"Humdrum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... careful reading of the report. There was really nothing very remarkable about it—nothing exciting nor sensational. It was indeed no more than a humdrum narrative of a vulgar crime. But it was necessary that he should know all about it, and be able to summarize it, and so he read it over with unusual care. It was a very plain story—there were no complications. It ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... the more imminent when the characters and forms of Warfare itself are constantly changing; hence, ever new demands have to be made upon the troops themselves, and the exact bearing of each of these is not easily to be appreciated in the humdrum surroundings of our ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... student's life, the two golden visits which she had paid to Italy, the introduction into a milieu of clever, gifted people all struggling to make the most of their talents, had been such an immense change from the placid, humdrum existence which had preceded it, that it still held for her an almost dreamlike charm of novelty, and this was intensified at the present moment by her return to Crailing to find everything going on just in the same old way, ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... the other for the amusements and employments of life. In this way he argued the matter very sensibly within his own mind, and resolved, without much difficulty, that he would go to Courcy Castle, and bask for a week in the sunlight of the fashion which would be collected there. The quiet humdrum of his own fireside would come upon ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... an exhibition would have been considered the worst taste, but nobody was disgusted, and many were delighted. They had begun to fear that Eustace was getting humdrum. This harlequinade after the pantomime at the church—for what is a modern smart wedding but a second-rate pantomime?—put them into a good humour, and made them feel that, after all, they had got something for their presents. And so the happy pair passed through ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... die with ennui. [of journalistic articles] MEGO, my eyes glaze over. Adj. wearying &c v.; wearing; wearisome, tiresome, irksome; uninteresting, stupid, bald, devoid of interest, dry, monotonous, dull, arid, tedious, humdrum, mortal, flat; prosy, prosing; slow, soporific, somniferous. disgusting &c v.; unenjoyed^. weary, tired &c v.; drowsy &c (sleepy) 683; uninterested, flagging, used up, worn out, blase, life-weary, weary of life; sick of. Adv. wearily &c adj.; usque ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... grown quieter as Isa's words droned on. It was, for all her commotion, a very humdrum thing that had ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... tell," she responded; "it was really humdrum and uneventful. Nothing much happened to me; I looked for work and got it. Oh, don't be distressed! it was easy, pleasant work enough, and I was much better busy. I begin to believe plenty of hard work is a real blessing to dissatisfied, restless people—you can't ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... times, if by that word is implied a freer scope than can be found in modern years for elemental passions, for fighting and loving in despite of every-day conventions; for enterprise, risks, temptations unknown in the atmosphere of humdrum peace and order. They are the early days of the century, days when easy and rapid means of communication had not yet destroyed all the glamour of distance, when a county like Lancashire was as a far-off ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... King. He and his wife removed to Vienna, where they remained till 1775, when they retired to Venice, Faustina's birthplace. Two years before this Dr. Burney visited them at their handsome house in the Landstrasse in Berlin, and found them a humdrum couple—Hasse groaning with the gout, and the once lovely Faustina transformed into a jolly old woman of seventy-two, with two charming daughters. As he approached the house with the Abate Taruffi, Faustina, seeing them, came down to meet them. Says the Doctor: "I was ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... a grisly raillery in Stafford's reply. "Now, the collie—were you sufficiently a fatalist to let him live, or did you prepare another needle, or do it in the humdrum way?" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... indifferent—from this famous book. It is, though in a different sense from Montaigne's, a livre de bonne foi. And we must remember that the readers whom it directly addressed expected from books of this kind "pastime" in the most literal and generous, if also humdrum, sense of the word; noble sentiments, perhaps a little learning, possibly a few hidden glances at great people not of antiquity only. All these they got here, most faithfully ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Ordinary, humdrum life, an integral part of the national life, enacting by slow, imperceptible changes the processes of the Time-Spirit, still occupies Mr. Bennett's attention. He has again traced for a score of years the lives of a group of people ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... music, often bitterly sad and sweetly regretful, and there is little hint of sunshine or careless merrymaking there. Bach is steeped in cloister gloom, with frequent moments of religious ecstasy. Haydn is generally cheerful in a humdrum sort of way, but when his real feelings begin to speak, not even Mozart is sadder. They were human beings with greedy, desiring souls in them, these men and women of the dead eighteenth century, not delicate painted figures on screens and panels, and none but actors would be consoled by their ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... as possible removed from Havemeyer's humdrum existence was that of Phineas Taylor Barnum, the greatest showman the world has ever seen, the originator of the great travelling circus, the exploiter of Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind, the owner of Jumbo, the most famous elephant that ever lived, whose name has passed into the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... are seldom adventurous all over; there are monotonous interludes with no melody, offering us little that is new to learn. Our love for war and sport shows that we were not built organically for humdrum. Now literature helps to make up for this deficiency in real life by providing us with adventures in which we can participate imaginatively, and from which we can derive new knowledge. If real life did supply us with all the intense living that we demand, we might not care to ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... supposed to make use of the humdrum literature of the day; who introduces obsolete words and coins new ones, and makes a patchwork of all languages; makes use of execrable phrases, and invents a style that may be called his own.' The Doctor compares these ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to perfect happiness. To pass away in a flame of fire after one has enjoyed the highest earthly joys, and is yet surrounded by them in death. Ah! that is to die like a god—far better such a death than a long, stupid, humdrum existence. Eternal, undying love rises like a flaming brand to the heavens above, in defiance of mankind's sentence—do you not think such an ending ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... who will deny that to trace the influence of religion upon human character is one of the [57] legitimate functions of the novel? In truth, the modern "novel of character" needs some such interest, to lift it sufficiently above the humdrum of life; as men's horizons are enlarged by religion, of whatever type it may be—and we may say at once that the religious type which is dear to Mrs. Ward, though avowedly "broad," is not really the broadest. Having conceived her work thus, she has brought ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... conscience; and they believe that all mankind can be brought to labour in their own spirit. The world would be a much happier place if their state of mind could be made universal. But the great mass of men are of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or any loftiness of character. Moreover, most of the world's work for the satisfaction of our primary wants must be of a humdrum sort, and often of a rough and coarse sort. There must be ditching and delving, sowing and reaping, hammering and ...
— Progress and History • Various
... is light, I suppose, and you see people, and get plenty of time for reading, and the pay is better than I could get at anything else. The fact is," she began to gain confidence as she talked, "I don't want to go on in the old humdrum way forever, doing housework and sewing, and never getting a chance at anything better. I have enough to eat and to wear at home, but the soul has some claims too, and I long for the contact of higher natures than those ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... think a witches' one. He talked now out of Marco Polo and he clad what that traveler had said in more gorgeous attire. He meant nothing false; his exalted imagination saw it so. He was painter of great pageants, heightening and remodeling, deepening and purifying colors, making humdrum and workaday over to his heart's desire. The Venetian in his book, and other travelers in their books, had related wonders enough. These grew with him, it might be said—and indeed in his lifetime was often said—into wonders without a foot upon earth. But if one took as figures ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... than what they see at home. It is, too, the cause of—I had almost said the excuse for—the modern rage for sensational novels. Those who read them so greedily are conscious, poor souls, of capacities in themselves of passion and action, for good and evil, for which their frivolous humdrum daily life gives no room, no vent. They know too well that human nature can be more fertile, whether in weeds and poisons, or in flowers and fruits, than it is usually in the streets and houses of a well-ordered and tolerably sober city. And because the study of ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... contemplates death with alarm. What is he to do in this land of ghosts? there is no place for him. Imagine the commonplace liver of a humdrum existence being received into ghostland. He enters nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at school. The ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... doing wrong agreed with her, energized her, made her more alert, cleverer, keying up her faculties? turned life from a dull affair into a momentous one? To abandon Ditmar would be to slump back into the humdrum, into something from which she had magically been emancipated, symbolized by the home in which she sat; by the red-checked tablecloth, the ugly metal lamp, the cherry chairs with the frayed seats, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... answered. She was searching out napkins in the sideboard. "I'm really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people who have no interest in anything ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... T.O. murmured after a while, "that places like this would be humdrum-y and commonplace? But I guess there are 'stories' everywhere. I'm beginning to find out ...
— Four Girls and a Compact • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... when I got to Woodbridge. I remember thinking that I could write quite a book now myself. Already I began to feel quite a hardened pioneer. It doesn't take an adaptable person long to accustom one's self to a new way of life, and the humdrum routine of the farm certainly looked prosy compared to voyaging with Parnassus. When I had got beyond Woodbridge, and had crossed the river, I would begin to sell books in earnest. Also I would buy a notebook and jot down my experiences. ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... said the colonel, "you are a queen, if ever there was one. And that you should think of such a simple thing when we had all given up! They would not have touched Umballa. Kit, Kit, whatever will you do when you return to the humdrum life at home?" ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... course of true love should have run smooth for them, if ever. But know you not that the gods envy no small thing, nor are angry at any humdrum happiness of common men? Know you not that the god of war spares the coward and slays the brave? That in the race for fortune Jove often trips the swiftest runners and lets the dull plodder creep past the winning post alone? Know you not that whom ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... fly was more like play than work. Oh, then it was April and I felt the rising tide of spring in my blood, and a bit of free activity like this under the blue sky suited my humour. A boy likes almost any work that affords him an escape from routine and humdrum and has an element of play in it. Turning the grindstone or the fanning mill or carrying together sheaves or picking up potatoes or carrying in wood were duties that were ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... bitterly; "there's the sore point. Now look here; my friend, do you think that an organization like mine is made to bend to the trivialities of a copying clerk's work? To follow the humdrum of every-day routine? To blacken paper? To become a servant?—me! with what I ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... soon grew tired of this quiet life. It seemed very stupid and humdrum when compared with Aunt Sheen's marvelous tales of the great ocean, and the strange sights and thrilling adventures that there awaited the voyager. He was larger than his brothers and sisters, his sea-going instinct was strong within him, he longed for the wonders of the great, unknown world, ...
— How Sammy Went to Coral-Land • Emily Paret Atwater
... the defects of his qualities, my dear. The same people can often rise to great heights and sink to great depths. They can do worse things—and better things—than we humdrum folk, who jog along the middle of the road. We must forgive such people for doing things we wouldn't do, and remember their power to ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... into the intimacy of the king's newly found liberty, and those same rakes and libertines felt highly flattered at being chosen by his highness for his companions in an enterprise which at least was something out of the beaten track of the rather humdrum amusements of the Louvre. Why the king particularly wanted to visit the fair of Neuilly on that particular day of that particular spring-time, none of those that were in the secret of the adventure professed to know or even were curious to inquire. It was enough for them that ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... combined to make Italy one huge hot-bed of unblushing vice. The very interest in individuality, the spectator-attitude towards life, made men ready to treat life as one large experiment, and for such purposes vice is as important as right living even though it ultimately turns out to be as humdrum as virtue. The Italian nobles treated life in this experimental way and the novels of Bandello and others give us the results of their experiments. The Novellieri were thus the "realists" of their day and of them all Bandello ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... pleased, laughing in his sleeve at their simplicity in fancying they were still infidels. He had lions in cages, and fleet leopards trained by Orientals to run down hares and deer. In short, he relished all rarities, except the humdrum virtues. For anything singularly pretty or diabolically ugly, this was your customer. The best of him was, he was openhanded to the poor; and the next best was, he fostered the arts in earnest: whereof he now gave a signal proof. He offered prizes for the best specimens ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... could you expect?' he replied. 'My ambition could not endure such a humdrum existence as yours; with these gay-coloured wings of mine I shall soar to higher realms, and be courted and caressed ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... there is something precarious in such a business as mine;—but I am endeavouring to make it less so from day to day, and hope very shortly to bring it into that humdrum groove which best befits a married man. Should I ask further assistance from you in doing this, perhaps you will not refuse it if I can succeed in making the matter clear to you. As it is I thank you sincerely for what you have done. I will ask you to pay the L3000 you have so kindly promised, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... ants that I find here are the finest flavored in the world," declared the yellow hen, "and there are plenty of them. So here I shall end my days; and I must say, Dorothy, my dear, that you are very foolish to go back into that stupid, humdrum world again." ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... the best of all are Scotchmen. Give me a good, heavy, raw-boned lump of a Scotchman, who'll believe nothin' till he's convinced, and accept nothin' till it's proved, who'll argue with a stone wall, if he's got nobody else to dispute with, in that slow sedate humdrum way that drives everybody wild but himself, who's got an amazin' conscience, but no nerves whatever to speak of—ah, that's the man to go under water, an' crawl about by the hour among mud and wreckage ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... passin' 'em off as floaters. I'm a-willin' to give you an' McGuffey a five-dollar profit over an' above your investment, an' take over th' property myself, just f'r a flyer, an' to sorter add a sportin' interest to an otherwise humdrum ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... is positively unfit for human society. Last week, for instance, when for three days on end we did not exchange a single word, not even at dinner, where the amenities should come on at least with the walnuts. I grant you that humdrum wears upon the spirit, that the flatness of the daily road may be a harder thing to get over than even Mr. Bunyan's hill Difficulty, but for a man to surrender himself mind and body to solitaire argues weakness. Moreover, ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... for though I am convinced my little Lydia would elope with me as Ensign Beverley, yet am I by no means certain that she would take me with the impediment of our friends' consent, a regular humdrum wedding, and the reversion of a good fortune on my side: no, no; I must prepare her gradually for the discovery, and make myself necessary to her, before I risk it.—Well, but Faulkland, you'll dine with us to-day ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... fellows! Not long ago, I heard one of them preach in a field, before thousands and thousands of people. A different sort of dish he gave us from that of our humdrum preachers, who, from the pulpit, choke their hearers with scraps of Latin. He spoke from his heart; told us how we had till now been led by the nose, how we had been kept in darkness, and how we might procure more light;—ay, and he proved it ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... he, 'frequently. I can't sleep on one side all night. I'll tell you, Brother Peters,' says he, 'I'm going to start a poker room. I don't seem to care for the humdrum in swindling, such as peddling egg-beaters and working off breakfast food on Barnum and Bailey for sawdust to strew in their circus rings. But the gambling business,' says he, 'from the profitable side of the table is a good compromise between ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... I don't mean that! I was thinking of your adventures. Father told me he found you living with some old friends on a big fruit-growing estate near a small town, and I supposed it had been all rather lonely and humdrum, until that quiet little game a few weeks ago made me realize that you must have seen a bit of the strenuous side down there. That would ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... of fact, Vera Nevill was an incongruous element in the Daintree household. In that quiet humdrum country clergyman's life she was as much out of her proper place as a bird of paradise in a chicken yard, or a Gloire de Dijon rose in ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... after this, and in fact for most of Our sojourn here, life in the trenches was of a somewhat humdrum character. There were a few days cf activity now and then, but normally the enemy was very inoffensive so far as we were concerned. He did, however, raid the 6th Battalion one night in the right sub-sector, almost ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so bitter. And yet—like every ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... family drifted. Jennie continued her work with Mrs. Bracebridge. Sebastian fixed himself firmly in his clerkship in the cigar store. George was promoted to the noble sum of three dollars, and then three-fifty. It was a narrow, humdrum life the family led. Coal, groceries, shoes, and clothing were the uppermost topics of their conversation; every one felt the stress and strain of trying ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... hard blow to poor Sellers to see the work on his darling enterprise stop, and the noise and bustle and confusion that had been such refreshment to his soul, sicken and die out. It was hard to come down to humdrum ordinary life again after being a General Superintendent and the most conspicuous man in the community. It was sad to see his name disappear from the newspapers; sadder still to see it resurrected at intervals, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Mr. and Mrs. Bingle stepped into a new and hitherto unsuspected world the instant they entered Pierre's. They stepped out of it at ten o'clock that night and into a very commonplace, humdrum sort of automobile and were whisked homeward by an astonished, unbelieving chauffeur. They had drunk the health of Napoleon the present, Napoleon the past, and Napoleon the future, and they had done it from cobwebby, mouldy bottles out of the ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... box-edged flower beds and flagged footpaths, led to a large, gray old Tudor house, whose mullioned diamond-paned windows, twisted chimney stacks, irregular moss-grown roof, ivied bell-tower, stone balls and carved porch offered the very utmost of the romantic and picturesque. The change from the humdrum, ordinary surroundings of their former school was supreme. Miss Beasley had promised them a pleasant surprise, and she had undoubtedly kept her word. The sixteen new arrivals grasped their handbags and small possessions, and set off up the ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... good chap yourself, but your prospects were not quite dashing enough for your festive Violet. I believe in a merry time even if it is a short one. But if I had really wanted to settle down in a humdrum sort of way, you are the man whom I should have chosen out of the whole batch of them. I hope what I say won't make you conceited, for one of your best points used to be ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... ago, you, or your firm rather, did me the honour of publishing a book to which I attached, and continue to attach, a good deal of importance. Here I am harvesting my wild oats; and that deed done, I expect to feel what a regular but rather humdrum sinner must feel as he returns from Confession. Quit of my past, I shall be ready to turn over a new leaf. I shall be able, if I please, to approach life from a new angle and try my luck in unexplored countries, so far, that is, as ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... spinner of the thread of life, was the eldest of the three. She held in her hand a distaff, wound with black and white woollen yarn, with which were sparingly intermixed strands of silk and gold. The wool stood for the humdrum everyday life of man: the silk and gold marked the days of mirth and gladness, always, alas! too few ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... and never,—no never, never,—wearing lighted candles round their heads.[39] I am deeply miserable. A real house like this is insupportable, after that canvas farm wherein I was so happy. What is a humdrum dinner at half-past five, with nobody (but John) to see me eat it, compared with that soup, and the hundreds of pairs of eyes that watched its disappearance? Forgive this tear.[40] It is weak and foolish, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... and the reputation he had gained in the vicinity gave weight to his words; and "The Band" subsided into the most humdrum farmers of the region. Rita had ample information of his safety, for it soon became known that he had killed two of the most active and daring of the guerillas and captured three others; and she worshipped the hero of her girlish ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... namely, that I had forgotten important business, and therefore thought it excusable to leave as soon as the sermon was over. Whether he sought to lure me on to further avowals, I know not: but, whatever was his motive, he asked me, in reply, whether I believed that he cared for the humdrum custom of church-going and whether I thought him imbecile enough to consider this as any thing more than the means by which to keep the masses in check; adding, that it was the duty of the intelligent ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... she must be possessed by a devil. She must be very wicked—in her heart just as wicked as Ellen. What could she do to cast out this dumb, tearing spirit?—should she marry one of her admirers on the Marsh, and trust to his humdrum devotion to satisfy her devouring need? Even in her despair and panic she knew that she could not do this. It was love that she must have—the same sort of love that she had given Martin; that alone could bring her the joys she now envied in her sister. And love—how shall ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... is with most lads, so it was with him, the prospect of a complete change in his mode of life was full of pleasurable excitement; and perhaps it was only natural that, now he had decided to forsake it, the monotonous humdrum fisher's life became almost unbearably irksome to him. Old Bill Maskell was not slow to observe this, and with the unselfishness which was so eminently characteristic of him, though he loved the lad as his own soul, he decided to shorten for ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... not in a talking humour," she answered. "My head aches, and I shall be glad to get to bed. It was a stupid, humdrum evening" ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... credit that her energies find the outlet of a passive sorrow inadequate. She burns to prove that one who is misunderstood and despised cannot only find useful work to do, but can do it better than her humdrum domestic sisters. Unfortunately, however, she overlooks the obvious and easy duties of her home. She scans the remote corners of the world. Her bruised spirit flutters about the bye-ways of charitable effort, and at length she establishes herself ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 6, 1890 • Various
... to be sought, but the attention of the people is directed elsewhere. In Seattle, as all along the line, the talk a year ago had been almost entirely on gold hunting. Every storekeeper advertised Klondike goods, but these signs were now rusty and faded. The fever was over, the reign of the humdrum was restored. ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... as deluded fools, but who are perhaps the only really enviable people in the world. Notable, too, were the fanatics of the Kosinski type, stern heroic figures who seem strangely out of place in our humdrum world, whose practical work often strikes us as useless when it is not harmful, yet without whom the world would settle down into deadly lethargy and stagnation. Then in England came a whole host of cranks who, without being Anarchists in any ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... settled life which a man with a good deal of gipsy blood in him can tolerate; it affords some scope for his chaffering and predatory instincts and satisfies the roving passion, which is not so strong in those of mixed blood. But it is too respectable or humdrum a life for the true, undegenerate gipsy. One wet evening in September last I was prowling in a copse near Shrewton, watching the birds, when I encountered a young gipsy and recognized him as one of a gang of about a dozen I had met several ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... her friend's safe and sheltered life. No care for her; no anxiety about ways and means; no need to work for money; and no need to fear for anybody dear to her. Christina's father was her guardian, not she his; he might be a very humdrum man, and no doubt was, but his daughter had no cause to be ashamed for him; had not the burden of his life and character on her own shoulders to take care of. A swift, keen feeling of this contrast would come over Dolly; but ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... to me the other day, with tears in her eyes, that she knew Rose thought her as hard as iron. "But what can I do?" she said. "I promised papa." She makes herself miserable, and it's no use. I wish the little wild thing would get herself well married. She's not meant for this humdrum place, and she may ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sublime to the humdrum and necessary, I heave a sigh, and pull myself together, and go in to make biscuits and fry ham. But I should not forget to tell you that before I do go in, very often my looming, wonderful walls and crags weave in strange shadowy ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the long, wolfish line of beasts stretched forth in their traces and followed in the snow-shoe trail. There was something imposing about it all, something that struck deep within him and roused strange thoughts. This that he saw was not the mere labour of man and beast; it was not the humdrum toil of life, not the daily slaving of living creatures for existence—for food, and drink, and a sleeping place. It had risen above that. He had seen ships and castles rise up from heaps of steel and stone; ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... I'm surprised at you! What do you mean by such conduct? What has become of that big room in your heart, which you keep brimful of love for babies and little bits of children? Do you want them to sit humdrum on rainy days, when they are tired of playing with dolls, and tops, and kittens, and have no story book for their kind mammas to read to them? This will never do, Aunt Fanny. Please to ...
— Little Mittens for The Little Darlings - Being the Second Book of the Series • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... model couple in the "New Heloisa" is one of humdrum, conscientious respectability. It is a country life, fairly simple and without ostentation; but it is as far removed as possible from all that can be connected with the noble savage. Julie and Monsieur de Wolmar, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... this opportunity was irresistible in its call. The prayer of her dreams had been answered. To bring good fortune to her family; to take care of this beautiful, wild little sister; to leave the yellow, sordid, humdrum towns for the great, rolling, boundless open; to live on a wonderful ranch that was some day to be her own; to have fulfilled a deep, instinctive, and undeveloped love of horses, cattle, sheep, of desert and mountain, of trees and brooks and wild flowers—all this was the sum of ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... Sophy, in waking, to find, as she had found before, farewell lines, that commended hope and forbade grief. "It was," he wrote, "for both their sakes that he had set out on a tour of pleasant adventure. He needed it; he had felt his spirits droop of late in so humdrum and settled a life. And there was danger abroad—danger that his brief absence would remove. He had confided all his secrets to Lady Montfort; she must look on that kind lady as her sole guardian till he return—as ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... mean a very secluded and humdrum life. She will have to make home an ever-cheery place, an ideal that means hard work and self-sacrifice through lonesome years in which her nobility ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... Carson City, the capital of Nevada Territory. We were not glad, but sorry. It had been a fine pleasure trip; we had fed fat on wonders every day; we were now well accustomed to stage life, and very fond of it; so the idea of coming to a stand-still and settling down to a humdrum existence in a village was not agreeable, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... dull boy with nothing but work, work, work. You needn't tell me the world was only made to work in. If it was, I've no business here. You must think up something spicy, and no make-believe. I want to go somewhere where I can laugh with my whole heart. I can't go on much longer at this old humdrum, monotonous jog, any more than your colts up at the farm could go around like the plow-horses, and I know it isn't right to expect it of me. And yet what has been the case? Off early in the morning to work, standing all day till I'm lame in body and mad ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... now, however, I invite all of you to listen attentively. In a few minutes you're going to hear something that will remind you of the distant whine of a sawmill. After all, Pablo is a poor old fellow who lives a singularly humdrum existence." ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house—this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... pain, but pain embitters pleasure; and who would not rather have his happiness concentrated into one memorable day, that shall gleam and glow through a lifetime, than have it spread out over a dozen comfortable, commonplace, humdrum forenoons and afternoons, each one as like the others as two peas in a pod? Since the law of compensation obtains, I suppose it is the best law for us; but if it had been left with me, I should have made the clever people ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... undisturbed that the old soldiers eagerly sought the post in preference to any other, and were given it as a peace privilege. For months, relief after relief tramped around the fort and found the terrace post as humdrum and silent as an empty church; but this night "Number Five" ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... is a low, newspaper, humdrum, lawsuit Country, where a young couple of the same ages Can't form a friendship, but the world o'erawes it. A verdict—grievous foe to those who cause it!- Forms a sad climax to romantic homages; Besides those soothing ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... quiet again, and absent in manner, and he glanced up at intervals in the direction of the window, A new thought had come to him. It made the sweat to break out at the top of his forehead, and then he heard no more of the clatter around him than the rum-humdrum as of a train in a tunnel, pierced sometimes by the shrill scream as of an occasional whistle. Presently he rolled up again, and went out ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... vain enough to cherish the hope of bequeathing something to posterity; I see no reason for resigning my right to that inventive freedom which others enjoy; and, as I have no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood—but falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true statement you are to expect—that I am a liar. This confession is, I consider, a full defence against all imputations. My subject is, then, what I ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... sure," replied the acute doctor. "I believe I know you better than you know yourself; one learns more of a person in an hour like this than in a whole humdrum lifetime. I believe you would find it very ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... she is, too. They tell me she's writing a novel and that Lady Byng is taking her up. Lady Byng—oh, yes, she writes novels. Good idea. Likely her books won't be quite so rough as some of our Canadian novels are. I like style in a book, all that fine manners stuff; takes your mind off the humdrum of everyday life. Byng—say, that was a wise appointment if ever there was one. My way of thinking, Lord Byng has 'em all beaten since Dufferin. Kings' and queens' uncles and cousins and brothers don't suit this democratic nation like a man who got acquainted with ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... brambled cares of everyday, The tiny humdrum things, May bind my feet when they would stray, But still my heart has wings, While red geraniums are bloomed against my window-glass, And low above my green-sweet hill the ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... not reply for a minute. She set her wine-glass down and toyed with the stem. Then she looked up at him under her eyelashes with that old daring look of hers, and repeated: "And love, Peter. But real love, not stodgy humdrum liking, Peter. I want the love that's like the hot sun, and the wide, tossing blue sea east of Suez, and the nights under the moon where the real world wakes up and doesn't go to sleep, like it does in the country in the cold, hard North. Do you know," she went on, "though ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... exhortations to steady work to do with exhortations to increasing love? Not much, apparently; but may not the link be, 'Do not suppose that your Christianity is to show itself only in emotions, however sweet; the plain humdrum tasks of a working man's life are quite as noble a field as the exalted heights of brotherly love.' A loving heart is good, but a pair of diligent hands are as good. The juxtaposition of these two commands preaches a lesson which we need quite as much ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... wonderful, and that the most amazingly radiant thing in it was what had happened to her and Bob Dillon. She pitied everybody else in the universe. They were so blind! They looked, but they did not see what was so clear to eyes from which the veil had been stripped. They went about their humdrum way without emotion. Their hearts did not sing exultant paeans that throbbed out of them like joy-notes from a meadow-lark's throat. Only those who had come happily to love's fruition understood the meaning of life. June was not only happy; she was this morning wise, heiress ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... killed all that. Everyone now seeks distinction in the Metropolis. County society has become a byword for the old-fashioned and the humdrum, for bad living, bad manners, and bad taste. No one would now dream of embarrassing his estate to secure a merely local renown. Hence the decay of the shrievalty. The modern high-sheriff looks upon his obligatory office ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... him; and she expressed so much regret at her want of success, that Granville, who was very much in love, regarded her disappointment as a proof of her affection instead of resentment for an offence to her self-conceit. After all, could he expect a girl just snatched from the humdrum of country notions, with no experience of the niceties and grace of Paris life, to know or do any better? Rather would he believe that his wife's choice had been overruled by the tradesmen than allow himself to own the truth. If he had been less in love, ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... to our dearests; little we cared for their tears. "Farewell!" we cried to the humdrum and the yoke of the hireling years; Just like a pack of school-boys, and the big crowd cheered us good-bye. Never were hearts so uplifted, never ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... ripe spawn, and a few had spawned, the season with them being a little later than on the stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold. Neither had the creek here any such eventful and startling career. It led, indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the roots and fallen treetops and among the loose stones. At rare intervals it beamed upon us from some still reach or dark cover, and won from us ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... accounts of ranch life and adventures on the far western plains, so alien and remote from snug, humdrum Plainfield life that Sidney always had the sensation of crossing a gulf when she opened a letter from the Bar N. As for Sidney's own letter, this is the way it read as she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the charge brought against me by certain ignoramuses—that I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:—that is the secret. By and by the "North American Quarterly Humdrum" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution—by way of mitigating the accusations against me—I offer the sad history appended,—a history about whose ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the untutored usually are, but uncomplexly. As she fondly contemplated her husband the next morning, she did not realize that in one swift day she had accomplished the main drama of her existence and henceforth must be content with the humdrum course of life. Archie was scarcely ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... still seemed running, like a great emotion, through her veins. The tragic leap of Julie, as she sets her horse to the cliff and thunders to her death, was always in Hester's mind. It was so that she herself would like to die, spurning submission and patience, and all the humdrum virtues. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... she is worrying for fear he may have fallen in, she remains at home. Really she expects to see him come home any minute, but by conjuring up imaginary dangers she is getting ready to make his home-coming a great relief instead {499} of a mere humdrum matter. She is "shooting the chutes", getting the thrill of ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... swear that the eyes of the haughtiest beauty Have never inspired in my soul that intense, Reverential, and loving, and absolute sense Of heart-felt admiration I feel for this man, As I see him beside me;—there, wearing the wan London daylight away, on his humdrum committee; So unconscious of all that awakens my pity, And wonder—and worship, I might say? "To me There seems something nobler than genius to be In that dull patient labor no genius relieves, That absence of all joy which yet never grieves; The humility of it! the grandeur withal! ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... road in a quite definable direction. But the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr. Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be so much differentiated in the future that ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... humdrum life, my wealth, which came to me without any effort of my own, and the hitherto almost unruffled character of my relations with you have all conspired to make me satisfied with an easy and rather indolent existence. I realize I need a shaking up. I want to forget myself in some novel experience, ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... notwithstanding his piety, loves it all the more on that account. It is strange that an example so salutary and stimulating to the poorest and meanest of us should be set by an unbelieving king, and that my humdrum existence should be secretly supported by "Frederick II. Roi ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... am so much accustomed, for my own part, to Hickman's whining, creeping, submissive courtship, that I now expect nothing but whine and cringe from him: and am so little moved with his nonsense, that I am frequently forced to go to my harpsichord, to keep me awake, and to silence his humdrum. Whereas Lovelace keeps up the ball with a witness, and all his address and conversation is ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the children are grown; Fun and frolic no more he knows; Robert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone; Off he flies, and we sing as he goes: Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink; When you can pipe that merry old strain, Robert of Lincoln, come ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... concerned, this story has now reached an end. With my departure from Aureataland, I re-entered the world of humdrum life, and since that memorable night in 1884, nothing has befallen me worthy of a polite reader's attention. I have endured the drudgery incident to earning a living; I have enjoyed the relaxations every wise man makes for himself. But ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... extraordinary things are happening. All very quiet and humdrum on the surface. Only the aeroplanes are busy, and if the sun is between you and them there are always the little black high Archie clouds following them, like vultures appearing ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... see one kinglet about, you may be sure there are others not far away, for, except in the nesting season, its habits are distinctly social, its friendliness extending to the humdrum brown creeper, the chickadees, and the nuthatches, in whose company it is often seen; indeed, it is likely to be in almost any flock of the winter birds. They are a merry band as they go exploring the trees together. The kinglet ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... promulgate it. Then I, for one, perceived at once that the splendid 'Fire Queen' could be no other than a daughter of 'Berners of the Burning Heart.' And now, Madam! am I permitted to introduce myself by the name I bear in this humdrum world of reality, or has your penetration already rendered such an ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... She took this rebuke with a candour, and a sense of its justice the most amiable: she nodded her approbation of the admonition; and, returning to her chair, quietly sat down, as she afterwards said, like a pretty little miss, for the remainder of one of the most humdrum evenings that ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... understand. Perhaps it arises from the peculiar fact that people find it more interesting to hear bad things of their neighbors than good, and the person who furnishes startling tales is considered better company than the humdrum ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... days to her, for something like despair came over her when she thought of spending all her life in that quiet house, devoted to humdrum cares, a few small pleasures, and the duty that never seemed to grow any easier. "I can't do it. I wasn't meant for a life like this, and I know I shall break away and do something desperate if somebody doesn't come and help me," she said to herself, when her first efforts failed and she fell into ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... perversity and administrative technique to have been surmounted and a wise, disinterested executive to be in supreme control of our business life. Let us suppose all this, and ask only the question: How would this executive treat the humdrum case of wool and mutton? How would it decide the number of ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... she had a fine crop of piques, vanities, and dislikes growing up under this new style of cultivation. She loved admiration, enjoyed her purple and fine linen, hid new-born envy, disappointed hope, and wounded pride behind a smiling face, and often thought with a sigh of the humdrum duties that awaited her at home. But under the airs and graces Aunt Pen cherished with such sedulous care, under the flounces and furbelows Victorine daily adjusted with groans, under the polish which she acquired ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... marriage with Roger much as though it were a stout set of palings with "No Right of Way" written across them in large letters. Outside, the waves of emotion might surge in vain, while within, she and Roger would settle down to the humdrum placidity of married life. But the dull, ceaseless ache at her heart made her sometimes question whether anything in the world could keep at bay the insistent ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... There was nothing of the old fashion about his style—the greasy coat and keen taste of Papa Malgras, the watching for the pictures of beginners, bought at ten francs, to be resold at fifteen, all the little humdrum comedy of the connoisseur, turning up his nose at a coveted canvas in order to depreciate it, worshipping painting in his inmost heart, and earning a meagre living by quickly and prudently turning over his petty capital. No, no; the famous Naudet had the appearance ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... certainly not been a record of unbroken success. But the employment here, by genius, of such subjects for substantial parts of a novel was a success pure and unmixed. So, in the earlier book, the same author had shown how the most humdrum incident and the minutest painting of ordinary character could be combined with historic tragedy like that furnished by Waterloo, with domestic drame of the most exciting kind like the discovery of Lord Steyne's relations with Becky, or the at least suggested later crime of that ingenious ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... there was a fierce, defiant, Greedy, grumpy, grizzly giant In the pages of a picture-book, and he Sometimes screamed, in sudden rages, "I must jump out from these pages, For this life's a much too humdrum one for me! Fiddle-dee! Yes, this life's a quite too quiet one ...
— Child Songs of Cheer • Evaleen Stein
... to the story of what was, perhaps, one of the strangest of all the adventures which have befallen me in the course of a life that so far can scarcely be called tame or humdrum. ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... with such delicious plays of fancy as lend witchery to a high white moon, an arched blue sky, or rolling prairies-even to the tranquil town and the happenings of every day. Nothing could put magic into the humdrum life of school, and here she must struggle through another whole year of it before she might reach Colorado. That was a cloud, indeed, for one who wasn't "smart" like Beulah Crosswhite. Mathematics Missy found an inexplicable, unalloyed torture; history for all its pleasingly suggestive ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... 1805 opened in humdrum prosperity and national self-satisfaction. Jefferson could look upon a country in which he held a position rivalled only by that of a European monarch or an English prime minister. The principles of Republican equality, of States' rights, of ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... seek his line in diplomacy; wherein he had no sooner built a reputation by services at two or three of the Italian courts than, with a knighthood in hand and an ambassadorship in prospect, he suddenly abandoned all, cast off the world, and retired into Cornwall, to make a humdrum marriage and ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... ground, there appear to be two subterranean stories below the surface. From Somerset House we pursued our way through Temple Bar, but missed it, and therefore entered by the passage from what was formerly Alsatia, but which now seems to be a very respectable and humdrum part of London. We came immediately to the Temple Gardens, which we walked quite round. The grass is still green, but the trees are leafless, and had an aspect of not being very robust, even at more genial seasons of the year. There were, however, large quantities of brilliant chrysanthemums, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the dwelling-house, but severely chide the lightkeepers for the disagreement that seems to subsist among them.' 'The families of the two lightkeepers here agree very ill. I have effected a reconciliation for the present.' 'Things are in a very HUMDRUM state here. There is no painting, and in and out of doors no taste or tidiness displayed. Robert's wife GREETS and M'Gregor's scolds; and Robert is so down-hearted that he says he is unfit for duty. I told him that if he was to mind wives' quarrels, ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that will live with us for many years. See, they are running along the platform as the train steams out. 494 they shout, and bravely and with smiling face he calls out in return 494, and off they go, he to the work of his life, and we to the more humdrum but perhaps not less necessary work ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... edged with black and thrust it into her dancer's cuff with some little murmur implying that she wishes him to keep it. To whomsoever these things happen life becomes a song. A little event of this kind lifts one out of the humdrum of material existence. I suppose the cause of our extraordinary happiness is that one is again, as it were, marching in step; one has dropped into the Great Procession and is actively doing the great Work. There is no denying it, that in these moments of sex one does feel more conscious ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... the good old whaling barque CACHALOT, as far as whaling is concerned, comes to an end. For all practical purposes she becomes a humdrum merchantman in haste to reach her final port of discharge, and get rid of her cargo. No more will she loiter and pry around anything and everything, from an island to a balk of drift-wood, that comes in her way, knowing not the meaning of "waste of time." The "crow's-nests" are dismantled, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that, when you parted, you would say, This is an extraordinary man. He is never what we would call humdrum; never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off." That Burke was as good a listener as he was a talker, Johnson never would allow. "So desirous is he to talk," he said, "that if one is talking at this end of the table, he'll talk to somebody at the other end." Johnson was ...
— Burke • John Morley
... the awful social wreckage[C] thrown upon the strand there; or possibly it would mean an isolated post out on the frontier, or down in the equally heroic field of the mountains of the South. He might leave some of you just where you are, in a commonplace, humdrum spot, as you think, when your visions had been in other fields. He might make you a seed-sower, like lonely Morrison in China, when you wanted to be a harvester like Moody. Here is the real battlefield. The fighting ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... unnoticed. Both are, in truth, the natural results of the predominating quality of his mind, to which we have before alluded,—analysis." In Poe's hands, however, the enumeration of pins and buttons, the exact imitation of the prosaic facts of humdrum life in this workaday world, is not an end, but a means only, whereby he constructs and intensifies the shadow of mystery which broods over ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... his wife to her room and soon left her in an unusually contented frame of mind to develop strategy for the coming party. Mrs. Allen's nerves utterly incapacitated her for the care of her household, attendance upon church, and such humdrum matters, but in view of a great occasion like a "grand crush ball," where among the luminaries of fashion she could become the refulgent centre of a constellation which her fair daughters would make ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... Jurgen was that she did not seem to tire of him: and he would often wonder what this lovely myth, so skilled and potent in arts wherein he was the merest bungler, could find to care for in Jurgen. For now they lived together like any other humdrum married couple, and their occasional exchange of endearments was as much a matter of course as their meals, and hardly ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... some miles away from his own home. The only inhabitants of this monastery were a dozen or so of Buddhist priests, who, except when they were engaged in the daily services of the temple, lived a quiet, humdrum, lazy kind of existence which harmonized well with the solitude and the majestic stillness of the mountain scenery by which they ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... is not concerned solely with sensational episodes. American ministers and the State Department are engaged for the most part in the humdrum adjustment of minor differences which never find their way into the newspapers. Probably more such cases arise with Great Britain, in behalf of Canada, than with any other section of the globe. On the American continent ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... Dwight was the boy of the V, a strong, hearty, happy young woman of fourteen, who succeeded in getting a great deal of enjoyment out of this humdrum, work-a-day world. Her rosy cheeks glowed and her brown eyes shone with health; for Jean was as full of life as a young colt, and vented her superfluous energy in climbing trees, walking fences, and running races, until Aunt Jane and her followers raised their hands and eyes ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... Alexander should come over from Hanover and join him at Bath, which was done. Next they wanted to rescue their sister Caroline from her humdrum existence, but this was a more difficult matter. Caroline's journal gives an account of her life at this time that is instructive. Here are a few extracts ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... invokers of reason against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers as a chosen people, as children of the light. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to light; stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong. This explains the love which Heine, that Paladin of the modern spirit, has for France; it explains ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... that is about you; my life has been humdrum enough, we all know; but you seem marked out ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... must stay, father. Why, the child is the life of the house. We are all so humdrum and mopy, I don't know what we should do without ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... battle-field of Sticklestad. Every spot to me was full of interest,—but an interest noways connected with the neat green villas, the rectangular streets, and the obtrusive warehouses. These signs of a modern humdrum prosperity seemed to melt away before my eyes as I gazed from the schooner's deck, and the accessories of an elder time came to furnish the landscape,—the clumsy merchantmen lazily swaying with the tide, darkened into armed galleys ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... Humdrum isn't where you live; it's what you are. Perhaps you are one of those whose lives are bound by neighbourly interests. Imaginatively, you never seek what lies under a gorgeous sunset; you are never stirred by any longing to investigate ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... the prejudice which he found in his home. Reading no books, for they thought it waste of time to read, the minds of his father and mother had sunk into such a narrow sluggishness that they could interest themselves only in trivialities. Their thoughts were occupied by their neighbours and the humdrum details of the life about them. Flattering themselves on their ideals and their high principles, they vegetated in stupid sloth and in a less than animal vacuity. Every topic of conversation above the most commonplace they found ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... spirited doings of their early friend. He wanted the superiority of his establishment, the excellence of his horses, the stoutness of his hounds, and the polish of his field, proclaimed, with perhaps a quiet cut at the Flat-Hat gentry; instead of which he had a mixed medley sort of a mess, whose humdrum monotony was only relieved by the absurdities and errors with which it was crammed. At first, Mr. Puffington could not make out what it meant, whether it was a hoax for the purpose of turning run-writing into ridicule, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... rises to the height of his chance and fulfils his ideals. But he is misunderstood by his wife, who sues him for a divorce but fails to bring conclusive evidence. The book ends happily, and throughout its course is a fine picture of a rather humdrum soul seeking—and reaching—the heights ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... named George and Mary Rabbit, and always used to sleep side by side. But after a few weeks they must have felt tired of their humdrum life; for one bright morning they ran away. I hope they are living happily together in the fragrant woods from ...
— The Nursery, July 1877, XXII. No. 1 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... never attended college. In his own opinion, he ought to see something of the world, and have his youthful fling. Later on, when he got ready to settle down, if Blanche were still in the humor, they might marry, and sink to the humdrum level of other old married people. The fact that Blanche Leary was visiting his mother during his unexpectedly long absence had not operated at all to hasten his return to North Carolina. He had been having a very good time at Clarence, and, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... stood there now on the model stand, gazing dreamily from his busy hands to his lean, intent features, it occurred to her that this day had not been a sample of their usual humdrum relations. From the very beginning of their business relations he had remained merely her employer, self-centered, darkly absorbed in his work, or, when not working, bored and often yawning. She had never come to know him any better than when she ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... native simplicity of the man, the absence of pose and ceremony, do much to strengthen this notion; but the real truth is that while gifted with unusual imagination, Edison's march to the goal of a new invention is positively humdrum and monotonous in its steady progress. No one ever saw Edison in a hurry; no one ever saw him lazy; and that which he did with slow, careful scrutiny six months ago, he will be doing with just as much calm deliberation of research six months hence—and six years ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the substance of Goethe's criticism:[7] Amid such influences and surroundings, occupied with fads and studies of this sort, lacking all incentive from without to any important activity and confronted by the sole prospect of having to drag out a humdrum existence, men began to reflect with a sort of sullen exultation upon the possibility of departing this life at will, and to find in this thought a scant amelioration of the ills and tedium of the times. This disposition was so general that "Werther" ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... animal! But he always does things on the quiet; it is his nature to. He's the sort of chap that thinks for about twenty years, and then goes straight and does the one and only thing that no one else would dream of doin'. I rather fancy, for all his humdrum ways, he would be a difficult man to thwart. I'd give a good deal to know how he got over Lady Florence, though. He has precious little to recommend him as ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... was bored. I was growing tired of my humdrum existence. So I'm ready to run risks.... Here's my ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... learned how people received, how they set their tables and served them, how they built their houses and furnished them. She learned not only the possibilities but the actualities of splendor and luxury in the town where she had led a retired and humdrum existence for nearly a lifetime. She now thrust her head forth from her dim old cavern, and fed her eyes on the flowers and fields and skies and goodly streams of the great ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... too, was sometimes a disadvantage to him; it drew upon him a notoriety which he was not always in the mood or the vein to act up to. "Good heavens, Mr. Foote," exclaimed an actress at the Haymarket Theater, "what a humdrum kind of man Dr. Goldsmith appears in our green-room compared with the figure he makes in his poetry!" "The reason of that, madam," replied Foote, "is because the muses are better company ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... and heard with the least emotion, perhaps, ever experienced by a soldier. Absorbed in reflections on what I heard, and in fancies of a world of which I knew so little, it is not to be doubted that I constructed ideals far beyond the humdrum reality of home life, impracticable ideals that tended only to separate me more from other men. Their world was not my world; this I knew full well, and I sometimes thought they knew it; for while no rude treatment marked their intercourse ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... the pearl of a woman who had given herself to him so long ago gained a more priceless value with every moment's thought, "Ah, sweet Madge! I'm the blessed idiot you loved and toiled for at Santa Barbara! I shouldn't have believed that such a thing could happen in this humdrum world." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... it is only one of the many talents that he possesses, which are so various and extraordinary, that it is very difficult to ascertain precisely the rank and value of each.] What I most envy Burke for, is, his being constantly the same. He is never what we call humdrum; never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off.' BOSWELL. 'Yet he can listen.' JOHNSON. 'No; I cannot say he is good at that. So desirous is he to talk, that, if one is speaking at this end of the table, he'll speak ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... am not allowed to walk or ride out alone, I shall 'gang daft!' I know I shall! Was ever such a dull, lonesome, humdrum place as this same Hurricane Hall?" complained Cap, as she sat sewing with Mrs. Condiment ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... like a woman who never looked beyond the range of the kitchen and larder, or thought beyond the humdrum prayers of your Manual. I wish to see my children established; I wish to see them gain station in the world; I wish to make them the first of their family; and I do assure you, Nancy, that it is not such a trifle as the difference between popery ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... utmost enthusiasm by every officer present. They gave three cheers for their gallant leader, and another rouser for the service they belonged to, which made the walls of their mess room ring again, so delighted were they at the prospect of leaving their quiet, humdrum quarters for the dash and ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest |
