"Irrevocable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at the last minute all these doubts have assailed me,' he explained. 'I didn't realize before how serious a thing marriage is—how irrevocable.' ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... Hankinson Judson Terwilliger applied by wire to the authorities in Rome for all right, title, and interest in one dukedom, free from encumbrances, irrevocable, and duly witnessed by the proper dignitaries of the Italian government, and at the second interview with the spectre cook of Bangletop, he was able to show her a cablegram received from the Eternal City stating that the papers would be sent upon receipt of the applicant's ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... invitingly with gas; they alone were alive in the weekly death of the town; and they gleamed everywhere, at every corner; the town appeared to consist chiefly of public-houses. He dropped the letter into the box in the market-place; he heard it fall. His heart beat. The deed was now irrevocable. He wondered what Monday held for him. The quiescent melancholy of the town invaded his spirit, and mingled with his own remorseful sorrow for the unstrenuous past, and his apprehensive solicitude about ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... meeting the town, and she clung to each duty of the man's convalescence hungrily. She knew she must face life, that she must have some word for her friends about her tragedy. She felt that in going away, in suing for the divorce himself, her husband had made the break irrevocable. There was no resentment nor malice toward him in her heart. Yet the future seemed hopelessly ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... conducted in accordance with the principle of an open market economy with free competition. 2. Concurrently with the foregoing, and as provided in this Treaty and in accordance with the timetable and the procedures set out therein, these activities shall include the irrevocable fixing of exchange rates leading to the introduction of a single currency, the ECU, and the definition and conduct of a single monetary policy and exchange rate policy the primary objective of both of which shall be to maintain price stability ...
— The Treaty of the European Union, Maastricht Treaty, 7th February, 1992 • European Union
... this "reinforced Reichsrath" recommended the establishment permanently of a broadly national Reichsrath, or Imperial assembly, together with the reconstitution of the old provincial diets. The upshot was the promulgation, October 20, 1860, of a "permanent and irrevocable" diploma in which the Emperor made known his intention thereafter to share all powers of legislation and finance with the diets of the various portions of the Empire, and (p. 457) with a central Reichsrath at Vienna, the latter to be made up ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... colonies, and is thus, in a sense, older than the state governments, which were not formed until after the Declaration of Independence. Also, that when the States gave in 1788 their consent to the constitution, their consent was irrevocable. Two quotations from decisions rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States will make clear the arguments ...
— Government and Administration of the United States • Westel W. Willoughby and William F. Willoughby
... oscillatory nisus to produce a vacuum which it never establishes. These vital forces of the respiratory and circulatory organs, so characteristic of the higher classes of animals, are opposed to the general forces of surrounding nature. The former vainly strive to make exception to the irrevocable law, that "nature abhors a vacuum." This act of opposition between both forces constitutes the respiratory act, and thus the respiratory thoracic being (like a vibrating pendulum) manifests respiratory motion, not as an effort of volition originating ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... forfeited your fame and your country, may your folly do no further mischief! If the last act is yet to do, I, who have loved you, esteemed you, reverenced you, and served you—I, who long thought you the first of womankind—entreat that before your fate is irrevocable, I may once more see you! I was, I once was, madam, most truly ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... I replied, "there is nothing irrevocable except the grief that is killing me. My condition can be expressed in a few words: I can not love her, I can not love another, and I ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... his concurrence in the resolution, or his readiness to help in carrying it out. But he was an elderly man with much experience and knowledge of law and diplomacy. It seemed to him to be a stern duty to prevent anything irrevocable taking place till it had been thought out and all was ready. There were all sorts of legal cruxes to be thought out, not only regarding the taking of life, even of a monstrosity in human form, but also of property. Lady Arabella, be she woman or ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... but, when he found that Miss Sidney was gone, anger and disappointment made him at once forget his prudence, and his intended respect; he declared, in the most passionate terms, his love for Selina Sidney, and his irrevocable determination to pursue her, to the end of time and space, in spite of all opposition whatsoever from any person whatever. His mother, who was prepared for a scene of this sort, though not for one of this violence, had sufficient command of temper to sustain it properly; her command of temper ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... your irrevocable decision I will return to-morrow and report," he answered in very good English, though he was typically Italian. "But I warn you that mischief is meant if you do not obey. Duperre told me so. Like myself you are paid to act as directed and to keep ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... extended, was permitted by Congress to form a Constitution and State Government, and admitted as a new State into the Union, by the name of Louisiana. The acts of Congress for these purposes, in addition to sundry important provisions respecting rivers and public lands, which are declared to be irrevocable unless by common consent, annex other terms and conditions, whereby it is established, not only that the Constitution of Louisiana should be republican, but that it should contain the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, that it should secure to ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... about penalties and punishments. The sole and sufficient penalty of sin is simply the state of being a sinner [Footnote: Sin, of course, may involve consequences, and the consequences may be both irrevocable and bitter; nor is it denied that fear of consequences may operate as a deterrent from certain kinds of sin. What is denied is that such consequences are rightly to be described as "punishment."]: and the conception of vicarious "punishment" is not ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... back she was baffled. She tried to disentangle the events between that moment when Grace, holding the lamp in her hand, blinked at them as they came across the lawn, and that other most awful moment when, in Paul's study, Grace declared final and irrevocable war. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Miklopolata. We humbly make known, that it is concluded in the unchangeable councils of heaven, that all the empires and kingdoms of the world must surrender themselves to the power of Quama; and as the will of providence is irrevocable, your kingdom must necessarily submit to fate. We therefore advise you to surrender voluntarily yourself and your dominions, rather than foolishly resist our invincible phalanx, and thereby experience all the bloody ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... Desmonds a haunting anxiety, and for Lenox the harassing realisation that his own strength or weakness during the next few months stood for no less than the happiness or misery of the only woman on earth. It is this irrevocable fusion of two lives, and the network of responsibilities arising from an act less simple than it seems, that constitute the strength, the charm, the tragedy of marriage: and a dim foreknowledge of its complexity dawned upon Lenox during his penitential ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... of the boys throbbed high with hope when they found themselves outside the enclosure which had served them as a prison, and they knew the irrevocable step had been taken; they must now go forward at ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... Up to the very last, therefore, He could have stepped down from the cross, going no further toward the dark abyss. But the moment came when this would be no longer possible; when, even for Him, the sacrifice would be irrevocable—when the possibility "to save Himself" was ended, and when He became for ever "the Lamb that was slain," bearing the marks of His wounds in His eternal body. When that moment passed, He might well ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... this church. Concerning the cause of it I require none of you to judge. I enter no plea against any man. Another will judge, who said, 'Destroy this temple and in three days I will rear it up.' But He spake of the temple of His body; which was destroyed and is raised up; and its living and irrevocable triumph I, or some other servant of God, will celebrate at this altar, Sunday by Sunday, that whosoever will may see, yes, and taste it. The state of this poor shell is but a little matter to a God whose majesty once inhabited a stable; yet the honour of this, too, shall be restored. You wonder ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... being wantonly cruel to her to the last in thus putting before her eyes a picture of the might-have-been just when it was too late. In a few hours from now the great vow would be spoken, the irrevocable knot tied which bound her to another man. Her troth was already plighted, her confession made to Pater Bonifacius—in a few hours from now she would be Bela's wife, and if Andor did come back now, she must be as nothing to him, he as a mere ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... ten, or twenty years, for every one of us the judgment will be set, and the books opened. If that be true, far more than that must be true. Is there but one day of judgment? Why, for us every day is a day of judgment—every day is a Dies Irae, and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors of your houses—it waits at the corners of your streets; we are in the midst ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... lips which moved in one we prayed, So that God ceased to hear us speak apart, What law irrevocable have we made? How shall He ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... servant also; he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reading of books not strictly religious, on Sunday, were acts not tolerated in his family. A child might wish to stay away from the house of God on the Sabbath, but it was not permitted. "Going to meeting" was a rule in the family as irrevocable as the laws ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... that they are being robbed of their guardian angels, that they are "orphans"—a mournful word greatly beloved of the Russian masses under multiform circumstances, both material and spiritual—and orphaned in a peculiarly distressing and irrevocable way. They might even feel when their saints' days came around quite correctly the next year that some spurious adventurer—Angel of Darkness—was being ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... was penning these records of vicious schemes—dire waste of wealth and time—irrevocable time!—Marston paced his study in a very different frame of mind. There were a gloom and disorder in the room accordant with those of his own mind. Shelves of ancient tomes, darkened by time, and upon which ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the truer the living. We doubt not the months that have been passing have shown us all many a place where there ought to be a grave, and many a lingering shred of the natural and sinful which we would gladly lay down in a bottomless grave. God help us to pass the irrevocable sentence of death and to let the Holy Ghost, the great undertaker, make the interment eternal. Then our life shall be ever budding and blossoming and shedding ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... to do with the case. Surely, when she had so sternly followed the dictates of reason, there was all the more need for some good fairy to weave a miracle which should upset her plans. Something must happen! Something! At sweet-and-twenty it is so difficult to believe in the irrevocable! ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... England nor America would a proposal to abolish marriage be tolerated for a moment; and yet nothing is more certain than that in both countries the progressive modification of the marriage contract will be continued until it is no more onerous nor irrevocable than any ordinary commercial deed of partnership. Were even this dispensed with, people would still call themselves husbands and wives; describe their companionships as marriages; and be for the most part unconscious ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... people would not rise in his favour. He said, "If the natives of this country, and also the Langgos and the Umiros, shall hear that I have exchanged blood with the Pacha, they will have thorough confidence, as they will know that he will always be true to me, and I to him; but without this irrevocable contract, they will always suspect some intrigue, either upon ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... to stand aside is hardly a ground for reproach. Disaster had so often been escaped during recent years, through some lucky turn of events abroad supervening on the purely temporising policy of the Government, that they had good reason to hesitate about committing themselves to any irrevocable course; while personal intrigues and the strife of religious parties gave the individual leaders sufficient occupation. Possibly also the influence of the Swiss school, antagonistic as ever to the peculiar tenets of Lutheranism, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... settle on him when he considered that he might lose everything that made life worth while. And it would be an irrevocable loss. He would never again have courage to weave the threads of his existence into another such goodly pattern. Even if he had the courage, he would never have the chance. No such fortuitous circumstances would ever again throw him into the arms ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... has some alternative," Cherry pleaded. "It can't be that marriage is the only—the only irrevocable thing! If you had a partner that you couldn't go on with, you could come to SOME agreement! You could make a sacrifice, but somehow you could end the association! Peter," she said, earnestly, "when I ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... him that what he said was irrevocable, but he was desperate. It seemed to him that in a moment more he would have told her his whole secret. But the young girl drew back from him with a slight start of surprise. There may have been something ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... altogether mediocre. He had loved his wife, but now after all she seemed to be a very ordinary human being. He had begun life with high hopes—and life was commonplace. He was to grow fretful and restless. His discontent was to lead to some action, some irrevocable action; but upon the nature of that action I do not think the Note Book was very clear. It was to carry him in such a manner that he was to forget his wife. Then, when it was too late, he was to see her at ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... already framing or moulding evil—the verb used is that of which the Hebrew name for potter is the participle. Though chosen of God and shaped by His hands for high service Israel's destiny is not irrevocable; nay, their doom is already being shaped. Yet He makes still another appeal to them to repent and amend their ways. To this they answer: No use! we will walk after our own devices and carry out every one the stubbornness of his evil heart. At least that is how Jeremiah interprets their ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... exhortation was water in her ears. The sound of it reached her confusedly, in a jumble. She was drowning and it was unconsciously, in this condition, that poked by Paliser, she heard herself uttering the consenting words that are so irrevocable and ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... had stated that there had been no sufficient reasons for commencing the war. That might be true. They might have been over-confident then. Be that as it might, they certainly had lost so much ground since then that they must now give up the struggle. This was his irrevocable opinion. It had been clearly shown that fourteen commandos were unable to continue in the veldt. This made peace a necessity, for what was to be gained by continuing a struggle without a proper army. The war might last a few months ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... was that proverb used of our elder philosophers, Manum a tabula: withhold thy hand from the paper, and thy papers from the print or light of the world: for a lewd word escaped is irrevocable, but a bad or base discourse published in ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... extremely soused, that there did not appear one inch or single thread about him unmarried.[140] Pardon me, that the melancholy object still dwells upon me so far, as to reduce me to punning. However, we attended to the chapel, where we stayed to hear the irrevocable words pronounced upon our old servant, and made the best of our way to town. I took a resolution to forbear all married persons, or any, in danger of being such, for four-and-twenty hours at least; therefore dressed, and went to visit Florimel, the vainest thing in town, where I knew would ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... deliberately courted. His decrees were doomed to failure. The bishops on their part refused to admit to their seminaries or to ordination anyone who attended the Collegium Philosophicum. The king, in the face of the irrevocable decision of the Belgian hierarchy, found himself in an untenable position. He could not compel the bishops to ordain candidates for Holy Orders, and his decrees were therefore a dead letter; nor on the other hand could he trample upon the convictions of the vast majority of his ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... himself against his rival, Sussex had purposely adopted the course most likely to throw odium on Leicester, without considering minutely whether it were the mode of proceeding most likely to be attended with success. But the step was irrevocable, and Sussex escaped from further discussing it by dismissing his company, with the command, "Let all be in order at eleven o'clock; I must be at court and in the presence by ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... gone into a passion, had accused us, reproached us, and stormed at us with all the ill-language that men of the world use! but that quiet, cold, irrevocable, "I have been mistaken in thee!" ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... exclaimed Catherine. "Too far!—Is to warn you that you are about to take a wanton to your bed—and that you will bitterly repent your folly when too late, going too far? It is my duty, Henry, no less than my desire, thus to warn you ere the irrevocable step be taken." ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... a strange wondering; he sat at the coffin and watched it. His wife's face it was, and above the sorrow of irrevocable parting floated the thought that she did not look happy as she lay in her bed of death. Monross had seen but two dead faces before, those of his father and mother. Both had worn upon the mask which death models an expression of relief. But this face, the face of his wife, of the woman with ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... grandfather's hat—I understood when I was a little boy that I was to have that some day. But now I get a hat for ten shillings, or less, two or three times a year. In the old days buying clothes was well-nigh as irrevocable as marriage. Our flat is furnished with glittering things—wanton arm-chairs just strong enough not to collapse under you, books in gay covers, carpets you are free to drop lighted fusees upon; you may scratch what you like, upset ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Senate, and was signed by the President. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, said of it: "Holding such a provision to be now constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable." This view of it was correct; it had no real significance, and the ill-written sentence never disfigured the Constitution; it simply sank out of sight, forgotten by ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... is irrevocable. I wish to place a world between Jeanne and Serge. If he has not gone away by tonight my complaint will be lodged in the courts ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... from their subjects under the pretext that their looks dealt forth death. Thus, without any remorse at being at once the judge and the accuser, De Marsay coldly condemned to death the man or the woman who had seriously offended him. Although often pronounced almost lightly, the verdict was irrevocable. An error was a misfortune similar to that which a thunderbolt causes when it falls upon a smiling Parisienne in some hackney coach, instead of crushing the old coachman who is driving her to a rendezvous. Thus the bitter and profound ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... were gazing eye to eye, McDowell's darkly keen and questioning, Steve's full of irrevocable ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... when thou keepest the pledge in thine own hands, and dost not deposit the gift in the charge of another? Let there be some one to whom thou canst entrust the pledge, that thou mayst not be able to take thy promise back. For the courage of the champion is kindled by the irrevocable certainty of the prize." Of course it was plain that he had said this in jest; sheer courage had armed him to repel the insult to his country. But Rorik thought he was tempted by avarice, and was loth to seem as if, contrary to royal fashion, he meant to take back the gift ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... wild and stormy wind thundered on the walls of the prison. Within, where the very atmosphere was self-contained, a cold and solemn peace held like an irrevocable judgment. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... entered when eternity closed its everlasting portals, and the enfranchised spirit went up to the Eternal Judge, it is not for me to say. God is just, and whatever was apportioned, it was good and right. Let it suffice to know, that, be his doom what it may, it is irrevocable—sealed forever. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... apostates, by their degeneracy, convert this greatest of blessings into a curse—this noblest good into an infinite evil. "As righteousness tendeth to life, so he that pursueth evil, pursueth it to his own death." Who can paint the horror of that moment, when the final, the irrevocable sentence will be passed upon a guilty race—when INFINITE LOVE will denounce INFINITE WO—when every word proceeding from the mouth of eternal justice will prove a poisoned arrow, struck into the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... good. She is deeply engaged just now in driving batches of stuffy relatives in a stuffy brougham—luckily there's no room for me in it—to still stuffier garden parties. And, besides, I don't feel that I can take any desperate step of that kind until the Irrevocable has been written in ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... all, then, distinctly and emphatically, I say, never count upon that; count upon all else that I can do for you, and forgive me when I advise harshly or censure coldly; ascribe this to my interest in your career. Moreover, before decision becomes irrevocable, I wish you to know practically all that is disagreeable or even humiliating in the first subordinate steps of him who, without wealth or station, would rise in public life. I will not consider your choice settled till the end of a year at least,—your name will be kept on the college books till ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pathway of an ideal right may stumble and fall on the stones of the world. It was only given me later to realise, through grief too terrible for words, that, given the world as the world is, there are wrongs that are irrevocable, lies that, once lied, no ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... fly the irrevocable hours Futile as air, or strong as fate to make Your lives of sand or granite. Awful powers, Even as men choose, they ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... Lady Landale to proceed to the Priory; but, impelled by her frantic dread of the separation, and entrenching herself behind the argument that her mysterious re-appearance would awaken suspicion where people would otherwise believe the Peregrine still in foreign parts, she had declared her irrevocable determination not to quit the island until she knew him to be safe. And he had remained, actuated by the dual desire, first to exonerate himself personally in her husband's eyes from any possible suspicion of complicity in Molly's flight—the bare thought of which ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... previously designated, is not enough; behind the functionary he claims the man. "All that may well be," he replies, to whatever may be said in praise of him,[1260] "but he does not belong to me as I would like." It is devotion which he exacts, and, by devotion, he means the irrevocable and complete surrender "of the entire person, in all his sentiments and opinions." According to him, writes a witness, "one must abandon every old habit, even the most trifling, and be governed by one thought alone, that of his will and interests."[1261] For ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Homer felt, who gave his men With glory but a transient state: His very Jove could not reverse Irrevocable fate. ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... rights, and enjoyments. Not only does this object of his hopes appear to him of immense importance, but he is never sure of reaching it till it is actually his own; the grade he fills is by no means irrevocable; he is always entirely abandoned to the arbitrary pleasure of his commanding officer, for this is imperiously required by the necessity of discipline: a slight fault, a whim, may always deprive him in an instant of the fruits of many years ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Enid had seen him vanish like a spectre out of her life, and had waited vainly for his coming, only to receive instead that letter of farewell which, the instant she had read it, she knew to be final and irrevocable. ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... indeed, we follow the lead of the moment; now, beyond a doubt, we let things take their course: we are hurried on irresistibly; that which we dared not openly to name, or fairly to face, now looms awfully above us—an irrevocable, accomplished fact. ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... les incidents de ce jour qui a fixe le sort de l'humanite. L'opinion que Jesus etait ressuscite s'y fonda d'une maniere irrevocable. La secte, qu'on avait cru eteindre en tuant le maitre, fut des lors assuree ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... he was, the sculptor grieved for the Irrevocable. Looking back upon Hilda's way of life, he marvelled at his own blind stupidity, which had kept him from remonstrating as a friend, if with no stronger right against the risks that she continually encountered. Being so innocent, she had no means ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... first-year man must dance was irrevocable. It had the authority of precedent in uncounted graduate classes. To be sure, it was neither required nor expected that all applicants be masters of the art; but, agitate his feet in some manner, every able-bodied male member must, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... conscious that it was the crisis of his history, and there rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an audible voice, words of irrevocable meaning. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... letter to Mrs. Beale from your father, my dear, written from Spa and making the rupture between them perfectly irrevocable. It lets her know, and not in pretty language, that, as we technically say, he deserts her. It puts an end for ever to their relations." He ran his eyes over it again, then appeared to make up his mind. "In fact it concerns you, Maisie, ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... not a right to cherish an evident vocation,—a right to reclaim her from the embrace of an excommunicated infidel, and present her as a chaste bride at the altar of the Lord? Perhaps, when that was done, when an irrevocable barrier should separate her from all possibility of earthly love, when the awful marriage-vow should have been spoken which should seal her heart for heaven alone, he might recover some of the blessed calm which her influence once brought over him, and these wild desires might ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... reduced from nine thousand men, to five thousand seven hundred and fifty-two. These prisoners were allowed a free passage to Europe, under the irrevocable condition not to serve again in the British ranks. Seven thousand stand of arms, a large number of tents, a long train of artillery, and a great quantity of clothing and stores fell into the hands ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... and concern themselves with training; but laws of judgment to manhood, and concern themselves with remedy and reward. There is a highly curious feeling in the English mind against educational law: we think no man's liberty should be interfered with till he has done irrevocable wrong; whereas it is then just too late for the only gracious and kingly interference, which is to hinder him from doing it. Make your educational laws strict, and your criminal ones may be gentle; but, leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig dungeons for age. And it is good ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... acknowledged by him as such to myself in his own chateau, is above the aspersions of a contemptible plebeian. Let this be a lesson to you, and never dare again to enter my sight. Footmen, conduct him out of my presence and service. No reply! I am irrevocable in this." ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... trouble. He had been recalled, as I said, from Jallica by family quarrels. When he reached the paternal mat, he found his sister Beeljie bound hand and foot in prison, with orders for her prompt transportation to my factory as a slave. These were the irrevocable commands of his royal father, and of her half-brother, Sulimani. All his appeals, seconded by those of his mother, were unheeded. She must be shipped from the Rio Pongo; and no one could be trusted with the task but the Ali-Mami's son and friend, ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... been sent, when she knew that her lover had received it, and that her decision was irrevocable, she was seized with trembling faintness, with the oppression of conscious guilt; and it seemed to her as if a new spring of love had suddenly burst forth in her heart, and as if she had never loved her father so sincerely, so devotedly, so tenderly, as now that she ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... friend, to be kept vaguely waiting; he would break it all off at once. His reception at Windsor threw an entirely new light upon the situation. The wheel of fortune turned with a sudden rapidity; and he found, in the arms of Victoria, the irrevocable assurance of his ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... du soleil, qui gemissais ainsi, L'irrevocable mort est un mensonge aussi. Heureux qui d'un seul ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... abstraction. We want matters of fact. Your case may be true as philosophy, but you have failed to ground it in example." So it is to history that our last appeal must be made, for, says Bolingbroke, "History is philosophy, teaching by example." Every decree of her stern tribunal is impartial and irrevocable. War the tonic or war the poison? She is the final judge. She will take you back, if you will, to her childhood days and point you out vast empires, owning the known world, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Medes, and Persians, fearful fighters all of them. ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... ye would adventure to trace our defections from the breach of the act of classes in the year 1650, all along to this day of our being bound in the grave of our neutrality, and all to edge up the spirit of the people to a due sense of our woful and irrevocable like backsliding from God (who hath acted many wonders for Scotland) you would find a perfumed smoke of incense springing from our altar in savoury and soul refreshing blessings. But ah! when shall ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... of faith. At this time, in the fervour of her devotion, she resolved to enter a convent and become a nun. Her father, however, believed that his daughter, whom he tenderly loved, might be truly religious without taking such an irrevocable step. But soon—whether through some juvenile attachment or not we cannot tell—her good desires and resolves grew faint, she left off prayer, and lost such comfort and blessing as had been granted her from above. "I began," she says, "to seek in the creature what I ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... wrote a long blaze letter to Barty, and poured out all my grief, and my resignation to the decree which I felt to be irrevocable. I reminded him of that playful toss-up in Southampton Row, and told him that, having surrendered all claims myself, the best thing that could happen to me was that she should some day marry him (which I certainly did ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... Evelyn. That disagreeable autocrat has succeeded in prejudicing our neighbours against us, and it hurts you. Well, nothing is irrevocable. Say the word, and we will leave the house to-morrow, and ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... accursed heart. But O! you judges of the ninefold Styx, Which with incessant torments rack the ghosts Within the bottomless Abissus' pits, You gods, commanders of the heavenly spheres, Whose will and laws irrevocable stands, Forgive, forgive, this foul accursed sin! Forget, O gods, this foul condemned fault! And now, my sword, that in ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... expressing great concern, Allworthy paused a moment, and then proceeded: "I have talked thus to you, child, not to insult you for what is past and irrevocable, but to caution and strengthen you for the future. Nor should I have taken this trouble, but from some opinion of your good sense, notwithstanding the dreadful slip you have made; and from some hopes of your hearty repentance, which are founded on the openness and sincerity of your confession. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... submit with resignation to the irrevocable decree of fate. When one has lived like you in the fear of God, honorably and loyally, death is but the passage to a ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... His impassioned pleading had touched her heart. At a time when she was crying out for something to satisfy her need, in an unguarded moment, she had mistaken an awakened, fleeting impression for love, and passed what was now in her eyes an irrevocable word. She was no coquette, who gives a promise the one day to be carelessly withdrawn the next. George Fordyce had been fortunate in gaining the promise of a woman whose word was as her bond. There are circumstances in which even such a bond may become null and void, but Gladys ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... soul. He was bartering his life. All his future depended upon this hasty act of a moment. The happiness of the mature man was risked by the thoughtless act of a boy. If in after-life this truth came home to him, it was only that he might see that the act was irrevocable, and that he must bear the consequences. But so it is ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... Dick's studio in the vague light of an October evening, and yet with a certain new shadow, half sad and half reproachful, in the beautiful eyes. After all, had he done his best for the child? Now that this thing was irrevocable and complete, a host of old misgivings and doubts, which he had believed long ago banished, broke in upon him. He had only asked that she should be happy—at least, he said, it had never been a question of himself. He certainly knew nothing to Lightmark's discredit, nothing ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... into a deep gulf of self-pity. Yesterday, now so far away, so irrevocable, was full of faith, of promise, of happiness, of grand purpose; now every path was hid by sliding sand. The world was a chaos. His book, his splendid mission, his communion with Adele, his very life, depended upon this wondrous psychic. Without her the world was a chaos, life a failure, and his faith ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... my dearest child," said sister Ursula, "which I dare not ask myself, and to which I am absolutely uncertain what answer I should return. I have not taken the final and irrevocable vows; I have done nothing to alter my situation with regard to Malcolm Fleming. He also, by the vows plighted in the Chancery of Heaven, is my affianced bridegroom, nor am I conscious that I less deserve his faith, in any respect now, than at ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... this one had remained, though often lost, as that remains which is to be, and she was now no less for him than before, though now seemingly lost irrevocably to another; and in all the seeming of irrevocable loss was drawing nearer—not with the victory and destiny of old in her eyes, but with no less victory and destiny inherent in her. Though far from him, she had been for long a disintegrated influence, but what had been distant was now near, and all was yielding like a ship in the ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... longer hide from you. That inticing speeches should not beguile me, I have made my self deaf to any but to him; and lest any mans person should please me more than his, I have dissembled the want of sight: Both which shadows of my irrevocable affections I have not spared to confirm before him, my father, and all other amorous soliciters—wherewith not made acquainted, I perceive my true intent hath wrought mine own sorrow, and seeking by love to be regarded, am cut of with contempt, ...
— Fair Em - A Pleasant Commodie Of Faire Em The Millers Daughter Of - Manchester With The Love Of William The Conquerour • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... for the best in the best of possible worlds, found no injustice in the granting of these broad manors—or, at least, no novelty worthy of mention to their sons. There is no whisper of ancient wrong; no hint or rankling of any irrevocable injustice. ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... the letter through and heard it fall with a faint thud to the bottom of the box. The last chance was still not gone, for the friendly old postmaster would have given it back to her if she had asked for it, but the mere noise it made in falling—one of the most distinctive and irrevocable sounding in the world—caused her to feel a lightening of the heart that meant satisfaction. She turned and went away down the bare village street, past the last row of whitewashed slate-roofed cottages, with the dark clumps of myrtle or tamarisk by their doors, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... He had helped her to decide to kill herself. He could not let her go that way. He stood before her and talked with all his might. "You cannot do that. You must not. You are overstrained and excited, and it is no time to do an irrevocable thing. You must wait till you see things calmly, at least. Taking your own life is not a thing to decide on as you might decide on going to a ball. How do you know that you will not be bitterly sorry to-morrow if you do that to-night? It's throwing ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... fingers worked restlessly. At last I recovered speech, but my voice terrified her; the hapless girl had understood my look, and for worlds she would not that the tale of her heavy misery should have been shaped out and confirmed by hard, irrevocable words. Nay, she seemed to wish to distract my thoughts from the subject: she rose from the floor: "Hush!" she said, whisperingly; "after much weeping, Clara sleeps; we must not disturb her." She seated herself then on the same ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... seemed to feel the tug waiting on the river, the sword-stick and the revolver, waiting on the table. The instant the election was ended and irrevocable, and Syme had received the paper proving his election, they all sprang to their feet, and the fiery groups moved and mixed in the room. Syme found himself, somehow or other, face to face with Gregory, who still regarded ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... of the Government is the personification of the Philippine people, and as such he cannot be held responsible for any act whilst he holds that position. His position is irrevocable until the Revolution shall triumph, unless extraordinary circumstances should compel him to tender his resignation to Congress, in which case only Congress shall elect whomsoever is esteemed ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... you; her smoothness, her very silence, and her patience speak to the people, and they pity her. You are a fool to plead for her, for you will seem more bright and virtuous when she is gone; therefore open not your lips in her favor, for the doom which I have passed upon her is irrevocable." ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... realize the significance of that signature her uncle had given the lawyers a few days before. Probably she would have accepted this act of fate as meekly as she had all else in her short life. For it must be clearly understood that the signature was irrevocable. No change of mind, no sober second thought coming into John's cloudy mind, would be of any use. A contract of sale is as binding under such circumstances ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick |
