"Living death" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had to expect in the future. The steps of her tyrant's progress would be gradual, but terrible. First, perhaps she would be confined to the Hall, then to her own rooms, and finally perhaps to some small chamber—some cell—where she would live a living death as long as her ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... revealed the secret that he had been forced to know. The excitement, such as it was, over Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass away. It was already waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. It was the portrait that had done everything. Basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. The murder ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... also came, about the year 1670, a painful book, the "Life of Pascal," a portrait painted slowly from the life or living death, but with an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive of disease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal's brain revealed, we are now told, the secret, not merely of that long prostration, those sudden passing torments, but of something analogous to them ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... exists and is one of the most powerful sentiments that rules mankind. You have attempted to violate it, to outrage it. However you may look upon your action, the penitentiary awaits you. Yet one can well hesitate to pronounce the word that condemns a fellow man to that living death. It is not the mere punishment itself. The dragging years will pass, but what will you be when they have passed? We no longer brand the persons of convicts, but none the less does the iron sear their souls and none the less does the world see with its mind's eye the scorched word 'convict' ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... increasing number of pines bordering the road and mingling with the distant forest. Very weird pines these were, chiefly covered with closely-packed dead foliage, with a living tuft of dark green at the end of each branchlet. A living death seemed to be their lot, and they moaned without moving as the light wind passed on ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... gazing on him, to hear the sound of his voice, to receive his smiles, seemed to her a joy she could only surrender with her existence. What then was the prospect of so soon losing him, even to crown himself with honor, but to her a living death? ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... to look at the whole matter fairly and boldly. What were the alternatives? I was Roger Trewinion's eldest son, and if I allowed my father's and Mr. Morton's will to be carried out, I doomed my darling to a loathsome life—a living death, while, though I should attain the object most dear to me, I should live in hell, the hell of being with a woman who loved another man. If I refused to marry her, things would be nearly as bad. I should still be dooming her to misery; she would not marry my brother, I should never be free from ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion of himself? Don't tell me that it will make you happy. That would be the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were satisfied,—that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you off ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... The common and foolish course is to lecture him on the sin of gambling and to tearfully urge him to associate only with very proper young men. But the young gambler is not in the least interested in that sort of a life, which appears to him to be a kind of living death, and such entreaty does not move him. His parents would do better by looking more closely into the case. Why is he a gambler? He desires money. He seeks excitement. He wants to live in an atmosphere of intense life and activity. Very well. ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... as he always was by the conquest of difficulties, he admired the force of mind and will by which this Russian lady, whom a terrible accident had made a hopeless invalid, overcame disabilities that would have reduced most people to a state of living death. In her, spirit annihilated matter. She joined French vivacity to the penetrating sensibility of the Sclavonic races, and she was a keen reader of character. Cavour interested her at once. Even in his exterior, the young Italian, with blond hair and blue eyes, was then ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... contrast their lives with their surroundings, and I trusted they did not. Some few, probably, had not been lepers, but criminals, who preferred the horrid liberty of Elhara to the chance of detection and the living death of the Hib Misbah. Other beggars were not really lepers, but suffered from one or other of the kindred diseases that waste Morocco. In Marrakesh the native doctors are not on any terms with skilled diagnosis, and once ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... convinced that this is not the truth about mysticism. Eckhart may have encouraged Schwester Katrei in her attempt to substitute the living death of the blank trance for the dying life of Christian charity; but none the less she caricatured and stultified his teaching. And I think it is possible to lay our finger on the place where she and so many others went ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... said Heyling, after a moment's pause. "To-night I consign you to the living death to which you ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... she sighed, "My Carlos!" even now I feel the perfumed zephyr of her breath Bearing to me those words of living death, And starting out the cold drops on ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... much better, as it is, my child," said the old scholar. "You see, dear, they would have taken him away. Nothing could have saved him. It would have been a living death behind prison ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... kind to me, good to me, dear to me," she went on quickly. "It is only in this that you will not understand. Would it not hurt you a little to feel that you had sent me to a sort of living death from which I could never come back to life? That I was imprisoned for ever among people who looked down upon me and only tolerated me for my fortune's sake? Yet that would be the very least part of it all! I could bear all that, if it were for any good. But to become the creature, the possession, ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... away from him for eleven years—she's tied to that imbecile for life. And after all the dreams and hopes she once had! You can imagine what it has been like for her, Anne, dearie—with her beauty and spirit and pride and cleverness. It's just been a living death." ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I put myself in your hands." Michael sighed. "This village makes me feel rather sick—the whole thing is too horrible, too sad—God's blue sky just up above, and His sweet, clean desert sand, and down here this living death, these idle, dirty ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... sad, tragic, yet glorious for him! It would be like a magic touch upon this lovely, cold, white ghost of Fay Larkin, transforming her into a living, breathing girl. He held his love as a thing aloof, and, as such, intangible because of the living death she believed she lived, it had no warmth and intimacy for them. What might it not become with a lightning flash of revelation? He dreaded, yet he was driven to speak. He waited, swallowing hard, fighting the tumultuous storm of emotion, and his ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... he found that he had been too late, and thus gone back to a living death upon a dead world? Or was he really dead after all, never to return either to his mother Earth or ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... godless freebooters to rifle her ships, kill her sailors, or throw them alive into the sea. Spain on her side seized English Protestant sailors who ventured into her ports, and burned them as heretics, or consigned them to a living death in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Yet in the latter half of the century these mutual outrages went on for years while the nations professed to be at peace. There was complaint, protest, and occasional menace, but no redress, and no ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and mind, she still had some desire to be cured, if possible, and made a most pitiful appeal for help to escape from her loathsome condition. We gave her the best counsel we could under the circumstances, and did all in our power to rescue her from her living death; but whether in any degree successful we cannot tell, as we have never heard from the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... want to save you from worse than death—yea, from a living death. Go from this place; for if you are here a month hence, you will be lost. Your people here will be defeated, and then the Mexicans will hand you all over to the Padre, who says he means to put you where you will be protected. Mark me: you will be sent where no cry for succor ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... niggardly quantities. He was hungering for a sight of the woods, which he knew must be so vital at this season. He had only the geraniums and the moss-rose that Isa, had sent, and they were worse than nothing, for they pined in this twilight of the cell, and seemed to him smitten, like himself, with a living death. He almost stopped, his heart's beating in his effort to hear the voices of the birds, and at last he caught the harsh cawing of the crows for a moment, and then that died away, and he could hear no sound but the voice of the clergyman in long clothes ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... a condemned man like? Did Graylock sleep? Did he suffer? Was the suspense a living death to him? Had he ever suspected him, Drene, of treachery after he, Graylock, had fulfilled his final ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... enthusiasm, triumphed over every obstacle. But she was returning to a house of mourning and of woe, where life would be one blank of desolation and stupor, to be wakened to bitter consciousness by intelligence of our doom. The sense of my responsibility, the full appreciation of the living death which, through my agency, had fallen upon a home as hallowed as ever love and joy consecrated to happiness, had burned up my eyeballs and my brain. I went forth into the recommencing storm, utterly unconscious of its rage and equally indifferent to fate. My comrade, ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... have awakened an interest in this remarkable and unique subject, and at the same time, above all, excited a stronger feeling of sympathy for our brothers and sisters suffering at the present time from the disease—a living death—in various portions of the globe, my humble efforts will ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... what they may do to others. Always suffering, always hopeless! Treated as criminals till their deeds are fatal, then certified to be "criminal lunatics." Such is the life of the underworld epileptic. Life, did I call it?—let me withdraw that word; it is the awful, protracted agony of a living death, in which sanity struggles with madness, rending and wounding a poor human frame. Happy are they when they die young! but even epileptics live on and on; but while they live we consign them to the underworld, where their pitiful ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... wish to see him again. When I meet him at your house, I shall leave the room, since I cannot pull him by the nose. I can force my spirit to leave my body, but it shall never bend to support that body. God of heaven, save thy child from this living death! I scarcely know what I write. My hand trembles; I am ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... learn in due season," laughed the fiend. "But now mark me, Harry of England, thou fierce and bloody kin—thou shalt be drunken with the blood of thy wives; and thy end shall be a fearful one. Thou shalt linger out a living death—a mass of breathing corruption shalt thou become—and when dead the very hounds with which thou huntedst me shall lick ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... up, and still he rocked himself gently, leaning on his sword. The girl suffered, too, to see him suffering so. A little while ago he had been hard, fierce, angry, cruel, threatening her with a living death that had filled her with horror. It had seemed quite impossible that there could be the least tenderness in him for any ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... the poor woman was sitting in the dark in the self-hypnotized condition of the utter emptiness of her living death, she heard Christophe playing. It was his habit to sit at the piano in the half-light, musing and improvising. His music irritated her, for it disturbed the empty torpor into which she had sunk. She shut the window angrily. ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland |
