"Irretrievable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the prayer, and knowing that the decree of Fate was otherwise, answered with heavy groans and unavailing tears. These were not unseen by Jupiter, who strove to console his immortal son. "To every one," he said, "his day is fixed; a short and irretrievable term of life is given to all; but to lengthen out fame by heroic deeds is the best that man can do. Under the lofty walls of Troy many sons of gods themselves perished,—among them the heroic Sarpedon, my own offspring, perished; Turnus, too, is summoned by the Fates, and has nearly ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... was run upon the shore at the highest tide. All efforts to float her again were unavailing. The calamity was irretrievable. The Aimable contained all the ammunition, the mechanic tools, and the farming and household utensils. But La Salle, ever rising superior to the blows of misfortune, still retained his firmness. Diligently he engaged in removing the stores from the wrecked ship. One of the ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... Mexicans; I mean that American farmers in many parts of the State expect unlimited credit, and profit by it in the meanwhile without a thought for consequences. Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this; they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bond-slave hopelessly grinding in the mill. So the whirligig of time brings in its revenges, and except that the Jew knows better than to foreclose, you may see Americans bound in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his married life March had learned not to censure the irretrievable; but this was just what his wife had ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... contrary, the enemy's weakest point, because this front was from its geographical position the one where British and French troops could most easily be assembled, and it was the one on which a serious defeat to the enemy necessarily threatened that enemy with a grave, if not an irretrievable, disaster. It is true that for the comparatively short period during which Russia really counted, that is to say during the early months before Russian munitions gave out, the Eastern Front—the Poland Front—was a weak point for the Germans. But the Russian bubble ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... of Lanjaron, and the tragical end of el Negro, were an irretrievable loss to the Moors. They now found it utterly impossible to oppose the superior and better disciplined troops of the Christians with any chance of success, either in open battle or in regular sieges. They therefore resolved to limit their whole means of defence ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... eight o'clock in the morning at Brighton took his seat perhaps opposite a young lady whom he thought pretty and interesting. When he arrived at Cuckfield he began to be in love; at Crawley he was desperately smitten; at Reigate his passion became irretrievable, and when he gave her an arm to ascend the steep ridges of Reigate Hill—a just emblem, by the way, of human life—he declared his passion, and they were married soon after. Nothing of this sort ever occurs on railroads. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... down upon this little brook—so insignificant in itself, but invested by law with a sanctity so awful, and so dire a consecration. The whole course of future history, and the fate of every nation, would necessarily be determined by the irretrievable act ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... reconciled to it. It is doing an irretrievable injury to one whose only fault is an undue and mistaken devotion to an unworthy cousin. If ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... the "extra- duty pay" which I received, though none of it was in money. I am inclined to think it a pretty good rule for a soldier to wait until he is "detailed," and not to try to put himself "on guard." I do not know any case in American history where the opposite course has not resulted in irretrievable injury to him who adopted it. Temporary success in gaining high position, before education and experience have given the necessary qualifications, necessarily results finally in failure; while slower advancement, giving full ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... moment she let another thought find harbour in her mind. Was the past irretrievable, the future predetermined? A woman's word had an old right to be broken. If she went to him, would not he welcome her gladly, and the future might yet ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... If the plan of politics there recommended, pray excuse my freedom, should be adopted by the King's Councils and by the good people of this kingdom (as so recommended undoubtedly it will) nothing can be the consequence but utter and irretrievable ruin to the Ministry, to the Crown, to the succession, to the importance, to the independence, to the very existence ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... not for us to portray all that passes in the human soul when it is brought into vivid communion with its Maker. It is enough for us to know that this sorrowful heart was made to exult in God, even in the calm consciousness of its irretrievable loss; and that before the sun of a day specially consecrated to grief had attained its meridian, the mourner came cheerfully forth from her place of retirement, while a chant, as of angelic voices, breathed through the temple of her sorrowful soul, even over ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... There was also in the case a measure of incapacity. Bazaine was no match as a military commander for the powerful genius of Von Moltke and the persistency of Frederick Charles and the more than two hundred thousand resolute Germans who surrounded him, and brought him and his army to irretrievable ruin. ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... brought upon yourselves these difficulties by being disaffected, and not being subject to rule. And my advice is that you become as other citizens, lest by a recurrence of these events you bring upon yourselves irretrievable ruin." ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... dissipation, and vice, for orders to kill and destroy, without dishonor; but to engage in any way in those vast and magnificent operations of peaceful industry, on which the true greatness and glory of England depend, would be perpetual and irretrievable disgrace. A young nobleman can serve, in the most subordinate official capacity, on board a man-of-war, and take pay for it, without degradation; but to build a man-of-war itself and take pay for it, would be to compel his whole ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... &c. v.; deep-rooted, ineradicable; inveterate; obstinate &c. 606. transfixed, stuck fast, aground, high and dry, stranded. [movable object rendered unmovable] stuck, jammed; unremovable; quiescent &c. 265; deterioration &c. 659. indefeasible, irretrievable, intransmutable[obs3], incommutable[obs3], irresoluble[obs3], irrevocable, irreversible, reverseless[obs3], inextinguishable, irreducible; indissoluble, indissolvable[obs3]; indestructible, undying, imperishable, incorruptible, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the air—society was too depraved to understand their import. It was reserved for later generations to give ear to their immortal utterances, eloquent witnesses to the lofty heights to which the Jewish spirit was permitted to mount in times of general decline. The northern kingdom sank into irretrievable ruin. Then came the turn of Judah. He, too, had disregarded the law of "sanctification" from Sinai, and had nearly arrived at the point of stifling his better impulses in the morass of ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... despair. She could not tell—could not guess—what had happened. She only knew that the man whose happiness meant more to her than her own, and the woman she had learned to love as a friend, had somehow come to irretrievable misunderstanding and disaster. At last she ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... hollows, were to attack them in flank, while the cavalry in one mass should then make a concentrated charge in front. It seemed certain that the effect of this movement would be to hurl the whole of the enemy's advance, horse and foot, back upon his battalia, and thus to break up his army in irretrievable rout. The plan was a sensible one, but it was not ingeniously executed. Before the handful of cavalry had time to make the proposed feint the cannoneers, being unduly excited, and by express command of Sir Francis Vere, fired a volley into the advancing columns of the archduke. This precipitated ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... innocent hour. It is that terrible "NEXT MORNING," when reason is wide awake, upon which remorse fastens its fangs. Has a man gambled away his all, or shot his friend in a duel—has he committed a crime or incurred a laugh—it is the next morning, when the irretrievable Past rises before him like a spectre; then doth the churchyard of memory yield up its grisly dead—then is the witching hour when the foul fiend within us can least tempt perhaps, but most torment. At night we have one thing to hope for, one refuge to fly ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... capture of Washington. Apparently General Lee, too, had drunk the poison of triumph, and dreamed of occupying the national capital, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and dictating the terms of peace to a disheartened North. The fascinating scheme—the irretrievable and fatal blunder—was ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... I ought to have familiarized the old De Lacey to me, and by degrees to have discovered myself to the rest of his family, when they should have been prepared for my approach. But I did not believe my errors to be irretrievable, and after much consideration I resolved to return to the cottage, seek the old man, and by my representations win him to ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... acknowledgment. Nothing but this hostile conduct would have afforded so indubitable a proof of the thing impugned. While the ancient patriarchates which had formed the substructure of the triple dais on which the Apostolic See rested were falling into irretrievable confusion, while the new State-made patriarch at Constantinople was trying to nominate and, if he could, to consecrate his elders and superiors at Alexandria and Antioch, who descended from Peter, the essential prerogative of the Apostolic See itself came forth into full light. The bishops ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... forward in a forced march, and by daybreak the Crown Prince and his 3,000 men were caught beyond hope of rescue, hemmed in between the Susquehanna River and the projecting arms of Chesapeake Bay. The surprise was complete, the disaster irretrievable, and at seven o'clock on the morning of October 15th the heir to the German throne and six of his generals, including Field Marshal von Hindenburg, surrendered to the Americans the last of their forces with ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... worldly vengeance in rooting up the dead man from the earth which covers him, nor that the executioner should now brand the mouldering bones with dishonour. No; the beloved of my soul will weep for me as one who has fallen innocent, and time will soften her sorrow; but how irretrievable a shock would it be if she learnt of the fearful and diabolical deeds of her ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Ballantyne, of which Sir Walter was a partner. The liabilities amounted to the vast sum of L102,000, for which Sir Walter was individually responsible. To a mind less balanced by native intrepidity and fortified by principle, the apparent wreck of his worldly hopes would have produced irretrievable despondency; but Scott bore his misfortune with magnanimity and manly resignation. He had been largely indebted to both the establishments which had unfortunately involved him in their fall, in the elegant production of his works, as well ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... the matter of Belgian neutrality that England and Germany went to war. As soon the British Government saw that hopes for peace were no longer possible Sir Edward Grey sent to its ambassadors in Germany and France the following telegram; "London, July 31, 1914; I still trust situation is not irretrievable, but in view of prospect of mobilization in Germany it becomes essential to his Majesty's Government, in view of existing treaties, to ask whether French [and German] Government is prepared to engage to respect the neutrality of Belgium so long as no other power violates it. A similar request ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow could there have been a more terrible picture of hopeless and irretrievable defeat. In this area alone, eighty-seven guns of various calibres, and fully a thousand horse and oxen-drawn vehicles, nearly a hundred motor-lorries, cars, field-kitchens, water carts, and a mass of ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... suspicion, of the agonizing suspence of unsatisfied doubt, and the "sickening pang of hope deferred"—heightened, rather than diminished, by the consciousness of innocent intention, and the feeling of undeserved affliction, and giving way only to the certainty of irretrievable misery, and the phrenzy of ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... find Byron's own nature again in the ascetic rule of life to which Conrad has subjected himself, and in his passionate and ideal tenderness for Medora, whose love, in his eyes, surpasses all the happiness of this world, and whose death plunges him into irretrievable despair. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... them. In scientific societies and in London generally, naturally enough he constantly came across the younger scientific men, such as Huxley and Hooker, who had declared for Darwin, and he made the irretrievable mistake of for a time attempting to disguise his opposition while he was writing the most bitter of all the articles against Darwinism. That appeared in the Edinburgh Review in April, 1860, and the range of knowledge it displayed, and the form of arguments employed, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... him as an open book, on some of whose pages he read histories of misfortune and loss, or crime and shame in the past, and on others, of eager ambitions and bright hopes for the future. There were men with gray hair and bowed forms, whose dull eyes and listless step told of hopeless, irretrievable loss; men of intelligence and ability whose recklessness or whose despondency told of some living sorrow, worse than death; there were some whose stealthy, shrinking gait and watchful, suspicious glance bespoke some crime, unknown to their fellows, ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... it was more owing to the fortunate circumstance, that the baronet's library contained nothing extremely offensive to a pure taste, nor dangerous to good morals, than to any precaution of her parents against the deadly, the irretrievable injury to be sustained from ungoverned liberty in this respect to a female mind. On the other hand, Mrs. Wilson had inculcated the necessity of restraint, in selecting the books for her perusal, so strenuously on her niece, that what at first had been the effects ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... he said. "Is this a time for Frenchmen and fellow-soldiers to fall out? We are in the midst of our enemies; a quarrel, a loud word, may suffice to plunge us back into irretrievable distress. Monsieur le Commandant, you have been gravely offended. I make it my request, I make it my prayer—if need be, I give you my orders—that the matter shall stand by until we come safe to France. Then, if you please, I will serve you in any capacity.—And ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me so impossible. I do not make things go very well, and I feel that my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. Perhaps I am thankless, but I so often feel that I should like to give it up and die. However, I presume that if I could have the opportunity I should at once desire ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the irretrievable step. Until he was actually married, a hope remained to him. He might postpone the fatal day; his purse was not yet empty. Why should he be too strict in the report of his election expenses to Constance? ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... wind-washed countryside, between Warminster, Andover, Stockbridge, and Salisbury. Yet always they will be associated in my mind with a bowing down sense of loneliness, of empty, unredeemed sadness, and of irretrievable loss. I cannot pretend that I experienced any sense of remorse or penitence, where my abortive attempt to win another man's bride was concerned. I had no such feeling. But, discreditable as that fact may be, it did not make the aching sorrow that possessed ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... repeat, that I cannot," answered the Constable. "The step which I have adopted as a great duty, may perhaps be a great error—I only know that it is irretrievable." ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that, of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was there no ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... allowances and charities in respect to those cabined and confined' his instinct toward a spirit so strapped down as Waymarsh's was to walk round it on tiptoe for fear of waking it up to a sense of losses by this time irretrievable. It was all very funny he knew, and but the difference, as he often said to himself, of tweedledum and tweedledee—an emancipation so purely comparative that it was like the advance of the door-mat ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... confirms a general impression that Lawrence's eagerness prevented his making due allowance for the way of the "Chesapeake," causing him to overshoot his aim; an error of judgment, which the accidents to the headsails converted into irretrievable disaster. The general testimony agrees that the crew, though dissatisfied at non-receipt of pay and prize money, behaved well until the moment of boarding. Four witnesses, all officers, stated ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... considered a place of punishment, or its subjects as criminals. It is to be an inviting refuge, into which the exposed may be gathered to be saved from a course which would inevitably end in penal confinement, irretrievable ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... now that the hair was suffered to lie around the face, instead of being stretched back as tightly as possible. One good result had come from the wood-shed catastrophe: the high comb had been shattered into irretrievable fragments. I inly determined that none like it should ever take ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... so irretrievable as a posted letter. This came home to Vernon as the envelope dropped on the others in the box at the Cafe du Dome—came home to him ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... from the old thoughts and old ways, Before you harden to a crystal cold Which the new life can shatter, but not mould; Freedom for you still waits, still looking backward, stays, But widens still the irretrievable space. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... fire-place and the hearth. There sat her bread and pies, in the most lamentable half-baked, sticky, doughy condition imaginable. She opened the oven, and peered in. There were Grandma's loaves, all a lovely brown. Out they came, with a twitch. Luckily, they were done. Her own went in, but they were irretrievable failures. ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... rose above the shouts of the soldiery to fill the dust-laden air with a dreadful clamor. The battle now swayed critically; a feather's weight on either side and one army would roll back in red, irretrievable ruin. It was the psychological instant. Nelson ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... me to select my pleasures with care, that I may not plunge into joyful moments that are irretrievable. May I indulge in the pleasures that bring happiness and not weariness. Grant that I may have the honor to protect others from harm and loss, as I engage in my pleasures and ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... case of conscience, as I came here," said Greenleaf. "It was, How far a promise is binding, when it involves a lasting and irretrievable wrong in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... ten, and that the eyes of all terrestrial stargazers are upon us. Adventurers, pretenders, and quacks, are our meteors, our aurorae, our comets, our falling-stars, shooting athwart our hemisphere, and exhaling into irretrievable darkness: our tuft-hunters are satellites of Jupiter, invisible to the naked eye: our clear frosty atmosphere that sets us all a-twinkling is prosperity, and we, too have our clouds that hide us from the eyes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... dramatic talent also showed promising glimpses of what was to come, and everything appeared to point to a shining stage career, when there came a crushing calamity. She lost her voice. She was now twelve years old, and in her childish perspective of life this disaster seemed irretrievable, the sunshine of happiness for ever clouded. To become a singer in grand opera had been the great aspiration of her heart. Her voice gone, she was soon forgotten by the fickle public who had looked on this young girl as a chrysalis soon to burst into the glory of ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... were coming down, excited her envy. The cool bracken grove on the top of the hill, with the oak boughs for roof, where the pigeons were raising an endless wedding hymn, and the autumn, humming, whispered to the ears of lovers in the fern, while the deer stole by. The bracken grove of irretrievable delights, of golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth! The bracken grove, sacred to stags, to strange tree-stump fauns leaping around the silver whiteness of a birch-tree nymph at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... he tinkles his little cow-bell curfew. Whenever slavery is touched, he sets up his scarecrow of dissolving the Union. This may do for the North, but I should conjecture that something more than a pumpkin-lantern is required to scare manifest and irretrievable Destiny out of her path. Mr. Calhoun cannot let go the apron-string of the Past. The Past is a good nurse, but we must be weaned from her sooner or later, even though, like Plotinus, we should run home from school to ask the breast, after we are tolerably well-grown youths. ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... of 1832, which was no doubt a statesmanlike measure, committed a great, and for a time it appeared an irretrievable, error. By that measure he fortified the legitimate influence of the aristocracy, and accorded to the middle classes great and salutary franchises; but he not only made no provision for the representation of the working classes in the constitution, but he absolutely abolished those ancient ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... fascinating a manner that within two minutes she succeeded in not only making me feel absolutely welcome and at home in her house, but also in some subtle fashion imbued me with the conviction that, serious as my misfortune undoubtedly was, it was by no means irretrievable. We could not talk confidentially at luncheon, the servants being present, but afterward, the weather being fine and the air warm for the time of year—it was the first day of December 1903—we adjourned to the garden, ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... the reign of Diabolus; not even a prayer or a sigh breaks forth from her heart for deliverance; she felt not her degradation nor her danger; she was dead while she yet lived—dead in sin; and from this state would have sunk, as thousands have, from spiritual and temporal death into eternal and irretrievable ruin. The first conception of a scheme for her deliverance from such awful danger, arises in the celestial court of her Creator; grace lays the foundation, and raises the top-stone. All the redeemed of God will unite in one song, 'Not unto us, O Lord; not unto us, but unto thy name give glory.' ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... on the other, he was almost drove distracted with Vexation and Resentment. He withdrew therefore, in a solitary Mood, to the Banks of the Euphrates, now fully persuaded, that his impropitious Star had shed its most baleful Influence on him, and that his Misfortunes were irretrievable, revolving in his Mind, all his Disappointments from his first Adventure with the Court-Coquet, who had entertain'd an utter Aversion to a blind Eye, down to his late Loss of his white Armour. See! said he, the fatal Consequence of being a Sluggard! Had I been more vigilant, ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... in fact. You must give me time to become accustomed to a whole heap of things: if we were to do anything suddenly now, we might blunder into some great mistake, perhaps irretrievable. I must train myself by degrees for another kind of life altogether; and I am going to surprise you, Keith—I am indeed. If papa takes me to the Highlands next year, you won't recognize me at all. I am going to read up all about ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... had left the metals, so to speak, and the result was confusion dire. A great shame held her, a dislocation of mind. She suffered that loneliness of soul which forms so integral a part of the misery of all apparently irretrievable disaster, whether moral or physical, and places the victim of it, in imagination at all events, rather ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... to me (in his wife's hearing!). "What a figure, and what a voice! You remember her voice? It's a loss, my dear lady, an irretrievable loss, to the operatic stage! Do you know, when I think what that grand creature might have done, I sometimes ask myself if I really had any right to marry her. I feel, upon my honor I feel, as if I had committed a fraud ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... been a wife but twelve months, when the sudden failure of the house in which her husband was a junior partner involved them in irretrievable ruin, and threw them almost penniless upon the world. At this time the commercial advantages of Australia, the opening it afforded for all classes of men, and above all, its immense mineral wealth, were ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... offerings gratified him, but yielding no return, and I ask, is there anything so discouraging to an ardent love as this cold neutrality, which proves, without a scruple, that all affection lavished upon it is an irretrievable waste. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the paper with a thrill of horror. Poor Edie! How absolutely his own small difficulties with Lord Exmoor faded out of has memory at once in the face of that terrible, irretrievable calamity. Harry dead! The hope and mainstay of the family—the one great pride and glory of all the Oswalds, on whom their whole lives and affections centred, taken from them unexpectedly, without a chance of respite, without a moment's warning! Worst of all, they would probably learn it, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Chancellor of the Exchequer should depute the great and solemn duty of determining what amount shall be expended for military purposes. There is not a country in the world that would not have been bankrupt long since, and plunged into irretrievable ruin, if the military authorities had been allowed to determine the amount of military force to be kept up, and the amount of revenue to ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... feeling. A sudden sense that what he had seen there he had himself evoked, that it was an answer to some question he had scarcely yet formulated, and that they were both now linked by an understanding and consciousness that was irretrievable, came over him. He rose awkwardly and went to the window. She rose also, but more leisurely and easily, moved one of the books on the table, smoothed out her skirts, and changed her seat to a little sofa. It is the woman who always comes out of ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... and my mother as to her character, but you will find that she is as utterly heartless as her own mother was. I always opposed the match, because I probed her mask of dissimulation, and knew Eugene could not be happy with her. But the mistake is irretrievable, and it only remains for you to watch him the more carefully. Lift me, father; I can't breathe easily. There is the doctor on the steps; I am too tired ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... arrangement for him. That, however, was before she knew what she knew now. The case was entirely altered—she could not possibly allow him to commit himself to an alliance with a daughter of these usurpers. That must be prevented at all hazards, and fortunately he had taken no irretrievable step as yet. "Unless I'm much mistaken," she thought, "he will forget all about Princess Edna if he once sees Lady Daphne. She ought to be lovely enough to satisfy even his ideal. But if he doesn't see her soon, it may be too late to ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... been as yet unsullied by any considerable violations of faith, justice, or humanity: but it must not escape remark, that the first steps taken by her in this business were strong, decided in their character, and almost irretrievable. ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and now past eighty-eight, is also still living in Clermont County, within a few miles of the old homestead, and is as active in mind as ever. He was a supporter of the Government during the war, and remains a firm believer, that national success by the Democratic party means irretrievable ruin. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... bereavement of an otherwise singularly placid and happy existence. Some two years after her marriage, Fanny Stephenson died, as yet a mere girl, leaving her lonely husband to take care of their baby boy alone and unaided. Grief for this irretrievable loss drove the young widower away for a while from his accustomed field of work among the Tyneside coal-pits; he accepted an invitation to go to Montrose in Scotland, to overlook the working of a large engine in some important spinning-works. He remained in this situation for one year only; but ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... unto me than all manslaughter; the irretrievable did ye take from me:—thus do I speak ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... danger. Also, hard as it was to fly, the danger being so close, yet he desired flight because it seemed to bring him aid, and to be the nearer way to safety; and he cast aside delay, which seemed to be an evil bringing not the smallest help, but perhaps irretrievable ruin. But just as he gained the threshold, the old man watching at the door smote him through the hams, and there, half dead, he tottered and fell. For the smiter thought he ought carefully to avoid lending his illustrious ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... Rome 647, and his triumph was in the same month in the year of Rome 692.) Happy it had been for him, if he had ended his days while he was blessed with Alexander's good fortune! The rest of his life, every instance of success brought its proportion of envy, and every misfortune was irretrievable. ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... which comes too late. The question whether Miss Aldclyffe were schemer or dupe was almost passed over by Cytherea, under the immediate oppressiveness of her despair in the sense that her position was irretrievable. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... of plenipotentiaries were carried, each on an American naval vessel, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and there at the Navy Yard began their conference. Two-thirds of the terms proposed by Japan were promptly accepted by the Russian envoys. But an irretrievable split on the remainder seemed inevitable. Japan demanded a money indemnity and the cession of the southern half of the island of Saghalien, which Japanese forces had already occupied. These ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... The grey-haired monk believed that, in his great knowledge of mankind. But she would suffer terribly, and it might be that others would suffer also. It was the consequence of an irretrievable error in the beginning, when it had seemed to the young girl just leaving the convent that the best protection against the world of evil into which she was to go would be the unconditional sacrifice ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... of the Court of France, and the rashness of the Prince, gave great sorrow to his harassed mind. Soon after his arrival in Paris he opened a correspondence with the Chevalier St. George, and represented to him that the misfortunes which had befallen the cause were not irretrievable, and that if ten regiments only could be landed in Scotland before the depopulating system adopted by the English Government had taken effect, an insurrection might again be raised with good grounds ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... damage that one may do to his system through the practice of masturbation may not be very serious, in many cases that have come under the author's observation in which the habit has reached extreme limits, very serious, sometimes irretrievable damage has been done, yet the encouraging feature of this whole matter is, that if the adolescent youth, who is practicing this habit, is warned of its danger and stops at once absolutely, nature comes to his rescue, and gradually, ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... companies are failing daily. . . The East End of London is clamouring for bread and peace at any price. If we fall, we fall for ever. . . . The working man has to choose whether he will have lighter taxation for the moment, starvation and irretrievable ruin for the future ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... own ignominious expulsion. Above all, he felt it impossible to submit any longer to the insulting tyranny of Wilder; he determined, therefore, to leave, not merely the college, but also his native land, and to bury what he conceived to be his irretrievable disgrace in some distant country. He accordingly sold his books and clothes, and sallied forth from the college walls the very next day, intending to embark at Cork for—he scarce knew where—America, or any other part beyond sea. With ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... read a Letter which is sent with the more Pleasure for the Reality of its Complaints, this may have Reason to hope for a favourable Acceptance; and if Time be the most irretrievable Loss, the Regrets which follow will be thought, I hope, the most justifiable. The regaining of my Liberty from a long State of Indolence and Inactivity, and the Desire of resisting the further Encroachments of Idleness, make me apply to you; ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... had not gone far but that from a rising ground they could see the little army of their enemies come on directly to their habitation, and, in a moment more, could see all their huts and household stuff flaming up together, to their great grief and mortification; for this was a great loss to them, irretrievable, indeed, for some time. They kept their station for a while, till they found the savages, like wild beasts, spread themselves all over the place, rummaging every way, and every place they could think of, in search of prey; and in particular for the people, of whom now it plainly appeared ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... with horrible torments—the sweet, unhappy creature! Even to this pass! even to this!—Treacherous, worthless spirit, and this thou hast hidden from me!—Stand up here—stand up! Roll thy devilish eyes round grimly in thy head! Stand and defy me with thy intolerable presence! Imprisoned! In irretrievable misery! Given over to evil spirits and to the judgment of unfeeling humanity, and me meanwhile thou lullest in insipid dissipations, concealest from me her growing anguish, and leavest her without ...
— Faust • Goethe
... given special leave of forty-eight hours to make all necessary preparations, would not you have gone where your more impressionable acquaintances and friends were gathered together in the greatest numbers, informing them of the position and doing, on the strength of it, a quiet but irretrievable swank? No ostentation, mark you, and nothing approaching a boast, but just a suspicion of a brave careless laugh, a voice just slightly choked with emotion and but a formal reluctance to accept the numerous and costly gifts proffered by relatives who at ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... of power was to be marked by a kind of civil proscription. The popularity which should arise from such an opposition was to be shown unable to protect it. The qualities by which court is made to the people, were to render every fault inexpiable, and every error irretrievable. The qualities by which court is made to power, were to cover and to sanctify everything. He that will have a sure and honourable seat in the House of Commons, must take care how he adventures to cultivate popular qualities; otherwise he may remember the old maxim, Breves et infaustos populi ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... by, unrelenting. It may be shattered with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable. ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... you, queen, for your own sake, for your husband's, for your children's, change your course; take a new direction; leave the path of danger on which you are hastening to irretrievable destruction." ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... had purloined, once more rose to confront him. Again he saw before him the irascible employer, pointing with relentless finger at the deficiency in the accounts, again he saw his weeping mother, his stern father,—the disgrace, the irretrievable past. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... mapped out, and a thousand times Virginia had gone through the ordeal of this day in her mind. Yet now the beating in her temples confused her thoughts. She was afraid that she should forget, that she should make some irretrievable blunder, and that everything would be ruined by her fault. But much might depend now upon a look or a gesture, and she held herself in a vice of self-control, fearing that her smile on greeting the courteous old Commandant was suspiciously forced, her voice unnatural, or the ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... cared less: we met during the holidays, and separated, without regret, after a month's quarrelling. When I went to sea, I ceased to think about them, concluding there was no love lost; but when I found that death had for ever robbed me of two of them, I felt the irretrievable loss. I reproached myself with my coldness and neglect; and the affection I had denied to them, I heaped threefold on my remaining sister: even before I had ever seen her on my return, the tide of fraternal love flowed towards her with an uncontrollable violence. All that I ought ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... finished, the board is cleared, Alsace and Lorraine were added to Germany, and the mistake is irretrievable. A fact accomplished cannot be blotted out. But hopeless as it all is, there are watchdogs who, on moonlight nights, call across the Vosges for revenge—for honor, for War, War, War. And the German watchdogs cry War, War, War. The word sounds the same in all languages. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... abandon the pleasing delusion, and talked over the old plans for redress of grievances, and a constitutional union with the mother country. With little or no belief in the possibility of either, they stood shivering on the banks of the Rubicon, that mythical river of irretrievable self-committal, hesitating to enter its turbid waters. A few of the bolder "shepherds of the people" tried to urge them onward; but no one was bold enough to dash in first and lead them through. Paine seized the opportunity. He had a mind whose eye always saw a subject, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... business even if we found that the Sirdar had gone down with all hands," he retorted bitterly. "Do you wish me to make my daughter believe she has come back into my life only to bring me irretrievable ruin?" ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... polygamy, but rather would they make, enforce, and maintain such laws themselves if absolutely free to regulate the subject? We can not afford to experiment with this subject, for when a State is once constituted the act is final and any mistake irretrievable. No compact in the enabling act could, in my opinion, be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... sorrowful face, the face of a man who has had his troubles of which he does not care to speak, was seized with a sort of sudden heroic madness. At that moment of irretrievable defeat, when he must have known that the company was annihilated and that there was not a man left to answer his summons, he grasped his bugle, carried it to his lips and sounded the general, in so tempestuous, ear-splitting strains that one would have said he wished to wake the dead. Nearer ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... cannot be denied that there are life-long burdens and griefs,—incurable illnesses, irretrievable losses, bereavements that will never cease to be felt, and cannot be replaced. Especially in advanced years there are infirmities, disabilities, and privations, which cannot by any possibility have a resultant ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... succeed in becoming leaders of men. A watchword or a catchword is more potent with the people than logic, especially if this be the least metaphysical. When a political prophet arises, to stir the dreaming, stagnant nation, and hold back its feet from the irretrievable descent, to heave the land as with an earthquake, and shake the silly-shallow idols from their seats, his words will come straight from God's own mouth, and be thundered into the conscience. He will reason, teach, warn, and rule. The real "Sword of the Spirit" is keener than the brightest blade ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... was now and then heard near by in uncertain directions, where perhaps the enemy were vexing our pickets. I believe it had been a helter-skelter day for us all, had the enemy got in then and attacked us in the midst of this confusion. They might surely have driven us into irretrievable rout, flying on the road to Rivas, by a spirited charge of fifty good men, or ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... extraordinary purchase!—Moses's bargain of green spectacles did not strike more dismay into the Vicar of Wakefield's family than my grandfather's rashness into the poor old shepherd. The thing, however, was irretrievable, and they returned without the sheep. In the course of a few days, however, my grandfather, who was one of the best horsemen of his time, attended John Scott of Harden's hounds on this same horse, and displayed ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... county. The neglect and scant food of the lean years had cost them their reputation. Each season they had needed smaller bands of "hoppers," and their standard had been lowered. It had been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and irretrievable loss. Because this morning, for a remote reason, the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view. Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the application of all available resource to one end ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... league to enforce peace would have to begin its regime with enforcing peace on terms of the unconditional surrender of the formidable warlike nations; which could be accomplished only by the absolute and irretrievable defeat of these Powers as they now stand. The question will, no doubt, present itself, Is the end worth the cost? That question can, of course, not be answered in absolute terms, inasmuch as it resolves itself into a question of taste and prepossession. An answer to ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... relation which was the most important event in George Eliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, have taken this particular law into ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... that in three weeks he forgot Alice, or had begun to forget her; but he had begun to reconcile himself to his fate, as people do in their bereavements by death. His consciousness habituated itself to the facts as something irretrievable. He no longer framed in his mind situations in which the past was restored. He knew that he should never love again, but he had moments, and more and more of them, in which he experienced that life had objects besides love. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... moments when Justine thought Amherst hard to Bessy, as she suspected that he had once been hard to his mother—as the leader of men must perhaps always be hard to the hampering sex. Yet she did justice to his efforts to accept the irretrievable, and to waken in his wife some capacity for sharing in his minor interests, since she had none of her own with ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... straight at the salient in the Federal line, and in spite of a brave resistance it was swept away; McLaws advancing rapidly toward the high ground in its rear. At one blow the whole left wing of General Meade's army seemed thrown into irretrievable confusion, and Hood pressing forward on McLaws's right, hastened to seize upon the famous Round Top, from which he would be able to hurl his thunder upon the flank and rear of the Federal line ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... somewhat of the same way of thinking, in regard to names, with that profound philosopher, Mr. Shandy, the elder, who maintained that some inspired high thoughts and heroic aims, while others entailed irretrievable meanness and vulgarity; insomuch that a man might sink under the insignificance of his name, and be absolutely "Nicodemused into nothing." I have ever, therefore, thought it a great hardship for a man to be obliged to struggle ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... to which death seems to menace irretrievable and final disaster. But it is personal love to which comes the divinest presage. Some voice says to our yearning heart, "Fear nothing, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... received by the Cabinet. Ministers were decidedly averse to any further assistance out of the public treasury. The prime minister was told that it could not be done. On the other hand, if it were not done, irretrievable disaster stared Canada in the face. For if the Canadian Pacific Railway went down, what of the future of the North-West? what of the credit {125} of Canada itself? This was perhaps the supreme moment of Sir John Macdonald's career. With a divided Cabinet, an unwilling following, and ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... happen almost every day, are dreadful to relate; and no punishment can be too great for those whose wilful conduct becomes the occasion of such catastrophes. Parents are deeply laden with guilt, who by this means plunge their children into irretrievable ruin; and lovers are deserving of no forgiveness, whose treacherous conduct annihilates the hopes and even the existence of ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... speak in the chamber; and he will speak according to the substance of my report. This is what I wish you to understand above all things. Next, I want you to know the German reply, I want you to realize the great, the irretrievable importance of every word which you utter. As for me, feeling as I do the full weight of my responsibilities, I wish to seek behind those words, beyond yourselves, whether there is not some detail unperceived by yourselves which will destroy the appalling truth established by your evidence. What ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... one thing in conversation with me of which I painfully felt the truth, that an addiction to worthless or useless pursuits did an irretrievable injury to the mental faculties. It is not only the actual time wasted which might have been turned to good account; the slender store of knowledge acquired on all subjects instead of the accumulation which there might have been; but, more than these, the relaxation of the mental powers till they ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... left the room to fulfil the Governor's instructions, while Basilivitch remounted his horse and returned to his kretschma, to serve, with smiling countenance and friendly mien, the men whom he had devoted to irretrievable ruin. ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... snapping of the thread of sympathy which had bound them. In this respect, he dreaded her own future as much as his own. What might she do? For he felt, in her, a potential element of desperation; a capacity to commit, at any moment, an irretrievable act. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... so long, and in now sending them back she does so without feeling sure in her mind that she could with safety sanction Mr Gladstone's new and important proposal.[9] The change it implies will be very great in principle and irretrievable, and the Queen must say that Lord John Russell's apprehensions as to the spirit it is likely to engender amongst the future civil servants of the Crown have excited a similar feeling in her mind. Where is moreover the application of the principle of public competition ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... regretfully; the recollection of something which was, and will never reappear, never! Such was the word which this wild solitude murmured to Gilbert's ear. Never! repeated he to himself, and his heart was oppressed by a sense of the irretrievable. He seated himself upon the sward, a few steps from the willow, his elbows upon his knees, and his head in his hands, and lost himself in long and painful meditation. I shall tell all; he felt at intervals in the depths of his being, ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... great pity. I have done myself an injury that is quite irretrievable;—I know that, and am prepared to bear it. I have done him, too, an injustice which I regret with my whole heart. I can only excuse myself by saying that I might have done him ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... began again, with an effort, "I want to say something to you. Once in my life, when I was almost as young as you are, I made a great mistake. Therefore I know that mistakes are not irretrievable. God teaches us sometimes by our very errors, leading us through them into light and truth. Only we must follow Him, and hold fast to the right, however difficult it may be. We must not be disheartened: ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... could accomplish, and often that not until the letter had lain weeks, or even months, on my writing-table. Without the aid of M. all records of bills paid, or to be paid, must have perished, and my whole domestic economy—whatever became of Political Economy—must have gone into irretrievable confusion. I shall not afterward allude to ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... compelled to retire upon the open bottom, closely pressed by the Siouxes, who failed not to seize each foot of ground ceded by their enemies. Had the Tetons stayed their efforts on the margin of the grass, it is probable that the honour of the day would have been theirs, notwithstanding the irretrievable loss they had sustained in the death of Mahtoree. But the more reckless braves of the band were guilty of an indiscretion, that entirely changed the fortunes of the fight, and suddenly stripped ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... in reality they bear not the least analogy to each other. In order to the forming a right judgment, it is absolutely necessary to observe this distinction, which will effectually secure you from the dangerous error of taking the shadow for the substance, an irretrievable mistake, pregnant with innumerable ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... sir, it is not to lament the irretrievable that I intrude myself upon your leisure. There is something to be done, to save, at least to spare, that lady. You did not fail to ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... I do, and, after all, perhaps, lose my character.' Again: 'Our affairs are in a more distressed, ruinous, and deplorable condition than they have been since the commencement of the war,' and he adds that unless congress comes valiantly to his assistance at once the country will sink into irretrievable ruin. Again he writes: 'Every idea you can form of our distresses will fall short of the reality. I have almost ceased to hope.' These were dark days, and the winds of adversity were beating mercilessly against the man into whose hands had been placed the cares of the great struggle for national ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... which it is impossible for a plaintiff to make out his case, or a defendant to make out his plea; as, in particular, when his proofs are beyond seas (for no protests, certifications, or procurations are allowed in our courts as evidence); and the damages are infinite and irretrievable by any of ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... from interruption to an obscure place in the suburbs. His poetical guide to godliness hearing nothing of him during half a year, and apprehending he might have carried the jest too far, sought after him, and found him just in time to prevent what Ruffhead calls "an irretrievable derangement." ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... for fear. You are perfectly safe. Your folly and wilfulness, your carelessness of opinion, your reckless spirit of defiant independence, your ugly and abominable desires"—her brain did not spare her—"might easily have brought you to irretrievable ruin. They might have destroyed you. But Fate has intervened to protect you. You have been saved from the consequences of your own imprudence—to call it by no other name. Give thanks to the God of luck, and to the woman who sacrificed her pride for your sake, and live ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... irregular; although it would be difficult to separate the effects produced by the enormous quantity of opium to which he had been accustomed from the feelings caused in a proud and intellectual man by the utter and irretrievable ruin which he had brought upon himself. Finding him possessed of great information and uncommon ability, I furnished him with books and writing materials, and extended to him many privileges not enjoyed by the ordinary patients in the wards. Observing that ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... march and encamp to the sound of instruments. Having arrived in the Milesian territory, he completely destroyed the crops and the orchards, and then again withdrew." In these expeditions he was careful to avoid any excesses which would have made the injury inflicted appear irretrievable; his troops were forbidden to destroy dwelling-houses or buildings dedicated to the gods; indeed, on one occasion, when the conflagration which consumed the lands accidentally spread to the temple of Athena near ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Seidlitz, with a swiftness, with a dexterity beyond praise, has picked his way across that quaggy Zabern Hollow; falls, with say 5,000 horse, on the flank of this big buffalo stampede; tumbles it into instant ruin;—which proves irretrievable, as the Prussian Infantry come on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... sentimental point of view; but he told himself that to be suspected of having poisoned his friend, and to be accused of poisoning, or attempting to poison, his daughter, would be ruin—ruin social and commercial, ruin complete and irretrievable. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... 1827, in consequence of the defection of part of the army from his staunch friend Bolivar, and accepted the comparatively insignificant appointment of Minister Plenipotentiary to the Governments of Chili and Buenos Ayres. In 1829, a serious rebellion, that threatened irretrievable disasters, having broken out in the Republic of Bolivia, the friends of order appealed to their old friend General Santa Cruz as being the only man capable of re-establishing public tranquillity. His ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... awaited with a certain amount of anxiety. Would Lupin not try to resume the offensive? Would he accept with a good grace the irretrievable loss of the woman he loved? Twice or three times, suspicious-looking people were seen prowling round the villa; and Valmeras even had to defend himself one evening against a so-called drunken man, who fired a pistol at him and sent ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... that day passed heavily for all of us. There was a sense of disaster in the air. Something irretrievable had fallen from our circle. But no one dared to name it. Night closed in upon the house with a changing sky. All the stars were hidden. The wind whimpered and then shouted. The rain swept down in spiteful volleys, deepening at last into a fierce, steady discharge. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... at length they forced their way into the camp of the Araucanians. Antiguenu exerted his utmost efforts to oppose the assailants; but he was at length forced along by the crowd of his soldiers, who were thrown into irretrievable confusion and fled. During the flight, he fell from a high bank into the river and was drowned. The Araucanians were defeated with prodigious slaughter, many of them perishing in the river in their attempt to escape by swimming. In this battle, which was fought ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... glad to see you," she said simply, "I have seen nobody except the doctor once, and the undertaker twice. It is dreadful to sit alone hour after hour face to face with the irretrievable. If I had not been so foolish as to enter into that agreement with Messrs. Meeson, I could have got the money by selling my new book easily enough; and I should have been able to take Jeannie abroad, and I believe that ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... portentous symbols, and that this style was therefore familiar to the Jews, would make it very natural for Jesus, in foretelling such an event as the coming destruction of Jerusalem, in conflagration and massacre, with the irretrievable subversion of the old dispensation, to picture it forth in a similar way. Fire was to the Jews a common emblem of calamity and devastation; and judgments incomparably less momentous than those gathered about the fall of Jerusalem and the dispersion of the self boasted favorites of Jehovah were often ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... great part of their devotion to Toussaint was loyalty to their race. Proceeding on this mistake, Leclerc and his council, sanctioned by the First Consul, ruined their work, lost their object, and brought irretrievable disgrace upon their names—some of which are immortalised only by the infamy of the act ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... that his ruin was irretrievable. That would be too monstrous and absurd. Because, except for this expanding trouble, everything inside him, all the main component parts that made up the vast and still solid thinking organism which had been labeled for external observers by the name of William Dale, remained quite unchanged. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... war. The Manchus hesitated, however, to attack him, knowing well his great military skill. But disunion in his ranks did what the Tartar sword could not effect. Many of his adherents deserted him, and the Chinese warrior who had never known defeat was brought to the brink of irretrievable disaster. From this dilemma death extricated him, he passing away at the head of his men without the stigma of defeat on his long career of victory. In the end his body was taken from the tomb and his ashes were scattered through the eighteen provinces of China, to testify that no trace remained ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... at each other; they did not need to speak; each knew that the girl did not realise at once the full and irretrievable nature of this misfortune. The word 'destitute' was at present unrealised, and she only thought that she had been deprived of what she loved best in the world—Ashwood. Mr. Grandly glanced at her, and then speaking ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... It is time that this ignorance should vanish. The knowledge of me and of my actions may be of use to you. It may teach you to avoid the shoals on which my virtue and my peace have been wrecked; but to the rest of mankind it can be of no use. The ruin of my fame is, perhaps, irretrievable; but the height of my iniquity need not be known. I perceive in you a rectitude and firmness worthy to be trusted; promise me, therefore, that not a syllable of what I tell you shall ever ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown |
