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tedium
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  • For most of the Fugees, tryouts meant the end of weeks of tedium.†   (source)
  • Her laugh had taken on the tones of an organ, her breasts had succumbed to the tedium of endless caressing, her stomach and her thighs had been the victims of her irrevocable fate as a shared woman, but her heart grew old without bitterness.†   (source)
  • Dutchy tells me about the tedium of life on board—how his best friend from their basic training days, another Minnesotan named Jim Daly, has taught him to play poker, and they spend long hours below decks with a revolving cast of servicemen in an endless ongoing game.†   (source)
  • And in subjecting ourselves to week after week of toil, tedium, and suffering, it struck me that most of us were probably seeking, above all else, something like a state of grace, less virtuous, motives of course for some Everesters myriad other came into play, as well: minor celebrity, career advancement, ego massage ordinary bragging rights, filthy lucre.†   (source)
  • pleased to have found a friend at these balls, where I expected to find only tedium... Does Ella (oops) Lela want more than friendship?†   (source)
  • To reduce the tedium of the journey, Orik played a game of riddles with Saphira.†   (source)
  • I worked like a beast and the few times I sat down to rest, not by choice but forced by the tedium of Sunday afternoons, I felt as if I were losing precious moments of my life: each idle minute meant another century away from Rosa.†   (source)
  • Tedium was closing in from all directions.†   (source)
  • Inching to the pantry, I knew that this game, born out of monsoon tedium, was no longer that.†   (source)
  • stroll with the monster might slim me down, rev me up and offer the impetus to slip into my future, better equipped to deal with the mindless tedium that is my life.†   (source)
  • There were only four soldiers, two horseback and two in the wagon, and they had relieved the tedium of travel by getting drunk.†   (source)
  • I often thought of the tedium of life once one had seen all its surprises.†   (source)
  • The rest was a tedium the queen knew well.†   (source)
  • But the view—of the blank face of the compound's outer wall—provided no relief from the tedium of the room.†   (source)
  • Either way, my apartment required a good showerhead and lots of scalding water to erase the flipping-burger tedium.†   (source)
  • In the House, Representatives John Page of Virginia, Jefferson's lifelong friend, and Thomas Tucker of South Carolina relieved the tedium of extended debates by penning and exchanging doggerel at the Vice President's expense.†   (source)
  • Tedium is the worst pain.†   (source)
  • His kind of rationality has been used since antiquity to remove oneself from the tedium and depression of one's immediate surroundings.†   (source)
  • "Nowt," said Askew, and I heard the deep tedium in his voice.†   (source)
  • For there was one last letter, this one in code, seemingly innocuous in its babbling about hunting and the tedium of life in Niagara.†   (source)
  • They hate the guards, they hate the food, they hate the tedium.†   (source)
  • And for all his efforts he had been rewarded with a life of uninterrupted tedium.†   (source)
  • Imagine, if you will, a land in which carpetbaggers swarmed not for a decade or so but for millennia and you will come to understand just one aspect of a Poland stomped upon with metronomic tedium and regularity by the French, the Swedes, the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and possessed by even such greedy incubuses as the Turks.†   (source)
  • Sprightly, trivial, and harmless items she passed on to friends, thus enhancing her status and relieving the tedium of spinsterhood.†   (source)
  • deep sleep; no, a coma, a state of suspension that would eliminate the tedium of waiting for the earth to tilt the other way and the waters to reverse their flow and race inland toward the fresher waters and the brighter rivers upstate.†   (source)
  • He was hardly surprised at the deepening postponement and tedium of his journey.†   (source)
  • I'm grateful I have others to deal with the tedium.†   (source)
  • But instead I'm numb with the tedium of a hard life.†   (source)
  • But, in the end, even that distraction with no expectation only increased the tedium.†   (source)
  • If this was power, why did it taste like tedium?†   (source)
  • He preferred to hunt and hawk, and leave the tedium to old Lord Arryn.†   (source)
  • "If you can bear the tedium," said Cersei.†   (source)
  • After her initial shock subsided, the tedium of waiting began to wear on her.†   (source)
  • Tedium set in as Judge Atlee went through page after page of questions.†   (source)
  • In my cave the tedium is worse, of course.†   (source)
  • My aunt said that spaceship guard was a good career for a young Vogon—you know, the uniform, the low-slung stun ray holster, the mindless tedium ...†   (source)
  • They had brought over the fritter and drink stands from the Street of the Turks and the people were in good spirits as they bore the tedium of waiting and the scorching sun.†   (source)
  • Then he thought that Gaston was not as foolish as he appeared, but, quite the contrary, was a man of infinite steadiness, ability, and patience who had set about to conquer his wife with the weariness of eternal agreement, of never saying no, of simulating a limitless conformity, letting her become enmeshed in her own web until the day she could no longer bear the tedium of the illusions close at hand and would pack the bags herself to go back to Europe.†   (source)
  • It helped me forget the tedium of moving only one way through the world, the way of the slow, slow body.†   (source)
  • If she had known that Aureliano Segundo was going to take things the way he did, with the fine pleasure of a grandfather, she would not have taken so many turns or got so mixed up, but would have freed herself from mortification the year before Amaranta Ursula, who already had her second teeth, thought of her nephew as a scurrying toy who was a consolation for the tedium of the rain.†   (source)
  • The men needed to see that he was still full of confidence, and that he had not allowed the tedium of their present predicament to weigh him down.†   (source)
  • Girding herself for the loud tedium about to engulf them, she said, "It may be some months before I have the opportunity to accept your offer, Blodhgarm, but I appreciate it nevertheless.†   (source)
  • FOR RELIEF from the tedium of his "insignificant" labors, Adams took long walks through Philadelphia as he often had in years past, his pace only somewhat slower.†   (source)
  • In my room we shared mean gossip about our friends, giggled over boys and whined about school and the tedium of life.†   (source)
  • It was a distinctly American tedium of traffic jams, credit card debt, fast food, and weekend trips to the Tysons Corner mall to push his son past shop windows hung with photographs of unveiled, half-naked women.†   (source)
  • From time to time he was half aware that he was delirious, but there was nothing he could do about it, and anyway he preferred the delirium to the tedium of waiting for the Indians to attack.†   (source)
  • Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, was nodding his head in sleep because of the overwhelming tedium of the drama.†   (source)
  • When she entered the room, he hurled himself upon her like a madman to calm the terrors of the day and the tedium of his weeks.†   (source)
  • After four straight days at the same table listening to endless and marginally useful testimony, they were almost numb with tedium.†   (source)
  • Blanca preferred those furtive hotel rendezvous with her lover to the routine of everyday life, the weariness of marriage and the shared poverty at the end of every month, the bad taste in the mouth on waking up, the tedium of Sundays, and the complaints of old age.†   (source)
  • Dr. Juvenal Urbino delivered the historic letter, which was then mislaid among other papers and never seen again, and the entire delegation almost suffocated in the tedium of the speeches.†   (source)
  • Tedium is the worst pain.†   (source)
  • But that night, as he looked through the albums as he had done on so many other evenings of Sunday tedium, Sara Noriega made one of those casual observations that freeze the blood.†   (source)
  • In addition to his work, which grew more and more intense, and the tedium of his furtive hunting, and the dead calm of the years, there was also the final crisis of Transito Ariza, whose mind had been left almost without memories, almost a blank, to the point where she would turn to him at times, see him reading in the armchair he always sat in, and ask him in surprise: "And whose son are you?"†   (source)
  • But the man who leaps past the mere lemon drop to the glory of God there figured forth—that is to say, the man whose eye is on the larger order of the universe, both the lemon drop and the freight train he stops to watch rush past—is more pitiable yet, from a certain point of view, and richly deserves the eternal tedium of Heaven.†   (source)
  • He was a murderer whose final stroke was over-long postponed, who had to bring himself through the greatest tedium to act, as if the whole wilderness, where he was born, were his impediment.†   (source)
  • Hated being tied down to the milking three-hundred-and-sixty-five days every year, hated trying to outguess the weather, hated more than anything else the everlasting tedium of setting out fenceposts, cleaning stables, unsnarling rope and old harness leather and baling twine, or mending bags, or crawling out of bed to run after the cows when they got through the fence and took off at a run through some neighbor's cornlot, no more knowing where they were going than how to spell.†   (source)
  • God knows into what suffocating depths of discomfort I have, over the years, plunged family and friends, who out of love have tolerated my frequent seizures and have more or less successfully concealed yawns, the faint crack of jaw muscles and those telltale drops at the tear ducts signaling a death struggle with tedium.†   (source)
  • There was nothing for it but to sit in my usual place beside Mrs Van Hopper while she, like a large, complacent spider, spun her wide net of tedium about the stranger's person.†   (source)
  • Well, I saw it was all up with Mr. Huxley for the evening, and I must say I had reached a point of tedium when any interruption was welcome.†   (source)
  • And this the sad fact, one of the saddest: that weary tedium which the heart and spirit feel when they no longer need that to whose need they (the spirit and the heart) are necessary.†   (source)
  • Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of others—his early distaste for Pett Pentland and her grim rusty aunts came from submerged memories of the old house on Central Avenue, the smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot room, the swooping howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone of their conversation on disease, death, and misery.†   (source)
  • (Author's footnote)] Tolstoy begins by saying that throughout life Shakespeare has aroused in him "an irresistible repulsion and tedium"†   (source)
  • If your man is of the first type, bawdy humour will not help you—I shall never forget the hours which I wasted (hours to me of unbearable tedium) with one of my early patients in bars and smokingrooms before I learned this rule.†   (source)
  • But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures.†   (source)
  • But this whole business is too large to deal with at the tail-end of a letter, Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE XVIII MY DEAR WORMWOOD, Even under Slubgob you must have learned at college the routine technique of sexual temptation, and since, for us spirits, this whole subject is one of considerable tedium (though necessary as part of our training) I will pass it over.†   (source)
  • The tedium of that work is hard to conceive.†   (source)
  • [Despairingly] I am dying of this tedium†   (source)
  • I see you every day pulling that long face, tedium written all over it.†   (source)
  • Carol herself would gladly have followed Mr. Ole Jenson, and migrated even to another Main Street; flight from familiar tedium to new tedium would have for a time the outer look and promise of adventure.†   (source)
  • The waves of the ocean of time, in their eternal monotone rhythm, washed Easter ashore, and the Berghof celebrated it, just as it took note of all time's Stages and turning points in order to avoid undifferentiated tedium.†   (source)
  • Hayward, after saying for a month that he was going South next day and delaying from week to week out of inability to make up his mind to the bother of packing and the tedium of a journey, had at last been driven off just before Christmas by the preparations for that festival.†   (source)
  • I have a memory of infinite tedium.†   (source)
  • On the other side her bed was bounded by the window: she had the street beneath her eyes, and would read in it from morning to night to divert the tedium of her life, like a Persian prince, the daily but immemorial chronicles of Combray, which she would discuss in detail afterwards with Francoise.†   (source)
  • It was Leora who bore the real tedium.†   (source)
  • The tedium of dread was forgotten when he began to find and make precise notes of a slackening of the epidemic, which was occurring nowhere except here at Carib.†   (source)
  • But at least they gave me an unreasoning pleasure, the illusion of a sort of fecundity of mind; and in that way distracted me from the tedium, from the sense of my own impotence which I had felt whenever I had sought a philosophic theme for some great literary work.†   (source)
  • Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leaving Wheatsylvania—the tedium of Bert Tozer's nagging—the spying of Pete Yeska and the Norbloms—the inevitability of turning, as so many unchanging times he had turned, south from the Leopolis road at the Two Mile Grove and following again that weary, flat, unbending trail—the superiority of Dr. Hesselink and the malice of Dr. Coughlin—the round which left him no time for his dusty laboratory—leaving it all for the achievement and splendor of the great city of Nautilus.†   (source)
  • And before you start spreading the poison of imperial tedium, my malcontent citizen, you're going to see that God and man have not deserted you and that medical authority has an eye on you, an unblinking eye, my good man, that its one ceaseless concern is your diversion.†   (source)
  • point on the bank of the stream of life, abstain from the pleasures which are offered to them above and below that point, that degree in life in which they will remain fixed until the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as pleasures, for want of any better, those mediocre distractions, that just not intolerable tedium which is enclosed there with them; Swann would endeavour not to find charm and beauty in the women with whom he must pass time, but to pass his time among women whom he had already found to be beautiful and charming.†   (source)
  • She passed as weary a fortnight as ever mortal spent in Miss Crawley's sick-room; but her little nerves seemed to be of iron, as she was quite unshaken by the duty and the tedium of the sick-chamber.†   (source)
  • As the omnibus contained only one other passenger, a sleepy old lady, Amy pocketed her veil and beguiled the tedium of the way by trying to find out where all her money had gone to.†   (source)
  • Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life.†   (source)
  • On re-entering the cloister, the archdeacon found at the door of his cell his brother Jehan du Moulin, who was waiting for him, and who had beguiled the tedium of waiting by drawing on the wall with a bit of charcoal, a profile of his elder brother, enriched with a monstrous nose.†   (source)
  • It was to this part of the cap that the bells were attached; which circumstance, as well as the shape of his head-dress, and his own half-crazed, half-cunning expression of countenance, sufficiently pointed him out as belonging to the race of domestic clowns or jesters, maintained in the houses of the wealthy, to help away the tedium of those lingering hours which they were obliged to spend within doors.†   (source)
  • To relieve the tedium of this untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her grandfather's old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night ballads of the country people the while.†   (source)
  • There was something glad in your glance, and genial in your manner, when you conversed: I saw you had a social heart; it was the silent schoolroom — it was the tedium of your life — that made you mournful.†   (source)
  • Others, whose briefer span forbade their devoting themselves to studies so abstruse, beguiled the little tedium of the way with penny-papers.†   (source)
  • To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it necessary to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana turned over the volumes of his scientific library.†   (source)
  • Undoubtedly the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam.†   (source)
  • Hepzibah troubled her auditor, moreover, by innumerable sins of emphasis, which he seemed to detect, without any reference to the meaning; nor, in fact, did he appear to take much note of the sense of what she read, but evidently felt the tedium of the lecture, without harvesting its profit.†   (source)
  • But my hands grew clammy around the porcelain bowl as I thought of myself stepping out, alone and powerless, to confront that mob of solid and virtuous citizens, avid for the excitement of punishment and blood to alleviate the tedium of existence.†   (source)
  • Sometimes I was off at midnight, sometimes not until two A.M. Tedium alternated with Grand Guignol, and Grand Guignol with high comedy.†   (source)
  • That spring I went back to Hopkins, partly under my mother's badgering—"You'll never amount to anything spending the rest of your life in the post office"—partly because the G.I. Bill would pay the tuition and free me from the tedium of post-office labor.†   (source)
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