"Vendetta" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Peter said, "tap the table with your forefinger. Personally, I will admit that I have had my doubts of the Baroness, but on the whole I have come to the conclusion that they were groundless. She is not the sort of woman to take up a vendetta, especially an unprofitable one." ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... keen, bitter, and outraged cry of "Take him out!" So strongly does the partisan heart pulsate to the interests of the nominee! This frantic petition had no effect on the interloper. A man who has inherited half a dozen violent quarrels, any one of which may at any moment burst into a vendetta,—inheriting little else,—is not easily dismayed by the disapprobation of either friend or foe. His statuesque features, shaded by the drooping brim of his old black hat were as calm as ever, and his slow blue eyes did not, for ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... ease, with the cord tied slackly around his waist and his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, he turned out, in a dizzy orgy of production, The Physiology of Marriage, the short stories constituting the Scenes of Private Life, At the Sign of the Cat-and-Racket, The Ball at Sceaux, The Vendetta, A Double Family, Peace in the Household, Gobseck and Sarrasine, besides studies, criticisms and essays for newspapers ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... begin to glimpse one or two of them. Revenge is not one. Critics have written for revenge, quoting gleefully, "O that mine enemy would write a book!" Pope is our classic example. But publishers have made that form of literary vendetta unprofitable nowadays, and I am glad they have done so. Much wit, but little criticism, has been inspired by revenge. Furthermore, I notice in my own case, and my editorial self confirms the belief, that the reviewer craves books to extol, not books to condemn. He is happiest ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Roma means Rome, and Londra, London. This ignorance, however, is part of the author's ingenuity. It leads to the establishment of a sort of object-speech, by aid of which the Earl learns that his guest has come to England to prosecute a vendetta against the man who ruined his happy Sicilian home. I need scarcely say that this villain is none other than D'Orelli; and when at last he and the Countess elope to Paris, the object-speech enables Giuseppe to ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... there is great difficulty about finding an executioner who becomes obnoxious to the Thar, vendetta or blood-revenge. For salting the criminal's head, however, the soldiers seize upon the nearest Jew and compel him to clean out the brain and to prepare it for what is often a long journey. Hence, according to some, the local name of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... inhabitants—your subjects, Prosper— hospitable, too. Whatever the island may have been in Seneca's time, to deserve the abuse he heaped on it in exile, to-day the Corsicans keep more of the old classical virtues than any nation known to me. In vendetta they will slay one another, using the worst treachery; but a stranger may walk the length of the island unarmed—save against the Genoese—and find a meal at the poorest cottage, and a bed, however rough, whereon he may sleep untroubled ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... position in the rear, indulge in what they humorously describe as "an artillery duel." The humour arises from the fact that they fire, not at one another, but at us. It is as if two big boys, having declared a vendetta, were to assuage their hatred and satisfy their honour by going out every afternoon and throwing stones at one another's little brothers. Each evening we go on sentry duty; or go out with patrols, or working ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... are the most usual cause of war, and not, as has been reported, glory and the capture of slaves. There is never wanting on the part of those who originate the war a reasonable motive. The vendetta system is not only recognized, but vengeance is considered incumbent on the relatives of one who has been killed, and, as a reminder, a piece of green rattan is sometimes strung up in the house. The rattan suggests that until it rots ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... our guests. These evenings were very popular during our first winters at Hull-House. Many educated Italians helped us, and the house became known as a place where Italians were welcome and where national holidays were observed. They come to us with their petty lawsuits, sad relics of the vendetta, with their incorrigible boys, with their hospital cases, with their aspirations for American clothes, and with ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... usually the result of accident, and much to the regret of the boys, who always apologised handsomely to the surviving relatives, which expression of regret was generally received in the amicable spirit with which it was tendered. There was none of the rancour of the vendetta in these little encounters; if a man happened to be blotted out, it was his ill luck, that was all, and there was ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... don't think I'm alarmed. In fact, I am not sure I wouldn't be willing to do it. Still, this vendetta seems to be rather old for any great amount of feeling on your part. How old were you when ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... a vendetta, but—deleterious poetry apart—he had injured no man, and the personnel of the Cabinet Committee was as little known to him as his poetry to the Cabinet Committee. In general, too, he was the object of a certain popularity and pitying regard; ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... the turmoil in China had subsided. For that reason I never visited her, nor did I permit the growth of friendship between her and my wife and daughter— a friendship which, in happier conditions, would have been natural and inevitable. But we were woefully mistaken. An Oriental vendetta neither slackens nor dies. By some means wholly unknown to me, the Young Manchus must have discovered, or guessed, that in leaving Lester's widow out of their reckoning they had lost a promising clew. Be that ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... inchoate civil forms. Then criminal law and penalty took the place of retaliation. Between groups blood revenge was only a detail of the normal relations of hostility and violence. Out-groups, however, sometimes made agreements with each other to limit blood revenge and vendetta. White men have had trouble with red men and black men because their customs as to relationship were not on the same level. The whites in New York and Pennsylvania colonies could not understand why the Indians were indifferent to ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... fourth toe he severs, he pays solidi three. LXXIIII If the fifth toe he severs, he pays solidi two. LXXV Upon all these damages or injuries, above described, which among men exempt occurred, therefore, a heavier punishment, have we placed than our ancestors, that the Faida (feud, vendetta), that is, the hatred, after the receiving the above described (ssta—suprascripta) punishment, may cease, and, moreover, not be required, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... libitum. We do not see an intelligible clash of great political ideas, but a wild melee, in the outcome of which we have no reason to be particularly interested. It is all as little tragic as a back-country vendetta, or a factional fight in the halls ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... is a prospect of a row. But with the development of a central authority, whether in the shape of the rule of many or of one, the public control of the blood-feud begins to assert itself; for the good reason that endless vendetta is a dissolving force, which the larger and more stable type of society cannot afford to tolerate if it is to survive. The following are a few instances illustrative of the transition from private to public jurisdiction. In North America, Africa, and elsewhere, we find the chief or chiefs pronouncing ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... the Restoration and the first part of the July Government. He dwelt in rue Greneta. [The Government Clerks. Gobseck.] Luigi Porta, a ranking officer retired under Louis XVIII., sold all his back pay to Gigonnet. [The Vendetta.] Bidault was one of the syndicate that engineered the bankruptcy of Birotteau in 1819. At this time he persecuted Mme. Madou, a market dealer in filberts, who was his debtor. [Cesar Birotteau.] In 1824 he succeeded ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... a cold bedfellow, and women are designed to cherish finer sentiments. As for Lucrezia, she will doubtless swear a vendetta, like those Sardinians." ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... her belt, and teach him with a shot, crash through heart or brain, that girls who were "unsexed" could keep enough of the woman in them not to be neglected with impunity, and could lose enough of it to be able to avenge the negligence by a summary vendetta. But she was a haughty little condottiere, in her fashion. She would not ask for what was not offered her, nor give a rebuke that might be traced to mortification. She only set her two rosebud-lips in as firm a line of wrath and scorn as ever Caesar's or ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... seventies, was an important factor. The fugitives from justice of the older States with a common impulse turned toward this empire of isolation. Europe contributed her quota, more particularly from the south, bringing with them the Mafia and vendetta. Once it was the Ultima Thule of the criminal western world. From the man who came for not building a church to the one who had taken human life, the catalogue of crime was ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... virile native stock has been strengthened with the blood of its northern neighbors. They are a capable, creative, conservative, reliable race. On the other hand, the hot temper of the South has been fed by an infusion of Greek and Saracen blood. In Sicily this strain shows at its worst. There the vendetta flourishes; and the Camorra and its sinister analogue, the Black Hand, but too realistically remind us that thousands of these swarthy criminals have found refuge in the dark alleys of our cities. Even in America the Sicilian carries a dirk, and the "death sign" ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... "that will put matters on a right basis with my firm whatever may happen to me. And now, if you please, I should like to see my double at once. I suspect a kinsman, but do not be afraid of a vendetta. If Master Robin, of whose prowess I have already heard, has crushed in a rib or two, so much the better. Even if he had broken my worthy relative's back, I fear me few would ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... "phoenix") which sprang from the head, where four of the five senses have their seat, and haunted his tomb, crying continually, "Uskuni!"Give me drink (of the slayer's blood) ! and which disappeared only when the vendetta was accomplished. Mohammed forbade the belief. Amongst the Southern Slavs the cuckoo is supposed to be the sister of a murdered man ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... seems a stronger organization than the family itself; but the clans live together in the villages, and as such they form a whole with regard to the outside world. Quarrels between two clans are not so rare as those inside a clan, and the vendetta does not act inside the clan, whereas a murder outside the clan must be avenged. Uncles and aunts within the clan are called father and mother, and the cousins ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... personal insult, imaginary or real, was moreover offered by Capodistrias to this fallen foe, after the aged mother of Petrobei, who had lost sixty-four kinsmen in the war against the Turks, had begged for his release. The vendetta of the Maina was aroused. A son and a nephew of Petrobei laid wait for the President, and as he entered the Church of St. Spiridion at Nauplia on the 9th of October, 1831, a pistol-shot and a blow from a yataghan laid him dead on the ground. He had been warned that his life was ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... shuddered, reiterating: "Really, Billy, the thing was necessary. I didn't dare refuse. You've no idea how these people are antagonized by an Italian villa. It seems sort of shameful to them. They foam at the mouth. Why, unless I had been tactful you'd have had vendetta and Mafia and everything ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... With a cry he suddenly vanished and the panel slid back. An instant later his head appeared in the door opposite and said: Meet me at Westland Row station at ten past eleven. He was gone. Tears gushed from the eyes of the dissipated host. The seer raised his hand to heaven, murmuring: The vendetta of Mananaun! The sage repeated: Lex talionis. The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done. Malachias, overcome by emotion, ceased. The mystery was unveiled. Haines was the third ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... flung over his shoulder as he drove; "and I shall swear a vendetta against everybody concerned, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... in conversation and with his help made a list of what we should require on our vendetta journey, all of which served to occupy his mind. Then I sent him to bed, saying that I would call him before dawn, having first put a little more bromide into his third cup of coffee. After this I turned in and notwithstanding the sight of those remains of the cannibal feast ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... centre about the sounding viaducts that leap over Rosebery Avenue. Upon a time the place had a reputation for lawlessness, but that is now gone, with most of the colour of things. Occasionally there is an affray with knives, but it is always among themselves: a sort of vendetta; and nobody interferes so long as they refrain from bloodshed or from annoying peaceable people. The services in the Italian Church are very picturesque, and so, too, are their ceremonies at Christmas-time; while the procession of the children at First ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... striking such a blow to my Sadie's, and indeed to all our hopes. Answer immediately and whatever instructions you may give me, I will follow most faithfully. I am ready to join you heart and hand in any vendetta against ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... "Sorry. I wish it could be like that, but we're not engaged in a personal vendetta. Orvil may be out of there by tonight, or he may not. He'll ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... oh' Dio! gi penetr la soglia; Le seguir nel' foco: M; un Ignoto poter' me lo contrasta. Si tenti ancor; non posso. Dunque il vedr gioir s gl' occhi miei? No; Melissa te aspetta Far s L'empio per me, per te vendetta. ...
— Amadigi di Gaula - Amadis of Gaul • Nicola Francesco Haym
... Madly he sprang on the apparition and slashed away in the dark. "Kiya!" The cry rang loud. Kondo[u] danced with joy, calling loudly for lights. "O'Iwa! O'Iwa! Kondo[u] has slain the O'Bake, the enemy of his child! Rejoice with Kondo[u]! The vendetta is accomplished!" In the darkness and confusion a groan was heard; then another, still fainter; then there was silence. Tomobei appeared with a light. He leaned over the long black robed body; to raise an alarmed face ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Rome, as the beginning of the period of the civil wars.[426] To justify this conclusion it is not enough to point to the fact that this was the first blood shed in civic discord since the age of the Kings;[427] for it might also have been the last. Though the vendetta is a natural outgrowth of Italian soil, yet masses of men are seldom, like individuals, animated solely by the spirit of revenge. The blood of the innocent is a good battle-cry in politics, but it is little more; it is far from being the mere pretext, but it is ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... a savage, untamed, untrimmed kind of country, and a man's life was little safer than it is to-day in the neighbouring island of Sardinia. There were brigands and bandits and families engaged in the private warfare of the vendetta, so that things were as lively and exciting as they get in parts of Virginia at times. Killing was certainly no murder, and even yet the vendetta flourishes to some extent. There is nothing harder than to get a high-spirited southern population ready to acknowledge the majesty of the ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... the way I look at it you and Cass got in bad this time. Here's the point. In this little vendetta of ours both sides were trying to keep inside the law and win out. When you elected Bolt sheriff that was one to you. When you took out that grazing permit and cut me off the reserve that was another time you scored heavy. A third time was when you brought 'steen thousand of Mary's little ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... all the easier," said Priscilla, "to pay him back if he hasn't any suspicion that we have an undying vendetta against him. I rather like vendettas, don't you? There's something rather noble in the idea of pursuing a man with implacable ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the feeling of revenge," answered the young man, frankly; "but I know what it is to feel wronged, and I think it is lucky that it is the law, and not an individual, that has done me the mischief—one can't have a vendetta against the law, you know. But, if it were a man, ay, though he were my own flesh and blood, he should pay for it—yes, sevenfold. I would not put up with injustice from any human being; and where I could, if ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... Manon's proofs of devotion. Mystery on mystery. However, this youth, under the diligent attentions of police spies, was soon seen and identified as an escaped convict, the famous hero of the Corsican vendetta, the handsome Theodore ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... resolution made years before. Final reception by the Emperor. Farewell celebration with the American Colony and departure. Stay at Alassio; visits to Elba and Corsica; relics of Napoleon: curious monument of the vendetta between the Pozzo di ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... impossible to quell. This fable lasted only for a single day. On the 25th Charles writes that he has begun to discover traces of a Huguenot conspiracy;[62] and on the following day this was publicly substituted for the original story. Neither the vendetta of the Guises nor the conspiracy at Paris could be made to explain the massacre in the provinces. It required to be so managed that the King could disown it; Salviati describes the plan of operations. It was intended that ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... eyes like a man possessed by a devil who will not leave him; and I have always observed, that the devil most obstinate to be expelled is a secret. I knew you were a Corsican. I knew you were gloomy, and always brooding over some old history of the vendetta; and I overlooked that in Italy, because in Italy those things are thought nothing of. But in France they are considered in very bad taste; there are gendarmes who occupy themselves with such affairs, judges who condemn, and scaffolds which avenge." Bertuccio clasped his hands, and as, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that our Dominic had a brother. As to "going into the bush," this only means that a man has done his duty successfully in the pursuit of a hereditary vendetta. The feud which had existed for ages between the families of Cervoni and Brunaschi was so old that it seemed to have smouldered out at last. One evening Pietro Brunaschi, after a laborious day amongst his olive-trees, sat on a chair against the wall ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... death of his padrone. But the padrone had laid a solemn injunction upon him. Solemn, indeed, it seemed to the boy now that the lips which had spoken were sealed forever. The padrona was never to know. If he obeyed his impulse, if he declared the vendetta against Salvatore, the padrona would know. The knife that spilled the murderer's blood would give the secret to the world—and to ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... had worn a hair-shirt next her delicate body. Be this as it may, many allusions in his poems suggest that he had lived the wild life of the barbarous Umbrian cities, being a highwayman perhaps, forfeiting his life, and also having to fly the country before the fury of some family vendetta. On the other hand, it is plain at every line that he was a frantic ascetic, taking a savage pleasure in vilifying all mundane things, and passionately disdainful of study, of philosophical and theological subtleties. No poet, therefore, of the troubadour ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... reason and moderation so easily quench the fires of insane hate, and where the vendetta is so easily overcome by the sublime grace of forgiveness, no woman could have been found so desperate as to sacrifice all spiritual, temporal, and social good, self, offspring, fame, honor, and all the desiderata of life, and time, and ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... a wrong committed was a natural impulse, and the recognition of this fact in custom established it not merely as a right but as a duty. War, the modern form of trial by battle, the vendetta, and the duel are examples that have survived down to modern times of this natural and primitive method ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... happiness of his quaint ward, the dance in the eyes of the merry child as some colored candies placed in my nonny-bag by my wife fell somehow from the sky right on to the table before her. The telling of his story, never before mentioned to any one but his wife and foster child, but kept like some vendetta wrong waiting for revenge in his rebellious heart these many years, seemed to have renewed his youth. A merrier, happier party it has never been my lot to share in; and now that I know the pathos of the last chapter written in this strange life, I rejoice ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... industrial or agricultural employments; the Gheg is stern, morose and haughty, the Tosk lively, talkative and affable. The natural antipathy between the two sections of the race, though less evident than in former times, is far from extinct. In all parts of Albania the vendetta (gyak, jak) or blood-feud, the primitive lex talionis, is an established usage; the duty of revenge is a sacred tradition handed down to successive generations in the family, the village and the tribe. A single case of homicide often leads to ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... country parishes in this, that, while revelling in internal dissensions, when attacked from without its inhabitants promptly scrapped every vendetta and, for the time being, stood back to back against ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... lot fell on a young Lieutenant Asgill of the Guards, whose mother appealed to the king and queen of France and to their powerful minister, Vergennes. The American Congress wanted blood for blood, which would have led to an endless vendetta. But Vergennes pointed out that Asgill, a youth of nineteen, was as much a prisoner of the king of France as of the Continental Congress. At this the Congress gnashed its teeth, but ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... Corsican Brothers' daggers and vendetta, the restless island! It is full of interest. I have been there." Breitmann smiled pleasantly at the girl, but his thought was unsmiling. Versed as he was in reading at a glance expression, whether it lay in the eyes, in the lips, or the hands, he realized with chagrin that he had made a misstep ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... N. revenge, revengement^; vengeance; avengement^, avengeance^, sweet revenge, vendetta, death feud, blood for blood retaliation &c 718; day of reckoning. rancor, vindictiveness, implacability; malevolence &c 907; ruthlessness &c 914.1. avenger, vindicator, Nemesis, Eumenides. V. revenge, avenge; vindicate; take one's revenge, have one's revenge; breathe revenge, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget |
