"Self-pity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Occasionally her self-pity took wilder and more daring flights. She determined to have happiness at any cost; but still more often she lay a helpless victim of an indescribable numbing stupor, the words she heard had no meaning to her, or the thoughts which arose in her mind were so vague and indistinct that ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... more than feel with those who were suffering, and weep beside them. His sympathy was always for their strengthening. He never encouraged exaggerated thoughts of pain or suffering—for in many minds there is a tendency to such feelings. He never gave countenance to morbidness, self-pity, or any kind of unwholesomeness in grief. He never spoke of sorrow or trouble in a despairing way. He sought to inculcate hope, and to make men braver and stronger. His ministry was always toward cheer and encouragement. He gave great eternal truths on which his friends might rest in their sorrow, ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... grief in his voice. But there was nothing like complaint, nor was there, nor self-pity, either, when he told me about his eyes and his doubts as to whether he would ever really see again. He passed his own troubles off lightly, as if they did not matter at all. He preferred to tell me about those of his friends whom I had met, ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... him for a second or two and then, whirling, entered the hut. Her cheeks were burning. Who shall say whether the tears that sprang to her eyes as she fell to work scrubbing in the corner were of anger or self-pity? ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... of the attack stung Maud to speech. She looked back over the months, thought of all she had suffered, and ached with self-pity. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... weary and sleepy that her curiosity and capacity for any other emotion was blunted. She had become simply a little, tired, sleepy animal. She let herself be undressed; she was not even moved to much self-pity when the lady discovered the cruel bruise on her delicate knee, and kissed it, and dressed it with a healing salve. She was put into a little night-gown which she knew dreamily belonged to that other child, and was laid in a little bedstead which she noted ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... snorted. "She won't have to marry him till she's seen him, and when she does see him she'll apologise to me for all the nasty things she's been saying about me." For a moment it looked as though Mr. Blithers would dissolve into tears, so suddenly was he afflicted by self-pity. "By the way, didn't she like the necklace I sent up ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... deal with her inevitable muddles in her own way,—the simple fatal way of letting things slide, and hoping that they would somehow come right in the end. But there seemed no present prospect of such a consummation; and for a while she gave herself up to a luxury of self-pity. Tides in her mind ebbed and flowed aimlessly as seaweed. Everything was hopeless and miserable. It was useless trying to be good; and she supposed Honor would never ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... of mind to speak, and my distemper was not of my wound. I had builded for this moment for two years, and now that it had come I was going to turn my back on it. More, I was going to refuse aid to a man who had succored me, had shown me genuine kindness. Self-pity is contemptible, but I ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... human atom in the howling white death about her but it passed quickly. She dreaded the physical suffering which experience told her would come when her body cooled and the wind penetrated her garments, yet there was no feeling of self-pity. It was all a part of the business and would come to any herder. The sheep were the chief consideration, and she never doubted but that she could endure ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... they were to have gone on their honeymoon; or he might strike further into Africa, and come back bronzed and worn with long marches and jungle fever, and with his hair prematurely white. He even considered himself, with great self-pity, returning and finding her married and happy, of course. And he enjoyed, in anticipation, the secret doubts she would have of her later choice when she heard on all sides praise of ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... quips and merry jests of Oscar Wilde, his artful artlessness, his insolence, his self-pity, his loyalty and fickleness, his sensuality and tenderness, only fill after all a small space in the heart's chamber of those who read him and stare at his ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... how foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of self-pity—and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... there swept changes of expression which Helen was not to forget. Anger and surprise contended together, widening her eyes and lips, and these were both overcome, after a struggle, by a revelation of self-pity not less amazing to the ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... pinch-beck Victorian Hamlet, suited our young friend, moreover, down to the ground. It offered sympathetic expression to his own nature and temperament; so that he wooed, scoffed, blasphemed, orated, drowned in salt seas of envy and self-pity, with a simulation of sincerity as convincing to others ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... white and shaken prisoner that the officer of the guard found when he entered the room at dawn. The man before him, his face streaked with tears of terror and self-pity, fell upon his knees before him, beseeching him to carry word to Peter of Blentz, that he was the king. The officer drew away with ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... know I don't claim to be any great moralist, Conward," he said, "and I have no pity for a gambler who deliberately sits in and gets stung. Consequently I am not troubled with any self-pity, nor any pity for you. And if you can get rid of our holdings to other gamblers I have nothing to say. But if it is to be loaded on to women who are investing the little savings of their lives—women like Bert Morrison and Mrs. Hardy—then I am ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... the accounts of every expedition, but more importance is attached to it as we approach the end of the Ninevite empire, when the kings were not so well able to endure hardship. Sennacherib mentions it on several occasions, with a certain amount of self-pity for the fatigue he had undergone, but with a real pride in his ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... not cruel," Deleah said; and then, quite unexpected by her, a sob rose in her throat, and it was all that she could do to keep the tears of self-pity back. "I am not cruel, but you so torment me. I want to be kind to you, but I do not want to hear about all this—which sounds so ridiculous to me. You are older than I am—you should know better. You should know how silly it is to talk to a girl like me such nonsense. And I want to go to ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... haunted thus; he only is free whose love for the human is so strong that he can pardon the individual sin; he alone can pray the prayer, "Forgive us our trespasses," out of a full heart. Forgiveness is the only cure of wrong. And hand in hand with Sense-of-injury walks ever the weak sister-demon Self-pity, so dear, so sweet to many—both of them the children of Philautos, not of Agape. But there was no hate, no revenge, in Godfrey, and, I repeat, his weakness he kept concealed. It must have been in his eyes, but eyes are hard to read. For the rest, his was a strong ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... in his arms with her tear-stained cheek against his heart, her eyes shut, and with that pathetic droop to her lips. Gently he tucked back the locks of hair that kept blowing across her forehead. Very tenderly, with a whimsical pretense at self-pity, he upbraided her for the trouble she ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... with a child of Nature like yourself would have given me the greatest joy. But—how shall I express my grief?" And here the old man struck a pathetically tragic attitude and drew out his handkerchief, weeping with a profound self-pity. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... it's very funny to set me afoot away off from everywhere—" Her voice quivered and broke from self-pity; her head ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... she is about the best woman for house-cleaning," said Harry, rather helplessly. He was so unaccustomed to even giving a thought to household details, that he had a vague sense of self-pity because he was now obliged to do so. His lost Abby occasionally, he believed, had employed this Mrs. Addix, but she had never troubled him ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... had never dreamed of allowing herself the luxury of self-pity: it seemed as much a personal right of Evelina's as her elaborately crinkled hair. But now she began to transfer to herself a portion of the sympathy she had so long bestowed on Evelina. She had at last recognized her right to set up some lost opportunities of her own; and once that ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... glaring light of noon that disclosed every crack and stain on the ugly brown walls. It was like the relentless light of his new revelation turned upon the stains and patches of his soul, dreary and terrible. Had the hour been twilight, some glamour of lost romance and self-pity might have fallen upon him like a violet veil, hiding the sordid truth; but he lacked the imagination with which artistic natures may shield themselves, and he saw things as they were. He even wandered momently from his own misery to reflect that he would have this room refitted and painted ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... had certainly been no coward—for his thigh was a cruel lump of pain which no human being would have kept so patiently to himself—became suddenly, like many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-pity; and when we smoothed and patted him and told him how sorry we were, it was laughable, and almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of moaning talk to us, as much as to say that he certainly ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... never did ye an ill turn 'at I ken o'!' said Phemy, and burst afresh into tears of self-pity and sense ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... words was no trace of rebellion or even of self-pity, but merely there was the dead weight and numbness of a hopeless resignation to make the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... Her moment of self-pity was gone in a flood of shamed indignation. She locked her hands round her knees and looked about her. "It is a beautiful world after all. And how near the beauty is to us; just over the fence and you are in the thick of it. Oh, but this ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... Meg and Bobby had so much to tell, and the twins were so interested and so full of self-pity to think that they couldn't go to school and find monkeys in the cloak room that Mother Blossom's piece ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... her wonder grew that instead of self-pity, repugnance, and deep dread, she should feel such a divine relief from the terror that ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... of a lifetime will be crowded into a moment in the memory of a drowning man, so a thousand things came flashing into Lloyd's mind. She saw the locust avenue all white and sweet in blossom time, and thought, with a strange thrill of self-pity, that she would never ride under its white arch again. Then she saw Betty's face on the pillow, as she had lain with bandaged eyes, telling in her tremulous little voice the story of the Road of the Loving Heart. Queerly enough, with that ...
— The Little Colonel's Hero • Annie Fellows Johnston
... others the throb of human agony and hope. In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform-for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not to frown and to speak clearly, just as my mother scolded us for not holding ourselves up. I can never remember seeing him indifferent, slack or idle in his life. He was as violent when he was dying as when he was living and quite without self-pity. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... and had proclaimed the duty of emigrating to Kansas to prevent it from becoming a slave state. Dave, it appeared, had taken up the idea zealously, and had persuaded her to go with him. Her story became pathetic in spite of her self-pity as she related the hardships of that settlement in the wilds, and described her loneliness, her shivering terror when her husband was away hauling logs for their first home, and news came that the ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... exercises, Helen de Vallorbes found existing circumstances excessively disturbing and disquieting. She was filled with an immense self-pity. She feared her health was failing. She became nervously sensible of her eight-and-twenty years, telling herself that her youth and the glory of it had departed. She wore black dresses, rolled bandages, pulled lint. Selecting Mary Magdalene ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... in her eyes then. The mood of self-pity induced by the King's reflections on left-handed gods had passed away. She looked fierce as a tigress when she shot out ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... trembled—they trembled with excitement, with self-pity, with anger. A penny? It was dreadful—dreadful to have to worry about a penny! But they had come to the point when one has to worry about pennies. Strange that her husband ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... him full in the face, "I mean to have Crothers in our firm." She saw the mingled liking and compassion which came in his eyes, and she bit her lip to keep down the wave of self-pity which arose in her. ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... this the tender sound of his own voice And sweet self-pity, or the fancy of it Made his eye moist; but Enid fear'd his eyes, Moist as they were, wine-heated from the feast; And answered with such craft as women use, Guilty or guiltless, to stave off a chance That breaks upon them ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... an excoriating brand of self-pity, "who am I that I should want a home for my daughter, now that she is grown? Mr. Kemble can treat his wife like a queen, but me—why, I'm mud under my ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... much in companionship, like his friendly intercourse with Phineas and Mo, that he found an anodyne, but in the consciousness of being magnetically affected by the crowd of his fellows. They offered him protection against himself. Whatever pangs of self-pity he felt, whatever wan little pleadings for the bit of fine porcelain compelled to a rough usage which vessels of coarser clay could disregard came lingeringly into his mind, he dared not express them to a living soul around. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... conscience—this being the test then being undergone by many men at the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Jimmie's conscience really was nothing like as strong as it ought to have been. Jimmie had moods of shameless self-pity, moods of desperate and agonizing doubt. He did not mean to let his dungeon-keepers know this, but they listened behind the door through a slot which the Tsar had had contrived for this purpose; it could be closed while the prisoner ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... and death by this incident, that the distress of her personal relations with Swithin was the single force in the world which could have coerced her into abandoning to him the interval she would fain have set apart for getting over these new and painful impressions. Self-pity for ill-usage afforded her good reasons for ceasing to love Sir Blount; but he was yet too closely intertwined with her past life to be destructible on the ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... self-pity. The self-pity loosened a little tail of hair which arose, rampant, from the exact middle of her crown. However, Kathryn lacked a mirror within range, and so she talked on quite as contentedly, despite the waving, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... later, of what he had brought on himself by mounting a moment earlier, was too much for him. Not a thought did he give to what might have happened to her had he come on the scene later; but, with all his cowardly soul laid bare, he rocked himself to and fro in a paroxysm of self-pity. ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Dick Maitland's position, and brought up amid refined surroundings, as he had been, would have regarded with horror and loathing such a situation as that in which he now found himself, and would have been overwhelmed with self-pity at the cruelly hard luck which forced them to herd with such uncongenial companions in such a pig sty of a place as the Concordia's forecastle just then presented; but Dick was something of a philosopher, ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... about me," she thought; and swept by an absurd emotion of self-pity, she kissed her own arms in the darkness to comfort herself, till her eyes, which never left his face, saw him turn warily ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... of a mood common to all young soldiers? Drew was just as sincere in writing his verses, and I put all the feeling I could into my tin-whistle interpretation of "The Minstrel Boy." What I want to make clear is, that a soldier's moods of self-pity are fleeting ones, and if he ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... to admit all that lay behind that strange coldness, and this desperate embrace; all the self-pity, and self-loathing, shame, rage, and longing of a married woman for the first time face to face with her lover ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... officer's voice lost its belligerent tone. He spoke as man to man, with no hint of self-pity. Young Carmody was honestly sorry. Here was a man who, in the act of giving him a friendly warning, had been felled by a brutal and unexpected blow. A hot blush of shame reddened his cheeks. He was about to speak but was interrupted by the voice of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... it, his name surrounded with a glamour of pathetic romance, as the sad widower with a mystery darkening his past and future. It was an agreeable gloom into which he fell. Self-pity warmed him and loosened his fierceness. He sighed with regret for his ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... rosy face was drawn into a decided pout, and her blue eyes were full of self-pity. She had to be sorry for her own grievance, because nobody else had either time or much inclination to sympathize; they were all far too much excited about ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... cruel, relentless aspects. Haas, with his weak, heavy face, stayed in Stanley's memory. An ordinary man might have tried again and won. But Haas was drunken with self-pity and the melancholy of his race. He would brood and suffer. Frank felt sorry for the man, and, somehow, ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... gosling might about life before it chips its egg. Take up their way of lamentation, and we shall find it an endless injustice to have to get up every morning and go to bed every night. Mrs. Porson wept, but never thought him or herself ill-used. And had she been low enough to indulge in self-pity, it would have been thrown away, for before she had time to wonder how she was to live and rear her children, she too was sent for. In this world she was not one of those mothers of little faith who trust God for themselves but not ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... a kind of agonized moan, and went lurching across the hall, spilling some wine from his glass. "And a man of my years, too!" he said, with an accent of self-pity. ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... hysterically. 'And you believe that you understand women! Do you think war appals us? Do you think because we may shed tears that it is from self-pity? Rubbish! There are thousands of us to-night who could ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... horribly, sometimes, this stone-cold silence, this walking always in shadowed paths without a ray of light, without the certainty of arriving anywhere, though he plod onward for a lifetime—and the old feeling of savage resentment, the old sense of self-pity—the surest thing on God's earth to blaze a trail for the oncoming of the worst that is in a man—bit at the soul of him and touched him ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... dropped behind suddenly realising my pariahdom. I wondered whether these magnificent beings would be ashamed of my company when we arrived at Chambery. I pictured myself sitting lonesome with Narcisse in the market-place while they revelled in their splendour, and the self-pity ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... he realised the little picture of himself wandering about with nobody to care for him, no lessons; for the first time in his life forbidden to dart into his mother's room at any moment, with a rush against the door, in full certainty that there could never be a time when she did not want him. Self-pity is very strong and very simple in a child, and to see, as it were, a little picture in his mind of a little boy, shut out from his mother, and wanted by no one, was more poignant still than the reality. ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... grief and wanhope might not rend his heart and slay him then and there, and lest all the deeds whereto he was fated should be spoiled and undone, self-pity fell upon him with the sweet remembrance of his love, and loosed the well of his tears, and he wept and wept, and might not be satiated of his mourning a long while. But when the night was yet dark and no sign of dawn ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... was uppermost in him as he sat outside the thatched cottage in the moonlight, while the wake was within, was not grief at his wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life, so carefully laid out not twelve months before, was disoriented; not any self-pity; not any grievance against God, such as little men might have: but a strange dumb wonder. There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay sister, her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six guttering candles were about her, and women droned their prayers with ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... it as I ought, for I shall feel it too intimately to be able to utter it. I was last night repeating a paragraph to myself, which I took to be an expression of rage, and in the middle of the sentence there was a stroke of self-pity which quite unmanned me. Be pleased, Sir, to print this letter, that when I am oppressed in this manner at such an interval, a certain part of the audience may not think I am out; and I hope with this allowance, to do it with satisfaction.—I am, Sir, your ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... its long continuing and evil results. Lives are wrecked, brains shattered, happiness destroyed by this monstrous evil, and many a man and woman fastens it upon himself, herself, through indulging in anxious thought, or by yielding to that equal devil-dragon of self-pity. ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... wrote both the finale of the Fifth symphony and the slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries' Ride and the motherhood theme in "Siegfried," Handel "Worthy is the Lamb" and "Waft her, angels"; while your little malicious musical Mimes are absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and impressive structure. And if Mozart is tenderest of all the musicians, Handel comes very close to him. The world may, ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... of self-pity relaxed me and I immediately went to bed. Since my main job now was waiting, I could wait ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... dress himself with some expedition. An accident, and to a forestiere! There would be money in this case. He regretted his lost sleep less now and cursed no more, though he thought of the ride up into the mountains with a good deal of self-pity. It was no joke to be a badly paid Sicilian doctor, he thought, as he tugged at his trousers buttons, and fastened the white front that covered the breast of his flannel shirt, and adjusted the cuffs which he took out of a small drawer. Without lighting a candle ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... fancy, though I may be as mistaken in this as I am in a good many other things, that most journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors. When an author is once warm in the saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is different: they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no longer the image ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... touch of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do those who indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly, as a horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before she recovered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... drove Penelope out for the second time that night may he readily appreciated. Its foundation was fear; its subordinate emotions were shame, self-pity and consciousness of her real feeling toward the man of the house. The true spirit of womanhood revolted ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... capacity to use the arts of her sex; capable of any wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked; but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,—in everything visible and audible,—the ideal of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... with all her power to make her life lovable and fair, and the beginning of all good is action, for in this warfare they who would win must struggle. Hitherto, since Martha's death, she had found in nascent, indolent self-pity the choicest of luxuries. Now she had abandoned this position and with courage and resolve was devoting herself to her husband and her house. Unfortunately, there were circumstances in John's special business cares that gave an appearance ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... wiping the sweat and dust from the forehead his mother had been so motherly proud of, and hear the heavy sigh with which he would sink in the not too easy chair that was all his haven after the tossing of the day's weary groundswell. He did not rise quite above self-pity; he thought he was hardly dealt with; but so long as he did not respond to the foolish and weakening sentiment by relaxation of effort, it could not do him much harm; he would soon grow out of it, and learn to despise it. ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... close the door on a golden opportunity for developing her greatest talent, and the young person's first dream of freedom and a fascinating career had come to grief. As she reviewed her disappointment and the dreary days that followed, a flood of self-pity welled up in the girl's heart, and she felt as if she must do something desperate to quiet ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... it. The boatmen of Ulysses faced the thunder and the sunshine alike with frolic welcome. We modern sailors have grown more sensitive. The sunshine scorches us, the rain chills us. We meet both with loud self-pity. ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... glimpse just as she and Hank were climbing the side of the gulley to the road. It was a glimpse that shocked him out of his youthful self-pity and stood him face to face with a very real hurt. They were climbing in plain sight, and so close to him that he could hear Hank's drawling voice telling Marion that she was a cute one, all right; he'd have ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... second touch of kindness Gibbie had received since he was the dog's guest: had he been acquainted with the bastard emotion of self-pity, he would have wept; as he was unaware of hardship in his lot, discontent in his heart, or discord in his feeling, his emotion was one of unmingled delight, and embodied itself in a ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... not walk between them. They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers, and along the transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship's bow be turned toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a state of self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from which hunger nor nausea nor aching bones ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... never felt so lonely in his life as he did this evening in the moving throng. He fancied that everybody was looking at him compassionately as he made his solitary way through the crowd, and almost gave way to self-pity. He would have liked to talk to the first comer, for the mere pleasure of hearing his voice, for in his loneliness he felt as if he were walking by the side of a stranger. And now his conscience smote him. He remembered the waiter Gustav, who had ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... with a mouth and lower jaw as hard and uncompromising as those of a skull. His eyes, which were strangely brilliant and young-looking, peered suspiciously from under ragged white eyebrows. But when they fell upon the doctor, the eyes became suddenly credulous, pleading, filled with self-pity. ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... changing from cold indifference to the most severe disdain, stung me into self-pity for my stupidity in having sought her. My anger was not against her, but against Pickering, who had, I persuaded myself, always blocked ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... and love alone—chaste, supersensuous, but purely human and exclusive love. No suggestion of national inspiration; no broad human sympathies; no echo of the oppressed ones' cry; no stern challenge of wrong; only a hopeless, undying love, and an unspeakable self-pity. He wasn't even a lyre; he was a pipe for Fortune's finger to sound what stop she pleased; and, judging from the tone of his playing, and the selection of his songs, it had pleased that irresponsible goddess to attune the chords of his ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... proportion that it exceeded both the other sensations. He had said very bitterly to Joan that she had broken his dream, but, because it had been broken, it none the less had the power to hurt intolerably. Each fragment throbbed with a hot sense of injustice and self-pity. He had not the slightest idea what to do with himself: every prospect seemed equally distasteful. He walked, to begin with, furiously and rather aimlessly down in the direction of the Embankment. The exercise, such as it was, dulled his senses and quieted a little ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... was convincing, but Juliet drooped visibly. The bent little figure on the blanket was pathetic, but the twins were not given to self-pity. As time went on, the conversation lagged. They had both had a hard day, from more than one standpoint, and it was not surprising that by midnight, the self-appointed sentries were sound asleep upon one blanket, with Romeo's coat ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... to feel relief. In dragging the will from its hiding-place he had put behind him the most difficult part of his adventure; the final ceremony of replacing it in the safe was a matter only of minutes. With self-satisfaction Jimmie smiled; in self-pity he sighed miserably. For, when those same minutes had passed, again he would be an exile. As soon as he had set his house in order, he must leave it, and once more upon the earth become a ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... with his arm over his eyes. The rain fell endlessly, rattling on the roof of the car, dancing silver in the coffee-coloured puddles of the road. Their boredom fell into the rhythm of crooning self-pity ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... he was on the point of breaking down, but he commanded himself, bravely dismissing the self-pity roused by her compassion. "How can I help but be?" ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... not keep, and the efficient ones would not stay with her. So the burden of the home fell heavily on her, and, pulling her martyr's crown close down on her head, she worked feverishly. When she was not working she was bemoaning her sad lot, and indulging in large drafts of self-pity. The holidays she spent were in sanatoriums and hospitals, but ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... watching for Milton and seeing the merry students in procession up the walk. The girls seemed so bright and so beautiful, he wondered how the boys could walk beside them with such calm unconcern. Their laughter, their mutual greetings threw him into a profound self-pity and disgust. When he joined Milton and Shepard, and went up the walk under the bare-limbed maple trees, he shivered with fear. They all seemed perfectly at home, with ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... life can be lived no longer with honour is greatness indeed; but to die because life galls and wearies and is hard to pursue—there is no greatness in that? It is the suicide's plea for his own self-pity. You live under tyranny, corruption, dynastic lies hard to bear, despotic enemies hard to bear, I know. But you forget—what all followers of your creed ever forget—that without corruption, untruth, weakness, ignorance in a nation itself, such ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... man for um's breakfast? Oh, a nice little Christian man will get um's thorn out for um; and then um shall eat the nice Christian man and the nice Christian man's nice big tender wifey pifey. (The lion responds by moans of self-pity). Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, now (taking the paw in his hand) um is not to bite and not to scratch, not even if it hurts a very, very little. Now make velvet paws. That's right. (He pulls gingerly at the thorn. The lion, with an angry yell of pain, jerks back his ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... of anger had now been replaced by self-pity. His red, loose-jowled face was sagging and his eyes became watery as he said, "At least you could have double-checked it. As a member of this Bureau you only have to fill out the forecast once every ten days. Is that so hard? Is there any reason why you should ...
— Summer Snow Storm • Adam Chase
... remember her?" she asked them, and her voice trembled with a half-genuine sort of self-pity, as if, for a moment, she imagined ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... Editha in the darkness which she felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... thought of you as one to be some day mine. I see now how foolish I have been. I will put the sea between us; and I hope my boat will go to the bottom; and then perhaps you will be sorry." ... And in the fervour of self-pity he ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... myself the ugly duckling of Andersen's fairy-tale, and every morning on waking I would run straight to my glass and try to persuade myself that the feathers of the swan were beginning at last to show themselves." Miss Ramsbotham laughed, a genuine laugh of amusement, for of self-pity not a trace was ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... a spasm of involuntary self-pity. After dinner I returned for news of Madame de Mortsauf, who was already better. If such were the joys of marriage, if such scenes were frequent, how could she survive them long? What slow, unpunished murder was this? During that day I understood ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... and throbbed, her arm ached where Jude had crushed the tender flesh. She leaned against the tree that had added to her pain, and wept miserably for very self-pity. She was downed and beaten. After all she was to be like the rest ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... would have to thaw him out before they buried him. He fancied he saw himself frozen in a grotesque position. There would be ice-crystals in the very centre of his heart, that heart that had glowed so fiercely with the lust of life. Yes, life was sweet. A vast self-pity surged over him. Well, he had done his best; ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... that it was over, her busy life. She was at the end of her tether, must lose her power and the sense of it. She was to begin the world again, starting with her fifty pounds, and without that which had made it a pride before. With a little shiver of self-pity, a half-sigh and a tightening of the lips, she accepted her fate. That was ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... evening, almost twilight, when he made his way home at last. As he neared the scene of action, the tired man condoled with himself over the untimely excitement that awaited him. He said to himself with pathetic self-pity that it was hard indeed for a man who had earned a little repose to go in upon all the troubles of another man's family. He had denied himself—he had not undertaken upon his own shoulders that pleasing burden; and now what was he to be saddled with?—the burden without the consolation—the ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... and falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin, experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation—the sensation, not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is God's holiness against which he has transgressed; and that feeling finds utterance age after age in the agonised cry, "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... ran into each other, impersonal and unselfish days. The story of Margaret's individual life was marking time; but if her romance was arrested, her sympathies were expanding. It was impossible for her to be dull, and she did not allow herself to be sad. Freddy's example forbade self-pity or repining. ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp-light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of strong self-pity—and I ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... a poor devil to think? You blow hot and cold all in a breath. I'm sick and ill and feverish," he continued with self-pity, "and now even you find me a trouble. I wish to God they'd shoot me and make an end. I'm sure it would ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... pipe-stems, and the flood and rush of the sunlit air dazzled him. He squatted by the white wall, the mind rummaging among the incidents of the long dooli journey, the lama's weaknesses, and, now that the stimulus of talk was removed, his own self-pity, of which, like the sick, he had great store. The unnerved brain edged away from all the outside, as a raw horse, once rowelled, sidles from the spur. It was enough, amply enough, that the spoil of the kilta was away—off his hands—out ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling |
