"Aimless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mystery why one Indian should be more voluptuous, or gather more icties about him than another, when none of them have any visible assets from which to derive an income. Unless it be that the more voluptuous Indian works every day of his weary, aimless life, spends nothing, and hoards the residual balance like a miser, lives on the old man before marriage, and on his klootchman after, we are unable to arrive at a solution. No one knew by what means Johnny had acquired ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... book." A wise man in the past hath shrewdly said, Knowing full well that when one's thoughts are paged They like foul spirits menace peace of mind. Alas! 'tis so, when tongue shall like a bird Take wing, soaring aloft, and as the wind Fly aimless over mountain, hill and dale, Until tired nature doth demand repose, Why did I Roosevelt as a pattern take And boast his doctrines as the wisdom's fount From which I drank as a disciple might Who ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... while foraging appear aimless; typical behavior consists of progression with a hesitant gait of two or three hops, a stop to eat, another series of hops and another stop. Footprints made by this movement are about 12 inches apart. With occasional spurts of hopping ...
— Home Range and Movements of the Eastern Cottontail in Kansas • Donald W. Janes
... His direction was aimless—he merely raced on and on through the jungle, the joy of unfettered action his principal urge, with the hope of stumbling upon some clew to Chulk or the she, ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ages lay unexpressed in those tossing billows, sweeping in out of the black east, making low moan to the unsympathetic and unheeding sky. Deeper and deeper the spirit of unrest, of doubt, of brooding discontent, weighed down upon me as I gazed; life seemed as aimless as that constant turmoil yonder, a mere silver-tinted heaving, destined to burst in useless power on a shore of rock, and then roll back again ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... the victim of death than have her drag out an aimless, cheerless existence, rendered joyless by ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... transformation from salt to fresh water fish. I had to effect my transition in a few weeks. Catholicism, like a fairy circle, casts such a powerful spell upon one's whole life, that when one is deprived of it everything seems aimless and gloomy. I felt terribly out of my element. The whole universe seemed to me like an arid and chilly desert. With Christianity untrue, everything else appeared to me indifferent, frivolous, and undeserving of interest. The ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... think of the passion that shook my youth, Of its aimless loves and its idle pains, And am thankful now for the certain truth That ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... his actions; but he is unlike him in possessing a keener sense of status, and in working more consistently and farsightedly to a remoter end. The kinship of the two types of temperament is further shown in a proclivity to "sport" and gambling, and a relish of aimless emulation. The ideal pecuniary man also shows a curious kinship with the delinquent in one of the concomitant variations of the predatory human nature. The delinquent is very commonly of a superstitious habit of mind; he is a great believer in luck, spells, divination and destiny, and ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... those three days, aimless about the land, Lost in a doubt, Pelleas wandering Waited, until the third night brought a moon With promise of large light on woods ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... that some white young'uns had called her "raving Rose." She hoped "God'lmighty would send down two she bears and eat 'em up." Peter was amazed by the old crone's ability to maintain an unending flow of concentrated and aimless virulence. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... matters, because his thoughts are elsewhere. One who is preoccupied is intensely busy in thought; one may be absent-minded either through intense concentration or simply through inattention, with fitful and aimless ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... liberal culture; but it is a book for the world, and for men of the world, and not for the cloister merely, and the scholar. But this, too, has its differing grades of readers, from its outer court of lively pastime and brilliant aimless chat to that esoteric chamber, where the abstrusest parts of sciences are waiting for those who will accept the clues, and patiently ascend ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... any noise about the house when she lay sleeping in the forenoon. Their sense of chivalry would not have permitted it. When she arose she called them to her and patted their heads and said: 'What dear parents I have!' It might be thought that the fair Frances led an aimless and idle life. Not so. The young lady was very busy and never forgot her aim. She was preparing herself to be a marryer of men and the leading marryer in the proud city of her birth. Every member of the household ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... the little childish delights which give to first love its charm and its violence. More than once the young man and Mademoiselle de Fontaine walked, tete-a-tete, in the avenues of the garden, where nature was dressed like a woman going to a ball. More than once they had those conversations, aimless and meaningless, in which the emptiest phrases are those which cover the deepest feelings. They often admired together the setting sun and its gorgeous coloring. They gathered daisies to pull the petals off, and sang the most impassioned duets, using the notes set down by Pergolesi ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... empty and aimless before seeing her; since seeing her she felt more empty, more aimless than ever. It was an absurd impression, and she tried to shake it off with the help of a recent volume of literary criticism, but it coloured her mind as though a ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... No one thought of telling us anything about flowers and trees, which give such zest to one's aimless rambles, nor about insects, with their curious habits, nor about stones, so instructive with their fossil records. That entrancing glance through the windows of the world was refused us. Grammar was allowed ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... about the court, in her irritatingly aimless fashion, passed between Brinnaria and the edge of the tank. There was no earthly reason for her so doing, as Brinnaria was barely a yard from the margin of the pool, and on the other side of Brinnaria was the ample expanse of the pavement of ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... stone. Standing by it was a man with a large chisel in one hand and a heavy mallet in the other. As I looked he walked up to the stone and began to knock great pieces off it with chisel and mallet. I paused to watch him, my curiosity aroused to know what he was doing in his apparently aimless work. ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... in feeling; but let the believer in annihilation place before him, instead of a life of sixty years, one of sixty minutes; then let him look on the face of a beloved being, or upon a noble or wise man, as upon an aimless hour-long appearance; as a thin shadow that melts into light and leaves no trace; can he bear the thought? No! the supposition of imperishableness is always with him; else there would hang always before his soul, as before Mahomet's in the fairest sky, a dark cloud; and, as Cain upon ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... an aimless one, for he hoped to reach the schooner, lying an eighth of a mile away, far enough in advance of his pursuers to seize one of the rifles carefully concealed there, and to make defense against his foes. The instant he broke into ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... whether it is summer or but spring. Unmated yet, nor of mate solicitous, in pure joy of heart he cannot refrain from ascent and song; but the snow-clouds look cold, and ere he has mounted as high again as the church-spire, the aimless impulse dies, and he comes wavering down silently ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... grizzly dawn that looked in on Rose through the dim window of her room on Clark Street, saw Rodney letting himself in his own front door with a latch-key after hours of aimless tramping through deserted, unrecognized streets. He was in a welter of emotions he could no more have given names to than to the streets whose dreary lengths he ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... reason that we know not what else to call them. The former was begun, in his own words, "with no real idea of how it was to turn out"; its nine volumes, published at intervals from 1760 to 1767, proceeded in the most aimless way, recording the experiences of the eccentric Shandy family; and the book was never finished. Its strength lies chiefly in its brilliant style, the most remarkable of the age, and in its odd characters, like Uncle Toby ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the Acadians, in their aimless wanderings through the town, found themselves near a large brick edifice, which was fenced in from the street by an iron railing, wrought with fantastic figures. They saw a flight of red freestone steps, ascending to ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... were written by me over seventeen years since—long years—seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea to what they refer. The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin of the Speranza, and yesterday, returning to Imbros from an hour's aimless cruise, discovered ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... sparring. They feed partially by day, and their big eyes surely see more than those of most other moths, that seem small and deepset in comparison. Their legs are long, and not so hairy as is the rule. They have none of the blind, aimless, helpless appearance of moths that do not feed. They exercise violently in the pupa cases before they burst the shields, and when they emerge their eyes glow and dilate. They step with firmness and assurance, as if they knew where they wanted to go, and how to arrive. ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... am so weary of the Curse of Living The endless, aimless torture, tumult, fears. Surely, if life were any God's free giving, He, seeing His gift, long since went ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... carefully selected adults in war has not yet won the right to destroy deliberately even its most inferior vital products in the womb. A civilization guilty of so reckless a waste of life cannot safely be entrusted with this judicial function. The blind and aimless anxiety to cherish the most hopeless and degraded forms of life, even of unborn life, may well be a weakness, and since it often leads to incalculable suffering, even a crime. But as yet there is an impenetrable barrier against progress in this direction. Before ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the prudence of a man who, having been endowed with a splendid fortune of not less than twenty million dollars, spent one cent of that vast sum usefully and dissipated every other cent and every other dollar of his gigantic wealth in mere aimless extravagance? This would, however, appear to be the way in which the sun manages its affairs, if we are to suppose that all the solar heat is wasted save that minute fraction which is received by the earth. Out of every twenty million dollars' worth of heat issuing from the glorious ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... never refuses to feed travellers; they get a good tea and breakfast, and often 10 to 20 are fed in a day. These travellers lead an aimless life, wandering from station to station, hardly ever asking for and never hoping to get any work, and yet they expect the land-owners to support them. Most of them are old and feeble, and the sooner all stations stop giving them free rations the better it will be for the real ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... think of the stories he had heard of the weary traveller lost in the desert, no water with which to moisten his parching throat, his tongue swollen, black, and immovable in his mouth, with already the first signs of delirium and insanity showing in his erratic and aimless actions. He shuddered as the picture presented itself, and thanked his stars that he was seated, though a prisoner, beneath such ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... waist or a lace petticoat to the little French laundress on Powell Street, and drove a sharp bargain with her. Julia accepted the situation very cheerfully; she and her mother both enjoyed their lazy, aimless existence, and to Julia, at least, the future was full of hope. She could do any one of a dozen things that would lead to fame ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... mirror in a trembling hand; Sad, trembling lips that utter broken thought: One of a wide and wandering, aimless band; One in the world who for the ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the rolling hills like ribbons of dental cream squeezed out evenly on rich green velour. Chateaux, pearl white centres in settings of emerald green, push their turrets and bastions above the mossy plush of the mountain side. Lazy little streams silver the valleys with their aimless wanderings. ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... giants down to those of the American provincial postmaster, Benjamin Franklin, a period of some seventy years, almost all the knowledge obtained was only useful in indicating how to experiment still further. So small was the knowledge, so aimless the long experimenting, that the discovery that not amber only, but other substances as well, possessed the electric quality when rubbed, was a notable advance in knowledge. Later, in 1792, it was found by ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... the adventurers led up hill and down dale and wound here and there in a fashion that seemed aimless. But always it drew nearer to a range of low mountains and Files said more than once that he was certain the entrance to Ruggedo's cavern would be ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... perhaps an assent. The two fell briskly to work and soon made an impression on the blank iron wall. At first the American chatted of this and that, rehearsing his own aimless ramblings as men will, but presently he observed that Smith was painting away and paying no ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... nothing of Spencer. Three long days devoid of incident, hopelessly dull, aimless, and uninteresting. On the fourth the only change in the situation was scarcely a reassuring one. He became aware ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Franklin would have been repeated in fifty communities from the Alleghanies to the Pacific coast; only these little states, instead of dying in the bud, would have gone through a rank flowering period of bloody and aimless revolutions, of silly and ferocious warfare against their neighbors, and of degrading alliance with the foreigner. From these and a hundred other woes the West no less than the East was saved by the knitting together of ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... this conversation with Alaric, Charley intended to call on his esteemed old friend. Many were the morning calls he did make; many were the weary, useless, aimless walks which he took to that little street at the back of Mecklenburg Square, with the fond hope of getting some relief from Mr. M'Ruen; and many also were the calls, the return visits, as it were, which Mr. M'Ruen made at the Internal ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... being who has attained to human form and the critical issues which depend on his using it rightly are dwelt on with an earnestness not surpassed in Christian homiletics. He who acts ill as a man may fall back into the dreary cycles of inferior births, among beasts and blind aimless beings who cannot understand the truth, even if they hear it. From this point of view human life is happiness, only like every form of existence it ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... got none,' replied Davis; and wandered for some time in aimless discussion of the difficulties in their path, and useless explanations of ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... a lovely ruin thou hast made! Alas! alas! thou hast no eye to see, And blindly slew'st him in misguided shade. Would I had lent my doting sense to thee! But now I turn to thee, a willing mark, Thine arrows miss me in the aimless dark!" ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the next day when she finally found the answer to her question. She had been wandering around the drawing-room, glancing into a book here, rearranging a vase of flowers there, turning over the pile of music on the piano, striking aimless chords on ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... possibly being influenced by what he had heard of the yearly vigils Mr. Moore was in the habit of keeping there, had taken a notion to stroll among the graves, in search of the rest and peace of mind he had failed to find in his aimless walks about the city. At least, that was the way he chose to account for the meeting he mentioned. Falling into reverie again, he seemed to be trying to recall the name which at this moment was of such importance to him. But it was without avail, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... within half a mile of the aimless traveller, and the small boat put out. Not one of his fellows but envied the young ensign as he left the ship, steered by Timmins, a veteran bo's'n's mate, wise in all the ins and outs of sea ways. They saw him board, neatly running the small boat under the schooner's counter; they saw the ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... life. Lady Helena and Inez returned to St. John's Wood. And Sir Victor, from his lodgings in Fenton's Hotel, followed his wife home every evening. It was his first thought when he arose in the morning, the one hope that upheld him all the long, weary, aimless day—the one wild delight that was like a spasm, half pain, half joy—when the dusk fell to see her slender figure come forth, to follow his darling, himself unseen, as he fancied, to her humble home. To watch near it, to look up at her lighted ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... she sought. She did not want to be told of the past. If Hugh was gone forever, then with him had gone all her love of living, her courage, all her better self. She wanted to be lifted out of the despair, the dazed aimless drifting from day to day, longing at night for the morning, and in the morning for the fall of night, which had been her life since his death. If somebody could assure her that it was not all over, that he was somewhere, not too ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... moments brushing her hair in a lazy, aimless way, and staring at the red logs. "Perhaps," she said at last, "I shall have to cheer you up, though, when you've heard what I've come for. Might as well out with it, I suppose! I know I can't bear having had news 'broken' to me. My husband told you he was seedy, didn't ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... seemed something ominous in this message, delivered apparently from one typical of his class, a worker out of work, a pipe in his mouth, a generally aimless air about ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... case,—a neighbor had carried it off for the workmen who were shingling his roof. It would never get there in time. There was a fire-engine, but it was nearly half a mile from the lakeside settlement. Some were throwing on water in an aimless, useless way; one was sending a thin stream through a garden syringe: it seemed like doing something, at least. But all hope of saving Maurice was fast giving way, so rapid was the progress of the flames, so thick the cloud ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I found the captain in my cabin, rummaging everywhere. He had flung out the contents of the lockers, my bedclothes, everything, in a jumble on the deck, which, in a drunken aimless way he was examining by the light of a couple of dip candles, stuck to the edge of the bunk. It was not a time to mind about that. "Sir," I said, "the ship is sinking. Come on deck, sir; take the sail off. The mate ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... high noon Aimless I stand, my promised task undone, And raise my hot eyes to the angry sun That will ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world; and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre, nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... weather could the impression of loneliness be stronger. The pines drooped and sobbed. Cascades, born somewhere in the dun firmament above, dropped down the mountain sides in ever-growing white threads. The rivers roared and plunged with aimless passion down the ravines. Stray little clouds, left behind when the wrack lifted a little, ran bleating up and down the forlorn hill-sides. More often, the clouds trailed along the valleys, a long procession ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... libertines; those of moderate fortune followed some profession and resigned themselves to the sword or to the church. The poorest gave themselves up with cold enthusiasm to great thoughts, plunged into the frightful sea of aimless effort. As human weakness seeks association and as men are gregarious by nature, politics became mingled with it. There were struggles with the 'garde du corps' on the steps of the legislative assembly; at the theatre Talma wore a wig which made him resemble Caesar; every one flocked to the burial ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... an opportunity of perusing these strangely neglected writings of my favorite author, I commenced the task of searching out and discovering them myself for mine own delectation. And after a deal of fruitless and aimless labor, (for, unlike Johannes Scotus Erigena, in his quest of a treatise of Aristotle, I had no oracle to consult,) after spending as many days in turning over the leaves of I know not how many volumes of old, dusty, musty, fusty periodicals as Mr. Vernon ran miles after ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... well aware of that, Frau Professorin," was Grover's somewhat aimless response; "and I assure you," he went on heartily, "that I wouldn't think of such a thing; no, not for ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... mistress, and his words, "I would rather see you dead," hurt her cruelly. Perhaps every body would say so. It was an unnatural match, this union of autumn and spring, but she must do something. Any thing was preferable to the aimless, listless life she was leading now. She could not be any more wretched than she was, and she might perhaps be happier when the worst was over and she knew for certain that she was Richard's wife. HIS WIFE! It made her faint and sick just to say those two words. What ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... exaggeration? We were dead, but behold, we live! We spent our energies in profitless work; but now we bear fruit unto God. We were lonely and isolated, but now have come to the heavenly Jerusalem, to the innumerable company of angels, and to the Church of the Firstborn. Our prayers were aimless and ineffective; but now we have the petitions we desired. New hope and joy have filled our hearts, as the ruddy clusters hang full and ripe in the autumn. Prove Him for yourself and see if this shall not be so for you also. Only give yourself entirely up to Christ. Abide in Him. Remain in Him. ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... counsel which has been requested, I have little to say. If there be any one subject which has not been sufficiently insisted on, it is the aimless life which young women generally lead after they have left school. A large portion are occupied in forming matrimonial plans when they are wholly unfit to enter into that sacred state. Dr. Johnson makes his Nekayah say of young ladies with whom she associated, "Some imagined they ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... store; Her children all are heirs that trace Their lineage through the royal race, And all her wealth is theirs—and more; But one with cunning hand controls The portions that his brothers fed, While thousands—just and worthy souls— In aimless anguish cry ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... away down in the Bad-lands alone and my horse slipped in some shale rock and went lame; strained his shoulder so I couldn't ride him. That put me afoot, and climbing up and down them hills I lost my bearings and didn't know where I was at for a day or two. I wandered around aimless, and got into a strip uh country that was new to me and ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... aimless, idle, and useless brain, emergencies often call out powers and virtues before unknown and suspected. How often we see a young man develop astounding ability and energy after the death of a parent, or the loss of a fortune, or after some other ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... commotion prevailed. Serving-men and maids ran hither and thither in an excited and aimless fashion; they started back in surprise and dismay when they perceived Wilhelmine's tall figure beside the Duke, but neither his Highness nor the lady stopped to question the servants on the cause of the disturbance. When they reached the first floor, where dwelt the Duchess Johanna Elizabetha, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... backward and lit on his neck, which I assure you is painful and disturbing to one's whole physical and moral framework. I'll say this much for Starr: The first thing he did when he got up was to shoot the head off the snake, whose tail continued to buzz in a dreary, aimless way when there was absolutely nothing to buzz about. Snakes ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... the maze by chance. Two hours afterwards it reached the nest in fifteen minutes; and after another interval of two hours it only required five minutes. After the third trial, the routes became more direct, there was less aimless wandering. The time of the twentieth trial was forty-five seconds; that of the thirtieth, forty seconds. In the thirtieth case, the path followed was quite direct, and so it was on the fiftieth trip, which only ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the Devil who arranged the thing, but the fact of the case is that Losson had for a long time been worrying Simmons in an aimless way. It gave him occupation. The two had their cots side by side, and would sometimes spend a long afternoon swearing at each other; but Simmons was afraid of Losson and dared not challenge him to a fight. He thought over the words in the hot still nights, and half the hate ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... idea of this at the time, however. Not the slightest suspicion entered my head. In view of that fact, I have since believed in guardian angels. For my next move, which at the time seemed to me absolutely aimless, was to change my blankets from one side of the fire to the other. And that brought me ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... along in the same aimless fashion until sure he was not watched, when he turned and made his way directly to the police office. The chief was there and Ben quickly told him everything ...
— The Telegraph Messenger Boy - The Straight Road to Success • Edward S. Ellis
... hands as they stood upon the bleak mountainside, and prayed to Him Whom they knew to be near them, though they were there alone, and saw nothing save the ground they knelt upon, and the thick clammy fog moving slowly around and above them in aimless and monotonous change. To their excited imagination that fog seemed like a living thing; it seemed as though it were actuated with a cold and deathful determination, and as though it were peopled by a thousand silent spirits, leaning over them and chilling their hearts ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... away, Step by step in mouldering moss; Thick branches bar the day Over languid streams that cross Softly, slowly, with a sound In their aimless creeping Like a smothered weeping, Through the ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... informed them that a large force of Boers, under Steyn and De Wet, with women and children, 3000 strong, was reported in the neighbourhood of Klerksdorp. Rumour further said that they were so bewildered by our apparently aimless midnight movements that they neither knew where to go nor what to do. The General added that it was his intention to march again in the afternoon in their direction, to have another outspan at dusk, and then to march all night and surprise them next ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... Brunswick; but it was by the substitution of human life for preparation, system, and skill; enthusiasm supplied the place of discipline; robbery produced military stores; and the dead bodies of her citizens formed epaulements against the enemy. Yet this was but the strength of weakness; the aimless struggle of a broken and disjointed government; and the new revolutionary power was fast sinking away before the combined opposition of Europe, when the great genius of Napoleon, with a strong arm and iron rule, seizing upon the scattered fragments, and binding them together into ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... of some old people are characterless; running in all directions, appearing as though a finely-woven cloth had left its impress upon the face, revealing a life aimless and idle, or distracted by a thousand cross-purposes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... Chris herself in a healthy fashion, a man of varying moods, and perhaps the richer for faint glimmerings of the real fire, Hicks yet found himself no better than an aimless, helpless child before the demands of reality. Since boyhood he had lived out of touch with his environment. As bee-keeper and sign-writer he made a naked living for himself and his mother, and achieved ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... so unaccountable. If the steps, too, had been soft and muffled, if we could have supposed the person was creeping about after booty of some kind, we should have been frightened, no doubt, but not so appalled as we were now at this singular, easy, and apparently aimless promenade. We did not speak, but lay trembling, and scarcely daring to breathe. Our room was long, and the distance to the open door so great that we could not hope to reach it unnoticed in the darkness, before the ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... for just as much time as was needed to see that there was nobody in it. After a moment or two of desperate clambering, however, there were two people in it, Mr. Evan MacIan, panting and sweating, and Mr. James Turnbull, uncommonly close to being drowned. After ten minutes' aimless tossing in the empty fishing-boat he recovered, however, stirred, stretched himself, and looked round on the rolling waters. Then, while taking no notice of the streams of salt water that were pouring ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... at ten o'clock, and if there was a noticeable rise or decline in a stock or a group of stocks, you were apt to witness quite a spirited scene. Fifty to a hundred men would shout, gesticulate, shove here and there in an apparently aimless manner; endeavoring to take advantage of the stock offered or ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... obscure work in a loft, when there was so much excitement on the streets. There was no authority to hold any one to steady employment; and so about two-thirds the helpers who reached Fredericksburg, spent a large part of their time in an aimless wandering and wondering, and finding so much to be ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Mike was so extravagant in his praise that they protested. Alvin told the particulars of their trip in the launch from home to Wiscasset and return, omitting of course all reference to Stockham Calvert that would give a hint of his profession and his purpose in making what looked like an aimless ramble through this portion of Maine. The Captain was assured that his boat would not be disturbed where it lay moored under the bank, and he and Chester gave no ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... have covered her over with loneliness. Her eyes have faded. Her eyes have come to fasten themselves on one alone. Whither can her soul escape? Let her be sorrowing as she goes along, and not for one night alone. Let her become an aimless wanderer, whose trail may never be followed. O Black Spider, may you hold her soul in your web so that it shall never get through the meshes. What is the name of the soul? They two have come ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... situation had outgrown their experience. Every now and then a crash of crockery or crystal was heard over the din of shrill voices, and occasionally a loud protest. Away from the buffet, on the fine floor of the restaurant, a few waitresses hurried distracted and aimless between the tables at which sat irate and scandalized persons who firmly believed themselves to be dying of hunger. A number of people were most obviously stealing food, not merely from the sideboards, but from their fellows. At a table near to the corner in ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... perpetually beside the throne, there would be no distraction to maintain a foothold. He would be there by right; he would be able to give all his mind to the directing of this world that he despised for its baseness, its jealousies, its insane brawls, its aimless selfishness, and its blind furies. Then there should be no more war, as there should be no more revolts. There should be no more jealousies; for kingcraft, solid, austere, practical and inspired, should keep down all the peoples, all the priests, and ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... in the mysterious ebb of the night Pass the men whose eyes are shut like anemones in a dark pool; Why don't they open with vision and speak to me, what have they in sight? Why do I wander aimless among them, ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... by their persevering foes. In vain they struck about them with their muskets, which, being heavy, the birds easily evaded, only to return to the assault with greater vigour, caring neither for their aimless blows ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... many reasons for, and as many against, marriage. There was the pleasure of domestic life, which made it possible to lead a moral life, as he called married life; then, and principally, the family and children would infuse his present aimless life with a purpose. This was for marriage generally. On the other hand there was, first, the loss of freedom which all elderly bachelors fear so much; and, second, an unconscious awe of ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... reasonable, for the Shining Light had been left to rot and foul in the water of Old Wives' Cove since my infancy. Whatever the pretence he made, the labor was planned and undertaken in anxious haste: there was, indeed, too much pretence—too suave an explanation, a hand too aimless and unsteady, an eye too blank, too large a flow of liquor—for a man ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... Dwarf was busily gathering pebbles from the edge of the pond, examining each carefully, and then throwing them down again in what appeared to be an aimless and unintelligible manner. ...
— The Mysterious Shin Shira • George Edward Farrow
... girl, with a toss of her head Mr. Gryce would have corrected in one of his grandchildren. "He can have nothing to say about me." And she began to move about the room in an aimless, half-insolent way. ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... aimless feet That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... affairs in the pageant of the stars are deceiving themselves or are trying to deceive others. They are giving their own little fancies the sanction of the universe. The butterfly that I see flitting about in the sunshine outside might as well read the European war as a comment on its aimless little life. The stars do not chatter about us, but they have a balm for us if we will be silent. The "huge and thoughtful night" speaks a language simple, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... ceased to own any significance, since the buildings were laid bare as far back as the winter of 1894-5. An hour or two spent in a careful inspection of this house and its contents is to most persons worth four times the same amount of time occupied in aimless wandering amongst the hot glaring streets of the city, peeping into this courtyard and that, and listening to the interminable tales of guide or custodian. If we study the Casa Nuova intelligently, lovingly and minutely, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... tidied with little pink feather dusters whenever she returned to Boston. She was so solid that society reporters didn't dare write little items about her, and when she was in Charleston she was invited to the Saint Cecilia Ball. Also she was rather ignorant, rather unhappy, and completely aimless. She and her daughter spent their summers three miles from Grimsby Head, in an estate with a gate-house and a conservatory and a golf course and a house with three towers and other architecture. When America ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... plates in basement kitchens, And along the trampled edges of the street I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates. The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts An aimless smile that hovers in the air And vanishes along the ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... into the gloomy fore-hold of a three-masted lake schooner, harnessed securely between two long capstan bars, and set to walking in an aimless circle while a creaking cable was wound about a drum. At the other end of the cable were fastened, from time to time, squared pine-logs weighing half a ton each. It was the business of Blue Blazes to draw these timbers into the hold through a trap-door opening ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... value Things Western as I ought, The trains,—that take us, whither? The ships,—that reach, what port? To me it seems but chaos Of greed and haste and rage, The endless, aimless, motion Of squirrels ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... MEN.—The purposeless and aimless life of any number of effeminate and sickly young men, is to be distinctly attributed to these sins. The large class of mentally impotent "ne'er-do-wells" are being constantly recruited and added to by those who practice what the celebrated Erichson ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... credence. At rare intervals (as now, in 1775), they will fling down their hoes and hammers; and, to the astonishment of thinking mankind, (Lacretelle, France pendant le 18me Siecle, ii. 455. Biographie Universelle, para Turgot (by Durozoir).) flock hither and thither, dangerous, aimless; get the length even of Versailles. Turgot is altering the Corn-trade, abrogating the absurdest Corn-laws; there is dearth, real, or were it even 'factitious;' an indubitable scarcity of bread. And so, on the second ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... But McGinty and his men were undisturbed by such reports. They were numerous, resolute, and well armed. Their opponents were scattered and powerless. It would all end, as it had done in the past, in aimless talk and possibly in impotent arrests. So said McGinty, McMurdo, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... reverberated through the empty church as they passed up the aisle. They stood in an aimless way before the altar rails. Frank fidgeted about, and made sure that the ring was in his ticket-pocket. He also took a five-pound note and placed it where he knew he could lay his hands upon it easily. Then he sprang round with a flush upon his cheeks, for one of the side-doors ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... his mother roused herself to a feverish industry. Even in the early days of her strength she had never been so busy in her home. But her work was aimless and to no purpose. When tidying she would take a cup without its saucer from the table, and set off with it through the room, but stopping suddenly in the middle of the floor, would fall into a muse with the dish in her hand; ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... show that animal development has not been an aimless drifting. Functions developed and organs arose and were perfected in a certain order. First the purely vegetative organs appeared, and the animal lived for digestion and reproduction; then came muscle and it brought with it nerve. But these were not enough; the brain had all ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... heroism that men shall call divine. "The less I pray, but the more I think!" Aye, it is not prayer in the old sense, the cry of the soul that believes itself craven, weak and wanton, because it has always been told so by blind guides; it is not this aimless outpouring of energy directed towards a Divinity in the skies, when the very Life and Mind Divine are the endowments of every rational creature, that has made man great; but thought, concentration, the serious, resolute application of the powers that man does possess, the bending of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... time, as he pursued his measured but aimless walk, by the fatal portrait which he more than once pressed with feverish energy to his lips, of the singular discovery he had made that night in the apartments of his father, he was naturally led, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... everybody must be acquainted with everybody. The decline of instructive conversation has been effected in a great measure by the barbarous habit of assembly en masse, where one hears the same succession of unmeaning platitudes, mutual insincerities, and aimless inquiries. It would be trite, however, to dwell on the vapid talk which must almost of necessity mark those who assemble in crowds, and which we are taught to call society, which really cannot exist without ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... upon Mrs. Perce. Sally was beaten. She was full of expostulations and arguments, but all were addressed to Toby, and she could not have borne any other society. So she wandered about the streets for an hour, miserably aware that once or twice she was followed by an aimless strolling youth who did not know how to occupy a lonely evening and who yet was too much of a coward to address her. In her mind she went over every detail of her friendship with Toby. It had become suddenly unreal, ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... women is much on Herr Riehl's mind. What are we to do with them? he asks despairingly. "What is to become of the army of innocent creatures, without means, without a craft, doomed to an aimless, disappointed life. Shall we shut them up in convents? Shall we buy them into Stifts? Shall we send them to Australia? Shall we put an end to them?" Quite in the manner of Dogberry, he answers his own questions. Let them go their ways as before, he says. ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... lingered in the doorway, looking and listening. Her heart was big with pity—pity for that disheartened man whose buoyancy and self-love had been so deeply wounded, pity for those wandering, angry, aimless men and women who might have rested secure in his guardianship; pity for all the hot, misguided hearts of men and women. Pity, too, for the man with the most impetuous heart of them all, who wandered in some foreign land with a ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... of Coincidence which thrusts itself into all our affairs, led her to the Minories, and to the very quay which Stafford had reached in his aimless wanderings; and, mechanically she paused and looked on dreamily at the bustle and confusion which reigned there. Perhaps the presence of the sheep and cattle attracted her: she felt drawn to them by sympathy ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... hides the movements of any bird. Then, all through the most interesting month of June the cottonwood-trees are shedding their cotton, and to a person on the watch for slight stirrings among the leaves the falling cotton is a constant distraction. The butterflies, too, wandering about in their aimless way, are all the time deceiving the bird student, and drawing attention from ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... realized what he must set himself to do if he was to become that which he fain would be. There must be no more playing at soldiers and sailors; no more of that farce of power and glory, in which, till now, he had been the chief actor; no more aimless adventure, undertaken in utter scorn of time and place. He must toil now in downright earnest; he must go forward, step by step; measure each day's effort, calculate each morrow's task, let each fruit ripen ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... in beautiful words, words that lived and spoke. His own strange fever burned inexpressibly inside him. Was he the only one who felt the challenge offered by the maddening fertility and foison of the hot sun-dazzled earth? Life, he realized, was too amazing to be frittered out in this aimless sickness of heart. There were truths and wonders to be grasped, if he could only throw off this wistful vague desire. He felt like a clumsy strummer seated at a dark shining grand piano, which he knows is capable of every ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... to make friends with Beautiful Dog, until he howled with anguish and affliction and fled as from pestilence; and, unable to endure the house any longer, put on my hat and set out upon one of those aimless walks one takes in a land where all ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... a sense more strangely beautiful, did I ever witness. Her tremulous, rapid, affectionate, eager, Scotch voice,—the swift, aimless, bewildered mind, the baffled utterance, the bright and perilous eye; some wild words, some household cares, something for James, the names of the dead, Rab called rapidly and in a "fremyt" voice, and he starting up surprised, and slinking off as ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... Emperor's striking his knife mechanically on the edge of his glass. Once only his Majesty broke the silence by a deep sigh, followed by these words addressed to one of the officers: "What time is it?" An aimless question of the Emperor's, it seemed, for he did not hear, or at any rate did not seem to hear, the answer; but almost immediately he rose from the table, and the Empress followed him with slow steps, and her handkerchief pressed against her lips ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Nabob had been subjected to every manifestation of the terrible ostracism of that Paris world to which he had neither relationship nor serious ties, and whose contempt isolated him more surely than a visiting monarch is isolated by respect—the averted look, the apparently aimless step aside, the hat suddenly put on and pulled down over the eyes. Overcome by embarrassment and shame, he stumbled. Some one said quite loudly, "He is drunk," and all that the poor man could manage to do was to return and shut himself up in the salon at the back of his box. Ordinarily, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... suddenly in at his office door, to look into her eyes and to have her question him, as she had questioned, concerning his beliefs and his hopes. He thought that in the evening he would like to go to a house of his own and find her sitting there waiting for him. All the charm of his aimless, half-dissolute way of life died in him, and he believed that with her he could begin to live more fully and completely. From the moment when he had definitely decided that he wanted Sue as a wife, Sam stopped overdrinking, ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... first place, a connected chain of histories, from the earliest times to the present day, with a selected list of contemporary memoirs and biographies, would throw a guiding gleam of light on thousands who are wandering, dark and aimless, in a labyrinth of 'masterpieces.' In this enquiry system is essential. Of desultory comments, charming and instructive in themselves and valuable in the formation of taste, we have abundant store. Who that has read ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... echo ... O, speak not, Nor tell me with my loss I am so dazed, That my tongue speaks unfaithfully my thought; That you, you too, within his shadow raised, Stand bare now, wanting all you held or thought, By aimless love or prisoned grief amazed. Tell me not: let me out of silence speak, Or let me still my thoughts in ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... to do?" said Frank, suddenly. It was just as they came in sight of the graceful spire of St Roque's; and perhaps it was the sight of his own church which roused the Perpetual Curate to think of the henceforth aimless life of his brother. "I don't understand how you are to give up your ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... offspring of that sectional agitation now prevailing in some of the States, which are as impracticable as they are unconstitutional, and which if persevered in must and will end calamitously. It is either disunion and civil war or it is mere angry, idle, aimless disturbance of public peace and tranquillity. Disunion for what? If the passionate rage of fanaticism and partisan spirit did not force the fact upon our attention, it would be difficult to believe that any considerable portion of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... window watching the fast-falling snow. It had been a long day to her—a long, weary, aimless day. She had tried to read, to play, to sing, to work; and failed in all. She had visited Mr. Richards; she had wandered, in a lost sort of way, from room to room; she had lain listlessly on sofas, and tried to sleep, all in vain. The demon of ennui had taken possession of her; and now, at the ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... interfered to much purpose. I was mad about her at the time," said her son, beginning to walk about the room in a restless, aimless manner. "I wish, mother, that you would cease to talk about the past. It seems to me sometimes like a dream; if you would but let it lie still, I think that I could fancy it was a dream. Remember that I do not ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... unthinking, careless hand; the same hand that created masterpieces, prompted by the slightest impulse, the least sensation. When I looked at them superficially they seemed disfigured by all sorts of smudges and thick black lines, which cross and recross in a seemingly wild and aimless sort of way; but when looked into carefully, they all have a meaning of their own, and have been put there with a just and deep felt appreciation of light and shade. The greater compositions crowded with figures, the buildings, ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... because they are semi-transparent, or look very malignant, or because they glide and do not walk, or are luminous, or for some other excellent reason. The combination, in due proportions, of pretty frequent inexplicable noises, with occasional aimless apparitions, makes up the type of orthodox modern haunted house story. The difficulty of getting evidence worth looking at (except for its uniformity) is obviously great. Noises may be naturally caused in very many ways: by winds, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... dull glow still lingered in the western sky, though the shadows of dusk were fallen on the fort and its surroundings, Major Hester passed the sentry at one of the gates and walked slowly, as though for an aimless stroll, as far as the little French-Canadian church. On reaching it he detected a dim figure in its shadow and asked in a low tone, "Is ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... studies his niece, or even a father his daughter? How often during the day was she absent from his thoughts, or from his dreams at night? What else gave him so much happiness as to please her, and what would he not do to give her pleasure? Why was he dissatisfied and aimless when not in her presence? Why so full-orbed and complete when she was near? He was eighteen years the elder, but there was in her a fullness of nature, a balanced development, which went far toward annulling the discrepancy. Moreover, though she was young, he was not old, and surely he had ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... clearly these people did not live in fairyland, and as little in the search after it. Good, strong, sensible, practical faces; women that evidently had their work to do, and did it; habitual energy and purpose spoke in every one of them, and purpose attained. Here was no aimless dreaming or fruitless wishing. The old lady's face was sorely weather-beaten, but calm as a ship in harbour. Charity was homely, but comfortable. Madge and Lois were blooming in strength and activity, and as innocent apparently of any vague, unfulfilled longings as a new-blown rose. Only ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... case; the fingers of the body or of the mind become swift and cunning, but the soul does not grow under such culture. We are willing to allow that many of those who browse in the sleepy meadows of aimless observation,—loving to keep their heads down as they gaze at and gather their narcotic herbs, rather than lift them to the horizon beyond or the heaven above,— act in obedience to the law of their limited natures. Still, let ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... declaration of the anonymous writer in Euseb. H. E. V. 28. 5, that the belief of the earliest Christians in the Deity of Christ might be proved from the old Christian hymns and odes. In the epistles of Ignatius the theology frequently consists of an aimless stringing together of articles manifestly originating in hymns and ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack |
