"Insufferable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to appear in their own ghostly persons—nay, they often have been seen to do so," admitted Travers. "But I will never believe they are at our beck and call, to bang tambourines or move furniture. We cannot ring up the dead as we ring up the living on a telephone. The idea is insufferable and indecent. Neither can anybody be used as a mouth-piece in that way, or tell us the present position or occupation and interests of a dead man—or what he smokes, or how his liquor tastes. Such ideas degrade our impressions of life beyond the ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... comes my son;" as a shadow passes the window, and Eustace's tall figure with the meekly stooping head comes in at the door. "Eustace, I beg that you will decide who is to be in authority in this house—your mother or this young lady. It is insufferable that every time I send the children into the corner Vera should call them out and give them cakes ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... to think of him and even to argue with him. By thinking of him she was able to keep the memory of him an impersonal one, and to convert him from an emotionally unbearable influence into an intellectually insufferable type. A conversion by which Hazlitt profited, for she tolerated him more easily as a result of her ruse. She thought of him. His youth was fast entrenching itself in platitudes and acquiring the vigor and directness that come as a reward of conformity. Life was nothing ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... playing with a ball in my hands, thy grandfather, O Kesava, gave me away to his friend, the illustrious Kuntibhoja. Abandoned, O chastiser of foes, by my own father, and my father-in law, and afflicted with insufferable woes, what use, O Madhava, is there in my being alive? On the night of Savyasachin's birth, in the lying-in-room, an invisible voice told me, "This son of thine will conquer the whole world, and his fame will reach the very heavens. Slaying the Kurus in a great battle and recovering the kingdom, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... you are insufferable!" she retorted, her breath coming short and quick. "I have a little pride also; and you had better stop before you push me too far. For I tell you frankly, I don't care enough for you to stand this sort of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... thing! He longed to be at home alone with her and say to her what he could not say before all these people. He thought of a very good reason why she had chosen this occasion to proclaim her authorship of the famous anonymous novel. She had been so humiliated, poor child, by the insufferable rudeness of that Western girl that she naturally wished to make good. And how modest and unselfish she had been to make the attempt to exalt another author when she herself was so much greater. ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Sparrow! What an insufferable chatterbox, what an incurable scold, what a voluble and tiresome blackguard is this little feathered cockney. There is not a sweet or pleasant word in all ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... "He's that insufferable kind of creature who thinks himself irresistible," June went on. "Micky has often told me the way he brags about his so-called 'conquests.' Conquests, indeed! What are they but a few poor ignorant girls hoodwinked by his handsome face and smooth tongue? ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... circumstance which I mention to prevent disappointment, since, no doubt, many a gentle traveller may indulge, as I confess to have done, the luxurious hope of feasting on this fruit in perfection under every hedge-row in Provence. Another month would have rendered the heat of the country insufferable, and stript it of much of its beauty, by reducing to bunches of bare poles those trees which still continued to afford verdure and finish to ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the extremists in Kyoto induced the sovereign to issue an edict in which, after speaking of the "insufferable and contumelious behaviour of foreigners," of "the loss of prestige and of honour constantly menacing the country," and of the sovereign's "profound solicitude," his Majesty openly cited the shogun's engagement to drive out the aliens within ten years, and explicitly affirmed that the grant ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... struck the group which are more strange and insufferable than any speech. Madly, in order to make conversation, the curate said ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... salt bush and a little grass in places. I can see no inducement for me to go further, so I shall return to the camp. Arrived after dark. My eyes are still very bad, and I suffer dreadfully from them. To-day has been hot, and the reflection from the white quartz and the heated stones was almost insufferable: what a relief it was when the sun ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... perfectly well that the roof of a veranda is not intended to be walked on. Your curiosity is insufferable. I suppose it has become professional. Or are you hoping for blackmail? If so, the hotel is the place ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... protest by gesture.... Shut me up in a dungeon—I'll shout so loud that I shall be heard for a mile round, or I'll starve myself, so that there shall be a still heavier weight on their black consciences. Kill me—and my ghost will return. All my acquaintances tell me: 'You are a most insufferable man, Pavel Ivanich!' I am proud of such a reputation. I served three years in the Far East, and have got bitter memories enough for a hundred years. I inveighed against it all. My friends write from Russia: 'Do not come.' But I'm going, to spite them.... Yes.... That ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... all the distinguished literary characters at the house of her aunt; but she told us that she never met anybody whose conversation could bear comparison with that of Buckle, excepting Lord Brougham and Alexander Dumas. The latter disgusts by his insufferable egotism. Miss P. also gave us a very entertaining account of an Arab wedding which she attended a day or two ago in company with Mrs. R. As soon as they were inside the house they were separated from their escort, and were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... trials of humanity that it has to converse about trifles while the heart is breaking. If only the tortured one could rush away to some lonely moor, there to weep and wail to his heart's content, the pain would not be so insufferable; but in life that cannot be, and Valmai smiled and talked platitudes with a ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... he died in Warsaw. Schilder, Mussa and Grach, all mortally wounded, had been carried off before him. The losses of the allies were also serious. An ill-considered march of the French from Varna into the Dobrudsha resulted in the loss of 2,000 men, most of whom succumbed to the insufferable heat. In the camp at Varna cholera wrought ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... disgusting to a person of sense, may be extremely agreeable and delightful to a self-conceited idiot. Was there not an idiotic monarch who was greatly pleased, when his courtiers, in speaking to him, affected to veil their eyes with their hands, as unable to bear the insufferable effulgence of his countenance? And would not a monarch of sense have been ready to kick the people who thus treated him like a fool? And every one has observed that there are silly women who are much gratified by coarse and fulsome compliments upon their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... of talker is slow to express positive opinions, is sparing in criticism, and studiously avoids a tone or word of finality. It has been well said that "A talker who monopolizes the conversation is by common consent insufferable, and a man who regulates his choice of topics by reference to what interests not his hearers but himself has yet to learn the alphabet of the art. Conversation is like lawn-tennis, and requires alacrity in return at least as much as vigor in service. A happy phrase, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... magnificent creature, and the end was abrupt; there was no slow decay. During her childhood she lived in the open air, for except in the cold nights of a brief winter only the jalousies were closed; and on that high shelf even the late summer and early autumn were not insufferable. Exhausted as the trade winds become, they give what little strength is in them to the heights of their favourite isles, and during the rest of the year they are so constant, even when storms rage in the North Atlantic, that Nevis and St. Christopher never feel the full force ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... She wished Marjorie had never seen nor heard of this hateful girl. And to think that Constance had announced that she was going to give a party in honor of her, the very person she had robbed of her best friend! It was insufferable. What could she do? If she refused to go, Marjorie and all those girls would wonder. She could give no reasonable excuse for declining to go at this late day. She told herself she would rather die than have Marjorie know ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... creatures, whether corporeal or spiritual, to what part of his creation He pleases, if therefore any of the stars (which are beyond all doubt so many suns to other systems) be of so dark a color as that above mentioned, they may be calculated to give the most insufferable heat to those dolorous systems dependent upon them (and to reprobate spirits placed there), without one ray of cheerful light; and may therefore be the scenes of future punishments." This letter is addressed to Dr. Heirschel at Slow. ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... brought, and who returns them to the owners, on giving the marks or description of their property; and this strict fidelity and honest dealing is universal over all this kingdom. In this country, from the passover to the beginning of the succeeding year, the sun shines with such insufferable heat, that the people remain shut up in their houses from the third hour of the day until evening; and then lamps are lighted up in all the streets and markets, and the people labour at their respective callings all night. In this country pepper ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... it without pity; immediately repressible, so that our laughter may not have been wasted, but sure of reappearing under fresh aspects, so that laughter may always find something to do; inseparable from social life, although insufferable to society; capable—in order that it may assume the greatest imaginable variety of forms—of being tacked on to all the vices and even to a good many virtues. Truly a goodly number of elements to fuse together! But a chemist of ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... mean," said Christie, with glistening eyes and awful deliberation—"do you mean to say that we're expected to fall in with this insufferable familiarity? I suppose they'll be calling US by ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... have, Nan. I'm a spoiled child, I admit it. You and Dad spoil me, and all my friends do, too. I'm made to believe that the sun rises and sets in silly little Patty Fairfield, and it has made me a vain, conceited, selfish, insufferable Pig! That's ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... level ridge, and sank forward upon its springs with a sigh of relief and the slow precipitation of the red dust which had hung in clouds around it. The whole coach, inside and out, was covered with this impalpable powder; it had poured into the windows that gaped widely in the insufferable heat; it lay thick upon the novel read by the passenger who had for the third or fourth time during the ascent made a gutter of the half-opened book and blown the dust away in a single puff, like the smoke from a pistol. It lay in folds and creases ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... "we were never in bondage to any man," and therefore the yoke of bondage would be insufferable to us, but slaves are accustomed to it, their backs are fitted to the burden. Well, I am willing to admit that you who have lived in freedom would find slavery even more oppressive than the poor slave does, but then you may try this ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... became depressed and yet more depressed by the fact that the prince was playing to an audience; for all the respectful and admiring nurses edged down the beach to behold him play; and those of them whose little charges were playing in the same game with him, assumed insufferable airs. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... share this secret with Ted!" declared Phyllis, obstinately. "He's nearly nineteen and he thinks he's the most important thing in creation, and he's perfectly insufferable in some ways, now. To have his advice asked in this thing would set him up worse than ever. I ...
— The Dragon's Secret • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... of the factions amongst the princes of the land, which the Romans (through their accustomed skill) could turne verie well to their most aduantage. They possessed it almost fiue hundreth yeares, and longer might haue doone, if either their insufferable tyrannie had not taken awaie from them the loue of the people as well here as else-where; either that their ciuill discord about the chopping and changing of their emperours had not so weakened the forces of their ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (1 of 12) - William the Conqueror • Raphael Holinshed
... seeme they to come very neere one to the other. From whose high and snow-covered mountains, the North and Northwest winds (the constant visitants of those coasts) send abroad their frozen nimphes, to the infecting of the whole aire with this insufferable sharpnesse. . . . Hence comes the generall squalidnesse and barrennesse of the countrie, hence comes it that in the midst of their summer, the snow hardly departeth . . . from their hils at all, hence come those thicke mists and most stinking fogges, which increase so much the ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... out. As for him, he was not happy unless he was working, and at times he made the screw spin again under his fierce strokes, whenever his eyes fell on the wan faces of his young companions stewing in the insufferable heat. He shortened the journey by twenty-four hours, for on the afternoon of the fourth day the woman, for the first time, ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... is this interesting lecture to last?" asked Bull, with his usual insufferable drawl; "for I ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... power of resistance. The worse, the better. Let evil and vindictiveness accumulate in mankind, let them grow and ripen like a monstrous abscess—an abscess the size of the whole terrestrial sphere. For it will burst some time! And let there be terror and insufferable pain. Let the pus deluge all the universe. But mankind will either choke in it and perish, or, having gone through the illness, will be regenerated to ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... that he had only five hundred pistoles to give him. He gave them with an excuse on the misfortunes of the time, because the Duchesse de Bourgogne thought with reason that a little was better than nothing, and that it was insufferable not ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... his own happiness. To him it was like a beautiful page from some old romance, that this lovely lady should have smiled upon him, and have laid her gracious hand upon him, calling him her knight. How insufferable the empty talk of the men around him seemed! Ah, if they knew how he was sworn to do ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... Elizabeth. "You insufferable young prig. That very girl laughing down through the branches—I'll wager she could set your head spinning in ten seconds if she thought it worth her ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... easiness of behaviour are acquired gradually and imperceptibly. No man can say "I'll be genteel." There are ten genteel women for one genteel man, because they are more restrained. A man without some degree of restraint is insufferable; but we are all less restrained than women. Were a woman sitting in company to put out her legs before her as most men do, we should be tempted to kick ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... modern. The Love-deity of the ancient Finns was Lempo, the evil-demon. It is more reasonable therefore to suppose that the Finns chose the son of Evil to look after the feelings of the human heart, because they regarded love as an insufferable passion, or frenzy, that bordered on insanity, and incited in some mysterious manner by ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... shakes his shoulders, and replies, "No, you are only miserable women, and cannot be admitted into any Jesuit establishment whatever." And so the male deputation departs with elation, and returns with airs of superior opportunity, and is more insufferable than ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... no insufferable resentment of the deception practised upon her, when informed of it by Sally. And why, therefore, Mr. Savage should comport himself as if the heavens had fallen on learning that he had betrayed himself unconsciously to his aunt, was ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... the flames had now become almost insufferable, and the sparks and flakes of fire fell so fast and thick, that the spectators were compelled to retreat to a considerable distance from the burning buildings. The noise occasioned by the cracking ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... promptly discarded it for the newer tourist's helmet, and that in turn for a yachting cap. Must I confess it?—before Boller left McGraw I had quite surpassed him as a model of fashion. But my ambition did not end here. The very conceit which had made me such an insufferable youth in my last days at home was the spur which drove me to win every honor that could come to an undergraduate. As Boller stepped out of offices I stepped into them—in presidencies and secretaryships almost innumerable, into editorships, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... governor, voiced a common notion when he declared that 'the state was subject to the three individuals, who united in their own persons the legislative and judicial power, which no monarch in England enjoys, which would be more despotic than the Roman triumvirate and equally insufferable.'"[67] ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... Boston, May 31, 1724, In the Hearing and at the Desire of certain Pirates [Archer and White], a little before their Execution, To which there is added, A more private Conference of a Minister with them (Boston, 1724). With his usual insufferable vanity, he indicates that the capture of the pirates was widely attributed to his public prayer against pirates on Sunday, Apr. 26: "Behold, before the week was out, there comes in a Vessel wherein" were the captive pirates. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... lover's unreasonableness, he had found the fight between Bodava and Castrillon an insult to the lady at stake. He suspected, too, that Castrillon had spoken lightly of her to General Prim, to Zeuill, perhaps to d'Alchingen. This was insufferable, and so, inasmuch as the mischief had been done, he would not and could not remain outside the combat. There seemed, also, a certain feeling at the Clubs where the Madrid scandal had become known, that Castrillon, on the whole, had proved a more dashing, and was probably the favoured, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... background. The disclaimer of the Major had, however, the effect of restoring to him the use of his tongue. Casting his uncertain eye on the gentlemanly person of the latter he exclaimed, in a tone of insufferable vulgarity; ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... biography put into the hands of a child, to whom Jane Eyre is allowed only in passages. We are young when we first hear in what narrow beds "the three are laid"—the two sisters and the brother—and in what a bed of living insufferable memories the one left lay alone, reviewing the hours of their death—alone in the sealed house that was only less narrow than their graves. The rich may set apart and dedicate a room, the poor change their street, but Charlotte Bronte, in the close captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... measure. The rector was advanced in years, but otherwise the veriest springald, being bold and of a high spirit, of a boundless conceit of himself, and of mien and manners most affected and in the worst taste, and withal so tiresome and insufferable that he was on bad terms with everybody, and, if with one person more than another, with this lady, who not only cared not a jot for him, but had liefer have had a headache than his company. Wherefore the lady discreetly made answer:—"I may well prize your love, Sir, and love you I should and ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... addressed each other as equals under the assumed names of Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Morley. This lackadaisical relation subsisted for several years. At length Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman disappeared in the Queen and the Duchess. The familiarity and arrogance of "Queen Sarah" became insufferable to Queen Anne, and the quondam friends parted as irreconcilable foes. Swift says of Queen Anne, that she "had not a sufficient stock of amity for more than one person at a time." She would always have a favorite, now, Miss ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... your flatteries are insufferable. Go and talk outside. (He sits down again at the table, with his jaws in his hands, and his elbows propped on the map, poring over it with a ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... his wife was a self-willed, ill-taught young woman, who set her own father at defiance, and threw herself on the protection of such a wandering oddity as Percy Shelley. She was strong-minded, and brought with her into her husband's house her elder sister, also strong-minded, a ridiculous and insufferable duenna, whom Shelley hated with all his heart and soul, and wished dead and buried out of his sight,—finding, no doubt, his unsteady disposition controlled and thwarted by the voice and authority of his sister-in-law, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... aboard about half-past five o'clock in the evening, and, we having been previously warned by letter, the moment that they stepped in on deck we hove up our anchor, started our engine, and proceeded to sea, in order that we might avoid spending the night in the insufferable heat of the harbour. We kept the engine going until we had rounded Dondra Head and were heading north, with Adam's Peak square off our port beam, when we made sail, bound for Calcutta, where we ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... and they have a merit which the first sort are never known to possess—the merit of being sometimes able to see the good qualities of persons who do not possess the advantage of being related to them by blood. The families whose members all admire each other, are families saturated with insufferable conceit. You happen to speak of Shakespeare, among these people, as a type of supreme intellectual capacity. A female member of the family will not fail to convey to you that you would have illustrated your meaning far more completely if you had referred her to "dear Papa." You are out ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... which was opposite to two windows, also barred, which lighted the passage, and thus one had a fine view as far as Lido. At that trying moment I did not care much for the view; but later on I found that a sweet and pleasant wind came through the window when it was opened, and tempered the insufferable heat; and this was a true blessing for the poor wretch who had to breathe the sultry prison air, especially in the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... all sides from lamps and tapers and crystals, cornelians and gems of fiery lustre, liquid lights and flashing mirrors, and eyes of crowding damsels, bright ones. So, when they had risen, and could bear to gaze on the insufferable splendour, they saw sitting on a throne of coral and surrounded by slaves with scimitars, a fair Queen, with black eyes, kindlers of storms, torches in the tempest, and with floating tresses, crowned with a circlet ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were washed to and fro by the tide before the city; and, then, my good Glumdalclitch seeing that I had talked a long time and was much wearied, took me up and put me into my box and carried me away. But not before I had heard the King speak of my dear country in a way which gave me great pain. 'Insufferable little wretches,' His Majesty was pleased to say, 'as foolish when they are living at peace at home as when they are going out to kill other little creatures abroad,' with more that was like this, and not ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... society, finds his noblest earthly elevation upon a gallows. It is a nuisance, though, having him pay this trifling debt of Nature—nobody but Nature would trust him—in my house. There must be an inquest and a commotion. The whole thing is an insufferable bore. Ritchie has given him up, and gone to bed, leaving old Phillis on the watch, with unlimited rations of whiskey, and a pile of fire-wood higher than herself. But I did not mean that you should hear ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... scantiest," returned Gian Maria, in chagrined accents. "It was ever the way of that secretive vassal. Damn him! He frankly told me that if I knew, I would talk. Heard you ever of such insufferable insolence to a prince? All that he would let me learn was that there was a conspiracy afoot to supplant me, and that he was going to capture the conspirators, together with the man whom they were inviting to take my place. Ponder it, Francesco! Such are the murderous plans my ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... spirit which has ever tended to make the earth a hell for its inhabitants. "The ministers," added the governor, "should pray oftener, and preach less." But he spake in all solemnity; there was not the ghost of a sense of humor in his whole insufferable carcass. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... occasioned to others. Indeed, it may be said that in self-sacrifice in the ordinary intercourse of life, mainly consists the difference between being well and ill bred. Without some degree of self-restraint in society a man may be found almost insufferable. No one has pleasure in holding intercourse with such a person, and he is a constant source of ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... warmly welcomed by a man who was their near relation and personal friend. Nothing of the kind, however, happened. They were conducted through the enemy's camp, and found him seated, and displaying insufferable pride and arrogance, with the chiefs of the Volscians standing round him. He bade the ambassadors deliver their message; and after they had, in a supplicatory fashion, pronounced a conciliatory oration, he answered them, dwelling with bitterness ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... demons!" he cried, "I'm not going to stand for her going hunting with that man-net! If she catches any insufferable pup in it I'll ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... He had no right to fish on this side of that log. The insufferable ass may own the land on the opposite side, but confound his impertinence, I ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... insufferable and his ignorance colossal. What time he could spare from his English tailor—"and you just ought to see his clothes, and especially his checkerboard waistcoats"—had been spent in abusing everything in English ...
— A Gentleman's Gentleman - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... almost simultaneously, and the result was that, in a very short time, BULMER might have rolled in money if he had felt disposed—as, to do him justice, he never did—to render himself ridiculous. Now what is there in the fact that BULMER has made a fortune in beer that should inflate him to so insufferable an extent? Can it be that there is some mysterious property in the liquid itself, some property which, having escaped even the careful investigation of the analytical chemists, has pervaded the being of BULMER, and has induced him to patronise ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... well. And the lover began to feel that he could no longer sit sipping the stockbroker's port with a hypocritical pretence of appreciation, and roasting himself before the blazing fire, the heat whereof was multiplied to an insufferable degree by grate ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... like the dilettante and unstable dog he was, gave it up, and sauntered off to scratch at a rabbit-hole with an insufferable air of suggesting that that was what he had come out for all the time. I continued to pound along doggedly. I was grimly resolute. I had caught Aunt Elizabeth's eye as she passed me, and the contempt in it had cut me to the quick. This bird despised me. ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... to whether on arrival his boots would be of spotless cleanliness, while the extravagance of a pair of white gloves meant a diminution in food which it was not pleasant to contemplate. Then, too, he felt savage disgust at the elegant costumes and smart cabriolets owned by empty-headed fops with insufferable airs of conquest, who looked at him askance, and to whom he could not prove the genius that was in him, or give voice to his belief that some day he would dominate them all. The restlessness and discomfort, and at the same time the sense of unknown ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... book. He could lasso and throw any galloping criminal, however fierce, with a gracefully uncoiling rope of deadly adjectives. On all of which he properly prided himself until he became unendurable to his fellows and insufferable to Peckham, who would have cheerfully fired him months gone by had he had a reason or had there been any other legal esoteric to ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the Doctor, turning angrily to the landlady, "this is insufferable. You may make out my bill this morning. I shall have ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... would be worthily used sometimes. I remember that an address which was being given to us by an eminent London specialist was much interrupted by a man in the front row, who amused himself by interjecting remarks. The lecturer appealed to his audience at last. "These interruptions are insufferable, gentlemen," said he; "will no one free me from this annoyance?" "Hold your tongue—you, sir, on the front bench," cried Cullingworth, in his bull's bellow. "Perhaps you'll make me," said the fellow, turning a contemptuous face over his shoulder. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... congregations of the Edinburgh churches. As nearly as I can judge, it is intellectual rather than emotional; but it is not a tribute paid to eloquence alone, it is habitual and universal, and is yielded loyally to insufferable dullness when occasion demands. ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... Gothic churches much more tolerable than the temples of Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge marbles, and their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their frescoed roofs and broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of Palladio's architecture was especially grievous to the sense in cold weather; and I warn the traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of Bellini to beware how he trusts himself in winter to ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... be miraculous indeed if that victory which has been won, had been gained without great toil, insufferable anguish and sacrifice such as all persons experience when they dare to brave the conventions of the dead past or blaze a ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... further fight we have plenty of stimulus still. Our oppression has been doubly bitter for having been mean. The tyranny of a strong mind makes us rage, but the tyranny of a mean one is altogether insufferable. The cruelty of a Cromwell can be forgotten more easily than the cant of a Macaulay. When we read certain lines we go into a blaze, and that fire will burn till it has burnt every opposition out. In his essay on Milton, Macaulay having written much bombast on the English Revolution, introduces ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... and the dramatists not very delicate in their plots, though in doing so they did but obey the dictates of fashion and the bad taste of the times. Even prolixity and circumlocution were countenanced, and the insufferable conceits we meet with in the poems of Donne, Cowley, and others, were highly relished in those days. Euphaeism (mentioned so often by Sir W. Scott in The Abbot,) was also then in vogue, and all these various peculiarities of style, language, &c. were indispensable ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... 'Fenton is insufferable with his insolent bearing and behaviour, and you encourage him in his familiarity. I heard you were taking tea with him and his wife yesterday. I must beg you never to do such a thing again as long as you are under ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... distinguish; And many splendid patterns may be found, In our own time, before our very eyes Look at Ariston, Periandre, Oronte, Alcidamas, Clitandre, and Polydore; No one denies their claim to true religion; Yet they're no braggadocios of virtue, They do not make insufferable display, And their religion's human, tractable; They are not always judging all our actions, They'd think such judgment savoured of presumption; And, leaving pride of words to other men, 'Tis by their deeds alone they ...
— Tartuffe • Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Moliere
... probably his early education was defective; for on all occasions, when speaking with us, he says, 'Yes, Monsieur le Comte!' or 'Certainly, Madame la Comtesse!' as if he were a servant. Yet withal, he has a peculiar pride, or perhaps I should say insufferable vanity. But his great fault, in my eyes, is the scoffing tone he adopts, when the subject ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... beds?" "No," answered the master of the house. "Can we have some straw on which to lie?" "None, none," was the reply. On which Mr. Coleridge cried out, "Are the Hessians Christians?" To have their Christianity doubted, was an insufferable insult, and to prove their religion, one man in a rage, hurled a log of wood at Mr. C., which, if it had struck him, would have laid him prostrate! But more effectually to prove that they were Christians, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... than matched; she's overmanned; and by a madman! Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field! But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me! I think I see his impious end; but feel that I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... clambering back toward Kueelo. Forgetting the sweat in his eyes and the insufferable heat, he ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... be the 'somebodies' to give it to them," rejoined Jack Curtiss. "They are getting insufferable. They actually twitted me this afternoon with being sore at them because I didn't get my patrol—as if I really wanted one. That Blake kid is the worst of the bunch. Just because his father has a little money he gives ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... "Insufferable people!" he muttered. He looked about him as he entered the room, and the poverty of the bookshelves did not escape his keen eyes, nor the open volume of Jonathan Edwards on the writing-table. There was a vase beside it, which held one ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... all the green plain with a rich amber light. The fantastic towers and trees of the distant city by the lake shone in his mellow lustre; the solitary island swam in a flood of gold, and the quaint edifice which crowned it blazed with insufferable splendour. As the eerie gloaming died in the west, and thin grey mists began to veil the outlandish scene, we realised to the full that we were all alone and friendless in an unknown world, and a deep sentiment of exile ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Bucer represented the case to me. Much less would I ever have advised that there should be a public marriage, to which (though he told me nothing of this) a young princess and young countess should come, which is truly not to be borne and is insufferable to the whole empire. But I understood and hoped, as long as he had to go the common way with sin and shame and weakness of the flesh, that he would take some honorable maiden or other in secret marriage, even if the relation did not have a legal look before the world. My concession ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... worship; but the other is the worse thing. In a few cases it proceeds from modesty; in the majority from intolerable self-conceit. The man who keeps his eyes downcast in that affected manner fancies that everybody is looking at him; there is an insufferable self-consciousness about him; and he is much more keenly aware of the presence of other people than the man who does what is natural, and looks at the people to whom he is speaking. It is not natural nor rational to speak ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... ride nor a long walk, though the sun was insufferable. The capital of Paraguay is not large. It is a sleepy, somnolent little town in which the most pretentious building was begun as the Presidential Palace and wound up as the home of a bank. But there are bullet marks on the facade of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... gate which led him to another field, and found himself surrounded by the silence of the country, a silence pierced and thrilled by the songs of larks. Larks make the sea lands of the south and east coasts insufferable. One lark in a suitable setting, and, for a while, is delightful, but twenty larks in all grades of ascent and descent, some near, some distant, ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... which was, that the carriage was ordered between three and four o'clock, and that in spite of the insufferable heat of the day the two invalids (so very differently disabled) were driven to the Central Park, were driven around it, heard Dodworth's Band perform half a dozen operatic selections as only that cornet-band can perform them, saw the loungers on the grass, the promenaders on the walks, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... she is tall and lean, and very ill shaped; she hath bad features, and a worse complexion; she hath a stinking breath, and twenty ill smells about her besides; which are yet more insufferable by her natural sluttishness; for she is always lousy, and never without the itch. As to other qualities, she hath no reputation either for virtue, honesty, truth, or manners; and it is no wonder, considering what her education hath ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... insufferable LLOYD GEORGE as the most dangerous, the most malignant, the most incompetent politician who has ever attempted to misrule this country. The iniquity of the Coalition will make enlightened rulers like LENIN and TROTSKY blush for the human race. I feel with you that till the real Liberal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... fancy that, thereby, they are invested with claims upon their party, and suffer indefinite dreams of political eminence to be awakened in their bosoms. I have seen a fellow draw his hat fiercely down over his brow, and strut about, with insufferable importance, on the strength of having been thoroughly ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... interrupted by an insufferable visit. I have dried my tears, and composed my thoughts. Adieu, my ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... time you will be a priest, I do hope you won't, without his experience, try to imitate Father Rowley too closely in his summary treatment of what I have already I hope made myself quite clear in believing to be in this case a most insufferable young man. Don't misunderstand this letter. I have such great hopes of you in the stormy days to come, and the stormy days are coming, that I should feel I was wrong if I didn't warn you of your attitude towards the merest trifles, for I shall always judge you and your conduct by standards ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... there would have been no "Credit-Mobilier" and its unsavory scandal, and it is safe to say that the road would not now be made to represent an expenditure of $106,000 per mile, and that Mr. Dillon and some others would not have so much money as to warrant them in putting on such insufferable airs. When it is remembered what use Oakes Ames and the Union Pacific crew made of issues of stock, it is not at all surprising that the president of the Union Pacific should think it an impertinence for a citizen to question the amount of capitalization or the use to which ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... speak to some one about Mr Travers. His poor wife has enough to bear. I can't trouble her. The man is insufferable; he upsets the whole house. His nurse has just been to me in tears. Nothing will please him. He rings his bell all day, and half the night, and for nothing—literally nothing! Just an excuse to give trouble. We have honestly done our best—more than ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... still hold their instrument under their left arm, and look about them. Thus the point is greatly weakened, if not entirely missed. I invoke the attention and vigor of orchestral conductors to this insufferable habit. It is, however, so rooted that they will only ensure its extirpation by making a large number of violinists amenable for the fault of a single player; by inflicting a fine, for example, upon a whole row, if one of them misses coming in. Even ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... lectured and preached to besides. Good heavens! In his lofty manner, I suppose, that people talk of. Prig—odious, insufferable prig! So I have mistaken George, have I? My own husband! And insulted her—her! And she is actually downstairs, writing to me, in ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the cook's galley! Mogstad goes in and sees the whole wall sprinkled over with dark-red stains—rushes off to Nordahl, and says he believes Juell has shot himself through despair at the insufferable heat he complains so about. "Great revolver disaster on board the Fram!..." On close inspection, however, the stains appeared to proceed from a box of chocolate that had upset in ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... the wind bore to us the insufferable odor of burning houses, warm ashes filled our mouths and eyes, and frequently we drew back just in time before great pillars which had been burned in two by the fire, and fell noiselessly on this calcined soil. Moscow ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the nature of curs to snarl," he said. "But his impertinence grows insufferable and must be muzzled." Linking his arm into La Mothe's he drew him slowly along the garden path. Both were preoccupied by the same desire, to win the other to his own way of thinking, but it was the more cautious elder who spoke first. He would appeal to the very ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... constituted himself the counsellor, monitor, and guide of a man, who, though many years his junior, was in all respects incomparably superior to him, as the sequel will show. This must have been almost insufferable to a nature like that of La Salle; who, nevertheless, was forced to arm himself with patience, since his brother held the purse-strings. On one occasion, his forbearance was put to a severe proof, when, wishing to marry a damsel of good connections in the colony, the Abbe Cavelier saw fit, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... certainly don't expect it—nobody will be better pleased than we.' Whereas, the world would do well to reflect, that injustice is in itself, to every generous and properly constituted mind, an injury, of all others the most insufferable, the most torturing, and the most hard to bear; and that many clear consciences have gone to their account elsewhere, and many sound hearts have broken, because of this very reason; the knowledge of their own deserts only aggravating their sufferings, and rendering ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... Miss Day and Miss Marsh had repeated this good story. It had impressed them at the time, but they did not tell it to others in an impressive way, and the girls, who had not seen Prissie, but had only heard the tale, spoke of her to one another as an "insufferable little prig." ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... a curtain and waved him to enter, bowing low as the visitor passed. Cairn found himself in Antony Ferrara's study. A huge fire was blazing in the grate, rendering the heat of the study almost insufferable. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... has been translated into English by an eminent scholar, it is therefore proper material to be worked into our services. As a matter of fact, a great deal of devotional language of which the Oriental liturgies is made up is prolix and tedious to a degree simply insufferable. Moreover in the case of prayers in themselves admirable in the original tongue in which they were composed, all is often lost through lack of a verbal felicity in the translation. If anyone questions this judgment, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... then you'll admit that if she possesses lovable qualities she doesn't wear them every day. They are so rich, so odiously rich, that you never can forget it. She doesn't allow you to. And Julia is about as insufferable.' ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... traits of good and evil, like all mankind,—nobler than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination,—which Puritan divines might do without rebuke. Not one of them has left on record a statement so broad and noble ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
