"Pitiably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of this sort told on them inescapably, and both being, unfortunately, of a rather high-strung intelligence and youth, recognized it, no matter how much consciousness might deny it, and wondered sometimes, rather pitiably, why they couldn't be always at one temperature, like lovers in poetry, and why either should ever worry or hurt the other when they loved. Any middle-aged person could and did tell them that they were now really learning ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... and yet what an infinite variety, there is in all the operations and purposes of Nature! She does not grow us men out of our mothers, but babes—helpless, pitiably, tearfully helpless babes!—ignorant; who must grow into the perfect stature and the mature mind of men. Is not this babe also a saurian in its little way? Does a wider gap separate the saurian from the man, than that which separates the tiny babe from some Bacon or Raleigh? The law ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... he has begun to be; the other he loves because he sorely needs love—as sorely as the other, and must begin to grow lovely one day. Nor dare we forget that the celestial human thing is in itself lovely as made by God, and pitiably lovely as spoiled by man. That is the Christ-thing which is the root of every man, created in his image—that which, when he enters the men, he possesses. The true earthly father must always love those ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... so deliberate. A man may not feel poverty very keenly and may live a quiet self-pleasing life in pure thoughtlessness; but it is quite another matter when he knows thoroughly what the issues are, and yet wails pitiably because he is asked to pay a little more, even if it does fall hardly sometimes, than those who get almost none of the benefit. It is like the healthy child crying because they do not give him a goody, as they have given to his sick brother ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... He contrived to be called away, at the critical moment, by some problematical superintendent of police. Poor Cuffy, the honestest, if not the wisest, speaker there, leapt off the waggon, exclaiming that we were all "humbugged and betrayed"; and the meeting broke up pitiably piecemeal, drenched and cowed, body and soul, by pouring rain on its way home—for the very heavens mercifully helped to quench our folly—while the monster-petition crawled ludicrously away in a hack cab, to be dragged to the floor of the House of Commons amid roars ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... eyes with her handkerchief. As she rose up, I could mark the modest, timid glance, and the slight blush as she presented herself again amongst the company, where all were strangers. I thought she appeared, though in the midst of such a number, to be woefully and pitiably alone. ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... way made tolerable by a prospect of sacrificial employment. I had been ill brought up to meet this racking emergency. What had there been, in all my life, fostered in body and happiness, expanding in the indulgent love and pitiably misdirected purpose of my uncle, to fit me for this denial of pure and confident desire? I tried, God knows I tried! summoning to my help all the poor measure of nobility the good Lord had endowed me with and my uncle had cultivated—I tried, God knows! to receive the communication ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... very painful to hear, she exclaimed, 'Miss Charlecote, I can't recollect things—I get puzzled—I don't say what I want to say. Tell me, is not my brain softening or weakening? You know Maria had water on the head once!' and her accents were pitiably full of hope. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Hemerlingues, father and son, who had reconquered his Highness and were carrying him in triumph to Paris. A ghastly dream! All those people, although they knew Jansoulet well, stared coolly at him as if his face conveyed no idea to them. Pitiably pale, with the perspiration standing on his brow, he stammered: "But, your Highness, do you not mean to leave—" A livid flash, like that of a sabre stroke, followed by a frightful peal of thunder, cut him short. But the flash that shot from the monarch's eyes seemed far more terrible ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... against the Republicans. Accordingly, he assails the Abolitionists! Now we do not find fault with him because his arguments are pitiably silly,—because an intelligent Abolitionist would refute them instantly,—but because, even if they were sound, they have no bearing upon his point. They are not only nonsensical, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of the last waltz that he had danced, he lost his way, and fell into a deep pit, so that sight and hearing forsook him, and he gave himself up for lost. But when he found out that he was unhurt after the fall, he began to cry pitiably and to call for help, till he suddenly heard talking ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... sighed, but said calmly, "You must pay the penalty for loving a parvenu's son. Come, Julia, no peevishness, no more romance, no more vacillation. You have tried Pride and failed pitiably: now I insist on your trying Love! Child, it is the bane of our sex to carry nothing out: from that weakness I will preserve you. And, by-the-bye, we are not going to marry Mr. Richard Hardie, but Mr. Alfred. Now, Mr. Alfred, with ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... last her lips began to turn from lead color to white, and then from white to pink, and her heavenly eyes to open again, and her mouth to murmur things pitiably small and not bearing on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... to her when she had said it. Perhaps she ought to be too careful of Stella to bring her into touch with a woman who had slipped from virtue, however innocently and pitiably. It was a scruple which might not have troubled her if Stella had been her own child. There was another thing. Would Grace Comerford, if she knew all, be willing that her adopted daughter should ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... youth has plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was embittered to Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... was come, as the end of such matters generally comes, by gradual decay, petty disaster, and mistake; till the snow-mountain, instead of being blown tragically and heroically to atoms, melts helplessly and pitiably away. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... with at a boarding-house on their first arrival, and took a fancy to, nobody ever knew why. He was an Englishman, had probably been upon the stage, and lived from hand to mouth, nobody knew how, until we took him up, and he took us in most pitiably. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... warehouses filled, with shelves and larders laden they are empty and hungry. No man need envy them; their feverish, restless whirl in the dust of publicity is but the search for a satisfaction never to be found in things. They are called rich in a world where no others are more truly, pitiably poor; having all, they are yet lacking in all because they ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... did he know what great lesson we should learn from this, and stammered his ignorance pitiably, but Winona, in the throes of some mysterious prepossession, forgot to reprove him, and merely allowed the more gifted Merle to purvey the desired information. So the Wilbur twin was practically free ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... old ladies, who also own the two deserted houses at the corner of Stamford Street, Blackfriars Road. It is scarcely necessary to speak of the now somewhat picturesque condition of the houses alluded to in either locality, for the pitiably dilapidated condition of them all must have been matter of remark for many years past to any one at all acquainted with London. {221} The house, 41. Skinner Street, is also worthy of remark from another circumstance. It was formerly occupied by William ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 44, Saturday, August 31, 1850 • Various
... myself from the litter to the ground, falling in an impotent heap with my feet entangled in the wrappings. But I caught sight of my good dame staggering on behind, half dragged, half carried by two Indian youths. Her clothing was torn and draggled, her face pitiably scratched, while great tears chased each other down ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... under which we read and interpret the conduct of Pope's parents; and they lead us to regard as wise and conscientious a scheme which, under ordinary circumstances, would have been pitiably foolish. And be it remembered, that to these considerations, derived exclusively from the civil circumstances of the family, were superadded others derived from the astonishing prematurity of the individual. That boy who could write at twelve years of age the beautiful and touching stanzas on Solitude, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Cathedral and the old stand side by side; the one strong and whole, the other partly torn down, scarred and maimed as a veteran who has survived many wars. Even in its ruin, it is an interesting type of the maritime Provencal church, but so pitiably overshadowed by its successor that the charm of its situation is quite lost, and few will linger to study its three small naves, the defaced fresco of the dome, or even the little chapel of Saint-Lazare, all white marble and carving and small statues, ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... or other well able and determined to protect her. Her nerves were at acute tension; her life that of a hunted creature; for though she thought her fate inevitable, she concentrated her mind on what seemed to others pitiably weak and inconsequent schemes ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... on the bridge, old man. Move on; move on, now!" at which David started, looked all around him, and then moved on as commanded. His back, always bent, and his gait, always decrepit and shuffling, were now pitiably so, and he had a long, long journey before him; but, thanks be to Him whose omnipotent care protects and watches over the poor in spirit, he had escaped a far longer one. On and on he went, not cold now, not thinking, not in haste; ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... I do wish I could get away from the place altogether. I shall fly to Agatha's side the very day that the term closes. I suppose it is pitiably weak of me, but this woman gets upon my nerves most terribly. I have seen her again, and ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pained regret. His own attitude toward his former comrades had also in the meantime undergone a change. The boys he had looked up to, even the wisest of the seniors, seemed to him very young indeed, and their football worries pitiably unimportant. They were but preparing for the real work of the world while Peter, and others like him, were actually doing it. In consequence not a lad among all his former classmates was half so companionable or congenial as was ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... suffered terribly. He groaned pitiably through the entire night. I had given him one of my wrappers, but his circulation had been badly affected by the intense cold. His face was gray and cadaverous, with deep lines engraved upon it from suffering. His feet were so frozen that it took him some time before ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... noonday tragedies haunting their household recesses; which veil was raised only to the gifted eyes of a Cassandra, or to the eyes that, like my own, had experimentally become acquainted with them as facts. Pitiably mean is he that measures the relations of such cases by the scenical apparatus of purple and gold. That which never has been apparelled in royal robes, and hung with theatrical jewels, is but suffering from an accidental fraud, having the same right ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... looking apprehensively around for Vivie. She has done her best to make herself matronly and dignified. The brilliant hat is replaced by a sober bonnet, and the gay blouse covered by a costly black silk mantle. She is pitiably anxious and ill ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... as the fact of their possession of salvation showed, chosen Romans and Asiatics together to be heirs of eternal life. By the side of these transcendent blessings which they possessed in common, how pitiably small and insignificant all the causes which kept them apart looked ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... marriage of a singer with the daughter of a cook was not at all considered a mesalliance. Johann was a sad drunken scapegrace, and his poor wife, in bringing up her family upon the small portion of his earnings which she could save from being squandered at the tavern, had a pitiably hard and long struggling life ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... pitiably wanting in appreciation of a munificent offer, the rest of Cullerne made no pretence of imitating his example. Westray was too elated to keep the good news to himself, nor did there appear, indeed, to be any reason for ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... deliberately adopt such a conclusion should trouble himself any more to look for truth. If a mere absurdity could make its way out of a little fishing village in Galilee, and spread through the whole civilized world; if men are so pitiably silly, that in an age of great mental activity their strongest thinkers should have sunk under an absorption of fear and folly, should have allowed it to absorb into itself whatever of heroism, of devotion, self-sacrifice, and moral nobleness there was among ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... absence even James Stewart and Erskine of Dun agreed to hurry on the marriage between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Francis, Dauphin of France, a feeble boy, younger than herself. Their faces are pitiably young as ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... these nearly half are wage-earners, the majority in unrecorded forms of labor,—chiefly household service or the care of their own homes, with some petty industry adding its mite to the yearly income. But industrial training has but begun for Italy. The wage is pitiably low, the conditions of living hard and full of privation; nor can these facts alter till better education and organization have been brought about. The latest Italian census is not yet published; but proofs of tables of the ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... there were charges of having brought the crusade to naught by thwarting the general plans, by his arrogance in refusing to be bound by the decision of the other leaders, and by having made a peace contrary to the interests of the crusaders. The list was a long one; but the evidence adduced was pitiably weak. Beyond the breath of suspicion, no word of real evidence connecting him with the murder of Conrad of Montferat was adduced, and the other charges were supported by no better evidence. Many of the German barons who had been at the crusades themselves came forward to testify to the falsity of ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... girl moaning most pitiably, so I went to see what was matter; admitted this afternoon. Inflammation of stomach; fearful pain; such a dear, sweet little thing (can hear her moaning just now). Talked to her this afternoon, and asked her if she knew Who had made ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... character and disposition. Mr. Blake read it over three times, and when he finished sat in a reverie with it still between his fingers. The tone of it was so like the man he had known long ago, that friend from whom a misunderstanding that now seemed pitiably trivial had separated him. It had been his fault; Mr. Blake could see that now. He had been both hasty and unjust. Over him surged a great wave of regret. Well, it was too late to mend the matter at this late day. One chance was, however, left him—to ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... around the single room, and a group of some six neglected children, frightened by our arrival, were huddled together in one corner. A very sick man was coughing his soul out in the darkness of a lower bunk, while a pitiably covered woman gave him cold water to sip out of a spoon. There was no furniture except a small stove with an iron pipe leading through ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... never, never!" She got off by the door at which she had been aiming to some retreat of her own, while aghast and defeated, left to make the best of it, he sank after a moment into a chair and remained quite pitiably staring before him, appealing to the great ...
— The Outcry • Henry James
... Huxley's "Life and Letters," Volume I., page 209. See Letter 107.) progresses favourably. I am exhausted and not well, so write briefly; for we have had nine days of as much misery as man can endure. My poor daughter has suffered pitiably, and night and day required three persons to support her. The crisis of extreme danger is over, and she is rallying surprisingly, but the doctors are yet doubtful of ultimate issue. But the suffering was so pitiable I almost got ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... government ought to be theocratic. One priest, famous for the part he took in the declaration of 1682, M. Bossuet, was not in error, when he wanted to form the rules of polity after the maxims of the Scriptures; and if he has pitiably failed in this endeavour, you have to accuse the weakness of his genius alone, which was too narrowly attached to examples taken from the books of Judges and Kings, without seeing that God, when He works on this world, proportions Himself to time and space, and knows the difference between ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... to produce some consummate work, will find himself pitiably in error, if he expects to turn it out of his hands, entire in all its parts, and ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... course, so picturesquely conveyed—as his poems. He is, in promiscuous alternation, refined, gross, sentimental, serious, humorous, indignant, repentant, dignified, vulgar, tender, manly, sceptical, reverential, rakish, pathetic, sympathetic, satirical, playful, pitiably self-abased, mysteriously self-exalted. His letters are confessions and revelations. They are as sincerely and spontaneously autobiographical of his inner life as the sacred lyrics of David the Hebrew. They were indited with ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... into the wood, and concealed themselves among the bushes, where they perceived the emissaries of the king in conference with some men and women, and the priest of the parish. Four little children were stretched upon the grass, one of them crying pitiably. The mother lifted it up and gave it pap, in order to quiet it; whilst the others crept upon the ground, and played with the flowers. The emissaries counted money into the hands of the husbands; the priest had his share, and the children were delivered up. The echoes of the wood repeated for ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... generous instance of a mountain farmhouse. The floors were innocent of mats, and the rooms otherwise pitiably barnlike. Yet an air of largeness distinguished the whole. It was clearly the home of a man of standing in his community, one who lived amply the only life he knew. You felt you already knew the man from his outer envelope. And this in ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... flashed a doubt. He laid down his tools and spoke to the animal. Instantly Crusoe dashed for the rocks, barking and crying with eagerness. But the path was closed, the tide was hurrying in, and Crusoe whined pitiably as he crept back and crouched against the man who of course knew better than a little dog what must ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... in the morning when Felipe pulled up next day before his little adobe house in the mountain settlement. The journey from the mesa below had been, perforce, slow. The mare was still pitiably weak, and her condition had necessitated many stops, each of long duration. Also, on the way up the canyon the colt had displayed frequent signs of exhaustion, though only with the pauses did he ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... Others, with more iron in their natures, endured fearful agony in silence. During memorable half-hours, filled with danger and death, many of my gross misjudgments of character were made clear to me. Men whom no one had credited with heroic qualities revealed them. Others failed rather pitiably to live up to one's expectations. It seemed to me that there was strength or weakness in men, quite apart from their real selves, for which they were in no way responsible; but doubtless it had always been there, waiting to be called forth at ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... many days—delirious often, murmuring things pitiably small, calling on her father, on her lover—sometimes on her horses and dogs. The physician was skillful, and life won the battle. But it was a weary time before they let her descend to the parlor to see ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... He might be free to forgive the trouble we had caused Him. I hope no reader of these words will think I am making light of a sacred subject; I never was more serious in my life. What I am trying to show is that, reduced to its simplest terms, the accepted theology of the churches to-day is pitiably inadequate as an explanation of our relationship to this great and mysterious universe. There is a beautiful spiritual truth underneath every venerable article of the Christian faith, but as popularly presented this truth has become so distorted as to be falsehood. It narrows religion and belittles ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... said Westerman, rising from his seat and coming into the middle of the room. "I do then utterly despise, scorn, and abominate him, and all such as him. I can conceive nothing in human form more deplorably low, more pitiably degraded, than such a poor subservient slave as ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... saw, when my eyes were clear again, was the dog. He crouched a few paces away from me, trembling pitiably, but uttering no cry. What had caused the ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... with all the varieties that make fever terrible to behold. He was never left without two attendants; and as Hope was in no danger now, though pitiably weak and slowly convalescent, Grace was often one of Walter's nurses. So was Julia Clifford. He sometimes recognized them for a little while, and filled their loving hearts with hope. But the next moment he was off into the world ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... into the breach. He had been a Speaker of the House, a general in the field and a Governor of Massachusetts, but was a faded old man, very commonplace, and except for the little post he held under Government pitiably helpless. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... justified. The manager's vocation is not to write plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the rehearsals of them, and even his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box-office has often proved to be pitiably delusive. The manager's true and only vocation is to refrain from producing plays. Despite all this, however, the manager has already collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it differently now. All sorts of new considerations have been presented to him. Not a word has been altered; ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... their ears. "Justice, oh God;" the old wife of Le Brun shrieked in trembling syllables. "They kill without hanging. I demand JUSTICE! Hear me, great God!" and her bent frame and wrinkled face writhed pitiably. ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... possessed a small vessel, to take him on board. But this man like a true Cretan took the money away by night, and bidding him come the next night with his family and attendants to the harbour near the temple of Demeter, as soon as evening fell, set sail. Now Perseus suffered pitiably in forcing himself, and his wife and children, who were unused to hardships, through a narrow window in the wall, and set up a most pititul wailing when some one who met him wandering on the beach showed him the ship of Oroandes under ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... were killing my men, or I never—I never meant to—to kill—" Oleson, shaking till he could scarcely stand, broke down and wept; wept pitiably, hysterically, as men of a certain fiber will weep when black tragedy confronts them all unawares. He cowered miserably before the Happy Family, his face ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... talking about lips just now but about lives. The life is the indorsement of the lips. It makes the words of the lips more than they sound or seem. Or, it makes them less, sometimes pitiably less, little more than a discount clerk ever busily at work. The words ever go to the level of the life, up or down. Water seeks its level persistently. So do one's words, and they find it more quickly than the water, for they go through ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... reached the open doorway of Drusilla's bedroom. And seated in a big velvet chair, as usual drawn near the window, though the shade was pulled straight down, pillows heaped all about her, sat Drusilla. Her face seemed small, oh, pitiably small, with bright eyes quite too large for their place. But someway Suzanna, looking in, knew ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... which prompted such a manifestation of them. At least, in such a condition of social manners and feelings mere wealth was not installed on the throne of Mammon in the eyes of all men. If one of the old coaches was more pitiably rickety than the rest; if the ancient-fashioned coat of some long-descended marchese was itself as threadbare as the old family liveries; if some widowed contessa had crept out from the last habitable corner of her dilapidated palazzo, where she was known to live on a modicum of ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... of Southerners who each moment—as they slid down that hill-side of a river—were taking deeper and stronger drafts of the heady sunshine of their own Southern sun. On the other hand, I am forced to admit that had his motive been pure benevolence his offering would not have been so pitiably scant. ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... and community work. As a matter of fact, social supervision is often so lax that obscene moving pictures and cards that are driven out of the large cities are exhibited without protest in the small towns. Usually the village is overchurched, and consequently divided into pitiably weak factions whose controlling aim is self-preservation. Seldom can a religious, philanthropic, or social organization be developed with sufficient strength to serve the community ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... It was a pitiably simple story. Betty saw, through its relation, the unconsciousness of the easily allured victim, the adroit leading on from step to step, the ordinary, natural, seeming method which arranged opportunities. The two had been thrown together ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... while the two men bent to their work with grim concentration. Neither of them dared think too much of what nameless dangers might be confronting Joan during those weary hours. Their actual knowledge of Arret was so pitiably slight. ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... I no reputation to endanger? [Rising—laying the paper aside.] What a pitiably small request! you will ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... sufferings speedily with the laudanum, and then I shall adopt the two girls as my heiresses, and take them here to live with me. As for Mrs. Chase, I hardly know what to do with the woman. They say she woke up soon after the shooting, and is taking on pitiably about Dainty's flight and Love's condition. I shall have to show her some kindness, I suppose, ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... were not over-active, the narrow pedestal whereon the stiff figure of a man of iron pride must accommodate itself to stand in despite of tempests without and within; and how the statue rocks there, how much more pitiably than the common sons of earth who have the broad common field to fall down on and our good mother's milk to set them on their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... both men would have felt inclined to risk everything for the sake of a little blood-stimulating tramp back and forth. The danger did not deter them. Only the plainsman's ingrained horror of throwing away a chance held them, shivering pitiably, to their places. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... fellow," said Rex, who could tighten his mind better than his seat in the saddle. And Joel managed the operation, though not without considerable expense of pain to his patient, who turned so pitiably pale while tightening his mind, that Joel remarked, "Ah, sir, you aren't used to it, that's how it is. I's see lots and lots o' joints out. I see a man with his eye pushed out once—that was a rum go as ever I see. You can't have a bit o' fun wi'out such sort o' ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... present time to undervalue. Begging these gentlemens' pardon, although Pope was not a poet of the same high order with some who are now living, yet, to deny his genius, is just about as absurd as to dispute that of Wordsworth, or to believe in that of Hunt. Above all things, it is most pitiably ridiculous to hear men, of whom their country will always have reason to be proud, reviled by uneducated and flimsy striplings, who are not capable of understanding either their merits, or those of any other ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... too poor to hire a preacher. What shall we do?" They had no training, save that training they had obtained in the old Baptist churches, or one similar in our own, and now that they were scattered over the great West, and were poor in this world's goods, they were indeed in a pitiably helpless condition. ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... self-restraint. Social conventions of many sorts were flouted; local factions resorted to terrorism against their opponents; legislatures abused their power by confiscating loyalist property and enacting laws for the dishonest promotion of debtor-class interests, and the central government, made pitiably weak by the prevailing jealousy of control, was kept wholly incompetent through the shirking of burdens by states pledged to its financial support. But populism and particularism brought their own cure. The paralysis of government ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... had been utterly crushed. When John Brown marched with his little band to attack the slave-owning aristocracy of the South, he became the forerunner of our terrible Civil War. It was the same spirit that moved the French trade unionists. Although pitiably weak in numbers and poor in funds, they decided to stop all parleyings with the enemy and to fire ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... unperformed or ill-performed!" Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister's should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... heartache. Deeply and achingly she was sorry for herself. Never had she felt so pitiably lonely, so bitterly in want of comfort and of sympathy. With another sigh she turned away from the river towards the house, vaguely wondering if, after such a night, she could ever ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the door which he had forced, got some wood from the stock in the corner, and kindled a fire in the old stove as quickly as his half-frozen hands would allow. He shook so pitiably as he worked that the Cat under the bed felt the tremor of it. Then the man, who was small and feeble and marked with the scars of suffering which he had pulled down upon his own head, sat down in one of the old chairs ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... sensations new as if she had been one of an exploration party into the heart of darkest Africa. They were attended by Tom and also the suave Hobson, who was all attentions but whose maneuvers in the direction of Caroline Darrah were pitiably fruitless. He was seconded in his attentions to the stranger by David with his most fascinating manner, and Mrs. Cherry sparkled and glowed at him with subdued witchery, while Tom sulked close at ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... mother, had spurned the terrible responsibility consequent upon that assumption, and cast her children from her bosom out into the wicked world, with never a care, nor a blessing, nor a prayer; it wasn't his fault that his infant soul had been even more pitiably neglected than the uncared-for body; it wasn't his fault that the little hands were taught to fight and steal rather than lift themselves up toward a gracious father to invoke His love and blessing, or that the words of blasphemy were frequent on the lips that ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... bit of emergency work he wanted me for, that only the remnant of a small appropriation was available for it, and that if I took it I would be pitiably paid; but that he wished me to do it, because some day, and that not too far away, it might have to stand the test not of friends, but of enemies. Also he said—let ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... nine months, abjure their friendly relations and furiously grapple in a life and death struggle over questions of secondary importance leads the dazed beholder at first to grope after the old Greek idea of ate or Nemesis. In reality the case does not call for supernatural agency. The story is pitiably human, if the student will but master its complex details. It may be well to close our study with a few general observations, though they almost necessarily ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... Mackhai, as the dogs, which for a treat had been admitted, came sniffing round the shivering lad, who looked pitiably thin and miserable in the kilt, with the sporran hanging down far lower ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... use the whole armful of "Raroo" leaves; Tom might massage, and the others do their best, which was pitiably poor, and their uttermost, which was ever so mean and little, the Conquering Worm would have its victim. And so with a few long-drawn, gulping sighs, each at a longer interval than the last, until the final one, "Little Jinny" ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... reasonable to claim that human behavior may be intelligently controlled or directed only in the light of intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the organism, its processes, and its relations to its environment? If this be true, how pitiably, how shamefully, inadequate is our knowledge even of ourselves! How few are those who have a sound, although meager, knowledge of the laws of heredity, of the primary facts of human physiology, of the principles of hygiene, of the chief ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... of marble and under a gilded roof, stood a pale, thin, debilitated youth, magnificently clothed, and holding in his hand a silver vase filled with grain, which he ever and anon distributed to the cackling multitude at his feet. Nothing could be more pitiably effeminate than the appearance of this young man. His eyes were heavy and vacant, his forehead low and retiring, his cheeks sallow, and his form curved as if with a premature old age. An unmeaning smile dilated his thin, colourless lips; and as he looked down on his strange favourites, he occasionally ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... probably will continue to fetter the development of the natives of India for centuries to come. Some simple reforms the English have secured, like the abolition of suttee and the improved condition of the child widows; but their influence on the great mass of the people has been pitiably small. India bears the same relation to the Orient that Italy does to Europe. It is the home of temples, palaces and monuments; it is the land of beautiful art work in many materials. Most of its cities have a splendid historical ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... rainy day; there was nothing to be gained in any respect by a wretched stand in the wet sodden grave-yard. Even the curate in charge hurried over the service. The ceremony was so pitiably desolate that Elizabeth wept at its remembrance for many a year; and between her and Martha it was always a subject of sorrowful congratulation, that little Harry had been too ill with a sore throat to go to the funeral; and had, therefore, ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... that I saw two trawlers ahead, one on each bow. By this time the boat's crew had quite recovered, but I did not wish to dive, as the battery was still pitiably low. I gradually altered course to north-east, but after half an hour's run I almost ran on top of a group of ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... three, while its wizened face was that of a spell-struck creature of no assignable age, or the wax image of some dwindling life wasting away before the witch-kindled fire of a diabolical hatred. The tiny hands and arms were pitiably thin, and showed under the yellow skin sharp little bones no larger than a chicken's; and at her wrists and temples the blue tracery of her veins looked like a delicate map of the blood, that seemed as if it could ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Brienne,—for recovery of health. Then to Nice, to Italy; but shall return; shall glide to and fro, tremulous, faint-twinkling, fallen on awful times: till the Guillotine—snuff out his weak existence? Alas, worse: for it is blown out, or choked out, foully, pitiably, on the way to the Guillotine! In his Palace of Sens, rude Jacobin Bailiffs made him drink with them from his own wine-cellars, feast with them from his own larder; and on the morrow morning, the miserable old man lies dead. This is the end of Prime Minister, Cardinal Archbishop Lomenie ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... know the reason of these inner struggles, and alternations. I am very pitiably a woman no doubt, weak in my will, strong only to love. Oh, I despise myself. At night, when all my household was asleep, I would go out bravely as far as the lake; but when I stood on the brink, my cowardice shrank from self-destruction. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... came a touch of realism that recalls the simple death-scenes that Walter Scott described in his grand twelfth- century manner. The old woman lingered pitiably in ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... stair which zigzagged upward, lighted in its progress by loopholes and iron-barred windows. Reaching the top of the first flight, the Count threw open a door of worm-eaten oak, and disclosed a chamber that occupied the whole area of the tower. It was most pitiably forlorn of aspect, with a brick-paved floor, bare holes through the massive walls, grated with iron, instead of windows, and for furniture an old stool, which increased the dreariness of the place tenfold, by suggesting an idea of its having ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... flow with ampler range And freer pace; but more, far more, I grieved 500 To see displayed among an eager few, Who in the field of contest persevered, Passions unworthy of youth's generous heart And mounting spirit, pitiably repaid, When so disturbed, whatever palms are won. 505 From these I turned to travel with the shoal Of more unthinking natures, easy minds And pillowy; yet not wanting love that makes The day pass lightly on, when foresight sleeps, And wisdom ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... the summit. They would there see the cedar, beneath whose shade they had first felt the thrill of desire, and there amidst the glowing stones they would assuredly find passion once more. But Serge soon began to stumble pitiably. He could walk no further. He fell a first time on his knees. Albine, by a mighty effort, raised him and for a moment carried him along, but afterwards he fell again, and remained, quite overcome, on the ground. In front of him, beneath him, spread ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... me, after she had been introduced, in no suspense about her present motive; she was on the contrary in a visible fever to enlighten me; but I promptly learned that for the alarm with which she pitiably panted our young man was not accountable. She had but one thought in the world, and that thought was for Lord Iffield. I had the strangest, saddest scene with her, and if it did me no other good it at least made me at last completely understand why insidiously, from the first, ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... of Christ given for us. The real Sabbath is not a sacred day, kept in a ceremonial and legal sense, but rather an inward quiet, a prevailing peace of soul, a rest in the life of God from stress and strain and passion. The Church has been pitiably torn and mutilated by disputes over the genuine form of administering these outer ceremonies, supposing them to be in themselves sacraments of life. As soon as they are recognized to be what they really are, only temporary signs and symbols, then the main emphasis ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... sighing over so pitiably, you old weeping-willow?" Papa said, laughing. "There are only merry folk here. Isn't it ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... the Carmelite. She opened her eyes, unclasped her hand, which had been locked round one of the old hag's, and sat up blinking, with a smile which died away very pitiably. ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... could not make any satisfactory diagnosis of the evil; but at least he should feel better to have done with the privileged assertive classes, to have taken up his part with the less Philistine, more pitiably ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... pitiably embarrassed. He stammered, coughed, stammered again, wrinkling his face so deeply he seemed about to weep; but finally he contrived to utter an apologetic laugh. "I ought to do that, of course; but in some way or other I just don't seem to be able ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... vessel seem like an infernal Eolian harp; the thunder rumbled like an indisposed giant, and to make things more agreeable, a gun broke from its lashings, and had it all its own way for about a quarter of an hour. Tom groaned most pitiably. I looked at him, and if I were to live for a thousand years, I shall never forget the expression of his face. His lips were blue, and—no matter, I'm not clever at portrait painting: but imagine an old-fashioned Saracen's Head—not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... contributions of money, for we are unable to raise them. Since this fierce, horrible war has raged in Germany between the Imperialists and Swedes, between the Catholics and Protestants, the cities of Berlin and Cologne have suffered pitiably, and have been levied upon and plundered, sometimes by the Swedes and sometimes by the Imperialists. Before the peace of Prague the Imperialists visited us quite often with cruel robberies and levies, ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... necessary to censure their lack of so-called chivalrous woman-worship. That artificial mood of emotion, though glorified by the literary art of greatest poets, has something pitiably unreal, incurably morbid, in its mysticism. But, putting this aside, we are still bound to notice the absence of that far more human self-devotion of man to woman which forms a conspicuous element in the Arthurian romances. ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... his head. "You've done everything, Red. All the trouble's with me. I'm so pitiably weak—so much weaker than I ever dreamed I could be. I can't seem to care whether I get out of this or not. All I want is to lie down and go to ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... look at his face—pitiably pale and agitated—to see that he was a sensitive man, not always able to control his nerves on occasions which tried his moral courage. A kind, I might almost say a noble face, and a voice unaffectedly persuasive, at once prepossessed me in his favor. The few words ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... Dale, with the whole team, went to the directors of the athletic faculty and besought them to change or modify the decision. Both the trainer and the coach, who had brought such glory to the university, threatened to resign their places. The disgrace of a pitiably weak team of freshmen being annihilated by minor colleges was eloquently put before the directors. But ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey
... that. Do you know, Palla, what Jack once said of us? He said—rather brutally, I thought—that you and I were immaturely un-moral and pitiably unbaked; and that the best thing for both of us was to marry and have a few children before we tried to do ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... now, feeling itself deserted, it gave vent to the most heartrending screams—screams that abruptly disturbed the silence of that lonely spot and pierced to the depths of Martha's soul. In an instant she rose, and, dashing on, bounded over stock and stone, tearing herself pitiably, but heeding it not in her intense anxiety to save her child. But the wolf had now increased its speed; the undergrowth was thick, the ground heavier, and soon screams became her only guide. Still on and on she dashed, now snatching up a little shoe which was clinging ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... only look at him in open-eyed amazement. The big man's terror was pitiably apparent. The copper skin had turned a dirty grey, his lower lip was trembling ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... made almost impossible because of the order to be back on the job when work commenced. A ten hour stretch of arduous labor, in a climate where incessant rain is the rule for at least six months of the year, was enough to try the strength and patience of even the strongest. The wages too were pitiably inadequate. ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... these scoundrels, who were only too happy to make a little martyr of the poor unsophisticated child, ignorant of everything, with the crushed and sickly air, timid and sullen, thin and pale, and pitiably clad in her wretched, countrified gowns. Bewildered, overwhelmed, so to speak, by this hourly torture, she became their drudge. They made sport of her ignorance, they deceived her and abused her credulity by absurd fables, they overburdened her with fatiguing ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... Rejoicing that the will you serve has dealt Its power on me. O, I hate you not. You and your crying grief should have blown past My heart like wind shaking a fasten'd casement. But I must have you in. Myself I loathe For opening to you, and thereby opening To the demon which had set you on to whine Pitiably in the porches of my spirit. You are but noise; but he is the lust of the world, The infinite wrong the spirit, the virgin spirit, Must fasten against, or ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... blood and liver are liable, even though the skin be clear and the cheeks rosy, to harbor some poisonous humors that might be transmitted to the wife or offspring—poor innocents, too often made to suffer pitiably for the vices or thoughtlessness ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... so weak," said the prince, "so pitiably weak! I thought to frighten the woman by starving myself, poor fool that ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... and how strangely the good and evil mix and mingle and clash and strive in each day's doings, and through the whole of life. They who believe that the saint is all saint, and the sinner all sinner, are blindly and pitiably ignorant of human nature. God has made no man without putting some little bit of the Divine image in him. The worst has some lingering trace or ruin of it. And the best is not so entirely the temple of the Holy Ghost that no fouler spirits ever ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... we know so pitiably little of natural science. We were hopelessly helpless against an ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... fairly made you jump. Its undulations of pitch gave you something the same sensation as riding rapidly over a worn-out asphalt pavement in a five-hundred-dollar automobile; unforeseen springs into the air, descents into unexpected pits. Her grammar wasn't flagrantly bad, though it had, rather pitiably, a touch of the genteel about it. But now, when she spoke to Rose, and with the lassitude of fatigue in her voice besides, Rose heard something ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... elementary education, and in giving a university training to such as had the aptitude and the ambition to obtain it; he believed in industrial training—and in these things the North Carolina of those days had little concern. Page even went so far as to take an open stand for the pitiably neglected black man: he insisted that he should be taught to read and write, and instructed in agriculture and the manual trades. A man who advocated such revolutionary things in those days was accused—and Page was ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... herself for this appeal to a man whom she could not respect, as though she were a suppliant at his mercy, but she feared the reproach of having deceived him, and she tried pitiably ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... had been sensitive to Alice. But in those days of obscurity and isolation it was not in her to cast Alice off. She had felt bound to Alice, not as Gwenda was bound, but pitiably, irrevocably, for better, for worse. The solidarity of the family ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... I tried to say 'no,' but I am so pitiably weak, I couldn't. You must despise me. But don't give me up entirely, for if I live, I'll do better. I'll go away to Father ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... one evening, at the only inn on the lake, a young German Prince, Karol von Roswald, and his friend the Italian Count Salvator Albani. They are travelling for the Prince's health, he being a sort of spoilt child, pitiably nervous, imperfectly educated, and half paralysed by the recent death of his mother and the earlier one of a fiancee. The inn is good to eat in (or rather out of), but for nothing else; and Salvator, hearing of Lucrezia, whose friend, though ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... profoundly troubled him. He knelt and kissed her hand in silence. "Is not love life itself?" she said, rising with difficulty from her arm-chair. "Let us go without delay and obtain permission," and, taking his hand, led him with steps slow and pitiably uncertain into the presence ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... little man came back after a while, they began asking him questions till he told his whole story, weeping pitiably. Then they got him to tell me about the other great event of his life also, in the rather ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... I felt capable of a much greater effort than that; I was in a fitting mood to overcome difficulties, and I decided on a treatise, in three sections, on "Philosophical Cognition." This would, naturally, give me an opportunity of crushing pitiably some of Kant's sophistries ... but, on taking out my writing materials to commence work, I discovered that I no longer owned a pencil: I had forgotten it in the pawn-office. My pencil was lying in ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... his wooing. Giovanni, by some intuition usually foreign to his dull nature, seemed to divine what manner of man would be Madonna Paola's ideal, and strove to pass himself off as possessed of the attributes of that ideal, with an ardour that was pitiably comical. He became an actor by the side of whom those comedians that played impromptus for his delectation were the merest bunglers with the art. He gathered that Madonna Paola loved the poets and their stately diction, and so, to please her better, ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... he came, and he had seen her crushed close in St. Pierre's arms in their meeting. It was this night, with its gloom and its storm, that had made the shadowings of her unrest a torturing reality. For St. Pierre had brought her back to the bateau and had played a pitiably weak part in concealing his desire to ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... of position, she sat vacillating pitiably. The knowledge that in a single moment he would have begun to speak spurred her to a fever of alarm, while a terrible nervous incapacity chained her limbs ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... no desire for him and no pity. Her countenance, seen even in dreams, expressed a calm but immutable repugnance. No wonder, for she was only acquainted with the pitiably inadequate sample of him introduced to her as Mr. Rickman of Rickman's. He was aware that she belonged exclusively not only to Jewdwine's class, but to Jewdwine himself in some way (a way unspeakably ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... "Yes—because I was pitiably inadequate to design anything better for us. I didn't know how. I didn't understand. I, the architect ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... attempting to turn your back on yourself, to borrow a phrase from your friend Lord Castlereagh's rhetoric, will be pronounced, even by those who do not care a bawbee about the debate, as not only ludicrous, but pitiably shabby. Keep your seat, Mr. Landor, and keep your temper for once in your life. Let us examine into this pretended mistake in your former dialogue about Laodamia. Well, as you are up, do me the favour, sir, to mount the ladder, and take ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... have read even to the last page without reserve, I did blame the last pages. You have hurt me, you have literally made me suffer! The punishment is beyond all proportion to the crime; you have created a pitiably frightful death! Assuredly the woman who defiles the marriage bed should expect punishment, but this is horrible; it is a punishment such as I have never seen. You have gone too far; you have done mischief to my ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... them unto us by His Spirit." When art, and poetry, and philosophy all pitiably fail, the Spirit unveils to us the bewildering feast. And so the unlearned has the same ultimate advantage as the learned, and the cottager has equal privilege with the monarch. The greatest things are not the perquisites of culture, ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... death—that it was only a question of minutes,—unless—unless she could make the man and woman before her understand that they would gain far more money by allowing her to live than by killing her now, to-night, for the value of the pearls that lay scattered on the floor, and the small, the pitiably small ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... at my bidding. I gave him a second injection. He lay back and soon he was sleeping. I turned toward Da Costa. His face was livid and sweating, and he was trembling pitiably. ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... ours. Where in Germany legislative schemes succeed easily when this huge bureaucratic machine is behind them, they would fail ignominiously in a country lacking this machinery, and lacking these pitiably tame people ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... passed over this bridge, then I could not trust mine eyes, but looked again and again, and said at last: "That is an ear! An ear as big as a man!" I looked still more attentively—and actually there did move under the ear something that was pitiably small and poor and slim. And in truth this immense ear was perched on a small thin stalk—the stalk, however, was a man! A person putting a glass to his eyes, could even recognise further a small envious countenance, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... eyes; an epidemic of foot-rot had broken out among cows in the Upper Alps, and several herds passed me in single file on their way to the valley, where they were going to be doctored. The cows had become so lean that they looked like skeletons, and dragged themselves pitiably down the slopes, and the smiling country with the fat meadow-land seemed to take a savage delight in gazing on this sad pilgrimage. At the foot of the glacier, which stood out sheer and steep before me, I felt so depressed, and my nerves were so overwrought, that I said I wished to ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... conviction that something unpleasant had happened, and that it would be as well not to be mixed up in it. Mr. Jansenius, though a few words from his wife had surprised and somewhat calmed him, was still pitiably restless ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... that they should follow. This was very far from the plan now suggested, that they should do it all, which would be quite out of the question. France had a strong army, they said, and it would be better to use it than to efface herself so pitiably. The proposition of abstention on the part of the Archduke was a delusion intended only to keep France out ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the letter which had been passed up to him in court, and surveyed him with an astonishment she made no effort to conceal. Never had she felt at a greater disadvantage with him. Never had she understood him less. Was this attempt at unconcern, so pitiably transparent to her, made in an endeavour to probe her mind or to deceive his own? In her anxiety to determine, ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... imputed to their Master views utterly irreconcilable with the grandeur of his new and heavenly religion. It was no religion at all which they as yet supposed to be the object of Christ's teaching, but a simple preparation for a pitiably vulgar scheme of earthly aggrandizement. But, whilst the other apostles had simply failed to comprehend their master, Judas had presumptuously assumed that he comprehended the purposes of Christ more fully ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... the dwarflings to seat themselves upon a great crag stone, and from thence to watch the haymakers; but a few mischievous fellows kindled a fire upon the stone, made it red-hot, and swept away embers and ashes. Morning came, and with it the tiny folk, who burned themselves pitiably. They exclaimed in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... pronounced individuality, for all you think she is nothing but a society butterfly. I can see it hurts to cram it into Robert Jennings' ideal of what a woman should be. It makes me feel badly to see Ruth so quiet and resigned, like a little beaten thing, so pitiably anxious to please. Self-confidence became her more. She hasn't mentioned suffrage since Robert called and stayed so late Wednesday, except to say briefly, 'I'm not going to march in the parade.' 'Why not?' I asked. 'Doesn't Bob want you to?' 'Oh, certainly. He leaves it to me,' she pretended ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... in the elder Dumas.) By this Kate intended to show how proud and unrestrained a Madigan was; hoped, too, perhaps, that there might attach a bit—the least bit—of suggestive license to the phrase. And all the while she was pitiably unconscious of how innocuous the old romanticist's tales of adventure may be, read in translation, by the light of such ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... friend suggests to me), save in this dim tradition, I can only say, that I doubt whether either of them ever heard even of the apostles; and I satisfied myself that the one who brought the secret had never heard of Joseph, was pitiably ignorant of Potiphar's wife, and only knew of "Mozhus" or Moses, that he "once heerd he was ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... of the very extraordinary change which that meeting has brought about in Francis' mental condition. Up to this point I can only be truly grateful to you for your kindness and sympathy with one whose life has been so pitiably wrecked, but beyond this—well, it is a very different matter. I understand the doctor has suggested to you that you should allow Francis to remain under this mistake—that you should visit him, and to all intents and purposes be the person he takes you for. The ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... that her father's knowledge of mining greatly exceeded his own. And the assertion that he had advanced sums of money for the carrying on of the work sounded plausible enough, for the girl knew that her father's income had been small—pitiably small, but enough, he had always insisted, for his meager needs. Unquestionably, up to that point the man's words had carried the ring of truth. Then came the false notes; the open accusation of Vil ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... onrush of his brother's power. He sought to persuade himself of Hamilton's infallible wisdom and Mary's folly of infatuation, but the only certain conviction was that of a bruised and heavy heart in his own breast. Paul was pitiably weak, but, also, he was sensitively tender. Love he gave and commanded with the uncalculating ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... which seldom broke the law and never resisted it, he had sunk of late years into a peaceful decay of all his faculties. He carried his emblem of office, a small mace, attached to his wrist by a string, and his hand shook pitiably as he fumbled for it, but less with excitement than from shock at having been aroused and dragged from his ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the boy grinned, and Howard, sick and weak with anger and sorrow, turned away and walked down toward the brook. He had tried once more to get near his brother and had failed. O God! how miserably, pitiably! The hot blood gushed all over him as he thought of the shame and disgrace ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... knob. When the door opened we saw who it was. I knew Marshey. He lived a little beyond Hazen on the same road. Lived in a two-room cabin—it was little more—with his wife and his five children; lived meanly and pitiably, grovelling in the soil for daily bread, sweating life out of the earth—life and no more. A thin man, racking thin; a forward-thrusting neck and a bony face and a sad and drooping moustache about his mouth. His eyes ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... crying behind my veil. My domestic prospect looked so dreary! my unfortunate husband was so hopelessly misguided, so pitiably wrong! The one chance for both of us, and the one consolation for poor Me, was to hold to my desperate resolution more firmly than ever. If I had wanted anything to confirm me in this view, and to arm me against ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... extension goes a deeply seated interest in the abolition of slavery. France—unlike England—feels shame at the idea of being chronicled in history as aiding oppression. The Frenchman is not so enormously conceited, so pitiably vain as to believe, like the Briton, that a crime is a virtue when for his own peculiar interest. Vain as the French may be, they have not quite come ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... very artless; and the drawn and cramped outline of the legs and feet, and of the arms and hands, even to the shrunken, slender-looking fingers, all combined to most strikingly convey to the pained senses the fragile frame and pixey figure of some pitiably afflicted child, unconscious altogether of the pathos ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... to speak, and no sound came from it. Philip waited patiently. She tried to be audacious, and failed pitiably. ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... has transferred Burke's thought to his own page: but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke's vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch |
