"Sickening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fill. For the first time he was tasting to the full a measure of bitterness as rank as any the world has to offer. For there is something in the deliberate rejection by one's kind: a mortification, a sickening sense of helplessness, of rage, of revolt, that belongs to this experience alone. It is a kind of suffering in which women frequently become connoisseurs. But its taste is none the less nauseous to the man on ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... and the country was rife with stories of the inhuman treatment of our men, daily dying by hundreds, while those who survived the cruelties were reduced to maniacs and imbeciles. And Helen, as she listened, grew nearly frantic with the sickening suspense. She did not know now where her husband was. He had made several attempts to escape, and with each failure had been removed to safer quarters, so that the chances now of his being exchanged seemed very far ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... man who had tempted him to crime, Lygon had a new sense of boldness, a sudden feeling of reprisal, a rushing desire to put the screw upon him. At sight of this millionaire with the pile of notes before him there vanished the sickening hesitation of the afternoon, of the journey with Dupont. The look of the robust, healthy financier was like acid in a wound; ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... produce perfect health. In order to get rid of a disease nothing is more frequent among primitive men than to picture the sick person on wood or on the ground, and to strike the injured part with an arrow or knife, in order to annihilate the sickening principle. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... there, terribly hot. The air was stifling. It fairly reeked of moisture and the smells from the swamp behind them were sickening. Tommy began to transfer the shells from the spare bent magazine to the one he had carried ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was no sleep for the poor victims—until the long, black sleep of unconsciousness rolled over them and in mercy blotted out their misery—for the N.C.O.'s came for them and dragged them away from us, and the sickening spectacle began again. ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... mad, or worse; these are some of the sickening French and German sentimentalities against which I have been warned. There is such a thing as a wholesome sense of repulsion, an honest manly recoil, a pure instinct of loathing, a thousand times to be preferred to this morbid mixture of good and evil, friend and foe, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of the month of Eloul, which were excessive in that year, were another calamity. Sickening smells rose from the borders of the Lake, and were wafted through the air together with the fumes of the aromatics that eddied at the corners of the streets. The sounds of hymns were constantly heard. Crowds of people occupied the ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... dreadful night, and more sickening the miasma, which lies around the opium creeks, multiplying and increasing and slowly sucking down into their slimy depths thousands upon thousands of those who dare to seek momentary relief from sorrow in its lethal stream. Mr. Caine thus describes ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... remembered, as she now remembered with a kind of sickening vividness, the last time they had been together in this room—for it was here, in the dining-room of Old Place, that they had spent their last miserable, heart-broken moment together, a moment when all the angry bitterness had been merged in ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... about on the edge of the ragged rock and let his feet down. He felt a projecting knob of something, and then for a sickening second he paused and shouted again and then he let go, hugging the face of the cliff. As he went down, he began to realise thankfully that the cliff was rough and irregular. His hands were running blood, but he did not know it. As he ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... O'Hara drew the automatic from his pocket, deriving a comforting assurance from the feel of the cold steel. Here was something no man could resist could he but get it into action. The light was now nearly abreast of his door, and for a sickening instant he thought the prowler was coming into the room. He held his breath. Now the lamp was at the open door, and now it was quickly withdrawn. After a breathless second he tip-toed forward and peered cautiously down ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... left arm was held by the second physician, while the chief surgeon bent over it, lancet in hand. A third doctor kneeled, holding a bowl under his Highness's arm, from which large drops of blood welled slowly, and fell with a sickening soft thud into ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... grasped his shoulder and gently shook it. He lay motionless. She caught hold of his hand again: it slipped from her limply, like a dead thing. A dead thing? ... Her breath caught. She must see his face. She leaned forward, and hurriedly, shrinkingly, with a sickening reluctance of the flesh, laid her hands on his shoulders and turned him over. His head fell back; his face looked small and smooth; he gazed at her ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... at the door. Presently it opened. Ancliffe entered with several men, all quick in movement, alert of eye. But Neale and Larry King were not among them. Allie's heart sank like lead. The revulsion of feeling, the disappointment, was sickening. She saw Ancliffe shake his head, and divined in the action that he had not been able to find the friends Hough wanted particularly. Then Allie felt the incredible strangeness of being glad that Neale was not to find her there—that ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... That sickening grip in the chest which is a real, physical pain, though the hurt be given to the soul of a man, slowed Dade's steps to a lagging advance towards the tableau the two made on the steps. So had the senorita sent him dizzy with desire (and with hope to brighten it) in the ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... Shepler, who commanded markets to rise and they rose, or to fall and they fell—Shepler begging, entreating a child of his! Despite the soul-sickening tragedy of it, the situation was not without its ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... blows, in which we came off victorious, and I hastily caught hold of the arm near the elbow to help bear the body away. The skin gave way under my hand, and slipped with it down to the wrist, like a torn sleeve. It was sickening, but I clung to my prize, and secured a very good chunk of wood while outside with it. The wood was very much needed by my mess, as our squad had then had none ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... artificial and untrue. Miss O'Flynn talks as if she were a superior being; Madame Villard talks as if she were a Royal personage. They talk about their customers and each other in a sort of make-believe grandiose way, that is as sickening as it is absurd. I don't know how to express it, but I'd rather work in a place where everybody is real, and claims only such honour and glory as absolutely belong to them. I ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... Guffey, speechless; and Guffey, for his part, took a couple of steps toward Peter, his brows gathering into a terrible frown, and his fists clenched. In a wave of sickening horror Peter remembered the scenes after the Preparedness Day explosion. Were they going to put ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... speak for a moment. She seemed to be held in thrall by both terror and a sickening dismay. It did not seem real, her surroundings here, this man, and the voice that was gloatingly pronouncing the death sentence upon the man who had come unbidden into her life, and into her heart, the man she loved. Yes, she understood! Danglar's words had been plain enough. ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... wildly in that suffocating hold, struggled fruitlessly to lift her face from her husband's shoulder into which it was ruthlessly pressed, and only ceased to struggle when the end of that terrible flight came with a jolt and a jar and a final, sickening crash that flung her headlong into a dreadful gulf of emptiness into which no light or echo of sound could ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... man who had been kneeling rigid and immovable before the wooden symbol reared upon the new-raised cairn of boulders swayed a little. His head fell forward heavily upon his breast. His eyes closed in spite of his desperate effort to shake off the deadly, sickening collapse of will and brain and body that was mastering him. He fell sideways, and lay in a heap ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... bonnet disdainfully on the sofa, 'if I ever was disgusted with boldness and affectation I have been to-day. But one thing let me tell you, Miss Rosalie, if you cannot learn more propriety of manners, if you make such sickening efforts to attract the attention of strangers, I will never allow you to go in public, at ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... came down in the same place twice, but he always came down stiff-legged. The jolt was sickening. All about, in a narrow, earth-cut circle he bucked, beginning to grunt and warm to his work and hence to increase the deviltry ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... you believe that he can stop of his own free will, you will be impatient with him when he stammers. You will scold him and tell him to "stop that kind of talking!" Thus you will irritate him, and bring to his heart that sickening sensation that he is totally helpless in the grip of his speech disorder and yet—"Oh, why will ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... when Abe lost his balance, it had reached the point beneath which he was sitting. There was an agonised cry from the vesselmen on their platform, a hissing splash with great gouts of liquid fire flying in all directions, a sickening smell, and then, a few minutes later, a clergyman, hastily summoned from the adjoining church, was reciting the burial service over the calcined body ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... crows, was yet a big part of the life of the frontiersman and frightful in its possibilities. Sherman's march to the sea or through the Carolinas, disgraceful to modern civilization as each undeniably was, lacked the sickening phase, guerrilla atrocities, that made the Civil War in the West, to those at least who were in line to experience it at close range, an awful nightmare. Union and Confederate soldiers might well fraternize in eastern camps because there they ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... the clock is like the throb of pain to sensations made keen by a sickening fear. And so it is with the great clockwork of nature. Daisies and buttercups give way to the brown waving grasses, tinged with the warm red sorrel; the waving grasses are swept away, and the meadows lie like emeralds ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Parflete," said he, "is a great blow. One becomes indifferent to what is said of, or done to, one's self; but that all this uncommon, saddening, sickening trouble should come upon Robert is too bad. It seems a kind of hacking and ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... that he has chosen what is there for him to gain? An inheritance of dim glory beyond the stars, obscured doubtless from time to time, if he is like other men, by sudden and sickening eclipses of his faith. And meanwhile the daily round, the insolent gibe, and the bitter ingratitude of men that leaves him grieving. Also not enough money to pay for a cab when it is wet, and considerable uncertainty ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... fixed on the crudest of all. No one was likely to be within earshot, thought he, so he picked up the largest stone he could find, took as careful aim as the dim light would allow, and hove it. There was a sickening crash, loud enough, he thought, to bring the whole School down on him, followed by a prolonged rattle as the broken pieces of glass fell ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... A strange, sickening sensation came over Frank at the discovery. Thus the evil he had done followed him. But for that wild freak of plundering the poor man's poultry-yard, he might be plodding now on his Maryland farm, and Atwater would not be ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... he began with a low laugh, "there lived a singularly sickening little prig of a kid, pampered and spoiled to his selfish marrow. Though I hate to roast a small boy, I am bound to say that this one was pretty nearly a total loss—and he was I. He threatened to grow into a more odious ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the more he thought of the scene of their parting, the more sickening became the conviction that her anger at his use of an ugly word was merely a subterfuge to break their engagement. The perfidy and cruelty of such an act was too hideous for belief—yet if the thing were possible! He had ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... written anything, or made a friend, or accepted an invitation, without saying, "Will this add to my consequence?" We must all nurse our reputations in this world. They don't come of themselves—they have to be made!' Well, I thought this all very sickening, and I said I didn't care a d—n about my reputation. I said I had a chance of living with people whom I liked, and of working at things I cared about, and I thought his theories simply disgusting and vulgar. He showed his teeth at that, and said that he had spoken as a ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... struggle by a sweep of Lem's left arm. Ann was petrified with fear; but this did not keep her from picking up the girl from the floor. In her terror she took in each motion of the fighters. She saw Lem lift his left hand, and heard the sickening thud as his great brown fist struck Everett full in the face. She saw the hook flash in the candlelight, then bury its glittering prong in the other's neck. Everett screamed once, then was silent; for with his unmaimed hand the scowman had grasped his enemy's throat and was shaking ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... sallying forth, all three of us, armed with magazine rifle, cutlass, and revolver. Mr. Carmichael in the middle, I on the lower, and Gazen on the upper side, or that nearest to Miss Carmichael. The rocks around were slippery with ordure, and the sickening stench of rotting skeletons made our very gorge rise. Suddenly a loud squeaking in the direction of the cave arrested us, and before we had recovered from our surprise, nearly a dozen young dragons, each about the size of a man, tumbled hastily ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... unfortunate girl's life—indirectly described by the ruffian who got possession of her in Paris—produce on the mind that sickening sense of the wanton stupidity of the Universe which fills ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... Eat out all joy of life or manhood. Earth Is here too hard on heaven—the Italian air Too bright to breathe, as fire, its next of kin, Too keen to handle. God, whoe'er God be, Keep us from withering as the lords of Rome— Slackening and sickening toward the imperious end That wiped them out of empire! Yea, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... cigarette he stretched himself and glanced at the dark windows, of which the blinds had not been pulled down. He understood then what was the matter. Dawn was the matter. The windows were no longer quite dark. He looked out. A faint pallor in the sky, and some stars sickening therein, and underneath the silent square with its patient trees and indefatigable lamps! The cigarette tasted bad in his mouth, but he would not give it up. He yawned heavily. The melancholy of the square, awaiting without hope the slow, hard dawn, overcame him suddenly.... Marguerite was ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... vulgar prejudice in favour of Shakspeare, Massinger, and the elder dramatic poets—the sickening adulation bestowed upon Sheridan Knowles and Talfourd, among the moderns—and the base, malignant, and selfish partiality of theatrical managers, who insist upon performing those plays only which are adapted to the stage—whose grovelling souls ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... damage upon their giant foe. They were, perhaps, supported by the sense that their captain's unrivalled audacity had done more harm to the United States than the operations of many thousand men. But their days were wretched; their task was sickening; it demands an imagination that can fix its eye upon stern, barren duty as a planet never darkened, always visible, for such a life as this to be carried on uncomplainingly and without a passionate longing for the bare exercise of hard blows. In addition, they read of the reproaches ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... that we abhor their institutions. But these northern men will not listen to reason. They keep on making eloquent speeches—their pulpits thunder against the sin of slaveholding. All grades of speech and thought are made use of, and the sickening sentimentalism of some of them is disgusting. They ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... of his companions, their symptoms so strongly recalled to his mind his own state when sickening with the Cow Pox, that he very ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... as he began slowly to press the bullet backward along its trail, but she uttered no sound, only a deep intake of breath that was half a sob, and the cold moisture of sickening pain stood in beads on ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... being translated into Cornish for the benefit of the company, was highly approved by all; and good humor being restored, every man got drunk save Hereward, who found the mead too sweet and sickening. ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... there but a moment when he noticed a strange, sickening odor, faint, as if coming from a ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... body—how will you dispose of that?' she asked, shuddering, and turning from the sickening spectacle with disgust. ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... after the time of his studies under Dr Melvin he had experience of schoolmasters of a different type. The tales of flogging under these pedagogues were so absolutely sickening, that Dr Burton's family used to beg him to stop his narrations to spare their feelings. He had beheld, though he had never undergone, the old-fashioned process of flogging by heezing up the culprit on the ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the great discomfort of maintaining contact with this mind, he extended his explorations in search of the answer. A growing suspicion was quickly confirmed beyond question, explaining at once the sickening deformities of the wasted mind and the enigma of the alternative means of communication. There simply was no adequate communication! From that, all else stemmed. Each of these creatures, these—he searched for the term—these "Man" as they called ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... of it? Weren't they our cows which gave the milk? And weren't they our potatoes which rotted in the ground, and our chickens which died before we could kill them? It was the pride of ownership which ate into our lives and made us quite sickening to our friends whose tastes ran to pink teas and hotel verandas, while we, poor fools, lived each day nearer to the soil, and loved more dearly the earth which ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... profanity, the mule team was unable to move the steer, six of us fastened our lariats to the main rope, and dragged the beef ashore with great eclat. But when one of the boys dismounted to unloose the hobbles and rope, a sight met our eyes that sent a sickening sensation through us, for the steer had left one hind leg in the river, neatly disjointed at the knee. Then we knew why the mules had failed to move him, having previously supposed his size was the difficulty, for he was one of the largest steers in the ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... During this sickening ordeal, not a muscle of the old man's face quivered; not a groan escaped from his firmly set lips. To judge from his appearance, it might have been a stick that he was burning. When at length he drew back the crisp burnt finger of his now blistered hand, he held it toward his ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... regarding the probability of his tale. Like most shrewd men he had an exalted notion regarding the shrewdness of others. He walked a little away from the bank and then turned to look back. A shiver ran over his body. Into his mind came the sickening fear that the telegraph operator at Pickleville was not an inventor at all. The town was full of tales, and in the bank he had taken advantage of that fact to make an impression; but what proof had he? No one had seen one of the inventions supposed to have been ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... on the afternoon of the day that followed your disappearance from Comanche that Boyle came into camp there. I had not forgotten him, of course, nor his influential position in this state; but I never thought of meeting him there. It was a sickening shock to me. I denied his protestations of acquaintanceship, but it passed off poorly with all of them who were present, except William Bentley, generous ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... the door-frame as it went by. He swung with a sickening thud into the inner wall, but he hung on and pulled himself ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... stately old adobe church, built in missionary times. The ceiling, however, was infested with myriads of bats, the smell of which was quite sickening, and I was glad to get out again. With him in this uttermost outpost of Christendom lived his aged mother and six sisters, and they treated us with all the hospitality their very limited means permitted. We especially enjoyed their ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... the sloop would be on the rocks; yet not a sound came from the thicket. The suspense was sickening. I had once experienced buck-fever, but it was nothing compared to this. The short carbine began to jump viciously ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... say just what my feelings were at this moment. I know that I was not surprised. I was frightened and yet I was not frightened. Something in me shrank back in a sickening terror; but I, the real I, was not frightened. I knew that this was my sister, and that there could be no reason why I should be frightened of her, because she loved me still, as she had always done. Further than this I was not conscious of any coherent ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... ever been since, or ever will be again—when Buttermilk Channel was quite dry at low water—when the shad in the Hudson were all salmon, and when the moon shone with a pure and resplendent whiteness, instead of that melancholy yellow light which is the consequence of her sickening at the abominations she every night ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... as a girl, rushed between us. I fired, and, with a frightful shriek, he fell. Then I ran forward and looked at him. The moonlight made him look deathly white, and I felt sure I had shot him. I'll never forget the sickening sensation that came over me at that moment! The hangman's noose seemed to dangle before my eyes. I dropped the pistol and rushed away to my room. I think I was stunned, for Horner found me sitting on a chair and staring blankly at the wall about an ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... experienced a sudden sinking in the region of his heart. There was a strange movement to the plane that made him fear the motor had been struck. He also missed the cheery hum at the same time, and felt a sickening sensation of falling. ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach
... flung herself upon it, her white teeth clicked together in its brain, and she sauntered slowly out of sight, bearing her latest victim in her mouth. It was hideous. To eat vegetables was natural enough, but to eat living, quivering flesh! A sickening faintness crept over him, and it was full an hour before he ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... Chloe turned and fled toward the red-flaring fires. In that moment a feeling of defeat surged over her—of heart-sickening hopelessness. The figures at the fires were unkempt, dirty, revolting, as they gouged and tore at the half-cooked meat into which their yellow fangs drove deep, as the red blood squirted and trickled from the corners of their ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... sickening to have this kind o' rot shoved on to a chap. What's the sense of it? What's the fun of ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... Yet fragrant in a heart remembering His former talks with Edith, on him breathed Far purelier in his rushings to and fro, After his books, to flush his blood with air, Then to his books again. My lady's cousin, Half-sickening of his pension'd afternoon, Drove in upon the student once or twice, Ran a Malayan muck against the times, Had golden hopes for France and all mankind, Answer'd all queries touching those at home With a heaved ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... was not, however, one of these victims. He was kept a close prisoner for two years, pining and sickening in his loneliness, while in the meantime the war continued, and at last a victory so decisive was gained by the Romans, that the people of Carthage were discouraged, and resolved to ask terms of peace. They thought ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... shoemaker, an' he doesn't be gettin' any work this longtime. Oh, indeed, then, Mr Lea, God knows thim people is badly off." My friend promised to visit the family she had spoken of, and we came away. The smell of the house, and of the court altogether, was so sickening that we were glad to get into the air ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... hung like a cloud around him, drenching the room. With every breath it grew thicker. He searched the table top frantically, but there were no empty bottles. His head began to spin from the sickening effluvium. ...
— The Coffin Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... QUEEN of melting JOY, Smiling supreme in unresisted charms: Ah, then, what transports fired the trembling boy! How throbb'd his sickening frame with fierce alarms! ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... that moment the plane gave a sickening swerve. Caught off his balance, the boy was thrown clear off the platform. The receiver connection snapped. He hung suspended by the single strap. Madly his hands flew out to grasp at the pitching rods. Just in time he seized ...
— Curlie Carson Listens In • Roy J. Snell
... with the which he'd grapple; PICTON prosed on,—the style in which men preach In a dissenting chapel. Prince ARTHUR twined one lank leg t'other round, Drooping a long chin like BURNE-JONES's ladies; And HARCOURT, sickening of the strident sound, Wished CONYBEARE in Hades. For over all there hung a cloud of fear, A sense of imminent doom the spirit daunted, And said, as plain as whisper in the ear, The House ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... needle moved with sickening speed and already registered but little more than five hundred feet. Four hundred! Carr braced himself for the impending crash and gathered Ora ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... What are you going to do? What do you expect us to do? Are we to spend our whole lives getting you positions which you won't keep? I can tell you we're... it's monstrous! It's sickening! Good God!" ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... were spared the full measure of this sickening sight, as the rapid manoeuvres of the Little Peace Maker compelled them to ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... the soldier clawed with puny fingers at the shaggy breast in vain endeavor to push away the grinning jaws. The lion lowered his head, the gaping fangs closed with a single sickening crunch upon the fear-distorted face, and turning strode back across the body of the dead horse dragging his limp ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Chrystie lie to her. A sumptuous figure in her glistening dress, she moved about, rose and sat, jerked back the curtains, picked up and dropped the silver ornaments on the bureau. Her lips were dry, her heart contracted with a sickening dread; never in all the calls made upon her had there been anything like this; finding her without resources, reducing her to an ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... flinging me clean over his crupper. I had given myself up for lost when I was suddenly caught as by outstretched arms, in the entangling foliage of a shrub, and as I lay there, dazed, I heard a sickening thud far below me, and guessed that no such friendly obstacle had saved my poor ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... cried the Harvester, sickening. "We will end this right now. I was rather busy this afternoon, but I wasn't too hurried to take that little weapon of yours to the chief of police and tell him where and how I got it and what occurred. He was to return it to you to-morrow with his ultimatum. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... his very soul sickening under the crushing truth of what Dill in his prim grammatical way was saying, did not answer at all. He was picking blindly, mechanically at the splinter, his face shaded by his worn, gray hat; and he was thinking irrelevantly how a condemned man must feel when they come to him in his cell and in ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... to think of: the subject, Narses. He said that I had bit him by my performance of Othello, and I told him I hoped I should make the blood come. It would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, the heart-sickening disgusts which I have endured in my profession, if, by its exercise, I had awakened a spirit of poetry whose influence would elevate, ennoble, and adorn our ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the insensibility with which the hanging judges in past generations used to don the black cap jauntily, and smile at the wretched beings whom they sentenced to death. Perhaps of all such anecdotes the most thoroughly sickening is that which describes the conduct of Jeffreys, when, as Recorder of London, he passed sentence of death on his old and familiar friend, Richard Langhorn, the Catholic barrister—one of the victims of the Popish Plot phrensy. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... sensibilities—namely, where it surprises a man under circumstances which offer (or which seem to offer) some hurried and inappreciable chance of evading it. Any effort, by which such an evasion can be accomplished, must be as sudden as the danger which it affronts. Even that, even the sickening necessity for hurrying in extremity where all hurry seems destined to be vain, self-baffled, and where the dreadful knell of too late is already sounding in the ears by anticipation—even that anguish is liable to ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... should do wrong in this respect. Still it is of no use. I am disappointed. This is not the republic I came to see; this is not the republic of my imagination. I infinitely prefer a liberal monarchy—even with its sickening accompaniments of court circulars—to such a government as this. The more I think of its youth and strength, the poorer and more trifling in a thousand aspects it appears in my eyes. In everything of which it has made a boast—excepting its education of the people and its ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... neither Anna nor Norgate moved. Norgate felt a strange sense of sickening excitement. It was as though the curtain ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... going down of the sun behind the chaparral-crested mountain was that evening withheld from Sandy Bar. The little canon was stifling with heated resinous odors, and the decaying driftwood on the Bar sent forth faint sickening exhalations. The feverishness of day and its fierce passions still filled the camp. Lights moved restlessly along the bank of the river, striking no answering reflection from its tawny current. Against the blackness of the pines the windows of ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... women of his family a man was always safe. She remembered something that Gora had once said to the same effect....Yes, she could have forgiven the theft of an outsider, for at least she would be spared this sickening suffocating sensation of contempt. It was demoralizing. She hated herself as much as she hated him. Moreover there would have been some compensation in sending ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... I'm going up to Wake Hill and live with Charlotte and Jerry, and see if I can't get tired enough every day to sleep at night. I couldn't keep on here. I couldn't. What we call civilization is too sickening to me. I should simply go off my nut. And when you come to that, it's an awful complication, besides the suffering of it. That I shrink from, too. I'm talking a good deal, but actually it's the thing I least want to do. I ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... beer; men and women drunken. One sight specially horrified him: a woman, dirty, naked shoulders and arms; feet and legs bare; a filthy skirt and bodice open at the breast; hair matted and wild; reeling along the pavement, crying out in drunken exclamations and mutterings. It was the most sickening sight the young man had ever seen, and with perhaps the exception of a fight he witnessed some days later between two such characters, the worst spectacle ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... of a desolate country, with its ancient charters superseded by brute force, its industrious population swarming from the land in droves, as if the pestilence were raging, with gibbets and scaffolds erected in every village, and with a Sickening and universal apprehension of still darker disasters to follow, was a spectacle still more ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Ugh! the sickening heat from the stove! the disgusting odor of musty papers! However, Amedee had nothing to complain of; they might have given him figures to balance for five hours at a time. He owed it to M. Courtet's kindness, that he was put at once into the correspondence room. ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... only procured for him the post of surgeon's mate in the Cumberland of the line. Here he saw enough of the horrors of naval life, enough of misery, brutality, and mismanagement, at Carthagena (1741), to supply materials for the salutary and sickening pages on that theme in "Roderick Random." He also saw and appreciated the sterling qualities of courage, simplicity, and generosity, which he has made immortal in his Bowlings ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... only by her sobbing. Men turned away and covered their eyes—Brookfield edged himself stealthily through the little crowd and sneaked out into the open air—and the officers of the law stood inactive. Helmsley felt the room whirling about him in a sickening blackness, and sat down to steady himself, the stinging tears rising involuntarily in his throat and ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... able to do it. We know that Ferdinand and Isabella, rulers of Spain, furnished him with the ships with which he came to the new land; but we should also know that for years and years he worked and struggled through sickening discouragement until he finally succeeded in procuring the support of the Spanish monarchs. We know that he found a great continent, and that his name is honored above all others of his time; but we should also know that he himself never knew that ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... would not be likely to come again. It would not take long to see the garden, and then she would go for ever. When they were half way down the path the garden gate opened, and Honeybird came through, wheeling a barrow. She had Lull's old crape bonnet on her head. Fly had a moment of sickening fright. ...
— The Weans at Rowallan • Kathleen Fitzpatrick
... heart sick. No one ever knew what Vaughan endured, for he as too proud to bare his soul. For two years he never looked at a gazette, or opened a newspaper, or heard a Ministerial announcement in the House of Commons, or listened to a conversation at his club, without the sickening apprehension that the next moment he would know that Arthur Grey was dead. Letters from Grey reached him from time to time, but their brave cheerfulness did nothing to soothe his apprehensions. For ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... determination to the contrary, to be somewhat uneasy about her. Suspense is certainly more difficult to bear than misfortune, for the certainty of an event arouses within us some of our best feelings to resist it; but suspense lets loose our imagination, and gives rise to that sickening feeling of 'hope deferred,' so ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... on their palms, stretched forward, open-mouthed. There was the rippling surface, carrying the shadow of the walls. Nothing came up. A cow could be heard lowing on the bluffs to her lost calf. The morning twitter of birds became an aggressive and sickening sound. ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... had to recognize the possibility of danger, and work hard at our defences. At any time, by going into the outskirts, we can have a skirmish, which is nothing but fun; but when night closes in over a small and weary garrison, there sometimes steals into my mind, like a chill, that most sickening of all sensations, the anxiety of a commander. This was the night generally set for an attack, if any, though I am pretty well satisfied that they have not strength to dare it, and the worst they could ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... sudden grudge against a member of your staff. I read your face, Mr. Lyne, and the weakness of your chin and the appetite of your mouth suggest to me that you are not over scrupulous with the women who are in your charge. I guess rather than know that you have been turned down with a dull, sickening thud by a decent girl, and in your mortification you are attempting to invent a charge which has no substance and ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... Wagner, thank the fates, is no hypocrite. He says out what he means, and he usually means something nasty. Tchaikovsky, on the contrary, taking advantage of the peculiar medium in which he works, tells the most awful, the most sickening, the most immoral stories; and if he had printed them in type he would have been knouted and ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... slaves, when the procession paused at his door. These parades continued two or three days, always accompanied by the great paper dragons, whether in the daytime or at night, by the noise of deafening tom-toms, and the sickening ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... wretched victims half consumed by fire, some of them still breathing! The bodies of the men and horses killed in the battle had also been roasted, so that for several leagues around the town there was a sickening stench of burning flesh! ... There are countrysides and towns which because of their situation are destined to serve as battlefields, and Hollabrun is one of them, because it offers an excellent military ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... just as his size and beauty were becoming clearly visible, the line came up with a sickening ease. The interested spectators caught a glimpse of ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... blindfold, to this street, fifty paces from the Station House, and within call of Saint Giles's church, would know it for a not remote part of the city in which their lives are passed? How many, who amidst this compound of sickening smells, these heaps of filth, these tumbling houses, with all their vile contents, animate, and inanimate, slimily overflowing into the black road, would believe that they breathe THIS air? How much Red Tape may there be, that could look round on the faces which now hem ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... With a sickening conviction that she had been sitting on her cousin's body while she wrote that ill-fated card, the young girl managed to gasp out impatiently: "But you must go—yes—go now, at once! Don't talk ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... spring suddenly released. The weight of every ounce of him, the force of every nerve and sinew, and all the gathered knowledge of years went into that terrific blow. It caught Arrkroo on the point of the chin. There was a sickening click. The man's head went back like the lid of a box. He fell to the ground, quivered for a moment, and then ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... in an empty silent room with no soul to care for. I could not help following him in imagination through crowds of pleasant faces, and then coming back to that dull place with its bough of mistletoe sickening in the gas, and sprigs of holly parched up already by a Simoom of roast and boiled. The very waiter had gone home; and his representative, a poor, lean, hungry man, was ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... sickening stench of personality in theatrical life," the great Madame Orloff told the doctor with her usual free-handed use of language, "it is like breathing a thin, pure air to be here again with our dear inhuman old Vieyra. ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield |
