"Pointless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two hazy terms, will make a debate that is pretty sure to end as it began. Thus it is that a question, plausible to appearance, may contain within it capacities of misunderstanding, cross-purposes, and pointless issues, sufficient to occupy the long night of Pandemonium, or beguile the journey to the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... and what was of more force, that she believed and felt in her own heart that every word of her recital was heard by her Creator. Albert had heard prayers and religious exhortations without number; prayers that were incoherent, pointless, vague, or uttered to the hearers instead of God; prayers that contained advice to the Deity galore, but of supplication and thankfulness not a vestige; but never before one that reached his heart and touched his feelings as the strange and piteous supplication uttered by this weird old ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... Pointless the shaft fell at David's feet. He had turned again to the beauties about him, and at that moment he spied the sundial—something ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... some degree of present fruition. Even vice would be in many ways sauceless and insipid in the absence of faith. Who does not remember the old cynic's testimony (in the "New Republic") to the piquancy lent by Christianity to many a sin, otherwise pointless. If the moralist distinguishes between actions that are evil because they are forbidden, and those that are forbidden because they are evil, the libertine has a counter-distinction between those that are forbidden because they are pleasant, and those that are pleasant because they are forbidden. ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... steel, Are heard around; the boiling waters roar, And smoky flames thro' fuming tunnels soar. Hether the Father of the Fire, by night, Thro' the brown air precipitates his flight. On their eternal anvils here he found The brethren beating, and the blows go round. A load of pointless thunder now there lies Before their hands, to ripen for the skies: These darts, for angry Jove, they daily cast; Consum'd on mortals with prodigious waste. Three rays of writhen rain, of fire three ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... pain of death being denounced against those who should call themselves Gregor or MacGregor, the names of their fathers. Under the same penalty, all who had been at the conflict of Glenfruin, or accessory to other marauding parties charged in the act, were prohibited from carrying weapons, except a pointless knife to eat their victuals. By a subsequent act of Council, 24th June 1613, death was denounced against any persons of the tribe formerly called MacGregor, who should presume to assemble in greater numbers than four. Again, by an Act of Parliament, 1617, chap. 26, these ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... sobbed. To appease her, I promised that I would remodel the story, although I knew that the doing so would leave it absolutely pointless. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The words were meaningless, pointless, perhaps, but they stabbed Ruth to the heart. She turned to him, saw him step forward slowly, looking very tall, older than she had ever known him. He had drawn within himself, and there manifested itself his inheritance ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... ducked his head. Ah, the listless wit of the rich! It may be pointless, but how laughable is ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... Lapsus Linguae from the Edinburgh University Magazine. The two prospectuses alone, laid side by side, would indicate the march of luxury and the repeal of the paper duty. The penny bi-weekly broadside of session 1828-4 was almost wholly dedicated to Momus. Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous verses, and University grievances are the continual burthen of the song. But Mr. Tatler was not without a vein of hearty humour; and his pages afford what is much better: to wit, a good picture ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not the patience for great length; nor the wit for brilliant satire; nor the imagination for te popular, spicy, impossible, ill-flavoured romance; so I have chosen the other line, adopted by the great majority, and aim at purposeless, pointless imbecility." ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... To a eulogium of the professional skill and successful [30] agricultural enterprise of Dr. Nichol, a medical officer of that Colony, with whom he became acquainted for the first time during his short stay there, our author travels out of his way to tack on a gratuitous and pointless sneer at the educational competency of all the elected members of the island legislature, among whom, he tells us, the worthy doctor had often tried in vain to obtain a place. His want of success, our author informs ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... a warrior's fame To shun the pointless stroke of shame? Will he that propped a trembling throne Not stand for right when right's ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... ex-artist, is much to be pitied for his extreme anguish at our having come to terms with the celebrated Robert Cruikshank in the supplying the designs of the caricatures in 'Figaro.' Seymour has been venting his rage in a manner as pointless as it is splenetic, and we are sorry for him. He ought, however, to feel, that notwithstanding our friendly wish to bring him forward, which we have done in an eminent degree, we must engage first-rate ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... CURTANA. The pointless sword of mercy is the principal in dignity of the three swords that are borne naked before the British monarchs ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... the interest lent to the proceedings by the presence of the royal favourite the affair must have seemed now very stupid and pointless to Marguerite, although she would certainly not have found it so had she known enough Latin to understand the horrible perversion of the Credo. But when the Offertory was reached, matters suddenly quickened. ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... may our readers remember one brief letter of Henry Clay (clarum et venerabile nomen!), who, when a candidate for the Presidency, wrote many excellent letters, and too many—so many, indeed, that his adversaries indulged in pointless ridicule, and called him 'The Complete Letter Writer.' We allude, of course, to that brief letter to certain importunate individuals in Alabama, which lost for him the decisive and final vote of New York, and made ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... pail And sang a country ditty, An innocent fond lovers' tale, That was not wise nor witty, Pathetically rustical, Too pointless ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... Mr. Choate, Mr. John M. Clayton, Mr. Berrien, were an altogether higher and abler class of men than those with whom Mr. Adams had his frequent wrangles in the House. The weapons which he so successfully employed against the young "fire-eaters" would have proved pointless and valueless in a contest with any one of the eminent men who in that long period gave character ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... my belief, however, that had I attempted a different order of composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention, since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... on with our pointless arguments and the other little group of three continued to lay plans for the re-education of Brenda, the depression of a deeper and deeper ennui weighed upon us all. The truth is, I think, that we were all waiting for the ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... love, surpassing far The love of all beneath, We find within our hearts, and dare The pointless darts ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... are endless. This particular version was sung to me by Capt. R.W. Robertson. It differs but slightly from the version which I originally learnt from Sir Walter Runciman. Very few of the words were printable, and old sailors who read my version will no doubt chuckle over the somewhat pointless continuation of the verses concerning Kitty Carson and Polly Riddle. They will, of course, see the point of my having supplied a Chopinesque accompaniment to ...
— The Shanty Book, Part I, Sailor Shanties • Richard Runciman Terry
... form a sort of cross between the Theodorian breed of novel and the Wardish—the extravagantly overrated—the heavy, imbecile, pointless, but still well-written, sensible, and, we may even add, not disagreeable, Tremaine and De Vere. The second of these books was a mere rifacimento of the first; and, fortunately for what remained of his reputation, Mr. Robert Ward has ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... windows behind him blazed with light. One or two of the big casements were open, and music and odd bursts of laughter drifted out. Somebody, it seemed, was singing an amusing song, but the snatches of it that reached Nasmyth struck him as pointless and inane. He had been at Bonavista a week, but, after his simple, strenuous life in the Bush, he felt at times overwhelmed by the boisterous vivacity with which his new companions pursued their diversions. There are not many men without an occupation ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal. 3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... pointless to follow the lost children of the party, Naigeon and Sylvain Marechal, Mably and Morelly, the fanatics that set atheism up as an obligatory dogma and a superior duty; the socialists who, to suppress egoism, propose a community of property, and who found a republic in which any man ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... itself—so little changed, so distinctly recollected—then I was indeed amazed at the torrent of little happy fragrant memories which seemed to pour from every doorway and window—the games, the meals, the plays, the literary projects, the readings, the telling of stories, the endless, pointless, enchanting wanderings with some breathless object in view, forgotten or transformed before it was ever attained or executed, of which children ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... with the anarchic mob supreme." Of course this may be highly amusing, but— The fact is that, with a disappointment the greater from having genial memories of a former book of his, I have to confess myself one of the dullards for whom Mr. PICKTHALL'S satirical darts fall apparently pointless. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 17, 1920 • Various
... face grew darker and his heart heavier. He felt himself out of place, outside the orbit of these people, very little in sympathy with them. He looked at the woman sitting at the next table, elegantly dressed, laden with jewels, whose laughter was incessant and speeches pointless—her companion found her interesting enough, but Douglas was conscious of nothing save her restless desire to please, her little bursts of frivolous mirth and an ugly twitch of her lips which every now and then revolted him. It was a chance, perhaps, or a mood, which made him ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... rest outside the gate, because of the darkness during which no man could go higher. Here, it is true, were no flowers to weave a pattern upon its carpet of green; true also, here were no beautiful angels, in green wings and green garments, poised in the sweet night-air, watchful with their short, pointless, flaming swords against the creeping enemy; but it was, nevertheless, the loveliest carpet of grass and moss, and as to the angels, I find it impossible to imagine, even in the heavenly host, one heart ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... anxious to end this pointless conversation, for the stranger had approached quite near and peered into his face, as though not free from suspicion. The darkness was deep, but on the other side of the ridge a small fire was burning, from fragments brought from the stables. Of this the adventurer meant to keep clear at all ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... precisely the same difficulty. To an English youth, unfamiliar with the language and shy as only English youths can be, a conversation with that redoubtable old lady must have been a grim ordeal indeed. One can almost hear the stumbling, pointless observations, almost see the imploring looks cast, from among the infinitely attentive company, towards the tutor, and the pink ears growing still more pink. But such awkward moments were rare. As a rule the days flowed on in easy monotony—or rather, not the days, but the nights. For Madame du ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... when he asked himself the latter question, for his own knowledge rendered it pointless. He knew that the game was as limitless on one side of the Mississippi ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... for he knew that Miss Trim was on the point of delivering one of her parenthetical and pointless orations, "it was indeed an amazing time! Such boating on the plains, and such camping out! To say nothing of tumbling into the water and ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... art! Thou hast hit it! Oh, the sweet sempstress! the excellent sempstress! Mistress of her scissors and needles, which are pointless and edgeless to her art! The sempstress had done nothing to the gown; yet raves and storms my mistress at her for having botched it in the making and mending; and orders her straight to make another one, which home the sempstress brings on ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... Robert Wilson, "This is not an account of how Boosterism came to Arcadia." It's a devil of a long way from it. And once the high point of a story has been reached and passed, it is pointless to prolong it too much. The capture of the Greatest Noble broke the power of the Empire of the Great Nobles forever. The loyal subjects were helpless without a leader, and the disloyal ones, near the periphery ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... out and going round to his side of the divided house. But so long as he remained in sight, Cleek's narrowed eyes followed him and the tense creases seamed Cleek's indrawn, silent lips. But when he broke that silence it was to speak to the captain and to say some silly, pointless thing about that refuge ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... what rumour avers, they gave her to us a virgin— They lie on her. A light lady! be sure, not alone 20 Clipp'd her an husband first; weak stalk from a garden, a pointless Falchion, a heart did ne'er fully to courage awake. No; to the son's own bed, 'tis said, that father ascended, Vilely; with act impure stain'd the facinorous house. Whether a blind fierce lust in his heart burnt sinfully flaming, 25 Or that inert that son's vigour, amort to delight, Needed ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... the story of the men who played football across the open between the enemy's line of trenches and our own when it was raked by fire. When I had finished, a friend of mine, evidently waiting for the end of a pointless story, said, "What did they do that for?" (Oh, ye gods, have pity on men and women who suffer from fatty ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... trouble of instructing an awkward novice such as I; and in hopes of exhausting my patience, and inducing me to resign the rod, as I had done the preceding day, my friend contrived to keep me thrashing the water more than an hour with a pointless hook. I detected this trick at last, by observing the rogue grinning with delight when he saw a large trout rise and dash harmless away from the angle. I gave him a sound cuff, Alan; but the next moment was sorry, and, to make amends, yielded possession of the fishing-rod ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... Chancellor soon saw that endless petty bickering would be the result of continuing him in the post. His petty pride was offended by having to serve as deputy to Albemarle. He was ingenious in detecting legal difficulties, and wearied the patience of the Attorney-General by pointless criticisms even on the wording of his patent of appointment. He treated those Irishmen who were obliged to deal with him with a haughty superciliousness which exasperated them to fury. The King soon found that a morose gravity and a punctilious pride were the worst ingredients ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... that of Demosthenes, and less diffuse than that of Cicero. Did the critic, asks Macaulay, ever hear any speaking that was less ornamented than that of Demosthenes, or more diffuse than that of Cicero? Yet the critic's remark was not so pointless as Macaulay thought it. Sincerity and intensity are, indeed, to the modern reader, the most obvious characteristics of Demosthenes. His style is, on the whole, singularly free from what we are accustomed to regard as rhetorical embellishment. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their life-time aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls. .. The harpoon, said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one bended arm — is it safe? Aye, sir, for it was not darted; this ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... course, is adapted from the French, though, by an accepted practice which seems to me dishonest, in spite of its acceptance, that fact is not mentioned on the play-bill. But the form is undoubtedly English, very English. What vulgarity, what pointless joking, what pitiable attempts to serve up old impromptus rechauffes! I found it impossible to stay to the end. Some actors, capable of better things, worked hard; there was a terrible air of effort in these attempts ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Serpents Lick the Pilgrim's Feet. The smiling Infant in his Hand shall take The crested Basilisk and speckled Snake; Pleas'd, the green Lustre of the Scales survey, And with their forky Tongue and pointless Sting shall play. Rise, crown'd with Light, imperial Salem rise! [10] Exalt thy tow'ry Head, and lift thy Eyes! See, a long Race thy spacious Courts adorn; [11] See future Sons and Daughters yet unborn In crowding Ranks on ev'ry side arise, Demanding Life, impatient for the Skies! ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... to the Quarterly upon Keats. Endymion, in spite of the noble self-criticism of its preface, is denounced as "Cockney poetry" [Footnote: The phrase was also employed by Blackwood, vol. iii. 519-524.]—a stupid and pointless vulgarism—and is branded as clothing "the most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language". The author is dismissed with the following amenities: "Being bitten by Leigh Hunt's insane criticism, he more than rivals the insanity of his poetry"; and we are half-surprised ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... stolid, loggerheaded, inapt, doltish, beetle-headed, blockish, sluggish; apathetic, unfeeling, insensate, callous; blunt, obtuse, dulled, pointless; dim, faint; tedious, uninteresting, prosaic, stupid, wearisome, jejune, depressing; lifeless, torpid, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... faces turned to Mecca. But when they arose from the ground, the sun's rays, now strengthening fast, seemed to confirm the Lord of Gilsland's conjecture of the night before. They were flashed back from many a spearhead, for the pointless lances of the preceding day were certainly no longer such. De Vaux pointed it out to his master, who answered with impatience that he had perfect confidence in the good faith of the Soldan; but if De Vaux was afraid of his bulky body, ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty-red iron cluking on pointless carts, high white wool- packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels; jingle, jingle, jingle! An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... history of the Pleistocene, complete with photographs and sketches, and it would be a pointless thing to do, because no future scientist would ever have ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... publication of two plays issued under his name in the same year 1608. "The Family of Love" is, in my judgment, unquestionably and incomparably the worst of Middleton's plays: very coarse, very dull, altogether distasteful and ineffectual. As a religious satire it is so utterly pointless as to leave no impression of any definite folly or distinctive knavery in the doctrine or the practice of the particular sect held up by name to ridicule: an obscure body of feather-headed fanatics, concerning whom we can only be certain that they were decent and inoffensive in comparison ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... visit more than one place where whisky was sold; and when at last he drove out of the town, he had but just enough power of self-control to keep himself from swaying about visibly as he sat in his sleigh. He was in boisterous spirits, and greeted every acquaintance he met with some rough jest—pointless but noisy—singing snatches of songs, and flourishing his whip with an air of tipsy bravado. At a small tavern near the sawmill he dismounted ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... days have pursued him beyond the grave. A small and threadbare sect of "liberals," as they call themselves,—men in whom want of skill, industry, and thrift has produced the usual results,—have erected an altar to Thomas Paine, and, on the anniversary of his birth, go through with a pointless celebration, which passes unnoticed, unless in an out-of-the-way corner of some newspaper. In this class of persons, irreligion is a mere form of discontent. They have no other reason to give for the faith which is not in them. They like to ascribe their want of success ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... compose it, and that before a passage can be said to be translated from one language into another it is often not the words only which must be rendered, but the thought itself which must be transformed; to a people habituated to exaggeration a saying which was not exaggerated would have been pointless—so weak as to arrest the attention of no one; in order to translate it into such words as should carry precisely the same meaning to colder and more temperate minds, the words would often have to be left out of sight altogether, and ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... for she understood. The man, she thought, was willing she should accept the somewhat pointless compliment as the sequence of his former speech, to cover his mistake if he had betrayed more than he thought desirable. It also increased her liking for him, since it appeared that Alton was capable of self-restraint. ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... Lucius, and they seemed as gay as ever, but I saw that she was sometimes puzzled. She said to me one day as we sat together, "I wish you would tell me what this is all about? I do not want to change it, and I am very happy, but isn't it all rather pointless? I believe you have some secret you are keeping from me." She was sitting close beside me, like a child, resting her head on my arm, and she took my ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cunning of the pen, and the devotion of the unknown great men, his friends of the brotherhood. Dialogue, closely packed, nervous, pregnant, terse, and full of the spirit of the age, replaced his conversations, which seemed poor and pointless prattle in comparison. His characters, a little uncertain in the drawing, now stood out in vigorous contrast of color and relief; physiological observations, due no doubt to Horace Bianchon, supplied links of interpretations between human character and the curious phenomena of human life—subtle ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... tarnished as their wardrobe, and both were hung out of sight. The man who, in the days of Anne, would have ventured on the freaks of Rochester, would have finished his nights in the watch-house, and his years in the plantations. The wit of the past age was also rude, vulgar, and pointless to the polished sarcasm of Pope, or even to the reckless sting of Swift. Yet manners were still coarse, and the Queen complained of Harley's coming to her after dinner,—"troublesome, impudent, and drunk." Her court exhibited form without dignity, and her parliaments the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... rested on the faces and the voices of Clan Ratcliffe that evening, as is not unusual with forces on the eve of battle. Their remarks came at longer intervals, and were more pointless and random than usual. There was a want of elasticity in their bearing and tone, partly coming from sympathy with the evident depression of their chief; partly from the portents of the time. The President was to arrive within forty-eight hours, and as yet there ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... I heap upon you—you, the most pointless things imaginable, saucy apes, brewers of odious contrasts, haunting birds of ill omen, mocking echoes, unseasonable reminders, oft-returning vexations, skeletons in my morris-chair, jesters in the tomb, death's-heads ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... suddenly he had brought the gun along from the bed with him and was holding it without having been in the least aware of the fact. Grinning twistedly at the old and pointless precaution, he shoved the gun into his trousers pocket, brought out matches, a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and began to smoke. Very considerate of them to see to it he wouldn't run out of minor conveniences ... ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... Jr., manifested even greater touchiness and exaggeration in the matter of his individual rights, and attempted to make all feel that he was a man with a man's privileges—an assumption which, of all things, is most groundless and pointless ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... so here you are!" I observed, with pointless cordiality, for I was bound I should do nothing to help him out. If he were, indeed, here running errands for my rival, he might have a fair field, but certainly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is hardly necessary to indicate that allusions to the "glorious but bloodless" revolution of 1688 are unwarranted and pointless when designed to tarnish, by the contrast they imply, the French Revolution of 1789. It was the bloody struggle of 1642-51 that made 1688 possible. The true comparison—if any comparison be possible between revolutions so widely different in their ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... the victor, amid the joyous acclamations of the crowd, and retiring, left the field to the meaner combatants, who were afterwards to make sport for the people. Four English and as many French squires fought for some time with pointless lances, when the French, gaining the advantage, the sports were ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... had entered the prison. By that time he had become inured to his convict life. The silence of his cell and the menial tasks he was compelled to perform, which had at first been so distressing, banal, maddening, in their pointless iteration, had now become merely commonplace—dull, but not painful. Furthermore he had learned many of the little resources of the solitary convict, such as that of using his lamp to warm up some delicacy which he had saved from a previous meal or from some basket which ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... whom I had for years foregathered were much given to realism of speech, as well as to picturesquely lurid verbal illustration. But this was different; the language of these men was crammed with filth for filth's sake, and flat, pointless profanity. I have no doubt that my inability to avoid expressing disgust made them worse than they otherwise would ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... on human nature that the achievement of eminence brings with it the malice and spite of petty minds and no one of prominence can avoid becoming the target of stupid and unscrupulous attack. It would be pointless now to go into those carping and unjust accusations directed at me by irresponsible newspaper columnists. Another man might have ignored these mean assaults, but I am naturally sensitive, and while it was beneath my ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... read what I have written I see how pointless it is. It is possible, indeed, that brooding over my personal calamity magnifies in my mind the sense of danger to this friend through me, and that I only need to find the right relation of friendliness coupled with aloofness which will secure him against ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... proper approach to the poems at the beginning of "Lustra," and to the short epigrams, which some readers find "pointless," or certainly "not poetry." They should read, then, the "Dance Figure," or "Near Perigord," and remember that all these poems come out of ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... the people—for they are the majority, and probably include our particular selves—who cannot carry on the ordinary business of everyday talk without the use of phrases containing a part that is appropriate, and another that is pointless or worse; the two parts have associated themselves together in their minds as making up what somebody has said, and what others as well as they will find familiar, and they have the sort of pleasure in producing the combination that a child has in airing a newly acquired word. ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... accomplishments that combine (that most unfrequent of all unions!) vivacity with grace, he was especially formed for that brilliant world from which his circumstances tended to exclude him. Under different auspices, he might have been—Pooh! we are running into a most pointless commonplace; what might any man be under auspices different from those by which his life has been guided? Music soon succeeded to conversation, and Clifford's voice was of necessity put into requisition. Miss Brandon had just risen ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nether promontories 5 Lie satisfied with layers of fat; and these Boeotian cheeks, like Egypt's pyramid, (Nor with less toil were their foundations laid), Sustain the cone of my untroubled brain, That point, the emblem of a pointless nothing! 10 Thou to whom Kings and laurelled Emperors, Radical-butchers, Paper-money-millers, Bishops and Deacons, and the entire army Of those fat martyrs to the persecution Of stifling turtle-soup, and brandy-devils, 15 Offer their secret vows! Thou plenteous ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... names of Scotland. Those who had hitherto borne it were commanded to change it under pain of death, and were forbidden to retain the appellations which they had been accustomed from their infancy to cherish. Those who had been at Glenfruin were also deprived of their weapons, excepting a pointless knife to cut their victuals. They were never to assemble in any number exceeding four; and by an Act of Parliament passed in 1617, these laws were extended to the rising generation, lest as the children ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... of confusion in how the play has been compiled for printing, in particular, a cast list which omits several significant characters, the late appearance of two pointless characters (Signor No and Juanna) and the delayed identification of Alanzo as Captain of the Guard. These have been argued to be evidence of revision ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... of the New Haven church was Mr. Noyes, whom many of his parishioners thought too noncommittal, erroneous, or pointless in discussing the themes which the itinerant preachers loved to dwell upon. Moreover, Mr. Noyes had refused to allow the Rev. George Whitefield to preach from his pulpit while on his memorable pilgrimage ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... birth, Jove's sceptred sons and demigods of earth. High on the sacred tree, the glittering prize Hangs o'er its guard, and tires the warriors' eyes; First their hurl'd spears his spiral folds assail, Their spears fall pointless from his flaky mail; Onward with dauntless swords they plunge amain; He shuns their blows, recoils his twisting train, Darts forth his forky tongue, heaves high in air His fiery crest, and sheds ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... him for a minute, during which the Yankee mate, frothing with fury and uttering all sorts of terrible threats, that were as powerless to hurt Jan as his pointless attack, danced round his watchful antagonist like a pea on a hot griddle; and then, the Dane, tired at length of the fun, advancing his left, delivered another terrific drive from the shoulder that tumbled Mr Flinders backwards under the hood of the booby hatch, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... from the impression of so and so up the Nile, or on first seeing Rome. Indeed, I venture to suggest that only the monotony of our forbears' lives explains the existence of those endless volumes of dreary allusions and pointless anecdote handed down to us as the Correspondence of Sir Somebody This, or of the beautiful Countess of That, or even of Blank, that prince of coffee-house wits. The welcome they received in days when (as is recorded ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... of the other men I have mentioned, grounds his work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart of Darkness," is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaningless as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story of Falk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... visicom, cut sharply into his musing. "The ship has discovered the scouter and is training an electronic beam upon it. My instruments record an electromagnetic vibration pattern of low power but rapidly varying frequency. The operation seems pointless." ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... advertisements and official announcements, while even the few remaining columns are often deplorably misused. One detestable custom, originally borrowed from France, is that of "padding" a journal with tenth-rate novels, pointless anecdotes and would-be humorous feuilletons, such as the weakest "comic annual" would decline without thanks. Another failing of Russian journalism is its fondness for the tu-quoque style of argument, retorting every mention of Poland by an allusion to Ireland. But, despite ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... Ministers generally, and the advantages of submission on their part to their chief, was thought by some who heard it not to have been made in good taste. The joke was just such a joke as the Duchess would be sure to make,—meaning very little but still not altogether pointless. It was levelled rather at her husband than at her husband's colleagues who were present, and was so understood by those who really knew her,—as did Mrs. Finn, and Mr. Warburton, the private secretary. But Sir Orlando and Sir Timothy ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... and was holding a screen between her face and the fire, motioned him to, seat himself opposite. He did so without words. He felt curiously and ridiculously tongue-tied. He fell to studying the woman instead of attempting the banality of pointless speech. From the smooth gloss of her burnished hair, to the daintiness of her low, black brocaded shoes, she represented, so far as her physical and outward self were concerned, absolute perfection. No ornament was ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
