"Agonising" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wrong," said Murray, warmly; "but have some pity for me too. Doctor Barnes, you cannot be blind to what I think and feel. All this is agonising to me. Look here, sir; do you think I have not brains enough to see that this man reads me and my sentiments toward your daughter. The scoundrel—the insolent barbarian! he is actually jealous, and under his smiling civility, he is trying to crush me down or ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... how to point a rope, which is one of the prettiest kinds of plaiting ever invented. The day passed slowly—oh! so slowly; for a day like that, so near home, yet so far away, and with so much misery in prospect, was agonising. I wondered what they would do to Mr Cottier; I wondered if ever I should get home again; I wondered whether the coastguards would have sufficient sense to arrest Marah if they saw him on the roads. In wondering like this, the day slowly dragged to an end; and at the end of ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... He has just been explaining to me that he hates the sort of things that amuse me,—dances and the opera, and social things. Why, then, should he go with me? He does sometimes, but I know it's an agonising sacrifice. What do you think he is going to do to-night? ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... implored him to stop. She uttered no dissent, she made no protestations; but she beseeched him, by their long and tender love, by all the common ties which bound them together, to cease to speak on a subject which was so agonising. ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... means of particular poisons; that other poisons are used for suicidal purposes; that the photographer takes cyanide of potassium, the medical man and chemist prussic acid or morphia, the poor man vermin-killer or oxalic acid, or carbolic acid, or some such agonising destroyer of life. And thus, though all poisons lead to the same end—stoppage of the breathing and blood circulation—yet each has its own particular way of sending the soul to eternity. He can therefore often tell the analyst detective how ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... had driven her back against her will? The thought maddened her, but she could not move. The passionate love in her heart anchored those weary feet. She flung up her arms towards a window through which a light shone dimly—the window of his room, and an agonising cry of farewell broke from her. It was his name that fled from her lips like a burning arrow, and reached her husband in the gloomy ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... sick apprehension came over the Bishop. Agonising fear. He must see Walker at once. Walker, his old friend, who would know what to do, what to advise. If ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... lumbago, as well as from a proud spirit and a broken heart. He had a dread of 'coming to the Workhouse.' Spectral fear which haunts ever the sensitive and poverty-stricken! Unreasonable? Perhaps. But not the less agonising. What comfort may Political Economy and an admirable Poor Law yield ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... louder; they became an agonising wail; the painful shrieking of a lover before the mutilated corpse of his affections. With unsteady hands he touched the limbs lying in confusion around him; the head, the torso, the arms that had snapped in twain; above aught else ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... the most inward grace. Once let a poor wretch awake to the unbroken winter of his own sinfulness, a sinfulness that is with him when he lies down and when he rises up, when he is abroad among men and when he is at home with himself alone: an incessant, increasing, agonising, overwhelming sense of sin,—and how that most miserable of men will grow in grace, and how he will drink in all the means of grace! How he will hear the word of grace preached, mixing it no longer with fault-finding, as he used ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... agonising suspense, and then the revolving figures reach the base of the mountain, and commence simultaneously to ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... God!" With his hands covering his eyes the big man is swaying from side to side like a mighty tree before a tempest. Cameron and Ross both spring to him. On the hillsides men stand rigid, pale, shaking; women shriek and faint. One ghastly moment of suspense, and then a horrid sickening thud; one more agonising second of silence, and then from a score of ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... conceal from me that parties of men had been searching for me, because, for a few days, I had been in actual hiding with Josephine, three or four miles up the woody mountain. I must hurry over all this: for the recollection of it, even at this great lapse of time, is agonising. The night before the Eos sailed she would not sleep—her incessant tears, the tremulous energy with which clasped me and held me for hours, all told the secret that I wished not to know. All that night she watched, as a mother ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... o'clock that she dragged herself up two flights of stairs toward her room on the attic floor at the Palace. She had been walking the streets like a mad creature all that intervening time, trying to still the agonising pain in her heart. Preston Cheney had long been her ideal of all that was noble, grand and good, she worshipped him as devout pagans worshipped their sacred idols; and, without knowing it, she gave him the absorbing passion ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... me with reproachful eyes, as they said, 'You are well on the road, Bob Brownley, and in time your heart and soul will bear the hall-mark of the snaky S on the two upright bars, and you will be but a frenzied fellow in the Dirty Dollar army.' Jim, Jim Randolph, as I listened to that agonising tale of the changing of that girl's heaven to hell, I did not see that halo you and I have thought surrounded the sign of Randolph & Randolph. I did not see it, Jim, but I did see myself, and I ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... therefore been left to man, as a doubtful gift of the gods. By order of Zeus, Prometheus was chained to a rock on the Caucasus, on account of his relation to man. An eagle perpetually gnaws his liver, which is as often renewed. He has to pass his life in agonising loneliness till one of the gods voluntarily sacrifices himself, i.e., devotes himself to death. The tormented Prometheus bears his sufferings steadfastly. It had been told him that Zeus would be dethroned by the son of a mortal unless ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... "If you are going home now, take my arm," he said, and they walked together along the path leading across the meadow. "You have been fighting a hard and despairing battle, Vera. So much you do not conceal. Are you going to conquer this agonising ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... leaped within him. Here was assistance close at hand. Mechanically he sought to raise his hand to open the window, but an agonising twinge reminded him of his thongs. He swiftly reviewed in his mind the means of attracting the attention of the soldier opposite. Whatever he was going to do, he must do quickly; for the fact that people were beginning to darken their windows showed that it must be close on half-past ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... life remember that early walk in Jerusalem! The being whom he loved best was leaning upon him, too much exhausted to decline his aid; there was thrilling happiness in being so near her; but the uppermost feelings in the mind of Lycidas were agonising fear upon Zarah's account, and intense impatience to reach some place of safety. Fearfully slow to Lycidas appeared the progress of the heavily-laden mule, terribly long the way that was traversed. The muleteer purposely avoided that which would have been most direct; he dared not ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... exceedingly lengthy. The heat was intense and grew intolerable as the day advanced and the sun climbed higher into the heavens. To aggravate matters a dust-storm blew up. The British wounded at the end of the line had a dreary, long, and agonising wait. Half-dead from fatigue, hunger, and racked with pain it is not surprising that many collapsed into the dust, more particularly as they could not secure the slightest shelter or relief from the broiling sun. As the hours wore on ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... glances at the opposite mirror. She encountered a battery of eyes. At the same time she heard a suppressed titter. It was only by an effort of will that she refrained from running out of the room, and she felt as if she had been dipped in the hot springs of Nevis. It was at this agonising moment that the amiable Lord Hunsdon presented the chair, with the murmured hope that he was not taking a liberty and that she recalled his having had the good fortune to be presented to her by his friend Mrs. Nunn earlier in the day. Anne, muttering her gratitude, accepted the chair without ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... Captain decided things had gone too far. He himself apparently remained to watch over the linen; but at five o'clock on the Sunday morning, Aunt Anna, Fleeming, and his mother were rowed in a pour of rain on board an English merchantman, to suffer "nine mortal hours of agonising suspense." With the end of that time peace was restored. On Tuesday morning officers with white flags appeared on the bastions; then, regiment by regiment, the troops marched in, two hundred men sleeping on the ground ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... over the edge at his fallen commander. Maybe the angry scarlet of Dirk's complexion provoked Barraclough's attack and before the poor man had recovered from his surprise a heavy lobster pot came smashing down over his face with agonising force, the splintering basket-work playing havoc with his features. Then he, too, experienced the unique sensation of gliding downward through space, a delight somewhat marred by the rudeness of ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... able to see a day into the future, we might have spared ourselves this agonising, for all our doubts and fears were suddenly dispersed in an entirely unexpected manner. Happily these interior problems are not infrequently resolved ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... examined his crowbar, and casting first a coxcomb look at the breathless spectators, brought the bar into the air with a flourish, and down with a crash on the right thigh of the poor prisoner. The agonising cry of the helpless man was drowned in a tremendous outburst of applause from the crowd. When he had been disposed of in each of his four limbs, Bec was treated in the same manner. Then the assistants, seizing Hugues, threw him on the cross, bound him, and the executioner lifted ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... my reason, forced by the agonising stimulus into precocious though transitory power: and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as running away, or, if that could not be effected, never eating or drinking ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... down the sail and leapt overboard in the hope of finding him. Unsuccessful, I looked around in agonising suspense, and saw close to me a fishing-boat with a peculiar drag-net furnished with hooks, which I knew ...
— A Retrospect • James Hudson Taylor
... winding-sheet of Edward's race: Give ample room and verge enough The characters of hell to trace. Mark the year and mark the night When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death thro' Berkley's roof that ring, Shrieks of an agonising king! She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From thee be born, who o'er thy country hangs The scourge of Heaven! What terrors round him wait! Amazement in his ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... found the pious clergyman reading prayers with great fervency, while Don Diego stood with his right hand upon his breast, looking steadfastly upon the agonising Fathom, and the young woman kneeled, with her streaming eyes lifted up to heaven, in an ecstasy of grief and devotion. The physician had run to an apothecary's shop in the neighbourhood, from whence he soon returned with an assistant, who applied a large blister to the back of the miserable ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... those of the classic sufferer in mythological tales. Jasper, indeed, had accommodated himself to this regular and unlaborious mode of gaining "sa pauvre vie." To call once a week upon his old acquaintance, frighten him with a few threats, or force a deathlike smile from agonising lips by a few villanous jokes, carry off his four sovereigns, and enjoy himself thereon till pay-day duly returned, was a condition of things that Jasper did not greatly care to improve; and truly had he said to Poole that his earlier ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... equal the scene of horror which the sudden conflagration produced in these two ships. The collision in which the fore-top-mast of the Hermenegildo fell on board of the Real Carlos, added to the general dismay; and the agonising screams of the unhappy crews, deserted by their countrymen and allies in that dreadful hour, could not fail to pierce the hearts of the brave conquerors; but to render them any assistance while the hostile flag was flying was impossible. The duty of the Admiral was to "sink, burn, and destroy." ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez, Vol. I • Sir John Ross
... since what a dreadful walk that was. He can remember it vividly across all the intervening years, and he declares that no criminal on his way to the gallows could have suffered from more agonising apprehensions. He pictured his reception in a thousand dismal forms. He saw himself knocking at the door; the moment's suspense; the servant facing him. What ought he to say? "Is Lady Charlton at home?" But that was ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... by what stares him in the face. Charles Dickens had lucid intervals in which he was vaguely conscious of the abuses around him; but his spasmodic efforts to expose these brought him into contact with realities so agonising to his highstrung literary nerves that he invariably sank back into debauches of unsocial optimism. Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses of the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in the social machine ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... unexpected horrors, that the safety of our lives is due, and, when we peeped occasionally at our steersman as we flew over the great rapid, where for over an hour every nerve, every fibre of his body was strung to agonising pitch, we looked and wondered. His eyes were fixed steadfastly before him, and as he flung all the weight of his body on to his pole, the whole boat trembled, but in a second obeyed his bidding and twisted whither he wished. Second, did we say? half-second, quarter-second, would ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... darkness was intense, his form and features were as clear and as defined as if it were noon-day. Fear would have inclined me to recoil from,—his loved presence to fly towards him. I remained on the spot where I was, choked with agonising sensations. When he had entered the room, the windows and shutters closed of themselves, and the candle was relighted—then I thought it was his apparition, and I fainted ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... octavos, quartos, and folios, has let us out at the end of his work just as wise as we were at the beginning. It was doubtless some philosophical wild-goose chase of the kind that made the old poet Macrobius rail in such a passion at curiosity, which he anathematises most heartily as "an irksome, agonising care, a superstitious industry about unprofitable things, an itching humor to see what is not to be seen, and to be doing what signifies nothing when it is ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... resembled Grandmother Starr; the lady looked like Rosemary, except that she was beautiful. "Father!" cried Rosemary, in an agonising whisper. "Mother!" Face to face at last with those of her own blood, dead ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... were carrying out dead bodies from the train; there were already at least fifty corpses laid on the platform, and the tale of dead increased every minute. Others, stricken with the fell disease, were lying on the platform, still alive, but in a state of collapse, or in the agonising cramps of this swift-slaying scourge. There happened to be two white doctors in the train, who did all that was possible for the sufferers, but, beyond the administration of opium, medical science is powerless in cholera cases. The ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... nearest to me was my sister Eva. A savage held her by her long hair, and with his sword lifted above her head, seemed but to wait the issue of the combat with the old chief to sever it from the body. I flew forward. My agonising fear was, that when he saw me coming he would complete his barbarous intention before he attempted to defend himself. I dared not shriek out; indeed my voice refused my feelings utterance. He was still gazing on the old warrior's gallant resistance, and did not observe my approach. Eva ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... and a great cry of agony rose to his throat—not of physical pain, though that was great too, but the wild, agonising shriek of mental torment, of disappointment and wrath and misery, greater than human ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... mode of your death is in our hands: it rests with us to make it slow or quick, painless or agonising; so take this ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... vacation I stayed at the school, and, in the absence of companionship and the sedative of work, suffered such agonising depression as led to physical illness, until one evening, after wandering aimlessly in the city, I fell fainting as I tried to reach the porch of a great church. When I recovered consciousness, I found myself in a room that smiled ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... is woven through the whole of this scene. In a hard masterful voice he speaks at length: "Bruennhilde! A suitor is come whom your fire does not alarm! I seek you for my wife; follow me unresistingly." It is all so strange, so like the agonising impossibilities of a dream,—Bruennhilde falls to trembling. "Who are you, dreadful one? Are you a mortal? Do you come from Hella's army of the night?" Still watching her, motionless on his point of vantage, he replies: "A Gibichung ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... took possession of him, and all that had formerly delighted him now gave him pain, inasmuch as it brought to his mind a host of recollections of the most agonising character. ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... fuss over a little pain!" What many would say to a suffering friend when sound and well themselves. What Richmond Chartley was ready to say to herself as she paced the room, with one hand pressed to her face, where the agonising pain seemed to start as a centre, and then ramify ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... beside herself, and implored that prayers might be offered for her. She had never before been seen in this state, and in her inexpressible anguish she kept repeating: "Oh! how necessary it is to pray for the agonising! ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... were not for the denounced race of De Haldimar," returned the youth,—"they were shed for their unhappy comrade—they were wrung from their stubborn hearts by the agonising grief of the wife ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... drove her to desperation. A conviction that the Mountain and the cakes were delicious, an amiable desire that the palate of her spoiled child should be gratified, some reasonable maternal anxiety that after so long and fatiguing a drive he in fact needed some refreshment, and the agonising consciousness that all her own physical pleasure at the moment was destroyed by the mental sufferings she endured at having quarrelled with her son, and that he was depriving himself of what was so agreeable only to pique her, quite overwhelmed the ill-regulated mind of this fond mother. Between ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... The creature at once raised its head also, and deliberately spat in his face, filling both eyes with poison. That is the invariable defence of the "Spitting Snake" (Rinkholz in Dutch, and Mbamba Twan or child catcher in Zulu). The pain is agonising. The eye turns red and appears to run with blood, but after a day or two the poison passes off and sight returns. The snake is not otherwise poisonous, but apparently can count on success in its shots ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... of Egyptian Mummies are past, how dare Mrs. Prodgit require, for the use of my son, an amount of flannel and linen that would carpet my humble roof? Do I wonder that she requires it? No! This morning, within an hour, I beheld this agonising sight. I beheld my son - Augustus George - in Mrs. Prodgit's hands, and on Mrs. Prodgit's knee, being dressed. He was at the moment, comparatively speaking, in a state of nature; having nothing on, but ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... not going away with Owen to Paris on Thursday night? The agonising question continued at every moment to present itself. Whatever she was doing or saying, she was always conscious of it, and as the time drew near, with every hour, it seemed to approach and menace her. She seemed to feel it beating like a neuralgic pain behind ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... to realise, too, that if deliverance was to come to me I must bestir myself and do what might be possible to meet it, for to remain passively lashed to that inert piece of drifting wreckage might very well mean a slow and agonising death by starvation. Yet, after all, what could I do? The land was my nearest refuge, and that, I considered, must be at least twenty miles distant, altogether too far to dream of swimming to it, although I rather prided ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Don't toll! You must not! You cannot!" Terror had sprung upon her, and her heart was being torn in two in her breast. That was surely what it seemed like—this agonising ache of fear. Now from hour to hour she would be waiting and listening to each sound borne on the air. Her thought would be a possession she could not escape. When she spoke or was spoken to, she would be listening—when ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the sergeant's tale, an agonising fear smote him for his friend M'Alister. Was there any hope that the Highlander could keep himself from the whiskey? Officers were making their rounds at very short intervals just now, and if drink and cold overcame ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... are rent on the forehead and round the head, in the hands, in the feet, and in the side; a stream of gore pours forth, at times trickling down in slow drops, at times (as on Fridays) in a fuller tide, accompanied with agonising pangs of body, and except in the fiercest moments of spiritual conflict, with interior consolations of ravishing sweetness. The wounds pierce deep down into the flesh, running even through the hands ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... history of myself, and of my sufferings, I had to gather strength for the task: one fatal day stood out in dreadful prominence; and to describe it was to live over again its agonising hours. Again I feel the same kind of emotion; again I must pause; for I am arrived at that moment which dragged me down a step lower into the abyss which I had seen from afar off, and from which I had vainly struggled to recede. ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... distresses his attention is directed to a "Next of Kin" advertisement. It relates to him and to the Yatton property; and if you be the least conversant with stage effect, you know what is coming: though the author thinks he is leaving you in a state of agonising ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... Irish Daily Mass Crusade; Total Abstinence; devotion to the Passion; devotion to the agonising Heart of Jesus. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... peculiarity in regard to all the final resolutions taken by him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic: the more final they were, the more hideous and the more absurd they at once became in his eyes. In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for a single instant all that time could believe in the ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... that she was on horseback, galloping, galloping, galloping, in headlong flight from someone, she knew not whom, but it was someone of whom she was unspeakably afraid. And ever behind her at break-neck speed, gaining upon her, merciless as fate, galloped her pursuer. It was terrible, it was agonising, yet, though in her heart she knew it to be a dream, she could not wake. And then, all suddenly, the race was over. Someone drew abreast of her. A sinewy hand gripped her bridle-rein. With a gasping cry she turned to face her captor, and saw—a Red Indian! His tigerish eyes gazed ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... our storm-lashed coast in tempest and in dark, Guardian of homeward-bound Poor JACK, to spread the news of fear, And tell him, battling with the storm, that rescuing hands, though near, Are not made helpless in his hour of agonising need, By ignorance that heeds not, and neglect that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... of victory frightened him. Now there must be an end of all this, now he would go home. He had not had the slightest prickings of conscience, the slightest longings, until now; all at once they were uncontrollable. SHE stood upon the hilltop, pure and noble. It became agonising. He must go at once, or it would drive him mad. This anxiety was made less acute by the sight of his mother's sincere pleasure. She came up to him when she heard that he had shut himself into his room. They had a really comfortable talk together—finally about ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... to watch over the linen; but at five o'clock on the Sunday morning, Aunt Anna, Fleeming, and his mother were rowed in a pour of rain on board an English merchantman, to suffer 'nine mortal hours of agonising suspense.' With the end of that time, peace was restored. On Tuesday morning officers with white flags appeared on the bastions; then, regiment by regiment, the troops marched in, two hundred men sleeping on the ground floor of the Jenkins' house, thirty thousand in all ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... every other man in the world might vanish for all that she cared. And had she only known it, she had never before looked so pretty as she did that night. This also she did not know, that her mother, catching a sudden picture of her under the candle-light, felt a deep pang of almost agonising envy. She, making her last desperate bid for love, was old and haggard; the years for her could only add to that age. Her gambler's throw was foredoomed before she ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... from all miseries and mischiefs! Unluckily we have none such; unluckily the Heavens themselves, in their rich pharmacopoeia, contain none such. There will no 'thing' be done that will cure you. There will a radical universal alteration of your regimen and way of life take place; there will a most agonising divorce between you and your chimeras, luxuries and falsities, take place; a most toilsome, all-but 'impossible' return to Nature, and her veracities and her integrities, take place: that so the inner fountains of life may again begin, like eternal Light-fountains, to irradiate ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... downward motion of his forefinger. He had, too, a quick, loud, ebullient laugh, sometimes shrill, sometimes deep; and he abandoned himself to laughter at an absurd story or jest as completely as anyone I have ever seen. Rose was an excellent mimic, and Father Payne used to fall into agonising paroxysms of laughter at many of his representations. But he always said that laughter was with him a social mood, and that he had never any inclination to laugh ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... other men. I have given to his own emotion the puniest name I could find for it; I have no nobler name for his intellect. But other men had thoughts, other men had passions; political, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, rebellious, agonising, imperial, republican, cruel, compassionate; and with these he fed his verses. Upon these and their life he sustained, he fattened, he enriched his poetry. Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in France, Shelley in England, made for him a base of passionate ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... hole in the road? who knows? In a moment they were all down, horse and riders flung in a heap together. The horse struggled to his knees, then fell again. He screamed, an agonising sound, that in Rita's excited mind seemed to mingle with the smoke and the dust in a cloud of horror. Every moment she expected to feel the iron hoofs crashing into her, as the frenzied creature struggled to regain ...
— Rita • Laura E. Richards
... dusk of a December day—that her mother had come back again to consciousness. She opened her eyes wearily, coming back, as Marjorie had herself that morning, from that strange realm of heavy and deathly sleep, to the pale phantom world called "life"; and agonising pain about the heart stabbed her ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... With agonising shriek He turned and fled, the spectral perspiration Dewing his brow and coursing down his cheek; Fled, and was lost to man's investigation (For full discussion of his little tricks See ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... lonely street was broken by a sudden cry of terror, followed by the clash of arms, the inevitable volley of oaths, the call for help, the final moan of anguish. They were the ever-recurring brief tragedies which told of denunciations, of domiciliary search, of sudden arrests, of an agonising desire for life and for freedom—for life under these same horrible conditions of brutality and of servitude, for freedom to breathe, if only a day or two longer, this air, polluted ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... filth, into which it fell like ink drops from the clouds. Few of the young or old have not read of the scene exhibited on the field of battle after the action, when visited by the surgeon. The cries of the wounded and dying for help, have been described by many graphic pens. The agonising entreaty for "Water! water! help, help!" has been conveyed to our minds with painful distinctness. I can liken the scene we witnessed in the low lane of famine and pestilence, to nothing of greater family resemblance, than that of the battle ...
— A Journal of a Visit of Three Days to Skibbereen, and its Neighbourhood • Elihu Burritt
... listless the limbs may have been when sustaining a too heavy heart, here they are braced, and the lagging gait becomes buoyant again. However perverse the memory may have been in presenting all that was agonising, and insisting only on what cannot be retrieved, here it is first disregarded, and then it sleeps and the sleep of the memory is the day in Paradise to the unhappy. The mere breathing of the cool wind ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... murmured down to Lady Davenant's embroidery frame, yet still in such a tone that Helen could not help thinking he meant she should hear)—"If I had a heart such as—" he paused, and, as if struck with some agonising thought, he sighed deeply, and then added—"but I have not a heart worth such acceptance, or ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... slave," and all that speech of Hyacinth's which the child had repeated, haunted Angela with an agonising iteration. She had not an instant's doubt as to the scene being faithfully reported. She knew how preternaturally acute Henriette's intellect had become in the rarified atmosphere of her mother's drawing-room, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... shield, the sword, the spirit of the brave, From rapine's armed hand thy vales to save, Land of illustrious heroes, who, of yore, Drenched the same plains with the invader's gore, Stood frowning, in the front of death, and hurled Defiance to the conquerors[145] of the world! Oh, when we hear the agonising tale Of those who, faint, and fugitive, and pale, Saw hourly, harassed through their long retreat, Some worn companion sinking at their feet, Yet even in danger and from toil more bold, Back on their gathering foes the tide of battle ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... of Felton must not, however, be conceived from this agonising scene of contrition. Of melancholy and retired habits, and one of those thousand officers who had incurred disappointments, both in promotion and in arrears of pay, from the careless duke, he felt, perhaps, although he denied it, a degree ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... books on the subjugation and the regulation of the heart will cure it. Descending with Dante to where the obstinate, and the embittered, and the gloomy, and the sullen have made their beds in hell will cure it. And much and most agonising prayer will above ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... agonising situation a horseman was seen approaching from the opposite side of the road. Only with the utmost difficulty could he force his way through the densely packed mob. Indeed, they would not have stirred a stump had he not kept on waving in his hand a piece of paper, ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... man's eyes, and seemed to see there an unfathomable sadness, such as he had never seen; but at the touch a pain so fierce and agonising passed through him, that he sank upon the ground and covered his ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, "for they are old like him," there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... objurgating and pleading with the spirits, who, she said, were vexing her child which had convulsions. "Observe," said the Doctor in his impressive way, "these were distinctly prayers, appeals for mercy, agonising protests, but there was no praise, no love, no thanks, no confession of sin." I said, considering the underlying idea, I did not see how that could be, thinking of the thing as they did, and the Doctor and I had one of our ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... pale as death, overwhelmed with awe. To have the answer of his prayers, the agonising of his soul for years, answered in the hour of utter defeat thrilled him with a sense of solemnity he had never felt. The man was not a man. He was the messenger swift and beautiful from the courts of heaven, ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... the agony of the thought was more than Paul could bear, and took him off with Pike alone into the leafless woods which crowned a hill at the top of the park. And then he would pause, and look out at the view, and the dull November sky, a madness of agonising unrest ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... This ring came from the Roman sepulchre of an early Christian, and the hand for which it was originally fashioned may have aided in the conquering war of the first Christian emperor; or may have been convulsed in an agonising death, "thrown to the beasts" of the circus, but reposing after death with the first martyrs to ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... the belt from which it depends. The consul in turn exhibits a mighty scroll of parchment, which takes as long to unroll as the officer's sabre takes to unsheath. Meanwhile I watch the combatants in agonising suspense, till the chamber becomes suddenly dark. But, after a painful pause, daylight appears, and to my unspeakable relief I find that my formidable visitors have vanished, and that I am alone ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... seems destined to be vain, self-baffled, and where the dreadful knell of too late is already sounding in the ears by anticipation—even that anguish is liable to a hideous exasperation in one particular case, namely, where the agonising appeal is made not exclusively to the instinct of self-preservation, but to the conscience, on behalf of another life besides your own, accidentally cast upon your protection. To fail, to collapse in a service merely your own, might seem ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... watching for them at the door—heard the landlady's cousin wailing, "Lil! Lil!"—and again plunged under, arms wide and eyes staring, and heart bursting with despair. Everything in him seemed bursting—an agonising sensation—as his overstrained lungs collapsed, and the power of his strong limbs failed him; then everything seemed to break away and let in the floods of Lethe with a rush—confusion and forgetfulness and a whirl of dreams, settling to a strange peace, an ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... And thus we lay agonising until the moon rose and then, by common consent, we stumbled on, seeking our great desire. And now as I went, my mouth parched, my tongue thickening to the roof of my mouth, I must needs think of plashing brooks, of bubbling ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... now that it was all over with us; fully expecting that the next sea would also break aboard, completely swamp the boat, and leave us all to swim for a few brief, agonising moments, and then to vanish for ever; yet with the never-slumbering instinct of self-preservation, I put the tiller hard over as the crest of the wave swept forward, and then frantically threw out an oar over the stern, ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... strange to her. She remembered his dark look, his frown when she had refused him. Oh, this loneliness, this helplessness. If she could be with him, beside him, she would fear nothing. That night, the first faint suspicion of jealousy, of doubt, an agonising dart of pain at the knowledge of what it would mean to her now if he left her, stirred in her breast. This room was stifling. She got up from her chair, went to the window, looked out between the thick ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... masters, then we shall be victims; ... we, do I say? Not ourselves alone, we are already victimised, but all that is dear to us, all that holds us to life, hope in the future, the salvation of humanity. See the things that press upon us, the agonising questions as to those who will come after us, and those who have children. This war is not yet over, and it is only too evident that its crimes and falsehoods have sown the seeds of new wars, near at hand. Why do we have ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... throw aside those traditions. Within the individuality itself of such persons, goes on, in an intensified form, that very struggle, conflict, and disco-ordination which is going on in society at large between its different members and sections; and agonising moments must arise, when the individual, seeing the necessity for adopting new courses of action, or for accepting new truths, or conforming to new conditions, will yet be tortured by the hold of traditional convictions; and the man or woman who attempts to adapt their life to ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... mournful image of Parthenia's fate, That hour, O long beloved and long deplored! When blooming youth, nor gentlest wisdom's arts, Nor Hymen's honours gather'd for thy brow, Nor all thy lover's, all thy father's tears Avail'd to snatch thee from the cruel grave; Thy agonising looks, thy last farewell 200 Struck to the inmost feeling of my soul As with the hand of Death. At once the shade More horrid nodded o'er me, and the winds With hoarser murmuring shook the branches. Dark As midnight storms, the scene of human ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... anguish I feel at the death of our sweet Annie. To know that I shall never see her again on earth, that her place in our circle, which I always hoped one day to enjoy, is forever vacant, is agonising in the extreme. But God in this, as in all things, has mingled mercy with the blow, in selecting that one best prepared to leave us. May you be able to join me in saying 'His will be done!' ...I know how much you will grieve and how much she ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... aloof, now took courage to approach, and form a second circle outside. The most furious despair now took possession of the souls of the devoted Pequodees: and their terrible war-cry was heard resounding high, and mingled with the agonising yells of the women and children, and helpless aged men, who were expiring amid the flames. Many of the warriors climbed the palisades, and leaped down among their foes, hoping to escape; but they were quickly despatched by the muskets ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... his own, and the fair Magnolia was evidently full of pleasant surprise and curiosity. I really think, if O'Flaherty had had a pistol within reach, he would have been tempted to deliver himself summarily from that agonising situation. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... their agonising pleasure, Convuls'd, and on the rapid whirlwinds spun ... Maidens and youths fling their wild arms in air. As their feet ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... angle, 'if I had but those unfortunate amethysts of mine—you recollect them, Kate, my love—how they used to sparkle, you know—but your papa, your poor dear papa—ah! there never was anything so cruelly sacrificed as those jewels were, never!' Overpowered by this agonising thought, Mrs Nickleby shook her head, in a melancholy manner, and applied ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... must not, speak,— Because I mark his quick impatient eye Striving in kindness to anticipate The word of welcome strangled in its birth? Is it not sorrow, while I truly love Sweet social converse, to be forced to shun The happy circle, from a nervous sense— An agonising poignant consciousness— That I must stand aloof, nor mingle with The wise and good in rational argument, The young in brilliant quickness of reply, Friendship's ingenuous interchange of mind, Affection's open-hearted sympathies? But feel myself an isolated ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of his Cross: however young, strong, proud, gallant, gifted, ambitious you may be- -sit down at the foot of Christ's Cross, and look thereon, till you see what it means, and must mean for ever. See how he nailed to that Cross, not in empty metaphor but in literal fact, in agonising soul and body, all of human nature which the world admires—youth, grace, valour, power, eloquence, intellect: not because they were evil, for he possessed them doubtless himself as did none other of the sons of men—not, I say, because they ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... incoherent, I fear, but I have been waking two nights witnessing such agonising suffering as I would not wish my worst enemy to endure; and I have now lost the guide and director of all the happy days connected with my childhood. I have suffered much sorrow since I last saw you ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... "Jove! I had been living for days with a stone on my chest." Now at last he had thought he would get hold of something, and—nothing! Not a trace, not a sign of anybody. He had raised his weapon as the door flew open, but now his arm fell. "Fire! Defend yourself," the girl outside cried in an agonising voice. She, being in the dark and with her arm thrust in to the shoulder through the small hole, couldn't see what was going on, and she dared not withdraw the torch now to run round. "There's nobody here!" yelled Jim contemptuously, but his impulse to burst into a resentful exasperated ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... deep waters of the lake, was wrapped in silence. Then followed the report—whispered through the party assembled to do honour to the future bride and bridegroom—that "Bill" was missing. Then came the agonising suspense and the eight hours' search ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... couple of years. How short is the time devoted to the manipulation of a plot can be known only to those who have written plays and novels; I may say also, how very little time the brain is able to devote to such wearing work. There are usually some hours of agonising doubt, almost of despair,—so at least it has been with me,—or perhaps some days. And then, with nothing settled in my brain as to the final development of events, with no capability of settling anything, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... hours that Prussian was agonising in the corn. Either he was calling out or some one was shouting ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... an authentic statement, in which he vouches, with every appearance of truth, that "Lord Melbourne dined at home on Wednesday last." The neighbourhood is in an agonising state ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... by this agonising possibility that instead of listening for the striking of the clock, he began to listen for the sound of some passing footstep—the footstep of someone passing by chance who might be sent to the parson with a note. With intolerable effort and suffering he managed to ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... pitch tepee, family fires are lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of the animal he snares. With blanket, bait, and bacon on a small hand-sled, silently the trapper trudges forward. The Northern Lights come down o' nights, and it is cold; but cold makes finer fur. Down far trails in gloomy forests, across the breasts of silent ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... had felt that her presence was some slight protection. Keeping close in the shadow of this creature's frowzy skirts, she had not so feared and dreaded those light eyes of Bough's, and the padding, following footsteps had kept aloof. As the woman passed her now, a rage of unspeakable, agonising fear rose in her bosom. She cried out to her, and clutched at her ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... as he put his big hand upon the child's head, and then taking up Fraser's letter, he again read it aloud. It described in simple language Gerrard's desperate struggle with the alligator, then went on about his courage and fortitude under agonising pain, for the wounds caused by alligators' claws invariably set up an intense and poisonous inflammation, and take a long time to heal, and concluded by saying, "as long as life lasts, I shall never forget that only for his heroic conduct I should now be a childless man, ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... from his uniform was agonising, and he berated the fate that pried him loose from tunic and puttees. So disgusted was he that, although the Government allowed three months longer before discarding uniforms, he shed ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... blazes with unendurable fierceness from July to October. In England he was full of strength and vigour, fond of boating and a good lawn-tennis player. In China he is always ill, anaemic, wasted, and dyspeptic, constantly subject to low forms of fever, and destitute of appetite. But more agonising than his bad health is the horrible reality of the unavailing sacrifice he is making—no converts but "outcasts subsidised to forsake their family altars;" no reward but the ultimate one which his noble self-devotion is laying up ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... the vestments of Catholic priests. They produced a wax figure, designed to represent a missionary, amused themselves with a mock trial, inflicted imaginary tortures, and returned the dummy to a cupboard, after which they proceeded to the crucifixion of a living pig. The third act was an agonising experience for the doctor, being nothing less than the sacrifice of one of the brethren, the selection being determined by lot. The doctor, in his quality of visitor, was, it is true, spared the chance of being himself ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... yielding to the strain on its roots. And while each moment was life or death to her, he found the current unexpectedly strong, and he had to use his utmost efforts to avoid being carried down far below where she stood watching with cramped, strained failing limbs, and eyes of appealing, agonising hope. ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which you did not adopt in haste. It was a principle well tried in struggle and conflict. It was a principle which gained the assent of one public man after another. It was a principle which ultimately triumphed, after you had spent upon it half a century of agonising struggle. And now what are you going to do? You have arrived at the division of the century. Are you going to repeat Penelope's process, but without the purpose of Penelope? Are you going to spend the decay and the dusk of the nineteenth ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... much for poor, half-petrified pink-face with the twisted tail. Seeing that its comrades were gone in earnest, it became desperate, flung itself frantically into the air with an agonising squeak, missed its mark, went crashing through the slender branches ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... of war dealt equal woe and counterchange of death; in even balance conquerors and conquered slew and fell; nor one nor other knows of retreat. The gods in Jove's house pity the vain rage of either and all the agonising of mortals. From one side Venus, from one opposite Juno, daughter of Saturn, looks on; pale Tisiphone rages among the many thousand men. But now, brandishing his huge spear, Mezentius strides glooming over the plain, vast as Orion when, with planted foot, he cleaves his ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... One spectacle was particularly agonising. It has been mentioned that Mrs. Dawson, one of the passengers, had declared before the vessel started, that, if she could, she would leave it, and would not sail. But her husband did not come in time, and she had therefore gone with the rest. She ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... wrought half so dexterously or gained such swift access to the heart. The vision faded, and a momentary darkness ensued. Suddenly a blaze of light irradiated the apartment. Rodolf beheld, for one short glimpse, a Gothic hall. Kate was there, and a lover kneeling at her feet. Madness seized him, agonising and intense. In vain he sought the features of his tormentor; the vision had departed, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... continued Valmai; "I shall never regret having kept my promise! Indeed, I never felt tempted to break it, except one day, when, in the old church, I met your father face to face. Never shall I forget the agonising longing I felt to throw myself at his feet and tell him all, and ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... couldn't make a child believe it was anything else, but it has made the Consuls sit up. My own private scares were really abominably annoying; as for instance after I had got to sleep for the ninth time perhaps - and that was no easy matter either, for I had a crick in my neck so agonising that I had to sleep sitting up - I heard noises as of a man being murdered in the boys' house. To be sure, said I, this is nothing again, but if a man's head was being taken, the noises would be the same! So I had to get up, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... berthed alongside the graving-dock pier at Williamstown, which made it easy of access. In spite of the agonising pain which Tom was suffering from an inflamed eye, he insisted on going to the Seamen's Meeting, and actually managed to make a good speech, though he scarcely knew what he was saying at the time. The party ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... putting up her hand as though to protect herself, on the point of crying again. "Calm yourself. That's enough. What are you afraid of? Surely you know me?" said Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch, trying to soothe her; but it was long before he could succeed. She gazed at him dumbly with the same look of agonising perplexity, with a painful idea in her poor brain, and she still seemed to be trying to reach some conclusion. At one moment she dropped her eyes, then suddenly scrutinised him in a rapid comprehensive ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Jack from the gangway, who was nearly fainting from agonising feelings. He sank on the deck for a moment, and then sprang up and ran to the port to look at the men in the water. He was just in time to see the coxswain raise himself with a loud yell out of the sea, and then disappear in a vortex, which ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... somewhere, far away, a woman with longing in her heart is dreaming beside an empty bed. All those are sick who fail to hear the moaning, the gnashing of teeth, the howling, the crashing and bursting, the wailing and cursing and agonising in death, because their ears are filled with the murmur of everyday affairs. These blind and deaf ones are sick, not I. Sick are those dumb beings whose soul can give voice neither to compassion nor to ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... taking poison, by hanging, by burning, at the hands of robbers, and at the teeth of animals, is said to be an inglorious one.[1555] Those men that are righteous never incur such or similar deaths even if they be afflicted with mental and physical diseases of the most agonising kind. The lives of the righteous, O king, piercing through the Sun, ascend into the regions of Brahma. The lives of those that are both righteous and sinful rove in the middle regions. The lives of those that are sinful sink into the lowest depths. There is only ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... his heart with the sudden movement of one who feels there an agonising spasm—his cheek, his very lips ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ungenial, but one that shall absorb and fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and purer fulness of life for which she yearns. Then follows the long and painful struggle,—a struggle so agonising to such a nature, that only one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it. For it is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere personal good. On one side is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her husband's wasted life and energies, even though ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... devils need something—is it that, then? Is it a real thing? Do people fight for it like that? For this imperious Voice is agonising for something and the drum is ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... had not come to her rescue. The ministers of her religion were scattered to the four corners of besieged, agonising France. She had no one to help her, no one to comfort her. That very peaceful, contemplative life she had led in the convent, only served to enhance her feeling of the solemnity ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven, nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is crimson with the ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... body (continued the renegade, mournfully), where I remained for many hours. At last I rose in a frenzy quite indifferent as to life or death. I went on deck, where I found my crew much in the same condition, from their agonising thirst; but I mocked them, and laughed at the smooth expanse of water, which, far as the eye could reach, was not rippled by the slightest breeze, and turned my eyes up in derision to the sun, who poured ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... had avoided asking Betty about George. Betty's twin had been away at the time of Radmore's break with Old Place—away in a sense which in our civilised days can only be brought about by one thing, an infectious illness. At the time the agonising debate was going on at Beechfield, he had been in a fever hospital close on a month, and they were none of them to see him for three more weeks. It had been at once a pain and a relief that he should not be there—yet what good could a boy of ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... depresses the souls of mortals—would now partake of all and each in an equal degree with the children of the earth. I would have my bosom torn with the conflicting passions of humanity—be chilled with the horrid doubts of jealousy, and with agonising fears for the duration of the affection which will become ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... woof, The winding-sheet of Edward's race: Give ample room and verge enough The characters of Hell to trace. Mark the year and mark the night When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death through Berkley's roofs that ring, Shrieks of an agonising king![5] She-wolf of France,[6] with unrelenting fangs That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate, From thee[7] be born who o'er thy country hangs The scourge of Heaven. What terrors round him wait! Amazement in his van, with Flight combined, And Sorrow's ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... dignities. It is as if Shakespeare had had in mind some such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical or military ones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the last touch of unkindness to the execution of its sentences, in the scene where Richard "deposes" himself, as in some long, agonising ceremony, reflectively drawn out, with an extraordinary refinement of intelligence and variety of piteous appeal, but also with a felicity of poetic invention, which puts these pages into a very select class, with the finest "vermeil and ivory" work ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... near such an enormity, let alone to have it brought home to herself in a horrible accusation; and the effect of it was a shock to her nervous system—one of those stunning blows which are scarcely felt at first, but are agonising in their after effects. When the reaction set in, Beth's disgust was so great it took a physical form, and ended by making her violently sick. It was days before she quite recovered, and in one sense of the word she was never the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... first lesson we ever had in the double fuck. Dear Lizzie was almost mad with the agonising sensations of rapturous pleasure the double thrusting produced upon her erotic nerves. I, too, felt the rubbing of Mr. M.'s prick so closely upon mine, for the slight membrane dividing the bottom passage from the ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... silently he bent over it, tears—tears, how human!—fell from his eyes like rain! And the little one smiled through the tears that bathed its cheeks! Ah, with what happy tears we welcome the stranger into our sorrowing world! With what agonising tears we dismiss the stranger back to the angels! Unselfish joy; but how selfish is ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... direction of the boulevard Malesherbes, with neck outstretched and straining eyeballs. At last, after an agonising wait, she and Mimile saw the carriages driving by. "Attention!" cried big Ernestine in a sharp whisper ... "everybody's on the ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... may I certainly know what God wants of me?" is sure to become the earnest and, oftentimes, the agonising cry of every humble and devoutly zealous young Christian. "How may I know the guidance of the Holy Spirit?" is ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... and pencil, and while shells and shrapnel were bursting over and around them the wounded man dictated a letter to his wife in Holland. Blood flowed copiously from the wound and stained the grass upon which he lay. He was pale as the clouds above him, and the pain was agonising, but the dying man's letter was filled with nothing but expressions of love ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... activity of the day, nobody is likely to contend that men are pressed keenly in their souls by any poignant stress of spiritual tribulation in the face of the two supreme enigmas. Nobody will say that there is much of that striving and wrestling and bitter agonising, which whole societies of men have felt before now on questions of far less tremendous import. Ours, as has been truly said, is 'a time of loud disputes and weak convictions,' In a generation deeply impressed by a sense of intellectual responsibility ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... close to the window, blinding him. At times he caught the clink of a bottle, and fancied that the men were supping; but he knew nothing for certain, and by-and-by the light was put out. A brief—and agonising—period of silence followed, during which he thought that he caught the distant tramp of horses; but he had heard the same sound before, it might be the beating of his heart, and before he could decide, oaths and exclamations ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... among the various sonorous things with which Mr. Rusper adorned the front of his shop, zinc dustbins, household pails, lawn mowers, rakes, spades and all manner of clattering things. Before he got among them he had one of those agonising moments of helpless wrath and suspense that seem to last ages, in which one seems to perceive everything and think of nothing but words that are better forgotten. He sent a column of pails thundering across the doorway and dismounted with one foot in a sanitary dustbin amidst ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... several were despaired of. Two of them had not recovered the use of their hands and feet at the end of ten weeks, and their faces, especially the eyes and mouth, seemed to be permanently, though slightly distorted. All the men agreed in one particular, that at midday they suffered most—agonising cramps, accompanied by shooting pains in the head and continuous vomiting to the point of exhaustion, these symptoms being very pronounced during the first week or eight days after the fish had ...
— John Corwell, Sailor And Miner; and, Poisonous Fish - 1901 • Louis Becke
... danger of death. Now the youthful lady and the gentleman ate little supper, but retired early to rest. Let us leave them there, since no words, except those of paradise unknown to us, would describe their delightful agonies, and agonising delights. Meanwhile, the husband, so well cuckolded that all memory of marriage had been swept away by love,—the said Avenelles found himself in a great fix. To the council of the Huguenots came the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... at least it seemed to us long, for we had to round the sandy spit before we could head towards the rock, and nearly got on shore in trying to make too close a shave. We could hear the crack of the pilot's carbine every few minutes, borne down to us by the freshening breeze, and the agonising "coo-ehs" of poor Wordsworth, whose ankles were already hidden by the advancing waters; added to this, we had only two oars, and the wind, now pretty strong, was dead in our teeth. I was steering, and Jim was standing up in the bows with his carbine for a shot, if the ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... miserable consequences, when received into a heart of insight and determination sufficient to follow out all belief to its ultimate practice, is the main object of my Poem. That a most degrading and agonising contradiction on these points must have existed in the mind of Elizabeth, and of all who with similar characters shall have found themselves under similar influences, is a necessity that must be evident to all who know anything of the deeper affections of men. In the idea of a married Romish saint, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... the hand coming and wrenched himself away, seeming to take a piece of my arm with him, and leaving me throbbing with agonising pain, and feeling as if I must yell out ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... fact—whether you are to be suited for inextinguishable sorrow, or for mere passing grief; and if you are at all in doubt upon the subject, he can solve the problem for you, if you lend him your confidence for the occasion. He knows from long and melancholy experience the agonising intensity of wo expressed by bombazine, crape, and Paramatta; can tell to a sigh the precise amount of regret that resides in a black bonnet; and can match any degree of internal anguish with its corresponding shade of colour, from the utter desolation and inconsolable wretchedness ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... out-reasons that surviving claim of the beloved dead? Which of us would, in his purest hour, desire to do so? She could not save him, but, as she valued her most precious human privileges, she dared not taste the fruits of life of which he was for ever robbed. Between her and happiness loomed that agonising face, She might disregard it, might close her eyes and press on, might live down the old sacred pity and give herself to absorbing bliss what would be the true value of that she gained? Nay, it was idle to affect that she had the choice. She felt that the first memory ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... we used to interpret into hieroglyphics of pain and suffering." This is in Lamb's most delightful vein. So, too, with other incidents of the school, especially "our little leaden inkstands, not separately subsisting, but sunk into the desks; and the agonising benches on which we were all cramped together, and yet encouraged to attain a free hand, unattainable in this position." Lamb recollected even his first copy—"Art improves nature," and could look ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... entertained, the visions of gay things which he had suffered the enchanter Imagination to call forth from the former obscurity of his fate, were all dispelled by the words that he had just heard spoken; and everything dark, and painful and agonising, was spread out around him in its stead. He was as one who, having fallen asleep in a desert, has dreamt sweet dreams, and then suddenly wakes with the rising sun, to find nothing but arid desolation ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... wreck, meditating on their fate. All were young. Life, with all its fancied charms and anticipated pleasure, had a few short moments previously been before them; and now, death in all its terrors—slow, lingering, and agonising—stared them in the face. One only of the whole party was a good swimmer, Mr W.R. Smith, and he was a very bold and strong one. He looked at the shore: two miles was a long distance to swim, with a full ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... she—she, by the very act of being born had caused her mother's death,—and she well knew that her father's heart, quietly as he had endured his grief to all outward appearances, had never healed of that agonising wound. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... midst of one of the paroxysms of Her Majesty's agonising agitation after leaving Versailles, for the past, the present, and the future state of the Royal Family, when the Princesse Elizabeth and myself were in vain endeavouring to calm her, a deputation was announced from the National Assembly and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the housekeeper, "that when he was agonising in prayer it came into his mind to wait until August this year. He hasn't any assurance what it may have meant; but that may come later, and p'r'aps the days may be told him; and he's awaiting, and we're awaiting too. There, that's all ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... that he must go to Luard and tell him that the story was an invention. Though he dreaded humiliation more than anything in the world, he hugged himself for two or three days at the thought of the agonising joy of humiliating himself to the Glory of God. But he never got any further. He satisfied his conscience by the more comfortable method of expressing his repentance only to the Almighty. But he could not understand why he should have ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... laughter in a house of mourning to this woman whose delight lay in a grave, and if they were sorrows, whether coming to a woman who had wept so much they would not extort some last secretion more agonising than a ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... went out to the hill, and lay all night wrestling and agonising to be sure whether there was a God. You know he 's just a small farmer, and it seems to me splendid that such a man should give himself to the big problems of the universe. Do you know," and Carmichael turned to the General, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren |
