"Cursed with" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... anything I could have said, by asking me not to say it. That is the worst of Hester. The partition between her mind and that of other people is so thin that she sees what they are thinking about. Thank God, Rachel, that you are not cursed with the artistic temperament! That is why she has never married. She sees too much. I am not a match-maker, but if I had had to take the responsibility, I should have married her at ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... privileges, as far as they are extended to any portion of the population; and he has there advantages which the people of this country have not yet gained, because we are but gradually making our way out of the darkness and the errors and the tyrannies of past ages. But in America he finds the land not cursed with feudalism; it is free to every man to buy and sell, and possess and transmit. He finds in the town in which he lives that the noblest buildings are the school-houses to which his children are freely admitted. ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... thyself, thy father, spare us all! Save thy dear life; or, if a soul so brave Neglect that thought, thy dearer glory save. Pity, while yet I live, these silver hairs; While yet thy father feels the woes he bears, Yet cursed with sense! a wretch, whom in his rage (All trembling on the verge of helpless age) Great Jove has placed, sad spectacle of pain! The bitter dregs of fortune's cup to drain: To fill with scenes of death his closing eyes, And number all his days by miseries! My heroes slain, my bridal ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... yet could feel thankful that it was not accompanied by fever, which it seemed a miracle to avoid; for if ever a district was cursed with the ague, the Makata wilderness ranks foremost of those afflicted. Surely the sight of the dripping woods enveloped in opaque mist, of the inundated country with lengthy swathes of tiger-grass laid ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... Whilst the other affair—" "Hush, hush!" interrupted the doctor; "I cannot bear to hear you mention it. Oh, surely Job himself never suffered such a trial of his patience! In fact, his troubles were scarcely worth mentioning, for he was never cursed with learned servants!" Saying this, the doctor retired, lamenting his hard fate in not having been born in those halcyon days when cooks drew nothing but their poultry; whilst the gentle Celestina's breast panted with indignation at his complaint. An opportunity soon offered for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... could we SEE and sympathize deeply with the misery of Europe and China, to say nothing of that in our own country. Nay, any wrong to others would blast all our pleasure, could we really feel it. Fortunately only a few are so cursed with sympathy. When the capacity for joyous feeling is joined with fortitude or endurance, then we have the really cheerful, who spread their feeling everywhere, whom all men love. Where cheerfulness is due to lack of sympathy and understanding, we speak of ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... establishment of Independence, no period has arrived that so decidedly proves the excellence of the representative system of government, and its superiority over every other, as the time we now live in. Had America been cursed with John Adams's hereditary Monarchy or Alexander Hamilton's Senate for life she must have sought, in the doubtful contest of civil war, what she now obtains by the expression of public will. An appeal to elections decides better than an ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... close—started at seeing me outside—then spoke to me. Her first words were reproof for what I had unintentionally done, and sounded as an earnest of what I was to be cursed with as long as we both lived. I answered angrily; this tone of mine changed her complaints to irritation. She taunted me with a secret she had discovered, which concerned Miss Aldclyffe and myself. I was surprised to learn ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... dying Carthage!" so their passion raved, "Would nought but these the conqueror's hate assuage? If these be taken, how may the land be saved Whose meat and drink was empire, age by age?" And bitter memory cursed with idle rage The greed that coveted gold above renown, The feeble hearts that feared their heritage, The hands that cast the sea-kings' sceptre down And left to alien brows their famed ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... have been where they built the fires. And then those Portuguese starving to death, slowly starving to death while thousands of savages watched them die. Have you ever thought what it means? But of course you have, for like myself you are cursed with imagination. God in heaven! is it wonderful that it gets upon the nerves? especially when one cannot find what one is looking for, that vast treasure"—and his face became ecstatic—"that shall yet be yours and mine, and make us ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... thee. I want not thy company nor wish for union with thee; he who coveteth the coming life renounceth thee, for thou seducest mankind, those of past time and those of present time. Allah the Most High lieth in wait for His servants and woe unto him who is cursed with thy company!" Answered she, "O thou that errest from the truth and wanderest from the way of reason, turn thy face to me and look upon my charms and take thy full of my nearness, as did the wise who have gone before thee. Indeed, they were richer than thou in experience ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... and serious enough—which we have in hand. There are gems of wisdom founded on health, morality, happiness, which should be put within reach of every household in our whole broad land. It is a most important, yet neglected subject. People are squeamish, cursed with mock modesty, ashamed to speak with their lips what their Creator spoke through their own minds and bodies when he formed them. It is time such nonsense—nonsense shall we say?—rather say it is time such fatal folly were withered and cursed by the sober common sense and moral ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... with Zip and Bang. And it's because Zenith has so large a proportion of such men that it's the most stable, the greatest of our cities. New York also has its thousands of Real Folks, but New York is cursed with unnumbered foreigners. So are Chicago and San Francisco. Oh, we have a golden roster of cities—Detroit and Cleveland with their renowned factories, Cincinnati with its great machine-tool and soap products, Pittsburg and Birmingham with ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... that I fell in love. In this as in everything through life I have been cursed with the foulest luck, but in this as in everything else my patience has won in the end. Lucy Luttrell loved another man called Railton—John Railton. He was another fool—you are all fools—but she married him and had a daughter. I wonder if you can ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... disappeared again. Never a chimney with the curling black smoke of the factory did he see above any of these clustered cities. When he recalled to mind the pall of soft-coal smoke which hangs over the average American city, he knew that while Italy might be cursed with poverty she had her blessing in fine clear skies. And always, swinging down the great roads, he saw in fancy the ghosts of armies, crusaders, mercenaries, feudal companies, crossbowmen, and ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... induce him to wear his fur coat, even in the coldest weather. He was obsessed with the idea that should Diplomacy ever be revived, his fur coat might grow too shabby to be used for his first entrance, so it reposed perpetually and uselessly in camphor. Arthur Cecil was cursed with the Demon of Irresolution. I have never known so undecided a man; it seemed quite impossible for him to make up his mind. Sir Squire Bancroft has told us in his Memoirs how Cecil, on the night of the dress rehearsal of Diplomacy, was unable to ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... not usually strive to dishonour himself because he is in a rage. And this man is incapable of rage. He must be cursed with one of those dark gloomy minds in which love always leads to jealousy. She will ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... wonder what they could have had to do. Perhaps it was the idle man's playmate that made the trouble. But a little farther reading in the old diary dissipates this illusion. If anybody thinks that our grandmothers must have been cursed with ennui because they did not attend three parties a night three times a week, with operas and theatres to fill in the off nights, they are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... returned the prince, dropping his head in disappointment. "Oh! Melchior, I have had but too sure proofs of what he intimates! I have long been certain that this wretched Bartolo is my son, though never before have I been cursed with his presence. Bad as I was taught to think him, my worst fears had not painted him as I now find the truth ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... suspect that he was also envious, malignant, and cruel. How far this will tend to confirm the assertion, that when a boy, he was an amateur of this royal sport, I do, says Mr. Ireland, not pretend to decide: but were a child, in whom I had any interest, cursed with such a propensity, my first object would be to correct it: if that were impracticable, and he retained a fondness for the cockpit, and the still more detestable amusement of Shrove Tuesday, I should hardly dare to flatter myself that ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... the Havanna was taken; at what expense is too well remembered. May my country be never cursed with such another conquest! ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... to what we are going to say: London is cursed with no predominating, no overwhelming, no characteristic aristocracy. There is no set or clique of any sort or description of men that you can point to, and say, that's the London set. We turn round and desire to be informed what set do you mean: every salon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... when he came back sooner than I had anticipated. There are devils everywhere in the bush, it is said; creatures that take on the semblance of man and kill those with whom they converse, but our banana patch seems to be exceptionally cursed with the presence ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... Babbs were said never to have prospered afterwards; their crops failed, the fisheries failed, and they became extinct in the second generation. The last of them, Ursula Babb, the grand-daughter of John, was to be seen wandering up and down the little beach of Lynmouth, a half-crazed old crone, cursed with the evil-eye, and babbling disjointed and incoherent stories of the ruin of ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... said. "Only a few minutes now. It's a good thing for you, and it's a good thing for Mary, who has been cursed with a brother like me. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... has been handed down from mother to daughter through the ages, while the poor, misguided souls of expectant women have suffered untold remorse, heaped blame upon themselves, lived lives literally cursed with fear and dread—veritable slaves to superstition and bondage—all because of the simple fact that a certain percentage of all children born in this world have sustained some sort of an injury or "embryological accident" during the first days of fetal existence. For ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... of the situation is, as I have spent so much of my life in trying to make the English understand, that we are cursed with a fatal intellectual laziness, an evil inheritance from the time when our monopoly of coal and iron made it possible for us to become rich and powerful without thinking or knowing how; a laziness which ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... the world is cursed with grafters and parasites—men who live off the body economic and give nothing substantial in return. But an appearance of uselessness is not always proof of such. We should not condemn men in ignorance. As old as Aesop is the fable of the rebellion of the ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... God, Canadians, that ye Have not been cursed with nobility. And, as you love your country, keep it free From those whose utter inutility For any good is proven by their pride Of blood; they have not aught to ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... Imagination is blessed or cursed with a fearful magic whereby he may scale the heights of Heaven or plumb ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... 'im, Bill," the man panted hoarsely. "Le' me fix 'im." He swung his heavy shoe, and Bill cursed with stirring eloquence. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... was that night of his. Alternations between hope and despair—fantastic pictures of future with and without her, wild pleadings with her—those delirious transports to which our imaginations give way if we happen to be blessed and cursed with imaginations—in the security of the darkness and aloneness of night and bed. And through it all he was tormented body and soul by her loveliness—her hair, her skin, her eyes, the shy, slender graces of her form—He tossed about until his bed was so wildly disheveled that he ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... deformities! All is the result of the ignorance or indifference of parents. As long as children are the accidents of lust instead of the premeditated objects of love, so long will the offspring deteriorate and the world be cursed with ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Catrina Lanovitch had this trick. She only played a Russian people-song—a simple lay such as one may hear issuing from the door of any kabak on a summer evening. But she infused a true Russian soul into it—the soul that is cursed with a fatal power of dumb and patient endurance. She did not sway from side to side as do some people who lose themselves in the intoxication of music. But she sat quite upright, her sturdy, square shoulders motionless. Her strange eyes were fixed with ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... therefore to the same language. A new race of writers were at that time seasoning the shallowest of all philosophies with systematic rancour against thrones and Christianity. To a military (and therefore in those days ignorant) aristocracy, such as all continental states were cursed with, equally the food and the condiment were attractive beyond any other. And thus, viz. through such accidents of luck operating upon so shallow a body of estimators as the courtiers and the little adventurers of the Continent, did the French literature and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... counselors, while to a great extent the semi-piratical sailors who infested the coast have been driven into other lines of dishonest endeavor. Perhaps not since the days of Lafitte and the pirates of Barataria has any part of the coast of the United States been cursed with so criminal and abandoned a lot of sea marauders as have for a decade frequented the waters off Alaska, the Pribylof Islands, and the sealing regions. The outlawry of a great part of the seal trade, and the consequent heavy profits ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... whatever, even itself. Still, there remains that one heroic and intelligent mouse. When Sidney Vandyke had left me to "think things over," I envied it with passion, feeling that I was not even of the mouse tribe. I felt more like a fly, if you can imagine a fly cursed with a human heart, who loves an eagle that has been shot in the wing and caged, and the cage set down on the seashore when the night tide is coming in. What could such a fly do but cling sadly to the cage and buzz and let the great rush of water drown it with the ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and over Edom will I cast out my shoe!" There they were before us, very visible to the eye, and we began naturally to ask questions of each other. Why was Moab the wash-pot, and Edom thus cursed with indignity? Why had the right bank of the river been selected for such great purposes, whereas the left was thus condemned? Was there, at that time, any special fertility in this land of promise which has since departed from it? We are told of a bunch of grapes which took two ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... "but surely there is some excuse! Of course," he added, with an effort to control his feelings, "I do not know Miss Philippa, but assuredly a young girl who is cursed with great wealth must discriminate between those who love her for herself and those who come to woo her because she is wealthy. Oh, believe me, it is, it must be very painful to be wealthy, to have to suspect and doubt—to run the hazard of wounding some noble nature, who may be ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... Secretly she cursed with her whole heart now the coldly practical, utterly self-interested side of Baroudi's nature. But she was afraid to defy it. She ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... mean to say that we have entered the Utopian age, for the present international situation is a peculiar one, since we are at the same time blessed with peace and cursed with militarism. This is not an age of war, yet we are burdened by great and ever-increasing armaments; the mad race for naval supremacy continues, while the relative strength of the powers remains practically the same; the intense and useless rivalry of the nations goes on until, according to the ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... is highly significant. It will be one of the Legion's greatest powers. It was and is due to the fact that these new Americans are not cursed with fixed ideas. They have seen too much, lived through too much in their comparatively short lives to be narrow-minded. Over in the A.E.F. the former hod-carrier often turned out to be too good as a construction manager for any officer ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... Clothing herself with Honour's name, Usurp'd his station; on the throne Which Liberty once call'd her own, (Gods! that such mighty ills should spring Under so great, so good a king, 290 So loved, so loving, through the arts Of statesmen, cursed with wicked hearts!) For every darker purpose fit, Behold ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... fall back upon phrenology; and directs that a man seeking a wife, or a woman seeking a husband, should obtain a phrenological chart of his head and then send it around until a counterpart is found. If the circle of one's acquaintance is so fortunate as to contain no one cursed with the same propensities or idiosyncrasies as himself, the newspapers are to be brought into requisition as a ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... that, just as molecules strive to fly apart on the application of heat, this earth will repel that projectile when electricity, which we are coming to look upon as another form of heat, is properly applied. It must be so, and it is the manifest destiny of the race to improve it. Man is a spirit cursed with a mortal body, which glues him to the earth, and his yearning to rise, which is innate, is, I believe, only a part ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... everything," answered Madge. "Some of the worst rotters the world has ever been cursed with have been brainy enough—men and women. We make too much fuss about brains; just as once upon a time we did about mere brute strength, thinking that was all that was needed to make a man great. Brain is only muscle translated into ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... God was their greatest enemy instead of their best friend. Their tortuous path across the wilderness was marked by a track of bleaching bones. All the evils which imagination can conceive fell on their devoted heads. Bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, cursed with famine and drought, swallowed by earthquake, slain by war, and robbed by priests, they found Jehovah a harder despot than Pharaoh. Death was to them a happy release, and only the grave a shelter from the savagery ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... might well have been mitigated with thankfulness that he was not cursed with a daughter like Charley's Bela. Bela was a firebrand in the village, a scandal to the whole tribe. Some said she was possessed of a devil; according to others she was a girl born with ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... no half measures in this child of the prairie. Her love was given, a wealth of generous feeling and loyal self-sacrifice. Her father read with a rare understanding. And in his big heart, so rough, so warm, he cursed with every forceful epithet of his vocabulary the folly of the man he had marked ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... my attention elsewhere for half an hour!" he cried angrily. "I seem to be cursed with fools for assistants!" ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... night," he said; "it has happened here before over cards, and will no doubt happen again until matters clear themselves up somehow. Marnham, as you see, drinks, and when drunk is the biggest liar in the world, and I, I am sorry to say, am cursed with a violent temper. Don't judge either of us too harshly. If you were a doctor you would know that all these things come to us with our blood, and we didn't fashion our own clay, did we? Have some ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions?—how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them, But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sympathized with and encouraged him. I cannot make up my mind whether you are a villain, or merely the victim of a sublimated and paradoxical imagination. But in either case, I wish to be placed on record as asserting that you are the worst enemy the United States is cursed with to-day." ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Here is Lemuel—cursed with a lean run and yet trying to maintain at least an appearance of geniality. Lemuel runs on a "differential" between New York, Chicago and St. Louis. Every passenger-traffic man knows that most of the differentials—as the roads that take longer hours, and so ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... destroyed in any other manner. Who does not desire to see Africa civilized and evangelized? Whose heart does not leap in view of the suppression of the slave trade? Who does not pray for deliverance from the evils of slavery? Who does not wish to behold the free people of color,—cursed with ineffectual freedom here,—recalled from their banishment, and placed where no obstacles will impede their march to affluence, preferment and honor? The Colonization Society, then, powerfully commends itself to ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... sir,' I acknowledged. 'First, I am a man; next, a down-trodden American citizen. I am cursed with neither profession, trade, nor expectations. Like Esau, I am pottageless. My residence is everywhere; the sky is my coverlet. I am one of the dispossessed, a sansculotte, a proletarian, or, in simpler phraseology addressed to ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... faint, I don't think she's the fainting kind. She is cursed with a sense of humour, and refused even ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... possible ultimate redemption of the African race and African continent was made twenty-five years ago. Every succeeding year has added strength to the hope of its realization. May it indeed be realized. Pharaoh's country was cursed with plagues, and his hosts were lost in the Red Sea, for striving to retain a captive people who had already served them more than four hundred years. May like disasters never befall us! If, as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... was right. There is an unseen world. Do I not see it? Am I not cursed with the seeing of it all the time? Call it a thought, an idea, anything you will, still it is there. It is unescapable. Thoughts are entities. We create with every act of thinking. I have created this phantom that sits in my chair ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... living things, however insignificant, are all filled to the very brim of their capacity—why is it that I, the roof and crown of things, stand here, a sad and solitary stranger, having made acquaintance with grief; having learned what they know not, the burden of toil and care, cursed with forecast and anticipation, saddened by memory, torn by desires? 'We look before and after, and pine for what is not.' All other beings fit their place, and their place fits them like a glove upon a fair hand, but I stand here 'a stranger upon the earth.' And the more I feel, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... provision of Nature. Gluttony is a degrading habit. Yet numbers of people attempt to justify the gratification of their gluttonous proclivities by the statement that they are "blessed with a good appetite," while the truth of the matter is, they are cursed with an inordinate lust for food. If people were more temperate in the pleasures of the table, the purveyors of remedies for dyspepsia would find their incomes considerably lessened. Satisfy your hunger, by all means, but do not pander to the vice ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... Britain, America has never been cursed with that part of their population called GIPSIES, forming in England an imperium in imperio. The famous "orders in council," can be clearly traced up to a Gipsy origin. The Londoners imitate and follow, but originate nothing.—One of the monarchs ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... magnificent establishment had exceeded his income; he had too much indulged his passion for all the fine arts, of which he was a liberal patron: he had collected a magnificent library, and had lavished immense sums of money on architectural embellishments. Cursed with too fine a taste, and with too soft a heart—a heart too well knowing how to yield, never could he deny himself, much less any other human being, any gratification which money could command; and soon the necessary consequence was, that he had no money to command, his affairs fell ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... as far as Tabatinga in Peru, and smaller steamers up the Orinoco to the spurs of the Andes, was known in its main features to explorers fifty years after its discovery. Africa, historically the oldest of continents, but cursed with a mesa form which converts nearly every river into a plunging torrent on its approach to the sea, kept its vast interior till the last century wrapped in utmost gloom. China, amply supplied with smaller littoral indentations but characterized by a paucity of larger inlets, finds compensation ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... scrupulous but soft-hearted examiner might overmark a sympathetic pupil. He never gives marks when the answer is wrong, but he gives a great many when it is right: and he is a little blind to deficiencies. He does not make it clear that Morris, as an artist, was cursed with two of the three modern English vices, that he was provincial and amateurish. But he gives him full credit for not being goaded to futility by a ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... say, that some degree of disapprobation was manifested: but why are the implements of gaming allowed in a place devoted to the society of both sexes? A pleasant thing for the wives and daughters of those who are blessed or cursed with such connections, to hear the Billiard-Balls rattling in one room, and the dice in another! That this is the case I myself can testify, as a late unworthy member of an Institution which materially affects the morals of the higher orders, while the lower may not even move to the sound of ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... of a "passionate fondness for geography," was the way one applicant expressed the wander-lust that was in him; while another wrote, "I am cursed with an eternal yearning to be always on the move, consequently this letter to you." But best of all was the fellow who said he wanted to come because ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... this it would appear that the Editor, WILLIAM ARCHER (without the "Mr.") has very faithfully produced the exact translation of the original. To be hypercritical, I might suggest that perhaps occasionally the version is rather too literal. For instance, Torvald Helmer, although he is cursed with one of the most offensive wives known to creation, would scarcely call her "a little lark," which conveys the impression that he is a "gay dog," and one given to the traditional ways of that species of ultra-sociable animals. I have ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... passably through all; his frame was wiry and nervous; his eye bright and full of life; and there was that abrupt, unsteady, mercurial restlessness in his movements and manner which usually accompanies the man whose sanguine temperament prompts him to concede to the impulse, and who is blessed or cursed with a superabundance of energy, according as circumstance may favour or judgment correct that equivocal ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... presented the opportunity for drinking. In every little town and village whisky was kept in public and private houses. There was, and yet is, near my father's farm two very small but ancient towns, containing each some twenty or thirty houses, and both of these places have been cursed with saloons in which liquor has been sold for the last thirty years. Both of these towns were favorite resorts with me, especially the one called Raleigh. I have been drunk oftener and longer at a time ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... funeral. No one saw him shed a single tear, not even when the earth was thrown on to the coffins, and people wondered at his composure; he had clung so closely to them. He was probably one of those who were cursed with inability ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... denunciation (vv, 11-17) is devoted to it. Its connection with the other vices attacked is loose, but it is worth noting that all these have an inner kinship, and tend to appear together. They are 'all in a string,' and where a community is cursed with one, the others will not be far away. They are a knot of serpents intertwined. We touch but slightly on the other vices denounced by the prophet's burning words, but we must premise the general observation that the same uncompromising plainness and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... in many instances, adopt steam instead of water-power, and becoming land-draining companies, instead of land-drowning companies; at least, let Nature have free course with her gently-flowing rivers, and allow the promise to be fulfilled, that the earth shall be no more cursed with ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... the railings of Belgrave Square, cursed with consciousness of itself, fears of the judgment of the other railings, and doubts of their fitness to stand in the same row with it. You are cold, mistrustful, cruel to nervous or clumsy people, and more afraid of the criticisms of those with ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... 'em out, anyway," replied Pratt. "That's the one important thing to consider. You're safe! And if you're cursed with a conscience and it's tender—well, that'll make a good plaister ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... in the wind on rusty irons, directed me to the only inn of the village. It was a two-story brick building, standing a little back from the road. I drew rein at the door, and dismounted my weary nag. My loud vociferations summoned to my side a bull dog, cursed with a most unhappy disposition, and a hostler whose temper was hardly more amiable. He took my horse with an air of surly indifference, and gruffly directed ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... anyone was deservedly cursed with an atrocious goat-stench from armpits, or if limping gout did justly gnaw one, 'tis thy rival, who occupies himself with your love, and who has stumbled by the marvel of fate on both these ills. For as oft as he swives, so oft is he taken vengeance on by both; she he prostrates by ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... therefore, which the commissioners mentioned, are very credible among men, who, being confined together within the same walls, never can forget their mutual animosities, and who, being cut off from all the most endearing connections of nature, are commonly cursed with hearts more selfish, and tempers more unrelenting, than fall to the share of other men. The pious frauds practised to increase the devotion and liberality of the people, may be regarded as certain, in an order founded ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... CARNEGIE, the Iron King and millionnaire of Pittsburg, has been addressing big audiences in Scotland. Amongst his remarks were the following:—"It is said that in America, although we have no aristocracy, we are cursed with a plutarchy. Let me tell you about that. A man who carries a million dollars on his back carries a load.... When I speak against the Royal Family I do not condescend to speak of the creatures who form the Royal Family—persons are so insignificant.... We laugh at your ideas in this petty little ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... with a little catch of her breath, "is there no such thing as oblivion? Is there a place in the world that is not haunted? I am cursed with memory." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... accomplice and tool are not those which any party would consider desirable in a leader. Whatever office-seekers, partisans, traitors, and public enemies may find in Mr. Johnson, it is certain that they find in him nothing to respect. He is cursed with that form of moral disease which sometimes renders a man ridiculous, sometimes infamous, but which never renders him respectable,—namely, vanity of will. Other men may be vain of their talents and accomplishments, but he is vain of the personal pronoun ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... and San Angel. As we gaze at the unequaled panorama, which Humboldt pronounced to be the most beautiful the eye ever rested upon, the thought forced itself upon us that with all its scenic beauty, this valley and plain of Anahuac has for centuries been cursed with crime and barbarism. The whole scene is inclosed by a grand circle of mountains, just far enough away to clothe them in charming purple. The rarefied atmosphere adds distinctness and brilliancy of coloring to everything. Two of these sky-reaching elevations are of world-wide reputation, namely, ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... abandoned his home and their two daughters, and became a drunken tramp. Every now and then she returned to him, appealing to his compassion for assistance. I think Charles Dickens must have had John Duncan's case in his mind when he wrote those powerful scenes of the poor man cursed with a ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... man and woman see this, and let them know in the day that is at hand, how the challenge may come from some petty authority of the time that rules not by its integrity but by its favourites. We are cursed with such authority, and many a one drives about in luxury because he is obsequious to it: he prefers to be a parasite and to live in splendour than be a man and live in straits. He has what Bernard Shaw so aptly calls "the ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse; for ye have robbed ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... it has ennobled countless thousands since-hatred for Germany and Germans. It centered about the slayer of his mate, of course; but it included everything German, animate or inanimate. As the thought took firm hold upon him he paused and raising his face to Goro, the moon, cursed with upraised hand the authors of the hideous crime that had been perpetrated in that once peaceful bungalow behind him; and he cursed their progenitors, their progeny, and all their kind the while he took silent oath to war upon them ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Menton the Riviera is cursed with electric tram lines. We were led beyond Cannes to the Corniche de l'Esterel by the absence of a tram line. We could not get away from the railway, however, without abandoning the coast. Is there any place desirable for living purposes in which ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... vengeance. I loved thee; and, in spite of thine offence, My heart is troubled by anticipation For thee. But thou hast earn'd thy doom too well. Had father ever greater cause for rage? Just gods, who see the grief that overwhelms me, Why was I cursed with such a wicked son? ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... the Pope and believes that the Pope cannot err, he or she believes that the Pope is superhuman, and such we know cannot be the case as long as there is life in the body, as we are all liable to the Adamic sin, as the world at large was cursed with the Adamic sin in the Garden ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... that's good and great; A knave this morning, and his will a cheat. Strange! by the means defeated of the ends, By spirit robbed of power, by warmth of friend By wealth of followers! without one distress Sick of herself through very selfishness! Atossa, cursed with every granted prayer, Childless with all her children, wants an heir. To heirs unknown descends the unguarded store, Or wanders, Heaven-directed, to the poor. Pictures like these, dear madam, to design, Asks no firm hand, and no unerring line; Some wandering touches, some reflected light, Some ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... trouble you. Moreover, now that he was sure that you were dead, I showed him the little statuette of yourself looking into water, which you gave me. Whereon he burst into tears, at the thought that such an one had departed from the earth, while it was still cursed with so many who are wicked, ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... Missionary Secretaries, the eloquent Reverend Lachlin Taylor, DD. The trip down had not been one of the most pleasant. The rains had drenched him, and the mosquitoes had plagued him with such persistency, that he loudly bemoaned his lot in being found in a country that was cursed with such ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... civilisation, and enjoying all the rights of manhood under British laws. From their earliest infancy they have known no language but the English, and no religion but Christianity; while the former are still barbarians, grovelling in fetishism, cursed with slavery, ignorant, debased, and wantonly cruel. The West India negro has so much contempt for his African cousin, that he invariably speaks of him by the ignominious title of "bushman." In fact, the former considers ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... melancholy of the scene, it would have been the stunted and withering leaves thus mournfully enshrouding the silent dead. There is something so unnatural in the conjunction of a scanty vegetation with a soil cursed with hopeless aridity, that the gardens and few green spots, occurring in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, detract from, instead of embellishing, the scene. Though pleasant and beautiful as retreats to those who can command an entrance, these circumscribed patches of ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... they become born as men possessed of great intelligence. Every kind of felicity and auspiciousness becomes theirs in consequence of that intelligence with which they are born. Those men of foolish understandings who cast wicked eyes upon the wedded spouses of other men, become cursed with congenital blindness in consequence of that sinfulness of theirs. Those men who, impelled by desire in their hearts, cast their eyes on naked women, those men of wicked deeds take birth in this world to pass their whole lives ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... background is the consideration of the evil influences of inheritance in old families. The scene is still New York and Long Island, full of the charm of outdoor life and hunting episodes. The principal male character Siward is cursed with the inheritance of drink. Siward's struggles to conquer his Enemy, and the fighting chance he sees at last in the affection of a girl, carry on the story to a hopeful finish. The novel has been published two years and a few months and more than 250,000 copies have been sold, ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... imagine they stand for progress, and they know nothing about the conditions. Many missionaries are very fine men, and they would do even better work if left a little more to their own initiative, and not cursed with this atmosphere of competition in figures. It isn't fair to damn the whole flock because a few of the sheep ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... him for nuthin'," said Lafitte. "He ain't worth nothin'. Besides, I can't charge a brother of the flag anything; anyhow, not you." I inferred that Jean Lafitte, also, was going to grow up into one of those men like myself, cursed with a reticence and shyness in some matters, and so winning a reputation of oddness or coldness, against all the real and passionate protest of ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... may have something to say, if they could only say it— indeed they generally have; but the next class are people who, having nothing to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words, that makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect. They try to cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of delivery. They look ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dissatisfaction with himself? 'Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places': why is it that amongst all God's happy creatures, and God's shining stars, men stand 'strangers in a strange land,' and are cursed with a restlessness which has not 'where to lay its head'? The consciousness of unrest is but the agitation of the limbs which indicates disease. That disease is the twitching paralysis of sin. Like 'the pestilence that walketh in darkness,' it has a fell power of concealing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... them was following the "stuffing regime". There had to be a lot of figuring done to get it for the sum of thirty dollars a month; and this put another grievous burden upon Thyrsis. Corydon, alas, had no talents for figuring, and was cursed with a weakness for such superfluities as clean laundry and coffee with cream. This was one more aspect of the difference between the Hebrew and the Greek temperament; and sometimes the Hebrew temperament would lose its temper, and the Greek temperament would take to tears. The situation ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... need. Yon fisher, with his great gold ear-rings, who throws his nets and cuddles his Juanita and carouses with his mates, hath more to thank the saints for than miserable I, who, blessed with wealth, am cursed with loneliness, and loving my fellow-men, yet know they are but sheep. God's sheep, natheless, silly and deaf to the cry of their true shepherd, and misled by ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... intoxicating wine of public favor. A profound gloom stole over him, and we even hear of hints at an attempt to commit suicide. Adam Liszt attributed it to the sad English climate, which Hein-rich Heine cursed with such unlimited bitterness, and took his boy back again to sunnier France. But the dejection darkened and deepened, threatening even to pass into epilepsy. It assumed the form of religious enthusiasm, alternating with fits of remorse as of one who had ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... in Groves of Oranges, and hear the Melody of Birds about them: But a Lapland Lyric, breathing Sentiments of Love and Poetry, not unworthy old Greece or Rome; a regular Ode from a Climate pinched with Frost, and cursed with Darkness so great a Part of the Year; where 'tis amazing that the poor Natives should get Food, or be tempted to propagate their Species: this, I confess, seemed a greater Miracle to me, than the famous Stories of their Drums, their ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... dispel my gloom, or to drown it in the maddening cup. And soon was it whispered, from one to another, until the whole town became aware of it, that my wife and child were lying dead, and that I was drunk! But if ever I was cursed with the faculty of thought, in all its intensity, it was then. And this was the degraded condition of one who had been nursed in the lap of piety, and whose infant tongue had been taught to utter a prayer against being ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... man prays, we are told, for a good digestion: let us add to the prayer — and a bad memory. Truly we are sometimes tempted to think that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our friends, we can swear, have all, without exception, atrocious memories; why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation must be imaginary; for even as we engage in this selfish moan ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... is cursed with evils, unknown to the rest of the human race in any section of the globe—reptiles of the most deadly venom, beasts of unparalleled ferocity, deserts of sand, and moral deserts a thousand times more appalling. But her greatest curse of all is the white man's cupidity, tearing asunder the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... difficult and much of the rendering is conjectural, but the point of the address seems to be that the young man was to go straight home, live with his wife, and be good, as a true child of God. The first column seems to be an enumeration of men who are cursed with misfortunes, for example, "one whom his mother brought forth with weeping," and perhaps forms part of a prayer that the bridegroom may not ever be like such men. We must hope some day to find a fuller text and so to determine the ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... called to the bar, he was without friends, without connections, without fortune, conscious of talents far above the mob by which he was elbowed, and cursed with sensibility, which rendered him painfully alive to the mortifications he was fated to experience. Those who have risen to professional eminence, and recollect the impediments of such a commencement—the neglect abroad—the poverty, perhaps, at home—the ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... O cursed with murder's guilt, how else wert thou The burden of her womb? Dost thou forswear Thy mother's kinship, ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... called now, through the fire amain, On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life— To the Person, he bought and sold again— For the Face, with his daily buffets rife— Feature by feature It took its place: And his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark, At the steady whole of the Judge's face— Died. Forth John's soul flared ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... discussion, I was unable to agree with you, knowing only too well from my own dread experience that the world which men agree to call that of the supernatural is just as real as—nay, perhaps even more real than—this world we see about us. In other words, I, like many of my countrymen, am cursed with the gift of second-sight—that awful faculty which foretells in vision calamities ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... was instant. From one old gullet, then from others, came choking, snarling sounds which presently became words. By those words Kirby heard himself cursed with a vituperation which made him, even in his temporary triumph, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... your broker is honest, then stick to him. Some concerns masquerading as brokers or commission merchants are really wholesale buyers on their own account. They will charge the shipper a commission on sales to themselves at a low figure. The Baltimore market seems especially cursed with this sort of thing, though it is now, I believe, forbidden by a code. As a whole, Baltimore is not a very satisfactory market for black walnut kernels, though the largest in the East. I find Philadelphia and New York ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... annexation of Texas." He declared that "he would never consent to the coming in of these Territories or States into the Union, when the fanatical spirit of the North was pouring into the House memorials against the annexation of Texas, simply because it was cursed with the peculiar institution of the South." To preserve the balance of power between the two sections of the Union, was the substance of Mr. Thompson's plea. If by the creation of the Territory of Iowa the North ...
— History of the Constitutions of Iowa • Benjamin F. Shambaugh
... said, that she had the most confounded jealous temper that ever a woman was cursed with; that he had been on his knees to her ever since his marriage, and had spent half his income in administering to her caprices and extravagancies; that as for these charges, they were so monstrous, he should not condescend to answer ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... the subject we should carry along with us these two recollections. First, we should recollect that Christianity had made much way among this particular class, the class of slaves. No wonder that men cursed with slavery embraced with joy a religion which was perpetually teaching the worth and dignity of the human soul, and declaring that rich and poor, peer and peasant, master and slave, were equal in the sight of God. And yet, great as this growth was, it contained within it elements of ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... readiness in quoting Scripture, chapter and verse. He was sent to Shepik, and hearing the complaints of the people about their poor crops and poverty, replied: "God tells you the reason in the third chapter of Malachi; where he says, 'Ye are cursed with a curse, for ye have robbed me.'" Then taking for a text, "Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse," etc., he inculcated the duty and privilege of setting apart at least a tenth of their earnings for God. The people were convinced, and after paying half of their crops, ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... wife thought they had hidden cunningly their four soft-bristled, helpless babies. What he thought he saw was the owl engaged in turning one of those same babies into nourishing infant owls' food, or "words to that effect." And the hedgehog, like most of the order Insectivora, is cursed with the temper of Eblis, too. Naturally, therefore, things happened, and happened the more hectically, perhaps, because Mrs. Hedgehog chanced at that moment to be away—attending to the last rites—shall we say?—over the form of an ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... upon the key-board, while the other executed, by itself, a passage of extraordinary difficulty and involution. Then, for the first time, the thought struck him that the musician was deaf.[17] Alas! the supposition was too true: Beethoven was cursed with the loss of his most precious faculty. Those who appreciate the full splendour of his gigantic genius, those who conceive, with a distinguished composer now living, that "Beethoven began where Haydn and Mozart left off;" those who coincide with an eminent critic, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... bid you farewell; I hope this fine poem will please you—and sell. You'll ne'er lack a friend if you ne'er lack a dime; May you never grow old till the end of Old Time; May you never be cursed with an itching for rhyme; For in spite of your physic, in spite of your plaster, The rash will break out till you go to disaster— Which you plainly can see is the case with my Muse, For she scratches away though she's said ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... when the long flotilla goes, and the last of their pay is done, The boys from the banks of Lac Labiche swing to the heavy sweep. And oh, how they sigh! and their throats are dry, and sorry are they and sick: Yet there's none so cursed with a lime-kiln thirst as that ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... overhear their chat, and to watch their familiar gestures. It is interesting and curious to recognise, in circumstances which elude the notice of historians, the feeble violence and shallow cunning of Louis the Twelfth; the bustling insignificance of Maximilian, cursed with an impotent pruriency for renown, rash yet timid, obstinate yet fickle, always in a hurry, yet always too late; the fierce and haughty energy which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... these people to us? In part, undoubtedly, our zone, and the natural endowments of this portion of the globe. In part, and of late years, our vindicated national character, and the safety of our Institutions. But the magnet in America is, that we are a republic. A republican people! Cursed with artificial government, however glittering, the people of Europe, like the sick, pine for nature with protection, for open vistas and blue sky, for independence without ceremony, for adventure in their own ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... first time given an official sanction, and the public edifices of Rome were by no means the sole beneficiaries of this new interpretation of the rights of war. Much of the valuable plunder had found its way into private houses,[51] to stimulate the envious cupidity of many a future governor who, cursed with the taste of a collector and unblessed by the opportunity of a war, would make subtle raids on the artistic treasures of his province a secret article of his administration. When the ruling classes of a nation have been familiarised for the larger part of a century ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... established in that region. Through this influence a Reformed Syrian Church has come into existence which promises to do much for the whole community in ideals and life. The Syrian Church has hitherto been greatly cursed with the trinity of evils—ignorance, ceremonialism and superstition. It was not until 1811 (at the suggestion of an Englishman) that it translated a part of the Bible (the four gospels) into the vernacular. And this is the only translation of the Scriptures ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... piano, was he not, on his entrance, greeted with a shout; but the real Knights of the Highway treated him always as the questioning, wide-eyed child. In spite of his after-midnight pallor, in spite of his honorable scars of dissipation, it was his misfortune to be cursed with a smile that was a perpetual plea ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... father's malign will she has consented to make one more manifestation of curative power, to go through once more,—and for the last time,—the mockery of a pretended fast. The scene is Lord Asgarby's house; the patient is Lord Asgarby's daughter—an only child, cursed with constitutional debility, the foredoomed victim of premature decline. This frail creature has heard of Vashti and believes in her, and desires and obtains her society. To Professor Dethick this is, in every sense, a golden opportunity, and he insists that the starvation ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... land to our hearts is too to be regenerated. A wretched class, cursed with ineffectual freedom, is to be made free indeed, and an outlet is to be opened to those who will voluntarily disencumber themselves of the evil and the threatening ruin of another domestic pestilence. Public opinion must be the only agent in ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... pathetically. "But what shall I do?" she asked. "I've got no money, no experience, no sense. I'm a vain, luxury-loving fool, cursed with a—with ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... was, unhappily, but too much; for the settlement was cursed with a band of desperadoes, exiles from organized society, who had sought the frontier to obtain impunity for their misdeeds. The leaders of this band were three brothers, whom no law could control, no obligation restrain; and with these men Cutler soon formed a close ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... can, under the changed conditions, be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard and fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... along toward the end of the alley. Something in their demeanor made Michael watch them instinctively. As they neared the end of the alley toward the street they paused a moment and one of the figures stole back lingeringly. He thought he recognized her as a girl cursed with more than the usual amount of beauty. She disappeared into the darkness of the tenement, but the other after looking back a moment kept on toward the street. Michael quickened his steps and came to the corner at about the same time, crossing ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... established as the ruling principles in a flexible, properly paced, continuing planning process, there will be no need to fear that future generations are going to be either stuck with large mistakes on our part, or cursed with shortages, floods, and pollution. With this report we hope to initiate such a process ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... particularly ugly in face and clumsy in build. Against that, he was tall and unusually powerful whenever he chose to exert his strength. In mind he was reputed slow and almost stupid, although he was a good classical scholar and possessed a good memory. He was cursed with a bad and sometimes ungovernable temper. He was honest and courageous. He rarely knew how to do the right thing at the right time or in the right place. And finally he had a bad name, and believed himself to be a homicide. Such was the commonplace ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... than they promise; many good Christians, whose aspects would enable them to pass, in any crowd, as very tolerable and becoming ruffians. This fellow may be one of the unfortunate order of virtuous people, cursed with an unbecoming visage. We ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence. Not that I dreamed of resuscitating Hyde; ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... meet Warwick Sahib as soon as they heard the shouts of his beaters—but Little Shikara had been waiting almost an hour. Likely, if they had known about it, they would have commented on his badness, because he was notoriously bad, if indeed—as the villagers told each other—he was not actually cursed with evil spirits. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... and cursed with a conscience, had risen that morning in a mood for carousal; at this hour of noon she had reached the point of ecstatic stupor. No state of trance was ever so exquisite. The air was swooning, but how delicate its gasps, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... "is cursed with intemperance. There is one miscellaneous dry-goods and grocery store, one drug store, one mill, about half a bookstore, and an ice-cream saloon; and within a radius of half a mile of this church there are ten grog-shops and two distilleries, quite too large a proportion ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott |
