"Torturing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the old nurse begin the conversation about Chia Yuen, which unconsciously so affected her heart that she hastily returned, quite disconsolate, into her room, and lay herself down on her bed, giving herself quietly to reflection. But while she was racking and torturing her brain and at a moment when she was at a loss what decision to grasp, her ear unexpectedly caught, emanating from outside the window, a faint voice say: "Hsiao Hung, I've picked up your pocket handkerchief in here!" and as soon as Hsiao Hung heard these words, she walked out with hurried ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... sheer pity that overcame the strange delight he had in torturing her, he desisted in his appeals and demands and subtle arguments. The long strain left him spent. And with the sudden let-down of his energy, the surrender to her stronger will, he fell prey at once to ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... warmly and went upstairs to Helen's room. I knew what it was Helen feared. The consequences of her crime. The terrible fear of public prosecution for the murder of her husband was torturing her poor delirious brain. For a moment I forgave her everything and pitied her from the depths ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... to have a pair made of very thin morocco, sir, instead of torturing herself as she did just now; but the management is so stingy. She was crying, sir; if I was a man and loved a woman, I wouldn't let her shed a tear, I know. You ought to order a ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... front of him he saw Krool stealing along with a wide-awake hat well down over his eyes. Presently the sinister figure was lost in the confusion. It did not occur to him that perhaps Krool might be making for the same destination as himself; but the sight of the man threw his mind into an eddy of torturing thoughts. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... coward!" cried the Tzigana, with a rapid glance toward the daggers, before which stood Menko, preventing her from advancing, and regarding her with eyes which burned with reckless passion, wounded self-love, and torturing jealousy. "Yes, coward!" she repeated, "coward, coward to dare to taunt me with an infamous past and speak of a still ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was but ill-suited for one of Bunyan's morbid sensitiveness. For it was based upon a constant introspection and a scrupulous weighing of each word and action, with a torturing suspicion of its motive, which made a man's ever-varying spiritual feelings the standard of his state before God, instead of leading him off from self to the Saviour. It is not, therefore, at all ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... a child she had been used to quote darted back into her mind with a torturing pang. How much longer of this agony could she stand? Anything, anything would be better than this dragging on in suspense, hour after hour. But when once again the little party approached the Senate House, she experienced a swift change of front. No, no, this was not suspense; it was hope! ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... vibration ran in torturing waves through its metal skeleton and skin. It passed the point of discomfort and became unbearable. Rick rocked his head from side to side, as though to get rid of the shattering howl, but it tore at his head, at his stomach, ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... but his name was struck off the army list, and this republican hero, who had forgotten the art of war, went in his old age, broken-hearted and disgraced, to a living grave, with a worm in his vitals, gnawing and torturing him, more terribly than thousands of Indians, practising the most unheard of cruelties could have done, until death, so long denied, came to him, naturally, as ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... Kentucky, from the period of the first pioneers in 1775, until Wayne's victory in 1794. These were the Indians who kept Boone in captivity, made Simon Kenton run the gauntlet, stole thousands of horses in Kentucky, and who for years attacked the flatboats and keel boats that floated down the Ohio, torturing their captives ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... these visits, each time the bar rattled down he trembled with the hope that the jailer brought him freedom. Each successive disappointment was as acute as the last, made more poignant by the torturing certainty that his hopes were vain. The effect of one was not at all counteracted ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... have. Do none confess but the guilty? What is all that we have read about the Inquisition and the old tortures? I have had to learn that torturing has not gone out of the world;—that ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... of Vanity and Hate! Scornful, yet envious, with self-torturing sneer 10 My lady eyes some maid of humbler state, While the pert Captain, or the primmer Priest, Prattles accordant scandal ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... charming of all women, who is your sister, that her noble man was in great good fortune; and I envy him because the Gods showed their love for him even up to the last. The wicked, torturing devils respected his gay spirit as he passed along and forgot to fill him full of arrows, poisoned arrows, as he ran the gauntlet down to the River. Her letters are beauteous reflections of her thoroughbred ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... dreadful ills were not enough, there have been added methods of medical treatment at once useless, torturing to the mind, and involving ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... incurable diseases, they use all possible ways to cherish them, and to make their lives as comfortable as possible. They visit them often, and take great pains to make their time pass off easily: but when any is taken with a torturing and lingering pain, so that there is no hope, either of recovery or ease, the priests and magistrates come and exhort them, that since they are now unable to go on with the business of life, are become a burden to themselves and to ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... being thus completely shrouded from view, the infantry stood motionless. A sullen expectation brooded over the colossal forces, who realised danger, but were yet condemned to a torturing inactivity. Suddenly the wild roar of thousands of voices rose from the river, and hosts of cavalry, which before could have been held back by English infantry, broke through the jungles like immense swarms of locusts. Thousands of wild Afghans and warriors from Bukhara, Samarcand, Khiva, and Semiryechensk, ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... did you inflict such torturing apprehensions upon me? This woman has been telling me of the horrors of the streets where you have been; and I figured you stricken suddenly with this foul malady, creeping into some deserted alley to expire uncared for, dying with your head upon a stone, lying ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... unprovoked attacks upon them. "God's elect" are always irritating us. They are eternally lying in wait with some monstrous absurdity, to spring it upon us at the very moment when we are least prepared. They take a fiendish delight in torturing us with tantrums, galling us with gammon, and pelting us with platitudes. Whenever we disguise ourself in the seemly toggery of the godly, and enter meekly into the tabernacle, hoping to pass unobserved, the parson is sure to detect us and explode a bombful of bosh upon ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... a corroding drop, a dark, deadly, vexing, torturing thing, fell upon God's fair creation, threatening to inoculate it with a poison that should leaven the whole lump, and change its beauty into corruption. But around the dark sin-spot, and because the sin-spot was there, divine love showered down, like the impalpable silver gathering on its object ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann Francke resolved to call upon God, a God in whom he did not believe, or rather in whom he believed that he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him, upon the poor pietist Francke, if perchance He really existed.[34] And from a similar state ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... from one man or from a society of the people,—when men are disposed to persecute. Power is always right; weakness always wrong. Power is always insolent and despotic: whether exercised in throwing its opposers into a bastile; burning them at the stake; torturing them on a rack; beheading them with a guillotine; or taking them off, as at the massacre of St. Bartholomew, at a general sweep. Power is the same in Turkey as in America. When the will of man is raised above law, it is always tyranny and despotism, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... to his aunt. Before he was halfway down the first column she was on the sofa with her smelling-salts, vowing she was more terrified than when she had expected to be killed every minute. When he had finished she upbraided him for torturing people unnecessarily, but remarked that he was even cleverer than she had thought him. The next morning she asked him to read it again; then read it herself. On the following day ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... while for the first year of my imprisonment I did nothing else, and can remember doing nothing else, but wring my hands in impotent despair, and say, 'What an ending, what an appalling ending!' now I try to say to myself, and sometimes when I am not torturing myself do really and sincerely say, 'What a beginning, what a wonderful beginning!' It may really be so. It may become so. If it does I shall owe much to this new personality that has altered every ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... stockade built around the foot of the hill on which his camp was pitched. A war of extermination on both sides now took place; Theodore showing no pity to the peasants whom he succeeded in capturing, and they, on their side, torturing and murdering any one who belonged to the Emperor's camp. A detailed account of the atrocities committed by Theodore during the last month of his stay in Begemder would be too horrible to narrate: suffice it to say that he ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... whom I will call Frank Helper. He was a Kentuckian by birth, kind and open-hearted,—a slave-holder by habit, not by nature. Warm feelings of regard had long existed between him and Mr. Noble; and to him the broken merchant applied for advice in this torturing emergency. Though Mr. Helper was possessed of but moderate wealth, he had originally agreed to endorse his friend's note for fifteen hundred dollars; and he now promised to empower some one to expend three thousand dollars in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... attempted to run away. It was the custom of slaves who wished to go from one plantation to another to carry passes in case they were stopped as suspected runaways. Frequently slaves would visit without benefit of passes, and as result they suffered severe torturing. Often the sons of the slaves' owners would go "nigger hunting" and nothing—not even murder was too horrible for them to do to slaves caught without passes. They justified their fiendish acts by saying the "nigger tried to run away ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... against my will, to leave him without a companion. I went to my room, and, in a state of excitement which I cannot describe, I paced for hours up and down its narrow precincts. I could not—who could?—analyse the strange, contradictory, torturing feelings which, while I recoiled in shrinking horror from the scene which the morning was to bring, yet forced me to wish the intervening time annihilated; each hour that the clock told seemed to vibrate ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... punish justly, but there is also something savage, akin almost to the mental attitude that makes "frightfulness" possible in war, in the belief that it is necessary to make headway against a sexual enemy by torturing, ruining, and dismembering men, women, and children, putting out the eyes of the boy who made a slip through bad companionship and mutilating the girl who loved "not wisely but too well." Only innocence ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... heart sank at the thought and her pride cried out against it. No, she could never stand the disgrace. But what if the truth were to leak out through Mary—that would be infinitely worse. Her thoughts went around in a torturing circle and brought her to no decision. Should she make a clean breast of it now and have nothing more to fear, or should she take a chance on Jo's never ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... hag! Have you no touch of feeling, that your eyes Gloat on a sight so horrible as this? Help me—take hold. What, will not one assist To pull the torturing ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... Everything irritated her in the strangest way. In all her busy healthful life she had never been nervous before. It was not hard work that had worn upon her. The doctor told them when they were freshmen that no girl ever broke down from work unless worry was added. Gertrude knew perfectly well what torturing little worry was gnawing away in her mind. She kept telling herself that her speech to Sara had been true—it was so—Sara had broken her engagement—and she could not, could not, could not humble herself to apologize. In fact, Sara was the one who ought ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... anyway," snorted the Cow, switching her tail. "All the choice bits of torturing. Why, I've not had so much as a single toss since I've been on this job; no I haven't!" And she shook her ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... proposed that the decision with respect to these eventualities—which might exceed both the Constitution and the Act of Union—should be deferred till after the new elections, as the Constitution with an almost torturing emphasis insists on caution when a change in the government system is contemplated. Even the rest of the few in the minority made known their different views, and among them the Shipowner JOeRGEN KNUDSEN openly confessed ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... the time which young ladies sacrifice to torturing the strings of their piano-forte, employed in obtaining domestic accomplishments, might not make them worse wives, or less agreeable companions to their husbands. This was the opinion 200 ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... friends, is not likely to be imaginatively equipped to explore the spiritual fastnesses of a sensitive and alien orphan. Beulah tried earnestly to get some perspective on the child's point of view, but she could not. The fact that she was torturing the child would have been outside of the limits of her comprehension. She searched her mind for some immediate application of the methods of Madame Montessori, and produced ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... to him, and injected drugs. Slowly torturing consciousness left him. The doctors began working over his horribly burned body, shuddering inwardly as the protective, feather-like covering of his skin loosened, and dropped from his body. Tenderly they lowered him ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... all this is so sharp that, compared with it, the creeping coldness in his blood is nothing more than a slight discomfort, and is scarcely felt. By and by he is overcome by drowsiness, and ceases to struggle; the torturing visions fade from his mind, and his only thought is to lie down and sleep. And when he sleeps he passes away; very easily, very painlessly, for the pain was of the mind, and was over long before ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... pounds of other hair and a big bow of ribbon. Keep the front locks on pins all night, and let them tickle his eyes all day, pinch his waist into a corset, and give him gloves a size too small and shoes the same, and a hat that will not stay on without torturing elastic, and a little lace veil to blind his eyes whenever he goes out to walk, and he will know what a woman's ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... all the pans, but we did it without making as much noise as would scare a deer, and then, each taking a rifle by the barrel, we were ready. Pedro was just telling a story of how he had forced an old man to say where his money was hid, by torturing his daughters before his eyes, and how, when he had told his secret, and the money was obtained, he had fastened them up, and set the house a-light,—a story which was received with shouts of approving laughter. As he finished, down came the butt of Rube's ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... thinking, knitting his brows in fierce effort to subdue his stunned faculties. By degrees the sad significance of Joan's words and actions during their visit that morning to the New Konak began to establish itself. He saw now that she was bidding farewell to her dream of happiness, deliberately torturing herself with a burden of memories. Even their parting kiss must have given her a twinge of direst agony; for the one thing he would never believe of Joan was that she had sacrificed him to some feminine whim, made him the sport of a ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... of hero or demigod with which we contrast it. What are the chorus of mariners, and the astute Ulysses, and the boyish generosity of Neoptolemus—what is the lonely cave on the shores of Lemnos—what the high-hearted old warrior, with his torturing wound and his sacred bow—what are all these to the vast Titan, whom the fiends chain to the rock beneath which roll the rivers of hell, for whom the daughters of Ocean are ministers, to whose primeval birth the gods of Olympus are the upstarts of a day, whose soul is the treasure-house ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are torturing me," said Jack; and he turned himself a little to look down at the ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... not a white woman. My mother's blood—of which I am proud—is in my veins, and when I was at school in Australia, it used to cut me to the heart to have to submit to insults from girls who took a delight in torturing and harassing me because of it. One day I lost control of myself; I heard them whispering something about 'the wild girl from the woods,' and I told them that my mother could trace her descent back for five hundred years ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... can most of us count upon dying safely in our beds, of diseases bred of modern civilization. But I am glad that those old barbarians, those rudimentary creatures working their way up into the divine likeness, when they were not hanging, drawing, quartering, torturing, and chopping their neighbors, and using their heads in conventional patterns on the tops of gate-posts, did devote their leisure intervals to rearing fortresses like this. Edinburgh Castle could not be conceived, much less built, nowadays, when all our energy is consumed in bettering the condition ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... ruled in Bukhara a cruel Emir who took a delight in torturing human beings. A mechanician from Italy fell into his clutches and was sentenced to death. The Italian promised that if his life were spared he would construct a machine wherewith the Emir could measure the flight of time. His prayer was granted and he made ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the inevitable second was almost completed, a faint rustling came from the other side of the iron door. Warren's face brightened with hope. With a nerve-racking rasp, the iron bar on the other side was raised: it was a torturing delay ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... be Seared in their Sins? 'Tis the Devil that with a red hot Iron fetcht from his Hell does cauterise them. Thus 'tis, till perhaps at last they come to have a Wounded Conscience in them, and the Devil has often a share in their Torturing and confounding Anguishes. The Devil who Terrified Cain, and Saul, and Judas into Desperation, still becomes a King of Terrors to many Sinners, and frights them from laying hold on the Mercy of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. In these regards, ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... the trees, ever and anon flew to the bottom of the globe and were seen fluttering about amongst the fish, then ascend to their little building without having wetted a feather; the effect is very pretty and the deception is pleasing, inasmuch as the birds require no torturing tuition to perform their little parts; the secret consists in one globe being placed in another considerably larger, the outer being filled with water in which are the fish, whilst the inner wherein the birds are seen is dry and empty. A fortress where canary birds are again the performers ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... tore out his tongue, and put out his eyes. That executioner is such that where men are concerned he would not shrink from inflicting any torture, even if he were ordered to pull the teeth of the victim; but, where girls are concerned, he would not lift up his hand to kill them, or to assist in torturing them. The reason for this determination is, because he too had an only daughter whom he loved dearly, and whom the Knights ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... hundred correspondents, scattered through all the counties of the state, report the cat as one of the greatest enemies of birds. The reports that have come in of the torturing and killing of birds by cats are absolutely sickening. The number of birds killed by them in this ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... had been an artist, to copy some of the fine forms she saw among these fish-girls—forms which had been left as the great God of nature made them, uncrippled by torturing stays and tight vestments. How easy their carriage! with what rude grace they poised upon their heads their ponderous baskets, and walked erect and firm, filling the air with their mournfully-musical cry! The great resemblance between these people and the ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... way peculiar to herself, but it was love, nevertheless,—and she had no idea of wreaking her disappointment upon the object on which she had set her heart. As a logical consequence, she determined to turn all her anger against Nehushta, and she pictured to herself the delicious pleasure of torturing the young princess's jealousy to desperation. To convince Nehushta that Zoroaster was deceiving her, and really loved herself, the queen; to force Zoroaster into some position where he must either silently let Nehushta believe ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... far from favourably disposed towards their poaching neighbours. Then, again, it might be merely that they had missed their track in the forest; or could it be that they had ventured to reach Goat Island in a canoe, and had been carried down the rapids. Such were the torturing doubts that passed as some shrill squirrel, or hoarse night owl pierced the air with a cry, and then all was silent again. While thus the hours went slowly by, his attention was attracted by a bright light in the sky. It appeared as if part of the heavens were reflecting some ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... alternate glimpses of a heaven or hell that had no relationship with tradition. She put her hands over her face and kept quite still in the grip of a sudden agony that made her physically cold and faint and exhausted. It would pass as it had passed before, yet was she forever to be at the mercy of this torturing realisation of empty years and eternal loss? Did Christopher love her or not? The assured "yes" and the positive "no" were as two shuttlecocks tossed over her strained mind by the breath of circumstance. Her own erroneous idea that her still unconquered ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... he cried in some astonishment. "I know well I could not endure that with which I have been torturing myself. I saw that clearly yesterday when I tried to rehearse it. Perfectly plain. Then what am I questioning? Did I not say yesterday as I went up the stairs how disgusting and mean and low it all was, and did not I run away ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... cares for their instruction" he seems to mean their possible transfer from French to English influences. The expression mettre a la chaudiere, though derived from cannibal practices, is often used figuratively for torturing and killing. The missionary in question was either Carheil or another Jesuit, who must have ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... to conceive a situation more severely torturing than this of captain Snipes. His house, with all his furniture, his kitchen, his barn and rice-stacks, his stables, with several fine horses, and his negro houses, all wrapped in flames; himself scorched and blistered with the furious heat, yet not daring to stir; his retreat well known ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... his fingers and toes into the grass and bit a mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing poignancy of it. Was ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... in the art of adding moral to physical tortures. The barbarous custom of punishment by torture was on several occasions condemned by the Church. As early as 866, we find, from Pope Nicholas V.'s letter to the Bulgarians, that their custom of torturing the accused was considered contrary to divine as well as to human law: "For," says he, "a confession should be voluntary, and not forced. By means of the torture, an innocent man may suffer to the utmost without making ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... 217). But he cannot keep his word, and there follows the scene of accusation. Its dramatic purposes are obvious, but Othello seems to have no purpose in it. He asks no questions, or, rather, none that shows the least glimpse of doubt or hope. He is merely torturing himself. ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... lack of imagination which makes men and women brutes. May it not be power of imagination? The interest of torturing is lessened, is almost lost, if we can not be the tortured as well ...
— The Return Of The Soul - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... rest of the world, she would have starved even though nothing had been taken from her. Now she has been despoiled of all that she possessed, while France and England can send her neither money nor provisions, for they would fall into the hands of those engaged in torturing her, so much so that every attempt on their part to alleviate her sufferings would but retard her deliverance still further. Did history ever witness a more poignant, a more desperate tragedy? It is a fact that ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... hid from her the dwindling of her mother's, and the fact, now so plain, that when Reginald Mallett died his wife's capacity for struggling was at an end. She had suffered bitterly from the sight of his deterioration and from her failure to prevent it. In his sulky, torturing presence she had desired his absence, but this permanent absence was more than she could bear. And all Henrietta could do was to obey her mother's injunction to accept help from her aunts, but she had refused the offer of an escort to Radstowe and Nelson Lodge; she would have no ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... away with Yesterday, do not feel as much Pain, as your Father and Mother would have felt, had any one pulled down their House and ran away with you? To be sure they do. Mrs. Two-Shoes used to speak of those Things, and of naughty Boys throwing at Cocks, torturing Flies, and whipping Horses and Dogs, with Tears in her Eyes, and would never suffer any one to come to her School who ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... that the calm following on her anguish, was a moderation of it. She was kept strung to confide in her girl by the recent indebtedness to her for words heavenly in the strengthening comfort they gave. But no sooner was she alone than her torturing perplexities and her abasement of the hours previous to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with his head in a bag. When they let go too fast it was rather like the half-way stage of taking chloroform. When they slowed up, there was the agonizing dread of pursuit. And through it all there burned the torturing suggestion that the ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... during these feasts and dances, he was seized with a boundless, unspeakable dread, a torturing anxiety. He felt inexpressibly desolate, and the consciousness of his lost, his wasted existence haunted him, while it seemed as if an inner voice was whispering—"Go, flee to her! with Elise is peace and innocence. If you are to be saved, ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... honored father feel when the sad story should reach his ears? would it indeed break his heart as Grandpa Dinsmore had said? The boy's own heart was overwhelmed with grief, dismay, and remorse as he asked himself these torturing questions. ...
— Elsie's New Relations • Martha Finley
... Then, trusting not a second look, In haste he sped hind up the brook, Nor backward glanced till on the heath Where Lubnaig's lake supplies the Teith,— What in the racer's bosom stirred? The sickening pang of hope deferred, And memory with a torturing train Of all his morning visions vain. Mingled with love's impatience, came The manly thirst for martial fame; The stormy joy of mountaineers Ere yet they rush upon the spears; And zeal for Clan and Chieftain burning, And hope, ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... difference between hazing a fellow and torturing him. Some mighty gritty people can't stand snakes or suckers. You kids ought to use ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... torturing jealousies of the seraglio and the haram, which have reigned so long in Asia and Africa, and which, in the southern parts of Europe, have scarcely given way to the difference of religion and civil establishments, are found, however, with an abatement of heat in the climate, ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... these questions were not considered satisfactory, they next endeavoured to sharpen his wits by torturing a German coiner in his presence; and when this mode of persuasion failed, they tortured Augusta himself. They stripped him naked. They stretched him face downwards on a ladder. They smeared his hips with boiling pitch. They set the spluttering mess on fire, and drew it off, skin ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... a good deal of bloodshed about," ruminated the judge. "Of course the Jesuit got here first and performed the mysteries of the Host in front of the natives. There were Indian wars and a good deal of torturing went on up on your property, Mr. Clark. Then the French and English traders shot each other from behind trees, where I understand you are going to build your pulp mill, and the survivors took the furs and struck off for Montreal in canoes, a matter ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... she proceeded to saw the can loose with a can-opener, while Rilla held the squirming animal, rolled in the coat. Anything like Doc's shrieks while the process was going on was never heard at Ingleside. Susan was in mortal dread that the Albert Crawfords would hear it and conclude she was torturing the creature to death. Doc was a wrathful and indignant cat when he was freed. Evidently he thought the whole thing was a put-up job to bring him low. He gave Susan a baleful glance by way of gratitude ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... she ought to do. She lay awake of nights cross-examining herself as to what precise words she had spoken that day, as to what things she had done, what gestures even she had made, in the vain and torturing effort to find out whether she had done anything which might betray her secret. It seemed to her, with the touching, delightful, pitiful egotism of which the love of the purest heart is capable, that there was not a breathing ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... lonely indeed when they had gone, but Dorothy was a healthy, prairie-bred girl, and not given to torturing herself with vain imaginings. ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... not speak, she did not move. She always knew, in her heart of hearts, that so it was: but when the sin took bodily shape, and was there before her very eyes, it was too dreadful to speak of, to act upon yet. And amid the most torturing horror and disgust of that great sin, rose up in her the divinest love for the sinner; she felt—strange paradox—that she had never loved her mother as she did at that moment. "Oh, that it had been I who had done it, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... that morning, went on to speak of the great overthrow of Paganism twenty years before, under the patriarch Theophilus; of Olympiodorus and his mob, who held the Serapeium for many days by force of arms against the Christians, making sallies into the city, and torturing and murdering the prisoners whom they took; of the martyrs who, among those very pillars which overhung their heads, had died in torments rather than sacrifice to Serapis; and of the final victory, and the soldier who, in presence ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... unhappy vessel bandied about, within a few leagues of her intended harbour, while the near neighbourhood of that place, and of these circumstances which could alone put an end to the calamities under which her people laboured, served only to aggravate their distress, by torturing them with a view of the relief they were unable to reach. She was at length delivered from this dreadful situation at a time when we least expected it: For, after having lost sight of her for several days, we were joyfully surprised, in the morning of the 23d July, to see her ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... said that she was sure I had forgotten to count; and another day, that I hurried the easy bars and slackened the difficult ones; then she accused me of not caring whether I played right notes or wrong, and torturing her ear by my false chords; then I banged the notes till I broke the strings: in short, there was no end to her complaints, till at last she wound them all up by declaring that both she and I hated music, and that if Mama and Margaret would take her ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... The gentleman then turning hastily round, exclaimed eagerly, 'What, is it alive?' 'Yes, sir,' said the boy. 'And how can you, you wicked, naughty, cruel boy,' replied the gentleman, 'take delight in thus torturing a little creature that never did you any injury? Put it down this moment,' said he, at the same time giving him a severe stroke with his horse-whip across that hand by which he held my brother. 'Let it go directly,' and again repeated the blow: the ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... and patience to quieten and allay her fears; but gradually the girl was prevailed upon to go to bed, and Mrs. Ramsay retired to the next room. But all night she heard Mysie tossing and turning, and quietly weeping, and she knew that despair was torturing and tearing her frightened little heart, and trying her ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... cherish the institution everywhere, and particularly in the Netherlands. Before Margaret of Parma's time, one hundred thousand Netherlanders had been burned or strangled, and Alva had spent seven years in butchering and torturing many thousands more." The magistrates of Brussells used similar expressions. "The King of Spain," said they to their brethren of Ghent, "is fastened to the Inquisition. Yea, he is so much in its ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... physical ills as well? You know how ill I was not long ago at Basle, more than once. I was beginning to suspect that that year would be fatal to me: illness followed illness, always more severe. But, at the very time when this illness was at its height, I felt no torturing desire to live and no trepidation at the fear of death. My whole hope was in Christ alone, and I prayed only that he would give me what he judged most salutary for me. In my youth long ago, as I remember, I would shiver at the ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... maiden said He heard with soul disquieted, And thus as fiercer grief assailed, His troubled senses wellnigh failed. Consumed by torturing fires of grief The king, the world's imperial chief, His lady lying on the ground In most unqueenly posture, found. The aged king, all pure within, Saw the young queen resolved on sin, Low on the ground, his own sweet wife, To him ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... spiritual is the idea at the back of laughing at foreigners. It concerns the almost torturing truth of a thing being like oneself and yet not like oneself. Nobody laughs at what is entirely foreign; nobody laughs at a palm tree. But it is funny to see the familiar image of God disguised behind the black beard of a Frenchman or the black face of a Negro. There is nothing funny in ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... continued, hurriedly, "and what you would say, but for the fear of hurting me—us, I mean; for Hetty loves her father quite as well as I do. But this is not as we think of Indians. They never scalp an unhurt prisoner, but would rather take him away alive, unless, indeed, the fierce wish for torturing should get the mastery of them. I fear nothing for my father's scalp, and little for his life. Could they steal on us in the night, we should all probably suffer in this way; but men taken in open strife are seldom injured; not, at least, ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... autumn arrived, and found my Ludecke still torturing and burning, and Sidonia still practising her evil sorceries upon man and beast, of which, however, it would be tiresome here to notice all the particulars. And on the 11th day of September, Jobst and his fair daughter arrived at Old ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... his journeys, he encountered a lady in chains, led by a knight who seemed to take pleasure in torturing her. Taught by Gurnemanz to rescue all ladies in distress, Parzival challenged and defeated this knight. Then only did he discover that it was Sir Orilus, who had led his wife about in chains to punish her for accepting a kiss from a strange youth. Of course Parzival now hastened to give an ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... signs and motions we could imagine, what was become of the people, and yet we could get nothing from them. Our lieutenant was for torturing some of them to make them confess, but William opposed that vehemently; and when he heard it was under consideration he came to me. "Friend," says he, "I make a request to thee not to put any of these poor wretches to torment." "Why, William," said I, "why not? You see ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... was very quick-tempered. In later years I have not suffered from the fearsome malady, but even now, after fifty years of stage-life, I never play a new part without being overcome by a terrible nervousness and a torturing dread of forgetting my lines. Every nerve in my body seems to be dancing an independent jig on its ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... "thar's the thing that sticks most in the heart of them that live in the wilderness and have wives and daughters;—to think of their falling into the hands of the brutes, who murder and scalp a woman just as readily as a man. As to their torturing them, that's not so certain, but the brutes arn't a bit too good for it; and I did h'ar of their burning one poor woman at Sandusky. But now, Captain, if you are anxious to have the young lady, your sister, in safety, h'yar's the place to stick up your tent-poles, h'yar, in this very ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... breathlessly, "oh, dear man that I love so—there is something between us, a shadow of shame and horror that is with me day and night and always must be. While you lay sick it was there, torturing me with every moan and sigh you uttered. It is with me wherever I go—it is between us now—yes, now—even while I strain you in my arms like this. I have watched you grow strong and well again, I've seen the love in your eyes, and I've yearned to be to you—all you would ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... servitude, have already pierced my heart. Have you not heard me sigh, while we have been talking? Do you not see the tears that now trickle down my cheeks? and yet these hardened Christians are unable to be moved at all: nay, they will scourge them amidst their groans, and even smile, while they are torturing them to death. Happy, happy Heathenism! which can detest the vices of Christianity, and feel for the ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... himself, exercised over his intended a ceaseless surveillance; and it was from this sagacity—this guardedness of his—this perfect, clear consciousness of his fair one's defects—this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that my ever- torturing pain arose. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... massed hundreds, the savages dropped where they stood, life rived away by the torturing ultra-violet, burned away by the blast of pure heat, or consumed by the conflagrations that raged instantly wherever that wide-sweeping fan encountered combustible material. In the face of power supernatural they lost all ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... were a comfort, as they were meant to be; for, with the girl's supreme conscientiousness, she had been torturing herself for fear she had not done all that was possible for her dear one; and, as Miss Prue's word had always been law with her, so now she let it heal this ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Most Important Immediate Step for the Betterment of the Human Race, from an Economic and Eugenic Standpoint.—What To Do With the Prostitute and How To Abolish Venereal Disease.—The Question of Abortion Considered In Its Ethical and Social Aspects.—Torturing the Wife When the Husband Is At Fault.—Influence of the Prostate on Man's Mental Condition.—The Most Efficient Venereal ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... villages is one matter, the outraging and torturing of women and children another. The truth of the former should not in any way convict a German officer, much less Private Johann Schmidt, ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... With torturing clearness, imagination built up the scene in the garden: the arrival of Broadstone's letter; the hand of the stricken man groping for the newspaper; the effort of those pencilled lines; and, finally, that wavering mark, John Ferrier's last ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to reside at the castle, torturing herself with jealous fears. She appeared before the Duke with eyes reddened by sleepless nights and bitter tears, and her habitual dreariness of ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... schooner, her masts tilting drunkenly, gave color to our purpose. It became filled with greater promise of drama, more picturesque. I began to thrill with excitement. I regarded Edgar appealingly, in eager supplication. At last he broke the silence that was torturing me. ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... passed, a day of torturing fear! Am I really insane? I know that I see queer things. This morning I looked towards the window and I saw a parrot sitting there! I saw it quite plainly. It ruffled up its red and green feathers and ...
— The Case of The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... draughts to absorb and take off the edge of the corroding poison? If she knew not what it was how could she administer so successfully to prevent the fatal consequences of it both in the maid and the charwoman? During this transaction the unhappy father finds himself afflicted with torturing pains immediately after receiving the composition from his daughter. Is there any care taken of him? Any physician sent for to attend him? Any healing draughts prepared to quiet the racks and tortures ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... indeed, places cultivators before both traders and artisans. Lastly came the police, the carriers of burdens, the eunuchs, and the slaves. By "police" are meant the runners attached to public offices, whose work too often involves "squeezing" and terrorizing, torturing, flogging, etc. To the present day police, barbers, and slaves require three generations of purifying, or living down, before their descendants can enter for the public examinations; or, to use the official expression, their "three generations" must be "clear"; at least so it ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... to make an apology and had given further offence. Just like my luck! And the daughter, too—I had hurt her feelings. Still, she had stood up for me; she had said to her father, "Not every one can be in the Institute," evidently meaning, "Why are you torturing this poor young man? He is bashful and ill at ease. I feel sorry for him." Sorry—yes; no doubt she felt sorry for me at first. But then I came out with that impertinence about the twenty-seven copies, and by this time she hates me beyond a doubt. Yes, she hates me. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Other faces shone there—his sister's—that of his mother. Gale shook off the tender memories. This desolate wilderness with its forbidding silence and its dark promise of hell on the morrow—this was not the place to unnerve oneself with thoughts of love and home. But the torturing paradox of the thing was that this was just the place and just the night for ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... propinquity. He was her type—kindly, unselfish, prosperously elate over life. He'd help her on with her wraps and be polite over doorways. Perhaps. He turned to his wife and laughed softly. A way out. Give her to the man. Give her away. End her love for him—her damned, torturing love that made him turn over inside and weep at night when she was asleep; that hounded him like an unclean memory. It was only her love that made him unclean. He looked at her with his ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... with Fred in the rear, he noted that the two men who formed the advance guard were not in their proper places; and, seeking relief from his torturing thoughts in striving to give the strictest attention to his father's military ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... windows, to imitate 'what Cato did, and Addison approved'? After all, what despicable cowards are human hearts, and how much easier to die like Socrates, Seneca, and Zeno, than stagger and groan under the load of hated, torturing years, that are about as welcome to my shoulders as the 'old man of the sea' to Sinbad's! ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... back from his brow like one waking from a hot and troubled sleep, and resumed his seat. Then suddenly, in full volume of voice, the prosecutor flung at him the lance for which he had been weakening Joe's defenses through those long and torturing hours. ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... sound of running feet. In his fear and agony he could have shrieked, but from his parched throat there issued no sound. Friend or foe, for him it meant the same fate—one touch on that knob and a torturing death ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... sent them almost every day during two months; every week I send a courier who meets her when, escaping from the Argus-eyes of her husband, she goes to the cathedral. But I receive only laconic replies. This woman is either incapable of genuine love, or she is a demon who delights in torturing me." ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... are now in our gaols might have been enjoying liberty and using that liberty well, that such a hell on earth as Norfolk Island, need never have existed, if we had expended in training honest men but a small part of what we have expended in hunting and torturing rogues. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... what maskes, what dances shall we haue, To weare away this long age of three houres, Between our after supper, and bed-time? Where is our vsuall manager of mirth? What Reuels are in hand? Is there no play, To ease the anguish of a torturing houre? Call Egeus ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the town in every direction, the wild aspect of the unreclaimed land, the gloomy appearance of the thickly wooded forest seemingly formed expressly to conceal a foe, all combined to impress the mind with that painful suspicion of unseen danger, which to many is more torturing than actual peril. Through all the agitation and alarm, the Mother of the Incarnation retained her accustomed self- possession, and by the calmness of her demeanour, encouraged the timid and desponding. During the five weeks' general excitement, ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... not in your class! Why—my folks aren't like your folks! Oh, we're just as good as you—of course—but we aren't as nice! Oh, we're not nice at all! Really and truly we're not!" Desperately through her mind she rummaged up and down for some one conclusive fact that would close this torturing argument for all time. "Why—my father—eats with his knife," ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... of black hair and his ragged coat. But at the moment she had the ability to see only one thing—the scrawny gray kitten that the boy had tied to the iron leg of the bench; the shrinking kitten that the boy was torturing ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... the twinkle Of stars in the far azure set, The mandolin's torturing tinkle, The click of the castanet! Music and wine and low laughter, Love and a torment of tune— Hate and a poignard thereafter, Under the ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... less solemn; and then his wife had answered him with a full, but not grieving heart. "Had our lot," he once said, "been cast in an Indian village, the prejudices of the country would have required you to submit to a horrid, torturing death upon my tomb. The prejudices of Christian lands, which attribute blame to the wife who does not yield herself a living sacrifice to a life of desolation from a false regard to her husband's memory, ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... in France under the pretence of a treasonable plot; how the King of Navarre and the Prince de Conde had been arrested; then how Conde and Coligny were ready to take up arms at the head of all the Huguenots of France, and try to stop this life-long torturing, by sharp shot and cold steel; then how in six months' time the king would assemble a general council to settle the question between Catholics and Huguenots. The Huguenots, guessing how that would end, resolved to settle the question ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... are who lord it o'er their fellow-men With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen Their baaing vanities, to browse away The comfortable green and juicy hay From human pastures; or, O torturing fact! Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack'd Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe Our gold and ripe-ear'd hopes. With not one tinge Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight Able to face an owl's, they still are dight 10 By the blear-eyed ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... on the subject of her Oscar, to whom she was apparently devoted. She was just telling Mavis how he liked to amuse himself by torturing the cat, when a sharp cry penetrated into the kitchen, as if coming from the neighbourhood of ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... the fence. I knew that Kathleen Somers was capable of getting far more pleasure from their inimitable hue than I; but even that inimitable hue was poisoned for her because it came from the world that was torturing her—the world that beat upon her windows, so that she turned her back to the day; that stormed her ears, so that she closed them even to its silence; that surrounded her, so that she locked every ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various |
