"Irrecoverable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boiled, he remembered a letter which, in the excitement of the afternoon, he had put in his pocket unread, and forgotten. It was from the family lawyer in Glasgow, informing him that the bank in which his uncle had deposited the proceeds of his sale of the land, was in a state of absolute and irrecoverable collapse; there was not the slightest hope of retrieving any portion ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... outsider? No; the best that could happen to him was now happening; let the coming day once be past, let a very few weeks have run their course, and the parting would have lost its sting; he would be able to look back, regretfully no doubt, but as on something done with, irrecoverable. Then he would apply himself to his work with all his heart; and it would be possible to think of her, and remember her, calmly. If once an end were put to these daily chances of seeing her, which perpetually fanned his ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... peep into this amusing history. First, here is the portrait of "that worthy and irrecoverable discoverer (as he has justly been called), Master Henry Hudson," who "set sail from Holland in a stout vessel called the Half-Moon, being employed by the Dutch East India Company to seek a northwest ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... from the body, enters upon a new life, whose course shall be exactly the reverse of that of earth, for it shall constantly increase in all the attributes of youth. There will be no dimming of the faculties, but a continual brightening; no grieving over an irrecoverable past, but a constant rejoicing over joys present and to come. There will be no past there, but a present more tangible than this, which is ever slipping from us, and a future far brighter and more certain than any that earth can afford. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... found they had already talked too much. Not to say that the French Revolution has since come; and has blown all that into the air, miles aloft,—where even the solid part of it, which must be recovered one day, much more the gaseous, which we trust is forever irrecoverable, now wanders and whirls; and many things are abolished, for the present, of more ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... beer and opium, and bark, above mentioned, may be increased by degrees, if the patient seems refreshed by them; and if the pulse becomes slower on their exhibition; but this with caution, as I have seen irrecoverable mischief done by greater quantities both of opium, wine, and bark, in this kind of fever; in which their use is to strengthen the digestion of the weak patient, rather than to stop the paroxysms of fever; but when they are administered in intermittents, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... his name has come to be an epithet of infamy in his land's language. Let not the grandeur of his views, the intent with which he set out, and the good he achieved, be lost in oblivion. Pride—"by that sin fell the angels!"—cast him headlong down the irrecoverable steep,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... debtor party acquiring daily new strength, everyone is in haste to get into the favored class. In any case, the debtor is safe. He has put his enjoyments behind him; they are safe; no turns of fortune can disturb them. The substance he has eaten up, is irrecoverable. The future can not trouble his past. He has nothing to apprehend. He has anticipated more than fortune would ever have granted him. He has tricked fortune; and his creditors—bah! who feels for creditors? What are creditors? Landlords; ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... abundant. The roar of the mountain torrents spoke eloquently to the geologist. "The thousands and thousands of stones, which, striking against each other, make the one dull uniform sound, are all hurrying in one direction. It is like thinking of time, when the minute that now glides past is irrecoverable. So it is with these stones; the ocean is their eternity, and each note of that wild music tells of one other step towards their destiny." Who can fail to discern in such a passage the poetic instinct which Erasmus ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... recovered when, after the lapse of nearly a century, the verdict of his neglectful posterity was reversed by the modern upholders of polyphonic art. Even now some important works are still apparently irrecoverable. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... hair, both curtsied in the same way, but the hostess' eye involuntarily rested longer on the slim Natasha. She looked at her and gave her alone a special smile in addition to her usual smile as hostess. Looking at her she may have recalled the golden, irrecoverable days of her own girlhood and her own first ball. The host also followed Natasha with his eyes and asked the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... painful had come to cloud the fair sky. He thought of himself at that time with a sort of wonder. He saw himself standing there, glad to watch the pale and glowing glory of the dawn, careless as to what the day might bring forth; and he knew that it was another and an irrecoverable ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... centuries. Those of the capitalists who had no friends at Court were made to pay the money, for which they had been forced to pledge themselves; and those who had such friends, got the sums which they had engaged to pay, represented as irrecoverable balances due by proprietors, and struck off. The proprietors themselves, plundered of all they had in the world, and without any hope of redress, left the country, or took service under our Government, or that of Oude, or descended to the rank ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... boy at school, he used to watch, out of the windows of a stuffy class-room, the great elms of the school close rising just thus in the warm summer air, while his thoughts wandered from the dull lesson into a region of delighted, irrecoverable reverie. To-day he sate for a long time in the little churchyard, the bees humming about the limes with a soft musical note, that rose and fell with a lazy cadence, while doves hidden somewhere in the elms lent as it were a voice to the trees. That soft note seemed to brim over from a spring of measureless ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... pretty Tessa was almost immediately eclipsed by the recurrent recollection of that friar whose face had some irrecoverable association for him. Why should a sickly fanatic, worn with fasting, have looked at him in particular, and where in all his travels could he remember encountering that face before? Folly! such vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs, with tickling importunity—best ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... really a revel of spirit and thought. It had indeed again an effect of almost pathetic incoherence that our brave quest of "the languages," suffering so prompt and for the time at least so accepted and now so inscrutably irrecoverable a check, should have contented itself with settling us by that Christmas in a house, more propitious to our development, in St. John's Wood, where we enjoyed a considerable garden and wistful view, though by that windowed privilege alone, of a large green expanse in which ladies and gentlemen ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... silence. But presently there was a stifled sob in the darkness; and Hester knew that Nelly was thinking of those irrecoverable weeks of which Bridget's cruelty ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it to a globe, pausing and calling on one another to mark the prismatic tints, the fugitive images, symbols, meanings of the wide world glassed upon our pretty toy. We launch it. We follow it with our eyes as it floats from us—an irrecoverable delight. We watch until the microcosm goes pop! Then we ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... pleading; raising their eyes in ecstasy to heaven, or turning them in ruth toward earth. Men and women of whom the world was not worthy—at the hands of those old painters they have received the divine grace, the dovelike simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret. Each face is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco. Over the whole scene—in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in the gloom, on the people, in the incense, from the chiming ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the editor, that compositions of such interest and antiquity should be now irrecoverable? But it is the nature of popular poetry, as of popular applause, perpetually to shift with the objects of the time; and it is the frail chance of recovering some old manuscript, which can alone gratify our curiosity regarding the earlier efforts of the border ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... are now publish'd to the World in this Volume. One only Play I must except (for I meane to deale openly) 'tis a COMEDY called the Wilde-goose Chase, which hath beene long lost, and I feare irrecoverable; for a Person of Quality borrowed it from the Actours many yeares since, and (by the negligence of a Servant) it was never return'd; therefore now I put up this Si quis, that whosoever hereafter happily ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Ten Volumes - Volume I. • Beaumont and Fletcher
... keep a mental waste-paper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it—torn up to irrecoverable tatters. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler |
