"Joyless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... voice of Gunnar the war-king cried out o'er the weeping hall: "Wail on, O women forsaken, for the mightiest woman born! Now the hearth is cold and joyless, and the waste bed lieth forlorn. Wail on, but amid your weeping lay hand to the glorious dead, That not alone for an hour may lie Queen Brynhild's head: For here have been heavy tidings, and the Mightiest under ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... on that dear morn, To pour out all his heart to me; As if, the separation borne, The coming hours would joyless be, ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... soft murmurs go, Up from the cold and joyless earth, Back to the God who bade them flow, Whose moving spirit sent them forth. But as for me, O God! for me, The lowly creature of Thy will, Lingering and sad, I sigh to Thee, An earth-bound ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... itself, along paths that had once echoed to the tread of slippered feet, armed sentries paced, their sharp challenges breaking the stillness of the night. Outside its wrecked fences strange men in stranger uniforms strode in and out of the joyless houses; tired pickets stacked their arias on the unswept piazzas, and panting horses nibbled the bark from the withered trees; rank weeds choked the gardens; dishevelled vines clung to the porches, and doors that had always swung wide to the gentle tap of loving fingers were opened timidly ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... in the "Row" in a lady's habit, trigly perfect in fit, and on a side-saddle. In America this is an extreme opinion, and it is only among the most fashionable that a young girl having all her life ridden in a man's saddle, finds the world a joyless place and parents cruel when she is no longer allowed to ride like a boy. But she becomes, in spite of her protests, "another who looks divine on a horse." And you can look divine too, if you choose! On second thoughts the adjective must be qualified. No one looks ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... actually hate him with the desire for a personal vengeance he had not believed. Was Duggan right? Was Mary Josephine unfair? And should he in self-defense fight to poison his own thoughts against her? His face set hard, and a joyless laugh fell from his lips. He knew that he was facing the inevitable. No matter what had happened, he must ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... remained standing stock still in the dusk. She had already reached the three palms when she heard behind her a loud peal of laughter, cynical and joyless, such as is heard in smoking-rooms at the end of a scandalous story. It made her feel positively faint for ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... their lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabby and squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Little remains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life from being quite joyless. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... heart, Till all my soul, each tumult charmed away, Yields, gently led, to Virtue's easy sway. By thee inspired, O Virtue! Age is young, And music warbles from the faltering tongue: Thy ray creative cheers the clouded brow, And decks the faded cheek with rosy glow, Brightens the joyless aspect, and supplies Pure heavenly lustre to the languid eyes: But when Youth's living bloom reflects thy beams, Resistless on the view the glory streams; Love, Wonder, Joy, alternately alarm, And Beauty dazzles with angelic charm. Ah! whither fled! ye dear illusions, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... such power to lift the poor out of his poverty, the wretched out of his misery, to make the burden-bearer forget his burden, the sick his sufferings, the sorrower his grief, the downtrodden his degradation, as books. They are friends to the lonely, companions to the deserted, joy to the joyless, hope to the hopeless, good cheer to the disheartened, a helper to the helpless. They bring light into darkness, and ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... Fountain of Domestic sweets, 760 Whose Bed is undefil'd and chast pronounc't, Present, or past, as Saints and Patriarchs us'd. Here Love his golden shafts imploies, here lights His constant Lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard, Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask, or Midnight Bal, Or Serenate, which the starv'd Lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. 770 These lulld by Nightingales imbraceing slept, And on thir naked limbs the flourie roof Showrd Roses, which ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... strange being, it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two-thirds of its existence in a joyless stupor, and be lost to all sensation for months together in the profoundest ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... threw himself upon his bed. The future appeared to him joyless, and he dreaded the inner conflict of the next few weeks; and yet he soon sank into a peaceful slumber. And again there was silence in the house. A plain old house it was, with many angles, and secret holes and corners—no place, in truth, for glowing enthusiasm and consuming passion; but ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... a moment. The whole panorama of that joyless youth of his seemed suddenly stretched out before him. He saw himself as boy, and youth, and man; the village school changed into the sectarian university, where the great highroad to knowledge was rank with the weeds of prejudice. He saw himself back again at the farmhouse, ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... grown old internally—old, despite her two-and-twenty years; she looked upon the life before her as a joyless, desert waste, which she had to traverse with bleeding feet and broken heart; and in the desolation of her soul, she sometimes shuddered at the death-like apathy and quiet of her feelings, broken by no sound, no note, not even ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... was confirmed in it by the preaching of one Jonathan Wilkins, as I have heard, a Methodist from "up the country," and a powerful mover of souls. As might have been expected in such a man as my grandfather, this religion was of a joyless and gloomy order, full of anticipations of hell-fire and conviction of the sinfulness of ordinary folk. But it undoubtedly was sincere, for his wife Philippa believed in it, and the master and mistress of Lantrig were alike the glory and strong ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... atrocity of which she was the victim. She could not have imagined, that, in all the fermentation of civilized depravity, a similar plot could have entered a human mind. She had been stunned by an unexpected blow; yet life, however joyless, was not to be indolently resigned, or misery endured without exertion, and proudly termed patience. She had hitherto meditated only to point the dart of anguish, and suppressed the heart heavings of indignant nature merely by the force of contempt. Now she endeavoured ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... monotony which is hardly fair to the poet. The individuals change their names, but they pass through the same typical woe of childbirth, desertion, loveless old age, incipient insanity, with eternal joyless toil. One will form a higher opinion if one reads the separate volumes as they appeared, and not too much ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... happened that my eyes encountered his, I should deny the truth; he added further fuel to the fires that consumed me, and rekindled such as might be expiring, if, mayhap, there were any such. But the beginning of all this was by no means so cheerful as the ending was joyless, as soon as I was deprived of the sight of this, my beloved, inasmuch as the eyes, being thus robbed of their delight, gave woful occasion of lamentation to the heart, the sighs whereof grew greater in quality as well as in quantity, and desire, as if seizing my every feeling, ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... heroic in the pages of a novel, but the reality is quite another matter. A tame, joyless, hopeless time you will have if you scorn good fortune, as you threaten, and go into the world to support yourself," ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... a warmth of affection that sweetens their cup of happiness and strews flowers all along their pathway of life. This pleasure lasts while their love lasts; but when love dies, happiness dies with it. This accounts for the joyless, pleasureless life of many married partners. First love, alas! departed; the first fire all burnt out, leaving naught but the dull ashes of cold indifference and burning tears. It sometimes goes somewhat the same way with members coming into the church. ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... was made By the Wind goddess—ruthless, undismayed; And so hath gained at length a prosperous height, Round which the elements of worldly might Beneath his haughty feet like clouds are laid. Oh, joyless power that stands by lawless force Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate, Internal darkness and unquiet breath; And if old judgments keep their sacred course, Him from that height shall heaven precipitate By ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... a reward, a home In banishment, hell groans, hard pain, and bade That torture house abide the joyless fall. When with eternal night and sulphur pains, Fullness of fire, dread cold, reek and red flames, ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... her head bandaged, and her fixed and sightless eyes, she answered meekly and readily to all the questions we put to her. Poor little thing! she was shocking to look at; one of the many innocent beings whose lives are to be rendered sad and joyless by this revolution. The doctor seemed very ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... perfect. The artist, if he would prevail, must not be seduced by any temptation, any extraneous desire, any peevish criticism, any well-meant rebuke, into trying a subject that he knows is too large for him. He must be his own severest critic. No artistic effort can be effective, if it is a joyless straining after things falteringly grasped. Joy is the essential quality; it need not always be a present, a momentary joy. There are weary spaces, as when a footsore traveller plods along the interminable road that leads him to the city where he would be. But he must know in his heart that ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you shining ran With peaceful floods, where the soft voice prevails Of building doves in lordly trees set high, Trees which enclose a home where love abides — His love and hers, a passioned ecstasy; Your tone has caught its echo and derides My joyless lot, as face down pressed I lie Upon the shifting sand, and hear the reeds Voicing a thin, dissonant threnody Unto the cliff and wind-tormented weeds. As with the faint half-lights of jade toward The shore you come and show a violet hue, I wonder if the face of my adored Was ever ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... till a year departed— Felt it of all hope bereft; Restless, joyless, broken-hearted, Then the warring bands he left;— Bade on Joppa's sandy shore Seamen hoist the swelling sail; Swift the bark to Europe bore O'er the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... no mirth the banquet knows: Where wine is not, the dance all joyless goes. The man, oppressed with cares, who tastes the bowl, Shall shake the weight ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... the Law, Your work ne'er done without some flaw; Those ghastly streets that drive one mad, With children joyless, elders sad, Young men unmanly, girls going by Bold-voiced, with eyes unmaidenly; Christ dead two thousand years agone, And kingdom come still all unwon; Your own slack self that will not rise Whole-hearted for the great emprise,— Well, all these dark ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... upon this Valley of Desolation, as it is emphatically called, the Convent of St. Bernard presents itself to the view. This cheerless abode, the highest spot of inhabited ground in Europe, has been tenanted, for more than a thousand years, by a succession of joyless and self-denying monks, who, in that frigid retreat of granite and ice, endeavor to serve their Maker, by rescuing bewildered travelers from the destruction with which they are ever threatened to be overwhelmed by the storms, which battle against them. In ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... Unitarian congregation for about a twelvemonth. My life during that time, save so far as my intercourse with Mrs. Lane, and one other friend presently to be mentioned, was concerned, was as sunless and joyless as it had ever been. Imagine me living by myself, roaming about the fields, and absorbed mostly upon insoluble problems with which I never made any progress, and which tended to draw me away from what enjoyment of life there was which ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... to pay the price, what is there left for them save the joyless sensuality and black ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... were shaken, from heaven there rained showers of flying stones, a whirling tempest rose on every side, the trees were rooted up and fell, heavenly music rose with plaintive notes, whilst angels for a time were joyless. Buddha rising from out his ecstasy, announced to all the world: "Now have I given up my term of years; I live henceforth by power of faith; my body like a broken chariot stands, no further cause of 'coming' or of 'going'; completely freed ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... board, from choral roofs the song; And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they wear a cold and joyless smile. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... preparations for his marriage. The inflexible logic of Calvinism had passed into her fibre, until it had become almost an instinct with her to tread softly in the way of pleasure lest God should hear. Generations of joyless ancestors had imbued her with an ineradicable suspicion of human happiness—as something which must be paid for, either literally in its pound of flesh, or in a corresponding measure of the materials ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... downcast looks the joyless victor sat, Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of chance below; And now and then a sigh he stole, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... I am filled full of tears: My heart filled with the beat Of tears, as of dancing feet, A lyreless joyless line, And music ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... back from taking them home; and have left them delighted with their day, the recollection of which will long make them happy. This morning I was pitying those whose lives are obscure and joyless; now, I understand that God has provided a compensation with every trial. The smallest pleasure derives from rarity a relish otherwise unknown. Enjoyment is only what we feel to be such, and the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... brave the flood in quest of gain And beat for joyless months, the gloomy wave. Let such as deem it glory to destroy, Rush into blood, the sack of cities seek; Unpierced, exulting in the widow's wail, The virgin's ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... tendency to give existence to a new human creature like ourselves. Were it not for this circumstance, a man and a woman would hardly ever have learned to live together; there scarcely could have been such a thing as domestic society; but every intercourse of this sort would have been "casual, joyless, unendeared;" and the propensity would have brought along with it nothing more of beauty, lustre and grace, than the pure animal appetites of hunger and thirst. Bearing in mind these considerations, I do not therefore hesitate to say, that the great model of the affection of ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... swinging the lantern at her side, and I followed, so mystified, so angered by her composure, that I scarcely knew what I did. She even turned, with pretty courtesy, to hold the light for me at the crypt steps,—a service that I accepted perforce and with joyless acquiescence in the irony of it. I knew that I did not believe in her; her conduct as to Pickering was utterly indefensible,—I could not forget that; but the light of her eyes, her tranquil brow, the sensitive lips, whose mockery stung and pleased in a breath,—by such testimony my doubts were ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... enforce our obligations. For since we must needs die, and are as water that is spilled upon the ground, which cannot be gathered up again, such a death as this amounts to positive happiness by the side of a contrasted experience in the joyless, hopeless death of a child, or friend. But without further preface, I ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... wretched leech of a Mexican, assures me that it will be certain death to attempt the journey. For want of any opposing evidence, I am constrained to believe him. I have no alternative but to adopt the joyless resolve to remain in Santa Fe until ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... have drunk water, eaten grass and given milk for the last time, and their senses have lost all vigour. He who gives these undoubtedly goes to joyless realms. ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... was made in November, 1883, the very year when the Pall Mall Gazette exposure started "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," and the conscience of England was stirred as never before over this joyless city in the East End of its capital. Even then, vigorous and drastic plans were being discussed, and a splendid program of municipal reforms was already dimly outlined. Of all these, however, I had heard nothing ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... in pieces everywhere: Into the joyless house and in the yard, On narrow streets, and paths, and pathless haunts, Where persecution raves, and menace dumb Chills all away from the pure light and air. The madman's cursed hands hold everything With snares and claws and stones ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... and the stretch of park looked suddenly grey and bare. Mollie drew her shoulders together with an involuntary shiver. Something had suddenly damped her ardour of enthusiasm; but it was not so much the bleak wind as the sight of the face gazing into her own, with its set lips, and bleached, joyless expression. For years to come Mollie could recall that moment, and feel again the chill in her veins with which she listened to ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... morning she rises without a hope, night by night she lies down vacant or apathetic; and the utmost use she can make of the day is to totter three or four times across the floor by the assistance of her staff. Yet, though we wonder that she is still permitted to cumber the ground, joyless and weary, "the tomb of her dead self," we look at this dry leaf, and think how green it once was, and how the birds sung to it in ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... thy joyless fate, Since first Hesione thy bride, When plac'd aloft in godlike state, The blushing beauty by thy side, Thou sat'st, while reverend Ocean smil'd, And mirthful strains the hours beguil'd; The Nymphs and Tritons danc'd ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... was between the night and day, When the Fairy King has power, That I sunk down in a sinful fray, And 'twixt life and death was snatched away To the joyless ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... were susceptible to every change; I was disappointed in love,—for the truth never approached to my ideal. Nursed early in the lap of Romance, enamoured of the wild and the adventurous, the commonplaces of life were to me inexpressibly tame and joyless. And yet indolence, which belongs to the poetical character, was more inviting than that eager and uncontemplative action which can alone wring enterprise from life. Meditation was my natural element. I loved ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Shibli Bagarag drooped in uncertainty of her state, and was as a reaper in a field of harvest, around whom lie the yellow sheaves, and the brown beam of autumn on his head, the blaze of plenty; yet is he joyless and stands musing, for one is away who should be there, and without whom the goblet of Success giveth an unsweetened draught, and there is nothing pleasant in life, and the flower on the summit of achievement ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... way I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... many and many a dreary year Must pass away ere the buds appear: Many a night of darksome sorrow Yield to the light of a joyless morrow, Ere birds again, on the clothed trees, Shall fill the branches with melodies. She will dream of meadows with wakeful streams; Of wavy grass in the sunny beams; Of hidden wells that soundless spring, Hoarding ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... other world were dismal to an extreme. The after-life in Hades was believed to be a shadowy, joyless copy of the earthly existence. In Hades the shade of great Achilles exclaims sorrowfully, "Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death. Rather would I live on earth as the hireling of another, even with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all the dead." [13] ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... hours have passed fleetingly at the pleasant tea-table, or by the warm hearth of some old country-house, going forth into the cold and cheerless night, reaches his far-off home only to find it dark and gloomy, joyless and companionless? How often has the hard-visaged look of his old butler, as, with sleepy eyes and yawning face, he hands a bed-room candle, suggested thoughts of married happiness? Of the perils of propinquity I have already spoken; the risks of contrast are also great. Have you ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... obtaineth eternal happiness. Even women, and the tribes of Visya and Soodra, shall go the supreme journey if they take sanctuary with me; how much more my holy servants the Brahmins and the Ragarshees! Consider this world as a finite and joyless ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... and more lovely world within. If religion has no word to say upon this it is incomplete, and we wander in the narrow circle of prayers and praise, wondering all the while what is it we are praising God for, because we feel so melancholy and lifeless. Dante had a place in his Inferno for the joyless souls, and if his conception be true the population of that circle will be largely modern Irish. A reaction against this conventional restraint is setting in, and the needs of life will perhaps in the future no longer be violated as they are today; and since it is ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... and cheer the name of the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar inn. There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his elbow ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... magic, that would keep her race alive. So drives the giantess to seek her mate, Joyless and choiceless, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... individual attachment for the king and queen which would, for a moment, create the illusion that a reaction had commenced in the public mind. One day the queen was sitting in her apartment at St. Cloud, in the deepest dejection of spirits, mechanically working upon some tapestry to occupy the joyless and lingering hours. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. The palace was deserted and silent. The very earth and sky seemed mourning in sympathy with the mourning queen. Suddenly, an unusual noise, as of many persons conversing in an under tone, was heard beneath the ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... superabundance now. I have every thing but time. My banishment expires to-morrow; but I shall never recross the sea. This is my country. Since I set my foot upon its shore I have never had a moment to yawn. In this land of real and substantial life, the spectre that haunted my joyless days dares not be seen—the "hour too ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... when the angel stooped, Whispering, 'Live on! for yet one joyless soul, Void of true faith in human happiness, Waits to be won by ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... the day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless war days. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... whose wounded souls when here below, But anxious thought and bitter fancies know, With days all joyless, nights of dull unrest; For those who in night's calm find all so blest And meet, in place of hope with morning beams, A horrid wak'ning to ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... the cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... no longer alone, he was no longer joyless! His little friend was there in the great cage among the twittering companions who were indifferent to the little prince. In order to know him at first sight, and always to be able to recognize him, Louis took the rose- colored ribbon from the neck of the automaton, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... channels, counselled resistance, mad as it might seem. As he thought of his situation, the tears came into his eyes, and he wept bitterly. The future was dark and forbidding, as the past had been joyless and hopeless. They were tears of anger and ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... trials that we have to endure as beginners is a joyless, flat, ungracious condition; a kind of paralysis of the soul, a dreary torpor. When we would approach God—pray to Him—He is nowhere to be found: He has disappeared, and everything to do with finding Him is become hard work, such hard work that it suddenly seems to us quite unprofitable: ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless, pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the happiest of her life. When Austin left Arden, he seemed always to carry away the brightness of her existence with him; for without him her life was very lonely—a singularly joyless life for one so young. Then, in an evil hour, as she thought, there came their final parting. How well she remembered her brother loitering on the broad terrace in front of Arden Court, in the dewy summer morning, waiting to bid her good-bye! How passionately she had ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... was incomprehensibly joyless to the hearts of each, though it was desired, and had long been desired, and mother was mother, daughter daughter, without diminution of love between them. They held hands, they kissed and clasped, they showered their tender phrases with full warm ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... think that I accepted this statement as gospel, but in my heart I thought I had never seen a sadder face than that of Gladys Hamilton; to me it looked absolutely joyless, as though some strange blight had fallen on her youth. I kept these thoughts to myself, like a wise woman, and when Max looked at me rather searchingly, as though he expected a verbal assent, I said, 'Yes, you are right, some girls are like that,' and left him ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Teacher, a Magazine for Teachers, says: "In The Big Business of Life we have the practical philosophy that it is everyone's business to abolish work and turn this world into a playground. Who will not confess that many mortals take their work too seriously, and that to them it is a joyless, cheerless thing? To be able to find happiness, and to find it when we are bending to our duties is to possess the secret of living to the full. And happiness is to be sought within, and not among the things that lie at our feet. The book before ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... she never known a winter? 'Tis the dreary dark time of waitin', the sunless, joyless bit o' all the year, when the singin' birds fly away, the butterflies and flowers die, and the very trees sigh and moan in their bareness and decay. 'Tis an empty bit o' life, when all that makes life sweet falls to pieces and ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... courted by an ode, On the bard her Dove bestowed. Vested with a master's right Now Anacreon rules my flight; His the letters that you see, Weighty charge consigned to me; Think not yet my service hard, Joyless task without reward; Smiling at my master's gates, Freedom my return awaits. But the liberal grant in vain Tempts me to be wild again. Can a prudent Dove decline Blissful bondage such as mine? Over hills and fields to roam, Fortune's guest without a home; ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... choice made on young Muller a deep impression. He was compelled to contrast with it his own course. For the sake of a passionate love for a young woman he had given up the work to which he felt drawn of God, and had become both joyless and prayerless: another young man, with far more to draw him worldward, had, for the sake of a self-denying service among despised Polish Jews, resigned all the pleasures and treasures of the world. ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... forbidding sort of a place. Only one company was stationed there, and my husband was nearly always scouting in the mountains north of us. The weather was severe, and the winter there was joyless and lonesome. The extreme cold and the loneliness affected my spirits, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... unhappily with her spouse. Whether she honestly returned Haydn's love cannot be known. Facts hint that she often abused and took advantage of his good nature. But for all that she beautified his life, so often joyless, by the tenderness which she awoke in him; and the woman who throughout twenty years could do that, deserved well of the man whose friend she was; and she earns our consideration and sympathy besides. From London the master wrote her the tenderest letters. Both, as their correspondence ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... all this, the centre of the scene, The white-haired matron, with monotonous tread, Plied the swift wheel, and, with her joyless mien, Sat like a Fate, and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Asa folk assembled in the Council Hall, at the root of the Tree of Life, to hear the message that Hermod had brought from the joyless realms; and he told them of Hela's reply to his ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... independent, and could go where she pleased. Then there would be the wide world for her to wander over, instead of this sea-girdled garden of Jersey. She had reasons of her own for so quietly submitting to this joyless life. Mrs. Winstanley kept her informed of all that was doing in Hampshire, and even at the Queen Anne house at Kensington. She knew that Roderick Vawdrey's wedding-day was fixed for the first of August. Was it not better ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... is their due." Ellen Key, similarly, while pointing out (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 14, 265) that the tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within "the whited sepulchre of marriage" is now being broken, exalts the privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there may be a few exceptional cases in which women ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "Beware!" sounded like thunder in her ears; the next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was cutting into her throbbing throat. He with the torso and those shoulders was seeking her ... how should he know her in that dreary garret, in those joyless habiliments? He would as soon known his Own in that crimson-bodiced, wire-framed dummy by the ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... made, and there seems no alternative to following literally in Christ's footsteps and turning the back on much of the beauty and the thrill of the world, bewilderment will seize the chooser and at the best he will dedicate himself to a joyless and unattractive puritanism, or surrender himself to a rudderless voyage across the ocean of life. Religion at school must touch with its refining power the impulses, aesthetic and intellectual, that ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... thou turnest love divine To joyless dread, and mak'st the loving heart With hateful thoughts to languish and repine, And feed itself with self-consuming smart; Of all the passions of the mind thou vilest ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... looked upon his whole existence, he seemed to see in a large, clear, cold comprehensiveness, all the wasted days, the fruitless activities, the futilities, the perpetual postponements that had followed his coming to London. He saw it all as a joyless indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and undisciplined desires, as a succession of days that began amiably and weakly, that became steadily more crowded with ignoble and trivial occupations, that had sunken now to indignity and uncleanness. He was overwhelmed by that persuasion, which ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... I shall never forget the impression his countenance made upon me. The features so handsome, the colouring so fine, the person that of a finished gentleman; and yet, all this pleasing combination of form and face marred by that cold, cruel, merciless eye. Its expression so dead, so joyless, sent a chill through my whole frame, and I shrank from encountering its icy gaze, and was about quietly to retire by a back door, when my attention was arrested by the following ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... fortune had befel me, And it would have been more happy. Had I not been born and nurtured, And had never grown in stature, 220 Till I saw these days of sorrow, And this joyless time o'ertook me, Had I died in six nights only, Or upon the eighth had perished. Much I should not then have needed, But a shroud a span-long only, And of earth a tiny corner. Little then had wept my mother, Fewer tears had shed my father, ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... to accomplish that he hath to do, and to see the token of his going again to the castle where the chain of gold appeared to him, for never yet saw he dwelling that pleased him so much. He hath ridden so far that he is come into the joyless forest of the Black Hermit, that is so loathly and horrible that no leaves nor greenery are there by winter nor by summer, nor was song of bird never heard therein, but all the land is gruesome and burnt, and wide are the cracks ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... heart, and ever felt the deepest interest in all that has been written and said upon the subject, and the most profound respect and loving sympathy for those heroic women, who, in the face of law and public sentiment, have dared to sunder the unholy ties of a joyless, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and the town to carry his clever brush to the welcome of a wider world, without a word or a thought of thanks for the creature who had worshipped and waited upon him hand and foot; and then I saw her life from day to day unroll its long monotonous folds, all in the same pattern, all drab duty and joyless sacrifice, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... elm. It has not grown an inch these hundred years. It does not look a day older than it did fifty years ago, I can tell you. There he stands the same; and yet a stranger in the place of his birth, in a new order of things, joyless, busy, transformed Chapelizod, listening, as it seems to me, always to the unchanged song and prattle of the river, with his reveries and affections far away among by-gone times and a buried race. Thou hast a story, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the parish poor, Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door; There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play, And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day;— There children dwell who know no parents' care; Parents who know no children's love dwell there! Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed; Dejected widows, with unheeded tears, And crippled age with more than childhood fears; The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they! The moping idiot and the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... "feel the soul of Nature, and see things as they are"; and when, instead of this, it turns to glorifying its own powers and achievements, or sets up any end apart from such discovery and interpretation, it becomes sickly, feeble, foolish, frivolous, vicious, joyless, and moribund; and meanness, cruelty, sensuality, impiety, and irreligion are the companions ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... it is never known to play or frolic like lambs or colts, or like most young creatures of the earth, in fact; but that in its babyhood it is as grave and melancholy as in its old age, born apparently with a deep sense of its own ugliness, and a mournful resignation to a long and joyless career. ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to it by this," replied Miss De Courcy, with the same joyless little laugh, giving the lace skirt an absent-minded kick with her red morocco toe. "I lived in the country ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... I miss thy smile of light, "Welcome" at morn and kind "good night!" But, when the quiet eve comes on, I feel that thou indeed art gone. That herald of delight to me Is joyless now, for ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... with priceless pearls; Piteous must be her state! And, torn from her, Doth Nala cling to life; or, day by day, Waste with long yearning? Oh, as I behold Those black locks, and those eyes—dark and long-shaped As are the hundred-petalled lotus-leaves— And watch her joyless who deserves all joy, My heart is sore! When will she overpass The river of this sorrow, and come safe Unto its farther shore? When will she meet Her lord, as moon and moon-star in the sky Mingle? For, as I think, in winning her, Nala would win his happy days again, And—albeit ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... man, the more devoted to the young knight from his dark melancholy and wild deeds, hastened to lower the drawbridge. Greetings were exchanged in silence, and in silence did Sintram enter, and those joyless gates closed with a crash behind the ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... sweeping blast, the sky o'ercast,"[1] The joyless winter day Let others fear, to me more dear Than all the pride of May: The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul, My griefs it seems to join; The leafless trees my fancy please, Their fate ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Whitechapel had done in her one visit to it with Tom, the year before, to see a loan collection of pictures. Street after street of blank, drab-faced houses—dull, unsmiling houses! She thought of children growing up there, wan and joyless, like plants kept out of the sun. And then two happy-eyed boys came running by with their satchels under their arms, while a door opened and a woman with a smiling mother-face came out to welcome them. And Miss Merivale confessed to herself the mistake she had been making. Where love ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took the greater hold on the fancy ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... waking times (If he be human), when he recollects That through the long, long hours of evil feasts With painted sin, and under glaring gas, His brightest friend was at a window-sill A watcher, seated in a joyless room, And haply left without ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... more Browning seems preoccupied with that in music which lends expression to a soulless animation, a futile and aimless vivacity. Only here it is the vivacity of the schools, not of the ballroom. Yet some lines seem a very echo of that hollow joyless mirth, for ever ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... pleased you?" asked Ojo, who was feeling solemn and joyless through thinking upon his ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... years have encompassed with a proletarian suburb, its once noble domain narrowed to the bare acres of a stinted breathing ground, Aston Hall looks forth upon joyless streets and fuming chimneys, a wide welter of squalid strife. Its walls, which bear the dints of Roundhead cannonade, are blackened with ever-driving smoke; its crumbling gateway, opening aforetime upon a stately avenue of chestnuts, shakes as the ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... heart the bitter resentment toward Olga Vseslavovna that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world where there was ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... o'er, impatient to destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy; In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow'r; With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more; Now pall the tasteless meats, and joyless wines, And luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain, [bb]Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds, alas! would touch th' impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness'd ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... which he conserved every smallest particle of ice, Elmer's motto seemed to be: "Haste not, waste not." But he did not appear to derive any great satisfaction from his task, let alone joy. In fact, Elmer seemed to be a joyless individual; one who habitually looked forward to the worst. On his broad face, of the complexion described in police reports as "pasty," melancholy sat enthroned. His nose was flat and broad, and flat and broad were his cheek bones, too. His hair was cut very short everywhere except in ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... their faces, aged before their time, and the mere wrecks of what they once were. Men who had gone to that region strong, active, ruddy, enthusiastic, and who, after a few months, returned thus feeble and shattered—some irreparably so; others with perhaps years of joyless life before them; a few with the unmistakable stamp of death already ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... were solemn affairs. She could make her feet go in a one-two-three triangle with approximate accuracy, if she didn't take any liberties with them. She was relieved to find that Todd danced with a heavy accuracy which kept her from stumbling.... But their performance was solemn and joyless, while by her skipped Sam Weintraub, in evening clothes with black velvet collar and cuffs, swinging and making fantastic dips with the lovely Miss Moore, who cuddled into his arms and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... artist seemed to look triumphantly through the solemn, purplish blue eyes of the young martyr, and Beryl knew that her own heart beat under the pamted folds of the diploidion; that she had epitomized in a symbolic picture, the history of her own joyless youth. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... much of an industry. It is not at all like the joyousness, that delight in life, spontaneous and unconscious, which one finds in the really great authors. Why the modern realist should believe that to be real he must be joyless—in the United States, at least—is perhaps because he feels the public need of protest against the optimistic sentimentalism of the Harold Bell Wrights and the Gene Stratton-Porters. But it would be a serious mistake to assume that neither ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... that, nigh there, I had borne my bitterest loss—when One who went, came not again; In a joyless hour of discord, in a joyless-hued July there - A July just such ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... the 140 pagazis promised by Ali bin Salim we were all employed upon everything that thought could suggest needful for crossing the sickly maritime region, so that we might make the transit before the terrible fever could unnerve us, and make us joyless. A short experience at Bagamoya showed us what we lacked, what was superfluous, and what was necessary. We were visited one night by a squall, accompanied by furious rain. I had $1,500 worth of pagazi cloth in my tent. In the morning I looked and lo! the drilling had ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Well then, I own my heart has broke your chains. Patient, I bore the painful bondage long, At length my gen'rous love disdains your tyranny; The bitterness and stings of taunting jealousy, Vexations days, and jarring, joyless, nights, Have driv'n him forth to seek some safer shelter, Where he may rest his weary wings ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... homeless boy in the seductive city. The companions whom he meets at the gymnasium are not the ones whose pursuits of later nocturnal hours entice him to sin. The honest fatigue of his exercises calls for honest rest. It is the nervous exhaustion of a sedentary, frivolous, or joyless life which madly tries to restore itself by the other nervous exhaustion of debauchery. It is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the heiress of the French throne, that even in the world of spirits she might be cheered by seeing Henry heading the armies of France, the terrible avenger of her wrongs. These hopes invigorated her until the fitful dream of her joyless life was terminated, and her restless spirit sank into the repose of the grave. She lived, however, to see her plans apparently in progress ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... With their rosy rings; As yet their bosoms knew not Soft song—and music grew not Out of the silver strings. No gladsome garlands cheerily Were love-y-woven then; And o'er Elysium drearily The May-time flew for men;[14] The morning rose ungreeted From ocean's joyless breast; Unhail'd the evening fleeted To ocean's joyless breast— Wild through the tangled shade, By clouded moons they stray'd, The iron race of Men! Sources of mystic tears, Yearnings for starry spheres, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... previous life; between the expressed subject and sentiment of home violation, and the expressed subject and sentiment of home love; between the sympathy of audience, given in irreverent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the rabidness of a dog, and the sympathy of audience given in an almost appalled humility of intense, rapturous, and yet entirely reasoning and reasonable pleasure; between these two limits of octave, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... the wrong I have done you!" he confessed one night with a haggard, remorseful face, when she stood, constrained and pensive, on his joyless hearth. ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... you, but it is my duty to leave you, so farewell for ever!'—that is what he would have said to her, knowing all the time that life would be utterly joyless to him. Would Cyril, in his hot, untried youth, be capable of a like generosity, or would he cleave to his betrothed with passionate, one-sided fealty, vowing that nothing on earth should separate them as long as they two loved ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Gawayne thinks of his wearisome journey (ll. 521-535). On All-hallows day Arthur entertains right nobly the lords and ladies of his court in honour of his nephew, for whom all courteous knights and lovely ladies were in great grief. Nevertheless they spoke only of mirth, and, though joyless themselves, made many a joke to cheer the good Sir Gawayne (ll. 536-565). Early on the morrow Sir Gawayne, with great ceremony, is arrayed in his armour (ll. 566-589), and thus completely equipped for his adventure he first hears ...
— Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight - An Alliterative Romance-Poem (c. 1360 A.D.) • Anonymous
... Rules them relentlessly; smiles forced and faint And joyless facial spasms Their meetings and their mutterings attend. Jerky approximations quickly end ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various |
