"Pitiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brave men who have died. The widow mourns, and the little children weep comfortless in their mountain home, and the wind rushes through the forest, and the river foams furiously down the mountain, falling in billows of lace over the rocks, and the sun shines over all, cold and pitiless. ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... The pitiless comment of the press he had hidden from his sister, but the visit of the other woman was simply unavoidable. There were certain rights not to be ignored, and the perfidy of the dead man placed beyond Marsoc's ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... fathom or more, then, with a cry, she clutched wildly at a little ledge of rock, and hung there, her feet resting on the shelving bank. Thirty fathoms down swirled and poured and rolled the waters of the Golden Falls. A fathom above, red in the red light of evening, lowered the pitiless face of Swanhild. Gudruda looked beneath her and saw. Pale with agony she looked up and saw, but she ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... in the open a seething, twisting mass of it, taunting him with its power, mocking him as pitiless as the mirage mocks a thirst-crazed creature of the desert. In an hour or two it would be gone. He might keep up its embers for a time—until the Eskimos, or starvation, or still greater storm put an end to it. The effort, ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... found now a new factor—the capacity of heart. Ideals that heretofore had borne to his mind the stamp of weakness, now showed themselves as real bulwarks of character. The men who had fallen by the wayside in the advance of his pitiless march to power, were no longer, to his eyes, types of the unfit, to be thrust aside. Some were men, indeed, who knew their own souls, and would ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... NETHERLANDERS. Two years after the cruel massacre of the Huguenot colony in Florida, Philip II, the King of Spain, decided to put an end to the obstinacy of the Netherlanders, and sent an army from Spain commanded by the Duke of Alva, who was as pitiless as Menendez. Alva began by seizing prominent nobles, and he would have arrested the Prince of Orange, but he escaped into Germany. A court was set up which condemned many persons to death, including the greatest nobles of the land. The people nicknamed it the Council of ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... and the shivering sound among them toward the feeble sun; such as we make to a poor fireplace when several doors are open. Sometimes I put my face to warm against the soft, rough maple-stem, which feels like the foot of a red deer; but the pitiless east wind came through all, and took and shook the caved hedge aback till its knees were knocking together, and nothing could be shelter. Then would any one having blood, and trying to keep at home with it, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... demoralization of the town. Except for a few saints and poets, whom he acclaims with a lyric ardor, the population is sunk in greed and hypocrisy and—as if this were actually the worst of all—complacent apathy. Spiritually it dwindles and rots; externally it clings to a pitiless decorum which veils its faults and almost makes it overlook them, so great has the breach come to be between its practices and its professions. Again and again its poet goes back to the heroic founders of Spoon River, back to the days which nurtured Lincoln, whose shadow ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... found two porridge bowls, one decorated with chickens and one with rabbits, which brought Polly and Peter back so vividly that her incipient pity was turned to rage. After that she wielded her brush and broom with pitiless fury. She rubbed the mahogany with the expression of one who might have been rubbing salt into the ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... Before the pitiless details, not one of which was spared him, were checked off, Maurice understood; half rising from his chair, he struck Krafft a resounding blow in the face. He had intended to hit the mouth, but, his hand remaining fully open, caught on the cheek, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... and dark against the morning sunrise was a village with a very tall and slender campanile and a line of cable bearing metal standards that he could not clear. He stopped his engine abruptly and dropped flat. He may have hoped to get at the bombs when he came down, but his pitiless pursuers drove right over him and shot him as ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... pitiless reality the play of it all came over him, and he walked off lest the sudden surging of ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... population—Malays, Bugis, Makassars, and a sprinkling of Sea Dyaks. Sometimes the flimsy, cane-walled, leaf-thatched huts, perched aloft on bamboo stilts, stand, like flocks of storks, in clusters. Again they stray a little apart, seeking protection from the pitiless sun beneath clumps of palms. Malays in short, tight jackets and long, tight breeches of kaleidoscopic colors were sauntering along the yellow road, oblivious of the sun. On the shelving beach naked brown men were mending their nets or pottering ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... saith a commentator, 'is Freyr, one of the most glorious among Norse Asen, or children of the gods—he who rules over rain, sunshine, and earth's fruitfulness. His adversary is Surtur, the Black Demon—a pitiless foe of the Asen, who in the great battle will fight with the evil Loki—'the curse and shame of gods and men'—and set heaven and earth afire. But then there will come a new heaven and a new earth, in which eternal justice shall reign, and the 'GREAT KING'—he whose steed shall wait beneath ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... over Uncle Tom's woes," the doctor continued. "And yet there are more than five million white people in America to-day who are the slaves of poverty, cruel and pitiless, who haven't enough clothes to keep warm, enough food to eat, and are utterly helpless and forsaken in illness. The black slave always had food and shelter, clothes and medicine. My business is to heal the sick—mind you! Shall I give it up to ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... night and wakes me up. In the morning my way is made through the waking city with a painful limp, that gives rise to much unsympathetic giggling among the crowd at my heels. Perhaps they think all Pankwaes thus hobble along; their giggling, however, is doubtless evidence of the well-known pitiless disposition of the Chinese. The sentiments of pity and consideration for the sufferings of others, are a well-nigh invisible quality of John Chinaman's character, and as I limp slowly along, I mentally picture myself with a broken leg or serious illness, alone among these people. A Fankwae ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... was I, I Regin, the smithier of the snare, And high up Fafnir towered with the brow that knew no fear, With the wrathful and pitiless heart that was born of my father's will, And the greed that the Gods had fashioned the fate of the earth ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... telegraph operator of that station came running toward them, bareheaded, and coatless, through the pitiless rain. The head-light showed his face to be bloodless ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... furnace, and I inwardly execrated that scoundrel Bainbridge and his lawless crew as I thought of the crowded longboat and the hapless women and children—to say nothing of the wounded skipper—pent up in her, with nothing to protect them from the pitiless ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... is familiar with the name of the Abbe Geoffroy of satirical memory, who drove the most popular actors and authors of the time to desperation. This pitiless Aristarchus must have been most ardently enamored of this disagreeable profession; for he sometimes endangered thereby, not his life, which many persons would have desired earnestly perhaps, but at any rate his health and his repose. It is well, doubtless, to attack those who can reply with ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... years, My mother's grave I sought, in my despair, But found it not! our grave-stone was not there! No we were fallen men, mere workhouse slaves, And how could fallen men have names or graves? I thought of sorrow in the wilderness, And death in solitude, and pitiless Interment in the tiger's hideous maw: I pray'd, and, praying, turn'd from all I saw; My prayers were curses! But the sexton came; How my heart yearn'd to name my Hannah's name! White was his hair, for full of days was he, And walk'd o'er tombstones, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... terminate the war by a regular peace and a regular settlement, and were not lured away, as Lord Milner would have advised them, when he said that the war in a certain sense would never be over, into a harsh policy of unconditional surrender and pitiless subjugation. ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... War began with the firing upon Fort Sumter. Shot came in a whirlwind, half a score of balls at a time. The woodwork blazed, the brick and stone flew in all directions. Red-hot balls from the furnace in Moultrie dashed down like a pitiless hailstorm. The barracks were ablaze, streams of fire burst out of the quarters. Ninety barrels of powder were rolled into the water lest it should explode in the awful heat. The men were stifled with fumes from the burning buildings. Over the horrors ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan
... policemen towards the conductor and the driver there is a silent message that says: "After all, we, too, are working men like you, over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in the service of the pitiless and dishonest public. We, too, have wives and children and privations and frightful apprehensions. We, too, have to struggle desperately. Only the awful magic of these garments and of the garter which we wear on our wrists sets ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... and quit the country. Left me flat, without a thing but my clothes and six-shooter, and what I had in my pockets." He lifted the cigarette from between his lips—thin, they were, and curved and rather pitiless, one could guess, if ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... And two men were fighting, and one man fell.' And the man who fell over the dreadful edge, For ever lost, and for ever must be; There was never a sandbank, rock, or ledge, There was nothing but the pitiless sea! ...
— Harry • Fanny Wheeler Hart
... reply to me!' repeated the pitiless sailor. 'You are thirty! I have already passed another barrier, but not long since. We are of suitable age for each other. The man should always have traversed the road before his companion. You are active and genteel; that does very well for women. You have always been an ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... grew stiller and more still under its pale covering, the wife had gathered her last resolution together, and dared a demand of those High Immortals whose contact with humanity had ended so long ago. They had hitherto been pitiless enough with her; though this she would scarcely acknowledge even in her feeble rebellion. But she should ask them, at last, to make ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... authority of bishops, and their pre eminence above their brethren, ye should bring into the kirk of God the ordinance of man, and that thing which the experience of preceding ages hath testified to be the ground of great idleness, palpable ignorance, insufferable pride, pitiless tyranny, and shameless ambition in the kirk of God. And finally, to have been the ground of that antichristian hierarchy, which mounteth up on the steps of pre eminence of bishops, until that man of sin came forth, as the ripe fruit of ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... be the subject of a special study. The very idea of such a project is to me infinitely risible. However, if I talk reason to you too often, will you not grow weary? This is my sole anxiety, for you well know that I am a pitiless reasoner when I wish to be. With any other heart than that which you misunderstand, I could be a philosopher such as the ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... side wall he was approaching-something that stood out in startling contrast to all the surroundings and yet seemed so much a part and parcel of the somber scene as to suggest an actor amid the settings of a well-appointed stage, and, as though to carry out the allegory, the pitiless rays of flaming Kudu topped the eastern cliff, picking out the thing lying at the foot of the western ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... his reputation as a chief so resolute, so pitiless, that it was the boast of his followers that his very name shouted in battle put to flight the Christian vessels. His smile was fine and malicious, his speech facile, revealing beneath the rude exterior of the corsair ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... stand the most searching and pitiless light of scholarship could not live. Science kills pagan faiths as with a stroke of lightning. But the gospel lives, because wise men go to Bethlehem and find there, not fiction, but fact. It welcomes and inspires the profoundest science and philosophy. ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... seventy years, from the time of the Pequot War, and during the subsequent troubles with the tribes in southwestern Connecticut, and on Long Island, and during King Philip's War, had fully taught them the craft, treachery and pitiless cruelty of the savages, as well as their capacity for extensive combination ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... relieved little sigh, and then, turning suddenly, fell upon the row of pitiless inquisitors, embracing as many as possible and smiling benignly at the rest. "Oh, girls, he's a dear," she said. "He's worth twenty of the gilded youths you meet out in society." She drew back hastily. "But ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... the great hall was filled with aldermen in their robes and chains, with the sheriffs of London and the whole imposing array, and the Lord Mayor with the Duke sat enthroned above them in truly awful dignity. The Duke was a hard and pitiless man, and bore the City a bitter grudge for the death of his retainer, the priest killed in Cheapside, and in spite of all his poetical fame, it may be feared that the Earl of Surrey was not of much more merciful mood, while their men- at-arms spoke savagely ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... town-hall, for that was the place of judgment. So, to be short, the jury was panelled, the witnesses sworn, and the prisoners tried for their lives: the jury was the same that tried Mr. No-Truth, Pitiless, Haughty, and the ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... justice he possessed a wonderful capacity in that way. Having put the sledge outside in order to make room, he called all the dogs in, resolving that the poor things should not be exposed to the pitiless storm. Then, having fed himself and them, he lay down with them and was soon in ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... livelihood by the heavy sweat of our brows. Still, we did gain an honest living. We were not ashamed to look day in the face, and fought our way against all odds with the stubborn independence of our British ancestors. But when 1894 went out without rain, and '95, hot, dry, pitiless '95, succeeded it, there came a time when it was ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... left there was a long row of guns, gruff and maddened, denouncing the enemy, who, down through the woods, were forming for another attack in the pitiless monotony of conflicts. The round red discharges from the guns made a crimson flare and a high, thick smoke. Occasional glimpses could be caught of groups of the toiling artillerymen. In the rear of this row of guns stood ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... the most serious part of the danger, when to my utter despair I again heard that hideous grating sound, and knew she had struck upon another reef. She stuck there for a time, but was again forced on, and presently floated in deep water. The pitiless reefs were now plainly visible on all sides, and some distance away I could see what appeared to be nothing more than a little sandbank rising a few feet above the ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... spread its wings and shaded him till he woke. When he got up he salaamed to it, who returned his greeting with joy and gratitude, and caressed him and said: 'O youth, tell me true! who are you, and where are you going? And how did you cross that pitiless desert where never yet foot of man had trod?' The prince told his story from beginning to end, and finished by saying: 'Now it is my heart's wish that you should help me to get to Waq of the Caucasus. Perhaps, by your favour, I shall accomplish my task and avenge my brothers.' ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... and a closet right at hand, where there was still a bottle or two in the champagne basket and a residuum of claret in a box,—quitted, I say, these comfortable quarters, and plunged into the heart of the pitiless snowstorm, in quest of a ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... brother; So shall ye be approv'd and shall not die. And they prepared to do accordingly. And as they were discoursing to each other, They said, We were in fault about our brother, In that we saw his soul in great distress, And yet were so exceeding pitiless, As not to hearken to his earnest cries: This is the cause of these our miseries. And Reuben said, You know I did forewarn, And beg that you would do the child no harm; But you would not do then as I desir'd, And now his blood is at our hands requir'd. Thus they discours'd about the cause that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... white and stern and pitiless. "You want to ruin my life, Maggie, and your ain too. Mr. Cameron will speak of having seen you here. And it is nae less than evendown ruin for a theology student to have women-folks coming to his ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... common when I was in the navy. It is un-English and assassin-like. It rarely keeps off the tyrant; the knife, the dirk, or whatever else may be the instrument, is almost invariably forced from the young bravo's hand, and the thrashing that he afterwards gets is pitiless, and the would-be stabber finds no voice lifted in his favour. He also gains the stigma of cowardice, and the bad reputation of being malignant and revengeful. Indeed, so utterly futile is the drawing of murderous instruments in ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... threat. The whole world was gone a dreary gray, with the blackness of night descending: a darkening zenith, a gray horizon lined with cold, black cloud, a coast without tender mercy for the ships of men, a black sea roughening in a rage to the northeast blasts. 'Twas all hopeless and pitiless: an unfeeling sea, but troubled, it seemed to me, by depths of woe and purpose and difficulty we cannot understand. We were bound for Topmast Harbor, on a wind favorable enough for courageous hearts; and my uncle had the wheel, and the fool of Twist ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... mastery of this feeling with only too certain success? might she not have learned to regard him with esteem, perchance,—with friendship,—sentiment,—anything but that which he desired or would claim at her hands? Silence and absence and time are pitiless destructives. Might they not? Aye, might they not? He paced to and fro, with quick, restless tread, at the thought. All his love and his longing cried out against such a cruel supposition. He stopped by ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... found Marthe facing him, Marthe, the unforeseen enemy, who seemed to hold him gripped as a prey and who, fierce and pitiless and alive to the least attempt at stratagem, would never let ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... claim his bond.—"Wait you till the evening," said Mongan. Evening came, and if help was coming, there was no sign of it. Mongan sat with his wife in the upper chamber; Forgoll out before them waiting to take possession of everything. Pitiless and revengeful the look of Forgoll; the queen weeping and walling; Mongan himself with no sign of care on him.—"Be not you sorrowful, woman," said he; "the one who is coming to help us is not far off; I hear his ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... The lying awake and tossing on pillows—if lying awake there is—has its cause in real joys—or griefs—not in things atrophied by time. So it seems on the stage, in the first act. If the curtain goes down on anguish and despair it seems equally the pitiless truth that it can never rise again; the play is ended; the lights go out forever; the theatre crumbles to dust; the world comes to an end. But the dim audience sitting in the shadow do not ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Valenciennes gave little sign of his malady on his joyous lyrical canvases. Keats sang of faery landscapes and Chopin's was a virile spirit; the most cheerful writer under the sun was Stevenson, who even in his Pulvis et Umbra conjured up images of hope after a most pitiless arraignment of the universe and man. And here is the paradox. This quartet of genius suffered from and were slain by consumption. (Stevenson died directly of brain congestion; he was, however, a victim to lung trouble.) That the poets turn their ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... come in and find him there. He got up and locked the door against intrusion before he should be able to master the outward signs of his emotion. Then he returned to his chair and looked about, thinking confusedly. There was something pitiless in the glaring light of noon that disclosed every crack and stain on the ugly brown walls. It was like the relentless light of his new revelation turned upon the stains and patches of his soul, dreary and terrible. Had the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... was the central power of the world of divinities, and was always represented, like Jupiter Tonans, with a thunderbolt in his hand. There were twelve great "consenting gods," composing the council of Tinia, and called "The Senators of Heaven." They were pitiless beings, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and every pulse cried—Danger! No time to think or breathe when Mindon burst into sight, wild with terror and following close beside him a man—a madman, a short bright dah in his grasp, his jaws grinding foam, his wild eyes starting—one passion to murder. So sometimes from the Nats comes pitiless fury, and men run mad and kill and ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... food, all waxing dangerous as privation and pain brought out the animal instincts lurking in them. Emil did his best, but mortal man was helpless there, and he could only turn his haggard face from the pitiless sky, that dropped no rain for their thirst, to the boundless sea where no sail appeared to gladden their longing eyes. All day he tried to cheer and comfort them, while hunger gnawed, thirst parched, and growing fear lay ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... rend the summer night; great battleships of the line might plunge to the bottom, carrying their crews with them; and the dead of two continents rot unburied—yet unmoved the stars would pursue their nightly march across the heavens, cruel day would follow pitiless night, and the careless earth follow its accustomed orbit as though the race were not writhing in its death agony. Gazing into the infinity of space human existence seemed but the scum upon a rainpool, human warfare but the frenzy of insectivora. Unmindful of the starving hordes of Paris and ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... sweeter still to die, And woe to him that laugheth me to scorn! Lo in a little while the anger of Me Shall make him mourn the day that he was born: For in mine hour of wrath no ruth have I, Ev'n I the tempest-hearted pitiless sea." ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... one who is sickly; one whose mouth contains worms; one whose breath smells like human excrement; one whose wife is dear to him; one who speaks harshly; one who is always suspicious; one who is avaricious; one who is pitiless; one who is a thief; one who is self-conceited; one who has a liking for sorcery; one who does not care for respect or disrespect; one who can be gained over even by his enemies by means of money; and lastly, ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... saddle, a blanket covering her, with wide-open eyes, and despite the presence of that stalking figure and the fact of her mind being locked round one terrible and inevitable thought, she saw the changing beautiful glow of the fire-logs and the cold, pitiless stars and the mustering shadows under the walls. She heard, too, the low rising sigh of the wind in the balsam and the silvery tinkle of the brook, and sounds only imagined or nameless. Yet a stern and insupportable silence weighed her down. This dark canon seemed at the ends of the ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... head and looked straight at him with flaming eyes, this fair, fragile creature transformed into a pitiless Fury. She forgot that indeed an Evil Spirit had dwelt within her; George Goring might be victim rather than culprit. In this hour of her anguish the identity of that body of hers, which through him was defiled, that honor of hers, yes and of Ian Stewart's, ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... and dirty on this autumn afternoon with the pitiless rain and murky sky; but when the little party reached the quiet suburban cemetery, the clouds had somewhat dispersed, though the late flowers which yet remained to gladden the earth drooped with the ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... Athens, and all the people ran out to see him; for his fame had gone before him, and every one knew of his mighty deeds. And all cried, "Here comes the hero who slew Sinis, and Phaia the wild sow of Crommyon, and conquered Kerkuon in wrestling, and slew Procrustes the pitiless." But Theseus went on sadly and steadfastly, for his heart yearned after his father; and he said, "How shall I deliver him from these leeches who ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... columns deal all with personality and the drama of personal life. They witness to no interest but the interest in intense individual experiences. The engagements, the love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are given in pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits and sensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers who write this stuff strike the personal note, and their heavily muscular portraits frown beside the initial letter. Murders and crimes are worked up to the keenest pitch of realisation, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... abyss; The hell of waters! where they howl and hiss, And boil in endless torture; while the sweat Of their great agony, wrung out from this Their Phlegethon, curls round the rocks of jet That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... life on its surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's wrappered world. The Widgett mental furniture was perhaps worn and shabby, but there it was before you, undisguised, fading visibly in an almost pitiless sunlight. Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a knight who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was of good seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and distantly related to Aunt Mollie's deceased curate. She ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... her feet, Margaret would have been thankful if that same pink parasol had been a reality at that moment, and in her hand, so that she could have held it as a screen between her crimsoning face and his pitiless old eyes. She writhed inwardly to think that all the idle fancies in which she had been indulging during the afternoon had been poured into her grandfather's angry ears. And it was positive ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... of these instructions, the deputies drew up a memorial of pitiless length, filled with astounding parallels between their own position and that of the Hebrews, Assyrians, and other distinguished nations of antiquity. They brought it to Walsingham on the 12th July, 1588, and the much enduring man heard ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... much decayed and governed by a wealthy, arbitrary, violent, generous, and cruel prince. His name is Rajah Maddan, a true Oriental potentate, delicate and barbarous, affable and sanguinary, combining feminine grace with pitiless ferocity. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... in the darkness of thy hair? Is the wise goddess fickle as a nymph of the woodland or the wells? Doth she love a man only for the bloom of his youth? Nay, I know not; but this I know, that on thee, Odysseus, old age will soon be hastening—old age that is pitiless, and ruinous, and weary, and weak—age that cometh on all men, and that is hateful to the Gods. Therefore, Odysseus, ere yet it be too late, I would bow even thee to my will, and hold thee for my thrall. For I am she who conquers all things living: ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... its former greatness. It was even supposed that he took by-past circumstances much to heart; and if a childhood passed at the side of a saturnine mother, under foreboding of coming evil, and a manhood drenched and blighted by the pitiless descent of the storm, could painfully impress the mind, his probably was impressed ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the fire it would at once have been put out. Fortunately Iguma's hut stood, and she invited us all in to take shelter beneath its roof, which, being composed of several layers of large leaves, fastened down by vines, sheltered us from the pitiless storm. There we all sat for the remainder of the night, all huddled up like so many mummies, and a curious picture we must ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... are soiled from falling, his face is bruised, his eyes are dull. Sometimes he curses the boys that tease him. Sometimes he tries to smile, in a drunken effort to placate pitiless, childish cruelty. ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... rising again; "I know not how to sustain it! a forgiveness such as this,— when I believed You must hate me for ever! when repulse and aversion were all I dared expect,—when my own inhumanity had bereft thee of thy reason,—when the grave, the pitiless grave, was already ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... Renascence, it is utterly impossible to call up the past. Perhaps no point of ancient Rome seems less Roman and less individual than that spot where Rienzi stood, silent and terrified, for a whole hour before the old stone lion, waiting for the curious, pitiless rabble to kill him. The big buildings shut out history, hide the Forum, the Gemonian steps, and the Tarpeian rock, and in the very inmost centre of the old city's heart they surround a man with the artificialities of an uninteresting architecture. ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Polly and then had a dreadful moment under that pitiless scrutiny while he felt in the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... which strikes one as also a characteristic American trait. Mr. James is not, I hasten to say, the reverse of this, but he shows a coolness in his treatment, a lordly indifference to the fate of his creations, an almost pitiless keenness of analysis, which savour a little more of an end-of-the-century European than of a young and ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... and watched for a long time with pitiless eyes. Then a queer, uneasy, wondering light began to develop in those dark, ominous eyes. She leaned forward the better to listen to the choked, inarticulate words that were pouring from the girl's lips. At last, moved by some power ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... was always a relief now, for with the end of the day's work he need no longer fight his battle. It was a losing battle—that he knew. Shunning everybody, he paced to and fro out on the dark, windy desert, under the lonely, pitiless stars. ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... pitiless Puritan conscience that takes the life out of us all!" cried Staniford, with sudden bitterness. Lydia seemed startled, shocked, and her hand trembled on his arm, as if she had a mind to take it away. "I was a long time laboring up to that point. I ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... there his mother's favorite passages,—now speaking of the great historic value of the book, and again of its more private value, as his mother's constant companion and solace. It was touching to see this pitiless intellect, which had bruised and broken the idols of so many faiths, to which Luther himself was recommended only by his bravery and self-reliance and the grandeur of his aims,—it was touching, we say, and suggestive also of many things, to behold the strong, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... a note in her voice! I have seen nothing like the thing that followed, not even in the supreme touch of a great actor's art; nothing to compare with her movement when she saw the hard eyes softened in tears; Claudine sank upon her knees and kissed La Palferine's pitiless hand. He raised her with his grand manner, his 'Rusticoli air,' as he calls it—'There, child!' he said, 'I will do something for you; I will put ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... waiting. room of the station, with all the time between seven and nine o'clock before them. Basil would have eked out the business of checking the trunks into an affair of some length, but the baggage-master did his duty with pitiless celerity; and so Basil, in the mere excess of his disoccupation, bought an accident-insurance ticket. This employed him half a minute, and then he gave up the unequal contest, and went and took his place ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... form. It sold by the thousand. Its weapon of defence was the same as its weapon of offence—pitiless and complete publicity. Measures of reprisal, either direct or underhand, undertaken against him, King ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... and modern, but he could not and would not master the languages he called dead. His mistranslations of the classics were themselves classics. They sent the other students into uproars; but Litton saw nothing funny in them. When he received Teed's examination papers he marked them with a pitiless exactitude. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... but terrible and pitiless! (Though the face of the first, the beautiful youth, sweet and lovely as it was, showed no trace of pity either.) About the head of the second youth were twisted a few broken and empty ears of corn, entwined with faded grass-stalks. A coarse grey cloth girt his ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... Caesar, the cruel conqueror of Gaul, the pitiless victor of Vercingetorix—Caesar, who cut off the hands of the Gauls as the only means of preventing them from fighting—Caesar admired Le Morvan. He loved that savage country, he delighted in it; in the deep gorges of its mountains he pursued the large wolves and the wild boar, and in it he established ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... others. Both had the same hard delicacy of form and feature, both were tall and almost emaciated, both had a sparse growth of gray blond hair far back from high intellectual foreheads, both had an almost noble aquilinity of feature. They confronted each other with the pitiless immovability of two statues in whose marble lineaments emotions ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... pair of sober, business-like spectacles bestrides the nose. Old age leaps upon it as his saddle, and rides triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness comes which no glasses can penetrate. Nature is pitiless in carrying out the universal sentence, but very pitiful in her mode of dealing with the condemned on his way to the final scene. The man who is to be hanged always has a good ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... individual act of heroism was displayed during those awful moments in the semi-darkness when the enemy opened fire on our crowded battalions. British officers stood upright, utterly regardless of self, doing their best to rally the shaken troops, and then falling beneath the pitiless hail of bullets. Later on the ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... returned to her native village, a shame-stricken woman, bearing in her arms the child whose birth had been her disgrace. That its father was now her husband did little or nothing to repair the loss which her weakness and wrong-doing had entailed on her. If there be a pitiless community in this world, it is a small New England village. Calvinism, in its sternest aspects, broods over it; narrowness and monotony make rigid the hearts which theology has chilled; and a grim Pharisaism, born of a certain sort of intellectual keen-wittedness, ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... weary it was, walking, walking, with such a burden! House after house, street after street, closed doors, repellant fronts, staring at her. Suppose she were poor and hungry, a woman wandering forlorn, how stony and pitiless these insolent mansions! And was she not burdened and friendless and forlorn! Tired, she reached at last, and with no purpose, the great white cathedral. The door was open. In all this street of churches and palaces there was no other door open. Perhaps here for a moment she could ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "Yes, constantly. They are pitiless marauders who lay waste whole kingdoms and transform populous districts into gloomy solitudes. While on my way from Mo to England we passed through Sati, a large market town at the convergence of several caravan routes, which was only three months before a prosperous and wealthy ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... cabin and stay to-night, and to-morrow I must try to go home to mamma," she sighed, turning toward the dark patch of woods where the lonely negro cabin stood, and followed by relentless fate in the shape of her pitiless rivals, ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... delicacy of feeling. Where the range of the thermometer is from a hundred to a hundred and fifty degrees of Fahrenheit, their character must partake in some sort of the qualities of the climate—fierce, rigorous, and pitiless in its wintry aspect, and without the compensating and genial tenderness of spring; fitful and passionate as the scorching heats of summer, and dark, stormy, and dreary as the desolation ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... upon a star, nor saw the face of a woman or of a child; that is to say, from my early years when the heart beats fast and the blood runs warmly in the veins. That fearful gap of time was filled to the brim with the peltings of a pitiless storm, hungry, driven, toiling like a galley slave under the Summer's burning sun, or thinly clad exposed to every blizzard and all the whirling storms of Winter, until my early manhood had vanished and the best years of my prime were ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... orchard's secret, the attempt to run away from Isom—or would he shield her in some manner? If he should tell all, there sat an audience ready to snatch the tale and carry it away, and spread it abroad. Then disgrace would follow, pitiless and driving, and Morgan was not there to bear her away from it, or to ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... along parallel, black and white; the white ones incandescent;—and a small helpless harried thing struggling to keep in the shadow of the black ones, or to regain it again across the pitiless zone of white that the little helpless thing called ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... to care for much. Yesterday I was a vagabond exposed to every pitiless storm, and now I am the guest of Jove. While there is life there is hope, and he who laughs at Destiny will gain Fortune. I would go through the past again to enjoy the present, and feel that, after ...
— Ixion In Heaven • Benjamin Disraeli
... struggling occupants and bearing them on, only to hurl them upon a second ridge beyond. The peasants upon the cliff gave piteous cries of grief and pity, which blended with the agonized groans and screams of drowning men and the thunder of the pitiless surge. Looking down they could see the black dots, which indicated the heads of the poor wretches below, diminishing one by one as they were hurled upon the rocks or ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... find shelter under the canoe (the rain pouring in torrents), but the crew were already in possession, and so closely packed, that not an inch was unoccupied. Thus baffled on every hand, we passed the night completely exposed to the "pelting of the pitiless storm," learning a lesson of practical philosophy which ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... think or speak ill of the dead," she was saying, "but, oh! what a cruel, pitiless man Mr. Page was. Think of the long years of persecution Uncle ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... been told by any one that the Lagden Commission recommended any of these pitiless iniquities, then we are afraid that his informer is a romancer of the superlative degree. The Lagden report was never discussed in any South African legislature, much less adopted by any Parliament in South Africa; indeed, it is detested because it recommended ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... materials with which we have to do in their most brilliant scientific theories seem at first to overwhelm us with their vastness and complexity. The hulks are so enormous, the forces are so mighty, the laws are so wide-sweeping, and at times so pitiless, the distances are so over-mastering, even the uses and beauties are so bewildering, that we bow in mute and almost abject submission to the incomprehensible all; of which we hesitate to affirm aught, except what has been manifest to ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Compare No. 845.] O Nature! Wherefore art thou so partial; being to some of thy children a tender and benign mother, and to others a most cruel and pitiless stepmother? I see children of thine given up to slavery to others, without any sort of advantage, and instead of remuneration for the good they do, they are paid with the severest suffering, and spend their whole life in benefitting those ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... bright morning when the slothful John was aroused by a long, vociferous pounding on the door. He started up in bed to find himself alone—the victim of his wrathful irony having evidently risen and fled away while his pitiless tormentor slept—"Doubtless to at once accomplish that nefarious intent as set forth by his unblushing confession of last night," mused the miserable John. And he ground his fingers in the corners of his swollen eyes, and leered grimly in the glass ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... an awful mouthful of silence. A pitiless blackness descended over my spirit. I looked at the money in front of me. It had been like selling my soul to the Devil. There it was, all that money. All I'd had to give up was any claim to being a human—I wasn't a Normal any more. ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... into the deep;' The awful depth of a world's despair; Hearts that are breaking and eyes that weep; Sorrow and ruin and death are there. And the sea is wide; And its pitiless tide Bears on its bosom away. Beauty and youth, In relentless ruth, To its dark abyss for aye. But the Master's voice comes over the sea, 'Let down your nets for a draught for Me.' And He stands in our midst, On our wreck-strewn ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... not pitiless toward our prayers; permit us to deliver the goddess. Oh! the most human, the most generous of the gods, be favourable toward us, if it be true that you detest the haughty crests and proud brows of Pisander;(1) ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... butterfly there comes an end to summer. The flowers dropped from the frames and died in the garden; a pitiless winter set in; and day after day the mittened and mufflered schoolboy, dragging his sled through drifts of heavy snow to school, eyed curiously the wan, wistful face of Judge Hyde's wife pressed up to the pane of the south window, its great restless eyes and shadowy hair bringing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... have been a very difficult one. But the breakdown gang and their tools were scattered to the winds, and several had fled along the track or across the fields. Moreover, the enemy's artillery fire was pitiless, continuous, and distracting. The affair had, however, to be ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... the departing visitor out to the hall. She had seen and heard enough to decide her on trying to break off the proposed negotiation—with the one kind purpose of protecting Mrs. Ellmother against the pitiless curiosity of Francine. ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... Vast and dark and pitiless is the night. But the morning will surely come; and after all the wrongs and tumults of life will rise the dawn of the Day of God. And then every question of fate, though it fill the universe for you now, shall dissolve in the brightness like a vapor, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... struggle beneath his notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement, to be a fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There seems no reason to believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the forlorn hope of overcoming that awful and pitiless power, with any real hope of establishing his own supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a man betrayed by passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his fierce attempt to free himself and get the upper hand. One cannot but feel in that passion of helpless ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... aspect, tyrannical December, O hast thou no mercy for the pitiless poor; Christmas is thine, and well we remember, Though dark is thy visage, we honour ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... inexhaustible and variegated information. Diplomatic and statesmanlike character can not be conceded to his State papers. Few, very few, will read them, although foreign Courts, ministers, statesmen, princes, and the so-called celebrated women are complimented and deluged with them. The most pitiless critics of these productions would be the smaller clerks in the Departments of Foreign Affairs in London and Paris. Only they are not fools to waste their time on ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... death, that I am like a man standing upon a long, low shore, with hideous cliffs frowning down upon him from behind, and the rising tide crawling slowly but surely about his feet. It seems to grow nearer and nearer every day, that black, pitiless tide; not rushing upon me with a great noise and a mighty impetus, but crawling, creeping, stealing, gliding toward me, ready to close in above my head when I am least prepared for ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... come during the ebb of a spring tide, when the coves and caves may safely be explored; at other times there is grave peril. The caverns at Mawgan Porth are remarkably fine, and the grandly wild stretch of beach can hardly be spoken of with too great enthusiasm. The coast is as pitiless as it is beautiful, and many relics of wreckage are often washed ashore; after heavy storms the crags and caves are still searched for jetsam. It may be noted that those who do not wish to examine the caves, but who desire to see massive waves breaking on a magnificent coast-line, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... thistles, if night would only bring him stars. Of course he suffered no little from his fellow-donkeys for this curious passion of his. They said well that it did not become him, for indeed it was no little laughable to see him gazing so sentimentally at the remote and pitiless heavens. Donkeys who belonged to Shakespeare Societies recalled the fate of Bottom, the donkey who had loved a fairy; but our donkey paid little heed. There is perhaps only one advantage in being a donkey—namely, a hide impervious to criticism. In our donkey's case it was ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... gusts, swept along the streets with relentless fury, whirling the cans on the roofs of the houses, and whistling down the chimneys with relentless roar; passers-by drew up the collars of their coats and bent their faces under the pitiless blast; while the rain, falling with its monotonous splash, splash, added to the gloom and rawness ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... sounds of music from the next room. His heart leaped joyfully. But almost instantly his hopes sank back, like spent swimmers in a relentless sea. It seemed as if his brain were thirsting. He was in a pitiless desert of white-heated thought, and there was not a cloud of oblivion upon the horizon of his despair. Remembrance flamed like a molten sun, greedily withering every green, refreshing thing in its path. How long before this ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... keep out of his way himself, for two reasons of my own. I do not wish Henley to suffer the insults of such a vulgar and narrow-souled rascal: my revenge is of a nobler kind. Neither am I quite certain that this keeper, hardened, obdurate, and pitiless as he is, could withstand Henley's oratory. At least I would not willingly have him subjected to the temptation: though the fellow is so averse to any sense of human pity that I think the danger ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Crispus, who was hanging opposite, and who, like a man in a faint or dying, had kept his eyes closed, opened them and looked at Caesar. His face assumed an expression so pitiless, and his eyes flashed with such fire, that the Augustians whispered to one another, pointing at him with their fingers, and at last Caesar himself turned to that cross, and placed the emerald to ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... been a time, not so very long ago—while I was hunting slavers on the West Coast, grilling under a scorching African sun day after day and month after month, with pitiless monotony—when the mere recollection of such weather as this had made me long for a taste of it as a priceless luxury; but now, after some five months' experience of the execrable British climate, I folded my cloak more closely about me, as I gazed through the carriage windows at the rain-blurred ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood |
