"Heartbreaking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... will be killed in this war, John Joseph, and that is heartbreaking to think of; yes heartbreaking, although you with your warlike notions ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... established many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the principles of control and test which are now at our service, and which permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation the growth and development and progress that the ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... the disquieting box, placed it on a table near the fire, beside his lamp, and sat down to reflect again. In the face of these papers, almost sacred, almost prohibited, which he would touch and which death alone could have placed in his hands, he had in this moment the consciousness, in a more heartbreaking manner, of the irrevocable departure of his mother; tears returned to him and he wept there, alone, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... resolution to separate the father and son. They clung to each other again and again, as if they had a presentiment that they should meet no more. Poor John was almost as violently affected: his master, as he always called Mr. Martin, was as dear to him as a father. He stood by, witnessing this heartbreaking struggle, overpowered with his own feelings, and wretched at seeing his dear respected master undergoing such a trial. "Ah, Miss Helen," whispered he, "what would I give to get one kiss of my master's hand before I leave him! But do not intrude on him: I would not add to ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... forbid my ever seeing it more, the wreck of it being now too ghastly and heartbreaking to any human soul that remembers the days of old. Forty years ago, there was assuredly no spot of ground, out of Palestine, in all the round world, on which, if you knew, even but a little, the true course of that world's history, ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... a heartbreaking attempt at devil-may-care cheerfulness] I ain't miserable. [He sits down again, and stretches his legs in ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... There had been a rending within her breast, as of physical violence, from which she now suffered anguish. There were a thousand stinging nerves. There was a mortal sickness of horror, of insupportable heartbreaking loss. She could not endure it. She ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... work that had accumulated during the four heartbreaking weeks of his absence. His chief clerk had done what he could, but there were questions of law, of fine judicial decisions to be made concerning the issue of patents, the marketing and leasing of school lands, the classification into grazing, agricultural, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... he. "Only I warn you I never tire when I find any one who will study Browning with me. I tried to read The Ring and the Book with a dear friend once, and reading my favorite part, 'Giuseppe Caponsacchi,' as I raised my eyes after that heartbreaking finale, 'O, great, just, good God! Miserable me!' I saw she was dozing. Since then, I read Browning with his ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... stumbled back across the breaks to the charred ashes of our labors. Apart from the tangible losses that lay in coals, the newspaper, the voice of the Brule, was gone. "Down into frontier history," Senator Phillips said. Into it had gone the ambitions, the heartbreaking labor, the vision of ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... wheelbarrows. And Mrs. Lynde says it is the most hideous color for a building, especially when combined with a red roof, that she ever saw or imagined. You could simply have knocked me down with a feather when I heard it. It's heartbreaking, after all the trouble ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... barely more than face and name then, but know and have the right to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's heartbreaking dedication to the ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... marionettes danced. And then at last the great falls of the Rassini, beyond which no white man had gone. They hid the canoe in the bushes and placed beneath it the iron stove and half their supply of food. Then they plunged into the brush, eastward. Bennie had never known such grueling work and heartbreaking fatigue; and the clouds of flies pursued them venomously and with unrelenting persistence. At first they had to cut their way through acres of brush, and then the land rose and they saw before them miles of swamp and barren land dotted with dwarf trees and lichen-grown ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... This heartbreaking result ought not to be charged to the soldiers so much as to the administration. John Armstrong, Secretary of War, allowed the British to land 5,000 men on the Chesapeake and to march fifty miles overland to Washington. Within a distance ...
— The Mentor: The War of 1812 - Volume 4, Number 3, Serial Number 103; 15 March, 1916. • Albert Bushnell Hart
... into another that was indistinct, ghostly, ominous. I find written in my Diary of Easter Day—exactly five weeks after the outbreak of the Revolution—these words: "From long talks with K. and others I see quite clearly that Russians have gone mad for the time being. It's heartbreaking to see them holding meetings everywhere, arguing at every street corner as to how they intend to arrange a democratic peace for Europe, when meanwhile the Germans are gathering every moment force ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... as 'twas wont, my finger, and holds it: But the grasp is the clasp of Death, heartbreaking and stiff; Yet feels to my hand as if 'Twas still thy will, thy pleasure and trust ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... clown's cap." From the top of the highest, which I named Mount Ernest, after my brother-in-law, a dismal scene stretched before us, nothing but the interminable sand-ridges, the horizon as level as that of the ocean. What heartbreaking country, monotonous, lifeless, without interest, without excitement save when the stern necessity of finding water forced us to seek out the natives in their primitive camps! Every day, however, might bring forth some change, and, dismal as the country is, one was buoyed up by the thought ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... have put poor Mamma off so late, as she is very much hurt at it, I fear, by what I hear, and accuses me of it. But that will, I trust, be forgiven. You don't say that you sympathise with me in my present heavy trial,[66] the heaviest I have ever had to endure, and which will be a sad heartbreaking to me—but I know you do feel for me. I am quiet and prepared, but still I fell very sad, and God knows! very wretched at times, for myself and my country, that such a change must take place. But God in His mercy will support and guide me through ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... The suspense is heartbreaking, and night brings no forgetfulness. Those long voiceless nights of South Africa! Not a bird's call, nor a chirp from the tiny creatures which hide in the grass. A white moon, a wide heaven filled with strange stars, and ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... locket with a picture of your wife inside it, and attached to the locket was the half of a coin. 'We split this for luck when we were young and foolish,' you said, and your laugh was one of the most heartbreaking sounds I ever heard in my life. Well now, having got to my point at last, it is my firm belief that you have a child living, and by all accounts as sweet a little maiden as the heart of man could wish, and the discovery came about in ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... is early morning in the flat of a young lawyer on the day he has to leave for the front. He is dressed in his khaki, and his wife, who is busying about his breakfast, is rising to a sublime but heartbreaking cheerfulness for the last farewell. "Nearly time for you to go, Robert, if you are to get to the barracks by six.... Betty? Oh, no, pity to waken her. I'll kiss her for you when she awakes and say daddy promised to bring ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... zigzag way up the awful steep, and emerged at last upon the dizzy and breathless height above. Two men could scarce climb abreast in it; and even this was defended by fortifications, and at the summit, against the sky, tents could be seen. Yet this was the only way to victory: only by this heartbreaking path could England drive France from the western continent, and give a mighty nation to the world. Wolfe saw, and was content; where one man could go, thousands might follow. And he perceived that the very difficulty of the enterprise was the best assurance of its ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... most effective thing a woman ever did. It was so simple that it was heartbreaking. She could not have uttered a word, he was such a powerful and great person, and she was so without ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... they really hold themselves aloof from the church, because they have too deep a reverence for the true teaching of Christ? Grand and beautiful as are St. Peter's in Rome, St. Mark's in Venice, or the Cathedral at Milan, it is heartbreaking to observe the so-called divine service in these buildings. Let us not be deceived by the sayings, that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the children, or that a childlike faith is best. That is quite true, but ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... and Judge Emery's widow recovered a little strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the younger son ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... of wondrous and obscure causes for crime. As far as England is concerned I should lump the influences provocative of crime and productive of misery into one—I say Drink is the root of almost all evil. It is heartbreaking to know what is going on at our own doors, for, however we may shuffle and blink, we cannot disguise the fact that many millions of human beings who might be saved pass their lives in an obscene hell—and they live ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... around the house, and the only way that we've got it on the animal is that we've got brains? This is a game, Laura, not a sentiment. Do you suppose that Madison—now don't get sore—hasn't turned these tricks himself before he met you, and I'll gamble he's done it since. A man's natural trade is a heartbreaking business. Don't tell me about women breaking men's hearts. The only thing they can ever break is their bankroll. And, besides, this is not Will's business; he has no right to interfere. You've been decent with him, and he's ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... said Ludlow, with an involuntary lapse into earnestness. "I was in the Park to-day for a little effect I wanted to get, and it was heartbreaking to leave the woods. I was away up in those forest depths that look wild in spite of the asphalt. If you haven't been there, you must go some day while the autumn color lasts. I saw a lot of your ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... In another place a company of reserves were recharging cases of artillery shells which had been sent back from the front in carload lots. There were horses here —a whole troop of draft horses which had been worn out in that relentless, heartbreaking labor into which war sooner or later resolves itself. The drove had been shipped back this far to be rested and cured up, or to be shot in the event ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... I have a lot of things to do. All those letters to write." Barry shuddered as he spoke. For nothing in all his ministerial experience was to him a more exhausting and heartbreaking task than the writing of these letters to the relatives and friends of his ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... of Christ mean if these deep truths on which He rested and from which He drew His strength, were uncertain or illusory? It would be the most pathetic, mournful, heartbreaking of ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... easily contrived to escape detection. Waller felt the matter very severely. To have the poor negroes, in whom he took so great an interest, carried into slavery, after all the toil and danger he had gone through, was almost heartbreaking. For long afterwards he could scarcely bear to ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... wonderful the cannon, how devastating the shells, if the target at which they are aimed is sufficiently far away and sufficiently small, the result will be disappointing; and the Russians at Dvinsk saw to it that the Germans experienced a long series of costly and heartbreaking ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... never forget the terrible scene of heartbreaking desolation and destruction that I encountered in every direction on going down to office next morning. It seemed at first sight as if the town had suffered from the effects of a bombardment. As I slowly wended my way along the various streets and across the ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... Her aunt has had a heartbreaking lesson. She may say a few words to unsay words that ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... spent from that heartbreaking climb up the merciless acclivity of the Butte Montmartre—he staggered rather than walked past the sleepy verger and found his way through the crowding shadows to the softly luminous heart of the basilica of the Sacre-Cour, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... distinction of the little Protestant cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you—in such a world as this—to renounce. If it should "make one in love with death to lie there," that's only if death should be conscious. As the case stands, the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowery sod, and the sleeper's mortality ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... did not look up until he had finished revising a difficult paragraph. By that time Mr. Hamlin had comfortably settled himself on a cane sofa, and, possibly out of deference to his surroundings, had subdued his song to a peculiarly low, soft, and heartbreaking whistle as he unfolded a newspaper. Clean and faultless in his appearance, he had the rare gift of being able to get up at two in the afternoon with much of the dewy freshness and all of the moral superiority of ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... in the papers that the Algonquin Trust Company had closed its doors; I read the heartbreaking details of the crowds besieging it, the lines of frightened people standing there in the rain all night long. It is ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... pleasures of life, for months or maybe years; here were they, with the familiar cliffs and downs under their hungry eyes, suddenly confronted with an alternative of the cruellest description, a Hobson's choice that left them no option but to submit or fight. It was a heartbreaking predicament for men, and more especially for sailor-men, to be placed in, and if they sometimes rose to the occasion like men and did their best to heave the gang bodily into the sea, or to drive them out of the ship with such weapons as ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... spent walking through the tenement-house districts and visiting police stations to see what was being done. It was a tragic week. We did everything possible to alleviate the suffering. Much of it was heartbreaking, especially the gasping misery of the little children and of the worn-out mothers. Every resource of the Health Department, of the Police Department, and even the Fire Department (which flooded the hot streets) was taxed in the effort ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... as consolation after this heartbreaking defection but two interesting things in life—the printing press and the Flobert Rifle. Somehow the week dragged through until Sunday, when Bobby duly scrubbed and dressed, had to go to church with his father and mother. Bobby, to tell the truth, did not care very much ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... pastel drawings made to illustrate Mrs. Anderson's fairy tale, "The Great Sea Horse," were also exhibited in America last winter. Made immediately after Mr. Elliott's heartbreaking labor on the rocking soil of Sicily, they are none the less quiet, childish, and fanciful in their charm. Only one of them might have been inspired by the turning over in his uneasy sleep of the giant buried beneath Etna—the picture of the naked giant sitting on a headland and emptying his hot ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... First, the heartbreaking business of giving over her child to the chappy-faced nurse and a rear room of nursery hung in the odors of formaldehyde and lined up into a ward of white iron cribs, each screened in with a clothes horse of little flannel ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... 'It is heartbreaking to see her in tragedy,' said Pinchas, burning his boats. 'She skips and jumps. Rather would I give Ophelia to one ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... tent, a miserable gipsy thing compared with the proud pavilion of the days of the glory of Billy the pig, was pitched on the outskirts of a poor little town, they found Madame Rocambeau dead in the canvas box-office which she had occupied for fifty years, the heartbreaking receipts in front of her, counted out into little piles of bronze and small silver. The end had come. The circus could not be sold as a going concern. It crumbled away. Somebody bought the old horses, Heaven knows for what purpose. Somebody bought the ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... about the family honour, but she was very much disturbed over Ellen. And then it was a heartbreaking thing to lose Bruce, too. He had always seemed like a brother, and it was almost as bad as if Neil or ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... their affair, and one knows. But one can't help thinking. Just fancy Gwen the wife of a blind country Squire. It is heartbreaking to think ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... far, farther than his strength could go. Yet he swam on, fighting against the heartbreaking thought that his companion had perhaps gone "down to the dim sea-line" in very truth. She had been so brave, so strong. She had buoyed up his courage when it had been fainting; she had fought splendidly against the last terrible inertia ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... always pinching me by the throat or by the back. But I am otherwise constituted; 'tis in all places alike to me. Yet, might I have my choice, I think I should rather choose to die on horseback than in bed; out of my own house, and far from my own people. There is more heartbreaking than consolation in taking leave of one's friends; I am willing to omit that civility, for that, of all the offices of friendship, is the only one that is unpleasant; and I could, with all my heart, dispense with that great and eternal farewell. If there be any convenience in so many standers-by, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... engrossing to the two ladies and Sir Nicholas. They had never come so close to the struggles of the Catholics in the north before; and although the Northern Rebellion had ended so disastrously, yet it was encouraging, although heartbreaking too, to hear that delicate women and children were ready gladly to suffer such miseries if the religious cause that was so dear to them could be thereby helped. Sir Nicholas, as has been said, was in two minds ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... right up. He's never taken a cropper in his life. God smiles on him. God has always smiled on him. He's never been beaten down to his knees... yet. I... I should not care to see that sight. It would be heartbreaking. And, Evan—" Her hand went out to his in a pleading gesture that merged into a half-caress. "—I am afraid for him now. That is why I don't know what to do. It is not for myself that I back and fill and hesitate. If he were ignoble, if he were ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... manner, the gentleness, had a heartbreaking effect. In a moment the woman's eyes were flooded with tears, which coursed down her cheeks. It was the relief that her poor troubled brain and nerves demanded, and ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... a desperate business, the subsequent climb was heartbreaking. He needed a long rest before he was able to plod on, now conceiving the sun in the guise of a personal enemy. The sweat that streamed from his face was brine upon his lips. For hours it was thus ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... respected, provided the bearer of it could prove his right to its possession. They stared in silence at the feverish youth as, with great effort he told them the story of the Black Phantom and of the heartbreaking weeks he had spent in pursuit ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... houses, few of which were less than a century old. The streets were narrow and crooked, mostly named after bygone admirals or forgotten sea-fights; the romantic and picturesque quarter of a great naval port to the casual glance of a passer-by, but heartbreaking to any except the most courageous resident on account of its overcrowded and tumbledown condition. Yet it lacked the dreariness of an East End slum, for the sea winds blew down the narrowest streets ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... and this numbing, heartbreaking delay would end; he would be free to take up his quest. O'Reilly choked at the thought; the blood drummed in his ears. Rosa would think he was never coming; she would surely believe that his heart had changed. As if it could! "O God! Come quickly, if you love me." Well, a week was only seven ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... the forest at the time of the breaking out of the fire, over whose fate remained a terrible uncertainty, gathered in silence around lonely hearths. The terrors of the past night were, to such, supplemented by days and even weeks of heartbreaking anxiety and suspense, closed at last by the knowledge of ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... fight," she began, as we talked in her modest little sitting-room, into which the sun streamed brightly with no thought of the cold shadows in the grim building below. "Oh, and such a hard, heartbreaking fight! Often it seems as if we had exhausted every means at our disposal, and yet we shall never give up. Why cannot we make the world see our case as we see it? Everything seems to have conspired against us—and yet I cannot, I will not believe ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... acquired a reputation as a world-wide traveller, and husbands for her numerous daughters amounting to a net total of six, by dint of travelling the latter backwards and forwards over those heartbreaking routes which suffer from two weeks or more of going ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... the war. A strange present, you say, but it proved a very valuable one. It seems to us very cruel. One would think that if Naaman and his wife loved this little girl—and I am sure they did—they would have sent her back to her home, for she must have had a heartbreaking time of it at first; but people were not kind in that way in those days. Yes, I am sure they loved her and were kind to her, for the simple reason that she evidently loved them; and I am also sure that the reason they loved her was that they ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... returned, with ill-concealed emotion, "how illy you could be spared by any of those who know and love you. Even I should feel it an almost heartbreaking thing to lose you out of my life, and your ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death, that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, "I wish I was with Livy." I do not know why I have left saying till now that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... said by Daniel Boone to his wife in that heartbreaking interview no one ever knew. When the scout rejoined the band, which now had assembled behind the protecting barricade, he said simply: "We must prepare for a hasty burial. These bodies must not be left for the wolves to maltreat." The leader spoke as quietly ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... person of Myra's aunt, Clarissa, Lady Fermanagh. For Lady Fermanagh was only too anxious to get her orphan niece off her hands, not only because Myra was an expense, but because her madcap exploits occasionally drove her almost to distraction, while her heartbreaking flirtations ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... as a boy weeps, but with the cruel, grinding sobs of a man. He wept for his stained pride, for his vain-glory, not because he had sinned and caused others to sin. The boy watching him, seeing the hero self-abased, hearing his heartbreaking sobs, interpreted very differently those sounds. Infinitely distressed, turning over and over in his mind some soothing phrases, some word of comfort and encouragement, Desmond waited till the first paroxysm had passed. What he said then shall not be set down in cold print. You may be sure he proved ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... you will do me the justice to believe that I would strain every nerve in your service, but it is actually heartbreaking to throw away my earnings on others. I am no rich man, abounding, like Mr. Rogers, in superfluous thousands, but working hard for independence, and what would be the most grateful pleasure to me if likely to be useful to you personally, becomes merely ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... joy in it, though," said Booverman, gloomily. "If I had those two strokes back, I'd go down in history, I'd be immortal. And you, too, Picky, you'd be immortal, because you went around with me. The fourth hole was bad enough, but the sixth was heartbreaking." ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... shillings when the time came. And now to-night he comes to me with a face as long as a yard-arm, and says that Janter won't keep it at any price, and that he does not know where he is to find another tenant, not he. It's quite heartbreaking, that's what it is. Three hundred acres of good, sound, food-producing land, and no tenant for it at fifteen shillings an acre. What am ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... they were all waiting. Thomas Jefferson had never seen any one die, only a dog that Tike Bryerson had shot on one of his drunken home-goings. But death was death, to a dog or to a girl; and vivid imagination supplied the appalling details. Over and over again in pitiless minuteness the heartbreaking scene was repeated: the little twitchings of the bed-clothing, the tossing of the girl's arms in the last desperate struggle for breath, his mother's low sobs, and the haggard face ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde |
