"Pitiful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Cossitollah, as a representative street, wherein the European and Asiatic elements of the Calcutta panorama are mingled in the most picturesque proportions; for Cossitollah is the link that most directly joins the pitiful benightedness of the Black Town to the imposing splendors of Kumpnee Bahadoor,—the short, but stubborn chain of responsibility, as it were, whereby the ball of helpless and infatuated stock-and-stone-worship is fastened to the leg of British ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... increased. And now a demure bride or two emerged in all the radiance of perfect love and raiment, squired by him, braving the searching sunshine with confidence in her beauty, her plumage, and a kindly planet; and, in pitiful contrast, here and there some waxen-faced invalid, wheeled by a trained nurse, in cap and cuffs, through sunless halls into the clear sea air, to lie motionless, with leaden lids scarcely parted, in the glory ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... read between the lines some, but I gathered that he now broke down completely at this betrayal of his trusting nature. Vida must of been suffering too keenly herself to write me all the pitiful details. And right on top of this blow comes the horrible discovery, when he takes his mandolin out of the case, that it has been fatally injured in the moving. One blow right on another. How little we realize the suffering that goes on all about us in this ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... pitiful, Despite the countless years That man has spent in wandering Through paths of ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... mean to catechise—indeed, I don't. You must try to forgive me for the liberties I seem to be taking.... The thing's so serious, so pitiful. This story already flying around back in town—making him a base coward—he'll never live it down. And it's to-night or never, a—a misstatement travels so fast and far, and has ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may, yet will not I forget thee." The pity of neighbours and acquaintance helpeth in times of distress, but the pity of a father and a mother is pity with an over and above. "The Lord," says James, "is very pitiful, and of tender mercy." Pharaoh called Joseph his tender father,[21] because he provided for him against the famine, but how tender a father is God! how full of bowels! how full of pity! (James 5:11; Gen 41:43). ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... debts. Two years later he was deposed by the Assembly, when the King cast him off, and gave the temporalities of his see to one of the Court favourites. After that Adamson never lifted his head. When he had fallen into poverty and sickness he made a pitiful appeal to Melville, which was most generously met. His old opponent visited him, and for months provided for him out of his own purse; and it was through the good offices of both the Melvilles that he was able to make his peace with the Church ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... by a strange event which happened about this time. One day, without any warning, the thought of Cynthia darted urgently and irresistibly into my mind. Her image came between me and all my tasks; I saw her in innumerable positions and guises, but always with her eyes bent on me in a pitiful entreaty. After endeavouring to resist the thought for a little as some kind of fantasy, I became suddenly convinced that she was in need of me, and in urgent need. I asked for an interview with our Master, and told him the story; he heard me gravely, and then said ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and its failure to effect the crime proposed strengthened immensely the power, popularity, and influence of the Stadholder, made the orthodox church triumphant, and nearly ruined the sect of the Remonstrants, the Arminians—most unjustly in reality, although with a pitiful show of reason—being held guilty of the crime of Stoutenburg ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... place immediately; not that I have any objections either to my Lady or you, sir; but, to be sure, it was a sad day for me that I engaged myself to her Ladyship. Little did I think that a lady of distinction would coming to such a poor pitiful place as this. I am sure I thought I should ha' swooned when I was showed the hole ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... John Save the ground we stand on"— Cried the Miller,—"but ye come in a hurry;" While the lad, turning pale, 'Gan to weep and to wail, And to patter this pitiful story: ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... grotesque and pitiful. Is it strange that the feud should flourish in a land ruled by a "God of wrath?" Is anything but sickness and death to be expected where both are looked on as visitations of an ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... and failure of this day, And weariness of thought, O Mother Night, Come with soft kiss to soothe our care away And all our little tumults set to right; Most pitiful of all death's kindred fair, Riding above us through the curtained air On thy dusk car, thou scatterest to the earth Sweet dreams and drowsy charms of tender might And lovers' dear delight before to-morrow's birth. Thus art thou wont thy quiet lands to leave And ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... letter, covered with outlandish postmarks, was brought to the young priest—a letter from Anglice. She was dying;—would he forgive her? Emile, the year previous, had fallen a victim to the fever that raged on the island; and their child, Anglice, was likely to follow him. In pitiful terms she begged Antoine to take charge of the child until she was old enough to enter the convent of the Sacre-Coeur. The epistle was finished hastily by another hand, informing Antoine of Madame Jardin's death; it also told him ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... traffic in the street, the rattle of cars and tramp of hoofs. Jens Olaj's voice ascended towards me from the stables as he chid the horses. I was perfectly stunned. I sat and moistened my lips a little, but otherwise made no effort to do anything; my chest was in a pitiful state. The dusk closed in; I sank more and more together, grew weary, and lay down on the bed again. In order to warm my fingers a little I stroked them through my hair backwards and forwards and crosswise. Small loose ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... in a drooping attitude, with her eye intent upon her master; and when they would have taken her away, she hung back, and, stretching her neck till it reached his knees, licked his hands with a tenderness that was pitiful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... You may call these observations coarse, if you please; but I have no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, to wear Treasury ribands, and then that we are to be told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it? If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the ease of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame of it? Everybody seems hitherto to have spared a man who never ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... broken leg, he tried to crawl along. The result was pitiful, for he merely floundered in the deep mass of soft whiteness. His share of the luggage was heavy packs, nothing of which he could make a flag of distress or even build a fire. He felt for his matches, and lighting a cigarette, waved it aloft, ...
— The Come Back • Carolyn Wells
... of money for these Indulgences. But the system itself had meantime taken deep root. It continued, and continues to this day. It was, however, at its worst when the Twenty-second Article was drawn up. Can we be surprised that it sternly condemned it? It is all a pitiful history. But it was necessary to refer to it in order both to show how the growth of the Romish Doctrine of Purgatory gradually gathered round it mischievous accretions, and also to prove how little the belief, that in the Intermediate State ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... near and gazed inscrutably at this miracle of physical unfitness. Under his gaze the pitiful and insignificant figure bore itself as with a ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... devotedly attached to him, possessed the power of transforming herself into a variety of different animals. By this means she contrived to support her father, who sold her again and again each time she assumed a different form, and thus he dragged on a pitiful existence. {58} ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... mendicants whose faces were less familiar. One afternoon a most extraordinary Irishman, with a black eye, a bruised hat, and other traces of past enjoyment, waited upon me with a pitiful story of destitution and want, and concluded by requesting the usual trifle. I replied, with some severity, that if I gave him a dime he would probably spend it for drink. "Be Gorra! but you're roight—I wad that!" he answered promptly. I was ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... the surf boomed hollowly on the smooth, shady shore, littered now, I knew, by the pitiful spoils ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... pitiful to see the unfortunate professor of deportment deporting himself no longer, the professor of dancing dancing contrary to every rule of his art. Remain in his cabin, with the seas shaking the ship from stem to ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... world began to look through the new eyes of pity a great sorrow had given him. How worn the faces of these children. They must be horribly overworked. What a pitiful, starved life for a child. He thought of his own childhood, and saw himself with swift bare feet roaming the open fields ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... heir, unwilling that his estate should swell the fortunes of the family that in life had disowned him. Into his ear some kindly angel had whispered my name, and the memory that I shared with him the frowns of our house, and that my plight must be passing pitiful, had set up a bond of sympathy between us, which had led him to will his lands to me. Of Madame de Chevreuse—who clearly was the patron saint of those of her first husband's nephews who chanced to tread ungodly ways—my cousin Marion had besought that she should see ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... quietly proceeded to take out his pipe, fill, and light it, keeping an eye on Tom, who now sat disconsolately across the branch, looking at the keeper—a pitiful sight for men and fishes. The more he thought of it the less he ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... years about the pitiful condition of the 'drammer,' but did he ever write a play that saw the ...
— You Can Search Me • Hugh McHugh
... talking of these matters," observed Mrs. Hastings, "we may as well face one or two things that have troubled us all a good deal. You know as well as we do that poor Tom has gradually been playing out; it's pitiful the way he has been letting his business go. Every one knows that he has ability, but he's been living more and more up in the air. He owns the block over there and the rent he gets from that is about all he has. And I shouldn't ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... the broken dishes and came towards him, with slack lips and great startled eyes. "John," she panted, like a pitiful frightened child, "what have I been doing?... Man, what did ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids: it was thought she was a woman, and was turned into a cold fish for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful, ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together. Traditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the poet, but they ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... debts, egad! why should not Victurnien have debts? At this time and at all times princes have debts, every gentleman has debts. Perhaps you would rather that Victurnien should bring you his savings?—Do you know that our great Richelieu (not the Cardinal, a pitiful fellow that put nobles to death, but the Marechal), do you know what he did once when his grandson the Prince de Chinon, the last of the line, let him see that he had not spent ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... her nephew. Selina felt sorry. Her passion ended in a gush of "nervous" tears under the influence of which she was led up stairs and put to bed, almost like a child—the usual termination of these pitiful outbreaks. ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... this. He's goin' to be a rancher. Yes, don't y' see?" he asked, with a pitiful attempt at a ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... reason and another I shall not name. Yet this wretched husk of squalor spent thought upon appearances; many houses in it wore a false front to seem as if they were two stories high. There they stood, rearing their pitiful masquerade amid a fringe of old tin cans, while at their very doors began a world of crystal light, a land without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis. Into that space went wandering a road, over a hill and down out of sight, and up again smaller ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... the wind go "Yooooo"? 'T is a pitiful sound to hear! It seems to chill you through and through With a strange and speechless fear. 'T is the voice of the night that broods outside When folk should be asleep, And many and many's the time I've ...
— Love-Songs of Childhood • Eugene Field
... been so pitiful, it would have been ludicrous—what followed. Day after day, in one corner of the kitchen, an old man boiled his potatoes and fried his unappetizing eggs over a dusty, unblacked stove; in the other corner an old woman baked and brewed over ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... stands high, with a sharp eye on all the town. Every back window in the Tenements has a glint of it, and so the back of the Tenements is always better behaved than the front. It was in the front that Jamie Don, a pitiful bachelor all his life because he thought the women proposed, kept his ferrets, and here, too, Beattie hanged himself, going straight to the clothes-posts for another rope when the first one broke, such was his determination. In the front Sanders Gilruth ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... and up rose a piercing shriek and a terrible roar. It seemed that both children must have been mortally hurt, and I looked out hastily, only to see Budge and Toddie running after the carriage, and crying pitifully. It was too pitiful,—I could not have proceeded without them, even if they had been afflicted with small-pox. The driver stopped of his own accord,—he seemed to know the children's ways and their results,—and I helped Budge and Toddie in, meekly hoping ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... gaze were pitiful. The constant shifting increased her bewilderment. Conscious of this awful and enormous sight all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground, and then she closed them altogether. She kept the lids as tight together as ever they ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... sufferings during two winters was added the distress of losing a comrade to whom he was deeply attached; he perished in the spring of '42 under the hardships of the war. The Eloge in which Vauvenargues commemorates the virtues and the pitiful fate of his friend, is too deeply marked with the florid and declamatory style of youth to be pleasing to a more ripened taste.[5] He complained that nobody who had read it observed that it was touching, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... northeast of the village, and before long Count Bismarck discovered in a remote place about twenty men dreadfully wounded. These poor fellows had had no attention whatever, having been overlooked by the hospital corps, and their condition was most pitiful. Yet there was one very handsome man in the group—a captain of artillery—who, though shot through the right breast, was talkative and cheerful, and felt sure of getting well. Pointing, however, to a comrade lying near, also shot in the breast, ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... we were hungry the moment she saw us, that she had heard the soldiers were on short rations in consequence of the destruction of the railroad, and turning towards me she went on to say: 'There was such a pitiful, hungry look on this boy's face that it would have haunted me for a long time if I had let you go away without giving you a dinner. Many a hungry soldier,' she continued, 'both of the Northern and Southern army, has had something to eat at this table, and I ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... in Polotzk, to a single room hired by the week, and the humblest associations, and the averted heads of former friends! But oftenest it was my mother who turned away her head. She took to using the side streets to avoid the pitiful eyes of the kind, and the scornful eyes of the haughty. Both were turned on her as she trudged from store to store, and from house to house, peddling tea or other ware; and both were hard to bear. Many a winter morning she arose in the dark, to tramp three or four miles in the gripping cold, through ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... is perhaps the most lovable figure in Russian literature. I say lovable, because he was at bottom a hapless man,—a man who had fed on his own mighty heart. There is a Carlylesqueness about his woe that makes his life immeasurably pitiful. Pushkin's sorrow one finds it difficult to lament deeply, since it was mostly of his own making; but Gogol's was the sorrowful lot of all heaven-aspiring souls who have not yet attained the last, safest haven of rest in God,—that ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... deceived checked the words which were rising to his lips. Again he saw himself in a pitiful light, and this self-contempt reflected upon Sidwell. He could not doubt that she was yielding to him; her attitude and her voice declared it; but what was the value of love won by imposture? Why had she not intelligence enough to see through his hypocrisy, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of hope. She turned eagerly to examine them. Piles of sombre skirts, blue and black and tan. They were stout and coarse and scant, and not of the latest cut, but what mattered it? She decided on a seventy-five cent black one. It seemed pitiful to have to economize in a matter of twenty-five cents, when she had been used to counting her money by dollars, yet there was a feeling of exultation at having gotten for that price any skirt at all that would do. A dim memory of ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... Heidi began. But she did not get very far, for the story she was reading told of a grandmother's death. Suddenly she cried aloud: "Oh, now grandmother is dead!" and wept in the most pitiful fashion. Whatever Heidi read always seemed real to her, and now she thought it was her own grandmother at home. Louder and louder she sobbed: "Now poor grandmother is dead and I can never see her any more; and she ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... to you," said Naggeneen; "it was you that spoke to me. You called me, and here I am to the fore, though I don't belong to your pitiful little thribe, and I needn't come when you call, if ...
— Fairies and Folk of Ireland • William Henry Frost
... caught up the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to. Jim Driscoll—that pitiful nonentity, with his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed extraordinary that the government should have hunted up such insignificant people. And immediately she had a great vague vision of the splendours they were going to—all the banquets ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... rewards great. Then the law, which is no respecter of professions of that kind, had got him. "Crackerjack" had but recently returned from a protracted sojourn at an institution arranged by the State in its paternalism for the reception and harbouring of such as he. The pitiful dole with which the discharged prisoner had been unloaded upon a world which had no welcome for him had been soon spent; even the hideous prison-made clothes had been pawned, and some rags, which were yet the rags of a free man, which had been preserved through the long period of ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... making them sadly tiresome. The first that he saw at the principal theatre was a version of Balzac's Pere Goriot. "The domestic Lear I thought at first was going to be very clever. But he was too pitiful—perhaps the Italian reality would be. He was immensely applauded, though." He afterwards saw a version of Dumas' preposterous play of Kean, in which most of the representatives of English actors ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... return. Joshua's prayer is answered. He knows now why little Ai has beaten them back. He asked, 'What shall I say?' He has got something of grave import to say. So far this passage carries us, leaving the pitiful last hour of the wretched troubler of Israel untouched. What lessons are ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... deem death to be preferable to life. O hero that never swervest from virtue, had I with my brothers met with destruction ere this at the hands of our enemies on the battle-field, I would not have found thee in this pitiful plight, thus pierced with arrows. Surely, O prince, the Maker had created is to become perpetrators of evil deeds. O king, if thou wishest to do me good, do thou then instruct me in such a way that I may be cleansed of this sin in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... first and last an incomparable sense of pattern and austerity of mood. He saw with an all too pitiless and pitiful eye the element of helplessness in things, the complete succumbing of things in nature to those elements greater than they that wield a fatal power. Ryder was the last of the romantics, the last ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... out Dagon. "That pitiful creature has refused gold and a precious goblet, which I ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... figure. But now this was all changed; as though by some mysterious alchemy, war had succeeded peace, the very landscape appearing grimly desolate, yet alive with moving figures. And these told the story, the story of defeat. It was not a new scene to me, but nevertheless pitiful. They came trudging from out the smoke clouds, and across the untilled fields, alone, or in little groups, some armed, more weaponless, here and there a bloody bandage showing, or a limp bespeaking a wound; dirty, unshaven men, in uniforms begrimed and ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... Impertinent, the Agreeable, the Thoughtful, Busie, or Careless; the Serene or Cloudy, Jovial or Melancholy, Untowardly or Easie; the Cold, Temperate, or Sanguine; and of what Manners or Dispositions soever, whether the Ambitious or Humble-minded, the Proud or Pitiful, Ingenious or Base-minded, Good or Ill-natur'd, Publick-spirited or Selfish; and under what Fortune or Circumstance soever, whether the Contented or Miserable, Happy or Unfortunate, High or Low, Rich or Poor (whether so through Want of Money, or Desire of more) Healthy or Sickly, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... she had shown them that she could at any rate do one thing rather well; but she was equally glad that she had obtained Janet's promise to avoid any discussion of her qualities or her situation. After all, with her self-conscious restraint and her pitiful assured income of three pounds a week, she was a poor little creature compared with the easy, luxurious beings of this household, whose upkeep could not cost less than three pounds a day. Janet, in rich and complicated ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... suddenly realized that almost every man in the room bore the unmistakable mark of service in the trenches. It was the first time that he had been brought violently into contact with the far-reaching and horrible devastation of this cruel war. One pitiful figure, a young man of about twenty-two who sat apart from the rest, so affected him that he scarcely recovered himself in time to acknowledge the great kindness of the Duchess of Windthorst, who was receiving him in the most ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... lips, and changing colour, that she too was aware that her husband had returned. Presently he opened the room-door, and stood there uncertain whether to come in. His face was gray and pale; he had a timid, fearful look in his eyes; something almost pitiful to see in a man's face; but that look of despondent uncertainty, of mental and bodily languor, touched his wife's heart. She went to him, and threw herself on his ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... B * * and such like to hum and haw you, or, rather, Lady J * * out of her compliment, and me out of mine.[69] Sun-burn me, but this was pitiful-hearted. However, I will tell her all about it when ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... expression for being asked for one's passport at San Juliano, and required to fetch it from San Lorenzo, full a mile and a quarter distant. In like manner, travellers, after two or three days' residence in the city, used to return with pitiful lamentations over "the misery of the Italian people." Upon inquiring what instances they had met with of this misery, it invariably turned out that their gondoliers, after being paid three times their proper fare, had asked for ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... prayer would not come. I fell into heavy doubting and despair, and murmured against the Lord that He plagued me more sorely than Lazarus or Job. Wretch that I was, I cried, "Thou didst leave to Lazarus at least the crumbs and the pitiful dogs, but to me Thou hast left nothing, and I myself am less in Thy sight even than a dog; and Job Thou didst not afflict until Thou hadst mercifully taken away his children, but to me Thou hast left my poor ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... next morning the cannon began to boom from the Castle of St. Angelo. Gabriel Zimandy sprang out of bed and dressed himself quickly. His first care was to tap at Madam Dormandy's door and inquire for her health. The patient answered in a pitiful voice that the guns were fairly splitting her poor head, and that she did not expect to live the day through. This reply seemed to be quite to the advocate's liking: of the lady's succumbing to her ailment he ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... Kurtz—Kurtz—that means short in German—don't it? Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life—and death. He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... friend. My head is still entirely filled with questions, and they are twining and twisting about like the fishing-worms in a bag, by the help of which men hope to secure fish. Be pitiful and allow me to fasten a few more of these questions to my fishing-rod, and thus try to secure ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... first awakening from his illusion. He had not gone far into the wilderness before it came to him, and it happened thus. As he was walking along in the forest he heard, but a short distance ahead of him, a pitiful cry of a creature in distress. Quickly he hurried on, and was just in time to see the convulsive gasp of a beautiful young fawn that had been seized and was being mangled by a great, fierce wolf, which had found it where ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... she ain't crazy. I 've seen that woman as sensible and as shrewd as any sane woman who ever drew breath. Then again, I 've seen her when I would n't get within fifty miles of her. Sometimes she 's pitiful to me; and then again I 've got to remember the fact that she 's a dangerous woman. Goodness only knows what would happen to a person who fell into her clutches when she 's got one of those immortality ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... to know—Nay, but I have asked you already. I desired to know did you deem me a very pitiful little fool?" ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... a pitiful game it all is! And alas! as George Sand says, "All this, you see, is a game that we are playing, but our heart and life are the stakes, and that has an aspect which is not ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... 'encouragement,' does not mean protection. A really wise policy should aim at making a country independent of foreign supply, but this should be effected without resorting to the pitiful shifts of customs duties and prohibitions. Industries must work out their own salvation, competition is the life of trade. A protected industry goes to sleep, and monopoly, like the protective tariff, kills it outright. ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... him, on the very day on which he and his men came in. They brought with them ten captives, boys and women. They were received with great joy. "He and those that were with him, arrived so DESTROYED BY THE MOUNTAIN, that it was pitiful to see them. When they were asked how they had lost themselves, they said that it was the thickness of the trees, so great that they could not see the sky, and that some of them, who were mariners, had climbed up the trees to look at the star (the Pole-star) and that they never ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... numberless rich hours of spectatorship, but somehow still find hooked to the wall of memory the picture of this hushed couple in the castle court, with the knocking at the gate, with Macbeth's stare of pitiful horror at his unused daggers and with the grand manner, up to the height of the argument, of Mrs. Kean's coldly portentous snatch of them. What I especially owe that lady is my sense of what she had in common, as a queer hooped and ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... space or time, laugh at each other's masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... his cell, and the poor devil fainted three times at the heat caused by the throng of his admirers. So long as his fate hung in the balance, Walpole could not take up his pen without a compliment to the man, who claimed to have robbed him near Hyde Park. Yet a more pitiful rascal never showed the white feather. Not once was he known to take a purse with his own hand, the summit of his achievement being to hold the horses' heads while his accomplice spoke with the passengers. A poltroon before his arrest, in Court he ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... own beseeching words, the jangle of the horses' bells, the mad movement of the poplars alongside, were all she had for answer, as they dashed on. No word came from the silent shape in front. There coursed through her mind a forecast of her pitiful progress through the city, driven onward by the lash, her swooning companion dragging on her arms, the crowd lining the pavements to stare at her, the officers pressing forward to greet her with mocking applause and ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... way to shore through that. She drove hard on the paddle. She was not afraid, but there rose in her a peculiar tensed-up feeling. Ahead lay a ticklish bit of business. The sixteen-foot canoe dwarfed to pitiful dimensions in the face of that snarling line of wind-harried water. She could hear the distant murmur of it presently, and gusty puffs of wind began ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... come to lead them. The preordained time has now arrived, and Emmanuel himself is to take the command. He, too, selects his captains—Credence and Good Hope, Charity, and Innocence, and Patience; and the captains have their squires, the counterparts of themselves—Promise and Expectation, Pitiful, Harmless, and Suffer Long. Emmanuel's armour shines like the sun. He has forty-four battering rams and twenty-two slings—the sixty-six books of the Bible—each made of pure gold. He throws up mounds and trenches, ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... it dashed between the rocky banks, still calling to him. If he could only close his ears to it! But it still called—called still—the river! And still the child's voice pierced the rush of sound with its pitiful flute note, until the two resolved themselves into contesting strains, answering each other antiphonally. The river—the baby—the river—the baby; and in and through, and betwixt and between, there spun the whirling merry-go-round, with its ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... This pitiful recompense recalls one both glorious and well-earned which M. Larrey received from the Emperor during the campaign in Egypt. At the battle of Aboukir, General Fugieres was operated on by M. Larrey under the enemies' ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... man, but he would take on misery too in his own person, that he might be experimentally merciful to us. Certainly, the experience of misery and infirmity must superadd some tenderness to the heart of our High Priest. But though it did not help him to be more pitiful, yet it was done for us, to help us to have more confidence in him, and boldness to come unto him. What an encouragement is it for a poor man to come unto the once poor Jesus Christ, who "had not where to lay his head?" He knows the evil of poverty, and he chose to know it, that he might have ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... their fill, And then 'twould occasion to somebody ill. Said Bertrand to Ratto, "My brother, to-day Exhibit your powers in a masterly way, And take me these chestnuts, I pray. Which were I but otherwise fitted (As I am ingeniously witted) For pulling things out of the flame, Would stand but a pitiful game." "'Tis done," replied Ratto, all prompt to obey; And thrust out his paw in a delicate way. First giving the ashes a scratch, He open'd the coveted batch; Then lightly and quickly impinging, He drew out, in ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... age shall pass away, and silenced are the guns, When sweethearts join their loves again, and mothers kiss their sons, When brave unto the brave return, and all they did is told, How pitiful my gift shall seem, when all ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... thy pitiful dirge, Thou need'st to be mournful and moan! The wrath of thy terrible surge ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... Cross of the Legion of Honour to the lieutenant in command, M. de Langle, who had behaved like a hero. I went alongside his ship to see him in the lonely creek to which the infected vessel had been relegated. A crowd of spectral figures crept to the ports to look at me. It was a pitiful scene. ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... this time his smile without words troubled her. It seemed the assertion of superior intelligence, contemptuous, if half pitiful of her ignorance. Once so serenely convinced of her superiority, Leam was now as suspicious of her shortcomings, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... faded in the sufferer's face, his cheeks had fallen in, but though the jolting must have caused him severe pain at times he rarely complained. Instead, he would smile at us encouragingly, or make some pitiful attempt at a jest, and I think it was chiefly to please us that he choked down a few spoonfuls of the very untempting stew we forced on him. Once, too, when I tried to feed him his eyes twinkled, though his lips were ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... he came by the mountain wall, The snow upon the heights looked down And said, "The sight is pitiful. The nostrils of his steed are brown With frozen blood; and he ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... "Shalt he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? Shall we 'the swarm that in the noontide beam were born,' feeling in ourselves the power to direct, this way or that, the forces of Nature—of Nature, of which we form so trivial a part—shall we, in our boundless arrogance, in our pitiful conceit, deny that power to the Ancient of Days? Saying, to our Creator, 'Thus far and no further. Thou madest, ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... word assured me that he meant to stand by me to the last ditch, and I knew it was the word of a man who never knew when he was beaten. While Cummings smoked a cigar in the window-seat I told Barrett the whole pitiful story, beginning with the night when I had promised Agatha Geddis that I would pull her father out of the hole he had digged for himself and ending with my appearance in the Cripple ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... obey'd; and with mine eye return'd Through all the seven spheres, and saw this globe So pitiful of semblance, that perforce It moved my smiles: and him in truth I hold For wisest, who esteems it least: whose thoughts Elsewhere are fix'd, him worthiest call and best. I saw the daughter of Latona shine Without the shadow, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... he leaned toward Jack. His face under the rim of light of the lamp had a new charm, which was not that of the indulgent or flattering or winning smile, or the masterful set of his chin on an object. He seemed pallid and old, struggling against a phantom himself; almost pitiful, this man of strength, while his eyes looked into Jack's ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Holy Father: he has made his first appeal to the tendency that he knows to be the chief frailty in man, and especially in those who are very tender and pitiful in their natural affections, and tender to their own bodies—for such men as these hold life dearer than any others. So he fastened on this point from his first word. But I hope, by the goodness of God, that you will ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... inward eye the face of his long-dead father, white and set with some inward pain of which he did not speak. Dick remembered that as a boy that had seemed to him a pitiful thing. Now he saw it somewhat as the believers once saw the face of the martyr, the visible manifestation of triumph—the success of being true to yourself in spite ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... pitiful," said Auberon. "With five or six times their number, there will be no fight ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... was a gaunt and haggard-looking man. The dirt seemed ingrained in him—in his hands, his eyebrows, his temples, under his hair, up to his very eyes. He told a pitiful story of long work and short pay—of hungry children and an over-tasked wife. He told, in fact, the story familiar to all of us—the 'chestnut' of the newspapers—the story which the busy man of ordinary society is not expected ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... straggling hand that wandered uncertainly over the lines. It was a pitiful letter telling of poverty bitter and grinding, but redeemed from utter misery by a love and faith ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... Lumley, with a pitiful smile, "that your intellects are sinking to a par with those of the geese which fly over the ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... voice were so pitiful that Pauline replied reassuringly: "I understand—I'll say nothing. Please show me those," and she pointed to a tray of unset rubies in ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... for months by bandages and by useless orthopedic apparatus! Now, however, thanks to care and good food and gymnastic exercises, many are improving. Their schoolmistress makes them practise gymnastics. It was a pitiful sight to see them, at a certain command, extend all those bandaged legs under the benches, squeezed as they were between splints, knotty and deformed; legs which should have been covered with kisses! Some could not rise from the bench, and remained there, with ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... age of nine, his father left Chatham, and Dickens was removed with the rest of the family to London, where his early pitiful struggles began, which ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... taken to dinner before joining the game at Nick's. It had gotten to be a sort of weekly date—although this night had given signs of being the last one. For a while that spring, desoxyribonucleic acid had begun to take second place in my heart. This is a pitiful admission for a biochemist to make—DNA should be the cornerstone of his life. But Shari was something rare—a gorgeous woman, if somewhat distant, who was thoroughly intelligent. She had already earned her doctorate, while I was still struggling ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... not wish to frighten them. At least, it knew now that life could come through the hole, and the small herbivore it had herded through confirmed that passage in the opposite direction was equally possible—plus a gratis demonstration of the other world's pitiful defenses. At swarming time, the whole new world would be open to embryo Harn, as well as this ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... had power been more centralized, and never in France had the reins been held by persons so pitiful, impelled by motives so contemptible. The levity, vanity, and spite of a concubine became a mighty engine to influence the destinies of nations. Louis XV., enervated by pleasures and devoured by ennui, still had his emotions; he shared Pompadour's ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... for his own hard-heartedness. He punished her as one would chastise a child. The tables were turned. The poor woman cowered under the stick which, figuratively, was constantly held over her. She was scarcely forty-two years old, and already had the stammerings of terror, and vague, pitiful looks of an old woman in her dotage. Her son continued to stab her with his piercing glances, hoping that she would run away when her courage was exhausted. The unfortunate woman suffered terribly from shame, restrained desire and ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... was at its height, you will know what happened when those white-clad figures went among the thousands of range-bred beasts, guarded by a pitiful handful of men. For range cattle are accustomed to a man only when he is mounted; then he is a part of his horse. It is dangerous for him to go among them on foot; then he is a strange animal. Many a cowboy has dismounted, ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... to work again to earn our daily bread—not with his old love or ability, but in an inert, feeble way that was pitiful to see. I think from the day my mother was buried he was dying. Some people, you know, die hard—some part with life lightly, as if it was a faded robe they shook off to don a brighter one. Others—my father was one, and I am like him—see one by one their trusts, their hopes, ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... seem sort o' pitiful, don't it, to think how sort o' homeless the Americans are a gettin'? How the posys that blow under the winders of Home are left to waste their sweet breaths amongst the weeds, while them that used to love 'em are a climbin' ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... not all. On the day of her first visit to M. Arthur, when Mme. Derline came out of the great house, she was broken-hearted—positively broken-hearted—at the sight of her brougham; it really did make a pitiful appearance among all the stylish carriages which were waiting in three rows and taking up half the street. It was the brougham of her late mother-in-law, and it still rolled through the streets of Paris after fifteen years' service. Mme. Derline got into the woe-begone brougham to drive ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... it be, perhaps, the perfume of warmed towels. Alas! God's satire weighs heavily on me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little, earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath him in humor, in ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the pretty, drooping head was lifted defiantly. No! she would not go down just yet, for one last motive remained. While she was at the store an hour before to buy a few necessary articles of food with the pitiful supply of money she had found in an old teapot on the kitchen shelf, a wonderful thing had occurred. Tod Greeley, weighing out some ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... Mark Twain to make me tired before. Positive fact." Ross slammed "Roughing It" on the floor. "When you're snowbound this-away you want tragedy, I guess. Humor just seems to bring out all your cussedness. You read a man's poor, pitiful attempts to be funny and it makes you so nervous you want to tear the book up, get out your bandana, and have ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... Once again you feel the bigness of your world, the tremendous significance of everything in it—including yourself—and a far-seeing sadness grips you. Living in the flesh seems so transient, almost a pitiful thing in the last analysis. But somehow you feel that there is something bigger—not beyond it, but all about it continually. And you wonder that you ever hated anyone. You know, somehow, there in the smoky silence, why men are noble or ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Elsie darted after him. Nor did she stop to be directed. She went straight to her food cupboard, without paying the slightest heed to the outstretched body of the luckless Farley. Lennon threw a rug over the pitiful form and hastened to drag three saddles and as many ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... herd. Some remind you of deer. Some have an expression in the face like certain persons you have known. A petted and well-fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly-fed one a pitiful and forlorn look. Some cows have a masculine or ox expression; others are extremely feminine. The latter are the ones for milk. Some cows will kick like a horse; some jump fences like deer. Every herd has its ringleader, its unruly spirit—one that plans all the mischief ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... alms; and when his father came and presented himself before him in turn, as he had done to the suitors one by one, he gave him of his own meat which he had in his dish, and of his own cup to drink. And the suitors were past measure offended to see a pitiful beggar, as they esteemed him, to be so choicely regarded ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... and your conscience is clear—what more can you want? You fall asleep—and suddenly... you hear a buzz!... Gnats! [Jumps up] Gnats! Be they triply accursed Gnats! [Shakes his fist] Gnats! It's one of the plagues of Egypt, one of the tortures of the Inquisition! Buzz! It sounds so pitiful, so pathetic, as if it's begging your pardon, but the villain stings so that you have to scratch yourself for an hour after. You smoke, and go for them, and cover yourself from head to foot, but it is no good! At last you have to sacrifice ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... of former days. Consequently the frequent calls which Dr. Surtaine deemed it expedient to make for the sake of appearances, at Hal's hotel, resulted in painful, rambling, topic-shifting talks, devoid of any human touch other than the pitiful and thwarted affection of two personalities at hopeless odds. "Least said soonest mended" was a favorite aphorism of the experienced quack. But in this tangle it failed him. It was he who first touched on the ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... from Master Semmler? Away again? Where? The cows are at home already. You bad boy, I can't understand you. Wait, I'll have to see if you have no tongue in your mouth!" She made a few angry steps forward. The child looked up to her with the pitiful expression of a poor, half-grown dog that is learning to sit up on his hind legs. In his fear he began to stamp his feet and rub his back against ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... who first sweep, and then hold out a small palm for the penny, dodging the horses' hoofs, and just escaping by a hair's breadth the wheels of truck or omnibus in their attempts to secure the coin, if some pitiful passer-by stops ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... he desired him to make it a present to the Jesuit, telling him at the same time, that as these people had great power and authority, it might be of service to us hereafter. This Campbell very unwillingly did, and received from the father, not long after, a pitiful present, not a quarter part of the value of the rim of the watch. We understood afterwards that this had come to the governor's ears, who was highly offended at it, as thinking that if any thing of that sort had been to be had, it was his due, and did not spare the Jesuits ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... been taken with one of her fits of charity, which made her give all she owned that she might overwhelm those who had nothing. At the idea of suffering, her whole soul melted into a pitiful fraternity. She went often to the pere Mascart's, a blind paralytic on the Rue Basse, whom she was obliged to feed herself the broth she carried him; then to the Chouteaux, a man and his wife, each one over ninety years of age, who lived in a little hut ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... not in our generation at least, had Europe seen anything like that flight—nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women, desperate, trampling men, tears and screams. In all those miles one saw neither complaining nor protestation—at times one might almost have thought it some vast, eccentric ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... the articles which had been founded on her answers, and the Bishop previously represented to her "that these doctors were all churchmen, clerks, and well read in law, divine and human; that they were all tender and pitiful, and desired to proceed mildly, seeking neither vengeance nor corporal punishment, but solely wishing to enlighten her, and put her in the way of truth and of salvation; and that, as she was not sufficiently informed in such high matters, the Bishop and the Inquisitor offered ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... believe it was she," he cried, in total disregard of the presence he was in, "I would not believe it; but now——" A certain pitiful gesture finished the sentence, and neither Coroner nor jury seemed to know just how to proceed, the conduct of the young man being so markedly different from what they had expected. After a short pause, painful enough to all concerned, the Coroner, perceiving that very little ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... veils to hide the truth. But, in that moment, the veils were lifted, and both saw Truth in all her naked terror and beauty. What he saw scorched and repelled but did not daunt him; instead, a nobler love, chivalrous and pitiful, was born of the sight. And she saw that love, and knew it great enough to clothe her even if she came to him stripped of fair repute and ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... she murmured while she listened,—"rest"; and with the repetition of the word the fever died out of her eyes, leaving them filled with such a look, more pitiful than any tears, as would have made a kind heart ache even to look at them; while her figure, alert and proud no longer, bent on the window ledge in such lonely and weary fashion that a strong arm would have involuntarily stretched out to shield it from any hardness or blow that might threaten, ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... cheeks that were obviously rouged; she wore a dress of curious shot silk decorated with much lace, and her fingers were thick with jewels; a large hat with great purple feathers waved above her head. It was a fantastic and gaudy impression that she made, and there was something rather pitiful in the contrast between her own obvious satisfaction with her personal appearance and the bizarre, almost vulgar, effect of such strangely contrasted colours. She came mincing into the room with her head a little on ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... now, let hearts united be To laud His praises joyfully, The God-Man born to-day. And let Thy mercy reach us now For pitiful and kind art Thou, O Virgin born, ...
— Hymns from the Greek Office Books - Together with Centos and Suggestions • John Brownlie
... subsisting between Harvey and Mary Abbott. These two children, known as Albert and Minnie Wager, were Harvey's offspring, the result of some liaison before his marriage; and Mrs. Abbott, taking charge of them for payment, had connived at the story of their origin, of their pitiful desertion. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... was strong again. With great shouts, he rallied his men. A pitiful handful; only fifteen of the fifty that had entered the valley. But Joan was alive, her face black with burned skin, otherwise unhurt. Wat's grin rose superior to a mask of raw flesh, and Grim, bleeding from a hundred wounds, was ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner |
