"Torment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... often ludicrous or piteous in the particular. The loneliness, the coarseness, the everlasting insistence of the pettiest and most troublesome wants and difficulties, harden and brace many minds, but narrow most and torment some. Wild game, song-birds, fish, forest trees, were but some of the things of which there were few or none round nearly all the young pastoral settlements. Everything was to make. The climate might ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... am so constantly opening it that I never bother to lock it, and the fact that it is strapped to me has always been sufficient protection. But I can appreciate now what a satisfaction, and what a torment, too, it must have been to that woman when she saw that the ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... that he might meet Governor Vandecar in Horace's office. As long as everyone thought the children his, he could hold to the point that they had to go back with him. He would make no compromise for money with the protectors of his children; for he had rather have their bodies to torment than be the richest man in the state. He had not yet avenged that woman dead and gone so many years back. At thought of her, he rose to his feet and smiled ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... prejudices. Prejudice and contempt, cloaked in the pretense of religious or political conviction are no different. These forces have nearly destroyed our nation in the past. They plague us still. They fuel the fanaticism of terror. And they torment the lives of millions in fractured nations all ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... ever how much I at last depended on him. If Corvick had broken down I should never know; no one would be of any use if HE wasn't. It wasn't a bit true I had ceased to care for knowledge; little by little my curiosity not only had begun to ache again, but had become the familiar torment of my days and my nights. There are doubtless people to whom torments of such an order appear hardly more natural than the contortions of disease; but I don't after all know why I should in this connexion so much as mention them. For the few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... and pressed hard against his temple, as though to still the dull, constant throbbing that brought to his mental agony the added torment of physical pain. For these three days now he had fought with mind and body and soul against the one conclusion that was tenable—the conclusion which to-night, robbing him of every hope in life, bringing ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... rather than walked, and was almost unrecognisable from the effects of his sufferings during the night;—he was colourless, haggard, his face swollen and even bleeding, and his merciless persecutors continued to torment him each moment more and more. They had gathered together a large body of the dregs of the people, in order to make his present disgraceful entrance into the city a parody on his triumphal entrance on Palm Sunday. They mocked, and with derisive gestures called him king, and tossed ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... summit and the crooked tree, and there the wind began to torment him. And when Judas rebuked it, it began to blow soft and low, and took leave and ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... passed into the Garden of the Convent, leaving him Confounded with Love, Admiration, Joy, Hope, Fear, and all the Train of Passions, which seize upon Men in his Condition, all at once. He was so teazed with this Variety of Torment, that he never missed the Two Hours that had slipped away during his Automachy and Intestine Conflict. Leonora's Return settled his Spirits, at least united them, and he had now no other Thought but how he should ...
— Incognita - or, Love & Duty Reconcil'd. A Novel • William Congreve
... hunt him up the following day, and he quickly noticed Toni's extreme disquietude upon learning that Dona Cinta wished to talk with him. The mate left the boat in lugubrious silence as though he were being taken away to mortal torment: then he began to hum loudly, an indication that he was in ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Will-o'- the-wisp. What could he be after? Was he looking for her? She dared not run, lest he should see and pounce upon her. The light came nearer, and grew brighter and larger. Plainly, the little fiend was looking for her—he would torment her. After many twistings and turnings among the pools, it came straight towards her, and she would have shrieked, but that terror ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... forty-eight hours, and before the end of another week Lyons had rescued the bonds of the Parsons estate from pawn, and disposed of his line of stocks carried by Williams & Van Horne. They were sold at a considerable loss, but he made up his mind to free his soul for the time being from the toils and torment of speculation and to nurse his dwarfed resources behind the bulwark of Elton's relief fund until the financial situation cleared. He felt as though he had grown ten years younger, and without confiding to Selma ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... rate Audrey's conduct had not had the effect of driving brother and sister apart. It had drawn them closer together if anything. Ted seemed to find relief in Katherine's society from the torment of his own thoughts, and he had shown no desire to look for distraction abroad; indeed the difficulty was to make him go out of doors at all for necessary exercise. He would have fits of work, when nothing would induce him to stir from the easel. Another time, he would spend whole ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... and good living, and so encouraged him enough to keep him earning these things for her. As soon as some money was made she would persuade him to work no more till it was spent; and even when he had made agreements to paint certain pictures for which he was paid in advance she would torment him till he gave all of his time to her whims, neglected his duty and spent the money for which he had rendered no service. Thus in time he became actually dishonest, as we shall see. It is a sad sort of story to tell of ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... [par. 409.] Clarendon. About this time the councils at Westminster lost a principal supporter, by the death of John Pym; who died with great torment and agony of a disease unusual, and therefore the more spoken of, morbus pediculosus, as was reported.—Swift. I wish all his clan had ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... harnessed I never would hear any of it. And it seemed that night that I couldn't manage to do without hearing it. Keats was wrong about that, you know,—about unheard melodies being sweeter. They can come to be clear torment. So I decided I'd begin going in harness. I suppose it was rather naive of me to think that I could, all at once, make a change like that. Anyhow, I found I couldn't go on with this. I brought it around to-day,—it's out there in the hall—to turn it over to Paula to do with as she ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... to an essential oil resembling peppermint (?). According to Padre Mercado, "When the seeds are taken with wine, sensation is so dulled that the drinker may be whipped without feeling the lashes, and even if put to the torment, does not feel it." These properties, if true, make this plant one of the most useful in the Philippines. The entire plant is stimulant. The infusion, given internally, causes sweating, excites the circulation, ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... do wish you would contrive some means to get rid of my odious Cousin Jehoiakim, he is the torment of my life." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... "This proceeding was, however, no invention of his, but an imitation of a usual mode of enchantment by means of wax figures (peri cunculas). The witches made a wax image of the person who was to be bewitched; and in order to torment him, they stuck it full of pins, or melted it before the fire. The books on magic, of the Middle Ages, are full of such things; though the reader who may wish to obtain information on this subject need not go so far back. Only eighty years since, the learned and celebrated Storch, of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... believe in the possibility of such mercy! Misery and torment seemed to await me, they seemed inevitable; therefore I took poison, which I secretly carried about me, and in a few hours its effects will slay me. I must die—there is no remedy! But before I die, do thou expound to me the teaching which includes ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... it. Then coming back one day from some races in France, he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt very cruelly. He suffered terribly in body and mind. His sufferings caused much suffering to others. He did his utmost to see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a fine essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he could not do so. His confidence in the benevolent intervention of God was altogether destroyed. His book tells of this shattering, and how labouriously he reconstructed his religion ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... the present state, whatever it be, we feel and are forced to confess the misery; yet when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable. But the time will surely come when desire will no longer be our torment and no man shall be wretched ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... a torment of the mind, A tempest everlasting; And Jove hath made it of a kind Not well, nor full nor fasting. Why so? More we enjoy it, more it dies; If not enjoyed, it sighing ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... the little boy whose fresh, cheerful face was crossed with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his presence was a source of torment. In the idiom of his generation Roscoe did not consider the matter "efficient." It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a "red-blooded he-man"—this was Roscoe's favourite expression—but in a curious ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... meeting the wan spectres of his own departed passions, since he could not meet the passions themselves; and he met them, for they could not rest, but returned to their former habitation, like unclean spirits as they were, each bringing seven more along with it, but not to torment him. Such were the beings with which the soul of this aged materialist was crowded. During life his well known motto was, "let us eat, and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Upon this principle, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... teaching may be of interest to some, who desire to train children with the least pain, and the most enjoyment to the little ones themselves. First, we never used a spelling-book—that torment of the small child—nor an English grammar. But we wrote letters, telling of the things we had seen in our walks, or told again some story we had read; these childish compositions she would read over with ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... other hand, though he had, to some extent, emasculated himself, though he was exempt from his chief torment, he discerned, flourishing within him, another crop of tares, of which the spread had till now been hidden behind the sturdier growth of other vices. In the first instance, he had believed himself to be less enslaved by sin, less utterly vile; and he was nevertheless ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... torment. I just had her out and back she doubles again. She just has me fair out of wind turnin' ...
— The Turn of the Road - A Play in Two Scenes and an Epilogue • Rutherford Mayne
... so much from his early standard, that his works no longer appeared to be by his hand; and forgetting his art more and more every day, he was reduced to painting, in addition to his usual panels and pictures, the meanest kinds of works. And he sank so low that everything was a torment to him, but above all his burdensome family of children, which turned all his ability in art into mere clumsiness. Wherefore, being overtaken by infirmities and impoverished, he finished his life in misery ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... arrived from Paris, and the other spoils of the day. When everything was buried she shut the door upon it, as in her heart she was shutting the door on her poor little fledgling hopes. Nothing remained to torment her vision, or distract her from what she had to do. The old gray rag and the battered black hat were all she ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... this king by the wrath of God has commanded, to my episcopal seat. The wrath of God will soon call Henry hence. May his dying hour be full of torment, and may the Holy Father's curse be realized and fulfilled in him! Farewell! We go with palms of peace forced on us; but we will return with the naming sword, and our hands will be ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... the procedure was this: Every one had [was enjoined] to enumerate all his sins (which is an impossible thing). This was a great torment. From such as he had forgotten [But if any one had forgotten some sins] he would be absolved on the condition that, if they would occur to him, he must still confess them. In this way he could never know whether he had made a sufficiently pure confession ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... Androcles, so he told it me at large; but as to the surgeon, we told him he had no way to know whether the lion would do so or not, but to cure him first and trust to his honour; but he had no faith, so to despatch him and put him out of his torment, he shot him in the head and killed him, for which we called him the ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... sleep of the night is more refreshing than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life, but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress worn at home, rather to remain ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... to kill us this time," declared little Robey, the youngest subaltern, to whom the nights were a torment unspeakable. He had been within an ace of heat apoplexy more than once, and his nerves ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... soul and conscience, all absolutely dead to every impulse but the insatiable, ever-increasing thirst for the damning poison. I entered one of these dens but once, but I can never forget the terrible sights and sounds of that "place of torment." The apartment was spacious, and might have been pleasant but for its foul odors and still fouler scenes of unutterable woe—the footprints of sin trodden deep in the furrows of those haggard faces ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... girl, to see you poor and in rags, clothed like a fagot, running barefoot about the fields on the Sabbath, when you carry about you more treasures than you could dig up in the grounds of the abbey. Do not the townspeople pursue, and torment you ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... children. The poor little souls! she could get on well enough with them for an hour or two at Avonside, but they had been a sore affliction to her at the Lodge. Any woman who can not wholly set aside self is sure to be tormented by, and be a still worse torment to, children. ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the dark Dominicans of Spain, A newborn Fury walks the wide domain, Gaunt INQUISITION; mark her giant stride, Her blood-nursed vulture screaming at her side. Her priestly train the tools of torment brings. Racks, wheels and crosses, faggots, stakes and strings; Scaffolds and cages round her altar stand, And, tipt with sulphur, waves her flaming brand. Her imps of inquest round the Fiend advance, Suspectors ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... happy, friend, forget, forget. A curse—no blessing—Memory, thou art; The very torment of a human heart. Ah! yes, I thought, I still am young; and let My heart but beat, I can be happy yet. Upon a friendly face clear shone the light; Without, low moaned the mountain's winds, and night Closed ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... sport about sundown. Accordingly Aaron and I started off between six and seven o'clock, one going upstream and the other down. The scene was charming. The sun shot up great spokes of light from behind the woods, and beauty, like a presence, pervaded the atmosphere. But torment, multiplied as the sands of the seashore, lurked in every tangle and thicket. In a thoughtless moment I removed my shoes and socks, and waded in the water to secure a fine trout that had accidentally ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... soldiers who did not succumb retreated in face of a weapon which could not be countered by any in their possession. The casualties were heavy, the sufferings of the wounded indescribable in their torment. From the military point of view, which holds that war is killing and that any method whatsoever is warrantable, the attack was a success as it gained ground, and for the time being confused the enemy. But it was a form of attack which could succeed only once. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... always exhilarates his audience so as to render weariness and satiety impossible. He is now coquetting a little with the Tories, and especially professes great deference and profound respect for the Duke of Wellington; his sole object in politics, for the moment, is to badger, twit, and torment the Ministry, and in this he cannot contain himself within the bounds of common civility, as he exemplified the other night when he talked of 'Lord John this and Mr. Spring that' (on Thursday night), which, however contemptuous, was too undignified to be effective. He calls ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... distress and seizure,—abhorred by his own household, who, if their services were not required, vanished at his approach, or, if summoned, entered the door of his room trembling,—he was an isolated and unhappy being, a torment to himself and to others. Wise, indeed, was Solomon, when he wrote, that "he who spared the rod ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Transgression: and our Innocence in either Case being exactly the same, God cannot but look upon us (in our natural State, before we commit Sin) as Creatures that never did any thing to offend him, and consequently be gracious and kind to us; for to leave us in this State, to suffer everlasting Torment, is worse than a Breach of Promise made to the Elect; and if we are as innocent, as tho' no such Covenant had ever been made, God cannot but regard us accordingly: and this proves that such a Covenant could never be made, because to ...
— Free and Impartial Thoughts, on the Sovereignty of God, The Doctrines of Election, Reprobation, and Original Sin: Humbly Addressed To all who Believe and Profess those DOCTRINES. • Richard Finch
... fire; and, when it was well burning, they each took a brand, and burned this poor creature gradually, so as to make him suffer greater torment. Sometimes they stopped, and threw water on his back. Then they tore out his nails, and applied fire to the extremities of his fingers and private member. Afterwards, they flayed the top of his head, and had a kind of gum poured all hot upon it; then they pierced his ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... to talk to me every day of them as of beloved friends, who were still living near her. She survived them however, but one month. Far from reproaching her aunt for the afflictions she had caused, her benign spirit prayed to God to pardon her, and to appease that remorse which we heard began to torment her, as soon as she had sent Virginia away with ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... mankind, of varied interests, of distractions, of infinite opportunities to preserve your distance from each other, is hardly conceivable; but on board ship, at sea, en tete-a-tete for days and weeks and months together, could mean nothing but mental torture, an exquisite absurdity of torment. He was a simple soul. His hopelessly masculine ingenuousness is displayed in a touching way by his care to procure some woman to attend on Flora. The condition of guaranteed perfect respectability gave him moments of anxious thought. When ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... she moved towards him, and her mother said something about the drawing-room, where the next moment she found herself. She did not use any little restless arts to play with her embarrassment; she did not torment the flowers or the chimney ornaments, nor even her own rings, she stood with her hands folded and her head a little bent down, like a pendant blossom, ready to listen to whatever might ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... confinement,—that his pursuit of Melmoth was incessant and indefatigable,—that he himself allowed it to be a species of insanity,—that while he acknowledged it to be the master passion, he also felt it the master torment of his life. He again visited the Continent, returned to England,—pursued, inquired, traced, bribed, but in vain. The being whom he had met thrice, under circumstances so extraordinary, he was fated never to encounter again IN HIS LIFETIME. At length, discovering that he had ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... haunted by spectres and scourged with a whip of scorpions, and his red-eyed fury makes all space a hell and shatters silence with the shrieks of the damned. He is a human soul, burdened with the frightful consciousness of Divine wrath and poised in torment on the precipice that overhangs the dark, storm-beaten ocean of eternity. His human weakness is frighted by ghastly visions and indefinite horrors, against which his vain struggle only makes his forlorn feebleness more piteous and drear. The gleams of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... visitors for tea, or rather, to be correct—a visitor. A lady to comfort me—or perhaps torment me—as only your sex can." His eyes suddenly rested on Margaret's photo, and he stopped with a frown. Mrs. Green's motherly face beamed with satisfaction. Here was a Romance with a capital R, which was as dear to her kindly heart as a ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... the third night the God of Fire appeared to the chief of the doctors in his sleep, and he was shaped like a burning brand and smoke went up from him. Out of the smoke he spoke to the doctor, saying: 'For this reason it is that I torment your people, that they hate me and curse at me and pay ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... of Parliament "have sate above seven years to hatch Cocatrices and Vipers, they have filled the kingdom with Serpents, bloodthirsty Souldiers, extorting Committees, Sequestrators, Excisemen; all the Rogues and scumme of the kingdom have they set on work to torment and vex the people, to rob them, and to eat the bread out of their mouthes; they have raised a causelesse and unnaturall Warre against their own Soveraigne Lord and King, a most pious Christian Prince, contrary to their allegiance and duty, ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Miss Bentley replied. "If Mr. Darrin objects on the score of safety I'm not going to torment him by ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... she would not have been so dear had she been really bad, but just naughty sometimes, and I must confess "sometimes" came pretty often. She had all sorts of loving scolding names, such as "precious torment," "darling bother," and she kept her poor dear grandmother on a continuous trot to see what mischief she was in, and frightened her mother (who thought everybody must want to steal Zay) by hiding behind the Missouri currant bush until ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... grief and torment; on they wend toward health and mirth, All the wide world is their dwelling, every corner of the earth. Buy them, sell them for thy service! Try the bargain what 'tis worth, For the days are ...
— Chants for Socialists • William Morris
... is still worse. The only deities that are practically recognized in these rude faiths are generally supposed to be malevolent beings, who have not only fixed an evil fate upon men, but whose active and continued function it is to torment them. Though there is a lingering belief in a Supreme Being who created all things, yet he is far off and incomprehensible. He has left his creatures in the hands of inferior deities, at whose mercy they pass a miserable existence. ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... him and silence her pleadings with a man's strength, and carry her off in triumph. It has been the way of man with woman since the world began, and Sypher knew it by his man's instinct. It was a temptation such as he had never dreamed was in the world. He passed through a flaming, blazing torment of battle. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... mother, Hannah walked with the desperate speed of passion through the village street, up the winding hill, across the common, along the avenue; and reached in less time than seemed possible the open grove of oaks, in one corner of which this obnoxious beer-house, the torment and puzzle of the magistrates, and the peat of the parish, was situated. There was no sign of death or sickness about the place. The lights from the tap-room and the garden, along one side of which the alley for four-corners was erected, gleamed in the darkness ...
— The Beauty Of The Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... Assembly was over Ailill knew that the torment of love had seized him for his brother's wife, and he was sorely shamed and wrathful, and the secret strife in his mind between his honour and the fierce and pitiless love that possessed him brought him into a sore sickness. And he went home to his Dun in Tethba ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... and such as pretend an interest in me, and a power over me, do so persecute me with their good nature, and take it so ill that they are not accepted, as I would live in a hollow tree to avoid them. Here I have nobody but my brother to torment me, whom I can take the liberty to dispute with, and whom I have prevailed with hitherto to bring none of his pretenders to this place, because of the noise all such people make in a country, and the tittle-tattle it breeds among neighbours that have nothing to do but to inquire ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... lessons. I know you, Ulrich, I know it! But I also know something else, and it must now be said frankly. If you allow yourself to be led on to paint pictures, if you do not submit to again become a modest pupil, and honestly torment yourself with studying, you will make no progress, you will never again accomplish a portrait like the one in the old days, like your Sophonisba. You will then be no great artist and you can, you must ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... impart, with tears of disappointment and humiliation, the rudiments of national history. He was immediately responsible to the father of this infant phenomenon, to Henry Jules, Duke d'Enghien, of whose "useless talents, wasted genius, imagination which was a torment to himself and others," Saint-Simon gives so copious an account. We have to think of our delicate and timid La Bruyere now for years the powerless plaything of this "unnatural son, cruel father, terrible husband, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... swine became the torment of their lives, for some of the devils said to haunt Vailima seemed to have entered into them, and no sty could be made ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... we mounted guard in the trenches before the gate of St. Nicholas;—and besides, it is so cold and rainy a night, that what with the roquelaure, and what with the weather, 'twill be enough to give your honour your death, and bring on your honour's torment in your groin. I fear so, replied my uncle Toby; but I am not at rest in my mind, Trim, since the account the landlord has given me.—I wish I had not known so much of this affair,—added my uncle Toby,—or that I had known more of it:—How ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... before that look, the most dreadful thing he had ever seen. It made him numb and sick, and when he rose he staggered; for, though tall, he was slender and had little strength. The weight on his chest became a pain and fixed on his throat, to choke and torment him. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... are driving him away. But am I not a guest too? Why should they drive me away? My clothes are not clean, but I have a clean conscience! I'm not Korshunov; I didn't rob the poor, I didn't ruin another's life, I didn't torment my wife with jealousy. Me they drive away, but he's their most esteemed guest, and he's put in the place of honor. Well, never mind! They'll give him another wife. My brother is marrying his daughter to him! Ha, ha, ha! ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... We met, shook hands, and took a quid; I shot poor Tom.—The worse for me; It brought his ghost,—as you shall see. Says he, 'I'm Tom Track's ghost, that's flat.' Says I, 'Now only think on that.' Says he, 'I'm come to torment you now;' Which was hard lines,—as you'll allow. 'So, Master Ghost, belay your jaw; For if on me you claps a claw, My locker yonder will reveal, A tight rope's end, which you shall feel.' Then off his winding-sheet he throwed, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... in, for a man tired, perplexed among different aims and subjects, and spurred by the immediate need of 'siller'! However, it's mine for what it's worth; and it's one of yours, the devil take it; and you know, as well as Flaubert, and as well as me, that it is NEVER DONE; in other words, it is a torment of the pit, usually neglected by the bards who (lucky beggars!) approached the Styx in measure. I speak bitterly at the moment, having just detected in myself the last fatal symptom, three blank verses in succession - and I believe, God help me, a hemistich ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... womankind. To me women were as good as men,—no better, no worse. But with my knowledge of those two girls there had grown up in me a faith in woman's virtue which in my opinion is man's greatest comforter; the lack of it his greatest torment. ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... further then. Her wish now was not to torment him further, but to comfort him. She determined that she would consult with Harry and with her uncle, and take counsel from them as to what steps might be taken to save the brand from the burning. She talked to him as a mother might have done, leaning on his arm, as she returned; ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Besides, vivisection may be painless in cases where the experiments are very cruel. If a person scratches me with a poisoned dagger so gently that I do not feel the scratch, he has achieved a painless vivisection; but if I presently die in torment I am not likely to consider that his humility is amply vindicated by his gentleness. A cobra's bite hurts so little that the creature is almost, legally speaking, a vivisector who inflicts no pain. By giving ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... North's lips were tightly compressed. He merely looked at this young officer, but Algy found that look to be the same thing as acute torment. ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... directions now. The A T O ranch must be far to the northeast of where she was. But scarcely a mile from her ran a line of straggling brush. It must be watered by a stream. She hobbled forward painfully to relieve the thirst that was already a torment ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... vivid picture of the orphanage children, as she had seen them, the doubt concerning the captain's future actions returned to torment ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... off the priestly hand, and fixed his eyes upon Seraphina. I happened to be looking at his face; he seemed to be ready to go out of his mind. His jealousy, the awful torment of soul and body, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... taught her vaguely, even through the torture her soul was undergoing, that composite sentiment of passion and cruelty felt for her by this Tartar in evening dress who mixed sneer with compliment in all he said. Dorothy could have shrieked out in the mere torment of it, and only the sight of Mr. Harley, broken and hopeless and helpless and old, gave her strength and courage ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... on—longing to escape, and yet prisoned between imaginary bounds within which he paced up and down, filled with an obscure desire to share, in the measure that was possible to him, her torment. ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... vast, so aggravated, so cowardly and base? And if there is retribution, on whose head should it fall? Shall we seize and hang the poor, ignorant, stupid, imbruted semi-barbarians who were set as jailers to keep these hells of torment and inflict these insults and cruelties? or shall we punish the educated, intelligent chiefs who were the head and brain ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to say," said she, with a blush. "I wish you would say it right out, and not torment me for half an hour, trying ...
— The Yacht Club - or The Young Boat-Builder • Oliver Optic
... do it!" she exclaimed, clasping her hands round her knees, and swaying to and fro passionately; "he never loses any power. She belongs to him, and he never gives up any thing. He would torment her almost to death, but he would never let her go free. No, no. You do ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... in torment, "I will risk my life and trust thee. Know thou art in the presence of the greatest miracle. I, though not a woman, am far gone with child—a thing which never happened on the earth till now—and in this hour it is decreed that I produce ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... to any creature too weak to protect itself, was the consciousness of power to torment that creature. But in this case the exercise of the power brought him into another relation, one with the water-but! He went back to the room where the child lay in her blankets like a human chrysalis, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... notice the mosquito, which is in many places a cruel torment; the centipede, which grows to an unusual size; the locust, of which there is more than one variety; and the scorpion, whose sting is ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me, destroy me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little interests and little successes and the life that passes like the shadow of ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... raw flesh. Harold groaned in spirit; he felt a weakness which began at his heart to steal through him. It took all his manhood to bear himself erect. He dreaded what was coming, as of old the once- tortured victim dreaded the coming torment of ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... 15:31 31 And they said unto me: Doth this thing mean the torment of the body in the days of probation, or doth it mean the final state of the soul after the death of the temporal body, or doth it speak of the things ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... possible—stay till the law's hand was in the air above his head, uplifted to strike, and then, in this last moment, die with this latest, most glorious passion as climax to his career? To flee meant endless fear, torment. To be captured meant defeat, utter and ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... some superior, and without some mad notion of making me die of vexation. I fortified myself against that notion, and I resolved at any rate not to die that kind of death. At last I got him into the habit of not tormenting me any more, by dint of letting him see that I did not torment myself at all. In point of fact I had risen pretty nearly superior to all these ruses, for which I had a supreme contempt; but I could not assume the same loftiness of spirit in respect of the prison's entity (substance), if one may use the term, and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... widows, who for a full year of widowhood might not wed again; the names of her deities she gave to the days of the planetary week. Her superstitions and folk-lore, deep-rooted, survived and lingered long among many nations: the old sorcery of the waxen image of an enemy transfixed by bodkins for the torment of that enemy; the belief in the were-wolf (one of the oldest of Roman traditions); the association of the yew tree with mourning and the ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... artistic, is, I like to believe, possessed only by you. That is, your soul, your spirit, your conscience, have passed into the most charming object of luxury that nature and art have produced for the eternal torment of fascinated mortals. I separate you from this divine half of yourself: at the present day it is too much to wish for justice and at the same time to love a woman. To think with grandeur and clearness, man must remove the lining of his nature and hold to his masculine ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... upstairs, where the rooms were theoretically warmed by stovepipes from below. The first (and the worst!) thing that confronted Thea was a suit of clean, prickly red flannel, fresh from the wash. Usually the torment of breaking in a clean suit of flannel came on Sunday, but yesterday, as she was staying in the house, she had begged off. Their winter underwear was a trial to all the children, but it was bitterest to Thea because she happened to have the most sensitive skin. While ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... lamp and lay down in bed it was pleasant, after the heat in Rohar, to find it so cool that he was obliged to pull a blanket over him. Only those who have endured the torment of hot nights in the tropics can appreciate his thankfulness as in the silence broken only by the monotonous cry of the nightjars he drowsed contentedly to sleep. Already he ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... fairy tales does the king's daughter? To win you, proud Lenore, I have turned sand into grass, and transformed myself into a respectable farmer. Therefore, beloved mistress, be reasonable, and do not torment me by ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... communion with Felicity, and the accumulated excitement of the evening worked in his thoughts an unexpected license and daring. It was possible to allow Emmet's claims when he was receiving the homage of the people alone, and she had not yet appeared; but her presence had revived the old passionate torment in his heart. Love returned triumphant, making light of all other ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the house he set his teeth, exclaiming low to himself, "Yes, tomorrow there shall be an end of this! We must risk everything and abide the consequences now. I'll have no more torment for any of us." ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... intercourse, in social habitudes. The blood of wholesome kindred is infected. Their tables and beds are surrounded with snares. All the means given by Providence to make life safe and comfortable are perverted into instruments of terror and torment. This species of universal subserviency, that makes the very servant who waits behind your chair the arbiter of your life and fortune, has such a tendency to degrade and abase mankind, and to deprive them of that assured and liberal state of mind ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... was a sorrowful prospect for these wanderers, that on the morrow they must again set forth, and that, after many nightfalls, they would perhaps be no nearer the close of their toilsome pilgrimage than now. These thoughts made them all melancholy at times, but appeared to torment Cilix more than the rest of the party. At length, one morning, when they were taking their staffs in hand to set out, he ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his pocket. I think at last he was convinced that I meant what I said, which I certainly did. The last year had been a year of torment to me. I had finished the 'Brig,' as a matter of duty, but if that piratical craft had sunk with all hands, including its creator, I should not have cared. I drove myself to my desk each day, as a horse might be driven to a treadmill, but the animal could have taken no less interest ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... seems to me to demonstrate the truth of the Fall of Man from the condition of moral very-goodness in God's sight. And I think that Dante connected the purifying pains of his intermediate state with actual sufferings in this life, working out repentance,—in himself and others. And the 'torment' of this passion, to the repentant or resisting, or purity-seeking soul is decidedly like the pain ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... a complication of images. He is never afraid of the colloquial, never afraid of slang even, and he often weaves lovely patterns with obsolete or technical words. These lines, in which Saltus paid tribute to Gautier, he might, with equal justice, have applied to himself: "No one could torment a fancy more delicately than he; he had the gift of adjective; he scented a new one afar like a truffle; and from the Morgue of the dictionary he dragged forgotten beauties. He dowered the language of his day with every tint of dawn and every convulsion ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... eldest was very handsome; but was so very proud of this, that he thought of nothing else from morning till night, and did not attend to the beauty of his wife. The second had married a man of great learning; but he made no use of it, only to torment and affront all his friends, and his wife more than any of them. The two sisters were ready to burst with spite when they saw Beauty dressed like a princess, and look so very charming. All the kindness that ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... in this sense, that he did not torment himself with penitences (decay of Spanish austerity); on the contrary, he even kept chocolate, honey and suchlike delicacies in his cell. In short, he was an up-to-date saint, who despised mediaeval practices and lived in a manner befitting the age which gave him birth. In this ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... dead had been granted shortly before the time of Luther's birth. By securing one of these, the relatives or friends of those in purgatory might reduce the period of torment which the sufferers had to undergo before they could be admitted to heaven. Those who were in purgatory had, of course, been duly absolved of the guilt of their sins before their death; otherwise their souls would have been ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... dark Orianas, In groves by the murmuring sea, And they'll give, as I suck the bananas, Their kisses, nor ask them from me. They'll never torment me for sonnets, Nor bore me to death with their own; They'll ask not for shawls nor for bonnets, For milliners ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... warm. But one gets accustomed to that. I do so like to find myself among these names which used to torment me so when I was a child. I had all manner of mysterious ideas about the pool of Bethesda and the beautiful gate, about the hill of Sion, and Gehenna, and the brook Cedron. I had a sort of belief that these places were scattered wide over ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... but not later; his footwear was altogether unmentionable. He was called well-to-do, and there was no necessity for him to cut such an abominable figure, so he soon became a by-word, and was designated as "sour dough." At all events, he was sour enough, and kept up a continual siege of torment until ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... a week or more, during which I imagine the parent birds purified themselves by every means known to them, the couple built another nest a few yards from the first, and proceeded to rear a second brood; but the new nest developed into the same bed of torment that the first did, and the three young birds, nearly ready to fly, perished as they sat within it. The parent birds then left the place as if it had ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... find the peace and lightness of heart which he craved; for man finds at first, in solitude, that only which he brings to it. Stagyra complains to the saint—and the complaint is curious, for it indicates the knowledge of a cure for the evils which torment him, and shows that Stagyra, like many other patients, had neither resolution to support his disease, nor to accept its remedy. 'You complain,' says St Chrysostom, 'that while you, with all your fasts, and vigils, and monastic austerities, have failed to appease your disquietudes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... showed her heels to the revenue cutter, and so far as David knew hours passed into days and days into weeks. It was like those nightmares in which in a minute one is whirled through centuries of fear and torment. Sometimes, regardless of nausea, of his aching head, of the hard deck, of the waves that splashed and smothered him, David fell into broken slumber. Sometimes he woke to a dull consciousness of his position. At such moments he added to his misery by speculating upon the other misfortunes ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... purge phlegm without danger. To which the learned Mr. Ray (in Append. Plant. Angl.) adds a zythogalum, or posset made of milk and beer, in which is boil'd some of the most pointed leaves, for asswaging the torment of the collic, when nothing else has prevailed. And now I might ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... wailed in the chimney like an evil spirit in torment; with fearful strength, it shook the whole house on ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... the dandy, the branded slave, are all distinguishable. Some prince or potentate, perhaps even the great king himself, appears before Rhadamanthus, and he instantly detects him, though he knows not who he is; he sees the scars of perjury and iniquity, and sends him away to the house of torment. ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... first said, that supposing this true, and the Gospel did present nothing else, yet why mayn't Angels be us'd in it, to warn Sinners to that Repentance which we know they so much rejoyce in; or Devils, to punish and torment the Guilty and Impious; as in the Case of Sceva's Son, and others. But yet further, as to the assertion it self, I know not what their Gospel offers, nor I believe are they better acquainted with what ...
— Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) and the Essay on Heroic Poetry (second edition, 1697) • Samuel Wesley
... trip, made in 1841, when there were "on board ten or a dozen slaves shackled together with irons." Of this subsequent incident he wrote, fourteen years later, to his friend, Joshua Speed: "That sight was a continual torment to me; and I see something like it every time I touch the Ohio or any other slave border. It is not fair for you to assume that I have no interest in a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Hubert! drive these men away, And I will sit as quiet as a lamb; I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word, Nor look upon the iron angerly: Thrust but these men away, and I'll forgive you, Whatever torment you do ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... places;—the heart of his slavery is in his worship: "That's a brave god, and bears celestial—liquor." But, in illustration of the sense in which the Latin "benignus" and "malignus" are to be coupled with Eleutheria and Douleia, note that Caliban's torment is always the physical reflection of his own nature—"cramps" and "side stiches that shall pen thy breath up; thou shalt be pinched, as thick as honeycombs:" the whole nature of slavery being one cramp and cretinous ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... torment of a lost soul, but, at least he had no more dreams, or spectral visitations. Hicks called him on the telephone once or twice, but the secretary ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... sat, tense, his body stiffened by the agony that rode it—unable to move a muscle. I watched the torment in his eyes build up to a crescendo of pain, until the suffering became so great that it filmed his eyes, and I knew that, though he still stared directly at me, ...
— There is a Reaper ... • Charles V. De Vet
... no belief in what he was saying. The things he knew? What? Nothing but pain and torment. Yet his heart went on wagging out words: "All life is a parting—a continual and monotonous parting. And most hideous of all, a parting with dead things. A saying good-by to things that no longer ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Edmonstone. 'You have begged every one's pardon, and it had better be forgotten as fast as possible. They have made more fuss already than it is worth. Don't torment yourself about it any more; for, if you have made a mistake, it is on the right side; and on the first opportunity, I'll go and call on Mrs. Deane, and see if she ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... clearly understood in spite of her knight's flowery speeches, she felt the shame of having treated a poor gentleman like a poor servant, and then the certainty that he must believe her ungrateful began to torment her, so that she thought of his face, and longed to see him with all her heart. For Beatrix's sake and her own honour she would not send for him; but she called one of her women and sent for the Lady Anne of Auch, who bore the standard of the ladies' troop, the same who had stopped ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... the colony was torment. Aletha rode behind her cousin on the saddle-blanket, and apparently suffered little if at all. But Bordman could only ride in the ground-car's cargo space, along with the sack of mail from the ship. The ground was unbelievably ...
— Sand Doom • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... with white-hot impatience to the day of his trip to the trading-station; twelve hours of relief, it would mean, from the worst pressure of his torment—twelve hours of merciful solitude in the old, voiceful friendliness of his forest trail. He started early, at the break of a sweet, singing dawn. The earth was elastic under his feet, the air tingling and mellow with a taste of growth; the flooded river ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... under the name of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing, and render every thing subservient to the dictates of their passions; and this spirit of encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in its object and motives, has never ceased to torment the nations. ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... Naples, as set forth by Pope Pius II in his Commentaries; for I am beginning to take a morbid interest in the unhappy love affairs of other men and to institute comparisons. If they have lived through the torment, why should not I? But Alfonso sighed for Lucrezia d'Alagna, a beautiful chaste statue of ice who loved him; whereas I crave the warm-blooded thing that is mine for the taking, but no more loves me than she loves the policeman who salutes her on his beat. I cannot take her. Something stronger ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Baas speak. It is written so. On the Limpopo it is written. All must go, if the Baas speak—one, two, three, a t'ousand. Else the bond is water, and the spirits come in the night, and take you to the million years of torment. It is nothing to die—pain! But only the Baas is kill me. It is written so. Only the Baas can hurt me. Not you, nor all the verdomde Rooineks out there"—he pointed to the vast camp out on the veld—"nor the Baas' vrouw. Do I not know all about the Baas' vrouw! She cannot hurt me.. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... from the fight. When the retreat began, the Indians hurried him along with them, stripped of coat, waistcoat, shoes, and stockings, his back burdened with as many packs of the wounded as could be piled upon it, and his wrists bound so tightly together that the pain became intense. In his torment he begged them to kill him; on which a French officer who was near persuaded them to untie his hands and take off some of the packs, and the chief who had captured him gave him a pair of moccasons to protect his lacerated feet. When ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... and it was only by the flash of the foam that I discovered the broad sheet of water before me. I had strayed into Hyde Park, and was on the bank of the Serpentine. With what ease might I not finish all! It was another step. Life was a burden—thought was a torment—the light of day a loathing. But the paroxysm soon gave way. Impressions of the duty and the trials of human nature, made in earlier years, revived within me with a singular freshness and force. Tears gushed from my eyes, fast and flowing; and, with a long-forgotten ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... monasteries of Italy into barracks, and the churches of France into magazines. "This voluntary martyrdom must have gradually destroyed the sensibility, both of mind and body; nor can it be presumed that the fanatics who torment themselves, are capable of any lively affection for the rest of mankind. A cruel unfeeling temper has characterized the monks of every age ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... friends, and at last it came to me occasionally to sleep with them and to satisfy my imperious need by mutual embraces and emissions. Before this happened, however, I was once or twice on the brink of despair and madness with repressed passion and torment. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... silent thanksgiving. Then he rose in the beauty of his tranquil and noble old age, so touched with the message he had to proclaim to his people, that the three deep furrows on his forehead, which some said he owed to the three dogmas of original sin, predestination, and endless torment, seemed smoothed for the moment, and his face was as that of an angel while ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Even "the Boys," that terrible Berserk-tribe, self-organised, self-dependent, and bound together in common iniquities and the dread of common retribution, who were in Aberalva, as all fishing towns, the torment and terror of all douce fogies, male and female,—even the Boys, I say, respected Captain Willis, so potent was the influence of his gentleness; nailed not up his shutters, nor tied fishing-lines ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... he would return, that she would hear. She could imagine how that the man, believing her good name in his power, and at his mercy, would not cease to torment and persecute her. ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... put the whole situation (his being swallowed by Baloo or the Great Lizard) on a perfectly satisfactory footing. Hell itself was spoken of as She-ol, and it appeared that it was not a place of burning, but rather of what one might describe as moral torment. This settled She-ol once and for all: nobody minds moral torment. In short, there was nothing in the theological system of Mr. Furlong that need have occasioned in any of his congregation ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... murmur, or complaint. Having now prepared all for the company, she retired from the party to her room. When she had left the party, one of the gentlemen said: "What a wicked and cruel man you are, thus to torment so kind a wife." He then took his hat and stick, and, without touching a morsel of the supper, went away. Another made a similar remark, and left, without touching the supper. Thus one after another left, till they were all gone, without tasting the supper. The master ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... can neither easy be, nor strict To lifeless clay, which ease nor torment knows, And where it cannot favour or afflict, It neither justice or ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... your husband,—and your uncle, whom, in truth, I love. You asked me a downright question which I did not then choose to answer by a downright answer. The downright answer was not at that time due to you. It has since been given, and as I like you too well to wish you to be in torment, I send you a line to say that I shall never be in the way of ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... impulse to use it. Then, full 2,000 years passed over our earth. At last came an era when man's heart journeyed forward with his mind. Then the woes of miners and the world's burden-bearers filled the ears of James Watt with torment, and his sympathetic heart would not let him stay until he had fashioned ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... distance must one be from the Greeks to ascribe to them such a stupidly narrow autochthony as does Ottfried Muller![10] How Christian it is to assume, with Welcker,[11] that the Greeks were originally monotheistic! How philologists torment themselves by investigating the question whether Homer actually wrote, without being able to grasp the far higher tenet that Greek art long exhibited an inward enmity against writing, and did not wish to be ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the burning torches of the Furies to agitate and torment it. Frauds, crimes, remembrances of the past, terrors of the future,—these are the domestic Furies that are ever present to the mind ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... pain, and his tongue lolling half out. It must also be stated that if a charitable soul of a bourgeois or bourgeoise, in the rabble, had attempted to carry a glass of water to that wretched creature in torment, there reigned around the infamous steps of the pillory such a prejudice of shame and ignominy, that it would have sufficed to repulse ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... in your hands, Huron," the captive at length answered, "and I suppose you will act your will on me. I shall not boast of what I can do, under torment, for I've never been tried, and no man can say till he has been; but I'll do my endivours not to disgrace the people among whom I got my training. Howsever, I wish you now to bear witness that I'm altogether of white blood, and, in a nat'ral way of white ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... Arabs seemed to be filled with an unusual desire to torment their victims. A man had passed the band that day on a fast dromedary, and the prisoners conjectured that he might have brought news of some defeat of their friends, which would account for their increased cruelty. ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... he to be shut out from the society of his fellows? How shall he exercise benevolence or justice in his cell? Will his heart become softened or expand who breathes the atmosphere of a dungeon? Solitary confinement is the bitterest torment that human ingenuity can inflict. The least objectionable method of depriving a criminal of the power to harm society is banishment or transportation. Expose him to the stimulus of necessity in an unsettled country. New conditions make new minds. But the whole attempt to apply law breaks down. You ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... intensified the gloom that brooded over the world. The struggle was unending. Men still remained the victims and slaves of passion and desire. Their sighs and curses and groans and cries of hatred and despair increased with the years; the smoke of their torment blackened the face ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... A thousand reasons, gospodar," cried the man passionately; "he who has this book understands the black magic of Kensky and the Jews! By the mysteries in this book he is able to torment his enemies and bring sorrow to the Christians who oppose him. Did not the man Ivan Nickolovitch throw a stone at him, and did not Ivan drop dead the next day on his way to mass, aye and turn black before they carried him to the hospital? And did not Mishka Yakov, who spat ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... relates having sat through an Italian opera, till, from sheer pain, he rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded streets, to solace himself with sounds which he was not obliged to follow, and thus get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention! According to his frank avowal, music was to him a source of pain, rather ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... instincts goad him on towards his wonted pursuit of pleasure. Similarly, he who, never having lived a continent life, forsaketh the path of virtue and commiteth sin, hath no faith in existence of a world to come. Dull as he is after death he hath torment (for his lot). In the world to come, whether one's deeds be good or evil these deeds are in no case, annihilated. Deeds, good and evil, precede the agent (in his journey to the world to come); the agent is ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... The torment in her brain eased then, and gradually she quieted down, with only a pang and a weight in her breast. The past seemed far away. The present was nothing. Only the future, that contained Jim Cleve, mattered to her. She would not have left the clutches of Kells, ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... settees of Malacca cane, black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors' racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber's crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment. A flag locker was in one corner, open, exposing various colored bunting, some rolled up, others half unrolled, still others tumbled. Opposite was a cumbrous washstand, of black mahogany, all of one block, with a pedestal, like ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... would have been persuaded that there were cases in which foreign influence was used with the Pasha to encourage the application of the torture when some old men, too feeble to survive for a moment the infliction of the bastinado, were subjected a second time to the torment of sleeplessness, under the bayonets of the Egyptian soldiers. But it is indeed too unreasonable and unjust to lay on the Pasha of Damascus the whole blame of these proceedings, unequalled in atrocity since the days of the fourth Antiochus. The guilt must be equally shared by those ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... "It's a shame to torment us as she does, knowing how poor we are and how happy a little of her money would make us. I'm tired of being a slave to a cruel old woman just because she's rich. If it was not for mother, I declare I'd wash my hands of her ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... relieve them; but Arthur, turning on him fiercely, routed him, and compelled him to retreat in terror to his land. Then he pursued his purpose, which was no less to destroy the race of Picts and Scots, who, beyond memory, had been a ceaseless torment to the ...
— The Legends Of King Arthur And His Knights • James Knowles
... hundred years ago a parson preached a sermon and told a story out of Fox's Book of Martyrs of a man who had assisted at the torture of one of the saints, and afterward died, suffering compensatory inward torment. It happened that Fox was wrong. The man was alive and chanced to hear the sermon, and thereupon he sued the parson. Chief Justice Wray instructed the jury that the defendant was not liable, because the story was told innocently, without malice. He took malice in the moral sense, as ...
— The Path of the Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... gully. A litter of hamstrung horses, and haggled men behind them, showed that a spearman on his face among the bushes can show some sport to the man who charges him. But, in spite of all, the square was still reeling swiftly backwards, trying to shake itself clear of this torment which clung to its heart. Would it break or would it re-form? The lives of five regiments and the honour of the flag hung ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for an honourable exhibition of the same strong feeling. Maurice had got into trouble with the authorities at King's College by essays in which he was taken to hold that the eternity of the future torment of the wicked is a superstition not warranted by the Thirty-nine Articles. A movement followed in the council of the college to oust Maurice from his professorial chair. Mr. Gladstone took great pains to avert the stroke, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... a dull, heavy presentiment that the boy who should have been the pride and delight of his life would be a drawback and a torment. ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... will be a man, If nature goes on with her first great plan; If water, or fire, or some fatal snare Conspire not to rob us of this, our heir. Our blessing, our trouble, our rest, our care; Our torment, our joy— "Only, ...
— Baby Chatterbox • Anonymous |
