"Desperate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very desperate straits indeed, and some of us seemed tempted to give ourselves over to despair. If it had not been for the steadiness of those that were under Lancelot, I feel sure that the most part of the sailors would ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... majority rule in government cannot fairly be demanded from a disfranchised group. It is not to be wondered at that the old slogan of socialism, "Strike at the ballot-box!"—the call to lift the struggle of the classes to the parliamentary level for peaceful settlement—becomes the desperate, anarchistic I.W.W. slogan, "Strike at the ballot-box with an ax!" Men who can have no family life cannot justly be expected to bother about school administration. Men who can have no home life but only dreary shelter in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... farther expenditure would plunge me into bottomless insolvency. I must confess that this disclosure of my financial condition added zest to the undertaking, and filled me with that fine excitement which accompanies a desperate speculation. I have always felt that another cow would have made a financier of me, and that I could have taken my place among my brethren in Wall Street without a tremor of the muscles or the ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... recognised that the unfortunate old fellow's evils had been in great part of his own creating. He knew that he was far from faultless. That poaching business—a very venial offence in a labourer's eyes—he knew had been a serious one, a matter of some two-score pheasants and a desperate fight with a gang. Looking at it as property, the squire had been merciful, pleading with the magistrates for a mitigated penalty. The drunkenness was habitual. In short, they were a bad lot—there was a name attached to the whole family for thieving, poaching, drinking, ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation; large scale migration of Zimbabweans to surrounding countries - as they flee a progressively more desperate situation at home - has increased; rural Zimbabwean men, women, and children are trafficked internally to farms for agricultural labor and domestic servitude and to cities for domestic labor and commercial sexual exploitation; young men and boys are trafficked to South Africa ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... maxim of that excellent divine," said he, "that Christian censure should never be used to make a sinner desperate; for then he either sinks under the burden or grows impudent and tramples upon it. A charitable modest remedy, says he, preserves that which is virtue's girdle-fear and blushing. Honour, dear lad, is the peculiar counsellor of well-bred natures, and these are few; but almost in ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... the picture of the fallen desperate man. He takes great trouble to persuade Saint Lambert that though the rigour of his principles constrains him to frown upon such breaches of social law as the relations between Madame d'Houdetot and her lover, yet he is so ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... a desperate effort he threw her into the next room. She fell onto the table which was laid for dinner, breaking the glasses, and then, getting up, she put it between her master and herself, and while he was ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... approaches the menopausal stresses with anxiety and apprehension, having done her duty to family and race, often having lived an exemplary self-sacrificing life, the intolerable contemplation of a late pregnancy drives her to desperate measures often for the first time in ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... being swept off into sin if one gives way, which one never suspected till then; and yet with all these, the most dreadful sense of helplessness, of slavery, of despair?—God grant that may not remain, for then comes the mad hope to escape death by death, to try by one desperate stroke to rid oneself of that self which is for the time one's torment, worm, fire, death, and hell. And what is this dark fight within us? What does the Bible call it? It is death and life, eternal death and eternal life, salvation and damnation, hell and heaven, fighting together ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... striking are that "To my Hairdresser," and the irresistibly comic satire on modern ordnance, in which during a naval battle, after all the fighting has been done by ramming, "the last stern order of the brave" is whispered through the ship: "We're going to fire the guns!!" This desperate course is taken and described—the air grows thick and dark with broken breech, flying tube, and disrupted armour-plate, and when ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Volscians was imminent, and the State was torn with internal dissensions; the patricians and the plebeians were bitterly hostile to one another, owing mainly to the desperate condition of the debtors. They loudly complained that whilst fighting in the field for liberty and empire they were oppressed and enslaved by their fellow-citizens at home; their freedom was more ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... it was with his brother towards him; but his works being evil, they minister to him no heavenly joy, neither do they beget in him love to his brother; but contrariwise, his heart fill his eye with evil also; which again provoketh (while it beholdeth the godly carriage of Abel) the heart to more desperate resolutions, even to set upon him with all his might, and to cut him off from the earth. Thus the goodness of God's people provoketh to envy the wicked heart of the hypocrite. As it was betwixt Saul and David; for after ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... news was brought to her of such a chance (the intelligence was given to her by old Lady Rockminster, whose speeches were as direct and rapid as a slap on the face), the humbled girl winced a little at the blow, but bore it meekly, and with a desperate acquiescence. "He has a right to marry, he knows a great deal more of the world than I do," she argued with herself. "Blanche may not be so light-minded as she seemed, and who am I to be her judge? I daresay it is very good that Arthur should go into Parliament ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... As erst, or whether wand'ring and defect Of nourishment have worn it all away. He said, whom they with indignation heard Extreme, alarm'd lest he should bend the bow, And sternly thus Antinoues replied. 340 Desperate vagabond! ah wretch deprived Of reason utterly! art not content? Esteem'st it not distinction proud enough To feast with us the nobles of the land? None robs thee of thy share, thou witnessest Our whole discourse, which, save thyself alone, No needy vagrant is allow'd to hear. ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... well as I do that that doesn't make a particle of difference. If I had been a boy instead of a girl, and had bucked the world for a living, I'd probably have done worse; and, anyway, it doesn't matter!" Her voice rose as if she were growing desperate. "I—I—like you—to pieces, Ward, and I'd—I'd rather marry you—than anyone else. But I don't want to think about that for a long while. I don't want to be engaged, or—or any different than the way we've been. It was good to be just pals. It was like my pretend Ward. I—I always ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... in basket-ball, Jane soon found herself fighting hard to win a position on the freshman team. She also found herself engaged in a desperate struggle to rule her own rebellious spirit. How she won the right to play in the deciding game of the year, because of her high resolve to be true to herself, has already been recorded in her doings as a ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... plentiful fortune, and a gentleman of good reputation, fitted out a sloop and went a-pirating, for which he was hanged, together with twenty-two of his crew, in November, 1718. Even women, like Anne Bonny and Mary Read, turned pirates and handled sword and pistol. Desperate, reckless, and lawless, they were filled with the spirit of adventure, and were the forerunners of the men that Hawke, Nelson, and Dundonald ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... of the case. In OTHELLO we have indeed a very strictly dramatic array of the forces of wrong—weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; but there is already a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of evil; and in LEAR the conception is worked out with a desperate insistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and prudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a note of gloom as is ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... have instincts to which the east wind appeals strongly. It excites their neuralgic energies. On the other hand, it was a curious circumstance, discovered afterward by an exchange of confidence between the desperate male victims, that this cleaning rage was carried on almost exclusively by the members of the Women's Co-Citizens' League in each of the voting ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... letters? Not Anno Domini, but many years B.C. The African deserves no pity. His hideous crime was enough to drive a father to any madness, and too many such monsters have by their acts made Texas justly desperate. But for American citizens to crowd to the retribution, and look on as at a holiday show, reveals the Inquisition, the Pagans, the Stone Age, unreclaimed in our republic. On the other hand, the young men and women who will watch side by side the burning of a negro shrink from using such words ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... of Barere was the loudest in opposition to their prayer. When the crimes of Lebon, one of the worst, if not the very worst, of the vicegerents of the Committee of Public Safety, had so maddened the people of the Department of the North that they resorted to the desperate expedient of imploring the protection of the Convention, Barere pleaded the cause of the accused tyrant, and threatened the petitioners with the utmost vengeance of the government. "These charges," he said, "have been suggested by wily aristocrats. The man who crushes the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little episode was being performed up stairs, an open carriage, showily caparisoned and drawn by a stylish pair of well-groomed bays, drew up at the door. A desperate effort had evidently been made to get the coachman into some sort of livery, for he wore a tall black hat, with a broad velvet band, and a buckle in front as big as an ordinary sized horse shoe. His coat, too, was ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... every creatur' in their camp, the night we first landed with that capital object! Had you not held back, Deerslayer, it might have been done, and then you wouldn't have found yourself, at the last moment, in the desperate condition you mention." ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... man sneered, and read forward. It was of that desperate fight; - The Muscovite stole thro' the mist-wreaths that wrapped the chill Inkermann height, Where stood our silent outposts: old England was in them that day! O sharp worked his ruddy wrinkles, as if to the breath of the fray They ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... doomed from the outset. But he made a desperate struggle, and his opponents were driven to sore straits to bolster up their case. The devils persisted in speaking bad Latin, and continually failed to meet tests which they themselves had suggested. Sometimes their failures were only too plainly ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... I. "Supposing a gang of men—men of no conscience, desperate, adventurous men—gets together, as men were together on that ship, the doings and fate of which seem to be pretty mysterious. They're all out for what they can get. One of them is in possession of a valuable secret, and he imparts ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... sick in body and soul, but learning the long patience, to confront his eternal enemy, Cheese- Face, who was just as sick as he, and just a bit willing to quit if it were not for the gang of newsboys that looked on and made pride painful and necessary. One afternoon, after twenty minutes of desperate efforts to annihilate each other according to set rules that did not permit kicking, striking below the belt, nor hitting when one was down, Cheese- Face, panting for breath and reeling, offered to call it quits. And Martin, head on arms, thrilled at the picture he caught ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... he said humbly, "but I ate the others before I knew you were coming. They are good, aren't they? Does your mother ever bake sugar cakes?" he ended in a desperate attempt ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... that they can enjoy the active elements in it with almost undivided delight. Such an accomplishment is far more difficult in the case of sorrow.... The creation of pain-sensations may be explained as a desperate device for enhancing the intensity of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... slave, 'whatever the slave is, there is no king on earth who can tyrannise over her will. But when this very slave is in nothing inferior to the king that bought her, your majesty shall then judge yourself of her misery, and her sorrow, and to what desperate attempts the anguish of ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... driver, but this is a pure fallacy, for a sled-dog's gallop is like a donkey's, short and sweet. The average gait is a shuffling trot, covering from five to seven miles an hour over easy ground; and even then desperate fights frequently necessitate a stoppage and readjustment of the traces. There are no reins, the dogs being fastened two abreast on either side of a long rope. To start off you seize the sled with both hands, give it a violent wrench to one side, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... their sockets and gleaming with a lurid light, as if fire was burning within them. His teeth were firmly set—his lips white and tightly drawn, as if he was meditating, or had already made, some desperate resolve. He scarce looked at the tracks, he needed their guidance no longer. He ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... of love and the salt sea—of a helpless ship whirled into the hands of cannibal Fuegians—of desperate fighting and tender romance, enhanced by the art of a master of story telling who describes with his wonted felicity and power of holding the reader's attention * * * filled with the swing ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... apprehension. Mears, a constable, in company with his brother, proceeded to Culver's house, when, on application being made for the men alluded to, Sir William immediately shot the young man who accompanied his brother in the execution of his duty. Such was the excitement, and the desperate menaces of Sir William and his party, that it became necessary for the magistrates to interfere to put a stop to the proceedings, by the capture of the ringleader of the party, from whose advice to his followers the most serious consequences were likely ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... the boy meditated leaping upon the warrior, in the desperate attempt to wrench his gun from his grasp; but the mother, ...
— The Daughter of the Chieftain - The Story of an Indian Girl • Edward S. Ellis
... immediately repaired in great numbers to the spot, to prevent the ingress of the enemy; while, on the other hand, a strong detachment of troops rushed forward from the camp of Polysperchon to force their way through the breach into the city. A very desperate conflict ensued, and while the men of the city were thus engaged in keeping back the invaders, the women and children were employed in throwing up a line of intrenchments further within, to cover the opening which had been ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... that Philip effected his escape from Pocasset his fortunes were in a desperate condition. His forces had been thinned by repeated fights and he had lost almost the whole of his resources. In this time of adversity he found a faithful friend in Canonchet, chief Sachem of all the Narragansetts. He was the son ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... tried. The man on the floor, working with desperate energy to replace the base-board, coughed in an asthmatic, wheezing way, as there came the imperative smashing of a fist upon the door panels, coupled with a gruff, curt demand for admittance. Again the man coughed—to drown perhaps the slight rasping sound as the base-board slid back into place—and, ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... better than in any other way. But of course he couldn't do that. Instead, he muttered that the damage didn't amount to much after all, and he hoped she wouldn't mind what he said, and then he got himself away and strode through the orchard like a man in a desperate hurry. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Calais was in that age deemed an impregnable fortress; and as it was known to be the favorite of the English nation, by whom it could easily be succored, the recovery of that place by France was considered as totally desperate. But Coligny had remarked, that as the town of Calais was surrounded with marshes, which during the winter were impassable, except over a dike guarded by two castles, St. Agatha and Newnam Bridge, the English ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... as he urged them on singly to the French, who on that day had resolved to offer their lives as an immolation to their mother-country. Eude on that day, ardent to clear himself from the odium which he had incurred, with desperate valour, taking a wide compass, attacked his new allies in the rear. The camp of the Mahometan was forced: the shrieks of his women and children reached him from amidst the massacre; terrified he saw his multitude shaken. Charles, who beheld ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... beaten at Hochstett, Villeroy at Ramilies, and Villars himself, the hero of Friedlingen, had lost the famous battle of Malplaquet against Marlborough and Eugene. Europe, kept down for a time by Colbert and Louvois, rose against France, and the situation of affairs was desperate. ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... party measures, which led her sometimes further than she wanted to go, Eleanor kept a very steady way, as graceful as it was steady. So friendly and frank as to give no cause of umbrage; while it was so cool and self-poised as to make Mr. Carlisle very uneasy and very desperate. It was just the manner he admired in a woman; just what he would like to see in his wife, towards all the rest of the world. Eleanor charmed him more by her high-bred distance, than ever she had done by the affection or submissiveness ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... misgivings to himself, and seemed the most indifferent of gay Cavaliers, he had really been a modest and diffident man. From the first he had had grave fears of the success of his cause, and more than doubts about the loyalty of his comrades. He was quite prepared not only for desperate effort, but for final defeat. No man could say he had embarked on the royal service from worldly ends, and now, if he had been a shrewd Lowland Scot, he had surely consulted his safety and changed his side, as most of his friends ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... arrest of a notorious young desperado who hails to the name of Deadwood Dick! Ha! ha! ha! isn't that rich, now? Ha! ha! ha! arrest Deadwood Dick! Why, 'pon my word it is a sight for sore eyes. I was not aware that I had attained such a desperate notoriety as that document implies. They will make me out a murderer before they get through, I expect. Can't let me alone—everlastingly they must be punching after me, as if I was some obnoxious pestilence ...
— Deadwood Dick, The Prince of the Road - or, The Black Rider of the Black Hills • Edward L. Wheeler
... have confessed behind prison bars that when they were children they were called cowards. After a while they actually came to believe that they were cowards, and in their efforts to acquire courage and demonstrate their bravery they were led to desperate and even criminal acts. They prowled around the dark alleys just to convince themselves that they were not afraid, that they were not cowards, and there they made the acquaintance of the criminals who led them into new and dangerous paths. Even if a child enters ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... desperate and colouring, which he was very unapt to do. "If you please, Mr. Richmond, I was sent to speak to—I forget what her name is—the ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... mines. And this indeed was the case, for in the first tide of the rush of gold seekers Clark had discerned the workings of an ancient rule. Always it had been gold which inflamed the human mind to endure to the uttermost. His imagination went back, and he saw the desperate influx heading for California, for Australia, for South Africa, that mob of adventurous spirits for whom there burned nightly over the hills the lambent promise of the morrow, strengthening and invigorating to further effort. He ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... and the rain beating in sharp, stinging drops like hailstones upon my face and hands. It must have been close upon midnight, and there was no light but the dim, glow-worm glimmer of the lanterns on deck. Every one was hurrying past me. I began almost to repent of the desperate step I had taken; but I had learned already that there is no possibility of retracing one's steps. At the gangways of the two vessels there were men shouting hoarsely. "This way for the Channel Islands!" "This way for Havre and Paris!" To which boat should I trust myself and my fate? ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... from which this decline of health might be supposed to proceed, to wit, his hopeless love for Miss Walton—for, according to the conceptions of the world, the love of a man of Harley's modest fortune for the heiress of L4,000 a year is indeed desperate. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... running out after "specials" we are absorbed in the mimic fight of Acacia Avenue—the desperate conflict between Mrs. Studholm-Brown, of The Hollies, and Mrs. Dawburn-Jones, of Dulce Domum. They have husbands, these amiable ladies, but the husbands are mainly concerned with the commissariat and supply department, and are neither ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... and shrinking with a shuddering instinctive fear. Then suddenly the thunders seemed to stifle all memory of sound—and left only the silent universe with myself and this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean, or a thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right out in the middle of a desert, ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... very hard, sir. But admitting this, will I not turn everything into money, in a situation so desperate? Only as it is impossible for me to procure between this and to-morrow one hundred thousand francs, I conjure you, employ this money to withdraw this unhappy draught. Or you, who are so rich, make me an advance; do not leave me in ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... during the last year of my residence at Craven Hill. I had no masters, and my aunt Dall could ill supply the want of other teachers; moreover, I was extremely troublesome and unmanageable, and had become a tragically desperate young person, as my determination to poison my sister, in revenge for some punishment which I conceived had been unjustly inflicted upon me, will sufficiently prove. I had been warned not to eat privet berries, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... friend of mine (John Abdullah Capricorn, to give him his full name) was commandeered by a publisher last year to write a book for 10. The work was far advanced when an editor offered him 15 and his expenses to visit the more desperate parts of the Sahara Desert, to which spots he at once proceeded upon a roving commission. Whether he will return or no is now doubtful, though in March we had the best hopes. With the month of May life becomes hard for Europeans south of the Atlas, and when my poor dear friend ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... that grow in the orchards in Winesburg." Now, broken and adrift, they clutch at some rigid notion or idea, a "truth" which turns out to bear the stamp of monomania, leaving them helplessly sputtering, desperate to speak out but unable to. Winesburg, Ohio registers the losses inescapable to life, and it does so with a deep fraternal sadness, a sympathy casting a mild glow over the entire book. "Words," as the American writer Paula Fox has said, "are nets through which all truth escapes." ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... I was getting a little desperate, and against Tchagan Hou's advice I decided to try bullying the weather, and when the rain came on again I refused to stop. As a result we were all soaked through, and after getting nearly bogged, all hands of us in a quagmire, I gave it up and we camped on the drenched ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... Desperate now, the lad placed her on the floor, and, thrusting his head from the window, perceived that he could clamber up the two or three feet of rain spout that ran close by, and gain a position on the roof just overhead. If he ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... he sat behind the bars, where the desperate legions drew, But he caught the hasting Tomlinson and would ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... up family prayers in my house, went to meetings, and conversed with experienced members of the church; but, for nine months or more, all to no purpose. At length I got into an awful state, beginning to think that I had been so desperate a sinner that there was no forgiveness for me. While I was in this miserable condition, I heard of a camp-meeting about to be held on Cape May, and I immediately resolved to attend it, and to leave no stone unturned to accomplish the object which I had so much at heart. I went accordingly, ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... The country was hilly, and more suited for sheep-farming than for corn. Water- privileges were abundant in the shape of picturesque torrents, and numerous mills turned their capabilities to profitable account. Our companions were rather of a low description, many of them Germans, and desperate tobacco-chewers. The whole floor of the car was covered with streams of tobacco-juice, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... character-revealing episodes that are only real when handled by a supreme artist. Its involutions and undulations, its very recoil on itself as the pair face their memories, he haunted, she suspicious, touch the springs of desperate lives. As an etching of a vicious soul, the Eliza of Chance is arresting. We do not learn her last name, but we remember her brutal attack on little Flora, an attack that warped the poor child's nature. Whether the end of the book is justified is apart from my present ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... me, Abdul," I exclaimed, "surely this situation is desperate? What can your nation subsist on ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... panic, no matter what happened. He bowed his face to hers, so that he felt the velvety smoothness of her cheek. She turned her mouth to him, and they kissed. His embrace was crushing for a moment, fierce with his love for her, desperate with his determination to ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... did not show the least excitement after his desperate contest. He had attended to it as a matter of business, and when over he suffered it to pass out of his mind. He took out his watch and ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... created a marquess. The English earldom of Brecknock was added in 1660 and an Irish dukedom of Ormonde in the following year. In 1682 he had a patent for an English dukedom with the same title. Buckingham's intrigues deprived him for seven years of his lord-lieutenancy, and a desperate attempt was made upon his life in 1670, when a company of ruffians dragged him from his coach in St James's Street and sought to hurry him to the gallows at Tyburn. His son's threat that, if harm befell his father he would ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... had first wounded. Ned, watching his chance, got in several blows, first at one and then at the other of the huge creatures. The third devil fish, which had not been wounded, had disappeared. Finally Koku, with a desperate blow, succeeded in severing the tail from the beast attacking him, and that battle ...
— Tom Swift and his Undersea Search - or, The Treasure on the Floor of the Atlantic • Victor Appleton
... Cressida part as a play, and then years afterward added the Hector part, and again years afterward the Ajax and Ulysses part, seems to me only a monstrous contrivance of an honest and an able man in desperate straits to make his theory square with fact. As to detail upon this subject, I shall only notice one point. Tag-rhymes, or rhymed couplets ending a scene or a speech in blank verse or in prose, are regarded by the metre-critics (and justly ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... suddenly vanished from the thoroughfares; and he found himself alone in places thoroughly unknown to him, waking to the displeasing recollection that the approaches to the city were said to be beset by brawlers and ruffians of desperate characters, whom the cessation of the civil wars had flung loose upon the skirts of society, to maintain themselves by deeds of rapine and plunder. As might naturally be expected, most of these had belonged to the defeated party, who had no claim to the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... point of indifference to the nation, but what must either render us totally desperate, or sooth us into the security of idiots. We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy, to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt. Men are in public as ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... at once adopted, and the committee chosen. Besides the chairman and Baldwin there were the vulture-faced secretary, Harraway, Tiger Cormac, the brutal young assassin, Carter, the treasurer, and the brothers Willaby, fearless and desperate men ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and even leading her sometimes when she was in a room she did not know. Dolores knew that she could only hope to exchange a word with him when he came back, and that the terrace was bleak and wet now, and the roses withered, and that her father feared for her, and might do some desperate thing if he found her lover talking with her where no one could see or hear. For old Mendoza knew the world and the court, and he foresaw that sooner or later some royal marriage would be made for Don John of Austria, and that even if Dolores ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... between two plates, and its fragrance filled the narrow cell. The penetrating smell of cabbage reached the nose of Toad as he lay prostrate in his misery on the floor, and gave him the idea for a moment that perhaps life was not such a blank and desperate thing as he had imagined. But still he wailed, and kicked with his legs, and refused to be comforted. So the wise girl retired for the time, but, of course, a good deal of the smell of hot cabbage remained behind, as it will do, and Toad, between his sobs, sniffed and reflected, ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... to the word of General Saterges, it was rascality which the General could pardon. He had gained many a victory in desperate strife,—now one other, the last and most complete: the kingdom's fairest star to shine among his honors! The proclamation of Stephen Cordier's pardon would instantly make broad the way to Chateau ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... me it seems of the utmost importance that not a moment should be lost in discovering what has become of the Inca, whose life may at this moment be in the utmost jeopardy; for those who were desperate enough to carry him off would probably not hesitate to kill him, if need were: indeed that may be their purpose. Your task, therefore, must be to rescue him without an instant's unnecessary delay, which you should be easily able to do with the aid of your troops. Probably if the officials ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... Though all to shivers dash't, the assault renew, Vain battry, and in froth or bubbles end: 20 So Satan, whom repulse upon repulse Met ever; and to shameful silence brought, Yet gives not o're though desperate of success, And his vain importunity pursues. He brought our Saviour to the western side Of that high mountain, whence he might behold Another plain, long but in bredth not wide; Wash'd by the Southern Sea, and on the North To equal ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... carried flowers over to St. Joseph's Hospital. But she could not pretend to herself that charities occupied her whole being.... No, the only way out was Matrimony. A marriage, suitable and successful, would start her career once more. With something like a desperate resolve Milly put her latch-key into the hole, and let herself into the paternal home, where a familiar family odor greeted her sensitive nostrils. With a grimace of disgust she swept upstairs. Decidedly it was time for her to settle ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... set. I was long in getting near her, and then she said her card was full; and when I made some desperate entreaty, she said, in an undertone that stabbed me by its very calmness, 'After what has passed to-day, the less we meet the better.' And she moved away, so as to cut me off ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... battle during the Crimean conflict followed, with an escort of Tartars and with carriage horses which at times seemed to fly over the ground. General de Kotzebue knew every foot of the soil and was, of course, a splendid host on such an occasion. On this first day the field of the desperate Alma fight was gone over carefully and on the succeeding morning the ruined ramparts and redoubts of the once great Fortress of Sebastopol—not as yet restored—were visited and studied. The Cemetery ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... suppose that such a catastrophe would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again ...
— Progress and History • Various
... I'm waiting. Why don't you shoot? You are greater cowards than I have ever been, with all my shiverings and teeth-chatterings. Isn't the stake big enough to warrant your last desperate play? I'll make it bigger. You are the two men who broke the rail-joint at Silver Switch. Ah, that ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... composition of the paper were generally approved, but the University had never before been taken by storm in such a manner, and there was some commotion about it. I believe that very few persons would have taken the same step. Mr Sheepshanks wrote to me on Mar. 7th, intimating that it was desperate. I had no doubt of success. Whewell told me that some people accused me of bad faith, in omitting allusion to the L100 a year received as Member of the Board of Longitude, and to the profits of Lectures. I wrote him a note, ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... danger of pity—in some cases a commendable and Christian virtue, but inapplicable to this pernicious sect. He observed that such was their devilish obstinacy in error that even the little children, the sucking babes, were hardened and desperate heretics. He affirmed that no man without Heaven's especial warrant should attempt their conversion lest while he lent his hand to draw them from the slough he should himself be precipitated ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Otto of Nordheim laid his hopes in the dust, and Henry, for the third time, invested the eternal city. Hitherto, the Romans, encouraged by the Pope, had made an heroic resistance, and the besiegers had suffered incredibly from their desperate sallies, as well as from the diseases that decimated them. But the fidelity of the citizens was beginning to totter beneath the protracted warfare, and many sighed for a period to their calamities. Henry failed not to profit by these dispositions, ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... she stripped the cover off the first of the books the half-back had picked out for her, and really went to work. She bit down, angrily, the yawns that blinded her eyes with tears; she made desperate efforts to flog her mind into grappling with the endless succession of meaningless pages spread out before her, to find a germ of meaning somewhere in it that would bring the dead verbiage to life. She tried to recall the thrill in Rodney's voice when he had told her, on ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... foreigners and against the religion of the foreigners. He feared that this rebellion was begun at their instigation, and would be carried on with their encouragement and help. He prepared therefore for a sharp and desperate struggle, which he was determined should be carried out to ...
— Japan • David Murray
... Madame du Barry. Annoyed by their remarks, Beaumont determined to go and reside at the Lazaristes, his house at Versailles, to avail himself of the King's last moments, and sacrifice Madame du Barry when the monarch's condition should become desperate. He arrived on the 3d of May, but did not see the King. Under existing circumstances, his object was to humble the enemies of his party and to support the favourite who had assisted to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... necessity of nature, into another sentiment of the same general character. This was the first instance in which I had witnessed a danger by fire. All was confusion around me, and all changed into hurricane within. The general situation, to my unpractised apprehension, appeared desperate, and I by contagion became alike desperate. At first I had been in some degree calm and collected, but that too was a desperate effort; and when it gave way, a kind of instant insanity ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... in particular places as reserve material for the making of milk. The qualities which are to appeal to the eye and ear and even nostrils of the male appear. Instincts dawn, an independence of spirit germinates, emulsified with a curious shyness and coyness and a desperate loneliness and secrecy. And all because there have been let loose in the blood from the glands of internal secretion the chemical substances that set going the clockwork of sequential incidents elaborated and repeated through countless aeons ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of it? How can I think of it? There be times yet when Bertrand, and Guy de Laval, and I, talking together of those days, feel our hearts swell, and the blood course wildly in our veins, and truly I do marvel sometimes how it was that we and others were held back from committing some desperate crime to revenge those horrid deeds, wrought by men who in blasphemous mockery called themselves the servants ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... least to the complete occupation of our gunboats and armies, and the suffering enemy is thus cut off from his communication with Texas, and from the only available resources on which he can securely rely to sustain him much longer in his wicked and desperate game of treason. His condition is in the last degree perilous; he seems to be in the very agony of dissolution, or at least in that stage which immediately precedes it. His extremities are already cold with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... peninsula, all these, however, being close at hand. I had for escort in my trips about the coast the famous Felix Martin, founder and Mayor of St. Raphael and of Valescure, a railway engineer who was known as the American of Provence, and who, in fact, is the most desperate and the most interesting and pleasant speculator of France. Speaking to me of Frejus, my favourite town, and its surroundings, Martin called it "the Roman Campagna on the Bay of Naples," a very pretty phrase, absolutely true of it, for the scenery ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... Suzanne, I had not believed ... Ah, you are more beautiful than ever ... No, I had not believed that the case was so desperate. ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... thickest darkness. Captain Ball, however, brought his vessel at length to Nelson's assistance, took his ship in tow, and used his best endeavours to bring her and his own vessel into Port Mahon. The difficulties and the dangers increased. Nelson considered the case of his own ship as desperate, and that unless she was immediately left to her own fate, both vessels would inevitably be lost. He, therefore, with the generosity natural to him, repeatedly requested Captain Ball to let him loose; and on Captain Ball's refusal, he became impetuous, ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... am a person, I can hold out no longer: I have wasted my spirits so to-day already that I am ready to sink under the fatigue; and I cannot but have some fears upon me yet, that my son Fainall will pursue some desperate course. ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... His emotions were too powerful to permit his utterance. Maddened by despair, into which the terrible situation of his cherished wife had plunged him, he paced the jail with long strides, gazing about him, as if to seek some desperate remedy for his woes. Escape had scarcely presented itself to his mind. He had not the energy of character which rises superior to every ill, and had bent himself supinely to the fate which awaited him. To work through ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... "Listen, Jack, unfortunate man! When I heard of the—the misfortune, and of your folly in remaining, I instantly planned a last meeting for you. As it fell out, my wife has a fancy to spend the night here: I have asked her to bring her sister with her. But this inconceivably desperate plan of leaving in your ship, in broad light of day, frustrates all I would have done for you. For God's sake let us contrive some way of warning the Peregrine off till midnight; keep hidden, yourself; do not wilfully run your head ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... distinctly; 'twas the youth's, Who sung a doleful song about green fields, How sweet it were on lake or wild savannah To hunt for food, and be a naked man, And wander up and down at liberty. He always doated on the youth, and now His love grew desperate; and defying death, He made that cunning entrance I described: ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... proceeded either from Miss Cordsen or Madeleine, for the windows of both rooms were open. If it were Madeleine, the plot had become so involved that she did not dare to think of it. If it were Miss Cordsen, it was bad enough, but still not so desperate. From the sound she guessed that it must be a glass of water, or something of that sort, and as soon as day began to dawn she got up and left her room in the hope of clearing up the mystery. Madeleine sat up as she heard Fanny ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... do something—anything—to prove his manhood. For nothing ever makes a boy resolve quite so suddenly and firmly to become a man instantly as to be treated by a girl as he had been by Ruth. Had the most desperate danger then come in David's way, he would have hailed and hazarded it with delight. But he could not think of anything to overwhelm her with just at that moment, and so he could only stride on in helpless, angry silence. Ruth flew after him as if her thin ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... Roman Empire, sufficiently numerous to make it politic, in the opinion of Infidels, for a candidate for the empire to profess Christianity; sufficiently powerful to secure his success, notwithstanding the desperate struggles of the heathen party; and sufficiently religious, or if you like superstitious, to make it politic for an emperor and his politicians to give up the senate, the court, the camp, the chase, and the theater, and weary themselves with long prayers, and longer speeches, of preachers about ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Carolina, entered the harbors of New York and New England, crossed Louisiana and northern Mexico to the Pacific, explored Mexico and Peru, marched across Georgia under the lead of the renowned Ferdinand de Soto, penetrated to the interior, and, after many romantic adventures and desperate hardships, discovered the magnificent river which we call the Mississippi; made perilous excursions into the wild depths of Arkansas and Missouri, and even to the remote banks of the ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... promiscuously, to our utter demonstrable ruin: the Dutch fighting otherwise, and we whenever we beat them. 2. We must not desert ships of our own in distress, as we did, for that makes a captain desperate, and he will fling away his ship when there are no hopes left him of succour. 3. That ships when they are a little shattered must not take the liberty to come in of themselves, but refit themselves the best they ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... grown three inches since he first gave it to me, but a man never sees anything and never suspects. If I had shown him a whole bush he would have thought it was the same. Well, it is a good night's work: the committee is safe. But this is a desperate game I am playing in these days —a wearing, sordid, heartless game. If I lose, I lose everything—even myself. And if I win the game, will it be worth its cost after all? I do not know. Sometimes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... to the purpose which I got out of Worcestershire. Two girls, daughter and niece of a farmer, bosom friends and bed-fellows, became involved in a love-affair and, desperate of a happy issue, attempted a charm to win their lovers back. On All Hallow Eve, two hours before the sun, they went into the garden, barefoot, in their nightgowns and circled about a stone which was believed to be bewitched.[13] ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... market they found that the wildmen upon whom they had banked as potential labor would not work. A few came and stayed, but most of them quit after earning a few pesos. So the hemp rotted in the field. Desperate, facing ruin, some of the planters went after labor too strongly, frightened and browbeat the Bogobos into working. The scheme worked, so a condition approximating peonage was developed upon several ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... with some difficulty, leaving his sword and one boot behind him. However, he at once pushed on, and placed himself at the head of the infantry engaged in the assault. But even his presence and example did not avail. The Russians maintained their position with desperate courage, and, when it became ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... easy," he observed, "to persuade desperate men that they've out-smarted themselves! Hold ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... at one time as many as 1200 people. Its passages were long and dark, and it abounded in rooms of all sizes and descriptions, in many of which were secure hiding places for men and stolen goods. The occupants were chiefly the most desperate characters in New York, and the "Old Brewery" was everywhere recognized as the headquarters of crime in the metropolis. The narrow thoroughfare extending around it was known as "Murderers' Alley" and "The Den of ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... her how the Canyon of the Colorado to the north, and the distance of the Mexican border to the south, made escape so almost desperate that the road agents preferred to devote their attentions to other routes. "If we were boarded, Miss Cullen," I said, "your jewelry would be as safe as it is in Chicago, for the robbers would only clean out the express- and mail-cars; but if they should so far forget their manners as to ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford |
