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Crushing   Listen
adjective
Crushing  adj.  That crushes; overwhelming. "The blow must be quick and crushing."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Crushing" Quotes from Famous Books



... would supply the ghost of Varus with a crushing answer to "Give me back my legions!" in such form as "Why did ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... was quickly followed by the crushing defeat of Piedmont at the battle of Novara. On the abdication of Charles Albert and the succession of Victor Emmanuel to the throne, the new King signed the Treaty of Peace on March 26, 1849. The terms of this treaty were considered disgraceful by the Genoese and were the immediate ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury

... to be, he would not, in seeking to remove it, select a time so unseasonable, and adopt measures so unwise, as would result, Samson-like, in removing the pillars of our great political fabric, and crushing the glorious Union, formed by the wisdom and cemented by the blood of our Revolutionary Fathers, into a ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward

... of the "Numancia's" bow-torpedo, striking the ill-fated frigate; and then the crushing and splintering of timbers under the fearful stroke of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various

... questions in the high key we are apt to adopt in addressing foreigners, in the instinctive fallacy that any language can be understood by any one if it be spoken loudly enough. The mother's manner was a crushing rebuke to the young man for his audacity. The father's manner was meant to intimate that natives of the region in which they were then adventuring were not worthy of rebuke, save such general rebukes as may be conveyed by displaying one's natural superiority of manner. The other ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... truth grows stronger day by day. I hear the soul of man around me waking, Like a great sea its frozen fetters breaking, And flinging up to heaven its sunlit spray, Tossing huge continents in scornful play, And crushing them with din of grinding thunder That makes old emptinesses stare in wonder. The memory of a glory passed away Lingers in every heart, as in the shell Resounds the by-gone freedom of the sea. And every hour new signs of promise tell That the great soul shall once again be free; ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... the legacy of monarchy, just as here the inheritance of slavery kept alive political strife, and culminated in civil war. As with us there could be no quiet but through the end of slavery, so in Mexico there could be no prosperity until the crushing tyranny of intolerance should cease. The party of slavery in the United States sent their emissaries to Europe to solicit aid; and so did the party of the Church in Mexico, as organized by the old Spanish council of the Indies, but ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... read it all over slowly and carefully, weighing every word. Presently he handed back the paper. "Your honour, it is complete and masterly," he said. "It puts the crushing of the revolt into the hands of Mr. Calhoun, and nothing could be wiser. He has the gifts of a leader, and he will do the job with no mistake, and in a time of crisis like this, that is essential. You have given him the right to order the militia to obey him, and nothing ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... John, of course," thought the young man, crushing a hope, and rattled the knocker. 'Tite Poulette sprang up from praying for her mother's safety. "What has she forgotten?" she asked herself, and hastened down. The wicket opened. The two ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... the whole thing out very clearly, and I saw no gap in my logic. I cannot describe how that scribble had heartened me. I felt no more the crushing isolation of yesterday. There were others beside me in the secret. Help must be on the way, and the ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... I don't believe nobody else ever did neither." "For the love of Mike," roared another, "let's stick to them words we're all agreed on, and keep off of that thorological grass!" "Man and boy, I've been to sea this thirty years," exclaimed Mr. Bob with crushing vehemence, "and there warn't no T in Christmas then, and there ain't now! C-R-I-S-S-M-A-S, you son of a sea cook, and I know hevery letter of it like the ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... had taken shelter with him to have him taken to the jungle where he now reposes. They did so, and the instant they left the building it fell to the ground. Many who saw it told me they had no doubt that the virtues of the old man had sustained it while he was there, and prevented its crushing all who were in it. The tomb was built over his remains by a Hindoo officer of the court, who had been long out of employment and in great affliction. He had no sooner completed the tomb, and implored the aid of the old man, than he got into excellent service, and has been ever ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... the story of our private lives. I must now either accept this duty entirely or abandon it entirely. I will not abandon it; for every instinct and nerve of intelligence I have tells me that this is a time when it must not be abandoned. I must accept a comparison that must be a contrast, and a crushing contrast; but though I can never be so good as my brother, I will see if I ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... their feelings are too big for utterance in anything less than capital letters. They require the additional aid of whole rows of notes of admiration, like balloons, to point their generous indignation; and they sometimes communicate a crushing severity to ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens

... "It's a crushing blow, to come before the preferment in rank that I have been led to expect would be my retiring compensation!" The colonel turned from them sharply, as if in pain, and walked in marching stride across the room. Frances withdrew ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... proclaimed two years ago at the Brussels conference of financiers assembled by the League of Nations. These experts said quite plainly and definitely that, so far as they could see, the salvation of Europe from bankruptcy depended upon the immediate diminution of the crushing burden of expenditure upon arms. That was two years ago. Linked up with this question is the whole question of the economic reconstruction of Europe. Linked up with it also is that deep and grave problem of reparations. It is no longer the case to-day, if it has ever been the case since ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various

... end of 1816 the cause of liberty in Chili was at its lowest ebb. After four years of struggle the patriots had met with a crushing defeat in 1814, and had been scattered to the four winds. Since then the viceroy of Spain had ruled the land with an iron hand, many of the leading citizens being banished to the desolate island of Juan Fernandez, the imaginary scene of Robinson Crusoe's ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris

... School so also with the university. The second, as the first, was the creation of the Church, and even more conspicuously it was the vehicle for fostering and maintaining the control of common institutions and a common learning, and thereby of crushing out the rich variety of local life which everywhere was springing up. In its very constitution the University of Paris, the mother and model of all later universities (at least in northern Europe), showed its international character; the students who flocked to it from all countries were organized ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... immediately drove to the general offices of the Harrisville Iron & Steel Co. The directors of the company were in special session to devise means of protecting their threatened property and of crushing the strike. ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton

... haunted him through all his misery. He knew she would be wondering about him, they had been such good friends. After all, must he go away? Perhaps never to see her again, without knowing whether she would miss him or not. Oh! at least, pain and sorrow and suffering are not so crushing when one is loved. It is something when the head is weary with its thoughts of anguish to pillow it on the sympathizing bosom of one who loves us; it is in the deep, imploring gaze of the eyes that watch us with a tender solicitude, that one learns ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... weeds and thorns, and matted underwood I force my way; now climb, and now descend O'er rocks, or bare or mossy, with wild foot Crushing the purple whorts;[1] while oft unseen, Hurrying along the drifted forest-leaves, The scared snake rustles. Onward still I toil, I know not, ask not whither! A new joy, Lovely as light, sudden as summer gust, And gladsome as the first-born of the spring, Beckons ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... struggle against hopeless odds for the means of a decent existence? What hour, of what day of what year ever passed in which the number of deaths, and the physical and moral anguish resulting from the anarchy of the economic struggle and the crushing odds against the poor, did not outweigh as a hundred to one that same hour's record of death or suffering resulting from violence? Far better would society have fulfilled its recognized duty of safeguarding the lives of its members if, repealing ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... man to neglect the opportunity afforded by this letter for a crushing reply; and accordingly he spend a pleasant hour that same afternoon in ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed

... properly belong to fire; and so hell's probable. How the soot flies! This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of. Carpenter, when he's through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of steel shoulder-blades; there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack. ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... and enforced their demands; she realized that without it women exercised small influence upon law-makers and had no power to reward friends or punish enemies. A sense of the terrible helplessness of being utterly without representation came upon her with crushing force. The first great cause of the injustice which pressed upon women from every point was clearly revealed to her and she understood, as never before, that any class which is compelled to be legislated for ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... heart Made all the world as happy as itself,— Prince Edwin, with a score of lusty knights, Rode forth a bridegroom to bring home his bride. Brave sight it was to see them on their way, Their long white mantles ruffling in the wind, Their jewelled bridles, horses keen as flame Crushing the flowers to fragrance as they moved! Now flashed they past the solitary crag, Now glimmered through the forest's dewy gloom, Now issued to the sun. The summer night Hung o'er their tents, within ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... dipped his line into the current, and drew it across the shadowy hollows beneath the bank. The river-gods were not, however, in a favourable mood, and after waiting in vain for some time, in a spot in which he was usually successful, he proceeded slowly along the margin of the brooklet, crushing the reeds at every step, into that fresh and delicious odour, which furnished Bacon with one of ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... over him. He was about to speak, when the man lifted his arms, swinging upward a heavy club. With quick presence of mind, Ramon jerked the blankets and the heavy canvas tarpaulin about his head, at the same time rolling over. The club came down with crushing force on his right shoulder. He continued to roll and flounder with all his might, going down a sharp slope toward the creek which was only a few yards away. Twice more he felt the club, once on his arm and once on his ribs, but his ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... stuck. And he saw that he had crawled under the cart and was trying to lift it by arching his back. But strange to say the cart did not move, it stuck to his back and he could neither lift it nor get out from under it. It was crushing the whole of his loins. And how cold it felt! Evidently he must crawl out. 'Have done!' he exclaimed to whoever was pressing the cart down on him. 'Take out the sacks!' But the cart pressed down colder and colder, and then he heard a strange knocking, awoke completely, and remembered everything. ...
— Master and Man • Leo Tolstoy

... kind in nature, a provision to deaden feeling when a death stroke falls—some merciful dispensation by which we fail to realize or to understand in its exactness the meaning of the stroke which is crushing us. ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... now, in the midst of the hills she loved—alone as she would never be again. She foresaw that she would not have the strength to lay that last blow upon her faithful old friend,—the crushing blow that perfect truth demanded. Her tenderness ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... about they were startled by a terrific crashing sound. They started in alarm, for, off to their left, the top of one of the ice caverns had crashed inward, the blocks of frozen water crushing and ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton

... shouted Jack in a voice of thunder. Then the truth dawned on him; and, crushing the table between his hands, he turned to the chamberlain, who, bewildered and half-frightened, was wondering ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various

... mingling as the astonished assailants realized the fight before them. An instant we held them, startled, and demoralized. The warriors bearing the log stumbled over a dead body and went down, the great timber crushing out another life as it fell. Again we fired, this time straight into their faces—but there was no stopping them. A red blanket flashed back beyond the big tree; a guttural voice shouted, its hoarse note rising above the hellish uproar, and ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... ship, the sea was running too high: it beat against the unfortunate vessel, and dashed over her. The people on shore thought that they heard cries of distress—cries of those in the agony of death; and they saw the desperate, useless activity on board. Then came a sea that, like a crushing avalanche, fell upon the bowsprit, and it was gone. The stern of the vessel rose high above the water—two people sprang from it together into the sea—a moment, and one of the most gigantic billows that were rolling up against the sand-hills cast ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen

... the greatest of poets. On the morning after your departure I finished the 'Philip Augustus.' In the thirty-eighth chapter is this sentence: 'O Isidore! 't is not the present, I believe, that ever makes our misery; 't is its contrast with the past; 't is the loss of some hope, or the crushing of some joy; the disappointment of expectation, or the regrets of memory. The present is nothing, nothing, nothing, but in its relation to the future or the past.' James is inferior to Scott in wit and humor, but more ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various

... think of my party, whose glory and whose service to Liberty are the pride of my life, crushing out this people in their effort to establish a Republic, and hear people talk about giving them good Government, and that they are better off than they ever were under Spain, I feel very much as if I had learned that my father, or some other honored ancestor, had been a slave-trader ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... any one who chanced to be in that spot at that special moment, but I did not realize this then. Covering the splash with my hands, I edged myself back to the door by which I had entered, watching those deathful eyes and crushing under my feet the remnants of some broken china with which the carpet was bestrewn. I had no thought of her, hardly any of myself. To cross the room was all; to escape as secretly as I came, before the portiere so nearly drawn between ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... excuse now. To appear before her again as Almos, after having seen my folly and realized the deceit of my position toward her, would be an act of shameful duplicity. I had not realized this before, for I had thought only of my great love for her and the joy of again being with her, but now the crushing force with which the truth presented itself, caused me to hesitate before taking another step that I now felt would be impossible to justify before Almos. In this great uncertainty of mind I ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood

... with distorted animation; turned dogs into deities, and leeks into lightning-darters; then gradually invested the blank granite with sculptured mystery, designed in superstition, and adored in disease; and then such masses of architecture arose as, in delirium, we feel crushing down upon us with eternal weight, and see extending far into the blackness above; huge and shapeless columns of colossal life; immense and immeasurable avenues of mountain stone. This was a perfect—that is, a marked, enduring, and decided ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... ROOKH try to soften this inexorable critic; in vain did she resort to her most eloquent commonplaces, reminding him that poets were a timid and sensitive race whose sweetness was not to be drawn forth like that of the fragrant grass near the Ganges by crushing and trampling upon them,[182] that severity often extinguished every chance of the perfection which it demanded, and that after all perfection was like the Mountain of the Talisman,—no one had ever yet reached its summit.[183] Neither these gentle ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... he saw that the end had absolutely come, that she was escaping from him, that she was slipping from his hands, that she was gliding from him, like a cloud, like water, when he had before his eyes this crushing proof: "another is the goal of her heart, another is the wish of her life; there is a dearest one, I am no longer anything but her father, I no longer exist"; when he could no longer doubt, when he said to himself: "She is going away from me!" the grief which he felt surpassed the bounds ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... This crushing blow to her fortunes and her pride no doubt broke Lady Blessington's heart; for within a few months of the last fall of the auctioneer's hammer, she died suddenly in Paris, to the unspeakable grief of d'Orsay, who declared to the Countess's physician, Madden, "She ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... novel back home with him, hidden under his jerkin; but Beverley's note lay upon Alice's heart, a sweet comfort and a crushing weight, when an hour later Hamilton sent for her and she was taken before him. Her face was stained with tears and she looked pitifully distressed and disheveled; yet despite all this her beauty asserted ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... much that needs amending In the present time, no doubt; There is right that needs amending, There is wrong needs crushing out. And we hear the groans and curses Of the poor who starve and die, While the men with swollen purses In the ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... on that night after his first meeting with the girl, and the succeeding days enforced the conviction he would have been glad to escape. He could no longer doubt that he was in love, madly infatuated with his best friend's fiancee, and the knowledge came like some crushing misfortune. It could scarcely be called a love at first sight, for he felt that he had always known and always loved this girl. He had never believed in these sudden obsessions, and more than once had been amused at Martel's ability to fall violently in love at a moment's notice, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... a crushing letter from the lady principal. She said that "The Ten Points of a good Doll" seemed a preposterous subject for senior students of literature to write about, and "My Favourite Elopement in Fiction" would be outside the purview of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various

... the nut-cracker mouth that always had the appearance of crushing something. His pale eyes glowed for ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... homeward voyage were passed by Haldane in vain conjecture. Of one thing he felt sure, and that was that Laura was by this time, or soon would be, Mrs. Beaumont; and now that the excitement of military service was over, the thought rested on him with a weight that was almost crushing. ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe

... been more serious, the branch nearly taking my head off if I did not stoop low enough. When I could look about me, the scene was most extraordinary and indescribable: a hundred elephants were tearing through the jungle as rapidly as their unwieldy forms would let them, crushing down the heavy jungle in their headlong career, while their riders were gesticulating violently, each man punishing his elephant, or making a bolster of himself as he flung his body on one side or the other to avoid branches; while some, Ducrow-like, and confident in their activity, were standing ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant

... his mouth to protest, the catastrophe occurred. There was a snap, and the toboggan shot downward. Bound as he was, the victim could see below him a brick wall right across the path of his descent. He was helpless to move; it was useless to cry out. For all that, as he felt in imagination the crushing shock of his head driven like a battering-ram against this wall, he uttered a roar such as from Achilles might have roused armed nations to battle. And even as he did so, his head touched the wall, there was a crash, and Stevens lay safe on a ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick

... forced to. You may have hit enemy harder than you think. All our native spies report that your artillery fire made considerable impression on enemy. Have your losses been very heavy? If you lose touch of enemy, it will immensely increase his opportunities of crushing me, and have worst effect elsewhere. While you are in touch with him and in communication with me, he has both of our forces to reckon with. Make every effort to get reinforcements as early as possible, including India, and enlist every man in both colonies who will serve and can ride. Things ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... avarice and a natural love of victory that he felt anxious to fight: to these was now added a dreadful certainty that Lamh Laudher was the man in existence who had inflicted on him an injury, for which nothing but the pleasure of crushing him to atoms with his hands, could atone. The approaching battle therefore, with his direst enemy, was looked upon by the Dead Boxer as an opportunity of glutting his revenge. When the crowd had dispersed, he called a waiter, ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... moments in the glorious Sicilian sundown I recollected those days when at seventeen she had admitted her love for me, and we were happy. Visions of that blissful past arose before me—and then the crushing blow I had received prior to ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux

... did not threaten immediate danger, I saw that unless means could be devised to support it, like catastrophes would at some time recur, and perhaps the whole mountain arm would give way, hurling the upper cities to destruction, and crushing the nether cities under its falling masses. The terrible consequences that would ensue were more appalling even in their remoteness than the ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... broadside on. She was a soft-wood built ship, and she trembled, sir, as though she would go to pieces at once like a pack of cards. Sheets and halliards were let go, but no man durst venture aloft. Every moment threatened to bring the spars crushing about us, and the thundering and beating of the canvas made the masts buckle and jump like fishing-rods. We then kindled a great flare and sent up rockets, and our signals were answered by the Sunk Lightship and the Knock. We could see one another's faces in ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor

... mode of fighting practised by the Highlanders, in the manoeuvre of the "Black Watch," or 42nd; and had shown his judgment in allowing them to fight in their own way. This gallant regiment, in which many of the privates were gentlemen, were exempted at this time from the service of crushing the rebellion, only to have a duty, perhaps more cruel and more unwarrantable, forced upon them, after the battle of Culloden. By a singular circumstance, the Black Watch was commanded by Lord John Murray, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson

... Americans in Texas, and on March 2, 1836, through their representatives in convention assembled, these Americans in true Revolutionary spirit declared Texas an independent republic. The Mexican government tried to put down this rebellion, but met with a crushing defeat, and Texas, the "Lone Star" state, remained an independent republic up to the time of her annexation and admission as a state of ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America

... open, and for an instant Stephen appeared, pale and in his night clothes and with a flaring candle in his hand. With a spring like a leopard Katrine had reached him and put her hand over the flame of the candle, crushing it out beneath her palm. The darkness she knew was their only shield. By their voices and their footsteps she could tell the men without numbered not less than four or five. Once let a light reveal to them that the ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross

... Industries: copra crushing, palm oil processing, plywood production, wood chip production; mining of gold, silver, and copper; crude ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... impulse of offense, and descended on MacNutt, beating at the prone, bull-like head, with its claret-colored bald spot, across which ran one livid scratch. He pounded on the clustered fingers of the gorilla-like hand, crushing and bruising them against the gilded iron grill-work, through which was ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... cherish for each other. While so far from you, I am sad, lonely, and unhappy; for I feel that I have no home but in the heart of him whom I love, and no country until I reach one where the cruel and crushing hand of Republican America can no longer tear ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen

... "Just raw, crushing force," he said wonderingly. "A ferocious demand, with no regard for facts, no consideration of mental characteristics, no thought of consequence." He shook his head slowly. "Never experienced anything just like ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole

... said that the breaking of the spirit, the crushing of all hope for any future save that of shame is always a part of the initiation of a white slave. Then the girl was shipped on to Chicago, where she was disposed of to the keeper of an Italian dive of the ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... bulwark; old Pedro, at the tiller, peered about from under his hand, and I, trying to expose myself to view as little as possible, helped him to look for the Lion. There she is. Yes! No! There she was. A crushing load fell off my chest. We had made her out ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... father's distant relationship, inherited a very magnificent property—the estate of Temple Barholm in Lancashire," Palford began to explain, but Mr. Hutchinson sprang from his chair outright, crushing his paper in ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... last plank that saved him from ruin, perhaps the last chance that stood between him and dishonour. He had never looked on it as within the possibilities of hazard that the horse could be defeated, and the blow fell with crushing force; the fiercer because his indolence had persisted in ignoring his danger, and his whole character was so accustomed to ease and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... Could that be the reason? Could it be that love was a companion for the weakest of mankind, if kindly entertained, and yet, if resisted, the master of the very strongest? Greif in his pride of youth believed himself as strong as any, and the sensation of being thus utterly overpowered was crushing and humiliating. He would not yield, but he well knew that he was conquered beforehand, and must be led away ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... none of the burden of humanity; his heart never breaks because a life is withering in despair? He takes no hurt from the weltering sorrows by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is woman, who bears the agony; the crushing burden of wrong-doing falls on them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-god in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you apprehend the nearness of danger, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... that lies between these mountains is the waste known as the Mojave desert. It stretches north and south from San Pasqual, fading away into nothing, into impalpable, unlovely, soul-crushing suggestions of space illimitable; dancing and shimmering in the heat waves, it seems struggling to escape. When the wind blows, the dust-devils play tag among the low sage and greasewood; the Joshua trees, rising in the midst of this ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne

... instant, he felt crushing pain, then the world dissolved into bright specks in a spreading blackness. One by one, the points of light winked out. And then, ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole

... already overcrowded with applicants. In his earnestness and eagerness the youth went from house to house asking for any kind of work "that would enable him to study art." But it was all in vain, and to save himself from starvation he was at length forced to accept the position of a day laborer, crushing stones for street paving. Yet he hoped to study painting when his day's work ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden

... value freedom in every department of our being—spirit as well as mind and body. George Adam Smith says: "The great causes of God and humanity are not defeated by the hot assaults of the Devil, but by the slow, crushing, glacier-like mass of thousands and thousands of indifferent nobodies. God's causes are never destroyed by being blown up, but by being sat upon. It is not the violent and anarchical whom we have ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... asked. "Is baby going to be very sick?" and a great crushing fear came upon her as ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... that the widow's partner was visibly impressed, a fact which, curiously enough, seemed to be anything but agreeable to the widow. After that they all filed off to supper, where they found the dancers already in possession, and there was much crushing and crowding, which tended to do away with ceremony and to promote the harmony ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... the solemnity of the occasion, but to me it served to increase its grandeur and gravity. The applause, though tumultuous, was not joyous. It seemed to me, as it thundered up from the vast audience, like the fall of an immense shaft, flung from shoulders already galled by its crushing weight. It was like saying, "Doctor, we have borne this burden long enough, and willingly fling it upon you. Since it was you who brought it upon us, take it now, and do what you will with it, for we are too weary to bear it.{no ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... the distant East, and so, when the "Servia" slowly glides from her moorings and turns her prow towards the sparkling sea, Nannie McKay is sobbing her heart out alone in her little white state-room, crushing with her kisses, bathing with her tears, the love-knot she had given her soldier boy ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King

... Pink is secured by crushing lynga (Sesamum indicum L.) seeds and boiling them in water. Threads are placed in this for five nights, while during the day they are dried in the sun. The root of the apatot (Morinda citrifolia or umbellata) is next crushed, and water is added. The threads are now transferred to this liquid, ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... the girl sprang back, crushing the birchbark case with its red flower into shapeless ruin. There was a muffled word, the flash of a figure, and McElroy the factor had flung himself before her. She caught the thud of a blow upon flesh and in a moment there were two men locked in deadly ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... compartment came the terrible thunder of the explosion, blowing the cavern to pieces, hurling men to death by the force of its shock, falling stones crushing out the ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes

... Monsieur Nanteuil, his clerks, and those who witnessed the accident, must have been greatly excited and upset, otherwise they would naturally have been much astonished at finding the substituted hand-cart practically uninjured after an accident of so crushing ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... by one impulse passion gave way to action. Like an invading army the townspeople poured in at the gate, trampling the turf and crushing the flower-beds. They forced the front door (whence the page fled, to hide in the cellar), pushed into the hall, swarmed into the drawing-room—upstairs—all ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... continue her flight; whether she crouched down again under the portico, resigned for one bitter moment to perish by the knife of Goisvintha—if Goisvintha were near; to fall once more into the hands of Ulpius—if Ulpius were tracking her to her retreat,—the crushing sense that she was utterly bereaved of her beloved protector—that the friend of her brief days of happiness was lost to her for ever—that Hermanric, who had preserved her from death, had been murdered in his youth and his strength ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... strike him that in disappearing he might throw all pursuit off his track, and at the same time have an ample and crushing revenge upon his old sweetheart, if he could give the impression that he had been murdered by her only child. It was a masterpiece of villainy, and he carried it out like a master. The idea of the will, which would give an obvious motive for the crime, the secret visit unknown to his own parents, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle

... quizzed objects on the floor, then took lunar observations through it, the broad disc of the Umpire's red face affording the medium of a planet. To General F——, who was then in the full pressure of his speech, making his, to him, crushing arguments a legal treadmill for his handsome brother, he seemed a perfect pest, inasmuch as whenever the General had got a real stunner of an argument on the crook of his mind, and just where he would be sure to lose it if the course were not left clear, he was sure to interrupt ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... man be in deadly earnest or very young, I cannot conceive a career more distressing to the imagination and crushing to the ambition than the practice of medicine in the East End. The bulk of my cases were club cases which enabled me to be sure of a living, and the rest were for the most part sordid and unpleasant subjects, springing out of the vile life of the district. Alien sailors abounded ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... settled down contentedly to double Canfield, the woman crushing out the last flicker of the late topic with a placid shake of the head, when the man asked her for her honest opinion of the American School of Domestic Science. "I don't truly think it's at all practical, dear," said Mrs. Salisbury regretfully. "But we might watch it for a year or two and go ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris

... liberal that he could hardly do enough to show his gratitude; which found but an imperfect vent, during the remainder of the day, in divers secret slaps upon his pocket, and other such facetious pantomime. Nor was it confined to these ebullitions; for besides crushing a bandbox, with a bonnet in it, he seriously damaged Mr Pecksniff's luggage, by ardently hauling it down from the top of the house; and in short evinced, by every means in his power, a lively sense of the favours he had received from ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... Lady Fulkeward was in the sixties, the girl had so much sadness in her face and so much tragedy in her soft eyes that she looked, if anything, older than the old woman. Gervase and Dr. Dean arrived together, and found themselves in a brilliant, crushing crowd of people, all of different nationalities and all manifesting a good deal of impatience because they were delayed a few minutes in an open court, where a couple of stone lions with wings were the ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion's ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... it was his school, his hospital, his newspaper, his philosopher telling of things present and things to come. From a religious point of view the whole colony was a unit. 'Thank God,' wrote one governor, 'there are no heretics here.' The Church, needing to spend no time or thought in crushing its enemies, could give all its attention to its friends. As for offences against the laws of the land these were conspicuously few. The banks of the St Lawrence, when once the redskin danger was put out of the way, were quite safe for men to live upon. The hand of justice was swift ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro

... undertaken in Ravenna as the capital of the empire in the West was the building and decoration of the churches of S. Vitale and S. Apollinare in Classe. All the Byzantine work that was done later in Ravenna is merely imitative, an expression of failing power under the crushing disaster of the Lombard invasion. When at last Aistulf in 751 made himself master of the impregnable city, it ceased, and suddenly, to be a capital, and though in 754 Pepin "restored" it to the papacy and established the pope throughout the Exarchate and the Pentapolis, he by that act founded the ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton

... seen to bear its fruit. But when the battle did take place, the result was such as to confound instead of justifying her patriotic expectations. In April, the English Admiral Rodney inflicted on the Count de Grasse a crushing defeat off the coast of Jamaica. In September, the combined forces of France and Spain were beaten off with still heavier loss from the impregnable fortress of Gibraltar; and the only region in which a French admiral escaped disaster was the Indian Sea, where ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... me as happy as I am ever destined to be here below—not unhappy. No! that I could not endure; I will boldly meet my fate, never shall it succeed in crushing me. Oh! it is so glorious to live one's life a thousand times over! I feel that I am no longer made for a quiet existence. You will write to me as soon as possible? Pray try to prevail on Steffen [von Breuning] to seek ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace

... very little, but they bore a crushing weight of care. From the time she began to talk, she took upon herself the burden of the whole family. When Mrs. Clifford had a headache, Flyaway was so full of pity that nothing could keep her from climbing upon the sufferer, stroking her face, and saying, ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May

... was young the Great Gray Tor must have split in two, forming one vast jagged gash hundreds of feet deep, whose walls so nearly matched, that, if by some earthquake pressure force had been applied, they would have fitted together, crushing in the verdant growth, and the vast Tor ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn

... them over the fire crushing each one as you drop it into the pot; let them boil five minutes; take them off, strain through a colander, and then through a sieve, get them over the fire again as soon as possible, and boil down two-thirds, when boiled down add to every gallon of ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... he could not tell. The embers of a man's passions will suddenly burst into flame, and he will fiddle madly while the fire burns his soul. He had avenged her as well as himself; but had he avenged her, now that he held Isaac Worthington in his power? By crushing him, had he not added to her trouble and her sorrow? She had confessed that she loved Isaac Worthington's son, and was not he (Jethro) widening the breach between Cynthia and the son by crushing the father? Jethro had not thought of this. But he had thought of her, night and day, as ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... was quite a small school to which she had been banished—a small private one where a few girls "who needed particular attention and training received the individual care they needed," as Aunt Pike carefully read out from the prospectus, dealing poor Kitty thus the last and most crushing insult. ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... answered with a groan, and crushing the parchment in his hand. Then he smoothed it out remorsefully and gave it to her. "It is a faithful copy; there is no other argument. Thou wilt go to her now—for it ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... into apperceptive acts. I hear of a friend who has had disasters in business and has lost his whole fortune. If I have never experienced such difficulties myself, the chances are that the news will not make a deep impression upon me. But if I have once gone through the despondency of such a crushing defeat, sympathy for my friend will be awakened, and I may feel his trouble almost as my own. The meaning of such an item of news depends upon the response which it finds in my own feelings. It ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry

... to bear, kept silence. Silence is the only weapon by which such victims can conquer; it baffles the Cossack charges of envy, the savage skirmishings of suspicion; it does at times give victory, crushing and complete,—for what is more complete than silence? it is absolute; it is one of the attributes of infinity. Sylvie watched Pierrette narrowly. The girl colored; but the color, instead of rising evenly, came out in ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... wait. The reptile, thirsting for more blood, saw the tempting morsel; and, darting forward, seized it in his huge jaws, crushing it in the act. The woman remained ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... woman, had formed the habit of crushing everything for its moral, until it lost its sweetness and grew almost odious, as flower-de-luces do when handled roughly. "There's a worm in that leaf, Myrtle. He has rolled it all round him, and hidden himself from sight; but there is a horrid worm in it, for all it is so young and ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... morning. The sun shone bright and warm, and there was a freshness in the atmosphere truly exhilarating. As I wandered musingly along, the consciousness of being alone, and of having surrendered all hope of finding my friends, returned upon me with crushing power. I felt, too, that those friends, by the necessities of their condition, had been compelled to abandon all efforts for my recovery. The thought was full of bitterness and sorrow. I tried to realize what their conjectures ...
— Thirty-Seven Days of Peril - from Scribner's Monthly Vol III Nov. 1871 • Truman Everts

... Dilke supported Fawcett by speech as well as vote. Mr. Gladstone, following Dilke in the debate, suggested that he had spoken without examining his facts, a charge specially calculated to excite this conscientious worker's resentment. 'I recorded a strong opinion as to the crushing of independent members by ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn



Words linked to "Crushing" :   destructive, suppression, crush, crackdown, bar, prevention, quelling, devastating, stifling



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