"Incurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... character of the piece, and a character rather unusually strong for Romance. She plays the part of reconciler after Partenopeus' fatal folly has estranged him from her sister, and plays it at great length, but with much less tedium than might be expected. But the author is an "incurable feminist," as some one else was once described with a mixture of pity and admiration: and he is not contented with two heroines. There is a third, Persewis, maid of honour to Urraque, and also a fervent admirer of the incomparable Partenopeus, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... too, in the propriety of this course by the conviction that all efforts to go beyond this tend only to produce dissatisfaction and distrust, to excite jealousies, and to provoke resistance. Instead of adding strength to the Federal Government, even when successful they must ever prove a source of incurable weakness by alienating a portion of those whose adhesion is indispensable to the great aggregate of united strength and whose voluntary attachment is in my estimation far more essential to the efficiency of a government strong in the best of all possible strength—the confidence ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson
... reason why one is sometimes tempted to quarrel with him is that his play of fence is so excellent that one longs to cross swords. For this and for other reasons no writer has a more stimulating effect, or is more likely to lead his readers on to explore and to think for themselves. In none is that incurable curiosity, that infinite variety of desire for knowledge and for argument which age cannot quench, more observable. Few if any have the indefinable quality of freshness in so large a measure. You never quite know, though you may have a shrewd suspicion, what De Quincey ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and Briscoe's father were old friends. Briscoe's father was dying with incurable heart disease; his son was dead, and old Briscoe had only one thought in his mind—to make sure he didn't die for nothing. So he took your father's papers, knowing they were as good as a death warrant, slipped away and boarded a Lhari ship that led roundabout to stars where the message hadn't ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... try, you know—ah—try very hard not to be queer. I hated being queer. But it wasn't any use, so at last I gave up trying. My kind of queerness is something one can't get over, apparently; it's a sort of incurable disease. Dear ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... a very talented lady teacher of Elocution in Philadelphia if she regarded shrill voices as incurable. She replied that they invariably yielded to instruction and training. Children under no domestic restraint who were allowed to scream out and dispute on all occasions and were never corrected in intonation, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... rise in the morning betimes, full of inflexible resolution. Having stretched his canvas, and carefully prepared his pigments, he went to breakfast, pondering great achievements. Here he fell in with a lot of Germans,—the most incurable race of gossipers in the world,—and while they discussed, in a learned way, every subject under the sun, the meal extended into the afternoon, and Jimman concluded that it was then too late to undertake anything. In this way his ambition burnt away, his money was ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... to explain how much difference there is between what is uncertain and what cannot be perceived, and to make a distinction between them. Let us, then, now deal with those who draw this distinction, and let us abandon, as incurable and desperate, those who say that everything is as uncertain as whether the number of the stars be odd or even. For they contend, (and I noticed that you were especially moved by this,) that there is something ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... our earlier years, most of the sufferings, and calm most of the agitations of the soul, however incurable and uncontrollable they may at first appear to the sufferer. But in the later periods of life, when severe shocks strike very heavily upon the soul, there is found far less of buoyancy and recovering power to meet the blow. ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... ship, which arrived from France, brought Madame de la Tour a letter from her aunt. Alarmed by the terrors of approaching death, which could alone penetrate a heart so insensible, recovering from a dangerous disorder, which had left her in a state of weakness, rendered incurable by age, she desired that her niece would return to France; or, if her health forbade her to undertake so long a voyage, she conjured her to send Virginia, on whom she would bestow a good education, procure for her a splendid marriage, and leave her the inheritance of her whole fortune. ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... demand that the temporal government of the people should be by and for the people, he was not willing to admit; and by covertly attempting to destroy or counteract all that he publicly and ostensibly admitted, he filled the people with incurable resentment against those who surrounded him, and to whom they attributed, rather than to himself, the faithless and despotic policy in secret pursued. A chamber of deputies was convoked, to whom the pope formally surrendered his government, declining to take any part in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... affections with the stings of a jealous heart. A soul so sensitive as mine feels deeply the wounds he has afflicted. Oh! unfortunate woman that I am! Wherefore am I consigned to the torments of impending fate. Have I committed crimes so incurable that there is no remedy for them! My heart is ready to burst! I shall die under the horror of my calamity! Oh! merciful heavens, have pity upon me!—poor wretched creature ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... themselves. There is another valuable blood test worked out by Noguchi. With these two tests we are now able to diagnose the disease, almost absolutely, and follow up the treatment till cure is complete, except in some of the incurable brain and spinal ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... sluggishness of mental action, obtuseness of apprehension, etc. Apathy may be temporary, and be dispelled by appeal to the feelings or by the presentation of an adequate motive, but stupidity is inveterate and commonly incurable. Compare APATHY; ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... possession. But the demon Asmodeus, who beset Sara, the daughter of Raguel,[244] and who killed her first seven husbands; those spoken of in the Gospel, who were simply struck with maladies or incommodities which were thought to be incurable; those whom the Scripture sometimes calls lunatics, who foamed at the mouth, who were convulsed, who fled the presence of mankind, who were violent and dangerous, so that they were obliged to be chained to prevent them from striking and maltreating other people; these kinds of persons were simply ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... write out the death warrants for all these men and women. One of the people on that ship was coming to see me. That's how I happened to be on the field. For her, at least, it may be better so. The poor woman was suffering from an incurable cancer." ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... one long torture," he cried with uplifted hands. "May every enterprise in which he engages end in disaster; may his father and mother die, and let him be left desolate; may a subtle and incurable disease lay its grip upon him; may misfortune pursue him in every shape and form; may he become a beggar with ulcered legs and sit on the roadside and beseech the passers-by, in sunshine and in storm, for a few cash that will just help to keep him alive; may he never have a son to perpetuate ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... seem an odd heading. But I really believe there is scarcely a greater worry which invalids have to endure than the incurable hopes of their friends. There is no one practice against which I can speak more strongly from actual personal experience, wide and long, of its effects during sickness observed both upon others and upon myself. I would appeal ...
— Notes on Nursing - What It Is, and What It Is Not • Florence Nightingale
... that it was the Muse that had taken advantage of my solitude and possessed me—the witch had evidently come to ruin a poor devil like myself making a living by collecting cotton duties. I decided to have a good dinner—it is the empty stomach that all sorts of incurable diseases find an easy prey. I sent for my cook and gave orders for a rich, sumptuous moghlai dinner, redolent of ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... certain Bruno Bibelbauer in the monthly medical journal, in which it is claimed that the reason for my paranoia is that I imagine that I have some paralysis. Everyone looks at me strangely; I am famous. My publisher is giving me a large advance. But—ah, I must not say it—I am incurable." He went immediately ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... disadvantages in the use of this yellow phosphorus. First of all, it is a poisonous substance; and what is more, the vapour of the phosphorus was liable to affect the workpeople engaged in the manufacture of lucifer matches with a bad disease of the jaw, and which was practically, I am afraid, incurable. A very great chemist, Schroetter, discovered that phosphorus existed under another form, some of which I have here. This, which is of a red colour, was found to be exactly the same chemical substance as the yellow phosphorus, but possessing in many respects different properties. For instance, you ...
— The Story of a Tinder-box • Charles Meymott Tidy
... that two wings were added for incurable patients, but this proved insufficient in the course of time; and in 1793 an adjoining plot of ground was obtained, and more accommodation provided. Only six years later, however, surveyors appointed to inspect the premises reported that the hospital ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... scenes of 1812, on an estate of his at Saint-Germain. The mad-woman recognized him indeed, but she died immediately. Having gained the promotion of general, Sucy committed suicide, the prey of incurable ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... Elizabethans, permitted no intermission between acts. It was very often laughed to death. At times it became a saturnalia of extravagant action, and it frequently ended in a free fight, when the Rose and the Lily hinted too openly at the Recluse's incurable tendency to sing off key. But that night it might have dragged its saccharine length of melody to the coronation of the Rose and a quick curtain if Miss Madigan had not walked right ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... large to be such an inconvenient and painstaking process, that the children who are allowed to lay a foundation for personality—to say "I" in its disagreeable stages—seem to be confined, for the most part, to either one or the other of two classes—the Incurable or the Callous. The more thorough a child's nature is, the more real his processes are, the more incurable he is bound to be—secretly if he is sensitive, and offensively if he is callous. In either case the fact is the same. The child unconsciously acts on the principle that ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... all golf clubs have extensive bars! It is not hard to understand why men who realize that they have become incurable victims of the insidious habit of golf should wish to drown the thought in drink. But in Birmingham they can't do it—not, at least, at bars. Alabama has beaten her public bars into soda fountains and quick-lunch ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... parcel after parcel with frank innocence and little bird-like cries of rapture, he knew the intolerable sweetness of bestowing delight on the beloved—a sweetness only equalled by the intolerable agony of seeing helpless and incurable pain on the ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... given careful advice relative to his present and probable future condition, and every effort is made to help the applicant plan his life so that he may be able at a later time to enter the college. Of course, it occasionally happens that applicants are found with serious and incurable health defects which make it very improbable that they will ever be in condition to ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Like all sufferers from incurable diseases she was only too ready to place confidence in any person who laid claim to special knowledge. She began to wonder if Considine was such a specialist. She wrote to him, looking for a miracle to ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... is very well said," quoth the Captain, "but it did not strike me. What I have seen in this book is courage. Here is a poor creature rolling on the carpet with agony; from childhood to death tortured by a mysterious incurable malady,—a malady that is described as 'an internal apparatus of torture;' and who does, by his heroism, more than bear it,—he puts it out of power to affect him; and though (here is the passage) 'his appointment ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Portugal, had invaded the Territories of Muly Moluc, Emperor of Morocco, in order to dethrone him, and set his Crown upon the Head of his Nephew, Moluc was wearing away with a Distemper which he himself knew was incurable. However, he prepared for the Reception of so formidable an Enemy. He was indeed so far spent with his Sickness, that he did not expect to live out the whole Day, when the last decisive Battel was given; but knowing the fatal Consequences that ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... part of every literature (I employ the words "dirty stories" in the circulating library sense); therefore a taste for dirty stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal. Call it a disease if you will—an incurable disease—which, if it is driven inwards, will break out in an unexpected quarter in a new form and with redoubled virulence. This is exactly what has happened. Actuated by the most laudable motives, Mudie cut off our rations of dirty stories, and for ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... story: regarding poetry, incurable love, false hair, and the hero of the story—The dangers of fame and the advantage of the upper shelf—The Chinaman's pigtail, and the collar of ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... judicious to have redundancies, they shall be lopped off, if possible; but this is very difficult to do, when a man has written with thought; and this defect, whenever I have suspected it or found it to exist in any writings of mine, I have always found incurable. The fault lies too deep, and is in the first conception. If you see Coleridge before I do, do not speak of this to him, as I should like to have his judgment unpreoccupied by such an apprehension. I wish much to have your further opinion of the young Roscius, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified reproach to his incurable incapacity. ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... offensive and unpalatable truth could be presented to mankind than this on which Jesus constantly insists, that sins of temper are much more harmful than sins of passion, that they spring from a more incurable malignancy of nature, that they produce far wider ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... She hated strange faces and strange places. Her sisters must have seen that such a temperament, if it made her unlikely to attract a husband or to wish to attract one, also rendered her lamentably unfit to earn her living as a governess. In those days they could not tell that the defect was incurable, a congenital infirmity of nature; and doubtless Charlotte, the wise elder sister, thought she had found a cure for both the narrow education and the narrow sympathies when she suggested that Emily should go to school. She writes to her friend ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... circumstances, and in a little time he was utterly exhausted. He had recourse to his bookseller, from whom, with great difficulty, he obtained a small reinforcement; and immediately relapsed into the same want of retention. He was conscious of his infirmity, and found it incurable: he foresaw that by his own industry he should never be able to defray the expense of these occasions; and this reflection sunk deep into his mind. The approbation of the public, which he had earned or might acquire like a cordial often repeated, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... visibly accumulating for a third deadly fall, and when it takes place, as take place it will, men will speak of the dispassionate cruelty of nature. Time after time the lava from Mount Vesuvius has overwhelmed the localities that nestle on its slopes, but human heedlessness proves incurable. If the Sicilians, knowing the nature of the soil, had built their towns of isolated, one-storied, wooden structures, at a reasonable distance from the shore, the effects of earthquake and tidal wave would not have been one hundredth ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... pictures, amongst which are a Virgin and dead Christ, by Lebrun, and a portrait of Mlle de la Valliere. Opposite is the Maison du Noviciat des Religieuses Hospitalieres de St. Thomas de Villeneuve. Still continuing in the Rue de Sevres, at No. 54, is the hospital for women who are incurable; it was founded in 1634 by Cardinal de la Rochefoucault, which is indicated by an inscription over the door; it contains 600 beds. There is a large chapel attached, in which there are some pictures, and one bearing the date of 1404 with a handsome ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... unsatisfied with what she had and wanted something else. From wishing to willing, from willing to asking, is not such a great distance. But if we ask the repentant sinner when she began to think of her criminal action we always learn that she suffered from incurable ennui, in which wicked thoughts came and still more wicked plans were hatched. Any experienced criminal psychologist will tell you, when you ask him, whether he has been much subject to mistakes in trying to explain women's crimes from the starting-point ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... inarticulate old hearts, is a comfort, if one chance to think of it.—Of "distressed needlewomen" who cannot sew, nor be taught to do it; who, in private truth, are mutinous maid-servants come at last to the net upshot of their anarchies; of these, or of the like incurable phenomena, I hear nothing in Berlin; and can believe that, under this King, Indigence itself may still have something of a human aspect, not a brutal or diabolic as is commoner in some places.—This is one ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Margot: By the time you read this I shall be dead. Ironical, isn't it? Coming so close—with death in the form of an incurable cancer intervening. ...
— Equation of Doom • Gerald Vance
... your manuscript on merits; if he does not, he will not long continue to be an editor. The two greatest curses of his existence (I speak from experience) are the poses and the incurable loquaciousness of some of his callers and correspondents. Don't attempt to spring any correspondence school salesmanship on a real editor. Learn what real salesmanship is, from a real salesman—who may sell bacon, or steel or motor cars instead of manuscripts. He lives ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... lives, from blooming boyhood to phlegmatic old age, is sufficiently amusing[57]; but to possess every portrait, bad, indifferent, and unlike, betrays such a dangerous and alarming symptom as to render the case almost incurable! ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... course; but there are conditions to be fulfilled first. It must be safe from the enemy. It must be placed in a permanent station. It must be on a good road, and within immediate reach of markets. It ought also to be on the way home, for the sake of the incurable or the incapacitated who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... replied AGRICULTURA. "And I charge this pair of Pernicious Pickles with planning—and to a large extent effecting—my Destruction! Hay, Hops, Cereals, Root-Crops, Fruits and Flowers—all ruined by these roystering rascals. They've done more incurable mischief in three supposed-to-be Summer Months than those much-maligned Boys over yonder did all the Winter. They've had it all their own way the Season through, ay, as much as though they'd nailed the weathercock to S.W., and knocked ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... mind turned to the stories that office must hold. How much of anxiety and suffering and sorrow and tragedy—and occasional joy—it must know. The mothers who brought children whom others had declared incurable—how tense these moments of waiting must be for them! The husband and wife who came together to find out whether she would have to have the operation—how many of the crucial moments of life were lived in such places as this! The power in these doctors vested! The power of their ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... was fifty and she was forty-one. His genius and accomplishments soon conquered the first place in her heart; and he kept that place until his death in 1848,—thirty years of ardent and reproachless friendship. Her other friends felt great inquietude in view of this friendship, fearing that the incurable melancholy and fitful moods of the Viscount would have a depressing influence on her; but she could not resist his fascinations any easier than he could resist hers. The Viscount visited her every day, generally in the afternoon; and when absent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... destiny is written," pursued the old man; "and a sad one it is. Consumed by a strange and incurable disease, which may at any moment prove fatal, you are scarcely likely to survive the next three days, in which case she you love better than existence will perish miserably, being adjudged to have ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... was in her twentieth year, Lady Sheerness was seized with a lingering, but incurable disorder. It made little alteration in her mind. In this melancholy situation she applied to cards and company to keep up her spirits as assiduously as she had done during her better health. She was incapable indeed of going so much abroad, ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... that extremely practical statesman Nicolo Machiavelli had in mind when he wrote that, "Dangers that are seen afar off are easily prevented; but protracting till they are near at hand, the remedies grow unseasonable and the malady incurable." ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... an incurable individualist who found himself sufficient unto himself. He was different from his neighbors in that he was always thinking, asking questions and pondering over his conclusions. He had convinced himself that each demand of the body was useless except the food that nourished it, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... durable, Richard,[****] who was now a widower, was affianced to Isabella, the daughter of Charles. This princess was only seven years of age; but the king agreed to so unequal a match, chiefly that he might fortify himself by this alliance against the enterprises of his uncles, and the incurable turbulence, as well as inconstancy, of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... change from an immediate state of procuration and delegation to a course of acting as from original power, is the way in which all the popular magistracies in the world have been perverted from their purposes. It is indeed their greatest and sometimes their incurable corruption. For there is a material distinction between that corruption by which particular points are carried against reason (this is a thing which cannot be prevented by human wisdom, and is of ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... unfit for the discharge of our duties; but while I have endeavoured to act, I have never blushed at feeling, like a man. Even now, that time has mitigated the keenness of the smart, I feel the habitual anguish of an incurable wound. But let me rather hasten to relate the few remaining events of a uniform unvaried life than detain you with a useless repetition ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... was just such an incurable as you." (Laughter.) "And Sam'l, when he wanted to, could get out as many cusses in a second as his anvil shot sparks. And the old man used to wrastle with him nights and speak about punishment, and pray for him in meeting. But it didn't do any good. When anything went wrong, Sam'l ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Pullen, or perhaps lie in embuscade for a rope of onions, as if they were Welsh freebooters. Loss of time and money may be recovered by industry: but to be a fool-born, or a rogue in nature, are diseases incurable. ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the feet of Austria in the terrible humiliation of Olmutz, that political and moral Jena of the civil wars of the Germanic races. Very perspicuous in discerning the slightest cloud that might endanger the privileges of the monarchy and aristocracy, he was blind of an incurable blindness with respect to the discernment of the breath of life contained in the febrile agitations of new Germany, which discharged from its revolutionary tripod sufficient magnetism and electricity between ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... Destruction, with a zeal to be destroyed, With sounding whip and rowels dyed in blood. But still in vain. The Providence that meant A longer date to the far nobler beast, Spared yet again the ignobler for his sake. And now, his prowess proved, and his sincere, Incurable obduracy evinced, His rage grew cool; and, pleased perhaps to have earned So cheaply the renown of that attempt, With looks of some complacence he resumed His road, deriding much the blank amaze Of good Evander, still where he was left Fixed motionless, and petrified with dread. So on they ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... prescriptions, it will not always succeed. The power of mind over body is no doubt great, but it may be strained until the physical power breaks down altogether. It is related of Muley Moluc, the Moorish leader, that, when lying ill, almost worn out by an incurable disease, a battle took place between his troops and the Portuguese; when, starting from his litter at the great crisis of the fight, he rallied his army, led them to victory, and instantly afterwards ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... accounting for everything in a philosophical way. He considers this, what I call a custom, as a real periodical disease peculiar to the climate. His train of reasoning is whimsical and ingenious, but I am not at leisure to give you the detail. The result was, that he found the distemper to be incurable; but after much study, he thought he had discovered a method to divert the evil he could not subdue. For this purpose, he caused a small building, about twelve feet square, to be erected in his garden, and furnished with some ordinary chairs and tables, and a few prints of the cheapest ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Bill creates new grounds for the dissolution of the marriage bond, which are unknown to the law of Scotland. Cruelty, incurable sanity, or habitual drunkenness are proposed as ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... the same words! My companion assumes to know my mood and habit of thought, and we go on from explanation to explanation until all is said which words can, and we leave matters just as they were at first, because of that vicious assumption. Is it that every man believes every other to be an incurable partialist, and himself a universalist? I talked yesterday with a pair of philosophers; I endeavored to show my good men that I love everything by turns and nothing long; that I loved the centre, but ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... him up here to my room last night and lying here in bed I told him that I had just discovered I was the victim of an incurable disease. I told him that within a month I would be in bed for keeps and asked him to marry me at once and to take me away with him to some quiet place where I could die ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... do all this they had to handle us freely, and ever and again one of their queer heads came down close to my face, or a soft tentacle-hand touched my head or neck. I don't remember that I was afraid then or repelled by their proximity. I think that our incurable anthropomorphism made us imagine there were human heads inside their masks. The skin, like everything else, looked bluish, but that was on account of the light; and it was hard and shiny, quite in the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... He seemed averse to putting into words some thought which troubled him beyond repression. "Do you know," he burst out finally, "that your partner, Sharon, has become the most incurable and dissolute gambler ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... of warfare (so virulent and disgraceful to all the parties), Hogarth's health visibly declined. In 1762, he complained of an internal pain, the continuance of which produced a general decay of the system, that proved incurable; and, on the 25th of October, 1764, (having been previously conveyed in a very weak and languid state from Chiswick to Leicester Fields,) he died suddenly, of an aneurism in his chest, in the sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year of his age. His remains were interred at ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... all night in the dew;—abstinence and perspiration generally effect a cure. For the minor form, the afflicted drink the melted fat of a sheep's tail. Consumption is a family complaint, and therefore considered incurable; to use the Somali expression, they address the patient with "Allah, have mercy upon thee!" not with ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... tendency which leads children to endow lifeless objects both with life and purposiveness. Moral attributes, however, whether good or bad, presuppose conscious choice, a faculty of weighing and if necessary repelling motives; and with such a faculty we have no reason for crediting animals. No doubt, our incurable habit of reading the facts of our own moral nature into the actions of beasts and birds accounts for the vogue alike of Aesop's Fables and of such works as the Jungle Books; but what strikes us as cruelty in the tiger is not a moral quality at all, any more than it is a ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... comical, but which here only gives Nelvil an opportunity of picking it up—form a similar prelude to a long series of extravagances. The culmination of them is that altogether possible-improbable visit to England, which might have put everything right and does put everything wrong, and the incurable staginess which makes her, as above related, refuse to see Oswald and Lucile together till she is ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... strong at games of ball, and generally at all the games in which there are two sides, conquerors and prisoners, or fights with sticks and stones. Stone-throwing is an incurable habit among the little Africans. Even now in the towns our police are obliged to take measures against these ferocious children. In Augustin's time, at Cherchell, which is the ancient Caesarea Mauretaniae, the childish population was split into two hostile camps which stoned each other. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... of the executioner. But the sacred right of the husband was invariably maintained, to deliver his name and family from the disgrace of adultery: the list of mortal sins, either male or female, was curtailed and enlarged by successive regulations, and the obstacles of incurable impotence, long absence, and monastic profession, were allowed to rescind the matrimonial obligation. Whoever transgressed the permission of the law, was subject to various and heavy penalties. The woman was stripped of her wealth and ornaments, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... resumed Tom earnestly, "is there any difference between the weakness of muscle and the faintness of heart which is produced by disease, and that which is produced by old age, except that the latter is incurable? Have not these women feelings like other women? Think you that there are not amongst them those who have 'known better times'? They think of sons and daughters dead and gone, perhaps, just as other old women in better circumstances do. But they must not ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... narrow," sighed Rickie. He and his friend were lying in a meadow during their last summer term. In his incurable love for flowers he had plaited two garlands of buttercups and cow-parsley, and Ansell's lean Jewish face was framed in one of them. "Cambridge is wonderful, but—but it's so tiny. You have no idea—at least, I think you have no idea—how the great world looks ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... Russian intellectual, if, together with the solution of the "question" my soul, too, is suddenly set free. It is delivered from all the habitual and harrowing experiences that, constant companions of my days and nights as they have been, have acquired all the peculiarities of those chronic and incurable ailments, to which the grave alone can bring release. For, if to the Jews themselves the "Pale," the "norm," etc., were a fatal and impregnable fact, which deformed their entire life, they were also for me, a Russian, something in the nature of a ...
— The Shield • Various
... mind a more distressing sense of imperfection. Extraordinary fertility of fancy, vehement dramatic passion, sincere study of nature, and great command of technical resources are here (as elsewhere in Ferrari's frescos) neutralized by an incurable defect of the combining and harmonizing faculty so essential to a masterpiece. There is stuff enough of thought and vigor and imagination to make a dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... they were frantically attempting to peg into the holes of the primitive switchboard and so establish "connections." When not knocking down and fighting each other, these boys were swearing into transmitters at the customers; and it is said that the incurable profanity of these early "telephone boys" had much to do with their supersession by girls. In the early days of the telephone, each instrument had to carry its own battery, usually installed in a ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... more than a slight indisposition) should be closely watched, and timely applications and remedies be administered; especially in the pleurisies, and all inflammatory disorders accompanied with pain, when a few days' neglect, or want of bleeding might render the ailment incurable. In such cases sweeten'd teas, broths and (according to the nature of the complaint, and the doctor's prescription) sometimes a little wine, may be necessary to nourish and restore the patient; and these I am perfectly willing to allow, when it is requisite. My fear is, as I expressed to you in ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... tempers and her caprices, at her fastidiousness and expensiveness, from an altered standpoint, her whole character seems to be illuminated with new light. He no longer finds her charming when she has an incurable restlessness and melancholy: her pretty negations of the facts life present to her begin to seem to him the product of a mind undisciplined by any actual knowledge that she is "a human creature, subject to the same laws as other human creatures." He ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... do not, I pray you, permit yourself to believe that Athenians are smitten with so incurable a depravity. Do you not observe their discipline in all naval matters? Look at their prompt and orderly obedience to the superintendents at the gymnastic contests, (26) their quite unrivalled subservience to their teachers in the ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... allong the mountain side—Our hardships had been extreme and as we neared the Delta of the great River one day I noticed The Galloping Swede was loosing his mind, or getting crazy with hardships, which is the most incurable of all diseases, He had been snow blind, had had sore eyes, was homesick and lonesome, and the added over exposeures had ruined that bright and cultured mind. Lee Wilda—for this is his name had been with me a long time. his home was in Minnesota, ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... their unity, which of all other things is as the church's walls; when they are divided, no wonder they crumble to atoms, if there is no skilful physician to heal them. It is sad when there is no balm in Gilead, and when there is no physician there. Hence it is, that the wounds of churches become incurable, like the wounds of God's people of old; either not healed at all, or else slightly healed, and to no purpose. May it not be said of many churches at this day, as God said of the church of Israel, that he sought for a man among them that should stand ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... religious and political discussion, was to him a veritable pandemonium. Everybody at that period of agitation and reform was giving lectures, and everybody went to hear them; and Carlyle ridiculed them all alike as pedlers of nostrums to heal diseases which were incurable. He lived in an atmosphere of disdain. "The English people," said he, "number some thirty millions,—mostly fools." His friends expostulated with him for giving utterance to such bitter expressions, and for holding such gloomy views. John Mill was mortally offended, and walked no more with ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... and informed her, gently, that he would go with her to Florence. After he had so pledged himself he thought not at all of the pain of his position as mediator between the mother's resentful grief and the son's incurable weakness; he drank deep, only, of the satisfaction of not separating from Mary Garland. If the future was a blank to Roderick, it was hardly less so to himself. He had at moments a lively foreboding of impending calamity. He paid it no especial deference, ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... unexpected by her or myself," Maverick explained in answer to their inquiries. "It is the result of a complication of disorders, some of long standing and incurable; and the present effect is partial paralysis. I hoped change of air and a quiet summer would delay what we knew ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... the same kind of large, bony mules as referred to in cases of spavin, and are incurable. They can, however, be relieved by the same process as recommended in spavin. Relief can also be afforded by letting the heels of the affected feet grow down to considerable length, or shoeing with a high-heeled ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... two army hospitals now remaining. I went to the largest of these (Douglas) and spent the afternoon and evening. There are many sad cases, old wounds, incurable sickness, and some of the wounded from the March and April battles before Richmond. Few realize how sharp and bloody those closing battles were. Our men exposed themselves more than usual; press'd ahead without urging. Then the southerners fought with extra desperation. Both sides knew that with ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... hot boxes, besides being perversely incurable, are the sworn enemies of high speed. At forty miles to the hour the journal was smoking again. At forty-five it burst into flames. Once more it was patiently cooled by bucketings of water drawn from the engine tank; after ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... syrup, but a preparation of senna; to Dr. Kilmer's Swamp Root, of which the principal medical constituent is alcohol; and, finally, to Dr. Bye's Oil Cure for cancer, a particularly cruel swindle on unfortunates suffering from an incurable malady. All of these, with other matter, which for the sake of decency I do not care to detail in these columns, appear in recent issues of the "Christian ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... sympathy between the night and the mind. All one's troubles represent themselves as increased a hundredfold if one wakes in the night, and begins to think about them. A muscular pain becomes the certainty of an incurable internal disease; and a headache suggests incipient softening of the brain. But all these horrors are dissipated with the morning light, and the after-glow of a cold bath turns them into jokes. So it was with me on the morning after my arrival at The Shallows. ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... like a splendid game of see-saw. Whatever else it is, it is not comradeship. This living, ancestral bond (not of love or fear, but strictly of marriage) has been twice expressed splendidly in literature. The man's incurable sense of the mother in his lawful wife was uttered by Browning in one of his two or three truly shattering lines of genius, when he makes the execrable Guido fall back finally upon the fact of marriage and the wife whom he has ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... and exchanged his lodgings for others situated in a more retired spot, rather than discontinue the practice. His explosive temper has furnished many amusing anecdotes. One day his cook, who, in consideration of her master's incurable unpunctuality, must be regarded as an aggrieved personage, served up some eggs which were not to his taste, and he emphasised his displeasure by throwing the entire batch at the head of the unfortunate domestic. On another ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... either their estates or reputations: and these Hells may fairly be considered as so many half-way houses to the Fleet or King's Bench Prisons, or some more desperate end. The love of play is the most incurable of insanities: robbery, suicide, and the extensive ruin of whole families, have been known to proceed from this ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... hawsers, like carrots. She was heavy, clumsy, unhandy—but that does not quite explain that power for mischief she had. You know, somehow, when I think of her I can't help remembering what we hear of incurable lunatics breaking loose now ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... nurse took him again, grumbling at the innate and incurable handlessness of men. Could I see Irma? Certainly not. What would I be doing, disturbing the poor thing? Very likely she was asleep. Oh, I had promised to go, had I? Well, she had nothing to do with that. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... "I fear that there is no doubt that your rheumatism is the sort most difficult to treat. It is a clear case of rheumatoid arthritis, but you are young, and the disease is in an early stage, so that we must hope for the best. In olden times it was supposed to be an incurable complaint, but of late years we have had occasional cures, quite remarkable cures, which have mitigated that decision. You must realise, however, that it is a difficult fight, and that you will ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... an explanation, and Diana told him the story of the last two or three weeks: Charlotte's increasing illness—so mysterious and incurable; the sudden return from Harold's Hill; Valentine's fears; Dr. Jedd's boldly-expressed opinion that the patient was the victim of foul play; the systematic exclusion of Philip Sheldon from the sick-room, followed immediately by symptoms ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... his argument, "positively nothing, and I am sure you are exaggerating your fears. Yet I am bound to tell you that, even if all you say should happen, it seems to me that to allow what can strictly be considered only as a temporary fit of insanity, would prove a less evil than to render incurable a disease of the mind which reason would ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the human heart. Teresa, instead of disapproving, relished the plan in general, with demonstrations of singular satisfaction. She at once conceived all the advantageous consequences of such a scheme, and perceived in it only one flaw, which, however, she did not think incurable. This defect was no other than a sufficient bond of union, by which they might be effectually tied down to their mutual interest. She foresaw, that, in case Ferdinand should obtain possession of the prize, he might, with great ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett |
