"Sickening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... clearly and distinctly; the efforts of the prosecution to shake him were useless. "Not guilty" was the verdict that thrilled through the breathless court. One man sank back in his seat in sickening despair. The vengeance that old Mr. Carson had longed to compass for the murder of his beloved boy was thwarted; he had been cheated of the desire that now ruled his life—the desire ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... for the curtain to rise. Quivering all through she waited for Barney Palmer, whose entrance was to open her drama. She glanced at her wrist-watch which she had left upon the little lacquered writing-table. Ten minutes of nine. Ten more minutes to wait. She felt far more of sickening suspense than ever did any young playwright on the opening night of his first play. For she was more than merely playwright. In her desperate, overwrought determination Maggie had assumed for herself the super-mortal role of ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... over his eyes and went toward the door. But suddenly an ingenious thought flashed through his head, from which, however, he himself became disgusted. And feeling nausea in the pit of his stomach, with clammy, cold hands, experiencing a sickening pinching in his toes, he again walked up to the table and said as though carelessly, but with a catch in ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... silent and deserted. I was quite sure that Mr. Browne had had urgent reasons for retiring. I had, indeed, anticipated the measure. I hardly hoped to find him at the Fort, and had given him instructions on the subject of his removal; yet, a sickening feeling came over me when I saw that he was really gone; not on my own account, for, with the bitter feelings of disappointment with which I was returning home, I could calmly have laid my head on that desert, ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... doorway. They ceased their noise just as quickly, and seemed to be listening. In the same instant, I heard a faint chink of metal to my left, that set me staring at the hook which held the great door wide. It moved, even as I looked. Some invisible thing was meddling with it. A queer, sickening thrill went through me, and I felt all the men about me, stiffen and go rigid with intensity. I had a certainty of something impending: as it might be the impression of an invisible, but overwhelming, Presence. The hall was full of a queer silence, and not a sound ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... was told by one and all who had the misfortune to spend October and November on the Transvaal border, a story of brave Britons, practically unarmed—heroically valorous but impotent—standing almost in the teeth of the enemy and sickening with hope deferred. ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... that not very gentle patrician. Cornelia and Drusus had had troubles enough before; but in the present crisis, actual destruction stared Agias's saviour in the face. The situation was maddening, was sickening. Agias wrung his hands in anguish. Then came the healthy reaction. Drusus was still alive and well. He could be warned. The plot could be thwarted. Pratinas and Ahenobarbus were not yet beyond the reach of retribution. He—Agias—was ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... blood sent a sickening chill through the boy. Had he done this much only to be able to see his pardner die? He drove his teeth into his hand again at the thought. What was that? Was it a trick of the tunnel, his heart sounding in his own ears, or a rhythmic beat from ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... by the report of a commission which had been appointed in 1840. They made a thorough investigation of the obscure conditions of labor underground, and reported a condition of affairs which was heart-sickening. Children began their life in the coal mines at five, six, or seven years of age. Girls and women worked like boys and men, they were less than half clothed, and worked alongside of men who were stark naked. There were from twelve to fourteen working hours in the twenty-four, ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... on indignantly. Aristide composed his face into an expression of parental interest; but within him there was shivering and sickening upheaval. He saw it all, ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... still bellying between the buntlines. 'One hand for the ship and one for yourself' is the rule aloft. But exceptions are more plentiful than rules on a day like this. Both hands must be used, though the sail and foot-ropes rack your body and try their best to shake you off. If they succeed, a sickening thud on deck, or a smothered scream and a half-heard plopp! overside would be ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... What was a dinner-party to her if her precious one was sickening for croup or any other fatal malady? Most infant maladies were fatal unless taken in time, and if she were away and he be taken ill, how would he fare? She decided that the Brights would have to do without ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... fulness drew near I grew feverish with excitement. I was sickening, as it were, to my madness, for never more should I look upon her willingly, with eyes ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... right to insist on every house burning up its own odds and ends. The true domestic motto is—"Every kitchen its own crematorium." I do this habitually, out of public spirit. It is true that a sickening odour permeates the house for an hour or two of every day, created by the combustion of dinner remnants; also that most of my family suffer from bad sore throats, which they attribute to this cause. What of that? The truly ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 23, 1892 • Various
... upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium; the bitter lapse into everyday life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... and various noises from the Fatal Mountain; its rushing winds; its whirling torrents; and, from time to time, the burst and roar of some more fiery and fierce explosion. And ever as the winds swept howling along the street, they bore sharp streams of burning dust, and such sickening and poisonous vapors, as took away, for the instant, breath and consciousness, followed by a rapid revulsion of the arrested blood, and a tingling sensation of agony trembling through every nerve ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... invigorated my bodily frame, until I outgrew and out-bloomed every girl of my age in the neighborhood, while really laying a foundation for many years of uninterrupted health, and a constitution to defy the change of climate for which I was destined; while it won me from the sickening, enervating habit of sedentary enjoyment over the pages of a book, which, added to the necessary studies and occupations, was relaxing alike the tone of the bodily and mental frame. From the polluted works ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... government legalized the metric system in 1866, all the school books on arithmetic began presenting the topic of the metric system, and, quite naturally, they did it by comparing its units with those of our system and calling for cross reductions from one system to the other. No better means of sickening the American children with the metric system could have been devised. Multitudes of the young formed a strong dislike for the foreign system with its foreign names, and could not now be easily convinced that it is not difficult to learn. Every school ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... well, she had not two thimblefuls of will. One would only have had to have given her a walloping across the back to have made her regularly wallow in drink. The anisette even seemed to be very good, perhaps rather too sweet and slightly sickening. She went on sipping as she listened to Salted-Mouth, otherwise Drink-without-Thirst, tell of his affair with fat Eulalie, a fish peddler and very shrewd at locating him. Even if his comrades tried to hide him, she could usually sniff him out when he was late. Just the night before she had slapped ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... remedies and replace the bandages. This is the awful hour. I put my fingers in my ears this morning. When it is over we go back to the men and put the ward in order once more, remaking the beds and giving clean handkerchiefs with a little cologne or bay water upon them, so prized in the sickening atmosphere of wounds. Then we keep going round and round, wetting the bandages, going from cot to cot almost without stopping, giving medicine and brandy according to orders. I am astonished at the whole-souled and whole-bodied devotion of the surgeons. Men ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... herself of getting absolutely maudlin. The idea of Tom Robinson of "Robinson's," with his middle size, matter-of-fact air, and foxy hair and moustache, entertaining such a dream and relinquishing it with a pang of mortal anguish that would leave a long sickening heart-ache behind! It was the infection of all the silly love stories she had ever read which had received a kind of spurious galvanic life from the very ordinary circumstance, the feather in her cap, as so many girls would have regarded it, of Dora, having ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... rails. Mahon unsupported, fell against the fireplace but rolled clear without injury. There was a sickening thump, and the engine sagged ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... prejudice in favour of Shakspeare, Massinger, and the elder dramatic poets—the sickening adulation bestowed upon Sheridan Knowles and Talfourd, among the moderns—and the base, malignant, and selfish partiality of theatrical managers, who insist upon performing those plays only which are adapted to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various
... calculus. As a matter of fact the average English boy of fifteen has only just looked at elementary algebra. But every one who knows anything of educational science knows, that by the simple expedient of throwing overboard all that non-educational, mind- sickening and complex rubbish about money and weights and measures, practice, interest, "rule of three," and all the rest of the solemn clap-trap invented by the masters of the old Academy for Young Gentlemen to fool the foolish predecessors of those who clamour for commercial education to-day, and ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Winstay has got it into his noddle that the Jews are responsible for the war—and that they leave the fighting to the English. It's rather sickening: even in South Africa we are not treated as we should ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... was not, however, one of these victims. He was kept a close prisoner for two years, pining and sickening in his loneliness, while in the meantime the war continued, and at last a victory so decisive was gained by the Romans, that the people of Carthage were discouraged, and resolved to ask terms of peace. They ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... cheek. The little chap makes no effort to escape,—he evidently knows it is hopeless,—he only crooks a thin little arm over his cheek as he shrinks back. Deliberately the great man holds down the thin little arm and strikes him again with savage force. It is sickening! If we interfere the child will probably only get it worse afterwards. There are a few brutes like this who make their own children's lives a misery, though mostly French people are very kind. The children look so ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... death as the beginning of her life; for I've heard as how the very life of a woman is love, and if the girl-wife cannot love her old husband—Oh, Hannah, let us drop the veil—the pictur' is too sickening to look at. Such marriages are crimes. Ah, Hannah, in the way of sweethearting, age may love youth, but youth can't love age. And another thing I am sartin' sure of—as a young girl is a much more delicate cre'tur' than a young man, it must be a great deal harder for her to marry an old ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... two men in passing each other, and then the dwindling of the footfall of one of them in a direction onwards. Eustacia stretched her neck forward till she caught a glimpse of a receding back and shoulders; and she felt a wretched twinge of misery, she knew not why. It was the sickening feeling which, if the changed heart has any generosity at all in its composition, accompanies the sudden sight of a once-loved one ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... girl on the musty mattress. It wasn't actual starvation which drew the skin so tightly over her cheek-bones and gave the pinched look to her face, for there was food still left on the cluttered table, where flies buzzed over the unwashed dishes in sickening swarms. It was the disease which had claimed a victim, sometimes several, from every family in turn who occupied the room, because it had never been properly disinfected. Not even the sunlight could get in to do its share towards making ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... liquors. I cannot, even at this distant moment, banish the recollection of the scene from my mind. To behold and to contemplate the dreadful ravages that wine had made upon the most brilliant and enlightened human intellect, was sickening to the very soul. I had then a relation living at Winchester, and I remained there till the next day. In the morning I became acquainted with one of the most staunch and steady friends of Liberty that I ever ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... Clara Vere de Vere: You pine among your halls and towers: The languid light of your proud eyes Is wearied of the rolling hours. In glowing health, with boundless wealth, But sickening of a vague disease, You know so ill to deal with time, You needs must play ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the beginning of the season he is quite another person. The magnetism that has done so much to win him fame shines in his eyes and seems to emanate from his finger-tips, but the difference in his physical being at the end of the season is sickening. Like a bedraggled, worn-out circus coming in from the wear and tear of a hard season, he crawls wearily back to New York with a cinematographic recollection of countless telegraph poles flying past the windows, audience after audience, sleeping cars, budding geniuses, the inevitable ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... outrageous thing I ever heard of—a woman humiliating her husband by refusing to sign papers when he has brought the man right into the house to fix them up! A pretty reputation I'll get out of it! It's sickening, disgusting. What do you expect me to do? Tell me that. If I want to buy a load of hay or a boar pig, am I to say to a man, 'Wait till I ask my wife ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... was a moment of sickening confusion. A howling man, brandishing a lathi, made a dash at Roy, a grab at his ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... ate casually and conventionally of the best things on the table—cold pheasant or Strasbourg pie. But the Secretary was a vegetarian, and he spoke earnestly of the projected murder over half a raw tomato and three quarters of a glass of tepid water. The old Professor had such slops as suggested a sickening second childhood. And even in this President Sunday preserved his curious predominance of mere mass. For he ate like twenty men; he ate incredibly, with a frightful freshness of appetite, so that it was like watching a sausage factory. Yet continually, when he had swallowed a dozen crumpets ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... remember a sound more sickening to the stomach than those chains made as they ran out through the hawse-holes. The one mistake Link committed was in ordering the upper square-sail to be reefed. By the mercy of God not a child was blown off the yards ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... rock upon which she lay. Every one rushed to the deck "with countenances which sufficiently expressed the horrors of our situation." Immediately they took in all sails, lowered the boats, and found they were on a reef of coral rocks. Two days of sickening anxiety followed, the ship sprang a leak, and they were threatened with total destruction. To their intense relief, however, the ship floated off into deep water with a high tide. Repairs were now more than ever necessary, and the poor battered collier was taken into ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... equal correctness be termed an amalgam of hydrogen, or "hydrogen amalgam." The efforts of many chemists and mining engineers have for many years been devoted to a search for some effective and economical means for preventing the "sickening" of mercury and its consequent "flouring" and loss. Some sixteen or more years ago, Professor Crookes, F.R.S., discovered and, after a series of experiments, patented the use of an amalgam of the metal sodium for this purpose. He made the amalgam in a concentrated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... For ever hallowed be this glorious day, 160 When Freedom, bursting her oppressive chain, Tramples on the oppressor. When the tyrant Hurl'd from his blood-cemented throne, by the arm Of the almighty people, meets the death He plann'd for thousands. Oh! my sickening heart 165 Has sunk within me, when the various woes Of my brave country crowded o'er my brain In ghastly numbers—when assembled hordes, Dragg'd from their hovels by despotic power, Rush'd o'er her frontiers, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... weight. A Frenchwoman had a baby at her breast. It cried with an unceasing wail. Other babies were crying; and young girls, with sensitive nerves, were exasperated by this wailing misery and the sickening smell which pervaded this ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... downwards at "And lay me gently down with them that rest," seems almost like Handel's own voice in a moment of sad depression. It serves, at anyrate, to remind us that the all-conquering Mr. Handel was a complete man who had endured the sickening sense of the worthlessness of a struggle that he was bound to continue to the end. But these personal confessions are scarce. After all, in oratorio Handel's best music is that in which he seeks to attain the sublime. In his choruses he does attain it: he sweeps ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... fascination of her terror. In that instant she realized a great many things: chiefly that she had never seen her husband angry with her, because she had taken every path to avoid the possibility, and that it was even more sickening than she could have thought. But she knew also that the battle was on, and suddenly, for no reason she could formulate, she remembered one of her own fighting ancestors who was said to have ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... came fast as she gazed into the mirror and buttoned up the coat. Was the woman's admiration cleverly feigned? this image she beheld an illusion? or did she really look different, distinguished? and if not beautiful—alluring? She had had a momentary apprehension, almost sickening, that she would be too conspicuous, but the saleswoman had anticipated that objection with the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... both strained forward in eager expectation. A few blows sufficed to remove the head of the cask. Horror! a sickening stench arose, and there became visible the headless trunk of a human being. That portion of the body which was not immersed in the wine, was putrid. 'Look here!' cried I, in mad triumph, plunging my arm into ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... of the "stewing" type. The flies in the store kept up a sickening hum, and tortured suffering humanity—in the form of the solitary Minky—with their persistent efforts to alight on his perspiring face and bare arms. The storekeeper, with excellent forethought, had showered sticky papers, spread with molasses ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... suffering from the long continuance of damp fogs. While I was balancing in my mind whether I ought not to take her south, I received another letter from Aunt Bretta. She told me that she was quite sickening to see me and my wife, and that my uncle hoped to be able to find some employment on shore which would suit my taste. When I laid the proposal before my wife, she at once acceded to it. "I am afraid," said she, "that ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... saw a glow of something lighter than the murk. The package! Quick as thought he stepped over to the rock and then almost stumbled over a figure in a white ball gown lying, as seemed at first impression, prone. A sickening horror passed through Jack as he bent ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... She couldn't trust herself to speak. She lived in sickening fear that on some Wednesday afternoon he would be sent for. It had never happened yet, but that made it all the more likely that it ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... desication, or of the drying of the pustules, commences between the twelfth and fourteenth day of the disease. In the confluent variety, patches of scab cover all the space occupied by the eruption, and the skin exhales a sickening odor. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... then to the right again down Lock Lane, and out of Lock Lane ran the alley, a little narrow gutter of a place, dark and squalid, paved with round stones, through which slops of all kinds perpetually percolated, and gave forth on the cleanest days a faint and sickening odour. Mike thought he could buy the stock for five shillings; the rent was only half a crown a week, and with the help of Tom, a remarkably sharp boy, who could tell him in what condition the goods were which were offered him for purchase, he hoped he could ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... to his knees and then to his feet, sagging limply against the fence, to which he clung for support. He felt for his nose, filled with a horrid, sickening dread that it was no ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... late! too late! The stone nips her, and she yells in agony. Down, down it comes, all the thirty tons of it, slowly pressing her old body against the rock below. Shriek upon shriek, such as we have never heard, then a long sickening crunch, and the door was shut just as, rushing down the passage, ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... of waters had already reached a speed greater than that of the wind itself. No longer the stars trembled, reflected, in the waters. All ugly, frothing, broken, the swift current foamed and leaped, in long, horrible gulfs and crests of sickening velocity. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Langres from the way that barber conserved it, but with no more than a handful of water, he did his work well. The face waters used by French barbers are all highly perfumed, in fact, too much so for the rough Westerner. When a man leaves a barber shop he carries a sickening sweet aroma with him and his friends know where he has been when he is as much as a hundred yards away. It may be of interest to note that the shave, hair cut, shampoo and massage cost me two and a half francs, or a little less than 50 cents American money. The price of the same ...
— In the Flash Ranging Service - Observations of an American Soldier During His Service - With the A.E.F. in France • Edward Alva Trueblood
... astonished and evidently affrighted crowds pressed round Sah-luma eagerly, staring at him in morbid fear and wonder, as though they expected him to drop dead before them in immediate fulfillment of the Prophet's solemn valediction. Theos, oppressed by an inward sickening sense of terror, also regarded him with close and anxious solicitude, but was almost reassured ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Smolensk, and passed near the battle-field of Borodino. About thirty thousand corpses had been left on this vast plain; and on our approach flocks of buzzards, whom an abundant harvest had attracted, flew away with horrible croakings. These corpses of so many brave men presented a sickening spectacle, half consumed, and exhaling an odor which even the excessive cold could not neutralize. The Emperor hastened past, and slept in the chateau of Oupinskoe which was almost in ruins; and the next day he visited a few wounded ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... holding court at Cordova, and thither Columbus went, fortified with a recommendation from Marchena. The monarchs were engrossed in the final conquest of Granada, and Columbus had to wait through six weary and heart-sickening years before royal attention was turned to his cause. It must have been during this delay that he despatched his brother Bartholomew to England with an appeal to Henry VII. Christopher had brought Alexander Geraldinus, the scholar, and also the Archbishop of Toledo, ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... said Jimmy. "Dismiss the rosy dream. Get even! You don't know me. There's not a flaw in my armor. I'm a sort of modern edition of the stainless knight. Tennyson drew Galahad from me. I move through life with almost a sickening absence of sin. But hush! We are observed. At least, we shall be in another minute. Somebody is coming down the passage. You do understand, don't you? Sprained ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... She felt Courtenay dragging her on irresistibly until they gained the lee of the smoking-room. He let her rest there, beneath the ladder leading to the bridge. Then a strange revulsion of feeling came to him. He experienced an overwhelming desire not to be parted from her; he had a sickening fear that he might never see her again; so he shouted, very close ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... had not proceeded far in his task when the crazed savages were around him. Every one carried a basket or receptacle, which he swung aloft, and they sang, prayed, rejoiced on their knees. Jones turned away from the sickening scenes that convinced him these savages were little better than cannibals. Rea cursed them, and tumbled them over, and threatened them with the big bowie. An altercation ensued, heated on his side, frenzied on theirs. Thinking some treachery might befall his ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... watching us from behind barred windows, and I fancied that I heard whispers—mere guttural sounds, that conveyed nothing to the ear, save, perhaps, a warning that we were on unholy ground. The path we trod was foul with refuse; the stench was sickening; the most forlorn cur would surely have slunk from such a kennel; and here, here, to this lazar-house of all that was unclean and infamous, came of his ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... a hot wind came, and the nest morning was summer. The horse that had drawn coal during the winter, now hitched to an ice wagon, died in the street. The pavements throbbed, the basement restaurants exhaled a sickening air, and through the grating was blown the cellar's cool and mouldy breath; and the sanitary writer on the editorial page cried ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... Sully—with his lordship's leave—" the man said quickly, but with a frightened glance at me—"are in the kennels at the back of the house; but it is not safe to go near them. The King is raving mad, and—and the other dog is sickening, I fear. The Duke we had to kill a month back. He brought the disease here, and I have had such losses through him as have nearly ruined me, please your lordship. And if the tale that we have got the madness among ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... ceiling. These books were not the books of to-day; they had stood so long in their places unnoted and untouched, that they had acquired the color of fungus, and smelt— Well, there is no use adding to the picture. Every one knows the spirit of sickening desolation pervading rooms which have been shut up for an indefinite length of time ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... effectively stamp the seal of infamy upon the whole sickening rape of justice than the manly outspoken statements of these six labor jurors. Perhaps the personalities of these men might prove ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... makes it seem short. The third hole at Prestwick is one that stirs the soul of the dare-devil golfer, for, after he has despatched the ball safely and well from the tee, he finds a big, gaping bunker, the famous "Cardinal," ahead of him for his second—an ugly brute that gives a sickening feeling to the man who is off his game. Defy this bunker, be on the green with your brassy, put a 4 on your card, and you have done something which should make you happy for the morning. The ninth again is an excellent hole at which the straight driver ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... grass, as it did here, where else no spot of sun might enter, so dense was the night of shade. The life of another day and time lived, however, beneath that shade; Charm and the cure, as they drooped over the canvas, confronted a graceful, attenuated courtier, sickening in a languor of adoration, and a sprightly coquette, whose porcelain beauty was as finished as the feathery edges ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... nature of the visitor; his divinity, the completion or counterpart of that of Demeter; his gift of prophecy; [68] all the soothing influences he brings with him; above all, his gift of the medicine of sleep to weary mortals. But the reason of Pentheus is already sickening, and the judicial madness gathering over it. Teiresias and Cadmus can but "go pray." So again, not without the laughter of the audience, supporting each other a little grotesquely against a fall, they ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... try to encourage, Arthur. When the lamps were lighted, and the customers had gradually thinned out, he was about to cross over and speak to him. To his surprise he saw that his place was vacant, and he was nowhere to be seen. A sharp pang went through the boy's heart, succeeded by a sickening faintness; and he leaned against the counter for support, filled with undefined fears of sorrow, and ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... passed between him and herself was thoroughly explained by what she had always regarded as their simple friendship and the cruel obstruction thrust upon it by her husband's injurious act. Dorothea stood silent, with her eyes cast down dreamily, while images crowded upon her which left the sickening certainty that Will was referring to Mrs. Lydgate. But why sickening? He wanted her to know that here too his ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the body—how will you dispose of that?' she asked, shuddering, and turning from the sickening spectacle with disgust. ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... circumstances? Nothing, for the poor wretches were already beyond any human aid, and to have interfered would have brought on us instant vengeance from the excited mob, but never, to the end of my days, shall I forget that sickening feeling of ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... from the "other-side" (another Fizzer no doubt, for the bush mail-service soon culls out the unfitted), an exchange of mail-bags, and then the Downs must be faced again with the same team of horses. Even the Fizzer owns that "tackling the Downs for the return trip's a bit sickening; haven't had time to forget what it feels like, you ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... in an apartment on the north-east side of the quadrangular building, where the sunshine never entered. Even daylight never came, but only a feeble, sickening twilight, precursor of the grave itself. It was not merely the gloom that intensified the horrors of the situation, or the ghastly traditions of the place, or the impending fate of our callous client; but there was a tier of shelves occupying the side ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... and giving a desperate spring, plunged headlong into the dreadful abyss, which providentially received him unhurt, and a friendly wave drove him on shore; where, however, he remained some minutes in a lifeless stupor, owing to the rapidity of his descent from the brain-sickening precipice. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... less, lay between him and the railway. He was not certain of his way, and he felt a sickening exhaustion on him; he had been without food since his breakfast before the race. A gamekeeper's hut stood near the entrance of the wood; he had much recklessness in him, and no caution. He entered through the half-open door, and asked the keeper, who was eating his ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... side for marching. With great pomp, he recrossed the Monongahela just below the point where Turtle Creek enters from the east. Within a hillside ravine, but a hundred yards inland, the brilliant column fell into an ambuscade of Indians and French half-breeds, suffering that heart-sickening defeat which will ever live as one of the most tragic events in ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... Thornfield for a year to come; he had not unfrequently quitted it in a manner quite as abrupt and unexpected. When I heard this, I was beginning to feel a strange chill and failing at the heart. I was actually permitting myself to experience a sickening sense of disappointment; but rallying my wits, and recollecting my principles, I at once called my sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary blunder—how I cleared up the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... sickening discovery. He had no revolver ammunition beyond the five cartridges remaining in the cylinder of ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... the voice of the milkman was to be heard in the land—when he trudged, still briskly if a trifle wearily, into Holborn, and held on eastward across the Viaduct and down Newgate Street; the while addling his weary wits with heart-sickening computations of minutes, all going hopelessly to prove that he would be late, far too late even presupposing the unlikely. The unlikely, be it known, was that the Alethea would not attempt to sail before the turn ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... infesting the whole city, and especially the house next door to the painter's, which had been the dwelling of the respectable alderman who had degenerated into this most disreputable of moneyless vagabonds. What added to the consternation of all who heard of it, was the sickening conviction that the extreme measures which they had resorted to in order to free the city from the ghoul, beyond which nothing could be done, had been utterly unavailing, successful as they had proved in every other known case of the kind. For, urged ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... bed and listened to her father coming up the stairs. She knew, before he reached the top, that Doyle would never let her be taken away. He would kill her first. He might kill Anthony Cardew. She had a sickening sense of tragedy coming up the staircase, tragedy which took the form of her father's familiar deliberate step. Perhaps had she known of the chauffeur's presence she might have chanced it, for every fiber of her tired body was crying for release. But she saw only her ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lover's yoke, A husband's rein. The wood, the tiger, at thy call Have follow'd: thou canst rivers stay: The monstrous guard of Pluto's hall To thee gave way, Grim Cerberus, round whose Gorgon head A hundred snakes are hissing death, Whose triple jaws black venom shed, And sickening breath. Ixion too and Tityos smooth'd Their rugged brows: the urn stood dry One hour, while Danaus' maids were sooth'd With minstrelsy. Let Lyde hear those maidens' guilt, Their famous doom, the ceaseless drain Of outpour'd water, ever spilt, And all the pain Reserved for sinners, e'en ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... actual oath escaped the girl's lips—"you were afraid of what that stuck-up fool of a woman would think. She knows about us—she's heard; she recognized me. I saw it in her eyes. She deliberately sneered at me, and you—you contemptible puppy!—you didn't even raise your hat to me after all your sickening, gushing protestations. I want to tell you right now, Dick Mostyn, that you can't walk over me. I'm ready for you, and I'm tired of ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... another corner of the room and ground the little bottle under my heel. Then I resumed my seat. The odor that pervaded the room was sickening. ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... cold white trunk of a birch-tree, and sank into thought; and his grey, monotonous life, his wages, his subordinate position, the dispensary, the everlasting to-do with the bottles and blisters, struck him as contemptible, sickening. ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... she loves best. The air from the water is cool and refreshing, the sky is clear and open, and the country around seems to beckon one to the green bosom of its shades. "Ob, what a relief after Havana!" one says, drawing a full breath, and remembering with a shudder the sickening puffs from its stirring streets, which make you think that Polonius lies unburied in every house, and that you nose him as you pass the door and window-gratings. With this exclamation and remembrance, you lower yourself into one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... in my ears. All ridiculous, irrational crying up of one class, whether the same be aristocrat or democrat—all howling down of another class, whether clerical or military—all exacting injustice to individuals, whether monarch or mendicant—is really sickening to me; all arraying of ranks against ranks, all party hatreds, all tyrannies disguised as liberties, I reject and wash my hands of. You think you are a philanthropist; you think you are an advocate of liberty; but I will tell you this—Mr. Hall, the parson of Nunnely, is a better friend ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... fatal black bean upon the fattest man, the concert closed with a suddenness that waked the man on the lookout. A moment later every grimalkin relaxed his hold on his neighbors, the column lost its cohesion and, with 121,000 dull, sickening thuds that beat as one, the whole business fell to the deck. Then with a wild farewell wail that feline host sprang spitting into the sea and struck out ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... still a sickening odor of illuminating gas in the room, although the windows were ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... his arm as had been my wont, I sauntered with him backward and forward. His gloom, however (which I considered quite natural under the circumstances), seemed entirely unabated. He said little, and that moodily, and with evident effort. I ventured a jest or two, and he made a sickening attempt at a smile. Poor fellow! as I thought of his wife, I wondered that he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth. At last I ventured a home-thrust. I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendoes, about the oblong box—just to let him perceive, ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... lips would move as if unconsciously, and form the fatal words of inquiry which never received an answer. Sometimes he took Alice for Ellen, and kneeling at her feet he, would implore her pardon, and curse and upbraid himself as her murderer and destroyer. With heroic patience, but with a sickening heart and a shuddering frame she listened to these ravings, and met his wild and involuntary confessions with a silent appeal to Heaven for mercy for him, and for ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... Like the rest of the crew, Jack Jeens knew nothing of how the battle went. He had his duty to do, and he did it, till all at once, just as he turned his head aside to give Phil a welcoming look through the gloom, he was conscious of the tremendous shock of a sickening blow. ...
— The Powder Monkey • George Manville Fenn
... the fervor of martyrs,—nay, to set them up beside such poems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper chambers of the soul that open toward the sun's rising, is to confound piety with dulness, and the manna of heaven with its sickening namesake from the apothecary's drawer. The "Enchiridion" of Quarles is hardly worthy of the author of the "Emblems," and is by no means an unattainable book in other editions,—nor a matter of heartbreak, if it were so. Of the dramatic works ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... nine cases out of ten they are of parents who have had a different bringing up than squatting about in the mud and filth. One woman I know at Notting Hill, and who was born in an Oxfordshire village, is at the present time surrounded with filth of the most sickening kind, which she cannot help, and to her credit manages to keep her children tolerably clean and nice for a woman of her position. There is another at Garrett Lane, Wandsworth; another at Sheepcot Lane, Battersea; two at Upton Park; one at Cherry Island; ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... the more he thought of the scene of their parting, the more sickening became the conviction that her anger at his use of an ugly word was merely a subterfuge to break their engagement. The perfidy and cruelty of such an act was too hideous for belief—yet if the thing were possible! He had left her to struggle alone ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... back to my room at last through a tortuous maze of gaping workmen and sickening flowers, three startled girls jumped up to catch me as I staggered across the threshold. I did not faint, I did not cry out. I just sat huddled on the floor rocking myself to and fro, and mumbling, as through a mouthful of sawdust: "Dolly Leonard ...
— Different Girls • Various
... then that I understood that this was no accident, but that someone in the restaurant was trying to murder me. The thought was hideous and sickening. I could bear the fire of the enemy from the belfry—that was part of the day's work; the danger of it only excited me; but the idea that one of my own side was lying within twenty feet of me, deliberately aiming with intent to kill, was ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... they began to feel a stifling heat. Thick smoke rose all around them. There was the sickening and suggestive smell of coal-oil in the air. Claudine's father felt that he must know what was going on. To look out of the windows might be death to all of them; still he ran into the sitting-room, tore down the beds and ...
— Harper's Young People, August 31, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... as the sea surges up upon the land. There were tossing arms; there was the hissing of breath through clenched teeth, the sickening thud of blows, and a gurgling cry of mortal agony. Then the sea surged out again, and there on the floor lay the thing that had ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... and confirmed by official documents, records, etc., giving an account of events that had been taking place in southern and western Russia during a period of nine months, between April and December of 1880. We do not need to recall the sickening details. The headings will suffice: outrage, murder, arson, and pillage, and the result,—100,000 Jewish families made homeless and destitute, and nearly $100,000,000 worth of property destroyed. Nor need we recall the generous outburst of sympathy ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... entered the stable he breathed more freely. He watched her face narrowly, but she did not blanch at the sickening spectacle ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... name out of this," quietly replied Leonie, her face dead white from the sickening thudding of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... or small one, that tiger was now an angry beast. Hopping backward a little way, he now crouched to the ground, and then gave a wild spring upward. It was heart-sickening as his great form, with its yellow skin and black stripes, his blazing eyes, his flashing teeth, and his outspread claws, rose toward us through the air. Of course he could not hurt us; we were too high up. Irene's face flushed. 'That was a great ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... footmarks, each enringing its pool of curdled blood; the broken bushes, the grooved mud-slides where the unknown brutes had slid in deadly embrace; the hollows, the splintered boughs, their ragged points tufted with skin and hair—all was sickening to me. Yet so hungry was I that when I turned towards the odious remnants of the vanquished—a shapeless mass of abomination—my thoughts flew at once to breakfasting! I went down and inspected the victim cautiously—a huge rat-like beast as far as might be judged ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... "And the sickening thing," he said, as he leant back in his chair and sipped his ginger-beer, "is that on the cover of it I've spelt Disappointment with ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... edge of the ragged rock and let his feet down. He felt a projecting knob of something, and then for a sickening second he paused and shouted again and then he let go, hugging the face of the cliff. As he went down, he began to realise thankfully that the cliff was rough and irregular. His hands were running blood, but he did not know it. As he felt resting places ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... had ridden half way a torturer fastened on his heart. That torture is suspicion; a vague and shadowy, but gigantic phantom that oppresses and rends the mind more terribly than certainty. In this state of vague, sickening suspicion, he remained some days: then came an affectionate letter from Rose, who had actually returned home. In this she expressed her regret and disappointment at having missed him; blamed herself for misleading him, but explained that their stay at Frejus had been prolonged ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... answering spark from him. But all that I was thinking and feeling then he had thought and felt long before. I am sure that he had already experienced, in imagination, every thrill, every keen joy, and every sudden sickening fear which the life might have in store for him. For this reason I forgave him for his rather bored manner of answering to my mood, and the more willingly because he was full of talk about a strange illusion which he had had at the restaurant. During a moment ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... with the going down of the sun behind the chaparral-crested mountain was that evening withheld from Sandy Bar. The little canon was stifling with heated resinous odors, and the decaying driftwood on the Bar sent forth faint sickening exhalations. The feverishness of day and its fierce passions still filled the camp. Lights moved restlessly along the bank of the river, striking no answering reflection from its tawny current. Against the blackness of the pines the windows of the old loft ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... shudder, Chloe turned and fled toward the red-flaring fires. In that moment a feeling of defeat surged over her—of heart-sickening hopelessness. The figures at the fires were unkempt, dirty, revolting, as they gouged and tore at the half-cooked meat into which their yellow fangs drove deep, as the red blood squirted and trickled from the corners of their mouths to drip unheeded upon the sweat-stiffened ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... rule, where we possess continued delight, there is no 'danger nigh.' Where an enjoyment comes between us and our God, it casts on us a shadow. When we have plucked a beautiful flower, if poisonous, it has such a sickening odor that we fling it from us. We do not 'pay too dear for our whistle,' unless it costs us a sin; then it soon becomes a loathed and useless toy. Otherwise, the dearer we pay, the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... espied his danger and, loosing the girl, stooped and taking the blow across the broad of his back was beaten to his knees; but, as I swung again, he sprang in beneath my lifted arms. I felt the sickening impact of a blow and the bludgeon flew from my hold; then he was upon me, belabouring me with both fists, but twining my legs in his, I clung to those merciless arms, while above his fierce snarling and the painful shock of his blows, I heard the ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... of the whaling industry contains many sickening records of the wholesale slaughter by savage whalers of newly discovered herds of walrus, seals and sea birds that through isolation knew no fear, and were easily clubbed to death ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday |
