"Sickening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Calmady, meanwhile, lay still and very fairly peaceful upon the narrow camp-bed in the middle of the room. He had lain there, save during one hour,—the memory of which haunted Katherine with hideous and sickening persistence,—ever since Tom Chifney, the head-lad from the stables, and a couple of grooms had carried him in, on a hurdle, from the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the tables toward Plimsoll who sat regarding them balefully, his teeth just showing between his parted lips, cards in midair, action in a paralysis that was caused by the concentration forced by Sandy's even gaze, by the same sickening conviction that his manhood shriveled in front of Sandy and that Sandy knew it. Oaths against Wyatt rose automatically in his brain like bubbles in a mineral spring, together with the consciousness that Wyatt, if not allied against him, was no longer for him, that his chosen tools lacked edge. ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... relatives of the prisoners, pressing about and crying out to Williams to have mercy on them. As for Williams, he took them in to the Colonel, the townspeople pressing into the door-yard and banking in front of it on the street. Behind all a tragedy impended, nor can I think of it now without sickening. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... at the door-frame as it went by. He swung with a sickening thud into the inner wall, but he hung on and pulled ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... laws are made. So I'm going up to Wake Hill and live with Charlotte and Jerry, and see if I can't get tired enough every day to sleep at night. I couldn't keep on here. I couldn't. What we call civilization is too sickening to me. I should simply go off my nut. And when you come to that, it's an awful complication, besides the suffering of it. That I shrink from, too. I'm talking a good deal, but actually it's the thing I least want to do. I don't ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Edgerton departed. When he rose to do so, I felt the awkwardness of my situation—the meanness of which I had been guilty—the disgrace which would follow detection. The shame I already felt; but, though sickening beneath it, the passion which drove me into the commission of so slavish an act, was still superior to all others, and could not then be overcome. I hurried from the window and from the premises while he was taking his leave. My mind was still in a frenzy. I rambled off, ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... frightened children, that grim uncouth altar had run and smoked; whether, in truth, as the ancient tales say, every one of those gray pillars all about had been set up, and still was based upon, the mouldering crushed remains of men. The sickening contagion of the sin of the place grew ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sickening that we can't break a window when we're really trying to. I should have thought that anyone could have ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... came I was long about my toilet; but at last, with a sort of hopeful desperation, I had to own that I could do no more, and must now stand or fall by nature. My occupation ended, I fell a prey to the most sickening impatience, mingled with alarms; giving ear to the swelling rumour of the streets, and at each change of sound or silence, starting, shrinking, and colouring to the brow. Love is not to be prepared, I know, without some knowledge of the object; and yet, when the cab at last ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... That frightful, sickening smell that strikes one in the face like something tangible. Ugh! I immediately grew dizzy and faint and had a mad desire to run. I think if I hadn't been a non-com with a certain small amount of responsibility to live up to, I should have ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... and only inflicted for great offenses, or for continued contumacy and bad conduct. A conspiracy was discovered, and seven of the ringleaders received three dozen lashes each, in presence of all the inmates of the jail. It was a punishment perhaps deserved and necessary, but sickening enough to witness. Richard's warder stood beside him, and while the cat was descending on one wretch's naked back, observed in a grim whisper: "Do you take warning, my man; for if you are reported again, the governor says you are to have a ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... described his cock as not very thick at the point, consequently the first part introduced itself very easily, but when the pillar pushed its way in, and began to stretch the parts, it produced a curious sickening feeling, very like as if I had received a kick on the bottom; so I was obliged to ask him to halt a little. He was too experienced in the art not to fully understand my feelings, and knew well it would go off in a minute or two, if I was left quiet. So ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... something in the air of a burial place which is unlike that of any other place. It is not altogether the closeness, or the damp, or the sickening smell of earth, but a certain subtle influence which unites with them and intensifies them. The spell of the dead is there, and it rests alike on mind and body. Such was the air of the catacombs. Cold and damp, it struck upon the visitor like the chill atmosphere ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... and she took up her theme again with visible and painful effort. A sickening familiarity, a weariness of it all before she had begun, showed in her voice and ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... no." And then as the insistence of his great figure towering over me had begun to fret my nerves—"Sit down, man," said I, with an impatient gesture, "and put that sickening toy away and come ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... the soft quick tread of a hospital steward, and standing before me, he took from its envelope the letter Solon Denney had sent me to say that she was dead. I handed it back, told him to burn it, and I shut my eyes to the sickening shapes of life. My fever came up again, and in the night I felt inch by inch over ground wet with blood for a picture I had relinquished in a Quixotic moment. I must have been troublesome, for they gave me the drug of dreams and I awakened peacefully. I watched the field surgeons gather about ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the schoolroom, she saw from twelve to fifteen girls lying about; some resting their aching heads on the table, others on the ground; all heavy- eyed, flushed, indifferent, and weary, with pains in every limb. Some peculiar odour, she says, made her recognise that they were sickening for "the fever;" and she told Mr. Wilson so, and that she could not stay there for fear of conveying the infection to her own children; but he half commanded, and half entreated her to remain and nurse them; and finally mounted his gig and drove away, while ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... caught sight of a horse's clean limbs moving in the checkered sunlight. Its rider—her heart gave a sudden, sickening throb and stood still. He was riding like a king, with his insolent dark face turned to the sun. She stared at him for one wild moment, then shrank against her tree. It was possible, it was possible even then, that he might pass ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... Rolling R done for that day. He might better have stolen those horses himself, Johnny thought. He would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that he had accomplished what he had set out to do; he would not have to bear this sickening feeling of failure ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... shown to the best hut. But before he entered it he could not avoid seeing the bodies of his late assailants in process of dismemberment as though they had been slaughtered cattle, and, inured as he was to horrible and sickening sights, never had he been conscious of so overpowering a feeling of repulsion as now. The cannibal atrocities of these human beasts, the glowering heads stuck all over the stockade,—the latest addition thereto ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... he must suffer! Hark to that low, sickening thud! 'Tis the accursed soap dropping from his nerveless grasp. Hist to that sound—like unto a death rattle! It is the water gurgling in the tub. And what means that low, poignant, smothered gasp? It is the last convulsive cry of Jacques descending ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... of which had to be traversed, must be nearly half a mile in length, all the heads of the horses projecting in double lines into the narrow passages, which makes tramping along these dark ways anything but pleasant. The close stench is very sickening, and I was glad when our journey came to an end. We have lost four horses so far. The mules are hardier and have stood the voyage well. They are besides accustomed to the sea, all having come ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... tiger, at thy call Have follow'd: thou canst rivers stay: The monstrous guard of Pluto's hall To thee gave way, Grim Cerberus, round whose Gorgon head A hundred snakes are hissing death, Whose triple jaws black venom shed, And sickening breath. Ixion too and Tityos smooth'd Their rugged brows: the urn stood dry One hour, while Danaus' maids were sooth'd With minstrelsy. Let Lyde hear those maidens' guilt, Their famous doom, the ceaseless drain Of outpour'd water, ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... a sickening fear at his heart. He knew very well that if the boy was about and unhurt he would have been at his side. Up and down the camp he strode in vain. At last one of the Kru boys thought he remembered seeing a great savage bounding away with some one on his back. He had thought that it was ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... an easy passage from one to the other without the necessity of going out of doors. A piece of clear ice, like glass, was set into the roof of each to answer for a window. They were all filled with a stench so sickening that Bob soon made an excuse to go outside and lend a hand in unpacking and helping Akonuk and Matuk make their ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... changes of mood, and decided that Luella Knapp was a most unaccountable young woman. And then there dashed over me a sickening realization of what I had done, of what I had promised, and of how impossible it was that I should ever reveal to her the secret I guarded. I cursed the mad folly and crime of her father, for they stood between her and me. Yet under the subtle influence that she cast upon me I felt the bonds ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... the exaltation of military talents, general grief at the loss of friends, fiendish exultation over victories alternated with depressing despondency in view of defeats, the impoverishment of a nation on the whole, and the sickening conviction, which fastens on the mind after the first excitement is over, of a great waste of life and property for which there is no return, and which sometimes a whole generation cannot restore. Nothing is so dearly purchased as the laurels ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... and by its means ascertained that the ship was being rapidly driven shoreward by the force of the waves. Meanwhile the shocks of the ship striking against the ground gradually grew less and less severe, until they ceased altogether, and the vessel became motionless save for an occasional sickening lurch when an exceptionally heavy wave struck her. By this time it was ascertained that the hold was nearly full of water, a circumstance from which the young officer in charge came to the conclusion ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... however, after a time he returns as glorious and beautiful as before. In this poetical fancy, the land of shades symbolizes the numb and lifeless period of winter as aptly as the Waters of Death in the Izdubar Epic, while the seeming death of the young god answers to the sickening of the hero at that declining season of the year when the sun's rays lose their vigor and are overcome by the powers of darkness and cold. The goddess who loves the fair young god, and mourns him with passionate grief, until her wailings and prayers recall him from his deathlike trance, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... civilization required its resources to be developed more than Ireland; in no country could a government be more imperatively called upon to foster—nay, to undertake and effect—improvements, than Ireland. In a country so circumstanced, how disappointing, then, and heart-sickening must it not have been to good and thoughtful men, to find the Government passing a bill for the employment of our people on unproductive labour. Not only did the Labour-rate Act exclude productive labour from its own operations, but its ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... already some beginning of that curious series of English blunders, that makes us wonder if there are neither proof-sheets nor judicious friends in the whole of France, and affects us sometimes with a sickening uneasiness as to what may be our own exploits when we touch upon foreign countries and foreign tongues. It is here that we shall find the famous "first of the fourth," and many English words that may be comprehensible perhaps ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gassed had jumpy hearts. But how was he ever going to get any better lying there on his back? What he needed was exercise and decent food and something cheerful to think about. He wanted desperately to get away from his memories, to forget the horrors, the sickening sights and smells, the turmoil and confusion of the past two years. In spite of his most heroic efforts, he kept living over past events. This time last year he had been up in the Toul sector, where half the men he knew had gone west. It was up there old Corpy ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... came, and it would be almost as light as one of these cakes if I knew I could surely earn my living. Oh, Aun' Sheba, you've had troubles, and you know what sore troubles my poor mother had, but neither you nor she ever knew the fear, the sickening dread which comes over one when you don't know where your bread is to come from or how you are to keep a roof over your head. Aunty, do listen to reason. Making cake and other things for Aun' Sheba ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... would be vain to attempt to describe her dismay when she heard the explanation of this tranquillity. Not here, but in London! Didn't she know? the housemaid said, who was a girl from Underwood. She thought everybody had known. And Lizzie had the sickening consciousness that had she inquired a little more closely she might have discovered for herself, and saved herself this trouble. She was taken in by the sympathising housemaid to have a second cup of tea at least, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... always regarded as their simple friendship and the cruel obstruction thrust upon it by her husband's injurious act. Dorothea stood silent, with her eyes cast down dreamily, while images crowded upon her which left the sickening certainty that Will was referring to Mrs. Lydgate. But why sickening? He wanted her to know that here too his conduct should be ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the sound too, and gave the credit to Tim, who in turn made sure that his cousin had lain down to sleep. So no one spoke, and the rustling was heard again, followed now sharply by a quick movement, a horrible yell, a rushing sound, and then the sickening thud of a heavy blow. Before the boys could quite grasp what it meant, there was a sharp rattling, as if a big stick was being rapidly moved in the chimney, then another yell, a fresh rattling as of another great stick against ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... Chloe turned and fled toward the red-flaring fires. In that moment a feeling of defeat surged over her—of heart-sickening hopelessness. The figures at the fires were unkempt, dirty, revolting, as they gouged and tore at the half-cooked meat into which their yellow fangs drove deep, as the red blood squirted and trickled from the corners of their mouths to drip unheeded upon the sweat-stiffened cotton of their shirts. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... home's in ashes now, Where joy was once a constant guest, And mournful groups there are, I trow, With neither house nor place of rest; And blood is on the broken sill, Where happy feet went to and fro, And everywhere, by field and hill, Are sickening sights and sounds ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... me see," said Mr. Simkins; "surely this is the gentleman who called here a few minutes ago. I told him to go home, and he said he would; but I noticed he turned down towards the quay; poor fellow, bad case, I'm afraid. He said he thought he was sickening for typhoid fever, and ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... never appeared more sickening in its inner corruptions than when delineated by this dainty young girl. Allen could see the swarming men about the hotels; he could see their hot, leering eyes and smell their liquor-laden breaths as they named the latest addition to the colony or boasted of their associations ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... to your father's strange conduct, it is not my place to speak of it before his unhappy and ill-bred child, but I have one request to make. It is this—that you do not again in my presence call your sister by that sickening name.' ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... Zoo—not even a nice white Polar bear, but one of those nondescript, snuff-coloured kinds that are all ragged ends from top to toe. That a man with such a rough exterior could be capable of such sickening sentimentality as Elizabeth had just described quite nauseated me. It made me dislike him more, if possible, than I had ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... mendicant hurriedly shuffle something under his feet, and conceal it beneath his long clothes. The publican was on him in an instant, had him by the throat, charged him with theft, and dragged him from his seat. Judge of his sickening horror when from beneath the pauper's clothes rolled forth the head of a girl about the age of fourteen or fifteen years, carefully separated from ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... greater than the burdens of a separate condition, and they will assert it. Let the war go on until they see the beautiful features of the old Confederacy beaten out of shape and comeliness by the brutalizing hand of war, and they will turn aside in disgust from the sickening spectacle, and become a separate nation. Fight twelve months longer, and the already opening differences that you see between New England and the great Northwest will develop themselves. You have two confederacies now. Fight twelve ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... remarkable in that, but as I neared McGinnis's Court I presently met another small boy, also eating a banana. A third small boy engaged in a like occupation obtruded a painful coincidence upon my mind. I leave the psychological reader to determine the exact co-relation between the circumstance and the sickening sense of loss that overcame me on witnessing it. I reached ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... and a half feet apart, was set in the ground, and to them two horizontal crosspieces, at a height of two and seven feet, were firmly fastened. Between the posts a slow fire was built. At nightfall the victim was disrobed and the torture began. After the sickening sight had continued long enough, an old man, previously appointed, discharged an arrow at the heart of the unfortunate, and freed her from further torture. The medicine-men forthwith cut open the chest, took out the heart, and burned ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... delinquencies, but only of moral. The "organs" of the "opposing party" will not take the trouble to point out—even to observe—that the "debasing sentiments" and "criminal views" uttered in speech and platform are expressed in sickening syntax and offensive rhetoric. Doubtless an American politician, statesman, what you will, could go into a political convention and signify his views with simple, unpretentious common sense, but doubtless ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... it is not an impressive interior; but, at any rate, it had the true musty odor which I never conceived of till I came to England,—the odor of dead men's decay, garnered up and shut in, and kept from generation to generation; not disgusting nor sickening, because it is so old, and ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... butchery of men and horses began; the fusillade became so violent and the scene so sickening that a Prussian lieutenant went crazy in the house opposite, and flung himself from the window into the mass of writhing horsemen. Tall cuirassiers, in impotent fury, began slashing at the walls of the houses, breaking their heavy sabres to splinters ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... I realized that I had ascended above the mouth, and was journeying rapidly toward the top of the tower. It had all happened with that sickening, surprising suddenness that characterizes ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... With what sickening fear I opened your letter! I was sure it contained some dreadful news. You have decided not to come till Wednesday, because your cousin Tom can accompany you on that day. I KNOW you are quite right. It is so much better, as you are ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... mallet swing back, heard a sickening crunch, and with a terrible pain shooting to his ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... swift oncoming of the motor boat and feared lest its waves might even yet wash the little form away that she held so insecurely. She refused to lift her eyes as the sound of the engine grew louder and she felt a sickening fear of the first waves that might reach ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... the opposite direction; Stern knew the boiling rush of waters had already reached a speed greater than that of the wind itself. No longer the stars trembled, reflected, in the waters. All ugly, frothing, broken, the swift current foamed and leaped, in long, horrible gulfs and crests of sickening velocity. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... however, one of these victims. He was kept a close prisoner for two years, pining and sickening in his loneliness, while in the meantime the war continued, and at last a victory so decisive was gained by the Romans, that the people of Carthage were discouraged, and resolved to ask terms of peace. They thought that no one would be so readily listened to at Rome as Regulus, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Jimmy. "Dismiss the rosy dream. Get even! You don't know me. There's not a flaw in my armor. I'm a sort of modern edition of the stainless knight. Tennyson drew Galahad from me. I move through life with almost a sickening absence of sin. But hush! We are observed. At least, we shall be in another minute. Somebody is coming down the passage. You do understand, don't you? Sprained ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... was diligently dusting the front office, his back to the door, when someone entered the bank. Thinking it was Porter he did not look up, but went on with his work. There was a sickening dusty smell in the office: the ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... That sickening grip in the chest which is a real, physical pain, though the hurt be given to the soul of a man, slowed Dade's steps to a lagging advance towards the tableau the two made on the steps. So had the senorita sent him dizzy with ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... afraid. His courage shamed mine. I was behind the barrier of the boatsmen, but once in the throes of the fight a slimy arm passed between two of them and wound itself around my leg. I screamed out, for it was icy cold and sent a sickening weakness all through me, so that I could not have swum a dozen feet with it upon me. One of the natives cut it off, and still it clung to my bloodless skin until I plucked ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... put a head on that," said the landlord, dropping a pinch of soda into the glass and stirring it in with a spoon. The schoolmaster tried to drink the mixture, but in vain; it did not quench the thirst, but produced a sickening effect. He felt like a man in a strange land, like a wanderer in the desert, a shipwrecked mariner. Oh, to be on the Susan Thomas, with miles of pure water all round! Or even at home, where the turning of a tap brought all ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... more thankless task than the attempt to assure shying people that we love them, respect them, and are glad to continue their acquaintance. The instances in which old school-mates meet in the journey of life with a sickening coolness, in consequence of changed circumstances and relations, are of every-day occurrence. Two persons who separated at the school-house door in dawning manhood, with equal prospects, come together later in life. One has risen in the world, has won hosts ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... oppressed slaves and people of color, was converted to his present views by Elizabeth Heyrick's pamphlet, "Immediate, not Gradual, Abolition of West India Slavery." Let me for a moment pause to render a tribute of justice to the memory of that devoted woman. Few will deny that the long and heart-sickening interval that occurred between the abolition of the slave-trade of Great Britain, and the emancipation of her slaves, was owing to the false, but universal notion, that the slaves must be gradually prepared for freedom: a notion that we now confess is as contrary to reason and Christian principle ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... He had a sickening sense that the subterfuge would not have deceived a five-year-old child, but it was ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... lost in frozen deserts we should range; Tho' we should drink where chilling Hebrus flows, Endure bleak winter blasts, and Thracian snows: Or on hot India's plains our flocks should feed, Where the parch'd elm declines his sickening head, Beneath fierce-glowing Cancer's fiery beams, Far from cool breezes and refreshing streams. Love over all maintains resistless sway, And let us love's all-conquering power ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... days the sickening August heat remained unbroken; but on the fifth the thunderheads began to gather and a fresh breeze swept down from the slopes of the distant Cumberland; a wind smelling sweetly of rain and full ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... two of sickening suspense followed the tiger's first unsuccessful charge. But presently the howl broke forth again, quickened rapidly to the note of the charge song, and once more the house trembled under the weight of the great animal. This time the leap of Him of the Hairy ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... that could be required of her, and was just as they used to do at her father's, in Vermont, thirty years ago. Her kitchen was larger than Mrs. Jones', which was rather uncomfortable on a hot day when there was washing to be done; the odor of the soap-suds was a little sickening then, she admitted, but in her kitchen it was different; she had had an eye to comfort when they were building, and had seen that the kitchen was the largest, airiest, lightest room in the house, with four windows, two outside doors, and ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... enough for entrance money to a Club. It's sickening! I wonder whether I shall ever get used to banking work? There's an old clerk in our office who says he should feel ill if he missed a day. And the old porter beats him—bangs him to fits. I believe he'd die off if he didn't see the house open to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... God! Oh, my God! My God!" With his hands covering his eyes the big man is swaying from side to side like a mighty tree before a tempest. Cameron and Ross both spring to him. On the hillsides men stand rigid, pale, shaking; women shriek and faint. One ghastly moment of suspense, and then a horrid sickening thud; one more agonising second of silence, and then from a score of throats ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... continued Summerhayes, "how I hated my brother: you've heard me curse him many a time. Well, the reason's all set down in these books. It worried him as he lay sickening for his death. To put it short, it was this: He was rich—I was poor. I was married—he was single. He had ships—I had none. So he gave me command of one of his tea-clippers, and I handed over to his care all I ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... the mountain was yellow with sulphur, and the air was sickening from its smell. Usoof and Abu were not a little terrified by this awful experience, and grasped their Tuan by the arm entreating him not to venture near what, they evidently thought, were the gates ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... Ugh! the sickening heat from the stove! the disgusting odor of musty papers! However, Amedee had nothing to complain of; they might have given him figures to balance for five hours at a time. He owed it to M. Courtet's kindness, that he was put at ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... never risen to a great height of civilization, nor can I forget the lessons I there learned of the power of sin. All this one can clearly see who visits the three worlds lying next in order to Plasden, but I will forbear the sad and sickening recital of the depth to which a world is carried by sin when once it gains ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... Horatia was really offended, but she did not say anything; and Mr Howroyd said quickly, 'I shall begin to think you are ill, Sarah, or sickening for a fever, and shall telephone to your mother to send for a doctor, if you talk such nonsense.—Now, Miss Horatia, come and see my greatest treasure of all; and he took her into an adjoining room, without asking ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... and beauty of it, all the while, so mingled with the sense of unfathomable danger, and the human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves rolling forever, and winds moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting and sickening forever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling beach like weeds forever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat, through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand, who spread the fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... taking big leaps on the road to health, when Polly was summoned to Dr. Dudley's office. Since her meeting with Aunt Jane, the sharp-voiced woman was ever close at hand, ready instantly to appear in the little girl's thought and fill her with sickening fear. Now Polly's feet lagged as she went downstairs; she dreaded to look into the office. But Dr. Dudley was there quite alone, ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... being translated into Cornish for the benefit of the company, was highly approved by all; and good humor being restored, every man got drunk save Hereward, who found the mead too sweet and sickening. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... at the next helping. When you have bought a man's book because you like his writing about Mr. Wardle's punch-bowl and Mr. Winkle's skates, it may very well be surprising to open it and read about the sickening thuds that beat out the life of Nancy, or that mysterious villain whose face ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... did not permit of much ventilation and, as the day was warm, the odor was sickening. Annie looked around fearfully, and humbly took her place at the end of the long line which slowly worked its way to the narrow inner grating where credentials were closely scrutinized. The horror of the place seized upon her. She wondered who all these poor people were and what the prisoners ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... no sound of fighting this side of the Tugela, only a few shells falling on Spion Kop, where Boer tents can be seen once more whitening the steep. We need no heliograph signal to tell us the meaning of all this. For us there is to be another sickening period of hope deferred; but we try to hide our dejection, and persuade the anxious townsfolk that it is only a necessary pause while General Buller brings up his big guns ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... underlies this piece is the old, incessant, undying aspiration, that men and women of the best order feel, for some avenue of escape, some relief, some refuge, from the sickening tyranny of convention and the commonplace, and from the overwhelming mystery with which all human life is haunted and oppressed. A man who walks about in a forest is not necessarily free. He may be as great a slave as anybody. But the exalted imagination dwells upon his ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Betty reproachfully. 'Oh, if you was sickening for the plague itself, and going to be as ugly as the Ooser in the church-vestry, ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... first time since that agitating day, to see him thus, crouching as a spy among those delicate plants, her heart beat heavily, she loathed herself for the seeming meanness that had been forced upon her. Yet there was misgiving at her heart—a vague, sickening apprehension that chained her ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... bad idea," declared Susan Atwell. "I sit near her, so I'll be the first one to hold out the olive branch. But if you hear something drop on the floor with a dull, sickening thud, you'll know that my particular variety of olive branch ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... eyes everywhere were indeed terrible. But I pass over the sickening details with the simple remark, that no ordinary imagination could conceive the deeds of torture and brutality of which these Turkish irregulars had been guilty. We searched carefully, but for a long time ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... It was sickening, because in a measure it was true, though he had never thought of emulating Lochinvar or any one else. He had neither thought nor cared about the public and what it would think, and the blatant way in ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... heels of the elation that filled his heart, came a sickening realization of his dilemma. He could not have told the Rogans what they wanted to know even if he had wished to! He himself didn't know the principles of the atomic engine. As Brand had remarked, he was no space navigator; he was simply a prosaic lieutenant, competent only ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... are any amount of such things in Glasgow already, and I question if they do any good. I know my mother and Ju are always down on them, and there's truth in what they say, too, that we are making a god out of the working class. It is quite sickening what is done for them, and how ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... to interfere, Samson sprang upon the officer, lifted him like a child above his head, and dashed him with a sickening crash to the ground, ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... rejection, but which in reality constitutes no ground of objection to guns whose parts are not required to be interchangeable. They might be described as "well adapted for ladies' use, or for boys learning to shoot;" but it gave me a sickening sense of the inexperience of many a noble-hearted youth who may have entered the service from the purest motives of patriotism, when a dealer, who was exhibiting one of these parlor-weapons, with a calibre no larger than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... of "Yob—Hee—Hee" they launched themselves into the fight, swinging their strong clubs above their heads and crashing skulls from left to right. By this time the Peruvians had lost many men, but the slaughter went on. The huge black clubs of the Mangeromas fell again and again, with sickening thuds, piercing the heads and brains of the enemy with the ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... the equator, and as it was midsummer the weather was extremely warm, and the smell of the oozing tar, pouring from every joint, was sickening. But the ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... — told only what was best, And with a saving vagueness, I should know Till I knew more. And had I known even then — After grim years of search and suffering, So many of them to end as they began — After my sickening doubts and estimations Of plans abandoned and of new plans vain — After a weary delving everywhere For men with every virtue but the Vision — Could I have known, I say, before I left you That summer morning, all there ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... worth trying," said the mate. "We've pretended to have a quarrel. Now just as we're going into port let one of the hands, the boy if you like, pretend he's sickening for small-pox." ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... what he had done and a sickening sensation struck him in the pit of the stomach; but the little man determined to give the best that was in him to undo ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... sickening to write what afterwards follows. None of us can longer doubt that these people are the most terrible of cannibals. I feel inclined to charge forward to rescue them, but the captain orders us all to stand fast, or we may chance to be treated in ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... whirling torrents; and, from time to time, the burst and roar of some more fiery and fierce explosion. And ever as the winds swept howling along the street, they bore sharp streams of burning dust, and such sickening and poisonous vapors as took away, for the instant, breath and consciousness, followed by a rapid revulsion of the arrested blood, and a tingling sensation of agony trembling through every nerve ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... sill with a sickening thud, scattering the diamond dust from his sun-colored pearl wings into a fine glittering mist upon the green paint. Ugh! with a jar up flew the window and Dizzy, thinking faintly about little Flutter, cuddled among the clover blossoms, was swept into the room and ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... reports which concerned this expedition. He buried himself in them for an hour, then threw them aside with contempt. What blunders and short-sight everywhere! The general public might well talk of the stupidity of English officers. And blunders so easily avoided, too! It was sickening. He felt within himself a fulness of energy and intelligence, a perspicacity of brain which judged ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... manifestations of Nature. This did not satisfy him nor resolve his doubts, and he therefore confessed that reason could not compass the exalted aims of philosophy. But there was no cynicism in his doubt. It was the soul-sickening consciousness that reason was incapable of solving the mighty questions that he burned to know. There was no way to arrive at the truth, "for," said he, "error is spread over all things." It was not disdain of knowledge, it was the combat ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... or despair. We know that we can control wherever we have real knowledge. The cook knows that she cannot make roast duck out of pork chops; but she knows also that she can make palatable and digestible pork chops by proceeding in one way, and that she can make tough and sickening pork chops out of the same materials by changing her procedure. In the same way the scientific approach to the problem of child training teaches us that, while we cannot make a "swan out of a goose," we can make the gosling into a better goose or a poorer goose by the treatment ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... should end; for all beyond is but the waking of the corpse. The last death-struggle of the Elizabethan heroism is over, and all its remains vanish slowly in an undignified, sickening way. All epics end so. After the war of Troy, Achilles must die by coward Paris's arrow, in some mysterious, confused, pitiful fashion; and stately Hecuba must rail herself into a very dog, and bark for ever shamefully around lonely Cynossema. Young David ends as a dotard—Solomon as worse. ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... where we possess continued delight, there is no 'danger nigh.' Where an enjoyment comes between us and our God, it casts on us a shadow. When we have plucked a beautiful flower, if poisonous, it has such a sickening odor that we fling it from us. We do not 'pay too dear for our whistle,' unless it costs us a sin; then it soon becomes a loathed and useless toy. Otherwise, the dearer we ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... kneeling rigid and immovable before the wooden symbol reared upon the new-raised cairn of boulders swayed a little. His head fell forward heavily upon his breast. His eyes closed in spite of his desperate effort to shake off the deadly, sickening collapse of will and brain and body that was mastering him. He fell sideways, and lay in ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... at this distant moment, banish the recollection of the scene from my mind. To behold and to contemplate the dreadful ravages that wine had made upon the most brilliant and enlightened human intellect, was sickening to the very soul. I had then a relation living at Winchester, and I remained there till the next day. In the morning I became acquainted with one of the most staunch and steady friends of Liberty that I ever knew—Mr. Budd, of Newbury, an attorney, and, I believe, clerk ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... that he has it not. For myself, I must say that I never made a venture,—and my life has been a succession of ventures, often with my whole stake upon the table,—I never made a venture that I did not have a sickening sensation at the heart. My courage, if it can be called by so sounding a name, has been in daring to make the throw when every atom of me was shrieking, "You'll ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... its dying groans and struggles), with its ghastly staring eyes, its blood-stained head or throat where the sharp steel pierced into the quivering flesh; picture it when the body is opened emitting a sickening odour and the reeking entrails fall in a heap on the gore-splashed floor; picture this sight and ask whether it is not the epitome of ugliness, and in direct opposition to the ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... arm as had been my wont, I sauntered with him backward and forward. His gloom, however (which I considered quite natural under the circumstances), seemed entirely unabated. He said little, and that moodily, and with evident effort. I ventured a jest or two, and he made a sickening attempt at a smile. Poor fellow!—as I thought of HIS WIFE, I wondered that he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth. At last I ventured a home thrust. I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendoes, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... said. "I'd as soon step twice on a toad that was hopping away as touch him again. Br-r! This place is sickening. I'll go, too—but not ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... survey the garden. All impatience, the lover waited, as minute after minute slowly passed. Dawn was broadening to day, but Veranilda came not. An agony of disappointment seized upon him, and he stood at length in the attitude of one sickening with despair. Then a footstep approached, and he saw the slave whose watch he had relieved come forward with so strange a look that Basil could ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... the smooth stone he kicked off his sandals of zitidar hide and with his bare feet braced himself against the sickening tilt, at the same time throwing his ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... invitation to the little lunches and dinners and pleasant evening gatherings that had begun to be so popular. There were not wanting the usual "boy-crazy" girls, who went eagerly trailing Allison, literally begging him for rides and attention, and making up to Julia Cloud and Leslie in the most sickening of silly ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Things that were mercifully kept from me then, mere abject terror of death, and of that kind of death—the disgrace—the crowds—all came on me, and with them, the misery all in one of those nine months; the loathing of those eternal narrow waved white walls, the sense of their closing in, the sickening of their sameness, the longing for a voice, the other horror of thinking myself guilty. The warder said it was ten minutes—I thought it hours! I was quite done for, and could hardly get down-stairs. I knew ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... A sickening feeling suddenly overwhelmed Jasper, and he felt faint. He looked keenly into the faces of the men standing near, but their eyes were averted. Did they believe him to be guilty of such a foul deed? he asked himself. Something told him that they did, and the less he now said the better ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... you are safe enough as you are, I reckon," he returned, "and I am taking care of Doll for you," he added with a sickening grin. ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... Creek were Philistines and enemies of God. "Suppose," he whispered to himself, "there should come from among them one who, like Goliath the Philistine of Gath, could defeat me and take from me my possessions." In fancy he felt the sickening dread that he thought must have lain heavy on the heart of Saul before the coming of David. Jumping to his feet, he began to run through the night. As he ran he called to God. His voice carried far over the low hills. "Jehovah of Hosts," he cried, "send to me this night out of the ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... will require the submission, not merely of their own people, but of their neighbors, and their jealousy of rival priestly castes will be a cause of wars. The story of the early days of mankind is a sickening record of torture and slaughter in the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... grew a little sickening, after a day or two). You saw Duke, the Hawaiian world champion swimmer, come in on a surf-board, standing straight and slim and naked like a god of bronze, balancing miraculously on a plank carried in on the crest of a wave with the velocity of a steam engine. You saw Japanese ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... In two hours we arrived at Canterbury, enveloped in clouds: lunch, bottled porter: at Dover, carried several miles in a tide of air, bitter cold, cherry-brandy; crossed over the Channel safely, and thought with pity of the poor people who were sickening in the steamboats below: more bottled porter: over Calais, dinner, roast-beef of Old England; near Dunkirk,—night falling, lunar rainbow, brandy-and-water; night confoundedly thick; supper, nightcap of rum-punch, and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... drew the bolt and opened the door. A sickening odor escaped, and a match lighted by one of the guards went out in the vitiated air; when it was possible to take in a candle, one could see dimly, from the rooms outside, the forms of men crouching or standing. ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... the good President as there is, is sickening. I hope those who vilify him for doing what he considers his duty have a quarter of his conscience and uprightness. He is a brave man. . . . He wrote Mr. Hawthorne that he had no hope of being popular during the first ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... An awful sickening shudder ran through him, a fear too great to be resisted. There rose from his heart a despairing prayer; and the unbeliever has sounded the depth of agony when he ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... under surveillance, at my suggestion. For your sake, and yours alone, I am giving him a chance. He is your protege; you are responsible for his conduct. To accuse him would be to place you in an embarrassing position. There is a sickening rumor in court circles that you have more than a merely kind and friendly interest in the rascal. If I believed that, Miss Calhoun, I fear my heart could not be kind to him. But I know it is not true. You have a loftier love to give. He is a clever scoundrel, and there is no telling how much ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... much as thought of asking permission to hope so far above his reach as he knew this prize was and passed his foolish, useless life in mere abject sighs and impotent longing. What nights of rage, what days of torment, of passionate unfulfilled desire, of sickening jealousy can he recall! Beatrix thought no more of him than of the lackey that followed her chair. His complaints did not touch her in the least; his raptures rather fatigued her; she cared for his verses no more than for Dan Chaucer's, who's dead these ever so many hundred years; she did not ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... the moment for the great and fatal passion, and the woman was all that a malignant fate could devise; not only to inspire the passion, but to transform a frame of mind arbitrarily imagined into a sickening reality. From a romantic solitary being I became a prosaic outcast. Nor could I recall anything in the world I had left worth the sacrifice of the magician that gave me brief spells of happiness and oblivion. Nobody pretended ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... and with elevated crest over the ground, and preferring the shady rocks along the sandy bed of the river. I tried several methods to render the potatoes, which we had found in the camps of the natives, eatable; but neither roasting nor boiling destroyed their sickening bitterness. At last, I pounded and washed them, and procured their starch, which was entirely tasteless, but thickened rapidly in hot water, like arrow-root; and was very agreeable to eat, wanting only the addition of sugar ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt |
