"Heartbreaking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inter-tribal flag of truce likely to be respected, provided the bearer of it could prove his right to its possession. They stared in silence at the feverish youth as, with great effort he told them the story of the Black Phantom and of the heartbreaking weeks he had spent in pursuit of the ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... the painful duty of informing Mauperin of his son's death. The old man's grief was heartbreaking. When Denoisel was admitted to Renee, he found her sitting on a footstool, sobbing, with her handkerchief pressed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... came. And now to-night he comes to me with a face as long as a yard-arm, and says that Janter won't keep it at any price, and that he does not know where he is to find another tenant, not he. It's quite heartbreaking, that's what it is. Three hundred acres of good, sound, food-producing land, and no tenant for it at fifteen shillings an acre. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... engrossing to the two ladies and Sir Nicholas. They had never come so close to the struggles of the Catholics in the north before; and although the Northern Rebellion had ended so disastrously, yet it was encouraging, although heartbreaking too, to hear that delicate women and children were ready gladly to suffer such miseries if the religious cause that was so dear to them could be thereby helped. Sir Nicholas, as has been said, was in two minds as to the lawfulness of rising against a ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... of muffled, heartbreaking moans, like those of a woman in dire pain, came to his ears. He felt the cold perspiration start over his body. His nerves grew tense with trepidation, his eyes wide with horror. Instinctively, his fingers clutched the revolver at his side and his gaze went toward the black, square thing ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the awful steep, and emerged at last upon the dizzy and breathless height above. Two men could scarce climb abreast in it; and even this was defended by fortifications, and at the summit, against the sky, tents could be seen. Yet this was the only way to victory: only by this heartbreaking path could England drive France from the western continent, and give a mighty nation to the world. Wolfe saw, and was content; where one man could go, thousands might follow. And he perceived that the very difficulty ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... looks curiously from one to the other, as if weighing them. Morell, whose lofty confidence has changed into heartbreaking dread at Eugene's bid, loses all power of concealing his anxiety. Eugene, strung to the highest tension, ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... concerned about the family honour, but she was very much disturbed over Ellen. And then it was a heartbreaking thing to lose Bruce, too. He had always seemed like a brother, and it was almost as bad as if Neil or Sandy should ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... perhaps the most effective thing a woman ever did. It was so simple that it was heartbreaking. She could not have uttered a word, he was such a powerful and great person, and she was so without ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... aunt has had a heartbreaking lesson. She may say a few words to unsay words that she ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... good her voice was, and, equally, how badly it needed training. She'd had, always, a passionate desire to sing and a belief in her possibilities. If she could get a chance, she could succeed. She'd undergone heartbreaking privations, trying to save money enough out of her earnings at one form of toil after another, to take lessons. But, repeatedly, these small savings had, by some disaster, been swept away: stolen once, by a worthless older brother; absorbed on another occasion by her mother's fatal illness. ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the fiend's appetite; and when she found him so incredulous, she begged of him to believe her, for it had been, remarked, that those who had dared to question their existence, always had some proof given, which obliged them, with grief and heartbreaking, to confess it was true. She detailed to him the traditional appearance of these monsters, and his horror was increased, by hearing a pretty accurate description of Lord Ruthven; he, however, still ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... It is heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of bright-eyed boys and girls growing up amid such hopeless surroundings. I shall not soon forget the picture of one little group whom I found squatted around a missionary's knees in a little mud-walled ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... years of heartbreaking toil at the mines my health utterly broke down. One day I fell fainting under the lash of the brutal overseer, and as I lay on the ground he ran at me and kicked me twice with his heavy iron-shod boots, once on the hip, breaking ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... marionettes danced. And then at last the great falls of the Rassini, beyond which no white man had gone. They hid the canoe in the bushes and placed beneath it the iron stove and half their supply of food. Then they plunged into the brush, eastward. Bennie had never known such grueling work and heartbreaking fatigue; and the clouds of flies pursued them venomously and with unrelenting persistence. At first they had to cut their way through acres of brush, and then the land rose and they saw before them miles of swamp and barren land dotted with ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... proper were repaired to the greatest possible extent. It was a heartbreaking task, for we must only guess at what machines should be connected together. Much damage had been done by the rushing air as it left, for it filled the machines, too, and they were not designed to resist the terrific air pressure that was on them when the pressure in the ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... look up until he had finished revising a difficult paragraph. By that time Mr. Hamlin had comfortably settled himself on a cane sofa, and, possibly out of deference to his surroundings, had subdued his song to a peculiarly low, soft, and heartbreaking whistle as he unfolded a newspaper. Clean and faultless in his appearance, he had the rare gift of being able to get up at two in the afternoon with much of the dewy freshness and all of the moral superiority of ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... scheme—just a little scheme. Sit down, dear old officer," he said, after a solemn pause. "And let this be a warning to you. Don't put your money in industries, dear old Captain Hamilton. What with the state of the labour market, and the deuced ingratitude of the working classes, it's positively heartbreaking—it is, indeed, ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... and spent from that heartbreaking climb up the merciless acclivity of the Butte Montmartre—he staggered rather than walked past the sleepy verger and found his way through the crowding shadows to the softly luminous heart of the basilica of the Sacre-Cour, he found her there, kneeling, her head bowed ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... talked reinforcements were pouring through the town, with great rumbling of artillery and blowing of trumpets. It was a comforting sound, as it presaged some relief for the Belgians in their heartbreaking stand. ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... that this marriage was one of the most perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death, that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, "I wish I was with Livy." I do not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful woman, classically regular in features, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is the kindness of men that counts, and all her life no one could have been more generously affectionate than was Mr. Harley to Dorothy. And now her estimate of him became her memory of his unflagging goodness; and this kept her from harsh judgment as he told what heartbreaking sacrifices she must make. Nor did she distrust a syllable; nor would she ask for explanation. The latter she would avoid; it was enough that Storri held her father at his horrid mercy. As against the setting forth in detail of Storri's ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... to run a second risk, for this monster lived in a den under yon mountain, with a brother of his, more fierce than himself; therefore, if you go thither and perish in the attempt, it will be the heartbreaking of both me and my lady. Let me persuade ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... endured when seeing Di and Eagle March together, kept me from raising my voice in persuasion. It would be heartwearing to be left behind, never to know what was happening except from an occasional letter; but to be on the spot and see for myself would be heartbreaking. I wasn't quite sure which would be worse, so I left the decision to Fate; and as I said before, it was my Frenchified genius for doing hair which settled the matter. Di discussed it with Father frankly before me, and argued ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Blanc; but being a very sensible, as well as remarkably handsome young person, she soon rallied, and insisted, quite as warmly as her mother did, that the sacrifice necessary to relieve Edouard from the peril which environed him—painful, heartbreaking as that sacrifice might be—must be submitted to without reserve or delay. In other words, that M. de Veron, junior, must consent to espouse Mademoiselle de Merode, and forthwith inform his father that he was ready to sign the nuptial-contract that moment if necessary. Poor ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... returned, with ill-concealed emotion, "how illy you could be spared by any of those who know and love you. Even I should feel it an almost heartbreaking thing to lose you out of my life, and your ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... never seen any one die, only a dog that Tike Bryerson had shot on one of his drunken home-goings. But death was death, to a dog or to a girl; and vivid imagination supplied the appalling details. Over and over again in pitiless minuteness the heartbreaking scene was repeated: the little twitchings of the bed-clothing, the tossing of the girl's arms in the last desperate struggle for breath, his mother's low sobs, and the haggard face ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... solemn eyes, tired wistful mouth. And it seemed to Kate that she was looking, not at her, but at life, that life which had cast her out, looking, not with rage now, but with a hurt reproachfulness in which there was a heartbreaking longing. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... assassin who goes through peaceful country places leaving behind him dead men looking sightlessly up to the sky. The hero will be the man or woman who knows and loves and serves. In the new histories we will be shown the tragedy, the heartbreaking tragedy of war, which like some dreadful curse has followed the human family, beaten down their plans, their hopes, wasted their savings, destroyed their homes, and in every way turned ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... honoured by your confidence. Then you showed me a locket with a picture of your wife inside it, and attached to the locket was the half of a coin. 'We split this for luck when we were young and foolish,' you said, and your laugh was one of the most heartbreaking sounds I ever heard in my life. Well now, having got to my point at last, it is my firm belief that you have a child living, and by all accounts as sweet a little maiden as the heart of man could wish, and the discovery came about in ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... leaving, and I must depart. With two Sunday School scholars, one on either side (for I had been to my Sunday School in the afternoon for the last time), loaded with large parcels of food, we passed down the street. How easy to write it down—how heartbreaking the experience! ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... on a table near the fire, beside his lamp, and sat down to reflect again. In the face of these papers, almost sacred, almost prohibited, which he would touch and which death alone could have placed in his hands, he had in this moment the consciousness, in a more heartbreaking manner, of the irrevocable departure of his mother; tears returned to him and he wept there, alone, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... midsummer while I was Police Commissioner, and most of each night I spent walking through the tenement-house districts and visiting police stations to see what was being done. It was a tragic week. We did everything possible to alleviate the suffering. Much of it was heartbreaking, especially the gasping misery of the little children and of the worn-out mothers. Every resource of the Health Department, of the Police Department, and even the Fire Department (which flooded the hot streets) was ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... by death and worked into our past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely knew, barely more than face and name then, but know and have the right to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's heartbreaking dedication to the ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... was white as a sheet. He did not care a dollar for his lost gold, but for this Indian boy to fail him—oh, it was heartbreaking! He buried his face in his hands. "Oh, Foxy!" he almost sobbed. "Foxy, my little Chippewa friend, I have tried so hard to treat you square—and—Foxy, you've failed me! You've failed me." And big, burly Jack Cornwall's tear-wet face was lying against Larry's ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... table spread beside the coping of the fount. A captain bowed with easy recognition and drew out two chairs. A statue-like waiter, born but to obey and, obeying, sweat, bowed less easy recognition and bent his spine to the backaching, heartbreaking angle of servitude. And through the gleaming maze of tables, light-footed as if her blood were foaming, Mrs. Violet Smith, tossing the curling ribbon of a jest over one shoulder. Following ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... extraordinary thing of all, and one that brought convincing confirmation to what had at first been mere suspicion, at night there could be heard heartbreaking cries and sobs coming from the house of Baji Lal. The voice was not his, nor that of his wife; it was, in all truth, the wail of a spirit, plaintive at times, then angry as if shrieking aloud for vengeance. For I myself have heard these sounds ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... now come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war. At first the mere horror of it stunned the more thoughtful of us; and even now only those who are not in actual contact with or bereaved relation to its heartbreaking wreckage can think sanely about it, or endure to hear others discuss it coolly. As to the thoughtless, well, not for a moment dare I suggest that for the first few weeks they were all scared out of their wits; for I know too well that the British civilian does not allow his perfect courage ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... to separate the father and son. They clung to each other again and again, as if they had a presentiment that they should meet no more. Poor John was almost as violently affected: his master, as he always called Mr. Martin, was as dear to him as a father. He stood by, witnessing this heartbreaking struggle, overpowered with his own feelings, and wretched at seeing his dear respected master undergoing such a trial. "Ah, Miss Helen," whispered he, "what would I give to get one kiss of my master's hand before I leave him! But do not intrude on him: I would not add to his ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... was in his mouth. What kind of a trick was fate playing on him? Was this to be the end of his heartbreaking struggle, his wild flight through the woods? Was he to get just a tantalizing glimpse of liberty to have it immediately snatched from him? At that moment he tasted ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... that heartbreaking book, the LIFE OF SCOTT. One should read such works now and then, but O, not often. As I live, I feel more and more that literature should be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it cannot be made beautiful and pious and heroic. We wish it to be a green place; the WAVERLEY NOVELS ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that and to play with it. "And you can't say I've not been ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... ship sailed from Sydney. At the same time Denison was touched by the allusion to passage money and expenses, and felt that making entries about the birth of clutches of chickens and ducklings, and the number of eggs sold, would be simple enough—much easier than the heartbreaking work of a supercargo, when such customers as Flash Harry of Apia or Fiji Bill of Apamama would challenge the correctness of their grog bills, and offer to fight him instead of paying. And then, he thought, it would be simply delightful ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... I have," replied Braxton. "And it's always been a treat to see the way he did his work. I saw him at the Polo Grounds when in that last, heartbreaking game he won the championship for the Giants. And I saw him, too, in that last game of the World's Series, when it seemed as though only a miracle could save the day. That triple play was the most wonderful ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... moved for a retrial, and began anew his heartbreaking labours in forcing a way to definite action through the thorn thicket of technicalities. At the same time, on his own account, and very secretly, he commenced a search for evidence against the attorneys for the defence. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... sure. He stands right up. He's never taken a cropper in his life. God smiles on him. God has always smiled on him. He's never been beaten down to his knees... yet. I... I should not care to see that sight. It would be heartbreaking. And, Evan—" Her hand went out to his in a pleading gesture that merged into a half-caress. "—I am afraid for him now. That is why I don't know what to do. It is not for myself that I back and fill and hesitate. If he were ignoble, if he were narrow, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... Lamb's subjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and the shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking evasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things he can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish art-neophytes of our age that they ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... circus, the family were greatly shocked, but the boy's declaration was regarded as a harmless illusion. This idea had taken complete control of his boyish imagination. Urged on by illusory hopes he was constantly practicing tricks and antics that led him into many heartbreaking escapades that made the cellar sessions more frequent. But nothing could suppress his good nature ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... invaders. In another place a company of reserves were recharging cases of artillery shells which had been sent back from the front in carload lots. There were horses here —a whole troop of draft horses which had been worn out in that relentless, heartbreaking labor into which war sooner or later resolves itself. The drove had been shipped back this far to be rested and cured up, or to be shot in the event that they were ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... by Daniel Boone to his wife in that heartbreaking interview no one ever knew. When the scout rejoined the band, which now had assembled behind the protecting barricade, he said simply: "We must prepare for a hasty burial. These bodies must not be left for the wolves ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... this opportunity of studying the features of the fine old hall, and making a note of them for future use. "What a magnificent old place!" he said to himself. "Trelawney says the man is at his last gasp, and will positively have to turn out before long. Poor beggar! I pity him. It must be heartbreaking to leave an old place like this, where one's ancestors have lived for generations, where every stone has its history, and the spirits of the departed seem still hovering in the ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... sometimes clogs and stops from friction and heat. I had had von Hofe and other reels freeze. But in this instance, it seemed that for the reel to freeze would be simply heartbreaking. Well—it froze, tight as a shut vise! I sat there, clutching the vibrating rod, and I watched the swordfish as the swells lifted him. I expected the line to break, but, ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... contracted. His resentment against his friend was gone. Surely it was a wise physician who had given him that heartbreaking little scene to remember when he should be tempted to harden his heart against the woman ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... whom I love more and more every day, as I discover moment by moment the wealth of his nature, leaves the printing-house more and more to me. Why, I guess. Our poverty, yours, and ours, and our mother's, is heartbreaking to him. Our adored David is a Prometheus gnawed by a vulture, a haggard, sharp-beaked regret. As for himself, noble fellow, he scarcely thinks of himself; he is hoping to make a fortune for us. He spends his ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... moment, and then he said: "No, we mustn't make terms with war, any more than we must do with cholera. It's a great, heartbreaking evil, and it puts everything back a stage. Of course it brings out fine qualities—I know that—and so does a plague of cholera. It's the evil in both that brings out the fine things to oppose it. But we ought to have more faith, and believe that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of jungle creatures more fitted to impress one with the prodigality of tropical nature. Four years before, we set ourselves to work to discover the first eggs and young of toucans, and after weeks of heartbreaking labor and disappointments we succeeded. Out of the five species of toucans living in this part of Guiana we found the nests of four, and the one which eluded us was the big sulphur-breasted fellow. I remembered so vividly the painstaking ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... somewhat relieved about my lady, I began to think a little of myself, and to wonder what the count meant to do with me. I felt certain he would never let me see her again if he could help it, and that alone was a heartbreaking grief to me; and then it came into my head that perhaps he would confine me somewhere for life—shut me up in a convent, perhaps, or a madhouse! As soon as this idea possessed me, it grew and grew till ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... lad, for it would be heartbreaking to know that all we've done out there, planting fruit-trees and getting the place in such nice trim, should be 'lowed to go back again to ruin, and grow over into forest wilds, as it would ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... her face swollen and stamped with the carpet-nap, squirming in a grief that was actually abashing before it was heartbreaking, Ann 'Lisbeth Connors, whose only epiphany of life was love, and shut out from so much else that helps make life sweet, was now shut out from none of ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... gleamings of pearls from her shining eyelids. Her handkerchief was soon a little wad of wet lace, ridiculously pathetic; her lips were blubbered. She wept on and on till she just had to blow her little red nose. She blew it with exquisite candor, and it gave forth the heartbreaking squawk of the first toy trumpet a child breaks ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... that had better be frankly met. The objectors to the Land Courts say that the applicants are so many and the process is so slow, it is almost useless and worse than heartbreaking to apply for relief. One thing, however, must be remembered—during the interim of application and hearing, a tenant cannot be disturbed in his holding, and if he refuses to pay his rent the landlord cannot evict him. The following ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... me as I write. Let no one ever say that this is a dull world! It is anything but dull! It is a pitiful, heartbreaking world, full of injustice, misunderstandings, false standards, and selfishness, but it is never dull. Neither is it a lost world, for the darkest corners of it are illuminated here and there by heroic deeds ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... Market without her. She was awake in an instant, and her face flushed pink with anger as she jumped out of bed, indignant at being deprived of her share of the unpleasant trip to the markets. Three times a week she nerved herself for that heartbreaking journey in the raw morning air, resolved never to let Chook see her flinch from her duty. As she started to dress herself with feverish haste, Chook recovered enough from his astonishment to ask ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... means!" said he. "Only I warn you I never tire when I find any one who will study Browning with me. I tried to read The Ring and the Book with a dear friend once, and reading my favorite part, 'Giuseppe Caponsacchi,' as I raised my eyes after that heartbreaking finale, 'O, great, just, good God! Miserable me!' I saw she was dozing. Since then, I read Browning with ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... attractive woman who is forced to earn her own living? In the business world? In the artistic world? Anywhere? I do not say that men are a pack of wolves, but—I had such a heartbreaking experience, especially in my brief musical career. I might have had a small part in grand opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City, so one particular musical wolf assured me, if I would show a little ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... been scattered in the thin grass over the poet, and one hardly dared lift one's eyes from them to the heartbreaking epitaph which one could not ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... we had to rely so completely on ourselves. No guardian to think for us, no precedent to follow without question, no lawmaker above, only ordinary men set to deal with heartbreaking perplexity. All weakness comes to the surface. We are homeless in a jungle of machines and untamed powers that haunt and lure the imagination. Of course our culture is confused, our thinking spasmodic, ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... how brilliant the gunnery, how wonderful the cannon, how devastating the shells, if the target at which they are aimed is sufficiently far away and sufficiently small, the result will be disappointing; and the Russians at Dvinsk saw to it that the Germans experienced a long series of costly and heartbreaking disappointments of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... the familiar cliffs and downs under their hungry eyes, suddenly confronted with an alternative of the cruellest description, a Hobson's choice that left them no option but to submit or fight. It was a heartbreaking predicament for men, and more especially for sailor-men, to be placed in, and if they sometimes rose to the occasion like men and did their best to heave the gang bodily into the sea, or to drive them out of the ship with such weapons as their hard situation and the sailor's ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... of old churches on the Aventine. I was freshly struck with the rare distinction of the little Protestant cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you—in such a world as this—to renounce. If it should "make one in love with death to lie there," that's only if death should be conscious. As the case stands, the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowery sod, and the ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... pious spirit. For Swift could love and could pray." Left to himself and to the natural thoughts of his mind, without those "orders" to which he had bound himself as a necessary part of his trade, he could have turned to his God with questionings which need not then have been heartbreaking. "It is my belief," says Thackeray, "that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to hire." I doubt whether any of Swift's works are very much read now, but perhaps ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... a chair and stared into vacancy. In all those long, long years of incessant struggle against heartbreaking obstacles he had never lost courage or faith. But this blow at the very life of the university and from its friends! He could not even lift himself enough to look to his God; it seemed to him that God ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... very pleasant to loaf along a passable road mounted on a light-footed horse, and Hazel enjoyed it if for no more than the striking contrast to that terrible journey in and out of the Klappan. Here were no heartbreaking mountains to scale. The scourge of flies was well-nigh past. They took the road in easy stages, well-provisioned, sleeping in a good bed at nights, camping as the spirit moved when a likely trout stream crossed their trail, venison and grouse all about them for variety ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... cried despairingly, "she's already asked them! It's a heartbreaking business, I tell you. Many a time when she's piped up in our walks or at the table with some question about her father and mother I've ignored it or feigned not to hear; but within the past year or two I've had to fashion ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... running he had no doubt. Up the path, past the old men sitting in the shade, past Mataara crouched in the doorway of the Big House, he followed at the heels of Mauriri. At his own heels, doglike, plodded Hare-Lip. From behind came the cries of the hunters, but the pace Mauriri led them was heartbreaking. The broad path narrowed, swung to the right, and pitched upward. The last grass house was left, and through high thickets of cassi and swarms of great golden wasps the way rose steeply until it became a goat-track. Pointing upward to a bare shoulder of volcanic rock, Mauriri ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... of heartbreaking misery have not killed his love or withered his hope. Surely love like his cannot fail of its reward. And maybe in the new world he will have the happiness that has been denied him in the old world, and in the evening of his life he may have the peaceful calm that has hitherto been ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... Marie Louise thought that his must be a heartbreaking business in these days when ships were being slaughtered in such numbers. She asked Polly and her husband if they ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... cigar, and his lady's gondola no longer traced his path. Then he saw the present in its real light: a palace without a soul, a soul that had no effect on the body, a principality without money, an empty body and a full heart—a thousand heartbreaking contradictions. The hapless youth mourned for Venice as she had been,—as did Vendramini, even more bitterly, for it was a great and common sorrow, a similar destiny, that had engendered such a warm friendship ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... curious smile of tender pity at the memory. "Afterwards—when I stood near her, trembling—she even took my hand and held it. Once she kissed it humbly like a little child while her tears rained down. Never before was there anything as innocently heartbreaking. She was so piteously grateful for love of any kind and so ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that she retained "l'oreille juste." Her husband said she wrote well, and he must know. Besides, am I to be convinced in my penultimate chapter that anything can be wrong with the model I have followed? Certainly not. It would be heartbreaking. ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... sure you will do me the justice to believe that I would strain every nerve in your service, but it is actually heartbreaking to throw away my earnings on others. I am no rich man, abounding, like Mr. Rogers, in superfluous thousands, but working hard for independence, and what would be the most grateful pleasure to me if likely to be useful to you personally, becomes merely painful if it causes ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... of his manner, the gentleness, had a heartbreaking effect. In a moment the woman's eyes were flooded with tears, which coursed down her cheeks. It was the relief that her poor troubled brain and nerves demanded, and ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... bear to hear her heartbreaking sobs. With the impulse of a father soothing a child he lifts her from the ground, and holding her in his strong embrace, strides on at the head of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... away in the future, living in the earthly paradise which had been conjured up before him by the warm, inspiring sentences of this miners' leader, and joyful in the contemplation of this paradise of happy humanity, he fell asleep. Could he have foreseen the terrible, heartbreaking ordeals through which Smillie often had to pass, still clinging with tenacity to the gleam that led him on, praying sometimes that strength would be given to keep him from turning back; of the strenuous battle he had, not only with those he fought against, but of the greater and ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... lady tourists as well as gentlemen staying at Cong. They were on pleasure bent, and had been dreadfully annoyed and disgusted in Galway at the heartbreaking scene attending the departure of some poor Irish emigrants. They are unreasonable in their grief, and take parting as if it were death; but it is as death to many of the aged relatives who will see these faces whom they love no ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... the papers that the Algonquin Trust Company had closed its doors; I read the heartbreaking details of the crowds besieging it, the lines of frightened people standing there in the rain all night long. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... far, farther than his strength could go. Yet he swam on, fighting against the heartbreaking thought that his companion had perhaps gone "down to the dim sea-line" in very truth. She had been so brave, so strong. She had buoyed up his courage when it had been fainting; she had fought splendidly against the last terrible ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... that you never can be uninspired, never to have a doubt or a shadowy misgiving. Neither you nor I nor Prothero will ever know a hundredth part of the rapture Nicky knows. We get it for five minutes, an hour, perhaps, and all the rest is simply hard, heavy, heartbreaking, grinding labour." ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... raised a monument for those other gallant gentlemen who died—Wilson, Oates, Bowers, Evans. They are all drawn for us clearly by him in these pages; they stand out unmistakably. They, too, come to be friends of ours, their death is as noble and as heartbreaking. And there were gallant gentlemen, I said, who lived—you may read amazing stories of them. Indeed, it is a wonderful tale of manliness that these two volumes tell us. I put them down now; but I have been for a few ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... And Mrs. Lynde says it is the most hideous color for a building, especially when combined with a red roof, that she ever saw or imagined. You could simply have knocked me down with a feather when I heard it. It's heartbreaking, after all the ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... been very hopeful. I don't know exactly what his mind runs on, but I can see that he is making heaps of plans in regard to the future, and oh! You can't think how glad and how thankful I am for the change. The state of dull, heartbreaking, weary depression that he fell into just after getting the news of our failure was beginning to undermine his health. I could see that plainly, and felt quite wretched about him. But now he is comparatively ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne |
