"Suicide" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inconvenience about our villa (besides its flavour of suicide) which it is necessary to mention here. By common consent all the cats of the neighbourhood had selected our garden for their evening reunions. I fancy that a tortoise-shell kitchen cat of ours must have ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... Distracted between love and duty, he purchased a deadly drug, which dividing with his mistress, both swallowed. The ensuing pains were terrific, but the pills were purgative, and not poisonous, by the contrivance of the unsentimental apothecary; so that so much suicide was all thrown away. You may conceive the previous confusion and the final laughter; but the intention was ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... an old lady the nearest way to the falls, she said, "Oh, the nearest way to the falls is to take the road you see passing along the woods at your left; it is the next best thing to try if you have failed in an attempt at committing suicide." ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... individual endeavors to minimize the activities of his motor mechanism by the use of agents which diminish brain activity, such as alcohol, tobacco, and various narcotics. Occasionally also, some person, who can find no respite from his own relentless energies, seeks relief in oblivion by suicide. ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... wisest philosophy. Anxiety is suicide, peace is life; worry destroys, serenity upbuilds. As you want to live, to grow, possess your souls in peace and serenity. Work, aye, work mightily, powerfully, daily, but work for the joy of it, not because worry drives you to it. Work persistently, consistently and worthily, because no man can ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... "It was deliberate—deliberate suicide. And attempted murder. It was a trap. I was the victim. He had me, and he threw himself over with me. Yet he did not hate me. He loved me... as much as it is possible for a horse to love. I am confounded. I cannot ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... coffer! There is a curiously shaped Italian dagger, of the kind which in a groove has poison that makes its wound mortal. On the old mantel-piece, over the fireplace, there is a vial in which are kept certain poisons. It would seem as if some one had meditated suicide; or else that the foul fiend had put all sorts of implements of self-destruction in his way; so that, in some frenzied moment, he might ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... committed suicide when they saw the soldiers coming," said the Anglian, whose name was Major Brown. "They often do that, and they do quite right. When they don't, the soldiers, and even the officers sometimes, do what they will with the women and ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... said. "Now we shall all be able to settle down. How did it happen? Earthquake in Dublin? But that would hardly do it. Cabinet Ministers committed suicide unanimously?" ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... medica to die of lingering consumption, supposed to have been inherited. My own condition seemed even more alarming, as insanity was being manifested, and rather than go to an insane asylum, it seemed to me the only thing to do was to commit suicide. Heart trouble, kidney complaint, and continual headaches caused from female trouble were some of the many ailments I had to contend with. My doctor tried to persuade me to undergo an operation as a means of relief, but I had submitted to a severe operation ten years previous, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... carried out such a work. Visitors to the church are given an opportunity to contribute to the fund—a common thing in such cases. Crowland is a gray, lonely little town in the midst of the wide fen country. The streets were literally thronged with children of all ages; no sign of race suicide in this bit of Lincolnshire. Everywhere is evidence of antiquity—there is much far older than the old abbey in Crowland. The most notable of all is the queer three-way arched stone bridge in the center of the village—a remarkable ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... that's why you're aimin' for to make a target of yorese'f again," Hawks suggested ironically. "Damn 'f I'd do it for the best man alive, let alone Jake Houck. No, sir. I'll go a reasonable way, but I quit this side of suicide. ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... the world, up to the present hour, has always meant the larger and still larger freedom of the individual. This freedom has always had its evils. So all life has its disadvantages. But only a few people, in any generation, believe in suicide as a cure. Nationalism, freely chosen, would be the murder of liberty and social suicide. When people have thought about it enough to comprehend its meaning, they will choose to bear what ills they must, and seek some more helpful method of cure, rather than adopt such an "heroic" treatment ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... she was better. About a month before the patient was admitted, the husband moved, whereupon she got depressed, complained of inability to apply herself to work, became slow and inactive, and blamed herself for having had the abortion performed. She began to speak of suicide and was committed because she bought carbolic acid. She later said that while in the Observation Pavilion she imagined her children were ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... than them both, Sir! 'Twas from the top of this high hill Saint Patrick preached the sarmint, That drove the frogs out of the bogs An' bothered all the varmint. The toads went hop, the frogs went flop, Slap-dash into the water, An' the snakes committed suicide to save themselves from slaughter." Pity there is no modern successor of Saint Patrick to extirpate the reptilia of the present day, the moonlighters and their ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... you said about its being a relief to die," continued the other, "only you was afraid to commit suicide?" ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... sighed, then his eyes brightened as they fell upon the sandwiches. Even a desperate young man on the verge of suicide if he is hungry must needs cheer up temporarily at the sight of food. Reynolds had taken an early breakfast after being up all night, and had eaten nothing since. After devouring the sandwiches and tea with relish, he ordered a hot bath, and in less than an hour ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... frenzy!—his nostrils dilated, his eyes gleaming with immoderate excitation—an incipient curse quivering on his lips, and every vein swelling—every muscle tense with fearful and passionate energy of purpose. Is he possessed with a devil, or does he meditate suicide, that his manner is so wild and hurried? With impetuous velocity he rushes to the window, and beneath his vehement but futile strokes, aimed at a scarcely visible, and certainly impalpable object, the fragile glass flies into fragments, the source of future ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... reckon," he mumbled. "A girl like Alice is some comfort: she don't come around acting as if she'd commit suicide if she didn't get three hundred and fifty dollars in the next five minutes. I expect I can spare five or six dollars for your show-off if I ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousand beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god, or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate and determined. The imagination endows the man-made thing with consciousness and powers, whether ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... as one lost to all hope and life. She appealed to us all to do miracles to save the struggling men in the waves, though two hours had already passed, and to have gone out then among those heavy breakers, with an inexperienced crew, would have been worse than suicide. All I could do was to reorganize the guard at the beach, take the two desolate females up to the fort, and give them the use of my own quarters. Very soon their anguish was quieted, and they began to look, for the return of their steamer with Ashlock and his rescued crew. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and pestilence attacked the fleet, which found a refuge in the harbour of Chebouctou, afterwards Halifax, where the unfortunate Admiral died from an apoplectic seizure. His successor, M. d'Estournelle, committed suicide in a fit of despondency caused by the responsibility thrown upon him, when men were dying by hundreds every day on those lonely Acadian shores. The French lost between two and three thousand men by disease or casualties, and the remnant of the great fleet, which was to have ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... parting should be happy. No hopes, no dreams of future joy, could make him forget the wealth of love he was leaving. Nor did he wish to forget. And woe to the man or woman who would buy composure and contentment by forgetting!—by really forfeiting a portion of their existence—by being a suicide of their own ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... was straddling up and down the room, a pent volcano ready to explode. He knew Whaley's advice was good. It would be suicide to encumber himself with this girl in his flight. But he had never disciplined his desires. He wanted her. He meant to take her. Passion, the lust for revenge, the bully streak in him that gloated at the sight of some one young and fine trembling before him: all ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... Gov. Leopoldo Garcia Penas, of Cavite province, and Gov. Antonio Cardola, of Bataan province. Cardola tried to commit suicide before surrendering. He shot himself three times in the head, but will recover. The insurgents behaved gallantly in the fight for the possession of the stone convent in Old Cavite, June 1st. General Augusti sent two thousand ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... cut to pieces. Charles the Bold, in trying to break away, was slain by a Lorraine officer who did not recognize him and who committed suicide when, the body of the famous Duke having been identified a couple of days later from an old scar behind the ear, he realized that it was he who had killed "so ...
— The Delta of the Triple Elevens - The History of Battery D, 311th Field Artillery US Army, - American Expeditionary Forces • William Elmer Bachman
... Marillier, op. cit. Here suicide appears to be regarded as a heroic act, and the women in question perish in doing a service ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... talk it over," suggested his superior. "It will be rough, yet necessary, and if it could appear suicide, eh? ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are disregarded; and if they cannot or will not produce anything to flatter the pride or appetite of the powerful or rich upstarts, they have no other choice left but beggary or crime, meanness or suicide. How many have I heard repent of ever returning to a country where they have no expectation of justice in their claims, no hope of relief in their necessities, where death by hunger, or by their own hands, is the final prospect ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it; and he vowed in his own mind to do something—anything; run away, commit suicide, before he would join himself for life to any girl he had never seen, especially old Thornton's daughter, who seemed so willing to jump at him. Not he. In vain they urged him to cultivate the fair damsel. Not till he had braced his nerves with ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... looking up from reading an account of the failure of a large Wall Street brokerage house, Kerr Parker & Co., and the peculiar suicide of Kerr Parker. "Yes, it's impossible, just as it is impossible for the regular detectives to antagonize the newspapers. Scotland Yard found that ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... respectable and increasing practice, in Greek-street, Soho, as a physician, to attend, exclusively, on the 'geud auld mon' and his rib, met such a return for his kindness and attention, that he committed suicide. Her next friend, a Mr. G——n, a very handsome young man, who was induced to quit his situation in the bank for the office of private secretary, made a mistake one night, and eloped with the female ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... and out! how they mutter! Poets unnamed—artists greatest of any, with cherish'd lost designs, Love's unresponse—a chorus of age's complaints—hope's last words, Some suicide's despairing cry, Away to the boundless waste, and ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... how was one to explain the prisoner's attempt at self-destruction? Prison statistics show that habitual offenders do not commit suicide. When apprehended for a criminal act, they are sometimes seized with a wild frenzy and suffer repeated nervous attacks; at others they fall into a dull stupor, just as some glutted beast succumbs to sleep with the blood of his prey still ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... entire away. But the Jewess's loveliness exalted the beholder; this one's was of the strange, irritating sort, resisted with difficulty and alluring a man into those byways which end in the gaming hell, the saturnalian halls, and the suicide's grave. Love had never chosen a more appetizing form to be the pivot on which human folly—perhaps human genius—was to spin idly and uselessly, like a beetle on a pin ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... a legitimate conclusion from the argument that our consciousness of it is negative? An argument, the very construction of which assigns to a certain term a certain meaning, but which ends in showing that this term has no meaning, is simply an elaborate suicide. Clearly, then, the very demonstration that a definite consciousness [comprehension] of the Absolute is impossible, unavoidably presupposes an indefinite consciousness of it [an ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... on my part; and the consequence of a blind enthusiasm, nourished either by a deep devotion to science, or by an unreasonable craving for fame: whilst others did not feel themselves justified in assisting a man who they considered was setting out with an intention of committing suicide. I was not, however, blind as to the difficulties of the journey which I was determined to undertake; on the contrary, and I hope my readers will believe me to be sincere, I thought they would be many and great—greater indeed than ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... writes to me that 'Dr. Johnson's quotation about suicide must surely be wrong. I have no recollection in any of Baxter's Works of such a statement, and it is in direct contradiction to all that is known of his sentiments. 'Mr. Davies sends me the following passage, which possibly Johnson might have ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... over me. I kicked off my slippers and was in the water before I had made up my mind fairly. Somebody heard the splash and they raised an awful hullabaloo. 'He's gone! Lower the boats! He's committed suicide! No, he's swimming.' Certainly I was swimming. It's not so easy for a swimmer like me to commit suicide by drowning. I landed on the nearest islet before the boat left the ship's side. I heard them pulling about in the dark, hailing, and so on, but after a bit they ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... the condiments used in the preparation." This gives a hint of the nicety of the culinary art, the genius required to practise it, and the fine physical effects that hinge upon it. It is no wonder that Vatel committed suicide before the great banquet which he had prepared for his master, the Prince of Conde, because he feared it was to fail. It is certainly enough to alarm ordinary amateurs,—and such are the most of us; for, while Americans place all due stress upon the table, they neglect to emphasize ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... the 12th century, but bushido in an undeveloped form existed before then. The samurai or nobles of Japan entertained the highest respect for truth. "A bushi has no second word" was one of their mottoes. And their sense of honour was so high as to dictate suicide where it was offended. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... said, "what you say sounds plausible, but years ago I saw the mangled corpse of a young suicide. He was an adept at cards, and for aught I know had learned the game as your brother might, at home. But away among strangers at the West that knowledge proved fatal. He was inveigled into playing by some gamblers, staked all his own money, then that ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... kangaroo—a robber by birth—born with a pocket!" "He is the claimant of lemon yellow"—a color to which Mr. Whistler deemed he had the sole right; and when he thought he had pulverized him in the press (it was soon after the Parnell Commission, when Pigott, the informer, had committed suicide in Spain), Whistler one evening thrust this pleasant note into Mr. Menpes's letter-box, scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, with ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz
... the crucible of his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last his powers of unflinching spiritual observation. The Dean of St. Paul's, whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficed to shelter him from scandal on the ground of his fantastic defence of suicide, was familiar with the idea of Death, and greeted him as a welcome old friend whose face he was glad to look on ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... 14, et in Vit. Constant i. 33, 34. Rufinus, c. 17. The virtuous matron who stabbed herself to escape the violence of Maxentius, was a Christian, wife to the praefect of the city, and her name was Sophronia. It still remains a question among the casuists, whether, on such occasions, suicide ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... century continuously. But girls often have the courage, or the ignorance, to do this to themselves. And the worst of it is, that the organization of our schools and workshops, and the demands of social life and polite society, encourage them in this slow suicide. It has already been stated that the excretory organs, by constantly eliminating from the system its effete and used material, the measure and source of its force, keep the machine in clean, healthy, and working order, ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... A THEATRE. SUICIDE OF A FAMOUS ACTRESS.— Last evening, the performance of the new and popular tragedy, Francesca, at the Coliseum, was interrupted by a scene perhaps the most awful that has ever been presented to the play-going public. A sinister fate seems to have pursued this play from ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... several wounds in the body, and a knife, of the sort then much used by travellers of an ordinary class, was left sticking in his back in a position to render it impossible to attribute the end of the sufferer to suicide. The clothes, too, exhibited proofs of a struggle, for they were torn and soiled, but nothing had been taken away. A little gold was found in the pockets, and though in no great plenty still enough to weaken the first impression that there had ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... to-morrow and trample me under foot. She thinks that I am ruining Mitya from jealousy on her account! Yes, she thinks that! But it's not so. To-morrow the cross, but not the gallows. No, I shan't hang myself. Do you know, I can never commit suicide, Alyosha. Is it because I am base? I am not a coward. Is it from love of life? How did I know that Smerdyakov had hanged himself? Yes, it ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... capital punishments. They would, indeed, as Spencer Cowper said bitterly, but too truly, rather send four innocent men to the gallows than let it be believed that one who had their light within her had committed suicide. The Tories exulted in the prospect of winning two seats from the Whigs. The whole kingdom was divided between Stouts and Cowpers. At the summer assizes Hertford was crowded with anxious faces from London and from parts of England more distant than London. The prosecution was conducted ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Claudius, coveted the grounds of Asiaticus. With the unscrupulous spirit of Jezebel, she procured the condemnation to death of the owner for crimes that he had never committed; a fate which he avoided by committing suicide. As soon as this obstacle was removed out of her way, she appropriated the villa; and in the beautiful grounds abandoned herself to the most shameless orgies in the absence of her husband at Ostia. But her pleasure and triumph were short-lived. The emperor ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... to the young man that, if she should notice him, she might think it very strange to find the would-be suicide there after what had transpired in the morning. He, on the contrary, bent all his efforts towards getting nearer to her; but he could not succeed. A fifth-rate actress from Paris had come to play Merope, and the crowd was so dense that one could not move. For lack ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... everything. All his musical studies were abandoned, his excursions into science went by default, and he was quite content to bang the piano in a concert saloon for enough to secure the bare necessaries of life. Suicide seemed to present the best method of solving the problem, and the various ways of shuffling off this mortal coil were duly considered. Meanwhile he filled in the time reading trashy novels—anything to forget time and place, and lose self in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... of the melancholy end of a gentleman who had destroyed himself. JOHNSON. 'It was owing to imaginary difficulties in his affairs, which, had he talked with any friend, would soon have vanished.' BOSWELL. 'Do you think, Sir, that all who commit suicide are mad?' JOHNSON. 'Sir, they are often not universally disordered in their intellects, but one passion presses so upon them, that they yield to it, and commit suicide, as a passionate man will stab another.' He added, 'I have often thought, that after a ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... said that when two armies face each other across a battle front and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be considered as a single army engaged in suicide. Now it seems to me that when countries, each one severally doing its best to arrest its private economic ruin, do their utmost to accelerate the economic ruin of each other, we are witnessing something very like the suicide ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... spigot in the bath-tub at night when the baby wanted a drink, and only last week he took both sets after I had gone to bed, propped them apart, baited them with cheese, and caught two horrid mice before morning. I was so hurt by his behavior that I drank some laudanum for the purpose of committing suicide, and then Mr. Fogg borrowed a pump in at Knott's drug store and pumped me out twice in such a rude manner that I have felt hollow ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... water, when on the crest of a swell, and straining his eyes to pierce the moonlight about him, hoping to catch sight of the figure of the captain, who was also a strong swimmer. But if he had jumped overboard with the intention of suicide, it was not to be supposed he would continue swimming. The mate, however, was hopeful that in that awful minute when he went beneath the waters, something like a realizing sense of what he had done would come to him and he would ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... the man said, with an air of some relief, as Westray's coolness convinced him that he was not contemplating suicide. "Just so, I see; some experiments. Well, in that case, I suppose, you would not require any special facilities for loading again quickly, otherwise I should have recommended one of these," and he took up a weapon from ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... seemed to close round Paul's brain, rendering him automatic in his actions, merely animal in his half-satisfied appetites. Fines and curses were his portion at the factory; curses and beatings—deserved if Justice held a hurried scale at home. Paul, who had read of suicide in The Bludston Herald, turned his thoughts morbidly to death. But his dramatic imagination always carried him beyond' his own demise to the scene in the household when his waxlike corpse should be discovered dangling ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... him of any consideration whatever. Slowly he had brought it home to himself that these people had resolutely determined to blow up the ground on which they themselves stood. This he perceived was their honesty. He did not understand the nature of a feeling which could induce so fatal a suicide, but he did understand that the feeling was there, and that the suicide ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... a suicide," he said, gravely. "A man threw himself from an empty carriage in front and was run over. ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... we take to persuade others as well as ourselves amply show that the task is far from easy. For many reasons we may be disgusted with life, but for none may we despise it. Not even those who commit suicide regard it as a light matter, and are as much alarmed and startled as the rest of the world if death meets them in a different way than the one they have selected. The difference we observe in the courage of so great a number of brave men, is from meeting death in a way different ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... to-morrow are the babies of to-day. The wealth of a nation therefore is the type of baby that will constitute its civilization from generation to generation, and absolutely nothing else counts. We hear much about race suicide, but is it not monstrous to cry for more babies when we do not know how to keep alive those we have? It is a fact that everywhere the birth rate of the Caucasian people is on the decline. Our birth rate as a whole, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... Save in suicide, of which she had sometimes thought, Mrs. Hannaford saw but one hope of release. A sister of hers had married a rich American, and was now a widow in falling health. That sister's death might perchance endow her with the means ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... do we want to live to-morrow? Is it because there is some one who loves you, and whom you want to see to-morrow, and be with, and love back? There is no other reason why we should live on than that we love and are beloved. It is when a man has no one to love him that he commits suicide. So long as he has friends, those who love him and whom he loves, he will live, because to live is to love. Be it but the love of a dog, it will keep him in life; but let that go, he has no contact with life, no reason to live. He ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... sheer excitement of this awful cataclysm. All London has been awake for a week. Soldiers are marching day and night; immense throngs block the streets about the government offices. But they are all very orderly. Every day Germans are arrested on suspicion; and several of them have committed suicide. Yesterday one poor American woman yielded to the excitement and cut her throat. I find it hard to get about much. People stop me on the street, follow me to luncheon, grab me as I come out of any committee meeting—to know my opinion of this or that—how ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... misunderstanding between the devil and the Roscicrucian; threw the Duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands; made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to delirium tremens, thence to suicide; broke the coachman's neck; let his widow succumb to contumely, neglect, poverty and consumption; caused the blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the customary note pinned to them forgiving the Duke and hoping he would be happy; revealed to the Duke, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Fleury, Hist. Ecclesiastique, tom. vii. p. 46. I have read somewhere, in the Vitae Patrum, but I cannot recover the place that several, I believe many, of the monks, who did not reveal their temptations to the abbot, became guilty of suicide.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... agree with direct evidence of a number of other witnesses or with what reasoned judgment considered probable in the circumstances. In this category are the reports of explosions before the Titanic sank, the breaking of the ship in two parts, the suicide of officers. It would be well to notice here that the Titanic was in her correct course, the southerly one, and in the position which prudence dictates as a safe one under the ordinary conditions at that time of the year: ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... prolonged suffering. Smoking often destroys the appetite. Smoking sometimes weakens the will power. Smoking sometimes leads to loss of memory. Smoking often leads to despondency. Smoking sometimes leads to suicide. Smoking frequently leads to loss—loss by bad health and waste of valuable time—direct loss in money required for other purposes, and immense loss through reckless, thoughtless, or unfortunate smokers being the cause of partial or total destruction by fire of buildings, ships, factories, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... sweat. sudor m. sweat. suelo ground, soil, floor. suelto loose, random. sueno sleep, dream. suerte f. fate, lot; sort. sufrimiento suffering, patience. sufrir to suffer. suicidar vr. to commit suicide. suizo Swiss. sujetar to subdue, subject. sujeto subject, liable, individual. suma sum. sumar to sum up, add. sumaria summary, verbal process (at law). sumo highest, greatest, supreme. suntuoso sumptuous. superficie f. surface. superioridad ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... his situation. The share he had, with two of his sons-in-law, in bringing his wife into her awful condition, and in driving on the public infatuation at the beginning, was more than he could endure to think of, and he was charged with having meditated suicide. Perhaps he had already formed the purpose afterwards carried into effect, and may have dropped expressions, under that thought, which to others might appear to indicate a design of self-destruction. He was accused of having said that ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... agent, who, ignorant of the reason of his arrest, suspecting treachery, and fearing the disclosures that might be extorted from him by torture, rolled himself in his bedclothes and set fire to them with his candle, the only means of suicide left him. When he felt that the burning was fatal he made an alarm and bade the attendant call the council of war, which immediately met in his cell. He then avowed his complicity in treasonable plans, and, assuring ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... characteristic phrase throws the strongest light both on Grant's temperament, and on the mastery of his business at which he had arrived. Under such generalship, an army's lines are a trap into which entrance is suicide. ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... and then at last came the thunder-clap—Henry had disappeared without leaving a trace. The wicked wife and the innocent brats had the four-roomed home to themselves. The Clothing Emporium knew him no more. Some whispered suicide, others America. Benjamin Beckenstein, the cutter of the Emporium, who favoured the latter hypothesis reported a significant saying: 'I have lived with two angels; I can't ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... in this life. Materialism, on the contrary, is, we are told, an afflicting system, tending to degrade man, which ranks him among brutes; which destroys his courage, whose only hope is complete annihilation, tending to lead him to despair, and inducing him to commit suicide as soon as he suffers in this world. The grand policy of theologians is to blow hot and to blow cold, to afflict and to console, to frighten and ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... untested weapon; I'm not sending men out under those circumstances and staying here on this ship and watch them blow themselves up. If that bomb's our only hope, it's got to be dropped right, and I'm not going to take a chance on having it dropped by a crew who think they've been sent out on a suicide mission. What happened to the Gaucho when she blew the Smuts up is too fresh in everybody's mind. But if I, who ordered the mission, accompany it, they'll know I have some confidence that they'll come ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... why do you so recklessly chase the bright rainbow of fame? Do you expect to be elected President, or do you belong to a suicide club?' ...
— Options • O. Henry
... when, in spite of the protests of the leaders from his own state of New York, he was again nominated on a platform denouncing the tariff, and defeated Harrison by an overwhelming majority. And now came one of those strange instances of party perfidy and party suicide, of which the country has just witnessed a second example. In accordance with the platform pledges, a bill to lower the tariff was at once framed in the House and adopted; but the Senate, although Democratic in complexion, so altered it that it fell far short of carrying out the party ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... but his sisters remembered that Willy had fallen in love with a girl whom he had seen play "Sweet Anne Page." They remembered long letters, tears and wild looks. He had sent her diamonds; and one night he had attempted suicide. All was now forgotten; at least it was the past, and nothing remained but one little melody which he had heard her sing, and which he sometimes whistled out ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... Robert. He shall taste of my despair, and learn by proof in some wild hour how much the wretched dare. And when it's all over, and he's torn all his hair out and smashed all his clubs, I shall go and commit suicide off the Cob. Because, you see, if I can't marry Phyllis, I shan't have any use ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... Illustrated by Clarence F. Underwood. The "Flirt," the younger of two sisters, breaks one girl's engagement, drives one man to suicide, causes the murder of another, leads another to lose his fortune, and in the end, marries a stupid and unpromising suitor, leaving the really worthy one to marry ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... conscience towards the fulness of truth, but that truth in its simplest elements seemed sometimes to be lacking to him. He was heard to say in after years that, had he not found Catholicity true, he would have been thrown back into a scepticism so painful as to suggest suicide as a relief. Yet those who have trodden any of the paths which lead from inherited heresy to true doctrine, will appreciate the force of the influences, both personal and social, which induced him to reconsider, and make for himself the grand rounds ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... was most important, he found that George had learned "very little" law. When asked if he thought he could support himself by Armenian or his "other acquirements," the younger man was not very hopeful, and horrified the old soldier by suggesting that if all else failed there was always suicide. ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... her grief had exhausted her, she lay upon the bed staring at the wall with eyes that looked as though her soul had emptied itself through them of all that makes life endurable, even of hope. For the first time in her life she thought of suicide—not suicide the vague possibility, not suicide the remote way of escape, but suicide the close and intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all griefs—suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst problem destiny can ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... owned a yacht and an exposed village, could destroy five of the proudest fleets of Christendom. And how had he done it? Nobody knew. The scientists lay down in the dust of the common road and wailed and gibbered. They did not know. Military experts committed suicide by scores. The mighty fabric of warfare they had fashioned was a gossamer veil rent asunder by a miserable lunatic. It was too much for their sanity. Mere human reason could not withstand the shock. As the savage is crushed ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... said to himself, as he got into the cab, 'why, if I were to send a thing like that there would be murder and suicide! She'd show it to her husband, and he'd come round and knock me into a cocked hat for it. Dear Lady Everard—she's a dear, but she doesn't know ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... of delay, the surviving vessels struggled one by one into the harbour of Chedabucto. In deadly dejection, D'Anville had succumbed to apoplexy; moreover, his successor, the Admiral D'Estournelle, had committed suicide; and the new commander was La Jonquiere, a distinguished naval officer, then on his way to Quebec to assume the office of Governor-General. His sorry fleet notwithstanding, La Jonquiere decided to strike a blow at Annapolis. Thither he shaped his course; but again a violent storm overtook them ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... good faith and upon reasonable grounds.[336] It is also proper by law to cut off a defense by a life insurance company based on false and fraudulent statements in the application, unless the matter misrepresented actually contributed to the death of the insured.[337] A provision that suicide, unless contemplated when the application for a policy was made, shall be no defense is equally valid.[338] When a cooperative life insurance association is reorganized so as to permit it to do a life insurance business of every kind, ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... and earnestness of Paolina's love had arrived at teaching her this with unmistakable clearness. She might pine, might die—might compel her heart to turn to stone;—might seek the refuge of a cloister, which is the southern equivalent for suicide;- -but she could not—she felt she could not live and be content to share her lover's love with another. It was not any sensation of the nature of jealousy so much as an unconquerable feeling that not to have all was ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the repartees with which we might have turned the tables on those scurrilous followers of the great man, but did not. Suddenly we run up against a gentleman, who, raising his cloak over his head, is on the point of jumping into the Tiber. We seize him by his mantle, and discover in the intended suicide an old acquaintance, equally well known to the Jews and the bric-a-brac shops, whose tastes for speculation and articles of vertu have first brought him to the money-lenders, next to the dogs, and ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... the country pastor may do in order to bring his church into vital contact with these great sociological movements. Of course he may ignore them, but that is church suicide. (1) He may recognize them. This means first of all to understand them, to appreciate their influence. There is a law of the division of labor that applies to institutions as well as to individuals. This law helps us to understand how such institutions as the Grange and farmers' ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... know. Disappointed men do such desperate deeds; commit suicide or marry for revenge. Poor, dear girl!" murmured Rose Stillwater, with a ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... it may be remembered, had a son who had renounced his Protestantism in order to become eligible for admission to the Toulouse bar, and then worried himself so much about his apostasy that he committed suicide in his father's house; and the father was unjustly accused before the Parliament of the town of having murdered the youth on account of his apostasy, was found guilty without a particle of proof, and then broken on the wheel and burnt on the 9th of March 1762. But the great voice of Voltaire ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... republican like old Giorgio, and a revolutionist at heart (but in another manner), was on the point of jumping overboard from the deck of his own schooner. That man, subjective almost to insanity, looked suicide deliberately in the face. But he never lost his head. He was checked by the thought that this was no escape. He imagined himself dead, and the disgrace, the shame going on. Or, rather, properly speaking, he could not imagine himself dead. He was possessed too strongly by the sense ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the wastage went on. One soldier fell off a cart and fractured his skull; another had his legs amputated by a lorry; a third was accidently shot, and another committed suicide. It is astonishing how many accidents ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... appears always in deep grief. Sometimes he seems about to attack the traveller, but, when resisted with courage, always flies. These legends are founded on two peculiar points in his story—his evincing timidity and his committing suicide—both of them circumstances almost unexampled in the history of ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... into partnership with a friend named Doyce, unfortunately invested his money in the financial schemes of Mr. Merdle, the greatest swindler of the day, and when the crash came and Merdle committed suicide, Clennam with hundreds of other innocent persons was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... I've got the sack, and so I came to see how you are getting on. I mayn't be a nice man, but—(with feeling)—I have a heart! And, as I don't intend to give up the forged I.O.U. unless I'm taken back, I was afraid you might be contemplating suicide, or something of that kind; and so I called to tell you that, if I were you, I wouldn't. Bad thing for the complexion, suicide, and silly, too, because it wouldn't mend matters in the least. (Kindly.) You must not take this affair too seriously. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... capital of the Empire was the safest place to reside in for a noble whose son had disappeared so mysteriously from home in a time of rebellion. The old people had not heard from him, or of him, for months. They took care not to contradict the rumours of suicide from despair circulating in the great world, which remembered the interesting love-match, the charming and frank happiness brought to an end by death. But they hoped secretly that their son survived, and that he had been able to cross the frontier with that part of the army which ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world. To yourself, as the faithful advocate of the Union, I tender the offering of my high ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the question whether the rooms on the north or on the south side of the staircase are properly described as "two pair right." Some years before Oliver Goldsmith removed to Brick Court, the Temple was the residence of another poet—William Cowper. His attempted suicide there in 1763 shows how bad for his melancholy temperament was a solitary life in chambers. Charles Lamb, on the other hand—as we see, for instance, from his essay on the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple—delighted in the Temple and all its ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... wilful, dishonest blindness, she would not see—not even in her secret heart would she acknowledge, that Manasseh had been strange, and moody, and violent long before the English girl had reached Salem. She even found some specious reason for his attempt at suicide long ago. He was recovering from a fever—and though tolerably well in health, the delirium had not finally left him. But since Lois came, how headstrong he had been at times! how unreasonable! how moody! What a strange delusion was that which ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... called a calamity upon his tribe. If he has wounded by accident any one of his own clan, and thus has committed the greatest of all crimes, he grows quite miserable: he runs away in the woods, and is ready to commit suicide, unless the tribe absolves him by inflicting upon him a physical pain and sheds some of his own blood.(45) Within the tribe everything is shared in common; every morsel of food is divided among ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... demand unconditional surrender, or else. This is impossible for a lot of reasons—most important, because the Nyjorders would like to keep their planet for their very own. They have tried every kind of compromise but none of them works. The Disans are out to commit racial suicide. A Nyjord fleet is now over Dis and the deadline has almost expired for the surrender of the cobalt bombs. The Nyjord ships carry enough H-bombs to turn the entire planet into an atomic pile. That is ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... was, that there existed no law in the constitution for hanging a Protestant. He said that if he were to hang a Protestant felon, he would be forced to consider it in his conscience only another name for suicide; and that, with a blessing, he would string up none but such vile wretches as were out of the pale of the constitution, and consequently not entitled to any political grace or salvation whatever. ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... bad actions are such actions as are neither for nor against human interests—for example, an unconscious act of a dreamer. Lastly, purely bad actions, which are absolutely against human interests, cannot be possible for man except suicide, because every action promotes more or less the interests, material or spiritual, of the individual agent or of someone else. Even such horrible crimes as homicide and parricide are intended to promote some interests, and carry out in some measure their aim when performed. ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... not reach forward to one's children, but backward to one's parents. This is the bright side of Chinese life; the dark side is the fearful ennui, the moral death, which falls on a people among whom there are no such things as hope, expectation, or the sense of progress. Hence the habit of suicide among this people, indicating their small hold on life. In every Chinese drama there are two or three suicides. A soldier will commit suicide rather than go into battle. If you displease a Chinaman, he will resent ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... my chamber-door; In came my school-boy friend whose guest I was, And said: 'Come, Paul, the town is all ablaze! A sad—a strange—a marvelous suicide! Pauline, who was to be a bride to-day, Was missed at dawn and after sunrise found— Traced by her robe and bonnet on the bridge, Whence she had thrown herself ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... mind—that side of his life was closed, closed. Now when a man says "closed, closed" like that, you can be pretty sure that some woman has double-closed him, so to speak. Perry was also thinking that other classical thought, about how cowardly suicide is. A noble thought that one—warm and inspiring. Think of all the fine men we should lose if ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... course of it he exchanges pledges of eternal love with Aloney the heroine. Finally, in a spasm of heroic self-sacrifice, he takes poison with the alleged purpose of saving the heroine's life. We never quite gather how his suicide should serve this end, but then the whole atmosphere is charged with that obscurity which is the very breath ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... duties of every kind—but she is chaste; she may make her husband miserable by indulgence of her ill-temper—but she is chaste; she may squander his money, ruin him by expense—but she is chaste; she may, in short, drive him to drunkenness and suicide—but still she is chaste; and chastity, like charity, covers the whole multitude of sins, and is the scape-goat for every other crime, and violation ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... should each write a letter setting forth the reasons which would compel them to end by suicide. Once in possession of such a document, each might kill the other without danger in case of infidelity. But in spite of mutual promises, neither ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... one of self-congratulation—the diggers and other inhabitants of Griqualand accept the British Government with heartfelt satisfaction. Sir Henry says nothing of the unaccountable and daily increasing dissatisfaction with that Government, and perhaps he knows nothing of it, as it would be an act of suicide for the Commissioners, which they would not be guilty of, to report ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... Suicide! this disastrous word struck heavily on the ear of Kunda; shuddering, she sat down. During the night she had frequently contemplated this step, and these words from Hira's mouth seemed to ...
— The Poison Tree - A Tale of Hindu Life in Bengal • Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
... that of spending is low, but marked by the cursed fig-tree, which has leaves, but no fruit. We know the type elsewhere; and there is a curious lateral allusion to it by Dante when Jacopo di Sant' Andrea, who had ruined himself by profusion and committed suicide, scatters the leaves of the bush of Lotto degli Agli, endeavouring to hide himself among them. We shall hereafter examine the type completely; here I will only give an approximate rendering of Homer's words, which have been obscured more by translation than ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... heir to a peerage, Mr. Tatham!—it is impossible. Nell has done the best she could in that way. They know nothing about her in that awful place she was married from—of course you remember it—a dreadful place, enough to make one commit suicide, don't you know. The Cottage, or whatever they call it, is let, and nobody knows anything about them. I took the trouble to go there, I assure you, on my own hook, to see if I could find out something. ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... right. How indeed could you remain all alone in the room of a suicide? Let us stay together then and tell ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... rate literature according to what people ask for. He begins to wonder whether Ralph Waldo Trine isn't really greater than Ralph Waldo Emerson, whether J. M. Chapple isn't as big a man as J. M. Barrie. That way lies intellectual suicide. ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... of children. Because I was never afterward as afraid of anything as of my own weakness, my own cowardice—so that when the agents of the Beast in the courts and in politics threatened me with all the abominations of their rage if I did not commit moral suicide for them, my fear of yielding to them was so great that I attacked them more desperately ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... glimpses of Baron Schenkelderff's past which fortified this resolve. The Baron, at one time a familiar figure in a much-observed London set, had been mixed up in an ugly money-lending business ending in suicide, which had excluded him from the society most accessible to his race. His alliance with Mrs. Newell was doubtless a desperate attempt at rehabilitation, a forlorn hope on both sides, but likely to be an enduring tie because it represented, to both partners, their last chance of ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... wishing some of them town chaps that write bush yarns 'ud come along and learn a thing or two," he said. "Most of 'em seem to think that when we're not on the drink we're whipping the cat or committing suicide." Rarely had Dan any excuse to offer for those "town chaps," who, without troubling to learn "a thing or two," first, depict the bush as a pandemonium of drunken orgies, painted women, low revenge, remorse, and suicide; but ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... she continued, "whom can I essentially have injured but myself? would his creditors have been benefitted by my refusal? had I braved the execution of his dreadful threat, and quitted his house before I was wrought upon to assist him, would his suicide have lessened their losses, or secured their demands? even if he had no intention but to intimidate me, who will be wronged by my enabling him to go abroad, or who would be better paid were he seized and confined? All that remains of his shattered ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... of the Duchy went over to Robert, and Medea da Carpi found herself surrounded in the mountain citadel of Urbania like a scorpion surrounded by flames. (This simile is not mine, but belongs to Raffaello Gualterio, historiographer to Robert II.) But, unlike the scorpion, Medea refused to commit suicide. It is perfectly marvelous how, without money or allies, she could so long keep her enemies at bay; and Gualterio attributes this to those fatal fascinations which had brought Pico and Stimigliano to their deaths, which had turned the once honest Guidalfonso ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... occasion he was a passenger on a Mississippi steamboat with a young man and his bride. The young man had collected a large sum of money for friends and employers, which he gambled away on the boat. Bowie kept him from suicide, took his place at the gaming-table, exposed the cheating of the gamblers, was challenged by one of them, fought him on the hurricane deck of the steamer, shot him into the river, and restored the ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Committee consisted of seventy-eight members; sixty-four were arrested. One of this number subsequently committed suicide in a temporary fit of insanity caused by ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... America, let us at least respect the mother country. In a dispute with America who would we conquer? Ourselves. Everything that injures America is injurious to Great Britain, and we commit a kind of political suicide when we endeavor to crush them ...
— A Little Maid of Old Maine • Alice Turner Curtis
... white bears, were sometimes so inexpressibly absurd that Mr Percival, to avoid fits of laughter, was obliged to look over his exercises alone. Nor were his eccentricities always confined to his English themes; his Latin verses were occasionally no less extraordinary, and in one set, on the suicide of Ajax, the last few lines consisted of fragmentary words interspersed here and there with numerous stars—a phenomenon which he explained to Mr Percival in the gravest manner possible, by saying that here the voice of ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... he smoked until the air became bluer than before. In a ghastly way, he was trying to decide whose death it should be,—as one decides a winter's flitting, whether to Florida or California; only now the question was: should it be suicide, or,—as in the saloon yesterday,—leave the decision to Chance? For the time the personal equation was eliminated; the man weighed the evidence as impartially as though he were ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... infanticide, suicide, the maiming of any one, or making any one an eunuch, were all prohibited by the King of Oude, on the 15th of May, 1833, as reported to Government by the Resident on the 6th November, 1834. These prohibitions ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... speaking of Lord Essex's suicide (1683)—His man, thinking he stayed longer than ordinary in his closet, looked through the key hole, and there saw him lying dead.—Swift. He was on the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... the part of his wife failed to find him, and the Prince only broke the silence long enough to usurp a woman's privilege by telling a lie, and declaring he did not know where Rubens was, "but I believe he has committed suicide through remorse." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... Neville Flood had lost his life in a storm on an Irish lough; a queer business, which no one had ever quite got to the bottom of. Many people had talked of suicide. There was no doubt he was in very low spirits just before it happened. He was unhappily married, mainly through his own fault. His wife could certainly have got a divorce from him if she had applied for it. But very soon ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... weigh upon her. She lost her spirits and her appetite; her friends began to remark with anxiety on the change in her behaviour and in her looks. She herself felt that the situation was intolerable, and that success or suicide lay before her. ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... recovering himself, "I accept this sisterly love as a sick man accepts the bitter medicine which he will not cast away lest he commit suicide. I accept you as my sister, but a sister must at least have confidence in her brother; she must not stand before him like a sealed book whose contents he is ignorant of. If I am to be your brother, I demand also the rights of a brother. I demand ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... "You speak of suicide? It was almost that you contemplated. No. The church teaches that a man who takes his own life goes straight to hell. So does Mohammed, for ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... of an old schoolfellow, to whom Pendle had been much attached, and from whom, in the earlier part of his career, he had received many kindnesses. This schoolfellow—he was a banker—had become a bankrupt, a beggar, finally a suicide, through no fault of his own, and when dying, had commended his wife and son to the bishop's care. Cargrim was then fifteen years of age, and being clever and calculating, even as a youth, had determined to utilise ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... him, would mean suicide, nothing less; for from that country in which Sanderson had gained his reputation had come stories of the man's remarkable ability with the weapon he had described, and Dale had no longing to risk ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... authentic custom among Rajput folk, as formerly throughout India, whereby a man who has no other means of enforcing a just claim against a powerful debtor has always the resource of bringing down upon him a fearful curse by committing suicide before his door. The Rajput chief pretends that the bond is illegal and void, being founded upon an obsolete custom disallowed by the English rulers; but in truth he has brought himself to believe that the blood penalty will not really be paid, and he is struck with horror when the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... make any sudden moves, you'll be committing suicide. If you yell out, it will amount to about the same thing. It's up to you to be ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... nutriment, and has universally disappointed expectation. There is an old saying that those who eat toasted cheese at night will dream of Lucifer. The author of Wuthuring Heights has evidently eat toasted cheese. How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors, such as we might suppose a person, inspired by a mixture of brandy and gunpowder, might write for the edification of fifth-rate blackguards. Were Mr. Quilp alive we should be inclined ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... steps, the middle left for carriages; lines of fortification, fosses, bastions, curtains, &c. &c. endless:—with gardens or bowling-grounds below; for it is all height and depth—you can walk nowhere without having whispers of suicide, toys of desperation. Expletive cries of Maltese venders shot up, sudden and violent. The inhabitants very dark, almost black; but straight, cleanlimbed, lively, active,—cannot speak in praise of their cleanliness—children very fair—women from the use of the faldetto, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... truth, as it were, by chance, like some hidden treasure. Such was the man of Ethiopia finding, as he crossed the desert, an apparently chance traveller able to expound to him the prophecies of Messiah (Acts viii. 27); and such was the jailor at Philippi, stopped in the act of committing suicide to be baptized by his prisoners (Acts xvi. 27, 30). Another finds "The Pearl" worth all the world besides, only after long search. Such was S. Paul, who sought for it in intense zeal for God, and found it in the Voice which said, "Why persecutest thou Me?" (Gal. ...
— The Kingdom of Heaven; What is it? • Edward Burbidge
... happen to believe both in the French Revolution and in him; that is to say, both that Real Kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that the destruction of Sham Kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally so. On the breaking-out of that formidable Explosion, and Suicide of his Century, Friedrich sank into comparative obscurity; eclipsed amid the ruins of that universal earthquake, the very dust of which darkened all the air, and made of day a disastrous midnight. Black ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... them. Of course a large majority of those I sell are sold to people whom I know, and I know they buy them for proper use. But a woman will slip in here and slyly ask for a revolver, and I am wondering if she is going to commit murder or suicide. Many a time a man looks so woe begone as he buys a pistol that I make some excuse to keep him from loading it here for fear he will blow out his brains right in ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... of death. He flies, but not unaccompanied; along with him are crime, poverty, hunger, idleness, his music the groan of the murderer, the clanking of the madman's chain, filled up by the report of the suicide's pistol, and the horrible yell of despair! And now he and his evil spirits are gone, the moral atmosphere is bright and unclouded, and the Angel of Temperance, Industry, and Peace goes abroad throughout the land, fulfilling his beneficent mission, and diffusing his ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... Telamon meeting in single combat, neither was the conqueror; but on parting they exchanged gifts, which were fatal to them both. Hector was dragged round the walls of Troy by the belt which he received from Ajax; while the latter committed suicide with the sword which was given ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the same kind of poison with her which she used before. She does not intend to use it herself—she has no motive for committing suicide; but she may intend to give it to you again. You must be careful, for that is your greatest danger. Your principal trouble for some time has been caused by that sister. She no longer loves her husband, who has wholly disappeared from your knowledge, and she professes to believe that he ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... every failure to give the correct answer she seized and devoured the unhappy aspirant. OEdipus arrived, in ignorance of the fact that he was the son of the late king. He quickly solved the riddle of the Sphinx, whereupon that monster committed suicide, and he was made king. He then married the queen,—not knowing that she ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... for the one by the other, should, by shutting up ports in which it wishes to buy and sell, cut its own hands and feet off, and so bleed to death!' 'In a commercial nation,' says the orator, 'the system of blockade is mere suicide.' ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... it took to spread through the system,—the "period of incubation," as it is termed,—although we knew in a general way that it averaged somewhere about ten days. But, about a year ago, fortune was kind to us. A nurse in one of the Parisian hospitals, in a fit of despondency, decided to commit suicide. Like a true Parisienne, she would be nothing if not up to date, and chose, as the most recherche and original method of departing this life, to swallow a pure culture of typhoid germs, which she abstracted from the laboratory. Three days later she began to complain of headache, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... supported by an army led by Rusas, his overlord. A fierce battle was fought in which the Assyrians achieved a great victory. King Rusas fled, and when he found that the Assyrians pressed home their triumph by laying waste the country before them, he committed suicide, according to the Assyrian records, although those of Urartu indicate that he subsequently took part in the struggle against Sargon. The Armenian peoples were compelled to acknowledge the suzerainty of Assyria, and the ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... he gave up the struggle. Life seemed to him devoid of value, and he attempted suicide. The ball from the revolver entered his lung without killing him, and the surgeon managed to extract it. Gorki was ill for some time after this event, and when he recovered set ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... but from all the bonds of the heart, from all natural affection. Finally, by a consequence, at once sad and odd, of the same doctrine, the highest point of self-possession is to prove that man is master of himself, by the emancipation of suicide and in the liberty of death. The Stoic philosopher declares himself insensible to the ills of life; he denies that pain is an evil; and, on the other hand, he claims the right to kill himself in order to escape from the ills of existence! So ended this famous school. At the same ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... bring No pain so keen as memory's sting. Good-night, good-bye. God bless you, dear, And give you love, and joy, and cheer! But sometimes, in the dark night, say A prayer for one who went astray, And found no pathway back, and died For love of you—a suicide." ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... truth, Cyril was very glad to hear that Mr. Palsey could not go out, for he himself was going to the court of Justice to appear as witness concerning the death of Mr. Winston, which some of the detectives suspected to be murder and some suicide. ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... their dead in their own houses, and then removed from them. This custom appears to have been very general about the time of the Spanish conquest, when a great number of Indians committed suicide in despair. Household utensils were placed in the graves, when the dead were buried in the houses, as well as when they were interred in other places. In many houses in which I made diggings I regularly found ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... kind could be multiplied almost without end. The negro as a free man and citizen retains many of the most prominent characteristics which marked his career in the days before the war. Now and again one hears of a negro committing suicide. Such an event, however, is almost as rare as resignation of an office-holder or the death of an annuitant. Indifference to suffering and a keen appreciation of pleasure, make prolonged grief very unusual among ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... a thousand times shoot yourself than to bring that black shadow into her life," said David. "Suicide is bad enough ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... such wide ones!—that is the bitterest of the humiliations that overwhelm me. To leave France so small when I wished to make it so great!" It was there that, overcome by immeasurable grief, the conqueror of so many battles wished to seek in suicide a refuge from the tortures of thought, and that he was to fail to find death, he who on the battle-field had squandered so many lives. O mortals, ignorant of your own fates, how happy you are not to ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... deal of sympathy for each other, and, candidly, I think you behaved pretty rudely to Ophelia. It's a poor way to show your love for a young woman, running a sword through her father every night for pay, and driving the girl to suicide with equal frequency, just to show theatre-goers what a smart little Dane you can be ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... BOSWELL. The correspondence, post, May 15, 1782, shews that Johnson sent for this book, not because he was gratified, but because he was accused, on the strength of one of the Beauties, of recommending suicide. On that day, being in the country, he wrote: 'I never saw the book but by casual inspection, and considered myself as utterly disengaged from its consequences.' He adds:—'I hope some time in the next week to have all rectified.' The letter of May 20 shews that on his return ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill |
