Perhaps, Barliss, you are pursuing a useless quest.

Better to go back to the ship and the useless quest without a goal, until he should die and the ship and robots should run down and stop.

Tell me, I pray you, if you can, so that I may not have travelled on a useless quest.

If this woman thought Richard was being too insistent or assertive, she very well might decide to get rid of him by sending him on a useless quest to the ends of the world.

'It seems that I have led you on a useless quest, my friends,' Hawkmoon told Bowgentle and Count Brass.

By the time we left the dining-room I could see that he regarded the whole matter as a useless quest, and that he was already wondering whether it would not be better for him to get back to London straight away.

'Poor child,' answered the dove, 'who has sent you on such a useless quest?'

According to Harold Bloom, one can presume that the "harmony was threatened if fully half of [the poem] was concerned with the useless quest after "The Melancholy".

--accepted this majestic swell as trustworthy circumstantial evidence that no important land lay to the southward, and so did not waste time on a useless quest in that direction, but changed his course and went searching elsewhere.

After a long and useless quest it occurred to me that I had better go to the place where the oxen were bred by a Kaffir chief, whose name I forget, but whose kraal was about fifty miles from our station.