"Living death" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him as you. You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death; and still he knows you not. In permitting this, I have surely acted a false part by the only man to whom the power was left me ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Spoke in you lately not my Cheeke should bee Made pale with feare. Lay not a lasting blush On my white name:—No haire should perish here Was vowed even now:—Oh let not a blacke deed, And by my sworne preserver, be my death My ever living death. Henrico, call To mind your holy vowes; thinke on our parents, Ourselves, our honest names; doe not kill all With such a murthering piece. You are not long T'expect, with the consent of men and angells, That which to take now from me will be ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... they followed him for the sake of the sweet food in his hand, and knew not whither they were going. My brothers, the servants of sin follow Satan for the sake of the sweet things which he offers, and know not that they are going to their death, even the living death of a lost soul. Some of you remember the old German legend of doctor Faustus. It is a terrible parable of the fate of all those who become the slave of sin. Faustus is represented as a man of great learning, who ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... convinced that this is not the truth about mysticism. Eckhart may have encouraged Schwester Katrei in her attempt to substitute the living death of the blank trance for the dying life of Christian charity; but none the less she caricatured and stultified his teaching. And I think it is possible to lay our finger on the place where she and so many others went wrong. The aspiration of mysticism is to find the unity which ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... to say," he went on, "that one does not know whether to call one's father's death ill news or not. But considering the living death he has led for twenty-three years, one can hardly call death and release a misfortune. The strange thing, the alarming thing about it, is the way Lady Helena takes it. One would think she might be prepared, that considering his life and sufferings, she ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... he smacked of churchyard mould And musty odors of moth-eaten palls— A living death, a walking epitaph! No lover that for tingling flesh and blood To rest soft cheek on and change kisses with. Yet lover somewhere; from his sly cocoon Time would unshell him. In the interim What was to do but wait, and mark who strolled Of evenings up the hill-path ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... up, and flinging it apart and removing the veil from its face, disclosed to their eyes the shape of Death itself, fleshless and hideous, at which sight Don Quixote felt uneasy, Sancho frightened, and the duke and duchess displayed a certain trepidation. Having risen to its feet, this living death, in a sleepy voice and with a tongue hardly awake, held forth ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... remembered her former flight to Chaillot, and that it was the king himself who had led her back again into the world. Her brow burned as the question forced itself upon her, Would he do so a second time? would he once more hasten, as he had then done, to rescue her from the living death to which she had consigned herself as an atonement ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... power to make us other than we are, that we too may have some part in the blessings of life?" Even in this last decade of the nineteenth century the priesthood of Bengal are defending against all humane legislation those old customs which render the girlhood of Hindu women a living death.[70] ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... course is to lecture him on the sin of gambling and to tearfully urge him to associate only with very proper young men. But the young gambler is not in the least interested in that sort of a life, which appears to him to be a kind of living death, and such entreaty does not move him. His parents would do better by looking more closely into the case. Why is he a gambler? He desires money. He seeks excitement. He wants to live in an atmosphere of intense ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... an interest in this remarkable and unique subject, and at the same time, above all, excited a stronger feeling of sympathy for our brothers and sisters suffering at the present time from the disease—a living death—in various portions of the globe, my humble efforts will not have been ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... to save you from worse than death—yea, from a living death. Go from this place; for if you are here a month hence, you will be lost. Your people here will be defeated, and then the Mexicans will hand you all over to the Padre, who says he means to put you where you will be protected. ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... standing up and holding out both hands to him. "Have mercy on me! I can't—I can't! My heart refuses and I cannot force it. All this—what is it to me?" She swept her hand at the glowing luxury around her. "Without love, what would such another home be to me? Worse than a prison-cell, I swear! A living death, to one like me! Barter and sale—cold calculation—oh, horrible prostitution, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... They say that nineteen hundred years ago a man was raised from the dead after having been buried for three days. They call it a great miracle. But I think the resurrection from the peaceful slumber of a three days' grave is not nearly so miraculous as the actual coming back to life from a living death of fourteen years duration;—'tis the twentieth century resurrection, not based on ignorant credulity, nor assisted by any Oriental jugglery. No travelers ever return, the poets say, from the Land of Shades beyond the river Styx—and ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... was returning to his rooms from the foul haunts of squalid dissipation and living death, when the thought of his own intolerable condition pressed on him with a heavier than usual weight. It was a very cloudy night, and he had long exceeded the usual college hours. The wind tossed about his clothes, and dashed in his face a keen impalpable sleet, while nothing dispelled the darkness ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the Levitical priests, had the disease been this creeping infection, have ever themselves escaped it, obliged as they were by their very office to submit the leper to actual handling and closest examination?... Leprosy was nothing short of a living death, a corrupting of all the humors, a poisoning of the very springs, of life; a dissolution, little by little, of the whole body, so that one limb after another actually decayed and fell away. Aaron exactly describes the appearance which the leper presented ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... will anticipate lasting sepultures. Some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die, shall groan that they can die but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the coverings of mountains, not of monuments, and ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... loved him still, and would always love him? Truth—truth and duty—loyal faith to her husband, the man whom in her mistake she had married. O, why could not such mistakes be undone! But they never could, never. It was a living death that she was condemned ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... joyfully in its conviction of the multitudinous ministry of living angels, infinitely varied in rank and power. You all know one expression of the purest and happiest form of such faith, as it exists in modern times, in Richter's lovely illustrations of the Lord's Prayer. The real and living death-angel, girt as a pilgrim for journey, and softly crowned with flowers, beckons at the dying mother's door; child-angels sit talking face to face with mortal children, among the flowers;—hold them by their little coats, lest they fall on the stairs;—whisper dreams of heaven ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... replied he, gnashing his teeth. 'Out of all the thousands she has slain I am the only one who has escaped, though why she spared me only to condemn me to this living death I cannot guess.' ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... Cleve. "But you condemn me to a living death.... To let you out of my sight with Kells or any of them! It'll be worse almost than my ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... the prospector's horse and burro sprawled on the ground half a dozen yards away, both animals frozen in the same baffling condition of living death. Dixon's brain reeled as he tried to fathom the incredible calamity that had apparently overwhelmed the world while he had been hidden away in his subterranean laboratory. Then a new and terrible thought ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... marched by devious and dangerous routes to that land where Our Lord lived and suffered. In fierce battle with the Saracens many a noble knight closed his eyes forever. Many met a harder fate—a living death in the noisome prisons of the unbelievers. After a lost battle Sir Broemser fell into the hands of the Turks, and in a dungeon had to suffer shameful imprisonment. Sometimes they would force their knightly foe to turn a millstone, while the crowd jeered. Then, in the hour of deepest misery the ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... victims' eyes grew greater and greater, and the terror more pronounced. He ceased for a moment and John slowly walked to the table, and mounting it, said quietly to Uraso: "Tell them that when I raise my hands over my head the ends of their living death will begin." ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... amid the palms. I found myself wondering if the lepers ever thought to contrast their lives with their surroundings, and I trusted they did not. Some few, probably, had not been lepers, but criminals, who preferred the horrid liberty of Elhara to the chance of detection and the living death of the Hib Misbah. Other beggars were not really lepers, but suffered from one or other of the kindred diseases that waste Morocco. In Marrakesh the native doctors are not on any terms with skilled diagnosis, and once a man ventures into Elhara, he acquires a reputation for ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... shall write in vain, the warning voice grow hoarse, But not until a city feels Red Revolution's feet Shall its sad people miss awhile the terrors of the street — The dreadful everlasting strife For scarcely clothes and meat In that pent track of living death — ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... England to-morrow," said Heyling, after a moment's pause. "To-night I consign you to the living death to which you devoted ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... too wild a thought," said Sybil, "ruin to him, ruin to all. No, we are severed by a fate as uncontrollable as severed you dear friend; ours is a living death." ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... evening when the poor woman was sitting in the dark in the self-hypnotized condition of the utter emptiness of her living death, she heard Christophe playing. It was his habit to sit at the piano in the half-light, musing and improvising. His music irritated her, for it disturbed the empty torpor into which she had sunk. She shut the window angrily. The music penetrated ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... into groups, each group crowding close to the windows for ten minutes, then giving place to another group. They slept on straw that was never changed, and the food given them was scarcely enough to keep them alive. Those who suffered this living death might have been free at any time had they been willing to go over to the British, but few of the patriots, even in this dread hour, deserted their cause. To while away the hours of their captivity, they carved their names upon the walls with rusty nails. ...
— The Story of Manhattan • Charles Hemstreet
... power which sent Aileen running up the road towards the pastures, by crossing which she could reach in a few minutes the quarry woods: "I must know if he is dead; if he is not dead, I must try to save him from a living death." ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... spirit that drives the man to the depths of drink and crime Will do the deeds in the heroes' van that live till the end of time. The living death in the lonely bush, the greed of the selfish town, And even the creed of the outlawed push is chivalry — upside down. 'Twill be while ever our blood is hot, while ever the world goes wrong, The nations rise in a war, to rot in a peace that lasts too long. And ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... expeditions to the Moluccas and the coasts of Asia, but nowhere the unspeakable atrocities which in Mexico, Hispaniola, and South America drove mothers to strangle their babes at birth and whole tribes to prefer self-immolation to the living death in the mines and slave-pens. Quite differently from the case in America, where entire islands and districts were depopulated, to bring on later the curse of negro slavery, in the Philippines the fact appears that the native population really increased and the standard of ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... became hardened and inured to that unspeakable existence, that living death of the galley-slave. But that first long voyage to Naples was ever to remain the most terrible experience of his life. For spells of six or eight endless hours at a time, and on one occasion for no less than ten hours, did he pull at ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... other children romp and play and laugh; but he neither romps, nor plays, nor laughs. He is inert. Some ancestor chained him to the rock, and the vultures of disease and unhappiness are feeding at his vitals. He asks for bread, and they give him a stone; he asks for life, and they give him a living death; he asks for a heaven of delight, and they give him a hell of despair. He has a right to freedom, but, in place of that, he is forced into slavery of body and soul to pay the debts of his grandfather. Nor can he pay these debts in full, but must, perforce, pass them on to his own children. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... dear Boy,—When you read this I shall have passed away. For the last six months my life has been a living death. The horror began in the following way. You know what a deep interest I have always taken in the family history of our house. I have spent the latter years of my life in verifying each detail, and my intention ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... it over her knee. It was a letter—one which must have been delivered on the very day when her father last wore the bunda. The envelope had not been broken: old Kapus hadn't had time to read his letter, the last which he had received before living death encompassed him. The tears gathered in Elsa's eyes at thought of her father handling this very letter with shaking yet still living hands: now they were incapable even of gripping ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... sighed, "my Carlos!" even now I feel the perfumed zephyr of her breath Bearing to me those words of living death, And starting out the cold drops ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... stone. That is the sign-manual of the Goddess. She printed it on the rock when she condemned me centuries ago to be enclosed within this narrow cell until you should come and release me. Your hand alone can remove that mystic symbol and save me from the penalty of a living death." ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... qualities most dear, plunged from that height, And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood's night! Are men, indeed, such things? and are the best More subject to this evil than the rest, 640 To drivel out whole years of idiot breath, And sit the monuments of living death? Oh, galling circumstance to human pride! Abasing thought, but not to be denied! With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroy'd by thought. Constant attention wears the active mind, Blots ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... instead—that would be worth dying for, even if it were the annihilation unbelievers took it for! To marry him, swell his worldly triumphs, help gild the chains of his slavery was not to be thought of! It was one thing to die that a fellow-creature might have all things good! another to live a living death that he might persist in the pride of life! She could not throw God's life to the service of the stupid Satan! It was a sad breakdown to the hopes ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... suspicion that your father might still be alive? You had my message through Mr. Cuthbert; I met you day by day after you knew that I had been your father's partner, and never once did you give yourself away! Were you tarred with the same brush as those canting snobs who doomed a poor old man to a living death? Doesn't it look like it? What am ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... seasons. The blossom was to Hator, the fruit is to me. Hator also was a brooder—but now his followers do not brood. In Sant all is icy selfishness, a living death. They hate pleasure, and this hatred is ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... too cosmopolitan. There could be little hope of isolation in this Indian metropolis. Its ever-changing population came from all quarters of the globe. To remain hidden in shunned districts, among moral and social lepers, would be living death. How else stay in Calcutta and not be recognized? The thought of constant disguise was repugnant. He shrank from the appearance of falsehood. Realizing the urgent necessity of concealment, he must be reserved ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... live.' The Christian life is a dying life. If we are in any real sense joined to Christ, the power of His death makes us dead to self and sin and the world. In that region, as in the physical, death is the gate of life; and, inasmuch as what we die to in Christ is itself only a living death, we live because we die, and in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... love is not to live, or it is to live a living death. The life that goes out in love to all is the life that is full, and rich, and continually expanding in beauty and in power. Such is the life that becomes ever more inclusive, and hence larger in ...
— Thoughts I Met on the Highway • Ralph Waldo Trine
... is it feel I then? If 'tis, how strange a thing, sweet powers above! If love be kind, why does it fatal prove? If cruel, why so pleasing is the pain? If 'tis my will to love, why weep, why plain? If not my will, tears cannot love remove. O living death! O rapturous pang!—why, love! If I consent not, canst thou o'er me reign? If I consent, 'tis wrongfully I mourn: Thus on a stormy sea my bark is borne By adverse winds, and with rough tempest tost; Thus unenlightened, lost in error's maze, My blind opinion ever dubious strays; I'm ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... care lay heavy Sleep the cousin of Death, Flat on the ground, and still as any stone; A very corpse, save yielding forth a breath, Small keep took he whom Fortune frown'd on, Or whom she lifted up into a throne Of high renown; but as a living death So dead alive, of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 404, December 12, 1829 • Various
... oh gentle Dames, who with closed urn, Present themselves, whose hearts are pierced Not for a fault by nature caused, But through a cruel fate, That in a living death, Does hold them fast, we each and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... results of the device were startling. By an act of January 4th, 1801, as many as 130 prominent Jacobins were "placed under special surveillance outside the European territory of the Republic"—a specious phrase for denoting a living death amidst the wastes of French Guiana or the Seychelles. Some of the threatened persons escaped, perhaps owing to the connivance of Fouche; some were sent to the Isle of Oleron; but the others were forthwith despatched to the miseries of captivity in the tropics. Among these ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Medici, Lorenzo and Girolamo, who are suitors for the hand of one and the same woman. The following novel, His Royal Highness (1909), shows how a prince, educated in aloofness from life, is saved from a living death through love for an American heiress. Finally, there appeared only last year a masterpiece in the most exquisite style, the narrative Death in Venice (1913). It is a heart-felt confession, taking as ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... was dragged out of his breast, but he resisted her. "Choose!" he whispered. "A living death ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... bring within quick reach of civilisation many localities in which at present, for lack of such communication, rough men are apt to grow into semi-savages, while those who retain the instincts of civilisation look upon their exile as a living death. It will do more to enlighten the dark places of the earth than any other mechanical agency of the ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... disposed to deny. The world knows it too well; and seeing that such toils are uncheered by the acquisition of fame or wealth—the only reward it can appreciate—the world considers the life of the missionary a living death, endured like martyrdom, only for the sake of its crown in the life to come. But not in this light was their life considered by the noble three whose history we have sketched in this volume, nor by Dr. Judson. The elevated sources of happiness opened even in this world ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... that the girl ceased to live, it would not have been difficult for one of her faith to have deposited her regrets by the side of hopes that were so justifiable, in the grave of the innocent. But the living death to which her offspring might be condemned, was rarely absent from her thoughts. She listened to the maxims of resignation, which were heard flowing from lips she loved with the fondness of a woman and the meekness of a Christian; and ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... is it, after having bid adieu to so many beloved objects, and there remains only a single one between yourself and utter solitude, the solitude of chains and a living death, to be separated even from that one! Maroncelli, on leaving me, ill and dejected, shed tears over me as one whom, it was most probable, he would never more behold. In him, too, I lamented a noble-minded man, cut off in the splendour of his intellect, and the vigour ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... his family. The great troubled eyes of the sick man followed his every movement, and he could not resist the impression that at last they seemed to recognize him and take in some thought of hope. It seemed terrible, this living death, this unutterable silence, and yet those staring eyes, he did not know whether it was a hopeful indication or otherwise, but at last they closed and the sufferer seemed to sleep heavily. Wearily passed the ...
— Three People • Pansy
... in which we dwell Is a foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to dust ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... meanwhile half the crew are clothing, feeding, questioning, caressing those nine poor fellows thus snatched from living death; and Yeo, hearing the news, has rushed up on deck to ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Ah, veil the living death from sight That wounds our beauty-loving eye! The children turn in selfish fright, The ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the year 1670, a painful book, the "Life of Pascal," a portrait painted slowly from the life or living death, but with an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive of disease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal's brain revealed, we are now told, the secret, not merely of that long prostration, those sudden passing torments, but of something analogous to them ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... their minds are taxed, though their bodies are neglected, and their souls forgotten. Nor is it unfrequent that their physical strength gives way under the constant pressure of intellectual studies. And thus they are subjected to all the evils of physical inability—the sufferings of living death, in consequence of an erroneous education. Besides, they are destitute of all those kinder feelings and sympathetic emotions which alone result from the cultivation of the moral susceptibilities, and become insensible to the more delicate affections ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... way to Strides Cottage again! Nearer and nearer now, that moment that must come, and put an end to all this puling hesitation. She could not help the thought that rose in her mind:—"This that I do—this reuniting of two souls long parted by a living death—may it not be what Death does every day for many a world-worn survivor of a half-forgotten parting in a remote past?" For, indeed, it seemed to her that these two had risen from the dead, and that for all she knew ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... turbulent and crude, Engenders bile, and stirs intestine feud. Observe your guests, how ghastly pale their looks When they've discussed some mystery of your cook's: Ay, and the body, clogged with the excess Of yesterday, drags down the mind no less, And fastens to the ground in living death That fiery particle of heaven's own breath. Another takes brief supper, seeks repair From kindly sleep, then rises light as air: Not that sometimes he will not cross the line, And, just for once, luxuriously dine, When feasts come round with ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... and anchored in love. Our newspapers teem with startling accounts of husbands and wives having shot or poisoned each other, or committed suicide, choosing death rather than the indissoluble tie; and, still worse, the living death of faithless wives and daughters, from the first families in this State, dragged from the privacy of home into the public prints and courts, with all the painful details of sad, false lives. What say you to facts like these? Now, do ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to murder in one awful tragedy; young girls, even children of tender years, outraged by these brutal ravishers till death ended their shame; women held into captivity to undergo the horrors of a living death; whole families burned alive; and, as if their devilish fancy could not glut itself with outrages on the living, the last efforts exhausted in mutilating the bodies of the dead. Such are the spectacles, and a thousand nameless horrors besides which this first experience of Indian warfare ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... means that as far as you're going to be concerned, I'm just another Ihelian private first class for awhile, not a space-neurotic Earthman! And our girls ... well, I think—I think they'd prefer anything to the living death in store for them—the rotting away of their lives in some infested alien jungle. Anyway, somebody's got to be judge. So let's get ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... at last?" I cried. "'Tis true I have somewhat altered. This hair of mine was black, if you remember—it is white enough now, blanched by the horrors of a living death such as you cannot imagine, but which," and I spoke more slowly and impressively, "you may possibly experience ere long. Yet in spite of this change I think you know me! That is well. I am glad your memory ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... country became more sombre from the increasing number of pines bordering the road and mingling with the distant forest. Very weird pines these were, chiefly covered with closely-packed dead foliage, with a living tuft of dark green at the end of each branchlet. A living death seemed to be their lot, and they moaned without moving as the light wind passed ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... forgiven for my imperfect appreciation of the blessings of Boycotting, and the Plan of Campaign, and many similar blessings. It matters little indeed how or when I die, so that Ireland lives, but her life can only be a living death if Irishmen are not free to say what they believe, and to act as they deem ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... "there is no convincing a layman of the matter contained on your shelves. Nor can I so convince my public. Nor will I try to. Besides, the man is consigned to the living death of life- long imprisonment in the pest-house. You know the beastly hole it is. He loves the dog. He's mad over it. Let him have it. I tell you it's rotten unfair and cruel, and I ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... loyal to my employers at any and all costs, that other loyalty, the tie that binds the branded, proved the stronger. I could not bring myself to the point of sending Dorgan, guilty as he doubtless was, back to the living death of the "long-termer." I make no excuses. One cannot touch pitch and escape defilement in some sort. For three years I had lived among criminals; and the bond . . . but I ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... hopeless! Treated as criminals till their deeds are fatal, then certified to be "criminal lunatics." Such is the life of the underworld epileptic. Life, did I call it?—let me withdraw that word; it is the awful, protracted agony of a living death, in which sanity struggles with madness, rending and wounding a poor human frame. Happy are they when they die young! but even epileptics live on and on; but while they live we consign them to the underworld, where their pitiful cry ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... realize, unless you have almost lived their life, what the snow and the frost mean to all the thrush people, but more especially to the common song-thrush and the redwing. At the worst it means death; at the best, little more than a living death. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... sensual indulgence stupefy, blunt, and confuse together in lifeless meshes, the vital tenant and the mortal tenement; they grow incorporate, alike unclean, powerless, guilty, and wretched. Then "Man lives a life half dead, a living death, Himself his sepulchre, a moving grave." Active virtue, profound love, and the earnest pursuit, in the daily duties of life, of "Those lofty musings which within us sow The seeds of higher kind and brighter being." ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... puerility of such an altercation as that in which he had just been engaged, the poor display of human character, the little, low passions which had been called up, even in himself, alike destitute of worthy cause and aim, and which had, perhaps, but just missed ending in the death of some, and the living death of others it all wrought to bring him back to his old wearying of human nature and despondent eyeing of the every-where jarrings, confusions, and discordances in the moral world. The fresh sea-breeze that swept by the ship, roughening the play of the waves, and brushing his own cheek with its ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... bridegroom comes leaping and reeling on, rushes into the chamber, suddenly seems transfixed to the floor, puts his hand to his sword, but not finding it at his side, looks back, calls aloud, but no one follows him. Horror, like living death, paralyzes the old man. The bridegroom throws himself upon the exile, who exclaims solemnly, as he thrusts ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... her. Miss Upton was thinking of her. The tears came faster now under the memory of the kindness of her chance acquaintance on the day—it seemed months ago—that she had left the world and entered upon this living death. ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... tell him that I am offended, and do not wish to see him again. When I meet him at your house, I shall leave the room, since I cannot pull him by the nose. I can force my spirit to leave my body, but it shall never bend to support that body. God of heaven, save thy child from this living death! I scarcely know what I write. My hand trembles; I am ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... doubt the infallibility of science; and any one who ventures to affirm persistently a story which science pronounces impossible (like your voyage through space), if he do not fall at once a victim to popular piety, would be consigned to the worse than living death of life-long ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... long and well, Cleansing thy sight by prayer and faith, And thou shalt know what secret spell Preserves them in their living death: Through sevenfold flames thine eye shall see The Saviour ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... she had to expect in the future. The steps of her tyrant's progress would be gradual, but terrible. First, perhaps she would be confined to the Hall, then to her own rooms, and finally perhaps to some small chamber—some cell—where she would live a living death as long as her ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... they joined hands with godless freebooters to rifle her ships, kill her sailors, or throw them alive into the sea. Spain on her side seized English Protestant sailors who ventured into her ports, and burned them as heretics, or consigned them to a living death in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Yet in the latter half of the century these mutual outrages went on for years while the nations professed to be at peace. There was complaint, protest, and occasional menace, but no redress, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Having lost enough blood to soak through the carpet and stain the very floor, unconscious, and hovering between life and death, Sumner was carried to a sofa, thence to his hotel. From that time on the scholar endured a living death. He was carried to Paris, where Dr. Brown-Sequard tried "the fire cure" upon the spine. But for years his desk was vacant. Massachusetts insisted that the empty seat should proclaim to the world her abhorrence of the ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... fist at the Catholic University and its scientific priestly professors, who condemned one so lightly to a living death. He hated the aspect of the place, the very ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Arthur might stop me, that anything could stop me, did not disturb my mind for a minute. All that I dreaded was that I might find myself too late; that this second blow might have proved to be too much for her, and that I should find my darling dead or passed from me into that living death which were the harder punishment of the two. But I was spared this killing grief. When our two conveyances stopped, it was in the driveway of her old home; and as I bounded upon the walk, it was to ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... it was to me. I could not clear myself without proving my brother to have been guilty of the foulest crime which a gentleman could commit. For eighteen years I have screened him at the expense of everything which a man could sacrifice. I have lived a living death which has left me an old and shattered man when I am but in my fortieth year. But now when I am faced with the alternative of telling the facts about my brother, or of wronging my son, I can only act in one fashion, and ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... but this was put down against me as an illusion. So a professor of nervous diseases was called in consultation, owing to my many desires to die (as life had no sunshine, flowers, or music for me); I was simply living a living death of torture which these professors would have were illusions. My parents were then informed that I must be sent to an asylum, where I was for ten long weeks. They also told me that my feelings were illusions, and proceeded to banish the same by giving the tired-out nerves ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... Hoffnung greeted me upon his quarterdeck, and his men sent up rounds of cheers which echoed over the waters. I stood for some minutes forgetful of everything, save that I had been snatched from that prison of steel; brought from the shadow of the living death to the hope of seeing friends, and country, and home again. Now one man wrung my hand, now another brought clothes, now another hot food; but I stood as one stricken dumb, holding nervously to the taffrail as though none should ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... mockery is this! Surely death is not death, and humanity is not extinct; but merely passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our perceptions. Death is a vast portal, an high road to life: let us hasten to pass; let us exist no more in this living death, but ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... witnessed this scene with gathering anger. The implied reproaches against her father—her father, who was lying there in a sort of living death—neutralized all her pity for griefs about tablecloths and china; and her anger on her father's account was heightened by some egoistic resentment at Tom's silent concurrence with her mother in shutting her out from the common calamity. She had become almost indifferent ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... is living death, a world where none but phantoms dwell A breath, a wind, a sound, a voice, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... complete soe'er—was but A specious bait; a soft, sly, tempting slut; A pleasing witch; a living death; a fair, Thriving disease; a fresh, infectious air; A precious plague; a fury sweetly drawn; Wild fire laid up and finely ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... what a cowpuncher would call a swell Easterner." Ignoring Gray's grimace of dislike she went on, deliberately exaggerating her musical Texas drawl. "You are a person of education and culture; you speak languages; you have the broad 'a,' and if you had to go unshaven it would be a living death. You are rich, too, and probably play the piano. People like that don't ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the subtle machinations of Hodson and his able cohorts. Then, as a telling example to the rest, Ames pursued him to the doors of the Lunacy Commission, and rested not until that body had condemned his victim to a living death in a state asylum. Kane, Fitch, and Weston fled to cover, and concentrated their guns upon their common enemy. The Beaubien alone stood out against him for three months. Her existence was death in life; but from the hour that she first read the newspaper intelligence regarding ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Arnold had here a fine opportunity to retrieve in some degree the bitter mischief of which he had been the occasion. Had he but come forth and suffered in Andre's place, the blackness of his crime would have almost disappeared in the brilliancy of his atonement; but he chose a living death instead, and his hapless victim went to his doom accompanied by the pity of every honest American heart. His manly figure affords a fine contrast to that of the traitor skulking down the lane (still shown as "Arnold's Path") at the back of the Robinson ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... Your medicines had a wonderful control over my disease, driving away its terrible symptoms as if by magic; they imparted to me a new power, filled my body and mind with unusual vigor, and transformed me from one racked with pain and living death or worse, to a full measure of health and happiness. I feel that if I had not been opportunely and successfully treated by you, that my life would have been permanently blighted, and that the happy and contented mind that now inspires these ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... were these simultaneous emotions recognized, when another phrase, life granted, called forth a cry as of one mighty voice. All were spared: but a sentence, to such as understood its meaning, of living death,—carcere duro in Spielberg and the Castle of Lubiano,—some for ten, others for fifteen, and the remainder for twenty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... several dreary days, when hope had sunk again to its lowest ebb, and all his worst apprehensions revived. It was like a living death; he was a close prisoner, and never a word reached him that any of his friends were concerning themselves ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... mine but in my dreams. O wretched dreams, that drive me mad. Pauline, they will tell us that we must not dream—we must not weep, we must be stocks and stones. We must wear this weight of living death till that good Lord that makes such laws shall send us death in mercy. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years of suffering: that might almost satisfy Him, one would think. Pauline! you and I are to say good-bye to-night. Good-bye! People talk ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... now he had been beaten in his game. He absolutely ignored his old passion for Lady Laura as though it had never been, and regarded himself as a model of constancy,—as a man who had loved, not wisely perhaps, but much too well,—and who must now therefore suffer a living death. He hated Parliament. He hated the Colonial Office. He hated his friend Mr. Monk; and he especially hated Madame Max Goesler. As to Lord Chiltern,—he believed that Lord Chiltern had obtained his object by violence. He would see ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... sudden death; it was an exquisitely painful one, which made every nerve quiver and the whole frame thrill with anguish; and that slow agony, in all its terribleness and protractedness, is the image that is set before us as the true ideal of every life that would not be a living death. The world is to be crucified to me, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... disintegration of life rises out of the most wonderful, mysterious, beautiful, and profound relation in humanity! Its roots go down into the very deeps of God, and out of its foliage creeps the old serpent, and the worm that never dies! Out of it steams the horror of corruption, wrapt in whose living death a man cries out that God himself can do nothing for him. It is but the natural result of his making the loveliest of God's gifts into his God, and worshipping and serving the creature more than the creator. Oh my child, it is a terrible thing to be! Except ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... punishment. I was thirty-six years of age at the time. I am now forty-four years old. I have spent the eight intervening years in the California State Prison of San Quentin. Five of these years I spent in the dark. Solitary confinement, they call it. Men who endure it, call it living death. But through these five years of death-in-life I managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known. Closest-confined of prisoners, not only did I range the world, but I ranged time. They who immured me for petty years gave to me, all unwittingly, the largess ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... oaths, that they had come from the seat of government—from the Castle—where they had been worked upon by the fear of death and the hopes of compensation, to give evidence against their fellows; that the mild and wholesome councils of this government are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is then dug up a witness. Is this fancy, or is it fact? Have you not seen him after his resurrection from that tomb, after ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... miserable world this is, with death making havoc everywhere! Then your theology exaggerates the evil a thousand-fold. If a man must die, let him die and cease to be. But your minister spoke to-day of a living death, in which one only exists to suffer. What ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... of my defenceless foe awhile unnerved my arm, But thoughts of glory or of gain dispelled the better charm; The water reddened with his blood, I left the lifeless corse, To meet myself a living death,—a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... she had heard M. de Crillon talk—and very unconcernedly too—of the living death of those who unhappily became the victims of a lettre de cachet. Yes, she remembered well how once, in order to gratify her importunate curiosity, he had told her of people sent to Pignerol, St. Michel, or Isle Marguerite, never to be heard ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... up and kept as holy relics,—when the house no longer echoed to the tones of the sweet childish voice, and the silence of the grave settled over earth,—when the glare of day was hateful and the darkness of night fearful, and life, without the darling one, was living death,—had you not then a partner, a kind, tender, sympathizing partner, who took you to his heart, and bowed his head with you, and knit you closer to him by a bond the strongest life can weave, the bond of sorrow shared? And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... a word from my love of the hope of the second birth! Could he clear my vision to see the sword creeping out of the sheath Inch by inch as we writhe in the toils of our living death! Could he but strengthen my heart to know that we cannot fail; For alas, I am lonely here—helpless and feeble and frail; I am e'en as the poor of the earth, e'en they that are now alive; And where is their might and their cunning ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris
... son survive hale and hearty, sir, when you're gone yourself, I implore you, sir, by your hoary hairs and by the one you dread, your wife, sir—if you tell me any lie to-day, may she outlast you by years and years, yes, sir, and you die a living death ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... a life half dead, a living death, And buried; but oh, yet more miserable! Myself my sepulchre, a ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... plain Hell to Madeleine, or worse. The Hell of the Bible and Dante had a lively accompaniment of writhing flames and was presumably clean. This might be an underground race condemned to a sordid filthy and living death for unimaginable crimes of a previous existence. Even the children looked as if they had come back to Earth with the sins of threescore and ten stamped upon their weary wicked faces. Madeleine's strong soul faltered, and she ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... written about that blind spot in the eye?' Not much was said about it at the time, but four days later, again at lunch, I outlined the whole story to him. I wrote the first eighteen chapters; Homer took up the tale as 'Hobart Fenton' and wrote the chapters about the house of miracles, the living death, the rousing of Aradna's mind, and so forth, up to 'The Man from Space,' where ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... hands. Now I guess you understand,"—and turning his head he fixed her with an inflexible glare, chill and heartless as steel,—"that one squeal out of you will be the last. Oh, I've got no scruples; arrest to me means a living death. I'll take a shorter course, by preference, and—I'll take you with me ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... poets, artists, critics, all, Who form a faction or who found a school, We weave Penelope's web with hearts of gall, And my poor brain is oft the weary tool. Yet do I choose this life. What is to me Peace or good fame, away from all of these, But living death? I do choose liberty, And leave to Athens' ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... wavering in the heat. Penrun swore vividly. The cowards! Still, perhaps they were afraid to unlimber their heavy artillery for fear of killing the girl. Or perhaps, which was more likely, they thought she was already dead and devoured. Few persons knew about the Living Death. ...
— Loot of the Void • Edwin K. Sloat
... it dull. It is in the most perfect keeping, and without any appearance of effort. Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like one sentence. There is something sublime in Martin's sceptical indifference to moral good and evil. It is the repose of the grave. It is better to suffer this living death, than a living martyrdom. "Nothing can touch him further." The moral of Candide (such as it is) is the same as that of Rasselas: the execution is different. Voltaire says, "A great book is a great ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... How sad, tragic, yet glorious for him! It would be like a magic touch upon this lovely, cold, white ghost of Fay Larkin, transforming her into a living, breathing girl. He held his love as a thing aloof, and, as such, intangible because of the living death she believed she lived, it had no warmth and intimacy for them. What might it not become with a lightning flash of revelation? He dreaded, yet he was driven to speak. He waited, swallowing hard, fighting the tumultuous storm of emotion, and ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... public, the expenses of their confinement, but to provide the means of their own honest subsistence for the future. It had none of the usual features of a prison; neither the hardened profligacy which scoffs down its own sense of guilt, nor the hollow-eyed sorrow which wastes away in a living death of unavailing expiation: there was neither the clank of chains, nor the yell of execration; but a hardworking body of men were seen, who, though separated by justice from society, were not supposed to have lost the distinctive attribute of human nature: they were treated ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... eyes—the half-doubting—half-yielding fight there, of ambition, and doubt, and the stubborn wrong of it all, of her hard lot and bitter life, of the hidden splendor that might lie beyond, and yet the terrible doubt, the fear that it might end in a living death—these, fighting there, lit up her eyes as candles at an altar of love. Then the very difference of his attitude, as he stood there, struck her,—the beautiful dignity of his face, his smile. She saw in an ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... I think that the times have not changed very much. Of the child's parentage I may not tell you, but as I hope for salvation I will tell you this. It will be better for you, and better for the child, that she comes back here, even to embrace what you have called the living death." ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... because the living death ne'er knew, They fear to prove it, as a thing that's new: Let me th' experiment before you try, I'll show you first how ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... social account. To kill one was by some considered a kindness, for it ended the misery of a man who would go crazy watching the shifting, crawling maggots anyway. It was bad enough to be a cow milker, but to be a sheep herder was living death. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... said, the solace of his life. For his sake he had been content to live even under his load of shame and misery. For him he had labored; for his happiness he had planned. And for what? What? That which was too hideous to think of—a living death—a union with one from whom he ought to stand apart ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... other hand, if the contract had been neglected, and a woman had accepted a lover without it, then, however great their love, however fit their union in every natural way, the woman was cast out as unchaste, impure, and abandoned, and consigned to the living death of social ignominy. Now let me repeat that we fully recognize the excuse for this social law under your atrocious system as the only possible way of protecting the economic interests of women and children, but to speak of it as ethical or ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... how changed and corrupted this heart has become!" she murmured, in her dejection, "when that life which was once my most ardent desire now seems to me worse than the grave. Anything—any life of duty in the world, rather than that living death." ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... his life, was wearing thin, and the dread almost amounting to horror, was rising into being. But before the armour of his pity really broke, he would die, as an insect when its shell is cracked. This was his final resource. Others would live on, and know the living death, the ensuing process of hopeless chaos. He would not. He denied ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... was born. I appealed to Lawrence Newt, our old friend and playmate. He promised me faithful secrecy, and through him the child was sent where Gabriel was at school. Then I withdrew from both. I thought it was the will of God. I felt myself commanded to a living death—dead to every friend and kinsman—dead to every thing but my degradation and its punishment; and yet consciously close to you, near to all old haunts and familiar faces—lost to them all—lost to my child—" Her voice faltered, and the tears gushed from ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... my name, in association with his, that caused the bitterness of his anguish. And I,—I knew that my father had robbed my husband in the vilest, most insidious manner; that he had drawn upon himself the awful doom of a forger, a dungeon home, a living death. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... to look at the whole matter fairly and boldly. What were the alternatives? I was Roger Trewinion's eldest son, and if I allowed my father's and Mr. Morton's will to be carried out, I doomed my darling to a loathsome life—a living death, while, though I should attain the object most dear to me, I should live in hell, the hell of being with a woman who loved another man. If I refused to marry her, things would be nearly as bad. I should still be dooming her to misery; she would not marry my brother, I should never be ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... happen to frustrate his scheme; but I soon heard that the house was actually begun. I vowed before my Maker that I would never enter it: I had rather toil on the plantation from dawn till dark; I had rather live and die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death. I was determined that the master, whom I so hated and loathed, who had blighted the prospects of my youth, and made my life a desert, should not, after my long struggle with him, succeed at last in trampling his victim under his feet. I would do any thing, every thing, for ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... pleasant voices, each with her market-basket over her arm, going homeward from shopping. It would be interesting to know their story—what it is that brings these daughters of a brighter world here into this valley of the living death. ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... Judge Scott was merely ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it and was hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged down by half a dozen of his blue- coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he emptied ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... of guilt; By the blood that you have spilt; By the Law that you have broken; By the terrible red token That you bear upon your brow; By the awful sentence spoken And irrevocable vow Which consigns you to a living Death and to the unforgiving Furies who avenge your crime Through the periods of time; By that dread eternal doom Hinted in your future's gloom, As the flames infernal tell Of their power and perfection In their wavering reflection On the battlements of Hell; By the mercy you denied, I condemn ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... interest; she forgets herself entirely, yet not without bitter anguish. She accepts the sacrifice, but it costs her infinite pangs. She is separated from her husband forever. Nor was the convent agreeable to her. It was dull, monotonous, dismal; imprisonment in a tomb, a living death, where none could know her agonies but God; where she could not even hear from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... shudder. "I hope they are not on my trail, but if they are—" he paused a moment, straightened himself up, and looked like what he was, a strong man—"if they are let them look out. I'd give my life to save my brother from the awful, living death to ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... would they were, that I might die at once; For now they kill me with a living death. Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears, Sham'd their aspects with store of childish drops: These eyes, which never shed remorseful tear, No, when my father York and Edward wept, To hear ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... it, and its shiny hair hung in foul wet curls over its dead face. I wrestled with the dead thing; it thrust itself upon me and forced me back and nearly broke my arms; it wound its corpse's arms about my neck, the living death, and overpowered me, so that I, at last, cried aloud and fell, ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... that whilst lying thus concealed the men of the party should be attacked and made captive or slain. Were such a catastrophe as this to befall them, the fate of those poor women and children would be little better than a living death; left as they would be to shift for themselves unaided, unprotected, and their hearts wrung with anguish for the loss of those to whom they were naturally in the habit of looking for help and protection, and with little or no chance ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... did they dare, to slay Owen Roe O'Neill? Yes, they slew with poison, him they feared to meet with steel. May God wither up their hearts! May their blood cease to flow! May they walk in living death, who poisoned Owen Roe! We thought you would not die—we were sure you would not go, And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell's cruel blow— Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky— Oh! Why did you leave us, Owen? Why did ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the living death," said the old man, now lighting a lantern. "You know that grave in a poem of ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... their very resurrection, shall be hurt of the second death. They shall arise in death, and shall be under it, under the gnawings, and terrors of it, all the time of their arraignment. As it were, a living death shall feed upon them; they shall never be spiritually alive, nor yet absolutely dead; but much after that manner, that natural death, and hell, by reason of guilt, doth feed on him, that is going before the judge, to receive his condemnation to the gallows. You ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the summer the coyotes shunned the specter of living death that plodded silently up and down the valleys and the ridges. When it came suddenly through the trees, drawn by the scent of a fresh kill, some coyote family scattered swiftly and left the feast. Cripp was as apt to howl in broad daylight as at night, ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... Discharging a sweet office, sweeter none, Mother and child, friend, counsel and repose; Naught matches with her, naught has leave with her To highest human praise. Farewell to him Who reverences not with an excess Of faith the beauteous sex; all barren he Shall live a living death of mockery. Ah! had but words the power, what could we say Of Woman! We, rude men of violent phrase, Harsh action, even in repose inwardly harsh; Whose lives walk blustering on high stilts, removed From ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... nights of a condemned man like? Did Graylock sleep? Did he suffer? Was the suspense a living death to him? Had he ever suspected him, Drene, of treachery after he, Graylock, had fulfilled his final ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... dead. Yet not by bitter hemlock. By the living death of an issue of blood which is worse than leprosy hath Sara been buried from the clean, though ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock |
