"Torment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the States-man that's witty, That watches and plots all the sleepless Night, For seditious Harangues to the Whigs of the City, And piously turns a Traitor in spite. Let him wrack, and torment his lean Carrion, To bring his sham-Plots about, Till Religion, King, Bishop, and Baron, For the publick Good, be quite ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... thoughts an unexpected license and daring. It was possible to allow Emmet's claims when he was receiving the homage of the people alone, and she had not yet appeared; but her presence had revived the old passionate torment in his heart. Love returned triumphant, making light of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... job he filled were located in the medieval notion of the physical appearance of hell. By day the environment was heat and torment. By night—lunar night, of course, and lunar day—it was frigidity and horror. Once in two weeks Earth-time a rocketship came around the horizon from Lunar City with stores for the colony deep underground. Pop received the stores ...
— Scrimshaw • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... stranger; he had every claim upon the bowels of your compassion; it may be that he was the salt of the earth, holy, helpful, and kind; it may be he was a man laden with iniquities to whom death was the beginning of torment. I ask you in the sight of Heaven: Gordon Darnaway, where is the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on earth? Can Fate One direr torment lend To her few little years of glitter and gloom With the sad old story to end When the spectres of Loneliness, Want and Pain Shall arise one night with ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... of multitudinous horns. When she woke, past ten, drinking the small cup of black coffee which locally accompanied dressing, she was still shaken. "That's the most cursed racket anyone ever had to endure!" A growing irritation made harsh his voice. "You couldn't torment a worse sound out of a thousand cats." She smiled wanly. "If we were like that in the past," he added, "I'm glad we changed, even if we are worse ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... so noble-hearted a rebel, and as time went by, and Zeus remembered his bygone services, he would have made peace once more. He only waited till Prometheus should bow his stubborn spirit, but this the son of Titans would not do. Haughty as rock beneath his daily torment, believing that he suffered for the good of ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... literature, to insolent girls whom she would be constantly wishing to strangle, or stupid little boys who would bore her to death. Her very soul sickened at the thought—as well it might; for to have to do such service with such a heart as hers, must indeed be torment. All hope of marrying Godfrey Wardour would be gone, of course. Did he but remain uncertain as to the truth or falsehood of a third part of what Mr. Redmain would record against her, he would never ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... cellar, which smelt, he could not help thinking, like a grave. Coming out to the sunshine, he shook himself with disgust. "Faugh!" he thought, "what sick fancies and sentimental nonsense possess me? I am growing unwholesome. My dreams of the other night have come back to torment me in the day. These must ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... peace until a few minutes since, when Thomas had sent him on an errand to the kitchen, and he had heard Mary Jane bewailing the loss of her bottle of "rheumatiz liniment." She at once charged him with hiding it to torment her, but, before he could defend himself, one of the other servants asked what kind of a bottle it was; to which she replied, that it was a vanilla-bottle into which she had emptied the liniment, as that in which the ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... love. Anyhow, I'm out of my mind. I can't think, I can't work, I don't care a hang for anything in the world. Good Heavens, Mary! I'm in torment! One moment I'm happy; next I'm miserable. I hate her for half an hour; then I'd give my whole life to be with her for ten minutes; all the time I don't know what I feel, or why I feel it; it's insanity, and yet it's perfectly reasonable. Can you make ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... to those perturbed and passionate souls, among others, to whom these futilities have become a rankling, continuous torment and depression. When life on earth appears fragmentary and disordered, not only nonsense but terrifying nonsense, full of hideous injustices, sickening uncertainties, and cruel destructions, men have not infrequently found a refuge in the divine. "Come ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... have seen sometimes how these poor wretches that get but almost to heaven, how fearfully their "almost," and their "but almost," will torment them in hell; when they shall cry out in bitterness of their souls, saying, 'Almost a Christian! I was almost got into the kingdom, almost out of the hands of the devil, almost out of my sins, almost from under the ...
— The Heavenly Footman • John Bunyan
... in the darkness the different shafts and wheels looked very curious and threatening, so much so that it only wanted a little imagination for one to think that this was some terrible torture chamber, the door at the end leading into the place where the water torment was administered, for the curious musical dripping and plashing sounded very thrilling and strange in the solemnity of ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... their portion in this life," to a place of unmitigated suffering. Whatever be the comprehension of the word Hades (rendered in our version by the word hell), there is an impassable gulf between Lazarus in Abraham's bosom and the rich man in torment. The "great gulf fixed" may be a figure; but it represents an awful reality; and that reality is, that there is no transition from the one state ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... you the greatest thing a woman can give a man—oh, what a fool I was—and you have no gratitude. You must be quite heartless. How could you be so cruel as to torment me by flirting with those vulgar girls. We've only got just over a week. Can't you even give ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... of their pleasure; yours is only a diversion of your pain. The muses have seldom employed your thoughts, but when some violent fit of the gout has snatched you from affairs of state; and, like the priestess of Apollo, you never come to deliver his oracles, but unwillingly, and in torment. So that we are obliged to your lordship's misery for our delight: You treat us with the cruel pleasure of a Turkish triumph, where those, who cut and wound their bodies, sing songs of victory as they pass, and divert others ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... it feareth me we would give Christ a testimonial to go over seas. Hold him, hold him! Nay the multitude would be gladly quit of him,—they cannot abide his yoke, his work is a burden, his word is a torment, his discipline is bands and cords, and what heart can ye have to keep Christ? What violence can ye offer to him to hold him still? All your entreaties may be fair compliments, but they would never rend ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... I should still torment him. If he had sons he would be miserable in the thought that his unknown son might, on his death, take from them the precious Mostyn estate, and that wretched, old, haunted house of his. I am binding him to ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... Italian, with whom she was smitten because he was in the May of his age, nobly dressed, a graceful mover, brave in mien, and was all that a lover should be to bestow a heart full of love upon an honest married woman too tightly squeezed by the bonds of matrimony, which torment her, and always excite her to unharness herself from the conjugal yoke. And you can imagine that the young gentleman grew to admire Madame, whose silent love spoke secretly to him, without either the devil or themselves knowing ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... poodle, and will perform even more than his tricks. It is always in action; always fidgety; generally incapable of much affection, but inheriting much self-love and occasional ill temper; unmanageable by any one but its owner; eaten up with red mange; and frequently a nuisance to its master and a torment to every one else. ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... was in private and not as a real exhibition at a public fair. Some days ago this would not have troubled the Prince at all; but trial and hardship were fast making Vance into a very different sort of boy from the Prince who was the despair of his poor tutor and the torment of ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... hear of it the most frequently, because it has a word in the phrase which, well or ill understood, has animated to persecution and oppression at all times infinitely more than all the dogmas in dispute between religious factions. These are, indeed, well formed to perplex and torment the intellect, but not half so well calculated to inflame the passions ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Lucretia) will assert the purity of her heart: or, if her piety preserve her from this violence, that wasting grief will soon put a period to her days. And, in either case, will not the remembrance of thy ever-during guilt, and transitory triumph, be a torment ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... American Coasts soever they arrived, exercised the same Cruelties, Slaughters, Tyrannies and detestable Oppressions on the most innocent Indian Nation, and diverting themselves with delights in new sorts of Torment, did in time improve in Barbarism and Cruelty; wherewith the Omnipotent being incensed suffered them to fail by a more desperate and dangerous ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... you come here to-day to torment me? Why have you mentioned my child to me? I believe you know where she is, and yet you will not tell me. What is the meaning ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... which very much afflicts me." And again the poor patient wife tells him, "Lay your commands upon me, what I am to do, and though it be to forget my children, and the long hope I have lived in of seeing you, yet I will endeavour to obey you; or in memory only torment myself, without giving you the trouble of putting you in mind that there lives such a creature as your faithful humble servant." At length dissipation undermined his naturally strong constitution; and for months this ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... I knew, and knew not how I knew, that the thing which I had said was true. With that knowledge came a happiness so deep and strong that it swept aside like straw the torment of those cords, and the deeper hurt that I lay at his feet. I suppose my face altered, and mirrored that blessed glow about my heart, for into his own came a white fury, changing its beauty into something inhuman and terrifying. ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... that I might hold one of her hands, but it was declined me; then she desired me to wipe the tears from her eyes, and the sweat from her face, which I did; then she desired that she might lean herself on me, saying she should faint. Justice Hathorne replied she had strength enough to torment these persons, and she should have strength enough to stand. I repeating something against their cruel proceedings, they commanded me to be silent, or else I should be turned out of the room." [Footnote: Chandler's American Criminal ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... her. How, in the obscure hamlet of Brook-Green, she had learned all the arts of pleasing it is impossible to say. In her arch smile, the pretty toss of her head, the half shyness, half freedom, of her winning ways, it was as if Nature had made her to delight one heart, and torment all others. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enough to add that for those remaining days until the present the unspeakable creature's mad infatuation for me had made my life well-nigh a torment, to say nothing of its being a matter of low public jesting. Hardly did I dare show myself in the business centres, for as surely as I did the animal found me and crawled to fawn upon me, affecting his release ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... which is thus ascribed to faith, and the facility with which sin may be expiated by penance, have led to great mental debility and superstition. Force has been added to the doctrine of a material paradise of trees, flowers, banquets, hymns; and to a hell, a dismal place of flames, thirst, torment, and horrid spectres. ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... where my aunt and such as pretend an interest in me, and a power over me, do so persecute me with their good nature, and take it so ill that they are not accepted, as I would live in a hollow tree to avoid them. Here I have nobody but my brother to torment me, whom I can take the liberty to dispute with, and whom I have prevailed with hitherto to bring none of his pretenders to this place, because of the noise all such people make in a country, and the tittle-tattle it breeds among neighbours that have nothing to do but to inquire who marries and ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... not the less because he looked ill for some days after the children's adventure, owing partly to the shaking which he had received in his fall, and partly to the miserable hours of anxiety and watching that had succeeded to it. The villagers of course attributed his appearance to the torment of a guilty conscience, and no one was more careful to dwell on this explanation than Mrs. Mugford, with a vehemence which surprised even Mrs. Fry, who knew the sharpness of her ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... again into the plain. So, also, Ix-i'on, "the Cain of Greece," as he is expressly called—the first shedder of kindred blood—was doomed to be fastened, with brazen bands, to an ever-revolving fiery wheel. But the very refinement of torment, similar to that inflicted upon Prometheus, was that suffered by the giant Tit'y-us, who was placed on his back, while vultures constantly fed upon his liver, which grew again as fast as ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... concerned, but—as you will hear—crudely, laboriously and without taste or feeling; he is one of the best fellows in the world, and without a particle of vanity. Whenever I played for him he looked immovably at my fingers, and one day he said 'My God! how I am obliged to torment myself and sweat, and yet without obtaining applause; and for you, my friend, it is mere play!' 'Yes,' said I, 'I had to labor once in order not to show ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Ross's mind wondered at his recognition of that black thing and of the danger it promised, even as he prepared for battle. He pushed his captive across the path of the man in fur and threw himself in the other direction. There was a blast to make a torment in his head as he ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... this, by little acts of kindness, Jenny gradually obtained the helpless creature's confidence; and daily, whenever able, went at the same hour to disperse the boys, who after school hours have, it sterns, been in the habit of assembling, for their amusement, to torment her. Jenny had often threatened to complain to the parents of the boys, and, should they not attend to her complaints, to place the whole case before the magistrates. She had complained to several whose children she recognised, but they either took no notice of ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... a cruelty so vast, so aggravated, so cowardly and base? And if there is retribution, on whose head should it fall? Shall we seize and hang the poor, ignorant, stupid, imbruted semi-barbarians who were set as jailers to keep these hells of torment and inflict these insults and cruelties? or shall we punish the educated, intelligent chiefs who were the head and ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... ——, or Aunt Molly, as she was called by some of her little favorites, that is to say, about a dozen girls, and (not complimentary to the unfair sex, to be sure) one boy. There was one, who, even to Miss Molly, was not a torment and a plague; and I must confess he was a pleasant specimen of the genus. At the time of which I speak, the great awkward barn of a school-house on the Common, near the Appian Way, had not reared its imposing front. In its place, in ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... seemed to me that Brutus was a model for all time. Now, understand I was a good Christian child, and I said my prayers every night and morning, but this did not prevent me from hating the big bully of the school, who made the lives of the ten or fifteen small boys a perpetual torment. How we suffered, no adult human tongue can tell—and our tongues never told because it was a convention that tales should not be told out of school. One of the pleasant tricks of the bully and his friends was to chase the little boys after school in the winter and bury them until they ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... in a dark room; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life, but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... trampled sward; that he would have regretted his decision every hour of his life; and if by a miracle he could have found himself once more with the fatal deed undone, he would have rejoiced for a moment, suffered his old torment for a little while, and then ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... all would be over. But he dared not! he dared not! Your savage is overawed by the blind terrors of taboo. His predecessor, some elder Tu-Kila-Kila of forgotten days, had laid a great charm upon that parrot's life. Whoever hurt it was to die an awful death of unspeakable torment. The King of the Birds had special charge to guard it. If even the Cannibal God himself wrought it harm, who could tell what judgment might fall upon him forthwith, what terrible vengeance the dead Tu-Kila-Kila might wreak upon him in his ghostly anger? And that dead Tu-Kila-Kila was his own ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... such thanks,' he uttered in a low voice, much moved, a smile making him look strangely stern. 'You shall understand what it means when a man says that he loves you. I have come to think your face so beautiful that I am in torment with the desire to press my lips upon yours. Don't be afraid that I shall be brutal enough to do it without your consent; my respect for you is stronger even than my passion. When I first saw you, I thought you interesting because of your evident intelligence—nothing more; indeed you were not ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... character—from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll through many months, promised an abiding torment; and in fact it never left me until the winding up of my case. Hitherto the human face had mixed often in my dreams, but not despotically nor with any special power of tormenting. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... lessons. That did not worry him: he only said to himself that he must certainly set about finding some other means of living, and start once more going from publisher to publisher. That was not very pleasant.... Pff!... It was useless to torment himself in advance. It was a jolly day. He ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... soberly before men, and if they will not choose the former they must die. If you will not hear the Son of God, and the truth of the Scriptures, there is nothing which you will or can hear; you will never be persuaded, and never will escape the place of torment." ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... satisfied with being merely rich. I wonder if we are satisfied to have this golden day together. I wonder if the white swallows are satisfied with the sea. I wonder if those rocks are satisfied and proud to stand impregnable against the constant torment ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... throngs of men that fill the world, all of them totally depraved, all of them caught, from farthest eternity, in the adamantine meshes of God's decrees; the most of them also being doomed in advance by those decrees to an endless existence of ineffable torment; and upon this situation of affairs the excellent Michael Wigglesworth proposes to make poetry." His "Day of Doom," a horribly realistic description of every terror of the expected judgment, was written in a ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... her blazing eyes. His soul was in torment with the touch of her; yet somewhere back of his trained brain lingered a spark of wit not yet extinguished along with his other wits by her spell. He ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... various animals, and behind well-closed doors. One reads it with intense pain and a disgust which combines nausea with indignation toward the ruthless experimenters who, disclaiming the hindering use of anaesthetics, exhibit all the phenomena of nervous torment. Monsters of research would sneer aside all critics of ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... we are perhaps most impressed by its striking incongruities. This London of dirt and disease was also the arena for extravagant fashion and princely display. This populace that watched with joy the cruel torment of a bear or the execution of a Catholic also delighted in the romantic comedies of Shakespeare. This people, so appallingly credulous and ignorant, so brutal, childish, so mercurial compared with Englishmen of to-day, yet set the standard of national ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... property on Rose. I gave her all her aunt's jewelry. I tried to salve over my conscience and make it seem right—what I had done, what I was doing. I tried to make it seem right by telling myself that Rose had enough property of her own and didn't need this, but I couldn't do it. I have been in torment, holding wealth that didn't belong to me, that has gnawed at my very heart all the time. Now I am going to confess. Here is Abrahama White's last will and testament. I found it in a box in the garret with some letters. Abrahama wrote letters to her sister asking her to forgive her, and telling ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... miserable man. Greta, do you know what it is to love without being loved? How can you know? It is torture beyond the gift of words—misery beyond the relief of tears. It is not jealousy; that is no more than a vulgar kind of envy. It is a nameless, measureless torment." ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... cannot win, that their own conquest is inevitable after three or four more years of horror and torment and personal despair, turn their blind hatred of England and America upon their own ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... having been so miserable in my life before or since. The torment of my sensibility was so great that I wished the sergeant to fall dead at my feet, and the stupid soldiers who stared at me to turn into corpses; and even those wretches for whom my entreaties had procured a reprieve I wished dead also, because I could not face them without shame. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... north-eastern Siberia during the month of July. They make the great moss tundras in some places utterly uninhabitable, and force even the reindeer to seek the shelter and the cooler atmosphere of the mountains. In the Russian settlements they torment dogs and cattle until the latter run furiously about in a perfect frenzy of pain, and fight desperately for a place to stand in the smoke of a fire. As far north as the settlement of Kolyma, on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... pitch, and sulphur burning together, with a most intolerable stench, as of burned carcases: the whole element above us was dark and dismal, distilling a kind of pitchy dew upon our heads; we heard the sound of stripes, and the yellings of men in torment. ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... doom of the soul in these Middle Ages, that a number of questions which to us would seem idle, questions of pure scholastics, disturb, frighten, and torment it, taking the guise of visions, sometimes of devilish debatings, of cruel dialogues carried on within. The Devil, fierce as he shows himself in the demoniacs, remains always a spirit throughout the days of ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... Herodotus cannot understand the religious intolerance which led the Persians to burn the shrines of Greek gods. Thus religion had a restraining influence in war throughout antiquity, and in the Middle Ages. The Pope, who was believed to hold the keys of future bliss and torment, was frequently, though by no means always, obeyed by the turbulent feudal lords, and often enforced the sanctity of a contract by the threat or the imposition of excommunication and interdict. In order to make these penalties more terrible, the torments ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... more than mine eyes, O most jocund Calvus, for thy gift I should abhor thee with Vatinian abhorrence. For what have I done or what have I said that thou shouldst torment me so vilely with these poets? May the gods give that client of thine ills enow, who sent thee so much trash! Yet if, as I suspect, this new and care-picked gift, Sulla, the litterateur, gives thee, it is not ill to me, but well and beatific, that thy labours [in his cause] are not made light ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... stifling summer days, when his cage seemed so cramped and unendurable, how Black Bruin thirsted for the woods, he alone knew. Sometimes he would fall asleep and dream of the old free life, only to wake to the torment of ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... worse could not happen. I had besides lost other things that used to sustain me, and being reckless, I was contemptuous, and listened to the talk about money with sublime indifference to the subject: with an attitude, too, I daresay. But Hermann's name revived my torment. Why had he come? to persuade the squire to control my father? Nothing but that would suffer itself to be suggested, though conjectures lying in shadow underneath pressed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her we knew it. And at last, after a long, long silence, she looked up from her joined hands, and said, "If I may only see my child again, even from the other side of the great gulf, I would be ready for any torment! It would be no torment to me, so I saw him! Do you think I shall be ...
— Lady Hester, or Ursula's Narrative • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I, "I do wish you would contrive some means to get rid of my odious Cousin Jehoiakim, he is the torment of my life." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... does not pay for as many Indians as they say there are, they crucify the unfortunate chief, or put his head in the stocks—for all the encomenderos, when they go to collect, have their stocks, and there they lash and torment the chiefs until they give the entire sum demanded from them. Sometimes the wife or daughter of the chief is seized, when he himself does not appear. Many are the chiefs who have died of torture in the manner which I have stated. When I was in the port of Ybalon some chiefs came there to see me; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... played about the rooms at Belgrave House. Perhaps, stifle it as he might, the sobbing voice of his daughter rang in his ears, "Come home with your own Nea, father;" and in spite of his pride his conscience was beginning to torment him. ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... my memory (said she once) given me for my benefit, and shall I make it my torment? No, Harriet, I will leave that to be done by you wise ones, and see what you ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... torments for their victims—how useless—the rack, the boot, tire,—all that they have imagined are not to be compared to the torture of extreme thirst. In the extremity of agony the sufferers cry for water, and it is not refused: they might have spared themselves their refined ingenuity of torment, and the disgusting exhibition of it, had they only confined the prisoner in his ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... away in the furrows deep Secure from jackal and passing plough, Would your eyes not follow me still through sleep Torment me then as they torture now? Would you ever have loved me, Golden Eyes, Had I done aught better ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... Sheila?" she asked, and into the slow, gentle tones of her voice something had crept, something sinuous and subtle, something that slid into the world with Lilith for the eternal torment of earth's daughters. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Redeemer of mankind, why hast Thou deserted me? O God the Father, Lord and Judge, why dost Thou torment me so?" ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... minutes of torment they knew that they were safe. They were far enough from shore to start up again and get away from those Spanish guns. The gallant tug was quite battered by that time, but nobody cared for that in ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... I don't wish it; to be here, there, or elsewhere, all the same to me; and then, you are right, I am not wicked; and those who are, I hate them, after my fashion, by making fun of them; you must think that, from relating stories where, to please my audience, I make it come out that those who torment others from pure cruelty receive, in the end, their pay, I become accustomed to ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... were brought before him, and condemned to torture and death. The torture was executed with unusual barbarity, for Drury was a man who knew no mercy. The confessors were first placed upon the rack, and then, as if the agony of that torment was not sufficient, their hands and feet were broken with large hammers, and other torments were added. When life was nearly extinct, they were released, and their martyrdom was finally accomplished by hanging. For fourteen days their bodies ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... than the primitive ancestor-worshippers of Aryan race did the early Japanese think of their dead as ascending to some extra-mundane region of light and bliss, or as descending into some realm of torment. They thought of their dead as still inhabiting this world, or at least as maintaining with it a constant communication. Their earliest sacred records do, indeed, make mention of an underworld, where mysterious Thunder-gods and evil goblins dwelt in corruption; but this vague world of the ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... gloom, And, rocking Hell's foundations, burst a blare Of stormy trumpets crying: "Woe, woe, woe!" Methought the angels must have wept to hear, Methought their tears had dropt like healing rain Upon the fires of torment, and assuaged Their blazing wrath, ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... fortune was at stake, and better that the boy should die than that all of us should live on in penury and bonds. Know you not, Prince, that the gods must have the gifts of the best, gifts of blood and virtue, or they will curse us and torment us?" ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... he have plundered it but from my own chamber? It hung against the wall of a closet, from which no stranger could have taken it except by violence. My perplexities and doubts were not at an end, but those which constituted my chief torment were removed. I listened to my friend's entreaties to tell him the cause of my elopement, and the incidents that terminated in the ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... and adjusting her head-dress or her robe as she might have done in private to a daughter. People asked with surprise and much annoyance whence came such a great friendship which had never been suspected by anybody? What completed the torment of the majority, was to see Madame des Ursins, as soon as she quitted the chamber of Madame de Maintenon, go immediately to Madame de Saint-Simon, lead her aside, and speak to her in a low tone. This opened the eyes of everybody and ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... agree apparently with Cesare Orsi—rather, she wanted to laugh at him coldly and leave him standing alone; but she must cultivate her defenses. There was, too, a sort of negative pleasure in misleading the banker, a sort of torment not unlike that enjoyed by the ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... spirit; he felt a weakness which began at his heart to steal through him. It took all his manhood to bear himself erect. He dreaded what was coming, as of old the once- tortured victim dreaded the coming torment of the rack. ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... and likely to be insulted by an offer of assistance. But my spirit was dead. I reached for her hands, but they eluded mine, slipped up my arms as she came sliding out of the saddle, and then her face was very close to mine. "Russ!" she whispered. It was torment, wistfulness, uncertainty, and yet tenderness all in one little whisper. It caught me off guard or indifferent to consequences. So I kissed her, without passion, with all regret and sadness. She uttered ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... her first anguish was over, found it possible to go on with life after all, as most of us do, no matter what our particular form of torment has been. It is even possible that she enjoyed moments of it, when she was one of the gay circle in the little house of dreams. But if Anne ever hoped that she was forgetting Owen Ford she would have ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... evil, or of mere earthly purpose and motive. "Between thy seed and her seed." Your struggle with her shall be in and for the very life of the race. "It," her life brought forth, "shall bruise thy head," thy whole power, and plan, and insidious cunning; "and thou shall bruise," shalt sting, torment, hinder, and trouble in the way and daily going, "his heel," his footstep. Thou, the subtle and creeping thing of the ground, shalt lurk after and threaten with crookedness and poison the ways of the ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... with the saucy nonchalance which made him both a favorite and a torment at the seminary. "Are you among the prophets?" and he sat up making room for ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... training, and character. While, in a large-natured man, solitude will make the pure heart purer, in the small-natured man it will only serve to make the hard heart still harder: for though solitude may be the nurse of great spirits, it is the torment of small ones. ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its somber and brooding ferocity? Well, I do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one's soul—than this kind ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... roused her: she had been told of their fate, but everything had been forgotten in the later anguish. Now she remembered with a sharp sting of pain, and she turned her face toward the speaker, waiting to hear why they stayed to torment her. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... saw, full of accursed instruments of torture horribly contrived to cramp, and pinch, and grind and crush men's bones, and tear and twist them with the torment of a thousand deaths. Before it, were two iron helmets, with breast-pieces: made to close up tight and smooth upon the heads of living sufferers; and fastened on to each, was a small knob or anvil, where ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... and everything seems far off and like things happening in a nightmare except that you know they're real. At last daylight broke, very pale, threatening, and slate colored. Deolda got up and began padding up and down the floor, back and forth, like a soul in torment. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... who were a trial and a torment to the teachers of the ordinary high schools and academies, the larger proportion would have scorned to steal, or commit any wanton outrage upon the persons or property of others. There were many high-minded, noble-hearted ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... children. Only a quarter of a mile of the still ocean separates her from safety and comfort. She sees the children playing about the door; she calls and calls. Will no one ever hear her? Her torn feet torment her, she is sore with blows and perishing with cold. At last her voice reaches the ears of the children, who run and tell their father that some one is crying and calling; looking across, he sees the poor little figure waving her arms, takes his dory and paddles over, and with amazement recognizes ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... commination. Did they sing?—yet they sinned here and here; and as a man soweth, so shall he reap, singer or sot. Lo! his songs are stars in heaven, but his sins are snakes in hell: each shall bless and torment him in turn. ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... her explanation with an air of doubt, or rather incredulity, sipped a cup of tea which had for some time been placed before him, and at length replied, "Well, Clara, whether I am right or wrong in my guess, it would be cruel to torment you any more, remembering what you have just done for me. But do justice to your brother, and believe, that when you have any thing to ask of him, an explicit declaration of your wishes will answer your ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... take a farewell benefit you come after me, with a card signed by the whole community and the board of aldermen, praying me not to do it. But it isn't of any use. You cannot move me from my fell purpose. I will torment the people if I want to. I have a better right to do it than these strange lecturers and orators that come here from abroad. It only costs the public a dollar apiece, and if they can't stand it what do they stay here for? Am ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... 'have they nothing to do at home but to torment me with telegrams? Didn't I tell them to pay the old Harry and have done with it? What do they mean?' and putting the envelope down by his plate he went quietly on with his dinner until he was through, when he took it up, ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... "Last Judgment," by Palma the younger, which immensely interests the custodian by reason of a little human touch which may or may not be true. On the left of the picture, in the Infernal regions, low down, will be seen a large semi-nude female sinner in torment; on the right, in heaven, the same person is seen again, in bliss. According to the custodian this lady was the painter's innamorata, and he set her in both places as a reward for her varying moods. The other pictures represent the capture of Zara by Marco Giustiniani in 1346. Zara, I ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... encounter, one bright September day in the garden, where, after his wont, old Tummus had been to what he called "torment them there weeds," to wit, chopping and tearing them up with his hoe, and leaving them to ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders written throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said; he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in complete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of 1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last always the crystal clarity of ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... No one cares a fig about me; what have I got to live for? To drink is the only chance I have of feeling a little pleasure in life; of losing for a few moments the dreadful consciousness of being an outcast; of losing for a moment the remembrance of happy days long ago: that's the greatest torment of all, Willis. Don't blame me if I drink; it's the elixir vitae for me just as much as for Paracelsus." And he turned the ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... other?" The tyrant, seeing deserved wrath awaiting him, laid his head down before Vixnu, who with one kick tossed it into the lowest abyss of hell. The wretched king, finding himself condemned to such a place of torment, begged pardon and mercy of Vixnu, but all the favour he received was one day's respite every year, to enable him to take part at a particular ceremony, to be observed in commemoration of ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... Middleton's school, there was a great tall dunce of the name of Fisher, who never could be taught how to look out a word in the dictionary. He used to torment everybody with—"Do pray help me! I can't make out this one word." The person who usually helped him in his distress was a very clever, good natured boy, of the name of De Grey, who had been many years ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... justice by death has this disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that justice has overtaken him. Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb that night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and untroubled slumber. Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind should the guilty atone. You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter is a certainty, whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in this life; and I desire you to continue to live yet awhile that you may taste ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... perpetually mingle even with its best feelings. Believe me, I was then less fitted for any communion with my fellow creatures than before. When I left them they had tormented me but it was in the same way as pain and sickness may torment; somthing extraneous to the mind that galled it, and that I wished to cast aside. But now I should have desired sympathy; I should wish to knit my soul to some one of theirs, and should have prepared for myself plentiful draughts of disappointment and suffering; for I was tender ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... dreams of an oak-tree does not share in the Englishman's joy; for he imagines that the vision was a warning to him that, from some trifling cause, an overwhelming calamity will burst over him. Thus do the ignorant and the credulous torment themselves; thus do they spread their nets to catch vexation, and pass their lives between hopes which are of no value and fears which are ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay |
