"Unforgivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... involves of itself no inconsiderable call on the tale-telling faculties. That the writers pay little or no attention to chronological and other possibilities is hardly much to say against them; if this be an unforgivable sin it is not clear how either Dickens or Thackeray is to escape damnation, with Sir Walter to greet them ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Hazlitt was consciously the aggressor, but his attacks were never wanton. He denounced Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey because they were renegades from the cause which lay nearest to his heart. Their apostasy was an unforgivable offence in his eyes, and his wrath was proportioned to the admiration which he otherwise entertained for them. It is true that he treated their motives hastily and unjustly, but none of his opponents set him the example of charity. In the earlier years of their acquaintance ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Molly, I think it's only fit for sick folks myself; but I suppose, as the saying is, we must eat by the card;" at which everybody laughed good-naturedly, her worried feeling wore off, and she began to think it would not, perhaps, be an unforgivable offence if one of them did commit a ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... appearance the novel suffered, perhaps deservedly, for what was involved in these intentions—for its quality of unexpectedness in particular—that unforgivable sin in the critic's sight—the immediate precursor of 'Ethelberta' having been a purely rural tale. Moreover, in its choice of medium, and line of perspective, it undertook a delicate task: to excite interest in a drama—if such a dignified word ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Margot! That was it, was it? An unforgivable offence. He lives up in the clouds, my dear; compared with him, you and I are miserable little earth-worms crawling about the ground. It will take some time before he is even aware of our presence. We will have to make friends with the ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... every brave man; the behest of all his clear insight into this Universe, the message of Heaven through him, which he could not suppress, but was inspired and compelled to utter in this world by such methods as he had. There for him lay the first commandment; this is what it would have been the unforgivable sin to swerve from and desert: the treason of treasons for him, it were there; compared with which all other ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... people, although if she would, she could exterminate them with her wit. And some could so easily be spared. It seems, too, that she is great enough to be a target, so she is under fire continually. This, while it causes her exquisite suffering, is from no fault of her own—save the unforgivable one of being original. "A frog spat at a glow-worm. 'Why do you spit at me?' said the glow-worm. 'Why do you shine so?' said the frog." And as to Percival—the man I used to know was Percival in embryo. He is maturing now, and is radiant ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... searching glance even her brazen face fell. Six months previously that creature had stolen Wilkins, the best cook I ever had. Mere man may not understand the enormity of this offence; but every woman knows there is no crime more heinous, more despicable, more unforgivable. She might find it in her heart to condone larceny, think lightly of arson, or even excuse murder; but there is not one who would extend even a deathbed pardon to the person who had robbed her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... smiled at him serenely. "I would not bury myself with you in an Ionian island for more than two months in a year for anything on earth. On my part, it would be the unforgivable sin. No woman has the right, however much she loves him, to ruin a man, any more than a man has the right to ruin a woman. But if you won't marry me, I'm perfectly willing to spend two months a year in an Ionian ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... do know about each other's souls, which is more than can be said of most men and women acquainted for half a lifetime. As for our pasts, you haven't had one, and I—well, if I swear to you that I've never murdered anybody, or been in prison, or committed an unforgivable crime, will ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... man! For the first time in his guileless life Septimus met it face to face. To read of human depravity in the police reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life is another. It horrified him. Mordaunt Prince had committed the unforgivable sin. He had stolen a girl's love, and basely, meanly, he had slunk off, deceiving her to the last. To Septimus the lover who kissed and rode away had ever appeared a despicable figure of romance. The fellow who did it in real life proclaimed himself an unconscionable ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... an adversary's pony is the unforgivable sin," he cried, smiling at her, and she hastily averted her eyes, having discovered an unnerving similarity ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... and after committing some unforgivable offense against the United States, Running Bear rallied his young men, and they fled the reservation and the ways and protection of the white men, and took to the mountains, where they lived by raiding the ranches in the neighborhood, and maintaining a sort of defensive ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... grant your powers of forgiveness may never be put to the test!" he ejaculated fervently. "The one unforgivable sin according to our Lord, is treachery;—may THAT never come ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Never was seen such headlong eagerness in pursuit of an object that could not possibly be attained; never was heard such a tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping,—as if one end of the ridiculous brute's body were at deadly and most unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round about went the cur; and faster and still faster fled the unapproachable brevity of his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of rage and animosity; until, utterly ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... have been little heeded had I given it. Max was not one in whose heart hatred could thrive, but every man should have a just sense of injury received, and no one should leave all vengeance to God. In Max's heart this sense was almost judicial. The court of his conscience had convicted Calli of an unforgivable crime, and he felt that it was his God-appointed duty to carry out ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... sweet temper which were natural to her, excused herself, went to her room, and cried half the night. It was not the shame of having been forcibly kissed that sickened her of herself, but the unforgettable, unforgivable fact that toward the last of that furious kissing she had found a certain low feline pleasure in the kisses. She wished that she might die, or, infinitely better, that she had ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... sat down by the bunk, after she had given Maigan a big feed of oats, with a small remnant of the bacon grease. She felt humbled now, as if her accusations constituted some unforgivable, despicable sin. This man had never intended to do her the slightest harm. He really never knew that she was coming. And through her stupid clumsiness his life was now ebbing. The doctor's long words sounded dreadfully in her ears: general sepsis, blood poisoning, ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... chaste, the other in love, both equally educated and large-minded, are estimating the same thing: one judges as disgusting, odious, revolting, and bestial what the other judges to be delicious, exquisite, ineffable, divine. What, for one, is in Christian phraseology, an unforgivable sin, is, for the other, the state of true grace. Acts that for one seem a sad and occasional necessity, stains that must be carefully effaced by long intervals of continence, are for the other the golden nails from ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... by the consciousness of unforgivable blaspheming, he rose with set face, lit his ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... is called for, it is necessary. Therefore let us work and faint not; remembering that though it be natural, and therefore excusable, amidst doubtful times to feel doubts of success oppress us at whiles, yet not to crush those doubts, and work as if we had them not, is simple cowardice, which is unforgivable. No man has any right to say that all has been done for nothing, that all the faithful unwearying strife of those that have gone before us shall lead us nowhither; that mankind will but go round and round in a circle for ever: no man has a right to say ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... come away with me.' I cannot trust myself to a love which has no standard of right and wrong. We look at it from different points of view. You see only the man and his temptation. I knew the priceless treasure of the love; therefore the sin against that love seems to me unforgivable." ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... everyday a matter, or as something so far removed from human affairs as to be mysterious and remote to a child. To mix Old and New Testament indiscriminately, as, for example, by taking them on alternate days, is unforgivable, and no teacher who has studied the Bible seriously could do so, if she cared about the religious training of her children, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... regarded himself and wished to be regarded as a man with a mission, having a clear idea how things were not to be done. There were Civil Service Reform Protectionists and Civil Service Reform Free Traders. There were a few politicians, who were discovered to be spoilsmen, the unforgivable sin, and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... wherein he dreamily celebrated the superiority of "friendship"! The sleep-walker had wakened to bitter knowledge of love and life, finding himself a failure in both. He had made a burnt offering of his dreams, and the sacrifice had been an unforgivable hurt to Mary. All that was left for him was the work he had not chosen, but at least he would not fail in that, though it was indeed no more than "dust in his mouth." If there had been anything ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... boy muttered. "I have read that somewhere, and it comes home to me. Failure is the one unforgivable sin. If I have to commit every other crime in the decalogue, I will at ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... or Saturday unnecessarily;" not confessing and communing at Easter, a mortal sin which "deprives one of the grace of God and merits eternal punishment" as well as "to slay and to steal something of value." For all these crimes, unforgivable in themselves, there is but one pardon, the absolution given by the priest, that is to say, confession beforehand, itself being one of the observances to which we are bound by strict obligation and at the very least once ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... declared affection of his brain), which prevented him from saying exactly what he wished in a connected manner; and the results of this are in part evident in the book. But it must always remain a blot, quite unforgivable and nearly inexplicable, on the memory of Wilson, that 'Christopher North' permitted himself to comment on some lapses in logic and style in a way which would have been rather that side of good manners and reasonable criticism in the case of a mere beginner in letters. ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the stenographic report, was in excellent form, and committed a good deal of unforgivable syntax. He was somewhat apprehensive when he saw the bill of fare inscribed "Ye Olde Chop House," for he asserts that the use of the word "Ye" always involves extra overhead expense—and a quotation from Shakespeare on the back of the menu, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... forgot the new and unforgivable grudge I had against him now. I forgot his very hand across my mouth, even before he paid me the compliment of removing it. There was the only girl in all the world: I had eyes and brains for no one and for nothing else. She had neither seen nor ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... Durdlebury might possibly have regarded that time-worn wonder of spiritual beauty merely as a stepping-stone to higher sacerdotal things. Such a man, he considered, having once come under the holy glamour of the cathedral, would have been guilty of the Unforgivable Sin. He had ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... was returning from his father's house to the Mission with equally mixed emotions. He knew he had dealt an almost unforgivable blow to those beloved parents whom he had honored and obeyed from his babyhood. Once he almost turned back. Then a vision arose of a fair young English girl whose unhappy childhood he had learned of years ago, a sweet, homeless face of great beauty, lips that were made ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... and only cared for old pictures—the National Gallery, and all that; and read no novels but French—Balzac and George Sand—and that only for practice for he was a singularly pure young man, the purest in all Cambridge, and in those days I thought him a quite unforgivable prig. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... unutterable bitterness he saw a darkness of mood that could not have been caused by her present weak and feverish state. She hated the life she had led, that she probably had been compelled to lead. She had suffered some unforgivable wrong at the hands of Oldring. With that conviction Venters felt a shame throughout his body, and it marked the rekindling of fierce anger and ruthlessness. In the past long year he had nursed resentment. He had hated the wilderness—the ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... sent with marvellous promptitude and courtesy to put his services at my disposal, as did many other great folk of his station; for they all agreed in blessing my hands, [1] judging that Pompeo had done me too great and unforgivable an injury, and marvelling that I had put up with ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... step could have been taken. It immediately stamped the socialists as wilful destroyers of the unity of labor. To the trade unionists, yet fresh from the ordeal of the struggle against the Knights of Labor, the action of the socialists was an unforgivable crime. All the bitterness which has characterized the fight between socialist and anti-socialist in the Federation verily goes back to this gross miscalculation by DeLeon of the psychology of the trade union movement. DeLeon, on his part, attributed the action ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... Indeed, Marishka sat leaning forward looking at him appealingly, aware that after all here was the only prop she had to lean upon in this extremity. She did not speak. The wrong he had done her and Austria was great—unforgivable, but the merit of his service in this situation was unmistakable. Inimical as he might be to the sentiments in her heart, there was no disguising the relief his presence gave her or the confidence that radiated from ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... that reflection did anything for him now. As he opened his eyes, one at a time, he thought of Boyd. Once, long ago, ages and ages ago, he had had to wake Boyd up, and he recalled how rough he had been about it. That had been unforgivable. ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Ellison, son and brother, and they had blotted him out of their lives by destroying all physical signs of him. There was something inhuman in the deliberateness of it, something unforgivable. ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... better. Both cold and wind were more severe and a bitter hail beat upon them. It was obvious that Areskoui did not yet forgive, although it must surely be a sin of ignorance, of omission and not of commission, with the equal certainty that a sin of such type could not be unforgivable for all time. ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was the practice of the Jesuits to stir up strife in families, to resort to espionage, to abuse the confessional, to make the Seminary priests their puppets, and to deny the king's right to license the brandy trade. What seemed to the Jesuits an unforgivable affront was Frontenac's charge that they cared more for beaver skins than for the conversion of the savages. This {55} they interpreted as an insult to the memory of their martyrs, and their resentment must have been the greater ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... their own, and do not consider that it is in the least necessary to interfere with the practice of others, or even to disapprove of it. And then comes the perennial difficulty of schoolboy honour; the one unforgivable offence is to communicate anything to masters; and an innocent-minded boy whose natural inclination to purity gave way before perpetual temptation and even compulsion might be thought to have erred, but would have ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the bottom of my heart," he said, "for a breach of good behaviour which really was unforgivable. I was angry when I should have been grateful. Much that you have said is true. Because it is true, I ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... and others mysteriously sardonic. Young officers were warned kindly by their more experienced comrades not to stare openly at the colonel's scar. But indeed an officer need have been very young in his profession not to have heard the legendary tale of that duel originating in a mysterious, unforgivable offence. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... thing to do, you say?—when at a word I might have had all the help I needed in guarding the pay-money? No; it wasn't altogether foolhardiness; it was partly weakness. For, twist and turn it as I might, there was always the unforgivable thing at the end: the fact that by calling in help and betraying Dorgan to others, I, once his prison-mate, and even now, like him—though in a lesser degree—a law-breaker, would become a "snitch," ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... incorrigible snob, and he decided that a young lady who earned her own living was not a fit theatrical associate for the patrician daughters of successful soap-boilers and pork-packers, thereby offering an unforgettable and unforgivable affront to all the legions of labor. I do not approve of Miss Whitney's sale of her photo to a cigarette firm; but I do say that the act is infinitely more excusable than the practice among high-fly society women of paying for the ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of Jesus toward sex offenders, and his permission to divorce, must seem like mistakes to churchmen who consider extramarital sex relations the unforgivable sin. And everyone must see the danger of having our judges adopt as a principle of justice the dismissal of offenders on the ground that ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... take his Master's degree, but he had no foreign language. Three terrible, wicked, unforgivable professors assured him that, if he could be in Germany six weeks during summer vacation, he could get enough German to pass the examination for the A.M. We believed them, and he went; though of all the partings we ever had, that ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... community the dumb brutes were almost as well known as the human inhabitants. The meaning was wholly plain to him too, and the term did not apply to the horse's color. Yellow, on the frontier, means just one thing: the most damning and unforgivable thing of all. When one is yellow he gives up easily, he dares not lift his arms to fight, and the wilderness claims him quickly. "There's a little creek with a bad mudhole just this side of the ford," Bill went on. "All the horses got through but Baldy, and he could ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... one of those unforgivable small offences which, in our civilized state, produce the social vendettas and dramas that, with savage nations, spring from the spilling of blood. Instead of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, we demand a nerve for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... affair, Jervis," Thorndyke said at length, in an ominously quiet and even gentle tone. "A sordid, callous, cold-blooded crime of a type that is to me utterly unforgivable and incapable of extenuation. Of course, it may have failed. Mr. Graves may even now be alive. I shall make it my very especial business to ascertain whether he is or not. And if he is not, I shall take it to myself as a sacred duty ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... certainly the devil! And with the feeling that to waste this swift-travelling commodity was unforgivable folly, he took up his brush. But it was no use; he could not concentrate his eye—besides, the light was going. 'I'll go up to town,' he thought. In the hall a ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... overthrown but never conquered principle of light. The bitter generalizations of this afterthought explain Sufficiently why it was excluded. To the later Strindberg—the man who wrote Advent, for instance—it must have seemed one of his most unforgivable offences. ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... worried her, too, that the face he was putting on their little holiday together was not quite as full as she could have wished—though the last thing in the world she could tolerate were really fat cheeks, those signs of all that her stoicism abhorred, those truly unforgivable marks of the loss of 'form.' He struck her as dreadfully silent, too, and she would rack her brains for subjects that would interest him, often saying to herself: 'If only I were clever!' It was natural he should think of dear Nedda, but ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Consuello's name had never been mentioned between them since the night that Mrs. Gallant had displayed her antipathy for her. He realized also that his mother would not be able to comprehend why Consuello met him in Gibson's absence and would probably consider it an unforgivable ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... discover them for himself, and thus at last be able to take action. The Countess was flushed with triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent—and Madame von Platen could not, being what she was, and having seen what she had seen, conceive it innocent—it was in an Electoral Princess an unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view, which none would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in the face, hurried off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen following. He came too late, despite ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... reading me aright, How a mere bragging was my purity. But now to pardon askt, I must add thanks.— I had forgot Manasses! Even love Was driven forth of me by these loud mouths! Whether in death he waits for me, I know not; But it had been an unforgivable thing To have made this the end; not to have gone To death as unto spousals, leaving life As one sets down a work faithfully done, And knows oneself by service justified, Worthy of love, whether love be or not. But, soiled with detestation, to have thrown Fiercely aside the garment ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... part of the thigh, by far the least seriously wounded of all in the ward, who never failed with his unending requests to the patient orderlies and his eternal complainings, until a public dressing-down from me brought him to heel. And Glover who wept that I had lost his bullet, that unforgivable carelessness in a surgeon that allows a bullet, removed at an operation, to be thrown away with ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... fiendish light in her eye—a light of such desperate satisfaction as betokened one gladly driven to commit the unforgivable Sissy moved toward the sensitive-plant in ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... believe," said Winter. "They disagreed, and she divorced him, thinking he would remain poor. The whirligig of time changed their relative positions, and to a jealous-minded woman that was unforgivable." ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... chanced, was a man of long experience with wild animals, in one of the chief zoological parks of the country. Long familiarity, however, had given him that most dangerous gift, contempt. And he had lost his position through that fault most unforgivable in an animal keeper, drunkenness. Owing to this fact, the inexperienced authorities of this little "Zoo" had been able to obtain his services at a comparatively moderate wage—and were congratulating themselves on ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... the digressions of attorneys and where they may wander on and on, apparently merely to display their oratory to their clients, and other courts where the undoubtedly bad manners of the bench to the bar are unforgivable. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... the world of reality is very different from make-believe, and a terrible thing. To the child—deception in regard to real things, whatever excuses adults may put forward in its defence, is well-nigh unforgivable. To be one who never says "it is" when it is not, nor "it will be" when it will not be—that is to be a friend on whom a child rests in ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... at the delicate attention paid her, but Oliver's eyes, the scribe is ashamed to say, were not fixed on the particular pair of green blinds that concealed this adorable young lady, certainly not with any desire to break through their privacy. One of the unforgivable sins—nay, one of the impossible sins—about Kennedy Square would have been to have recognized a lady who looked, even during the daytime, out from a bedroom window: much less at night. That was why Sue ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Mr. Keith. "That is what you young poets want. At present you are too unperplexed and glib. Suffering! It would enlarge your repertoire; it would make you more human, individual, and truthful. What is the unforgivable sin in poetry? Lack of candour. How shall there be candour if the poet lacks worldly experience? Suffering! That is what you people want. It would ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... find anything to be said for his, but then she didn't try to, it was so manifestly unforgivable. All she could do, faced by this bitter sorrow, was to leave Edward to God. Sternly, as he flung out of the room at last, unsoftened, untouchable, deaf to her even when she used the tone he had always obeyed the tone of authority, she said to herself she must leave her ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... ought not to have said a thing like that. It was unforgivable. But you do talk like an idiot. How on earth can one make mistakes in breeding? Oh, you and I talk different languages, that's all, and it's not any use at all trying to think and ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the door of dreams, and was walking in a vision, a living man among the blessed dead. Would it be right for him to go with them into the heavenly city? Would it not be a deception, a desecration, a deep and unforgivable offense? The strange, confusing question had no reason in it, as he very well knew; for if he was dreaming, then it was all a dream; but if his companions were real, then he also was with them in reality, and if they had died then he must have died too. Yet he could not rid his mind of the sense ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... sacred faith in the British Empire is still kept passionately alive. And, at all events, Charlie Webster may truly be said to have one article of faith—the glory of the British Empire. To him, therefore, the one unforgivable sin is treason against that; as probably to die for England—after having notched a good account of her enemies on his unerring rifle—would be for him not merely a crown of glory, but the purest and completest joy that could ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... Cable's generation are as jealous of their retirement as was the brave old man Poquelin; and to have it invaded by a young American who not only threw their pictures upon his canvas, but standing behind it, reproduced their eccentricities of speech for applauding Northern audiences, was a crime unforgivable in their moral code. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... reminding herself, it seemed, of Lawford Tapp's most glaring faults. Improvidence and a hopeless leaning toward extravagance were certainly unforgivable blemishes in the character of a young man in the ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... reproved us for bad manners, or for being unkind to other children, or selfish, or affected, or oafish, or sulky. Her direst thunders, however, were kept for anything which approached ill-breeding. Giving ourselves airs, or "posing," or any other form of juvenile vulgarity, were well-nigh unforgivable sins. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... say the least, not have hinted that they were "little better than drivelling." But I do not think that when Jeffrey wrote these things, or when he actually perpetrated such almost unforgivable phrases as "stuff about dancing daffodils," he was speaking away from his sincere conviction. On the contrary, though partisanship may frequently have determined the suppression or the utterance, the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... lived. It was a heavenly place in which there was no marrying or giving in marriage, a sexless quiet windless place where mankind lived in a state of bliss. For some unknown reason mankind had been thrown out of that place, had been thrown down upon the earth. It was a punishment for an unforgivable sin, the ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Nor leave him though in flames below— God help me in his fire!" So in the South; vain every plea 'Gainst Nature's strong fidelity; True to the home and to the heart, Throngs cast their lot with kith and kin, Foreboding, cleaved to the natural part— Was this the unforgivable sin? These noble spirits are yet yours to win. Shall the great North go Sylla's way? Proscribe? prolong the evil day? Confirm the curse? infix the hate? ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... certain side of Public School life, he realised how easily he could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same; no one would think worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would turn round upon him; that was the one unforgivable sin—to be found out. But it was rarely that anyone was caught; and the descent was so easy. In his excitement he might ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... and his staff were entertained at Masterly palaces. The latter affairs pained Prince Trevannion excessively—hours on end of gorging uninspired cooking and guzzling too-sweet wine and watching ex-slave performers whose acts were either brutal or obscene and frequently both, and, more unforgivable, stupidly so. The Masterly conversation ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... whether it would be unforgivable to dash quickly out and slam the door behind him. But in the next breath escape was forgotten and he was looking about him in sheer amazement. Here was his hallway, but no longer empty. A shield-backed chair stood beside the parlor door. A settle ran along the wall beyond. A pink-cheeked moon ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... heart so radically and finally set against God that no power which God can consistently use will ever save it.' 'The sin, therefore, can only be the culmination of a long course of self-hardening and depraving.' It is unforgivable, because the soul which can recognise God's revelation of Himself in all His goodness and moral perfection, and be stirred only to hatred thereby, has reached a dreadful climax of hardness, and has ceased to be capable of being influenced ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... phrenologists. They speak and write with ineffable profundity about the "criminal" ear, the "criminal" thumb, the "criminal" glance. They gain access to gaols and pester unfortunate prisoners with callipers and cameras, and quite unforgivable prying into personal and private matters, and they hold out great hopes that by these expedients they will evolve at last a "scientific" revival of the Kaffir's witch- smelling. We shall catch our criminals by anthropometry ere ever a criminal thought has entered their brains. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... with Pink and the Silent One at his heels. He had forgotten that Harry Conroy ever had a sister of any sort whatsoever. All he knew was that Harry had done him much wrong, of the sort which comes near to being unforgivable, and that he had sneered insults that no man may overlook. All he thought of was to get his hands ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... not even known that he was coming down last night. And worst and most unforgivable of all, she had not been told that Make-Way-There was ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... scaffolding of the skiff landing at Walnut Log, and being themselves far overtaken in liquor and vainglorious with a bogus alcoholic substitute for courage, the brothers had accused him, wantonly and without proof, of running their trot-line and stripping it of the hooked catch—an unforgivable sin among the water dwellers and the shanty boaters of the South. Seeing that he bore this accusation in silence, only eyeing them steadfastly, they had been emboldened then to slap his face, whereupon he turned and gave them both the beating of their lives—bloodying their noses and bruising ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... every fiber of Hardy's gaunt frame. He was losing his temper, and he was wise enough to know that that would never do. The unforgivable sin was to lose control of oneself. He must hold on to his voice, his movements; but a nest of hornets, under attack, could not have been angrier. "I protest!" he said, as calmly as he could. "Here I been settin' around waitin' for this place ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... is simplicity of heart and life; that one's relations with others should be direct and not diplomatic; that power leaves a bitter taste in the mouth; that meanness, and hardness, and coldness are the unforgivable sins; that conventionality is the mother of dreariness; that pleasure exists not in virtue of material conditions, but in the joyful heart; that the world is a very interesting and beautiful place; that congenial ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had found himself at liberty to say to her things that were harder to hear, he felt a curious repugnance to giving her any inkling of what he thought about this. It would be a hideous thing to do, he concluded, an unforgivable thing, and an actual hurt. Kendal had for women the readiest consideration, and though one of the odd things he found in Elfrida was the slight degree to which she evoked it in him, he recoiled instinctively from any reasoned action which would distress her. ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... seemed to know nothing of the avenging God, whose name had rung terribly from that rostrum for half a century: a God swift of anger and mighty to punish: an omnipotently jealous God. The Deity he served was one of infinite charity to whose forgiveness nothing was unforgivable—except unforgiveness. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... the right of self-ownership of soul and body. Respectability could easily forgive the teaching of theoretic Anarchism; but Emma Goldman does not merely preach the new philosophy; she also persists in living it,—and that is the one supreme, unforgivable crime. Were she, like so many radicals, to consider her ideal as merely an intellectual ornament; were she to make concessions to existing society and compromise with old prejudices,—then even the most radical views could be pardoned in her. But that she takes her ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... crowd now very distinctly, egging one another on to commit the unforgivable offense and storm a woman's gates. They were shouting for the Gray Mahatma in chorus; it had grown into a chant already, and when a crowd once turns its collective yearnings into a single chant, it is only a matter of minutes before the gates go down, and ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... looked at me boldly with his black eyes—too boldly, I thought. You see, I was a creature of environment, and at that time had strong class instincts. Such boldness on the part of a man of my own class would have been almost unforgivable. I know that I could not avoid dropping my eyes, and I was quite relieved when I passed him on and turned to greet Bishop Morehouse—a favorite of mine, a sweet and serious man of middle age, Christ-like in appearance and goodness, and a scholar ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... Maddalena, sinned when he had kissed her, when he had shown her that he delighted to be with her? Was he not sinning now when he promised to buy for her the most beautiful things of the fair? For a moment he thought to himself that his fault against Maddalena was more grave, more unforgivable than his fault against Hermione. But then a sudden anger that was like a storm, against his own condemnation of himself, swept through him. He had come out to-day to be recklessly happy, and here he was giving ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... bounced through the kitchen, slammed the door of his room, turned the key in the lock and—stood still in the middle of the floor. Whipped by a girl not four years his senior! Whipped by a girl! It was an unforgivable outrage. He would get even for that. But what was he to do? Would could he do? She had beaten him at every turn, she had set Toady against him, she had made him the laughing stock of his cousins. He—he—he would ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... He felt sure that the head-master would consider such an escapade by boys of the Sixth Form an unforgivable crime, and that expulsion would follow discovery; and knowing the hot temper of his uncle, he feared that the latter would view the matter in the most serious light. It was therefore with a light heart that he went across to the Black Dog and placed the note in the hands of ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... his life (or he were not human, but an angel) it dawns on a man that he has done the unforgivable. It dawns on most men oftener than once a week. So men ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... is it composed, that it should be judged as so much more precious than the Body?—the dear Body, which we pamper and feed and clothe and cosset and cocker, till it struts on the face of the planet, a mere magnified Ape of conceit and trickery, sloth and sensuality, the one unforgivable anachronism in an otherwise perfect Creation! For Body without Soul is a blot on the Universe,—a distortion and abomination of nature, with which nature by and by will have nothing to do. Yet I freely grant that while Soul animates and inspires all creation, man cannot or will not comprehend it; ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... never sinned? It feels that it has sinned, though it cannot say how or when, but it feels that this sin was direct as between itself and God, and is the cause of its separation from God; and it feels this sin to have been an infidelity. It is with this part of the soul that we sin the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be sinned by mere natural man: (here we touch the mystery of the two orders of sinning which, to the initiated, are seen both to be covered by the same commandments). ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... unforgivable error of tact I might have stood by the old brontosaurus to the bitter end. One evening he and I were listening to a concert given by the "Fluffy Furbelows" in the camp Nissen Coliseum, and a Miss Gwennie Gwillis was expressing an ardent desire to get ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... tears and ran into the house. In the darkness of her own room she began to think of her father's words. For some reason she could not understand, the attack made on her spirit seemed more terrible and unforgivable than the attack upon her body made by the farm hand in the shed. She began to understand vaguely that the young man had been confused by her presence on that warm sunshiny afternoon as she had been confused by the words uttered by Jim Priest, by the song of the bees in the ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson |
