"Irretrievably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bread and the underdone beef. Whether or not he ever realised that it was my mother's hand that had kept him above the surface of life, I shall never know; but when that strong grasp was relaxed, he went hopelessly, irretrievably, and unresistingly under. In the beginning there was merely a general wildness and disorder in his appearance,—first one button, then two, then three dropped from his coat. After that his linen was changed less often, his ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... vision, Robert Utie awoke to the recollection of his folly and his rashness, and he realized the critical period which he had provoked. His clerkship lost, his self-pride poignant, his pockets nearly empty, his respectable career irretrievably terminated, his sweetheart insulted, and his life in danger! There was no escape either from despair or fate. Tiltock was strutting about below stairs with a drunken old doctor, misnamed a surgeon, who deposited behind the bar a rusty case of surgical instruments, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... visit to the learned Viennese doctor and the trip to Ischl. A few more months of this appalling absorption in his own personality, this morbid marriage of man to his own image, and he suspected that his brain would be irretrievably injured. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... squall, which had in no way affected us (so small and partial was the sphere of its influence), had sufficed to separate ours irretrievably from our companion-raft, and the squadron of boats that had promised not to forsake us. And now the eye of agony was strained in vain over the weltering waste, for a vestige of those refugees from the Kosciusko—buried, perhaps, a thousand fathoms deep, by their sudden visitors, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... instantaneous, magical; Lord Ronsdale sprang to his feet; John Steele looked at him, at the wavering face, the uncertain eyes. No doubt existed now in his mind; Gillett had not secured the paper, or he would have given it to his patron when they were alone. That fact was patent; the document was gone, irretrievably; there could be no hope of recovering it. The bitter knowledge that it had really once existed would not serve John Steele long. But with seeming resolution he went on: "I had the story from his own lips," deliberately, "put in the form ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... Peregrine himself. Foxes are vermin as well as rats, as Perry in his wickedness had remarked; but a young man who can break an old one's heart by a predilection for rat-catching may win it as absolutely and irretrievably by prowess after a fox. Sir Peregrine had told to four different neighbours how a fox had been run into, in the open, near Alston, after twelve desperate miles, and how on that occasion Peregrine had been in at the death ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... Knights Templars, which had before exposed the Christians to a fatal defeat at the brook Kishon, forced the feeble king to annul the determination of a council of war, and advance to a camp in an enclosed valley among the mountains, near Hittin, without water. Raymond did not fly till the battle was irretrievably lost, and then the Saracens seem to have opened their ranks to allow him free passage. The charge of suggesting the siege of Tiberias appears ungrounded Raymond, no doubt, played a double part: he was a man of strong sagacity, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... his wife and children, had fled! Openly and irretrievably he had separated himself from country and people; he had, by this flight, solemnly expressed before all Europe the discord which existed between him and his people, between the king and the constitution to which ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... counter it would be calmly taken from you by somebody who would give you a printed receipt. That and no more. It appears that such knowledge is irresistible. People went in and tendered; and once it was taken from their hands their money was more irretrievably gone from them than if they had thrown it into the sea. This then, and nothing else was being carried on in there . ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... the story of an eventful night, for it was with gray-faced despair that the captain gave the requisite order when the second engineer reported that his senior was dead, the crown of two furnaces destroyed, and the engines clogged, if not irretrievably damaged, by fallen debris. None realized better than the young commander what a disastrous fate awaited his ship in the gloom of the flying scud ahead. There was a faint chance of encountering another steamship which would respond to his ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... Southern officers possessed, and a course that was feasible for him was not so for most of them. The task of winning a mere livelihood was by no means a promising one for men left without a profession and without property, in a country that seemed to be irretrievably ruined. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... stern message uttered by retributive justice. How infinitely more enviable the duty of the Amicus Curiae, my gallant friend and quondam colleague, who in voluntary defence has so ingeniously, eloquently and nobly led a forlorn hope, that he knew was already irretrievably lost? Desperate, indeed, must he deem that cause for which he battles so valiantly, when dire extremity goads him to lift a rebellious and unfilial voice against the provisions of his foster-mother, Criminal Jurisprudence, in whose service he won the brilliant ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... peck at my nose, that I have to give up the idea. Thus one of my good-byes is over. By the time that they are all ended, and we have returned to the house, I am drowned in tears, and my appearance for the day is irretrievably damaged. My nose is certainly very red. It surprises even myself, who have known its capabilities of old. Bobby, always prosaic, suggests that I shall hold it in the steam of boiling water, to reduce the inflammation. But I have not the heart ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... struggles to possess themselves of the tracts south of the Paropamisus, and extending from the Heri-rud to the Sutlej and the mouths of the Indus, overstrained the strength of their State, and by shifting the centre of its power injured irretrievably its principle of cohesion. As early as the reign of Demetrius a tendency to disruption showed itself, Eucratidas having held the supreme power for many years in Bactria itself, while Demetrius exercised authority on the southern side of the mountains. It is true that at the death of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... that it can have no effect whatever upon the condition of the emancipated black in any other respect. In other words, they hold that it relieves him from his so-called legal obligation to render his personal service to his master without compensation, and there leaves him, totally, irretrievably, and without any power on the part of Congress to look after his well-being from the moment of this mockery of emancipation. Sir, such was not the intention of the friends of this amendment at the time of its initiation here, and at the time of its adoption; and I ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... that he was not prepared to act on such an understanding made him feel as responsible as if it actually existed. Being conscious of something rather more than cousinly tenderness in the past, he really could not be sure that he was not already irretrievably committed. Not that Lucia's manner had ever taken anything of the sort for granted. He had nothing to fear from her. But he had much (he told himself) to fear from his own conscience ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Ducos, made similar suggestions; they recognized the scientific possibility of the problem, but they were irretrievably handicapped by the shortcomings of photography. Even when substantially instantaneous photographs were evolved at a somewhat later date they were limited to the use of wet plates, which have to be prepared by the photographer and used immediately, and were therefore quite out of the question ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... tribute to Time": ah yes, yes;—and yet I will believe, so long as we continue together in this sphere of things there will always be a potential Letter coming out of New England for me, and the world not fallen irretrievably dumb.—The best is, I am about going into Scotland, in two days, into deep solitude, for a couple of months beside the Solway sea: I absolutely need to have the dust blown out of me, and my mad nerves rested (there is nothing else quite gone wrong): this ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ways to draw forth the voluntary avowal, with its divine tears and blushes. Harry Anguish, who spent much of his time at the castle and who invariably deserted his guards at the portals, was as eager as the Countess to have her commit herself irretrievably by word or sign, but he, too, was disappointed. He was, also, considerably puzzled. Her Highness's manner was at all times frank and untroubled. She was apparently light-hearted; her cheeks had lost none of their freshness; her eyes ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... talked more freely than to anyone, knew aught of the details of that momentous Report, what recommendations he actually should make to Congress; for none knew better than he that a hint derived from him which should lead to profitable speculation would tarnish his good name irretrievably. Careless in much else, on the subject of his private and public integrity he was rigid; he would not have yielded a point to retain the affection of the best and most valued of his friends. Fastidious by nature on the question of his honour, he knew, also, that other accusations, even when ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... wanting the cavaliere; she was closeted with him for hours at a time. These conferences all ended in one conclusion—that she was irretrievably ruined. No one knew this better than the marchesa herself; but her haughty reluctance either to accept Count Nobili's money, or to give up Enrica, was the cause of unknown ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... and went with them out into the gutter. It was picked up, preserved, and exists to this day, its pages blackened with the Boston mud. Many papers and records of the province which Hutchinson had in his care for the purpose of his history were irretrievably lost. ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... any rate do as well. Why rob himself of the comfort of one day during which his soul would not be irretrievably condemned? Now he might sleep. For this night, at any rate, he might sleep. He doubted whether he would ever sleep again after the doing of the deed. To be commonly wicked was nothing to him,—nothing to break through ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... beginning of 1818 the business affairs of the brothers became so irretrievably involved that Peter and Washington went through the humiliating experience of taking the bankrupt act. Washington's connection with the concern was little more than nominal, and he felt small anxiety ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... find her. He was a breeder of horses on an extensive scale, and had knowledge enough of the transactions of Mark Gardner and his set, not to be very solicitous of the acquaintance of Colonel Martindale, while he dreaded that the London beauty would irretrievably fill his little wife's ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... madness lay that way if he dwelt on such fancies for long. Of a sudden he realized all that she meant to him, and cursed himself anew. While he had the power to possess her he had dallied and hesitated, but now that he had no voice in it, now that she was irretrievably beyond his reach, he vowed to snatch her and ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... inexpressible torments at the hands of their apoplectic-looking performers; who were all at the last gasp, and all determined to die bravely at their posts. And then the entranced audience, with half-shut eyes and quivering palms! Oh, it was too much; we lost our character typo irretrievably that day; half suppressed titters from the squire's pew were not to be borne. In that unhappy moment we sinned away some quarter of a century's unrivalled reputation for good manners and musical taste. Old Fiddlestrings never forgave us, never did he vouchsafe us another ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... is rendered poisonous by such breath as this man mingled with Zenobia's. Yet his reflections possessed their share of truth. It was a woeful thought, that a woman of Zenobia's diversified capacity should have fancied herself irretrievably defeated on the broad battlefield of life, and with no refuge, save to fall on her own sword, merely because Love had gone against her. It is nonsense, and a miserable wrong,—the result, like so many others, of masculine egotism,—that the success or failure of woman's existence ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with us, regret that while the world is deluged with insipid correspondences, and 'pictures of mind' that were not worth drawing, the correspondence of a man who never wrote unwisely should lie mouldering in private repositories, ere long to be irretrievably destroyed; that the 'picture of a mind' who was among the conscript fathers of the human race should still be left so vague and dim. This letter is addressed to Schwann, during Schiller's first residence in Weimar: it has already been referred to ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... been said, or sung, upon the same subject, from Plato to Thomas Aquinas. I confess I derived little benefit from all this display of poetry and erudition; for, after the first few stanzas, finding himself irretrievably perplexed by the united difficulties of the language and the subject, I withdrew my attention, and amused myself with the paintings on the walls, and with reveries on the past and present, till I was roused by ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... forget, yet I could not succeed; and even in my most happy moments there was always a shadow, the shadow of Locasto; there was always a fear, the fear of his return. Yes, it seemed at times as if we were two unfortunates, as if our happiness had come too late, as if our lives were irretrievably shipwrecked. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... the utter disgust of R—— and P——, when, like a couple of Samsons they awoke, and found that their hair was certainly untouched, but that the most positive support of their strength had been cut off irretrievably, and their dinner of lamb gone where all innocence should go. Some bread and cheese, together with a few eggs which the boatmen purchased for us at a neighbouring cottage, supplied the loss of our lamb. The coolness of the afternoon gave R—— and ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Angelica's charm and personality that the populace, in spite of their knowledge of her deeds, one and all adored her—to the end of her life the unstinting love and adulation of all who came in contact with her was hers irretrievably. ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... marks the difference of the two plays, namely, the fate of Faust. Marlowe's Faust is utterly and irretrievably damned. On the old theory of an essential antagonism between the secular and the sacred, and upon the old cast-iron theology to which the intellect of man was enjoined to conform, there is no escape whatsoever for the rebel. So ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... heard a voice or voices, was looking over his garden gate—where he now looked more frequently than into his books—fancying that Grace might be abroad with some friends. He was now irretrievably committed in heart to Grace Melbury, though he was by no means sure that she was so far committed to him. That the Idea had for once completely fulfilled itself in the objective substance—which he had ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... nearly twelve when he reached home. Now, once more, would begin the gruesome process of deception—flinching of soul, and brazening of visage. It would be better when the whole thievish business was irretrievably begun and ordered ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... think the remark, that Shakspere never leaves any of his characters the same at the end of a play as he took them up at the beginning, will be found to be true. They are better or worse, wiser or more irretrievably foolish. The historical plays would illustrate the remark ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... terrible kind of respite, a breathing-space of agonized suspense. As it circled around, and came again to the opening by which it had entered, it might continue on another eventless revolution, or it might, according to the whim of the eddy, be cast forth once more, irretrievably, into the clutch of the awful sluice. Sometimes two logs, after a pause in what seemed like a secret death-struggle, would crowd each other out and go over the falls together. And sometimes, on the other hand, all would make the circuit safely again and again. ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... knew, also, how and when to give in. When he saw the wall shaking and crumbling irretrievably at a particular place, he patched it up with sops of cash from his three cash-earning companies. If the banks went, he went too. It was a case of their having to hold out. If they smashed and all the collateral they held of his was thrown on the chaotic market, it would be the end. And so it ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the only Being, who could have sustained him in the hour of temptation. He saw his past errors, he moaned over them, but alas! he considered it too late to repair them. His life, he believed to be irretrievably lost, and he wished only to commit himself to the mercy of ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... echoes of the air-raid had almost died away by this afternoon. When Mr. BILLING again tried to move the adjournment, the SPEAKER put him back in his box with so firm a hand that his spring may have been irretrievably injured. It is hoped that the National Service Department, which recently sent Mr. LOWTHER a notice informing him that he was about to be transferred to Wolverhampton as a labourer at 4s. 10d. a day, "on the ground that such employment ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... answer came. The man was insensible. And then the danger of his position came upon Montgomery, and he turned as white as his antagonist. A Sunday, the immaculate Dr. Oldacre with his pious connection, a savage brawl with a patient; he would irretrievably lose his situation if the facts came out. It was not much of a situation, but he could not get another without a reference, and Oldacre might refuse him one. Without money for his classes, and without a situation—what was to become of him? It ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... passed for such in England) to hold the most discordant elements together, and to make what is rotten seem almost sound; and, indeed, without his chaplain's dextrous skidding, Carew would long ago have irretrievably lost social caste, and dissipated his vast means to the last shilling. On the other hand, Byam Ryll was gifted with even rarer qualities; he was essentially a man of mark and character, and might have made his fortune in any pursuit by his own wits; but his fortune had been ready-made when ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... considered himself to have 'irretrievably lost caste.' It is a fantastic idea, and could not have any justification in a country where an Englishman of good manners and behaviour need never want congenial society. Gordon was abnormally proud, independent and sensitive: an unfortunate disposition for anyone who has his ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... that what is known as the "mastery of the seas" will, when the great war is finished, pass irretrievably from the hands or the ambition of any nation, and that more urgently than ever in her history England will have need of a friend. It is true that we might be her enemy and might do her some small harm—it is truer that ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... the mother knew that the fragile young man who dined there so quietly every day way apt to be quite another sort of person after he had been three hours outside. It was only when his life seemed to have been irretrievably ruined that Dowson quite deliberately abandoned himself to that craving for drink, which was doubtless lying in wait for him in his blood, as consumption was also; it was only latterly, when he had no longer any interest in life, that he really wished to die. But I have never known him when ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... dared not incur the moral responsibility of sending him across the sea, at his age, after so many years of exile, when the very tradition of him had passed away, to find his friends dead, or forgetful, or irretrievably vanished, and the whole country become more truly a foreign land to him than England was now,— and even Ninety-second Street, in the weedlike decay and growth of our localities, made over anew and grown unrecognizable by his ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... made of the terms cited above, there are instances in which some of the same words can hardly be any thing else than nouns. Thus all, when it signifies the whole, or every thing, may be reckoned a noun; as, "Our all is at stake, and irretrievably lost, if we fail of success."—Addison. "A torch, snuff and all, goes out in a moment, when dipped in the vapour."—Id. "The first blast of wind laid it flat on the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... her to become my wife, to take me as the lesser of two evils. The day on which you have led Mme. Fauvel and her niece to the extreme edge of the precipice, pointed out its dark depths, and convinced them that they are irretrievably lost, I shall appear, and rescue them. I will play my part with such grandeur, such lofty magnanimity, that Madeleine will be touched, will forget her past enmity, and regard me with favorable eyes. When she finds that it is her sweet ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... At last she could say, "My fate!" and call the whole world to witness her surrender. "Whether he loves me, or whether he hates me," she thought, "I have chosen him." Sinaetha, weaving spells by the moon, was not more determined or more irretrievably in love than Sara. The danger of such wild moods is as attractive to the very young as it is terrifying to the more mature. Perfectly conscious of her beauty, she felt able to defy, sue, and conquer at the same moment. Orange had never seen her to such brilliant advantage. ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... and provoking situation at such gatherings is due to the multitude of tongues only those know who have wasted time and money in attending them. Usually three or more languages are officially accepted and most of the time is irretrievably lost in misunderstandings and ...
— Esperanto: Hearings before the Committee on Education • Richard Bartholdt and A. Christen
... rumour of his personal misfortune his influence rapidly dwindled; when the period closed, many of those who had been his political associates had left him, and from Mr. Chamberlain, in political life, he was irretrievably sundered. ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... lips were almost colorless, and the peculiar eyes, greenish and great-pupiled, were surrounded by stained, discolored rings that might have been the result of weary vigils, or of ill-health. The woman, who was possibly thirty, must once have been possessed of a fragile type of beauty, but it was irretrievably lost now in the premature age that ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... of affairs that the Spartan commander, Gylippus, passed over into Italy with a little squadron of four ships, with the view merely of preserving the Greek cities in that country, supposing that Syracuse, and, with her, the other Greek cities in Sicily, were irretrievably lost. At Tarentum he learned to his great surprise and satisfaction that the Athenian wall of circumvallation at Syracuse had not yet been completed on the northern side. He now sailed through the straits of Messana, which were left completely unguarded, and arrived safely at Himera on the north ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... led the Jacobin opposition to the war. This is one of the most sagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the conflict were terrible. If the foreigners and the emigrant nobles were victorious, all that the Revolution had won would be instantly and irretrievably lost. If, on the other hand, the French armies were victorious, one of two disasters might follow. Either the troops might become a weapon in the hands of the court and the reactionary party, for the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... of loss and sorrow, due partly to the growing knowledge, not pleasing to our vanity, that Margaret could get on very well without us, that we were not necessary to her life. Miss Forsythe recovered promptly her cheerful serenity, but not the elasticity of hope; she was irretrievably hurt; it was as if life was now to be endured. That Margaret herself was apparently unconscious of this, and that it did not affect much her own enjoyment, made it the harder to bear. The absolute truth probably was that she regretted it, and had moments of sentimental unhappiness; but ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the appearance of the empty shelves excited the regret and indignation of every spectator, whose mind was not totally darkened by religious prejudice. The compositions of ancient genius, so many of which have irretrievably perished, might surely have been excepted from the wreck of idolatry, for the amusement and instruction of succeeding ages; and either the zeal or avarice of the archbishop might have been satiated with the richest spoils which were the rewards ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... when they were irretrievably committed by the purchase of their tickets, and when they sat down in the waiting. room of the station, with all the time between seven and nine o'clock before them. Basil would have eked out the business of checking the trunks into an affair of some length, but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and hovers about her unceasingly. He talks a great deal, though not very brilliantly. He is telling her in an audible undertone how Jack Singleton of "Ours" has lately made an object of himself before gods and men, and irretrievably ruined himself for life by marrying the youngest ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... hundred in the crowded season of the fall of the year. One retires at night under the misapprehension that the following morning will find these seats still available. On ascending the companionway, however, one's gaze is met by a heterogeneous collection of impedimenta. The benches are buried as irretrievably as if they "had been carried into the midst of the sea." Almost anything may have been piled on them, from bales of hay—among which my wife once sat for two days—to the nucleus of a chicken farm, destined, let us say, for the ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... Museum, was discovered by Sir Robert Cotton in the possession of his tailor, who was just about to cut the precious document out into "measures" for his customers. Sir Robert redeemed the valuable curiosity at the price of old parchment, and thus recovered what had long been supposed to be irretrievably lost. ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... return, answered, "That he believed, from the representations he had received of the private opinions both of Badenoch and Athol, that their treason was more against Baliol than the kingdom; and that now that prince was irretrievably removed, he understood they would be glad to take a part ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Marion Hayden who had been so happy these last few months, improving in health and strength and ability to live a more useful life, and the Marion Hayden who had so miserably disgraced herself to-day, were far apart—in fact irretrievably separated. Where, indeed, had gone her power of self-control, her wisdom and tact in governing the children? Why had she so harshly told Fred to run away from her when the dear child was only showing his affection according to his own nature? Such an ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... probably, the good human nature which by vice, and especially by drunkenness, may be irretrievably ruined. ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... duly condemned by an American court, the proceeding would have been irreproachably regular. This being so, by the acknowledgment of the English themselves, who will be willing to admit that any will be found bold enough to cause an irretrievably fatal rupture to grow out of a quarrel of this kind, concerning the mode of procedure. England has consulted her legal advisers; America will consult hers also. Do disputes in which the national honor ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... "You are irretrievably bent upon this alliance?" asked the empress, thoughtfully. "It was then not to gratify me that you sought to place a crown upon my ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the house a door slammed. I got away from her feeling small and weak as if the best part of me had been torn away and irretrievably lost. Rose must have been ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... is not so easy to find arguments for its preservation. There is no sense or utility in exhibiting a blank tablet, and I have seen without scruple or remorse such superannuated vestiges employed in repairing the church fabric. But this, be it understood, is only when the stone is irretrievably beyond memento mori service, and on the clear condition that it is employed in the furtherance of religious work. It is true that a stone is only a stone, whatever it may have been used for, but a peculiar sanctity is in most minds associated with the grave, and we ought not ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... birth in my mind to infinite inquietudes. You had roved into Norwalk, a scene of inequalities, of prominences and pits, among which, thus destitute of the guidance of your senses, you could scarcely fail to be destroyed, or, at least, irretrievably bewildered. I painted to myself the dangers to which you were subjected. Your careless feet would bear you into some whirlpool or to the edge of some precipice; some internal revolution or outward shock would recall you to consciousness at some perilous moment. Surprise and fear ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... sketch-book; in fine, to do all that lies in his power to prevent the child from doing anything whatever for himself. The result is that the various vital faculties which education might be supposed to train become irretrievably starved and stunted in the over-educated school child; till at last, when the time comes for him to leave the school in which he has been so sedulously cared for, he is too often thrown out upon the world, helpless, listless, ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... generals, colonels, majors, and captains, fell into the hands of the Swedes, as prisoners of war. The total loss in killed and wounded of the Swedes was under two thousand, the chief loss being due to the desperate resistance of the Russians, after the battle was irretrievably lost. It may be doubted whether so complete and surprising a victory, between armies so disproportionate in force, ...
— A Jacobite Exile - Being the Adventures of a Young Englishman in the Service of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden • G. A. Henty
... For sixty years that world has no longer existed for me. I know there must be such places as New York, Europe, Asia, and Africa; but not one word has been heard of them—not in sixty years. With the coming of the Scarlet Death the world fell apart, absolutely, irretrievably. Ten thousand years of culture and civilization passed in the twinkling of an eye, 'lapsed ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... sensible missionary could bring himself to tell a man who has done all that he could do, and more than many who have received the true light of the Gospel, that he was excluded from all hope of salvation, and by his very birth and colour handed over irretrievably to eternal damnation. It is possible to put a charitable interpretation on many doctrines of ancient heathenism, and the practical missionary is constantly obliged to do so. Let us only consider what these doctrines are. They are not theories devised by ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... inanities which pass for wit are poured forth; and daily the nerve and strength of each carouser grow weaker. Can you retrieve those nights? Never! But you may take the most shattered of the crew and assure him that all is not irretrievably lost; his weakened nerve may be steadied, his deranged gastric functions may gradually grow more healthy, his distorted views of life may pass away. So far, so good; but never try to persuade any one that the past may be repaired, for that delusion is the very source and spring of the foul stream ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... fortnight the labours of fourteen years were annihilated. Forty-four persons were murdered, 369 dwellings consumed, 261 pillaged, and 172,000 head of live-stock carried off into Kafirland and irretrievably lost; and what aggravated the wickedness of the invasion was the fact that during a great part of the year the Governor had been engaged in special negotiations for a new—and to the Kafirs most advantageous—system of relations, with ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... doubt of it," said Mrs. Hastings. "Still, I think it must be adopted—for several reasons. In the first place, I fancy that if we can pull Gregory up now we will save him from involving himself irretrievably. After all, perhaps, you owe him the effort. Then I think that we all owe something to Harry, and we can, at least, endeavour to carry his wishes out. He laid down what was to be done with his possessions in a will, and he never could have anticipated ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... nevertheless still shivering from the terror of the preceding night; I felt as if I had come in contact with an unknown power, or rather as if I had grazed against the outer edge of a circle, one step across which would be enough to plunge me irretrievably into destruction, as though it were only by the exertion of all the power of my will that I should be able to guard myself against that awful dread which never slackens its hold upon you until it ends in incurable insanity. ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... which she had risked and suffered so much must be back there, in Lanyard's lodgings, in Victor's possession—lost irretrievably, since she would never find the courage to go back for them, even if she dared assume that Victor had not yet recovered and escaped or that Lanyard had ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... could have checked and that would have resulted inevitably in the abandonment of the cause forever. The King's Basin lands with the wealth of effort that had already been expended would have been given over to the river, lost irretrievably to ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... am he in dread of whom all London shivers, and it was to tell you that—that I stopped you, Barbara. To tell you and to test, if not your love, at least your good intentions as my wife. The world tells me that I cannot win your love, that it has been given irretrievably to another. But your fidelity I must prove before you wear my name. I am placing my life, my safety, my honor, in the sweet jeopardy of your hands. My life is forfeit, as you know. My life is henceforth in your hands." ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... better than a hired hand; trade was confined to the petty dealings of a country market; and although thrift and energy, even under such depressing conditions, might eventually win a competence, the most ardent ambition could hardly hope for more. Never was an obscure existence more irretrievably marked out than for these children of the Ohio; and yet, before either had grown grey, the names of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, and of Stonewall Jackson, Lieutenant-General in the Confederate Army, were ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... acquiesced in his pre-eminence, and, waiving their claims to an equal share of the authority, they allowed him to go forward and direct the operations of the day. If the day had been lost, Miltiades, even though he had escaped death upon the field, would have been totally and irretrievably ruined; but as it was won, the result of the transaction was that he was raised to the highest pinnacle of glory ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... known. Of the views presented in the preceding paper, some are wellnigh certainly established, some are probable, some have a sort of plausibility, others—to which we have refrained from giving assent—may possibly be true; but none are irretrievably beyond the jurisdiction of scientific tests. No suggestion has so far been broached which a very little further increase of our scientific knowledge may not show to be either eminently probable or eminently improbable. ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Scriptures, the Synagogue can, as of yore, relegate it to the Apocrypha, even as it can enrich the canon with later expressions of the Hebrew genius. Its one possible rival, Islam, is, as Kuenen maintains, as sterile for the future as Buddhism, too irretrievably narrowed to the Arab mentality. But why, despite his magnificent tribute to Judaism, does this unfettered thinker imagine that the last word is with Christianity? Eucken, too, would call the future Christian, though he rejects the Incarnation and regards the Atonement ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... fill her with horror. Why not try to save herself now, while there was yet time? She still had a chance. A drowning man will grasp even at a straw. She was not irretrievably lost. The devil might still be cheated of a victim. This man believed in her; he offered to make her his honored wife. He forgave the past and held out a generous hand to save her. A revulsion of feeling suddenly shook the girl to the innermost recesses of her being. Burying ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... coat some one contrived to soil, and it was sent to be cleansed; but, either by accident, or probably by design, the day after it came home, the sleeves became daubed with paint, which was not discovered until the ruffles also, to his great mortification, were irretrievably disfigured. ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... she was gone, Mr. Houseman, being freed from his fear that his client would commit herself irretrievably, recovered a show of composure, and his wits went ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Chicago as no loss to the General and no reflection on him, but rather as the best thing for him; and that the true policy and purpose was to beat Conkling, who committed the error in strategy, however gallant the sentiment that inspired him, of committing himself irretrievably to Grant—and though the contested votes were all against him, he was unchangeable. "No angle-worm nomination will take place to-day"—meaning nothing feeble—was Mr. Conkling's oracular remark the morning ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... with four thousand men; the constable himself, the Duke de Montpensier, the Duke de Longueville, the Marshal St. Andre, three hundred gentlemen, and several thousand common soldiers, were taken; the defeat was irretrievably complete, and to the victors almost bloodless. The English did not share in the glory of the battle, for they were not present; but they arrived two days after to take part in the storming of St. Quentin, and to share, to their shame, in the sack and spoiling of the town. They ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... that Gen. Early has been beaten again at Waynesborough, and that the enemy have reached Charlottesville for the first time. Thus it seems our downward career continues. We must have a victory soon, else Virginia is irretrievably lost. ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... is that heaven is attainable only for those whom the arbitrary predestination of God has elected; all others are irretrievably damned. Calvin was the first Christian theologian who succeeded in giving the fearful doctrine of unconditional election and reprobation a lodgment in the popular breast. The Roman Catholic Church had ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... wheels for some distance, and the boys knew that if a stone of any size was met the waggon must be irretrievably wrecked, and they saw in anticipation the flames overtaking it, scorching up the valuables it contained, and ending by reaching the ammunition, when everything must be blown ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... to say that, with desperate infatuation, I made a solemn promise to my creditors to satisfy them all on the first day of the ensuing month, and on the fulfilment of that promise it depended, whether my character as a gentleman was still preserved or irretrievably lost. Ellen, I cannot attempt to describe to you what I suffered at that time. The wrestling with an impossibility, the struggle after what was unattainable, the incapability of resigning myself to what seemed inevitable, the powerless rage, the smarting pride, the ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... uncleanness. He was overwhelmed by that persuasion, which only freshly soiled youth can feel in its extreme intensity, that life was slipping away from him, that the sands were running out, that in a little while his existence would be irretrievably lost. ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... effect. The hoof-marks of Dyke's horse had been traced in the mud of the road to within a quarter of a mile of the foot-hills and there irretrievably lost. Three days after the hold-up, a sheep-herder was found who had seen the highwayman on a ridge in the higher mountains, to the northeast of Taurusa. And that was absolutely all. Rumours were thick, ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... lead them to attempt. You feel, with deep annoyance, that a paroxysm of shyness has often made you speak entirely at random, and express the very opposite sentiments to those you really feel, committing yourself irretrievably to, perhaps, falsehood and folly, because you could not exercise self-control. Try to bring vividly before your mental eye all that you have suffered in the recollection of past weaknesses of this kind, and that will ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... of the Dunkers. You urge that such things can be nothing more than the play of boys and girls, and are something worse than mere waste of time, for they set young people to thinking of the theatre, which is irretrievably sunk and only harmful. In your character of trustee, you are sorry it has been done, and beg that it may not be ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... income be sunk irretrievably for ever from a hundred pounds to fifty, and that he hath no other method to supply the deficiency, I desire to know, my Lord, whether such a person hath any other course to take than to sink half his expenses in every article of economy, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... their account the nearest of kin; or, in other words, simply a discarded niece of the defunct. She telegraphs back that she will arrive in person for the funeral. I shall remain till she comes. I have lost a fortune, but have I irretrievably lost a friend? I am sure I can't say. Yes, I ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... pattern of certain European novels, themselves chiefly representing the worst members of the class they claim to depict, was the cause of her ruin. She had so recklessly trifled with her reputation, that although her immediate friends did not believe the worst, yet with the world her character was irretrievably lost. At five-and-twenty she had already sacrificed her own peace; she had brought shame on her husband's name, and had filled with the bitterest grief, the heart of an indulgent father. Happily, her mother was in the grave, and she had ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... reseated themselves, the same thought in the minds of each. Here was something they could not take away, something to be left forever and irretrievably behind,—left with the healthy life they had been leading, the cheerful endeavor, the undying hopefulness which it had fostered and blessed. Was what they WERE taking away worth it? And oddly enough, frank and outspoken as they had always been to ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... Bugis irretrievably committed to action and had made himself responsible for success on his own head, he was so elated that in the lightness of his heart he absolutely tried to be civil with Cornelius. But Cornelius became wildly jovial in response, and it was almost more than he could stand, he ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... that his patron was irretrievably landed and considering that his own "expert" dignity had been sufficiently saved, relaxed into enthusiasm and small talk. Only in the later Italian rooms did his critical claws again allow themselves to scratch. A small Leonardo, the treasure of the ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... homekeeping, and so shy, what wonder that those lonely, heart-hungry men should fall in love with her? In all the population of the camp the number of women was fewer than two score, and of this number half were married, others were hopeless spinsters, and others were irretrievably bad, only excepting Miss Woppit, the prettiest, the tidiest, the gentlest of all. She was good, pure, and lovely in her womanliness; I shall not say that I envied—no, I respected Hoover and Dodsley and Barber Sam for being stuck on the girl; you 'd have ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... printing machine in Germany excited considerable hostility among the pressmen. In some of the principal towns they entered into combinations to destroy them, and several printing machines were broken by violence and irretrievably injured. But progress could not be stopped; the printing machine had been fairly born, and must eventually do its work for mankind. These combinations, however, had an effect for a time. They deterred other printers from giving orders for the machines; and Koenig ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... feelings she watched him leave the room.... Inevitable re-action set in, doubts overwhelmed her. Had she done what was best or had she blundered irretrievably? She went unsteadily to a chair, extraordinarily tired, exhausted in her new weakness by the emotional strain through which she had passed. She was beginning to be a little aghast at what she had done, at the force that she ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... this post to Wills, to go to him and investigate. I have also detached Berry from here, and have sent him on by train at a few minutes' notice to Edinburgh, and then to Glasgow (where I have no doubt everything is wrong too). Glasgow we may save; Edinburgh I hold to be irretrievably damaged. If it can be picked up at all, it can only be at the loss of the two first nights, and by the expenditure of no end of spirits and force. And this is the harder, because it is impossible not to see that the last readings polished and prepared the audiences in general, and ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... only. Soon the expression of hopelessness vanished and the lines of her face became resolute, hard, and determined. Surprise had yielded to reflection, reflection to pity and remorse. Now remorse in turn gave way to determination. Shotaye felt that she, much rather than her friend, was lost, irretrievably lost; but her energetic nature demanded that she should see the situation clearly. Although the spasmodic hints of Say, her broken words, spoke enough, she wanted more. Her mind craved the full truth, however terrible ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... apple all this fair scene passed away, and creation as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned—no matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... that the hero shall not always be faultless, but always shall be noble. The moment, however, that he begins to wrangle with Eve about their respective shares of blame, he forfeits his estate of heroism more irretrievably than his estate of holiness—a fact of which Milton cannot have been unaware, but he had no liberty to forsake the Scripture narrative. Satan remains, therefore, the only possible hero, and it is one of the inevitable blemishes of the poem that he should disappear almost ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... failed to recover from the injuries she had received at the hands, first of the Medes, and then of the Scythians, but had with each advancing year seen more severe wounds inflicted upon her, and hastening her irretrievably to her ruin. And besides this, Egypt and Chaldaea, the ancient kingdoms which had for a short time bent beneath her yoke, had now once more arisen, and were astonishing the world by their renewed vigour. Psammetichus, it is true, after having stretched his arm across ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the consciousness perpetually before them, of being able to withdraw from the adventure as soon as they lost heart. This last consideration of itself would be fatal. Nothing rouses energy and strengthens determination so effectually as the knowledge that we are irretrievably committed: the climber of some desperate but possible steep is never safe till the rope is cut beneath him; the crosser of a difficult ford is never sure of completing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... afford to do it. If a man's asset is money, or character or position or relatives and friends or popular favor or any other perishable article, he must take care how he trifles with it. He may find himself irretrievably ruined. But my asset happens to be none of those things. It is one that can be lost or damaged only by insanity or ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... different experiences, L—M and M—N, namely; and that although the absolute may, and indeed must, from its superior point of view, read its own kind of unity into M's two editions, yet as elements in finite experience the two M's lie irretrievably asunder, and the world between them ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... your opinion and that of your 'circle' may chance to be. Constance, you here have your ultimatum. Defy me, if you please, but prompt separation will ensue; and you will unexpectedly find yourself en route for America. Peace or war? Before you decide, recollect that all your future will be irretrievably colored by it." ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... that emphatically termed the virtue of our sex, Helen, on which social happiness rests, society depends, on what is it based? is it not on that single-hearted virtue truth?—and truth on what? on courage of the mind. They who dare to speak the truth, will not ever dare to go irretrievably wrong. Then what is falsehood but cowardice?—and a false woman!—does not that ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... untouched after the transfer—that is, absolutely unpainted upon. It is pure photography in every sense of the word, and the resultant picture one hardly to be surpassed in any way. I have rather laid a stress on this point, well knowing how pictures are at times irretrievably ruined by the barbarous hand of would-be artists, who by far exceed the true artists in number; and the hint on retouching should not be lost sight of, either, at a period when the tendency is to stereotype every one in marble-like texture, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... continued. "For each day sacrificed to Barbara I must deduct something like twenty-five hundred dollars. A long campaign would put me irretrievably in the hole; I'd get so far behind that a holocaust couldn't put me even. She can't expect that of me, yet girls are such idiots about devotion, and of course she doesn't know what a heavy task I'm facing. And there are the others—what will they do while I am out ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... to relieve him of the necessity of creating. Too often, he made of his art a purely mental game. His emotion, his creative genius were far more intermittent, his breath far less long than one once imagined. Some of the earlier works have commenced to fade rapidly, irretrievably. At present one wonders how it is possible that one once sat entranced through performances of "The Flying Dutchman" and "Tannhaeuser." "Lohengrin" begins to seem a little brutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trumpets, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... mysterious likeness to, or connection with, a charming young gentleman rendered him only the more undesirable. Poor Kate! If she gave her heart to Archibald, and then Archibald became somebody else, what shall we say became of her heart? Must it not have been irretrievably lost, and shall we be surprised if we hereafter detect in her ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... best to begin with birth: I would therefore warn those who desire to be fathers of notable sons, not to form connections with any kind of women, such as courtesans or mistresses: for those who either on the father or mother's side are ill-born have the disgrace of their origin all their life long irretrievably present with them, and offer a ready handle to abuse and vituperation. So that the poet was wise, who said, "Unless the foundation of a house be well laid, the descendants must of necessity be unfortunate."[3] Good birth indeed brings with it a store of assurance, which ought to ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch |
