"Loveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some tempter's crafty suit Would woo thee to a loveless bed: I see thee to the altar's ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... Miss Bartlett, who had really been neither pliable nor humble nor inconsistent. She had worked like a great artist; for a time—indeed, for years—she had been meaningless, but at the end there was presented to the girl the complete picture of a cheerless, loveless world in which the young rush to destruction until they learn better—a shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good, if we may judge from those who have ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... When we were girls he told us we ought to make worldly marriages, but in the end he let us choose the men we loved and gave us the material help in money which enabled us to marry them. I find exactly the opposite plan adopted by most parents: they sacrifice their children to loveless marriages as long as they know there is enough money for no demand ever to be made ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... must not appear to be curious. To question her for the details would have been repugnant to his nicely balanced sense of the fitness of things. Nevertheless, he reflected, if her love had been illicit, was it more illicit than that of the woman who enters into a loveless marriage, induced to such action by a sordid consideration of worldly goods and gear? Was her sin in bearing a child out of wedlock more terrible than that of the married woman who shudders at the responsibilities ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... Angelica's thoughts ran on. "Hollow, shallow, inconsistent—loveless. Catholicism equals a modern refinement of pagan principles with all the old deities on their best behaviour thrown in; while Protestantism is an ecclesiastical ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... myself to govern and protect myself, without being tied to a watch-dog, whose baying would serve much the same purpose as that picture in mosaic in the House of the Tragic Poet. I have a very sincere affection for you, Alma, but the day on which you sell yourself in a loveless marriage, will strain hard ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... such a marriage was made none may rightly know now. I can remember that the dark-browed Nicholas, who was but little loved at our house, took some heed to this girl, greatly younger than himself, though herself of ripening age when she let herself be persuaded into that loveless wedlock. It was whispered that he had made a convert of her; the Jesuits and seminary priests were hard at work, striving to win back their lost power by increasing the number of their flock and recruiting from ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... and a plain funeral after a useful, unselfish life, than a grand mausoleum after a loveless, ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... in those days, of the love of my girlhood, for I knew now that it had been sinful in me to turn from the path that had opened before me into perfect trust and peace, and walk blindly over withered hopes to a loveless future. Time had shown me that I esteemed Wainwright Angier more highly in those days than the man who was now my husband. But I never spoke of him, and I dared not ask his fate, for I knew my husband hated his memory. But one sad day, when, with Geoffrey, I walked ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... the red fires of the artist-flesh to burn within him, while he bemoaned the fact that he had never yet found a woman worthy of his devotion. Loudly did he bewail his over-fastidiousness; in which, nevertheless, he secretly glorified. But now for so long had he mourned his loveless estate, that, since of all the subjects of his brush woman was most congenial to him, he had gradually come to lay every fault of his work, crudeness of coloring, hardness of line, harshness of texture, finally, his very conventionality of conception, to the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... still art thou, To bind the loveless joyless vow, The heart from pleasure to delude, To join the ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... ever more lonely or loveless than the ill-starred and ill-favoured Queen Mary. She had no near relatives in England except Elizabeth, and Elizabeth, by the irony of fate, was worse than a stranger to her. The awful solitude of a throne excluded her, even more than her own ill-health and brooding temper, from the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... barking at one another, thought Laura, listening to the loveless bandying of words—she was unused to the snappishness of the Irish manner, which sounds so much worse than it is meant to be: and she was chilled anew by it when, over the telephone, she heard Georgy holding a ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... Hyacinth's jealousy had brought matters to a crisis. Something must be done, Angela told herself, and quickly, to set her right with her sister, and in her own esteem. She had to choose between a loveless marriage and the Convent. By accepting one or the other she must prove that she was not the slave of ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... a marriage for money or rank, then, as a rule, matters lie more favorably. The two accommodate themselves mutually, and a modus vivendi is established. They want no scandal, and regard for their children compels them to avoid any, although it is the children who suffer most under a cold, loveless life on the part of their parents, even if such a life does not develop into enmity, quarrel and dissension. Often accommodation is reached in order to avoid material loss. As a rule it is the husband, whose ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... where his little cousin was tending some of his favourite flowers, and while standing near and watching her he had amused himself with comparing fair youth, delicate and attractive, with shrivelled eld, livid and loveless, and in jestingly repeating to a smiling girl the vinegar discourse of a cankered old maid. Once on such an occasion Caroline had said to him, looking up from the luxuriant creeper she was binding to its frame, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... she admitted her own beauty. He would, he must want her more than that other life, at the very thought of which her face darkened. That other life so hard, and far from her! So loveless, formal, and yet—to him so real, so desperately, accursedly real! If he must indeed give up his career, then surely the life they could live together would make up to him—a life among simple and sweet things, all over the world, with music and pictures, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... uproar of streets, or in the noise that drifts through wails and windows—you can hear the hackneyed melancholy of street music; a music which sounds like the actual voice of the human Heart, singing the lost joys, the regrets, the loveless lives of the people who blacken the pavements, or jolt ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... light for the first time on his black, loveless face. "What is it?" he enunciated distinctly, ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... the wreck of chivalry, To her proud soul no common fear can bring: Bravely she tarrieth for her Lord the King, Her soul aflame with passionate ecstasy. O Hair of Gold! O Crimson Lips! O Face! Made for the luring and the love of man! With thee I do forget the toil and stress, The loveless road that knows no resting-place, Time's straitened pulse, the soul's dread weariness, My freedom and ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... poverty, but he also inherited a deformity which made him the butt of ridicule among his vulgar companions. His childhood was made up of neglect which developed a cold, distant nature. He is generally described as a loveless old man, but his biographers seem to forget the influences that surrounded his childhood. Such were the opportunities enjoyed by Girard; such the chance offered to him, but he held that a man's best capital was "industry," and this seemed ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... understand my story entirely. Wanting a full explanation, you might fairly ask me why I married with this drawback. I did not know of it, but my wife believed I did. We were both most cruelly deceived, it does not matter now. She is condemned to a loveless, joyless life; so am I. With a wife beautiful loving, young, I must lead a most solitary existence—I must see my name die out for want of heirs—I must see my race almost extinct, my life passed in repining and ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... to discover what it is they really wish to do. A summer so spent may keep many a girl from slipping into teaching just because it seems the only thing she can do. Such a salvation will be twofold, for it will save not only the girl, but also a profession overcrowded with loveless followers. There are so many needs to be filled by a woman's work that it is her duty to look for some vocation for which she is truly adapted, to get out of the ruts of those professions into which women flock because they have ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... the tragedy of a careless and supercilious coquetry which plays with the heart as the fisherman plays with the salmon? Read "Clara Vere de Vere." Would you know the dull heartache of a loveless married life, growing at times into an intolerable anguish which no marital fidelity can do much to medicate? Read "Auld Robin Gray." Who but a poet can interpret the pain of a parting between loving hearts, with its remorseful recollections of the wholly ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... proposals known. Either because such an alliance flatters their pride or because they dare not refuse, Iseult's parents accept in their daughter's name and prepare everything for her speedy departure. The queen, wishing to save her daughter from the curse of a loveless marriage, next brews a love-potion which she bids Brengwain—her daughter's maid and companion—administer to King Mark and Iseult on their ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... with Henry; a pure and innocent existence, he had said, must be sacrificed, and doomed to hopeless disappointment, if I persisted in my refusal. I had persisted, and Alice was sacrificed, though to what I knew not; but to some mysterious necessity—to some secret obligation. A loveless marriage—a lonely passage through life—and God only knew what secret trials—what withering of the heart—what solitude of the soul—what measure of that hope deferred, which makes the heart sick—of that craving void which nothing ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... account as well as work on his own account—to oppress and overreach for his own ends as well as to be honest and benevolent for his own ends, for he will find ill-doing far easier, and more natural, in one sense, and a plan that brings in quicker profits, than well-doing; and so this godless, loveless, every-man-for- himself nation, or sham nation rather, this joint-stock company, in which fools expect that universal selfishness will do the work of universal benevolence, will quarrel and break up, crumble to dust again, as Babel did. "But," says God to ...
— Twenty-Five Village Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... resented that," he broke in. "You've hugged that ghost of a loveless marriage to your bosom and sighed for the real romance you'd missed. Well, maybe you did. But you haven't found it yet. I'm very sure of that, although I doubt if I could ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... turned her face toward me; her sorrowful eyes looked as if she could never again know sleep or forgetfulness. "I am a coward," she said, "yet I thought that cowardice and my desire for life had both died together. I did not draw back from the knives of the Indians, but now I am afraid of a loveless marriage. We are young. We may live many years. Oh, monsieur, I have ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... here. Egotism, egotism, egotism! Its name, he thought, was surely Ostermore. And again, as once before, under the like circumstances, he found more pity than scorn awaking in his heart. The whole wasted, sterile life that lay behind this man; the unhappy, loveless home that stood about him now in his declining years were the fruits he had garnered from that consuming love of self with which the gods ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Parliament; but it was the impulse of a man who knew his life to be falling into ruin, who welcomed any suggestion that would save him from final and fatal apathy—of a man whose existence had always been loveless—who, with passionate ideals, had never known anything but a venal embrace. In Quarrier's position, with abounding resources, with the love of such a woman as this, what would he not have made of life? ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... the murmur of his hard renown, Year after year he shambled through the town, — A loveless exile moving with a staff; And oftentimes there crept into his ears A sound of alien pity, touched with tears, — And then (and only then) did ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... won, Wilfred," I said. "Supposing it had been otherwise, and you had succeeded in your designs. Would you have been any happier? Would you not have been haunted with the thought that you had ruined her life, besides condemning her to the hell of a loveless marriage?" ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... called and asked her if she could not arrange for a divorce, she answered gently, "My husband is the noblest man in the world. Should I separate from him who has no one but me to love him? Am I to tell him that I hate him, I who owe everything to him, and who brought him no dowry but a loveless heart?" ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... darling's way might be opened up, and that she might be saved from committing so great a wrong, which would bring upon her the curse of a loveless marriage. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... intuition of the lonely woman's loveless heart, Queen Catherine read in my face what a poor trader might not speak. She reached her hand to me, and when I would have saluted it like any dutiful subject, she took my hand in hers and placed Hortense's hand ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... with divine vision. But household wisdom, labour of love, toil upon earth according to the law of Heaven—these are reconcilable, in one code of glory, with revelation in cave or island, with the endurance of desolate and loveless days, with the repose of folded hands that wait ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... feel it now, but it will feel it then. The fire of His love will kindle a fire of loving self-reproach. The weight of a heavy shame to think of the past, and to know now of His beauty, and His love, and His care, care for so careless a soul, love for a soul so loveless,—this will sting with an extreme severity the soul humbled before Him. And here we should do well to remember that, as the characters of each differ almost infinitely, whereby there are innumerable shades and degrees of ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... "Bloody of purpose, and yet bloodless. Lustful of purpose, and yet loveless. In his prisons many wait for death, but none perish; for the King has sworn that none shall die before the fool Diogenes, and we cannot find the fool. The loveliest women of Sicily have been torn from their ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... delight; Keep the waters in thy sight. Love hath made me strong to go, For thy sake, to realms below, Where the water's shine and hum Through the darkness never come: Let, I pray, one thought of me Spring, a little well, in thee; Lest thy loveless soul be found Like a ...
— The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories • George MacDonald
... Connor, whom she had known in Dublin, but now that he has come down to ask her to marry him she chooses the farmer, brutal though she knows him, because as his wife she can do the work for Ireland that she has imagined for herself. The loveless marriage, so universal an institution all over Ireland, made it nothing out of the way for Ellen to act as she did, even though at the time of the action of the play a higher ideal of marriage than that of the old matchmaking had come in. It is this institution that Mr. Robinson, from one point ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... completion of the report, on which his heart was set, the will to live deserted Dudley Norton. To drop in harness was, as he had said to Quita, a kinder fate than the dismal disintegration of a loveless old age; and the loosening of his grip on life brought reaction sharp and sudden, from which he ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... wanderings; the midnight closet; the thoughts which, as Hume said of his own, could not exist in the world, but were all busy with life in seclusion,—these were rendered sweeter than ever to a mind for which the ordinary objects of the world were now utterly loveless; and the musings of solitude had become, as it were, a rightful homage and offering to the dead. We may form, then, some idea of the extent to which, in Mordaunt's character, principle predominated ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home for ever, and relinquish ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... she would not. She never wanted to be alone—she who had been so fond of solitude such a short time ago. She was afraid of herself—afraid to think—afraid of that dim future that was drawing so very near. Every feeling of heart and soul revolted at the thought of that loveless marriage—the profanation of herself seemed more ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... the fountain of domestic sweets, Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced. Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendear'd, Casual fruition; nor in court amours, Mix'd dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenade, which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... was love in the sunshine, and love in the air; Youth, hope, home, companionship, spring, everywhere. There was youth, there was spring in her blood; yet she only, In all the great city, seemed loveless and lonely. ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Amazon or a Ramona, but because she is representative of some millions of women in business, and because, in a vague but undiscouraged way, she keeps on inquiring what women in business can do to make human their existence of loveless routine. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... first woe fell, And the rest fall upon it, not on me: Else should I bear that Henry comes not?—fails Just this first night out of so many nights? Loving is done with. Were he sitting now, As so few hours since, on that seat, we'd love No more—contrive no thousand happy ways To hide love from the loveless, any more. I think I might have urged some little point In my defense, to Thorold; he was breathless For the least hint of a defense: but no, The first shame over, all that would might fall. No Henry! ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... love, for social life, for contact with the great, throbbing world outside. Women do admire beautiful things; but there is something they admire infinitely more. Luxuries do not come first in any real woman's desires. She prefers poverty with love to luxury with an indifferent or loveless husband. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... hath no savour on my tongue, my youth is sped ere my dawn is day. Nothing is left to me, Eric, save this fair body that thou didst scorn, and the dreams which I may gather from my hours of scanty sleep, and such shame as befalls a loveless bride." ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... much as named one," responded Mrs Dorothy, with a little laugh. "Sure, you are not one of those foolish maids that think they must be loveless and forlorn without they ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... is not her husband, which in some ways I would he were. A simple reason. I asked her, and she had no mind to either, and as her mother married where her heart was, so I have sworn that the daughter should do, or not at all—for better a nunnery than a loveless bridal. ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... rather superficial metaphysician, but the warm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deep respect for the man. He talks of the absurdities of women's education; draws a bitter picture of a woman's fate in a loveless marriage of convenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, but asks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from a schooling in folly; assails the practice of gallantry, and the fashionable conjugal infidelities of his day; writes with real indignation of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... the children in village streets—they will not get out of your way; by and by in rural places the merciful man will have to ring his bell almost incessantly to avoid running over them. As I do not travel at a furious speed I manage to avoid most things, even the wandering loveless oil-beetle and the small rose-beetle and that slow-moving insect tortoise the tumbledung. Two or three seasons ago I was so unfortunate as to run over a large and beautifully bright grass snake near Aldermaston, once a snake sanctuary. He writhed and wriggled on the road as if ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... doubt from general report, as they had not seen him themselves. "From bad to worse! That is their destiny. I see it, but I cannot alter it. The selfishness of a mean and crafty man—the selfishness of an ambitious and silly woman—- the selfishness of a spiteful and loveless child all tend one way, from bad to worse! And you, my darlings, must suffer it awhile, I fear. Yet, when things are at their worst, you can come to me. I can do ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... that Miss Newcome was engaged to the Marquis Fairntosh, but for all that no marriage took place. First the death of Lady Kew made an inevitable postponement, and then Ethel herself shrunk from the loveless match, and, in spite of Lord Fairntosh's protests, dismissed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... lost or known the dread of losing a love so vast and glorious, do we prize it at its just worth. And if a man who has once possessed this love shuts himself out from it by his own act and deed, and sinks to some loveless marriage; if by some incident, hidden in the obscurity of married life, the woman with whom he hoped to know the same felicity makes it clear that it will never be revived for him; if, with the sweetness of divine love still on his lips, he has dealt a deadly wound ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... time has not taught it to be patient. For Diana Paget, childhood had been joyless, and girlhood lonely. That blank and desolate region, that dreary flat of fenny waste ground between Vauxhall and Battersea, on which the child's eyes had first looked, had been typical of her loveless childhood. With her mother's death faded the one ray of light that had illumined her desolation. She was shifted from one nurse to another; and bar nurses were not allowed to love her, for she remained with them as an encumbrance ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... passed to Hades untimely, in her seventh year, before her many playmates, poor thing, pining for her baby brother, who at twenty months old tasted of loveless Death. Alas, ill-fated Peristeris, how near at hand God has set the sorest ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... in Florence was painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... that I know to be vain. If one of us is to suffer, let it be that one who is used to suffering. I have never been the darling of my parents, like you; I have not been used at home to the kindness and the love that you remember. A life without sweetness and joy has well fitted me for a loveless future. And, besides, you are worthy of him, and I am not. Mrs. Gallilee is wrong, Carmina, if she thinks I am your rival. I am not your rival; I never can be your rival. Believe nothing else, but, ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... shall praise him and the shores bear part That reared him when the bright south world was black With fume of creeds more foul than hell's own rack, Still darkening more love's face with loveless art Since Paul, faith's fervent Antichrist, of heart Heroic, haled the world vehemently back From Christ's pure path on dire Jehovah's track, And said to dark Elisha's Lord, 'Thou art.' But one whose soul had put the raiment on Of love that ...
— A Midsummer Holiday and Other Poems • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... you!" said Patsy, impulsively. "I forgive you all, Aunt Jane; for through your own selfishness you cut yourself off from all your family—from all who might have loved you—and you have lived all these years a solitary and loveless life. There'll be no grudge of mine to follow you to the grave, Aunt Jane. But," her voice hardening, "I'll never touch a penny of the money that was denied my poor dead mother. Thank God the old Dad and I are independent, and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... her sterile wit. Herself waxed weary on her loveless throne. Men felt life's tide, the sweep and surge of it, And craved a living voice, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... say, our heart is a battle-field, on which no less than the Devil himself, and God Himself are fighting for our souls. On one side, Satan trying to bring us into that state of eternal death in which he lives himself; Satan, the loveless one, the self-willed one, the accuser, the slanderer, slandering God to us, slandering man to us, slandering to us the friends we love best and trust most utterly; yea, slandering our own selves to us, trying to make us believe that we are as bad, ought ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... are we so unwilling? What mean we continually to talk of being "spared"—spared from that happy journey, from that heavenly Home! They that are not journeying home are spared indeed: but how faithless, how loveless is it in us to bring up an evil report of the good Land, to show such fear and distance from the forgiving ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... agricultural labourers in South Dorsetshire, led by one of their class, George Loveless, in receipt of 9s. a week each, demanded the 10s. rate of wages usual in the neighbourhood. The result was a reduction to 8s. An appeal was made to the chairman of the local bench, who decided that they must work for whatever ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... he could not quite grasp it all in those few minutes—it is rather deep, you know—and so he is coming up to dinner to-night to make a thorough study of it. He feels it is his one last hope, and if it fails him, he is lost in the sea of a loveless marriage." ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... Whither back? How to the dark? From no dark came I, but the depths of light; From the sun-heart I came, of love a spark: What should I do but love with all my might? To die of love severe and pure and stark, Were scarcely loss; to lord a loveless height— That were a living death, damnation's ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... honeymoon. We saw it fading; but we did not know How bleak the path would be when once its glow Was wholly gone. And yet we two were forced to follow on - Leagues, leagues apart while ever side by side. Darker and darker grew the loveless weather, Darker the way, Until we could not stay Longer together. Now that all anger from our hearts has died, And love has flown far from its ruined nest, To find sweet shelter in another breast, Let us talk calmly of our past mistakes, ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... realising her young strength she held him firm in her grip and threatened to throw him into a pond if he persisted in his attempted chastisement. Since then he had respected her person, but to the day of his death he had cursed her for anserine stupidity. An unlovely, loveless and unloved old man. Why should Blanquette have wept over him? She had not the Parisian's highly strung temperament and capacity for facile emotion. She was peasant to the core, slow to rejoice, and slow to grieve, and she had the peasant's remorseless ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... my charge, that I should be dismissed. She was my last chance as she was your own. But what to me were risks? I had lost my love, and my country had dishonoured herself in my eyes. I was nameless, loveless, countryless. All had gone, ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... sweets, Whose bed is undefiled and chaste pronounced, Present, or past, as saints and patriarchs used. Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared, Casual fruition; nor in court-amours, Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenate, which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. These, lulled by nightingales, embracing ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... started up. I saw in her eyes the light of old battles. "Oh, it was a horror!" she cried, beginning to pace the floor. "It seemed to me that I was living the agony of all the loveless marriages of the world. I felt myself pursued, not merely by the importunate desires of one man—I suffered with all the millions of women who give themselves night after night without love! He came to seem ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... thinking that after all he had found one way of escape from his troubles. For if Lesley accepted Maurice, and lived with him in a house opposite her father's, there would always be a corner for him at their fireside, and he would not go to the grave feeling himself a childless, loveless, desolate old man. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... recalled scattered fragments of her life—the first luxurious little menage, and the second. How many more would there be? She was only in her twenties still. Uneasily he tried to see into the years ahead for her, and he thought he saw a lonely old age, childless, loveless, cynical, hard. But this fear soon fell from his mind. No, whatever happened, she would do it gracefully, an artist always, to the end. He sighed and gave up the effort. For he could not think of Laura as old, nor could he think of her any more as being ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... in the fierce ceremonies. His own igloo built, day after day, night after night, he sat alone. His heart ached with the unrequited and eternal desire of all the loveless and lonely things of the world. Outside, the moon increased in fulness and soared in a low circle about the sky. The dogs crouched low on the ground, ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... counsel and generous tenderness. But she could not have been so good company as Lady Craven, who was a very gifted person, and knew how to compose songs and sing them, and write comedies and play them, and who could keep the Margrave amused in many ways. When his loveless and childless wife died he married the English woman, but he grew more and more weary of his dull little court and his dull little country, and after a while, considering the uncertain tenure sovereigns had of their heads ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... eyes, Tormenting and alluring; does he dream, As I ofttime this morn, how they would seem Loved but unloving?—Nay the world's too sweet That we the ghost of such a pain should meet— Behold, she goes, and he too, turning round, Remembers that his love must yet be found, That he is King and loveless in this story Wrought long ago ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes; it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow.... ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded, hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart's legality, which women apply instinctively to all their feelings, ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... and beauty not its own. Those feeble feminine plants, are, it sometimes seems to me, the strength and perfection of creation—strength perfected in weakness; the ivy, green among the snows of winter, and clasping together in its true embrace the loveless ruin; and the vine that maketh glad the heart of man amidst the miseries of life. I must not be mistaken, though, for Devereux's talk was only a tender sort of trifling, and Lilias had said nothing to encourage him to risk more; but she ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... criticism to modern institutions in general and to marriage in particular, gravely defending the "marriage of convenience." And his amazement is not diminished by the sense that the author of this plea for the loveless marriage, which poets have at all times scorned and derided, was himself beyond question happily, married. The truth is that there are two men in Ibsen—an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us—else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon. A man's love is like that. It is wider, larger, more human than a woman's. Women think that they are making ideals of men. What they are making of us are false idols merely. You made your false idol of me, and I had not ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... liberty, except as regards Mexicans, against whom they are always warned. They are told that they become sick from contact with such men. Never are they forced to contract what would turn out to be a loveless marriage. A beautiful Indian girl was much sought for by a Mexican. He spoke the Tarahumare language very well, and offered to give her a good house and fine clothes and a whole handful of silver dollars. Her brother, who was half civilised, ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... amorously, and gave her a look that would have overcome any scruples. The Regent, by means of time, which respects not queens, was, as everyone knows, in her middle age. In this critical and autumnal season, women formally virtuous and loveless desire now here, now there, to enjoy, unknown to the world, certain hours of love, in order that they may not arrive in the other world with hands and heart alike empty, through having left the fruit of the tree of knowledge untasted. ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... congenial, our aspirations identical. In pleasant and profitable companionship we can certainly indulge as heretofore, and it would greatly pain me to be deprived of it in future, but this can be ours without the sinful mockery of a marriage—for such I hold a loveless union. I feel that I must have your esteem and your society, but your love I neither desire nor ever expect to possess; for the sentiments you cherish for me are precisely similar to those which I entertain ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... verity Pisias makes us to side with Daphnaeus by his extravagant language, charging marriage with being a loveless intercourse, and one that has no participation in divine friendship, although we can see that it is an intercourse, if erotic persuasion and favour fail, that cannot be restrained by shame and fear as by bit and bridle." Thereupon Pisias said, "I care little about his arguments; ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... decay of Miss Amelia seemed as utterly remote and detached from her own life as one of the past ages in history. The youth in her brain created a radiant illusion of immortality. By no stretch of imagination could she picture herself like the infirm and loveless creature before her. Yet she knew, without realizing it, that Miss Amelia had once been young, that she had once even been beautiful. There was a legend, fading now into tradition, that her lover had been killed in a duel, fought for her while she was still a girl, and ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... his breast he trembled at the fierce hopelessness in her voice. In a moment he recognized that a crisis was coming; that she was utterly irresponsible, utterly beyond reasoning. Like a spectre her loveless childhood had risen and confronted her; and now that there was no longer even hope, she had turned desperately upon herself with the blank despair of a wounded animal. End it all!—that was her one impulse. He felt it already taking shape; ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... earth: Shines in exposing knaves, and painting fools, Yet is, whate'er she hates and ridicules. No thought advances, but her eddy brain Whisks it about, and down it goes again. Full sixty years the world has been her trade, The wisest fool much time has ever made From loveless youth to unrespected age, No passion gratified except her rage. So much the fury still outran the wit, The pleasure missed her, and the scandal hit. Who breaks with her, provokes revenge from hell, But he's a bolder man who ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... loyal nature leaves its seal of grace, And chastity is in her atmosphere. Not that chill chastity which seems austere (Like untrod snow-peaks, lovely to behold Till once attained—then barren, loveless, cold); But the white flame that feeds upon the soul And lights the pathway to a peaceful goal. A sense of humour, and a touch of mirth, To brighten up the shadowy spots of earth; And pride that passes evil—choosing good. All ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... would be difficult to say whether faith or love predominated most; but even then it by no means prevented the existence of extreme poverty, for we read frequently in the Acts and Epistles of the collections made for the Christian churches. But in our faithless, loveless, selfish, sin-drowned century, such an attempt at community of goods would not only annihilate all morality completely, but absolutely degrade us back from civilisation and modern Catholicism into the rudest and most meagre barbarism. The apostles of such doctrines ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... when in addition to the healing of wounds and disease, the afflicted sufferers are welcomed to such a home as the Samaritan Hospital has become. All such kind deeds become doubly sweet when done in the name of Christ, because they carry with them sympathy for those in pain, love for the loveless, a home for the homeless, friendship for the friendless, and a divine solace, which are often more than surgical skill or medical science. Such an institution the Samaritan Hospital is ever to be. It began in weakness and inexperience, but with Christian devotion and ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... face in his hands, and his strong frame shook as he pictured what might have been, contrasting it with the hideous reality of his loveless and miserable marriage with the banker's daughter, who threatened him with ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... you would have let it pass without a thought. Nay, I need not wish its darkness to lie on you for ever either; but, Antoine, remember you are all I have left. In my silent, lonely life, and this dull house—and I always a reserved and seeming loveless man—you may well pine for something more, some lighter, gayer time, and ever brood over the means to find it. But remember, my son, that you are by birth above the paltry pleasures of the herd; that you can come to me and ask for money if you covet some pastime ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... because a woman is leading a public life that she prefers it, that she has no desire for a home and little ones. Often her choice has been the lesser of two evils,—more to be desired than a life, married, but loveless; one in which she must slave from morn till eve and then receive as ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... loved her, and they were in God's sight more truly husband and wife than the soulless and loveless ceremony of the law made her and her ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... love comes to you, as it will come,—for no woman with your eyes and your mouth ever yet lived a loveless life!—never forget that it is the biggest thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift. Don't let any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence you, nor the tittle-tattle of other folks, and even if ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... to question the disposition of your wealth; if you prefer to give it to my cousin, I am willing, perfectly willing. I enjoy wealth as well as most people do, I suppose; but poverty does not frighten me half so much as a loveless marriage. Give Hugh your fortune, if you wish, but, father! father! let there be no estrangement between you and me. I can bear everything but your displeasure; I dread nothing so much as the loss of your love. Oh, father! forgive a disappointment which my conscience ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... antique Gem Cat-Pie Legend Authors The Critic The Dilettante and the Critic The Wrangler The Yelpers The Stork's Vocation Celebrity Playing at Priests Songs Poetry A Parable Should e'er the loveless day remain A Plan the Muses entertained The Death of the Fly By the River The Fox and Crane The Fox and Huntsman The Frogs The Wedding Burial Threatening Signs The Buyers The Mountain Village ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... unable to find a teacher. It is most true that the living and the dead are still one family, for of course there are no "dead," unless we most correctly put into this category the dull of hearing, the dull of heart, and the loveless who still walk this earth. But if we deem the pioneers defunct and inarticulate, then it is little likely that we shall comprehend the reality and the naturalness of this interplay and inspiration. If we never seek, information and insight will scarcely ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... remain young, my dear Count. Loveless marriages make old men and women of youths and maidens. I remember thinking that remark out for myself after a great deal of effort, and you may remember that I sprung it with considerable effect on the cabinet when the matter was formally discussed ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... to know My selfish joy had been another's woe; Better my grief and my strength to control, Than the despair of her frail-bodied soul; Better to go on, loveless, to the end, Than wear love's rose, whose thorn had ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... had the pride to tear her heart clean from love's terrible hands, whole or broken, as might be, and to toss it, with the dead dull weeks into old time's sack of irrevocably lost and useless things, and so to live her life out, loveless, in the still haven of Gianluca's friendship. But, having his love, she had not such pride; and the loyalty she truly had was matched alone against all human ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford |
