Quotes About Desultory

My whole course of life," I observed, "has been desultory, and I am unfitted for any periodically recurring task, or any stipulated labor of body or mind. I have no command of my talents, such as they are, and have to watch the varyings of my mind as I would those of a weathercock.

It turned its heavy eyes on Zaphod and clicked its beak in a desultory fashion. "Go away," said Zaphod. "Okay," muttered the bird morosely and flapped off into the dust again.

The sin was mine; I did not understand. So now is music prisoned in her cave, Save where some ebbing desultory wave Frets with its restless whirls this meagre strand.

It's genius simmering, perhaps. I'll let it simmer, and see what comes of it," he said, with a secret suspicion all the while that it wasn't genius, but something far more common. Whatever it was, it simmered to some purpose, for he grew more and more discontented with his desultory life, began to long for some real and earnest work to go at, soul and body, and finally came to the wise conclusion that everyone who loved music was not a composer.

The wild unbounded hills we ranged, While oft our talk its topic changed, And, desultory as our way, Ranged, unconfined from grave to gay. Even when it flagg'd , as oft will chance, No effort made to break its trance, We could right pleasantly pursue Our thoughts in social silence too

Me? Never in life!' said Smith, giving them his familiar beam of amiability: only now with a ragged carelessness, a desultory approximation, like a man who briefly raises a mask on a stick to his face but cannot be bothered to line up the eye holes. Septimus and Hendrick glanced at each other involuntarily, to share the dismay that each for different reasons was feeling.

Everything that belongs to the past seems to have fallen into the sea; I have memories, but the images have lost their vividness, they seem dead and desultory, like time - bitten mummies stuck in a quagmire.

I kept waiting to fall in love with Salinger's cramped, desultory writing until I was annoyed.

Nothing perhaps increases by indulgence more than a desultory habit of reading, especially under such opportunities of gratifying it.

The education of our hero, Edward Waverley, was of a nature somewhat desultory. In infancy his health suffered, or was supposed to suffer (which is quite the same thing), by the air of London.

It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shanty-town seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky.