"Irrecoverable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... where her home was, were two little children. She worshipped them, and her husband she adored. Some hallucination, a tremor of the flesh, the flush of wine, and there, circled by a leering crowd, she crouched, her life disgraced, irrecoverable for evermore. ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... your heart," says Emerson ('Society and Solitude'), "that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.... Ah, poor dupe! will you never learn that as soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glories between To-day and us, these passing hours shall glitter, and draw us, as the wildest romance and the homes of beauty and poetry?" Horace would have hailed a brother in the ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... several types of curve for their sepulchral urns. The feature common to all of them is a niche, of door or window shape, with a powerfully indented architrave. Reminiscences of the design for the tomb of Julius are not infrequent; and it may be remarked, as throwing a side-light upon that irrecoverable project of his earlier manhood, that the figures posed upon the various spaces of architecture differ in their scale. Two belonging to this series are of especial interest, since we learn from them how he thought of introducing the rivers at the basement of the composition. It seems that he hesitated ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... After his past measures towards the Elector, Ferdinand believed that a sincere reconciliation was not to be hoped for. The violent course he had once begun, must be completed successfully, or recoil upon himself. What was already lost was irrecoverable; Frederick could never hope to regain his dominions; and a prince without territory and without subjects had little chance of retaining the electoral crown. Deeply as the Palatine had offended against the House of Austria, the services ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... who looked well and sang well, and the evening went off very happily. After the performance we were invited by Mr. Harris to a supper of some thirty persons, where we were the special guests. The manager toasted me, and I said something,—I trust appropriate; but just what I said is as irrecoverable as the orations of Demosthenes on the seashore, or the sermons of St. Francis ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... watch, out of the windows of a stuffy class-room, the great elms of the school close rising just thus in the warm summer air, while his thoughts wandered from the dull lesson into a region of delighted, irrecoverable reverie. To-day he sate for a long time in the little churchyard, the bees humming about the limes with a soft musical note, that rose and fell with a lazy cadence, while doves hidden somewhere in the elms lent as it were a voice to the trees. That soft note seemed to brim over from a spring ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... persecution,' said Masham. 'Now, my opinion of Cadurcis is, that his egotism, or selfism, or whatever you may style it, will ultimately preserve him from any very fatal, from any irrecoverable excesses. He is of the world, worldly. All his works, all his conduct, tend only to astonish mankind. He is not prompted by any visionary ideas of ameliorating his species. The instinct of self-preservation will serve him ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Point of Honour in Men is Courage, and in Women Chastity. If a Man loses his Honour in one Rencounter, it is not impossible for him to regain it in another; a Slip in a Woman's Honour is irrecoverable. I can give no Reason for fixing the Point of Honour to these two Qualities, unless it be that each Sex sets the greatest Value on the Qualification which renders them the most amiable in the Eyes of the contrary Sex. Had ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... statements, remembering how merciless the father had often been in dealing summarily with the arguments and statements of his own contemporaries. One asks oneself in vain what the magnetic charm of his presence and temperament can have been. It was undoubtedly there, and yet it seems wholly irrecoverable. The same is true, in a different region, with the late Mr. W. E. Henley. His literary performances, with the exception of some half-a-dozen poetical pieces, have no great permanent value. His criticisms were vehement and complacent, but represent no great delicacy of analysis nor breadth ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Cordilleras of Castile, when he brought down that fine fellow whose head adorned his room, the horns just thirty-eight inches long. And in the joy of these recollections there seemed to sound a regretful note, as if he spoke of things gone by and irrecoverable, no longer for him. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... day in love: Ah, could not your eager youth have led you to a thousand diversions, a thousand times have baited in the long journey of life, without hurrying on to the last stage, to the last retreat, but the grave; and to me seem as irrecoverable, as impossible to retrieve thee!—Could no kind beauty stop thee on thy way, in charity or pity; Philander saw me then. And though Myrtilla was more fit for his caresses, and I but capable to please with childish prattle; ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... murmured, in the voice of long ago, "Why do I stay to wound and to be wounded by the hand that once caressed me? Why do I find more pleasure in your contempt than in another woman's praise, and feel myself transported into the delights of that irrecoverable past, now grown the sweetest, saddest memory of my life? Send me away, Pauline, before the old charm asserts its power, and I forget that I am not the happy ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... that are not able to make a right judgment and difference betwixt them on other principles. Hence it comes to pass, that where some ignorant person hath cured accidentally a slight disease, and a Physician hath a Patient dye of an irrecoverable Case, here the Empiric shall be applauded, and the Physician decryed. Nay many will say the disease is the same in both, whereas we daily see most gross mistakes in such opinions, when the Cases differ totally in their Nature, agreeing ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... with himself for feeling happy while Tina's mind and body were still trembling on the verge of irrecoverable decline; but the new delight of acting as her guardian angel, of being with her every hour of the day, of devising everything for her comfort, of watching for a ray of returning interest in her eyes, was too absorbing to leave room for alarm ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Sonnets.] as in his first, risk the loss of that particular battle, is inseparable from the condition of man, and the uncertainty of human means; but that the loss of this one battle should be equally fatal and irrecoverable with the loss of his first, that it should leave him with means no more cemented, and resources no better matured for retarding his fall, and throwing a long succession of hindrances in the way of his conqueror, argues some essential defect of system. Under our ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... not think that such resentment should be reckoned as a manifestation of modern decadence. The hustling out of sight of that "lovely hoyden" is unworthy of a poet; poet's eyes should rest longer upon beauty so irrecoverable—for though the wife and mother be the happiest that ever was, she can never ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... with the editor, that compositions of such interest and antiquity should be now irrecoverable? But it is the nature of popular poetry, as of popular applause, perpetually to shift with the objects of the time; and it is the frail chance of recovering some old manuscript, which can alone gratify our curiosity regarding ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... had possessed for centuries. Those of the capitalists who had no friends at Court were made to pay the money, for which they had been forced to pledge themselves; and those who had such friends, got the sums which they had engaged to pay, represented as irrecoverable balances due by proprietors, and struck off. The proprietors themselves, plundered of all they had in the world, and without any hope of redress, left the country, or took service under our Government, or that ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... together in his chair, his head hanging forward, his teeth set, his whole shape, in limb and feature, carrying the show of profound, of irrecoverable injury. He started to his feet when she entered. She did not once lift her eyes to his face, but sunk on her knees before him, hurriedly slipped her night-gown from her shoulders to her waist, and over her head, bent toward the floor, held ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy's face, the suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery she said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What right had she to stand in Dick's light? Who was she to decide between his code and hers? ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... the boy! And because he was her failure, she was annoyed with him, began to dislike him, grew to hate him. She looked on him as a painter might upon a picture, or a poet, upon a poem, which he had only succeeded in getting into an irrecoverable mess. In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close together, and often tumble over each other. And whether it was that her failure with Photogen foiled also her plans in regard to Nycteris, ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... yielding to the overseer's solicitation to halt on the evening of the 29th April, instead of travelling on all night as I had originally intended: had I adhered to my own judgment all might yet have been well. Vain and bootless, however, now were all regrets for the irrecoverable past; but the present was so fraught with circumstances calculated to recal and to make me feel more bitterly the loss I had sustained, that painful as the subject was, the mind could not help reverting to ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... his own pursuits, and he did indeed work as easily as most men play. He was unconscious of his own powers of mental application: his mind worked with as much ease as his lungs breathed. The great bulk of his earlier writings must be quite irrecoverable now. He wrote school-books, specially a set of historical abridgments for the use of schools, under the name of Dr White; he also compiled much of the information in Oliver and Boyd's 'Almanac,' and almost all the letterpress of Billings's ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Chopin's first Ballade, that composition so laden with formidable memories—begun it without thinking and without apprehension—showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind and her situation, compared with my ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... pocket unread, and forgotten. It was from the family lawyer in Glasgow, informing him that the bank in which his uncle had deposited the proceeds of his sale of the land, was in a state of absolute and irrecoverable collapse; there was not the slightest hope of retrieving any portion ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... and the debtor party acquiring daily new strength, everyone is in haste to get into the favored class. In any case, the debtor is safe. He has put his enjoyments behind him; they are safe; no turns of fortune can disturb them. The substance he has eaten up, is irrecoverable. The future can not trouble his past. He has nothing to apprehend. He has anticipated more than fortune would ever have granted him. He has tricked fortune; and his creditors—bah! who feels for creditors? What are creditors? Landlords; a pitiless and unpitiable ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... and often evades them altogether. Although, under his bond, interest is payable on overdue instalments, it is never enforced. An examination of the accounts revealed the existence of considerable arrear claims extending over several years, and for the most part irrecoverable now. Practically, the tithe-farmer's obligations have never been discharged in the year to which they belonged. Of the collections credited in the year 1876-77, nearly one-half was on account of ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... of the expostulating Jeremiah is here unmistakable; and (as I have said) a Divine answer to his expostulations must have been given him, though now perhaps irrecoverable from among the expansions which it has undergone, verses 26-44. Two things are of interest: the practical carefulness of this great idealist, and the fact that the material basis of his hope for his country's freedom and prosperity was his own right to a bit of ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... right of confiscation; and if they refused to obey this summons, they would be in danger of being besieged, and compelled to submit by force, since their Duke was defeated, and his dominions utterly unprovided with means of defence, upon account of their irrecoverable losses in the three late battles. The lords returned answer by their speaker Monsieur John de la Vaquerie that the county of Artois belonged to the lady of Burgundy, daughter of Duke Charles, and descended to her in a right line from Margaret, Countess ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... of wine or beer and opium, and bark, above mentioned, may be increased by degrees, if the patient seems refreshed by them; and if the pulse becomes slower on their exhibition; but this with caution, as I have seen irrecoverable mischief done by greater quantities both of opium, wine, and bark, in this kind of fever; in which their use is to strengthen the digestion of the weak patient, rather than to stop the paroxysms of fever; but when they ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... can look with a smile at the troubles and pains of the past; but you can't. Old pains keep on gnawing at your heart, old desires, old deceptions, old dreams, assailing you in the dead stillness of your present where nothing moves except the irrecoverable ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad |
