"Pitiful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sordid things, what was there that she could do to eke out her pitiful little living? For live she must, since she was here in this bleak world and it seemed to be expected of her. Keep boarders? Yes, if there were any to keep; but in this town there were few who boarded. There was nothing to draw ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... belonged to our regiment during the war. The above I think a low estimate. Well, on the 26th day of April, 1865, General Joe E. Johnston surrendered his army at Greensboro, North Carolina. The day that we surrendered our regiment it was a pitiful sight to behold. If I remember correctly, there were just sixty-five men in all, including officers, that were paroled on that day. Now, what became of the original 3,200? A grand army, you may say. Three ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... the race—Hartshorn won it in a neck-and-neck drive with Calloway just as Shea was flogging the bay colt past the sixteenth pole—and we will lift the curtain again at the point where the judges summoned Pitkin into the stand to ask him for an explanation of Sergeant Smith's pitiful showing. ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... Methodist Episcopal Church even appointed an hour of prayer that the Senate might be moved to convict. The lawyers for the defense so far outgeneraled the prosecutors that one who reads the records at the present day finds difficulty in thinking of them as more than the account of a pitiful farce. At length on May 16 the Senate was prepared to make its decision. The last charge was voted upon first. It was a very general accusation, drawn up by Stevens, and seemed most likely to secure the necessary ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... fell into her chair again, unable to see that pitiful, anguished face; and Mrs. Dering, sitting down on the bed, drew the trembling figure ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... she would spread it in her loneliness, And think how finely she too might be drest, As finely as any proud woman of them all, If the God of Israel had not visited her Surely for sin, though she could not remember. Thus one joy was. And then the Lord Naaman, This wonder soiled, this pitiful great captain Forbidden all that he had so proudly been— To worship him, that was her other joy. When the dusk came, and the city fell to silence, And out of his poor banishment he would walk, She followed him, knowing the very hour, And all her heart was flooded ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... for that." Their lips met and she clung to him, all the pitiful longings of her days and nights of misery in her caress, the dependence of helpless womanhood, but greater than that, the fear for his safety, which took precedence over ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... you be gentle with Dorothea. Find, if you can, something admirable in this plain spinster keeping, at the age of thirty-seven, a room in her breast adorned and ready for first love; find it pitiful, if you must, that the blind boy should mistake his lodging; only do not laugh, or your laughter may accuse you in ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tortured by the political gadflies in Washington, and suffering painfully from the weariness of hope so long deferred, telegraphed: "Is anything to be done?" A pitiful time of it Mr. Lincoln was having, and it called for a patient fortitude surpassing imagination. Yet one little bit of fruit was at this moment ripe for the plucking! After about four weeks of wearisome labor the general had brought matters to that condition which was so grateful to his ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... M. de Rastignac, deal with the world as it deserves. You are determined to succeed? I will help you. You shall sound the depths of corruption in woman; you shall measure the extent of man's pitiful vanity. Deeply as I am versed in such learning, there were pages in the book of life that I had not read. Now I know all. The more cold-blooded your calculations, the further you will go. Strike ruthlessly; you will ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... that there should be an element of delight somewhere in life. Notoriously it is rather hard to come by. City crowds at night present the spectacle of people making huge and fevered efforts to run delight to earth and often achieving only pitiful failure. I believe the normal way in which delight ought to enter the lives of married people is just through their satisfaction in each other's society, enriched by the society of their children. When a man and a woman ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... these honored guests as they with tears have told us of their pitiful lot, have narrated to us how, when they might have been tilling the soil (or what passes for soil) of the New Hampshire hills, shearing their lambs, manipulating their shares (with the aid of plough-handles), and watering their stock at the nearest brook, ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Puritanism, and on the other hand he boldly sought the themes and even the modes of expression of his poetry in the arduous, contentious and highly melodramatic life that lay all about him. Whitman, however, was clearly before his time. His countrymen could see him only as immoralist; save for a pitiful few of them, they were dead to any understanding of his stature as artist, and even unaware that such a category of men existed. He was put down as an invader of the public decencies, a disturber of the public peace; even his eloquent ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... said Leigh, "I have been abroad some time, studying various 'phases', of its so-called intellectual and scientific life, and have found many of these phases nothing but an output of masked barbarity. The savages of Thibet are more pitiful than the French or Italian vivisectionist,—and the horrors that go on in the laboratories would not be believed if they were told. Would not be believed! They would be flatly denied, even by the men who are engaged in them! And were I to write a plain statement of what I know to be true, ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... have been actually destroyed, but in the much more numerous cases where we may be reasonably sure that municipal life continued without a break throughout the incursions of the pirates, their decay was pitiful; and when recorded history begins again, after a gap of two hundred years, with the Roman missionaries of the sixth and seventh centuries, we find thenceforward, and throughout the Saxon period, many of the towns living ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... instant neither stirred. It was the expected; and still there is a limit to human endurance. The girl was trembling, in a nervous tension too great to bear longer. An effort indeed she made at control; but it was a pitiful effort and futile. In surrender absolute, abandon absolute, she dropped back into her seat, her arms crossed pathetically on the surface of the library table, her face ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... round, smooth edge becoming by degrees blunted and broken, its tones rough and coarse and harsh, some of the notes fading into feeble indistinctness—the fine, bold, true intonation hiding its tremulous uncertainty in trills and quavers, alternating with pitiful husky coughing, while every now and then one or two lovely, rich, pathetic notes, surviving ruin, recalled the early sweetness and power of the original instrument. The idea of what that woman's voice might have been to her used to ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... across which—nearly a thousand yards of bare bullet-swept field—the Ghurkas had a day or so previously tried to charge. The bodies still lay there in rows just as they had fallen under the bursts of fire that mowed them down—pitiful huddled figures in the grass staring ahead into the great void. Few of the faces showed signs of suffering—such is the mercy of the rifle bullet; and so great was the resemblance to sleep that later, when we came to retire, the writer ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... me too far. When I said in the Bazaar, "if I were a painter, I would paint this bridge; but, as I am no painter, but a poet, I must therefore speak," &c. Upon this the critic says, "He is so vain, that he tells us himself that he is a poet." There is something so pitiful in such criticism, that one cannot be wounded by it; but even when we are the most peaceable of men, we feel a desire to flagellate such wet dogs, who come into our rooms and lay themselves down in the best place in them. There might be a whole ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... the strength leave him like the steam from an engine as the flood reaches its fire-box; when I saw the hands that thought they was strong enough to shape the future danglin' between his crooked knees, an' the eyes that had never before asked mercy lookin' up glazed an' pitiful, why, it felt to me as if I was just tryin' to send the strength out of my own body into his. Poor ol' Jabez, he was cast steel to the finish, no spring, just simply rigid an' stiff, till at last ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... from his hand, and he stood looking at his daughter. His look was pitiful, and she could not bear to see him shake his head slowly from side ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... him, two days after, as he sat in his friend Judge Brown's law office, poring over a volume of law. He saw that Bacon's treatment had been heroic; he couldn't get the pitiful confusion of the preacher's face out of his mind. But, after all, Bacon's seizing of just that instant was a stroke ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... beside a house which had been recently blown down by a shell. As we drove slowly by, a wounded old woman was carried out and laid beside the bodies of two other white-haired women who had just been dug out of the ruins. Though fatally injured, they were still living, and I shall never forget the pitiful looks on those ashy gray faces as they looked up into my face with eyes like those of sheep about to ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... It was pitiful to see the expression of her eyes as she looked in his face without a word. She was leaning back in the wooden arm-chair, one hand lying in her lap, the other hanging limply over the side of the chair. Her hair, which had been fastened in a coil at the back of her head, had ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... but one bruise! Oh! this murdering of childhood; those heavy hands crushing this lovely girl; how abominable that such weakness should have such a weighty cross to bear! Again did Gervaise crouch down, no longer thinking of tucking in the sheet, but overwhelmed by the pitiful sight of this martyrdom; and her trembling lips seemed to be seeking for words ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... whom he had surmised evil, and on whom he had bestowed at best only a little cynical admiration, crept home with steps that faltered, burdened with a heaviness of heart and a weariness of body which could be measured only by the pitiful eye of Him who carries the world's ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... our regiments came over a hill and saw the valley that lay before them being terrifically shelled by the cannon and assailed by hail from the machine guns, the whole column was seen to pause and a look of worry came over the faces of these men that for just an instant was pitiful. They knew that ahead of them lay death for many and it is not strange that for several seconds the lines were held up, but then a look of fierce determination and of courage took the place of the former expression and with a great resolve and courage, dash, and daring, the lines ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... week that followed that important Sunday, crowds of women, children, and old men; Spaniards, Cubans, and people of other nations, went out of Santiago. They hardly knew where to go. Men who saw that sight said it was pitiful. All the roads leading from Santiago were filled with people and wagons, toiling on to some place of safety. Most of these people had very little food, except the fruit then ripe on the mango-trees, and so had to be fed by our Army and by the Red Cross Society. Ever since General Shafter's army ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... the stories we had been told of it, we might have imagined a wild bore. I am sure it made us all grunt before we could get over it, it was such an uneven rocky track of road, full of great holes, and at that time swells with such rapid currents, as we had made most pitiful shift, if we had not been accommodated with a most excellent conductor; who yet, for all his haste, fell over his horse's head as he was plunging into some dirty hole, but by good luck smit his face into a soft place of mud, ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... she heard a great stagger behind her, and a pitiful moan, and Sir Charles fell heavily, striking his head against the edge of the sofa. She looked round—as she knelt, and saw him, black in the face, rolling his eyeballs fearfully, while his teeth gnashed awfully, and a little jet of foam ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... her ear-trumpet. To hear that lovely voice, for I do her justice, and there are lovely notes in her voice, lovely, to hear that voice shrieking and screaming away, in what she called the great scene, was simply pitiful. There was no melody, and above all there was no form. A musical composition is like an architectural building; it must be built up and constructed. How often have I said that! You must have colour, and you must have line, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... with a bitter, pitiful smile. "I wear it in memory of that girl who died very young"—she pointed to the picture—"and to remind me not to care for anything too much lest it should prove to be a lie." She nodded softly to the picture. "He and she are both ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... that repelled her, And the cold hand that turned her away, And take, from the lips that denied her, This answerless prayer of to-day! Take Lord, from my mem'ry forever That pitiful sob of despair, And the patter and trip of the little bare feet, And the one piercing ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... labour quenched their last spark of courage; as I had talked to these poor people I had seen them glancing about with dull, troubled, despondent eyes, and heard them say to one another softly, and with pitiful smiles: ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... had looked across to the little girl, over to Bachelor Billy, who stood leaning against the mantel, and then down again into the lady's eyes. It was almost pitiful to look into his face and see the strong emotion outlined there, marking the fierceness of the conflict in his mind between a great desire for honest happiness and a stern and manly sense of the right and proper thing for him to do. At last ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... I was, the day seemed intolerably long, but at length the sun was sufficiently low to allow of the horses trekking again, although the poor beasts' plight was pitiful. Again I trekked through the better part of the night, due north, and with no fear of missing the water, for it was a wide sheet that the kopje had shown me almost a ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... on the red war-path, War fiercely to the death, Be pitiful and tender to the helpless and the fair, I fought—have many slain, But not a single stain Of blood of maids or children dims the ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... down under a miserable constraint—Belle flushed and indignant, Mildred no longer disguising her sadness, and poor Mrs. Jocelyn with moist eyes making a pitiful attempt to restore serenity so that Belle's happy day might not become clouded. Roger tried to break the evil spell by giving his impressions of the Park to Mrs. Jocelyn, but was interrupted by her husband, who had been watching the young man with ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... that?' Annabella burst forth with a cry that was almost pitiful. 'Do you know that? Is there no hope? Can ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... the grace of a woodsman's perseverance and the instinct of a wild creature, gained at last the clearing in which his cabin stood. Behind him wavered a long, deep-gouged furrow-trail, pitiful attest of suffering. His strength was water, but he was home. After a long time he reached the door, and rested. The incident was cruel, but it was only one of many in a ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... intentively; I did consent; And often did beguile her of her tears, When I did speak of some distressful stroke That my youth suffer'd. My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs: She swore,—in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange; 'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful: She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me; And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her, I should but teach him how to tell ...
— Othello, the Moor of Venice • William Shakespeare
... pitiful return for the millions of dollars which Morse's invention had saved or earned for those nations which used it as a government monopoly, and while I find no note of complaint in his own letters, his friends ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... that sometimes followed me about. The cat had never been known to catch a bird, but she had a way of watching them that was very embarrassing to the bird. Whenever she appeared, the mother bluebird would set up that pitiful melodious plaint. One morning the cat was standing by me, when the bird came with her beak loaded with building material, and alighted above me to survey the place before going into the box. When she saw the cat, she was greatly disturbed, and in her agitation could not keep ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... too well for his own peace of mind the pitiful diversions of the old man's day. It sapped his powers of resistance. In the morning there was the doctor, a weary little man, untemperamental and mercifully impervious to insult, who chugged up the lane in a car that needed ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... convulsively and her arms trying to grapple with it for a surer hold. But suddenly she gave a piercing scream, and Nan, peering down through the branches in instant alarm, saw Ruth lying at the foot of the tree in a pitiful little motionless heap, and knew in a moment that she had tried to do what she had ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... dancing up and down as if they were bewitched. Nurse took out the frocks, and there was the children's collar-box, a large round cardboard-box with a lid, jumping from side to side like a box in a fairy tale; and such dreadful pitiful little mews coming from the inside! Nurse undid the lid, and out sprang Spot like a flash of lightning, and ran as if she were running for her life out of the door and down the stairs, and safe into the kitchen, where she cuddled herself up in a corner of the fender, wishing ...
— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hand may unclose; Yet still it keeps such faded show Of when 'twas gathered long ago, That the crushed petals' lovely grain, The sweetness of the sanguine stain, Seen of a woman's eyes must make Her pitiful heart, so prone to ache, Love roses better for its sake:— Only that this can never be:— Even so unto ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... calm, my child," she returned, with a pitiful accent. "Sit down beside me here, and I will explain why I am so disturbed. Good heavens! we have always supposed that Sir William was a man ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... on the mounds and the rent linen which flutters from little sticks stuck about the graves, grow whole and new again. The pots are red and hot as they come from the fire, and the pitiful cloths take on the sheen of youth and fold themselves about invisible forms. None may see the dead, though it is said that you may see ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... he had been amusing himself with a girl who was nothing else than an attractive and finely-dressed harlot, named Brandonia Seroni, the last woman in all Milan whom he could with decency receive into his house. And the pitiful story was not yet complete. In marrying her the foolish youth had burdened himself with her mother, two or more sisters, and three brothers, the last-named being rough fellows without any calling but that of common soldiers. The character of the girl herself may be judged by the ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Austerlitz reeled before the charge of the Connaught Rangers." Wellington himself was Irish, as in the later wars of England Lord Gough, Lord Wolseley, Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener, and General French came from Ireland. The Irish soldiers in the English service by a pitiful irony of fate helped materially to fasten the chains of English domination on the peoples of India in a long ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... hideous doubt occurred to his mind, he couldn't rest in his bed till he had cleared it all up and settled it for ever, one way or the other. If Tilgate wasn't his, by law and right, he wanted none of it. If his father was trying to buy off the real heir to the estate with a pitiful pittance, in order to preserve the ill-gotten remainder for Lady Emily's son, why, Granville for his part would be no active party to such a miserable compromise. If some other man was the Colonel's ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... yet—before her mental eyes flashed the vision of that wet January afternoon when she had come back to Harlowe House from her Christmas vacation and had been greeted by the sound of Evelyn's sobs as she passed her door. How she had gone to Evelyn's room and there heard the pitiful story of Ida Ward's illness and her failure to send Evelyn's college fees, and of how, through the Semper Fidelis Fund, she had come forward and bridged ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... The pitiful note in her voice, which he recognized instantly, stirred him to the core. Astonished that she should be in the mine and in trouble, he dashed forward, and his candle went out in the rush. Groping in the darkness her hands encountered his. ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... the arrival of the pitiful fugitives at the advanced lines. The cheers were for the fact that the refugees had at least escaped with their lives. The growls were for the Mexicans ...
— Dave Darrin at Vera Cruz • H. Irving Hancock
... Crow as being very funny. He forgot all about his loss of sleep. And his eye twinkled quite merrily. He tried to laugh, too; but it was a pitiful attempt—no more than a hoarse cackle, which was, as Jimmy Rabbit had said, positively painful. Old Mr. Crow seemed to realize that he was making a very queer sound. He hastily turned his laugh into a cough and pretended that ...
— The Tale of Jolly Robin • Arthur Scott Bailey
... fathers but now they are all going together. Everything is in a critical condition. There is not much truth in the land. All human affection is gone. There is mighty little respect. The way some people carry on is pitiful." ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... sejour, than the doors were thrown open; and from M. VISCONTI, and other members of the Council, who happened to be present, I experienced the most polite and obliging attention. As an Englishman, I confess that I felt a degree of shame on reflecting to what pitiful exaction a foreigner would be subject, who might casually visit any public object of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... history. Political life was only part of his religious life. It was religion that prompted his literary life. It was religious motive that, through a thousand avenues and channels stirred him and guided him in his whole conception of active social duty, including one pitiful field of which I may say something later. The liberalism of the continent at this epoch was in its essence either hostile to Christianity or else it was indifferent; and when men like Lamennais tried to play at the same time the double part of tribune of the people and catholic ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Blower, who had approached so as to be on the verge of the genteel circle, though she did not venture within it—they exchanged sagacious looks, and a most pitiful shake of the head. Mowbray's eye happened at that moment to glance on them; and doubtless, notwithstanding their hasting to compose their countenances to a different expression, he comprehended what was passing through ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... into a little toyshop near Coenties Slip and he saw a tugboat deck-hand purchase a pitiful little train of cars, laying his quarter on the counter with the softest smile he had seen on a man's ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... built is reached. Does the herring enjoy that sort of riding, think you? Quite as much, I should say, as one does hack-driving. From my point of view, the hawk is but the hackman of the air. Sympathize with the fish? Not much. Nor would you if you heard the pitiful cry the hawk sets up the moment he finds that his claws are tangled in a fish's back. Home he flies to seek domestic consolation, uttering the while the weeping cry of a grieved child; there are tears in his ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old Jerusalem fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and said, 'The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children.' The stern Hebrew imagination could conceive no blacker gulf of wretchedness; that was the ultimatum of degraded god-punished man. And we here, in modern England, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... that doesna move him, say, 'Aaron Latta, do you mind yon day at Inverquharity and the cushie doos?' likewise, 'Aaron Latta, do you mind yon day at the Kaims of Airlie?' likewise, 'Aaron Latta, do you mind that Jean Myles was ower heavy for you to lift? Oh, Aaron, you could lift me so pitiful easy now.' And syne says you solemnly three times, 'Aaron Latta, Jean Myles is lying dying all alone in a foreign land; Aaron Latta, Jean Myles is lying dying all alone in a foreign land; Aaron Latta, Jean Myles ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... he confessed, "of a poor beggar of a Phoenician who used to make water-jars in Sidon. I have been condemned to plow the high seas and explore the tall mountains until I find the Pitiful Princess. She must be up at the very peak, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... It was indeed a pitiful and chagrined body of horsemen who, hurrying through Worcestershire and the adjoining county, sought to hide themselves from the King's officers. Pausing in their mad flight, they rifled the house ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... open, Dick nodded Graham up beside him. At first bewilderment was all she betrayed, then her eyes focused first on Dick's face, then on Graham's, and, with recognition, her lips parted in a pitiful smile. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... in his sleep, and a brandy bottle lay on the floor. He had swallowed nearly the whole of the poison raw, and his limbs were paralyzed. Suddenly he opened his eyes; then he writhed and yelled, "Mother!—the beast! the beast!" The lady threw herself down on her knees with a pitiful cry, but Bob did not speak to her. ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... what a pitiful situation you have been the cause of placing me! Soon, very soon, a band of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas! how can I give what I would with so much pleasure have afforded them? Nevertheless, take two arrows, ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends: North American Indian • Anonymous
... the courtyard with me, it's a beautiful moonlight night; we will walk up and down arm in arm under the trees, while you tell me your pitiful tale." He drew the doleful governor into the courtyard, took him by the arm as he had said, and, in his rough, good-humored way, cried: "Out with it, rattle away, Baisemeaux; what have you ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... one reason and another I shall not name. Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent thought upon appearances; many houses in it wore a false front to seem as if they were two stories high. There they stood, rearing their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe of old tin cans, while at their very doors began a world of crystal light, a land without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis. Into that space went wandering a road, over a hill and down out of sight, and up again smaller in the distance, ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... boy, "you must help me. You must do something, oh, something, to help!" Then he made an attempt to stand, to get on the animal's back, but his poor foot gave out, and he huddled down to the ground again in pitiful, hopeless pain. The horse's nose touched his ear, starting him from a fast oncoming stupor. At the same instant the six o'clock whistle blew at the mill across the frozen river. In a few moments the men ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... you will exact a price, drive a bargain, with the men who are enduring the agony of this war on the battlefield, in the trenches, amid the lurking dangers of the sea, or with the bereaved women and pitiful children, before you will come forward to do your duty and give some part of your life, in easy, peaceful fashion, for the things we are fighting for, the things we have pledged our fortunes, our lives, our sacred honor, to vindicate ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... gave a pitiful glance round the dismantled room, which a few hours before had been decorated with the many and varied objects which were Darsie's treasures. She looked at the wooden wardrobe, the doors of which swung wide, showing ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in London with Lucie, knew little and thought less of all this, till he received a pitiful letter from Gabelle, who expected each morning to be dragged out to be killed, telling of the plight into which his faithfulness had brought him, and beseeching his ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... you for the virtue and the happiness which you assume as the concomitants of the gift? See Bacon himself: what black ingratitude! what miserable self-seeking! what truckling servility! what abject and pitiful spirit! So far from intellectual knowledge, in its highest form and type, insuring virtue and bliss, it is by no means uncommon to find great mental cultivation combined with great moral corruption." (Aside to Riccabocca.—"Push on, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... upstairs Miss Ainslie's sweet voice came to them in pitiful pleading: "Carl, Carl, dear! Where ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... their hearers. Some have been honest, many more unintentionally dishonest, and others deliberately deceitful. The relative size of these classes it is unnecessary to attempt to ascertain. They have talked and sung their way into the hearts of the hearers as does the pitiful beggar on the street. The donor sees that evidently something is needed, and gives with little, if any, careful investigation as to the real needs of the case. The result of it all has been that the testimony of those who ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... by nature gentle and pitiful. He could not endure to see his friend suffering. So he gave him the lead he had found in the street, saying, "Now, take care of that! Maybe your wealth will come from it." Luis accepted the lead unwillingly, for he thought that Luis was ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... long to clamber over its side and drag Nobs in to comparative safety, and then I glanced around upon the scene of death and desolation which surrounded us. The sea was littered with wreckage among which floated the pitiful forms of women and children, buoyed up by their useless lifebelts. Some were torn and mangled; others lay rolling quietly to the motion of the sea, their countenances composed and peaceful; others were set in hideous lines of agony or horror. Close to the boat's ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... is played: if they capitulate now, it will no longer be the act of the Governor of Paris. How ingenious this would have been, if it had not been pitiful! ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... the pitiful black face, the rags and the dirt, he could hardly recognize the little king. Madou, as he passed, said good morning in so mournful a tone that Jack's eyes filled with tears. The children saw nothing more ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... giant was about to strike him a frightful blow; for the hand that was free from holding the lantern doubled up fiercely. Tony, indeed, uttered a pitiful little cry that was almost a sob; and throwing himself forward clung to the arm of his terrible father. But he was immediately flung roughly aside as ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... in Paradise, Or sit on steps of Heaven alone? If Saints and Angels spoke of love Should I not answer from my throne? Have pity upon me, ye my friends, For I have heard the sound thereof: Should I not turn with yearning eyes, Turn earthwards with a pitiful pang? O save me from a pang in Heaven! By all the gifts we took and gave, Repent, repent, and be forgiven: This life is long, but yet it ends; Repent and purge your soul and save: No gladder song the morning stars Upon their birthday ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... Lady going into the Temple, ascending the steps, with many figures worthy of praise, such as a gentleman in antique dress, who, having dismounted from his horse, with his servants waiting, is giving alms to a beggar, quite naked and very wretched, who may be seen asking him for it with pitiful humility. In this place, also, are various buildings and most beautiful ornaments; and right round the whole work, executed likewise in fresco, are counterfeited decorations of stucco, which have the appearance of being attached to the wall with large rings, as ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 05 ( of 10) Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto • Giorgio Vasari
... to the Greek Church as [Greek: Pantelee/mon], that is, the "all-pitiful;" and in Latin his name is spelled Pantaleymon and Pantaleemon. Hagiologists seem to have been puzzled, but the compiler of the Acta Sanctorum, for July 27, St. Pantaleon's Day in the Roman calendar (xxxiii. 397-426), gives the preference to Pantaleon, and explains ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... principal parts in my composition is a kind of pride of stomach; and I scorn to fear the face of any man living: above every thing, I abhor as hell the idea of sneaking in a corner to avoid a dun—possibly some pitiful sordid wretch, whom in my heart I despise and detest. 'Tis this, and this alone, that ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... sight, threw himself at the feet of Fire Eater and, weeping bitterly, asked in a pitiful voice which could ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... contingency might happen. Smith, the Doctor, and Spalding sighted him carefully, each with his rifle resting against the side of a tree, and blazed away, their guns sounding almost together. It was pitiful the scream of agony that bear sent up. It was almost human in its anguish. It went ringing through the woods, dying away at last almost in a human groan. After struggling and clasping his arms for a moment ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... head, pitiful over the good people likened to things unclean, and royally upraising them: in doing which, he scattered to vapour the leaden incubi they had been upon his flatter moods of late. 'No, but it's a rapture to breathe the air here!' His lifted chest and nostrils were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in command, M. de Langle, who had behaved like a hero. I went alongside his ship to see him in the lonely creek to which the infected vessel had been relegated. A crowd of spectral figures crept to the ports to look at me. It was a pitiful scene. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... in her pocket for her parcel; it was safe, but her car fare was gone, and she stood a pitiful, mud-besmeared little object. Then the big tears began to come as she walked along very fast. "O dear, I'm lost!" she said to herself, "and I'll have to walk home, and Aunt Elizabeth is in a hurry, and she'll scold me! O dear! O dear! I want my own home, I do, I do." She began then to run along ...
— A Dear Little Girl • Amy E. Blanchard
... moment longer, wonderingly, as though hardly believing what she saw. Then she broke down. The long restrained tears welled up and rolled over her thin cheeks, making lines and patches in the pink powder, at once grotesque and pitiful. The carefully curled ringlets of colourless hair contrasted strangely with the sudden havoc in her complexion. Perhaps she was conscious of it, for she tried to turn her face away, so that Greif should not see it. Then ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... for a moment of the pitiful little mining rig that Roger Hunter had taken out to the Belt ... the tiny orbit-ship to be used for headquarters and storage of the ore; the even tinier scout ship, Pete Racely's old Scavenger that he had sold to ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... are both grotesque and pitiful. Is it strange that the feud should flourish in a land ruled by a "God of wrath?" Is anything but sickness and death to be expected where both are looked on as ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... would my soul have been faithful; never an alien pleasure Lured me away from the light lit in your luminous eyes, But we have altered the World as pitiful man has leisure To criticise, balance, take ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... well. The lady listened attentively, said she knew we were hungry the moment she saw us, that she had heard the soldiers were on short rations in consequence of the destruction of the railroad, and turning towards me she went on to say: 'There was such a pitiful, hungry look on this boy's face that it would have haunted me for a long time if I had let you go away without giving you a dinner. Many a hungry soldier,' she continued, 'both of the Northern and Southern army, has had something to eat at this table, and I expect many more ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... Fifth avenue, or in the parks of the city, during the breeding season, one's attention is repeatedly attracted by the pitiful shrill call of a sparrow fallen on the pavement upon its first attempt at flight, or by the stronger note of a mother sparrow, sharply bewailing the fate of a little one, killed by the fall, or dispatched alive ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... Because a just idea cannot but be fruitful. Yes, it's an aim worth working for. And its being me, Kostya Levin, who went to a ball in a black tie, and was refused by the Shtcherbatskaya girl, and who was intrinsically such a pitiful, worthless creature—that proves nothing; I feel sure Franklin felt just as worthless, and he too had no faith in himself, thinking of himself as a whole. That means nothing. And he too, most likely, had an Agafea Mihalovna to ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... of Soldiers, the Manners and Diet of Carthusians. Advice in chusing a Way of getting a Livelihood. The Conveniency of a single Life, to be at Leisure for Reading and Meditation. Wicked Soldiers oftentimes butcher Men for a pitiful Reward. The daily Danger ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... in their own eyes. More tried to comfort her, and presently gently drew himself away. He felt it was almost too much for him; but as she turned away she could not bear to let him go, and once more threw her arms round him with that pitiful cry, and only gave way when at last she sank ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... one couldn't be. These people believed that this report in itself was proof enough to officially accept the fact that UFO's were interplanetary spaceships. And when some people refused to believe even this report, the frustration was actually pitiful to see. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... general muster was made, and all appeared who had survived the perils of the wilderness, a more pitiful and humorous spectacle was exhibited than ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... beings. She was offered for six thousand wadas, about ten shillings in English money. It is quite impossible to conjecture of what use such a poor old creature can be. The Shereef Kebir made a present of a little boy to Said of Haj Beshir this evening. The poor little fellow looked very pitiful. He was stolen from Daura. He has only one cheek marked with the shonshona, because his mother lost all the children which she bare before him; and the custom is, when a mother thus loses her children, to ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson |
