"Insufferably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... line. The word scythesman, for a short poem, is insufferably rough; and furthermore requires the inhalation of a good breath, before it can be pronounced; besides which, as the second objection, by connecting sheaves with scythesman, it shows that the scythe ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... That's just his misfortune, that there's no character in him... But that's not the point. I want to speak of what is good, of what is rare in him. He has enthusiasm; and believe me, who am a phlegmatic person enough, that is the most precious quality in our times. We have all become insufferably reasonable, indifferent, and slothful; we are asleep and cold, and thanks to any one who will wake us up and warm us! It is high time! Do you remember, Sasha, once when I was talking to you about him, I blamed him for coldness? I was right, and wrong too, then. ...
— Rudin • Ivan Turgenev
... many lands. In one country he learned one thing, and in another country he learned another thing. There was no country or kingdom so small or poor that it did not have something to teach the prince. And the prince, though he had been so insufferably stupid at his books, learned the lessons of his ...
— Tales of Giants from Brazil • Elsie Spicer Eells
... again. "Have I failed in politeness by not doing so? I fear you would find me an insufferably dull companion." ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... devilry. Among the noisiest and most quarrelsome of the dragoons were two non-commissioned officers—brutal-looking ruffians both of them—who made their way from group to group, drinking wherever the chance offered, shouting obscene songs, and making themselves insufferably offensive whenever a man more quietly disposed than his comrades happened to be met. Boastful and quarrelsome, these two, with a few dragoons of different regiments, at length attached themselves to Sempil's Regiment, amongst whom it ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... "packed" into the arm above us, it was not disagreeably chilly. The thermometer stood at fifty-nine degrees in our cabin. Indeed, were it not for the great bodies of ice, these extreme northern summers, where the sun hardly sets for months, would get insufferably hot,—too hot to be endured ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... have given a good deal to slip in beside David on the sofa and listen to the discussion. She wanted with all her heart to know how he would answer this man who could be so insufferably wise, but there was other work for her, and her attention was brought back to her own uncomfortable part by ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... quickly as he could. The young people opposite him were insufferably dull. Apparently they had never met each other before and were at a loss to make conversation to suit the occasion. Accordingly, they listened intently to the string band while the young man smoked a long cigar, and in the natural course of things, they ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... Believing the important part of the Gospel to be its ethical precepts, Grundtvig, furthermore, prided himself upon the correctness of his own moral conduct and his ability to control all unworthy passions. "I was at that time," he later complained, "nothing but an insufferably vain and narrow-minded Pharisee." ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... relief of wives, rather than for husbands, is but weakly conjectured, and is manifest the extreme shift of a huddled exposition ... Palpably uxorious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for woman, and that a husband may be injured as insufferably in marriage as a wife. What an injury is it after wedlock not to be beloved, what to be slighted, what to be contended with in point of house-rule who shall be the head, not for any parity of wisdom (for that were something reasonable), ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... opened only into a guardroom always occupied by soldiers. Bertram was permitted access to the Princess's drawing-room at her pleasure, and her pleasure was to admit him very frequently. She found her prison-life insufferably wearisome, and even the scraps of extremely local news, brought in by Bertram from the courtyard, were a relief to the monotony of having nothing at all to do. She grew absolutely interested in such infinitesimal facts as the arrival of a barrel of salt sprats, the sprained ankle of Mark ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... quarter of an hour,' answered Urania, meekly; 'but that seems rather long in a broiling sun. You always have such insufferably hot weather on your ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one cluster ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... invention in this matter of penal discipline, may be seen in the example of Jeremy Bentham himself. This celebrated man, whose cogitative faculty was assuredly of the most vigorous description, but who had a mode of developing it the most insufferably and needlessly prolix, would have filled our prisons with inextinguishable laughter by the introduction of certain "tragic masks," indicative of various crimes or passions, in which the several offenders were to be occasionally paraded—a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... subterraneous one of the robbers in Gil Blas. Here we underwent the ceremony of having our pocket-books searched for papers and letters, and our trunks rummaged for knives and fire-arms. This done, we were shown to the lodging I have described, and the poor priests, already insufferably crouded, were obliged almost to join their beds in order to make room for us.—I will not pain you by a recital of all the embarrassments and distresses we had to surmount before we could even rest ourselves. We were in want of every thing, and the rules of the prison such, that ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... not speak of the enthusiasm excited by actresses, improvisatrici, female singers,—for here mingles the charm of beauty and grace,—but female authors, even learned women, if not insufferably ugly and slovenly, from the Italian professor's daughter who taught behind the curtain, down to Mrs. Carter and Madame Dacier, are sure of an admiring audience, and, what is far better, chance to use what they have learned, and to learn more, if ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... returned prodigal had his own suite of rooms, his own servants, his own bank account, drank, smoked, and was merry. For five or six months he thought himself in Paradise. Then he began to find his life insufferably weary. The burden of hypocrisy is very heavy to bear, and Rex was compelled perpetually to bear it. His mother demanded all his time. She hung upon his lips; she made him repeat fifty times the story ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... me up. In old days to go anywhere in a ball dress was a simple joy to me, I admired myself; now I feel ashamed and awkward. And then! The doctor.... Then..." Kitty hesitated; she wanted to say further that ever since this change had taken place in her, Stepan Arkadyevitch had become insufferably repulsive to her, and that she could not see him without the grossest and most hideous ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... it! They have no relation to each other. You mistake the occasion for the cause, the means for the motive. Your alphabet is in fault. Such a set of vain, frivolous, dishonest, mean, hypocritical, and insufferably vulgar letters would be turned out of any respectable, well-bred spelling-book. Vanity, frivolity, dishonesty, meanness, hypocrisy, and vulgarity can be exhibited in all the affairs of life, not excepting those whose ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... a true Frenchman insofar as that, though he could be lively and engaging when it suited him, he became insufferably dull and wearisome as soon as ever the need for being lively and engaging had passed. Seldom is a Frenchman NATURALLY civil: he is civil only as though to order and of set purpose. Also, if he thinks it incumbent upon ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in his low, toneless, but distinct voice. In a few moments the excitement subsided; he was pronounced insufferably monotonous. Fans rustled, hoops scraped the hard floors. Lady Constance gave a loud admonitory cough. Warner paid no heed. Still he read on in low monotone. A few moments more and its spell had enmeshed the company. The silence was so deep ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... I spent in Saigon I stayed at the Hotel Continental. I shall remember it as the place where they charged a dollar and a half for a highball and fifty cents for a lemonade. It was insufferably hot. I can sympathize now with the recalcitrant convict who is punished by being sent to the sweat-box. Battalions of ferocious mosquitoes launched their assaults against my unprotected person with the persistence that the Germans displayed at Verdun. In the next room the tenor of the itinerant ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... was already "in the similitude of a corpse." "What? What do you say?" I asked. He assumed a startlingly ferocious demeanour, and imitated to perfection the act of stabbing from behind. "Already like the body of one deported," he explained, with the insufferably conceited air of his kind after what they imagine a display of cleverness. Behind him I perceived Jim smiling silently at me, and with a raised hand checking ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... longer; but does not render it less unjust. Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in the harem of an Oriental: they do not complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely it is that even men complain of the general order of society; and how much rarer still would such complaint be, if they did not know of any different order existing anywhere else. Women do not complain of the general lot of women; or rather they do, for plaintive ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... unrevealable burden, and she rose, rejoicing that Clotilde had happened to be out of eye-and-ear-shot. The scanty fire in the fireplace was ample to warm the room; the fire within her made it too insufferably hot! Rain or no rain, she parted the window-curtains and lifted the sash. What a mark for Love's arrow she was, as, at the window, she stretched her two arms upward! And, "right so," who should chance to come cantering ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... the shout of a donkey-driver, the shrill of a bugle from the barracks broke sharply through the muffled sounds of the city. The June wind, heavy with the waters of the Ganges which flows past Cawnpore, made the night insufferably hot. But the heat did not trouble Sabat, the wild son of the Arabian desert, who was talking—as he always did—in a roaring voice that was louder than most men's shouting. He was telling the story of Abdallah's brave ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... you knew. You escaped an infliction. It was insufferably dull. We all smiled and smiled, till there were 'miles and miles of smiles'; and we were all bored to extinction! Ask ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... members of this inharmonious family took place in the cell of the elder who had such an extraordinary influence on Alyosha. The pretext for this gathering was a false one. It was at this time that the discord between Dmitri and his father seemed at its acutest stage and their relations had become insufferably strained. Fyodor Pavlovitch seems to have been the first to suggest, apparently in joke, that they should all meet in Father Zossima's cell, and that, without appealing to his direct intervention, they might more decently come to an understanding under the conciliating influence of the ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... asked with a little flush of confusion. "Mrs. Sartin will be. She always expects him to marry a duchess at least. She is so insufferably proud of him." ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... over a balcony or than taking one's coffee at Florian's. It is of such superficial pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to which they minister. These are fortunately of the finest— otherwise Venice would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to linger ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... remarked, as guests will, gentle reader, when our backs are turned, that Howel was insufferably purse-proud and conceited, and his wife as affected and provincial as possible; they did not hear the friendly notices, and were well content to fill the concert room with their party, all in full dress, to the admiration of ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... immediately above the Dhondha gateway. They are called "nau chauki", or "the nine cells", and are both well lighted and well ventilated. But in spite of their height, from fifteen to twenty-six feet, they must be insufferably close in the hot season. These were the State prisons in which Akbar confined his rebellious cousins, and Aurangzeb the troublesome sons of Dara and Murad, as well as his own more dangerous son Muhammad. During these times the fort was strictly guarded, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... her. Harriet glanced at a mirror; her brassy hair was as smoothly moulded as its tendency to curve and ring ever permitted, and she wore a thin old transparent white gown that looked at least comparatively cool on this insufferably hot evening. With hardly an instant's ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... Christ, therefore, earnestly incited by the example of its king, thinking indeed that the holy places are much more impiously and insufferably polluted by the infidels than when defiled by merchants, abide in the holy house with horses and with arms, so that from that, as well as all the other sacred places, all filthy and diabolical madness of infidelity being driven out, they may occupy themselves by day ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... unsatisfied. There was a young dairy farmer, with a face like a red harvest moon, who stopped at her aunt's door on his way to market. He would sell Miss Joliffe eggs and butter at wholesale prices, and grinned in a most tiresome way whenever he caught sight of Anastasia. The Rector patronised her insufferably; and though old Mr Noot was kind, he treated her like a small child, and sometimes patted her cheek, which she felt to be ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... satire. He was not a man to rise above his age, and it would be charitable to ascribe a portion of his grossness to it. Voltaire is said by his loose talk to have driven Pope's good old mother from the table at Twickenham; Walpole's language not only in his home at Houghton, but at Court, was insufferably coarse; and Pope wrote to ladies in language that must have disgusted modest women even in his free-speaking day. His foul lines on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to whom he had formerly written in a most ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... in Siargao for two years, as the agent of a Hong Kong firm which was trying to build up the hemp industry there. That was before the American occupation of the islands. The village where I lived was the seaport. I would have been insufferably lonesome if I had not had something to interest me in my very abundant spare time, for during much of the year I was, or rather I had supposed I was, with the exception of the Padre, the only white man on the island. Twice a year the Spanish tax collector came and stayed long ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... Brobdingnag." Where is now the negro car? It is gone to rejoin its elder brother, the negro pew. The white people's cars he describes as "large, shabby omnibuses," with a red-hot stove in the middle, and the air insufferably close. ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... bustle that most of us fully expected that the first battle in the Holy Land was about to begin. It was by now high noon and insufferably hot, and the soft alluvial dust churned up by motor bicycles and galloping hoofs rose in suffocating clouds. We were penned in by the high cactus-hedges and not a breath of air could reach us to dissipate the choking dust. We had, it would appear, escaped the sand only to encounter ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... daylight old Caleb left the house to cross the low creek bed valley and join a working party in a new field which was being cleared of timber. He had been away two hours when without warning the hot air became insufferably close and the light ghost of breeze died to a breathless stillness. The drought had lasted almost four weeks, and now at last, though the skies were still clear, that heat-vacuum seemed ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the breeze to spring up with the morning, but no breeze came. As it wore on toward noon the atmosphere became insufferably sultry, and the sea looked as smooth as glass. I saw the captain's eye turn often and anxiously to windward. Far away in that direction, and alone in the blue heaven, I observed a little black cloud, and asked if it would bring us ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... It is not the engagement, but the severe cold with which I perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably damp. They are ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... the opposite one. If you have never heard that Miss Dawes has been married these two months, I will mention it in my next. Pray do not forget to go to the Canterbury Ball; I shall despise you all most insufferably if ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... anything very extraordinary to-day?" asked Adelaide with such an air of contemptuous curiosity as seemed to him insufferably insolent. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... the punishment of the undeveloped soul? It is that it should be placed where it WILL develop, and sorrow would seem always to be the forcing ground of souls. That surely is our own experience in life where the insufferably complacent and unsympathetic person softens and mellows into beauty of character and charity of thought, when tried long enough and high enough in the fires of life. The Bible has talked about the "Outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth." The influence ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sun, upon a dry and sandy country, makes the air insufferably hot. Ali having robbed me of my thermometer, I had no means of forming a comparative judgment; but in the middle of the day, when the beams of the vertical sun are seconded by the scorching wind from the desert, the ground ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... word, but he grew insufferably self-righteous, and preached total abstinence to everybody, from Darco to the call-boy. He atoned for this unconsciously by the ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... for grinding flour and sawing timber; and in a word, all the concomitants of a large and flourishing city. I should, however, except the public streets. These are still unpaved, and consequently in wet weather, in some places, impassable, and in dry weather insufferably dusty. I have spoken of the sudden squalls which arise often in the Bay. Whilst one of these prevails, clouds of dust are carried from the streets so dense that you cannot see half a yard before you. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... curtain lecturer, who between eleven o'clock at night and seven the next morning delivered for thirty years a curtain lecture to her husband Job Caudle, generally a most gentle listener; if he replied she pronounced him insufferably rude, and if he did not he was insufferably sulky.—Douglas Jerrold, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... unfortunate went to his seat, and, among all the hilarious faces, one stood out—Dora Yocum's. Her laughter was precocious; it was that of a confirmed superior, insufferably adult—she was laughing at him as a grown person laughs at a child. Conspicuously and unmistakably, there was something indulgent in her amusement. He choked. Here was a little squirt of a high-school girl who would trot up to George Washington ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... passed the zenith and had begun to sink in the west. Then, again, on foot or donkey-back, we visited the different parts of the oasis, returning in time for a six-o'clock dinner; after which, the room usually becoming insufferably hot, we once more sought our open-air drawing-room and took our evening coffee by the light ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... out of date. The apartments nearest to the Radiator are insufferably hot, those farthest away unbearably cold, and those between too changeable ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... really interested them. Ugly things and very dull things are prominent in their story, as in the tales of American humorists. The general impression they convey is of something tiresomely extensive, distractingly miscellaneous, and yet insufferably monotonous. But that is not what they mean. They had better not seek to express themselves by too definite instances. They will be understood and believed when they say that to them America, with its vast spaces from ocean ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... of noise, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek and a bell. The cars are like shabby omnibuses holding thirty, forty, fifty people. In the centre of the carriage there is usually a stove, fed with charcoal or anthracite coal, which is for the most part red hot. It is insufferably close, and you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other object you may ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... his phrase. Oh, God have mercy! What had he, albeit dumbly, allowed himself to ask of Olive? What right had he, henceforward, to call himself a man, or honourable, or brave, or anything else but an insufferably selfish cad, that he had ever once allowed one such instant of supine appeal to scar the surface of their perfect friendship? A girl like Olive was not for such a man as he was—now. Once, it might have been; but, at that time, it had not occurred to him ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... one hand and from the renascent peoples of the East on the other: that we have lost the courage of youth and have not yet gained the courage of desperate humiliations, in taking hold of things. To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a fire-work being lit produces sparks, and soon he was ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... change in the fellow's attitude. I don't imagine there will be until the last moment. He is just a pig-headed, insufferably conceited Englishman, full of class prejudices ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... into the small spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the Brontes, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their mother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study (you ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... was there, [7] The first choice of the fair, To all but himself very gentle! And ASHRIDGE'S lord [8] Most insufferably bored With manners ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... keep Mr Newton's society all to herself and her daughters! However, the young gentleman asked Barbara for permission to pay his respects to her when he returned to the metropolis; this had been accorded by Barbara, who, on her return to Pentonville, for the first time found that comfortable home 'insufferably dull and stupid.' Edward Leslie, too—how dull and stupid even he was, after the chattering perfumed loungers of the elysium she had just quitted! Yet Edward was never considered either dull or stupid by competent judges; but, quite ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... anxiety smoothed itself away, and his manner became patronizingly authoritative again. Fanny seemed to have become part of the routine of the place. Fenger did not send for her. June and July were insufferably hot. Fanny seemed to thrive, to expand like a flower in the heat, when others wilted and shriveled. The spring catalogue was to be made up in October, as always, six months in advance. The first week in August Fanny asked for an interview with Fenger. Slosson was to be there. At ten o'clock ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... are here. I had them out to a box party last night. They are most insufferably happy. Clifford is not sane yet, but is rallying. He is rallying considerably; for he spoke of plans for pushing the Herald Addition harder than ever when he gets home. And you know such a thing as business has never entered his mind for six months—unless it was ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... whispered to the nearest eunuch. Livius, climbing into his own gilt vehicle and lifted shoulder-high by eight Numidians, became aware that Marcia's eunuchs had been told to keep an eye on him; two yellow- robed, insufferably impudent inquisitors strode ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... they keep a regular force of runners, or "ropers in," for the purpose of enticing strangers within their walls. They are located over stores, as a general rule, and the Broadway establishments usually have a number of flashily-dressed, vulgar-looking men about their doors in the day time, who are insufferably rude ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... I think he is the most arrogant, ill-mannered and insufferably conceited man I have ever met," Myra responded warmly. "He openly boasts that no woman can resist him, prides himself on his conquests, and while you were out of the room he was making passionate love to me, and only made fun of my attempts to snub him. I hope ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... truth is, Blackie has taken pity on me and has promised to take me out for a spin, just to cool off. It has been so insufferably hot." ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... It was growing insufferably hot. Blasts of air, as if from a furnace, began to rush up and down past them. And the trail was growing steeper still, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... insufferably unhappy if in the presence of women they thought the least bit in the world of that which they ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... Designed for forty-nine parts. Part Third, consisting of a preface, a postscript, and a little something between, by Gabriel Johnson; enriched by a faithful account of his ideal voyages, and illustrated with poems by several hands, as likewise with other strange things not insufferably clever, nor furiously to the purpose; printed in the year 17," etc. [The phrase mentioned first is perhaps less remarkable than Scott's apparent forgetfulness ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... her companion. A girl who was shrewd, industrious, and often amusing, was not to be despised in her opinion; so she showed her fair young handmaiden a certain amount of respect. She had engaged companions before, who being entertaining were not trustworthy, or being trustworthy were insufferably dull. She could trust Dolly with the most onerous of her domestic or social charges, she found, and there was no fear of her small change disappearing or her visitors being bored. So the position of that "young person" became an ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wondered about it herself and expressed her wonder to you. She has insisted on it, so that she has put the idea into your head that I am insufferably pushing. Upon my word I think I have been very discreet. And how completely your aunt must have lost every tradition of sociability, to see anything out of the way in the idea that respectable intelligent ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... to hear read: I have forgot all about it. His 'Memorials' were insufferably tiresome to me. You don't speak of Tichborne, which I never tire of: only wondering that the Lord Chief Justice sets so much Brains to work against so foolish a Bird. {170} The Spectator on Carlyle is very good, I think. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... funeral was no sooner performed, than she assumed the fine lady, and found so many people of both sexes to flatter, caress, and instruct her, that, for want of discretion and experience, she was grown insufferably vain and arrogant, and pretended to no less than a duke or earl at least for her husband; that she had the misfortune to be neglected by the English quality, but a certain poor Scottish lord was then making interest to be introduced to her acquaintance. ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... might have been much improved by judicious culture; apples and pears that in England we should have no hesitation in pronouncing execrably bad; and a species of fruit unknown to all of us which the Chinese called Zee-ts, of a sweet sickly taste when ripe, otherwise most insufferably astringent. Some of the gentlemen thought they saw hazel nuts among the shruberry, but it is more than probable they were mistaken. A few bad grapes were sometimes brought to us, but the party who ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... and her lover, Walter of Gloucester, are so insufferably tedious that Scott doubtless decided to "leave to conjecture" their interminable vicissitudes. The names of other novels, whose pages he may impatiently have scanned, may be garnered by those who will, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... gale under the lee of a little island, then beat about for two weeks of increasing misery, when 'hides were thought very good meat, and rats, cats, mice, and dogs, parrots and monkeys that were got at great price, none escaped.' The Minion was of three hundred tons; and so was insufferably overcrowded with three hundred men, two hundred English and one hundred negroes. Drake's little Judith, of only fifty tons, could have given no relief, as she was herself overfull. Hawkins asked all the men who preferred to take their chance on land ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... anything was pulling up on the bit and doing something or talking of doing something or other for the country. It was already assured that the season would be insufferably dull—from a social standpoint at least. Evelyn could not suppress a certain resentment. She was not one of those who had found an element of thrill in the suddenly altered perspectives. Her plans for the spring ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a gun, loads it to the muzzle, discharges it twice in vain, and throws himself over with the recoil exactly like a clown. But at last, while I was in town, he aims at the more amiable cat of the two and shoots that animal dead. Insufferably elated by this victory he is now engaged from morning to night in hiding behind bushes to get aim at the other. He does nothing else whatever. All the boys encourage him and watch for the enemy, on whose appearance they give an alarm, which immediately serves as a warning to the creature, ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... witnessing the ejection of the Pottses. With the tension that had come into the scene they had been in the way; she, as keenly as Jack, had felt the sense of unfitness, though she had been willing to endure it, and as keenly as Jack she had felt Mr. Potts as insufferably presuming. She had been glad that his presumption should wreak punishment upon her mother, but glad, too, that when the weapon had served its purpose, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... manners, the Highland dress, and everything national or local that I could lay my hands upon. Now that I have got my German Burns, I lean a good deal upon him for opening a conversation, and read a few translations to every yawning audience that I can gather. I am grown most insufferably national, you see. I fancy it is a punishment for my want of it at ordinary times. Now, what do you think, there was a waiter in this very hotel, but, alas! he is now gone, who sang (from morning to ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... abruptness. "It's as if you had taken the trouble to pick out the people in the world that I have least in common with. Your cousin I have always thought a conceited ass—besides his being the most ill-favoured animal I know. Then it's insufferably tiresome that one can't tell him so; one must spare him on account of his health. His health seems to me the best part of him; it gives him privileges enjoyed by no one else. If he's so desperately ill there's only one way to prove it; but he seems ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... in this was is iron plied alone, But mighty masses and whole bulwarks fall, And top of tower, huge piece of bastion, And with much toil disrupted, solid wall; While streams of boiling water pouring down, Insufferably the advancing paynims gall: An ill-resisted rain, which, in despite Of helmet, makes its ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... excursion. It is entirely filled with moral and religious conversation and debate, and with a more ample detail of the Solitary's past life, than had been given in the sketch of his friend. The conversation is exceedingly dull and mystical; and the Solitary's confessions insufferably diffuse. Yet there is very considerable force of writing and tenderness of sentiment in this part ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... institutional scheme, of fealty and dynastic exploit and coercion, to the newer scheme of the ungraded commonwealth, are convinced, to the point of martyrdom, that anything like a return to the old order is morally impossible as well as insufferably shameful and irksome; whereas those people, of the retarded division of the race, who have had no experience of this new order, are equally convinced that it is all quite incompatible with ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Matarengi. On turning out of the road to avoid a hay-sled, we were whirled completely over. There was no fun in this, at such a time. I fell head foremost into deep snow, getting a lump in my right eye, which completely blinded me for a time. My forehead, eyebrows, and the bridge of my nose were insufferably painful. On reaching Matarengi I found my nose frozen through, and considerably swollen. The people were in bed, but we went into the kitchen, where a dozen or more were stowed about, and called for the landlord. Three ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... progress I had made in my studies. My replies did not appear to satisfy him and I had not been home a week before he declared his intention to send me to school again. I was by no means sorry to hear of this resolve, for my brother was finishing his education in New York, and the house was insufferably dull. I was at once dispatched to Mount de Sales, a convent near Baltimore. The inmates of the convent consisted of pupils and nuns—the latter acting as instructresses to the former, assisted by two ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... of a country life, but acknowledged that he quite agreed with him in disliking, pastorals—excepting always that beautiful drama, "The Gentle Shepherd." Mr. Percy said, that, in his opinion, a life purely pastoral must, if it could be realized, prove as insufferably tiresome in reality, as it usually is found to be in fiction. He hated Delias and shepherdesses, and declared that he should soon grow tired of any companion with whom he had no other occupation in common but "tending a few sheep." There was a vast difference, he thought, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... by nature slave-drivers; though it was her interest to secure Clara for a permanency, she began by exacting from the girl as much labour as could possibly be included in their agreement. The hours were insufferably long; by nine o'clock each evening Clara was so outworn that with difficulty she remained standing, yet not until midnight was she released. The unchanging odours of the place sickened her, made her head ache, and robbed her of all appetite. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... The evening was insufferably hot; not a breeze stirred in the leaves; and despite open windows, the air of the room was heavy and lifeless. A faint perfume, having a sort of sweetness, but which yet was unutterably revolting, made itself perceptible to the nostrils. Apparently it had pervaded the ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... jaded spirits. She could even think hopefully of Liz, and her mind was full of schemes for her redemption, when she espied, at a short distance from her own gates, the solitary figure of Teen, with her hand shading her eyes, looking anxiously down the road. She had found life at Bourhill insufferably dull without ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... voice, with its harsh consonants and its absurd repetitions of the military title, grated insufferably on Ashley's ear. He was beyond himself although he ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... ran into thousands, as they might sometimes do, this plan would be insufferably tedious. In that case we are driven back upon the astronomical method. In consequence of the movement which is commonly called the precession of the equinoxes, though it might more accurately be described as a kind of second rotation of the earth, the angle between the ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... oppressively, so insufferably hot in the hall! Each one felt the crushing influence, and in spite of the importance of the occasion, the proceedings every now and then came to a stand-still and then were hurried on again with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of things which is indissolubly allied to the style in which it is expressed. In other words I wanted to write a certain amount of pages in prose, which, strictly speaking, is my proper business. I have attended to it conscientiously with the hope of being entertaining or at least not insufferably boring to my readers. I can not sufficiently insist upon the truth that when I sit down to write my intentions are always blameless however deplorable the ultimate effect of the act may ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... Father Richard. Father Richard had been a pilgrim, and had visited the Holy Land, and had made himself notorious by interminable sermons, for he was wont to preach half-a-dozen hours at a time. Crowds had listened to him in Paris and other places. The English, who probably thought his sermons insufferably long, or too much leavened with French sympathies, drove him out of Paris, and he had taken refuge at Troyes. The monk had heard much of Joan of Arc, and was eager to see and speak with her, but his enthusiasm was mixed with ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... to you, indeed! One would think you were about to be executed, instead of married to an earl. Do not be so insufferably childish," returned her sister, impatiently. "There will be no time to-morrow for you to see Lady Cameron, and it is uncourteous, uncivil to refuse ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of mud huts, and abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find a most intolerable stench. Did you ever behold streets so insufferably narrow, or houses so miraculously tall? What gloom their shadows cast upon the ground! It is well the swinging lamps in those endless colonnades are kept burning throughout the day; we should otherwise have the darkness of Egypt in the time of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... me to beware of a number of things I did not so much as know by name, she shot off like a respectable old aerolite with a black trail streaming out behind. If she remains here much longer she will be coming back upon a mission to reform us. As for Tuck, he became insufferably patronizing at once. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... vineyards, and pasturage, in case of siege. There are still some faint traces of dead gardens left upon its arid wilderness, among the ruins of a castellated palace, decorated with the cross-keys and tiara of an unremembered pope. But now it lies a mere tract of scorched grass, insufferably hot and dry and sandy, intersected by dirty paths, and covered with the loathliest offal of a foul Italian town. Should you cross this ground at mid-day, under the blinding sun, when no living thing, except perhaps some poisonous ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... and life has resumed for me its natural colors. I destroyed those letters one after the other because, although written with the effort of my whole being to be what you call sweet, they sounded to me insufferably disagreeable. And now whatever I write I shall have to send because if I destroy this letter also I shall not have time to write another before you come to see me as you promised. And the reason ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... MR. GROVE.—This insufferably ignorant, and, therefore, insolent magisterial cur, who has recently made himself an object of unenviable notoriety, by asserting that "the Irish would swear anything," has shown himself to be as stupid as he is malignant. Would, for instance, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to love her, and obeyed all her insufferably tiresome behests. But I longed to wreak vengeance upon her all the same. My dearest friend, the fellow with whom I was to have spent my holidays, was leaving at the end of this term which I was missing. He wrote to me furious letters, urging me to come back, and reproaching ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... can contrive a way of keeping our heads above water without having recourse to these detestable methods, I shall be only too relieved. I loathe having to traffic with these dirty swindlers; it's too insufferably wearying and degrading.... By the way, Peter, what ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... burning fluids corrode, destroy, and consume them in a very short time; when I consider the rending, burning, and tearing pains and tortures of the gout, stone, colic, cancer, rheumatism, convulsions, and such like insufferably painful distempers; when I see the crises of almost all acute distempers happen either by rank and fetid sweats, thick lateritious and lixivious sediments in the urine, black, putrid, and fetid dejections, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... Masterpiece he long had planned) Had reached the End of Book Eleven, And he was nearing Forty-Seven. Admirers had not long to wait; The last Book came at Forty-Eight, And should have been the Heart and Soul— The Crown and Summit—of the whole. But now the oddest Thing ensued; 'Twas so insufferably crude, So feeble and so poor, 'twas plain The Writer's Mind was on the wane. Nothing could possibly be said; E'en Friendship's self must hang the head, While jealous Rivals, scarce so civil, Denounced it openly as "Drivel." Never was such Collapse. ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... as an unfailing truth, that there neither is, nor never was, any person remarkably ungrateful, who was not also insufferably proud. In a word, ingratitude is too base to return a kindness, too proud to regard it, much like the tops of mountains, barren indeed, but yet lofty; they produce nothing; they feed nobody; they clothe ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... time, I should say," removing his hat with mock courtesy, and stepping across the threshold. "Not going out without an escort, my dear? Surely not. Really, I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends down town, for boring me so insufferably, else I should ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Greenstream suddenly appeared insufferably dull, empty; the thought of monotonous, identical days spun thinly out, the nine hundred dollars extended to its greatest length, in that banal setting, suddenly grew unbearable.... There was ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... pain to the most sensitive, and eager to efface the painful feeling; and I have thought that in all this I could trace the result of his having lived entirely alone for many years. I have known a man insufferably arrogant, conceited, and self-opinionated; another morbidly suspicious and ever nervously anxious; another conspicuously devoid of common Eense; and in each of these I have thought I could trace the result of a lonely life. But ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... thought of culling them, yet so wonderfully arranged that every one exclaims at their picturesque effect? When you have dull guests,—guests that put me to sleep, or out of patience,—is it not Madeleine who amuses them? How many evenings, that would have been insufferably stupid, have flown delightfully, chased by her ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... you all you wish to know? Apropos! I saw him at a party last night, playing the devoted to that little beauty, Netta Dupres. We were all in Paris at the same time. I don't fancy her; she is too insufferably vain and affected. It is my opinion that she is flirting with Eugene, which must be quite agreeable to you. Oh, I tell you, Beulah, I could easily put her mind, heart, and soul in ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... skins, reflected that Warde seemed to be saturated with fresh air and all the sweet, clean things which one associates with mountains. "He loves hills," thought John, "and he loves our Hill." Warde began to speak in his jerky, confidential tones. Dirty Dick had always been insufferably dull, pompous, ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... does it not make an impression?" asked Yourii. Ivanoff shook his head vaguely, and began to tell Ilitsch about Semenoff's last moments. It was now insufferably close in the room. Yourii watched Ivanoff, as his red lips sipped the vodka that shone in the lamplight. Everything seemed to be ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... clean place—it is twice as dirty as Lucera: a reposeful dirtiness, not vulgar or chaotic, but testifying to time-honoured neglect, to a feudal contempt of cleanliness. You crawl through narrow, ill-paved streets, looking down into subterranean family bedrooms that must be insufferably damp in winter, and filled, during the hot months, with an odour hard to conceive. There is electric lighting, of course—a paternal government having made the price of petroleum so prohibitive that the use of electricity for street-lighting ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... insufferably galling. Carrington might have been dealing with mutinous dusky troopers instead of free Englishmen who farmed their own land, and the lads who had at first appeared disposed to side with him hesitated. He swung around in the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... through in any direction. The landlord, finding the crowd embarrassing, closes up the building in front. The silent, smiling crowd goes to the rear. The rear is also closed. Then the crowd masses to right and left of the house; and both sides have to be closed, which makes it insufferably hot. And ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... watching seemed to be insufferably dreary and wearisome; then something startling would send the blood thrilling through my veins again; and so on and on, till the moon began to grow pale, the light to appear of a pearly grey in the east, golden flecks glistened high all above the trees, and once more it ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... find any charms in her. "We are kind to her," the Misses Osborne said, a pair of fine black-browed young ladies who had had the best of governesses, masters, and milliners; and they treated her with such extreme kindness and condescension, and patronised her so insufferably, that the poor little thing was in fact perfectly dumb in their presence, and to all outward appearance as stupid as they thought her. She made efforts to like them, as in duty bound, and as sisters of her future husband. She passed ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... upright. She sprang from the bed and, her heart beating insufferably, felt her way to the window. From the wing opposite the message had come—a soft, shrouded sound, another ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... they were still six miles short of being opposite to Hugli. The patient Bengalis could endure no more; the oxen were done up, the men refused to go farther without a rest. Halting at a hamlet some five miles from the river, they rested and fed till midnight, then set off again. It was not so insufferably hot at night, but on the other hand they were less able to avoid obstructions: and the rest had not been long enough to make up for the terrible ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... way. That prolixity at the beginning of many primitive epics, their wordy deliberation in getting under way, is probably intentional. The Song of Roland, for instance, begins with a long series of exceedingly dull stanzas; to a reader, the preliminaries of the story seem insufferably drawn out. But by the time the reciter had got through this unimportant dreariness, no doubt his audience had settled down to listen. The Chanson d'Antioche contains perhaps the most illuminating ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... sickly romance possessed the field. The Yellow Book and similar strange exotics of the first period withered and died, and the cult of literature (!) for the British Home was shortly afterwards in full blast. There followed an avalanche of insufferably dull and puerile magazines, in which the word Sex was strictly taboo, and the ideal aimed at was apparently the extreme opposite to real life. It was odd how suddenly the sex note—(as I will call it for want of a better word)—disappeared from the press. Psychology was ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... and he was so worn and haggard that I scarcely recognized him. He had seen hardship since our parting. The people were very dirty and very hospitable. They took us into the tupek at once, which was extremely filthy and made insufferably hot by a sheet-iron tent stove. The women wore sealskin trousers and in the long hoods of their adikeys, or upper garments, carried babies whose bright little dusky-hued faces peeped timidly out at us over the mothers' shoulders. A ptarmigan was ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... for home you will always think of it. Our reporters demand of the foreigner, barely he has stepped ashore, what he thinks of the United States; and then nearly every one he meets helps to form the opinion that we are insufferably underbred. Ours is not studied incivility; it is worse than that; ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Rand mopped his face. The room seemed insufferably hot. He found an electric fan over the workbench and plugged it in, but it made enough noise to cover any sounds of stealthy approach, and he shut it off. He had finished revising his list to include the recovered pistols for as far ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... journey. Man and his doings! always the same old story, and woman always to be treated either as a toy or as a beast of burden, or at any rate as an incubus. Why not sing of woman also as she is when she is unattached and free from the trammels and persecutions of this tiresome tyrant, this insufferably self-conceited bore ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... have made another stupid blunder," said he. "As I have told you plainly before, you are insufferably conceited. You think you know enough for two men, when you know just half enough for one. That's what's the matter. You have made ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... this is that this paragon of manly virtue has "the most delicate of human minds," and that women are irresistibly attracted to him by his splendid perfections of character. But posterity has admitted that the portrait is insufferably overdrawn, and that Grandison is absurd. The finest scenes in this interesting but defective novel are those in which the madness of Clementina is dwelt upon in that long-drawn patient manner of which Richardson was a master. The book ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... are behaving in the same way with me. You began it by criticizing my friend, Henry Hammond, and invited him to the judge's house party for the express purpose of humiliating and insulting him. The boys of your crowd gave him the cold shoulder when he tried to be friendly and Grace was insufferably rude to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... his men and instructed them to seize him, one by either arm, and in this manner the wretched man was dragged over the ground until he agreed to walk. And what made the whole thing more bitter and harder to endure was the utter insignificance of that little pimply-faced, bald-headed officer, so insufferably consequential in his brutality, who took advantage of his knowledge of French to vituperate the prisoners in it in curt, incisive words that cut and stung like the ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... on the world from the eyes of the immigrant who has lost all his illusions of the land where dollars grow on the street and where everyone has an equal chance to be president, and if you do not cringe in abject humility, you are not unlikely to be insufferably self-asserting, considering that the world has robbed you and that now it is your turn to get all that is coming to you. So you make loud demands in a rude, ordering voice. The nurse is there to wait upon you—and finally ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... sun-stroke, which occasions a brain-fever, the malignant fever, cholera morbus, or dysentery; while, at the same period, in the interior, particularly on the windward side, the air is temperate and salubrious. For six months in the year, from November to April, the town of St. Louis is insufferably and noxiously hot; scarcely any one but the slaves could be induced to remain there, the free inhabitants departing for the interior. Then again, the dry months at Port St. Louis are the rainy ones in the central parts; and, whilst the fiercest hurricanes are raging ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... running across the street to the station. It was, however, a little quieter in the vestibule when Flett had banged the door. He next opened the inner door that led to the smoking compartment of the Colonist car. In spite of its roominess, it was almost insufferably hot and very dirty; the sunlight struck in through the windows; sand and fine cinders lay thick upon the floor. A pile of old blue blankets lay, neatly folded, on one of the wooden seats, and on those ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... In all the writings of the time, the theological interest is in the forefront. The economic and social groundwork only casually reveals itself. This it is that makes the reading of the sixteenth-century polemics so insufferably jejune and dreary. They bring before us the ghosts of controversies in which most men have ceased to take any part, albeit they have not been dead and forgotten long enough to have ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... brother-in-law—Sis's husband. Insufferably old-timy. Don't think of anything but business. Used to look at me through his horn-rimmed glasses and say I was entirely too young to be receiving attentions from a man as old as Mr. Warren; but he didn't know. I'm not young, really, you know. Of course, I'm not twenty ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... trombone she looked to him like one of the angels on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too, in four voices—in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They called her "Mamise, ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... the last three days had been insufferably hot, and my forehead and face were blistered painfully. It was altogether a new experience to have my nose blistered on one side by the sun, and on the other by a frost-bite. During my first winter ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... Besides, you might take it—really, you might take it for a declaration. But it has nothing to do with you personally; it's what you represent. Fortunately you don't know all that, or your conceit would increase insufferably." ...
— The American • Henry James
... Even shame, the last of evils; of the first Be sure then.—How shall I behold the face Henceforth of God or Angel, erst with joy And rapture so oft beheld? Those heavenly shapes Will dazzle now this earthly with their blaze Insufferably bright. O! might I here In solitude live savage; in some glade Obscured, where highest woods, impenetrable To star or sun-light, spread their umbrage broad And brown as evening: Cover me, ye Pines! Ye Cedars, with innumerable boughs ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... if he were riding in the desert against a wind storm. It would have been impossible even for a friend to recognize him, and the two women in their white veils were like all native women of wealth and breeding in Algiers. Hsina was crying, and Fafann, who expected to go with her mistress, was insufferably important. Victoria felt that she was living in a fairy story, and the wearing of the veil excited and amused her. She was happy, and looked forward to the journey itself as well as to ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and I grew insufferably feverish. I sent Mary Quince to the lobby to try and see Madame, who, I feared, was probably to-ing and fro-ing in and out of Uncle ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... sleep; they were plainly apoplectic and disposed to snore. There were no staring portraits to remonstrate with you for being lazy; no round-eyed birds upon the curtains, disgustingly wide awake, and insufferably prying. The thick neutral hangings, and the dark blinds, and the heavy heap of bed-clothes, were all designed to hold in sleep, and act as nonconductors to the day and getting up. Even the old stuffed fox upon the top of the wardrobe was devoid of any spark of vigilance, for his glass eye had fallen ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... morning walks were always taken in the same direction. He asked her questions about her mother, and cut short the answers she gave him by remarks on the weather. In one breath, he said she must feel the day insufferably hot, and in another he protested that he quite envied her in her cool ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... daily, and the weather was insufferably hot, the thermometer being, in the coolest place, 107 at twelve in the morning, and 109 at three in the afternoon. At his own suggestion I made a couch for him outside the hut, in the shade, and placed a mat for myself by its side. For five successive days I took him in my arms ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 362, Saturday, March 21, 1829 • Various
... a verdant-looking island, whose waving palms, seen above and beyond a broad belt of dingy mangroves, looked particularly tempting to those who had been cooped up so long on shipboard, where, now that the breeze had sunk, it seemed insufferably hot. ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... and slender and pale, languid of movement, languid of eye, languid of speech. His eyes drooped, half-closed beneath blond brows; a long wiry hand lazily twisted a rather affected blond moustache, his voice drawled his speech in a manner either insufferably condescending and impertinent, or ineffably tired,—who could ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Luxemburg, those excellent persons prayed her to clothe herself as honest girls were wont to do. Above all, the English ladies, who have always made a parade of chastity and modesty, must have considered her so disguising herself monstrous and insufferably indecent. The Duchess of Bedford sent her female attire; but by whom? By a man, a tailor. The fellow, with impudent familiarity, was about to pass it over her head, and, when she pushed him away, laid his unmannnerly hand upon her—his tailor's hand on that hand which had borne the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... of nigger officer-holders from ambush. Like the erstwhile Artemus Ward's monkey, the editor of the Press is "a most amusin kuss." The South never gets angry at that kind of an animal. Occasionally a corrupt Republican administration appoints some ignorant Ethiopian to office who becomes insufferably insolent to his white neighbors and is called down with a six-shooter; but for every negro office-holder "assassinated by Southern savages" at least five white women are dragged from their homes by Northern white-caps and brutally abused. Who ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... At home I am a democrat. A republic, a true republic, seems not improbable, a fighting dream. Yet beholding the back of the ears of a trotting man I perceive it to be impossible—the millennium another million years away. I grow insufferably superior and Anglo-Saxon. I am sorry, but what would you? ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens
... manfuca, with whom I dwelt, several of these animals were constantly fed and cherished as dii penates, nor was any one allowed to interfere with their freedom, or to harm them when they grew insufferably offensive. The death of one of these crawling deities is considered a calamity in the household, and grief for the reptile becomes as great as for ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... interesting monumental figure. As I left the church, the second (Catholic) congregation was entering for divine worship. Meanwhile the heavens were "black with clouds;" the morning till eleven o'clock, having been insufferably hot and a tremendous thunder storm—which threatened to deluge the whole place with rain—moved, in slow and sullen majesty, quite round and round the town, without producing any other effect than that of a few sharp flashes, and growling peals, at a distance. But the darkened and flitting shadows ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... said our poor friend; "and how the deuce, then, is it to be like conversation in 'fashionable life'? When the very best conversation one can get is so insufferably dull, how do you think people will be amused by reading a copy of ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
