"Misery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... drops of rain stung her face. Afar off from the southwest more was coming. . . . She turned hopelessly from it, then almost at once her dull misery was changed ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... scanty fare as they could pick up in the forest, or happily meet with in some forsaken Indian settlement, or wring by violence from the natives. Some sickened and sank down by the way, for there was none to help them. Intense misery had made them selfish; and many a poor wretch was abandoned to his fate, to die alone in the wilderness, or, more probably, to be devoured, while living, by the wild animals which roamed ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the Departure of the Romans. 410—449?—After the departure of the Romans, the Picts from the north and the Scots from Ireland continued their ravages, but though they caused terrible misery by slaughtering or dragging into slavery the inhabitants of many parts of the country, they did not succeed in making any permanent conquests. The Britons were not without a government and an armed force; and their later history shows that they were capable of carrying on war ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... importance of the law. But here, again, it is not merely Christ alone who does it, but God in Christ, and Christ in the Church, who honor the divine law by the respect produced for it. They bring us to repentance; they make us feel the sinfulness of sin; show us the misery it causes to those who love us,—how it pains God, pains Christ, pains the good, and pains our friends. So we feel it, and show it by true penitence, and so honor the law. The law is satisfied when the sufferings of Christ and his followers, caused by ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... was filled with a harsh cheering that left the girl almost weeping in her terror and misery. But the men saw nothing of the effect of their good-will. They were only too glad to be able to find such an outlet to their feelings. When the cheering ceased Pete thrust out an arm toward her. His palm was stretched ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... in his power to have me put into the Bastille when he pleases. Perhaps he may not do this, but sure it is too dangerous to try whether he will or no; they must be men of very tryed Virtue who will suffer poverty and misery when they have a way to prevent it, so easy too, and when they think they only revenge themselves of ingratitude; for you will always find that men generally think their services are too little rewarded, and, when discarded, as he will be ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... undying enemy of his sister. The affair ended in the bulk of the nobility and soldiery turning to his side and in Sophia being obliged to leave the throne for a convent, where she spent the remainder of her life in the misery of strict seclusion. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... a woman whose childhood was bright with promise endures an after-life of misery because, through a false delicacy, she remained ignorant of her physical nature and requirements, although on all other subjects she may be well-informed; and so at length she goes to her grave mourning the hard fate that has made existence a burden, and perhaps wondering ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... aboard, she made me a sign with her head, and I at once went up to her. All the warm colour had gone out of her dark face, and the fire had faded from her dark eyes, but she was still very beautiful in her misery, and she carried herself grandly, like a ruined queen. As I looked at her my mind went back to that first day I ever saw her and was bewitched by her, and then to that other day when I found her in the sea-fellow's arms and thought the way of the world ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... they were at the bottom, nor can the puppy who is nearly old enough to see, as yet see any more than one who is but this moment born; so the man who has made some progress towards the approach to virtue, is no less in a state of misery than he who has made ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... flesh, and to reduce it to the earth from which it sprung. Such a countenance was here—forlorn—emaciated—careworn—every vestige of human joy long since removed from it, and every indication of real misery too deeply marked to admit a thought of simulation or pretence. The eye of the man was vacant. He obeyed the turnkey listlessly, when that functionary, with a patronizing air, directed him to the situation in the dock in which he was required ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... cut deeply. No one in the entire town thought him a more complete failure than he considered himself. Skies, from being sunny, grew suddenly sodden; not a tenement or alley but thrust obtrusively forward its tale of misery. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... gone on stuttering at it until she got it straight, if Galbraith hadn't put her out of her misery by striding over, snatching the book from Quan, and reading the line himself. She hadn't anything more to say in the first act, and she managed to get through the rest of the song numbers without disaster, if equally without confidence or dash. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... and gaining nought in return. Heaven has had no time to look after him. But I, though rather jealous of him, still love my kind host. I pity him: his strength is going, he can bear up no longer. He will die, like your children, already dead of misery. This winter he was ill; what will ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... the case of the Chartists in 1842. For some time previous to the summer of 1842, great distress, it will be remembered, prevailed among the manufacturing population of the northern and midland counties. The misery of the preceding winter had been dreadful in the extreme; emaciated, haggard beings might be daily seen wandering about the country half naked, in the coldest weather; sufferings, almost without a parallel, were borne with patience and resignation. Despair there might be in the hearts of thousands, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... rose before dawn, and spent the time till sunrise in their private devotions. Then the bell of their chapel rang, and the Indians came in crowds at the call; for misery had softened their hearts, and nearly all on the island were now Christian. There was a mass, followed by a prayer and a few words of exhortation; then the hearers dispersed to make room for others. Thus the little chapel was filled ten or twelve ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... as they do at present, not only the more unlikely is it that they will repent at all; but even if they do, the more bitter, the more painful must their repentance be. The only way to escape suffering for sin hereafter is to suffer for it here. Sorrow here or misery hereafter; they cannot escape one or ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... the apparent ease of the inhabitants of a country where property seems pretty equally divided, and where he is not shocked (as he is unhappily too generally throughout Europe) by the melancholy contrast between the splendour of the opulent, and the extreme misery of the peasantry. Here ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... worst came to the worst, the Englishman could be dealt with as easy as the German. Monsieur Simon trotted on that long journey from Nancy to Paris, and saw that famous town, stealthily and like a spy, as in truth he was; and where, sure, more magnificence and more misery is heaped together, more rags and lace, more filth and gilding, than in any city in this world. Here he was put in communication with the king's best friend, his half-brother, the famous Duke of Berwick; Esmond recognized him as the stranger who had visited Castlewood now near ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of misery and dread while he is chained to the oar. What you do when you are both released is a matter I have ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... suffice to show that, as a rule, they do not use fair means to find hands, and it is hardly surprising that where they have been they leave behind them wrecked families, unhappiness, enmity, murder and a deep hatred of the white man in general as the cause of all this misery. This recruiting is not only immoral in the highest degree, but also very harmful to the race, and it is to-day one of the principal reasons for ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... to flaner on the Piazza, while his women-folk make life tolerable at home; which is a very unfair and spiteful version of his proceedings, for he has really gone as much on my business as on his own. I sent him—feeling his look of misery, as he sat on a packing-case in the middle of this chaos, terribly on my mind—to see if he could find the English consul (whom he knows a little), and discover from him, if possible, where your friends are. It is strange, as you say, that ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but I thought so. Ay, you will hear me now! I am your father, Alexander Morton, who drove you, a helpless boy, into disgrace and misery. I know your shameless life: for twenty years it was mine, and worse, until, by the grace of God, I reformed, as you shall. I have stopped you in a disgraceful act. Your mother—God forgive me!—left HER house, for MY arms, as ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... upon a seat and covered her face with her hands, a piteous sight in her misery and the terror which, notwithstanding her bold words, she could not conceal. Caleb walked to the door and paused there, while the white-haired Nehushta stood by the brazier of charcoal and watched them both ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... dwelling in his own Soul, how can he hate any living thing? Grief and delusion rest upon a belief in diversity, which leads to competition and all forms of selfishness. With the realization of oneness, the sense of diversity vanishes and the cause of misery is removed. ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... Hysteria.—In order to be successful in this line of treatment the cause must be found and treated. An English physician writes: "It is pitiable to think of the misery that has been inflicted on these unhappy victims of the harsh and unjust treatment which has resulted from false views of the nature of the trouble; on the other hand, worry and ill-health, often the wrecking of the mind, body and estate, are entailed upon the near relatives in the nursing of a ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... volcano, since all its minerals are merely volcanic, has at least in all likelihood been destroyed by its fire. All kinds of trees and plants, all-domestic animals, nay a great part of the nation itself, may have perished in the dreadful convulsion of nature: Hunger and misery must have been but too powerful enemies to those who escaped the fire. We cannot well account for these little carved images which we saw among the natives, and the representation of a dancing woman's hand, which are made of a kind of wood at present ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... her; she was thinner than she had been, and otherwise showed the marks of misery and of factory life. The sight was almost intolerable to him. Poor girl, she herself was suffering cruelly enough beneath the same yoke she had helped to ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... one mouth the expression of real misery, and in another is a protestation against real misery. Religion is the moan of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... failure had brought a whipping. Although the outhouse in which he was to lie was cold and damp and smelt horribly, he was glad when his master thrust him into it, and he was content to lie down in the straw and forget his misery in sleep. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... which she had already evinced; but she was comparatively passive now, and seemed quietly to bide her time for accomplishing her second resolve touching him she once loved but now hated, as well as satisfying her revengeful spirit by the misery or destruction of her rival. We say affairs in Don Leonardo's residence had assumed a singular and peculiar aspect, and the dull routine of everyday life that had characterized the last year ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... to say with St. Augustine that, all men being involved in the damnation caused by the sin of Adam, God might have left them all in their misery; and that thus his goodness alone induces him to deliver some of them. For not only is it strange that the sin of another should condemn anyone, but there still remains the question why God does not deliver all—why ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... not mean to be cruel, but this blow cut me deeply. I remember the tide of misery that seemed to flood over my mind, to this day. I was miserable because my father was dead, and I could not go to him for comfort. I was miserable because I was out of temper, and Matilda had had the best of the quarrel. I was miserable—poor little wretch!—because I could not wear my pink ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... full of roaring noises and of intense activities. Then Mrs. Clarke went on talking. There was something very feminine and gently enticing in her voice, which resembled no other voice ever heard by Dion. He felt kindness at the back of her talk, the wish to alleviate his misery if only for a moment, to do what she could for him. She could do nothing, of course. Nevertheless he began to feel grateful to her. She was surely unlike other women, incapable of bearing a grudge. For he had not been very "nice" to ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... should ever be able to accommodate ourselves to each other's principles. Had I known soon enough that he did not answer to my requirements, I should have dismissed him at once, and thought no more about him, and all this misery would never have occurred; but having been kept in ignorance, I consider that I was inveigled into consenting, that the vow I made was taken under a grave misapprehension, that therefore there is nothing either holy or binding ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... prevent future misery. Let me speak about that which has long dwelt on my mind like a nightmare, about that which I did fear it was almost too late to speak. Not of your pursuit, not even of that fatal pursuit, do I now think, but of your companion in this amusement, in all ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... by winds that parched the lips and filled the eyes with fine dust, causing us infinite misery, our gaze was ever turned northward where Omar told us lay our land of promise. The very last hesitations on the part of our followers had long been overcome. The African savage is not given to roaming far from his own tract, fearing capture or assassination at the hands of neighbouring ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... against this the legislator ought to provide. Men have said of old, that to fight against two opponents is hard; and the two opponents of whom I am thinking are wealth and poverty—the one corrupting men by luxury; the other, through misery, depriving them of the sense of shame. What remedies can a city find for this disease? First, to have as few retail traders as possible; secondly, to give retail trade over to a class whose corruption will not injure the state; and thirdly, ...
— Laws • Plato
... stranger had turned his head and was looking at us—never shall I forget the infinite pathos of his expression at that moment. There was something in the face which betrayed misery and dejection so abject that for days afterwards the look haunted me. Again I saw the lips ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... curiosity, he generally is caught by one of his paws and thus falls a prey to the hunter's pleasure. The traps, when visited, are relieved of the contents and then set again. The game is put out of its misery and carried to camp, where it is skinned, and where all of the pelts recently taken are stretched out, dried, cured, and packed in small bales, whenever a sufficient quantity is obtained so to do with it. The trapper, when in full dress for an expedition, and especially after having been ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... suddenly came over me the miserable certainty that I was helpless, and that anything I did would be but labour lost, and injure no one but myself. And, Smith, too! It was all up with our precious secret parleys; perhaps we should not even be allowed to see one another any more. In my misery I sat down on the floor in a corner of my dungeon and felt as if I would not much care if the house were to fall about my ears and bury me in the ruins. Cheerful reflection this for a youth of ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... back on the bed, dreaming and drowsy. When she awoke in the morning, a mountain of misery seemed to weigh ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... to be the victim of an unrequited passion, while afforded such splendid opportunities of communion with the one beloved, deprived that passion of its most deplorable features. Accessibility is a great point in matters of love, and perhaps of the two there is less misery in loving without return a goddess who is to be seen and spoken to every day, than in having an affection tenderly reciprocated ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... through centuries of fear and torment. Sometimes, regardless of nausea, of his aching head, of the hard deck, of the waves that splashed and smothered him, David fell into broken slumber. Sometimes he woke to a dull consciousness of his position. At such moments he added to his misery by speculating upon the other misfortunes that might have befallen him on shore. Emily, he decided, had given him up for lost and married—probably a navy officer in command of a battle-ship. Burdett and Sons had cast him off forever. ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... concealed from him, and that cannot be avoided, or to impose more wants on his desires, which already give him concern enough. Would he have long life? who guarantees to him that it would not be a long misery? would he at least have health? how often has uneasiness of the body restrained from excesses into which perfect health would have allowed one to fall? and so on. In short, he is unable, on any principle, to ...
— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant
... that the first word man uttered in Paradise must have been "El," the Hebrew name of his Maker, while as a result of the fall of Adam, the first utterance of every child now born into this world of sin and misery is "heu," Alas! After the splendidly engraved bronze plates containing, as we now know, ritual regulations for certain cults, were discovered in 1444 at the town of Gubbio, in Umbria, they were declared, by some authorities, to be written in excellent Hebrew. The study of them ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... be fixed in its abode in love to God is the secret of all blessedness, as it is the source of all righteousness. Love is always joy in itself; it is the one deliverance from self-bondage to which self is the one curse and misery of man. The emancipation from care and sorrow and unrest lies in that going out of ourselves which we call by the name of love. There be things masquerading about the world, and profaning the sacred name of love by taking it to themselves, which are only selfishness ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... from afar off, and like a wounded animal he crept away from his comrades, not because their reproaches stung him, for he did not hear them, but because he wanted to think what his mother and "Little Sister" would say, but his misery was as nothing to that of the two who sat up there amid the ranks of the blue and white holding each other's hands with a despairing grip. To Bud all of the rest of the contest was a horrid nightmare; he hardly knew when the three companies were marched ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... sounds drove the poor bird into a wild state of terror, and that in his flutterings he had caught his leg in the bars of the cage; anyway, I went up about the middle of the party to see how my pet was faring, when I found him in utter misery clinging to the bars, his thigh dislocated and his leg hopelessly broken. It was a mournful duty to carry him away to merciful hands that would end his torture by an instant death. For many a day I missed that bright, handsome birdie who had always a welcome ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... Nest came the sound of revelry, and from the slave camp there rose other sounds, the voice of groaning broken by an occasional wail wrung out of the misery of some lost creature who lay there in torment. Gradually the ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... survivors may be a few of those maimed or weakened by disease whom the storm has passed over as too obscure, of too little importance even for the messengers of Death to remember and to relieve from their misery. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. The weapons of offence regularly win in their race with the weapons of defence. Fortresses that took years to construct are shattered in a day. The ironclad is sunk by the torpedo. How very little margin lay between this ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... will give me more than this one dance?" queries Adrian. "Is there nobody else you can condemn to misery out ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... was out in the cold. He was very poor. Papa thought all evil of him. Violet had refused him over and over again. He quarrelled with you, and all the world seemed against him. Then of a sudden you vanished, and we vanished. An ineffable misery fell upon me and upon my wretched husband. All our good things went from us at a blow. I and my poor father became as it were outcasts. But Oswald suddenly retricked his beams, and is flaming in the forehead of the morning sky. He, I believe, has no more than he had deserved. ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... bleak spring evening, near the end of February, young Gourlay had gone to the Howff, to escape the shuddering misery of the streets. It was that treacherous spring weather which blights. Only two days ago the air had been sluggish and balmy; now an easterly wind nipped the gray city, naked and bare. There was light enough, with the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... radiator. "Aunt Selina is crazy. I only kissed your hand, anyhow, and I don't know why you sat in the den all evening; you might have known that Bella would notice it. Why couldn't you leave me alone to my misery?" ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... challenge. Much to the benevolent amusement of Mr. Austin and Colonel Halkett, he charged the responsibility of every crime committed in the country, and every condition of misery, upon the party which declined to move in advance, and which therefore apologized for the perpetuation of knavery, villany, brutality, injustice, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and week out Keith stumbled along through those misery- filled days, each one seemingly a little more unbearable than the last. Of course, it could not continue indefinitely, and Keith, in his heart, knew it. Almost every lesson was more or less of a failure, and recitation hour was a torture ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... suppressing violence, but an ally of the church in spreading sound religion and morality. The rulers, instead of merely reflecting the popular will, should lead and direct all agencies for suppressing vice and misery. Southey, as his son takes pains to show,[169] though he was for upholding authority by the most stringent measures, was convinced that the one way to make government strong was to improve the condition of the people. He proposed many measures of reform; national ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... original taint predisposed them to sin. But this predisposition to sin does not condemn man fatally to its committal; he may escape from it by the exercise of his free will; and in the same way he may by personal effort raise himself gradually out of the state of material decline and misery to which the fault of his ancestors has brought him down. The pagan conception of the four ages unrolls before us a picture of constant degeneration, whereas the whole order of Biblical history from its starting-point in the earliest chapters of Genesis affords the spectacle of the progressive ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Thee with the rest invites The grateful odor of the coffee, where It smokes upon a smaller table hid And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums That meanwhile burn, sweeten and purify The heavy atmosphere, and banish thence All lingering traces of the feast. Ye sick And poor, whom misery or whom hope, perchance! Has guided in the noonday to these doors. Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng, With mutilated limbs and squalid faces, In litters and on crutches from afar Comfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrils Drink ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... When you have torn Fathers from children, husbands from their wives, And scattered woe and wail throughout the land, You think with gold to compensate for all. Hence! Till we saw you we were happy men; With you came misery ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... between Tulloghoge and Toome there lay unburied a thousand dead," and that since his arrival on the Blackwater—a period of a couple of months—"there were about 3,000 starved in Tyrone." In O'Cane's country, the misery of his clansmen drove the chief to surrender to Dowcra, and the news of Hugh Roe's death having reached Donegal, his brother repaired to Athlone, and made his submission to Mountjoy, early in December. O'Neil, unable to maintain himself on the river, Roe, retired ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... settle upon none but peaceful views of things, or that bodily weakness made her unable to bear any other, she did mount upon one of those "ladders" and left her burden on the ground. She thought she did. She was as quiet outwardly as before; she told Mrs. Derrick, who looked at her in misery,—and told her with a steady cheerful little smile, that "she dared say the letter would come to-morrow." But it is true that Faith had no power to eat that night nor the next day; and that she did not know ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... This feeling that he wanted to run away, that he was on thorns to be gone from so trying a situation, and yet must linger because it looked better, made his presence so trying. He put up his eyebrows for misery, and clenched his fists on his knees, feeling so awkward in presence of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... Governor, and you, My brethren: dried as I am with age, The tendrils of my heart are pliable; Nor have the tangles of this thicket-world So twisted all my grain as not to bend Before another's misery. Wherefore, I do ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch Turn, and return, indenting with the way; Each envious brier his weary legs doth scratch, Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay: For misery is trodden on by many, And being low ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... themselves, that when he was alone with Lucia he would say to her such things as he had said before, that there would be differences, misunderstandings, as before, and that his second coming would end in misery and separation like the first. It seemed to him that Kitty, kind Kitty, had the same perception and foreboding. Thus he interpreted her very evident compassion. She ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the suffragists "have thrown to the wind every political, not to say every moral principle;" that "three-fourths of the agitators are in mutiny against Providence because it made them women;" and that "if the ballot were granted to women it would be a burden so crushing that life would be a misery." ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... is character, marshalled so as continually to stimulate interest or excitement. The reason good dialogue is seldom found in plays is merely that it is hard to write, for it requires not only a knowledge of what interests or excites, but such a feeling for character as brings misery to the dramatist's heart when his creations speak as they should not speak—ashes to his mouth when they say things for the sake of saying them—disgust when ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... America. I was writing her a letter just before you came in—informal, you know, to put her out of her misery. If I had waited for the governor to let her know in the usual course of red tape we should never have got anywhere. Also one to the nephew, telling him about his twenty pounds. I believe in humane treatment on these occasions. The governor would ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... original plan, to say a few words upon the PROBABLE MEANS OF ITS CURE. And, indeed, I am driven to this view of the subject from every laudable motive; for it would be highly censurable to leave any reflecting mind impressed with melancholy emotions concerning the misery and mortality that have been occasioned by the abuse of those pursuits, to which the most soothing and important considerations ought to be attached. Far from me, and my friends, be such a cruel, if not criminal, conduct; let us then, my dear Sir, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... none, save such as human misery always has on human sympathy. I performed the marriage ceremony for her when she was a mere child, and felt profound compassion for the wretchedness that soon overtook her ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... devouringly on the elocutionist—as yet unruffled by suspicion. They were doing their best to say the things at which his lips balked. But as the recitation proceeded their light died from hope to misery and from misery to the anger of hurt pride. He stood very rigid and very attentive, making no effort to interrupt, but holding her gaze defiantly ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... there are scenes of considerable energy and polish. The hero, a profligate, after abusing all the advantages of fortune, commits a forgery, and is executed. The sympathies of an affectionate wife, in his misery and degradation, tend to heighten the interest, and point the moral of the story; his last interview with the partner of his woe is admirably drawn, as are some caustic observations on that most disgusting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... on the subject of my letters treats the question lightly. Perhaps he is young, enjoying the morning of life and thinking little of its close. On the mind of a student of history is deeply impressed the sadness of its page; the record of infinite misery and suffering as well as depravity, all apparently to no purpose if the end is to be a physical catastrophe. Comtism, while it bids us devote and sacrifice ourselves to the future of humanity, can ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... the small trader. Under the present system a large proportion of the population have so deteriorated in health and stamina as to endanger the existence of the nation. Private enterprise and competition are responsible for nine-tenths of the misery and suffering of our twenty million poor. But we must not attempt to alter the conditions because the small private trader would be ruined. Nevertheless the system is going to be altered, whether the small trader likes it ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... each other's presence; it was here that the wounded had afterwards crept, crawled, and dragged themselves, here they had pushed, wrangled, striven, and fought for a draught of that precious fluid which assuaged the thirst of their wounds—or happily put them out of their misery forever; here overborne, crushed, suffocated by numbers, pouring their own blood into the flood, and tumbling after it with their helpless bodies, they dammed the stream, until recoiling, red and angry, it had burst its banks and overflowed the cotton-field in a broad ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... everywhere; death many times welcomed as God's blessing in disguise—who can wonder if many hearts tried in the fiery furnace of four unparalleled years, and never hitherto found wanting, should have quailed in presence of starvation, fatigue, sleeplessness, misery, un-intermitted for five or six days, and culminating ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Betty said, "and I understand your feeling that you cannot save yourself by bringing ruin upon an innocent man who helped you. I realise that one must have time to think it over. But, Rosy," a sudden ring in her voice, "I tell you there is a way out—there is a way out! The end of the misery is coming—and it will not be what ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... girls' thoughts with him, until the life they led, life in the vast and intricate London of the twenty-second century, a life interspersed with soaring excursions to every part of the globe, seemed to them a monotonous misery ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... poor had agreed to renounce the rights of savage life and the prerogative of force, in return for the benefits of civilisation; but finding the compact broken on the other side, finding that the upper classes governed in their own interest, and left them to misery and ignorance, they resumed the conditions of barbaric existence before society, and were free to take what they required, and to inflict what punishment they chose upon men who had made a profit of their sufferings. Danton was ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... little by the rivers of blood that streamed over the length and breadth of the Slavonic land. Half a million Jewish victims were not sufficient to satisfy the followers of a religion of love. They only whetted their insatiable appetite. The anarchy among the Gentiles increased the misery of the Jews. The towns fell into the hands of the Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, and Tatars successively, and it was upon the Jews that the hounds of war were let loose at each defeat or conquest. Determined to exterminate each ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... cabbages, rye coffee without sugar, bones of venison, salted pickles, etc.—all in the midst of crying children, dirt, filth and misery. The last entertainment made the first serious unfavorable impression on my mind relative to the west. Traveled six miles to breakfast and to entertain an idea of starving. No water, no food fit to eat, dusty roads and constantly enveloped in a cloud of smoke, owing to the woods and ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... say in Ireland for generations back, that the misery and the wrongs of the people have made their sign, and have found a voice in constant insurrection and disorder. I have said that Ireland is a country of many wrongs and of many sorrows. Her past lies almost all in shadow. Her present is full of anxiety and peril. Her future depends ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... back in school-girl fashion. She was dressed all in black, and had thrown a black scarf over her head, as the room was cold and draughty. At her breast was a spray of cypress, the emblem of Young Italy. The initiator was passionately describing to her the misery of the Calabrian peasantry; and she sat listening silently, her chin resting on one hand and her eyes on the ground. To Arthur she seemed a melancholy vision of Liberty mourning for the lost Republic. (Julia would have seen in her only an overgrown hoyden, with a sallow ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... rows of houses like those already described form a quadrangle, in whose centre there is a garden, inclosed by an iron railing and containing some statue or other. In all of these places and streets the eye is never shocked by the dilapidated huts of misery. Everywhere we are stared down on by wealth and respectability, while, crammed away in retired lanes and dark, damp alleys, Poverty dwells with her ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... should be unhappy under such a master as God. The principle is good, but I do not think it warrants the inference that beasts have no feeling, because I think that, properly speaking, perception is not sufficient to cause misery if it is not accompanied [281] by reflexion. It is the same with happiness: without ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... protege in a small heap on the sofa, with his head deep in the cushion as though he sought escape from the light. Again the feeling of harbouring some small animal in pain came to him, and he frowned. The mute misery of that huddled form held a more poignant appeal than ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... was no need to speak. They both understood and felt the full misery of household changes that are not entirely happy ones; changes that bring unfaithfulness and ingratitude on one side, and resentful, wounded love on the other. And the worst of it all was, that it might have been so different. Why had the lovers set themselves apart ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... should be made Government clerks, and insist upon their right to all vacant appointments on the plea of being "old settlers." Others have suggestions to make the neglect of which would prove ruinous to the colony: general misery is only to be averted by the repeal of the duty on tobacco: no more ships need be expected (this is after a gale and wreck,) unless a break-water be constructed, which may be done for ninety-five thousand pounds, and there was a surplus revenue last year over the expenditure of ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... sent for, but before they could arrive, or water be procured, the whole tenement was so enveloped in flames that it could not be saved. In an hour, the locale of our misery was reduced to ashes. They had put me on my legs as soon as we got clear of the school-room, to ascertain whether I was hurt, and finding that I was not, they ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... Rotha the hours went by with flying feet. Every hour of them was as precious to her as her heart's blood. How few were the hours of morning! The thing which above all she came here to do was not being done. A dull dead misery seemed to sit cold ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... feathers smell. And I'm dosed with it eight times a day! Think of it, milk! But what makes me mad is to have it ladled out to me by that long-faced, fish-eyed food destroyer, whose only joy in life is to hunt me down and gloat over my misery. Oh, I'll get square with him yet, sir; ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... the drumming of hoofs, seized his revolver, rolled out into the sun, and sat up on the ground. And from this position he emptied his gun at the yelling cowboys until another shot put him out of his misery. ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... had had some drink I believed them. There were also the fools and the mad. Des exaltes—quoi! When I was drunk I loved them. When I got more drink I was angry with the world. That was the best time. I found refuge from misery in rage. But one can't be always drunk—n'est-ce pas, monsieur? And when I was sober I was afraid to break away. They would have stuck me like ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... attaining Buddhahood was this: in what miserable condition are the people! they are born, they decay, they die, pass away and are born again; and they do not know the path of escape from this decay, death and misery. ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... I will take you to the British lines unhurt, and then you will be sent to the Isle of Wight, or some such place; you will be well housed, well clothed, well fed, until the war's over. Don't you think you are silly asses to stay here and play a losing game, amidst all this misery and suffering, when you can get away unhurt and ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... devotion of some poor neighbour, who in too many cases paid the penalty of kindness in becoming herself the victim of the same disorder!' From the vantage ground already won I look forward with confident hope to the triumph of medical art over scenes of misery like that here described. The cause of the calamity being once clearly revealed, not only to the physician, but to the public, whose intelligent co-operation is absolutely essential to success, the final victory of humanity is only a question ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and she led the way, while the surprised young man and the mistress of the house followed her. The patient was a strong young fellow, who sat on the edge of the bed in the little kitchen-bedroom, pale as ashes, and holding one elbow with a look of complete misery, though he stopped his groans as the strangers ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... a thunder-stroke Had crashed the summer air, my sense awoke To sudden apprehension: hard the yoke Of misery was mine to bear; ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... on, many ladies of noble birth enrolled themselves in the company, working side by side with their humbler sisters in the relief of every kind of misery; but daughter of peer or of peasant, the Sister of Charity was and is, before all else, the daughter of God and the servant of the poor. Louise le Gras rejoiced one day when she heard that one of the Sisters had been severely beaten by a patient and had ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... misfortune, she exulted in the enjoyment of her husband and little boys. The first is taken away, and none know how soon the latter may be. So joys and sorrows are mingled together. At this moment she is more miserable for having been happy, and so great is the misery, it outweighs all the happiness of former years. Such is the nature of pain and pleasure. A pang of the former, an instant's acute agony, may be equivalent to hours of what is called enjoyment. We are so made. We may hope for ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... to hear it; but if you hadn't let the cottage to papa, I believe I should have suffered the indignity and misery of being sent ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins |
