"Living death" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bringing him in contact with this man and his family. The great troubled eyes of the sick man followed his every movement, and he could not resist the impression that at last they seemed to recognize him and take in some thought of hope. It seemed terrible, this living death, this unutterable silence, and yet those staring eyes, he did not know whether it was a hopeful indication or otherwise, but at last they closed and the sufferer seemed to sleep heavily. Wearily passed the hours; he chose not to leave ...
— Three People • Pansy
... learn in due season," laughed the fiend. "But now mark me, Harry of England, thou fierce and bloody kin—thou shalt be drunken with the blood of thy wives; and thy end shall be a fearful one. Thou shalt linger out a living death—a mass of breathing corruption shalt thou become—and when dead the very hounds with which thou huntedst me shall lick ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... SIN at first its rage dissemble may, 'Twill soon upon thee as a lion prey; 'Twill roar, 'twill rend, 'twill tear, 'twill kill out- right, Its living death will gnaw thee day and night: Thy pleasures now to paws and teeth it turns, In thee its tickling lusts, like brimstone burns. Wherefore beware, and keep it out of door, Lest it should on thee as a ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... reputation and interest; she forgets herself entirely, yet not without bitter anguish. She accepts the sacrifice, but it costs her infinite pangs. She is separated from her husband forever. Nor was the convent agreeable to her. It was dull, monotonous, dismal; imprisonment in a tomb, a living death, where none could know her agonies but God; where she could not even hear from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... said Heyling, after a moment's pause. "To-night I consign you to the living death to which you ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... movement. It loosens what ought to be tight, it contracts the nerves, and so shortens the limbs that a tall man finds all the comeliness of his stature taken from him while he is still unmutilated. It is in truth a living death; and when the excruciating torment is gone, it leaves an almost worse legacy behind it—inability to move. Even debtors in the torture chamber have the weights sometimes removed from their feet; but this cruel malady, when it has ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... into the world? Quindam tunc vivere incipiunt, cum desinendum est, imo quidam ante vivere desierunt quam inciperent, this is of all most lamentable,—many souls end their life, before they begin to live. For what is our life, but a living death, while we do not live to God, and while we live not in relation to the great end of our life and being,—the glory of God? It were better, says Christ, that such "had never been born." You who are created again in Jesus Christ, it most of all concerns you to ask, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... been sold. That son had been, as he once said, the solace of his life. For his sake he had been content to live even under his load of shame and misery. For him he had labored; for his happiness he had planned. And for what? What? That which was too hideous to think of—a living death—a union with one from whom he ought to stand apart ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... joined to Christ, the power of His death makes us dead to self and sin and the world. In that region, as in the physical, death is the gate of life; and, inasmuch as what we die to in Christ is itself only a living death, we live because we die, and in proportion as ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... dream, that some day it would have claimed its last victim, and the surface would be level and solid, so that people would come and go, scarcely remembering that beneath their feet was once a chasm into which throbbing lives had to descend, to darkness and a living death. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... living death— The coffined garb the city wears! I draw through sighs my heavy breath, And pine till lengths of wood and heath Blow over ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... printed it on the rock when she condemned me centuries ago to be enclosed within this narrow cell until you should come and release me. Your hand alone can remove that mystic symbol and save me from the penalty of a living death." ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... that I must be loyal to my employers at any and all costs, that other loyalty, the tie that binds the branded, proved the stronger. I could not bring myself to the point of sending Dorgan, guilty as he doubtless was, back to the living death of the "long-termer." I make no excuses. One cannot touch pitch and escape defilement in some sort. For three years I had lived among criminals; and the bond . . . but I ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... it, Tibble. It seems to me that life is no life, but living death, without that freedom! And I MUST hear of it, and know whether it is mine, yea, and Stephen's, and all whom I love. O Tibble, I would beg my bread rather than not have that ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the 'Cagot and Cressida' 'Suspiria' we should probably have had under symbols of mighty abstractions the vision of the pariah world, and the world of health and outward fortune which scorns and excludes the other, and partly, at all events, actively dooms it to a living death in England of to-day, as in India of the past, and in Jewry of old, where the leper was thrust outside the wall ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... the bitterness of his anguish. And I,—I knew that my father had robbed my husband in the vilest, most insidious manner; that he had drawn upon himself the awful doom of a forger, a dungeon home, a living death. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... word from my love of the hope of the second birth! Could he clear my vision to see the sword creeping out of the sheath Inch by inch as we writhe in the toils of our living death! Could he but strengthen my heart to know that we cannot fail; For alas, I am lonely here—helpless and feeble and frail; I am e'en as the poor of the earth, e'en they that are now alive; And where is their might and their cunning with the mighty ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris
... is high at the beginning, the penalty is terrible at the close. And this penalty is exacted equally from those who have deliberately said, "Evil, be thou my Good," and for those who have been decoyed, snared, trapped into the life which is a living death. When you see a girl on the street you can never say without enquiry whether she is one of the most-to-be condemned, or the most-to-be pitied of her sex. Many of them find themselves where they are because of a too trusting disposition, ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... infinitely great and the infinitely little, frozen by the mockery of two eternities, this "quintessence of dust" which is ourselves, cries aloud to be delivered from the body of its living death. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... With the living death of Takeshi, there was no male heir. Several family councils were held in the presence of the two Mr. Fujinami generally in the lower-house, at which six or seven members of the collateral branches were also present. Grandfather Gennosuke, who despised Takeshi as a waster, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... followed was white and beautiful. On the other hand, if the contract had been neglected, and a woman had accepted a lover without it, then, however great their love, however fit their union in every natural way, the woman was cast out as unchaste, impure, and abandoned, and consigned to the living death of social ignominy. Now let me repeat that we fully recognize the excuse for this social law under your atrocious system as the only possible way of protecting the economic interests of women and children, but to speak of it as ethical ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... would ask did not frighten her, and a happiness which he had persistently held away from himself triumphed in a sudden, submerging flood. It was as if something in her eyes and voice had promised him that the dreams he had dreamed through weeks of torture and living death were coming true, and that possibly in her ride over the tundra that night she had come a little nearer to the truth of what those weeks had meant to him. Surely he would never quite be able to tell her. And what she said to him tomorrow would, in the end, ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... By the blood that you have spilt; By the Law that you have broken; By the terrible red token That you bear upon your brow; By the awful sentence spoken And irrevocable vow Which consigns you to a living Death and to the unforgiving Furies who avenge your crime Through the periods of time; By that dread eternal doom Hinted in your future's gloom, As the flames infernal tell Of their power and perfection In their wavering reflection On the battlements of Hell; By the mercy you denied, I condemn your ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... cases of insanity of both German officers and men who were driven insane by the scenes of slaughter at this battle and especially by the great cry of horror and despair uttered by the poor Russians as they were shot down in cold blood or driven to a living death in the ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... in the varying folds of her glowing scarf. He had visited the tropics, where the zodiacal triangle, with its celestial light, replaces, during the short nights, the burning rays of an oppressive sun. He had crossed the latitudes where life becomes pain, and advanced into those in which it is a living death, making himself familiar, on the long way, with the heavenly miracles in the wild path of sailors who make for no port! Seated on a poop without a helm, his eye had ranged from the two Bears majestically overhanging the North, to the brilliant Southern Cross, through ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... as I could, with uplifted sword to slay and be slain. The bolt was drawn. A tar-barrel caught fire. The door was opened. What followed? Not the men came out, but the fire rushed in at them like a living death, and the first I thought to fight with was blackened and crumpled on the floor like a leaf. One fearsome yell, and dumb for ever. The feet ran up again, but fewer. I heard them hack with their swords a little way up at ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... rejoicing in the power that he had over her mind. If he felt all this for Aunt Maria, what would he not feel for the world, and for that wife of his? If old Aunt Maria could so wake in him the love of life and the hatred of that living death to which he had been condemned, what passionate will to live would rise in answer to the world's ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... to Strides Cottage again! Nearer and nearer now, that moment that must come, and put an end to all this puling hesitation. She could not help the thought that rose in her mind:—"This that I do—this reuniting of two souls long parted by a living death—may it not be what Death does every day for many a world-worn survivor of a half-forgotten parting in a remote past?" For, indeed, it seemed to her that these two had risen from the dead, and that for all she knew each might say of the other:—"It is not she." For ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... defenders of craft and Christian deception, the cunning advocates of regicide, the proud servants of the only salvation-dispensing Church!—there, with rage in their hearts, they meditated plans of vengeance against this criminal pope who had condemned them to a living death; who, like a wicked magician, had changed their sacred college into an open grave! He had killed them, and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... men who were his companions in youth. This gate is opened for them only. Since his retirement no one has seen him; no one ever will see him. He shows the same care to conceal himself that he had formerly to show himself. He has not suffered from his decline. He exists in a sort of living death." ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... of exile, toil, and privation, we are not disposed to deny. The world knows it too well; and seeing that such toils are uncheered by the acquisition of fame or wealth—the only reward it can appreciate—the world considers the life of the missionary a living death, endured like martyrdom, only for the sake of its crown in the life to come. But not in this light was their life considered by the noble three whose history we have sketched in this volume, nor by Dr. Judson. The elevated sources ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... lepers ever thought to contrast their lives with their surroundings, and I trusted they did not. Some few, probably, had not been lepers, but criminals, who preferred the horrid liberty of Elhara to the chance of detection and the living death of the Hib Misbah. Other beggars were not really lepers, but suffered from one or other of the kindred diseases that waste Morocco. In Marrakesh the native doctors are not on any terms with skilled diagnosis, and once a man ventures into Elhara, he acquires ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... to him numerous phases of life—or, rather, of living death—in the slums of the great city which caused him many a heartache at the time, and led him ever afterwards to consider with anxious pity the condition of the poor, the so-called lost and lapsed, the depraved, degraded, and unfortunate. Of course he found—as ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... am afraid he will never know anything more in this world"—she said, sorrowfully—"Neither man nor woman! Nor can he thank God for a life which will be long, living death! ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... at the whole matter fairly and boldly. What were the alternatives? I was Roger Trewinion's eldest son, and if I allowed my father's and Mr. Morton's will to be carried out, I doomed my darling to a loathsome life—a living death, while, though I should attain the object most dear to me, I should live in hell, the hell of being with a woman who loved another man. If I refused to marry her, things would be nearly as bad. I should still ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... Alabama—from which escape is next to impossible now, in my loneliness, stared me in the face. The possibility of ever becoming anything but an abject slave, a mere machine in the hands of an owner, had now fled, and it seemed to me it had fled forever. A life of living death, beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field, and the sugar plantation, seemed to be my doom. The fiends, who rushed into the prison when we were first put there, continued to visit me,{233} and to ply me with questions and with their tantalizing remarks. I ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... souls, so that they would die for each other any minute, so that without each other there was no meaning in anything. It would not help a single soul, for them to murder their love and all the happiness of their lives; to go on in a sort of living death. Even if it were wrong, he would rather do that wrong, and take the consequences! But it was not, it COULD not be wrong, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Treated as criminals till their deeds are fatal, then certified to be "criminal lunatics." Such is the life of the underworld epileptic. Life, did I call it?—let me withdraw that word; it is the awful, protracted agony of a living death, in which sanity struggles with madness, rending and wounding a poor human frame. Happy are they when they die young! but even epileptics live on and on; but while they live we consign them to the underworld, where their pitiful ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... to God that that vessel had come up sooner! We should have been saved—those left of us—from a living death that lasted for many years. Yes, now you come to mention it, I remember the rain; but we never dreamed that it would put out the fire, for we left her burning furiously. Well, the other ship was too late, and it makes no difference now. But, to get on with ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... holding it over her knee. It was a letter—one which must have been delivered on the very day when her father last wore the bunda. The envelope had not been broken: old Kapus hadn't had time to read his letter, the last which he had received before living death encompassed him. The tears gathered in Elsa's eyes at thought of her father handling this very letter with shaking yet still living hands: now they were incapable even of gripping this tiny ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... it was the king himself who had led her back again into the world. Her brow burned as the question forced itself upon her, Would he do so a second time? would he once more hasten, as he had then done, to rescue her from the living death to which she had consigned herself as an atonement for ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... device were startling. By an act of January 4th, 1801, as many as 130 prominent Jacobins were "placed under special surveillance outside the European territory of the Republic"—a specious phrase for denoting a living death amidst the wastes of French Guiana or the Seychelles. Some of the threatened persons escaped, perhaps owing to the connivance of Fouche; some were sent to the Isle of Oleron; but the others were forthwith ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the streets, uttering their long and quavering cries of welcome. To them the entry of the British was a relief from a living death, as almost all were captives taken in war, or in the Dervish raids upon quiet villages. They could scarce even yet believe that they were free—that their ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... whole month now since Eurypelma received his stab from the poisoned javelin of Pepsis, he has not recovered; nor will he ever. When you touch him, he draws up slowly one leg after another, or moves a palpus feebly. But it is living death; a hopeless paralytic is ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... sad, tragic, yet glorious for him! It would be like a magic touch upon this lovely, cold, white ghost of Fay Larkin, transforming her into a living, breathing girl. He held his love as a thing aloof, and, as such, intangible because of the living death she believed she lived, it had no warmth and intimacy for them. What might it not become with a lightning flash of revelation? He dreaded, yet he was driven to speak. He waited, swallowing hard, fighting the tumultuous storm of emotion, and ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... I have broken. But you shall decide, my darling. If I return you will be known as the wife of the convict Sefton. Say: shall I be henceforth dead forever to you and my mother and the children? Shall it be a living death for me, and deliverance and safety and honor for you all? You must choose between my infamy ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... angels, infinitely varied in rank and power. You all know one expression of the purest and happiest form of such faith, as it exists in modern times, in Richter's lovely illustrations of the Lord's Prayer. The real and living death-angel, girt as a pilgrim for journey, and softly crowned with flowers, beckons at the dying mother's door; child-angels sit talking face to face with mortal children, among the flowers;—hold them by their little ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... live in hell, and heaven to behold; To welcome life, and die a living death; To sweat with heat, and yet be freezing cold; To grasp at stars, and lie the earth beneath; To tread a maze that never shall have end; To burn in sighs, and starve in daily tears; To climb a hill, and never to descend; Giants ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... "A living death," Grimshaw said. He glanced down at the replica of himself. A convulsive shudder passed through him from head to foot; his face twisted; his eyes dilated. He made a strong effort to control himself and whispered: "I understand. Go ahead. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... do not wish to see him again. When I meet him at your house, I shall leave the room, since I cannot pull him by the nose. I can force my spirit to leave my body, but it shall never bend to support that body. God of heaven, save thy child from this living death! I scarcely know what I write. My hand trembles; I am ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Ah, veil the living death from sight That wounds our beauty-loving eye! The children turn in selfish fright, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... this woman who thus abandoned the secret of her soul to him; giving him to understand that it was there that she passed her days, buried in her recollections, dreaming of her departed years, of that which had been, of that which might be, a living death. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Froment had been struck on the spinal column by an exploding shell. Young as he was, he was one of the intellectual leaders of his generation, handsome, ardent, eloquent, overflowing with life and visions, loving and beloved, nobly ambitious, and all at once, at a blow,—a living death! His mother who had centred all her pride and love on him now saw him condemned for the rest of his days to this terrible fate. They had both suffered terribly, but each hid it from the other, and this effort kept them up. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... was an exquisitely painful one, which made every nerve quiver and the whole frame thrill with anguish; and that slow agony, in all its terribleness and protractedness, is the image that is set before us as the true ideal of every life that would not be a living death. The world is to be crucified to me, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... life which I had given, I turned from gladness and I walked with woe, Toward living death by grief untimely driven, I search for Thammuz whom harsh fate ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... bile, and stirs intestine feud. Observe your guests, how ghastly pale their looks When they've discussed some mystery of your cook's: Ay, and the body, clogged with the excess Of yesterday, drags down the mind no less, And fastens to the ground in living death That fiery particle of heaven's own breath. Another takes brief supper, seeks repair From kindly sleep, then rises light as air: Not that sometimes he will not cross the line, And, just for once, luxuriously dine, When feasts come round with the revolving year, Or ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... themselves into groups, each group crowding close to the windows for ten minutes, then giving place to another group. They slept on straw that was never changed, and the food given them was scarcely enough to keep them alive. Those who suffered this living death might have been free at any time had they been willing to go over to the British, but few of the patriots, even in this dread hour, deserted their cause. To while away the hours of their captivity, they carved their names upon the walls ...
— The Story of Manhattan • Charles Hemstreet
... and even after he was answerable for two murders. That man never knew himself a villain, and it was only when the rope was gradually closing round his neck that the keen sleuth-hound remorse found him out, and he had the grace to save an innocent man from a living death. This monstrous hypocrite was another typical scoundrel, and his like people every ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... height, And sunk, deep sunk, in second childhood's night! Are men, indeed, such things? and are the best More subject to this evil than the rest, 640 To drivel out whole years of idiot breath, And sit the monuments of living death? Oh, galling circumstance to human pride! Abasing thought, but not to be denied! With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroy'd by thought. Constant attention wears the active mind, Blots out her powers, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... imbecile for life. And after all the dreams and hopes she once had! You can imagine what it has been like for her, Anne, dearie—with her beauty and spirit and pride and cleverness. It's just been a living death." ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... needs lie dead at our feet before these skeptics can be convinced? Is not such a state a living death? Must these men visit him in the cell of the asylum, watch him as a raving maniac, gaze upon him as a hopeless idiot or a driveling imbecile, before they will be convinced? Such proof is at hand. Not an asylum in any country but has its score ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... bleeding breast; rape joined to murder in one awful tragedy; young girls, even children of tender years, outraged by these brutal ravishers till death ended their shame; women held into captivity to undergo the horrors of a living death; whole families burned alive; and, as if their devilish fancy could not glut itself with outrages on the living, the last efforts exhausted in mutilating the bodies of the dead. Such are the spectacles, ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... fixed in slime and gurgle a dismal chant. The materialist and the heretic, whose existence, Dante holds, was only a living death, are confined in blazing tombs. Murderers and tyrants ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... I want to save you from worse than death—yea, from a living death. Go from this place; for if you are here a month hence, you will be lost. Your people here will be defeated, and then the Mexicans will hand you all over to the Padre, who says he means to put you where you will be protected. Mark me: you will be sent where ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... summer the coyotes shunned the specter of living death that plodded silently up and down the valleys and the ridges. When it came suddenly through the trees, drawn by the scent of a fresh kill, some coyote family scattered swiftly and left the feast. Cripp was as apt ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... said in a low voice, "means life to me instead of a living death; it means more than I can tell you, more than even you ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... parentage I may not tell you, but as I hope for salvation I will tell you this. It will be better for you, and better for the child, that she comes back here, even to embrace what you have called the living death." ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sound scarcely human; his right arm shook and quivered with his vain efforts to raise it; still it hung nerveless by his side. Consciousness and will yet lingered in his brain, but physical life and speech had gone for ever. He fell down struck by that living death—that worse than death, ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... when hope had sunk again to its lowest ebb, and all his worst apprehensions revived. It was like a living death; he was a close prisoner, and never a word reached him that any of his friends were concerning ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... country became more sombre from the increasing number of pines bordering the road and mingling with the distant forest. Very weird pines these were, chiefly covered with closely-packed dead foliage, with a living tuft of dark green at the end of each branchlet. A living death seemed to be their lot, and they moaned without moving as the light wind passed ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... he always was by the conquest of difficulties, he admired the force of mind and will by which this Russian lady, whom a terrible accident had made a hopeless invalid, overcame disabilities that would have reduced most people to a state of living death. In her, spirit annihilated matter. She joined French vivacity to the penetrating sensibility of the Sclavonic races, and she was a keen reader of character. Cavour interested her at once. Even in his exterior, the young Italian, with blond hair and blue eyes, was then ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... all, Who form a faction or who found a school, We weave Penelope's web with hearts of gall, And my poor brain is oft the weary tool. Yet do I choose this life. What is to me Peace or good fame, away from all of these, But living death? I do choose liberty, And leave to ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... cried,—'would God it were morning, and in the morning would God it were night!' then life is not good. If you could be some one else for a few hours, then you might understand—what defeat and living death—" ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... she had been all her life From tender human ties, she loved the world With all her loving heart, the fresh, free world That God had made, and this life seemed to her As but a living death. A living tomb The harsh stone walls that from the convent frowned Upon the peaceful valley sweet with flowers. The beautiful green valley, threaded by Bright rivulets that sought the quiet lake, Dear haunts sought daily by her maiden feet. And "wilt thou not, for my ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... braved dangers untold. I sought—defied death, because I deemed you lost. I spared the man I thought my rival, because I believed you loved him. Though a young man, there are gray hairs in my head, for it has been a living death since that night, Morgianna. Why ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... a railroad accident saying: "That was the first time I had ever seen death; the first time I realized what death was." Exactly. You don't know death till you have seen it; you don't know invasion till you have felt it. However wise, however able the conquerors, life under them is a living death. True, the farmer's property was untouched, but his liberty was gone. If you, a well- behaved citizen, have ever been arrested and marched through the streets of your home town by a policeman, how did you like it? Give the policeman a rifle ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... brought To learn the lesson nature taught, Then had I, like my sires of yore, The prize from every courser bore. Now, lasting servitude's my lot, My birth contemned, my speed forgot; Doomed am I, for my pride, to bear A living death from ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... stupefy, blunt, and confuse together in lifeless meshes, the vital tenant and the mortal tenement; they grow incorporate, alike unclean, powerless, guilty, and wretched. Then "Man lives a life half dead, a living death, Himself his sepulchre, a moving grave." Active virtue, profound love, and the earnest pursuit, in the daily duties of life, of "Those lofty musings which within us sow The seeds of higher kind and brighter being." ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... came back to my living death; too weak now to carry a finger to the salt water and back to my mouth; too weak to think of Eva; too weak to pray any longer for the end, to trouble or to care ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... frustrate his scheme; but I soon heard that the house was actually begun. I vowed before my Maker that I would never enter it: I had rather toil on the plantation from dawn till dark; I had rather live and die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death. I was determined that the master, whom I so hated and loathed, who had blighted the prospects of my youth, and made my life a desert, should not, after my long struggle with him, succeed at last in trampling his victim under his feet. I would do any thing, every ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... that Judge Scott was merely ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it and was hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged down by half a dozen of his blue- coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott was the keystone in the arch of injustice, ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more, to change this terror of sick negation, of unspeakable death, for that region of painful hope. Imagination cannot mislead us into too much horror of being without God—that one living death. Is not this ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... refuses and I cannot force it. All this—what is it to me?" She swept her hand at the glowing luxury around her. "Without love, what would such another home be to me? Worse than a prison-cell, I swear! A living death, to one like me! Barter and sale—cold calculation—oh, horrible ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... are what a cowpuncher would call a swell Easterner." Ignoring Gray's grimace of dislike she went on, deliberately exaggerating her musical Texas drawl. "You are a person of education and culture; you speak languages; you have the broad 'a,' and if you had to go unshaven it would be a living death. You are rich, too, and probably play the piano. People like that ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... was returning to his rooms from the foul haunts of squalid dissipation and living death, when the thought of his own intolerable condition pressed on him with a heavier than usual weight. It was a very cloudy night, and he had long exceeded the usual college hours. The wind tossed about his clothes, and dashed in his face a keen impalpable sleet, while nothing dispelled ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... look up, and still he rocked himself gently, leaning on his sword. The girl suffered, too, to see him suffering so. A little while ago he had been hard, fierce, angry, cruel, threatening her with a living death that had filled her with horror. It had seemed quite impossible that there could be the least tenderness in him for any one—least of all ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... neither romps, nor plays, nor laughs. He is inert. Some ancestor chained him to the rock, and the vultures of disease and unhappiness are feeding at his vitals. He asks for bread, and they give him a stone; he asks for life, and they give him a living death; he asks for a heaven of delight, and they give him a hell of despair. He has a right to freedom, but, in place of that, he is forced into slavery of body and soul to pay the debts of his grandfather. Nor can he pay these debts in full, but ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... than ordinary death such as was credited me," huskily muttered the exile. "Ten years,—and ever since I have been here, helpless to extricate myself, doomed to a living death, which none other can ever ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... struggling in terrible earnest with want, and taking, through the Sweater who commands the situation, starvation prices for the making of a coat, for the which, by working nineteen hours in the day, and reducing life to the slavery of a living death, they manage to earn ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 6, 1891 • Various
... surely choke from the suffocating pressure upon my chest; I retain memory of glaring violently into the darkness; how I fondled the sharp edge of the hunting knife, crying and shouting impotent curses, which I trust God has long ago forgiven, at that incarnate devil who had hurled me down to such living death. Terror dominated my brain, pulsed like molten fire through my blood, until, as the desperation of my situation became more clearly defined, I tottered upon the very verge of insanity, feeling I should soon become a helpless, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... fear of my defenceless foe awhile unnerved my arm, But thoughts of glory or of gain dispelled the better charm; The water reddened with his blood, I left the lifeless corse, To meet myself a living death,—a lifetime ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... blind spot in the eye?' Not much was said about it at the time, but four days later, again at lunch, I outlined the whole story to him. I wrote the first eighteen chapters; Homer took up the tale as 'Hobart Fenton' and wrote the chapters about the house of miracles, the living death, the rousing of Aradna's mind, and so forth, up to 'The Man from Space,' where once again I ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... did they dare, to slay Owen Roe O'Neill? Yes, they slew with poison, him they feared to meet with steel. May God wither up their hearts! May their blood cease to flow! May they walk in living death, who poisoned Owen Roe! We thought you would not die—we were sure you would not go, And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell's cruel blow— Sheep without a shepherd, when the snow shuts out the sky— Oh! Why did you leave us, Owen? Why did ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... I had a vision. I saw a door—shut, ominous. Before that door stood a woman, tall, pale, beautiful. She was there to enter, but to what no mortal living could say. She saw nothing but loss and the hollowness of a living death behind that closed door. ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... effort. Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like one sentence. There is something sublime in Martin's sceptical indifference to moral good and evil. It is the repose of the grave. It is better to suffer this living death, than a living martyrdom. "Nothing can touch him further." The moral of Candide (such as it is) is the same as that of Rasselas: the execution is different. Voltaire says, "A great book is a great evil." Dr. Johnson would have laboured this short apophthegm into ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... always love him? Truth—truth and duty—loyal faith to her husband, the man whom in her mistake she had married. O, why could not such mistakes be undone! But they never could, never. It was a living death that she was condemned ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... anything else. Their minds were so set upon the girl marrying that Lord's son that they are greatly disappointed. I admire her for what she did. I wish I had done the same myself before I married Gabe Grimsby. My life has been a living death ever since. But, there, I have talked too long. I must hurry away home. I hope Gabe will never know that I have been here. He must think that ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... shook his fist at the Catholic University and its scientific priestly professors, who condemned one so lightly to a living death. He hated the aspect of the place, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... dead. Yet not by bitter hemlock. By the living death of an issue of blood which is worse than leprosy hath Sara been buried from the clean, ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... it have come without any warning? It's as sudden as being shot. It's the living death, Binkie. We're to be shut up in the dark in one year if we're careful, and we shan't see anybody, and we shall never have anything we want, not though we live to be a hundred!" Binkie wagged his tail joyously. "Binkie, we must think. Let's see how it feels to be blind." Dick shut his eyes, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... throughout, and now he had been beaten in his game. He absolutely ignored his old passion for Lady Laura as though it had never been, and regarded himself as a model of constancy,—as a man who had loved, not wisely perhaps, but much too well,—and who must now therefore suffer a living death. He hated Parliament. He hated the Colonial Office. He hated his friend Mr. Monk; and he especially hated Madame Max Goesler. As to Lord Chiltern,—he believed that Lord Chiltern had obtained his object by violence. He would see to that! Yes;—let ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... about the year 1670, a painful book, the "Life of Pascal," a portrait painted slowly from the life or living death, but with an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive of disease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal's brain revealed, we are now told, the secret, not merely of that long prostration, those sudden passing torments, but of something analogous ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Hoffnung greeted me upon his quarterdeck, and his men sent up rounds of cheers which echoed over the waters. I stood for some minutes forgetful of everything, save that I had been snatched from that prison of steel; brought from the shadow of the living death to the hope of seeing friends, and country, and home again. Now one man wrung my hand, now another brought clothes, now another hot food; but I stood as one stricken dumb, holding nervously to the taffrail as though none should drag me down again to the horrors of the dinghy, or ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... More than once she had heard M. de Crillon talk—and very unconcernedly too—of the living death of those who unhappily became the victims of a lettre de cachet. Yes, she remembered well how once, in order to gratify her importunate curiosity, he had told her of people sent to Pignerol, St. Michel, or Isle Marguerite, ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... "not to implore mercy, for full well I know it would be vain. Neither do I speak to gain your prayers, for a lingering, living death within these walls will be a penance fit to cleanse my soul of every sin. I speak not for myself, but for one whom I have wronged though he never did me wrong; one who, if living, is now an exile under the ban of ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... neglected, and their souls forgotten. Nor is it unfrequent that their physical strength gives way under the constant pressure of intellectual studies. And thus they are subjected to all the evils of physical inability—the sufferings of living death, in consequence of an erroneous education. Besides, they are destitute of all those kinder feelings and sympathetic emotions which alone result from the cultivation of the moral susceptibilities, and become insensible to the more delicate affections of the soul, and elevating hopes of the truly ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... what is it feel I then? If 'tis, how strange a thing, sweet powers above! If love be kind, why does it fatal prove? If cruel, why so pleasing is the pain? If 'tis my will to love, why weep, why plain? If not my will, tears cannot love remove. O living death! O rapturous pang!—why, love! If I consent not, canst thou o'er me reign? If I consent, 'tis wrongfully I mourn: Thus on a stormy sea my bark is borne By adverse winds, and with rough tempest tost; Thus unenlightened, lost in ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... have awakened an interest in this remarkable and unique subject, and at the same time, above all, excited a stronger feeling of sympathy for our brothers and sisters suffering at the present time from the disease—a living death—in various portions of the globe, my humble efforts will not have been ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... sound of his voice, to receive his smiles, seemed to her a joy she could only surrender with her existence. What then was the prospect of so soon losing him, even to crown himself with honor, but to her a living death? ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... she sighed, "My Carlos!" even now I feel the perfumed zephyr of her breath Bearing to me those words of living death, And starting out the cold drops on ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... said in conclusion, "there is no convincing a layman of the matter contained on your shelves. Nor can I so convince my public. Nor will I try to. Besides, the man is consigned to the living death of life- long imprisonment in the pest-house. You know the beastly hole it is. He loves the dog. He's mad over it. Let him have it. I tell you it's rotten unfair and cruel, and I won't stand ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... to think of. The awful God! "Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I go from Thy Presence? If I climb up into heaven, Thou art there; if I go down to hell, Thou art there also." Where life is, there is He; and though it be but the life of death—the living death of eternal torment—He is the principle of it. And being thus intimately present with the very springs of thought, and the first elements of all being, being the sustaining cause of all spirits, whether they be good or evil, He is intimately present with evil, ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... seasons. The blossom was to Hator, the fruit is to me. Hator also was a brooder—but now his followers do not brood. In Sant all is icy selfishness, a living death. They hate pleasure, and this hatred is ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay |
