"Wretchedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to pour out words—he knew not what words, but he knew that they had been straining at his lips—to wreck his self-respect for ever, and hopelessly defeat even the crazy purpose that had almost possessed him, by drowning her wretchedness in disgust, by babbling with the tongue of infatuation to a woman with a husband not yet buried, to a woman who loved ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... funeral service said over the body of "old Jim Jimson," who had given them such help as they could not dispense with in their square bit of garden, and squandered the money that should have provided for the wife and five children whose wretchedness had torn Gerry's ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... infant was starving with hunger, and all Flora's efforts to keep it quiet proved unavailing. The gentlemen were as sick and helpless as the baby, and nothing could well increase their wretchedness. They had now been ten hours at sea; and, not expecting the least detention from the non-arrival of the steamer, nothing in the way of refreshment had formed any part of their luggage. Those who had escaped the horrors of sea-sickness, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... toasted cheese, and hard salted meat has led to suicide. Unpleasant feelings of the body produce correspondent sensations in the mind, and a great scene of wretchedness is sketched out by a morsel of indigestible and ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... convulsively about the iron bars that guarded his window, but the feeling of horror that suddenly seized him was remote from self-pity. He was thinking of Elizabeth. What unspeakable wretchedness he had brought into her life, and he was still to bequeath her this squalid brutal death! It was the crowning shame and misery to the long months of doubt and ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... own disgrace and wretchedness it is not wonderful if my mind turned with relief to the thought of Pinkerton waiting for me, as I knew, with unwearied affection, and regarding me with a respect that I had never deserved, and might therefore fairly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... During the twelve months that he had been a curate in a parish in one of the worst parts of London, he had seen much of the sick and the dying. He had seen poverty, wretchedness, and sin in their most dreadful aspects, and the peace and comfort of his mother's present condition were a great contrast to the riot and squalor of many a death room into which he had sought to carry the gospel ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... fighting in order to cheer you up—we are not lying about in the open-air day and night, starved and suffering from wounds and homesickness, in order that you at home may be cheerful at the tea or beer table. We are fighting and bearing this terrible wretchedness in order that you may he spared the horrors of war, and that Germany's future may be bright." That is, I believe, what the enormous majority of Germany's soldiers are fighting for. Soldiers on both sides have similar and quite reconcilable ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... may move you, gentlemen, to beware, or unheard-of wretchedness intreat you to take heed, I doubt not but you will look backe with sorrow on your time past, and endevour with repentance to spend that which is to come. Wonder not (for with thee will I first beginne), thou famous ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... by arts in which he served his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, and depopulation on his country. Mine were under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, manufactures, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... cavalry encampment the leaves lay thick around the unfortunate horses exposed to the weather with miserably insufficient covering. There was a general air of wetness and wretchedness from the infantry to the cavalry barracks, and some misgivings were entertained as to the condition of the garrison of Lough Mask House. General opinion has set in decidedly against the Ulster contingent: horse and foot, and police, magistrates and floating population unite in ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... spears it comes down, sending pedestrians who have grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under cover, adding to the wretchedness of life in trench or bombproof as nothing else can. And the Doctor, biting hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin upon his breast and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ahead, recalls, even more vividly than ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... rest of my information: judge for me, what I can, what I ought to believe!—You know the rumours of the world concerning you: Even I, who stay so much at home, and have not taken the least pains to find out my wretchedness, nor to confirm it, since I knew it, have come to the hearing of it; and if you know the licence taken with both your characters, and yet correspond so openly, must it not look to me that you value not your honour in the world's eye, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... painful to dwell on such details,—but we are now approaching the close. In addition to most of those sad varieties of wretchedness which surround alike the grandest and humblest deathbeds, there was also in the scene now passing around the dying Byron such a degree of confusion and uncomfort as renders it doubly dreary to contemplate. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Goethe— everything I have of his, both what is well known and what is not; here I shed invariable tears over Werther, however often I read it; here I wade through Wilhelm Meister, and sit in amazement before the complications of the Wahlverwandschaften; here I am plunged in wonder and wretchedness by Faust; and here I sometimes walk up and down in the shade and apostrophise the tall firs at the bottom of the glade in the opening soliloquy of Iphigenia. Every now and then I leave the book on the seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my flower beds, from which I return ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl by the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down: but my worse ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind: a wretchedness which kept drawing from me silent tears; no sooner had I wiped one salt drop from my cheek than another followed. Yet, I thought, I ought to have been happy, for none of the Reeds were there, they were all gone out in the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... said before," the woman replied, with bitter irony in her tones, "I have come with my little girl to thank you for the present we received last night;—a present of wretchedness ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... connected with my first performance of it which proved how painfully the unredeemed horror and wretchedness of the piece acted upon my nerves and imagination. In the last scene, where poor Belvidera's brain gives way under her despair, and she fancies herself digging for her husband in the earth, and that she at last recovers and seizes him, I intended to utter a piercing scream; this I had not ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the wretchedness that has flowed from hereditary honours, riches, and monarchy, that men of lively sensibility have almost uttered blasphemy in order to justify the dispensations of providence. Man has been held out as independent of his power who made him, or as a lawless ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... Centre street stands a tall tenement-house, sheltering anywhere from forty to fifty families in squalid wretchedness. The rent which each family pays would procure a neat house in a country town, with perhaps a little land beside; but the city has a mysterious fascination for the poorer classes, and year after ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... to Thyrsis to see his wife's happiness just then; she was like a flower which has been wilting, and suddenly receives a generous shower of rain. It was just what he had prayed for; having seen all along that her wretchedness was owing to her being shut up alone with him. So now he did his best to repress his own opinions, and to let the two friends work out their ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... having attained to man's estate, was scarcely able to get a livelihood; and overwhelmed with wretchedness, sat down on the day of a procession at the door of the cathedral of Seville, in the moment the procession passed by. Among the other canons he perceived the murderer of his father. At the sight of this man, filial affection, rage, and despair got so ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... Chivalry equally new and surprising XVIII In which the Rays of Chivalry shine with renovated Lustre XIX Containing the Achievements of the Knights of the Griffin and Crescent XX In which our Hero descends into the Mansions of the Damned XXI Containing further Anecdotes relating to the Children of Wretchedness XXII In which Captain Crowe is sublimed into the Regions of Astrology XXIII In which the Clouds that cover the Catastrophe begin to disperse XXIV The Knot that puzzles human Wisdom, the Hand of Fortune sometimes will untie ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... man's evil propensities, no one, perhaps, is a more fruitful mother of wretchedness and crime than the propensity to indolence. It is a common saying, that the love of money is the root of all evil; but that root often runs deeper, and finds its life in indolence, which incites those under ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... The wretchedness of his tone quite touched me. I forgot my anger and sense of resentment, and all the old affection and loyalty came back with a rush. How could I ever have imagined a fellow like Crofter was worthy to hold a candle ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... so. Man is not the measure of his own happiness, any more than of his own health. The diet that he takes to be healthy, may prove his poison; and where he looks for happiness, he may find the extreme of wretchedness and woe. For man must live up to his nature, to his bodily constitution, to be a healthy man; and to his whole nature, but especially to his mental and moral constitution, if he is to be a happy man. And nature, though it admits of individual peculiarities, is specifically the same for all. There ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... myself when I think of what I have seen—the suffering, the misery, and the wretchedness. I saw enough at first to have made me open my eyes, but the thing was not shown to me really till I saw the bones of murdered people—people whom I had seen walking about alive—lying there a few weeks later, just skeletons; a little ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... selfishness and hypocrisy when closely examined. Pythius was one of the most merciless tyrants that ever lived. He held all the people that lived upon his vast estates in a condition of abject slavery, compelling them to toil continually in his mines, in destitution and wretchedness, in order to add more and more to his treasures. The people came to his wife with their bitter complaints. She pitied them, but could not relieve them. One day, it is said that, in order to show her husband ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... suppose, in your voice when you asked my pardon for disturbing me, that softened my heart. I told you I had met with a disappointment which had broken me for life. There was no need to explain further. The only hopeless wretchedness in this world is the wretchedness ...
— The Frozen Deep • Wilkie Collins
... in his place? He saw his son lapsed to atheism, to the ESPRIT, to the pleasant frivolity of clever Frenchmen—he saw in the background the great bloodsucker, the spider skepticism; he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer hard enough either for evil or good, and of a broken will that no longer commands, is no longer ABLE to command. Meanwhile, however, there grew up in his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous skepticism—who ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... do among those whose business was literally their life. The eye, sensitively fond of elegance, the extreme of elegance, in everything, and permitting no other around or about him, could not bear the tokens of mental and bodily wretchedness among the ignorant poor; he escaped from them as soon as possible; thought that poverty was one of the irregularities of this wrong-working machine of a world, and something utterly beyond his power to do away or alleviate; and left to his steward ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... next morning, I was resolute to declare my passion to Dora, and know my fate. Happiness or misery was now the question. There was no other question that I knew of in the world, and only Dora could give the answer to it. I passed three days in a luxury of wretchedness, torturing myself by putting every conceivable variety of discouraging construction on all that ever had taken place between Dora and me. At last, arrayed for the purpose at a vast expense, I went to Miss Mills's, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Therese at once relapsed into the gloomy train of reflections that had occupied her since the day she had seen with her bodily eyes something of the wretched life that she had brought upon the man she loved. And yet that wretchedness in its refinement of cruelty and immorality she could not guess and was never to know. Still, she had seen enough to cause her to ask herself with a shudder "was I right—was ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... photographs and bills, looking out into the street. They stand side by side, evidently quite oblivious and indifferent to the motley folk about them, chatting and laughing, taking the wet and windy wretchedness of the night as a joke. They are both plump and rosy-cheeked, dark eyes gleaming and red lips parted; both decidedly good-looking, much too rosy and full-faced, too well fed and comfortable to take ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... home and passing outcasts of the street. We must sometimes reflect that our comfort is not simply a reward for virtue or intelligence, even if it be not sometimes the prize of actual dishonesty. To shut our eyes to the mass of wretchedness around us is to harden our hearts, although to open our hands is too often to do more harm than good. It is no wonder that we should be tempted to declaim against competition, when the competition means that so many unfortunates are to be crowded off their narrow standing-ground ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... unconquerable fatality of which I have been speaking, I do not know what might have happened: but, having been early convinced that a union between him and me must be attended with I know not what scenes of wretchedness, in short, knowing the thing in a certain sense to be impossible, it has always been so considered by me, and therefore I have no reason to think myself in any danger. Doubts occasionally rise in my mind, but in general soon disappear. ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... controversy, crowned by the crushing calamity of blindness, were to be his portion for more than thirty years. Singular among poets in the serene fortune of the first half of life, in the second half his piteous fate was to rank in wretchedness with that of his ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the distant mountains, bright and smiling in their noonday splendor. As his eyes dwelt upon them in brooding silence, Helen gained her feet. And, aware of her great part in this wretchedness, she took his hand very gently in her own. Subtly conscious of the touch, realizing the tumult in his soul, she found herself suddenly alive to a feeling within her deeper than mere pity and sympathy. It was the anguish preceding tears. Quickly withdrawing her ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... young men and women, spoke of her with something like devotion, and all said how kind and charitable she was, and as merry as a bird on a bright day; they said she pitied their wretchedness and their troubles, and was still the young girl in spite of her long dresses, and fearing nothing, while even the animals ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Persians; and the spoils of this fruitful country are proposed as the prize of your valor and discipline. Believe me," added Julian, "the Roman republic, which formerly possessed such immense treasures, is now reduced to want and wretchedness once our princes have been persuaded, by weak and interested ministers, to purchase with gold the tranquillity of the Barbarians. The revenue is exhausted; the cities are ruined; the provinces are dispeopled. For myself, the only inheritance that I have received from my royal ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... was in bed. In spite of her wretchedness, her body was plump, swollen out, as it were, while her face was puffy, and her hands seemed numbed as she drew the tattered sheet over her. She had small, keen eyes and a whimpering voice, and displayed a noisy humility ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... their very infancy, restrained by the invisible bonds of opinion, overcome by panic terrors, their faculties blunted by ignorance, how should the people know the true causes of their wretchedness? They imagine that they can avert it by invoking the gods. Alas! do they not see, that it is, in the name of these gods, that they are ordered to present their throats to the sword of their merciless tyrants, in whom they might find the obvious cause of the evils ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... felt no sympathy with his son. It never occurred to him to think of the agony with which those few lines had been written; of the wretchedness of the young heart which had hoped so much and failed so greatly; of the misery which the son felt in disappointing the father. He was a good, kind parent, who spent his long days and longer nights in thinking of his family and their welfare; he would, too, have greatly triumphed ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... consciousness tending more and more to consist in memories of error and imperfection rather than in a strengthening sense of achievement.' We have to turn to such books as Bunyan's Grace Abounding to find any parallel to such wretchedness. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... probably will be, besides relief to the bakers themselves, which has already been in part conceded, a more wholesome kind of bread, such as will keep fresh and palatable through the day, and cleaner baking; for the wretchedness of the trade has made it vile and filthy, as is the case in other trades besides that of the bakers. Many an article of mere luxury, many a senseless toy, if our eyes could be opened, would be seen to bear ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the way in which he had been brought up, and of the poor lad's ignorance and wretchedness, he pitied him and ceased to wonder, or to be ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... that he was guilty; that even now he was being hunted, hatless, hungry, weary and thirsty—a pariah with every honest man's hand raised against him—reminded her that the limit of her wretchedness lay, not in the fact that her faith in him had been shattered, but in the more appalling consciousness that he would not come back to her! Wild herald of woe and death, he had flitted into her life—as carelessly as he came ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... struggle against it? he asked himself. Why live on in misery, only to die in misery at the end? Why not end it now? There was no God, at least none that cared; and as for the future—he had laughed when the minister mentioned hell. What profounder wretchedness could it hold than all he had ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... visitor is the squalor and the wretchedness of these homes of India's poor. The clothing of a whole family is not worth one American dollar, while about ten cents in our money will feed a family of four. The houses have no furniture, except a bed of the most primitive pattern, made of latticed reeds; the smoke ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... had met Diggle in the street at Market Drayton to his last encounter with him at the Battle of the Carts, he had been the mark of his enmity, malice, spite, trickery. But Desmond thought less of his own wrongs than of the sorrow of his friend, Mr. Merriman, and the harrowing wretchedness which must have been the lot of the ladies while they were in Diggle's power. The man had brought misery into so many lives that it would be a good deed if, in the fortune of war, Desmond's sword could ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... Anger, distrust, wretchedness, the spirit of the alien, loneliness, were alive in him. The magnetism of this deep penetrating man, possessed of a devil, was on him, and in spite of every reasonable instinct he ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her friends. But would he excite in her the interest she was exciting in him? The thought of his possible remoteness from her, pained him and made his heart sink. The noblest characters experience strange sensations of desolation and wretchedness at the thought of disapproval and rejection. Esteem, the testimony of our neighbor's appreciation, the approval of those worth while, these are the things for which we yearn with fondest hopes. To know that we have done well is satisfaction, but to know ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... down, dear, and I will put him upon your lap," said the young mother. There never was a more complete picture of wretchedness than poor Jock, as he placed himself unwillingly on the sofa with his knees put firmly together and his feet slanting outwards to support them. "I sha'n't know what to do with it," he said. It is to be feared that he resented its existence ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... Molyneux' prognostications nearly a century before. "Can the history of any fruitful country on the globe," he asked (and the question may be asked still), "enjoying peace for fourscore years, and not visited by plague or pestilence, produce so many recorded instances of the poverty and wretchedness and of the reiterated want and misery of the lower orders of the people? There is no such example in ancient or ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... the misfortune and misery that are found in the marriage state, and have not known that it is a safe estate, they have wished to do the best for their children, to help them to a happy life and freedom from wretchedness. So that St. Peter has foretold here nothing else but just that the world should become full of priests, monks, and nuns. Thus youth, and the best that are in the world, have run with the multitude to the devil. St. Peter says it, alas! only too truly, that many ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... Florence to here Sunday night by steamboat. Eastport is in Mississippi. Waiting here for a steamboat to go down; paying one dollar a day for board. Like other taverns here, the wretchedness is indescribable; no pen, ink, paper or newspaper to be had; only one room for everybody, except the gambling rooms. It is difficult for me to write. Vina intends to get a pass for Catharine and herself for the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... shouldst thou rejoice that thou hast not contributed to swell the amount of human suffering. Happier far is she who has added nothing, in respect of children, to the sum of human misery, than she who has become a mother, to see her offspring perish in the strife of warriors, or of hunger, or wretchedness, or wasting disease. That thou hast given birth to no heirs of misery should afford thee joy, rather than ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... afford its members safe escort through the passes in rear of the force. The General had little faith in the Sirdar, but he was fain to give his consent to an arrangement which promised alleviation to the wretchedness of the ladies, scarce any of whom had tasted a meal since leaving Cabul. Some, still weak from childbirth, were nursing infants only a few days old; other poor creatures were momentarily apprehending the ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... not see him again that trip, but on my next (I had a six months' charter) I went up to the store. Ten yards away from the door Blake's scolding met my ears, and when I came in he gave me a glance of utter wretchedness; Egstrom, all smiles, advanced, extending a large bony hand. "Glad to see you, captain. . . . Sssh. . . . Been thinking you were about due back here. What did you say, sir? . . . Sssh. . . . Oh! him! He has left us. Come ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... cannot go: I live not in the land I have reduced beneath such wretchedness: And who could leave the brave, whose lives and ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... are coming to Christ cannot be persuaded, until the temptation comes, that they are so vile as the Scripture saith they are. True, they see so much of their wretchedness as to drive them to Christ. But there is an over and above of wickedness which they see not. Peter little thought that he had had cursing, and swearing, and lying, and an inclination in his heart to deny his Master, before the temptation came; but when that indeed came upon him, then he found ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... There was wretchedness in every view of the matter. He loved her so well, and yet he could do nothing! He could take no step toward saving her or assisting himself. The marriage bells would ring within a month from the present time, and ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... wretchedness of the German people as a whole, found no comfort in the German genius for science, literature, and art, or only a miserable comfort which "does not make up for the proud consciousness of belonging to a nation strong, respected, and feared." Because Germany in his time was ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... purchasing beyond their means, or at least spending their money needlessly. However such sinful tricks may be allowed to prosper in the case of a man of the world, in the case of a child of God they will not prosper, except God allow them to do so in the way of chastisement, whilst leanness and wretchedness is brought into the soul. I knew a case of this kind where it was the whole bent of the mind of a professed believer to obtain such "good salesmen," and where even a Jew was kept outside the shop walking up and down to induce persons to come in and buy; and yet that same professed believer failed ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, Third Part • George Mueller
... has passed from death unto life. The other day, a Lancashire coal-miner was killed in the pit; only a minute before he was killed he was overheard praising God. He had been a sad drunkard; his home was wretchedness itself. Money was in his hands only helpful to hellish enjoyment. But the grace of God changed his heart and life. His home and family were soon made happy. He became a preacher, went about from village ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... step by which he would lose the whole world at once. "I only lose," said he, "a very small portion of it, and if I should lose the whole, pray what loss is it? For what is there in the world so desirable, unless a man should desire deceit, and violence, and misery, and wretchedness, giddiness and distraction. Contentment and tranquillity," said he, "constitute the happiness of man; but in your city there are no such things to be found. Because who is there here content with his station? Higher, higher, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... give some description of Mrs. Alien that the reader may be able to judge in what manner her actions will hereafter tend to promote the general distress of the work and how she will probably contribute to reduce poor Catherine to all the desperate wretchedness of which a last volume is capable, whether by her imprudence, vulgarity or jealousy—whether by intercepting her letters, ruining her character or turning ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the winter, in Canton, the lower classes suffer severely from cold: they are poorly fed and worse clothed: and hundreds of them may be seen about the streets, shivering and looking the very picture of absolute wretchedness. Amongst these, a few old women may be seen sitting by the side of the streets, earning a scanty subsistence by mending and patching the clothes of people as poor as themselves. These poor women, having all undergone ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... the other the madame addressed as her brother. The monsieur was handsome, rather tonnish, and of the high haughty ton, and seemed the devoted attendant or protector of the madame, who sometimes spoke to him almost with asperity, from eagerness, and a tinge of wretchedness and impatience, which coloured all she said; and, at other times, softened off her vehemence with a smile the most expressive, and which made its way to the mind immediately, by coming with sense and meaning, and ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... he seemed poor and half starved, and was scratching his fingers, which were covered with the itch. He was a miner's son, and lived at Wanlockhead; did not go to school, but this was probably on account of his youth. I mention him because he seemed to be a proof that there was poverty and wretchedness among these people, though we saw no other symptom of it; and afterwards we met scores of the inhabitants of this same village. Our road turned to the right, and we saw, at the distance of less than a mile, a tall upright building of grey stone, with several men standing ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... poison, can learn to endure absolute solitude, can bear contumely, scorn, and shame, and never show it. Carry Brattle had already become accustomed to misery, and as she walked she thought more of the wretchedness of the present hour, of her weary feet, of her hunger, and of the nature of the rest which she might purchase for herself at some poor wayside inn, than she ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... posterity will give to their hero the only pre-eminence he has earned, that of having been the greatest of the destroyers of the human race. What year of his military life has not consigned a million of human beings to death, to poverty, and wretchedness? What field in Europe may not raise a monument of the murders, the burnings, the desolations, the famines, and miseries, it has witnessed from him! And all this to acquire a reputation, which Cartouche attained ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... they were young, they were happy. The evil days arrived—and they were wretched, and lacked strength to bear their wretchedness. They are gone where ONE alone must judge them—may HE have pity on their ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... philanthropy has received a great impulse by the labors of Howard and Wilberforce. But the charitable institutions we speak of were in progress east of the Rhine years before the former commenced "his voyage of discovery, his circumnavigation of charity, to collate distresses, to gauge wretchedness, to take dimensions of human misery;" or before the latter could write in 1807, after so many labors for the extinction of the Slave Trade, "Oh what thanks do I owe to the Giver of all good for bringing me in his gracious providence to this great ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... me to foreign parts. Never! Well, I DID say to myself, if he goes to France, perhaps he may catch a little politeness—but no; you began as Caudle, and as Caudle you'll end. I'm to be neglected through life, now. Oh yes! I've quite given up all thoughts of anything but wretchedness—I've made up my mind to ...
— Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures • Douglas Jerrold
... do love you, and you bring me only wretchedness. I have never been happy since the miserable day I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... are the deserts of sorrow, Our hearts are the ashes of hope, And madly from gladness we borrow The brightness where sadness may grope; My raptures in wretchedness vanish, My bosom is weeping with wrongs; Then sing me the old songs, mother, Then sing ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... not blame herself for having been guided by her; but she felt that were any young person, in similar circumstances, to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive any of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good. She was persuaded that under every disadvantage of disapprobation at home, and every anxiety attending his profession, all their probable fears, delays, and disappointments, she should yet have been a ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... had remained peaceful and still the while, unscathed and undefiled, grand, dignified and majestic, while the owner of the fine chateau of the gardens and the fountain and of half the province around earned a precarious livelihood in a foreign land, half-starved in wretchedness ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... serve the others, they get only what is left—which often is nothing at all, and many literally starve to death. No wonder these poor creatures—be they little girls or women—all wear "the same look of hopeless despair and wretchedness," making an impression on the mind more pitiable than any disease. The writer had among her patients some who tried by the most agonizing of ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... had to be invalided back to Bucharest. The illness grew upon me, and my condition became very serious. Worthy Andreas nursed me with great tenderness and assiduity in the lodgings to which I had been brought, since they would not accept a fever patient at Brofft's. After some days of wretchedness I became delirious, and, of course, lost consciousness; my last recollection was of Andreas wetting my parched lips with lemonade. When I recovered my senses, and looked out feebly, there was nobody in the room. How long I had been unconscious I had no idea. I lay there in a half stupor till ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... in a mighty army, identified in principles and interests. Here was the principle of the Church—association for reciprocated strength; they were thus taught the inevitable result of the indulgence of the vice. The missionaries of temperance went through the country contrasting the wretchedness and the degradation and the filth of drunkenness with the domestic comfort, and the health, and the regular employment of those who were masters of themselves. So far as men believed this, and gave up the tyranny of the present for the hope of the future—so ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... corridor, he muttered a curse. What did that chairborne brass hat know about space cafard? About the depthless blackness, the wretchedness of free fall, the tides of primitive terror that swept you when the animal realization hit that you were away, away, away from the environment that gave you birth. That you were alone, alone, alone. A million, a million-million miles from your nearest fellow ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... his home-coming sense, seemed like those of parents. Mr. Pawket trembled slightly; he stood high-collared and coattailed, upon the glittering steps. Mrs. Pawket, in black silk, clove to his arm. The twins, in the heated wretchedness of Sunday clothes, stepped forward, and in the interests of sentiment stuck forth two wads of tightly bound pink roses. The Rural, blushing in a costume of very bright blue, wearing elbow mitts, and carrying a pink feather fan, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... desired to put the common people in possession.—Observations on supposed degrees of possible advancement of the knowledge and welfare of the community; with reflections of astonishment and regret at the actual state of ignorance, degradation, and wretchedness, after so many thousand years have passed away.—Congratulatory notice of those worthy individuals who have been rescued from the consequences of a neglected education by ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... said that I regarded the evils of slavery as falling most heavily on the slaveholders; in other words, on the white population. Slavery begets idleness; idleness begets vice; and vice plunges individuals into-wretchedness, degradation and infamy. In some of the slave States, the slaves perform most of the labor, consequently children are brought up in idleness. The inevitable consequence is, that a large majority of them, long before they arrive to adult age, are deplorably vicious. It ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... grafted on them. In Barnaby himself it was desired to show what sources of comfort there might be, for the patient and cheerful heart, in even the worst of all human afflictions; and in the hunted life of his outcast father, whose crime had entailed not that affliction only but other more fearful wretchedness, we have as powerful a picture as any in his writings of the inevitable and unfathomable consequences of sin. But, as the story went on, it was incident to these designs that what had been accomplished ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... all the other terrible things which this great evil power does is the bringing of wretchedness and want to the wives and the children of the men who are its victims. These innocent ones suffer for the common comforts of life, food and clothing. This we call poverty. [Add the word Poverty. This completes ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... burst of wretchedness had subsided and she had recovered her balance. "I'm afraid we must wait a little longer, Patty," she advised. "Don't mention my name to father, but see how he acts in the morning. He was so wild, so unlike himself, that I almost hope ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Poland is to embrace the knees of the nobility when they meet them; you cannot stir a step in a village without having the women, children, and old men saluting you in this manner. In the midst of this spectacle of wretchedness you might see some men in shabby attire, who were spies upon misery: for that was the only object which could offer itself to their eyes. The captains of the circles refused passports to the Polish noblemen, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... Miss Porter, "and though I, too, said it would be best, I began to distrust him from that moment—to think that he preferred money to myself. Uncle Bertram promised secrecy and went back alone, and then commenced a life of wretchedness, which makes me shudder even to recall it. With the exception of my own servant, who dared not tell if I bade her be silent, the blacks knew nothing of our marriage, and though we lived together as man and wife, so skillfully did Mrs. Le Vert and Esther, her white domestic, ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... of their criminal acts were weighty enough to sustain an energetic inquiry. Hence their reputation became worse than scandalous: the mingled infamy of their calling, and the houseless condition of wretchedness which had made it worth their acceptance, combined to overwhelm them with public scorn; and this public abhorrence, which at any rate awaited them, mere desperation led them too often to countenance and justify ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... from these quotations that our relations with the Transvaal, hostile as they may have been, were scarcely true relations—that the real enmity and rancour, the blood-spilling and wretchedness that commenced at this period, and are at the moment of writing still continuing, were due, firstly, to party spirit in Great Britain, and secondly, to the machinations of adventurers, who, having no status elsewhere, put the ignorance of a race of farmers ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... right. Go on then, kiddie, and do take care!" Jim's voice was strained with anxiety and wretchedness. While Norah was full of hope, and, indeed, could scarcely realize that they might not find Dad soon, the boy had the memory of the fruitless search all the previous day to dispirit him. As he looked at the forbidding wall of ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... born large and strong, his size and strength would be useless to him until he had learned to use them. They would be prejudicial to him, by preventing others from thinking of assisting him; and left to himself he would die of wretchedness before he had known his own necessities. We pity the state of infancy; we do not perceive that the human race would have perished if man had not ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Christian mediaeval Europe, also, nothing new was added to the theory of hysteria; it was, indeed, less known medically than it had ever been, and, in part it may be as a result of this ignorance, in part as a result of general wretchedness (the hysterical phenomena of witchcraft reaching their height, Michelet points out, in the fourteenth century, which was a period of special misery for the poor), it flourished more vigorously. Not alone have we the records of nervous epidemics, but illuminated manuscripts, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sorrow in her face, as if she reproached her own soul." Poor Felice. How Felice's frame must be pulsing under the conditions of which he had just heard the caricature; how her fair temples must ache; what a mood of wretchedness she must be in! But for the mixing up of his name with hers, and her determination to sunder their too close acquaintance on that account, she would probably have sent for him professionally. She was now sitting alone, suffering, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the Augustine monastery at Erfurt. He was full of an overwhelming sense of his own wretchedness and sinfulness. Like St. Paul, he was crying to be delivered from the body of death which he carried about him. He practised all possible austerities. He, if no one else, mortified his flesh with fasting. He passed nights in the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Alice is not alone in her wretchedness. It appears that our friends Lawyer Miles and Mr. Redleigh and their families are at present engaged in the momentous task of getting the name of the street in which they live changed from Cemetery Avenue to Sportland Place. And our other friends two blocks west of us are ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... [Matt. 11:27] yea, and faith too, by which the soul layeth hold upon Christ, if it be right, must be wrought by the exceeding greatness of his mighty power; the working of which faith, I perceive, poor Ignorance, thou art ignorant of. [1 Cor. 12:3, Eph. 1:18,19] Be awakened, then, see thine own wretchedness, and fly to the Lord Jesus; and by his righteousness, which is the righteousness of God, for he himself is God, thou ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... answered, hysterically inaccurate in her wild wretchedness. "I'll tell you.—It is that awful man, Mr. Gleason. He has ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... his agitation. The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness. He walked along the pavement like a drunken man, regardless of the passers-by, and jostling against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next street. Looking round, he noticed that he was standing ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... can say or can do for anyone, such have been thy sayings and thy doings, and all thy confidences have been squandered on an ingrate mind. Wherefore now dost torture thyself further? Why not make firm thy heart and withdraw thyself from that [wretchedness], and cease to be unhappy despite the gods' will? 'Tis difficult quickly to depose a love of long growth; 'tis difficult, yet it behoves thee to do this. This is thine only salvation, this is thy great victory; ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... submitted will be found painfully replete with accounts of the ruin and wretchedness produced by recent earthquakes, of unparalleled severity, in the Republics of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The diplomatic agents and naval officers of the United States who were present in those countries at the time of those disasters furnished all the relief in their power ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Johnson • Andrew Johnson
... captured; to engage the interest of this haughty fine lady for the mother of her lover's children; to appeal to her and make her the instrument of her future happiness, since she was the cause of her present wretchedness. ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... this fashionable life; she had no one for whom to dress, or whom to tell of her successes and triumphs. Sometimes the memory of her wretchedness came to her, mingled with memories of consuming joys. She would hate Lousteau for not taking any pains to follow her; she would have liked to get tender ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... given him a good character. The man acknowledged his firm belief in the existence of a Supreme Being, which touched the governor's heart deeply. Does he not know that it has ever been the mission of the Supreme Being to serve as Impresario to Falsehood and Wretchedness? ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... reports of the Poor-law Inspectors, I find them teeming with statements of the wretchedness which prevails in the distressed districts of Ireland. The general character of the reports is, that starvation is, literally speaking, gradually driving the population into their graves. The people cannot quit their hovels for want ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... vexation, the useless harassing of all who were obliged to submit ultimately—Lord Colambre saw; and all this time he endured the smell of tobacco and whisky, and of the sound of various brogues, the din of men wrangling, brawling, threatening, whining, drawling, cajoling, cursing, and every variety of wretchedness. ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... moon was again lifting above the city and touching all the roofs with silver. From where he lay he looked out and up, trying to forget his wretchedness, but living the coming encounter again and again. His ears grew hot as Barber seized one of them and wrung it, or brushed his face with a hard, sweaty hand. Imagining insult upon insult, his chest heaved ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... we shall become the curse of all Europe, the malediction of every one, from the Pope on his throne to the very beggar at the church gate, who, ragged and leprous, in the last extremity of human wretchedness, shall bless himself that he is neither Giles Amaury nor ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... and satisfaction this bright picture of our country's growth and prosperity, while only a closer scrutiny develops a somber shading. Upon more careful inspection we find the wealth and luxury of our cities mingled with poverty and wretchedness and unremunerative toil. A crowded and constantly increasing urban population suggests the impoverishment of rural sections and discontent with agricultural pursuits. The farmer's son, not satisfied with his father's simple and laborious life, joins the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... much did that cost him! It was his own fault, of course. It was all brought on by his impracticability, his whimsicality, his eccentricity, and his punctiliousness. Nevertheless, there was in him that which excited my deepest commiseration. The wretchedness and the pain of his face, and the suffering which was visible in his attitude, all touched me. He sat crouched down, shivering, shuddering, his teeth chattering, and presented a deplorable picture of one who struggled vainly against ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... us relentlessly like whips of steel. So utterly miserable did we become that at length we even ceased to rise occasionally to take a look round, to see whether, perchance, another sail might have hove in sight. I believe that some of my companions in suffering found a temporary refuge from their wretchedness in short snatches of fitful sleep; at all events I caught at intervals the sound of low mutterings, as of sleeping men; but, as for me, exhausted though I was, I could not sleep. My anxiety on behalf of these poor wretches, who were in a way ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... necessarily of moral degradation, such as I hardly ever heard of, and it is no wonder, when a great part of the community is plunged into such a condition (and we may fairly suppose that there is a gradually mounting scale, with every degree of wretchedness up to the wealth and splendour which glitter on the surface of society), that there should be so many who are ripe for any desperate scheme of revolution. At Sunderland they say there are houses with 150 inmates, who are huddled five ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... whose luminous task was known to the whole army, is no more? Is not his loss the loss of something akin to life? For a Guynemer is like the nation's flag: if the soldiers' eyes miss the waving colors, they may wander to the wretchedness of daily routine, and morbidly feed on blood and death. This is what the loss of a ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... Mayor—and the three great eras of my existence were the year of my shrievalty, the year of my mayoralty, and the year after it. Until I had passed through this ordeal I had no conception of the extremes of happiness and wretchedness to which a human being may be carried, nor ever believed that society presented to its members an eminence so exalted as that which I once touched, or imagined a fall so great as that which I experienced. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 380, July 11, 1829 • Various
... see the man who could make up his mind to come into the midst of such wretchedness ...
— The Amber Witch • Wilhelm Meinhold
... blessed the man unto whom these things are given, declared him happy, whose life was so fortunate, and whose death so honorable; and they thought that he very much had pleased the Lord. But the other man was a beggar, who having lived all his life in wretchedness and in poverty, went the way of all flesh. And his body long time lay without the ministry of the funeral rites, unburied, and mangled by the birds of prey; and at length was it dragged by the feet into a pit-hole, and covered ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... often fail us when most we want their aid; that their possessors can solace themselves with their imaginary exertions in behalf of ideal misery, and yet shrink from the labours of active benevolence, or retire with disgust from the homely forms of real poverty and wretchedness. In fine, the superiority of true Christian charity and of plain practical beneficence has been ably vindicated; and the school of Rousseau has been forced to yield to the school of Christ, when the question has been concerning the best means ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... happy world. Ahriman instantly made deformity, impurity, and gloom, in opposition to it. All beauty, virtue, harmony, truth, blessedness, were the work of the former. All ugliness, vice, discord, falsehood, wretchedness, belonged to the latter. They grappled and mixed in a million hostile shapes. This universal battle is the ground of ethics, the clarion call to marshal out the hostile hosts of good and ill; and all other war is but a result and ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... circle, however, there were two exceptions. One, within the Wakeham family, was Elfie. Quick to note the signs of wretchedness in him and quick to feel the attitude of neutrality assumed by her family toward the war, the child, without stint and without thought, gave him a love and a sympathy so warm, so passionate, that it was to his heart like balm to an open wound. There was no neutrality about Elfie. She was ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... made any man rich, but his mind. He that can order himself to the law of Nature is not only without the sense but the fear of poverty. O, but to strike blind the people with our wealth and pomp is the thing! What a wretchedness is this, to thrust all our riches outward, and be beggars within; to contemplate nothing but the little, vile, and sordid things of the world; not the great, noble, and precious! We serve our avarice, and, not content with the good of the earth that is offered ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... held in slavery for debt to be set free; and cancelled all fines payable to the state. These measures caused contentment and prosperity to take the place, everywhere throughout Attica, of previous discontent and wretchedness. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... she knew that they had met with some reverse of fortune,—for she had heard her father regret, for her sake, his altered estate. She knew this, but nothing more: her father's enemies, who would gladly have added to his wretchedness, by making his child look upon him with horror, could not find in their hearts, when they gazed on her innocent face, to make one so unoffending wretched. It is a lovely blindness in a child to have no discernment of a parent's faultiness; and so it happened that the Lady ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... as to the near future. He would effect a loan. The debt of Suzuki repaid, all his goods would be restored to Kamimura San. Goemon took this talk at its real value. Shaking his fist he berated Iemon with violent words. "Ah! Shame is brought to the House of Kamimura, wretchedness to his family—and by this vile stranger. It is Iemon with his heartless wicked treatment of O'Iwa San, who has wrought distress and ruin to the ward. For Goemon there is neither food nor clothing? Wait! Time shall bring his vengeance on Iemon and his House." Iemon would have detained ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... till I am dead. Begone, cursed black crow! you wish me peace; that shows you are a glozing cheat! Go to, and caw to simpler fools than I! I know very well the quarryman's lot is an utterly miserable one, and there is no comfort for his wretchedness. I hale out stones from dawn to dark, and for price of my toil, all I get is a scrap of black bread. Then when my arms are no longer as strong as the stones of the mountain, and my body is all worn out, I shall ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... future state. Thousands, no doubt, think they should be wretched in this condition: but, although I have been acquainted with a number of this description, I never saw one made unhappy in consequence. It is the fear of endless misery which produces so much wretchedness in the world.—This idea, it is true, beggars all description! It produces that fear which hath torment. It disturbs the brain; destroys the mental faculties; and, by distracting the imagination, fills the soul with horror! It is infinitely more to be ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... crust and a garret. After death, in not a few cases, the burial was through charity of friends, and this can hardly be called an adequate compensation, for the memorial tablet or monument that commemorates a life of privation, if not of absolute wretchedness. ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... sufficient courage to oppose him, so powerful had he become by the discords of Florence. Great, certainly, but unhappy city! which neither the memory of past divisions, the fear of her enemies, nor a king's authority, could unite for her own advantage; so that she found herself in a state of the utmost wretchedness, harassed without by Uguccione, and plundered within by ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... I can only see him again, this may not happen and everything may be as it was before when he still loved me." So just and rational did this idea appear to her, that she found herself wondering passionately why she had not thought of it before. It was so easy a way out of her wretchedness that it seemed absurd of her to have overlooked it. And this discovery filled her with such tremulous excitement, that when she opened her purse to buy her ticket, her hands shook as if they were palsied, and the porter, who held her bag, was ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... must not be spared the want and wretchedness of war; these are particularly useful in shattering its energy and subduing its will.—GENERAL v. HARTMANN, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... woman punished in losing her own child when she had tried to do away with her step-daughter; but instead of blaming herself she began to hate Hase-Hime more than ever in the bitterness and wretchedness of her own heart, and she eagerly watched for an opportunity to do her harm, which ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... fellow-insurgents had brought to London. But how changed now was the scene! Then the country was excited by the deepest anxiety and alarm, and the spectacle on the field was that of one immense mass of squalid poverty and wretchedness, of misery reduced by hopeless suffering to recklessness and despair. Now all was gayety and splendor in the spectacle, and the whole country was excited to the highest pitch ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... accountable for what I say. I had better go. We can talk of this at another time. I dare say I can manage for a day or two, though it will not be easy to do so. However, I am accustomed to rubbing shoulders with every created description of undeserved indignity and wretchedness. ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... I wrote of a phase of wretchedness in our great cities, which I designated "Uninvited Poverty." I confined myself to the examination of those who may be properly designated the helpless victims of adverse fate. There are other phases of misery, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... woman knew too well exile. Strong of soul that earl, sorrow sharp he bore; To companionship he had care and weary longing, Winter-freezing wretchedness. Woe he found again, again, After that Nithhad in a need had laid him— Staggering sinew-wounds—sorrow-smitten man! That he overwent; ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Walter Simson, in believing that the gypsies are the descendants of the mixed races who followed Moses out of Egypt. The Rom in Egypt is a Hindoo stranger now, as he ever was. But that the echo of centuries of outlawry and wretchedness and wildness rises and falls, like the ineffable discord in a wind-harp, in Romany airs is true enough, whatever its origin may have been. But I ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... drive them in upon us. Two more natives, one of them a young man, and the other his sister, a girl of fourteen years old, were brought in by the governor's boat, in a most deplorable state of wretchedness from the smallpox. The sympathy and affection of Arabanoo, which had appeared languid in the instance of Nanbaree and his father, here manifested themselves immediately. We conjectured that a difference ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... the magnificent ball his eyes grew dim at the thought of the social tragedy which it symbolized, of his own poverty and of the deeper wretchedness of scores to whom he had been trying to minister. He was fighting to keep his courage up, but the longer he watched the barbaric, sensual display of wealth sweeping before him, the ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... I have but little inclination to appear abroad. O! this brother! this brother! to what wretchedness ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... evil in the land, a difficulty of most serious embarrassment. . . . The people cannot afford to wait without encountering all the hardships of bankruptcy and ruin. . . . Our differences will not permit our people to wait further adjustment when they are in a death struggle with poverty and wretchedness." ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... impelled by a scarcity of bread, a vast multitude from the surrounding country gather around the royal palace at Versailles, their great number, sallow faces and squalid appearance indicating widespread wretchedness and want. Their appeal for royal assistance is plainly written, in "legible hieroglyphics in their winged raggedness." The young king appears on the balcony and they are permitted to see his face. If he does not read their written appeal, he sees it in their pitiable ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... efforts as president to win the approval of the people by public works. He recognized the necessity of aiding the working classes as far as possible, and protecting them from poverty and wretchedness. During a dearth in 1853 a "baking fund" was organized in Paris, the city contributing funds to enable bread to be sold at a low price. Dams and embankments were built along the rivers to overcome the effects of floods. New streets were opened, ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... was singularly adaptable. In a few days it was as though she had been for years in her little ruined house. She was very happy, though there was scarcely a day when her heart was not wrung. Such young-old faces! Such weary men! And such tales of wretchedness! ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... survived the raft of the Medusa. I still remember a certain pine cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennae, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre |
