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Fester   Listen
verb
Fester  v. t.  To cause to fester or rankle. "For which I burnt in inward, swelt'ring hate, And festered ranking malice in my breast."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fester" Quotes from Famous Books



... men died every day. Good and useful men, husbands of adoring wives, loving fathers of families, men needed by their country, by humanity, were swept mercilessly away. Only such carrion as this was left to fester upon the earth, to poison the lives of decent men and women. The doctor, standing above him, looking on the defaced image of what God, for some mysterious purpose, had made, had no thought but to restore to this foully-damaged frame the spirit and strength to do its evil work. Nurses, gentle and ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann

... lack of moral courage to deal drastically with the wound. If poison remains, it is bound to fester. Captain Dalton should ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... haughty leech to pester, But when the wound in size increased, And then began to fester, He sought a learned Counsel's lair, And told that Counsel, then and there, How COBB'S neglect of his defect Had made his ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert

... color, sometimes having a greenish cast. A man in Tulubin has a tattoo across his throat which is distinctly green, while the remainder of his tattoo is the common blue black. The newly tattooed design stands out in whitish ridges, and these frequently fester and produce a mass of itching sores lasting about one ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... compensation to give evidence against their fellows. I speak of the well-known fact that the mild and wholesome councils of this government are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man, lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and is ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... He has sold his birthright; yet still the Lord is ready, with outstretched arms, to receive him the moment he resolves to return, just as the loving father received his prodigal son. Thus it is with many other sins. They leave a sting in the heart which may rankle and fester a long time; and a stigma in the character which may never, in this ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... vanquished, his light of hope gone out for ever. It was a meagre consolation that, in thinking back upon the matter afterwards, he could take to himself the credit of having spoken no word which could ever fester in his mother's mind. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... ostentatious celebrity dwells to sate curiosity and flatter pride. My countryman: it is well, and perhaps fortunate. Yes," he said, after a second pause, "yes; it were indeed a boon, had the earth a fountain for the wounds which fester and the ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... condition was such that I felt I might collapse in a moment. The gnawing in the stomach had developed there a permanent weakness, so that it was not possible to hold myself up in certain positions. Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips and the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... back into her corner again, while the captain said, "I will draw up some sea water, with which you must bathe her head. Smart's wound will fester I doubt; we have nothing here to ease that, I ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton

... particular crimes, yet still as long as the sinful heart is left in them unchanged, the sin which is checked in one direction is sure to break out in another. Sin, like every other disease, is sure, when it is driven onwards, to break out at a fresh point, or fester within some still more deadly, because more hidden and unsuspected, shape. The man who dare not be an open sinner for fear of the law, can be a hypocrite in spite of it. The man who dare not steal for fear of the law, can cheat in spite of it. The selfish man will find ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... is to the summer sweet, Though to itself it only live and die; But if that flower with base infection meet, The basest weed outbraves his dignity: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... indeed, contemptible assailants. Of all that they wrote against him, nothing has survived except what he has himself preserved. But the constitution of his mind resembled the constitution of those bodies in which the slightest scratch of a bramble, or the bite of a gnat, never fails to fester. Though his reputation was rather raised than lowered by the abuse of such writers as Freron and Desfontaines, though the vengeance which he took on Freron and Desfontaines was such, that scourging, branding, pillorying, would have been a trifle to it, there is reason to believe that they gave him ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... chimney. An occasional explosion is good for both. I rather distrust a man who never swears, or savagely kicks the foot-stool, or pokes the fire with unnecessary violence. Without some outlet, the anger caused by the ever-occurring troubles of life is apt to rankle and fester within. The petty annoyance, instead of being thrown from us, sits down beside us and becomes a sorrow, and the little offense is brooded over till, in the hot-bed of rumination, it grows into a great injury, under whose poisonous shadow springs up ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... they robbed from the people by the building of temples and pyramids. Under the oligarchs will flourish, not a priest class, but an artist class. And in place of the merchant class of bourgeoisie will be the labor castes. And beneath will be the abyss, wherein will fester and starve and rot, and ever renew itself, the common people, the great bulk of the population. And in the end, who knows in what day, the common people will rise up out of the abyss; the labor castes and the Oligarchy will crumble away; and then, ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... is an error to suppose that Solitude leads away from Humanity. On the contrary it is Nature who brings us near to Man, her spoilt and darling child. The enemies of their fellows are bred, not in deserts, but in cities, where human creatures fester together in heaps. The lovers of their fellows come out of solitude, like those hermits of the Thebaid, who fled far from cities, who crucified the flesh, who seemed to hang to the world by no more than a thread, and yet were infinite in their ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... Of Valdichiana, in the sultry time 'Twixt July and September, with the isle Sardinia and Maremma's pestilent fen, Had heap'd their maladies all in one foss Together; such was here the torment: dire The stench, as issuing steams from fester'd limbs. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... was not without his peacock on the wall, his skeleton in the closet, his thorn in his side; though the peacock did not scream loud, the skeleton was not very terrible in his anatomical arrangement, nor was the thorn likely to fester to a gangrene. The Duke was always ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... officer turned in their direction Tim shook his fist at him, this time becoming the incarnation of rage. "Turn yer ugly mug away!—turn it away, I tell ye, from a sight too blessed for yer dirty eyes to see!—ye cholera germ!—ye fester!—ye—ye——Oh, me darlin'," he wailed to the little nurse, "if ye'd but go deaf a minute whilst I tell 'im what's in me 'art!" And in disappointment he held his thumb to his nose, by this most desperate sign trying to express the insults his tongue ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris

... in great Hamlet taught, Is that a throne is dearly bought By lawless love and bloody deeds, Which fester like corrupted weeds, And smell to heaven with poison breath Involving all in certain death. For fraud and murder can't be hid Since Eve and Cain did what they did And left us naked through the world, Like meteors in midnight ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce

... according to the brief statement of ex-Minister Charles Denby, "are bandaged at an age varying from three to five years. The toes are bent back until they penetrate the sole of the foot, and are tightly bound in that position. The {134} parts fester and the toes grow into the foot." The result is that women grow up with feet the same size as when they were children, and the flesh withers away on the feet and below the knees. Throughout life the fashion-cursed ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... heart in secret; and in time a dreadful thing came to happen—the stagnant soul beginning to fester. One day the girl, whose heart was the quintessence of all innocence, happened to see a low word scribbled upon a fence. And now—they had urged her to discover sins, and she discovered them. Suppose that word were to stay in her mind and haunt her—suppose that she were not ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... stretcher-bearer can go—lying among the dead and dying, a field of creeping forms, some quivering in the barbed wire, where dead men hang as on a gibbet, hoping only for a cleanly death from a bullet before their wounds fester and poison the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... prudence had abandoned the ministers, and as if they meant to plunge themselves and us headlong into that gulf which stood gaping before them; by giving a year's notice of the project of their Stamp Act, they allowed time for all the discontents of that country to fester and come to a head, and for all the arrangements which factious men could make towards an opposition to the law. At the same time they carefully concealed from the eye of Parliament those remonstrances which they had actually received; and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... imprisoning night has half released her, More desires the sun's full face of cheer, than we, Well as yet we love the strength of the iron-tongued north-easter, Yearn for wind to meet us as we front the sea. All thy ways are good, O wind, and all the world should fester, Were thy fourfold godhead quenched, or stilled thy strife: Yet the waves and we desire too long the deep south-wester, Whence the waters quicken shoreward, clothed with life. Yet the field not made ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... wanted to dare to say that the South has its faults—no one condones them—and its disadvantages, but that even what they suffered from these was better than what awaited them in the great alleys of New York. Down there, the bodies were restrained, and they chafed; but here the soul would fester, and they would ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... cases the extremities are most severely attacked. The fingers, after being drawn in like claws, begin to fester. They do not drop off, but seem rather to be absorbed, the nails following the stumps down; and I actually saw finger-nails on a hand that had no fingers. The nails were on the knuckles; the fingers had ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... Russia, nor anything happened that could have given rise to such a conjecture. It must therefore be sheer mischief. There are such diabolical spirits, who, incapable of good, cannot rest inactive but fester the world ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)

... it—is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes; the justifier of the most appalling barbarity; a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds; and a secure shelter, under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal abominations fester and flourish. Were I again to be reduced to the condition of a slave, next to that calamity, I should regard the fact of being the slave of a religious slaveholder, the greatest that could befall me. For all slaveholders ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... to desire? while he, Jerrem, belonged to no one, could claim no one, had no name and could not say where he came from. Down in the depths of a heart in which nothing that was good or bad ever lingered long Jerrem let this fester rankle, until often, when he seemed most gay and reckless, some thoughtless word or idle joke would set it smarting. The one compensation he looked upon as given to him above Adam was the power of attraction, by which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... Kessenmas an' a happy New Year, Cleveland Christmas Song A Christmas Wassail Sheffield Mumming Song Charms, "Nominies," and Popular Rhymes Wilful weaste maks weasome want A rollin' stone gethers no moss Than awn a crawin' hen Nowt bud ill-luck 'll fester where Meeat maks The Miller's Thumb Miller, miller, mooter-poke Down i' yon lum we have a mill, Hob-Trush Hob "Hob-Trush Hob, wheer is thoo?" Gin Hob mun hae nowt but a hardin' hamp, Nanny Button-Cap The New Moon A Setterday's ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman

... lonely without you. Frewen had to come up and sit in my room for company last night and I actually kissed him, a thing that has not occurred for years. Jack, poor fellow, bears it as well as he can, and has taken the opportunity of having a fester on his foot, so he is lame and has it bathed, and this occupies ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Ceylon, it became independent in 1948; its name was changed to Sri Lanka in 1972. Tensions between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil separatists erupted into war in 1983. Tens of thousands have died in the ethnic conflict that continues to fester. After two decades of fighting, the government and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) formalized a cease-fire in February 2002 with Norway brokering peace negotiations. Violence between the LTTE and government forces ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... delinquencies of country people becomes clear. In the improvement of rural morality due to the sifting of country people during the farmer period, it becomes evident that among a people so serious-minded some delinquencies still remain. The immoralities that still lurk and fester in the country are due very largely to waste. This waste of human things is parallel to the waste of ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson



Words linked to "Fester" :   mature, suppurate, release, sore, maturate, discharge, suppurating sore, eject



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