"Ennui" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... portion, part, participation; advantage, benefit, weal, behoof; usury. Antonyms: boredom, ennui, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... would brush the whole phantasmagoria away, force himself back into the world of Equatoria, stride out of his rooms, if it were day, and down into the city; but the pressure of the deeper activities of his mind would steal back and command him. His physical nature was sunk into a great ennui, and the other forces ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... ashore were mere oases, separated by whole deserts of the most wearisome ennui. For weeks, perhaps, those who were not fortunate enough to be living hard and getting fatigued every day in the boats were yawning away their existence in an atmosphere only comparable to that of an orchid-house, a life ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... servants—preparing his food herself, watching for his safety, and at length saving him. Her tenderness, her patience, her discretion, her disinterested benevolence not only defied danger (that were little to a woman of her temper), but endured a lengthened trial, all the ennui caused by the necessity of keeping her house, continued self-control, and the thousand small daily sacrifices which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been hard to bear. Now, if Shakespere had drawn the character of the Duchess ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... worn, complained of ennui, was already wearied of the life she had been leading, and had lost all ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... majesty; the college doctor, in cap and gown, anointing the young princes of knowledge; the buffoon, in his cap and bells, dancing to the god of laughter; mylady of the pink-tea circle, in her huffing, puffing gasoline-car, fleeing the monster of ennui; the bride and bridegroom at the altar or before the mayor putting on their already heavy-ruffled garments the sacred ruffle of law or religion; the babe brought to church by his mother and kindred to have the priest-tailor sew on his new garment the ruffle ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... muttering to himself, 'I suppose this poor beggar was put here out of the way. They might, you know,' he added confidentially, raising the ferrule of his umbrella, 'they might have stuck a stake through you, and buried you at the crossroads.' And again, a feeling of ennui, a faint disgust at his poor little witticism, clouded over his mind. It was a pity thoughts always ran the easiest way, ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... that larger vision of the opening world, which is only not too much for the great, irregular art of Shakspere; and everywhere the effort is visible in the work of his hands. This agitation, this perpetual delay, give him an air of weariness and ennui. To others he seems to be aiming at an impossible effect, to do something that art, that painting, can never do. Often the expression of physical beauty at this or that point seems strained and marred in the effort, as in those heavy German ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... and abbeys and churches of Europe for more than one thousand years. It was true congregational singing, in which all took part; simple and religious as the songs of Methodists, both to drive away fear and ennui, and fortify the soul by inspiring melodies,—not artistic music borrowed from the opera and oratorio, and sung by four people, in a distant loft, for the amusement of the rich pew-holders of a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... assembled to breathe the coolness of the evening. This man was the Marquis Don Vegal, knight of Alcantara, of Malta, and of Charles III. He had a right to appear in this pompous equipage; the viceroy and the archbishop could alone take precedence of him; but this great nobleman came here from ennui and not from ostentation; his thoughts were not depicted on his countenance, they were concentrated beneath his bent brow; he received no impression from exterior objects, on which he bestowed not a look, and heard not the envious reflections of the mestizoes, when his four horses ...
— The Pearl of Lima - A Story of True Love • Jules Verne
... It had seemed to him that the house was darker, and gloomier, and more comfortless than ever. He had hurried over to see a dying man, and now there was nothing for him to do but to kick his heels. But before he went to bed his ennui was dissipated by a full explanation of all his aunt's terrors. She crept down to him at about nine, and having commenced her story by saying that she had a matter of most vital importance on which to speak to him, she told him ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... condemned to a state of perfect rest, but it was not the remedies or the abstinence I dreaded most; I feared the effects of ennui; I thought I should die of it. No doubt the doctor saw the danger as well as myself, for he asked me if I would mind his sister coming and working in my room occasionally with a few of her friends. I replied that, despite my shame ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... he ran the soul of the desert, born of the sun, palms, ennui, flies, the sand, and Allah knows what besides, suddenly sat up in Jill's eyes and laughed, and as she laughed the words "Go always alone in ze night to 'is oasis bien aimee" rang in the girl's ears, as a strange and startling idea flashed ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... Ennui, before long, gave place to grumbling, and that to recrimination; and from what the others could not help hearing, through the boarded-up doors and the floor of the loft, Tom and his wife had a cat-and-dog time ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... the morbid melancholy of Chateaubriand. It is directed towards an observation of others, not towards an analysis of self, and this gives it more philosophical importance, because although romantic peevishness is very common among modern poets, and although ennui inspires a multitude of sonnets, a deliberate and imaginative study of useless suffering in the world around us is rare indeed among the poets. It is particularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... But Ennui finds entrance into every scene, when the gloss of novelty is over; and the fiend began to seize upon Mr. Touchwood just when he had got all matters to his mind in the Cleikum Inn—had instructed Dame Dods in the mysteries ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... imagined his soul to be crushed by grief. He suffered from quickly succeeding impulses to weep, to howl, to bite his fists till blood came, to spend days on his bed with his head thrust under the pillow; but these arose from sheer ennui, from the anguish of an immense, indescribable, inconceivable boredom. His mental inability to grasp the hopeless nature of his case as a whole saved him from suicide. He never even thought of it once. He thought of nothing. But his appetite ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... enquired with the tedious irony of ennui, "is one indebted for this unexpected honour on the part of the First Under-Secretary of the British Secret Service? Or whatever your high-sounding ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... Ages, instead of grumbly dusty provocations from the present,—his feeling, haste mainly, and need of getting through! The very Crown-Prince, I should guess, was as good as indifferent to this antique Cadet of the Hohenzollerns; and looked on Nurnberg and the old white Castle with little but ENNUI: the Princess of England, and black cares on her beautiful account and his own, possess him too exclusively. But in truth we do not even know what day they arrived or departed; much less what they did or felt in ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... But he was not yet cured of longing for that self-forbidden city in the North. He desired it—he desired the arid wilderness of its treeless streets, its incessant sounds, its restless energy; he desired its pleasures, its frivolous days and nights, its satiated security, its ennui. Its life had been his life, its people his people, and he longed for it with ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... Versailles would occasionally shed a ray of sunshine, or rather lamp light, over Louis the Fifteenth's habitual ennui. After supper, chansons, sallies, and repartee, would be the order of the night. Occasionally at these supper-parties some brilliant things would be said. One evening, when some one sang a complaint upon ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... a very bad time—I still recall. I suffered, I suppose, from a sort of ennui of the imagination. I found myself without an object to hold my will together. I sought. I read restlessly and discursively. I tried Ewart and got no help from him. As I regard it all now in this retrospect, it seems to me as if in those days of disgust and abandoned ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... professional damnation—he knew that; every second must break like froth in a wine glass; an instant's perplexity, a slackening of the tension, and those flaccid intellects would relax into native inertia. Incapable of self-amusement, depending utterly upon superior minds for a respite from ennui, their caprice controlled his ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... inwardly at the note of pride in his voice and looked up to meet a pair of brilliant black eyes looking at me with an appraising approval that grated. He was a tall, good looking chap, with an air of ennui that sat oddly on his powerful frame. I felt sure that I would like Lillian Gale's husband as little as I did ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... is your air and jaded; Sabbath hours have lost their zest; Utter ennui has invaded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... nature, and a series of agreeable and uninterrupted sensations invite to repose and oblivion. But in the changeful and tumultuous atmosphere of England, to be tranquil is a labour, and employment is necessary to ward off the attacks of ennui. The English as a nation is pre-eminently active, and the natives of no other country follow their objects with so much force, fire, and constancy. And, as human powers are limited, there are few ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... had every thing which could make life happy; an ample fortune, affectionate family, fame never contested, the consciousness of great powers nobly applied—"I have never through life," said he in his old age, "had a chagrin, still less an hour of ennui. I waken in the morning with a secret pleasure at beholding the light. I gaze upon it with species of ravishment. All the day I am content. In the evening when I retire to rest, I fall into a sort of reverie which ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... a buckler for the purpose of confronting ennui. I place my time at the direction of patience; and on the very eve of feeling I am going to get bored, I ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... transported Us as prisoners to Paris, Caged us in Vincennes' strong fortress. 'Damn them!' said our valiant colonel, Hans von Weerth, 'it was much nicer, Galloping, with shining sabres Hostile lines to charge with fury, Than on this hard bench to sit here, And to battle with ennui thus. For this foe there is no weapon, Neither wine nor even dice-box, Nothing but tobacco. I once Tried it in the country of the Dull Mynheers, and here it also Will do service; let us smoke then!' The commander of the fortress Got a keg ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... never so startled in my life. It was a dread revelation of dissatisfaction and ennui, that might lead no one ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... come for love of thee! They seek from ennui to be free, To ask some boon, or tell some tale Which, true or false, will rarely fail To leave behind ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... nothing to be desired; she who had been somewhat unmindful of him lately on a sudden seemed really glad to see him. His slightly tired, aristocratic face lightened; the sunshine of Jocelyn Wray's eyes, the tonic of youth radiating from her, were sufficient to alleviate, if not dispel, ennui ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... short, slender and stout, dark and light, but they had these things in common—they all dressed in black and white, their hair was lofty and of exaggerated waterfall, and their expressions never altered from one of lazy-eyed, lofty, scornful ennui. To Bobby they were easily the leading feature ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... but not sufficiently elevated above the range of every-day life; he has exhausted the surface of life; and as there is little progression in his dramas, and every thing turns usually on the same point, this adds to the impression of shallowness and ennui, as characteristic of the existing state of society. Willingly would he have abolished masks altogether, but he could hardly have compensated for them out of his own resources; however, he retained only a few of them, as Harlequin, Brighella, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... request, Margaret, eager for any subject of passing occupation that might enliven, even for a moment, an hour's ennui, desired that she might be admitted; and shortly after a simply dressed girl, whose sunken head could not conceal her exquisite beauty, was ushered in. Her step as ill-assured and trembling; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... knowing what to do with himself but fiddle around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough. Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... imitating Kotzebue's plays! Nothing but our nefarious magnanimity was the cause of Juno's untimely end. For had we, instead of kneeling (which by the way seemed to "punish" you a good deal), had we, I say, vested the property in one or other of us, she, instead of diverting her ennui by hunting, would have been trotting home by the side of her master—and the article would have been ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... great and varied throng, as the beggar munching a crust may look in at a banqueting hall, but the people they are forced to live with are exactly like themselves; and that way lies not only monomania but an ennui that makes the blessing ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... things in which there is social danger, unless with the larger leisure are given high and enduring interests. To health especially there is great danger, for nothing breaks down a woman's health like idleness and its resulting ennui. More people, I am sure, are broken down nervously because they are bored, than because they are overworked; and more still go to pieces through fussiness, unwholesome living, worry over petty details, and the daily disappointments which result ...
— Why go to College? an Address • Alice Freeman Palmer
... them. Much better marry a respectable pork-butcher outright, and have at least the healthful exercise of chopping sausage-meat to fill up the stray gaps in the conversation. In that condition of life, they say, people are at any rate perfectly safe from the terrors of ennui. However, the season was over at last, thank Heaven; and in a week or so more they would be at dear old ugly Dunbude again for the whole winter. There Hilda would go sketching once more on the moorland, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... went to Europe as consul, Uncle Tom's Cabin was already published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... at times her grave eyes clouded and her attention wandered, it was less in ennui than because of occult trains of thought set astir by some chance word or phrase ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... stranded at this pleasant place of endurable ennui for three long months, during which there was no going out from nine to five P.M. Our society afforded little resource, our reading less. When the weather permitted—that is, in the delicious, incomparable month ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues"; but he does not realize that the student, tho in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, tho it may be a more ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... they had fallen into a lower and narrower place in her affection, but that they saw Chateaubriand installed in a higher and larger place. They feared that her peace would be wrecked in wretchedness by an intimate connection with one so discontented and capricious, a sort of spoilt idol, a hero of ennui, filled with causeless melancholy, voracious of praise, querulous, exacting, his own imperious and inevitable personality ever uppermost. In vain they sought to warn and dissuade her from the new attachment. Montmorency seems to have fancied that ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... after the marriageable time,—or, rather, that is what interests the women who sit of summer nights on balconies. For in those long-moon countries life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different pieces, and has a personal way of playing them ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... without yours beginning to scowl. That which you do is unworthy, Monsieur; is inhospitable—is, is lache, yes, lache:" (he spoke rapidly in French, his rage carrying him away with each phrase:) "I come to your house; I risk my life; I pass it in ennui; I repose myself on your fidelity; I have no company but your lordship's sermons or the conversations of that adorable young lady, and you take her from me, and you, you rest! Merci, Monsieur! I shall thank you when I have the means; I shall know to recompense a devotion a little importunate, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... place, spot. endurer, to endure, put up with. enfance, f., childhood, enfant, m. f., child. enfanter, to beget. enfer, m., enfers, pl., hell. enfin, at length, at last, lastly, in short, anyhow. enflammer, to inflame. enfoncer, to drive deeply. ennemi, m., enemy; adj., hostile. ennui, m., weariness, trouble, ennuyer, to weary; s'— , to find no pleasure in. entasser, to heap up. entendre, to hear; se faire —, to be heard; to understand; faire —, to give to understand. enti-er, -re, whole. entraner, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... 5; regard of Gallatin for, 9; pained at Gallatin's departure, 11; gives him letter to Kinloch, 11; sends him money and secures interest of Dr. Cooper, 17; his ingratitude toward, regretted by Gallatin, 20; supposes his failure to write due to misfortune, 27; accuses Gallatin of indolence and ennui, ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... What to do! I no longer doubted the truth of little Mr. Rumplestein-O'Grady's story. But what to do about it? I considered going to the warehouse, but the thought of high adventure sends nothing but ennui coursing through my veins. Besides, there was undoubtedly some element of danger in that course. The police! Naturally! They would know how to deal with this situation and perhaps even avenge poor Mr. Rumplestein's ...
— "To Invade New York...." • Irwin Lewis
... easier. It is but a moderate distance from here, and if you can moderate your young footsteps, and your American quick walk, to an old man's pace, I would go there with you some day. In this languor and ennui of my life, I spend some time in local antiquarianism, and perhaps I might assist you in tracing out how far these traditions of yours may have any connection with reality. It would be curious, would it not, if you had come, after two hundred years, to piece out a ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... saw that it was raining; and in that part of the world it really never does rain but it pours. Needless to touch upon the impatient ennui with which he roamed the house. He sent for Andre to lunch ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... subject the labouring classes to unnecessary labour is wantonly depriving them of any opportunities of intellectual improvement; and that the rich are heaping up for their own mischief the disease, lassitude, and ennui by which their existence ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... that; is it not so? Allow me therefore to exculpate myself. I am a woman who, since childhood, has had to labour for my livelihood and for that of those I love. You can know nothing of what that labour of the artist's life entails,—interminable journeys, suffocating ennui, the unwholesome monotony and publicity of a life passed in hotels and trains. It was not fit that a young and growing girl should share that life. As much as has been possible I have guarded Karen from ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... awnings, and sheltered from the boisterous afternoon trade winds by the opposite side of the court. But Susy did not seem inclined to linger there long that morning, in spite of Mrs. Peyton's evident desire for a maternal tete-a-tete. The nervous preoccupation and capricious ennui of an indulged child showed in her pretty but discontented face, and knit her curved eyebrows, and Peyton saw a look of pain pass over his wife's face as the young girl suddenly and half-laughingly broke away and fluttered ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... is by no means adapted to the plebian taste. It requires a certain acquaintance with high life, and-and-and something of-of-something d'un vrai gout, to be really sensible of its merit. Those whose-whose connections, and so forth, are not among les gens comme il faut, can feel nothing but ennui at ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... hate it all—all—all!" said Bianca, as she swallowed the last drop of her coffee, and threw herself on the sofa in an attitude of languor and ennui. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... sally forth e'en now. What martyrdom endurest thou! What kind of life is this to be living, Ennui to thyself and youngsters giving? Let Neighbor Belly that way go! To stay here threshing straw why car'st thou? The best that thou canst think and know To tell the boys not for the whole world dar'st thou. E'en now I hear one in ...
— Faust • Goethe
... They therefore feel continual languor and listlessness, unless when under the influence of the stimulus which brought on the exhaustion. Every scene, however beautiful, is beheld with indifference by such patients, and the degree of ennui they feel is insupportable: this makes them have recourse to the stimulus which has exhausted their excitability, which in some degree removes this languor for a time; but it returns with redoubled strength, and redoubled horror, when the stimulant ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... saw him. You really ought to take up your abode here, or live somewhere near him. He mopes dreadfully, and needs nothing so much as the society of an old friend. You could rouse him from his blue fits and ennui, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Gill's sleeve, she allured him. The assistant paused before them. The Spanish girl continued to allure. Merton Gill stared moodily at the half-empty wine glass, then exhaled smoke as he glanced up at his companion in profound ennui. If it was The Blight of Broadway probably they would want him to ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... compositions is so invariably sensational, the gesture so calculated, so theatrical, that much of the truly impressive material, the quantities of original ideas, lose all substantiality, and become indistinct components of these vast mountains of ennui, these wastes of rhetorical and bombastic instruments, these loud and prancing concertos of circus-music. There is something almost insulting to the intelligence in these over-emphasized works, these ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... state of profound idleness, which to me is a luxury; and we should all, I believe, have been in a state of high enjoyment, had it not been for the detestable cold gales and much rain, which always gives much ennui to children away from their homes. I received your letter of 13th June, when working like a slave with Mr. Sowerby at drawing for my second volume, and so put off answering it till when I knew I should be at leisure. I was extremely glad to get your letter. I had intended a couple of months ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... an unfailing source of solace and satisfaction. During my long years of official banishment to the luxuriant and deadly deserts of Western Africa, and to the dull and dreary half clearings of South America, it proved itself a charm, a talisman against ennui and despondency. Impossible even to open the pages without a vision starting into view; with out drawing a picture from the pinacothek of the brain; without reviving a host of memories and reminiscences which are not the common property of travellers, however widely ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... have the truth at last, the explanation, perhaps, of all the extraordinary ennui and neglect that had made such an invasion as that of Alaric, as that of Radagaisus, as this of Attila, possible. For it is only what is in the mind that is of any importance. The empire rightly understood was not about to die, but to change ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... army, but it was too late, and after a futile pursuit round the entire country, he had the chagrin of seeing the French enter Stuttgart. Here Villars remained but a few days. Wilhelmine said afterwards that 'l'ennui de Stuttgard' had proved a greater defence than the entire Imperial army! Be this as it may, Villars evacuated Stuttgart in an amazingly short time, and retired eastwards to the ancient town of Schorndorf. Now the Duchess-mother ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... the doorway, drawling a little as he talked to his friends—evidently a lion, bored in advance with the whole proceeding and meaning to slip away as soon as he could. But when his eye fell on Mary, he stared at her unobserved for nearly a minute and his ennui disappeared ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... so ready as he for a fight, none so quick to resent the intrusion of a respectable man into his haunts. So he had money enough to procure his peculiar garb, a "mersheen" to run with and fight for, a girl to console him, the "Old Bowery Theatre" to beguile him from his ennui, and the Bowery itself to disport his glory in, he was content. Rows were numerous in this quarter, and they afforded him all the other relaxation he desired. If there be any truth in the theories of Spiritualism, let us be sure his ghost still ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... you think it is so. Yet you know me so well, Don, that you should understand me better. I handed the whole affair over to Nevin, and to you that seems like ennui, I know. But it does not mean that; it simply means that as a hopeless man of business I appoint another to do what I know myself incapable of doing. Once I am committed to the production of a book, Don, I cease to exist outside its pages. I live and move ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... chair, and sat down again on a corner of the table. Carnaby stood up, threw his arms above his head, and yawned with animal vehemence, the expression of an intolerable ennui. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... hours in the autumn, but sometimes they continue for days. The atmosphere seems half water, and its warm damp compels close-housing, to avoid the clammy, sickly feeling met beyond the portals. At such times, time hangs heavily, and every resource sometimes fails to dispel the gloom and ennui consequent upon the weather; conversation will pall; music cease to delight, and reading weary. To stand and watch the rain through the window-panes, to lounge from the drawing-room to your chamber, to drum with your fingers ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... on. Naturally we four bold spirits, the ubiquitous McGuntrie, Van Blarcom, the young reservist Pietro Ricci,—a very good sort of fellow,—and I were herded together beyond escape. Also, a foursome at bridge seemed divinely indicated by our number, and to avert a sheer paralysis of ennui we formed the habit of winning each other's money at ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... above him the lady, who had been gazing down the road from sheer ennui, had noticed the graceful figure of the cavalier, and had watched his approach until he halted with upturned face beneath her window. At that instant a little fan opening as it fell, dropped from her hand and fluttered in the light breeze, like a bird with a broken wing, beyond the road and ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... of the Court, and Lady Merceron could not quite understand why Charlie had tired so soon of his excursion, or why his friend persisted with so much fervor that anything was better than London, and the Court was the most charming place he had ever seen. Of the two Charlie seemed to feel the ennui much the more severely. Yet, while Mr. Wentworth spoke of returning to town in a few weeks, Charlie asseverated that he had paid his last visit to that revolting and disappointing place. Lady Merceron wished she had Uncle Van by her side ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... a little to kill time, and occupies much of it with her embroidery and other fancy works, and after a short period passed amongst the vine-clad hills, sighs once more to return to her dear Paris, complains of ennui, wonders what the fashions will be at the next Longchamp, and whether they will be such as become her or not, but feeling herself bound to wear whatever may be pronounced the modes, and trusts to ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... irresistible enchantment. He became bored at the long hours in the bright sun, yawned in his wicker chair, smoking pipe after pipe, not knowing what to talk about. Josephina, on her part, tried to drive away the ennui by reading some English novel of aristocratic life, tiresome and moral, to which she had taken a great liking in her ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... for we sometimes feel desire or aversion without immediately knowing their objects, and in consequence without immediately exerting any of our muscular or sensual motions to attain them: as in the beginning of the passion of love, and perhaps of hunger, or in the ennui of indolent people. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... it's Roy Gilbert!" and ran towards the courtyard. The car finally disgorged Nettie Gilbert and her uninteresting fourteen-year-old daughter. They came in for luncheon, and their story was soon told. Paris was hot, and in despair of dispelling Roy's thickening ennui at his European exile, which threatened to terminate their trip, Mrs. Gilbert had induced her husband to charter the car for a tour of Normandy and Brittany. Having done all the north-coast watering-places and remembering that ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... Lin Tai-y, when she found that Pao-y had gone out of doors, she continued the whole day a prey to ennui. In the evening, she deputed messengers two and three times to go and inquire about him. But when she came to know that he had been scalded, she hurried in person to come and see him. She then discovered Pao-y all alone, holding a glass and scanning his features ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... have seemed long and monotonous; but the daily walks on the platform, when I steeped myself in the reviving air of the ocean, the sight of the rich waters through the windows of the saloon, the books in the library, the compiling of my memoirs, took up all my time, and left me not a moment of ennui ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... sex love maintain itself without marriage and marriage colors over sex love with parental feelings, financial interests, home and its emotions, etc. In sex gratification[1] there is the danger of all sensuous pleasure: that a periodic appetite gratified often leaves behind it an ennui, a distaste,—sometimes reaching dislike—of the entire ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... often contents himself with approximate rhymes that are nearly as bad as some of Mrs. Browning's and Whittier's. Very different is the deliberate artifice of the following lines, where the monotony of the rhyme-sound fits the "solemn ennui" of the trailing peacocks; ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... wonderful in that,' said I; 'we are at the commencement of a philological age, every one studies languages; that is, every one who is fit for nothing else; philology being the last resource of dulness and ennui, I have got a little in advance of the throng, by mastering the Armenian alphabet; but I foresee the time when every unmarriageable miss, and desperate blockhead, will likewise have acquired the letters of Mesroub, and will know the term for bread, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... entered the hotel and mounted to his room. He was beginning to hate it, its hideous hotel furniture, the memory of hours of ennui spent there. Against his doorsill the evening paper lay, and picking it up he let himself in and lighted the gas. On the mantel the small nickel clock seemed to start out at him, insolently proclaiming the hour, half past seven. He ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... The powerful Superintendent of Finance, with his eye for the beautiful and desire for the luxury of kings, built for himself such a chateau as only the magnificence of that time produced. It was situated far enough from Paris to escape any sort of ennui, and was surrounded by gardens most marvellous, within a beauteous park. It lay, when finished, like a jewel on the fair bosom of France. The great superintendent conceived the idea of pleasing the young ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Grig's typewriting office. At that very moment she herself ought to have been dancing. Not in a smart club; no! Only in the basement of a house where an acquaintance of hers lodged; and only with clerks and things like that; and only a gramophone. But still a dance, a respite from the immense ennui and solitude ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... is, but my frame is one peculiarly susceptible to ennui. There's no man so instantaneously bored. What activity does this singular constitution in all cases produce! All who are sensitive to ennui do eight times the work of a sleek, contented man. Anything but a large chair by the fireside, and a family circle! Oh! ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... care and ennui away by indulging in private theatricals; this winter they organized an amateur company, called themselves the "Teheran Bulbuls," and, with burnt-corked faces and grotesque attire, they rehearsed and perfected themselves in "Uncle Ebenezer's ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... morning paper about the coddling of criminals; and witty writers will have it that prisons are gentlemen's clubs where all the comforts of refined life are combined with a voluptuous idleness, or with only work enough to avert ennui. Criminals are depicted as waiting in cues at the gates of prisons for admission, like the public at the doors of a popular theater; though at the same time in another column, you may find the statement ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... fish-like mouths and eyes. Their habits were as unpollywoglike as their appearance. I visited their micaceous pool again and again; and if I could have spent days instead of hours with them, no moment of ennui ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... il l'attrape en volant; il a de la grace et de la finesse dans ce qu'il dit mais il ne sais pas causer de suite; il est distrait, indifferent; il s'ennuierait souvent sans une tres bonne recette qu'il a contre l'ennui, c'est de s'endormir quand il veut. C'est un talent que je lui envie bien; si je l'avais, j'en ferais grand usage. Il est malin sans etre mechant; il est officieux, poli; hors son milord March, il n'aime rien: on ne saurait ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... opens with a dance given in honour of Tatiana's birthday. Onegin feels bored and out of sheer ennui he begins to flirt with Olga. The thoughtless girl willingly yields to the young man's attentions and promises to dance the cotillion with him, in order to punish her lover for his jealousy.—This tactless behaviour enrages Lenski to such a degree, that he challenges Onegin ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... have suffered from ennui. The roping and throwing and branding, the wild swing and dash of handling stock, the mad races to head the mustangs, the fierce combats to subdue these raging wild beasts to the saddle, the spectacle of the round-up with its brutish multitudes and its graceful riders, the dust and monotony and ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... experience, the passionate personal interest in people and things, which gave design to the great art of the past. It is at best satirical, at worst parasitic, using up all devices of design and turning from one to another in a restless ennui which of itself can give no enrichment. It may have its uses, since it insists upon the supreme importance of design and provides a new method for the expression of three dimensions; but this method will be barren unless those who practise it enrich it with their own observation ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... "I'll confess that if there is one thing for which I am especially grateful to Providence it is for its having spared me the ennui of having to live in a virtuous world! But sit down, and I'll talk as if that blessing had not been granted to us. As for the salutation of Mr. Rangely which so shocked your reverence, that was part of the campaign. He had ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... also seen the world, and after long experience have discovered that ennui is our greatest enemy, and remunerative labor our ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... happier in mind. I think I was dying of ennui; but the doctors called it inherited delicacy of constitution. That is why mamma is so anxious, and I wish not ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... in that first conversation, told me much about herself that she did not know she was telling. I became fairly certain, for instance, that she had not married Mr. Douglas van Tuiver for love. The young girl who has so married does not suffer from ennui in the first year, nor does she find her happiness depending upon her ability to solve the problem of charity in connection with her husband's ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... the deliberate marches of the plodding horse, and the endless rocking of the dromedary that knoweth his master! Farewell, finally, to annoyance without anger, delay without vexation, indolence without ennui, endurance without fatigue, appetite without ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... occupation is as essential for the happiness and wellbeing of woman as of man. Without it, women are apt to sink into a state of listless ENNUI and uselessness, accompanied by sick headache and attacks of "nerves." Caroline Perthes carefully warned her married daughter Louisa to beware of giving way to such listlessness. "I myself," she said, "when ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... I am sure, that the world would be glad to welcome you, as a remarkable young man; and you would soon find yourself able to look at things more calmly. You would see that all these things are much simpler than you think; and, besides, these rare cases come about, in my opinion, from ennui and ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... saw her disappear amongst the guests in the other salon, under the bright flood of light shed by the chandeliers; and when she was gone, it seemed to him that the little Japanese salon was positively empty and that night had fallen on it. Profound ennui at once overcame him, while Marianne, in a happy frame of mind, on returning to Kayser's studio, reviewed the incidents of that evening, recalling Vaudrey's restless smile, and seeming again to hear Rosas's ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... to-day living according to plain common sense—spiritual common sense as well as material—is the fact that we are all living in a chronic state of excitement. It is easy to prove this fact by seeing how soon most of us suffer from ennui when "there is not anything going on." It seems now as if the average man or woman whom we see would find it quite impossible to stop and do nothing—for an hour or more. "But," some one will say, "why should I stop and do nothing when I am as busy ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... mais je crois que vous pouvez etre sans inquietude sur les consequences de celui-ci. Mon medecin est un homme habile qui soignera tres bien votre tante, et mes filles lui epargneront un mal tres penible, l'ennui ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... sense, a well-regulated character, saves from idleness and ennui, alternating with sentimentality and excitement, those tenderer emotions, those deeper passions, those nobler aspirations of humanity, which are the heritage of the woman far more than of the man; and which are potent in her, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Most of my days between my fifteenth and twenty-fifth years were spent in the wars. At the age of twenty-five I returned to the chateau, there to reside as my uncle's representative, and to endure the ennui of peace. At the chateau I found a fair, tall girl, fifteen years of age: Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland, soon afterward Queen of France and rightful heiress to the English throne. The ennui of peace, ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... more feared than respected throughout the village. The Corporal was a cunning teacher of all animals: he could learn goldfinches the use of the musket; dogs, the art of the broadsword; horses, to dance hornpipes and pick pockets; and he had relieved the ennui of his solitary moments by imparting sundry accomplishments to the ductile genius of his cat. Under his tuition, Puss had learned to fetch and carry; to turn over head and tail, like a tumbler; to run up your shoulder when you ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... caused by that last infirmity of noble ships, without concerning myself much with the why or the wherefore. The surmise of my maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui at every seam. But at the time I did not know; I knew generally very little, and least of all what I was doing ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... difficulty succeeded in pacifying the mystified individual; assuring him that Ganguernet, though fond of fun, was in the main a charming good fellow, a pleasant boon companion, and one without whom, especially in the country, it was impossible to drive away ennui. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... house, striking across the fields so as not to run any risk of encountering Mr. Casaubon's carriage, which, however, did not appear at the gate until four o'clock. That was an unpropitious hour for coming home: it was too early to gain the moral support under ennui of dressing his person for dinner, and too late to undress his mind of the day's frivolous ceremony and affairs, so as to be prepared for a good plunge into the serious business of study. On such occasions he usually threw into an easy-chair in the library, and ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... is, and hard of heart, and like to die of ennui at times. And hence it welcomes with pathetic joy all who can bring some new fancy or trick to their castle-building, rejecting all other without remorse. To this World of Fashion Iola had offered herself, giving freely her great voice and her superb body, now developed into the full splendour ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... the mind fed too long upon monotony succumbs to the insidious mental ailment which the West calls "cabin fever." True, it parades under different names, according to circumstances and caste. You may be afflicted in a palace and call it ennui, and it may drive you to commit peccadillos and indiscretions of various sorts. You may be attacked in a middle-class apartment house, and call it various names, and it may drive you to cafe life and affinities and alimony. You may have it wherever ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... generally spoken of in brisk naval asides as a "duffer," the kitchen of his boat is a wine-closet, and, to look at him poring for hours over his paper, one may well believe that time is heavy on his hands and that he arrives during every summer vacation at depths of mortal ennui where "nothing new is, and nothing true is, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... and human, as Zenobia and Eustacia are human, and pathetic in their fates, with a pathos that even Hawthorne and Mr. Hardy have seldom the power to make us feel. But the fate of Nora was ironic as the fate of none of the others, for all three of them escaped the ennui and misery of life, while Nora but begins a new life, freer for the moment than her old life, but promising, in the end, only ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... with melancholy or ennui a short while before, now had the glow of pre-determined conquest; his face shone with that resolve; and by this transformation, as well as by the inconsistency of his countenance with the soft tone and playful ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... sister, wife, and children yawned, With a long, slow, and drear ennui, All human patience far beyond; 715 Their hopes of Heaven each would have pawned, Anywhere ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... exert all her will to keep with her this Indian summer. She must school her nature, govern her passions, drill her mind to accept with serenity what was to come—dulness, delay, the long fatigues of playing a part, the ennui of tent life, of this solitude a deux in the Fayyum. She must not permit this opulence of beauty to be tarnished by the ravages of jealousy; for jealousy often destroys the beauty of women, turns them into ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... absolutely real; Yashvin, the typical officer; the English trainer, Cord; Betsy, always cheerful, always heartless, probably the worst character in the whole book, Satan's own spawn; Karenin himself, not ridiculous, like an English Restoration husband, but with an overwhelming power of creating ennui, in which he lives and ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... mus' kill you I shall do so. Otherwise I have sufficient trouble to keep me from ennui. My frien', I am going home to enjoy my property. If you live or die it signifies nothing to me. No! Why, for the pleasure of killing you, should I bring your dirty gendarmes ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... American, and Russian. These are not afflicted with curiosity as to each other's past. The chief is under sealed orders; both German and Russian had left their respective countries for good of Kaiser and Tsar; the American is an adventurous son of millionaire residing in New York. Weary of ennui in the metropolis, this Yankee aristocrat seeks diversion in trips to all parts of the globe. All of these are ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... job to earn your living honestly and to satisfy the absolute needs of many people by quickly and painlessly slaughtering cattle. But, when somebody, just for the sake of killing time, because of ennui, shoots and martyrs harmless animals, or merely so wounds them that if they are not retrieved they must die terrible deaths, we call it noble sport. I should like to see a demonstration of the difference between killing an ox and ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... regarde jamais mes partitions sans etre gagne par la tristesse et sans penser que de morceaux a retoucher! En composant, je n'ai jamais connu d'autre muse que l'ennui." ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... and the obtrusive importunity of place-seekers, in a manner that pleased us much more than a dance would have done. Conversation was kept up very well, and the visit passed off without any feeling of ennui, or anything whatever to recollect with regret. The ladies looked at us from their apartments through gratings, and without our being able to see them very distinctly. We were anxious to see the tombs of the late Raja, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... metal. He has a new responsibility and it adds to his strength of character to assume it in all its phases. Another thing it brings comfort and joy to the mother during the long days while her man is out in the fray. It drives ennui out of the household throughout our ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... know," he said grimly. "With my violin, a good cook, English books and papers—I hate your Yankee trash—and occasional travel, I think I could get through life without very great ennui. I do not expect to be governor of Virginia for ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... moving from wave to wave over alternate swells and depressions and finally to reach the vast, interminable low prairie that extends itself in front—(be it for hours, days or weeks)—one never tires; pleasurable and exhilarating sensations are all the time felt; ennui is never experienced. Doubtless there are moments when excessive heat, a want of fresh water, and other privations remind one that life is a toil; but these drawbacks are of short duration. There are no concealed dangers—no difficulties of road; a far-spreading ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... have heard of ladies whose whole lives seem to be but a changing from one kind of pleasure to another; who suffer chiefly from what they call ennui, (a kind of disease from which my sisters are not likely to suffer at all,) and to whom a new pleasure to enjoy would be something like what a new world to conquer would be to Alexander. Why should they not hear our Lancashire girls' cry of 'Con ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... if he had said he was going to drown himself. Blinker bids man fetch some cool outing flannels—he acts as if he were preparing to go to be shot, but must face it. Ennui ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... yes. I have been fifteen years at St. Peter's awaiting that day when through pure ennui the examiners will pass me. It will be a sad wrench to leave the dear old home." He continued, a tinge of melancholy in his voice: "You know, I am the last of the old brigade. The medical student no longer riots. His name is no longer ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... began in the blue drawing-room. Heat and fatigue soon put an end to all coquetting between the sexes. The beautiful silks were hidden by the crowd; only the shoulders remained, and, to appease their terrible ennui, the men gazed down the backs of the women's dresses. Shoulders were there, of all tints and shapes. Indeed, it was like a vast rosary, alive with white, pink, and cream-coloured flowers; of Marechal Niels, Souvenir de Malmaisons, Mademoiselle Eugene Verdiers, Aimee Vibert ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... voluptuousness. For our part, we are slow to believe that ever any man did or could learn the somewhat awful truth, that in a certain ruby-colored elixir there lurked a divine power to chase away the genius of ennui, without subsequently abusing this power. True it is that generations have used laudanum as an anodyne (for instance, hospital patients) who have not afterward courted its powers as a voluptuous stimulant; but that, be sure, has arisen from no abstinence in them. There are in ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day |
