"Misery" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... insight are not of the same quality. Here is a musician who is a greater master than anyone else in the discovering of tones, peculiar to suffering, oppressed, and tormented souls, who can endow even dumb misery with speech. Nobody can approach him in the colours of late autumn, in the indescribably touching joy of a last, a very last, and all too short gladness; he knows of a chord which expresses those secret and weird ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... with him, who loved her better than his life. But in a quick vision he saw her with him, she who was delicately nurtured and used from childhood to all that care and money could give, he saw her with him, sharing his misery, his hunger and his wandering, suffering silently for love's sake, but suffering much, and he could not bear ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... her face gone haggard, her eyes full of misery. Suddenly she sank upon her knees beside a chair, and, with a moan, buried ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... alacrity to assure her there was no such thing, he actually swallowed one of the bags. 'Twas no easy matter, and he grew very red, and stared frightfully, and swallowed a draught of water precipitately. His misery was indeed so great that at the conclusion of a polite little farewell speech of the major's, he uttered an involuntary groan, and lively Miss Mag, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... ordered off in haste to Afghanistan. The geographical proficiency which had won her so many marks served her only too well, but she hastened to extract her atlas from the fatal niche, and to pore over her geographical misery. She felt she ought to withdraw her own letter for revision, but she could not get at Marcelle or even make her understand. In her perturbation she gave Cabul and Candahar as Kings of Navarre, and Marcelle, implacable ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... cried. "They have quaffed of the wrong cup! That gold goblet contained a love-potion distilled from rare plants by the Queen, and destined for the wedding wine of Isolt and King Mark! And now the Lord Tristram and she have drunk it together, by misadventure, and can never be parted more! Oh, misery ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... turbulent Passions the World is infested with, I would leave to Men: And could I make my whole Sex of my Opinion, they would be resigned without the least Grudge or Envy; for Peace and Harmony dwell not with them, but on the contrary, Discord, Perturbation and Misery are their constant Companions. But tho' I speak thus with the utmost Sincerity of Love; yet I cannot think a Woman greatly the Object of Esteem who, like Serina in the Orphan, having such a Father as Acasto, and such Brothers, affectionate to her, however blameable ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... Garden of Eden is not paradise, neither does Moses say so. Paradise is the divine joy, and that was in their own hearts so long as they stood in the love of God. Paradise is the divine and angelical joy, pure love, pure joy, pure gladness, in which there is no fear, no misery, and no death. Which paradise neither death nor the devil can touch. And yet it has no stone wall around it; only a great gulf which no man or angel can cross but by that new birth of which Christ spoke to Nicodemus. Reason asks, Where is paradise to be found? Is it far off ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... to bestow pleasure on every one, and instead of, as usual, being helpful and agreeable, he had plunged others who had done him no wrong—nay, perhaps a whole household, whose daughter had given him the first love of her young heart-into misery and disgrace. Had he considered the consequences of his act, he would still be merry Heinz. Then he remembered how, when a boy, playing with other lads high up among the mountains just as it was beginning to thaw, he had hurled the work they had finished with so much ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to say that he had a nice carpet and a good pillow; did I want anything of the sort? He would be proud that I should use anything of his. You would delight in Avery, my cuddy man, who is as quick as 'greased lightning', and full of fun. His misery is my want of appetite, and his efforts to cram me are very droll. The days seem to slip away, one can't tell how. I sit on deck from breakfast at nine, till dinner at four, and then again till it gets cold, and then ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... are at ease; hear my voice, ye careless daughters, give ear unto my speech; many days shall ye be troubled, ye careless women, etc." It is just because we fold our hands and sit at ease that so many of our less fortunate fellow creatures are leading lives of misery, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... caught them in the house one day, whispering and kissing? I walked straight out into the woods to be alone with my shame. My brain was on fire. When I recalled his lecherous looks and her wanton meaning glances I was tempted to destroy myself in misery and despair. Human nature—ah, God, what a beastly thing it is. I had trusted them both so utterly—I loved her so deeply. How had they repaid my trust and love? By deceiving me, under my eyes, in my own home, before my ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... pavement, and, with streaming eyes, prayed for her child, for us, and for herself. There was something indescribably touching in this display of strong natural ties, between those who were plunged so deep in misery. A piece of five francs was put into the hands of the old woman, but, though she blessed the donor, her look was not averted an instant from the agony depicted in her daughter's face, nor did she appear conscious of what she possessed, a moment after. The carriers from the hospital ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Manufacturing industries stand on a different footing. Most of the staple industries of Ireland, notably the woollen industry, and the aptitudes which brought them into being, were deliberately destroyed long ago by fiscal measures imposed by England, and their destruction aggravated the misery and exhaustion produced by a bad land system. How far their partial revival under the fiscal Home Rule of Grattan's Parliament was genuine, and might, with a continuance of fiscal Home Rule, have been permanent, it is impossible to say. ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... to Olivia. Ah—what if she did not guess anything of the meaning of what she was hearing? For one instant he knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star. But when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near, how near they Stood; and to be with her ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... at home, because he's always surrounded by the signs of the ruin and misery he has brought on the home; and the sight and thought of it sets him off again before he's had time to recover from the last spree. Then, again, the noblest wife in the world mostly goes the wrong way to ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... again; never, certainly, on the same terms. She had the reputation of being capricious, though she had been constant in her kindness to him. Never see her again, or only see her changed! He was not aware of the fulness of his misery before; he was not aware, until this moment, that unless he saw her every day life would ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of Heaven on the States where it prevailed. Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people, with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia, Maryland, and the other States having slaves. Travel through the whole continent, and you behold the prospect continually varying with the appearance and disappearance of slavery. The moment you leave the Eastern ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... their strength, women in the pride of their beauty, or even children in their infantine innocence and grace, would live to behold; but that sovereigns and subjects were destined, almost without exception, to perish with circumstances of unutterable, unimaginable horror and misery, as the direct consequence of this day's pageant; we may well believe that the most sanguine of those who now greeted it with eager hope and exultation would rather have averted his eyes from the ill-omened spectacle, and would ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... bread for weeks and that she was so weak she could hardly stand, and the tears came to the woman's eyes as she saw the precocious mite who had known nothing of the innocent happiness of her years. And Gervaise took this slender creature for example, whose eyes alone told the story of her misery and hardships, for in the Coupeau family the vitriol of the Assommoir was doing its work of destruction. Gervaise had seen a whip. Gervaise had learned to dread it, and this dread inspired her with tenderest pity for Lalie. Coupeau had lost the flesh and ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... won't overwork; we shall all miss you very much.' Friend after friend 'got away' to sport and fresh air, with promises to write and chaffing condolences, and as each deserted the sinking ship, I took a grim delight in my misery, positively almost enjoying the first week or two after my world had been finally dissipated to the four ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... hands and rocked herself backward and forward in her misery, but answered not a word. What could she answer, if she had plotted with this "dreadful man" against a young and innocent girl, to deliver her over into his hands, at the risk of all her earthly ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... you know." The conductor went out, and the boy doubled up with misery. He couldn't let his one chance go like this. He felt for his breast pocket and crackled Nils' letter to give him courage. He didn't want Nils to be ashamed of him. The train stopped. Suddenly he remembered his brother's kind, twinkling eyes, that always looked at you as if from far away. The lump ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... dear," says Barnes, waving a little gloved hand. "Bye-bye!" and his brougham drove away. While Ethel Newcome had been under her brother's roof, where I and friend Clive, and scores of others, had been smartly entertained, there had been quarrels and recriminations, misery and heart-burning, cruel words and shameful struggles, the wretched combatants in which appeared before the world with smiling faces, resuming their battle when the feast was concluded and the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thee, or cast by The pledge in which my soul delighted— That all this wrong and misery Should be avenged at last, and righted, And ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore
... Emperor and Empress of Russia are ignorant of a great deal that is done in their name; or, as the phrase is, "By order of the Czar;" and that they know little of the results of those Edicts and Ukase which are causing such dire misery to thousands of their subjects, not only to the long-suffering Jews but also to Christian women and children; and it is her belief that if the truth could be placed before them, as she hopes to place it, they will attack the evil even at the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... wit replied, that there was Scripture warrant for his drinking, inasmuch as the command was, to give wine to those that be of heavy heart. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more; and, for his part, he had been little better than miserable ever since he heard of Rebecca's betrothal. A light, careless man, but of good parts, and as brave a talker as I have heard since I have been in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... was insupportable, the thermometer under the shade of my tent marking 112 deg.F.; and to add to our misery there came upon us a plague of flies, the like of which I verily believe had not been on the earth since Moses in that manner brought down the wrath of God on the Egyptians. They literally darkened the air, descending ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... the sea. It comes up from a soil that descends downward through all times and ages, through all the days of humankind, down to the very foundations of the globe itself. For it grows from the flesh of the nameless, unnumbered multitudes of men condemned by life throughout its course to misery. It has its roots where death and defeat have been. It has its roots in all bruised and maimed and frustrated flesh, in all flesh that might have borne a god and perished barren. It has its root in every being who has been without sun, in every being who has suffered cold ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... wasn't before I went there. For, I tell you, Ned, I was a heathen; I knew no more about God and his love for man than a block of stone; and I thought that he hated poor people, and sent them all to hell, and that there was no use being good. I did not know that it was sin brought the misery I saw around me into the world, and that God hates sin, but loves sinners; for if he doesn't, he'd never have sent his only Son into the world to save them. At last I was asked what trade I would be, and I said, ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... considered what was best to be done. Miss Hilary must be told; but how to get at her in the middle of the night, thereby leaving her mistress to the mercy of Mrs. Jones. It would never do. Suddenly she thought of Miss Balquidder.—She might send a message. No, not a message—for the family misery and disgrace must not be betrayed to a stranger—but a letter to Kensington. With an effort Elizabeth composed herself sufficiently to write one—her first—to her dear ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... one, too. What was the matter with him, that he felt so played out? Suddenly he shivered and was chilled to the marrow, and he pulled the sheet up under his chin and went to sleep in the absorbed contemplation of each minute bodily misery. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... heart aching for the quiet misery betrayed by Sandy's voice, she could not blame the girl. Nor could she blame herself. So Justine got the full measure of her disapproval, and, while she worked, Mrs. Salisbury refreshed her soul with imaginary conversations in which she kindly but firmly informed Justine that ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... the forest every day. This afternoon he was tempted to go still farther. Madame Joubert had told him about some caves at the other end of the wood, underground chambers where the country people had gone to live in times of great misery, long ago, in the English wars. The English wars; he could not remember just how far back they were,—but long enough to make one feel comfortable. As for him, perhaps he would never go home at all. Perhaps, when this great affair was over, he would buy a little farm and stay here for the ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... In his misery Dan was not at all averse to fighting, if a good excuse were offered. So his first move was not to look up, but to wrest him self out of that grip, haul away ...
— Dave Darrin's Fourth Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... can hear the newspaper boys telling lies (perhaps special lies he has paid for) at the top of their voices; he can note as evening draws on the pleasant glare of gas upon the street mud and there pass him the familiar surroundings of servility, abject poverty, drunkenness, misery, and vice. He has his music-hall on the Saturday evening with the sharp, peculiar finish of the London accent in the patriotic song, he has the London paper on Sunday to tell him that his nastiest little Colonial ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... with it among this people, sufficiently indicate the motives which must have first led to it; for they believe that, by eating their enemies, they not only dishonour their bodies, but consign their souls to perpetual misery. ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... Nothing can satisfy the justice of God but justice in his creature. The justice of God is the love of what is right, and the doing of what is right. Eternal misery in the name of justice could satisfy none but a demon whose bad laws had ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... peevishly, 'What is the use of walking along these fine streets and squares? Let us turn down some alley!' He felt he should be more at home there. Lamb said of an old acquaintance of his, that when he was young he wanted to be a tailor, but had not spirit! This is the misery of unequal matches. The woman cannot easily forget, or think that others forget, her origin; and, with perhaps superior sense and beauty, keeps painfully in the background. It is worse when she braves this conscious feeling, and displays all the insolence of the upstart and affected ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... careless laugh from which all bitterness was absent, and after a little pause Sylvia sat down by his side. His whole attitude amazed her this morning. Some magic had been at work. The fretful misery of the past few weeks had passed like a cloud. This was her own Guy come back to her, clean, sane, with the boyish humour that she had always loved in him, and the old quick light of understanding and sympathy in ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... judged the slayer of the settler according to their laws. They sent him to ha shackled with chain and iron ball and do heavy, squaw-work in misery the balance of his years. They did not say because this Indian was bad that all Seminoles ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... named on account of its hazel-nuts, on the lower St. Lawrence, to the Kingdom of Ochelay, west of Stadacona; east of Canada was Saguenay, and west of Ochelay was Hochelaga, to which the other communities were tributary. After a winter of much misery Cartier left Stadacona in the spring of 1536, and sailed into the Atlantic by the passage between Cape Breton and Newfoundland, now appropriately called Cabot's Straits on modern maps. He gave to France a positive claim to a great region, ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... in the matter, as the popular pressure upon them was too great to be resisted." This determination is rightly characterised by Mr. Farrelly, the late legal adviser to the Government of the South African Republic, as the "fiendish project of wrecking the mines and plunging into hopeless misery for years tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children." But that is not all. He has put upon record[105] the sinister fact that the man entrusted with the execution of this infamous design ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... got three of them!" cried Fred excitedly, and then ran forward, to quickly put the wounded birds out of their misery. ...
— The Rover Boys on Snowshoe Island - or, The Old Lumberman's Treasure Box • Edward Stratemeyer
... married — and I am very sure I shall not want to see his wife here — I shall not do it. — Though I might ask her for his sake — No! I should better break with him at once and have no more to do with him; it would be only misery." "And what is it now?" said something else. And "Not ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... Commission,—a summons which it was impossible to decline. For a year this new work forbade a continuance of the old; and just as I was again free came the Bryan effort to capture the Presidency, which, in my opinion, would have resulted in wide-spread misery at home and in dishonor to the American name through out the world. Most reluctantly then I threw down my chosen work and devoted my time to what seemed to me to be a political duty. Then followed my appointment to the Berlin Embassy, which could not be declined; and just at the period ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... was not for me, Angus. It was my father's bargain, not mine. I was told that you had done with me—that you had never meant to marry me. Yes, Angus, your mother told me that with her own lips—told me that she interfered to save me from misery and dishonour. And then I was hurried off to a cheap French convent, to learn to provide for myself. A couple of years' schooling was the price I received for my broken heart. That was what your mother called making me a lady. I think I should have ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... ashamed,—for she was full of a passionate emotion too strong for weeping—a contempt of herself and of him, too great for mere clamour. Was he so much of a man in the slow thick density of his brain she thought, as to have no instinctive perception of her utter misery? He hastened to her and tried to take her hands, but she drew herself away from him and sank down in a chair as ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... thus enthralled and disciplined the Mirage appeared in the guise of the first Reform Bill. If only that Bill could pass into law, the reign of injustice and oppression would cease, starvation and misery would flee away, and the poor would rejoice in a new heaven and a new earth. But no sooner was the Royal Assent given to the Bill than the Mirage—that deceitful image of joy and refreshment—receded into the dim distance, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... Piazza, while his women-folk make life tolerable at home; which is a very unfair and spiteful version of his proceedings, for he has really gone as much on my business as on his own. I sent him—feeling his look of misery, as he sat on a packing-case in the middle of this chaos, terribly on my mind—to see if he could find the English consul (whom he knows a little), and discover from him, if possible, where your friends are. It is strange, as you say, that Miss Bretherton should not have written ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to poverty, without even an object in view to provide for either, would be the height of folly and extravagance." Again he paused, but Alonzo was still silent. He proceeded—"Could you, Alonzo, suffer life, when you see the wife of your bosom, probably your infant children, pining in misery for want of bread? And what else have you to expect if you marry in your present situation? You have friends and well wishers; but which of them will advance you four or five thousand pounds, as a gratuity? My daughter must be supported according to her rank and standing in life. Are you enabled ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... the pastoral poem which is misliked? for perchance, where the hedge is lowest, they will soonest leap over. Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometime out of Melibeus's mouth, can show the misery of people under hard lords, or ravening soldiers? And again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest? Sometimes, under the pretty tales of wolves and sheep, it can include the whole considerations of wrong-doing and patience. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... fever attacked me, and for weeks my life was despaired of. At length the crisis passed; my youthful constitution conquered the disease, and I was again restored to the world in which I had experienced so much joy and so much misery. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... influence of a temporary affect, to sacrifice everything in order to carry out what later on proves worthless and vain. Lacking in sure criteria and guides, they are slavishly dependent upon momentary external influences, and under unfavorable conditions of life suffer want and misery and give way to temptation, frequently falling into a life of vagabondage, drunkenness, and crime. In prison they often develop mental disorders, are looked upon as malingerers, and oscillate between prison and the insane asylum, only to begin ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... schoolmates a hasty farewell as soon as I could do so without suspicion, I hurried along the Esplanade in the direction she and her father had ridden. But they had put their horses to a canter, and I could not see which way they had gone. In the greatest misery I turned down a side street, but was soon elevated to a state of excitement by seeing the same pair galloping towards me. Flushing up to my hair, I stopped and heroically faced her as she passed. She smiled again, but, alas! upon my Love's ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... child, notwithstanding all these pleasing and attractive smiles, has a heart prone to evil. To you is it committed to be the teacher of that child; and on that teaching will mainly if not entirely depend its future happiness or misery; not of a few brief years—not of a life-time, but of eternity; for though a dying creature, it is still immortal, and the happiness or misery of that ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... registered which show a run of five for the red, the next game would just as often have made the run into six as have turned in favor of the black. But the gambling reasoner is incorrigible: if he would but take to squaring the circle, what a load of misery would be saved. A writer of 1823, who appeared to be thoroughly acquainted with the gambling of Paris and London, says that the gamesters by {281} profession are haunted by a secret foreboding of their future destruction, and seem as if they said to the banker at ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... times under Sylla, than to the nature and habits of Pompey; that Aemilia great with child should be, as it were, ravished from the embraces of another for him, and that Antistia should be divorced with dishonor and misery by him, for whose sake she had been but just before bereft of her father. For Antistius was murdered in the senate, because he was suspected to be a favorer of Sylla for Pompey's sake; and her mother, likewise, after she had seen all these ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... burnt feathers smell. And I'm dosed with it eight times a day! Think of it, milk! But what makes me mad is to have it ladled out to me by that long-faced, fish-eyed food destroyer, whose only joy in life is to hunt me down and gloat over my misery. Oh, I'll get square with him yet, sir; I swear ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... no escape. The heavy wheel, bearing its ponderous weight of misery, and pursued to the very edge of the float by the dog, plunged off into the water with a mighty splash. Colonel Witham, clinging in desperation to the handle bars, sank with the wheel in some seven feet of water. Then, amid a whirl and bubbling of the water like a ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... was my father; O that he were alive, and here beholding His daughter's trial! that he did but see The flatness of my misery; yet with ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... than they deserved," exclaimed Stephen, "when one thinks of the misery and suffering that they inflicted on poor old uncle Jeffrey. I would sooner ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... reading all the new works within his reach, and during the afternoons and evenings to discuss the matters treated in these books. It seemed a terrible want to miss these delights on returning to his narrow home. He felt it, for the first time, as a personal affliction and source of misery that his wife was unable to read and write; that his parents were talking of nothing but their illness and physical sufferings, and that all the inmates of his home alike had no more sympathy with him ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... first-mentioned; I was not so good-natured or so quick to act as he. Neither did they resemble those of my other uncle, who merely represented compassion for those unfortunately situated, but was without the least vestige of rebellious feeling against the conditions or the people responsible for the misery; my uncle was always content with life as it was, saw the hand of a loving Providence everywhere and was fully and firmly convinced that he himself was led and helped by this same Providence, which specially watched over the launching of his projects for the welfare of mankind. No, my feeling was ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... overcoats, were delirious, raved and threw themselves about. By the braziers squatted adults and children who were still well, indifferently chatting, drinking tea and smoking. In all the yurtas I saw the diseased and the dead and such misery and physical ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... the poison-dipped arrows of Heracles was a matter of greater difficulty. They were still in the possession of the much-aggrieved Philoctetes, who had remained in the island of Lemnos, his wound still unhealed, suffering the most abject misery. But the {300} judicious zeal of the indefatigable and ever-active Odysseus, who was accompanied in this undertaking by Diomedes, at length gained the day, and he induced Philoctetes to accompany him to the camp, where the skilful leech Machaon, the son of ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... were being made in Bologna. The misery and destitution of the country rendered money scarce, and cast a gloom over the people. It was noticed that when Clement entered the city on October 24, none of the common folk responded to the shouts of his attendants, Viva Papa Clemente! ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... for the dirt and vice and misery which must prevail in houses where seven or eight persons, of both sexes and all ages, are penned up together for the night in the one rickety, foul, vermin-hunted bed-room. The picture of agricultural life unrolls itself before us as it is painted ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... looked at the two bits of paper in his hand. "Did more wrong and misery ever come to a fellow all at once than I've ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... Mr. Radcliffe witnessed a scene of desperation, accompanied with the ordinary circumstances of licentiousness, and reckless misery, which, unchecked by adequate regulations, the prisons of that day afforded. Until after the execution of Lord Derwentwater and of Lord Kenmure had taken place, hopes of a reprieve sustained the unhappy ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... "It would take a good deal of magnanimity to forgive you that. What nights I have passed! That little whisper has whistled in my ear ever since, like the wind in a keyhole. Who could it be? What could it mean? I suppose I have had more real, solid misery out of that ..." He paused, and looked troubled. "Though I had more to bother me, or ought to have," he added, and slowly ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... of our present trials: Mr. Holland is, I suppose, very dangerously sick; and poor Mrs. Holland is the very embodiment of despair. When I look at her in prospective misery, I am reminded of poor, dear cousin Abbie (to whom I would write if it didn't seem a sacrilege), and I conclude there is really more misery in this world of ours than I had any idea of. I've discovered why the world was made round. It must be to typify our lives—sort of a tread-mill existence, ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... he whose actions tend uniformly to the welfare, constantly to the happiness, of his fellow creatures. The vicious man, is he whose conduct tends to the misery, whose propensities form the unhappiness of those with whom he lives; from whence his own peculiar ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... if flamboyant tragedy, Caesar Borgia, to the Borgia of Betterton and Smith's Machiavel. In 1680 her roles were Arviola in Tate's The Loyal General; Julia in Lawrence Maidwell's capital comedy, The Loving Enemies; Queen Margaret in Crowne's The Misery of Civil War, a version of 2 Henry VI. In the winter of this year Mrs. Lee re-married, and thenceforward is billed as Lady Slingsby, our first titled actress. Her husband was probably Sir Charles Slingsby, second baronet, of Bifrons in Kent, a nephew of Sir Robert ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... and she meanwhile was saying that for her there was no greater happiness than to see him, to follow him wherever he liked this very moment, to be his wife and helper, and that if he went away from her she would die of misery. ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... recall my misery of mind after Mr. Swain's death. One hope had lightened all the years of my servitude. For, when I examined my soul, I knew that it was for Dorothy I had laboured. And every letter that came from Comyn telling ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the advantage of Lady Purbeck and Sir Robert. And it is clear from this letter that Lady Purbeck was even at that time on good terms with her husband and able to influence him. A reader might have been tempted to imagine that Purbeck's "melancholy fitts" of insanity were the result of misery about his wife's infidelity; but, if she could still "draw from him speeches to her advantage," this cannot have been the case. The prosecution of Lady Purbeck was pretty clearly at the instigation of Buckingham and not of Purbeck. There is just a possibility that ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... of his reserve broke, and the great current of life rushed over his lips, to happiness or to misery, ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... out once more. Art had had no chance to claim him for its own, and Love had cheated him. But when he discovers Hilda, and Hilda's son, and Hilda's misery—Hilda, "with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night!"-with her, love, passion, pity, intensity of living come ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Country pastimes, fly, Sad troops of humane misery, Come serene looks, Clear as the Christal Brooks, Or the pure azur'd heaven that smiles to see The rich attendance on our poverty; Peace and a secure mind Which all men ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton
... is born of a humorist hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. It cometh up and is cut down like a flower. It fleeth as if it were a shadow ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... to enjoy or estimate their new privileges. Such a cotemporaneous emancipation of the colored population of the Southern States could only bring a common calamity on all the States, and the most severe misery on those who were to be thus thrown upon society, under the most abject, helpless and deplorable circumstances.'—[Speech of ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... leading to Palestine was drenched with blood, and along its dreary track lay scattered at no distant intervals the skeletons and the wrecks of nations. After four years of toil and misery and victory, Jerusalem was conquered by the crusaders; but as their conquests were not the work of wisdom and prudence, but the fruit of a blind enthusiasm and an ill-directed heroism, they laid the foundation of ...
— The Relations of the Federal Government to Slavery - Delivered at Fort Wayne, Ind., October 30th 1860 • Joseph Ketchum Edgerton
... on a wild Shore. No Appearance of Inhabitants. One of our Lieutenants dies. Conduct of a Part of the Crew who remained on the Wreck. We name the Place of our Residence Mount Misery. Narrative of Transactions there. Indians appear in Canoes off the Coast. Description of them. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... donkeys known as married men: rather more honourable than most of them. He had to be present at the ball at the Schloss and behold his loathed Henrietta, suffer torture of chains to the rack, by reason of his having promised the bitter coquette he would be there. So hellish did the misery seem to him, that he was relieved by the prospect of lying a whole day long in loneliness with the sunshine of the woods, occasionally conjuring up the antidote face of the wood-sprite before he was to undergo ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wife, 'we should never regret having performed that which is a work of precaution; and we must remember that the raft— although it may not be required as we intended it—has already far more than repaid us for the labour bestowed upon it. Remember the misery we were suffering but a short time since, and from which the idea of this raft at once relieved us. Measures of precaution, however irksome, should always be adopted. It is only the slothful and vacillating who either ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... be subjected to unavailing torture. It maybe said, "Would not your hints tend to make people frivolous?" Certainly not, if my hints are wisely used. Let it be observed that I merely wish to do away with hypocritical conventions whereby timid men like my correspondent are subjected to extreme misery and a vast waste of intellectual power is inflicted on the world. Suppose that some ridiculous guardian had taken up the modern notions about scientific culture, and had forced Macaulay to read science alone; should we not have lost ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... him that the Twenty-fourth Infantry was on the ground. Colonel Greenleaf was just leaving the post, but Major La Garde, his successor, manifested his great pleasure in seeing this form of assistance arrive. Such a scene of misery presented itself to Major Markely's eyes that he, soldier as he was, was greatly affected, and assured Major La Garde that he was prepared personally to sink every other consideration and devote himself to giving what assistance he could in caring ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... to and I'm ready to die for it. I've got nothing to say," answered the man with still more of the determination of misery in his voice. "My neighbors don't know nothing about it and I don't want 'em to. Just let them keep quiet and let it all die when the State ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a system requiring the infliction of misery on other beings be called a religious system?... To seek a good by doing an evil ...
— The Essence of Buddhism • Various
... beheld that doll close to. The whole shop seemed a palace to her: the doll was not a doll; it was a vision. It was joy, splendor, riches, happiness, which appeared in a sort of chimerical halo to that unhappy little being so profoundly engulfed in gloomy and chilly misery. With the sad and innocent sagacity of childhood, Cosette measured the abyss which separated her from that doll. She said to herself that one must be a queen, or at least a princess, to have a "thing" like that. She gazed at that beautiful pink dress, that beautiful smooth hair, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... them for the loss of liberty; they form indeed the "Pariahs" of Roman society. "In other countries," a Roman once said to me, "you have one man who lives in wealth and a thousand who live in comfort. Here the one man lives in comfort, and the thousand live in misery." I believe this picture is only too true. The middle classes, who live by trade or mental labour, must have a hard time of it. The professions of Rome are overstocked and underpaid. The large class of government officials or "impiegati," to whom admirers ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... Library was traced and arrested, when he pleaded that absolute want had driven him to the act. He had a wife ill and starving at his home, and this on investigation proving true, he was pardoned and saved further misery. ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... of which I was the heiress. Then a terrible misfortune befell us: the ship on board which I was a passenger caught fire, and was utterly destroyed, and everybody was obliged to take refuge in the boats. Then, to add still further to our misery, a gale sprang up, and the boats became separated. We suffered dreadfully during that gale, and were several times in the greatest danger of being drowned. Then, when the gale was over, the sailors in our boat knew not in which direction ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... walked through the snow across that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes stung. And he fought against that inarticulate misery, against the melancholy that settled upon him ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... could not help feeling sad. It was not merely that she would have to part with Eric, "but that bright boy," thought Fanny, "what will become of him? I have heard strange things of schools; oh, if he should be spoilt and ruined, what misery it would be. Those baby lips, that pure young heart, a year may work sad change in their words and thoughts!" She sighed again, and her eyes glistened as she raised them upwards, and breathed ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... meeting. I say this in order that you may know how very determined a man's will must be—if he does not wish to be selfish. A course of struggling is miserable indeed. I spared her any knowledge of my misery." ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... could experience excess and satiety without the inconvenience of learning what to do with one's hands in a drawing-room! When the characters all spoke at once and I missed some of the phrases they flashed at each other, I was in misery. I strained my ears and ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... that Father Peter had been arrested for stealing a great sum of money from the astrologer. Everybody's tongue was loose and going. Many said it was not in Father Peter's character and must be a mistake; but the others shook their heads and said misery and want could drive a suffering man to almost anything. About one detail there were no differences; all agreed that Father Peter's account of how the money came into his hands was just about unbelievable—it had such an impossible look. They said it might have ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... to Will, but she knew such a thing was impossible. There would surely be a letter from him on the following morning hidden within their secret pillar-box between two bricks of the mill wall. For that she must wait, and even in her misery she was glad that with Will, not herself, lay decision as to future action. She had expected some delay; she had believed that her father would impose stern restrictions of time and make a variety of conditions with her sweetheart; she had even hoped that Miller Lyddon might command ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... tax? 'tis so still! we can see The Church thrive in her misery, And, like her Head at Beth'lem, rise, When she, oppress'd with troubles, lies. Rise?—should all fall, we cannot be In more extremities than He. Great Type of passions! Come what will, Thy grief exceeds all copies still. Thou cam'st from Heav'n to Earth, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... you have, child, and how little you know of the realities of life." But gazing into the pure face, with a vague dread for that future, and knowing that One alone knew whether it might contain happiness or misery for her darling, she said, with visible emotion, "You are a good girl, Clemence, and whatever may be in the future, remember that I always sought your welfare as the one great object of my existence. Always remember ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... Artists in Albemarle Street—a beautiful apartment terribly disfigured by its pictures, which had been procured from fashionable members in the fashionable taste of twenty years earlier, and were crying aloud for some one brave enough to put them out of their misery. No interpretation of the word 'artist' could by any ingenuity be stretched to include Sir Isaac. Nevertheless he belonged to the club, and so did a number of other men in like case. The difference between Sir Isaac and the rest was that Sir Isaac did actually ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... fall of 1620 the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth during a disagreeable storm, and, noting the excellent opportunity for future misery, began to erect a number of rude cabins. This party consisted of one hundred and two people of a resolute character who wished to worship God in a more extemporaneous manner than had been the custom in the Church ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... was filled with a harsh cheering that left the girl almost weeping in her terror and misery. But the men saw nothing of the effect of their good-will. They were only too glad to be able to find such an outlet to their feelings. When the cheering ceased Pete thrust out an arm toward her. His palm was stretched ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... on, and at intervals there was the rumble of trains passing to and from Ravenscourt Park station, and the clang of distant tram-bells. The voice of mighty London mocked at Jack's misery, and he conquered his emotions. He lifted a ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... prepared background, it was the processes of her pregnancy rather than the issue of it, that got into the foreground of her mind. She was in for an experience now that no one could call trivial. She had months of misery ahead of her, she assumed, reasoning from the one she had just gone through with, surmounted by hours of agony and peril that even Portia ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... cannot but remark, what I have often meditated over, how trifling, how apparently insignificant, are the circumstances which determine the felicity or misery of human beings. I was possessed of an ample estate; I was, in most difficult conditions, in unruffled amity with all my neighbors, on both sides of the great feud, except only my hereditary enemy; I was high in the favor of the Emperor; ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman, Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned being. He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd alike in nature and in man. He was the cause of the fall of man, the tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as Ormuzd was. But that, perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older Zoroastrian creed. With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he would not be eternal in the future. ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... drops of rain stung her face. Afar off from the southwest more was coming. . . . She turned hopelessly from it, then almost at once her dull misery was changed ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... General; "and we can always offer curry, as you see. My daughter has a capital recipe she wiled out of an old Hindoo rascal that cooked for our mess. You really need not take it on that account," as Carmichael was doing his best in much misery; "it is only meant to keep old Indians in fair humour—not to be a test of good manners. By the way, Janet has been sounding your praises, how have ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Mr. Twist had thought, fresh from his work in France, fresh from where people were profoundly occupied with the great business of surviving at all. Here he came back from a place where civilization toppled, where deadly misery, deadly bravery, heroism that couldn't be uttered, staggered month after month among ruins, and found America untouched, comfortable, fat, still with time to worry over the suspected amorousness of the rich, still putting people into uniforms in ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... after Sir Duncan's marriage, when he and his bride were in London, with the lady's parents come to help, in the misery of outfit, a little boy ran through a field of wheat, early in the afternoon, and hid himself in a blackthorn hedge to see what was going on at Anerley. Nothing escaped him, for his eyes were sharp, being of true Danish breed. He saw Captain ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... long smouldered burst forth in a blaze upon Rome and stopped the civil discord. In this most serious war, which was attended with many variations of fortune, and brought on the Romans the greatest misery and the most formidable dangers, Marius by his inability to accomplish anything of importance showed that military excellence requires bodily vigour and strength: but Sulla by his great exploits obtained among his own citizens the reputation of a great commander, among his friends the ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... which represented the patron of their ancestors, were too valuable as voting units to be neglected by its representatives, even when the sense of the obligations of wealth, which was one of the best features of Roman civilisation, failed to provide an occasional alleviation for the misery of dependants. From a political point of view, this dependence was utterly demoralising; for it made the recipients of benefits either blind supporters of, or traitors to, the personal cause which they professed. It was on the whole preferable ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... and Elfreda all begun to cry, and their father sat lookin' at 'em, the picture of misery. It clean took away our appetites. She piled our plates with jam and sardines, but we couldn't swaller a mouthful with them poor kids sobbin' all round the table. We was thankful they was put to bed before supper. Mrs. Dawkins fried potaters and sausages and set 'em down in front of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... "Lan' o' misery!" cried the visitor, chuckling delightedly. "I wonder how you done kep' you face, Miss Kitty. ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... Mediterranean, whose blue waters remind me of Newport harbor and our old days there. Ah, my sweet saint, blessed was the day I first learned to know you! for it was you, more than anything else, that kept me back from sin and misery. I call you my Sibyl, dearest, because the Sibyl was a prophetess of divine things out of the Church; and so are you. The Abbe says, that all true, devout persons of all persuasions belong to the True Catholic Apostolic Church, and will in the end be enlightened to know it. What do you think ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... is it redeemed, even in the case of the latter? Think for a moment of the poverty there is amid all our plenty. Think of the evils and misery that are the consequence as well as the cause of poverty. There are thousands of men, and women, and children dying every year in India from want and sheer starvation. We are told that, in each case, a penny a day would mean comparative plenty. They are God's creatures, ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... like mine, suspence is misery. Wax! render up thy trust,—Be the contents Prosperous, or fatal, they ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... middle of the stream like a bit of driftwood, We immediately waded out to the rock and brought him ashore, where we lighted a fire, took off all his clothes, and rubbed him till he began to show signs of life again. But you may judge, mes garcons, of my misery when I found that the coil of tobacco was gone. It had come off his neck during his struggles, and there wasn't a vestige of it left, except a bright red mark on the throat, where it had nearly strangled him. When he ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... with bitter anguish at the thought of having been thus instrumental in consigning to the infernal bondage of slavery so many of my fellow-beings. I have wrestled in prayer with God for forgiveness. Having experienced myself the sweetness of liberty, and knowing too well the after misery of a great majority of them, my infatuation has seemed to me an unpardonable sin. But I console myself with the thought that I acted according to my best light, though the light that was in ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... the parade ground, came to him from afar off, and like a wounded animal he crept away from his comrades, not because their reproaches stung him, for he did not hear them, but because he wanted to think what his mother and "Little Sister" would say, but his misery was as nothing to that of the two who sat up there amid the ranks of the blue and white holding each other's hands with a despairing grip. To Bud all of the rest of the contest was a horrid nightmare; he hardly knew when the three companies were marched back to receive the judges' ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... bitterly, "if there was a God He could not stand by and see me suffering such prolonged and awful misery." ...
— The Middy and the Moors - An Algerine Story • R.M. Ballantyne
... no courtly fears him fright; No begging wants his middle fortune bite: But sweet content exiles both misery and spite. ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... had been summoned by an inexorable decree to the tribunal of judgment! where it appeared alone—alone—alone, to be weighed in the balance of justice. "But, perhaps, sweet Jesus!" she whispered; "oh, perhaps, Thou didst in the last struggle hear it from its abyss of misery plead for mercy; perhaps, through thy bitter passion and death Thou didst rescue ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... an easy-chair with mustard plasters on his legs and cold bandages on his head, nearly dead with misery. He was coughing with the short cough of a dying man, without any one knowing how he had caught it, and his wife looked at him like a tigress ready to eat him, and as soon as he saw us he trembled so violently as to make his hands and knees shake, so I said ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... winter the carnage was terribly apparent; the prowlers who skulked from place to place in search of booty could be distinguished in all directions. Marauding began on a frightful scale, discipline was slackened by misery, and for miles around thousands of wretched soldiers stripped the scarcely less wretched peasantry of their few ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of Cleombrotus; my mourning habit is long since familiar to me. It was put on to condole with you in your banishment; and now you are restored to your country, and to your kingdom, must I still remain in grief and misery? Or would you have me attired in my royal ornaments, that I may rejoice with you, when you have killed, within my arms, the man to whom you gave me for a wife? Either Cleombrotus must appease you by mine and my children's tears, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... life. Their principles are vitiated by lotteries, they are deceived by vain and delusive expectation, and are led into habits of idleness and vice, which produce innumerable evils, and, ultimately, end in misery and pauperism." ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... by Mr. Bumble from the wretched home where one kind word or look had never lighted the gloom of his infant years. And yet he burst into an agony of childish grief, as the cottage-gate closed after him. Wretched as were the little companions in misery he was leaving behind, they were the only friends he had ever known; and a sense of his loneliness in the great wide world, sank into the child's heart for the ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... May 17th.—"Misery loves company"; and so I am writing to you. Perhaps it will be some consolation to you that I too have been knocked up for two weeks, one of which I spent in bed. Nothing serious the matter, only put down and ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... as I tell you, not our eternal dwelling, but our little-while wandering, God would that we should use it as folk who were weary of it. And he would that we should in this vale of labour, toil, tears, and misery not look for rest and ease, game, pleasure, wealth, and felicity. For those who do so fare like a foolish fellow who, going towards his own house where he should be wealthy, would for a tapster's pleasure become ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... This misery I foresaw was not of short duration; I had heard of the wars that were lately broken out between Austria and Prussia. Patiently to wait their termination, amid sufferings and wretchedness such as mine, appeared impossible, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... it now; you will have to suffer for it more, till your bloom is all gone, and you are worn to a skeleton. If I had dared, Agnes—if I had dared, I should have put an end to this mortal existence; and thus I should have saved you all this coming disgrace and misery. But I had not the courage to lay violent hands upon myself, and go, a deliberate suicide, into the presence of my Maker. I have tried all other means; I have gone through exposure and fatigue, which ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... in this world is Envy. In the lower grades of society what pining and misery might be traced to this baleful passion. Why are the actions of a rich rival, or one endowed with personal charms, or gifts in conversation, and the object of attraction in society, so often disparaged, and ascribed to any but pure motives? Whence is ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... her mother's name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. "Oh, if Mother needs me—" she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the chorus of facetious good-bys ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... that you are not aware of the complete misery which is occasioned to me, and the certain ruin which must attend the Review, by our unfortunate procrastination. Long before this, every line of copy for the present number ought to have been in the hands of the printer. ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... at each other in blank misery; their dream of establishing themselves in the arms business had blown up in ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... back and walked to the window. For a full minute he stayed there, watched by the amazed, displeased eyes of the girl. When he came back he sat down quietly in the chair facing Billy. His countenance was grave and his eyes were a little troubled; but the haggard look of misery was quite gone. ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... of the other, there was no possibility, granting even the start the boy had had, that Clarie Archman could have made the trip uptown in the same time. It was more likely that the boy might even linger a long while in misery and indecision before he came home. That was why he, Jimmie Dale, had dismissed Benson and the car for ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... save me now," she murmured, in an almost inaudible voice; "but I do not complain. Who knows the misery from which death may preserve me? I do not crave life; I have suffered so much during the past year; I have endured such humiliation; I have wept so much! A ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Christmas Eve, 1916. Two long, haggard years of the war had dragged by, to a wailing crescendo of misery, famine, disease, and madness. We had been hurled up and down an invisible line of death, bending and pressing it back and forth like a horde of ants ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous disorder. Secret desires were excited, and but too often found opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... born sickly, poor, and mean, A slave: no misery could screen The holders of the pearl of price From Caesar's envy; therefore twice I fought with beasts, and three times saw My children suffer by his law; At last my own release was earned: I was some time in being burned, But at the close a Hand ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... unlucky, I think; everything went wrong with me now. Like the lonely, hopeless hero in Longfellow's translation of Min's favourite Coplas de Manrique, I might well exclaim in my misery— ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... have been written, and could not be what they are, were it not for the fact of death. If there is one idea that can be said to dominate the author of "The Life of Man," it is the idea of death. Constantly he keeps asking: Why all this struggling, all this pain, all this misery in the world, if it must end in nothing? The suffering of the great mass of mankind makes life meaningless while it lasts, and death puts an end even to this life. Again and again Andreyev harks back to the one thought from which all his other thoughts seem to flow as from their ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... cruel, iniquitous,' she said to herself, as she hurried along the dusty pavement, impelled by agitated thoughts, 'to trade upon my weakness—my misery—to see me steeped to the lips in odious poverty, and to tempt me with the glitter of wealth. I never pretended to love him—never—thank God for that! I let him tell me that he loved me, and I consented to be his wife; but ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... regard that phrase! To one it arouses feelings akin to rapture; to another it is suggestive of heavings and horror. To him whose physical condition is easily and disagreeably affected by aquatic motion, "at sea" savours of bad smells and misery. To him who sings of the intensity of his love for "a ride on the fierce, foaming, bursting tide," "at sea" sounds like the sweet ringing of a silver bell floating towards him, as if from afar, fraught with the fragrance and melody of distant climes—such ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... folios of old Fuller in almost as few days, and I went to bed last night in agony, and am writing with a vial of eye water before me, alternately dipping in vial and inkstand. This may enflame my zeal against Bankrupts—but it was my speculation when I could see better. Half the world's misery (Eden else) is owing to want of money, and all that want is owing to Bankrupts. I declare I would, if the State wanted Practitioners, turn Hangman myself, and should have great pleasure in hanging the first after my salutary law should ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... seeing in Thebes Much evil, and the misery of men's hands Who sow with fruitless wheat the stones and sands, With fruitful thorns the fallows and warm glebes, Bade their hands hold lest worse hap came to pass; But which of you had heed ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of excitement, misery, and despair, and the short dawn, when it broke, brought not hope but horror and dismay, for all at once, when the morning mist was lying heavily upon the lower reach of the river, the sound of oars ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... presenting a deformity rather than an ornament: however there he stands on the pinnacle of what he and men in general would call the monument of his glory, a memento of blood, of tears of widows and orphans. Could the names of those ruined and heart broken beings be inscribed upon it, whose misery was wrought by his triumphs, it would indeed tell a tale of woe. The Place Vendome, in which the column stands, has a very noble appearance, being a fine specimen of the style of building of Louis the Fourteenth, in whose reign it was erected; and he too fed his ambition ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... and similarly, it does not suffer the pangs of anticipation, the terrors of which Lord Beaconsfield spoke, when he said that the worst calamities in his life were the calamities which never happened. Nine-tenths of the misery of suffering lies in the power of forecasting its continuance and its increase, and the lesser patience of which I have spoken is the patience which, by no effort of reason, but by pure instinct, hears the burden of the moment in the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... heart. The whirlwind of fear and distress of a little while ago, which could take no definite direction, seemed to have died away and given place to a dead frost the steady bearing down of disgrace and misery, inevitable, unmitigable, unchangeable; no lessening, no softening of that blasting power, no, nor ever any rising up from under it; the landscape could never be made to smile again. It was the fall of a bright star ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... absence. The future was still open to him, and he determined to fill it with joys for her which should in some measure compensate her for the sorrow and suffering of the past; for George regarded poverty and want as misery, and did not see how his mother could have been contented, as she ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... air. One was unharmed; another had so tightly twisted the cord about its shank that one foot was curled up and seemed paralyzed; the third, in its struggles to escape, had sawn through the flesh of the thigh and so much harmed itself that I thought it humane to put an end to its misery. When I took out my knife to cut their hempen bonds, the heads of the family seemed to divine my friendly intent. Suddenly ceasing their cries and threats. they perched quietly within reach of my hand, and watched me in my work of manumission. This, owing to the ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... The Russian officer spoke only broken French. He commanded one of the opposing trenches, and from his narrative it appeared that his men had not received any food supplies for some days and were actually on the point of starvation. Not being able to stand their misery any longer, he had taken the bull by the horns and, with the utter confidence and straightforwardness of a fearless nature, had simply come over to us, the enemy, for help, offering a little barrel of water which his companion carried on his head and ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... down beside him, 'you are simply devoid of common sense, by invoking the hatred of the gods! You alone are the cause of your present misery. ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... Luther, the peasants of Germany were suffering the most atrocious and awful misery; Luther himself knew about it, he had denounced the princely robbers and the priestly land-exploiters with that picturesque violence of which he was a master. But nothing had been done about it, nothing ever is done about it—until at last the ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... girl with sudden ebullitions, Flashes of fun, and little bursts of song; Petulant, pains, and fleeting pale contritions, Mute little moods of misery and wrong. Only a girl of Nature's rarest making, Wistful and sweet—and with a ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... cities groups of these victims, their heads drooping for shame, their eyes red with tears, their clothing in rags. Many died upon realizing the last hope which had sustained them so long. Sad-eyed mothers looked in vain among the thin ranks for their beloved ones, and time only soothed the untold misery of this wild enterprise. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... expenditure, with slang and bold brusquerie intended to signify her emancipated view of things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I am sorely tempted to hiss out "Petroleuse!" It is a small matter to have our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our sense of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, the promise of life—penetrating affection, stained and blotted out by images of repulsiveness. These things come—not of higher education, but—of dull ignorance fostered into pertness by the greedy ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... character. They may be good and useful, but they have no dignity or splendour, and are quite destitute of the strange meteoric power and grandeur which have accompanied the career of Clubs. Societies there are, indeed, which identify themselves through their very nomenclature with misfortune and misery, seeming proudly to proclaim themselves victims to all the saddest ills that flesh is heir to—as, for instance, Destitute Sick Societies, Indigent Blind Societies, Deaf and Dumb Societies, Burial Societies, and the like. The nomenclature ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... Deliberately the great man holds down the thin little arm and strikes him again with savage force. It is sickening! If we interfere the child will probably only get it worse afterwards. There are a few brutes like this who make their own children's lives a misery, though mostly French people are very kind. The children look so ill and pale, too, they probably don't ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... proverb,—"Silks and satins put out the kitchen fire." Silks and satins—meaning by them the luxuries of housekeeping—often put out not only the parlor fire, but that more sacred flame, the fire of domestic love. It is the greatest possible misery to a man and to his children to be homeless; and many a man has a splendid house, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe |
