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More "Insupportable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on—luncheon and dinner occupying a good deal of time, for, in spite of the heat, the midshipmen retained their appetites. The heat increased as the sun rose. If it was hot on deck it was hotter still in the cabin, which the stifling air and the cockroaches rendered almost insupportable. Towards evening they came in sight of the curious island of Saba, having the appearance of a high, barren, conical-shaped rock rising directly out of the ocean. As they got nearer, a few huts were seen at the base of the mountain, and in front a flight of steps hewn out of the solid rock ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... parted with him on the beach the evening previous. At the sound of every horse's feet she started, and her heart beat quicker. But he came not that day, and as evening approached, her disappointment became almost insupportable; she tried to frame excuses for him; he had never been to the house; perhaps he had, by a very natural mistake, gone to her uncle's house in town, instead of that where she now was, and which was rather more than a mile from St. Blas, and whither ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... helplessly in the grip of deadly hate and agony. He hated her then—hated her beauty—and the betrayal of her fear for him. What was life to him now? Oh, the insupportable bitterness! ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... in the balmy atmosphere, looking lazily at that bright, almost insupportable picture of blue sea under blue sky, there came the dip of oars, making music, and a sound of coolness with every ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... dormitory, where everything was rolling and crashing, in the midst of a terrible chorus of lamentations and imprecations, and he thought that his last hour had come. There were other days, when the sea was calm and yellowish, of insupportable heat, of infinite tediousness; interminable and wretched hours, during which the enervated passengers, stretched motionless on the planks, seemed all dead. And the voyage was endless: sea and sky, sky and sea; to-day the ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... their friends the moment financial reverses force them either to reduce their scale of living far below the standard, or go to work. When that happens it is the fault of the reversed, not of the entrenched. False pride, constant whining, or insupportable irritabilities gradually force them into a dreary class apart. If anything, people of wealth and secure position take a pride in standing by their old friends (their "own sort"), in showing themselves above all the means sins of which fiction and the stage have accused them, and ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... you are insupportable with your news of the last century. Now, mind, if you persist in this bad habit of laughing at people, I will have ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... III. finds himself compelled to allow the Arab troops incorporated into his army their barbarous tam-tam music, lest they revolt. The measured beat of the drum sustains the soldier in long marches which otherwise would be insupportable. The Marseillaise contributed as much toward the republican victories of 1793, when France was invaded, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... which the world imposes upon those who yield to its empire. If God were so exacting as the world, so inflexible in the laws that He imposes upon us, so severe in the chastisements by which delinquencies are punished, piety would be an insupportable burden through the weakness of the greater part of men; and God would find very few worshipers who would be willing to submit ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... there was not a sufficient number of those who were to undergo the last punishment to render the ceremony imposing. A few more were required for the stake, or you would not have escaped from those dungeons so soon. As it was, a month of anxiety and suspense, almost insupportable, had to be passed away before Amine was again summoned to the ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... dream-like element that I seemed to discover in all the things about me, and for that reason I continued my journal until a few years ago. . . . But at that time the mere idea that a day might come when someone would have a peep at it was insupportable to me; so much so indeed that if I left home and went to the Island or elsewhere for a few days, I always took care to seal up my journal, and with the greatest solemnity I wrote upon the packet: "It is my last wish that this book be ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... from the blazing room above which we hung suspended was now all but insupportable, and the fumes threatened to stifle us. My head seemed to be bursting; my throat and lungs ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... were shining with unusual brilliancy. He certainly felt deeply the loss of his money; but the idea that he had been swindled for the benefit of some clever rascal was absolutely insupportable to him. ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... doubt a slow poison, but then so very slow. Their nerves were unbraced by that fierce democracy of thought, trampling on all prescription, all tradition, in which Lessing loved to shoulder his way and advance his insupportable foot. "What is called a heretic," he says in his Preface to Berengarius, "has a very good side. It is a man who at least wishes to see with his own eyes." And again, "I know not if it be a duty to offer up fortune and life to the truth; ... but I know it is a duty, if one undertake ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... full-length figure. Mr. Tryan had not returned, and I missed George. I sat there until, wakeful and nervous, I saw the fire fall and shadows mount the wall. There was no sound but the rushing of the wind and the snoring of the sleepers. At last, feeling the place insupportable, I seized my hat and opening the door, ran ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... wish the station platform of Market Blandings to become suddenly congested with red Indians so that he might save Joan's life; and he did not wish to give up anything at all. But he was conscious—to the very depths of his being—that a future in which Joan did not figure would be so insupportable as not to bear considering; and in the immediate present he very strongly favored the idea of clasping Joan in his arms and kissing her ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... back to his own family, more excited, but not worse than before; and finding in the family circle everything as he has left it, the urgency of Abel, who wishes to make him offer a sacrifice, becomes altogether insupportable. More say we not, excepting that the motivation of the scene in which Abel perishes is of the rarest excellence, and what follows is equally great and priceless. There now lies Abel! That now is Death—there was so much ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... this had been brought about he knew nothing. Had he been told he would have stormed, and insisted on the engagement coming to an end. But would this have mended matters? Would it not have made Mehetabel's position in the house only more insupportable? ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... the fullness of imperial glory, when the will of one man was the supreme law of the empire. He also wrote of events when liberty had fled, and the yoke of despotism was nearly insupportable. He describes a period of great moral degradation, nor does he hesitate to lift the veil of hypocrisy in which his generation had wrapped itself. He fearlessly exposes the cruelties and iniquities of the early emperors, and writes with judicial ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... of the Spanish guerillas and were published by order of the Regency at Cadiz. Despised by the Spaniards, flouted by Napoleon, set at defiance by the French satraps, and reduced wellnigh to bankruptcy, the puppet King felt his position insupportable, and, hurrying to Paris, tendered his resignation of the crown (May, 1811). In his anxiety to huddle up the scandal, Napoleon appeased his brother, promised him one-fourth of the taxes levied by the French ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Crime, or to accuse My other self, the partner of my life; Whose failing, while her Faith to me remaines, I should conceal, and not expose to blame 130 By my complaint; but strict necessitie Subdues me, and calamitous constraint, Least on my head both sin and punishment, However insupportable, be all Devolv'd; though should I hold my peace, yet thou Wouldst easily detect what I conceale. This Woman whom thou mad'st to be my help, And gav'st me as thy perfet gift, so good, So fit, so acceptable, so Divine, That from her hand I could suspect no ill, 140 And ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... the ardour of voluptuousness! There she discovered the Duke of Laverdiere who had had some success at Court; she waltzed with a viscount and experienced an unusual disturbance of mind. From this moment she lived a new life; her husband and all her surroundings became insupportable to her. One day, in looking over some furniture, she hit a piece of wire which tore her finger; it was the wire from her ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... the engine-room, where there was no air stirring, and the vapor of steam hung heavily in the atmosphere, the heat was almost insupportable. ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... race by the Scythian name Arimaspi, for in the Scythian language arima signifies one and spou the eye. The whole of the country which I have been speaking of has so hard and severe a winter, that there prevails there for eight months an altogether insupportable cold, so that if you pour water on the ground you will not make mud, but if you light a fire you will make mud. Even the sea freezes, and the whole Cimmerian Bosphorus, and the Scythians who live within the trench travel on the ice and drive over it in waggons. . . . Again, with reference to the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... estates. The blood of the most eminent champions of liberty had been shed upon the scaffold; and such as by a timely flight avoided that fate, were wandering in misery far from their native land, while the obsequious slaves of despotism enjoyed their patrimony. Still more insupportable than the oppression of these petty tyrants, was the restraint of conscience which was imposed without distinction on all the Protestants of that kingdom. No external danger, no opposition on the part of the nation, however steadfast, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... her longing gaze from the telephone and looked at her hands. She could not meet the insupportable expression ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... these pilgrimages of disagreement, as three conflicting opinions on the same subject would make insupportable what is otherwise rather exhilarating. She starts from Edinburgh to-morrow for a brief visit to the Highlands with the Dalziels, and will join us when ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a privileged aristocracy and the fiercely defended corn laws made the limitations of a small area more oppressive. In Ireland, a landless peasantry in a grainless land, dulled by deprivation of opportunity, found in emigration an escape from insupportable evils. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... but invented and devised to adorn and please her. Flowers for her were made so sweet and birds so musical. All nature seems to bear an intimate relation to the being we adore; and as to us life would now appear intolerable, a burthen of insupportable and wearying toil, without this transcendent sympathy, so we cannot help fancying that were its sweet and subtle origin herself to quit this inspired scene, the universe itself would not be unconscious of its deprivation, and somewhat of the world's lustre might be missed ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... and when we took our departure, we were quite laden with flowers, good wishes, and messages for mutual friends in England. It was rather a hot journey down, and the train seemed full, but the scenery was lovely. As we approached Colombo the heat became greater, and in the town itself it was almost insupportable. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... l'Auxerrois, where he was in the habit of hearing Mass, has lent him a house at Nogent-sur-Marne. There he receives a few visitors. But in truth the places he once liked best, the people, nay! the very friends, have become to him nothing less than insupportable. Though he still dreams of change, and would fain try his native air once more, he is at work constantly upon his art; but solely by way of a teacher, instructing (with a kind of remorseful diligence, it would seem) Jean-Baptiste, who will be heir to his unfinished ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... unendurable. True, there are social distinctions of the sort which even Ernest Le Breton, communist as he was, could not practically get over; but then they were distinctions familiarised to the sufferers from childhood upward, and so perhaps a little less insupportable. But that Harry Oswald's sister—that Edie, his own precious delicate little Edie, a dainty English wild-flower of the tenderest, should be transplanted from her own appreciative home to such a chilly and ungenial soil as that—the ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... his early death would have blotted out the memory of it. She wept as for the loss of the most perfect treasure with which mortal woman had ever been endowed; for weeks after he was gone the idea of future happiness in this world was hateful to her; consolation, as it is called, was insupportable, and tears and sleep were ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... grow flat, and its briskness fail. And by how much the further it runs from me, by so much the less it lives, till it comes to the burden of old age, not only hateful to others, but to itself also. Which also were altogether insupportable did not I pity its condition, in being present with it, and, as the poets' gods were wont to assist such as were dying with some pleasant metamorphosis, help their decrepitness as much as in me lies by bringing ...
— The Praise of Folly • Desiderius Erasmus
... traffic soon to flow from west to east by way of the Isthmus of Darien; it is to build up our merchant marine; it is to furnish new markets for the products of our farms, shops, and manufactories; it is to make slavery insupportable in Cuba and Porto Rico at once, and ultimately so in Brazil; it is to settle the unhappy condition of Cuba and end an exterminating conflict; it is to provide honest means of paying our honest debts without overtaxing the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ulysses S. Grant • Ulysses S. Grant
... frequent rustlings among the leaves; and being pretty sure they were snakes I expected every instant to be stung by them. This increased my anguish, and the horror of my situation became now quite insupportable. I at length quitted the thicket, very faint and hungry, for I had not eaten or drank any thing all the day; and crept to my master's kitchen, from whence I set out at first, and which was an open shed, and laid myself down in the ashes with ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... commenced a regular process, and made him daily visits, besides sending for him frequently, and thus perplexed him exceedingly. All this time the dead man was left in the garden, which being near the house, and the body beginning to putrefy, such an odour was caused as became almost insupportable. At length, the merchant, overpowered by the bad smell, and alarmed by the measures the mandarin was preparing to prove him culpable, was happy to compromise the affair, and have the dead body removed, on paying the sum of four thousand ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... they came to tell me, that Florine, dying, wished to speak to me. I heard what she had to say; her revelations changed my projects. This dark and mournful life which had become insupportable to me, was suddenly lighted up. The sense of duty woke within me. You were no doubt a prey to horrible misery; it was my duty to seek and save you. Florine's confessions unveiled to me the new plots of the enemies of my scattered family, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... following Miss Raynor's yacht. He had told me of his conversations with Sylvia, but what reason had I to believe he spoke the truth? That any man should have loved these two women filled me with rage. That that man should be Walkirk was an insupportable thought. I was not only jealous but I felt myself the victim ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... kind of faith,—were it only faith in this, That cobwebs are not cloth; that a Constitution could be made. Cobwebs and chimeras ought verily to disappear; for a Reality there is. Let formulas, soul-killing, and now grown body-killing, insupportable, begone, in the name of Heaven and Earth!—Time, as we say, brought forth these Twelve Hundred; Eternity was before them, Eternity behind: they worked, as we all do, in the confluence of Two Eternities; what ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... thunderstroke to Othello, who now plainly saw that he was no better than a murderer, and that his wife (poor innocent lady) had been ever faithful to him; the extreme anguish of which discovery making life insupportable, he fell upon his sword, and throwing himself upon the body of ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... proofs of her guilt. The principal point to be considered is what punishment you will inflict: it ought not to be so slight a one that the remembrance of it may leave no impression behind, nor so heavy that it may anyways be deemed insupportable. After all, I only give my opinion freely, which, above all, is to do ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... ten come out on the other side. In the tenth case they just have either to make the best of it or to make a break.... Of course people always can throw up the sponge, even married people, if things are insupportable. The door isn't locked. But there's no point, I think, in having it swinging ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... having been star-gazing, and another, anxious for as many strokes as possible, mistaking that part for the bottom of his shuttlecock; while this would be followed by, "O, my leg," from the untoward movement of a stick or a barrow. In short, such scenes were insupportable; and what with the accidents that arose, and the tops without strings, and the strings without tops, the hoops without sticks, and the sticks without hoops, the seizure of the favourite toy by one, and the inability of another to get any thing, ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... a resolution. She has determined to revenge herself. From that day, so far as regards you, her mask, like her heart, has turned to bronze. Formerly you were an object of indifference to her; you are becoming by degrees absolutely insupportable. The Civil War commences only at the moment in which, like the drop of water which makes the full glass overflow, some incident, whose more or less importance we find difficulty in determining, has rendered you odious. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... stand, if you feel disposed to let them, precisely as we left them at our last mournfully happy parting; for, till then, though it break my heart, I could never, never consent to a renewal of our intercourse. Have I said enough, and not too much? I could not, under the almost insupportable weight of grief, fear, and anxiety, that is distracting my brain, and crushing my poor heart,—I could not say less, I dare not say more. O Claud, Claud, why has this dreadful cloud come over us? O, pray that it may be speedily removed, and once more let in, on our pained and perplexed hearts, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... was a hot one, and the heat from the fire, together with that from the sun, was almost insupportable; but, stripped of all clothing that could conveniently be cast aside, each one continued at his self-imposed task of averting the threatened ...
— Ralph Gurney's Oil Speculation • James Otis
... man like me, of a delicate temper, quick at discovering errors and eager to redress them, even in cases where they do not personally affect myself but indefatigable where they do, this eternal discord, these quarrels and despicable brawls are become insupportable. I have endured the torture seven miserable years, and surely that is no slight trial: surely that is sufficient to prove I have not wanted patience or fortitude. To be a good husband and a provident father, and to ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... is enjoyed by everybody, on catres or in hammocks; for the heat of mid-day is insupportable, and repose after a bath is ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... London in my way to that insupportable spot, a country village; for I am really going to Churchhill. Forgive me, my dear friend, it is my last resource. Were there another place in England open to me I would prefer it. Charles Vernon is my aversion; and I am afraid of his ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... inch or more: if they succeed in getting the swarm even on the outside of the hive it is left; if they go in, it is well; if they go off, why hope for "better luck next time." The hive is left unsheltered in the hot sun and when there is no wind, the heat is soon insupportable, or at least very oppressive; the bees hang in loose strings, instead of a compact body, as when kept cool; they are very apt to fall, and when they do, will rush out from every side: if the queen chances to drop with them, they may "step out." Two thirds of all the bees that go to the woods are ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... in honest Evans's examination of Mrs. Page's schoolboy. To the objection that Shakspeare wounds the moral sense by the unsubdued, undisguised description of the most hateful atrocity—that he tears the feelings without mercy, and even outrages the eye itself with scenes of insupportable horror—I, omitting Titus Andronicus, as not genuine, and excepting the scene of Gloster's blinding in Lear, answer boldly in the name ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... of their profusion. This charm would at once be destroyed by any approximation to the severity of the ancient taste in any one point, even in that of the costume; for the contrast would render the variety in all the other departments even the more insupportable. Gay, tinselled, spangled draperies suit best to the opera; and hence many things which have been censured as unnatural, such as exhibiting heroes warbling and trilling in the excess of despondency, are perfectly justifiable. This fairy world is not peopled by real men, but by ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... over-taxed body must bear, the leaden weariness of worn-out limbs, and the sub-conscious effort to retain warmth and vitality in spite of the ceaseless lashing of the icy gale. Then, as aching muscles grow lax, the nervous tension becomes more insupportable, unless, indeed, utter weariness breeds indifference to the personal peril each time the decks are swept by a frothing flood, or a slippery spar must be clung to with frost-numbed and often bleeding hands. That is, at least, on board the sailing ships where ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... authority exercised was at first mild, and ensured to the bondsmen almost the same privileges with their masters, yet the idea of power soon crept in upon the mind, and at length lenity was converted into rigidity, and the gall of servitude became insupportable; the oppressed, soon found that that liberty, which they had just given up, was an inalienable privilege of man, and sought means to regain it: this was effected,—but not until a time when ignorance began to decline, when improvements were made in the arts, commerce and governments, ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... was dead. Bellisario, from his great age, took no share in it, and was soon afterwards killed by a fall from a stage, which he had erected for the purpose of retouching some of his frescos. Nor did Spagnoletto experience a better fate; for, having seduced a young girl, and become insupportable even to himself from the general odium which he experienced, he embarked on board a ship; nor is it known whither he fled, or how he ended his life, if we may credit the Neapolitan writers. Palomino, however, states him to have died in Naples in 1656, aged sixty-seven, ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... immediately at Hoebel's in the Kothgasse, whether the Hoebel who belongs to this place set off from Vienna to Baden? It is really so distressing to me to depend on such people, that if life did not possess higher charms, it would be utterly insupportable in my eyes. You no doubt got my yesterday's letter, and the 2 florins for the chocolate. I shall be obliged to drink coffee to-morrow; perhaps after all it is better for me than chocolate, as the ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... bear so cruel a scene, I returned to my room with tears in my eyes. In general, tears and cries, instead of moving the duke to pity, put him in a passion. Pity was a feeling that was painful and even insupportable in ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... Misfortune that the Coloneys were not inform'd of our Coming two Months sooner, and through the Interestedness, ill Nature, and Sowerness of these People, whose Government, Doctrine, and Manners, whose Hypocracy and canting, are insupportable; and no man living but one of Gen'l Hill's good Sense and good Nature could have managed them. But if such a Man mett with nothing he could depend on, altho' vested with the Queen's Royal Power and Authority, and Supported by a Number of Troops sufficient to reduce by force ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... to brighten it up he had sometimes passed over into positive failure. The most unyielding admirers of his early novels can hardly contradict a reader who complains that he finds the adventures of the bandits at Jonstorna insupportable and the naivete of Christiana mawkish. There are pages in Alroy that read as if they were written for a wager, to see how much balderdash the public will endure. Disraeli seems to have been conscious of this weakness, and he tried to relieve ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... received, particularly in rescuing him from so many imminent dangers of death, which he now saw must have been attended with such dreadful and hopeless destruction. The privileges of his education, which he had so much despised, now lay with an almost insupportable weight on his mind; and the folly of that career of sinful pleasure which he had so many years been running with desperate eagerness and unworthy delight, now filled him with indignation against himself, and against the great deceiver, ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... is the man whose name instantly occurs to any one involved, or likely to be involved, in litigation—such an one must be instantly secured—at all events, taken from the enemy—at any cost. The pressure upon such a counsel's time and energies then becomes really enormous, and all but insupportable. As it is of the last importance either to secure his splendid services, or deprive the enemy of them, such a counsel—and such, it need hardly be said, was Sir William Follett—is continually made the subject of mere speculation by clients who are content to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... signifies nothing, but a privation attended with pain, and a suffering state of body or soul; now I would fain know what kind of misery can be that of a free being, whose heart enjoys perfect peace, and body perfect health? And which is aptest to become insupportable to those who enjoy it, a civil or a natural life? In civil life we can scarcely meet a single person who does not complain of his existence; many even throw away as much of it as they can, and the united force of divine and human laws can hardly put bounds to this disorder. ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... these, and then the comforting Voices were heard at her ear saying, soft and low, "Go forward, Daughter of God, and I will help thee." Then she added, "When I hear that, the joy in my heart, oh, it is insupportable!" ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... in December it had been arranged that his wife and daughter should only remain at York during the winter, and should return to the Continent in the spring. "Mrs. Sterne's health," he writes, "is insupportable in England. She must return to France, and justice and humanity forbid me to oppose it." But separation from his wife meant separation from his daughter; it was this, of course, which was the really painful parting, and it is to the credit of Sterne's disinterestedness of affection ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... those they sought were to be seen among the tattered and many-colored garments. The father and the lover found instant relief in the search; though each was condemned again to experience the misery of an uncertainty that was hardly less insupportable than the most revolting truth. They were standing, silent and thoughtful, around the melancholy pile, when the scout approached. Eyeing the sad spectacle with an angry countenance, the sturdy woodsman, for the first time since his entering the plain, spoke ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... 'This is insupportable!' said Emily; 'Theresa, you know not what you say. Sir, if you respect my tranquillity, you will spare me from the ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... had entered the little parlor, his friend cast himself into a chair, and throwing off his hat, wiped away the perspiration which, though a cold October evening, was streaming down his forehead. Thaddeus endured a suspense which was almost insupportable. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... to call him when he is married to Louisa? I must call him something. It's impossible to be constantly addressing him, and never giving him a name. I cannot call him Josiah, for the name is insupportable to me. You yourself wouldn't hear of Joe, you very well know. Am I to call my own son-in-law 'Mister?' I believe not, unless the time has arrived when I am to be trampled upon by my relations. Then, what am I to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... eager to be released from the strain of a most insupportable situation, "what are we ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... were to be seen, as winter is here replaced by a very mild rainy season. The heat in summer is often said to be insupportable, the temperature rising to more than 36 degrees Reaumur. To-day it reached ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... he should come back to seek for more—a vague awe and horror surrounded the idea of his slinking in again with stealthy tread, and turning his face toward the empty bed, while she shrank down close at his feet to avoid his touch, which was almost insupportable. She sat and listened. Hark! A footstep on the stairs, and now the door was slowly opening. It was but imagination, yet imagination had all the terrors of reality; nay, it was worse, for the reality would have come and gone, and there an end, but in imagination it was always coming, ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... superb," said she. "You play the part of my very worthy husband to perfection. It is as if one saw and heard him. Ah, I would that he resembled you a little, as he would then be less insupportable, and it would be somewhat ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... some beings, but I knew not by whom—a battle, a strife, an agony, was traveling through all its stages—was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable, from deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams, where of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power, and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... sagacious fish, the crab, and the not unfrequent practice of the mule and donkey, he described their general objects; which were briefly vengeance on their Tyrant Masters (of whose grievous and insupportable oppression no 'prentice could entertain a moment's doubt) and the restoration, as aforesaid, of their ancient rights and holidays; for neither of which objects were they now quite ripe, being barely twenty strong, but which they pledged themselves to pursue with ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... get well here.' Elena, too, was fretting with impatience; she was worried by Insarov's pallor, and his emaciation. She often looked with involuntary terror at his changed face. Her position in her parents' house had become insupportable. Her mother mourned over her, as over the dead, while her father treated her with contemptuous coldness; the approaching separation secretly pained him too, but he regarded it as his duty—the duty of an offended father—to disguise ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... How insupportable would be the days, if the night with its dews and darkness did not come to restore the drooping world. As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... so insupportable as the load of sin: would you, therefore, be fitted for afflictions, be sure to get the burden of your sins laid aside, and then what afflictions soever you may meet with will be very easy ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and execrate his very name; that he should now know and feel all this, and triumph in the recollection; was gall and madness to the usurer's heart. The dead boy's love for Nicholas, and the attachment of Nicholas to him, was insupportable agony. The picture of his deathbed, with Nicholas at his side, tending and supporting him, and he breathing out his thanks, and expiring in his arms, when he would have had them mortal enemies and hating each other to the ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... than political divisions. 'The nations are the citizens of humanity,' said Mazzini; and so they ought to be. Some of the omens are favourable. Militarism has dug its own grave. The great powers increased their armaments till the burden became insupportable, and have now rushed into bankruptcy in the hope of shaking it off. In prehistoric times the lords of creation were certain gigantic lizards, protected by massive armour-plates which could only be carried by a creature thirty to sixty ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it." Perhaps the praises of our mothers tarry in our brains too long anyway. It may be a provision of nature that woman shall inspire her child with sufficient ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... necessity for Alfred to announce the sad news to his widowed mother; and here the power of language fails us—the shock was so sudden, so unexpected. The half of her life was so suddenly torn from the bereaved one, that the pang was well-nigh insupportable. But God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and has promised that the strength of His beloved ones shall be even as their day. So He strengthened the sensitive frame to bear a shock which otherwise might have ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... retreated from the window, at its commencement, to avoid the possibility of hearing, what was not probably intended to reach the ears of a third person. "Would any but a favored lover," he thought, "be admitted to such an interview?" The idea was insupportable; he traversed his apartment with perturbed and hasty steps, and it was not till long after De Valette retired, that he sought the repose of his pillow, and even then, in a state of mind which completely ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... Contemporary) which Nekrassov bought in 1847. Turgenieff, Herzen, Byelinsky, Dostoyevsky gladly sent their works to him, and Nekrassov soon became the intellectual leader of his time. His influence became enormous, but he had to cope with all the rigours of the censorship which had become almost insupportable in Russia, as the effect of the Tsar's fears aroused by the events of the French ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... the whale is frequently attended with such an insupportable smell, as to bring on a disorder of the brain." ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... defrauding the living. If I saw, Sir, any probability that this bill could be so amended in the Committee that my objections might be removed, I would not divide the House in this stage. But I am so fully convinced that no alteration which would not seem insupportable to my honourable and learned friend, could render his measure supportable to me, that I must move, though with regret, that this bill be read a second time ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... went up to the rails; and, to cap all, that old Mrs. Godfrey, who weighs at least three hundred, came and knelt close by me, and just completely crushed all one side of my flounces; I was provoked and indignant; this, added to the intense heat, was almost insupportable; but here I am again, thank God. O, Althea, you look so cool and comfortable; won't you come, please, and fan me a minute—untie my hat, and take away my gloves and scarf, they are like so many fire-coals. It is too bad to make a servant of you, dear, but that ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... a stout healthy race, and are seldom sick, although they expose themselves by lying out in the sun at mid-day, when the heat is almost insupportable to a white man. It is the universal practice of both sexes to grease themselves all over with butter produced from goat's milk, which makes the skin smooth, and gives it a shining appearance. This is usually renewed every day: when neglected, the skin becomes ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... now," says he, "to show how the action of the will depends on causes; that there is nothing so agreeable to human nature as this dependence of our actions, and that otherwise we should fall into an absurd and insupportable fatality; that is to say, into the Mohammedan fate, which is the worst of all, because it does away with foresight and good counsel. However, it is well to explain how this dependency of our voluntary actions does not prevent that there may be at the ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... moment before the miracle had fallen upon her cheek (as she declared in her deposition), was found to be quite dried up; the bone, which had been rotted and putrified, was restored to its former condition; all the stench, proceeding from it, which had been so insupportable that by order of the physicians and surgeons she was separated from her companions, was changed into a breath as sweet as an infant's; and she recovered at the same moment her sense ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... this meeting, and asked him whence he came, whither he was going in such haste, and why he was alone. He smiled upon me with his usual complacency, and said, 'Remember that when you were in Gascony the tempestuous climate was insupportable to you. I also am tired of it. I have quitted Gascony, never to return, and I am going to Rome.' At the conclusion of these words, he had reached the end of the garden, and, as I endeavoured to accompany ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... only feels miserable but ridiculous." None remain in the provinces except the poor rural nobility; to live there one must be behind the age, disheartened or in exile. The king's banishment of a seignior to his estates is the highest disgrace; to the humiliation of this fall is added the insupportable weight of boredom. The finest chateau on the most beautiful site is a frightful "desert"; nobody is seen there save the grotesques of a small town or the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... seemed to lose some of his assurance. "No, we quarrelled. The girl is insupportable. She is engaged now to a lord of sorts, an Englishman, and they are ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... England. Firstly, many servants, whose time with their masters had expired, on account of the good opportunity to plant tobacco here, afterwards families and finally entire colonies, forced to quit that place both to enjoy freedom of conscience and to escape from the insupportable government of New England and because many more commodities were easier to be obtained here than there, so that in place of seven farms and two or three plantations which were here, one saw thirty farms, as well cultivated and stocked with cattle as in Europe, and a hundred plantations which ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... catching these fishes with hand-nets, in the rifts and currents; and the women were busy in cleaning and drying them. Their offal had accumulated around the huts in offensive heaps, and gave out an odor which was almost insupportable, but of which the women appeared to take no notice. We did not, therefore, trespass long on their hospitality, but returned to our boat and started back to La Union. As night came on, the trees along the river's bank were thronged with chachalacas, which almost deafened us with their querulous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... more from the sun's rays than the elephant, whose nature prompts it to seek the deepest shade. Its dark colour and immense surface attract an amount of heat which becomes almost insupportable to the unfortunate creature when forced to carry a heavy load during the hot season in India. Even without a greater weight than its rider, the elephant exhibits signs of distress when marching after ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... what an easy, quiet mind, thought Thady, must that man have—how devoid of care and fear must he be, to be able to sit there motionless all the live-long day, and not feel it dreary, long, endless, insupportable, as he did. ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... evidences of its presence every day. I watched again all of last night in the same cover, gun in hand, double-charged with buckshot. In the morning the fresh footprints were there, as before. Yet I would have sworn that I did not sleep—indeed, I hardly sleep at all. It is terrible, insupportable! If these amazing experiences are real I shall go mad; if they are fanciful I am ...
— The Damned Thing - 1898, From "In the Midst of Life" • Ambrose Bierce
... even when an apparent necessity of their discussion arrives in the course of life. The present reserve between Hermione and Vere rendered even the idea of any plain speaking about the revelation of Peppina quite insupportable to the mother. She could only pretend to ignore that it had ever been made. And this she did. But now that she knew of it she felt very acutely the difference it had made in Vere. That difference was owing to ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... a bookworm nameless in the page of history, dwelled within those walls apart from worldly solicitude and strife; relieving what would otherwise have been an insupportable monotony, with sweet converse, with books, or the ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... suddenly by some insupportable pain, he wrenched her hands from his knees, sprang to his feet, and walked swiftly back and forth. She remained kneeling by the chair, looking up at him with a most piteous face. "Hetty," he exclaimed, "you must be patient ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... the world, as I was at that time, devotes himself to the faithful fulfilment of duty, rendered it comparatively easy for me to accommodate myself patiently to a condition which a short time before would have seemed insupportable. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was at last compelled to acknowledge that we were lost! We were on an Indian trail, and the bushes grew so low that at almost every step I was obliged to bend my forehead to my mule's neck. This increased the pain in my head to an almost insupportable degree. At last I told F. that I could not remain in the saddle a moment longer. Of course there was nothing to do but to camp. Totally unprepared for such a catastrophe, we had nothing but the blankets of our mules, and a thin quilt in which I had rolled ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... alliance with German princes against the Emperor. Several of those princes, headed by Maurice of Saxony, had secretly formed a league to resist by force of arms the "measures employed by Charles to reduce Germany to insupportable and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... of her apartment became insupportable to her. She sprang up, opened the window, and sat down in the balcony outside, trying to find composure by looking down into the dark, still street. The voices of two men engaged in eager conversation reached her ear. They sat upon the broad steps of the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sense of disaster might have been less poignant. But the thought that his own carelessness had enabled the enemy to get possession of a thing likely to involve Lady Agatha in further trouble was nearly insupportable. He gritted his teeth and clenched his hands ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... touching, for a long time must elapse before they met again. Monte-Leone had resolved to leave Naples for some time. The proximity of Sorrento lacerated his heart, and to see her he loved the wife of another would to him be insupportable. Taddeo was aware of the reasons why the Count had determined to travel, and had he no mother he would also have been anxious to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... to the seclusion of her bijou residence in the heart of the most fashionable quarter. Here she pondered for a short time upon the doubtful unkindness of fate which had deprived her of a husband whom she despised, and of a home which his presence had made insupportable. But she soon roused herself to face her new lack of responsibility, and to enjoy it. At first, she moved cautiously. There were numerous sympathisers who urged her to defy the world, such as it is, and to show herself everywhere entirely careless of what people ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various
... on the same errand, was forcibly arrested by something scarcely short of an embrace from Hamilton, who expressed himself as surprised as pleased at his appearance, and in whose glistening eyes, as well as the friendly looks of those around, Louis experienced some relief from the almost insupportable sense of dulness that had oppressed him ever since his entrance into the house. But now, the doctor having opened his book, the young gentlemen were obliged to separate and form into their places. Hamilton kept Louis ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... insurmountable as they fall altogether upon the mother of the family, who is living in a flat, or, worse still, in a tenement house, where one stove and one set of utensils must be put to all sorts of uses, fit or unfit, making the living room of the family a horror in summer, and perfectly insupportable on rainy washing-days in winter. Such a woman, rather than the prosperous housekeeper, uses factory products, and thus no high standard of quality ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... Or ties more close connect thee with this house, As this thy joy evinces, rein thy heart; For insupportable the sudden plunge From happiness to sorrow's gloomy depth. As yet thou ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... dance before him the whole evening; the women kissed his face and the men his hand, and he talked to them in German. Though this evening went off well enough, it is clear that nothing would be more insupportable than to live at this Court; the dulness must be excessive, and the people who compose his habitual society are the most insipid and uninteresting that can be found. As for Lady Conyngham, she looks bored to death, and she never speaks, never appears ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... honeymoon; but you will also have to contend against a resolution. She has determined to revenge herself. From that day, so far as regards you, her mask, like her heart, has turned to bronze. Formerly you were an object of indifference to her; you are becoming by degrees absolutely insupportable. The Civil War commences only at the moment in which, like the drop of water which makes the full glass overflow, some incident, whose more or less importance we find difficulty in determining, has rendered you odious. The lapse of ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... famous all over America, for their multitude, the troublesomeness of their buzzing and the venom of their stings, which occasion an insupportable itching, and often form so many ulcers, if the person stung does not immediately put some spittle on the wound. In open places they are less tormenting; but still they are troublesome; and the best way of driving them out of the houses is to burn a little brimstone in {273} the mornings ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... home. The hospital was always pathetic to Harmony; on this Christmas-Eve she found it harrowing. Its very size shocked her, that there should be so much suffering, so much that was appalling, frightful, insupportable. Peter felt her quiver under his hand. A hospital in festivity is very affecting. It smiles through its tears. And in every assemblage there are sharply defined lines of difference. There are those who are going home soon, God willing; there are those ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... all in Raptures; he imagin'd, that this Honour done him by the King of Kings, was the sole Result of his exalted Merit. The second wasn't altogether so agreeable; The third prov'd somewhat troublesome; the fourth insupportable; the fifth was tormenting; and at last, he was perfectly outrageous at the continual Peal in his Ears of No Monarch's happier Sir, than you, You say right, &c. and at being daily harangu'd at the same Hour. Whereupon he wrote to Court, and begg'd of his Majesty to recal his Chamberlain, his ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... world's unappeased and unappeasable agony; then we too are torn by the paroxysm of anguish; we would flee to the Nirvana of oblivion and unconsciousness, turning our back upon what we cannot alleviate, and longing to lay down the burden of life, and to escape from that which has become insupportable."[195] But these are only the dark and seemingly forsaken hours in which men sit in despair beneath the juniper-tree and imagine that all the world has gone wrong. The juniper-tree in Christianity is the exception; the Bo-tree of Buddhism, with the same despondent estimate, is the rule. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... that are simply self-revelations—outpourings of her indignations. She is not at her best in these. "Indiana," written in her age of revolt, is too obviously a pamphlet to reveal her passionate hatred of marriage. In it she looked on marriage as "un malheur insupportable." But "Consuelo," "La Comtesse de Rudolstadt," "Lettres d'un voyageur," Lelia, Spiridion, Valvedre, Valentine, "History of her Life and letters," and many other books reveal her agonies and agitations, her hope and power, her love of ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... in lively repartee, laughing." Then begin the action and the dialogue. The scenario may be set forth in this wise: boisterous salutations, hilarious talk and accounts of flirtations; tittle tattle about neighbors and lively scandals; exchange of commiserations on the insupportable humor of masters and the fatigue of service; cessation of laughing, kissing and shouting, the day being ended; quick change of scene to a levee of washing mallets; one of the women steals a trinket ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... white flag. No blame can rest upon the men, for their presence there at all is a sufficient proof of their public spirit and their gallantry. But the lessons of the war seem to have been imperfectly learned, especially that very certain lesson that shell fire in a close formation is insupportable, while in an open formation with a little cover it can never compel surrender. The casualty lists (80 killed and wounded out of a force of 470) show that the Yeomanry took considerable punishment before surrendering, but do not permit us to call the defence desperate ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Allworthy's instance, was outwardly, as we have said, reconciled to his brother; yet the same rancour remained in his heart; and he found so many opportunities of giving him private hints of this, that the house at last grew insupportable to the poor doctor; and he chose rather to submit to any inconveniences which he might encounter in the world, than longer to bear these cruel and ungrateful insults from a brother for whom he ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... had himself. He began to fear that certain private transactions of his own would not escape Hiram's observation. He felt magnetically that instead of bullying and domineering over the new-comer, Hiram's eyes were on him whatever he did. This was insupportable; but how could he help it? The more work he imposed on Hiram, the better the latter seemed to like it, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... at home until he has accumulated an insupportable load of ennui, and then he sallies forth to distribute ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... which we see no reason to question, in regard to several of the early Popes. But no large number of persons could have existed within them. The closeness of the air would very soon have rendered life insupportable; and supposing any considerable number had collected near the outlet, where a supply of fresh air could have reached them, the difficulty of obtaining food and of concealing their place of retreat would have been in most instances insurmountable. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... is as proud as a beggar grown rich and dressed in his first suit of embroidery. By St. Anthony, he is become quite insupportable. Do you not observe how he increases the number of his ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... knew the source whence they sprung, and was merely able to suppress the utterance of my feelings in her presence. My looks, however, were abundantly significant, and my company became hourly more insupportable. Abstracted from these considerations, my father's remonstrances were not destitute of weight. He gave me being, but sustenance ought surely to be my own gift. In the use of that for which he had been indebted to his own exertions, he might ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... agonising cry, and fell down on the deck. Then a flood of tears sprang into my burning eyes, and I sobbed as if my heart would burst asunder. I did not try to check this. It was too precious a relief to my insupportable agony. I crept close to my friend's cot, took his hand gently, and, laying my cheek upon it, wept there as I never wept before. Jack's former advice now came back to me vividly, and his words of caution, "Honour thy father and thy ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... having a son born to him, and Leontine a daughter; but to the unspeakable grief of the latter, his young wife (in whom all his happiness was wrapt up) died in a few days after the birth of her daughter. His affliction would have been insupportable, had he not been comforted by the daily visits and conversations of his friend. As they were one day talking together with their usual intimacy, Leontine, considering how incapable he was of giving his daughter ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... believe that suffering and death are sent by him deliberately, and not cruelly. One single instance, however minute, that established the reverse, would vitiate the whole theory; and if so, then we are the sport of a power that is sometimes kind and sometimes malignant. An insupportable thought! ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... crude and simple rhythm. I thought of its influence in displacing planets, and of the almost infinite musical variations that were set in motion, and then I compared my crude thrumming with the majestic thunders of the sea, and realized the insupportable beauty of absolute music. A dog talks by smell. There are vibrations of smell, as well as of sound or of heat or of light. And the blind reveal vibration of touch, the holiest of the senses. We talk now by sound, but ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... will serve to make the matter clear: "The taxes required in the Roman empire, to sustain the court and civil service, the army and desolating wars, and the hungry brood of office-holders, as well as to provide largesses to the soldiers, were excessive in the extreme, so as to prove an almost insupportable burden to the people. The ordinary and economical expenses of the government were great; but when we take into view that during a period of seventy-two years previous to Diocletian, there were twenty-six individuals who held the imperial crown, besides a great number of unsuccessful aspirants, and ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... of the Swarm were, in the midst of the excitement of Mr. Crabtree's change of residence. In all their young lives of varied length they had never before had an opportunity to witness the upheaval of a moving and this occasion was frought with a well-nigh insupportable fascination. The General's remaining at the post of family duty and his command of his henchman to the same sacrifice was indeed remarkable, though ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... country. The Jacobins sent agents to Belgium to propagate revolutionary principles, and establish clubs on the model of the parent society; but the Flemings, who had received us with enthusiasm, became cool at the heavy demands made upon them, and at the general pillage and insupportable anarchy which the Jacobins brought with them. All the party that had opposed the Austrian army, and hoped to be free under the protection of France, found our rule too severe, and regretted having sought our aid, or supported us. Dumouriez, ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... from the sun's rays than the elephant, whose nature prompts it to seek the deepest shade. Its dark colour and immense surface attract an amount of heat which becomes almost insupportable to the unfortunate creature when forced to carry a heavy load during the hot season in India. Even without a greater weight than its rider, the elephant exhibits signs of distress when marching after ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... mission she went aside and prayed, complaining of the distrust of these, and then the comforting Voices were heard at her ear saying, soft and low, "Go forward, Daughter of God, and I will help thee." Then she added, "When I hear that, the joy in my heart, oh, it is insupportable!" ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "She will see no Jew who is tolerable. Every male of that race is insupportable,—'insupportably ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... shutter remains closed, while the sound of spurs, swords, and voices cross each other in the corridor, sometimes near, then dying away into the distance. A few moments more of anxious waiting and agony almost insupportable, then I raise my arm determined to break the window, when a new noise from the outside causes a shudder ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the diversions he took with his companions could banish her from his thoughts; yet did she not so wholly engross his attention, as to render him remiss in his studies; his ambition, as I said before, would not suffer him to neglect the means of acquiring praise, and nothing was so insupportable to him as to find at any time another boy had merited a greater share of it: by which we may perceive that this very passion, unruly as it is, and in spite of the mischiefs it sometimes occasions, is also bestowed upon us for our emolument; and when properly ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... in the nunnery now became insupportable, and I determined to escape. I pleaded ill-health, and kept my bed. The physician of a neighbouring convent, who had a great reputation, was sent for against my wishes. When I heard of his arrival, I dressed to receive him for I was fearful of some ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... marriage, however, is sufficiently peculiar. When, from some unhappy incompatibility of temper, a married couple live so miserably together as to render life insupportable, it is competent for them to apply to the Danish Governor of the island for a divorce. If, after the lapse of three years from the date of the application, both are still of the same mind, and equally ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... will win applause, but simply what the facts are. And undoubtedly it is true that all considerate men in England have been compelled to contemplate the possibility of over-population, of an insupportable pauperism, of a burden of helpless numbers which shall sink the whole nation into abysses of starvation with all its horrible accompaniments. It is but a few years since Ireland escaped unexampled death by famine only by an unexampled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... life, or so I thought; and that he expressed this by silence made my heart yearn toward him for the first time since I recognized him as my brother. I tried to stammer some excuse. I was glad when the darkness fell again, for the sight of his bowed head and set features was insupportable to me. It seemed to make it easier for me to talk; for me to dilate upon the purity, the goodness which had robbed me of my heart in spite of myself. My heart! It seemed a strange word to pass between us two in reference ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boy would seem to improve after these ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... previously served as a common man in a company of which the captain was a fellow that sold cats' meat and tripe in the streets of Rome, and the lieutenant a scullion of his mother's kitchen. Since Imperial aristocracy is now become the order of the day, he is as insupportable for his pride and vanity as he, some years ago, was contemptible for his meanness. He married, in 1803, Madame Leclerc, who, between the death of a first and a wedding with a second husband—a space of twelve ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... joys under Aunt Almira's roof, life at home became insupportable. Mrs. Quimby said it was Almira herself, not the life. Clash followed clash; there came sneers, tears, squabbles, rows, and at last practical banishment. Old Quimby could stand it no longer. Almira went to live ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... New York, in the spring of 1825, in the so-called Allen House, on the eminence west of the fort, having purchased my furniture at Buffalo, and made it a pretty and attractive residence. But after the death of my son, the place became insupportable from the vivid associations which it presented with the scenes of ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... inquire into the reason why Philip II gave up his previous relations with England and sided with the Queen of Scots, we shall find it mainly in the fact that the victory of Protestant ideas in England exercised a counter-action which was insupportable for the government he had established in the Netherlands. But that he gave Mary no help in her troubles, though information was once collected as to how it might be done, may also be traceable to the disturbances ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... conjecture that the most distinctive difference of the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern is its habit of seeing the fun of things. With those dear Chilians we saw the fun of many little hardships of travel which might have been insupportable without the vision. Sometimes we surprised one another in the same hotel; sometimes it was in the street that we encountered, usually to exchange amusing misfortunes. If we could have been constantly with these fellow-hemispherists our progress through Spain would have ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... rested all its weight on the vaginal orifice of the urethra, preventing the discharge of the urine, and thus being the cause of great pain when the animal endeavoured to void it, or the faecal matter. The uterus was become of almost a black colour, swelled, softened, and exhaling an insupportable odour. Judging from this that the preservation of the uterus was impossible, and reckoning much on the good constitution of the patient, I warned the proprietor of the danger of its reduction, even supposing ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... subjects difficult, if not impossible of discussion, even when an apparent necessity of their discussion arrives in the course of life. The present reserve between Hermione and Vere rendered even the idea of any plain speaking about the revelation of Peppina quite insupportable to the mother. She could only pretend to ignore that it had ever been made. And this she did. But now that she knew of it she felt very acutely the difference it had made in Vere. That difference ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... tresses of this young girl's shapely head was a brain seething in revolt, or that the silken laces of her bodice muffled the beatings of a heart suffocated by the luxurious dulness of a life which she now told herself had become insupportable. Cicely had thought a great deal since her visit to London and Muriel's wedding, and had arrived at this conclusion—that she was suffocating, and ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... were deprived of even this guidance: for the meridian sun gives no clue to the points of the compass. They did not much feel the disadvantage; as at noon-tide the hot tropical atmosphere had become almost insupportable, and the heat, added to their fatigue from incessant toiling through thicket and swamp, made it necessary for them to take several ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... months, and hardly so much, after the accession of Francis II., a serious matter brought into violent collision the three parties whose characteristics and dispositions have just been described. The supremacy of the Guises was insupportable to the Reformers, and irksome to many lukewarm or wavering members of the Catholic nobility. An edict of the king's had revoked all the graces and alienations of domains granted by his father. The crown refused to pay its most lawful debts, and duns ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... all marshalled, And their ways all governed for ever; And he felt the sight of his soul Shrivel up like a fire-licked scroll In his insupportable terror. ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... when she is metamorphosed; her face is no longer the same; her eyes, indeed, remain closed, but the acuteness of the other senses compensates for the loss of sight. She becomes gay, noisy, and restless to an insupportable degree; she continues good-natured, but she has acquired a singular tendency to irony and bitter jests.... In this state she does not recognise her identity with her waking self. 'That good woman is not I,' she says; 'she ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... agony and the perfect peace that I have this day enjoyed! The agony in the morning was almost insupportable. It seemed then utterly impossible for me to take up so heavy a cross as to follow my Saviour in the ordinance of baptism. The very thought was dreadful, and yet I knew that it was my duty. I felt that the anger of God would be kindled against me,—that his Holy Spirit would not always strive with ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... disfigured; for although his upper parts were exhausted, and dried to a skeleton, covered only with dead skin; the lower parts were swelled up like bladders, and the shape of his feet could scarcely be perceived. Torments and pains insupportable, greater than those he had inflicted upon the christians, accompanied these visitations, and he bellowed out like a wounded bull, often endeavouring to kill himself and destroying several physicians for the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... crushed, trampled on, and cried out at each encounter. From far they stretched their arms to dip their fingers in the holy water, but getting nearer, saw its color, and the hands retired. They scarcely breathed; the heat and atmosphere were insupportable; but the preacher was worth the endurance of all these miseries; besides, his sermon was to cost the pueblo two hundred and fifty pesos. Fans, hats, and handkerchiefs agitated the air; children cried, and gave the sacristans a hard enough ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... masterpiece of wickedness, unique, we think, even among Barere's great achievements, obtained his full pardon even from that rigid conclave. The insupportable tyranny of the Committee of Public Safety had at length brought the minds of men, and even of women, into a fierce and hard temper, which defied or welcomed death. The life which might be any morning ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... since she had parted with him on the beach the evening previous. At the sound of every horse's feet she started, and her heart beat quicker. But he came not that day, and as evening approached, her disappointment became almost insupportable; she tried to frame excuses for him; he had never been to the house; perhaps he had, by a very natural mistake, gone to her uncle's house in town, instead of that where she now was, and which was rather more ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... assuredly, most painful to have to suffer the abuse of those for whom we have never done aught; but the outrages of those whom we have succoured, maintained, and favoured are insupportable injuries. ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... a strange effect upon the mind of Mark Hurdlestone. It cheated him of a part of his revenge. He had expected that the loss of Elinor would have stung Algernon to madness; that his existence would have become insupportable without the woman he loved. How great was his mortification when, neither by word nor letter, nor in conversation with his friends, did his injured brother ever revert to the subject! That Algernon did not feel the blow, could scarcely be inferred from his silence. The grief ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... Austria and the Germans detached from Germany without motive. Such a retirement must coincide with the definition of the territory of the Saar, and the assigning, pure and simple, of Upper Silesia to Germany and the end of all the insupportable controls ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... those who spoke to him, moved around him, touched him, not an instant ago? Dead! buried! lost for evermore, as far as earth's for evermore would extend. He was an old man, so lately exultant in the full strength of manhood. The utter loneliness of his life was insupportable to think about. He got up hastily, and tried to forget what never more might be, in a hurried dressing for the breakfast ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... prove the fatal effects of the climate, on which subject he thus writes to his brother: "We have undergone a severe season this summer, heat being excessive, attended with calms that rendered it insupportable; this has occasioned a great mortality, and made death quite familiar to us, it being the usual thing to attend the funeral of the friends we conversed with the day before. Though this made us a kind of mechanic philosophers, (if I may use the term,) I do not ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... have much to think of. Sometimes my thoughts are almost insupportable, I almost sink—I believe I would if it were not for Marguerite. She is my ministering angel—and I ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... and ascribed to Butler are: A Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus, or London's Confession but not repentance ... (1643), represented in vol. iv. of Somers's tracts; Mola Asinarum, on the unreasonable and insupportable burthen now pressed ... upon this groaning nation ... (1659), included in his posthumous works, which is supposed to have been written by John Prynne, though Wood ascribes it to Butler; The Acts and monuments of our late parliament ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... will have found the little inn so insupportable, that he too will join us. Listen to that sigh of poor Nina's and you'll understand what it ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... very angry with me, as Lady Townshend assures me, for not having been near her. The truth is, that when I carried George to wait on her the day that he was in town, before his going to school, her room was quite insupportable, and for that reason I could not allow ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... silent; new and conflicting ideas clashed in his brain, while very close to him in the warm, fragrant night sat this alluring, sorely tried and lonely creature, who soon found the silence insupportable. To keep talking was safe; to be long silent impossible, since they seemed to draw nearer and nearer with every moment, and soon it would either be Ringfield's hand upon that dark lock he perceived adorning ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... superstition, he yet thought it possibly "founded on a physical reality"; he regarded the moon as the true "evil eye," and bade men "not sleep uncovered beneath the smile of the moon, for her glance is poisonous, and produces insupportable itching in the eye, and not infrequently blindness." If he believed in the immortality of the soul, he did not disdain to know the vendor of poisons who was a Gypsy. If he stayed three weeks in Badajoz because he knew he should never ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Let an inhabitant of Quebec suddenly arrive in Cuba in February, and he would suffer from languor and exhaustion; after becoming acclimated to this tropical climate, let him suddenly return to Quebec in January, and the severity of the weather would be almost insupportable. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... characters are easily and perfectly known; for they seldom think it worth while to practise any disguise before those, whose good opinion they do not value, and who are obliged to submit to their most insupportable humours, because they are ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... an inch or more: if they succeed in getting the swarm even on the outside of the hive it is left; if they go in, it is well; if they go off, why hope for "better luck next time." The hive is left unsheltered in the hot sun and when there is no wind, the heat is soon insupportable, or at least very oppressive; the bees hang in loose strings, instead of a compact body, as when kept cool; they are very apt to fall, and when they do, will rush out from every side: if the queen chances to drop with them, they may "step out." Two thirds of ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... under your nose a heap of rotten onions and you will still have but a faint idea of the insupportable odour which emanates from these trees and when its fruit is opened the ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... alienated what little affection she had for him. He seems to have sought low company even after his marriage, and Lady Byron has intimated that she did not think him altogether sane. Living with him as his wife was insupportable; but though she separated from him, she did not seek ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... him was strengthened and embittered. Nevertheless his youth, aided by the astringent quality of the clear dawn, still struggled sturdily against it. And he ate six times more breakfast than his suffering and insupportable father. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not where—somehow, but I knew not how—by some beings, but I knew not by whom—a battle, a strife, an agony, was traveling through all its stages—was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable, from deepening confusion as to its local scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I (as is usual in dreams, where of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Fortune blind, but she generally makes those blind whom she embraces. Thus they are almost always beside themselves under the influence of haughtiness and waywardness; nor can there be created anything more utterly insupportable than a fortune-favored fool. There are to be seen those who previously behaved with propriety who are changed by station, power, or prosperity, and who spurn their old friendships and lavish indulgence on the new. But what is more foolish than when men have resources, ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... the more fondly, now he seemed degraded and friendless. She could not, or would not, comprehend the extent of his guilt; and had upbraided Mr. Buxton to the top of her bent for thinking of sending him away to America. There was a silence when he came in which was insupportable to him. He looked up with clouded eyes, that dared not meet ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... stone, which is found in veins in a mountain near Sanaa. None of these can be opened, and only a few of the lower ones, in consequence of which, a thorough air is rare in their houses; yet the people of rank do not seem oppressed by the heat, which is frequently almost insupportable to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... its real cause. The fact was, that Bridget was an heiress; if not on a very large scale, still an heiress, and, what was more, unalterably so in right of her mother; and the thought that a son of his competitor, Doctor Woolston, should profit by this fact, was utterly insupportable to him. Accordingly he quarrelled with Mark, the instant he was apprised of the character of his attentions, and forbade him the house, To do Mark justice, he knew nothing of Bridget's worldly possessions. That she was beautiful, and warm-hearted, and frank, and sweet-tempered, and feminine, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... here, even after the army, of England had moved towards Germany, when the die was cast, and his mind should, therefore, have been made up, he was almost insupportable. The low bows, and the still humbler expressions of the Prussian Ambassador, the Marquis da Lucchesini, were hardly noticed; and the Saxon Ambassador, Count von Buneau, was addressed in a language that no well-bred master ever uses in speaking to a menial servant. He ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... swans glide upon them, and rejoice in their beauty. But what is your surprise while, as you are flowing along so happily, you suddenly encounter a steeper slope, longer and more dangerous than the first! Then the torrent recommences its tumult. Formerly it was only a moderate noise; now it is insupportable. It descends with a crash and a roar greater than ever. It can hardly be said to have a bed, for it falls from rock to rock, and dashes down without order or reason; it alarms every one by its noise; all fear to approach it. Ah, poor torrent! what will you do? You drag away in your fury ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... at a rate which in the remoter districts seldom exceeds twenty miles an hour, is doubtless a very tiresome occupation; still it has much to relieve the tedium of what under the English system of railroad travel would be almost insupportable. The fact of easy communication being maintained between the different cars renders the passage from one car to another during motion a most feasible undertaking. One can visit the various cars and inspect their occupants, and to a man travelling to obtain ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... announce the sad news to his widowed mother; and here the power of language fails us—the shock was so sudden, so unexpected. The half of her life was so suddenly torn from the bereaved one, that the pang was well-nigh insupportable. But God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and has promised that the strength of His beloved ones shall be even as their day. So He strengthened the sensitive frame to bear a shock which ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... was watched by two Indians, who remained near him in a sitting posture. Even when their dusky faces were lost in the darkness, he could see the gleam of their piercing eyes as the fire-light flashed and faded. Once, when the pain from his fastenings became insupportable, he complained to one of the watchers and begged to be unbound for a moment, while a wild hope rushed through his heart that he might then, quick as a flash, seize Rudolph and Kitty and fly through the darkness out of the reach of his pursuers. Vain hope! no opportunity ...
— Po-No-Kah - An Indian Tale of Long Ago • Mary Mapes Dodge
... entirely to the selfish ends pursued by the members. In the hands of those members, they said, are lodged all the considerable commands of the army, all the lucrative offices in the civil administration: and while the nation is falling every day into poverty, and groans under an insupportable load of taxes, these men multiply possession on possession, and will in a little time be masters of all the wealth of the kingdom. That such persons, who fatten on the calamities of their country, will ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... from the Scythians, and we call the one-eyed race by the Scythian name Arimaspi, for in the Scythian language arima signifies one and spou the eye. The whole of the country which I have been speaking of has so hard and severe a winter, that there prevails there for eight months an altogether insupportable cold, so that if you pour water on the ground you will not make mud, but if you light a fire you will make mud. Even the sea freezes, and the whole Cimmerian Bosphorus, and the Scythians who live ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Charles, don't o'erwhelm a Man—already under insupportable Affliction. I'm sure I always intend to serve my Friends; but if my malicious Stars deny the Happiness, is the ...
— The Busie Body • Susanna Centlivre
... The insupportable heat experienced by the crew shortened their stay at Rio. Upon the 16th of October, anchor was weighed, but it was five days before a land breeze allowed the vessels to gain the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... and dined at Lady Lucy's, where you know I have not been this long time. They are plaguy Whigs, especially the sister Armstrong, the most insupportable of all women, pretending to wit, without any taste. She was running down the last Examiner,(6) the prettiest I had read, with a character of the present Ministry.—I left them at five, and came home. But I forgot to tell you, that this morning my cousin Dryden Leach, the printer, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... shut myself up in the fortress!" said she, smiling in spite of herself in the midst of her tears. "Since this insupportable man has taken possession of my drawing-room, I will remain in my own room; we will see whether he dares ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... So long as the sunny weather lasted and friends came to visit him from time to time Oscar was content to live in the Chalet Bourgeat; but when the days began to draw in and the weather became unsettled, the dreariness of a life passed in solitude, indoors, and without a library became insupportable. He was being drawn in two opposite directions. I did not know it at the time; indeed he only told me about it months later when the matter had been decided irrevocably; but this was the moment when his soul was at stake between good and evil. The question ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... had seen on the right were tame and lumpish; and while I gazed on this Alpine region, I felt a longing to explore its recesses, though accompanied with toil and danger, similar to that which a sailor feels when he wishes for the risks and animation of a battle or a gale, in exchange for the insupportable monotony of a protracted calm. I made various inquiries of my friend Mr. Jarvie respecting the names and positions of these remarkable mountains; but it was a subject on which he had no information, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the door and left, but Borgert undid one of the windows and let the pure autumn air stream in. The odor of these poverty-stricken wretches was insupportable to him. Disgusting! He took from a carved cabinet on the wall a large perfume bottle, and sprinkled a good portion of its contents upon the costly rugs and the upholstery of his furniture. Then he rang the bell ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... hours of great depression also, when life was nothing but a burden and she would weep without knowing why. On these occasions Nick was invaluable. He had a wonderful knack of banishing those tears, and in his cheery presence the burden was never insupportable. ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... my knees I struggled, and the pain on the top of my skull grew all but insupportable. It was coming back to me now; how Nayland Smith and I had started for the hotel to warn Graham Guthrie; how, as we passed up the steps from the Embankment and into Essex Street, we saw the big motor standing before ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Hammond had at once taken precautions, but implored Parliament at the same time either to remove the King to some other place or else to discharge himself from an office the burden of which he found insupportable. With this last request Parliament did not comply, and Hammond had to continue in his painful trust, obeying the instructions sent him. His Majesty was not to be allowed any longer to ride about the island, or to receive unauthorized visitors; ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... solitude of the mansion almost insupportable, and he paced the echoing floors from morning till night, in all the agony of woe and desolation, vainly imploring Heaven for relief. It came to him first in the guise of poetic inspiration. He wrote with a wonderful ease and power. Page after page came from his prolific ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... was over, the Thorpes and Allens eagerly joined each other; and after staying long enough in the pump-room to discover that the crowd was insupportable, and that there was not a genteel face to be seen, which everybody discovers every Sunday throughout the season, they hastened away to the Crescent, to breathe the fresh air of better company. Here Catherine and Isabella, arm in arm, again tasted the sweets of friendship in an unreserved ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... regrette pas du tout, du tout!' she cried with a flood of words. 'Madame—ah! je me jetterais au leu pour madame—une femme si charmante, si adorable! Mais un homme comme monsieur—maussade, boudeur, impassible! Ah, non!—de ma vie! J'en avais par-dessus la tete, de monsieur! Ah! vrai! Est-ce insupportable, tout de meme, qu'il existe des types comme ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... the mean time a disorder and a terror fell again upon those that were fortifying their camp at the top of the hill, upon their seeing those beneath them running away; insomuch that the whole legion was dispersed while they thought that the sallies of the Jews upon them were plainly insupportable, and that Titus was himself put to flight, because they took it for granted that, if he had stayed, the rest would never have fled for it. Thus were they encompassed on every side by a kind of panic fear, and some dispersed themselves ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... pregnant in Lorna's half bitter reply checked Lane's further questioning. He edged closer to the stove, feeling a little cold. A shadow drifted across the warmth and glow of his mind. At home now he was to be confronted with a monstrous and insupportable truth—the craven cowardice of the man who had been eligible to service in army or navy, and who had evaded it. In camp and trench and dug-out he had heard of the army of slackers. And of all the vile and stark profanity which the war gave birth to on the lips of ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... next movements. In a stationary position, the damp coldness of the atmosphere was almost insupportable, but he attained a great advantage by his present stillness: he could listen undisturbed by the noises made by the bricks which crumbled from ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the certain results of enlightened competition. It could only be true at the expense of the old proverb, that necessity is the mother of invention; for do we not every day see men submitting idly and languidly to evils which can just be borne? whereas, if these were a little greater, and therefore insupportable, they would at once be remedied. An impulse ab extra seems in a vast number of instances to be necessary, to promote the good of both nations and individuals. Now, whether this shall come in the ordinary course of things, and be recognised as necessity, or from an enlightened ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... and her brother scuffling with the spider men, tearing at the tentacle arms that encircled them and drew them relentlessly into the basket-weave cage. There was a tremendous thump and the warping of the very universe about them all. Bert Redmond, his body racked by insupportable tortures, was hurled into the black abyss ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... character, strength of will and a decided sense of right and wrong, which make intercourse difficult. A sensitive conscience is no addition to the amenities of the dinner-table. But when a man is willing to counter a deadly sin with a shrug of the shoulders, when between white and black he can discover no insupportable contrast, the probabilities are that he will at least humour your whims and respect your prejudices. And so it is that the Andalusians make very agreeable acquaintance. They are free and amiable in their conversation, ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... hands of a Duchesse de Chaulieu. None but an old woman of sixty could put up with the little ailments of which, they say, the great poet is always complaining,—a habit in Louis XIV. that became a perfectly insupportable annoyance. It is true the duchess does not suffer from it as much as a wife, who would have ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... to me of the contrary; but be it our sex, or the man's sex, a secret of moment should always have a confidant, a bosom friend, to whom we may communicate the joy of it, or the grief of it, be it which it will, or it will be a double weight upon the spirits, and perhaps become even insupportable in itself; and this I appeal to all human ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... He protested the means available were insufficient for "sustaining the necessary extent of naval force, if your ships are to be torn to pieces by an eternal conflict with the elements during the tempestuous months of winter."[19] Melville was craving for a decisive action to end the insupportable strain. "Allow me to remind you," he added, "that the occasions when we have been able to bring our enemy to battle and our fleets to victory have generally been when we were at a distance from the blockading station." In the end, as we know, Cornwallis had his ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... to death; for we will no longer suffer law and peace to be disturbed. So our forefathers went to work when they drowned five kings in a morass at the Mula-thing, and they were filled with the same insupportable pride thou hast shown towards us. Now tell us, in all haste, what resolution thou wilt take." Then the whole public approved, with clash of arms and shouts, the ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... torture! How he racks and tears me! Death! Shall I own my shame or wittingly let him go and whore my wife? No, that's insupportable. ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... his lips shall he slay the wicked." (Is. xi. 4; Luke xix. 27.) "His countenance as the sun shining in his strength," disclosed to the beloved disciple such splendor as to overwhelm him. The like display of divine majesty was insupportable to Saul of Tarsus when on his way to Damascus. (Acts xxvi. 13.) To the workers of iniquity, "our God is a consuming fire." (Heb. xii. 29.) It is a certain truth,—"The vengeance of the gospel is weighter than the vengeance of the law." (Heb. x. 28, ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... wrapper of orange and purple. In Edinburgh the old town and the new alike thrilled and hummed with the noise of a contested election. There were processions, hustings, battles royal everywhere, the night made hideous, the day insupportable. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... the man whose name instantly occurs to any one involved, or likely to be involved, in litigation—such an one must be instantly secured—at all events, taken from the enemy—at any cost. The pressure upon such a counsel's time and energies then becomes really enormous, and all but insupportable. As it is of the last importance either to secure his splendid services, or deprive the enemy of them, such a counsel—and such, it need hardly be said, was Sir William Follett—is continually made the subject of mere speculation by clients who are content to take the chance of obtaining ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... were engaged in shampooing the royal personages.... Conversation, it may readily be imagined, was not well maintained under these trying circumstances, and had it not been for some excellent watermelons which were handed to us, the tedium of the interview would have been insupportable." ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... have lost sons, husbands, and fathers, must needs believe that it was for a just and holy cause, and statesmen are forced to continue to deceive themselves and others. For if this were to cease, life would be insupportable to themselves and to those whom they govern. How unfortunate is Man; he is the prey of his own ideas, has given up everything to them, and finds that each day he must continue to give more, lest the gulf open under his feet and he ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... "busy" book-collectors who intrust the selection of their books to secretaries or librarians, and thus sacrifice the keenest enjoyment of this captivating pursuit. Of all absurdities, this seems the most insupportable. It would be far more sensible to have your secretary select your friends, because if you should happen not to like these, you could abandon them without ceremony or expense. Why not also attend the opera and your various social functions by proxy, through your secretary? If ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... should come back to seek for more—a vague awe and horror surrounded the idea of his slinking in again with stealthy tread, and turning his face toward the empty bed, while she shrank down close at his feet to avoid his touch, which was almost insupportable. She sat and listened. Hark! A footstep on the stairs, and now the door was slowly opening. It was but imagination, yet imagination had all the terrors of reality; nay, it was worse, for the reality would have come ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... expectancy, waiting with a dread that was almost insupportable for the music that Piers was about to make. They were close to the open French window of the music-room, but there was no light within. Piers was evidently sitting there silent in the darkness. Her pulses were beating violently. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... home at Grandma Rugg's became insupportable to Arch. He could not remain there. The old woman was crosser than ever, and, though he gave her every penny of his earnings, she was ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... native of Brazil. You are not ignorant of the frightful slavery under which my country groans. This continually becomes more insupportable since the epoch of your glorious independence, for the cruel Portuguese omit nothing which can render our condition more wretched, from an apprehension that we may follow your example. The conviction, that these usurpers against the laws of nature and humanity only meditate new oppressions, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... infected with you have great fortune. The fardel of all this ware that is in him you shall commonly see carried upon the back of these two beasts that live within him, Ignorance and Imperiousness, and they may well serve to carry other vices, for of themselves they are insupportable. His Ignorance acquits him of all science, human or divine, and of all language but his mother's; holding nothing pure, holy, or sincere but the senseless recollections of his own crazed brain, the zealous fumes of his inflamed spirit, and the endless labours of his eternal tongue, the ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... of being in a house of ground glass, and their newness made them look clean, comfortable, and wholesome. Not so the more substantial bone huts, which, from their extreme closeness and accumulated filth, emitted an almost insupportable stench, to which an abundant supply of raw and half-putrid walrus' flesh in no small degree contributed. The passages to these are so low as to make it necessary to crawl on the hands and knees to enter them; and ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... less affected by country people than some others. I spent yesterday at Yallahs, received five candidates, on examination, for baptism, preached in the morning, and administered the Lord's supper to about a hundred members in the afternoon. The congregation was such as to make the heat almost insupportable. There were nearly as many outside the house as within, and many more would come, but they cannot hear without exposure to the sun all the time. This however will, I hope, be remedied in a few months, as we have now ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
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