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Orgy   /ˈɔrdʒi/   Listen
Orgy

noun
(pl. orgies)
1.
Any act of immoderate indulgence.  Synonyms: binge, splurge.  "An emotional binge" , "A splurge of spending"
2.
Secret rite in the cults of ancient Greek or Roman deities involving singing and dancing and drinking and sexual activity.
3.
A wild gathering involving excessive drinking and promiscuity.  Synonyms: bacchanal, bacchanalia, debauch, debauchery, drunken revelry, riot, saturnalia.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Orgy" Quotes from Famous Books



... a conqueror. For he had decided not to go up to the flat, but to breakfast right here and to spend an hour in the square before going back to the glass cage at nine. His chest pouted; his eyes glistened; wine ran in his veins. He ordered ham-and-eggs and hot-cakes. An orgy! ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper

... autumn of 1875 an insurrection had broken out in Bulgaria, and the Turkish Government despatched a large force to repress it. This was done, and repression was followed by a hideous orgy of massacre and outrage. A rumour of these horrors reached England, and public indignation spontaneously awoke. Disraeli, with a strange frankness of cynical brutality, sneered at the rumour as "Coffee-house babble," and made odious ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... some way offended this chief. His offer was accepted, and, accompanied by five ruffianly whites and some hundreds of natives, the unfortunate people were surprised and butchered. Elated with this achievement, Larmer returned to Ponape, and, during the orgy which took place to celebrate the massacre, he shot dead one of his white companions who had displeased ...
— The Brothers-In-Law: A Tale Of The Equatorial Islands; and The Brass Gun Of The Buccaneers - 1901 • Louis Becke

... amongst themselves. I was indeed in an unenviable plight, by no means sure that I would not be slain out of hand when they became sufficiently sober to capture me. As I marked the progress of their damnable orgy I cast about for some plan to take advantage of their condition. I observed that a stupor was already beginning to overcome a few of them. Then suddenly an incident happened to drive all else ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... drove him childishly frantic. He wanted to kill Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous presumption. He was saying this over and over to himself with his teeth tight shut, and a perfect orgy of hate and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... railroads, combined to enrich the office-holder and to increase the volume of public debts. A long series of repudiations of these debts injured Southern credit for many years. South Carolina occasioned the most vivid description of the orgy in a book entitled The Prostrate State, by a Maine abolitionist and Republican, named Pike; but several other States would have furnished similar materials to ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... her conception of an eighteenth-century buck, and made love with a fervour that was all the more enhanced by the sight of Miss Gibbs in the front row, sitting with pursed-up lips and straightened back. Meta, as Lydia Languish, sighed, wept, made eyes, and indulged in a perfect orgy of sentiment, while Lois acted the cheeky maidservant with enthusiasm. The best of all, however, was Mrs. Malaprop; Linda had seen the play on the real stage, and reproduced a famous actress to the utmost of her ability. Her absurd manners and amusing ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... Caroline it didn't matter. In a perfect orgy of energy they were hurling book after book in all directions until sometimes three or four were in the air at once, smashing against shelves, cracking the glass of pictures on the walls, falling in bruised and torn heaps upon the floor. It was ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... the Kawa foots the sea. Triplett's observations and our assistance. The death of the compass-plant. Lost! An orgy of desperation. Oblivion and excess. The Kawa brings us home. Our reception in Papeete. A celebration at ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... orgy, nor were the proprieties in any way transgressed by so harmless a festivity; yet from this night a singular change was observed in this man. Pleasure no longer charmed him, and instead of repeating the experiment I have just described, he speedily ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green

... stillness. A dog howled in the distance, and the pounding of swift hoofs along the trail told of fresh arrivals. An hour later and the single street of Carson City would be alive with humanity, eager for any excitement, ready for any wild orgy, if only once turned loose. That it would be turned loose, and also directed, the man lying on his face in the grass felt fully assured. He smiled grimly, wishing he might behold "Black Bart's" face when he should discover the flight of his intended ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... Cam and all his cohorts in MAB let themselves go in a good old-fashioned creative orgy. With one large difference. In the past, copy, layouts, and other campaign ingredients were threshed out in endless conferences, and decisions were made on the basis of an informed group guess. Now, each new idea was exposed at infancy like a Spartan ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds

... ceased from the long attempt to build up a kingdom of God by force and violence, and fell back on its truer work of building up a kingdom of righteousness in the hearts and consciences of men. It was from the moment of its seeming fall that its real victory began. As soon as the wild orgy of the Restoration was over, men began to see that nothing that was really worthy in the work of Puritanism had been undone. The revels of Whitehall, the scepticism and debauchery of courtiers, the corruption of statesmen, left the mass of Englishmen what Puritanism ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... passed quietly. Jonathan strolled here or loitered there; but saw none of the roisterers. He believed they were sleeping off the effects of their orgy on the previous evening. After dinner he smoked his pipe. Betty and Helen passed, and Helen smiled. It struck him suddenly that she had never looked at him in such a way before. There was meaning in that warm, radiant flash. A little sense of ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey

... in that iron cave. The fire had died out in the stove, but the room was full of that tepid warmth which produces the dull heavy-headedness and nauseous queasiness of a morning after an orgy. The stove is a mesmerist that plays no small part in the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac

... evening when the war-party reached the camp site selected as suitable for the orgy in which they proposed to indulge. The canoe containing Donald and the cask of fire-water was among the last to make a landing. Already fires were lighted on the bank above, and the earlier arrivals were impatiently ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore

... idea of Ed Symes involved in a Bacchic orgy was just a little too much for the normal ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett

... was given the men for a few days after, in order that they might recover from the orgy, for indeed they had never had such a gorge since their arrival in France. All were in excellent spirits, and these were by no means diminished when it became known that our next area was in front of Arras. It was recognised to be an enviable part of the line to be situated in, ...
— Three years in France with the Guns: - Being Episodes in the life of a Field Battery • C. A. Rose

... too far off to see her blushes and her tears. Francesco pointed out her stepmother, whom she had looked for in vain the previous evening; and as she could no longer make any opposition, he led her, covered with blushes and confusion, into the middle of this orgy. ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... family, of love and marriage, of man and woman, had burst out into lurid flames. It was rare that a man had so cut, slashed, and vilified himself as did this depatriated citizen while playing the piano. He converted music into an orgy, a ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... chin of the burro, was rewarded by the lazy flopping of an ear and then went in to his delayed orgy. ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... seventeen miles below Cooperstown. Here they were joined by a trader named George Winedecker, who had come down from Otsego Lake with a boat-load of goods, including rum, to supply the Indian villages down the river. During the night the red men, full of Winedecker's rum, became embroiled in a murderous orgy. The missionaries were awakened by the howling of the Indians over their dead, and in the morning saw Indian women skulking in the bushes, hiding guns and hatchets, for fear of the intoxicated Indians who were drinking deeper. "Here, in one party, were missionaries ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall

... stepped once more into that rich orgy of emotion. This time, though dimly aware of noise and a confusion of shouting, she carried the scene through to the end. "Romeo, I come! This do I drink to thee." She lay for a moment where she had fallen close to the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... tang of spring in the air we cleaned the shack, put up fresh curtains and did a little baking. Then we grew reckless and went into an orgy of extravagance—we took a bath in the washtub. Wash basins were more commensurate with the water supply. Then we scrubbed the floor with the bath water. In one way and another, the settlers managed to develop a million square miles of frontier dirt ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... minor drama of Malavikagnimitra we find the same thing in a different manner. It must never be thought that, in this play, the poet's deliberate object was to pander to his royal patron by inviting him to a literary orgy of lust and passion. The very introductory verse indicates the object towards which this play is directed. The poet begins the drama with the prayer, "Sanmargalokayan vyapanayatu sa nastamasi vritimishah" ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... Prettyland. Corresponding to an inward majesty, of which, from youth, he had been conscious, he now felt an outward, and had not been awake eight minutes when his brain was invaded by plans—plans of debauchery, palaces, orgy, flying beds of ivory arabesqued in fan-traceries of sapphire, in which Rebekah Frankl lolled, and smiled; and on toward Thring he stepped, prince new- crowned, yet by old heredity, high exalted above laws, government, and the ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel

... the time, as she whirled, she was conscious also of some strange dim need. A sense of discomfort oppressed her arms. She hadn't everything she required for this solitary orgy. Something more was lacking her. Something essential, vital. But what on earth it could be she knew not; she ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... he was the most important man in the College. His slow, lumbering body as it rolled along the Court was followed by the eyes of countless freshmen. His appearance on the occasion of a College concert was the signal for an orgy of applause. Cardillac might lead the College, but he was, nevertheless, of common clay. Lawrence was of ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole

... Central Committee to do anything or to burn anything to prevent their advance. That night, when houses that he had set on fire were blazing in the Rue Royale (he had had petroleum pumped upon them by fire-engines), there was a fierce orgy held by the light of the flames before the Church of the Madeleine. A wild, demon-like dance was led by three women who had done duty all day as petroleuses,—Florence, Aurore, and Marie. Marie had been publicly thanked at the Hotel-de-Ville for sending a cannonball through ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... more pitiful, no characters more heartless, and no sadder ending. Clever, of course; artistic, equally so; but—well, the Baron's advice to his enemies is, Go in heavily for Christmas festivities, have an orgy of plum-pudding, creams, sweets, and mince-pies, and, on the day after Boxing Day, stay indoors, and read The ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 101, November 21, 1891 • Various

... as usual, stood in the bow hurrying the men on with a hoarse voice, the result of his drunken orgy ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky

... personally I consider that holly is most suitable and decorative where Nature planted it. Christmas," finished Mr. Sawyer, slightly disconcerted by Jimsy's attentive stare, "Christmas is merely a day and a dinner. Let the frivolous make of it an orgy of sentimentality if ...
— Jimsy - The Christmas Kid • Leona Dalrymple

... who filled these streets at night—the people who sacked the Leicester Square hotel and took part in the famous orgy which Blackburn describes as "unequalled in England since the days of the Plague, or in Europe since the French Revolution"; these people were not at all in quest of food. They were engaged upon a mad pursuit of pleasure and debauchery and drink. "Eat, drink, and be vicious; but above all, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... the hubbub; another a coat-flap, torn in the brawl; one her delicately fashioned shoe, another her best mantle. Memory returned to these worthy people, and with it a certain shame for their unjustifiable agitation. It seemed to them an orgy in which they were the unconscious heroes and heroines. They did not speak of it; they did not wish to think of it. But the most astounded personage in the town ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... spectacular effect of that offer is reflected in the many descriptions, both serious and satiric, of an era of speculation which to many generations might seem incredible—though not to this generation which has itself lived through an orgy of speculation. ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt

... and events soon proved that this life had prepared my character for some violent passion. A philosopher could have foretold that. Every thing in excess brings on reaction. The drunkard may abstain long, but the moment he touches spirit, an orgy commences. Men love, because the time and a woman have come—and that hour and person came all at once to ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... a blow, for the gambler was seated and at his mercy. The Kid checked himself, while his face began to twitch as though the nerves underlying it had broken bondage and were dancing in a wild, ungovernable orgy. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... and brush he was a huge timber-wolf; but the lie was given to his wolfhood by his color and marking. There the dog unmistakably advertised itself. No wolf was ever colored like him. He was brown, deep brown, red-brown, an orgy of browns. Back and shoulders were a warm brown that paled on the sides and underneath to a yellow that was dingy because of the brown that lingered in it. The white of the throat and paws and the spots over the eyes was dirty because ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London

... resistance offered to their advance, they proceeded to vent their rage on the town. They shot down a lot of villagers, and arrested many more. A great many escaped to the country. A lot of houses were first sacked, and then burned. The orgy continued during the night, and through the next day. On the evening of the twenty-second, something over four hundred men were collected near the church and lined up to be shot. The work was done for a time by a firing squad which fired into the crowd with more or ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson

... imprint on the sacks of wheat. Gentlemen, you are, all of you, appointed to the commissariat of the Army of Rats. If you find a watchman sleeping in the church, you must manage to make him drunk,—and do it cleverly,—so as to get him far away from the scene of the Rodents' Orgy." ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... intelligent. "The Little Ones, my friend, notice things. You are quite enough of a roughneck, but if I, Nebran's priestess, walk through their workroom all blown about and looking like the tag end of an orgy ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... sure that a large region of north-eastern London must be in flames. With the solemn feelings of bridegrooms and marriage-mornings—with a flinching, a flinching heart, God knows, yet a heart up-buoyed on thrilling joys—I went about making preparations for the Gargantuan orgy of the night. ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... great night at an adjoining camp when the old chief died. It was made the occasion of a fearful orgy. Dry wood and brush were gathered into a huge pile, the body of the dead chief was placed upon it, and the mass set on fire. As the flames blazed upward with a roar, the Indians, several hundred in number, broke forth into wild ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald

... experimental unit of the Royal Engineers grew and transformed itself into a vast independent organization. Names and uniforms, constitutions and regulations, were altered so often that the whole change might seem to be an orgy of official frivolity if it were not remembered that the powers brought within reach of man by the new science were increasing at an even greater speed. But there was no breach of continuity; the process was a process ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... minutes after the commencement of the fire there was under way a regular orgy of roof pulling. Whoever had an enemy ran and tore his roof off, and there were several instances of reciprocity, two families tearing off each other's roofs, each believing the other ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... of a four-branched candlestick, dressed in his monkish frock, a white robe in which he felt at ease, with the cord tied slackly around his waist and his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, he turned out, in a dizzy orgy of production, The Physiology of Marriage, the short stories constituting the Scenes of Private Life, At the Sign of the Cat-and-Racket, The Ball at Sceaux, The Vendetta, A Double Family, Peace in the Household, Gobseck and ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet

... 'Tis an orgy of goblins, an image Of nudity flouting the flood, Of shorn-headed brownies who scrimmage And splash ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various

... was one of those men of stone, coming, like the statue of the Commandante, to knock at the door of a Don Giovanni, and in the midst of feast and orgy to announce that it is even now the moment to begin to think of Heaven. He had been barn at Ferrara, whither his family, one of the most illustrious of Padua, had been called by Niccolo, Marchese d'Este, and at the age of twenty-three, summoned by an irresistible vocation, had fled from his father's ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... discovered and applied there was great rejoicing in the laboratory and a regular orgy of playing ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

... they laughed loud and long as he retailed the little mishaps and the comic episodes of his journey. Then Underhill in his turn related all that had happened since the wreck, and all became grave again as he told of the capture in the early morning after their night march, the wild orgy in which their captors had indulged, the elaborate preparations they had made under the direction of their sorcerer for the sacrificial rite to which their captives were destined. But for the appearance of the aeroplane he had no doubt that within a few short hours they would have been massacred, ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang

... individuals whose sense of decent fitness was imperfect. The barman and the landlord and the principal members of the landlord's family were hard put to it to quench that funereal thirst. Constance, as she ate a little meal in the bedroom, could not but witness the orgy. A bandsman with his silver instrument was prominent at the counter. At five minutes to three the Vaults spewed forth a squirt of roysterers who walked on the pavement as on a tight-rope; among them was the bandsman, his silver instrument only half enveloped in its ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... it. The chronological sequence of events properly dates from the morning following the morning when Peep O'Day, having been abruptly translated from the masses of the penniless to the classes of the wealthy, had forthwith embarked upon the gastronomic orgy so graphically ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... to its place within the case. Why ponder upon such things as these? The real character of the poet Emilius was, after all, a matter of but little consequence to her. Whether the meeting at his house was a wild, reckless orgy, or a mere intellectual gathering of literary genius, it was none the less certain that her lord was tarrying there, away from her side. But perhaps, indeed, even this was a duty which he owed to his fame and station; and her face brightened up with ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... language, and parents their children; men and women become almost like animals in the indulgence of their amorous propensities. They enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy; and as the light of the sun they adore, and the presence of numerous spectators, seems to be no restraint on their indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is preserved when the shades of night fall on such a scene of licentiousness and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... tablecloth was soiled with large purple stains. The floor was littered with bits of smashed glass. By the table, the chairs that had been pushed back or overturned showed the number of drinkers to have been about ten. An acrid smell of tobacco and wine hung about this scene of an overnight orgy. ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont

... had an orgy in the refreshment-room. But he took me afterwards to Tishy's, where ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... our bodies flat behind the concealing rocks, peering fearfully forth into the great deserted chamber. Even amid that lonely silence it was a sight to chill the heart; and to us, comprehending something of what it would soon reveal of savage orgy. It was like gazing down into the mouth of the Pit. The single touch of color in the drear picture came from the crimson drapery hanging over the edge of the raised platform. Seeing all this at one glance my anxious eyes sought ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... one last year," Francis continued, "never any details, but all kinds of mysterious hints—a sort of mixture between a Roman orgy and a chapter from the 'Arabian Nights'—singers from Petrograd, dancers from Africa and fighting men ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... visit was not so easy of execution. It required two days of red tape and official dispensation before she finally reached the seaside hospital that, by unpleasant coincidence, only a year before had been the resort hotel of more than one dancing orgy. ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst

... improvement on our supper last night. We had only bread and cheese among us, and we all drank water from the same chipped sugar-bowl. Which didn't, it appears, prevent a newspaper this morning from denouncing the great orgy ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... cropped almost close, his red hair, the fiery filaments of which, when under the reflection of certain lights, might have given the impression as though his face had been rubbed with phosphorus. Two teeth lost in a night orgy and brawl, he did not exactly remember now, caused him to spit out indistinct words which one could not always understand. He was bald only on the top of his head, like a tonsured monk, with a crop of short, curly hair, golden and shiny, around ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... sound beyond a gurgling breath of strangulation had passed the Hindu's lips. There had been no clamour, no outcry; nothing but a few smothered words, gasps, the scuffle of feet upon the earth; it was like a horrible nightmare, a fantastic orgy of murderous fiends. The flame of the campfire flickered sneers, drawn torture, red and green shadows in the staring faces of the men who lay upon the ground, and the figures of the stranglers glowed red in its light, like ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... happens that I have no near relatives of military age, and neither I nor any near relative is likely to suffer by the war. But when I brood over the agony of the less fortunate millions, over the harrowing experience of Belgians, Poles, and Serbs, over the whole ghastly orgy of blood and tears in Europe, I feel unutterable disdain of these paltry efforts to justify the ways of God ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... orgy of headline which followed upon his remarkable victory at Central Hull, Commander KENWORTHY might reasonably have expected that his entry into the House would have produced an uproarious scene of demonstration and counter-demonstration. But there was nothing of the kind. The jubilant "Wee Frees," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various

... fulfil an unexpected concert engagement; and on the same day Barry left home to join a shooting-party in Scotland. A few days later Nan and Penelope returned to London, accompanied by Kitty, who asserted an unshakable determination to take part in the orgy of spending which ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... the smothered ferocity of thunder in the hills. No waiting of turns, no licking of lips and moustaches to get the lingering flavors, no dalliance. They were as restless and suspicious here as everywhere; their feast was the horrid hasty orgy of ghouls in a church-yard. But an even distribution was made: I don't think any one got more than his share. Of course there were underhand attempts in plenty and, at least once, open violence—a sudden rush from opposite sides, a growling ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... says old George Wright is having the time of his life. His wife has gone to Charlottetown to visit her sister and he is his own boss for the first time since he was married, forty years ago. He's on a regular orgy, Aleck says. He smokes in the parlour and sits up till eleven o'clock ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... mirth of the evening banquet seemed to Harold as the malign revel of some demoniac orgy. He thought he read in every face the exultation over the sale of England. Every light laugh in the proverbial ease of the social Normans rang on his ear like the joy of a ghastly Sabbat. All his senses preternaturally sharpened to that magnetic keenness in which we less hear ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... have been a frightful orgy, and now arid as the Sahara desert and quite as flat and dreary, the bachelor dinner was in truth more often than not, a sheep ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... with his general, and his quarrelsome disposition, his overweening vanity and his habit of composing libellous chansons made him eventually the enemy of most persons of position both in the army and at court. In the year 1659 he fell into disgrace for having taken part in an orgy at Roissy near Paris during Holy Week, which caused great scandal. Bussy was ordered to retire to his estates, and beguiled his enforced leisure by composing, for the amusement of his mistress, Madame de Montglas, his famous Histoire amoureuse ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... military operations undertaken by Germany were against African natives in her dependencies and against China in 1900. The conduct of the German troops appears, it is true, to have been distinguished, in this latter expedition, by a brutality which stood out in relief even in that orgy of slaughter and loot. But we must remember that they were specially ordered by their Imperial master, in the name of Jesus Christ, to show no mercy and give no quarter. Apart from this, it will not be disputed, ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson

... of popular custom; he had looked on at much the same orgies before in New Guinea and on the Zambesi, and they only depressed him: so he stopped at Brackenhurst, and went for a walk instead in the fresh summer meadows. Robert Monteith, for his part, had gone to the Derby—so they call that orgy—and Philip had meant to accompany him in the dogcart, but remained behind at the last moment to take care of Frida; for Frida, being a lady at heart, always shrank from the pollution of vulgar assemblies. As they walked together ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen

... at the bar are charged with disorderly conduct by the following facts: They emptied said bottle of champagne, which was reputed to hold one quart. That bottle of said wine was emptied completely, which is proven by your marshal, who, after the orgy in our leading hotel, did approach a waiter of said hotel and ask for a taste of said wine, but upon investigation the bottle was found ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey

... prize-fight, given in detail, by rounds, is followed by an orgy of drunkenness rising to a scale almost Homeric. The man, crazy with alcohol, runs amuck, and things begin to happen. The village is turned upside down. Two powerful contrasts are dramatically introduced, one as an interlude ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... a fortunate man, who had risen from place to place, but he never felt a satisfaction so deep, so complete as at that moment. He himself was startled at his own delight, at that orgy of pride that had extinguished his chronic ailments; it seemed to him as though he were spending in a few hours the stores of ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... of it. The green thinned to lighter green that merged blue even as he looked. But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of rose and gold flashed through it by the sun. On and up, to the sprouting beard of growing crest, the colour orgy increased until it was a kaleidoscopic effervescence of ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London

... fondness for sweets with Clyde Fitch. They did not dare to eat as much pastry as they liked before others, so they often retired to Frohman's rooms at Sherry's or to Fitch's house on Fortieth Street, in New York, and had a dessert orgy. ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman

... stampede of the people, all straining for the hills, pouring in a mad rush from the valley and the town. Behind them were the still madder, swifter, more terrible waters, coming in sudden thuds, in furious drives, eddying and sculping and rearing in an orgy or remorseless and heartrending destruction. Down before that roaring avalanche went walls and trees and buildings. The shepherd boy saw men give up the struggle for escape, cowering by the roadside, and women, turning from the race to the hills, rushed back to meet the ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly

... lay watching the unearthly orgy at the fire a plan slowly took shape in McElroy's mind. They were unbound as they had been for many days, the silent guard proving sufficient surety for their retention, and they were two to one in the wild confusion of the growing excitement. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... traversed some passage, their ears caught the sound of music. They listened a moment, then Constance proposed they snuff the candle and draw near the sound; "for very like the beaux were having an orgy," she said. And Katherine, full of adventure and deeming it a fine, young lady's trick—she had heard talk of such things among the older girls at the convent—opined "'twas the thing to do." And they ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... him, to indulge in "unbridled extravagance." One night, he went so far as to eat a "hundred francs" in a supper with a wench, which inspired him to make this memorable remark in the midst of the orgy: "Pull off ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... meant that Winny, who had never had hers, nor any share in anybody else's, should taste, just for once, the rapture of a fling. She should have it for three solid hours of that delicious night, in one mad, flaming, stupendous orgy at the ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... a cupboard full of rye!'" he said. "Almost a goal! But not ONLY liquors, my little friend. Champagne—cases of it—caviar, canned grouse with truffles, lobster, cheeses, fine cigars, everything you could think of, erotic, exotic and narcotic. An orgy in cans and bottles, a bacchanalian revel: a cupboard full of indigestion, joy, forgetfulness and katzenjammer. Oh, my suffering palate, to have to leave it all without one sniff, one ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... in their own blood, yet still able to writhe upward and deal death to any other that might approach. They were at a deadlock, yet each feared to make the first overtures for peace. There was, in actuality, no longer even an English or a German nation. It was an orgy of homicide, in which the best of mankind were wantonly destroyed, leaving only the puny, the feeble-minded, the deformed, and the ineffectual to perpetuate ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train

... Germans performed from the war's very beginning, which provoked an expression of great indignation from all the civilized world, were not perpetrated in a moment of orgy or madness. They have ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne

... you want to expose a scandalous orgy in the New Witness, you may depend on the following as being a correct account by an ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... came to those whom they later awakened with a start. Fights as desperate as the one around the house became features of this period, which was only a warming-up practice for the war demon before the orgy of the impending assault on ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... orgy of ingratitude," said Ludwig, as he watched the rabble dancing with glee before the house. "The Jesuits are responsible. If my Lola had been called Loyala, she could still have ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... time. And I can assure you that the sea itself cannot look more wild, more terrifying—with the wrack driving overhead, and the rain falling in torrents, and the wind whistling and roaring, and rushing past you as if called by the sea to some frightful tryst, some horrible orgy of the elements, and striving to tear you up and carry you with it. Still—still—perhaps it is as beautiful—then—in its way, as in its season ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton

... did not deter the "emperor," however. Ruthlessly he and his men looted those flooded temples, forcing Professor Stevens and his party to lend aid in the orgy of pillage. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various

... perfections are mutually exclusive. Only in a kind of aesthetic orgy — in the madness of an intoxicated imagination — can we confuse them. As the Roman emperor wished that the Roman people had but a single neck, to murder them at one blow, so we may sometimes wish that all beauties had but one form, that we might behold them together. ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... golden sands of Newport, only they were blazing with glory as if they were veritable diamond dust: I saw the waves, of incomparable blue, rolling up on the shore. A vague perfume was wafted on the air. I was in an orgy of vision. Yet there was no stage of maudlin emotion. ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve

... world-wide experience. For many years after Dickens' death in 1870, indeed, until quite recent years, with only occasional lapses, the "Ministers of the Crown" were wont to dine at Greenwich, as a fitting Gargantuan orgy to the ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... afternoon of Bursley Wakes—not our modern rectified festival, but the wild and naive orgy of seventy years ago, the days of bear-baiting and of bull-baiting, from which latter phrase, they say, the town derives its name. In those times there was a town-bull, a sort of civic beast; and a certain ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... roystering time. First, for Susan's sake, we secured a widowed cousin of mine, Eileen Wetherwood, with her four children; and we sent out invitations to the ban and arriere ban of the county's juvenility, to say nothing of that of London, for a Boxing-day orgy. Having accounted satisfactorily for Susan's entertainment, we thought, I hope in a Christian spirit, of our adult circle. Dear old Jaffery would be with us. Why not ask his sister Euphemia? They had a mouse and lion affection for each other. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... indifferent to him: and he relapsed into his sulky mood from which nothing could draw him, neither the soft eyes of his neighbor, nor the wine that he drank. Finally, when he was half asleep, he asked himself angrily what on earth he was doing at such an interminable orgy, and did not hear the miller propose a trip on the water to take certain of the guests home. Nor did he see Sabine beckoning him to come with her so that they should be in the same boat. When it occurred to him, there was no room for him: and he had to go in another boat. This ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... recriminated Piera was his having charged Dimas [283] with being a filibuster, and their revengefulness reached an incredible limit. The heartrending moans of this martyr to his duty still resound in that convento converted into the scene of an orgy of blood. The unfortunate man was heard to shout: 'For God's sake, for God's sake, have pity,' and trustworthy persons tell that under the strain of torture he would challenge them to fight in a fair field by saying: 'I will fight alone against twenty of you;' ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester

... remarkably decent and clean. Of course, when music-hall songs are sung at the concerts, the other sex is sometimes more than casually mentioned. It is the comic papers which are responsible for the myth that the period of furlough is spent in a Roman orgy; this is, of course, true of some few, but for the great majority the reverse rules, and une permission is spent in a typically French way, paying formal calls to the oldest friends of the family, being with the family as much as possible, and attending to such homely affairs as the purchase ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan

... of this indecent orgy seems to us almost as discreditable as the purpose it veiled so thinly. Who was Stephen A. Douglas, that the President, with his Cabinet and the two highest officers of the army and navy, should add their official dignity to the raising of his monument, and make the whole country ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... Rousseau were the equivocal pernicious influence, half-priest, half-pandar, half-charlatan, half-prophet of a world-disintegrating orgy of sentiment, should I for one, I am tempted to ask, close the gates of our platonic ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... human victims. It dawned on me that it might have been some of my companions, and a spirit of revenge possessed me. But I had no weapons, but relying on my experience in eluding savages, I crawled up to the village, during the height of the orgy, and slew one of the warriors, and took his weapons, as ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay

... trembled during the French Revolution. Perhaps it would tremble less if it could combat the monster with a clearer conscience and less burden of compromising theory—if it could launch its forces frankly at the fundamental doctrine, and not merely employ them to police the transient orgy. ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... fire brigade and prepared horses, carts and food for a hasty flight. The situation became worse when news arrived from Kobdo that the Chinese there had made a pogrom, killing some of the inhabitants and burning the whole town after a wild looting orgy. Most of the people got away to the forests on the mountains but it was at night and consequently without warm clothes and without food. During the following days these mountains around Kobdo heard many cries of misfortune, woe and death. The severe cold and hunger killed off the women and children ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski

... valleys, against order and against clear thought, with all the hard consequences that clear thought brings. They were in no way subject to enthusiasm for the vaguer emotions roused by the Gospel or for the more turgid excitements derivable from Scripture and an uncorrected orgy of prophecy. They were "on the make." The rich in Montpelier and Nmes, a knot of them in Rome itself, many in Milan, in Lyons, in Paris, enlisted intellectual aid for the revolt, flattered the atheism of the Renaissance, supported ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc

... connection with the camp. Indeed, the bigger of the three dingoes told himself, with a regretful sigh, that this great grey wolf had in all probability dispatched the kangaroo-hound at an early stage of the night, and had been sleeping off the first effects of his orgy, when they first saw him lying near the camp-fire. At all events, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson



Words linked to "Orgy" :   pampering, revel, indulging, revelry, orgiastic, humoring, religious rite, binge, indulgence, rite, debauch



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