"Insufferable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are insufferable. Go and talk outside. (He sits down again at the table, with his jaws in his hands, and his elbows propped on the map, poring over ...
— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw
... say such things to Aurelia, although, if you are worthy to dine at her side, they are the very things you are longing to say. What insufferable stuff you are talking about the weather, and the opera, and Alboni's delicious voice, and Newport, and Saratoga! They are all very pleasant subjects, but do you suppose Ixion talked Thessalian politics when he was admitted ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... more, eh?" he sneered, too mad to raise his voice to the more convenient bellow which seemed to soothe him as much as it distressed his listener. "Well, you've got a fool's mate in Sir George Covert, the insufferable dandy! And all you two need is a pair o' Panzas and a brace of windmills. Bah!" He grew angrier. "Bah, I say!" He broke out: "Damnation, sir! Go ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... exploit of the night before. Miss Day and Miss Marsh had repeated this good story. It had impressed them at the time, but they did not tell it to others in an impressive way, and the girls, who had not seen Prissie, but had only heard the tale, spoke of her to one another as an "insufferable ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... generous impulses, its tender yearnings, its noble aspirations, that the stricken conscience pours into the confessor's ear. The strugglings and writhings of the soul, the convulsive efforts to cast off an insupportable burden, to escape from an insufferable anguish, to find rest for itself in its weariness, peace for its warring passions, an answer and a solution to its doubts,—these are the events of the confessional. And its fruits are the folios of Molina and Vasquez and Filutius and Lessius and ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... despatched to his rest. Yet she knew hatred of her lord in his being suspected as instigator or accomplice of the hand that dealt the blow. He became to her thought a python whose coils were about her person, insufferable to the gaze backward. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as sharp as a needle, and possesses the remains of a brown shirt and a ragged kitchen duster as turban. I am very fond of little Achmet, and like to see him doing tableaux vivants from Murillo with a plate of broken victuals. The children of this place have become so insufferable about backsheesh that I have complained to the Maohn, and he will assemble a committee of parents and enforce better manners. It is only here and just where the English go. When I ride into the little ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... him when he has attained such objects. He loves the process of attaining, but does not quite like to have attained, and that, of course, is very absurd. In fact, man is a comical creature; there seems to be a kind of jest in it all. But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... thus accounting for my omissions, I shall be thought pleading for my defects, or proclaiming my deserts. In the German author it was a manifest act of pocket-picking to stuff his novel with such insufferable rubbish. And it seemed to me that, by translating it, I should make myself a party to his knavery as well as to his dulness. However, if any man complains of this omission, for an adequate "consideration" (as the lawyers say) I shall be happy to cart the whole of it upon his premises—deliver ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... back creakingly. This ancient landlubber was becoming as great an affliction as any cross-bowed mariner. He shook a musty effluvium from his piebald clothes, overturned my inkstand, and went on with his insufferable nonsense. ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... of him, but in a low voice.] Insufferable! Well, yes. [She sits down. She is too much wounded to make any further appeal.] You're perfectly right. There's no possible harmony between divorced people! I withdraw my hand and all good feeling. No wonder I couldn't stand you. Eh? However, that's pleasantly past! But at least, my ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... had any other living child at the time), in full expectation that it was for Virginia, he encountered so much of ungrateful and abusive treatment, after the brethren met at Southampton,—especially at the hands of the insufferable Martin, who, without merit and with a most reprehensible record (as it proved), was chosen over him as "governor" of the ship,—that he was doubtless glad to return from Plymouth when the SPEEDWELL ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... capable of proclaiming her sin in Altavilla when there was a gathering of people. The count got more and more alienated from this woman, who upset all his moral, theological, and social ideas, and finally inspired him with dread. This turned to terror and insufferable foreboding, that made him long for his liberty, especially after Amalia smilingly made a certain revelation ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... all would probably have continued well, had he turned his back upon the capital the day after receiving the auditor's warrant upon the treasury, and hastened home. But the President's levees were about opening for the season; and two or three of those most insufferable of all coxcombs, the attaches of foreign embassies,—whisking their dandy rattans and sporting finely curled mustachoes;—who, to his unsophisticated observation, appeared to be men of far greater importance than their less-pretending ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... never seen such attention, such concentration, as in these great congregations of the Edinburgh churches. As nearly as I can judge, it is intellectual rather than emotional; but it is not a tribute paid to eloquence alone, it is habitual and universal, and is yielded loyally to insufferable dullness ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... mutinous eyes?' he shouted sometimes at dinner, drinking his beer, and slapping the table with his hand. 'You think, maybe, you're as silent as a sheep, so you must be all right.... Oh, no! You'll please look at me like a sheep too!' My position became a torture, insufferable,... my heart was growing bitter. Something dangerous began more and more frequently to stir within it. I passed nights without sleep and without a light, thinking, thinking incessantly; and in the darkness without ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... much; and having nothing whatever to do, and a word or two of French, she had taken what she called an INTEREST IN THE FRENCH PRISONERS. A big, bustling, bold old lady, she flounced about our market-place with insufferable airs of patronage and condescension. She bought, indeed, with liberality, but her manner of studying us through a quizzing-glass, and playing cicerone to her followers, acquitted us of any gratitude. She had a tail behind her of heavy, obsequious ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Provence for many strange exploits, committed in order to please his lady, was the talented Peire Vidal. On one occasion he caused himself to be sewn into a wolfskin and ran about the fields; but he was set upon by dogs and so badly mangled that he nearly succumbed to his wounds. He was an insufferable braggart, but never had any success in love. The prince of caricatures, however, was the German knight and minnesinger, Ulrich of Lichtenstein. He is responsible for a novel in prose, entitled The Service of Woman, which is faintly reminiscent of Goethe's ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... and was her sole remaining attachment to this world, deprived even of that melancholy solace which letters or messages could give: that the bitterness of her sorrows, still more than her close confinement, had preyed upon her health, and had added the insufferable weight of bodily infirmity to all those other calamities under which she labored: that while the daily experience of her maladies opened to her the comfortable prospect of an approaching deliverance into a region where pain and sorrow are no more, her ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... had so shaped themselves, in consequence, as to raise up two parties in the army. And here was laid the foundation of all those personal jealousies which culminated in Lee's dismissal from the army. While his abilities won respect, his insufferable egotism made him disliked, and it is to be remarked of the divisions Lee's ambition was promoting, that the best officers stood ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... did not leave me his money until my freshman days were far behind me, wherein lies the solace that he may have outgrown an opinion while I was going through the same process. At twenty-three I confessed that all freshmen were insufferable, and immediately afterward took my degree and went out into the world to convince it that seniors are by no means adolescent. Having successfully passed the age of reason, I too felt myself admirably qualified to look with scorn upon all creatures employed in the business of getting an education. ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... endowed with an extraordinary lack of imagination and of curiosity. I recall having given a friend, who was a journalist, a little book of Nietzsche's to read, which he returned with the remark that he had not been able to get through it, as it was insufferable drivel. I have heard the same opinion, or similar ones, expressed by journalists of Ibsen, Schopenhauer, Dostoievsky, Stendhal and all the most stimulating minds ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... her sex. Lord Frederick on first seeing her was struck with her beauty, and Miss Milner apprehended she had introduced a rival; but he had not seen her three times, before he called her "The most insufferable of Heaven's creatures," and vowed there was more charming variation in the plain features ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... "Noble Scot," said he, "your unexampled generosity, and the invincible fidelity of these heroic men, have compelled me to accept the life I had resolved to lose under these walls, rather than resign them. But virtue is resistless, and to it do I surrender that pride of soul which made existence insufferable under the consciousness of having erred. When I became the husband of King Edward's daughter, I believed myself pledged to victories or to death. But there is a conquest, and I feel it, greater than over hosts in ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... had, nevertheless, a garishness and artificiality which would offend the artistic eye. When newly constructed, the Roman temples in the time of the emperors must have been oppressive, reflecting the hot sunshine from their snowy cellae and pillared porticoes with an insufferable glare. Marble—unlike sandstones, clay-slates, and basalts, which are kindred to the earth and the elements, and find themselves at home in any situation, all things making friends with them, mosses, lichens, ivies—is a dead, cold material, and does not harmonise with ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... only, but false. It is commonly said, indeed, in our courts, that truth it is which aggravates the libel. And so it is as regards the feelings or the interests of the man libelled. For is it not insufferable that, if a poor man under common human infirmity shall have committed some crime and have paid its penalty, but afterwards reforming or out-growing his own follies, seeks to gain an honest livelihood for his children in a place which ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... times farther from the sun than the other, and there is no reason to believe that those planets nearest the sun suffer under the action of excessive heat, or that the more distant are exposed to the rigours of insufferable cold, which, in either case, might render them unfit for the abodes of intellectual ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... returned Paul. "I must have been insufferable! And I admit that I was slightly piqued against YOU for the idolatries showered upon you at the ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... If you can find anything worse to say, say it—and may you live to hear that good-for-nothing Orsino call you good and confiding when you are eighty-two years old. And Corona is laughing at me. It is insufferable. You used to be a good girl, Corona—but you are so proud of having four sons that there is no possibility of talking to you any longer. It is a pity that you have not brought them up better. Look at Orsino. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... considerable. In the Kurpfalz, for instance, the Jewish traveller had to pay the usual "white penny" for every mile, but also a heavy general fee for the whole journey. If he was found without his ticket of leave, he was at once arrested. But it was when he came to a bridge that the exactions grew insufferable. The regulations were somewhat tricky, for the Jew was specially taxed only on Sundays and the Festivals of the Church. But every other day was some Saint's Festival, and while, in Mannheim, even on those ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... behaviour are acquired gradually and imperceptibly. No man can say "I'll be genteel." There are ten genteel women for one genteel man, because they are more restrained. A man without some degree of restraint is insufferable; but we are all less restrained than women. Were a woman sitting in company to put out her legs before her as most men do, we should be tempted ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... playing Bach. Of all women, Jacob honoured her most. But to sit at a table with bread and butter, with dowagers in velvet, and never say more to Clara Durrant than Benson said to the parrot when old Miss Perry poured out tea, was an insufferable outrage upon the liberties and decencies of human nature—or words to that effect. For Jacob said nothing. Only he glared at the fire. Fanny laid ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... is," said Jock; "but I say, mother, don't go making him cockier. You know he's only fit to be stitched up in one of Jessie's little red Sunday books, and he must learn to keep a civil tongue in his head, and not be an insufferable little donkey." ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one of these cottages, the visitor is at a loss to determine which of the two is the more obnoxious—the suffocating smoke in the passage or the poisoned air of the dwelling-room, rendered almost insufferable by the crowding together of so many persons. I could almost venture to assert, that the dreadful eruption called Lepra, which is universal throughout Iceland, owes its existence rather to the total want of cleanliness than to the climate of the ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... something less than three hundred dollars a year. Her eyes were beginning to be opened to the immense moral and social questions that lie behind the simple preference of American girls to work for men rather than for women. Household work was women's sphere, Sandy reasoned, and they had made it a sphere insufferable to other women. ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... she impatient with the civilized Philistine, but is willing to speak to him in a language all his own, hoping indeed to tune his tongue one day to something less uncouth. None can sympathize more cordially than the writer does with Durtal in his horror of unauthorized devotions, of insufferable vernacular litanies, of nerveless and sickly hymns, of interminable "acts of consecration" void of a single definite idea, more especially when these things are brought into the very sanctuary itself, with stole and cope and every apparent ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... loved me," said Lorenzo Bezan, in the privacy of his own room, on the morning subsequent to that of the serenade. "It was only my own insufferable egotism and self-conceit that gave me such confidence. Now I review the past, what single token or evidence has she given to me of particular regard? what has she done that any lady might not do for a gentleman friend? I can recall nothing. True, she has smiled kindly-O ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... would first reach us. A wild change had come over all men; and the first sense of pain was the wild signal for general lamentation and horror. This first sense of pain lay in a rigorous constriction of the breast and lungs, and an insufferable dryness of the skin. It could not be denied that our atmosphere was radically affected; and the conformation of this atmosphere, and the possible modifications to which it might be subjected, were now the topics of discussion. The result of investigation sent an electric thrill of the intensest ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... next to the old lady, and the room, from which the older guests were quietly disappearing, was enthusiastically cleared for dancing. The air, close already, became absolutely insufferable now; the men's collars wilted, the girls' flushed faces streamed perspiration. But the cool side-porch was accessible, and the ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... "Colonel, this is quite insufferable," I cried, goaded almost to madness. "I shall stand no more of it. Leave me in peace, I'll have no more ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... silks and laces Have come at times to my insignificant shop, For pieces of jade, or banners, or curious cuttings of ivory. And I look with insufferable emotion Upon their roseleaf skin, And breathe the soft scents that flow from their garments, And long to soothe their lily-fingered hands. In their presence I am seized with longings unutterable, And am filled with a sickness of my present ...
— Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse • Thomas Burke
... months Defoe had been vehemently but vainly striving to accomplish by argument what had been wrought in an instant by the French King's insufferable insult. It is one of the most brilliant periods of his political activity. Comparatively undistinguished before, he now, at the age of forty, stepped into the foremost rank of publicists. He lost not a moment in throwing himself into the fray as the champion of the king's policy. Charles ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... concerned about its own affairs, While hoping to live on for ever, cost what it might; and another life, mysterious, indefinite, obscure, that, as a worm in an apple, secretly gnawed at the core of his former life, poisoning it, making it insufferable. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... sulphur." Jeremy Taylor3 says, in that discourse on the "Pains of Hell" where he has lavished all the stores of his matchless learning and all the wealth of his gorgeous imagination in multiplying and adorning the paraphernalia of torture with infinite accompaniments of unendurable pangs and insufferable abominations, "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who roasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of that fire of hell which penetrates the very entrails without consuming them;" "husbands shall see their wives, parents shall see their children, tormented ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... though no less than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the author's principal object is to depict—in direct contrast to Mr. B. and Lovelace—a "Good Man"—the actual first title of the book, which he wisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter of these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... by admirers; it seemed to me then that it would have been insufferable conceit to have even asked myself if it could matter to her. It was only in the light of after events that the possibility of my having been mistaken occurred to me. And I don't even now see that I could have acted otherwise——" Here Uncle Paul sighed a little. "We ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... locality. They would not hear of privileged orders: but they wished to have a privileged city. That twenty-five millions of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand gentlemen and clergymen was insufferable; but that twenty-five millions of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand Parisians was as it should be. The qualification of a member of the new oligarchy was simply that he should live near the hall where the Convention ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... been written about the insufferable situation of the Russian Jews, these serfs of the twentieth century, chained to "the Pale of Settlement," somewhat like the Roman colons, "glebae adscripti." The tragic history of late years and the epoch through which we are living can disturb the inner composure of the most indifferent ...
— The Shield • Various
... a most amiable and heroic character. He first went to Hispaniola with Columbus in his second voyage, where he manifested an ardent but honest zeal, first in attempting to instruct the natives in the principles of the catholic faith, and afterwards in defending them against the insufferable cruelties exercised by the Spanish tyrants who succeeded Columbus in the discoveries and settlements in South America. He early declared himself Protector of the Indians; a title which seems to have been acknowledged by the Spanish government. ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... dismantled huts, for the most part mere burrows with roofs of interlaced boughs that were now smoking amid the ashes of the fires. Not a sign of disorder, nor even of the rapidity with which so great an army had been moved; not a scale of armour left behind—only the insufferable stench of a barbarian camp, of offal and refuse piled or scattered about, of dead beasts and of dead men—the sick and wounded who had yielded to sword or disease during the last ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... shall I be....I wish you knew me more thoroughly. If the opinion you have of my learning and genius (Geist) should perhaps suffer thereby, yet I am sure the idea I would like you to form of my character would gain. I am not the insufferable, unmannerly, proud, slanderous man Herr Klotz proclaims me. It cost me a great deal of trouble and compulsion to be a little bitter against him."[153] Ramler and the rest had contrived a nice little ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... M———, qui osa frapper La Gabrielli." Only Metastasio's persuasions (for Gabrielli prized his friendship and advice as much as she trifled with him in a different role) persuaded her to spare the Frenchman the insufferable ridicule which her retention of the telltale sword would have imposed on one whose rank and station could ill afford to be made the laughing-stock of ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... known to possess—the merit of being sometimes able to see the good qualities of persons who do not possess the advantage of being related to them by blood. The families whose members all admire each other, are families saturated with insufferable conceit. You happen to speak of Shakespeare, among these people, as a type of supreme intellectual capacity. A female member of the family will not fail to convey to you that you would have illustrated your meaning far more completely if you had referred her to "dear Papa." You are ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... little girl of his down again,' Mrs. Ormonde said. 'I wonder whether she still reads that insufferable publication. By-the-by, I found you had told them ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... cold and shook. In this mood she called out once to King. But he was far ahead and did not turn. She did not know whether he had heard her. Gradually the weakness passed; they topped the ridge and the sun wanned her. Coolly and collectedly she turned her thoughts upon the insufferable insult and came back through a sort of circle to her first intention. Now the decision was cold and stubborn: he ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... never seen so many beggars. It was insufferable. For this evening, at least, every one was giving—except Livingstone. Want was stretching out its withered hand even to Poverty and found it filled. But Livingstone took no part in it. The chilly and threadbare street-venders of shoe-strings, ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... natives' condition is to rope in a lot of young Kwanns, put them in Government schools, overload them with information they aren't prepared to digest, teach them to despise their own people, and then send them out to the villages, where they behave with such insufferable arrogance that the wonder is that so few of them stop an arrow or a charge of buckshot, instead of so many. And when that happens, as it does occasionally, Welfare says they're murdered at ...
— Oomphel in the Sky • Henry Beam Piper
... in his endeavours, either to overthrow their government, or to bend it to his will. But the full experiment had now been made; and the result was a conviction not to be resisted, that moderation would only invite additional injuries, and that the present insufferable state of things could be terminated only by procuring the removal of the French minister, or by submitting to become, in his hands, the servile instrument of hostility against the enemies of his nation. Information ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... shouted, "it is not my fault that the fellow proved an impostor. I employed him with the best of intentions, for your—and our—good!" "Nephew Frederick," said he, "this is insufferable; you will regret it! I shall never—NEVER" (as if he had been pronouncing my ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... calves head, although The tongue and brains together go, Both keep so great a distance here, 'Tis strange if ever they come near; For who did ever play his gambols 1015 With such insufferable rambles To make the bringing in the KING, And keeping of him out, one thing? Which none could do, but those that swore T' as point-plank nonsense heretofore: 1020 That to defend, was to invade; And to assassinate, to aid Unless, because you drove him ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... are invested with claims upon their party, and suffer indefinite dreams of political eminence to be awakened in their bosoms. I have seen a fellow draw his hat fiercely down over his brow, and strut about, with insufferable importance, on the strength of having been ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... was absolutely necessary that she should restrain herself and endure his insufferable endearments, and even force herself to speak. And yet her tongue seemed tied, and it was only by the utmost effort of her will that she could bring herself to express her astonishment at his rapid ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seeing that I had talked a long time and was much wearied, took me up and put me into my box and carried me away. But not before I had heard the King speak of my dear country in a way which gave me great pain. 'Insufferable little wretches,' His Majesty was pleased to say, 'as foolish when they are living at peace at home as when they are going out to kill other little creatures abroad,' with more that was like this, and not fit ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... making love to me, Race?" Under the ridicule of her tone his face darkened. "If you are, it's insufferable ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... agreed Diamond. "But I don't like to go into the game with Badger in the box. I don't like him. The fellow has made himself an insufferable nuisance. I don't agree with you that he is such a wonder. He's a very ordinary fellow, with a rich father and a swelled head. Out West, where he came from, everybody got down on their knees to him, and here at Yale that sort of business don't go. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... which never was sweet, was soured to such a degree, by these accumulated evils, that she was insufferable. Her husband kept out of the way as much as possible: he dined and supped at his club, or at the tavern: and, during the evenings and mornings, he was visible at home but for a few minutes. Yet, though his time ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... ascending by a natural climax to that final consummation and perfect crown of my felicity—that almighty blessing which ratified their value to all the rest? Wherefore, oh! wherefore do I shrink in miserable weakness from—what? Is it from reviving, from calling up again into fierce and insufferable light the images and features of a long-buried happiness? That would be a natural shrinking and a reasonable weakness. But how escape from reviving, whether I give it utterance or not, that which is for ever vividly ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... o'clock in the evening, and, we having been previously warned by letter, the moment that they stepped in on deck we hove up our anchor, started our engine, and proceeded to sea, in order that we might avoid spending the night in the insufferable heat of the harbour. We kept the engine going until we had rounded Dondra Head and were heading north, with Adam's Peak square off our port beam, when we made sail, bound for Calcutta, where we arrived exactly a ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... the insufferable LLOYD GEORGE as the most dangerous, the most malignant, the most incompetent politician who has ever attempted to misrule this country. The iniquity of the Coalition will make enlightened rulers like LENIN and TROTSKY blush for the human ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... what have I done," said Buck Tom fiercely, "to merit the bad treatment and insufferable injustice which I have received since I came to this accursed land? I cannot stand injustice. It makes my blood boil, and so, since it is rampant here, and everybody has been unjust to me, I have made up my mind to pay ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... impressive, even bombastic style secured for it a very large public and was a constant relief after the long years of abstract and abstruse Hegelianism. The same result also proceeded from the extravagant glorification of love, which in comparison with the insufferable sovereignty of pure reason, found an excuse, if not a justification. What we must not forget is, that just on these two weaknesses of Feuerbach "true Socialism" in educated Germany fastened itself like a spreading plague since ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... this way your English [Yankee] neighbors shall no longer be enabled to draw the best wares and merchandise from our country for nothing; the beavers and furs not excepted. This has, indeed, long since been insufferable; although it ought chiefly to be imputed to the imprudent penuriousness of our own merchants and inhabitants, who, it is to be hoped, shall, through the abolition of this seawant, become wiser ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... time, the King got rid of that little she-dwarf, named Mexica, in whose insufferable talk and insufferable presence the Queen took delight. But the sly little wretch escaped during the journey, and managed to get back to the princess again, hidden in some box or basket. The Queen was highly delighted to see her again; she ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... village time out of mind. I had once saved Gawky's life, by plunging into a river and dragging him on shore, when he was on the point of being drowned. I had often rescued him from the clutches of those whom his insufferable arrogance had provoked to a resentment he was not able to sustain; and many times saved his reputation and posteriors, by performing his exercises at school; so that it is not to be wondered at, if he ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... . you are insufferable!" she retorted, her breath coming short and quick. "I have a little pride also; and you had better stop before you push me too far. For I tell you frankly, I don't care enough for you to stand this sort of treatment ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... published a book of titles for their kings, as well as for the Portuguese; but Selden tells us, that "their Cortesias and giving of titles grew at length, through the affectation of heaping great attributes on their princes to such an insufferable forme, that a remedie was provided against it." This remedy was an act published by Philip III. which ordained that all the Cortesias, as they termed these strange phrases they had so servilely and ridiculously invented, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... prove that the flight frequently originated in a latent sense of honour and shame, which rendered the presence of the deceived husband and innocent children insufferable to her whose indulgence of a guilty passion had caused her to forfeit her right to the conjugal home; but they could not comprehend this, and persisted in thinking the woman who fled with her lover more guilty than her who remained under the roof of ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... did this an icy spasm seemed to contract his heart, . . seized by a sudden insufferable anxiety, he stared like one spell-bound into Sah-luma's wide-open, fixed, and glassy eyes. Dead eyes! ... yet how full of mysterious significance! ... What—WHAT was their weird secret, their imminent meaning! ... Why did their ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... that the prince was playing to an audience; for all the respectful and admiring nurses edged down the beach to behold him play; and those of them whose little charges were playing in the same game with him, assumed insufferable airs. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... and anxieties he has had over the matter, how many enemies he has made over it, the thousand bothers and annoyances he has gone through, so that you say, "The affair was not worth all this trouble." For being reminded of any favour done to one is always unpleasant and disagreeable and insufferable:[435] but the flatterer not only reminds us of his services afterwards, but even during the very moment of doing them upbraids us with them and is importunate. But the friend, if he is obliged to mention the matter, relates ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... named, and for its part is confident that equal appreciation will be shown for its own earnest and unselfish endeavours to fulfil a duty to humanity by ending a situation, the indefinite prolongation of which has become insufferable." ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... appreciate her. Her particularity he found "fussiness," her energy annoyed him, and her well-meant interest in others appeared to him insufferable busy-bodyism. More than once that afternoon he remembered her with a sense of irritation. "A confounded old maid," he called her to himself as he pushed off his dory from the ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... has generally blown away that inauspicious bashfulness, which hangs a much longer time, commonly, on the faces of the southern students; such a one (if he fall not too egregiously into the contrary extreme, so as to become insufferable) may still be the more eligible person for a tutor, as he may teach a young gentleman, betimes, that necessary presence of mind, which those who are confined to ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... thought to myself, you are one of those people with a dramatic sense of your own importance. It will probably make you very happy, and an absolutely insufferable person! I have little doubt that the tiny prig was saying to herself, "I dare say that all these men are wondering who is the clever-looking little girl who is walking in the opposite direction to the match, and ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... comes a change. The novelty wears away; we get in some degree the gauge of the scenery and the variety of circumstance; the dawdling, snail-foot, insufferable creep of the ship from one fisherman's dog's-hole to another becomes inexcusable; the weather conspires against us; the sportsman wonders why he had brought gun and fishing-rod; even Science grows weary at times in its limited and hampered inspection. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... a single instance of their power to over-ride me. It got to be so that when a carpenter wanted to drive a nail he had to substitute a screw and use a screw-driver, a noiseless process but an insufferable waste of time and money. Lathers worked four days on a job that should have been accomplished in as many hours. Can you imagine these expert, able-bodied men putting laths on a ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... were relations of Marcius, and expected to be warmly welcomed by a man who was their near relation and personal friend. Nothing of the kind, however, happened. They were conducted through the enemy's camp, and found him seated, and displaying insufferable pride and arrogance, with the chiefs of the Volscians standing round him. He bade the ambassadors deliver their message; and after they had, in a supplicatory fashion, pronounced a conciliatory oration, he answered them, dwelling with ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... I pressed the magic box to my ear, and faintly there echoed in my brain a few disconnected strains of that solemn music. But now, more than ever, it was insufferable to me, and I dropped the box ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... S——, or, in default, a duel with her father; and who drove a flash curricle with a bay and a grey, and who was presented with much pride by Mrs. Gam as Castlereagh Molloy of Molloyville. We all agreed that he was the most insufferable snob of the whole season, and were delighted when a bailiff came down ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the advantages and enjoyed the practice of her brother, who spoke the previous evening, he said: "But of course Mrs. Hooker couldn't vote, nor be a member of the legislature, or even a justice of the peace. Insufferable nonsense! If such women don't vote before I die—well, like Gough's obstinate deacon, I won't die ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... "Credit-Mobilier" and its unsavory scandal, and it is safe to say that the road would not now be made to represent an expenditure of $106,000 per mile, and that Mr. Dillon and some others would not have so much money as to warrant them in putting on such insufferable airs. When it is remembered what use Oakes Ames and the Union Pacific crew made of issues of stock, it is not at all surprising that the president of the Union Pacific should think it an impertinence for a citizen to question the amount of capitalization or the use to which a part of such ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the school, to show him what an ignoramus he is. I consider him neither more nor less than a rascal; and really, now that I come to think of it, what he said about Michelet awhile ago was quite insufferable, outrageous! To talk in that way about an old master replete with genius! It ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... early education was defective; for on all occasions, when speaking with us, he says, 'Yes, Monsieur le Comte!' or 'Certainly, Madame la Comtesse!' as if he were a servant. Yet withal, he has a peculiar pride, or perhaps I should say insufferable vanity. But his great fault, in my eyes, is the scoffing tone he adopts, when the ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... gave color to the romance, and it is all very pretty," says Marcia, with insufferable patronage. "But there was some one else, and he could have had quite as much fortune without any trouble. He was a ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... jumped round with an oath; and Maggie, her face flaming, started to her feet. The tone, the words, the look of the little man at the window were alike insufferable. ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... eyes, which had been so long darkened by the artifices of incredible deceit, and my own incurable misery fully presented to my view. If you were acquainted with the unhappy fair, who hath fallen a victim to my mistake, you will have some idea of the insufferable pangs which I now feel in recollecting her fate. If you have compassion for these pangs, you will not refuse to conduct me to the spot where the dear remains of Monimia are deposited; there let ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... he must find some way to make her go before it is too late. Now do you understand, Mr. Hammerton? Now do you perceive why the thought of having all this pitiful story scareheaded in a penny paper is insufferable to me?" ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... natural and easy while he was sure of seeing his lady every day, had become quite impossible to him. He felt that he ought to remain in Florence, that he ought not to follow her to Rome. But Florence had become insufferable to him; and he determined to remove to Naples, because to get to Naples it was necessary to pass through Rome. The melancholy barren approach to the Eternal City, which, three years before, had inspired Alfieri with nothing but ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... "Horrid, insufferable woman!" she thought angrily as she went upstairs. "How thankful I shall be to ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... him, he had a poor opinion of that which people called affection, regard. As for l'amour, that was the supreme egotism. The affections were simply a means to "make oneself paid." Affection! Bah! One did not offer it for nothing, bien sur! It was through this insufferable pretext that one arrived at governing others. "Comment? Your presence can give me happiness, and you will not remain always beside me? It is nothing to you how I suffer? To me whom you love you refuse this small demand?" ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... retained a stubborn silence, and their example was followed by the earth, the air, and the water. Although the heat of the day was rendered still more insufferable by Mr. Fabian's thick hunting suit, yet his flesh chilled with fear when he discovered the actual loss of his partridges ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... distraction from his boredom from this literature. The mass of books which he had once studied he had thrown into dim corners of his library shelves when he left the Fathers' school. "I should have left them in Paris," he told himself, as he turned out some books which were particularly insufferable: those of the Abbe Lamennais and that impervious sectarian so magisterially, so pompously dull and empty, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... foment the misunderstanding betwixt us; but really they give themselves no trouble about our affairs; and, so far as I know them, are a very good sort of people. On the whole, I think I may with justice pronounce my precious yoke-fellow a trifling, teasing, insufferable, inconsistent creature. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... our representative partner if you like, appointed head-clerk and officer of the Legion of Honor, for you really have done for the poor man, he adores his Stanislas, the little monstrosity who is so like him, that to me he is insufferable. Unless you prefer to settle twelve hundred francs a year on Stanislas—the capital to be his, and the life-interest ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... until nightfall; the night proved dark, but dangerously clear and calm. No lights were allowed—not even a cigar; the engine-room hatch-ways were covered with tarpaulins, at the risk of suffocating the unfortunate engineers and stokers in the almost insufferable atmosphere below. But it was absolutely imperative that not a glimmer of light should appear. Even the binnacle was covered, and the steersman had to see as much of the compass as he could through a conical aperture carried almost up to ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... doubt, willingly exchange a good deal of the former for a little of the latter." Still, one must not be too confident of this; the bodily requirements of a wrinkled old seyud would be very trifling, while his egotism would, on the other hand, be insufferable. This is a grazing village chiefly, and the gravelly desert comes close up to the walls, so that there is no difficulty about pushing on immediately after ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... him. And then she sighed, with that vague feeling of dissatisfaction with herself. She felt crude and awkward and dull of wit. Her mother, Marthy, Ward—all the persons she knew—were crude and awkward and ignorant beside Charlie Fox. And she had had the temerity, the insufferable effrontery, to criticize him and patronize him over those ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... Almighty God upon their devoted heads. The least I desire for the slave is, that he may be speedily released from the pain of drinking a cup whose bitterness I have sufficiently tasted, to know that it is insufferable. ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... over in his mind the pros and cons of the situation, he had wisely determined that Herminia's confinement had better take place somewhere else than in England. The difficulties and inconveniences which block the way in English lodgings would have been well-nigh insufferable; in Italy, people would only know that an English signora and her husband had taken apartments for a month or two in some solemn old palazzo. To Herminia, indeed, this expatriation at such a moment was in many ways to the last degree distasteful; for her own part, she hated the merest appearance ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... does not render the north of Europe uninhabitable, so the mosquitos do not prevent men from dwelling in the countries where they abound, provided that, by their situation and government, they afford resources for agriculture and industry. The inhabitants pass their lives in complaining of the insufferable torment of the mosquitos, yet, notwithstanding these continual complaints, they seek, and even with a sort of predilection, the commercial towns of Mompox, Santa Marta, and Rio de la Hacha. Such is the force of habit in evils ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... dusky vagueness of the Common, and as I passed it I heard in the hot stillness the click of a pair of billiard-balls. As "every one" was out of town perhaps the servants, in the extravagance of their leisure, were profaning the tables. The heat was insufferable and I thought with joy of the morrow, of the deck of the steamer, the freshening breeze, the sense of getting out to sea. I was even glad of what I had learned in the afternoon at the office of the company—that at ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... good-bye; she was fortunately out when I made my preparations, and I left a note telling her I was sent on a mission by the king. At the Croix de Berny I met his Majesty returning from Verrieres. He threw me a look full of his royal irony, always insufferable in meaning, which seemed to say: "If you mean to be anything in politics come back; don't parley with the dead." The duke waved his hand to me sadly. The two pompous equipages with their eight horses, the colonels and their gold lace, the escort and the clouds of dust rolled rapidly away, to ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Schontz, smiling. "Here you are, more than married; you will be insufferable, you will be always wanting to get home, there will be nothing loose about you, neither your clothes nor your habits. And, after all, my Arthur does things in style. I will be faithful to ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... would catch in knots, and when she tried to loosen it, would break, and the needle had to be threaded over. Somehow the work was terribly irksome to her, and the house looked so still and dim and lonesome, and the tick-tock of the kitchen-clock was insufferable, and Sally let her work fall in her lap and looked out of the open window, far to the open ocean, where a fresh breeze was blowing toward her, and her eyes grew deep and dreamy following the gliding ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Dorothy blushed when she welcomed him aroused my ire at once. Now Mr. Willoughby Newton was a very handsome and proper gentleman, and on his broad acres grew some of the sweetest tobacco that ever left Virginia; but I could scarce treat him civilly, which only shows what an insufferable puppy I still was, and I made myself most miserable. His learning was more of the court and camp than of the bookshelf,—a defect which I soon discovered,—and I loved to set him tripping over some quibble of words, a proceeding which amused me vastly, though my mirth was shared ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... waters at Bagnigge Wells, and living at the 'Imperial Hotel' there, there used to sit opposite me at breakfast, for a short time, a Snob so insufferable that I felt I should never get any benefit of the waters so long as he remained. His name was Lieutenant-Colonel Snobley, of a certain dragoon regiment. He wore japanned boots and moustaches: he lisped, ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... indeed if that victory which has been won, had been gained without great toil, insufferable anguish and sacrifice such as all persons experience when they dare to brave the conventions of the dead past or blaze a trail for ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... say, comes my son;" as a shadow passes the window, and Eustace's tall figure with the meekly stooping head comes in at the door. "Eustace, I beg that you will decide who is to be in authority in this house—your mother or this young lady. It is insufferable that every time I send the children into the corner Vera should call them out and give ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... walk their horses in a southerly direction; but the heat was now so great, that it became almost insufferable, and at last the horses stood still. They dismounted and drove their horses slowly before them over the glowing plain; and now the mirage deluded and tantalized them in the strangest manner. At one time Alexander pointed with delight (for he could not speak) ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... with his child, it was his turn to submit. She sat opposite him, sewing, her foreign face inscrutable and indifferent. He felt he wanted to break her into acknowledgment of him, into awareness of him. It was insufferable that she had so obliterated him. He would smash her into regarding him. He had a raging agony of ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... risen again as the troubled fancy regained a portion of its activity. These indistinct shadows of consciousness, as they came in the wake of the physical power that felt the quickening influence of another draft of air, carried more insufferable sensations in their dark forms than had accompanied my more distinct perceptions. They were mere filmy traces, broken and unconnected—exhibiting to me sometimes only the darkness of the bell, sometimes the mere face; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... replied, "if I permitted your intervention, I could never hold my head up in Berlin again! In any case, I could not stay here. The first thing I should do would be to quarrel with that insufferable young cad who insulted us last night. I am afraid, at the first opportunity, I ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... upon the road for meeting the wants of travellers once adapted to such a practice, it would easily become universal. It is, however, very possible that mere horror of the heats of daytime may have been the original ground for it. The ancients appear to have shrunk from no hardship as so trying and insufferable as that of heat. And in relation to that subject, it is interesting to observe the way in which the ordinary use of language has accommodated itself to that feeling. Our northern way of expressing effeminacy, is derived chiefly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... insufferable resentment of the deception practised upon her, when informed of it by Sally. And why, therefore, Mr. Savage should comport himself as if the heavens had fallen on learning that he had betrayed himself unconsciously to his aunt, was something ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... forces, which were a strong security to him, whose help would prevent his suffering any thing by a sudden onset, or by open force; but for him to kill them on the sudden, in order to gratify a passion that governed him, was a demonstration of insufferable impiety. He also was guilty of so great a crime in his older age; nor will the delays that he made, and the length of time in which the thing was done, plead at all for his excuse; for when a man is on a sudden amazed, and in ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... ever on the watch for transactions by which they inevitably prosper without incurring any obligation, and doubtless my brother will be able to gather a just share of the value of your highly-remunerative body without submitting you to the insufferable annoyance of losing a ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... the South—had slunk into their holes in hotel back bedrooms, in shady barrooms, or in the negro quarters of Georgetown, as if the majestic, white-robed Goddess enthroned upon the dome of the Capitol had at last descended among them and was smiting to right and left with the flat and flash of her insufferable sword. ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... gone over on swift horses; but yet, when we reached the borders of the lake we were quite exhausted, and our hearts failed us. The heat of the smoke was insufferable, and sheets of blazing fire flew over us in ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes |
