"Catastrophe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opening of an era which can mean either great achievement or terrible catastrophe for ourselves ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... sun; and they were then strown over the surface of the island, destroying all the pastures, so that many thousands of cattle, horses, and sheep perished. But worse than that, upwards of nine thousand persons lost their lives by this dreadful catastrophe. ...
— Wonders of Creation • Anonymous
... general beneficence which those lively exhibitions are so capable of raising in the human mind, might be of great service, when directed to right ends, and induced by proper motives: particularly where the actions which the catastrophe is designed to punish, are not set in such advantageous lights, as shall destroy the end of the moral, and make the vice that ought to be censured, imitable; where instruction is kept in view all the way, and where vice ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... fleet was wrecked. His brother, Prince Maurice, was lost with his ship, the Defiance, the only ship saved being the Swallow. Prince Rupert returned in the Swallow to France in the same year. Hitherto the prince had been a restless, clever man, "very sparkish in his dress," but this catastrophe to his fleet and the loss of his brother broke his spirit, and he retired to England, where he died in his bed in 1682 at ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... home. Last week, only, I upset the vanilla bottle, and then we were completely out of vanilla till just yesterday." She smiled again confidingly, and Billy tried to seem very sympathetic—though of a truth, to be out of vanilla did not at that moment seem to him a serious catastrophe. "And really, I like tea better, you know. I only said coffee because father told me cowboys drink it a great deal. Tea is so much quicker ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... "in several ways that appalling catastrophe may have taken place; and, should this be the case, how many questions will be asked of history, but asked in vain! As for Rome,—what other great name in the present strife pitted against England,—for ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... had few adherents except Aronson and Weekes, C.O., now languishing in Dartmoor. The second thought that the Allies' cause was tainted, and that Britain had contributed as much as Germany to the catastrophe. This included all the adherents of the L.D.A.—or League of Democrats against Aggression—a very proud body. The third and much the largest, which embraced everybody else, held that we had fought long enough and ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... nothing that man could do: until such time as the natural drainage of the plain and the parched substratum absorbed the superfluous moisture, the brigade was as helpless as a steamer with a broken screw-shaft. Mercifully for the staff, the catastrophe had overtaken the brigade within a mile of a fair-sized farm; and eventually, after much labour in the mire, the brigadier and his immediate following were able to claim its hospitality. Luckily it was occupied. A smiling good-natured ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... them; and, instead of trusting everybody, put no faith in any one. This conduct ultimately recoiled upon themselves; their shares fell in value; some of them became bankrupt, while the others had a hard struggle to avoid that catastrophe; and the public lost all confidence in banks and bankers. The worst part of the tale remains to be told; namely, that many widows and orphans, whose all was invested in bank shares, were utterly ruined and reduced to destitution by the failures ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... on her hat outside in the now darkening and deserted offices, it seemed to her that the roar of men's passions was a gale through the silence. Quite irrelevantly she was clutched with a terror of catastrophe. The possibility of fire! Only last week there had been a devastating one in a children's hospital out in Columbus, Ohio. She beat down these flames of fear. Yet what strange and horrible passions lay just a scratch beneath the surface of the day-by-days. A little girl aged four had once ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... lady. It's impossible; don't consider any such catastrophe for a moment. Come, Constance, I really think we ought to be going.—Er, you see, Mrs. Eustace, you can't believe—that is, don't let anything Gustavo says trouble you. With all respect for his many fine ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... in this city a very considerable riot, in which about one hundred people have been probably killed. It was the most unprovoked, and is therefore, justly, the most unpitied catastrophe of that kind I ever knew. Nor did the wretches know what they wanted, except to do mischief. It seems to have had no particular connection with the great national question now in agitation. The want of bread is very seriously dreaded through the whole kingdom. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... acts of violence that he might not himself supply his opponents with the pretext which they sought, but he had not been able to prevent a great portion of his faithful partisans—who remembered the catastrophe of Tiberius, and were well acquainted with the designs of the aristocracy—from appearing in arms, fearing that, amid the immense excitement on both sides, quarrels could hardly be avoided. The consul Lucius Opimius offered the usual sacrifice in the porch of the Capitoline temple, one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... very popular in the highest circles of France, and consequently, owing to difference of character, would be less relished by the same circles in England. I suspect the author to be a great admirer of Chateaubriand's "Atala," whose death is brought to mind by the catastrophe of Elode's. Here, however, the similitude ends. There is nothing to be said respecting the comparative features of Charles the Bold and Chactas, except that the Indian possessed those qualities of the heart which ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... felt at all, it was probably rather satisfaction at an event happening than sorrow for the death of the person. It seems Lord Londonderry had been unwell for some time, but not seriously, and a few days before this catastrophe he became much worse, and was very much dejected. He told Lord Granville some time ago that he was worn out with fatigue, and he told Count Munster the other day that he was very ill indeed. The Duke of Wellington saw him on Friday, and was so ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... bellowed out in the empty room: "What! What!" in such a fiendish tone as to astonish himself. The footsteps stopped outside the door. He stood openmouthed, maddened and still, as if in the midst of a catastrophe. The door-handle rattled lightly. It seemed to him that the walls were coming apart, that the furniture swayed at him; the ceiling slanted queerly for a moment, a tall wardrobe tried to topple over. ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Mephistopheles find her. Faust urges her to fly with them, but she refuses, and places her reliance for salvation upon earnest prayer, and sorrow for the wrong she has done. Pleading for forgiveness, she expires; and as Mephistopheles exults at the catastrophe he has wrought, angels appear amid the music of the celestial choirs and bear the sufferer ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... the miracle is of importance for the development of the Evangelist's purpose, in that it makes the immediate occasion of the embittered hostility which finally precipitates the catastrophe of the Cross. Therefore the great length to which the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... there happened a final catastrophe. The palace at Cnossus was once more destroyed, and never rebuilt or re-inhabited. Iron took the place of Bronze, and Aegean art, as a living thing, ceased on the Greek mainland and in the Aegean isles including Crete, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Ned Hinkley and his widowed sister found it their policy to depart also, seeking superior objects in another county; and at this moment Charlemont is an abandoned and deserted region. It seemed to decline from the moment when the cruel catastrophe occurred which precipitated Margaret Cooper from her pride of place. Beautiful as the village appeared at the opening of our legend, it was doomed to as rapid a decay as growth. "Something ails it now—the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... compromitted the King; they saved him from the rage of the People, to exasperate that rage and bring on the catastrophe prepared for centuries; it was a scaffold that the vengeance of the Templars demanded. The secret movers of the French Revolution had sworn to overturn the Throne and the Altar upon the Tomb of Jacques de Molai. When Louis ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... earth and the works which are therein may be burnt up. It tells us that this is no impossible fancy: that the fires imprisoned below our feet can, and may, burst up and destroy mankind and the works of man in one great catastrophe, to which the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755—when 60,000 persons were killed, crushed, drowned, or swallowed up in a few minutes—would be a merely ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... he to have acted? The union was impossible; the speedier their separation, therefore, clearly the better. Unfortunate, indeed, had been his absence from Hellingsley; unquestionably his presence might have prevented the catastrophe. Oswald should have hindered all this. And yet Mr. Millbank could not shut his eyes to the devotion of his son to Coningsby. He felt he could count on no assistance in this respect from that quarter. ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... must have been an attractive house, surrounded by large grounds, and enjoying a superb view of the city and the Golden Horn. It was burnt[486] in the fire which devastated the district on the 25th June 1784, and since that catastrophe its grounds have been converted into market gardens or left waste, and its chapel has been a desecrated pile. But its proud name still haunts the site, calling to mind political relations which have long ceased to exist. ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... powerful beauty powerless. She knew she could discover the cause of the present situation the moment she chose to do so; but, for the first time, perhaps, a woman recoiled before a secret. Human life is sadly fertile in situations where, as a result of either too much meditation or of some catastrophe, our thoughts seem to hold to nothing; they have no substance, no point of departure, and the present has no hooks by which to hold to the past or fasten on the future. This was Mademoiselle de Verneuil's condition at the present moment. Leaning back in the carriage, she sat there like an ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... fellowship, even the rejected poetry, had not caused him such misery as this. He had loved a young lady, and had been accepted;—and then the young lady had jilted him. At this time of his life he was about thirty; and as to the outside world, he was absolutely dumfounded by the catastrophe. Up to this period he had been a sportsman in a moderate degree, fishing a good deal, shooting a little, and devoted to hunting, to the extent of a single horse. But when the blow came, he never fished or shot, or hunted again. I think that the young lady would hardly have treated him so badly ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative as in poetry. Only the metrical Morte—from which, it would appear, Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the manner in which genius transproses or transverses—has, for that reason, for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind. But before we come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches—the chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral—which he also, in some cases at least, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... being resolved into a mental condition, and a material reality; and the consequence was, that he fell into the very errors which it was the professed business of his life to denounce and exterminate. How this catastrophe came about we shall endeavour ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... this look of peace that made Ann Leighton regard this latest as the lightest of all the calamities that had fallen upon her frail shoulders. She felt that in a measure the catastrophe had brought the Reverend Orme back—nearer to her heart. Her heart, which had seemed to atrophy and shrivel from disuse since the poignant fullness of the last days of Shenton, was suddenly revivified. Love, pity, tender care,—all the discarded emotions,—returned ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... failure of his efforts, for it was this minister who had in the first place come to him. The steeplejack had fallen, so to speak, right into the middle of his department; and with the King's donation coming on the top the catastrophe bulked large. For, be it known, on the order of the day for the morrow's sitting of Parliament was a motion of the Labor Party, directing censure on the Government for having brought pressure to bear on contractors and caused work to be continued upon Government buildings when Labor and Capital ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... transactions, the testimony which he collected, somewhat at random, is of high authority. The reader will find Oviedo's account of the Inca's death extracted, in the original, among the other notices of this catastrophe in ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... rushed at full speed past the temple of Mercury, which stood in a grove before the city. Evidently people knew of the catastrophe, for there was an uncommon movement in front of the temple. While passing, Vinicius saw crowds on the steps and between the columns. These people holding torches were hastening to put themselves under protection ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... of Darius, evoked from the shadowland by the libations of Atossa and by the appealing cries of the Chorus. The latter, indeed, hardly dare to address the kingly ghost: but Atossa bravely narrates to him the catastrophe, of which, in the lower world, Darius has known nothing, though he realizes that disaster, soon or late, is the lot of mortal power. As the tale is unrolled, a spirit of prophecy possesses him, and he foretells the coming slaughter of Plataea; then, ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... time to recover from the shock of the recent arrests, they were just beginning to wonder what would happen if their unsuspecting friends from commando walked into the pitfalls prepared for them, racking their brains for plans to avert such a catastrophe, when the very thing they feared ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... convulsions. It is an agent, however, too hazardous to be trusted out of medical hands, and even when the doctor administers it himself, the parents must fully recognise the fact that, inasmuch as the child may die during a fit quite independently of breathing chloroform, so the occurrence of that catastrophe during its employment is not to be made a subject of self-reproach to them, or of blame to ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... of a powder magazine, absolutely alone, a single spark would have blown him to atoms and might have caused a catastrophe which would have brought untold evil. But he was as calm as a May morning. He walked through them, the man who told me said, as if he did not know there was a soul in a hundred miles of him, and as if Absalom were only something ...
— The Spectre In The Cart - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... encounter. Mrs Askew found that some parties of men had gone along the coast to the eastward with ropes, on the possibility of some of the wreck driving on shore in that direction, for they were not aware that the ship had gone down, the mist having come on almost at the moment of the catastrophe. Some of them shook their heads behind the lady's back when they heard of it. The captain would be tempted to go looking about round the spot till darkness should come on, and then the return on shore would be doubly hazardous. One thing was certain, that ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston
... Sancha served to hasten on the catastrophe which was to stain the throne of Naples with blood: one might almost fancy that God wished to spare this angel of love and resignation the sight of so terrible a spectacle, that she offered herself as a propitiatory sacrifice to redeem the crimes ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... no inharmonious prelude to the last quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dulness of the senses there is a gentle preparation for the final insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the last step on a long decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and the attitude more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to a man, had delayed; rather they had not considered that there was any immediate danger from fire; it was too early in the season for the grass to be tinder dry, as it would become a month or six weeks later. They were wholly unprepared for the catastrophe, so far as any expectation of it went. But for all that they knew exactly what to do and how to go about doing it, and they did not waste a single ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... Rousseau wrote a love-story, and sentiment became the rage. An artisan has a day to spare, and takes his family to a garden or a dance. Human existence, thus embellished, impulsive, and caricatured, becomes a continuous melodrama, with an occasional catastrophe induced by political revolutions. Louis XIV., the most characteristic king France ever had, is a genuine representative of this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a certain beetle, of whom we have all heard, could extract filth even from pearls, if we have examples that fire has destroyed and water deluged, shall therefore pearls, fire, and water be condemned. In consequence of the remarkable catastrophe which ends my play, I may justly claim for it a place among books of morality, for crime meets at last with the punishment it deserves; the lost one enters again within the pale of the law, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... did) on mountain slopes, the high souled king, overwhelmed with grief and bathed in sweat, came to a distressful condition. And saying,—It is even so—that virtuous lord of men, immersed in an ocean of grief anxiously proceeded to ascertain the cause (of that catastrophe). And that mighty-armed and high-souled one, acquainted with the divisions of time and place, could not settle his course of action. Having thus bewailed much in this strain, the virtuous Yudhishthira, the son of Dharma or Tapu, restrained his soul and began to reflect in his mind as to who ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the horrible abyss into which civilization has fallen. At any rate, some such machinery must be put into successful operation before any limitation of national armaments can be effected. The war has shown to what a catastrophe competitive national arming has led, and would probably again lead the most civilized nations of Europe. Shall the white race despair of escaping from this hell? The only way of escape in sight is the establishment of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... surpassed by any port in the world. Vessels from England, bound to Port Lincoln, should run along in about 35 degrees 20 minutes south latitude, until they arrive in 135 degrees 20 minutes east longitude, when they may haul up to the north-east, and make Cape Catastrophe. After arriving near the Cape, they may then shape a course to pass between it and Williams' Island. There are strong tide ripplings here, which, to a stranger, would present the appearance of reefs; but as the channel is perfectly clear, no danger need be apprehended. Having ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... its progress. On and onward it would sweep, with the steady gait of destiny, until the continents would melt with fervent heat, the atmosphere glare with the ominous conflagration, and all living creatures, in land and sea and air, perish in one universal catastrophe." ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... was necessary to make the Liberals fully understand their power. He had fully expected in this way to elect a Conservative member for the city of York. Great was his chagrin, therefore, when he found the Liberal candidate returned. Upon investigation he discovered, as he told me, that the catastrophe was due to the activity of a local Irish priest, who was a devoted Fenian, utterly opposed to the Parliamentary programme, and who had exerted his authority over the local Irish to bring them to the polls for ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... I told Mrs. Meredith, and a great deal besides, for I was still in the first violence of bitter, self-reproachful grief. I wanted to be rid of the child, the cause of the catastrophe, whom I hated as vehemently as I had loved its mother, and I begged Mrs. Meredith to help me to dispose of it in such a fashion that, to me at least, the little one should be to all intents and purposes as dead as she was. Babies, I knew, had not a very strong hold ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... and after the final awards, the elect being caught up "to meet the Lord in the air" (I. Thes. iv. 17), the heaven and the earth would be reduced to chaos through the agency of fire. In reference to that grand catastrophe we find it recorded in II. Peter iii. 10, that "the heavens shall pass away with a great noise and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... consequences of them, which wasted Grecia-Magna, before the Roman power prevailed in that part of Italy. They are perhaps exaggerated; therefore I shall only rate them at one million. Let us hasten to open that great scene which establishes the Roman empire, and forms the grand catastrophe of the ancient drama. This empire, whilst in its infancy, began by an effusion of human blood scarcely credible. The neighboring little states teemed for new destruction: the Sabines, the Samnites, the AEqui, the Volsci, the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... no love lost between him and whatever bore that name. Even now, if the untravelled one's first acquaintance be not distinguished by an unlovely ducking, so much the worse. The ducking must come. Caution must be learnt by catastrophe. No one can ever know how unstable a thing is a birch canoe, unless he has felt it slide away from under his misplaced feet. Novices should take nude practice in empty birches, lest they spill themselves and the load of full ones,—a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... journey to Italy. We had all bungled, the whole wretched bunch of us, Peter and Blenkiron and myself ... I had a feeling at the back of my head that there was something in it all that I couldn't understand, that the catastrophe could not be quite as simple as it seemed. But I had no power to think, with the insolent figure of Ivery dominating the room ... Thank God I had a bullet waiting for him. That was the one fixed point ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... every play is caused always by the folly or fault of a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom and virtue of a woman, and failing that, there is none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children; the virtue of his one true daughter would have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he had ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the register, I was affected at a coincidence which conveyed a tribute of respect to the memory of the great author of striking significance, while it recorded the painful catastrophe which has broken over upon the American Republic. It was a sad sight to me to see the profane and suicidal antagonisms which have rent it in twain brought to the shrine of this great memory and graven upon its sacred ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... deficit alter aureus." This may be the epitome of her life's history, and upon it one may moralise at will; and certainly readers of the "Tragedy of Cammilla de' Martelli" will admit that a spoilt life is as great a catastrophe as ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... him, and sinking sensations troubled the pit of his stomach. At seven he telephoned to Winifred by trunk call. No! Fleur had not been to Green Street. Then where was she? Visions of his beloved daughter rolled up in her pretty frills, all blood and dust-stained, in some hideous catastrophe, began to haunt him. He went to her room and spied among her things. She had taken nothing—no dressing-case, no Jewellery. And this, a relief in one sense, increased his fears of an accident. Terrible to be helpless when his loved one was missing, especially when he couldn't bear fuss ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... which bordered on farce. But we are inclined to infer from some passages, both in "Cecilia" and "Camilla," that she might have attained equal distinction in the pathetic. We have formed this judgment less from those ambitious'scenes of distress which lie near the catastrophe of each of those novels, than from some exquisite strokes of natural tenderness which take us, here and there, by surprise. We would mention as examples, Mrs. Hill's account of her little boy's death in "Cecilia," and the parting of Sir Hugh ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the catastrophe of the other stories. They almost invariably close in the sullen gloom of a wet March evening, when we wonder afresh if ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... intoxication of her love, he never dreamed that her father's life was a prolonged punishment; that, day and night, a terrible future opened its vista before him; and that each moment of his existence brought him nearer and nearer to a dreadful catastrophe. He had not heard the inexorable sentence of the notary:—"Four months more and your bond expires, when all you possess in this world will be sold by the officers of justice to ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... proceedings, tho of a popular character, were thrown away, because a rumor had become universally current, "that the very time when the city was in flames, Nero, going on the stage of his private theater, sang 'The Destruction of Troy,' assimilating the present disaster to that catastrophe ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... night might cause them to incur. As Clarence looked idly on the workmen, and painfully on the crumbling and fearful descent I have described, he little thought that that spot would, a few years after, become the scene of a catastrophe affecting in the most powerful degree the interests of his future life. Our young traveller put up his horse at a small inn, bearing the Westborough arms, and situated at a short distance from the park gates. Now that he was so near ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was to refute this calumny that the learned African bishop elaborated his great defense of Christ's kingdom, the "Catholic Church, which should include all nations and speak in all tongues." In Books 1-5 St. Augustine shows that the catastrophe of Rome was not due to the neglect of the old mythological superstitions; and in Books 6-10 that the heathen cult was helpless for the life after death. Books 11-14 deal with the origin of the two cities, namely, of God and the World; Books 15-18 ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... know whether you will think my plan for killing Mark a clever one. Perhaps not. But if I do deserve any praise in the matter, I think I deserve it for the way I pulled myself together in the face of the unexpected catastrophe of your arrival. Yes, I got a window open, Mr. Gillingham, under your very nose; the right window too, you were kind enough to say. And the keys—yes, that was clever of you, but I think I was cleverer. I deceived you over the keys, Mr. Gillingham, ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... Washington. You did wrong, Richard, not to take me with you, when I wanted so much to go. I know that, after what happened, you and your mother think you were fully justified in what you did; but, Richard, you are mistaken. The very means you took to avert a catastrophe hastened it instead. The cruel disappointment and terrible homesickness which I endured hastened our baby's birth, and cost its little life. Had it lived, Richard, I should have been a better woman from what I am now. It would have been something for me to love, and oh, ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... "forced draught." His nerves, like iron, had been drawn tight—to the snapping point: only some great climax of relief would disentangle the tense feelings which he now controlled with external calmness, and sub-surface tremors which warned him of an approaching catastrophe. ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... in addition to the wear-and-tear of the Readings in England and America, the nervous shock of that terrible railway accident at Staplehurst, on the 9th of June, 1865, the lamentable catastrophe of exactly five years afterwards to the very day, that of the 9th of June, 1870, becomes readily comprehensible. Because of his absorption in his task, however, all through, he was unconscious for the most part of the wasting influence of his labours, or, if he was so at all towards the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... leave her lips. A nearer and fiercer bolt had shot to earth at that instant, striking a tree so near that the noise of its fall mingled with the crash of the heavens. When it had ceased, he had gone. He could not face the look with which she met this new catastrophe. ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... herself wishes, to have shewn the Frankness of her Disposition, and to have openly avowed her Love. But Lovelace, by his own intriguing Spirit, made her Reserves, and then complained of them; and as she was engaged with such a Man, I think the Catastrophe's being what is called Unhappy, is but the natural Consequence of such an Engagement; tho', I confess, I was not displeased that the Report of this Catastrophe met with so many Objections, as it proved what an Impression the Author's favourite Character had made on those Minds ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... Spain of the ships that escaped from the catastrophe of this expedition, it was known there that Diego Flores de Valdes had persuaded the duke to infringe the royal instructions. Accordingly, the king had given strict orders in all his ports, wherever ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... taken place in their department during the late gales. They were lodged in a house adjoining to the morai that was lent us by the priests. Such were our arrangements on shore. I shall now proceed to the account of those other transactions with the natives, which led, by degrees, to the fatal catastrophe of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... the peace that must end this war it is taken for granted that that peace must be followed by some definite concert of power which will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again. Every lover of mankind, every sane and thoughtful man, ...
— Why We are at War • Woodrow Wilson
... The catastrophe was prevented by the clown Wamba, who, springing betwixt his master and Isaac, and exclaiming, in answer to the Prince's defiance, "Marry, that will I!" opposed to the beard of the Jew a shield of brawn, which he plucked from beneath his cloak, ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... fallen on the man she had robbed, the shame and self-reproach, which had been lulled asleep for a while, which now woke up with renewed power to torment and irritate—these were too much for her self-control, and while Mrs. Ormonde and De Burgh eagerly discussed the catastrophe, she kept silence and struggled ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... number, five were women, and three of them were among the dead. Of the remaining twenty-four bodies, five were men, and the rest lads, from twelve to seventeen years of age. Among the dead men was a pye-man, who was said to have fallen first, and caused the dreadful catastrophe. A great number of the pupils in attendance happened to be collected in St. Bartholomew's Hospital at the time, and afforded prompt assistance; and Dr. Powell, and a Surgeon, who were both upon the spot, directed their ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Alexius was solemnly crowned with his father in the dome of St. Sophia. In the first days of his reign, the people, already blessed with the restoration of plenty and peace, was delighted by the joyful catastrophe of the tragedy; and the discontent of the nobles, their regret, and their fears, were covered by the polished surface of pleasure and loyalty The mixture of two discordant nations in the same capital might have been pregnant with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... Government for the benefit of a part—the first three of the parties above described were in substantial accord as against the fourth. If they could or would have acted unitedly, they, could certainly have carried the election, and averted the catastrophe which followed. Nor were efforts wanting ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... had lost everything except what was on their bodies when the catastrophe occurred. Their horses were gone, and they hadn't a gun between them; nothing but two revolvers, and about a half ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... well the danger that went with her up the line. It laid strong hold upon her, as the loosened brake shot the bucket up the dizzy cable. As she was swept up higher and higher she could only hope and pray that the catastrophe which she knew was coming might be delayed until the level stretch above the Falls was reached, where the cables ran so near the ground she might descend in safety. She had given Joe the right number, and she knew that nothing ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... the oration from the chimney-corner, delivered with suitable gesticulations while he stood drying himself at the fire after the catastrophe of the swamp, a silence of some minutes followed. The promise of the colt made to the priest with such an air of authority, was a finale which the father did not expect, and by which he was not a ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... Mr. Seymour, I feel as though we were all of us upon the edge of some dreadful catastrophe—as though there were about to be a mighty change, and beyond it another life, something new and unfamiliar. It came over me at dinner—that was why I left the table. Quite suddenly I looked, and all the people were different, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... will grow old and die like an individual, and that therefore some step must be taken to save from extinction the particular species which he regards as divine. The only means he can think of to avert the catastrophe is to kill a member of the species in whose veins the tide of life is still running strong and has not yet stagnated among the fens of old age. The life thus diverted from one channel will flow, he fancies, more freshly and freely ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... it was anchored at the float, he liked to be lifted into it and lie there rocking with the wash of the river. It made a change which he declared rested him, and it was through this simple and apparently harmless pleasure that a terrible catastrophe took place. ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... a magnanimous thing we should be shirking our responsibilities in the most cowardly fashion. It is bad enough to know, that we have such cynical political sophists in Congress, that they would even suffer that catastrophe to innocent people in the Philippines, if they thought it would ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... catastrophe. In a moment of reckless adventure my pupils tried a pound cake without a recipe. A pound cake can be nothing else but what it says. That meant a pound of everything and Japanese soda is doubly strong. That was a week ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... matter now kindled a great fire, and a woman's reasonable irritation, which he had himself created, produced for Raymond Ironsyde a very complete catastrophe. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... minute. It was nothing less than a catastrophe, in the dead of an Arctic winter and in a game-abandoned land, to lose their grub. They were not panic-stricken, but they were busy looking the situation squarely in the face and considering. Joe Hines ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... grew restless. The loneliness of the place oppressed him and he wanted to hear of Knapp. Knapp had been caught and Knapp would talk and he burned to know what Knapp would say of him. He was sure the man knew little; he had foreseen such a catastrophe and been as secret as the grave, but Knapp might have picked up something. Anyway he wanted to know just how he stood. Food, his greatest need, supplied, his next was news, someone to tell ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... catastrophe recorded in the last chapter, Mrs. Tibbs had been very shy of young-lady boarders. Her present inmates were all lords of the creation, and she availed herself of the opportunity of their assemblage at the dinner-table, to announce ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... seriously mean, Miss Gould, that you are going to run the risk of another such—such catastrophe? It is absurd. I cannot believe it of you! Is ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... their souls!" the captain said earnestly. "I am afraid she is gone. In fair fight one strives to do as much damage as possible, but such a catastrophe as this is awful. I trust the other ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... The catastrophe of which he had been the author played perhaps a part in his taciturnity. But let us hasten to say that in battle, and more especially during the last campaign against the Arabs, Roland had been too frequently obliged to jump his horse over the bodies of his victims to be so deeply ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... allowed on the stage; and into that arm-chair Miss Marrable sank, preparatory to a fit of hysterics. Magdalen stepped forward at the first convulsion; snatched the letter from Miss Marrable's hand; and stopped the threatened catastrophe. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... its filmy veil still lay in its white box—a fairy garment that had survived the catastrophe. Dinah sat and looked at it dully. The light of her single candle shimmered upon the soft folds. How ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... yet through all his heart yearned over his wife, for he realised that, great as was his own sorrow, hers was still harder to bear. He might reason with her till doomsday, he might prove over and again that for the night's catastrophe she was as free from blame as himself, yet Esmeralda, being Esmeralda, would turn her back on reason and persist in turning the knife in her own wound. Speech failed him; but the voiceless prayer of his heart found an answer, for no words that he could ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... two lovers when they met again on either side of the grating in the Carmelite convent should now be comprehended to the full, and the violence of the passion awakened in either soul will doubtless explain the catastrophe of the story. ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... it will!" said Geoffrey, still awaiting the catastrophe. It was a great bore, of course, in fact a nuisance, but it ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... of Spain. A beacon or two had been piled on the hills, by order of the authorities, to pass on the news when it should come; a few lads had disappeared from the countryside to drill in Derby marketplace; but except for these things, all was very much as it had been from the beginning. The expected catastrophe meant little more to such folk than the coming of the Judgment Day—certain, but infinitely remote from the ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... rare event, and it places him at once in communication with the indispensable person whose presence was antecedently unlikely. The very existence of his memoirs would have been jeopardised had the Anadyr reached Point-de-Galle immediately before instead of immediately after the catastrophe which converted Carbuccia. At the beginning of his mission against Masonry, coincidence arranged the last illness of the Cingalese pythoness to the exigencies of his date of arrival; it brought John Campbell to Pondicherry and Phileas Walder to Calcutta; at Singapore it ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... any rational hope of benefit during the incubation, and with the anticipatory purpose of prevention. It must be suggested by a suspicion of the verities of the case, and applied before any rupture has taken place. To prevent this and to antagonize the causes which might precipitate the final catastrophe—the elevation of the toes—resort must be had to the slings and to the application of firm bandages or splints, perhaps of plaster of Paris, with a high shoe, as about the only indications which science and nature ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... anticipate the catastrophe. The play, reader, is extant in choice English, and you will employ a spare half-crown not injudiciously in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... infinite damage to her stockings. George Bertram had handed her down, and when in the act of turning round to give similar assistance to some other adventurous lady, had left her alone on the slippery stones. Of course any young lady would take advantage of such an unguarded moment to get into some catastrophe. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would have been impossible in a well-regulated university, but Percy Bysshe Shelley could not have fitted easily into any system. Born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, on August 4, 1792, simultaneously with the French Revolution, he had more than a drop of wildness in his ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... the news of this overwhelming catastrophe, the Indian Government endeavored to rescue the garrisons of Kandahar and Ghazni, as well as that of Jelalabad; but the Mohammedan troops refused to march against their co-religionists, and the Sikhs also showed great unwillingness. ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough |
