"Irrevocable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all, this was the cruel destiny of Kullervo, the irrevocable end of the son of the heroes—the death of ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... manner, my forebodings were realized. That night I was destined to meet a sorrow surpassing any which my troubled life had known. Even now I experience great difficulty in relating the matters which befell, in speaking of the sense of irrevocable loss which came to me. Briefly, then, at about ten minutes before the dining hour, whilst all the passengers, myself included, were below, dressing, a faint cry arose from somewhere aft on the upper deck—a cry which was swiftly taken up by other voices, so that presently a deck steward echoed ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... blindly, and without fully realising the difficulties of a clergyman's position. He has considered all of them himself, and has been shown how small they are, when they are faced boldly, but he wishes you, too, to feel them as strongly and completely as possible before committing yourself to irrevocable vows, so that you may never, never have to regret the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... crossing of this stream was in reality a declaration of war against the Republic, and later writers relate that upon arriving at the Rubicon Caesar long hesitated whether he should take this irrevocable step, and that, after pondering many hours, he at length exclaimed, "The die is cast," and plunged into the river. But there is not a word of this in ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... if that is your irrevocable decision I will return to-morrow and report," he answered in very good English, though he was typically Italian. "But I warn you that mischief is meant if you do not obey. Duperre told me so. Like myself you are paid to act as directed and to keep a silent tongue. Only ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... Here, by your august ancestors, the Law of Primogeniture was settled, and much rubbish was annihilated in the House of Brandenburg: Eldest Son always to inherit the Electorate unbroken; after Anspach and Baireuth no more apanages, upon any cause or pretext whatsoever; and these themselves to lapse irrevocable to the main or Electoral House, should they ever fall vacant again. Fine fruit of the decisive sense that was in the Hohenzollerns; of their fine talent for annihilating rubbish,—which feat, if a man can do it, and keep doing it, will more than most others accelerate ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... never will be—else we must imagine an action of God returning upon itself—a purposeless and futile action. Man is a creature. Creatures are thoughts of God. It is the nature of thought to be irrevocable. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hat—I understood when I was a little boy that I was to have that some day. But now I get a hat for ten shillings, or less, two or three times a year. In the old days buying clothes was well-nigh as irrevocable as marriage. Our flat is furnished with glittering things—wanton arm-chairs just strong enough not to collapse under you, books in gay covers, carpets you are free to drop lighted fusees upon; you may scratch what you like, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... nothing else than Carlo's work. He sat in darkness in the room where Carlo had spoken, thinking of him as living and dead. The brilliant life in Carlo protested against a possible fatal tendency in his acts so irrevocable as to plunge him to destruction when his head was clear, his blood cool, and a choice lay open to him. That brilliant young life, that fine face, the tones of Carlo's voice, swept about Merthyr, accusing him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as there is no real change of heart in Germany and no final and irrevocable break with militarism, the law of self-preservation should be considered paramount; no fresh extension of Prussian militarism to other continents and seas should be tolerated; and the conquered German colonies can be regarded only as guaranties for the security of the future peace of the world. This ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... commemorated. Two Greek proverbs have accidentally been explained by Pausanias: "He is a man of Tenedos!" to describe a person of unquestionable veracity; and "To cut with the Tenedian axe;" to express an absolute and irrevocable refusal. The first originated in a king of Tenedos, who decreed that there should always stand behind the judge a man holding an axe, ready to execute justice on any one convicted of falsehood. The other arose from the same king, whose father having reached his island, to supplicate ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... from whom I spring? My father's sire was king of all the gods; My ancestors fill all the universe. Where can I hide? In the dark realms of Pluto? But there my father holds the fatal urn; His hand awards th' irrevocable doom: Minos is judge of all the ghosts in hell. Ah! how his awful shade will start and shudder When he shall see his daughter brought before him, Forced to confess sins of such varied dye, Crimes it may ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... one last motive which is not stated in my text, but is involved in the very idea of opportunity or season—viz. that the time for the high and noble purposes of which I have been speaking is rigidly limited and bounded; and once past is irrevocable. The old, wise mythological story tells us that Occasion is bald behind, and is to be grasped by the forelock. The moment that is past had in it wonderful possibilities for us. If we did not grasp them with promptitude and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... told that the determination of a woman is irrevocable, so a little delay does not much matter. Meanwhile, another problem passes my comprehension. I have thought and thought about it, and am convinced there is a misunderstanding somewhere, which possibly will be cleared ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... training; but laws of judgment to manhood, and concern themselves with remedy and reward. There is a highly curious feeling in the English mind against educational law: we think no man's liberty should be interfered with till he has done irrevocable wrong; whereas it is then just too late for the only gracious and kingly interference, which is to hinder him from doing it. Make your educational laws strict, and your criminal ones may be gentle; but, leave youth its liberty and you will have to dig dungeons for age. And it is good for a man ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of delay; and if it had not been for that, he often thought it would have been impossible to have held to his purpose. But as it was, all engagements, whatever they might be, had to be pressed into the short space of a fortnight, and under the double impulse of Maurice's own energies, and of that irrevocable must, things went on fast ...
— A Canadian Heroine - A Novel, Volume 3 (of 3) • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... nature had known. An importunate thought, of which he had till now refused to see more than the shadow as it dogged his footsteps, at last rushed upon him and grasped him: he was obliged to pause and decide whether he would surrender and obey, or whether he would give the refusal that must carry irrevocable consequences. It was in the room above Nello's shop, which Tito had now hired as a lodging, that the elder Cennini handed him the last quota of the sum on behalf of Bernardo Rucellai, the purchaser of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... innocent enough, a girl's first love-kiss, and the kiss of a man who loved in earnest for the first time, but it seemed a great and a fearful thing to her, irrevocable as lost innocence itself; and he, whose masculine light-heartedness made not much of mere kisses, and laughed at the thought that love could do much wrong, felt that he had given a pledge he must redeem and a promise he ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... these five, or ten, or twenty years, for every one of us the judgment will be set, and the books opened. If that be true, far more than that must be true. Is there but one day of judgment? Why, for us every day is a day of judgment—every day is a Dies Irae, and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors of your houses—it waits at the corners of your streets; we are in the midst of judgment—the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... Judson Terwilliger applied by wire to the authorities in Rome for all right, title, and interest in one dukedom, free from encumbrances, irrevocable, and duly witnessed by the proper dignitaries of the Italian government, and at the second interview with the spectre cook of Bangletop, he was able to show her a cablegram received from the Eternal City stating that the papers would be sent ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... politicians, by an alliance with Southern leaders, on the part of others who care nothing for the South as such; a lingering tenderness, a forgiving magnanimity and generosity, among the people at large, which would in this case be wholly misplaced; and finally an easy faith in the extent and irrevocable nature of the successes already accomplished—all concur to lead on to the commission ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... in a lighter manner, and yet with a show of effort in assuming it, which was even more expressive than the manner he dismissed; 'it is no irrevocable offence in a young fellow of your brother's years, if he is heedless, inconsiderate, and expensive - a little dissipated, in the ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... self-deception that my own pride forbade discussion with her. As it was, I was able to say: "Don't try to spare me, Carlotta, I'm glad you had the courage and the good sense not to let us both drift into irrevocable folly. I thank you." I opened the door into the hall. "Let us talk no more about it. We could say to each other only the things that sting or the things that stab. Let us be friends. You must give me your friendship, at least." ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... the wicked will still be living upon the earth in their mortal state,—men will be planting and building, eating and drinking, all unconscious that the final, irrevocable decision has been pronounced in the sanctuary above. Before the flood, after Noah entered the ark, God shut him in, and shut the ungodly out; but for seven days the people, knowing not that their doom was fixed, continued their careless, pleasure-loving life, and mocked ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... resolution. I have devoted the week to the envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the solution came to me as something final and irrevocable. Mistrusting the counsels of the night, when the brain is unduly excited by nervous insomnia, I have applied the test of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... has made, with whatever reluctance, an irrevocable decision, it is doubtless well to become adjusted to it as rapidly as possible; and this he can best do by thinking of the decision as a wise one—the only one, in fact, which a sensible person could have made. Thus it was ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... principal delight should be in augmenting your domestic felicity, and returning your affection, even to the height of romance. To a man of less keen sensibility, and less enthusiastic tenderness of disposition, Flora Mac-Ivor might give content, if not happiness; for were the irrevocable words spoken, never would she be deficient in the duties ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... economically with men and boys they will be inferior in precisely the measure in which they differ from men. All that constitutes this difference they are supposed not to trade upon except in one way, and that is by winning or luring a man to marry, selling themselves in an almost irrevocable bargain, and then following and sharing his ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... my dearest, my poor, poor child! It shall be never if you choose, Lynette. But make no rash vows, no determinations that you think irrevocable. Leave the future to God. Now dry these dear eyes, and put old thoughts and memories of sorrow and of wrong most resolutely away from you. Be happy, as Our Lord meant all innocent creatures of His to be. And do not be tempted ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... to his sick fancy as he had seen it last in Dick's studio in the vague light of an October evening, and yet with a certain new shadow, half sad and half reproachful, in the beautiful eyes. After all, had he done his best for the child? Now that this thing was irrevocable and complete, a host of old misgivings and doubts, which he had believed long ago banished, broke in upon him. He had only asked that she should be happy—at least, he said, it had never been a question ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... heart. At a time when she was crying out for something to satisfy her need, in an unguarded moment, she had mistaken an awakened, fleeting impression for love, and passed what was now in her eyes an irrevocable word. She was no coquette, who gives a promise the one day to be carelessly withdrawn the next. George Fordyce had been fortunate in gaining the promise of a woman whose word was as her bond. There are circumstances in which even such a bond may become null ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... enacted. From that day to this no charge of crookedness or dishonesty has been made against a professional ball player. Repeated attempts have been made to reinstate these men or those of them now living, but their expulsion was final and irrevocable. ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... They had reached that irrevocable and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling intersection of all youth and all joy. They realized the verses of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty years old taken together. It was marriage sublimated; these ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... The irrevocable meaning of the thing she had feared in her dreams seemed too vast to comprehend when it drew near her, and she had not clearly realized that minutes now—and few of them—stood between her husband and his death. Her scornful eyes ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... nothing; I felt not the least hesitation at taking the last irrevocable step; I was filled with joy and impatience. Never did a betrothed lover count the slow hours with more feverish ardour; I slept only to dream that I was saying mass; I believed there could be nothing in the world more delightful than to be a priest; ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... to-day. I was very much pleased with some of the things; there are some good colossal figures, and an exquisite statue of a kneeling girl, that charmed me greatly; there are some excellent busts, too. How wonderfully that irrevocable substance assumes the soft, round forms of life! The color in its passionless purity (absence of color, I suppose I should say) is really harder than the substance itself of marble. I could not fall in love with a statue, as the poor girl in Procter's poem did with the Apollo Belvidere, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... consideration, to say nothing of the doubts which had just arisen. A pause had ensued, however, for the Duke, busied with his own feelings, had suffered his thoughts to run back into the past; and, as is the case with every human being whose mind dwells upon the acts that are irrevocable, he found matter for sorrow and regret. After about five minutes' silence, during which they both continued to gaze thoughtfully into the fire, the Duke returned to the matter before them ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... did, by ordinance irrevocable without the consent of the United States and the people of said State, as required by said act, provide that perfect toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured and that no inhabitant of said State shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... moment, to have the tingling delight of showing the grand creature he had just begun to tame. He was going to extinguish the pallid light of Susan's prettiness in the brightness of Myrtle's beauty. He would bring this young man, neutralized and rendered entirely harmless by his irrevocable pledge to a slight girl, face to face with a masterpiece of young womanhood, and say to him, not in words, but as plainly as speech could have told him, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... alternative," Cherry pleaded. "It can't be that marriage is the only—the only irrevocable thing! If you had a partner that you couldn't go on with, you could come to SOME agreement! You could make a sacrifice, but somehow you could end the association! Peter," she said, earnestly, "when I think of marketing again—six chops and soup-meat and butter ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... Ingebiorg and her brother appealed to Pope Celestine III, who declared the sentence of divorce illegal and null. Philip not only paid no attention to the numerous letters and legates of the Pope, but he tried to make the divorce irrevocable by taking a new wife. After several rebuffs he found in Agnes of Meran, the daughter of a Bavarian noble, one who was willing to accept the dubious position (1196). Innocent III at once took up an uncompromising attitude, and instructed his legates that if Philip refused to send away Agnes ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... roses, on the steps of porticoes, a fragrance floated up like incense round the limbs of statues, which were bathed in a golden light by the lamps of the piazza. Those marble countenances were placid with an eternal youth, beneath the same stars that had embellished irrevocable nights, that recalled some excursions into an enchanted world, some romantic gestures the knack ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... step to preferment! Was this the care and labour thou hast taken To bring thy foes together to a banquet, To lose thy crown, and be deluded thus! Well, now I see my cause is desperate, The judgment's pass'd, sentence irrevocable, Therefore I'll be content and clap my hands, And give a plaudite to their proceedings. What, shall I leave my hate begun unperfect? So foully vanquish'd by the spiteful Senses! Shall I, the embassadress of gods and men, That pull'd proud Phoebe from her brightsome sphere, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... in her changed circumstances. It would be like him then to step forward and avow himself ready to marry her. But it was out of the question for her to consent. She wished the matter settled and done with; she wished the irrevocable words spoken. ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... regarded by me as a settlement in principle and substance—a final settlement of the dangerous and exciting subjects which they embraced. Most of these subjects, indeed, are beyond your reach, as the legislation which disposed of them was in its character final and irrevocable. It may be presumed from the opposition which they all encountered that none of those measures was free from imperfections, but in their mutual dependence and connection they formed a system of compromise the most conciliatory and best for the entire country that could be obtained ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... will plainly perceive that I have no personal interests in these, or any other points, at variance with yours; but, on the contrary, if I were base and interested, I have now taken a decisive and irrevocable step to ruin my prospects; having no other security for such not being the consequence of my candour save my good opinion of your ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... to implore your forgiveness for neglecting to obey as to the advertisement, but the truth is——" and he hesitated—"I have a plan. It may not meet with your concurrence," he added, "but I wished to submit it before you made other and irrevocable arrangements." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... form a Constitution and State Government, and admitted as a new State into the Union, by the name of Louisiana. The acts of Congress for these purposes, in addition to sundry important provisions respecting rivers and public lands, which are declared to be irrevocable unless by common consent, annex other terms and conditions, whereby it is established, not only that the Constitution of Louisiana should be republican, but that it should contain the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, that it should secure to the citizens the trial by ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... once a judgment had been given and had been duly recorded it was irrevocable, and if any judge attempted to alter such a decision he was severely punished. For not only was he expelled from his judgment-seat, and debarred from exercising judicial functions in the future, but, if his judgment had involved the infliction of a penalty, he ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... now! Phyllis felt, with her substitute in her place, her own wraps on, and her feet taking her swiftly towards her goal, as if she were offering herself to be made a nun, or have a hand or foot cut off, or paying herself away in some awful, irrevocable fashion. She packed, mechanically, all the pretty things Mrs. De Guenther had given her, and nothing else. She found herself at the door of her room with the locked suit-case in her hand, and not even a nail-file of the ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... was of so great importance to his peace. Though from his impatience to obtain the object of his passion, three months seemed an age, yet he disposed himself to wait with patience, relying on the sultan's word, which he looked upon to be irrevocable. But all that time he not only counted the hours, days, and weeks, but every moment. When two of the three months were past, his mother one evening going to light the lamp, and finding no oil in the house, went out to buy some, and when she ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... in the process of rectification will inevitably feel that they are being robbed of their guardian angels, that they are "orphans"—a mournful word greatly beloved of the Russian masses under multiform circumstances, both material and spiritual—and orphaned in a peculiarly distressing and irrevocable way. They might even feel when their saints' days came around quite correctly the next year that some spurious adventurer—Angel of Darkness—was being foisted ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Deus." And from this point until the "Per Christum Dominum nostrum, Amen," which, since there was no Mass, closed the ceremony, he felt more master of himself and his emotions than at any time previously during this day. A sensation of finality, of the irrevocable, came to him. He said within himself, "This matter has passed out of my hands into the hands of God." And in the midst of the violence of the storm a calm stole upon his spirit. "God knows best!" he said within himself. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... in the conflict between this earthly passion and his heavenly calling and election. But the author has taken pains to make the obstacle between Andrea and Ilaria absolutely unreal. The fact that Andrea has as yet taken no irrevocable vow is not the essence of the matter. Vow or no vow, there would have been a tragic conflict if Andrea had felt absolutely certain of his calling to the priesthood, and had defied Heaven, and imperilled his immortal soul, because of his overwhelming passion. That would have been a tragic situation; ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... the Desmonds a haunting anxiety, and for Lenox the harassing realisation that his own strength or weakness during the next few months stood for no less than the happiness or misery of the only woman on earth. It is this irrevocable fusion of two lives, and the network of responsibilities arising from an act less simple than it seems, that constitute the strength, the charm, the tragedy of marriage: and a dim foreknowledge of its complexity dawned upon Lenox during his penitential progress into a ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... may bear a rich harvest. It often, indeed, passes an irrevocable sentence on weakness and misery, but often, too, it leads to a healthy revival, and lays the foundation of a new and vigorous constitution. "I recognize in the effect of war upon national character," said Wilhelm von Humboldt, "one of the most salutary elements in the moulding ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... abstraction. We want matters of fact. Your case may be true as philosophy, but you have failed to ground it in example." So it is to history that our last appeal must be made, for, says Bolingbroke, "History is philosophy, teaching by example." Every decree of her stern tribunal is impartial and irrevocable. War the tonic or war the poison? She is the final judge. She will take you back, if you will, to her childhood days and point you out vast empires, owning the known world, Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Medes, and Persians, ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... decisions of that Parliament on them are so often of paramount importance to the whole world, if the Parliament should be the only body in the world denied the right of revising its own judgments, the only one whose first resolution is so irrevocable that even itself may not change or modify it. To rescind a recent vote is, no doubt, as Sir Robert Peel said, a step not wholly free from objection. It should be an exceptional act, as one which, if often repeated, would give an appearance of capricious ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... when he remembered that he had given Gantry, the division traffic manager of the Transcontinental, a quiet hint to look up one Evan Blount, a young lawyer, on his next visit to Boston. By all odds it would be better to wait for Gantry's report before taking any irrevocable steps in the bargaining with Evan Blount's father; but unhappily the crisis had arrived, and in all probability it could not be postponed. None the less, the vice-president tried ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... Napoleon had demanded on the spot the hand of the Czar's marriageable sister, Catherine, it is doubtful if Alexander would have refused. But the imperial host still vacillated, for he had not taken the irrevocable step; a hesitating mention was made of his guest's younger sister, Anne, who was still a child, as an eventual possibility, and ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... human being. Her passionate self-love instinctively, unconsciously, had made of his life the appendage of hers. And now—? His devotion had never been so plain, so attested; and all the while bitter, terrifying voices rang upon the inner ear, voices of fate, vague and irrevocable. ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cause of Cromwell's fall! The king wanted Whitehall. The sly Cromwell noticed it, and made him a present of his gem, the palace on whose construction and decoration he had labored ten years. Henry accepted the present; but now Cromwell's fall was irrevocable. The king could not, of course, forgive Cromwell for having dared to offer him a present so valuable, that Henry could not or would not repay it. He remained, therefore, Cromwell's debtor; and since this tormented and vexed ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... Florence in the year 1261. He fought in two battles, and was fourteen times ambassador, and once prior of the republic. Through one fatal error, he fell a victim to party persecution, which ended in irrevocable banishment. His last resting-place was Ravenna, where the persecution of his only patron is said to have caused the poet's death. What an affecting record of gratitude! His last days at Ravenna are thus referred to by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... more cheerful than any other mortuary employment, this disinterment of the person you have been, and are not any longer; and so did Perion find his cataloguing of irrevocable ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... the significance of that signature her uncle had given the lawyers a few days before. Probably she would have accepted this act of fate as meekly as she had all else in her short life. For it must be clearly understood that the signature was irrevocable. No change of mind, no sober second thought coming into John's cloudy mind, would be of any use. A contract of sale is as binding under such circumstances ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... sensations as the chevalier was incapable, he merely allowed such words of compliment to escape him as weigh neither with him who utters nor her who hears them; and yet, before the close of this first interview, the abbe had decided in his irrevocable will that this woman ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that illuminated the vicissitudes and passions of many years, until it was finally assimilated and became part of my being; the reader will also remember how the mere mention, at a certain moment, of the word "France" awoke a vital impulse, even a sense of final ordination, and how the irrevocable message was obeyed, and how it led to the creation of ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... vocation, advocate, irrevocable, vociferous, provoke, revoke, evoke, convoke; (2) vocable, vocabulary, avocation, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... test, and both knew it. Zoe was slightly pale. She fully realised that to conform now to Severac Bablon's wishes was tantamount to becoming a member of his organisation (which operated against her father!)—was to take a possibly irrevocable step in ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... think that Milton set space on the same absolute level as time. But that need not disturb the illustration. In the second place it is difficult to derive the true serial character of time from the relative theory. Each instant is irrevocable. It can never recur by the very character of time. But if on the relative theory an instant of time is simply the state of nature at that time, and the time-ordering relation is simply the relation between such states, then the irrevocableness of time would seem to mean ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... accepted the position, whether rightly or wrongly, and that the acceptance is ancient history. The question what shall he do next is sufficiently weighty to occupy all his attention without loading his mind with anxious doubts regarding the irrevocable past. ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... was irrevocable, and sovereigns took it to obtain pardon, to secure glory, and propitiate favor. The pope alone could release the votary, and he took good care to make the price heavy in ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... passing within: the poor novice despoiled of her transient finery, and clothed in the conventual garb; the bridal chaplet taken from her brow, and her beautiful head shorn of its long silken tresses. I heard her murmur the irrevocable vow. I saw her extended on a bier; the death-pall spread over her; the funeral service performed that proclaimed her dead to the world; her sighs were drowned in the deep tones of the organ, and the plaintive requiem of the nuns; the father ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the day,—thus haunted and terrified by night, but still not repenting her resolve, Leila saw the time glide on to that eventful day when her lips were to pronounce that irrevocable vow which is the epitaph of life. While in this obscure and remote convent progressed the history of an individual, we are summoned back to witness the crowning fate of ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of us the judgment will be set, and the books opened.[254] If that be true, far more than that must be true. Is there but one day of judgment? Why, for us every day is a day of judgment—every day is a Dies Irae,[255] and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West. Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors of your houses—it waits at the corners of your streets; we are in the midst ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... to him that what he said was irrevocable, but he was desperate. It seemed to him that in a moment more he would have told her his whole secret. But the young girl drew back from him with a slight start of surprise. There may have been something in the tone of his voice and in his manner that verged upon a seriousness ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... happened. When we were first engaged we both professed the same faith. From that faith I had gradually departed, and it seemed to me that it would be wicked if she were not made acquainted before she took a step which was irrevocable. This was true, but it was not quite all the truth, and with a woman's keenness she saw at once everything that was in me. She broke out instantly ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... youthful friend, or the reading of books not strictly religious, on Sunday, were acts not tolerated in his family. A child might wish to stay away from the house of God on the Sabbath, but it was not permitted. "Going to meeting" was a rule in the family as irrevocable as the laws of the ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... the Court of Directors should resolve to abolish the monopoly; but at the request of Mr. Sulivan the contract was without difficulty purged of this obnoxious clause. The term was made absolute, the monopoly rendered irrevocable, and the discretion of the Directors wholly excluded. Mr. Hastings declared the reserved condition to be no longer necessary, "because the Directors ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... them for just about one minute before he spoke, and during that minute each man there realized that what was coming would be quite irrevocable. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... current of galvanism it is possible to make the respiratory muscles of an animal recently dead act in precise imitation of life, and the heart can be excited into brisk contraction by the same means. But the result was that "the muscles excited by the current dropped quickly into irrevocable death through becoming exhausted under the stimulus, and that in fact the galvanic battery, according to our present knowledge of its use in these cases, is an all but certain instrument of death. By subjecting animals to death from the vapor of chloroform in the same atmosphere, and treating one ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... that of persons held to service. To avoid misconstruction of what I have said, I depart from my purpose not to speak of particular amendments, so far as to say that, holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable. ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... sharing in the duties of a guardian that she may visit her son, and see him, and be apprised of all the measures adopted for his education; but to intrust her with the sole guardianship of the boy without a strict guardian by her side, would cause the irrevocable ruin of ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... Homer felt, who gave his men With glory but a transient state: His very Jove could not reverse Irrevocable fate. ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... of illustrious patriots who participated in the exercises of the Mecklenburg Convention of the same date, 1775, not one was present to animate us with their counsel, or speak of the glorious deeds of the Revolutionary period—all having succumbed to the irrevocable fiat of nature, and passed to "that bourne whence no traveler returns." Their example, their precepts, and sacrifices in the cause of freedom, constitute their rich and instructive heritage to us. A cloudless sky, a balmy atmosphere, and a glow of patriotic ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... spirit as to induce her father, on his death-bed, to entreat Madame de Mancini to compel her to take the veil. In compliance with this injunction, Mary had been placed in a convent until she should attain the fitting age to assume the irrevocable vows. Thus trained in seclusion, and with no ambitious aspirations, she had acquired a character of perfect simplicity, and her countenance bore an expression of intelligence and sensibility far more attractive than ordinary ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... far-reaching reforms which have created the British India of the twentieth century were either most reluctantly sanctioned by the court of directors or have been carried out since its dominion was transferred to the crown. Irrevocable as they are, and beneficent as they may be on the whole, they have certainly imposed difficulties of portentous magnitude upon the rulers of India, nor would it be surprising if some native survivors of the olden days in ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... irrevocable hours, Futile as air or strong as fate to make Your lives of sand or granite; awful powers, Even as men choose, they either ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... had an expression of firmness and decision; he had formed a firm resolution, had come to an irrevocable determination. ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... was irrevocable. In my present ignorance of the domestic history of the Hadwins, I was unqualified to judge how far circumstances might extenuate or justify the act. On both accounts, therefore, it was ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... worn and battered are they by the storms of years! How tremblingly stands the Cross upon their ancient towers, as if its sacred form had become feeble like the fraternity that once flourished here! What witnesses they are of an irrevocable past! Their crumbling walls, if they could speak, might grow sublimely eloquent, and thrill us with inspiring tales of heroism, patience, tact, and fortitude exhibited when these Missions bloomed like flowery oases on the arid ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... not irrevocable—I may change, you know. In the meantime, let us go down to Fleet Street and interview Casey. And then, if you're good, I'll take you to ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... absolute and irrevocable determination that the bill is to be extended to us, the sooner the great penalty is inflicted the better; for in politics and commerce, as in all the other affairs of life, absolute and certain evil is better ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seldom met a young man with such natural gifts for finance and politics. I shall anchor five miles out from Whittingham to-night (for I know you have no ships), and if you join me, well and good. If not, I shall consider your decision irrevocable. ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... dare offer to anxious mourners grieving over sinful friends departed is that God only is the judge of what constitutes irrevocable rejection of good, that we cannot tell who has irrevocably "done despite to the Spirit of grace," and that the deep love and pain of Christ for sinful men remains for ever and ever. We may tell the ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... of the moment, the solemnity of the ceremony, the sacred glooms which surrounded me, and the chilling silence that prevailed when I uttered the irrevocable vow—all conspired to impress my imagination, and to raise my views to heaven. When I knelt at the altar, the sacred flame of pure devotion glowed in my heart, and elevated my soul to sublimity. The world and all its recollections ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... agonies of remorse. Thyrsis would face the blunder they had made—it might have been avoided so easily, and now it was irrevocable! His whole body would shake with silent sobbing. Ah, this curse of their lives, this hideous shame—that they had not even been able to take proper care of their child! This wrong, too, the world meant to inflict upon them—this ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... the turf should be protected against you. In either case the judges desire to bring your career as an owner to a close; and we hereby bar you and your entries from all tracks of the Association. This is final and irrevocable.' ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote |
