"Relentless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heights on our left across the great road, appeared before them. Seized with astonishment, these stragglers instantly halted: they had looked for nothing of the kind, and with their first impressions were led to believe that relentless fate had traced upon the snow between them and Europe that long, black, and motionless line as the fatal ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... effective quality, far removed from the corresponding elements of the poem of art. At first sight, one might say that Browning's dramatic lyrics had this impersonal quality. But compare the close of 'Give a Rouse,' chorus and all, with the close of 'Child Maurice,' that swift and relentless stroke of pure tragedy which called out the enthusiasm of so great a critic ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... entered, wondering if he would find the house empty. To his surprise it was full—orchestra, balcony, and gallery. The play was a serious effort by a brilliant young dramatist of the modern school of realism. In two minutes from the rising of the curtain the play had gripped him with relentless power. Slowly, remorseless as fate, he saw the purpose of the author unfold itself in a series of tense and terrible scenes. The comedy over which the crowd laughed with such contagious merriment was even more sinister than the serious parts. No matter what the situation—whether ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... 1456. The snow fell over Paris with rigorous, relentless persistence; sometimes the wind made a sally and scattered it in flying vortices; sometimes there was a lull, and flake after flake descended out of the black night air, silent, circuitous, interminable. ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the name of those scenes, of which he was not only an eye-witness, but a sharer, I ask, whether it be befitting that in that land, consecrated as it is in the annals of England's glory, a terrible, remorseless, relentless despotism should be established; and that the throne which England saved should be filled by the tyrant by whom your own countrymen, after the heat of battle, have been savagely and deliberately murdered? Never! the people of this country are averse, indeed, to wanton and unnecessary war; but ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... relentless foe, the severe judge, and the pampered monarch, all were merged in the man, when by her side—and Sultan Mahomet, for the first time in his life, ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... nothing but nervous folly and weakness, and I believed she herself would be glad to be forced to give it up. Besides, even if my reason had not told me all this, my own feelings would have been enough to make me relentless. ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... persons, in the same palace, to another woman. Besides this, however, she had many causes for distress. She suffered from the absence of her children, from her daughter's domestic unhappiness, from the Emperor's remoteness, his infidelities in Poland, from the dangers threatening him in this relentless and distant war. She wrote to her daughter February 3: "I got here, dear Hortense, the evening of the 31st, as I expected. My journey was pleasant, if I can call it so when it separated me further from ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... had persuaded himself that there had been a chance for him to have such a home, and live in it—not alone. That chance had gone—had never really existed, he knew now. For sooner or later he must have awakened from the pleasant dreams of self-persuasion to the reality of his relentless responsibility. No, there had never been such a chance; and he thanked God that he had learned before it was too late that for him there could be no earthly paradise, no fireside a deux, no home, ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... They were especially severe in their animadversions upon the Kentuckians. They denounced their raids upon the Indian towns and villages along the Scioto and the Wabash as barbarous and uncalled for. They pointed to the fact that the Kentuckians pursued the Indians with a fierce and relentless hatred, using the scalping knife, and burning down their cabins and corn fields, forgetting at the same time the thousands of Kentuckians cruelly slain, the carrying away into captivity of pregnant women and innocent children, and the ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... opinion. There are many serious objections to secret diplomacy, but it cannot be entirely done away with even under a republican form of government until the people are educated to a fuller understanding of international politics. The German Kaiser was relentless in his attempt to score a diplomatic triumph while France was isolated. He was thwarted, however, by the moral support which England, Italy, and the United States ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... ancient courtship. While at this mansion, amid all the blandishments of hope, Matilda's health began to fail beyond the power of restoratives, and the anxious eye both of parent and betrothed, marked the advance of relentless disease. The maiden faded away from their affections until both stood by her bed and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... outcome of the relentless and terrible mysticism of Saint John of the Cross, the art of the rack, the delirium tremens of divine intoxication here on earth; aye, but what a passion of adoration, what a voice of love stifled by anguish found utterance in ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... by which it is regulated and protected, were hunting them like beasts of prey for their destruction. Perhaps they deserved it, and this consideration may still more strongly account for their fierce and relentless-looking aspect. There is, in the meantime, no doubt that, however wild, ferocious, and savage they may have appeared, the strong and terrible hand of injustice and oppression had much, too much, to do with the crimes which they had committed, and which drove them out of the pale ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... everything he had, a thing quite unnecessary to do; and then to make good he had deprived this Indian of his hair, which alone might put him back on his trail. He might get another horse and take up once more that relentless and murderous pursuit; and this time, like Lynch, he would be out for blood and not for the ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... he knew that nothing could hurt me and my husband more fatally than this dreadful calumny." And uttering a loud cry of despair, and wringing her hands, she exclaimed: "Oh, my God, what did I do, to deserve so terrible a disgrace! What did my husband do that he should be thus exposed to the relentless malice of his foe? Was not the measure of our wretchedness full? Could not that cruel man, who calls himself Emperor of the French, content himself with hurling us into the dust, and with robbing my husband of ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... given me at the time. "I told him that I had no business to interfere, and that I was not sure it would be right even for me to meddle with the course things had taken." I was aware of weakening my case as I went on; I had better left her with a dramatic conception of a downright and relentless refusal. ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... courteous by nature; but he had some faults, which perhaps belonged as much to the fierce period in which he lived as to his own character. He was rash and passionate, and in his passion he was sometimes relentless ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... taken place in the castle hall of Schonwaldt since Quentin had partaken of the noontide meal there, and it was indeed one which painted, in the extremity of their dreadful features, the miseries of war—more especially when waged by those most relentless of all agents, the mercenary soldiers of a barbarous age—men who, by habit and profession, had become familiarized with all that was cruel and bloody in the art of war, while they were devoid alike of patriotism and of the romantic spirit ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... golden glory of the skies through which the Virgin is triumphantly borne, surrounded by myriads of angels and cherubim, and awaited by the Eternal. This last is a figure the divine serenity of which is the strongest contrast to those terrible representations of the Deity, so relentless in their superhuman majesty, which, in the ceiling of the Sixtine, move through the Infinite and fill the beholder with awe. The over-substantial, the merely mortal figure of the Virgin, in her voluminous red and blue draperies, has often been ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... it highly incompatible with all you know of the Gen'l's relentless character, that said sapphires and money should have been given ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... last he became positively ill. He was depressed by the incessant relentless attacks made upon him through the Waterville Patriot, and by his apparently hopeless outlook. The Patriot published some of his radical utterances much garbled, of course, and called him "an anarchist and ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... but she kept busy, and the plan worked admirably during the day. She was not sleeping well, however, and found that nights have a power all their own. When the lights went out, thought held the girl in its relentless grip. It was of no use to lengthen her working hours in the hope that sleep would come more promptly, for the more exhausted Elizabeth became the less able was she to sleep, and thought stared at her out of the darkness ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... again. By an unwonted effort, yet not without a pang of shame at sinning on the edge of the grave, she drags herself to the spot. She is troubled by the savage look of a place all rough with yews and thorns, by the rude, dark beauty of that relentless Proserpine. Prostrate, trembling, grovelling on the ground, the poor old woman weeps and prays. Answer there is none. But when she dares to lift herself up a little, she sees that Hell itself ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... for the most part are relentless and hard. The poor man is thrown into competition with his fellows for work. He may get along when work is easy to get and wages are good, but in dull times he falls behind, and is in hopeless trouble. His life is a long, hard struggle to make adjustments to his environment, ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... of time, Perez, single-handed, maintained an energetic defensive warfare against the disfavour of a vindictive monarch, the oppression of predominant rivals, the insidious machinations and wild fury of relentless private revenge, the most terrific mockeries of justice, the blackest mental despondency, and exquisite physical suffering. Philip II. displayed all his atrocious feline propensities—alternately hiding and baring his claws—tickling his victim to-day with delusions of mercy and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... face, and stared grimly at deep lines of avarice ironed into it. Even the mud on the floor, the dust on the table, and the cobwebs on the ceiling maliciously conspired against him, and asserted themselves in every seam of his threadbare clothes. But the face,—stern, stony, relentless, an uncertain compromise between the ghastly severity of a German etching and the constipated austerity of old pictures of the saints,—in that, one fixed idea had blotted out every other vestige of humanity. ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... thus upon the threshold of Another night about to close the door Upon one wretched day to open it On one yet wretcheder because one more;— Once more, you savage heavens, I ask of you— I, looking up to those relentless eyes That, now the greater lamp is gone below, Begin to muster in the listening skies; In all the shining circuits you have gone About this theatre of human woe, What greater sorrow have you gazed upon Than down this narrow chink ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... "This relentless judge," says Norman Duncan, "on a stormy July day carried many bundles ashore at Cartwright, in Sandwich Bay of the Labrador. The wife of the Hudson's Bay Company's agent examined them with delight. They were Christmas gifts from the children of the "States" to the lads and little ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... given examples enough of the horrid cruelties which are sometimes thought fit on such occasions. But if the innocent and most natural act of "running away" from intolerable tyranny, deserves such relentless severity, what kind of punishment have these law-makers themselves to expect hereafter, on account of their own enormous offences! Alas! to look for mercy (without a timely repentance) will only be another instance of their gross injustice! "Having their consciences seared with a hot iron," ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... half choked with mud, Peace shook the water from her eyes and flew at her assailant with vengeance in her heart, pounding right and left with relentless fists wherever she could hit. But the enemy was a larger and stronger child, and it would have gone hard with the brown-eyed maid had not the minister himself arrived unexpectedly upon the scene and separated the two young pugilists, ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... primitive, abandoned fear. And suddenly her vista of womanhood narrowed to include the ugly foreground of life that youth had looked over in its eager, far-flung scanning of the horizon beyond. Suddenly she felt all the oppression and sorrow of the sex bear down upon her and mark her with its relentless finger. Because she was a woman she would pay for every joy with a corresponding sorrow; receive a blow for every caress; know courage and fear with equal intimacy.... She stopped eating and she began ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Ireland under the protection of France, in the event of the Prince of Orange succeeding to the British throne. No proposition could more entirely suit the exigencies of Louis, of whom William was by far the ablest and most relentless enemy. The correspondence which has come to light in recent times, shows the importance which he attached to Tyrconnell's proposition—an importance still further enhanced by the direct but unsuccessful overture made to ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... sudden fear at being opposed to my father. I had, too, a feeling of personal shame because this strong man, whom I dreaded on account of his severity, should have been so overwhelmed by an insult. There was at this period, and later, much going on in my outer life to lessen the relentless influence of the creed of conduct which prevailed in our home for me, and for all of our house. I had even then begun to suspect at school that non-resistance did not add permanently to the comfort of life. I was sorry that my father ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... truth our ancestors had their share of pressure, and more than their share of ill-health. The stomach was the same ungrateful and rebellious organ then that it is now. Nature was the same strict accountant then that she is now, and balanced her debit and credit columns with the same relentless accuracy. The "liver" of the last century has become, we are told, the "nerves" of to-day; which transmigration should be a bond of sympathy between the new woman and that unchangeable article, man. We have warmer spirits and a higher vitality than our home-keeping great-grandmothers ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... relentless, had entered these beloved walls. An old servant, who had nursed Idris in infancy, and who lived with us more on the footing of a revered relative than a domestic, had gone a few days before to visit a daughter, married, and settled ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... anyway, pursued the relentless conscience—even the wish to be good was always choked by a complete forgetfulness; and before she could catch her breath the words were out, so, although she had believed nearly all her life that one might grow into goodness, she was quite rebellious to-night with the thought of ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... had helped in the disintegration. Nepenthe—it's sunshine, its relentless paganism—had done the rest. It shattered his earlier outlook and gave him nothing in exchange. Nothing, and yet everything. That vision of Angelina! It filled his inner being with luxurious content; content ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... morning she arose early, urged by a fevered restlessness that drove her with relentless force. Dressing, she discovered the loss of a little heart-shaped brooch, Jack's gift, ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... happy bridegroom was one Col. Starbottle, recently elected to represent Calaveras County in the legislative councils of the State. As I cannot record the event in finer language than that used by the correspondent of "The Sacramento Globe," I venture to quote some of his graceful periods. "The relentless shafts of the sly god have been lately busy among our gallant Solons. We quote 'one more unfortunate.' The latest victim is the Hon. C. Starbottle of Calaveras. The fair enchantress in the case is a beautiful widow, a former votary of Thespis, and lately ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... as the sun shot its last gleams over the field, the swords of the British horsemen were seen to flash and fall with relentless vigour. The brigades of Vandeleur and Vivian, well husbanded during the day, had been slipped upon the foe. The effect was electrical. The retreat became a rout that surged wildly around the last squares ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... as having no title. I will see her no more. I will return to the land which, if it affords none fairer, has at least many as fair, and less haughty than Miss Wardour. Tomorrow I will bid adieu to these northern shores, and to her who is as cold and relentless as her climate." When he had for some time brooded over this sturdy resolution, exhausted nature at length gave way, and, despite of wrath, doubt, and anxiety, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... A bare fisted, relentless, give and take fight such as this promised to be is common enough wherever hard men foregather, dirt-common in a country where the fag end of a long winter of enforced idleness leaves restless nerves ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... March 1872 at Pisa, mourning that united Italy was so largely the outcome of foreign help and monarchical bargainings. Garibaldi spent his last years in fulminating against the Government of Victor Emmanuel. The soldier-king himself passed away in January 1878, and his relentless opponent, Pius IX., expired a month later. The accession of Umberto I. and the election of Leo XIII. promised at first to assuage the feud between the Vatican and the Quirinal, but neither the tact of the new sovereign nor the personal suavity of the Pope brought about any real ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... to this garrison, and to all his soldiers, a terrible example of the relentless severity with which insubordination should be punished, to prove to them that mortal daring and mortal energy were vain to escape the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Grobble sat in the long cane chair in his sitting-room, a look of rebellious discontent upon his face. What could he do? Better chuck his job and clear out! The strain was getting awful. What a relentless, watchful brute Dearman was! To him entered that gentleman after gently ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... inspired the "Danse Macabre"; but the sculptor's thought is expressed with the subtle handicraft of a supersensitive age, with a fury of achievement and a triumph over technical difficulties that is the very essence of the best French Renaissance. In the same spirit Ronsard continues his relentless comparison of the dead woman with the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... his brother a very frank, manly, good-humoured letter from Paris. He was aware, he said, that by his own marriage he had forfeited his aunt's favour; and though he did not disguise his disappointment that she should have been so entirely relentless towards him, he was glad that the money was still kept in their branch of the family, and heartily congratulated his brother on his good fortune. He sent his affectionate remembrances to his sister, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... punishment of all, the most relentless vengeance wreaked on a helpless victim. "Of all the laws which swept down upon them from St. Petersburg and Moscow," says Leroy-Beaulieu with characteristic insight into the soul of Israel, "those which they [the Jews] find hardest to bear are the regulations ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... workmen moved away from the grating, counting the money that glistened in their black hands. There were disappointments, mutterings, remonstrances, hours missed, money drawn in advance; and above the tinkling of coins, Sigismond's voice could be heard, calm and relentless, defending the interests of his employers with a zeal ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... at each other quickly, and as quickly averted their eyes. Ethel gave a toss to her curls, and walked off to her cubicle. Kate went on unhooking with relentless haste, and Flora sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, and melted ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the first thoughts run which are evolved by this brown and torn devastation. But the tension naturally passes, and one comes back, first, to the victory—to the results of all that hard and relentless fighting, both for the British and the French forces, on this memorable battlefield north and south of the Somme. Eighty thousand prisoners, between five and six hundred guns of different calibres, and more than a thousand machine guns, had fallen to the Allies in four months and a half. ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... can never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he live?—an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages—and especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before the coming of the plague. ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... the rosy warning Of the bright relentless morning, When, thy soft caresses scorning, I shall leave thee in the shade. All the day my work must chain me, And its weary bonds restrain me, For I may not re-attain thee till the light begins ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... strange fruits of the tree of faith. The members of one of these believed that it was only necessary to climb upon the roofs in order to take flight to heaven. The deceptions practised on them by charlatans, the relentless persecution of the government, even the loss of reason, all counted for nothing if only they might enjoy some few moments of supreme felicity and live in harmony with the divine! To experience such ecstasy ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... the one of you and hang the other."] The following extracts from that fine old play, "The Witch of Edmonton," bear a strong resemblance to the scene described in the text. Mother Sawyer, in whom the milk of human kindness is turned to gall by destitution, imbittered by relentless outrage and insult, and who, driven out of the pale of human fellowship, is thrown upon strange and fearful allies, would almost appear to be the counterpart of Mother Demdike. The weird sisters of our transcendant bard are wild and wonderful creations, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... curled up on the store-porch, nursing a bare foot and viewing the world through the top of his hat. Did the most active man calmly and without egotism dissect the sum of his useful accomplishment, he would be highly discouraged, for time is a relentless destroyer. But a man can not take so disdainful a measure of his own value. He must live. To superior minds like the philosopher's or Stacy Shunk's he may be living his tale of years happy in constantly ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... beautiful, and true, and pure in this modern world. That is why his best songs sing of mother's love and childhood and of the eternal bond between them. He hated sham, and humbug, and false pretence, and that is why his daily paragraphs gleam and sparkle with the relentless satire and ridicule; he detested the solemn dulness of conventional life, and that is why he scourged society with the "knotted lash of sarcasm" and dissipated melancholy with the unchecked effrontery of his mirth. And so his songs ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... and relentless warfare with the clerical authorities of Catholic and Protestant lands, the anatomists and physiologists had at last obtained permission to dissect bodies and to substitute a positive knowledge of our organs and their habits for the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Wherever we have turned, we have met with its influence; whatever schemes for legitimate expansion our Kaiser and his great counsellors may have framed have been checked, if not thwarted, by our sleepless and relentless foe. No longer can we, the great peace-loving nation of the world, conceal from ourselves the coming peril. England has declared herself our ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... argument, that the most complicated recesses of thought are best reached by the simplest forms of expression. I said to myself, 'I will study that truth if ever I take to literature as I have taken to song;' and—yes—it was that evening that the ambition fatal to woman fixed on me its relentless fangs—at Enghien—we were on the lake—the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... March, 1689, the French reduced the castle of Heidelberg to a heap of ashes, and for more than a century its bleak ruins kept alive the hatred of Germany toward their relentless enemies. ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... anxiety and terror cloud all faces. It was partly because self-interest bound many to Herod, and partly because they all feared that any outburst of Messianic hopes would lead to fresh cruelties inflicted by the relentless, trembling tyrant. So the Magi, who represented the eagerness of Gentile hearts grasping the new hopes, and claiming some share in Israel's Messiah, saw His own people careless, and, if moved from their apathy, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the increase of the cost of living caused by such tariff becomes a burden upon those with moderate means and the poor, the employed and unemployed, the sick and well, and the young and old, and that it constitutes a tax which with relentless grasp is fastened upon the clothing of every man, woman, and child in the land, reasons are suggested why the removal or reduction of this duty should be included in a revision ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... clans or families. The head of the clan built a ship, and taking with him his family and relations, founded a settlement in wild Britain, or wherever the winds happened to carry them. They were very fierce and relentless in war, and committed terrible ravages on the helpless Britons, sparing neither men, women, nor children, burning buildings, destroying and conquering ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... were well received in the hotel, though they were not at an age which commands popularity. In the criticism which was passed upon them—the free, realistic and relentless criticism of private hotels—Sophia was at first set down as overbearing. But in a few days this view was modified, and Sophia rose in esteem. The fact was that Sophia's behaviour changed after forty-eight hours. The Rutland Hotel was very good. It was ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... way. I thought of these things as I gazed upon the helpless women and children thronging about me, and my heart sank as I realized how great indeed was the burden resting upon us all, how frail the hope of safety. Death, savage, relentless, inhuman death in its most frightful guise with torture and agony unspeakable, lurked along every mile of our possible retreat; nor could I conceive how its grim coming might long be delayed by that palisade of logs. We were hopeless of rescue. ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... spoken to you all, to express my admiration of the splendid manner in which you have fought and are still fighting against a powerful and relentless enemy. ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... a weird race. There was no running, no galloping; only a steady, relentless trot that jarred poor Boland to the bone. After an hour, during which the pursuers gained steadily, Pete called a halt. They took the packs from the led animals and turned them loose, to go back to Fishhook Mountain; they refilled their canteens ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... often appears about the death-bed of dying states, but his genius has not so often been matched. The son of a Suevic father, his mother the daughter of Wallia, the successor and avenger of Ataulfus the Visigoth, he was the champion of the empire against the Vandal, that is to say, against her most relentless foe. His success in this was the secret of his power. Pondering the fate of his predecessors he determined he would not end as they did. Therefore he determined to make whom he would emperor and to depose him when he had done with him; in a word, he meant to be the ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... work, however hard or unreasonable, but determined to defend himself against any attempt at another flogging. In the cold passion that took possession of him, the slave-boy became utterly reckless of consequences, reasoning to himself that the limit of suffering at the hands of this relentless slave-breaker had already been reached. He was resolved to fight and did fight. He began his morning work in peace, obeying promptly every order from his master, and while he was in the act of going up to the stable-loft ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... England fought with such relentless animosity, won his throne by the display of matchless ability in the field and the cabinet. The present Napoleon reached his throne by perjury, assassination, and crimes of the blackest atrocity. The first Napoleon England pursued with her ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... and that I Shall never see thee on the earth again, Incredible it seems! Alas, alas! What is this thing, that they call death? Oh, would That I, this day, the mystery could solve, And my defenceless head withdraw from Fate's Relentless hate! I still am young, and still Feel all the blight and misery of age, Which I so dread; and distant far it seems; But, ah, how little different from age, The flower of my years!"—"We both were born," She said, "to weep; unhappy were our lives, And heaven ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... pleadings of the simulacra of the powers he had set up to rule, were crushed at daybreak by the realities in a sense of weight that pushed him mechanically on. He telegraphed to Roland, and mentally gave chase to the message to recall it. The slumberer roused in darkness by the relentless insane-seeming bell which hales him to duty, melts at the charms of sleep, and feels that logic is with him in his preference of his pillow; but the tireless revolving world outside, nature's pitiless ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of the hopes that had been raised by Kitchener's army, the French, headed by M. Pichon and backed by the Russian Press, once more mooted the vexed question of Japanese intervention. In the Turkish dominions the Greeks were subjected to relentless persecution, especially on the coast of Asia Minor. The massacre of Armenians on an unprecedented scale was reported from Bitlis, Moosh, Diarbekir and Zeitun. In the first-named region 9,000 bodies, mostly women and children, were, it is alleged, cast into the river Tigris.[105] The ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... was not literally true, that she was not, nor would she ever be alone—while he lived. It was only a question of how he could help her. It had seemed almost certain that the danger threatening her came from one of two sources—either from those who were left of the Crime Club, relentless, savage for vengeance on account of the ruin and disaster that had overtaken them; or else from the Magpie, and behind the Magpie, massed like some Satanic phalanx, every denizen of the underworld, for Silver Mag had disappeared ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... rosaries of chalcedony and jasper; she not only sent votive offerings to the venerated shrines of the saints in Brittany, and presented rich gifts every year to the Holy Virgin of Auray, but she went herself on a pilgrimage. Alas! it was all to no purpose; a relentless ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... nation, rendered necessary by the rebellion of eleven slave States and the consequent liberation from slavery of four million persons whose unpaid labor had enriched the lands and impoverished the hearts of their relentless masters. ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... now she was here in Boston, but she could not even play the scale, nor interpret the phrase for the ear to which they had been so laboriously attuned; and Cyril's face, in the flesh, was no beckoning star of promise, but was a thing as cold and relentless as was the waste of waters across which it ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... warning to clear the way. The back of her head was covered with a little cap as plain as a nun's cap; and I never saw an ornament about her. Yet criticism never touched Mme. Ricard. Not even the criticism of a set of school-girls; and I had soon to learn that there is none more relentless. ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... On the revolutions of Trebizond under the later empire down to this period, see Fallmerayer, Geschichte des Kaiserthums von Trapezunt, ch. iii. The wife of Manuel fled with her infant sons and her treasure from the relentless enmity of Isaac Angelus. Fallmerayer conjectures that her arrival enabled the Greeks of that region to make head against the formidable Thamar, the Georgian queen of Teflis, p. 42. They gradually formed a dominion ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... to that," said my mistress, with relentless generosity. "I intend to give you a dress, and as you have next to nothing to do to-morrow, you can alter it in time. If you had any gratitude in you, Elise, you'd be out of yourself ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... houses are the only fabrications of man's hands that are personalities. Enterprise builds the factory, Greed the tenement, but Love alone builds the house, and by Love alone is it maintained against the city's relentless encroachments. Once hallowed by habitation, what warm and vivid influences impregnate it! Ambition, pride, hope, joys happily shared; suffering, sorrow, and loss bravely endured—the walls outlive them all, gathering with age, from grief and joy alike, kind memories and ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... would be a deed of charity and true chivalry, yet one by no means without its peril and its risk. Old Sanghurst is a wily and a cruel foe, and failure would but mean more tyranny and suffering for the miserable victim he holds in his relentless hands. It might lead also to some mysterious vengeance upon you yourselves. There are ugly whispers breathed abroad about the old man and his evil practices. Travellers through these forest tracks, richly laden, have ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... between nations has been to check the relentless flood of cheap, unpaid-for fiction, which formerly poured from the press, submerging the better literature. The Seaside and other libraries, with their miserable type, flimsy paper, and ugly form, were an injury alike to the eyesight, to the ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... "Some," persisted the relentless doctor, "even speak of your having been seen together; but of course, if she is a Glasgow lady, ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... York has its hardships and toil, and it has its joys as well, among rich and poor. Grim and relentless, it is beautiful at all times until man puts his befouling hand upon the landscape it paints in street and alley, where poetry is never at home in summer. The great city lying silent under its soft white blanket at night, with its myriad of lights twinkling and rivalling the stars, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... nothing like that figure. In that case it is no use to talk of it." In despair you cry, "Well, what will you offer?" with a choking voice. "Fifteen shillings would be about my figure for it," answers the fiend, relentless ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... of a heart with anguish broken And rescu'd from despair, attend your highness. Alas! my gracious lord, what have I done To kindle such relentless wrath against me? ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... but failed to break the guard and danced out again, Macdonald still pressing on him. Again and again LeNoir rushed, but the guard was impregnable, and steadily Macdonald advanced. That steady, relentless advance began to tell on the Frenchman's nerves. The sweat gathered in big drops on his forehead and ran down his face. He prepared for a supreme effort. Swiftly retreating, he lured Macdonald to a more rapid advance, then with a yell he doubled ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... at last and stood with drooping head, trying to shield its face from that cruel, relentless, stinging thing which the man creature wielded. He was cowed, but ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... gathering very slowly in the dim horizon of squalid, starving Paris: for the next half-dozen years they would still dance and gamble, fight and flirt, surround a tottering throne, and hoodwink a weak monarch. The Fates' avenging sword still rested in its sheath; the relentless, ceaseless wheel still bore them up in their whirl of pleasure; the downward movement had only just begun: the cry of the oppressed children of France had not yet been heard above the din of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... perquisites, viz.: the heart, liver and kidneys. On these, with the addition of a chop from a pig, at whose dying moments I was present, and a portion of an unfortunate duck, I made an excellent meal. That night was rather an uneasy one for me, for I had Eugene-Aram-like dreams in which relentless sheep chased me round farmhouses and barns into the arms of fierce ducks and avenging porkers. But reveille, and then daylight came at last, and peace for my ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... my dear, what are your feelings with regard to them? Come, you relentless foe of all bucklers, speak; I am listening to you. (Peace whispers into Hermes' ear.) Is that your grievance against them? Yes, yes, I understand. Hearken, you folk, this is her complaint. She says, that after ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... It was not true. I went back to my recollections of old Dan Gorman, a man as intensely interested in the struggle as ever any one was. I remembered his great pot belly, his flabby skin, his whisky-sodden face. I remembered his grasping meanness, his relentless hardness in dealing with those in his power. The most thoroughly materialised business man in Belfast has more spirituality about him than old Dan Gorman ever had. Nor did I believe that his son, Michael Gorman, would have accepted Mrs. Ascher's account of his position. He would have winked, ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... relentless monitor went on, "and desired to become in music the great voice of my country"—I looked at him quickly but saw no smile—"I should watch the great ships down there below, I should listen to them with an artist's ears. They are here from all over the world, these ships, they are manned ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... us on edge with excitement, a situation which I sometimes thought he enjoyed more keenly than any other in his relentless tracing down of ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... a fraction, and that fraction again scattered over vast areas, in various states of civilization, and under diversified kinds of governments, enjoying liberty and rights of citizenship in the one, and groaning under relentless oppression in the other,—are they still none other than Semites? Are they so permeated with Semitic features that they can never amalgamate with their surroundings and become full-weighted citizens of the state where ...
— Zionism and Anti-Semitism - Zionism by Nordau; and Anti-Semitism by Gottheil • Max Simon Nordau
... But Mr. Moseley was relentless. "I assure you it is true. And the other hand—" He stopped in grave deliberation. The Methodist brother, who had been growing more and more overcharged with suppressed knowledge, could contain ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... you've got 'em handy. Evil eyes rather tickle me. We'll see which makes most impression—my hand or your eye," and he laid the black-magic man across his knee, and gave him such a genuine motherly quilting as he had never experienced in his life before. Hot blows he was accustomed to, but this cool, relentless, tingling flagellation, all on the one spot, and continued till every particle of blood in his body seemed to leap to meet each stroke, was new to him, and it made ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... Midgard serpent, which, with its tail in its mouth, encircled the earth. In the last trial of strength Thor wrestled with an old woman, and after a violent contest was thrown down upon one knee. But the hag was in truth relentless old age, who sooner or later lays low ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... A large element of his difficulty lay in the fact that the population of the whole State was tainted with disloyalty to a degree which rendered Missouri less a factor in the larger questions of general army operations, than from the beginning to the end of the war a local district of bitter and relentless factional hatred and guerrilla or, as the term was constantly employed, "bushwhacking" warfare, intensified and kept alive by annual roving Confederate incursions from Arkansas and the Indian ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... in Africa more dreaded by hunters than the wild buffalo, for the beast, with its spreading sharp horns is a formidable foe, and will seldom give up the attack until utterly unable to move. They are fierce and relentless. ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... passions are laid bare, whose life is traced, whose countenance is portrayed with miraculousness, distinctness and verisimilitude. All the phenomena of life in the camp, the court, the boudoir, the low faubourg, or the country chateau are ranged in order, and catalogued. This is done with relentless audacity, often with a touch of grotesque exaggeration, but always with almost wearying minuteness. Sometimes this great writer finds that a description of actuality fails to give the true spiritual key to a situation, and he overflows into allegory, ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... young woman of about twenty-two, small and pale, hollow-eyed, yet with a relentless look about her, entered the room. She was a friend at ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... was that, at the same time that Clerambault pursued his relentless analysis which struck at the foundations of current beliefs, an inverse process of reconstruction and idealisation was going on in the mind of Madame Mairet. Her grief longed to convince itself that after all there had been a holy cause, and the dead ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... life, the worm you quicken From crashing suns.... "Let there be light!" you said. Light was, and life,—Man rose, and Man fell stricken By your relentless power that through him sped; And again Man rose, halt like the walking dead, Dragging these heavy laws you never knew Till you recoiled from him astonishd,— Ah, holy goddess, ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... but he lay there with his great white eyes fixed on the ceiling, in the cool, determined manner of a bold man who had made up his mind to face danger and meet whatever might befall him. We escaped, however, without injury, the doughty landlord and his relentless sons merely demanding pay for supper, lodging, horse-feed, and breakfast, which my valiant uncle, betraying no signs of fear, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... ship fed the poor devils on the 25th of last May, far out at sea and left them to bullyrag their way to New York—and now they ain't as near New York as they were then by 250 miles! They have drifted 750 miles and are still drifting in the relentless Gulf Stream! What a delicious magazine chapter it would make—but I had to deny myself. I had to come right out in the papers at once, with my details, so as to try to raise the government's sympathy ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... law of historical inevitability and necessity determined the matter. He pointed out that the bourgeoisie, represented by the Constitutional Democrats in the political struggle, were compelled to wage relentless war upon Absolutism, the abolition of which was as absolutely essential to the realization of their class aims as it was to the realization of the class aims of the proletariat. Hence, in this struggle, ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... might drift out of action and be unable to return when the wind fell with the approaching sunset. The hawser, however, parted, and with it the last hope of escape. Great numbers of the crew had already been killed and wounded by the relentless pounding the ship had received from her enemies, for whom, toward the end, the affair became little more than safe target practice, with a smooth sea. As yet no voice had been raised in favor of submission; ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... England, though wages were low, provisions were cheap and employment constant. The growth of the wool trade, then further stimulated by refugees from the "three towns of Flanders," against which Louis de Male was waging relentless war, was bringing comfort to many, and riches to a few. The maritime greatness of England that found its first results in the battle of Sluys was the fruit of a commercial activity on the sea which ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... credence to tales, of which many came to me, exposing Miss Caroline as an able and relentless coquette. Nor could I fail to understand how the late Colonel Jere Lansdale would have found need to be a duellist after he became her lover, even had he aforetime been ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... Relentless as he was in hewing life to his theory—hammering substance to the form of his thought—yet he was tender, too, in the manner of a rainbow dancing over an abyss. For the moment he wanted to say, "Poor girlie, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... bright and careless young men and say to him, "I killed Carfax—thus and thus it was." Oh! the relief! the lifting of the weight! For then—and only then—this pursuing Shadow, so strangely grave, not cruel, but only relentless, would step back. Because that confession—how clearly he knew it!—was the thing that God demanded. So long as he kept silence he resisted the Pursuer—so long as he resisted the Pursuer he must ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... institution of chivalry, and, to a great degree, insensible to those high ideals of fealty and honor which were the cardinal virtues of the knightly order. Owing to the absence of these fine qualities of mind and soul, the Italian in war was too often of fierce and relentless temper, showing neither pity nor mercy and having no compassion for a fallen foe. Warriors never admitted prisoners to ransom, and the annals of their contests are destitute of those graceful courtesies which shed such a beautiful ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... between man and man. And yet, we all agree in one object of our being—all prey on each other! Glory, which is but the thirst of blood, makes yon soldier the tiger of his kind; other passions have made me the serpent: both fierce, relentless, unscrupulous—both! hero and courtier, valour and craft! Hein! I will serve this young man—he has served me. When all other affection was torn from me, he, then a boy, smiled on me and bade me love him. Why has ...
— Calderon The Courtier - A Tale • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was to keep silence, if its enemies did not push their triumph to an extremity. Even the indefatigable Arnauld seems to have promised to be quiet. But the Jesuits were too conscious of their power, and too relentless in their hostility, to pause in their determination to crush their opponents. They had recourse both to gibes and to active persecution. They printed an almanac with the figure of Jansen as frontispiece, flying in the guise of a winged devil before the Pope and ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... Armstrong's qualifications for the post, his presence in the Cabinet was most inadvisable, for he did not and could not inspire the personal confidence of either Gallatin or Monroe. Once in office, he turned Monroe into a relentless enemy and fairly drove Gallatin out of office in disgust by appointing his old enemy, William Duane, editor of the Aurora, to the post of Adjutant-General. "And Armstrong!"—said Dallas who subsequently as Secretary of War knew whereof he spoke—"he was the devil from the beginning, ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... OF, War Minister of Louis XIV., born in Paris; was a man of great administrative ability in his department, but for the glory of France and his own was savage for war and relentless in the conduct of it, till one day in his obstinate zeal, as he threatened to lay the cathedral city of Treves in ashes, the king, seizing the tongs from the chimney, was about to strike him therewith, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... same staring, cloudless sky of dazzling blue, the same blazing sun, the same breathless atmosphere, and the same oil-smooth sea. And as these days of calm and stagnation succeeded each other with relentless persistency, I kept up the custom of bathing the negroes and thoroughly cleansing the slave-deck, until at length the poor creatures actually grew fat and merry, so that Mendouca, despite his fast-growing impatience and irritability ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... them so little that he reminded Parliament of the summary way in which Henry V. at Agincourt dealt with the Frenchmen who fell into his hands. John Knox thought that every Catholic in Scotland ought to be put to death, and no man ever had disciples of a sterner or more relentless temper. But ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... by all his comrades and esteemed by his officers; and yet he could not secure his promotion. Even the commandant at Verona had interceded for him in vain. He must have a powerful enemy who pursued him with relentless persistence. ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... the valley of the Ohio by the whites, with the march into the wilderness of that wild-turkey breed of heroes of which Boone, Kenton, the Zanes, and the Wetzels were the first, the Indian's nature gradually changed until he became a fierce and relentless foe. ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... be curious as to the motives and policy of a person, virtuous as a man, but so relentless as a lawgiver. Although Draco was himself a noble, it is difficult to suppose that laws so stern and impartial would not operate rather against the more insolent and encroaching class than against the more subordinate ones. The attempt shows a very unwholesome state ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... damn me, you'll resemble those That flay'd the Travell'r, who had lost his clothes; Are there not foes enough to do my books? Relentless trunk-makers, and pastry-cooks? Acknowledge not those barbarous allies, The wooden box-men, and the men of pies: For heav'n's sake, let it ne'er be understood That you, great Censors! coalesce with wood; Nor let your ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... deliver an adverse vote, was seized by the gatherers of gossip, ever ready to discover a sinister motive in the actions of the man who never forgot, was embedded in that prose epic of the "Wrath of Marius" which subsequently adorned the memoirs of the great, and became a story of how the relentless lieutenant had, in malignant disregard of his own convictions, caused Metellus to commit the inexpiable wrong of dooming a guest-friend to an unworthy death.[1070] The death was inflicted with all the barbarity of Roman military law; Turpilius was ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... she had been a little child. "Did you love him so very dearly, Nelly?" he whispered, his cheek against her: "for somehow of late he has not seemed to me good enough for thee. He has got an inkling that something has gone wrong, and he was very inquisitive—I may say he questioned me in a relentless kind of way." ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the mad anguish of that ruined greatness, and wronged natural affection, the Poet, relentless as fortune herself in her sternest moods, intent on his experiment only, will bring out his great victim, and consign him to the wind and the rain, and the lightning, and the thunder, and bid his ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... philanthropist—Cornelius Vanderbilt. Personally he was a disgusting brute; ignorant, base, a boor in his manners, a blackguard in his language; he had little if any natural affection, and to those who offended him he was a relentless barbarian. Yet the man was a great philanthropist, and became so by the piling up of millions of dollars. Of course he did that for his own vulgar satisfaction, though personally he could not use the money when he ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... young men was relentless. By miracles of luck, as well as by deduction from the topography of the way the runaways must take, the young men picked up the blizzard-blinded trail and clung to it. When the snow flew, Smoke and Labiskwee took the most improbable courses, turning east when ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... platform was the resemblance of a dark pitchy cavern, from whence issued appearance of fire and flames; and, when it was necessary, the audience were treated with hideous yellings and noises as imitative of the howlings and cries of the wretched souls tormented by the relentless demons. From this yawning cave the devils themselves constantly ascended to delight and to instruct the spectators:—to delight, because they were usually the greatest jesters and buffoons that then appeared; and to instruct, for that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... a tempestuous and relentless sea; a week of seasickness and deserted cabins; of lonely quarterdecks drenched with spray—spray so ambitious that it even coated the smokestacks thick with a white crust of salt to their very tops; a week of shivering in the shelter ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catharine. Having formed these beings she did not know what she had done. If the auditors of her work, when read in manuscript, shuddered under the grinding influence of natures so relentless and implacable—of spirits so lost and fallen; if it was complained that the mere hearing of certain vivid and fearful scenes banished sleep by night and disturbed mental peace by day, Ellis Bell would wonder what was meant ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson |
