"Cursed with" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mentioned, are very credible among men, who, being confined together within the same walls, never can forget their mutual animosities, and who, being cut off from all the most endearing connections of nature, are commonly cursed with hearts more selfish, and tempers more unrelenting, than fall to the share of other men. The pious frauds practised to increase the devotion and liberality of the people, may be regarded as certain, in an order founded on illusions, lies, and superstition. The supine idleness ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... visiting the five towns of this neglected field, I selected one place as a center for extra effort, and here I commenced a series of gospel meetings. The result is a church of seventeen members and a Sunday-school of fifty scholars. As all these towns are dreadfully cursed with saloons, we are trying to create a temperance sentiment. Fifty have already signed the pledge, among them some of the worst drunkards in the town. Forty-five children have joined the 'Children's Band' and are trying to keep their lives clean. We have bought half an acre of ground, ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... projectile when electricity, which we are coming to look upon as another form of heat, is properly applied. It must be so, and it is the manifest destiny of the race to improve it. Man is a spirit cursed with a mortal body, which glues him to the earth, and his yearning to rise, which is innate, is, I believe, only a part of his probation and trial." "Show us how it can be done," shouted his listeners in chorus. "Apergy is and must be able to do it," Ayrault continued. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... from Ovid in the beginning of his tale, where the Renaissance poet undertakes to explain why Mirrha is cursed with love for her father. While she listens to the sweet, sad songs of Orpheus, Cupid,[15] falling in love with her, courts her and is rejected; his parting kiss "did inspire/her brest with an infernall and ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... true wisdom begins at home, and that it all begins at the heart. And they all teach us that he is the wisest of men who has the worst opinion of his own heart, as he is the foolishest of men who does not know his own heart to be the worst heart that ever any man was cursed with in this world. 'Here is wisdom': not to know the number of the beast, but to know his mark, and to read it written so indelibly ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... been cursed with the rule of British Tories since 1783, is it likely that our condition would have been better than that ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... sometimes sends as far as to Wicklow for men to capture and sell them for him. He was once fortunate enough to trap a pair of the snow geese of the Arctic region, but Belmullet, in other respects a primeval paradise, is cursed with the small boy of civilisation; and one of these pests of society slew the goose with a stone. The widowed gander consoled himself by contracting family ties with the common domestic goose of the parish, and all his progeny, in other particulars ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... whisky was kept in public and private houses. There was, and yet is, near my father's farm two very small but ancient towns, containing each some twenty or thirty houses, and both of these places have been cursed with saloons in which liquor has been sold for the last thirty years. Both of these towns were favorite resorts with me, especially the one called Raleigh. I have been drunk oftener and longer at a time in Raleigh than in any one place in Indiana. I have written ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... the host in arms. Night, as never night before, Hearkened to an army's roar Breaking up in snaky swarms: Torch and steel and snorting steed, Hunted by the cry of blood, Cursed with blindness, mad for day. Where the torches ran a flood, Tales of him and of the deed Showered like a torrent spray. Fear of silence made them strive Loud in warrior-hymns that grew Hoarse for slaughter yet unwreaked. Ghostly Night across ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... anything I could have said, by asking me not to say it. That is the worst of Hester. The partition between her mind and that of other people is so thin that she sees what they are thinking about. Thank God, Rachel, that you are not cursed with the artistic temperament! That is why she has never married. She sees too much. I am not a match-maker, but if I had had to take the responsibility, I should have married her at seventeen to ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... you before you knew that I was a Princess," she said; "you need not forget that I am a woman still, cursed with the plate-mail of rank added to the weariness and inaction of a ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... fair promise and half-developments of spring, can one wander safely through the place. The sting of the serpent is in this Eden. Cursed is the ground for man's sake in the fairest scene that his industry, and genius, and virtue can make for himself; but cursed with a double curse is the ground that he makes a wilderness by his selfishness and wickedness. And this double curse, this fatal Circean spell, has come upon these beautiful grounds in common with all the neighbourhood of Rome because of ages ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... indignantly up and down I fell to dwelling upon the romance of the fog. And romantic it certainly was—the fog, like the grey shadow of infinite mystery, brooding over the whirling speck of earth; and men, mere motes of light and sparkle, cursed with an insane relish for work, riding their steeds of wood and steel through the heart of the mystery, groping their way blindly through the Unseen, and clamouring and clanging in confident speech the while their hearts are heavy with ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... began to be uneasy; for the life of the Emperor had been so often menaced, that it was very natural to fear some snare or surprise, and imagination takes the reins when beset by such fears. Prince Murat swore and cursed with all his might, sometimes the imprudence of his Majesty, then his gallantry, then the lady and her complaisance. I was not any better satisfied than he, but being calmer I tried to quiet him; and at last, unable longer to restrain his impatience, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the Magnificat— EXALTAVIT HUMILES. There is the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved BEFORE it is loveable. There is the terrible allegory of the "Sleeping Beauty," which tells how the human creature was blessed with all birthday gifts, yet cursed with death; and how death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep. But I am not concerned with any of the separate statutes of elfland, but with the whole spirit of its law, which I learnt before I could speak, and shall retain when I cannot write. I am concerned ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... creaking signboard, swinging in the wind on rusty irons, directed me to the only inn of the village. It was a two-story brick building, standing a little back from the road. I drew rein at the door, and dismounted my weary nag. My loud vociferations summoned to my side a bull dog, cursed with a most unhappy disposition, and a hostler whose temper was hardly more amiable. He took my horse with an air of surly indifference, and gruffly directed me to the ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... pleasant, for the world likes cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for balls,—romantic with West Rock and its legends,—cursed with a detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be the frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,—with its neat carriages, metropolitan hotels, precious old college-dormitories, ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nothing would ever induce him to wear his fur coat, even in the coldest weather. He was obsessed with the idea that should Diplomacy ever be revived, his fur coat might grow too shabby to be used for his first entrance, so it reposed perpetually and uselessly in camphor. Arthur Cecil was cursed with the Demon of Irresolution. I have never known so undecided a man; it seemed quite impossible for him to make up his mind. Sir Squire Bancroft has told us in his Memoirs how Cecil, on the night of the dress rehearsal of Diplomacy, was unable to decide on his make-up. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... East London, and there were tens of thousands of people abroad on it. I tell you this so that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe in the next paragraph. As I say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as an American waif would curse, stranded in a strange and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead them to believe, and succeeded in making them believe, they took me for a "seafaring man," who had spent his money in riotous living, lost his ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... must be this of thine, Deliverer whom we seek, whoe'er thou art, Pope, prince, or peasant! If, indeed, the first, The noblest, therefore! since the heroic heart Within thee must be great enough to burst Those trammels buckling to the baser part Thy saintly peers in Rome, who crossed and cursed With the same finger. ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... party were at their lowest; and this, coupled with his peculiar sensibility, put a severe strain upon him. Some people thought that he was a man of genius, morbidly sensitive shrinking from public life and the Press, cursed with insufficient ambition, sudden, baffling, complex and charming. Others thought that he was a man irresistible to his friends and terrible to his enemies, dreaming of Empire, besought by kings and armies to put countries and continents straight, a man whose notice blasted ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... a lean, slight man in a rusty cloak and a three-cornered hat worn well down over his nose so as to shade his face. And when presently he doffed this hat and made a sweeping bow to the young lovers, Andre-Louis confessed to himself that had he been cursed with such a hangdog countenance he would have worn his hat in precisely such a manner, so as to conceal as much of it as possible. If M. Leandre appeared to be wearing, in part at least, the cast-offs of nobleman, the newcomer appeared to be wearing the cast-offs of M. Leandre. Yet despite his vile clothes ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... work of supererogation, since there probably remain few such epithets in the English language which have not already been applied to him by one writer or another. Yet it is hard to hold one's hand, although humanity would perhaps induce us to pity rather than to revile a man cursed with so unhappy a temperament. But whatever may be said or left unsaid about him personally, the infinite disturbance which he caused cannot be wholly ignored. It was great enough to constitute an important element in history. Covered by ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... very severe critics of the doings of their family; and Balzac, cursed with the sensitiveness of genius, and smarting under the bitter disappointment of disillusionment and of thwarted and compressed powers, was not likely to be an indulgent critic; but making due allowance for these facts, it does not appear that his home was a particularly comfortable ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... school was cursed with the usual abnormal pupil in a silly overgrown girl called Sary Myers. Sary's parents were shiftless and ignorant people and though Sary was almost fifteen years old, and a woman in size, she was still among ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... teaching has been handed down from mother to daughter through the ages, while the poor, misguided souls of expectant women have suffered untold remorse, heaped blame upon themselves, lived lives literally cursed with fear and dread—veritable slaves to superstition and bondage—all because of the simple fact that a certain percentage of all children born in this world have sustained some sort of an injury or "embryological accident" during the first days of fetal existence. ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... father be cursed with such a terrible wish? Yes, when the father was that complex, unhappy man, Louis of France. Commines knew the King as no man else knew him, and in the gloomy depths of that knowledge he found two reasons why the father would have no sorrow for ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... similar to those of Britain may with safety be transferred to other states, and that it is among them alone that we are to look for durable alliances or cordial support. The wretched fate of all the countries, strangers to the Anglo-Saxon blood, who have been cursed with these alien constitutions, whether in the Spanish or Italian Peninsulas, or the South American states—the jealous spirit and frequent undisguised hostility of America—the total failure of English institutions in Ireland, have had no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... his too hospitable, magnificent establishment had exceeded his income; he had too much indulged his passion for all the fine arts, of which he was a liberal patron: he had collected a magnificent library, and had lavished immense sums of money on architectural embellishments. Cursed with too fine a taste, and with too soft a heart—a heart too well knowing how to yield, never could he deny himself, much less any other human being, any gratification which money could command; and ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... away. The French and Indians, after killing fifty Palatines and taking thrice that number prisoners, turned tail and marched back to the Lake again, with some of Honikol Herkimer's lead in their miserable bodies. The Valley was rarely to be cursed with their presence again. It was as if a long fever had come to its climax in a tremendous convulsion, and then gone off altogether. We regained confidence, and faced the long ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... told their dismal tale. The Romans, too, were heading in such a way that it was before their very faces that their ship was about to be cut off; and yet of all this multitude not one could raise a hand in its defence. Some wept in impotent grief, some cursed with flashing eyes and knotted fists, some on their knees held up appealing hands to Baal; but neither prayer, tears, nor curses could undo the past nor mend the present. That broken, crawling galley meant that their fleet was gone. Those two fierce darting ships meant that the hands of Rome ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... my friend. He rushed at the door and shook it like a madman; he cursed with incredible fluency and addressed me in terms which it would be inadequate to describe as rude. Then I silently shot the bottom bolt and noisily drew back the top one. He thought I had unbolted the door, and when he found that I had ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... implacable National Anthem! Though for quiet and rest he may yearn, It pursues him at every turn - No chance of forsaking Its ROCOCO numbers; They haunt him when waking - They poison his slumbers - Like the Banbury Lady, whom every one knows, He's cursed with its music wherever he goes! Though its words but imperfectly rhyme, And the devil himself couldn't scan them; With composure polite he endures day and ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... manifestation of curative power, to go through once more,—and for the last time,—the mockery of a pretended fast. The scene is Lord Asgarby's house; the patient is Lord Asgarby's daughter—an only child, cursed with constitutional debility, the foredoomed victim of premature decline. This frail creature has heard of Vashti and believes in her, and desires and obtains her society. To Professor Dethick this is, in ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... passion—a passion so unnatural, indeed, that it suggested the horrid and insatiable longings of the damned—and yet their souls were naked to each other. It was their fate that they could hide nothing each from each—they were cursed with ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... him pathetically. "But what shall I do?" she asked. "I've got no money, no experience, no sense. I'm a vain, luxury-loving fool, cursed with ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... in Wilhelmine's life at that time was the Duke's friend Baron Forstner, a man of excellent and sterling qualities, but one of those unfortunate mortals cursed with a lugubrious manner which makes their goodness seem to be but one more irritating characteristic of a tiresome personality. Forstner was genuinely devoted to the Duke; he had been the companion of the Prince's childhood, had shared ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... of the great and good French government than did many a Conscientious Objector at the hands of the great and good American government; or—since all great governments are per se good and vice versa—than did many a man in general who was cursed with a talent for thinking during the warlike moments recently passed; during, that is to say, an epoch when the g. and g. nations demanded of their respective peoples the exact antithesis to thinking; said antitheses being vulgarly called Belief. Lest which statement prejudice some members ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... chair; her eyes were gazing, with rapt attention, toward the purple dusk by the window. She was listening. Nurse, as she had often assured her friends, "was not cursed with imagination," but now fear held her so that she could not stir nor move save that her hand trembled against the wall paper. The chatter of the fire, the shouts of some boys in the Square, the ringing of the bell of St. Matthew's for evensong, all ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... is of a tyrannical nature, and instead of leading a private life has been cursed with the further misfortune of ...
— The Republic • Plato
... do not maintain that a man is responsible for his own ailments?" said Mr. Harland—"That would be too far-fetched, even for YOU! Why, as a matter of fact a wretched human being is not only cursed with his own poisoned blood but with the poisoned blood of his forefathers, and, according to the latest medical science, the very air and water swarm with germs of death ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... placed in the hands of the compiler by a physician of Philadelphia who for many years had shown great kindness to its writer, in the endeavor to cure him of his pernicious habits. The writer seems from childhood to have been cursed with an excessive sensibility, and an unusual constitutional craving for excitement, coupled with an infirm and unreliable will. The habit of daily dependence upon alcohol appears to have been established for years before the use of opium was commenced; and the latter was begun ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... have learnt to read the words that are written by the hand of Fate. And here—here is the open book. It is all here. The storm of disaster that brought you into the world will dog your footsteps. You are cursed with the luck that leads to disaster. Wherever you go men will bless your name, and, almost in the same breath, their blessings shall turn to the direst curses. It is not I who am speaking. My tongue utters ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... God had not willed it that any man should look so deeply into the heart of his fellow-man. That was indeed to know good and evil; and the thought stole over him that perhaps it was in degree as a man had eaten of the forbidden fruit of the tree of life that he was cursed with ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... row last night," he said; "it has happened here before over cards, and will no doubt happen again until matters clear themselves up somehow. Marnham, as you see, drinks, and when drunk is the biggest liar in the world, and I, I am sorry to say, am cursed with a violent temper. Don't judge either of us too harshly. If you were a doctor you would know that all these things come to us with our blood, and we didn't fashion our own clay, did we? ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... called now, through the fire amain, On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life— To the Person, he bought and sold again— For the Face, with his daily buffets rife— Feature by feature It took its place: And his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark, At the steady whole ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... is cursed with a number of "orators"—men regarded as "eloquent"—"silver tongued" men—fellows who to the common American knack at brandishing the tongue add an exceptional felicity of platitude, a captivating mastery of dog's-eared sentiment, a copious and obedient vocabulary of eulogium, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... himself once more at the bars, and, after another fearful paroxysm, fell back inert upon the floor. For hours he lay exhausted, but wildly restless, too spent to struggle and too demented and tortured to be still. He moaned, he groaned, he cursed with horrid filthy words and phrases, bit as a dog bites in his madness, strove to gnaw the loathsome rags which had long ceased to cover his nakedness, and then again was still, save for the incessant rolling of his restless ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... its fulness the beauty and glory of life. Let the man and woman see this, and let them know in the day that is at hand, how the challenge may come from some petty authority of the time that rules not by its integrity but by its favourites. We are cursed with such authority, and many a one drives about in luxury because he is obsequious to it: he prefers to be a parasite and to live in splendour than be a man and live in straits. He has what Bernard Shaw so aptly calls "the soul of a servant." If we are to prepare for a braver ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Gipsies were now the only persons addicted to such wickedness; but this is not the case; for it is well known that almost every town is cursed with an astrological, magical, or slight-of-hand fortune-teller. There are two now in Southampton; and their wretched abodes are visited not only by vain and ignorant servants, but often by those who belong to the higher circles, and not unfrequently by ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... seasoning the shallowest of all philosophies with systematic rancour against thrones and Christianity. To a military (and therefore in those days ignorant) aristocracy, such as all continental states were cursed with, equally the food and the condiment were attractive beyond any other. And thus, viz. through such accidents of luck operating upon so shallow a body of estimators as the courtiers and the little adventurers of the Continent, did the French literature and language attain the preponderance which once ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... priest. In common disputes also, affecting the veracity of each other, it was customary for the one to say to the other, "Touch your eyes, if what you say is true." If he touched his eyes, the dispute was settled. It was as if he had said, "May I be cursed with blindness if it is not true what I say." Or the doubter would say to his opponent, "Who will eat you? Say the name of your god." He whose word was doubted would then name the household god of his family, as much as to say, "May god So-and-so destroy ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... was he cursed with a state of mind more wearing and more wearisome than remorse. He had no remorse; but the evildoer who can hold that avenger at bay, cannot escape the slower torture of incessantly doing the evil deed again and doing it more efficiently. In ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... supplicating. No; his instincts told him that not even the last extremity of danger would force a tear from those proud eyes, nor bow that haughty head an inch. How this wild, fierce worship maddened him! So longing, yet so slavish—so reckless, so debased, yet all the while cursed with a certain leavening of the true faith, that drove him to despair. But come what might, in a few minutes he would see her again. Even at such a time, there was something of repose ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... country in the world more cursed with worthless curs than that of Mexico and the other southern republics; the cities and villages actually swarm with these animals, and produce no little vexation to travellers, who speak of their eternal yelping and barking in the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... are young. Youth can afford ideals, being vigorous enough to stand the hard knocks they earn their possessor. But I am an old fellow cursed with a tender heart and tolerably keen eyes. That combination, Messire de Logreus, is one which very often forces me to jeer out of season, simply because I know myself to be upon the verge ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... undoubtedly, our zone, and the natural endowments of this portion of the globe. In part, and of late years, our vindicated national character, and the safety of our Institutions. But the magnet in America is, that we are a republic. A republican people! Cursed with artificial government, however glittering, the people of Europe, like the sick, pine for nature with protection, for open vistas and blue sky, for independence without ceremony, for adventure in their own interest,—and ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... I read the paper, which proved to be a letter, evidently written to Mr. Benton, and the signature was plainly, "your heart-broken Mary," I could only pick out half sentences, but read enough to show me the treachery and sorrow, aye, more, a life cursed with shame, and at ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... the last evidence of their lack of wisdom and interest in the province they had so long cursed with their misrule, sent over George Burrington. After the creation of the counties of Bath and Clarendon the representative of the Lords Proprietors was called "Governor of ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... if she had profited by God's mercy, if she had done in time, done years ago, what was imperatively ordered her; if she hadn't in fine been cursed with the loveliness that was to make her behaviour a thing of fable. She may keep them still if she'll sacrifice—and after all so little—that purely superficial charm. She must do as you've done; she must wear, dear lady, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... man who is well balanced, who is not cursed with some little defect or weakness which cripples his usefulness and neutralizes his powers. Wanted, a man of courage, who is not a coward in any ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... a harsh, cruel man," Snass went on. "Yet the law is the law, and I am just. Nay, here with this primitive people, I am the law and the justice. Beyond my will no man goes. Also, I am a father, and all my days I have been cursed with imagination." ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... I put my life into your hands, and not only my own life, which, God knows, is not worth saving, but the happiness of a respectable old man, and the honour of a family of consideration. My love of low society, as such propensities as I was cursed with are usually termed, was, I think of an uncommon kind, and indicated a nature, which, if not depraved by early debauchery, would have been fit for better things. I did not so much delight in the wild revel, the low humour, the unconfined liberty of those with whom I associated ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... are best described briefly. Each of the papers noticed the play, and each of them damned it with uncompromising heartiness. The criticisms varied only in tone. One cursed with relish and gusto; another with a certain pity; a third with a kind of wounded superiority, as of one compelled against his will to speak of something unspeakable; but the meaning of all was the same. James Boyd's play was ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... c'n have him for nuthin'," said Lafitte. "He ain't worth nothin'. Besides, I can't charge a brother of the flag anything; anyhow, not you." I inferred that Jean Lafitte, also, was going to grow up into one of those men like myself, cursed with a reticence and shyness in some matters, and so winning a reputation of oddness or coldness, against all the real and passionate protest of his ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... the friar, the fit rhyming is upon you too? Is't come to that? Then we are all peppered, or the devil pepper me. What would I not give to have Gargantua see us while we are in this maggotty crambo-vein! Now may I be cursed with living on that damned empty food, if I can tell whether I shall scape the catching distemper. The devil a bit do I understand which way to go about it; however, the spirit of fustian possesses us all, I find. Well, by St. John, I'll poetize, since ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... a fever. Then did I tell her to name her price. And the price was none other than the head of John—John Baptist, who for defiling the name of Antipas' wife had been put in a dungeon under the castle of Machaerus. Antipas is not cursed with poverty. Yet are there prices too great, for since the head of the brawler came blinking on a platter, do the people declare he were Elias, and that he is not dead but walks the dungeon by day and ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... are to be 'cursed with a granted prayer,' you young Don Quixote. You are to come here to school, and I am to foot the bills. You are to come next Monday, which being the first of April and all-fool's-day, I consider an appropriate time for beginning. You are to tilt with certain giants, called Grammar, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... free talk about the other sex in which many men indulge. "I remember," he says, "a man's dinner at which two of those present, both persons of eminence, started a theory that every man who is blessed or cursed with the artistic instinct has at some period of his life wanted to marry a barmaid. Mr. Sandys gave them such a look that they at once apologized. Trivial, perhaps, but significant. On another occasion I was in a club smoking-room when the talk was of a ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... cried out one young man, who was wildly buttoning and unbuttoning his coat as if he wanted to fight the subject through; "but we are not cursed with names so ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... lecture per day, as he did to his other pupils, he used to come to his rooms at all hours, and force him to read, by reading with him. He also stood his friend in a serious emergency. Young Wardlaw, you must know, was blessed or cursed with Mimicry; his powers in that way really seemed to have no limit, for he could imitate any sound you liked with his voice, and any form with his pen or pencil. Now, we promise you, he was one man under his father's eye, and another down at Oxford; so, one night, this gentleman, being warm with wine, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... may have been—I have heard of such things"—and she laughed fearfully at the horrible thought a tempting devil was putting into her mind—"I have heard of young girls—poor desolate creatures, cursed with riches, and having no one to guard them—of some stranger coming and marrying them hastily, but not for love—oh, not for love!" And her laughter grew absolutely frightful in its mockery. "How do I know but that you ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... record about a young man of promising amiable disposition, but cursed with more conscience than brains, who had been told by his doctor (for as I have above said disease was not yet held to be criminal) that he ought to eat meat, law or no law. He was much shocked and for some time refused to comply with what he deemed the unrighteous ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... is highly significant. It will be one of the Legion's greatest powers. It was and is due to the fact that these new Americans are not cursed with fixed ideas. They have seen too much, lived through too much in their comparatively short lives to be narrow-minded. Over in the A.E.F. the former hod-carrier often turned out to be too good as a construction manager for any officer to despise ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... the seen that they are but one world. I cannot tell where to draw the line between natural and supernatural. To me the two are one. But this I know; the moment I realised that I hated Wilfred, I was cursed with a terrible curse. Evil passions surged within me, I planned dark deeds, murder did not seem hateful, and hell far worse than that which I had felt when I had been struggling on the cliff was now ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... to rebellion. Her favourite theme was the doctrine of non-resistance. That doctrine she taught without any qualification, and followed out to all its extreme consequences. Her disciples were never weary of repeating that in no conceivable case, not even if England were cursed with a King resembling Busiris or Phalaris, with a King who, in defiance of law, and without the presence of justice, should daily doom hundreds of innocent victims to torture and death, would all the Estates of the realm united be justified in withstanding his tyranny ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rights of manhood under British laws. From their earliest infancy they have known no language but the English, and no religion but Christianity; while the former are still barbarians, grovelling in fetishism, cursed with slavery, ignorant, debased, and wantonly cruel. The West India negro has so much contempt for his African cousin, that he invariably speaks of him by the ignominious title of "bushman." In fact, the former considers himself in every respect an Englishman, and the anecdote of the West India ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... Howells wrote: "You do stir me mightily with the hope of dictating and I will try it when I get the chance. But there is the tempermental difference. You are dramatic and unconscious; you count the thing more than yourself; I am cursed with consciousness to the core, and can't say myself out; I am always saying myself in, and setting myself above all that I say, as of more worth. Lately I have felt as if I were rotting with egotism. I don't admire myself; I am sick of myself; but I can't think of anything else. Here I am ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with the fact, that in almost every instance, both the character and the condition were referable, in a great measure, to the influence of the mother. Some of them were blessed with good mothers, and some were cursed with bad ones; and though the conviction is not in all the cases marked with equal distinctness, yet in several of them, the very image and superscription of the mother remains upon the child to this day. I sometimes visit the place which was the ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... his time? Because Donatello had not the temper which would bully a hundred popes, and extract a magnificent advertisement from each encounter. Why does Shelley still claim a larger share of the world's admiration than Keats, his indubitable superior? Because Shelley was blessed or cursed with the trick of interesting the world by the accidents of ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... still the heart would hunger and be empty of its true possession unless God Himself had flowed into it. It were but a poor advancement and the gain of a loss, if yearnings were made immortal, and the aching vacuity, which haunts every soul that is parted from God, were cursed with immortality. It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the fuller ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... with any one virtue in particular, except that very considerable one of charitably letting all do as they please. It is much, however, that these tears, if not very burning, were really honest. Society, though not believing very deeply in the supernatural, was not cursed with an arid, parching, and hardened scepticism about the genuineness of good emotions in a man, and so long as people keep this baleful poison out of their hearts, their lives remain ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... helpless babies. What he thought he saw was the owl engaged in turning one of those same babies into nourishing infant owls' food, or "words to that effect." And the hedgehog, like most of the order Insectivora, is cursed with the temper of Eblis, too. Naturally, therefore, things happened, and happened the more hectically, perhaps, because Mrs. Hedgehog chanced at that moment to be away—attending to the last rites—shall we say?—over the form ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... violent and maddening as it was unreal and transient. But that delusive passion has subsided, and among the unmerited mercies for which I have to be thankful is that, in my frantic pursuit of Clara Day, I was not cursed with success! For all the violence into which that frenzy hurried me I have deeply repented. I can never forgive ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... are included in this order. First, there are the Ostriches, which are the envy of all people cursed with weak digestive powers; then there is the Dodo, with its mysterious and half-told history; also the Bustards, the Coursers, the Plovers, the Cranes, the Storks, the Sandpipers, the Snipes, &c. These varieties of wading birds are carefully classed, and represented in the compartment of ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... are told, for a good digestion: let us add to the prayer — and a bad memory. Truly we are sometimes tempted to think that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our friends, we can swear, have all, without exception, atrocious memories; why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation must be imaginary; for even as we engage in this selfish moan for help in our own petty case, we are moved ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... fierceness of their contempt, what we asked for. We are the slave ants of the nest, the work-bees of the hive, come, in truth, of those here who still be men and women of a sort, but toilers only; unknown in love, unregretted in death—those who dangle all children but their own—slaves cursed with the accomplishment of their ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... dearer land to our hearts is too to be regenerated. A wretched class, cursed with ineffectual freedom, is to be made free indeed, and an outlet is to be opened to those who will voluntarily disencumber themselves of the evil and the threatening ruin of another domestic pestilence. Public opinion must ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... the garb of flesh, and being heirs Of all the dulness of their stolid sires, And all the erring instincts of their tribe, Nature's own teaching, rudiments of "sin," Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay And cursed with sense enough ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... thickness of skin of that wonderful little wind-bag —. The way that second rate amateur poses as a man of science, having authority as a sort of papistical Scotch dominie, bred a minister, but stickit, really "rouses my corruption." What a good phrase that is. I am cursed with a lot of it, and any fool can ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... with fatigue, I yet could feel thankful that it was not accompanied by fever, which it seemed a miracle to avoid; for if ever a district was cursed with the ague, the Makata wilderness ranks foremost of those afflicted. Surely the sight of the dripping woods enveloped in opaque mist, of the inundated country with lengthy swathes of tiger-grass laid low by the turbid ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... a little catch of her breath, "is there no such thing as oblivion? Is there a place in the world that is not haunted? I am cursed with memory." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... conditions, be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard and fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water supply; ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... women, and children, not cursed with the fatuity that would become a vice-president of the Phrenological Society, must by this time be about heartsick of what are called Novels of Fashionable Life. Only two men of any pretensions to superiority of talent have had part in the uproarious manufacture ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... her good, robust nerves; such things, she well knew, being perilous to those cursed with delicacy of that sort. The best endeavors, the best intentions, would be without avail in such cases, such sufferers would find their powers of endurance destroyed by these successive acts of violence, till it would be impossible to meet them tolerably. Again she looked at Mrs. Melwyn, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... to the bar they leap; And then when the long flotilla goes, and the last of their pay is done, The boys from the banks of Lac Labiche swing to the heavy sweep. And oh, how they sigh! and their throats are dry, and sorry are they and sick: Yet there's none so cursed with a lime-kiln ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... cursed with an atrocious goat-stench from armpits, or if limping gout did justly gnaw one, 'tis thy rival, who occupies himself with your love, and who has stumbled by the marvel of fate on both these ills. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... have greater natural intelligence than the Irish. No people have been so unfortunately cursed with organizations which led them to abnegate personal thought, and Ireland is an intellectual desert where people read nothing and think nothing; where not fifty in a hundred thousand could discern the quality of thought in the Politics of Aristotle or the Republic of Plato ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... Were the vulture and the owl; The water was as dark and rank As ever a Company pumped, And the perch that was netted and laid on the bank Grew rotten while it jumped; And bold was he who thither came At midnight, man or boy, For the place was cursed with an evil name, And that name was "The ...
— English Satires • Various
... is an unseen world. Do I not see it? Am I not cursed with the seeing of it all the time? Call it a thought, an idea, anything you will, still it is there. It is unescapable. Thoughts are entities. We create with every act of thinking. I have created this phantom that sits in my chair and uses my ink. Because I have created him ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... investigating spirit under the featherbed of respected and respectable tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build on a secure foundation, or cursed with the spirit of mere scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... a human being to pass a stormier night than was that night of his. Alternations between hope and despair—fantastic pictures of future with and without her, wild pleadings with her—those delirious transports to which our imaginations give way if we happen to be blessed and cursed with imaginations—in the security of the darkness and aloneness of night and bed. And through it all he was tormented body and soul by her loveliness—her hair, her skin, her eyes, the shy, slender graces of her form—He tossed about until ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... opulent, With virile manhood, and emotions keen, And wonderful with God's creative fire. At noon he stands, with Love's large fortune spent In petty traffic, unproductive, mean - A pauper, cursed with impotent desire. ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... like to have them linger in the corridors and hear the moans from the wards and private rooms where the maimed and the crippled and the incurable are faintly struggling in the grasp of death. I would like to lead them through the children's ward, where mites of humanity cursed with heredity's blight, removed from a mother's bosom, consigned to suffering throughout the span of their feeble days, lie faintly breathing their lives away. And then would like to say to them: "You contemptible cowards, you ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... One must have been cursed with a sluggish, half-dead body and a torpid soul, had he not responded to the influences under which our gay party spent the next few hours. Innumerable snow-flakes had carried down from the air every particle of impurity, and left it sweet and wholesome enough ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... I am cursed with an inability to speak when I am most deeply moved, either by anger or tenderness. This misfortune has wrecked my life. On the verge of old age, the sorrows and the mistakes of my early life fill my thoughts so completely that I ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... and interpreted entirely in the young man's favour. And it was thus and in that moment that was sown the generous seed of the friendship that was to spring up between these two men, its roots fertilized by Sir John's pity that one so gentle-natured, so honest, and so upright should be cursed with so villainous ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... untouched by the desire which one finds in the Englishman, in proportion as he rises in the world, to approximate to the figure of the gentleman. On the other hand, a nettete, a faculty of exposition, such as the English gentleman is rarely either blessed or cursed with. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... medals, tokens, prizes and emblems, with the picture of every conspicuous church worker and leader of her denomination. Between times the girl studied the early history of her church, read the religious papers and in other ways fitted herself for her life work. Poor Charity! She was so cursed with a holy ambition, that to her men were not men, they simply ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... he replied, while another shudder ran along his nerves; "but why should I fear it? I, who have become worthless to myself and annoying to my friends; exquisitely sensible of my true condition, yet wanting the power to change it; cursed with a lively apprehension of all that I ought now to be, yet totally incapable of even making an effort to be so! My dear sir, I feel deeply the kindness of your motives, but it is too late for me to hope ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... they built the fires. And then those Portuguese starving to death, slowly starving to death while thousands of savages watched them die. Have you ever thought what it means? But of course you have, for like myself you are cursed with imagination. God in heaven! is it wonderful that it gets upon the nerves? especially when one cannot find what one is looking for, that vast treasure"—and his face became ecstatic—"that shall yet be yours and mine, and make us ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... I have suffered and am suffering now. Oh, Phillip! Phillip! why is your image ever before me! Why do you approach me with your grave but kind face and hold out your hand in tenderest sympathy! Oh, my heart, it is maddening! Why was I born to such feeling! Why was I cursed with the susceptibilities of a warm and loving heart! Why were not these sympathetic chords torn rudely asunder ere they could vibrate with such anguish! Why did not my heart turn into stone ere it took root in such deadly bitter soil! Ah well, ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... miles up the Amazon as far as Tabatinga in Peru, and smaller steamers up the Orinoco to the spurs of the Andes, was known in its main features to explorers fifty years after its discovery. Africa, historically the oldest of continents, but cursed with a mesa form which converts nearly every river into a plunging torrent on its approach to the sea, kept its vast interior till the last century wrapped in utmost gloom. China, amply supplied with smaller littoral indentations but characterized ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... he had conceived an admiration in a part which would have taxed the resources of the ablest. I was engaged in her support, and at the first rehearsal I recollect saying to my dear old friend, Arthur Moseby—dead, alas, these many years. An excellent juvenile, but, like so many good fellows, cursed with a tendency to lift the elbow—I recollect saying to him 'Arthur, dear boy, I give it two weeks.' 'Max,' was his reply, 'you are an incurable optimist. One consecutive night, laddie, one consecutive night.' We had, I recall, an ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... traditional veal,—but all undaunted. He never tried it again, yet people say he has thrown away all his chances of a thrifty living by perpetual wandering in the woods with gun and fishing-rod, and that he is cursed with a deplorable indifference to the state of his fences and potato-patch. No one could call him an admirable citizen, but I am not sure that he has chosen the worser part; for who is so jovial and sympathetic ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... In appearance he was particularly ugly in face and clumsy in build. Against that, he was tall and unusually powerful whenever he chose to exert his strength. In mind he was reputed slow and almost stupid, although he was a good classical scholar and possessed a good memory. He was cursed with a bad and sometimes ungovernable temper. He was honest and courageous. He rarely knew how to do the right thing at the right time or in the right place. And finally he had a bad name, and believed himself to be a homicide. Such was the commonplace ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... meditation remained pleasant. At last she realized suddenly that she was not going to feel wicked. She was surprised and even a trifle horror-stricken by her insensibility. Then, fairly faced by it, she came to the conclusion that, in a woman cursed with such a brute of a husband, such insensibility was not only natural, it ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... "Cinnamon and sugar"—he cursed with a great oath; and turning gave Nettie a violent push from him, that was half a blow. "Go home!" he repeated—"go home! and mind your business; and don't take it ...
— The Carpenter's Daughter • Anna Bartlett Warner
... with the strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions?—how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them, But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... it—and know what you have to fight against. To be a Malincourt is at once to have a curse and a blessing hung round your neck. The Malincourts were originally of French extraction—descendants of the haute noblesse of old France—cursed with the devil's own pride and passionate self-will, and blessed with looks and brains and charm above the average. They never bend; they break sooner. And I think you've got the lot, ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... so." He said that his declarations as to the right of the negro to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were designed only to refer to legislation "about any new country which is not already cursed with the actual presence of the evil,—slavery." He denied having ever "manifested any impatience with the necessities that spring from the ... actual existence of slavery among us, where it does ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Menton the Riviera is cursed with electric tram lines. We were led beyond Cannes to the Corniche de l'Esterel by the absence of a tram line. We could not get away from the railway, however, without abandoning the coast. Is there any place desirable for living purposes in which the ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... know how I would have our friends treat us who are cursed with bad tempers. I think to avoid unnecessary provocation, and to be patient with us in the height of our passion, is wise as well as kind. But no principle should be conceded to us, and rights that we have unjustly attacked ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... brought one of our Missionary Secretaries, the eloquent Reverend Lachlin Taylor, DD. The trip down had not been one of the most pleasant. The rains had drenched him, and the mosquitoes had plagued him with such persistency, that he loudly bemoaned his lot in being found in a country that was cursed with such abominable animals. ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... any party would consider desirable in a leader. Whatever office-seekers, partisans, traitors, and public enemies may find in Mr. Johnson, it is certain that they find in him nothing to respect. He is cursed with that form of moral disease which sometimes renders a man ridiculous, sometimes infamous, but which never renders him respectable,—namely, vanity of will. Other men may be vain of their talents and accomplishments, but he is vain of the personal pronoun itself, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... himself that he had known adversity in his time, but in the months succeeding his dismissal from the hospital he qualified for a post-graduate course in privation. He was cursed with the curse of the age; it was an age of specialties, and he had none. His only one, the knowledge of the track, had been buried in him, and nothing ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... with you, knowing only too well from my own dread experience that the world which men agree to call that of the supernatural is just as real as—nay, perhaps, even far more real than—this world we see about us. In other words, I, like many of my countrymen, am cursed with the gift of second-sight—that awful faculty which foretells in vision calamities that are ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... director of many Boards, took a pheasant-shooting in the neighbourhood of Hawk's Hall, and with it a house. Here he lived more or less during the winter months, going up to town when necessary, to attend his Boards. Lord Lynfield was cursed with several extravagant sons, with whom John Blake, who was a good shot, soon became friendly. Also he made himself useful by lending one of them a considerable sum of money. When this came to Lord Lynfield's ears, as Honest John ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... first time given an official sanction, and the public edifices of Rome were by no means the sole beneficiaries of this new interpretation of the rights of war. Much of the valuable plunder had found its way into private houses,[51] to stimulate the envious cupidity of many a future governor who, cursed with the taste of a collector and unblessed by the opportunity of a war, would make subtle raids on the artistic treasures of his province a secret article of his administration. When the ruling classes of a nation have been familiarised ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... and worn-out poetry. We could write against the whole 'connu, connu,' and at the end a 'deliver us'—from evil it might be, certainly from no great temptation. Let the world believe it—it will some day—English thought is at present exhausted, stagnant, and imitative. It is cursed with mannerism, even as the Chinese are cursed, and every honest man of mind knows it. In such a state of national art it is cheerful to open a volume like these poems, in which one hears, as it were, the first lark-notes of an early dawn and sees ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... speak of it. I only did for you what you would have done for me. I have been very unlucky; I was cursed with a husband who was a fool, and who lost all his money—no one can say he's in his right mind. They say that I have driven him out of his mind, but that is not so, you know that it is not so; I've ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... resting-place of one who slept below; and if any thing were wanting to add to the melancholy of the scene, it would have been the stunted and withering leaves thus mournfully enshrouding the silent dead. There is something so unnatural in the conjunction of a scanty vegetation with a soil cursed with hopeless aridity, that the gardens and few green spots, occurring in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, detract from, instead of embellishing, the scene. Though pleasant and beautiful as retreats to those who can command an entrance, these circumscribed patches of verdure offend ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... be the wish only of the young or the ignorant; to every one else, a perpetual vigil will appear to be a state of wretchedness, second only to that of the miserable beings, whom Swift has in his travels so elegantly described, as "supremely cursed with immortality." ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... lost all zest for the intoxicating wine of public favor. A profound gloom stole over him, and we even hear of hints at an attempt to commit suicide. Adam Liszt attributed it to the sad English climate, which Hein-rich Heine cursed with such unlimited bitterness, and took his boy back again to sunnier France. But the dejection darkened and deepened, threatening even to pass into epilepsy. It assumed the form of religious enthusiasm, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris |
