"Desperate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "He made a desperate effort to move, and taking his cane in his left hand, passed his right hand slowly down it, from the golden head that adorned it to the other extremity. 'Look you,' ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... death he stood, but lo! the air Grew silent, and the horses ceased to neigh, And off his brow he tossed the clustering hair, And from his limbs he throw the cloak away; For whom would not such love make desperate? And nigher came, and touched her throat, and with ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... heads surged and quieted; murmurs burst out and died again; and all the while the hateful, insolent melody rose and fell; the horns bellowed; the drums crashed. It sounded like some shocking dance-measure; a riot of desperate spirits moved in it, trampling up and down, as if in one last fling ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... had but one hundred soldiers in garrison. He could not place much reliance upon the aid of undisciplined citizens. Still his brave spirit was disposed to present a desperate resistance. He called his council together, but was unwilling to have the people know the nature of the summons, lest they should clamor for ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... the People vs. James Day, alias 'Big-mouthed Scotty,' and William Jones, alias 'Billy Clews,' on the complaint of Captain Ira S. Garland, of the Twelfth precinct. Probably there are not two other men in this city who could fairly be compared with these. They are both of the most dissolute, desperate habits, and have been what they now are, thieves, since the date of their entry into this city. The first, who is truthfully styled 'big-mouthed'—that hole in his face being almost large enough to run in one of the cars on the elevated railroad in Greenwich street—was born in ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... have lived in the land, You who have trusted the trail, You who are strong to withstand, You who are swift to assail: Songs have I sung to beguile, Vintage of desperate years, Hard as a harlot's ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... more to father than I have," Dahlia cried, now stretching forward with desperate courage to confront her uncle, distract his speech, and avert the saying of the horrible thing she dreaded. "Rhoda was everything to him. Mother ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... auspiciously for our arms. Fort Donelson had fallen, after a desperate contest, and nearly all its garrison were taken prisoners. The scattered remains of the rebel army, under Johnston, had retreated precipitately from Kentucky, which had indeed been to them "the dark and bloody ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... utterly destitute and in need of medical care, to homes in many cases completely destroyed." The hospital and dispensary service was therefore continued. Dr. Finley and her group were sent to Germany and here met the returned prisoners of war, who were in desperate condition. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... their strong attacks against the allied troops on the eastern bank of the San. Desperate attacks everywhere have been repulsed ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... ring again. We heard a swift rush. The elephant turned tail, and fled madly away, crashing through the matted brake that crackled and tore under his tread. The howdah swayed wildly, and the peon clung tenaciously on to the top bar with all his desperate might. The mahout, or elephant-driver, tried in vain to check the rush of the frightened brute, but after repeated sounding whacks on the head he got her to stop, and again turn round. Meantime the cries and shouting had ceased, and the beaters came pouring from the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... the tiny clearing, he had grown afraid to start for home. As the dusk gathered, he had crept trembling into the cabin, whose door would not stay shut. When it grew quite dark, he crouched in the inmost corner of the room, desperate with fear and loneliness, and lifted up his voice piteously. From time to time his lamentations would be choked by sobs, or he would grow breathless, and in the terrifying silence would listen hard to hear if any one or anything were coming. Then again would the ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... seized with a whirlwind of frantic tears, of desperate sobs and mortal anguish. But through his frantic tears he looked at his father to see whether he had guessed it, and when mother came in he started to shout louder in order to divert any suspicion. But he did not go to her arms; he clung more closely to father, so that father had to carry ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... obedient animal had acquired through long experience of its master's habits. The locality had an unfavorable reputation. Sailors—deserters from whaleships—had been seen lurking about the outskirts of the town, and low scrub oaks which everywhere beset the trail might have easily concealed some desperate runaway. Besides these material obstructions, the devil, whose hostility to the church was well known, was said to sometimes haunt the vicinity in the likeness of a spectral whaler, who had met his death in a drunken bout, from a harpoon in the ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... once so dry and so excitable, and faint in swathes over a play (I suppose - for a wager) that would seem to me merely tedious, smile behind your hand, and remember the little dears are all in a blue funk. It must be very funny, and to a spectator like yourself I almost envy it. But never get desperate; human nature is human nature; and the Roman Empire, since the Romans founded it and made our European human nature what it is, bids fair to go on and to be true to itself. These little bodies will all grow up and become men and women, and have heaps ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from New York, the image is that of a great green prairie, the monotony of whose surface is scarcely broken by the rivers which cross it here and there, and the great lines of railroad that serve as causeways through the desperate mud of spring and winter. A scattered people, who till the unctuous black soil only too easily, and leave as much of the crop rotting on the ground through neglect as would support the entire population; rude though thriving towns, where the grocery and the tavern, the ball room and the race course ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... off, for I shall not give it." At this moment the thief suddenly grasped the woman's hand in which she held the knife, seizing it by the wrist, and while she was writhing in desperate struggle against the iron grip, with his other hand thrust the end of ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... fall, for the rain had ceased, and there were outlines of moving cloud in the sky. It was the night which made his situation so terrible, by concealing the chances of escape. At first, he thought most of Roger. Was his brave horse drowned, or had he safely gained the bank below? Then, as the desperate moments went by, and the chill of exposure and the fatigue of exertion began to creep over him, his mind reverted, with a bitter sweetness, a mixture of bliss and agony, to the two beloved women to whom his ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... Sophronia. As I have told you, the condition of our affairs is desperate, and may be blown ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... been ever since. He had resumed his work at Aldershot, and owing to certain consequences of the wound in 1915 was not likely, in spite of desperate efforts on his own part, to be sent back to the front. His letters varied just as his presence did. Something always seemed to be kept back from her—was always beyond her reach. Sometimes she supposed she was not clever enough, that he found her inadequate and irresponsive. Sometimes, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... inducement to the smallest efficient numbers. In this uncertainty, therefore, I put into motion fifteen thousand men, as being an army which, according to all human calculation, would be prompt and adequate in every view, and might, perhaps, by rendering resistance desperate, prevent the effusion of blood. Quotas had been assigned to the States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the governor of Pennsylvania having declared on this occasion an opinion which justified a requisition to the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George Washington • George Washington
... first he had believed that she, like himself, had been deceived, for it had seemed to him out of the question that a young music mistress, who did not seem more than twenty years old, could have been mixed up in the doings of a desperate set of conspirators; however, he quite understood the alarm she must have felt, for though his story might have been believed owing to his being a stranger, and unconnected in any way with men who could have been concerned in a Nihilist plot, it would no doubt have been vastly more difficult ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... to Whitelocke from two mariners in hold for speaking desperate words,—that they would blow up the ship and all her company, and would cut the throat of the Protector, and of ten thousand of his party. One of them confessed, in his petition, that he was drunk when he spake these words, and had no intention ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... so lonely a position, so far removed from the possibility of assistance in case of attack. He settled there, however, just after Pontiac, who was at the head of an alliance of all the Indian tribes of those parts, had, after the long and desperate siege of Fort Pitt, made peace with us upon finding that his friends, the French, had given up all thought of further resistance to the English, and had entirely abandoned the country. Mr. Welch thought, therefore, that a permanent peace was likely to reign on the frontier, ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... been in any respect bettered, either by the minister's or David's interference. Aunt Janet had received no special reproofs or threats for her encroachments on Maggie's rights, and she made a point of extending them in many ways. Before March was over the girl was growing desperate. ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... of bearing and rearing a large family. She approaches the menopausal stresses with anxiety and apprehension, having done her duty to family and race, often having lived an exemplary self-sacrificing life, the intolerable contemplation of a late pregnancy drives her to desperate measures often for the first time in ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... between newspaper articles duly pamphleted and distributed to the disgust of all decency, and the translation of an Arabian limited in issue and intended only for the few select. Nor could they fail to observe that black balling The Nights and admitting the "revelations" was a desperate straining at the proverbial gnat and swallowing the camel. My readers will hardly thank me for dwelling upon this point yet I cannot refrain from ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... by this, the desperateness of mans heart: {148b} for what is it but desperate wickedness, to make promise to God of amendment, if he will but spare them; and yet so soon as they are recovered (or quickly after,) fall to sin as they did before, and never to regard their ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... as so often Maggie found her, in a stiff-backed chair, her hands folded on her lap, staring in front of her. Her eyes were like the open eyes of a dead woman; it was as though, with a great effort of almost desperate concentration, she were driving her vision against some obstinate world of opposition, and the whole of life had meanwhile stayed to ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... did not decline, but only did not increase. Even of the real and not imaginary ploughmen at any time possessed by Italy, too many in the south were slaves, and therefore ineligible for the legionary service, except in desperate intestine struggles like the Social war or the Servile. Rome could not lose for her recruiting service any ploughmen but those whom she had really possessed; nor out of those whom really she possessed any that were slaves; nor out of those whom (not being slaves) she might have ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... it; she consented to it," said Jean Merle. "If she had uttered one word against my desperate plan, I should have recoiled from it. To be dead whilst you are yet in the body; to have eyes to see and ears to hear with, and a thinking brain and a hungry heart, whilst there is no sign, or sound, or memory, or love from your former life; you cannot conceive what that is, Phebe. I was ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... desperate men, wild women, And dark-eyed Amazon girls, And one little boy, with a peach-down cheek And yellow ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... a cheap showiness, are the ingredients of this devil's cauldron. The worst of it is that it has no fine elements at all. There is a nobility about real tragedy which evokes a quality of passionate and sincere emotion. There is something essentially exalted about a fierce resistance, a desperate failure. But this abject, listless dreariness, which can hardly be altered or expressed, this miserable floating down the muddy current, where there is no sharp repentance or fiery battling, nothing but a mean abandonment to a meaningless and unintelligible destiny, seems to have ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... family I will not serve much longer," I cried, "for I am driven desperate. You have stricken the sword out of my hands; you have left us all defenceless. I had always these letters I could shake over his head; and now—what is to do? We are so falsely situate we dare not show the man the door; the country would fly on fire against us; and I had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... child and learning to "suffer and grow strong." Fate had ordained, however, that Russell's father should not die upon the gallows; and soon after the verdict was pronounced, when all Mrs. Aubrey's efforts to procure a pardon had proved unavailing, the proud and desperate man, in the solitude of his cell, with no eye but Jehovah's to witness the awful deed, took his own life with the aid of a lancet. Such was the legacy of shame which Russell inherited; was it any marvel that at sixteen that ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... without heeding her. She was some way behind me, and feeling that she could not otherwise prevent my entrance, for I was now upon the very lobby, she made a desperate attempt to seize hold of my person: she succeeded in grasping the end of my shawl, which she drew from my shoulders; but slipping at the same time upon the polished oak floor, she fell at full ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... and humanity, with abusive Histories of the Greek and Roman republics, with fulsome panegyrics on the Roman Emperors (at the very time when we were reviling Buonaparte for his strides to universal empire) with the slime and offal of desperate servility—and we cannot but consider the Essay as one of the poisonous ingredients thrown into the cauldron of Legitimacy "to make it thick and slab." Our author has, indeed, so far done service to the cause of truth, that he has counteracted many ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Thomson was kept on board, and had a cabin given up to her own use; good living and medical attendance soon cured the soreness of her tanned and blistered skin, and the ophthalmia, which had deprived her of the sight of one eye. The black Boroto grew desperate when he found that she would not return to him, and threatened to cut off her head to satisfy his vengeance—a catastrophe which the rescued woman avoided by not going on shore; and she was eventually handed over, in good ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... regulated by a scale of averages because it is constantly subject to arbitrary changes. If the duty be adjusted on that basis for any given date, a reduction of wages would at once be enforced abroad, and the American manufacturer would in consequence be driven to the desperate choice of surrendering the home market or reducing the pay of workmen. The theory of protection is not answered, nor can its realization to attained by any such device. Protection, in the perfection of its design as described by Mr. Hamilton, does not invite ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... cabin ten miles from Indiana, on one of the doctor's farms, some colored men had taken refuge and worked as harvest hands in the neighborhood. To it came the sheriff at midnight with a posse, and after as desperate a resistance as unarmed men could make, two were captured. On one of these was found ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... heart of the riotous district, in Second Avenue, when some one who had evidently been once in his clutches, recognized him, and pointing him out, shouted "Detective!" Instantly a rush was made for him, and he was knocked down, and kicked and stamped upon. Regaining, with a desperate effort, his feet, he sprang up the steps of a house, and fought his assailants fiercely, till the lady of the house, seeing his perilous situation, courageously opened the door and let him in, and then bolted and barred it in the face of the mob. Through some ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... lift himself she rolled down with his weight and threatened to capsize. But he must not be beaten. He was fighting for Carrie's life, and remembering this gave him extra strength. Sliding his hands along the side of the punt, he let the current take him aft, and then with a desperate effort lifted the upper of his body above the pointed stern. Next moment, he fell forward on the deck and crawled to the well. He had won. He tried to shout, but could not. His heart beat like a hammer and ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... army informed us that affairs were equally bad in Paris. Rendered desperate by hunger, the citizens were up in arms, and no one's life was safe for a day. By a stroke of good fortune the Queen-Mother had escaped from the city, and was now with the young King at Poitiers. Of Raoul I could learn nothing, but the Duke of ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... opposition party, there is often bloody work; but this election was, in the electioneering phrase, a "hollow thing"—i.e. quite sure, as those who had voted for Admiral Hood now withdrew, without standing a poll, as being convinced beforehand their chance to succeed was desperate. ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... his nose; he drew two or three deep breaths, and then a strange thing happened: Derancourt began to sob in a terrible manner, and to talk of all those things he had never mentioned. The grief he had suppressed for months overflowed, or rather, rushed out in desperate, heartrending lamentations. ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... I was desperate. Then suddenly I looked at him and he looked at me and he said, with great dignity, "All gentlemen must be silent!" and sat down, with his ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... in January, '48, just after breakfast, Jolivet trois (tertius) put a sparrow into his squirrel's cage, and the squirrel caught it in its claws, and cracked its skull like a nut and sucked its brain, while the poor bird still made a desperate struggle for life, and there was ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... thereupon was laid to the place. In a sortie the brave Schwartzenberg was killed, but Colonitz coming up in force the mutineers were locked up in the town which they had seized, and the Turk never came to their relief. Famine drove them at last to choose between surrender and a desperate attempt to cut their way out. They took the bolder course, and were all either killed or captured. And now—the mutineers having given the Turk this lesson in Christian honour towards captives—their comrades and the rest of the imperial forces showed them the latest and most approved Christian ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... will be put away long before he comes," responded Master Cheese. "Mind your own business. And, look here! if anybody comes bothering, Mr. Jan's out, and Mr. Cheese is out, and they can't be seen till the morning—unless it's some desperate case," added Master Cheese, somewhat qualifying the instructions—"a fellow dying, or ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... hostility. The Baron seemed to bring all the weight of his fortune to bear upon him, the better to humiliate him in his poverty. M. de Bargeton had counted on having no more to say, and his soul was dismayed by the pause spent by the rivals in mutual survey; he had a question which he kept for desperate emergencies, laid up in his mind, as it were, against a rainy day. Now was the proper time ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... harbouring that Minna's comfortable circumstances were in part due to this man's friendship, filled me with gloomy misgivings. But as I have said, although I could find no real cause to complain of infidelity, I was distracted and alarmed, and was at last driven to the half-desperate resolve of regaining my balance in this respect by obtaining complete possession of Minna. It seemed to me as though my stability as a citizen as well as my professional success would be assured by a recognised union with Minna. The two years spent in the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Plutarch, in his Life of Otho, after quoting the view of the emperor's secretary, Secundus, that Otho was over-strained and desperate, goes on to give the explanation of 'others'. This agrees exactly with the story given here. Plutarch and Tacitus are apparently quoting from the same authority, unknown to ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... not bring herself to believe this. She searched all the while. She searched between reeds and bulrushes; tramped and tramped on the muddy shore, never thinking of how deep her foot sank, and how wet she had become. She was unspeakably desperate. Her heart ached in her breast. She did not weep, but wrung her hands and called for her child in loud ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... were simply shrieking with laughter, and loud shouts of the most infamous encouragement reached us. "If you go on like that, you'll get there by Christmas," or, "Well done! stick to it. Now you're off." We were stuck faster than ever. Things looked desperate. At last, with the combined strength of all the animals and men, we got ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... studded here as everywhere with them; fine buildings put to the pernicious use of imprisoning for life those whose only crime is poverty, and destined to be metamorphosed ere long (so I prophesy) into lunatic asylums for desperate ministerialists, prisons for the Chartists, veterinary colleges for cattle with the rot, and as one good end, hospitals for the poor. Near Redruth, I took notice in the moonlight of Carn-breh, the remains of a British beacon or hill-fort, much of the antiquarian interest of which ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Hawkins, son of the noted English freebooter Sir John Hawkins. The reference in the text is to the fight between Richard Hawkins and the Spanish admiral Beltran de Castro, off the coast of Peru, June 20-22, 1594; after a long and desperate contest, the English were forced to surrender. Hawkins was taken a prisoner to Spain, but afterward sent back to England; he died soon after 1620. See his work, Observations ... in his Voyage into the South Sea (London, 1622; reprinted ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume XI, 1599-1602 • Various
... ever be able to recover it; though the recent boundless theatre of hostilities is gradually contracting, and the resources of the rebellion are rapidly melting away, until there remains no longer any doubt of our ultimate and even speedy success in crushing the wasted armies of the desperate foe; and though the boundaries of the boasted confederacy are uncertain, ever-shifting, and mystical, while whole populations of recovered regions of country hail the advent of our conquering flag ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... bow her dusky head to earth and kiss the print of his heel, she would have obeyed could she but feel sure that her reward would be a simple touch of his hand, an assurance that no other woman could find a moment's place in his love. Verily, he had been doing desperate wooing in the long winter, for the very depths of her nature were all athrob with love for him. And now he could no longer plead that poverty withheld his offer of his hand. She would soon be mistress of her own little fortune, and, ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... Roman soldiers denouncing their compatriots and themselves; others betook themselves to a safe distance from the cities; some hurled themselves into wells or over precipices. The leaders of the opposition confiscated the property of the rich, abolished debts, and gave arms to the slaves. It was a desperate contest. Once overcome, the Achaeans reassembled an army and marched to the combat with their wives and children. The general Dioeus shut himself in his house with his whole family and set fire to the building. Corinth ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... river." Balch describes it as an attempt to "penetrate into the city by galloping between the redoubts." It was the anticipation of the Crimean "Charge of the Light Brigade;" only in this case, no one blundered; it was simply a desperate chance. Cannon were to the right, left, and front, and the heroic charge proved in vain; the noble Pole fell, banner[8] in hand, pierced with a mortal wound—another foreign martyr to our dearly ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... murderer and his victim was a most desperate one. Half of a man's shirt sleeve was found near the dead body, soaked in blood. The woman had evidently torn it from her murderers arm in her ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... Rosamund's room, feeling more and more that wild living thing inside her—that wild thing that would not be subdued, that would rise up and urge her to desperate actions. Then all of a sudden there came the patter of small feet, and those feet stopped, not at Rosamund's door, but at her own. It was opened and a little face peeped in. Irene, in Rosamund's room, could ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Reform Bill in our times. But the Commons made a memorable stand against Edward III. when he was the most powerful sovereign of western Europe, one which would have been impossible had not this able and ambitious sovereign been embroiled in desperate war both ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... two had been the only white men who did us wrong, then might our plight not have become so desperate; but many there were, upwards of sixteen so Master Hunt declared, who from day to day carried away secretly such weapons and tools, or powder and shot, as they could come upon, thereby trusting to the word of the savages that they might live with them in their villages always, ...
— Richard of Jamestown - A Story of the Virginia Colony • James Otis
... with a lady, and a series of bows took place. Desmond held his hat in his hand till we had passed; his expression varied so much from what it was when I saw him last, at the breakfast table, he being in a desperate humor then, that it served me for mental comment ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... her eyes taking in one by one, the murky windows, the dirty floor, the unwashed dishes, the tumbled bed, the rusty, grease bespattered stove choked with cold ashes, she told herself hotly that it was not the dirt nor even the desperate crassness that was smothering her joy. It was the fact that there was nowhere a touch to suggest preparation for her home-coming. Martin had made not even the crudest attempt to welcome her. It would have been as easy for Rose to be cheerful in the midst of mere ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... of proceeding in this last case, the first plausible, and frequently used, as when it is hinted to them that the Roman people might entertain an ill opinion of them, or that there might be an appeal from their judgment; the other desperate, and not so much used, as when threatened with prosecution themselves if they suffer themselves to be corrupted. This is a hazardous point, and is conducted with more safety to the orator when in a large assembly where corrupt judges are restrained by fear, and the upright have the majority. ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... old self rose against this new self that was the slave of comfort. It made desperate efforts to shake off the strangling lethargy. When he went about saying that he was getting rusty, that he ought never to have left Leeds, and that it would do him all the good in the world to go back there, he was saying what he knew to be the truth. The life he was leading ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... a knight That road, who halted, asking, "What's the fright?" They told him, and he spurred straight for the site! The beast was seen to smile ere joined they fight, The man and monster, in most desperate duel, Like warring giants, angry, huge, and cruel. Stout though the knight, the lion stronger was, And tore that brave breast under its cuirass, Scrunching that hero, till he sprawled, alas! Beneath his shield, all blood and mud and mess: Whereat ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... discarded her honour to make of it a cloak for the protection of Tremayne? Did she love Tremayne and take that desperate way to save a life she accounted lost, or was it that she knew the truth, and out of affection for Una had ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... rifle. Now he let it sink slowly so that the butt came to rest gently upon the rock at his feet. Blenham held the high hand; Blenham was unthinkably vile; Blenham was desperate. And Terry, his little Terry on whom Blenham had always looked with the eye of a brute and a beast, was in there, just beyond three inches of solid seasoned ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... end, for his father would not hear of providing him with the necessary funds now that he had actually confessed his atheism. He was hardly allowed to speak to his sisters, every request for money to start him in some profession met with a sharp refusal, and matters were becoming so desperate that he would probably have left the place of his own accord before long, had not Mr. Raeburn himself put an end to a state of things which had ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Emily made a last desperate effort. She wrung her handkerchief hard in her lap, and let off the name as if she had been letting off a ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... came out of it emperor. Fouche, minister of police, and his assistants were not going to be useless, for if in the eyes of the public, Georges' death seemed the climax, it was in reality but one incident in a desperate struggle. The depths sounded by the investigation had revealed the existence of an incurable evil. The whole west of France was cankered with Chouannerie. From Rouen to Nantes, from Cherbourg to Poitiers, thousands of peasants, bourgeois and ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... attack, but a body of Polish cuirassiers were at last sent to their aid, who, levelling their lances, and dashing with loud shouts against the flank of the Turkish batteries, carried the position, and put the defenders to the sword. It was not so much a battle, as a series of desperate but irregular skirmishes scattered over wide extent of ground—the Turkish troops (who were almost all cavalry, as most of the regulars and artillery were still in the camp) gradually receding before the heavy advancing columns of the Christians. By four P.M. they were driven so ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the punishment of the confiscation of their property. They acted accordingly, and returned to the presence of Don Fernando de Silva and of his successor, Don Juan Nino de Tabora. Those barbarians endured very great delay, until, finding themselves in a desperate condition and poorly equipped, they returned, committing signal depredations on the way; and since then they have continued their incursions, to the very great injury of all the country. And although expeditions have been ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various
... And last of all he appears as the disappointed, disillusioned man, "infelix academicus ignotus." A wife and children on his hands, his occupation gone, his hopes of the Revels Mastership blasted, he becomes desperate, and writes that last bitter ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... never moved once whilst they rowed. In the end, I myself broke the silence, shouting lustily to them, but getting no answer until I had repeated the call thrice. The fourth cry, loud and in something desperate, brought the response so eagerly awaited; but when I recognised the voice of him who then hailed me I fell down again in my boat with a heart-stricken burst of sorrow, for the voice was the ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... should be tempted to make trial of the powers of himself and his umbrella in this way, we think it right, by way of caution, to tell him that the French General Bournonville, who was imprisoned in the fortress of Olmutz in 1793, became so desperate that he attempted to regain his freedom by leaping with an umbrella from his window, which was forty feet from the ground. He hoped that the umbrella would break his fall. Doubtless it did so to some extent, and saved him from being killed, but being a large heavy man, he ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... declines the weight of other things, and alters the true state of the question: it is a shrewd sign, either that he has not weighed things maturely, or else (which is more probable,) that he maintains a desperate cause." ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... so much to ask a person to have a cup of tea!" Martie stammered, with a desperate attempt at self-defense. She felt tears pressing against her eyes. Lydia would have been meek, Sally would have been meek, but Martie's anger was her nearest weapon. It angered her ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... or two of the daily papers contained an account of Andrew's arrest, with his father's name and all the particulars of the transaction. Any one reading this account, with the reporter's comment, could not help but believe that Andrew was a desperate bad boy, and undoubtedly guilty in design ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... me so smartly through my facings, that although it was quite a cold day for Spain, I give you my honor I perspired to the very tips of my fingers And toes. The chance of escape was, I felt, almost desperate. The previous evening a rumor had circulated that the British general had stormed Ciudad Rodrigo, and might therefore be already hastening in his seven-league boots, toward Badajoz. The French were consequently more than ever ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... this resolution so suddenly? There was time, all the time in the world, and having once neglected the thing at the very start, it was curious that she should now, at this late date, make her desperate resolve. Preston had not been worse, more difficult to handle. In fact, when the two women had grown used to his case, the management had been simple enough. He had thought she was inured to the disgust and the horror—placid ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... least, as Mart Benson could remember, it had gurgled across the foot of his father's garden, tumbling heels over head down the little fall in the middle, as if it knew it had got into some place that didn't belong to it, and was in a desperate hurry to get out. ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... with him, there comes into the Hall Creed and Ned Pickering, and after a turne or two with them, it being noon, I walked with them two to the King's Head ordinary, and there we dined; little discourse but what was common, only that the Duke of Yorke is a very, desperate huntsman, but I was ashamed of Pickering, who could not forbear having up my Lord Sandwich now and then in the most paltry matters abominable. Thence I took leave of them, and so having taken up something at my wife's tailor's, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Second-Lieut. Edmunds who had been on leave since we left Miraumont came back to assist me, for about another month. Great droves of German prisoners now began to pass us several times a day, a cheering sight in one way, but not a pleasant one in another. They were truly a desperate-looking collection of men, mostly of a ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... bore up against what was harder yet to encounter than all these. Charles Barclay's was one of those natures which, being miserable, are apt to become desperate. To such men, affliction seems to be torture, but no discipline. But our humanity perceives from a level, and therefore a short-sighted point of view. We may well be thankful that the Great Ruler sees ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... such things (and he must be a lucky physician, methinks, who has no such mischief within his own experience) never weigh with deadly weight on any man's conscience. Something must be risked in the cause of science, and in desperate cases something must be risked for the patient's self. Septimius, much as he loved life, would not have hesitated to put his own life to the same risk that he had imposed on Aunt Keziah; or, if he did hesitate, it would have been only because, if the experiment turned out disastrously ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... desperate burst of speed, his clothing tattered with bullet holes, the Lieutenant gained his trench and leaped down to its cover. His face, wearing an expression of mingled hope and despair, he rushed to the bomb-proof dug-out where sat his Colonel and brother officers. ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... betray him, he made desperate efforts to suppress it but Nature would have its way, and probably did so with greater violence than if no resistance ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... and they will become desperate. Their interests are mine, of course. I am perfectly sincere in saying to you, Lady Deppingham, and to you, Mr. Browne, that in time they will win out against you in the courts. But they are impatient; they are not the kind who can wait and be ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... shining palace of the sun, And shiver all the starry firmament, For amorous Jove hath snatch'd my love from hence, Meaning to make her stately queen of heaven. What god soever holds thee in his arms, Giving thee nectar and ambrosia, Behold me here, divine Zenocrate, Raving, impatient, desperate, and mad, Breaking my steeled lance, with which I burst The rusty beams of Janus' temple-doors, Letting out Death and tyrannizing War, To march with me under this bloody flag! And, if thou pitiest Tamburlaine the Great, Come down from heaven, ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... confusion she was aware of her determination not to betray to them that she was ill. "If only the cat wouldn't grow so fast, I believe I could manage," was her desperate thought. There was a roaring in her ears; she caught suddenly from an infinite distance the voice of the stout ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... perfect pair in absolutely perfect surroundings. And no one supposes that he himself is perfect or that the world around him is perfect. So there is in the pair a consciousness of imperfection, a vision of perfection, and a desperate yearning to be more perfect and to make the world more perfect. Deep and strong as the creative impulse itself is the impulse to improvement. It is due to this impulse that the mother reaches over her child with such loving care, strives to ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Marius she was thinking, when her mother, surprising her gazing into vacancy, would ask her, "What are you thinking of?" And, at every new vexation she had to endure, her imagination decked him with a new quality, and she clung to him with a more desperate grasp. ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... obtain from Parliament the self-governing powers of a spiritual society. I doubt it, and I do not desire it. My own ideal is Cavour's—the Free Church in the Free State; and all such schemes as Mr. Temple's seem to me desperate attempts to make the best of two incompatible worlds. By judicious manipulation our fetters might be made to gall less painfully, but they would be more securely riveted than ever. So in this new controversy Mr. Temple stands on one side and I on the other; but this does not impair my ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... broke out half against my will. Margaret was forced to listen, for I would not let her go, but she seemed to harden herself against me, growing colder, stiller, statelier, as I went on, and when I said in my desperate way,— ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... Gerald remains to sketch some jewels, which Lakme has left upon a shrine while she goes flower-gathering with her slave Mallika, evidently also to await developments when she returns. Lakme soon comes sailing in on her boat, and there is a desperate case of love at first sight. Their demonstrations of affection are soon interrupted by the appearance of the priest, whose anger Gerald escapes by fleeing, under cover of a convenient thunder-storm. In the next act Lakme and her father appear in the ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... again, that our enterprise is hopeless, because even if we obtained the land with supremacy over it, the poor only would go with us? It is precisely the poorest whom we need at first. Only the desperate make good conquerors. ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... victory over the youth. But Rodrigo was strong as a man, and his deadly hate of the count added vigor to his arm. Though soon wounded and bleeding, he yet parried with skill the blows aimed at his heart, and finally, with one desperate effort, drove the sword of Mudarra through and through the body of Gormaz. The head of his fallen enemy Rodrigo carried home in triumph to the proud Diego. Thus did the youthful Ruy Diaz de Bivar avenge the wrongs ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... to wilful men The injuries that they themselves procure Must be their schoolmasters. Shut up your doors: He is attended with a desperate train; And what they may incense him to, being apt To have his ear abus'd, ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... disappear in the water in terror; but he must breathe, and out would come his nose again, nearer the dog each time. At last the water ran out of the hole as well as in, and the soaked beast came with it, and made a desperate rush. But in a trice the dog had him, and the boys stood off in a circle, with stones in their hands, to see what they called "fair play." They maintained perfect "neutrality" so long as the dog was getting the best of the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner |
