"Sickly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... learned that the book was in the press. He had apparently heard little of it before. This alone would show with what ease and smoothness Gibbon must have worked. He had excellent health—a strange fact after his sickly childhood; society unbent his mind instead of distracting it; his stomach was perfect—perhaps too good, as about this time he began to be admonished by the gout. He never seems to have needed change. "Sufficient for the summer is the evil thereof, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... large, 'twill yield very good faggot: It is likewise admirable covert for wildfowl, and will be made to grow even in moist, as well as dry places: The young and tender tops of furzes, being a little bruis'd and given to a lean sickly horse, will strangely recover and plump him. Thus, in some places, they sow in barren grounds (when they lay them down) the last crop with this seed, and so let them remain till they break them up again, and during that interim, reap considerable ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... sullen, cantankerous, abusive. They were all compassionate to him, treating him like a spoiled, but not the less in reality a sickly child. Arctura thought her grandmother could not have brought him up well; more might surely have been made of him. But Arctura had him after a lifetime fertile in cause of self-reproach, had him in the net of sore sickness, at the mercy ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... success, and was exceedingly brilliant. The daily journals abounded, and their subscription lists were enormous. Where there is freedom, men and women will read—and where there is unmitigated despotism, the people care little to read the sickly journals which are permitted ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... baggage had been destroyed at the burning of the Indian town of Mavila, and many of the soldiers were without armor and without weapons. In place of the gallant array which, more than three years before, had left the harbor of Espiritu Santo, a company of sickly and starving men were laboring among the swampy forests of the Mississippi, some clad in skins, and some in mats woven from a kind ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... the ranks of the criminal class, who would never have fallen into the category of criminal convicts if adequate provision had been made for the rescue of those drifting to doom. When once he has fallen, circumstances seem to combine to keep him there. As wounded and sickly stags are gored to death by their fellows, so the unfortunate who bears the prison brand is hunted from pillar to post, until he despairs of ever regaining his position, and oscillates between one prison and another for ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... itself!—with its university, its schools, its churches, its hospitals, its missions; its homes, its lodging-houses, its hotels, its drinking shops, its houses viler still; its factories, its ships, its great steamers; and the same humanity busy in all!—here the sickly lady walking in the panoply of love unharmed through the horrors of vicious suffering; there the strong mother cursing her own child along half a street with an intensity and vileness of execration unheard elsewhere! The will of the brooding spirit must be a grand one, indeed, to enclose ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... ways; here and there I got a glimpse of faded turf, looking like a worn-out bit of carpet, or some appearance of a kitchen garden, the sparse vegetables of which (potatoes, cabbages, and lettuces), would have figured appropriately upon a Lilliputian table. A few sickly wallflowers were trying to enjoy ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... was at Exeter, I think. But there, now, you don't find such men and women in these times; and do you know the reason of that, Sir Percy? I'll tell you: it's the doctors. The doctors can keep all the sickly ones alive now: before it was only the strong ones that lived. Dear, dear me! when I hear some of those London women talk, it is nothing but a catalogue of illnesses and diseases. No wonder they should say in church, 'There is no health in us:' every one of them has something ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... the sanguine hopes with which they were begun have been realized. There have been obstacles in the way of success which might have been partly foreseen, but which could not have been fully anticipated. Many of the children brought to the missionaries were so sickly and emaciated, that they soon died in spite of all the attention bestowed on them. The mortality has been at times most depressing. There was no vitality to resist disease. The effort to preserve ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... know, be nothing else. When the healthy love of life is on one, and all its forms and its appetites seem so unutterably real; when the most brutal and the most spiritual things are lit by the same sun, and each is an integral part of the total richness,—why, then it seems a grudging and sickly way of meeting so robust a universe to shrink from any of its facts and wish them not to be. Rather take the strictly dramatic point of view, and treat the whole thing as a great unending romance which the spirit of the universe, striving to realize its own content, is eternally thinking ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... "arranged in careful order a series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks." There were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his mother's toilet-table when he, a sickly child, slept in her dressing-room; the silver taper-stand which the young advocate bought for her with his first fee; a row of small packets inscribed by her hand, and containing the hair of such of her children as had died before her; and more odds and ends of a like sort—pathetic ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... that he somewhat resembled a good-natured commercial traveller of the superior class. Beside him was a lady with skim-milky eyes and complexion, belonging to the "interesting" class of women, where that class merges in the sickly, her greatest pleasure being apparently to enjoy nothing. Opposite this pair sat two little girls in ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... The sickly gas-jet still struggled bravely with adversity at the end of the raised silver arm of the statuette which had kept to a hair's breadth its graceful pose on the toes of its left foot; and the staircase lost itself in the shadows above. Therese was parsimonious with the lights. To see all this was ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... his face, and made waking each morning a dry-throated torture. Now he stopped at the entrance to the ship where he had been reassigned a berth for the night shift. An attendant handed him a small bottle, three biscuits, and a magazine. He tasted the chemically purified water sickly, stuffed the three ersatz biscuits into his pocket, and moved down the ...
— Victory • Lester del Rey
... landing which had been the narrow setting of ten years of her life. That haughty smile, in which there was a touch of profound pity and of scorn as well, such scorn as a parvenu feels for his poor beginnings, was evidently addressed to the poor sickly child whom she fancied she saw up at that window, in the depths of the past and the darkness. It seemed to say to Claire, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... love me at first; I was such a sickly, awkward kind of a fellow then—and I know I am ugly. Besides, I was a foreigner. The children used to laugh at me, at first; and they even went so far as to throw stones at me, when they saw me kiss Marie. I only kissed ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and chat merrily over warmed-up meat and johnny-cake, or even no meat at all, when such days came. How she ever came to think that she could go to Chautauqua was a matter of surprise to herself; but it happened to have been a sickly summer among the wealthy people, and large bills had come in—the next thing was to spend them. Chautauqua was a silly place to do it in, to be sure; that was Dr. Mitchell's idea, and the family laughed together over Eurie's last wild notion; but for all that they good-naturedly ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... Trueman, from Baltimore, and two children belonging to the Paxton family. But the emigrants who came out in the Vine, have suffered very much; we lost twelve of them. The action of the disease was more powerful with them than is common—they unfortunately arrived here in the most sickly month in the year, February. I am strongly of the opinion, sir, that if the people of New England leave there in the winter, that the transition is so great, that you may count upon a loss of half at least. They may, in my estimation, with safety, leave in the months ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... can't afford to spare you yet besides the death of a blue jacket can in no way benefit us. What's the use of 'a bloody war and a sickly season,' that standard toast at every West India mess, if the juniors are to go off and not the seniors— Cranstoun's the ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... meaning rose in the vacuous eye of Lovel; Isaacs caressed his diamond pin, smiling in a sickly fashion; McNamara's wandering stare fixed and grew unhumanly bright; Ufert openly dropped his hand on his ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... barrel arrived at one-thirty. No one claimed it till about three, when a small, sickly—looking gentleman (probably a curate) came up, and sez he, "Have you got anything for Pitman?" or "Wili'm Bent Pitman," if I recollect right. "I don't exactly know," sez I, "but I rather fancy that there barrel bears that name." The little man ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... the old man, with another explosion, stamping violently on the floor. "No, I don't. You're poor as spring snakes, and your mother's sickly, and you've hard work to get enough to keep the flesh on your bones; but I don't tell ye to do that. I tell ye to take it straight to the Old Man, and tell him where ye found it, and all about it. I've knowed him ever since his mustash growed, and before. You go ...
— The Green Satin Gown • Laura E. Richards
... opinion. I don't hold with your scribblers. At the same time I wouldn't count too positively, in your place, on his being likely to fail. That little Mirabel—if it wasn't for his beard, I should believe he was a woman, and a sickly woman too; he fainted in our house the other day—that little Mirabel is in earnest. Rather than leave Miss Emily from Saturday to Monday, he has got a parson out of employment to do his Sunday work for him. And, what's more, he has persuaded her (for some reasons of his ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... university at Paris, accompanied by the chaplain and an equerry. When the Lady Wendula, his master's mother, learned what an excellent reputation Biberli had gained as a schoolmaster, she persuaded her husband to send him as esquire with their sickly son. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... laws of the Universe, and the environment of existence, must needs move in circles of harmonious unity, making loveliness out of commonness, and poetry out of prose. The devotee of what is mistakenly called 'pleasure,'—enervated or satiated with the sickly moral exhalations of a corrupt society,—would be quite at a loss to understand what possible enjoyment could be obtained by sitting placidly under an apple-tree with a well-thumbed volume of the wisdom of the inspired pagan ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... ci-devant convent of the jesuits, built by one of the munificent dukes de Bourbon. It is a magnificent oblong stone building. In the centre of the court was a tree of liberty, which, like almost all the other trees, dedicated to that goddess, which I saw, looked blighted, and sickly. I mention it as a fact, without alluding to any political sentiment whatever. It is a remark in frequent use in France, that the caps of liberty are without heads, and the trees of liberty without root. The ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... had momentarily forgotten, the reason why he had planned this expedition. He was in pursuit. The recollection cheered him up, restored to him the strength of his manhood, put him right with himself. The envy and the almost sickly sentimentality vanished from him, and he broke into the usual gay conversation which seldom failed him, ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... end of nearly every voyage, he used to run down to pay a visit to Captain and Mrs Fleetwood, at their place in Hampshire; and, on one occasion, he persuaded the lady to allow him to take her eldest boy, who was a little sickly, a ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... "at eighteen, was a sickly country lad with less than the usual elementary education and no other prospects than a life of drudgery on the old farm. But there was in him an elemental strength of will that was sufficient, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... to the newly-created vineyards, some consisting of French grafts on American stock, others American plants; but vines are capricious, and one vineyard looked sickly enough, although free from parasites. The climate did not suit it, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... conversation goes on in the bosom of this fantastic barn and the great moving shadows that cross it; night is heaped up in its corners, and pointed by a few scattered and sickly candles. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... siege being raised, Melville left Poitiers for Geneva, footing it all the way in the company of a few fellow-students. If he was sickly as a child, he gathered vigour in his 'teens and grew up a manly youth. He was of short stature and great agility, high-spirited, brave, the cheeriest of companions, full of resource in emergencies, and with an artful humour by which he made his escape from many a ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... Salisbury, on the borders of Hampshire. The father in his emergencies had almost been tempted to ask his son for money; but hitherto he had refrained. A daughter was married to a tradesman at Warminster, and was also doing well. A second son who had once been sickly and weak, was a scholar in his way, and was now a schoolmaster, also at Warminster, and in great repute with the parson of the parish there. There was a second daughter, Fanny, at home, a girl as good as gold, the glory and joy and ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... around him! Thee! rapt in thy dark magnificence, I call At this still midnight hour, this awful season, When on my bed in wakeful restlessness, I turn me, weary: while all around, All, all, save me, sink in forgetfulness, I only wake to watch the sickly taper that lights, Me to my tomb. Yes, 'tis the hand of death I feel press heavy on my vitals; Slow sapping the warm current of existence; My moments now are few! e'en now I feel the knife, the separating knife, divide The tender ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French
... the moon shone out from behind the clouds. In its sickly light about half-way between us and the edge of the clearing, say thirty yards off, I saw—oh! what did I see! The devil destroying a lost soul. At least, that is what it looked like. A huge, grey-black creature, grotesquely human in its shape, had the thin Kalubi in its ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... well as his voice, testified to his jangled nerves. He was very fat, but had apparently at some time been much fatter, so that the skin hung about his face in loose pouches, like the cheeks of a blood-hound. He was of a sickly color, and his thin, sandy hair seemed to bristle up with the intensity of his emotion. In his hand he held a pistol, but he thrust it into his ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... a poor trembling thing which you should pity. Even the least remembrance of my visionary joy might wound my sickly fancy. I therefore restore the last memorials of your kindness to their rightful owner. (She lays some trinkets on the table.) This, too, that like a dagger struck my heart (presenting a letter). This, too (going to rush out of the door in tears), and I will ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... clothes together, and they started that evening for the mill. Sal believed it was the doctor who recommended Mrs. Lake as a foster- mother for the baby, having attended her child. The storm came on after they started. The child had been very sickly ever since they left London. The gentleman took the Cheap Jack's wife straight back to the station, paid her handsomely, and sent her up to town again. She had never seen him since. As to his name, it so happened she had never heard it at ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... us affably. Through a curtained recess was the small common room, where yellow and black men reclined, in a purple dusk, beaded with the lights of little lamps. The odour was sickly, the air dry. The gentleman wondered whether we would have a room. No, we wouldn't; but I bought cigarettes, and we went upstairs to the little dirty bedrooms. The bed is but a mattress with a pillow. There, if you are a dope-fiend, you may have your pipe and lamp, very cosy, and you may lock ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... insensible to danger. His fighters were a motley collection of blacks, soldiers and boys. Nearly all had been afflicted with sickness. Mackenzie says that when the defeated British commander was brought aboard the "Niagara" and beheld the sickly and parti-colored beings around him, an expression of chagrin escaped him at having been conquered by ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... like Holborn and Tottenham Court Road, which form the central market of a large neighbourhood, inhabited by a vast number of mechanics and poor people, a few shops are open at an early hour of the morning; and a very poor man, with a thin and sickly woman by his side, may be seen with their little basket in hand, purchasing the scanty quantity of necessaries they can afford, which the time at which the man receives his wages, or his having a good deal of work to do, or the woman's having been out charing ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... was emptying his great-coat pockets of letters to different boys, which he had brought down. Smike glanced, with an anxious and timid expression, at the papers, as if with a sickly hope that one among them might relate to him. The look was a very painful one, and went to Nicholas's heart at once; for it told a sad history. He considered the boy more attentively, and was surprised to observe ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... ragged, barefooted girl, then, and sickly and weak for want of food; but I think I felt mother's hunger more than my own: and many and many a bitter night I lay awake, crying, and praying to God to give me means of working for myself and aiding her. And he has, indeed, been good to me," said ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... shaken ever so little, they would rush out and scour all over it in search of the aggressor. I must have tested some hundreds of leaves, and never shook one without the ants coming out, excepting one sickly-looking plant at Para. In many of the pouches I noticed the eggs and young ants, and in some I saw a few dark-colored scale insects or plant lice; but my attention had not been at that time directed to the latter as supplying ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... reported, they were of good quality, the best of the prisoners of war having naturally been reserved for the commander of the expedition. The men were mostly stout and athletic, while the women were of healthy and properly agreeable appearance. Of the whole number there were none who seemed to be at all sickly or ill favored; while the only one who exhibited any signs of deformity was a dwarf, whose withered and twisted figure imparted to him that peculiar grotesque and ape-like appearance which, at that period, was certain to commend him to the taste of wealthy purchasers, ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... was large and dark, a sickly light only filtering in through a hole in the roof. The floor was paved, and the roof was supported by great wooden columns, the trunks of large forest trees. The greater part of the building was shut off by a large wooden screen, about the height of a man, close to them, so that they ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... W. pleasure vehicles have been tested by insurance company officials. They have been proved practically unbreakable, the material and durability surprising the insurance officials. Insurance is not issued on sickly persons, weak buildings nor on inferior vehicles. It is because our vehicles are so well made that ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... breakfast, I mean a real breakfast. If it's in New England there'll be doughnuts and pies on the table, and not those sickly convict labor pies of the city either, with the prison pallor yet upon them, but brown, crusty, full-chested pies. And if it's down South there will be hot waffles and fresh New Orleans molasses; and if it's in any section of our country, north or south, east or west, such comfits and ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... day] Started out soon this morning, passed several graves, we hear that it is sickly on the route, that there are cholera, smallpox, & measles, but rumor says so much, that you do not know when to believe her, but the graves prove that some have died, & it must be expected that from such a number, some ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... brought fresh annoyances—perpetual grinding tyranny, the violation of every principle of justice, contempt for all human charity, which exasperated the prisoners, and slowly consumed them with a fever of sickly rancour. They lived like wild beasts, with the lash ceaselessly raised over their backs. Those torturers would have liked to kill the poor man—Oh, no; it can never be forgotten; it is impossible! Such sufferings ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... a week trying to drive out of my mind my last glimpse of you with your sickly grin, pretending to be tickled to pieces that the only white man within two hundred miles of your shack was going on a holiday. You old bluffer! I used to hang over the rail of the steamer, on the way up, and see you standing as I left you beside the ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the alley back of the flat, and the flat had been obliged to get another maid of all work. Time passed, a month, six months, a whole year went by. At length Maria gave birth to a child, a wretched, sickly child, with not even strength enough nor wits enough to cry. At the time of its birth Maria was out of her mind, and continued in a state of dementia for nearly ten days. She recovered just in time to ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... prompts. "Let the heart speak." The heart you address will understand its language. Be earnest, sincere, self-loyal, and manly in this matter above all others. Let there be no nauseous flattery and no sickly sentimentality Leave the former to fops and the latter to ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... and fondling her child, with kiss-words. "Sickly sentiment," said the first man. "Mother love," said ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... in ashes; nay, that this period, fertile in good and evil, be crowned by marriages such as are said to be made in heaven, no doubt because the great match-making spirit of life pursues ends unguessed by human wisdom, which would often remain in single blessedness, and found homes for sickly infants. Wedlock, in other words, and, for the matter of that, father and motherhood, and most of the serious business of the universe, should not be looked upon as a compensation or consolation, but rather as something for ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... and my Lady was dependent on him for the care of Sir Walter in the holidays. To crown his offences, he never cleaned his own plate, but drew sketches and played the guitar! Moreover, Mrs. Martha had her notions that he was making that sickly Frenchified maid of Miss Conway's much too fond of him; and as to his calling himself Mr. Delaford—why, Mrs. Martha had a shrewd suspicion that he was some kin to her first cousin's brother-in-law's shopman's wife in Tottenham-court-road, whose name she ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... poorhouse breed— not at all. You're too pretty dressed and you're too well fed. I know what they be there, for I have been there myself. Yes, ma'am! Jabez Potter came after me to the poor farm. I was sickly, too. There's them that said he went to Doctor Davison first to find out if I was goin' to git well before he come arter me; but Jabez ain't never treated me noways but kind. Starn he is— by natur and by ...
— Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill • Alice B. Emerson
... an established, legalized custom in Greece, is well summed up by Westermark, who says: "The exposure of deformed or sickly infants was undoubtedly an ancient custom in Greece; in Sparta, at least, it was enjoined by law. It was also approved of by the most enlightened among the Greek philosophers. Plato condemns all those children who are imperfect in limbs ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... gather its fruits. In 946 an outlaw who had taken his seat at a feast in his hall slew him as he was attempting to drag him out by the hair. The next king, Eadred, the last of Eadward's sons, though sickly, had all the spirit of his race. He had another sharp struggle with the Danes, but in 954 he made himself their master. North-humberland was now thoroughly amalgamated with the English kingdom, and was to be governed by an Englishman, Oswulf, with the title of Earl, ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... the remainder of the year, they occupy a three-quarter span-roof house, in which an intermediate temperature is maintained. All our Epiphyllums are grafted on the Pereskia aculeata. We graft a few at intervals of two or three years, so, if any of the older plants become sickly or shabby, they are thrown away, and the younger ones grown on. Some of the stocks are worked to form pyramids, and some to form standards. The height of the pyramids is 6 ft., and, to form these, six or eight scions are inserted. The heads ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... had never reached it: the last general elevation of the land had raised it beyond the reach of the highest stream-tides; and when my gang and I took possession of its twilight recesses, its stony sides were crusted with mosses and liverworts; and a crop of pale, attenuated, sickly-looking weeds, on which the sun had never looked in his strength, sprang thickly up over its floor. In the remote past it had been used as a sort of garner and thrashing-place by a farmer of the parish, named Marcus, who had succeeded in rearing crops of bere and oats on two sloping ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... position to resume paying rent. This is my own opinion. The poor man himself was sorely perplexed and cast down. A thin, white, helpless-looking man. The terrors of the eviction had taken hold of his wife, who was sickly. The only hope they had was that God would bless the potato crop, for they had secured Champion ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... filial piety has been wont to relieve superannuated parents from an existence devoid equally of joy and of hope; and that in others parental love may have even dictated the exposure—with a view to their perishing—of feeble, sickly, and deformed children, incapable of being nurtured into self-sustaining and self-depending life? But increased conversance with nature and art constantly reveals new capacities of comfort and happiness in life, and that, not for the strong alone, but for ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... of chiefly very young Patellae, Mytili, and other species. I found similar microscopical fragments in earth filling up the central orifices of some large Fissurellae. This earth when crushed emits a sickly smell, precisely like that from garden-mould mixed with guano. The earth accidentally preserved within the shells, from the greater heights, has the same general appearance, but it is a little redder; ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... for the time. What was coming over me, that I could listen to such a suggestion with patience? What a strange influence did this girl Niabon possess that I, a sensible man, felt she could and would make me yield to her wishes, and let a sickly, delicate woman like Mrs. Krause accompany me on a voyage that presented nothing but danger. The fever must have weakened my ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... downward, into mounds of silk and velvet, to which women adapted themselves about 1575, 1750, and 1830, and thence, with little mitigation, to the present day. How expressive the lines of one figure are of health, and grace, and bounteous fulness of life! and how poor, and sickly, and mean, and man-made the other creatures seem! See, too, in the former, that all the wearer's limbs are as free as air; she can even clasp her hands, with arms at full-length, above her head. Queen Bess, yonder, could do many things, but she could not do that; neither could your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... foot that must never be cured, fasting much and passing sleepless nights, depriving himself of comfortable clothing and nutritious food, he felt that he was imitating the saints and martyrs who were the ideals of his sickly boyhood, and in recompense of abstinence he was happy. He was kind-hearted and charitable to all, but most strict in his enforcement of religious duties. It never occurred to him to doubt his absolute right to flog his neophytes for any slight negligence in matters of the ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... slumbered, With a sickly crust encumbered, Leapeth now a roaring flood, Wild as war, and red ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... piercing. His colour was curiously attractive, while partly tropical; it reminded one vaguely of a blood-orange. That is, that while it was ruddy and sanguine, there was a yellow in it that was in no way sickly, but seemed rather to glow like gold apples of the Hesperides—Father Brown thought he had never seen a figure so expressive of all the romances about the ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... street, as though he feared that the keen air might make him change his mind in spite of himself. He had to stop a great many times that day to breathe on his purple hands. Still, he did not regret having lent his mittens to William John—poor, pale, sickly little William John, who ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of these actions done by themselves and from the reaction of those miseries, they assume lower births and then they accumulate a new series of actions, and they consequently suffer misery over again, like sickly men partaking of unwholesome food; and although they are thus afflicted, they consider themselves to be happy and at ease and consequently their fetters are not loosened and new karma arises; and suffering from diverse miseries they turn about in this world like a wheel. If casting off ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Then they went into Death's vast hothouse, where flowers and trees grew together in wonderful profusion. Blooming hyacinths, under glass bells, and peonies, like strong trees. There grew water-plants, some quite fresh, and others looking sickly, which had water-snakes twining round them, and black crabs clinging to their stems. There stood noble palm-trees, oaks, and plantains, and beneath them bloomed thyme and parsley. Each tree and flower had a name; each represented a human life, and belonged to men still ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... very poor district, poor enough to rival many an East-End parish. Associations cluster around Campden and Little Campden Houses, and the still existing Holland House, where gathered many who were notable for ability as well as high birth. To Campden House Queen Anne, then Princess, brought her sickly little son as to a country house at the "Gravel Pits," but the child never lived to inherit the throne. Not far off lived Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest philosopher the world has ever known, who also came to seek health in the ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... in favour of this scheme, Mr. and Mrs. Falconer had done all in their power, with the utmost zeal and address, to forward it, by contriving continual dancing-parties and musical meetings, at their house, for the young people. Lady Oldborough, who was sickly, whose manners were not popular, and who could not bear to be put out of her way, was quite unsuited to this sort of business, and rejoiced that the Falconers took it off her hands. Things were just in this state, and Lord Oldborough ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... a pretty house surrounded by apple trees and green grass, would not, perhaps, have had that 'papier-mache' appearance, and would not have been dressed at eight o'clock in the morning in a black coat of the kind we see hanging in the Morgue. M. Tavernier received the newcomer with a sickly smile, which disappeared as soon as M. Batifol ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... birth a blight was on his body and on his mind. With difficulty his almost imperceptible spark of life had been screened and fanned into a dim and flickering flame. His childhood, except when he could be rocked and sung into sickly sleep, was one long piteous wail. Until he was ten years old his days were passed on the laps of women; and he has never once suffered to stand on his ricketty legs. None of those tawny little urchins, clad in rags stolen from scarecrows, whom Murillo loved to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... followed. Immediately there was the raucous call of the general alarm siren and a flashing light from the bastion that paled the red mists to a sickly, luminous pink. Full gravity coming down with crushing force on ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... hollow, rank with bulrushes, and glorious with the starry marsh marigold. But here and there dead trees stood upright, gaunt and white in their places, great swathes of bark hanging loose from their limbs, while crowds of young saplings, sickly for want of space and light, thrust up their heads towards the sunshine, and were tied together and cumbered in their struggle by climbing ropes of ivy, and long banners ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... of sense and benevolence, but a very great humorist. This gentleman had such peculiar ideas of female character, that he waged war with most of the polite and modern accomplishments. As one of the first blessings of life, according to his notions, was health, he endeavoured to prevent that sickly delicacy, which is considered as so great an ornament in fashionable life by a more robust and hardy education. His niece was accustomed, from her earliest years, to plunge into the cold bath at ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... young, or females, or aged linger behind, a strong army of males bravely returns to rescue them at the danger of losing their own lives. Many of their brave deeds, if recorded in history, would compare favourably with those of mankind! Too often has a poor, sickly ape, which by his very feebleness allowed himself to be captured and placed in a zoo, been compared to human beings. Even in spirit and movements he has been considered as a human caricature and ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... little sister grew very sickly, and she died just before I came to school: but the same disposition still continued; and it was my friend's outcries of being hurt, that drew me into that odious quarrel, that we ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... darkness; he saw himself as a "sick soul," obsessed with the idea that he saw life relentlessly and clearly. There came to him the conviction that he had been arrogant, a conceited ass, bent on ruin, "a sickly soul," he said. Out of that realization grew resolutions that needed no vowing or pledging, for as simply as a man turns from one road to another he turned from his habit ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... Arthur smiled in a sickly way. He felt suddenly as if this man could see right through him, and all the while he hated him. Seymour Michael meant "debts"—it was only natural that one of his race should think of money before all things—Arthur's thoughts were fixed on Dora. And guiltily he ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... with a sickly smile. "It is all strange and new to us. We were waiting for you. But I have become slightly interested in this—" He indicated a circular window, fixed in the steel side of the boat. "Isn't it a ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... she had taken had a high back, and against this she laid her head, as if too weary to support it. Lack of sleep and appetite had paled her florid colour to a sickly hue, and she looked wan and languid as a dying woman. But still he did not pity her, as he must have done had her face been half as beautiful as ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... prayer Whose hearing ear is everywhere; He brings not back the childish days That ringed the earth with stones of praise, Roofed Karnak's hall of gods, and laid The plinths of Philae's colonnade. Still less he owns the selfish good And sickly growth of solitude,— The worthless grace that, out of sight, Flowers in the desert anchorite; Dissevered from the suffering whole, Love hath no power to save a soul. Not out of Self, the origin And native air and soil of sin, The living waters ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... if after a few years they are sick, the parents change their names and give them new ones, thinking that the first name did not agree with them. A Druze told me that he named his son in infancy Asaad (or happier) but he was sickly, so they changed his name to Ahmed (Praised) and after that he grew better! He has now become a Christian, and has ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... ruins are removed from sight, The season too comes fraught with new delight: Time seems not now beneath his years to stoop, Nor do his wings with sickly feathers droop: Soft western winds waft o'er the gaudy spring, And open'd scenes of flowers and blossoms bring, 30 To grace this happy day, while you appear, Not king of us alone, but of the year. All eyes you draw, and with the eyes the heart: Of your own pomp, yourself the greatest ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... everything was ghostly and colourless. The fields that should have been green were as grey as the skies; the tree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds and as cloudy. And when I had walked for some hours the evening was closing in. A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon, as if pale with reluctance to leave the world in the dark. And as it faded more and more the skies seemed to come closer and to threaten. The clouds which had been merely sullen became swollen; and then ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... mud and of water, mingled and mixed together in the wildest chaos, like a portion of some world in the process of formation. Here and there on the dun-coloured surface of this great marsh there had burst out patches of sickly yellow reeds and of livid, greenish scum, which only served to heighten and intensify the gloomy effect of the ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... houses are all built exactly alike. Painted in sickly greens and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil. Here the architect has catered to the different families, different individual tastes in one point of view alone, regarding the number of rooms: They are known as "four-or six-room cottages." In ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... wild-flower garden were all that was left of the dooryard, while a few gnarled apple trees remained of the orchard, which had been reset in another place. The garden had been moved, also the lanes; the one creek remaining out of three crossed the meadow at the foot of the orchard. It flowed a sickly current over a dredged bed between bare, straight banks. The whole place seemed worse than a dilapidated graveyard to me. All my love and ten times the money I had at command never could have put back the face of nature as I knew it ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... There was something really terrible in it all; in the slow funereal pace at which we floated across the subterranean lake; in the dead quiet among us, only interrupted by the slow plunge of the oar into the sickly waters. In spite of all the lights that had been kindled we were still in a thick vapour of darkness, and could form but a dreamy notion of the beauty and the grandeur of the crystal dome within which we men from the upper earth were hidden from our fellows. The lights were flared aloft as ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... clung to it the more intensely, precisely because it seemed unattainable,—from a sort of morbid craving for whatever had become as unattainable as my mother's presence. I loathed action, even for the realization of my dreams, and over-concentrated thought threatened to degenerate into a sickly reverie that should presently exhaust the forces of my life, like an unnaturally prolonged sleep. New influence added in this direction might have driven me insane, while the diversion afforded by Valeria's counter-enthusiasm and the necessity ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... struck by the misery of the settlers. At the Falls they were sickly, suffering with fever and ague; many of the children were dying. Boonsboro and Harrodsburg were very dirty, the inhabitants were sickly, and the offal and dead beasts lay about, poisoning the air and the water. During the winter no more corn could be procured than was enough to furnish ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... been sickly so long, that she has no ground in cultivation, and cannot help herself, and has only what yams her ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... maturing, yet will shortly, even in the bleak and churlish temperature of this world, lift up its head and spread abroad its branches, bearing abundant fruits; precious fruits of refreshment and consolation, of which the boasted products of philosophy are but sickly imitations, void of fragrance and ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... mournfully at the flapjacks. He picked up one which was only half scorched, buttered it, poured himself a cup of sickly coffee, and began to ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... plenty of her own, in first-class securities that I could never persuade her to vary, for she is shrewd in that way and steadily refuses to sign anything. Also she will probably be my heiress—and, Aylward," here a sickly look of alarm spread itself over his face, "I don't know how long I have to live. That infernal doctor examined my heart this morning and told me that it was weak. Weak was his word, but from the tone in which he said it, I believe ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... she had developed a positive genius for mothering delicate lambs and calves and sickly chicks, so that when a crisis had arrived almost immediately after the birth of Damaris, the Squire had bundled the highly-certificated nurse into a motor and sent her packing back to London, and called upon Jane Coop to rise ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... and a half bushels per acre, harrowed in with a light harrow. This application was made in March, and the early part of April, and in less than three weeks after the application, the wheat had undergone an entire change, from a yellow, sickly color, to a dark luxuriant green. The application had evidently infused new life and vigor into the plants, and as the result proved, very nearly or quite doubled its product. So much for the crop of wheat; but what was still more valuable to me, in my system of farming, it likewise secured for ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... false to your father; no man has ever insulted me that way, or ever will. If he did, I would shoot him as I would a dog. I cannot help being pretty any more than you; I cannot sew myself up in a bag, and shall not try to catch the small-pox, so do not worry me again with this sickly sentiment about respectability, and the duties of a wife. I know my own business, and can ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... sickly. Left Satadoo at sun-rise: several of our canteens stolen during the night. This forenoon we travelled for more than two miles over white quartz, large lumps of which were lying all round; no other stone to be seen. Carried ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... its kind. But it's a kind I hate. There's a craze about for sickly pathos, which, to me, is simply disgusting. In that man Ayre there's the making of a popular writer. Mark my words, and see if he doesn't make a hit. In a few months he will be all the rage—you see. And it is to make room for ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... Ah! with a sickly gasping grin And quivering eyelids, Creeping Sin Stole to the cave; but, suddenly, As through its glimmering mouth he passed, The serpents flashed and gripped him fast: He wriggled and gave one awful cry, Then all at once the cave was cleared; The snakes with ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... The vivid sunset reflections, now thrown back from the black arch, yet gave a reddish smokiness to the livid and sickly green which showed, from time to time, beneath the underhanging masses of inky black. The sky to the north and to the south had a tortured appearance, as though some demon of a size beyond imagining were twisting the furies of the tempest ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... quality of his make. The nobility of labor and the essential nobility of man were never so effectively preached before. The deadliest enemy of democracy is not the warning or dissenting voice, but it is the spirit, rife among us, which would engraft upon our hardy Western stock the sickly and decayed standards of ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... watching her pale face in its undisturbed sleep. At the footfall, he roused her gently. Mrs. Ducharme hastily drew back. She, too, did not seem to have passed a peaceful night. Her flabby fat face was sickly white, and she trembled as she opened the side door to the hot morning sun. She threw some small thing into the waste by the door; then looking around to see that she was not observed, she hurled with all her strength a long bottle toward the swamp across the fence. The bottle fell ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Excellency; he is my youngest, and the light of my old eyes, but he is weak and sickly, and there are times when I feel that I am fighting against fate, and that it would be better that I should let him die in peace. But I love him, and I would have him live. Will the Hakim see the boy and say whether he is ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... religion as in every-day life, the faculties of thought, feeling, and volition must be present, distributed in fair proportions. When reason is overfed in the exercise of religion, the result is a dry and barren rationalism. When the emotions are overfed the result is a wild and sickly ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... flaunt about the play-rooms and gardens, levying black-mail upon those who are imprudent enough to engage them in "chaff" or badinage, and desperately endeavouring to hook themselves on to the wealthier and younger members of the male community. They poison the air round them with sickly perfumes; they assume titles, and speak of one another as "cette chere comtesse;" their walk is something between a prance and a wriggle; they prowl about the terrace whilst the music is playing, seeking whom they may devour, or rather whom they may inveigle ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... has come, Prudence," I answered with a sickly attempt at gayety, "does not seem to be a reason why you should call with such vehemence on your Maker. There does not appear to be any need of Providential interposition. Things are not ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... Constantine, Gallus and Julian, were saved from the fury of the soldiers, the former was about twelve, and the latter about six, years of age; and, as the eldest was thought to be of a sickly constitution, they obtained with the less difficulty a precarious and dependent life, from the affected pity of Constantius, who was sensible that the execution of these helpless orphans would have been esteemed, by all mankind, an act of the most deliberate cruelty. [11] Different ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... itself extinguished. And what place is as secure as that chosen, where they can {226} be reached only with the utmost difficulty, and than only at the peril of even life itself? Imperfect seed sown in poor ground means a sickly harvest. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... to do with it?" demanded Percy, chucking his gloves toward the piano. He faced Anne once more, prepared to insist on full satisfaction. The look in her eyes, however, caused him to refrain from pursuing his tactics. He smiled in a sickly fashion and said, after a moment devoted to reconstruction: "But, never mind, Anne; I was only having a little fun bullying you. That's a man's privilege, don't you know. We'll try it again to-morrow, if you ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... all. And feeling the cool sheets about her she folded her arms and abandoned herself to every recollection. Her imagination, heightened as by a drug, enabled her to see the white, dusty road and the sickly, yellow moon rising through the branches. Again she was standing by him, her arms were on his neck; again they stood looking into the vague distance, seeing the broken paling in the moonlight. There were ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... the wall. Then you see slimy, oozy trickles of water running down the inside of the tunnel, and you notice that the bricks are not red or brown, as they are at the tunnel's mouth, but dull, sticky, sickly green. Your voice, when you speak, is quite changed from what it was out in the sunshine, and it is a long time before the tunnel is ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... Romans called desiderium, (the yearning too obstinate after one irrecoverable face,) too probably I should have pined away into an early grave. Harsh was my awaking; but the rough febrifuge which this awaking administered broke the strength of my sickly reveries through a period of more than two years; by which time, under the natural expansion of my bodily strength, the danger ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... single gentleman in it, but his appearance was less prepossessing and indicative of liberality than that of the former stranger. The new-comer was a little gentleman, with a pale face and a sickly form. His mien was grave and care-worn; his dark eyes were gloomy and stern; his expansive forehead ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... have painted Chopin somewhat as a sickly sentimentalist, living in an atmosphere of moonshine and unreality. Yet this was not precisely true. In spite of his delicacy of frame and romantic imagination, Chopin was never ill till within the ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... and more economical to have healthy babies than to have sickly ones. The healthy way is the simple way. It merely means self-control, common sense and constructive knowledge on the part of ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... lived with him for many years, and was buried by him, with an affectionate epitaph, in 1725. The family tradition represents him as a sweet-tempered child, and says that he was called the "little nightingale," from the beauty of his voice. As the sickly, solitary, and precocious infant of elderly parents, we may guess that he was not a little spoilt, if only in ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... strongly came into my mind from the following circumstance. As I was coming along to-day, I met a certain person of this place, of my own rank and station, no mean fellow, one who, like myself, had guttled away his paternal estate; I saw him, shabby, dirty, sickly, beset with rags and years; —"What's the meaning of this garb?" said I; {he answered}, "Because, wretch that I am, I've lost what I possessed: see to what I am reduced,— all my acquaintances and friends forsake me." On this I felt contempt for him in comparison with myself. "What!" ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... Love affects people in as many different ways as wine. Some are exalted,—their feet spurn the earth, their heads are in the clouds; some pugnacious, walking about with a chip on the shoulder; others are stupidly happy,—their faces wearing a sickly smile that becomes painful to look at; others again, like you, melancholy as a wailing tenor in the last act of 'Lucia.' Like learning, a little draught of love is dangerous; drink largely and be sober. The charmer will ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... bone man would go down and with his wooden shoe break the ice round the seagulls and wild ducks, which were frozen in the lake, and then carry them home under his snow-covered cape. He would put them on the peat beside the fireplace, where for days they stood on one leg gazing sickly into the embers, until Soerine at last took them into the kitchen and wrung ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... repute; and by perseverance it has become a very giant. Birmingham is, in my mind and in the minds of most men, associated with many giants; and I no more believe that this young institution will turn out sickly, dwarfish, or of stunted growth, than I do that when the glass-slipper of my chairmanship shall fall off, and the clock strike twelve to-night, this hall will be turned into a pumpkin. I found that strong belief upon the splendid array of grace and beauty by which I am surrounded, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... defences against these northern invaders. At the first sight of their unholy prows, rising like water snakes above the waves, all the defenceless inmates and refugees, all the church plate and valuables, and all sickly or aged brothers were hurried into these monastic keeps; the doors—set at a height of from ten to twenty feet above the ground—securely closed, the ladders drawn up, food supplies having been no doubt already laid in, and a state ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... Yes a Tale of Scandal is as fatal to the Reputation of a prudent Lady of her stamp as a Fever is generally to those of the strongest Constitutions, but there is a sort of puny sickly Reputation, that is always ailing yet will outlive the robuster ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... resorted to pig-Latin. "Seegry," she cried, pulling at his coat, "shegry ain'tgry gotgry agry thinggry." But when the little girl, who knew pig-Latin in all its various dialects, turned angry, scornful eyes upon her, the neighbor woman's daughter sat up and her smile faded to a sickly blankness. ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... her chair as she declared herself to be Mary Swan was old and sickly looking, but nevertheless there was that about her which was prepossessing. Her face was thin and delicate and pale, and not hard and coarse; her voice was low, as a woman's should be, and her hands were white and small. Her clothes, though very ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... better; that the heroine cannot open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the fine phrases of preparation fall from round her like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands before us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly wench, or perhaps a strapping market-woman. Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will too often start the trick of "getting ugly;" and no disease is more difficult to cure. I said authors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... answered, with a smile—a somewhat sickly smile—"then I think, mistress, you should have double pay, to console you for your sorrow and for any doubts that might be ...
— The Lady Of Blossholme • H. Rider Haggard
... it," he said to himself. "I almost felt there would be some fearful gulf intervene between Isabella and myself, when I had again left her side. O, prophetic soul, though our eyes cannot fathom the future, there is an instinctive power in thee that foretells evil. My life is but a sickly existence. I am the jest and jeer of fortune, who seems delighted to thwart me, by permitting the nearest approach to the goal of happiness, and yet stepping in just in time to prevent the consummation of my long ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... she thrice a felon's daughter. My father and mother," Jonathan went on to say, "never found a fault in her till now. Who was more welcome on the hill than pretty Grace? who would oftenest come to nurse some sickly lamb, but gentle Grace? who was wont, from her childhood up, to run home with me so constantly, when school was over, and pleased my kinsfolk so entirely with her nice manners and kind ways? Hadn't he fought for her more than once, and though he came home with bruises on ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and the sun's rays falling strongly into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy, for sunshine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only a glare: a stifling, sickly glare, serving but to bring forward stains and dirt that might otherwise have slept. There was neither health nor gaiety in sunshine in a town. She sat in a blaze of oppressive heat, in a cloud of moving ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... strangers to one another; you have no friends in common now. Richard lives in a mansion, while you live in a hovel; Richard's wife is a fine "lady" in silks and satins, attended by flunkeys, while your wife is a poor, sickly, anaemic, overworked drudge. You still live in the same city, yet not in the same world. You would not know how to act in Richard's home, before all the servants; you would be embarrassed if you sat down at his dinner table. Your children would be awkward and shy in the ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... original figures in American literature was Ralph Waldo Emerson—a figure, indeed, in many ways unique in all literature. Born in Boston in 1803, the son of a Unitarian clergyman and a member of a large and sickly family, he followed the predestined path through Harvard College, graduating with no especial honors, entered the ministry, and served as pastor of the Second Church of Boston until 1832. Then, finding himself ill at ease in the position, he resigned, and, settling at Concord, ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... shillings. She's a careful creature, and it will go as far with her thrift as twenty will do with Effy Hopkirk; so you will give Effy twenty. Mrs. Binnacle, who lost her husband, the sailor, last winter, is, I am sure, with her two sickly bairns, very ill off; I would therefore like if you will lend her a note, and ye may put half-a-crown in the hand of each of the poor weans for a playock, for she's a proud spirit, and will bear much before she complain. Thomas Dowy has been long unable to do ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... with him, allured perhaps by Madame Permon's daughter, whom he subsequently married. At the house of this amiable hostess, an old friend of his family, Buonaparte found occasional relief from the gloom of his existence. The future Madame Junot has described him as at this time untidy, unkempt, sickly, remarkable for his extreme thinness and the almost yellow tint of his visage, which was, however, lit up by "two eyes sparkling with keenness and will-power"—evidently a Corsican falcon, pining for action, and fretting its ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... word: "Kindness." Daon't mistyke me, nao sickly sentiment and nao patronizin'. Me as kind to the millionaire as 'im to me. [Fills his mug ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... language all his own, hoping indeed to tune his tongue one day to something less uncouth. None can sympathize more cordially than the writer does with Durtal in his horror of unauthorized devotions, of insufferable vernacular litanies, of nerveless and sickly hymns, of interminable "acts of consecration" void of a single definite idea, more especially when these things are brought into the very sanctuary itself, with stole and cope and every apparent endeavour ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... snares. For within me was a famine of that inward food, Thyself, my God; yet, through that famine I was not hungered; but was without all longing for incorruptible sustenance, not because filled therewith, but the more empty, the more I loathed it. For this cause my soul was sickly and full of sores, it miserably cast itself forth, desiring to be scraped by the touch of objects of sense. Yet if these had not a soul, they would not be objects of love. To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved, I defiled, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... me, Heaven, That I do brag thus!—this your air of France Hath blown that vice in me; I must repent. Go, therefore, tell thy master here I am; My ransom is this frail and worthless trunk; My army but a weak and sickly guard: Yet, Heaven before,[20] tell him we will come on, Though France himself,[21] and such another neighbour, Stand in our way. There's for thy labour, Montjoy. Go, bid thy master well advise himself: If we may pass, we will; if we be hinder'd, We ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... was over, to one of the parks, and did his reading there. Not far from his office, eastwardly, where two streets met at an angle, was a small open space too limited to be called a square, even if its shape had not been a triangle. Here, under the shade of two very sickly trees, surrounded by tall warehouses, were a couple of benches. Peter sat here many evenings smoking his pipe. Though these few square feet made perhaps the largest "open" within half a mile of his office, ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... need that warning thought from his companion. There was no mistaking that sickly sweet stench born of decaying animal matter, which was the betraying effluvium of a snake-devil's lair. He turned to the right-hand wall and with a running leap reached its broad top. The lane curved to end in an archway cut through another wall, which was higher than Dalgard's head even when ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... (which but salutes us here,) Inhabits these, and courts them all the year: Ripe fruits and blossoms on the same trees live; At once they promise, and at once they give: So sweet the air, so moderate the clime, None sickly lives, or dies before his time. Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncursed To shew how all things ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... had told him that he had good eyes, squint immediately that he might appear ugly. This was really an unnecessary trouble; for the good man was already sufficiently plain, having a very ill-looking mouth, a sickly appearance, small stature, and a hump ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... so intense was the horror which this man's presence inspired in me. My hand clutching the curtain, I stood watching him. The lids veiled the malignant green eyes, but the thin lips seemed to smile. Then Smith silently pointed to the hand which held a little pipe. A sickly perfume assailed my nostrils, and the explanation of the hushed silence, and the ease with which we had thus far executed our plan, came to me. The cunning mind was torpid—lost in ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... open basket, containing even now a few rotting oranges, some damaged tapes, and such articles as are vended by small hawkers. Standing by the bed-side was a lad with an intelligent, not ill-favoured, countenance, though sickly, and expressive of deep grief, as he gazed on the face of one who had ever been a kind mother to him, and from whom he now knew full well that he was ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... of the nature of rubber and of leather—an ugly, repulsive, tyrannous growth, over-running and killing other and more delicate corals, as undesirable pests crowd out useful and becoming vegetation. It occurs in varying colours and forms—sickly green and grey, bronze and yellow, brown and pink. Loathsome, resembling offal in some aspects as the receding tide lays it bare, it becomes pretty and interesting when covered with calm, limpid water, and its dull life ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... sat, and sickly heaves Disturbed my spirit's sloth, A wind came, blown o'er distant sheaves, That hissing, tore and lashed the leaves ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... disposition, with lucky marks on her body, and with good hair, nails, teeth, ears, eyes, and breasts, neither more nor less than they ought to be, and no one of them entirely wanting, and not troubled with a sickly body. The man should, of course, also possess these qualities himself. But at all events, says Ghotakamukha, a girl who has been already joined with others (i.e., no longer a maiden) should never be loved, for it would be reproachable to do ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... withdrawn and suddenly made a swoop on them all at once. Defending themselves as best they could, Walt, Ralph and Bob Harding were, nevertheless, driven back against the bushes. So far as Walt and Ralph were concerned, it was a real fight, but with Bob Harding it was different. His face was a sickly yellow, and in his eyes was a light that Jack had seen before—the expression of a ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... had died; her face had remained young and handsome. The vigor of her youth had overcome the grief of her spirit, and her cheeks, although colorless and transparent in their paleness, were still free from that sallow, sickly pallor, which is the herald of approaching dissolution. She was apparently healthy and young, and only sick and cold at heart. Perhaps she only needed some sunbeams to warm up again her chilled heart, only some gleam of hope ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... past life came back to him with a rush: the cabin home across the river from the distillery; the still-house itself, with the rough men who gathered there; the neighboring shanties with their sickly, sad-faced women, and dirty, quarreling children; the store and blacksmith shop at the crossroads in the pinery seven miles away. He saw the river flowing sluggishly at times between banks of drooping willows and tall marsh grass, as though smitten with the fatal ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... along one field which separated the village from a wooded gorge. Here all had once been green and beautiful in spring and summertime; but now, for many years past, thick clouds of smoke from coal-pit engines and iron furnaces had given to trees and shrubs a sickly hue. Nature had striven in vain against the hot black breath of reeking chimneys. Right down among the stunted trees of this ravine went the foot-track which Johnson followed. Darkness had now gathered all around, yet here and ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... made me tread the path of life with all the burthens of it (except its cares) upon my back; in no one moment of my existence, that I remember, have ye once deserted me, or tinged the objects which came in my way, either with sable, or with a sickly green; in dangers ye gilded my horizon with hope, and when Death himself knocked at my door—ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tone of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he doubted of ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... and said among other things this: "I find that a man may live like a fool, but he will scarcely die like one." As from time to time he appeared on the street during the early months of 1796, others of his old acquaintance were struck by the sight of a tall man of slovenly appearance and sickly aspect, whom a second look showed to be Burns, and that he was dying. Yet in that February there were still some flutters of song, one of which was, Hey for the Lass wi' a Tocher, written in answer to Thomson's beseeching inquiry if he was never to hear from him again. ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... about the cheaper shelters which only open at six in a number of the lower East Side streets. Miserable food, ill-timed and greedily eaten, had played havoc with bone and muscle. They were all pale, flabby, sunken-eyed, hollow-chested, with eyes that glinted and shone and lips that were a sickly red by contrast. Their hair was but half attended to, their ears anaemic in hue, and their shoes broken in leather and run down at heel and toe. They were of the class which simply floats and drifts, every wave of people washing up one, as breakers do driftwood ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... in the spring-house were abject. That's the only word for it. Craven, somebody suggested later, and they were that, too. They smiled sickly grins and tried to be defiant, and most of them tried to put down whatever they held in their hands and to look innocent. If you ever saw a boy when his school-teacher asks him what he has in his mouth, and multiply the boy thirty times ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... dread of him, but with her utmost cajolery). Nothing, dearest Caesar. (With sickly sweetness, her voice almost failing) Nothing. I am innocent. (She approaches him affectionately) Dear Caesar: are you angry with me? Why do you look at me so? I have been here with you all the time. How can ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... henceforth, and comrades to boot!" cried Rick. "Jolly Clerks o' Saint Nicholas to share and share alike—ha? So then 't is accorded. And now what o' yon lily-livered imp? 'T is a sickly youth and I love him not. But he hath a cloak, look'ee—a cloak forsooth and poor Rick's a-cold! Ho, lad—throw ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... flanks whence, according to Shadrach, Higgs would be lowered in a food-basket. In this shadow and on either side of it, covering a space of quite a hundred yards square, lay the feeding-den, whence arose a sickly and horrible odour such as is common to any place frequented by cats, mingled with the more pungent smell ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... innovation, and extreme excitement. The pillars of the social edifice have been shaken, and the whole social atmosphere has been decomposed by alchemical demagogues and revolutionary apes. The sickly atmosphere has suffused a morbid humor over the whole frame, and left the social body little more than 'the empty and bloody ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... that it seemed on the point of toppling over to shatter the smooth, green mirror below. Some of its sturdy exposed roots reached down from the bank into the water, where they caught and held the drift from upstream,—reeds and twigs and matted grass,—a dirty, sickly mass that swished lazily on the flank of the ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... face of the young knight riding by the carriage side. She looked for those answering signals which used to be lighted up in yonder two windows, and told that love was burning within. She smiled gently at him, to which token of regard he tried to answer with a sickly grin of recognition. Miserable youth! Those were not false teeth he saw when she smiled. He thought they were, and they ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray |
