"Decrepit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breathes around us proof that those all-evil times Are fled with their decrepit thoughts, their slaughter, and their crimes; Long stood THIS HALL the type of all could MAN'S grim bonds increase— Henceforth be it his Vestibule to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... horror-stricken guest gazed at the window, in the hope that the pale face and great sad eyes would appear again. Nothing was seen at the window, but presently horrible shrieks penetrated even the thick walls of the castle, and rent the night air. An hour later, a dark huddled figure, like that of an old decrepit woman, carrying something in a bundle, came into the ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... probably been made through the Duc de Longueville, a prisoner in England since the Battle of Spurs.[166] In January Louis' wife, Anne of Brittany, had died. Louis was fifty-two years old, worn out and decrepit; but at least half a dozen brides were proposed for his hand. In March it was rumoured in Rome that he would choose Henry's sister Mary, the rejected of Charles.[167] But Henry waited till May had passed, and Maximilian had proclaimed to the world his breach ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... who had the business of the nation upon his hands; yet he slackened his pace when he came near the cottage where he knew that he was to meet Mrs. Temple and her daughters. When he entered the cottage, the first object that he saw was Helen, sitting by the side of a decrepit old woman, who was resting her head upon a crutch, and who seemed to be in pain. This was the poor woman who had been ridden over by Lady Di. Spanker. A farmer who lived near Mrs. Temple, and who was coming homewards at the time the accident happened, ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... a good deal about the Crambrys, for he passed their so-called habitation in going to one of his wood-lots. It was only a month before that he had found them all sitting outside their broken-down fence, surrounded by decrepit chairs, sofas, tables, bedsteads, bits of ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the Danubian States, Hungary, Turkey, etc. A climate of surpassing quality, a soil so luxuriant and fertile as is hardly found in the best regions of the United States, will some day furnish an abundance of food to unnumbered people. The decrepit political and social conditions of those countries cause hundreds of thousands of our own people to prefer crossing the ocean rather than to settle in those much nearer and more comfortably located ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... upon the waters and about the shores of this peculiar sea, born but yesterday, and already encircled with ruins and condemned to disappear; and a month's voyage would not suffice to gather up the chief of them; but the thought alone of beholding from a distance those decrepit cities, those mysterious islands, those fatal sand-banks, excited ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... you? Are not you the cause of it all?... Is it not you?... Is it not thou?...[15] Is it not thou, Judas, who hast robbed me, by taking advantage of my youth? Dost not thou skin the peasants? Is it not thou who hast deprived this decrepit old man of his daily bread? Is it not thou?... O Lord! Everywhere there is injustice, and oppression, and villainy.... So down with everything,—and with me also! I don't wish to live—I don't wish to live any longer in Russia!"—And the spade made swifter ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... front, built of brick and stone, with no pretensions to symmetry, seemed to be bending beneath the weight of a worm-eaten roof covered with the curved pantiles in common use in the South of France. The decrepit casements were fitted with the heavy, unwieldy shutters necessary in that climate, and held in place by massive iron cross bars. It would have puzzled you to find a more dilapidated house in Angouleme; nothing but sheer tenacity of mortar kept it ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... ended, I could have laughed myself to scorn to find In that decrepit man so firm a mind; God, said I, be my help and stay secure, I'll think of thee, leech-gatherer, on the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Denny, Jack, Davis, Dan, Moult, and Mark Twain who made the "long trip" through Syria from Beirut to Jerusalem with their elaborate camping outfit and decrepit nags "Jericho," "Baalbec," and the rest. It was better camping than that Humboldt journey of six years before, though the horses were not so dissimilar, and altogether it was a hard, nerve-racking experience, climbing the arid hills of Palestine in that torrid summer heat. Nobody makes ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Alden assisted her into Madame's decrepit phaeton, and urged the superannuated horse into a wildly exciting pace of three miles an hour, she asked to be driven to ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... Bienfaisance, had arranged that their children and some youthful cousins were to play before a party of friends on New Year's Night on the stage of a little theatre which had just been added to their house. The play was to represent the decrepit old year going out and the new one coming in. The eldest daughter, a charming girl of fourteen, was to be the good genius of 1886, and to be dressed in a loose transparent robe. On the appointed evening, after the company had assembled, she donned her stage costume and ran ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... restored his tranquillity, and he passed to a more familiar topic of conversation. "What is your age?" said he to the cadi. "Fifty years." "It would be the age of my eldest son: you see me here," continued Timur, "a poor, lame, decrepit mortal. Yet by my arms has the Almighty been pleased to subdue the kingdoms of Iran, Turan, and the Indies. I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... that they had only fallen a foot or two;—and in the midst of all the gay glittering and eddied lingering, the noble bearing by of the midmost depth, so mighty, yet so terrorless and harmless, with its swallows skimming in spite of petrels, and the dear old decrepit town as safe in the embracing sweep of it as if it were set ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and by its nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of that period, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, is the idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keeping him out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the great Jacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisation of ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just as for more than a century great men ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... had been hit even harder. He, who only a few weeks before looked robust and hearty, now appeared almost decrepit. He did not eat, so to say, and did not sleep. He became frightfully thin. It gave him pain ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... ganados (cattle farms) of Spanish America. In one corner was a house, constructed of upright poles, with a thatch of palm-leaves. This contained the lazos, alparejas, saddles, etcetera, of the vaqueros; and in the door of this house stood a decrepit old zambo, the only human thing about the place. The zambo's woolly head over the pickets had reflected itself a dozen times on ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... woman thought of her own life and compared it with what she saw. Sold to a decrepit old husband who had worshipped her in strange, pathetic fashion of his own, she had spent five years in submitting to an affection she loathed, enduring it to the very end, and sacrificing every instinct of her nature in the performance ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... the whole man were a moral and physical humbug; his wonderful beauty of face, for aught I knew, might be removable like a mask; and, tall and comely as his figure looked, he was perhaps but a wizened little elf, gray and decrepit, with nothing genuine about him save the wicked expression of his grin. The fantasy of his spectral character so wrought upon me, together with the contagion of his strange mirth on my sympathies, that I soon began to laugh as ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that the island had lately been conquered by the subjects of Opoony, King of Bolabola, whose acquaintance Captain Cook wished to make. Instead of seeing a fine-looking warrior as he had expected, he found a withered, decrepit wretch, half blind with age; yet it seemed that he was the terror of all the ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... cab,' he said after some hesitation induced less by consideration of the expense than by the sheer novelty of the proceeding. Ere she could respond he was gone. Not without trouble and a thorough drenching he discovered a decrepit four-wheeler. ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... mentioned among refined people. Did I deserve to be lifted up to heaven and then dragged down to hell by you? Was it right for you to slander my flourishing and vigorous years and land me in the shadows and lassitude of decrepit old age? Give me some sign, however faint, I beg of you, that you have returned to life!" I vented my anger in ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... to represent the letter, and a bunch of lilac leaves in the other, which later was to clasp the lily. From under the long eyelashes lying on her cheeks, she smiled mischievously at Malcolm, who was vainly trying to put a decrepit bend into his athletic young back, as he bent over the pole in the attitude ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... rail, he would woo crying babies out of their mothers' arms, and still them; it was always his back that Irishwomen thumped, to ask if they must get out at the next station; and he might be seen handing out decrepit paupers, as if they were of royal blood and bore concealed sceptres in their old umbrellas. Exquisitely nice in his personal habits, he had the practical democracy of a good-natured young prince; he had never yet seen a human being who awed him, nor one whom ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... for a year past had been decrepit, died, broken-hearted, when the first news came of Austrian victories. He was sadly missed in his accustomed haunts. A younger man succeeded him as caretaker of St. Mark's, and Andrea, not old enough ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... girl was caught by a glance—a single glance—from one at the opposite corner of the court-room, and that glance brought her back to the full consciousness of the fearful development she was about to make. A decrepit old woman, resting with bent form upon a staff, which was planted firmly before her, seemed wrapped in the general interest pervading the court. The woman was huge of frame and rough of make; her face was large and swollen, and the tattered cap and bonnet, the coarse and soiled materials ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... the only woman in the hotel dining room for luncheon. The food was good, but the service impossible, as there were some forty men, mostly officers, very hungry, and only one decrepit waiter to do the work. Good humor prevailed, each diner making allowances, and here for the first time I heard that expression, destined to become so popular as an excuse for almost anything: ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... personified. Spenser says he is an old man, decrepit and half blind. He was waited on by a boy named Anamnestes. [Greek, eumnestis, "good memory," anamnestis, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... and mistress of this house. You will prepare the beds as you are told." Whereupon what does that decrepit old sinner ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... finished creation he saw that it was good, yea, very good. Can this be said of our bodies now? Let the blind, the deaf, the lame, the countless sufferers on beds of affliction, the child-bearing mother, the decrepit consumptive, the rheumatic invalid, let these say whether our bodies are very good now. And how about our spirits? I use the term spirit here in the sense of its being the basis of human perception and thought. Are our spirits or minds very good? Let those who are trying ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... devoured the soul as well as the body. Pah! this prating about immortality was absurd, convicted of meaninglessness before a tragedy like this; for what was an immortality worth that was given to her last decrepit phase of life, after all its beauty and strength and loveliness had passed soulless away? To be aught but a mockery immortality must be as manifold as the manifold phases of life. Since life devours so many souls, why suppose death will ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... prove the truth of this argument. I, amongst others, belonging to a large party who were waiting at a railway station for the train that was to carry us down to a garden party at one of the many lovely places on the Thames, saw an old man, a decrepit creature, bowed and palsied, making his way to where the third-class compartment would be. His arms were full of bundles of various sizes. Coming near a truck, the old man, who was half blind, marched against the edge of it, and all his little bundles fell helplessly to the ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford
... at the last shall come old age, Decrepit, as befits that stage. How else wouldst thou retire apart With the hoarded memories of thy heart, And gather all to the very least Of the fragments of life's earlier feast, Let fall through eagerness to find The crowning dainties ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... had carried out the vengeance which you began. Every day that we waited seemed as three autumns to us. Verily, we have trodden the snow for one day, nay, for two days, and have tasted food but once. The old and decrepit, the sick and ailing, have come forth gladly to lay down their lives. Men might laugh at us, as at grasshoppers trusting in the strength of their arms, and thus shame our honoured lord; but we could not halt in our deed of vengeance. ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... dodder; senesce. Adj. aged; old &c. 124; elderly, geriatric, senile; matronly, anile|; in years; ripe, mellow, run to seed, declining, waning, past one's prime; gray, gray-headed; hoar, hoary; venerable, time-worn, antiquated, passe, effete, decrepit, superannuated; advanced in life, advanced in years; stricken in years; wrinkled, marked withthe crow's foot; having one foot in the grave; doting &c. (imbecile) 499; like the last of pea time. older, elder, eldest; senior; firstborn. turned of, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... forward through the gate, his eyes fell upon a figure coming up apparently from the sea-shore. It was that of a woman, seemingly well advanced in life, and dressed in the garb of the lower orders: there was nothing particular in her appearance, except that in her gait and figure she was more decrepit than from her countenance might have been expected. The tears were streaming rapidly down her face, however; and though she suddenly paused on perceiving the stranger, she could not command those tears from flowing on, though she turned away ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... quite true of the latitude of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island, that Tomorrow is born before Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection and another of prophecy. I cared not how long the day might be, nor how many of them. I had earned this repose by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... some decrepit and dirty old man or woman to enter the Bureau, selling boot-laces or bananas and, on being peremptorily ordered out, to see the figure suddenly straighten itself, and hear his Chief's well-known voice remark, "So you don't recognise me, ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... are not only blind (excuse my frankness), but pallid and decrepit; how comes it, then, that you have so many lovers? All men's looks are for you; if they get possession of you, they count themselves happy men; if they miss you, life is not worth living. Why, I have ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... of constables was described by Fielding in "Amelia."[148] The watchmen intended "to guard our streets by night from thieves and robbers, an office which at least requires strength of body, are chosen out of those poor old decrepit people, who are from their want of bodily strength rendered incapable of getting a livelihood by work. These men, armed only with a pole, which some of them are scarce able to lift, are to secure the persons and houses of his Majesty's subjects from the attacks of young, bold, stout, ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... old Halsey, raising his eyes for a moment and then dropping them again. Batts did the same. The glance was momentary. But both men had the same impression of a pleasant-faced young woman sitting erect behind Jonathan Webb, the decrepit driver of the wagonette, and looking straight at them as they passed her. There was a general effect of youth and bright colour; of pale brown hair, too, over very ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was sadly crushed. She admitted that she had made a horrible mistake, which she regretted more for our sakes than her own, though she herself was so bored that she felt a decrepit wreck, a ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... a great deal happier and vastly more contented than our liberated and idle old clerk. Though in the first flush and excitement of his freedom from his six-and-thirty years' confinement in a counting-house,—(he entered the office a dark-haired, bright-eyed, light-hearted boy; he left it a decrepit, silver-haired, rather melancholy, somewhat disappointed man, whose spirits, as he himself confesseth, had grown gray before his hair,)—though, when in the dizzy and happy early hours of his freedom, Elia exultingly wrote ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... the tropic jungle, Miss Drexel and Juanita, her Indian maid, led the way. Her brother, carrying the three rifles, brought up the rear, while in the middle Davies and Wemple struggled with Mrs. Morgan and the two decrepit steeds. One, a flea-bitten roan, groaned continually from the moment Mrs. Morgan's burden was put upon him till she was shifted to the other horse. And this other, a mangy sorrel, invariably lay down at the end of a quarter of a ...
— Dutch Courage and Other Stories • Jack London
... and owns no more the folly; shall this be called a heavenly conjunction? Were I in height of youth, as now I am, forced by my parents, obliged by interest and honour, to marry the old, deformed, diseased, decrepit Count Anthonio, whose person, qualities and principles I loathe, and rather than suffer him to consummate his nuptials, suppose I should (as sure I should) kill myself, it were blasphemy to lay this fatal marriage to heaven's charge——curse on your nonsense, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... for the purpose of feeding. Very old persons sleep much of their time; in the natural progress towards death, the animal faculties are first extinguished; accordingly, when they begin to decline in decrepit old age, the periods of their intermissions are longer. The celebrated De Moivre, when eighty-three years of age, was awake only four hours out of the twenty-four; and Thomas Parr at last slept the greatest part of his time. An ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... French bank note is said to average two or three years, and does not terminate until the condition is very shaky indeed—crimpled, pierced with pinholes, corner creases torn, soft, tarnished, decrepit while yet young. Some have been half-burned; one has been found half-digested in the stomach of a goat, and one boiled in a waistcoat-pocket by a laundress. No matter; the cashier at the bank will do his best to decipher it; he will indeed take an infinity of trouble to put together the ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... for himself; nor did he give thought to money, but kept his in a basket suspended by a cord from the ceiling, wherefore all his workmen and friends could take what they needed without saying a word to him. He passed his old age most joyously, and, having become decrepit, he had to be succoured by Cosimo and by others of his friends, being no longer able to work. It is said that Cosimo, being at the point of death, recommended him to the care of his son Piero, who, as a most diligent executor of his father's wishes, gave ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... the high structure of the station. The scene is laid in one of the towns of the Western section. Faces of passengers, restless, way-worn, sickly, are seen in the windows. The cars are over-crowded beyond all measure. There are many black-eyed children, with curly black locks, and also old people, decrepit with age. The railway platform is crowded with Jewish youths, with representatives of the Jewish community, and a mass of curious people who eagerly scan the newcomers. A large crowd of passengers emerge from the cars rapidly and in ...
— The Shield • Various
... flowers, scenery, sports, worship, fine music, the best kind of food, "air the angel's breathe," and sleep recuperative enough to revivify the old and decrepit, fishing, rowing, swimming and the like are not all that need fill one's days at ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... that seemed interminable, the old man came driving around the house. To a ramshackle buggy he had hitched a decrepit horse. They wedged in as best they could, the old man between them, and at a shuffling amble the nag proceeded through ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... myself my own dear land—dear, despite its many phases of wretchedness—smiling in universal comfort and health. I imagined its political prisons yawning with emptiness, while their haggard and decrepit and sorrowful occupants hobbled out into the sunshine of liberty, and the new life we were bringing to them. Fancy flew abroad on the wings of hope, dropping the seeds of progress wherever ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... wits, they were even more hard-headed than the workers. Hence constant excitements and wordy wars, till at last the authorities banished the already outlawed Sabbatai from Smyrna. When he heard the decree he said, "Is Israel not in exile?" He took farewell of his brothers and of his father, now grown decrepit in his body and full of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... picture is recalled which presented itself as we entered for the first time the broad portal of the cathedral, where an old, wrinkled, bare-limbed woman, poor and decrepit, sat upon the stones at the entrance of the church offering rosaries for sale. She did not speak, but held up a cross with its attachments, accompanied by a look so cadaverous, so weak and pitiful, that she got ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... A decrepit vehicle with a gaudy linen canopy hove in sight. Mr. Ducksmith hailed it as the last victims of the Flood must have hailed the Ark. He sprang into it and drove ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... from the tree were then distributed. None of the children were omitted; some went home so loaded that they could hardly carry all, and even many of the oldest, decrepit Indians who could not be ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 4, April, 1889 • Various
... Jasper's life, and almost lost his own in so doing. I fancy he wishes he had, rather than remain the poor cripple he is. Exposure, exertion, and neglect afterward brought on paralysis of the lower limbs, and there he is—a fine, talented, spirited fellow tied to that cursed chair like a decrepit old man." ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... Christmas Eve, gray with the portent of coming snow, crept slowly over the old plantation of Brierwood, softening the outlines of a decrepit house still rearing its roof in massive dignity and a tumbledown barn flanked by barren fields. A quiet melancholy hovered about the old house as if it brooded over a host of bygone Yuletides alive ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... establishments to a wide extent, and though the proportion of the deaf to be benefited by them is small,[113] yet for a number of the deaf there is a peculiar need. These are deaf persons, usually the old and decrepit, who are without means to support themselves, and have no family or friends to look to for help. To them a special retreat in association with others in similar condition proves an immeasurable blessing, and in such their last years may be ...
— The Deaf - Their Position in Society and the Provision for Their - Education in the United States • Harry Best
... expression of ideas and sentiments; it must be adequate, supple, free, now energetic, now graceful, delicate; sometimes even subtle and complex, but always to the exclusion of the ancient remains of decrepit formalism. ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... exulted at beholding the hidden recesses of an Imperial mansion laid bare to the jokes and ribaldry of Belleville and La Villette. Every class of Parisian society was represented in the throng that swayed and hustled through the rooms, but the saddest sight of all was a knot or two of decrepit veterans from the Invalides who leant against the balustrade of the grand staircase, and gazed with pinched-up lips and dry eyes at the National Guards on duty, lounging and carousing down below. The stairs were littered with ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... settled art and language, but strong for that very reason in first impulses, and in putting down all that is felt. . . . The manner in which some of the hoary saints in these pictures pore over their books and carry their decrepit old age, full of a bent and absorbed feebleness—the set limbs of the warriors on horseback—the sidelong unequivocal looks of some of the ladies playing on harps and conscious of their ornaments—the people of fashion seated in rows, with Time coming up unawares ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... It was winter, and yet not Winter's self. The old gentleman had lost all that bright and hilarious nature; all that sparkling and exciting stimulus which he owns and holds here so joyously in January, February, and even March. He was decrepit, yet spiteful; a hoary, old, tottering, palsied villain, hurling curses at all who ventured into his evil presence. One look outside showed me the full nature of all that was before me, and revealed the old tyrant in the ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... a fine summer's afternoon, in the middle of the week, the air is soft and quiet; the busy population of Rouen seem, with one consent, to rest from labour, and the Goddess of Leisure tells her beads. One, two (decrepit old men); three, four, five (nurses and children); six, seven, eight (Chasseurs de Vincennes or a 'noble Zouave),' and so on, until the Rosary is complete and there are no more seats.[50] Every day under our windows they come and wedge themselves close together on the long stone seats under ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... and decrepit, lives with one of her sons, who takes care of her. This son is a gardener and a carpenter and, being thrifty, fares much better than many Negroes ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... Quaker-like garb that her husband had liked, and the muslin kerchief crossed upon her breast was a quaint pearl-like frame to the beauty of feature which had slowly but surely, in spite of adverse circumstance, come to its prime. Smith's stalwart figure and the decrepit form of his friend were both clad in sleek broadcloth. They wore the high white collar and stock of the period. In Smith's light hair there was not a gray thread, nor were there many wrinkles in his smooth forceful face. The old man was gray and wrinkled; he ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the divan, hearing the sentence of the Sultan, approached with their drawn sabres towards the decrepit sage; but Misnar, ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... natural wood. All things about the place carried out the patriarchal air which emanated from the inside as well as the outside of the house. The genius of the provinces preserved everything; nothing was new or old, neither young nor decrepit. A cold precision ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... tippling as often as they can fall into company in the day, and conclude with downright drunkenness at night. These gentlemen never know the satisfaction of youth, but skip the years of manhood, and are decrepit soon after they are of age. I was godfather to one of these old fellows. He is now three-and-thirty, which is the grand climacteric of a young drunkard. I went to visit the wretch this morning, with no other purpose but to rally him under the pain ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... crumbs from the threshold, began to scold shrilly, and at the sound, the old servant, a decrepit negress in a blue gingham dress, hobbled out into the path and stood peering at him under her hollowed palm. Her forehead was ridged and furrowed beneath her white turban, and her bleared old eyes looked up at him with a blind and groping ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... crew itself. The most decrepit, crippled or youthful were of course out of the question. But the foreigner and our shifty friend the man in lieu were fair game. Entering largely as they did into the make-up of almost every scratch crew, they were pressed ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... highest importance. It marks a collision between the old principle of Lewis XIV., of the Bartholomew Massacre, of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the new rationalistic principle of spiritual emancipation. The old principle was decrepit, it was no longer able to maintain itself; the hounds were furious, but their fury was toothless. Before the new principle could achieve mastery, Rousseau had made mastery impossible. Two men came ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... Accompanied by the town government, we started on our rounds. The first house was tightly closed, and no reply was made to our demands for entrance. The second was the same; one might imagine that it had been deserted for weeks. At the third, the door was opened, and within, an aged woman, ugly, bent, decrepit. Here we measured. The next house, and the next, and the next, were shut. And then another open house contained another veritable hag. Passing several other houses, tightly closed, we found a third old woman, and I saw that we were destined to secure nothing but decrepit hags, ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... make them relinquish the pleasure and the profit they derived from the existing state of things. Nor had they the energy or the opportunity to institute a thorough revolution. Italy, as Machiavelli pointed out in another passage of the Discorsi, had become too prematurely decrepit for reinvigorating changes;[2] and the splendid appeal with which the Principe is closed must even to its author have sounded like a flourish ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... one wide grave, with the box of treasures between them, and above them a large white cross with a simple inscription. The lot was fenced around with a hawthorn hedge, and here and there a rose bush grew luxuriantly. There was room for himself and for the old grandmother who was now terribly decrepit, so that she was unable to take any care of the house, and Patrick Marsh had consented to let his little shanty and come, with good Molly his wife, to look after the lad's comfort, for they had no child, and Archie was nearer to them than any living ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... so rude a man, smiled, drew up the least decrepit bench she could find, and sat down, in spite of the angry mutterings of her irritated host. Then she opened her satchel, took out the small bottle of gold, and handed it to him without a word. The ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... reason why the Son of Heaven inclined to the little Shiobara. It had reached the Emperor that a Recluse of the utmost sanctity dwelt in that forest. His name was Semimaru. He had made himself a small hut in the deep woods, much as a decrepit silkworm might spin his last Cocoon and there had ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... should be offered up a more solemn and deliberate sacrifice. The men whom Tancred had spared were all murdered; and the wrath of Tancred was roused, not by their fate, but by an act which called his honor into question. The butchery went on with impartial completeness, old and young, decrepit men and women, mothers with their infants, boys and girls, young men and maidens in the bloom of their vigor, all were mowed down, and their bodies mangled until heads and limbs were tossed together in awful chaos. A few were hidden away by Raymond ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... calling forth by name His mighty Angels, gave them several charge, As sorted best with present things. The sun Had first his precept so to move, so shine, As might affect the earth with cold and heat Scarce tolerable; and from the north to call Decrepit winter; from the south to bring Solstitial summer's heat. To the blanc moon Her office they prescribed; to the other five Their planetary motions, and aspects, In sextile, square, and trine, and opposite, Of noxious efficacy, and when to join ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... of his youth, on the threshold of assured success, snatch him away without warning from the parents devoted to him, the wife who loves him and the children dependent on him; and then leave them both, the decrepit and useless old and the needed young to drop into the tongueless silence of the grave, that silence broken only by the sound of the clods as they fall on the coffin lid or the plash of tears, or the choking sob; to allow the ...
— Why I Preach the Second Coming • Isaac Massey Haldeman
... "Oh, mine is a decrepit world, where nature takes a hundred years to move a foot of solid land. Men and animals go about in flocks. Originality ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... tells his readers that Lancaster was at this time so old as to be nearly decrepit; and two years later, that he was "almost blind for age." He was exactly forty-one, having been born in 1287 (Inq. Tho. Com. Lane, 1 Edward the Third 1. 88), and 53 years had not elapsed since the marriage of his parents. We may well ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... husband, her children, are no more!—one, one only comfort remains—one friend, one solace in adversity—one ray of light in the dark hour! Amidst universal desertion, RUTH has not forsaken her; but is become her joy in sorrow, her companion in solitude, her prop in decrepit age! Can we wonder that she wishes to discard a name which awakened such recollections, and only recalled the dream of happiness? "Call me not Naomi,—call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... embers of the fire, while the ceaseless rain huddled against the pane without, a terrible vision crossed her mind. She saw her son, no longer young, wan with dissipation and excess, peevish and fretting for the luxuries which she herself, old and decrepit, could no longer procure for him. She even heard a voice reproaching her as the cause of their common ruin: "Why did you humor me, woman, when I should have been corrected? Why did you bring me up to ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... who I am. I'm a poor, old, lame, decrepit, miserable creature, sitting down here to ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... of the door had cut into the babble like a knife into butter; a rough, rasping voice, loud and compelling, which caused the conversation of the members of the ensemble to cease on the instant. Only Mr Saltzburg, now in a perfect frenzy of musicianly fervor, continued to assault the decrepit piano, unwitting of an ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the one, and the rather broken-backed appearance of the other, which still retains its legibility although the t's have begun to lose their crossing, we can say that the one was a young man and the other was advanced in years without being positively decrepit." ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... What an opportunity for sermonizing on the failure of representative government! In that war England lost much of her old prestige in the eyes of the world, and felt that she had lost it. But nothing would have been more unphilosophical than to have assumed that England was degenerate or decrepit. It was only that her training had been for so long exclusively mechanical and peaceful. The terrible, but glorious, experience of the Indian Rebellion showed that Englishmen still possessed in as full measure as ever those noble characteristics on which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... broke upon the word, his usually upright figure seemed suddenly bowed and shrunken, he looked indeed a very grief-stricken, decrepit old man as he stood fumbling in the pockets of his shabby coat, whence he presently drew a letter that shook and rustled in his fingers as he ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... is much to show that among quite primitive peoples there is less of shrinking from death and more of certainty about a continued life after death than we generally find among more intellectual and civilized folk. It is, or has been, quite, common among many tribes for the old and decrepit, who are becoming a burden to their fellows, to offer themselves for happy dispatch, and to take willing part in the ceremonial preparations for their own extinction; and this readiness is encouraged by their na[i:]ve and untroubled belief in a speedy transference ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... extravagant, the impossible, the deformed, in style and matter, which is most eagerly read. The simplest things in life should convince one. The novelist's hero is no longer the fine, handsome young fellow of twenty years ago. He is something between forty and fifty, if not deformed, at least decrepit with dissipations, and with the gift of fascination, whatever that may mean, in place of the simpler attributes of a few decades ago. And the heroine!—There is no more book-muslin and innocence. She has, as a rule, green eyes; she is middle-aged, and if she has not been married before, ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... played it once or twice, and played it very well; in fact, an old gentleman who was going slowly along the street stopped and leaned on the fence to listen. He had been a captain in the militia in the days of the old New England trainings, and now though he walked with two canes and was quite decrepit, he liked to be reminded of his military service, and the march gave him a great pleasure and made him young again while he stood there beating time on the front fence, and nodding his head. One may often give pleasure without knowing it, if one ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... she, cunning hag, drew near, And smelling to his herb, he recollects His wandering spirits, and with anger checks His coward fears; resolved now to outdare The worst of dangers, whatsoe'er they were; He eyed her o'er and o'er, and still his eye Found some addition to deformity. An old decrepit hag she was, grown white With frosty age, and withered with despite And self-consuming hate; in furs yclad, And on her head a thrummy cap she had. Her knotty locks, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... decrepit old man fell back into a corner, his eyes glaring with the unmistakable gleam of insanity, and ...
— Dorothy Dale's Queer Holidays • Margaret Penrose
... The people of the city itself had to be helped to escape before the bombardment commenced. They would have to stay there taking care of the children, packing them into lorries, driving ambulances, rendering first aid, taking the wounded and decrepit out of danger and always returning to it again themselves. As the certainty of the risk and service was impressed on them their faces brightened. Risk and service, that was what they most desired; they were girls, but they hungered to play a soldier's ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... tread the stage after us? as if we suffered them to be cut off that we might keep possession for ever. The unfortunate orphan that none will own, none will regard: distress, in whatever form it appears, excites compassion, but particularly in the helpless. Whoever puts an infant into the arms of decrepit old age, passes upon it a sentence of death, and happy is that infant who finds a reprieve. The tender sprig is not likely to prosper under the influence of the tree which attracts its nurture; applies that nurture to itself, where the calls occasioned by decay are the most powerful—An old ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... girlish. It was said that she often wrote State papers from her father's dictation, and was allowed to read all the books in his library. At the receptions—where the situation was saved by the presence of a very decrepit old lady (a relation of the Corbelans), quite deaf and motionless in an armchair—Antonia could hold her own in a discussion with two or three men at a time. Obviously she was not the girl to be content with peeping through a barred ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... the enemy for several days, unknown to them, we determined with a party of 60 men to rise on the Gaol guard, and disarm them, which consisted of 14 old decrepit men and young boys, (whose appointment over us we considered rather an insult, than good economy in the commander:) next we were to proceed to St. John's Gate, about eight rods distant from the gaol and attack and disarm that guard, consisting chiefly of English sailors, 18 in number, ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking
... candle end, with his sharp features, fluffy little moustache, and oval face, he looked at times delicately and gaily young, and then appeared quite old, decrepit, full of sorrow, pressing his folded arms ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... flourish, but in short time be dissolved. And they that go about by disobedience, to doe no more than reforme the Common-wealth, shall find they do thereby destroy it; like the foolish daughters of Peleus (in the fable;) which desiring to renew the youth of their decrepit Father, did by the Counsell of Medea, cut him in pieces, and boyle him, together with strange herbs, but made not of him a new man. This desire of change, is like the breach of the first of Gods Commandements: For there God says, Non Habebis Deos Alienos; Thou shalt not have the Gods of other Nations; ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... Marie's reaction. It was even more encouraging than he had hoped for. "I understand less than before! How could anything reactivate that rubble? They put everything over five years old into the piles, and the stuff's supposed to be decrepit already. You'd almost think we were destroying wealth before its time, because if those disabled mechanisms reactivate—" She came to a dead halt. "That's madness! Oh, I wish High Holy Day were here already so I could get back to work and stop ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by Fortune's dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth; For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Or any of these all, or all, or more, Entitled in thy parts, do ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... now not a barbarous multitude pouncing upon old and decrepit empires, not a violent concussion of tribes accompanied by all the horrors of general destruction, but we see the vigorous elements—peaceably congregating and mingling together on virgin soil—; led together by the irresistible attraction of free and broad principles; ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... of the pageant opened in July 1914. Once again the rulers were feasting and the workers at toil, but the scene was enlivened by the presence of the leaders of the Second International, a group of decrepit professorial old men, who waddled in in solemn procession carrying tomes full of international learning. They sat in a row between the rulers and the people, deep in study, spectacles on nose. The call to war was the signal for a dramatic appeal from the workers to these leaders, who refused ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... little mice that were playing in the barn though the old mouse said: 'Little mice, beware! When the owl comes singing "Too-whoo" take care!' If you do it again we shall consider it deliberately unfriendly of you.... Well, I'll toddle my decrepit old bones out of this. Eleven o'clock! How time has flown, to be sure! Thank you for a pleasant evening. Good-by, George. Good-by, all! Be good little ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigor. That trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, lost its temper and its fine edge, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... and then went home before night. When the big party of 31 arrived, they had with them one other cannibal of Friday's tribe, a Spaniard, and Friday's father. It appears they always carefully unbound a victim before despatching him. They brought Friday pere for lunch, although he was old, decrepit and thin—a condition that always unfits a man among all known cannibals for serving as food. They reject them as we do stringy old roosters for spring chickens in the best society. Then Friday, ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison |
