"Routine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which he obtained the honour of knighthood from the hands of our present gracious sovereign, then Prince Regent, always appeared to me to differ in some material circumstances from the ordinary routine of court etiquette, and rather to resemble one of those amusing and instructive narratives denominated fairy tales. But on this delicate subject perhaps the safest course is to suffer the reader to judge for himself: so without further circumlocution, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... shirt-fronts and hard bored eyes emerging from dim billows of fur and velvet. She seemed to hear what the couples were saying to each other, she pictured the drawing-rooms, restaurants, dance-halls they were hastening to, the breathless routine that was hurrying them along, as Time, the old vacuum-cleaner, swept them away with the dust of their carriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... The routine of Jerry's new life shaped into pleasant ways. She felt more like Jerry Travis and less like a dream-creature living in a golden world she had brought around her by wishing on a wishing-rock. She could not have found a moment in which to be homesick; twice a week she wrote back to Sweetheart ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... the table. The guests were curious to know how the King took the news. "The King writes just as he always does," said Lord George, "except that I observe he has omitted to mark the hour and the minute of his writing with his usual precision." It needed a heavy shock to disturb the routine of George III. The King hoped no one would think that the bad news "makes the smallest alteration in those principles of my conduct which have directed me in past time." Lesser men might change in the face of evils; George III was resolved to be changeless and never, never, to yield to the ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... down, but for the outside clamour of events, into very quiet routine. Her two years' life in London was melting away into a dream; only Dick and her love for Dick stood out with any intensity, and since Dick made no sign to her, held out no hand, she tried as much as possible to shut him from her ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... meanwhile, Jones sat kicking his heels. It was in the morning, and always in the morning Jones was invisibly at work. Now, his routine upset, loathingly he kicked his heels. But Jones had ways of consoling ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... trembling girl in her simple pink frock, her face hidden in her hands, and the sunlight bringing out lines of gold in her fair hair. So it ended—his month-old romance. To-day he must go back to the old dull routine that makes up the sum of a sailor's life, and this brief madness must be but a ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... great majority are as Martian as the majority of their congregations. The average clergyman is an official who makes his living by christening babies, marrying adults, conducting a ritual, and making the best he can (when he has any conscience about it) of a certain routine of school superintendence, district visiting, and organization of almsgiving, which does not necessarily touch Christianity at any point except the point of the tongue. The exceptional or religious clergyman may be an ardent Pauline salvationist, in which case ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... general submission. Be that as it may, Bonaparte immediately seized the pretext, or the motive that was given him to banish me, and I was apprized by one of my friends, that a gendarme would be with me in a few days with an order for me to depart. One has no idea, in countries where routine at least secures individuals from any act of injustice, of the terror which the sudden news of arbitrary acts of this nature inspires. It is besides extremely easy to shake me; my imagination more readily lays hold of trouble than hope, and although I have ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... consummating his designs and delivering the republic into the hands of its enemies. If a portion of the press circulate information calculated to aid the foe in the defeat of the national armies, to endeavor to prevent this evil by the slow routine of civil law, might result in the destruction of the state. The fact that we raise armies to secure obedience commonly enforced by the ordinary civil officers is a virtual and actual acknowledgment that ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to which the foregoing state of things refers, the Established Church has had an awakening which has taken a real hold upon and has been influenced by the laity, and has recognised that it has a mission to the people rather than an official routine, facts which are not without significance in their bearing upon what follows with regard to the town of Royston, and the relative positions of the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... the surgeon briefly, and stood with mouth agape. Never had the disciplined Wolverines performed a sea duty with so ragged a routine as the getting in of the boat containing the live man and the dead body. The dead seaman was reverently disposed and covered. As to the survivor there was some hesitancy on the part of the captain, who was inclined to send him forward until Dr. Trendon, after a swift scrutiny, ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the daily routine on board these ships may serve to amuse those who have never crossed the Atlantic, and may recall agreeable or disagreeable recollections, as the case may be, to those ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... They drove over to Minneapolis again and took in the wonderful flour mills, for anything that pertained to machinery fascinated Skinner. Then they went out to the Lake and had a trout dinner and all the rest of it. But after a time, this unaccountably useless routine ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... home, tapping briskly at her typewriter in the mornings and giving her afternoons and evenings to the old innocuous routine, and it was said of her that she had changed and gotten citified, of course, but seemed very much interested in everything and everybody, and many were the placid hours in the pink nursery, the drives with the Edward R. Hunters in the new ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... said. Relief replaced in some measure his earlier uneasiness. "Which means that they're Terran, and can be dealt with according to Reclamations routine. Is ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... a sleep on Mrs. Pinks's sofa, as was his custom in his study—little study, alas, went on there!—but he had a call to make, and must rouse himself, and that was partly why he had sought the inn. For Mrs. Ramshorn's household was so well ordered that nothing was to be had out of the usual routine. It was like an American country inn, where, if you arrive after supper, you will most likely have to starve till next morning. Her servants, in fact, were her masters, and she dared not go into her own kitchen for ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... apprentice to a merchant, with whom he spent the next six years at Paris, whence he returned to Florence with an inveterate repugnance to commerce. His father then proposed to make a canonist of him; but the study of Gratian proved hardly more congenial than the routine of the counting-house to the lad, who had already evinced a taste for letters; and a sojourn at Naples, where under the regime of the enlightened King Robert there were coteries of learned men, and even Greek was not altogether unknown, decided his future career. According ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... before he became proconsul, he has arrived at the conclusion that it might have amounted to twelve or thirteen years. Nothing, however, can be more unsatisfactory than the process by which he has reached this result. According to the usual routine, an individual advanced to the consulate became, in a number of years afterwards, a proconsul; and yet, as everything depended on the will of the emperor, it was impossible to tell how long he might have to wait for the ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... apparent that the ideas of his colleagues and himself differed too widely to permit united action. They were thinking of the commonplace routine of school instruction,—reading, writing, arithmetic, and the like. He looked to education as the regenerating agent of the world,—that agent without the aid of which liberty runs into license, and the rule of the many, as he had witnessed it in terror-stricken France, may ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... has steadily persisted in a course of life which has subjected her constantly to a long series of indignities, apparently preferring a wild, careless, lawless and scandalous Bohemianism to the sober routine and conventional demands of a modern lady's ordinary existence. Her last 'adventure' occurred some few weeks since at a Broadway hotel, from which she was expelled at a very short notice by the proprietors in presence of a number of the guests. It is presumed that at present she is almost ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... and of any indiscreet zeal. The great Religious Orders knew how to deal with life, and it was safer to have an enthusiasm for an Order than for an individual. Seculars were the right people for daily routine and work among the poor, but for a young secular priest to become a bright, particular ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... to encourage me in my work, and to cheer me in every respect, since an entire sympathy subsists between us, as you know; we seem to require no addition, and our lives revolve in the most inflexible routine possible. I rise at half-past five, and work seriously till half-past nine; then dress for dejeuner at ten. I commonly walk half-an-hour afterwards, and then set to on some other study—usually of late in the German ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... (I am off hard on the road to Borgo, drooping with the heat, but still going strongly), you may say that is explicable enough. First a thing is useful, you say, then it has to become routine; then the habit, being a habit, gets a sacred idea attached to it. So with bridges: e.g. Pontifex; Dervorguilla, our Ballici saint that built a bridge; the devil that will hinder the building of bridges; cf. the Porphyry Bridge in the Malay cosmogony; Amershickel, Brueckengebildung im kult-Historischer. ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... time of his appointment as engineer at the Killingworth Pit, George Stephenson was in a measure relieved from the daily routine of manual labour, having, as we have seen, advanced himself to the grade of a higher class workman. But he had not ceased to be a worker, though he employed his industry in a different way. It might, indeed, be inferred that he had now the command of greater ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... rough memorandum-book, kept by the bottle-boy, or, in his absence, by the housemaid, I stood aghast. The morning's entries looked already like a sample page of the Post Office directory. The new calls alone were more than equal to an ordinary day's work, and the routine visits remained to be added. Gloomily wondering whether the Black Death had made a sudden reappearance in England, I hurried to the dining-room and made a hasty breakfast, interrupted at intervals by the apparition of the bottle-boy to announce ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... In the daily routine of private life none in the household were more punctual and regular than Mr. Gladstone. At 8 o'clock he was up and in his study. From 1842 he always found time, with all his manifold duties, to go to church regularly, rain or shine, every morning except when ill, at half-past 8 o'clock, He walked ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... unique picture in the tangled heap of life, and because it invested this picture with the clearest outlines and the most vivid colours. Thus the new world dawns on humanity with [p.171] fascinating power, rousing it out of the sluggishness of daily routine, binding it through a corporate aim, raising inspiring ardour through radiant promises and terrible threats, and creating achievements otherwise impossible. This prepared road into the kingdom of the ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... discover, to his great joy, that in this suspicion he deeply wronged this most undaunted army; for the cause of this agitation and uneasiness simply was that the hour of dinner was at hand, and it would almost have broken the hearts of these regular Dutch warriors to have broken in upon the invariable routine of their habits. Besides, it was an established rule among our ancestors always to fight upon a full stomach, and to this may be doubtless attributed the circumstance that they came to be ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... and reason came back to him he was like a new being. Happiness gave wings to his feet and he walked on air. A divine song seemed to be singing in his ears. Mechanically, he went through the regular routine of school, with no difference that others could see. To himself, heart and soul—detached and divorced from his body—seemed soaring in a new and beautiful world in which lessons and teachers had no place, no part. Whenever it was possible for him to do ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... disturbers of the church, passing by the act of "presentation" as an obstacle too formidable to be separately attacked on its own account, made their stand upon one of the two acts which lie next in succession. It is the regular routine, that the presbytery, having been warned of the patron's appointment, and having "received" (in technical language) the presentee—that is, having formally recognised him in that character—next appoint a day on which he is to preach before the congregation. This sermon, together ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... remain there, to face the future and work it out alone; he persuaded himself to feel that this was his paramount duty to the State, to the memory of the dead. But those very years of army life made such a task impossible; the dull, dead monotony of routine, the loneliness, the slowness of results, became intolerable. As it came to thousands of his comrades, the call of the West came to him, and at last he yielded, and drifted toward the frontier. The life ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... night, and very early on Saturday were settled down into the old routine. But how different everything is! At church tearful, clouded faces; at home, warmhearted friends looking upon us as for the last time. It is all right. I would not venture to change it if I could; but it is hard. At times ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... their horses meantime snatching at the young green boughs as they sauntered lazily on; and Du Meresq, who had travelled in all sorts of strange out-of-the way places, described weirder scenes in other lands, and pictured a fuller, more vivid life than she in her routine existence ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... months, and there was little to break the monotony except one or two changes of trench areas and the interspersal, now and then of raids carried out either by ourselves or the enemy. Raids had now become part and parcel almost of trench warfare routine. The Divisional Commander's wishes were that they should be carried out frequently, and he was strongly supported by General Carey, who insisted on each Battalion preparing a scheme for a raid, either large or small, as soon as it took over the line, so that no time should ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... kitchen knows her. Neat, clean, honest, capable, happy in her work, resisting all the temptations that come through loneliness and deadly routine, she clings ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... must have a proportionate body of counter evidence to establish a different mode of generation. At all events, Mr. WEEKES'S protracted gestation of 166 days by his galvanic battery is not likely, in the existing rage for despatch, to supersede the existing routine ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... a livelihood, but the old enthusiasm was gone never to return. Fortunately for himself and for the world, however, he transferred it to the perfecting of his invention, and devoted all the time he could steal from the daily routine of his duties to ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... white-faced, clean-shaven, grizzly-haired fellow of fifty. He was still suffering from this sudden disturbance of the quiet routine of his life. His plump face was twitching with his nervousness, and his ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the day, hour, and minute of filing the despatch, its destination, address, length, and amount paid. When I received the response I found a statement of the exact time it was filed for transmission, and also of its reception at Krasnoyarsk. This is the ordinary routine of the Russian telegraph system. I commend it to the notice of interested persons ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... quietly into a room beneath, where there are generally some mild prints to be turned over, some mild coffee to drink, some mild conversation about mild things in general; and then the party remount the stairs, and mildly listen to more mild music. This is the common routine of a classical pianoforte soiree. The beneficiaire is a fashionable teacher, and, in a small way, a composer. He gives, every season, a series, perhaps two or three series, of classic evenings. The pupils and their families form the majority of the audience, interspersed with a few pianoforte amateurs, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... may be mischievous enough to upset the whole routine of garrison life. You have read something about the Mexican rebels, ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Lieutenants - or, Serving Old Glory as Line Officers • H. Irving Hancock
... was an effective shelter for the horses and in which they kept dry and comfortable through the winter—which was a cold and stormy one. All the men worked hard, and we soon had the stable finished, and the horses housed. Thus our building work was done, and we settled into the regular routine of ...
