"Pitiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... falling fast, but not faster nor more softly than the tears of the widowed mother and the crippled daughter, as they bowed themselves down before the cold bars, which ought to have enclosed a mass of glowing coals on that pitiless December day; but only a dull red spark or two, amid a heap of dust, just twinkled in the grate, and seemed to mock their wretchedness. Cold! Cold! Everything was cold there but faith and love. Food there was none! But on the little ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... calculated to give him flat feet. The supreme test of a charitable mind is toleration for the opinions of others,—an admission that perchance we do not know it quite all. It is much easier to give a $5 bill to a beggar than to forgive a brother who rides his pitiless logic over our prejudices. The religious world has contributed countless millions to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but has never forgiven Tom Paine for brushing the Bible ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... grudgingly accommodated, and that was by a Brazilian living on the frontier. The hot sun had ruthlessly shone on me all day as I waded through the long arrow grass that reached up to my saddle. The scorching rays, pitiless in their intensity, seemed to take the energy from everything living. All animate creation was paralyzed. The relentless ball of fire in the heavens, pouring down like molten brass, appeared to be trying to set the world on fire; and I lay utterly exhausted on my horse's neck, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... still hanging over his handsome face, he shook himself away from the caressing hand which was laid upon his shoulder, as if to hold him back from running away to the great, pitiless sea. ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... of Albemarle and Admiral Sir George Pococke sailed in early spring on a more important errand, landed in June near Havana with eleven thousand soldiers, and attacked Moro Castle, the key of the city. The pitiless sun of the tropic midsummer poured its fierce light and heat on the parched rocks where the men toiled at the trenches. Earth was so scarce that hardly enough could be had to keep the fascines in place. The siege works ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... around which the tinkle of a little brook over its pebbly bed only seemed to intensify. Presently she had no more tears left and she dried her eyes and sat upright and was suddenly aware of a great interior light, pitiless and clear beyond all dayshine. And in it she saw herself with a vision more than mortal. It was an intolerable vision, but during it there was formed in her soul the faculty ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... he had earned scorn, ill-report, and hatred; nay, he had even diligently gone to work, and lost his own self-love and self-respect in the service of his darling idol. He was at once, for lucre's sake, the mean, cringing fawner, and the pitiless, iron despot; to the rich he could play supple parasite, while the poor man only knew him as an unrelenting persecutor; with the good, and they were chiefly of the fairer, softer sex, he walked in meekness, the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... before her undecided. She recalled all that Flockart had told her. He was the emissary of Lady Heyburn without a doubt. The girl had told him openly of her decision to speak the truth and expose him, but he had only laughed at her. Alas! she knew his true character, unscrupulous and pitiless. But she placed ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... with the cool dark and the mountain winds, after the long, pitiless day of fierce, devouring sunlight, the moon glided over the fainting world with peace and healing—like an angel over a battle-field.... The two are mystic in every Indian ideal of beauty, and alike cosmic—woman and ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... War began with the firing upon Fort Sumter. Shot came in a whirlwind, half a score of balls at a time. The woodwork blazed, the brick and stone flew in all directions. Red-hot balls from the furnace in Moultrie dashed down like a pitiless hailstorm. The barracks were ablaze, streams of fire burst out of the quarters. Ninety barrels of powder were rolled into the water lest it should explode in the awful heat. The men were stifled with fumes from the burning buildings. Over the horrors of this attack the Stars and Stripes ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan
... towards it; but when they got to the spot whence the sound seemed to proceed, they could see nothing except some wreckage. They were all dead, their agony was done, their cries no more ascended to the pitiless heavens; and wind, and sky, and sea were ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... jest," said the Bishop angrily. "You said you had a matter of vital import to lay before me. Make haste. And remember that you are here only on sufferance. I shall be pitiless. I shall scourge the evil principle you represent from the face of ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... her goodlihead Left the tall palaces of Troy behind. And ever were the ghastly-visaged Fates Thrusting her on into the battle, doomed To be her first against the Greeks—and last! To right, to left, with unreturning feet The Trojan thousands followed to the fray, The pitiless fray, that death-doomed warrior-maid, Followed in throngs, as follow sheep the ram That by the shepherd's art strides before all. So followed they, with battle-fury filled, Strong Trojans and wild-hearted ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... was utilized to complete the out-fit. Its shape was beyond doubt uncommon, but it had big pockets, and it looked like business. Thorpe, as he glanced up and down his image in the tall mirror of the wardrobe, felt that he must kill a large number of birds to justify the effect of pitiless proficiency which this jacket ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and bright as if this coast had never seen the bay darkened with the grey columns of the waterspouts, stalking across the waves before the northern gale; and the tiny herring-boats fleeing from their nets right for the breakers, hoping more mercy even from those iron walls of rock than from the pitiless howling waste of spray behind them; and that merry beach beside the town covered with shrieking women and old men casting themselves on the pebbles in fruitless agonies of prayer, as corpse after corpse swept up at the feet of wife and child, till in one case alone a single dawn saw ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of "Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a pitiless sensuality that the poet had intended to procure through this representation. But Strauss's music, save in such exceptional passages as the shimmering, restless, nerve-sick opening page, or the beginning of the scene with the head, or certain other crimson patches, hampers and ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... has blighted each blossom, That ever has bloomed in her pathway below; It has froze every fountain that gushed in her bosom, And chilled her heart's verdure with pitiless woe: Her parents, her kindred, all crushed by oppression; Her husband still doomed in its desert to stay; No arm to protect from the tyrant's aggression— She must weep as she treads on ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... fierce impetuosity, and, moreover, was not known to us for a friend, and so we . . . etc., etc. When asked what had become of the witches, he only pointed his finger silently to the ground, then voiced calmly a moral reflection: "The passion for gold is pitiless in the very old, senor," he said. "No doubt in former days they have put many a solitary traveller to sleep in ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... something, to be found in words of troublesome vagueness, in variable moods, in an increased sensitiveness of mind and an undercurrent of emotional bitterness—she was emotional at last! She puzzled me greatly, for I saw two spirits in her: one pitiless as of old; the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the West furnished contrasts and incongruities innumerable —vaster perhaps, and more significant. There was the incessant contrast of civilization with barbarism, of the East with the West; and there was infinite play for the comic expose of the credulous "tenderfoot" at the hands of the pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter shook the skies as each new initiate unwittingly succumbed to the demoniac wiles of his tormentors. The West was one vast theatre for the practice of the "practical joke." Behind everything, menacing, foreboding, tragic, lay ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... boarded in the hope that he might do something for the girl who had been going wrong. The tenement had been torn down, with blocks of others, to make way for a bridge-terminal, and he saw the vision of the city's pitiless progress. This quest of old acquaintances made him think of Joralemon. He informed Gertie Cowles that he was now "in the aviation game, and everything is going very well." He sent his mother a check for five hundred dollars, with awkward words ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Lincolnshire farmer who, after listening to a sermon on Hell, said to his wife, "Noa, Sally, it woant do. Noa constitootion could stand it," expressed in his own fashion the healthy limit of endurance. Our spiritual constitutions break under a pitiless strain. When we read in the diary of Henry Alline, quoted by Dr. William James in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," "On Wednesday the twelfth I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... For love of the little sons and daughters safe at home, say a kind word, buy a paper, even if you don't want it; and never pass by, leaving them to sleep forgotten in the streets at midnight, with no pillow but a stone, no coverlet but the pitiless snow, and not even a tender-hearted robin to ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... my dear monsieur," said my husband, "when a man starts on an electoral career he must remember that he stakes everything; his public life and also his private life. Your adversaries will ransack your present and your past with a pitiless hand, and sorrow to him who has any dark spots to hide. Now I ought not to conceal from you that to-night, at the ministers', much was said about a little scandal which, while it may be venial in the life of an artist, takes proportions altogether more ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... continual wonder. A dust of rice powder is sometimes excusable, but there can be no possible apology for the "made-up" faces one sees upon our streets. They deceive no one and have no excuse for being. The woman who stands in the pitiless glare of the footlights must needs add color to replace that stolen from her face by the strong white light of day, but others have no such excuse for "frescoing" the face. It is a sin alike against good taste ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... confounded, quivering with pain. It had been one thing to feel that she hated and scorned me, to know that the trust and confidence which she had begun to place in me were transformed to loathing. It was another to listen to her hard, pitiless words, to change colour under the lash of her gibing tongue. For a moment I could not find voice to answer her. Then I pointed to ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... which the nobles of seaboard countries rarely renounced, and of which they were the more jealous from the fact that they had continually to dispute them with their vassals and neighbours, was the pitiless and barbaric right of appropriating the contents of ships happening to be wrecked ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... felt only bitter, self-reproachful, and full of pity for poor human beings. It was a time when the divine creatures born of woman seemed mere little waifs astray in a friendless universe, somehow lost on a cruel earth, crying like children in the pitiless night, foredoomed and predestined to broken hearts and death. It seemed a very sad and strange mystery, and more sad, more strange to be one of these human ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... turns to the angels and says: "Messrs. Angels, this seems to be the very fellow for our business." Then to Napoleonder he says: "Satan was perfectly right. You are worthy to be the instrument of my wrath, because a pitiless conqueror is worse than earthquake, famine, or deluge. Go back to the earth, Napoleonder; I turn over to you the whole world, and through you the whole world shall ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... Out in the pitiless nothingness of space, the Partners' minds responded to an instinct as old as life. The Partners attacked, striking with a speed faster than Man's, going from attack to attack until the Rats or themselves were destroyed. Almost all the time, it ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... the Princess heard those angry words; And—saddened, maddened, shamed—breathless she fled Into the thicket, doubtful if such sin Might not be hers, and with fresh dread distressed. "Aho!" she weeps, "pitiless grows the wrath Of Fate against me. Not one gleam of good Arriveth. Of what fault is this the fruit? I cannot call to mind a wrong I wrought To any—even a little thing—in act Or thought or word; whence then hath come this curse? Belike from ill deeds done in by-gone lives It ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... singularly distinct and splendid, had the power to fix and fascinate my vision—never felt before—as they shone above me, clear and crystalline as enthroned in space—judges, and spectators, cold and pitiless as it seemed to me, in the strangeness and forlornness of my condition—Arcturus, and the Ursas, great and little, and Lyra, and the Corona Borealis, Berenice, and Hydra, and Cassiopea's chair; these and many more. I marked them ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... across his path. He somehow discerned that it would deal directly with knowledge the saner judgment of a commonplace world had always deemed undesirable, unlawful, unsafe, dangerous to the souls that dared attempt it, failure involving a pitiless ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... you know everything! Your King is hard, stony, pitiless, isn't he? Let us see how hard he can be. I knew from the beginning that he would come—that he would have to rush after me. But remember, Surangama, I never for a single moment asked him to come. You will see how I make your King confess his defeat ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... nothing,—no, thou mighty Unknown, I do not fear! But then I hope nothing: I believe nothing. Those pleasant dreams of yours—God, Heaven, Immortality—are to me meaningless words. At times I utter them, and they seem to shine down like pitiless stars upon the black boiling sea ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... roll nearer and more near, The wind's awake, the pitiless wind's awake, It shrieks the menace that I dare not hear, Soon at my feet the angry waves will break In desolating wrath—and here I stand Helpless my house is ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... multitudes flocked to listen to their teachings. Some of the nobility, and even the wife of the king, were among the converts. In many places there was a marked reform in the manners of the people, and the idolatrous symbols of Romanism were removed from the churches. But soon the pitiless storm of persecution burst upon those who had dared to accept the Bible as their guide. The English monarchs, eager to strengthen their power by securing the support of Rome, did not hesitate to sacrifice the Reformers. For the first time in the history ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... hammer, and Lady Holme went alone to the piano, turned the button that raised the music-stool, sat down too, holding herself very upright, and played some notes. For a moment, while she played, her face was so determined and pitiless that Mr. Bry, unaware that she was still thinking about Miss Filberte, murmured to ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... progress in their misery: Refined wits, your patience is our bliss; Too weak our scene, too great your judgment is: To you we seek to show a scholar's state, His scorned fortunes, his unpity'd fate; To you: for if you did not scholars bless, Their case, poor case, were too-too pitiless. You shade the muses under fostering, And made[31] them leave to sigh, and learn ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... sigh not, old man, such a doleful 'heigh-ho,' Dost think I possess not the will to say, 'No'? And shake not thy head, I could pitiless be Should supplicants come ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... room in a cheap city boarding house, the man cowered like a wild thing, wounded, neglected, afraid; while over him, gaunt and menacing, cruel, pitiless, insistent, stood a dreadful need—the need of Occupation—the need of something ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... concealer, is also the pitiless exposer. How often in the Arctic had Alan imagined, with his whole being athrill, this reunion with the girl who, in the last strained moment of parting, had promised to wait for him! How often had Doris, in the secrecy of her soul, even when the last hope of reunion had failed, ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... blighted each blossom, That ever has bloomed in her path-way below; It has froze every fountain that gushed in her bosom, And chilled her heart's verdure with pitiless woe; Her parents, her kindred, all crushed by oppression; Her husband still doomed in its desert to stay; No arm to protect from the tyrant's aggression— She must weep as she ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant sheets—the work of her own looms; a better pillow with a pillow-case on it that was delicious to his cheek; for he had his weakness about clean, white linen. She put a curtain over the pitiless window. He saw a wild rose in a glass beside his Testament. He discovered moccasin slippers beside ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... first signs of the decay of her beauty, and she was frightened to think that white hair and wrinkles would at last come. She vainly tried to comfort herself with the assurance that she could recover her fresh complexion by burning certain herbs and pronouncing a few magic words. A pitiless voice cried, "You will grow old Thais; you will grow old." And a cold sweat of terror bedewed her forehead. Then, on looking at herself again in the mirror with infinite tenderness, she found that she was still beautiful and worthy to be loved. ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... onslaught of the Huns, on the 22nd of April, 1915, which had driven them forth from their homes, a panic-stricken, terror-hunted crowd of old men, women and little babes, while over them broke, with a continuous and appalling roar, a pitiless rain ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... bright and burning blazonry of God, Glitter awhile in their eternal depths, And, like the Pleiad, loveliest of their train, Shoot from their glorious spheres, and pass away, To darkle in the trackless void; yet Time, Time, the tomb-builder, holds his fierce career, Dark, stern, all pitiless, and pauses not Amid the mighty wrecks that strew his path, To sit and muse, like other conquerors, Upon the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... beasts. It makes fearful ravages among grouse, rabbits, and hares. It is the mythical vampire embodied. It is not very much larger than the least weasel, and has the same long, lithe, slender body and neck. A gray squirrel would look bulky beside one, but in indomitable courage and pitiless ferocity I do not think it has an equal. Only a lack of material or bodily fatigue suspends its bloody work, and its life is one long career of carnage. It has a terrific set of teeth, which are worked by most powerful muscles. Dr. Coues, ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... by Pierce Egan, the author of Life in London and Boxiana. Walter Scott writes in his diary of being absorbed in an account of the trial, while he deprecates John Bull's maudlin sentiment over 'the pitiless assassin.' That was in 1826, but in 1828 Scott went out of his way when travelling from London to Edinburgh, to visit Gill's Hill, and describes the scene of the tragedy very vividly. Lockhart's Life, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... cutting down the prices of his rivals was only a taste of the unerring instinct for business that was later to make him as much feared as respected in the trade. By a single stroke he had shown his ability to play on the weakness as well as the needs of the public, coupled with a pitiless disregard for other interests than his own, which ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... clasping her boy to her breast, and praying the saints to protect him from his cruel father. How often that death-bed haunted the son, and justified his belief that there was no parent's love in the heart which was now his sole shelter from the world and the "pelting of its pitiless rain!" Again I say "poor Roland;" for I know that in that harsh, unloving disrupture of such solemn ties thy large, generous heart forgot its wrongs,—again didst thou see tender eyes bending over the wounded stranger, again hear low murmurs breathe the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more dashing and far-reaching. Under the moonlight and the watching balloons there will be swift noiseless rushes of cycles, precipitate dismounts, and the never-to-be-quite-abandoned bayonet will play its part. And now men on the losing side will thank God for the reprieve of a pitiless wind, for lightning, thunder, and rain, for any elemental disorder that will for a moment lift the descending scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud, the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and nervous, and mud-stained desperate men ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... Wigton, and the nine miles which lay between that not too brilliant town and the desolate fell-side hamlet which he had been so fain to make his own spiritual domain had not been such as disposed him to a cheerful view of things. The rain had fallen in a steady, pitiless downpour, which seemed to soak through every outer covering and to penetrate the very flesh and marrow of the tired traveler as it pattered noisily on the umbrella and streamed over the leather apron; and the splash of the horse's hoofs through the liquid mud and broad tracts of standing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... Prince Albert,—in fact, she scarcely ever took her eyes off him." I suppose she found him "goodly to look upon." It is certain that she worshiped him with her eyes, as well as with her heart and soul,—then and ever after. For the world, even for the Court, he grew, as the pitiless, pilfering years went by, a little too stout, and somewhat bald, while his complexion lost something of its fine coloring and smoothness, and his eyes their fulness,—but for her, he seems to have always kept the grace and glory of his youth. Even when he was dying-when the gray twilight of ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... arrest her steps. She stood still, and leant against the smooth, whitened trunk of a beech tree. Her hands locked themselves tightly together; her face, white and miserable, lifted itself despairingly towards the pitiless winter sky ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... come in and find him there. He got up and locked the door against intrusion before he should be able to master the outward signs of his emotion. Then he returned to his chair and looked about, thinking confusedly. There was something pitiless in the glaring light of noon that disclosed every crack and stain on the ugly brown walls. It was like the relentless light of his new revelation turned upon the stains and patches of his soul, dreary and terrible. Had the hour been twilight, some glamour of lost romance ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... both for the mother and the child. It would come out all right, of course, he strove to reassure himself. Nothing else could happen now, with her life so splendidly settled at last. That Fate could be so pitiless—no, it was unthinkable! ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... friend, that man are you— And see the meaning plain to view. The dragon in the pool beneath Sets forth the yawning jaws of death; The beast from which you helpless flee Is life and all its misery. There you must hang 'twixt life and death While in this world you draw your breath. The mice, whose pitiless gnawing teeth Will let you to the pool beneath Fall down, a hopeless castaway, Are but the change of night and day. The black one gnaws concealed from sight Till comes again the morning light; From dawn until the eve is gray, Ceaseless the white one gnaws away. And, 'midst ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... she keeps, she thinks she is exercising an influence on the politics of her time. Her form of conversation consists in plying her victim with questions. Not here one there one, to keep the ball rolling, but a steady and pitiless fire of 'Do you think?' and ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... her hatred; and the shock which her whole being experienced when she first encountered this strong and pitiless nature was now so overwhelming that she bowed before Philippe just as Rouget had been in the habit of bending before her. She anxiously awaited Vedie's return. The woman brought a formal refusal from Max, who requested Mademoiselle Brazier to send ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... else choose milder words. I am outspoken and harsh; I have no pity for this pitiless man, and I ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Next morning we once more ascended Slievenamon, where we endeavoured to dissipate the heavy hours and the still heavier consciousness at our own hearts by firing at a mark. The day suddenly darkened, and we had to seek shelter under rocks from a pitiless mountain shower. We had dispatched a messenger to O'Mahony to demand an interview that evening; and, after he had returned, we were invited to partake of some new potatoes (then beginning to exhibit ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... did your clouds retain For peasants' fields their floods of hoarded rain? O pitiless earth! why open no abyss To bury in its chasm ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... stay and hear what no modest young woman would put herself in the way of hearing, you shall be silent when I bid you. The only good you can gain is in the way of warning. Look at that woman" (indicating Ruth, who moved her drooping head a little on one side, as if by such motion she could avert the pitiless pointing—her face growing whiter and whiter still every instant)—"look at that woman, I say—corrupt long before she was your age—hypocrite for years! If ever you, or any child of mine, cared for her, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... contributions to the French language. It gives us some insight into its ugliest side to know that, among other words, it produced the following: 'guillotine,' 'incivisme,' 'lanterner,' 'noyade,' 'sansculotte,' 'terrorisme.' Still later, the French conquests in North Africa, and the pitiless severities with which every attempt at resistance on the part of the free tribes of the interior was put down and punished, have left their mark on it as well; 'razzia' which is properly an Arabic word, having been added to it, to express the swift ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... he wanted to do, in that abysmal fear that can still make a mindless animal out of a civilized man, was to run and hide—to get away from the fearful monster that had risen up to glare at him with those stony, pitiless eyes, and to reach for him with two-fingered bands ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... seldom under 80 deg. Fahrenheit, and although divested of heavy furs we would invariably awaken from a sleep of, perhaps, a couple of hours, drenched with perspiration, in which state we would once more face the pitiless cold. In England such extremes of temperature, experienced day after day, would probably kill the strongest man outright, but here they made no appreciable ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... right, then go ahead," said Tennesseean Crockett; but supposing that one can not "be sure" of anything except the love of God, supposing that one looks out through the tangled limbs of the olive trees of a Gethsemane to a sky studded with pitiless stars, supposing that the future is obscure and the present black as Styx, supposing that even the face of the Father Himself is palled and curtained—then must one be content to ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... Bertha preceded her up-stairs, talking all the way in something of her old mischievous whisper. 'Am I in disgrace with you, too, Phoebe? Miss Fennimore says I have committed an awful breach of propriety; but really I could not leave you to the beating of the pitiless storm alone. I am afraid Malta's sagacity and little paws would hardly have sufficed to dig you out of a snowdrift before life was extinct. Are you greatly displeased with me, Phoebe?' And being by this time ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not because he spared his soldiers or treated them as fellow-citizens, but because he had led them to victory and made them famous. If a man will win battles and give his brigade a right to brag loudly of its doings, he may have its admiration and even its enthusiastic devotion, though he be as pitiless and as ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... torn a thorn from my flesh—I flung it from me with disgust as I had flung away the unseen reptile that had fastened on my neck in the vault. The deep warm friendship of years I had felt for Guido Ferrari froze to its very foundations—and in its place there rose up, not hate, but pitiless, immeasurable contempt. A stern disdain of myself also awoke in me, as I remembered the unreasoning joy with which, I had hastened—as I thought—home, full of eager anticipation and Romeo-like ardor. An idiot leaping merrily to his death ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Apache Spring. The trail then moves southward between towering cliffs, a lane through which is caught a far-distant glimpse of the mountains. Little whirlwinds of dust spring up, ever and anon, twirling wildly across the sandy wastes. The air suffocates, like the breath of a furnace. Ever the pitiless sun searches and scorches, as conscience sears and stings ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... of great force of character—zealous, laborious, and indefatigable—but pitiless, relentless, and cruel. He had no bowels of compassion. He was deaf to all appeals for mercy. With him the penalty of non-belief in the faith of Rome was imprisonment, torture, death. Eight young priests lived with him, whose labours he directed; and great was his annoyance to find that ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... replaced by a fresh wave. A faint mistiness hangs above the beach at some distance, formed of the salt particles dashed into the air and suspended. At night, if the tide chances to be up, the white surf rushing in and returning immediately beneath has a strange effect, especially in its pitiless regularity. If one wave seems to break a little higher it is only in appearance, and because you have not watched long enough. In a certain number of times another will break there again; presently one will encroach the ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... and the bergs more numerous, embattled in a formidable array. If an ideal picture, from our point of view it was impenetrable. No "water sky" showed as a distant beacon; over all was reflected the pitiless, white glare of the ice. The 'Aurora' retreated to the open sea, and headed to the west in search of a break in the ice-front. The wind blew from the south-east, and, with sails set to assist the engines, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... conversation, as he called it, among them; and he addressed no jokes or idle speeches to them himself. A system of grooves overhead brought to his counting-room the cash from the clerks in wooden balls, and he returned the change, and kept the accounts, with a pitiless eye for errors. The women were afraid of him, and hated him with bitterness, which exploded at crises in excesses of ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... remembers, after raging and shouting like a madman between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near the river as the dawn was breaking, threw away his ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... was hardly needed to produce a melancholy effect. Why should there be caustic plants where everything is hot and burning? In deserts where thirst is enthroned, and where the rocks and sand appeal to a pitiless sky for moisture, it was a savage trick to add the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... left standing, many of whom were sorely wounded and weak from loss of blood. Sir Oliver Buttesthorn, Sir Richard Causton, Sir Simon Burley, Black Simon, Johnston, a hundred and fifty archers, and forty-seven men-at-arms had fallen, while the pitiless hail of stones was already whizzing and piping once more about their ears, threatening every instant to further reduce ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were left galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh; 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; Till over by Delhem a dome spire sprung white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for ...
— O May I Join the Choir Invisible! - and Other Favorite Poems • George Eliot
... and sought alms from the populace. Unheeding, regardless, they passed on without the wink of an eyelash to testify that they were conscious of his existence. And then he said to himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs, and that he was alone in ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... pitiless marauders who lay waste whole kingdoms and transform populous districts into gloomy solitudes. While on my way from Mo to England we passed through Sati, a large market town at the convergence of several caravan routes, ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... Pacific now spans the stream, run out of rations entirely at the head of Heart River, and still stuck to the trail and the chase, headed southward over rolling, treeless prairies, and for eleven days and nights of pelting, pitiless rain dragged our way through the bad-lands, meeting and fighting the Sioux two lively days among the rocks of Slim Buttes, subsisting meantime partly on what game we could pick up, but mainly upon our poor, famished, worn-out, staggering ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... Cyril's self-righteousness and irrepressible joy in Alma's unguarded betrayal of unconscious passion, has darkened the whole story. Sin has engendered sin. Cyril's noble purpose to devote himself entirely to his high calling, and be worthy of it, has become pitiless ambition. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... black and white; the white ones incandescent;—and a small helpless harried thing struggling to keep in the shadow of the black ones, or to regain it again across the pitiless zone of white that the little helpless thing called ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... bright being, like no other in its divine brightness, so long in the making, now no more than a dead leaf, a little dust, lost and forgotten for ever—oh, pitiless! Oh, cruel! ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... extraction in the female line, had sufficient influence to obtain the nomination to the bishopric for a prince who was at the period in his infancy. John of Bavaria—for so he was called, and to his name was afterward added the epithet of "the Pitiless"—on reaching his majority, did not think it necessary to cause himself to be consecrated a priest, but governed as a lay sovereign. The indignant citizens of Liege expelled him, and chose another bishop. But the Houses of Burgundy and Bavaria, closely allied ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... were many. And each had a meaning which he read with a sureness that was almost instinctive. The deep unease of the myriads of bare tree-trunks about him, supporting their snow-laden canopy, told him of the burden which the pitiless northern heavens were thrusting upon them. It also told him of the strength of the breeze which was driving the banking snow outside. The not infrequent booming crash of a falling tree spoke of a burden already too great to bear. So with the splitting of an age-rotted limb ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... they found him he had passed to an extremity of terror. The world had become hideous and threatening, the sun was a pitiless glare, each rocky ridge he clambered became more dreadful than the last, each new valley into which he looked more hateful and desolate, the cramped thorn bushes threatened him gauntly, the rocks had a sinister lustre, and in every blue shadow about him ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... They spend their lives in tame and uninterrupted indifference. Possessed of little politeness and goodness of heart, their conversation is cold and cheerless; their manners stiff and haughty. Without passions, they are crimeless; without weakness, they are pitiless. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... the vague and tender dream Of dead love's lingering kisses, To crushed hearts haloed by the gleam Of unreturning blisses; Deep mourns the soul in anguished pride For the pitiless death that won them, - But the saddest wail is for lips that died With the virgin dew ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... trample under foot; tread under foot, tread upon, trample upon, tread down upon, trample down upon; crush under an iron heel, ride roughshod over; rivet the yoke; hold a tight hand, keep a tight hand; force down the throat; coerce &c 744; give no quarter &c (pitiless) 914.1. Adj. severe; strict, hard, harsh, dour, rigid, stiff, stern, rigorous, uncompromising, exacting, exigent, exigeant^, inexorable, inflexible, obdurate, austere, hard-headed, hard-nosed, hard-shell [U.S.], relentless, Spartan, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... one dead, dreary expanse of white, so far as the eye can reach—no living creature frequents this wilderness—neither bird, beast, nor insect. The silence, deep as death, is broken only when the roaring storm arises to sweep before it the pitiless, ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... and world-maker among the families of men. He saw it dawn red-flickering across the dark forests and sullen seas; he saw it blaze, bloody and red, to full and triumphant noon; and down the shaded slope he saw the blood-red sands dropping into night. And through it all he observed the Law, pitiless and potent, ever unswerving and ever ordaining, greater than the motes of men who fulfilled it or were crushed by it, even as it was greater than he, his heart speaking ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... invest, Stooped ever to that Anchoret's behest; Nor reasoned of the right, nor of the wrong, But at his bidding laid the lance in rest, And wrought fell deeds the troubled world along, For he was fierce as brave, and pitiless ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... the ditch, and a few even climbed the parapet, but of these nearly all were made prisoners. The rear of the column fell back to the cover of the hill, while all those who had gained the crest were forced to lie there, exposed to a pitiless fire of sharp-shooters and the scarcely more endurable rays of the burning sun of Louisiana, until night came and brought relief. In this unfortunate situation the sufferings of the wounded became so unbearable, and appealed so powerfully to the sympathy of their comrades, ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... of the belfry near its summit. In this cage there was what appeared at first to be a heap of rags, but which presently resolved itself into a human shape, crouching in that narrow, cruel space, exposed there to the pitiless beating of the sun, and suffering Heaven alone can say what agonies. The murmuring crowd looked up in mingled fear ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... sufficient to make the flesh shudder. But gravity and sedateness are the leading characteristics of the Spaniards, and the very robber, except in those moments when he is engaged in his occupation, and then no one is more sanguinary, pitiless, and wolfishly eager for booty, is a being who can be courteous and affable, and who takes pleasure in conducting himself with sobriety ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... there—for all you would not know. No one else will ever be so intimate with you as I am. We have quarrelled together, wept together, jested happily and jested bitterly. You have spared me not at all. Pitiless and cruel you have been to me. You have reckoned up all my faults against me as though they were sins. You have treated me at times unlovingly—never was lover treated so unlovingly as you have sometimes ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... Marius, like a man who did not sleep enough, he was abounding and bright to-day, after one of those pitiless headaches, which since boyhood had been the "thorn in his side," challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify one in humble endurances. At the first moment, to Marius, remembering the spectacle of the emperor in ceremony, it was almost bewildering to ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... though in fear, yet all the while in obedience to the supremest law of all. To the southward there would be protection; life there would be preserved: here it was impossible—for birds. "Keep low; press on!" Victory shall be to the strongest: the weak shall fall in this pitiless wind, and the snow shall cover the dead, but in the end there shall be a better life for some. "Keep ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... with two or three slight, sure touches of his pencil. This power Mr. Leech possesses, in an extraordinary degree. . . . For this reason, we enter our protest against those of the Rising Generation who are precociously in love being made the subject of merriment by a pitiless and unsympathizing world. We never saw a boy more distinctly in the right than the young gentleman kneeling on the chair to beg a lock of hair from his pretty cousin, to take back to school. Madness is in her apron, and ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... than the pangs of Marsyas; and she wondered whether a courageous Roman captive who was shorn of his eyelids, and set under the blistering sun of Africa, suffered any more keenly; but motionless, apparently impassive as a stone mask, on whose features pitiless storms beat in vain, she bore without wincing the agony of her humiliation. Very white and still, she sat hour by hour with downcast eyes, and folded hands; and those who watched most closely could detect only one change of position; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... I cannot say. I even sometimes hope and acquiesce; for his talents are indeed extraordinary. But his pride, and the pitiless revenge which he shews a constant propensity to take, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... bailiff took part with his future son-in-law, and would hear of no reasons which Ellen could offer for delay. He was eager to squeeze the farmer's well-filled purse a little tighter, and he fancied he might do this when his daughter was Stephen Whitelaw's wife. So suitor and father were alike pitiless, and the wedding was fixed for the 10th of March. There were no preparations to be made at Wyncomb Farmhouse. Mr. Whitelaw did not mean to waste so much as a five-pound note upon the embellishment of those barely-furnished rooms in ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... undoubtedly very great. In a mean and sordid society, he was an enthusiast for the acquisition of knowledge, and while his passion for physiology induced—as it so often does—an indifference regarding the infliction of pain, his pitiless vivisections were not more cruel than experiments made in this twentieth century, and some of them by men of national reputation. He was the type of the class of experimenters whom Dr. Johnson had in ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... fashions that had seemed so real and so essential before were revealed in their true light, only as dreams that would pass: deep in them she had never heard the crash of armor in the battlefields without her bower. But she knew now. She saw life as it was, stark and cruel, remorseless, pitiless to the weak, treacherous to the strong, ever waging war against all creatures that dwelt upon ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... were he and pitiless of heart Who marking that wild thing made weak and tame, Broken, and grieving for her glory gone, Could mock her grief; but scornfully apart Sidero stood, and watched a wind that came And tossed the curls like fire that ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... was subject in love to Cronos and bare splendid children, Hestia [1618], Demeter, and gold-shod Hera and strong Hades, pitiless in heart, who dwells under the earth, and the loud-crashing Earth-Shaker, and wise Zeus, father of gods and men, by whose thunder the wide earth is shaken. These great Cronos swallowed as each came forth from the womb to his mother's knees with this intent, that no other of the proud ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... Scottish Highlands, where there are not enough fine intervals to point the difference. That was like to be our case, the day we left Noyon. I remember nothing of the voyage; it was nothing but clay banks and willows, and rain; incessant, pitiless, beating rain; until we stopped to lunch at a little inn at Pimprez, where the canal ran very near the river. We were so sadly drenched that the landlady lit a few sticks in the chimney for our comfort; there we sat in a steam ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he left Galloway House without a word, and cast himself and his bad name once more adrift on a pitiless world. ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... the pitiless truth and then there was a long silence. As he stood before her, a little breath of wind passed over the garden. He came back from the world of sordid places to the land of enchantment. There was certainly some spell upon him. He had found his way into a garden which ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gloomy side street the blue gleam of the pitiless river showed light against the somber night, the yellow blinking lights of the tugs flitting about ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... She met me at the door as she met you. She was a shell burned out by one fierce moment of fire. Something had toppled in her and collapsed, and only by the pitiless and continual irony of her silence could she hide her inward loathing. With me she was proud and acid, but in her mother's room, whither she led me, her silence was like a frightened, defensive covering which might, at any ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... plunged ahead, the inmates of the stage kept up a pitiless fusillade of shots against the ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... women Soldiers go from one to another, speaking to the hesitating ones, laying a hand on the shoulder of the ready ones, and leading them to the front. What a long time it may be since any loving hand was laid on the shoulder of many of those Recruits! Life, the rough, pitiless life of the great city, has always been pushing them along lower and lower down till it got them underfoot. Here they listen to the sound of a voice of sympathy, and feel the pressure of a hand that wishes to lead them. And there above sits The General for a ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... been the worst element of her pain—to take away the blind chance against which her impotent wings had been beaten in vain efforts to escape from the dark cage. It was that contact with "the living will of a living person," which gives the human element to what would otherwise be hard, blind, pitiless fate. ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... sound, slip from thy couch and in the rays of the lamp have courage to look upon him in all his horror. Then, when thou hast seen for thyself that what we say is truth, with thy knife swiftly slay him. Thus shalt thou free thyself from the pitiless doom meted ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... the pitiless insistence of progress and expansion in our time than that it should get into the Smallways blood. But there was something advanced and enterprising about young Smallways before he was out of short frocks. He ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... experience of the last seventy years, from the time of the Pequot War, and during the subsequent troubles with the tribes in southwestern Connecticut, and on Long Island, and during King Philip's War, had fully taught them the craft, treachery and pitiless cruelty of the savages, as well as their capacity for extensive combination among ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... conceded to his State papers. Few, very few, will read them, although foreign Courts, ministers, statesmen, princes, and the so-called celebrated women are complimented and deluged with them. The most pitiless critics of these productions would be the smaller clerks in the Departments of Foreign Affairs in London and Paris. Only they are not fools to waste their time on ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... life,—of goblin convulsions and strange fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One's very footsteps have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one's garments brushing over the rough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp, remorseless touch,—as if its very nature were so pitiless and acrid that the slightest contact ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... waste of No Man's Land, pitted with shell holes, blasted and seared by the pitiless storm of fire that had ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... Uncle Tom's woes," the doctor continued. "And yet there are more than five million white people in America to-day who are the slaves of poverty, cruel and pitiless, who haven't enough clothes to keep warm, enough food to eat, and are utterly helpless and forsaken in illness. The black slave always had food and shelter, clothes and medicine. My business is to heal the sick—mind you! Shall I give it ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... learned that art, it torments me more than this bed. But the face of the lady who ruleth here will not be rekindled fifty times ere thou shalt know how much that art weighs. And, so mayest thou return unto the sweet world, tell me wherefore is that people so pitiless against my race in its every law?" Then I to him, "The rout and the great carnage that colored the Arbia red cause such orison to be made in our temple." After he had, sighing, shaken his head, "In that I ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... from secret apprehensions until he landed at Calais, upon the next morning. "Now for a last 'throw off' at Paris!" he exclaimed. "Damn England! I hope I shall never see it again!" he growled, unmindful of the pitiless Fates ever spinning the mysterious web of Destiny. "I'll first show up at Berthe Louison's, at No. 9 Rue Berlioz. They shall have my next address given to them as Delhi. The real Major Hawke dives under the troubled sea of Life at Paris, only to emerge at ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... murdering men, women, and children; rampant diabolism, and incarnate revenge were at work in the most beautiful city in the world! Fair women converted into demons, and dragged by ruffianly soldiery through the streets to universal execration and pitiless death; children of tender age pinned to the earth and bayoneted; men innocent or not, shot, cut, stabbed, slashed, destroyed—a whole city given up to the summa injuria of an infuriate, reckless, and brutal army! ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... never noticed before, marred the edge of his profile. If he hadn't been George, would she have said that he looked stupid at the moment? For a flashing instant of illumination she saw him with a vision that was not her own, but a stranger's, with a pitiless clearness unsoftened by any passion. Then the clearness faded rapidly before an impulse of tenderness, and she told herself that he was merely handsome, gay, and careless, as he had been on their honeymoon. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... you, sir, if you are still able to follow good advice," continued the judge, in the same pitiless voice, "that if that respectable person, your kinswoman Teresa, is still willing to take charge of your daughter Fanny, surrender her unconditionally, renounce all your rights to her now and for evermore, for if you raise ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... conscience and before his contemporaries, Dante then created an Imaginary World and with great detail he described the circumstances which had led to his defeat and depicted the hopeless condition of greed and lust and hatred which had turned his fair and beloved Italy into a battlefield for the pitiless mercenaries of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... your spirit should be strong enough to meet its spirit mate somewhere in the realms of imagination, and the bodily presence ought not really to be necessary, your stubborn heart of flesh craves sight and sound and touch. That is the only pitiless part of death, it seems to me. We have had the friendship, the love, the sympathy, and these are things that can never die; they have made us what we are, and they are by their very nature immortal; yet we would come near to bartering all these spiritual possessions for ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... into those pitiless eyes. It seemed she could not help herself. "I will tell you," she said at last. "But you will be kind to her? You will remember how young she is, and that—that you ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... friendly. I forgot myself for a time, it being impossible to think of anything while lying on my back on the hearth, with baby Blount trying to pull my hair out by the roots and cutting a stubborn tooth on my nose. He was a delightful, pitiless, young rascal and would leave anything and ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... the heart beat low, And the empty hours went by Pitiless, with the wail of woe And the moan of Hunger's cry— When the trembling hands upraised in prayer Had only the strength to ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... to exploit their children, for it is easy to deliver them into the hands of proxenetism. But this is not confined to the poorest classes; among small tradespeople, poverty is also an indirect agent of prostitution. Here again the effect of pitiless exploitation is seen; in certain occupations which leave the girls free evenings, and also in certain shops, the proprietor only pays his employes an absurdly small salary, because they can add to it by prostitution. For this reason, many saleswomen, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... discarded all artificial, all adventitious helps. If interior, spontaneous rhythm could not be relied on, and the natural music and flexibility of language, then there was nothing to shield the ear from the pitiless hail of words,—not one ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... almost ran from the house, down the street, and up the stairs to his apartment. He flung himself into a chair, buried his face in his hands, and groaned aloud. The hopelessness of his case surged through his brain with pitiless reiteration. He might as well attempt to fly to one of the cold stars above his casement as to besiege the society of New York. There was literally no human being out of earth's millions to give him the line that would pass him through those ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... hills, your bitterness, Guard ye with flail Of shattering wind and thong of sleet Your pride uplifting To the impaled stars; be pitiless Before this unquiet trail Of man-herds drifting ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... a lump in her throat. Across a bright, familiar veranda she could hear a clear, sharp voice answer, "American goose!" She saw a lean tanned face burn red with anger. A wave of loneliness went through her. The irony of it was pitiless. How ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... a human voice comes near To speak a gentle word: And the eye that watches through the door Is pitiless and hard: And by all forgot, we rot and rot, ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... the short-lived congratulations of the fickle spectators. Again man fought with man, or waged a fiercer contest with the tiger. Again the wounded gladiator looked up despairingly for mercy, but received only the signal of death from the pitiless spectators. ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... dragged forth bound, and made to sit upon coarse mats. Sogoro and his wife closed their eyes, for the sight was more than they could bear; and the spectators, with heaving breasts and streaming eyes, cried "Cruel!" and "Pitiless!" and taking sweetmeats and cakes from the bosoms of their dresses threw them to the children. At noon precisely Sogoro and his wife were bound to the crosses, which were then set upright and fixed ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford |
