"Futile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... best clothes; you sat in rows round a stuffy room; you drank stewed tea, and ate buttered cakes. You met every day the same—everlastingly the same ladies, dressed in the same garments, and listened every day to the same futile talk. From the older ladies, criticisms of last Sunday's sermon, and details of household grievances; from the younger, "Have you seen Miss Horby's new hat? Did you hear the latest about the Briggs? ... I'm going to ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... to Andy Gowran again, but Mrs. Hittaway did. After a faint and futile endeavour made by her to ascertain what had taken place in the parlour down-stairs, she descended and found Andy seated in his chair, still holding his hat in his hand, as stiff as a wax figure. He had been afraid of the lord, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... under shields or hoods, lined with non-heat-conducting material, and to bury them in non-heat-conducting material in a pulverized state, for the purpose of retaining and equalizing the heat; but all these attempts have proved futile in practice, and the fact remains, that the universal practice in steel works at the present day all over the world is to employ a heating furnace of ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... Bulwer and Byron heroes and heroines are very well, they are all of them handsome; but my personages are mostly unattractive in look, and therefore ill-adapted to figure in ideal portraits. At the best, I have always thought such representations futile. You will not easily find a second Thackeray. How he can render, with a few black lines and dots, shades of expression so fine, so real; traits of character so minute, so subtle, so difficult to seize and fix, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... in the disappearance of the old marriage service. It was like the dropping of a weight to which our shoulders had become so accustomed that we hardly realized it till it was gone. Instead of pompous and futile absurdity—as in the existing exhortation, and homily—beautiful and fitting quotation from the unused treasures of the Bible. Instead of the brutal speech, the crudely physical outlook of an earlier day, the just reticence and nobler perceptions of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
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