"Throe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... also indulges in the natural wish that his college bills "had leaden wings and tortice feet." This was in 1617. The young man's patrimony, whatever it may have been, had dwindled, and he confesses to "many a throe and pinches of the purse." For the moment, at least, ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... give me a definition of love according to thy idea. What can it be—for thou seest it exists out of romances. This worthy youngster undertook these little conspiracies through love. Thou heardst it thyself with throe unworthy ears. Come, what is love? For my part, I know ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ferocious, and the whole country from the sea foam to the foothills looked tumbled and new, with the newness of infinite antiquity. The last thunders of creation seemed scarcely to have died away, the last throe scarcely to have ceased, leaving million-ton rock cast on rock and the new, shear-cut cliffs spitting back their first taste ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... that's just the thing I'd like especially to sing; But at the task my spirits faint, For 'tis not every one can paint Battalions, with their bristling wall Of pikes, and make you see the Gaul, With, shivered spear, in death-throe bleed, Or Parthian stricken ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... the stone of the Kaabah, keep the faith which has been throe and mine since my mother, dying, gave me to thy mother, whose milk gave me health and, in my youth, beauty—and, in my youth, beauty!" Suddenly she buried her face in her veil, and her body shook with sobs which had no voice. Presently she continued: "Listen, and by Abraham and Christ and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... genial flame of Earth, and there With torment and with tension does prepare The lush disclosures of the vernal time. All joys draw inward to their icy urns, Tormented by constraining rime, And there With undelight and throe prepare The bounteous efflux of the vernal time. Nor less beneath compulsive Law Rebuk-ed draw The numb-ed musics back upon my heart; Whose yet-triumphant course I know And prevalent pulses forth shall start, Like cataracts that with thunderous ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... when the wind comes fiercely down the river, and heavy storms have increased the volume of water as well as loosened the last bolt that yet holds her securely together,—then, when there is none to witness the death-throe of wood and iron, she will heave and labor and at last break apart. The two fragments will go sweeping down, whirled over like playthings—touching the points of the rocks and giving out groans and shrieks like those which precede dissolution; then for one moment there will be a dark mass ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... unfathered mass no birth In divine seats hath known; In the blank echoing solitude, if earth, Rocking her obscure body to and fro, Ceases not from all time to heave and groan, Unfruitful oft, and, at her happiest throe, Forms what ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... the jays came. Not many, in fact, had been asked, and when Jeff Durgin actually appeared, it was not known that he was both the first and the last of his kind. The lady who was matronizing the tea recognized him, with a throe of her quickened conscience, as the young fellow whom she had met two winters before at the studio tea which Mr. Westover had given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and whom she had never thought of since, though she had then promised herself to do something for him. She had then ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his arm around her, her pale gold hair blowing about his face. In the same instant he was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If he could so frame words that she could see what he then saw! And he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the desire to paint these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah, that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very thing that the great writers and master-poets did. That was why they were giants. They knew how to express ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... birth of Mickiewicz, Russia was bringing to a close a prodigious period of development in almost every field of human activity. It was really the birth-throe of a nation that was to move powerfully, and to dominate—partially—the new age. And the splendid and never again to be equalled pageant of the life of Catherine the Great, with its wild dreams of world dominance and of the glorious revival of perished ...
— Sonnets from the Crimea • Adam Mickiewicz
... and the people of the house, frightened, came running into the apartment. I cries, 'The man is perishing, run instantly for a surgeon!' He heard me, and with a quick movement raised his left hand as if to countermand the order; another struggle, then one mighty throe, which seemed to search his deepest intestines; and he remained motionless, his head on his knee. The cough had left him, and within a minute or two he ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... great gong struck. Just over his head, penetrating wood and iron, he heard the mighty throe of the Pit once more beginning, moving. And then, once again, the limp and ravelled fibres of being grew tight with a wrench. Under the stimulus of the roar of the maelstrom, the flagging, wavering brain righted itself once more, and—how, he himself could not say—the business of the day ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... The last expiring throe of a mighty superstition was about to convulse the little society at Salem, and, as usual in such cases, ignorance and prejudice went hand in hand for the destruction of reason and humanity. The last of the great religious persecutions was to begin, when eminent divines were to stand ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... the letter a second time before speaking, for I feared to betray myself. The choice of a friend might be a momentous occasion for me. I had already ground for hope, that she had asked me to help her in the first throe of her trouble; but love makes its own doubtings, and I feared. My thoughts seemed to whirl with lightning rapidity, and in a few seconds a whole process of reasoning became formulated. I must not volunteer to be the friend that the father advised his ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... man makes no attempt to rise, nor movement of any kind, save a convulsive tremor through his frame; the last throe of parting life, which precedes the settled stillness of death. For ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... I felt a single throe of expiring love, the love that had filled my heart to the brim. An immeasurable nausea of disgust overcame me, to the exclusion of other ideas, a fixed sense that a thing so dangerous in its angelic disguise, so poisonous and loathsome, must not remain on earth; this jest of Satan must be removed ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... brought with them, alas! a wounded foe, Bound hand and foot, yet nursed with cruel care, Lest that in death he might escape one throe They had decreed his living flesh should bear: A youthful officer, by one foul blow Of treachery surprised, yet fighting still Amid his ambushed train, calm as the snow Above him; hopeless, yet content to spill His blood ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... hollow heavens forever shone On gleaming fiord and pathless field! Behind them, in the nether deep, The central fires, that never sleep, Grappled and rose, and fell again; And with colossal shock and throe The shuddering mountain rent in twain ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... back upon the meagre pillow, was in her death-throe groping in the air, with glazed eyes rolled upward to the ceiling, while the under jaw dropped lower, lower, leaving the mouth half open never to be closed again, ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... meat will she bestow; And were I only young again! Said "Hate ye shall have and the hunger throe"— To honied ...
— The Return of the Dead - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... dealings with my soul, I knelt beside the tortured man and wept, And cried to Heaven for mercy. As I prayed, My soul cast off its shameful enterprise; And when it fell, I saw my godless self— My own degraded, tainted, guilty heart, Which it had hidden from me. Oh, the pang— The poignant throe of uttermost despair— That followed the discovery! I felt That I was lost beyond the grace of God; And my heart turned with instinct sure and swift To the strong struggler, praying at my side, And begged his succor and ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... Stewart, who had learnt to believe it mere dishonour and tameness to forgive the son for his father's deeds. A cloistered priest could hardly do so: pardon to a hostile family came only with the last mortal throe; and here was this warlike king forgiving as ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... moving things shall end, The regions now are dark with doom, No friendly ray relieves the gloom. Each ocean foams with maddened tide, The shrinking hills in fear subside. Trembles the earth with feverous throe The wind in fitful tempest blows. No cure we see with troubled eyes: And atheist brood on earth may rise. The triple world is wild with care, Or spiritless in dull despair. Before that saint the sun is dim, His blessed ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... by thirst; Land, by the oceans passed; Transport, by throe; Peace, by its battles told; Love, by memorial mould; Birds, by ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... have courage to live out every throe of anguish fate assigned me, and principle to contend for justice and ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... impatient doves, up rose the floating car, Up went the hum celestial. High afar The Latmian saw them minish into nought; And, when all were clear vanish'd, still he caught A vivid lightning from that dreadful bow. When all was darkened, with Etnean throe The earth clos'd—gave a solitary moan— And left him once ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... and ye alone, can know How these twain souls burn and glow, Can interpret every throe Of the full ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... upon Italy, bringing in its train an inevitable diminution of the population. To add to the misfortunes, Attila, the King of the Huns, or, as he called himself, "the Scourge of God," invaded the empire. The battle of Chalons, the convulsive death-throe of the Roman empire, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... seen in shaded situations, and the ice still disfigures the bays and indentations of the shore in some places, as if it were animated with a determination to hold out against the power of the sun to the utmost. Nature, however, indicates its great vernal throe. White fish were first taken during the season, this day, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... forth a sound and lusty book. True vigor of expression does not pass from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the lips are limbered by downright living interests and by passions in the very throe. Language is the soil of thought; and our own especially is a rich leaf-mould, the slow growth of ages, the shed foliage of feeling, fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth-change, that the vocal forest, as Howell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... how well!" answered the man, with a throe of bitter passion breaking up the calm he ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... its destinies, the real real, (Purport of all these apparitions of the real;) In thee America, the soul, its destinies, Thou globe of globes! thou wonder nebulous! By many a throe of heat and cold convuls'd, (by these thyself solidifying,) Thou mental, moral orb—thou New, indeed new, Spiritual World! The Present holds thee not—for such vast growth as thine, For such unparallel'd flight as thine, such brood as thine, The FUTURE ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... throe that was almost like a literal death. This—on this he had lived; the ether of ecstasy was the breath of his life. He clutched at the stained red handkerchief knotted about his throat as if he were ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... come, and prayed to God all day. At "an intense throe of the dusk" she started up—she "dared to say," in her dying speech, that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace—and there he waited her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... befel us twain this parting blow: Allah: I pray the Truthful show me Roth * And mix our lives nor part them evermo'e! How blest were we as 'death one roof we dwelt * Conjoined in joys nor recking aught of woe; Till Fortune shot us pith the severance shaft; * Ah who shall patient bear such parting throe? And dart of Death struck down amid the tribe * The age's pearl that Morn saw brightest show: I cried the while his case took speech and said:—* Would Heaven, my son, Death mote his doom foreslow! Which be the readiest road wi' thee to meet * My Son! for whom I would my soul ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... it was. A vital part had been struck. For some minutes the huge leviathan lashed and rolled and tossed in the trembling waves in his agony, while he spouted up gallons of blood with every throe; then he rolled over on his back, and lay extended a lifeless mass upon ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye's scope— Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine; And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine! On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage (like the throe That, a-work in the rock, helps its labor and lets the gold 95 go) High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them—all Brought to blaze on the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... And the retaining of this paper was so important to him that even in his death throe he thrust it in this strangest of all hiding-places, as being the only one that could be considered safe from search. And the girl! Her first words on coming to herself were: 'You have left that line of writing behind.' Mr. Gryce, those words, few and inexplicable as they are, contain ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... festivals in all England, wrote for Beerbohm Tree, took on another music professorship, promised a trip to Germany, and at last, staggering home one night, on his way to his wife and little boy and girl, fell in his tracks and in four days was dead, at the age of thirty-seven. They say that in his death-throe he arose and facing some great, ghostly choir raised his last baton, while all around the massive silence rang with the last ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... rest, let these be as in the Treaty of Utrecht; arrangeable in the lump;—and indeed, of Parma and Piacenza perhaps the less we say, the better at present." This was, in substance, Ripperda's Treaty; the Third great European travail-throe, or change of color in the long-suffering lobster. Whereby, of course, the Congress of Cambrai did straightway disappear, the floor miraculously vanishing under it; and sinks—far below human eye-reach by this time—towards the Bottomless Pool, ever since. Such was the beginning, such ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hands, and didst hale Unto thy couch in the cave. 'Mother! mother!' I shrieked out my wail— Wroughtest the pleasure of Kypris; no shame made the god-lover quail. Wretched I bare thee a child, and I cast him with shuddering throe Forth on thy couch where thou forcedst thy victim, a bride-bed of woe. Lost—my poor baby and thine! for the eagles devoured him: and lo! Victory-songs to thy lyre dost thou chant!—Ho, I call to thee, son Born to Latona, Dispenser of boding, on gold-gleaming throne Midmost of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... time ago, To be mi wife,—an soa aw thowt Aw'd introduce her, as aw owt. Mi hont wor pleeased to see us booath,— To mak fowk welcome nivver looath,— An th' table grooaned wi richest fare, An one an all wor pressed to share, Mi sweetheart made noa moor to do. Shoo buckled on an sooin gate throe; Mi hont sed, as shoo filled her glass,— "Well, God bless thi ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... * He fared from natal country fain to go: His home left he and went from us to grief; * Nor to his brethren could he say adieu: Yea, his loss wounded me with parting pangs, * And separation cost me many a throe: He fared farewelling, as he fared, our eyes; * Whenas his ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... with such crucifying effort—"What if Ariadne should die?" It was as though someone had called to her. She looked down into the black abyss from which she had willfully turned away her eyes, and saw that it was fathomless. A throe of revolt and hatred shook her. She bowed her head to her knees, racked by an anguish compared with which the torture of childbirth was nothing; and out of this deadly pain came forth, as in childbirth, something alive—a vision as swift, as passing as ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... over the obstruction in a tumbling heap and sprang at the flag as a panther at prey. He pulled at it and, wrenching it free, swung up its red brilliancy with a mad cry of exultation even as the color bearer, gasping, lurched over in a final throe and, stiffening convulsively, turned his dead face to the ground. There was much blood upon the ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... when it seemed to me that I had been struck a violent blow, and the next instant I was struggling amongst broken wood, dust, and plaster, fighting fiercely to escape; for there was a horrible dread upon me that at the next throe of the earthquake we should be buried alive far down in the ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... "This conflict is the birth-throe of a new European order of things. The man who attempts to judge the future by the old standards or to force the future back to them will be found to be hopelessly out of date. The world will have no use for him. The world has ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... left arm stiffened. The big biceps—an heirloom of my athletic days—thickened up, and I turned my eyes away from the dying face, half hidden by the darkness. His struggles were very terrible, but with my weight upon his lower limbs, and my grasp upon his windpipe, that death-throe was as silent as it was horrible. The end came slowly. I could not bear the horror of it longer. I must finish it and be done with it. I put my right arm under the man's shoulders and raised the upper part of his body from the berth. Then a desperate wrench with my left ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... confident of fame, From vales where Avon[127:1] winds the Minstrel came. Light-hearted youth! aye, as he hastes along, 45 He meditates the future song, How dauntless lla fray'd the Dacyan foe; And while the numbers flowing strong In eddies whirl, in surges throng, Exulting in the spirits' genial throe 50 In tides of power ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... soul, soul of mine! Soul, soul, soul of throe! Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine, And sing thy lauds in ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the divine drear accents flow, No soul that listens may choose but thrill to know it, Pierced and wrung by the passionate music's throe. ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... resolute dispassion—yet how exactly they prefigure the implacable sternness of the ultimate shepherds. A strange life is theirs, taking them day after day into the bosom of homes prostrated by the emigrating throe. Does this matter-of-fact bearing conceal an infinite tenderness, a pity that dare not show itself for fear of unmanly collapse? Are they secretly broken by the sight of the desolate nursery, the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... is soft—yet dreams will still Convert that couch to snow, And in my slumbers shot and shout Are ringing from Glencoe." That stalwart man arose and paced The chamber to and fro, While to his brow the sweat-drop sprung Like one in mortal throe. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... perpendicular columns, some of them capped by a huge flat rock laying as regularly as if placed there by the hand of mechanical skill, and then again they were thrown down and lay scattered around as if by some violent throe of nature. Though there were vast fields of rock, not a shrub, nor any sign of vegetation could be seen. All was desolate, sand and rock. What struck them as being very singular about these rocks, was the fact that, they were divided into two distinct parts, leaving ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... who could withstand an angel? He gave up trying; he let her have her way; and when dinner time came, Dolly and he had an almost jovial dinner. Until Mr. Copley rose from table, unlocked a cupboard, and took out a bottle of wine. Dolly's heart gave a sudden leap that meant a throe of pain. Was there another fight to be fought? How should she fight another fight? But the emergency ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... the recesses of the gynaeceum there breaks a cry, expressing rather wrath and surprise than mere pain. Then there comes another, more plaintive—the moan of a strong man in the death-throe. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... steep; 'twas at the time when swiftly sinks the snow; All honey-combed, the river ice was rotting down below; The river chafed beneath its rind with many a mighty throe. ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... Worm had done his work, but he had hardly reckoned on the strength of this man. With a vast throe of fear Locasto tried to free himself. Tenser, tenser grew the thongs; they strained, they bit into his flesh, but they would not break. Yet as he relaxed it seemed to him they were less tight. Then he ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... horrible: the limbs once so round and lovely shrivelling up into nothings; the eyes—those eyes that shone like heaven—being quenched into black dust; the lustrous golden hair now lank and discolored. The last throe came. I beheld that final struggle of the blackening ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... cities in America was struggling out of the earth. The whole country was in a similar throe. Everywhere were great dreams partly realized. One could not help but imagine what the nation would become, just as one could not look at the unfinished Capitol at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue without completing its lines ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters |
