"Pitiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... So the lady lives in Paris, as usual. After this she puts neither 'monsieur,' nor 'my friend,' nor 'dear count,' nothing at all. She begins abruptly: 'Once before, many years ago, I came to you as a suppliant. You were pitiless, and did not even deign to answer me. And yet, as I told you, I was on the verge of a terrible precipice; my brain was reeling, vertigo had seized hold of me. Deserted, I was wandering about Paris, homeless and penniless, and my child ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... waste of No Man's Land, pitted with shell holes, blasted and seared by the pitiless storm of fire that had swept ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... vehicles, with numerous foot-passengers, were waiting on either side; but no, they moved it for a little distance, then smoked a bit, then moved it a few inches and smoked again, and so on for another half-hour, while we were exposed to a pitiless north-east wind. They evidently enjoyed our discomfiture, and were trying how much of annoyance we would bear patiently. Fiery tempers have to be curbed in Canada West, for the same spirit which at home leads men not to "touch their hats" to those above them in station, here would vent itself in ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... affair near Lagny, where we charged the intrenched Burgundians through the open field four times, the last time victoriously; the best prize of it Franquet d'Arras, the free-booter and pitiless scourge ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... judge of heaven's mysterious ways. The conviction settled down and down into his heart, that that apparently simple affair of killing a bird—which, even with the aggravation of all the cruelty exhibited by the thoughtless, yet certainly pitiless youth, is so apt to be viewed carelessly, or only with an avowal of disapprobation—which, if too much insisted on as an act to be taken up by superior retribution, is more apt still to be laughed at—was the cause of all the ills that had befallen ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... tender dream Of dead love's lingering kisses, To crushed hearts haloed by the gleam Of unreturning blisses; Deep mourns the soul in anguished pride For the pitiless death that won them, - But the saddest wail is for lips that died With ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... hero of the mob, was pitiless. "You ain't afraid, hey?" he sneered. "If you ain't afraid, go do ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... rest, it is at least as wretched to be turned from the door where you hope to find shelter, with dripping clothes and shivering limbs; yet such was our fate. There was nothing at the venda to eat, no place for us, none for our horses, and so we set out again to brave the pitiless storm; a few yards, however, brought us to a low cottage on the road side, and there we knocked. A mulatto serving-man came round cautiously to reconnoitre from the back of the house, when having ascertained that we really were English travellers benighted and wet, the front door was opened, ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... formation in a desolate spot that the sheepmen had taken for a prison. It is a common fact that on many of these high buttes and mesas the pitiless weather of ages has chiseled figures, faces, and forms which, in their monstrous grotesquery, suggest the discarded clay modelings of ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... in Tartar limbo, worse than hell. A devil in an everlasting garment hath him; One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel; A fiend, a fury, pitiless and rough; 35 A wolf, nay, worse; a fellow all in buff; A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands The passages of alleys, creeks, and narrow lands; A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry-foot well; One that, ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... that, during the past week, she had been reading the headings of certain suppressed chapters in Lorimer's history, and that they had changed her whole attitude towards the man. The signs were slight, too slight for him to have recognized them as yet; but Sally's curious, pitiless eyes had discerned them. She had discerned and disapproved, and she had resolved that no squeamish delicacy should keep her from preventing Beatrix's playing the part of ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... be that he was said to care for reliques with a superstitious passion worthy of Louis XI. Sismondi sums up the description of this extraordinary despot in the following sentences, which may be quoted for their graphic brevity: 'False and pitiless, he joined to immeasurable ambition a genius for enterprise, and to immovable constancy a personal timidity which he did not endeavor to conceal. The least unexpected motion near him threw him into a paroxysm of nervous terror. No prince employed so many ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... use her for all the little hateful tasks that nobody else would do and in which there was no thanks or any glory,—Seth in his senses would never have held up this dear though unfinished soul to the scorn, the pitiless ridicule of her townsmen. ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... commenced his retrograde march when the snow, like a violent storm of the Alps, beat around the devoted heads of his soldiers, and their progress was henceforth a combat against their pitiless foes the Cossacks, who hovered around them, and the still more pitiless elements. Danger awaited him at every step and on every hand, and when he arrived on the margin of the Beresina, his vast army was reduced to about 14,000 men. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... surges o'erleap the deck! Hark! how the pitiless tempest raves! Ah, daylight will look upon many a wreck Drifting over the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... wretches, wheresoe'er you are That bide the pelting of the pitiless storm! How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and widow'd raggedness defend you From ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... that this warfare on the frontier is pitiless. This is a general statement of a truth to which there are exceptions. One of these was a reconciliation on the battlefield between French and German soldiers who lay wounded and abandoned near the little town of Blamont. When dawn came they conversed with each other while waiting ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... commandant, giving the other a veiled look of animosity, expressing thus a little of that loathing which had gradually come to embrace everything habitual to this pitiless and violently beautiful land. And when the subordinate had withdrawn, he muttered to himself, as he returned to his apathetic contemplation of the papers on his desk, "All the same, an ideal! And I killed it for him a few days before ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... and fell. In punishment for that cruel deed he is said to be still a wanderer upon the earth with no rest for his weary feet. This, too, is a mere legend; but certainly I have found, even in the grim business of a soldier, that retribution like a fury pursues all pitiless men. ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... the dry skins and coverlets, the party lay down to rest, leaving Peter to keep watch lest they should again drift from their haven, and be exposed to the pitiless seas. All took their spell of duty; but the cheerless night passed without further incident, and the day found them still under the shadow of the great berg. As the day advanced, the storm swept the pack northward, and the party, ascending ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... the blazing sun, whose rays shot downward upon her head with pitiless power. When she found her brain growing dizzy, she averted the danger of sunstroke by dropping or swimming for some distance below the surface. This always cooled or refreshed her, though she felt her face and neck blistering ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... your uncle now from me that I shall find means to protect Nun, his noble father, when the vengeance of the gods and of Pharaoh falls upon the rest of your race. Already—tell him this also—the sword is whetted, and a pitiless judgment is impending. Bid him ask himself what fugitive shepherds can do against the power of the army among whose ablest leaders he is numbered. Is your father ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... belief that she continues to go to church almost every Sunday either in the morning or the afternoon, a harmless delusion which for some time I took no pains to dispel, knowing as I did that she meant to go every Sunday. Yet I knew also that pitiless, unemotional statistics would reveal an average attendance on her part of rather less than ten times in the course of each year. I was brute enough finally to call attention to a tally-sheet, covering ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... is very stern and pitiless toward the poor prince," said Madame Kleist, who had succeeded in suppressing her own emotions, and, following the lead of the king, she was desirous to let it appear that the subject was one of no ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... hours." The consequence is, that let one arrive starved at an inn, one can obtain nothing till such hours as those who are not starving desire to eat;—and if one is foredone with travel, weary, and wanting rest, the pitiless alarum-bell, calling those who may have had twelve hours' sleep from their beds, must startle those who have only just closed their eyes for the first time, perhaps for three nights,—as if the whole traveling community were again at ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... this harlot existence, advised Valerie on every step, and pursued her course of revenge with pitiless logic. She really adored Valerie; she had taken her to be her child, her friend, her love; she found her docile, as Creoles are, yielding from voluptuous indolence; she chattered with her morning after morning with more pleasure than with Wenceslas; they could laugh together ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... was the only man of those he was now living with to whom he felt the least attraction. In a vague way he clung to him; and though he never faced the thought of what he was about fairly, yet it passed through his mind that even in Drysdale's company he would be safer than if alone. It was all pitiless, blind, wild work, without rudder or compass; the wish that nothing very bad might come out of it all, however, came up in spite of him now and again, and he looked to Drysdale, and longed to become ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... in April lies the Mole, disembowelled by the peasant's spade; at the foot of the hedge the pitiless urchin has stoned to death the Lizard, who was about to don his green, pearl-embellished costume. The passer-by has thought it a meritorious deed to crush beneath his heel the chance-met Adder; and a gust of wind has thrown ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... the stablemen, bus-washers, drivers, mechanics, chauffeurs, and conductors, who had left their beds much in advance even of the travellers, let us not speak—even they had begun the day later than their wives, mothers, or daughters. All this flying population, urged and preoccupied by pitiless time, gazed down upon George and saw a gay young swell without a care in the world rushing on 'one of those motor-bikes' ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... is strangely stern, the curse of war was hardly needed to produce a melancholy effect. Why should there be caustic plants where everything is hot and burning? In deserts where thirst is enthroned, and where the rocks and sand appeal to a pitiless sky for moisture, it was a savage trick to add ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... faithless, unscrupulous and pitiless humbugs in their dealings with their own sex—which, whatever they may say, they despise at heart—that I am happy to be able to say, Mrs. Vane proved true as steel. She was a noble-minded, simple-minded creature; she was also a constant creature. ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... heard no noise.' I was stupefied. The sailors said they saw me walking, first to Andernach, then to the forest. I made many trips, they said, no doubt to bury the gold and diamonds. The valise had not been found. My remorse still held me dumb. When I wanted to speak, a pitiless voice cried out to me, 'You meant to commit that crime!' All was against me, even myself. They asked me about my comrade, and I completely exonerated him. Then they said to me: 'The crime must lie ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... now, hanging at their necks, were a heavy burden. Wiser than their masters they had crawled beneath the shade, scanty as it was, of the boxwood trees, and stood there patiently waiting—For what? For death and the pitiless crows patiently waiting overhead. ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... pitiless suspense to the mother of Charles Clancy, while they are abroad searching for ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... cruel and pitiless, but it was not base, when it had among its gifts such a certainty as that, rock-like under his feet, bearing him up in ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... as the War Trade Board the right to establish priorities of export and supply for the benefit of these people whom we have been so happy to assist in saving from the German terror and whom we must not now thoughtlessly leave to shift for themselves in a pitiless competitive market. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... a few inches of lace-bordered cambric. A glance at Jeanne's face showed her that the child had developed a new side to her character. There was something pitiless about the straightened mouth, and ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a cry from another sphere. To those of us who once experienced the still and pitiless cold, a cry terribly suggestive of the horror-charged gloom, of the icy silence as unbroken as that of unfathomable deeps, of the stern and uncompromising individuality of ...
— Out of the North • Howard V. Sutherland
... short-lived congratulations of the fickle spectators. Again man fought with man, or waged a fiercer contest with the tiger. Again the wounded gladiator looked up despairingly for mercy, but received only the signal of death from the pitiless spectators. ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... garrotte a man at Pai-sha in a dark alleyway back of Loo Kotai's place. He feared the rope, therefore, more than he did the knife of the Maori; but he feared them both too much to remain within reach of either. Therefore he chose the pitiless jungle. ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... eye The scholars' progress in their misery: Refined wits, your patience is our bliss; Too weak our scene, too great your judgment is: To you we seek to show a scholar's state, His scorned fortunes, his unpity'd fate; To you: for if you did not scholars bless, Their case, poor case, were too-too pitiless. You shade the muses under fostering, And made[31] them leave to sigh, and ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... and he drew his lips very tightly together when the pitiless hands forced upon his mind the fact that the day was marching ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... ever Wingfold felt that if there was no God, his soul was but a thing of rags and patches out in the masterless pitiless storm and hail of a chaotic universe. Often would he rush into the dark, as it were, crying for God, and ever he would emerge therefrom with some tincture of the light, enough to keep him alive and send him to his work. And there, in her own seat, Sunday after Sunday, sat the ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... in a vigil of the night, when he lay in the hot darkness, unable to sleep, that he came at length to this resolve. And now that he had cut the knot he was too just to blame Alison Parr for having pointed out —with what often had seemed a pitiless cruelty—something of which he had had a constantly growing perception yet had continually sought to evade. And he reviewed, as the church bells recorded the silent hours, how, little by little, his confidence had crumbled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... three sorts of people, my son, from whom the philosopher has to hide his secrets. They are princes, because it would be imprudent to enlarge their power; the ambitious, whose pitiless genius must not be armed, and the debauchees, who would find in hidden sciences the means to satiate their evil passions. But I can talk freely to you, who are neither debauched—for I quite overlook the error you nearly gave way to in the arms of yonder girl—nor ambitious, ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... as brought him down that first time; which indeed did not despond at all then, though it felt the weight of life's undertakings and drawbacks. And the warm rain, and yellow, sun-coloured mist of this April day, had no likeness to the cold, pitiless, pelting December storm. Yet passing all the times between, his mind went back constantly to that first one. He felt over again, though as in a dream, its steps of loneliness and heart-sinking — its misty ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... to the angels and says: "Messrs. Angels, this seems to be the very fellow for our business." Then to Napoleonder he says: "Satan was perfectly right. You are worthy to be the instrument of my wrath, because a pitiless conqueror is worse than earthquake, famine, or deluge. Go back to the earth, Napoleonder; I turn over to you the whole world, and through you the whole world ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... think it will be almost as great a surprise to the reader as it was to the local population when he learns that in a memorandum of April 26, 1921, the Tirana Government complained to the League of Nations that the Yugoslav civil and military officials were behaving in a very pitiless fashion towards the Albanians. Certainly they have not as yet established Albanian schools, but they propose to do so when there is accommodation and when teachers are available; and then, maybe, to the disgust ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... for so much as it might be worth, was denied to him. And he sat there, trying to face the fact that seemed almost incredible to a man of what seemed to him his aptitudes and capacity, the awful fact that he had not enough to do to fill up his life. He did not state this pitiless truth to himself explicitly, but it was beginning to loom from behind a veil, and he would some day be forced to look at it. He could not start anything fresh. He had not the requisite impulse. He could have ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... all the lines of her face took place. She became sinister, mocking, and pitiless. An exultant cruelty croaked in her voice. Minute, repulsive remodellings of her neck and cheeks changed her to a harpy, and seeing these evidences of her great genius Douglass grew bitterly resentful, and when she ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... remains of the ancient city that can never be ruined—for instance, the great stone quarries, pits over a hundred feet deep and acres broad, in some of which the Athenian prisoners were penned up to waste away under the gaze of the pitiless captors; the Greek theater cut out of the solid rock; the great altar of Hiero II., six hundred feet long and about half as broad, also of solid rock. Then there is a mighty Hexapylon, which closed the fortifications of Dionysius at the northwest ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... manifestations of the spirit of our globe, one seeking only evil, injustice, tyranny, suffering, the other strives for liberty, right, radiance, joy. These two powers stand once again face to face. Our opportunity is to annihilate the one that comes from below. Let us know how to be pitiless that we have no more need for pity. It is the measures of organic defense—it is essential that the modern world should stamp out Prussian militarism as it would stamp out a poisonous fungus that ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... which stretched in front of the camp was intolerably flat The sun rose with pitiless regularity, shone with a steady glare for a great many hours, and then set. That was all that ever happened. The coming of a cloud into the sky would have been greeted with cheers. No cloud appeared A sandstorm, however ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... out of my abstraction, and looking up I found myself entering the deep shadows of the ravine. The day was stifling; and this transition from the pitiless, visible heat of the parched fields to the cool gloom, heavy with pungency of cedars and vocal with twittering of the birds that had been driven to its leafy asylum, was exquisitely refreshing. I looked for my mystery, as usual, but not finding the ravine in a communicative mood, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... dragging into the glare of publicity the sacred details that give to life all its secret happiness, faith and delight. To do so would be ten times worse offense against the ethics of unwritten and unspoken things than describing with pitiless precision the death beds of children, as Little Nell, Paul Dombey, Dora, Little Eva, and, thank heaven! only a ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... constantly increased. Feeling that this time she was dying, she grieved over the pitiless macerations she had used, and with touching artlessness begged forgiveness of her poor body for having exhausted its strength, and so having perhaps hindered it from living to ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... considered a reliable guide, seem to have been the surviving vestiges of an earlier social state on a more matriarchal basis. They are most distinct at the dawn of German history. From the first, however, though divorce by mutual consent seems to have been possible, German custom was pitiless to the married woman who was unfaithful, sterile, or otherwise offended, though for some time after the introduction of Christianity it was no offence for the German husband to commit adultery (Westermarck, Origin of the Moral ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and made a personal appeal for an encore, which was given; but there was a mishap this time; Cinderella's threads became entangled and she came near to breaking her china nose. Audiences are invariably most pitiless when they are most pleased, and have no mercy on exhausted actors. At the cry of "Speech! Speech!" the Prince stepped forward ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... and there a well, with its huge lumbering wheel and patient bullocks, went creaking and groaning night and day, as if earth grudged the tiny rivulet coming so toilfully from her dry breast, and gave it up with sighs of pain. The sky was cloudless, pitiless, brazen. The sun rose into it without a single fleck of vapour to mitigate its fierceness ... all day it shone and glistened and blazed, until the very earth seemed to crack with heat and the mere thought of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... were received should be burned. The king of Aragon decreed (1194) that any one who listened to the preaching of the Waldensians, or even gave them food, should suffer the penalties for treason and should have his property confiscated by the state. These are the beginnings of a series of pitiless decrees which even the most enlightened kings of the thirteenth century issued against all who should be convicted of belonging either to the Albigenses or the Waldensians. The Church and the civil government agreed that heretics ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... charm of foreign lands, With shadows of palms, and shining sands, Where the tumbling surf, O'er the coral reefs of Madagascar, Washes the feet of the swarthy Lascar, As he lies alone and asleep on the turf. And the trembling maiden held her breath At the tales of that awful, pitiless sea, With all its terror and mystery, The dim, dark sea, so like unto Death, That divides and yet unites mankind! And whenever the old man paused, a gleam From the bowl of his pipe would awhile illume The silent group in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the car started forward once more. A sensation of being under the paws of a beast, odious and fetid, savage and pitiless, overwhelmed her. That this was no trick of a moment but a calculated scheme to abase and possess her she now realized with a sort of dull horror. And on top of all he was, despite ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... left galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh; 'Neath our feet broke the brittle, bright stubble like chaff; Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... is not Christ's Heavenly Father, but Jehovah, the blood-spattered deity of the Jews, a God of battles, of sacrifices and death, a God pitiless and without mercy. But man's soul, being conceived of the Infinite Mind, may never utterly perish even though corrupt with sin or debased by ignorance, for even then that divine Spark which is the very life of the soul shall ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... fellow-citizens, but because he had led them to victory and made them famous. If a man will win battles and give his brigade a right to brag loudly of its doings, he may have its admiration and even its enthusiastic devotion, though he be as pitiless and as wicked ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... malady, and noting where, after death, such men were buried. The seclusion of the graveyard was then invaded, and the corpse secretly conveyed by Andreas to his chamber, and concealed sometimes in his own bed. A diligent search was at once made to determine accurately the cause of death. This pitiless zeal for correct details in anatomy, associated as it was with indefatigable practice in physic, appeared to Vesalius, as it does to his successors of to-day, to be the only satisfactory method of acquiring that knowledge which is essential to a doctor. Thus it was that ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack of eloquence or of pitiless logic; but what I saw at that moment was so novel, and made such an impression on me, that my unruly and unbridled imagination was carried away by the superstitious terrors of childhood. He held out his hand, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... suppress, as far as was practicable, all reference in the public newspapers to the misdoings of themselves and their adherents. This was but natural. No one likes to see his transgressions preserved to future ages in all the pitiless coldness of type, which may rise up against his descendants long after he himself is forgotten. The following is a complete transcript of the contemporary report of the trial of these rioters, as published in ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... pray you? Who might be your mother, That you insult, exult, and all at once, Over the wretched? What though you have no beauty,— As, by my faith, I see no more in you Than without candle may go dark to bed,— Must you be therefore proud and pitiless? Why, what means this? Why do you look on me? I see no more in you than in the ordinary Of nature's sale-work:—Od's my little life, I think she means to tangle my eyes too!— No, faith, proud mistress, hope not after it; 'Tis not your inky brows, your black ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... I paid the abbe a visit, and after reproaching him for his behaviour I gave him his choice between paying me the money he owed me and leaving the house at once. He did his best to get out of the dilemma, but seeing that I was pitiless he said he could not leave without paying a few small sums he owed the landlord, and without the wherewithal ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... But he kept his self-command, and by dint of it he presently arrived at some notion of her own share in the scene. Horror, recoil, disavowal—a wild resentment of the charges heaped upon her, of the pitiless interpretation of her behavior which broke from those harsh lips, of the incredulity passing into something like contempt with which Cliffe had endured her wrath and received her protestations—then a blind ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "I niver can call her my wife," he gives us pictures of the struggle that went on in the cottage-homes of the West Riding during the "hungry forties." In "Owd Moxy" his subject is the old waller who has to face the pitiless winter wind and rain as he plies his dreary task on the moors; but in most of his poems it is the life of the handloom-weaver that he interprets. The kindliness of his nature is everywhere apparent and gives a sincerity to the poems in which he portrays with rare discernment and ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... be more than seven; But years go fast in the slums, And hard on the pains of winter The pitiless summer comes. The wail of sickly children She knows; she understands The pangs of puny bodies, The clutch of small ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... of canonization of the Condes, it has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Conde, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyere's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he calls him, en souquenille. But to dwell on all this is to forget that the great Conde, even ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... heard all you have to say and—and—I am going to speak frankly. You have shown me in your voice and manner, as well as in your words, the most heartless egotism and pitiless cruelty. Your nearest friend is dying simply because she is near you, her days are numbered, and you can feel such indifference that you go about giving advice and analysing your feelings. I cannot say all I should like to; I have not the gift of words, but—but I can at least say that ...
— Ivanoff - A Play • Anton Checkov
... flour, blowing in thin wisps from under the horse's hoofs, while the men's jean and deerhide were sprinkled with glittering particles. The wind dropped towards sundown, and when, climbing a great hill shoulder, they dipped again to the forest the snows flamed crimson, against a pitiless blueness, out of which there seemed to fall a ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... this age is a totally different one to the spirit of their own childhood's age. It is shorn of reverence and unquestioning obedience to elders, and is an independent creature who will only obey through conviction of good or personal benefit. Children are unerring and pitiless judges of those placed over them, and how can a mother, just because she is a mother, expect respect and reverence in her children if she earns their contempt by her conduct ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... my grandfather urged the disconsolate Marion, who had come all the way from Kinghorn without speaking a single word, to alight from the cart, and remain there till the cloud of night, when she might go to her mother's unafflicted by the gaze of the pitiless multitude. ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... cold, and lonesome, but at that time I had my good warm, well-fed dreams, so I did n't mind so much. And always I thought it would be better next year, but it was n't. None of the things that come to some men fell to me; it continued the same old pitiless grind until I began to expect it. Then I said to myself that it would be different when I got through. But it was n't. I finished, and you are the only pleasant recollection I have of all that past. You used to let me sit by your fire and now and then you brought out cake they ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... of humanity! Man's intuitive instincts are better than his formulated creeds. The hope is secretly cherished that the grace of God, because it is the grace of an infinite Being, must and will operate beyond the limits defined by a narrow theology. No Christian, however staunch to the pitiless teaching of the school to which he belongs, ever brings himself really to think that any one beloved by him in the World Beyond is irretrievably lost. His creed, perhaps gives him no hope in regard to that one who dies without religion; but his own heart refuses to surrender ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... arguments to those distorted, clumsy, narrow-minded, ungainly, crippled things? Yes, I have just now been listening to the fruits of some of this present-day culture, and my ears are still ringing with the sound of historical 'self-understood' things, of over-wise and pitiless historical reasonings! Mark this, thou unprofaned Nature: thou hast grown old, and for thousands of years this starry sky has spanned the space above thee—but thou hast never yet heard such conceited and, at bottom, mischievous chatter as the talk of the present day! So you ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... parables strange and wonderful, which he, the Well of Wisdom most wisely put forth. At one time he brought into his tale a certain rich man which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day, but who was so niggardly and pitiless toward the destitute as to overlook a certain beggar named Lazarus laid at his gate, and not even to give him of the crumbs from his table. So when one and other were dead, the poor man, full of sores, was carried away, he saith, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... had bleak beginnings. The icy shore, the sombre pines, the stealthy savages, the hard soil, the unbending religious austerity, the Scriptural severity, the arrogant virtues, the angry intolerance of contradiction—they all made a narrow strip of sad civilization between the pitiless sea and the remorseless forests. The moral and physical tenacity which is wrestling with the Rebellion was toughened among these flinty and forbidding rocks. The fig, the pomegranate, and the almond would not grow there, nor the nightingale sing; but ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... of God which is the greatest triumph of His enemy. God is set forth as if He were encompassed with human limitations—the fiery imagery of the Old Testament pressed into the service of modern and western minds, until He is made to seem pitiless, revengeful, exacting, lying in wait to catch His creatures in fault, and awaiting them at death ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... when the cold, pitiless eye of the thinker penetrated through the sophisms of desire as clearly as his bodily eye saw the gray in his hair and the premature age in his face, he saw how impossible it was to keep the secret of his situation from Dom Diego. Honor forbade it, though this, he did not shrink ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... footsteps with moccasined feet whose trail leads along the receding sands of the western ocean. A bit of red colour set in immemorial time, now a silent sentinel, weeping unshed tears with eyes peering into a pitiless desert. ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... welcomed in a spirit of bitter penitence for her fault in loving one who no longer regarded her. "I do not deserve any man's regard," murmured she, as she laid her soul on the rack of self-accusation, and wrung its tenderest fibres with the pitiless rigor of a secret inquisitor. She utterly condemned herself while still trying to find some excuse for her unworthy lover. At times a cold half-persuasion, fluttering like a bird in the snow, came over her that Bigot could not be utterly base. He could not thus forsake one who ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Susanna, he explains, when he heard the Count's footsteps, and, fearing to meet him because of the decoy letter, he had jumped from the window and got a sprained ankle, which he offers in evidence. The orchestra changes key and tempo, and begins a new inquisition with pitiless reiteration:— ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... beneath his notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement, to be a fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There seems no reason to believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the forlorn hope of overcoming that awful and pitiless power, with any real hope of establishing his own supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a man betrayed by passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his fierce attempt to free himself and get the upper hand. One cannot but feel in that passion ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... die for lack of nourishment; still though your spirit should be strong enough to meet its spirit mate somewhere in the realms of imagination, and the bodily presence ought not really to be necessary, your stubborn heart of flesh craves sight and sound and touch. That is the only pitiless part of death, it seems to me. We have had the friendship, the love, the sympathy, and these are things that can never die; they have made us what we are, and they are by their very nature immortal; yet we would come near to bartering all these spiritual possessions for the 'touch ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... down the prices of his rivals was only a taste of the unerring instinct for business that was later to make him as much feared as respected in the trade. By a single stroke he had shown his ability to play on the weakness as well as the needs of the public, coupled with a pitiless disregard for other interests than his own, which constitutes ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... knows love only as the source of the follies which are her gain, and grows rich upon the substance of men whose graves she has made; that she is the most consummate of pretty hypocrites, the most dangerous of schemers, the most insatiable of mercenaries, the most pitiless of mistresses. This cannot all be true. Yet thus much is true— that, like the kitten, the geisha is by profession a creature of prey. There are many really lovable kittens. Even so there must be ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... he came upon a slope of sward Against the pool. With startled cry the maids Shrank clamoring round their mistress, or made flight To covert in the hazel thickets. She Stirred not; but pitiless anger paled her eyes, Intent with deadly purpose. He, amazed, Stood with his head thrust forward, while his curls Sun-lit lay glorious on his mighty neck,— Let fall his bow and clanging spear, and gazed Dilate with ecstasy; ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... dismal and dirty on this autumn afternoon with the pitiless rain and murky sky; but when the little party reached the quiet suburban cemetery, the clouds had somewhat dispersed, though the late flowers which yet remained to gladden the earth drooped with the heavy moisture; and when the last words were spoken, ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... St. Louis, and other missions were attacked early in the following year. Fathers Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were tortured and murdered at St. Ignace. From village after village the shrieks of helpless women and men and children, tied to stakes in burning houses, ascended to a seemingly pitiless Heaven. Many persons were tortured on the spot, but as many or more reserved for the sport of the Iroquois villages. Father Brebeuf was bound to a stake, and around his neck was thrown a necklace of red-hot tomahawks. They cut off his lower lip, and thrust a heated iron rod down ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... world was broken to pieces. Either God did not exist at all, or He was cold and pitiless—one way of it was as bad as the other. The heavenly country dissolved into cloud and melted away, and above was nothing but empty space. No more folding of your hands, like a fool! Walk on the earth, and lift up your head, and defy Heaven ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... over her and watched for a long time with pitiless eyes. Then a queer, uneasy, wondering light began to develop in those dark, ominous eyes. She leaned forward the better to listen to the choked, inarticulate words that were pouring from the girl's lips. At last, moved by some power she could not have accounted for, she knelt beside ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... and reached only disaster, I have battled and broken my lance; I am bruised by a pitiless master That the weak ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... answered: 'O Most High, O Thousand-eyed and Wisest! can it be That one exalted should seem pitiless? Nay, let me lose such glory: for its sake I would not leave one ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... indefinable, and irrealisable as the passing of one hour into the next. There had been the time before he kissed her, there was the time afterwards, but the transition had been so swift, and so little recognised, so inevitable, that while it drew both their lives down deep into the wild, pitiless surge of human feeling, she still remained more dearly and completely his by intuition than when he held her—a true woman—in his arms. The moral training of a lifetime, the unceasing, daily discipline of a mind indulgent ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... languages he called dead. His mistranslations of the classics were themselves classics. They sent the other students into uproars; but Litton saw nothing funny in them. When he received Teed's examination papers he marked them with a pitiless exactitude. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... wondered whether a courageous Roman captive who was shorn of his eyelids, and set under the blistering sun of Africa, suffered any more keenly; but motionless, apparently impassive as a stone mask, on whose features pitiless storms beat in vain, she bore without wincing the agony of her humiliation. Very white and still, she sat hour by hour with downcast eyes, and folded hands; and those who watched most closely could detect only one change ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... pitiless horror of it struck him for an instant. That she was half distraught and wholly morbid, he saw from her look, and the sight awakened that indomitable pity which had served always as a medium for the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the gaps in the pavement, the mouths of the gutters, the candelabra, and the numbers above the doors. The most trifling objects became for him companions, or rather, ironical spectators, and the regular fronts of the houses seemed to him to have a pitiless aspect. He was suffering from cold feet. He felt as if he were about to succumb to the dejection which was crushing him. The reverberation of his footsteps vibrated through ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... vigilance relaxes for a moment, it will steal your crust and leave you to starve. Every time I think of this incessant sullen contest, with no quarter given or taken, I shudder, and pray that I may die before I am at the mercy of the pitiless world. When I came to London, I saw, for the first time in my life, that hopeless, melancholy promenade of the sandwich-men; human wreckage drifting along the edge of the street, as if cast there by the rushing tide sweeping past them. They—they seemed ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... his surroundings with an infinite care. As the darkness deepened he meditatively taped a flashlight below the barrel of the sub-machine gun. Turned on, it would cast a pitiless light upon his target, and the sights would be silhouetted against the thing to be killed. He hung his grenades in a handy row just inside the mouth of the Tube and set his gas bombs conveniently in place, then ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... to that Anchoret's behest; Nor reasoned of the right, nor of the wrong, But at his bidding laid the lance in rest, And wrought fell deeds the troubled world along, For he was fierce as brave, and pitiless as strong. ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... shouted, but there was no more response than if the desert silence had remained unbroken. By the tracks of his shuffling bare feet he must have been drawing that terrible circle for several hours, while the pitiless sun beat down on his unprotected head. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and was dark-coloured and swollen, his head jerked forward loosely with each stride, and his tottering legs were bent almost double at the knees. If he sank just a little lower, his hanging hands ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... is familiar with the name of the Abbe Geoffroy of satirical memory, who drove the most popular actors and authors of the time to desperation. This pitiless Aristarchus must have been most ardently enamored of this disagreeable profession; for he sometimes endangered thereby, not his life, which many persons would have desired earnestly perhaps, but at any rate his health and his repose. It is well, doubtless, to attack those who ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... the Huguenot colony in Florida, Philip II, the King of Spain, decided to put an end to the obstinacy of the Netherlanders, and sent an army from Spain commanded by the Duke of Alva, who was as pitiless as Menendez. Alva began by seizing prominent nobles, and he would have arrested the Prince of Orange, but he escaped into Germany. A court was set up which condemned many persons to death, including the greatest nobles of the land. The people nicknamed ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... He turns the tides! The fulness of my yesterday Has vanished like a rapid dream, And pitiless and far away The cool, refreshing waters gleam: Grim rocks of dread and ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... manor. Was he missing? Then, who was his heir? Any sons? Dead of the plague! Brothers? Dead of the plague! Wife? Dead of the plague! Children? Kinsfolk? All gone! Their blackening carcases huddled in sweltering masses of putrefaction in the wretched hovels, while the pitiless July sun blazed overhead, "Calmer than clock-work, and ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; 40 Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... it he led the way. To live in a country infested by mosquitoes ought to insure to a person the possession of health, wisdom, and riches, for assuredly I know of nothing so conducive to early turning in and early turning out as that most pitiless pest. On the present occasion I had not long turned in before I became aware of the presence of at least two other persons within the limits of the little loft, for only a few feet distant soft whispers became fintly audible. Listening attentively, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... had told her. He was the emissary of Lady Heyburn without a doubt. The girl had told him openly of her decision to speak the truth and expose him, but he had only laughed at her. Alas! she knew his true character, unscrupulous and pitiless. But ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of the compass. If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave fertility ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... himself like this, against herself for ever having found glamour in the man. It humiliated her to remember how utterly she had once allowed his personality to master hers. And under the sting of this humiliation she felt hard and pitiless. Dimly she was aware that a curious change had come over her to-night. Normally, the sight of any living thing in distress was enough to stir her quick sympathy: but Gerald mourning over the prospect of having to go back to regular work made no appeal to her—a fact which the sufferer ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... heroic characters in the play. We have a hint that Charles Edward Stuart himself is with the band whom the young man protects so loyally. It may seem strange that the drama is named, not for him, but for the crafty and pitiless executioner of the king's justice. But he is after all the most interesting character in the piece, with his Biblical references in broad Lowland Scots (we may suppose that the Stewarts speak Gaelic among themselves), his superstition, his remorseless cruelty. We ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... with an entire self-satisfaction, a vein of pitiless sense, which enabled her to see herself as others might see her, and which saved her from the follies often incident to the self-satisfied. She considered herself a beauty; she thought, and with reason, that she would be well worth looking at in her wedding-clothes, but she also told ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... prominent brow of a thinker a pair of deep-set, shadowy dark eyes peered forth, with the lifeless, unwinking stare of an owl. Between them jutted a large, bony beak of a nose, with finely-cut nostrils. The pitiless set of the powerful jaw was only partially concealed by an enormous drooping moustache, the latter reddish in colour and streaked with gray, like his thinning, carefully brushed hair. His age was hard to determine. Somewhere around forty-five, George ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... has blighted each blossom, That ever has bloomed in her path-way below; It has froze every fountain that gushed in her bosom, And chilled her heart's verdure with pitiless woe; Her parents, her kindred, all crushed by oppression; Her husband still doomed in its desert to stay; No arm to protect from the tyrant's aggression— She must weep as she treads ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... window she had seen beautiful Paris writhing under the pitiless lash of the demon of terror which it had provoked; she had heard the rumble of the tumbrils, dragging day after day their load of victims to the insatiable maker of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... pictured himself as she must be picturing him: a noble, struggling young spirit persecuted by misfortune, but bravely and patiently waiting in the shadow of a dread calamity and preparing to meet the blow as became one who was all too used to hard fortune and the pitiless buffetings of fate. These thoughts made him weep, and weep more broken-heartedly than ever; and he wished that she could ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... the dire years whose awful name is Change Had grasped our souls, still yearning in divorce, And pitiless shaped them in two forms that range— Two elements which sever ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... their white hands to us. I can hardly express how much we were moved by it all. Farewell is, as we all know, a hard word to say. But we were leaving them forever; and the dark storm-clouds, the icy sea, and snowy ledges, seemed a pitiless fate for those whose voices had such power to touch our feelings. What if they were savage Huskies: they had human hearts, with all the beautiful possibilities of souls that might ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... good hap to be left to humor this craving. I was wroth with the hard and bitter world for its cruelty; yet it was in truth that very world, and its pitiless call to duty, which at that time rescued me from worse things. Verily I now bless each one who then strove to rouse me from my selfish and gloomy sorrow, from the tailor who cut my mourning weed to Ann, whose loving ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... canals, and see nothing but marshes, wild and terrible, with sluggish rivers crawling through mud-banks to the sea, beaten back by fierce tides, to overflow into oozy meers and stagnant pools. Think of raging winds, never still, the howling of seas, and the driving of pitiless rains. No other views but those, and no definite forms rising out of the water save great forest trees, growing so densely that no daylight shines through the black roof of branches. Imagine the life of our forefathers, who fled here from an existence so much more dreadful that ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson |
