"Distressful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with reason. What is that spectre the tired slumberer sees? The foul familiar lineaments affright him; Its pose of menace and its pointing hand To caution urge, to providence invite him, To foil this scourge of the Distressful Land. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 30, 1890. • Various
... exhibits herself on the stage to several hundred people, but there I do not distinguish the individual eyes that are fixed on me, and my mind is diverted from the annoyances of my real situation by the distressful circumstances of my feigned one. Moreover, to add to my sorrows, at the beginning of the evening a lady spilled some coffee over a beautiful dress which I was wearing for the first time. Now I will tell you what ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the place in the midst of an impressive stillness, which made the sharper and more distressful to me the clank of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... he had ceased to try for it, and a lover who was carried so much past it on the white wings of an angel, that he could not get back to it. Massimilla could be happy with desire, not imagining its issue; but her lover, distressful in his happiness, would sometimes obtain from his beloved a promise that led her to the edge of what many women call "the gulf," and thus found himself obliged to be satisfied with plucking the flowers at the edge, incapable ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... servile egotism that is almost always at the bottom of the homage paid to those in high places. More deeply than in the hearts of others was this resentment implanted in the heart of Franz Ferdinand, and he never forgave the world what he suffered and went through in those distressful months. It was chiefly the ostensible vacillation of the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, Count Goluchowski, that had so deeply hurt the Archduke, who had always imagined that Goluchowski was deeply attached to him. According to Franz Ferdinand's account, Goluchowski ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... Yet rest where thou art, 'Twill be dreadful to meet, And distressful to part. The champion of Ulster! Oh! think what a foe! In that meeting there's grief, In that journey ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... it he awoke one particularly nasty morning and thanked the Lord he was not obliged to earn his bread at all, to say nothing of earning it in so distressful a fashion. There was a lull in the shipping because cars were not then available. He promptly took advantage of it and rode by the very shortest trail to the ranch—and Mona. But Mona was visiting friends in Chinook, ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... by what he sometimes does, but by what he is. And, secondly, that as Sir Walter Scott pointed out, when dealing with this very matter, "the vices into which Jones suffers himself to fall are made the direct cause of placing him in the distressful situation which he occupies during the greater part of the narrative; while his generosity, his charity, and his amiable qualities become the means of saving him from the consequences of his folly." Fielding ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... was over to our joint satisfaction, she had to return to the distressful main theme of our talk. She harked back to Sir Anthony, touched on his splendid behaviour, recalled, with a little dismay, the hitherto unnoted fact that, after the ceremony he had held himself aloof from those that thronged round Boyce. Then, ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... favourable opinions entertained in regard to some of the miscellaneous pieces which went to make up the volume of the 'Songs of the Ark.' Of the piece entitled 'Apathy,' Allan Cunningham thus wrote:—'Although sufficiently distressful, it is a very bold and original poem, such as few men, except Byron, would have conceived or could have written.' Motherwell said of the 'Sea-gray Man,' that it was 'the best of all modern ballads.' This ballad, shortly after I had composed ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Prue's distressful face and Mark's surprise produced an inspiring effect upon Sylvia, who continued, with an ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... rebellious action; but clearer and clearer the demand for war was heard, through and above the din. "When the late intelligence from the northeast reached us," said an emotional follower of the Administration,[278] "it bore a character most distressful to every man who valued the integrity of the Government. Choosing not to enforce the law with the bayonet, I thought proper to acknowledge to the House that I was ready to abandon the embargo.... The excitement ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... of no assistance to the distressful Henry we continued our own search, and, by hailing all within call, eventually reached our trench, where we found the colonel, always in good mood when something practical wanted doing, superintending Headquarters' ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... wrong. I was expecting too much of them when I accorded them that faint gleam of intelligence which the tribulations of a distressful stomach ought, one would think, to have aroused. I visit them at dawn. They are lined up as on the day before, but motionless. When the air grows a little warmer, they shake off their torpor, revive and start walking again. The circular procession begins anew, like ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... came in contact with the cannon; the shouts of rage; the blows; the screams of pain; the white face of Colgate as he reeled and fell. These are all in my memory, blurred, commingled, indistinct, yet distressful as any nightmare. In some way, how I know not, I realized that we had hurled them back, shattered them by our first fierce blow; that the guns were once again ours; that fifty dismounted troopers were tugging desperately at their wheels. Then that ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... enterprise, what industry, in but two years of one human existence! What a world of doubt, of distressful anxiety and misgiving in the heart of the woman, left to patient expectation, to prayerful, tearful hopes and fears! What trust in man and faith in God during those two years! And now, with her children, she was coming to rejoin her ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... followed his entrance, gentlemen, we have already seen. Your time being precious, I have but made use of the silence which poor Mr. Plowman found so distressful. ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent. I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed, and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did not trust such important matters ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... There was a distressful space to cross, of sand and slippery mud and drowned vegetation, including the remains of her garden; the look of everything was changed. Only the ditch-bank against the reddened sky supplied the usual landmark. Its crest was black with shovelers, ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... and intently thought out from its emotional premises. It can take permanent possession of a deep mind here and there, and under certain conditions it can become epidemic. Imagine, for instance, a small nation with an intense vitality, but on the verge of ruin, ecstatic and distressful, having a strict and minute code of laws, that paints life in sharp and violent chiaroscuro, all pure righteousness and black abominations, and exaggerating the consequences of both perhaps to infinity. Such a people were the Jews after the exile, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... with them the melancholy evidence of the truth of what they had just heard. It came on still—it stopt—it was at their own door it stopt. The old man could not speak, but his wife rushed forward with a distressful shriek. The truth was soon all known. They had no child. They had only a dead body to weep over—to lay in the grave. Is it necessary to say more? A few days passed. They were the bitterest days the bereaved parents had ever known; but they passed, and their minds became comparatively calm. Neither ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... my dream, methought, I went To search out what might there be found; And what the sweet bird's trouble meant, That thus lay fluttering on the ground. I went and peered, and could descry 545 No cause for her distressful cry; But yet for her dear lady's sake I stooped, methought, the dove to take, When lo! I saw a bright green snake Coiled around its wings and neck. 550 Green as the herbs on which it couched, Close by the dove's its head it crouched; And with the ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... bunched electrics lit up that distressful palace of all the luxuries, and they fared sumptuously, swinging on through the emptiness of abject desolation. Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the guttural voice of a Chinaman, the clink-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp steel wheels, and the oath of a ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... Le Jeune's distressful experiment with a band of wandering Algonquins had convinced the Jesuits that their schemes of mission-conquest could not bear much fruit if they were confined to the vagrant tribes of the north. Farther west in the peninsula of the great lakes lived ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... face was distressful. They were all silent for a little, Hugh kissing his mother's wet cheeks. Fleda had softly nestled her head in her bosom. But Mrs. Rossitur ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... him all she honestly could, and corrected his many blunders so quietly that he soon ceased to be a deep, distressful red during recitation, and tugged away so manfully that no one could help respecting him for his efforts, and trying to make light of his failures. So the first hard week went by, and though the boy's heart had sunk many a time at the prospect of a protracted wrestle with ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... characteristic of the man of action that he thinks lightly of reverses; he loves hard buffets as a swimmer high waves, and when he tells his life-story he does not talk of his "distress." This "distressful stroke that my youth suffered" is manifestly pure Shakespeare—tender-hearted Shakespeare, who pitied himself and the distressful strokes his youth suffered very profoundly. The characterization of Othello in the ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... of Italy and of literature, languished, in his old age, in the most distressful poverty; and having sold his palace to satisfy his creditors, left nothing behind him but his reputation. The learned Pomponius Laetus lived in such a state of poverty, that his friend Platina, who wrote the lives ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... New-England churches presents no epoch more melancholy, distressful, and stormy than the first, and none more united, prosperous, or commendable than the second period in the annals of the Salem ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... destitute children of poor Elton the actor, who was drowned in the Pegasus. They are exceedingly anxious to have the great assistance of your name; and if you will allow yourself to be announced as one of the body, I do assure you you will help a very melancholy and distressful cause. ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... unhappiness is strengthened and sinking into the Unconscious makes still deeper the despondency he experienced before. In the same way the doctor, listening to the symptoms of a patient, does not allow these distressful ideas to dwell in his conscious mind. His thought passes on immediately to the remedy, to the idea of the help he must give. Not only does he manifest this helpfulness in reasoned action, but also, by Unconscious realisation, in his very ...
— The Practice of Autosuggestion • C. Harry Brooks
... handkerchief, and cried in good earnest. I believe her to be warmly and gratefully attached both to the king and queen and she has received from the queen very uncommon assistance, I am informed, in some very distressful Situations. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... his wont. This was grievous to Abdallah and he said in himself, "Verily, the heart of the Commander of the Faithful and his fashions are changed towards me and nevermore shall I get of him that cordiality wherewith he was wont to entreat me." And this was distressful to him and concern waxed upon him, so that he recited the ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... see. The treatment was daring, and it cut me like a knife that the whole painting had a red glow: the dress was red, the light falling on the hair was red, the shine of the eyes was red also. It was fascinating, but weird, and, to me, distressful. There flashed through my mind the remembrance of Mathilde in her scarlet robe as she stood on the Heights that momentous night of my arrest. I looked at the picture in silence. He kept gazing at it with a curious, half-quizzical smile, as if he were unconscious of my presence. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and man. I have no choice; my immediate return is as much a duty and obligation upon me as can in human society be laid upon one who would not renounce the character of a gentleman. Judge, then, of the distressful situation I must have been in at the time of decyphering your last lines, and judge how sacred and indispensable those circumstances must be, that do not give me even room to hesitate in a difficulty of so much delicacy. I love you, my dearest brother, with the truest ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... and spent another thirty minutes focusing his full strength on the opposite end. The rock, however, refused to move an inch, and, because a few crackers are not much for a hungry man to work on after an all-night march, Thurston became conscious that he had a headache and a distressful stitch in his side. Still, being obstinate and filled with an unreasoning desire to prove his trustworthiness to his fair employer, he continued doggedly, and after another hour's digging found the stone still immovable. Then it happened that while, with the perspiration dripping from him, ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... answered in English, "because I know. Your position's this." He sat down in his rocking chair, crossed his legs, and looked at me as if he expected me to show signs of astonishment at his knowing so much. "You're in a hole. You must leave this island of Jamaica—surely it's as distressful as my own dear land—and you can't go home, because the runners would be after you. You're 'wanted' here as well as there, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... attention; and I was distressed by the news of Mr. Tresham, yet less so than if they had fully occupied my mind. I was neither a false lover nor an unfeeling son; but man can give but a certain portion of distressful emotions to the causes which demand them; and if two operate at once, our sympathy, like the funds of a compounding bankrupt, can only be divided between them. Such were my reflections when I gained my apartment—it seems, from the illustration, they already ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... castle—the spreading woods—the winding river, gladly leaving his unsightly, heathy source, and lingering with apparent delight as he passes the fairy walk at the bottom of the garden;—your late distressful anxieties—your present enjoyments—your dear little angel, the pride of your hopes;—my aged friend, venerable in worth and years, whose loyalty and other virtues will strongly entitle her to the support ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... hostelry, now converted by a sudden malevolence on the part of fate into a temporary hospital. As she took the last flight she could hear Gaspard's stertorous breathing coming at the regular intervals of distressful slumber, and through that an ominous murmur of grave and low-voiced conference, such as one hears in the chambers of the dead. The convulsive application of a powder puff to the tip of her burning nose—her whole face was aflame with exertion and excitement—was merely a part of her whole ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... parts almost distressful. She was failing, she said, and she begged me to be a good son, give up my wanderings and join my cousin at once. Also she enclosed post-office orders for forty pounds. Her letter, written in a fine faltering hand and so full of gentle affection, brought ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... his mind with such questions, the deeper grew the darkness of the inexplicable dilemma, to which a fresh obscurity was now added in his suddenly distinct and distressful remembrance of the "Pass of Dariel." Where was this place, he wondered wearily?—When had he seen it? whom had he met there?— and how had he come to Al-Kyris from thence? No answer could his vexed brain shape to these demands, . . he ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... quiet presence, a man and a boy from that distressful outer world had entered. They moved with effort and difficulty into its untrodden depths. Uninvited and unasked, they sought its hidden and invisible centre, the mysterious heart of it which the younger ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... country made demand for city housing of an inexpensive sort, and there came into being all over the land the type of the family house squeezed by the price of land to four stories high, 16 to 20 feet wide, built in long rows and blocks. The "ugly sixties" bred not only distressful village "villas," but unpleasant city houses of this type, which are to-day a real menace to wholesome living. Many such blocks may be found in any of our older cities, casting a depressing influence upon all who come in sight ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... isolation depressed him greatly. He was alone; from this world with its vesper lights and hues, and fires, and stars, and human sounds, he stood aloof and apart, as though shut close within a dark room. So distressful was this sense of solitude, that as he crossed the melon-field where hundreds of melons were growing in the gloom, to him they seemed like human skulls that Jay strewn upon ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... for resisting arrest and assaulting the minions of the law; hounded by a vengeful and determined posse; unacquainted with his whereabouts, ignorant of any way of escape from that hollow square, round whose sides window after excitable window was lighting up in his honour; all in all, as distressful a figure of a fugitive from justice as ever was on land ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... follows his career can be explained first by the progress of Hinduism at the expense of Buddhism and secondly by the invasions of the Huns. The Chinese pilgrim Sung-Yuen has left us an account of India in this distressful period and for the seventh century the works of Hsuean Chuang and I-Ching ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... November 16. Soon after his return both the asthma and the dropsy became more violent and distressful, and though he was attended by Dr. Heberden, Dr. Brocklesby, Dr. Warren, and Dr. Butter, who all refused fees, and though he himself co-operated with them, and made deep incisions in his body to draw ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... do tell me!' said the girl, with a curious mixture of coaxing and distressful in her tone. 'Do tell me who it was, Hazel. I ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... necessity that experience may prove. It has successfully adjusted itself to changing conditions in the past. It will do so again. The mobility of our institutions, the richness of our resources, and the abilities of our people enable us to meet them unafraid. It is a distressful time for many of our people, but they have shown qualities as high in fortitude, courage, and resourcefulness as ever in our history. With that spirit, I have faith that out of it will come a sounder life, a truer standard of values, a greater recognition of the results of honest ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... speak; Name but my crime, I'll fully satisfy you,— Alas! had you vouchsaf'd to hear me then, When I so earnest sought to meet your eye, It never would have come to this, nor would, Here in this mournful place, have happen'd now This so distressful, this so mournful meeting. ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... melancholy two months that I have passed, and in my situation, you will not wonder I shun a conversation which could not be bounded by a letter—a letter that would grow into a panegyric, or a piece of moral; improper for me to write upon, and too distressful for us both!—a death is only to be felt, never to be talked over by ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... lying, as they had been in life. Their bodies had not lost their former hue, but were whole and uncorrupt, together with their garments. These, the consecrated tabernacles of two holy souls, that sent forth full sweet savour, and showed naught distressful, were placed by King Barachias in costly tombs and conveyed by ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus |
