"Monotony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... raised. It is recorded that in moments of defeat pirates voluntarily have set fire to their powder magazines and thus were blown to destruction rather than plead for mercy. During long cruises, when no ships upon the horizon line varied the monotony of the daily routine, pastimes were invented, each one out-rivalling the other in sheer wickedness. Captain Teach considered it rare sport to lock his men in the ship's hold and then set sulphur afire to ascertain how long they could withstand asphyxiation. Yet ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... her Countess-mother, who, in the matter of dress, was a consummate artist,—Nathalie carried a great cluster of vivid crimson camellias, that gave a perfect finish to a costume now relieved from any suspicion of monotony, or too conventional simplicity. The red of the waxen camellia, vividly transparent as it was, was scarce redder than the unroughed cheeks and lips of their bearer. Nor was the brilliant sparkling of the diamonds in the kakoshnik inadequately reproduced in the ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... inserted several sets of questions for every day in the week, differing in length, to prevent monotony, and to accommodate those occasions when you ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... all monotony. When we had worried along our easting to 126 degrees west longitude, we left the variables and headed south through the doldrums, where was much calm weather and where, taking advantage of every fan of air, we were ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... that their restless spirits would soon tire of the monotony of work without ultimate interest. Ordinarily the hope of a big cut is sufficient to keep men of the right sort working for a record. But these men had no such hope—the camp was too small, and they were too few. Thorpe adopted the expedient, now quite common, of ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... the one-legged boy went out of the room with the inspector, the latter accompanied by the anxious and protesting superintendent. After that monotony settled down again. The long morning and the longer afternoon wore away and the whistle blew for quitting time. Darkness had already fallen when Johnny passed out through the factory gate. In the interval the sun had made a golden ladder of the sky, flooded the world with its ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... stretching away on the shore-line. The trees were of enormous size. We landed after anchoring near a sandy beach, and waded ashore, and were rewarded by finding a quantity of nuts that were very palatable and satisfying to hunger, and a welcome change from the monotony ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... this lifeless monotony with a resigned smile, but it made Elinor visibly nervous; not actively nervous as in the case of annoyance, but mournful and weary, as one often becomes after many days of rain, when all one's gloomy thoughts seem to pour down upon one with the rain; or ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... in which I so long resided. The flat roofs, the measured pace of the camel, the half-naked negro, the uncouth Bedouin, the cloudless heavens, the tawny earth, and the meagre apology for turf, are exchanged for ricketty wooden houses with coarse tiling, laid in such a way as to eschew the monotony of straight lines; strings of primitive waggons drawn by buffaloes, and driven by Bulgarians with black woolly caps, real genuine grass growing on the downs outside the walls, and a rattling blast from the Black Sea, more welcome than all the balmy spices of Arabia, for it reminded me that I ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... peaceful and most united family life goes on without monotony. But I cannot speak of the things which touch me most, except clumsily. So it is better to keep from doing so. The Princess writes to me from Rome that she shall be delighted to obtain possession of the two water-colors ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... now endeavoured to while away their long hours of captivity by watching spiders making their webs. I can understand this. In the dreary monotony of this dreariest of sieges a spider would be an event. But alas, the spider is outside, and we are the flies caught in his toils. Never did time hang so heavily on human beings as it hangs on us. Every day seems to have twice the usual ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... appetites, condiments and canned goods, how fondly we turn from the dreary monotony of the "dainty" menu to the memory of the satisfying dishes of our mothers! What made us, like Oliver Twist, ask for more? Were those flavors real, or was it association and natural, youthful hunger that enticed us? Can we ever forget them; or, what is more practical, can we again realize ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... is matched by its practical advantages. The compact grouping of the Exposition palaces not only meant a saving of ground and labor, but it makes it easier to handle the crowds, and lessens the walking required of the visitor. There is no monotony. In developing the general idea, each architect and artist was left free to express his own personality and imagination. The result is that varied forms and colors in the different courts and buildings blend truly into ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the body of officers. In their secret hearts every one of them was glad that in the deadening monotony of their garrison life this affair, painful as it was, was now assuming tangible proportions. For not a single one of them had any kindly feeling for Kolberg, whose secretive disposition and whose absence from nearly all ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... Now the metre may have great merits. I am disposed to say that, having fascinated Mr. Swinburne, it must have great merits. That I dislike it is, no doubt, my fault, or rather my misfortune. But undoubtedly it is a metre that no man but Mr. Swinburne could handle without producing a monotony varied ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... strenuous work required of a section laborer, the foreman had to refuse their request. Then they tried to find employment amongst the scattered ranches which here and there commenced to break the monotony of the prairie, but as the planting had been finished long ago, and the harvest would not commence until after school had re-opened, their appeals were in vain. Then they discovered that we had ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... are two lonely Western barbarians in a strange land. We'll play together for a little while. We're not used to each other's sort of play, but that will break up the monotony of life all the more. I don't know how long we'll ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... nevertheless, I marvel at the fortitude of landowners who spend the winter in the country; there's so little to do that if anyone is not in one way or another engaged in intellectual work, he is inevitably bound to become a glutton or a drunkard, or a man like Turgenev's Pigasov. The monotony of the snowdrifts and the bare trees, the long nights, the moonlight, the deathlike stillness day and night, the peasant women and the old ladies—all that disposes one to indolence, ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... the monotony to be as maddening as ever. There were times when she rebelled passionately against the solitude of the place. There were moments to her when it seemed that her mind couldn't ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... the thought, she was willing to lie in Philip's arms and take what he could give. They were two of a kind, she thought scornfully. In her bitterness, the bleak, snow-covered land, with its drooping pines, seemed in its cold monotony a fitting background for two ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... life. And so, whereas during her grief, he had revered and respected it even to a point of silent sympathy, now that she was gladdened, his heart rose on the wings of strengthened hopes. Even in the dreary monotony of this existence in his Aunt Babette's conciergerie, Time had not failed in his work, and now, perhaps, soon he might humbly strive to help Time. The very next day he returned—on some pretence of ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... reader to experience its weariness, if he were truly desirous of so doing. But I hesitate to take such a course, and trust that some of these lines even once repeated may convey some inkling of the dulness of the days. Monotony of view—for we live at the centre of a complete circle of sea and sky; monotony of food—for all things taste the same on board ship; monotony of existence—for each day is but a barren repetition of ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... How can they keep on so steadily, so swiftly? Cases are emptied and refilled; bottles are labeled, stamped and rolled away; jars are washed, wiped and loaded, and still there are more cases, more jars, more bottles. Oh! the monotony of it, the never-ending supply of work to be begun and finished, begun and finished, begun and finished! Now and then some one cuts a finger or runs a splinter under the flesh; once the mustard machine broke—and still the work goes on, on, ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... across the wide monotony of prairie with its undulating wavelets, a tawny green beneath the scorching summer sun. He was thinking deeply; perhaps dreaming, although dreaming had small enough place in his busy life. His lot was a stern fight against crime, and, ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... that a confession can often be extracted by the endless repetition of one question alone; they cannot bear the pressure of its monotony. Perhaps it was the monotony of the measured rattle and clack of the machine going on so steadily that finally impelled Wes Dean, after his long frowning survey of the scene, to vault the low stone wall ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... touched, and her unfailing energies exercised in behalf of Mr Snow's melancholy, nervous wife. In upon the monotony of her life she had burst like a ray of wintry sunshine into her room, brightening it to at least a momentary cheerfulness. During a long and tedious illness, from which she had suffered, soon after the minister's arrival in Merleville, Janet had watched with her a good many nights, and ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned ...
— The Road • Jack London
... not reply. She was indeed too much upset for words. Tea-drinking was the only form of dissipation in which she and her friends indulged, or had indulged for many years past. In more energetic days an occasional dinner had varied the monotony, but as time crept on there seemed a dozen reasons for dropping the more elaborate form of entertainment. A dinner-party upset the servants; it necessitated the resurrection of the best dinner-service from the china cupboard, and the ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... greater pleasure than do ordinary people, because they have got the notion, they themselves would make a better dinner off the viands served at our tables than their own. And doubtless some break in the monotony gives a fillip of pleasure. And that explains why folk in general look forward with pleasure to high days and holy days—mankind at large, but not the despot; his well-stocked table groaning from ...
— Hiero • Xenophon
... lumber, arriving in Crossville in time for an eight o'clock supper; spent an hour after breakfast with brother Cameron, rode twenty-seven miles to Deer Lodge, half the way in a hard rain, getting pretty wet. The monotony of the trip was broken, Thursday, by picking my way through the brush rather than following the road. For ten miles before reaching Deer Lodge, I followed closely the track of the storm, the week before. Trees were torn up, houses and barns unroofed, the ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 44, No. 5, May 1890 • Various
... with earth containing the whitish, globular eggs of the Rose-beetle, encumbered mantel and furniture; glass aquariums half full of earth, sod, and youthful larvae of the same sinful beetle lent pleasing variety to the monotony of Scott's interior decorative effects. Microscopes, phials, shallow trays bristling with sprouting seeds, watering-cans, note-books, buckets of tepid water, jars brimming with chemical solutions, blockaded the legitimate ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... suit me excellently for coming. I have acted exactly up to your instructions, and have sold my rubbish at the broker's in the next street. All this movement and bustle is delightful to me after the weeks of monotony I have endured. It is a relief to wish the place good-bye—London always has seemed so much more foreign to me than Liverpool The mid-day train on Monday will do nicely for me. I shall be anxiously looking out for you on ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... pursuit? A summons, a bogus appointment, and all would be over. It is well they don't have days of fog in the Latin countries—the countries of assassination. By Jove! here comes something at last to break our dead monotony." ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her generous purse and pours forth melodies of her myriad-tongued voices for man's delectation, for, if the shackles of wage slavery are not loosed, the mind is stultified and ambition destroyed by the long hours of toil's monotony in the factory, the machine shop, in the mines, at the desk, and on the farm. It matters not, though the fireside of the home sheds forth a radiance in which is blended paternal love, health and happiness, for, if woman is denied equal suffrage, then this queen of the household, perforce, ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... But the white monotony of the rolling land and level lake remained unbroken. The reindeer did not come. The days became shorter, dimmer, darker. The mercury kept ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... building perched on pillars. But much that is ancient and simple in square red brick remains. The plain, low-roofed houses, with their flat facades and crumpled, lichened tiles, succeed one another down Castle Street and West Street with a delightful monotony. The elaborate carved and painted doorways, knockers, lunettes, doors and steps are quite a model exhibition. The two streets wear a Georgian air of poke-bonnets and long purse-strings. Or they are ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... overwhelmingly for Mr. Bryan on the free-silver issue four years previously, and it was thought that I, because of my knowledge of and acquaintanceship with the people, might accomplish something towards bringing them back into line. It was an interesting trip, and the monotony usually attendant upon such a campaign of political speaking was diversified in vivid fashion by occasional hostile audiences. One or two of the meetings ended in riots. One meeting was finally broken up by a ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... on Sunday, and being, as usual, wearied by the monotony and apparent insincerity of it all, he again gives ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... of the guests gathered together at Blandings Castle that the place was dull. The house party had that air of torpor which one sees in the saloon passengers of an Atlantic liner—that appearance of resignation to an enforced idleness and a monotony to be broken only by meals. Lord Emsworth's guests gave the impression, collectively, of being just about to yawn and look ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Covenanters up and down the West Country. Their wedding day was the 10th of June, but it was not till August that Claverhouse and his wife came home to Dudhope. Since then four years have passed, during which the monotony of his duty in hunting Covenanters had been relieved by the office of Provost of Dundee, in which it is said he ruled severely, and the sameness of Jean's life at Dudhope by a visit to the Court of London, where she produced a vast impression, and was said to have been ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... list of ordinary discomforts and privations. Two of the men twice a year drove their cattle two hundred and fifty miles to the nearest railway station, but none of the women accompanied them on these trips, which were always looked forward to by their husbands as a relief from the monotony ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... broken by Welsh groins—that is to say, groins which cut into the main arch below the apex. It is not singular in the principle of its design, but it is unique in its proportions, in which the exact mean seems to be attained between the poverty and monotony of a waggon-headed ceiling and the ungraceful effect of a mere groined roof with a depressed roof or large span—to which may be added, that with a richness of effect scarcely, if at all, inferior to fan ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... sun her natural filth was no menace to the eye, no repulse to the senses. Above the Liffey, even at so early an hour, the heat shimmers like a silver mist. The bells of churches were ringing, and the great cathedral bells boomed in thrilling monotony over the peaceful city. Here and there in the shabby yet renowned streets, horsemen moved along; now and then the costermonger raised his cry of fresh fruit, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sagacity, and to elevate him by the frequent evidence of the marvels of animal life—all these calls upon our higher faculties will be wanting, and lacking them your immortal part will be dizzied, stunned by the monotony of the scrubbing-brush, and poisoned past the remedy of perfume by yellow soap. Your wife and children, too, will have their faces continually shining like the holiday saucers on the mantel-piece. Now consider the conceit, the worse than arrogance of this; the studied ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... young, unknown, and apparently an ordinary country doctor. The prince, however, soon perceived that he was far superior to his circumstances and position, and placed himself upon a very confidential footing with him. One day he complained of the desolation and monotony of his life and asked, in a tone between jest and earnest, what he ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... and his head began to ache. He longed for home that he might lie down and breathe, but a long way and a great snowy wind were betwixt him and rest. He fell into a reverie, and seemed to get on better for not thinking about the exertion he had to make. The monotony of it at the same time favoured the gradual absorption of his thoughts in a dreamy meditation. Alternately sunk in himself for minutes, and waking for a moment to the consciousness of what was around him, he had walked, as it ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... glad to be able to break the monotony of this long journey by a visit to a half-sister of mine, who was then living at the hill-station of Mussoorie. The change to the delightful freshness of a Himalayan climate after the Turkish-bath-like atmosphere of the plains in September was most grateful, ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... there came another break in the monotony of outpost life which had, if possible, a more powerful and exciting influence on us than the arrival of the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... leaning on the blackened handle, the heavy head of the hammer buried in the snow, and looked after his brother, who was walking along the road northward, toward the wood. Above this wood a sharp, orange red streak now seemed to slash through the monotony of the landscape like a gaping wound. The sun was sinking. The dark, still and motionless wood seemed to keep watch and ward over the young man's path, above this the flame colored band, against which the separate treetops ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... time, imparting that terrible disease[203] which has swept off whole nations; as woodmen in his forest, and intrusive tillers of his ground, scaring away to the far West those animals of the chase given by the Great Spirit for his food: there is to him a terrible monotony of result. In the delicious islands of the Caribbean Sea, and in the stern and magnificent regions of the northeast, scarcely now remains a mound, or stone, or trace even of tradition, to point out the place where any among the departed ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... very fatiguing work for the whole party but they all exerted themselves with the most strenuous energy, especially Mr. Lushington; and our labours were varied by several amusing novelties which relieved the monotony of the employment. ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... their arrival at Baltimore, their lives were of the most dreary monotony. The rain, which had begun to fall soon after their arrival, continued to descend in torrents, and they found themselves close prisoners in the sanded parlors of the miserable inn. They could but compare this wretched place with the grand old forests and broad ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... up—the dead—that were in it." Haltingly the words fell through the silence. There was a certain monotony about them, as if they had been often repeated. The speaker turned his head from side to side upon the pillow uneasily, as if conscious of restraint, then spoke again in the tone of one newly awakened. "Why doesn't that fellow come?" he demanded restlessly. "Did ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... in somebody else, there is still enough of it for all the purposes of examination. In my contacts with the species I find no one who possesses a quality which I do not possess. The shades of difference between other people and me serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, I have been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which I perceive is more accurate and more ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... travelling along it could possibly see him. He can just descry the lone cottonwood afar off, outlined against the horizon like a ship at sea. It is the only tree in sight; elsewhere not even a bush to break the drear monotony of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... and literalize the romance of her youth which Sister Soulsby had so frankly outlined. He would think upon nothing but her as he knew her,—the kindly, quick-witted, capable and charming woman who had made such a brilliant break in the monotony of life at that dull parsonage of his. The only genuine happiness in life must consist in having bright, smart, attractive women like that ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... smokestack guys and rigging, were huge rope-nettings, hung there for the purpose of breaking the force of the seas and so saving our mess-room doors. But the doors were smashed and the mess-rooms washed out just the same. And yet, out of it all, arose but the one feeling, namely, of monotony. ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time, the turbidity of events, sank into a vague background before which glittering cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves, things lay quietly on their shelves; the troubles of the day arranged themselves ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... (for his passion was usually short-lived, and his nature kind), he looked about him on his Sundays and holidays, and he saw how much monotony and weariness there was, and thence how drunkenness arose with all its train of ruin. Then he appealed to the Bigwig family, and said, "We are a labouring people, and I have a glimmering suspicion in me that labouring people of whatever condition were made—by a higher intelligence than ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... west of that town[1120] lay the strong city of Capsa.[1121] It marked almost the extremest limit of Jugurtha's empire in this direction, placed as it was just north of the great lakes and west of the deepest curve of the Lesser Syrtis. The town was the gift of an oasis, which here broke the monotony of the desert with pleasant groves of dates and olives and a perennial stream of water. The sources of this stream, which was formed by the union of two fountains, had been enclosed within the walls, and supplied drinking water for the city before ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... entire day the Princess Ziska herself never left her private apartments, and towards late afternoon Gervase began to feel the hours drag along with unconscionable slowness and monotony. Never did the sun seem so slow in sinking; never did the night appear so far off. When at last dinner was served in the hotel, both Denzil Murray and Dr. Dean sat next to him at table, and, judging from outward appearances, ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... Zobeide, reassured by the monotony of his voice, decided at last to come out of her shell. First she showed the point of her little horny nose, then her black eyes, her flat-pointed tail, and finally her strong little claw-tipped feet. Seeing the melon, she made a gesture of ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... two Weeks it was immense. In time, however, it struck him that there was a certain Monotony in spending one's Money on the Night Owls and showing up with the Milkman. The Poker Players were into him and he began to suspect that he ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... in China, it is religion which breaks the monotony of female life, and collects within the temples, on the various festivals, an array of painted faces and embroidered skirts that present, even to the European eye, a not ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... temperature. For dreary hours that lengthened into weary days and nights, and these again into never-ending weeks, the driving, drenching flood poured down upon the sodden earth, searching the very marrow of the five thousand hapless men against whose chilled frames it beat with pitiless monotony, and soaked the sand bank upon which we lay until it was like a sponge filled with ice-water. It seems to me now that it must have been two or three weeks that the sun was wholly hidden behind the dripping clouds, not shining ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... relations, and the lavish use of pathos. Did we still possess the whole of the comic literature of the Greeks, we should, without doubt, find in it the models of all these species, with this difference, however, that the clear head of the Greeks assuredly never allowed them to fall into a chilling monotony, but that they arrayed and tempered all in due proportion. Have not we, even among the few pieces that remain to us, the Captives of Plautus, which may be called a pathetic drama, the Step-Mother of Terence, a true family picture; while the Amphitryo borders on the fantastic boldness ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... beam of oak hung from a rope tied about the center, and this beam is struck with a hammer, first on one side, and then the other. Sometimes an iron klepalo is used as well, and then they strike first the beam and then the iron bar, so as to vary the monotony of the call. I found that the wooden klepalo could be heard for a distance of about one and a half miles over land, and the iron one for over two miles. Now we can easily make a wooden klepalo for use in this camp, and then if Dutchy, or any of the rest of us, keep within a mile ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... laws of syllable-counting given above. But if in this respect the Spanish poet has less freedom than the English versifier, he has infinitely greater liberty in the arrangement of his rhythms. The sing-song monotony of regularly recurring beats is intolerable to Latin ears. The greater flexibility of Spanish rhythm can best be ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... of which by loving eyes might have been read uneasy thought patiently carried, and the lack of some essential to conscious well-being. The other girls were looking on this side and that, eager to catch sight of anything to trouble the monotony of the daily walk; but the eyes of this one were cast down, except when occasionally lifted in answer to words of the schoolmistress, the grenadier, by whose side she was walking. They were lovely brown eyes, trustful and sweet, and although, as I have said, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... represented, the National Woman Suffrage Society was formed, which has done most efficient service, holding conventions in many of our large cities, and awakening thought and action. In Saratoga and Newport a new class was reached. Wearied with the monotony of fashionable dissipation and the driveling idiocy of flirtations, women were glad to hear ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to write the adventures of the last year. As I compose my mind to the task, there arises before me the memory of days of suffering, and nights of sleepless apprehension—days and nights that, in their black monotony, seemed well nigh eternal. And the sorrow, too, which I felt on that terrible day, when my companions, whom common dangers and common sufferings had made as brothers to me, were dragged away to an ignominious death ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... most poor mortals were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child, who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony of poverty. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... the horses have done nothing for days on end but feed and grow fat, and the drivers nothing but clean up and look after their teams and harness. If the guns up in the firing line had to shift position it has meant no more to the teams than a break of the monotony for a day or two, a night or two's marching, and ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... years later he became divisional engineer in the Pas-de-Calais, at the Marles mines. When there he married the daughter of the rich owner of a spinning factory at Arras. For fifteen years they lived in the same small provincial town, and no event broke the monotony of existence, not even the birth of a child. An increasing irritation detached Madame Hennebeau, who was disdainful of this husband who gained a small salary with such difficulty. The misunderstandings between them ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... the dulness and monotony of the life there was little to complain of, and Godfrey was surprised to find how far it differed from his own preconceived notions of the life of a political prisoner in Siberia. It was only when, by an effort, he looked ahead for years and tried to fancy the possibility of being so cut ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... in Havana; it was something to vary the monotony of this beautiful island-city, and the inhabitants seized upon it as a gala day. Business was suspended; the throng put on their holiday suit, the various regiments appeared in full regalia and uniform, for the new lieutenant-commander-in-chief was to ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... listen to what he called reason, and therefore he held his tongue. The idea that a French ship might be somewhere near, behind that wall of fog, had in it something which to him was not unpleasant, since it afforded some variety to the monotony of his situation. He stood, therefore, in silence, with his face turned towards the direction indicated by Zac, and listened intently, while the skipper stood in silence ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... Very few of them appeared to reside in any large town, but to prefer rural retreats "far from the madding crowd," where doubtless a letter, even on the business of the Corporation, would be a welcome diversion to the monotony of existence. As to the clergy, doubtless their names had been suggested by the good Bishop of S—, who would be in a position to introduce a considerable connection to his fellow- directors. Reginald ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... at the time capable of doing this for themselves, and mosaicists were brought from Constantinople, who covered the churches of Italy with a sublime monotony of Byzantine traditions. But the Gothic blood was burning in the Italian veins; and the Florentines and Pisans could not rest content in the formalism of the Eastern splendour. The first innovator was, I believe, Giunta of Pisa, the second Cimabue, the third Giotto; the last only being a man of ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... of one of my unfortunate fellow-countrymen, which I am permitted to make, will afford an interesting view of the internal administration of the Sing Sing prison, by one of its inmates. After alluding to the absolute monotony of prison life, he gives one day as a specimen of every day. "Monday morning, the large prison bell rings at five o'clock, when we all rise; half an hour after, we all go out to work, to our respective shops, till breakfast, ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... of home-study "hooky" to break the monotony. He would run off a couple of pages of regular exercise, and then turn back to the hunt-and-peck system of typing to work on a story. He took a furtive glee in this; he felt that he was getting away with something. In mid-July, ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... day, which was Saturday, in order to be in time for the gathering of the Indians in the pueblo on Sunday. I therefore travelled on after nightfall, though the road was much longer than I expected, leading through extensive pine forests, the monotony of which was interrupted only once by the appearance of ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... a legacy had been bequeathed to him, and that he was on his way to a distant city to claim it. He had stopped at the near-by port in order to break the monotony of the journey. "Before the disaster that befell me," continued he, "I lived in comparative comfort, but ever since I have been struggling. I was obliged to begin all over again and build a new house and start a new business. You can easily understand that I soon fell ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... these stories, because they are human, has come the humanity of the players: the thing which makes it possible for them to feel this music, and to play it, not as a machine would play, grinding it out with dead monotony, but with all the colour ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... took in a party of ladies, which somewhat relieved the monotony of the cabin, and I was amused by listening to their lively prattle, and the little gossip with which they strove to wile away the tedium of the voyage. The day was too stormy to go upon deck—thunder and lightening, accompanied with torrents of rain. Amid the confusion ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... too, flanked the porch, and the carefully trimmed wistaria vine hung gracefully over all. Across both ends of the house ran wide verandahs, with porte cochere, sun parlour, conservatory and tea-porch breaking the monotony. ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... scene! Imposing too in its sorrowful grandeur, and well suited to a land which may be called a graveyard of empires and nations. The monotony of the landscape would be unbroken, but for certain elevations and hillocks of strange and varied shapes, which spring up, as it were, from the plain in every direction; some are high and conical or pyramidal in form, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... voice seemed to come from farther off. The sunlight through the stained glass projected colored splotches here and there. I wondered if the people knew how homely they looked with those splotches on their faces, like great birth-marks. That suggested a pastime to relieve the monotony. ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... said he, 'un prix extreme a voir votre attention fixee sur la question qui interesse mon pauvre pays; la misere surpasse tout ce que vous pouvez imaginer.' Pamphlets about the plague had been showered upon the public, the monotony of waste paper being broken, at rare intervals, by a more or less useful publication. 'The Pharmacopoeia of the Silkworm,' wrote M. Cornalia in 1860, 'is now as complicated as that of man. Gases, liquids, and solids have been laid under contribution. From chlorine ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... drudgery may be lightened and its efficiency heightened by the introduction of a richer content that shall provide a greater variety in the repetitions, insure an adequate motive for effort, and relieve the dead monotony that frequently rendered the older methods so futile. I look forward to the time when to be an efficient drillmaster in this newer sense of the term will be to have reached one of ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... functions. The treasures of life are not hidden; they are close at hand, so close that we overlook them. We cheat ourselves with a pitiful fear of ourselves. Men and women of the future will not seek happiness; they will have gone beyond it. Mere happiness would produce monotony. And their lives shall be lives of change and variety with the thrills produced by ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... front of a low one-family house with a flight of outside steps, differing in no wise from the other houses on the block, which were all built on the same plan, of exactly the same height, of exactly the same width, and with absolute similarity of detail. Frederick had observed such architectural monotony only in workingmen's houses in Germany, while here it was the mark of a ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... home, with cisterns of water as well as springs and wells; to have fields of wheat, vineyards of grapes, and gardens of melons and all luscious fruits—this is the picture that haunts the wandering Arab, amid the hardships and monotony ...
— Hebrew Life and Times • Harold B. Hunting
... of the congregation was, as ever, a reflection of the sermon. The heat of the day, the reaction from the long week in the open air, the quiet monotony of the well modulated voice rising and falling in regular cadence in what is supposed by so many preachers to be the tone suitable for any sacred office, produced an overwhelmingly somnolent effect. Many of them slept, some frankly and openly, others ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... had a vaguely mysterious air and you could imagine that it would be a fit scene for shady transactions. It suggested a more lurid time, when ruthless men carried their lives in their hands, and violent deeds diapered the monotony of life. ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... dark day followed, with nothing to break its melancholy monotony except the bulletins that came from hour to hour reporting little change either for better or for worse. Rose broke the news gently to Aunt Plenty and set herself to the task of keeping up the old lady's spirits, for, being ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... this a very interesting experience—quite a jolly break in the dull monotony of the day. Hunting up the stick, he laid it in the lawyer's hands, and then turned his eye ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... from France to the monotony of everyday affairs. But a girl showed him the beauty ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... of it," said the man eagerly; and he followed his officer promptly as he walked round the cottage, and said a few words to his sentries, who seemed to gladly welcome the coming of some one to relieve the silence and monotony ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... And no monotony! You climb the inviting hills and woods day by day, week after week, ever to find fresh enchantment. Not a bend of road or winding mountain-path but discloses a new scene—here a fairy glen, with graceful birch or alder breaking the ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... how much of first-class art they have in these prairies—how original and all your own—how much of the influences of a character for your future humanity, broad, patriotic, heroic and new? how entirely they tally on land the grandeur and superb monotony of the skies of heaven, and the ocean with its waters? how freeing, soothing, nourishing they ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... have already spoken, and would add, in proof of the pains taken by the former superintendent, Dr. Browne, to break the monotony of asylum life, that he introduced private theatricals, in which vaudevilles and farces were performed by and for the lunatics, and even before the public. A practice still beneficially preserved is that of ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... luxuriously fitted up "dahabeah," that I arrived at Korosko, a Nubian village about a thousand miles from the Mediterranean. The ascent of the Nile was simply a prolonged feast in this comfortable sailing-craft, with the panorama of imposing temples and gigantic ruins relieving the dreary monotony of the river-banks. The valley of this ancient stream, from the First Cataract, where it ceases to be navigable, to Cairo, is remarkable alone to the traveler for its vast structures and mausoleums. ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... overcritical Americans, and thought it was time to give one of them a lesson. Perhaps he was tired of trapping ordinary garden variety spies of the Belgian brand. It would be a pleasing variation in the monotony of convicting defenseless, helpless Belgians if he could show that one of these fellows masquerading as Americans was a sham. Especially one of that journalistic tribe that had been sending out reports of German atrocities. Furthermore, it would ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... often seemed to me that if there be, as certain ancient philosophers fabled, one certain figure pervading all nature, human and universal, it is the circle. Round, in one vast monotony, one eternal gyration, roll the orbs of space. Thus moves the spirit of creative life, kindling, progressing, maturing, decaying, perishing, reviving and rolling again, and so onward forever through the same course; and thus even would seem to revolve the mysterious mechanism of human events ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... too long, and end by tiring of the pursuit while it is yet in its early stages. Many excellent plots, admirable from the constructive point of view, have been wasted by stringing them out too far; the reader recognizes their merit, but loses his enthusiasm on account of a sort of monotony of strain; he wickedly turns to the concluding chapter, and the game is up. "The Woman in White," by Wilkie Collins, was published about 1860, I think, in weekly installments, and certainly they were devoured with insatiable appetite by many thousands ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... variety of material to work with than Puccini. Japanese music is arid and angular, and yet so great is Puccini's skill in combining creative imagination and reflection that he knew how to make it blossom like a rose. Pity that he could not wholly overcome its rhythmical monotony. Japanese melody runs almost uninterruptedly through his instrumental score, giving way at intervals to the Italian style of lyricism when the characters and passions become universal rather than local types. ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... difficult to say whether, in such poems as this, Coleridge is overtaken by his besetting indolence, or whether he is deliberately writing down to the theories of Wordsworth. Another criticism of his own on his early blank verse, where he speaks of "the utter want of all rhythm in the verse, the monotony and dead plumb down of the pauses, and the absence of all bone, muscle and sinew in the single lines," applies only too well to the larger part of his work in this difficult metre, so apt to go to sleep ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... day, night after night, till his life's end, plenty and comfort and neatness and respectability and warmth in dull monotony; while outside somewhere in the cold and rain, in poverty and want and wretchedness, wandered Edith with the wailing baby in ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... Knight began to weary of the monotony of his existence, and to sigh for fresh adventures and more excitement. The Squire, too, wished for change, and was not altogether pleased with the buffet he regularly got every evening at the ...
— The Seven Champions of Christendom • W. H. G. Kingston
... inevitable mother—with a couple of little sisters; how shall a man desert his family? He was born on a farm on the Murge, the watershed between this country and the Adriatic. Thinking of the Murge, that shapeless and dismal range of limestone hills whose name suggests its sad monotony, I began to understand the origin of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Ocean was heard far inland; but just when the tempest had lulled, it sounded as if hundreds of heavy wagons were driving over a hard tunnelled road. Joergen heard it even in his dungeon, and it was a change in the monotony of his existence. No old melody could have gone more deeply to his heart than these sounds—the rolling ocean—the free ocean—on which one can be borne throughout the world, fly with the wind, and wherever one went have one's ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... it. And the playful wit of her lover made Therese marvel. She never could have imagined the infallible taste which he exercised naturally in joyful caprice and in familiar fantasy. At first he had displayed only the monotony of passionate ardor. That alone had captured her. But since then she had discovered in him a gay mind, well stored and diverse, as well as the gift of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... did not leave Ryde until the 23d, it is possible that Fielding received a reply. During the remainder of this desultory voyage he continued to beguile his solitary hours—hours of which we are left to imagine the physical torture and monotony, for he says but little of himself—by jottings and notes of the, for the most part, trivial accidents of his progress. That happy cheerfulness, of which he spoke in the Proposal for the Poor, had not yet deserted him; and there are moments when he seems rather on a pleasure-trip ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... hostility. His brow was smooth and his smile cheerfully condescending. Indeed, he appeared anxious to have me enter, and cast an indulgent look at Rudge, whose irrepressible joy at this break in the monotony of his existence was tinged with a very evident dread of offending his master. Interested anew, I followed this man of contradictory impulses into the room toward which he ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... marks. Every day there were herds or single deer to be seen along the way, and at a number of points we passed long piles of whitened antlers. Other game too, ducks, geese, and ptarmigan had become plentiful since we entered the caribou country, and now and then a few were taken to vary the monotony of the diet of dried caribou meat. Loons were about us at all hours, and I grew to love their weird call as much almost ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... monotony; and how many men have said it since these rocks were made; and now you say ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... end?" he queried, although he flushed a little at her words. "It's not profitable to meditate upon a blank monotony, you know." ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... am," observed lady Feng, "and I only wish some one would come and have a chat with me to break my dull monotony." ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Catholic prisoners. The convicts have no privileges; a sharp, intelligent lad may become a hall boy or get employed in the mess room; or a mechanic may be appointed to one of the workshops and so gain some slight relief from the monotony of their lives; but they get no reward, beyond a little tobacco once a week for chewing; smoking is strictly prohibited; once a month they are allowed to be visited by their friends. On entering the building the visitor is forcibly struck ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... treat, particularly when it enabled them to prepare nourishing broth for their sick, and once Rose shot a stag, giving them several good meals, but this happened so seldom as to do little toward varying the monotony of their fare. ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... and leaden in their sockets, that there was a drumming in his ears, and that if heat and weariness thus made an end of him, he need no longer watch the oppressive multitude of stars, or hear the monotony of ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... work and eager to finish the poem of my "Valkyrie" in a fortnight. Some recreation after that will be a necessity; I want the change of traveling, and should especially dislike to finish my last poetic work, the great introductory play, here, where the monotony of my accustomed surroundings oppresses me, and where troublesome visitors put me generally in a bad temper. I want to go to the Alps, and should like at least to have a taste of the frontier of Italy, and to ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... were times when all the loveliness of that island seemed but a hideous place of exile, an abhorrent monotony which surrounded her—grasped her—clung to her—hemmed her in, as if it were an evil spirit, having life and the power to torture her. She thought of those whom she loved, she pondered upon all the grand schemes of her ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... then, those motives which were not the best were made to seem so very weak and mean by the way in which Miss Todd approached them. When she thought of the matter alone, it seemed to her that she was perfectly reasonable in wishing to be married, in order that she might escape the monotony of a lonely life; and she thought that if she could talk to Miss Todd about the subject gently, for a quarter of an hour at a time every day for two or three months, it was possible that she might explain ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... were sham fights galore, but it was mostly squad and company drill, until if some devil had scooped out our brain-boxes and filled them with sawdust we could have carried out the orders just as well. In fact, one fellow must have gone mad with the monotony of it and perpetrated the rhyme, to the tune of ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... grey sand, grey rocks, grey over-arching sky, relieved only by the soft purple of the sage—a picture of utter loneliness, of intense desolation, which was a horror. The eye found nothing to rest upon—no landmark, no distant tree, no gleam of water, no flash of colour—only that dull monotony of drab, motionless, and with no ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... interview with Mr. Cartwright, he had passed through a stormy scene with James Greenfield and the words of the president of The King's Basin Land and Irrigation Company were ringing in his ears with painful monotony: ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... individuality were in her case not so much the outcome of the feeling proper to the character, as the manifestation of diligent painstaking art which had not yet learnt to conceal itself. The gleam of the smallest spark of genius would have been a welcome relief to the monotony of talent.... It must not be forgotten, however, that a highly artificial play like 'Ingomar' is by no means a favorable medium for the display of an actress' powers, though it may fairly indicate their nature. Before a definite rank can be assigned to her among English actresses, Miss Anderson ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... and handkerchiefs were strung along indiscriminately with Jonathan's trousers, coats, waistcoats and socks. Here and there, in between, prismatic quilts, red bordered tablecloths and fringed napkins varied the monotony. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris |
