"Cursed with" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... joy is fleeting, cursed with sin, apportioned unto exiles, a little time of wretched waiting. Homeless we tarry at this inn with sorrow, mourning in spirit, mindful of the house of pain beneath the earth wherein are fire and the worm, the pit of every evil ever open. So now arch-sinners ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... Independence, no period has arrived that so decidedly proves the excellence of the representative system of government, and its superiority over every other, as the time we now live in. Had America been cursed with John Adams's hereditary Monarchy or Alexander Hamilton's Senate for life she must have sought, in the doubtful contest of civil war, what she now obtains by the expression of public will. An appeal to elections decides better than an appeal ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... they lost, And drank oblivion of their native coast. Instant her circling wand the goddess waves, To hogs transforms them, and the sty receives. No more was seen the human form divine; Head, face, and members, bristle into swine: Still cursed with sense, their minds remain alone, And their own voice affrights them when ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... zest for the intoxicating wine of public favor. A profound gloom stole over him, and we even hear of hints at an attempt to commit suicide. Adam Liszt attributed it to the sad English climate, which Hein-rich Heine cursed with such unlimited bitterness, and took his boy back again to sunnier France. But the dejection darkened and deepened, threatening even to pass into epilepsy. It assumed the form of religious enthusiasm, alternating with fits of remorse ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... is an unseen world. Do I not see it? Am I not cursed with the seeing of it all the time? Call it a thought, an idea, anything you will, still it is there. It is unescapable. Thoughts are entities. We create with every act of thinking. I have created this phantom that sits in my chair and uses my ink. Because I have created him ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... sons of his race and nation into exile in distant cities; he had brought others to the Kasbah, and yet others to death: he was a man at open enmity with God, and God had given him, as a mark of His displeasure, a child who was cursed with devils, a daughter who had been born blind and dumb and deaf, and was ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... was displeased with Israel; but his blessing was promised to those who devoted liberally of their substance to Him. "Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... and get your string then," said Mr. Best. "And long may your fine faith flourish. You're a great lesson to us people cursed with ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... schools, and in frequent visits to the sick of their respective parishes. But the youthful Levites feel this to be dull work; they prefer lavishing their energies on a course of proceeding which, though to other eyes it appear more heavy with ennui, more cursed with monotony, than the toil of the weaver at his loom, seems to yield them an unfailing ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... deserved, and he was himself very proud of it, but he dared not show it at Battersby. He knew also that he was now at the end of his tether; this was his one idea (I feel sure he had caught more than half of it from other people), and now he had not another thing left to write about. He found himself cursed with a small reputation which seemed to him much bigger than it was, and a consciousness that he could never keep it up. Before many days were over he felt his unfortunate essay to be a white elephant to him, which he must feed by hurrying into ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... learnt to read the words that are written by the hand of Fate. And here—here is the open book. It is all here. The storm of disaster that brought you into the world will dog your footsteps. You are cursed with the luck that leads to disaster. Wherever you go men will bless your name, and, almost in the same breath, their blessings shall turn to the direst curses. It is not I who am speaking. My tongue utters ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... what we are going to say: London is cursed with no predominating, no overwhelming, no characteristic aristocracy. There is no set or clique of any sort or description of men that you can point to, and say, that's the London set. We turn round and desire to be informed what set do you mean: every salon has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... of the evils thus dazzlingly described we are happily free in these times. We are not cursed with a currency composed of coins which are good, bad and indifferent, with the result that the public gets the bad and indifferent while the nimble bullion dealers absorb and export the good. There is nothing to choose between one piece of paper and another, and ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... them how his business stood. John had been brought up to go into the business, and now, at the last moment, he was undeceived, and ordered off to a new life, from which every instinct of his being shrank afraid. He was cursed with an imagination in excess of his brains, and in the haze of the future he saw two pictures with uncanny vividness—himself in bleak lodgings raising his head from Virgil, to wonder what they were doing at home to-night; ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... sentimental millionaire that he holds his wealth in trust for humanity,—in other words, that he has been chosen by an all-wise Providence to be the universal almsgiver of mankind. The arrogance of this boast is unsurpassable. To be rich is within the compass of any man gifted or cursed with an acquisitive temperament. No one may give to another save in humbleness of spirit. And there is not a millionaire in America who does not think that he is fit to perform a delicate duty which has eluded the wise of all ages. In this matter Mr Carnegie is by far the worst offender. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... myself, 'This woman, this human being, lived to a great age. She had children, a husband and family, friends and relations; her household was busy and cheerful; she was surrounded by smiling faces; and then suddenly they are gone, and she is left alone like a solitary fly... like a fly, cursed with the burden of her age. At last, God calls her to Himself. At sunset, on a lovely summer's evening, my little old woman passes away—a thought, you will notice, which offers much food for reflection—and behold! instead of tears ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... conditions, be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard and fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water supply; but the ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... earth will repel that projectile when electricity, which we are coming to look upon as another form of heat, is properly applied. It must be so, and it is the manifest destiny of the race to improve it. Man is a spirit cursed with a mortal body, which glues him to the earth, and his yearning to rise, which is innate, is, I believe, only a part of his probation and trial." "Show us how it can be done," shouted his listeners in chorus. "Apergy is and must be able to do it," Ayrault continued. "Throughout Nature we ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... suffering face and extended arms walk up and down his room, crying out from the depths of his heart: 'Oh, those poor people, those poor people!—the sad, wretched women, the little, trembling frightened children meant to be so happy!—all cursed with sin, cursed and crushed and tortured by sin!' And he would then open his arms as if to embrace the whole world, and exclaim, 'Why won't they let us save them?'—meaning, 'Why won't society and the State let The ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... art, Pope, prince, or peasant! If, indeed, the first, The noblest, therefore! since the heroic heart Within thee must be great enough to burst Those trammels buckling to the baser part Thy saintly peers in Rome, who crossed and cursed With the ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... deservedly cursed with an atrocious goat-stench from armpits, or if limping gout did justly gnaw one, 'tis thy rival, who occupies himself with your love, and who has stumbled by the marvel of fate on both these ills. For as oft as he swives, so oft is ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... companions into life; and I could not but be struck with the fact, that in almost every instance, both the character and the condition were referable, in a great measure, to the influence of the mother. Some of them were blessed with good mothers, and some were cursed with bad ones; and though the conviction is not in all the cases marked with equal distinctness, yet in several of them, the very image and superscription of the mother remains upon the child to this day. I sometimes visit the place which was the scene of my early training, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... Had worn the garb of flesh, and being heirs Of all the dulness of their stolid sires, And all the erring instincts of their tribe, Nature's own teaching, rudiments of "sin," Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay And cursed with sense enough ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... semi-piratical sailors who infested the coast have been driven into other lines of dishonest endeavor. Perhaps not since the days of Lafitte and the pirates of Barataria has any part of the coast of the United States been cursed with so criminal and abandoned a lot of sea marauders as have for a decade frequented the waters off Alaska, the Pribylof Islands, and the sealing regions. The outlawry of a great part of the seal trade, and the consequent heavy profits of those who are ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... at that time seasoning the shallowest of all philosophies with systematic rancour against thrones and Christianity. To a military (and therefore in those days ignorant) aristocracy, such as all continental states were cursed with, equally the food and the condiment were attractive beyond any other. And thus, viz. through such accidents of luck operating upon so shallow a body of estimators as the courtiers and the little adventurers of the Continent, did the French literature and language attain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... cursed with an inability to speak when I am most deeply moved, either by anger or tenderness. This misfortune has wrecked my life. On the verge of old age, the sorrows and the mistakes of my early life fill my thoughts so ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... am here, and with one word I could dispel the illusion," he acquiesced. "But I know myself; I am cursed with a peculiar, sinister sense of humor, and I am afraid I would not say the word. Hence, when the husband enters we are all silent. Then I say, 'I regret to have arrived at such an inopportune moment.' I take my hat ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... "'My heart is on the ground,'" he answered, using an expressive Indian phrase. "I cannot be light and witty. I am cursed with seriousness." ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... him. Some concerns masquerading as brokers or commission merchants are really wholesale buyers on their own account. They will charge the shipper a commission on sales to themselves at a low figure. The Baltimore market seems especially cursed with this sort of thing, though it is now, I believe, forbidden by a code. As a whole, Baltimore is not a very satisfactory market for black walnut kernels, though the largest in the East. I find Philadelphia and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... destroy his political movement which was threatening to destroy the Workingmen's League. "A very shrewd chap is Dorn," thought Davy—why do we always generously concede at least acumen to those we suspect of having a good opinion of us?—"A VERY shrewd chap. It's unfortunate he's cursed with that miserable envy of those better born and better off than ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... cried softly. "If I only had not been Liszt's son," Piloti muttered, "then I would not be so wretched, so cursed with ambitions. Alas! why was I ever told ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... some reason that seemed to make his face effeminate. It was easy to see why he had not been successful in private practice. He was like somebody trying to protect a raw surface from heat and cold; so cursed with diffidence, and so sensitive about his boyish appearance that he chose to shut himself up in an oscillating wooden coop on the sea. The long run to Australia had exactly suited him. A rough life and the pounding of bad weather had ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... chair; her eyes were gazing, with rapt attention, toward the purple dusk by the window. She was listening. Nurse, as she had often assured her friends, "was not cursed with imagination," but now fear held her so that she could not stir nor move save that her hand trembled against the wall paper. The chatter of the fire, the shouts of some boys in the Square, the ringing of the bell of ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... harsh, cruel man," Snass went on. "Yet the law is the law, and I am just. Nay, here with this primitive people, I am the law and the justice. Beyond my will no man goes. Also, I am a father, and all my days I have been cursed with imagination." ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... shakes a rat, he flung himself once more at the bars, and, after another fearful paroxysm, fell back inert upon the floor. For hours he lay exhausted, but wildly restless, too spent to struggle and too demented and tortured to be still. He moaned, he groaned, he cursed with horrid filthy words and phrases, bit as a dog bites in his madness, strove to gnaw the loathsome rags which had long ceased to cover his nakedness, and then again was still, save for the incessant rolling of his restless head, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... coat, even in the coldest weather. He was obsessed with the idea that should Diplomacy ever be revived, his fur coat might grow too shabby to be used for his first entrance, so it reposed perpetually and uselessly in camphor. Arthur Cecil was cursed with the Demon of Irresolution. I have never known so undecided a man; it seemed quite impossible for him to make up his mind. Sir Squire Bancroft has told us in his Memoirs how Cecil, on the night of the dress rehearsal of ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... fatigue, I yet could feel thankful that it was not accompanied by fever, which it seemed a miracle to avoid; for if ever a district was cursed with the ague, the Makata wilderness ranks foremost of those afflicted. Surely the sight of the dripping woods enveloped in opaque mist, of the inundated country with lengthy swathes of tiger-grass laid low by the turbid ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... vengeance. I loved thee; and, in spite of thine offence, My heart is troubled by anticipation For thee. But thou hast earn'd thy doom too well. Had father ever greater cause for rage? Just gods, who see the grief that overwhelms me, Why was I cursed with ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... cursed with the rule of British Tories since 1783, is it likely that our condition would have been better than that of ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... at seeing me outside—then spoke to me. Her first words were reproof for what I had unintentionally done, and sounded as an earnest of what I was to be cursed with as long as we both lived. I answered angrily; this tone of mine changed her complaints to irritation. She taunted me with a secret she had discovered, which concerned Miss Aldclyffe and myself. I was surprised to learn it—more ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... father, spare us all! Save thy dear life; or, if a soul so brave Neglect that thought, thy dearer glory save. Pity, while yet I live, these silver hairs; While yet thy father feels the woes he bears, Yet cursed with sense! a wretch, whom in his rage (All trembling on the verge of helpless age) Great Jove has placed, sad spectacle of pain! The bitter dregs of fortune's cup to drain: To fill with scenes of death his closing eyes, And ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... it has ennobled countless thousands since-hatred for Germany and Germans. It centered about the slayer of his mate, of course; but it included everything German, animate or inanimate. As the thought took firm hold upon him he paused and raising his face to Goro, the moon, cursed with upraised hand the authors of the hideous crime that had been perpetrated in that once peaceful bungalow behind him; and he cursed their progenitors, their progeny, and all their kind the while he took silent oath to war upon them relentlessly ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... about nothing. I'm not cursed with nerves ordinarily, but there are times—" She arose slowly, stood there beside her chair, gracefully slender, gracefully imperious. "You've chosen ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... end at the thought of possible confinement in a dark, damp, cold stone prison-house, with rusty-hinged or even sealed doors, where no window opens to the light of day; where no friendly voice is ever heard; where liberation is impossible, and where, cursed with the remainder of life, one is doomed to a miserable existence till the mortal and the immortal separate? Deliver us from such ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... is the knell of passing and decay: The sun-smit vastness of the world doth weigh Upon my riddling soul like hidden sin, And bids it speak. Thou desert art my kin! I crumble to thee, waning day by day; But I am cursed with questions that betray The end of life before death's hours begin, My eyes are staring, yet their sight is blind. My ears are hollow, yet they hear no sound. My knees are buried and my body sinks. The stars weave fates that they themselves ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Howe was the younger son of a planter, residing in one of the wildest mountain regions in central Virginia. The elder Howe was blessed with a large family, and cursed with a heavily mortgaged estate—a combination of circumstances not unusual among the warm-hearted, generous and extravagant people of the ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Appetite is a wise provision of Nature. Gluttony is a degrading habit. Yet numbers of people attempt to justify the gratification of their gluttonous proclivities by the statement that they are "blessed with a good appetite," while the truth of the matter is, they are cursed with an inordinate lust for food. If people were more temperate in the pleasures of the table, the purveyors of remedies for dyspepsia would find their incomes considerably lessened. Satisfy your hunger, by all means, but do not pander to the ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... appearance he was particularly ugly in face and clumsy in build. Against that, he was tall and unusually powerful whenever he chose to exert his strength. In mind he was reputed slow and almost stupid, although he was a good classical scholar and possessed a good memory. He was cursed with a bad and sometimes ungovernable temper. He was honest and courageous. He rarely knew how to do the right thing at the right time or in the right place. And finally he had a bad name, and believed himself ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... made that drive,—for two reasons. Biggest one was that I wanted to be sure of having it all made, in case something went wrong on that feature drive; get me? Other was plain, human bullheadedness. Some of the four-flushers I was cursed with in the company,—because they were cheap and I had to balance up what I was paying the Injuns,—they kept eyeing that bluff where I said I'd come down with the coach, and betting I wouldn't, and talking off in corners ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... the Gipsies were now the only persons addicted to such wickedness; but this is not the case; for it is well known that almost every town is cursed with an astrological, magical, or slight-of-hand fortune-teller. There are two now in Southampton; and their wretched abodes are visited not only by vain and ignorant servants, but often by those who belong to the higher ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... man who is well balanced, who is not cursed with some little defect or weakness which cripples his usefulness and neutralizes his powers. Wanted, a man of courage, who is not a coward in ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Embankment. No! no! no! the merciful God had not willed it that any man should look so deeply into the heart of his fellow-man. That was indeed to know good and evil; and the thought stole over him that perhaps it was in degree as a man had eaten of the forbidden fruit of the tree of life that he was cursed with this ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... time the populace had invaded the palace and cursed with indignities unmentionable the marble halls, and the furnishings in general, and pillaged such portable property as pleased the individual ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... man in a rusty cloak and a three-cornered hat worn well down over his nose so as to shade his face. And when presently he doffed this hat and made a sweeping bow to the young lovers, Andre-Louis confessed to himself that had he been cursed with such a hangdog countenance he would have worn his hat in precisely such a manner, so as to conceal as much of it as possible. If M. Leandre appeared to be wearing, in part at least, the cast-offs of nobleman, the newcomer appeared ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... of supererogation, since there probably remain few such epithets in the English language which have not already been applied to him by one writer or another. Yet it is hard to hold one's hand, although humanity would perhaps induce us to pity rather than to revile a man cursed with so unhappy a temperament. But whatever may be said or left unsaid about him personally, the infinite disturbance which he caused cannot be wholly ignored. It was great enough to constitute an important element in history. Covered by the powerful authority of his influential and patriotic ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... I know exactly what you mean. Lots of us are cursed with the same instinct. I am, and sometimes I believe your father is, too. It ought to be that when one sees a thing clearly in his own mind, and knows it is best, others—at least those near to him—should somehow be aware of it. But they usually ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... merely cursed with a sense of humour, Mr. Honna," I observe, and we avoid conversational rock and shoals until we are ensconced ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... to his own uses. A great force? Yes, a great force was his, but a dangerous one. He never reached the heights, but was always posturing behind the foot-lights. And he has left no school, no descendants. Like all hybrids, he is cursed with sterility. The twentieth century will find Wagner ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... far this will tend to confirm the assertion, that when a boy, he was an amateur of this royal sport, I do, says Mr. Ireland, not pretend to decide: but were a child, in whom I had any interest, cursed with such a propensity, my first object would be to correct it: if that were impracticable, and he retained a fondness for the cockpit, and the still more detestable amusement of Shrove Tuesday, I should hardly dare to flatter myself that he could become a merciful man.—The subject ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... eloquent Reverend Lachlin Taylor, DD. The trip down had not been one of the most pleasant. The rains had drenched him, and the mosquitoes had plagued him with such persistency, that he loudly bemoaned his lot in being found in a country that was cursed with ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... this neglected field, I selected one place as a center for extra effort, and here I commenced a series of gospel meetings. The result is a church of seventeen members and a Sunday-school of fifty scholars. As all these towns are dreadfully cursed with saloons, we are trying to create a temperance sentiment. Fifty have already signed the pledge, among them some of the worst drunkards in the town. Forty-five children have joined the 'Children's Band' and are trying to keep their lives clean. We have ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... than this, he would undoubtedly have ranked among the profoundest scholars and most eminent geniuses that adorned the reign of the maiden queen. But he was unfortunately cursed with an ambition that nothing could satisfy; and, having accustomed his mind to the wildest reveries, and wrought himself up to an extravagant pitch of enthusiasm, he pursued a course that involved him in much calamity, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... c'n have him for nuthin'," said Lafitte. "He ain't worth nothin'. Besides, I can't charge a brother of the flag anything; anyhow, not you." I inferred that Jean Lafitte, also, was going to grow up into one of those men like myself, cursed with a reticence and shyness in some matters, and so winning a reputation of oddness or coldness, against all the real and passionate protest of ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... had been cursed with too much of it. In his youth he had skulked through alleys and back streets—the fear of laughter and ridicule dogging his mixed heels. Never before to have paused to philosophize over what had caused his wasted ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... one young man, who was wildly buttoning and unbuttoning his coat as if he wanted to fight the subject through; "but we are not cursed with names so ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... Salome danced until like fire my blood chased itself into a fever. Then did I tell her to name her price. And the price was none other than the head of John—John Baptist, who for defiling the name of Antipas' wife had been put in a dungeon under the castle of Machaerus. Antipas is not cursed with poverty. Yet are there prices too great, for since the head of the brawler came blinking on a platter, do the people declare he were Elias, and that he is not dead but walks the dungeon by day and whither ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... long story with which I will not trouble you. Moreover, now that he was sure that you were dead, I showed him the little statuette of yourself looking into water, which you gave me. Whereon he burst into tears, at the thought that such an one had departed from the earth, while it was still cursed with so many who are ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Atlantic and the Mediterranean—of greatest commercial importance in the world. And its people, especially those in rural parts, are exceptionally frugal and industrious. But France as a nation has not made the progress in the world that its natural advantages call for. It has been cursed with expensive and unstable governments and sanguinary wars. Its upper classes, the natural leaders of its peoples, are excessively fond of pleasure and military glory, and the energies of the nation have been much misdirected. As a consequence, despite its natural advantages, France is losing ground ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... abstractedly upon the key-board, while the other executed, by itself, a passage of extraordinary difficulty and involution. Then, for the first time, the thought struck him that the musician was deaf.[17] Alas! the supposition was too true: Beethoven was cursed with the loss of his most precious faculty. Those who appreciate the full splendour of his gigantic genius, those who conceive, with a distinguished composer now living, that "Beethoven began where Haydn and Mozart left off;" those who coincide with an eminent critic, in saying that "the discords of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... my hand, would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions?—how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them, But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... when thou dost, Then mayst thou still be cursed with loving me; And, as thou art, be still unpitied, loathed; And let his ghost—No, let his ghost have rest— But let the greatest, fiercest, foulest fury, Let Creon haunt himself. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... servants, and to wonder what they could have had to do. Perhaps it was the idle man's playmate that made the trouble. But a little farther reading in the old diary dissipates this illusion. If anybody thinks that our grandmothers must have been cursed with ennui because they did not attend three parties a night three times a week, with operas and theatres to fill in the off nights, they are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... was stolen, and called in the aid of a priest. In common disputes also, affecting the veracity of each other, it was customary for the one to say to the other, "Touch your eyes, if what you say is true." If he touched his eyes, the dispute was settled. It was as if he had said, "May I be cursed with blindness if it is not true what I say." Or the doubter would say to his opponent, "Who will eat you? Say the name of your god." He whose word was doubted would then name the household god of his family, as much as to say, "May god So-and-so destroy me, if what I have said is not true." ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... "nobodies"—men who have no power—no unction—no mission. They strain their brains to write common-places, and wear themselves out repeating the rant of their sect and the cant of their schools. The bar is cursed with "nobodies" as much as the pulpit. The lawyers are few; the pettifoggers are many. The bar, more than any other medium, is that through which the ambitious youth of the country seek to attain political eminence. Thousands go into the study of ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... people to us? In part, undoubtedly, our zone, and the natural endowments of this portion of the globe. In part, and of late years, our vindicated national character, and the safety of our Institutions. But the magnet in America is, that we are a republic. A republican people! Cursed with artificial government, however glittering, the people of Europe, like the sick, pine for nature with protection, for open vistas and blue sky, for independence without ceremony, for adventure in their own ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... become born as men possessed of great intelligence. Every kind of felicity and auspiciousness becomes theirs in consequence of that intelligence with which they are born. Those men of foolish understandings who cast wicked eyes upon the wedded spouses of other men, become cursed with congenital blindness in consequence of that sinfulness of theirs. Those men who, impelled by desire in their hearts, cast their eyes on naked women, those men of wicked deeds take birth in this world to pass ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... downright—such as I Should perish if I did not have from thee; I let the wrong go, withered up and dry, Cursed with divine forgetfulness in me. 'Tis but self-pity, pleasant, mean, and sly, Low whispering bids the paltry memory live:— What am I brother ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... found some sweet wild Notes among the Natives, where they live in Groves of Oranges, and hear the Melody of Birds about them: But a Lapland Lyric, breathing Sentiments of Love and Poetry, not unworthy old Greece or Rome; a regular Ode from a Climate pinched with Frost, and cursed with Darkness so great a Part of the Year; where 'tis amazing that the poor Natives should get Food, or be tempted to propagate their Species: this, I confess, seemed a greater Miracle to me, than the famous Stories of their Drums, their Winds ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... but what is a far rarer form of kindness, to take active trouble, that he should have followed the raw student with long and careful letters of advice upon the proper direction of his studies. For five years Barry was maintained abroad by the Burkes. Most unhappily for himself he was cursed with an irritable and perverse temper, and he lacked even the elementary arts of conduct. Burke was generous to the end, with that difficult and uncommon kind of generosity which moves independently of gratitude ...
— Burke • John Morley
... nations, are a connecting link between Europe and Asia, between civilization and barbarism. Thus the Pole, the wealthiest member of the Slav family, has in his character all the childishness and inconsistency of a beardless race. He has courage, spirit, and strength; but, cursed with instability, that courage, strength, and energy have neither method nor guidance; for the Pole displays a variability resembling that of the winds which blow across that vast plain broken with swamps; and though he has the impetuosity of the snow squalls that wrench ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... man's heart an' tunes his gullet t' the appreciation o' good Jamaica rum. An' I never knowed a man t' carry a more irksome burden of appetite than Small Sam Small o' Whoopin' Harbor. 'Twas fair horrible t' see. Cursed with a taste for savin', ay, an' cursed, too, with a thirst for good Jamaica rum! I've seen his eyes glitter an' his tongue lick his lips at the sight of a bottle; an' I've heared un groan, an' seed his face screw up, when he pinched the pennies in his pocket an' turned away from the temptation ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... possession unless God Himself had flowed into it. It were but a poor advancement and the gain of a loss, if yearnings were made immortal, and the aching vacuity, which haunts every soul that is parted from God, were cursed with immortality. It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the fuller possession ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... it if we can only save it. Out of this agony and tears will be born a united people. We have always been cursed with the impossible ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... Shame, Clothing herself with Honour's name, Usurp'd his station; on the throne Which Liberty once call'd her own, (Gods! that such mighty ills should spring Under so great, so good a king, 290 So loved, so loving, through the arts Of statesmen, cursed with wicked hearts!) For every darker purpose fit, Behold in triumph ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... blown again; iridescent as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes cheerful Mr. Barnum's success; New Haven, girt with flat marshes that look like monstrous billiard-tables, with hay-cocks lying about for balls,—romantic with West Rock and its legends,—cursed with a detestable depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track so murderously close to the wall that the peine forte et dare must be the frequent penalty of an innocent walk on its platform,—with its neat carriages, metropolitan ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Extraordinary. I'm supposed to be an engineer myself; I say supposed, because in the seven years since my graduation, my father hasn't given me much opportunity to prove it. He has a strong sense of value of time, and I'm cursed with the unenviable quality of being late to anything and for everything. He even asserts that the occasional designs I submit are late Jacobean, but that ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... entered that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... us who are cursed with an over-abundant measure of self-consciousness, nothing is harder than simple naturalness. The remedy is to lose oneself in one's art. Think of the story so absorbingly and vividly that you have no room to think of yourself. Live it. Sink yourself in that mood ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... possessing a number of good qualities in such abundant measure as to make him a total failure in everything except the cutting of tobacco. Like many witty, generous and kind-hearted persons in a much higher rank of existence, he was cursed with a total want of tact. On the present occasion, having sliced through an unusually long package of leaves and having encountered an exceptional number of obstacles in doing so, he thought fit to pause, draw a long breath and wipe the perspiration from his sallow forehead ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... boat to the bar they leap; And then when the long flotilla goes, and the last of their pay is done, The boys from the banks of Lac Labiche swing to the heavy sweep. And oh, how they sigh! and their throats are dry, and sorry are they and sick: Yet there's none so cursed with a lime-kiln thirst ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... in vain to be, Oh, wherefore am I thus consigned, With eyes that every truth must see, Lone in the city of the blind? Cursed with the anguish of a power To view the fates I may not thrall, The hovering tempest still must lower, The ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... or cursed with an ironical humour the troublesome history of the Church of England since the Reformation cannot fail to be an endless source of delight. It really is exciting. Just a little more of Calvin and of Beza, half a dozen words here, or Cranmer's pencil through a single phrase ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... sometimes sends as far as to Wicklow for men to capture and sell them for him. He was once fortunate enough to trap a pair of the snow geese of the Arctic region, but Belmullet, in other respects a primeval paradise, is cursed with the small boy of civilisation; and one of these pests of society slew the goose with a stone. The widowed gander consoled himself by contracting family ties with the common domestic goose of the parish, and all ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... or the ignorant; to every one else, a perpetual vigil will appear to be a state of wretchedness, second only to that of the miserable beings, whom Swift has in his travels so elegantly described, as "supremely cursed with immortality." ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... Veronica, that will show they are cursed with an argumentative temperament which must be rooted out at any cost," I agreed; "and if they don't say anything, that will prove them possessed of a surly disposition which must be checked at once, before it develops ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... we are told, for a good digestion: let us add to the prayer — and a bad memory. Truly we are sometimes tempted to think that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our friends, we can swear, have all, without exception, atrocious memories; why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation must be imaginary; for even as we engage in this selfish moan for ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... a tyrannical nature, and instead of leading a private life has been cursed with the further misfortune of ...
— The Republic • Plato
... been cursed with curiosity. Always have I wanted to know; and, on the Elsinore, I have already witnessed many a little scene that was a clean-cut dramatic gem. So I did not discover myself, but ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... were at last able to send a big dray to drag away the horse that lay dead before his shop door. The huge dray already contained eleven other dead horses, and when it reached this particular door it broke down, and it was hours before it could be moved. The unfortunate man who had thus been cursed with a granted wish closed his doors in despair and wrote us a final pathetic letter in which he requested us to remove either the horses or his shop, he ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... at that time was the Duke's friend Baron Forstner, a man of excellent and sterling qualities, but one of those unfortunate mortals cursed with a lugubrious manner which makes their goodness seem to be but one more irritating characteristic of a tiresome personality. Forstner was genuinely devoted to the Duke; he had been the companion of the Prince's childhood, had shared his studies, and had followed him on his travels to the ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... done you? Murderesses get short shrift in France. There is none of that sickening sentimentalism here that we are cursed with in ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... knowing only too well from my own dread experience that the world which men agree to call that of the supernatural is just as real as—nay, perhaps, even far more real than—this world we see about us. In other words, I, like many of my countrymen, am cursed with the gift of second-sight—that awful faculty which foretells in vision calamities ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... to the hall. This is the reason why the teachings of our greatest prophets give rise to endless disputations when we try to understand them by following their words and not be realising them in our own lives. The men who are cursed with the gift of the literal mind are the unfortunate ones who are always busy with their ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... Something in their demeanor made Michael watch them instinctively. As they neared the end of the alley toward the street they paused a moment and one of the figures stole back lingeringly. He thought he recognized her as a girl cursed with more than the usual amount of beauty. She disappeared into the darkness of the tenement, but the other after looking back a moment kept on toward the street. Michael quickened his steps and came to the corner at about the same time, crossing over as the other ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... they imagine they stand for progress, and they know nothing about the conditions. Many missionaries are very fine men, and they would do even better work if left a little more to their own initiative, and not cursed with this atmosphere of competition in figures. It isn't fair to damn the whole flock because a few of the ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... creaking signboard, swinging in the wind on rusty irons, directed me to the only inn of the village. It was a two-story brick building, standing a little back from the road. I drew rein at the door, and dismounted my weary nag. My loud vociferations summoned to my side a bull dog, cursed with a most unhappy disposition, and a hostler whose temper was hardly more amiable. He took my horse with an air of surly indifference, and gruffly directed me ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... are often very severe critics of the doings of their family; and Balzac, cursed with the sensitiveness of genius, and smarting under the bitter disappointment of disillusionment and of thwarted and compressed powers, was not likely to be an indulgent critic; but making due allowance for these facts, it does not appear that his home was a particularly comfortable place at this ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... could so consecrate himself to art, was not a bad man. Yet his acts were often, as we have seen, most reprehensible. Frequently the subject of slander, he was not a victim of conspiracy to defame. Although circumstances were many times against him, he was his own worst enemy. He was cursed with a temperament. His mind was analytical and imaginative, and gave no thought to the ethical. He remained wayward as a child. The man, like his art, was not immoral, but simply unmoral. Whatever his faults, he suffered frightfully for ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... scorn might well have been mitigated with thankfulness that he was not cursed with a daughter like Charley's Bela. Bela was a firebrand in the village, a scandal to the whole tribe. Some said she was possessed of a devil; according to others she was a girl born with the ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... to the end. Cardan was before all else a man of books and of the study, and it is not rare to find that one of this sort makes a harsh unsympathetic husband. The qualities which he attributes to himself in his autobiography suggest that to live with a man cursed with such a nature would have been difficult even in prosperity, and intolerable in trouble and privation. But fretful and irascible as Cardan shows himself to have been, there was a warm-hearted, affectionate side to his nature. ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... be uneasy; for the life of the Emperor had been so often menaced, that it was very natural to fear some snare or surprise, and imagination takes the reins when beset by such fears. Prince Murat swore and cursed with all his might, sometimes the imprudence of his Majesty, then his gallantry, then the lady and her complaisance. I was not any better satisfied than he, but being calmer I tried to quiet him; and at last, unable longer to restrain his impatience, the prince sprang out of the carriage, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... at the distance of 1900 years. That Christians should be treated still worse, if worse could be found for them, is less strange, when every step one treads is upon the bones of martyrs; and who dares say that the surrounding campagna, so often drenched in innocent blood, may not have been cursed with pestilence and sterility to all succeeding ages? I have examined the place where Sylla massacred 8000 fellow-citizens at once, and find that it produces no herb but thistles, a weed almost unknown in any other ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... refuse to send their dirty garments to be washed where thou dost dwell. . . . Wouldst leave me now already, when I have not seen thee for three days? May thy house be destroyed! Stop, in the name of Allah; stop, I say! Was ever mother cursed with such ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... "but surely there is some excuse! Of course," he added, with an effort to control his feelings, "I do not know Miss Philippa, but assuredly a young girl who is cursed with great wealth must discriminate between those who love her for herself and those who come to woo her because she is wealthy. Oh, believe me, it is, it must be very painful to be wealthy, to have to suspect ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... stood, potential, opulent, With virile manhood, and emotions keen, And wonderful with God's creative fire. At noon he stands, with Love's large fortune spent In petty traffic, unproductive, mean - A pauper, cursed with impotent desire. ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... think that the scornful apostle had the Garden of Eden in his eye when he speaks so bitterly to Timothy of a class of people who are cursed with 'itching ears.' Eve's ears itched unappeasably for the devil's promised secret; and we have all inherited our first mother's miserable curiosity. How eager, how restless, how importunate, we all are to hear that new thing that does not at all concern us; ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... "Cinnamon and sugar"—he cursed with a great oath; and turning gave Nettie a violent push from him, that was half a blow. "Go home!" he repeated—"go home! and mind your business; and don't take it upon you to ...
— The Carpenter's Daughter • Anna Bartlett Warner
... a man running society on his fees—that is, endeavouring to cope with the rich on the mere earnings of a barrister, however large they may be—I have met with several instances which would have preserved me from the same fate had I ever been cursed with such an inclination. The number of successful men at the Bar who have been ruined by worshipping the idol which is called "Society," and which is perhaps a more disastrous deity to worship than any other, is legion. This is one unhappy ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... the somewhat free talk about the other sex in which many men indulge. "I remember," he says, "a man's dinner at which two of those present, both persons of eminence, started a theory that every man who is blessed or cursed with the artistic instinct has at some period of his life wanted to marry a barmaid. Mr. Sandys gave them such a look that they at once apologized. Trivial, perhaps, but significant. On another occasion I was in a club smoking-room when the talk was of a similar kind. Mr. Sandys ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... salvation! To count their beads and mutter their Ave Marias; 'tis all they need. Yon fisher, with his great gold ear-rings, who throws his nets and cuddles his Juanita and carouses with his mates, hath more to thank the saints for than miserable I, who, blessed with wealth, am cursed with loneliness, and loving my fellow-men, yet know they are but sheep. God's sheep, natheless, silly and deaf to the cry of their true shepherd, and misled ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sir,' I acknowledged. 'First, I am a man; next, a down-trodden American citizen. I am cursed with neither profession, trade, nor expectations. Like Esau, I am pottageless. My residence is everywhere; the sky is my coverlet. I am one of the dispossessed, a sansculotte, a proletarian, or, in simpler phraseology addressed to ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom, or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private or social virtues. Here are no Hottentots ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... his honour's curious behaviour, I knew him and distrusted him enough not to think much of it. He was a coward, cursed with a guilty conscience, and would fain have passed himself off as a righteous judge and powerful patron. He was anxious to conciliate me, not so much, I thought, because of my hint about the property, which he was satisfied was incapable of proof, as from a fear I ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... cursed with her whole heart now the coldly practical, utterly self-interested side of Baroudi's nature. But she was afraid to defy it. She ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... with tears, which he manfully wiped away with a sneaking little movement of his left hand, as he pretended to look out of the window toward the distant lights. A man whose tear-ducts have dried with adolescence is cursed with a shriveled soul for the rest ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... edifices of Rome were by no means the sole beneficiaries of this new interpretation of the rights of war. Much of the valuable plunder had found its way into private houses,[51] to stimulate the envious cupidity of many a future governor who, cursed with the taste of a collector and unblessed by the opportunity of a war, would make subtle raids on the artistic treasures of his province a secret article of his administration. When the ruling classes of a nation have been familiarised for the larger part of a century with the easy ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... realise in its fulness the beauty and glory of life. Let the man and woman see this, and let them know in the day that is at hand, how the challenge may come from some petty authority of the time that rules not by its integrity but by its favourites. We are cursed with such authority, and many a one drives about in luxury because he is obsequious to it: he prefers to be a parasite and to live in splendour than be a man and live in straits. He has what Bernard Shaw so aptly calls "the soul of a servant." ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... the national demand but by irresponsible private individuals whose aim is profit, not the fulfilment of a national demand. "The causes of commercial depression lie in the non-consumption of the incomes of our millionaires."[207] Another Socialist writer asserts: "Our era is cursed with crises occurring far more frequently than plagues and causing as much misery. Economists say that these crises are caused by over-production. Private enterprise compels every producer to produce for himself, to sell for himself, to keep all his transactions ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... he cursed with a state of mind more wearing and more wearisome than remorse. He had no remorse; but the evildoer who can hold that avenger at bay, cannot escape the slower torture of incessantly doing the evil deed again and doing it more efficiently. In the defensive declarations and pretended confessions ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... a little catch of her breath, "is there no such thing as oblivion? Is there a place in the world that is not haunted? I am cursed with memory." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