— From the Rapidan to Richmond and the Spottsylvania Campaign - A Sketch in Personal Narration of the Scenes a Soldier Saw • William Meade Dame
... is worthy of more consideration is that in being vaccinated a child is apt to contract some infectious disease such as tuberculosis or syphilis which are the two most dreaded. Now so long as arm-to-arm vaccination was the routine practice, there was a remote probability that this sort of accident might occur. It appears to be true that a few accidents of this kind have occurred, just as a few arms have become septic or had erysipelas ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... time the body lay across the threshold without a sign of life. The buzz of the roulette-wheel was resumed and the crap- dealer began his monotonous routine. Every eye was fixed on the nonchalant man at the bar, but the unconscious creature outside the threshold lay unheeded, for in these men's code it behooves the most humane to practise a certain aloofness in the matter ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... that marriage? Why should he speak to me thus? The air was enough—the calm sleep of the winds—the fragrance. I was a girl again, till his quiet taunt awoke me. Does he think that I have lost a thought or a feeling because of this dull heavy routine of cares? Why did he speak to me in that cold tone? I have not deserved it. Heaven knows I have not deserved it from him, or from any ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... her tears. "What a fool I am making of myself!" she said. "The fact is, John, I am only a little nervous. You mustn't mind it. You know," she said, laughing, "we old maids are like cats,—we find it hard to be put out of our old routine. I dare say we shall all of us be happier in the end for this, and I shall try to do all I can to make it so. Perhaps, John, I'd better take that little house of mine on Elm Street, and set up my tent in it, and take all the old furniture and old pictures, and old-time ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... influences as arise from habit are powerful and cannot be ignored. The fact must be recognized that it will be difficult to change immediately the usages to which the mass of men have been accustomed. In daily life we are in the habit of eating, sleeping, and following the routine of our existence at certain periods of the day. We are familiar with the numbers of the hours by which these periods are known, and, doubtless, there will be many who will see little reason in any attempt ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... settling down into what became its normal routine. The Cabinet was completed by the appointment of Jefferson as Secretary of State and Edmund Randolph as Attorney-General. Jefferson would have preferred to go back to France as American Minister, but in a fulsome letter he declared himself willing to accept any ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Lilla, of course, felt lonely in the absence of her cousin, but the even tenor of life went on for her as for others. After the first shock of parting was over, things went back to their accustomed routine. In one respect, however, there was a marked difference. So long as home conditions had remained unchanged, Lilla was content to put ambition far from her, and to settle down to the life which had been hers as long as she could remember. ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... a-gypsying for a fortnight among the mountains or beside the sea. You see their white tents gleaming from the pine-groves around the little lakes, and catch glimpses of their bathing-clothes drying in the sun on the wiry grass that fringes the sand-dunes. Happy fugitives from the bondage of routine! They have found out that a long journey is not necessary to a good vacation. You may reach the Forest of Arden in a buckboard. The Fortunate Isles are within sailing distance in a dory. And a voyage on the river Pactolus is open to any one who ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... July 1767, Chatterton was transferred to the office of John Lambert, attorney, to whom he was bound apprentice as a clerk. There he was left much alone; and after fulfilling the routine duties devolving on him, he found leisure for his own favourite pursuits. An ancient stone bridge on the Avon, built in the reign of Henry II., and altered by many later additions into a singularly picturesque but inconvenient thoroughfare, had been displaced by a structure better adapted ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... another class of poems,—Visions. The first is the 'Palace of Art,' or a fine house, in which the poet dreams that he sees a very fine collection of well-known pictures. An ordinary versifier would, no doubt, have followed the old routine, and dully described himself as walking into the Louvre, or Buckingham Palace, and there seeing certain masterpieces of painting:—a true poet dreams it. We have not room to hang many of these chefs-d'oeuvre, but for a few we must ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... hotel there was now a good deal of foolish drinking; foolish, because in this climate it is very bad for the human system, and in these surroundings of much interest and excitement the relief of its exaltation from monotony or ennui or routine could hardly be required. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... witness box, the anxious and hopeless looks of the prisoner were manifest to all. But the girl, whose name, she said, was Bessy Gillies, answered in so flippant and fearless a way that the auditors were much amused. After a number of routine questions, the depute-advocate asked her if she was at home on the morning of the fifth of September last, when ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... have a rather stormier session than in the morning. Mrs. Grandon has a vague suspicion that Eugene will come out of this much worsted. He will spend his money and there will be nothing left. The young man is in a curious mood. He is well aware that he never can or will confine himself to business routine, that he is the product of the nineteenth-century civilization, termed a gentleman, rather useless, it ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... snatched from our caress, So suddenly withdrawn, Alone are we and comfortless; As in a dome of emptiness The old routine goes on, Aimless, since ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... and would not reassemble until eight o'clock in the evening. Some clerks only or officers of the court remained, who were too much harassed by applications for various forms and papers connected with the routine of public business, and by other official duties which required signatures or attestations, to find much leisure for answering individual questions. Some, however, listened with a marked air of attention to my earnest request for the circumstantial details ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... but with the thought of the living present. Paris, their friends, their families, their professions, all seemed to be forgotten, or completely over-shadowed by the habitual daily routine of marches and halts, duties and drudgery. They were no longer a great painter and a brilliant barrister. They were two soldiers; two atoms of that formidable machine which shall conquer the German; they were as two ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... soul of Islam. This is what Mohammed felt and now declared to be of infinite moment, that idols and formulas were nothing; that the jargon of argumentative Greek sects, the vague traditions of Jews, the stupid routine of Arab idolatry were a mockery and a delusion; that there is but one God; that we must let idols alone and look to Him. He alone is reality; He made us and sustains us. Our whole strength lies in submission to Him. The thing He sends us, be it death even, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... dead, continuing to keep up their spirits until the announcement of tea turned their thoughts into a new channel. By the time all the rich pies, cakes, and preserves were eaten, their feelings seemed to have subsided into their accustomed everyday routine. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... were some favouring conditions, the importance of which our studies of the human problems already discussed will have made my readers realise. Isolated, the Irish farmer is conservative, sceptical of innovations, a believer in routine and tradition. In union with his fellows, he is progressive, open to ideas, and wonderfully keen at grasping the essential features of any new proposal for his advancement. He was, then, himself eminently a subject for co-operative treatment, and his circumstances were equally so. The smallness ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... feeding the gold-fish in the small square glass tank—a tiny fountain in the centre of which it pleased him to set playing—and later carefully examining the ferns and other pot-plants in search of green-fly, scale, or blight. But to-day the innocent routine of his life was rudely broken up. He had no heart for his accustomed tidy potterings, but lingered aimlessly, fingering the gold watch-chain strained across the convex surface of his waistcoat, sand looking pitifully enough between the lace curtains ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... to use a nautical expression, we had repaired damages, and we began to fall into the usual routine of scholastic business: but it was full a week before our master made his appearance in the school-room, and he did so then with a green shade over his eyes, to conceal the green shades under them. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... was sure to succeed. And he accepted the responsibilities of success, and determined to make the best he could of his life. From his first start, he had thrown his heart into his business, and common figures, and dull routine, were to his mind invested with a power which could help him in his pursuit,—not the mere pursuit of making money, but of being something. Before a twelvemonth had passed, he had made himself master of every detail in his business; at the end of his second year, he was so invaluable ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... remain very long in the mixing department. My head for figures soon earned me a place in the office. Much of it was routine work. Four times every year we had to send out the notices that owing to the increased cost of labour and materials we were reluctantly compelled to increase our prices 22-1/2 per cent. We made it 22-1/2 per cent. with the happy ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... finally settled down into a quiet monotonous routine of eating, smoking, watching the barometer, and sleeping twelve hours a day. The gale with which we were favoured two weeks ago afforded a pleasant thrill of temporary excitement and a valuable topic of conversation; but we have all come to coincide ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the routine work of complying with the provisions of the copyright laws is usually in the hands of one clerk, who is responsible for the preparation and filing of the necessary documents at the proper time and for keeping a complete record of all that he does. ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... taking, worry over myself that I was so intent upon casting off all my obligations and postponing them, and repudiating my wage-earning lot, by which I was destined to be held fast in the slow wheelwork of office routine. ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... and logical mind foresaw. It expounds a principle founded upon exact facts faithfully stated. His entire work, in embryo, can be seen between the lines of the questionnaire. This was his first attempt at reaction against the universal routine ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... the new age of enthusiasm for science and learning was thronging in his veins—FRANCOIS RABELAIS. Born about 1490 or 1495, at Chinon, in Touraine, of parents in a modest station, he received his education in the village of Seuille and at the convent of La Baumette. He revolted against the routine of the schools, and longed for some nutriment more succulent and savoury. For fifteen years he lived as a Franciscan monk in the cell and cloisters of the monastery at Fontenay-le-Comte. In books, but not those of a monastic library, he found ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... until the surrender of Vicksburg little occurred to vary the routine siege operations. Thirteen heavy cannon, from IX-inch to 32-pounders, were landed from the fleet to take their place in the siege batteries, in charge, at different points of the lines, of Lieutenant-Commander T.O. Selfridge, ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... Forrester knew, or cared to know. With the delay in Venezuela he was impatient. He wanted to close up that business and move his fleet of tenders, dredges and rafts to another coast. So, as was the official routine, he turned over the matter to Sam Caldwell, to settle it in Sam Caldwell's ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... mother had stopped him, and a second time money matters held him in a vise of steel, but the third season—he did not care to dwell upon that last summer: his conscience was ill at ease. And Edna worked like the galley slave into which operatic routine transforms the most buoyant spirit. For the first two years her letters were as regular as the mail service—and hopeful. She was getting on famously. Her cousin corroborated the accounts of plain living and high singing. ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... to institute a routine of nightwatchmen, cooks and messmen. The night-watchman's duties included periodic meteorological observations, attention to the fire in the range, and other miscellaneous duties arising between the hours ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... necessarily a life sentence; but your satisfaction in it—your acceptance of the routine of your treadmill—is chilling to the hopes of those who have waited upon your progress; and it imperils your future—as well as that hope we have in the humanities that are to be implanted in the minds of the young people you are to instruct. ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... of STRANGE[410] and Woodhouse are next, in routine, to be noticed. The catalogue of the library of the former is a great favourite of mine: the departments into which the books are divided, and the compendious descriptions of the volumes, together with the ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... much alike—always the same routine. The season commences with the reception of the grande maitresse, then comes the Schleppenkur, the Ordensfest, and after that the Emperor's birthday, with a gala opera in the evening; then the first, second, and third balls ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... of Americans live in America; and the Atlantic American, it is to be feared, often has a cautious and conventional imagination. In his routine he has lived unaware of the violent and romantic era in eruption upon his soil. Only the elk-hunter has at times returned with tales at which the other Atlantic Americans have deported themselves politely; and similarly, but for the assurances of Western readers, ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... lethe, and the men ask, 'What's the news?' as if the old were so bad. How many individuals can we count in society? how many actions? how many opinions? So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man's genius contracts itself to a very few hours. The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboschi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... not a great deal of study done that day. The young lady assistant had to point out to the new master the whole routine in which the classes were engaged when their late teacher left, and which had gone on as well as it could since. Then Master Langdon had a great many questions to ask, some relating to his new duties, and some, perhaps, implying a degree of curiosity not ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... one of the servitors to bring ashes in a brass bowl. We watched him rake them out from under the fires, shake water on them, and mix them into paste as casually as if the business were part of his regular routine. The Mahatma took the bowl from him and plastered King and me liberally with the stuff, making King look like a scabrous fanatic, and I don't doubt I looked worse, having more acreage of anatomy. Last of all he put some on himself, but only here and there, ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... The daily routine of clearing the soil, tilling the arable land, raising corn, rye, wheat, oats, and flax, of gathering iron ore from bogs and turpentine from pine trees, and in other ways of providing the means of ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... neither Dissent nor Radicalism, but general aversion to all considerations which might disturb belief in all the routine of existence, in all its temporal and spiritual aspects, as it had come amongst them. The fathers and the brothers go to the City every day at nine, the young ladies play tennis, read novels, and beg to be taken to dances at ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... occupied by Maurice Gordon and his sister. Gordon was the local head of a large trading association somewhat after the style of the old East India Company, and his duties partook more of the glory of a governor than of the routine of a trader. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... be more delightful than a visit to a third or fourth grade room in which the children were writing original poems, fables and stories! The monotony of routine English work was completely broken down; the children were enthusiastic,—enthusiastic to such a degree that they ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... the case with the whole lines of the states. It would be well for their own sakes, and for the public good, if they could be furnished. They will not be able, when our friends come to co-operate with us, to go on a common routine of duty; and if they should, they must, from their appearance, be held ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... weeks, when he had become accustomed to the routine of work which he was expected to accomplish, and being often left alone in the office, Richard Swiveller began to find time hang heavy on his hands. For the better preservation of his cheerfulness, ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... crisis and make a great virtue of a simple duty rather clumsily done. None of these eight had made any real experiments with life, they had lived in blinkers, they had been passed from nurse to governess, from governess to preparatory school, from Eton to Oxford, from Oxford to the politico-social routine. Even their vices and lapses had been according to certain conceptions of good form. They had all gone to the races surreptitiously from Eton, had all cut up to town from Oxford to see life—music-hall life—had all come to heel ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... and months and years went by unpunctuated, his life settling gradually into the routine of an unhappy calm. He neglected too much the social side of life, and rather held to his old friends than busied himself with the search for new. Battersleigh was gone, swiftly and mysteriously gone, though ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... up and about, a few were cooking late breakfasts, and some were washing. Contrary to orders, they had stripped to the waist as they bent over their little mess-tins of soapy (p. 101) water; all the boys seemed familiar with trench routine. They were deep in argument at the door of one dug-out, and almost came to blows. The row was about rations. A light-limbed youth, with sloping shoulders, had thrown a loaf away when coming up to the trenches. He said his ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... Association held a business session. The general routine of business was followed. There being no unfinished business or reports of special committees, the Association heard the reports of the officers of last year. The Director read his report and the report of the Secretary-Treasurer was presented by his assistant, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... in such a summer! The lines in his forehead looked as if they had been made with a harrow and there were times when his eyes had the expression of a hunted animal. Pacifying disgruntled guests was now as much a part of the daily routine as making out the menus. In the halcyon days when a guest had a complaint, he made it aside, delicately, as a suggestion. Now he made a point of dressing Mr. Cone down publicly. In truth, baiting the landlord seemed to be in the nature of a recreation with the guests of The Colonial. ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... with the men who sent them," he said, "Trench, Castleton, Willoughby. I met them daily in Suakin, just ordinary officers, one rather shrewd, the second quite commonplace, the third distinctly stupid. I saw them going quietly about the routine of their work. It seems quite strange to me now. There should have been some mark set upon them, setting them apart as the particular messengers of fate. But there was nothing of the kind. They were just ordinary prosaic regimental officers. Doesn't it seem strange to you, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... trades which it seems possible for a joint-stock company to carry on successfully, without an exclusive privilege, are those, of which all the operations are capable of being reduced to what is called a routine, or to such a uniformity of method as admits of little or no variation. Of this kind is, first, the banking trade; secondly, the trade of insurance from fire and from sea risk, and capture in time of war; thirdly, the trade of making and maintaining a navigable cut or canal; and, ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... turbulent life of the palace—the daily routine of quarrels and peacemaking with the King, and undisguised hostility from the Queen, through all of which Henri's heart still remained hers. "How I long to have you in my arms again," he writes, when on a hunting excursion, which had ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... happening. We came to a stop; I heard a growing murmur of voices and laughter outside, and then the click of the raised sides of the wagon. I heard Mifflin's shrill, slightly nasal voice making facetious remarks as he passed out the cards. Evidently Bock was quite accustomed to the routine, for though his tail wagged gently when the Professor began to talk, he lay quite peaceably dozing at ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... her, and, as events more exciting than the usual routine of their young lives were ahead, their tongues went a rare pace. But the only thing worth presenting to the reader came at the end, after the said business of ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... slid comfortably down a well oiled groove of routine. He went to the movies regularly, wrote as regularly to Cynthia and thought about her even more, read enormous quantities of poetry, "bulled" with his friends, attended all the athletic contests, played cards occasionally, and received his daily liquor from Vinton. ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... my baby. "Don't cry," I begged him. "Don't be mad. I'll get your Drinko back. Those dirty thieves, I'll get it back." I held him under one arm, his pants dripping. I think I looked like a Pekinese, with my hair over my eyes. I went to the 'phone, dialed Harry's number, and got the same routine. ...
— Sorry: Wrong Dimension • Ross Rocklynne
... idea is a mistaken one. Honesty of the purest kind, as honesty is usually understood, is very common. They cannot help feeling, also, that you somewhat overestimate the value of your work, which to them seems to be only a higher sort of routine, calling for no intellectual endeavor, and requiring but little more than an ordinary bookkeeper's care for its perfect performance. But for the differences that do exist between your tasks and those of the bookkeeper you will remember you are already ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... by the circle in which she lived, as a woman of great mental energy. Her conversation was animated and vigorous, and marked by a distinct originality of manner and a choice of topics fresh and striking, and out of the commonplace routine. To persons who were but slightly acquainted with her, the energy of her manner had even something of the ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... the legitimate domain of the true water-colourist. With all these pictures about us—and with Mr. Colomb's workshop fitted up with Armstrong lathes and all manner of tools wherein he varies the routine of official life by making all manner of instruments, and wreaking his ingenuity upon all kinds of inventions—and with the pleasant company of Mr. Davies, the agreeable and accomplished official secretary of Sir West Ridgway, the evening wore quickly away. ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... when Paw died. This was an unexpected and unsettling contingency. One doesn't look for a "chronic's" doing anything so unscheduled and foreign to routine; but Paw spoiled all precedent. They found him that morning with his heart quite still, and Luke knew they stood in the presence of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... had enough of the routine of a Government clerkship, and he resigned to become the receiver of a bank in Middletown, New York. Later he accepted a position as bank examiner in the eastern part of the State. But his longing to return to the soil was growing apace, and presently he bought a little farm on the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... merely to get information—that she may have an ax to grind. Both Kato and she will bear watching, and I have made arrangements to have it done. I've called on that young detective, Chase, whom I've often used for the routine work of shadowing. There's nothing more that we can do now until to-morrow, so we might as well ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... be supposed, therefore, that it was an unfortunate moment for Phil Compton's visit. Mrs. Dennistoun had scarcely seen them that day, and she was sitting by herself, somewhat sick at heart, wondering if anything would break the routine into which their life was falling; or if this was what Elinor must address herself to as its usual tenor. It would be better in the country, she said to herself. It was only in the bustle of the season, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... which had wandered off in search of grass; and having found them and driven them back to our primitive camping-place, to tie upon their backs the pack-saddles, and fasten on them the heavy tin-lined cases of scientific instruments and photographic plates. This task was only part of the day's routine, which included the writing up of my diary, the registering of observations, sketching, photographing, changing plates in cameras, occasionally developing them, surveying, cleaning of rifles, revolver, &c. &c. The effort of lifting up the heavy cases on to the ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... cottons as a rule are coarser and shorter than American cottons. The land is prepared before the breaking of the monsoon, and the planting begins after it. There is not the same care bestowed upon the cultivation of the Indian cotton, nor are such improved methods practised as in America. The ancient routine of past generations still persists, and as a consequence the yield per acre is less than one-half that of America. Moreover the acreage planted is only about two-thirds that of America. The better growths of East Indian cotton were once largely used ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... The barber, the water-seller, Pepe the waiter, Sebastian the deft were troubled about him for a week or more. He came back, and hid his wound, speaking to no one of it; and no one dared to pity him. And although he resumed his routine and was outwardly the same man, we may trace to that last stroke of Fortune the wasted splendour of his eyes, the look of a dying stag, which, once seen, haunted the observer. He was extraordinarily handsome, except for his narrow shoulders and ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... summer after the Squire's marriage fell back into its usual routine. The greatest change made there was in the residence of the attorney, who with his family went over to live at Hoppet Hall, giving up his old house to a young man from Norrington, who had become his partner, but keeping ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... figure, and big head covered with flimsy flaxen plaits. We were both aware of the smooth selfishness of her character, though Sara chose to ignore it for Jill's benefit. She was industrious, painstaking, and capable of a great deal of dull routine in the way of duties, but she was far too fond of her own comfort, and all the affection of which she was capable was lavished upon her own relatives; she had cared for Sara moderately, but her other pupil, Jill, was a thorn in her side. So I passed over ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... left, and then for two days devoted himself to a study of the conditions surrounding the murder—that and routine matters. The trunk, for instance, was duly returned by the railroad from New York, and Carroll and his friend made a minute investigation of every article contained therein. Their search was well-nigh fruitless. The trunk contained little save the wardrobe of a well-dressed man—suits, shirts, ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... sheer force of will in a mould of serenity, with her soft yellow coils of hair and her still childish figure, was charming. After that one glance at Evelyn, with her astonishing beauty, he thought no more about her. When his address was finished the usual routine of the school began. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... turned for the better. Misrule in India is met not by insurrection, but by constitutional and loyal, widely demanded Reform, such as, I feel convinced, the enlarged franchise in England will support too warmly for the old routine to resist. All the churches are seeking moral reform.... Reforms lately too great to think of, we now calmly contemplate as certainties of a near future. Lord Herschell, an ex-Chancellor, pronounces that the legislative power ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... with a firm hand the inveterate vices of Spanish administration, substituting a more simple and expeditious system of public administration for that superfluity of civil service and ponderous, tardy and ostentatious official routine, I hereby declare as ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... regardless; then coffee to keep her going. The message of the returning fainting spells was unheeded, unless answered by recklessness, for fear thoughts had come and old enmities and new ones haunted in. Routine and regimen had gone weeks before, and now a vacation had to be. She did not return to her work, but deluded herself with a series of pretenses. Before the year was gone, the imps of morbid toxins came into their own and she resorted to wines, later to alcohol in stronger ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... and among the boulders. At sunset the doors would all be closed, for then the rain and the electrical storm would return, and at night the blizzard. The storm-and-heat cycle was the deadly weather routine of the Infernos. ...
— Loot of the Void • Edwin K. Sloat
... most of far travels, to extract from adventure the last thrill, to impress the awestricken reader with a full sense of the danger and hardship the writer has undergone. Thus, if the latter takes out quite an ordinary routine permit to go into certain districts, he makes the most of travelling in "closed territory," implying that he has obtained an especial privilege, and has penetrated where few have gone before him. As a matter of fact, ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... reservations at the desk. He left his passport there to go through the standard routine, including being checked by the police, had his bag sent up to his room and, a few minutes later, hands nonchalantly in pockets, strolled along the Rue de Liberte toward the casbah area of the medina. Up from the native section of ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Dodge's daily routine was somewhat as follows: He never slept at his own hotel, but arose in the morning between ten and eleven o'clock, when he was at once visited by Bracken and supplied with numerous drinks in lieu of the breakfast for which he never had any desire. At noon ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... have breakfast in the open air it will be much cooler for every one, and Sary need not stop her routine work on account of our being in her way in the kitchen. If we help and wait on ourselves Sary need not be delayed by our tardiness ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... I go about more or less. For a while I didn't: business seemed to revive and everybody in real estate became greatly excited. But it all simmered down again to the usual routine. So I've been going about to various affairs, dances and things. And, consequently, there's peace and quiet at home for me. "Always yours, "C ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... had arranged a routine which seemed admirable. Until luncheon time, he was with Ruth and, usually, out of doors, according to prescription. In the afternoon, he went up again, sometimes staying to dinner, and, always, he ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... delusion of love's blindness is dispelled forever. I know Garth was blind, during all those golden days, to my utter lack of beauty, because he wanted ME so much. But when he had had me, and had steeped himself in all I have to give of soul and spirit beauty; when the daily routine of life began, which after all has to be lived in complexions, and with features to the fore; when he sat down to breakfast and I saw him glance at me and then look away, when I was conscious that I was sitting behind the coffee-pot, looking ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... yesterday some what late in the day with the oddness and uncomfortableness—I do not mean discomfort—which comes from too much boots, too much disturbance of one's ordinary routine, too much listening to people airing their opinions and recounting rumours, and, last of all, very wearied by the uncustomary task of transporting a terrible battery of hand artillery (for we are at last all heavily ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Werder acted under superior orders. But, sir, you must perceive that in these discretionary situations there is no such dangerous man as the innocent executant, the martinet, the person of routine, the soldier stifled in his uniform. I saw Werder after the capitulation. A little man, lean and bilious. Such was the opponent who reversed for us successively, like the premisses of an argument, the bank, the library, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... and laughter. And the same incessant life which plays upon his face shows itself in every movement of his limbs. Never for a moment is he still unless he has some work upon his hands. He has his little routine of tasks, regularly assigned, which he goes through with the most amusing good-humor and attention. It is his duty to see that the skiffs are not jammed under the wharf on the rising tide; to sweep out ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... acted liked magic, and he was soon out of the doctor's hands. In a few days' time he was downstairs; and at the end of a fortnight he had resumed his ordinary routine of life. ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... been some complaint that the experiment of meeting out cut and dried moral texts as a part of school routine has not proved to be so effective as was expected by their promulgators. The moral education which we received in our childhood was very indirect and came from listening to stories recited by the 'Kathas' ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... school system different from anything you have on your Earth. The task of the teacher is, not to teach knowledge but to assist in bringing out what is already latent in the soul, rather than a set routine, for every individual is considered a master in some line of thought and activity. The pupil is led into knowledge instead of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... strain during business hours. Each person with whom he is unacquainted that confronts him at his post is a possible robber who at any moment may attempt, either by violence or chicanery, to filch the treasure he guards. The happening of any event outside the usual routine at once arouses a cashier's distrust, and this sudden flight of a stranger with money which did not belong to him quite justified the perturbation of the cashier. From that point onward, innocence of conduct or explanation ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... occur to the reader to visit a large ship-building establishment, such as those on any one of the five rivers named above, he will see something like the following routine ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... the ordinary routine of our life at the Doctor's, according to my two years' experience, the only exception being that our meals varied, as to quantity and quality, in direct proportion to the Doctor's credit in the neighbouring town; for, I will do our preceptor the justice to state that, ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of the dramatic author may interfere," he said, after a slight hesitation, "with that of the magistrate, especially in a province where one's labours are little more than routine." ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... strange intellect is that of the animal, a mixture of mechanical routine and subtle brain-power! Does it contain gleams that contrive, wishes that pursue a definite object? Following in the wake of so many others, the Lycosa warrants us in ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... sounded calls for the routine at Fort Steele—a mere cantonment, yet, of tents and rough board buildings squatting upon the bare brown soil near the river bank, north of us, and less than a month old. The wagon road was a line of white dust from the river ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... abundantly civil to his friend; but that individual seemed to care very little whether we were civil to him or not. He talked more than all the rest of us put together— corrected Old Smith on points of law—and put me right on the routine of crops; proved to old Lambert's own satisfaction that he knew nothing of stall-feeding, and so belaboured us with great people, with their whole birth, parentage, and connexions, that we might have fancied he was Mr Debrett. Sibylla evidently believed he was the most delightful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... rich virgin soils; they are better fitted for raising vegetables, melons, sweet potatoes, small fruits, peaches, and pears than wheat, Indian corn, hay, and other staples. The eminent superiority of this kind of farming in New Jersey over the old routine of wheat, corn, hay, and potatoes is well known. These South Jersey soils are easily cleared of brushwood or standing timber, and of stumps, with a hand or horse-power puller which is a cheap affair, and the wood is salable in all this part of the State at remunerative prices, ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... they all knew, and they had long since exhausted their stock of condolence over previous discussions of their grievances. They were in something the same position as an elderly couple who have nothing left to say to each other. The routine of existence kept them in contact, but they were parts of a mechanism which wanted oil. There was not one of them but would have passed a blind man begging in the street, not one that felt moved to pity by a tale of misfortune, not one who did not see ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... visible, desirable object, even the hungry Russian workmen of to-day are capable of sudden and temporary increase of output. The "Saturdayings" (see p. 119) provide endless illustrations of this. They had something in the character of a picnic, they were novel, they were out of the routine, and the productivity of labor during a "Saturdaying" was invariably higher than on a weekday. For example, there is a shortage of paper for cigarettes. People roll cigarettes in old newspapers. It occurred to the Central Committee of the Papermakers' Union ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... from the steps, for he was hardly able to walk, the pain in his back and his right leg was intolerable. But he suddenly remembered that he had not locked the little gate into the garden that evening. He was the most punctual and precise of men, a man who adhered to an unchangeable routine, and habits that lasted for years. Limping and writhing with pain he went down the steps and towards the garden. Yes, the gate stood wide open. Mechanically he stepped into the garden. Perhaps he fancied something, perhaps caught some sound, and, glancing to the left ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... his operation was faultless—a smooth routine which admitted of no error. He smiled as he remembered his fumbling efforts with the first caravan and his halting improvements when he had dealt with the next. What were ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... used to wonder how my letters could interest Allan so much as he said they did; I could find so little to narrate. And, talking of that, it strikes me that we are not sufficiently thankful for the monotony of life. I speak advisedly; I mean for the quiet uniformity and routine of our daily existence. In our youth we quarrel a little with its sameness and regularity; it is only when the storms of sudden crises and unlooked-for troubles break over our thankful heads that we look back with regret to ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... passed quietly and once more our hero fell into his routine work. Jones was sick, so the deckhands had a little more to do than usual. Randy pitched in with vigor, much to the satisfaction of ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... looked very stern. He was naturally a good-hearted, gentlemanly, and scholarly man. He thoroughly understood the subjects he professed to teach. In fact, the ordinary routine of classic and mathematical study had, by long practice, grown so simple to him, that he was accustomed to look with astonishment upon a boy who stumbled over some of ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... of Greek. But this boy seemed all brains. His cheeks flushed, his eyes glittered, he learned as if he actually enjoyed learning. True, as Mr. Cardross soon discovered, his acquirements were not at all in the regular routine of education; he was greatly at fault in many simple things; but the amount of heterogeneous and out-of-the-way knowledge which he had gathered up, from all available sources, was quite marvelous. And, above all, to teach a boy unto whom learning seemed a pleasure ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... here sketched was the routine. But we appealed to the taste of San Francisco more distinctly in particular fetes. "Ye Olde Time Pycke-Nycke," largely advertised in hand-bills beginning "Oyez, Oyez!" and largely frequented by knights, ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... le Claire sat wild-eyed and excited, and flew fearfully to Judge Blodgett and the professor, when Mr. Brassfield went free, with Alderson at heel. And all the time, as the crew of a ship carry on the routine of drill while the torpedo is speeding for her hull, these social amenities went on all unconscious ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... middle-aged, commonplace, and very cautious general, who faithfully plodded through the war without defeat or victory. He looked so long before he leaped that he never leaped at all—not even on retreating enemies. Good for the regular office-work routine, he was like a hen with ducklings for this river war, in which Curtis, Grant, Buell, and his naval colleague Foote, were all his ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... decided rightly according to his own party, and wrongly according to the party opposite. A political leader is so sure of support and so sure of attack, that it is hardly necessary for him to be even anxious to be right. For the country's sake, he should have officials under him who know the routine of business." ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... course, but the smaller the better at first. You'll have to take charge of the men and the work and all the rest of it—I don't know anything about that. I'll attend to the incorporating and the routine, and I'll try to place the stock. You'll have to see, first of all, whether you can get contracts from the logging firms ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... the day before Senator Davis's term expired. He was soliloquizing to himself in the intervals of putting motions and attending to the routine of his office. He was very fond of Senator Isham G. Harris of Tennessee, and when he had occasion to call a senator to the chair, generally it would be Harris. He called Harris to him while I was there, and I heard him say as his friend came up: "Harris, Harris! When I get out of here I won't have ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... the origin of the bookkeeper's warmed-over wisdom—but Mitchell's duties were so simple and so constricted as to allow no opening for science, or so, at least, it seemed to him. How could he be scientific, how could he find play for genius when he sat at the end of a telephone wire and answered routine questions from a card? Every day the General Railway Sales Manager gave him a price-list of the commodities which C. & M. handled, and when an inquiry came over the 'phone all he was required, all he was permitted, to do was to read the figures and to quote time of ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... don't know much of British life yet, for I have spent nearly all my time in the States and in Canada. But I hope that to lose one of your boots is not part of the ordinary routine of life ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... careful cutting of the tree beforehand is important. It appears that to cut the top completely out while the tree is dormant, so disrupts the routine circulation that the few lower branches which are left intact, are well taken care of and, it seems to me, that this, together with the stimulation of WOUND REPAIR by cutting and allowing time enough for the cells to get into ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... Briskow's blood, so he sought a more congenial environment. He found it in the village, in a livery stable; there, amid familiar odors and surroundings both agreeable and economical, he spent most of his time, leaving Ma to amuse herself and Allie to pursue the routine of studies laid ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... of relaxation were, however, only occasional. All the rest was toil, and the routine of hard work and grave assiduity went on month after month, and year after year, with little interruption. With the exceptions which we have noted, all pleasures and distractions seemed of little interest to Lee, and to the present writer, at least, he seemed on all occasions to bear ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Oh, well! I daresay not. But one wants a change. One gets tired of the same dull routine, always. Now, Graeme," added he, as she made an incredulous gesture, "don't begin to fancy any mystery. That would be too absurd, ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... the shop looked different—the whole plant looked different—the men, the tools, the materials, the very smoke from the big chimney, all took on a kind of glory. The rows of machines looked like a parade and the mingled roar and grinding of them sounded like a brass band at a picnic. The dull routine of a daily schedule was suddenly changed to a thrilling program ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... I say, is not external, but internal. It lies in the same disconcerting apprehension of the larger realities, the same impatience with the paltry and meretricious, the same disqualification for mechanical routine and empty technic which one finds in the higher varieties of men. Even in the pursuits which, by the custom of Christendom, are especially their own, women seldom show any of that elaborately conventionalized and half automatic proficiency which is the pride and boast of most men. It ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken |
