"Misery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like blasphemy. And I couldn't endure the thought of telling what I'd done, either. I argued it all out a thousand times that I hadn't done any real harm after all, but it was no use. I've been so wrapped up in my own brooding and misery that I didn't realize I was inflicting suffering on those dear to me by my conduct, and, maybe, holding some of them back from the paths of salvation. But my eyes have been opened to this to-night, and the Lord has given ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Oh, could I but have hoped, to become agreeable to Thee, such a hope would have been like a change from Hell to Heaven. So far was I from presuming to hope for it, that I feared this sea of affliction might also be followed by everlasting misery, in the loss of Thee. I dared not even desire to enjoy Thee—I only desired ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... he assured her, as he buttered a piece of toast, "happiness and hunger might well be twins. They go so well together. Misery can take away one's appetite. Happiness, when one gets over the gulpiness of it, is the best tonic in the world. And I never saw any one, dear, with whom happiness agreed so well," he added, pausing in his task to bend over and kiss her. "Do you ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not think that Harry was wholly in the right, though I dare say all my young readers will sympathize with the stout-hearted little hero. So far, Jacob Wire had done him no harm. He had suffered no hardship at his hands. All his misery was in the future; and if he had stayed, perhaps his master might have done well by him, though it is not probable. Still, I think Harry was in some sense justifiable. To remain in such a place was to cramp ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... all her wonderful career had Al'mah sung so well—with so much feeling and an artist's genius—not even that night of all when she made her debut. The misery, the gloom, the bitterness of the past hour had stirred every fibre of her being, and her voice told with thrilling power the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that break and give no sign Save whitening lip and fading tresses, Till Death pours out his cordial wine Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses,— If singing breath or echoing chord To every hidden pang were given, What endless melodies were poured, As sad as earth, as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Elfric was wholly uninfluenced: after the preaching of the Passion by a poor simple monk on Good Friday, he retired to his own little room, where he wept as if his heart would break. Had Dunstan been then in town, the whole story would have been told, and much misery saved, for Elfric felt he could trust him if he could trust anybody; but unhappily Dunstan was, as we have seen, keeping ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... to Palestine was drenched with blood, and along its dreary track lay scattered at no distant intervals the skeletons and the wrecks of nations. After four years of toil and misery and victory, Jerusalem was conquered by the crusaders; but as their conquests were not the work of wisdom and prudence, but the fruit of a blind enthusiasm and an ill-directed heroism, they laid the foundation of no permanent settlements, and in ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... fire in the stones burned blue for her my heart would be all hers. Now the necklace is gone. You can imagine the effect on a woman of that temperament. And you can see the result." He pointed with a face of misery to the solitaire on his watch-chain. "She insisted on giving this back. Says that a woman as careless as she proved herself can't be trusted with jewelry. And she's hysterically sure that misfortune will follow us for ever if ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... between them had been annihilated, that soon afterwards there came a letter from him. Yet there had not been more than two or three a year. They had been, however, like books of many pages, closely written, in Arabic, in a crabbed characteristic hand, and full of the sorrow and grandeur and misery of the East. How many books on the East David had read he would hardly have been able to say; but something of the East had entered into him, something of the philosophy of Mahomet and Buddha, and the beauty of Omar Khayyam had given a touch of colour and intellect to the narrow ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... birds are just as capable of feeling misery as we are," Cuthbert said quietly, "not perhaps over trivial matters, though they do bicker and quarrel a good deal among themselves, but they have their great calamities, and die of thirst, of hunger, and of cold. ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... turn the man's head (and it was more than probable that it would), so much jealousy would be created against him among the other railway people throughout Germany, that his life would be made a misery to him. ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... over us in this our fearful plight. Now, the Holy Ghost chooseth—as it should seem—in this place, to present us with that goodness that is in God's heart towards us, rather under the term of mercy; for that, as I said before, it so presenteth us with our misery, and his pity and compassion; and because it best pleaseth us when we apprehend God in Christ as one that has the love of compassion and pity for us. Hence we are often presented with God's goodness to us to cause us to hope, under the name of pity and compassion. 'In his pity ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... dat, my sister took down sick wid de misery. Doc., he come to see her at night. He would hide in de woods in daytime. We would fetch him his victuals. My sister was sick three weeks 'fore she died. Doc, he would take some blankets and go and sleep in dat grave, kaise he know'd dey would look in our house fer him. Dey ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... increased more rapidly, he had raised a fierce opposition against him. About this time his faithful wife Khadija died, and then his devoted uncle. His misery over these events was increased by the fact that his business failed him, and he was reduced to poverty. He tried to improve his fortunes by emigration; but the scheme was a failure. He was so persecuted by the Meccans that ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... expedients. What remains to be done is obvious to every human being—but to that man who, instead of being a Methodist preacher, is, for the curse of us and our children, and for the ruin of Troy and the misery of good old Priam and his sons, become a ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... hall, half-stunned, and with all the misery of defeat and the certainty of the futility of my death to further torture my last moments. Over me stood Ramiro, his dagger ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... him reading before the fire. "To be warm all the time, every day! It is like Aladdin. In Paris I have had weeks together when I was not warm once, when I did not have a bath once, like the cats in the street. The nights were a misery. People have terrible dreams when they are so cold. Here I waken up in the night so warm I do not know what it means. Her door is open, and I turn on my light. I cannot believe in myself until I see ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... pledged to each other with the full consent of Elfwyn and the Lady Hilda; and on those fine August nights, as they walked home after the labours in the field, or the service in the priory, they forgot all the misery of the land, and lived only ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... It is the great misery of Christians in this life, that they have such poor, narrow, and limited spirits, that are not fit to receive the truth of the gospel in its full comprehension; from whence manifold misapprehensions in judgment, and stumbling in ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... appeal to damnation. But threats of hell-fire were only meant to startle the sinner from his repose. His morality could be framed from no baser material than love to the Divine perfections. 'What thanks are due to you for not loving your own misery, and for being willing to take some pains to escape burning in hell to all eternity? There is ne'er a devil in hell but would gladly do the same' ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... following the most deplorable aberrations of a child of sin. Such a man is not Mr Patmore. He has no imagination at all—or, what is the same thing, an imagination which welters in impotence, far below the level of the emotions which it ought to overrule. The pitfalls of his tale of misery are covered over with thin sprinklings of asterisks—the poorest subterfuge of an impoverished imagination; and besotted indeed is the senselessness with which he disports himself around their margin. Maud, the victim, is the daughter of Gerald, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... from yesterday's debauch. Hank's whole face, especially in the region of his eyes, was puffed unbecomingly. Casey, squinting an angry eye at Hank and the cup of coffee, spared a thought from his own misery to acknowledge surprise that anything on earth could make Hank more unpleasant to look upon. Joe had a sickly pallor to prove the potency of ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... flowing from this power, in malignant hands, was proportioned to the good that would arise from the virtuous use of it. Hence, Wieland, in forbearing to claim his own, withheld all the positive felicity that would accrue to his vassals from his success, and hazarded all the misery that would redound ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... alive. What is the reason that my lord has neglected me for five months? The house where I am imprisoned is a starvation-house. Now have I made the jailer carry a letter to my lord. When thou, my lord, shalt make an end of my misery, send, and the imprisonment, since it has been ended by thee, I will cause to conduce to thy blessing (I will even thank thee for). I am ill ... ten KA of SU-DA, thirty-one KA ZAG-HI-LI ... two KA SAR-SAR EL-SAR send me that I die ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... unlike yourself, Maud, I know not what to make of it! I sent you that box, beloved one, to say that you had my whole heart; that I thought of you day and night; that you were the great object of my existence, and that, while misery would be certain without you, felicity would be just as certain with you; in a word, that I love you, Maud, ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... moment, beyond the chronological limits I have set myself, what constitutes the sempiternal attraction of Hamlet but the appeal to deepest experience of that history of a no less blameless dreamer, dragged, in spite of himself, into a world out of joint involved in a tangle of crime and misery, created by one of the prime agents of the cosmic process as it works in and ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... many are very happy," I replied. "You take a morbid view. Misery is not the rule. I am sure the majority ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... dollars for a minister is only a slow way of killing him, and is the worst style of homicide. Why do not the trustees and elders take a mallet or an axe, and with one blow put him out of his misery? The damage begins in the college boarding house. The theological student has generally small means, and he must go to a cheap boarding house. A frail piece of sausage trying to swim across a river of gravy on the breakfast ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... bein's always was a-hurtin' somethin'," she soliloquized, distressed. "Thar some chap has left that rabbit in misery behind him, and here I've sent Joe Lorey down the mountain with a worse hurt than it's got." She sighed. "It certain air a funny world!" ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... very reason that it was unprecedented, it seemed to stir her memory now, and awaken a dormant train of thought. The White Moll! She remembered the first time she had ever been called by that name. It took her back almost three years, and since that time, here in this sordid realm of crime and misery, the name of Rhoda Gray, her own name, her actual identity, seemed to have become lost, obliterated in that of the White Moll. A "dip" had given it to her, and the underworld, quick and trenchant in its "monikers," had instantly ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... wholly unable to measure the proportions of the gigantic genius of the author of "Notre Dame," and hence she discharges at him a volley of denunciatory epithets, borrowed always from the severest classic style—"the champion of vice," "the chronicler of sin," "the historian of shame and misery." She could not believe that in all his writings it was possible to discover a single honourable, innocent, and wholesome thought. Sin was the Muse which he invoked; horror attended his footsteps; thousands of monsters served as his escort, ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... elegant!" She turned to her giggling friends and introduced them gushingly. Carroll was in misery—a martyr to the cause. But Evelyn would not let him get away. Through her sudden friendship with the great detective, Evelyn was building up a reputation that was destined to survive for years, and she was not one to fail to make ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... Countrymen, contradicted by none. Briefly, what is recounted of him, is, that when he first appeared to the World, and a Youth, he had a very fine treble Voice, admired and encouraged universally, but by a dissolute Life lost it, and his Fortune. Being reduced to the utmost Misery, he entered into the Service of a Composer, as a Copyist, where he made use of the Opportunity of learning the Rules of Composition, and became a good Proficient. After some Years, he recovered a little Glimpse of Voice, which by Time ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... torment—always weeping and gnashing your teeth? All this, I say, is abiding you who will not embrace Jesus Christ, whatever your profession be. For, believe me, a profession will not save you from this eternal misery, if ye receive not Jesus Christ. Whatever your sufferings be here, yet ye shall suffer this hereafter, if ye receive not Jesus Christ. My heart bleeds for many sufferers in Scotland, who shall suffer everlasting torment in hell, because they will not receive ...
— The Life of James Renwick • Thomas Houston
... him was branded with the name of Jacobin, and you were deprived of good society along with the countenance of the government: an intolerable situation, particularly for a woman, and of which no one can know the misery ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... to do this, Jack,' she cried. 'I swear that I will tell you everything some day, but nothing but misery can come of it if you enter that cottage.' Then, as I tried to shake her off, she clung to me in a frenzy ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... visits a number of calls that were not pressing. When he came out to his buggy, Harry Aldis stood at the horse's head, at the carriage steps beside the driveway, his chin sunk on his breast, in an attitude of hopeless misery. ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... impossible, notwithstanding his treachery, to avoid feeling some compassion for the emperor, whose life at this time was rendered one long scene of misery by the presumption of the Crusaders, and his not altogether groundless fears of the evil they might inflict upon him, should any untoward circumstance force the current of their ambition to the conquest of his empire. His daughter Anna Comnena ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... all as careful as you be, but they're falling into shiftless ways. If I'm sick and have to depend on myself, all right. I'll dose up with lobelia or gamboge, or put a blister-plaster on the back of my neck or take a drink of catnip tea or composition, and then the cure of my misery is with the Lord God of Hosts. But if I send for an administrator, it's different. He takes the responsibility and I want him to fulfil every will of the Lord. When an Elder comes to administer to me and is afraid ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... such persons vent their sorrow. Her hair hung in long wisps on her neck. Her dress was torn and draggled, and there was a great bruise over her eye. She had the air of one frantic with despair and misery. ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... with an access of misery. Frenziedly he caught her hands and pressed them. Annadoah struggled. His words ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... premeditated science made these horrors worse. Our recoil from this deed of hers and what it has brought upon the world is seen in our wish for a League of Nations. The thought of any more battles, tenches, submarines, air-raids, starvation, misery, is so unbearable to our bruised and stricken minds, that we have put it into words whose import is, Let us have no more of this! We have at least put it into words. That such words, that such a League, can now grow into something more than ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... here in these mountains for our children. If a child's afflicted in its nether limbs, it don't need to lay helpless no more, a misery to itself and everyone else. There's the waters of Warm Springs and doctors with knowing that are there to help them on foot," a mountain mother told me last winter when I stopped at her cabin. "Take the night," she urged. "You can ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... to say to her? What message will you send to her? You will hardly let me go back without some word." This was said to him by his sister as he walked about the room in his misery. What message could he send? He desired to return himself, and was willing to do so at a moment's notice if only he could be assured that if he did so she would as a wife do her duty by owning that she had been in the wrong. How should he live with a wife who would ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... of that utter clinging mother-love in her eyes that claims any degree of suffering gladly rather than the loss of her own—passionately welcoming misery in preference to loss. She, too, had divined ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... was a ponderous oaken bench, and upon this old Russell seated himself wearily. Here he sat, and as Harry completed his survey of the apartment, his eyes rested upon his unfortunate companion as he sat there, the picture of terror, despondency, and misery. Harry felt an involuntary pity for the man; and as his own flow of spirits was unfailing, he set himself to work ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... turned and faced me, empty as I was. The soul in her, realizing the truth, stood erect to meet the misery of lonely pain that inevitably lay ahead—in some sense as though she welcomed it already; and, strangest of all, she blossomed, physically as well as mentally, into a fuller revelation of gracious loveliness than before, sweeter and more exquisite, indeed, than anything life had yet shown ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... lasted till eight o'clock in the morning; and the nationality of the small majority purchased the undying hatred of the English minister, William Pitt. The people were still suffering from the cruel exactions of landlords and tithe-proctors. Their poverty and misery were treated with contempt and indifference, and they were driven to open acts of violence, which could not be repressed either by the fear of the consequences, or the earnest exhortations of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... man is absolutely indifferent to the happiness and misery of others. The first has a natural tendency to give pleasure, the second pain. This every one may find in himself. It is not probable that these principles can be resolved into principles more simple and universal, whatever attempts may have ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... and he can hear the newspaper boys telling lies (perhaps special lies he has paid for) at the top of their voices; he can note as evening draws on the pleasant glare of gas upon the street mud and there pass him the familiar surroundings of servility, abject poverty, drunkenness, misery, and vice. He has his music-hall on the Saturday evening with the sharp, peculiar finish of the London accent in the patriotic song, he has the London paper on Sunday to tell him that his nastiest little Colonial War was a crusade, and ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... was so busy with Bobby's supper, and, withal, so accustomed to the woman's looks of hopeless misery that she had failed to observe anything unusual until her attention was thus called to her, "what ever have you done ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... any thought that I should take the field against the common enemy, leaving this tangled web of mystery and misery behind. In sheerest decency I owed it first to Jennifer to make a swift and frank confession of the ill-concluded tale of happenings. That done, I owed it equally to him and Margery to find some way to set ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... packet dealt; the rest of the cards in that packet are unused and remain unseen. A novel and interesting addition to the game is that the three of clubs (called "Cato") does not rank as a club but can be played to any trick and win it. The dealer, in addition to his other calls, may declare "misery" when he has to make less ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of the churches and many other organizations for many long weary years have been bailing out the troughs of human misery with their little pails; their children's shelters, day nurseries, homes for friendless girls, relief boards, and innumerable public and private charities; but the big taps of intemperance and ignorance and greed are running night and day. It is ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... that there will be some holy man of God in their camp to whom my Lord will reveal His will, as He hath done to me, and will show the things which must come to pass. I would so willingly spare all the bloodshed and misery which war will bring. It is so terrible a thing for Christian men ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... intended to signify her emancipated view of things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I am sorely tempted to hiss out "Petroleuse!" It is a small matter to have our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our sense of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, the promise of life—penetrating affection, stained and blotted out by images of repulsiveness. These things come—not of higher education, but—of dull ignorance fostered into pertness by the greedy ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... her hands upon her breast: Oh mockery at misery's hest! We hid in flowers her body's grief,— Counting by many a rose ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... of the actual misery which filled the heart of the graceful, dignified young man by her side. She considered herself in the position of a mother, who forces an undesired, but nevertheless, delectable sweet upon a child, who gazes at her with adoration when the savour has reached his palate. She did not expect ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in every direction but the right one, seeking vainly to discover me; and he evidently dreaded that I was drowned, his face being the picture of misery and despair. ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... these people's houses! She knew that, for all her silken gown, she had no place among them; but she thought that they were not kind to stare and whisper and laugh, shaming her before one another and before him. Her heart swelled; to the dreamy misery of the day and evening was added a passionate sense of hurt and wrong and injustice. Her pride awoke, and in a moment taught her many things, though among them was no distrust of him. Brought to bay, she put out her hand and found ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... is!" replied Haney, hastily. "I'd forgotten. Well, take care o' yourself," he added, genially, walking on in instant forgetfulness of the woman's misery, for his mind was turned upon the talk which his younger brother Charley had given him ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... raids were by Zeppelins on little English seaside towns—Scarborough, Hartlepool, and Harwich. Except in so far as they inflicted mutilation and death upon many non-combatants, mostly women and children, and misery upon their relatives and friends they were without effect. But early in 1915 began a systematic series of raids upon London, which, by October of 1917, had totalled thirty-four, with a toll of 865 persons killed, and 2500 wounded. It seems fair ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... had spoken, he was sorry. The anger in her eyes changed instantly, first to searching, then to misery. She cried out: ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of something to say that wouldn't hurt his father's feelings or his mother's, but couldn't, and he stood there in misery and disappointment, his lips quivering and twisting and the tears gathering ...
— The Circus Comes to Town • Lebbeus Mitchell
... or blasted Upon this bough? a lightning stroke had come Even from that Heaven in whose light I bloom'd And taken away the greenness of my life, The blossom and the fragrance. Who was cursed But I? who miserable but I? even Misery Forgot herself in that extreme distress, And with the overdoing of her part Did fall away into oblivion. The night in pity took away my day Because my grief as yet was newly born, Of too weak eyes to look upon the light, And with the hasty notice of the ear, Frail life was startled ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... communicate in visions, they will be revealed to each other in dreams. Bind them by worldly ties; wed your son, in the time to come, to another woman, and my grand-daughter to another man. In vain! I tell you, in vain! You may doom them to misery, you may drive them to sin—the day of their union on earth is still a day predestined in heaven. It will come! it will come! Submit, while the time for submission is yours. You are a doomed man. I see ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... night speechless with misery because Matthew had said the wind was round northeast and he feared it would be a rainy day tomorrow. The rustle of the poplar leaves about the house worried her, it sounded so like pattering raindrops, and the full, faraway roar of the gulf, to which she listened delightedly at other times, ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... jeopardy by the hostile designs and insidious acts of a foreign nation, as well as by the dissemination among them of those principles, subversive of the foundations of all religious, moral, and social obligations, that have produced incalculable mischief and misery in other countries; and as, in fine, the observance of special seasons for public religious solemnities is happily calculated to avert the evils which we ought to deprecate and to excite to the performance of the duties which we ought to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... should be. But try and see his point of view. He has the attachment to Cloom that you have—not the same kind; he would never have felt it a trust or something to be made better for its own sake, but he does feel he has a right to it, and that is a hard thing to bear. Ishmael, all this misery, the reason why your brothers have not been brought up as you have, with the same advantages, which now they can never gain all their lives long, the reason why Vassie, who is clever and pretty, will have a difficulty in getting a husband worthy of her, is because ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... long he walked without pause; it seemed unending to him; at length the faintest rosy tint, a reflection from morning's palette of splendor, lodged on the glass of his eastern window, and woke him from his misery. At the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... a woman determines to make a business, a trade, of her beauty, it does not follow that she will make a fortune. Lovely creatures may be found there, and full of wit, who are in wretched circumstances, ending in misery a life begun in pleasure. And this is why. It is not enough merely to accept the shameful life of a courtesan with a view to earning its profits, and at the same time to bear the simple garb of a respectable middle-class wife. Vice does not triumph so easily; it resembles ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... as he wanted expansively at this moment to want something, somebody—who was not Eunice—he was perfectly clear on this point—but should be in a measure all she stood for to him. He had renewed in the night, though in so short a time, not less acutely, all the wounded misery of what Eunice had forced upon him. He was there between the dark and dawn, and here again in the cool of the garden, to taste the full bitterness of the conviction that he was not good enough to be loved. He was not to be helped ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... peaceful and happy village of Brunen on the Rhine, misery had made itself felt. Grief and anguish dwelt with the bereaved mothers, with the forsaken brides, and the weak old men; with the useless cripples, who had returned from the war, and who spent their time in relating the dangers ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... kneeling, offering up prayer after prayer for God's forgiveness, both for herself and for him who had brought her to this pass of sin and misery. "'Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa!'" repeated she, bowing herself to the ground. "I am the chief of sinners; who shall deliver me from this body ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... scandalous conduct on your part, by the fruitless promise of a hidden treasure, to lead an honest man, who has hitherto faithfully followed his calling, into ruin—to induce him to neglect his business—and to bring misery upon his wife and children, by rendering him improvident and idle. Begone! and delude them no longer ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 482, March 26, 1831 • Various
... of Paradise Lost. But I am no table-tipping medium eager for your applause or your money. I don't care for money. I think you know enough of me through the newspapers to vouchsafe that. You are rich, and it is your chief misery. Listen! Whether you believe it or not, you are very unhappy. Let me read your horoscope. Your club life bores you; you are tired of our silly theatres; no longer do you care for Wagner's music. You are deracinated; you are unpatriotic. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... he has embittered our existence, withered our youth, ruined my future, and done his best to spoil yours by compelling you to marry Costeclar. And, to crown all these deeds of kindness, he runs away now, after stealing twelve millions, leaving us nothing but misery and a disgraced name. ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... perfectly legitimate desire to get some amusing novel ideas for each other, and then comes jealousy. I sometimes think that if Adam and Eve had been merely engaged, she would not have talked with the serpent; and the world had been saved an infinity of misery. ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... quarrelling, were all going on at once, interspersed with occasional shouts of laughter at some vulgar joke, or at the fluttering and cries of a wounded fowl. Sometimes a poor chicken would receive several shots, before its misery would be terminated by a fatal one. When one fowl was killed, a fresh one was brought forth. Each man who fired at the mark, paid a trifling sum for the privilege, and was entitled to the fowl, if ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell
... it! Ay, we shall fight in such a way, my friend, that all Europe shall hide her face, and feel the shame of the carnage and misery for which her miserable selfishness is responsible. There is one thing about my people, Brand, which is divine, and, thank God, it is in my own blood, too, notwithstanding my years of exile. We love our country, our hills and mountains, our corn-fields and vineyards, our ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... vagabonds; or, as banished men, to forsake the kingdom!" Again: "with bloody tears of heart, he, and his wife, their seven children, and their servant (seventeen of them in all), did that day make their petition unto their honours," &c. Can human misery be sharper than this—and to be the lot of a philosopher and bibliomaniac?! But "VENIET ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... darkness with the light and joy of all about me; nay, you cannot imagine what a very hard thing it is, at such times, to overcome some savage feelings of misanthropy which will present themselves. But when I am alone, and under the influence of opium, I lose for a season my chief source of misery, myself; my mind takes a new and unnatural channel; and I have often thought that any one, even that of insanity, would be preferable to its natural one. It is drawn, as it were, out of itself; and I realize in my own experience the fable of Pythagoras, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... adventure is on which we are set; it is this—there is, some small distance from this, a castle of a knight hight Sir Turquine, who hath in his prison a great many knights of King Arthur's court, and several knights of his Round Table. These knights he keepeth there in great dole and misery, for it is said that their groans may be heard by the passers along the high-road below the castle. This Sir Turquine is held to be the greatest knight in the world (unless it be thou) for he hath never yet been overcome in battle, whether a-horseback or a-foot. But, indeed, I ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... their will into the field, quartered and taken care of by our Government, and all possessed with the absurd prejudice that, as they have been maimed in fighting the battles of rebellion, the restoration of legitimate sovereignty would to them be an epoch of destruction, or at least of misery and want; and this prejudice is kept alive by emissaries employed on purpose to mislead them. Of these, eight thousand are lodged and provided for in this city; ten thousand at Versailles, and the remainder in Piedmont, Brabant, and in the conquered departments on the left ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... gone into business again; she had risked their whole fortune in a purchase of all the railway systems and coal and steel companies in the country on a margin, and she was now trembling, every Sabbath hour, lest through some chance word of hers he find it out. In her misery and remorse for this treachery she could not keep her heart from going out to him in pity; she was filled with compunctions to see him lying there, drunk and contented, and ever suspecting. Never suspecting—trusting her with a perfect and pathetic trust, and she holding over him ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... eyebrows contracted. Scolded, struck, on such a day, and in the presence of that man! Two heavy drops formed in her eyes and rolled down her white cheek. I trow those two drops turned the scale held by the Great Judge's hand, from which happiness and misery are measured ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... abode of misery and despair, a hell, such as Dante might have conceived, a crowd of wretches, some of whom were to be hanged in the course of the week, greeted me by deriding my elegant attire. I did not answer them, and they began to get angry and to abuse me. The gaoler quieted them by saying ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova • David Widger
... and lived through the full force of the blight and misery—would persuade me that it all means nothing, and is a mere amusing trifle! Trifle, indeed, that breaks hearts and leads to despair and self-destruction and dishonour! No, no, no—nothing shall lead me to a gamester! though Frank may be lost to me! He will be! he ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Bernard was able to bear it. Then, sir, to bear it was to begin to love it, for it was the most infectious joyfulness that ever gladdened man's ears. The change, once begun, went on; he hung upon her voice as if it had been music. Every laugh shook him out of his long misery—it appeared to be to him like new life running along the nerves of the old dead tabernacle. So might one think of a man in the desert, as he looks down into the well, with the reflection of the sun in it; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... high Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute; And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argued then, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and apathy, and glory and shame; Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy. Paradise Lost, Bk. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... your heart will have already told you why it is not for you and me now to look forward to the happiness that once seemed to lie before us. You know what a terrible result has followed from my rashness; but then you are free—that is something; for the rest, perhaps it is less misery to die, than to live and know that you have caused another's death. You remember, the night they played Fidelio, I told you I should always try to remain worthy of your love; and how could I keep that promise if I permitted myself to think of enjoying ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... this nature aside for the moment, my younger readers need only hold the broad fact that during the whole of the fourth century, multitudes of self-devoted men led lives of extreme misery and poverty in the effort to obtain some closer knowledge of the Being and Will of God. We know, in any available clearness, neither what they suffered, nor what they learned. We cannot estimate the solemnizing or reproving power of their examples on the less zealous Christian world; ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... righteous—since a single slip of faith may throw him on his back, like a skaiter, while gliding smoothly to his paradise. Now, therefore, whatever the certainty of faith in the facts may be, the certainty of the individual as to his happiness or misery is no greater than ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... gate, walked slowly down the avenue, enjoying the grateful and cooling shade, and so much pleased with the placid ideas of rest and seclusion excited by this confined and quiet scene, that he forgot the misery and dirt of the hamlet he had left behind him. The opening into the paved court-yard corresponded with the rest of the scene. The house, which seemed to consist of two or three high, narrow, and steep-roofed buildings, projecting ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... into relation with what we in the West believe to be real experience. In a railway accident a driver is pinned against the furnace and slowly burned to death, praying the bystanders in vain to put him out of his misery. What is this? It is the sport of God! In Putumayo innocent natives are deprived of their land, enslaved, tortured, and murdered, that shareholders in Europe may receive high dividends. What is this? The sport of God! In the richest countries of ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Headstone had been racked and riven in his mind since the quiet evening when by the river-side he had risen, as it were, out of the ashes of the Bargeman, none but he could have told. Not even he could have told, for such misery ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... partly upon his ignorance of future events, and partly upon the hope of a future state, that all his happiness in the present depends, ver. 77, &c. IV. The pride of aiming at more knowledge, and pretending to more perfection, the cause of Man's error and misery. The impiety of putting himself in the place of God, and judging of the fitness or unfitness, perfection or imperfection, justice or injustice of his dispensations, ver. 109, &c. V. The absurdity of conceiting himself the final cause of the creation, or expecting that perfection in the moral ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... came to be a misery, for the sweeping and the dusting and the baking and the brewing which he encountered there left him no place to call his own, so that he lost his patience at last ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... trouble, trial, ordeal, fiery ordeal, shock, blow, cark[obs3], dole, fret, burden, load. concern, grief, sorrow, distress, affliction, woe, bitterness, heartache; carking cares; heavy heart, aching heart, bleeding heart, broken heart; heavy affliction, gnawing grief. unhappiness, infelicity, misery, tribulation, wretchedness, desolation; despair &c. 859; extremity, prostration, depth of misery. nightmare, ephialtes[obs3], incubus. pang, anguish, agony; torture, torment; purgatory &c. (hell) 982. hell upon earth; iron age, reign of terror; slough of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... nearly made the whole thing come to a standstill; and, unfortunately, no one was on the spot to stop it in time. I heard the noise, and rushed on deck; the puppy had just been drawn out nearly dead; the whole of its stomach was torn open. It gave a faint whine, and was at once put out of its misery. Poor little frolicsome creature! Only a little while ago you were gambolling around, enjoying an innocent romp with your brothers and sisters; then came the thigh-bone of a bear trundling along the deck from the ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... dissolute man died in August, 1752, and the poet was born on the 20th of the following November.[3] Such a parent could not be a loss; he would have been, in all human probability, as careless of his son as he was of his wife; and, at all events, Chatterton had not the misery of early cruelty to complain of, for he had a mother, tender and affectionate, although totally unfit to guide and manage his wayward nature. Her first grief with him arose, strange as it may seem, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... home, nor the road, not even ask for a morsel of bread.... They thought that he would die somewhere behind a fence from hunger, or be drowned in some river.... What did they leave him? Nothing, but the means of discerning the different degrees of misery. And this meant torture upon torture.... He might have been sitting somewhere near the church, or along the road, and Zbyszko passed by without recognizing him. May be he even heard Zbyszko's voice, but he could not hail him.... Hey!... I cannot keep myself from weeping!... God wrought ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Clara to lift her head to listen to the kind words. 'Was I so very wrong?' she murmured; 'you know I never thought of that! Will he forgive me, and let me come home? But, oh, granny! and what is to become of my uncle?' she ended, with a sound of misery. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thousand pounds—an immense sum for the period—was set upon his head—although his secret was known to hundreds of persons in every walk of life, and even to the beggar and the outlaw—not one attempted to betray him. Not one of all his followers, in the midst of the misery which overtook them, regretted having drawn the sword in his cause, or would not again have gladly imperilled their lives for the sake of their beloved Chevalier. "He went," says Lord Mahon, "but not with him departed his remembrance from the Highlanders. For years and years ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... much more which she will do? She has delivered the insane—I may say by the scientific insight of one man, more worthy of titles and pensions than nine-tenths of those who earn them—I mean the great and good Pinel—from hopeless misery and torture into comparative peace and comfort, and at least the possibility of cure. For children, she has done much, or rather might do, would parents read and perpend such books as Andrew Combe's and those of other writers on physical education. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... guests is the best relief which can be afforded for the misery of such domestic feuds. After such words as had been spoken Lord and Lady Trafford could hardly have sat down comfortably to dinner, with no one between them but Mr. Greenwood. In such case there could not have been much conversation. But now the Marquis could ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... yes, my mother"-Clotilda shakes her head in sorrow. "How strange that, by her misfortune, all, all, is misfortune for ever! from one generation to another, sinking each life down, down, down, into misery and woe. How oft she clasped my hand and whispered in my ear: 'If we could but have our rights.' And she, my mother,—as by that sacred name I called her-was fair; fairer than those who held her for a hideous purpose, made her existence loathsome to herself, who knew the right but forced ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... policy they had everywhere pursued, they confirmed the mandarins in their offices and granted a general amnesty to all who would lay down their arms. As the Tatars entered the city the emperor left it, and after wandering about for some days in great misery, he drowned himself in the Yangtsze-kiang. Thus ended the Ming dynasty, and the empire passed again under a foreign yoke. By the Mings, who partly revived the feudal system by making large territorial grants to members of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... I went into my room, closing the door behind me sharply. I spent a wretched hour or so, sorting over my clothes and possessions, trinkets and the like, and packing them for a journey. Nothing was very clear in my mind, between bitter repining at the misery which had come upon me and the growing repulsion I felt for making these two unhappy, but it was at least obvious that I must as soon as possible ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... throng, foredoomed to crime and punishment, rightfully begins at some distance from the police office; and that the careless maintenance from year to year, in this, the capital city of the world, of a vast hopeless nursery of ignorance, misery and vice; a breeding place for the hulks and jails: is ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... with tears in her eyes. She never before had seen a man show suffering. The misery she had known in life had been more or less veiled to her and softened by falling on older and friendly shoulders. She now got for the first time a clear view of Carrington, apart from the quiet exterior in which the man was hidden. She felt quite sure, by a sudden ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... to punish a man for not doing what he cannot do. We think, therefore, that if we say that we cannot do well, we establish also our own claim to escape from punishment. But God declares that a state of sin is and must be a state of misery; and that if we cannot escape the sin, we cannot escape the misery. According to God's meaning, then, the words, "Ye cannot do the things which ye would," mean no other than this: "Ye cannot escape from hell; ye cannot be redeemed ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... beings. He took them in his hands so that they should multiply; he paired them, and from this sprung the Indians. When there were people he placed them upon the earth, but he soon observed that they were subject to sickness, misery, and death, and that unless he provided them with the Sacred Medicine they ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... wish fulfilled," answered Maltravers, almost with sternness, and with an expression of great pain in his compressed lips, "I should have to thank you for much misery." He rose ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was a passionate devotion, and through it came the only real trouble they knew—they were afraid that God would answer her prayer, and take her from them. So her bad days came to mean days of black misery for them, when they spent their time beseeching God not to take her prayers seriously: it was only because she was ill that she thought she wanted to die, and would have changed her mind by the morning. ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... distinguished her in times of trial. "It falls a little heavily on a poor sick woman—innocent of all suspicion, and insulted by the most heartless neglect. Don't let me distress you. I shall rally, my dear; I shall rally! In this dreadful calamity—this abyss of crime and misery and deceit—I have no one to depend on but myself. For Blanche's sake, the whole thing must be cleared up—probed, my dear, probed to the depths. Blanche must take a position that is worthy of her. Blanche must insist ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... men judged the slayer of the settler according to their laws. They sent him to ha shackled with chain and iron ball and do heavy, squaw-work in misery the balance of his years. They did not say because this Indian was bad that all Seminoles were slayers ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... servants much longer; you're lucky if you find one of the old sort, who knows how to light a fire or wash a dish. Go into the houses of men with small incomes; what do you find but filth and disorder, quarrelling and misery? Young men are bad enough, I know that; they want to begin where their fathers left off, and if they can't do it honestly, they'll embezzle or forge. But you'll often find there's a worthless wife at the bottom of it,—worrying and nagging because she ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... section at least, had given up hope of being able to score the big victory that was in every mind when the war started. What the outcome would be did not seem to be clear to them. All they knew was that the work meant misery for them, and that, as far as they could see, this misery would continue on and on indefinitely. They had lost confidence in the newspapers. It was plain to be seen that the stereotyped rubber-stamped kind of ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... the colonel knew no bounds, and he vowed all sorts of vengeance. You may fancy one of his men did not join in his threats. Many a time that fortnight Captain Morgan wished a shot from the castle might find him out and end his misery. And yet whenever he was tempted to desert or quarrel with his colonel the thought of the lady left with no protector at the mercy of such a man held him to his post. All he could do was once or twice to urge the colonel to raise the siege, ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... he went by himself to nurse these wretched thoughts, and although the sight of Ida had suggested them, he went on to think of himself, and soon became so absorbed in his own misery that he quite forgot about her, and, failing to rejoin the girls that evening, Ida had to go home alone, which was a great disappointment to her. But it was, perhaps, quite as well, on the whole, for both of them that he was not thrown with ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... as simple as the flowers of the field; knowing when, but scarcely why, he closes to the bitter wind; and feeling why, but scarcely when, he opens to the genial sun; yet without his questing much into the capsule of himself—to do which is a misery—he may have a general notion how he ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... lot of these men; and they go through it. They have their share of injustice, tyranny, disappointment; one by one each bright boy's dream of success and renown is scourged out of their minds, and sternly and lovingly their Father in heaven teaches them the lesson of all lessons. By what hours of misery and blank despair that faith was purchased, we can only guess; the simple strong men give us the result, but never dream of sitting down and analysing the process for the world's amusement or their own glorification. We question, indeed, whether they could have told us; whether ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Convent at Matanzas, while her noble brother is a slave, with felons, laboring with the cursed chain-gang in the same city to which we are bound. Now, boys, do you wonder that when I found myself under orders to go again to the scene of all this misery I was affected, and that a melancholy has possessed me which has increased as the voyage has progressed? I did determine at first that I would leave the ship at Gibralter and go home, but I dreaded to part with my shipmates. I shall not go ashore while we lay at Matanzas for many ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... of his valuable gifts to herself—jewelry, laces, and two children—and sent them to his hotel. The message was received by the Countess, who gladly accepted the charge of the little ones, but returned the carriage and its other contents. On Lauraguais's return he was thrown into the deepest misery by Sophie's resolve; but, although she was touched by his pleading and reproaches, she remained inflexible. She accepted, however, a pension of two thousand crowns which his generosity settled on her. We are told that the sentimental Countess joined with her husband in urging ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... attempt to prevent the spread of slavery provoked a brief but momentous debate. Clay left the Speaker's chair to remonstrate, "in the name of humanity," against a policy which could result, he believed, only in the misery of the slaves of the South. The lot of the negro would be vastly improved if the unfortunate people were more widely dispersed. Taylor, of New York, called this a specious plea. "It is that humanity," said he, "which seeks to palliate disease by the application of nostrums, ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... this act 376 houses were dissolved with an aggregate revenue of L32,000, not counting plate and jewels confiscated. Two thousand monks or nuns were affected in addition to about eight thousand retainers or servants. The immediate effect was a large amount of misery, but the result in the long run was good. Perhaps the principal political importance of this and the subsequent spoliations of the church was to make the Reformation profitable and therefore popular with an enterprising class. For the lion's share of the prey did not go ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... pair, why gave we you to King Peleus, to a mortal? but ye are without old age, and immortal. Was it that with men born to misery ye might have sorrow?"—Iliad, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... face and defiled her feet with barbaric orgies; but she knew it no more,—her children were gone out into the world. And the world had need of them. Its rank and miasmatic civilization,—its hotbeds of sin and misery,—its civil corruptions and its social lies,—its reeling, rotten principalities,—its sickly atmosphere of effeminate luxury, wherein neither justice nor judgment lived, and the solitary virtues left mere effete shadows of philanthropy and cowardly impulses ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... the animosity of the contending parties. The Pagans were incensed at the rashness of a recent and obscure sect, which presumed to accuse their countrymen of error, and to devote their ancestors to eternal misery. The habits of justifying the popular mythology against the invectives of an implacable enemy, produced in their minds some sentiments of faith and reverence for a system which they had been accustomed to consider with the most careless levity. The supernatural ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... what that meant. She had often seen it creeping over women's faces for months, who died at last of slow hunger or consumption. That meant death, distant, lingering: but this—Whatever it was the woman saw, or thought she saw, used as she was to crime and misery, seemed to make her sick with a new horror. Forgetting her fear of him, she caught his shoulders, and looked keenly, steadily, into ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... good old Vicar to her sire applied For help, and help'd her when her sire denied. When in few years Death stalk'd through bower and hall, Sires, sons, and sons of sons, were buried all, She then abounded, and had wealth to spare For softening grief she once was doom'd to share; Thus train'd in misery's school, and taught to feel, She would rejoice an orphan's woes to heal: - So Jesse thought, who look'd within her breast, And thence conceived how bounteous minds are bless'd. From her vast mansion look'd the Lady down On humbler buildings of a busy town; Thence came her friends of either ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... would pity wert thou free To soothe my woe; and though I be Condemned to helpless misery, My heart, my Love, ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... thin line, a network of melancholic wrinkles. She saw instead of her own face, middle-aged and good to see, the expression of a life of honesty and good will to others and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others, at life, and death, at that which had been and that which was to come. She saw instead of her own face in the glass, the face of her dead Aunt Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... but substantially subjects of Rome like the rest, and when all the Italians began to find their position equally intolerable. It is true, that there were still distinctions: the Bruttians and their companions in misery were already treated exactly like slaves and conducted themselves accordingly, deserting, for instance, from the fleet in which they served as galley-slaves, whenever they could, and gladly taking service against Rome; and the Celtic, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... go barefoot in such bad weather. But what is worse than all, he has not even a boot or a wooden shoe to leave before him while he sleeps to-night, so that the Christ-child could put something there to comfort him in his misery." ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... the ground. But this remedy was now ineffectual though we employed it so perseveringly as to hazard suffocation: they swarmed under our blankets, goring us with their envenomed trunks and steeping our clothes in blood. We rose at daylight in a fever and our misery was ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... Original of our Beings, and the Centre of our Rest. Our Reasonable Nature hath a peculiar Reservation for Thee; and our Happiness consists in our Assimilation to, and Employment about, Thee. The nearer we approach unto Thee, the more free we are from Error, Sin, and Misery; and the farther off we are from Thee, the farther off we are from Truth, Holiness, and Felicity. Without Thee, we are sure of nothing; we are not sure of ourselves: but through Thee, there is Self-Enjoyment in the mind, when ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... a flower worn by a lady guest at my table, when, in the midst of enjoyment and surrounded by friends, the hand of the law in the form of a burly detective was laid on me in Cuba. In all the misery and humiliation of that scene I remember the peculiar color of the wood of a cigar box standing on the sideboard. Doubtless each of my readers will recall some similar phenomenon in his ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... may be; nevertheless all this has not stood me in such stead but that I have been shrewdly shaken, nay, all but uprooted by the blast, and altogether lacerated by the bite of this same envy. Whereby I may very well understand that 'tis true, what the sages aver, that only misery is exempt from envy in the present life. Know then, discreet my ladies, that some there are, who, reading these little stories, have alleged that I am too fond of you, and that 'tis not a seemly thing that I should take so much pleasure in ministering ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... appeared to have conspired against her, and this final and most crushing blow was the last straw. Gipsy clenched her fists in an agony of hopelessness. "Oh, Dad, Dad! why don't you come back?" she moaned, and the utter futility of the question added to her misery. Outside the sun was shining and the birds were singing cheerily—they had their mates and their nests, while she had not even a relation to claim her. She could hear the voices of the girls as they took their eleven o'clock ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... feeling that was almost misery, therefore, he waited for her on Monday afternoon, walking to and fro in his study, where all the walls were white, and all the woodwork coloured like the leaf of a cigar; where the books were that colour too, in Hilary's special deerskin binding; where there were no flowers ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... {beginning}, swells to a great bulk by her lies) runs before to thy ears, Deianira, {to the effect} that the son of Amphitryon is seized with a passion for Iole. As she loves him, she believes it; and being alarmed with the report of this new amour, at first she indulges in tears and in her misery gives vent to her grief in weeping. Soon, however, she says, "But why do I weep? My rival will be delighted with these tears; and since she is coming I must make haste, and some contrivance must be resolved on while it is {still} possible, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... aptly called, from its extent and ramifications, the battle of the Rivers—continued through many weeks while all the world wondered and stood aghast at the slaughter, and the single gleam of brightness that came out of that maelstrom of death and misery was the growing respect of Frenchman, German and Briton for the individual and collective courage of each other and the death-defying devotion that was ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell |
