Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Torturing   /tˈɔrtʃərɪŋ/   Listen
Torturing

noun
1.
The deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason.  Synonym: torture.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Torturing" Quotes from Famous Books



... hand across her forehead. The horrible scene was being reenacted within her and was torturing her. Germaine Astaing did not move, but stood with folded arms and anxious eyes, while Hortense Daniel sat distractedly awaiting the confession of the crime and the explanation of the ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... herds and stores, the rather that all attempts to dislodge him from his mountain fastness, and destroy his band, had failed. Blackburn seemed to enjoy the same kind of protection as Ughtred, and practised the same atrocities, torturing and imprisoning his captives unless they were heavily ransomed. He also led a life of wildest licence, and, when not engaged in some predatory exploit, spent his time in carousing ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... the Spaniards did that torturing to death shipwrecked English sailors was bad policy. The result was always to make other English sailors fight more desperately to avoid a similar fate. Revenge made them more and more aggressive, and treaties made with Spain were disregarded because, as they ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig

... torturing himself with futile regrets, a faint shadow fell across his eyes. Looking toward the moon, hanging low in the west, he saw what seemed a vague, watery cloud obscuring her; but as it moved so that her beams lit up one side of it he perceived the clear, sharp ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... hills, who had grown corn in his back yard and thought he had a right to make whiskey out of it—he had no other means of livelihood. Breakers of God's laws; of man's; victims of tricks and legal technicalities, of torturing want and of headlong passion, and of sheer court errors or of perjured testimony—here they were, all on the same footing, no discriminations made! To what end? So that they might be punished and repent and ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... names, both by night and by day, where the cries and pains of the injured innocence of their victims could never reach the world, for relief or redress for their wrongs; without remorse or shame, they would glory in torturing, in the most barbarous manner, the feelings of those under their power; telling us, at the same time, that this mortifying of the flesh was religion, ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk

... the mechanism of physiological compensation may have become so perfected that the functioning of the organism is quite adequate to the needs of the environment. As a result, the ruling motive of the conduct becomes the desire to release the personality from this torturing sense of inability by a constant demonstration of the power to control circumstances or ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... twenty years, and exercising freely, 1894 found her at 60 with a strong pulse, a perfect digestion and a keen enjoyment of sport, racing in particular, and, on the whole, enjoying life as well as any woman in the universe, with no regrets, no torturing remorse, but with a serene faith that when done with this world she—never having done anything very bad here—will have a pretty good time ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... the west. Shann was still waiting for the other's signal when there arose from the camp a sound to chill the flesh of any listener, a wail which could not have come from the throat of any normal living thing, intelligent being or animal. Ululating in ear-torturing intensity, the cry sank to a faint, ominous echo of itself, to waver ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... facts are known about this adventurer. One is that he was reproved on a certain occasion by Morgan (who thought nothing of torturing his captives) for "harshness" to his prisoners, and the other that he wrote sentimental verse, particularly one ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse

... remembered the arsenic. He must have eaten some of the meat. I tickled the inside of his throat, and he brought up most of the poison. Soon afterwards the other brigands came up to the enclosure, screaming with pain, and wanted to murder me. I had cast a spell over their meat, and it was torturing them, they cried. I must be killed at once, and then the spell would be removed. The king commanded them to withdraw. They resisted. He drew his saber, and cut down two of the ringleaders. The rest ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... he brought the offerings personally in embarrassing bulk. One offering was a gramophone which nearly drove her mad. Even in its present stage of development it offends the sensitive ear; but in its early days it was an instrument of torturing cacophony. And Jaffery, thinking the brazen strains music of the spheres, would turn on the hideous engine, when he came to see her, and would grin and roar and expect her to shew evidence of ravished senses. She did her best, poor child, out of politeness and recognition ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... depends on the little cramped fractions in the "Stocks" and "Funds." Another catches a fine frenzy from the "Shares," and regulates his day's movements "the very air o' the time" by their import—and hence he dreams of gold and gossamer, or sits torturing his imagination with writs and executions that await ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XIII, No. 369, Saturday, May 9, 1829. • Various

... exercised over his intended a ceaseless surveillance; and it was from this sagacity—this guardedness of his—this perfect, clear consciousness of his fair one's defects—this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her, that my ever- torturing pain arose. ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... myself an accomplice in the fraud of which she is ashamed? How can I look her in the face, when I have not hesitated, out of selfish consideration for my own tranquillity, to forbid that frank avowal of the truth which her finer sense of duty had spontaneously bound her to make? Those were the torturing questions in Lady Janet's mind, while her arm was wound affectionately round Mercy's waist, while her fingers were busying themselves familiarly with the arrangement of Mercy's hair. Thence, and thence only, sprang the impulse which set her ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins

... restrained, I should for ever have been miserable. The remembrance of this escape, and the certain knowledge that of all beings whom I knew I was most likely to be mistaken in an emergency, always produced in me a torturing tendency to inaction. There was no such tendency now. I thought I chose Mary, but there was no choice. The feeblest steel filing which is drawn to a magnet, would think, if it had consciousness, that it went to the magnet of ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford

... case with the men from whom I chanced to recede, to whom I ceased to give, and, by this action, denied good, I experienced a torturing sense of shame. ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi

... who should prescribe a course of Labrador whenever we are physically or spiritually "run down" would be of little use to the majority of us. We see here the monkish side of Mr. Wells' temperament deliberately torturing the social and worldly side of him, the spirit suggesting to the flesh and the devil that they ought to be content with spiritual contemplation. The mystic has the final word in those humorous-passionate conversations in which first and last things are ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... within a few leagues of her intended harbour, while the near neighbourhood of that place, and of these circumstances which could alone put an end to the calamities under which her people laboured, served only to aggravate their distress, by torturing them with a view of the relief they were unable to reach. She was at length delivered from this dreadful situation at a time when we least expected it: For, after having lost sight of her for several ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... Presbyterians—in my judgment the worst of all, as far as creed is concerned. This Church was founded by John Calvin, a murderer! John Calvin, having power in Geneva, inaugurated human torture. Voltaire abolished torture in France. The man who abolished torture, if the Christian religion be true, God is now torturing in hell; and the man who inaugurated torture, is now a glorified angel ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... searching, they found a huge stairway cut for the use of bathers in the side of the cliff, and up this feet-torturing path Montgomery ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... him in the days that had passed; she had waited eagerly for St. Pierre; like a bird she had gone to him when at last he came, and he had seen her crushed close in St. Pierre's arms in their meeting. It was this night, with its gloom and its storm, that had made the shadowings of her unrest a torturing reality. For St. Pierre had brought her back to the bateau and had played a pitiably weak part in concealing his desire ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood

... up to all these physical ills as well? You know how ill I was not long ago at Basle, more than once. I was beginning to suspect that that year would be fatal to me: illness followed illness, always more severe. But, at the very time when this illness was at its height, I felt no torturing desire to live and no trepidation at the fear of death. My whole hope was in Christ alone, and I prayed only that he would give me what he judged most salutary for me. In my youth long ago, as I remember, I would shiver at the very name of death. This at least I have achieved as I have ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... with him?" she breaks forth, advancing toward him, as though to compel him to give her an answer to the question that has been torturing her for days past. ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"

... you who have been putting up with old-fashioned trusses or "appliances" with their belts, bands, elastics, leg-straps and other torturing harness— trusses which hurt so much every time you move that they almost drive ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons

... downwards upon the hard, unyielding bench, and to escape the jeers of his companions, drew himself close up in a corner near the door, and pretended to be asleep. But alas! no sleep came to those burning eyeballs through those long—long hours, and though racked with a torturing headache and feverish thirst, he knew no way to relieve himself, and dared not move lest he should again encounter the ridicule of ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... known. When they tear a workingman's hand in a machine or kill him, you can understand—the workingman himself is at fault. But in a case like this, when they suck a man's blood out of him and throw him away like a carcass—that can't be explained in any way. I can comprehend every murder; but torturing for mere sport I can't comprehend. And why do they torture the people? To what purpose do they torture us all? For fun, for mere amusement, so that they can live pleasantly on the earth; so that they can buy everything with the blood of the people, a prima donna, ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... in every gale: Far hence are banish'd vapours, spleen, and tears, Tea, scandal, ivory teeth, and languid airs: No pug, nor favourite Cupid there enjoys The balmy kiss, for which poor Thyrsis dies; Form'd to delight, they use no foreign arms, Nor torturing whalebones pinch them into charms; No conscious blushes there their cheeks inflame, For those who feel no guilt can know no shame; Unfaded still their former charms they shew, Around them pleasures wait, and joys for ever new. But cruel virgins meet severer fates; Expell'd ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... sky. The eternal GOD is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms." Ofttimes where the love of earthly parents has not failed, yet have they been powerless to bless and to keep. The cruel tyrant has tortured the parent in torturing the child; while there has been no power to deliver. And in the presence of human want or suffering how impotent has the strongest human love oft proved to be! Not so the love of our heavenly FATHER: His resources and His power ...
— Separation and Service - or Thoughts on Numbers VI, VII. • James Hudson Taylor

... measures of precaution as well as of savagery. They diminished the danger of revolt; and a blind, childless prisoner, without counsellors or friends, was harmless. But to make the sight of his slaughtered sons the poor wretch's last sight, was a refinement of gratuitous delight in torturing. Thus singularly was Ezekiel's enigma solved and harmonised with its apparent contradictions in Jeremiah's prophecies: 'Yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... cares of Europeans, principally occasioned by their love of accumulating money which they never enjoy, the principal cause of the modern disorder of dyspepsia prevalent among them is their irrational habit of interfering with the process of digestion by torturing attempts at repartee, and racking their brain at a moment when it should be calm, to remind themselves of some anecdote so appropriate that they have forgotten it. It has been supposed that the presence of women at our banquets has occasioned this fatal ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... worthy of your friendship. You are indeed the honour and the glory of my life, and your faith in my lyric gift lifts me to the stars. But you must remember that my Muse is wayward and my vein of genius not too rich. No Hercules will reward my travail, so do not expect of me the birth-pangs that are torturing Virgil. I have time to look abroad on life and to correct tears by wine and laughter while my hands are busy with the file and pumice-stone. Before you know it, the billboards of the Sosii will announce the completed work, and the dedication shall show Rome who is ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... sighs, When, Laura, upon you I turn my eyes, For whom the world's allurements I disdain, But when I see that gentle smile again, That modest, sweet, and tender smile, arise, It pours on every sense a blest surprise; Lost in delight is all my torturing pain. Too soon this heavenly transport sinks and dies: When all thy soothing charms my fate removes At thy departure from my ravish'd view. To that sole refuge its firm faith approves My spirit from my ravish'd bosom flies, And wing'd ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... no 'breaking' it. It will break him. It will kill him. Alas, it is the ungrateful child that has the power to inflict a slow and torturing death! Poor father! Poor mother! And it is I that must witness it. I, that would die to save them from such ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... the Banking Office; what, is there not from six to Eleven P.M. 6 days in the week, and is there not all Sunday? Fie, what a superfluity of man's time,—if you could think so! Enough for relaxation, mirth, converse, poetry, good thoughts, quiet thoughts. O the corroding torturing tormenting thoughts, that disturb the Brain of the unlucky wight, who must draw upon it for daily sustenance. Henceforth I retract all my fond complaints of mercantile employment, look upon them as Lovers' quarrels. I was but half ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... heart of the strong hard man was swelling with the love which, in it all along, was now awake. He could not weep, but sobbed dry, torturing sobs, that seemed as if they would kill him. But he must see that the boy was safe in bed, and rising ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... considered Samuel Franklyn a worthy man and a good citizen. The majority, doubtless, held the saner view. A few years more, and he certainly would have been made a baronet. He relieved much suffering in the world, as assuredly as he caused many souls the agonies of torturing fear by his emphasis ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood

... probable result to quarrel about the means. But how you did take us all in! I give you my word I never suspected you for a moment. Your stammer and wig were both admirable. As for Elaine, she's torturing her brain with metaphysical doubts as to the nature of love, and says she will never love again. She tells her mother that her Adolphus was an ideal personage who has no longer existence, and that her love is buried with him; but here she ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant

... very thing that led one into temptation. The very humility and diffidence that made one hate to seem or to be superior to others was the occasion of falling. The religion recommended was a religion of scrupulous saints and self-torturing ascetics; and the result of it was to make one, as experience widened and deepened, mournfully indifferent to an ideal which seemed so utterly out of one's reach. It is very difficult to make the right compromise. On the one hand, there is the sense ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... was poisoned by the Jesuits. He had signed a Bull to suppress the order, which Bull was to "be forever and to all eternity valid." The result of it was "acqua tofana of Perugia," a slow and torturing poison. ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... sorrel plunged after him and the rolling stones cracked. Suffering as I was by this time, with cramp in my legs, and torturing pain, I had to choose between holding my horse in or falling off; so I chose the former and accordingly ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey

... sacrificed to the spirit of corn, by the Pawnees, on the 22d of February last. For this purpose she was placed on a foot-rest, between two trees, about two feet apart, and raised above the ground, just high enough to have a torturing fire built under her feet. Here she was held by two warriors, who mounted the rest beside her, and who applied lighted splinters under her arms. At a given signal a hundred arrows were let fly, and her whole body was pierced. These ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... lead into her mind. What if the captain was only so ready with his promise of escorting her to Belgrade in order to get rid of her? What if he does not come to-morrow, either at eight or later? A torturing jealousy excited her nerves. When she reached the anteroom, she felt about on the table for the candle and matches she had left there. Instead of these her hand touched a knife—a sharp cook's knife with a heavy handle. This also sheds light on darkness. She grasped the knife and walked up and down. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... my life from the king's, I left thee awhile, for love, torturing, stings; Never more will I leave thee-my tender love round thee Like fresh boughs for thy life, would ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell

... direct fashion has Virginia Reed told of a heroic deed in the history of brave pioneer girls—but as the story comes from her pen, it is scarcely possible to realize the anxiety, the torturing fear, the hideous danger of such an expedition as that one of hers when at midnight, on the great plains, she set out ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... and waking. The only thing absolutely absent from it was the feeling of rest. The usual sufferings of a youth in love had nothing to do with it. I could leave her, go away from her, remain away from her, without an added pang or any augmented consciousness of that torturing sentiment of distance so acute that often it ends by wearing itself out in a few days. Far or near was all one to me, as if one could never get any further but also never any nearer to her secret: the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... sacrilegious; while it also inculcates that sins of thought should be confessed in order that the confessor may judge of their mortal or venial character. What sort of a chain this links around the strictly conscientious I would attempt to portray, if I could. But it must have been worn to understand its torturing character! Suffice it to say that, for months past, according to this standard, I had not made a good confession at all! And now, filled with remorse for my past sacrilegious sinfulness, I resolved on making a new general ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... torturing me?" Zinaida Fyodorovna said suddenly in Russian in a breaking voice. "What is it for? Think of my misery . . ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... hollow eyes will never cease to haunt you. Men should promote happiness, and not cause misery. Let the savage Indians torture captives to death by the slow flaming fagot, but let civilized man respect the tenderness and love of confiding women. Torturing the opposite sex is double-distilled barbarity. Young men agonizing young ladies, is the cold-blooded cruelty of devils, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... have hated mysteries. Here I am face to face with two absolutely insoluble ones. Captain Griffiths has assured me that there is here in Dreymarsh something of sufficient importance to account for the presence of a foreign spy. You have confirmed it. I have been torturing my brain about that for the last twenty-four hours. Now there happens something more inexplicable still. You are arrested, and you are not arrested. Your identity is known, and Captain Griffiths is forbidden ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Jove in thickest night The issues of the future veils, And laughs at the self-torturing wight Who with imagined terrors quails. The present only is thine own, Then use it well, ere it ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... answered the palmer, sadly, "and 'tis a sorry sight to see. By the Sheriff's castle, out upon the roadway, they have built an angled gallows-tree to bear the four of them at once. They are to die at noon, after the torturing is done. I could not bear the sight; and so have turned my back ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick

... more. He would have been spared, and she would have been spared, the shock that had so cruelly assailed them both. What had she gained by Mrs. Rook's detestable confession? The result had been perpetual disturbance of mind provoked by self-torturing speculations on the subject of the murder. If Mirabel was innocent, who was guilty? The false wife, without pity and without shame—or the brutal husband, who looked capable of any enormity? What was her future to be? How was it all to end? In the despair ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins

... all the weapons of which he managed with perfect skill. He had a rapier for aristocratic immunities of evil, arrows to transfix prescriptions and shams; and with snobs (we must change the figure) he played as a cat does with a mouse, torturing and then devouring. In the words of Miss Bronte, "he was the first social regenerator of the day, the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things." But this was his chief and glorious strength: in the truest sense, he was ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... the monster, recovering itself, was turning madly to finish off its insignificant but torturing opponent, A-ya came leaping back to the rescue, with a blazing and sparkling faggot in each hand, and the old men, some with fire-brands, some with spears, clamoring resolutely behind her. With fearless dexterity, she thrust the fire straight ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... student we will consider this letter. The complaint in Crashey Jane's letter is about two boys who are torturing her morning, noon, and night, Sunday and weekday, by blowing some "long long brass ting" as well as a bugle, and the way she dwells on their staying power must bring a sympathetic pang for that black sister into the heart of many a householder in London ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... any man or beast I might say. Where we cannot get out, no one can get in," he added, as if answering her thoughts. "I am afraid that you won't see your brother to-morrow morning. But I'll reconnoitre as soon as I can do so without torturing HIM," he said, looking anxiously at the helpless man; "he's got about his share of pain, I reckon, and the first thing is to get him easier." It was the longest speech he had made to her; it was the first time he had fairly looked her ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte

... turned to retrace the long hopeless road. And now the thoughts of home became at every yard of the way more painful and even terrifying to her. What a misery to have to face it—to have to think of it! But to run away and hide herself from her parents, and escape for ever from her torturing apprehensions, never entered her mind. She loved her poor drink-degraded mother; there was no one else for her to love, and where her mother was there must be her only home. But the thought of her father was like a nightmare to her; even the remembrance of his often ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... "The robbing and torturing of travellers, the plundering and burning of Saxon Villages... Almost all the Towns and Villages hereabouts are so plundered out, that many a one now has nothing but what he carries on his body. Plundering was universal: and no sooner was one party away, than another came, and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... journal. Thither the Londoners flocked, as the Athenians of old flocked to the market place, to hear whether there was any news. There men might learn how brutally a Whig, had been treated the day before in Westminster Hall, what horrible accounts the letters from Edinburgh gave of the torturing of Covenanters, how grossly the Navy Board had cheated the crown in the Victualling of the fleet, and what grave charges the Lord Privy Seal had brought against the Treasury in the matter of the hearth money. But people who lived at a distance from the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Ethel always was kind, and her father, whom, since his illnesses, she tended with much benevolence and care. But she did battle with Lady Kew repeatedly, coming to her Aunt Julia's rescue, on whom her mother as usual exercised her powers of torturing. She made Barnes quail before her by the shafts of contempt which she flashed at him; and she did not spare Lord Kew, whose good-nature was no shield against her scorn. The old queen-mother was fairly afraid of her; she even left off beating Lady Julia ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... into the great upright blocks of sandstone which, riveted with iron bands to their copings, were relied upon to hold the main road from destruction. Sometimes in fragments, and sometimes almost entire, the craft would be slung clean over the torturing battlements, and be left stranded high and dry on our one village street, a menace to traffic, but a huge joy to ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell

... attempt to penetrate the torturing mystery left it as dark, or darker than before. For when she came to ponder every word, her suspicion was confirmed that Ghysbrecht did know something about Gerard. "And who were the two knaves he thought had done a good deed, and told me? Oh, my Gerard, my poor deserted babe, you and I are ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... again, with torturing scorn, "You!" And then she smiled, for she knew why her enemy was there, and her hour of triumph was come. The girl moved swiftly to the window—she could see the wounded Marcum slowly crossing ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.

... to be imaginatively equipped to explore the spiritual fastnesses of a sensitive and alien orphan. Beulah tried earnestly to get some perspective on the child's point of view, but she could not. The fact that she was torturing the child would have been outside of the limits of her comprehension. She searched her mind for some immediate application of the methods of Madame Montessori, and produced a lump of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... dungeon of utter hopelessness. My sweet day-dreams and midnight rhapsodies trooped back to mock at me. I felt that I must bow broken under anguish or else steel myself and shout back cynical derision to the whole wan troop of torturing regrets. And all the time, she was caressing that thing in her hand and looking down at it with a fondness, which I—poor fool—thought that I alone could inspire. I suppose if I could have crept away unobserved, I would have gone from her presence ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... and his wife spent a night of most torturing suspense. On their return from the Mazmorra, they told every thing to their son, Ysajar; who, going immediately to the prison, with some difficulty gained over the jailer, a Moorish woman, by offering her gifts,—and at length ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... was marked by care and anxiety, and he seemed ambitious to win a name. "Fear first assailed the child, and he trembled and screamed; but at a frown, with youth came love, torturing the hapless bosom, where fierce flames of rage, resentment, jealousy contend. Disturbed ambition presented next, to bid him grasp the moon and waste his days in angry sighs, add deep rivalry for shadows, till to conclude the wretched catalogue, appears pale avarice, straining delusive counters ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna

... should think that he can please me by giving the labor of his soul to making them. It is much the same thing as I feel, for instance, when I go to hear a master of music, and find that he has spent his hours in torturing himself and his fingers in order to give me an acrobatic exhibition, when all the time what I wish him to do, and what his genius gave him power to do, was to find the magic word that should set free ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair

... or the next, that the man fell and could not rise again? The woman did not know. Something had got into her brain and was dancing there and would not stop; something blent of sun and glare, sand, mirage, torturing thirst. There was a little gray scorpion, too—but no, that had been crushed to a pulp by the man's heel. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... and I, we could have reached them in half the time Geoff and old Binks took! We could have rescued them before "The Theodora" began to settle down!' he blurted out when he found Ned sobbing helplessly in a corner of the tea-house, The latter, though not possessed of Alick's torturing powers of imagination, was overcome with remorse for his own share ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell

... a moment the attack flinched and hung back and swayed uncertainly under the cruel hail. For a moment only, and then it surged on again, seethed and eddied in agitated whirlpools amongst the stakes and strands of the torturing wires, came on again, and with a roar of hate and frenzied triumph leaped at the low parapet. The parapet flamed and roared again in gusts of rapid fire, and the front ranks of the attackers withered and went ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable

... conflicting emotions, the poor girl dragged herself to her own apartment and there upon a restless, sleepless couch, beset by wild, impossible hopes, and vain, torturing regrets, she fought out the long, bitter night; until toward morning she solved the problem of her misery in the only way that seemed possible to her poor, tired, bleeding, little heart. When the rising sun shone through the narrow window, it found ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... days after this that Hugh sat by the open window, listening to Annie reading from the virtuous and veracious Richmond Enquirer. Distressed by what he heard, not knowing whether it was true or not, he begged her to cease torturing him. She laid aside the paper with an emphatic 'I don't believe it!' that could not but attract his attention, and ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... quite normal and well-conditioned individuals, is the impulse among boys at and after puberty to take pleasure in persecuting and hurting lower animals or their own young companions. Some youths display a diabolical enjoyment and ingenuity in torturing sensitive juniors, and even a boy who is otherwise kindly and considerate may find enjoyment in deliberately mutilating a frog. In some cases, in boys and youths who have no true sadistic impulse and are not usually cruel, this infliction of torture on a lower animal produces an erection, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... soon faded from her face and the sparkle died out in her dark eyes. Pale, alert, intelligent, she stood there minute after minute, searching the single room with anxious, purposeless eyes; then, driven into restless motion by the torturing tension of anxiety, she paced the loose boards like a tigress, up and down, head lowered, hands clasped against her mouth, worrying the fingers with the edge ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... torturing him again, and heavily, in the impersonal darkness, he pondered, "I don't—We're all so flip and think we're so smart. There'd be—A fellow like Dante—I wish I'd read some of his pieces. I don't suppose I ever ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... the poverty of the industrial masses to-day means not only the absence of the special comforts, but that it means positive suffering. Men are starving from want and are chained down like slaves to a torturing task. But let us discriminate. It is true in states of unemployment and illness the physical man may be crushed by naked poverty, but that has nothing whatever to do with socialism. We have emphasized before that it is the solemn duty of society to find ways and means to ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... she was looking upon Satan in that moment when he first realized that his fall from heaven was for eternity and that, against every torturing passion of conviction, he must turn his talents and his fearful courage ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris

... torturing moment. He knew what she desired and what weapons she could wield wherewith to subdue his will. The battle he fought with himself just then was but a precursor of the fiercer one which anon he would have ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... a striking instance of divine agency, which has overtaken him at last, and punished him by the hands of those very people who have suffered so much from him; he being well known to have exercised his barbarous disposition in murdering or torturing any who unfortunately came within his reach."—The Derwent ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... the cowboys rode in from the northern hills, the Quarter Circle KT lay under a mantle of sullen, torturing heat. Not a breath of air fanned the poplars, straight and motionless, in front of the house. The sun buried itself in a solid wall of black that rose above the Costejo peaks, hidden now in the shadow of the coming storm. The horses were dripping with sweat—their coats ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman

... through Henrietta's body at these words. The very air of the room was all at once difficult to breathe, and she only felt better when she sat in the carriage again. But even there she was haunted by some unendurable, undefinable, torturing feeling which struck her still more unpleasantly when Clementina remarked: "Yes, there is nothing but ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai

... sound of running feet. In his fear and agony he could have shrieked, but from his parched throat there issued no sound. Friend or foe, for him it meant the same fate—one touch on that knob and a torturing death by fire. ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... awake; the mind of man was ignorant of its own treasures and its own capacities. It is pathetic to think of the mediaeval students poring over a single ill-translated sentence of Porphyry, endeavoring to extract from its clauses whole systems of logical science, and torturing their brains about puzzles more idle than the dilemma of Buridan's donkey, while all the time, at Constantinople and at Seville, in Greek and Arabic, Plato and Aristotle were alive, but sleeping, awaiting only the call of the Renaissance to bid them speak ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... fine saddle with the blood of its owner. The point of the dying man's lance pierced his face, but he noted the bleaching of Kearney's, as one dragoon after another was flung upon the sharp rocks over which his bewildered brute stumbled, or was caught and held aloft in the torturing arms of ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... there came an hour—nay, a moment, when in that twilight hour which the French call "'Twixt dog and wolf," the most torturing and shameful of human passions, jealousy, had taken possession of Jacques de Wissant, disintegrating, rather than shattering, the elaborate fabric of his House of Life, that house in which he had always dwelt so snugly and ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... his clouded eyes the hands which were torturing him, Febrer saw a pair of black sleeves, then a cravat, a shirt collar different from those used by the peasants, and above all this a face with a gray mustache, a face he had often seen on the roads, but which ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... the subject of her Oscar, to whom she was apparently devoted. She was just telling Mavis how he liked to amuse himself by torturing the cat, when a sharp cry penetrated into the kitchen, as if coming from the neighbourhood of ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... true? that spirits of wickedness and enmity may execute each other's punishment, as those of righteousness and love minister each other's happiness! that—damned among the damned—the spirit of a Nero may still delight in torturing, and that those who in this world were mutual workers of iniquity, may find themselves in the next, sworn retributors of wrath? No idle threat was that of the demoniac Simon, and possibly with no vain fears did the ghost of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... which is already beyond your reach! Seek not to deceive your own heart! You are incapable of executing what you threaten! You are incapable of torturing a being who has done you no wrong—but whose misfortune it is that her feelings have been sensible to impressions like your own. But I love you ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... the crystallization of what little thinking he had managed to do in the two purgatorial days he'd spent in that down-state hotel—in the intervals of fighting off the torturing jingle of that tune, and the memory of the dull frozen agony he'd seen in Rose's face as he left her. No great result, truly. The mountain had labored and ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... sensuality. With regard to this older authors like Mitchell,[1] Blumroder,[2] Friedreich,[3] have brought examples which are still of no little worth. They speak of cases in which many people, not alone men, use the irritation developed by greater or lesser cruelty for sexual purposes: the torturing of animals, biting, pinching, choking the partner, etc. Nowadays this is called sadism.[4] Certain girls narrate their fear of some of their visitors who make them suffer unendurably, especially at the point of extreme passion, by biting, pressing, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... more terrible; fire is of all things that which produces in man the most pungent sensation; not finding anything more cruel, the enemies to the several dogmas were to be everlastingly punished with this torturing element: fire, therefore, was the point at which their imagination was obliged to stop; the ministers of the various systems agreed pretty generally, that fire would one day avenge their offended divinities; thus, they painted ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... the signs and motions we could imagine, what was become of the people, and yet we could get nothing from them. Our lieutenant was for torturing some of them to make them confess, but William opposed that vehemently; and when he heard it was under consideration he came to me. "Friend," says he, "I make a request to thee not to put any of these poor wretches ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe

... me, but you were the first to awaken them. If I now take pleasure in torturing you, abusing you, it is your fault; you have made of me what I now am, and now you are even unmanly, weak, and ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

... and did not look at her for a long time. That episode in her past history of which she had told him—of the poor Christminster graduate whom she had handled thus, returned to Jude's mind; and he saw himself as a possible second in such a torturing destiny. ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... choked her. Then clear, dry, keen wind sung in her ears and whipped her hair. The light about her darkened. The King had headed into the pines. The heavy roar of the gale overhead struck Lucy with new and torturing dread. Sage King once in his life was running away, bridleless, and behind him there was fire on ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... was broken up in the football match. Rickie and Mr. Pembroke were on the ground when the accident took place. It was no good torturing him by a drive to the hospital, and he was merely carried to the little pavilion and laid upon the floor. A doctor came, and so did a clergyman, but it seemed better to leave him for the last few minutes with Agnes, who had ridden down ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... that her heart all but stops beating. And when she has so grieved and sobbed and moaned and started and sighed, then she has looked in her heart to see who and of what worth was he for whose sake Love was torturing her. And when she has recalled each wandering thought, then she stretches herself and turns over; and turning, she turns to folly all the thinking she has done. Then she starts on another argument and says: "Fool! What does it matter to me if this youth is ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes

... give people pain. You take a fiendish delight in torturing others. But if you think you can influence me in the slightest degree, you're very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... threw them down again while he searched his pockets absently for the missing cigarette case. Remembering, he jerked himself to his feet with an exclamation of pain. Was all life henceforward to be a series of torturing recollections? He swore, and flung his head up angrily. Coward! whining already ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull

... gone—sold and gone, To the rice-swamp dank and lone, There no mother's eye is near them, There no mother's ear can hear them; Never when the torturing lash Seams their back with many a gash, Shall a mother's kindness bless them, Or a mother's arms caress them. Gone, gone—sold and gone, To the rice-swamp dank and lone, From Virginia's hills and waters, Woe is ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark

... not withstand it. My throat ached; I could scarcely breathe, and it seemed that my heart would burst." Here the tears gushed forth as she took a step toward him with outstretched arms, and said between her sobs: "I wanted you, you! for my husband—for my husband, and I could not bear the torturing thought of losing you or enduring any other man. I could not give you up after that—it was all too late, too late; it had gone too ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... little gland and fibre in his whole being and all the great ulcers in his diseased stomach seemed like fierce flames cutting and licking and torturing him, half-drunk, he staggered from one grog shop to another, begging ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock

... seventeenth century, when by the reformation in Europe and the British Isles, the dragon was cast down from the symbolic heaven, he has been assailing in "great wrath" all ranks and degrees of men, not, as before, with fire and sword, with scaffolds, gibbets, thumb-screws,—torturing and destroying their mortal bodies, that he might reach their immortal souls: but by bringing them together in voluntary associations on principles of the covenant of works, subversive of the covenant of grace, and consequently aiming at the drowning of the mystic woman. ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele

... warriors, urging him on in the rapid flight which would not permit a careful examination of the ground before him. Tantor, the elephant, who could have turned and scattered his adversaries with a single charge, fled like a frightened deer—fled toward a hideous, torturing death. ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... a wild-beast passion, tearing and torturing quite ordinary persons like herself, she had always been a little sceptical. The great love poems of the world, when she read them, had always left her with the feeling that their authors were of different clay from herself ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... torturing joy the sounds Drop burning on thine ear; The mother-heart, though bleeding, bounds Her ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... how she did it. It was like loosing her grip upon life itself. Yet after a few seconds of torturing irresolution she obeyed him, abandoning her last hold and hanging ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell

... suggestibility for certain of one's own ideas is abnormally increased. Great individual differences exist in that respect in normal life. There are normal hypochondriacs who believe that they feel the symptoms of widely different diseases under the influence of their own ideas, and others who are torturing themselves with fears on account of unjustified beliefs. But the abnormal increase of suggestibility parallel to that of hypnotism for suggestions from without exists for suggestions from within, mainly in nervous diseases, especially in neurasthenic, hysteric, and psychasthenic ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg

... which humanity dictates in such cases,[106] to prevail on him to come into ordinary course of other people in like government, laying before him the sentence of the law in such cases, namely that he must be pressed to death, the only torturing execution which however they were ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... a corroding drop, a dark, deadly, vexing, torturing thing, fell upon God's fair creation, threatening to inoculate it with a poison that should leaven the whole lump, and change its beauty into corruption. But around the dark sin-spot, and because the sin-spot was there, divine love showered down, like the impalpable silver ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... none. Let that pass, however. But I cannot give you time. I cannot hold out—who can hold out, under injurious secrecy— under mocking injustice—under torturing doubt from the one who is pledged to the extreme of confidence? Let us once understand one another, and we will never meet more, and I will endure whatever must be endured, and we shall have time—Oh, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... made to me that you are forcing negroes into the military service, and even torturing them—riding them on rails and the like to extort their consent. I hope this may be a mistake. The like must not be done by you, or any one under you. You must not force negroes any more than white ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... it ever come? What would be the outcome? Jim tried to plan for the approaching emergency, but the best he could do was to struggle to conceal the acute case of chills and fever then torturing his weak body and adding confusion to his ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... "Ah, stop torturing me. Do not ask me any more questions. I am going away,—flying like a coward. I will not tempt further suffering. And yet—once more—only once? could that do harm? Ah, God, my God, be merciful!" she cried, clasping her hands and lifting them above her bowed head. Then remembering, ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson

... to go to sleep. Then he discovered that an extra two glasses of whiskey-and-water would solve that particular difficulty, and send him into prompt, leaden slumber—but the early mornings remained as torturing as ever. In the twilight he awoke oppressed and sick at heart with gloom—and then dozed at intervals through fantastic new ordeals of anguish and shame and fear, till it was decently ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... twinkle Of stars in the far azure set, The mandolin's torturing tinkle, The click of the castanet! Music and wine and low laughter, Love and a torment of tune— Hate and a poignard thereafter, Under the ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner

... Pope presented him with a consecrated hat and sword, an honour which had previously been bestowed only on reigning sovereigns. In Spain it was regarded not only as a sacred duty but a pleasant amusement for the King and his Court to watch the torturing of heretics. England alone—then a comparatively weak and insignificant country—stood out against this overwhelming combination. And in attempting to realize the position of affairs we must remember that in the sixteenth century the ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous

... package, which it needed no ingenuity to identify as the late crimson-lake. She would have to be pleasant with Diva, for much as that perfidious woman might enjoy telling her where this furtive bridge-party had taken place, she might enjoy even more torturing her with uncertainty. Diva could, if put to it, give no answer whatever to a direct question, but, skilfully changing the subject, talk ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... Whereat fear and great hope fell upon the seamen, and they sailed three days and nights, till, on the fourth day, they sighted Behram's ship. Ere ended day, they came up with it and surrounded it on all sides, even as Behram had taken Asaad forth of the chest and was beating and torturing him, whilst the prince cried out for succour and relief, but found neither helper nor deliverer; and indeed he was sorely tormented with much beating. Presently Behram chanced to look up and seeing himself encompassed by the queen's ships, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous

... were dead; to have mourned you as dead; to have spent ten whole years of weary, comfortless days; and then to find suddenly that you have been all this time living,—voluntarily hiding yourself from me; needlessly torturing me! Why, Hetty! Hetty! you must have been mad. You must be mad now, I think, to kneel there and tell me all these details so calmly, and in such a matter-of-fact way. Do you realize what a monstrous thing you have been doing?" ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous

... said Adrian, "not even a mouse. Sellers—oh, what men daily do, not knowing what they do!—is shut up in the scullery, I suppose, torturing his poor defenceless fiddle. That 's what it is to be a musical boot-and-knife boy. And Wickersmith will be at his devotions. He tells me he never gets leisure for his morning meditation till luncheon 's cleared away. And that's what it is to be a pious butler. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... the oilskin packet with the blanks, and they were just mad! They didn't know whether I'd changed the papers, or whether Danvers had been carrying a dummy message, while the real one was sent another way. They spoke of"—she closed her eyes—"torturing me ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie

... he has many times held the balance with an unsteady hand. How sad the condition of him who is in authority! Not only are the miseries of power imposed upon him, but its vices also, which, not content with torturing, succeed in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... say. I only know I have forbidden him this place," he replied. "Harrie, Harrie, my little wife! You are very merciless! You are torturing me, and I—I would die to save you ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming

... eyes, and when she grew too curious, he administered an antidote in the form of a few Armenian numerals. If his Autobiography is to be credited, Isopel loved him, and he was aware of it; but the knowledge did not hinder him from torturing the poor girl by insisting that she should decline the verb "to love" ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... the verandah while a servant brought brandy-and-soda, and Nana Sahib, with a restless perversity akin to the torturing proclivity of a Hindu was quizzing ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... unlike me; is so entirely the image of her lost father, that the sight of her beauty sometimes overwhelms me with torturing memories. Here. General Laurance is a carefully written paper, which I submit for your examination and mature reflection. When in the presence of proper witnesses you sign that contract, you will have purchased the right to claim my hand—mark you, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... grass; "I thought that papa might fall ill on the voyage home, and die, and that the ship for whose safe course I prayed night and day, might bring me nothing but the sacred remains of the dead. I have thought this, Arthur, and I have lain awake at night, torturing myself with the thought: till my mind has grown so full of the dark picture, that I have seen the little cabin in the cruel, restless ship, and my father lying helpless on a narrow bed, with only strangers to watch his death-hour. I cannot tell you how many different things I have feared: but I ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... unsealed.' We have the same holy oracles, and the same mercy-seat. The time is past for merely challenging the right to personal judgment of religious truths. In Britain the lions are securely chained, and the cruel giants disabled. The awful crime of imprisoning and torturing man for conscience' sake, exists only in kingdoms where ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... sordid life was unhinging me, and there was no legitimate way of escape from it. I formed wild plans of running away, to do what I did not care so long as it brought a little action, anything but this torturing maddening monotony; but my love for my little brothers and sisters held me back. I could not do anything that would put me for ever beyond the pale of ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... the mountains of the Great West and spread over the Pacific Coast from Panama to Alaska. The Valkyries were women. They were the most terrible of all. No woman was eligible for membership who had not lost near relatives at the hands of the Oligarchy. They were guilty of torturing their prisoners to death. Another famous organization of women was The Widows of War. A companion organization to the Valkyries was the Berserkers. These men placed no value whatever upon their own lives, and it was they who totally destroyed the ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... around the tree, fire was set to this, and, as the flames rose up and the heat grew greater, he felt sure that his last hour had come. However, word had reached one of the French officers that the Indians were torturing their prisoner, and he rushed in, scattered the burning brush, ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton

... however, had, of course, been less solemn; and then his wife had answered him with a full, but not grieving heart. "Had our lot," he once said, "been cast in an Indian village, the prejudices of the country would have required you to submit to a horrid, torturing death upon my tomb. The prejudices of Christian lands, which attribute blame to the wife who does not yield herself a living sacrifice to a life of desolation from a false regard to her husband's memory, are, if not so horrid, every ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... you do not understand, little soul that sings—the spring is torturing me and taunting me. If only ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... the name of MacSawby, who, being of a Practical turn (as most of his countrymen are, and, indeed, Edinborough in Scotland is about the most Practical town that ever I was in), pointed out that we were all very Tired, and needed Refreshment and Repose; that the task of Torturing Negroes gave much trouble and consumed more time ("Aiblins it's douce wark," quoth the Scotch gentleman); that all the wood about was sopped with wet (and a "Dry Roast's best," said the Scotch Gentleman); and finally, that the thing could be much better done at ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... of dire despair; By Thine agony of prayer; By the cross, the nail, the thorn, Piercing spear, and torturing scorn; By the gloom that veiled the skies O'er the dreadful sacrifice,— Listen to our humble cry, ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... him. He was in New York when he wrote the last letter." She took a malicious pleasure in thus torturing her visitor; and, determined not to gratify her by any manifestation of interest or curiosity, Beulah took up a couple of volumes and turned to the ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans



Words linked to "Torturing" :   bastinado, nail pulling, strappado, electric shock, burning, sensory deprivation, kittee, piquet, falanga, dismemberment, taking apart, prolonged interrogation, boot, crucifixion, painful, picket, kia quen, rack, nail removal, sleep deprivation, persecution, excruciation, judicial torture, strapado, agonizing, agonising, genital torture



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com