescence in the irony of it. I knew that I did not believe in her; her conduct as to Pickering was utterly indefensible,—I could not forget that; but the light of her eyes, her tranquil brow, the sensitive lips, whose mockery stung and pleased in a breath,—by ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... some place, together; but Legree would not permit it, and more than once broke up such attempts, with oaths and brutal execrations,—so that the blessed news had to circulate from individual to individual. Yet who can speak the simple joy with which some of those poor outcasts, to whom life was a joyless journey to a dark unknown, heard of a compassionate Redeemer and a heavenly home? It is the statement of missionaries, that, of all races of the earth, none have received the Gospel with such eager docility ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven, Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence assigns them. One alone, The redbreast, sacred to the household gods, Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky, In joyless fields and thorny ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... bed, with her head bandaged, and her fixed and sightless eyes, she answered meekly and readily to all the questions we put to her. Poor little thing! she was shocking to look at; one of the many innocent beings whose lives are to be rendered sad and joyless by this revolution. The doctor seemed very ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... often of the Greeks, for the joy of the Greek in life was far greater than that of the Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring to a pagan, and "Pax tecum aeterna" is among the commonest of the inscriptions. The life beyond the grave was at best an unreal and joyless copy of an earthly existence, and Achilles told Odysseus that he would rather be the serf of a poor man upon earth ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... almost always found in a new residence. The poor man had alighted there for a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these continually shifting scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a stranger among strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though joyless satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire college and submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... which just supports life. The manners of the young ladies were equally mild, uncomplaining, and respectable; the only difference was, that Constantia was pensive and dejected, Isabel active and cheerful in adversity. The former seemed to move in a joyless routine of duty; but Isabel was so animated that only the most minute observer could tell that she was not perfectly happy, and hence she gained the character of having ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... insignificant trifles which form its sum of happiness, denied the sympathetic love and tenderness which is the life of little hearts, deprived of the pleasures suited to its state, yet too immature to turn within itself for comfort in its need, its life without and within a dull, joyless, dreary blank—such was poor Harry's, for a shadow dark and terrible rested on his baby heart and home, a something that darkened and deepened day by day, and grew more and more insupportable as the weary time crept on. What it was, and how long it had rested ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they wear a cold and joyless smile. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... now the perfum'd lamps stream wide their light, And social converse chears the livelong night, Thus spake Zorobabel, "too long in vain "For Sion desolate her sons complain; "In anguish worn the joyless years lag slow, "And these proud conquerors mock their captive's woe. "Whilst Cyrus triumph'd here in victor state "A brighter prospect chear'd our exil'd fate, "Our sacred walls again he bade us raise, "And to Jehovah rear the pile of praise. "Quickly these ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... drunk water, eaten grass and given milk for the last time, and their senses have lost all vigour. He who gives these undoubtedly goes to joyless realms. ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was torn off at the shoulder, and sick unto death, he fled to the fens, there to end his joyless life. Then Beowulf rejoiced at his night's work, wherein he had freed Heorot ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... to her and she was grateful for his forbearance. Her mind was in a turmoil; she was married—that was all she knew—married to somebody she liked but did not love. Married to a man who had been chosen for her partly against her will. She glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes; if she was joyless, no less was he. It was an inauspicious beginning to a married life which would end who knew how? Before the depressing granite facade of the London Safe Deposit the party descended, Mr. Debenham paid ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... worry and anxiety have become habitual likewise lives a discordant life. He looks out of a joyless present, back on a past devoid of interest, and forward into a future ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... oppresses me. It is the knowledge of my—of Antoinette's indifference which makes the future so joyless, so desolate. Beulah, this has caused my ruin. When I stood by Cornelia's coffin, and recalled her last frantic appeal; when I looked down at her cold face, and remembered her devoted love for her unworthy brother, I vowed never to touch wine again; ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... ask no lordling's titled name, Nor miser's hoarded store; I ask to live with those I love, Contented though I 'm poor. From joyless pomp and heartless mirth I gladly will withdraw, And hide me in this lowly vale, Beneath my ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... me, And it would have been more happy. Had I not been born and nurtured, And had never grown in stature, 220 Till I saw these days of sorrow, And this joyless time o'ertook me, Had I died in six nights only, Or upon the eighth had perished. Much I should not then have needed, But a shroud a span-long only, And of earth a tiny corner. Little then had wept my mother, Fewer tears had shed my father, And my brother ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... sensual, and calculating, feeling with her fingers for the gold chain, a mere golden-fleshed, rose-flushed hireling, solid and prosaic. The go-between is dimly seen in the background, but the face of the suitor is a strange, ironic study: past youth, worn, joyless, and bitter, taking his pleasure mechanically and with cynical detachment. The "Storm calmed by S. Mark" (Academy) was, in Mr. Berenson's opinion, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Town Hall, which was now used as a warehouse. The outer walls still remained, but the beautiful interior wood-work had been sold and removed. That is how it is with me, thought Ella. She flew along as fast as she could, onward to sleepless nights and joyless days. ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... the man and woman met in one long, wild gaze. Sylvia stretched out her white hands and smiled, and Richard Devine understood in his turn the story of the young girl's joyless life, and knew how ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... burial-place—till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one. But Rose was with him in the tomb. He leaned upon her in his daily passage from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back again from the weary chair to the joyless bed—his bed and hers, their marriage-bed—till even this short journey ceased and his head lay all day upon the pillow and hers all night beside it. How long poor Mr. Toothaker was kept in misery! Death seemed to draw near the door, and often to lift the latch, and sometimes to thrust his ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... joyless and a gloomy morn, Wet was the grass, and hung with pearls the thorn; When Damon, who design'd to pass the day With hounds and horns, and chase the flying prey, Rose early from his bed; but soon he ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... like most young creatures of the earth, in fact; but that in its babyhood it is as grave and melancholy as in its old age, born apparently with a deep sense of its own ugliness, and a mournful resignation to a long and joyless career. ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... blameless heart, Till all my soul, each tumult charmed away, Yields, gently led, to Virtue's easy sway. By thee inspired, O Virtue! Age is young, And music warbles from the faltering tongue: Thy ray creative cheers the clouded brow, And decks the faded cheek with rosy glow, Brightens the joyless aspect, and supplies Pure heavenly lustre to the languid eyes: But when Youth's living bloom reflects thy beams, Resistless on the view the glory streams; Love, Wonder, Joy, alternately alarm, And Beauty dazzles with angelic charm. Ah! whither ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... dead, to confess, make signs of the cross in front of icons, with a quiet mind, without being conscious of the lie, and to continue in the service which gave him the feeling of being useful and some comfort in his joyless family life. Although he believed this, he felt with his entire being that this religion of his, more than all else, was not "the right thing," and that is why his eyes always ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... first acts of the play, Zelma was languid, absent, and more unequal than usual. A strange sense of evil, a vague foreboding, haunted her. It was in vain that she said to herself, "What have I, a lonely, disappointed woman, loveless and joyless, to fear of misfortune more,—since death itself were welcome as change, and doubly welcome as rest?" The nameless fear still clung to her, sending cold thrills along her veins, fiercely grasping and holding her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... along paths that had once echoed to the tread of slippered feet, armed sentries paced, their sharp challenges breaking the stillness of the night. Outside its wrecked fences strange men in stranger uniforms strode in and out of the joyless houses; tired pickets stacked their arias on the unswept piazzas, and panting horses nibbled the bark from the withered trees; rank weeds choked the gardens; dishevelled vines clung to the porches, and doors that had always swung wide to the gentle tap of loving fingers were opened ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... By fraud and falsehood thou mad'st me thy wife—that shall be forgotten! Five joyless years have I spent in this house— all shall be forgotten from the day ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... Gene Stratton-Porter, like the cheerfulness of "Pollyanna," seems to be very much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be real he must be joyless—in the United States, at least—is perhaps because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither Mr. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... soon to pass into the same Valley of the Shadow, not so much of Death as of Joyless Life. His beloved and idolized Bobbin died on July 14, 1797. She seems to have been a wise little maiden, to whom her father wrote most affectionate letters, full of rather unsuitable details, political and financial and otherwise, and not scrupling to speak ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... very sad to lose a child, and especially a son," sighed Elizabeth, and involuntarily she thought of Anna, that poor mother whom she had robbed of her son, that he might grow up in eternal joyless imprisonment, that he might be morally murdered, and from a man be converted ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... the Addresses of Fribblers, and expose their Children to the ambiguous Behaviour which Melainia complains of, till by the Fondness to one they are to lose, they become incapable of Love towards others, and by Consequence in their future Marriage lead a joyless or a miserable Life. As therefore I shall in the Speculations which regard Love be as severe as I ought on Jilts and Libertine Women, so will I be as little merciful to insignificant and mischievous Men. In order to this, all Visitants ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... the centre of the scene, The white-haired matron with monotonous tread Plied the swift wheel, and with her joyless mien Sat, like a fate, and watched ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... from his joyless village life to the still worse life of a sailor boy. He went on board a wretched little vessel, to stand by the rudder while the skipper drank. Filthy and disgusting the poor boy looked; starving and benumbed with ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... wine and cheer the name of the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar inn. There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... sympathize. I was revolted by friendships,—for they were susceptible to every change; I was disappointed in love,—for the truth never approached to my ideal. Nursed early in the lap of Romance, enamoured of the wild and the adventurous, the commonplaces of life were to me inexpressibly tame and joyless. And yet indolence, which belongs to the poetical character, was more inviting than that eager and uncontemplative action which can alone wring enterprise from life. Meditation was my natural element. I loved to spend the noon reclined by some shady stream, and in a half sleep to shape ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... trying to do? For what had he been searching in those slow, laborious, almost painful brush strokes—in that clumsy groping for values, in the painstaking reticence, the joyless and mathematical establishment of a sombre and uninspiring key, in the patient plotting of simpler planes where space ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... her son to the heiress of the French throne, that even in the world of spirits she might be cheered by seeing Henry heading the armies of France, the terrible avenger of her wrongs. These hopes invigorated her until the fitful dream of her joyless life was terminated, and her restless spirit sank into the repose of the grave. She lived, however, to see her plans apparently in progress toward their most ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... sat at his parents' feet for hours together, with his little hands patiently folded in each other, and his thin wan face raised towards them. They had seen him pine away, from day to day; and though his brief existence had been a joyless one, and he was now removed to that peace and rest which, child as he was, he had never known in this world, they were his parents, and his loss sank deep ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow'r; With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more; Now pall the tasteless meats, and joyless wines, And luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain, [bb]Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds, alas! would touch th' impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness'd ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... father's flocks and slaves and coffers, a troop of cares and responsibilities; unless he be a man without a sense of duty, in which case we are not supposed to envy him. The firstborn of an indigent father inherits a double measure of the disadvantages of poverty,—a joyless childhood, a guideless youth, and perhaps a mateless manhood, his own life being drained to feed the young of his father's begetting. If we cannot do away with poverty entirely, we ought at least to abolish the institution of primogeniture. ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... Leslie, for the wrong I have done you!" he confessed one night with a haggard, remorseful face, when she stood, constrained and pensive, on his joyless hearth. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... tide. Every year London society and the ranks of the landed gentry are reinforced by returned Australians and New Zealanders and Cape-of-Good-Hopers and China and India merchants, who feel that their hard labors and long exile have left life empty and joyless until they see the names of their wives and daughters in the Gazette among the presentations at a drawing-room ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... commit themselves; they must do mischief, and waste their money, if they do not know how to turn it to account. Churches, and shops, and warehouses, and cottages, and small row, and place, and terrace houses, must be built, and lived in, however joyless or inconvenient. And it is assuredly intended that all of us should have knowledge, and act upon our knowledge, in matters with which we are daily concerned, and not to be left to the caprice of architects or mercy of contractors. There is not, indeed, anything in the following essay ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... perfect in fit, and on a side-saddle. In America this is an extreme opinion, and it is only among the most fashionable that a young girl having all her life ridden in a man's saddle, finds the world a joyless place and parents cruel when she is no longer allowed to ride like a boy. But she becomes, in spite of her protests, "another who looks divine on a horse." And you can look divine too, if you choose! On second thoughts the adjective ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the story Virgil tells, but it is true to natural history. Similarly, it is pleasant to think that the Pope's mercy may ultimately have been extended to Donatello. We can imagine an aged couple living a serious, retired life in the castle of Monte Beni, childless, and to a certain extent joyless, but taking comfort in their mutual affection, and in acts ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... trials that we have to endure as beginners is a joyless, flat, ungracious condition; a kind of paralysis of the soul, a dreary torpor. When we would approach God—pray to Him—He is nowhere to be found: He has disappeared, and everything to do with finding Him is become ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... aloud, 'My freedom!' feeling as a butterfly flown out of a box to stretches of sunny earth beneath spacious heavens. Her bitter marriage, joyless in all its chapters, indefensible where the man was right as well as where insensately wrong, had been imprisonment. She excused him down to his last madness, if only the bonds were broken. Here, too, in this very ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; it testifies ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... hair and his rosy countenance. Then the child would dream that he was sailing aloft over shining forests, and that his mother, beaming with all the beauty of her lost youth, flew before him, showering golden flowers on his path. These were the happiest moments of Brita's joyless life, and even these were not unmixed with bitterness; for into the midst of her joy would steal a shy anxious thought which was the more terrible because it came so stealthily, so soft-footed and unbidden. Had not this child been given her as a punishment for her ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... but he saw no reason why he should be taxed for things which he disliked and disapproved. The result of that evening confirmed him in his resolution. It was a scene of drinking, gluttony, secret fear, endless squabbling, and joyless excitement. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... assigned this cause; that the Lord took away from the man beauty and elegance of life, and transferred it to the woman; and that hence the man, unless he be re-united with his beauty and elegance in the woman, is stern, austere, joyless, and unlovely; so one man is wise only for himself, and another is foolish; whereas, when a man is united with his beauty and elegance of life in a wife, he becomes engaging, pleasant, active, and lovely, and thereby wise. A fifth said, that women were created ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... among the rungs of his chair, and heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste. The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney's removal ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... returning as if from their old graves to warn her to prepare a shroud, or, with purpose almost as unwelcome, to exhibit their wrinkles and infirmity and claim her as their companion by the tokens of her own decay. Many a merry night had she danced with them in youth, and now in joyless age she felt that some withered partner should request her hand and all unite in a dance of death to the music of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took the greater hold on the fancy of the scientifically ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... was many minutes before the softest words the eloquent lover could shape to sound sufficed to dry those burning tears, and bring back the enchanting smile,—nay, even then the smile was forced and joyless. They walked on for some moments, both in thought, till Hastings said: "Thou lovest me, Sibyll, and art worthy of all the love that man can feel for maid; and yet, canst thou solve me this question, nor chide me that I ask it, Dost thou not love the world and the world's judgments more than ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... natural aptitude for higher industries, the great mass of the native population are compelled by the present commercial system to remain mere peasants. Even so the cheapness and simplicity of the means of life prevent them from being a joyless race. A plantation cooly generally has two days in the week on which he ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was before me.'—Medwin's ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... beguile the way in case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures, etc.," the true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought himself unsuitably ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... marriage. The inflexible logic of Calvinism had passed into her fibre, until it had become almost an instinct with her to tread softly in the way of pleasure lest God should hear. Generations of joyless ancestors had imbued her with an ineradicable suspicion of human happiness—as something which must be paid for, either literally in its pound of flesh, or in a corresponding measure ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the termination less added to substantives, makes adjectives signifying want; as, worthless, witless, heartless, joyless, careless, helpless. Thus comfort, comfortless; ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... far from settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? Let him prove it, then, by being as good in the same way as ordinary ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... throng with eyes that seemed to see nothing of its frantic frenzy and joyless joy—a stalwart man, who strode along like a giant among midgets, his vacant eyes fixed before him, his strong white face expressionless. Hugh Ritson saw him. They passed within two paces, but without recognition. The one was wandering aimlessly ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... had he 'scaped thy lance! But haply Zeus purposed to ruin all, And maketh all our toil and travail vain— Ay, now will grant the Trojans victory Who from Achaea now hath reft her shield! Ah me! how shall old Peleus in his halls Take up the burden of a mighty grief Now in his joyless age! His heart shall break At the mere rumour of it. Better so, Thus in a moment to forget all pain. But if these evil tidings slay him not, Ah, laden with sore sorrow eld shall come Upon him, eating out his heart with grief ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... hath to do, and to see the token of his going again to the castle where the chain of gold appeared to him, for never yet saw he dwelling that pleased him so much. He hath ridden so far that he is come into the joyless forest of the Black Hermit, that is so loathly and horrible that no leaves nor greenery are there by winter nor by summer, nor was song of bird never heard therein, but all the land is gruesome and burnt, and wide are the cracks therein. He hath scarce gone thereinto or ever ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... harsher than any of their predecessors, will not, as we have seen, allow it to appear even at the foot of the page. To reproduce all that has been written in disparagement of this precious portion of God's written Word would be a joyless and an unprofitable task. According to Green, 'the genuineness of the passage cannot be maintained[589].' Hammond is of opinion that 'it would be more satisfactory to separate it from its present context, and place it by itself as an appendix to the Gospel[590].' ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... This was a wretched, joyless existence—a never-ending martyrdom, a never-ceasing contest. Amelia stood alone and unloved in her family, feared and avoided by all the merry, thoughtless, pleasure seeking circle. In her sad presence they shuddered involuntarily and felt chilled, as by a ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Will he leave it again soon? Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than a fortnight at a time; and he has now been resident eight weeks. If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine days ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... died To save our people. And when war was red Around us, friends upbore the gentle dead Home, and dear women's heads about them wound White shrouds, and here they sleep in the old ground Beloved. And the rest long days fought on, Dwelling with wives and children, not alone And joyless, like these Greeks. ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... and chast pronounc't, Present, or past, as Saints and Patriarchs us'd. Here Love his golden shafts imploies, here lights His constant Lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard, Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask, or Midnight Bal, Or Serenate, which the starv'd Lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. 770 These lulld by Nightingales imbraceing slept, And on thir naked limbs the flourie roof Showrd Roses, which the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Sun. Slowly He returns to his Cell at Evening, for no one there is anxious for his arrival; He has no comfort in his solitary unsavoury meal: He throws himself upon his couch of Moss despondent and dissatisfied, and wakes only to pass a day as joyless, as monotonous ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... he was indeed "failing." He looked-weary and sad, and the cold or defiant gleam in his steel-gray eyes, was changed into a wistful and painful expression that was very pathetic. I did not dare to invade his reserve with any tender of sympathy. Joyless and hopeless as he might be, I felt instinctively that he would play out his drama alone. Perhaps this was a mistake on my part: he may have been hungry for the word I did not speak. God knows. I was not lacking in proper interest in his well-being, but ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... may culminate in a state of mind such as we see extolled in Buddhism, a colorless state, joyless and painless, across which the fleeting splendors of thought pass like stars. Well, the man of the south cares naught for that sort of paradise. The vein of real sensation is freely, perpetually open, open to life. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... at least forbear In offerings to my shade to share, For by the plot thy guile has laid His consecration will be stayed. This very day how shall I brook To meet each subject's altered look? To mark each gloomy joyless brow That was so bright and glad ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... joyless as the wide waste lying hushed around me, unblessed with the verdure of a single hope, a single love; and as I looked down the coming years, my way seemed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... realization of the love of this man and this woman one for another," and in support of his contention declared that sex love between husband and wife—apart from parenthood—was something to prize and cherish for its own sake. The Lambeth Conference, he remarked, "envisaged a love invertebrate and joyless," whereas, in his view, natural passion in wedlock was not a thing to be ashamed of or unduly repressed. The pronouncement of the Church of England, as set forth in Resolution 68 of the Lambeth Conference seems to imply condemnation ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... how ugly and joyless by comparison the fellow's own country sometimes seems, filled with money-making and fogs and ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... while wholly ignoring his descendant. But Michael was too wise to put himself into places where he could be pointedly ignored, and the resplendent dinner, with its six footmen and its silver service, was not really more joyless than usual. But his father's majestic displeasure was more apparent when the three men sat alone afterwards, and it was in dead silence that port was pushed round and cigarettes handed. Francis, it is true, made a couple of efforts to enliven things, but his ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... come to look at life from the point of view of age about to die. Young though she felt, the heavy weight of joyless days had fallen upon her, and left her broken-spirited and old before her time. With a despairing cry, she asked the world what it could give her in exchange for the love now lost, by which she had lived. She ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... expressing what you must long ago have suspected. Edna, you know very well that I love you better than every thing else—that I have loved you from the first day of our acquaintance; and I have come to tell you that my happiness is in your dear little hands; that my future will be joyless unless you share it; that the one darling hope of my life is to call you my wife. Do not draw your hand from mine! Dear Edna, let me keep it always. Do I mistake your feelings when I hope that ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... thy joyless fate, Since first Hesione thy bride, When plac'd aloft in godlike state, The blushing beauty by thy side, Thou sat'st, while reverend Ocean smil'd, And mirthful strains the hours beguil'd; The Nymphs and Tritons danc'd around, Nor ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... brainless; he had the same idea of women as Professor Kraill had ventilated in his lectures—that they were the vehicles of the race, living for the race but getting all the fun they could out of the preliminary canter, since the race was a rather strenuous, rather joyless thing for them. And it was in men they found the fun. Yet here was Marcella, who was quite different from anything feminine he had ever seen or imagined, suddenly appealing to him not to let her be fickle. Immediately he felt very manly, very ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... which sink into the heart and bear a rich harvest by the time they meet again. Days and months glide by, and the pains of separation still endure; for they feel how necessary they have become to the happiness of each other, and how cold and joyless existence seems when far from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... week's rent. And the exquisite thought in his mind, the thought of penetrating sweetness, was that whence this delicacy had come, other and even rarer delicacies might have come. All his past life seemed to him to be a miserable waste of gloomy and joyless years. ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... have deer meat to eat," he said, as he spread a soft skin by the fire, for the boy to lie on. Then he turned to place the child on the skin,—but no boy was there. He had no son. Only that strange bird perched, joyless and alone, over the fire, on the pole ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... spirit, of whose power I sing, Electric, deathless energy of mind, Harp of the soul, by genius swept, awake! Inspire my strains, and aid me to portray The base and joyless vanities which man Madly prefers to everlasting bliss!— Come! let us mount gay Fancy's rapid car, And trace through forest and o'er mountain rude The bounding footsteps of the youthful bard, Yet new to life—a stranger to the woes His harp is doomed to mourn in plaintive tones. His ardent unsophisticated ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... proceeded, talking of the day's battle so destructive of heroes. Having achieved feats exceedingly difficult of accomplishment, Vasudeva and Arjuna, at last, reached the (Pandava) encampment. Then that slayer of hostile heroes, viz., Vibhatsu, beholding the camp joyless and melancholy and everything to be in confusion, addressed Krishna with an agonised heart, and said, "O Janardana, no auspicious trumpet blows today, its blasts mingled with the beat of drums and the loud blare of conchs. The sweet Vina also is nowhere played ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that formidable "Beware!" sounded like thunder in her ears; the next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was cutting into her throbbing throat. He with the torso and those shoulders was seeking her ... how should he know her in that dreary garret, in those joyless habiliments? He would as soon known his Own in that crimson-bodiced, wire-framed dummy ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... no loneliness: — no matter where We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends Forsake us in the seeming, we are all At one with a complete companionship; And though forlornly joyless be the ways We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there, Like scattered lamps ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... shell of worldliness that had grown upon him. In his remoteness from it, New York became very distasteful to him; he thought with reluctance of going back to it; his club, which had been his home, now appeared a joyless exile; the life of a leisure class, which he had made his ideal, looked pitifully mean and little in the retrospect; he wondered how he could have valued the things that he had once thought worthy. He did not know what he should replace it all with, but Rosalie ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... His handsome face, head and shoulders above the tall woman he was dancing with, gazed out over the sea of dancers in all the freshness of his youthful joy, and triumph. He danced well, something he had contrived to learn in the joyless country from which he hailed. But there was no reflection of his joy in the faces of the two men gazing down from the shelter of the curtained box. There were only ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... hostile 35 towards the beings whom he had formerly exalted in beauty and glory: he created for the traitors a marvelous abode as penalty for their action, namely the pangs of Hell, bitter afflictions; Our Lord called forth that 40 abysmal joyless house of punishment to wait for the outcast keepers of souls.[3] When he knew that it was ready, he enveloped it in eternal night and equipped it with torment, filling it with fire and fearful cold, with fume and red flame: ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... thing and the clamor had had its hideous way with him. Physicians would have given a name to his mental and physical condition. He had heard these names often—applied to men the strain of whose lives had been like the strain of his own, and had left them as it had left him—jaded, joyless, breaking things. Some of them had been broken and had died or were dragging out bruised and tormented days in their own homes or in mad-houses. He always shuddered when he heard their names, and rebelled with sick fear against the mere mention of them. ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... look to see what such principles really result in; and of these we must choose not those who would welcome license, but those who long passionately to live by law. It is the condition of such men that I have been just describing. Its characteristics are vain self-reproach, joyless commendation, weary struggle, listless success, general indifference, and the prospect that if matters are going thus badly with them, they will go ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... of Gunnar the war-king cried out o'er the weeping hall: "Wail on, O women forsaken, for the mightiest woman born! Now the hearth is cold and joyless, and the waste bed lieth forlorn. Wail on, but amid your weeping lay hand to the glorious dead, That not alone for an hour may lie Queen Brynhild's head: For here have been heavy tidings, and the Mightiest under shield Is laid on the bale high-builded ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... which the rhythm and poetry of life had entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... downcast looks the joyless victor sat, Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of chance below; And now and then a sigh he stole, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... world and love seemed to her as a void and make-believe from beginning to end. Even the memory of the protestations of love, which her husband had made to her in days past, brought to her lips a dry, hard, joyless smile, like a sharp cruel knife which had cut through her heart. She was thinking, perhaps, that the love which seemed to fill so much of one's life, which brought in its train such fondness and depth of feeling, which made even the briefest separation so ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore |
