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More "Breaking point" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... temper had reached its breaking point. It snapped. In a twinkling, things were happening. Using quick, almost superhuman strength, he picked up the half-breed by the neck and one leg and hurled him, like a thunderbolt, into the group at ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... last connecting link of discipline was strained nearly to the breaking point. An angry gleam appeared in his eyes, and he said in a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... Duchambon, the French commander, that they should have their answer from the cannon's mouth. It is not my purpose to tell of it in detail, for it lasted forty-seven days and strained the nerves of everyone to the breaking point. But one or two things happened in the time which, to my mind, make our Captain seem a very human person. There was, for instance, his amazing kindness, as unfailing to his captives as to his own men. When the great French ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... a spark of hope beneath this knowledge was not easy and John, having been in New York now for nearly three weeks without any encouragement from the fates, was near the breaking point. A gray apathy had succeeded the frenzied restlessness of the first few days. The necessity for some kind of work that would to some extent occupy his mind was borne in upon him, and the thought of Smith had followed naturally. If anybody could ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... further musing on these confusing things, by taking my life. People will be shocked. Deny me the right to have control over myself. They will offer the explanation that I was at the breaking point. Supplying medical reasons. To calm themselves down; for if everyone thought so, then there would soon be a universal protest against living. Life would be boycotted. That must not happen. If you ask: why not?—you will be condemned as a sophist. People don't like to die; the term is ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... as he writes John's heart seems near the breaking point, and a sob shakes his pen a bit, as it comes over him all anew, and almost overcomes him, how this wondrous Jesus, this throbbing heart of God, was treated. Listen: "He came to His own possessions, and they who were His—own—kinsfolk—and the quiver of John's heart-sob seems to make the ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... the opening-performance, which was to be given in a manufacturing city in New England. The nerves of all the company were stretched to the breaking point; and overwrought as he was himself, Thyrsis could not but pity the unhappy "leading lady", who could hardly keep herself together, even with the drugs he ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... admitted, even to himself, the strain the wounded man had been and was on their nerves. Under his seeming indifference Buck was near the breaking point; Jock, victim of a thousand worries, was bent under his burdens. Grell, having fought the all-night fight for a human life, was still weak with weariness from the effort. Rasba, a newcomer, brought welcome reserves of endurance, ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... thrust suddenly into Mrs. Forest's face could hardly improve a temper already strained to the breaking point. ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... hunter with a pack of trained fox hounds entered the forest a mile to the west of Silver Spot's den. It was not long before the dogs had found the trail of the big fox and the chase was on, a chase destined to try the cunning and strength of the hunted to the breaking point. ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... charcoal-black mustache; neck like a loop in standing rigging; arms long as cant-hooks, with the steel grips for fingers; sluggish in movement and slow in action until the supreme moment of danger tautened his nerves to breaking point; then came an instantaneous spring, quick as the recoil of a parted hawser. All his life a fisherman except the five years he spent in the Arctic and the year he served at Squan; later he had helped in the volunteer crew alongshore. Loving the service, he had sent word ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... progress for over a year. He began in earnest when he returned in 1903 and he steadily forged ahead. While he was away he studied and pondered over all the former instructions and with the aid of a pitch pipe he soon was busy at his songs and exercises. He returned in 1904 ill, discouraged to the breaking point. After my accident I was much exercised as to the outcome of all these years of preparation. He was ready to start out as a singer but his heart failed him at last and he became disconsolate. He could ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... the reef without difficulty, then turned to swim along it. The trough just seaward of the breaking point of the waves was the most comfortable swimming position and they went ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... saw him again. Neither he nor she had taken any steps to complete the rupture; and at the Mi-careme dance, given by the Siowa Hunt, Quarrier, who was M. F. H., took up the thread of their suspended intercourse as methodically and calmly as though it had never quivered to the breaking point. He led the cotillon with agreeable precision and impersonal accuracy, favouring her at intervals; and though she wasted no favours on him, she endured his, which was sufficient evidence that matters were still ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... a mask fear covered it. He thrust his strained body forward and with shaking hand grasped the shoulder of the girl. "Hid it! Tell me, in heaven's name, tell me where could a man hide a million dollars?" His voice was tense to the breaking point. He searched the girl's face as if all eternity depended ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... it became increasingly plain to me that Sir Charles's nervous system was strained to the breaking point. He had taken this legend which I have read you exceedingly to heart—so much so that, although he would walk in his own grounds, nothing would induce him to go out upon the moor at night. Incredible as it may appear to you, Mr. Holmes, he was honestly convinced that a dreadful fate overhung ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... of the house was packed almost to suffocation. The other characters in the play had withdrawn, and for the first time the two women were alone together. Both keyed up almost to the breaking point, we faced each other, and there was a dead, I might almost say a deadly pause before ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... when relations with Spain were strained to the breaking point, Aaron Burr was weaving the strands of one of the most intricate and baffling intrigues in American history. Shortly after relinquishing the office of Vice-President, Burr undertook an extensive tour through the West. In the course ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... the earth and the doings of its people. But Jaska scarcely saw the fleeting images, the men locked in conflict for the right to live, the screaming, terror-stricken women. This was now a century-old story, and the civilization of Earth had almost reached the breaking point. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... man joined his family and began a desperate struggle to earn his own living. Mrs. Grant's father was a slave owner and a sympathizer with the South in the growing trouble between that section of the country and the North. But the quarrel had not yet reached the breaking point, and although he did not approve of his son-in-law's northern views and heartily disapproved of his conduct, he gave him a start as a farmer and then left him to ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... the day. We were very tired, and we both fell asleep, but I woke with a start, for I heard something coming through the bush. I wakened Mac, and we grasped our heavy walking sticks and lay still. The sound came nearer and nearer, and just when our nerves were at breaking point two bright eyes looked down at us over the edge of the little hollow we were in—it was a hedgehog. We couldn't keep from laughing at the scare it had given us. I wanted to take revenge, but Mac said, "No, let the little devil alone, it's a sign of good luck." ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... the course of a great war men come quite to misjudge its very nature, the task of the Government would be strained some time or other in the future to breaking point. False news, too readily credited, does not leave people merely insufficiently informed, conscious of their ignorance, and merely grumbling because they cannot learn more, it has the positive effect of putting them into the wrong frame of mind, of making them support ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... were with the responsibility of determining the issues of peace and war can realize the strength and energy and persistency with which we labored for peace. We persevered by every expedient that diplomacy could suggest, straining almost to the breaking point our most cherished friendships and obligations, even to the last making effort upon effort, and hoping against hope. Then, and only then, when we were at last compelled to realize that the choice lay between honor and dishonor, between treachery and good faith, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... at the back door was using the ax from Macdonald's wood pile, as the sound of splintering timber told. Between three fires, Macdonald felt his chance stretching to the breaking point, for he had no faith at all in Chance Dalton's word. They had come to get him, and it looked now ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... attraction of the earth and moon were to be replaced by steel wires connecting the two bodies to prevent the moon from leaving its orbit, there would be needed four number ten steel wires to every square inch upon the earth, and these would be strained nearly to the breaking point. Yet this stress is not only endured continually by this pliant, impalpable, transparent medium, but other bodies can move through the same space apparently as freely as if it were entirely free. In addition to this, the stress from the sun and the more variable ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... control of sex love outside marriage by the individual—and that we are right in so doing is incontestable. But let us realise that in practice self-control has a breaking point, and that if in any community marriage is difficult or late of attainment, an increase of irregular ...
— Love—Marriage—Birth Control - Being a Speech delivered at the Church Congress at - Birmingham, October, 1921 • Bertrand Dawson
... thought for the last two days, steaming back from the Piraeus to Alexandria, had been that I was drawing nearer to Cairo, and to those whose doings in my absence pulled at my curiosity and keyed my interest to breaking point. But if you think that I tore open those envelopes and greedily absorbed their contents the moment they were put into my hands, you have never been a conductor or even an observant passenger on a "pleasure yacht." When the letters arrived I was engaged in persuading ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... dockwallopers—more than one steamer scraped her paint in the haste to get under the long spouts that waited to pour out grain by the hundred thousand bushels. Trains came down from Minneapolis, boats came down from Duluth, warehouse after warehouse at Chicago was filled; and over-strained nerves neared the breaking point as the short December days flew by. Some said the Clique would win, some said Page would win; in the wheat pit men were fighting like tigers; every one who knew the facts ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... by a string, she drew out with great care a rather large, square-looking missive, and then rising from her chair with much fluttering of her black gown and mysterious creaking sound, as of tight under-wear strained to breaking point, she held it out toward Walden, who had durng her last oratorical outburst unconsciously put his hand to his head in a daze ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... 27, 1918, just on the eve of the armistice, when German resistance was already shaken almost to breaking point, President Wilson gave it the coup de grace by his message on the post-bellum economic settlement. No special or separate interest of any single nation or group of nations was to be taken as the basis of any settlement which did not concern the common interest of all; there were not ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... will test such a man almost to breaking point. Then she yields, and, being feminine, her obduracy is the measure of her favors, for she will bestow on her dogged suitor all, and more than all, that ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... hand and stained my fingers, next my lips and teeth, with the sweet dark fruit of a mulberry-tree beside me. The shadows deepened; I picked up my saddle, and, carrying it housewards, put it in its place in the harness-room among the fig- and apricot-trees—laden to breaking point with ripe and ripening fruit. The two servant girls had departed on their Christmas holiday that morning, so grannie and auntie were the only members of the family at home. I could not see or hear them anywhere, so, presuming they ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... between Danvers and Nancy. There was a peculiar gleam in the eyes of Montrose, and a jaunty self-possession which became him well, as he stood and looked down at the man whose temper he had surely tried to the breaking point. ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... respect to theory the hanging of the Quakers was a confession, in the realm of practical politics it was but a Pyrrhic victory. The authority of magistrate and clergy, strained to the breaking point, never quite recovered its old security. The capital law was itself passed by a bare majority, and the successive executions carried popular opposition to the verge of insurrection. Nor did the executions ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Marques. In spite of the protests of Great Britain and of Portugal as to his unneutral attitude he had been continued in his position. But on December 7, 1900, the strain to which the relations between the two Governments had been put reached the breaking point. The Dutch Minister, Dr. Van Weede, withdrew from Lisbon and at the same time the Portuguese Minister at the Hague, Count ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... proportion to the weight of dry wood per unit of volume when green. Other strength values follow different laws. The hardness varies in a slightly greater ratio than the square of the density. The work to the breaking point increases even more rapidly than the cube of density. The modulus of rupture in bending lies between the first power and the square of the density. This, of course, is true only in case the greater weight is due to increase in the amount of wood substance. A wood heavy with resin or other infiltrated ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... the silence had worn his self-control to the breaking point he rose and walked to the dining room and stood looking down into the yard. The grass out there was long and unkempt; roses bloomed on the fence; wistaria, in its deeper green of midsummer, ran riot over the trellis where Clarence had basely dodged his lovely mistress, and, after ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... She had held her breath a good many times during the dinner, and even in the theater, where certain old memories and associations sprang at them both, as it were, from ambush. But always, at the breaking point, he managed to summon up unexpected reserves for resistance, intrenched himself in the manner of his ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... not the day of miracles," continued the senator, "and it is stretching probability to the breaking point to believe that Lloyd died from natural causes at the very moment when his death would be of benefit to Nancy. In addition to this, there is the disappearance of ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... where the thin hair was wound into a tight knot and held in place by a tortoise-shell comb with a carved top, she wondered how her mother could possibly keep it up day after day as she did? But, if she had only known it, this silence, which tried her nerves to the breaking point, was positively soothing to her mother. Mrs. Carr could keep it up not only for days and weeks, but, had it been necessary, she could have kept it up with equal success for half a lifetime. While she sat there, working buttonholes in a bad light, she thought quite as passionately as Gabriella, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... his second wind in the moment of respite, and was settling into the collar in a way to strain the working harness to the breaking point. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... black and tan patch amidst the greenery, stood reaching with his tongue at an overhanging prune branch, bowed to the breaking point with green beads of fruit. As they watched, he sucked its tip between his blue lips, pulled at it with a twist of his head; the branch cracked and broke. Dynamo, his eyes closed in meditative enjoyment, started to absorb it from ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... his babble, I could not hide from him my respect and interest. He misconstrued both into respect for the present soul of Charlie Mears, to whom life was as new as it was to Adam, and interest in his readings; and stretched my patience to breaking point by reciting poetry—not his own now, but that of others. I wished every English poet blotted out of the memory of mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest names of song because they had drawn Charlie from the path of direct narrative, and would, later, spur him to imitate ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... growing seedier of raiment and fatter of body, enduring patiently the sneers and sarcasms of the indignant men of the village, while the mother's face grew thinner, her body weaker, and her once blond hair so gray that she looked ten years beyond her age. Then, four years after the son's return, the breaking point came. With the front of her garments dripping wet, she stood erect from her tub, looked at him where he sat near the kitchen fire—the base-burner had long ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson
... and body strained to the breaking point, was incoherent. "We guessed how you'd gone—the second satellite, Fellows—Hackett and I came after ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... frenziedly, cursing lowly, but none the less viciously. It was quite by accident that when his patience was strained almost to the breaking point, he struck his hand against a board that formed part of the partition between his building and the courthouse next door, and tore a huge chunk of skin from the knuckles. He paid little attention to ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... would guy his somewhat massive neighbour in a childish almost girlish voice, shouting with laughter when The Triangle rose on one arm and volleyed Dutch at him, pausing whenever The Triangle's good-nature threatened to approach the breaking point, resuming after a minute or two when The Triangle appeared to be on the point of falling into the arms of Morpheus. This sort of blague had gone on for several nights without dangerous results. It was, however, inevitable ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... and his looks are intolerable—a coarse worthless brute. Drop him head first over the rock, and catch another. But take care your rod does not bend to breaking point. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... a few hours, there was one chance in a thousand that reinforcements might arrive. After Velaine fell next day, and the defile between the two mountain-hills of Amance swarmed with yelling Uhlans, the French still held. They did not hope, but they fought. How they fought! And at the breaking point, as if by miracle, ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... it is true that all that we see is the result of development from one or a few invisible germs of life, then, in plants as well as in animals there must be a line of descent connecting all the trees and vegetables and flowers with a common ancestry. Does it not strain the imagination to the breaking point to believe that the oak, the cedar, the pine and the palm are all the progeny of one ancient seed and that this seed was also the ancestor of wheat and corn, potato and tomato, onion and sugar beet, rose and ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... Convention. The Bulgarian Premier, M. Danev, concurred in this point of view, but his conduct of the subsequent London negotiations was so 'diplomatic' that their only result was to strain the patience of the Rumanian Government and public opinion to breaking point. Nevertheless, the Rumanian Government agreed that the point in dispute should be submitted to a conference of the representatives of the great powers in St. Petersburg, and later accepted the decision of that conference, though the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... sallow, that must have given some ominous hint of fever. This delicate thing was broken on the wheel of life. They say of Anne perpetually that she was "gentle". In Charlotte's sketch of her she holds her pretty head high, her eyes gaze straight forward, and you wonder whether, before the breaking point, she was always as gentle as they say. But you never see her in any moment of revolt. Her simple poems, at their bitterest, express no more than a frail agony, an innocent dismay. That little raising of the head ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
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