"Loveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a spot of painting, A lifeless, loveless hue; Though your heart be sick to fainting It says not a word to you; A bird knows nothing of gladness, Is only a song-machine; A man is a reasoning madness, A woman a ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... two most concerned to arrange," he declared "I never did fancy these loveless royal marriages. They are very little better than false ones." Then he laughed. "Tell me about this one of yours," he said, "the 'true facts' ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... of the purest charity—housing, caring for, befriending them, so as no son could have done it more tenderly and efficiently. The mother—on the whole a good woman—died blessing him; the strange, godless, loveless, misanthrope grandmother lived still, entirely supported by this self-sacrificing man. Her, who had been the bane of his life, blighting his hope, and awarding him, for love and domestic happiness, long mourning and cheerless ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... difficult to say whether faith or love predominated most; but even then it by no means prevented the existence of extreme poverty, for we read frequently in the Acts and Epistles of the collections made for the Christian churches. But in our faithless, loveless, selfish, sin-drowned century, such an attempt at community of goods would not only annihilate all morality completely, but absolutely degrade us back from civilisation and modern Catholicism into the rudest and most meagre barbarism. The apostles ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... Four Hundred in New York, its scandals and divorces in high life, and think it is smart to imitate it. You seem to stay out of it, but what if you do? Are you going to sit like a knot on a log and have them say you made a loveless marriage for ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... To wear around its gems of light. Smile, Lady, smile!—I will not see Rivers and Hastings bend the knee, Till those bewitching lips of thine Will bid me rise in bliss from mine. Smile, Lady, smile!—for who would win A loveless throne through guilt and sin? Or who would reign o'er vale and hill, If ...
— English Satires • Various
... to him. The silent pressure of the hands recalled nights of distraction. He half shut his eyes, a sudden madness overcame him, although he was sufficiently calm to say to himself that she had an end in view, this woman's coming to him, loveless, to speak of love to him, herself unmoved by the senses, to awaken vanished feelings, to offer herself with the irresistible skill of desire: a dead passion born ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... a little curiously, and then she realised that the girl had lived a loveless life, and that the sudden change to the atmosphere of love and friendship had ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... hard nature. Such a man could never understand a personality like that of his older son, nor could the son understand the father. Prince Hal, loving life in all its manifestations, joy in all its forms, could find small satisfaction in the rigid etiquette of a loveless court so long as it offered him an opportunity for little more than formal activity. When the rebellion of the Percies showed him that he could do the state real service, he seized his opportunity gladly, gayly, modestly. On his father's cause he centered the energies which he ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... been. Her fine eyes exercised a melancholy fascination over him: he could not forget them: although he knew now the drab soul that slumbered in their depths he went on seeing them as he wished to see them, as he had first seen them. It was one of those loveless hallucinations of love which take up so much of the hearts of artists when they are not entirely absorbed by their work. A passing face is enough to create it: they see in it all the beauty that is in it, unknown to its indifferent ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... up. I saw in her eyes the light of old battles. "Oh, it was a horror!" she cried, beginning to pace the floor. "It seemed to me that I was living the agony of all the loveless marriages of the world. I felt myself pursued, not merely by the importunate desires of one man—I suffered with all the millions of women who give themselves night after night without love! He came to seem like some monster to me; I could not meet him unexpectedly without starting. ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... introduces to her each one of the suitors, Indumati bows low in loveless salutation, and passes on. How beautiful is this humble courtesy! They are all princes. They are all her seniors. For she is a mere girl. Had she not atoned for the inevitable rudeness of her rejection by the grace of her humility, the scene would ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... felt that true love, in its most unsatisfied longings, its most cruel delays, nay, even its sharpest agonies of hopeless separation, is sweeter ten thousand times than the most "respectable" of loveless marriages such as this. ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... had clasped her in his arms for the first time upon the ruined tower—as when he had rained his kisses on her lips beside the Wishing Well—in his youth and beauty and passion. Her nineteen years of loveless wedlock were swept away, and left her as she saw herself in the little portrait he himself had painted, and which was now his legacy. His menaces and vows of vengeance against her and hers were all forgotten; ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... which remains unmentioned, but which is possibly internal. He is first displayed "pacing a sombre avenue of ilex and arbutus that reflected with singular truth the gloom of his countenance," and "toying sadly with the jewelled hilt of his dagger." He meditates upon his loveless life and the burthen of riches. Presently he "paces the long and magnificent gallery," where a "hundred generations of Di Sornos, each with the same flashing eye and the same marble brow, look down with the same sad melancholy upon the beholder"—a truly monotonous ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... silence, her stricken face full of trouble. How could she, from her glass house, throw stones at a loveless marriage? But this was different from her own case! Nobody was worthy to marry her hero without giving the best a woman had to give. If she were a girl—a sudden tide of color swept her face; a wild, delirious tingle of joy flooded her veins—oh, if she were ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... Loveless, unloved and unlovable Tammas the Titan, from Ecclefechan, writing in spleen says: "Nelson's unhappy affair with a saucy jade of a wench has supplied the world more gabble than all his victories." And possibly the affair in question was quite ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... had seen it, being but a solemn and poetic form of beauty. The change in such a world made by the discovery that his being an adopted son set him apart in a class different from other boys—a class unlovely and loveless—had been great, had stolen much of the joy from living; but he was very young then, and the joy of mere living and breathing was strong in his blood, and he had gradually become accustomed—hardened, if you will—to the idea of ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... pride or because they dare not refuse, Iseult's parents accept in their daughter's name and prepare everything for her speedy departure. The queen, wishing to save her daughter from the curse of a loveless marriage, next brews a love-potion which she bids Brengwain—her daughter's maid and companion—administer to King Mark and ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... exposing knaves, and painting fools, Yet is, whate'er she hates and ridicules. No thought advances, but her eddy brain Whisks it about, and down it goes again. Full sixty years the world has been her trade, The wisest fool much time has ever made. From loveless youth to unrespected age, No passion gratified except her rage. So much the fury still outran the wit, The pleasure missed her, and the scandal hit. Who breaks with her, provokes revenge from hell, But he's a bolder man who dares be well. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... his sister in mock reproof: "Shure and it's ye that has not yet wished me aven a dacent top o' the marnin', let alone the gratin's of the sason! Shame on ye—ye heartless, thoughtless, loveless—" ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... not feel glad to know this, yet she was not sorry. Somehow it soothed her to know that she was not a forsaken, loveless maiden. It was something to possess the love of so good a man, even if she could ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... much. Brother-and-sister marriages, not uncommon in the Dry-towns, are based on expediency and suspicion, and are frequently, though not always loveless. It explained Dallisa's taunts, and it partly explained, only partly, why I found her in my arms. It did not explain Rakhal's part in this mysterious intrigue, nor why Kyral had taken me for Rakhal, (but only after he remembered seeing me ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... if injury came to the Malplaquet, while under my charge, that I should be dismissed. She was my last chance as she was your own. But what to me were risks? I had lost my love, and my country had dishonoured herself in my eyes. I was nameless, loveless, countryless. All had gone, and ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations, the dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short night in, rue de la Goutte-d'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her outcast man, madame in rue Git-le-Coeur, canary and two buck lodgers. Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing's. Spurned and undespairing. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... sated with her sterile wit. Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne. Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it, And craved a living ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... went whither? And were one to the end—but what end who knows? Love deep as the sea as a rose must wither, As the rose-red seaweed that mocks the rose. Shall the dead take thought for the dead to love them? What love was ever as deep as a grave? They are loveless now as the grass above them ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and made no reply. People said that she had had her own romance in her youth and that her mother had sternly repressed it. I had heard that her marriage with Mr. DeLisle was loveless on her part and proved very unhappy. But he had been dead many years, and Aunt Winnifred never ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sorrow in her eyes, at her helpless sister. Some strange possessing desire had urged Hugh Fraser on to woo and win the helpless French beauty, whom an adverse fate had stranded in England. The mute sacrifice of the wedding was followed by the two years of Valerie's loveless marriage. It was an existence for the two sisters, bought by the sacrifice of one and Troubetskoi never ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... thought of the deadly sin—the treachery, the perjury, the sacrilege; oh! and the dreadful degradation of such a loveless marriage?" ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... indignation somewhat abated, and now vastly relieved at the realization that she indeed was free from her loveless and long-since irksome alliance with Waldron, calmly enough returned to the club-house. Head well up, and eyes defiant, she walked up the broad steps and into the office. Little cared she whether the piazza gossips—The ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... to suffer, let it be that one who is used to suffering. I have never been the darling of my parents, like you; I have not been used at home to the kindness and the love that you remember. A life without sweetness and joy has well fitted me for a loveless future. And, besides, you are worthy of him, and I am not. Mrs. Gallilee is wrong, Carmina, if she thinks I am your rival. I am not your rival; I never can be your rival. Believe nothing else, but, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... seems not made to fade away, Sweet death, that seems to make us loveless clay, I know not which is sweeter, no, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... a dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... only to scrape and hoard, moidering away her loveless life on the futile energies and sordid aims of a miser's wretched pleasures. But every now and then she had risen up out of the slough into which she had gradually sunk, and had done some grand things ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... and lip, the new sweetness of expression, there rose before his imagination another face, which for many years had seemed to him the most beautiful in the world, but which now appeared suddenly hard and loveless. He never realised the fact for himself, but it was really in this moment of meeting with Esther in the flush of her happiness that the last link was snapped in the chain which had ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... loveless to-night, Since he is departed whose smile made it bright: I mourn, but the sigh of my soul shall be brief, The pathway is short to the ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... you before," said Meldon—"in fact, I'm tired telling you—that she hasn't got to kill him until after she's married him. You don't surely want her to be guilty of one of those cold-blooded, loveless marriages which are the curse of modern society and end in the divorce court. She ought to have some feeling of affection for him before she marries him, and I think it is probably aroused in her now. No woman could possibly see a man treated as I treated Simpkins this afternoon without feeling a ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... rightly know now. I can remember that the dark-browed Nicholas, who was but little loved at our house, took some heed to this girl, greatly younger than himself, though herself of ripening age when she let herself be persuaded into that loveless wedlock. It was whispered that he had made a convert of her; the Jesuits and seminary priests were hard at work, striving to win back their lost power by increasing the number of their flock and recruiting from all classes of the people. Nicholas was then a blind tool in the hands ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... not?—fails Just this first night out of so many nights? Loving is done with. Were he sitting now, As so few hours since, on that seat, we'd love No more—contrive no thousand happy ways To hide love from the loveless, any more. I think I might have urged some little point In my defense, to Thorold; he was breathless For the least hint of a defense: but no, The first shame over, all that would might fall. No Henry! Yet I merely sit and think The morn's ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... congregated uproar of streets, or in the noise that drifts through wails and windows—you can hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which sounds like the actual voice of the human Heart, singing the lost joys, the regrets, the loveless lives of the people who blacken the pavements, or jolt along on ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... intuition of the lonely woman's loveless heart, Queen Catherine read in my face what a poor trader might not speak. She reached her hand to me, and when I would have saluted it like any dutiful subject, she took my hand in hers and placed ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... that a pure life is the source of all happiness. Pray to God each morning that He may give you strength to live as a woman who respects her responsibilities and duties; for the punishment you would otherwise incur is terrible: you would lose your love. Oh! to live loveless, to tear flesh from flesh, to belong no more to the one who is half of your very self, to live on in pain and agony, bereft of the one you have loved! In vain would you stretch out your arms to him; ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... for whose arrival she had been looking with such mingled feelings. Little need was there now for mingled feelings. She knew well with what feeling to expect him. She had at times within the depths of her heart formed an idea that her life would not be loveless; but now—but now—This man who was her husband, and the only one to whom she could look for love—this man turned from her in horror; he hated her, he loathed her—worse, he looked upon her as a Hindu—worse still, if any thing could ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... anyone tell, with the uneven standard set up by morality and religion? The world smiled upon a loveless marriage. What more degrading? It frowned upon a love perfect in all but the sanction of the Church, if the two had the courage to proclaim their love. It discreetly looked another way when the harlot of "Society" tripped by with her husband ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... were fitful—now beginning to look forward, now moody and dejected; and they were shorter. During this third week Aunt Rosamund joined them. The good lady had become a staunch supporter of Gyp's new existence, which, in her view, served Fiorsen right. Why should the poor child's life be loveless? She had a definitely low opinion of men, and a lower of the state of the marriage-laws; in her view, any woman who struck a blow in that direction was something of a heroine. And she was oblivious of the fact that Gyp was quite guiltless of the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the personal character of Goethe refuses to credit him with any moral worth accordant with his bodily and mental gifts. It figures him a libertine,—heartless, loveless, bad. I do not envy the mental condition of those who can rest in the belief that a really great poet can be a bad man. Be assured that the fruits of genius have never grown, and will never grow, in such a soil. Of all great poets Byron might seem at first glance to constitute an exception to this—I ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... again know sleep or forgetfulness. "I am a coward," she said, "yet I thought that cowardice and my desire for life had both died together. I did not draw back from the knives of the Indians, but now I am afraid of a loveless marriage. We are young. We may live many years. Oh, monsieur, I have not ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... contracted as a marriage for money or rank, then, as a rule, matters lie more favorably. The two accommodate themselves mutually, and a modus vivendi is established. They want no scandal, and regard for their children compels them to avoid any, although it is the children who suffer most under a cold, loveless life on the part of their parents, even if such a life does not develop into enmity, quarrel and dissension. Often accommodation is reached in order to avoid material loss. As a rule it is the husband, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... to make me fade away, Rank plug, that navvies smoke in loveless clay, I know not which ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... Palace; he felt the night wind on his face, He loathed, as he left, the embraces, the softness and scent of the place, But, ah, if his night had been loveless, with no one to solace his need, He never had written that sermon ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... him, "I know I didn't always do what is right, but if I deserved to be punished, Siegfried did not. Why did I escape?" After an interval of silence, she began to speak of her past, of conflicts with her husband, who had deceived her. Hers had been one of those loveless matches which are contracted in the customary business fashion. She told Frederick that she was an artist by nature, Rubinstein, for whom she had played when she was eleven years old, having prophesied a great future for her. "I don't know anything ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... pride, till we forget that there is anything better for us than selfishness, till we forget that God is love, and that we His children are meant to be loving even as He is loving; and that also is the gate of hell. And worst and darkest of all, when in that stupid, sinful, loveless state of mind, God's loving Spirit still strives and pleads with us, and tries to awaken us, and terrify us with the sight of the everlasting misery and ruin into which we have thrown ourselves, we may turn those pleadings of God's Spirit, ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... Catherine of Shakspeare; but Mr. Froude has given us the key to many parts of her story which Shakspeare left unexplained, and delicately enough has made us understand how Henry's affections, if he ever had any for her—faithfully as he had kept (with one exception) to that loveless mariage de convenance—may have been gradually replaced by indifference and even dislike, long before the divorce was forced on him as a question not only of duty to the nation, but of duty to Heaven. ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... old woman, childless and loveless; I know what it is to stand alone with life's hollow corpses,—corpses of youth, and love, and hope. Perhaps this is why my heart turned to her in her sweet youth and guileless innocence. I used to fancy, when I saw her, a child under the old-fashioned locust's ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... darkness, the positive negation of bliss, the recoil of self to devour itself, and forever. The consciousness of being was intense, but in all the universe was there nothing to enter that being, and make it other than an absolute loneliness. It was, and forever, a loveless, careless, hopeless monotony of self-knowing—a hell with but one demon, and no fire to make it cry: my self was the hell, my known self the demon of it—a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and empty, and I longed for a flame that I might know there was a God. Somehow I ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... grasp it all in those few minutes—it is rather deep, you know—and so he is coming up to dinner to-night to make a thorough study of it. He feels it is his one last hope, and if it fails him, he is lost in the sea of a loveless marriage." ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... railroad station, and she was trying to persuade him that there would be months and years in which to make up for the loveless blank, before sane speech found its opportunity. And even then there ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... clearly, this report of it has not explained, is that spirit of energetic discontent with her past in which she had entered on her musings. Why such soreness of spirit? Her childhood had been pinched and loveless; but, after all, it could well bear comparison with that of many another child of impoverished parents. There had been compensations all through—and were not the great passion of her Solesby days, together ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Miss Newcome was engaged to the Marquis Fairntosh, but for all that no marriage took place. First the death of Lady Kew made an inevitable postponement, and then Ethel herself shrunk from the loveless match, and, in spite of Lord Fairntosh's protests, dismissed the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... appear to be curious. To question her for the details would have been repugnant to his nicely balanced sense of the fitness of things. Nevertheless, he reflected, if her love had been illicit, was it more illicit than that of the woman who enters into a loveless marriage, induced to such action by a sordid consideration of worldly goods and gear? Was her sin in bearing a child out of wedlock more terrible than that of the married woman who shudders at the responsibilities of motherhood, or evades the travail of ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... could scarcely hear. But all at once to leave me at the last, More at the wonder than the loss aghast, With huddled, unintelligible phrase, And frighten'd eye, And go your journey of all days With not one kiss, or a good-bye, And the only loveless look the look with which you pass'd: 'Twas all unlike your great and ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... clear down to the end of her loveless life, and saw the neighbors coming virtuously to perform the last rites, and wondered why it all had to be. She was unaware of all her years of sacrifice, glorious patience, loving toil. Her life seemed to have been so ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... you behold Yourself grown old, These words shall speak your spirits moody: "Unhappy one! What heaps of fun I've missed by being goody-goody! Oh, that I might have felt the hunger Of loveless age when I ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... world's delight; Keep the waters in thy sight. Love hath made me strong to go, For thy sake, to realms below, Where the water's shine and hum Through the darkness never come: Let, I pray, one thought of me Spring, a little well, in thee; Lest thy loveless soul be found Like a dry and ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... sketch born to poverty, but he also inherited a deformity which made him the butt of ridicule among his vulgar companions. His childhood was made up of neglect which developed a cold, distant nature. He is generally described as a loveless old man, but his biographers seem to forget the influences that surrounded his childhood. Such were the opportunities enjoyed by Girard; such the chance offered to him, but he held that a man's best capital was "industry," and this seemed to ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... arraigned in secret by the tears of the feeble and oppressed! The sighs which he has pressed out, the plaints which he has generated, cry up to heaven against him, and their echo clangs horrid from heaven down again upon the life of the loveless and revengeful.... And can we sleep in peace another hour, as long as there are men upon the earth with whom we live in unpeace and enmity? Cannot be written the happiness, the inward bliss of the peaceful and peace-making. Revenge, indeed, seems ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... said upon the subject, and the most profound respect and loving sympathy for those heroic women, who, in the face of law and public sentiment, have dared to sunder the unholy ties of a joyless, loveless union. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... this class and even added one of them to his traveling companions. The parables of the lost coin, lost sheep, and prodigal son were spoken in reply to the slur, "This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them" (Luke 15). The elder brother of the prodigal pictures this loveless and censorious religion. ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... which fills the place of love, and even of regard, by the domestic hearth of most of the commercial houses of Paris, had set to work with all her superior and active intelligence, to make the fortune they hoped for. And so her life had flowed on, uniform, peaceful and respectable, but loveless. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... to be. The young man talked of life here, not hereafter; he showed how a man may live in this world and yet live a lost life; have gold and lands, and yet lose all love and hope and peace and manhood. He pictured the man who gains wealth and grows hard and loveless, and Job thought of Andy Malden; he told of him who plunges into dissipation and drink, and lingers a wreck in the streets, and Job knew he meant Yankee Sam. Aye, he pictured a young life that grasps all the world and forgets right and God and mother's ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... ruin, and the wreck of chivalry To her proud soul no common fear can bring; Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord, the King, Her soul aflame with passionate ecstasy. O, hair of gold! O, crimson lips! O, face Made for the luring and the love of man! With thee I do forget the toil and stress, The loveless road that knows no resting place, Time's straitened pulse, the soul's dread weariness, My freedom, and my ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... garret in Fifty-four, To welcome Fifty-five. 'God knows,' said he, 'if another year Will find this man alive. I was born for love, I live in song, Yet loveless and songless I'm passing along, And the world?—Hurrah! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... you; and I scarcely thought you would have let it pass without a thought. Nay, I need not wish its darkness to lie on you for ever either; but, Antoine, remember you are all I have left. In my silent, lonely life, and this dull house—and I always a reserved and seeming loveless man—you may well pine for something more, some lighter, gayer time, and ever brood over the means to find it. But remember, my son, that you are by birth above the paltry pleasures of the herd; that you can come to me and ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... flattery and a feigned indifference. Lady Lambert, who is eagerly expecting her husband to be proclaimed King, and is assuming the state and title of royalty to the anger of Cromwell's widow, falls in love with a cavalier, Loveless. Her friend, Lady Desbro', a thorough loyalist at heart, though wedded to an old parliamentarian, has long been enamoured of Freeman, the cavalier's companion. Lambert surprises Loveless and Freeman with his wife and Lady Desbro', but Lady Lambert pretending they have come to petition ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... way of escape from his troubles. For if Lesley accepted Maurice, and lived with him in a house opposite her father's, there would always be a corner for him at their fireside, and he would not go to the grave feeling himself a childless, loveless, ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... in the partition wall; Miss Bartlett, who had really been neither pliable nor humble nor inconsistent. She had worked like a great artist; for a time—indeed, for years—she had been meaningless, but at the end there was presented to the girl the complete picture of a cheerless, loveless world in which the young rush to destruction until they learn better—a shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good, if we may judge from those who ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... Lean, loveless, hungry lanes are these! The longest has an end. Ill luck tasted to the bitter lees Soonest shall mend. >From out the foe's ranks if Heaven please Shall ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... congenial, our aspirations identical. In pleasant and profitable companionship we can certainly indulge as heretofore, and it would greatly pain me to be deprived of it in future, but this can be ours without the sinful mockery of a marriage—for such I hold a loveless union. I feel that I must have your esteem and your society, but your love I neither desire nor ever expect to possess; for the sentiments you cherish for me are precisely similar to those which I entertain toward you. Mr. Manning, we shall always be firm friends, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... true heart sought its God through the sole formulas it knew, but spurs forward to the end, a mighty power to destroy, to do away with old corruptions and break down idols on their altars,—saint and iconoclast! Did the heart of stone within him know its ancestry,—track its hard, loveless descent from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... joyless, and girlhood lonely. That blank and desolate region, that dreary flat of fenny waste ground between Vauxhall and Battersea, on which the child's eyes had first looked, had been typical of her loveless childhood. With her mother's death faded the one ray of light that had illumined her desolation. She was shifted from one nurse to another; and bar nurses were not allowed to love her, for she remained ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... keen terror of the cry. For surely there was no sleeper there, man, woman, or child, who yelled not aloud in an agony of fear. And I knew that it could only be because of the unseen presence in their street of the outcast, the homeless, the loveless, the wanderer for ever, who had refused a stone to his maker whereon to rest his cross. Truly I know not whence else could have come that cry. And I looked to see that all the inhabitants of the village should rush out upon me, and go for to ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... hassock at his feet, and she looked up at him with strange, dumb eyes. His frail body and towering ambition, his loveless life that knew not what it missed, roused in her a pity almost maternal. A fierce resentment rose within her against herself, for not loving him as she knew a husband should be loved. If he had only won her with his heart instead ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... when it came, they caught at it wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers. They had a hard life enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing winters, labour and drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of their girlhood; a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood. But what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the glass and hot blood in the heart; ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... no need to be warned by Asher Aydelot of Hans Wyker's doings. He knew all of Wyker's movements through Rosie Gimpke. Jacobs had been kind to Rosie, whose bare, loveless life knew few kindnesses, and she harbored the memory of a good deed as her grandfather harbored his hatred. Moreover, the Wyker joint had played havoc with the Gimpke family. Her father had died ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... repeat, that I would not have her live on earth without me. But sorrow does not always kill; youth is strong, and nature works miracles. I have seen trees, struck by lightning, still stand erect and put forth new leaves. I have seen blasted lives drag their weary length to a loveless old age. I have seen noble hearts severed from their mates, slowly consumed by the weariness of widowhood and solitude. If we could die when we have lost those we love, it would be too sweet to love. Jealous of his creature, God does ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... all at once I must talk to you. You looked so little, so young, so helpless, all huddled up there by the fire. Kathrien, you've never had to think for yourself. You don't know what you are doing in going on with this blasphemous, loveless marriage. Why, dear, you are making the most terrible mistake possible to a woman. Marriage with love is often a tragedy. Without love it is a hell. A horror that will deepen and grow ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the windows and locking the door. On the whole, it was not so bad as he expected; at least, there was less violence and more despair. She covered her face with her hands, and writhed in anguish, when she said that she had utterly degraded herself by this loveless marriage. She scarcely mentioned her husband. She made no complaint of him, and even spoke of him as generous. It seemed as if this made it worse, and as if she would be happier if she could expend herself in hating him. She spoke of him rather as a mere witness to some shame for ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... was as great a sceptic as you about the evidences thereof, and having held twenty times that Jacob's serving fourteen years for Rachel was not too long by fourteen days, I was not a likely person (with my loathing dread of marriage as a loveless state, and absolute contentment with single life as the alternative to the great majorities of marriages), I was not likely to accept a feeling not genuine, though from the hand of Apollo himself, crowned with his various godships. Especially too, in my position, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... thou do? how shalt thou bear The cruel world, the sickening still despair, The mocking, curious faces bent on thee, When thou hast known what love there is in me? O happy only, if thou couldst forget, And live unholpen, lonely, loveless yet, But untormented through the little span That on the earth ye call the life of man. Alas! that thou, too fair a thing to die, Shouldst so be born to double misery! "Farewell! though I, a god, can never know How thou canst lose thy pain, yet time will go Over thine head, and thou mayst mingle ...
— The Earthly Paradise - A Poem • William Morris
... light for the first time on his black, loveless face. "What is it?" he enunciated distinctly, looking at ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... didn't think that matters could be settled by such arrangements. It's sane, I know, it's comfortable and kindly. But I thought—Oh! I thought of different things, quite different things from all this. I thought of you who are so beautiful caught in a loveless passionless world. I thought of the things there might be for you, the beautiful and wonderful things of which you are deprived.... Never mind what I thought! Never mind! You've made your choice. But I thought ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... hence, O Night, your wasted hours, You bring me not my Life's Delight, My Star of Stars, my Flower of Flowers! You leave me loveless and forlorn, Pass on, most false and futile night, Pass on, and perish ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... but because she is representative of some millions of women in business, and because, in a vague but undiscouraged way, she keeps on inquiring what women in business can do to make human their existence of loveless routine. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... retired professor, more than sixty years old, childless, loveless, stranded in a lonely study strewed with wrecks of the world's thought, his work in life finished, his one literary venture gone down with all it held, with nobody to care for him but accidental acquaintances, moved gently to the side of the bed and looked upon the pallid, ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... expected—without contemplating beforehand the money she would put into his hand for the work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings," turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman and priest. We trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth, her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for La Rochefoucauld, the final shattering of all her illusions; and when at last, tired of the world, she bows her beautiful head in penitent prayer, we too love and forgive her, as others have done. Were ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... account as well as work on his own account—to oppress and overreach for his own ends as well as to be honest and benevolent for his own ends, for he will find ill-doing far easier, and more natural, in one sense, and a plan that brings in quicker profits, than well-doing; and so this godless, loveless, every-man-for- himself nation, or sham nation rather, this joint-stock company, in which fools expect that universal selfishness will do the work of universal benevolence, will quarrel and break up, crumble to dust again, as Babel ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... grown As gray as the snows around him sown. He hovers over a fire of pine, Spicy and cheering; toward the line Of the towering peaks he lifts his eyes. "I'd rather have a boy with shining hair, To bear my name, than all your share Of earth's red gold," he said; And died, a loveless, childless man, Before the ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... of course, but no stockings. They think it quite effeminate to sleep under a roof, except during the severest months of the year. There is a married daughter across the river, just the same hard, loveless, moral, hard-working being as her mother. Each morning, soon after seven, when I have swept the cabin, the family come in for "worship." Chalmers "wales" a psalm, in every sense of the word wail, to the most doleful of dismal tunes; they read a chapter round, and he prays. If his prayer has ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... out, the naked truth; her loveless marriage, the great kindness of her husband towards her, her determination bred of idleness and vanity to enslave Michael anew when he came to Rome, his resistance, his decision to leave Italy, her inveigling him under plea of urgency ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... egotism! Its name, he thought, was surely Ostermore. And again, as once before, under the like circumstances, he found more pity than scorn awaking in his heart. The whole wasted, sterile life that lay behind this man; the unhappy, loveless home that stood about him now in his declining years were the fruits he had garnered from that consuming love of self with which the ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... report, on which his heart was set, the will to live deserted Dudley Norton. To drop in harness was, as he had said to Quita, a kinder fate than the dismal disintegration of a loveless old age; and the loosening of his grip on life brought reaction sharp and sudden, from which he ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... sin. She'd better driven him to suicide, than condemned him to live a lie to the end of his days. No doubt she regarded it as a momentary act of expiation. That's the way her romances taught her to look at loveless marriage—as something spectacular, transitory, instead of the enduring, degrading squalor that ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... was ever more lonely or loveless than the ill-starred and ill-favoured Queen Mary. She had no near relatives in England except Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, by the irony of fate, was worse than a stranger to her. The awful solitude of a throne excluded her, even more than her own ill-health and brooding temper, from the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... and pride. And curiously enough, his last words caused a look of jealousy to pass across the face of the Captain. This look, unnoticed by the Count, and speedily repressed, came to me as a revelation. It seemed to betray a bitter envy of the Count's mere loveless and unloved right of possession; and it bespoke the resolve that, if the Captain might not have her smiles, not even her husband might be content in his rights. Such men will give a woman to death ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... but unloving?—Nay the world's too sweet That we the ghost of such a pain should meet— Behold, she goes, and he too, turning round, Remembers that his love must yet be found, That he is King and loveless in this story Wrought long ago for some dead ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... secret chagrin of an old maid who sees pass by in useless monotony her dark, loveless, despairing days, without hope even of some event of personal interest, while about her moves the busy whirl of happier creatures whose life has but one goal, who feel emotions and tendernesses, and who look upon her simply as an obscure accessory in the household's ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... young, my dear Count. Loveless marriages make old men and women of youths and maidens. I remember thinking that remark out for myself after a great deal of effort, and you may remember that I sprung it with considerable effect on the cabinet ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... least, I thought him the very perfection of manly strength and beauty and goodness. True, it was the mature, warm beauty of the Indian summer, for he was more than middle-aged; but it was very genial to the chilly, loveless morning of my own early life," said Marah, dropping her head upon her hand and sliding ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... it, would disgust him with my advice. Had it been different when I first came here, I might now be a better man. I was an orphan, came here from the North, had no soul in this vast city to love or care for me, and for five years I have lived here loveless and lonely, save when with those companions which a friendless being is almost sure to fall in with here; and I can turn to no one, feeling that they ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... no terror, for the decay of Miss Amelia seemed as utterly remote and detached from her own life as one of the past ages in history. The youth in her brain created a radiant illusion of immortality. By no stretch of imagination could she picture herself like the infirm and loveless creature before her. Yet she knew, without realizing it, that Miss Amelia had once been young, that she had once even been beautiful. There was a legend, fading now into tradition, that her lover had been killed in a duel, fought for her while she was still a girl, and that she ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Radziwill, whom he was so determined to marry that he offered his father to abandon his rights of succession to the throne on her account. This King Frederick-William would not permit, and William was compelled to wed Goethe's pupil, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar. A loveless match in every sense of the word, for he remained until the day of Princess Elize's death her most devoted friend and admirer, seeking her advice in many a difficulty, to the great annoyance of Prince Bismarck, who detested her, and after her death the old emperor continued to show the utmost ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... to you, as it will come,—for no woman with your eyes and your mouth ever yet lived a loveless life!—never forget that it is the biggest thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift. Don't let any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence you, nor the tittle-tattle of other folks, and even ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... divorce, she answered gently, "My husband is the noblest man in the world. Should I separate from him who has no one but me to love him? Am I to tell him that I hate him, I who owe everything to him, and who brought him no dowry but a loveless heart?" ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Philip Dunboyne's letters; and Miss Helena was to say nothing of that unlucky slip of the tongue, relating to her mother, which she had discovered to be a serious act of self-betrayal—thanks to my confusion at the time. If I had not thought of Eunice, and of the desolate and loveless life to which the poor girl was so patiently resigned, I should have refused to ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... early—just to a good man. It would not have been necessary for her to have loved him—not with passion—only to have relied upon him. Some one to trust, she craved for, more than some one to love; yet she allowed that a loveless marriage is a mock marriage. She did not regret the loss of her conventional faith, but she wished she could join the congregation just for the human fellowship. She felt the need of union, of some central station, a centre of peace, unlike the church, the house of disunion. Without ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... and twice they had been wrested from his arms; these things, it was plain, were not for him. He was too old, he told himself, ever to make a further effort. No, there was nothing before him now but to live out his loveless life alone, to sink into a peevish, selfish old bachelor, and to make a will in Maurice's favour, and get himself out of the world that wanted him not with as much expedition as ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... and then a glance at her face, and sighed. He gathered from it the conviction that she would be a cruel step-mother to his children, her mercy that of a loveless non-collector. It should not be. He would do better for them than that. He loved his daughter, but needed not therefore sacrifice his last hopes where the sacrifice would meet with no acceptance. House ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... tour, especially very many here in Leipzig, where I inform you of this, in order—that you may in future change your disposition, and not act so uncharitably towards others. Another bad, bad trick, and you are done for! Do you understand me, you little man, you loveless and partial dog of a critic, you musical snarler [Schnurrbart], you Berlin ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks |
