"Heartbreaking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at last the great falls of the Rassini, beyond which no white man had gone. They hid the canoe in the bushes and placed beneath it the iron stove and half their supply of food. Then they plunged into the brush, eastward. Bennie had never known such grueling work and heartbreaking fatigue; and the clouds of flies pursued them venomously and with unrelenting persistence. At first they had to cut their way through acres of brush, and then the land rose and they saw before them miles of swamp and barren land dotted ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... the town," the peasant put in. "Our cattle died last spring... the plague. All the beasts have died round us, all of them. There aren't half of them left, it's heartbreaking." ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... "I get news—and what heartbreaking news!—of my father, by sending a messenger to Selina. It is more than ever impossible that I can put myself in the way of seeing Helena again. She has written to me about Philip, in a tone so shockingly insolent and cruel, that I have destroyed her letter. Philip's visit to the farm, ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... am very curious to see the parting between Yves and Chrysantheme; I listen with all my ears, I look with all my eyes, it takes place in the simplest and quietest fashion: none of that heartbreaking which will be inevitable between Madame Prune and myself; I even notice in my mousme an indifference, an unconcern which puzzles me; I positively am at a loss to ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... wont, my finger, and holds it: But the grasp is the clasp of Death, heartbreaking and stiff; Yet feels to my hand as if 'Twas still thy will, thy pleasure and trust that ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... far, farther than his strength could go. Yet he swam on, fighting against the heartbreaking thought that his companion had perhaps gone "down to the dim sea-line" in very truth. She had been so brave, so strong. She had buoyed up his courage when it had been fainting; she had fought splendidly against the last terrible inertia ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... It is heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of bright-eyed boys and girls growing up amid such hopeless surroundings. I shall not soon forget the picture of one little group whom I found squatted around a missionary's knees in a little mud-walled yard just before I left Khera Kalan ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... and saw Hal's mood. "Don't misunderstand us!" he cried. "It's heartbreaking—but it's not in our power to help. We are charged with building up the union, and we know that if we supported everything that looked like a strike, we'd be bankrupt the first year. You can't imagine how often this same thing happens—hardly a month we're ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... though," said Booverman, gloomily. "If I had those two strokes back, I'd go down in history, I'd be immortal. And you, too, Picky, you'd be immortal, because you went around with me. The fourth hole was bad enough, but the sixth was heartbreaking." ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... he and Steger were constantly to be met with in courts of law, for he was constantly being reexamined in some petition in bankruptcy. They were heartbreaking days, but he did not flinch. He wanted to stay in Philadelphia and fight the thing to a finish—putting himself where he had been before the fire; rehabilitating himself in the eyes of the public. He felt ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... child, you have had a very narrow escape," he said when he had finished, drawing her into his arms and caressing her with great tenderness; "what a heartbreaking thing it would have been for us both had this little hand," taking it tenderly in his, "been robbed of its fingers; far worse to me than to ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... Elsie," Arthur returned, with ill-concealed emotion, "how illy you could be spared by any of those who know and love you. Even I should feel it an almost heartbreaking thing to lose you out of my life, and ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... is heartbreaking, and night brings no forgetfulness. Those long voiceless nights of South Africa! Not a bird's call, nor a chirp from the tiny creatures which hide in the grass. A white moon, a wide heaven filled with strange stars, and the tall moon-flowers at the gate ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... Twenty years of heartbreaking misery have not killed his love or withered his hope. Surely love like his cannot fail of its reward. And maybe in the new world he will have the happiness that has been denied him in the old world, and in the evening of his life he may have the peaceful calm that ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... so sensitive that I feared the shock would make him ill, but Allan came at last to the rescue. He had been called out of the room for a moment, and came back to find a scene of dire confusion—it took so little to upset mother, and really it was heartbreaking to all of us to ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... who later on played an important part in our sufferings, was intrusted with the ring, and was warned never to let me see it again. It was heartbreaking, as we three prisoners sat bound and held down by guards, to see the Lamas and officers handle all our things so roughly that they spoiled nearly all they touched. Particularly disgusting was their avidity when, ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... such-an-one, whom we scarcely knew, barely more than face and name then, but know and have the right to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's heartbreaking dedication to the generations whom he ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... were little better than strangers—to rouse the painful impressions of her past life which we had so carefully hushed to rest—this, even in her own interests, we dared not do. Whatever sacrifices it cost, whatever long, weary, heartbreaking delays it involved, the wrong that had been inflicted on her, if mortal means could grapple it, must be redressed without her knowledge ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last, however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial materialism and cynicism, is the key-note of the ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... gallant army, which under their chiefs had drawn to a head at Ruthven. They were to disperse, he wrote, and secure their own safety as best they could; they must wait for better times, when he hoped to return bringing foreign succours. Heartbreaking orders these were for the brave men who had lost all in the Prince's cause, and who were now proscribed and ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... It was heartbreaking work, this waiting and watching, and there was not one of the "Yankee's" crew but would have given a year's pay to have seen the mist lift long enough to bring us ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... immediately repaired by the invaders. In another place a company of reserves were recharging cases of artillery shells which had been sent back from the front in carload lots. There were horses here —a whole troop of draft horses which had been worn out in that relentless, heartbreaking labor into which war sooner or later resolves itself. The drove had been shipped back this far to be rested and cured up, or to be shot in the event that they were ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... years of heartbreaking toil at the mines my health utterly broke down. One day I fell fainting under the lash of the brutal overseer, and as I lay on the ground he ran at me and kicked me twice with his heavy iron-shod boots, once ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... there, hands loosely clasped in her lap, looking at Katie with great solemn eyes, tired wistful mouth. And it seemed to Kate that she was looking, not at her, but at life, that life which had cast her out, looking, not with rage now, but with a hurt reproachfulness in which there was a heartbreaking longing. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... were books he would as often as not waste half the next day in going again to acquire a job lot of them haphazard, and bring them home tied about with a string, and hide them from Miriam under the counter in the shop. That is a heartbreaking thing for any wife with a serious investigatory turn of mind to discover. She was always thinking of burning these finds, but her natural turn for ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... painful duty of informing Mauperin of his son's death. The old man's grief was heartbreaking. When Denoisel was admitted to Renee, he found her sitting on a footstool, sobbing, with her handkerchief pressed to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... statement of my having, in a postscript to my very first letter to her after the receipt of the hideous news, asked Mrs. Corvick whether her husband mightn't at least have finished the great article on Vereker. Her answer was as prompt as my question: the article, which had been barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap. She explained that our friend, abroad, had just settled down to it when interrupted by her mother's death, and that then, on his return, he had been kept from work by the engrossments into which that calamity ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... are emphatically "in prison," restrained by chains, goaded with whips, tasked, and under keepers. Not a wretch groans in any cell of the prisons of our country, who is exposed to a confinement so vigorous and heartbreaking as the law allows theirs to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and madame have had a terrible scene about some money that Madame (poor thing!) wanted for her father. She fainted, and the doctor came, and she had to be bled, calling out all the while, 'My father is dying; I want to see papa!' It was heartbreaking to hear her——" ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... employment of bribes, they easily contrived to escape detection. Waller felt the matter very severely. To have the poor negroes, in whom he took so great an interest, carried into slavery, after all the toil and danger he had gone through, was almost heartbreaking. For long afterwards he could scarcely bear to speak ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... tourists as well as gentlemen staying at Cong. They were on pleasure bent, and had been dreadfully annoyed and disgusted in Galway at the heartbreaking scene attending the departure of some poor Irish emigrants. They are unreasonable in their grief, and take parting as if it were death; but it is as death to many of the aged relatives who will see these faces ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... engrossing to the two ladies and Sir Nicholas. They had never come so close to the struggles of the Catholics in the north before; and although the Northern Rebellion had ended so disastrously, yet it was encouraging, although heartbreaking too, to hear that delicate women and children were ready gladly to suffer such miseries if the religious cause that was so dear to them could be thereby helped. Sir Nicholas, as has been said, was in two minds as to the lawfulness of rising against a temporal sovereign ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... live without hers. He could come and visit her, and sit in the kitchen and hold her hand, and he must manage to be content with that. But day by day the music of Tamoszius' violin became more passionate and heartbreaking; and Marija would sit with her hands clasped and her cheeks wet and all her body atremble, hearing in the wailing melodies the voices of the unborn generations which cried ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... it was all nothing, and that he would continue at fifteen shillings when the time came. And now to-night he comes to me with a face as long as a yard-arm, and says that Janter won't keep it at any price, and that he does not know where he is to find another tenant, not he. It's quite heartbreaking, that's what it is. Three hundred acres of good, sound, food-producing land, and no tenant for it at fifteen shillings an acre. What ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... up. He's never taken a cropper in his life. God smiles on him. God has always smiled on him. He's never been beaten down to his knees... yet. I... I should not care to see that sight. It would be heartbreaking. And, Evan—" Her hand went out to his in a pleading gesture that merged into a half-caress. "—I am afraid for him now. That is why I don't know what to do. It is not for myself that I back and fill ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... sailed from Sydney. At the same time Denison was touched by the allusion to passage money and expenses, and felt that making entries about the birth of clutches of chickens and ducklings, and the number of eggs sold, would be simple enough—much easier than the heartbreaking work of a supercargo, when such customers as Flash Harry of Apia or Fiji Bill of Apamama would challenge the correctness of their grog bills, and offer to fight him instead of paying. And then, he thought, it would be simply ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... as a sheet. He did not care a dollar for his lost gold, but for this Indian boy to fail him—oh, it was heartbreaking! He buried his face in his hands. "Oh, Foxy!" he almost sobbed. "Foxy, my little Chippewa friend, I have tried so hard to treat you square—and—Foxy, you've failed me! You've failed me." And big, burly Jack Cornwall's tear-wet face was lying against Larry's ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... aunt has had a heartbreaking lesson. She may say a few words to unsay words that she never ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... we pick out a buck at a considerable distance, either in his solitary retreat, or with a band of deer; and we go after him. Here we figure out where he is traveling and make a detour to intercept him. This is often heartbreaking work, up hill and down dale, but ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... her heartbreaking sobs. With the impulse of a father soothing a child he lifts her from the ground, and holding her in his strong embrace, strides on at the head of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... ne puis-je aller," etc. "Why can I not go where the roses go, And not await The heartbreaking regrets which the end of things Keeps for ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... two ways—first by the slow, halting, wasteful operation of time, which has established many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the principles of control and test which are now at our service, and which permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation the growth and development and progress that the empirical method of trial and error could ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... John Addington Symonds told her that she retained "l'oreille juste." Her husband said she wrote well, and he must know. Besides, am I to be convinced in my penultimate chapter that anything can be wrong with the model I have followed? Certainly not. It would be heartbreaking. ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... time had come for leaving, and I must depart. With two Sunday School scholars, one on either side (for I had been to my Sunday School in the afternoon for the last time), loaded with large parcels of food, we passed down the street. How easy to write it down—how heartbreaking the experience! ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... and obscure causes for crime. As far as England is concerned I should lump the influences provocative of crime and productive of misery into one—I say Drink is the root of almost all evil. It is heartbreaking to know what is going on at our own doors, for, however we may shuffle and blink, we cannot disguise the fact that many millions of human beings who might be saved pass their lives in an obscene hell—and they live so in merry England. Durst any one describe a lane in Sandgate, Newcastle-on-Tyne, ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... heartbreaking second, then he saw that caution was the better way. "I'll have to shut you out for a minute or two, boys. Go down to the bar and have a few on me." He turned, laughing and waving to them. Then the door closed, and Dozier turned slowly to face his hunted man. Into Andrew's mind came back ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... were they, with the familiar cliffs and downs under their hungry eyes, suddenly confronted with an alternative of the cruellest description, a Hobson's choice that left them no option but to submit or fight. It was a heartbreaking predicament for men, and more especially for sailor-men, to be placed in, and if they sometimes rose to the occasion like men and did their best to heave the gang bodily into the sea, or to drive them out of the ship with such weapons as their hard situation and the sailor's ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson |
