"Pitiable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fine words, but hopeless to explain that which has lured more than one white woman out into the golden wilderness to the wrecking of her soul; and which has nothing whatever to do with the pseudo-psychic waves which trick us into such pitiable hysteria ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... her heart was heavy with dire dread lest Clara's horror of the disease should augment its ravages. Dr. Asbury was summoned with all haste; but, as usual, seemed an age in coming, and when at last he came could only prescribe what had already been done. It was pitiable to watch the agonized expression of Clara's sweet face, as she looked from the countenance of the physician to that of her friend, striving to discover their ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... day, and in the evening the citizen himself said that he would see her. Simonne had been for sending her away. But the citizen was peremptory. And he was so helpless... in his bath ... name of a name, the pitiable affair! ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... his guide turned to see those that were undergoing punishment. And at first they saw only distressing and pitiable sights, but after that, Thespesius, little expecting it, found himself among his friends and acquaintances and kinsfolk who were being punished, and undergoing dreadful sufferings and hideous and bitter tortures, and who wept and wailed to him. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... anxious suspense; and when the morning dawn broke upon my vision, I felt an indescribable emotion of gratitude, as I had fully made up my mind, the night previous, that long before this time I should have been sleeping the sleep of death. It was a pitiable sight, when the morning light appeared, to see twenty human beings stripped naked, with their bodies cut and lacerated, and the blood issuing from their wounds; with their hands and feet tied, and their bodies fastened to stakes, with brushwood piled around ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... much regret. The old Chief, indeed, with his flowing beard, and pompous array, and engaging manners, had made a strong impression upon us all; but his pitiable and childish distress, whatever might have been the cause, took away from the respect with which we were otherwise disposed to regard him: yet this circumstance, though it makes the picture less finished, serves ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... companions declared afterwards that had it not been for the strength of the curl, his hair would have stood upright. For, following Bruce, led in fact by a string, came an awful apparition—Juno herself, a pitiable mass of caninity—looking like the resuscitated corpse of a dog that had been nine days buried, crowded with lumps, and speckled with cuts, going on three legs, and having her head and throat swollen ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows all about the romance, I say, and the educational advantages, but I doubt if he had turned his attention to the harbour lights; and it may be news even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable. Hanging about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often re-enacted on a more important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... purty haid o' your'n, an' pitch ye over into the Devil's Kittle, to wait fer yer runt lover to come arter ye." He twisted her about viciously. Despite her strength, unusual in a woman, Plutina was powerless in his grip. Holding her close, face to face, he contemplated the girl's pitiable distress with gloating eyes in which there was no faintest suggestion of pity. The prisoner met the malignant gaze for an instant. Then, her eyes fell, and she stood trembling. She was panting, partly from terror, partly from the violence with which she ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... they are of course no more available than pine splints, though the Graham variety is the best. Aerated bread is probably the most healthful, but this is pitiable to live on; it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... pitiable object, thought at first to enter the hut and attack the giant; but considering how unequal the combat would be, he stopped, and resolved, since he had not strength enough to prevail by open force, to use art. In the mean time, the giant having emptied ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... over, the men sauntered out upon the verandah for a smoke. Lois went, too, but sat somewhat apart with a piece of needlework in her hands. She preferred to be alone that she might think. She thought first of old David, and his pitiable condition. What could she do to help him? she asked herself. It was not right that he should be kept as a pauper while there were several people in the parish who could provide for him without the least trouble. Her father was one of them, and she was determined to speak to him just ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... details. The truck system of payment, prevalent in mining regions and many factory towns, reduced the actual wage by almost one-half. In the cities, unskilled immigrants had so overcrowded the common labor market that competition had reduced them to a pitiable state. Hours of labor were generally long in the factories. As a rule only the skilled artisan had achieved the ten-hour day, and then only in isolated instances. Woman's labor was the poorest paid, and her condition was the most neglected. A visitor to Lowell in 1846 thus describes the conditions ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... this pitiable stuff [he wrote] uphold it on the ground of its truthfulness. Taking the thesis into question, this truthfulness is the one overwhelming defect. An original idea that—to laud the accuracy with which the stone is hurled that knocks us in the head. A little less accuracy might have left ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... insinuating, but I shall preserve my temper though you have lost your manners: well, assuredly of all objects in creation, the most pitiable is a man ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... the line of the horizon to the westward. Sometimes we thought that we might possibly have passed it, and then we hoped against hope that we should reach it even now before dark. Still the day wore on, and our poor horses followed us with feeble steps, and it was pitiable to look at them, so swollen and disfigured had they become, their faces resembling hippopotami rather than terrestrial steeds. At last Dio's stumbled and fell; nothing which we could do would induce the poor creature to rise, so ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... when, as I approached my bench, I saw that he was already there. But as I came up to him I could scarce be sure that it was indeed the same man. There were the curly-brimmed hat, and the shining stock, and the horn glasses, but where were the stoop and the grey-stubbled, pitiable face? He was clean-shaven and firm lipped, with a bright eye and a head that poised itself upon his great shoulders like an eagle on a rock. His back was as straight and square as a grenadier's, and he switched at the pebbles with his stick in his exuberant vitality. ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... assemblage was thrown into a pitiable state of terror by a most extraordinary combat and tumult taking place somewhere in the circle. The remonstrances of Mr. Smitz and the oaths of the Englishman rose against the general din of the expostulations of the men and cries of the women. Match after match was struck by the men, only ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... in a very pitiable state. (I learned some months later that he was come down expressly to dissuade Rumbald from any attempt at that time; but I did not know that then.) Here, only, thought I, is one of the chicken-hearted ones. I determined to play ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... strewn with the dead and the wounded, whose fate, in the bitter frost, was far the more pitiable. Gangs of the victors went from house to house, pillaging and stabbing, and sometimes singing together as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... indeed, took leave of the queen at St. James's, to set off for Weymouth, in company with Mrs. Hastings. I was really very sorry for her; she was truly in a situation Of suffering, from bodily pain, the most pitiable. I thought, as I looked at her, that if the ill-humours I so often experience could relieve her, I would consent to bear them unrepining, in preference to seeing or knowing her so ill. But it is just the contrary; spleen and ill-temper only ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... right to hold property and do business themselves. I think that man and woman both would live more happily if the laws were more equal; but as they are, they are a shame to this enlightened age. They make a married woman a beggar all her life, although she may have a rich husband, and a most pitiable one, if he is poor. Wipe out the law entirely that gives us a third of our husband's property; we can make better bargains than that ourselves with our husbands. The one-third law does us not a mite of good, unless our husband dies, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Martin Luther sat solitary during the Diet of Augsburg (Diet known to us, our old friend Margraf George of Anspach hypothetically "laying his head on the block? there, and the great Kaiser, Karl V., practically burning daylight, with pitiable spilling of wax, in the CORPUS-CHRISTI procession there), [Antea, vol. v. p. 197.]—where Martin Luther sat solitary, and wrote that celebrated Letter about 16 Crows holding THEIR Parliament all round," and how "the pillars of the world were never seen by anybody, ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... was pitiable. Snatches of talk overheard in Paris and elsewhere warned her that Mrs. Leland would prove an unconquerable foe. She was miserably conscious that her own letter, posted overnight, would rise up in judgment against her, but already she had devised the plausible excuse ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... suddenly running up to the king and casting himself weeping at his feet, "art thou, then, really troubled? Forgive thy poor slave!" and he began blubbering in the most pitiable manner, while he looked up into the face of the king with such a look of wo-begone and ludicrous despair, that Paterflor himself could scarce refrain from bursting ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... his posterity, it was answered, 'The kingdom of the English belongs to God. After you, He will provide a king according to his pleasure.'" But those who will look at the facts will see in the holy Confessor's character little but what is pitiable, and in his reign little ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... was in a pitiable state, for the Germans as they retired carried off everything—livestock, vehicles, all food, and most of the male population. The civilians that were left behind took refuge in the cellars during the fighting, coming out as soon as the Boche ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... possessed the knowledge to sweep away her grief. And yet would it? Was it not probable that a girl like her would feel even greater grief at the knowledge that her father was a hunted criminal instead of merely dead? She presented a most pitiable figure standing there, absolutely alone in the world. She had gone through experiences that day which would have made the average woman collapse, and to cap it all she had received the final blow in the ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... well was reached, they bound his feet. He was to be let down head foremost. He was fastened to the curb; the crank turned, and his body disappeared. The alferez noted the seconds with his watch. At the signal the body was drawn up, too pitiable to describe; but Tarsilo was still mute. Again he was let down, again he refused to speak; when he was drawn up the third time, ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Child Life.—Perhaps the French Revolution and the unforgettable incident of the pitiable peasant child were not without influence in causing him to become a great poetic interpreter of childhood. No poem has surpassed his Alice Fell, or Poverty in presenting the psychology of childish grief, or his We Are Seven in voicing ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... a pitiable state of mental distress; his hand clutched nervously a copy of the St. James's Gazette, which contained the fatal news. He said very little to the superintendent except that a person who was very dear to him had ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... of railway stock. And then his zeal was quickened by his personal kindness for Valentin; he had a sort of pity for him which he was well aware he never could have made the Comte de Bellegarde understand. He never lost a sense of its being pitiable that Valentin should think it a large life to revolve in varnished boots between the Rue d'Anjou and the Rue de l'Universite, taking the Boulevard des Italiens on the way, when over there in America ...
— The American • Henry James
... had overreached itself, and she sat there a pitiable object, with the ruin she had herself caused around her. I gave her one look, and turned ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... with acquaintances and the sound of a conversation in her ears. When one reflects upon her extraordinary tragedy, when one attempts to gauge the significance of her character and of her life, it is difficult to know whether to pity most, to admire, or to fear. Certainly there is something at once pitiable and magnificent in such an unflinching perception of the futilities of living, such an uncompromising refusal to be content with anything save the one thing that it is impossible to have. But there is something alarming too; was she perhaps ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... comfort at all, and that he was only a "peculiar" man. He had one great grudge against the world it seemed. Other boys were straight and healthy, but for some unaccountable reason Heaven had seen fit to give him a crippled grandson. Little Carl Adkins was a pitiable looking object. They sometimes saw him shut up in a closed carriage, and being whisked through the town; but few had ever been able to pass a word with the poor boy. These reported that he was really bright, and had a woe-begone look on his drawn ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... very rude as well. But something seemed to force it out of me. Just think: there was a generous heart, clogged up with self-importance and wealth! To me, as he stood there on the hearth-rug, he was a most pitiable object—with an impervious wall betwixt him and the kingdom of heaven! He seemed like a man in a terrible dream, from which I must awake him by calling aloud in his ear—except that, alas! the dream was not terrible ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... burst into tears, her shoulders heaving with the sobs of her grief, her breast surging and falling, while her little hands covered her eyes, as she stood with bent head, a pitiable little figure. ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... artists to make his gloves, and he went home after the opera to change his cravat for succeeding parties. His impertinence and audacity exceeded anything ever recorded of men of fashion,—as when he requested his royal master to ring the bell. Nothing is more pitiable than his miserable end, deserted by all his friends, a helpless idiot in a lunatic asylum, having exhausted all his means. Lord Yarmouth, afterward the Marquis of Hertford, infamous for his debaucheries and extravagance, was another of the prince's companions in folly and drunkenness. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... And his pitiable lying letter? It was posted—lurking in the pillar-box round the corner, waiting to speed on its way to break the heart of the girl, who had been willing to risk all, and count the world well lost for the sake ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... more humanely, and partly by the fact that the practice of emigration in Southern Italy has reduced the numbers of applicants for the coral-fishing business and has thereby, indirectly at least, raised wages and bettered the old conditions of service. A truly pitiable account is given of these poor creatures some thirty years ago by an English writer, whose knowledge of the Neapolitan people and character remains probably unsurpassed; and it is some satisfaction to reflect that even in Mr Stamer's day the bad old ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... Minchin was supported from the court before the round eyes of a hundred or two of her fellow-creatures, in the pitiable state of one who has been condemned to die, and not set free to live. It was as though she still misunderstood a verdict which had filled most faces with incredulity, but none with an astonishment to equal her ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... with the motionless figure of Stella Lamar before me in her last pitiable close-up. For I have never lost the sense of solemnity on entering the room of a tragedy, in spite of the long association I have had with Kennedy in the scientific detection of crime. Particularly did ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... entirely unfavorable, for the speed and impetuosity of the muddy stream had given him a good deal to think about. He dismissed his reflections until a more favorable time, and placing the lantern on the sand turned to Nugget, who was in a pitiable state of fright. ...
— Canoe Boys and Campfires - Adventures on Winding Waters • William Murray Graydon
... distance, from heights which neither she nor all that respectable world that despised his poor shell could ever attain. With it all there was no hint of superciliousness: the eyes were too sad, too terribly wise in their own way for that; and his whole manner went far beyond modesty; it had all the pitiable self-consciousness of one that has fallen from the higher social plane. No common man, no matter what his fame and offences, could lose his self-respect as this poor gentleman had done. Anne, filled with a pity she ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... doesn't care for anything. She has a wonderful tact, an eye for color, and an instinct for the current fashion in what goes for literature and art. But she has no appreciation of anything permanent and no lasting enjoyment of anything. I think that is terrible. I can't think of anything much more pitiable." ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... course in silence, for they were worn-out and despondent; they suffered dreadfully from thirst, and it was pitiable to see the tongues of the poor horses hanging out of their mouths. Day dawned, and there were no signs of the caravan. A thick vapour was rising from every quarter, and they hoped that when it cleared up they would be more fortunate; but no, there was the same monotonous ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... their pleasure. In parts of the island where the inhabitants took refuge in the monasteries, they were slaughtered by thousands together; others, tempted back to their homes by the promulgation of an amnesty, perished family by family. The lot of those who were spared was almost more pitiable than of those who died. The slave-markets of Egypt and Tunis were glutted with Chian captives. The gentleness, the culture, the moral worth of the Chian community made its fate the more tragical. No district in Europe had exhibited a civilisation more free from the vices of its type: ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... nothing better than to be on your side," replied the sheriff's wife. "Mollot has told me," she continued in a low voice, "what took place here to-day—it is pitiable! Only one man showed talent, and that was Achille Pigoult. Everybody agrees that he would make a fine orator in the Chamber; and therefore, though he has nothing, and my daughter has a dot of sixty thousand francs, not to speak of what, as an only child, ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the yard, where his mistress kept a few pet bantam fowls, and, after eating their eggs, he secured one of the hens, and began plucking it. The noise of the poor bird called some of the servants to the rescue, when they found the half-plucked creature in such a pitiable condition that they killed it at once. After this, Mr. Monkey was ...
— Minnie's Pet Monkey • Madeline Leslie
... was successful, so far as plunging the country into a needless war was concerned; but it was Polk and Taylor, not Calhoun, who obtained the Presidency through it. Mr. Calhoun's struggles for a nomination in 1844 were truly pitiable, but they were not known to the public, who saw him, at a certain stage of the campaign, affecting to decline a nomination which there was not the ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... pitiable state of incertitude and despair. His oration, his interdicted challenge, his book, his religion were all swallowed in by the one great passion which now flooded and filled his brain—his love for ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... worse for wear it looked: the white-topped wagons (there were only a few) were torn and battered, the other vehicles were only make-shifts, cut down from the originals, the horses, mules and oxen were very thin, and the people themselves were gaunt and ragged and pitiable. As brown as any Arabs and as bearded as the miners ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... once awakes from his dull dream To mark with curious joy the kingly trunk, The sweeping boughs and tower of leaves that gave it, Even so the most of men; they take the gift, And care not for the giver. Strange indeed Are they, and pitiable beyond measure, Who, thus unmindful of their wretchedness, Crowd at life's bountiful gates, like fattening beggars, Greedy and blind. For see how rich a thing Life is to him who sees, to whom each hour Brings ...
— Among the Millet and Other Poems • Archibald Lampman
... asked, "Who were the parties composing that committee? On the one hand, there was all the property of the country, in every variety and form, aggregated to support a measure peculiarly framed for its interest and protection. Who was the other party? All that was pitiable and miserable in the land, sunken alike by ignorance and destitution. How, again, were the respective causes of these parties conducted? On the one side was one of the most active and vigilant bodies of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... is to do. A mysterious fiat goes forth and a million women simultaneously put on black straw hats surmounted by a cock in his pride. Another mysterious order goes forth and two million women simultaneously begin reading the latest novel by Robert W. Chambers. Pitiable are those in whom this instinct is wanting and who must tag timidly behind, venturing only where a million others have gone before. Perhaps it is, with such people, a case of arrested development. Boys of sixteen and girls of fourteen have ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... dirty shoes, and they've tracked all over the floor. Your cousin likes cleanliness. A great girl like you ought to be clean. Weren't you clean in Brittany? But I recollect when I went down there to buy thread it was pitiable to see the folks,—they were like savages. At any rate she has a good appetite," added Rogron, looking at his sister; "one would think she ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... been a time, Mrs Smith told her, when her spirits had nearly failed. She could not call herself an invalid now, compared with her state on first reaching Bath. Then she had, indeed, been a pitiable object; for she had caught cold on the journey, and had hardly taken possession of her lodgings before she was again confined to her bed and suffering under severe and constant pain; and all this among strangers, with the absolute ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... waste of human material, this pitiable crushing of joy in the day's work, and this crippling of the economic output is at last to be reduced, indeed nothing is more needed than a careful scrutiny of the various psychophysical functions ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... usually the stimulus of remote chances of danger either from beasts or men. Our sympathies are drawn out towards our humble hardy companions by a community of interests, and, it may be, of perils, which make us all friends. Nothing but the most pitiable puerility would lead any manly heart to make their inferiority a theme for self-exaltation; however, that is often done, as if with the vague idea that we can, by magnifying their deficiencies, demonstrate ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... distance, unable to realize that they had arrived, and why, when they said "Chicago," people no longer pointed in some direction, but instead looked perplexed, or laughed, or went on without paying any attention. They were pitiable in their helplessness; above all things they stood in deadly terror of any sort of person in official uniform, and so whenever they saw a policeman they would cross the street and hurry by. For the whole of ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... most people consider the very fact that they are still conscious an absolute proof that they have not died. The horrible doctrine of eternal punishment, too, is responsible for a vast amount of most pitiable and entirely groundless terror among those newly arrived in Kamaloka who in many cases spend long periods of acute mental suffering before they can free themselves from the fatal influence of that hideous blasphemy, ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... top, is straight. The wound is of course still fresh and sore, but is already showing signs of healing. The poor man has evidently been not only barbarously mutilated, but nearly frightened to death. With his pale face and half-grown beard, and his head bound up, he is a pitiable object. Obviously he was nearly as much afraid of me as of his midnight assailants, and was far too much bewildered by the harsh tone of "the Saxon" to tell a smooth and coherent story. Bit by bit, amid many interruptions, he told his pitiful narrative, ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... bed tortured with the pain of the gout, sinking under incurable disease, with no pleasant memories of the past to cheer him, with disgrace and disaster accumulating, and with no bright hopes beyond the grave, he loathed life and dreaded death. The emperor in his palace was perhaps the most pitiable object which could be found in all his realms. He tossed upon his pillow, the victim of remorse and despair, now condemning himself for his cruel treatment of his brother Rhodolph, now inveighing bitterly against the inhumanity and arrogance of Ferdinand ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... collectively guilty of Joan of Arc's death. He even goes out of his way to abuse English literature in this amazing passage: 'De Shakespeare a Milton, de Milton a Byron leur belle et simple litterature est sceptique, judaique, satanique.' It is pitiable that so distinguished a writer as was Michelet should pen such rubbish, but when a Frenchman writes on the subject of Joan of Arc much should be forgiven him. More serious than the abuse of the English in Michelet's work are the inaccuracies in his account of Joan of Arc. For instance, ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... he had found the pitiable remnants of Soapy he came upon Carter. The range boss was lying prone on his back, his body apparently unmarred. His horse was standing near him, grazing. Carter had not been in ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and learned D'Aguesseau," says Michelet, "notwithstanding the pitiable, the wretched sides of his character, had two lofty sides, his reform of the laws, and a personal passion, the taste and urgent need of universality, a certain encyclopaedic sense. A young man came to him one day, a man of letters ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Mackenzie, stonemason, journalist, and prime minister, died in April, 1892, a victim to the paralysis which had been steadily creeping for years over his enfeebled frame, and made him a pitiable spectacle as he sat like a Stoic in the front seats of the opposition, unable to speak or even to rise without the helping arm of some attentive friend. On the 30th October, 1893, Sir John Abbott, probably ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... no longer. He clearly perceived that what was fun to them was mortal terror to the pitiable object of their merriment, and, advancing to the edge of the dyke, he held out his pole at arm's length to render him what ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... 1748, a year in which the fortunes of New France had reached so low an ebb that nothing but the most loyal administration might now save her. Even then a strong honest man might possibly have weathered the storm already lowering over this New World dominion; but, with pitiable perverseness, every trait in Bigot's character helped it on to ruin. In private life vain, selfish, heartless, extravagant to the point of folly; in public life mercenary and venal beyond shame—such were the characteristics of the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... we have ever since had the pitiable sight of the parents, the sisters, and the sweetheart crooning over the emigration of the best able-bodied young men ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... The delay was pitiable for the old woman, whom, when I came to her again, I found to have swooned away. It was all I could do with my bruised arm to lift her and bring her to the ladder. How I got her down and into her cabin I know not; but when I came out again to my lady's side, the ship seemed to swim before ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... They are pitiable objects. Never having learnt to read anything but the sporting papers, books are of no use to them. They never wasted much of their youth on thought, and, apparently, have lost the knack of it. They don't ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... world, Judith's ingenuous display of feeling had in its very sincerity a something pitiable. How could she strip from her soul every fold of reserve and stand unloved and unashamed, sanctified, as it were, by the very hopelessness of her passion? How could women make of their whole existence a thing to be rejected, reflected Kitty, who, giving nothing, could ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... incontiguous and barbarous northeastern possessions as representative of his Imperial Majesty, and plenipotentiary of the Company his own genius had created; forgot the year of loneliness and hardship and peril in whose jaws the bravest was impotent; forgot even his pitiable crew, diseased when he left Sitka, that had filled the Juno with their groans and laments; and the bells of youth, long still, rang in his soul ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... they call it. For a time the husband and wife remained on good terms. They were allowed to visit each other once a month. After a while she tired of him and would have nothing more to do with him. She served four years, and received a pardon. Hendricks still remains in prison, and is a pitiable and helpless wreck. He is totally blind, and his nervous system entirely shattered. He can scarcely lift food to his mouth. He is so weak that it is with difficulty he walks about the prison park. An aged prisoner waits on him constantly to care ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... prize story, and Poe had sent in his 'Manuscript in a Bottle' among others. It would have broken your hearts, gentlemen, to have seen him. His black coat was buttoned up close to his chin—seedy, badly worn—he himself shabby and down at the heels, but erect and extremely courteous—a most pitiable object. My servant wasn't going to let him in at first, he looked so much ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of May the session was opened. The benches of the Commons presented a singular spectacle. That great party, which, in the last three Parliaments, had been predominant, had now dwindled to a pitiable minority, and was indeed little more than a fifteenth part of the House. Of the five hundred and thirteen knights and burgesses only a hundred and thirty-five had ever sate in that place before. It is evident that a body of men so raw and inexperienced must ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sadness as deep as the eye of man can behold. And we, who dimly gaze on these things with our own blind eyes, we know full well that it is not they alone that we are striving to see, not they alone that we cannot understand, but that before us there lies a pitiable form of the great power that quickens ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of the dingy salesroom and idly thumbing a catalogue of effects about to be put up at auction; but his insouciance was so unaffected that the inevitable innocent bystander might have been pardoned for perceiving in him a pitiable victim of the ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... way was long; and now, sitting in the yellow sunshine of that kind day, with the fool of Twist Tickle for company, I watched them come again, their burden deposited in the inevitable arms. I wondered if the spirit of old Tom Hossie rejoiced in its escape. I wondered if it continued in pitiable age or had returned to youth—to strength for action and wish for love. I wondered, with the passionate curiosity of a lad, as I watched the procession of simple folk disperse, far off, to supper and to the kisses of ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... motley and the merry, merry jangling of the bells, and you will find how slender are the muscles that the armour lays bare, how shrivelled the breast that the ermine strips, how dragged and weary is that pitiable, naked figure which a few moments before was dancing fantastically, ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... vernacular,—extremely exotic in the London climate. If she do not gravitate too irresistibly towards that class of New-Era people (which includes whatsoever we have of prurient, esurient, morbid, flimsy, and in fact pitiable and unprofitable, and is at a sad discount among men of sense), she may get into good tracks of inquiry and connection here, and be very useful to herself and others. I could not show her Alfred (he has been here since) nor Landor: but surely if I can I will,—that or a hundred ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... understand the nature of this wretched form of slavery as carried on at Hong Kong. There did not exist a class of women brought to the pitiable plight of prostitution by the wiles of the seducer, or through the mishap of a lapse from virtue, after which all doors to reform are practically closed against such, as in Western civilization, nor were there those known to have fallen through innate perversity; but such as existed among ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... there with people of no name, In noisome alley, and in pathless wood: And where we think the truth least understood, Oft may be found a "singleness of aim," That ought to frighten into hooded shame A money mong'ring, pitiable brood. How glorious this affection for the cause Of stedfast genius, toiling gallantly! What when a stout unbending champion awes Envy, and Malice to their native sty? Unnumber'd souls breathe out a still applause, Proud to behold him ...
— Poems 1817 • John Keats
... at table, telling the footman to lay 'that parcel' beside the clock on the mantelpiece. Aminta and Mrs. Lawrence gave out a little cry of bird or mouse, pitiable to hear: they could not wait, they must know, they pished at sight of plates. His look deferred to their good pleasure, like the dead hand of a clock under key; and Weyburn placed the missive before him, seeing by the superscription that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... young men in England, and this poor creature was of the number. I never was more rejoiced than when he quitted my ship, for the sight of so much weakness sickened one of human nature. Miserable as his fate proved to be, and pitiable as his condition really was while in my charge, his case has the alleviating circumstance with me, of having made me acquainted with those whom it might not otherwise have been ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... their personal interests before those of the country, and measuring the success of every activity by the pecuniary profit it brought to them and to those on whom they depended for their supplies of capital. The pitiable failure of some conspicuous samples from the first batch we tried of these poor devils helped to give the whole public side of the war an air of monstrous and hopeless farce. They proved not only that they were useless for public work, but that in a well-ordered nation they would never have ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... put his head into the mouth of the shelter and asked if we were ready. I nodded, and, supporting each other, Scowl and I limped from the place. Outside were about fifty soldiers, who greeted us with a shout that, although it was mixed with laughter at our pitiable appearance, struck me as not altogether unfriendly. Amongst these men was my horse, which stood with its head hanging down, looking very depressed. I was helped on to its back, and, Scowl clinging to the stirrup leather, we ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... man and an anti-slavery man, and an advocate of any special Christian reform; but the effect of adopting any one of these reforms as the supreme object of a man's pursuit, never fails to belittle him. One of the most pitiable objects the world contains is a man of generous natural impulses grown sour, impatient, bitter, abusive, uncharitable, and ungracious, by devotion to one idea, and the failure to impress it upon the world with the strength by which it possesses himself. Many of ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... those only who have been in the same predicament as I can appreciate. "Thank the Fates!" I murmured, and stopped to allow the comers to reach me, noting with a grim smile that they were covered with mud from top to toe, and as damp as a couple of Malvern hydropaths. Their plight was every whit as pitiable as mine; and although the rain had not abated its flow or the wind its strength, yet I almost felt as though it had grown fine again. Corroborative proof of the sociability ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... pitiable sight. Tons of hot water had been pouring on his devoted head, and his shaggy, shapeless coat was so plastered to his long, little body, that he looked more like a drowned weazel than a terrier. He was trembling violently, and whined piteously, as they gave him to me; nevertheless, he attempted ...
— My Doggie and I • R.M. Ballantyne
... and nothing good except what is honourable: let him guide his life by this rule: let him both act and expect others to act in accordance with this law, and let him regard those whose minds are steeped in indolence, and who are given up to lust and gluttony, as the most pitiable of mankind, no matter how splendid their fortunes may be. Let him say to himself, "Pleasure is uncertain, short, apt to pall upon us, and the more eagerly we indulge in it, the sooner we bring on a reaction of feeling against ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... and salvation, is a chained enemy, and a captive to Him who triumphed in his resurrection and ascension to glory, and under the control and permissive will of Him, whom they denominate Keetchee Manitou, or Great Spirit; and, consequently they are enslaved to all that is pitiable in ignorance and superstition. Acknowledging the being of a God, the uncultivated minds of these savages have led them to shrink from the thoughts of annihilation, and to look forward with hope to a future life. They have ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... to be a girl, or other mischance befall, there was an end of the old race of Tichborne. The property would then go to collaterals, and the baronetcy must become extinct. It was under the weight of these new sorrows that the Dowager Lady Tichborne wrote pitiable letters to Gibbes, promising money and asking for more particulars; while enclosing at the same time to the man who thus so unaccountably kept himself aloof a letter beginning, "My dear and beloved Roger, I hope you will not refuse to come back to your poor afflicted mother. I have ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... nine o'clock in the morning until two in the afternoon. The day was exceedingly hot, and as there was no water to be obtained nearer than a mile from the berg,[12] we suffered greatly from thirst. The condition of the wounded touched my heart deeply. It was pitiable to hear ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... is left—which often is nothing at all, and many literally starve to death. No wonder these poor creatures—be they little girls or women—all wear "the same look of hopeless despair and wretchedness," making an impression on the mind more pitiable than any disease. The writer had among her patients some who tried by the most agonizing of deaths—voluntary starvation—to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... spent in haunting the purlieus of the prison (consequently the night preceding the second public examination of Agnes), I was attacked by ardent fever in such unmitigated fury, that before morning I had lost all command of my intellectual faculties. For some weeks I became a pitiable maniac, and in every sense the wreck of my former self; and seven entire weeks, together with the better half of an eighth week, had passed over my head whilst I lay unconscious of time and its dreadful freight of events, excepting in so far as my disordered ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... How pitiable it is to see a great good man be-fuddled by a half truth. For to allege "Industrialism" to be the grand agency in the elevation of a race of already degraded labourers, is as much a mere platitude as to say, "they must eat and drink ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... who was really in a pitiable state. "I'm sorry to trouble you, Mrs Clayton Vernon. But I want to speak to ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... the prince's cook in his name for meat, bread, and wine. Then he led Ephraim to his tent, which was lighted by a lantern, and asked how he, who from his appearance was neither a slave nor a person of mean degree, had come into such a pitiable plight. The messenger replied that on his way he had bandaged the wounds of a severely injured man with the upper part of his apron, and the chamberlain instantly went to his baggage and gave him a piece of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the more helpless, the more pitiable, the louder would their blood have cried for reprisals against the wild beasts who sent them ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... thoughts of this man, now that his adventure was over and his end near? If he were in very truth a prince, how pitiable, how paltry! What cheap martyrdom! If an impostor, had the game been worth the candle?—Death seemed a coin of high value for this short, vanished comedy. The man alone could answer, for the truth might not be known, save by the knowledge that comes with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... singular beauty. The sleeves of his jacket were too short; with his ill-cut country gloves and a waistcoat too scanty for him, he looked prodigiously ridiculous, compared with the young men in the balcony—"positively pitiable," thought Mme. de Bargeton. Chatelet, interested in her without presumption, taking care of her in a manner that revealed a profound passion; Chatelet, elegant, and as much at home as an actor treading the familiar boards of his theatre, ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of the Revolution, when there was fighting in the very courtyard of the factory, so pitiable an inventory never had been seen in the Fromont establishment. Receipts and expenditures balanced each other. The general expense account had eaten up everything, and, furthermore, Fromont Jeune was indebted to the firm in a large ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... chance escaped from the guardians which the good Earl of Kent had put over him to take care of him in his lunacy, was found by some of Cordelia's train, wandering about the fields near Dover, in a pitiable condition, stark mad, and singing aloud to himself, with a crown upon his head which he had made of straw, and nettles, and other wild weeds that he had picked up in the corn-fields. By the advice of the physicians, Cordelia, though earnestly desirous of seeing ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... in 1825, at Rheims, during the coronation of CHARLES X, with an amusing causerie on the manners and customs of the Restoration. The splendour of this coronation ceremony was singularly spoiled by the pitiable taste of those who had charge of it. These worthies took upon themselves to mutilate the sculpture work on the marvellous facade and to "embellish" the austere cathedral with Gothic decorations of cardboard. The century, like the author, was young, ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... communicate elasticity to my spirits. But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... of rock, by the aid of which he gradually drew himself out of the water, and grasping at crevices or bits of seaweed, slowly and painfully reached the ledge on which they had stood before they took the leap. He presented a pitiable spectacle; his face, pale as death, was dabbled with blood; his head drooped on his breast; his clothes were torn, and streamed with the salt water; his cap was gone, and the wet hair, which he seemed too exhausted to push aside, hung over his forehead and eyes. He was evidently dizzy, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... reappeared there when she was again thrown into prison for debt; but, by entering into an agreement to sing at the theatre every night, under surveillance, she was enabled to obtain her release. Her recklessness and improvidence had brought her to a pitiable condition; and in her latter days, after a career of splendor, caprice, and extravagance, she was obliged to subsist, it is said, by button-making. She died in frightful indigence, the recipient of charity, at a hospital in Bologna, ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris |
