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More "Unendurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... REBELLION.—Habit has been called the "balance wheel" of society. This is because men readily become habituated to the hard, the disagreeable, or the inevitable, and cease to battle against it. A lot that at first seems unendurable after a time causes less revolt. A sorrow that seems too poignant to be borne in the course of time loses some of its sharpness. Oppression or injustice that arouses the fiercest resentment and hate may finally come to be accepted with resignation. Habit helps us learn that "what cannot be cured ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... you children could manage to remember to shut the screens doors behind you," remarked Doctor Hugh one morning at the breakfast table. "If there is one thing positively unendurable, it is flies ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... seat at table, the return of their usual hour of arrival, all places and all things remind us of the departed one, and bring up harrowing remembrances of the past, that add deeper pangs to our sorrow, and fill our hearts with more unendurable anguish, and suffuse our cheeks with more scalding tears, as the stern reality presses upon us, that ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... unfertile, the olive groves bear little fruit. I wandered through the lonely country, towards the mountains; the day was overcast and the clouds hung sluggishly overhead. As I walked, suddenly I heard a melancholy voice singing a peasant song, a malaguena. I paused to listen, but the sadness was almost unendurable; and it went on interminably, wailing through the air with the insistent monotony of its Moorish origin. I struck into the olives to find the singer and met a swineherd, guarding a dozen brown pigs, a youth thin of face, with dark eyes, clothed in undressed sheep-skins; and the brown ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... unendurable, the Topaze was got ready, and the refugees hurriedly went on board and started for St. Lucia. In the afternoon the gentlemen of the party, having placed their families in safety, returned by the ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... that of his own will, lest the poets of the democracy looking back on the heroes of the past should overcome them with the ideas of a later day, and the Atticottic nature find a loftier spirit in those who felt the unendurable pride of the Fianna and rose against it. Well, it is only natural he should try to protect the children of his thought, but they need no later word from him. If writers of a less noble mind than his deal with these things they will not rob his heroes of a single power to uplift or inspire. In Greece, ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... cause for itself, and hold life cheap if its sacrifice may in any way advance it. Blockade duty is perhaps a harder test of this love than actual field service; and as months pass on, it becomes almost unendurable. The first few days can be taken up in sight seeing on board, and the most novel of these said sights is the drill which follows the daily call to quarters. The rapid roll of the drum is the signal: here, there, everywhere, on berth ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... brought to a crisis. Her home becomes unendurable to her, and she accepts the offer of marriage made by a subordinate, and not very highly paid official, in one of the Departments of the Civil Service. Her parents pronounce their blessing, and rejoice in an event which promises them an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various
... mention. On the voyage from New Orleans to Galveston, the Captain of the ship refused to keep his agreement with his passengers in regard to furnishing ice and other absolute necessaries, thus endangering their health and making their situation thoroughly unendurable. After unsuccessful efforts to bring the Captain to reason, my brother took command himself, placed the Captain, heavily ironed, in close confinement, and thus landed in Galveston. Then he released his prisoner, and repaired immediately to General ...
— 'Three Score Years and Ten' - Life-Long Memories of Fort Snelling, Minnesota, and Other - Parts of the West • Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve
... for, had talked with just a few hours ago, lay dead in the bunk-house, she forgot that it was merely an expected incident of Western life. She lay in her bed shaking with nervous dread, and the shrill rasping of the crickets and tree-toads was unendurable. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... last words, and perhaps I should not have noticed them; yet, as a friend of you and yours, I will say again, Kitty, he who is not fit to live should feel himself most unfit to die, which is but to live with all the passions that made life unendurable made ours forever." ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... what's given you. You stand alone, and you'll be cut alone, worked overtime alone, kicked alone, and, when it gets unendurable, starve alone. But, if you've got any sense or sand, don't stand alone to get kicked and cuffed and robbed by a company or by a bunch of companies. Meet union with union, strength with strength, and, if worst comes ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... Business can go on no longer with it. The most Conservative English People, thickest-skinned, most patient of Peoples, is driven alike by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things 'spoken,' and by things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only felt and very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People. Their Life, as it is, has ceased to be longer possible ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... the toil of rowing in the galleys was excessive, almost unendurable. Yet it seems to have been performed by freely-enlisted men, and therefore it was probably less severe than that of the great-oared galleys of more recent times, which it was found impracticable to work by ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the poor old man's groans,—the sight of his gashed, oozing, and inflamed back, bared again to the whip,—was to Carl unendurable. But as it was not in his power to obey the impulse of his soul, to spring for a musket and slay that monster of cruelty, Ropes, on the spot,—he must try other means, perhaps equally unwise and desperate, to save Toby ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... of the Bishop of Hippo. The mules and horses that buck when one is trying to cure them, are his symbol for the recalcitrant Donatists. The little donkeys, obstinate and cunning, that trot in the narrow lanes of Algerian casbahs, appear here and there in his sermons. The gnats bite in them. The unendurable flies plaster themselves in buzzing patches on the tables and walls. Then there are the illnesses and drugs of that country: the ophthalmias and collyrium. What else? The tarentulas that run along the beams on the ceiling; the hares that ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... "canned thunder." She did not dare to be informed as to the probable details of those intentions; to know fully the nature of the risk he was running would have made the agony of her apprehensiveness unendurable. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... harkened—I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... his—that this foul dishonor could creep up and stain them—that this infamy could ever be of them and upon them. All the ruin that before had fallen on him to-day was dwarfed and banished; it looked nothing beside the unendurable horror ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... life had been a hideous burden. It was unendurable. Every time he opened his Bible, he read his own condemnation; and, as he slowly paced his study, he muttered text after text, always ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... conscience was worked upon until she bound him to a cabinet maker in the city. To him, the restraint was unendurable, and he ran away. He came after dark to bid me good-bye, left love for mother and Elizabeth, and next morning left Pittsburg on a steamboat, going to that Eldorado of Pittsburg ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... again passed by this swamp and found that during the interval it had not been visited by a single moose. The moccasin tracks had been scented, and the moose had left the neighborhood. A moose with a nose as sensitive as this would find existence unendurable in New ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... as a lion endure unendurable evil: No one of men who doth wrong shall escape from ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... civilisation, of which he had unquestionably witnessed there some of the worst aspects, and also a strong belief in the efficacy of passive resistance as the most peaceful means of securing the redress of all Indian grievances in India as well as in South Africa should they ever become in his opinion unendurable. Mr. Gokhale, before he died, obtained a promise from him that for at least a year he would not attempt to give practical expression to the extreme views which he had already set forth in the proscribed ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... utterly innocent of the smallest perception of its meaning or intention—the draughts they drew upon the patience of the audience were enormous, and but grudgingly met. But for the acting of Farren and the managers, the whole thing would have been an unendurable infliction. As it was, it afforded a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... great deal of pain where there is a very cheerful temper in which to bear it, and much leisure where there is much intelligence, but not vice versa. For if a man is intelligent, he feels pain doubly or trebly; and a cheerful but unintellectual temper finds solitude and unoccupied leisure altogether unendurable. ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... confidence between Lewisham and Miss Heydinger, each of which increased Lewisham's exasperation. "It will not be long before you also, Lewisham, will begin to know the infinite purification of a Pure Love...." Then suddenly, with a vague idea of suppressing Parkson's unendurable chatter, as one motive at least, Lewisham rushed into ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... oneself, much less any one else. At any rate," she said, with a bitter smile, "you have given me Bellamy, a start in society, and a sapphire necklace. In twenty years, I hope, if the fates are kind, to have lost Bellamy on the road—he is really unendurable—to rule society, and to have as many sapphire necklaces and other fine things as I care for. In enumerating my qualities, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... forward, fiery hot, and with a trembling hand took one of the papers he was distributing all round, right and left, to the people on deck. It was unendurable that the memory of that one event should thus dog me through life with such ubiquitous persistence. I tore open the sheet. There, with horrified eyes, I read this hateful paragraph, in the atrociously vulgar style ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... sake of any ulterior object, and, as this approval is more and more fostered and strengthened by praise (III:liii.Coroll.), and on the contrary (III:lv.Coroll.) is more and more disturbed by blame, fame becomes the most powerful of incitements to action, and life under disgrace is almost unendurable. ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... frantic. A stampede among them there would have meant instant death to many of us, and untold suffering to the dismounted remainder. How slowly the cold, bitter hours went by! I had thought the burning heat of the Colorado September unendurable. I wondered in that time of freezing torment if I should ever again call the ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... a man with a blackened face, a shattered knee, and festering holes all over his body. Gas-gangrene had set in and the stench was almost unendurable. The surgeon gently felt the injured leg, but the man gave such long-drawn piercing shrieks that he had to be left alone. He was sent to the resuscitation ward to recover strength a little, for he was very weak through loss of blood. In the evening he began to rave—he asked for ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... greasy nature of this curious form of clay is remarkable. Naphtha has been obtained from it and various commercial enterprises have been started at Kimmeridge in connexion with the local product but all seem to have failed miserably because of the unendurable smell that emanates ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... have died with fatigue. We should be looking like ghosts ourselves, and despair would be seizing on our hearts. We should be in continual squabbles with our guides and porters, and completely exposed to their unbridled brutality. During the daytime, a damp, penetrating, unendurable humidity! At night, a cold frequently intolerable, and the stings of a kind of fly whose bite pierces the thickest cloth, and drives the victim crazy! All this, too, without saying any thing about wild beasts ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... obstinacy of a bigot tries to meet the acumen of a lawyer? What more terrible to endure than the acrimonious pin-pricks to which a passionate soul prefers a dagger-thrust? Granville neglected his home. Everything there was unendurable. His children, broken by their mother's frigid despotism, dared not go with him to the play; indeed, Granville could never give them any pleasure without bringing down punishment from their terrible mother. His ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... over on his back. The ammonia was still in his eyes, and he could not open them. The agony was terrible, almost unendurable. With her hand under his arm he struggled to his feet. He felt her lead him somewhere, and suddenly he was pushed into a chair. She left him alone for a little while, but presently came back and began ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... issued to each man. It was parched in the coals, mixed with salt, stored in the pockets, and eaten on the road. Chewing the corn was hard work. It made the jaws ache and the gums and teeth so sore as to cause almost unendurable pain. ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... life. I had no ballast, nothing to steady me in the tempest. My hope had been all in the present, and it perished with her. I cared for nothing, my little children were a misery to me, the old home was unendurable. I got leave of absence from my employers, and came up here—desperate. I dashed into every sort of dissipation and extravagance; I tried one excitement after another, if only I could drown every memory I had. I abandoned myself to so-called 'friends' of the worst sort, who degraded me to their ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... might have been a day of fate indeed. Life would have been an unendurable burden if what you feared had happened. What's more, I would have lost my faith in God had such a home and its inmates been destroyed. The thought of it makes me sick," and I ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... ashamed, and he felt others were ashamed in his presence. "Fancy such a thing happening," he said, sitting down. "I was sitting here, and all of a sudden, do you know, I felt a terrible piercing pain in my side . . . unendurable, my nerves could not stand it, and . . . and it led to this silly performance. This is the age of nerves; there is no help ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 1812 these unendurable insults to our flag were not repeated by Great Britain, but her Government steadily refused to make any formal renunciation of her right to repeat them, so that our immunity from like insults did not rest upon any better foundation than that which ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... and great clouds of black earth from the woods. A German letter was found next day dated "In Hell's Trenches." It added: "It is not really a trench, but a little ditch, shattered with shells—not the slightest cover and no protection. We have lost 50 men in two days, and life is unendurable." White puffs of shrapnel from field guns were lathering the place persistently, so that when the German trenches were broken down it was difficult to repair them or move ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... the doctor, "all the scenes of which charity compels you to be a spectator; but you will get used to it in time, as we all do. It is the law of existence. The confessor, the magistrate, the lawyer would find life unendurable if the spirit of the State did not assert itself above the feelings of the individual. Could we live at all but for that? Is not the soldier in time of war brought face to face with spectacles even more dreadful than those we see? ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... little chaps' after all," I couldn't resist commenting. "Familiarity breeds contempt, you see. I am sorry Diogenes had so much of their society. He'll be unendurable tomorrow. Well, you had ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... respect to the scenery. I think, as a general rule, that a foreign traveller may always be sure, if a country is abused in France, it possesses attractions for him, and vice versa; for the "toute beaute" of a French amateur is invariably a piece of formality or common-place, unendurable to the lovers of the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... machine which summons the sovereign to exercise his sovereignty being set agoing about every four months.—This was a good deal, and too much, as the sovereign himself soon discovers. Voting so frequently becomes unendurable; so many prerogatives end in getting to be drudgery. Early in 1790, and after this date, the majority forego the privilege of voting and the number of absentees becomes enormous. At Chartres, in May, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... plighted faith. And accordingly for six and seven years these incomparable men accomplished the cruel task imposed upon them. And this last, the thirteenth year, was exceedingly hard for them to pass. Yet unrecognised by any one they have passed it, as known to you, suffering unendurable hardships of various kinds. This is known to you all. These illustrious men have spent the thirteenth year, employed in menial service of others. This being so, it is for you to consider what will be for the good of both Yudhishthira ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... escape me, which, instead of eliciting sympathy, would only excite laughter. Maimed and bleeding, I toiled on, and wishing, oh! so fervently, that the next blow might be on my head, instead of the inferior parts of my body. Towards evening, my torture became unendurable, and throwing my tired body on the ground, I determined not to work longer, let the consequences be what they may. This conduct was so entirely unexpected, that it took my captors by surprise, and finding blows of no avail, ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... river of feet, Sahib, that never—never—never stops. It is not the standing without any motion; it is not hunger; nor is it the dead part before the dawn when maybe a single one comes here to weep. It is the burden of the unendurable procession of feet from the knee down, that ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... son is a tell-tale, Mr. Grace, and allow me to say that this is none of his business. When I am insulted, I resent it." To be chaffed by his own uncle when under sentence of a court-martial had not been agreeable, but this admonition was unendurable. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... Maharajah. Worse still, he was making a pundit of that outcast boy, who had been already too much favoured in the palace, so that he might very well grow up to be Minister of the Treasury instead of Rasso, son of Surji Rao—a thing unendurable. Surji Rao was the fattest man in the State, so fat that it was said he sat down only twice a day; but he lay awake on sultry nights for so many weeks reflecting upon this, that he grew obviously, almost ostentatiously, thin. To this he added such an extremely dolorous expression ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... victory. When he felt himself sufficiently rested, he renewed the fight; and, by adopting various manoeuvres, in which he was greatly assisted by some adjacent trees, succeeded in putting in several telling blows with his knife. Again the animal became aroused to madness unendurable, and, gathering himself up for a final effort, succeeded in planting a terrible blow on the hunter's head, which once more brought him to the ground. From this blow and the previous loss of blood, the brave man fainted entirely away. How long he remained in this state he ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... heart, I hate green, or red, or I dislike any one colour, and then is obliged to live in its neighbourhood, she will find herself dwelling with an enemy. We all know that there are colours of which a little is enjoyable when a mass would be unendurable. Predominant scarlet would be like close companionship with a brass band, but a note of scarlet is one of the most valuable of sensations. The gray compounded of black and white would be a wet blanket to all bubble of wit or spring of fancy, but the shadows of rose colour ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... see clearly through the confusion, how unbearable it had been to hear him say, "That you with your youth and your innocence and your candour...." He had thought it too horrible to suspect her, and by that confidence he made her load of guilt almost unendurable. ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... sky, though it was not yet the stated hour of worship, she suddenly knelt down, and leaning on their knees, with hands clasped more fervently than her wont, she broke forth into tremulous singing of that hymn, which from her lips they now never heard without unendurable tears. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... never recovered from the blow. The circumstances of her son's death were too abominable, to unendurable. If he had risked his life in the conspiracy, she might have been reconciled to his losing it. But he was a mere child, who had sat at home, chafing but powerless, while his seniors plotted and fought. He had been sacrificed to the Duke's insane fear, to his savage ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... as to Harut, because we are too valuable to be killed just now, if for no other reason; also as to the suspense, which is unendurable. Therefore I will walk with you to look at that snake, Ragnall, and so no doubt will Hans. The exercise will ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... himself,—his second self,—as that being; and to perceive with how withering a contempt such a being would contemplate such another man as was in truth the real George Hotspur, whose actual sorrows and troubles had now become so unendurable. ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... step, or go around or under, were very numerous, and sometimes we landed in a bed, not of roses, but of thorns. Sloths and strange birds' nests hung from the trees, while the mosquitos and insects made life almost unendurable. We were covered with carapatas, bruised and torn, and almost eaten up alive ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... this the most accursed, unendurable of ills! Nigh two months a fevered fancy for a maid my bosom fills. Fair she is, as other damsels: but for what the simplest swain Claims from the demurest maiden, I must sue and sue in vain. Yet doth now this thing of evil my longsuffering heart ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... to Poppins' lodgings, and there quarrel with her old friend Polly. It may be that at this time she did not receive all the respect that had been paid to her some months back, and this reverse was, to her proud spirit, unendurable. "Polly," she said, "if you wish to turn your back upon me, you can do so. But I won't put up ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... chill in Fownes' fingers was clearly not unendurable, for in a moment he came to the table, and putting his hand over that of Janice, which held the ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... distinctness with which he conceived a state of society from which every vestige of strife, and the modes of behaviour adapted to ages of strife, shall be utterly and forever swept away. Through misery that has seemed unendurable and turmoil that has seemed endless, men have thought on that gracious life and its sublime ideal, and have taken comfort in the sweetly solemn message of peace on earth and good will ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... ending he had cut four years out of his life. For this reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh unendurable—loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... insistent than ever. He felt that it would be impossible to remain seated, calmly talking, for another minute. The conversation of the Davencotts that had so engaged him now only sounded like a senseless clatter of words and unendurable laughter. He wished they would go; that all of them except Savina Grove would vanish; but why he wanted her to stay, why he wished to be alone with her, and what, in such a circumstance, he would say, were all mysteries. Lee determined to rise and make his bow, to ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was not so promising; it was Mrs. Cowell and Louise over again—plain, sensible, thrifty, but perfectly unendurable to luxurious Mary, who was accustomed to elegance and ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... next room was—as she now knew—the voice that haunted Romayne. Not the words that had pleaded hunger and called for bread—but those other words, "Assassin! assassin! where are you?"—rang in her ears. She entreated Madame Marillac to break the unendurable interval of silence. The widow's calm voice had a soothing influence which she was eager to feel. "Go on!" ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... more. The deadly palor of her countenance was the only sign of the anguish she suffered; outwardly, she was very calm. If she could only have done anything for her pet! but to wait, and watch, not knowing what to do, this was unendurable; and she was just debating in her own mind if she ought not to send for another doctor, as Louis might be detained all night, when she heard him come in. She pressed her cold hands upon her brow, and ordered Sarah to bring him immediately; ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... unfortunate as to come within the range of its influence. The passengers on the steamship America, from Bremen for New York via Southampton, found the brief period of their stay at the latter port almost unendurable; and while some paced the wet decks impatiently, others grumbled both loudly and deeply in the cabins, or shut themselves up in their state-rooms in sulky discomfort. Those who remained on deck had at least the amusement of watching for the steamboat ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... love you so dearly that your displeasure is perfectly unendurable," she replied, lifting her head to ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... over the prairie country into what seemed to her to be the Nowhere, listening to the wind chant, now requiems, now dirges, listening to its shriek and whistle, listening to it cry aloud and moan, die down to a whisper, then rise once more and wail like a living thing in unendurable pain. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... happiness, Felicity had preached, would be less unendurable than no happiness—ever—at all; and she had at last convinced herself that this was so. Yet now she shook with doubt. Was this dead thing the actuality which at any price she ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... there," said Betty, but she did not dare to say anything else. What an unendurable thing to be afraid and ashamed of ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Play was evidently written at a time when the conviction that the state of things which it represents could not endure much longer, had taken deep hold of the Poet's mind; at a time when those evils had attained a height so unendurable—when that evil which lay at the heart of the commonweal, poisoning all the social relations with its infection, had grown so fearful, that it might well seem, even to the scientific mind, to require the fierce 'drug' of the political revolution,—so fearful as to make, even to such a mind, the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... not think that, in its main features, the truth of this sketch can be impugned; and if it be just even in outline, then a reformation of some kind or other was overwhelmingly necessary. Corruption beyond a certain point becomes unendurable to the coarsest nostril. The constitution of human things cannot ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... criticism is becoming unendurable. Of course you have heard that matters have already become strained between the civil government and myself. Only last week my head aide-de-camp sent for a barber who was attached to a neighboring regiment, using as a messenger the orderly whom I had stationed at the door. For this trifling ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... aggrandisement of Prussia has been denied by him, and is not in itself probable. But there are understandings which prove to be understandings on one side only; politeness may be misinterpreted; and the world would have found Count Bismarck unendurable if at every friendly meeting he had been guilty of the frankness with which he informed the Austrian Government that its centre of action must be transferred from Vienna to Pesth. That Napoleon was now scheming for an extension of France on the north-east is certain; ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... can do in this way we must look on not as palliatives of an unendurable state of things, but as tokens of what we desire; which is in short the giving back to our country of the natural beauty of the earth, which we are so ashamed of having taken away from it: and our chief duty herein will be to quicken this shame and the pain that comes ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... prosaic life," he said, with a sigh. "Those who drink the waters in the morning are inert—like all invalids, and those who drink the wines in the evening are unendurable—like all healthy people! There are ladies who entertain, but there is no great amusement to be obtained from them. They play whist, they dress badly and speak French dreadfully! The only Moscow people here this year are Princess Ligovski and ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... the silence was getting unendurable, the body turned over and rolled away from the basin to the side of the room, where it lay stomach up. There was a faint "plop" from the basin—exactly like the noise a fish makes when it takes a fly—and the green light in ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... scenes, to which Rudolf had not the courage to put a heroic end, were repeated many days. When Pauline's tears became unendurable, he went out and wandered for hours through the streets, restless, out of humour, tortured. It had happened so on that ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... fingering Drusus's money bags; the next haunted by the murdered man's ghost. When he called on Cornelia, her slaves said she had a headache and would receive no one. Pratinas held aloof. No news all day—the suspense became unendurable. He lived through the following night harassed by waking visions of every conceivable calamity; but toward morning fell asleep, and as was his wont, awoke late. The first friend he met on the street was Calvus, the young poet ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... cost, and a mean little vanity that sacrificed lives when not appeased. She is the most disagreeable figure in modern drama. Were it not for her good looks and pity for her misspent life and death she would be absolutely unendurable. The dramatic genius of Ibsen makes her credible. But what was the matter ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... driven from this city by the ferocious fleas, which seemed to render life almost unendurable in hovel and palace. I could get no rest day or night in many parts of the state, on account of the savage attacks of these unspeakable, insatiate biters, more terrible than an ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... night, the thought not only that I personally have lost Tom and Sophy, but that the exquisite fabric of these relationships, so intricate, so delicate, so highly organised, could be cast aside, to all appearance so wastefully, is almost unendurable. . . . I went up to the moor on the top of the hill this morning, where I could see, far away, the river broaden and lose itself in the Atlantic. I lay on the heather looking through it and listening ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Lizzie was sitting sewing near the edge of the river, that she might look after Sandy. He was told not to climb on to the stones in the current of the stream, but as he was bent on catching the vain, provoking wagtails who strutted about on them, the prohibition was unendurable. As soon as Lizzie's head was bent over her work, he would clamber in and out till he reached some quite forbidden rock; and then, looking back with dancing eyes and the tip of his little tongue showing between his white teeth, he would say, "Go ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the right to check injury to our commerce and people through the devastation of the island, and, most important, the need of removing at once and forever the constant menace and the burdens entailed upon our Government by the uncertainties and perils of the situation caused by the unendurable disturbance in Cuba. I said: The long trial has proved that the object for which Spain has waged the war can not be attained. The fire of insurrection may flame or may smolder with varying seasons, but it has not been and it is plain that it can not be extinguished by present methods. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... and their legs especially with birch bark; sad species of fleecy hosiery; whence their nickname),—his Birkebeins I guess always to have been a kind of Norse Jacquerie: desperate rising of thralls and indigent people, driven mad by their unendurable sufferings and famishings,—theirs the deepest stratum of misery, and the densest and heaviest, in this the general misery of Norway, which had lasted towards the third generation and looked as if it would last forever:—whereupon they had risen proclaiming, in ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... them. They were told they took no effective steps to arrest emigration—that they next to the British Government were responsible for the depopulation of the country; that they failed to encourage Irish trade and manufactures and that they "made life dull and unendurable for the people." And so on and so forth it continued its criticisms with remarkable ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... through the narrow opening a glimpse could be had of the sovereign, who had resumed his weary, anguished tramp between the fireplace and the window. Back and forth he shuffled with heavy, dragging steps, and ceased not, despite his unendurable suffering. An aide-de-camp had just entered the room—it was he who had failed to close the door behind him—and Delaherche heard the Emperor ask him ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... justice, by confounding all moral distinctions. What, then, so far as the authority of the New Testament is concerned, becomes of slavery, which cannot be maintained under any form nor for a single moment, without "respect of persons" the most aggravated and unendurable? And what would become of that most pitiful, silly, and wicked arrangement in so many of our churches, in which worshippers of a dark complexion are to be sent up to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and said, 'But to thee, O king, how seemeth their life?' 'Of all that I have ever seen,' quoth the king, 'the most hateful and wretched, the most loathsome and abhorrent.' Then spake the chief counsellor unto him, "Such, know thou well, O king, and even more unendurable is our life reckoned by those who are initiated into the sight of the mysteries of yonder everlasting glory, and the blessings that pass all understanding. Your palaces glittering with gold, and these splendid garments, and all the delights of this life are more ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... prospect of success would the French commit themselves openly; and during 1776 and 1777 the tide ran too steadily against {95} the insurgents. Finally, in December, when the anxieties of Franklin and his associates were almost unendurable, the news of Burgoyne's surrender was brought to Paris. The turning-point was reached. Vergennes immediately led the French King to make two treaties, one for commercial reciprocity, the other a treaty of military alliance, recognizing the independence of the United States, ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... she went back to her room and covered her face with her hands; perhaps she was praying; if so, it was unconsciously; but she still listened for the detectives, the police-officers who might be coming. The strain was almost unendurable, and it was with a strange, inexplicable relief that her suspense was brought to an end by the sound of someone approaching the opposite door and knocking. She rose, trembling, and listened, as she had listened so many times that eventful night. The knock was repeated three times; she heard ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... to be graduated, I concluded that it was better than nothing. I hate such places, as a rule, they are so close and stuffy, and the essays so long and dull, and the girls all look pretty much alike, and I begged Bell to get a seat as near the door as possible, so I could go out when it became unendurable. Just then your letter was brought to me, and after reading it, nothing could have kept me from Eloise Smith. I asked ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... very complimentary remarks upon my assurance in offering him such securities. It made me so mad I could have choked him—it is bad enough to be treated with hauteur by a white man, but contempt from a nigger is almost unendurable." ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... native of horse-racing England, you belong to a nation of gamblers. My brother died no extraordinary death, Mr. Westwick. He sank, with many other unfortunate people, under a fever prevalent in a Western city which we happened to visit. The calamity of his loss made the United States unendurable to me. I left by the first steamer that sailed from New York—a French vessel which brought me to Havre. I continued my lonely journey to the South of France. And then ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... leaped up, and with a hoarse laugh gave me a severe blow in the face.' This was too much. To have your grief flapped back in your face like a wet sheet is bad, but also and at the same time to have your claret uncorked is unendurable. The 'Ancient Mariner,' then about seven years old, could not stand this. 'With his cross-bow'—no, stop! what are we saying? Nothing better than a kitchen knife was at hand—and 'this,' says Samuel, 'I seized, and was running at him, when my mother came in and took me by the arm. ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... dissuading words Theano spake: "Wherefore, ah wherefore for the toil and strain Of battle's fearful tumult do ye yearn, Infatuate ones? Never your limbs have toiled In conflict yet. In utter ignorance Panting for labour unendurable, Ye rush on all-unthinking; for your strength Can never be as that of Danaan men, Men trained in daily battle. Amazons Have joyed in ruthless fight, in charging steeds, From the beginning: all the toil of men Do they endure; and ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... a counter where spangled nets and embroidered chiffons were sold. It had seemed to Helen today that half the world must be giving a ball to which the other half was invited, so constant—in spite of the rain—were the calls for her wares. The girl told herself bitterly that it would not be so unendurable were she handling anything but those filmy, glittering stuffs that spoke so loudly of youth and love and laughter. If it were only gray socks and kitchen kettles that she tended! At least she would be spared the sight of those merry, girlish faces, and the sound of those care-free, ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... came to a decision. This kind of thing was unendurable; it would be better to get it over. Turning round so suddenly that ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... did not surprise me when Elder Frederick remarked, "Every body is not called to the divine life." To a man or woman not thoroughly and earnestly in love with an ascetic life and deeply disgusted with the world, Shakerism would be unendurable; and I believe insincerity to be rare among them. It is not a comfortable place for hypocrites ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... they are in extinction, that they are fit for nothing better, and that hence they are shut out from eternal joy, would surely be an everlasting pang. And the case is infinitely worse if it is realized that they are in endless torment. We think the very thought of that would be unendurable even in ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... heat at sea far from unendurable; a soft wind continually wafted its cooling influence towards us, and an awning had been spread out to shelter us from the rays of the sun. But what a contrast when we come to land! As I sat in the room here the perspiration ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... it will probably plan an opportunity to do so. Such is the theory; but what is the tragic result? Military expenditures have increased at a stupendous rate and all Europe groans under a burden of almost unendurable taxation. Moreover, the possession of such splendid machinery of warfare is a constant temptation to employ it and so vindicate its staggering expense. This was startlingly shown in the case of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... and drowned in blood and mud, because in Europe the Catholic party supported militarism, and kept aristocratic criminals in control of states. Or you find yourself involved in a marital tragedy, and in order to free yourself from unendurable misery, you are obliged to go to law-courts dominated by the tradition of Paul, the Roman bureaucrat, who despised women, and regarded marriage as a means of gratifying an unclean animal desire. "It is better to marry than to burn," he said, with ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... physicians and servants, who reported to their employer every careless word. Removed from Belriguarda, he was ordered to be confined in the Ferrarese convent of San Francisco; and two friars were appointed to watch over him continually. Such a life was unendurable to the proud poet, who disliked the nauseous medicines of the convent as much as its restraint; and taking advantage of a festa, when his keepers were unusually negligent, he made his escape by a window. In the disguise of a shepherd he travelled on foot over the mountains of the Abruzzi, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... my person too often, both in single combat and on the battle-field, to be cowed by a bully—such as I fancied this fellow to be—and the spirit of resistance was fast rising within me. His dictatorial style was unendurable; and discarding all further prudential considerations, I resolved to submit to it no longer. I did not give way to idle recrimination. Perhaps, thought I, a firm tone may suit my purpose better; and, in my reply, I adopted it. Before I could ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... four minutes or so before the pain and tension in his lungs became unendurable. Dalgetty knew he would be helpless as he rose, still in his semi-hibernating state, but his body was shrieking for air. Slowly he ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable. I am compelled to Mister him and to Sir him with every speech. One reason for this is that Wolf Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him. It is an unprecedented thing, I take it, for a captain to be chummy with the cook; ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... for him to unload is idiotic; for as he does far less mischief with his throat cut than when he is starving, a rational society would esteem the cutthroat more highly than the capitalist. The thing has become so obvious, and the evil so unendurable, that if our attempt at civilization is not to perish like all the previous ones, we shall have to organize our society in such a way as to be able to say to every person in the land, "Take no thought, saying ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... of brutality, so that the girl's heart was wont to quicken apprehensively whenever she heard her step. She scolded, she punished, she coerced. But from an outsider, the bare thought of a snub was unendurable, and the possibility that Dinah might by any means lay herself open to one was enough to bring down the vials of wrath upon her head. Dinah remembered still with shivering vividness the whipping she had received on one occasion for demeaning ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... gave her one look and one squeeze of the hand, and then as I saw her glances wander to his face, I groaned in spirit, stammered some words of choking sorrow and was gone, before her embarrassment would let her speak words, which I knew would only add to my grief and make this hasty parting unendurable. ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Jackson's at New Orleans. England was a great and powerful nation while ours was but small and weak, but we were in the right—fighting against dreadful wrongs done to our sailors—and God helped us to drive away our haughty, powerful foe, and deliver our brave tars from her unendurable oppression." ...
— Elsie at the World's Fair • Martha Finley
... a philosopher. I tried my fortune and failed, and I thought I could bear it, but it is unendurable. Perhaps I shall find it more tolerable away from her," ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... to linger, afraid of having to talk to her. He felt as if the least thing she said would be charged with some unendurable emotion and that at any minute he might be called on to respond. To be sure this was not like what he knew of Maisie; but, everything having changed for him, he felt that at any minute Maisie might ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... to light, as it is their love that takes them to death. They gaze upon one another, and rush into each other's arms. Brangaena, turning round, is horrified to see what her officiousness has accomplished. The music rolls on in a torrent of almost unendurable sweetness; the ship reaches land, and the curtain drops as Tristan and Isolda, oblivious of all but themselves and their passion, stagger in one another's arms, and the trumpets sound without as the King approaches to claim ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... Elias B. Hopkins carried on this campaign. There he would sit, night after night, with the open book upon his knee, and at the slightest provocation off he would go, like a musical box when the spring is touched. The monotonous drawl became unendurable, but it could only be avoided by conforming to the parson's code. A chronic swearer came to be looked upon with disfavour by the community, since the punishment of his transgression fell upon all. At the end of a fortnight the reader was silent more than half the time, and ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... have been cited at length because they are all typical and because of the variety of symptoms and the great difference of age. Only in one of the cases was there any very severe pain, and it was really the pain, which had become unendurable, which caused the ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... the needle, and emulating the tireless industry of the Sister, who worked thus during daylight that she might pursue her mission of mercy and succour at night. Thus passed some days, and then Jessica's blood grew restless; the narrow room seemed to her stifling and unendurable, and she pined for the open air, as a caged blackbird ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... in her plight must always be touching, but her touchingness was indescribable—almost unendurable to the ripe aged woman of the world who watched and heard her. It was as if she knew nothing of the meaning of things—as if some little spirit had been torn from heaven and flung down upon the dark earth. One felt that one must weep ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is unendurable. I hate to be surrounded with incessant spying; what do you want to arrive at? tell me, what do you want ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... suspicion became unendurable he had consulted Anthony who assured him that Frances, who ought to know, was convinced that there was nothing in it except incompatibility, for which Bartie was ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... seen Loughlinter, and when last she had left it, she had made up her mind that she would never place her foot upon the place again. Her wretchedness had all come upon her there. It was there that she had first been subjected to the unendurable tedium of Sabbath Day observances. It was there she had been instructed in the unpalatable duties that had been expected from her. It was there that she had been punished with the doctor from Callender whenever she attempted escape under the plea of a headache. And it was ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... something in New England of vastly deeper importance than a reputation for making popular campaign speeches. He for the first time caught a glimpse of the utter irreconcilableness of the Northern conviction that slavery was evil and unendurable, and the Southern claim that it was divine and necessary; and he began here to realize that something must be done. Listening to Seward's speech in Tremont Temple, he seems to have had a sudden insight into the truth, a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... buried, where hyenas prowled and jackals wandered, and where the desolate cry of the night-owls echoed over the rocks. In winter the wind sweeps up the valley and howls round the rocks; in summer the sun makes it a veritable furnace, unendurable to man. There is nothing here to remind one of the God Who watches over him, and the tender Aton of the Pharaoh's conception would seem to have abandoned this place to the spirits of evil. There are no flowers where Akhnaton cut his sepulchre, and no birds sing; for the King ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... everything that Kenny said with a corroborative, birdlike nod of politeness. With the megaphone upon the floor by Kenny's chair, he made no further pretense of deafness. He said nothing at all and Kenny found his new inscrutable trick of silence unendurable. One singular fact loomed out above all others. Adam shamelessly accepted the word miser with a gloating chuckle. He seemed to like it. For Kenny, generous to a fault and prodigal with money, the word embodied ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... soon blurred their outlines, but he had fixed their positions in his mind so that he could have reached them with his eyes shut. At the end of the third hour he had made his way half through the rope. It took him two hours more to weaken one half of the remainder. The pain was becoming unendurable. He quivered from head to foot each time he moved his jaw, for his lips were torn to the quick. His tongue was shredded; his chest damp with blood. Finally he ceased. Then carefully, very carefully, threw back his shoulders so as to bring a strain to the rope. He felt it pull ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... and as the hours dragged on I began to grow dead tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat, the foul smell of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed almost unendurable. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... if they should make a sudden appearance. Somewhere along that miserable ride, after daylight had broken and the pieced wire that Grace Kerr had cut had been passed, Lambert fell unconscious across the horn of his saddle from the drain of blood from his wounds and the unendurable pain of his bonds. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... moisture on her cheek. Her patience had been taxed to the uttermost that day, but Townshead, who had spent most of it in querulous reproaches, had gone out, and his daughter was thankful to be alone at last, for the effort to retain a show of composure had become almost unendurable. ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... relative died and left me some property which I sold to invest in an annuity, and thus have just enough to live on quietly, apart from what I may earn. Under such strange conditions it might be asked whether life was not unendurable. Frankly speaking, I cannot say that I find it so. I have in London a few bachelor friends who go with me to theaters, etc. In the suburbs I have about half a dozen family friends. Here I meet with pleasant society and a hearty ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... over. They could not make him marry her though they could probably make him pay very dearly for not doing so. If he could only harden his heart sufficiently he could escape in that way. But he was not hard, and he did feel that so escaping, he would have a load on his breast which would make his life unendurable. Already he was beginning to hate the coast of Ireland, and to think that the gloom of Scroope Manor was ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... our knees with our eyes shut, singing, Brother ——, two months saved, came over to me and said softly 'I'm afraid I'm slipping back, Captain.' Poor lad, his home is nearly unendurable. His mother said she would sooner see him dead than a Salvationist. We all prayed, sang, and I believed for him, and he got beautifully right. Read and explained Isaiah liv., 'No weapon that is ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... bitterly angry. That her mother should dare to gossip about him like that! That she should call him "ugly," that she should speak with that air of almost insolent proprietorship of those wonderful early years long, long before she, Esther, had come into his life at all, it was unendurable! ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... of sorrowful mortification pierced to his heart. He thought of all her love and all her loveliness, he called to mind all the marvellous story of their united fortunes. He felt that for her and her alone he cared to live, that without her quick sympathy, even success seemed unendurable. His judgment fluctuated in an eddy of passion and reason. Passion conquered. He dismissed from his intelligence all cognizance of good and evil; he determined, under all circumstances, to cling ever to her; he tore from his mind all memory of the late disclosure. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... complete without music. Even a large piano which has seen its best days does not seem to be altogether a cumberer of the ground where another equally bulky piece of furniture would be unendurable. But unless some member of the family has decided musical ability, the best use of a piano or organ in a home is to sustain the uncertain voices in singing. Home singing is almost a necessity even where no one ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... letter speak for itself: and if thou hast anything to say, keep it for the end. For nothing is more unendurable than a commentary upon ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... meaning of the word." Withal, however, his Father, to whom naturally the favour of the new Duke, Ludwig Eugen, was of importance, could not persuade Schiller to welcome him to the Sovereignty with a poem. To Schiller's feelings it was unendurable to awaken, for the sake of an external advantage from the new Lord, any suspicions as if he welcomed ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... political institutions, and the common law as practiced and established in London had a predominating influence on the destinies of the United States. While the colonists drifted far from the religious establishments of the mother country and found her commercial policies unendurable and her political hauteur galling, they nevertheless retained those legal and institutional forms which remain the foundation of ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... sunshine in their shady places! He fell into mournful mood over the troubles of his race. Always a kind-hearted fellow, he had not been used to think about such things; he had had troubles of his own, and had got through at least some of them; people must have troubles, else would they grow unendurable for pride and insolence. But now that he had begun to hope he saw a glimmer somewhere afar at the end of the darksome cave in which he had all at once discovered that he was buried alive, he began also to feel how wretched those ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... The tension was almost unendurable. The heavy breathing of Inspector Murdy seemed like the blowing of a grampus. Mr. Gray glanced across at him irritably. The vicar coughed slightly, then looked startled that he had made ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... empty, so vain, so weak, were getting the better of her, were conquering her, were robbing her of her prestige and her ancient glory, simply because she herself was too generous to speak out and tell the truth! There was a martyrdom to her in this which was almost unendurable. ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... have in effect started to go away—and not gone away—and yet must go away some time—and may go away at any minute: this consciousness, to a person standing first on one tired foot and then on the other, rapidly becomes almost, but never quite, unendurable. Reason totters, but remains on the throne. One can almost lay down a law: Two persons who do not part with kisses should part ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... passionate outburst to the thistle, and the thistle's reply, instead of a Sir Walter and Queen Elizabeth couplet. Long, lance-shaped, deeply cleft, sharply pointed, and prickly dark green leaves make the ascent almost unendurable; nevertheless, the ant bravely mounts to where the bristle-pointed, overlapping scales of the deep green cup hold the luscious flowers. Now his feet becoming entangled in the cottony fibres wound about the scaly armor, and a bristling bodyguard thrusting spears at him in his struggles ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... again, but sleep was as far from him as ever. After another long and almost unendurable period he opened them once more, and it seemed to him that there was a faint tint of gray in the east. He sat up, and looking a long time, he was sure of it. The gray was deepening and broadening, and at its center it showed a tint of silver. The dawn was at hand, and ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not notice the exultation in his voice; she did not consider what his explanation might be; she only felt that she could not now endure to listen to it. The mere sound of a human voice had become an unendurable thing. She hardly knew indeed that Durrance was speaking, she was only aware that a voice spoke, and that the voice must stop. She was close by the window; a single silent step, and she was across the sill and free. Durrance continued to speak out of the ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... it until some one mentioned me ez Chaplin to the expedition West, when the pressure becum unendurable. They sposed I was keeper uv the President's conscience, and I hed not a minit's peece after that. In vain I ashoored em that, there bein no consciences about the White House, no one could hold sich a offis; in vain I ashoored em that I hed no influence ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... on the deck outside the combing of the cockpit. Nirvana had no attraction for him. He resented forced inactivity as an unendurable wrong. Instead of smoking with half-closed eyes, he peered eagerly forward under the sail. He noted everything—the floating gulls and puffins, the stiff, wild-eyed cormorants, the jelly-fish, the whirling eddies of the tide. As the yacht drifted ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... however, that the suffering from this change of habit became most unendurable. While the day-light lasted it was possible to go out-of-doors, to sit in the sunlight, to walk, to do something to divert attention from the exhausted and shattered body; but when darkness fell, and these resources failed, nothing ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... wisdom and utility in what all do. The great mass of the folkways give us discipline and the support of routine and habit. If we had to form judgments as to all these cases before we could act in them, and were forced always to act rationally, the burden would be unendurable. Beneficent use and wont ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... avoid: first, because I believed them of no great interest to the general reader; second, because, with this my first sea-trip, I have not become adept enough in their use to "swing" them with the fluent grace of your true-going, irresistible old salt; and from any other source they are, to my mind, unendurable. ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... No?" he said, with the slightest taint of bitterness. "Well, well, I have found, Esther, the worst reality is never unendurable when it comes out from behind the clouds through which we at first see it darkly—never—not even the rack. I suppose it will be so with death. And by that philosophy the slavery to which we are going must afterwhile become ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... times when the place looks too beautiful for earth; but, to balance this, deserts and storms, terrible rains, and dust borne on winds that seem as if they had come from the mouth of a furnace. There are times, too, when the state of the atmosphere affects your nerves, and life seems to be unendurable." ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... of Forest Home and its woods and streams, her restlessness increased. The stifling finishing room, the endless complaints of the girls, and the everlasting crunching of glass under foot were at times almost unendurable. ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... could eat nothing whatever, only drink. I had a great loathing for food, and a fever that never left me. I was so reduced, for they had given me purgatives daily for nearly a month, and so parched up, that my sinews began to shrink. The pains I had were unendurable, and I was overwhelmed in a most deep sadness, so that I had no rest either night ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... to his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads up to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated in an excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek—and the Honorable William Linder experienced upon the undefended rear of his person the most violent kick of a lifetime not always devoted to the arts of peace. It projected him clear of the window-sill. His last sensible vision was the face of the musician, the mouth absurdly ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... no official notice would be taken of it? Perhaps so; since the guards did begin that policy at once, and no official notice was taken of it. Yes, from that moment Joan's life in that dungeon was made almost unendurable. Do not ask me to enlarge upon it. I ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... with a whinny and, talking to him to distract his attention, Sir Shawn got him along. Perhaps the horse knew that his master's heart was cold. It was a well-nigh unendurable pain to Sir Shawn to pass the place where the friend of his youth and boyhood had ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... must endeavour to bring this war to an end. If there was the least chance of our being able to maintain our independence, we would still fight on, and not even the bitterest sufferings would appear unendurable. But have we any such chance?—that is the question which ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... was still a vivid remembrance to her. She recalled those tedious months of grief as one recalls a horrid nightmare, and she declared that another such winter, particularly if she were to be deprived of Emily's society, would be unendurable. ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... been unendurable to Euphra, a little while before, to find that she had a rival in a servant. Now she scarcely regarded that aspect of her position. But she looked doubtfully at Margaret, and ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... years in time, still in the place of his birth, the effect of unreality would be even more startling, especially if those things should have happened which prophets predict and toward which all progress tends. Conditions would be unendurable, manners offensive. No man would seem quite a man. No woman would seem modest. Clothes, customs, beliefs, ambitions, and ideals would all have changed. And he himself would seem to them a pitiable reversion ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... with them. They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for food himself; he waited for them to come back. At last he heard them coming down the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left. One of them sat down at the piano, and they all began to sing. This Hedger found absolutely unendurable. He snatched up his hat and went running down the stairs. Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old times were coming back. They had supper in the oysterman's basement and then sat down in front of their own doorway. The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regal glory; ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... I proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena about this Under-world, but here again I was disappointed. At first she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them. She shivered as though the topic was unendurable. And when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears. They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw in that Golden Age. When I saw them I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks, ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... they keep in this horrid place!" she said to herself. "Well, well, I always did know that school would be unendurable." ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... an unendurable wrong. The man was lost to him for ever now, so he thought. Why couldn't the brute have got himself decently caught on the opposite bank, or shot in ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Hope, thou sweet, bright angel of God! Without thee life were an evil unendurable, with thee for companion gloomy Doubt, sullen Fear and dark Despair flee utterly away, and we, bold-hearted, patient and undismayed by any dangers or difficulties, may realise our dreams at last. O sweet, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... son that his father made handsomer men by night than by day, and cast in Lionardo's teeth that he could not finish the equestrian statue of the Duke of Milan. It is therefore not improbable that when, according to the legend, he corrected a drawing of Ghirlandajo's, he may have said things unendurable to ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... for M. d'Aubray to try to reassure her about himself! He thought it was only a trifling indisposition, and was not willing that a doctor should be disturbed. But then he was seized by a frightful vomiting, followed by such unendurable pain that he yielded to his daughter's entreaty that she should send for help. A doctor arrived at about eight o'clock in the morning, but by that time all that could have helped a scientific inquiry had been ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and beauty, and finally "came out" completely to Mrs. Blake's satisfaction. But Lottie at fifteen or sixteen was her despair—"Exactly like a great unruly boy," she lamented. She dashed through her lessons fairly well, but the moment she was released she was unendurable. She whistled, she sang at the top of her voice, and plunged about the house in her thick boots, till she could be off to join the two boys at the rectory, her dear friends and comrades. Robin Wingfield, the elder, was her junior by rather more than a year; and this advantage, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... I love you so dearly that your displeasure is perfectly unendurable," she replied, lifting her head to gaze fondly into ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... imagined to be somewhere about 100 miles. Fortunate, indeed, is it for us that there is a goodly layer of atmosphere over our heads, for, were this not so, these visitors from space would strike upon the surface of our earth night and day, and render existence still more unendurable than many persons choose to consider it. To what a bombardment must the moon be continually subject, destitute as she is of ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... She had a tender longing for her son: to be with him would afford her greater satisfaction than the magnificence of her daughter's house. Irene consented stonily. It was burying herself alive, but then no one would torment her with hateful marriages. To stay here with Agatha was simply unendurable. ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... wretched when none of those they love are by. I have often thought some of the blackest tragedies of the earth might have been averted if there had been a true friend to stand at the wrung one's elbow at the fatal minute of decision and point to the sun behind, just when the black ahead grew unendurable. Please follow Mr. Brownley that you may be ready, should his awakening to what he has done become unbearable. Tell him the dreaded morrows are never as terrible actually as they seem ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... basket—but nothing worse than that.... No.... However, she must just have patience, and in two or three days all would be decided. She could not say anything with certainty, but she felt that this unendurable confusion within her mind could not last much longer. The question would have to be ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... It was his counsel had brought about this marriage, and all that was to ensue from it. And why was it? Because he loved her so much that he could not bear to see her unhappy: or because his own sufferings of suspense were so unendurable that he was glad to crush them at once—as we hasten a funeral after a death, or, when a separation from those we love is imminent, cannot rest until the ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... expended and exhausted their tortures against the firmness of the martyrs sustained by Christ, the devil devised other contrivances. They were cast into the darkest and most unendurable place in their prison; their feet were dragged out and compressed to the utmost tension of the muscles; the jailers, as if instigated by a demon, tried every sort of torture, insomuch that several of them, for whom God willed such an end, died of suffocation in prison. Others, who had been tortured ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... war of 1812 these unendurable insults to our flag were not repeated by Great Britain, but her Government steadily refused to make any formal renunciation of her right to repeat them, so that our immunity from like insults did not rest upon any better foundation than that which might be dictated by considerations of interest ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... reached that point where she did not want to think. On hearing Edith say that she would go to New York on Monday, a sadden and strong temptation assailed her. Impulsive, but not courageous, abounding in energy, but having little fortitude, she found the conditions of her country life growing unendurable. Van Dam seemed her only refuge, her only means of escape. She soon lost all hope of their sustaining themselves by work in Pushton. Her uncurbed nature could wait patiently for nothing, and as the long, idle days passed, she doubted, and then despaired, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... (Exit SENDEN.) The election day is unendurable! In no fight in my life did I have this feeling of fear. It is a mean cannon-fever of which any ensign might be ashamed. And it is a long time since I was ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... permanence. He moved as a man in a dream, living under a shadow of almost tangible weight, as a criminal must do who has been sentenced to early execution. The longing to see Madeleine again, to hear the sound of her voice, to feel her presence, was so intense as to be almost unendurable. Again and again he said to himself that had she cared for another, had she even told him that she could not care for him, he would have taken his dismissal as irrevocable and gone to try and drag out the remainder ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... equality, then conflict arises. If a woman expects a man to beat her at his pleasure, as has everywhere been the case and still is in some places, if she considers it just, brutality exists only in extremes of violence. If she considers a blow, or even a rough word, an unendurable insult, then brutality arises with the commonest disagreement. In other words, it is comparatively easy to deal with a woman expecting an inferior position, whose individual tastes, wills, ideas, and ideals have never been developed,—the ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... way towards the river. As I approached the stakes below the pool, a golden-eye duck rose from beside the bank, and on whistling wings flew swiftly into the gloom. I crouched in the shelter of a holly tree, and waited and watched till the cold became unendurable; but no other sign of life was visible; the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... longer without noticing it we should probably have been severely frost-bitten. In other respects we did not suffer the least inconvenience from the cold—on the contrary, found the temperature agreeable; and I am convinced that 10 deg., 20 deg., or even 30 deg. lower would not have been unendurable. It is strange how one's sensations alter. When at home, I find it unpleasant if I only go out-of-doors when there are some 20 degrees of cold, even in calm weather. But here I don't find it any colder ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... her pocket, but she remembered her resolutions and for some time resented the impervious clutch of the temptation. But the sorrow that hung about her, that penetrated like a corrosive acid into the very marrow of her bones, grew momentarily more burning, more unendurable. Twenty times she tried to wrench it out of her heart. The landlady brought her up some tea; she could not drink it; it tasted like soapsuds in her mouth. Then, knowing well what the results would be, she resolved to go out ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... notice the exultation in his voice; she did not consider what his explanation might be; she only felt that she could not now endure to listen to it. The mere sound of a human voice had become an unendurable thing. She hardly knew indeed that Durrance was speaking, she was only aware that a voice spoke, and that the voice must stop. She was close by the window; a single silent step, and she was across the sill and free. ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... an attempt to correct this crying evil. What must be expected to become of that general good-will which is the natural inheritance of a well-constituted mind, when urged by so bitter oppression and such unendurable sufferings? The whole temper of the human heart must be spoiled, and the wine of life acquire ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... exclaimed the seer—"the wild, the dreadful, the undefinable, the unutterable, the shadowy forms and seemings of things and actions to be! They crowd upon me in powers and numbers unendurable, inconceivable! Words never formed by human breath sound within my heart, and tell of things that mortal tongue may never utter. Eyes, clear, cold, dead, bright, and chill as winter moonshine, look into my soul, and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... also more fully developed by the variety and interest of his working material and surroundings. This is the point to which our prophets who pour their lamentations over advancing civilisation should direct their main attack, as, indeed, the best of them have done. For certainly it is an unendurable result if the enormous majority of civilised mankind are for ever to be debarred from the highest ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the pulpit he escaped from me. I was forced to sit silent and to listen while he preached doctrine in which he had no belief, and put forward theories of salvation, redemption by faith, and the like, which meant less than nothing to him. Finding this presently unendurable by me, I strove to govern him mentally when he was in the pulpit, to track him, as it were, with my mind, to head him off with my mind when he was beginning to ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... disadvantages in the form of unjust farming conditions, wretchedly low wages, lynchings, segregation, injustice in the courts, poor housing, poor schools, and so on, all of which tended to make life in the home environment more and more unendurable. While these driving forces were at work, there suddenly loomed up in the North a most unusually large demand for labor, and in this the Negroes saw the possibility of gaining access to an environment where conditions ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... madness. At school we used to be "drilled" in the playground once a week; I have but to think of it, even after forty years, and there comes back upon me that tremor of passionate misery which, at the time, often made me ill. The senseless routine of mechanic exercise was in itself all but unendurable to me; I hated the standing in line, the thrusting-out of arms and legs at a signal, the thud of feet stamping in constrained unison. The loss of individuality seemed to me sheer disgrace. And when, as often happened, the drill-sergeant ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Chantry's unendurable bandages, and put on my clothes, for there were brambles along the path. The lodges and the dogs were still, and I crept like a hunter after game, to avoid waking them. Our village was an irregular camp, each house standing where its ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the cross which Endicott disowned; they were proud of the English history which was also theirs. Why should they sever themselves from these? It was not until English injustice and selfishness, long endured, became at last unendurable, that the resolve to live truly independent, or to die, fired the muskets ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... government which he assailed. He pursued the government with his irony and abuse, not because they fell beneath him in point of honour or principle, but because they refused him their confidence as Lord Chancellor, when his indiscretions and bullying rendered him alike odious to the court and unendurable to the cabinet. His lordship might fairly be considered as much the "standing counsel" for the rebellious Canadians in the lords, as Mr. Roebuck was in the commons. Nevertheless, the denunciations of the government by the eccentric peer were in the main grounded upon their errors and vacillation, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... couple had been wedded beyond the traditional honeymoon. He was afraid that he might have the bridegroom permanently upon his hands did he advance so great a sum. This was made plain to the bride, who protested that life would be quite unendurable without her liege lord, or more properly speaking, in this case, liege subject; but the Governor ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... only drink. I had a great loathing for food, and a fever that never left me. I was so reduced, for they had given me purgatives daily for nearly a month, and so parched up, that my sinews began to shrink. The pains I had were unendurable, and I was overwhelmed in a most deep sadness, so that I had no rest either ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... a stone wall, for thus I regarded it, became at last almost unendurable. Clavering shy, and the secretary unapproachable—how was I to gain anything? The short interviews I had with Mary did not help matters. Haughty, constrained, feverish, pettish, grateful, appealing, everything at once, and never twice the same, I learned to dread, even while I coveted, ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... jealousy of the fame of the new-comers, or through some settled antipathy between flesh and fish, or simply through his natural beastliness, he communicated effluvia to the atmosphere that were perfectly unendurable by whale, which promptly expired ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... undertake. He proposed to keep this room open as a place to which those who wished might resort at different times, and find some quietude, instruction, and what fortifying thoughts he could collect to enable men to endure their almost unendurable sufferings. He did not intend to teach theology. Anything which would be serviceable he would set forth, but in the main he intended to rely on holding up the examples of those who were greater than ourselves and were our redeemers. He meant to teach Christ ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... again. The glare intensified until the glow in the sky was unendurable, but Bart looked anyhow, making out the strange shape of the ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... returning his glance, "I would not do it. It would put too much power in the hands of a few men, and we have enough of that already. The owner of a fleet of aerial warships would be above all human law. He could terrorise the earth, and make mankind his slaves. Life would become unendurable under such conditions. Commercialism, which only means slavery plus the liberty to starve, is bad enough, but it is at least possible. The other would be impossible. There is no man quite honest enough to be trusted with such a power as that. I have worked ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... struggle in which the obstinacy of a bigot tries to meet the acumen of a lawyer? What more terrible to endure than the acrimonious pin-pricks to which a passionate soul prefers a dagger-thrust? Granville neglected his home. Everything there was unendurable. His children, broken by their mother's frigid despotism, dared not go with him to the play; indeed, Granville could never give them any pleasure without bringing down punishment from their terrible mother. His loving nature was weaned to indifference, ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... with calmer sleep and a more natural exercise of the organs of vision, succeeded. I have made many attempts at a further reduction, but have been uniformly unsuccessful, owing to the extreme and almost unendurable agony ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... there was no form of government at all, but a welter of Dutch farmers, Basutos, Hottentots, and halfbreeds living in a chronic state of turbulence, recognising neither the British authority to the south of them nor the Transvaal republics to the north. The chaos became at last unendurable, and in 1848 a garrison was placed in Bloemfontein and the district incorporated in the British Empire. The emigrants made a futile resistance at Boomplaats, and after a single defeat allowed themselves to be drawn into the ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... small amount; and with this administration of justice, he and his country must be content. Who does not see that such an abdication of authority on our part would lead to the perpetration of wrongs that would soon become unendurable, even if we were first to become a broken spirited people? And, considering the arrogance and recklessness of many foreigners in China, and the pusillanimous character of the natives, what can be expected but contempt and aggression on one side, and mistrust and finesse ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... sacred symbols. Stoic rationalism, in its logical development, is menaced wherever we meet the perception that the course of the world must in some way be helped, and wherever the contrast between reason and sensuousness, that the old Stoa had confused, is clearly felt to be an unendurable state of antagonism that man cannot remove by his own unaided efforts. The need of a revelation had its starting-point in philosophy here. The judgment of oneself and of the world to which Platonism led, the self-consciousness which it awakened by the detachment ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... house-place, and Jane sang on at her churning in the dairy across the yard. I sat gazing at the fire, where I could see nothing but Jack Dobson in his martial grandeur, and I hated him for his greatness, and despised myself for my pettiness. All the same it was unendurable, and it was a relief to see Joe Braggs tiptoeing carefully across the yard dairywards. The rascal should have been patching a gap in the hedge of Ten-acres, and here he was, foraging for a jug of ale. He could wheedle Jane as easily ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... oh! my God!" shouted Sukey, and he writhed and leaped, until he displaced the gratings, scattering the nine-tails of the scourge all over his person. At the next blow, he howled, leaped and raged in unendurable agony. ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... battle of life. In the matter of marriage especially an ignorant girl may be fatally deceived, and indeed I know cases in which the man who was liked well enough as a companion was found to be objectionable in an unendurable degree as soon as he ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... "It was unendurable,—the pathos of the words! I was blinded, stifled,—I almost groaned aloud. If we had been alone, there our trial would have ended. I should have snatched her to my soul. But the eyes of others were upon us, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... yet the criticism is becoming unendurable. Of course you have heard that matters have already become strained between the civil government and myself. Only last week my head aide-de-camp sent for a barber who was attached to a neighboring regiment, using as a messenger the orderly whom I had stationed at ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... left him pale. For a panicky moment he thought of facing about in actual flight; he had little doubt that Lucy would meet him with no token of recognition, and all at once this probability struck him as unendurable. And if she did not speak, was it the proper part of chivalry to lift his hat and take the cut bareheaded? Or should the finer gentleman acquiesce in the lady's desire for no further acquaintance, and pass her with stony mien and eyes constrained forward? ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then,—known it must and shall be,—is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... and fell on his knees before the queen. For a long time past the young lady-in-waiting had perceived that Robert of Cabane had, through his own fault, lost the love of Joan; for his tyranny had indeed become more unendurable ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... when she received hers. An intuition that Osgood repented his rashness touched Lily's pride, and preserved her silence. When the second letter came, she thought he had the intention of experimenting with her; a test, she concluded, was unendurable, not to be submitted to. Should she test him, and proclaim the engagement she meditated? it would be a relief to do something. She could not reach him with a letter, for he had gone on a mackerel voyage beyond the limits of the post-office. She decided differently according to the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... was gone Dolly Grey spent the remainder of the afternoon in contemplating what would have been her condition had she agreed to join her lot to that of Mr. Barry, and she came to the conclusion that it would have been simply unendurable. There was nothing of romance in her nature; but as she looked at matrimony, with all its blisses,—and Mr. Barry among them,—she told herself that death would be preferable. "I know myself," she said. "I should come to hate him with a miserable hatred. And then I should ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... away he was not defeated, for he yet found means of hearing from his betrothed, and even occasionally to correspond with her, but he soon found that the long absence grew more and more unendurable, until at last he determined to venture forward at every risk to be near ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... right of every girl to enjoy companionship and friends. Thousands of girls toil through the day in shops, factories, offices and kitchens and at night sit friendless and alone until the loneliness becomes unendurable and they seek companionship of the unfit and the refuge of the street. Has religion anything to do with ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... has been called the "balance wheel" of society. This is because men readily become habituated to the hard, the disagreeable, or the inevitable, and cease to battle against it. A lot that at first seems unendurable after a time causes less revolt. A sorrow that seems too poignant to be borne in the course of time loses some of its sharpness. Oppression or injustice that arouses the fiercest resentment and hate may finally come to be accepted with resignation. ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... solitudes of the large house Mary Fawcett found life unendurable. Still handsome, naturally gay of temper, and a brilliant figure in society, she frequently deserted her elderly husband for weeks at a time. The day came when he peremptorily forbade her to leave the place without him. For a time ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the multitudinous other and far greater mysteries. I was never the victim of fear of goblins and ghosts because I was never taught them. I was merely taught by nature to follow, as if led by a rare and tender hand, the then almost unendurable beauty that lay on every side of me. It was pain then, to follow beauty, because I didn't understand beauty; it must always, I think, be distressing to follow anything one does ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... month to travel the distance by river, if time permitted I had rather adventure next time upon the Nile than ever go by train over that line again. I confess I have made the journey by rail frequently but it becomes really more unendurable each trip. Of course I laid in stores of liquids and solids for the voyage. I ought to have known better, but one thinks nothing of the toothache when it is past. The mineral waters became too hot to drink, and not quite near enough the boiling-point ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... a naked dervish lying in a scrap of shade asleep under a lion skin. It was as if Dizful drowsed sullenly in that July blaze brewing something, like a geyser, and burst out with it at the end of the unendurable day. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Peculiar sensations, unendurable thoughts raced through the commander as he lay there limply. He knew his predicament. He wanted desperately to rise, to rush to the control room. Time and time again in those first few moments of impotence he strove mightily to pull his limbs back to life. But his greatest efforts were barren of ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... a stab of pain that was almost unendurable, she did not guess it. From the moment her first child was laid in her arms, Kate, like many another woman, regarded herself as a mother to all mankind. For her, this was the boy Jacques had left in her care, the husband she had chosen for her own ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... he said, when Gafsa belonged to the Sultan of Trablus (Tripoli) there was sad misgovernment in the land. The taxes became quite unendurable, and the city was half emptied of its inhabitants, who fled this way and that, rather than submit to the extortions of the Sultan's officers. And among those who escaped in this fashion was a god-fearing widow and her children. Her name was Leila. She took up her abode near this fountain, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... as profound, was different in character. Her sex and various other considerations taught her more restraint; but she also felt the situation to be altogether unendurable, and after a few moments of bitterly eloquent silence, ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... steerage, below, to the first cabin or upper deck, the passengers had occupied every kind of quarters; the sea was smooth, so that few were seasick, but the sun beat down from directly overhead, out of a sky almost cloudless, and even under the awnings the heat and moisture were well-nigh unendurable. The gold seekers who clung to their heavy boots and trousers ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... an evil side to every other kind of almsgiving. It is well to save life, but the world is already overstocked with life; and in saving life one may be making the struggle for existence still more unendurable for those who come after. But in giving your money to science you are accomplishing a definite good; the results of science have always been beneficent. Science will alleviate the wants of the world more wisely than the kindest heart that ever ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... head under the unendurable weight of this question. He shudders, and with lifted hand tries to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in the unprovisioned canoe had, to use his own expression, "taken it out of him." He tried to arouse himself by directing his mind to the ingots the Chinamen had spoken of, but it would not rest there; it came back headlong to the thought of sweet water rippling in the river, and to the almost unendurable dryness of his lips and throat. The rhythmic wash of the sea upon the reef was becoming audible now, and it had a pleasant sound in his ears; the water washed along the side of the canoe, and the paddle dripped between each stroke. Presently ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Leopard-man, released from Moreau's eye, had risen straight from his knees, and now, with eyes aflame and his huge feline tusks flashing out from under his curling lips, leapt towards his tormentor. I am convinced that only the madness of unendurable fear could have prompted this attack. The whole circle of threescore monsters seemed to rise about us. I drew my revolver. The two figures collided. I saw Moreau reeling back from the Leopard-man's blow. There was a furious yelling and howling all about ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... bear the gnawing hunger at her heart for the presence of him unto whom was every thought of her brain and every throbbing pulse of her soul? The future seemed to stretch before her, a terrible, an unendurable blank. ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... that you ought not to remain much longer at your present post. You will, in all human probability, be involved in complications from which you cannot escape with honor. Separated from your family and all your kin, and an object of suspicion, you will find your position unendurable. A fatal infatuation seems to have seized the southern mind, during which any act of madness may be committed. . . . If the sectional dissensions only rested upon real or alleged grievances, they could be readily settled, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... "Then your son is a tell-tale, Mr. Grace, and allow me to say that this is none of his business. When I am insulted, I resent it." To be chaffed by his own uncle when under sentence of a court-martial had not been agreeable, but this admonition was unendurable. He entered the shop. ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... Lord has shown that a great and blessed life is possible on conditions which the world pronounces simply unendurable. He would not accept the world's maxims, would not be ruled by the world's principles, did despite to the world's most favorite plans. He even tasted the dregs of reprobation that the world metes out to those who oppose her, enduring the cross, and despising the shame. But His life was ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... that he was gaining in poise. Sometimes, when the adorer is at a distance from the object of his devotion, the idolatry of love assumes fateful proportions. During his stay in Paris, Frederick had lived in a state of constant fever, and his yearning for his idol had risen to an unendurable degree. About the image of little Ingigerd Hahlstroem, a heavenly aureole had laid itself, so compelling in its attraction that Frederick's mental vision was literally blinded to everything else. That illusion had ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... worn out with fatigue, and nature triumphed over my grief. I fell into that heavy sleep which follows the expenditure of nerve power, and from which one awakes able to bear life again and to carry the load that seemed unendurable. When I awoke it was day, and the wintry sky was dull and dark like that of yesterday, but it also wore a threatening aspect, from the great masses of black cloud that covered it. I went to the window and looked out for ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... this last mighty effort. Yes, for all he was bred in the gentle life of civilisation, for all ruthless cruelty had no place in his normal temper, his one desire now was to kill, to slay this brute-man who had made his life unendurable. ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... grew more and more distinct in her mind a kind of idealized Mr. Brumley, very grave, very attentive, wonderfully understanding, saying illuminating helpful tonic things, that made everything clear, everything almost easy. She wanted someone of that quality so badly. The night would have been unendurable if she could not have imagined Mr. Brumley of that quality. And imagining him of that quality her heart yearned for him. She felt that she had been terribly inexpressive that afternoon, she had shirked points, misstated points, and yet he had been ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... supposed that during chapel the next morning, and when he went into early school, Walter was in an agony of almost unendurable suspense; and this suspense was doomed to be prolonged for some time, until at last he could hardly sit still. Mr Paton did not at once notice that his desk was broken. He laid down his books, and went on as usual with ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... songs and shrieks and orisons, its outcries of delight and of despair, rise never to the hearing of the Immortals but as a perfect harmony.... Wherefore they could not desire to hush the tones of pain: it would spoil their music! The combination, without the agony-tones, would prove a discord unendurable to ears divine. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the sky, though it was not yet the stated hour of worship, she suddenly knelt down, and leaning on their knees, with hands clasped more fervently than her wont, she broke forth into tremulous singing of that hymn, which from her lips they now never heard without unendurable tears. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... better than you; he can move about in a house without breaking cups and glasses; he leaves my shoes alone. Yes! He knows how to move in society; but you are ridiculous—I am ashamed of you—you are unendurable—do you ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... time, when his feeling of restlessness became quite unendurable, the ex-ambassador would wander round Fort Gayole and on some pretext or other demand to see one or the other of his prisoners. Marguerite, however, observed complete silence in his presence: she acknowledged his greeting with a slight inclination of the head, and in reply to certain perfunctory ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... one squeeze of the hand, and then as I saw her glances wander to his face, I groaned in spirit, stammered some words of choking sorrow and was gone, before her embarrassment would let her speak words, which I knew would only add to my grief and make this hasty parting unendurable. ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... the sting and torment of my remorse had closed them round her like a vice. Yes! my remorse. The white despair of Walter's face, when my cruel words struck him to the heart in the summer-house at Limmeridge, rose before me in mute, unendurable reproach. My hand had pointed the way which led the man my sister loved, step by step, far from his country and his friends. Between those two young hearts I had stood, to sunder them for ever, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... was half-past by her large gold watch, which she held in her hand as if she were counting the pulse of the afternoon, and that, by the kitchen clock, which she felt sure was not an hour too fast, it had already struck six. The lapse of time was rendered the more unendurable to Mrs. Jerome by her wonder that Mr. Jerome could stay out in the garden with Lizzie in that thoughtless way, taking it so easily that tea-time was long past, and that, after all the trouble of getting down the best tea-things, Mr. Tryan ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... humans. But he had been a member of the family, romping with them in the living-room, sitting at meals with them in the dining-room, going upstairs at night with them, and the thought that he was to be "kept out" would be unendurable. ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... with swifter foot within the prison. Alaric was allowed the use of books and pens and paper, but even with these he found a day in prison to be almost an unendurable eternity. This was the real punishment of his guilt; it was not that he could not eat well, and lie soft, or enjoy the comforts which had always surrounded him; but that the day would not pass away. The slowness of the lagging hours nearly drove him mad. He made a thousand resolutions ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... they're about fourteen, and there they're kept, strictly tabooed, till they're just going to be married. I went to see them myself; it was a horrid sight. The poor creatures were confined in a dark, close hut, without air or ventilation, in that stifling climate, which is as unendurable from heat as this one is from cold and damp and fogginess; and there they sat in cages, coarsely woven from broad leaves of the pandanus trees, so that no light could enter; for the people believed that light would kill them. No man might see them, ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... meekly bore, Till unendurable it grew. "To stop this persecution sore I will consult ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... carelessly glanced at the money in her purse, and then put on her things for the journey. Waiting, she stood at the window to look for the postman. Presently she saw him in the distance; he approached quickly, but spent an unendurable minute out of sight in the shop next door. When he emerged Hilda was in anguish. Had he a letter for her? Had he not? He seemed to waver at the gateway, and to decide to enter.... She heard the double blow of his drumstick ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... home, and I came upon this gang of ruffians at your door. Impatient at being delayed,—for my time is much occupied,—I rebuked them for being in me way. One of them turned to me and insolently inquired, 'Do you own this street, or have you just got a lien on it?' which unendurable insult was greeted with a loud laugh from the other ruffians. I called them by some properly severe name, and raised me cane to force a passage,—and the rest you know. Now, gentlemen, is there anything I ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the inordinate ingratitude of the French in not recognising his amiable qualities. It was his habit to remind them that but for his clemency in carrying out the instructions of Bathurst and those who acted with him, their condition could be made unendurable. He was incapable of grasping the lofty personality of the persecuted ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... except to take what's given you. You stand alone, and you'll be cut alone, worked overtime alone, kicked alone, and, when it gets unendurable, starve alone. But, if you've got any sense or sand, don't stand alone to get kicked and cuffed and robbed by a company or by a bunch of companies. Meet union with union, strength with strength, and, if worst comes to worst, fight with fight. Us workingmen have things ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... are drawn by a man or a donkey. The first day I took a man, an old sailor, who talked incessantly of his adventures, stopping to rest every five minutes, dissipating all my pleasant reveries, and making an unendurable bore of himself. The next day I told the proprietor to get me a man who would not talk all the time. The man he supplied jogged along in absolute silence; he would not even answer my questions. Supposing he had his orders to keep profound silence, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... men, and women have done with us and can do everywhere a great work in this. Women are on our National Committee and doing a great deal of its organization. Our men in the trenches, in the air, at sea, endure for us what we would have said before the war was humanly unendurable. They pay for our freedom with a great price—and we send them out to pay it—in death, disablement, suffering and sacrifice. To fail in our duty behind them would ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... our best suits, or brush us altogether from our seats; the brakes do not work; the traces get unhitched; an immense whip is flourished and cracked; the horses become unmanageable; frightened women in a high key scream "Mercy!" and the ride becomes not only dangerous but unendurable. ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... policy and to content themselves with smaller additions to the prices of their wares. If it were not for this regulative work of the potential competitor, we should have a regime of monopoly with its unendurable evils; and if, on the other hand, the regulator were as efficient as it should be, we should have a natural system in which complete freedom would rule. The limitless difference between these conditions measures the ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... toil of rowing in the galleys was excessive, almost unendurable. Yet it seems to have been performed by freely-enlisted men, and therefore it was probably less severe than that of the great-oared galleys of more recent times, which it was found impracticable to work by free enlistment, or otherwise than by slaves under the ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... terrible to her to see human lives going off in such a foul smoke of hell! Not a sentence was uttered by the one but was furiously felt as a wrong by the other—to be remorselessly met by wrong as flagrant, rousing in its turn the indignation of injury to a pain unendurable. It is strange that the man who most keenly feels the wrong done him, should so often be the most insensible to the wrong he does. So dominant is the unreason of the moment, that the injury he inflicts appears absolute justice, and the ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the dugouts! And then the fury of the charge, and the everlasting killing, killing, or being killed! The danger had seemed little or nothing to me when I was there. But at a distance it was frightful, unendurable. I knew that I could never stand up to it again. Besides, already I had done my share—enough for two or three men. Why must I go back into that hell? It was not fair. Life was too dear to be risking it all the time. I could not endure it. France? France? Of ...
— The Broken Soldier and the Maid of France • Henry Van Dyke
... reached that famous depot of the fleecy tribe without adventure. I will not attempt to describe the tedium of that horrid voyage, for it has been often described before; and to Martin, who was in no ways fastidious, it was not so unendurable as it must always be to those who have been accustomed to more rapid movement. Nor yet will I attempt to put on record the miserable resources of those, who, doomed to a twenty hours' sojourn in one of these floating prisons, vainly endeavour to occupy ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... daughter's letter; give me your answer, and let us cut short an interview—which, if disagreeable to you, is almost unendurable to me." ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... he had cut four years out of his life. For this reward of all his constancy he had endured what had been wellnigh unendurable—loneliness, homesickness, isolation, discomfort. For this he had kept his body clean and his soul clean where all about him was sloth and slackness. He thought backward upon that which he had undergone; he thought forward upon the dreary purposeless ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... be buried, where hyenas prowled and jackals wandered, and where the desolate cry of the night-owls echoed over the rocks. In winter the wind sweeps up the valley and howls round the rocks; in summer the sun makes it a veritable furnace, unendurable to man. There is nothing here to remind one of the God Who watches over him, and the tender Aton of the Pharaoh's conception would seem to have abandoned this place to the spirits of evil. There are no flowers where Akhnaton ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... occasion of his visit to the yacht, was, all unknown to his accomplices, his by right of birth, so that there was nothing other than a long-dead scandal in the French Navy that might have proved a bar to an affiance such as he dreamed of. And now to be thwarted at the last moment! It was unendurable. That pig of a Ward had sealed his own death warrant, of ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... men were worn out with the tremendous labors which they had performed since their arrival on the Peninsula; they were burned by almost unendurable heat; they were nearly devoured by the countless myriads of flies and other annoying insects; and they were forced to drink impure and unwholesome water. It was not strange that hundreds died in camp, and ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... had proved that they could meet the English in battle with some prospect of success would the French commit themselves openly; and during 1776 and 1777 the tide ran too steadily against {95} the insurgents. Finally, in December, when the anxieties of Franklin and his associates were almost unendurable, the news of Burgoyne's surrender was brought to Paris. The turning-point was reached. Vergennes immediately led the French King to make two treaties, one for commercial reciprocity, the other a treaty of military alliance, recognizing the independence of the ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... seriously objected, and his actions plainly told the story of his disgust at the conduct of the silly members of his race. He usually remained a passive observer until the exercise in the manual of arms, at which particular period in the ceremonies, the caperings and the barkings would become quite unendurable. Our hero would then assume the character of a preserver of the peace. He would make for the nearest group of revellers, and, in as many seconds, give a half dozen or more of them vigorous shakes, which would set them to howling, and ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... face was pinched and drawn. The struggle with wild weather had drained the lips and the cheeks of colour, and her brown hair under her serge cap fell limply about her small ears and neck. She was an image not so much of grief as of some unendurable distress. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
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