"Self-pity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him till she's seen him, and when she does see him she'll apologise to me for all the nasty things she's been saying about me." For a moment it looked as though Mr. Blithers would dissolve into tears, so suddenly was he afflicted by self-pity. "By the way, didn't she like the necklace I sent up to her ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... on, and the quips and merry jests of Oscar Wilde, his artful artlessness, his insolence, his self-pity, his loyalty and fickleness, his sensuality and tenderness, only fill after all a small space in the heart's chamber of those who read him and stare at his plays and let ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Juliet drooped visibly. The bent little figure on the blanket was pathetic, but the twins were not given to self-pity. As time went on, the conversation lagged. They had both had a hard day, from more than one standpoint, and it was not surprising that by midnight, the self-appointed sentries were sound asleep upon one blanket, with Romeo's coat for a pillow and the ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... what he was saying to her. The injustice brought a lump of self-pity to her throbbing throat.... That he should not realize and honor the courage of her sacrifice.... That he should reproach, despise.... She had expected ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... bravely, only to have his toil culminate in a second failure. A third effort was equally futile. Worn by hunger and fatigue, and by the racking emotions of the situation, his spirit weakened again, so that he sat on his haunches in a huddled posture of wo, and sobbed like a child in desperation and self-pity. ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... He had been stolid and dour in his other misfortunes, had taken them as they came, calmly; he was not the man to whine and cry out against the angry heavens. He had neither the weakness nor the width of nature to indulge in the luxury of self-pity. But the sudden death of his gallant roadster, his proud pacer through the streets of Barbie, touched him with a sense of quite personal loss and bereavement. Coming on the heels of his other calamities ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... gods love die young," flashed through his mind as he watched him now, coming and going; and he sighed, it seemed so likely; and felt already that he should miss the Boy; and wondered, with retrospective self-pity, how he had managed to live at all with ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... he jerked erect and cupped his palm round his ear. Far off; muted by distance, but still unmistakable; he heard the baying of bloodhounds. Then this was the end. A sob broke from his throat. What was he, an animal; to be hunted down as a sport? Tears of self-pity welled to his eyes as he thought back to a party and a girl and laughter and cleanliness and the scent of magnolias, like a heady wine. But that was so long ago—so long ago—and now.... He looked down at his sweating, lacerated body; his blistered calloused ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... A wave of self-pity enveloped the Judge. His voice broke as he answered: "George, I haven't any little girl—she never even has spoken to me about this affair that the whole town knows about. Oh, I haven't any ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... father, and sums it up that he "sighs as a lover but obeys as a son." The father dies, and he records the fact with the remark that "the tears of a son are seldom lasting." The terrible spectacle of the French Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity because his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees, just as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all the allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon—often without even mentioning ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the middle-aged celibate, filled with the fury of frustration and profoundly sorry for himself. His place was taken by a gentle old man, an old man of an appealing and childlike innocence, pure from all lust, from all self-pity, enjoying, actually enjoying, the consideration that ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... rosy face was drawn into a decided pout, and her blue eyes were full of self-pity. She had to be sorry for her own grievance, because nobody else had either time or much inclination to sympathize; they were all far too much excited about their ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... at will. But, at bottom, he had too little sympathy with his fellows to find in their mistakes, or sins, or sufferings, the wherewithal to bring out of us our most generous tears. Those he wept once or twice himself when writing were drawn from him by a reflex self-pity that is easily evoked. In genuine pathos, Hugo ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... stood, a single human atom in the howling white death about her but it passed quickly. She dreaded the physical suffering which experience told her would come when her body cooled and the wind penetrated her garments, yet there was no feeling of self-pity. It was all a part of the business and would come to any herder. The sheep were the chief consideration, and she never doubted but that she could ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... desperation, but now a sudden, terrible, yet calming idea struck her to absolute quietness. There was a way, just one, to thwart this adversary; she could destroy the body into which it thought to return. At the same moment there arose in her soul two opposing waves of emotion—one of passionate self-pity to think that she, so weak and timid, should be driven to destroy herself; the other of triumph over her mortal foe delivered into her hands. She felt a kind of triumph too in the instantaneousness with which she was able to make up her mind that this was the only thing ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... men," Peter went on, "who have struggled and suffered and failed, and who have fought and failed again till their tempers are spoiled, until they grow bitter. They go in for self-pity, and self-pity leads to moping and brooding and madness; self-pity is the most selfish and useless thing on the face of God's earth. It is cruel, it is deadly, both to the man and to those who love him, and whom he ought to love. ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... the throb of human agony and hope. In the meantime he will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform—for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go again ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Marshall, his voice a mere whisper between parched lips. He tossed up his arms in a gesture that betokened his utter weariness of soul. "My God, how I've suffered!" he said chokingly, and his eyes were wet with the sudden anguish of self-pity. ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... him. He was surprised, dumfounded, overwhelmed. The only thought that now ran through his addled brain was that he simply had to do something. He couldn't stand there forever, like a fool, waving a pistol. In a minute or two they would all be laughing at him. It was ghastly. The wave of self-pity, of self-commiseration submerged him completely. Why, oh why, had he got himself into this dreadful pickle? He had merely come to talk it over with Nellie, that and nothing more. And now, see what he ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging to a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship's bow be turned toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a state of self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from which hunger nor nausea nor aching ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... and became focused upon herself. For the first time in days she was seeing herself without the mask of cheerfulness she had so determinedly assumed. And as she looked, her eyes suddenly filled with tears—tears almost of self-pity. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... distinct value as an ornament. But now what was ordinarily enough for her failed to satisfy. She felt horribly alone in the world, as if she had slipped upon some terrible ledge of rock overhanging a sheer precipice, and there was no one—no one on earth to help her back to safety. Tears of self-pity rose hot in her eyes as she stood, not far from Virginia and the doctor, ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... like hollow shows; nor more Sweet Ida: palm to palm she sat: the dew Dwelt in her eyes, and softer all her shape And rounder seemed: I moved: I sighed: a touch Came round my wrist, and tears upon my hand: Then all for languor and self-pity ran Mine down my face, and with what life I had, And like a flower that cannot all unfold, So drenched it is with tempest, to the sun, Yet, as it may, turns toward him, I on her Fixt my faint eyes, ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... forgot self-pity and vain repining, in the discovery of the one particular woman swinging dizzily past in the arms of an Incroyable, whose giddy plumage served only to render the more striking her exquisite fairness and the fine simplicity of ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... privacy. Her possessions were limited in number. The crude square table she had constructed herself. Upon it was a little old-fashioned walnut-framed mirror, a brush and comb, and a dilapidated ebony cabinet which contained odds and ends the sight of which always brought a smile of derisive self-pity to her lips. Under the table stood an old leather trunk. It had come with her from Texas, and contained clothing and belongings of her mother's. Above the couch on pegs hung her scant wardrobe. A tiny ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... Conscience still felt that her long fight had ended in a total defeat and that she had been saved from worse than defeat only because her victor had risen to her plea for magnanimity. Now she lay staring at the ceiling with eyes that burned in their sockets. Self-pity warred with self-accusation. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... His brain was confused with remembering, fevered with anguish of regret for things lost, which would never come again. He had nearly succumbed to that most unmanly of all spiritual assailants, the coward of Self-Pity—would have succumbed, had ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... fancy, though I may be as mistaken in this as I am in a good many other things, that most journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors. When an author is once warm in the saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is different: they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no longer the image of their own young aspiration, and they would willingly see Pegasus ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of tears. When they fall ill, they do not welcome it as a call from the Father. They do not sing "Nearer my God to thee." We do not find them going about saying "I shall be home shortly." Oh no! They indulge freely in self-pity. Like a limpet to a rock do they cling to this wretched, sinful world. Congregations are asked if they cannot "do something," a subscription is got up, and the man of God rushes off to the seaside, where prayer, in co-operation ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... life was dropping back into its old ways, that the greatness of their calamity became apparent. If Henry Hill had understood his opportunity, he might have stepped into his children's affections and been a true father to them. But he forgot them in his own self-pity. He was lonely, unspeakably lonely, and the house was dreary and dull without Mother. He who had always sought first of all his own pleasure and comfort now reached out for solace somewhere. And he found it with his old associates in his old haunts. When he returned to his home after ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... my dear—but you must reflect, that, etc., etc., et cetera"—each et cetera a dab of wet wool, taking out more and more stiffening and color, until the beautiful project hangs, a limp rag, on her hands, a forlorn wreck over which she could weep in self-pity. ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... continuing and evil results. Lives are wrecked, brains shattered, happiness destroyed by this monstrous evil, and many a man and woman fastens it upon himself, herself, through indulging in anxious thought, or by yielding to that equal devil-dragon of self-pity. ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... with a heavy heart; and mine is very heavy." She broke down through self-pity. "Oh, ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... Marshall, speaking in that cheery, matter-of-fact tone, scorning the luxury of self-pity, conquering the temptation to look on herself as an object of sympathy. Peggy regarded her with affectionate admiration, quite unaware how important a factor she herself had been in bringing about a transformation almost ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... threw himself on the couch, dressed as he was in the dark mourning garments, which he had half torn off in his rage and despair, and broke out into such loud groans that he himself was almost frightened in the silence of the night. Full of self-pity and horror at his own deep grief, he turned his face to the wall to screen his eyes from the clear, full moon, which only showed him things he did not want to see, while ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sense. She was no unsophisticated school girl; she was a woman of the world. The social and political atmosphere in which she moved seemed charged with dynamic possibilities. Her closed eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. Winifred let them fall unheeded, feeling miserable consolation in her self-pity, as ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... so lonely in his life as he did this evening in the moving throng. He fancied that everybody was looking at him compassionately as he made his solitary way through the crowd, and almost gave way to self-pity. He would have liked to talk to the first comer, for the mere pleasure of hearing his voice, for in his loneliness he felt as if he were walking by the side of a stranger. And now his conscience smote him. He remembered the waiter Gustav, who had been unable ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... was caught in a trap. He must lie and maintain his place, or he must confess and go out of society. It must not be supposed that he took his predicament lightly, or that he made his choice without pangs of self-pity at the cruel necessity. It was his honor, or hers! and if only the one or the other could be saved, it must be his. So he saved it—according to his lights. He saved it by being very bold in his statements by day, ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... mother into the carriage, and convoyed them to the church, where Bonbright awaited them. She could not prevent a feeling of exasperation, especially toward Mrs. Frazer, who had moved from chair to chair, uttering words of self-pity, and pronouncing a constant jeremiad.... Such preliminaries to a wedding she had never expected to witness, and she witnessed them with ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... horse-dealer of the name of Budgett, certainly in exile at Boulogne owing to a standing difference with the bankruptcy laws of his country, was alive still. But Arthur was very fond of himself, and once in the mood of self-pity, he could invent pathetic anecdote after pathetic anecdote of his privations which would have touched the heart of a hardened grandmother, much more of a susceptible girl. She fell into the way of calling him "King ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... self-pity relaxed me and I immediately went to bed. Since my main job now was waiting, I could wait just as ...
— The Misplaced Battleship • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... at him for a half minute, stewing and helpless in his own self-pity. The Old Gentleman's eyes were bright with the giving-pleasure. His face was getting more lined each year, but his little black necktie was in as jaunty a bow as ever, and the linen was beautiful and white, and his gray mustache was curled ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Abolitionist as well, and had proclaimed the duty of emigrating to Kansas to prevent it from becoming a slave state. Dave, it appeared, had taken up the idea zealously, and had persuaded her to go with him. Her story became pathetic in spite of her self-pity as she related the hardships of that settlement in the wilds, and described her loneliness, her shivering terror when her husband was away hauling logs for their first home, and news came that the slave-traders from Missouri had made another raid ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... could make no answer. She had come on a sudden impulse to cheer the lonely leader of her people. Perhaps his need in this dark hour had called her. She thought of Socola's story of his mother's vision and wondered with a sudden pang of self-pity where the man she loved ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... rather called up all the pictures of the happy past, and the probable future—painting the scene when she should lie a corpse, with the son she had longed to see in life weeping over her, and she unconscious of his presence—till she was melted by self-pity into a state of sobbing and exhaustion that made Margaret's heart ache. But at last she was calm, and greedily watched her daughter, as she began her letter; wrote it with swift urgent entreaty; sealed it up hurriedly, for fear her mother should ask to see it: and then, to make ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... beyond any perception of minor shades of feeling. She answered him in the same passionless tone in which she had greeted him, with no suggestion of self-pity, nor any claim for sympathy in her manner, as she motioned him ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... granted. And they seem to reflect moments when Schnitzler felt that, in choosing poetry rather than medicine for his life work, he had sacrificed the better choice. And yet they do not show any regrets, but rather a slightly ironical self-pity. A note of irony runs through everything that Schnitzler has written, constituting one of the main attractions of his art, and it is the more acceptable because the point of it so often turns against the ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... the thought of the junior warden, of the two more empty pews, and then the thought, in irresistible self-pity, of how hard he had tried, how well he had meant, how much he had given up, and he felt his eyes filling with a man's painful, bitter tears. There had been so little beauty, reward, in his whole past. Once, thirty years before, ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... her after she had shut her mouth. Her face settled into a martyr-like appeal to Heaven in proof of the justice of her cause. And then she fell back on her forlorn hope. She wept hysterically, in sincere self-pity, to think that an affectionate mother ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... deliberate handling of experience, such a quiet adjustment of memories, is not without its uses. Any view of life that will save a man from whining is worth taking. Any reckoning that will prevent a man from indulging in self-pity—that subtlety of selfishness—is worth making. There is, moreover, something very simple and obvious in this way of thinking and judging. To make one kind of experience deal with another kind, to set the days and the hours in battle array—or shall we say to arrange a tourney where ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... all the more pitiable! Constance never pitied herself. She did not consider that Fate had treated her very badly. She was not very discontented with herself. The invincible commonsense of a sound nature prevented her, in her best moments, from feebly dissolving in self-pity. She had lived in honesty and kindliness for a fair number of years, and she had tasted triumphant hours. She was justly respected, she had a position, she had dignity, she was well-off. She possessed, ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... distress of her personal relations with Swithin was the single force in the world which could have coerced her into abandoning to him the interval she would fain have set apart for getting over these new and painful impressions. Self-pity for ill-usage afforded her good reasons for ceasing to love Sir Blount; but he was yet too closely intertwined with her past life to be destructible on the instant as ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... a fervor of self-pity. I was in one of those moods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the future stretches blank and gray in front of one. In such a mood it is imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance. Work ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... lamentation, and we shall find it an endless injustice to have to get up every morning and go to bed every night. Mrs. Porson wept, but never thought him or herself ill-used. And had she been low enough to indulge in self-pity, it would have been thrown away, for before she had time to wonder how she was to live and rear her children, she too was sent for. In this world she was not one of those mothers of little faith who trust God for themselves but not for their children, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... into the very depths of this strange self-pity. He was out of tune with everything around him. He had been thinking, through the dead night, of all that he had given up when he left the house of his father, the wealthy pagan Demetrius, to join the company of the Christians. Only two years ago he had been ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... accounts of every expedition, but more importance is attached to it as we approach the end of the Ninevite empire, when the kings were not so well able to endure hardship. Sennacherib mentions it on several occasions, with a certain amount of self-pity for the fatigue he had undergone, but with a real pride ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked; but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,—in everything visible and audible,—the ideal of ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... There was still a little red gleaming between the bars, and Kit would have liked to go in and warm his toes on the hearthstone. But he knew that his aunt was listening. He was going thirteen, and big for his age, so he wasted no pity on himself, but opened the door and went out. Self-pity is bad at any time. It is fatal ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... one," said Susan to herself. And instantly tears of self-pity bowed her head over the little towel-rack, and turned her heart to water. "I love children so—and I couldn't have children!" came the agonized thought, and she wept bitterly, pressing her eyes against the smooth folds of ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... my unbelief Had fashioned in my vision as all life. Now even this so little virtue waned, For I became caught up into the strife That I had pitied, and my soul was stained At last by that most venomous despair, Self-pity. I no longer was aware Of any will to heal the world's unrest, I suffered as it suffered, and I grew Troubled in all my daily trafficking, Not with the large heroic trouble known By proud adventurous men who would atone With their own passionate pity for the sting And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... splendors to which he would be obliged to introduce her. Even Talbot, the man who was getting rich upon the products of his enterprise, had a more impressive wife than he. And thus, with much reflection, this strange, easy-natured brute without a conscience, wrought up his soul into self-pity. In some way he had been defrauded. It never could have been intended that a man capable of winning so many of his heart's desires as he had proved himself to be, should be tied to a woman incapable of illuminating and honoring his position. ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... agreed Kit wondering at her endurance, and wondering at the poise and beauty of her after such experience. There was no trace of nervousness, or of tears, or self-pity. It was as if all this of which she told had been a minor affair, dwarfed by some tragic thing to ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... words was no trace of rebellion or even of self-pity, but merely there was the dead weight and numbness of a hopeless resignation to make the words sound flat ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... second touch of kindness Gibbie had received since he was the dog's guest: had he been acquainted with the bastard emotion of self-pity, he would have wept; as he was unaware of hardship in his lot, discontent in his heart, or discord in his feeling, his emotion was one of unmingled delight, and embodied itself in ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... doing had given her a ray of real comfort. He had interpreted Paula—in terms how different from those employed by Aunt Lucile! He had comprehended Rush without one momentary flaw of resentment. Last of all, he had quite simply and without one vitiating trace of self-pity, explained himself, luminously, so that it was as if she had known him all ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... over this afternoon to "cheer me up". She means well, but her cheering capacities are not great. Her mode of attack is first to enlarge on every possible ill, and reduce one to a state of collapse from pure self-pity, and then to proceed to waft the same troubles aside with a casual flick of the hand. She sat down beside me, stroked my hand (I hate being pawed!) and ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... stood listening till the noise died away. Then she sank all limp in a chair and began to cry. There was wrath in her sobs, and bitter self-pity. She had made a fine tragedy scene, but the glory of it was short. She did not regret it, but an immense dreariness had followed on her heroics. Was there ever, she asked herself, a ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... his blankets, covered himself and went to sleep. The fact seemed to bring bitter reality to Shefford. Nothing was going to happen. The valley was to be the same this night as any other night. Shefford accepted the truth. He experienced a kind of self-pity. The night he had thought so much about, prepared for, and had forgotten had now arrived. Then he threw another blanket round him, and, cold, dark, grim, he faced that lonely vigil, meaning to sit there, wide-eyed, to endure and ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... train—oh, no doubt! But she was clear-sighted now, saw that the true fault after all was hers, and would waste no time in accusing others. Very soon she dismissed him from her mind. In all the blank hopelessness of her fall from hope she put aside self-pity, and tasked herself to face the worst. To Emilia and Nancy she had spoken lightly, as if scarcely alive to her dreadful position, still less alive to her sin. They had misunderstood her: but in truth she had spoken ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Maitland's position, and brought up amid refined surroundings, as he had been, would have regarded with horror and loathing such a situation as that in which he now found himself, and would have been overwhelmed with self-pity at the cruelly hard luck which forced them to herd with such uncongenial companions in such a pig sty of a place as the Concordia's forecastle just then presented; but Dick was something of a philosopher, and was, moreover, full of "grit". He held ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... disregards the law of gravitation and falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin, experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation—the sensation, not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is God's holiness against which he has transgressed; and that feeling finds utterance age after age in the agonised cry, "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... treatment, for he had promised to fight in the Indian wars; but the Jesuits were dependent on the caprice of their conductors. Any one, who, from experience in the wilds, has learned how the term "tenderfoot" came to be applied, will realize the hardships endured—and endured without self-pity—by these scholarly men of immured life. The rocks of the portage cut their naked feet. The Indians refused to carry their packs overland and flung bundles of clothing and food into the water. In fair weather the voyageurs slept on the sand under the overturned canoes; in ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... who had promised to come—and yet might not come. The bitterness came back, the self-hate. He remembered a young man and promises made, but not kept; a girl who had believed and never lost faith even when he had retreated back to the land away from everything. Long sullen silences, self-pity, brooding over the news stories that got worse and worse. And the children—one born dead—two born deaf and dumb ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley
... forgotten all about me," she thought; and swept by an absurd emotion of self-pity, she kissed her own arms in the darkness to comfort herself, till her eyes, which never left his face, saw him turn warily and desperately to ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... buried him. He fancied he saw himself frozen in a grotesque position. There would be ice-crystals in the very centre of his heart, that heart that had glowed so fiercely with the lust of life. Yes, life was sweet. A vast self-pity surged over him. Well, he had done his best; he could ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... so much that she had quite recovered from any self-pity on that score. Like the daughter of convent manners that she was, she kept up her self-respect by a little ceremony at this meal. She dressed for it usually; at least she put on fresh ribbons and flowers, gave a touch here and there to the table, held Maria ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... the shadowed depths of her eyes. "I've never been treated so in my life!" she declared, overcome by the self-pity of a struggling soul ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... infinite taking of pains was done in a losing battle with blindness. There is a constantly increasing succession of references in the Diary to his failing eyesight and his fears of blindness in the future. The references are made in a matter-of-fact tone, and are as free from self-pity as if he were merely recording the weather or the date. All the more on that account, the days when he is weary and almost blind with writing and reading, and the long nights when he is unable to read, show him to be a very ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... concerned. The woman who harps upon her ailments, who appears at the breakfast table with a depressed and melancholy visage, who regales us with an account of how poorly she slept, the nightmares she experienced, the pain she suffers, and who puts into her inflection the poison of self-pity is an emissary of Satan. I have seen a whole family's happiness for the day destroyed by the meaningless ranting of a hysterical woman. Life is hard enough for all, for each of us to at least wish ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... spirit of Meleager, and, though not verbally copied from him, have the precise quality of his rhythms and turns of phrase. But the abandonment to sensibility, the absorption in self-pity and the sentiment of passion, are carried by Propertius ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... grow dark; and, tired of standing, I sat down upon the floor, for there was nothing to sit upon besides. There I still sat, long after it was quite dark. All at once a surge of self-pity arose in my heart. I burst out wailing and sobbing, and cried aloud, 'God has forgotten me altogether!' The fact was, I had had no dinner that day, for Mrs. Conan had expected to return long before; and the piece of bread ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... offence—with warm, savory-smelling soup; then, he who had certainly been no coward—for his thigh was a cruel lump of pain which no human being would have kept so patiently to himself—became suddenly, like many human invalids, a perfect glutton of self-pity; and when we smoothed and patted him and told him how sorry we were, it was laughable, and almost uncanny, how he suddenly set up a sort of moaning talk to us, as much as to say that he certainly had had a pretty bad time, was really something of a hero, and ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or even self-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to be a failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region where everything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet who has written of love one is conscious of compensations: the happiness of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... all the self-pity rising in him. He went on: "Good God! what nurslings we are when we first feel our feet! We're like children just loose from the leading-strings. Anything that glitters catches us. Every trap that is set for our unwary feet we drop into. ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... muddles in her own way,—the simple fatal way of letting things slide, and hoping that they would somehow come right in the end. But there seemed no present prospect of such a consummation; and for a while she gave herself up to a luxury of self-pity. Tides in her mind ebbed and flowed aimlessly as seaweed. Everything was hopeless and miserable. It was useless trying to be good; and she supposed Honor would ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... farther away. As it led in a straight line from the royal-masthead to the rail, this meant that he would fall overboard, and the thought comforted him. The concussion would kill him, of course; but no self-pity afflicted him now. He merely considered that she, who had relented, would be spared the sight of him crushed to a ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... gentle and almost endearing, emphasized the feeling of miserable self-pity that had taken hold of her and ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... of ocean-like rivers and almighty tall pumpkins. No one has made such charming use of the trick as Mark Twain. The dryness of the story of a greenhorn's sufferings who had purchased "a genuine Mexican plug," is one of the funniest things in literature. The intense gravity and self-pity of the sufferer, the enormous and Gargantuan feats of his steed, the extreme distress of body thence resulting, make up a passage more moving than anything in Rabelais. The same contrast, between an innocent style of narrative and the huge palpable nonsense of the story told, marks the tale of the ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... that he felt any special remorse. His agonies were private, and his chance of redemption lay in this, that they neither ceased nor eased with time; perhaps in this, too, that he wasted no breath in apologetics or self-pity, but blamed himself ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... too, is full of self-pity, though she does not mention her tears; and her letter is a long portrait of her husband's faults. She wants a little encouragement to leave him, but she is afraid he will go to the dogs if she does. So, like a generous woman, she ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... in him as he sat outside the thatched cottage in the moonlight, while the wake was within, was not grief at his wife's death; not a shattered mind that his life, so carefully laid out not twelve months before, was disoriented; not any self-pity; not any grievance against God, such as little men might have: but a strange dumb wonder. There she lay within, in her habit of a Dominican lay sister, her hands waxy, her face waxy, her eyelids closed. And six guttering candles were about her, and women droned ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Ziph, a small place on the edge of the southern desert, betray his haunt to Saul. The king receives the intelligence with a burst of thanks, in which furious jealousy and perverted religion, and a sense of utter loneliness and misery, and a strange self-pity, are mingled most pathetically and terribly: "Blessed be ye of the Lord, for ye have compassion on me!" He sends them away to mark down his prey; and when they have tracked him to his lair, he follows with his force and posts them round the hill where David ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... they both regretted the pale flash of telepathy. There had been something wounded in his eyes; and she had not meant that. No; a new charity for the hapless had softened her wonderfully within a fortnight's time, and a self-pity, not entirely ignoble, had subdued the brilliancy of her dark eyes, and made her tongue more gentle in dealing with all failings. Besides, she was not yet perfectly certain what ailed her, never having really cared for any one man before. No, she was not at all certain. ... ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... themes for passionate poetry nearer home than the legendary love-tales; and when she forgot him, finding excitement elsewhere during his months of service with Octavian, he nursed his morbid grief in un-Roman self-pity, this first poet of the poitrinaire school. His subsequent career was meteoric. Octavian, fascinated by a brilliancy that hid a lack of Roman steadiness, placed him in charge of the stupendous task of organizing Egypt, a work that would tax the powers of a Caesar. The romantic poet lost ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... of the family that would soon be realizing how foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of self-pity—and I never saw ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Christopher, pervading his entire body—repulsion that was but a recoil from his exhausted rage. In this new emotion there were both weariness and self-pity, and to his mental vision there showed clearly, with an impersonal detachment, his own figure in relation to the scenes among which he moved. "That is I yonder," he might have said had he been able to disentangle thought from sensation, "plodding along there through the red mud ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... stone-cold silence, this walking always in shadowed paths without a ray of light, without the certainty of arriving anywhere, though he plod onward for a lifetime—and the old feeling of savage resentment, the old sense of self-pity—the surest thing on God's earth to blaze a trail for the oncoming of the worst that is in a man—bit at the soul of him and touched him ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Kitty, in his ear, as she came across him in one of the drawing-rooms, "Lord Hubert takes me in to supper. Poor me!" She made an extravagant face of self-pity and swept on. Lord Hubert was one of the sons of the house, a stupid and inarticulate guardsman, Kitty's butt and detestation. Ashe smiled to himself over her fate, and went back to the ballroom in ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at him for a second or two and then, whirling, entered the hut. Her cheeks were burning. Who shall say whether the tears that sprang to her eyes as she fell to work scrubbing in the corner were of anger or self-pity? ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... with Jack drawn close to him, lay back, awe-stricken and with his face wet from mysterious tears. The comfort of the childish self-pity that came with every thought of himself, wandering, a lost spirit along the mountain-tops, was gone like a dream and ready in his heart was the strong new purpose to strike into the world for himself. He even took it as a good omen, when he rose, to find his fire quenched, the stopper of ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... first time in her life, she pitied herself, not knowing that self-pity is the first step toward relief from overpowering sorrow. When detachment is possible, the long, slow healing has ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... was rid of any self-pity. I think he was stunned by the horror of the thing, that he, a man of Chinese letters, who had departed from the centuried custom of his pundit caste of remaining in their own country, who had left his family or clan to increase his store of lesser knowledge, should be denied the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been. There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... hadn't come when you did, Kate," he would say, weeping with self-pity, "I should have died alone. I wouldn't own to any one how sick I was. Why, one night I was so weak, after being out thirty-six hours with a sick woman, that I had to creep upstairs on my hands and knees." He sobbed ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... long since become but a shadow and a name to Cally; she had willed it so, and so it had been. Now, in his own poor scrawl, the ghost of a lover too roughly discarded rose and walked again. And beneath the cheap writing and the unrestrained self-pity, she seemed to plumb for the first time the depths of the boy's present misery. The old story, having struck him down once, had hunted him out and struck him down again. Where now ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... that his grief and wanhope might not rend his heart and slay him then and there, and lest all the deeds whereto he was fated should be spoiled and undone, self-pity fell upon him with the sweet remembrance of his love, and loosed the well of his tears, and he wept and wept, and might not be satiated of his mourning a long while. But when the night was yet dark and no sign of dawn in the ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... sturdy, inveterate rascal does it seem to occur to insinuate that he has been doing work of any kind, or that he in the least cares to do any; while at the same time all self-pity is eschewed in his narrative, and he relates his experiences much as though they are the experiences of another man, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... through the damp, ill-smelling sand of the beach, sick with self-pity. On the other side of those glaring, inscrutable mountains, a battle, glorious, dramatic, and terrible, was going forward, and he was thirteen miles away. He was at the base, with the supplies, the sick, and ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... bitterness and self-pity in the taunt at the end of the words. Elizabeth felt it, as she seized her pistol from her belt, and pointed it at the astonished group. They were not accustomed to girls with pistols. "Open that door, or I will ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... made his offer; whereat the wild man swung his boomerang disagreeably, and indicated that he must have "more, more." Tears of self-pity flooded Sinkum's eyes. He had no choice but to obey, and at last the black-fellow left with a sack containing ten times the value of the goods the storeman had been forced to buy. He had been cheated, cruelly used; he was a poor man, and could not stand such losses. ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... But he did more than feel with those who were suffering, and weep beside them. His sympathy was always for their strengthening. He never encouraged exaggerated thoughts of pain or suffering—for in many minds there is a tendency to such feelings. He never gave countenance to morbidness, self-pity, or any kind of unwholesomeness in grief. He never spoke of sorrow or trouble in a despairing way. He sought to inculcate hope, and to make men braver and stronger. His ministry was always toward ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... tendency of his songs was toward love, and love alone—chaste, supersensuous, but purely human and exclusive love. No suggestion of national inspiration; no broad human sympathies; no echo of the oppressed ones' cry; no stern challenge of wrong; only a hopeless, undying love, and an unspeakable self-pity. He wasn't even a lyre; he was a pipe for Fortune's finger to sound what stop she pleased; and, judging from the tone of his playing, and the selection of his songs, it had pleased that irresponsible goddess to attune the chords of his ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... it, his name surrounded with a glamour of pathetic romance, as the sad widower with a mystery darkening his past and future. It was an agreeable gloom into which he fell. Self-pity warmed him and loosened his fierceness. He sighed with regret ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... over and drank his fill, and then made his greedy breakfast on the berries that grew abundantly round, and nodded hospitably to his hand. All the time he wept, and moaned to himself in the self-pity of a hunted, fearful wretch. Then he drank again from the spring, and without rising from his knees pushed himself back a little from it, and fell ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... sue the filibusters if they did not put him ashore. If only they had put him ashore, in gratitude he would have crawled on his knees. What followed was of no interest to David, nor to many of the filibusters, nor to any of the Cuban patriots. Their groans of self-pity, their prayers and curses in eloquent Spanish, rose high above the crash of broken crockery and the pounding of the waves. Even when the search-light gave way to a brilliant sunlight the circumstance was unobserved by David. Nor was he concerned in the tidings brought forward by the ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... was unfamiliar. There were heavy oaken doors, always closed, and outside the windows, fastened into the thick stone walls, were iron bars, obviously (so she thought) a provision against Indians. All this she noted with an infinite self-pity, but without surprise—an emotion unknown in dreams. The child in the cradle was invisible under its coverlet which something impelled her to remove. She did so, disclosing the face of a wild animal! In the shock of this dreadful revelation the dreamer awoke, trembling in the darkness ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... best it may be named, I first knew the song of the soul. Now, although it is better not to dwell upon the memory of past spiritual joys, lest we become greedy, and equally wise not to dwell upon the memory of anguishes, lest we fall into self-pity, which of all emotions is the most sickly and useless (and our wisest is to live only from hour to hour with all the sweetness that we can, leaving to Him the choosing of our daily bread, whether it be high joy or pain), still I confess that I have thought over and compared ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... lips writhing with an excoriating brand of self-pity, "who am I that I should want a home for my daughter, now that she is grown? Mr. Kemble can treat his wife like a queen, but me—why, I'm mud under ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... years of one's life, all concentrated for one on the tip of a rope, than it is to spread out saving one's life over a whole year, 365 breakfasts, 365 luncheons, 365 dinners, 33,365 moments of anger, of reckless worry, of remorse, of self-pity, 40,000 of despair and round up with a swing at the end of one's year at the tiptop of one's being, as if it had only taken five minutes. And yet it is only an act of the creative imagination of ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... very frail. Whilst stationed here, she was often fighting bronchitis, but she never spoke of herself. Never even said she was tired. There was not a trace of self-pity or ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... like an acid. He saw Michael Lanyard a sorry figure, sitting stultified with self-pity ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... exercises, Helen de Vallorbes found existing circumstances excessively disturbing and disquieting. She was filled with an immense self-pity. She feared her health was failing. She became nervously sensible of her eight-and-twenty years, telling herself that her youth and the glory of it had departed. She wore black dresses, rolled bandages, pulled lint. Selecting Mary Magdalene as her ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... tones of grave mistrust. "Poor things!" she said. As a country girl, used to the practical ends of poultry, she knew as well as the cook that it was the fit and simple destiny of chickens to be eaten, sooner or later; and it must have been less in commiseration of their fate than in self-pity and regret for the scenes they recalled that she sighed. The hens that burrowed yesterday under the lilacs in the door-yard; the cock that her aunt so often drove, insulted and exclamatory, at the head of his harem, out of forbidden garden bounds; ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... memory choked and blinded Johnnie. She could neither see the path before them, nor find the voice to answer her questioner. The bleak pathos of her situation came home to her, and tears of rare self-pity filled her eyes. Why was it a disgrace that Stoddard should treat her kindly? Why must she be ashamed of her feeling for him? Shade's voice ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... habitation and name, from the Puritan colony in America, and these in a merely allegorical, not historical manner. Certain traits, however, ally it more closely to New England Puritanism. It is a relentless tale; the characters are singularly free from self-pity, and accept their fate as righteous; they never forgave themselves, they show no sign of having forgiven one another; even God's forgiveness is left under a shadow in futurity. They have sinned against the soul, and something implacable in evil remains. The ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... to be executed to-morrow by the Grand Panjandrum's order,' said the Court Physician dolefully, wiping a tear of self-pity ...
— The Mysterious Shin Shira • George Edward Farrow
... head in self-pity. The self-pity loosened a little tail of hair which arose, rampant, from the exact middle of her crown. However, Kathryn lacked a mirror within range, and so she talked on quite as contentedly, despite the waving, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... glimpses of what it might be to disregard them and the elemental claim they make upon us. We have yielded at times to the temptation of ignoring them for selfish aims, of considering the individual and not the family convenience, and we remember with shame the self-pity which inevitably followed. But just as we have learned to adjust the personal and family claims, and to find an orderly development impossible without recognition of both, so perhaps we are called upon now to make a second adjustment between the family and the social claim, ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... committed at a layman's house, say a merchant's or manufacturer's, a cheesemonger's' or greengrocer's, or, to go higher, a barrister's, a member of Parliament's, a rich banker's, I should have felt alleviation, a drop of self-pity. But to be seen deliberately to go out of the house of a clergyman drunk! a clergyman of the Church of England too! not that alone, but of an expounder of that dark Italian Hierophant, an exposition little short of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... rose and went sadly to the window. Her eyes, full of self-pity, gazed with unwonted indifference at the passers-by. How thankful she would have been to have Mr. Delarayne at her side at this critical moment in her life. There were times when she was not unappreciative of the many ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... self-pity rose upon him like a flood. Just at the worst, he heard a knock at the library door. Before he could say 'Come in,' it was hurriedly opened, and his two married daughters confronted him—Pamela, too, ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... up and put her hand as usual in the hole of the wall: there was nothing there. She fell straight into one of her stupid rages; but neither her hunger nor the hole in the wall heeded her rage. Then, in a burst of self-pity, she fell a-weeping, but neither the hunger nor the hole cared for her tears. The darkness began to come on, and her hunger grew and grew, and the terror of the wild noises of the last night invaded her. ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... lady!—or was it a delusion on her part, one of the devices of self-pity? Yet he recalled the emaciated face and form, the cough, the trailing step, Miss Foster's anxiety, some comments ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sound of these words on her own lips was like a summons arousing her from a dream. The sordidness of her life, its cruel lack of opportunity in contrast with the gifts she felt to be hers, and on which he had dwelt, was swept back into her mind. Self-pity, dignity, and inherent self-respect struggled against her woman's desire to give; an inherited racial pride whispered that she was worthy of the best, but because she had lacked the chance, he refrained from offering her what he would have laid at the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with them, or seemed rather to make their own narrowing prospects look more narrow, and the approach of the King of Terrors more black and relentless, than before. Jenny lay back on her poor bed, with the tears of a dumb self-pity running down her cheeks, and James's only answer to it was conveyed in a brief summons to Sandy to come and see his mother before the end. The prosperous son, broadened out of knowledge almost by good feeding and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rocking to and fro, whimpering tearlessly, like a suffering dog. Strangely enough, within the withered bosom of this most wretched creature there had welled up, from some hidden source of womanly feeling, a passionate self-pity, a no less passionate self-loathing. This was what a moment's contact with all that she had so long abjured—purity, ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... tragic about it, though I must seem consumed with self-pity," he returned, smiling. "It is only that I have dropped out of the world while Tom ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... astonished maid in the hall and let himself out into the night. The blood was pounding in his veins, he felt in actual need of physical violence; he did not know how he had managed to keep his hands off Raymond. He walked on at a furious pace; presently he laughed with a sort of self-pity. ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... on to such and such an objective and have pushed forward three hundred yards here or have been bent back there. One thing you notice: every man forgets his own catastrophe in his keenness for the success of the offensive. Never in all my fortnight's journey to Blighty did I hear a word of self-pity or complaining. On the contrary, the most severely wounded men would profess themselves grateful that they had got off so lightly. Since the war started the term "lightly" has become exceedingly comparative. I suppose a man is justified in saying he's got off lightly when what he ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... youth, I had suffered a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of death. I remembered now that my affections as well as my passions had drained out of me, leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation, a dreg of self-pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions and tendernesses and all the complex moral interplay of a man had reasserted themselves. It occurred to me that the real meaning of this numbness might be a gradual slipping away from the ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to leave the bow-string for the next day's march. For three days before Christmas the entire company had no food but snow. Christmas was celebrated by starvation. Hearne could not indulge in the despair of the civilized man's self-pity when his faithful guides went ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... face there swept changes of expression which Helen was not to forget. Anger and surprise contended together, widening her eyes and lips, and these were both overcome, after a struggle, by a revelation of self-pity not less amazing to the woman than to ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do those who indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly, as a horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before she ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and Peace.... Alas! it cannot be: To advance is to encounter dreadful danger; But to recede, inevitable death; His own associates would deal the blow: Thus led by Fate, behold upon the plain, The adverse bands in view, and in advance. Now Fear, Self-pity, and affected Courage, Speak in their hideous shouts with voice scarce human; Like that which issues from his hollow throat Who sleeping bellows in a frightful dream. More near their glaring eye-balls ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... broken-hearted man. To have allied my family with a child of Nature like yourself would have given me the greatest joy. But—how shall I express my grief?" And here the old man struck a pathetically tragic attitude and drew out his handkerchief, weeping with a profound self-pity. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... the week behind him, with all its ups and downs, its quarrels, its ennuis, its moments of delightful intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, and those threadbare monotonous weeks into which he was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in him a mad inconsequent sting of disgust, of self-pity. ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cruel fate at length; The burying waters close around their head— 590 They sink! for ever number'd with the dead. Those who remain the weather shrouds embrace, Nor longer mourn their lost companions' case: Transfix'd with terror at the approaching doom, Self-pity in their breasts alone has room. Albert, and Rodmond, and Palemon, near, With young Arion, on the mast appear: Even they, amid the unspeakable distress, In every look distracting thoughts confess; In every vein the refluent blood congeals, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.] |
