"Intolerable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... injuries done us have become intolerable we have still been clear that we wished nothing for ourselves that we were not ready to demand for all mankind—fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live and to be ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... Not to have a hole of my own would be intolerable to me. But, as I was saying, I shall not be unhappy. To enjoy life, as you do, is I suppose out of the question for me. But I have a satisfaction when I get to the end of the quarter and find that there is not half-a-crown ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... that "conversion" or "salvation" consists in a "complete turning away from self," common sense revolts. It is not true either in every-day life or in larger matters of conduct. In every-day life the incurably "unselfish" person is an intolerable nuisance. Here the common-sense rule is very simple: you have no right to seek your own "salvation," or, in non-theological terms, your own self-approval, at the cost of other people's; you have no business to offer sacrifices which the other party ought not to accept. It is true that in ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... fable of The Cry is the most absurd I ever saw, but the sentiments generally just; and I think, if well dressed, would make a better body of ethics than Bolingbroke's. Her inventing new words, that are neither more harmonious or significant than those already in use, is intolerable. ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... nobles, ending with the blazon of the Elector Palatine. A new morning prayer and lecture was established here by clergymen inclined to Puritanical principles in 1599. The bells began to ring at five in the morning, and were considered Pharisaical and intolerable by all High Churchmen in the neighbourhood. The extreme Geneva party made a point of attending these early prayers. Lilly, the astrologer, went to these lectures when a young man; and Scott makes Mike Lambourne, in "Kenilworth," refer ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... perished monsters. Arid and inhospitable mountain ranges rose before him, furrowed with dry channels of ancient torrents, white and ghastly as scars on the face of nature. Shifting hills of treacherous sand were heaped like tombs along the horizon. By day, the fierce heat pressed its intolerable burden on the quivering air; and no living creature moved on the dumb, swooning earth, but tiny jerboas scuttling through the parched bushes, or lizards vanishing in the clefts of the rock. By night the jackals prowled and barked in the distance, ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... had the whole Earth to the verge of the sea under her control, is now under the control of Sudeshna and living in fear of her. She who had dependants to walk both before and behind her, alas, now herself walketh before and behind Sudeshna. This, O Kaunteya, is another grief of mine that is intolerable. O, listen to it. She who had never, save for Kunti, pounded unguents even for her own use, now, good betide thee, poundeth sandal (for others). O Kaunteya, behold these hands of mine which were not so before.' Saying this she showed him her hands marked with corns. And she continued, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... these beasts before his chariot, Might wed Alcestis. For her low brows' sake, Her hairs' soft undulations of warm gold, Her eyes clear color and pure virgin mouth, Though many would draw bow or shiver spear, Yet none dared meet the intolerable eye, Or lipless tusk, of lion or boar. This heard Admetus, King of Thessaly, Whose broad, fat pastures spread their ample fields Down to the sheer edge of Amphrysus' stream, Who laughed, disdainful, at the father's pride, That set such value on one ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... sets up socially is intolerable. It sounds fantastic to say that whole bodies of women place their chief reliance for social advancement on dress, but it is true. They are, or are not, as they are gowned! The worst of this fantasy is not only ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... she were willing to forgive him for the intolerable wrongs which he had inflicted upon her, it would be very prejudicial to her husband's cause to enter into any agreement or alliance with him whatever; for all her party and friends in England, whom Warwick had done so much to injure, ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... center, whose vertical rays struck, and parched, and scorched the living sufferers; and blistered and baked the boat itself, so that it hurt their hot hands to touch it. The beautiful, remorseless ocean was one sheet of glass, that glared in their bloodshot eyes, and reflected the intolerable heat of heaven upon these poor wretches, who were gnawed to death with hunger; and their raging thirst ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... deck perhaps half-an-hour, when a delicious coolness and freshness began by almost insensible degrees to pervade the hitherto intolerable closeness of the hot and enervating atmosphere, and, looking away to the westward, we saw, by the quick, flickering illumination of the lightning, a few transient cat's-paws playing here and there upon the surface of the water. Gradually and erratically these evanescent movements ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... those whom you loved, and by whom you desired to be remembered, not for your good, but for theirs. How far you might fail through human weakness, in shame for the past, despair at the little that could in the remnant of life be accomplished, or the intolerable pain of broken affection, would depend wholly on the degree in which your nature had been depressed or fortified by the manner of your past life. But I think there are few of you who would not spend those last days better than all ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... pillows and tried to sleep. Sleep!—she had almost forgotten what it was, that tender restorer of tired nature, it seemed so long now since she had slept. It was only about eight-and-forty hours perhaps, but it appeared an intolerable time. Her fatigue of the night before, and her unnatural excitement, had worn her out at last. She did fall asleep; she fell into a heavy slumber that was almost like stupor. She had taken a few drops out of the opium bottle in a glass of ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... nonsense, Miss Ross. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength. It is a disease to be borne with patience, like any other nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants. My trip to Mexico will be good ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... Robert, quite unable patiently to endure any further cross-examination; and he walked away through the trees to say to his friend,—'There's an intolerable Yankee yonder, splitting troughs as fast as possible, but his tongue is ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... HAVILAND,—Many persons transported by you last year have become a county charge, and it has become an intolerable burden to the tax-payers. Any person bringing a child or indigent person into this county without being legally indentured, shall be prosecuted to the full ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... caused by an ill-fitting door, was drawn quite across the entrance, and in my hasty and unforeseeing impatience I pushed it rudely aside with rough hands and admitted myself within the sacred precincts, just in time to see myself branded by my own actions, an intolerable little imp, who, on this occasion, if never before, was "enough to ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... severity. An immense development of manhood and self-dependence, an heroic determination to bear every trial for conscience' sake, and a certainty of succeeding, in the long-run, in breaking the heavy chain and casting off the intolerable yoke ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... out of them reached for his undershirt. His mother, looking at him, fell mentally on her knees before the beautiful, living body. "Oh, my son, the straight, strong darling! My precious little son!" She shook with that foolish aching anguish of mothers, intolerable. . . . "Why must he stop being so pure, so safe? How can I live when I am no longer strong enough ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... muttered in her sleep—I thought she was laboring under some fearful nightmare; but when she persisted, and I questioned her, and found the horror true, I was like a man turned instantly into stone, save for one intolerable throb within. I am still so; everything passes by me like a dream. She was so young, seemingly so innocent and light-hearted. I loved her! Gentlemen, you have thought me guilty of my wife's death,—this ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... furniture. It was also not surprising that the whole town had an amphibious appearance, to a degree unusual even in a seaport. Every one depended on the whale fishery, and almost every male inhabitant had been, or hoped to be, a sailor. Down by the river the smell was almost intolerable to any but Monkshaven people during certain seasons of the year; but on these unsavoury 'staithes' the old men and children lounged for hours, almost as if they revelled in ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... little above the village. A Canadian named Gignieres, who had gone with nine Indians to reconnoitre, now returned to say that he had been within sight of Schenectady, and had seen nobody. Their purpose had been to postpone the attack till two o'clock in the morning; but the situation was intolerable, and the limit of human endurance was reached. They could not make fires, and they must move on or perish. Guided by the frightened squaws, they crossed the Mohawk on the ice, toiling through the ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... physical nausea that assailed him when he saw them, one or two pictures in recent Paris exhibitions where the coveted accent of surprise had been produced by representing the sacred figure in the trivial monde of the boulevards, and fixed upon them as the source of Patullo's intolerable inspiration. Certain muscles felt responsive at the thought of Patullo which Arnold had forgotten he possessed; it was so seldom that a missionary priest, even of athletic traditions, came in contact with anybody who required ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... some Shandean work gravely to task for its scandalous irregularities, and utter want of methodical arrangement. Such is Carlylism; and this is all that can be said upon the matter. But the style which seemed not altogether unnatural, and far from intolerable, in Herr Teufelsdrockh, becomes a strangely inconvenient medium of communication where a whole history is to be told in it. The mischief is, that it admits of no safe middle path: it must arrest attention for its novelty, its graphic ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... rites and ceremonies, that overtly, while he endeavoured to enjoy the reputation of probity and uprightness, he, secretly, combined the nature of the tiger and wolf; with the consequence that he had been the cause of much trouble in the district, and that he had made life intolerable for ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... her. She was as calm as ever; her eyes were not even fully open, and the touch of her hand subdued him as it had always done. Though he had never entertained any hope of possessing her since the day when she had refused him in Bedford Square, a sense of intolerable loss came upon him as he saw her for the first time pledged to ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... young man, with characteristic youthful pretence of the most transparent kind. He looked in Miss Leonora's face as he spoke. He knew the very name of priest was an offence in its way to that highly Evangelical woman; and if they were to come to single combat, better immediately than after intolerable ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... an intolerable amount of redundant verbiage in Scott's novels. Those endless and unnecessary introductions make the shell very thick before you come to the oyster. They are often admirable in themselves, learned, witty, picturesque, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... got away as in fact managed to do so in the actual circumstances. The almost certainty of sickness and death nerved many a man to incredible exertions to be free, who would have waited more patiently for an exchange if his condition had been less intolerable or less sure of a fatal result. But even if there had been some more escapes, it would be no argument in favor of the horrible system which was adopted. There is no resemblance between the situation of prisoners ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... head, and his eagerness was changed to gloom. With desperate vivacity he sustained the five intolerable minutes of inquiry, where had he been, what had he been doing? Then once again the maiden aunt commenced her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... approved by the Royal Institution. In making the appointments provision was made for "a Librarian," and the Rev. Joseph Abbott was selected as the first Librarian of McGill at the beginning of 1845. The Royal Institution considered the Governors' actions to be growing daily more drastic and intolerable, and they urged the Home Government to take steps to end the struggle between the two bodies. On January 13th the Lord Bishop of Montreal, the Rev. Dr. Mountain, who had meanwhile become one of the Governors of the University, again wrote to the ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... realistic, however prolix in its descriptions, can give us more than the barest outlines of the course of life followed by the personages it attempts to portray. A touch here, a touch there, and a character is indicated. No more, for more would be intolerable. ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... pack like poverty. Burton, Anat. Mel. iii. 3: {Ouden penias baryteron esti phortion}. "No burden, saith Menander, is so intolerable ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... all this wealth the desire to escape grew stronger, and with it grew a hatred of my hitherto pleasant prison until the thought of remaining in it became intolerable to me. That very evening I began a minute examination of my prison walls; but it was not till several days had passed that I at length discovered a route where here a crack, there a tiny ledge, and again ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... to breast a fiercer storm of persecution than that which was sweeping over God's ancient people at the time when my story opens, about 167 years before the Christian era. The Roman had not yet trodden the soil of Palestine as a conqueror; but a yoke yet more intolerable than his lay on the necks of the sons of Abraham. Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria, one of the most merciless tyrants that ever existed, bore rule in the city of David. He had deluged the streets of Jerusalem with blood, he had plundered and polluted the ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... with the trade-wind, which blows continually between S.E. and S.E. by E. the farther one goes to the southwards, finding it still more easterly, all the way between the line and the tropic of Capricorn. This almost intolerable obstacle to the outward-bound India voyage, was afterwards found easy to be avoided, by keeping a course to the westward, near the coast ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... flash he realized the strangeness of his conduct, and with anxious, alarmed face, asked my pardon. I felt that this was an opportunity to put an end to a situation that was growing intolerable. My persistent questioning gained me something, but, on the whole, ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... annoy, vex, and hurt me?" Incapable himself of so mean a spirit of jealousy at superior excellence, he could not make it out; but such, was the fact, and the very mysteriousness of it made it more intolerable to bear. ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... hearts swelled in first rebellion against that which Walter Pater calls "the inexplicable shortcoming or misadventure on the part of life itself"; we were overwhelmingly oppressed by that grief of things as they are, so much more mysterious and intolerable than those griefs which we think dimly to trace to man's ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Cecil Rhodes at close quarters was peevish, irritable, and like a big spoilt child. Now at a distance we know him, with all his faults, to have been a great-souled man. Social reformers near at hand are often intolerable bores and religious fanatics frequently a pestilential nuisance. We have to get well away from a man to see him as he really is. And so it is with ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... was not intolerable. Western Texas had gone on prospering, growing in spite of the horde of rustlers ranging its vast stretches; but this cold, secret, murderous hold on a little struggling community was something too strange, too terrible ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... wreck behind. Ceaseless and unwearied industry is his delight, and enterprise and speculation his abhorrence. Riches do not corrupt, nor poverty depress him; for his mind is a sort of Pacific ocean, such as the first navigators described it—unmoved by tempests, and only intolerable from its dead and tedious calms. Thus he moves on, and when he dies his son moves on in the same pace, till generations have passed away, without one of the name becoming distinguished by his exploits ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... treat all who return to their homes from captivity with another tribe, in order that all alien substances and influences may be removed from them. When he had been thus purified he entered the house and his people embraced him and wept over him. But to him the odors of the lodge were now intolerable and he soon left the house and sat outside. Seeing this, the shaman gave it as his opinion that the purification already made was not sufficient, and that it would be well to have a great dance over him. In those days the Navajo had a healing dance in the dark corral; but it was imperfect, with few ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... way to obtain what you wanted was to employ the necessary violence. If it was thorough and quick enough, there would be no present resistance, and no subsequent complaint. And if there was some excess in the way of cruelty and retribution, it was sure of amnesty on the ground of intolerable provocation and of suffering endured too long. The king had accepted his own humiliation as if it had been as good as due to him. He could not do more for others than for himself. His brief alliance with the aristocracy ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... in human affairs; but that has often been doubted by brave and light-hearted men. Giovanni yielded a little reluctantly. If she had asked him to make it two months instead of one, he would have refused, for it seemed to him intolerable to lose a moment between decision and action, and his thoughts doubled their stride with every step, in a geometrical progression; a moment hence, a minute would be an hour, an hour a month, a month a lifetime. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... compelled to go back to his business, Regimbart went to inform Frederick about the arrangement. He had been left all day without any news, and his impatience was becoming intolerable. ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless. Everything seemed pervaded by a poignant distress; the hush of feverish, intolerable expectation. The still earth, the heavy flowers, even the growing darkness, breathed the exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt that she ought to go; that it was wrong to stay; that the hour and the place were as treacherous ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... was as free as air. Her soul and her heart were her own, and he could not reach either. He knew it. That knowledge like the little poisoned needle had punctured the triple-plate of his complacency and pride and left him no relief from pain, a pain that would have become intolerable had he known that of all the bars that stood between her and him the one that nothing could move was a young peasant in his employ, who watered and fed horses, and who often led them up and down the road ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... lively turn of mind, declared that life at Whitehall was becoming absolutely intolerable, and that she should be thankful to go to Oakham, for at least ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... stedfast firmament beneath them shook: Rapt by the ethereal steeds the chariot roll'd; Brass were their hoofs, their curling manes of gold: Of heaven's undrossy gold the gods array, Refulgent, flash'd intolerable day. High on the throne he shines: his coursers fly Between the extended earth and starry sky. But when to Ida's topmost height he came, (Fair nurse of fountains, and of savage game,) Where o'er her pointed summits proudly raised, His fane breathed odours, and his altar blazed: ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... contentedly forever, our only cause of uneasiness being that, at some of the numerous ports we touched, the magic presence on which the spell depended might go from us, as it came to us, without ceremony or warning, and leave us to cross the great ocean in the world of intolerable loneliness that would settle on the ship when she was gone. There was something like a patriotic aspiration in our desire to transplant this brightest of Eastern blossoms to diffuse its supreme ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... couldn't have devised a more intolerable situation. So thought Steele Weir as he strode away from the dwelling, still laboring under the emotions provoked by the girl's disclosure, wincing at his own biting thoughts and writhing at his own ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... Armenia the most fertile portion of the whole territory had been seized and occupied by the invaders, from whom it thenceforth took the name of Sacassene, the Armenians and Cappadocians may have found the yoke of the Scyths so intolerable as to have gladly exchanged it for dependence on a comparatively civilized people. In the neighboring territory of Asia Minor a similar cause had recently exercised a unifying influence, the necessity of combining to resist Cimmerian immigrants having tended to ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... quite spoil'd thee, nothing makes a Woman so vain, as being flatter'd; your old Lover ever supplies the Defects of Age, with intolerable Dotage, vast Charge, and that which you call Constancy; and attributing all this to your own Merits, you domineer, and throw your Favours in's Teeth, upbraiding him still with the Defects of Age, and cuckold him as often as he ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... Royal Highness had deigned to confer confidentially with me on the subject, and make me, as it were, a "Mediator" on matters which, he assured me with great emphasis, had occasioned him an amount of anxiety almost intolerable. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... numerous white merchants have a good pull on him. All who are getting anything out of him are willing to tolerate him. All who get nothing out of him would gladly see him deported. Wherever he gets a foothold in country or city he depreciates real estate by making conditions more or less intolerable. He is a prolific subject for religious fanatics and cranks to practice upon. He is an alien here in his native country among his own people. He is the only man in all the world ashamed of himself and his color. ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... midnight, he made an exertion, while there was plenty of light, to clear away the sea-weeds from a space on the sand where he must to-morrow make his fire, and broil his fish. The smell of the smallest quantity of burnt weed would be intolerable in so confined a place: so he cleared away every sprout of it, and laid some of the drift-wood on a spot above high-water mark, picking out the driest pieces of fire-wood he could find for ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... smoothly wherever it was established; and that he, and the working classes whom he represented, found in it a considerable relief from the heavy duties daily imposed upon them. He wished that some measure could be devised for superseding the use of nosebags, which he designated as an intolerable nuisance, especially during the summer months; but he principally relied for an improvement in condition on the prohibition of the mixture of chaff with oats; which latter article, he contended, was unfit for the use of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... intolerable," said Robert at last. "We should not have let him out; he may make a public ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... would have been comfortable. But during the entire winter we were not uncomfortably warm anywhere, and even in Bombay, which is considered one of the hottest places in the world, and during the rainy season is almost intolerable, we slept under blankets every night and carried sun umbrellas in the daytime. At Jeypore, Agra, Delhi and other places the nights were as cold as they ever are at Washington, double blankets were necessary on our beds, and ordinary overcoats when we went out of doors after dark. Sometimes ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... mere sight of a human face, never beheld before, could disturb the whole tenor of my life,—a stranger of whose mind and character I knew nothing, whose very voice I had never heard? It was only by the intolerable pang of anguish that had rent my heart in the words, carelessly, abruptly spoken, "if she were to die," that I had felt how the world would be changed to me, if indeed that face were seen in it no more! ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... explanations. [Very low and with great concentration] I entirely and absolutely refuse to believe anything of the sort against Ronald Dancy in my house. Dash it, General, we must do as we'd be done by. It hits us all—it hits us all. The thing's intolerable. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the merchant. 'Yes, the candle.' 'Ha, ha, ha! it is not yet burnt out,' answered the merchant, laughing, 'and will not be burnt out for the next fifty years; it lies there a hundred fathoms deep in the earth.' When the Devil heard this he screamed awfully, and went off with a most intolerable stench." [119] ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... mass of papers, which turned out to be the autograph letters of Olden Barneveld during the last few years of his life; during, in short, the whole of that most important period which preceded his execution. These letters are in such an intolerable handwriting that no one has ever attempted to read them. I could read them only imperfectly myself, and it would have taken me a very long time to have acquired the power to do so; but my copyist and reader there is the most patient and indefatigable person alive, and he has quite mastered ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... grandmother. She certainly had taken an unholy joy in flaunting her Martel characteristics in the old lady's face. It was not that she preferred to identify herself with her mother's family rather than with her father's. The Martel shiftlessness and visionary improvidence were quite as intolerable to her as the iron-clad conventions of the Bartletts. She could take correction from Aunt Isobel and Aunt Enid, but there was something in her grandmother's caustic comments that made her tingle with instant ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... he must, therefore, accommodate the horses as he best can. The reins should always be held so that the horses are "in hand;" but he is a very bad driver who always drives with a tight rein; the pain to the horse is intolerable, and causes him to rear and plunge, and finally break sway, if he can. He is also a bad driver when the reins are always slack; the horse then feels abandoned to himself; he is neither directed nor supported, and if no accident occurs, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... inestimable. Charmian was not obsessed by any dark thoughts of death. But she considered that she knew quite well the weight of time's burden in life. She needed help to make the waiting easier. For sometimes, when she was sitting alone, the prospect seemed almost intolerable. The crowded Opera House, the lights, the thunder of applause, the fixed attention of the world—they were all so ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... were received the letters containing that final record of his life, which took from the hearts of those who loved him best the intolerable bitterness, because it told that he had not only dreamed his dream—he had ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... sure was the dreadfulest sight that ever I saw; the rage of the Imperial soldiers was most intolerable, and not to be expressed. Of 25,000, some said 30,000 people, there was not a soul to be seen alive, till the flames drove those that were hid in vaults and secret places to seek death in the streets rather than perish in the fire. Of these miserable ...
— Memoirs of a Cavalier • Daniel Defoe
... we were vieing with each other in grief the princess cried, 'I burn! I burn!' She found that the fire which consumed her had at last seized upon her whole body, which made her still cry 'I burn,' until death had made an end of her intolerable pains. The effect of that fire was so extraordinary that in a few moments she was wholly reduced to ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... remained pondering. He presently rose, and walked up and down the deck. He could hear Lydia and Hicks trying that song: now the voice, and now the flute; then both together; and presently a burst of laughter. He began to be angry with her ignorance and inexperience. It became intolerable to him that a woman should be going about with no more knowledge of the world than a child, and entangling herself in relations with all sorts of people. It was shocking to think of that little sot, who had now made his infirmity known for all the ship's company, admitted to association with ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... as a benevolent arrangement to all concerned,—not 'winked at,' or 'suffered,' like polygamy, but ordained,—that it was full of blessings to all who fulfilled the duties of the relation in the true spirit of the institution; and, moreover, it is true that there are few curses which will be more intolerable than they will suffer who make use of their fellow-men, in the image of God, for the purposes of selfishness and sin; while those who feel their accountableness in this relation, and discharge it in the spirit of the Bible, will find their hearts refined and ennobled, and the relationship ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... instantaneous momentary conversions—I never realized what was meant till a week ago. Day after day, all that time, I had been filled with gloomy, reproachful, or bitter thoughts of God and the providence which took Edward from me. It was intolerable that he should be swept away into silence, leaving me so worn and hopeless, and, worst of all, so dissatisfied and discontented with the hand that did it—my vaunted philosophy failing and giving out utterly. I knew it was right, but could ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... his nervousness was becoming intolerable, there sounded a knock. The knock he had anticipated—timid, brief. He stepped hastily from the room, and opened. Nancy hardly looked at him, and neither of them spoke till the closing of two doors ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... winds Before me; dust is on the shrunken grass, And on the trees beneath whose boughs I pass; Frail screen against the Hunter of the sky, Who, glaring on me with his lidless eye, While mounting with his dog-star high and higher Ambushed in light intolerable, unbinds The burnished quiver of his shafts of fire. Between me and the hot fields of his South A tremulous glow, as from a furnace-mouth, Glimmers and swims before my dazzled sight, As if the burning ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... into which she had fallen; the sand gave way to the step. But despondency in her brought no meekness; the cloud did not descend in rain; resting over the horizon, its darkness was tinged with the fires which it fed. The heart, already so embittered, was stung and mortified into intolerable shame and wrath. From the home that should have been hers, in which, as acknowledged heiress, she had smiled down on the ruined Vernon, she was banished by him who had supplanted her, as one worthless and polluted. Though, from motives of obvious delicacy, Vernon had not said ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... One reason why she is so intolerable to me is that she is a grotesque caricature of what you ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sort, even if it be that of theft) on tribute exacted from the Christian populations, and extorted, not in return for any work of administration, but simply because he was the stronger. And that has made his rule intolerable, and is ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... tragic. Tangles' mother had a difference of opinion with a friend. The friend snatched at her opponent's ear jewels, and tore the ear. Life with a torn ear was intolerable, so Tangles' mother walked three times round the well, repeated three times, "My blood be on your head!" and sprang in. She rose three times, each time said the same words, and then sank. All this Tangles confided to the Elf, who concocted a game based upon the incident—which, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... made their being together most intolerable to her was their persistence in the religion of a vanished god in whose empty ceremonies alone they could now take part together. Of the sacred image nothing was left but the feet of clay. Freed of that desecration, she could cure or endure everything else; her obligations, moreover, ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... three other conspirators against the Government of her cousin, Louis Philippe. The search had lasted for several hours, during which these unfortunate persons were penned in a small space and exposed to almost intolerable heat. A mantelpiece had been contrived so as to turn on a swivel and form an opening into a suffocating recess. When the Duchesse and her companions were found their hands were scorched and part of their clothes burnt. She was taken to the fortress ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... outflanked by the Boers, whose whole method of conducting their attack was extraordinarily skilful. Nothing but the excellent discipline of the overmatched troopers prevented the retreat from becoming a rout. Fortunately, before the pressure became intolerable the 7th Hussars with some artillery came to the rescue, and turned the tide. The Hussars galloped in with such dash that some of them actually got among the Boers with their swords, but the enemy rapidly fell ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... said. He has a method of treating me which makes me feel like a timid boy, which to Boswell (comprehending all that my character does in my own imagination and in that of a wonderful number of mankind) is intolerable. It requires the utmost exertion of practical philosophy to keep myself quiet; but it has cost me drinking a considerable quantity of strong beer to dull my faculties.' The picture of the son drinking himself down to the level of the ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... curious to know whether this was the sister who "had gone wrong," but did not know how to phrase the question. After a time, she felt the temptation to tell the mason what she knew becoming intolerable. Her mind hovered about her secret as a bird hovers over a great void; she was irresistibly drawn to the fatal plunge. She moved off while she yet felt the power to do so without speaking. Her cousin looked ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... they all may be one." And yet the history of the church has demonstrated by many a sad example that this offense "must needs come." No widely extended organization of church discipline in exclusive occupation of any country has ever long avoided the intolerable mischiefs attendant on spiritual despotism. It was a shock to the hopes and the generous sentiments of those who had looked to see one undivided body of a reformed church erected over against the medieval church, from the corruptions of which they had revolted, ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... of narrative; a story must advance. This does not mean that the story shall always go at the same rate, though it does mean that it shall always go. If a story always had the rapidity and intensity of a climax, it would be intolerable. Music that is all rushing climaxes is unbearable; a picture must not be a glare of high lights. The quiet passages in music, the grays and low tones in the background of the picture, the slow chapters in a story, are as necessary as their opposites; indeed, climaxes are dependent on contrasts ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... and we were quite surprised to find such a writer as Mrs. Moore busied in moral brick and mortar. Such an idea, at first, was merely juvenile; the second time a little nauseous; but the ten thousandth time, it is quite intolerable. Caelebs, upon his first arrival in London, dines out,—meets with a bad dinner,—supposes the cause of that bad dinner to be the erudition of the ladies of the house,—talks to them upon learned subjects, and finds them as dull and ignorant as if they had piqued themselves upon ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... sleep and live together in crowded quarters without protest or friction. But the negro naval officer is kept out of the service by hook or by crook for the avowed reason that the cramped quarters of the wardroom would make association with him intolerable. In the army, on the other hand, the experiment of mixed regiments has never been tried. A good colored soldier can nevertheless obtain a commission by going through West Point, or by rising from the ranks, or by being appointed ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... that precise moment when the imagination was most abstracted from all commercial common-places; to be stopped by a tailor, (and such a tailor!) when the mind was dreaming of a mistress—the bare idea was intolerable! So I thought; and, without further explanation, hurried precipitately from the spot, nor ever once paused till far removed from the husky tones of that sepulchral voice which had once before so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... merciful delivery of speedy death, as his Cretan prototype did the annual tribute of Athenian youths and maidens, but, gloating over his prey, doomed them to lingering destruction. He rotted their flesh with the scurvy, racked their minds with intolerable suspense, burned their bodies with the slow fire of famine, and delighted in each separate pang, until they sank beneath the fearful accumulation. Theseus [Sherman. D.W.]—the deliverer—was coming. His terrible sword could be seen gleaming as it rose and fell on the banks of the ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... could not help loving the countess and the whole Rostov family, but neither could she help loving Nicholas and knowing that his happiness depended on that love. She was silent and sad and did not reply. Nicholas felt the situation to be intolerable and went to have an explanation with his mother. He first implored her to forgive him and Sonya and consent to their marriage, then he threatened that if she molested Sonya he would at once marry ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... his own making. Now, my cousin—(as he is my cousin, I may say what I please of him)—my cousin Craiglethorpe is a solemn coxcomb, who thinks, because his vanity is not talkative and sociable, that it's not vanity. What a mistake! his silent superciliousness is to me more intolerable than the most garrulous egotism that ever laid ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... Negroes had no ability, certainly no disposition, to reason concerning the changes and disasters which had overtaken their former masters. The white people of the South were divided into three classes. First, those who felt that defeat was intolerable, and a residence in this country incongenial. They sought the service of the Imperial cause in war-begrimed Mexico; they went to Cuba, Australia, Egypt, and to Europe. Second, those who returned to their homes after the "affair at Appomattox," and sitting down under the portentous clouds ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... in two, and swallowed with half of the spear sticking in it with which it had probably been killed by the natives. The stench of this ravenous monster was great even before it was dead; and when the stomach was opened it became intolerable. ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... never saw such fortitude and courage, never dreamed that such qualities existed in women until he knew me, and saw the way I met trouble. Oh, no indeed," again dabbling her eyes, "that is not it at all. No, my only feeling about Marcia's conduct is that I have been left to bear intolerable grief and ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... where families reign, and where governmental servants might consistently hold office for life, such a system has a warrant—though even there it is found to be obstructive and reactionary. But in a republic, where universal suffrage is the law, nothing more intolerable could be conceived. The idea of creating a class distinct from all other classes, independent of the administration and unaccountable to the voters, fixed and immovable save for causes proven—why, it is, not a step, it is ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... true, though she had often heard it, and now she was amazed at the strangeness of the physical sensation which came over her and grew till it was almost intolerable. It was not fright, for she longed for the moment of appearing; it was not ordinary nervousness, for she felt that she was as steady as a rock, and now and then, when she tried a few notes, to 'limber' her voice, it was steady, too, and ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... with shoulders back and stood there, a splendid figure of a man. His face was flushed and working, showing plainly the jealous passions and the intolerable longing for the girl's approval which had whipped him into this melodramatic outburst. Ruth faced him with silent, contemptuous scorn. Martin's gorge rose to fever pitch. With difficulty he restrained himself from slipping the cuffs and springing at ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... another. He knew that Salve had made love to Elizabeth, and had wished to make her presents since she had come into his house; and that the same girl was now to be his son's wife—the idea was absolutely intolerable! ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... the girl. She felt a lump in her throat—a choking sensation, which seemed to make her mother's present conduct all the more intolerable. How was she to live in the future with the knowledge that her father's memory was, as she felt, profaned? But at least she had got ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... her hand. There was nothing vicious about the young man—he was the dupe, not the deceiver; but to a mind like Amy's, filled, too, as it was with the image of Herbert Lyddiard, his attentions were intolerable. The open encouragement he now received from the father, however, emboldened him to persevere, and he professed to look upon her marked disapproval as nothing but maidenly diffidence, and proceeded to address her as though a positive ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... Hugh himself, though it did not in any way develop his intellect or his temperament, it had a real value. It taught him a certain self-reliance; it showed him that what was disagreeable was not necessarily intolerable. What Hugh needed to make him effective was a certain touch of the world, a certain hardness, which his home life did not tend to develop. And thus this bleak and uncheered episode of life gave him a superficial ordinariness, and taught him the need of conventional compliance with the ways of the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... dagger as she spoke. "If I am tracked or followed, whether by friend or foe, this will free me from persecution; and it shall do so, by the living lights of heaven! This, after all, is the one true, the last friend of the wretched. All hail to thee, healer of all intolerable anguish!" and she kissed the bright blade, before she consigned it to the sheath; and then, stretching out both hands to Paullus, she ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... influence, but just quietly went on his own way, and let other men go theirs. Another of his beliefs was, that there was no man or thing in the world too bad to be tolerated; faithfully acting up to which belief, the Captain himself tolerated persons and things intolerable. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes |
