"Unforgivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all know that it was sheer overwork,—the using of a delicately-tuned instrument too commonly and continuously and carelessly to let it last its normal life. We may well talk of the waste of wood and water, of food and fire, but the real and unforgivable waste of modern civilization is the waste of ability and genius,—the killing of useful, indispensable men who have no right to die; who deserve, not for themselves, but for the world, leisure, freedom from distraction, expert medical advice, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... his grave voice answered. "There is this deep, tremendous link,—some secret power they emanate that keeps me well and happy and—alive. If you cannot understand, I feel at least you may be able to—forgive." His tone grew tender, gentle, soft. "My selfishness, I know, must seem quite unforgivable. I cannot help it somehow; these trees, this ancient Forest, both seem knitted into all that makes me live, ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... you possibly promise me, too, that you'll forgive the absolutely unforgivable way I've acted all summer, and give me a chance to show that ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... They speak and write with ineffable profundity about the "criminal" ear, the "criminal" thumb, the "criminal" glance. They gain access to gaols and pester unfortunate prisoners with callipers and cameras, and quite unforgivable prying into personal and private matters, and they hold out great hopes that by these expedients they will evolve at last a "scientific" revival of the Kaffir's witch- smelling. We shall catch our criminals by anthropometry ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... house I at present inhabit it is found absolutely essential that the father and the mother, three daughters, two maidservants, the nurse, and even, I believe, the infant son, should rise from their beds at 5 o'clock when reveille is, at the whim of the G.O.C., put at that unforgivable hour. It is only myself who may ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... cannot trust myself to a love which has no standard of right and wrong. We look at it from different points of view. You see only the man and his temptation. I knew the priceless treasure of the love; therefore the sin against that love seems to me unforgivable." ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... body. Respectability could easily forgive the teaching of theoretic Anarchism; but Emma Goldman does not merely preach the new philosophy; she also persists in living it,—and that is the one supreme, unforgivable crime. Were she, like so many radicals, to consider her ideal as merely an intellectual ornament; were she to make concessions to existing society and compromise with old prejudices,—then even the most radical views could be pardoned in her. But that she takes her radicalism seriously; ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... the unforgivable sin. Had my mother discovered me poring over the half intelligible but wholly fascinating story of Adam and Eve and the Devil, she would have beaten me with the first implement to her hand. I had a moment's terror lest the possession of a work of literature should ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... table companions were guilty in his eyes of the one unforgivable sin—they were ugly. Ugly alike in feature, dress, and bearing, they had for him absolutely no excuse for existence. He felt no bond of common humanity with them. In his lexicon what was not beautiful was not human, and ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... hymn-books; or they read tight-folded copies of the Minneapolis Journal or Tribune. But when the announcements began all Plato College sat up to attention, for Prexy Wood was very likely to comment with pedantic sarcasm on student peccadillos, on cards and V-neck gowns and the unforgivable crime of smoking. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... pained Prince Trevannion excessively—hours on end of gorging uninspired cooking and guzzling too-sweet wine and watching ex-slave performers whose acts were either brutal or obscene and frequently both, and, more unforgivable, stupidly so. The Masterly ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... did anything for him now. As he opened his eyes, one at a time, he thought of Boyd. Once, long ago, ages and ages ago, he had had to wake Boyd up, and he recalled how rough he had been about it. That had been unforgivable. ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... were before Brumaire by his biting comment that he had made way for the King of Rome, not for a Directory which included one traitor and two babies. His indignation was just. An abdication forced on by idealogues was hateful; to be succeeded by Fouche seemed an unforgivable insult; but he touched the lowest depth of humiliation on the 25th, when he received from that despicable schemer an order to ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Scottish Covenanters. No, Cary, she will not survive that. I never yet knew a worldly woman forgive that one crime of crimes—Calvinism. Anything else! Don't you see why, my dear? It sets her outside. And she knows that I know she is outside. Therefore I am unforgivable. However absurd the idea may be in reality, it is to her mind equivalent to my setting her outside. She is unable to recognise that she has chosen to stay without, and I am guilty of nothing worse than unavoidably seeing that she is there. That I should be able to ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... haunted me the fear of the "Unforgivable Sin." What this was I was never able to discover. I dreaded to enquire too closely, lest I should find I had committed it. Day and night the terror ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of what a good citizen should be are all at sixes and sevens. No two people will be found to agree in every particular of such an ideal, and the extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what is permissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span nearly the whole range of human possibility and conduct. As a consequence, we bring up our children in a mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warring voices, perplexed as to what they must do, uncertain as to what they may do, doomed ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... both equally educated and large-minded, are estimating the same thing: one judges as disgusting, odious, revolting, and bestial what the other judges to be delicious, exquisite, ineffable, divine. What, for one, is in Christian phraseology, an unforgivable sin, is, for the other, the state of true grace. Acts that for one seem a sad and occasional necessity, stains that must be carefully effaced by long intervals of continence, are for the other the golden nails from which all the rest of conduct and existence is suspended, the things ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... fatal business always; and that especially, as highest instance of it, which includes all the lower ones, this of solemnly calling Chief Captain, and King by the Grace of God, a gentleman who is NOT so (and SEEMS to be so mainly by Malice of the Devil, and by the very great and nearly unforgivable indifference of Mankind to resist the Devil in that particular province, for the present), is the deepest fountain of human wretchedness, and the head mendacity ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... she had ascribed it to the recoil of a proud man from the dread of social humiliation. But it took another aspect under the strong light just thrown upon his early life by her discovery in the room below. Nothing but some act, unforgivable and unforgettable would account for that black mark drawn between a father's eyes and his son's face. No bar sinister could tell a stronger tale. But this was no bar sinister; rather the deliberate stigmatising of one yet loved, but banned for a reason which was little short ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... fete-days;[5336] eating meat on Friday or Saturday unnecessarily;" not confessing and communing at Easter, a mortal sin which "deprives one of the grace of God and merits eternal punishment" as well as "to slay and to steal something of value." For all these crimes, unforgivable in themselves, there is but one pardon, the absolution given by the priest, that is to say, confession beforehand, itself being one of the observances to which we are bound by strict obligation and at the very ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... their more experienced comrades not to stare openly at the colonel's scar. But indeed an officer need have been very young in his profession not to have heard the legendary tale of that duel originating in a mysterious, unforgivable offence. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... death, like these others, but was walking in a vision, a living man among the blessed dead. Would it be right for him to go with them into the heavenly city? Would it not be a deception, a desecration, a deep and unforgivable offence? The strange, confusing question had no reason in it, as he very well knew; for if he was dreaming, then it was all a dream; but if his companions were real, then he also was with them in reality, and if they ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the Jesuits to stir up strife in families, to resort to espionage, to abuse the confessional, to make the Seminary priests their puppets, and to deny the king's right to license the brandy trade. What seemed to the Jesuits an unforgivable affront was Frontenac's charge that they cared more for beaver skins than for the conversion of the savages. This {55} they interpreted as an insult to the memory of their martyrs, and their resentment must have been the greater because the accusation was not made publicly in Canada, but formed ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... kept out of her reach, for a considerable part of the time, by her father. In addition, a third member of the Barrett family, her brother Alfred, earned excommunication from his father's house by the unforgivable offence of matrimony. Altogether it was not without a certain feeling of relief that, in the middle of October, Mrs. Browning, with her husband and child, left England for Paris. The whole visit had ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the blame of the whole conspiracy was on him. A big crime, well carried out, is its own excuse for being; but failure, like unto genius, is unforgivable. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... warmth is stirred—and yet I know that an angry old man out of Parliament, and that can do nothing but be angry, is a ridiculous animal." The war against America he described as "a wretched farce of fear daubed over with airs of bullying." War at any time was, in his eyes, all but the unforgivable sin. In 1781, however, his hatred had lightened into contempt. "The Dutch fleet is hovering about," he wrote, "but it is a pickpocket war, and not a martial one, and I never attend to petty larceny." As for mobs, his attitude ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... a fool?" she answered. "Do you not know that to speak disrespectfully of the ancestors of a Chinaman is unforgivable? To all appearances Prince Shan never moved from his wonderful palace in Pekin, many thousands of miles away. Yet he lifted his little finger and the ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pony is the unforgivable sin," he cried, smiling at her, and she hastily averted her eyes, having discovered an unnerving similarity between ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Because it felt thee reading me aright, How a mere bragging was my purity. But now to pardon askt, I must add thanks.— I had forgot Manasses! Even love Was driven forth of me by these loud mouths! Whether in death he waits for me, I know not; But it had been an unforgivable thing To have made this the end; not to have gone To death as unto spousals, leaving life As one sets down a work faithfully done, And knows oneself by service justified, Worthy of love, whether love be or not. But, soiled with detestation, to have thrown Fiercely ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... an Italian church with a French cathedral would be to compare two altogether different things, a fault in logic, and in criticism the unforgivable sin; for a work of art must be judged in its own category, and praised only for its own qualities, and blamed only for ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... rule of conduct at the musicale is to maintain absolute silence during the selections. It is an unforgivable breach of etiquette to speak, fidget or otherwise disturb the guests while the numbers are being performed. Encores are permissible, but loud applause is undeniably vulgar. Silence, interest and attention characterize the ideal guest ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... a major scandal. An epidemic of measles on the maternity floor of a modern hospital indicates the unforgivable medical sin—carelessness. It was hushed up as much as possible, pending the time when the top people could shake off the shock and recover their wits. The ultimate recovery of thirty babies was a tribute ...
— I'll Kill You Tomorrow • Helen Huber
... he found this country critical of the Shantung settlement, that doubt became a conviction; the British through social attentions, had wheedled House into a position favorable to their allies, the Japanese. The loyal House was convicted of the one unforgivable offense, disloyalty. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... campaigning with Train, she had to make her choice between Negroes and women. She chose women, just as her abolitionist friends in the East had chosen the Negro; and their indifference and opposition to woman suffrage at this crucial time was as unforgivable to her as was his valuation of the Negro to them. They called him a Copperhead, remembering his southern wife and his hatred of abolitionists, his vocal resistance to the draft, and his demands for immediate unconditional peace. They ignored entirely his defense of the Union in ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... Scandinavian languages, and of the Celtic, abound in our midst. Borrow was a forerunner with Bowring of much of this 'useless' learning. Borrow came to consider Bowring's apparent neglect of him to be unforgivable. But that time had not arrived, when in 1842 he wrote to him ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... fiber of Hardy's gaunt frame. He was losing his temper, and he was wise enough to know that that would never do. The unforgivable sin was to lose control of oneself. He must hold on to his voice, his movements; but a nest of hornets, under attack, could not have been angrier. "I protest!" he said, as calmly as he could. "Here I been settin' around waitin' for ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... commend nor condemn it, and a child who remarks upon the meals set before him, however simple the remark may be, instantly feels his disgrace in the sharpest reproof from his parents. It is one of the unforgivable crimes. ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... side which his wife runs. Well, as he has had to study to work up his side, why let hers be such a "jump in the dark," for him? Let the home become a study, even a science, and let not so many wives reach a forgivable level of domestic excellence on the "dead bodies" of so many unforgivable "bloomers." Remember that in matrimony, as in everything else it is the premier "bloomer" which blows up les chateaux en Espagne. Afterwards you have to use concrete—and build as ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... hearing that she had suffered losses in the collapse of the South Sea scheme, Savage remained henceforth her implacable enemy. Perhaps her abuse of the divine Clio, the suspected instigator of his attacks upon her, may have been an unforgivable offense. ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... she could exterminate them with her wit. And some could so easily be spared. It seems, too, that she is great enough to be a target, so she is under fire continually. This, while it causes her exquisite suffering, is from no fault of her own—save the unforgivable one of being original. "A frog spat at a glow-worm. 'Why do you spit at me?' said the glow-worm. 'Why do you shine so?' said the frog." And as to Percival—the man I used to know was Percival in embryo. He is maturing ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... a good deal for a lad to say, at that age, and with Bob's upbringing and popularity, even though he said it rather scornfully in the fewest words. The scorn was really for himself, and I could well understand it. Nay, I was glad to have something to forgive in the beginning, I with my unforgivable mission, and would have laughed the matter off without another word if Bob ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... And with the feeling that to waste this swift-travelling commodity was unforgivable folly, he took up his brush. But it was no use; he could not concentrate his eye—besides, the light was going. 'I'll go up to town,' he thought. In the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... a keen interest in the administration of his State, and has undertaken, at no small cost to his Exchequer, one of the most important irrigation works yet attempted in any Native State. But he committed what Tilak and his friends regarded as two unforgivable offences: he fought against the intolerance of the Brahmans and he is a faithful friend end ally of the British Raj. Hence they set in motion against him, the descendant of Shivaji, in his own State, exactly the same machinery of agitation and conspiracy which ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... take action. The Countess was flushed with triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent—and Madame von Platen could not, being what she was, and having seen what she had seen, conceive it innocent—it was in an Electoral Princess an unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view, which none would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in the face, hurried off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen following. He came too late, despite the diligence of ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... of darkness and Lucifer as the overthrown but never conquered principle of light. The bitter generalizations of this afterthought explain Sufficiently why it was excluded. To the later Strindberg—the man who wrote Advent, for instance—it must have seemed one of his most unforgivable offences. ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... question, put through the Sagoth interpreter, I received the reply that having spared my life they considered that Tu-al-sa's debt of gratitude was canceled. They still had against me, however, the crime of which I had been guilty—the unforgivable crime of stealing the great secret. They, therefore, intended holding Dian and me prisoners until the manuscript was returned ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... quivered. The unforgivable insult had been offered. Question the legitimacy of Mr. Brewster's parentage, knock Mr. Brewster down and walk on his face with spiked shoes, and you did not irremediably close all avenues to a peaceful settlement. But make a remark like that about his hotel, and war ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... she had been doing, dreaming of him until—until what? Jenny sighed at the grey vision. Only hunger had driven her to his side on this evening—the imperative hunger of her nature upon which Keith had counted. He had been sure she would come—that was unforgivable. He had welcomed her as he might have welcomed a man; but as he might also have welcomed any man or woman who would have relieved his loneliness upon the yacht. Not a loved friend. Jenny, with her brain restored by the gentle breeze to its normal ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... to turn a critical eye on their imperfections: some physical harshness or a general lack of personal delicacy—but a girl who was usher at Keith's was approached with a different attitude. One could tolerate qualities in an intimate valet that would be unforgivable in a mere acquaintance on ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... through the kitchen, slammed the door of his room, turned the key in the lock and—stood still in the middle of the floor. Whipped by a girl not four years his senior! Whipped by a girl! It was an unforgivable outrage. He would get even for that. But what was he to do? Would could he do? She had beaten him at every turn, she had set Toady against him, she had made him the laughing stock of his cousins. He—he—he would do something ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... sorry I spoke, Clarkson," he apologized humbly. "It certainly seemed to have slipped my memory that I myself—I can't think how I managed to make such hideous, unforgivable mistakes." ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... away to-morrow. When we were alone in the hall for a moment he told me that he was going. "If you can ever forgive me," he said, "will you write and tell me? What I have done may seem unforgivable. But when a man dreams a great deal he sometimes thinks that he can ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... Field were there, and we stood and bewailed the absence of duns and lack of sport. We loitered there with our rods spiked, and smoked sadly. I then, and not for the first time, repeated the tale of my former experiences, and at last begged Halford not to be shocked, not to think me an unforgivable brute, but would he give me free permission to try the wet fly in the old way, and without prejudice. He at first laughingly protested, but saying he would ne'er consent, consented. I was to do ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... and still they dwelt upon her. "How much more beautiful you are than any other woman I ever saw, Grizel!" he said. And it was not only true, but he knew it was true. What was Lady Pippinworth beside this glorious woman? what was her damnable coldness compared to the love of Grizel? Was he unforgivable, or was it some flaw in the making of him for which he was not responsible? With clenched hands he asked himself these questions. This love that all his books were about—what was it? Was it a compromise between affection and passion countenanced by God for ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... bridge with the great skill and sweet temper which were natural to her, excused herself, went to her room, and cried half the night. It was not the shame of having been forcibly kissed that sickened her of herself, but the unforgettable, unforgivable fact that toward the last of that furious kissing she had found a certain low feline pleasure in the kisses. She wished that she might die, or, infinitely better, that she ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... aime." She smiled at him serenely. "I would not bury myself with you in an Ionian island for more than two months in a year for anything on earth. On my part, it would be the unforgivable sin. No woman has the right, however much she loves him, to ruin a man, any more than a man has the right to ruin a woman. But if you won't marry me, I'm perfectly willing to spend two months a year in an Ionian island with you," and she looked at him, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... time? It was nearly eleven.... A great heaviness of futility and despair weighed him down. He felt incapable of action. He felt that he had done some terrible deed—like striking his mother in the face—something unforgivable, unreversible, struck through and through with finality.... He felt more and more cold and brutal, with the sullenness of the criminal who can't undo his crime and won't admit ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... stinging contempt of his wife's words, the voice of their world. If Doris Dane of the sextette were really Rose—and in the bottom of his heart, despite his valiant pretense, he couldn't manage more than a feeble doubt of it—she had committed the unforgivable sin. Or so he thought, leaving out of his calculations one ingredient in the situation. She had done an unconventional thing for the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Hazlitt was consciously the aggressor, but his attacks were never wanton. He denounced Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey because they were renegades from the cause which lay nearest to his heart. Their apostasy was an unforgivable offence in his eyes, and his wrath was proportioned to the admiration which he otherwise entertained for them. It is true that he treated their motives hastily and unjustly, but none of his opponents set him the example of charity. In the earlier years ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... by a bottle of whiskey, a syphon, and a glass. The drink he mixed and swallowed contained little soda. It increased the fire in his heart and throat. He paced the long room in crazy indignation. Every nerve in his body quivered with a sense of unforgivable insult and deadly outrage. Austin's face loomed before him like that of a mocking devil. He had hell in his throat, and again he tossed down a dose of whiskey, and threw himself into the arm-chair. The daily paper lay on a stool at his hand. He took it up ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... unutterable bitterness he saw a darkness of mood that could not have been caused by her present weak and feverish state. She hated the life she had led, that she probably had been compelled to lead. She had suffered some unforgivable wrong at the hands of Oldring. With that conviction Venters felt a shame throughout his body, and it marked the rekindling of fierce anger and ruthlessness. In the past long year he had nursed resentment. He had hated the wilderness—the loneliness of the uplands. He had waited ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... stage, or to hearing half-veiled indecency flaunted from the stage, blazoned in the newspapers, or used even in ordinary conversation. I could not get used to ... scenes and actions directly forbidden as unforgivable ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... Louis. I ought not to have said a thing like that. It was unforgivable. But you do talk like an idiot. How on earth can one make mistakes in breeding? Oh, you and I talk different languages, that's all, and it's not any use at all trying to think ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... something limp and motionless—something that a dozen hours before had been a throbbing, scurrying bit of life in the forest. To be sure, that "something" did not always have a food value commensurate with the labor and time Stub had spent to procure it; but to Stub evidently the unforgivable sin was to return with nothing, which fact may explain why Rathburn came home one night to find Stub on guard beside a small dead snake. Both man and dog went supperless that night—the man inside the cabin before a ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... things he did were amusing. A boy is a boy, and if he's alive, he's very apt to be lively. Mother could tell you a few pranks that Leon has put us through; but they're only a boy's foolishness, they are not unusual or unforgivable. I've gone over the evidence your son brings, with extreme care, so has father. Both of us are quite familiar with common law. He has every proof you can possibly desire. You can't get around it, even if your heart wasn't worn out with rebellion, and you were not crazy to have ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... never failed with his unending requests to the patient orderlies and his eternal complainings, until a public dressing-down from me brought him to heel. And Glover who wept that I had lost his bullet, that unforgivable carelessness in a surgeon that allows a bullet, removed at an operation, to be thrown ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... at him, I saw that a different McGeorge was evident, different even from when I had seen him at the Italian restaurant where he had been so oppressed by the fear not of death, but of life. In the first place, he was fatter and less nervous, he was wearing one of those unforgivable soft black ties with flowing ends, and he had changed ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... reminding herself, it seemed, of Lawford Tapp's most glaring faults. Improvidence and a hopeless leaning toward extravagance were certainly unforgivable blemishes in the character of a young man in the ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... calmly. You, too, would have forgotten her folly in what she found to say, as Arnold did; you, too, would have drawn faith and courage from her face. One would not be irreverent, but if this woman were convicted of the unforgivable sin she could explain it and obtain justification rather ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... him. It made her angry with herself and with Burnaby that she should feel this way; be so moved by "primitive virtues." She detested puritanism greatly, and righteously, but so much so that she frequently mistook the most innocent fastidiousness for an unforgivable rigidity. "If they once do," she concluded, "once do fall in love with their husbands again, they're safe, you ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... being unkind to other children, or selfish, or affected, or oafish, or sulky. Her direst thunders, however, were kept for anything which approached ill-breeding. Giving ourselves airs, or "posing," or any other form of juvenile vulgarity, were well-nigh unforgivable sins. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... trouble, and after committing some unforgivable offense against the United States, Running Bear rallied his young men, and they fled the reservation and the ways and protection of the white men, and took to the mountains, where they lived by raiding the ranches in the neighborhood, and maintaining a sort of defensive partnership with Whipple's ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... he had not really passed through the door of death, like these others, but only through the door of dreams, and was walking in a vision, a living man among the blessed dead. Would it be right for him to go with them into the heavenly city? Would it not be a deception, a desecration, a deep and unforgivable offense? The strange, confusing question had no reason in it, as he very well knew; for if he was dreaming, then it was all a dream; but if his companions were real, then he also was with them in reality, and if they had died then he must have died too. Yet he could not rid his mind of the sense ...
— The Mansion • Henry Van Dyke
... object that could not possibly be attained; never was heard such a tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping,—as if one end of the ridiculous brute's body were at deadly and most unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round about went the cur; and faster and still faster fled the unapproachable brevity of his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of rage and animosity; until, utterly exhausted, and as far ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... marrying or giving in marriage, a sexless quiet windless place where mankind lived in a state of bliss. For some unknown reason mankind had been thrown out of that place, had been thrown down upon the earth. It was a punishment for an unforgivable sin, ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Lovell—" for an instant her eyes glowed with a sudden radiance of remembrance—"and he and I became secretly engaged, in spite of the fact that I had already promised to marry Maurice. I expect you think that was unforgivable of me," she seemed to search the intent faces of her little audience as though challenging the verdict she might read therein; "but there was some excuse. I was very young, and at the time I promised myself to Maurice I did not know that Geoffrey cared for me. And then—when ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... pour swift retribution on the head of offending men, we dare not doubt. That he does not is patent. Another scene is plainly the purpose of God. He has a scene behind a scene. If this world were an end, there is rank and unforgivable injustice done. Men have not been dealt fairly with, and may, with legitimacy, make acrimonious reply; but we are clearly taught that this world is a stage for the display of character, not for its reward, and the next scene will be for the reward of character, and not ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... young American poets, whose work, seldom seen here, interests me, and I named their books. He had never heard of them. This enthusiast did not even appear to have the beginning of an idea that his was unforgivable ignorance seeing that he knew more than a native ought to know about some of our taverns. Had he been an Englishman and a friend of mine I should have told him that I thought his love of letters was as spurious ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... she is making a perfect fool of you. Can't you see it? Can't you see—but, my God, how can I ask that question of you? When a man gets to be as old as you, he—" He broke off abruptly, on the point of uttering the unforgivable. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... searching glance even her brazen face fell. Six months previously that creature had stolen Wilkins, the best cook I ever had. Mere man may not understand the enormity of this offence; but every woman knows there is no crime more heinous, more despicable, more unforgivable. She might find it in her heart to condone larceny, think lightly of arson, or even excuse murder; but there is not one who would extend even a deathbed pardon to the person who had robbed her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... "It's unforgivable of me to call, Miss Stanley," he said, shaking hands in a peculiar, high, fashionable manner; "but you know you ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and only cared for old pictures—the National Gallery, and all that; and read no novels but French—Balzac and George Sand—and that only for practice for he was a singularly pure young man, the purest in all Cambridge, and in those days I thought him a quite unforgivable prig. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... of Jesus toward sex offenders, and his permission to divorce, must seem like mistakes to churchmen who consider extramarital sex relations the unforgivable sin. And everyone must see the danger of having our judges adopt as a principle of justice the dismissal of offenders on the ground that the prosecutors ...
— The Mistakes of Jesus • William Floyd
... will concede that the slaughtering of animals for food is not an evil, but that what is really unforgivable is the infliction of physical suffering on animals. And all the time for her, as well as for man, calves and lambs are being emasculated to make her meat succulent; wild animals are painfully done to death to provide her table with delicacies; birds with young in the nest are shot ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... take his Master's degree, but he had no foreign language. Three terrible, wicked, unforgivable professors assured him that, if he could be in Germany six weeks during summer vacation, he could get enough German to pass the examination for the A.M. We believed them, and he went; though of all the partings we ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... grand-darter," said old Goodsoe; for Captain Parish had removed himself to a little distance, and was again investigating the condition of the ship's galley, which one might suppose to have been neglected in some unforgivable way, judging from his ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... of eternities,—since every being is the sum of a chain of experiences infinitely varied from all others.... To some Cyrillia's happy tears might bring a smile: to me that smile would seem the unforgivable sin against the Giver of ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... held the means thereto in his hand. He had not been sure before Stephen arrived whether he should reveal the situation or not. But the temptation was too great. That the son's mind and soul should finally have escaped his father, "like a bird out of the snare of the fowler," was the unforgivable offence. What a gentle, malleable fellow he had seemed in his school and college days!—how amenable to the father's spiritual tyranny! It was Barron's constant excuse to himself for his own rancorous feeling—that Meynell had robbed him of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... you, Oscar," I broke in. "I thought you shrank from giving pain always: to me it's the unforgivable sin." ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... other lands, a plougher of the desolate places of the "vasty deep," yet withal a lover of home, who trod at times, with bitter longing for his native land, the thorny paths of exile. To him physical cowardice was the unforgivable sin, next to treachery to his lord; for the loyalty of thane to his chieftain was a very deep and abiding reality to the Anglo-Saxon warrior, and in the early poems of our English race, love for "his ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... the world of reality is very different from make-believe, and a terrible thing. To the child—deception in regard to real things, whatever excuses adults may put forward in its defence, is well-nigh unforgivable. To be one who never says "it is" when it is not, nor "it will be" when it will not be—that is to be a friend on whom a child rests ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... she behaved herself she could not stay. She tempered her behaviour somewhat during the first term, but it was no use. Like every dog with a bad name, all the mischief in the school was attributed to her. According to schoolgirl canons of loyalty it was an unforgivable sin to tell tales or "give people away," so Isabelle shouldered the iniquity of the whole school. The teachers ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... had gone as far as was wise, if he cared to continue working for Burns, and he made no reply whatever. So Jean turned her attention to the man whose bulk shaded her from the sun, and whose remarks would have been wholly unforgivable had she ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... the necessary trout for breakfast, it is wiser to choose the surest bait. The crackle of the fish in the frying-pan will atone for any theoretical defect in your method. But to choose the surest bait, and then to bring back no fish, is unforgivable. Forsake Plato if you must,—but you may do so only at the price of justifying yourself in the terms of Aristotelian arithmetic. The college president who abandoned his college in order to run a cotton ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... world made to give their everything for those they love. You're one of them. To rob you of an object for you to work and sacrifice yourself for would be to rob you of the greatest thing in your life. It would be an unforgivable crime, and though it broke my heart I would refuse to commit that crime. Marcel is ready for you the moment you ask for him. Oh, yes, it's just as I said. His outfit is ready. We've enlarged it as he's grown. An-ina has done her share. There's two of everything, ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... go, Nor leave him though in flames below— God help me in his fire!" So in the South; vain every plea 'Gainst Nature's strong fidelity; True to the home and to the heart, Throngs cast their lot with kith and kin, Foreboding, cleaved to the natural part— Was this the unforgivable sin? These noble spirits are yet yours to win. Shall the great North go Sylla's way? Proscribe? prolong the evil day? Confirm the curse? infix the hate? In ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... step could have been taken. It immediately stamped the socialists as wilful destroyers of the unity of labor. To the trade unionists, yet fresh from the ordeal of the struggle against the Knights of Labor, the action of the socialists was an unforgivable crime. All the bitterness which has characterized the fight between socialist and anti-socialist in the Federation verily goes back to this gross miscalculation by DeLeon of the psychology of the trade union movement. DeLeon, on his part, attributed the action of the Federation to a hopelessly ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... Ellison, son and brother, and they had blotted him out of their lives by destroying all physical signs of him. There was something inhuman in the deliberateness of it, something unforgivable. ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... to think they were real. And although he had found himself at liberty to say to her things that were harder to hear, he felt a curious repugnance to giving her any inkling of what he thought about this. It would be a hideous thing to do, he concluded, an unforgivable thing, and an actual hurt. Kendal had for women the readiest consideration, and though one of the odd things he found in Elfrida was the slight degree to which she evoked it in him, he recoiled instinctively from any ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Unfortunately, the management of the affair was committed to an incorrigible snob, and he decided that a young lady who earned her own living was not a fit theatrical associate for the patrician daughters of successful soap-boilers and pork-packers, thereby offering an unforgettable and unforgivable affront to all the legions of labor. I do not approve of Miss Whitney's sale of her photo to a cigarette firm; but I do say that the act is infinitely more excusable than the practice among high-fly society women of paying ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... your powers of forgiveness may never be put to the test!" he ejaculated fervently. "The one unforgivable sin according to our Lord, is treachery;—may THAT never ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... not even known that he was coming down last night. And worst and most unforgivable of all, she had not been told that Make-Way-There was to be galloped ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... behest of all his clear insight into this Universe, the message of Heaven through him, which he could not suppress, but was inspired and compelled to utter in this world by such methods as he had. There for him lay the first commandment; this is what it would have been the unforgivable sin to swerve from and desert: the treason of treasons for him, it were there; compared with which all other ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... of a husband to his wife's silence when speech is fatal. . . to his character as a man. Has she not flung suspicion over his bones interred, that they are the bones of a—monster? . . . If Byron's sins or crimes—for we are driven to use terrible terms—were unendurable and unforgivable as if against the Holy Ghost, ought the wheel, the rack, or the stake to have extorted that confession from his widow's breast? . . . But there was no such pain here, James: the declaration was voluntary, and it was calm. Self- collected, and gathering up all ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... returning from his father's house to the Mission with equally mixed emotions. He knew he had dealt an almost unforgivable blow to those beloved parents whom he had honored and obeyed from his babyhood. Once he almost turned back. Then a vision arose of a fair young English girl whose unhappy childhood he had learned of years ago, a sweet, homeless ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... Agnes was the loss for the Dormer family of the advantages attached to the possession of Mrs. Dallow. The larger mortification would round itself later; for the hour the damning thing was that Nick had made that lady the gift of an unforgivable grievance. He had clinched their separation by his letter to his electors—and that above all was the wickedness of the letter. Julia would have got over the other woman, but she would never get over ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... spread through the town that old J. G. Whitmore had fired the Happy Family in a bunch for some unforgivable crime against the peace and dignity of the outfit, and that the boys were hatching up some scheme to get even. From the gossip that was rolled relishfully upon the tongues of the Dry Lake scandal lovers, the Happy Family must have been ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... form of theft utterly unforgivable it is the theft by a writer of another writer's undeveloped ideas. Borrow the plot of Sir J. M. Barrie's last play, and you do him no harm; you only write yourself down a plagiarist. But listen to the scenario of his next play (if he is kind enough to read it to you) and write it up ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... consciousness of this fact did not lessen their animosity. As for the Boston people, they felt, as they faced the emissaries of their oppressors on that wintry night, the accumulated exasperation of generations of injustice, and perhaps a stern thrill of joy that now, at last, the final, unforgivable outrage was ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... in the way of being worthy, the first condition surely is that one be. Let Cant cease, at all risks and at all costs: till Cant cease, nothing else can begin. Of human Criminals, in these centuries, writes the Moralist, I find but one unforgivable: the Quack. 'Hateful to God,' as divine Dante sings, 'and to the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... almost as well known as the human inhabitants. The meaning was wholly plain to him too, and the term did not apply to the horse's color. Yellow, on the frontier, means just one thing: the most damning and unforgivable thing of all. When one is yellow he gives up easily, he dares not lift his arms to fight, and the wilderness claims him quickly. "There's a little creek with a bad mudhole just this side of the ford," Bill went on. "All the horses got through ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... handed down to shuddering posterity a definition of the act of eating which might have been framed by a dyspeptic ghoul. "Eat: to devour with the mouth." It is a shocking view to take of so genial a function: cynical, indelicate, and finally unforgivable by reason of its very accuracy. For, after all, that is what eating amounts to, if one must needs express it with such crude brutality. But if "the ingestion of alimentary substances"—to ring a modern change upon the older formula—is in itself a process material even unto carnality, it ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... was a man of long experience with wild animals, in one of the chief zoological parks of the country. Long familiarity, however, had given him that most dangerous gift, contempt. And he had lost his position through that fault most unforgivable in an animal keeper, drunkenness. Owing to this fact, the inexperienced authorities of this little "Zoo" had been able to obtain his services at a comparatively moderate wage—and were congratulating themselves on the possession of ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... But for an unforgivable error of tact I might have stood by the old brontosaurus to the bitter end. One evening he and I were listening to a concert given by the "Fluffy Furbelows" in the camp Nissen Coliseum, and a Miss Gwennie Gwillis was expressing an ardent desire to get ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... report, was in excellent form, and committed a good deal of unforgivable syntax. He was somewhat apprehensive when he saw the bill of fare inscribed "Ye Olde Chop House," for he asserts that the use of the word "Ye" always involves extra overhead expense—and a quotation from Shakespeare on the back of the menu, ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... could see the long stretch of the hill, just before the curve. Fanny, sitting bolt upright, an unforgivable sin—in Polly's eyes—was whirling down it. She had apparently lost all control of her sled. Polly ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... May, burst into tears and ran into the house. In the darkness of her own room she began to think of her father's words. For some reason she could not understand, the attack made on her spirit seemed more terrible and unforgivable than the attack upon her body made by the farm hand in the shed. She began to understand vaguely that the young man had been confused by her presence on that warm sunshiny afternoon as she had been confused by the words uttered by Jim Priest, by the song of the bees in the orchard, ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson |
