"Interminable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distinguish anything to guide her. Below stretched the ground, vaguely white; grey walls surrounded her, and when she paused, hesitating and turning her head, she divined that behind this icy veil extended the immense avenue with interminable vistas of gas-lamps—the black and deserted Infinite ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... of the day. And now that it had at last been achieved, it proved to be a very poor imitation of the ideal rest and slumber that he had been yearning for. To begin with, the delays before quarters were settled upon were interminable. And then this news about the brandy. The evening meal was delayed almost a couple of hours, and every minute of the delay annoyed him, because it was so much precious time for sleep lost. Even when the meal ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... seemed an interminable time, Cal's mind ceased to function rationally, and like an animal suddenly faced with the unknown he froze, shrank within himself, stood motionless. Yet far down within his mind, there was still detached observation, ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... measure would also seem to be more consistent with the policy of the existing laws—that of converting the public domain into cultivated farms owned by their occupants. That policy is not best promoted by sending emigration up the almost interminable streams of the West to occupy in groups the best spots of land, leaving immense wastes behind them and enlarging the frontier beyond the means of the Government to afford it adequate protection, but in encouraging ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... the boat. To bundle them in pell-mell, scramble in ourselves, and shove off was the work of but a few brief minutes; and presently we found ourselves once more in the creek, with our bows pointed river-ward, and eight men straining at the oars as we swept foaming past the interminable array of mangroves, with their gaunt roots, like the legs of gigantic spiders sprawling out into the ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... disappointed—and only when morning came did you leave me, vanishing through 'the ivory gates.' Oh I how interminable the sad, lonely days seemed to me, and how I wished that I could sleep, and dream of you, my angel, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... traversed was not far, although it seemed to her impatience to be interminable. Mere Malheur, with her light heels, could once run through it in a minute, to a tryst in the old tower. La Corriveau was thrice that time in groping her way along it before she came to a heavy, iron-ribbed door set in a deep arch, which ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... glance spanned the channel to the further shore, and it seemed as though an interminable waste of water stretched between. And all the time, at every stroke, that mad, racing current was pulling against him, fighting for possession of the strong, sinewy ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... beyond the front door which faced her, beyond—into the night, looking for Martin, waiting for him to come home to his boy. She asked herself again and again how she had been so restrained when her Billy had been carried in. After what seemed interminable ages, she heard heavy steps on the back porch and knew that her husband had returned at last. He brought in with him a gust of wind that caused the lamp to smoke. She held it with both hands, afraid that she might drop it, and carrying it to the dining-room ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... fresh discussion among themselves; and, as it seemed as interminable as it was uninteresting, Reding took an opportunity to wish his host a good night, and to slip away. He never had much leaning towards the evangelical doctrine; and Freeborn and his friends, who knew what they were holding a great ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... this is rare— When a beloved hand is laid in ours, When jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafened ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed— A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost impulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... many times over till it seemed impossible that he could make any mistake. And then she watched him go, and set herself with a heart like lead to face the interminable day. ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Griffin had a working knowledge of the Rational People's language eleven days later when he sat down to drink herb infused hot water with Joe and other Old Ones in the low-roofed wooden building around which clustered a village of two hundred humanoids. He fidgeted through interminable ritualistic cups of hot water. Eventually Joe hid his hands in the sleeves of his robe and turned with an air of polite inquiry. Now we get down to ...
— Blessed Are the Meek • G.C. Edmondson
... of that garden, and nearly all around is ugliness supreme! For this is a garden on the roof of an old house; the grand river is the Thames, alive with the shipping of its world-wide commerce, and all around lies that interminable forest of rookery chimneys, where wild ungainly forms tell of the insane and vain efforts of man to cope with smoke; where wild beasts—in the form of cats—hold their nightly revels, imitating the yells of agonised infants, filling the dreams of sleepers with ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... pipes filled and lighted, some one would strike up a "chantey"—one of those interminable, monotonous ballad-songs which are peculiar ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... from the very grave my love had still the power to benefit and bless you—if you would but give me the pledge I ask. You know how from this overwhelming affection which I have given you these long, interminable years, there has been born a hate deeper, deeper even than its parent love, for it constrains me rather to endure the bitterness of your reproaches, the agony of leaving you destitute on earth, than consent that even one inch of my property, one penny of my ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... not take I told the man in charge I would send for as soon as possible. There was no sleighing yet, and that drive was the most excruciating thing I ever endured over corduroy roads through wild and dark forests, along interminable country roads of yellow clay mixed with mud till finally we reached the house of the chief member of society in my district where we were to stay until our own house ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... into her own bed with a soundless sigh of exhaustion. She did not blow out the candle, but lay staring at it. Her dream was annihilated. She foresaw an interminable, weary and futile future in and about Moze, and her mother always indisposed, always fretful, and curiously obstinate in weakness. But Audrey, despite her tragic disillusion, was less desolated than ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... were soon wedged into one of the interminable lines of carriages that blocked all the approaches to St. James's Square. The ball had been long expected, and there was a crowd in the streets, kept back by the police. The brougham went at a foot's ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... country stretched apparently at my feet. The shore, like the south side of Roebuck Bay, was fringed with mangroves, while to the North-North-East lay an extensive plain, over which the water seemed, at certain seasons of the year, to flow. The country around, for miles, wore the appearance of an interminable and boundless plain, with an almost imperceptible landward elevation, and thickly ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... It is her added gift of song that makes Yasmini unique, for she can sing in any of a dozen languages, and besides the love-songs that come southward from the hills, she knows all the interminable ballads of the South and the Central Provinces. But when, as that evening, she is at her best, mixing magic under the eyes of the inquisitive, she sings songs of her own making and only very rarely the same song twice. She sang that night of the winds of the world which, she ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... of my contemporaries who thought seriously about the matter, were very much in my own state of mind—inclined to say to both Mosaists and Evolutionists, "a plague on both your houses!" and disposed to turn aside from an interminable and apparently fruitless discussion, to labour in the fertile fields of ascertainable fact. And I may, therefore, further suppose that the publication of the Darwin and Wallace papers in 1858, and ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... needles. When conversation flagged she fell to her work as furiously as if a husband and half a dozen sons were waiting for its completion. David often wondered in his secret soul what Josephine did with all the interminable gray socks she knitted. Sometimes he concluded that she put them in the home missionary barrels; again, that she sold them to her hired man. At any rate, they were very warm and comfortable looking, and David sighed as ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of hostilities by the Armistice was not in the legal sense the "end of the war," it brought it within sight. No one in January 1919 dreamt that the process of making peace and ratifying the necessary treaties would drag on for a seemingly interminable length of time, and it was realised, with grave misgiving in Ulster, that the Home Rule Act of 1914 would necessarily come into force as soon as peace was finally declared, while as yet nothing had been done to redeem the promise ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... composed of traders, who are gradually leaving the "old town," which is some distance below, and is called Bamboo town. Both of these places are accessible, and have the interminable lane of shops, all the "same ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... the bronchial tubing;—then, toward morning, it would grow chill with venomous vapors, with morbific dews,—till the sun came up to lift the torpid moisture, and to fill the buildings with oven-glow. And the interminable procession of mourners and hearses and carriages again began to circulate between the centres of life and of death;—and long trains and steamships rushed from the port, with ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... whitewashed houses with deep verandahs, peering coyly out from the midst of fragrant, blazing gardens. The Residency, the Custom House, the Police Barracks and the Koetei Club can readily be distinguished by the Dutch flags that droop above them. The river-bank itself is one interminable street. Here dwells the brown-skinned population—Malays, Bugis, Makassars, and a sprinkling of Sea Dyaks. Sometimes the flimsy, cane-walled, leaf-thatched huts, perched aloft on bamboo stilts, stand, like flocks of storks, in clusters. Again they ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... their death before her eyes, without a moment's interruption, for she never slept for a single second. Think of the torture of it! To see her children dying through all the hours of the long day and all the hours of the interminable night!" ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... seemed interminable, and as mother and son sat waiting, every word spoken in the next room sounded like a moan from the injured man. Mrs Winthorpe's face appeared to be that of a woman ten years older, and her agony was supreme; but like a true wife and tender mother—ah, how little we think of what a mother's patience ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... let me attempt to describe as briefly as I can my adventure. We set out from Colombo in the early morning of Jan. 26th. For about two-thirds of our journey the road lies along the coast, stretching through swampy rice-fields and interminable cocoanut avenues until Ratnapoora is reached. So far the scenery does not greatly differ from that of Colombo. But it was after we left Ratnapoora that I first realised the true wonders of this land. Our road rose almost continuously by narrow tracks, ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the memory of that day has never been wholly clear. Sodden with weariness, dazzled and muddled by the savage sun-glare, he followed, with eyes fixed, the rhythmically, monotonously moving feet of his leader, through an interminable desert of soft, clogging sand; a desert which dropped away into parched arroyos, and rose to scorched mesas whereon fierce cacti thrust at him with thorns and spikes; a desert dead and mummified in the dreadful heat; a lifeless Inferno wherein moved neither beast, bird nor ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Germany for the same purpose. When, under the successors of Conrad, the land was the prey of interminable feuds between the nobles, the Westphalian towns concluded a league against the knights, one of the clauses of which was never to lend money to a knight who would continue to conceal stolen goods.(22) When "the knights and the nobles lived on plunder, and murdered whom they chose to murder," as the ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... right. The Western Navigator locates the spot somewhere about here. But beware of illusions, my friend. I begin to doubt the testimony of my senses. Perhaps yonder prospect is a mirage, and Byle was only a goblin of the mind. This interminable river is enchanted. I sympathize with La Salle's conviction that the Ohio runs to Cathay. Maybe we have sailed round the globe and are now in sight of the Indies. Or we have come to Arabia. Does not the vision resemble some Mohammedan Isle of the Blest—one of the ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... short, by the accumulation of the respective agencies of which it is made up, and the skill of the engineer who conducts its operations. The whirlwind of the former is dreadful indeed, but it is soon hushed on the ruins it has occasioned, and it blusters no more; but the gale of the latter is interminable in desolation, and seems to increase in strength as the bulwarks which opposed it disappear. The repose of Europe has been assailed by both, at different periods of her history. It is our mercy to have outlived the mighty storm, and we are now in a condition to look with gratitude, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... for one. That pattering rain drops on your brain. You'll be worse after dinner, for you must dine at one to-day, that Betty may go to afternoon service. She insists upon having her chopped hay. And then when she goes out, who was something to you, something to speak to—what an interminable afternoon you'll have to go thro'. You can't break yourself from your locality: you cannot say "Tomorrow morning I set off for Banstead, by God": for you are book'd for Wednesday. Foreseeing this, I thought a cheerful letter ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... which followed appeared to him interminable. Never in his travels had he encountered such a long minute. But at length Clementine appeared, preceded by the worthy Mlle. Virginie Sambucco, her aunt; and the mandarins who smiled on the etagere heard the sound of three kisses. Wherefore three? The superficial reader, who pretends to foresee ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... on the top of a Nilometer, or graduated pillar for measuring the rise and fall of the river Nile. On the pedestal is a Latin inscription by Dr. Parr, who (his vicarage of Hatton being so close at hand) was probably often the Master's guest, and smoked his interminable pipe along these garden-walks. Of the vegetable-garden, which lies adjacent, the lion's share is appropriated to the Master, and twelve small, separate patches to the individual brethren, who cultivate them at their own judgment and by their own labor; ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... interminable. There was no sun now. The gray and white clouds were spread thinly over the sky and only a diffused brightness gave the ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... into the little back room, his grandmother was sitting over her interminable accounts, each of which represented a little profit to herself, some a little relief to many, some a tragedy to a few; and many of which were in code, for these represented transactions of a character which no pawnshop, particularly ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... classes. It was rather late at night before, having vainly hunted for him in his favourite restaurants, I found the narrow, poverty-stricken rue in which Verlaine was living a year or so ago. Passing through a dark courtyard, I had to mount interminable stone stairs, lighting foul French matches as I went, to relieve the blackness. At last I arrived outside his door, very near the sky. I knocked. A voice called out, "I've gone to bed." I explained my lateness and said ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... audience ought to increase. After the sunset, dinner—what a tedious business it is; the waiting is perfectly planned, but the waiters themselves have to wait ages at the two service hatches, where they get all jammed together, so the time between the courses seems interminable; you almost forget you are at a meal at all. To-night dinner and conversation both hang fire at our end of the table, and I overhear from the other end where my cousin sits interesting scraps about India, which is distinctly annoying; R. is relating some of his experiences there ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... initial part of Joan's great dream was realizing itself at last. It was the first time that any of us youngsters had ever seen an army, and it was a most stately and imposing spectacle to us. It was indeed an inspiring sight, that interminable column, stretching away into the fading distances, and curving itself in and out of the crookedness of the road like a mighty serpent. Joan rode at the head of it with her personal staff; then came a body of priests singing the Veni Creator, the banner of the Cross ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to comprehend, to help, to guide their myriad aspirations in the interminable and headlong hunt for happiness, was, to Palla, the most vital problem in ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... summoned courage to gather my limbs together and crawl out the way I had entered. The distance was but a few paces, yet to traverse these seemed an interminable nightmare of swaying and stumbling. I know only one other occasion upon which the liberal atmosphere of the open earth seemed sweeter to my senses when I reached it than ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... should have done, could I have found an outlet at the right place, but field-paths are almost unknown in that part of France, and my lane, stiff and straight as any street, and marked into terribly vanishing perspective by the regular row of poplars on each side, seemed interminable. Of course night came on, and I was in darkness. In England I might have had a chance of seeing a light in some cottage only a field or two off, and asking my way from the inhabitants; but here ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... they were rattling over a tangled maze of switches, dodging interminable processions of freight-cars, barely missing crowded passenger trains whose bells struck clear and then flatted as the trains flew by; defiling by narrow water-ways, crowded with small shipping; winding through streets lined ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... hitched on behind ambulances. Some wealthy people are giving a regular motor kitchen to run about to various "dressing"-stations—this will be most useful, but it doesn't do away with the need of something to eat during those interminable waits at ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... of light, I glanced down again to my surroundings. Everywhere I looked, I saw nothing but the same flat weariness of interminable plain. Nowhere could I descry any signs of life; not even the ruins ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... this way she did not know, but it seemed an interminable time. The sun was already high in a pure blue sky and beat down pitilessly. Billy felt as if she must be carrying a very warm burden along with her, and moreover her feet grew so heavy, moving slowly and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... undistinguished tract of field and meadow and common land; now it is a mimic forest, delighting the eye with the finest combinations of trees and shrubs, the rarest effects of form and foliage, and bewildering the mind with its green glades, and impervious recesses, and apparently interminable extent. It is the triumph of landscape gardening, and never more beautiful than in this autumn sunset, lighting up the ruddy beech and the spotted sycamore, and gilding the shining fir-cones that hang so thickly amongst the dark pines. The robins are singing ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... painful effect on my systematic temperament. The drawers were filled with letters evidently unsorted, for now and then I came upon a mass of business receipts and acknowledgements crammed in among wedding invitations or letters from some elderly lady, who wrote interminable pale epistles in the finest and most feminine of Italian hands. That a man of Mr. Vanderbridge's wealth and position should have been so careless about his correspondence amazed me until I recalled the dark hints Hopkins ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... stout-hearted Pierre suffered an exclamation of despair to escape him, and he instantly stopped, in the manner of a man who could no longer conceal the dread that had been collecting in his bosom for the last interminable and weary hour. Sigismund, as well as most of the men of the party, had dismounted a little previously, with a view to excite warmth by exercise. The youth had often traversed the mountains, and the cry no sooner reached ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... common, straight-backed chair in the room, between the chest of drawers and the wall. Through that interminable half-hour she sat upright upon it, her hands folded upon her knees, quite cold and motionless, her eyes closed, and her lips parted in an expression of bodily pain. Then she rose suddenly, all straight at once, tall and unbending, and stood still while one might have counted ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... learn that its principles apply to all the relations of life. The difference between us is, that when you estimate man's chief object, or as you call it, his 'main chance,' you take only the present into view, you leave out of sight altogether the interminable future, with its higher hopes and deeper interests, and relations ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... who knows the Palais de Justice at Paris, where every variety of black attire may be studied, can easily imagine the appearance of M. Popinot. The habit of sitting for days at a time modifies the structure of the body, just as the fatigue of hearing interminable pleadings tells on the expression of a magistrate's face. Shut up as he is in courts ridiculously small, devoid of architectural dignity, and where the air is quickly vitiated, a Paris judge inevitably acquires a countenance puckered and seamed by reflection, and ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... the Renaissance burst suddenly upon the world in the fifteenth century without premonitory symptoms. Far from that, within the Middle Age itself, over and over again, the reason strove to break loose from its fetters. Abelard, in the twelfth century, tried to prove that the interminable dispute about entities and words was founded on a misapprehension. Roger Bacon, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, anticipated modern science, and proclaimed that man, by use of nature, can do all things. Joachim of Flora, intermediate between the two, drank ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... there divides the sway With startling dawn and dazzling day; But gloriously serene Are the interminable plains: One fixed, eternal sunset reigns O'er the wide ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... after a month of steady marching, the caravan was well within Italian territory. The route lay parallel with the sea, but nearly a hundred miles distant from it. It traversed the interminable wadys and shelving table-lands leading down to the coast from the granite and pink Nubian stone foothills of the inner range of giants which guarded the fertile valleys of Abyssinia. Thus far, no unexpected difficulties ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... What a grand lord was this Monsieur de Sillon! How he bought himself into that colonelship of Dragoons, invented that band uniform, scattered those broad pieces at play, kept that stable of English hunters, and boasted of those interminable ancestries in Burgundy! Well, this Monsieur de Sillon, who rode in the carriages of the King by right of his four centuries of noblesse, whose coat bore no less than eighteen fine quarterings, whose crest was an eagle and his betrothed a Merecour, ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... move onward under the direction of the Chief Marshal. The grand difficulty results from the invariably mistaken principles on which the deputy marshals seek to arrange this immense concourse of people, so much more numerous than those that train their interminable length through streets and highways in times of political excitement. Their scheme is ancient, far beyond the memory of man or even the record of history, and has hitherto been very little modified by the innate sense of something wrong, and the dim perception of ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Mackinaw's history is very little different from that of most Western settlements and military Stations. Dark, sanguinary, and bloody tragedies were constantly enacted upon the frontiers for generations. As every one acquainted with our history must know, the war on the border has been an almost interminable one. As the tide of emigration has rolled westward it has ever met that fiery counter-surge, and only overcome it by incessant battling and effort. And even now, as the distant shores of the Pacific ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... theme for which the cloven tongues of Pentecost were none too fiery, or the tongues of angels too melodious. As bursts of impassioned prose-poetry the finest passages in these writings have never been surpassed, nor ever will be equalled so long as short sentences prevail, and the interminable period must not unfold itself in heights and hollows like the incoming tide of ocean, nor peal forth melodious thunder like a mighty organ. But, considered as argumentative compositions, they are exceedingly ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... played in his career. The attitude that the world took toward him from the beginning, an attitude of aggressive mistrust,—the role that he was expected and practically forced to assume in the drama of existence, the role of a hero of interminable strife,—must have seemed to him altogether mysterious and somewhat absurd. But his part was fixed by the black patch. It gave him an aspect so truculent and forbidding that all the elements of warfare gathered around ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... upon the Prince while he was threading green tracks in the lower valleys of the wood; and though the stars came out overhead and displayed the interminable order of the pine-tree pyramids, regular and dark like cypresses, their light was of small service to a traveller in such lonely paths, and from thenceforth he rode at random. The austere face of nature, the uncertain issue of his course, the open sky and the free air, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... face, and an ear was applied there to receive an expected word in a whisper. This complied with, the ponderous gates unfolded, and a vista of solemn magnificence was presented to the view. It was a vista at once of colossal statues and trees, interminable in perspective and extending, as it was found, the whole length of the city to its western gate. Incredible as it may be, until we reflect upon the ancient statuary of the eastern world, Velasquez reports each and all of these ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez
... Strolling in the cool moonlight, I was attracted by a brilliant light beneath the trees, and cautiously approached it. A circle of thirty or forty soldiers sat around a roaring fire, while one old uncle, Cato by name, was narrating an interminable tale, to the insatiable delight of his audience. I came up into the dusky background, perceived only by a few, and he still continued. It was a narrative, dramatized to the last degree, of his adventures in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... careful that his surroundings should suit the grandeur of his office. His court was magnificent beyond anything that had been dreamed of in the West. He had an enormous palace constructed at Versailles, just outside of Paris, with interminable halls and apartments and a vast garden stretching away behind it. About this a town was laid out, where those who were privileged to be near his majesty or supply the wants of the royal court lived. This palace and its outlying buildings, including two or three less gorgeous ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... phantom arisen from the grave, a vampire with a violin, who comes to suck, if not the blood from our hearts, at least the money from our pockets? Questions such as these kept chasing each other through the brain while Paganini continued his apparently interminable series of complimentary bows; but all such questionings instantly take flight the moment the great master puts his violin to his chin and began ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Shinto gods, 'Daijingu,' 'Hachiman,' 'Inari-Sama.' All the statues are black, or seem black in the yellow lamplight, and sparkle as if frosted. I feel as if I were in some mortuary pit, some subterranean burial-place of dead gods. Interminable the corridor appears; yet there is at last an end—an end with a shrine in it—where the rocky ceiling descends so low that to reach the shrine one must go down on hands and knees. And there is nothing in the shrine. This is the Tail of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... her!" he cried. Her was his mother, her was France. All the rest had disappeared as if into a fog. Jacqueline was a phantom of the past; so many things had happened since the old times when he had loved her. He had crossed the Indian Ocean and the China Sea; he had seen long stretches of interminable coast-line; he had beheld misery, and glory, and all the painful scenes that wait on warfare; he had seen pestilence, and death in every shape, and all this had wrought in him a sort of stoicism, the result of long acquaintance with solitude and danger. He remembered ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... period of his existence, it would have been a matter of indifference whether it found him righteous or wicked. As to hope in death there would have been no difference. But this is not the case. Man hath an immortal part within. At the period of mortal life, he enters on an interminable state. ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... by the most loving of wives, desirable. Say the girls are beginning to practise their music, which in an honourable English family, ought to occupy every young gentlewoman three hours; it would be rather hard to call upon poor papa to sit in the drawing-room all that time, and listen to the interminable discords and shrieks which are elicited from the miserable piano during the above necessary operation. A man with a good ear, especially, would go mad, if compelled daily ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... breathlessly through an interminable series of rooms and corridors. I gave the signal to Mr. Beresford, who was nervously waiting for it in the wings, and the curtain went up on Hynde Horn disguised as the auld beggar man at the king's gate. Mr. Beresford was reading the ballad, and we ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... famous nest of brigands; and when after climbing a tremendous hill, we had come into its long white street, Dick was of opinion that Archidona of to-day was still an ideal summer resort for the fraternity in case they should crave a town life. Each low-browed house in the interminable avenue looked a fit nursery for mysteries and secrets. Here and there a dark face framed in a knotted red handkerchief peered from a lighted doorway, staring after the Gloria until she had slipped over the brow of the hill to coast smoothly ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... good. We sheltered Tom as much as we could from the wind with our bodies; and we wrung out his wet jacket, and chafed his hands and feet till the circulation was restored. The night, however, seemed interminable. To favour us still further, the wind fell, and shifted further to the south, which made it much warmer. The sea also went down, for it did not seem to lash with such fury as before ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... played through in one act, but many; to a world waiting the conclusion it dragged on through interminable months and years, offering no change, no sudden twists of fortune, no elusive hopes. At last, mercifully, the tragedy ended; the green curtain came down and covered the continent to the Strait of Magellan. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... march was also fifteen miles in length, through one interminable jungle of thorn-bushes. Within two miles of the camp, the road led up a small river bed, broad as an avenue, clear to the khambi of Mpwapwa; which was situated close to a number of ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Had they the fairer hue and bright complexion of the Hearts, or was theirs the darker complexion of the Clubs? Over this question there were interminable disputes. The whole marriage system of the island, with its intricate regulations, would depend on its ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... nationality of which I have spoken—of a nationality in which the interests of a part should be esteemed as the interests of the whole; and on the other side it has been pursued in opposition to that idea. I will not here go into the interminable question of slavery—though it is on that question that the Southern or democratic States have most loudly declared their own sovereign rights and their aversion to national interference. Were I to do so I should ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... lack of funds, gained many advocates for the bill, and to her is due the credit for the success of the work which the committee was appointed to do. She was always at work, unresting, unhasting, and, although weary and worn with the interminable delay, neither she nor any member of the committee left any honorable means untried in order to secure what was so vitally necessary to the very existence of this board during ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... been unexpectedly merciful to us. The moment I heard the head of the essay given out, there flitted before my frightened mind volumes of reports, Battersea schools, Bell, Wilderspin, normal farms, National Society, British Schools, interminable questions about how religion might be separated altogether from secular education, or so much religion taught as all religious sects could agree in. These are all very good things and people to discuss, I daresay; ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... his grandfather was much cleverer than his father, and though he sat down at the piano without sulking, he did so not so much for the sake of obedience as to be able to dream in peace, as he always did while his fingers ran, mechanically over the keyboard. While he played his interminable exercises he heard a proud voice inside himself saying over and over again: "I am a ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... on; they never looked back nor rested; they vanished in the distant blue haze. They crossed many meadows and hills, and passed through strange, far-away countries. All honour to you, heroic host of the interminable path! Mockery and reproach pricked me to rise, but found no response in me. I gave myself up for lost in the depth of a glad humiliation—in the shadow ...
— Gitanjali • Rabindranath Tagore
... sun Cuthbert saw that they were making their course nearly due east, and therefore that it could not be their intention to take him to Jerusalem, which was to the north of the line they were following. A long day's journey, which to Cuthbert seemed interminable, found them on the low spit of sand which runs along by the side of the Dead Sea. Behind, lofty rocks rose almost precipitously, but through a cleft in these the Arabs had made their way. Cuthbert saw at ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... of the characters, as in a mirror, he gives us as it were a perspective view of it. In this sort of perspective Shakspeare is the greatest master I know: a single word frequently opens to view an almost interminable vista of antecedent states of mind. Confined within the narrow limits of time, the poet is in many subjects obliged to mutilate the action, by beginning close to the last decisive stroke, or else he is under the necessity of unsuitably hurrying on its progress: on either supposition he must reduce ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... interminable. Time had never moved so slowly before. She tried to lie still, to relax; then to direct her thought in other channels; but all of these meandering streams flowed back into the main current which was Ben. Yet it was folly to worry about him; ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... Sir Pitt Crawley began to smoke his pipe; and when it became quite dark, he lighted the rushlight in the tin candlestick, and producing from an interminable pocket a huge mass of papers, began reading them, and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... can of a state in possession of external and internal tranquillity. He is therefore driven to interest us by painting with painful accuracy the torments and the penury of domestic life—chagrins experienced in the honest exercise of duty, in the education of children, interminable dissensions between husband and wife, the bad conduct of servants, and, above all things, the cares of earning a daily subsistence. The spectators understand these pictures but too well, for every man knows where the shoe pinches; it ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... that their victims might not escape. Armed citizens, with loaded muskets and sabres gleaming in the lamplight, began to emerge, through the darkness, from their dwellings, and to gather, in motley and interminable assemblage, around the Hotel de Ville. A regiment of guards were stationed at the gates of the royal palace to protect Charles and Catharine from any possibility of danger. Many of the houses were illuminated, ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... Nearly all that interminable day, the mechanism of the stage and the condition of the pike (much fresh-cracked limestone on it) administered to Gabriella's body such a massage as is not now known to medical science. But even this was as nothing in comparison to the rack on which she stretched ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... intellectual; where writers called a spade a spade, and painters painted all sorts of similar bucolic instruments with candour and an inadequate knowledge of their art; where composers thumped their pianos the harder, the less their raucous inspiration responded, or maundered incapably into interminable incoherency, hunting for themes in grays and mauves and reds and yellows, determined to find in music what does not ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... her at his desk, swinging idly from side to side in the revolving chair, through the small space the desk permitted. Upon the blotter before him she saw that he had been drawing interminable squares, oblongs, triangles and circles, joining them to one another in aimless, wandering sequence—his sign of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... the woods, which appeared to be interminable, till the night closed in, and then the Indians halted, and while one remained as guard over us, the others collected wood for a fire. They had some provisions, but offered none to us. After an hour they lay down ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... Alixe recalled the interminable arguments, the snatches of poetry, the hasty rushes to the keyboard; a composer was in travail. At the end of a year, Rentgen professed his satisfaction; Van Kuyp stood on the highroad to fame. Of that there could be no doubt; Elvard ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... arrival, to anticipate with the greatest eagerness our visit on the morrow to this magnificent structure of white marble, which stood so majestically outlined under the blue, star-lit sky, its graceful spires and peaks seeming interminable: ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... strong sense of relief and freedom that he at last escaped from what had seemed to him an interminable period of captivity to the uncongenial moods and manners of other people. He opened the door of his rooms with a sense of having returned to a place where he could be himself—his new self—that strange new self who singularly failed to enjoy ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... the story by the correspondence of the actors produces more important effects. The hundred and forty-four pages in question are all devoted to the proceedings of three days. They are filled, for the most part, with interminable conversations. The story advances by a very few steps; but we know all that every one of the persons concerned has to say about the matter. We discover what was Sir Charles Grandison's relation at a particular time to a certain Italian lady, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... first day at Tavistock was passed by Neverbend and Alaric in hearing interminable statements from the various mining combatants, and when at seven o'clock Alaric shut up for the evening he was heartily sick of the job. The next morning before breakfast he sauntered out to air himself in front of the hotel, and who should come whistling up the street, with ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... by the road. I was very nervous somehow, and towards evening believed that I had lost the road, for I came upon wild pine forests, with huge masses of rock from 100 to 700 feet high, cast here and there among them; beyond these pine-sprinkled grass hills; these, in their turn, were bounded by interminable ranges, ghastly in the lurid evening, with the Spanish Peaks quite clear, and the colossal summit of Mount Lincoln, the King of the Rocky Mountains, distinctly visible, though seventy miles away. It seemed awful to be ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... no end to the ringing for some months, and we had three servants who absolutely refused to stay in so bad a place. We had also to contend with letters and notes in the same way, brought to us at haphazard: "Does Mr So-and-so live here?"—"No, he does not."—"Then pray where does he?" This was interminable, and not five minutes in the day passed without the door-bell being rung. For the sake of not changing my servants I was at last put to the expense of an extra boy for no other purpose but to answer the constant applications at the door. ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... not a sincere Jacobin? If he made the offer to the royal family, why did he vote for their death? Was he resolved, at all events, to be at the head of one of the parties? A middle course would not suit such a man; and so on. Interminable were the queries and their solutions, the pamphlets and the memoirs, which the conduct of this vain man occasioned, and which must assuredly have appeased his manes. Recently it has been discovered that the charge brought against Armine ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the mystery that awaits us looks out through the eye-slits in the grave-clothes muffling her. Where have they come from, where are they going, all these slow wayfarers out of the unknown? Probably only from one thatched douar[A] to another; but interminable distances unroll behind them, they breathe of Timbuctoo and the farthest desert. Just such figures must swarm in the Saharan cities, in the Soudan and Senegal. There is no break in the links: these wanderers have looked on at the building of cities that were dust when the Romans ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... ready to go on till one to-morrow," replied the children. By degrees, however, the frequent sound of wheels was heard, and the dancers got thinner and thinner, till, for the last half hour, some half-dozen couples of young people danced at interminable reel, while Mr. and Mrs. Porter, and a few of the most good-natured matrons of the neighborhood looked on. Soon after midnight the band struck; no amount of negus could get anything more out of them but "God save ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... The interminable time that followed contained for Gale about as much suspense as he could well bear. What astonished him and helped him greatly to fight off actual distress was the ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... the usual hour was a heavy cross on this momentous evening, promptly availed himself of a chance for delay by climbing on Amy's lap, and going into a voluble inventory of the contents of a drawer into which he had obtained several surreptitious peeps. His effort to tell an interminable story that he might sit up longer, the droll havoc he made with his English, and the naming of the toys that were destined for the supposed child, evoked an unforced merriment which banished the last ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... Beauvayse, stimulated by the recollection of the Mayor's promise to introduce him to the loveliest girl he had ever seen in his life, or ever should see, mentally registered a vow that he would keep the old buffer up to that, by listening to his interminable hunting-stories, and laughing at his venerable jokes, to tears if necessary. Love, like War, sharpened a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... days' march from the Nile junction, or about 160 miles. The journey had been extremely monotonous, as there had been no change in the scenery; it was the interminable desert, with the solitary streak of vegetation in the belt of mimosas and dome palms, about a mile and a half in width, that marked the course of the river. I had daily shot gazelles, geese, pigeons, desert grouse, &c. but no larger game. I was informed that at this spot, Collodabad, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... behind Greenwich. As usual, the hall was untenanted, with no servant to answer questions. He searched the dark recesses of a dirty letter-rack, on the chance that he might find a telegram from his wife waiting for him. Then he went gaily up the interminable staircase, making nothing now of its five flights, enjoying their steepness as productive ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... a spiral staircase within one of its immense limbs; and, climbing steadily upward, lighted by a lantern which the door-keeper's wife gave us, we had a bird's eye view of Paris, much obscured by smoke or mist. Several interminable avenues shoot with ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... by the laughter of the three servants of the establishment, gained the kiosk by walking over the flower-beds and round the vases with the perverse grace of an insect describing its interminable zig-zags as it tries to get out of a closed window. When he had clambered into the kiosk, and the servants had retired, he sat down on a wooden bench and wallowed in the delights of his triumph. He had completely fooled a great man; he had not only torn off his mask, but he had ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... clerk, a trained nurse, a teacher, a social worker, the burden may be so great that the girl is disheartened. She is all the more disheartened because, knowing that a useful life is a strong, steady pull, the way before her seems interminable. If she carries her whip inside her—this counsel is not for those of us who are lazy—she does well to remember that there is a point beyond which fatigue should not be borne, that is, when it overdraws her capital of health and ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... but to winter in the country he chose a spot between Montreal and Quebec, little thinking what the long winter months would bring forth. The little handful of Frenchmen had no idea of the severity of the Canadian climate; they little dreamt of the interminable months of ice and snow when no navigation was possible. Before Christmas had come round the men were down with scurvy; by the middle of February, "out of one hundred and ten persons composing the companies of our three ships, there were not ten in perfect ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... rusty screen of the back parlor window one viewed the spiraea, still in need of spraying. Mrs. McKee herself was in the pantry, placing one slice of tomato and three small lettuce leaves on each of an interminable succession ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of us. I saw Colonel Sheraton half look up as he stood, bent over the bed. Thus, stunned by horror as we were, we waited. It was a long time, an interminable time, moments, minutes, it seemed to me, until there must have been thrice time for the repetition of the signal, if ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... cotton-mills, and lighten the warehoused accumulation of cottons, or other inert matter; but no lucky plague, pestilence, or cholera, comes to thin the crowded phalanx, and rid this empire of some portion of the interminable brood of mongers of all shapes and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... of the room and went down to the dining-room. Four of the "young chaps" were playing their interminable game of cards at the table. A three months' old niece of Mrs. King, whose mother was sitting with her sister in the bedroom talking, lay in a dressbasket on the table being ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... with care, was always weighty with thought. Lord Roehampton was little at his office; he worked in a spacious chamber on the ground floor of his private residence, and which was called the Library, though its literature consisted only of Hansard, volumes of state papers, shelves of treatises, and interminable folios of parliamentary reports. He had not been at home a week before the floor of the apartment was literally covered with red boxes, all containing documents requiring attention, and which messengers were perpetually bringing or carrying away. ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... one pays for the telephone by the year. The company lost money on Mrs. Budlong's wire. As a telephoner she was simply interminable. She would spend a weekend at the instrument while the prisoner at the other extreme of the wire shifted from ear to ear, sagged along the wall, postponed household duties, made signals of distress to other members of the family, and generally ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... in front of us, surrounded by an interminable forest of jungle, lies Gunong Poe, the south-west boundary of Sarawak, while behind it again rise the long low hills of Sambas, in Dutch Borneo. Stretching far out to sea, and to the right of Poe, ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... that we began one of our interminable conversations, one of those long, wandering, intensely generalizing, diffusely personal talks that will be dear to the hearts of intelligent youths until the world comes to an end. The Change has not abolished ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... of these fortunes are the Astor, Goelet and Rhinelander estates in the East and, in the West, the Longworth and Field estates are notable examples. To deal with all the conspicuous fortunes based upon land would necessitate an interminable narrative. Suffice it for the purposes of this work to take up a few of the superlatively great fortunes as representatives ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... endless, a. interminable, illimitable, limitless, unlimited, boundless, infinite; continuous, uninterrupted, continual perpetual, unending, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of the gigantic German army, pouring through the streets of Brussels, fully equipped down to its kitchens, its smoking coffee-wagons, its corps of gravediggers, and, of course, its cuirassiers in burnished helmets that were shining in the autumn sun. The huge, interminable, apparently irresistible multitude! Regiment after regiment, battalion after battalion, going on and on for hours, and even days—the mighty legions of the nation that a few days before had "never so much as ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... other quarter could he turn with a hope of being put into communication with the person he sought. But Doom was apparently quite unqualified to be an aid to him. He was, it seemed, at variance with his Grace on account of one of those interminable lawsuits with which the Gaelic chiefs, debarred from fighting in the wholesome old manner with the sword, indulged their contestful passions, and he presented first of all a difficulty that Count Victor in his most hopeless moments had never allowed ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... seemed interminable Willet's figure disappeared over the cliff, and, with a gasp, Robert followed, Tayoga coming swiftly after. The three were so tired, their vitality was so reduced that they lay down in the snow, and drew long, painful breaths. When some ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... In this fashion an interminable week slipped past, bringing the patient to that critical "corner" with which too many of us are familiar. Neither Paul nor Mackay left the study for twenty-four hours; while the women sat with folded hands and waited—a more ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... an army. Regiment after regiment, silent, motionless, it stretched back into silver mist, and the mist rolled beyond, above, about it; and through it he saw, as through rifts in broken gauze, lines interminable of soldiers, glitter of ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... the Feast of Pentecost has no ceremonial trappings even with the orthodox. Passover and Tabernacles stand on a different footing. The abstention from leavened bread on the former feast has led to a closely organised system of cleansing the houses, an interminable array of rules as to food; while the prescriptions of the Law as to the bearing of palm-branches and other emblems, and the ordinance as to dwelling in booths, have surrounded the Feast of Tabernacles with a considerable, if less extensive, ceremonial. But there is this difference. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... like yesterday, to Canton sights; but as we had several distant places to visit, we took sedan chairs, and went shouting along, four coolies each, Indian file, through the town, forming quite a cavalcade, with our guide in front. It was the same interminable maze of narrow, crowded thorough-fares, crammed with human beings, that we had seen for the first time yesterday. A great commotion was seen ahead at one place, out of which emerged several men in crimson robes, bearing banners, clearing the way and shouting out the name and dignities ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie |
