"Wretched" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own and the present, thought Dickens to be vulgar; if the cause of that judgement was that he wrote about people in shops, the cause is discredited now that shops are the scenes of the novelist's research. "High life" and most wretched life have now given place to the little shop and its parlour, during a year or two. But Dr. Brown, the author of Rab and His Friends, thought that Dickens committed vulgarities in his diction. "A good man was Robin" ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... the youth who feigned His birth from Libyan Ammon, smitten yet The nations with a rod of iron, and driven Their chariot o'er our necks. Thou dost avenge, In thy good time, the wrongs of those who know No other friend. Nor dost thou interpose Only to lay the sufferer asleep, Where he who made him wretched troubles not His rest—thou dost strike down his tyrant too. Oh, there is joy when hands that held the scourge Drop lifeless, and the pitiless heart is cold. Thou too dost purge from earth its horrible And old idolatries;—from the proud fanes Each to his grave their priests go out, ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... within sight of you than they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth, which conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and thinking, too, that you are thinking they are thinking about themselves,—and so look at you with a wretched mixture of self-consciousness, awkwardness, and attempts to carry off both, which are betrayed by the cowardly behavior of the eye and the tell-tale weakness of the lips ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Valliere was afraid of those faces, in which her ignorance of Parisian types did not permit her to distinguish the type of probity from that of dishonesty. The appearance of misery alarmed her, and all whom she met seemed wretched and miserable. Her toilet, which was the same she had worn during the previous evening, was elegant even in its careless disorder: for it was the one in which she had presented herself to the queen-mother; and, moreover, when she drew aside the mantle which covered her face in order to ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... during the three hours and a half which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my daily life that this wretched numbness held possession of me. It went with me on my sea-shore walks and rambles into the country, whenever—which was seldom and reluctantly—I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of Nature which ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
|
