"Excruciating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when he awoke, but a strange brightness seen through what seemed blurred eyes. A moment passed before his mind worked clearly, and then he had to make an effort to think. He was dizzy. When he essayed to lift his right arm, an excruciating pain made him desist. Then he discovered that his arm was badly swollen, and the hand had burst its bandages. The injured member was red, angry, inflamed, and twice its normal size. He felt hot all over, and ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... that they felt no pain at all; but their boast did not last long, for a few moments later, while I was watching poor Filippe, Antonio and the man X threw themselves down on the rocks, rolling over and contorting themselves, evidently in most excruciating pain. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... And he grew daily more conscious of a great peace and happiness—peace and happiness such as he had never known since his boyhood's days. He, who had found the ways of modern society dull to the last point of excruciating boredom, was not aware of any monotony in the daily round of the hours, which, laden with simple duties and pleasures, came and went softly and slowly like angel messengers stepping gently from one heaven to another. The world—or that which is called the world,—had receded from him altogether. ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... the mysterious words, Mariette lost herself in conjectures and suppositions, fully convinced that so short a letter, after a prolonged absence, must inevitably bring unexpected news. In her poignant perplexity Mariette endured torments and excruciating torture, to which the uneducated are continually exposed. To hold in our grasp, and beneath our eyes, the few lines that bring us joy or sorrow, and be unable to penetrate the secret; to be under the necessity of asking a stranger to read these lines, and to receive from indifferent lips the ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears of the murderers were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull was fractured, and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket.... The most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew in the hands of some of the mob. This instrument was bored into the flesh of the man and the woman, in the arms, legs, and body, and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw, quivering ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... from forward some of the men's clothing, which he distributed among the party; and then, having done all that a man could do, he sat himself down, almost overcome, to wait till the morning, when he might hope to get the survivors on shore. Adair's leg gave him excruciating pain. Rogers sat on one side of him, Murray on the other, supporting him in their arms, and endeavouring, by every means they could think of, to alleviate his suffering, by gently rubbing his legs, frequently changing his position, and tightly ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... suddenly gripped the foot-board with such force that the bed shook; her eyes expanded with horror only, and she cowered as if a whip cracked above her neck. Then she straightened herself, laughed aloud, and ran out of the room. Hamilton, at the moment, was in the throes of an excruciating spasm, and was spared this final agony in his harsh and untimely death. Angelica was hurried from the house to a private asylum. She lived to be seventy-eight, but ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... resolutioners: they could not agree to violate their almost newly sworn covenant, by approving of the admission of these wicked malignants into public places of power and trust;—in defence of which many of them faced the awful gibbet, banishment, imprisonment, and other excruciating hardships;—whereas several hundreds of the resolutioners, on the very first blast of temptation, involved themselves in fearful apostacy and perjury; some of them became violent persecutors of these their faithful brethren, and not a few of them absolute monsters of iniquity.—The dreadful ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... mouth-organ, coming down the sidewalk. The windows were intentionally above the level of the eyes of the seated pupils; but the picture of the musician was plain to Penrod, painted for him by a quality in the runs and trills, partaking of the oboe, of the calliope, and of cats in anguish; an excruciating sweetness obtained only by the wallowing, walloping yellow-pink palm of a hand whose back was Congo black and shiny. The music came down the street and passed beneath the window, accompanied by the care-free shuffling of ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... positively began to fail under the restraint he imposed upon himself. His wound caused him agony, and profanity would have been his natural expression of even slight annoyance. All day long grisly oaths rose to his lips. Now and then an excruciating twinge would cause a half-uttered expletive to burst forth like a projectile. A deep groan would follow, as the man became rigid in ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... minute, in the eye, is very painful; but a piece of burning lime is excruciating. Shakspeare gives a graphic description of the pain from the presence of any foreign substance, however small, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... the inn which induced the writer hereof to speak so slightingly of the residence of Basileus. These evils are now cured and forgotten. This is written off the leaden flats and mounds which they call the Troad. It is stern justice alone which pronounces this excruciating sentence. It was a farce to make this place into a kingly capital; and I make no manner of doubt that King Otho, the very day he can get away unperceived, and get together the passage- money, will be off for dear old Deutschland, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Penthesilcia, except that, in poor Marie's case, the woman suffered from the awful frenzy of the male, in whom the "gentlest passion" degenerated in Saturnalia of revolting cruelty. The Duke killed Marie because doing so gave him the most damnable pleasure,—her the most excruciating pain. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... his wife Winifred, in their cart put the gypsy witch-wife and her daughter to flight. The Welshman administered some oil, which, after two hours of suspense, and with the help of an opiate, saved the life of Lavengro. During this companionship Borrow found that Williams suffered excruciating spiritual terrors from the conviction that he had committed the sin against the ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... by my efforts and the excruciating pain I lay back upon the snow. A short rest, and again I pulled feebly at the steel teeth, until my hands were bleeding ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne
... seventeenth century. The Countess Elizabeth enticed young girls into her palace on divers pretexts, and then coolly murdered them, for the purpose of bathing in their blood. The spectacle of human suffering became at last such a delight to her, that she would apply with her own hands the most excruciating tortures, relishing the shrieks of her victims as the epicure relishes each sip of his old Chateau Margaux. In this way she is said to have murdered six hundred and fifty persons before her evil career was brought to an end; though, when one recollects ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... careful investigation; but they failed to unravel the plot and did not discover the dynamite concealed in the carpenters' sleeping quarters. Halturin showed wonderful coolness while the search was going on, and continued to sleep every night on the explosive, though it caused him excruciating headaches. When he was assured by the chemist of the Executive Committee that the quantity collected was sufficient, he exploded the mine at the usual dinner hour, and contrived to escape uninjured.* In the guardroom immediately above the spot where the dynamite was exploded ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... There was an excruciating howl of agony and Amy was violently set upon, deposited on the nearer bed and pummelled until he begged for mercy. When quiet was restored Edwards asked: "Is 'Boots' coming ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Nor do I overmuch commiserate him to whose lot the fifth may fall, for slumber descends upon him forthwith, and he passes away in painless oblivion. But wretched he who chooses the sixth, whose hair falls from his head, whose skin peels from his body, and who lingers long in excruciating agonies, a living death. The seventh phial contains the object of your desire. Stretch forth your hands, therefore, simultaneously to this table; let each unhesitatingly grasp and intrepidly drain the potion which ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... the motion of the bowels is totally impeded or inverted, arises from spasms, violent exertions of the body, eating of unripe fruit, drinking of sour liquors, worms, obstinate costiveness, and various other causes, which produce the most excruciating pain in the region of the abdomen. Large blisters applied to the most painful part, emollient clysters, fomentations, and the warm bath, are amongst the most likely means; but in many instances, this disorder ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... particular reason for doing this; they had no grudge against either the railroad or the particular operator who happened to be in charge. They were children, and it was fun to hear the bullets pop, and excruciating fun to see the operator run out of the shack with a yell and go scampering off into the darkness. One operator entered into negotiations with the enemy. Recognizing their perfect right to shoot up the station ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... drink," and later in the day his strength returned. He felt strange prickings in the skin of his hands and feet. But lately his limbs had grown heavy. This pricking sensation gave place to the most excruciating cramps, which he did not find very amusing. He rarely laughed now but often stopped short and stood still on the sidewalk, troubled by a strange buzzing in his ears and by flashes of light before his eyes. Everything looked yellow to him; the houses seemed to be moving ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... this, and deep down in his soul he prayed—prayed that death might come to him first, so that he might not have to look upon the agonies of this other, whose end would be ghastly in its fearless resignation. His own suffering had become excruciating. Sharp pains darted like red-hot needles through his limbs, his back tortured him, and his head ached as though a knife had cloven the base of his skull. Still—he could breathe. By pressing his head ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... His patter is excruciating and, to hide his want of skill in sleight-of-hand, he moves his hands and arms in grotesque curves, with his body so bent that it is almost impossible to see what he is trying to do. I have never yet seen any Indian give an English performance ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... more larnin' dan dat, I'd better find somebody else! Do yer tink I got pink paper and silver-sprigged 'welopers to write sich trash on? Tea drinkin' indeed! Why dis here's to be a rigler scrumptious, fash'nable 'tainment! I want yer to say, 'Miss Clorindy consents her most excruciating compliments, and begs to state that, owing to de 'picious ewent ob de master's weddin', she takes dis opportunity to 'quest de 'stinguished company ob Mr. Otheller Jones for dis evenin', to a reparatory 'tainment; and she would furder mention dat dare will be ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... the horror of which would remain on into his waking time. They were not necessarily horrible things at all, but their clearness in the dream, and their total, if slow, disappearance as the actual world came back, became sometimes an excruciating torment. Who could say that they, or some equivalents, might not reach him out of the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... descended from his box and rang. The concierge, assisted by a female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of the four beds in the salle d'accouchement. Once in bed, her pains became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... and October, 1348, at Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal proceedings were instituted against them, after they had long before been accused by the people of poisoning the wells; similar scenes followed in Bern and in Freiburg, in 1349. Under the influence of excruciating suffering, the tortured Jews confessed themselves guilty of the crime imputed to them; and it being affirmed that poison had in fact been found in a well at Zofingen, this was deemed a sufficient proof to convince ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... first-born. A towering fact this, that Abel, though dead, was living and canonized in another life more effectually and truly than those whom the pope ever canonized! The death of Abel was indeed horrible; he did not suffer death without excruciating torment nor without many tears. Yet it was a blessed death, for now he lives a more blessed life than he did before. This bodily life of ours is lived in sin, and is ever in danger of death. But that other life is eternal and perfectly free ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... the heavens when she again awoke. A burning fever consumed her, and delirium had fastened on her with fearful spasmodic and excruciating pains internally. She endeavored to rise, but fainted in so doing. She shrieked wildly for assistance, but none heeded her cries. For hours she was thus, left alone, the pains increasing, and her brain in a constant whirl. Again she slept, ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... remain only dynamite and scientific breeding. My touching faith in these saves me from pessimism: I believe in the future; but this only makes the present—which I foresee as going strong for a couple of million of years or so—all the more excruciating by contrast. ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... testimony to his domestic virtue is the deep affection of his young wife Paulina. Refusing all entreaty, she resolutely determined to die with her husband. They opened their veins together; she fainted away, and was removed by her friends and with difficulty restored to life; he, after suffering excruciating agony, which he endured with cheerfulness, discoursing to his friends on the glorious realities to which he was about to pass, was at length suffocated by the vapour of a stove. Thus perished one of the weakest and one of the most amiable of men; one who, had he had the courage to ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... agonising wrenches were given of the most fearful character, as the screws and ropes of the horrid instrument were set in motion. Not a word did he utter; scarcely a groan escaped from his bosom, though every limb was suffering the most excruciating torture; the blood gushed from his nostrils and mouth, his eyes well nigh started from their sockets. His physical nature at length gave way, though his courage did not fail him. He fainted. Death would ...
— The Last Look - A Tale of the Spanish Inquisition • W.H.G. Kingston
... at Swann was even more excruciating than the first. Never had he supposed it to have been so recent an affair, hidden from his eyes that had been too innocent to discern it, not in a past which he had never known, but in evenings which he so well remembered, which he ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... them, and even worse, for some time, and the gap separating them seemed to be growing wider all the while. Each had said exasperating and belittling things of the other, and a wall of hate had been built up where once there had been a bond of strong friendship. The pain in Badger's eye was excruciating, and it rendered him for a little while absolutely reckless. Fortunately, it also rendered him incapable of inflicting on his former friend the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... bed for a week. That vulgar Dr. Fisk, with his elbow in her bosom, tried five times to extract her tooth, and then broke it to the roots. I hear there is a galvanic ring for rheumatism. The pain in my joints is excruciating; I have an idea my bones are changing into chalk; the right knee will hardly bend." The darkly colored shawl with its border of cypress intensified her sunken blue-traced temples and the pallid lips. She ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... asked him: "How do you now find yourself?" He replied: "What shall I say?—Hast thou never witnessed what torture that man suffers from whose jaw they are extracting a tooth? Fancy to thyself how excruciating is his pain from whose precious body ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... they endeavored to divert their minds from it, by a constant singing and laughing, so loud as to drown the sound of our lamentations.—After they had told Manuel they should carry us to Matanzas as prisoners of war, they proceeded to pinion our arms as they had Capt. Hilton's, so tight as to produce excruciating pain. ...
— Narrative of the shipwreck of the brig Betsey, of Wiscasset, Maine, and murder of five of her crew, by pirates, • Daniel Collins
... little gayer,—the embroidery on this tattered coat of civilized life,—I went into only two theatres; one the Old Drury, once the scene of great glories, now of execrable music and more execrable acting. If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... untied him and pouncing upon me, tried to put me in his place, while my companion took to his heels. As they were six to one, they succeeded, and I had the very unpleasant experience of being bastinadoed. The first dozen or two strokes I didn't mind much, but at about the ninetieth the pain was too excruciating for description. When they had finished with me I naturally enquired what it was all for. It seems that my companion when firing at a duck had accidentally shot an Egyptian woman, the wife of one ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... consideration. Dismal reflection! Mr Methusaleh looked up to one of the hotel windows to get rid of it. The boy was inexperienced, and might be in the hands of sharpers, who would rub their hands and chuckle again at having done the "knowing Jew." Excruciating thought! Mr Methusaleh visibly perspired as it came and went. The boy himself was hardly to be trusted. He had been the plague of Mr Methusaleh's life since the hour of his birth—was full of tricks, and might have schemes ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... ordained, consecrated and sacrificed. See the Church at an Oecumenical Council; then it capped the climax of cruelty and crime; it resorted to demoniacal subterfuge to condemn good men as heretics and burn them alive, believing that death by fire would inflict the most exquisitely excruciating tortures; at the Council of Constance it sought to condemn Wickliffe, by making an inference from some of his principles that he propagated the doctrine,—"God is obliged to obey the Devil,"—nowhere ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... mingled with the curses and cries of brutal drivers, and the heartrending groans of wounded soldiers, who, lying, in many cases with undressed wounds, on the hard, springless, and jolting vehicles, suffered excruciating agony. Many of these, unable to endure their sufferings, died, and thus the living and the dead were in some cases jolted slowly along together. The road on each side was lined with dead animals and men—the latter lying in a state of apparent ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... tight boots and stiff collars no pen can fitly tell. But only to one another did they confide these sufferings and the rare moments of repose when they could stand on one aching foot with heads comfortably sunken inside the excruciating collars, which rasped their ears and made the lobes thereof a pleasing scarlet. Brief were these moments, however, and the Spartan boys danced on with smiling faces, undaunted by the hidden anguish which preyed upon them "fore and aft," as Will ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... impelled by curiosity in spite of a more hallowed feeling, I lifted the creeper and was about to peer into the darkness, when a sudden noise within made me jump back with affright. It was the most horrible and excruciating shriek I had ever heard in my life. If anyone by a refinement of cruelty were to compound a torture for the ears, I do not think he could produce anything half so ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... were in a strait-jacket. One of my arms is immovable, my head is bandaged, and when I try to turn I suffer excruciating pain. ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... in the spasm of his throat. But he took Rowcliffe's hand and wrung it, discharging many emotions in that one excruciating grip. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... Bardstown, Ky., where he died in 1798. The unsuccessful struggles of Fitch make a melancholy history. In his last appeal he used this language: "But why those earnest solicitations to disturb my nightly repose, and fill me with the most excruciating anxieties; and why not act the part for myself, and retire under the shady elms on the fair banks of the Ohio, and eat my coarse but sweet bread of industry and content, and when I have done, to have my body laid in the soft, warm, and loamy soil of the banks, with ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, December 1887 - Volume 1, Number 11 • Various
... just to compare a human being impaled alive on a stake with another overburdened with his world's task. The overburdened man might stumble and fall, and so perish. Things would have been hard to him. But not, therefore, could you compare his sufferings with the excruciating agonies of the poor wretch who had been left to linger and starve with an iron rod through his vitals. This argument was thought to be crafty rather than cunning by those who were fond of fishing. But he had another on which, when he had blown off the steam ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... head rather higher than usual, and practised the spirited arts of retort and repartee. And nobody gave her any credit for it. Then Rochester puts the little thing (poor Jane was only eighteen when it happened) to the torture, and, with the last excruciating turn of the thumbscrew, she confesses. That was the enormity ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... was a captain's wife, who had been wrecked, and had thus fallen into his power. A happy thought struck some of the mandarins—that she might be passed off as the sister of the barbarian Queen. She was accordingly put into a cage, and carried about for exhibition; but Elepoo delivered her from the excruciating death she would have suffered as Queen Victoria's sister, and restored her to her countrymen. The whole cabinet was indignant; he was summoned to appear immediately before his exasperated sovereign, and sentenced to transportation to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... door was shut on Oliver, he threw himself, shaken, on the couch, hating Oliver and all his works more than ever. Go about barefoot and swab decks! It was madness. Besides being dangerous to health, it would be excruciating discomfort. And to be insulted for not grasping at such martyrdom! It was intolerable; and Doggie remained justly indignant ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... men as the contortions of the proved heterodox tied to a stake must have been to their chastening ecclesiastical judges. Why go to the fire when a recantation will save you from it? Why not break the excruciating faggot-bands, and escape, when you have only to decide to do it? We naturally ask why. Those martyrs of love or religion are madmen. Altogether, Nevil's adjurations and supplications, his threats of wrath and appeals to reason, were an odd mixture. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... directly he is turned to stone. This has been the fate of all those who have really seen fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predestination, were turned to stone. The modern sociological scientists (with their excruciating Eugenics) are turned to stone. The only difference is that the Puritans make dignified, and the Eugenists somewhat ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... I come off duty everything gets blurred. The outlines of objects grow indistinct and misty. I have to sit down in a chair. The pain is excruciating." ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... and looked around he became conscious of excruciating pains and he closed them again to rest. His outflung hand struck something that made him look around again, and he saw Tex Ewalt, face down at his side. He released his grasp on the other's collar and slowly the whole thing came to him, and ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... the suffering of one fallen from a high estate. His gait is strangely majestic, and he marches along with his simple blanket as though he were wearing the purple. His common talk is a series of piercing screams and cries, {29} more painful to the ear than the most excruciating fine music that ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... fight! Nothing but fight! And all this trying time, Bismarck suffered excruciating pains from his old ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... ghastly, yet still unconquerably happy. She had now no reason to conceal the ravages of disease, and her color was something frightful. Still, she did not suffer as much, for her mind had overborne her body to such an extent that she had the mastery for the time, to a certain extent, of those excruciating stabs of pain. People looked at her incredulously. They could not believe that she felt as she talked, that she was as happy and resigned as she looked, but it was all true. It was either an abnormal state into which her husband's death had thrown her, ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... first, in spite of the prompt ventilation to clear them off. There was no escape from the smell. I had heard of "gasoline heart," but the odour only made me sick and dizzy. Like most novices, I suppose, I was suffering excruciating torture. Not so, Kennedy. He got used to it in no time; indeed, seemed to ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... fig-tree sap and lentisk, moistened the whole with Sphettian[786] vinegar, and, turning back the patient's eyelids, applied his salve to the interior of the eyes, so that the pain might be more excruciating. Neoclides shrieked, howled, sprang towards the foot of his bed and wanted to bolt, but the god laughed and said to him, "Keep where you are with your salve; by doing this you will not go and ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... of a ridge and looked down into a narrow strip of plain on the other side. Just as Nada had given up in weakness and despair, so now he was almost ready to quit. He had traveled miles since the owl fight, and his wounds had stiffened, and with every step gave him excruciating pain. His injured eye was entirely closed, and there was a strange, dull ache in the back of his head, where Gargantua had pounded him with his beak. The strip of valley, half hidden in its silvery mist ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... and the cool lawn and shrubberies of Hyde Lodge were a hundred-fold more pleasant to her than the stiff little parterre at Bayswater, wherein scarlet geraniums and calceolarias flourished with an excruciating luxuriance of growth and an aggravating brilliancy of colour. She liked any place better than the hearth by which Philip Sheldon brooded with a dark thoughtful face, and a mind absorbed by the mysteries and complications ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... the ear of the human adult. Consequently, what does your baby do but betake itself to a practical study of the caterwaul! After a few conscientious rehearsals a creditable degree of perfection is usually reached, and a series of excruciating performances are forthwith commenced, which last with unbroken success until the stage arrives when correction becomes possible. This process may check the child's taste for imitating the lower animals in some of their less engaging peculiarities, but his dramatic instincts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... seeing things!" The pain in his empty stomach was now becoming excruciating. To steady himself he shut his eyes, shook his head as though to clear it, then looked again at that strip of metal in his hand. Attached to it were two slender strips of leather like straps, ending in ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... preparing for the rack, yet I played recklessly for the eclat it gave me. To-day I have an occasional reminder of those struggles in a weak knee, which has a way of twisting unexpectedly and causing excruciating pain, but I consider that these twinges are fair payment for the pleasure with which I contemplated my picture years ago in the Harlansburg Sentinel, showing me in my foot-ball clothes, poised on a photographer's fence. The subject, the Sentinel explained, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... was in everybody's way—in Crusoe's way, and being, so to speak, "beside himself," was also in his own way. If people trod upon him accidentally, which they often did, Grumps uttered a solitary heart-rending yell, proportioned in intensity to the excruciating nature of the torture he endured, then instantly resumed his position and his fascinated stare. Crusoe generally held his head up, and gazed over his little friend at what was going on around him, but if for a moment he permitted his eye to rest on the countenance ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... no oasis. They found no wady other than stone-dry. By day they slept, by night pushed forward. Day by day they grew weaker and less rational. The increasing nerve-strain that possessed them was companioned by the excruciating torture of their bodies racked by the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... abstracted (can it be otherwise than coldly and unfeelingly?) and put together again as coldly and unfeelingly. The epitaph now before us owes what exemption it may have from these defects in its general plan to the excruciating disease of which the lady died; but it is liable to the same censure, and is, like the rest, further objectionable in this; namely, that the thoughts have their nature changed and moulded by the vicious expression in which they are entangled, to an excess rendering them wholly ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... slavery is a political, a civil, and a commercial evil. It is true that it is most excruciating and frightful in its effects upon the physical nature of its victim. But slavery is seen in its more awful wickedness and terrible heinousness, when we contemplate the vast waste of intellect, the vast waste of moral ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... of journals," says the Quebec Chronicle, "find it hard enough at present to collect the simple subscription, without demanding postage in advance. People who writhe at present under the payment of their bare paper account, will find forwarding postage, in advance, an excruciating sacrifice." The 2 cents is no doubt primarily intended for soldiers' letters. The 3 cents pays the new single rate for postage; the 6 cents the charge on letters to the United States. The 12-1/2c represents ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... do get into the ear. That is a subject on which it is useless to argue with me upon philosophical grounds. I have a vivid recollection of a story told me by Mrs. Primmins,—how a lady for many years suffered under the most excruciating headaches; how, as the tombstones say, "physicians were in vain;" how she died; and how her head was opened, and how such a nest of earwigs, ma'am, such a nest! Earwigs are the prolifickest things, and so fond of their offspring! They sit on their eggs like hens, and the ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... protests are first heard; then armed resistance; then anarchy. Thus it was with the French of the eighteenth century. Thus it is with the Russian, the German, the English, the Irish peoples of to-day. The heel of the tyrant is studded with too many steel nails to be borne without excruciating pain and without ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... was free, (that is, before nature had barricaded it up in the little cyst,) its presence was the cause of frightful disorders, killing about fifty per centum of its victims in terrible agony. The young worms having hatched in the body of man, migrate to the numerous muscles, causing the most excruciating pain, so that the patient, fearing to move his inflamed muscles, would lie motionless upon his back, and if he did not die in this state of the disorder, nature came to the rescue and imprisoned the creature by surrounding it with a fibrous cyst, where it lives for years, being ready at any moment ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... she stood there, her hands pressed to her ears until, with a final excruciating dig into the strings, he dropped ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... his review[928] of Soame Jenyns's Inquiry into the Origin of Evil. Jenyns was possessed of lively talents, and a style eminently pure and easy, and could very happily play with a light subject, either in prose or verse; but when he speculated on that most difficult and excruciating question, the Origin of Evil, he ventured far beyond his depth[929], and, accordingly, was exposed by Johnson, both with acute argument and brilliant wit. I remember when the late Mr. Bicknell's humourous performance, entitled The Musical Travels of Joel Collyer[930], in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... most dangerous,[11] most rarely successful and most frequently failed-in of all motives—again as it is everywhere. Comedy in letters is good: but it should be fairly "genteel" comedy, such as this age excelled in—not roaring Farce. An "excruciatingly funny" letter runs the risk of being excruciating in a sadly literal sense. Now the men of good Queen Anne and the first three Georges were not given to excess, in these ways at any rate; and there are few better examples of the happy mean than the best of ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... be, it is certain that for the rage of the people Nero must have a victim, and Tacitus tells us that he charged the Christians with the crime. Then opened in Rome the awful carnival of bloodshed that the orator never mentions, in which horrible modes of torture and excruciating methods of producing pain vied with each other in satisfying the demands of death. Women bound to raging bulls and dragged to death were not without the companionship of others who, in the evening, in Nero's garden, were coated with pitch, covered with tar, bound to stakes of pine, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... old woman was wheeled into the church in an invalid's chair. I knew by the expression of her countenance that she was suffering. When I met her after the service and asked her about her story she said as the most excruciating pain convulsed her body, "I have not been free from pain in twenty years and have scarcely slept a night through all that time," and then, brushing the tears from her eyes, and with an expectant face, she exclaimed, ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... possible bad luck. So the boys came override as rather uncanny heroes, and every one asked them questions instead of pounding them for making trouble. Little Penn delivered quite a speech on the folly of superstitions; but public opinion was against him and in favour of Long Jack, who told the most excruciating ghost-stories, till nearly midnight. Under that influence no one except Salters and Penn said anything about "idolatry," when the cook put a lighted candle, a cake of flour and water, and a pinch of salt on a shingle, and floated them out astern to keep the Frenchman quiet in case he was still ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... Probably some one knew the truth about her, in all that great society. Such things might be known. Francesca Campodonico's delicate noble face rose faintly between her and the sky, and she realized with excruciating suddenness the distance that separated her from the woman she hated, the woman who perhaps knew that Gloria Dalrymple was the daughter of a peasant and a fit wife by her birth for Angelo ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... some voracious, sharp-fanged, predatory animal. Happy—was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of living water and yet must perish of drought. He could only imagine one greater misery, one more excruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than this happiness she had conferred upon him—and that was to be ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... metal band, though his lungs stabbed within him as he breathed, though the pain in his feet was unendurable, Eric wrenched again and again at the handle, but the door would not budge. He called, but there was no answer. Almost delirious with baffled rage and excruciating suffering, the boy hurled himself against the door, throwing his shoulder out of joint with the power of the blow. The door fell inwards and ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... pain, so extremely flattered and exalted by such decency, that not for the world would he have revealed the fact that there had been a second faint click while his arm was being bound to his side, and an excruciating jar that made him suspect the abominable thing to be out again. He didn't know how the mechanism worked, but he was sure that the thing Urquhart had with such labour hauled in had slipped out and was disporting itself at large ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... at first intense, the tendons of the legs and arms being dreadfully strained, and the spinal column bent so as to be nearly broken in two. The shoulder-blades, forced into close contact, pressed the vertebrae inward, and caused excruciating pains along the lumbar vertebrae, where the ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... unlucky hands together rather eagerly, my little dog Muff happen'd to be in the way, by which means my pet was squeez'd rather more than it lik'd, and my Adonis's finger bit by it so feelingly, that it would have delighted you to see how he twisted his soft features about, with the excruciating anguish. ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... grasp. How painful was the distance at which they now appeared! My present debility was felt with intolerable impatience. To love and to be unable to heap happiness on the object beloved, was a thought that assailed me with excruciating sensations! ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... not only found on the Vigilance Committees, (tribunals organized in opposition to the laws of the states where they exist,) but uniting with the merciless and the profligate in passing sentence consigning to infamous and excruciating, if not extreme punishment, persons, by their own acknowledgment, innocent of any unlawful act. Out of sixty persons that composed the vigilance committee which condemned Mr. Dresser to be scourged in the public square of Nashville, TWENTY-SEVEN were members of churches, and one of them a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... present bliss, and shuddered at the awful future which presented itself. A few minutes were sufficient for Philip to resume his natural self-possession. He sat down by the side of his Amine, and clasped her in his arms. They remained silent. They knew too well each other's thoughts; and, excruciating as was the effort, they were both summoning up their courage to bear, and steeling their hearts against the conviction that, in this world, they must now expect to be for a time, perhaps for ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... walk home," said Mr. Alwynn, slowly. It gave him excruciating pain to say anything so severe as this; but he got ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... comes a man with an accordion. He is playing "Annie Laurie." Every now and then he strikes a wrong note. Excruciating agony! Did he render it correctly it might blend with a romantic dream, but when he insists on flatting persistently, as for bonnie Annie Laurie he offers to lay him down and die, who is to bear it? And why does he not consummate the proffered sacrifice by dying at once? I would cheerfully bury ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... such language as those eloquent and high-spirited ladies, under less offensive provocation, were wont to lavish on the officials of an oppressive law. I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of this play I have never come across in all the range of that excruciating experience. The rare and faint indications that the writer was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller relief the reckless and shameless incompetence of the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... end of two months did she receive a letter. Fear for his health, apprehension of his death during this cruel interim, caused an agony of suspense, which, by representing him to her distracted fancy in a state of suffering, made him, if possible, still dearer to her. In the excruciating anguish of uncertainty, she walked with trembling steps through all weathers (when she could steal half a day while her parents were employed in labour abroad) to the post town, at six miles' distance, to inquire for ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... with a family of six on his hands, some idea of the situation may be had. I can recall having been without food many a day, and the pangs of hunger drove me almost to desperation. But mother and father would come late at night from a day of depressing toil and excruciating inward pain, the result of their inability to relieve our suffering, and pacify us for the night with such things as they had been able to get. When I awoke the next morning they were gone again on ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... on such evenings, was privileged to strike false notes with painful iteration, even to the actual distress of auditors, without a word of criticism from the leader or the manager. Excruciating discord from the flute, on three or four nights of a season, was accepted as part payment for such playing, upon every other night, as seldom had been heard from any flute in any orchestra in ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... thought itself. Sometimes there is manifested, towards the near approach of death, an almost insane brilliancy; as, for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who occupied the last minutes of his ebbing life with a very subtile mathematical discourse concerning the exceeding, the excruciating smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts. And strange as it may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a triumphant vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian faith. Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the fragmentary glimmerings ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... attached to a mother who dropped her h's, or called Maria Marire! How are you to introduce her into society? My dear Mrs. Pendennis, I will name no names, but in the very best circles of London society I have seen men suffering the most excruciating agony, I have known them to be cut, to be lost utterly, from the vulgarity of their wives' connections. What did Lady Snapperton do last year at her dejeune dansant after the Bohemian Ball? She told Lord Brouncker that he might bring his daughters or send ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me, while we heard the account of Miss Noemie Nightingale, of Upper Norwood, cured in the previous June of deafness, rising, in the case of one ear at least, from a perforation of the drum. She was present at the piscines, when on a sudden she had felt excruciating pains in the ears. The next she knew was that she heard the Magnificat being sung in honour ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... rival sets of capitalists, and (2) how to save it from its perpetual and greater hell of suffering by the bloodless wars between the machine owning masters and the machine operating slaves, which wars, if less excruciating, are yet more destructive ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... indulged in without rebuke as long as Islamism as a system and a faith prevails in the world. Happily for the poor women, the husbands do not generally beat them so as to imperil their lives, in case their own relatives reside in the vicinity, lest the excruciating screams of the suffering should reach the ears of her parents and bring the husband into disgrace. But where there is no fear of interference or of discovery, the blows and kicks are applied in the most merciless and barbarous manner. Women are killed in this way, ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... Crawford endured the most excruciating agonies with the utmost fortitude, when faint and almost exhausted, he commended his soul to God, and laid down on his face. He was then scalped, and burning coals being laid on his head and back, by one of the squaws, he again arose and attempted to walk; but strength ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... no less than excruciating to both that I should announce this decision to you by word of mouth. I have therefore taken the less painful course of writing. Before you receive this I shall have left the town by the evening coach for London, on reaching ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... hobbling along just able to walk. He had strained a tendon in his right leg the previous morning, and had been enduring the most excruciating pain all day. He wanted to stay and help us skin the sheep, but I would not let him We were a long way from camp, and it would require all his strength to get back ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... of her life—months of excruciating physical sufferings, vividly described for us by her contemporaries—the woman's rectitude and wisdom, her swift tender sympathies, were still, as ever, at the disposal of all who sought them. With unswerving energy she still ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... to their rightful owners from a safe distance, laughing as if they would split their sides. One of the naked rascals had seized a flannel undershirt of the colonel's, which was drying on a branch. His efforts to introduce his great feet into the sleeves were excruciating. Another savage had found a pair of linen pantaloons, which he was endeavoring to put on like a coat, appearing much embarrassed with the posterior portion, which completely masked his face. Aragon had seen a young reprobate of his own age make off with a pair ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... profound that he heard a little animal twittering somewhere near by under the snow. It made a small frightened cheep like a field mouse, and he wondered languidly if it were hurt. Then he understood that it must be in pain: pain so excruciating that he seemed, mysteriously, to feel it shooting through his own body. He tried in vain to roll over in the direction of the sound, and stretched his left arm out across the snow. And now it was as though he felt rather than heard the twittering; it seemed to ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... exchange but for a very real enjoyment, obtained in relieving our object. Even extremes in this class of our dispositions, as they are the reverse of hatred, envy, and malice, so they are never attended with those excruciating anxieties, jealousies, and fears, which tear the interested mind; or if, in reality, any ill passion arise from a pretended attachment to, our fellow creatures, that attachment may, be safely condemned, as not genuine. If we be distrustful or jealous, our pretended affection is probably ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the discovery taught me something further, namely, that my head was liable to excruciating little throbs of pain. I raised a hand to it. My forehead was swathed in bandages, like a turbaned Turk's. Oh, to be sure, in the castle at Prezelay, as we were retreating up the staircase, Schwartzmann had fired ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... the prisoner, who was conveyed by them to the city gaol, to await the investigation of the outrage by the civic authorities and the result of the injury committed. The victim of revenge died a few days after the occurrence in excruciating agony. It will scarcely be believed that the perpetrator of the deed, after a short confinement, was spirited away up the country, no doubt at the connivance of ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... would be excruciating! And I certainly am going to have a stab at it. Let's see who will go into it. Steve Edwards—no, Steve wouldn't, of course. Tom Hall will, I'll bet. And Roy Draper and Harry Wescott, probably. We ought to get as many of the fellows ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... hold. Then over they began to go, the first, the second, the third, and another, and another, and after each went a moan from Anastasio. He leaned through the window to see one tossing in the waves, then suffered a next pang to see the next follow after. It was an excruciating cumulus of grief. The trooper regarded him quizzically. Destruction of merely worldly goods had become routine for him. He returned to his contemplation ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... lowest barbarism: and the Spanish conquerors of the New World themselves often exhibited cruelty such as even Indians seldom surpass. See below, vol. ii. p. 444. In spite of such cases, however, it must be held that for artistic skill in inflicting the greatest possible intensity of excruciating pain upon every nerve in the body, the Spaniard was a bungler and a novice as compared with the Indian. See Dodge's Our Wild Indians, pp. 536-538. Colonel Dodge was in familiar contact with Indians for more than thirty years, and ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... held him. And he, in turn, struggled against them and clenched his teeth on the forceps. The group swayed back and forth. Such exertion, in the stagnant heat, brought the sweat out on all of them. The black sweated, too, but his was the sweat of excruciating pain. The chair on which he sat was overturned. Captain Ward paused in the act of pouring himself a drink, and called encouragement. Worth pleaded with his assistants to hang on, and hung on himself, twisting the tooth till it crackled and ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which in my ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... here from Carlisle raised my disorder and pains to so intolerable a degree that I was obliged to stop, and may not get away for a day or two." Again, on the eighteenth: "I am better, and partly free from the excruciating pain I suffered; but still so weak that I can scarce bear motion." He lay helpless at Shippensburg till September was well advanced. On the second he says: "I really cannot describe how I have suffered both in body and mind of late, and the relapses have been worse as the disappointment was ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... of the Christian Religion." Boswell writes of him: "Jenyns was possessed of lively talents, and a style eminently pure and 'easy', and could very happily play with a light subject, either in prose or verse; but when he speculated on that most difficult and excruciating question, 'The Origin of Evil,' he ventured far beyond his depth, and, accordingly, was exPosed by Johnson [in the 'Literary Magazine'), both with acute argument ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... unavoidable misfortunes; then, sir, though a very industrious tradesman, I was twice burned out, and lost my little all both times. I lived upon those fires a month. I soon after was confined by a most excruciating disorder, and lost the use of my limbs. That told very well; for I had the case strongly attested, and went about to collect the subscriptions myself. I was afterwards twice tapped for a dropsy, which declined into a very profitable consumption. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... our people began to fall down again with the scurvy. The effect of these nuts alone, in checking this disease, is astonishing: Many whose limbs were become as black as ink, who could not move without the assistance of two men, and who, besides total debility, suffered excruciating pain, were in a few days, by eating these nuts, although at sea, so far recovered as to do their duty, and could even go aloft as well as they did before the distemper seized them. For several days about this time, we had only faint breezes, with smooth water, so that we made but little ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... just be equal. Again I repeat it, let me have the side where I take no risks when viewed from the skeptic's standpoint, and where I can "repose in a paradise of illusions," in preference to the skeptic's excruciating doubt. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... Anthony returned home, outraged nature asserted itself and at every moment the pain in her back was excruciating. She went to a doctor for the first time in her life and was given a fly-blister and some drugs to put in whiskey. The last two she threw away but applied the blister, which only increased her misery. She suffered terribly all summer but was busy every moment writing ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... skin-blast hypo on top of the joint and let it go. For a moment the finger felt cold, numb, pleasant. Then the shock wore away and the tip of my finger, my whole finger and part of my hand shocked me with the most excruciating agony that the hide of man ever felt. Flashes and waves of pain darted up my arm to the elbow and the muscles in my forearm jumped. The sensitive nerve in my elbow sang and sent darting waves of zigzag needles up to my shoulder. My hand was a source of searing heat ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... of sleep the night before drove us to bed early. Our beds consisted of a place on the dirt-floor with a blanket under us. Soon all were asleep; but long before morning first one and then another of our party began to cry out with excruciating pain in the eyes. Not one escaped it. By morning the eyes of half the party were so swollen that they were entirely closed. The others suffered pain equally. The feeling was about what might be ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... summits upon us, but being warm from walking, we did not heed it. The mountains looked higher than in summer, and the old castles more grim and frowning. From the hard roads and freezing wind, my feet became very sore, and after limping along in excruciating pain for a league or two, I filled my boots with brandy, which deadened the wounds so much, that I was enabled to go on in a kind of trot, which I kept up, only stopping ten minutes to dinner, till ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor |
