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More "Torment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... work of God, to alter this creation. [For it is manifest, and many have confessed that no good, honest, chaste life, no Christian, sincere, upright conduct has resulted (from the attempt), but a horrible, fearful unrest and torment of conscience has been felt by many until the end.] Therefore, those who are not fit to lead a single life ought to contract matrimony. For no man's law, no vow, can annul the commandment and ordinance of God. For these reasons ...
— The Confession of Faith • Various
... of a lion with the face turned half round, and the third of a dog who looks straight before him; to signify that things of the past afflict by means of thoughts, but not so much as things of the present which actually torment, while the future ever promises something better; therefore behold the wolf that howls, the lion that roars and the dog ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... him, the constant scared uncertainty of what he might say, what she might feel, what they both might do, from one moment to the next . . . she could forget, in those fiery and potent draughts, everything, all this that was so hard and painful and that she could not understand and that was such a torment to try to understand. Everything would be swept ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... been the most ardent and most deep. A disposition, on his own side, to form strong attachments, and a yearning desire after affection in return, were the feeling and the want that formed the dream and torment of his existence. We have seen with what passionate enthusiasm he threw himself into his boyish friendships. The all-absorbing and unsuccessful love that followed was, if I may so say, the agony, without being the death, of this unsated desire, which lived on through his life, and filled his poetry ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... mounted to the assault, covering themselves as well as they could with their shields. In vain, however, did they mount. The defenders poured down showers of boiling pitch and oil, which penetrated the crevices of their armour, and caused intolerable torment. Great stones were toppled over from the battlements upon them; and sometimes the ladders, seized by the poles with hooks, were cast backwards, with all upon them, on the throng below. For half-an-hour, encouraged ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... fairies' protection being gone, the spring lost much of its freshness and coldness, and more than two-thirds of its volume, and the banished serpents and stinging insects returned, and multiplied, and became a torment and have ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... the ropes which were fastened round his waist. He tottered rather than walked, and was almost unrecognisable from the effects of his sufferings during the night;—he was colourless, haggard, his face swollen and even bleeding, and his merciless persecutors continued to torment him each moment more and more. They had gathered together a large body of the dregs of the people, in order to make his present disgraceful entrance into the city a parody on his triumphal entrance on Palm Sunday. They mocked, and with derisive gestures called ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... easily catched—I thank him—I want but to be sure, I should heartily torment him by banishing him, and then consider whether he should depart this ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a pleasant exercise-ground for a jealous man who does not dance. No "bolgia" of the hell invented by the sombre imagination of the great poet could have surpassed, in torment, the Circolo ball-room on that last Carnival night to ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... don't help worth a farthing. I cannot get rid of him now. Ever since he came to me last summer, on one accursed day, he has been my constant visitor, and he cannot be driven away, Understand this, father, and do not wonder any longer at my behaviour—and do not torment me." ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... from my palaces in utter pain, Seeing the world as dust and vanity, A desert of despair, a raging sea Of torment.... ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... "It was long enough for me, and I was out in the open and stirring. It must have been a slice of torment for you here alone all day, not even knowing if I'd ever get back or have any ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... When he charged her with it there's nothing so sweet and gentle on earth as that girl! What had she done? Nothing at all, but torment a poor fellow until his nerves and will were wrecked. How could she ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... long, deep ravine, and the smoke-streaked clouds of fire, trailing like a yellow mist over them, with a fierce white blast shooting up here and there when the lid of an oven was raised, as though to add fresh temperature to some particular male-factor in some particular chamber of torment. Humanity about was joyous, however. Laughter and banter and song came from the cabins that lined the big ravine and the little ravines opening into it. A banjo tinkled at the entrance of "Possum Trot," sacred to the darkies. ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... escape of their booty, but now, hymning with tranquil dignity the high and terrible office they had among mortals, they claim the head of Orestes, as forfeited to them, and devote it with mysterious charms to endless torment. At the intercession of the suppliant, Pallas, the warrior-virgin, appears in a chariot drawn by four horses. She inquires the cause of his invocation, and listens with calm dignity to the mutual complaints of Orestes and his adversaries, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... My friend, I am only grieved that you of all others should have been so deceived. I have seen you with Anna, and I have not known whether to be glad or sorry. I have been in torment all the while to know whether it was to Anna or to Annabel that you were making love so charmingly. Nigel, do you know that ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... experience is not able to efface it. Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable. But the time will surely come when desire will no longer be our torment and no man shall be wretched but by his ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... will entrap a young Christian when there is illness in the home, and under pressure he will fly to magic incantations and heathen practices, in order to get deliverance from the malignant spirit which he still believes has power to torment him. Many a convert has fallen on the occasion of a funeral. It takes more faith than a Westerner can realise, to defy the legions of gwei which at that time threaten your home and its inhabitants with numberless ills; and strength of mind is required ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... slaked his raging thirst and satiated the gnawing appetite of the obese, than which there is no crueller torment to an inert liver and ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... wife is in torment, it is as well for him to nod his head and let her believe that she does not ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... exception among her countrywomen for ability and acumen: an extreme self-satisfaction and vanity are revealed in the recital of her most disreputable tricks. She passes for a white blackbird, a woman of intellect caught in the harem; and it needs but little ingenuity to guess the torment she must have been to her protectors—first to the excellent Dr. Millingen, with whom she formed a love-match, and whom she abuses—and then to her second husband, Kibrizli, ambassador in 1848 to the court of England, upon whom she attempted to palm off ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... certain, that earnest desire has been the cause of the greatest events; and this ought to instruct us that the world stands in need of a great many instincts, which, examined according to the ideas of our reason, are ridiculous and absurd. For there is nothing so opposite to reason as to torment ourselves in this life, that we may be praised after we are dead, since neither philosophy, nor experience, nor faith, nor any thing whatsover, makes it appear, that the praises given us after death can do us any good. It would ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... idiotic terror, and he would have caught a staring and meaningless look in the glassy eyes which were naturally so bright and blue. But he really did not know—being merely an overgrown stupid fellow—the mischief he was doing, and the absolute horrible torment that ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... furious, and hitting Charlie Black he felt would relieve his feeling almost as much as a fight with Tim Roon. The two bad boys never lost an opportunity to torment him or Meg, and Bobby felt that here was a heaven-sent opportunity to even up ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... illuminating passage on the importance of the effectiveness of reasoning things out: "I have a student's lamp, of which the flame vibrates most unpleasantly unless the collar which bears the chimney be raised about a sixteenth of an inch. I learned the remedy after much torment by accident, and now always keep the collar up with a small wedge. But my procedure is a mere association of two totals, diseased object and remedy. One learned in pneumatics could have named the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... withered, it shook beneath the gem; He took the vivid ruby, the ransom of a land, And tied it firmly, tightly, within his garment's hem; And then he shuffled forward, but like a thorn within His soul he bore the torment of bitterness ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one's soul—than this kind of prolonged hunger. Sad, but true. And these ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Sidonia herself never appeared in the nuns' choir. She gave Dorothea many excellent and convincing reasons for her absence. (But in my opinion, it was caused by hate and abhorrence of the sacrament and the holy Word of God; for such are a torment and a torture to the children of the devil, even as the works of the devil are an abomination to ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... said he; "fiend! devil! you were born to torment me. There is no hotter hell than thine! Do thy work. I must bear all,"—and Jaspar felt that he was sold to the ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... repressed a shiver when the lean, hard fingers closed suddenly upon his own. A tremor ran through them, and then the pressure increased, until Seaforth was glad that it grew painful. He dare not glance at his comrade, he would not look at Tom, and sat very still in torment for a space, while he felt that Alton's arms had grown rigid by the cruel ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... recesses of her suspicious and silent nature. She would never consent to explain things; she herself knew not what was the matter with her; but she felt ill whenever the doctor drew too near to her mother; and would press her hands violently to her bosom. Her torment seemed to sear her very heart, and furious passion choked her and made her cheeks turn pale. Nor could she place any restraint on herself; she imagined every one unjust, grew stiff and haughty, and deigned no reply when she ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... know no greater torment, among those minor ones which are the worst, than the intelligent conversation—full of suggestion and fine analysis, perhaps, and descriptions of other places—which reveals to us that the kindly speaker is indeed occupying the same ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... sake. I have no love for learned discourses. I like to take life easy, and it is too much trouble to be intellectual. Such ambition does not trouble my head, and I am perfectly satisfied, mother, with being stupid. I prefer to have only a common way of talking, and not to torment myself to ...
— The Learned Women • Moliere (Poquelin)
... front. The upward reaching fingers of coppice and brush had their occupants, fragments of commands under cover, bands of sharpshooters. And everywhere over the open, raked by the guns, were dead and dying men. They lay thickly. Now and again the noise of the torment of the wounded made itself heard—a most doleful and ghostly sound coming up like a wail from the Inferno. There were, too, many dead or dying horses. Others, still unhurt, galloped from end to end of the field of death. In the wheat-field there were several ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the torment of their lives, for some of the devils said to haunt Vailima seemed to have entered into them, and no sty could be made strong enough ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... Solar Walk or Milky Way; Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n, Behind the cloud-topt hill an humbler heav'n; Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd, Some happier island in the wat'ry waste; Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To BE, contents his natural desire, He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire: But thinks admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... destroyest not only thyself but thy father. The king will shed not only thy blood but mine." His wife tried to console him, saying: "Do not torment thyself. With the sale of my jewels I will obtain 10,000 gold pieces, and with this sum you will buy ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... growing people will need such a man as you to lead them, and you will lead them more grandly than others who have had an easier school. You have learned the first principles of true education—it is, the habit that can not do wrong without feeling the flames of torment within. Every sacrifice that you have made to your conscience has given you power. That power is a godlike thing. You will see all one day, as I ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... man. The Sun was so to move as to affect the earth alternately with a cold and heat almost unbearable; to the Moon were assigned her motions; the other planets were to join in various ways, often "unbenign." The winds were assigned their stations to torment the earth and sea, and the thunder was set to strike terror to the heart of man. The poles of the earth were pushed aslant, and soon the effects of the changes were felt in ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... you real talent,—real feeling for art? Then study music;—do something worthy of the art,—and dedicate your whole soul to the beloved saint. If without this you have a fancy for quavers and demi-semi-quavers, practise for yourself and by yourself, and torment not therewith the Capellmeister ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Edmonstone. 'You have begged every one's pardon, and it had better be forgotten as fast as possible. They have made more fuss already than it is worth. Don't torment yourself about it any more; for, if you have made a mistake, it is on the right side; and on the first opportunity, I'll go and call on Mrs. Deane, and see if she ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... own chamber, and held long and anxious self-communion. The course of her thoughts may be gathered from the terrible revelations made by Mother Demdike to Alizon. A prey to the most agonising emotions, it may be questioned if she could have endured greater torment if her heart had been consumed by living fire, as in the punishment assigned to the damned in the fabled halls of Eblis. For the first time remorse assailed her, and she felt compunction for the evil she had committed. The ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... torment; but, truth to tell, they did not often attack him, for Soeren had sunk into apathy. That was the Sheriff's view of his case. "My clerk was quite a clever fellow in his time," he used to say. "But, you know, his hasty marriage, his large family, and all ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... evening already alluded to by Hellyer the coastguardsman, for running the risk; while, as for Rover, he fairly revelled in the water, paddling round and round Bob and Dick, thereby executing a series of concentric circles never dreamt of by the Egyptian mathematician whose problems have been the torment of the boys ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... another, and several joined in with their remarks.—'Nae muckle o' a deevil was there to gang oot! He was aye an unco hairmless cratur!'—'And that saft-hertit til a' leevin thing!'—'He was that! I saw him ance face a score o' laddies to proteck a poddick they war puttin to torment, whan, the Lord kens, he had need o' a' his wits to tak care o' himsel!'—'Aye, jist like him!'—'Weel, the Lord taks care o' him, for he's ane o' ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... it till you have another, in order that you may have something to tell you how well I love you." As she sent it from her she did not know how much of solace there was even in the writing of a letter to him she loved, nor had she as yet felt how great was the torment of remaining without palpable ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... good swords have won. Still, like a spreading ulcer, which leech-craft may not cure, Let your foul usance eat away the substance of the poor. Still let your haggard debtors bear all their fathers bore; Still let your dens of torment be noisome as of yore; No fire when Tiber freezes; no air in dog-star heat; And store of rods for free-born backs, and holes for free-born feet. Heap heavier still the fetters; bar closer still the grate; Patient as sheep we yield us ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... please all who look at them; and that when they triumph in their beauty, they experience a joy to which their lovers very little contribute. He argues further, that if one is not beloved, it is a yet greater torment to see one's mistress at an assembly; that the more she is admired by the public, the more unhappy one is not to be beloved, and that the lover is in continual fear lest her beauty should raise a more successful passion ...
— The Princess of Cleves • Madame de La Fayette
... Castlemaine's, and supped, every day Lady Castlemaine do speak of going to lie in at Hampton Court Let me blood, about sixteen ounces, I being exceedingly full Lust and wicked lives of the nuns heretofore in England Only wind do now and then torment me . . . extremely See her look dejectedly and slighted by people already She also washed my feet in a bath of herbs, and so to bed Sir W. Pen did it like a base raskall, and so I shall remember Slight answer, at which ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Diary of Samuel Pepys • David Widger
... vacuum. Death is no riddle, compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the "Book of Martyrs." The "dry-pan and the gradual fire" were the images that frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Meanwhile the torment of the two desert robbers had ended. And Dismas was at last set free from Barabbas, to whom a demoniacal fate had chained him his whole life long. Jesus had come between them, and had divided the penitent man from the impenitent. ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... that she has something on her mind," continued Sir Alexander. "Upon my delicately hinting this opinion to Lady Hartledon, she denied it with a vehemence which caused me to suspect that I was correct. Does your lordship know of anything likely to—to torment her?" ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... disobedience of God's Word or a willful failure to live by its requirements. It is a serious thing to disobey God's law because it involves the destiny or end of our soul. It means living in either eternal torment or eternal bliss. To commit sin is a terrible thing and a very serious thing. That is the reason we need to search the Scriptures to find out how to live pleasing to the Lord in this world. We can't do this ...
— The Key To Peace • A. Marie Miles
... the occasional observations of Jenny Dennison. This true-bred serving-damsel was, in her own person, a complete country coquette, and when she had no opportunity of teasing her own lovers, used to take some occasional opportunity to torment her young lady's. This arose from no ill-will to Henry Morton, who, both on her mistress's account and his own handsome form and countenance, stood high in her esteem. But then Lord Evandale was also handsome; he was ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... desperate measures, which I would willingly avoid; but if nothing else will keep them quiet, the grave must. Ay, the grave," he repeated in a hollow voice; "it is not my fault if I am compelled to send them thither. Fools to torment me thus!" ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... as I in torment lay 'Mid the souls plagued by heavenly power, An angel touch my arm, and say: 35 Go hence, and cool ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... recognition—of the law of universal unity and coherence. The separation which exists between individuals, between worlds, between the different poles of the universe and of life, the mental and physical fantasy called space, is a nightmare of the human imagination. That nightmares exist, and exist only to torment, every child knows; and what we need is the power of discrimination between the phantasmagoria of the brain, which concern ourselves only, and the phantasmagoria of daily life, in which others also are concerned. This ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... such sights to realise the enormity of human agony, grasp the torment that a stupid bit of flying steel can inflict upon a splendid human frame—so well, so happy, so full of hope but a second since. Oh, the pity of ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... with this letter on her lap. Perhaps it was true what the priest said. And all her religious doubts began to torment her conscience. And in her cowardly hesitation, which drives to church the doubting, the sorrowful, she went furtively one evening at twilight to the parsonage, and kneeling at the feet of the thin abbe, ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... that they had been alternately shivering and burning, their wounds having received no attention, they had seen no one, not a living soul. They were tortured by a consuming thirst, and the beating of the rain against the window-panes added to their torment, but they could not move hand or foot. Hence, when they heard Silvine approaching, the first word that escaped their lips was: "Drink! Give us to drink!" that longing, pathetic cry, with which the wounded always pursue the by-passer whenever the sound of footsteps arouses them from their ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... the darling and torment of father and mother. She intrigued with each secretly; and bestowed her fondness and withdrew it, plied them with tears, smiles, kisses, cajolements;—when the mother was angry, as happened often, flew to the father, and sheltering ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... did not forget what he had seen; the memory of it was a constant torment and a misery to him. And now the chance had come, and he hit "that ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... for revenge. But as the fulfilment of every wish proves to be more or less a delusion, so is also the wish for revenge. The expected enjoyment is mostly embittered by pity; nay, gratified revenge will often lacerate the heart and torment the mind, for the motive which prompts the feeling of it is no longer active, and what is left is the ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... new heir, a bridegroom, or some godfather left the church, saying, "Here, this is for all of you; don't torment any of my party," Toupillier, appointed by the beadle to receive these alms, pocketed three-fourths, and distributed only the remaining quarter among his henchmen, whose tribute amounted to a sou a day. Money and wine were his ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... stair-carpet, with one or two pieces of sheet music; but true gratitude does not despise even the humblest means of expression. The succeeding day he came as before; but after being relieved of his torment, he found nothing prepared for him. But when he took to thoughtfully licking one of the little girl's hands, "that answered not with a caress," the mother thought better of it, and drove in a ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... my linen, I will only say that the washerwomen have struck work, as they have no fuel. I believe my shirt was once white, but I am not sure. I invested a few weeks ago in a pair of cheap boots. They are my torment. They have split in various places, and I wear a pair of gaiters—purple, like those of a respectable ecclesiastic, to cover the rents. I bought them on the Boulevard, and at the same stall I bought a bright blue handkerchief which ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... morning he had resolved that, let the torment of the day be what it might, he would bear it,—unless by chance he might be turned out of the house. But no tragedy such as that came to relieve him. Aunt Polly gave him his tea at breakfast with a sternly forbidding look,—and Julia was ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... image, often a complication of images. He is never afraid of the colloquial, never afraid of slang even, and he often weaves lovely patterns with obsolete or technical words. These lines, in which Saltus paid tribute to Gautier, he might, with equal justice, have applied to himself: "No one could torment a fancy more delicately than he; he had the gift of adjective; he scented a new one afar like a truffle; and from the Morgue of the dictionary he dragged forgotten beauties. He dowered the language of his day with every tint of dawn and every ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... soul, and reading all the guilt and crime that's written there. O, Louise! was it not enough to drive me, by your unrelenting scorn and bitterness, to commit the act which has brought me here, without seeking to torment your victim by penetrating his dungeon to mock at the misfortune ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... hurried mouthfuls and we were on the tramp again. Our sleepless night, and the strong emotions that had kept us awake, made us feel tired and listless, but the bare idea of being exposed to the same torment and fear another time, gave us courage and strength to press on as far as possible in search of some nocturnal refuge, more secure from the four-footed inhabitants of the land, before sunset should have enticed them ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... are there even in Protestant churches who can give a reason for their belief? If the heathen worship degrades mankind because it is a superstition, with fear for its motive, how large a part of Christian preaching consists also of an appeal to terror! Is not the fear of everlasting torment in hell the motive power of much which is called Christianity? Consider Catholics eating their God: is that the worship of the Father in spirit and truth? Think of the religious wars, of the religious persecutions: ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of Frank Osbaldistone, who carried the portmanteau. Osbaldistone says, concerning him, "Of all the propensities which teach mankind to torment themselves, that of causeless fear is the most irritating, busy, painful, pitiable."—Sir W. Scott, Rob Roy ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... reply will give satisfaction or displeasure remains yet to be ascertained. Thackeray's feelings are not such as can be gauged by ordinary calculation: variable weather is what I should ever expect from that quarter, yet in correspondence as in verbal intercourse, this would torment me.—Yours faithfully, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... must be an unpardonable sin, and I have committed it. Some say that all wrong-doers may get right— I wonder if there is a chance for me, a single chance? No, no, I am sure there is none—none whatever. But, oh, if only I could see my boy alive again! I would be willing to suffer any torment for that, but better still—if only he might be immortal—if only he could live forever in happiness on some other plane, as good people believe, I'd ask nothing for my part—absolutely nothing! I brought him into the world. I am responsible ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... I doomed by the trick of some police spy to pass what bade fair to be the remainder of a life that had been so bright and full of fair promise in hopeless exile, torment, and degradation—and all because I protested against injustice and made myself ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... the pleasant sailing with wind and tide, and the many agreeable objects with which I was constantly entertained during the whole way, were all suppressed and overcome by the single consideration of my wife's pain, which continued incessantly to torment her." The second despatch of a messenger, in great haste to bring the best reputed operator in Gravesend recalls Murphy's words: "Of sickness and poverty he was singularly patient and under pressure of those evils he could quietly read Cicero de Consolatione; but if either of them ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... withstood, And, conquered, mourned their hardihood. Thou hast encountered, face to face, King Yama(912) with his murdering mace. Fierce as the wild tempestuous sea, What terror had his wrath for thee, Though death in every threatening form, And woe and torment, urged the storm? Thine arm a glorious victory won O'er the dread king who pities none; And the three worlds, from terror freed, In joyful wonder praised thy deed. The tribe of Warriors, strong and dread As Indra's self, o'er earth had spread; As giant trees that towering stand In mountain glens, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... them, Rev. Nathaniel Ward, was inspired to write an address to her, in which he declares his wonder at her success as a poet, and playfully foretells the consequences if women are permitted to intrude farther into the domain of man. The closing lines express so well the conflicting emotions which torment the minds of the opponents of the woman suffrage movement, that I venture to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... of pouring boiling pitch and oil on their heads. At length, Nicote was taken and carried to the king of Ova, who ordered him to be impaled on an eminence in view of the fort, where he lived two days in torment. His wife, Donna Luisa de Saldanna, was kept three days in the river to be purified, as the king designed her for himself; but when brought before him, she upbraided him for his cruelty, and he ordered ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... the way of man with woman since the world began, and Sypher knew it by his man's instinct. It was a temptation such as he had never dreamed was in the world. He passed through a flaming, blazing torment of battle. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... up, not that he wished to save the "biped" any anguish, but the wise man vomits comfortably when he can, the necessity being bad enough without additional torment. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... last glimpse,—the two girls being in tears,—in that dreary half-hour after all was arranged, and the flocking-in of the neighbors was waited for, Benjamin, as calm as the dead face below him, was asking himself if the poor gentleman, his father, had not gone away to a place of torment. He feared it; nay, was he not bound to believe it by the whole force of his education? and his heart, in that hour, made only a feeble revolt against the belief. In the very presence of the grim messenger of the Eternal, who had come to seal the books and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... She thought it was a Will-o'- the-wisp. What could he be after? Was he looking for her? She dared not run, lest he should see and pounce upon her. The light came nearer, and grew brighter and larger. Plainly, the little fiend was looking for her—he would torment her. After many twistings and turnings among the pools, it came straight towards her, and she would have shrieked, but ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... habitudes. The blood of wholesome kindred is infected. Their tables and beds are surrounded with snares. All the means given by Providence to make life safe and comfortable are perverted into instruments of terror and torment. This species of universal subserviency, that makes the very servant who waits behind your chair the arbiter of your life and fortune, has such a tendency to degrade and abase mankind, and to deprive them of that assured and liberal ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... might at last die a death more cruel than that of the meanest beggar in the kingdom? And it was not enough that I should be condemned to so horrible a fate; not enough that before my own end I should behold my father and mother perish in intolerable torment, when I would have willingly given my own life twenty times over to save them; all this was not enough, but before my own death I must hear words of love such as I had never before dreamed of. It was necessary that he should break my heart with his words; that my bitter lot should be rendered ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... long afternoon the thing continued to worry him; added to the torment he was suffering from the burning letter in his vest-pocket, it was well-nigh unendurable. He had to work vehemently to make the time pass. Toward six o'clock, he began to realise that he had been shaping the time toward ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Prometheus Filched fire from the altars of the gods To warm the world, Incurring Jove's dread wrath And endless torment. ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... and crushing materialism, when He determined upon sending among men, Anselm, the saint; Angelo, the tone artist; Zophiel, the poet; and Jemschid, the painter. The spirits murmured not, although they knew they were to relinquish their heaven life for that torment of perpetual struggle which the forbidden knowledge of Good and Evil has entailed upon all ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... letters to seal, saying, "It is not worth keeping." She afterwards much regretted the loss of this enigmatical memorial. After having burnt the paper, her Majesty said to me, "That man is born to be my torment; he has always some mad scheme in his head; remember, the first time you see him, to tell him that I do not like diamonds now, and that I will buy no more so long as I live; that if I had any money to spare I would rather add to my ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... are a means of setting a mark on a family, and placing it at issue with a considerable portion of the neighbourhood! What a pernicious engine for the gratification of pride, scandal, envy, and malice! What an inquisition of the few bad by which to torment the many good! What a dagger in the hands of tolerated assassins! In short, what a perversion of reason, what a disease in the very bosom of society, what a lurking demon stationed at the threshold of every happy family, to blast and ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... without acquainting you with the fact, although I ought not so to do. The pity of it all is that, while you are depriving yourself of everything, I keep solacing myself with various amenities— which is why I am telling you this, that the pangs of conscience may not torment me. Frankly, I confess that I am in desperate straits—in such straits as I have never yet known. My landlady flouts me, and I enjoy the respect of noone; my arrears and debts are terrible; and in the office, though ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Puritan ministers, whose hair was cut short. For if a man with long hair had gone into the pulpit to preach, I would have gone out of the Church again, though he might preach better than the other." All through this time visions of hell and torment, and devils and damnation troubled him; now and then there were "elevations in my mind, but these were few and far between; a while after all was lost again." He soon consoled himself for his matrimonial disappointment; he married and had three daughters, then ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... by her dark auburn hair, An oil-jug he plung'd her within. Seven days, seven nights, with the shrieks of despair Did Ellen in torment convulse the dim air, All cover'd with ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... queen-mother, and a handsome Italian, with whom she was smitten because he was in the May of his age, nobly dressed, a graceful mover, brave in mien, and was all that a lover should be to bestow a heart full of love upon an honest married woman too tightly squeezed by the bonds of matrimony, which torment her, and always excite her to unharness herself from the conjugal yoke. And you can imagine that the young gentleman grew to admire Madame, whose silent love spoke secretly to him, without either the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... the children came home yesterday, they said something about your having told them some story of old times here; of a ghost, or some such thing. I never heard of anything of the sort. Do you—do you remember what it was? I ought not to torment you!" she added, remorsefully; for Mrs. Peyton put her hand to her head, and her brow contracted slightly, as ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... concerned, although keenly conscious of his misfortune and of his dependence upon his daughter. Thereupon, all the evil that lay dormant in the depths of his nature was aroused and let loose. His selfishness amounted to ferocity. Under the torment of his suffering and his weakness, he became a sort of malevolent madman. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil devoted her days and her nights to the invalid, who seemed to hate her for her attentions, to be humiliated by her care as if it implied generosity and forgiveness, to suffer ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... nearly everything save that we were very merry. Almost the only thing that remains with me as a permanent impression was the fact that Theobald one day beat his nurse and teased her, and when she said she should go away cried out, "You shan't go away—I'll keep you on purpose to torment you." ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... indicated their fate were singularly multiplied. "To destroy, to kill, to cause to perish." And while the murder of a nation was thus made a legal execution, the mode was left to the option of the executioners; and every torment that malignity could devise might be inflicted, while all were stimulated by the promise of the plunder of their victims—"and to take the spoil of ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... or Chet, as it was usually styled, was accustomed to be strangled the greater part of the morning by the baby. Most of the afternoon it was worried by Zackey, and, during the intervals of torment, it experienced an unusually large measure of the vicissitudes incident to kitten life—such as being kicked out of the way by Maggot senior, or thrown or terrified out of the way by Mrs Maggot, or dashed at by stray dogs, or yelled at by passing boys. The only sunshine ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... being sent by the Great Spirit from the far-off happy land to which my fathers have gone, to smooth my path of pain, and lead me to those blessed fields of sunbeams and flowers where the cruelty of the enemies of my people will no more have power to torment me?" ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... to be out in the world and doing, for our ill-fated First Revolt, that had miscarried in the Chicago Commune, was ripening fast. Yet he possessed his soul with patience, and during this time of his torment, when Hadly, who had been brought for the purpose from Illinois, made him over into another man* he revolved great plans in his head for the organization of the learned proletariat, and for the maintenance of at least ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... fellowship in this. They are commonly, next their creditors, most bitter against the lawyers, as men that have had a great stroke in assisting them hither. Mirth here is stupidity or hard-heartedness, yet they feign it sometimes to slip melancholy, and keep off themselves from themselves, and the torment of thinking what they have been. Men huddle up their life here as a thing of no use, and wear it out like an old suit, the faster the better; and he that deceives the time best, best spends it. It is the place where new comers are most welcomed, and, ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... and accordingly she was condemned to suffer the most cruel death that could be invented, and her sentence was, to be nailed to a cross, and kept alive as long as possible. The sentence was put in execution; when she fainted with the cruel torment, the hangman gave her strong liquors, &c. to revive her; the sixth day she died. Her long sufferings, youth, and good constitution, made her flesh so tender, delicious, and valuable, that the executioner sold it for above eight tallies; for there was such thronging ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... unchastity, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. Each of these mortal sins is again analyzed extensively. The Weimar edition of Luther's Works remarks: "If these catalogs were employed for self-examination, confusion, endless torment, or complete externalization of the consciousness of sin was bound to result. We can therefore understand why the Reformer inveighs against this 'enumerating of sins.'" ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... more. He now reigns on Little Bulwan, sometimes called Gun Hill, below Lombard's Kop. His range is nearer, he can even reach the Manchesters' sangars with effect, and he is far the most formidable of the guns that torment us. ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... changed. He seemed to have died and passed into hell, and the flames, as they rose in imagination about him, were penetrating every fiber of his being, and he cried out in his distress. But as though the vision had been only to teach him of the reality of that place of torment, Edwin felt himself caught up, as it were, and he was seemingly suspended in an endless space with the eternal realities of life opened up for him to view. For miles and miles nothing but space appeared to stretch before, above, and around him, with the glaring flames that he had just ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... of England and Irelande;" and, for fear they should forget his design of solely pleasing them, he addresses them directly in the course of his narrative: "Now, gentilwomen, doe you thinke there could have been a greater torment devised, wherewith to afflicte the harte of Silla?" Shakespeare, an assiduous reader of collections of this kind, and who, unfortunately for their authors, has not transmitted his taste to posterity, was acquainted with Riche's tales, and drew from this ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... the Devil does in great wrath, make a descent upon them. The Devil is a Do-Evil, and wholly set upon mischief. When our Lord once was going to Muzzel him, that he might not mischief others, he cry'd out, Art thou come to torment me? He is, it seems, himself Tormented, if he be but Restrained from the tormenting of Men. If upon the sounding of the Three last Apocalyptical Angels, it was an outcry made in Heaven, Wo, wo, wo, to the inhabitants of the Earth ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... intreating her to take notice of that melancholy condition in which he then lay, miserable through the wants under which he suffered, and still more miserable from the apprehensions of a shameful death, and the fear of being plunged also into everlasting torment. Having finished this letter, he began to withdraw his thoughts as much as possible from this world, and to fix them wholly where they ought to have been placed throughout his life; praying to God for His assistance, and endeavouring to render himself ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... mayst thou be doubly shamed," replied the doctor sternly, "to torment her into frenzy with thy jealous fancies, and she already at death's door. Thou sawest naught, whatever thou mayst have dreamed; and mark me now, Desire Minter, I forbid thee to speak one word more, good or bad, to Priscilla Molines while thou stayest here; and if thou heedest not, I'll put thee ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... France has never recovered from this blow. Maximilian openly expressed his execration of this deed, though the pope ordered Te Deums to be chanted at Rome in exultation over the crime. Not long after this horrible slaughter, Charles IX. died in mental torment. Henry of Valois, brother of the deceased king, succeeded to the throne. He was at that time King of Poland. Returning to France, through Vienna, he had an interview with Maximilian, who addressed him in those memorable ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... equally detests. Hence, too, must flow those tears which a widow sometimes so plentifully sheds over the ashes of a husband with whom she led a life of constant disquiet and turbulency, and whom now she can never hope to torment any more. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... them to her to read or throw them into the fire, just as you choose. Your wife never sets foot in the streets, she only drives out with me; her only walk is on the island, and I am always with her; I see her suffer, but I never hear her complain. How could she complain to me, who suffer the same torment, and on her account? For from the time when that ghostly face appeared in the house my misery began; till then I was happy and beloved. Do not be afraid of my bursting into tears; I love no longer—now I only hate, and with my whole ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... phlegmatic musical animal who called forth such stormy devotion in a female breast, and who, himself cold and indifferent, was loved to the extent of a watery grave being sought by his inamorata as solace for his indifference, let me ask the question why the women who torment men with their uncertain tempers, drive them wild with jealousy, laugh contemptuously at their humble entreaties, and fling their money to the winds, have twice the hold upon their affections that the patient, long-suffering, domestic, frugal Griseldas have, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... cause, the rust-hued spots upon the flags were the tokens of their courage and their death, and the prisoners were the miserable remnant spared from death in battle to die upon the scaffold. Poor old man! he had outlived all joy. Had he lived longer he would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe; he would have seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more than midnight darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a victim to those bloody persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... individuals who get a chance to indulge it. For unlike the true Jigger, the female of which deposits eggs in the wound she makes, these Harvest-mites have no object of the kind, and when not killed by the hands of those they torment, they soon die victims to ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... laugh—laugh—some time he go away like a man at a window, but he come again. M'siu, he live there! And Filon, he know that I see, so he make like he not care; but I think he care a little, else why he make for torment me all the time? Ever since I see him at that shearing at Agua Caliente eight, ten year gone, he not like for let me be. I have been the best shearer in that shed, snip—snip—quick, clean. Ah, it is beautiful! All the sheepmen like for have me shear their sheep. Filon is new man at ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... is death to me? I meet it daily on the sea. My greatest, my only torment is the pain that ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... me among them, and in return they honoured me with a dance. Am I not very childish? I am sure you will think so, but then I feel so much happier every day now in spite of the horrible dreams which sometimes torment and make ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... o' him!' said another, and several joined in with their remarks.—'Nae muckle o' a deevil was there to gang oot! He was aye an unco hairmless cratur!'—'And that saft-hertit til a' leevin thing!'—'He was that! I saw him ance face a score o' laddies to proteck a poddick they war puttin to torment, whan, the Lord kens, he had need o' a' his wits to tak care o' himsel!'—'Aye, jist like him!'—'Weel, the Lord taks care o' him, for he's ane ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... soul is incomparably greater, and the power of showing it is still less; for there is no power in the body, and the soul has none, whereby this fruition can be made known. Everything of that kind would be a great hindrance, a torment, and a disturbance of its rest. And I say, if it really be a union of all the faculties, that the soul, even if it wished,—I mean, when it is in union,—cannot make it known; and if it can, then it is not ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... tortured unceasingly. The sun had passed the zenith—this sun of a culminating summer throughout which he had thrived regal and lustful. It seemed ignoble of him that he now should stoop to torment only us, and one of us a small woman. There was all his boundless domain ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... as Fred came near he made frantic signals to him to get down and crawl too; so we all knelt down and crawled behind Fred, striving to make no noise and filling the unhappy chief so full of fury at the noise we did make that he writhed in nervous torment. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... quotations that Jesus not only preached belief in his divinity as essential to salvation, but endeavored to terrify people into belief by threats of eternal torment. Jesus was responsible for the theological conception of a fiery hell. If he was mistaken, if there never was a place of torment for the wicked after death, is it not an act of constructive criticism to expose the person most responsible for ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... coast was closely watched on the African side, to prevent the embarkation of slaves, as it was on the Brazilian side, to prevent their being landed, the poor wretches were frequently waiting for weeks on the seashore undergoing every species of torment. ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... cried. "Where is heaven? I am not guilty of her death. She was a fool to die, and I shall not soon forgive her for leaving me so. If she came back I would punish her, torment her, make her scream with pain—if ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... remain in torment until the final Judgment Day if I should break my oath, but may it rest in eternal peace the day on which his ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the swallows. They set off on this expedition with anticipations of a fine frolic; but before they had gone far, Isaac began to feel a strong conviction that he was doing wrong. He told his companions he thought it was very cruel sport to torment and kill poor little innocent birds; especially as they might destroy mothers, and then the little ones would be left to starve. There was a Quaker meeting-house about a mile and a half distant, and he proposed that they should all go there, and leave the swallows ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... is upon the anvil which it is my duty to provide against. I will, therefore, pass over no circumstance by which I can affect the mind through hope or fear; but, please God to give me light from any other source, I will not think it lawful to torment these unfortunate, and, it may yet be, honest men." He accordingly took his departure from the library, whispering a word to Greenleaf ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... avenging and punishing God, until they think they have no longer any need of Christ. God is Love, they tell us; not recognizing that the Christ is that very Love of God. He will not cast us into hell, they say; there is no pit of burning torment. But they know there is something that follows after sin; they know that God is not weak, but abides by his own truth. Therefore, when they have made out God to be Love, and blotted away the old, literal hell, they turn back and declare pitilessly,—'There ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... man was not at all in the most enviable state; grief and torment followed him, and what he said about the true, and the good, and the beautiful, was, to most persons, like roses for a cow!—he was quite ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... made no answer, but tore and scratched among the papers, and yelled and screeched like a fiend in torment. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... The torment was over. Even that day the healing would begin. The survivors of the people scattered over the country—leaderless, lawless, foodless, like sheep without a shepherd—the thousands who had fled by sea, would begin to return; the pulse of life, growing stronger and stronger, would ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... self and strive to develop your own individuality. Keep this in view, play joyously with Puffie, and go to sleep early, for long watching spoils the complexion of young ladies. Begin to think to-morrow of the dress which you will wear at that brilliant ball—planned by our father to torment mamma—and you will have success. Do not mind those mists, dreams, and other visions which come and go. They are conditions of mind which are very much subject to fancy, and other painted pots. This is all that I, your great-grandfather, can tell you, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... formerly member of Parliament for Greenwich, I had been called upon to set to sleep, and to arrest a continuous barking cough from which a young lady who was staying in the house was suffering, and who, consequently, was a torment to herself and her friends. I thought this a good opportunity for a control experiment, and I sat her down in front of a lighted candle which I assured her that I had previously mesmerized. Presently her cough ceased and she fell into a profound sleep, which lasted until twelve ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... much from the heat, but more from the bad food and the bad water. For the first time in his life he found his body shaken with fever and was compelled to use quinin in great quantities. The attacks of insects, of insects that flew, that crawled, that tunneled beneath the skin, turned life into a torment. His huge triple-terraced neck became raw with countless wounds. But he did not stop by the way. His eyes became oblivious of the tangled and overcrowded life about him, of the hectic orchids and ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... house in Arlington Street, whence I will myself conduct you to the school I may have chosen as your residence. Remember, that from to-day you will begin a new life. Ah, by the bye, there is one other question I must ask. You have no relations, no associates of the past who are likely to torment you in ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the timid fellow-traveller of Frank Osbaldistone, who carried the portmanteau. Osbaldistone says, concerning him, "Of all the propensities which teach mankind to torment themselves, that of causeless fear is the most irritating, busy, painful, pitiable."—Sir W. Scott, Rob ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... these glories cease to shine? Shall sinful man grow great by his offence, And from its course turn back Omnipotence? "Forbid it! and oh! grant, great God, at least This one, this slender, almost no request; When I have wept a thousand lives away, When torment is grown weary of its prey, When I have rav'd ten thousand years in fire, Ten thousand thousand, let me then expire." Deep anguish! but too late; the hopeless soul, Bound to the bottom of the burning pool, Though ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Sugar House as a dreadful place of torment, and says that thirty disorderly men were allowed to steal from the other prisoners the few comforts they possessed. They would even take the sick out of their beds, steal their bedding, and beat and kick the wretched ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... you to settle them," said Erica, laughing, "and see if I can't sketch a little in the amphitheatre. They can't torment us there because there is ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... Samuel Gray, who he is; a stranger, the black man, the devil, who hath assumed this form to mislead and torment us. One can only wonder at the various cunning of Satan," ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... entertainment of their pleasure; yours is only a diversion of your pain. The muses have seldom employed your thoughts, but when some violent fit of the gout has snatched you from affairs of state; and, like the priestess of Apollo, you never come to deliver his oracles, but unwillingly, and in torment. So that we are obliged to your lordship's misery for our delight: You treat us with the cruel pleasure of a Turkish triumph, where those, who cut and wound their bodies, sing songs of victory as they pass, and divert others with their own sufferings. Other ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... thou desire that both the despotism should fall to others, and also the substance of thy father, carried off as plunder, rather than that thou shouldest return back and possess them? Come back to thy home: cease to torment thyself. Pride is a mischievous possession. Heal not evil with evil. Many prefer that which is reasonable to that which is strictly just; and many ere now in seeking the things of their mother have lost the things of their father. Despotism is ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... found in a score of widely separated regions, down to our day, when the death, revival and revelation occurred to the founder of the Arapahoe new religion of the Ghost Dance. The belief "works for righteousness". "The common sort... have great care to avoyde torment after death, and to enjoy blesse," also they have ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... talking when there's Naisi on the foreshore, and Fergus with him? LAVARCHAM — despairingly. — I'm late so with my warnings, for Fergus'd talk the moon over to take a new path in the sky. (With reproach.) You'll not stop him this day, and isn't it a strange story you were a plague and torment, since you were that height, to those did hang their lifetimes on your voice. (Overcome with trouble; gather- ing her cloak about her.) Don't think bad of my crying. I'm not the like of many and I'd see a score of naked corpses ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... the primitive ancestor-worshippers of Aryan race did the early Japanese think of their dead as ascending to some extra-mundane region of light and bliss, or as descending into some realm of torment. They thought of their dead as still inhabiting this world, or at least as maintaining with it a constant communication. Their earliest sacred records do, indeed, make mention of an underworld, where mysterious Thunder-gods and evil goblins dwelt in corruption; ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... these "pulpit fevers" in Salem Chapel one day, and Sally, his wife, was there; she sat all the time in a nervous torment, and as soon as he had finished, she rushed off out of the place ashamed of him. Dear woman, her homely criticisms were sometimes very severe upon him, partly because she was jealous for his reputation, and partly because she so loved him, and that was her way of showing the ardour ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... perhaps, condemn me, but Camille knows very well that you did everything. He does not torment me at night as he ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... the survey which he usually took of his fields before breakfast, and immediately beginning on the subject on which he was anxious, he gave a full account of his sister's proceedings. 'In short,' said he, 'Emily and Ada torment poor Lily every hour of her life; she bears it all as a sort of penance, and how it is to end I ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... travellers chiefly notice the mosquito, which is in many places a cruel torment; the centipede, which grows to an unusual size; the locust, of which there is more than one variety; and the scorpion, whose sting ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... had been torture to him. Yet he had not questioned whether one should go through this torture. He seemed to believe in education through subjection and torment. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... loved even her naughtinesses, as when she stamped her foot at me, which she could not do without also gnashing her teeth, like a child trying to look fearsome. How pretty was that gnashing of her teeth! All her tormentings of me turned suddenly into sweetnesses, and who could torment like this exquisite fury, wondering in sudden flame why she could give herself to anyone, while I wondered only why she could give herself to me. It may be that I wondered over-much. Perhaps that ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... of an ape, would make mouths at him. Then swiftly changing his shape, in the likeness of a hedgehog, he would lie tumbling in Caliban's way, who feared the hedgehog's sharp quills would prick his bare feet. With a variety of such-like vexatious tricks Ariel would often torment him, whenever Caliban neglected the work which Prospero ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... extraordinary way, touched. She sat in a sort of restless torment, knowing not which way to turn. She began twenty different sentences, and left off at the first syllable of each. At last, in desperation, she hurried out, "Tell me, sir, for what you want the ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Him like grey thunder-clouds, and all the saints lean forward from their vantage ground to curse and threaten. At the very bottom bestial features take the place of human lineaments, and the terror of judgment has become the torment of damnation. Such is the general scope of this picture. Of all its merits, none is greater than the delineation of uncertainty and gradual awakening to life. The middle region between vigilance and slumber, ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... lasted a long time; it was not only the indignity of having my best ornament taken from me, though that was bad; but it was this, how could I ever brush the flies off my sides and my hind legs any more? You who have tails just whisk the flies off without thinking about it, and you can't tell what a torment it is to have them settle upon you and sting and sting, and have nothing in the world to lash them off with. I tell you it is a lifelong wrong, and a lifelong loss; but thank heaven, they don't do ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... with a strangely new feeling of companionship. Again he made no effort to analyze the change in himself; he accepted it as one of the two or three inexplicable phenomena this night and the storm had produced for him, and was chiefly concerned in the fact that he was no longer oppressed by that torment of aloneness which had been a part of his nights and days for so many months. He was about to speak when he made up his mind not to disturb the other. So certain was he that Father Roland was asleep that he drew away from the door on the ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... find out if you hadn't better let her turn her jack and trust to gettin' even on your deal. You got a claim staked out in New York, and a scandal like this might handicap you in workin' it. And 'tain't as if hushin' her up was something we couldn't well afford. And think of how it would torment your ma to know of them doin's, and how 'twould shame Pish in company. Of course, rob'ry is rob'ry, but mebbe it's our play to be sporty like ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... him. The well had supplied good drinking water since the days of Julius Caesar, but shortly after entering the cellar one of the old women had drunk from it, and shortly afterward had died in great torment. The little ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... they consider themselves suffering beings who deserve heavy recompense; and the Carmelite or Trappist sister, who macerates herself by the hair-shirt or the cilex, would look upon God as a false or wicked Being, if, after such cruel torment, He did not promptly open to her ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... continually playing tricks upon the members of the company, and it was his especial delight to torment the "supers." Quite frequently in our sham Indian battles he would run up to the "Indians" (the supers), and putting his pistol close to their legs, would fire at them and burn them with the powder, ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... Albert wrote at this time about having "a world of torment," he really took matters very patiently and philosophically. In the devotion of his wife, in the affection of his children, in his beloved organ, "the only instrument," he said, "for expressing one's feelings," he found consolation and peace. He wrote,—"Victoria has taken the whole affair ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... is admired by no one, not even by a woman with no eye at all for the physical points of the male. It would be a real kindness to save worthy Tetlow. What a fool she'd make of him!—how she'd squander his money—and torment him with jealousy—and unfit him for his career. Poor Tetlow! If he could get what he wanted, he'd be well punished for his imprudence in wanting it. Really, could friendship do him a greater service ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... cannot think any such thing likely to take place," she continued more positively; "and, sir, you at least will not permit Miss Eve to torment herself with any notions as unreasonable, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... eternity tell me, then, how can a soul awaking in purgatory at the moment of separation from this body be sure that she is not really in hell? how can she know that the flames that burn her and consume not will some day cease? For the torment she suffers is like that of the damned, and the flames wherewith she is burned are even as the flames of hell. This I would fain know, that at this awful moment I may feel no doubt, that I may know for certain whether I dare hope or ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... (them that would) to imbrace it and by the use of a stock of five thousand pounds to ease them of the superfluity of most of their companies that had but strength and health to labor; near a year I spent to understand their resolutions, which was to me a greater toil and torment, than to have been in New England about my business but with bread and water, and what I could get by my labor; but in conclusion, seeing nothing would be effected I was contented as well with this loss of time and change ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... week in torment, and then it occurred to me that this low-born, gaitered person would have been better pleased with my brother. So I tried to recall the tricks with which my brother had particularly aggravated me; and, the next time I smelt ...
— Pussy and Doggy Tales • Edith Nesbit
... prospection[obs3], lookout; prospect, perspective, horizon, vista; destiny &c. 152. suspense, waiting, abeyance; curiosity &c. 455; anxious expectation, ardent expectation, eager expectation, breathless expectation, sanguine expectation; torment of Tantalus. hope &c. 858; trust &c. (belief) 484; auspices &c. (prediction) 511; assurance, confidence, presumption, reliance. V. expect; look for, look out for, look forward to; hope for; anticipate; have in prospect, have in contemplation; keep in view; contemplate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... "Do not torment her thus, madam," cried Alizon, who with Dorothy looked at the strange scene with mingled apprehension and wonderment. "Much as I desire to know the secret of my birth, I would not obtain ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... blacker than jet; her eyes, I say, of which the gaze could scarce, from their excess of lustre, be supported, which have been celebrated as a miracle of tenderness and sprightliness, which have given rise, a thousand times, to the finest compliments of the day, and have been the torment of many a rash man, must excuse me, if I do not pause longer to praise them, in a letter; her mouth was the feature of her face which compelled the most critical to avow that they had seen none of equal perfection, and that, by its shape, its smallness, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... was another thing. If you persist in wishing to share our work after hearing what I shall tell you, you will understand that the power of a sentiment is according to the nature of souls, and that a matter which would not in the least trouble a strong mind may very well torment the conscience of ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... Chet, as it was usually styled, was accustomed to be strangled the greater part of the morning by the baby. Most of the afternoon it was worried by Zackey, and, during the intervals of torment, it experienced an unusually large measure of the vicissitudes incident to kitten life—such as being kicked out of the way by Maggot senior, or thrown or terrified out of the way by Mrs Maggot, or dashed at by stray dogs, or yelled ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... sister filled her with a vague sense of terror which she could not explain to herself; which it was imperatively necessary that she should conceal; and which, on those very accounts, became a daily and hourly torment to her that was almost more than she ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... panting of the fearful heart? This miser love of Life that dreads to lose Its cherish'd torment? shall the diseased man Yield up his members to the surgeon's knife, Doubtful of succour, but to ease his frame Of fleshly anguish, and the coward wretch, Whose ulcered soul can know no human help Shrink from the best Physician's ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... muttered he. "Not even the rack affrights him; and in his blasphemous haughtiness he moves along in the midst of the soldiers, not as a prisoner, but as a commander. Oh, these Howards are destined to torment me; and even their death will scarcely be ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... wonder my uncle compares him to a burr, a sting-nettle, and a hedgehog. I'm sure he's been nothing but a plague to everybody, ever since he came here. I'm glad he's gone, anyhow. And yet, poor fellow, I pity him. He must be miserable himself, or he wouldn't torment everybody else so—but I must go to ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... But you were unable to communicate your certainty to the court. Well, you must now compel me to share it. I am not asking you to go into details and to live again through the hideous torment which you have suffered, but merely to answer certain ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... of indescribable agony—another long night of torment; and again up rose the sun in ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... jolly book read unto them. And we have seen those who have given themselves to a hundred puncheons of old devils, in case that they did not feel a manifest ease and assuagement of pain at the hearing of the said book read, even when they were kept in a purgatory of torment; no more nor less than women in travail use to find their sorrow abated when the life of St. Margaret is read unto them. Is this nothing? Find me a book in any language, in any faculty or science whatsoever, that hath such virtues, properties, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... withdraws, presumably, after this, to give St. Nicholas an opportunity to amend matters. Whereupon one representing the real celestial St. Nicholas suddenly appears, perhaps from behind a curtain at the rear of the image, and seeks out the thieves. He threatens them with exposure and torment unless they restore their plunder; they give in; and St. Nicholas goes back to his concealment. When the barbarian returns, his delight is naturally very great at perceiving so complete an atonement for the saint's initial ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... facility with which sin may be expiated by penance, have led to great mental debility and superstition. Force has been added to the doctrine of a material paradise of trees, flowers, banquets, hymns; and to a hell, a dismal place of flames, thirst, torment, and horrid spectres. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... love Had been the very sum of my confession! O happy torment, when my torturer Doth teach me ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... my song with ghosts forlorn, Three gibbering ghosts that mope and mourn, Then shrieking, flee at breath of dawn, Where creatures fell In torment dwell, Blind things and foul, That creep and howl, That rend and bite And claw and fight. Where fires red-hot Consume them not, And they in anguish Writhe and languish And groan in pain For night again. Sing hey for ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... and spices to fall to a degree which spelled ruin for the Venetians. The Turks continued to harry Italian traders in the Levant, and the Turkish sea-power grew to menacing proportions, until in 1571 Venice had to appeal to Spain for help. To the terror of the Turk was added the torment of the Barbary pirates, who from the northern coast of Africa frequently descended upon Italian seaports. The commerce of Venice was ruined. The brilliance of Venice in art and literature lasted through another century (the seventeenth), supported on the ruins of ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... and indignity which tyrannical ingenuity could devise.' One day George visited his wife in a distracted state of feeling. '"I have been careful, and I have been patient," said he; "but it's growing worse and worse: flesh and blood can't bear it any longer. Every chance he can get to insult and torment me, he takes. I thought I could do my work well, and keep on quiet, and have some time to read and learn out of work-hours; but the more he sees I can do, the more he loads on. He says that though I don't ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... which left him stammering, unable to speak any precise prayer. He thought of the overwhelming reassertion of Nature's powers which had attended the death of those two poor children. Was it not awful? To have taken that vow to the Virgin, to have endured torment throughout life, and to end by plunging into death, on the loved one's neck, distracted by vain regret and eager for self-bestowal! The brutal fact of impending separation had sufficed for Benedetta to realise how she had duped ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... well. She almost felt sorry for him now. Jealousy is a terrible torment. Would Martin have returned from the fields by now? [Pg 199] Would he be sitting with Rosa, or perhaps standing about with Marianna? She grew hot and cold by turns. Both things were dreadful, she could not permit either of them. She, who a moment ago had been ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... pride, my good old friends, My heart you will not blame, That rack'd my agonizing breast, And set my brain on fire; The thought to fall from honour's sphere In undeserved shame, And see my baby, and myself; The torment of his sire!" ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... of unspeakable anguish—the prayer of a soul in torment. It seemed to Tranter that the speaker had thrown himself down, and was beating ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... sitting in torment, and now he rose to go. "No, uncle," he said, in a thicker voice, "I shall never marry. A clergyman who is married is bound to life by too many ties. Even his affection for his wife is a tie. And then there is her affection for the world, its ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... of how this person's contemplated action will affect your own celestial condition? It is a distressing but entirely unavoidable fact, that if this person acts in the manner which he has determined upon, he will be condemned to the lowest place of torment reserved for those who fail at the end of an otherwise pure existence, and in this he will never have an opportunity of meeting the very much higher placed Ah-Ping, and of restoring to him the ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... of Bailey's history was very different from what he said of himself. He had been long the disgrace and torment of his own relations in the United States, and at last, after years of every kind of vice, had been obliged to fly from his country under strong suspicions of forgery. He went to the north, and for a year or two lived a wild life full of adventure; during which he occupied himself diligently ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... help expressing my amazement at his universal readiness upon all subjects, and Mrs. Thrale said to him, "Sir, Miss Burney wonders at your patience with such stuff, but I tell her you are used to me, for I believe I torment you with more foolish questions than anybody else ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... an occasional pastime, harmless and playful enough in itself, yet intended as a special means of discipline for Grandpa, and certainly, a source of great torment and anxiety ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... to-day? The lady or the gentleman? Ah, neither, I see. Both flaunt the bloom of perfect health and make the doctor shy. It is spring without, but summer within," ran on Dr. Rob gaily, wondering why both faces were so white and perturbed, and why there was in the air a sense of hearts in torment. "Flannels seem to call up boating and picnic parties; and I see you have discarded the merino, Nurse Gray, and returned to the pretty blue washables. More becoming, undoubtedly; only, don't take cold; and be sure you feed up well. In this air people ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... began, muffled, in the deeps of sleep, that swiftly rushed upward, like a wail, into passionate belligerence, and that died away and sank down into an inarticulate whine. It was a bestial cry, as of a soul in torment, filled with ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... Why torment the fellow more? This thing had happened, that was all. And the fewer who realized the danger, and were thereby put under still greater strain, the ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... and evil, the knowledge of what she is. She sees at last the good she is not, the evil she is. She knows that she is herself the fire in which she is burning, but she does not know that the Light of Life is the heart of that fire. Her torment is that she is what she is. Do not fear for her; she is not forsaken. No gentler way to help her ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... clinging to it for air, completely barred its entrance. They strove to force their way through apertures in length fourteen inches and barely six inches in breadth, and in some instances succeeded. The cries, the heat, I may say without exaggeration, the smoke of their torment which ascended can be compared to nothing earthly. One of the Spaniards gave warning that the consequences would be 'many deaths;' this prediction was fearfully verified, for the next morning 54 crushed and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... his own breast, and with a rapid movement, right over the heart, he thrust in the blade with all his might, up to the hilt. Not a drop of blood spurted out, the thick blade obstructing the wound. His face convulsed with an expression of excruciating torment; his hanging ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... 'tacit', 'digit', 'deposit', 'compact', 'complex', 'revise', 'response', 'acute'. Those which have the suffix -es prefixed throw the stress back, as 'honest', 'modest'. Those which have the suffix -men prefixed also throw the stress back, as 'moment', 'pigment', 'torment', and to the antepenultima, if there be one, as 'argument', 'armament', 'emolument', the penultimate vowel becoming short or obscure. In 'temperament' the tendency of the second syllable to disappear has carried the stress still further back. ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... without taste or feeling; he is one of the best fellows in the world, and without a particle of vanity. Whenever I played for him he looked immovably at my fingers, and one day he said 'My God! how I am obliged to torment myself and sweat, and yet without obtaining applause; and for you, my friend, it is mere play!' 'Yes,' said I, 'I had to labor once in order not to show ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... ruling and guiding motive of his life. He was patient with his enemies, and equally patient with equally unreasonable friends. No hasty act of his administration can be traced to his impatience. He had a tender, brotherly regard for every human being; and the thought of oppression was torment to him.... A statesman without a statesman's craftiness, a politician without a politician's meannesses, a great man without a great man's vices, a philanthropist without a philanthropist's impracticable dreams, a Christian ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... or of Rupert. That they had not succeeded in recovering their freedom I was pretty well assured, but what had become of them, and whether they were alive or dead, was more than I could learn. The shadow and the secrecy of the East had closed like a curtain over their fates, and I was left to torment myself with ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... forget, we make the most trivial things a pretext to recall remembrances, which is due above all to the fact that we persist in living amidst the same surroundings in which the beings who have so long been our torment lived. We are less the slaves of passion than of habit. It is this captivity that must be escaped from, or we shall wear ourselves out in a ridiculous and shameful slavery. Well, the past is past, we must break the ties ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... nothing," I interrupted her,—"nothing. I am shorn of it all. It has all gone from me, like the strength of Samson. Spare me, and torment me not.... I cannot heal your child. I am not like you. I was not prepared for—this condition of things. I did not expect to die. I never thought of becoming a spirit. I find myself extraordinarily embarrassed by it. ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... olive is an artificial beauty; to make it look like an umbrella is the ne plus ultra of arboriculture. But the present race of olives, twist and torment them as we will, are inferior to those of the times of our grandfather. 'Towards the close of the last century, there was a winter night of intense frost; and when the morning broke, the trees were nearly smitten to the core. That year, there was not an olive gathered in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... marvellous thing the world has ever known. It means so much to me, indeed to us all. These messages are erratic—fitful. I have now waited for weeks for a renewal of these strange communications and there is nothing. But in the midst of this, a distracting love for you seems to unnerve and torment me. I beg you to wait until those days may come when I can show you all the devotion I yearn now to give you, but must not, for every moment that voice may reach me from beyond the grave, and I ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... blazing eyes. His soul was in torment with the touch of her; yet somewhere back of his trained brain lingered a spark of wit not yet extinguished along with his other wits by her spell. He lowered ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... me more than to see men torment each other; particularly when in the flower of their age, in the very season of pleasure, they waste their few short days of sunshine in quarrels and disputes, and only perceive their error when it is too late to ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... since he could not meet the passions themselves; and he met them, for they could not rest, but returned to their former habitation, like unclean spirits as they were, each bringing seven more along with it, but not to torment him. Such were the beings with which the soul of this aged materialist was crowded. During life his well known motto was, "let us eat, and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Upon this principle, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... that there is any deep-laid scheme or profound mystery, with which we mean to torment him during the course of our tale, we may as well say at once that the little plot, which Ruth had in view, and which began to grow quite into a romance the longer she pondered it, was neither more nor less than to bring Captain Bream and Mrs David ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... FAUSTUS. Torment, sweet friend, that base and aged man, That durst dissuade me from thy Lucifer, With greatest torments ...
— Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... of heaven toils without hope in the darkness of the mine, riots in the delights of paradise compared with me. By the caprice of one woman, I am robbed not only of enjoyment but of peace, and condemned for ever to the torment of ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... knew him to be unambitious and inoffensive. He was almost always of a good old family. He was always a Cavalier. His peculiar notions were not obtruded, and caused no annoyance. He did not, like a Puritan, torment himself and others with scruples about everything that was pleasant. On the contrary, he was as keen a sportsman, and as jolly a boon companion, as any man who had taken the oath of supremacy and the declaration ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... meekly at the heels of a youngster like Gedge, who had been commissioned to put him to work and look after him. But Reginald was too sick at heart and disgusted to care what became of himself, as long as Mr Durfy's odious voice ceased to torment his ears. The only thing he did care about was what was to become of Horace. Was he to be put in charge of some one too, or was he to remain a ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... causing agony rather than anger, and proceeding from love, not from hate. The fear, distress, humiliation, anguish of modern jealousy are in the mind of the injured husband. He suffers torments, but has no wish to torment either of the guilty ones. There are, indeed, even in civilized countries, husbands who slay erring wives; but they are not civilized husbands: like Othello, they still have the taint of the savage in them. Civilized husbands resort ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... he joined the living to the dead, Hand linked to hand in torment, face to face. The rank flesh mouldered, and the limbs still bled, Till death, O misery, with lingering pace, Loosed the foul union and the long embrace. Worn out at last with all his crimes abhorred, Around the horrid madman swarmed apace The armed Agyllans. ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... hour had wrought a change. Her eyes were grown restless, her colour came and went. The past stirred in its shallow—ah, so shallow—grave; and dead hopes and dead forebodings, strive as she might, thrust out hands to plague and torment her. If the man who sought to speak with her by stealth, who dogged her footsteps and hung on the skirts of her party, were Tignonville—her lover, who at his own request had been escorted to the Arsenal before their departure from Paris—then her plight was a sorry one. For what ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... and sages, Gods and men of climes and ages, Conquerors of lifelong sorrow, Torment that ye made your throne, Help, Oh! help in us the morrow, Full of triumph ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... orders have never slept in the Bastille. They would know better; the thickness of my walls, the vigilance of my officers, the number of rounds we go. But, indeed, what can you expect, monseigneur? It is their business to write and torment me when I am at rest, and to trouble me when I am happy," added Baisemeaux, bowing to Aramis. "Then ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... that then the victory would have been easy; but no, she ever looks as if she had some inward resource—some security—and therefore could be calm. I should deem it some Huguenot fanaticism, but she is a very saint as to the prayers of the Church, the very torment of our lives.' ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be added another class of men—the stern and gloomy enthusiasts, who would make earth a hell, and religion a torment: men who, having wasted the earlier part of their lives in dissipation and depravity, find themselves when scarcely past its meridian, steeped to the neck in vice, and shunned like a loathsome disease. Abandoned by the world, having nothing to fall back upon, nothing ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... truth that with thee I am last of the Godheads." Vex'd was the spirit of Zeus, as at last he made answer to Thetis:— "Plagueful indeed is the hour which to strife and contention with Hera Sees me committed by thee, and her words of reproach are a torment; Ever, when cause there is none, she upbraids me before the Immortals, Saying I favour the Trojans, and succour the press of their battle. Quickly depart from me now, lest thy coming be noted of Hera; Go, and the care be with me henceforth till it all is accomplish'd. See now, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... have not told you that I should always love you, I have lied. Read my—heart; you will behold your name, your name alone, written there; and tell me, courageous creature, noble-hearted woman, how can one stifle the aspirations of a love which has been the only joy, the only torment of one's life? Remember the past, Dolores—our childhood, the blissful existence in which love was first awakened in our hearts. I do not know what was passing in yours; but mine has nourished but one thought, cherished but one hope: to belong to you and ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... ludicrous or piteous in the particular. The loneliness, the coarseness, the everlasting insistence of the pettiest and most troublesome wants and difficulties, harden and brace many minds, but narrow most and torment some. Wild game, song-birds, fish, forest trees, were but some of the things of which there were few or none round nearly all the young pastoral settlements. Everything was to make. The climate might be healthy and the mountain outlines noble. But nothing but work, and successful ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... being loved? How can you know? It is torture beyond the gift of words—misery beyond the relief of tears. It is not jealousy; that is no more than a vulgar kind of envy. It is a nameless, measureless torment." ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... of the States-man that's witty, That watches and plots all the sleepless Night, For seditious Harangues to the Whigs of the City, And piously turns a Traitor in spite. Let him wrack, and torment his lean Carrion, To bring his sham-Plots about, Till Religion, King, Bishop, and Baron, For the publick Good, be quite ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... thoughts an unexpected license and daring. It was possible to allow Emmet's claims when he was receiving the homage of the people alone, and she had not yet appeared; but her presence had revived the old passionate torment in his heart. Love returned triumphant, making light of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... job he filled were located in the medieval notion of the physical appearance of hell. By day the environment was heat and torment. By night—lunar night, of course, and lunar day—it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks Earth-time a rocketship came around the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. Pop received the stores ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... stranger; he had every claim upon the bowels of your compassion; it may be that he was the salt of the earth, holy, helpful, and kind; it may be he was a man laden with iniquities to whom death was the beginning of torment. I ask you in the sight of Heaven: Gordon Darnaway, where is the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on earth? Can Fate One direr torment lend To her few little years of glitter and gloom With the sad old story to end When the spectres of Loneliness, Want and Pain Shall arise one night with ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... of multitudinous horns. When she woke, past ten, drinking the small cup of black coffee which locally accompanied dressing, she was still shaken. "That's the most cursed racket anyone ever had to endure!" A growing irritation made harsh his voice. "You couldn't torment a worse sound out of a thousand cats." She smiled wanly. "If we were like that in the past," he added, "I'm glad we changed, even if we are worse ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... so noble-hearted a rebel, and as time went by, and Zeus remembered his bygone services, he would have made peace once more. He only waited till Prometheus should bow his stubborn spirit, but this the son of Titans would not do. Haughty as rock beneath his daily torment, believing that he suffered for the good of ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... literature, to insolent girls whom she would be constantly wishing to strangle, or stupid little boys who would bore her to death. Her very soul sickened at the thought—as well it might; for to have to do such service with such a heart as hers, must indeed be torment. All hope of marrying Godfrey Wardour would be gone, of course. Did he but remain uncertain as to the truth or falsehood of a third part of what Mr. Redmain would record against her, he would never ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... cellar, which smelt, he could not help thinking, like a grave. Coming out to the sunshine, he shook himself with disgust. "Faugh!" he thought, "what sick fancies and sentimental nonsense possess me? I am growing unwholesome. My dreams of the other night have come back to torment me in the day. These must ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... peace until a few minutes since, when Thomas had sent him on an errand to the kitchen, and he had heard Mary Jane bewailing the loss of her bottle of "rheumatiz liniment." She at once charged him with hiding it to torment her, but, before he could defend himself, one of the other servants asked what kind of a bottle it was; to which she replied, that it was a vanilla-bottle into which she had emptied the liniment, as that in which the ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... love. Anyhow, I'm out of my mind. I can't think, I can't work, I don't care a hang for anything in the world. Good Heavens, Mary! I'm in torment! One moment I'm happy; next I'm miserable. I hate her for half an hour; then I'd give my whole life to be with her for ten minutes; all the time I don't know what I feel, or why I feel it; it's insanity, and yet it's perfectly reasonable. Can you make ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... to those perturbed and passionate souls, among others, to whom these futilities have become a rankling, continuous torment and depression. When life on earth appears fragmentary and disordered, not only nonsense but terrifying nonsense, full of hideous injustices, sickening uncertainties, and cruel destructions, men have not infrequently found a refuge in the divine. "Come ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... have seen sometimes how these poor wretches that get but almost to heaven, how fearfully their "almost," and their "but almost," will torment them in hell; when they shall cry out in bitterness of their souls, saying, 'Almost a Christian! I was almost got into the kingdom, almost out of the hands of the devil, almost out of my sins, almost from under the ...
— The Heavenly Footman • John Bunyan
... in the darkness the different shafts and wheels looked very curious and threatening, so much so that it only wanted a little imagination for one to think that this was some terrible torture chamber, the door at the end leading into the place where the water torment was administered, for the curious musical dripping and plashing sounded very thrilling and strange in the solemnity of ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... their portion in this life," to a place of unmitigated suffering. Whatever be the comprehension of the word Hades (rendered in our version by the word hell), there is an impassable gulf between Lazarus in Abraham's bosom and the rich man in torment. The "great gulf fixed" may be a figure; but it represents an awful reality; and that reality is, that there is no transition from the one state ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... you the greatest thing a woman can give a man—oh, what a fool I was—and you have no gratitude. You must be quite heartless. How could you be so cruel as to torment me by flirting with those vulgar girls. We've only got just over a week. Can't you even give ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... of their pleasure; yours is only a diversion of your pain. The muses have seldom employed your thoughts, but when some violent fit of the gout has snatched you from affairs of state; and, like the priestess of Apollo, you never come to deliver his oracles, but unwillingly, and in torment. So that we are obliged to your lordship's misery for our delight: You treat us with the cruel pleasure of a Turkish triumph, where those, who cut and wound their bodies, sing songs of victory as they pass, and divert others ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... it feareth me we would give Christ a testimonial to go over seas. Hold him, hold him! Nay the multitude would be gladly quit of him,—they cannot abide his yoke, his work is a burden, his word is a torment, his discipline is bands and cords, and what heart can ye have to keep Christ? What violence can ye offer to him to hold him still? All your entreaties may be fair compliments, but they would never rend ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... I should still torment him. If he had sons he would be miserable in the thought that his unknown son might, on his death, take from them the precious Mostyn estate, and that wretched, old, haunted house of his. I am binding him to ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... Italian, with whom she was smitten because he was in the May of his age, nobly dressed, a graceful mover, brave in mien, and was all that a lover should be to bestow a heart full of love upon an honest married woman too tightly squeezed by the bonds of matrimony, which torment her, and always excite her to unharness herself from the conjugal yoke. And you can imagine that the young gentleman grew to admire Madame, whose silent love spoke secretly to him, without either the devil or themselves knowing ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... poodle, and will perform even more than his tricks. It is always in action; always fidgety; generally incapable of much affection, but inheriting much self-love and occasional ill temper; unmanageable by any one but its owner; eaten up with red mange; and frequently a nuisance to its master and a torment to every one else. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... was in private and not as a real exhibition at a public fair. Some days ago this would not have troubled the Prince at all; but trial and hardship were fast making Vance into a very different sort of boy from the Prince who was the despair of his poor tutor and the torment of ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... hear of it the most frequently, because it has a word in the phrase which, well or ill understood, has animated to persecution and oppression at all times infinitely more than all the dogmas in dispute between religious factions. These are, indeed, well formed to perplex and torment the intellect, but not half so well calculated to inflame the passions ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Lucretia) will assert the purity of her heart: or, if her piety preserve her from this violence, that wasting grief will soon put a period to her days. And, in either case, will not the remembrance of thy ever-during guilt, and transitory triumph, be a torment ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... American Coasts soever they arrived, exercised the same Cruelties, Slaughters, Tyrannies and detestable Oppressions on the most innocent Indian Nation, and diverting themselves with delights in new sorts of Torment, did in time improve in Barbarism and Cruelty; wherewith the Omnipotent being incensed suffered them to fail by a more desperate and dangerous ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... you come here to-day to torment me? Why have you mentioned my child to me? I believe you know where she is, and yet you will not tell me. What is the meaning ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... which very much afflicts me." And again the poor patient wife tells him, "Lay your commands upon me, what I am to do, and though it be to forget my children, and the long hope I have lived in of seeing you, yet I will endeavour to obey you; or in memory only torment myself, without giving you the trouble of putting you in mind that there lives such a creature as your faithful humble servant." At length dissipation undermined his naturally strong constitution; and for months this ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... I knew, and knew not how I knew, that the thing which I had said was true. With that knowledge came a happiness so deep and strong that it swept aside like straw the torment of those cords, and the deeper hurt that I lay at his feet. I suppose my face altered, and mirrored that blessed glow about my heart, for into his own came a white fury, changing its beauty into something inhuman and terrifying. ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... that I might hold one of her hands, but it was declined me; then she desired me to wipe the tears from her eyes, and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint. Justice Hathorne replied she had strength enough to torment these persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I repeating something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be silent, or else I should be turned out of the room." [Footnote: Chandler's American Criminal ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... her. How, in the obscure hamlet of Brook-Green, she had learned all the arts of pleasing it is impossible to say. In her arch smile, the pretty toss of her head, the half shyness, half freedom, of her winning ways, it was as if Nature had made her to delight one heart, and torment all others. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enough to add that for those remaining days until the present the unspeakable creature's mad infatuation for me had made my life well-nigh a torment, to say nothing of its being a matter of low public jesting. Hardly did I dare show myself in the business centres, for as surely as I did the animal found me and crawled to fawn upon me, affecting his release ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... which is thus ascribed to faith, and the facility with which sin may be expiated by penance, have led to great mental debility and superstition. Force has been added to the doctrine of a material paradise of trees, flowers, banquets, hymns; and to a hell, a dismal place of flames, thirst, torment, and horrid spectres. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... where my aunt and such as pretend an interest in me, and a power over me, do so persecute me with their good nature, and take it so ill that they are not accepted, as I would live in a hollow tree to avoid them. Here I have nobody but my brother to torment me, whom I can take the liberty to dispute with, and whom I have prevailed with hitherto to bring none of his pretenders to this place, because of the noise all such people make in a country, and the tittle-tattle it breeds among neighbours that have nothing to do but to inquire who marries and ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... not the less because he looked ill for some days after the children's adventure, owing partly to the shaking which he had received in his fall, and partly to the miserable hours of anxiety and watching that had succeeded to it. The villagers of course attributed his appearance to the torment of a guilty conscience, and no one was more careful to dwell on this explanation than Mrs. Mugford, with a vehemence which surprised even Mrs. Fry, who knew the sharpness of her ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... again into the plain. So, also, Ix-i'on, "the Cain of Greece," as he is expressly called—the first shedder of kindred blood—was doomed to be fastened, with brazen bands, to an ever-revolving fiery wheel. But the very refinement of torment, similar to that inflicted upon Prometheus, was that suffered by the giant Tit'y-us, who was placed on his back, while vultures constantly fed upon his liver, which grew again as fast as ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... concerned, but—as you will hear—crudely, laboriously and without taste or feeling; he is one of the best fellows in the world, and without a particle of vanity. Whenever I played for him he looked immovably at my fingers, and one day he said 'My God! how I am obliged to torment myself and sweat, and yet without obtaining applause; and for you, my friend, it is mere play!' 'Yes,' said I, 'I had to labor once in order not to show ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Ross's mind wondered at his recognition of that black thing and of the danger it promised, even as he prepared for battle. He pushed his captive across the path of the man in fur and threw himself in the other direction. There was a blast to make a torment in his head as he ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... this, by little acts of kindness, Jenny gradually obtained the helpless creature's confidence; and daily, whenever able, went at the same hour to disperse the boys, who after school hours have, it sterns, been in the habit of assembling, for their amusement, to torment her. Jenny had often threatened to complain to the parents of the boys, and, should they not attend to her complaints, to place the whole case before the magistrates. She had complained to several whose children she recognised, but they either took no notice of ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... a cruelty so vast, so aggravated, so cowardly and base? And if there is retribution, on whose head should it fall? Shall we seize and hang the poor, ignorant, stupid, imbruted semi-barbarians who were set as jailers to keep these hells of torment and inflict these insults and cruelties? or shall we punish the educated, intelligent chiefs who were the head and ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... ——, or Aunt Molly, as she was called by some of her little favorites, that is to say, about a dozen girls, and (not complimentary to the unfair sex, to be sure) one boy. There was one, who, even to Miss Molly, was not a torment and a plague; and I must confess he was a pleasant specimen of the genus. At the time of which I speak, the great awkward barn of a school-house on the Common, near the Appian Way, had not reared its imposing front. In its place, in ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... seemed to me that Brutus was a model for all time. Now, understand I was a good Christian child, and I said my prayers every night and morning, but this did not prevent me from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of the ten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, no adult human tongue can tell—and our tongues never told because it was a convention that tales should not be told out of school. One of the pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little boys after school in the winter and bury them until they ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... in a dark room; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life, but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... trampled sward; that he would have regretted his decision every hour of his life; and if by a miracle he could have found himself once more with the fatal deed undone, he would have rejoiced for a moment, suffered his old torment for a little while, and then ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... all would be over. But he dared not! he dared not! Your savage is overawed by the blind terrors of taboo. His predecessor, some elder Tu-Kila-Kila of forgotten days, had laid a great charm upon that parrot's life. Whoever hurt it was to die an awful death of unspeakable torment. The King of the Birds had special charge to guard it. If even the Cannibal God himself wrought it harm, who could tell what judgment might fall upon him forthwith, what terrible vengeance the dead Tu-Kila-Kila might wreak upon him in his ghostly anger? And that dead Tu-Kila-Kila was his own ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... such thanks,' he uttered in a low voice, much moved, a smile making him look strangely stern. 'You shall understand what it means when a man says that he loves you. I have come to think your face so beautiful that I am in torment with the desire to press my lips upon yours. Don't be afraid that I shall be brutal enough to do it without your consent; my respect for you is stronger even than my passion. When I first saw you, I thought you interesting because of your evident intelligence—nothing more; indeed you were not ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... character—from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... lessons. That did not worry him: he only said to himself that he must certainly set about finding some other means of living, and start once more going from publisher to publisher. That was not very pleasant.... Pff!... It was useless to torment himself in advance. It was a jolly day. He ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... soberly before men, and if they will not choose the former they must die. If you will not hear the Son of God, and the truth of the Scriptures, there is nothing which you will or can hear; you will never be persuaded, and never will escape the place of torment." ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... satisfied with being merely rich. I wonder if we are satisfied to have this golden day together. I wonder if the white swallows are satisfied with the sea. I wonder if those rocks are satisfied and proud to stand impregnable against the constant torment ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... throngs of men that fill the world, all of them totally depraved, all of them caught, from farthest eternity, in the adamantine meshes of God's decrees; the most of them also being doomed in advance by those decrees to an endless existence of ineffable torment; and upon this situation of affairs the excellent Michael Wigglesworth proposes to make poetry." His "Day of Doom," a horribly realistic description of every terror of the expected judgment, was written in a ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... her blazing eyes. His soul was in torment with the touch of her; yet somewhere back of his trained brain lingered a spark of wit not yet extinguished along with his other wits by her spell. He ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... various animals, and behind well-closed doors. One reads it with intense pain and a disgust which combines nausea with indignation toward the ruthless experimenters who, disclaiming the hindering use of anaesthetics, exhibit all the phenomena of nervous torment. Monsters of research would sneer aside all critics of ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... we are perhaps most impressed by its striking incongruities. This London of dirt and disease was also the arena for extravagant fashion and princely display. This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet set the standard of national ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... property on Rose. I gave her all her aunt's jewelry. I tried to salve over my conscience and make it seem right—what I had done, what I was doing. I tried to make it seem right by telling myself that Rose had enough property of her own and didn't need this, but I couldn't do it. I have been in torment, holding wealth that didn't belong to me, that has gnawed at my very heart all the time. Now I am going to confess. Here is Abrahama White's last will and testament. I found it in a box in the garret with some letters. Abrahama wrote letters to her sister asking her to forgive her, and telling ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... miserable man. Greta, do you know what it is to love without being loved? How can you know? It is torture beyond the gift of words—misery beyond the relief of tears. It is not jealousy; that is no more than a vulgar kind of envy. It is a nameless, measureless torment." ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... cannot win, that their own conquest is inevitable after three or four more years of horror and torment and personal despair, turn their blind hatred of England and America upon their own ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... having been so miserable in my life before or since. The torment of my sensibility was so great that I wished the sergeant to fall dead at my feet, and the stupid soldiers who stared at me to turn into corpses; and even those wretches for whom my entreaties had procured a reprieve I wished dead also, because I could not face them without shame. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... north-eastern Siberia during the month of July. They make the great moss tundras in some places utterly uninhabitable, and force even the reindeer to seek the shelter and the cooler atmosphere of the mountains. In the Russian settlements they torment dogs and cattle until the latter run furiously about in a perfect frenzy of pain, and fight desperately for a place to stand in the smoke of a fire. As far north as the settlement of Kolyma, on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... pitch, and sulphur burning together, with a most intolerable stench, as of burned carcases: the whole element above us was dark and dismal, distilling a kind of pitchy dew upon our heads; we heard the sound of stripes, and the yellings of men in torment. ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... doom of the soul in these Middle Ages, that a number of questions which to us would seem idle, questions of pure scholastics, disturb, frighten, and torment it, taking the guise of visions, sometimes of devilish debatings, of cruel dialogues carried on within. The Devil, fierce as he shows himself in the demoniacs, remains always a spirit throughout the days of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... Herodotus cannot understand the religious intolerance which led the Persians to burn the shrines of Greek gods. Thus religion had a restraining influence in war throughout antiquity, and in the Middle Ages. The Pope, who was believed to hold the keys of future bliss and torment, was frequently, though by no means always, obeyed by the turbulent feudal lords, and often enforced the sanctity of a contract by the threat or the imposition of excommunication and interdict. In order to make these penalties more terrible, the torments ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... more than mine eyes, O most jocund Calvus, for thy gift I should abhor thee with Vatinian abhorrence. For what have I done or what have I said that thou shouldst torment me so vilely with these poets? May the gods give that client of thine ills enow, who sent thee so much trash! Yet if, as I suspect, this new and care-picked gift, Sulla, the litterateur, gives thee, it is not ill to me, but well and beatific, that thy labours [in his cause] are not made light ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... stifling summer days, when his cage seemed so cramped and unendurable, how Black Bruin thirsted for the woods, he alone knew. Sometimes he would fall asleep and dream of the old free life, only to wake to the torment of ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... worse could not happen. I had besides lost other things that used to sustain me, and being reckless, I was contemptuous, and listened to the talk about money with sublime indifference to the subject: with an attitude, too, I daresay. But Hermann's name revived my torment. Why had he come? to persuade the squire to control my father? Nothing but that would suffer itself to be suggested, though conjectures lying in shadow underneath pressed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her we knew it. And at last, after a long, long silence, she looked up from her joined hands, and said, "If I may only see my child again, even from the other side of the great gulf, I would be ready for any torment! It would be no torment to me, so I saw him! Do you think I shall be ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I, "I do wish you would contrive some means to get rid of my odious Cousin Jehoiakim, he is the torment of my life." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... does not pay for as many Indians as they say there are, they crucify the unfortunate chief, or put his head in the stocks—for all the encomenderos, when they go to collect, have their stocks, and there they lash and torment the chiefs until they give the entire sum demanded from them. Sometimes the wife or daughter of the chief is seized, when he himself does not appear. Many are the chiefs who have died of torture in the manner which I have stated. When I was in the port of Ybalon some chiefs came there to see me; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... played about the rooms at Belgrave House. Perhaps, stifle it as he might, the sobbing voice of his daughter rang in his ears, "Come home with your own Nea, father;" and in spite of his pride his conscience was beginning to torment him. ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... my memory (said she once) given me for my benefit, and shall I make it my torment? No, Harriet, I will leave that to be done by you wise ones, and see what you ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... torments for their victims—how useless—the rack, the boot, tire,—all that they have imagined are not to be compared to the torture of extreme thirst. In the extremity of agony the sufferers cry for water, and it is not refused: they might have spared themselves their refined ingenuity of torment, and the disgusting exhibition of it, had they only confined the prisoner in his ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... away in the furrows deep Secure from jackal and passing plough, Would your eyes not follow me still through sleep Torment me then as they torture now? Would you ever have loved me, Golden Eyes, Had I done aught better ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... Sheila?" she asked, and into the slow, gentle tones of her voice something had crept, something sinuous and subtle, something that slid into the world with Lilith for the eternal torment of earth's daughters. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Redeemer of mankind, why hast Thou deserted me? O God the Father, Lord and Judge, why dost Thou torment me so?" ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... minutes of torment they knew that they were safe. They were far enough from shore to start up again and get away from those Spanish guns. The gallant tug was quite battered by that time, but nobody cared for that in ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... I don't wish it; to be here, there, or elsewhere, all the same to me; and then, you are right, I am not wicked; and those who are, I hate them, after my fashion, by making fun of them; you must think that, from relating stories where, to please my audience, I make it come out that those who torment others from pure cruelty receive, in the end, their pay, I become accustomed to ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... were brought before him, and condemned to torture and death. The torture was executed with unusual barbarity, for Drury was a man who knew no mercy. The confessors were first placed upon the rack, and then, as if the agony of that torment was not sufficient, their hands and feet were broken with large hammers, and other torments were added. When life was nearly extinct, they were released, and their martyrdom was finally accomplished by hanging. For fourteen days their bodies ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... than the primitive ancestor-worshippers of Aryan race did the early Japanese think of their dead as ascending to some extra-mundane region of light and bliss, or as descending into some realm of torment. They thought of their dead as still inhabiting this world, or at least as maintaining with it a constant communication. Their earliest sacred records do, indeed, make mention of an underworld, where mysterious Thunder-gods and evil goblins dwelt in corruption; but this vague world of the ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... gloom, And, rocking Hell's foundations, burst a blare Of stormy trumpets crying: "Woe, woe, woe!" Methought the angels must have wept to hear, Methought their tears had dropt like healing rain Upon the fires of torment, and assuaged Their blazing wrath, ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... fortune was at stake, and better that the boy should die than that all of us should live on in penury and bonds. Know you not, Prince, that the gods must have the gifts of the best, gifts of blood and virtue, or they will curse us and torment us?" ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... he have plundered it but from my own chamber? It hung against the wall of a closet, from which no stranger could have taken it except by violence. My perplexities and doubts were not at an end, but those which constituted my chief torment were removed. I listened to my friend's entreaties to tell him the cause of my elopement, and the incidents that terminated in the ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... and adjusting her head-dress or her robe as she might have done in private to a daughter. People asked with surprise and much annoyance whence came such a great friendship which had never been suspected by anybody? What completed the torment of the majority, was to see Madame des Ursins, as soon as she quitted the chamber of Madame de Maintenon, go immediately to Madame de Saint-Simon, lead her aside, and speak to her in a low tone. This opened the eyes of everybody and ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... agree apparently with Cesare Orsi—rather, she wanted to laugh at him coldly and leave him standing alone; but she must cultivate her defenses. There was, too, a sort of negative pleasure in misleading the banker, a sort of torment not unlike that enjoyed by the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... spirit; he felt a weakness which began at his heart to steal through him. It took all his manhood to bear himself erect. He dreaded what was coming, as of old the once- tortured victim dreaded the coming torment of the rack. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... and likely to be insulted by an offer of assistance. But my spirit was dead. I reached for her hands, but they eluded mine, slipped up my arms as she came sliding out of the saddle, and then her face was very close to mine. "Russ!" she whispered. It was torment, wistfulness, uncertainty, and yet tenderness all in one little whisper. It caught me off guard or indifferent to consequences. So I kissed her, without passion, with all regret and sadness. She uttered ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... her first anguish was over, found it possible to go on with life after all, as most of us do, no matter what our particular form of torment has been. It is even possible that she enjoyed moments of it, when she was one of the gay circle in the little house of dreams. But if Anne ever hoped that she was forgetting Owen Ford she would have ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... evil, or of mere earthly purpose and motive. "Between thy seed and her seed." Your struggle with her shall be in and for the very life of the race. "It," her life brought forth, "shall bruise thy head," thy whole power, and plan, and insidious cunning; "and thou shall bruise," shalt sting, torment, hinder, and trouble in the way and daily going, "his heel," his footstep. Thou, the subtle and creeping thing of the ground, shalt lurk after and threaten with crookedness and poison the ways of the ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... with the saucy nonchalance which made him both a favorite and a torment at the seminary. "Are you among the prophets?" and he sat up making room for ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... training, and character. While, in a large-natured man, solitude will make the pure heart purer, in the small-natured man it will only serve to make the hard heart still harder: for though solitude may be the nurse of great spirits, it is the torment of small ones. ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one's soul—than this kind ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... roused her: she had been told of their fate, but everything had been forgotten in the later anguish. Now she remembered with a sharp sting of pain, and she turned her face toward the speaker, waiting to hear why they stayed to torment her. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... saw, full of accursed instruments of torture horribly contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and crush men's bones, and tear and twist them with the torment of a thousand deaths. Before it, were two iron helmets, with breast-pieces: made to close up tight and smooth upon the heads of living sufferers; and fastened on to each, was a small knob or anvil, where ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... and everything seems far off and like things happening in a nightmare except that you know they're real. At last daylight broke, very pale, threatening, and slate colored. Deolda got up and began padding up and down the floor, back and forth, like a soul in torment. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... who were a trial and a torment to the teachers of the ordinary high schools and academies, the larger proportion would have scorned to steal, or commit any wanton outrage upon the persons or property of others. There were many high-minded, noble-hearted ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... children. Only a quarter of a mile of the still ocean separates her from safety and comfort. She sees the children playing about the door; she calls and calls. Will no one ever hear her? Her torn feet torment her, she is sore with blows and perishing with cold. At last her voice reaches the ears of the children, who run and tell their father that some one is crying and calling; looking across, he sees the poor little figure waving her arms, takes his dory and paddles over, and with amazement recognizes ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... commination. Did they sing?—yet they sinned here and here; and as a man soweth, so shall he reap, singer or sot. Lo! his songs are stars in heaven, but his sins are snakes in hell: each shall bless and torment him in turn. ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... her explanation with an air of doubt, or rather incredulity, sipped a cup of tea which had for some time been placed before him, and at length replied, "Well, Clara, whether I am right or wrong in my guess, it would be cruel to torment you any more, remembering what you have just done for me. But do justice to your brother, and believe, that when you have any thing to ask of him, an explicit declaration of your wishes will answer your ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... take a farewell benefit you come after me, with a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen, praying me not to do it. But it isn't of any use. You cannot move me from my fell purpose. I will torment the people if I want to. I have a better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come here from abroad. It only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for? Am ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 'have they nothing to do at home but to torment me with telegrams? Didn't I tell them to pay the old Harry and have done with it? What do they mean?' and putting the envelope down by his plate he went quietly on with his dinner until he was through, when he took it up, ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... "Last Judgment," by Palma the younger, which immensely interests the custodian by reason of a little human touch which may or may not be true. On the left of the picture, in the Infernal regions, low down, will be seen a large semi-nude female sinner in torment; on the right, in heaven, the same person is seen again, in bliss. According to the custodian this lady was the painter's innamorata, and he set her in both places as a reward for her varying moods. The other pictures represent the capture of Zara by Marco Giustiniani in 1346. Zara, I ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... encounter, one bright September day in the garden, where, after his wont, old Tummus had been to what he called "torment them there weeds," to wit, chopping and tearing them up with his hoe, and leaving them to ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders written throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said; he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in complete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of 1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last always the crystal clarity of ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... No one cares a fig about me; what have I got to live for? To drink is the only chance I have of feeling a little pleasure in life; of losing for a few moments the dreadful consciousness of being an outcast; of losing for a moment the remembrance of happy days long ago: that's the greatest torment of all, Willis. Don't blame me if I drink; it's the elixir vitae for me just as much as for Paracelsus." And he turned the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... other?" The tyrant, seeing deserved wrath awaiting him, laid his head down before Vixnu, who with one kick tossed it into the lowest abyss of hell. The wretched king, finding himself condemned to such a place of torment, begged pardon and mercy of Vixnu, but all the favour he received was one day's respite every year, to enable him to take part at a particular ceremony, to be observed in commemoration of ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Middleton's school, there was a great tall dunce of the name of Fisher, who never could be taught how to look out a word in the dictionary. He used to torment everybody with—"Do pray help me! I can't make out this one word." The person who usually helped him in his distress was a very clever, good natured boy, of the name of De Grey, who had been many years ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... justice by death has this disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that justice has overtaken him. Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb that night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and untroubled slumber. Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind should the guilty atone. You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter is a certainty, whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in this life; and I desire you to continue to live yet awhile that you may taste ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... perpetually mingle even with its best feelings. Believe me, I was then less fitted for any communion with my fellow creatures than before. When I left them they had tormented me but it was in the same way as pain and sickness may torment; somthing extraneous to the mind that galled it, and that I wished to cast aside. But now I should have desired sympathy; I should wish to knit my soul to some one of theirs, and should have prepared for myself plentiful draughts of disappointment and suffering; for I was tender ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... dreams of an oak-tree does not share in the Englishman's joy; for he imagines that the vision was a warning to him that, from some trifling cause, an overwhelming calamity will burst over him. Thus do the ignorant and the credulous torment themselves; thus do they spread their nets to catch vexation, and pass their lives between hopes which are of no value and fears which are ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... my savage headaches. For a day and a night I was in blind torment. Have at it, now, with the stoic remedy. Sickness of the body is no evil. With a little resolution and considering it as a natural issue of certain natural processes, pain may well be borne. One's solace is, to remember that it cannot affect the soul, which partakes of the eternal nature. This body ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... selecting some of her choicest produce, and an immense bunch of herbs, as antidotes for all the aches and ills which human flesh is heir to, on a bright, glowing September morning, we set forward on my homeward journey. "Blessings brighten as they leave us;" and although I had been considered the torment of the whole household, all regretted my departure, and begged me ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... behalf, be my advocate with Him so that He may pardon me for the death of my brother whom I had poisoned by this wicked Abbe of St. John. I confess it to thee as to my good patron and mistress. But what was to be done? He was a torment to my realm. Get me pardoned and I know well ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... faintly; and he, amidst that deep silence, that darkness, that coolness of the grave, fell upon his knees. It was not, however, through any need of prayer and worship, but because his whole being was giving way beneath his crushing mental torment. He felt a torturing longing to be able to see clearly within himself. Ah! why could he not plunge even more deeply into the heart of things, reflect, understand, and at last ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and hitting Charlie Black he felt would relieve his feeling almost as much as a fight with Tim Roon. The two bad boys never lost an opportunity to torment him or Meg, and Bobby felt that here was a heaven-sent opportunity ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... there was barely time to go to Sunday school. But the singing was so delightful. She sang the pretty hymns over to the babies. In the evening the family generally went out or had company. So after Jack and the babies were abed she used to read, unless Jack wouldn't go to sleep and torment her with questions ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... would) to imbrace it and by the use of a stock of five thousand pounds to ease them of the superfluity of most of their companies that had but strength and health to labor; near a year I spent to understand their resolutions, which was to me a greater toil and torment, than to have been in New England about my business but with bread and water, and what I could get by my labor; but in conclusion, seeing nothing would be effected I was contented as well with this loss of time and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... don't see why you should go out of your way to torment yourselves about nothing at all. It all seems plain enough to me. The donkey has run off, and intends to keep running till he drops. There's a long, straight, smooth road before him, and he'll stick ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... "You and your grandmother torment me," she said with a sob. "I want to live! to live," she repeated, and twice she beat her little fist upon her bosom. "Let me be free! I am still young, I want to live, and you have made me an ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... desolation! We never found out his name or learned how he fared—whether he lived or died, and if he died how long he lived before he died. It is a puzzle which will always lie unanswered at the back of my mind, and I know that in odd moments it will return to torment me. I will bet one thing, though—nobody else tried to cut that ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... pursuant to his sentence, a stone was found in his gall bladder, of the size of a lark's egg. This unhappy man was remarkable for an extreme irascibility of temper: might it not have been occasioned by the torment that such a substance must produce in so irritable a situation? He however, the night before his execution, confessed that the murder which he committed was premeditated. Notwithstanding which, he had, the day before he was tried, prepared an opening through ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... cuffed—what wonder the abused animal ran away or gave up the ghost? Then the boy's grief! His dear, precious only friend that he loved so devotedly! He mourns, sighs, weeps, not dreaming that he has himself done his dog to death. He is lost, having no one to love and torment. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... cannot guess. I was brought here at night, only forty-eight hours ago, and landed from a vessel which almost immediately departed whence it had come, into the darkness. My captors left me to go with the vessel, the chief of them threatening to return every week to torment me unless I obeyed his slightest command. I stand in great fear of this man, who is tall and bearded, for he brings with him instruments of torture and bottles containing, ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... The thunderous organs bellowed through the gloom, And, rocking Hell's foundations, burst a blare Of stormy trumpets crying: "Woe, woe, woe!" Methought the angels must have wept to hear, Methought their tears had dropt like healing rain Upon the fires of torment, and assuaged Their blazing wrath, so piteous ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... whilst he was resting from his rapid wanderings up and down the beach. Needless to say, it had the same effect. Little did the negro dream what fun he was causing amongst the bluejackets on our forecastle. Really, it was a shame to torment ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... the cabinet of Princes, when they talk of risking ten thousand lives for a victory, and laying waste a province to cut off the resources of the enemy? Let us not balance misery against forgiveness. It is childish reasoning to keep ourselves in torment, because we will not forget the injuries we have suffered. Peace only can heal our putrifying wounds, and peace can never be bought too dear, unless the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... fum de oberseah didn' 'pear ter do no good. Ev'y now en den 'is feet'd 'mence ter torment 'im, en 'is min' 'u'd git all mix' up, en his conduc' kep' gittin' wusser en wusser, 'tel fin'ly de w'ite folks couldn' stan' it no longer, en Mars' Dugal' tuk Hannibal back down ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... than one-half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment—everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... pick my bones at least.' ''Till now,' the astonished cur replies, 'I looked on all with envious eyes. 100 How false we judge by what appears! All creatures feel their several cares. If thus yon mighty beast complains, Perhaps man knows superior pains. Let envy then no more torment: Think on the ox, and learn content.' Thus said: close following at her heel, With cheerful heart ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... tasteless—with such a straight grim spoon was it mostly administered, and so flavored and strengthened by the competence of their eyes. Women knew so much best how a woman surpassed—how and where and why, with no touch or torment of it lost on them; so that as it produced mainly and primarily the instinct of aversion, the sense of extracting the recognition, of gouging out the homage, was on the whole the highest crown one's felicity could wear. Once ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... bound: Nay heare me Hubert, driue these men away, And I will sit as quiet as a Lambe. I will not stirre, nor winch, nor speake a word, Nor looke vpon the Iron angerly: Thrust but these men away, and Ile forgiue you, What euer torment you do put ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... soul remain in torment until the final Judgment Day if I should break my oath, but may it rest in eternal peace the day on which his death ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... equal, free and happy, for the crime of social barbarity, and you pass by this crime, to extenuate another, to extenuate the horrid torments of slavery! Not satisfied with violating nature, by abusing her offspring, even in her name, you encourage slaveholders to torment them. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... he wouldn't like. Them fellows is terrible afraid of the Irish Members. And they've a good right to be, for devil the finer set of men you'd see anywhere than what they are. There isn't a thing goes wrong in the country but they're ready to torment the life out of whoever might be responsible for the ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... fifteen years; and how should I do so now, whenas my Lord hath been bountiful to me in delivering me from the captivity of the infidels and doing away from me that which was more grievous than the fiery torment? I will wait till sun down." So at nightfall Sherkan and Zoulmekan came to her with food and said, "Eat, O pious man." But she said, "This is no time for eating; it is the hour for doing my service to the ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... he might form the design of making use of her for his own vile purposes, or at least of advising her to quit me for some happier and more wealthy lover. This idea brought in its train a thousand reflections, which had no other effect than to torment me, and throw me again into the state of despair in which I had passed the morning. It occurred to me, more than once, to write to my father; and to pretend a new reformation, in order to obtain ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... noise here by an affair of gallantry, offered Sixty guineas to have him conveyed away. We have lost twenty-six officers, besides many wounded, and ten pieces of artillery. Braddock lived four days, in great torment.(601) What makes the rout more shameful is, that instead of a great pursuit, and a barbarous massacre by the Indians, which is always to be feared in these rencontres, not a black or white soul followed our ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... narrow space, the working of the joints compressed, and inflammation at the joints, or at the wings of the coffin-bone, is excited; in worse cases navicular disease is established, or, from inadequate circulation, thrush holds possession at the frog, or scratches torment the heels. ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... don't torment yourself; hear me. I feel myself loved enough in this one moment for all the past," he said, as he laid ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... obviated by the abandonment of the iron cup, the powder being left to act on the lead itself. Two or three channels cut around the neck of the bullet helped to keep the point in line, and aided at the same time the fastening of the cartridge. Thus came its final metamorphosis to the buzzing little torment that has been at intervals for the last twenty years flying over all the continents and perplexing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... and do not believe that I shall live over this winter. Breathing is difficult to me; and perhaps the inexpressible heaviness which burdens me may contribute to this torment. When I sit up sleepless in my bed through the long nights, and see the night in myself, behind me and before me, then dark, horrible phantasies surround me, and I often think that insanity, with ashy cheeks, ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... unhappy. The eldest had married a gentleman, extremely handsome indeed, but so fond of his own person, that he was full of nothing but his own dear self, and neglected his wife. The second had married a man of wit, but he only made use of it to plague and torment every body, and his wife most of all. Beauty's sisters sickened with envy, when they saw her dressed like a Princess, and more beautiful than ever; nor could all her obliging affectionate behaviour stifle their jealousy, which was ready to burst when she told them how happy she ...
— Beauty and the Beast • Marie Le Prince de Beaumont
... just going down, a hissing globe of fire and torment. Already the lower limb was in contact with the jagged backbone of the mountain chain that rimmed the desert with purple and gold. Out on the barren, hard-baked flat in front of the corral, just where it had been unhitched when the paymaster and his safe were dumped ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... ten the legends of the martyrs fell into my hands. I remember reading with a kind of horror, which really was rapture, of how they pined in prisons, were laid on the gridiron, pierced with arrows, boiled in pitch, thrown to wild animals, nailed to the cross, and suffered the most horrible torment with a kind of joy. To suffer and endure cruel torture from then on seemed to me exquisite delight, especially when it was inflicted by a beautiful woman, for ever since I can remember all poetry and everything demonic was for me concentrated in ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... of the malignant goddesses is revealed in a most obtrusive form in the village deities of the Dravidians of Southern India.] "The dead were specially to be feared; nor was it only those dead who were unhappy or unburied that might torment the living, for the magician sometimes warns them that their tombs are endangered" (Article "Magic (Egyptian)," Hastings' Encycl. Ethics and Religion, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... more consideration than that to which nothing is entitled. No doubt, when bodily pain has ceased, it is all over: we do not feel it any more. And you have probably observed that the impression left by bodily pain passes very quickly away. The sleepless night, or the night of torment from toothache, which seemed such a distressing reality while it was dragging over, looks a very shadowy thing the next forenoon. But it may be doubted whether you will ever so far succeed in overcoming ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... depend upon his own temperament, training and character. While, in a large-natured man, solitude will make the pure heart purer, in the small-natured man it will only serve to make the hard heart still harder; for though solitude may be the nurse of great spirits, it is the torment of small ones. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... alive, and reserve him to grace their triumph and rejoice their eyes by his torture. When resistance is attempted, this is often impossible, and an instant death saves the victim from the far greater horrors of captivity and protracted torment. When an enemy is struck down, the victor places his foot upon the neck of the dead or dying man, and with a horrible celerity and skill tears off the bleeding scalp.[276] This trophy is ever preserved with jealous care by ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... sayde, 'I am ful woe That yow sholde bee torment soe, But wee had wyth yow beene! Had wee bene ther, yowr breders alle, Wee wolde hav garred the warlo {26} falle, That wrought yow all ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... fears, my sorrows, and my broken heart, Will roll in cruel triumph. I'm content. A long and troubled record I shall leave Of struggles in the dark 'gainst many foes. I begged for light to see my duty clear To see the purpose of my suffering To see the end that my Creator served In heaping hills of torment on my head. The light has never come. But now ere long I must be called where all shall be made clear. Till then a few weeks more of faith in Him A few weeks more with an unfalt'ring tongue To praise His wisdom though its end be hid. A few weeks ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... interests, of distractions, of infinite opportunities to preserve your distance from each other, is hardly conceivable; but on board ship, at sea, en tete-a-tete for days and weeks and months together, could mean nothing but mental torture, an exquisite absurdity of torment. He was a simple soul. His hopelessly masculine ingenuousness is displayed in a touching way by his care to procure some woman to attend on Flora. The condition of guaranteed perfect respectability gave him moments of anxious thought. When he remembered suddenly ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... wailed, lifting her arms in a gesture of despair. "Where is he? Tell me! It was not White Brother of the Snow sent to the torment of ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with perfect firmness, the worry and torment that David has occasioned her today. That would be stoical. Clara is greatly strengthened and improved, but we can hardly expect so much from her. David, you and I will ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... scamper after him, holding forth a twist of bulrushes, which was intended to represent Bellerophon's ornamental bridle. But the gentle child, who had seen the picture of Pegasus in the water, comforted the young stranger more than all the naughty boys could torment him. The dear little fellow, in his play hours, often sat down beside him, and, without speaking a word, would look down into the fountain and up toward the sky, with so innocent a faith that Bellerophon ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... are never tormented, And never asked money where husbands dissented? And never see others, their rivals, in fashion ahead, And never have doctors—a woman's great dread— And nothing, I hope, like my own indigestion, To torment and starve them, as this one does me, And keep them from sipping—forgive the suggestion— The nectar etherial ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... disturbing her, but hoping to see one of the physicians or some one of the family, of whom to make inquiries. Oh, the nervousness of those days! the restless, weary nights we passed, till our fears and apprehensions became a racking torment, and we felt almost that we must die (sic) ourselves ourselves or be out of suspense; but when, on the evening of the tenth day after her illness, a messenger came with pallid face and almost wild look to say that she was dead, ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... man's wife is in torment, it is as well for him to nod his head and let her believe that she does ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... heard a violent sigh, and out rushed a torrent of words that each seemed tinged with blood from the unfortunate speaker's heart. "Old man," he almost shrieked, "what did I ever do to you, that you torment me so? Sure you were born without bowels. Beggared but an hour agone, and now you must come and tell me I have lost her by losing house and lands! D'ye think I need to be told it? She was too far above me before, and now she is gone quite out of my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... us hope He will, at last, set me free; for I long, oh so earnestly! to be at rest. Carmen, a guilty conscience is a scorpion which never ceases to torment, and deals a death-blow to all peace and happiness; therefore keep your heart pure, my darling, and ever have God's commandments before your mind, so as to avoid sinning against them. Let me persuade you to come back into ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... ill again. Io Welland had come back in all the glamorous panoply of waking dreams to command and torment his loneliness of spirit. At night he dreaded the return to the draughtless room on Grove Street. In the morning, rising sticky-eyed and unrested, he shrank from the thought of the humid, dusty, unkempt hurly-burly ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was the measure of his anguish. His body was bowed down by the fearful storm that shook his soul, as the tall pines bend before the blast. Like his predecessor, he could not refuse to bear the burden of life; he was afraid to die while he bore the yoke of hell. The torment grew intolerable. ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... a way very different to what appeared to be his usual habit; but it struck his guests that it was assumed to throw them off their guard, and that he was eyeing them all the time, much in the way that a hungry cat does a trapful of mice, which she knows will shortly be thrown to her to torment. After some time, he took his departure, and they heard him lock and bolt the doors behind him. There they were, then, once more prisoners, at the very moment it was all important to ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... when, in his last drunken despairing frenzy, he had left the world with a curse in his heart and had faced the black unknown with reckless laughter and a profane toast. It is to be doubted if there can be a hell of greater torment than that experienced by one who, endowed by nature with a capacity for great living, is betrayed by the very strength of his genius into a situation that is intolerable of his real self, and is forced, thus, to a continuous ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... they were in the train going to Bayreuth. In the next he saw her as Kundry rush on to the stage. He felt that, whatever it cost him, that was the life he must obtain. He felt that he could not live if he did not acquire it, and so intense was the vision that, unable to endure its torment, he got up and proposed they should go into the garden and ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... It is the son of Michael O'Connell who died on the roadside and was buried by the charity of his neighbours. Michael O'Connell, born in the image of God, who lived eight-and-fifty years of torment and starvation and sickness and misery! Michael O'Connell, who was thrown out from a bed of fever, by order of his landlord, to die in sight of where he was born. It's his son is talkin', Father Cahill, ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... his spectacles as he sentenced the Czar of Russia to ten years in the salt mines—and made it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperleigh always read the foreign news—the news of things that he couldn't alter—as a form of wild and stimulating torment. ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... knowledge and which does not progress but has a kind of stationary and eternal value, like the beauty of the dawn, or the love of a mother for her child, or the joy of a young animal in being alive, or the courage of a martyr facing torment. We cannot for all our progress get beyond these things; there they stand, like light upon the mountains. The only question is whether we can rise to them. And it is the same with all the greatest births of human imagination. As far as we can speculate, there is not the faintest probability ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... me for a moment into the prisons of the Inquisition.'—(God help my poor brother Tom.)—'Behold Religion, with Mercy and Justice chained down under her feet,—there sitting ghastly upon a black tribunal, propped up with racks and instruments of torment. Hark!—hark! what a piteous groan!'—(Here Trim's face turned as pale as ashes.)—'See the melancholy wretch who uttered it'—(Here the tears began to trickle down)—'just brought forth to undergo the anguish of a mock trial, and endure the utmost pains that a studied system of cruelty has been ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... soul, madam, they are delicious. Bless me! It is worth crossing the Atlantic to eat one. Try one, my lord, and then you can torment the Macaronies[45] by telling them they don't know anything about fine eating," said Dapper, after ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... own taste! May wit and humour wing their flight to another region, and the mighty void be supplied by maukish sentiment, horse-collar grins, wood-demons, and other show-cattle of the Smithfield muses! May you be visited by a locust tribe of scribblers, who shall conspire to torment that groaning martyr, the Press, with ducal lampoons, drowsy epics, and zig-zag heroics! With Hope the upholsterer, and Bryon the idler, with Joe Miller in quarto, Genius in thin duodecimo, Leadenhall romances, and Puritan biography: and should your worship ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... robbery, amused herself while he was gone in handling the precious jewels in her basket. It was to conceal temporarily this treasure that she wished to visit the Schoolmaster in his cellar, and not to torment, as was her usual custom, her victim. We will mention presently why, with the consent of Bras-Rouge, La Chouette had confined the Schoolmaster ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... necessary for devout and God-fearing people to creep into holes and corners, like felons hiding from the law, that they may worship the Almighty after some fashion as pure as it is simple, knowing the while that if they are found so doing their lot and the lot of their wives and children will be the torment and the stake. Now the thumbscrew and the rack as instruments for the discomfiture of heretics are relegated to the dusty cases of museums. But some short generations since all this was different, for then a man who dared to disagree with certain doctrines was treated with far less mercy than is ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... questions which torment me when I am alone in the dead of night. My bed becomes a place of unendurable torture. I rise and dress myself, and wait for the daylight, looking through my ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... intelligence,' and the occult meaning of Z. Marcas requires a long and elaborate commentary. Repeat the word Marcas, dwelling on the first syllable, and dropping abruptly on the second, and you will see that the man who bears it must be a martyr. The zigzag of the initial implies a life of torment. What ill wind, he asks, has blown upon this letter, which in no language (Balzac's acquaintance with German was probably limited) commands more than fifty words? The name is composed of seven letters, and seven is most characteristic of cabalistic numbers. If M. Gozlan's ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... thick lips, upturned nose, projecting eyes, unwieldy belly, he was sought by Alcibiades and admired by Aspasia. Even Xantippe, a beautiful young woman, very much younger than he, a woman fond of the comforts and pleasures of life, was willing to be his wife, even if she did afterwards torment him, when the res angusta domi disenchanted her from the music of his voice and the divinity of his nature. "I have heard Pericles," said the most dissipated and voluptuous man in Athens, "and other excellent orators, but was not moved by them; while this Marsyas—this Satyr—so affects ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... in man's natural immortality and his consciousness in death. This doctrine laid the foundation upon which Rome established the invocation of saints and the adoration of the Virgin Mary. From this sprung also the heresy of eternal torment for the finally impenitent, which was early incorporated into the ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... steepness, there was no wall. Here for a while he ran up and down till the wind-driven fire from new-lit huts at its brink leapt out upon him like thin, scarlet tongues. He threw himself to the ground, he rose again, beating his head with his hand, for his long hair was ablaze. Then in his torment and despair, of a sudden he threw himself backwards into the dark gulf beneath. Fifty feet and more he fell to the rocks below, and where he fell there he lay till he died, and on the morrow the Zulus ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... hand, though he had, to some extent, emasculated himself, though he was exempt from his chief torment, he discerned, flourishing within him, another crop of tares, of which the spread had till now been hidden behind the sturdier growth of other vices. In the first instance, he had believed himself to be less enslaved by sin, less utterly ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Eccles. i. 18. What peace can all yield to a soul reflecting on posting away time, now near the last point, and looking forward to endless eternity? Oh the thoughts of time wasted with, and fair opportunities of good lost by the vehement pursuings and huntings after shadows and vanities, will torment the soul by assaulting it with piercing convictions of madness and folly, in forsaking all to overtake nothing; with dreadful and soul-terrifying discourses of the saddest of disappointments, and with the horror of an everlasting ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... laughing at me, and here was I, who was a year her senior and twice her size, sitting like an idiot, red to the ears. In faith, the larger a man is, the more the women seem tempted to torment him; but on me she presently took pity, and as the fiddles tuned up in the great ballroom, she led the way thither and permitted me to tread a minuet with her. Of course there were a score of others eager to share her dances, but she ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the luggage," she said. The smile with which she forced herself to respond to the fixed simper of the Watchetts seemed to cause her horrible torment. She motioned nervously to George Cannon, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... like Henry of Exeter were channels through which the Christian priesthood received those miraculous powers by their exercise of which alone it was possible for the ordinary sinner to be rescued from eternal torment. Of the structural doctrines of theology which were then the shibboleths of English Churchmanship generally, I never entertained a doubt. That the universe was created in the inside of a week four thousand and four years before ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... of setting a mark on a family, and placing it at issue with a considerable portion of the neighbourhood! What a pernicious engine for the gratification of pride, scandal, envy, and malice! What an inquisition of the few bad by which to torment the many good! What a dagger in the hands of tolerated assassins! In short, what a perversion of reason, what a disease in the very bosom of society, what a lurking demon stationed at the threshold of every happy family, to ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... for talks with beautiful ladies," David Verne replied in his weak, dull voice. "Besides, it's music that I've chosen to torment myself with this afternoon. Where is she?" And when Brantome had nodded toward Lilla. "Ah, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Riennes has sent her demon to torment you, that is all. I thought she would. It is quite according to rule, a most clear and excellent case. Indeed, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... 'absurd', 'tacit', 'digit', 'deposit', 'compact', 'complex', 'revise', 'response', 'acute'. Those which have the suffix -es prefixed throw the stress back, as 'honest', 'modest'. Those which have the suffix -men prefixed also throw the stress back, as 'moment', 'pigment', 'torment', and to the antepenultima, if there be one, as 'argument', 'armament', 'emolument', the penultimate vowel becoming short or obscure. In 'temperament' the tendency of the second syllable to disappear has carried the stress still further ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... flatly refuse you my hogshead. They would send a wine-grower who did such foolish acts to the mad-house. Make roads in the Atlas Mountains, when I cannot get out of my own house! Dig ports in Barbary when the Garonne fills up with sand every day! Take from me my children whom I love, in order to torment Arabs! Make me pay for the houses, grain and horses, given to the Greeks and Maltese, when there are ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... death. The conclusion slowly came to him that just blind killing was not enough. For all he knew death might bring instant forgetfulness—and thus not constitute in itself a satisfactory measure of vengeance. The fear of death was a reality and a torment: for all he knew, the thing itself might be a change for the better. It might be that, suddenly hurled out of this world of three dimensions, his enemies would have no knowledge nor carry no memories ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... personal pronouns, in order to express emphasis, or opposition, or the identity of the subject and [the] object of a verb; and thus forms a pronoun relative: as, 'I did it myself;' 'he was not himself, when he said so;' 'the envious torment themselves more than others.' Formerly self and selves were used simply as nouns, and governed the pronoun, which was kept distinct from it [them] in the possessive case: but since they [the pronoun and the noun] have ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... nothing more to make her unhappy," sounded strangely in her ears. Nothing more to make her unhappy! Could she have anything more, then or ever, to make her happy? Could she ever be happy again? All that had happened during the last few days passed through her mind, and added to her torment. How indignant had she been when her brother had hinted to her that Ussher did not intend honestly by her; into what a passion had she flown with Father John, when he had cautioned her that she should be circumspect in her conduct with her lover; what an insult she had felt it when Mary Brady ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... me, Hastings!" said Sibyll, with great emotion. "Oh, if thou knewest how I torment myself in thine absence! I see thee surrounded by the fairest and the loftiest, and say to myself, 'Is it possible that he can remember me?' But thou lovest me still—still—still, and ever! Dost ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to prevent this misfortune, Henry did the very worst thing he possibly could; he began to run and cry, "Mag! Mag!" with a raised voice, whilst the bird, as if resolved to torment him, hopped forward across the other field, perched herself on the stile, and, as he drew near, flew right down from thence ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... Messrs. Lord and Jacobs put a stop to the conversation, and was the signal for Toby's time of trial. It seemed to him, and with good reason, that the chief delight these men had in life was to torment him, for neither ever spoke a pleasant word to him; and when one was not giving him some difficult work to do, or finding fault in some way, the other would be sure to do so; and Toby had very little comfort from the time he began work in the morning ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... personified Germany for her, the other England. It was as if she saw Hermann and Michael with bayonet and rifle stalking each other across some land of sand-dunes and hollows, creeping closer to each other, always closer. She felt as if she would have gladly given herself over to an eternity of torment, if only they could have had one hour more, all three of them, together here, as on that night of stars and peace when first there came the news which for the moment had ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... supposed to pursue a sick man and torment him. [Footnote: See "Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia," vol. iv. ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... would reply in such cases, looking them straight in the face. It took courage to do that: the agent might grow bigger, become an enemy. She didn't care! She wasn't going to lower her price for anybody! And the commission she had to pay them was a torment to Lily; calculating the percentage made her head split—not to speak of the complicated nature of the contracts, worse than insurance policies. The poor artiste was bound down on every side, at the mercy of the manager; everything was ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... not gaze upon thee; My feeble virtue staggers, and again The fiends of jealousy torment and haunt ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... violence of his sufferings seemed to abate and leave him at rest for a few moments. His thoughts wandered to all he loved upon earth, but the respite was of short duration. Soon the agony he endured drew from him piercing cries. During his long martyrdom no torment had equalled the present. It seemed as though he were being devoured by flames, or as if molten lead were ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... companions, or her studies (upon the latter subject he had grown quite curious, of late), she would feel that she was blushing, and answer, with downcast eyes, and be half glad and half sorry when he ceased to question her, and would then sit and torment herself by recalling what she had said, and thinking how much it might have ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... reality to prevent his witnessing the triumph of his brother. Through the deserted apartments, the scene of so many bitter reflections, the unhappy youth stalked like a discontented ghost, conjuring up around him at every step new subjects for sorrow and for self-torment. Impatient, at length, of the state of irritation and agonized recollection in which he found himself, he rushed out and walked hastily up the glen, as if to shake off the load which hung upon his mind. The sun ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... to stray Far as the Solar Walk or Milky Way; Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n, Behind the cloud-topt hill an humbler heav'n; Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd, Some happier island in the wat'ry waste; Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To BE, contents his natural desire, He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire: But thinks admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... to the cottage did not become less frequent as the summer advanced, and her interest in Lilias seemed to increase with every visit. Not that she had ceased to torment the child with her discontented repinings for the past, or her melancholy forebodings for the future. There was always some subject for comment ready; and Nancy never let pass unimproved an opportunity to say something depressing. But Lilias was learning ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... piling up the standard Dictionary. Many have dwelt severely on Johnson's inequalities, without attending to their cause; that was unquestionably the "body of death" which hung so heavily upon his system, and rendered writing at times a positive torment. Let his fastidious critics remember that he never spent a single day, of which he could say that he was entirely well, and free from pain, and that his spirits were often so depressed, that he was more than once seen on his knees, praying ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... true,' she returned, with a groan; 'but, Miss Garston, hell has begun for me here; for three years I have been in torment, and rightly too,—and rightly too,—for I never was a good woman, never like Susan, who read her Bible and went to church. Oh, she is a good creature, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his country, he exposed himself to cruel reproach, to manifold hardship and hazard of life; about fourteen years almost unsuccessful he persevered in this difficult, but delusive attempt. What hunger, what cold, what torment and death have some Jesuitic and other antichristian missionaries undergone, to propagate the most ruining delusions of hell; all under the pretence of earnestness to gain sinners to Christ and his church. ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... will not only grow monstrous and despotic, but artificial appetites will be created which, like a ghastly Frankenstein, develop a kind of independent life and force, and then turn on their creator to torment him without pity, and will mock his efforts to free himself from this slavery. The victim of strong drink is one of the most pitiable creatures on earth, he becomes half beast, or half demon. Oh, the silent, suffering tongues that whisper ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... the gentleman? Ah, neither, I see. Both flaunt the bloom of perfect health and make the doctor shy. It is spring without, but summer within," ran on Dr. Rob gaily, wondering why both faces were so white and perturbed, and why there was in the air a sense of hearts in torment. "Flannels seem to call up boating and picnic parties; and I see you have discarded the merino, Nurse Gray, and returned to the pretty blue washables. More becoming, undoubtedly; only, don't take cold; and be sure you feed up well. In this air people must eat plenty, and you have ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... m., tiger. timide, timid. tirer, to draw. toi, thou, thee. tombeau, m., tomb, grave. tomber, to fall. ton, ta, tes, thy. tonnerre, m., thunder. tt, soon. toucher, to touch, move. toujours, always, ever, still. tour, m., turn, round. tour, f., tower. tourment, m., torture. tourmenter, to torment. tourner, to turn. tous, pl., all. tout, all, whole; everything; only, quite. toutefois, however. tracer, to trace, write, enter. trahir, to betray. traner, to drag. trait, m., shaft, arrow, traiter, to treat; ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... death coming towards them day by day, until it at last destroys them also inch by inch. What had I done that I should find myself bound like those poor wretches? I cannot tell you. Morphia wipes out the memory as surely as drink. I only know that I was in torment. Faces, familiar and strange faces, some compassionate, some indignant, some horror-struck, come back to me sometimes, blurred as by smoke, but I see nothing clearly. I dimly remember fragments of appeals that were made to me, fragments of divine music in cathedrals ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... demanded the witch. "Did yonder sniffling hypocrite thrust my darling from his door? The villain! I'll set twenty fiends to torment him till he offer thee his daughter on his ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and tender fooleries of that sort, or would have been, had it not been the property of an up-to-date, worldly-wise young woman who knew better than to save from the flames such sources of delicious torment, such instruments ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... I would go to the play, twice a week if I could: I dote upon it—only you're too affecting sometimes. You do put me in such a state—into such fits of crying! Goodness gracious me, Miss Lane, how can you let them torment that poor child so!' ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... flung himself across his writing-table and with trembling hands tried to wrench from his neck his order Pour le Merite. I can affirm without any exaggeration that I could see him wasting away under the ceaseless moral blows dealt to him, and that the mental torment he went ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... order of things, take the place of theological morality, or the responsibility of man to some abstract idea. Next, the day's work will be short. This need not be insisted on. It is clear that with work unwasted it CAN be short. It is clear also that much work which is now a torment, would be easily endurable if ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... earnest desire has been the cause of the greatest events; and this ought to instruct us that the world stands in need of a great many instincts, which, examined according to the ideas of our reason, are ridiculous and absurd. For there is nothing so opposite to reason as to torment ourselves in this life, that we may be praised after we are dead, since neither philosophy, nor experience, nor faith, nor any thing whatsover, makes it appear, that the praises given us after death ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... substituted a mild and emollient application. He was in great fear all night lest he should have done wrong in adopting this treatment; but was greatly relieved next morning on finding his patients comparatively comfortable, while those whose wounds had been treated in the usual way were writhing in torment. Such was the casual origin of one of Pare's greatest improvements in the treatment of gun-shot wounds; and he proceeded to adopt the emollient treatment in all future cases. Another still more important improvement was his employment of the ligature in tying ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the shadows of crime and torment and death, the life of Amelius glided insensibly into the peaceful byways of seclusion, brightened by the companionship of Sally. The winter days followed one another in a happy uniformity of occupations and amusements. There were lessons to fill up the morning, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... her: she had been told of their fate, but everything had been forgotten in the later anguish. Now she remembered with a sharp sting of pain, and she turned her face toward the speaker, waiting to hear why they stayed to torment her. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... ministers, whose hair was cut short. For if a man with long hair had gone into the pulpit to preach, I would have gone out of the Church again, though he might preach better than the other." All through this time visions of hell and torment, and devils and damnation troubled him; now and then there were "elevations in my mind, but these were few and far between; a while after all was lost again." He soon consoled himself for his matrimonial disappointment; he married and ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... little boy whose fresh, cheerful face was crossed with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his presence was a source of torment. In the idiom of his generation Roscoe did not consider the matter "efficient." It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a "red-blooded he-man"—this was Roscoe's favourite expression—but in a curious and perverse manner. Indeed, to think about ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... began to torment itself again. Why did Josephine shun him now? Ah! she loved Raynal now that he was dead. Women love the thing they have lost; so he had heard say. In that case, the very sight of him would of course be odious to her: he could understand that. The absolute, unreasoning faith he once had ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... delusions which man is doomed to suck in with his mother's milk; viewing with painful sensations those irregular desires, those disgusting propensities, by which he is perpetually agitated; seeing the terrible effect of those licentious passions which torment him; of those lasting inquietudes which gnaw his repose; of those stupendous evils, as well physical as moral, which assail him on every side: the contemplator of humanity would be tempted to believe that happiness was ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... great deal of important business to do in it. Time and death are both in my view, and seem both to call aloud to me to make no delay. I beg of you, therefore, not to disquiet yourself or me. What must be, must be. The decrees of Providence are eternal and unalterable; why, then, should we torment ourselves about ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... and not fruitlessly. I tried to keep the word of His patience. He kept me in the days of my anguish. I was afraid with terror—I was troubled. Through great tribulation He brought me through to a salvation revealed in this last time. My fear had torment; He has cast it out. He has given me in its stead perfect love. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... she stand, And strives with the thought within her, and finds no word to speak: For such is the strength of her anguish, as well might slay the weak; But her heart is a heart of the Queen-folk and of them that bear earth's kings, And her love of her lord seems lovely, though sore the torment wrings, —How fares it with words unspoken, when men are great enow, And forth from the good to the good the strong desires shall flow? Are they wasted e'en as the winds, the barren maids of the sky, Of whose birth there is no ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... Radha frenziedly contemplating her lonely state. Ornaments grown too hot for wearing—from the passion burning in her heart—are strewn about the bed, while hands tightly clasped suggest her wild unhappy torment. The vast and barren hills, empty angular buildings, tiny guttering candles and lonely flowering tree provide ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... gives to Richard therefore a power which excites astonishment, and a courage which extorts admiration. He gives to Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary, greatness, and adds to it a conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... "I think she does it to torment us, just." He was tired by this discussion; he turned and ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... this other—that much was plain—but that it boded anything but captivity and torment they could not believe. That last phrase was too eloquent ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... If priests be good, it is so surely; But when Jesus hung on the cross with great smart, There he gave, out of his blessed heart, The same sacrament, in great torment; He sold them not to us, that Lord omnipotent: Therefore Saint Peter the Apostle doth say, That Jesus' curse hath all they Which God their Saviour do buy or sell, Or they for any money do take or tell. Sinful priests giveth the sinners example ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... was continually playing tricks upon the members of the company, and it was his especial delight to torment the "supers." Quite frequently in our sham Indian battles he would run up to the "Indians" (the supers), and putting his pistol close to their legs, would fire at them and burn them with the powder, instead of shooting over their heads. ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... have been a thousand times more tolerable than that simple idea of solid size. My aching mind was fixed and riveted down upon the mere quality of vastness, vastness, vastness, and was not permitted to invest with it any particular object. If I could have done so, the torment would have ceased. When at last I was roused from this state of suffering, I could not of course in those days (knowing no verbal metaphysics, and no metaphysics at all, except by the dreadful experience of an abstract ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... that what Plato, in the "Cratylus," made Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest. For, when they wish to explain the nature of any God, they first examine his name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their turn. How saith Socrates? "I bethink me of a very new and ingenious ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... and immortal is in no way solicitous or uneasy on any account, neither does he torment or tease others; anger is unworthy of his greatness ... for all these things are the property ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... angry eyes, she began to take a naughty comfort to herself in her unexpected proximity. She drew a little closer to him on purpose to annoy Lucy; and then, when she found that he was short-sighted and could not find his places, she found them for him, thus adding to poor Lucy's torment; for this had once been Lucy's own seat, and she herself had seen to her father's comforts. From attending on him, Rosamund began to watch him, and then she found a good deal of food for meditation. In short, it is to be feared that she did not follow the service as she ought to have done. For the ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... People may, if they please, call it the radical evil of human nature—a name which will at least serve those with whom a word stands for an explanation. I say, however, that it is the will to live, which, more and more embittered by the constant sufferings of existence, seeks to alleviate its own torment by causing torment in others. But in this way a man gradually develops in himself real cruelty and malice. The observation may also be added that as, according to Kant, matter subsists only through the antagonism of the powers of expansion ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... person dies is founded on the idea that the minister of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it against some closed door, (which alone would serve the purpose,) crammed it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was likely to be miserably pinched and squeezed by the movement on casual occasion of such door or lid. An open or swinging door frustrated this, and the fiends had to try some other locality. The friends of the departed were ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... my word to my father," continued Balthasar; "and because it is a principle of mine, that man must never gratify his passions, least of all that of love. My conviction is, that our life is a state of torment and woe; and the more we try to escape from these feelings, the more awful vengeance do our terrours afterward take upon us. As to why this is so, who ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... was hated, and thus had no protection against treachery. One evening as I left school I was struck in the back by a handful of small stones tied in a handkerchief. When the valet, who punished the perpetrator, told this to my mother she exclaimed: "That dreadful child! he will always be a torment to us." ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... notary, without being recognized by the men. The marriage-contract is signed, and the lovers disappear to return in their true characters, full of righteous contempt. Isabella and Rosaura make believe to be conscience-stricken, and for a long while torment and deceive their angry bridegrooms. But at last they grow tired of teasing, they present the disguised Dolores, and they put their lovers to shame by showing that all was a farce. Of course the gentlemen humbly ask their pardon, and old Onofrio is ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... passed, without her receiving any news of Don Rafael; and her cheek, gradually growing paler, with the blue circles darkening around her eyes, bore witness to the mental torment she ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... there was a dear little naughty girl, not bad, she would not have been so dear had she been really bad, but just naughty sometimes, and I must confess "sometimes" came pretty often. She had all sorts of loving scolding names, such as "precious torment," "darling bother," and she kept her poor dear grandmother on a continuous trot to see what mischief she was in, and frightened her mother (who thought everybody must want to steal Zay) by hiding behind the Missouri currant ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... but I supposed her greatness would come out in her conversation. I gave it all the opportunities I could, but I was not disappointed when I found her only a dull, kind woman. This was why I liked her—she rested me so from literature. To myself literature was an irritation, a torment; but Greville Fane slumbered in the intellectual part of it like a Creole in a hammock. She was not a woman of genius, but her faculty was so special, so much a gift out of hand, that I have often wondered ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... King and by the peril of the Church. No situation could be more painful or perplexing than that of the old Cavalier who found himself in arms against the throne. The scruples which had not prevented him from repairing to the Dutch camp began to torment him cruelly as soon as he was there. His mind misgave him that he had committed a crime. At all events he had exposed himself to reproach, by acting in diametrical opposition to the professions of his whole life. He felt insurmountable ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... India have turned the Station of Kashima into a prison; and, because there is no help for the poor souls who are now lying there in torment, I write this story, praying that the Government of India may be moved to scatter the European population to ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... second theory of inconstancy rested upon the first theory of supposed love, and that upon guesses and surmises, so that the whole edifice was just as shadowy and unsubstantial as it could well be. But then it is curious to see how much real torment people manage to extract from ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the Book of Genesis," said the Hare, "but what does dominion mean? Does this Book of Genesis say that it means the right to torment that which is ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... friendly, somewhat sweet expression usual to it when all was calm within. As for Cleave himself, his nature owned a certain primal flow and bigness. There were few fixed and rigid barriers. Injured pride and resentment did not lift themselves into reefs against which the mind must break in torment. Rather, his being swept fluid, making no great account of obstacles, accepting all turns of affairs, drawing them into its main current, and moving onward toward some goal, hardly self-conjectured, but simple, humane, and universal. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... unnatural convulsion which they occasion. In proportion to the dazzling and seducing nature of error will be the greatness of the triumphs of truth: the demand for conviction and firm belief will be strong and pressing in proportion to the torment occasioned by the pangs of doubt. But doubt was necessary to elicit these errors; the knowledge of the disease had to precede its cure. Truth suffers no loss if a vehement youth fails in finding it, in the same way ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... believed, for example, that the soul continued in existence after death, and that persons would be unhappy unless buried in tombs with suitable offerings, and that if left unburied, or without suitable offerings, the souls of these persons would return to torment the living, Inasmuch as in the patriarchal family only sons could perform religious rites, that is, could make offerings to the departed spirits, these superstitions acted as a powerful stimulus to preserve the family ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... by her madness and cruelty increased. At first she made a pretext of some act of carelessness on the part of the child to torment her. Afterwards she did not stop there, but she did it when it came into her mind, or when her physical state impelled her to do so. One torture of her own invention was that of pricking her hands with a needle, and she delighted in seeing them covered with indentures ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... continually forming committees or circles for this purpose or that, purposes which fizzled out at about the third meeting of each group. Esther Tidditt was supposed to be in charge of the kitchen on this particular morning, but she had gone into the committee meeting in order to torment Elvira and Mrs. Brackett, ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... London banker, formerly member of Parliament for Greenwich, I had been called upon to set to sleep, and to arrest a continuous barking cough from which a young lady who was staying in the house was suffering, and who, consequently, was a torment to herself and her friends. I thought this a good opportunity for a control experiment, and I sat her down in front of a lighted candle which I assured her that I had previously mesmerized. Presently her cough ceased and she fell into a profound sleep, ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... intolerable heat. As the day advanced so did our sufferings increase. It was a dead calm, the sun perpendicular over us, actually burning that part of our bodies which rose clear of the water. I could have welcomed even a shark to relieve me of my torment; but I thought of Celeste, and I clung to life. Towards the afternoon I felt sick and dizzy; my resolution failed me; my vision was imperfect; but I was roused by Swinburne, who cried out, "A boat, by all that's gracious! Hang on a little longer, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... let him go, and he knew it. Hence his cruel self-torture of fatigue, his cruel exercise of courage. He who hung his head in his milk in torment when I asked him a question in German, what courage had he not needed to take this his very first trip out of England, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Blind anger and scorn against all who surrounded her were his first emotions; there was something of martyrdom in her position; she, essentially so good and noble, to be dragged here before these narrow-natured slaves of an ignoble social order, in all probability to be condemned to miserable torment by men who had no shadow of understanding of her character ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... no flavor in his mouth, and though the gin maddened his spirit, it could not drown his wretchedness, for deep within him, like a maggot in a bread-fruit, was the torment of love. Sometimes in prison he would lower his head like a cow, and run at the wall, exclaiming: "I will die, I will die!" And then he would fall, with his beautiful hair all matted with blood, and his beautiful body next to lifeless, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... very pathetic sketch of his own miserable boyhood in the strangely ordered home in Milan, with his callous, tyrannical father, his quick-tempered mother, and the superadded torment of his Aunt Margaret's presence. Fazio Cardano was a man of rigorous sobriety, and he seems moreover to have atoned for his early irregularities by the practice of that austere piety which Jerome notices more than once as a characteristic of his old age.[177] ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... gnawing pain at my heart, The vision had vanished,—but oh, the smart Of the wound, which no time can ever heal, Was a torment, which only lost souls can feel. Yet in spite of the pain, the woe, the despair, I dote, as I look on a lock of dark hair, That I culled from the head, Of the loveliest maid; Many long years ago,— ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... may be proved from the love and justice of God revealed in Scripture. The Protestants divide—in theory, that is—mankind into two classes, the righteous, who are destined to infinite bliss; the wicked, who are doomed to infinite torment; in which latter class, to make their arbitrary division exhaustive, they put of course nine hundred and ninety-nine out of the thousand, and doom to everlasting companionship with Borgias and Cagliostros, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... had two little daughters, Meeky and Squeaky. Meeky was a good little mouse, and did everything her mother told her. Squeaky was very brave and daring, but she was the torment of ...
— Mouser Cats' Story • Amy Prentice
... them with a smile. "I guess you had better. It would be a shame to torment this young man after ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... even frenzied enough to think over what he would have done, if such a thing had been—of her utter helplessness against that which raged in him—of the grey thickness of the walls where he might have held and wrought his will upon her—insult, torment, death. His alcohol-excited brain ran riot—but, when it did its foolish worst, he was baffled ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... must spring up from the heart, like a wild flower from seed God plants in virgin forest soil, to bring contentment with its blossoming. The sunshine which falls upon it must be pure and bright from heaven. Plant it in an atmosphere of sin, and that which might have been a holy passion becomes a torment, bitter in ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... and the most beauteous Goddess, with the nodding of her head, shook the fields loaded with the heavy crops; and contrived {for him} a kind of punishment, lamentable, if he had not, for his crimes, been deserving of the sympathy of none, {namely}, to torment him with deadly Famine. And since that Goddess could not be approached by herself (for the Destinies do not allow Ceres and Famine to come together), in such words as these she addressed rustic Oreas, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... sleep I heard what you said." "Ah! fair sire, you never heard it, and I dare say it was a dream." "Now you are coming to me with lies. I hear you calmly lying to me. But if you do not tell me the truth now, you will come to repent of it later." "Sire, since you torment me thus, I will tell you the whole truth, and keep nothing back. But I am afraid that you will not like it. In this land they all say—the dark, the fair, and the ruddy—that it is a great pity that ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
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