"Racking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this country by the Normans, the land in Norfolk was so light and fine, that the farmers usually plowed with two rabbits and a case knife!—Jones's Wonderful Changes, p. 86.—Weep at this ye who are now racking your inventive powers for improvements in agricultural implements. See what your forefathers could accomplish by means the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... she had slept better than she had done for the past ten nights. Both youth and weariness will assert themselves in the end against the tyranny of nerve-racking stress. She had slept but she woke up with her eyes full of tears. There were no traces of them when she met him in the shabby little parlour downstairs. She had swallowed them up. She was not going to let him see. She felt ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... not console his wife, whose hysterical fit was succeeded by a racking headache, which by night was almost unbearable. Strong coffee, aconite, brandy, and belladonna, were all tried without effect. Nothing helped her until she commenced her toilet, when in the excitement of dressing she partly ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... lost its comfortless appearance, and himself, his wife, and children had been provided with sufficient food and clothing. Yet the stamp of death was on the poor patient's wasted features, and a racking cough tried him terribly at times. But his mind was quite clear, and he had begun to see his way to pardon and peace, though it was with but a trembling hand that his faith laid hold of the ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... swirling, swaying dust-cloud, and out of it continued to come those nerve-racking shouts, yells and shrill screams, accompanied by a fusillade of ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Rocky Ranch - Or, Great Days Among the Cowboys • Laura Lee Hope
... possible to conceive, and it displays the skill of the aviator in a striking manner. Daring sweeps, startling wheels, breathless vol-planes, and remarkable climbs are carried out. One wonders how the machine can possibly withstand the racking strains to which it is subjected. The average aeroplane demands space in which to describe a turn, and the wheel has to be manipulated carefully and dexterously, an operation requiring considerable judgment on the part ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... one may jump when he has waited in nerve-racking suspense for a pistol shot. The boy had done exactly what he had expected him to do—broken that sacred ante-prandial hour with the Lindon Evening News which Judith had not broken this ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple
... And Nevyrazimov, racking his brain for a means of escape from his hopeless position, stared at the rough copy he had written. The letter was written to a man whom he feared and hated with his whole soul, and from whom he had for the last ten years been trying ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... nothing: what was it? No answer. As soon as we were in the corridor he ordered me to stand with my face to the wall, and went away. There I stood in my stocking feet waiting. The cold chilled me through; I began standing first on one foot and then on the other, racking my brains as to what they were going to do to me, wondering why I was being punished like this, and how long it would last; you know the thoughts fear-born that plague the mind.... After what seemed an eternity ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... sisters, two marked for sure and early death, laboring at literary work every day with the passion and intensity that come to few men. Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters. And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the great tragedies of literature, but out of it came the flowering ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... to hover on that mystical border-land on the confines of gloomy insanity that would allow its owner to seriously wander through and behold any theological beauties in Bunyan. To the Jew there is none of the gloomy, weird, mystical, mind-racking, ungodly theology that some of our creeds torture the poor brains of their professors with. As the wild Indian of the plains runs sticks through his anatomy and capers wildly about to torture his body, so some ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... Kupfer had told him the evening before. It is true that his meditations, too, were of a fairly tranquil character. He fancied that this strange girl interested him from the psychological point of view, as something of the nature of a riddle, the solution of which was worth racking his brains over. 'Ran away with an actress living as a kept mistress,' he pondered, 'put herself under the protection of that princess, with whom she seems to have lived—and no love affairs'? It's incredible!... Kupfer talked of pride! But in the first place we know' (Aratov ought ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... "At one time I felt sure that the thought of the pets he had left behind at the house would take him home soon. But since Miranda brought him word last August that everything was all right there, that hope's gone. For months and months I've been racking my brains to think up a plan. If we could only hit upon something that would turn his thoughts back to natural history again—I mean something big enough to get him really excited—we might manage it. But how?"—she ...
— The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... vests and neck-wear being spilled from their pullmans in San Antonio in the early morning following the fight. Which also partly accounts for the unhappy predicament in which "Cricket" McGuire found himself as he tumbled from his car and sat upon the depot platform, torn by a spasm of that hollow, racking cough so familiar to San Antonian ears. At that time, in the uncertain light of dawn, that way passed Curtis Raidler, the Nueces County cattleman—may his shadow never measure under six ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... Thieves" would be used as water-tanks, and the wine would ripen in casks of several hundred gallons, and be racked off by taps at successive intervals when clear. The first deposit of tannin and fixed albumen would remain at the bottom of No. 1 vat, the second deposit after racking in No. 2; and the wine which is now an astringent, cloudy, and muddy mixture of impurities, would leave the vine-grower's store bright, and fit for the merchant's vats in Limasol, and command a more than double price. This is a matter of certainty and not conjecture. Should the black wines be carefully ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... a sight that made him rub his eyes in amazement. The accident was repeated—it had been no accident. Now only a hundred feet up, directly above him, the big machine seemed to quiver with a sudden increase or change of power. A rasping, ear- racking sound—a spurt of blue vapor—and the aeroplane did what no other flying machine had ever done before; it stopped stock-still ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... the Northwest blast shrieks through their tops and there are groanings diversified by sharp cries as some decayed branch is snapped or tree falls. It was amid these doleful sounds Archie swung his ax. He was not conscious of the bitter cold for his work kept him warm, but his brain was full of racking thoughts. He had toiled like a slave for nigh six months and had accomplished little, with every imaginable deprivation he had saved nothing, and for the next six months he foresaw cold and hunger, which he doubted he could survive. Here was an offer that meant comfort, and relief from ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... Before his eyes appeared, sad, noisome, dark; A lazar-house it seemed; wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased—all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... mocking imitation of liberty: long ago, her physical vigors had been drained under stress of anguish. Now, she was well-nigh incapable of any bodily activity. There came not even so much as the feeblest moan from her lips. The torment was far too racking for such futile fashion of lamentation. She merely sat there in a posture of collapse. To all outward seeming, nerveless, emotionless, an abject creature. Even the eyes, which held so fixedly their gaze on the window, were quite expressionless. Over them lay ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... unlike those late terrific sleeps! And groans, that rage of racking famine spoke: The unburied dead that lay in festering heaps! The breathing pestilence that rose like smoke! The shriek that from the distant battle broke! The mine's dire earthquake, and the pallid host Driven by the bomb's incessant thunder-stroke To loathsome vaults, where ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... the inflexibly formal tactics of the British army. Again and again he had seen those tactics proved of no avail in the face of an invisible enemy and an almost inexpugnable country. He had learned the nerve-racking tension of being exposed to a storm of bullets that came apparently from nowhere to cut down the British lines as the hail cuts down the standing grain; he had learned the shock of seeing the level veldt, over which he was marching, burst into a line of fire at his very feet from a spot where ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello. Mary sat gloating in the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden chair brought her. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr's. Jeremy's minor chords soothed her like the music of a tom-tom. "Why, oh why," she said to herself, "does some one not write ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... to wield it unmercifully. The brandy-bottle, her never-failing companion, was by her side, and as she mused mopingly over her sins, she took from time to time copious draughts of the potent spirits, regardless of its power to do otherwise than to rob her of these racking memories of the past. In about two hours the promenaders returned and found her lying back speechless in her chair, the bottle and glass by her side; her eyes rolled wildly as she gazed vacantly on her children, but she was unable to ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... She was racking her brains as to how she should raise the money for Victor Lamont in a half hour's time, in order to save herself from the exposure that would be sure to follow if she ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... "all the calamity which is now the portion of the man that stands before thee—all the struggles, the racking throes that torture this seared breast, arise from one solitary cause—the offspring of one crime, and of that crime the unhappy victim who suffers by it is innocent. The rites of religion never blessed my mother's bridal bed, and I was born a thing despised, looked down upon by ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... the powers of your mind, and conceive, if you can, what that mother felt whose only son sickened, and, after racking her heart with hopes and fears, died before her eyes, and was placed in his coffin and carried to his rest. Yet One in the likeness of a man bade the bearers stand still, then, with a touch, made the coffin open, the dead come back, blooming with ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... a sob, indicative of the inner throes that were racking the statesman's whole being, burst from his heart. His head fell upon his breast, and his whole body trembled. Joseph comprehended the immensity of his grief, and made no ineffectual attempt ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... had a headache Nan Tok' was full of attention and concern. When the husband had a cold and a racking toothache the wife heeded not, except to jeer. It is always the woman's part to fill and light the pipe; Nei Takauti handed hers in silence to the wedded page; but she carried it herself, as though the page were not entirely trusted. Thus she kept the ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an hour I sat there, chewing the stem of my useless pipe and racking my bran, but the "few brief words" obstinately refused to come. Nine o'clock chimed mournfully from the Norman tower of the church hard by, yet still my pen was idle and the paper before me blank; also I became conscious of a tapping somewhere close at hand, now stopping, now beginning ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... alarm-clock; but Avrillia was a poetess, and a fairy besides, and she set the alarm-thermometer. It sounded very pleasant to Sara, like soda-water running through a straw on a hot afternoon; but Avrillia seemed to find it rather nerve-racking. ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... "I was racking my brain how to get rid of Sister when I saw her go out," Beverley said. "I'm sure you managed it. I've been desperate. You can't think what things have happened! Tell me, ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of her gray tweed coat, painfully climbed out—the muscles of her back racking—and examined the state of the rear wheels. They were buried to the axle; in front of them the mud bulked in solid, shiny blackness. She took out her jack and chains. It was too late. There was no room to get the jack under the axle. ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the hope that he would be better to-morrow, next week, next month. Ah! yes, but to-morrow never came; or rather, when it did come, it was no longer to-morrow with its promise of renewed health. It was to-day, with the same disappointment, the same pains, the same racking cough, which he had endured on so many other to-days that had come and gone ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... had lovingly cherished, now seemed unworthy of his affections. He began to attend the local drawing-school, where he formed a connection with a youngster who had left college, and who lent him an old treatise on geometry. He plunged into this study without a guide, racking his brains for weeks together in order to grasp the simplest problem in the world. In this matter he gradually became one of those learned workmen who can hardly sign their name and yet talk about algebra as though it were an ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... jingoes, neither are they millionaires. They are care-worn toilers, hard-worked fathers and mothers of children. They have in many cases given sons and brothers and husbands to our ranks; their hearts are aching with passionate sorrow for the dead. Many more are enduring the racking agony of suspense. Multitudes, besides, spend their lives in a hard fight to keep the wolf from the door. Already they are pinched, and they know that in the months ahead their poverty will be deeper. ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... is a remarkable instance of the sort: During several weeks she had every symptom of consumption; violent irritation of the lungs, excessive perspiration, which soaked her whole bed, a racking cough, continual expectoration, and a strong continual fever. So fearful were her sufferings that her death was hourly expected and even desired. It was remarked that she had to struggle strangely against a strong temptation to irritability. Did she yield for an instant, she burst into tears, ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... flabby, drunken wreck he had dragged to the Glade Farm weeks ago with a masterful command. It had been a bitter fight, with days of heavy sullenness on Wherry's part and swift apology when the mood was gone, days of hard riding and walking, of icy plunges after a racking grind of exercise for which Carl himself with his splendid strength inexorably set the pace, days of fierce rebellion when he had calmly thrashed his suffering young guest into submission and locked him in his room, days of horrible choking remorse and pleading ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... without their own choice and of necessity? Given a righteous God, how can He allow sin to exist for ever, so that evil shall be as eternal as good, and Satan shall reign in hell as long as Christ in heaven? Worst of all puzzles, perhaps, was that of the existence of evil and of misery, and the racking doubt whether God could be good, and yet look on the evil and the misery of the world unmoved and untouched. It seemed so impossible to believe that a Creator could be either cruel enough to be indifferent to the misery, or weak enough to be ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... the proprietress of a prosperous establishment.] Oh, yes, it did slip my memory to come on Thursday, didn't it? The truth is I had a most racking head, a thing I never have—well, I oughtn't to say never have, ought I? [To MISS LIMBIRD.] Now, Miss Limbird, see that two pots of Creme de Mimosa are posted to Mrs. Arment, Carlos Place; and book me, please—me—you thoroughly understand?—to ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... suspected wine of another vintner, and to ascertain what drugs or ingredients they found in the said wine or cask to sophisticate the same. At another time eight pipes of wine were ordered to be destroyed because, on racking off, bundles of weeds, pieces of sulphur match, and "a kind of gravel mixture sticking to the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... flared up at once, and she ran down the steps with a roar and a bellow that are fearful to imagine, nerve-racking ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... terrestrial paradise—where are never extremes of temperature and where the air is like balm, kept ever pure by the ozone-laden southeast trade, asthma, phthisis, and tuberculosis flourish as luxuriantly as the vegetation. Everywhere, from the few grass huts, arises the racking cough or exhausted groan of wasted lungs. Other horrible diseases prosper as well, but the most deadly of all are those that attack the lungs. There is a form of consumption called "galloping," which is especially dreaded. In two months' time it reduces the strongest man to a skeleton under a grave-cloth. ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... the Rector had recovered his composure after that nerve-racking day and that terrible landing through the surf, and after he had stopped nursing the bruises received from a fall as the vessel struck, the last wagon was driving off; and the long-shoremen had vanished silently in all directions, as though the beach had eaten them alive. Not ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of an old workman, offered to Jocquelet by Amedee, obtained only a grimace of displeasure from the actor. However, it ended by his being reconciled to the part, studying it, and, to use his own expression, "racking his brains over it," until one day he ran to ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... by himself, and even seriously racking his brain to find a direction for this single force four times multiplied, with which he did not doubt, as with the lever for which Archimedes sought, they should succeed in moving the world, when someone tapped gently at his door. D'Artagnan ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a beloved citizen: "'Death loves a shining mark,' and she hit a dandy when she turned loose on Jim." And also in the closing words of a New Mexico obituary, which the Kansas Magazine quotes: "Her tired spirit was released from the pain-racking body and soared aloft to eternal glory at 4.30 Denver time." We die, as it were, in motion, as we sleep, and there is nowhere any boundary to our expansion. Perhaps we shall never again know any rest as we now understand ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... hotel was equally friendly, racking his brains to find a way of serving Monte by serving madame. It made him feel quite like those lordly personages who used to come here with a title and turn the place topsy-turvy for themselves and for their ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... about Chia Yn, which unconsciously so affected her heart that she hastily returned, quite disconsolate, into her room, and lay herself down on her bed, giving herself quietly to reflection. But while she was racking and torturing her brain and at a moment when she was at a loss what decision to grasp, her ear unexpectedly caught, emanating from outside the window, a faint voice say: "Hsiao Hung, I've picked up your pocket handkerchief in here!" and as soon as Hsiao ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... of this stream, the road ascended by a good and moderate ascent to a dividing ridge, but immediately entered upon ground covered with fragments of an altered silicious slate, which are in many places large, and render the road racking to a carriage. In this rock the planes of deposition are distinctly preserved, and the metamorphism is evidently due to the proximity of volcanic rocks. On either side, the mountains here are densely covered with tall and handsome trees; and, mingled with the green of a variety ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... the trees dropping with dew, the creeping autumnal fog, and increasing cold, made me pause, and feel that to sleep in my light summer dress under such circumstances was, if not to die, at least to contract, during the night, such disease as would render existence not worth the having—racking rheumatism for life, or fever, or inflammation, in some of their many forms, and endless consequences. So I resolved to keep moving as long as I had power to stir a limb, as this would give me a chance of maintaining ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... Haig, an Irish and Scotch group of regiments, were the most successful of all. The bridge at Pont Arcy had been destroyed, but still one of its girders spanned the stream. It would have been tricky walking, even under ordinary circumstances, but nerve racking to attempt, when from every hill and wood and point of land, Maxims, machine guns and a steady rifle fire are concentrated on the man crossing that one girder. By the afternoon, the engineers attached ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... credible; and you won't understand it. I don't. But as I stood by the grave, I suddenly felt that there was something for me to do, something very important that had to be done. It was odd, very odd. I went back to my hotel quite harassed, puzzling and racking my brains. Then an idea struck me; and I had a hunt through the registers. I found that two days before she died a boy was born, Hildebrand Anne Beauleigh—the old Beauleigh names. She knew that I should like him to be called by them. From the registers ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... was more sinned against than sinning. Every line in the boy's fragile, pathetic figure went straight to the older man's heart. It came to him, almost joyously, that there had been premonition in his strange mood of longing for a son. As an end to this nerve-racking night, there was work to do—for the remainder of it, at least for a brief moment, he had a companion in his grim, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... suppose so. Bless my insurance policy! I might as well take the same chance you do. But if you're going to have such a nerve-racking thing as that on the program, you'd better get to bed early and ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... with a stick. The boy sitting beside him laughed. He was a short well—dressed black—haired boy with rings on his fingers who worked in the town poolroom, racking the pool balls. "I'd like to go where there are women with blood ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... Their jeers and banter were giving place to cold distrustful looks, which were far more trying to bear. How he longed to be able to burst upon their astounded minds with the pent-up intelligence that was silently racking and splitting his little bosom! But if he did—the terrible firm of Quirk, Gammon, and Snap—Oh! the very thought of them glued his lips together. There was one, however, of whom he might surely make a confidant—the excellent Huckaback, with whom ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... the trouble of forswearing yourself and racking your brains to stifle truth with falsehood,' I coldly replied. 'I have trusted to the testimony of no third person. I was in the shrubbery this evening, and I saw and heard ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... suddenly came the War, infesting the seas with unaccustomed and nerve-racking dangers. I must apologise for mentioning this, as everybody knows that we ought now to forget about the War as quickly as possible and get on with more important matters, but at the time it had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... Racking my brain for a new start I fell back on those useful fellows, the authors. Presuming that anyone who had lived in that fascinating region—the promised land (if land is the word) of so many of us who are weary of English climatic treacheries—would be familiar with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... be impossible to describe my feelings as I was flung upon the floor of our prison. This was cold, damp, and filthy; but I heeded not these grievances. Greater sorrows absorbed the less. There is no torture so racking, no pain so painful as the throbbings of a jealous heart; but how much harder to bear under circumstances like mine! She could sleep, smile, dance—dance by my prison, and with ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... this argument. All the wounds in his heart were aching, and he could not bring his thoughts to majorities. He passed a night of nerve-racking strain. The jeopardy of election did not concern him. That night at the dinner party he had realized that he had a formidable rival in Fletcher, who had a place firmly fixed in the Winthrop household. Still, against odds, he had determined ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... said; "but he has no right to visit my father's sins on me. He hates me, and he always did; and he has been racking his brains to find out something against me. That rascally German doctor has found him an excuse, and so he throws in my teeth, as fresh discovered, what he ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... venom'd stang, That shoots my tortur'd gums alang; And thro' my lugs gies mony a twang, Wi' gnawing vengeance; Tearing my nerves wi' bitter pang, Like racking engines! ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the years passed on. Maurice worked, and struggled, and pinched, till his face grew old and careworn, and the hard racking cough began to make itself heard, and Nea's fine color faded, for the children were coming fast now, and the days ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... take too long to repeat the efforts Mr. Prime made to lead me to reconsider my resolution. Meanwhile I was racking my brains to find a way of letting matters rest without depriving him utterly of hope. As he said, the knowledge that my heart was his only increased the bitterness of his despair. Happy as I was, I felt bewildered and uncertain. I shrank instinctively ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... trouble him in his weakness. Yet as she heard the poor man's cry, "Lieber Heiland, hilf mir" (Dear Saviour, help me), her prayers, too, rose for him to the compassionate Saviour. Now it is a little boy with a bad back, terrible sores, and a racking cough, who would let no one else touch him. "Every night," she says, "I used to pray with Otto after they were all in bed, and he used to put his poor little arm round my neck as I knelt beside him; but ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... heap themselves into broken and irregular waves, each striving to overtop the other in their plunge upon the city. They broke, indeed, into the back door of the city, and then, with a suddenness that seemed to rock the very foundations of the earth, the wind struck us, in three nerve-racking blasts. ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... farther described as a thin man, handsome, but with a "singular air," nor could my colleague more satisfactorily define this air, though he made a racking struggle to ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... terrible temptation, his heart-racking struggle ceased. He lowered the long, black rifle. He took one last look at ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... lose under your very gaze the divinity which has informed her, grow commonplace, turn from flame to ashes, from a radiant vitality to a relic, is anything but a pleasure for any man, and has been nothing less than a racking spectacle to my sight. Each mournful emptied shape stands ever after like the nest of some beautiful bird from which the inhabitant has departed and left it to fill with snow. I have been absolutely miserable when I have looked ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... air was full of music. It was not unlike the grand transformation scene in the pantomime when all that has been gloom and despondency gives way in the flash of an eye to elysian splendour and dazzling gaiety. 'Pon my soul, I never felt so exuberant in all my life. The once nerve-racking clangour was like the soothing strains of an invisible orchestra to my delighted senses. Ha! Ha! What a merry old world it is, ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... I didn't see them," Raskolnikov answered slowly, as though ransacking his memory, while at the same instant he was racking every nerve, almost swooning with anxiety to conjecture as quickly as possible where the trap lay and not to overlook anything. "No, I didn't see them, and I don't think I noticed a flat like that open.... But on the fourth storey" (he had mastered the trap now and was triumphant) ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... swept, disordered and aimless, through his mind, he wondered if a nightmare were upon him; he, the darling of Belgravia, the Guards' champion, the lover of Lady Guenevere, to be here outlawed and friendless; wearily racking his brains to solve whether he had seamanship enough to be taken before the mast, or could stand before the tambour-major of a French regiment, with a chance to serve the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... poisoned, destroyed! If you were acquainted with the history of every family in your street, don't you know that in two or three of the houses there such tragedies have been playing? Is not the young mistress of Number 20 already pining at her husband's desertion? The kind master of Number 30 racking his fevered brains and toiling through sleepless nights to pay for the jewels on his wife's neck, and the carriage out of which she ogles Lothario in the Park? The fate under which man or woman falls, blow of brutal tyranny, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at him, and seeing by his starved look how he was racking his jaded brain for some excuse to go with me, I honestly believe I was sorry for him. The chaplain was a thick-set, clean-shaven, politic little fellow whose "Good-mawning, brothah?" had the heavy sweetness of perfumed lard. ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... horrible. Their minds had had no concept of such horror, such relentless, racking pain. The blazing lights, the questions screaming in their ears, Frankle's vicious eyes burning in frustration, and their own screams, rising with each question they would not answer until their throats ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse
... the joy they experienced at her discomfiture. Never had she been at a loss to know which way to turn to extricate herself from a difficulty; but now, how helpless she was. She nervously tapped the palm of her left hand with her fan, vainly racking her brain in an effort to find a solution. Dick, who had been watching her narrowly the while, saw a strange light begin to play in her eyes in which he read Don Felipe's death as plainly as though it were written across the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... year, with a groat a month if thou wilt keep mine house, bring in my meals, and the like, and by and by, so thou art a good lad, and runst not after these new-fangled preachments which lead but to heresy, and set folk racking their brains about sin and such trash, we'll get thee shorn and into minor orders, and who knows what good preferment thou mayst not win ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... which were racking her limbs, she kept her sharp eyes fixed on Helene, who was now busy fumbling in her pocket, and on seeing her visitor place a ten-franc piece on the table, she whimpered all the more, and tried to rise to a sitting posture. Whilst struggling, she ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... fluctuating hope, and a time when the doctor said mommie must go to a hospital—Boise, since she had friends there. And there was a terrible, nerve-racking journey to the railroad. And when Ward rode next to the Wolverine ranch, there was no Billy Louise to taunt or tempt him. John Pringle and Phoebe told him in brief, stolid sentences of the later developments and gave him a meal and offered him ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... which still remains, Sweet converse with the stream and me wouldst share: Ye flowers, leaves, grass, woods, grots, rills, gentle air, Low valleys, lofty hills, and sunny plains: The harbour where I stored my love-sick pains, And all my various chance, my racking care: Ye playful inmates of the greenwood shade; Ye nymphs, and ye that in the waves pursue That life its cool and grassy bottom lends:— My days were once so fair; now dark and dread As death that makes them so. Thus the world ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... more than ever struck by your eccentricity, Lizabetha Prokofievna. I admit that I told you of Lebedeff's duplicity, on purpose. I knew the effect it would have on you,—on you alone, for the prince will forgive him. He has probably forgiven him already, and is racking his brains to find some excuse for him—is not that the ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... moving fitfully; strange, racking gasps came from her throat. The other two were similarly affected. Almost frightened, held motionless by the weirdness of it, ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... of the crank-shaft is a large reversing friction clutch, which drives, through miter gear, a vertical shaft placed just in front of the post; from the latter the slewing, racking, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... continually racking imagination to perfect the art of moving from one place to another, and who can drop asleep in a carriage and wake at an hundred mile distance, have no notion of all the difficulties of a day's journey here. In the first place, all the horses of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... I'm racking my brain until it's near bursting.... Why didn't she say anything to me? Why have I known so little about her? Why have I kept so far away from her? (He ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... fall down on the space of green turf before the church, now bathed in the soft golden October sunshine, and recant these happy, commonplace centuries of heresy, and have back again the good old believing days of bigotry, and superstition, and roasting, and racking, if only to have once more the men who dreamed those windows out of their faith and piety (if they did, which I doubt), and made them with their patient, reverent hands (if their hands were reverent, which I ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the wheel." But I could hardly speak from emotion. The fatal moment had come. I held my breath. The tapping had stopped as unexpectedly as it had begun, and there was a renewed moment of intolerable suspense; something like an additional turn of the racking screw. I don't suppose I would have ever screamed, but I remember my conviction that there was nothing else for it ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... perpetual cough, offer to sell an infallible remedy for one. Sir THOMAS MORE, in his "Utopia," declares that no man ought to be punished for his religion; yet he became a fierce persecutor, flogging and racking men for his own "true faith." At the moment the poet ROUSSEAU was giving versions of the Psalms, full of unction, as our Catholic neighbours express it, he was profaning the same pen with infamous epigrams; ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... merely postponed," the Celt continued, gloomily. "The damage was done when that infernal destroyer sighted us. Just how the alarm was given, and what brought the sea-wasp racking her engines up the coast, we can't tell. But the cat's out of the bag, now, and we've got to look out for an attack at any moment we try to ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... been less exhausted by long travail and racking thoughts, far different, perhaps, would have been the language of a man so stern. But circumstance impresses the hardest substance; and despite his native intellect and affected superiority over others, no one, ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ennui in my youth. But the malady merely plays with the green fruit; it reserves its serious ravages for the ripe. I can promise you 't is not a laughing matter. Have you ever had a fixed idea? Have you ever spent days and nights racking your brain, importuning the unanswering Powers, to learn whether there was—well, whether there was Another Man, for instance? Oh, bring me drink. Bring me Seltzer water and Vermouth. I will seek nepenthe at the ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... as he could through the dark deserted roads, and though his head was racking and he felt, as he put it, "like nothing on earth," he covered the five miles between Marlehouse and Redmarley in under half an hour. He went round to the side door and felt for the key, as he hoped to slip in ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... a sob. "She isn't a bit well. She has a cold and such a racking cough. I'm keeping ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... him by himself. I would not allow him companions to make merry with so as to make a pleasure of intoxication. I would then wait until next morning when he was sober, and leave him alone with a racking headache until the evening, when I would give him another dose, and so on, forcing him to get drunk until he ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... wealth and consequence. He was aware, from his knowledge of mankind, that Mannering, though generous and benevolent, had the foible of expecting and exacting a minute compliance with his directions. He was therefore racking his recollection to discover if everything had been arranged to meet the Colonel's wishes and instructional and, under this uncertainty of mind, he traversed the house more than once from the garret to the stables. Mrs. Mac-Morlan revolved in a lesser orbit, comprehending ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... Tom paused perplexed, racking his brains.—For who, the deuce, was it? Where had he seen, and that as he could have sworn quite recently, this same forceful countenance lit by russet-grey eyes at once dauntless and sad, deep-set, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... to our camp about a mile away. And the sun blazed, and the flies pestered and stung and buzzed and fought with each other for the drops of sweat streaming down your face. How long should we be here? When were we going into action?... The suspense was brain-racking. The diarrhoea increased: everyone went down with it. Some got the ague shivers and some a ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... of sovereign power, his magic wand; With this he draws the ghost from hollow graves; With this he drives them from the Stygian waves: * * * * Thus arm'd, the god begins his airy race, And drives the racking ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Chichester at which it was even remotely probable that there would be such a thing as an artist's colourman. And yet, without white, my absurd little pictures would be as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedients. Then I suddenly stood up and roared with laughter, again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hour-glass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... in the West Side Boys' Lodging-house ticked out the seconds of Christmas eve as slowly and methodically as if six fat turkeys were not sizzling in the basement kitchen against the morrow's spread, and as if two-score boys were not racking their brains to guess what kind of pies would go with them. Out on the avenue the shopkeepers were barring doors and windows, and shouting "Merry Christmas!" to one another across the street as they hurried to get home. The drays ran over the pavement with muffled sounds; winter had set ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... ways of women, was crushed by her changed air. He looked away, racking his brains to hit on what he could have done to offend her. She glanced at him out of the tail of her eye, and a wicked little dimple appeared in one cheek. He was sufficiently punished. She was mollified. But it was so sweet to feel ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... While he was racking his brain sudden orders were shouted through the building. The lounging groups came up with a jerk, there was a rattle of arms, and in ten seconds the farm boys had resolved into a machine, a set of rigid blue lines that reached the length of the waiting room. There was another order, and one after ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... nobody needs to be told that what is put out at the door may steal in at the window. It may be that, in the seventeenth century, the pious English justices had no suspicion that enforced sleeplessness is a form of physical torture more nerve-racking and irresistible than the thumb-screw. Three days and nights of "watching" brought Elizabeth Clarke to "confess many things"; and when, on the fourth night, her townsmen Hopkins and Stearne dropped in to fill out from her own lips the warrants against those ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... it was excellent advice, but I did not seem able to follow it just then; the throbbing and aching of my arm and the racking pain of my sore head were altogether against it, to say nothing of the continuous groaning and moaning of the injured men round about me, and the occasional sharp ejaculations of agony extorted from the unfortunate individual who happened at the moment to be under the surgeon's hands. So, instead, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... thirty-two. Every now and then he drank, then lay back again with a groan of pain. Piled up on the skylight was a heap of rugs and blankets, for use when the violent chilling attack of ague would follow on the burning, bone-racking heat of fever. ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... idea of the nature of man, to think with what composure and confidence a succession of persons of the greatest genius have launched themselves in illimitable space, with what invincible industry they have proceeded, wasting the midnight oil, racking their faculties, and almost wearing their organs to dust, in measuring the distance of Sirius and the other fixed stars, the velocity of light, and "the myriads of intelligent beings formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity," that people the numberless ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... lost a considerable sum by the escape of a prisoner, would not run any risk in an affair of such consequence, and our hero was obliged to submit to the tortures of his own presaging fears. After he had waited five hours in the most racking impatience, he saw the attorney enter with all the marks of hurry, fatigue, and consternation, and heard him exclaim, "Good God, have you ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... girl half raised herself at this reminder, then sank back to her original position with a fresh burst of racking sobs. Finding her good-natured ministrations ineffectual, the senior left Mignon to herself and began to change methodically to her peasant costume of the second act, the scene of which was laid in a village and in front of the cottage where ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... Catherine, a gossip in the centre of a family, and a thick neighbourhood? One spark of hope remained. Catherine had spoken kindly, even lovingly. The situation admitted no half course. Gerard's mother thus roused must either be her best friend or worst enemy. She waited then in racking anxiety to hear more. No word came. She gave up hope. Catherine was not going to be her friend. Then she would expose her, since she had no strong and kindly feeling to balance the natural love ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... without illusion the foolery of War, the hideous waste of it, the shocking toll of agony and loss which it inflicts—and if left to himself would as a rule have no hand in it. It is only occasionally—when ground down beyond endurance by the rent-racking classes above him, or threatened beyond endurance by an enemy from abroad, that he turns his reaping-hook into a sword and his muck-fork into a three-pronged bayonet, exchanges his fowling-piece for a rifle, ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... can remember any more old saws," said Buddie, after racking her small brain for a minute ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... her merciless towards herself. She took pleasure in the hardest of self-imposed penances, as if the racking of her soul by incessant prayers, and wasting of her body by vigils and cruel fastings, were a vicarious punishment, borne for the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... showers from the curling manes of the roaring waves. But overhead, all this while, it was as clear as a lovely winter moon could make it, and the stars shone brightly in the deep blue sky; there was not even a thin fleecy shred of cloud racking across the moon's disk. Oh, the glories of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Economy of repairs, which are of a simple and comparatively inexpensive character, and of much less frequent occurrence, as the continuous heat avoids the racking occasioned by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... is not often fine, is owing to its not being fermented. After it is got into the hogshead, the generality of people think they have acquitted themselves very well, and done all the necessary business, except racking it. But I can assure them, the more any liquor is rack'd, the more it is weaken'd. By often racking, it loseth its body, and so becomes acid for want of ...
— The Cyder-Maker's Instructor, Sweet-Maker's Assistant, and Victualler's and Housekeeper's Director - In Three Parts • Thomas Chapman
... events would have taken had he but known that the mysterious jewel which had cost old Mackwayte his life, had been in his, Desmond's, possession from the very day on which he had assumed the guise and habiliments of Mr. Bellward. He was racking his brains to think what he had done with the box of cigarettes he had purchased at the Dionysus shop on the afternoon of the day he had taken the leave train back ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... of Babel, the confusion of languages is only in his mouth. All the vacations he speaks as good English as any man in England, but in term times he breaks out of that hopping one-legged pace into a racking trot of issues, bills, replications, rejoinders, demures, querelles, subpoenas, &c., able to fright a simple country fellow, and make him believe he conjures. Whatsoever his complexion was before, it turns in this place to choler or deep melancholy, so that ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the iron-horns, ripping, racking, Listen to the quack-horns, slack and clacking. Way down the road, trilling like a toad, Here comes the dice-horn, here comes the vice-horn, Here comes the snarl-horn, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... return from Gigha he passed many hours pacing the great hall of his castle, racking his brain to discover a means whereby he might protect the lives of the women and children who were under his care. He remembered how, on the day of his throning, those children had stood at the verge of the court ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... day was Sunday, and he rose at twelve with a racking headache. He had promised to take a chop with his friend at two, and at that hour he presented himself, with difficulty, at Mrs. Poppins's room. She was busy laying the cloth as he entered, but his friend was ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... an exact copy of the miseries of a New England spring; a bright sun came for an hour or two in the morning, just to coax you forth without your cloak, and then came up a villanous, horrible wind, exactly like the worst east wind of Boston, breaking the heart, racking the brain, and turning hope and fancy to an irrevocable green and yellow hue, in lieu of ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... serious that Somaloff begged General Rachieff to order the fetters which bound her wrists to be removed, receiving in reply a refusal as contemptuous as it was decisive. All that day the exile's secret lover walked moodily on, racking his brains for some method by which to save the woman from dying before even the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... notion of carrying my frivolities into such a scene, but Jane said her mind ran on it, and it was 'anything to take off her thoughts from that man.' So I went into her room, and oh! if you could have seen the poor thing, with her short breath and racking cough, her cheeks burning and her eyes glistening at that flimsy trumpery. One bunch of the silver flowers on my skirt was wrong; she spied it, and they would not thwart her, so she would have the needle, and the skeleton trembling fingers set them right. They said she would sleep the easier for ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and remained motionless. There he now lies where he was shot down in the dust and dirt, and his white beard and his rotting rags seem to raise a silent and eloquent protest to high Heaven against the devilish complots which are racking Peking. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... his head and pretended to be racking his memory; for it would have been quite easy to say that the party had left on Saturday, on their way to Bologna. That was the answer the gentleman expected, and the innkeeper generally found ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... awakened with a parching thirst, and a head racked and bursting with pain. It was some minutes before his faculties took in the meaning of his surroundings. Some minutes before they took in anything but the certainty of his parched throat and racking head. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... always remained in my own bed until I heard her heavy breathing, denoting that she slept, before I dared to leave my own room to go to my sisters. The desire of racking me off, as dear charming Mrs. Benson used to call it, might have seized her, and my absence would ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... like the rest, the sort of trash that the newspapers serialize. They had to produce it by a fixed time, once or twice a week: and it had been going on for years. They went on producing and producing, long after they had ceased to have anything to say, racking their brains to find something new, something more sensational, more bizarre: for the public was surfeited and sick of everything, and soon wearied of even the most wanton imaginary pleasures: they had always to go one better—better than the rest, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland |
