"Cankered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man's mind, and for my friend's sake to win his base confidence. Needing a spy, and being himself a born traitor, he readily believed me at his beck; in truth he had long marked me, so I found, for a cankered soul who waited but the occasion to advance by infamy. I held the creature in my hand; I turned him over and over, and he, the while, thinking me his greedy slave. And so, usurping the place of some other who would have ambushed ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... called Vautrin; to see how far away the rebellious eddy will be carried ere it is lost, and what the end will be of this really diabolical man, human still by the power of loving—so hardly can that heavenly grace perish, even in the most cankered heart. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... look over the apple trees carefully; cut out and burn all cankers. Black rot has been increasing in the state, and since a great deal of early infection may come from cankered limbs, it is important that cutting out and ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... degrading jokes of ribald boys and depraved men,—you are quite correct, Sir, in stating that she is not my daughter. On the contrary, she is the daughter of an Hungarian nobleman who had the misfortune to incur my displeasure. I had a son, crooked spawn of a Christian!—a son, not like you, cankered, gnarled stump of life that you are,—but a youth tall and fair and noble in aspect, as became a child of one whose lineage makes Pharaoh modern,—a youth whose foot in the dance was as swift and beautiful to look at as the golden sandals of the sun when he dances ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... sir!" exclaimed the down-at-heels gentleman. "Sir Oswald, permit me to bring to your notice one Anthony—myself, once blooming gayest of the gay, now, alas! a faded blossom, cankered, sir, blighted, yet not to be trodden upon with impunity and always your most obliged, humble servant!" Here he paused to lift the brimming tankard the gloomy landlord had just set before him and bow ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... with the laces, and glancing all the while on every side at the ugly misshapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not a branch was straight, not one was free, but all were interlaced and grew one about another; and just above ground, where the cankered stems joined the protuberant roots, there were forms that imitated the human shape, and faces and twining limbs that amazed him. Green mosses were hair, and tresses were stark in grey lichen; a twisted root swelled into a limb; in the hollows of the rotted bark he saw the masks of men. His ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... hearts are straitly knit in passion and desire, But on cold iron smite the folk who chide at them in vain. Thou, that for loving censurest the votaries of love, Canst thou assain a heart diseased or heal-a cankered brain? If in thy time thou kind but one to love thee and be true, I rede thee cast the world away and with that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... career as man of the world, however lit up by a morbid vanity, or galvanized by a lascivious passion, there will come at times the consciousness of a better heart, struggling beneath your cankered action,—like the low Vesuvian fire, reeking vainly under rough beds of tufa and scoriated lava. And as you smile in loge or salon, with daring smiles, or press with villain fondness the hand of those lady-votaries of the same god you serve, there will gleam upon you ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... gay, thoughtless temper she was called. I should here describe the mother and daughter to you. The mother needs little description—a pale, black-haired, black-eyed woman, who should have been blooming and sprightly, but that care had damped her spirits, and cankered the ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... ethics. So strong was the aesthetic impulse that it seemed for a while capable of drawing all the forces of the nation to itself. A society that rested upon force and fraud, corroded with cynicism, cankered with hypocrisy recognizing no standard apart from success in action and beauty in form, so conscious of its own corruption that it produced no satirist among the many who laughed lightly at its vices, wore the external ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... politic signors of Venice forget what King David saith, 'Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.' Also, in religion, they hang their cloth according to the wind, siding now with the Pope, now with the Turk; but aye with the god of traders, mammon hight. Shall flower so cankered bloom to the world's end? But since I speak of flowers, this none may deny them, that they are most cunning in making roses and gilliflowers to blow unseasonably. In summer they nip certain of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... upper portion of the stem and putting it into soil to root, and afterwards, as lateral stems develop on the old stock, they may be cut away with a sharp knife, and treated in a similar manner. Should a plant become sickly, and look shrivelled and cankered at the base, it is always best to cut away the healthy part of the stem, and induce it to form fresh roots, thus giving it a new lease of life. Seeds of these plants may be obtained from dealers, more especially ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... head for having said that Elizabeth grew old and cankered, and that her mind was as crooked as her carcase. Perhaps the beauty ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... the causer of this rebellion by my traitor brother,' said Sir Gawaine, 'and my name shall be cursed for it. Had I not wilfully driven thee, thou wouldst have accorded with Sir Lancelot, and he and his brave kinsmen would have held your cankered enemies in subjection, or else cut them utterly away. Lift me up, my lord, and let me have a scribe, for I will send a letter to Sir Lancelot ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... over him in the shape of a yearning for fellowship. It grew to be his custom to spend the whole day in wandering about the streets, aimlessly, unless it might be called an aim to establish a species of brotherhood between himself and the world. With cankered ingenuity, he sought out his own disease in every breast. Whether insane or not, he showed so keen a perception of frailty, error, and vice, that many persons gave him credit for being possessed not merely with a serpent, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... changes in Paris is the Paris of the Americans, that foul swelling at the Carrara throat of Youth's fairyland. It is this Paris, cankered with the erosions of foreign gold and foreign itch, that has placed "souvenirs" on sale at the Tomb of Napoleon, that vends obscenities on the boulevards, that has raised the price of bouillabaisse to one franc fifty, that has installed ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... way! Boston does this to-day. Last year she stole a man; her merchants stole a man! The sacrifice of man to money, when shall it have an end? I pity those merchants who honor money more than man. Their gold is cankered, and their soul is brass,—is rusted brass. They must come up before the posterity which they affect to scorn. What voice can plead for them before their own children? The eye that mocketh at the justice of its son, and scorneth to obey the mercy of its daughter, the ravens of posterity shall ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... Other vices we assume for that we falsely suppose they bring us either pleasure, profit, or honour. But in envy who is it can find any of these? Instead of pleasure, we vex and gall ourselves. Like cankered brass, it only eats itself, nay, discolours and renders it noisome. When some one told Agis that those of his neighbour's family did envy him, "Why, then," says he, "they have a double vexation—one, with their own evil, the other, ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... may fit Their necks to his own yoke! (With growing intensity) That adder who Would coil about the world! That serpent scruffed With white deceit and low ambition's slime, That crept into the garden of my dream And cankered bud and root, nursed by my toil, Fed with my dearest blood! Ay, he will quake, And cry for mercy to a stony Heaven Whose pity drops long since were drained upon The woe that he hath ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... hate you, sir! Detest you! Never wish To see you more! You have ruined me! Undone me! A blighted life I wear, and all through you! The fairest hopes that ever woman nourished, You've cankered in the very blowing! bloom And sweet destroyed, and nothing left me, but ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... friends—friends of the most opposite dispositions, ages, and talents—by the old and wayward Wycherley, by the cynical Swift, the rough Atterbury, the gentle Spence, the stern attorney-bishop Warburton, the virtuous Berkeley, and the "cankered Bolingbroke." Bolingbroke wept over him like a child; and Spence's description of his last moments is at least as edifying as the more ostentatious account of the deathbed of Addison. The soldier ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... taunt, answered in a tone so bitter, so full of hatred to himself, so replete with the outpouring of a cankered heart, so despairing and reckless, that the lawyer felt that even in him there might ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... for Mary Fitton was the passion of Shakespeare's whole life. The adoration of her, and the insane desire of her, can be seen in every play he wrote from 1597 to 1608. After he lost her, he went back to her; but the wound of her frailty cankered and took on proud flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and to madness. When at length he won to peace, after ten years, it was the peace of exhaustion. His love for his "gipsy-wanton" burned him out, as ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... looked to myself. The type of my countenance was there; but, oh, transformed to an ideal, such as I now, for the first time, saw possible—ennobled in every defective line—purified of its taint from worldliness—inspired with high aspirations—cleared of what it had become cankered with, in its transmission through countless generations since first sent into the world, and restored to a likeness of the angel of whose illuminated lineaments it was first a copy. So thought Stephania of me. Thus did she believe I truly was. Oh! blessed, and yet humiliating, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... of Allah, the Compassionating, the Compassionate![FN203] Thy letter hath reached me, O my lady, and hath given ease to a sprite worn out with passion and love-longing, and hath brought healing to a wounded heart cankered with languishment and sickness; for indeed I am become even as saith ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... blasted were their wedded days with strife; Each season looked delightful, as it past, To the fond husband, and the faithful wife. Beyond the lowly vale of shepherd life They never roamed; secure beneath the storm Which in Ambition's lofty land is rife, Where peace and love are cankered by the worm Of pride, each bud of joy industrious ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... important change LaFontaine was responsible, as well as for another bill which simplified the judicial system of Lower Canada. An attempt was made to bridle the turbulence of Irish factions, which had brought to Canada the long-standing, cankered quarrels of the Old World. A bill was passed to suppress all secret societies except the Freemasons. It was, of course, aimed straight at the Orange Society, that vigorous politico-religious organization which preserves the memory of a Dutch prince and of a battle ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... my lord, a silly and cankered auld haveril, and that my head is full of prejudices and fancies. Would to God that I were wrong. If I were, I would go down on my knees to her ladyship and ask her pardon and serve her like a dog all the days of my life; but, waes me, ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... of the houses are various; plain white is rare, and the prevailing tints are the light-brick of the fresh laterite and the dark rusty ochre of the old. But all are the same in one point, the mildewed, cankered, gangrened aspect, contrasting so unfavourably with the whitewashed port-towns of the Arabs. The upper stories of wood-work based on masonry, the fronting piazzas or galleries, the huge plank-balconies, and the general use of shingle ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... answered. "There was only one that I ever really loved, and that love you cankered. But I did love her, more than aught else, and she has been taken from me, and he has done it. With her by my side I could have forgiven you, I could have learned to forget my greed; but now it can never be, and although I believe that I have at last made her ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... mule with ten dollars' worth of trappings on him, and a driver with ten cents' worth on him; a palace like a dream of stone, entirely surrounded by nightmare hovels; a new, shiny, modern apartment house, and shouldering up against it a cankered rubbish heap that was once the playhouse of a Caesar, its walls bearded like a pard's face with tufted laurel and splotched like a brandy drunkard's with red stains; a church that is a dismal ruin without and a glittering Aladdin's Cave of gold and gems and porphyry and onyx within; ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... dingy dungeon pined that brave and noble knight, For the Saracenic warriors well they knew and feared his might; Long he lay and long he languished on his dripping bed of stone, Till the cankered iron fetters ate their way ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... can not nowe preserue him self frome corruption and wormes. Iulianus was compelled in the end to crie, O galilean (so alwayes in contempt did he name our sauiour Iesus Christ) thou hast nowe ouercomen. And who doubteth but Iesabel, and Athalia, before their miserable end, were conuicted in their cankered consciences, to acknowledge that the murther, which they had committed, and the empire whiche the one had six yeares usurped, were repugnant to iustice: Euen so shall they I doubt not, whiche this daye do possesse and mainteine that monstriferous authoritie ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... he was going, were alike unknown. It was said that his mother had been an English lady of noble family who had married a foreigner not unheard of in circles where men pile up 'the cankered heaps of strange-achieved gold'—that he had been born and educated in England, taken abroad, and so on. But the facts of a life in such cases are of little account beside the aspect of a life; and hence, though doubtless the years of his existence contained their share of trite and homely ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... Till under their bite and their tread The swedes, and the wheat, and the barley, Lay cankered, and trampled, and dead. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... lesse cherefulnes to embrase theim, then if beyng ledde on my hande from countrey to countrey, I should poynct the at eye, how euery people liueth, and where they haue dwelte, and at this daye doe. Let it not moue the, let it not withdrawe the, if any cankered reprehendour of other mens doynges shall saie vnto the: It is a thyng hath bene written of, many yeares agone, and that by a thousand sondry menne, and yet he but borowyng their woordes, bryngeth it foorthe for a mayden booke, and naimeth it his owne. For if thou ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... essentially gambling implements, as much as roulette tables. Now I am not preaching at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning; but I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not republican. It belongs to two phases of society,—a cankered over- civilization, such as exists in rich aristocracies, and the reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real Republicanism is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of government, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... my house upon another's ground; Mocked with a heart just caught at the rebound,— A cankered thing that looked ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... answered the minister, "if thou hast any means of pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath of an old witch, like Mistress Hibbins," added he, attempting to smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hall he religiously kept his ears open and his mouth shut. And, listening, he learned. For some things said in his hearing were distinctly not pretty, and made one wonder if Prince Victor's deep-rooted confidence in an England mortally cankered with social discontent were not grounded in a surprising familiarity with backstairs morale. Other observations, again, were merely ribald, some were humorous, ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... at hard, clean work, like haying or harvest, but the slavery of being nurse to calves and scrub-boy to horses cankered my spirits more and more, and the thought of living in town filled me with an incredulous anticipatory delight. A life of leisure, of intellectual activity seemed about to open up to me, and I met my chums in a restrained exaltation which must have been trying to their ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of beautiful women, to enter, before he was of age, upon that political career in which it seemed certain that if he would follow in his father's steps he might hope for more than his father's fortunes. If Charles Fox had been quite cankered by his father's care, if the essence of his genius had been corruptible, he might have given the King's friends a leader as far removed from them as Lucifer from his satellites, and contrived perhaps—though that indeed would ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... gudesire aff the grund. Dougal was glad to see Steenie, and brought him into the great oak parlour, and there sat the laird his leesome lane, excepting that he had beside him a great, ill-favoured jackanape, that was a special pet of his; a cankered beast it was, and mony an ill-natured trick it played—ill to please it was, and easily angered—ran about the haill castle, chattering and yowling, and pinching, and biting folk, specially before ill weather, or disturbances ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... my call! Stern Genius hear from thy retreat On some old sepulchre's moss-cankered seat, Beneath the Abbey's ivied wall That trembles o'er its shade; Where wrapt in midnight gloom, alone, Thou lovest to lie and hear The roar of waters near, And listen to the deep dull groan Of some perturbed sprite Borne fitful on ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... writes, "Wickedness burneth as the fire, the anger of Jehovah darkens the land, and the people shall be the food of the fire." And James declares to proud extortioners, "The rust of your cankered gold and silver shall eat your flesh ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... matter. King, the driver, looked as if he thought it did, and appeared morose. Is it because coachmen always keep their appointments with society and society never keeps its appointments with coachmen that a settled melancholy seems to brood over them, and their souls seem cankered with misanthropy? ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... red-headed tormentor, could not, for the life of him, count those inside in hundreds and thousands in such a manner as to be reasonably certain of correctness. As it would have cankered his soul to feel that he was being beaten out of a half-dozen rations by the superior cunning of the Yankees, he adopted a plan which he must have learned at some period of his life when he was a hog or sheep drover. Every Sunday morning all in the camp ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... disabled was greater than the physical pain I endured. My friend asked an old woman, who doctored among the slaves, what was good for the bite of a snake or a lizard. She told her to steep a dozen coppers in vinegar, over night, and apply the cankered vinegar to ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... went on, his voice taking the high drone of prophetic utterance, "an' you's all cobered wit' gol' lace. De Good Book say—'Hab no respec' for dem dat wears fine apparel.' No! 'Deir garments shall be mof-eaten, deir gol' an' silver shall be cankered, an' de worm'—hear, you nigger!—'de worm, shall ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... come! the Tyrant's throne Is crumbling, with men's hot tears rusted; The sword earth's mighty have leant upon Is cankered, with ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... the deserted rose-garden, rank and grown to weeds. On some of the bushes were cankered, frozen buds. In the center of the garden, at the meeting-point of several paths, a mossy fountain was flowing into a greenish basin shaped like a seashell, and in this basin a poilu was washing his clothes. He was a man of thirty-eight or nine, big, muscular, out-of-doors looking; whistling, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... stand[1053] thair friend. But the contrarie declaired, everie man took purpose for him self. The complaintis of the brethren within the towne of Edinburgh was lamentable and sore. The wicked then began to spew furth the vennoum whiche befoir lurked in thare cankered hearte. The godly, alsweall those that war departed, as the inhabitants of the towne, wer so trubled, that some of thame wald have preferred death to lyve, at Godis pleasur. For avoiding of danger, it was concludit that thei should departe at mydnycht. The Duik maid provisioun ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... glimpse of the sunny sky was as strange to her as him, nor answered peevishly though his complaining accents roused her from sweetest dream only to share his wretchedness. He knew her faith, yet nourished a cankered jealousy; and when the slow disease had chilled all his heart save one lukewarm spot which Death's frozen fingers were searching for, his last words were, "What would my Rose have done for her first love, if she has been so true ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... touch, Then knew I where to seat me in a land Under wide heavens, but yet there is not such. So as she shows she seems the budding rose, Yet sweeter far than is an earthly flower; Sovereign of beauty, like the spray she grows; Compassed she is with thorns and cankered flower. Yet were she willing to be plucked and worn, She would be gathered, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... done. Casi. To thee Reueng doth Cassius kneele him downe. Thou that brings quiet to perplexed soules, And borne in Hel, yet harborest heauens ioyes, Whose fauor slaughter is, and dandling death, Bloud-thirsty pleasures and mis boding blisse: Brought forth of Fury, nurse of cankered Hate, 1540 To drowne in woe the pleasures of the world. Thou shalt no more in duskish Erebus: And dark-some hell obscure thy Deity, Insteede of Ioue thou shalt my Godesse bee, To thee faire Temples Cassius will erect: And on thine alter built ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... leprosy of Foedora's vanity had taken hold of me at last. I probed my soul, and found it cankered and rotten. I bore the marks of the devil's claw upon my forehead. It was impossible to me thenceforward to do without the incessant agitation of a life fraught with danger at every moment, or to dispense with the execrable ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... strange freaks of vegetable life unknown to science grew amid the products of various no less flourishing industries. You beheld a rosebush capped with printed paper in such a sort that the flowers of rhetoric were perfumed by the cankered blossoms of that ill-kept, ill-smelling garden. Handbills and ribbon streamers of every hue flaunted gaily among the leaves; natural flowers competed unsuccessfully for an existence with odds and ends of millinery. You ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... smitten upon the old wound that Sir Launcelot du Lake gave me, of the which I feel that I must die; and if Sir Launcelot had been with you as he was, this unhappy war had never begun, and of all this I myself am causer; for Sir Launcelot and his blood, through their prowess, held all your cankered enemies in subjection and danger. And now," said Sir Gawaine, "ye shall miss Sir Launcelot. But alas! I would not accord with him; and therefore," said Sir Gawaine, "I pray you, fair uncle, that I may have paper, pen, and ink, that I may write unto Sir Launcelot a letter with mine own hands." ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... I was told that, before the year was out, the family hadn't a knife that would cut anything, they were so cankered with rust. So much for education and learning to read, as you justly ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... essence, the vitality of actions, derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any external source. Like the plant which while it derives the accident of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its odour in whatever soil it ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... said the father, "Ambulinia. I will forbid Elfonzo my house, and desire that you may keep retired a few days. I will let him know that my friendship for my family is not linked together by cankered chains; and if he ever enters upon my premises again, I will send him to his long home." "Oh, father! let me entreat you to be calm upon this occasion, and though Elfonzo may be the sport of the clouds and winds, yet I feel assured that no fate will send ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... shall see a recrudescence of the superstitions of mediaeval papistry, or whether it shall witness the severance of the living body of the ethical ideal of prophetic Israel from the carcase, foul with savage superstitions and cankered with false philosophy, to which the theologians have bound it, turns upon their final judgment of the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... he were cankered in disposition, which I will say Malachi is not, he might make it very unpleasant for you to remain, by ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... lacrimose raptures over so simple a thing as a youthful friendship; his abject confession of despair and dependence; his long-drawn-out revelation of a sick heart, and his morbid craving for sympathy in a passion which he himself feels to be abominable,—all this suggests a cankered soul of which there can be little hope. Hamlet greets the returning ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... space apart, carried each a galling fragment, of which nothing but death could break the rivets, to hide it in new society beneath the gayest looks they could assume. Your mother succeeded; she forgot it soon. But it rusted and cankered at ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... this cankered apathy has its merciful compensations. After the first shock and panic of war there appears to descend on all who have a share in it, whether active or passive, a kind of numbed indifference as to danger; a kind of callousness as to consequences, which I ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... herself; her good breeding is so absolute that she would not be uncontrolledly familiar with her nearest and dearest, and her thoughts are all for others. But the shrew must always be thrusting herself forward; her cankered nature turns kindness into poison; she resents a benefit conferred as though it were an insult; and yet, if she is not constantly noticed and made, at the least, the recipient of kindly offers, she contrives to cause every one within reach of her ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... glory,—his derision to my fame! Nay, of a truth I need him,—even as the King needs the court fool,—to make mirth for me in vacant moments,—for there is something grotesque in the contemplation of his cankered clownishness, that sees nought in life but the eating, the sleeping, the building, and the bargaining. Such men as he can never bear to know that there are others, gifted by heaven, for whom all common things take radiant shape and meaning,—for whom the flowers reveal their fragrant ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... it would have moved the spirit of the most cankered denizen of a city to see the beauty of the parasites that clustered and hung from tree to tree. The orchids were of the most brilliant colours; and now and then they passed a lake or pool in the depths ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... them yet? Yet! How few attain to the age of the Psalmist! Twenty-seven years have passed since that date: how often, in those years, have the dark doors opened for the young as for the old! William Mainwaring died first, careworn and shamebowed; the blot on his name had cankered into his heart. Susan's life, always precarious, had struggled on, while he lived, by the strong power of affection and will; she would not die, for who then could console him? But at his death the power gave way. She lingered, but lingered dyingly, for three years; and then, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... must part, my Neighbor Nelly, For the summers quickly flee; And the middle-aged admirer Must, too soon, supplanted be. Yet, as jealous as a mother, A suspicious, cankered churl, I look vainly for the setting, To ...
— Neighbor Nelly Socks - Being the Sixth and Last Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... winds thin winnow through the woods With tremulous noise, that bids, at every breath, Some sickly cankered leaf Let go its hold ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... looks sink in my breast; Thy gentle words stir poison there; Thou hast disturbed the only rest That was the portion of despair. Subdued to duty's hard control, I could have borne my wayward lot: The chains that bind this rained soul Had cankered then, but crushed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... butterfly. Alas, all these kind of things are but a painting the devil, and a setting a carnal gloss upon a castle of his; thou art but making gay the spider: is thy heart ever the sounder for thy fine gait, they mincing words, and thy lofty looks? Nay, doth not this argue, that thy heart is a rotten, cankered, and besotted heart? Oh! that God would but let thee see a little of thy own inside, as thou hast others to behold thy outside: thou painted sepulchre, thou whited wall, will these things be found virtues in the day of God? Or, is this the way that thou takest to mortify sin? 'An high look, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Saints, no. To hear of her was enow. They say she has a face like a cankered oak gall or a rotten apple lying cracked on the ground among the wasps. Mayhap though you ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rousing passions which, after all, are the great driving forces of human life?" It is true, the same writer continues, our conventional moral formulae are no longer strong enough to control passion adequately, and that we are generating steam in a boiler that is cankered with rust. "The cure is not to cut off the passions, or to be weakly afraid of them, but to find a new, sound, healthy engine of general morality and common sense within which they will work" (Edward Carpenter, Albany Review, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... he had the true Iago-like disposition "to spy out abuses." Accordingly, in 1598, he published a series of venomous satires called "The Scourge of Villanie," rough in versification, condensed in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more than a caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once indecent and inhuman. To prove that this scourging of villany, which would have put Mephistopheles to the blush, was inspired by no respect for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... gravely, "that is not true, and it's foolish, besides. If you were useless—blind as well as lame—if you were as cankered and ill to do with as you are mild and sweet, there would be no question of burden, because you are one of us, our own. If you were thinking of Angus Dhu, you might speak of burdens; but it is nonsense to say that to me. You know that you are more to my mother ...
— Shenac's Work at Home • Margaret Murray Robertson
... gratuitously with some of the best books on these subjects; and if you shall converse with him again, after another year or two of his progress, and compare him once more with the ignorant, stunted, cankered beings in his vicinity, you will see whether there be anything essentially at variance between his narrow circumstances in life ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... number of tea plants were introduced into Brazil, with a colony of Chinese to superintend their culture. The plantation was formed near Rio Janeiro and occupied several acres. It did not, however, answer the expectations formed of it, the shrubs became stunted, cankered and moss grown, and the Chinese finally abandoned them. The culture was again tried in 1817. The plantations lie between the equator and 10 deg. south latitude, nearly parallel with Java, and of course are exposed to the same ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds |
