"Sickly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or other, with wondrous little bodily labour; professing to be a farmer, he held one of the finest pieces of land in the settlement, but his agricultural operations, for the most part, consisted in hoeing a few sickly stems of corn, while others were reaping buckwheat, or sowing a patch of flax, "'cause the old woman wanted loom gears;" shooting cranes, spearing salmon, or trapping musquash on the lake, he prefers to raising fowl or sheep, ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... the establishment, and in estimating its effect upon the character of Charlotte Bronte, we must remember that she was a sensitive thoughtful child, capable of reflecting deeply, if not of analyzing truly; and peculiarly susceptible, as are all delicate and sickly children, to painful impressions. What the healthy suffer from but momentarily and then forget, those who are ailing brood over involuntarily and remember long,—perhaps with no resentment, but simply as a piece of suffering that has been ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... broadcast, at the rate of six and a half bushels per acre, harrowed in with a light harrow. This application was made in March, and the early part of April, and in less than three weeks after the application, the wheat had undergone an entire change, from a yellow, sickly color, to a dark luxuriant green. The application had evidently infused new life and vigor into the plants, and as the result proved, very nearly or quite doubled its product. So much for the crop of wheat; but what was still more valuable to me, in my system ...
— Guano - A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers • Solon Robinson
... Wilson. Archer declared that he had been "very badly treated" by the Doctor, which he urged as his reason for leaving. True, the doctor had been good enough to allow him to hire his time, for which he required Archer to pay the moderate sum of $120 per annum. As Archer had been "sickly" most of the time, during the last year, he complained that there was "no reduction" in his hire on this account. Upon reflection, therefore, Archer thought, if he had justice done him, he would be in possession of this "one hundred ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... a girl, had been a poor sickly little creature, and was dead; but Agnes was likely again to become a mother, and waited anxiously for the money which would enable her to prepare for such an event. Anxiously as she waited, it never came, and Jaggers, to whom it was to have been directed, advanced her a sovereign, ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... went. The extremity was now too great for argument. They dared not so much as look at their women-folk, lest they should be unmanned by the sight of those huddled creatures—their finery but serving to render them the more pitiable in their sickly affright. In a body the whole thirty of them swept from the room, and with Bellecour at their head and Ombreval somewhere in the rearmost rank, they made their way to ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... a series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks. These were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his mother's toilet when he, a sickly child, slept in her dressing-room; the silver taper-stand which the young advocate had bought for her with his first five-guinea fee; a row of small packets inscribed with her hand, and containing the hair of those of her offspring that had died before her; his father's ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... to open your eyes to the things which are not mortal and which perish not eternally. For man is but a frail and changing creature as regards his mortality, seeing that his life is not longer than the lives of other created things, and he is delicate and sickly and exposed to manifold dangers from his birth. But the soul of man dieth not, neither is there any taint of death in it, but it liveth for ever and is made glorious above the stars. For the stars, also, shall have an end, and the earth—even ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... do too much, and the first impression of the visitors was unfavorable. All that white muslin, that waxed floor, in which the light shone without blending, the clean window-panes reflecting the sky, which wore a gloomy look at sight of such things, brought out more distinctly the thinness, the sickly pallor of those little shroud-colored, moribund creatures. Alas! the oldest were but six months, the youngest barely a fortnight, and already, upon all those faces, those embryotic faces, there was an expression of disgust, an oldish, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... "I almost felt there would be some fearful gulf intervene between Isabella and myself, when I had again left her side. O, prophetic soul, though our eyes cannot fathom the future, there is an instinctive power in thee that foretells evil. My life is but a sickly existence. I am the jest and jeer of fortune, who seems delighted to thwart me, by permitting the nearest approach to the goal of happiness, and yet stepping in just in time to prevent the consummation of ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... clearly; the full, strong, healthy light of the sun, could not find its way into it, and day after day Dolly became more like one of those plants growing in shady places, which live and shoot up, but only put out pale and sickly leaves, and feeble buds. One by one, and by little and little, with degrees as small as her own tiny footsteps, she lost all her merry ways, dropping them, here one and there another, upon the path she was silently treading; as little children let fall the ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... starts the conversation goes on in the bosom of this fantastic barn and the great moving shadows that cross it; night is heaped up in its corners, and pointed by a few scattered and sickly candles. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... the sun was at the edge of noon, just balancing to fall, there came a boy, a little wretched, elfish-looking child, as sad and sickly as a boy could be, who asked the man for food. He answered him, "Poor little fellow! there, the pot is full of venison, so go ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... the fire, my eyes wandered from Smith to my loved one. I saw that they were both pale, serious, silent. I did not know why, and I could not help thinking that there was but one cause, or one secret to learn. This was not one of those vague, sickly suspicions, such as had formerly tormented me, but an instinct, persistent and fatal. What strange creatures are we! It pleased me to leave them alone before the fire, and to go out on the quay to dream, leaning on the parapet ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... blade of grass upon them. Yet, notwithstanding the sterility of the soil, the large white amarillis which grew in such profusion on the alluvial plains of the Macquarie, was also abundant here. But it had lost its dazzling whiteness, and had assumed a sickly yellow colour and its very appearance indicated that it was not in ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... no coward. Country-bred and born, I had no feeling but the keenest scorn For those fine lady "ah's" and "oh's" of fear So much assumed (when any man is near). But God implanted in each human heart A natural horror, and a sickly dread Of that accursed, slimy, creeping thing That squirms a limbless carcass o'er the ground. And where that inborn loathing is not found You'll find the serpent qualities instead. Who fears it not, himself is next of kin, And in his ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Whose hearing ear is everywhere; He brings not back the childish days That ringed the earth with stones of praise, Roofed Karnak's hall of gods, and laid The plinths of Philae's colonnade. Still less he owns the selfish good And sickly growth of solitude,— The worthless grace that, out of sight, Flowers in the desert anchorite; Dissevered from the suffering whole, Love hath no power to save a soul. Not out of Self, the origin And native air and soil of sin, The living waters spring and flow, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... gay people. She had not wanted a little girl at all, and when Mary was born she handed her over to the care of an Ayah, who was made to understand that if she wished to please the Mem Sahib she must keep the child out of sight as much as possible. So when she was a sickly, fretful, ugly little baby she was kept out of the way, and when she became a sickly, fretful, toddling thing she was kept out of the way also. She never remembered seeing familiarly anything but the dark faces of her Ayah and the other native servants, and as they always obeyed her and gave her ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... up at old Collins', Quite a bunch was there before, You could hear the fiddler calling, And the scraping on the floor. Through the dingy sodhouse window Gleamed a sickly yellow light, Where I helped you from the wagon, Holding you so loving tight. Then they called out, "Choose your pardners, Numbers five, six, seven, and eight," And we hustled up to join in, For we knew that we were late. ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... doors and window frames by the weather, was not replaced; the holes gnawed and torn by the hungry rats in wainscot and floor were never patched and food was more scarce than ever. Aunt Janet sat, a dourly silent ghost, while Marcella read to Andrew, listening sickly to the beasts clamouring for their scanty meals. And one night, when he had been out alone along Ben Grief and seen his lands and his old grey house, Lashcairn the Landless, as they called him, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... a sort of sickly, mustard-colored satin with chocolate-colored trimmings, and wreaths of pink stuff and coral ornaments that look like lobster-claws. Really, it gives you quite a turn just to see it; and then, she has some kind of a grass-green weeping-willow tree that she is going to wear in her hair. Really, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... and that, as I went, leading the Augusta by the hand, they gave to me the general's salute. That I turned and saluted them in answer ere I yielded myself into the power of my god-father, Stauracius, who greeted me with a false and sickly smile. ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... with perspiration, and drove away sleep. It sent him out on long midnight walks through the silent city in an atmosphere as stifling as that of a green-house. It beat down upon Tokyo its fetid exhalations, the smell of cooking, of sewage and of humanity, and the queer sickly scent of a powerful evergreen tree aflower throughout the city, which resembled the reek of that Nagasaki brothel, and recalled the dancing ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... yet to leave a more enduring monument in human institutions than any other man of his age. Macaulay thus graphically describes him: "The audacity of his spirit was the more remarkable, because his physical organization was unusually delicate. From a child he had been weak and sickly. In the prime of manhood, his complaints had been aggravated by a severe attack of small-pox. He was asthmatic and consumptive. His slender frame was shaken by a constant hoarse cough. He could not sleep unless his head was propped by several pillows, and could scarcely ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... by any change of expression while he was speaking. There was no anger in his tone; just cold, calm purpose, and some contempt. And whatever feelings the half-breed may have had he seemed incapable of showing them, except in the sickly hue ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... did not in the least correspond with the conception everyone has of a tramp. He was a frail little man, weak and sickly-looking, with small, colourless, and extremely indefinite features. His eyebrows were scanty, his expression mild and submissive; he had scarcely a trace of a moustache, though he was over thirty. He walked along timidly, bent forward, with his hands thrust into his sleeves. The collar ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... courts were sometimes frightened as they looked at his viperish, flat head, his slit mouth, his eyes gleaming through glasses, and heard his sharp, persistent voice which rasped their nerves. His muddy skin, with its sickly tones of green and yellow, expressed the jaundice of his balked ambition, his perpetual disappointments and his hidden wretchedness. He could talk and argue; he was well-informed and shrewd, and was not without ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... was a boy thet hed two grey squirrels in a cage. They kep' thinkin' o' the time they used t' scamper in the tree-tops an' make nests an' eat all the nuts they wanted an' play I spy in the thick leaves. An they grew poor an' looked kind o' ragged an' sickly an' downhearted. When he brought 'em outdoors they used t' look up in the trees an' run in the wire wheel as if they thought they could get there sometime if they kep' goin'. As the boy grew older he see it was cruel to keep 'em ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... cold crystal waters at the base of the rock. Many-colored mosses, sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like fear, black like despair, purple like the lips of a strangled man, clung there. I remembered an old spring I used to haunt when I was just old enough to be awed by the fact of life and frightened at the possibility of death. Just ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... stood—staring hard at you the whole time. One feature that would soon send a lonely man off his chump is that no matter how many are in sight they are all looking at you, and they follow step by step with a sickly deliberation. They are all yellow and pink, and next to spiders seem the most loathsome creatures on God's earth. Talking about spiders [Bowers always had the greatest horror of spiders]—I have to collect them as well as insects. Needless to say I caught them with a butterfly net, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... a sickly child; I have been anxious—who would not? I have seen you grow in health and ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... least, looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation—fences gone, lonesome smoke-stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood, the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with here and there a sickly-looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by negro squatters. In the city of Columbia, the political capital of the State, I found a thin fringe of houses encircling a confused mass of charred ruins of dwellings ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... and Edwin was in the middle of the shop. Her face in the twilight had become more mysterious than ever. He was in a state of emotion, but he did not know to what category the emotion belonged. They were alone. Stifford had gone for the half-holiday. Darius, sickly, would certainly not come near. The printers were working as usual in their place, and the clanking whirr of a treadle-machine overhead agitated the ceiling. But nobody would enter the shop. His excitement increased, but did not define itself. There was a sudden roar ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... gave feeble thanks; but, unluckily, he had so set his mind upon raspberries, that he could not enjoy the thought of anything else. It was a sickly distaste for everything, and Miss Selby saw that he was not as much pleased as she meant him to be; she looked at him wistfully, and, half grieved, half impatient, she longed to know what he would really like, or if he were positively ungrateful. She ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... terror dashed up the hill, while the boy lay back and pulled helplessly on the reins. When he got her halted the thing had disappeared, and both boy and beast turned heads toward the still terrible sounds of its going. It was the first time either had ever seen a railroad train, and the lad, with a sickly smile that even he had shared the old nag's terror, got her back into the road. At the gate sat a farmer in his wagon and he ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... his demands. In a correspondence between them, in 1841, Smith told Hotchkiss that he had agreed to forego interest for five years, and not to "force payment" even then. Smith assured Hotchkiss that the part of the city bought from him was "a deathly sickly hole" on which they had been able to realize nothing, "although," he added, with unblushing affrontery for the head of a church, "we have been keeping up appearances and holding out inducements to encourage immigration that we scarcely think justifiable in consequence of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... As with mute, sickly denial I turned away it seemed to me that I sensed a shifting of forms at the monte table—caught the words "You watch here a moment"; and close following, a slim white hand fell heavily upon My Lady's shoulder. It whirled her about, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... all built exactly alike. Painted in sickly greens and yellows, they rise on stilt-like elevations above the malarial soil. Here the architect has catered to the different families, different individual tastes in one point of view alone, regarding ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... and the moon rose, lighting up with a sickly glow the diseased world that had swallowed him. He lay in the bottom of his canoe, covering his face with his caribou coat, and tried to sleep. But sleep would not come. Before dawn he struck on, watching ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... of Canaan, by right of war. The report is, that this fountain, at the beginning, caused not only the blasting of the earth and the trees, but of the children born of women, and that it was entirely of a sickly and corruptive nature to all things whatsoever; but that it was made gentle, and very wholesome and fruitful, by the prophet Elisha. This prophet was familiar with Elijah, and was his successor, who, when he once was the guest of the people at Jericho, and the men of ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... but Giotto, assisted, I believe, by Cimabue, who painted these frescos. Our one-legged attendant had followed us also into this church, and again hastened out of it before us; and still we heard the dot of his crutch upon the pavement, as we passed from street to street. By and by a sickly looking man met us, and begged for "qualche cosa"; but the boy shouted to him, "Niente!" whether intimating that we would give him nothing, or that he himself had a prior claim to all our charity, I ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... stonily at the thin lady in drill, and decided that she was an "Impossible Person," blissfully unconscious of the fact that before Aden was reached she would pour all her inmost secrets into the "Impossible Person's" ear, and weep salt tears at parting from her at Marseilles. The mother of the sickly little girls in muslin swept them away to the other end of the deck when she discovered them playing with the children who inhabited the next state-room, and the men stared at one another stolidly across the smoking-room. The more experienced travellers knew ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... been burned in the room, and there was a queer sickly scent about. Everything in that place was strained and uneasy and abnormal—the candle shades on the table, the mass of faked china fruit in the centre dish, the gaudy hangings and the nightmarish walls. But the food was magnificent. It was the best ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... fraternity, which must give the uninitiated a vast idea of the establishment of the ministerial organ, while to the initiated it signifies that no one paper can lay claim to the enjoyment of their services. Mr. Bolton was a young man, with a somewhat sickly and very dissipated expression of countenance. His habiliments were composed of an exquisite union of gentility, slovenliness, assumption, simplicity, newness, and old age. Half of him was dressed for the winter, the other half for the ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... every fall of the year in these rich alluvial soils, some portions of which have been worked for fifty years without the assistance of manure, and still yield abundant crops. It will be a long while before the drainage necessary to render them healthy can be accomplished. The sickly appearance of the inhabitants establishes but too well the facts related to me; and yet, strange to say, it would appear to be a provision of Providence, that a remarkable fecundity on the part of the women in the more ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... looks, except in her one weak feature, a cutaway chin. His body, indeed, seems to have been made up of the bad points of both parents: he had his rheumatism from his father. But his spirit was made up of all their good points; and no braver ever lived in any healthy body than in his own sickly, ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... many poor women with their husbands; and when I contemplated their wasted forms and haggard sickly looks, together with the close swamp whose stagnant air they were doomed to breathe, whose aspect changeless and deathlike alone met their eyes, and fancied them, in some hour of leisure, calling to memory the green valley and the pure river, or the rocky glen and ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... Sabini and at Agatha. This coup could indeed have been effected by a small British force. In the mountains they would, moreover, have found a healthy climate, while we should have been left in the sickly districts of the low veldt. And had we been compelled to stay there for two months we would have been forced to surrender, for about the middle of October the disease among our horses increased and so serious was the epidemic that none but salted ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... rage in his heart so caused his eyes to dance and dazzle, and his hands to shake, that he could scarcely see the figures on the assignats, or separate one from the other. He bundled them up at last, crammed them into his pocket, and hurried off, with a sickly smile upon his face, and maledictions, which found fierce utterance as soon as he had reached a safe distance, trembling on ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... Lavelaye was quite correct in attributing significance to the publication of "Progress and Poverty," though the seed sown by Henry George took root, not in the slums and alleys of our cities—no intellectual seed of any sort can germinate in the sickly, sunless atmosphere of slums—but in the minds of people who had sufficient leisure and education to think of other things than breadwinning. Henry George proposed to abolish poverty by political action: that was the new gospel which came from ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Love affects people in as many different ways as wine. Some are exalted,—their feet spurn the earth, their heads are in the clouds; some pugnacious, walking about with a chip on the shoulder; others are stupidly happy,—their faces wearing a sickly smile that becomes painful to look at; others again, like you, melancholy as a wailing tenor in the last act of 'Lucia.' Like learning, a little draught of love is dangerous; drink largely and be sober. The charmer will not cast so powerful a spell upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... hospitable roof, were collected from the busy Copenhagen all the superior intellects of their day; here was the home of genius; and now say not, "Ah, how changed!" No; it is still the spirits' home—a hothouse for sickly plants. Buds that are not strong enough to expand into flowers, preserve, though hidden, all the germs of a luxuriant tree. Here the sun of mind shines in on a home of stagnant spirits, reviving and cheering it. The world around beams through the eyes into the soul's ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... then an awful and sickly pause. Jeremy seemed to himself to be sinking lower and lower into a damp clammy depth of degradation. What must this world be that it could change itself so instantly from a place of gay and happy pleasure into a dim groping room ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... and white and purple lights flitted like strange will-o'-wisps through the half light, and disappeared into the darkness beyond the common. The lights in the stores beamed dimly. A green shade in Pray's threw a sickly shaft athwart the pavement. But even as they looked a tall figure, weariness emanating from every movement, stepped between window and light, book in hand, and ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... a different cast,—Count Olonym (Olonyne—that's it), son of the President of the Royal Society and a captain in the Imperial Guards. He is mean-looking and sickly, but has much sense, candour, and general information. There was at Abbotsford, and is here, for education just now, a young Count Davidoff, with a tutor Mr. Collyer. He is a nephew of the famous Orloffs. It is quite surprising how much sense and sound thinking this youth has at the early ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... doing the whole imperfectly; or else there is choice made of some important feature, to which, as more honorable than the rest, the decoration is confined. The evil is when, without system, and without preference of the nobler members, the ornament alternates between sickly luxuriance and sudden blankness. In many of our Scotch and English abbeys, especially Melrose, this is painfully felt; but the worst instance I have ever seen is the window in the side of the arch under ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... is vigorous, graceful, healthy: all you see passing by are well made—there are no sickly faces, no scrawny limbs. If by some rare chance you encounter a person who has lost an arm or a leg, you can be almost certain you are looking at a victim of the fer-de-lance,—the serpent whose venom putrefies living tissue.... Without fear of exaggerating facts, I can ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... but grown Despite a wound, and over the wound and used My flesh to heal my flesh. My love's a fever Which longed for that which nursed the malady, And fed on that which still preserved the ill, The uncertain, sickly appetite to please. My reason, the physician to my love, Angry that his prescriptions are not kept Has left me. And as reason is past care I am past cure, with ever more unrest Made frantic-mad, my thoughts as madmen's are, And my discourse at random from ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... a great family gathering took place, and one and all agreed that little Rawdon was a fine boy. They respected a possible Baronet in the boy between whom and the title there was only the little sickly, pale ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... being, as I heard, sickly, rested her at Rufford five days and kept most her bedchamber, and in that time the young man her son fell into liking with my wife's daughter before intended, and such liking was between them as my wife tells me she makes no doubt of a match, and ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... were silent for a moment, gazing out over the rolling plain—a plain studded with stunted trees and sickly-looking bushes with here and there a cactus plant for variety's sake—out to the hazy mountains beyond, serene, calm, majestic, jutting jaggedly into the dazzling ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... himself with a commiseration that was sickly in spite of its truth. It was the fault of the man that he was imbued too strongly with self-consciousness. He could do a great thing or two. He could keep up his courage in positions which would wash all the courage out of most men. He ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... face was haggard and sickly; her eyes were heavy with sleep and hunger: real Milesian eyes they were, dark, delicate blue, glooming out from black shadows with a ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... he, "thou sickly lubber. If you rise not in a minute's time, we will see what a rope's end can do to 'liven ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... with which the old pauper drank it down prevented him from noticing at first that the wine was drugged; but as he swallowed the last drops he tasted the sickly and nauseating flavor, and flinging the cup on the bed he cried out that some one was ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... by the million, an education which chokes idealism and increases the growing flippancy in matters of faith and morals; they sneer, and well they may, at the manufactured art, the carpenter's Gothic architecture, the sickly literature, the decaying interest in scholarship; they find fewer and fewer candidates for exploration and colonization; they rankle under the series of diplomatic ineptitudes since Bismarck; they see France, Russia, and England antagonized and leagued ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... pure and noble, gladly done, Unselfish work for sickly souls When sorrow in black surges rolls And gloomy darkness hides the sun,— These in their truth make more the man Than royal aim or ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... made him understand: The Body of our Lord—take and eat this! I rolled the small sour flakes beneath my tongue With him. I caught, with him, the gleam of tears, Far off, on some strange face of sickly dread. The Blood—and the cold cup was in my hand, Cold as an axe-heft washed with waterish red. I heard his last poor cry to wife and child.— Could any that heard forget it?—My true God, Hold you both in His arms, both in His arms. And then—that ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... they were trying to effect an entrance through one of the windows, other mystified participants in the night's affairs were looking on from secret and divers hiding-places. Far out in the little grove Derby and his old companion watched the operations of the church-breakers, the sickly glare of Carpenter's lantern as it stood upon the edge of the rain barrel affording an unholy light for the occasion. Windomshire and Anne, crouching behind a stack of old benches, looked on in amazement. Mr. Hooker, whose conscience was none too easy, doubtless for excellent reasons, ...
— The Flyers • George Barr McCutcheon
... Santo. Life is reduced to its lowest expression; people exist rather than live. Every one remembers that every one else is an invalid. Voices are soft, conversation is subdued, visits are short. There is a languid, sickly sweetness in the very courtesy of society. Gaiety is simply regarded as a danger. Every hill is a temptation to too long and fatiguing a climb. No sunshine makes "the patient" forget his wraps. No ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... fortune. Well, I understand it. It is our Karma after the Revolution. Property shall avail us nothing. Everything we have shall be taken from us. Look at this Chinese wall taking away all our money. Think of that foolish contractor Gretchkin and our costly datcha. Behold our sickly children. How much money have we not spent trying to heal our children, eh, eh! Doctors have all failed. Even a magic ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... combination. The cartridge association puts my competitor in the A class and gives him 50 and 10 off, but we, who have to sell in the same town and to the same men, can only get 50. It's the most childish and sickly combination that I ever saw. Manufacturers seem to sit up nights to see what infernal fools they can make of themselves. Now I tell you there are only two classes of dealers—wholesalers and retailers. If a man is a wholesaler ...
— A Man of Samples • Wm. H. Maher
... profoundly disinclined to rise. He shrank from the tasks that awaited him—the task of witnessing the grief of the widow and the pale looks of the orphan heir, the dismal negotiations with undertakers and clergymen and lawyers, the stupid questions of the domestics, the sickly fragrance of stephanotis in the house. Then, too, there was the awkward uncertainty as to his own future. What effect would the tragedy of last night have on that? Was it a notice to quit, or what? He should be sorry to go. He liked the place, he liked his pupil, and further, he had ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... is in the Indies, but they are recruiting for it, so many have been carried off by the yellow fever last sickly season. A transport, they say, will sail next week, and the recruits are to march for embarkation in three or ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... calling that helps one on; 'tis an inborn sort of genus the talent of obsarving, and growing wise by obsarving. One picks up crumb here, crumb there: but if one has not good digestion, Lord, what sinnifies a feast?—Healthy man thrives on a 'tatoe, sickly looks pale on a haunch. You sees, your honour, as I said afore, I was own sarvant to Colonel Dysart; he was a Lord's nephy, a very gay gentleman, and great hand with the ladies,—not a man more in the world;—so I had the opportunity of larning what's ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at Camerlah, which is situated in a level country, they used to resort to the banks, and eat on the sides; frequently betaking themselves to the water, to avoid the heat of the sun. However, they became sickly and emaciated, and their eyes suffered much; but, on being sent to the hills, they soon recovered, and are now (1808) in a healthy condition. They seem fond of the shade, and are observed in the hot weather to take the turn of the hills, so as to ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... months or so, some few years back. Of course, he has no conscience; but he is a man of birth and education—at one time the director of the Customs of Cayta. That idiot-brute Gamacho fastened himself upon him with his following of the lowest rabble. His sickly fear of that ruffian was the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fool, would have been likely to do: but in the obstinacy with which, after his total downfall, he clung to the airy sound of majesty, and such pigmy toys of observance as could be obtained under his circumstances, we cannot persuade ourselves to behold no more than the sickly vanity of a parvenu. The English government acknowledged him by the highest military rank he had held at that time when the treaty of Amiens was concluded with him as First Consul; and the sound of General Buonaparte, now so hateful ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... was that the clerk had a horrible dread of the water. At Vernon, his sickly condition did not permit him, when a child, to go and dabble in the Seine. Whilst his schoolfellows ran and threw themselves into the river, he lay abed between a couple of warm blankets. Laurent had become ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... arrived at one-thirty. No one claimed it till about three, when a small, sickly-looking gentleman (probably a curate) came up, and sez he, 'Have you got anything for Pitman?' or 'Will'm Bent Pitman,' if I recollect right.' 'I don't exactly know,' sez I, 'but I rather fancy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Dean of Angel's raised a point of order, when A chunk of old red sandstone took him in the abdomen, And he smiled a kind of sickly smile, and curled up on the floor, And the subsequent proceedings interested ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... at my imprisonment, as he termed it; but the next day I had the laugh against him, for our sleeping neighbours happened to be a middle-aged Quaker, with a very sickly delicate wife. I, of course, was forced to go to bed when she did, or be obliged to pass through her chamber after brother Jonathan had retired for the night. This being by no means desirable, I left ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... evening, and found, not without some difficulty, an upper room, brilliantly lighted, over a grocer's warehouse. We went up two pairs of stairs, and I did so in fear and trembling, remembering what the odour is when a large dining-room is filled with black waiters: a sort of sickly, sour smell pervades the room, that makes one hate the thought, either of dinner, or of the poor niggers themselves. It seems it is inherent in their skin; to my surprise and satisfaction, however, we ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... parti-coloured; the sands of the deeper line to the right are tinctured a pale and sickly green by the degradation of the porphyritic traps, here towering in the largest masses yet seen; while the gravel of the left bank is warm, and lively with red grit and syenitic granite. Looking down the ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... was misery itself, the life he knew, but the misery once surmounted, and vain desires eliminated, it was a life that tended to bind closer the ties of family love. Being a sickly child, Mapu did not begin to study the elementary branches until he was five years old, an advanced age among people whose children were usually sent to the Heder at four, to spend years upon years there that brought no joy to the student as he sat all day long bent over the great folios ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... he ordered them to carry away the flowers, which were beginning to make the air sickly, and to open the window for a moment. Then the valet closed the doors and curtains, and called in Narcissus, the king's favorite dog, who, jumping on the bed, settled himself at once on the king's feet. The valet next put out the wax-lights, ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... notebook crushed up to her, Lilly's voice rang out like the crack of a whip, springing them apart. There were a whiteness and a sense of emptiness upon her and she wanted to crumple up rather sickly and cry, as if the blows had been ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... he come with the last ones, he off with his coat like I with my ulster, an' as well as we could we wrapped four or five of 'em up—one that was sickly, an' one little delicate blonde, an' a little lame girl, an' the one—the others called her Mitsy—that'd come over the fence first. An' by then half of 'em was beginnin' to cry some. An' the wind was like so ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... State; his words had been watched, his looks noted, his friends jealously withdrawn. In such an atmosphere the boy grew up silent, wary, self-contained, grave in temper, cold in demeanour, blunt and even repulsive in address. He was weak and sickly from his cradle, and manhood brought with it an asthma and consumption which shook his frame with a constant cough; his face was sullen and bloodless, and scored with deep lines which told of ceaseless pain. But beneath this cold ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... was beginning now to brighten with the reflection of the coming dawn in the sky, and the flickering fire of Vesuvius was waxing sickly and pale; and while all the high points of rocks were turning of a rosy purple, in the weird depths of the gorge were yet the unbroken shadows and stillness of night. But at the earliest peep of dawn the monk had risen, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... shed. Some of them had old leather grips or canvas bags, but many had no luggage at all. A few wore seedy overcoats, but the greater part had none, they stood with their hands in their ragged pockets, shivering and stamping. Most of them were undersized, some tough, some rather sickly. A dull-eyed, wretched, sodden lot. I got the liquor on their breaths. A fat old Irish stoker came drifting half-drunk up the pier with ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... with her sickly pains Will silence thy heroic strains; Thy heart—now warmly beats—will chill And stop thy lover's wonted skill. He could not see thee pine and weep Nor could he ease thy troubled sleep— 'Twould quite unman his firm resolve, And ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... others, and this loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities. As he was the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of air; for all of which he was ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... water—in England with hot. I told my mistress I was afraid that putting my hands first into the hot water and then into the cold, would increase the pain in my limbs. The doctor had told my mistress long before I came from the West Indies, that I was a sickly body and the washing did not agree with me. But Mrs. Wood would not release me from the tub, so I was forced to do as I could. I grew worse, and could not stand to wash. I was then forced to sit down with the tub before me, and often through pain and weakness was reduced to kneel or to sit down ...
— The History of Mary Prince - A West Indian Slave • Mary Prince
... of labor, of a sort adapted to their powers, is well for body and mind, during the period of maximum physical vigor. We believe that the magnificent health which distinguishes our women from those of your day, who seem to have been so generally sickly, is owing largely to the fact that all alike are furnished with ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... rehearsin' moosic," explained Phoebe, with a sickly smile. "He haven't singed for a score of years; but they've awver-persuaded him and he's promised to give 'em an auld ballet ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... began to die out. A babble of conjecture and exclamation broke out, but Jim Silent, still sickly white around the mouth, swung up into ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... boy became pathetic to him; behind his dapper morning clothes, his intricate studs and fobs and rings, his reedy self-confidence, the physician saw the faint, grisly shadow of a sickly middle-age, a warped and ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... sickly, faint-hearted, lukewarm, languid, and spasmodic efforts that the cause is to be kept alive. God will have all or nothing. This is an age in which, if never before, both good men and bad men are truly in earnest. The ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... he admitted; "pearter'n I've felt afore in years. You see, she was a good wife. She was a good-lookin' woman, an' smart as they make 'em, an' a fine housekeeper, an' she always done her duty by me an' the children, an' she warn't sickly, an' I never hearn a cross word out o' her in all the thutty year we lived together. But dang it all! Somehow, I never did like Maria.... Yes, ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... at the Abbey," she said, "but at least we have the hawks, and breezy hills to ride over, instead of this sickly city atmosphere, which to my nostrils smells of ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... copper complexion, well made, sickly look, medium height, stoops when walking, quick when spoken to; ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... why this flower doth show So yellow, green, and sickly too; Ask me why the stalk is weak And bending, yet it doth not break; I must tell you, these discover What doubts and fears ...
— Language of Flowers • Kate Greenaway
... a sickly smile crossed Lionel's wan lips. "Do you remember how you offended your mother, Jan, by telling her she only wanted to ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... not find that his combined income amounted to riches amid a world of idleness. At Buston he was constantly told by his uncle of the necessity of economy. Indeed, Mr. Prosper, who was a sickly little man about fifty years of age, always spoke of himself as though he intended to live for another half-century. He rarely walked across the park to the rectory, and once a week, on Sundays, entertained the rectory family. A sad occasion it generally was to the elder of the rectory children, ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... herself. Jem whistled, pretending not to hear; but he peered sharply into her face, with the relish which all sickly, premature children have for a mystery or pain. Very seldom was there hint of either about Martha Yarrow. She was an Ohio woman, small-boned, muscular, with healthy, quick blood, not a scrofulous, ill-tempered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... left foot with fierce gloom. He was giving it his undivided attention. It rested on a wooden "cricket," and was encased in a carpet slipper that contrasted strikingly with the congress boot that shod his other foot. Red roses and sprays of sickly green vine formed the pattern of the carpet slipper. The heart of a red rose on the toe had been cut out, as though the cankerworm had eaten it; and on a beragged projection that stuck through and exhaled the pungent odor of ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... which should be employed in serious consultations, and making the necessary preparations for the ensuing campaign, was idly spent in revels, in gaming, and other debauches unfit for a Catholic court. But warlike Schomberg, who, after the retreat of James, had leisure to remove his sickly soldiers, to bury the dead, and put the few men that remained alive and were healthy into winter quarters of refreshment, took the field early in spring, before Tyrconnell was awake, and reduced the castle of Charlemont, the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... may be delayed for several months by the difficulty of the passages. There are a few Anthrax grubs beside the remains of pupae not far removed from the final metamorphosis; there are others, but very rarely, on Mason bees already in the perfect state. These grubs are sickly and appear to be ailing; the provisions are too solid and do not lend themselves to the delicate suckling of the worms. Who can these laggards be but animalcules that have roamed too long in the walls of the nest? Failing ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre |
