"Loveless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our heart against a brother offended, we will find in our need even the great and infinite love of God shut against us, harder to be won than a strong city, ribbed and stockaded as the bars of a castle. To the unforgiving there is no forgiveness. To the hard, and relentless, and loveless, there is no love. To the ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... been a loveless waste, Starred by no holiday. And she had wed for roof, and bread; She gave her work in pay. (Oh! the moon-memories, ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... one warfare upon earth: Shines in exposing knaves, and painting fools, Yet is, whate'er she hates and ridicules. No thought advances, but her eddy brain Whisks it about, and down it goes again. Full sixty years the world has been her trade, The wisest fool much time has ever made From loveless youth to unrespected age, No passion gratified except her rage. So much the fury still outran the wit, The pleasure missed her, and the scandal hit. Who breaks with her, provokes revenge from hell, But he's a bolder man who dares ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... her, and he drew her in, darkening the windows and locking the door. On the whole, it was not so bad as he expected; at least, there was less violence and more despair. She covered her face with her hands, and writhed in anguish, when she said that she had utterly degraded herself by this loveless marriage. She scarcely mentioned her husband. She made no complaint of him, and even spoke of him as generous. It seemed as if this made it worse, and as if she would be happier if she could expend herself in hating ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... saving his soul. He asks his daughters as to their love for him—that, by means of a certain device he has invented, he may retain his favorite daughter on his island. The elder daughters are betrothed, while the youngest does not wish to contract a loveless union with any of the neighboring suitors whom Leir proposes to her, and he is afraid that she may ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... of life are more powerful than even youthful cynicism and youthful heart-break. Prior to devoting herself to a loveless life and the commonplaces of the stoic's tub, Miss Hugonin was compelled by the barest decency to bid her ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... been more to me than life lying in a foreign grave. What use is life to one so lonely and bereft? Where should I fly? what should I do? I have never lived alone. I have always had another to live for and to love. Methinks death would be the better thing than such a loveless life." ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... touch had the dread operation of the heathen taboo. Now Goneril brooked no chiding. So, at favorable times, he, in a wary manner, and not indelicately, would venture in private interviews gently to make distant allusions to this questionable propensity. She divined him. But, in her cold loveless way, said it was witless to be telling one's dreams, especially foolish ones; but if the unfortunate man liked connubially to rejoice his soul with such chimeras, much connubial joy might they give him. All this was sad—a touching ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... made no reply. People said that she had had her own romance in her youth and that her mother had sternly repressed it. I had heard that her marriage with Mr. DeLisle was loveless on her part and proved very unhappy. But he had been dead many years, and Aunt Winnifred never spoke ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Miss Newcome was engaged to the Marquis Fairntosh, but for all that no marriage took place. First the death of Lady Kew made an inevitable postponement, and then Ethel herself shrunk from the loveless match, and, in spite of Lord Fairntosh's protests, dismissed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Elizabeth and her ministers. He had himself been reared in a hardy school; he had been trained to be indifferent to pain. It may well be that his callousness in speaking of Tudor cruelties is to be traced to the influences that surrounded his loveless childhood and youth. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... that if injury came to the Malplaquet, while under my charge, that I should be dismissed. She was my last chance as she was your own. But what to me were risks? I had lost my love, and my country had dishonoured herself in my eyes. I was nameless, loveless, countryless. All had gone, and ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... me. But sorrow does not always kill; youth is strong, and nature works miracles. I have seen trees, struck by lightning, still stand erect and put forth new leaves. I have seen blasted lives drag their weary length to a loveless old age. I have seen noble hearts severed from their mates, slowly consumed by the weariness of widowhood and solitude. If we could die when we have lost those we love, it would be too sweet to love. Jealous of his creature, ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... the loveless one, that seeketh its advantage in the advantage of many—it is not the origin of the herd, but ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... said Meldon—"in fact, I'm tired telling you—that she hasn't got to kill him until after she's married him. You don't surely want her to be guilty of one of those cold-blooded, loveless marriages which are the curse of modern society and end in the divorce court. She ought to have some feeling of affection for him before she marries him, and I think it is probably aroused in her now. No ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... again. The pretty moist, green herbage, the graceful grasses, quickly wither away; dust and straws and rubbish from the road lie in the dry channel, and by and by it is filled with a summer growth of dock and loveless nettles which no ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... never be happy any more, but it must not, could not, be ignoble. And by a pathetic mixture of childish romance with her woman's trials, the philosophy which had nothing to do with this great decisive deed of hers had its place in her imagination of the future: so far as she conceived her solitary loveless life at all, she saw it animated by a proud stoical heroism, and by an indistinct but strong purpose of labour, that she might be wise enough to write something which would rescue her father's name from oblivion. After all, she was only a young girl—this ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the two most concerned to arrange," he declared "I never did fancy these loveless royal marriages. They are very little better than false ones." Then he laughed. "Tell me about this one of yours," he said, "the 'true facts' as ...
— The Colonel of the Red Huzzars • John Reed Scott
... grown old, These words shall speak your spirits moody: "Unhappy one! What heaps of fun I've missed by being goody-goody! Oh, that I might have felt the hunger Of loveless ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... crying for her in the hall. Three innocent babies—and how many more?—to grow into life under the shadow of a wrecked and loveless home! What had she done? What ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... delight; Keep the waters in thy sight; Love hath made me strong to go, For thy sake, to realms below, Where the water's shine and hum Through the darkness never come Let, I pray, one thought of me Spring, a little well, in thee; Lest thy loveless soul be found Like the dry ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... whom she had known in Dublin, but now that he has come down to ask her to marry him she chooses the farmer, brutal though she knows him, because as his wife she can do the work for Ireland that she has imagined for herself. The loveless marriage, so universal an institution all over Ireland, made it nothing out of the way for Ellen to act as she did, even though at the time of the action of the play a higher ideal of marriage than that of the old matchmaking had come in. It is this institution that Mr. Robinson, from one point ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... most; but even then it by no means prevented the existence of extreme poverty, for we read frequently in the Acts and Epistles of the collections made for the Christian churches. But in our faithless, loveless, selfish, sin-drowned century, such an attempt at community of goods would not only annihilate all morality completely, but absolutely degrade us back from civilisation and modern Catholicism into the rudest and most meagre barbarism. The ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... had studied the Humane Letters, which were no longer disregarded by the princes of the Continent; they were the sweet sister, the eldest of the family, fading fast in her loveless home, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have little sense of the beauty of holiness. And for his sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy there could be no middle terms; irresistible election, irresistible reprobation; only sometimes extremes meet, and again it may be the trial of faith that the justified seem as loveless and unlovely as the reprobate. Abetissez-vous! A nature, you may think, that would magnify things to the utmost, nurse, expand them beyond their natural bounds by his [88] reflex action upon them. Thus revelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, but an evidence conclusive only ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... a rash and rather superficial metaphysician, but the warm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deep respect for the man. He talks of the absurdities of women's education; draws a bitter picture of a woman's fate in a loveless marriage of convenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, but asks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from a schooling in folly; assails the practice of gallantry, and the fashionable conjugal infidelities ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... believe that that company of beasts of prey into which destiny had chanced to thrust him would give him romance and happiness and all he had dreamed of when as a student he used to sing the song "Youth is wasted, life is nought, when the heart is cold and loveless." ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... no desire to question the disposition of your wealth; if you prefer to give it to my cousin, I am willing, perfectly willing. I enjoy wealth as well as most people do, I suppose; but poverty does not frighten me half so much as a loveless marriage. Give Hugh your fortune, if you wish, but, father! father! let there be no estrangement between you and me. I can bear everything but your displeasure; I dread nothing so much as the loss of your love. ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... advocate for loveless, and least of all for mercenary marriages, but I think we want some via media between the French mariage de convenance and our English and American method of leaving so grave a question as marriage entirely to the whimsies and romantic fancies of young girls. We need ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... some tempter's crafty suit Would woo thee to a loveless bed: I see thee to the altar's ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... highest use of happy love is this; To make us loving to the loveless ones; Willing indeed to halve our meed of bliss, If our sweet plenty others' want atones: Of love's abundance may God give thee store, To spend in love's sweet ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... perfection. Can He in whose hand my heart is, command me to wed the man whom he has not enabled me to love? Can the Pure, the Just, the Merciful, have ordained that I should suffer embraces which I loath, and violate vows which His laws permitted me to make? Can He have ordained a perfidious, a loveless, and a joyless prostitution? What if a thousand prodigies should concur to enforce it a thousand times, the deed itself would be a stronger proof that those prodigies were the works of darkness, than those prodigies that the deed was commanded by ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... first indignation somewhat abated, and now vastly relieved at the realization that she indeed was free from her loveless and long-since irksome alliance with Waldron, calmly enough returned to the club-house. Head well up, and eyes defiant, she walked up the broad steps and into the office. Little cared she whether the piazza gossips—The Hammer and Anvil Club, in local slang—divined the quarrel or not. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... desire had urged Hugh Fraser on to woo and win the helpless French beauty, whom an adverse fate had stranded in England. The mute sacrifice of the wedding was followed by the two years of Valerie's loveless marriage. It was an existence for the two sisters, bought by the sacrifice of one and ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... West!—'tis well for me My years already doubly number thine;[16] My loveless eye unmoved may gaze on thee, And safely view thy ripening beauties shine; Happy, I ne'er shall see them in decline; Happier, that, while all younger hearts shall bleed, Mine shall escape the doom thine eyes assign To ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... pleasant companions in agreeable ways. He had shot up to his full height, five feet eleven inches, and from his handsome features there shone those piercing dark eyes which riveted attention where-ever they were turned. His loveless, cheerless boyhood was over, and the liberty of Oxford, which, even after the mild constraint of a public school, seems boundless, was to him the perfection of bliss. He began to develop those powers of conversation which in after years gave him an irresistible influence over ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... obliged to remonstrate with her for the silly trick of eating her meals on the floor instead of at table,—and yet she was a warm-hearted, affectionate girl, and like many another princess of that time, she deserved a happier fate than the loveless marriage that had been arranged for her. Our memories are quite fresh about Bianca and her sorrows, because an accommodating tourist, who had Mrs. Ady's "Beatrice d'Este" with her, has loaned it to us for reading in the evenings—at least for as much time as we can afford to spend in-doors ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... precious nard; Nor did she deem the act a task, Nor look for great reward; She only thought of His great love, And felt her gift was small For Him who left His home above To suffer death for all. But her blest Lord more highly prized The loving heart that gave; For loveless gifts are e'er despised, Yet men oft seek to pave The way that leads to glory land With deeds devoid of grace; But only those who love can ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... talk to you. You looked so little, so young, so helpless, all huddled up there by the fire. Kathrien, you've never had to think for yourself. You don't know what you are doing in going on with this blasphemous, loveless marriage. Why, dear, you are making the most terrible mistake possible to a woman. Marriage with love is often a tragedy. Without love it is a hell. A horror that will deepen and grow more dreadful with ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... much worse it might have been—I might have been born a prince, with a duchy to rule over. I might have been as that poor man, my cousin, a creature whose life is all pomp and no real dignity, all merry-making and no real mirth—loveless, isolated and vain." ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... which that great love has forgiven and purged away, and if we are ever to know the depth of our own evil, we must measure it by His wonderful tenderness. We must set our 'sins in the light of His countenance,' and contrast that supreme sacrifice with our own selfish loveless lives, that the contrast may subdue us to penitence and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the bulbul poured its song. The love that has lain latent within her bosom, or burned with friendship's unconsuming flame, awakes like smoldering embers fanned by desert winds and fed with camphor wood, enveloping all her world. She longs to leave the loveless life with her sullen lord; to cast from her as things accursed the gaudy robes and glittering gems; to fly with the shepherd lad to the deep cool forests of the far east and dream her life away in some black tent or vine-embowered cot—to take ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... silence, her stricken face full of trouble. How could she, from her glass house, throw stones at a loveless marriage? But this was different from her own case! Nobody was worthy to marry her hero without giving the best a woman had to give. If she were a girl—a sudden tide of color swept her face; a wild, delirious tingle of joy flooded her veins—oh, if she were a girl, what a wealth ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... never be yours, I will never be another's. I have no right to kill my body, that I know, but neither have I the right to kill my soul; and of the two sins I will choose the lesser, and sooner kill myself than lie in loveless arms. I gave myself to you, my lover, that night, when we changed vows in the moonlight. I will kiss no other man's lips, I will share no other man's bed. I am your wife by the laws of God, and I will die ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... seemed as utterly remote and detached from her own life as one of the past ages in history. The youth in her brain created a radiant illusion of immortality. By no stretch of imagination could she picture herself like the infirm and loveless creature before her. Yet she knew, without realizing it, that Miss Amelia had once been young, that she had once even been beautiful. There was a legend, fading now into tradition, that her lover had been killed in a duel, fought for her while she was still a girl, and that she had worn ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... possibly internal. He is first displayed "pacing a sombre avenue of ilex and arbutus that reflected with singular truth the gloom of his countenance," and "toying sadly with the jewelled hilt of his dagger." He meditates upon his loveless life and the burthen of riches. Presently he "paces the long and magnificent gallery," where a "hundred generations of Di Sornos, each with the same flashing eye and the same marble brow, look down with the same sad melancholy upon the beholder"—a truly monotonous ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... never loved, and cannot know How drear and hopeless youth itself may seem; The long, blank loveless years to wonder through, With nought, save ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... favorably. The two accommodate themselves mutually, and a modus vivendi is established. They want no scandal, and regard for their children compels them to avoid any, although it is the children who suffer most under a cold, loveless life on the part of their parents, even if such a life does not develop into enmity, quarrel and dissension. Often accommodation is reached in order to avoid material loss. As a rule it is the husband, whose conduct is the rock against which marriage is dashed. This ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... so short; because we must part at last; because yon moon shines on when the nightingale sings to it no more! A little while, and thine eyes will grow dim, and thy beauty haggard, and these locks that I toy with now will be grey and loveless." ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the bastard son of an aristocratic Englishwoman who in early youth was forced by her father into a loveless union with a rich plebeian. The single fault of the mother's life is confessed after twenty years, when the husband in a moment of anger strikes her high-spirited and obstinate son. The latter consents to leave his home for ever, and relinquish the name he has borne. On these terms ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the highest rank awoke suddenly to the discovery that life was given them for nobler purposes than that of frivolous enjoyment and tawdry vanity. Despising themselves; despising the husbands to whom they had been wedded in loveless marriages de convenance, whose infidelities they had too often to endure: they, too, fled from a world which had sated and sickened them. They freed their slaves; they gave away their wealth to found hospitals and to feed the poor; ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... him, while he bemoaned the fact that he had never yet found a woman worthy of his devotion. Loudly did he bewail his over-fastidiousness; in which, nevertheless, he secretly glorified. But now for so long had he mourned his loveless estate, that, since of all the subjects of his brush woman was most congenial to him, he had gradually come to lay every fault of his work, crudeness of coloring, hardness of line, harshness of texture, finally, his very conventionality of conception, ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... turbulent heart, to relieve the aching brain. As everything connected with sex, so our ideas about illicit sex relations that are not connected with love, are honeycombed with hypocrisy and false to the core. While purchasable, loveless sex relations can, of course, not be compared to love relations, still under our present social, economic and moral code they are the only relations that thousands of men and women can enjoy, and they are better than none; and in quite a considerable ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... O Night, your wasted hours, You bring me not my Life's Delight, My Star of Stars, my Flower of Flowers! You leave me loveless and forlorn, Pass on, most false and futile night, Pass on, and ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... cursed be the hands that changed those letters, and be they struck off by the hangman's knife, and handle hell fire for ever; thrice accursed be the cruel hearts that did conceive that damned lie, to part true love for ever; may they sicken and wither on earth joyless, loveless, hopeless; and wither to dust before their time; and burn in eternal fire," He cursed the meat at their mouths and every atom of their bodies, from their hair to the soles of their feet. Then turning from the cowering, shuddering pair, who had almost hid themselves beneath ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Summer by summer my father brought her to us. Always memory was kindled afresh, always sorrow kept smouldering. Once she came; I lay here; she has not left me since. He,—he also comes; he has soothed pain with that loveless eye, carried me in untender arms, watched calmly beside my delirious nights. He who loved beauty has learned disgust. Why should I care? I, from the slave of bald form, enlarged him to the master of gorgeous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the Earth— 55 And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... effect on the loveless Ferris. It was the first voluntary mark of affection he had encountered for longer than he liked to remember. It set old ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... love, yet was as great a sceptic as you about the evidences thereof, and having held twenty times that Jacob's serving fourteen years for Rachel was not too long by fourteen days, I was not a likely person (with my loathing dread of marriage as a loveless state, and absolute contentment with single life as the alternative to the great majorities of marriages), I was not likely to accept a feeling not genuine, though from the hand of Apollo himself, crowned with his various godships. Especially too, in my position, I could ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... at her a little curiously, and then she realised that the girl had lived a loveless life, and that the sudden change to the atmosphere of love and friendship had ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... of those who succumbed to the "unholy hunger." It was like a form of revenge taken on them, for their loveless schemes of robbing and fleeing; a revenge contrived by the ancient, barbaric country they had so lightly invaded. Now, she held them captive—without chains; ensorcelled—without witchcraft; and, lying stretched like some primeval monster in ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... the lamp was lit, too high you turned it; The oil was wasted in a blinding blaze. Your passion was too ardent in the start— Set by the lamp: farewell. God gird the heart Through darkened hours, and lone and loveless ways. ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the state when he seized the throne, but that he could not disregard the laws of nature so far as to countenance such a monstrous union. These disproportioned matches ought not to be permitted in any state, nor should men be allowed to form unequal loveless alliances, which are in no sense true marriages. A magistrate or lawgiver might well address an old man who marries a young girl in the words of Sophokles: "Poor wretch, a hopeful bridegroom you will be;" and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... plants, are, it sometimes seems to me, the strength and perfection of creation—strength perfected in weakness; the ivy, green among the snows of winter, and clasping together in its true embrace the loveless ruin; and the vine that maketh glad the heart of man amidst the miseries of life. I must not be mistaken, though, for Devereux's talk was only a tender sort of trifling, and Lilias had said nothing to encourage him to risk ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Joan felt that her duty lay beside a woman whom Fate had treated so ill; that duty demanded that an effort must be made to bring a little brightness into so solitary and loveless a life. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... career. Born to be a lover, in Dante's great way, he had groped through life without the vision of Beatrice, seeking to satisfy his blind desire, as perhaps Dante after Beatrice's death did also, with the lower love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk. The Church encouraged its priest to be "a fribble and a coxcomb"; and a fribble and a coxcomb, by his own confession, Caponsacchi became. But the vanities he mingled with never ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the reply will be vouchsafed. There was never yet an aspirant who was unable to find a teacher. It is most true that the living and the dead are still one family, for of course there are no "dead," unless we most correctly put into this category the dull of hearing, the dull of heart, and the loveless who still walk this earth. But if we deem the pioneers defunct and inarticulate, then it is little likely that we shall comprehend the reality and the naturalness of this interplay and inspiration. If we never seek, information and insight ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... Ambassador's visit, gathered no doubt from general report, as they had not seen him themselves. "From bad to worse! That is their destiny. I see it, but I cannot alter it. The selfishness of a mean and crafty man—the selfishness of an ambitious and silly woman—- the selfishness of a spiteful and loveless child all tend one way, from bad to worse! And you, my darlings, must suffer it awhile, I fear. Yet, when things are at their worst, you can come to me. I can do but ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... depict the secret chagrin of an old maid who sees pass by in useless monotony her dark, loveless, despairing days, without hope even of some event of personal interest, while about her moves the busy whirl of happier creatures whose life has but one goal, who feel emotions and tendernesses, and who look upon her ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... thought. Nay, I need not wish its darkness to lie on you for ever either; but, Antoine, remember you are all I have left. In my silent, lonely life, and this dull house—and I always a reserved and seeming loveless man—you may well pine for something more, some lighter, gayer time, and ever brood over the means to find it. But remember, my son, that you are by birth above the paltry pleasures of the herd; that you can come to me and ask for money if you covet some pastime that befits you; that ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... then is purchased at the price of their freedom. Their lives become locked up in the small closet of their limited concepts. Their literal and rigid understanding of the Christian church and its faith makes them so loveless that their lives have an alienating effect on others, and they themselves fail ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... found one way of escape from his troubles. For if Lesley accepted Maurice, and lived with him in a house opposite her father's, there would always be a corner for him at their fireside, and he would not go to the grave feeling himself a childless, loveless, desolate ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Richard de Loveless, who was a courtier, and a very well bred man, being observed to hesitate at the words "after our marriage," was thereupon desired to explain himself. He replied by talking very largely of his exact complaisance while ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... she hates and ridicules. No thought advances, but her eddy brain Whisks it about, and down it goes again. Full sixty years the world has been her trade, The wisest fool much time has ever made. From loveless youth to unrespected age, No passion gratified except her rage. So much the fury still outran the wit, The pleasure missed her, and the scandal hit. Who breaks with her, provokes revenge from hell, But he's a bolder man who dares be well. Her every turn with ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... So Juana loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded, hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart's legality, which women apply instinctively ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... still art thou, To bind the loveless joyless vow, The heart from pleasure to delude, To join the gentle to ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... childhood; her marriage. It had been loveless on her part, but she had cared a little, believing that love on her husband's part would suffice. Was it love, ever at all? Is love possible where tenderness, courtesy, consideration do not exist? Time going on, daily she had suffered his incivility, ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... sinister above the mirk. It was impossible to decide whether an enormous mass of pitchy and Tartarian gloom was being slowly moulded by diabolic invisible hands into a city, or a city, the desperate and damned abode of a loveless race, was disintegrating into its proper fume and dusty chaos. With relief we turned outwards to the nobility of the St Lawrence ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... that she held. He was engaged to the other girl, but he had not known what love was until he met Yvette. He was bound to the other girl by ties he could not break, which was quite true, because the nice girl had a rich father. He drew such a pathetic picture of the loveless life he must in the future lead, that a great wave of self-pity surged up within him and his voice quavered. He felt almost resentful that she should take the separation in such an unemotional manner. When a man gets what ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... but he remained there mute, not daring to speak, experiencing all the tortures of remorse and retribution. Of what avail had been ambition? How had it overleaped content and ease of mind! Into what a nest of stings and thorns his loveless marriage had plunged him! And now but the black shadow remained; he walked in the darkness of unending isolation. So he should continue to walk straight to ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... the white splendour of our honeymoon. We saw it fading; but we did not know How bleak the path would be when once its glow Was wholly gone. And yet we two were forced to follow on - Leagues, leagues apart while ever side by side. Darker and darker grew the loveless weather, Darker the way, Until we could not stay Longer together. Now that all anger from our hearts has died, And love has flown far from its ruined nest, To find sweet shelter in another breast, Let us talk calmly of our past mistakes, And of our ...
— Poems of Optimism • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... A lifeless land, a loveless land, Without lair or nest on either hand: Only scorpions jerked in the sand, Black as black iron, or dusty pale; From point to point sheer rock was ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... on me: Else should I bear that Henry comes not?—fails Just this first night out of so many nights? Loving is done with. Were he sitting now, As so few hours since, on that seat, we'd love No more—contrive no thousand happy ways To hide love from the loveless, any more. I think I might have urged some little point In my defence, to Thorold; he was breathless For the least hint of a defence: but no, The first shame over, all that would might fall. No Henry! Yet I merely sit and think The morn's deed o'er and o'er. I must ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... supposed that any other springs were pushing here. Egotism, egotism, egotism! Its name, he thought, was surely Ostermore. And again, as once before, under the like circumstances, he found more pity than scorn awaking in his heart. The whole wasted, sterile life that lay behind this man; the unhappy, loveless home that stood about him now in his declining years were the fruits he had garnered from that consuming love of self with which the gods had ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... thy wise laws have here, among savages, a less brutal application. For one who dies loveless (and as the Sakais are not given to strong passions, and are chaste by nature, this is not a very great sacrifice) many are saved from unhappiness and a whole race ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... and beauty—sorrow, as he had seen it, being but a solemn and poetic form of beauty. The change in such a world made by the discovery that his being an adopted son set him apart in a class different from other boys—a class unlovely and loveless—had been great, had stolen much of the joy from living; but he was very young then, and the joy of mere living and breathing was strong in his blood, and he had gradually become accustomed—hardened, if you will—to the idea of his ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... bad—perhaps worse!" cried Joyce, thinking of the possibility of a loveless reunion with Ray, if she stayed away too long! In that case she would have no compensation for her act ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... birth; and I the unutterable pleasure of being a mother. There was something of delicacy in my husband's bridal attentions; but now his tainted breath, pimpled face, and blood-shot eyes, were not more repugnant to my senses, than his gross manners, and loveless familiarity to my taste. ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... about it. It has been so hastily arranged, and Norma isn't one bit in love with her husband, and don't pretend to be. Hugh is patient and devoted to her, which is my strongest hope for their happiness in the future. It seems to me so unnatural to make a loveless marriage. I can't understand a woman's doing it. Nesbit is going to Palestine and the East. He is miserably changed; his hair is beginning to streak with gray at the temples already, and the lines about his mouth are getting hard. It makes me miserable to think ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... when he saw her wondrous loveliness, One moment to great Nature's sacred power He bent and was no longer passionless; But when he bade her to his secret bower Be borne a loveless victim, and she tore Her locks in agony, and her words of flame And mightier looks availed not, then he bore Again his load of slavery, and became A king, a heartless beast, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... lovely blue eyes, with their dreamy languor and "luminous awakenings," turn the heads alike of men and women, of poet and critic, of statesman and priest. We trace her brief career through her pure and ardent youth, her loveless marriage, her fatal passion for La Rochefoucauld, the final shattering of all her illusions; and when at last, tired of the world, she bows her beautiful head in penitent prayer, we too love and forgive her, as others have done. Were not twenty-five years of suffering and penance an ample ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... love comes to you, as it will come,—for no woman with your eyes and your mouth ever yet lived a loveless life!—never forget that it is the biggest thing in the world, the one altogether good and perfect gift. Don't let any twopenny-halfpenny considerations of worldly advantage influence you, nor the tittle-tattle ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... those few minutes—it is rather deep, you know—and so he is coming up to dinner to-night to make a thorough study of it. He feels it is his one last hope, and if it fails him, he is lost in the sea of a loveless marriage." ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... beautiful bowed head. It was true, then. She loved him. Without meaning it he had won her heart. He whose earnest wish it had been to save her from pain, to console her, to brighten her lonely life, had brought this fresh sorrow on her. To the misery of a loveless marriage he had added a heavier cross, an unhappy, a misplaced affection. No exultant vanity within him rejoiced at the knowledge that, unsought, she had learned to care for him. Only regret, pity for her, stirred in him. ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... on their insolent pride the revenge of the purest charity—housing, caring for, befriending them, so as no son could have done it more tenderly and efficiently. The mother—on the whole a good woman—died blessing him; the strange, godless, loveless, misanthrope grandmother lived still, entirely supported by this self-sacrificing man. Her, who had been the bane of his life, blighting his hope, and awarding him, for love and domestic happiness, long mourning and cheerless solitude, he treated with ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... twist, that seems to make me fade away, Rank plug, that navvies smoke in loveless clay, I know not which is ranker, no, ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... broken by selfishness. To be absorbed in self is of course to have the heart shut to others. Our own interests, inclinations, possessions, when they assert themselves in our lives, build up impassable barriers between us and our fellows. To live to self is the real root of every sin as it is of all loveless life. The Apostle uses careful language: he admits the necessity for attention to our 'own things,' and only requires that we should look 'also' on the things of others. His cure for the hindrances to Christian unity ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... childless and loveless; I know what it is to stand alone with life's hollow corpses,—corpses of youth, and love, and hope. Perhaps this is why my heart turned to her in her sweet youth and guileless innocence. I used to fancy, when I saw ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... of Charlotte Bronte consists in the fact that she makes love so splendid and glorifying a thing, and that she does not waste her powder and shot upon the poor in spirit. The loveless man or woman, after reading her book, may say, "What is this great thing that I have somehow missed? Is it possible that it may be waiting somewhere even for me?" And then such as these may grow to scan the faces of their fellow-travellers in hope and wonder. In ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had brought matters to a crisis. Something must be done, Angela told herself, and quickly, to set her right with her sister, and in her own esteem. She had to choose between a loveless marriage and the Convent. By accepting one or the other she must prove that she was not the slave of a ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... example, if he should ever chance to see it, would disgust him with my advice. Had it been different when I first came here, I might now be a better man. I was an orphan, came here from the North, had no soul in this vast city to love or care for me, and for five years I have lived here loveless and lonely, save when with those companions which a friendless being is almost sure to fall in with here; and I can turn to no one, feeling ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... different ways in order to discover what it is they really wish to do. A summer so spent may keep many a girl from slipping into teaching just because it seems the only thing she can do. Such a salvation will be twofold, for it will save not only the girl, but also a profession overcrowded with loveless followers. There are so many needs to be filled by a woman's work that it is her duty to look for some vocation for which she is truly adapted, to get out of the ruts of those professions into which women flock because they have ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... warmth. We talk about ardent desires, warm hearts, the glow of love, the fire of enthusiasm, and even the flame of life. We draw the contrast with cold natures, which are loveless and unemotional, hard to stir and quicken; we talk about thawing reserve, about an icy torpor, and so on. The same general strain of allusion is undoubtedly to be traced in our text. Whatever more it means, it surely means this, that Christ comes to kindle in men's souls a blaze ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a verity Pisias makes us to side with Daphnaeus by his extravagant language, charging marriage with being a loveless intercourse, and one that has no participation in divine friendship, although we can see that it is an intercourse, if erotic persuasion and favour fail, that cannot be restrained by shame and fear as by bit and bridle." ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... is loveless to-night, Since he is departed whose smile made it bright: I mourn, but the sigh of my soul shall be brief, The pathway is short to the grave of ...
— The Poetry of Wales • John Jenkins
... unable to distinguish between candour and disingenuousness. Any appearance of deceit—which she regarded as wrong in itself—always excited her scorn, but desperation now urged a step which might lead, she thought, to much good or much evil. That it could lead to more evil than a loveless marriage was not, however, to be feared. She started from the house with feverish cheeks, a beating pulse, and a new strange consciousness of power—power over herself, her fate, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... by the fireplace.] Why doesn't he come? This waiting is horrible. He should be here. Why is he not here, to wake by passionate words some fire within me? I am cold— cold as a loveless thing. Arthur must have read my letter by this time. If he cared for me, he would have come after me, would have taken me back by force. But he doesn't care. He's entrammelled by this woman—fascinated by her—dominated by her. ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... to try again, to fling aside control and restraint and with her trembling body pressed close and her eager arms clasped about his neck, pour out her love and make a passionate stammering plea for something,—just something to put into her memory, her empty loveless memory,—but suddenly, like the gleam of a lamp in a tunnel, her pride lit up, the little streak of pride which had taken her unprofaned through all her sordid life, and she sat up, choked back her sobs, and dried her face with the skirt of ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... and viewing her features for a time, he had gone out into the garden where his little cousin was tending some of his favourite flowers, and while standing near and watching her he had amused himself with comparing fair youth, delicate and attractive, with shrivelled eld, livid and loveless, and in jestingly repeating to a smiling girl the vinegar discourse of a cankered old maid. Once on such an occasion Caroline had said to him, looking up from the luxuriant creeper she was binding to its frame, "Ah! Robert, you do not like old maids. I, too, should ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Ah, woe is me! I from my clinging babe was rudely torn; His tender lips a loveless bosom pressed; Can I forget him in my life new born? Oh that my ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that when a girl she had been "crossed in love," for her single maidservant she always trained to a sober and loveless life like her own, and as soon as a girl cast an eye upon a likely swain ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... with hall and chapel, tower and bell, for the sake of the homesteads that will grow up in security round that church-castle. This only, however, whilst the golden age lasts. The moment the Plutonic power is let loose, and the loveless Alberic comes into the field with his corrupting millions, the gods are face to face with destruction; since Alberic, able with invisible hunger-whip to force the labor of the dwarfs and to buy the services of ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... on. "Hollow, shallow, inconsistent—loveless. Catholicism equals a modern refinement of pagan principles with all the old deities on their best behaviour thrown in; while Protestantism is an ecclesiastical system founded ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... suitableness, common sense were the best words that could be used to account for it, began to seem revolting. She could not have explained why, yet she felt, at times, a positive repugnance to take any part in the celebration of so worldly, so loveless a contract. ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the Low Countries had not impeded the true-hearted affection of Maximilian and Mary; and, though since her death his want of self-restraint had marred his personal character and morals, and though he was now on the point of concluding a most loveless political marriage, yet still Mary was—as he shows her as the Beatrice of both his strange autobiographical allegories—the guiding star of his fitful life; and in heart his fidelity was so unbroken that, when after a long pause he again looked up to Christina, he ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be reclaimed. The man, too, was some magnanimous hero, riding a great horse by the shore of the sea. They rode through forests together, they galloped by the rim of the sea. But waking, she was able to contemplate a perfectly loveless marriage, as the thing one did actually in real life, for possibly the people who dream thus are those who do ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... heart to punish Woola during the long years that had passed since that first day upon Mars when the green jed of the Tharks had placed him on guard over me, and I had won his love and loyalty from the cruel and loveless masters of his former life, yet I believe he would have submitted to any cruelty that I might have inflicted upon him, so wondrous was his affection ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... enjoy absolute liberty, except as regards Mexicans, against whom they are always warned. They are told that they become sick from contact with such men. Never are they forced to contract what would turn out to be a loveless marriage. A beautiful Indian girl was much sought for by a Mexican. He spoke the Tarahumare language very well, and offered to give her a good house and fine clothes and a whole handful of silver dollars. Her brother, who was half civilised, and therefore ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... tell you only one half of it," she replied, wearily. "I have suffered much, and yet through no fault of my own. I am cast off, deserted, condemned to a loveless, joyless life; my heart is broken; there is nothing left me but to die. I repeat that it is ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... absolute blackness of darkness, the positive negation of bliss, the recoil of self to devour itself, and forever. The consciousness of being was intense, but in all the universe was there nothing to enter that being, and make it other than an absolute loneliness. It was, and forever, a loveless, careless, hopeless monotony of self-knowing—a hell with but one demon, and no fire to make it cry: my self was the hell, my known self the demon of it—a hell of which I could not find the walls, cold and dark and empty, and I longed for a flame that I might know there ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald |
