"Sickly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... you think, an exception; at least I am not going to trouble you with antiquated love passages, that, like old faded pictures, require a good deal of varnishing to be at all attractive. But, I confess, I like not to hear so young a girl ridiculing what is, despite the sickly sentiment that so often obscures it, the purest and noblest evidence of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... moment. Leclerc hoped that Toussaint would lead the conversation. But Toussaint was deep in thought. Gazing on the anxious and sickly face of the Captain-General, he was grieving at heart that he, and so many thousands more who might have lived long and useful lives at home, should be laid low, in the course of a bad enterprise against the liberties of the natives. The mournful gaze of his mild eyes confused ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... a wavering line upon the roof, the sickly flame of a candle partially fell upon the human figures before alluded to, throwing them into darkest relief, and casting their opaque and fantastical shadows along the ground. An old coffin upon a bier, we have said, served the mysterious twain for a seat. Between them stood a bottle and a glass, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Americans are plundering the earth far and near for flowers and seeds and ferments of literature in the hope, perhaps vain, of fallowing our thin soil with manure rich and diverse and promiscuous so that the somewhat sickly plants of our own culture may burst sappy and green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives, we should not forget that northwest corner of the Mediterranean where the Langue d'Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of Pierre Vidal, ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... warm-hearted, generous, plucky fellow, with boundless vanity and a romantic vein of maudlin sentiment that seduces him from time to time into the gin-and-water corner of an Indian newspaper. Under the heading of "The Forest Ranger's Lament," or "The Old Shikarry's Tale of Woe," he hiccoughs his column of sickly lines (with St. Vitus's dance in their feet), and then I believe he feels better. I have seen him do it; I have caught him in criminal conversation with a pen and a sheet of paper; ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... he has started on a rampage through the general offices here, I've seen the bond-room clerks grip their desks like they expected to be blown through the windows; and the sickly green tinge on Piddie's face when he comes out from a hectic ten minutes with the big boss is as good a trouble barometer as ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... we love to linger in such a place, amid the thousands of volumes grown dingy with the accumulated dust of years!—We care not for one of your modern libraries, with its spruce shelves, filled with the sickly effusions of romantic triflers—the solemn, philosophical nonsense of Arthur, the dandified affectation of Willis, and the clever but wearisome twittle-twattle of Dickens—once great in himself, now living on the fading reputation of past greatness; we care not to enter a library made up of such ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... were off the Seamew, and a lantern swinging in her hold shed a sickly light upon the sleepy faces of her crew. The mate was at the foc'sle ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... behind the legend for the history. Is it presumptuous to ask our readers to try to understand the thirteenth century and love St. Francis? They will be amply rewarded for the effort, and will soon find an unexpected charm in these too meagre landscapes, these incorporate souls, these sickly imaginations which will pass before their eyes. Love is the true ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... think well of any man that was so much worse than his word. On this we had some disagreement, and I gave him to understand, that I intended to leave the vessel. At this he appeared to be very much dejected; and our mate, who had been very sickly, and whose duty had long devolved upon me, advised him to persuade me to stay: in consequence of which he spoke very kindly to me, making many fair promises, telling me that, as the mate was so sickly, he could not do without me, and that, as the ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... Spectres were; likewise that my Brother is just home from Italy, and on the wing thitherward or somewhither swiftly again; in a word, that all is confusion and flutter with me here,—fit only for silence! My Wife sent me off hitherward, very sickly and unhappy, out of the London dust, several weeks ago; I lingered in Fifeshire, I was in Edinburgh, in Roxburghshire; have some calls to Cumberland, which I believe I must refuse; and prepare to creep ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... fresh, beautifully fresh, and send the Snark along, wing and wing, her wake bubbling, the log-line straight astern. At the end of half an hour, while we were preparing to set the spinnaker, with a few sickly gasps the wind would die away. And so it went. We wagered optimistically on every favourable fan of air that lasted over five minutes; but it never did any good. The fans faded out ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... a sickly grin and opened his mouth to speak, but his jaw dropped instead, and he passed across that frontier which is watched by no ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... will. If he did, I would shoot him as I would a dog. I cannot help being pretty any more than you; I cannot sew myself up in a bag, and shall not try to catch the small-pox, so do not worry me again with this sickly sentiment about respectability, and the duties of a wife. I know my own business, and can ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... be employed in serious consultations, and making the necessary preparations for the ensuing campaign, was idly spent in revels, in gaming, and other debauches unfit for a Catholic court. But warlike Schomberg, who, after the retreat of James, had leisure to remove his sickly soldiers, to bury the dead, and put the few men that remained alive and were healthy into winter quarters of refreshment, took the field early in spring, before Tyrconnell was awake, and reduced the castle of Charlemont, the only place that held for James ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... dark and enigmatical origin. Close at hand is the Place and College of the Sorbonne—silent in the midst of noisy life, solitary in the heart of the most crowded quarter of Paris. A sombre mediaeval gloom pervades that ancient quadrangle; scant tufts of sickly grass grow here and there in the interstices of the pavement; the dust of centuries crust those long rows of windows never opened. A little further on is the Rue des Gres, narrow, crowded, picturesque, one uninterrupted ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the more, as, from a little elf, I've had a high opinion of myself, Though sickly, slender, and ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... to this mystical aspiration of the Psalmist, if we degrade it to be the mere expression of a desire for unbroken residence in a material Temple. He was no sickly, sentimental seeker after cloistered seclusion. He knew the necessities and duties of life far better than in a cowardly way to wish to shirk them, in order that he might loiter in the temple, idle under the pretence of worship. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 'are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in the war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success still be incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and at one mighty blow levels the population with the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... greeted the prodigal good-humouredly enough, and one could read Phil's relief and forgiveness on his smiling face. Master Ned, grateful for an easier ordeal than he had feared, made no exception against Phil in the somewhat sickly amiability he had for all, and we thought that here were reconciliation and the assurance of ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... rude spoiler of so many plans, broke in upon the sanctity and perfect peace of that happy ranch home and ravished it of its treasure, leaving a broken hearted man and a little boy, orphaned and sickly, to be cared for. The ranch was sold, the rancher moved to the city of Edmonton, thence in a few years to a little village some twenty-five miles nearer to the Foothills, where he became the Registrar and Homestead Inspector for ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... quite a boy, delicate and taciturn, at loggerheads with his mother and with her favorites. Marie Louise d'Orleans, elder sister of the young Duchess of Savoy, had married the King of Spain, Charles II., a sickly creature of weak intellect. Louis XIV. felt the necessity of forming new alliances; the old supports of France had all gone over to the enemy. Sweden and Holland were already allied to the empire; the German princes joined the coalition. The Prince of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... meditative but even melancholy. This last point leads me naturally to another question. The delicate build of Chopin's body, his early death preceded by many years of ill-health, and the character of his music, have led people into the belief that from childhood he was always sickly in body, and for the most part also melancholy in disposition. But as the poverty and melancholy, so also disappears on closer investigation the sickliness of the child and youth. To jump, however, from this to the other extreme, and assert that he enjoyed vigorous health, would be as great ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... dried earth scattered about. A general air of squalid neglect pervaded the place. Great red stains on the floor and walls testified to frequent and indiscriminate betel-nut chewing. The light breeze from the river swayed gently the tattered blinds, sending from the woods opposite a faint and sickly ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... been such a silly idiot you wouldn't have been taken in by such a transparent business," returned Raymonde, pulling off her moustache. "Look here, we don't care about this sickly sort of stuff, so the sooner you drop it the better. Gracious, girl! Turn off the waterworks! Be thankful Gibbie didn't scent out your romance, that's all! If the Bumble knew you'd put that card inside that strawberry basket, she'd pack up your boxes and send you home by the next ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... was severely concealed beneath an ugly, tight, close, nun-like cap, tied under the chin. A smile displays beautiful teeth when one has them; but she did not smile. Her eyes did not seem to have been dry for a very long time. She was pale; she had a very weary and rather sickly appearance. She gazed upon her daughter asleep in her arms with the air peculiar to a mother who has nursed her own child. A large blue handkerchief, such as the Invalides use, was folded into a fichu, and concealed her figure clumsily. Her hands were sunburnt ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... inhaling the scented evening air and gazing down the sloping side of the lawn. Women and girls were returning from the post-office, many of them with letters in their hands. Some of these were so impatient to know their contents that they were straining their eyes to read them in the sickly light that fell from a sparse row of electric lamps. I watched ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... taken cold, but, as every love-letter ought, it is not without a pathetic crescendo; the tearing away of hearts so firmly joined, her solitary imprisonment availed little; for that he lived and was her own, filled her spirit with that consciousness which triumphed even over that sickly frame so nearly subdued to death. The familiar style of James the First's age may bear comparison with our own. I ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... spectacles progressing along the streets on the top of an omnibus, their self-confident glitter falling here and there on the walls of houses or lowered upon the heads of the unconscious stream of people on the pavements. The ghost of a sickly smile altered the set of Ossipon's thick lips at the thought of the walls nodding, of people running for life at the sight of those spectacles. If they had only known! What a panic! He murmured interrogatively: ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... 25th of April, after having been long sick; and Mr Starkie began to grow very weak. The 28th, our pinnace which had gone to Banda came back to Bantam, having lost William Chace, one of her factors, and all the others in her were weak and sickly. The new protector now forbade us from proceeding with our house; but by the favour of the Sabander, and Cay Tomogone Goboy the admiral, we were with much ado allowed to finish it. Mr Starkie, our principal factor, died on the 30th June, whose burial General ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord's fear that no train would start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people waiting and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some faces, and the labeled employes of the railway wore looks of ominous importance. Of course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought information of the officials running to ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... were silent for a moment, gazing out over the rolling plain—a plain studded with stunted trees and sickly-looking bushes with here and there a cactus plant for variety's sake—out to the hazy mountains beyond, serene, calm, majestic, jutting jaggedly into the dazzling blue of ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... and gardeners kill off too many birds, nature revenges herself by sending a plague of insects which the small birds, if alive, would have eaten. Gamekeepers ruthlessly shoot hawks and kites, or snare stoats and polecats, with the result that their game grows up too thick for its feeding ground, sickly specimens are allowed to linger on, and a destructive murrain follows. The rook, no doubt, is fond of eggs; but nevertheless he does the farmer good service when he devours the grubs which are turned up by the plow; and as the salmon disease, which of late has proved so destructive, is attributed ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... laughed, and all three entered the little station to wait for the train, which was due in a few minutes. Fernandino a sickly-looking boy of twelve, was carrying a bouquet which he was to present to Donna Maria. Andrea, put in excellent spirits by his little conversation with his cousin, took a tea-rose from the bouquet and stuck it in his button-hole, then cast a rapid glance ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... ladies at court who befriended him, the marriage of one, the death of another, increased his insecurity. He had inherited, to his bane, another estate—Gonor—from his elder brother. It was encumbered, the cause litigious, and he had inherited with it the tutelage of a sickly child. He never shook off the burden. A tragic error marked his end. He died, certainly broken-hearted, just when his powerful cousin, by a conversion perhaps unknown to the poet himself, had rejected calumnies, ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... call him, Louis—was a young man just of the age of Frank Gresham. But there could hardly be two youths more different in their appearance. Louis, though his father and mother were both robust persons, was short and slight, and now of a sickly frame. Frank was a picture of health and strength; but, though manly in disposition, was by no means precocious either in appearance or manners. Louis Scatcherd looked as though he was four years the other's senior. He had been sent to Eton ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... although we have earnestly tried to do this in various ways. He first went to Virginia to seek a situation, complaining of lack of salary, and that he was getting in debt, but he has returned thence. He is now fully resolved to go to old England, because his wife, who is sickly, will not go without him, and there is need of their going there, on account of a legacy of four hundred pounds sterling, lately left by a deceased friend, and which they cannot obtain except by their personal presence. At Gravesend there never has been a minister. Other settlements, ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... first to suffer. That beauty which should have been an inevitable smile on the face of society, an overflow of genuine happiness and power, has to be imported, stimulated artificially, and applied from without; so that art becomes a sickly ornament for ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... have Sent You the Sloop, Commanded by John Webb, Loaded with Sundry Goods that has Rec'd some damage, which must desire You to Unload directly and take Care to Gett them dryed. there is also a Negro Boy that is Sickly, a Negro Man said to be taken off of Barmudas by the privateer as he was a fishing, and a Mollatto belonging to Some of the Subjects or Vassalls of the King of Spain, all which We Recomend to Your Care that they may not Elope. the Number of Spanish ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... children see them. Like many great writers whose fame now rests on the suffrages of child readers, Andersen seems at first to have felt that the Tales were slight and beneath his dignity. They are not all of the same high quality. Occasionally one of them becomes "too sentimental and sickly sweet," but the best of them have a ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... character of the innocent could be anywhere very secure, or their advantages very freely enjoyed, in a country where a man could do openly with impunity what the traveller describes to have been done by the Persian physician of the Governor of Allahabad? This governor, being sickly, had in attendance upon him eleven physicians, one of whom was a European gentleman of education, Claudius Maille, of Bourges.[26] The chief favourite of the eleven was, however, a Persian, 'who one day threw his wife from the top of a battlement to the ground in a fit of jealousy. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... house in the world! Grisell's own wishes were not the same, for the great household was very bewildering—a strange change from her quietly-busy convent. The Countess was quiet enough, but dull and sickly, and chiefly occupied by her ailments. She seemed to be always thinking about leeches, wise friars, wonderful nuns, or even wizards and cunning women, and was much concerned that her husband absolutely forbade her consulting the ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Samuel Johnson. His black servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has been pressed on board the Stag Frigate, Captain Angel, and our lexicographer is in great distress. He says the boy is a sickly lad, of a delicate frame, and particularly subject to a malady in his throat, which renders him very unfit for his Majesty's service. You know what manner of animosity the said Johnson has against you[1046]; and I dare say you desire no other opportunity ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... than seven; But years go fast in the slums, And hard on the pains of winter The pitiless summer comes. The wail of sickly children She knows; she understands The pangs of puny bodies, The clutch ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... Pshaw! son, My faith is bound to Guido; and if you Do not throw off your duty, and defy, Through sickly scruples, my express commands, You'll yield at once. No more: I'll ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... listening to the conversation, and I saw him start so that he nearly dropped his piece; his face was quite convulsed, and he turned of a sickly pallor. The light was so strong upon him that I could ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... died on his lips, and Dorothy perceived a sickly grey overspread his face as he stared ahead. She looked and saw a great mass of rock right in the centre of the stream, as if a portion of the cliff had fallen into it, dividing the passage. Pepin, who had ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... young, or females, or aged linger behind, a strong army of males bravely returns to rescue them at the danger of losing their own lives. Many of their brave deeds, if recorded in history, would compare favourably with those of mankind! Too often has a poor, sickly ape, which by his very feebleness allowed himself to be captured and placed in a zoo, been compared to human beings. Even in spirit and movements he has been considered as a human caricature and heaped with ridicule. ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... with no way of escape from the baffling strokes, the lightning flashes; flashes of blindness one might rather call them. In truth, the intuitions of the night (for they worked still, or tried to work, by night) became the sickly nightmares of the day, in which Prior Saint-Jean slept, or tried to sleep, or lay sometimes in a trance without food for many hours, from which he would spring up suddenly to crowd, against time, as much as he could into his book with pen or brush; ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... fields that should have been green were as grey as the skies; the tree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds and as cloudy. And when I had walked for some hours the evening was closing in. A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon, as if pale with reluctance to leave the world in the dark. And as it faded more and more the skies seemed to come closer and to threaten. The clouds which had been merely sullen became swollen; and then they loosened and ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... turned away with a sickly, disappointed air. "Then they ought to have a conscription, or something," she said, pouting her lips. "The Government ought to take it in hand and manage it somehow. It's bad enough having to go by these beastly steamers to India at all, without having one's ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... was unable to fight with him. Her enfeebled body was empty of all resistant force. Now, as she clung to him, she felt its sickly weakness, its drained energies. She wanted peace, the sofa again, the swaying walls to steady, the angry man to be her father, quiet in the armchair. She forgot her promise to Crowder, her pledged word, everything, but that there ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Duncan remarks ('Fecundity, Fertility, etc.' 1871, p. 334) on this subject: "At every age the healthy and beautiful go over from the unmarried side to the married, leaving the unmarried columns crowded with the sickly and unfortunate.") We may, therefore, infer that sound and good men who out of prudence remain for a time unmarried, do not suffer ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... sees sin in his righteousness, for so the prophet intimates, when he saith, "All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags" (Isa 64:6): but there is nothing can make one's righteousness filthy but sin. It is not the poor, the low, the mean, the sickly, the beggarly state of a man, nor yet his being hated of devils, persecuted of men, broken under necessities, reproaches, distresses, or any kind of troubles of this nature, that can make the godly man's righteousness filthy; nothing but ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... often he does not recognize and therefore isolates the pudic and hidden side of life, together with the poetry it contains. He has a multitude of rapid remarks about old maids and old women, ugly girls, sickly women, sacrificed and devoted mistresses, old bachelors, misers. One wonders where, with his petulant imagination, he can have picked it all up. It is true that Monsieur de Balzac does not proceed with sureness, and that in his numerous productions, some of which appear to us ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... is at a low ebb among us," said Mr. Bulstrode, who spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air. "I, for my part, hail the advent of Mr. Lydgate. I hope to find good reason for confiding the new hospital to ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... caste woman, chief wife of a great prince of Northern India, held in her arms her first, her only son, a weakling, a sickly babe nigh unto death. Thrice had she been shamed by the birth of a woman child, and now her crown, her glory, her great gift unto her lord ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... The sickly airs had died of damp; Through huddling leaves the holy chime Flagged; I, expecting Mrs. Gamp, Thought—"Will the woman come in time?" Upstairs I knew the matron bed Held her whose name confirms all joy To me; and tremblingly I said, "Ah! will it be a girl or boy?" And, soothed, my ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... halted the thing had disappeared, and both boy and beast turned heads toward the still terrible sounds of its going. It was the first time either had ever seen a railroad train, and the lad, with a sickly smile that even he had shared the old nag's terror, got her back into the road. At the gate sat a farmer in his wagon ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... a sickly, suffocating smell in her nostrils; and her eyes opened wide upon a face bent above her own. She had slept with a small lamp burning beside her, and by its dim light it seemed to her ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... made this choice from the usual motives of princes, she soon found reason to repent of the unequal alliance. She was a princess of a masculine spirit and uncommon understanding: the duke of Brabant was of a sickly complexion and weak mind: she was in the vigor of her age; he had only reached his fifteenth year: these causes had inspired her with such contempt for her husband, which soon proceeded to antipathy that she determined to dissolve a marriage, where, it ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... "None of your sickly melodrama here. Take out of your pocket the pistol you carry and give it to me," Crozier growled. "You are not to be trusted. The habit of thinking you would shoot somebody some time— somebody you had injured—might ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her lungs to scream, but at that instant a mass of cotton-wool was thrust over her face, and she began to breathe in a sickly sweet vapour. Somebody else was in the room now. They were holding her feet. The voice in her ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... brilliantly illuminated now. Night would bring no rest to Cruces, while the crowds were there to be fed, cheated, or amused. Daybreak would find the faro-tables, with their piles of silver and little heaps of gold-dust, still surrounded by haggard gamblers; daybreak would gleam sickly upon the tawdry finery of the poor Spanish singers and dancers, whose weary night's work would enable them to live upon the travellers' bounty for the next week or so. These few hours of gaiety and excitement were to provide the Cruces people with food and clothing for as many days; ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... cast and character. The last half-century has been pregnant with novelty, project, innovation, and extreme excitement. The pillars of the social edifice have been shaken, and the whole social atmosphere has been decomposed by alchemical demagogues and revolutionary apes. The sickly atmosphere has suffused a morbid humor over the whole frame, and left the social body little more than 'the empty and bloody skin of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... believe me; I love you. I am the man who loves you because he has found in you qualities that are inestimable. You are one of those perfect creatures who have as much brains as sentiment; and the sentimentality that permeates you is not the sickly sentimentality of ordinary women. It is that gloriously beautiful faculty of tenderness which characterizes great souls, and which one never meets elsewhere in the world. And then, you are so beautiful, so graceful, with a grace that is all your own, and I, who am a painter, you ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... nearly at hand, and travelling seemed deeply dangerous, in her sickly state, for the enfeebled Susanna. Yet she herself, panting to receive again the blessing of her beloved father, concentrated every idea of recovery in her return. She declined, therefore, though with exquisite sensibility, the supplicating desire of this Editor [Madame d'Arblay] ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... not only that they were to be denied an opportunity of refuting the charges preferred, but that they were destined to leave the town branded as three of the biggest and most unsuccessful liars ever encountered, had well-nigh reduced Daphne and Jill to tears. And when, upon the sickly resumption of negotiations, it appeared highly probable that they would not be permitted to ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect. They recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weed that covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the sweltering paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for a breath of air after a sleepless night. Now the paupers were gone, and where the old mansions that had fallen to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the symphony transposed for the piano becomes hysterically sad. This literature of woe, as Whitman calls it, this Maladie de Rene, as we like to call it in Europe, is in many ways a most humiliating and sickly phenomenon. Young gentlemen with three or four hundred a year of private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yestreen the water slumbered, With a sickly crust encumbered, Leapeth now a roaring flood, Wild as ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... upper part of the Antares. The pulse of the generator might have been the beating of the maimed ship's heart, angry and threatening. It seemed to be growing stronger. And had something moved in the lock? Dasinger stood, senses swimming sickly, dreaming that something huge rose slowly, towered over him like a ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... not given the rights that belong to them in the home. They come into the world sickly or crippled, inheriting a weak constitution or a tendency toward that which is ill. They have little help from environment. One of a numerous family on a dilapidated farm or in an unhealthy tenement, the child struggles for an existence. Poverty, drunkenness, ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... if someone had been listening to every word and act, a bolt was suddenly shot back, and the door thrown open against Guest's chest. He started back in astonishment, for there, in the dark opening, stood Malcolm Stratton, his face of a sickly sallow, a strange look in his eyes, and a general aspect of his having suddenly turned ten years older, startling ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... moment; then answering him with polite but intentional contempt). That seems to be an attempt at what is called a pretty speech. Let me say at once, Mr. Valentine, that pretty speeches make very sickly conversation. Pray let us be friends, if we are to be friends, in a sensible and wholesome way. I have no intention of getting married; and unless you are content to accept that state of things, we had much better not ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... a thin, ragged, barefooted girl, then, and sickly and weak for want of food; but I think I felt mother's hunger more than my own: and many and many a bitter night I lay awake, crying, and praying to God to give me means of working for myself and aiding her. And he has, indeed, been ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... is an ugly, sickly little thing, not more than seven!" he cried scornfully. "The idea of a girl in blue spectacles! Come and have a walk." For once Bertie followed instead of leading, though he was strongly inclined to return to the house. He did not think his cousin was ugly, and he pitied her ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... Calkins said, coming forward, her homely face aglow with shame. "She isn't a bad girl, ma'am, she doesn't mean to be, but she has a dreadful time. Her mother is sickly, and has to go out washing, times when she isn't able to sit up; and there'll be days when she can't hold up her head; and the father is bad, ma'am, and drinks, and swears, and sells things for ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... to have an active spirit in a sickly body. It is a disharmony to have, like one of the very greatest of Christ's disciples, "a thorn in the flesh to buffet him." Who shall deliver us from this body of death? When you hear of a Beethoven deaf or of a Robert Louis Stevenson ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... was his objective, and presently, where a blue light dimly pierced the mist, he paused, pushed open a swing door, and stepped into a long, narrow passage. He descended three stairs, and entered a room laden with a sickly perfume compounded of stale beer and spirits; of greasy humanity—European, Asiastic, and African; of cheap tobacco and cheaper scents; and, ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... direction he indicated, and there, upon our lower-mast- head, and also upon the trysail gaff-end, was a globe of pale, sickly green light, which wavered to and fro, lengthening out and flattening in again as the cutter tossed wildly over ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... sickly smile, while the corpse swayed about with ghastly jerks over her left shoulder. She held it in position with her two left arms. "It's a pity we could not have met as friends, Maskull. I could have shown you a side of Tormance which now perhaps you will never see. The wild, mad, side. But now it's ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... interrupted by a footfall slowly approaching. I did not turn to ascertain who it might be, but trusted it was no one of importance, as the poddy and I presented rather a grotesque appearance. It was one of the most miserable and sickly of its miserable kind, and I was in the working uniform of the Australian peasantry. My tattered skirt and my odd and bursted boots, laced with twine, were spattered with whitewash, for coolness my soiled cotton blouse hung loose, ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... it true, that, before any vice can fasten on a man, body, mind, or moral nature must be debilitated. The mosses and fungi gather on sickly trees, not thriving ones; and the odious parasites which fasten on the human frame choose that which is already enfeebled. Mr. Walker, the hygeian humorist, declared that he had such a healthy skin it was impossible for any impurity to stick to it, and maintained that it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Immediately there was the raucous call of the general alarm siren and a flashing light from the bastion that paled the red mists to a sickly, luminous pink. Full gravity coming down with crushing force on the ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... was Marchant whom he had singled out. For just a moment Errol poised the rubber dagger over his "victim," as if gloating. It was dramatic, realistic. As Errol paused, Marchant smiled at the rest of us, a sickly smile, I thought, as though he would have said that the play was being carried ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve
... prison ship anchored in the Wallabout. She was moored near Remsen's Mill about the 20th of October, 1776, and was then crowded with prisoners. Many landsmen were prisoners on board this vessel: she was said to be the most sickly of all the prison ships. Bad provisions, bad water, and scanted rations were dealt to the prisoners. No medical men attended the sick. Disease reigned unrelieved, and hundreds died from pestilence, or were starved on board this floating Prison. I saw the sand beach, between ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... bed apparently asleep, so she shook him, in righteous indignation at his conduct. A bottle from her bar, standing on the table, added suspicions to her wrath. Moore did not respond to her efforts as a healthy man should. Instead he turned a sickly white face to ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... take violent likes and dislikes to the same boys; fondle some without any apparent reason, though he had a leaning to the servile, and, perhaps, to the sons of rich people; and he would persecute others in a manner truly frightful. I have seen him beat a sickly-looking, melancholy boy (C——n) about the head and ears, till the poor fellow, hot, dry-eyed, and confused, seemed lost in bewilderment. C——n, not long after he took orders, died out of his senses. I do not attribute that ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... Charley's face grew sickly pale under the torch light, and he stood for a space like one in a daze. The captain near him was kneeling ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... have her baby so backward. But the utmost she could prevail upon it to do was to hold hard and fast by a chair, or by Robin's fist, and gaze across the great gulf which separated her from Meg and the piece of bread and treacle stretched out temptingly towards her. It was a wan, sickly baby with an old face, closely resembling Meg's own, and meagre limbs, which looked as though they would never gain strength enough to bear the weight of the puny body; but from time to time a smile kindled suddenly upon ...
— Little Meg's Children • Hesba Stretton
... that give dignity to human nature, a craving desire for luxurious enjoyment and sudden wealth, which renders those who seek them dependent on those who supply them; to substitute for republican simplicity and economical habits a sickly appetite for effeminate indulgence and an imitation of that reckless extravagance which impoverished and enslaved the industrious people of foreign lands, and at last to fix upon us, instead of those equal political rights ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... And indeed, the baby was as fat as a little partridge. Maida wondered how Dicky could lift her. Also Delia was as healthy-looking as Dicky was sickly. Her cheeks showed a pink that was almost purple and her head looked like a mop, so thickly was it overgrown with tangled, ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... efforts of one young girl. Now, for my part, I do not grudge my Irish fellow citizens these advantages obtained by honest labor and good conduct; they deserve all the good fortune thus accruing to them. But when I see sickly, nervous American women jostling and struggling in the few crowded avenues which are open to mere brain, I cannot help thinking how much better their lot would have been, with good strong bodies, steady nerves, healthy digestion, and the habit of looking any kind of work in ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Marquis, like most men who chafe under a wife's superiority, saved his self-love by arguing from Julie's physical feebleness a corresponding lack of mental power, for which he was pleased to pity her; and he would cry out upon fate which had given him a sickly girl for a wife. The executioner posed, in ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... row?" Dennison said, with a kind of sickly sarcastic smile which meant that he had scored off me ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead grown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... his friendship with Darrell, when he, Ashe, was one of the leaders at Eton, popular with the masters in spite of his incorrigible idleness, and popular with the boys because of his bodily prowess, and Darrell had been a small, sickly, bullied colleger. Scene after scene recurred to him, from their later relations at Oxford also. There was a kind of deliberation in the way in which he forced his thoughts into this channel; it made an outlet for a fierce bitterness of spirit, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... hostess conspired to shut, with its waxed floor, its four-poster bed, its characteristically French chairs and fireplace, its champagne bottles and dirty basins and used towels and packets of Somatose on the table. And in the sickly air of the confined space in behind the curtains of the bed lay my little uncle, with an effect of being enthroned and secluded, or sat up, or writhed and tossed in his last dealings of life. One went and drew back the ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... tricks on old Mother Nature, transforming her vegetable children into different shapes and making them no longer recognizable in their original forms. Like the fairies in Irish mythology, this man steals away the plant babies, but instead of leaving sickly elves in their places, he brings into the world exceedingly healthy or lusty youngsters which grow up into a full maturity, and develop traits of character superior to the ones they supplant. For instance he took ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... struggled to his feet. With one hand he clutched the doorframe for support. The skin of his cheeks had gone a sickly white. ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... a Tale of Scandal is as fatal to the Reputation of a prudent Lady of her stamp as a Fever is generally to those of the strongest Constitutions, but there is a sort of puny sickly Reputation, that is always ailing yet will outlive the robuster characters of ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... as you stood—staring hard at you the whole time. One feature that would soon send a lonely man off his chump is that no matter how many are in sight they are all looking at you, and they follow step by step with a sickly deliberation. They are all yellow and pink, and next to spiders seem the most loathsome creatures on God's earth. Talking about spiders [Bowers always had the greatest horror of spiders]—I have to collect them as well as insects. Needless to say I caught them with a butterfly net, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... huckster's three-day's fish, And just as silent; then thy mother with Her tearful and beseeching look, that moves Like a green widow in a mourning trance, The very picture of "God help us all;" And thou, with sickly whining worse than they, Do ye think I shall do murder? Why not go At once unto the foe, and there be spurn'd By Henrietta, that false Delilah?— Or plot my death for loyalty? What is A father in your minds weigh'd with a king? Yet what is "king" to you? ye were not bred To lick his moral ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... 'twas beautiful and hard, Whereto his invis'd properties did tend; The deep-green emerald, in whose fresh regard Weak sights their sickly radiance do amend; The heaven-hued sapphire and the opal blend With objects manifold; each several stone, With wit well blazon'd, ...
— A Lover's Complaint • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... impatience the secretary made a sign. From behind a stone pillar there stepped forth a man at whose appearance Francis could not forbear a scream. He was tall and very attenuated, clothed wholly in black. His face thin and sinister was of a pale sickly color while his eyes, black and glittering, held the gaze with a basilisk glare. He was the ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... hanging over his brow. His features were sharp and diminutive, his face of a deadly white, his lips pale, and his hair of a mixture between red and white. He had very little show of beard—indeed, it was almost difficult to say what his age might be. He might have been a sickly youth early sinking into decrepitude, or an old man, hale in constitution, yet carrying no flesh. But the most important feature, and that which immediately riveted the attention of Amine, was the eye of this peculiar personage—for ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... apprehended in itself, and all culminate in the conclusion; they do not complicate the thought, or puzzle us, they only heighten expectation]. In such an age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior. At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies. In some heathen countries they would have been exposed ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... given by the juntas, who, as soon as the pronunciamentos began, assumed the functions of government, and scattered epaulets in absurd profusion. Truly, as Captain Widdrington observes, one has heard of bloody wars and sickly seasons, and rapid advancement consequent thereon, but nothing ever equalled the promotion that was now given; and this system Espartero was also obliged to adopt, in order not to be deserted by the lukewarm among his adherents, or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... a plot lately found, for which four have been publickly tried at the Old Bayley and hanged. My Lord Sandwich is still in good esteem, and now keeping his Christmas in the country; and I in good esteem, I think, as any man can be, with him. Mr. Moore is very sickly, and I doubt will hardly get over his late fit of sickness, that still hangs on him. In fine, for the good condition of myself, wife, family, and estate, in the great degree that it is, and for the public state of the nation, so quiett as it is, the ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... and jessamine, as well as others besides. The stronger scents of kennel and stable, and even of ale and beer, that filled the room as the constables trooped into it were almost a relief to the children, because they at least were familiar, and unlike the other strange, sickly fragrance. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... is at this moment absent from Spain, his faithful subjects will not allow that absence to be prejudicial to him. They intend to vindicate his just rights, and to overturn the contemptible faction which, headed by an intriguing woman, supports the unfounded claims of a sickly infant. In anticipation of Ferdinand's death, all necessary measures have been taken; and, before three days elapse, you will see a flame lighted up through the land, which will speedily consume and destroy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... His father says he's taken a great shine to you. I hardly know the boy, but he's a little queer and he's always been a little sickly. Edward doesn't know how to handle him, and the boy's ma—well, she's one of those Terre Haute Bartlows, and those people never would stay put. Edward's made too much money for his wife's good, and the United States ain't big enough for her and the girls. But that boy got tired ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... afraid to touch it?" asked Agony, as Mary tilted over a sickly looking head and indicated the identifying ring and ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey |
