14 uses
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Definition
lacking in variety — typically boring
- First of all, just the variety of it—I mean, it's an interruption, a break in the everlasting, endless monotony.1.3 - In the Restaurant (23% in)
- We insert that sort of thing into the mainstream of our lives as a kind of interruption or interlude, for the purpose of "recreation," which is to say: a refreshing, revitalizing exercise of the organism, because it was in immediate danger of overindulging itself in the uninterrupted monotony of daily life, of languishing and growing indifferent.4.2 - Excursus on the Sense of Time (50% in)
- It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it "pass," by which we mean "shorten" it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage.4.2 - Excursus on the Sense of Time (59% in)
- Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it "boring," but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all.4.2 - Excursus on the Sense of Time (60% in)
- What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony—uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death.4.2 - Excursus on the Sense of Time (67% in)
- One should speak of monotony, of an abiding now, of eternalness.5.1 - Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity (3% in)
- I'm all for celebrating holidays just as they fall; we should mark the passing of the year in the usual way, its turning points, I mean, so that the monotony gets divided up.5.9 - Walpurgis Night (3% in)
- One part of the eternal monotony of time's rhythm, of the diverting, standard segmentation of the normal day, which was always the same, to the point where each day was so confusingly like, so identical with, the next that it could be taken for it, a fixed eternity that made it hard to understand how time could ever bring forth changes—one part of the undeviating schedule (as our readers will recall) was that Dr. Krokowski made his rounds every day between half past three and four...6.1 - Changes (90% in)
- He found it similar in many ways to life at the shore: a primal monotony was common to both landscapes.6.7 - Snow (12% in)
- There are situations in life on earth, or circumstances of landscape (if one can speak of "landscape" in this case), in which a confusion and obliteration of temporal and spatial distances, ending in total dizzying monotony, is more or less natural and legitimate, so that immersion into its magic during a vacation, for instance, might likewise be considered legitimate.7.1 - A Stroll by the Shore (78% in)
- Time drowns in the unmeasured monotony of space.7.1 - A Stroll by the Shore (90% in)
- This was no childish, monotonous peep show, of which they were all tired and with which no one bothered after his first three weeks here.7.7 - Fullness of Harmony (3% in)
- The symphonic accompaniment sometimes fell away into silence; but goat-footed Hans continued to blow his naive, monotonous air and lure exquisitely colored, magical tones from nature—until finally, after a long pause, a series of new instrumental voices entered, tumbling rapidly, each higher than the other, their timbres rising in self-surmounting sweetness, until every richness, every fullness held back up to now, was realized for one fleeting moment, which contained within it the...7.7 - Fullness of Harmony (61% in)
- We say this, because we consider it our duty to shame irresponsible sorts who asserted that Dr. Krokowski had turned to arcane subjects in the hope of rescuing his lectures from what he feared was unmitigated monotony.7.8 - Highly Questionable (2% in)
There are no more uses of "monotonous" in The Magic Mountain.
Typical Usage
(best examples)