"Unendurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unendurable; "patience had had its perfect work." He knew that a boy of twelve, however strong and sinewy, was not a match for an almost full-grown man; so, to balance matters, he secreted on his person an old bowie-knife. When next he met Steve, ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... becoming unendurable, the Topaze was got ready, and the refugees hurriedly went on board and started for St. Lucia. In the afternoon the gentlemen of the party, having placed their families in safety, returned by the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... a letter to the leaders of the Franks as follows: "The Goths, having seized by violence Italy, which was ours, have not only refused absolutely to give it back, but have committed further acts of injustice against us which are unendurable and pass beyond all bounds. For this reason we have been compelled to take the field against them, and it is proper that you should join with us in waging this war, which is rendered yours as well as ours not only by the orthodox faith, which rejects the opinion of the Arians, but also ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... waited for the new suit Maurice walked up and down the little room, round and round the table, where on a turkey-red cloth a hideous hammered brass bowl held some lovely maidenhair ferns. The vision of Eleanor abasing herself to Lily was unendurable. To drive it from his mind, he went to the window and stood looking out through the fragrant greenness of rose geraniums, into the squalid street where the offspring of the Funeral Pomps Director were fighting over the dead ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... dancing in my head. My plan about Berlin and the wedding immediately, etc., was certainly somewhat adventurous when you look at it in cold blood, but I hope there will be no change from July. If I am to be tormented, as you say, with an "unendurable, dispirited, nervous being," it is all the same in the end whether this torment will be imposed upon me by my fiancee or—forgive the expression—by my wife. In either case I shall try to bear the misfortune ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... could not remain where I was any longer, though the daylight was hateful to me, and the thought of the great, innocent, bold sunrise unendurable. Here there was no well to cool my face, smarting with the bitterness of my own tears. Nor would I have washed in the well of that grotto, had it flowed clear as the rivers of Paradise. I rose, and feebly left the sepulchral cave. I took my ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... He would die rather than behold the face of the tyrant who had enslaved him.[140] To Cato it was nothing that he should leave to others the burden of living under Caesar; but to himself the idea of a superior caused an unendurable affront. The "Catonis nobile letum" has reconciled itself to the poets of all ages. Men, indeed, have refused to see that he fled from a danger which he felt to be too much for him, and that in doing so he had lacked something of the courage of a man. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... hours ago, lay dead in the bunk-house, she forgot that it was merely an expected incident of Western life. She lay in her bed shaking with nervous dread, and the shrill rasping of the crickets and tree-toads was unendurable. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... through jealousy of the fame of the new-comers, or through some settled antipathy between flesh and fish, or simply through his natural beastliness, he communicated effluvia to the atmosphere that were perfectly unendurable by whale, which promptly expired from ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... of March 23, 1856, happily the last year of this sort of widowhood, she writes: "This winter has been the loneliest of my life. If you knew my situation you would pronounce it unendurable. I should have thought so myself if I had had a foreshadowing of it a few years ago. But the human mind can get acclimated to anything. What with constant occupation and a happy consciousness of sustaining and cheering my poor old father in his descent to the grave, I am almost always in a state ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... evening of March 10, the lead being nearly closed, I gave orders to get under way the next morning. The delay had become unendurable, and I decided to take the chance of Marvin's overtaking us with the ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... He thought of all her love and all her loveliness, he called to mind all the marvellous story of their united fortunes. He felt that for her and her alone he cared to live, that without her quick sympathy, even success seemed unendurable. His judgment fluctuated in an eddy of passion and reason. Passion conquered. He dismissed from his intelligence all cognizance of good and evil; he determined, under all circumstances, to cling ever to her; he tore from his mind all memory of the late disclosure. He ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... the day grew warm, until I felt as if the hand was caught and pinched in a red-hot vice. Then in my agony I begged my guard for water to wet it with, but for some reason they desired silence, and at every noise threatened me with a revolver. At length the pain became absolutely unendurable, and I grew what it is the fashion to call demoralized. I screamed, cried, and yelled in my torture, until, as I suppose, my captors became alarmed, and, stopping, gave me a handkerchief,—my own, I fancy,—and a canteen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... at the home of Mlle. Cormon, and afterwards at that of M. du Bousquier, who married "the old maid." One of the town's most open-hearted men; his only faults were having married a rich old lady who was unendurable, and the habit of making villainous puns at which he was first to laugh. In 1824 M. du Coudrai was poverty-stricken; he had lost his place on account of voting the wrong way. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... India precludes the possibility of its being a sphere for European colonization. With the exception of the hill districts, the intense heat during the greater part of the year makes out-door occupation trying even to the native, and well-nigh unendurable for Europeans—a heat uncompensated by the coolness of the night, for in the North-West, at least, the stifling closeness of the night is more trying than the heat of the day. If this heat lasted for only a few days, ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... man fall in love with the young woman who is most unfit for him of all the young women of his acquaintance, and why does the young woman accept the young man, or the old man, who is better adapted to making her life unendurable than any other man of her circle of acquaintances? Why does the stalwart Adam Bede fall in love with Hetty Sorrel, "who had nothing more than her beauty to recommend her?" The delineator of his motives "respects him none the less." She thinks ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... A stampede among them there would have meant instant death to many of us, and untold suffering to the dismounted remainder. How slowly the cold, bitter hours went by! I had thought the burning heat of the Colorado September unendurable. I wondered in that time of freezing torment if I should ever again ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... could he point as possessing any motive for such a deed. She had been the victim of some mistake, his lovely and ever kindly disposed daughter, and while the loss was irreparable he would never make it unendurable by thinking otherwise. ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... drowsily. The months of fatigue, the unbroken strain, the feverish weeks spent in endless trails, the constant craving for movement to occupy my thoughts, the sleepless nights which were the more unendurable because physical exhaustion could not give me peace or rest, now told on me. I drowsed in the very presence of death; and the stupor settled heavily, bringing, for the first time since I left Varick Manor, rest and immunity ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... never look her brother in the face again if the idea of the engagement should dawn on him. How could she escape it? Carry it out she could not. All her enthusiastic wish to spend her life in making this poor district better was now overshadowed by the unendurable thought of what ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... subsequent to the fourth Presidential election. This was found to be necessary by the circumstances of the contest between John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr. It was then found that the complications in the method of election created by the original clause were all but unendurable, and the ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... ten years before, the fair Julie—at least, she was fairer then than now!—had come to New York to enter the employ of a family whose mistress had decided that life without a French maid was unendurable. Rogers had met her, had been fascinated by her black eyes and red lips, had, in the end, proposed honourable marriage —quite unnecessarily, no doubt!—had been accepted, and for some months had led an eventful ...
— The Mystery Of The Boule Cabinet - A Detective Story • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... stuck to it. The moistening of the cotton-wool with glycerine was a decided improvement; still the respirator only enabled us to remain in dense smoke for three or four minutes, after which the irritation became unendurable. Reflection suggested that, besides the smoke, there must be numerous hydrocarbons produced, which, being in a state of vapour, would be very imperfectly arrested by the cotton-wool. These, in all probability, were the cause ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... perceive. Perhaps it all comes to this, that I am a hard and morally limited cad with a mind beyond my merits. Naturally I resist that as a complete solution. Anyhow, I had a sense of inexorable need, of distress and insufficiency that was unendurable, and for a time this aeronautical engineering ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... change came o'er the spirit of my dream," and endless processions of watchmen moved along, each mournfully dinning in my ears, "Past four o'clock." At length I was attacked by night-mare. Methought I was an hourglass—old Father Time bestrode me—he pressed upon me with unendurable weight—fearfully and threateningly did wave his scythe above my head—he grinned at me, struck three blows, audible blows, with the handle of his scythe, on my breast, stooped his huge head, and shrieked in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... death that brings their love to light, as it is their love that takes them to death. They gaze upon one another, and rush into each other's arms. Brangaena, turning round, is horrified to see what her officiousness has accomplished. The music rolls on in a torrent of almost unendurable sweetness; the ship reaches land, and the curtain drops as Tristan and Isolda, oblivious of all but themselves and their passion, stagger in one another's arms, and the trumpets sound without as the King approaches ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... You are leagued with her against me! This is unendurable! Oh, that I had never been lured to this abominable country! Oh, that I had never known the shame of finding my own grandson sunken so low! But I have borne the very utmost that I can support! Now it shall end! I will return with your father to our old home, that ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... you think so?" she asked. He looked at her, but did not speak. She went on. "Why is it wrong? They say God gives life and only God should take it away. Why? It's given—we don't ask for it, and no conditions come with it. Why should one, if it gets unendurable, keep an unasked, unwanted gift? If somebody put a ball of bright metal into your hands and it was pretty at first and nice to play with, and then turned red-hot, and hurt, wouldn't it be silly to go on holding it? I don't know much about God, anyway," she went ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... The silence became unendurable. I felt that I must overcome my languor so far as to address him. I am not a nervous man, and I never knew before what Virgil meant when he wrote "adhoesit faucibus ora." At last I managed to stammer out a few words, asking ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... here, however, an underlying subdued frenzy which awakes some sympathy. There is an almost unendurable impatience expressed even in the rhythm of many ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... not unendurable that this girl, who was left unsought in our father's house for years, should be living in such splendor? I shall hate the sight of my own ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... of the worst aspects, and also a strong belief in the efficacy of passive resistance as the most peaceful means of securing the redress of all Indian grievances in India as well as in South Africa should they ever become in his opinion unendurable. Mr. Gokhale, before he died, obtained a promise from him that for at least a year he would not attempt to give practical expression to the extreme views which he had already set forth in the proscribed pamphlet Hind Swaraj. At an early ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... them to a village on rising ground, a short distance from the road, and halted them there. The exhausted men threw themselves down in the shade of the houses. They had the long day yet to pass, and their thirst seemed unendurable; still, the halt was welcome, for there was not a man but felt that his strength was at an end, and that it would have been an ...
— For Name and Fame - Or Through Afghan Passes • G. A. Henty
... wanted to turn in flight, their natural impulse held down by the bonds of discipline and that pride of fellowship which is shamed to confess to a shiver along the spine. Some saw pictures of home, of sweethearts; some saw nothing. Some were in a coma of merciless suspense that grew more and more unendurable, until it seemed that anything to break it would ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... and physical with calmer sleep and a more natural exercise of the organs of vision, succeeded. I have made many attempts at a further reduction, but have been uniformly unsuccessful, owing to the extreme and almost unendurable agony occasioned thereby. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... two hundred miles through the Park. Nevertheless, they almost lost their lives in the attempt. At one point, ten thousand feet above the sea, a fearful blizzard overtook them. The cold and wind seemed unendurable, even for an hour, but they endured them for three days. A sharp sleet cut their faces like a rain of needles, and made it perilous to look ahead. Almost dead from sheer exhaustion, they were unable to lie down for fear ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... and made a fire and camped among ruins. But La Salle lay awake all night, watching the sharp-pointed autumn stars march overhead, and suffering what must have seemed the most unendurable of all ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Angleford, and she—she the girl whose heart he had broken, was in his house, looking on at him among his guests! The thought was almost unendurable, and she slowly rose from her chair; then she sat down again, for she was trembling and quite incapable of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... and Vienna. In 1861 his last hopes of a Paris success with Tannhaeuser were extinguished; his concerts up till then had resulted only in an increasing burden of debt; his domestic existence was unendurable; things were as bad as bad could be. So he sat down and wrote his only comedy. It was not a simple case of "tasks in hours of insight willed can be through hours of gloom fulfilled." The Mastersingers had been sketched, as we know, ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of '75. If one were to tell me that this was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... long afternoon the thing continued to worry him; added to the torment he was suffering from the burning letter in his vest-pocket, it was well-nigh unendurable. He had to work vehemently to make the time pass. Toward six o'clock, he began to realise that he had been shaping the time toward the evening's appointment with Steering. As he got it shaped he grew more peaceful. He was arranging things so that he could win out with Steering. ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... noticed them; yet, as a friend of you and yours, I will say again, Kitty, he who is not fit to live should feel himself most unfit to die, which is but to live with all the passions that made life unendurable made ours forever." ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... standard of humanity that prevailed in antiquity. Some held places of honor in the family, and enjoyed the confidence and even the friendship of their master. Yet at Sparta, where slavery assumed the form of serfdom, the lot of the slave was peculiarly hard and unendurable. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the minutes now until the doctor should come. The old woman's prattle about the return of her lost boy, so big and strong and handsome, had become unendurable. She felt that she should scream and collapse unless help came at once. She looked at her watch. It was just thirty-five minutes from the time she had left the cabin ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... son is a tell-tale, Mr. Grace, and allow me to say that this is none of his business. When I am insulted, I resent it." To be chaffed by his own uncle when under sentence of a court-martial had not been agreeable, but this admonition was unendurable. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... man, and his love for her had never blinded him as to her faults; often he had corrected her for unfilial behaviour, for a too sharp word, for selfishness. But the one quality which to a strong and tender man is unendurable in the woman he loves, cruelty, he had never before realised in the girl, and his discovery that it lay in her to hurt him as she had done, had nearly ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... is complete without music. Even a large piano which has seen its best days does not seem to be altogether a cumberer of the ground where another equally bulky piece of furniture would be unendurable. But unless some member of the family has decided musical ability, the best use of a piano or organ in a home is to sustain the uncertain voices in singing. Home singing is almost a necessity even where no one sings ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... and share her thoughts. Again he was the outsider; behind these two was a life full of detail and circumstance, of which he knew nothing. His excited brain called up pictures, imagined fiercely at words and looks, until the darkness and stillness of the room became unendurable; and he sprang up, threw on his clothing, and went out. Retracing his steps, he found the very spot where they had met. Guiltily, with a stealthy look round him, though wood and night were black as ink, he knelt down ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... had been enslaved for centuries by the king and the nobles. Their oppression had been execrable, and it had become absolutely unendurable. "We, the millions," they exclaimed in their rage, "will no longer minister to your voluptuousness, and pride, and lust." "You shall, you insolent dogs," exclaimed king and nobles, "we heed not your barking." "You shall," reiterated the Pope, in the portentous thunderings of the Vatican. ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... the height of victory, but kneeling, weeping, on the verge of torture. Human nature could not bear this long. A hoarse cry burst forth: "Will you keep us here all day; must we dine here?" a voice perhaps of unendurable pain that simulated cruelty. And then the executioner stepped in and seized ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... The widow might fascinate him by her knowledge of the world, her dash, her strength, her unconventionality—all these qualities Clara was willing to allow her—but she was convinced that she would be unendurable as a life companion. She had come to an age when habits are not lightly to be changed, nor was she a woman who was at all likely to attempt to change them. How would a sensitive man like her father stand the constant strain of such a wife, a woman who was all decision, with no softness, ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... instance, by the difference between the nominal and effective force of every regiment he had seen, even when supposed to be complete, and gravely doubts whether a nominal army of 100,000 men often brings fifty thousand into the field. What he found unendurable was the constant shifting of quarters, the utter want of privacy and leisure it often entailed, and the distasteful society in which he was forced to live. For eight months at a stretch he never took a book in his hand. "From the day we marched from Blandford, ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... suddenly and the other guest of the house glided into the kitchen. Her eyes were crinkled up as if with an almost unendurable pain, her fingers were pressed to her temples, her ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... conscience was worked upon until she bound him to a cabinet maker in the city. To him, the restraint was unendurable, and he ran away. He came after dark to bid me good-bye, left love for mother and Elizabeth, and next morning left Pittsburg on a steamboat, going to that Eldorado of Pittsburg boys—"down ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... Convention of the preceding year—March, 1919—which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the association, could not have celebrated the submission of the Federal Suffrage Amendment but this had to await a new Congress. Now it was almost unendurable that this commemoration of Miss Anthony's one hundredth birthday could not have been glorified by the proclamation that this amendment was forever a part of the National Constitution. However, by the time another month had rolled by, this culmination of her life work awaited the ratification ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... It would have been unendurable to Euphra, a little while before, to find that she had a rival in a servant. Now she scarcely regarded that aspect of her position. But she looked doubtfully at Margaret, and ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... At any rate," she said, with a bitter smile, "you have given me Bellamy, a start in society, and a sapphire necklace. In twenty years, I hope, if the fates are kind, to have lost Bellamy on the road—he is really unendurable—to rule society, and to have as many sapphire necklaces and other fine things as I care for. In enumerating my qualities, you ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... by their violent natures, they cease to respect the laws and to know any bounds, and thus lose both the respect and the fear of their subjects, because the ills those subjects are bearing seem more unendurable than those they only fear,—then, either excessive licentiousness or patience driven to extremity is full ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... of the creaking windlass and the clanking chain continued for so long that the suspense became almost unendurable. At last there came into sight an iron ring, from which as a centre depended four lesser chains spreading wide. In a few seconds more I could see that these were fixed to the corners of the great stone tomb with the covering of glass, which was being dragged upward. As it arose ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... time we got back there the day was done and "the darkness had fallen from the wings of night." We had travelled nearly fifty miles, the horses were almost dead; the thermometer stood at 100 degrees in the shade when we rested under the quandongs. In the night blankets were unendurable. Had there been any food for them the horses could not eat for thirst, and were too much fatigued by yesterday's toil to go out of sight of our camping place. We followed along the course of the lake north of west for seven miles, when ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... became acute, almost unendurable; and when at last, after repeated attempts, no reply could be obtained from his home, he replaced the receiver and leaned for a moment on the desk, shaken with such a storm of apprehension as he had rarely known. He turned to the inspector in ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... one time that the Brothers were serving the lepers and the sick in a hospital, near to the place where St. Francis was. Among them was a leper who was so impatient, so cross-grained, so unendurable, that everyone believed him to be possessed by the devil, and rightly enough, for he heaped insults and blows upon those who waited upon him, and what was worse, he continually insulted and blasphemed the blessed Christ ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the innocence of the man they were about to crucify. Compared with these pious miscreants who had no scruples about corrupting one of the disciples, but shuddered at the thought of putting back into the treasury the money they had taken from it, Judas becomes noble. His remorse is so unendurable that it drives him ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... of it!" I laugh. "On the contrary, it has so accustomed me to their friendship I would find life utterly unendurable without it." ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... and most tantalising moments by making some excuse for breaking up the evening, and then would drive me frantic by asking whether he was to keep up my character for consistency in my absence. However, ten days since, the twelfth of May, after three weeks' unendurable detention in town on one pretext or another, I escaped, and made my way to Bowstead at last. My uncle told me that he had been obliged unwillingly to consent to our precious charge going to meet her sister at Brentford, and that she was but newly come home. Presently she entered, but scarcely ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... could meet the English in battle with some prospect of success would the French commit themselves openly; and during 1776 and 1777 the tide ran too steadily against {95} the insurgents. Finally, in December, when the anxieties of Franklin and his associates were almost unendurable, the news of Burgoyne's surrender was brought to Paris. The turning-point was reached. Vergennes immediately led the French King to make two treaties, one for commercial reciprocity, the other a treaty of military alliance, recognizing the independence of the United States, and ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... and more distinct in her mind a kind of idealized Mr. Brumley, very grave, very attentive, wonderfully understanding, saying illuminating helpful tonic things, that made everything clear, everything almost easy. She wanted someone of that quality so badly. The night would have been unendurable if she could not have imagined Mr. Brumley of that quality. And imagining him of that quality her heart yearned for him. She felt that she had been terribly inexpressive that afternoon, she had shirked points, misstated points, and yet he had been marvellously ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... was a friend of Owen's. But his face was suddenly blotted from her mind. For if her father were to refuse to see her, if he were to cast her off for good and all, what would she do? Her life would be unendurable; she would go mad, mad as Margaret. But the picture did not frighten her, she knew it was fictitious; and looking into her soul for the truth, she saw the trees in the Green Park and the chimney pots of Walsingham ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... was unendurable. It seemed as though everybody was talking at the top of his voice. The musicians—a pianist and two violinists—found it difficult to make themselves heard. They were pounding and sawing frantically in a vain effort to beat the bedlam of conversation and laughter. It was ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... the "Baby-Talk Lady's" good-bye dance, not to be present was unendurable. Now William again gets the dress suit, and how he wears it at the party, and Genesis discloses the fact that the proud garment is in reality his father's makes up the story of ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... "The hope had gone from my life. I had no ballast, nothing to steady me in the tempest. My hope had been all in the present, and it perished with her. I cared for nothing, my little children were a misery to me, the old home was unendurable. I got leave of absence from my employers, and came up here—desperate. I dashed into every sort of dissipation and extravagance; I tried one excitement after another, if only I could drown every memory I had. ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... speech had been about as pleasant to say as eating cinders, and when it was done I felt a sudden sensation (very rare with me) of unendurable fatigue. As the last words left my lips the sun set, but my eyes were so bedazzled that I am not sure that I should not have fallen, but for an unexpected support. What Philip had been thinking of during my speech I do not know, for I had avoided looking ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... obstinacy of a bigot tries to meet the acumen of a lawyer? What more terrible to endure than the acrimonious pin-pricks to which a passionate soul prefers a dagger-thrust? Granville neglected his home. Everything there was unendurable. His children, broken by their mother's frigid despotism, dared not go with him to the play; indeed, Granville could never give them any pleasure without bringing down punishment from their terrible mother. ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... that he lied. This was no great reproach, for, more or less, every statesman lied, but the intensity of the private secretary's rage sprang from his belief that Russell's form of defence covered intent to kill. Not for an instant did the Legation draw a free breath. The suspense was hideous and unendurable. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... head under the unendurable weight of this question. He shudders, and with lifted hand tries to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... it might have been a consolation to Deesha to dwell for a time beside their graves. As it was, the deep bark of the murderous dogs filled her ear perpetually, and their fangs seemed to tear her heart. Her misery in the quiet mansion of the mornes was unendurable; and the very day after the funeral she departed, with her husband, to a place where no woman's eye could mark her maternal anguish—where no semblance of a home kept alive the sense of desolation. She retired, with her husband ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... four miles short of the inner extremity of Volcano Bay; and second, because within a mile or two of that extremity the water of the bay sometimes actually boiled, and the heat would there be quite unendurable." ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... almost unendurable even here in the wooded shelter. Outside, where the storm raged unrestrainedly over its fierce playground, ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... hear of it, and even the two little ones—do you think we should ever again feel one moment's peace of mind? Every time you looked paler or feebler, every time we saw you give the least little wince of pain—why, I think we should go out of our minds. It would be unendurable.' ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... good and noble, and all the other expressions, whatever they may be; and the sigh 'Alas, poor Yorick,' which expresses everything at once—have become proverbial among us Germans.... Yorick was a crawling parasite, aflatterer of the great, an unendurable burr on the clothing of those upon whom ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... were, the reason being that even with such powerful searchlights as are used by the enemy, which have a perfect range of five miles, it is easier for them to distinguish a moving object than a stationary one. It was almost unendurable to have our rifles in our hands—the barrels frequently hit by the enemy's bullets—and to have to stand still unable to use them—by order; but of course it would have been fatal to have opened fire. We ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... went for nothing, even in the moment in which they were made. She had suffered for meddling; that was bad: it was worse to the Imp not to meddle; inactivity was the one thing unendurable. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... the olive groves bear little fruit. I wandered through the lonely country, towards the mountains; the day was overcast and the clouds hung sluggishly overhead. As I walked, suddenly I heard a melancholy voice singing a peasant song, a malaguena. I paused to listen, but the sadness was almost unendurable; and it went on interminably, wailing through the air with the insistent monotony of its Moorish origin. I struck into the olives to find the singer and met a swineherd, guarding a dozen brown pigs, a youth thin of ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the southern serfs was bad enough before America was "discovered"; and quite unendurable in earlier times. There is a village not many hours from Naples where, in 1789, only the personal attendants of the feudal lord lived in ordinary houses; the two thousand inhabitants, the serfs, took refuge in caves and shelters ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... American's lips, a smile a little contemptuous, more than a little inscrutable. In its light Calendar grew restive and lost something of his assurance. His feet shifted uneasily beneath the table and his dark eyes wavered, evading Kirkwood's. At length he seemed to find the suspense unendurable. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... if in a dream, she opened a bandbox and put her hat away. She smoothed her soft hair before the glass. Her appearance pleased her, and she wondered if she were worth a man's life. She was a dainty morsel, no doubt, so dainty that life was unendurable without her. But she was wronging herself, she did not wish him to kill himself.... Men had done so before for women.... If it came to the point, she would do everything in her power to prevent such a thing. She would do everything, yes, everything except marry him. She couldn't settle down to ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... the world, lay in the distinctness with which he conceived a state of society from which every vestige of strife, and the modes of behaviour adapted to ages of strife, shall be utterly and forever swept away. Through misery that has seemed unendurable and turmoil that has seemed endless, men have thought on that gracious life and its sublime ideal, and have taken comfort in the sweetly solemn message of peace on earth and good ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... last mighty effort. Yes, for all he was bred in the gentle life of civilisation, for all ruthless cruelty had no place in his normal temper, his one desire now was to kill, to slay this brute-man who had made his life unendurable. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... we'd tried, could we? It's just the right hour, and just the right kind of light. Those basins are unendurable—sinks of iniquitous ugliness, unless the tide's in and there's a sunset going on. Just look now! Who cares whether Honfleur has been done to death by the tourist horde or not? and been painted until one's art-stomach ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... she said with raillery. Then she added, "Less unendurable than profiting by a-creeping up in ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... chill in Fownes' fingers was clearly not unendurable, for in a moment he came to the table, and putting his hand over that of Janice, which held the ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... not merely that a life of running in and out of other people's houses, and chatting the same bits of news threadbare with one acquaintance after another, as at Riflebury, would have been unendurable by us. The rare arrival of a visitor from some distant country-house to call at the Vicarage was the signal for every one, who could do so with decency, to escape from the unwelcome interruption. But as we grew older, Mrs. Arkwright ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Basutos, Hottentots, and halfbreeds living in a chronic state of turbulence, recognising neither the British authority to the south of them nor the Transvaal republics to the north. The chaos became at last unendurable, and in 1848 a garrison was placed in Bloemfontein and the district incorporated in the British Empire. The emigrants made a futile resistance at Boomplaats, and after a single defeat allowed themselves to be drawn into the settled order of ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thought Beulah, as she prepared to answer the unlucky letter. As guardedly as possible she alluded to Mr. Mortimor and his family, and urged Pauline to talk to her husband gently but firmly, and assure him that the continued interference of his family was unendurable. If her remonstrances proved futile, to do what she considered due to herself as mistress of her own establishment, and try not to notice the annoyances of others. Beulah felt and acknowledged her inability to advise the young wife in the difficult position in which she was ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... tied together at my back, the right arm being put back over the shoulder and the left arm turned up from underneath. Then I was hung up by the cord that bound my thumbs. The agony was unendurable. I fainted, was taken down, was given torture, and when I came ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... upon the bench before they passed through the open door to comparative freedom. Cherry locked and bolted the door behind them, and pulled down the outer shutter, with which, on occasions, the gaoler made life in the cells a little more unendurable by excluding the light. The cells were below the level of the courtyard, and they moved along the trench ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... room being heated to an extraordinary degree. Like a salamander he basked in the heat, and would not allow either door or window to be opened, even in the midst of summer, when a large fire made the apartment almost unendurable. Cuthbert felt as though he were walking into a Turkish bath, and sat as far away from the fire as he could. After saluting him, his uncle sank back into his seat and looked ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... pretext for sordid tyranny. So beware of offending Monsieur de la Baudraye; he would forgive an infidelity, because he could make capital of it, but he would be doubly implacable if you should touch him on the spot so cruelly wounded by Monsieur Milaud of Nevers, and would make your life unendurable." ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... I am not allowed to enjoy the honest fellow's society in the presence of ladies. They have their own taste in perfumes. Their clothes and their letters reek with the foetid secretion of the musk deer. The clean vegetable smell of tobacco is unendurable to them. Allow me to retire—and let me thank you for the trouble you took to ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... heavily curtained recess, and some one was behind the drapery. I had seen the folds move. I had no way of warning the boy. Had we been alone, I doubt if I would have made the effort. Concealment for Page, unendurable suspense for those who loved him, must end. I spoke only when necessary to interpret an ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... beauty of fifteen. The princess, comprehending the peril of the hour, could not sleep. Maria pressed her child to her throbbing heart, and the pride of the queen was soon vanquished by the tenderness of the mother, as with convulsive energy she embraced her, and wept in anguish almost unendurable. Shouts of unfeeling derision arose from the troops below, stationed for the protection of the royal family, and their ears were assailed by remarks of the most brutal barbarity. Hour after hour of ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... another order of reality. Their moments had another pulse, another rhythm and vibration. They burned as they beat. While they lasted Gwenda's life was lived with an intensity that left time outside its measure. Through this intensity she drew the strength to go on, to endure the unendurable with joy. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... the prisoner may be, she will free him. These twenty bars are as great music as anything in the world: they even leave Senta's declaration in the "Dutchman" far behind; they are at once triumphant and charged with a pathos nearly unendurable in its intensity. The scene ends with a strange hushed unison passage like some unearthly chant: it is the lull before the breaking of the storm. The entry of Pizarro and the pistol business are by no means done as Wagner or Mozart would have done them. The music is always excellent and sometimes ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... that he would, alone and unaided, regain his lost good name and position in society, had proved but empty boasts—he would no longer hide the fact from her, not in the hope of being received at home as a repentant prodigal (even the thought of such a course was unendurable), but with the purpose of obtaining from her the means of entering upon a ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... at last, finding the suspense unendurable, and gave him a scribbled line to carry to ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... family and his friends, half-way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing—it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... away altogether from our friends in their times of sorrow, than go to them as we do. Instead of being comforters to make them stronger to endure, we only make their grief seem bitterer, and their loss more unendurable, doing them harm instead of good. This is because we have not learned the art of giving comfort. Our Master should be our teacher; and if we study his method, we shall know how to be a blessing to our friends in their times of loss ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... given a hint of Ward's intentions by what the old man had said about the "canned thunder." She did not dare to be informed as to the probable details of those intentions; to know fully the nature of the risk he was running would have made the agony of her apprehensiveness unendurable. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... ought to be done out of doors," said Charlton, coming back from a kind of maze in which he had been listening to her. "It is unendurable!" ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... against the cold glory of stars like a pit of ultimate darkness, and Jessup had to guide the boat in with radar. When the last lock had clanged shut behind him and he stood in a narrow metal corridor, shut away from the sky, Lancaster felt a sense of unendurable loss. ...
— Security • Poul William Anderson
... another, and their life became more and more unendurable. All three felt that it was useless; instead of bringing them together, it only drove ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... darkness and starlight, and the cab made slow and painful way through the frost-bound streets. The amble and the sliding of the horse was exasperating, the drive unendurable with uncertainty and cold, and Mike hammered his frozen feet on the curving floor of the vehicle. Street succeeded street, all growing meaner as they neared the Gare de Lyons. Fearing he should miss the express he called to the impassive driver to hasten ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... wind, however; and before long Duke found his condition unendurable. He was past middle age and cared little for exercise; but he saw that something must be done. Therefore, he made a vigorous attempt to dry himself in a dog's way. Throwing himself, shoulders first, upon the alley mud, he slid upon it, back downward; he rolled and rolled and ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... be deep in thought, and several times in the night Marian heard him breathe an impatient sigh, as if his thoughts were not pleasant to him. More than once he rose from his chair and paced the room softly for a little time, as if the restlessness of his mind had made that forced quiet unendurable. The early morning light came at last, faint and wan and gray, across a forest of blackened chimney-pots, and by that light the watchers could see that Jacob Nowell had changed for ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... few weeks at Simla during which her name and Nick Ratcliffe's had been coupled together, but he had never definitely known what had taken place. Had Nick been good to her, he wondered for the first time? How was it that the bare mention of him was unendurable to her? What had he done that she should shudder with horror when she remembered him, and should seek thus with loathing to thrust him out of ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... slunk off to their huts, unaware of their exact crime, and closely followed by a scowling but despondent mob of natives. As they crossed their sacred boundary, Muriel cried, with a sudden outburst of tears, "Oh, Felix, what on earth shall we ever do to get rid of this terrible, unendurable godship!" ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... beginning with the time of Elizabeta Petrovna. What was favorable was suppressed; the unfavorable was most rigorously enforced. Jews living outside the Pale were driven back into it on the slightest pretext and in the most inhuman manner. To increase the already unendurable congestion, the Pale was made smaller than before. In accordance with the first clause of the "May laws," Jews were expelled from the villages within the Pale itself. In 1888 the districts of Rostov and Taganrog, which till then had belonged ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... that! That she should call him "ugly," that she should speak with that air of almost insolent proprietorship of those wonderful early years long, long before she, Esther, had come into his life at all, it was unendurable! ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... said, "and would often be unendurable to me if it were not for my sense of humor, as it would be to my sister if it were not for her love, for Julius is really a very lovable man, and I, too, am very fond of him. But I must laugh sometimes, though ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... in its main features, the truth of this sketch can be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a certain point becomes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The constitution of human things cannot ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... onto the bed, and "buzz—buzz—buzz" sounded about my head. It was a huge fly which had been sleeping in a corner of my room and had been roused by the heat of the stove. It flew about in great circles, now around the bed, now in all four corners of the chamber—"buzz—buzz—buzz"—it was unendurable! At last I heard it creep into a bag of sugar which had been left on the window sill. I sprang up and closed the bag tight. The fly buzzed worse than ever, but I went back to bed and attempted to sleep again, feeling that I had ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... pupils had been attracting the attention of a small circle of connoisseurs and amateurs. My father had perceived his talent, and manifested a particular liking for him in consequence. Suddenly the general interest in him and talk about him became unendurable to my father who grew envious of him. Finally, to complete his vexation, he learned that his pupil had been asked to paint a picture for a recently built and wealthy church. This enraged him. 'No, I will not permit that fledgling to triumph!' said he: 'it is early, friend, to think ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... without protest, and that sincerity was like a skilled hand on a wound. It brought comfort where a fumbling kindness would have been unendurable. It made him strangely, deeply happy to know that she would see too that he had failed. "I've never had pity on anyone—not even myself—I've learnt ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... Magazine which lay on the bureau, and shortly became absorbed in its contents. As for me, I had to grip both sides of my chair to conceal my nervousness. My legs fairly shook with terror. The silence, broken only by the scratching of Holmes's pen, was becoming unendurable and I think I should have given way and screamed had not Holmes suddenly risen and walked to the telephone, directly back of where Cato ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... excellent Miss Joyce. A beginning very far down would have to be made, if she were to reach the individuality of this perfectly nurtured modern child of hers. There was nothing bad about Molly; she was irritatingly blameless. But what she lacked was appalling! At eighteen she would be unendurable. ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... memories lay heavily upon her spirit—naturally virtuous and refined. I repeatedly urged her to consent to the publication of her narrative; for I felt that it would arouse people to a more earnest work for the disinthralment of millions still remaining in that soul-crushing condition, which was so unendurable to her. But her sensitive spirit shrank from publicity. She said, "You know a woman can whisper her cruel wrongs in the ear of a dear friend much easier than she can record them for the world to ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... night, however, that the suffering from this change of habit became most unendurable. While the day-light lasted it was possible to go out-of-doors, to sit in the sunlight, to walk, to do something to divert attention from the exhausted and shattered body; but when darkness fell, and these resources failed, nothing remained except ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... evening if need be. Taught by my earlier studies, I now know the exact period of the Bee's hatching and therefore of the Anthrax' laying, which must take place soon after. Anthrax trifasciata settles her family in July, or in August at latest. Every morning, at nine o'clock, when the heat begins to be unendurable and when, to use [the author's gardener and factotum] Favier's expression, an extra log is flung on the bonfire of the sun, I take the field, prepared to come back with my head aching from the glare, provided that I bring home the solution ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... reassure her about himself! He thought it was only a trifling indisposition, and was not willing that a doctor should be disturbed. But then he was seized by a frightful vomiting, followed by such unendurable pain that he yielded to his daughter's entreaty that she should send for help. A doctor arrived at about eight o'clock in the morning, but by that time all that could have helped a scientific inquiry ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Yet he could not leave them thus. Somewhere within him a something, until now quiescent, demanded recognition and insisted upon expression. Why had it waited until now! It was a changed John Covington who spoke from that doorway, when at last silence became unendurable. The hard lines in the face had softened, and the previously insistent voice now betrayed realization of the present, and hopelessness for the future. The fires of truth and love and faith and honor, which burned so brightly ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... craving for company and employment. He cannot endure silence or solitude. When he stands still, he seems to hear the throbbings of his own conscience terrible as the ticking of the clock in the chamber of death. To be alone is unendurable, because it is to be with God. To escape from this fiery furnace, he hastens to plough in his field or sell in his shop. In such a case, the worldliness, even when it runs to the greatest excess, is not the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... of iron, brooking no contradiction, he would not suffer any of the white men on the island to take advantage of them. He watched the missionaries suspiciously and, if they did anything of which he disapproved, was able to make life so unendurable to them that if he could not get them removed they were glad to go of their own accord. His power over the natives was so great that on his word they would refuse labour and food to their pastor. On the other hand he showed the traders no favour. He took care that they ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... configuration of landscape that compelled them to labyrinthine canyons and valleys that led rarely to the west. Once in such a canyon, they could only follow it, no matter where it led, for the cold peaks and higher ranges on either side were unscalable and unendurable. The terrible toil and the cold ate up energy, yet they cut down the size of the ration they ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... the use of his faculties it was to discover himself the possessor of a violent headache. The pain came in such fearsome throbs that it was well nigh unendurable. The lamp still sputtered dimly where the professor had left it. At the moment it was on the point of going out altogether. The reporter noticed this, and over him stole a sense of panic. What if the light ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... pose me with short questions; your case and mine are diametrically different, and it is nonsense attempting to draw a parallel. I say, that when a man endures patiently what ought to be unendurable, he is ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... instead of eliciting sympathy, would only excite laughter. Maimed and bleeding, I toiled on, and wishing, oh! so fervently, that the next blow might be on my head, instead of the inferior parts of my body. Towards evening, my torture became unendurable, and throwing my tired body on the ground, I determined not to work longer, let the consequences be what they may. This conduct was so entirely unexpected, that it took my captors by surprise, and finding blows of no avail, they desisted, and left me to suffer alone. I had to be carried home, much ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... of drama, for us unendurable, gradually separated from Mysteries; it reached its greatest development under the early Tudors. The authors of Moralities strove to write plays not merely amusing, as farces, then also in great favour, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the folkways give us discipline and the support of routine and habit. If we had to form judgments as to all these cases before we could act in them, and were forced always to act rationally, the burden would be unendurable. Beneficent use and wont ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... becomes very severe; if, above all, huge masses of men and material have to be moved over hundreds of miles in a great military expedition against a mobile and alert foe, then the strain becomes almost unendurable. And the chapter of accidents in this region of the unknown! Unseasonable rains cut off expeditions for weeks from their supply bases. Animals died by the thousand—after passing through an unknown fly-belt. Mechanical transport got bogged in the marshes, held up by bridges washed away, or ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... knows all. It was not that I was afraid you would betray me (I never even thought of that), but I thought, 'How can I look him in the face if I don't confess?' And if you had been at the other end of the earth, but alive, it would have been all the same, the thought was unendurable that you were alive knowing everything and condemning me. I hated you as though you were the cause, as though you were to blame for everything. I came back to you then, remembering that you had a dagger lying on your table. I sat down and asked you to sit down, and for a whole minute ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... passive: for all buildings are not passive; some seem to rise by their own strength, or float by their own buoyancy; a dome requires no visibility of support, one fancies it supported by the air. But passive architecture without help for its passiveness is unendurable. In a lately built house, No. 86, in Oxford Street, three huge stone pillars in the second story are carried apparently by the edges of three sheets of plate glass in the first. I hardly know anything to match the painfulness of this and some other of our shop structures, in which the iron-work ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... wildly beating heart she had seen the King, Von Ritz and the escort ride up to the entrance and disappear. She had waited—waited—waited, her nerves set for the climax, until the continued silence seemed an unendurable shock. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... him. It was his counsel had brought about this marriage, and all that was to ensue from it. And why was it? Because he loved her so much that he could not bear to see her unhappy: or because his own sufferings of suspense were so unendurable that he was glad to crush them at once—as we hasten a funeral after a death, or, when a separation from those we love is imminent, cannot rest until ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of a family of lively skunks, and the skunk is an animal whose terrific offensive powers necessitate extreme caution in approaching him. Should a young dog unwarily attempt to tackle a skunk, he had to be rigorously quarantined for a fortnight, for otherwise the inexpressibly sickening odour was unendurable. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... and so they had no complaint to make. Comfort and privation are, after all, measured largely by contrast, and what to them would have been comfortable and luxurious living would have seemed to you and me little less than unendurable hardship. ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... all but insanity, when he entered office, and had a power of stipulating on what terms alone he would be Premier, much less is he strong enough now. Not Tories only, but Whigs (to judge by their past) and the whole mass of our honest fighters, and certainly the Court, will find it an unendurable humiliation to do justice by compulsion of the Boers. Their atrocious doctrine is, that before we confess that we have done them wrong, we must first murder enough of them to show that we are the stronger. It is awful to attribute sentiment so wicked to the Premier, or to ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... on the far side grew unendurable. The black rat whisked round, and rushed madly for the run. He gained the shelf by a beautiful swinging leap, easy and silent ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... declares that he has read, in some other account, of a dreadful, unendurable face that used to stare at people ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... caution seems applicable to the case of all persons suffering from nervous irritability, viz., that a secluded space should be measured off accurately, in some private grounds not liable to the interruption or notice of chance intruders; for these annoyances are unendurable to the restless invalid; to be questioned upon trivial things is death to him; and the perpetual anticipation of such annoyances is little less distressing. Some plan must also be adopted for registering the number of rounds performed. I once walked for eighteen ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry than to burn," he said, with unmatchable brutality; ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... right of birth, so that there was nothing other than a long-dead scandal in the French Navy that might have proved a bar to an affiance such as he dreamed of. And now to be thwarted at the last moment! It was unendurable. That pig of a Ward had sealed his own death warrant, of that ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... positions in his mind so that he could have reached them with his eyes shut. At the end of the third hour he had made his way half through the rope. It took him two hours more to weaken one half of the remainder. The pain was becoming unendurable. He quivered from head to foot each time he moved his jaw, for his lips were torn to the quick. His tongue was shredded; his chest damp with blood. Finally he ceased. Then carefully, very carefully, threw back his shoulders ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... for a long while; the numbness became painful; the tension a dull endurance. Fatigue came, too; she rested her head wearily on the back of the chair and closed her eyes. But the tall clocks ticking slowly became unendurable—and the odour of ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... most distressing, I was, on the other hand, much impressed and at times fairly startled by the large and diversified number of people to whom the very existence of the white slave traffic had become unendurable and who promptly responded to any appeal made on behalf of its victims. City officials, policemen, judges, attorneys, employers, trades unionists, physicians, teachers, newly arrived immigrants, clergymen, railway officials, and newspaper ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... tabooed, till they're just going to be married. I went to see them myself; it was a horrid sight. The poor creatures were confined in a dark, close hut, without air or ventilation, in that stifling climate, which is as unendurable from heat as this one is from cold and damp and fogginess; and there they sat in cages, coarsely woven from broad leaves of the pandanus trees, so that no light could enter; for the people believed that light would kill them. No man might see them, because it was close taboo; but at last, ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... abashed. But all eyes were on Jamie as he opened his desk. He put the letter in his pocket. The clerks looked at one another. The suspense became unendurable. When old Mr. Bowdoin came in, the cashier told him what had happened. "Jamie's foreign mail has come again. But he will never read it here, sir, and we can't send him out ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... analysis searches deep. Patience could hardly have been one of the virtues most native to the woman's valiant spirit, and one feels in her keen and solemn meditations that she had herself known the bitter and corroding power of the sin "that burns and does not consume," and that "makes the soul unendurable to itself." It is with convincing fervour and fulness that she presents impatience as the permanent condition of the lost. The little discussion of impatience in human relations, and of the "proud humility" resorted to by a soul ravaged by a sense ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... won something in New England of vastly deeper importance than a reputation for making popular campaign speeches. He for the first time caught a glimpse of the utter irreconcilableness of the Northern conviction that slavery was evil and unendurable, and the Southern claim that it was divine and necessary; and he began here to realize that something must be done. Listening to Seward's speech in Tremont Temple, he seems to have had a sudden insight into the truth, a quick ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... come out of it all as well as other people when this life of family and incomes and match-making was over, she saw no reason to doubt. Ranters and canters might talk as they pleased, but God knew better than make the existence of thoroughly respectable people quite unendurable! She was kind-hearted, and treated her maid like an equal up to the moment of offense—then like a dog of the east up to that of atonement. She had the power of keeping her temper even in family differences, and hence was regarded ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... we sent you a warning last week make the smells more unendurable?" asked the registrar suggestively, and the sophomore ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... no," she declared. "I would rather put up with your own efforts, however clumsy. Love-making at first hand is dull enough. At second hand it would be unendurable." ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... another. If they were truly alive to the duty of conclusiveness, or to the inexpressible magnitude of the subjects which nominally occupy their minds, but really only exercise their tongues, this elegant Pyrrhonism would be impossible, and this light-hearted neutrality most unendurable. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... business in a mechanical way. He returned with the first train, though why he scarcely knew. He felt no inclination to visit at Mrs. Marchmont's any more, for since he had come more fully under Miss Martell's influence Addie had lost her slight hold upon him, and now her manner was growing unendurable. He also felt that after Mr. Martell's coldness he could not visit there again, and he doggedly purposed to give his whole time to his business till events righted him, if they ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... means of his culture is almost universally underrated. The interest in causality that unfolds itself more and more vigorously with the learning of speech, the asking why, which is often almost unendurable to parents and educators, is fully justified, and ought not, as unfortunately is too often the case, to be unheeded, purposely left unanswered, purposely answered falsely. I have from the beginning given to my ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... AND REBELLION.—Habit has been called the "balance wheel" of society. This is because men readily become habituated to the hard, the disagreeable, or the inevitable, and cease to battle against it. A lot that at first seems unendurable after a time causes less revolt. A sorrow that seems too poignant to be borne in the course of time loses some of its sharpness. Oppression or injustice that arouses the fiercest resentment and hate may finally come to be accepted ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... toil of rowing in the galleys was excessive, almost unendurable. Yet it seems to have been performed by freely-enlisted men, and therefore it was probably less severe than that of the great-oared galleys of more recent times, which it was found impracticable to work by ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... house is scarcely better than a hovel, surrounded with chickens and pigs, and with only a small garden,—unadorned and lonely and repulsive,—has no cravings which make the life of the favored rich sometimes unendurable. The poorer he is, and therefore the more miserable as we should think, the more contented he seems to be; while a fashionable woman or ennuied man, both accustomed to the luxuries and follies of city life, with all its refinements and gratification of intellectual and social pleasures, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... lights, had descended upon us. In this purplish light Wolf Larsen's face glowed and glowed, and to my excited fancy he appeared encircled by a halo. We lay in the midst of an unearthly quiet, while all about us were signs and omens of oncoming sound and movement. The sultry heat had become unendurable. The sweat was standing on my forehead, and I could feel it trickling down my nose. I felt as though I should faint, and reached out ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... impression, the sky being—for a wonder in that latitude—perfectly cloudless, and of a clear, pure, soft, crystalline blue, into which the great luminary leapt in dazzling splendour, palpitating with breathless heat that promised to soon become almost unendurable. It was my custom to indulge in a saltwater bath every morning in the ship's head, one of the men playing the hose upon me for a quarter of an hour or so, and never did that bath seem a greater luxury to me than on this ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood |
