"Desolately" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... girl," he said desolately. "Up to a year ago she was like she had always been, as biddable as a child, and meek and yielding every way. All at once she's got ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... had come from a little town in the California foothills; the second from a summer resort in a Valley of the Californian Sierra. He was being reported pretty well all over the United States now, but the first news in all probability were the only valuable clew. They were desolately vague though. A man who flies covers much ground. Where did he sleep? Where was his lair—or his nest, rather? It was sleeping, not flying, that he was to be caught. How could she locate him? It would take time, to ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... more fighting, and the men who had come to convert the savages to Christianity obtained absolute control of the island of Haiti. The enslaved natives, we are told, wove their sorrows into mournful ballads which they droned out desolately as they tilled the fields of ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... times, they had always chosen midsummer for their trip, and the princess had joined her sister at some northern city or watering-place. This visit, therefore, was to be Nina's first glimpse of her aunt's home, and the princess was determined that she should not spend the time desolately in the country! She might come here for a little while—for reasons that the princess would have found hard to explain to herself, she did not want Nina to get a false impression. Yet for nothing would she have exposed her husband's failing—even to her own family. With the weakness ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... promised hour turned out to be nearly two hours. The roads were very bad here and it was as much as the carriage wheels could do to force their way through the marshy sand. The monotonous Bucskak[4] which extended desolately, like a billowy sandy ocean, to the very horizon, were overgrown with dwarf firs that looked more like shrubs than trees. Not a village, not a hut was anywhere to be seen. From the roadside sedges, flocks of noisy wild-geese, from time to time, flew across the sky ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... Lawrence reassured her, but she seemed indignant with him for having overheard her. Afterwards, sitting together desolately in the magnificent drawing-room, she became affectionately maternal. I have always wondered why Lawrence confided to me the details of their very intimate conversation. It was exactly the kind of thing he was ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... the lesser throng, A giant oak, so desolately grand, Stretches its gray imploring arms to ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... and there a solitary castello, rusty with old age, and turned into a farm, juts into picturesqueness from some point of vantage on a mound surrounded with green tillage. But soon the dull and intolerable creta, ash-grey earth, without a vestige of vegetation, furrowed by rain, and desolately breaking into gullies, swallows up variety and charm. It is difficult to believe that this creta of Southern Tuscany, which has all the appearance of barrenness, and is a positive deformity in the landscape, can be really fruitful. Yet ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... believed he had quieted down after all his disgraces, and would take life as it came; as the rest of his comrades do. And now he's broken out again as audacious as possible, and it's all begun over again!" She wept desolately. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... sat alone—very completely and desolately alone—in a whitewashed, unhomely room that everywhere bore the stamp of dak bungalow; from the wobbly teapoy[4] at his elbow to the board of printed rules that adorned the empty mantelpiece. The only cheering ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... letter in silence, and read it by the waning light of the open door. The crackling of the fire behind her was the only sound within. Without, the wind moaned desolately through the bare trees. It was ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... rumbling cart which passes me so swiftly the country doctor or the village priest, summoned to the death-bed of some notorious atheist? Is the slender white hand which closes those heavy shutters in that gloomy house the hand of some heart-broken Eugenie, desolately locking herself up once more, for another lonely night, with her sick ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of the Almirante Gomez were going dead slow. Away up beside her monster funnels her siren blew dismally, Whoo-oo-oo-oo! and was silent for the regulation period, and blew desolately again into the clinging gray mist that ringed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... of agony and critical equipoise! But the perpetual state of street-mending, that is the crowning interest. What would I not sometimes give to exchange the Swiss sweeping-girls, plying their long brooms desolately in the mud, for the paviors' hammers of America, which play upon the pebbles like a carillon of muffled bells? As for the other lack, it is the want of wooden bridges. Far away in my native meadows gleams the silver Charles: the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... returned late at night. They wandered about the streets, looking at the pavement as if to see whether the passengers had not left a purse behind them. They might have been supposed to be following tracks, so observant were they wherever they went. When they met they looked desolately at one another, as much as to say, "Have you ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to questions, he had said that Irene was not well; he felt he could no longer trust himself. His mother kissed him with her large soft kiss, and he pressed her hand, a flush of warmth in his cheeks. He walked away in the cold wind, which whistled desolately round the corners of the streets, under a sky of clear steel-blue, alive with stars; he noticed neither their frosty greeting, nor the crackle of the curled-up plane-leaves, nor the night-women hurrying in their shabby furs, nor the pinched faces of vagabonds at street ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Fanny interrupted desolately. "I think he did come as much to see me as anything—for a while it looked like it. Anyhow, he liked to dance with me. He danced with me as much as he danced with her, and he acted as if he came on my account ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... starved desire for companionship; and as time passed they only clung the closer, each to the other, as jealously fearful as a marooned man and woman might have been of any harm which might come to the one and leave the other utterly, desolately alone. ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... the allegorical prophecy of Isaiah to the effect that the mother of many children must die desolately, while the barren woman shall have an abundance of children. (Isaiah 54:1.) He applies this prophecy to Hagar and Sarah, to the Law and the Gospel. The Law as the husband of the fruitful woman procreates many children. For men of all ages have ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... own chamber, I could hear the old Captain tramping desolately about the Ark, calling, "Ma! ma!" Could hear the outside door swung open, and imagine Grandpa's wild face peering into the darkness, while still he called; "Ma! ma! where be ye? It's half ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... the Winds stood desolately, in the midst of a wide-eyed agricultural country, and was approached only by a sort of farm track that ran up hill and down dale, in a most erratic course, to the distant ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... face Hideously puckered, shrivelled like a monkey's With lips drawn backward from its teeth. "Speak, speak, In God's name, speak, what art thou?" whispered Drake, And a sharp cry came, answering his dread, A cry as of a sea-bird in the wind Desolately astray from all earth's shores, "Captain, I am thy boy, only thy boy! See, see, my captain, see what they have done! Captain, I only bore the ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... people mark the path of the public trial. Ah! I see strong men trying to lead the lassoed pony, pitching and rearing, with white foam flying from his mouth. I choke with pain as I recognize my handsome lover desolately alone, striding with set face toward the lassoed pony. 'Do not fall! Choose life and me!' I cry in my breast, but over my lips I ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... get Limerick on the wire. From Kildare I had been trying all morning to reach Limerick on the telephone. All the Limerick shops I passed were blinded or shuttered. In the gray light, black lines of people moved desolately up and down, not allowed to congregate and apparently not wanting to remain in homes they were weary of. A few candles flickered in windows. After leaving my suitcase at a hotel, I left for the strike headquarters. On my way I neared Sarsfield bridge. Between it ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... confusion was imparted to the aspect of a gentleman who at that moment, in the company of a lady, came out of the brilliant booth. The lady was so brown that Maisie at first took her for one of the Flowers; but during the few seconds that this required—a few seconds in which she had also desolately given up Sir Claude—she heard Mrs. Beale's voice, behind her, gather both wonder and pain into a single sharp ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... that ever an author did,—raising himself by his own unassisted efforts to be the chosen companions of nobles and princes, obtaining all that heart could desire of riches and honor,—we turn away and say, Poor Walter Scott! How desolately touching is the account in Lockhart, of his dim and indistinct agony the day his wife was brought here to be buried! and the last part of that biography is the saddest history that I know; it really makes us breathe a long sigh of relief when ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... had never hitherto given a moment's troubled thought to such matters, now sat in her dressing-room listening to the infrequent, hollow clang of the falling chair seats, attempting thus to estimate the audience straggling sparsely, desolately in. To re-enter the stage after an exit was like an icy shower-bath. Each night she hoped to find the receipts larger, and indeed they did from time to time advance suddenly, only to drop back to desolating driblets the following night. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... to make a passage for her, as he went ahead to scratch a match and light the long, one-armed flickering kitchen burner. The bare, deeply shadowed floor, the kitchen table, the blank windows, and the blackened range, in which the fire was out, came desolately into view. There was a sense as of deep darkness of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... astonishing forms of beauty. I watched it through a pair of glasses, seeking to verify my early conception of an iceberg—in the geographies of my grammar school days the pictures of icebergs always included a stranded polar bear, standing desolately upon one of the snowy crags. I looked for the bear, but if he was there, he refused to ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... again. The porticoes of the abandoned premises fill with street litter, old paper, and straws. The easterly winds cut the life out of the streets, the long ranks of automatic machines look out across the empty parade, and rust, and the lines of the pier-deck advance desolately far into the wind and grey sea, straight and uninterrupted. It is more than barren then, Clayton-on-Sea, for man has been there, builded busily and even ornately, loaded the town with structures for even his minor whims in idleness; and forsaken it all. So it will look on the Last ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... house. The blinds were all drawn down over the front windows, to keep out the sun. The little slip of garden was left solitary—baking and cracking in the heat. The square was silent; desolately silent, as only a suburban square can be. I walked up and down the glaring pavement, resolved to find out her name before I quitted the place. While still undecided how to act, a shrill whistling—sounding doubly shrill in the silence around—made ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... Mrs. Fountain, desolately: "Yes, go and have your pillow fight. It doesn't matter now. We're sending the presents all back, anyway." She begins frantically wrapping some ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... Fort Bent, and when I passed that way again it was a great mass of yellow mounds, with a piece of broken wall standing desolately here and there, a wreck of the past in a ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... fierce witch-haunted heights of Norcia rose forbidding. This is the kind of panorama that dilates the soul. It is so large, so dignified, so beautiful in tranquil form. The opulent abundance of the plain contrasts with the severity of mountain ranges desolately grand; and the name of each of all those cities ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... house. No human being, it seems to me, is quite so lonely as the young girl from the country when she first comes to the city and starts in the struggle of life there without acquaintances. All her instincts are social, and she is, for the time being, almost desolately alone in a wilderness of strange human beings. She must have some one to talk to—it is the law of youth as well as the law of her sex to crave constant companionship. And the consequences? She is sentimentally in a condition to prepare her for the slaughter, to make her ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... been on hot bricks all this month, ever since that day here. I knew it was in the wind. What gets in the wind never gets out. [She rises and throws out her arms] Never! It just blows here and there [Desolately] and then—blows home. [Her voice changes to resentment] But I've paid for being a fool— 'tisn't fun, that sort of life, I can tell you. I'm not ashamed and repentant, and all that. If it wasn't for him! I'm afraid he'll never forgive ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wished to be alone and collect the vague ideas of passionate appeal which he felt rioting through his mind. He stood by his window looking across the square. The fall winds had strewn the grass with dead leaves and the half-bare limbs swayed desolately. The big houses on the north side, were unusually quiet. He could see crepe fluttering from two doors. The widow of the dead president of a suspended bank lived in one of them; in the other the widow of a great man who was found dead in his office the second day of ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... drove off to the barn, leaving the women to pick their way on chips and strips of board laid in the mud, to the safety of the chip-pile, and thence to the kitchen, which was desolately littered ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... on showing the Klondike woman that they could trifle quite as gracefully as she with the lesser vices of Bohemia; or perhaps they wished to demonstrate to the younger dancing men in her train that the North Side set was not desolately austere in its recreation. The Honourable George, I regret to say, produced a smelly pipe which he would have lighted; but at a shocked and cold glance from me he put it by and allowed the Mixer to roll him one of the yellow paper cigarettes from a sack of tobacco which ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... had already begun to gather. We went on and up and ever higher, like the youth in "Excelsior;" the beech and dwarf oak took the place of the pine, and at last we arrived at a cleared summit whose long brown grass waved desolately in the dim light of evening. A faint glow still lingered over the forest-hills, but down in the valley the dusky shades hid every vestige of life, though its sounds came up softened through the long space. When we reached the top a ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... clusters of crags, even when it is free of snow. All, however, when I passed was serene, and even beautiful—owing to the glow which the red rocks had in the sun. We got down to Chapiu about seven—itself one of the most desolately-placed villages I ever saw in the Alps. Scotland is in no place that I have seen, so barren or so lonely. Ever since I passed Shapfells, when a child, I have had an excessive love for this kind of desolation, and I enjoyed my little square ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... she said, piteously. "I got up at eight for the first train, and now I feel"—she fell back in her chair, and whispered desolately with shut eyes—"as if I should ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... long-pondered journey to Italy? For his own sake, I should be glad he might. Yet it seems desolately far, across those great hills and plains. I remember how I formed a plan for providing him with a sum sufficient for the purpose. But that ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... streams into his face. He walked to the gate and then turned into the high-road and strode along in the open, buffeted by slanting gusts. The evenly ridged fields were a blurred waste of mud, and the russet coverts which he and Owen had shot through the day before shivered desolately against a ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... ruins of an old church. The crumbling tower, with its arched doorways, is almost hidden by the profusion of shrubbery which surrounds it. Its moss covered walls, entwined with ivy planted by loving hands which have since crumbled into dust, look desolately out upon the old churchyard at its back. Here, pushing aside the rank vines and tangled bushes which conceal them, one finds a few weather—beaten tombstones A huge buttomwood tree, taking root below, has burst apart one of these old slabs and now, with its many fellows ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... morning. Any sort of a place will do; she's accustomed to rough it. Just to have a roof over her until I find a room in the village where we can shake down." Here, led by his own words to contemplate the future, he looked desolately round the cornice of the hall, as if it were a shelf on which somebody might have left ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... five the agonized earth was still. Long before five, the stupefied survivors stood slowly recovering their faculties of speech and motion. Long before five, a piteous wail ascended to heaven from fathers and husbands and wives and mothers, desolately mourning the dead in the streets of Caracas, La Guayra, Merida, San Felipe, and Valencia. In this manner the Holy Thursday of 1812 drew toward its close. But the physical disasters consequent upon the great earthquake were of insignificant import as compared with ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... lesson to him acted as a restraint; though, had it been a brawny woman or a lacquey in his path, he would certainly have followed his natural counsel. He turned away, lingering outside till it was dusk and the bruise on his head gave great throbs, and then he footed desolately farther and farther from the house. To combat with evil in his own country village had seemed a simple thing enough, but it appeared a superhuman ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... change! Go thou and view it, All desolately sunk, The circle of the Druid, The cloister of the monk; The abbey boled and squalid, With its bush-maned, staggering wall; Ask by whom these were unhallow'd— Change, change ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... for ye, Miss?" Croppy inquired compassionately, stuffing his lighted pipe into his pocket, as I drifted desolately past him. "Sure you're killed with the load you have! This is a rough owld place for a lady to be walkin'. Sit down, Miss. God knows you have a right to ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... was silent, a misty figure in a lap-robe. The rain streaked the mica lights in the side-curtains. A distant train whistled desolately across the sodden fields. The inside of the car smelled musty. The quiet was like a blanket over the ears. Claire was in a hazy drowse. She felt that she could ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis |
