"Torment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... my savage headaches. For a day and a night I was in blind torment. Have at it, now, with the stoic remedy. Sickness of the body is no evil. With a little resolution and considering it as a natural issue of certain natural processes, pain may well be borne. One's solace is, to remember that it cannot affect the soul, which partakes of the eternal nature. This body ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... selecting some of her choicest produce, and an immense bunch of herbs, as antidotes for all the aches and ills which human flesh is heir to, on a bright, glowing September morning, we set forward on my homeward journey. "Blessings brighten as they leave us;" and although I had been considered the torment of the whole household, all regretted my departure, and begged me ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman
... behalf, be my advocate with Him so that He may pardon me for the death of my brother whom I had poisoned by this wicked Abbe of St. John. I confess it to thee as to my good patron and mistress. But what was to be done? He was a torment to my realm. Get me pardoned and I know well ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... faintly; and he, amidst that deep silence, that darkness, that coolness of the grave, fell upon his knees. It was not, however, through any need of prayer and worship, but because his whole being was giving way beneath his crushing mental torment. He felt a torturing longing to be able to see clearly within himself. Ah! why could he not plunge even more deeply into the heart of things, reflect, understand, and at last ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... and hitting Charlie Black he felt would relieve his feeling almost as much as a fight with Tim Roon. The two bad boys never lost an opportunity to torment him or Meg, and Bobby felt that here was a heaven-sent opportunity ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Oak Hill School • Mabel C. Hawley
... there was barely time to go to Sunday school. But the singing was so delightful. She sang the pretty hymns over to the babies. In the evening the family generally went out or had company. So after Jack and the babies were abed she used to read, unless Jack wouldn't go to sleep and torment her with questions ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... would) to imbrace it and by the use of a stock of five thousand pounds to ease them of the superfluity of most of their companies that had but strength and health to labor; near a year I spent to understand their resolutions, which was to me a greater toil and torment, than to have been in New England about my business but with bread and water, and what I could get by my labor; but in conclusion, seeing nothing would be effected I was contented as well with this loss of time and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... don't see why you should go out of your way to torment yourselves about nothing at all. It all seems plain enough to me. The donkey has run off, and intends to keep running till he drops. There's a long, straight, smooth road before him, and he'll stick ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... "You and your grandmother torment me," she said with a sob. "I want to live! to live," she repeated, and twice she beat her little fist upon her bosom. "Let me be free! I am still young, I want to live, and you have made me an ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... desolation! We never found out his name or learned how he fared—whether he lived or died, and if he died how long he lived before he died. It is a puzzle which will always lie unanswered at the back of my mind, and I know that in odd moments it will return to torment me. I will bet one thing, though—nobody else tried to cut that ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... pursuant to his sentence, a stone was found in his gall bladder, of the size of a lark's egg. This unhappy man was remarkable for an extreme irascibility of temper: might it not have been occasioned by the torment that such a substance must produce in so irritable a situation? He however, the night before his execution, confessed that the murder which he committed was premeditated. Notwithstanding which, he had, the day before he was tried, prepared an opening through ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... cuffed—what wonder the abused animal ran away or gave up the ghost? Then the boy's grief! His dear, precious only friend that he loved so devotedly! He mourns, sighs, weeps, not dreaming that he has himself done his dog to death. He is lost, having no one to love and torment. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... cannot guess. I was brought here at night, only forty-eight hours ago, and landed from a vessel which almost immediately departed whence it had come, into the darkness. My captors left me to go with the vessel, the chief of them threatening to return every week to torment me unless I obeyed his slightest command. I stand in great fear of this man, who is tall and bearded, for he brings with him instruments of torture and bottles containing, ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... The thunderous organs bellowed through the gloom, And, rocking Hell's foundations, burst a blare Of stormy trumpets crying: "Woe, woe, woe!" Methought the angels must have wept to hear, Methought their tears had dropt like healing rain Upon the fires of torment, and assuaged Their blazing wrath, so piteous ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... whilst he was resting from his rapid wanderings up and down the beach. Needless to say, it had the same effect. Little did the negro dream what fun he was causing amongst the bluejackets on our forecastle. Really, it was a shame to torment ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... the cabinet of Princes, when they talk of risking ten thousand lives for a victory, and laying waste a province to cut off the resources of the enemy? Let us not balance misery against forgiveness. It is childish reasoning to keep ourselves in torment, because we will not forget the injuries we have suffered. Peace only can heal our putrifying wounds, and peace can never be bought too dear, unless the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... fum de oberseah didn' 'pear ter do no good. Ev'y now en den 'is feet'd 'mence ter torment 'im, en 'is min' 'u'd git all mix' up, en his conduc' kep' gittin' wusser en wusser, 'tel fin'ly de w'ite folks couldn' stan' it no longer, en Mars' Dugal' tuk Hannibal back down ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... than one-half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment—everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... pick my bones at least.' ''Till now,' the astonished cur replies, 'I looked on all with envious eyes. 100 How false we judge by what appears! All creatures feel their several cares. If thus yon mighty beast complains, Perhaps man knows superior pains. Let envy then no more torment: Think on the ox, and learn content.' Thus said: close following at her heel, With cheerful heart ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... tasteless—with such a straight grim spoon was it mostly administered, and so flavored and strengthened by the competence of their eyes. Women knew so much best how a woman surpassed—how and where and why, with no touch or torment of it lost on them; so that as it produced mainly and primarily the instinct of aversion, the sense of extracting the recognition, of gouging out the homage, was on the whole the highest crown one's felicity could wear. Once ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... bound: Nay heare me Hubert, driue these men away, And I will sit as quiet as a Lambe. I will not stirre, nor winch, nor speake a word, Nor looke vpon the Iron angerly: Thrust but these men away, and Ile forgiue you, What euer torment you do put ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... soul remain in torment until the final Judgment Day if I should break my oath, but may it rest in eternal peace the day on which his death ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... equal, free and happy, for the crime of social barbarity, and you pass by this crime, to extenuate another, to extenuate the horrid torments of slavery! Not satisfied with violating nature, by abusing her offspring, even in her name, you encourage slaveholders to torment them. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... he wouldn't like. Them fellows is terrible afraid of the Irish Members. And they've a good right to be, for devil the finer set of men you'd see anywhere than what they are. There isn't a thing goes wrong in the country but they're ready to torment the life out of whoever might be responsible for the ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... fifteen years; and how should I do so now, whenas my Lord hath been bountiful to me in delivering me from the captivity of the infidels and doing away from me that which was more grievous than the fiery torment? I will wait till sun down." So at nightfall Sherkan and Zoulmekan came to her with food and said, "Eat, O pious man." But she said, "This is no time for eating; it is the hour for doing my service to the ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... he might form the design of making use of her for his own vile purposes, or at least of advising her to quit me for some happier and more wealthy lover. This idea brought in its train a thousand reflections, which had no other effect than to torment me, and throw me again into the state of despair in which I had passed the morning. It occurred to me, more than once, to write to my father; and to pretend a new reformation, in order to obtain ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... noise here by an affair of gallantry, offered Sixty guineas to have him conveyed away. We have lost twenty-six officers, besides many wounded, and ten pieces of artillery. Braddock lived four days, in great torment.(601) What makes the rout more shameful is, that instead of a great pursuit, and a barbarous massacre by the Indians, which is always to be feared in these rencontres, not a black or white soul followed our ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... narrow space, the working of the joints compressed, and inflammation at the joints, or at the wings of the coffin-bone, is excited; in worse cases navicular disease is established, or, from inadequate circulation, thrush holds possession at the frog, or scratches torment the heels. ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... don't torment yourself; hear me. I feel myself loved enough in this one moment for all the past," he said, as he laid ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... obviated by the abandonment of the iron cup, the powder being left to act on the lead itself. Two or three channels cut around the neck of the bullet helped to keep the point in line, and aided at the same time the fastening of the cartridge. Thus came its final metamorphosis to the buzzing little torment that has been at intervals for the last twenty years flying over all the continents and perplexing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... and do not believe that I shall live over this winter. Breathing is difficult to me; and perhaps the inexpressible heaviness which burdens me may contribute to this torment. When I sit up sleepless in my bed through the long nights, and see the night in myself, behind me and before me, then dark, horrible phantasies surround me, and I often think that insanity, with ashy cheeks, ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... unhappy. The eldest had married a gentleman, extremely handsome indeed, but so fond of his own person, that he was full of nothing but his own dear self, and neglected his wife. The second had married a man of wit, but he only made use of it to plague and torment every body, and his wife most of all. Beauty's sisters sickened with envy, when they saw her dressed like a Princess, and more beautiful than ever; nor could all her obliging affectionate behaviour stifle their jealousy, which was ready to burst when she told them how happy she ...
— Beauty and the Beast • Marie Le Prince de Beaumont
... just going down, a hissing globe of fire and torment. Already the lower limb was in contact with the jagged backbone of the mountain chain that rimmed the desert with purple and gold. Out on the barren, hard-baked flat in front of the corral, just where it had been unhitched when the paymaster and his safe were dumped ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... ten the legends of the martyrs fell into my hands. I remember reading with a kind of horror, which really was rapture, of how they pined in prisons, were laid on the gridiron, pierced with arrows, boiled in pitch, thrown to wild animals, nailed to the cross, and suffered the most horrible torment with a kind of joy. To suffer and endure cruel torture from then on seemed to me exquisite delight, especially when it was inflicted by a beautiful woman, for ever since I can remember all poetry and everything demonic was for me concentrated in ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... of the malignant goddesses is revealed in a most obtrusive form in the village deities of the Dravidians of Southern India.] "The dead were specially to be feared; nor was it only those dead who were unhappy or unburied that might torment the living, for the magician sometimes warns them that their tombs are endangered" (Article "Magic (Egyptian)," Hastings' Encycl. Ethics and Religion, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... more consideration than that to which nothing is entitled. No doubt, when bodily pain has ceased, it is all over: we do not feel it any more. And you have probably observed that the impression left by bodily pain passes very quickly away. The sleepless night, or the night of torment from toothache, which seemed such a distressing reality while it was dragging over, looks a very shadowy thing the next forenoon. But it may be doubted whether you will ever so far succeed in overcoming ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... depend upon his own temperament, training and character. While, in a large-natured man, solitude will make the pure heart purer, in the small-natured man it will only serve to make the hard heart still harder; for though solitude may be the nurse of great spirits, it is the torment of small ones. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... of unspeakable anguish—the prayer of a soul in torment. It seemed to Tranter that the speaker had thrown himself down, and was beating ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... alive, and reserve him to grace their triumph and rejoice their eyes by his torture. When resistance is attempted, this is often impossible, and an instant death saves the victim from the far greater horrors of captivity and protracted torment. When an enemy is struck down, the victor places his foot upon the neck of the dead or dying man, and with a horrible celerity and skill tears off the bleeding scalp.[276] This trophy is ever preserved with jealous care by ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... sayde, 'I am ful woe That yow sholde bee torment soe, But wee had wyth yow beene! Had wee bene ther, yowr breders alle, Wee wolde hav garred the warlo {26} falle, That wrought yow all ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... fears, my sorrows, and my broken heart, Will roll in cruel triumph. I'm content. A long and troubled record I shall leave Of struggles in the dark 'gainst many foes. I begged for light to see my duty clear To see the purpose of my suffering To see the end that my Creator served In heaping hills of torment on my head. The light has never come. But now ere long I must be called where all shall be made clear. Till then a few weeks more of faith in Him A few weeks more with an unfalt'ring tongue To praise His wisdom though its end be hid. A few weeks ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... interests, of distractions, of infinite opportunities to preserve your distance from each other, is hardly conceivable; but on board ship, at sea, en tete-a-tete for days and weeks and months together, could mean nothing but mental torture, an exquisite absurdity of torment. He was a simple soul. His hopelessly masculine ingenuousness is displayed in a touching way by his care to procure some woman to attend on Flora. The condition of guaranteed perfect respectability gave him moments of anxious thought. When he remembered suddenly ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... wailed, lifting her arms in a gesture of despair. "Where is he? Tell me! It was not White Brother of the Snow sent to the torment of ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... we can hardly expect Clara to bear, with perfect firmness, the worry and torment that David has occasioned her today. That would be stoical. Clara is greatly strengthened and improved, but we can hardly expect so much from her. David, you and I will ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... scamper after him, holding forth a twist of bulrushes, which was intended to represent Bellerophon's ornamental bridle. But the gentle child, who had seen the picture of Pegasus in the water, comforted the young stranger more than all the naughty boys could torment him. The dear little fellow, in his play hours, often sat down beside him, and, without speaking a word, would look down into the fountain and up toward the sky, with so innocent a faith that Bellerophon ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... are never tormented, And never asked money where husbands dissented? And never see others, their rivals, in fashion ahead, And never have doctors—a woman's great dread— And nothing, I hope, like my own indigestion, To torment and starve them, as this one does me, And keep them from sipping—forgive the suggestion— The nectar etherial ...
— Nothing to Eat • Horatio Alger [supposed]
... disturbing her, but hoping to see one of the physicians or some one of the family, of whom to make inquiries. Oh, the nervousness of those days! the restless, weary nights we passed, till our fears and apprehensions became a racking torment, and we felt almost that we must die (sic) ourselves ourselves or be out of suspense; but when, on the evening of the tenth day after her illness, a messenger came with pallid face and almost wild look to say that she was dead, ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... man's wife is in torment, it is as well for him to nod his head and let her believe that she does ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... heard a violent sigh, and out rushed a torrent of words that each seemed tinged with blood from the unfortunate speaker's heart. "Old man," he almost shrieked, "what did I ever do to you, that you torment me so? Sure you were born without bowels. Beggared but an hour agone, and now you must come and tell me I have lost her by losing house and lands! D'ye think I need to be told it? She was too far above me before, and now she is gone quite out of my ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... us hope He will, at last, set me free; for I long, oh so earnestly! to be at rest. Carmen, a guilty conscience is a scorpion which never ceases to torment, and deals a death-blow to all peace and happiness; therefore keep your heart pure, my darling, and ever have God's commandments before your mind, so as to avoid sinning against them. Let me persuade you to come back into ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... ill again. Io Welland had come back in all the glamorous panoply of waking dreams to command and torment his loneliness of spirit. At night he dreaded the return to the draughtless room on Grove Street. In the morning, rising sticky-eyed and unrested, he shrank from the thought of the humid, dusty, unkempt hurly-burly ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... was the measure of his anguish. His body was bowed down by the fearful storm that shook his soul, as the tall pines bend before the blast. Like his predecessor, he could not refuse to bear the burden of life; he was afraid to die while he bore the yoke of hell. The torment grew intolerable. ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... a way very different to what appeared to be his usual habit; but it struck his guests that it was assumed to throw them off their guard, and that he was eyeing them all the time, much in the way that a hungry cat does a trapful of mice, which she knows will shortly be thrown to her to torment. After some time, he took his departure, and they heard him lock and bolt the doors behind him. There they were, then, once more prisoners, at the very moment it was all important to ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... when, in his last drunken despairing frenzy, he had left the world with a curse in his heart and had faced the black unknown with reckless laughter and a profane toast. It is to be doubted if there can be a hell of greater torment than that experienced by one who, endowed by nature with a capacity for great living, is betrayed by the very strength of his genius into a situation that is intolerable of his real self, and is forced, thus, to a continuous ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... they were in the train going to Bayreuth. In the next he saw her as Kundry rush on to the stage. He felt that, whatever it cost him, that was the life he must obtain. He felt that he could not live if he did not acquire it, and so intense was the vision that, unable to endure its torment, he got up and proposed they should go into the garden and ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... It is the son of Michael O'Connell who died on the roadside and was buried by the charity of his neighbours. Michael O'Connell, born in the image of God, who lived eight-and-fifty years of torment and starvation and sickness and misery! Michael O'Connell, who was thrown out from a bed of fever, by order of his landlord, to die in sight of where he was born. It's his son is talkin', Father Cahill, ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... his spectacles as he sentenced the Czar of Russia to ten years in the salt mines—and made it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperleigh always read the foreign news—the news of things that he couldn't alter—as a form of wild and stimulating torment. ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... knowledge and which does not progress but has a kind of stationary and eternal value, like the beauty of the dawn, or the love of a mother for her child, or the joy of a young animal in being alive, or the courage of a martyr facing torment. We cannot for all our progress get beyond these things; there they stand, like light upon the mountains. The only question is whether we can rise to them. And it is the same with all the greatest births of human imagination. As far as we can speculate, there is not the faintest probability ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... me for a moment into the prisons of the Inquisition.'—(God help my poor brother Tom.)—'Behold Religion, with Mercy and Justice chained down under her feet,—there sitting ghastly upon a black tribunal, propped up with racks and instruments of torment. Hark!—hark! what a piteous groan!'—(Here Trim's face turned as pale as ashes.)—'See the melancholy wretch who uttered it'—(Here the tears began to trickle down)—'just brought forth to undergo the anguish of a mock trial, and endure the utmost pains that a studied system of cruelty has been ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... soul, madam, they are delicious. Bless me! It is worth crossing the Atlantic to eat one. Try one, my lord, and then you can torment the Macaronies[45] by telling them they don't know anything about fine eating," said Dapper, after ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... own taste! May wit and humour wing their flight to another region, and the mighty void be supplied by maukish sentiment, horse-collar grins, wood-demons, and other show-cattle of the Smithfield muses! May you be visited by a locust tribe of scribblers, who shall conspire to torment that groaning martyr, the Press, with ducal lampoons, drowsy epics, and zig-zag heroics! With Hope the upholsterer, and Bryon the idler, with Joe Miller in quarto, Genius in thin duodecimo, Leadenhall romances, and Puritan biography: and should your worship ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... robbery, amused herself while he was gone in handling the precious jewels in her basket. It was to conceal temporarily this treasure that she wished to visit the Schoolmaster in his cellar, and not to torment, as was her usual custom, her victim. We will mention presently why, with the consent of Bras-Rouge, La Chouette had confined the Schoolmaster ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... necessary for devout and God-fearing people to creep into holes and corners, like felons hiding from the law, that they may worship the Almighty after some fashion as pure as it is simple, knowing the while that if they are found so doing their lot and the lot of their wives and children will be the torment and the stake. Now the thumbscrew and the rack as instruments for the discomfiture of heretics are relegated to the dusty cases of museums. But some short generations since all this was different, for then a man who dared to disagree with certain doctrines was treated with far less mercy than is ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... questions which torment me when I am alone in the dead of night. My bed becomes a place of unendurable torture. I rise and dress myself, and wait for the daylight, looking through my ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... intelligence,' and the occult meaning of Z. Marcas requires a long and elaborate commentary. Repeat the word Marcas, dwelling on the first syllable, and dropping abruptly on the second, and you will see that the man who bears it must be a martyr. The zigzag of the initial implies a life of torment. What ill wind, he asks, has blown upon this letter, which in no language (Balzac's acquaintance with German was probably limited) commands more than fifty words? The name is composed of seven letters, and seven is most characteristic of cabalistic numbers. If M. Gozlan's ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... thick lips, upturned nose, projecting eyes, unwieldy belly, he was sought by Alcibiades and admired by Aspasia. Even Xantippe, a beautiful young woman, very much younger than he, a woman fond of the comforts and pleasures of life, was willing to be his wife, even if she did afterwards torment him, when the res angusta domi disenchanted her from the music of his voice and the divinity of his nature. "I have heard Pericles," said the most dissipated and voluptuous man in Athens, "and other excellent orators, but was not moved by them; while this Marsyas—this Satyr—so affects ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... in man's natural immortality and his consciousness in death. This doctrine laid the foundation upon which Rome established the invocation of saints and the adoration of the Virgin Mary. From this sprung also the heresy of eternal torment for the finally impenitent, which was early incorporated into the ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... steepness, there was no wall. Here for a while he ran up and down till the wind-driven fire from new-lit huts at its brink leapt out upon him like thin, scarlet tongues. He threw himself to the ground, he rose again, beating his head with his hand, for his long hair was ablaze. Then in his torment and despair, of a sudden he threw himself backwards into the dark gulf beneath. Fifty feet and more he fell to the rocks below, and where he fell there he lay till he died, and on the morrow the Zulus ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... hand, though he had, to some extent, emasculated himself, though he was exempt from his chief torment, he discerned, flourishing within him, another crop of tares, of which the spread had till now been hidden behind the sturdier growth of other vices. In the first instance, he had believed himself to be less enslaved by sin, less utterly ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Eccles. i. 18. What peace can all yield to a soul reflecting on posting away time, now near the last point, and looking forward to endless eternity? Oh the thoughts of time wasted with, and fair opportunities of good lost by the vehement pursuings and huntings after shadows and vanities, will torment the soul by assaulting it with piercing convictions of madness and folly, in forsaking all to overtake nothing; with dreadful and soul-terrifying discourses of the saddest of disappointments, and with the horror of an everlasting ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... laughing at me, and here was I, who was a year her senior and twice her size, sitting like an idiot, red to the ears. In faith, the larger a man is, the more the women seem tempted to torment him; but on me she presently took pity, and as the fiddles tuned up in the great ballroom, she led the way thither and permitted me to tread a minuet with her. Of course there were a score of others eager to share her dances, but she ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the luggage," she said. The smile with which she forced herself to respond to the fixed simper of the Watchetts seemed to cause her horrible torment. She motioned nervously to George Cannon, ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... like Henry of Exeter were channels through which the Christian priesthood received those miraculous powers by their exercise of which alone it was possible for the ordinary sinner to be rescued from eternal torment. Of the structural doctrines of theology which were then the shibboleths of English Churchmanship generally, I never entertained a doubt. That the universe was created in the inside of a week four thousand and four years before ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... of setting a mark on a family, and placing it at issue with a considerable portion of the neighbourhood! What a pernicious engine for the gratification of pride, scandal, envy, and malice! What an inquisition of the few bad by which to torment the many good! What a dagger in the hands of tolerated assassins! In short, what a perversion of reason, what a disease in the very bosom of society, what a lurking demon stationed at the threshold of every happy family, to ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... for talks with beautiful ladies," David Verne replied in his weak, dull voice. "Besides, it's music that I've chosen to torment myself with this afternoon. Where is she?" And when Brantome had nodded toward Lilla. "Ah, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Riennes has sent her demon to torment you, that is all. I thought she would. It is quite according to rule, a most clear and excellent case. Indeed, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... torment of our queen, [That she can never 'scape the blame. Oh God!] Had but this lovely mischief died before She set her ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 'absurd', 'tacit', 'digit', 'deposit', 'compact', 'complex', 'revise', 'response', 'acute'. Those which have the suffix -es prefixed throw the stress back, as 'honest', 'modest'. Those which have the suffix -men prefixed also throw the stress back, as 'moment', 'pigment', 'torment', and to the antepenultima, if there be one, as 'argument', 'armament', 'emolument', the penultimate vowel becoming short or obscure. In 'temperament' the tendency of the second syllable to disappear has carried the stress still further ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... flatly refuse you my hogshead. They would send a wine-grower who did such foolish acts to the mad-house. Make roads in the Atlas Mountains, when I cannot get out of my own house! Dig ports in Barbary when the Garonne fills up with sand every day! Take from me my children whom I love, in order to torment Arabs! Make me pay for the houses, grain and horses, given to the Greeks and Maltese, when there are ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... death. The conclusion slowly came to him that just blind killing was not enough. For all he knew death might bring instant forgetfulness—and thus not constitute in itself a satisfactory measure of vengeance. The fear of death was a reality and a torment: for all he knew, the thing itself might be a change for the better. It might be that, suddenly hurled out of this world of three dimensions, his enemies would have no knowledge nor carry no memories ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... personal pronouns, in order to express emphasis, or opposition, or the identity of the subject and [the] object of a verb; and thus forms a pronoun relative: as, 'I did it myself;' 'he was not himself, when he said so;' 'the envious torment themselves more than others.' Formerly self and selves were used simply as nouns, and governed the pronoun, which was kept distinct from it [them] in the possessive case: but since they [the pronoun and the noun] have ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... nothing more to make her unhappy," sounded strangely in her ears. Nothing more to make her unhappy! Could she have anything more, then or ever, to make her happy? Could she ever be happy again? All that had happened during the last few days passed through her mind, and added to her torment. How indignant had she been when her brother had hinted to her that Ussher did not intend honestly by her; into what a passion had she flown with Father John, when he had cautioned her that she should be circumspect in her conduct with her lover; what an insult she had felt it when Mary Brady ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... me, Hastings!" said Sibyll, with great emotion. "Oh, if thou knewest how I torment myself in thine absence! I see thee surrounded by the fairest and the loftiest, and say to myself, 'Is it possible that he can remember me?' But thou lovest me still—still—still, and ever! Dost ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to prevent this misfortune, Henry did the very worst thing he possibly could; he began to run and cry, "Mag! Mag!" with a raised voice, whilst the bird, as if resolved to torment him, hopped forward across the other field, perched herself on the stile, and, as he drew near, flew right down from thence ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... Messrs. Lord and Jacobs put a stop to the conversation, and was the signal for Toby's time of trial. It seemed to him, and with good reason, that the chief delight these men had in life was to torment him, for neither ever spoke a pleasant word to him; and when one was not giving him some difficult work to do, or finding fault in some way, the other would be sure to do so; and Toby had very little comfort from the time he began work in the morning ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... personified Germany for her, the other England. It was as if she saw Hermann and Michael with bayonet and rifle stalking each other across some land of sand-dunes and hollows, creeping closer to each other, always closer. She felt as if she would have gladly given herself over to an eternity of torment, if only they could have had one hour more, all three of them, together here, as on that night of stars and peace when first there came the news which for the moment had ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... supposed to pursue a sick man and torment him. [Footnote: See "Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia," vol. iv. ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... would reply in such cases, looking them straight in the face. It took courage to do that: the agent might grow bigger, become an enemy. She didn't care! She wasn't going to lower her price for anybody! And the commission she had to pay them was a torment to Lily; calculating the percentage made her head split—not to speak of the complicated nature of the contracts, worse than insurance policies. The poor artiste was bound down on every side, at the mercy of the manager; everything was ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... not gaze upon thee; My feeble virtue staggers, and again The fiends of jealousy torment and haunt ...
— Percy - A Tragedy • Hannah More
... violence of his sufferings seemed to abate and leave him at rest for a few moments. His thoughts wandered to all he loved upon earth, but the respite was of short duration. Soon the agony he endured drew from him piercing cries. During his long martyrdom no torment had equalled the present. It seemed as though he were being devoured by flames, or as if molten lead were ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... companions, or her studies (upon the latter subject he had grown quite curious, of late), she would feel that she was blushing, and answer, with downcast eyes, and be half glad and half sorry when he ceased to question her, and would then sit and torment herself by recalling what she had said, and thinking how much it might have ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... reality to prevent his witnessing the triumph of his brother. Through the deserted apartments, the scene of so many bitter reflections, the unhappy youth stalked like a discontented ghost, conjuring up around him at every step new subjects for sorrow and for self-torment. Impatient, at length, of the state of irritation and agonized recollection in which he found himself, he rushed out and walked hastily up the glen, as if to shake off the load which hung upon his mind. The sun ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... to stray Far as the Solar Walk or Milky Way; Yet simple nature to his hope has giv'n, Behind the cloud-topt hill an humbler heav'n; Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd, Some happier island in the wat'ry waste; Where slaves once more their native land behold, No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. To BE, contents his natural desire, He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire: But thinks admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... to the cottage did not become less frequent as the summer advanced, and her interest in Lilias seemed to increase with every visit. Not that she had ceased to torment the child with her discontented repinings for the past, or her melancholy forebodings for the future. There was always some subject for comment ready; and Nancy never let pass unimproved an opportunity to say something depressing. But Lilias was learning ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... piling up the standard Dictionary. Many have dwelt severely on Johnson's inequalities, without attending to their cause; that was unquestionably the "body of death" which hung so heavily upon his system, and rendered writing at times a positive torment. Let his fastidious critics remember that he never spent a single day, of which he could say that he was entirely well, and free from pain, and that his spirits were often so depressed, that he was more than once seen on his knees, praying ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... true,' she returned, with a groan; 'but, Miss Garston, hell has begun for me here; for three years I have been in torment, and rightly too,—and rightly too,—for I never was a good woman, never like Susan, who read her Bible and went to church. Oh, she is a good creature, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his country, he exposed himself to cruel reproach, to manifold hardship and hazard of life; about fourteen years almost unsuccessful he persevered in this difficult, but delusive attempt. What hunger, what cold, what torment and death have some Jesuitic and other antichristian missionaries undergone, to propagate the most ruining delusions of hell; all under the pretence of earnestness to gain sinners to Christ and his church. ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... will not only grow monstrous and despotic, but artificial appetites will be created which, like a ghastly Frankenstein, develop a kind of independent life and force, and then turn on their creator to torment him without pity, and will mock his efforts to free himself from this slavery. The victim of strong drink is one of the most pitiable creatures on earth, he becomes half beast, or half demon. Oh, the silent, suffering tongues that whisper ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... the gentleman? Ah, neither, I see. Both flaunt the bloom of perfect health and make the doctor shy. It is spring without, but summer within," ran on Dr. Rob gaily, wondering why both faces were so white and perturbed, and why there was in the air a sense of hearts in torment. "Flannels seem to call up boating and picnic parties; and I see you have discarded the merino, Nurse Gray, and returned to the pretty blue washables. More becoming, undoubtedly; only, don't take cold; and be sure you feed up well. In this air people must eat plenty, and you have ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... m., tiger. timide, timid. tirer, to draw. toi, thou, thee. tombeau, m., tomb, grave. tomber, to fall. ton, ta, tes, thy. tonnerre, m., thunder. tt, soon. toucher, to touch, move. toujours, always, ever, still. tour, m., turn, round. tour, f., tower. tourment, m., torture. tourmenter, to torment. tourner, to turn. tous, pl., all. tout, all, whole; everything; only, quite. toutefois, however. tracer, to trace, write, enter. trahir, to betray. traner, to drag. trait, m., shaft, arrow, traiter, to treat; ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... death coming towards them day by day, until it at last destroys them also inch by inch. What had I done that I should find myself bound like those poor wretches? I cannot tell you. Morphia wipes out the memory as surely as drink. I only know that I was in torment. Faces, familiar and strange faces, some compassionate, some indignant, some horror-struck, come back to me sometimes, blurred as by smoke, but I see nothing clearly. I dimly remember fragments of appeals that were made to me, fragments of divine music in cathedrals ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... demanded the witch. "Did yonder sniffling hypocrite thrust my darling from his door? The villain! I'll set twenty fiends to torment him till he offer thee his daughter on his ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and tender fooleries of that sort, or would have been, had it not been the property of an up-to-date, worldly-wise young woman who knew better than to save from the flames such sources of delicious torment, such instruments ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... I would go to the play, twice a week if I could: I dote upon it—only you're too affecting sometimes. You do put me in such a state—into such fits of crying! Goodness gracious me, Miss Lane, how can you let them torment that poor child so!' ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... flung himself across his writing-table and with trembling hands tried to wrench from his neck his order Pour le Merite. I can affirm without any exaggeration that I could see him wasting away under the ceaseless moral blows dealt to him, and that the mental torment he went ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... order of things, take the place of theological morality, or the responsibility of man to some abstract idea. Next, the day's work will be short. This need not be insisted on. It is clear that with work unwasted it CAN be short. It is clear also that much work which is now a torment, would be easily endurable if ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... earnest desire has been the cause of the greatest events; and this ought to instruct us that the world stands in need of a great many instincts, which, examined according to the ideas of our reason, are ridiculous and absurd. For there is nothing so opposite to reason as to torment ourselves in this life, that we may be praised after we are dead, since neither philosophy, nor experience, nor faith, nor any thing whatsover, makes it appear, that the praises given us after death ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... substituted a mild and emollient application. He was in great fear all night lest he should have done wrong in adopting this treatment; but was greatly relieved next morning on finding his patients comparatively comfortable, while those whose wounds had been treated in the usual way were writhing in torment. Such was the casual origin of one of Pare's greatest improvements in the treatment of gun-shot wounds; and he proceeded to adopt the emollient treatment in all future cases. Another still more important improvement was his employment of the ligature in tying ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... the shadows of crime and torment and death, the life of Amelius glided insensibly into the peaceful byways of seclusion, brightened by the companionship of Sally. The winter days followed one another in a happy uniformity of occupations and amusements. There were lessons to fill up the morning, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... her: she had been told of their fate, but everything had been forgotten in the later anguish. Now she remembered with a sharp sting of pain, and she turned her face toward the speaker, waiting to hear why they stayed to torment her. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... ministers, whose hair was cut short. For if a man with long hair had gone into the pulpit to preach, I would have gone out of the Church again, though he might preach better than the other." All through this time visions of hell and torment, and devils and damnation troubled him; now and then there were "elevations in my mind, but these were few and far between; a while after all was lost again." He soon consoled himself for his matrimonial disappointment; he married and ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... little boy whose fresh, cheerful face was crossed with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his presence was a source of torment. In the idiom of his generation Roscoe did not consider the matter "efficient." It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a "red-blooded he-man"—this was Roscoe's favourite expression—but in a curious and perverse manner. Indeed, to think about ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... began to torment itself again. Why did Josephine shun him now? Ah! she loved Raynal now that he was dead. Women love the thing they have lost; so he had heard say. In that case, the very sight of him would of course be odious to her: he could understand that. The absolute, unreasoning faith he once had ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... delusions which man is doomed to suck in with his mother's milk; viewing with painful sensations those irregular desires, those disgusting propensities, by which he is perpetually agitated; seeing the terrible effect of those licentious passions which torment him; of those lasting inquietudes which gnaw his repose; of those stupendous evils, as well physical as moral, which assail him on every side: the contemplator of humanity would be tempted to believe that happiness was ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... great deal of important business to do in it. Time and death are both in my view, and seem both to call aloud to me to make no delay. I beg of you, therefore, not to disquiet yourself or me. What must be, must be. The decrees of Providence are eternal and unalterable; why, then, should we torment ourselves about ...
— Dickory Cronke - The Dumb Philosopher, or, Great Britain's Wonder • Daniel Defoe
... and not fruitlessly. I tried to keep the word of His patience. He kept me in the days of my anguish. I was afraid with terror—I was troubled. Through great tribulation He brought me through to a salvation revealed in this last time. My fear had torment; He has cast it out. He has given me in its stead perfect love. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... she stand, And strives with the thought within her, and finds no word to speak: For such is the strength of her anguish, as well might slay the weak; But her heart is a heart of the Queen-folk and of them that bear earth's kings, And her love of her lord seems lovely, though sore the torment wrings, —How fares it with words unspoken, when men are great enow, And forth from the good to the good the strong desires shall flow? Are they wasted e'en as the winds, the barren maids of the sky, Of whose birth there is no ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... Radha frenziedly contemplating her lonely state. Ornaments grown too hot for wearing—from the passion burning in her heart—are strewn about the bed, while hands tightly clasped suggest her wild unhappy torment. The vast and barren hills, empty angular buildings, tiny guttering candles and lonely flowering tree provide ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... gives to Richard therefore a power which excites astonishment, and a courage which extorts admiration. He gives to Macbeth a similar, though less extraordinary, greatness, and adds to it a conscience so terrifying in its warnings and so maddening in its reproaches that the spectacle of inward torment compels a horrified sympathy and awe which balance, at the least, the desire for the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... "I think she does it to torment us, just." He was tired by this discussion; he turned and ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... this other—that much was plain—but that it boded anything but captivity and torment they could not believe. That last phrase was too eloquent ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... being the meanest as well as the most wicked of men. As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... If priests be good, it is so surely; But when Jesus hung on the cross with great smart, There he gave, out of his blessed heart, The same sacrament, in great torment; He sold them not to us, that Lord omnipotent: Therefore Saint Peter the Apostle doth say, That Jesus' curse hath all they Which God their Saviour do buy or sell, Or they for any money do take or tell. Sinful priests giveth the sinners example ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... was continually playing tricks upon the members of the company, and it was his especial delight to torment the "supers." Quite frequently in our sham Indian battles he would run up to the "Indians" (the supers), and putting his pistol close to their legs, would fire at them and burn them with the powder, instead of shooting over their heads. ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... have been a thousand times more tolerable than that simple idea of solid size. My aching mind was fixed and riveted down upon the mere quality of vastness, vastness, vastness, and was not permitted to invest with it any particular object. If I could have done so, the torment would have ceased. When at last I was roused from this state of suffering, I could not of course in those days (knowing no verbal metaphysics, and no metaphysics at all, except by the dreadful experience of an abstract ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... that what Plato, in the "Cratylus," made Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest. For, when they wish to explain the nature of any God, they first examine his name, and torment the letters thereof, arranging and altering them according to their will, and flying off to the speech of the Indians and Medes and Chaldeans, and other Barbarians, if Greek will not serve their turn. How saith Socrates? "I bethink me of a very new and ingenious ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... and immortal is in no way solicitous or uneasy on any account, neither does he torment or tease others; anger is unworthy of his greatness ... for all these things are the property ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... angry eyes, she began to take a naughty comfort to herself in her unexpected proximity. She drew a little closer to him on purpose to annoy Lucy; and then, when she found that he was short-sighted and could not find his places, she found them for him, thus adding to poor Lucy's torment; for this had once been Lucy's own seat, and she herself had seen to her father's comforts. From attending on him, Rosamund began to watch him, and then she found a good deal of food for meditation. In short, it is to be feared that she did not follow the service as she ought to have done. For the ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... People may, if they please, call it the radical evil of human nature—a name which will at least serve those with whom a word stands for an explanation. I say, however, that it is the will to live, which, more and more embittered by the constant sufferings of existence, seeks to alleviate its own torment by causing torment in others. But in this way a man gradually develops in himself real cruelty and malice. The observation may also be added that as, according to Kant, matter subsists only through the antagonism of the powers of expansion ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... person dies is founded on the idea that the minister of purgatorial pains took the soul as it escaped from the body, and flattening it against some closed door, (which alone would serve the purpose,) crammed it into the hinges and hinge openings; thus the soul in torment was likely to be miserably pinched and squeezed by the movement on casual occasion of such door or lid. An open or swinging door frustrated this, and the fiends had to try some other locality. The friends of the departed were ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... The torment in her brain eased then, and gradually she quieted down, with only a pang and a weight in her breast. The past seemed far away. The present was nothing. Only the future, that contained Jim Cleve, mattered to her. She would not have left the clutches of Kells, if at that ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... my word to my father," continued Balthasar; "and because it is a principle of mine, that man must never gratify his passions, least of all that of love. My conviction is, that our life is a state of torment and woe; and the more we try to escape from these feelings, the more awful vengeance do our terrours afterward take upon us. As to why this is so, who ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... was hated, and thus had no protection against treachery. One evening as I left school I was struck in the back by a handful of small stones tied in a handkerchief. When the valet, who punished the perpetrator, told this to my mother she exclaimed: "That dreadful child! he will always be a torment to us." ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... notary, without being recognized by the men. The marriage-contract is signed, and the lovers disappear to return in their true characters, full of righteous contempt. Isabella and Rosaura make believe to be conscience-stricken, and for a long while torment and deceive their angry bridegrooms. But at last they grow tired of teasing, they present the disguised Dolores, and they put their lovers to shame by showing that all was a farce. Of course the gentlemen humbly ask their pardon, and old Onofrio is ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... passed, without her receiving any news of Don Rafael; and her cheek, gradually growing paler, with the blue circles darkening around her eyes, bore witness to the mental torment she ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... there was a dear little naughty girl, not bad, she would not have been so dear had she been really bad, but just naughty sometimes, and I must confess "sometimes" came pretty often. She had all sorts of loving scolding names, such as "precious torment," "darling bother," and she kept her poor dear grandmother on a continuous trot to see what mischief she was in, and frightened her mother (who thought everybody must want to steal Zay) by hiding behind the Missouri currant ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... but I supposed her greatness would come out in her conversation. I gave it all the opportunities I could, but I was not disappointed when I found her only a dull, kind woman. This was why I liked her—she rested me so from literature. To myself literature was an irritation, a torment; but Greville Fane slumbered in the intellectual part of it like a Creole in a hammock. She was not a woman of genius, but her faculty was so special, so much a gift out of hand, that I have often wondered ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... King and by the peril of the Church. No situation could be more painful or perplexing than that of the old Cavalier who found himself in arms against the throne. The scruples which had not prevented him from repairing to the Dutch camp began to torment him cruelly as soon as he was there. His mind misgave him that he had committed a crime. At all events he had exposed himself to reproach, by acting in diametrical opposition to the professions of his whole life. He felt insurmountable ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... India have turned the Station of Kashima into a prison; and, because there is no help for the poor souls who are now lying there in torment, I write this story, praying that the Government of India may be moved to scatter the European population to ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... second theory of inconstancy rested upon the first theory of supposed love, and that upon guesses and surmises, so that the whole edifice was just as shadowy and unsubstantial as it could well be. But then it is curious to see how much real torment people manage to extract from ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the Book of Genesis," said the Hare, "but what does dominion mean? Does this Book of Genesis say that it means the right to torment that which is ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... friendly, somewhat sweet expression usual to it when all was calm within. As for Cleave himself, his nature owned a certain primal flow and bigness. There were few fixed and rigid barriers. Injured pride and resentment did not lift themselves into reefs against which the mind must break in torment. Rather, his being swept fluid, making no great account of obstacles, accepting all turns of affairs, drawing them into its main current, and moving onward toward some goal, hardly self-conjectured, but simple, humane, and universal. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... unnatural convulsion which they occasion. In proportion to the dazzling and seducing nature of error will be the greatness of the triumphs of truth: the demand for conviction and firm belief will be strong and pressing in proportion to the torment occasioned by the pangs of doubt. But doubt was necessary to elicit these errors; the knowledge of the disease had to precede its cure. Truth suffers no loss if a vehement youth fails in finding it, in the same way ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... believed, for example, that the soul continued in existence after death, and that persons would be unhappy unless buried in tombs with suitable offerings, and that if left unburied, or without suitable offerings, the souls of these persons would return to torment the living, Inasmuch as in the patriarchal family only sons could perform religious rites, that is, could make offerings to the departed spirits, these superstitions acted as a powerful stimulus to preserve the family ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... by her madness and cruelty increased. At first she made a pretext of some act of carelessness on the part of the child to torment her. Afterwards she did not stop there, but she did it when it came into her mind, or when her physical state impelled her to do so. One torture of her own invention was that of pricking her hands with a needle, and she delighted in seeing them covered with indentures ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... continually forming committees or circles for this purpose or that, purposes which fizzled out at about the third meeting of each group. Esther Tidditt was supposed to be in charge of the kitchen on this particular morning, but she had gone into the committee meeting in order to torment Elvira and Mrs. Brackett, ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... London banker, formerly member of Parliament for Greenwich, I had been called upon to set to sleep, and to arrest a continuous barking cough from which a young lady who was staying in the house was suffering, and who, consequently, was a torment to herself and her friends. I thought this a good opportunity for a control experiment, and I sat her down in front of a lighted candle which I assured her that I had previously mesmerized. Presently her cough ceased and she fell into a profound sleep, ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... intolerable heat. As the day advanced so did our sufferings increase. It was a dead calm, the sun perpendicular over us, actually burning that part of our bodies which rose clear of the water. I could have welcomed even a shark to relieve me of my torment; but I thought of Celeste, and I clung to life. Towards the afternoon I felt sick and dizzy; my resolution failed me; my vision was imperfect; but I was roused by Swinburne, who cried out, "A boat, by all that's gracious! Hang on a little longer, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... let him go, and he knew it. Hence his cruel self-torture of fatigue, his cruel exercise of courage. He who hung his head in his milk in torment when I asked him a question in German, what courage had he not needed to take this his very first trip out of England, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... Blind anger and scorn against all who surrounded her were his first emotions; there was something of martyrdom in her position; she, essentially so good and noble, to be dragged here before these narrow-natured slaves of an ignoble social order, in all probability to be condemned to miserable torment by men who had no shadow of understanding of her character ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... no flavor in his mouth, and though the gin maddened his spirit, it could not drown his wretchedness, for deep within him, like a maggot in a bread-fruit, was the torment of love. Sometimes in prison he would lower his head like a cow, and run at the wall, exclaiming: "I will die, I will die!" And then he would fall, with his beautiful hair all matted with blood, and his beautiful body next to lifeless, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... very pathetic sketch of his own miserable boyhood in the strangely ordered home in Milan, with his callous, tyrannical father, his quick-tempered mother, and the superadded torment of his Aunt Margaret's presence. Fazio Cardano was a man of rigorous sobriety, and he seems moreover to have atoned for his early irregularities by the practice of that austere piety which Jerome notices more than once as a characteristic of his old age.[177] ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... gnawing pain at my heart, The vision had vanished,—but oh, the smart Of the wound, which no time can ever heal, Was a torment, which only lost souls can feel. Yet in spite of the pain, the woe, the despair, I dote, as I look on a lock of dark hair, That I culled from the head, Of the loveliest maid; Many long years ago,— ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... may be proved from the love and justice of God revealed in Scripture. The Protestants divide—in theory, that is—mankind into two classes, the righteous, who are destined to infinite bliss; the wicked, who are doomed to infinite torment; in which latter class, to make their arbitrary division exhaustive, they put of course nine hundred and ninety-nine out of the thousand, and doom to everlasting companionship with Borgias and Cagliostros, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... had two little daughters, Meeky and Squeaky. Meeky was a good little mouse, and did everything her mother told her. Squeaky was very brave and daring, but she was the torment of ...
— Mouser Cats' Story • Amy Prentice
... them with a smile. "I guess you had better. It would be a shame to torment this young man after ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... 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 ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... even frenzied enough to think over what he would have done, if such a thing had been—of her utter helplessness against that which raged in him—of the grey thickness of the walls where he might have held and wrought his will upon her—insult, torment, death. His alcohol-excited brain ran riot—but, when it did its foolish worst, he was baffled ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... must spring up from the heart, like a wild flower from seed God plants in virgin forest soil, to bring contentment with its blossoming. The sunshine which falls upon it must be pure and bright from heaven. Plant it in an atmosphere of sin, and that which might have been a holy passion becomes a torment, bitter in ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... and the most beauteous Goddess, with the nodding of her head, shook the fields loaded with the heavy crops; and contrived {for him} a kind of punishment, lamentable, if he had not, for his crimes, been deserving of the sympathy of none, {namely}, to torment him with deadly Famine. And since that Goddess could not be approached by herself (for the Destinies do not allow Ceres and Famine to come together), in such words as these she addressed rustic Oreas, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... sleep I heard what you said." "Ah! fair sire, you never heard it, and I dare say it was a dream." "Now you are coming to me with lies. I hear you calmly lying to me. But if you do not tell me the truth now, you will come to repent of it later." "Sire, since you torment me thus, I will tell you the whole truth, and keep nothing back. But I am afraid that you will not like it. In this land they all say—the dark, the fair, and the ruddy—that it is a great pity that ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes |
