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More "Curse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the cabin, clearly outlined against the flickering light of the interior, was a man. And as Sheila watched another streak of fire burst from the door, and she heard the shrill sighing of the bullet, heard the horseman curse. But he did not stop in his flight, and in an instant he had crossed the river. She saw him for an instant as he was outlined against the clear sky in the moonlight that bathed the crest of the slope, and then he ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... who publicly declared that he desired the election to the Duma only to work for the extermination of the Jews of Poland. By the way, it is strange to notice how the word "exterminate," which thirty years ago in the days of Bismarck and Eduard von Hartmann as Ausrotten was subject to the curse and condemnation of the Poles, has now come to honor, and how ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... They fought upon that day till the ground was heaped with their dead, while, as the foremost fell thick and fast, their comrades, says the Roman, sprang upon their piled-up bodies, and hurled their javelins at the enemy as from a hill. They fought like men to whom life without liberty was a curse. They were not defeated, but exterminated. Of many thousand fighting men went home but five hundred. Upon reaching the place of refuge where they had bestowed their women and children, Caesar found, after the battle, that there were but three of their senators left alive. So perished ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... relief at command, he was in his way as "brazen-bowelled" at work as he was "golden-mouthed" at expression, and he had ample leisure. But the inability to undertake sustained labour, which he himself recognises as the one unquestionable curse of opium, deprived us of an English philosopher who would have stood as far above Kant in exoteric graces, as he would have stood above Bacon in esoteric value. It was not entirely De Quincey's fault. It seems to be generally recognised now that whatever occasional ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... violent and unreasonable as if raging under the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on which he had come to Middlemarch. Everything that bad happened to him there seemed a mere preparation for this hateful fatality, which had come as a blight on his honorable ambition, and must make even people who had only vulgar standards ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... greatness was in his will, sagacity, watchfulness, and devotion to public affairs. Factions could not oust him, because he was strong; the King would not part with him, because he was faithful; posterity will not curse him, because he laid the foundation of the political greatness ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... gods, but it is all of no use; the Father of the Gods tears the ring from his finger, and then they untie him and tell him to take himself off where he will. And now, as he goes, he lays a terrible curse on the ring. To every one who shall ever gain it, he swears, shall come ill luck, misfortune, sorrow, terror, and death; let him rule the world if he will, never shall he be happy; everyone shall long for the ring, and to him who gets it, ...
— The Wagner Story Book • Henry Frost
... Elverton, after the door was shut in my face of the only man I ever tamed my spirit to ask aid from: yes, the cowardly hypocrite that dared not deny me to my face, sent his lacquey to tell me he was unwell, and could not be disturbed by beggars. May the curse—' ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... Jew! fable or not a fable, thou, when first starting on thy endless pilgrimage of woe,—thou, when first flying through the gates of Jerusalem and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing curse behind thee,—couldst not more certainly have read thy doom of sorrow in the misgivings of thy troubled brain, than I when passing forever from my sister's room. The worm was at my heart; and confining myself to that state of life, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... and name. To scream would be to invite their ready knives to her heart—to the heart of any woman who might rush to her succor. The cry died in her throat, and, trembling with dread and excitement, she clung to the door post and crouched and listened, for stifled mutterings could be heard, a curse or two in vigorous English, a stamping of impatient ponies, a warning in a woman's tone. Then, thank God! Up at the storehouse corner a light came dancing into view. In honest soldier tones boomed out the query "What's the matter, Six?" and then, ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... ask me then, whether I think that a statute of absolute prohibition would stop this flowing curse, I reply that at least it would put the influence of authority on the right side. It would lend it the force of consistent endeavor. As it is, it would be far better if the public sanction had no expression; ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... our affection for all He thus taught: 'If ye love them which love you what new thing do ye? for even the fornicators do this; but I say unto you, pray for your enemies, and love them which hate you, and bless them which curse you, and offer prayer for them which despitefully use you.' And that we should communicate to the needy, and do nothing for praise, He said thus: 'Give ye to every one that asketh, and from him that desireth to borrow turn not ye away, for, if ye ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... bull. In dying, he recommended to them this Evangelical poverty as the foundation of their institute; and lest this foundation should be undermined by the prudence of the flesh, he forbade in the strongest terms, on pain of the curse of the Almighty, and of his also, the introduction into the order of ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... which he is not wholly well-informed, and be able to listen, even to ask intelligent questions, in matters with which he has no minute acquaintance. Such a man, if he steers clear of the contempt for indefinite views which is often the curse of men with clear and definite minds, makes the best kind of talker, stimulating and suggestive; his talk seems to open doors into gardens and corridors of the house of thought; and others, whose knowledge ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... He would go back each night for new gossip; and first he heard that old man Granitch was meaning to have all the conspirators arrested and sent to jail; but then it was said that young Lacey had left the hospital and vanished, no one knew where. And they never knew; never again did he appear to curse the strikers at the Empire, nor to break the hearts of chorus-girls on the Great White Way! His grim old father's hair turned grey in a few weeks; and while he went on to fill his contracts with the Russian government, all men knew that his heart was eaten ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... and rarely sober; the relief his absences had been was denied her entirely; and in some sunny corner of the uninhabited rooms up-stairs she spent her days, toiling at such sewing as was needful, and silent as the dead, save as her life appealed to God from the ground, and called down the curse of Cain upon a head she would have shielded from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... God, a curse of man upon us!" continued grandmother, now no longer with terrifying voice. Besides, she spoke as calmly as if she were merely reciting to us the history of some strange family. "Your great-grandfather. Job Aronffy, he who lies in the first niche, bequeathed ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... my brother, and the best boy that ever lived. Curse them!" he cried, shaking his clenched fist; "curse the Yankees. What right have ...
— That Old-Time Child, Roberta • Sophie Fox Sea
... infantry looked very far from cheerful, and darted glances full of suppressed hatred at the yellow-faced major. And when, dead-tired, they had finished the drill, and were putting away their guns in the corner, they would curse the very uniform they wore as if it ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... loose and began to curse Macdonald with a bitterness that surprised the Government agent. What struck him most, though, was the obvious anxiety of Northrup to quiet his partner and to gloss over what he had said. Thinking of it later, Gordon wondered why the Dane, who had as much ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... her golden hair lying upon her shoulders, and the light of an eternal sun shining down upon her brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and buffeted by fortune, and untaught in letters, and unheeded by men, had the compensation or the curse which is ...
— A Dog of Flanders • Louisa de la Rame)
... holds and can drag a man to his undoing just as thoroughly as the "long as ye both shall live" curse from the altar-rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and "The Voice that breathed o'er Eden" lifting the roof off. In this manner was Dicky Hatt kidnapped, and he considered it vastly fine, for he had received an appointment in India which carried a magnificent salary from the Home ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... not mind about the books. Doubtless they were well enough in their way, a source of practical knowledge. But he did not care a curse about books or knowledge or faith as he walked through the snow across that gleaming white patch in the dusky forest. His heart cried aloud in forlorn protest against the surging emotions that beset him. His eyes stung. And he fought against that inarticulate ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... governor, understanding his father was in court, said he granted some minutes to the old man to converse with and bless his son. "Shall I give my blessing to a rebel?" cried the aged parent—"I hereby give him my curse." Rostophchin ordered the culprit to be executed, and then turning to the Frenchman, said, "Your preference of your own people was natural. Take your liberty. There was but one Russian traitor, and you have witnessed ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... treated alike and robbed from start to finish. When Albert had turned his back upon him, and, worse than that, taken away his best client, as he afterwards learned, the old scoundrel suffered the worst blow to his vanity he ever received. "Curse the fellow!" he would say to himself. "I'll pay him and have revenge if I live long enough, and I'll never rest till I do. No man ever got the best of me, and in the long run no man ever shall!" Like an Indian he bided his time, though waiting and watching with his merciless ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... skirt. If she do, she wouldn't think of what caused it—above all it's being a bullet. Well, I must be off! It will never do to keep the young lady waiting. If she don't feel disappointed at seeing me, bless her! If she do, I shall curse her! What's passed prepares me for either event. In any case, I shall have satisfaction for the slight she's put upon me. By God I'll ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... long ago," answered Palmer, smiling sardonically. "If the fall of Adam and the curse of Cain are fables,—as they are, of course,—they are just as true as AEsop's fables, for all that. They hit off human nature. But man isn't all. I've never belonged to any church, as I've often told you. But the longer I live the more I trust in ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... that thou hast gained for us much prey in the island of our foes through tobacco. For they that carry, mix, and weigh it, practise all manner of fraud; and by its indulgence some are led on to habitual drinking, some to curse and swear, and some to seek it through blandishment, and to lie in denying their use of it—not to speak of the injury it inflicts upon many, and its immoderate use upon all, body as well as soul. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... waste of the Bacon Food there, surely, A'tim. Why do you not replenish the stomach that is but a curse to you, being empty, at the ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... all-but-human serve! Monsters made of stone and nerve; Towers to threaten and defy Curse or blessing of the sky; Shafts that blot the stars with smoke; Lightnings harnessed under yoke; Sea-things, air-things, wrought with steel, That may smite, and fly, and feel! Oceans calling each to each; Hostile hearts, with kindred speech. Every work ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... "Curse him!" cried Sir Robert, "what shall I do now? he cost me the d—-l and all of money, and I have not had him a twelvemonth. Can you lend me a ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... little rusty iron shelf, fixed in the corner, was our tinware. Although called tinware, it really was zinc, and was susceptible, through much hard work, of a high polish, but this "polishing tinware" was a fearful curse to the poor prisoner. It consisted of a jug for water and a bowl for washing in and a pint dish for gruel. There were strict and imperative orders, rigidly enforced, that this tinware should be kept polished, the result being that the men never washed ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... did. I began to throw again six feet above the bush, for a salmon often shifts his ground after rising. One cast—a second—another trout rises which we receive with an anathema, [Footnote: Anathema: a curse.] and drag the fly out of his reach. The fourth throw there is a swirl like the wave which arises under the blade of an oar, a sharp sense of hard resistance, a pause, and then a rush for dear life. The wheel shrieks, the line hisses through the rings, and thirty yards down the pool the great ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... days, my sleepless nights— my wandering brain—my hunger and thirst—my wretched, wretched life for long, long lonesome years. All these things you did not know of, young gentleman, when you and your companions threw stones at me. Don't think I would curse you for it. No, no. Come near, my children. I bless you, ay! from my heart, all of you. You who ill-treated me and you who never ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... Iximche, on the Ratzamut. Build there houses and a city, and construct a road on which all the people may pass and rest. Abandon Chiavar. As for you, people, if you succeed, may my words come to you as a curse." Thus spoke the king Qikab to our ancestors. Then the commands were given to the rulers, and the words of the king were sent to our ancestors. Nor did the Quiches ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton
... deplorable, for though barley may still be had it is at an enormous price, and it is impossible for labourers to provide for their families at such prices. It is to corn merchants and dealers in grain whose very existence they have been taught to curse and deprecate that the good people of this country must now look for near five months to come for subsistence." "If we have not an early harvest, God knows what will be the consequences," is another remark of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... woman decreed for him, to raise a family, to engage in work, to build cities and to gather resources. All this is looked upon in the same optimistic spirit as marking progress, whereas the Biblical writer, consistent with his point of view, looks upon work as a curse, and makes Cain, the murderer, also the founder of cities. The step to the higher forms of life is not an advance according to the J document. It is interesting to note that even the phrase the "cursed ground" occurs in both the Babylonian and Biblical tales; but whereas in the latter ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... "Clear out—we've got no work to spare; Go beg," was all reply they made. You rich, who bade me work, I've fed With relish on the bones you threw; Made of your straw an easy bed: Old tramp,—I have no curse to vent on you. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... rascal swore he Existence would not make a curse, Knew not an iamb from a choree, Although we read him heaps of verse. Homer, Theocritus, he jeered, But Adam Smith to read appeared, And at economy was great; That is, he could elucidate How empires store of wealth unfold, How flourish, why and wherefore less If the ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... said the old woman; "I have heard a good man say that a curse was like a stone flung up to the heavens, and maist like to return on the head that sent it. But if ye ken Lord Evandale, bid him look to himsell, for I hear strange words pass atween the sodgers that are lying here, and his name is often mentioned; and the tane o' them has ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... publicly offered by him on the 26th. After the trial he adds: "One of the first Things which the Pyrates, who are now so much the Terror of them that haunt the Sea, impose on their poor Captives, is, to curse Dr. M——r. The Pyrates now strangely fallen into the Hands of Justice here, make me the first Man, whose Visits and Counsils and Prayers they beg for. Some of them under Sentence of Death, chuse to hear from me the Last Sermon they hear in the world. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... it cannot but be a great injury against God, and procure a curse, when people employ not their best things in His service. This is clear from the words, 'Cursed be the deceiver which hath in his flock a male, and voweth and sacrificeth unto the Lord a corrupt thing.' So men that ...
— The Life of James Renwick • Thomas Houston
... Edna decidedly. "That flag talk didn't take the curse off the statement that the war ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... you luck," cried Mike, his young voice quivering, his face working with emotion, his usually merry eyes ablaze with passion. "I tell you it'll bring a curse on you. You'll live to rue the day you turned on us that way—an' maybe it won't be long ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... is none can undo it, nor save our souls from the curse; But many a million cometh, and shall they ...
— Chants for Socialists • William Morris
... lapse of her lord into morality would not only take the very ground of her invention from under her feet, but would rob her and him of an income that sustains them both in blissful independence of the curse of Adam. But do not let us be disheartened. Nature is strong; she is persistent; she completes her syllogism after we have long been feeding the roots of her grasses, and has her own way in spite of us. Some ancestral ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... this day, thou shalt remain a woman and she shall remain a man!' At these words of his, all the Yakshas began to soften Vaisravana for the sake of Sthunakarna repeatedly saying, 'Set a limit to thy curse!' The high-souled lord of the Yakshas then said unto all these Yakshas that followed him, from desire of setting a limit to his curse, these words, viz.,—After Sikhandin's death, ye Yakshas, this one will regain his own form! Therefore, let this high-souled Yaksha ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... once who drew a horse on a bit of paper to amuse the company and covered it all over with many parallel streaks as he drew. When he had done this, an aged priest (present upon that occasion) said, "You are pleased to draw a zebra." When the priest said this the man began to curse and to swear, and to protest that he had never seen or heard of a zebra. He said it was all done out of his own head, and he called heaven to witness, and his patron saint (for he was of the Old English Territorial ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... abandon the hopes to which it had given birth, at the very moment they were plotting to obtain the scalp of the "medicine-man." The beloved "fire-water," that seduces so many to their destruction, who have enjoyed the advantages of moral teaching, and which has been a withering curse on the red man of this continent, still had its influence; and the craving appetites of several of the drunkards of the party brought them to the spot, as soon as their eyes opened on the new day. The bee-hunter ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... also discerned in the opening of Genesis things which could not be literally received. The geography of the rivers in Paradise is inexplicable, though it assumes the tone of explanation. The curse on the serpent, who is to go on his belly—(how else did he go before?)—and eat dust, is a capricious punishment on a race of brutes, one of whom the Devil chose to use as his instrument. That the painfulness of childbirth is caused, not ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... bitter curse on the head, an' heart, an' hand, That plotted, wished, an' worked the fall of this Irish hero bold; God's curse upon the Irishman that sould his native land, An' hell consume to dust the hand ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... of the perpetual prison; he, whose spirit rose elastic to every storm of life, and exulted in the air of action, stood appalled at the fear of blindness;—blindness in the midst of a career so grand;—blindness in the midst of his pathway to a throne;—blindness, that curse which palsies the strong and enslaves the free, and leaves the whole man defenceless;—defenceless ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... devotion, whose faithful love hath watched over me, guarded, blessed from the first hour of my life, instilled within me the principles of life on earth and immortality in heaven—mother! mother! will not thy gentle virtues cling around thy boy, and save him even from a father's curse? Can I do else than devote the life thou gavest, to thee, and render back with my stronger arm, but not less firm soul, the care, protection, love thou hast bestowed on me? Mother, Virgin saint," he continued ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... of confining trade by the invisible, but potent chains of law, has been a curse wherever it has prevailed. In England, more dependent than other nations on the extent of its commercial intercourse, it may be said to have operated as a scourge. The most terrible inflictions of natural evil, storms, famine, and ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... will buy out the leaders. Better times will come, and we shall all settle down to the same old game of grab on the same old basis. But you," Sommers turned on the sauntering blue-eyed fellow, "people like you are the real curse." ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Jinny, as if genius were the biggest curse a woman can be saddled with? It's giving you another sex inside you, and a stronger one, to plague you. When we want a thing we can't sit still like a woman and wait till it comes to us, or doesn't come. We go after it like a man; and if we can't get it peaceably we fight for it, as a man fights ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... praise, that it wanteth not grammar; for grammar it might have, but it needs it not; being so easy of itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which I think was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind, which is the end of speech, that hath it equally with any other tongue in the world: and is particularly happy, in compositions of two or three words together, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... passing vessel, and then swiftly disappear. In nearly all the Pacific Islands the natives hold them in detestation and horror, and when one is seen lying coiled up on a rock sunning itself or crawling over the surface of the reef in search of food, a stone, accompanied by a curse, is always hurled at it. In the Ellice Oroup, when catching flying-fish at night, one (or more) of these horrid serpents is sometimes swept up in the scoop-net before it can be avoided. They range from six inches to nearly four feet in length, ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... in his hand, but with a curse he dropped it, tore loose from the boy and rushed through the door, disappearing in ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... chase flared up. The news spread from barrack to barrack, and the men doubled out intent on the capture of Simmons, the wild beast, who was heading for the Cavalry parade-ground, stopping now and again to send back a shot and a curse in ...
— This is "Part II" of Soldiers Three, we don't have "Part I" • Rudyard Kipling
... De Guiche, "the present is a moment for me, in which no other consideration and no other respect exist, than the consideration and respect of a man of honor towards the woman he worships. Drive me away, curse me, denounce me, you will be perfectly right. I have uttered complaints against you, but their bitterness has been owing to my passion for you; I have said I wish to die, and die I will. If I lived, you would ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in the profoundest error, that I know nothing in the world about what my wife had to do, that I am entirely a stranger to what she has done; and that if she has committed any follies, I renounce her, I abjure her, I curse her!" ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... cold and very reasonable spirit disturbed suddenly, thrown off its balance, as by a violent beam, a blaze of new light, revealing, as it glanced here and there, a hundred truths unguessed at before, yet a curse, as it turned out, to its receiver, in dividing hopelessly against itself the well-ordered kingdom of his thought. Twelfth volume of a dry enough treatise on mathematics, applied, still with no relaxation of strict method, to astronomy and music, it should have ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... to the college and there I fell in with a lady, one of the mistresses, who was the cleverest woman that I ever knew, and in her way a good woman, but one who believed that religion was the curse of the world, and who spent all her spare time in attacking it in some form or other. Poor thing, she is dead now. And so, you see, what between these causes and the continual spectacle of human misery which ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, reputation, birth,—and their opposites,—death, disease, pain, deformity, weakness, poverty, contempt, humility of station,—these are in themselves neither a benefit nor a curse. They may do us good, they may do us harm. We may use them for good, we may ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... tears from her cheeks. "When he ran out of Johnny Gagnon's," she went on, "I run after. I hold on him. He curse me. He throw me down. Since then I hate him. I lak make him hurt lak me. I ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... Saragossa after reading the funeral service over them. I saw Tesse and told him of the scene I had witnessed, and demanded vengeance. He laughed in my face. Senor, I persisted, and he got angry and told me that, were it not for my cloth, he would hang me from the steeple. I called down Heaven's curse upon him, and left him and came home. Do you wonder, senor, that I found it hard to spare those Frenchmen for whom you pleaded? Do you wonder that I, a man of peace, lead out my villagers ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... the great curse of it; that's what I deplore," Sewell broke out, "in our young people coming from the country to the city. They must all have some genteel occupation! I don't blame them; but I would gladly have saved you this experience—this knowledge—if I could. I ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... thee to the very core, and then devour thee. I hate her! She has robbed me of my peace, and now, with deep conceit and hellish pride, she deigns not to turn her head this way. Oh that I had the power to curse her!' ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... the history slipped from my hand. Then I saw a dead man, dreadful in the moon-dawn, The ghost of the master, bowed upon that book. He muttered as he searched it,—what vast convulsion Mocks my sexton's curse now, shakes our English clay? Whereupon I told him, and asked him in turn Whether he espied any light in those pages Which painted an epoch later than his own. I am a shadow, he said, and ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... breed filth and crime, With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats; And men are withered before their prime By the curse paved in with the lanes ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... or that his children and grandchildren will detract from instead of adding to the sum of the good citizenship of the country. Similarly we should take the greatest care about naturalization. Fraudulent naturalization, the naturalization of improper persons, is a curse to our Government; and it is the affair of every honest voter, wherever born, to see that no fraudulent voting is allowed, that no fraud in ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Lilith thereto: "Meseems not long ago One stood at Eden's gate like thee. But thy face Is darker, red thy lips. Of kingly race I know thee. Say, whence comest thou, O prince?" "Nay, then," he sighed, "an outcast I, long since From Heaven thrust out; yet now, the curse is past, Nor mourn I Heaven lost, if at the last Thy love I win. Yea, where thou art, I know Is Heaven. And bliss, in sooth" (oh, soft and low, He said), "lives ever in thy smile." His speech Thus ended. And toward the sandy beach He passed. Though long her eyes the stranger sought ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... before she is told about it. I will tell lies—I shall be forgiven—but I must save my child; and when she is stronger perhaps I may be able to comfort her. Oh! I wish she would not speak to him so tenderly and trustfully, when she is delirious. I could curse him when she does." And then Nest would call for her mother, and Eleanor would go, and invent some strange story about the summonses Edward had had to Caernarvon assizes, or to Harlech cattle market. But at last she was driven to her wits' end; it was three weeks since he had even stopped ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... complaint is quite of an opposite nature, and I have so many arrangements to make, so many difficulties to combat, so many enemies to deal with, that I am much of a General as will make me a historian of misfortunes, and nail my curse upon the ruins of what good soldiers are pleased to call the army in Virginia. There is an age past since I heard from you. I acknowledge that on my part, I have not written so often as I ought to have done, but you will excuse this silence ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... tutor told him of a great dragon that guarded a hoard of ill-gotten gold in the mountains, he resolved to kill it. So the fragments of Odin's sword were forged into a new blade, and Sigurd slew the dragon and took the gold, but with it he brought on himself a curse which had been put upon the treasure by the dwarf from whom ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... reverend David was indeed betrothed to Barbara Bamberg, Sidonia presented herself once in the choir, kneeled down, and was heard to murmur, "Wed if thou wilt, that I cannot hinder; but a child thou shalt never hold at the font!" And truly was the evil curse fulfilled. ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... Maximilian, see the power you have over me, you almost make me believe you; and yet, what you tell me is madness, for my father will curse me—he is inflexible—he will never pardon me. Now listen to me, Maximilian; if by artifice, by entreaty, by accident—in short, if by any means I can delay this marriage, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of relaxation is more important to the chief executive than to the day laborer is quite apparent. Even in the case of the day laborer the crack of the lash and the curse of the driver may have been capable of securing a display of activity among the laborers, but such means are not comparable in efficiency to the more modern methods. Laborers are now given more hours of rest, are not kept fearful and anxious, but are given short hours of labor and long ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... the game generously, Letitia; but it is all I can do not to despise you... because he loves you, and it has meant so little to you, you have done so little in return. That is the curse of this thing you call marriage. You say to yourself that you've got him... the law and the conventions will keep him for you... and so you can treat him as you please. You'll take him off with you now, and ...
— The Naturewoman • Upton Sinclair
... once McGuire paused to curse silently at the complaisance of this people. What could he not do if they would help. Ten companies of trained men, armed with their deadly electronic projectors that disintegrated any living thing they reached—and he would clutch at his tousled ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... go, it's better for you to go, and God be with you."—(The old woman thought for the best when she said that.)— "But stop a bit before you go. Which would you like best for me to make you, a little cake and bless you, or a big cake and curse you?" "Dear, dear!" said he, "make me a big cake. Maybe I shall be hungry on the road." The old woman made the big cake, and she went on top of the house, and she cursed him as far as she ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... of the Entente, including the United States, are now united in an effort to stamp out the curse of feudalism in Austria and in Germany—a curse which has disappeared from all other parts of the civilized world. They are united to crush the military spirit of conquest which exists among the war leaders of the Prussians. They are pledged ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... Dark Dame on Levenside as we ferried over to Lochaber, and the last we saw of her, she stood knee-deep in the water, calling, calling, calling, through the grey dun morning, a curse on Clan Donald and ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... not in either lies the curse: The hell of it's because I don't know which loss hurt the worse — My God ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... good wench and a brave one," he said, "and I am proud that my roof is the one to shelter thee from those lawless men, who are the curse of our ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... art poor; For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey, And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none; For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire, The mere effusion of thy proper loins, Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum, For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age, But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, Dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg ...
— Measure for Measure • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... fact," says Rev. John W. Chadwick, "that the immeasurable torrent of abuse that greeted his expressed opinion did not in any least degree avail to make him one of the pro-slavery faction. He differed from the most earnest of the anti-slavery men only as to the best method of getting rid of the curse of human bondage."[26] ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... large gouty shoes: his servant, not finding them, began to curse the thief. "Never mind," said his lordship, "all the harm I wish the rogue is, that the shoes may ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... must know and believe that He has done it all for your sake, if your faith is to help you. Therefore that is a vain, senseless doctrine that has been hitherto preached and taught in the great schools, which have had no experience of this knowledge, and have only attained to imagine how the curse afflicted Christ our Lord, and how He sits above in heaven unemployed, and possesses a joy with Himself; and thus their hearts remain barren, so that faith cannot live in them. But Christ does not stand there for Himself, but He is to be preached that He is ours. For what necessity could there ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... curse of Eden, and brings them a blessing instead: Blessed are they that labour, for Jesus partakes of their bread. He puts His hand to their burdens, He enters their homes at night: Who does his best shall have as a guest the Master of ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... 'tis a curse which angry fates impose, To mortify man's arrogance, that those Who're fashioned of some better sort of clay, Must sooner than the common herd decay. What bitter pangs must humble genius feel, In their last hour to view ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... plague poison their breath, And sleep never visit the place of their bed! On their children and wives, on their life and their death, Abide still the curse of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... little victim of nursery malpractice through the imitative age, and you will discover in him the cigarette smoker, the tippler, the self-abased youth, and later, the man whose life is shadowed with the curse of baneful appetite. ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... suffered moreover for the grief and misery of His mother and disciples, who were in great sadness. And He suffered because His death would be wasted for many men, and for the ingratitude of many, and for the blasphemies of those who would curse Him who died for love of us. And His nature and interior reason suffered because God withdrew from them the inflow of His gifts and consolations, and abandoned them to themselves in such distress. Therefore Christ complained and said, My ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... it out with a king of finance? That's the man we're in with—I can't tell you his name, now—he's the one that owns the forty-nine per cent. They're crazy about copper or he'd never have looked at me—there's some big market fight coming on. And didn't he curse and squirm and holler, trying to make me give up my control? He told me in years he had never gone into anything unless he got more than half for a gift! But I told him 'no,' I'd been euchered out of one mine; and ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... heard that affliction is the surest way to heaven. Dora will lead him that road, and it will be more sure than pleasant. Poor fellow! He'll soon be as ready to curse his wedding-day as Job was to curse his birthday. A costly wife she will be to keep, and misery in the keeping of her. But if you came to talk to me about Dora STANHOPE, I'll cease talking, for I don't ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... Why there, there, there, there, a diamond gone cost me two thousand ducats in Franckford, the curse neuer fell vpon our Nation till now, I neuer felt it till now, two thousand ducats in that, and other precious, precious iewels: I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the iewels in her eare: would she were hearst at my foote, and the duckets ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... have mercy upon whom he will, but on whom man's righteousness will give him leave; but his will, not ours, must rule here, therefore his righteousness and his only. So then, men are justified from the curse in the sight of ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... Louisa has a chance of a presentation to Queen's College. I hope she will succeed. Do not, my dear sir, be indifferent—be earnest about it. Come what may afterwards, an education secured is an advantage gained—a priceless advantage. Come what may, it is a step towards independency, and one great curse of a single female life is its dependency. It does credit both to Louisa's heart and head that she herself wishes to get this presentation. Encourage her in the wish. Your daughters—no more than your sons—should be a burden on your hands. Your daughters—as much as your sons—should ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... always going to be rich next year—no occasion to work. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it. ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... I sat down and wrote to Madame that her husband was in good health, and that I quite hoped to see him depart in a few days for La Pauline. I will not deny that the letter went into the post-box followed by a curse. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... winds stretch the sails; we scud over the foam-flecked waters, whither wind and pilot called our course. Now wooded Zacynthos appears amid the waves, and Dulichium and Same and Neritos' sheer rocks. We fly past the cliffs of Ithaca, Laertes' realm, and curse the land, fostress of cruel Ulysses. Soon too Mount Leucata's cloudy peaks are sighted, and Apollo dreaded of sailors. Hither we steer wearily, and stand in to the little town. The anchor is cast from the prow; the sterns are ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... their departure he thought of the emancipated house in which he could, if he desired, go mad and curse the gods without having to keep up a husbandly front. He considered, "I could have a reg'lar party to-night; stay out till two and not do any explaining afterwards. Cheers!" He telephoned to Vergil Gunch, to Eddie Swanson. Both of them were engaged for the evening, and suddenly he ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... they are very indifferent. If their Gods answer not their Desires, they curse them. They undervalue and revile their Gods. A Fellow gives out himself for a Prophet. His Success. The King fends for one of his Priests. Flyes to Columbo. Pretends himself to be a former Kings Son. Flyes from the Dutch. The King catches and quarters him. The Peoples high opinion still of this ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... invoke the great curse? Ha, what dost thou mean? Art thou a fool? Have not many died upon the word of Sipsu, Sipsu whose spirits never desert him! Harken! Did not Sipsu go unto the mountains in his youth? Did he not hear the hill spirits speaking? Did he not carry food ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... it,' he replied, burying his face in his hands. 'The curse of GOD was on it; it has been on me for years.' After a few moments, he added: 'But hear the rest, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of desolation, it gave back to desolation a quality more melancholy than utter barrenness. Glittering in the sunlight, the beds of alkali gleamed leper white; above them the agitated air was like the hot waves that dance and quiver about iron at white heat. From horizon to horizon the curse of God seemed to have fallen on the land; it was as if, cursing it, He had forgotten it, and left it as the abomination of desolation. Judith scarce heeded, her thoughts straying after first one then another of the group that made up her little world—Peter Hamilton, ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... have for centuries been the objects of admiration, of imitation, of veneration, on the part of the debased people who gave us the earlier books of the Bible. The memory of Jacob became the dominant influence among the Hebrew nation; hence the continuous curse that rested upon them, the curse that rests upon the cheat, the defrauder of his own household, his brother, his father, his uncle. It is necessary to say that the world should know that our religion is founded ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... plunged on, not knowing where, and not caring, was when the roan reeled suddenly and flung forward to the ground. Even that violent stop did not unseat Red Pierre. He jerked up on the reins with a curse and drove in the spurs. Valiantly the horse reared his shoulders up, but when he strove to rise the right foreleg dangled helplessly. He had stepped in some hole and the bone ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... he answered, turning his head aside, and added with sudden petulance, "God's curse upon Pasquale Paoli, and all ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... saved who are congregated above the saints is the pleasantest portion of the picture. Here Damion and Pythias embrace each other; a young husband springs to greet the wife whom he lost too early; a poor unfortunate to whom life was a curse is timidly raising his eyes, scarcely believing that he is in paradise; men with fine philosophic heads converse together; and a number of honest serving- women express their astonishment with such gestures as are customary among that class ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... determined to abolish it; Maryland and Delaware have put declared emancipationists in places of their highest trusts by unprecedented majorities; and Kentucky is visibly casting about to see how she can best rid herself of the curse. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... traditional idea that they were a race lying under a curse for their obstinacy in refusing the gospel. Like other children of New England birth, I walked in the narrow path of Puritan exclusiveness. The great historical church of Christendom was presented to me as Bunyan depicted it: one of the two giants sitting at the door of their ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... India by the ferocious Pindarree, who asked for it with the insolence of a robber, and wrenched it from the recusant with the atrocities of a devil. Here there was no pretence of equivalent given or promised: and this was so exquisite an outrage, a curse so withering, that in 1817 we were obliged to exterminate the foul horde (a cross between the Decoit and the Thug) root and branch. Now between these two poles lie two different forms of mitigated spoliation. One was the Mahratta chout, the other the black ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... you were stalkin' us, eh? Why, we led you bung into it, of course. Colonel Dabney—don't you think he's a nice man, Foxy?—Colonel Dabney's our pet particular friend. We've been goin' there for weeks and weeks, he invited us. You and your duty! Curse your duty, sir! Your duty was ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... remark, "The young fool has courage. What a deep game he is playing. I tell you he has more talent than the whole of our side together except yourself—curse him." ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... root-and-branch democracy he opposed the view, that every old belief, or institution, such as the throne or the Church, had served some need, and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to which it might be again recalled, and made once more a benefit to society, instead of a curse ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... wel-awey the stounde! 1695 Gan for to aproche, as they by signes knewe, For whiche hem thoughte felen dethes wounde; So wo was hem, that changen gan hir hewe, And day they goonnen to dispyse al newe, Calling it traytour, envyous, and worse, 1700 And bitterly the dayes light they curse. ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Slimak, when she had unfolded her carefully laid plans. 'Curse her, how she lords it over me! You can see that her father ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... become public characters. The "Dancing Girl" of India is thus shut up to her evil life by those who love her most; and her religious profession becomes to her the highway to perdition and a bitter curse to society. Recent effort has been made, in Bombay, to save such girls by making it a legal offence to "marry" them to the gods and thus devoting them to a life of shame. But this law only refers to the dedication of girls of tender age in Bombay. It is exceedingly sad that, ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... do, myself," replied Miss Harson, "although, as in this poor woman's case and in many others, gold is not the best thing to find. It often brings with it so much sorrow and sin as to be a curse to its owner. The only safe treasure is that laid up in heaven, where 'neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church
... coopers, stevedores, and others, beside some thousands of unskilled labourers occupied in the handling of the fish. All these men are now without a day's work, or any means of obtaining it. The isolation of the colony, away out in the Atlantic with no neighbour, is its greatest curse. People unemployed cannot emigrate, but must swell an army of industrials depending on the Government for relief. The city is a veritable aggregation of unemployed; it is a city to let. Every business, factory, wharf, ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... coldly concluded into Mrs. Clement Dumby's ear, "we all behaved disgracefully. As you very justly observe, liquor has been the curse of the South." It was of a piece with Kittie Provis to put me next ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... external things! How many of the passers knew that they flitted past the greatest glory of the age of Newton, Locke, and Wren? For one who would reverence the author of "Paradise Lost," there were probably twenty who would have been ready with a curse for the apologist of the killing of the King. In-doors he was seen by Dr. Wright, in Richardson's time an aged clergyman in Dorsetshire, who found him up one pair of stairs, in a room hung with rusty green "sitting ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... Elizabeth in the long ago when we were children together. I have it yet. He came, and I tried hard to break him of his failing. But I had undertaken a job that was too big for me. Upon my return from a Western trip I found that he had taken to drinking again, and in his cups had enlisted. His curse followed him into the army. He rose to the rank of sergeant, only to fall again and suffer degradation. The other day he shot himself at the post where he was stationed, after nearly thirty years of service. Yet in all his ups and downs he never forgot ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... principle that he believes will make for better things, a man of integrity and worth whom the best of men may be glad to hold as a friend. Yet we find in the condition to which we have drifted such a one may be pilloried by wasters, gamblers, rioters, a crew that are the curse of every community. We lash the atheist and the age but give little heed to the insincerity and cant of those we do not refuse to call our own. What an example for the man anathematised. He sees the vice and meanness of those we allow to pass for orthodox, and when he sees ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... balanced again for a devil of a while. Even the most surly is full of smiles nowadays. Most of us when we fall on the pavement (did you ever try it on Chestnut between Sixth and Seventh on a slippery day?) curse the granolithic trust and wamble there groaning. But not nowadays. Make the best of things. Fine ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... with curse They hounded on to death's untimely doom. [Footnote: T. L. Harris, Lyrics of the ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... meant to act. If any contrary impression produces in your mind any feelings different from those which have made so great a part of my happiness throughout life, I shall deeply regret what seems to be annexed as a curse inseparable from the pursuit of a public life; but I will once more beg you to be assured that neither those feelings on your part, nor anything which they can produce, will vary my sincere and heartfelt affection towards you, and that whether my judgment ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... tricked beyond the moment of nervous exaltation into the belief that it had fused into its mate. Life itself was futile enough, but that dream of the perfect love between two beings immemorially paired was the most futile and ravaging of all the dreams civilization had imposed upon mankind. The curse of imagination. Only the savages and the ignorant masses understood "love" for the transitory functional thing it was and were undisturbed by spiritual unrest . . . by dreams . . . mad longings. . ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Southampton, we 'ave. Got a parss up to Lunnon, 'cause a pal told us there'd be work at the factories. But there weren't no work. Gawd's truf! What're sailormen wantin' wi' clorth-makin' and 'ammering' tin-pots? Them's the only jobs we wuz offered in Lunnon. I don't give a curse for the plyce.... No, Sammy an' me we says to each other"—he took another drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—"we says this ain't no plyce for us. We'd just come ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... all, injure none," wrote Fowler, "whilst infidelity, selfishness and disorder curse some, delude others and degrade all. I therefore want all of my people encouraged to cultivate religious feeling and morality, and punished for inhumanity to their children or stock, for profanity, lying and stealing." And again: "I would that every ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... a knight that was sore wounded upon the head. Sir, said Sir Launcelot, who wounded you so sore? Sir, he said, a knight that beareth a black shield, and I may curse the time that ever I met with him, for he is a devil and no man. So Sir Launcelot departed from him and thought to meet with Sir Tristram, and so he rode with his sword drawn in his hand to seek Sir Tristram; and then he espied ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... passage might, in ignorance of what they were doing, be induced to tear up the stone, and unconsciously commit a sacrilege from which every Chaldaean in his senses would have shrunk back. The formula provides for such cases, and it secures that the curse shall fall not only on the irresponsible instruments, but reach the instigator of the crime, even when he had taken no actual ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... kind of thing keeps up. 'It is not well to speak thus freely of young men, Margarita!' Ha, ha! Little I thought that day which way the wind set in my mistress's temper! I'll wager she reproves me no more, under this roof or any other! Curse her! What did she want of Alessandro, except to turn his head, and then bid him go ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the fellow's hand, and we all trooped behind him down the lane. At the further end the road cut it across at right angles. Down this my uncle hastened, but his search was not a long one, for the glaring light fell suddenly upon something which brought a groan to my lips and a bitter curse to those of Jem Belcher. Along the white surface of the dusty highway there was drawn a long smear of crimson, while beside this ominous stain there lay a murderous little pocket-bludgeon, such as Warr ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... weak And my body miserable, an ugly thing. Love left me like a coal upon the floor, Like a half-burned sod that is never put out. Worse than the cough, worse than the fever itself, Worse than any curse at all under the sun, Worse than the great poverty Is the devil that is called "Love" by the people. And if I were in my young youth again I would not take, or give, or ...
— The Kiltartan Poetry Book • Lady Gregory
... Wait till I call on you. What of that pair by the pond? Curse it, but I believe they're our quarries. She has two arms round his neck. The wanton baggage! And she once protested she loved me! On to 'em, Rofflash. Engage the fellow while I handle the wench. Eh?—Why—look ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... or not, as you darned well please," said Hayle doggedly, biting at the butt of his cigar as he spoke. "It don't matter a curse to me; you don't mean to tell me you think I'm fool enough to stand by ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... color and feel. You fit 'em this way and that and turn 'em and—all at once, they shine and sing. God! I never knowed what was the matter with me till I began to work with words—and that is work. Sheila! Lord! How you hate them, and love them, and curse them, and worship them. I used to think I wanted whiskey." He laughed scorn at that old desire; then came to self-consciousness again and was shamefaced—"I guess you think I am plumb out of my head," ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... in those who give, and blessed in those who receive. Patronage is twice cursed,—cursed in the incompetency which it places where merit ought to be, and in the incompetency which it creates among the class who make it their trust. But the curse which you have mainly to avoid is that which so often falls on those who waste their time and suffer their energies to evaporate in weakly and obsequiously waiting upon it. We therefore say, Rely upon yourselves. But there is One other on whom you must ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... for you to decide for yourselves. No man has any right to interfere. It seems to me to be eminently proper for women to sit upon grand juries, which will give them the best possible opportunities to aid in suppressing the dens of infamy which curse the country. I shall be glad of your assistance in the accomplishment of this object. I do not make these remarks from distrust of any of the gentlemen. On the contrary, I am exceedingly pleased and gratified with the indication of intelligence, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... muttered curse, he lunged across the room to Cis, snarled into her face as he reached her, and wrenched the roses out of her hand. "I'll hurt 'em all right!" ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... evil. It is late, no doubt, and very late; but his mood is not to die as he has lived. He asks, not for those who would come at a word, but for his wife. And I am glad to be the bearer of that message even if I carry back a curse ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... a Pausee, but the family call themselves Rawats, and are considered to be Rajpoots, since they have acquired landed possessions by the murder and ruin of the old proprietors. They all delight in murder and rapine—the curse of God is upon them, sir, for the murder of their ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... would you like to be saddled with a young wolf- hound cub like that—Sorley Boy's son he is, no other, on my life—that I was fool enough to take wardship of when he was a puling puppy and his father an honest man? What do you think of that? Curse the whole tribe of them, ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... been that way with us, too," said I, "but it is the rebel 'Grants' we curse, and the Ethan Allens and John Starks, and treacherous Green Mountain Boy's, who would shoot us in the backs or make a dicker with Sir Henry sooner than lift a finger to obey the laws of the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Canterbury hastened unto Sir Mordred, and rebuked him for wishing to marry his uncle's wife. 'Leave such desires,' said the Bishop, 'or else I shall curse you with bell, book, and candle. Also, you noise abroad that my lord Arthur is slain, and that is not so, and therefore you will make ill work in the land.' At this Sir Mordred waxed very wroth, and would have killed the Bishop had he not fled ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... damned Doc Alton, his methods, the faro players in the next room, himself, and wound up with a blistering curse directed against mankind in general ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... With a wild curse the chief of sheriffs dashed down the stairway and as she heard him go the terror of Winnsome's heart seemed to turn her blood cold. She knew what that command meant. She knew that her father would obey it. ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... 'Twas not the dumb wave, but a living man that turned to Winter my Spring, And Aimee had married another and sought the Australian shore. She must have thought I was dead, Heaven help me, betwixt us ocean's roar. I have sometimes wondered if gold is ever aught but a curse, No, that's wrong—if honestly gained, no harm in a well filled purse, But I often think of the little home standing there by the sea, For far off merry England, the home planned for Aimee and me. Oh to have toiled for her from dawn till the dews of restful night, Her smile ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... for a sword, and cast in his lot with the children of the Covenant, even to the fulfilling of the promise; and woe, woe unto him who, for carnal ends and self-seeking, shall withhold himself from the great work, for the curse shall abide with him, even the bitter curse of Meroz, because he came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty. Up, then, and be doing; the blood of martyrs, reeking upon scaffolds, is crying for vengeance; the bones of saints, which lie whitening in the highways, are pleading ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... bores you; you are tired of our silly theatres; no longer do you care for Wagner's music. You are deracinated; you are unpatriotic. For that there is no excuse. The arts are for you deadly. I am sure you are a lover of literature. Yet what a curse it has been for you! When you see one of your friends drinking wine, you call him a fool because he is poisoning himself. But you—you—poison your spirit with the honey of France, of Scandinavia, of Russia. As for the society ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Nidrei, the congregation kept growing larger and larger; unknown people, pushing one another, wrapped in prayer shawls, came in, one hundred after another, until the terrified Rabbi lifted his hand as if to curse and exclaimed: 'He who has flesh in his cheeks, let him throw off the prayer shawl!' Hundreds remained covered, and when the prayer shawls were torn away from them, all saw the skulls of the dead who had come out of the graves to celebrate the Day of Atonement with ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... son-in-law's house under a curse? The yellow-haired woman in the open carriage drove up to the door at half-past ten this morning, in a state of distraction. Felicia and I saw her from the drawing-room balcony—a tall woman in gorgeous garments. She knocked with her own hand at the door—she cried out distractedly, "Where ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... that, curse you!" ejaculated he, whipping a big, ugly knife out of his bosom, and striking savagely at my heart with it. Fortunately the sudden glitter in his eyes warned me, and I succeeded in catching his upraised ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... the table wi' his hand, He garr'd the red wine spring on hie— "Now Christ's curse on my head," he said, "But avenged ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... a magnet to draw to their standard "whatsoever worketh abomination or maketh a lie." But "cursed be Canaan" is a poor drug to ease a throbbing conscience—a mocking lullaby to unquiet tossings. Those who justify negro slavery by the curse on Canaan, assume as usual all the points in debate. 1. That slavery was prophesied, rather than mere service to others, and individual bondage rather than national subjection and tribute. 2. That the prediction of crime justifies it; or at least ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... fulfilment, deceive those who confide in them. Yet it may be easily shown that the poet has, in his work, displayed more enlightened views. He wishes to show that the conflict of good and evil in this world can only take place by the permission of Providence, which converts the curse that individual mortals draw down on their heads into a blessing to others. An accurate scale is followed in the retaliation. Lady Macbeth, who of all the human participators in the king's murder is the most guilty, is thrown ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Nay, truly, it hath that praise, that it wanteth not grammar; for grammar it might have, but it needs it not; being so easy of itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which I think was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind, which is the end of speech, that hath it equally with any other ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... heard his doom without flinching, and only turned to the gaoler to say, "Now that everything is over, the sooner I get to my cell the betther. I have despised the world too long to care a single curse what it says or thinks ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... breathed, I had almost said no heart beat for listening. Not long; in an instant there rose the sharp simultaneous cry of many people in rage and despair. Inarticulate at that distance, it was yet an intelligible curse, and the roll, and the roar, and the irregular tramp ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... to grumble at in that? Of the money the copyists will receive a tchetvertak apiece, and the rest will go to the Government." Upon that the disillusioned suitor would fly out upon the new order of things brought about by the inquiry into illicit fees, and curse both the tchinovniks and their uppish, insolent behaviour. "Once upon a time," would the suitor lament, "one DID know what to do. Once one had tipped the Director a bank-note, one's affair was, so to speak, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... affairs, but the Bishop's censure is mild compared to that of an anonymous historian, who writes: "Abbe Loutre, missionary of the Indians in Acadia, soon put all in fire and flame, and may be justly deemed the scourge and curse of this country. This wicked monster, this cruel and blood thirsty Priest, more inhumane and savage than the natural savages, with a murdering and slaughtering mind, instead of an Evangelick spirit, excited ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... leave out a curse or two when he next reads the Commination Service, and balance matters in that way," said Madame Valtesi, ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... her direction. Silhouetted against the red of the sunset they made dark and sinister figures. Joan glanced apprehensively at Roberts. He was staring with a look of recognition in his eyes. Under his breath he muttered a curse. And although Joan was not certain, she believed that ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... was not a new experience for her latterly to lie awake cogitating her marriage in unhappy sleeplessness. It had seemed to her on such occasions that all the old banker's predictions about the results of her marrying Archie had come true like a curse, and sooner than might have been thought. But never before had she seen so clearly how impossible Archie was, never before felt herself without one atom of regard for him—not even desire. And yet her mind was too little fertile in expedients to suggest to her any way out ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... uttered a curse, and was so dreadfully alarmed that she knew not what to do. At first she declared she would not go to this wedding at all, but she felt it impossible to rest until she had seen the bride, so she determined ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... state of the soul. "This is life eternal, to know thee and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." Up to the moment in which the spirit turns with filial confidence and obedience to God, there cannot be a cessation either in the curse that must rest upon enmity and disobedience, or in the pain which must be produced by so terrible a malady. Some time or other, be it near or remote, in one year or in a million, there must be repentance ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... being loyal to Enchanted Wiggeries; of living cheek-by-jowl with lies of a peaceable quality, and stuffing your nostrils, and searing your soul, against the accursed odor they all have!—For I can assure you the curse of Heaven does dwell in one and all of them; and the son of Adam cannot too soon get quit of their bad partnership, cost ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... seen many of the money masters shrieking and roaring, anon rushing about with whitened faces, indescribably contorted, and again bellowing forth this order or that curse with savage energy and wildest gesture. The puny speculators had long since uttered their doleful squeak and plunged down into the limbo of ruin, completely engulfed; only the big speculators, or their commission ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... lived beside her mother, she had a most perfect innocence of thought and behavior and a really remarkable piety. This young girl, like her mother, was fanatically attached to the Bourbons; she was therefore a bitter enemy to the Revolution, and regarded the dominion of Napoleon as a curse inflicted by Providence upon France in punishment of the crimes ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... its points." For Rickie suffered from the Primal Curse, which is not—as the Authorized Version suggests—the knowledge of good and evil, but the ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... mass of evil which flows from this fatal source, a person must be in France; he must see the finest soil, the finest climate, the most compact state, the most benevolent character of people, and every earthly advantage combined, insufficient to prevent this scourge from rendering existence a curse to twenty-four out of twenty-five parts of the inhabitants of this country. With us, the branches of this institution cover all the states. The southern ones, at this time, are aristocratical in their dispositions: and that that spirit should grow and extend itself, is within the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... but I will call attention generally to the fact that the Jews employed such phrases not only rhetorically, but also, and indeed chiefly, from devotional motives. (113) Such is the reason for the substitution of "bless God" for "curse God" in 1 Kings xxi:10, and Job ii:9, and for all things being referred to God, whence it appears that the Bible seems to relate nothing but miracles, even when speaking of the most ordinary occurrences, as ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... the pigeons who were returning after the passing of death?" he began to mutter in fury, replying to his thoughts. "Now it's too late! A curse upon them!" ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... 'She took her own life, and died calling down a heavy curse on thee and thine. The poor, exiled, scorned and plundered oculist Nebenchari in Babylon sends thee this intelligence to Egypt. It is as true as his own hatred of thee.' Listen to these words, Psamtik, and remember how on his dying bed thy father told thee that, for every drachm ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... fish that came to his net, and all were treated alike and robbed from start to finish. When Albert had turned his back upon him, and, worse than that, taken away his best client, as he afterwards learned, the old scoundrel suffered the worst blow to his vanity he ever received. "Curse the fellow!" he would say to himself. "I'll pay him and have revenge if I live long enough, and I'll never rest till I do. No man ever got the best of me, and in the long run no man ever shall!" Like an Indian he bided his time, ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... will appear," said he, "either to think that the office is not worth much, or else that there are not many worthy to fill it." Alluding to one of his enemies who led a dissolute and discreditable life, he said: "That man's mother takes it as a curse rather than a blessing if any one hopes that her son will survive her." When a certain man sold his ancestral estate, which was situated by the seashore, Cato pretended to admire him, as being more powerful than the sea ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... me, neighbors!" at last he cried,— "What to me is this noisy ride? What is the shame that clothes the skin, To the nameless horror that lives within? Waking or sleeping, I see a wreck And hear a cry from a reeling deck! Hate me and curse me,—I only dread The hand of God and the face of the dead!" Said old Floyd Ireson, for his hard heart, Tarred and feathered and carried in a cart ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... wandering by the river, had encountered a pond of giant frogs, and the fricassee was the result. I had not then overcome my national antipathy to the victims of Saint Patrick's curse; and, to the voyageur's astonishment, I refused to share ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... He seemed my natural resource, but my cousin would be there. A final hope there was. I was foolish enough to say, "If she is not in town, then Miss Darthea Peniston, near by. If you fail me, I shall curse you while ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... here that I have realized how things will look; what people will think—and say, curse them. Our being out so long together; my buying clothing ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... he believes that "the whole country lies under a curse to this day, and will do, till some effectual course be taken by our honored Governor and General Court to make amends and reparation" to the families of such as were condemned "for supposed witchcraft," or ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... them. She must soar towards the place of the angels, whither good women soar in the great moments of their love, borne up by the winds of God. On the minaret of the mosque of Sidi-Zerzour, while Androvsky remained in the dark shadow with a curse, she had mounted, with prayer, surely a little way towards God. And now God said to her, "Mount higher, come nearer to me, bring another with you. That was my purpose in leading you to Beni-Mora, in leading you far out into the desert, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... fool then, that believing him capable of doing this, believing myself still the husband of that woman, your wife, and to spare that innocent girl the shame of thinking me a villain, I purchased his silence by consenting. May God curse ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... coz, [PULLS OUT A RED HERRING.] fear nothing; I have not the heart to devour you, an I might be made as rich as Golias: oh, that I had room for my tears, I could weep salt water enough now to preserve the lives of ten thousand of my kin: but I may curse none but these filthy Almanacks, for an 'twere not for them, these days of persecution would ne'er be known. I'll be hang'd an some fishmonger's son do not make on them, and puts in more fasting days than he should do, because he would utter his ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... (I will not name him even with an initial) who was malignant to the core. Learned, industrious, accomplished, he kept all his talents at the service of a perfect genius for hatred. If you crossed his path but once, he would never cease to curse you. The grave might close over you, but he would revile your epitaph and mock at your memory. It was not even necessary that you should do anything to incur his enmity. It was enough to be upright and sincere and successful, to waken the wrath of this Shimei. Integrity was an offence ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... Old World as again under the curse of monarchy, and the new-comers as refugees from oppression, the Republican party found itself ready to arrange for the easiest possible disposal of the public lands. "Let them come," said one writer. "Good and wholesome laws with the avenues to ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... Hervey uttered a curse, and, plunging past the trio, careless of the leveled weapons, ran down to the end of the jetty, and, throwing his arms round Date, leaped with him into the sea. They fell just beside the boat, as Random saw when he reached the spot. A confused volley of curses arose, as the boat pushed out from ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... you don't curse us for barging in like this," Miss Kent apologised, "but my brother is fed to the teeth with me and is going to try and cadge a dance or two off you, Miss Rowe, if ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... crash on to the timber flooring of the pavilion. Desmond heard his head strike the boards with a thud, heard a muttered curse. He found himself standing in a narrow lane, less than three feet wide, which ran between the garden wall and the summer-house; for the pavilion, erected on a slight knoll surrounded by turf, was not ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... his face dead-white save for the running red about his jaw. "Curse ye for a cowardly Englishman!" and, struggling to his feet, he ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... Laird's court-day, An' mony a time my heart's been wae, Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash, How they maun thole a factor's snash He'll stamp an' threaten, curse an' swear, He'll apprehend them, poind their gear; While they maun stan', wi' aspect humble, An' hear it a', an' fear and tremble! I see how folk live that hae riches; But surely poor folk maun be wretches." Lu. "They're no sae wretched's are wad think; Tho' constantly on poortith's brink, ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... you think so, Captain? —glancing at the ivory leg. He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He's all a magnet! How long since thou saw'st him last? Which way heading? Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's, cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely snuffing; this man's blood —bring the thermometer; —it's at the boiling point! —his pulse makes these planks beat! —sir! —taking a lancet from his pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm. Avast! roared ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... sergeant wagged his disreputable head. "German handwriting, that is, my young lady," he croaked. "That's how our German lords and masters curse them! write their Gott mit uns! The noble Captain Hahn I knew as soon as I ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... victims. To tens of thousands that are killed, and hundreds of thousands that survive with feeble constitutions, add millions that grow up with constitutions not so strong as they should be, and you will have some idea of the curse inflicted on their offspring by parents ignorant of the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... many points it looks not unlike a strangely prolonged rubbish-heap in which busy giants have been digging with huge spades, making mounds and pits, caverns and trenches, piling up here a monstrous heap of stones, casting down there a mighty statue. But how it fascinates! Of curse one knows what it means. One knows that on this strip of land Naville dug out at Deir-el-Bahari the temple of Mentu-hotep, and discovered later, in her shrine, Hathor, the cow-goddess, with the lotus-plants streaming from her sacred forehead to her ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... on his way to the front door, kicking at the obstacles he tripped over and swearing and sobbing as he went. It was ridiculous enough, of course, but Jed did not feel like smiling. The bitterness of the little man's final curse was not humorous. Neither was the heartbreak in his tone when he spoke of his boy. Jed felt no self-reproach; he had advised Leander just as he might have advised his own son had his life been like other men's lives, normal men who had married and possessed sons. He ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... such contrition as I see in thee.' 'Alack, father mine, what say you?' replied Ciappelletto. 'My kind mother, who bore me nine months in her body, day and night, and carried me on her neck an hundred times and more, I did passing ill to curse her and it was an exceeding great sin; and except you pray God for me, it will not be ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... against the worst that he could do, being well prepared for him to lose first his color and then the temper which he had never lost since she had known him; to fly into a fury, to curse her up hill and down dale—in a word, to behave as her first husband had done more than once, but this one never. What Rachel did not anticipate was a smile that cloaked not a single particle of surprise, and the little cocksure bow that accompanied ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... far as concerned all the sons—deformed births excepted—and at least the first daughter. Injurious, however, to the public weal as exposure might appear, the prohibition of it soon changed its form from that of legal punishment into that of religious curse; for the father was, above all, thoroughly and absolutely master in his household. The father of the household not only maintained the strictest discipline over its members, but he had the right and duty of exercising judicial authority over them and of punishing them as he deemed fit in life ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... "Yes, curse it. It looks as if it would never let up again." He raged up and down the room with the spirit of blasphemy burning in his eyes. "I wish I'd never seen ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... "Heaven forbid! I'm quite sure Mr. Breakspeare wouldn't take my words in that sense. I am all for zeal and hopefulness. The curse of our age is pessimism, a result and a cause of the materialistic spirit. Science, which really involves an infinite hope, has been misinterpreted by Socialists in the most foolish way, until we get a miserable languid fatalism, leading ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... round his body, and placed the hand of the other firmly over his mouth. The ghost now began to ascend the coach, and they heard him clambering up the hind wheel; he slipped down, however (a bad omen), and muttered a half-curse; then, to help himself up better, he seized hold of the sash of the window, and with it took a grip of Ulrich's beard, as he was leaning close to the side of the coach to watch his proceedings. Not a stir did the brave old ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... is condemned by the Divine judgment save for a mortal sin. Yet a man is condemned for theft, according to Zech. 5:3, "This is the curse that goeth forth over the face of the earth; for every thief shall be judged as is there written." Therefore theft is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... interest. He hoped the House would make a point to adopt the principle of compensation, and to stimulate the slave to genuine and spontaneous industry. If this were not done, and moral instruction were not imparted to the slaves, liberty would prove a curse instead of a blessing to them. Touching upon the property question, and the proposed plans for emancipation, Mr. Gladstone said that the House might consume its time and exert its wisdom in devising ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... imprecation or oath. The genius of the language does not seem to favor the formation of terms to be used in oaths or for purposes of profanity. It is the result of the observation of others, as well as my own, to say, that an Indian cannot curse. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... when I stood in the sorest need of a little talk with her—she went away, and left me to my loneliness and my suspense. I am a poor deformed wretch, with a warm heart, and, perhaps, an insatiable curiosity as well. Insatiable curiosity (have you ever felt it?) is a curse. I bore it until my brains began to boil in my head; and then I sent for my gardener, and made him drive me here. I like being here. The air of your library soothes me; the sight of Mrs. Valeria is balm to my wounded heart. She has ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... so sure of. Who could have written this bolt-upright, old-fashioned superscription, not a letter of which seems on speaking terms with its neighbor? The very O absolutely turns its back upon the M in O'Malley, and the final Y wags his tail with a kind of independent shake, as if he did not care a curse for his predecessors! And the seal, too,—surely I know that griffin's head, and that stern motto, Non rogo sed capio. To be sure, it is Billy Considine's, the count himself. The very paper, yellow and time-stained, looks coeval with his youth; ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... marching through the province of Meath, arrived at the borders of Cualnge. Fortunately for the invaders, the expedition took place while the Ulstermen lay prostrate in their cess, or "Pains," a mysterious state of debility or torpor which was inflicted on them periodically in consequence of an ancient curse laid upon Conchobar and the warriors of Ulster as a punishment for a wrong done to the goddess Macha. This strange malady, resembling the couvade among certain savage nations, ordinarily lasted five days and ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... tells us that the Rev. Dr. William Lancaster, archdeacon of Middlesex, objected strongly to the dispersal of anti-stage tracts at the door of his church, on the grounds that they tended "to teach the ignorant People to swear and curse." ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... great wisedome and vertue in the opinion of the world: he will preferre his voluntary banishment at Salona, before all the Romaine Empire. Finally, the Emperour Charles the fifth, esteemed by our age the most happy that hath liued these many ages: he will curse his conquestes, his victories, his triumphes: and not be ashamed to confesse that farre more good in comparison he hath felt in one day of his Monkish solitarines, then in all his triumphant life. Now shall we thinke those happie in this imaginate greatnes, who themselues thinke themselues vnhappie? ...
— A Discourse of Life and Death, by Mornay; and Antonius by Garnier • Philippe de Mornay
... cried. "Curse on your beauty, curse on my own folly, for I have been undone by both! I hate you! Take the truth; I'll not be poisoned with it! I am sick of you; you have disgusted me! I will ease my heart by telling you the whole. If I seek the society of other women, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... pastor, who was often Abonyi's partner at his evening card parties, delivered an edifying address beside the open grave. He took for his text the verse (Matthew v. 44): "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you," and said a great deal about forgiveness and reconciliation. The listeners were much moved, and ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... whether in sentiment or practise would be received and cherished with unanimous, and fervent, and lasting attachment; and, furthermore, by a long and rigorous bondage, they had been rendered, for the time being at least, humble and dependant. Thus they were disciplined by a curse of providence, adopted to fit them to receive instruction from their Benefactor with a teachable ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... one of the most assiduous of the guests at the philosophic meals of Baron Holbach and Helvetius; he was very good-humoured, easy to live with, and free from that irritable self-consciousness and self-love which is too commonly the curse of the successful writer, as of other successful persons. He did not go into company merely to make the hours fly. With him, as with Helvetius, society was a workshop. He pressed every one with ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... shower of tears, which the father could not behold with unmoistened eyes, although he reviled her with marks of uncommon displeasure; and turning to the Count, "I appeal to you, sir," said he, "whether I have not reason to curse the undutiful obstinacy of that pert baggage, and renounce her for ever as an alien to my blood. She has, for some months, been solicited in marriage by an honest citizen, a thirty thousand pound man; and ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and shalt call them to mind among all the nations whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee; and shalt return unto the Lord thy God, and shall obey his voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children, with all thy heart, ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... the guiding star of the future with every power composed of several distinct bodies, and though I am a republican more perhaps than thousands who are citizens of a republic, inasmuch as I have known all the curse of having had a king—still such a development of Great Britain's future, were it even connected with monarchy, I, a true republican, would hail with fervent joy. To contribute to such a future, I indeed should consider more practical support ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... the lads who sat on the thwart beside us, and the maidens who took our hands in the hall to lead us to the chamber. Other days have come in their stead, and other friends shall cherish us. What then? Shall we wound the living to pleasure the dead, who cannot heed it? Shall we curse the Yuletide, and cast foul water on the Holy Hearth of the winter feast, because the summer once was fair and the days flit and the times change? Now let us be ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... bark and made a little amulet of it. She punched a hole through one end and put a leather string through it. Neither she nor Dion could write, so when she had explained what must be done Melas himself took a sharp stone and scratched a curse upon crows in the soft bark. When it was done Daphne hung it about the neck of the scarecrow. "There," said Melas grimly, "I don't believe he'll go to sleep on the job. He's a Spartan scarecrow! Now let's ...
— The Spartan Twins • Lucy (Fitch) Perkins
... with horror. Now Cain realizes that his work is less than half done: he is himself still alive and so is his son Enoch. He rushes forward to kill his child, but the mother throws herself between, and Cain discovers that he is not strong-willed enough to carry out his design. God's curse condemns him to eternal unrest, and while the elements rage around him Cain goes ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... 'trek,' even for great distances; and till the discovery of gunpowder they were the most formidable of foes. The Arabs and Northern Europeans have founded great civilisations; the Mongol hordes have been an unmitigated curse to humanity. The invaders never kept their blood pure. The famous Jewish nose is probably Hittite, and certainly not Bedouin. There are no pure Turks in Europe, and the Hungarians have lost all resemblance ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... out, and my brother forced to fly the country, and is now working in some coachmaker's yard, in London; banished he is!—and here am I, forced to be what I am—and now that I'm reduced to drive a hack, the agent's a curse to me still, with these bad roads, killing my horses and wheels—and a shame to the country, which I think more of—Bad luck ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... my life should be ruined by this thing," he said wearily. "Any prospect of news is delightful, however small. I am under a sort of curse,—as much as though I had really had something to do with poor Alexander's death. It comes up in all sorts of ways. Unless we can solve the mystery, I shall never be ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... I," answered Ketill. "I want no braver leader. But the gods curse me if we roast not a few score ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... the baby back to its mother; but not without a solemn blessing, so solemn that, to Sylvia's superstitious and excited mind, it undid the terrors of what she had esteemed to be a curse. ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... country. You will not believe it. Some day you will see the truth, and you will remember my words. It may be that you will realize it a little sooner, or I would not have dared to speak as I am speaking. This, then, is the curse which is eating the heart out of your very existence. The love of his Motherland is no longer a religion with your young man. Let me repeat that,—I will alter one word only. The love of his Motherland is no ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... new Empress was handed to her traveling-carriage by the Archduke Charles, and amid salvos of artillery, mingled with the cheers of the populace, she set forth. There were a few signs of discontent among little knots who collected to curse their national humiliation, and the aristocracy were not reconciled to see Prince Esterhazy in the role of guide to the Prince of Wagram, as Berthier had now been styled by imperial decree in Paris. But, on the whole, Europe was impressed with a sense of Francis's sincerity. The father went ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the bread and meat of his hungry children squandered and sacrificed with a fiendish recklessness. Within the dingy walls of the Ace of Spades was bartered the domestic happiness of many a home that had been cheerless enough, God knows, without this extra curse. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... to that little household; and when he saw Jenny, it ached for that young man downstairs. It was more than a professional contempt for the "general practitioner" that made him silently curse what he called the "death-doctor," as he looked at Jenny, "Jack of all diseases, ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... so few of the ideas that flit through our minds do, in point of fact, produce their motor consequences. Life would be a curse and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to do so. Abstractly, the law of ideo-motor action is true; but in the concrete our fields of consciousness are always so complex that the inhibiting margin keeps the centre inoperative most of the time. In all this, you see, I speak ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... girl of Mara's would not tell who set her on you. It is not like a maid to be sparing with her mistress' secrets, and Morfed is at the back of it. It is his work, and he laid a curse on the girl if she told who sent her. About the only thing that would keep ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... just seen your keeper, that shuffling Vatel, half kill a poor old woman for a stick of wood? It is such fellows as that who make you an enemy to the poor; and the talk is very bitter against you. They curse you every bit as hard as they used to bless the late Madame. The curse of the poor, monseigneur, is a seed that grows,—grows taller than your tall oaks, and oak-wood builds the scaffold. Nobody here tells you the truth; and here ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... little—"Sir," said he, addressing Dartmore, "it is a sad thing to be dependant on these low persons; the wise among the ancients were never so wrong as when they panegyrized poverty: it is the wicked man's tempter, the good man's perdition, the proud man's curse, the melancholy man's halter." ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wild Highlander." She would be satisfied with nothing less than the unabridged stories of Edward I's siege of this "gray bulwark of the North," the murder of the powerful Douglas by his treacherous host King James II; the building of and the mysterious curse upon Mar's Work, and twenty other human documents not half so moving, had she but known it, as the story of Basil Norman's first and only love. Once or twice I thought she guessed that I wished to speak of myself and her, and that she deliberately held me at arm's length, like a young person ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... pay for it. In practical life space is a matter of available transportation, not of geometrical planes, as the old railroad magnate knew when he threatened to make grass grow in the streets of a city that had offended him. If I am motoring and ask how far it is to my destination, I curse as an unmitigated booby the man who tells me it is three miles, and does not mention a six mile detour. It does me no good to be told that it is three miles if you walk. I might as well be told it is one mile as the crow flies. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... companion, who, I was not till then aware, stood by my side. "No hopes this time, confound it!" Then he continued for some time to curse and swear awfully, as I afterwards discovered, for I did not then know ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... woman, nature's fairest ill, The woe of man, that first created curse, Base female sex, sprung from black Ate's loins, Proud, disdainful, cruel and unjust, Whose words are shaded with enchanting wiles, Worse than Medusa mateth all our minds; And in their hearts sit shameless treachery, Turning a truthless vile circumference! O, could my fury paint ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... they sed wuz kin ter the devil. He told me that he could go out hind the house and make some noise and the devil would come and dance with him. He sed the devil learned him to play a banjo and if you wanted to do anything the devil could do, go to a cross road walk backwards and curse God. But don't nebber let the devil touch any of your works or anything that belonged to you or you would lose ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... with, and doth make haste, To get him note, or name, by any offer Where blood or gain be objects; steeps his words, When he would kill, in artificial tears: The crocodile of Tyber! him I love, That man is mine; he hath my heart and voice When I would curse! he, he. ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... thy deserted fields Are sadder warnings spoken, From quenched hearths, where thy exiled sons Their household gods have broken. The curse is on thee—wolves for men, And briers for corn-sheaves giving! O! more than all thy dead renown ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... some Saturday. (Write me word how you think of him as a bookseller.) The duty you pay for your place, by putting together a Chresthomathy, is very fair; whether you are obliged to print your Lectures I cannot decide. I shall curse them both if they prevent you from tearing yourself away from the Donnish atmosphere and bachelor life of Oxford, and from throwing yourself into the fresh mental atmosphere of Germany and of German mind and life. You must take other journeys besides lake excursions ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... it well remembered, is the curse which Stepmother Nature placed upon The Dog, when he elected to turn his back on his own kind, and to become the only one of the world's four-footed folk to serve Man of his own accord. To punish the Dog for this abnormality, Nature decreed that his life should begin ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... adultery, man-stealing, bearing false witness, rebellion against parents, were all equally made capital crimes. The law against the latter was in these words:—'If any child or children, above sixteen years of age, and of sufficient understanding, shall curse or smite their natural father or mother, he or they shall be put to death. Exodus xxi, ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest
... stay here! for thee England is only a worthy gallery, To walk in expectation; till from thence Our greatest King call thee to his presence. When I am gone, dream me some happiness, Nor let thy looks our long hid love confess, Nor praise, nor dispraise me; nor bless, nor curse Openly love's force, nor in bed fright thy nurse With midnight startings, crying out, Oh, oh, Nurse, oh, my love is slain, I saw him go O'er the white Alps alone; I saw him, I, Assail'd, fight, taken, stabb'd, bleed, fall, and die, Augur me better chance, except dread Jove Think it enough for ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... veteran with finality. "They never do. They chafe. They strain. They curse out the job and themselves. They say it isn't fit for any white man. So it isn't, the worst of it. But they stick. If they're marked for it, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... then, whether I think that a statute of absolute prohibition would stop this flowing curse, I reply that at least it would put the influence of authority on the right side. It would lend it the force of consistent endeavor. As it is, it would be far better if the public sanction had no expression; ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... why he should trouble further about them. The American threatened a fresh obstacle. He was winning his way with Helen altogether too rapidly. In the light of those ominous words at the luncheon table his close association with Stampa indicated a definite knowledge of the past. Curse him! Why did ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... was counting out the money, I was taken with a sort of insanity, and I struck him with a large hammer which happened to be at hand. Then I carried off the money and buried it, since which time I have never touched it. It has been a curse to me. This is all I ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... this Juice the growth of God, who dare Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a Snare? A Blessing, we should use it, should we not? And if a Curse—why, then, ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... wi his hand, He garrd the red wine spring on hie; "Now Christ's curse on my head," he said, "But avenged of Lord Scroope ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... season of the year, but their blind malice was too eager to remember this. Another person by continually dunning a poor debtor to pay him half a sovereign had driven him to commit suicide! So ran their bitter tongues. Backbiting is the curse of village life, and seems to keep people by its effects upon the mind far more effectually in the grip of poverty than the lowness of wages. They become so saturated with littleness that they cannot attempt ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... commenced. Then there were whispered communications from the grooms, and long faces under some of the hats. This horse hadn't been fit since last Monday's run, and that man's hack wasn't as it should be. A muttered curse might have been heard from one gentleman as he was told, on jumping from the box, that Harry Stubbings hadn't sent him any second horse to ride. "I didn't hear nothing about it till yesterday, Captain," said Harry Stubbings, "and every foot I had fit to come out ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... Naturally the curse of Costecalde is Tartarin. So much fame for a single man! He everywhere! always he! And slowly, subterraneously, like a worm within the gilded wood of an idol, he saps from below for the last twenty years that triumphant renown, and gnaws it, and hollows it. When, in the evening, at the club, ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... must see that I am in the agonies of childbirth," she said, sitting up and gazing at him with a terrible, hysterical vindictiveness that distorted her whole face. "I curse him before he is born, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wished my love. Ay, that was bitter, for I was ashamed—I who never was shamed of man or woman. But there was more sweetness in your torment than bitterness in my shame. He never knew you were there. He screamed out to you from the crowd in the procession his parting curse on your unfaithfulness and went out—but he nearly killed those two strong spearmen who tried to seize him. How strong he was then, how brave! What a noble lover for any woman! So tall and delicate and fair with ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... HOTHER. Ha, trembling! My curse upon the slave who first invented A word which ne'er my Nanna's lips should sully; Thy excusations kill me! I imagined It was a chaste, a maidenish reflection, That made my Nanna blush at our affection: Unmurmuring I obeyed, and kept in secret. Why hast thou ta'en from ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... behold them surrounded with flames, their flesh torn from their bones, the skin of their head peeled off, coals heaped thereon, and sharp thorns driven into their flesh. The thought of such scenes makes us curse our own existence, and shudder at the thought of bringing ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... flung down his tracing with something between a groan and a curse. "Who can do that drudgery," he cried, "while the poor young lady— Mother, you take it in hand; find me some material, though it is no bigger than a fly's foot, give me but a clew no thicker than ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... of the language does not seem to favor the formation of terms to be used in oaths or for purposes of profanity. It is the result of the observation of others, as well as my own, to say, that an Indian cannot curse. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... tainted with the presence of guilt; here all was pure with innocence. There she had been "under the curse"; here she was "under the benediction." There she had been tormented by a devil; here she was comforted by an angel. And this is scarcely putting the comparison, as it existed in her ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... Peter, who was with Him on the mount of transfiguration, who was with Him the night He was betrayed. Come, Peter, tell us what you think of Christ. Stand in this witness-box and testify of Him. You denied Him once. You said, with a curse, you did not know Him. Was it true, Peter? Don't you know Him? "Know Him!" I can imagine Peter saying: "It was a lie I told then. I did know Him." Afterward I can hear him charging home their guilt upon these Jerusalem ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... brain was hot as if he wore no turban, under the blaze of the sun. "I will leave things as they are while we are in this black Gehenna," he determined. "What is written is written. Yet who has seen the book of the writing? And there is a curse on all this country, ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Lord forgive you, Mr. Pickle, for having been the immediate cause of my disaster. If you had stood by me from the beginning, according to your promise, I should not have been teased by that coxcomb who has brought me to this pass. And why did I put on this d—d unlucky dress? Lord curse that chattering Jezebel of a landlady, who advised such a preposterous disguise!—a disguise which has not only brought me to this pass, but also rendered me abominable to myself, and frightful to ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... with an air of sincerity which left no room for suspicion. I cursed and swore, but they let me curse and swear as much as I liked. At last I discovered that there was no help for it, and I paid a second time, laughing at the clever rascal who had taken me in so thoroughly. Such are the lessons of life; always full of new experiences, and yet one ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... point of achieving it. Their troops on the bank of the river Tisza[147] were preparing to march on Budapest. And it was at that critical moment that the world-arbiters at the Conference who had anathematized the Bolshevists as the curse of civilization interposed their authority and called a halt. If they had solid grounds for intervening they were not avowed. M. Clemenceau sent for M. Bratiano and vetoed the march in peremptory terms which did scant justice to the services rendered and the sacrifices made by ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... received expiation at the hands of Theseus, and died in a calm and peaceful way. This legend was the basis of some of the finest of the Greek dramas, "Oedipus Tyrannus," and the "Oedipus at Colonus" of Sophocles, and "The Seven against Thebes" of Aeschylus. The curse of Oedipus still rested on his sons. The story of Antigone, defying the tyrant Creon, and burying her slain brother, Polynices, is the foundation of the drama of Sophocles, bearing her name. Finally, the Epigoni, descendants ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... enough to give way now, Henrietta," he said, "you would despise me before the month is over; and I, desperate at having to drag out a life of disgrace, would blow out my brains with a curse on you." ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... out of the dust, and the planting of Eden; of the rivers, of God's mistake in trying Adam alone in the Garden, of the rib made into Eve, of the prohibited tree, the snake, the wormy apple, the fall, the curse, the thorns—and how, in order to crown the curse and make it real, God drove the sinful pair forth from the Garden and condemned them to farm ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... "A curse on this babe's play! Must men stand here like whipped curs until a slave commands us enter? Come! Who'll follow me past that door? I'll know what lies behind this mummery if I choke it from old Jabez's ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... him the treasures of the world was as nothing to him now; the treasures themselves seemed to him as contemptible as pebbles to an admirer of diamonds; they were but gewgaws compared with the eternal glories of the other life. A curse lay, he thought, on all things that came to him from this source. He sounded dark depths of painful thought as he listened to the service performed for Melmoth. The Dies irae filled him with awe; he ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... happened that on the first night the German Emperor saw the comet without the aid of a telescope he was attacked by one of those fits of hysteria which, according to ancient legend, are the hereditary curse of the House of Brandenburg. He had made possible that which had been impossible for over a thousand years—he had invaded England in force, and he had established himself and his Allies in all the greatest fortress-camps of south-eastern England. After all, the ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the Tinker, ''tis naught but a bit of solder. Give it to me!' But Saint Patrick took it to a smith instead, and the smith told him the truth about it, and Saint Patrick put a curse on the Tinkers, that every man's face should be against them, and that they should get no rest at all but to ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... oft-repeated tradition, eighteen peasants, some of whose names are still preserved, are said to have disturbed divine service on Christmas Eve by dancing and brawling in the church-yard, whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon them, that they should dance and scream for a whole year without ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completely fulfilled, so that the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee deep into the earth, and remained the whole time without nourishment, until they were finally released ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the Holy One! But o'er some plain that steameth to the sun, Peopled with Death; or where more hideous Trade 140 Loud-laughing packs his bales of human anguish; I will raise up a mourning, O ye Fiends! And curse your spells, that film the eye of Faith, Hiding the present God; whose presence lost, The moral world's cohesion, we become 145 An Anarchy of Spirits! Toy-bewitched, Made blind by lusts, disherited of soul, No common ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower—and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel. ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... sorrowing may raise complaint against Winston Spencer Churchill, First Lord of the British Admiralty, who, by conscienceless instructions which must bring him the curse of mankind, conjured up this ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... and the Dykemen, their peddler hosts, with yard-stick spears! But thou, oh Bello! lord of the empire lineage! Noah of the moderns. Sire of the long line of nations yet in germ!— thou, Bello, and thy locust armies, are the present curse of Orienda. Down ancient streams, from holy plains, in rafts thy murdered float! The pestilence that thins thy armies here, is bred of corpses, made by thee. Maramma's priests, thy pious heralds, loud proclaim that of all pagans, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... cried the boy, as now in his bare feet he stood, the hot tears jumping suddenly out of his eyes. "You mocked me, fooled me, lost me! Curse you! ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... of a virtue that is twice blessed,—blessed in those who give, and blessed in those who receive. Patronage is twice cursed,—cursed in the incompetency which it places where merit ought to be, and in the incompetency which it creates among the class who make it their trust. But the curse which you have mainly to avoid is that which so often falls on those who waste their time and suffer their energies to evaporate in weakly and obsequiously waiting upon it. We therefore say, Rely upon yourselves. But there is One ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... disastrous, not to doubt whether in giving a new world "to Castile and Aragon," Cristobal Colon did not impose a burden on the country of his adoption which she was unable to bear, and which became, in the hands of the successors of her muy Espanoles y muy Catolicos kings, a curse instead of a blessing. Certain it is that Spain was not sufficiently advanced in political economy to understand or cope with the enormous changes which this opening up of a new world brought about. The sudden increase of wealth without labour, of reward for mere adventure, slew in ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... poached eggs and plum-cake at afternoon tea, while many other persons went without dinner. The king was so surprised and hurt at these remarks that he boxed the prince's ears, saying, "I 'll teach you to be too clever, my lad." Then he remembered the awful curse of the oldest fairy, and was sorry for the rudeness of the queen. And when the prince, after having his ears boxed, said that "force was no argument," the king went away ...
— Prince Prigio - From "His Own Fairy Book" • Andrew Lang
... you so, Sorr," sez I; an', afther that, when he wanted to help a Paythan I stud wid the muzzle contagious to the ear. They dare not do anythin' but curse. The Tyrone was growlin' like dogs over a bone that has been taken away too soon, for they had seen their dead an' they wanted to kill ivry sowl on the ground. Crook tould thim that he'd blow the hide off any man that misconducted himself; but, seeing ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... those who call them friends—but Christ will not suffer us to stop there. "Bless them that curse you," He said; "pray for them that despitefully use you." So He spoke, and on the Cross He made the great word luminous for ever by His own prayer for His murderers: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... destroy him; if thou wouldst preserve him. Do that thou'rt unacquainted with, and curse ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... leaders. Better times will come, and we shall all settle down to the same old game of grab on the same old basis. But you," Sommers turned on the sauntering blue-eyed fellow, "people like you are the real curse." ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... undressed with a clumsy hand upon the buttons and many a curse at the obstinate things. The intense silence of the morning hour depressed him and he wondered that the hotel should sleep so soundly. His own door was both locked and bolted—he had a pistol in his travelling-bag and would finger it with grim satisfaction at such moments as these. ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... sprang from the prostrate figure on the quay were some incoherent oaths, which ultimately took form. "Curse Legrand, curse him!" ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... signs of pregnancy, save one Firuzah[FN235] hight. So the King conceived a grudge against her, saying in his soul, "Allah holdeth this woman vile and accursed and He willeth not that she become the mother of a Prince, and on this wise hath the curse of barrenness become her lot." He would have had her done to death but the Grand Wazir made intercession for her and suggested to the Sultan that perchance Firuzah might prove with child and withal not show outward signal thereof, as is the manner of certain women; wherefore to slay ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... with your approbation if I can get it, without it if I must, to stand by them with fidelity equal to their great deserts. If you will stand with me, we shall conquer faction in the North and South, and shall save the country from the curse of being ruled by the combination now calling itself the opposition. We shall leave this country to our children as we found it—united, strong, prosperous ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... battle: no one who fights has a lust for battle. Editors of newspapers and people on General Staffs, possibly also Cabinet Ministers, have lusts for battles, as long as they arrange the battle and talk about it afterwards—curse them! ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... was right," said Lord Glenvarloch, in the bitterness of his spirit; "and his curse justly followed me when I first entered that place. There is contamination in the air, and he whose fortune avoids ruin, shall be blighted in his honour ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... "God's curse upon this household," the woman cried. The monkey whimpered again, and she took it by the scruff and tossed it to the floor. "Peace, ape, or I will have you strangled. Bestir yourself, father, and call Anton. There is a blight of deafness ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... with whom he was talking excitedly. He spoke rapidly in Spanish. Kate caught only one word, "Senora," as he handed a note to Walcott, at the same time pointing backward over his shoulder towards the entrance. Kate saw Walcott grow pale as he read the missive, then, with a muttered curse, he started for the door, followed ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... a curse is a tender conscience! Thou hast been kind to me in my need, and if prayers from a sincere heart can do thee service, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... very important parts of house plumbing. Great care must be bestowed upon the construction, material, fitting, etc., of the plumbing fixtures, that they be a source of comfort in the house instead of becoming a curse to ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... that challenge down once, and a man said to me the next day, "I wasn't at your meeting last night, but I understand you made the astounding statement that no man had been in the liquor business twenty years who hadn't the curse in ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... music that meets the ear! No sweet strains of Strauss will greet you here, But the moan of sickness, the feeble wail Of suff'ring childhood—of mothers pale, The groan of despair, or, alas, still worse! The blasphemous jest, or fierce, deep curse. ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... attenuations that it admits of. I certainly am not conscious of any bitterness of heart towards any one.... I believe it is only in the first perception of evil or sense of injury that I am unmeasured or unreasonable in my expression of condemnation—but you know, my dear, suddenness is the curse of my nature.... But my self-love always springs up against the shadow of blame, and so you need pay no heed to what I say in self-justification. If I am censured justly, I shall accept the reproof inwardly, whatever outward ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... stood for a little scanning the broad channel, shading her eyes as if to search for something on the extreme horizon. The air was very quiet and he thought that he could hear her sigh. Then she turned and re-entered the House, while Heritage by his side began to curse under his breathe with a ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... a shrill outcry at sight of a mouse; men curse roundly when large, buzzing, blue-bottle flies disturb their after-dinner nap; but let occasion come and the stuff of which heroes are made is in us all. I think well of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... actual condition of these Documents in Capricornus and Aquarius is no bad emblem. His so unlimited Wanderings, toilsome enough, are without assigned or perhaps assignable aim; internal Unrest seems his sole guidance; he wanders, wanders, as if that curse of the Prophet had fallen on him, and he were "made like unto a wheel." Doubtless, too, the chaotic nature of these Paper-bags aggravates our obscurity. Quite without note of preparation, for example, we come upon the following slip: "A peculiar feeling it is that will rise ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... by the popularity of their own prose. The poems of both will live, and have justice done them by posterity. "Madoc" was many years ago recommended to me by one of the most able, and most candid, of our living authors. I read it with much interest. "The Curse of Kehama" is full of high and wild poetry; and "Roderick, the last of the Goths" gives a noble picture of deep penitence and of devoted patriotism. You will hardly read any ten lines of the longer poems of Sir Walter Scott, without meeting ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... of wealth those two fools, Supritika and Vibhavasu, from each other's curse, have become an elephant and a tortoise respectively. Owing to their wrath, they have both become inferior animals. And they are engaged in hostilities with each other, proud of their excessive strength ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... startled by seeing it in children by the time they can lisp a lie, and we note in them, with a sickening at heart, the father's or grandfather's tendency to secretiveness or deceit, or the mother's penchant for false excuses. We can scarcely bequeath a greater sorrow to our offspring than to curse them before their birth with this hereditary taint, which is, perhaps, one of the hardest of all evils to correct. It may take the form of exaggerated speech, of courteous or cowardly prevarication, or of downright falsehood, but, in whatever guise, it is a curse to the owner thereof as ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... greater evil is to be made perpetual. If the guaranties of the Constitution can be broken provisionally to serve a temporary purpose, and in a part only of the country, we can destroy them everywhere and for all time. Arbitrary measures often change, but they generally change for the worse. It is the curse of despotism that it has no halting place. The intermitted exercise of its power brings no sense of security to its subjects, for they can never know what more they will be called to endure when its red right hand ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... hypnotism, or hypocrisy? Their fanaticism was contagious, especially after their flight to the mountains of Kwangsi. There Siu-tsuen boldly raised the flag of rebellion and proclaimed that he had a divine call to restore the throne to the Chinese race, and to deliver the people from the curse of idolatry. In this twofold crusade he was ably seconded by one Yang, who possessed all the qualities of a successful hierophant. Shrewd and calculating, Yang was able [Page 158] at will to bring on cataleptic fits, during ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... resent it or not, as you darned well please," said Hayle doggedly, biting at the butt of his cigar as he spoke. "It don't matter a curse to me; you don't mean to tell me you think I'm fool enough to stand by and ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... friend," 'e sez, "you two on Choosday week, Is to be joined in very 'oly bonds. To break them vows I 'opes yeh'll never seek; Fer I could curse them 'usbands 'oo absconds!" "I'll love 'er till I snuff it," I responds. "Ah, that's the way I likes to 'ear yeh speak, Young ...
— The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke • C. J. Dennis
... roam through the darkness. He must descend with his heart full of charity, and severity at the same time, as a brother and as a judge, to those impenetrable casemates where crawl, pell-mell, those who bleed and those who deal the blow, those who weep and those who curse, those who fast and those who devour, those who endure evil and those who inflict it. Have these historians of hearts and souls duties at all inferior to the historians of external facts? Does any one think that Alighieri has ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... idiotically useless fetter that weights down humanity. Being a woman you will never be able wholly to free yourself from that same fetter. But lift its weight from your soul just this once! You were going to curse your life with a blasphemously wicked, loveless marriage to-morrow. And the world would have approved. You have a chance to atone for an attempted wrong and to win happiness for yourself and the man you love, to-morrow, by marrying James then. A few representatives of the world will hold up their ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... guarded our coasts. Yet he should have known that a rough sailor, who thought himself ill used by the Admiralty, might, after the third bottle, when drawn on by artful companions, express his regret for the good old times, curse the new government, and curse himself for being such a fool as to fight for that government, and yet might be by no means prepared to go over to the French on the day of battle. Of the malecontent officers, who, as James believed, were impatient to desert, the great majority ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... such a terrible curse. But what gave rise To no little surprise Was, that nobody seemed one ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... he spoke a pistol-shot resounded through the night. It cut through the deathly silence of the forest like a spiteful curse, and was answered by another—then, after a short ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... barnacles!" yelled Comrade Bannerman. He shook his fists at the plutocrats and cursed until he made me sick. He was a tank-town nut who didn't like to work; had built up a theory that work was a curse and that the "idle classes" had forced this curse on the masses, of which he was one. He believed that all the classes had to do was to clip coupons, cash them and ride around the country in Pullman palace cars. Here was the whole bunch of them in seven "specials" rolling right by his front door. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... Entente, including the United States, are now united in an effort to stamp out the curse of feudalism in Austria and in Germany—a curse which has disappeared from all other parts of the civilized world. They are united to crush the military spirit of conquest which exists among the war leaders of the Prussians. They are pledged ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... when he had got up over the churches, give forth both oath and curse, with bell, {472} book, and candle? And was not the ceremony of his oath, to lay three fingers a-top of the book, to signify the Trinity; and two fingers under the book, to signify damnation of body and soul if they sware falsely? And ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... considering at all, he may be considered in the creative category. Limiting ourselves, then, to these two main varieties of the artistic temperament, the active and the passive, I should say that the latter is an unmixed blessing, and the former a mixed curse. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... I did not say the Secretary, did I? Well, curse it, since you have found me out, I will not deny it. It ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... struggle approached. Every soul in Zyobor moved in a daze, with strained face and fear haunted eyes. Their proficiency in mental telepathy was a curse to them now: every one carried constantly, transmitted from the brains of the servant-fish outposts, a thought picture of that outer cavern in the murky depths of which writhed the thousands of crowding Quabos. Each mind in Zyobor was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... New World from their hands to those of more normally constituted races. That the self-abandonment to sterilizing passions and ignoble persecutions which marked Spain out for decay in the second half of the sixteenth century, and rendered her the curse of her dependencies, can in part be ascribed to the enthusiasm aroused in previous generations by the heroic conflict with advancing Islam, is a thesis capable of demonstration. Yet none the less is it true that her ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... been the devil of a disturbance in Munich; and the King's mistress, Lola Montez, has been forced to fly for her life. She has been the curse of Bavaria, yet the King is ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... think or do, Or make or spoil or bless or blast, Is curse or blessing justly due For sloth or effort in the past. My life's a statement of the sum Of vice indulged or overcome. And as I journey on the roads I shall be helped and healed and blessed. Dear words shall cheer, and be as goads To urge to heights as yet unguessed. My road shall be the road ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... Galihud unto Sir Launcelot: Sir, here be knights come of kings' blood, that will not long droop, and they are within these walls; therefore give us leave, like as we be knights, to meet them in the field, and we shall slay them, that they shall curse the time that ever they came into this country. Then spake seven brethren of North Wales, and they were seven noble knights; a man might seek in seven kings' lands or he might find such seven knights. Then they all said at once: Sir Launcelot, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... jangled insistently. The orderly on duty dropped his feet from the desk to the floor and lifted the receiver with a muttered curse. ...
— Poisoned Air • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... whirling into an eternity of darkness—with a destination so remote, and a mission so obscure, as not to be of the slightest disturbance to her immediate consciousness. All she asked of fate that moment was the blessedness of nothing; and for answer—her mind was jerked back ruthlessly to the curse of ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... "I'm worth nothing when a whim of hers is in question. But in a losing game at Port Said we used to double the stakes and go on. She do a Melancolia! She hasn't the power, or the insight, or the training. Only the desire. She's cursed with the curse of Reuben. She won't do line-work, because it means real work; and yet she's stronger than I am. I'll make her understand that I can beat her on her own Melancolia. Even then she wouldn't care. She says I can only do blood and bones. I don't ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Williams raised his thin arms above his head. Out of his eyes rained challenge, denunciation, anathema! Mutely he was hurling the curse of God's church. With the last ounce of his attenuated strength he was struggling for the voice which at this moment of supreme need had failed him. Over the body of the congregation, as the preacher halted, ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... grown so angry in his sermon that he afterwards forgot the Lord's Prayer. He urged that "this had happened some time ago." III. When some women went out after the sermon, he called after them, and told them that if they would not stop to receive the blessing they would have his curse; "not guilty." IV. He had cohabited with a servant girl, and an illegitimate child was born; "others do the same thing." V. He forgot the cup at the communion; "that happened long ago." VI. He said to the officer, "All are devils who want me to go ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Juice the growth of God, who dare Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a Snare? A Blessing, we should use it, should we not? And if a Curse—why, then, Who set ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... to seventy thousand souls, among whom there are twenty-five different forms of religion. Two-thirds of the inhabitants are scoundrels, who have there sought a refuge against the offended laws of their country. They are not only a curse and a check to civilization, but they reflect dishonour upon the remaining third portion of the Texans, who have come from distant climes for the honest purposes of trade and agriculture. This mongrel and mixed congregation of beings, though firmly united in one point (war with Mexico, ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... one breathed, I had almost said no heart beat for listening. Not long; in an instant there rose the sharp simultaneous cry of many people in rage and despair. Inarticulate at that distance, it was yet an intelligible curse, and the roll, and the roar, and the irregular ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... been the results of the Land Law passed in 1881. And under the curse so engendered the country is now labouring. It cannot be denied that the promoters of the Land Laws are weak, and that the disciples of the Landleague are strong. In order that the truth of this may be seen and made apparent, the ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... muffled curse he swung on his heel, and made to cross the gravel path and plunge into the shrubbery. But Desmond was too quick for him. Springing upon his back, he caught his arms, thus preventing him from using his pistol. He was a powerful man, and Desmond ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... explorations as were made were with the one object of getting through it or around it. In fact, as late as 1787, opinion in Europe was divided as to whether the discovery of the New World had been a blessing or a curse. ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... similar circumstances) they gravely abused their position to build up huge fortunes for themselves. During the fifteen years following the battle of Plassey (1757) there is no denying that the political power of the British in India was a mere curse to the native population, and led to the complete disorganisation of the already decrepit native system of government in the provinces affected. It was vain for the directors at home to scold their servants. There ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... and relate how, like the Lady of Shalott, when I first began to gaze upon the world of realities "the curse" came upon me. It was in ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... was afraid of being mad; when I used to start from my sleep, and fall upon my knees, and pray to be spared from the curse of my race; when I rushed from the sight of merriment or happiness, to hide myself in some lonely place, and spend the weary hours in watching the progress of the fever that was to consume my brain. ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... pure I will remain, But, crushed and bruised, the flower no guilt shall stain. I fear the combat that I may not fly, Hard-won the fight, and dear the victory. Here, love, my curse! Here, dearest friend, my foe! Yet will I arm me! Father, I would go To steel ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... went on addressing him, 'to be brought up strictly and straitly. I was so brought up. Mine was no light youth of sinful gaiety and pleasure. Mine were days of wholesome repression, punishment, and fear. The corruption of our hearts, the evil of our ways, the curse that is upon us, the terrors that surround us—these were the themes of my childhood. They formed my character, and filled me with an abhorrence of evil-doers. When old Mr Gilbert Clennam proposed his orphan nephew to my father for my husband, my father impressed ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... if you meditated an attempt upon your illustrious person. Are you thinking of suicide? Let us see whether you have some concealed weapon, some poisoned ring. Curse upon it! the poison of the Borgias! Is the white substance in this china bowl, vulgarly called sugar, by some terrible chance infamous arsenic disguised under the appearance of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... obstacle between him and his happiness. He might pity her, he might be grateful to her; but the intense fervor of one passion, and the longing desire to which it gave rise, made it impossible for her ever to seem to him any thing else than the curse ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... depths where alway love abounded First had risen a song with healing on its wings Whence the dews of mercy raining balms unbounded Shed their last compassion even on sceptred things.[1] Even on heads that like a curse the crown surrounded Fell his crowning pity, soft as cleansing springs; And the sweet last note his wrath relenting sounded Bade men's hearts be melted ...
— Studies in Song, A Century of Roundels, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, The Heptalogia, Etc - From Swinburne's Poems Volume V. • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... good-for-nothing brother some small escapade looming immense in the horizon of her enjoyment. She had ever distorted or inflamed the facts of life by an overheated fancy, by the spirit of romance, by a gift—or curse—of imagination, which had given her also dark visions of a miserable end, of a clouded and piteous close to her brief journey. "I am doomed—doomed," had been her agonized cry that day before Ian Stafford ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... commenced in October, 1748; and she thus concludes her letter to the novelist, her ladyship taking care to mystify her identity by giving her address, Post-office, Exeter, although resident at Haigh in Lancashire. "If you disappoint me," she writes, "attend to my curse." ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... that a certain Sir John, with some of his company, once went abroad jetting, and in a moon-light evening, robbed a miller's weire and stole all his eeles. The poor miller made his mone to Sir John himself, who willed him to be quiet; for he would so curse the theef, and all his confederates, with bell, book, and candel, that they should have small joy of their fish. And therefore the next Sunday, Sir John got him to the pulpit, with his surplisse on his back, and his stole about his neck, and pronounced these ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would have saved her son from all evil; his momentary forgetfulness of it is his ruin; her prayer at last granted, saves him—not, indeed, from death, but from the curse of living as the destroyer ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... own parts, we side with Coleridge. Malice is not always of the heart. There is a malice of the understanding and the fancy. Neither do we think the worse of a man for having invented the most horrible and old-woman-troubling curse that demons ever listened to. We are too apt to swear horribly ourselves; and often have we frightened the cat, to say nothing of the kettle, by our shocking [far too ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... not from the pen of vainglory, but from the process of that pensiveness, which two summers since overtook me; whose obscured cause, best known to every name of curse, hath compelled my wit to wander abroad unregarded in this satirical disguise, and counselled my content to dislodge his ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... see 'em in the morning, when you're cleaning out the stall, A-leaning on the railings nearly dead, And you reckon by the evening they'll be pretty sure to fall, And you curse them as you tumble into bed. Oh, you'll hear it pretty soon, 'Pass the word for Denny Moon, There's a horse here throwing handsprings like a clown; And it's 'Shove the others back or he'll cripple half the pack, There's another blessed horse ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... was brutally treated and thrown down by Gronfier, assisted by six men carrying a dark lantern and a pole-axe; to Cavaignac, who was secured by Colin, a smooth-tongued villain, who affected to be shocked on hearing him curse and swear; to M. Thiers, who was arrested by Hubaut (the elder); who professed that he had seen him "tremble and weep," thus adding falsehood to crime; to Valentin, who was assailed in his bed by Dourlens, taken by the feet and shoulders, and thrust into a padlocked police van; to ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... bent his head, in shame and sorrow. 'Here me, dear God,' he said, 'from this day, I will do what one man can to drive out the curse ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin, Young Folks' Edition • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... awaited the word from your lips which will make him in rank what he is in sentiment and in courage. Consider, in short, your people who love you and who yet are famished, who have no other wish than to bless you, and who, nevertheless—no, I am wrong, your subjects, madame, will never curse you; say one word to them and all will be ended—peace succeed war, joy tears, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... labor's progress. We blame capitalism and its wasteful, brutal industrial system for all our social problems, but our numbers were vast and our bondage grievous before modern industry came into existence. We may curse the trusts, but our subjection was accomplished before the trusts had emerged from the brain of evolution. We may blame public officials and individual employers, but our burdens were crushing before these were born. We ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... rapping was, it brought no immediate answer. Again I knocked; then feet came shuffling along the passage. I had aroused my sleepy wretch; doubtless he would come groaning (for Jonah might not curse save in the way of religion), and rubbing his eyes, to let me in. The door opened and Jonah appeared; his eyes were not dull with sleep but seemed to blaze with some strong excitement; he had not been to his bed, for his dress was not disordered, and a light ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... constitutionality I have nothing to do; about that I know but little and care much less. But suppose it is constitutional, what then? To tell me a law is constitutional which robs me of my liberty is simply ridiculous. I would curse the constitution that authorized the enactment of such a law; I would trample the provisions of such a law under my feet and defy its pains and penalties. I would respect and obey such an inhuman law no more than OUR revolutionary fathers did the odious and absurd doctrine that kings and tyrants ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... before you're kicked out. Open a pool-room like all the has-beens and trim the suckers right, left, and down the middle. Money's the whole thing. Get it. Don't mind how you do, but just get it. You'll be honest enough for ten men then. Anyway, there's no one cares a curse how you pan out—" ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... Smith believed that amongst the fragments of the Chaldean Genesis, discovered by him, one might be interpreted as relating to the fall of the first man, and that it contained the curse pronounced upon him by the God Ea, after his transgression.[62] But this was an illusion, which a more profound study of the cuneiform document has dispelled. Smith's translation, which was too hasty, immature, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... sun; at her feet only the white slate of the stoep. And well enough I knew that under the proud Empire flag many a widow as young and as heart-broken as this Dutch girl would watch the sun go down as hopelessly as she, and I could not help the thought which sprang to my soul—God's bitter curse rest on the head of the man, be he Boer or Briton, who brought about this ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... led Kamar al-Zaman thither, and stationed an eunuch at the door. And when all this was done, the Prince threw himself on the couch, sad-spirited, and heavy- hearted; blaming himself and repenting of his injurious conduct to his father, whenas repentance availed him naught, and saying, "Allah curse marriage and marriageable and married women, the traitresses all! Would I had hearkened to my father and accepted a wife! Had I so done it had been better for me than this jail." This is how it fared with him; but ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... last. The night came on. I had been sitting for a long while alone in my tent. It was dark outside. It struck two in the town. I was beginning to curse the Jew.... Suddenly Sara came in, alone. I jumped up took her in my arms... put my lips to her face.... It was cold as ice. I could scarcely distinguish her features.... I made her sit down, knelt down before her, took her hands, touched ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... story of song and adventure. There is romance in the river and tragedy on the hill, and while the memory of Wolfe and Montcalm is green, the city will be the Mecca of the Dominion. But keep the hand of the Goth—the practical man—from touching the old historic landmarks of the city. A curse has been pronounced on those who remove their neighbours' landmark, but what shall be said of those who remove the landmarks which separate century from century and period from period." ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... my heart so deep That, howso tired I've been, I've kept Eyes waking when near me another slept, Lest I might mutter it in my sleep? And now at the last to blab it clear! How the women will shrink from my pictures! And worse Will the men do—spit on my name, and curse; But then up in heaven I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... found the lost remembrance. My misfortune—I ought to call it the punishment for my sins, is recalled to me now. The worst curse that can fall on a father is the curse that has come to me. I have a wicked daughter. My own ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... is himself broiling under the intollerable and interminable Wrath of God; and a fiery Wrath at God, is, that which the Devil is for that cause Enflamed. Methinks I see the posture of the Devils in Isa. 8.21. They fret themselves, and Curse their God, and look upward. The first and chief Wrath of the Devil, is at the Almighty God himself; he knows, The God that made him, will not have mercy on him, and the God that formed him, will shew him no favour; and so he can have no Kindness for that God, ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... Mr. McFarlane, I hate this rotten work," he cried out. "I—I hate it so bad I could just rather bite my tongue out than tell you the things I've got to. It's rotten. I don't know—— Say, you don't know me, and I don't guess you care a curse anyway. But I was brought up in a city and taught to believe things were a deal better than I've lately come to think they are. Psha! These fellers have got to be hanged when and where we get them. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... slain, the loss of the one wise leader to whom all turned with uplifted hearts seemed the signal for annihilation; and then, indeed, it appeared that the prophecy of Mary Ballard's old grandfather had been fulfilled and the curse of slavery had not only been wiped out with blood, but that the greater curse of anarchy and misrule had taken its place to still further scourge ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... Olympia! That removes a curse from me—I—I mean that fills me with a courage that is not my own, I have learned yours or stolen it. But you will forgive me, for I mean to use it all ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... would have half the sale money, for the commission—and wanted it all too! lord, how he did curse and swear! ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... him in amazement. "Curse you!" he cried. "Who are you to interfere—you that are new to the lodge? Stand back!" He raised his stick; but McMurdo had whipped his pistol out of his ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cicero, Boethius, and a host of others are in abundance, and form a catalogue rendered doubly exciting to the bibliophile by the insertion of an occasional note, which tells of its antiquity,[208] rarity, or value. In some of the volumes a curious inscription was inserted, thundering a curse upon any who would dare to pilfer it from the library, and for so sacrilegious a crime, calling down upon them the maledictions of Saints Maria, Oswald, Cuthbert, and Benedict.[209] A volume containing the lives of St. Cuthbert, St. Oswald, and St. ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... of the Vatican, "perditionis filios,—excommunicatos, anathemizatos, maledictos, aeterni supplicii reos," etc., etc. "Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby,—but nothing to this. For my own part I could not have a heart to curse ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... him probably, even in his youth, it had been a woman's gewgaw, useless, but allowable as tending to her happiness. Now the door was never even opened before his eye. His last interview with Carry had been in that room,—when he had laid his curse upon her, and bade her begone before his return, so that his decent threshold should be no longer polluted by ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... more than intimated that it was at his option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps interminably; but that it would produce a discord in nature which all the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would find cause to curse. ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... I can well remember those times when all the fire-eating leaders of the South and the poor dirty trash of the North got their desire when that poor dupe of a President allowed the mischievous fugitive slave act to become a law of the land. This law was a curse to the nation, an outrage upon the poor Negro and suffering humanity. This bill gave the poor Negro no protection in the land of his birth, a country boasting of being the land of the brave and the home ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... his foot he did it with a vengeance; but it did not tend to add to the sweetness of his temper. They say that the best dog will turn cross if he be kept chained all the time, and it was the same with the man; he had not a thing to do all day but lie and curse his fate, and the time came when he wanted ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... the importance which it attaches to the opinion of the only nations which the execration of all that lives and breathes have not yet armed against it. It is afraid. It feels that all is crumbling under foot, that it is being shunned and abandoned. It seeks in every direction a glance that does not curse it. It must not, it shall not find that glance. It is not necessary to tell Italy what our imperilled cities are worth; for Italy is preeminently the land of ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... superstition and ignorance and moral depravity, so that the people know not right from wrong, there is only one cure for her,—the Bible. Religion here is a mockery and a shame; such as, if it were better known, would make the heathen laugh in scorn. The priests are a curse to the land, not a blessing. Perhaps they are better in other lands,—I know not; but well I know they are, many of them, false and wicked here. No truth is taught to the people,—no Bible is read in their ears; religion is not taught,—even ...
— Martin Rattler • R.M. Ballantyne
... incensed at him and said, Go from before me, for I shall never receive good counsel from thee. The King then took the Cid by the hand and led him apart, and said unto him, Thou well knowest my Cid, that when the King my father commended thee unto me, he charged me upon pain of his curse that I should take you for my adviser, and whatever I did that I should do it with your counsel, and I have done so even until this day; and thou hast alway counselled me for the best, and for this I have given thee a county in my kingdom, holding it ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... to send one of his own men a little way back with him, to see him clear of the mob. To his astonishment, he recognised the distorted face which glared into his as that of the Diwan Dwarika Nath, and found his help refused with a venomous curse. The commander ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... to fall upon him, he did not in the least understand; but he did understand that the Virgin as he had thought her, should be kind, and mild, and gracious. He had never stopped to think whether the curse as uttered by the woman, might or might not be true. Of loyalty to his father he had thought much; but now he believed that it behoved him to think more of loyalty to the Virgin, as defined by the woman in ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... fairest ill, The woe of man, that first created curse, Base female sex, sprung from black Ate's loins, Proud, disdainful, cruel and unjust, Whose words are shaded with enchanting wiles, Worse than Medusa mateth all our minds; And in their hearts sit shameless treachery, Turning a truthless vile ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... saying—no merit in that. The ethics of the profession have to be lived up to, curse 'em as we may, at times. Len, how are we to get to know something about little Hungary upstairs? Those eyes of his are going to follow me into my ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... he cries out, "If he dies, then am I a traitor. May ten thousand devils tear me in pieces! Here, ye bloodhounds, take back your curse!" And flinging the blood-money at the feet of the priests, he flies from their presence, pursued by ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... to, Alice. The Moors are intellectual mummies." Allen carefully turned two pages, and encouraged by a nod of approval from Mrs. Gorham proceeded. "Why, Miss Gorham, if a Moor happens to sit down upon a tack he doesn't curse or swear or rail at fate; he simply murmurs, 'It is written,' and carefully replaces the tack for some other Moor to ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... "Don't curse in my camp, Mr. Morse, or whatever your name is." The Scotchman's blue eyes flashed. "It's a thing I do not permeet. Nor do I let beardless lads tell me what they will or won't do here. Your wound will be washed ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... when it shall have to answer for its stewardship to its own people. If they knew as much in July 1914 as they do now, which of them would have plunged into war? And probably if the war goes on for another year they will curse the cowardice which kept them from manfully facing the problem of peace, for which every principle of religion and humanity, every interest, social, material, and political, of their ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... He dropped a loud curse, like a howl, and kept upon his way. The footfalls were as swift; he saw their impressions at his heels—prints of a small, lithe, human foot, made by no living man. He shut his eyes and his ears, but ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... significant actions; would it not for many days hide from you some part of the truth that you seek? Or if you imagine that greatness lay in your grasp, and disillusion has taken you back to your place in the second rank; have you the right, for the rest of your life, to curse the envoy of truth? For, after all, was it not truth your illusion was seeking, assuming it to have been sincere? We should try to regard disillusions as mysterious, faithful friends, as councillors none can corrupt, And ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... not Christians at all!" exclaimed Vane, with a burst of righteous wrath, "they are the bane and curse of Christianity, and have been ever since Constantine made it official and fashionable. They are responsible for every corruption that has crept into the Church, for every blot that defiles the purity of the Creed. They are not Christians, and they never have ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... and play right sadly, To my mother's door begone, And sing: Here is thy daughter, Whom thou didst curse to stone." ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... great a curse as it is, is not the only evil whose effects bear most heavily on women. Wrong is hydra-headed, and to work so hard to cut off one head, when there is a way by which all may be dissevered, is not a far-sighted movement; and when you add to this ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... and upright boy can have upon the companions of his own age, and upon those who are younger, is incalculable. He cannot do good work if he is not strong and does not try with his whole heart and soul to count in any contest; and his strength will be a curse to himself and to everyone else if he does not have thorough command over himself and over his own evil passions, and if he does not use his strength on the side of decency, justice, and ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... water, I heard her nose take the ground, and presently the feet of men shuffling, as they disembarked, over loose stones: then a low curse following on a slip and a splash. "Who's that talking?" a voice inquired, quick and angry. "Sergeant! Take that man's name." But apparently the sergeant could not discover him. The footfalls grew more regular and seemed to be mounting the cliff, along the base ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... farmers; wherefore they Left hoe and plough, and crouched in heights remote, Companioned with the grey-winged fogs; but he Made waste their fields and throve upon their toil— As throve the boar, the fierce four-footed curse Which Artemis did raise in Calydon To make stern mouths wax white with foreign fear, All in the ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... grew quite too bad to bear, Paying such sums to get rid of the chair! But dead men's fingers hold awful tight, And there was the will in black and white, Plain enough for a child to spell. What should be done no man could tell, For the chair was a kind of nightmare curse, And every ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... for me after all. Curse him," he added violently. "What cruel luck! And I've been thinking all day of what ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... reply in the same manner, but he remembered that the horse, whom he felt ready to curse, bore on his back a man with a hundred and fifty pistoles in his pocket, so he resigned himself, and beat his ass to ...
— Chicot the Jester - [An abridged translation of "La dame de Monsoreau"] • Alexandre Dumas
... days hide from you some part of the truth that you seek? Or if you imagine that greatness lay in your grasp, and disillusion has taken you back to your place in the second rank; have you the right, for the rest of your life, to curse the envoy of truth? For, after all, was it not truth your illusion was seeking, assuming it to have been sincere? We should try to regard disillusions as mysterious, faithful friends, as councillors none can corrupt, And should there be one more cruel than the rest, that ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... bringing the car to a sudden halt. To go and tell her must be the first step in his redemption. Till that was done the curse of the dead man would follow him. It seemed to him now, as he looked back, that through all the spring and summer the shadow of Lord Dawn had crept behind him. He would go at once. He would go that night. He knew where he ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... Saxon. "Lead I cannot, but my posterity curse me in my grave if I follow not with the foremost wherever thou ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... For I freely own that I am one of those who refused to believe there would be "a great offensive." (Curse such trite and sounding words, which put measureless misery through the mind as unconsciously as a boy repeats something of Euclid.) I believe that no man would now dare to order it. The soldiers, I knew, with all the signs before them, still could ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Mr. Las Casas was any relation to the archdeacon here. They both preach a good deal alike, it seems to me. He says, 'The system of oppression and cruelty in dealing with the natives makes them curse the name of God and our holy religion.... For should God decree the destruction of Spain it may be seen it is because of our destruction of the Indians, and that His justice may be ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... God, while my soul rebels against Him. The voices of the dead and of the dying mingle with the rise and fall of the organ. Sometimes a note vibrates on my ear like a death-cry—the sound of rushing waters besets me—the curse of Cain follows me, and his words of complaint are ever upon my lips—"My punishment is greater than ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... jaws with unspontaneous laughter loud; Their meat dripp'd blood; tears fill'd their eyes, and dire Presages of approaching woe, their hearts. 421 Then thus the prophet Theoclymenus.[95] Ah miserable men! what curse is this That takes you now? night wraps itself around Your faces, bodies, limbs; the palace shakes With peals of groans—and oh, what floods ye weep! I see the walls and arches dappled thick With gore; the vestibule is throng'd, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... together like a castanet rattling," said Velasco, "You tremble like a string under the bow. Come closer. There—one ran over my sleeve, curse the creature! Did you feel him, the vermin? Put ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... such explorations as were made were with the one object of getting through it or around it. In fact, as late as 1787, opinion in Europe was divided as to whether the discovery of the New World had been a blessing or a curse. ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... not strive to verify it by destroying the arbitrary divisions and enmities that still separate the different tribes of humanity? Why do we talk of fraternity while we allow any of our brethren to be trampled on, degraded or despised? The earth is our workshop. We may not curse it, we are bound to sanctify it. ... We must strive to make of humanity one single ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... interrupted, "Do not tremble nor weep! That cruel curse I can change and soften, And instead ...
— On the Tree Top • Clara Doty Bates
... Hutchings was worked up to a high degree of nervous tension, and he was. He cried out that he knew that every one believed that he had done it; but he hadn't. He'd never thought of it. He was damned if he didn't wish he had done it. He might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, anyhow. He broke off to curse Lord Loudwater at length. He had been a curse to every one who came into contact with him while he was alive, and now he was getting people into trouble when he was dead. Yes: he wished it had occurred to him to stick that knife into him. He'd ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... help or befriend you. While you are still children, I shall leave you, and yet, if only I could wait till you are big enough and know enough to be Marie's guardian! But I shall not live so long. I love you so much that it makes me very unhappy to think of it. Dear children, if only you do not curse ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... person, will be the only ones in town, then, who will not believe it against me. I know I've acted wrong and like a fool; but what chance has a fellow when he gets credit for evil only, and a hundred-fold more evil than is in him? Curse it all! since every one insists that I have gone wholly over to the devil, I might ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... cream-cheese sandwiches when I was presented to her. I knew in one look that society had never bothered Dulcie any. Victuals was her curse. In the cattle business it ain't riding disrespectful horses that gets you the big money; it's being able to guess weights. And if Dulcie pulled a pound less than one hundred and eighty then all my years of training has gone for naught. She was certainly ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... 'God's curse on you!' he said. 'Where is Margot? That I may beat her! That I may beat her as you have beaten me.' He waved his hand with a tipsy ferocity ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... Giraud's fortune. I was mindful, lastly, that in England we are taught to ride straight, and I sat down and wrote to Madame that her husband was in good health, and that I quite hoped to see him depart in a few days for La Pauline. I will not deny that the letter went into the post-box followed by a curse. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... false and gay; A land where people dread a "curse;" A land of letters gone astray, Or intercepted, which is worse; Where weddings false fond maids betray, And all the babes are ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... was about to curse in his heart the versatile humor of his mistress, when he saw, by a side-glance, that ears which had no concern in the subject, had liked to have shared in the matter of their discourse. Seizing the weapon ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... find in the savory odors which came steaming up from the basement kitchens of the restaurants in Market Street, caring more to gain them than to avoid the rain. His teeth chattered; he shambled, stooped, and gasped. He was too desperate to curse his fate—he could only long for food. He could not reason; he could not understand that ten thousand hands might gladly have fed him; he could think only of the hunger which consumed him, and of food that could ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... I assured myself. There was nothing left for me to do but rejoice in Farnham's safety, curse my own idiocy for harbouring fantastic suspicions, despite all evidence which should long ago have overthrown them, and proceed to retrace my six thousand mile journey across the continent ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... convent church of Kolbig, not far from Bernburg. According to an oft-repeated tradition, eighteen peasants, some of whose names are still preserved, are said to have disturbed divine service on Christmas Eve by dancing and brawling in the church-yard, whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon them, that they should dance and scream for a whole year without ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completely fulfilled, so that the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee deep into ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... us—dreamers and indolent. We were always going to be rich next year—no occasion to work. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it. ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... 5); and shows that to fallen sinful men the law cannot give deliverance from either its condemnatory sentence or the reigning power of sin, so that its only effect is to work wrath, while the righteousness which God gives through faith in Christ sets men free from both the curse of the law and the inward power of sin, thus bringing them into a blessed state of justification, sanctification, and holy communion with God here, with the hope of eternal glory hereafter. Chaps. 6-8. Since the doctrine of the admission of the Gentiles ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... of policy, and in atrocious contempt of all the ties that nature and the human heart and human laws have hallowed, she was promised, (if that word may be applied to the violent obtrusion upon a man's bed of one who was doubly a curse—first, for what she brought, and, secondly, for what she took away,) and given to Tiberius, the future emperor. Upon the whole, as far as we can at this day make out the connection of a man's acts and purposes, which, even to his own age, were never ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... compelling power of fate in the case of OEdipus, while we reject as arbitrary the situations in the Ahnfrau or other destiny tragedies. And such an element is indeed contained in the history of king OEdipus. His fate touches us only because it might have been ours, because the oracle hung the same curse over us before our birth as over him. For us all, probably, it is ordained that we should direct our first sexual feelings towards our mothers, the first hate and wish for violence against our fathers. Our dreams convince us of that. King OEdipus, who has slain his father Laius and married his ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... One-half of the house was full of Confederates, and the other of Yankees. They then brought us to Burkesville, where all the Yankees were gathered together. There was an ould doctor there, and he began to curse me, and to talk about all we had done to their prisoners. I tould him, 'And what have you to say to what you done to our poor fellows?' He tould me to shut up, and sure I did. They asked me fifty questions after, and I never opened me mouth. The next day was the day when all the Confederate ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... hideous face of a fantasy of smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death—the horror was that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying and withering at ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... eye to the general infirmity of human nature, I will lay down the law, beginning with a prelude. To the intending robber we will say—O sir, the complaint which troubles you is not human; but some curse has fallen upon you, inherited from the crimes of your ancestors, of which you must purge yourself: go and sacrifice to the Gods, associate with the good, avoid the wicked; and if you are cured of the fatal impulse, well; but if ...
— Laws • Plato
... them over I heard a crash and the sound of tumbling stones, and looking out I saw that the ladder had fallen, and commenced to curse Antonio for his carelessness; but imagine my horror when I saw him throw down the bottom ladder and then run as fast as he could towards the camp. My first and only thought was to pay Antonio for his treachery. It was evidently his intention to leave me safely housed in a place from which ...
— Montezuma's Castle and Other Weird Tales • Charles B. Cory
... that God had laid down as to the times, places and manner of His worship, and gave the people instead inventions of his own. To say the least, he had no business to do this, and he exposed himself to the curse that comes upon those who take from or add to ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... heart-cry (uttered to Parthenope's female relatives, themselves too sympathetic to resent it), "I cannot stand her any longer!" This unfortunate debacle is very ingeniously contrasted with the courtship of another couple, immune from the curse; and the whole story is as fresh as it is amusing. Perhaps it might have been told in fewer words; at times the slender theme seems a trifle overladen. But probably your true Broughtonians (who must be reckoned in thousands) would condemn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... who denounced property, and was all for taxing land and landlords into the Bankruptcy Court, resent so bitterly his temporary exclusion from the family estates? Marcia could not see that there was any logical answer. If landlordism was the curse of England, why be angry that you were not asked ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Nevertheless, the old gentleman has the righteous energy which prompts him to say to the departing Euphues, already out of hearing, 'Seeing thou wilt not buy counsel at the first hand good cheap, thou shalt buy repentance at the second hand, at such unreasonable rate, that thou wilt curse thy hard pennyworth, and ban thy hard heart.' Euphues takes to himself a new sworn brother, one Philautus, who carries him to visit his lady-love, Lucilla. Lucilla is rude at first, but becomes enamored of Euphues's conversational power, and finally of himself. In fact, she unceremoniously ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... not written down any thing, except a single curious fact, which, having the sanction of his inflexible veracity, may be received as a striking instance of human insensibility and inconsideration. As he was passing by a fishmonger who was skinning an eel alive, he heard him 'curse it, because it would ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... another matter! I would rather offer pepper to a cat than talk to him of you. You would see how he would curse and swear and call you ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... immovable as the marble walls around him, stood the Roman; and he stretched out his hand over that frenzied crowd, with gesture as proudly commanding as though he still stood at the head of the gleaming cohorts of Rome. The tumult ceased; the curse, half muttered, died upon the lip; and so intense was the silence, that the clanking of the brazen manacles upon the wrists of the captive fell sharp and full upon every ear in that vast assembly, as he thus ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... heard a good sermon of Mr. Woodcocke's at our church: only in his latter prayer for a woman in childbed, he prayed that; God would deliver her from the hereditary curse of childe-bearing, which seemed a pretty strange expression. Out with Captn. Ferrers to Charing Cross; and there at the Triumph taverne he showed me some Portugall ladys, which are come to towne before the Queene. They are not handsome, and their farthingales ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... beasts (those who are not matriculated), and mangles slang: wranglers, fops, and medalists become quite "household words" to him. He walks to Trumpington every day before hall to get an appetite for dinner, and never misses grace. He speaks reverently of masters and tutors, and does not curse even the proctors; he is merciful to his wine-bin, which is chiefly saw-dust, pays his bills, and owes nobody a guinea—he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 530, January 21, 1832 • Various
... to be allowed, and the sale of rum was forbidden throughout the whole colony. For Oglethorpe knew how the Redman loved "fire-water" and how bad it was for him, and he wanted the settlement of Georgia to be a blessing and not a curse to the Redman, as well as to ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... taken by Virginia was that of peace-maker. On the one hand, such men as Washington, Madison, and Mason, who were earnestly hoping to see their own state soon freed from the curse of slavery, could not fail to perceive that if Virginia were to gain an increase of political weight from the existence of that institution, the difficulty of getting the state legislature to abolish it would be enhanced. But on the other hand, they saw that South Carolina ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... behold, in that day that they shall rebel against me, I will curse them even with a sore curse, and they shall have no power over thy seed except they shall ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... there, "This fellow was also with Jesus of Nazareth." And again he denied with an oath. "I do not know the Man." Another hour passed; and yet he did not realize his position; when another confidently affirmed that he was a Galilean, for his speech betrayed him. And he was angry and began to curse and to swear, and again denied his Master: and the ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... private life and of the individual conscience.' With an energy not unworthy of Burke at his fiercest, he denounces the fallen and impotent regality of the popes as temporal sovereigns. 'A monarchy sustained by foreign armies, smitten with the curse of social barrenness, unable to strike root downward or bear fruit upward, the sun, the air, the rain soliciting in vain its sapless and rotten boughs—such a monarchy, even were it not a monarchy of priests, and tenfold more because it is one, stands out a foul ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... dost make my brow bend to the earth. Sooner than nature! See the curse of children! In life they keep us frequently in tears; And in the cold grave leave ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... audience improve every possible opportunity for breaking into rapturous applause. Their zeal occasionally outruns their discretion, and they finally ruin the attempt of Miss RICHINGS to execute a florid cadenza at the end of one of her arias. An intelligent usher is therefore detailed to curse them into a comprehension of their duties, after which they applaud with a discretion which produces almost exactly the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 34, November 19, 1870 • Various
... use she made of it was to get the idea of dress; and the primeval curse still clings to man, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... with officers and men aboard this ship I cannot recall an instance of an officer addressing a private otherwise than is usual when a gentleman issues an order. I have never heard an officer or noncommissioned officer curse a man. During the engagement of Cabanas the orders were issued as quietly as at any other time, and the men went about their work as steadily ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... sight! For all thy meekness and thy praying and thy almsgiving, God knows it was an ill day when I set eyes on that fair face of thine!" Yet this was in no way his true thought, for in spite of his lower nature the Count loved her, but it is ever the curse of anger in a man that it shall wreak itself most despitefully on his nearest and best. And Itha, who had learned this in the school of long-suffering, answered never a word, but only prayed the ...
— A Child's Book of Saints • William Canton
... sightlessly up to the sky. The hero will be the man or woman who knows and loves and serves. In the new histories we will be shown the tragedy, the heartbreaking tragedy of war, which like some dreadful curse has followed the human family, beaten down their plans, their hopes, wasted their savings, destroyed their homes, and in every way turned ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... work, to build cities and to gather resources. All this is looked upon in the same optimistic spirit as marking progress, whereas the Biblical writer, consistent with his point of view, looks upon work as a curse, and makes Cain, the murderer, also the founder of cities. The step to the higher forms of life is not an advance according to the J document. It is interesting to note that even the phrase the "cursed ground" occurs in both the Babylonian ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... marriage, and what rivals legitimate children are, whom one dares acknowledge before God—before the world. Boast not of the love of the prince, but remember that an honorable solitude is the only situation becoming to you. Such connections bear their own curse and punishment with them. Hasten to avoid them. Lastly, I would add, never dare to mingle your impure hands in the affairs of state. I have been obliged to give the order to the state councillors in appointments and grants of office, not to regard the protection and recommendation of a ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... For the blessing of the father establisheth the houses of children; but the curse of the mother ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... devil of a disturbance in Munich; and the King's mistress, Lola Montez, has been forced to fly for her life. She has been the curse of Bavaria, yet the King is still ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... read his sturdy verse, And revelled over ringing major notes, The mournful meaning of the undersong Which runs through all he wrote, and often takes The deep autumnal, half-prophetic tone Of forest winds in March; nor did they think That on that healthy-hearted man there lay The wild specific curse which seems to cling For ever to the Poet's ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... been on the lonely moorland, Where the treacherous snow-drift lies, Where the traveller, spent and weary, Gasped fainter and fainter cries; It has heard the bay of the bloodhounds, On the track of the hunted slave, The lash and the curse of the master, And the groan that the captive gave. Hark to the voice ...
— Legends and Lyrics: First Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... because I understand you have married a woman of sense. To marry a fool—to form or to have any connexion with a fool," continued his lordship, his countenance changing remarkably as he spoke, "I conceive to be the greatest evil, the greatest curse, that can be inflicted ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... the warlocks mingle in it, Thorberg Skafting, any curse? Could you not be gone a minute But some mischief must be doing, Turning ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... It has docks, but no shipping; bonded warehouses, but no commerce. It has a community of fishermen at Claddagh, but the fisheries of the bay are neglected. As one of the poor men of the place exclaimed, "Poverty is the curse of Ireland." On looking at Galway from the Claddagh side, it seems as if to have suffered from a bombardment. Where a roof has fallen in, nothing has been done to repair it. It was of no use. The ruin has been left ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... he not hit us enough, calumniated us sufficiently, wherever there are spectators, tragedians, and a chorus? Does he not style us gay, lecherous, drunken, traitorous, boastful? Does he not repeat that we are all vice, that we are the curse of our husbands? So that, directly they come back from the theatre, they look at us doubtfully and go searching every nook, fearing there may be some hidden lover. We can do nothing as we used to, so many are the false ideas which he has instilled ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... the summer was terrible. The sun came up in that blue sky like a curse, and hung there till night came to comfort the blistering earth. And one morning a terrible thing happened. Annie was standing out of doors in the shade of those miserable little oaks, ironing, when suddenly a blast of air struck her in the face, which made her look up startled. ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... aside his war gear, and sought the quiet of his own home and the cheering presence of fair Cleopatra. For the remembrance of his mother's curse and his country's ingratitude weighed heavily on his mind, and he cared no longer to mingle with his ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... and maybe I won't. I have the money, and Bob or Bill will never dare to ask for it back. If you ever see me in the Assembly again you'll know that I'm going to vote for Burroughs—curse him!" ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... far than the discovery of all the Nile sources together. Now that you have done with domestic slavery for ever, lend us your powerful aid toward this great object. This fine country is blighted, as with a curse from above, in order that the slavery privileges of the petty Sultan of Zanzibar may not be infringed, and the rights of the Crown of Portugal, which are mythical, should be kept in abeyance till some future time when Africa will become ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... to read the cause that could lie deep enough for so imperishable an impression,—they were pariahs. The Jews that, in the twenty-eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, were cursed in a certain contingency with a sublimer curse than ever rang through the passionate wrath of prophecy, and that afterwards, in Jerusalem, cursed themselves, voluntarily taking on their own heads, and on the heads of their children's children forever and ever, the guilt of innocent blood,—they are pariahs to this hour. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... continued, "you will know why I live here as I do; you will understand something of the web of mystery that is woven about this place. You will see the curse that rests upon ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... the blanket and peered out—only to suffer the sting of a thousand needles. Again, he hunched his shoulders guardedly and endeavored to roll a cigarette; but the tempestuous blasts discouraged this also, and with a curse he dashed the tobacco from him. After that he remained still, listening, until he heard an agreeable change outside. The screeching sank to a crooning; the crooning dropped to a low, musical sigh. Flinging off the blanket, ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... is the Price of the Stocks; if he looks over the Advertisements, it is in Quest of some new Project; when he has finished his Enquiry, and mixes in Conversation, you hear him expatiate upon the Advantage of some favourite Project, or curse his Stars for missing the lucky Moment of buying as he intended at the Rise of the South-Sea. Another complains of the Roguery of some Broker or Director, whom he intrusted; this I have heard canvass'd over and over, with so many Aggravations of Meanness and Knavery ...
— The Theater (1720) • Sir John Falstaffe
... Chiavari is the native place of the barrel-organ, that from this little town go forth to all the dwellers in remotest lands the grinders of the many-cylindered torment, the persecutor of the prose-writer, the curse of him who calculates. Just as the valleys of Savoy supply white-mice men, and Lucca produces image-carriers, so does Chiavari yield its special product, the organ-grinder. Other towns, in their ambitions, have attempted the "industry," but they have egregiously ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... "I curse the hour and the day on which I made your acquaintance, for it is not possible to load the heart of a poor lover with more sorrows, regrets, and bitter cares than oppress and weigh down my heart to-day. Alas! I chose you amongst ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... the Italian submitted, and threw his Goods over-Board, with many a bitter Curse to the Gods both above and below, that he had committed his Life to so barbarous ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... Carter, that I would give my heart to you yesterday and today to another? I thought that it lay buried with your ashes in the pits of Warhoon, and so today I have promised my body to another to save my people from the curse ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this, he came down from his shop and seized the broker by the collar, saying, "O scurviest of brokers, what aileth thee to bring us a damsel to flout and make mock of us, one after other, with her verses and talk that a curse is?" So the broker took her and carried her away from before him and fared, saying, "By Allah, all my life long, since I have plied this profession never set I eyes on the like of thee for unmannerliness ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... door was shut in my face of the only man I ever tamed my spirit to ask aid from: yes, the cowardly hypocrite that dared not deny me to my face, sent his lacquey to tell me he was unwell, and could not be disturbed by beggars. May the curse—' ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite
... immortal, viz., in the record which it furnishes, that by meekness of submission, and by earnest conflict with evil, in the spirit of cheerfulness, it is possible ultimately to disarm or to blunt the very heaviest of curses—even the curse of lunacy. Had it been whispered, in hours of infancy, to Lamb, by the angel who stood by his cradle—"Thou, and the sister that walks by ten years before thee, shall be through life, each to each, the solitary fountain of comfort; and except it be ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... urged him to embark in person for a holy war against the Saracens of Sicily; he was prevented by death, and Basil, surnamed the Slayer of the Bulgarians, was dismissed from the world with the blessings of the clergy and the curse of the people. After his decease, his brother Constantine enjoyed, about three years, the power, or rather the pleasures, of royalty; and his only care was the settlement of the succession. He had enjoyed sixty-six years the title of Augustus; and the reign of the two ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... informs the audience (what they did not know before) that, from a clump of shrubbery, he had seen fully as much as they of the preceding scene. He does not blame Fidelia. Oh! no. In her cruel dilemma, she could do no less. But he curses—and curses again—and continues to curse for some time—that Fate which deprives him of the "paltry means" (one hundred and seventy thousand florins) to buy off the "heartless monster" (Rodicaso). Having wreaked himself upon Destiny to his own satisfaction, he suddenly remembers that he has not ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... "It's the curse of the Irish to feel the wounds of others as keenly as though they were one's own," she said, as she sat down again. "What concern is it of mine whether the old fool hoards his money and drives lost souls to perdition? I've no right to worry about other people's troubles. Sure ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... pursuing of steeds, Pelops in his car drawn by four horses perpetrated, as he drove, the murder of Myrtilus, by casting him into the sea, hurling him down to the surge of the ocean, as he guided his car on the shore of the briny sea by Geraestus foaming with its white billows. Whence the baleful curse came on my house since, by the agency of Maia's son,[30] there appeared the pernicious, pernicious prodigy of the golden-fleeced lamb, a birth which took place among the flocks of the warlike Atreus. On which both Discord drove back the ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... why the daisy is white, my dear, I know why the seas are blue; I know that the world is a dream, my dear, and I know that the dream is true; I know why the rose and the toad-stool grow, as a curse and a crimson boon, Hey! diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... a gentleman commoner at —— College, Cambridge; and at nineteen a suit of solemn black, and the possession of five thousand a year, bespoke me heir to all my father left; and from that hour have I had cause to curse the title of this paper. Young and inexperienced, I entered wildly into all the follies wealth can purchase or fashion justify; but I was still to be the victim of the phrase. "We'll take care of him," said a knot of the most determined play-men upon town; and they did. Two ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... there is no infinite; in presence of that lying nature which adorns itself with a thousand symbols of immortality, while yet there is no immortality; in presence of all these deceptions, man may be allowed to curse the day of his birth, or to abandon himself to the intoxication of thoughtless pleasure. But, a secret instinct tells us that wretchedness is a disorder, and thoughtless pleasure a degradation. Let us have confidence in this deep utterance ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... necessary qualification for recognition as a scholar, and the best passport for an appointment to many of the higher teaching posts in England. But the emphatic warning comes from the experience of Germany that even the very perfection of educational systems and methods may be used so as to be a curse to the country which has adopted them. Published statistics show that juvenile crime, often of the most revolting kind, is rampant, and has been increasing in Germany, that suicides have become common even amongst the very young. The highly efficient mental drill provided by German ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... would look as well agin in him to show a good road—a good country road, that one could go over in the spring of the year without wishin' to do as Job did—curse God ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... our people against the fear of death. Had he only done so, what a lot of letters to the Times, advertisements of patent medicines; and Eugenic discussions we should have been spared! If earthly immortality were known to be such a curse, we could more easily convince the most scrupulous devotee of health that old age was ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... help make you fat or thin, and they will keep you supple, graceful, and light on your feet, so that when I tell my husband that he must dance with you, Madam, he will not say, "Nothing stirring," and when you, Professor, ask me to dance, I will not curse ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... at that tea, too! Don't you see it steaming over there? What wouldn't I give for just one cup! Ten minutes more and it may be too late. The pain will come on again—and it will be very doubtful if I shall ever get home. I'm close on the stage when one begins to digest one's own stomach. Curse it! I won't starve any longer! Matt! she's in there all ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... Cannon is the son of George Q. Cannon of Utah, who was First Councillor of the Mormon Church from 1880 to 1901. After the death of Brigham Young, George Q. Cannon's diplomacy saved the Mormon communism from destruction by the United States government. It was his influence that lifted the curse of polygamy from the Mormon faith. Under his leadership Utah obtained the right of statehood; and his financial policies were establishing the Mormon people in industrial prosperity when ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... one means by happiness," he said briefly, having to step aside in order to avoid a groom with a bucket. "Why do you think I shall be happy? I don't expect to be anything of the kind. I expect to be rather less unhappy. I shall write a book and curse my charwoman—if happiness consists in that. What ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... devoured me, and I caught them by the jaws and slew them. I thy servant slew the lion and the bear, therefore this Philistine uncircumcised shall be as one of them. I shall now go and deliver Israel from this opprobrium and shame. How is this Philistine uncircumcised so hardy as to curse the host of the living God? And yet said David: The Lord that kept me from the might of the lion and from the strength of the bear, he will deliver me from the power of the Philistine. Saul said then to David: Go, and our Lord be ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... be it from us to think that the weak hand of the woman could facilitate the work which was guided only by the miraculous hand of God. The Virgin conceived our Lord without the lusts of the flesh, and therefore she had not the pangs and travel of woman upon her, she brought him forth without the curse of the flesh. These be the Fathers' comparisons. As bees draw honey from the flower without offending it, as Eve was taken out of Adam's side without any grief to him, as a sprig issues out of the bark of a tree, as the sparkling light from the brightness of the star, such ease was it to ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... to curse silently at the complaisance of this people. What could he not do if they would help. Ten companies of trained men, armed with their deadly electronic projectors that disintegrated any living thing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... necessary to send down to India for help? Cholera at Capoo might mean cholera everywhere in this new unknown country. What about the women and children? The Wandering Jew was abroad; would he wander in our direction, with the legendary curse following on his heels? Was I destined to meet this dread foe a third time? I admit that the very thought caused a lump to rise in my throat. For I love Thomas Atkins. He is manly and honest according to his lights. It does not hurt me very much to see him with a bullet ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... quit the old faiths," she continued rapidly, "and gone to preaching Christian Socialism. You have driven the best members of the church away, and made the press your enemy. That mob which hails you a god will turn and curse you. You will never build your marble dream out of such stuff. Both your sermons to-day will make your trustees more hostile. There was no Bible in them—only personalities and rank Socialism. I saw that woman in front of me drinking it all in ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... their condition, that between master and slave there are ties of mutual attachment and affection, that the virtues of the master are refined and exalted by the degradation of the slave; while at the same time they vent execrations upon the slave-trade, curse Britain for having given them slaves, burn at the stake negroes convicted of crimes for the terror of the example, and writhe in agonies of fear at the very mention of human rights as applicable to men of color. The impression produced upon my mind by the progress of this ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... economical husbandry which redeemed the rocky sierra from the curse of sterility, they dug below the arid soil of the valleys, and sought for a stratum where some natural moisture might be found. These excavations, called by the Spaniards hoyas, or "pits," were made on a great scale, comprehending frequently more than ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... think that I am saying what I cannot do. We are inflexibly determined to stamp the curse of war out here and now, if it cost millions of lives to do so. Your forces are surrounded, your aerostats are captured or destroyed. It is no use mincing matters at a moment like this. It is life or death with you. If you do not believe me, General le ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... of this deity Nursed at the teat of thine imagination, Was bred, brought up by thine own vanity, Whose being thou mayst curse from the creation; And so thou list, thou may as soon forget love, As thou at first didst ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... the navvies in the Five Towns had reached even her: how they drank and swore all day on Sundays, how their huts and houses were dens of the most appalling infamy, how they were the curse of a God-fearing and respectable district! She and Gerald Scales glanced down at these dangerous beasts of prey in their yellow corduroys and their open shirts revealing hairy chests. No doubt they both thought how inconvenient it was that railways could not be brought ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we display ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... entirely; and in some sunny corner of the uninhabited rooms up-stairs she spent her days, toiling at such sewing as was needful, and silent as the dead, save as her life appealed to God from the ground, and called down the curse of Cain upon a head she would have shielded from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... blasphemy against Nature never found expression. No natural function ought to cause constant suffering or disease; and if it does, the rational inference is that something is wrong in the circumstances. The Orientals invented the myth of Eve and the apple, and the curse pronounced upon her, to explain the sorrows and infirmities of the sex, which were, in fact, a consequence, not of God's wrath, but of man-made conditions and customs. If you once admit that these sorrows and infirmities are inseparable from woman's natural constitution, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... Feng assured herself that there was no one about. "How is it," she next asked, "that I'm like a queen of hell, or like a 'Yakcha' demon? That courtesan swore at me and wished me dead; and did you too help her to curse me? If I'm not nice a thousand days, why, I must be nice on some one day! But if, poor me, I'm so bad as not even to compare with a disorderly woman, how can I have the face to come and spend my life with ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... pockets: they told their parents about him: and, though at first they had been inclined to look askance at his advances, they were won over by the frank open manners of their noisy neighbor, whose piano-playing and terrific disturbance overhead had often made them curse:—(for Christophe used to feel stifled in his room and take to pacing up and down like a caged bear).—They did not find it easy to talk to him. Christophe's rather boorish and abrupt manners sometimes made Elie Elsberger shudder. But it was all in vain ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... sighs opprest. Turbulent brothers of the stars, Companions of the tempests of the seas, Those lights are all that may avail Peace to restore; murderous yet innocent; Which, open or concealed, Will bless with calm, or curse with pride. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... ten days after the lieutenant asked me if I would not now confess that which they had before asked of me. I answered, that I had already said as much as I would. Three weeks after I was sent to the priest, where I was greatly assaulted, and at whose hand I received the pope's curse, for bearing witness of the resurrection of Christ. And thus I commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, with all those who unfeignedly call upon the name of Jesus; desiring God of his endless mercy, through the merits of his dear Son Jesus Christ, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... Henriette's intellect and soul and heart that were here devouring with swift flames a body without stamina; for Jacques had the milk-white skin and high color which characterize young English women doomed sooner or later to the consumptive curse,—an appearance of health that deceives the eye. Following a sign by which Henriette, after showing me Madeleine, made me look at Jacques drawing geometrical figures and algebraic calculations on a board before the Abbe Dominis, I shivered at the sight of death ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... chief officer of the city, resolved to take the opportunity of delivering the Empire from such a curse, and was joined in his enterprise by a certain sorcerer called Kao Hoshang. They sent two Lamas to the Council Board with a message that the Crown Prince was returning to the Capital to take part in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... good creation," and resist the endeavors of Ahriman to injure, and if possible, ruin it. This could only be done by careful tilling of the soil, eradication of thorns and weeds, and reclamation of the tracts over which Ahriman had spread the curse of barrenness. To cultivate the soil was thus incumbent upon all men; the whole community was required to be agricultural; and either as proprietor, as farmer, or as laboring man, each Zoroastrian was bound to "further the works of life" ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... whirling phantasmagoria of his brain. The light behind them, streaming in through the open door, confused him, made him feel as though this were all a trick of the nerves, a kind of chaotic nightmare; and with a muttered curse at his own folly in imagining for one moment that Iris Wayne herself stood before him, he fell back on the couch and closed his aching ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... divine dealing with sin as being the erasure of a writing, perhaps of an indictment. There is a special significance in the use of the word here, because it is also employed in the description of the Levitical ceremonial of the ordeal, where a curse was written on a scroll and blotted out by the priest. But apart from that the metaphor is a natural and suggestive one. Our sin stands written against us. The long gloomy indictment has been penned by our own hands. Our past is a blurred manuscript, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... been terrible. He had changed and not for the better, as he grew older, becoming a sombre, moody man; worse than all, he had succumbed to the fire-water, the curse of his race. The horrible treachery and brutality of the assault wherein his kinsfolk were slain made him mad for revenge; every wolfish instinct in him came to the surface. He wreaked a terrible vengeance for his wrongs; but in true ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... "sons of Eblis," whose stubborn courage had already twice hurled us back in confusion and disgrace with a hundred empty saddles. At first her tone was one of simple amaze and horror. It softened afterwards into wonder and perplexity, and the oft-repeated rebuke or curse was on its last recurrence spoken with more of pitying tenderness and regret than ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... one-idea parties. The Prohibitionists, a unit now, took the field on the "army canteen" issue, making much of the fact that our increased export to the Philippines consisted largely of beer and liquors to curse our soldiers. The anti-fusion or "Middle-of-the-road" Populists, the Socialist Labor Party, the Socialist-Democrats, and the United ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... to speak of infelicities of diction in a book so justly famous as the Prayer Book for its pure and wholesome English. Wordsworth's curse on ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... the unconscious girl to her chamber, leaving Gregory to curse himself for having been lured into a confession that it now seemed to him had been unnecessary, since in his newly found vitality he realized that death was none so near a thing as that scoundrelly fool of a leech had led ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... (prolonging the time as much as he might) aduised to send a letter to the great Turke, the which his grandfather had written or caused to be written. In the which letter he gaue his malediction or curse to his children and successours, if they enterprised to besiege Rhodes. The sayd Robert Perruse bare the sayd letter, and as he was accustomed, he went to Acmek Basha for to cause him to haue audience, and to present the sayd letter. And the Basha sayd hee would see the letter: for it is ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... ain't able to git under the Injun's hide. They'll go with the British an' burn, an' rob, an' kill. The settlers 'll give hot blood to their childern. The Injun 'll be forever a brother to the snake. We an' our childern an' gran'childern 'll curse him an' meller his head. The League o' the Iroquois 'll be scattered like dust in the wind, an' we'll wonder where it has gone. But 'fore then, they's goin' to be great trouble. The white settlers has got to give up their land an' move, 'er turn ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... Birtwell as they talked still farther about the unhappy case, "how much easier is prevention than cure! How much easier to keep a stumbling-block out of another's way than to set him on his feet after he has fallen! Oh, this curse of drink!" ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... think poorly at all. You were never meant to work. Your curse is the curse of Eve, not Adam. You ought to have a child. You wouldn't be wasting your soul out on a man then. You'd take every farthing that Traill's left you, as it's only right you should. You don't see any right ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... avoided in like manner. A hail-storm of abuse followed these first hostilities. He rose into a passion against the Queen; reproaching her with the bad training she gave her children; and, addressing my Brother: 'You have reason to curse your Mother,' said he, 'for it is she that causes your being an ill-governed fellow (UN MAL GOUVERNE). I had a Preceptor,' continued he, 'who was an honest man. I remember always a story he told me in my youth. There was a man, at Carthage, who had been condemned ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... place was given up to fire and sword; and all the bitterness of hatred was manifested by the soldiery, both European and native. "Not a man was spared; the Affghans were hunted down like vermin; and whenever the dead body of an Affghan was found, the Hindoo sepoys set fire to the clothes, that the curse of a 'burnt father' might attach to his children." General Pollock also determined to destroy the Char Chouk, the principal bazaar in Cabul, where the remains of the unfortunate Sir William M'Naghten had been exposed to insult. This bazaar was destroyed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... I am, and always have been, opposed to slavery. It is an institution that not only degrades the slave, but brutalizes the slave-holder, and I pledge you my word that I shall use my best endeavors—yes, that I shall lay down my life, if need be—to keep this curse from finding lodgment upon Kansas soil. It is enough that the fairest portions of our land are already infected with this blight. May it spread no farther. All my energy and my ability shall swell the effort to bring in Kansas ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... how people act when confronted by the ruin of their hopes. Do they rave and curse and cry aloud? He could not think clearly—his mind seemed to avoid the real issue and refuse to strike on the sore place, and he thought of all ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... fire. Deep snow inflicts severe hardship. A trackless journey ends in safety and a hospitable welcome. Provisions exorbitant in price. A march on snowshoes. Sleds of native pattern are made. Delay through water on the ice. Bitter cold and the curse of solitude. A dismal swamp. Unfriendly Indians and the purchasing power of whiskey. The main source of the Mississippi comes into view. Disabled by excessive exertion. Hoists the flag. Visits of ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... the absolute truth. There was no deceit or suppression in her clear gaze; if anything, only the faintest look of wonder at his astonishment. And he—this jealously guarded secret, the curse of his whole wretched life, had been guessed by this simple girl, without comment, without reserve, without horror! And there had been no scene, no convulsion of Nature, no tragedy; he had not thrown himself into ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... swell the Jingo train and ape the tricks of Tories: Let Rosebery share with Chamberlain his cheap Imperial glories: Let Primrose Leaguers' base applause to Duty's promptings blind you— Desert an outraged nation's cause, and take this curse ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... credible that Father Diaz was unacquainted with the people who so broke his heart, and that he did not know the measures resorted to in the country. A few pages farther on the same father says: "The poverty of these Indians is not their curse, but it is their own idleness and laziness, and they content themselves with little. They are not ruled by covetousness; and, although there is some covetousness, their fondness for doing nothing tempers it, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... even brought Cyprus nearer with a tender home claim, to hear of the wanderings of San Marco among those temples of Aphrodite; and his scorn of the unholy worship kindled her soul as the Patriarch told how the young Evangelist had not feared to curse the godless Cyprian city for its idolatry—of the tumult that had been raised by his followers, as they hurled the images of the Pagan gods from their pedestals, ruining portions of the huge, unholy structure as they fell and killing some of those who ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... about to repeat. When I tell them, "I cannot promise this, I cannot answer for the other, I must see my principal, I have not the money, I am a poor man and it does not rest with me," they are so unbelieving and so impatient, that they sometimes curse me in Jehovah's name.' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Christian enterprises, the thought recurred of vast blessings to be wrought for the Dark Continent by the agency of colored men Christianized, civilized, and educated in America. Good men reverently hoped to see in this triumphant solution of the mystery of divine providence in permitting the curse of African slavery, through the cruel greed of men, to be inflicted on the American republic. In 1816 Mills successfully pressed upon the Presbyterian "Synod of New York and New Jersey" a plan for educating Christian men of color for the work of the gospel in their ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... disease—in the night. Her last word to me was her curse: I don't think I could have borne her blessing. My other relatives will not grieve much on my account. Essie will cry for a day or two; but I have provided for her: I made my own will ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... gone to the extreme of drudgery and others because it has shrunk into nothingness and futility. Sometimes people become ill because their personality, hungry for work, is given nothing but introspection to feed upon. This is the self-imposed curse of the ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... Mait. The curse of having lived in these wilds cleaves to me in all things. Here are Andre and Mortimer, and a hundred more, and none but I ...
— The Bride of Fort Edward • Delia Bacon
... toward the centre of the town, preceded by the six cavasses, who shouted to the motley crowd to make way for their high lordships, and when the promptest obedience was not rendered whacked the offenders with their canes with great impartiality and no light hand. Hardly a curse or a scowl resulted from this treatment, the crowd mostly seeming to take the stick discipline ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... growing smaller. I have lived in a little world all my life. The only information I get of the big world comes through well-meaning, but often prejudiced, persons. I do not know man as I should. I believe to know God you must know man. Alfred, I am told intemperance is the curse of the theatrical profession. Are many ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... so weary of the Curse of Living The endless, aimless torture, tumult, fears. Surely, if life were any God's free giving, He, seeing His gift, long ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... was always a secondary consideration. When the pestilence had abated, the mayor sent them a certificate expressing his approbation of their conduct. But even these men, whose worth commanded respect, were not safe from the legalized curse that rests upon their hunted race. A Southern speculator arrested Bishop Allen, and claimed him as a fugitive slave, whom he had bought running. The constable employed to serve the warrant was ashamed to drag the good man through the streets; and he merely said, in a ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... woman beautiful will aim to marry a man mentally and physically fit to be the father of her children. An immoral, vile-tongued, untruthful or diseased father is a curse to his race. It is her duty and aim to improve ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... this appeal no solemn murmur ensued, for at that instant a scream arose from the bed, and to the sound of an opening door rang out the words: "Keep her away! What do you let her come in here for, to confound me and make me curse the day she was ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... by the little field where she strayed I was never good at catechism The blind tyranny of the just Visions of the artistic temperament—delight and curse ...
— Quotations From Gilbert Parker • David Widger
... Devil, surpassed Cicero and the humanists and all that had ever been known in the virulence of its invective against "the most hellish father, St. Paul, or Paula III" and his "hellish Roman church." "One would like to curse them," he wrote, "so that thunder and lightning would strike them, hell fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them"—and so on for page after ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... part of Wessex. Vast sums of Danegelt were yearly sent out of the country to buy off the fresh invasions which were perpetually threatened. Then Ethelred the Unready, Ethelred Evil-counsel, advised himself to fulfil his name, and the curse which Dunstan had pronounced against him at the baptismal font. By his counsel the men of Wessex rose against the unsuspecting Danes, and on St. Brice's eve, A. D. 1002, murdered them all with tortures, man, woman, and child. It may be that they only did to the children as the fathers had done ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... "I tried to be happy; but you see, the life doesn't suit me. Tour father couldn't rest in this house, though he had made himself such a comfortable home. No more can I rest here. There is a curse upon the house, perhaps," he added, ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... leaped to his horse and with a curse rode on. The woman laughed as he passed beneath, then sat down in the dusky loft with a red pool ...
— The Indian's Hand - 1892 • Lorimer Stoddard
... peasants, some of whose names are still preserved, are said to have disturbed divine service on Christmas Eve by dancing and brawling in the church-yard, whereupon the priest, Ruprecht, inflicted a curse upon them, that they should dance and scream for a whole year without ceasing. This curse is stated to have been completely fulfilled, so that the unfortunate sufferers at length sank knee deep into the earth, and remained the whole time without nourishment, until they were finally released by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... stounde! 1695 Gan for to aproche, as they by signes knewe, For whiche hem thoughte felen dethes wounde; So wo was hem, that changen gan hir hewe, And day they goonnen to dispyse al newe, Calling it traytour, envyous, and worse, 1700 And bitterly the dayes light they curse. ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... thought to regret that he did not teach me the making of evil medicine. Would I had all the curses in the world! (Turning piteously to him.) But you do not love me any the less because I have not one little, little curse ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... is haunted by the fear that he will die during a general election, and that his obituary notices will be seriously curtailed by the space taken up by the election results. The curse of our party system, from his point of view, is that it takes up so much room in ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... not recognize it. But the Highmarket police, to whom it would be handed, would know it at once to be the Mayor's: it was one which Mallalieu carried almost every day—a plain, very stout oak staff. And the police would want to know how it came to be in that quarry. Curse it!—was ever anything so unfortunate!—however could he have so far lost his head as to forget it? He was half tempted to rise in the middle of the night and set out for the moors, to find it. But the ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... McMurrough answered violently. It went sadly against the grain with him to shield his enemy, but so it must be. "Curse you, let him in!" he continued fiercely; they were making his task more hard for him. "And have a care of him," he added anxiously. "Do you hear? Have ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Roman rule was an intolerable injustice, that it ought not to be endured, that resistance to it was right and proper and would be crowned with success by the intervention of God. If he heard Jesus say, "Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you ... as ye would that men should do to you do ye to them likewise; for if ye love them that love you what thank have you ... love ye your enemies," what would such a man have thought? In the ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... Libraries for forty shillings price: a shame it is to be spoken. This stuff hath he occupied in the stead of gray paper by the space of more than these ten years; and yet he hath store enough for as many years to come. . . . Our posterity may well curse this wicked fact of our age, this unreasonable spoil of England's most noble antiquities, unless they be stayed in time.' Fuller, in his 'Church History of Britain,' quotes Bale's lamentation, and adds his own testimony on the same subject: 'As brokers in Long Lane, when ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... Even to tipmost lance and topmost helm, In blood-red armor sallying, howl'd to the King, "The teeth of Hell flay bare and gnash thee flat!— Lo! art thou not that eunuch-hearted King Who fain had clipt free manhood from the world— The woman-worshipper? Yea, God's curse, and I! Slain was the brother of my paramour By a knight of thine, and I that heard her whine And snivel, being eunuch-hearted too, Sware by the scorpion-worm that twists in hell, And stings itself to everlasting ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... a gatewarden! by a knave! by a ploughman's son from Lincolnshire!' he cried. 'A' cracked my skull with a pikestave and kicked me about the ribs when I lay on the ship's floor, sick like a pig. God curse the day you sent me to Calais, a gentleman's son, to be beat by a boor!' He broke off and began again. 'God curse you and the day I saw you! God curse Kat Howard and the day I carried her letter! God curse my sister Margot and the day she gar'd me carry the letters! And may a swift death ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... Ascalon's curse of blood had descended to him; it was no mitigation in her eyes that he had slain for her. But he had brought her security. Although he had paid the tremendous price, he had given ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... writers of some of the articles in the Edinburgh Review, I can tell you, having had to-day, from my literary intelligencer, Mr. Holland, two huge sheets, very entertaining and sensible. Jeffrey wrote the article on Parliamentary Reform and that on the Curse of Kehama, Sydney Smith that on Toleration, and Malthus that on Bullion; and if you have any curiosity, I can also tell you those in the Quarterly, among whom Canning is one. Thank my aunt for her information ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... hast thy country's cause at heart thou wilt hear me in this thing. I will give you back the lords you all love. I will trouble you no more myself. I would I had never seen this evil place. It has been nought but a curse to me from the ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... shall the Enemies of GOD be more active against his Cause: than his People for it? GOD forbid. If the Work being so far carried on, shall now mis-carry, and fail in our hands, our own consciences shall condemne us, and posterity shall curse us: But if wee stand stoutly and stedfastly to it, the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in our hands, and all ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... the man, but I would hardly have heeded it but for that which followed. When his back was fairly turned there came a wee wifie out o' the corner, where she had been watchin', and shook her neive (fist) at him and ca'ed him ill names. It was like a curse upon him. And she bade him go hame to his fine house, where he would have to live his leefu' lane a' his days as a punishment for his wickedness. I had a few words with her after that. She was unco curious to hear ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... alone? Saint John! I would sooner slit a hundred throats than have his shadow fall on me. Was it not he that hanged Orso and the twelve! A curse upon the ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... answer, as he plunged on, not knowing where, and not caring, was when the roan reeled suddenly and flung forward to the ground. Even that violent stop did not unseat Red Pierre. He jerked up on the reins with a curse and drove in the spurs. Valiantly the horse reared his shoulders up, but when he strove to rise the right foreleg dangled helplessly. He had stepped in some hole and the ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... his mules to 'buckle' up a strap somewhere. I was surprised to hear him cursing something under his breath. It was not his manner, I thought, to curse straps or mules. We said good-bye a very cordial one and then drove down towards the main road. It winds through a vlei towards the town. We had got almost to the big water-course so banked up in thirsty sand, when he told me what he was cursing. He repeated his words deliberately: ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... from my shoulder-blade, and mine arm be broken from the bone. If I [have] rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him: Neither have I suffered my mouth to sin, by wishing a curse to his soul. The stranger did not lodge in the street; but I opened my doors to the traveller. If my land cry against me, or that the furrows likewise thereof complain: If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money, or have caused the owners thereof to lose ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... the visit of the Dark Angel, when Egypt awoke, and found not a house in which there was not one dead. If such fearful waste of life goes on here, with no decisive or final advantage on either side attained, that ancient curse may ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... won't do you any good; you've got to fight this battle out, I'm afraid, by yourself, trusting in the deep love of your husband to teach him forbearance. Your father's and my troubles were never very big because we shared the curse, so we knew how to sympathize with ...
— The Girl with the Green Eyes - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... sarcasms of their kindred; the malediction of my father—my exile from my native land—my enrolment amongst the infamous caste of courtezans; the blood with which my days have been and will be stained; that imperishable curse attached to my name, instead of that immortality of virtue which you have taught me to doubt. It is for this that you would purchase my forgiveness. Do you know any price on earth capable of purchasing ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... poverty's sake from the observance of the implacable conditions. He spoke literally of the "need" to create, usually in the French term, besogne; and he was inclined to regard the imposition of this need on a man rather as a curse laid upon him than as a privilege and a pleasure. But I must not enlarge upon this further than to observe that this portion of his "Life" which I was approaching coincided in point of time with that period ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... was free of the vain imaginings which curse the lives of those who boast the culture of civilization. She was content in her woman's memory, in her looking forward, and the present was full of an hundred and one occupations which held her mind to the exclusion ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... "Lead I cannot, but my posterity curse me in my grave if I follow not with the foremost wherever thou shalt ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... declared Miss Jinny emphatically. "If we were idling around, musing on ourselves from morning till night like some poor creatures do, we'd get prickly mighty soon. People were made to work, and it's flying in the face of Providence to try to get away from it. We all got our share in the curse of Adam, and the sooner we realize ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... that our line was doomed. I saw men stand, regardless of exposure, and curse the day. For more than eighteen hours we had been near the Federal lines. We had no hope. We knew that our line, marching out for attack, could not even reach the enemy. Before it could come within charging distance it would be beaten to pieces ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... to be completed at the expense of the Company, in I know not (yet) how many volumes foolscap folio. I am busy getting up my Hindoo mythology; and for the purpose I am once more enduring Southey's Curse. To be serious, Coleridge's state and affairs make me so; and there are particular reasons just now, and have been any time for the last twenty years, why he should succeed. He will do so with a little encouragement. I have not seen ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... yet visited the northern part of the lake, there where it was so dark, and mysterious, and where—as old Nonna used to relate—evil spirits dwelt, and a giant covered with pumice-stone was compelled by a curse to live. Perhaps, if he could only get to the other shore, he might see a ghost! That was a tempting prospect! So he turned the bow of the boat towards the north, and bidding his companion to row hard, did the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Never curse my memory. Remember that the worst pang of my agony is in dying far from my children, far from my wife, without a friend to close my eyes. Farewell, my own Caroline. Farewell, my children. I send you my blessing, my most tender tears, my last kisses. Farewell, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MURAT—1815 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... shall Jove, albeit he is self-willed in his temper, be lowly, in such[76] wedlock is he prepared to wed, as shall hurl him out of his sovereignty and off his throne a forgotten thing; and the curse of his father Saturn shall then at length find entire consummation, which he imprecated when he was deposed from his ancient throne. From disasters such as these there is no one of the gods besides myself that can clearly disclose to him a way ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... molding unmade spheres, And, like a blessing or a curse, They thunder down the formless years, And ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... what curse of what gods falls this calamity," the boy went on, "that we of the Chief Commissioner's stockades are forced to receive a mahout from the Vindha Hills; and an unreputed elephant—from the ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... long ago shed the last tear of regret for one whom they believed to be as pure as you are now. Why should you take her to them from the tomb, living still, but a loathsome mass of sin? I am equal to my destiny. The curse is great, but I will bear it alone; and the curse of God will fall upon ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Greek mythology, the spirit of revenge, which prompts the members of a family to commit fresh crimes to obtain satisfaction. These crimes necessitate further acts of vengeance, and the curse is thus transmitted from generation to generation. The word is also used for a man's evil genius, which drives him to sin without any provocation; a man so driven is sometimes called Alastor. The epithet is applied to Zeus and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... extent to which I carried my curses and wishes, on this occasion, frightened the officers. They said nothing, but let me curse myself out, to my heart's content. A man soon wearies of so bootless a task, and the storm passed off, like one in the heavens, with a low rumbling. I gave myself no concern about the matter afterwards, but things took their course until noon. ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... between a groan and a curse. "Oh, you poor, crazy child! Can nothing make you understand that Bartley wants to get rid of you, and that he's just as ready for one lie as another? He thinks he can make out a case of abandonment with the least trouble, and ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... them. He managed to impress a sense of his own importance upon everybody, including the headmaster. He slid into a position of superiority. above three or four colleagues who would have shamed him at an examination, and who uttered many a curse because they saw themselves surpassed and put in the shade by a stranger, who, they were confident, could hardly construct a hexameter. He never quarrelled with them nor did he grossly patronise them, but he always let ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... the patent" is the curse of the French patentee. A man may spend ten years of his life in working out some obscure industrial problem; and when he has invented some piece of machinery, or made a discovery of some kind, he takes out a patent and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... wall of Damascus. [289]I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza. [290]I will send a fire on the wall of Tyrus. [291]I will kindle a [292]fire in the wall of Rabbah. As the crime which brought down this curse was idolatry, and the term used in all these instances is Chomah; I should think that it related to a temple of Chom, and his high places, called by the Greeks [Greek: lophoi mastoeideis]: and to these the spouse of Solomon certainly alludes, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... thy eyes up from the poor, but give Proportion to their merits, and thy purse; Thou may'st in rags a mighty prince relieve, Who, when thy sins call for't, can fence a curse. Thou shalt not lose one mite. Though waters stray, The bread we cast returns in fraughts ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the word "Garrison." The Irish are essentially right when they talk as if all Protestant Unionists lived inside "The Castle." They have all the virtues and limitations of a literal garrison in a fort. That is, they are valiant, consistent, reliable in an obvious public sense; but their curse is that they can only tread the flagstones of the court-yard or the cold rock of the ramparts; they have never so much as set their foot ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... office—at a bar for criminals—to stand a spectacle for the public, amid robbers, and murderers, and to run the fearful chances of the law, I solemnly warn you, old man, you will have innocent blood on your conscience—you will call down God's curse upon your head." ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... eatin' chicken, if you've ever seen bricks piled, kind a thrown down in a pile around a mortar box, that's the way the chicken bones looked around Uncle Lemuel's plate; and all the time there was a lot of talk about the evil of intemperance and the curse of strong drink, and grandpa said that he'd seen slavery abolished, and the time would come when strong drink ...
— Mitch Miller • Edgar Lee Masters
... ripe." And he waited and watched for the day of reckoning. One day there was evidence of short circuiting, and Holroyd, making an unwary examination—it was in the afternoon—got a rather severe shock. Azuma-zi from behind the engine saw him jump off and curse at the peccant coil. ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... transport in western Queensland, I was for a few weeks put in charge of the camel-loading. Camels are curious beasts and know to an ounce the weight they carried yesterday, and if you attempt to put on them one jam-tin more they will curse you long and loud, end up with some very sarcastic and personal remarks, and then submit to the injustice under protest. They are very revengeful and will harbor a grudge for days, waiting their chance to bite your arm off ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... the man who did the guilty deed, Whether alone he lurks, or leagued with more, I pray that he may waste his life away, For vile deeds vilely dying; and for me, If in my house, I knowing it, he dwells, May every curse I spake on my ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... again the copy of Shakespeare's works, she glanced at the play where the book was lying open. It was "Timon of Athens," and the page upon which her eyes rested contained Timon's terrible curse outside the walls of Athens. She read it through, and then let the book drop upon her lap, wondering why any one in his right mind could so curse his fellow beings. She glanced toward the man upon ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... At Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of 1035, when Danish and English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at Oxford Harold Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040. The place indeed was fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King Algar, left her curse on it. Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden by their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May morning, or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl's wings in the dusk above the lake ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... have been the daughter of a wandering, pioneer missionary, but the king, I mean Dingaan, murdered her parents, of whom he was jealous, after which she went mad and cursed the nation, and it is to this curse that they still attribute the death of Dingaan, and their defeats and other misfortunes of ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... who is limited by talent, personality, or preference to a single kind of role is not properly an artist at all. It is the curse of success that, in any art, a man who has pleased the public in any single thing is called upon, if he would turn it into money, to repeat it, as exactly as he can, as often as he can. If he does so, he is, again, not an artist. It is the business of every kind ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... one appointed by wisdom, and designed to secure the best interests of the human race. Come, and let us ascertain what bearing the circumscribed sphere of woman has on the great political and social evils that curse and desolate the land. Come, for this cause claims your most invincible perseverance; come in single-heartedness, and with a personal self-devotion that will yield everything to Right, Truth, and Reason, but not an iota to dogmas or theoretical opinions, no matter how ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... whither I always fly in order to escape bad weather. Is it to be wondered at that even the parson here is acquiring the habit of swearing? From time to time in conversation his speech halts, and then he always swallows a curse. A few days ago, just as he was coming out of the snow-covered church, he thrashed his dog and exclaimed: "The confounded cur spoiled ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther
... this robbery they committed another upon a hop-merchant, who was riding with his wife. They searched him very carefully for money, but could find none, until Dyer beginning to curse and swear and threatening to kill him, his wife cried out, For Heaven's sake, do not murder my husband and I'll tell you where his money is. Accordingly, she declared it was in his boots, upon which Dyer cut them off his legs and found fifty guineas therein, ...
— 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
... that are killed add hundreds of thousands that survive with feeble constitutions, and millions not so strong as they should be; and you will have some idea of the curse inflicted on their offspring, by parents ignorant of the laws of life. Do but consider for a moment that the regimen to which children are subject is hourly telling upon them to their life-long injury or benefit, and that ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... serious; and, as the leaving of a banana peel upon a public platform is in its very nature "negligent," the company's lawyer would recommend settlement. Thus "Banana Anna" was able to live in comfort if not in luxury; and an infirmity that might under other circumstances have been a curse became, in fact, a blessing. Of course she took a new name and hired—temporarily—a new residence for each accident; but, as she moved from city to city, she was able to keep up the same ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... is without its pains, its fears, I may say its horrors. It is precisely on account of all these that I am now talking to you. The knowledge that my life is always safe, no matter in what peril I may be, does not relieve me from anxiety and apprehension of evil. It would be a curse to live if I were not in sound physical condition; it would be a curse to live as a slave; it would be a curse to live in a dungeon. I have known vicissitudes and hardships of every kind, but I have been fortunate enough to preserve myself whole and unscathed, ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... "No, curse it! I wish she would speak. But she never does. She scorns me, and holds her tongue. She keeps off from me, as if I was a pestilence. By George! she was fond enough of her pestilence once. And when I came a-courting, you would see miss blush—blush red, ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... made of it was to get the idea of dress; and the primeval curse still clings to man, in the shape ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... said accomplishments! If you were not living in the Pliocene age, Professor James Parkhurst, you would know that accomplishments are a curse—accomplishment is the only thing that counts. I can sing a little, play the piano a little, auction bridge a good deal; I can cook, and sew fancy things. The only thing I can do well is to dance, and no real man wants to be supported by ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... it not for the lucky bullet which removed two fingers and part of a third from the right hand of the Dyak chief. Not even a healthy savage can afford to treat such a wound lightly, and ten days elapsed before the maimed robber was able to move the injured limb without a curse. ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... at my work-table, walking restlessly about the room, stepping out into the raw air on the balcony and looking for a sign down the dark and silent road. I curse myself for my folly in entering the Hotel Metropole. The damned Turk held me in the palm of his hand. He made mock of me to his heart's content.... And Carlotta is in his power. I grow white with terror when I think of her terror. She is somewhere, locked up in ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... roguery which had been, in my opinion, practised upon him, and asked him what had become of the gold plates. He informed me that they were in a trunk with the large pair of spectacles. I advised him to go to a magistrate, and have the trunk examined. He said 'the curse of God' would come upon him should he do this. On my pressing him, however, to pursue the course which I had recommended, he told me he would open the trunk if I would take 'the curse of God' upon myself. I replied I would do so with the greatest ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... is to be forever cured—do not say of base and infamous hypocrisy, but of fanaticism, of intolerance, and of that kind of hardness which makes one anathematize and curse; it is to carry a corrective to admiration even of Bossuet, and for all who, after his example, exult, were it only in words, over their enemy dead or dying; who usurp I know not what holy speech, and involuntarily ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... fine scene of perfect beauty and deep repose, as presented to the eye, directed to nature only—to the mind's eye rolling up to nature's God—was also the (newly transfigured) theatre of man's worst and darkest passions; that the army—that odious, hideous, necessary curse of civilization, the severe and hateful guardian of liberty and peace, (though uncongenial to both)—was at that moment evoked by all the lovers of both for their salvation; was even then violating the ideal harmony of the hour, by its foul yet saving presence; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... by Eve, Adam too ate of the forbidden fruit, and the man and woman were driven out of the Happy Garden, and the curse fell upon them because ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... profess faith in Christ. And it all started from my grandmother's prayer for her sons and daughters. May God turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest He come and smite the earth with a curse! ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... considerable distance, to mingle with the murky stream of the latter, and forming a visible blue channel in its centre—a phenomenon I thought allegorical of the slave-stained condition of the one state, and the free soil of the other, for while Ohio is free from the curse of slavery, the banks of the Mississippi have for centuries been deep dyed in the life's ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... mode of treating this main incident, Shelley said that it might be remarked that, in the course of the play, he had never mentioned expressly Cenci's worst crime. Every one knew what it must be, but it was never imaged in words—the nearest allusion to it being that portion of Cenci's curse beginning—"That, if ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... through his spine as he did so. His next cry was a scream of real pain and fear. The tears gathered in his eyes with his rage and terror. He cried, "You've done for me; you've broken my back! Oh, my back; curse ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... and afford to pay for it. In practical life space is a matter of available transportation, not of geometrical planes, as the old railroad magnate knew when he threatened to make grass grow in the streets of a city that had offended him. If I am motoring and ask how far it is to my destination, I curse as an unmitigated booby the man who tells me it is three miles, and does not mention a six mile detour. It does me no good to be told that it is three miles if you walk. I might as well be told it is one mile as the crow flies. I do not fly like a crow, and I am not walking either. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... wounded leg, tingled to kick Phineas. Of course Jeanne, knowing him now to be such a gilded ass, would have nothing more to do with him. It explained her letter. He damned Phineas to all eternity, in terms compared with which the curse of Saint Ernulphus enunciated by the late Mr. Shandy was a fantastic benediction. "If I had a dog," quoth my Uncle Toby, "I would not curse him so." But if Uncle Toby had heard Doggie of the Twentieth Century Armies who also swore terribly in Flanders, for dog he would ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... it. I thought he was going to take his own life, and held my breath for the report. But nothing like that was in his mind. Instead, he laid the pistol down and deliberately tore in two the object of his anger. Then with a smothered curse he made for the ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... branch after.' I have seen his poem on the bush in a manuscript book, carefully written in the beautiful Irish character, and the great treasure of a stonecutter's cottage. This is the form of the curse: 'I pronounce ugliness upon you. That bloom or leaf may never grow on you, but the flame of the mountain fires and of bonfires be upon you. That you may get your punishment from Oscar's flail, to hack and to bruise you with the ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... and that quiet town in which Mr. Sinclair's life has passed is destined to feel its heaviest curse. Its streets are filled with soldiery. The dark canopy of smoke from which now and then a lurid flame shoots upward, shows that their work is destruction, and that they will do it well. Terrified women flit hither and thither, mingling their shrieks in ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... a cessation of armaments. He went first to Shan Si, and interviewed the Premier there; the Premier consulted his colleagues in the Shan Si ministry, and one of them said: 'War is ruinous to the people, and a fearful waste of wealth; it is the curse of the smaller Powers. Although the idea will come to nothing, we must consent to a conference; otherwise Hu P&h will consent to it first, in order to gain favour with the Powers, and thus we shall lose the predominant position we now ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... features" to boast of. The cavalry are quartered in the tin huts, but the Liverpools, Devons, Gordons, and Volunteers have pitched their own tents, and a terrible time they are having of it. Dust is the curse of the place. We remember the Long Valley as an Arcadian dell. Veterans of the Soudan recall the black sand-storms with regretful sighs. The thin, red dust comes everywhere, and never stops. It blinds your eyes, it stops your nose, it scorches your throat till the invariable shilling ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... vanished. In its stead, a burning rage swept upon him, filled his heart, and made him once more a brute thirsting for revenge. Before his distorted vision rose the mocking face of Jim Weston, and a deep growling curse spued from his lips. Then he saw Glen standing with Reynolds by the side of the street, and turning swiftly around he faced the Golden Crest, and lifting his dirty bleeding right hand, he shook his clenched fist, and hurled forth a stream of terrible ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... "that curse will always follow in the train of war: and even now the public tranquillity of England is fearfully dependent upon the seasons. And touching pestilence, you fancy yourselves secure, because the plague has not appeared among you for the last hundred and fifty years: a portion of time, which ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... night long those furtive forces moved through the forest. They passed by every road, by every lane, through every avenue of trees. I heard the whispered commands of the officers. I heard the sloshing of the mud under foot and the occasional muffled curse of some weary marcher who would slip to the ground under the weight of his burden; and I knew, all of us knew, that at the zero hour, 4:35 o'clock in the morning, all hell would land on the German line, and these men from the trees would move forward with the ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... of Hypatia, the attack of the Christians upon her chariot, the dragging of her exquisite body through the streets, and even into the church, and up to the altar, up to the foot of "the colossal Christ watching unmoved from off the wall, his right hand raised to give a blessing—or a curse?" ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... was greatness: there was that which lifted men to such deeds as write man's name across the firmament! And, strange to say, Lieutenant Lapenotiere recognised something of it in this queer old man, in dressing-gown and ill-fitting wig, who took snuff and interrupted now with a curse and anon with a "bravo!" as the Secretary read. He was absurd: but he was no common man, this Lord Barham. He had something of the ineffable ...
— News from the Duchy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that ever the slave Snaps the shackles that bind him, and leaps Into life in the heart of the brave The sense of the might that now sleeps— To which people, which side shall I cleave? Which fate shall I curse with my own? To which banner pray Heaven to give The triumph? Which ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... erection of some proper memorial of the sad past. Nothing better than the founding of a People's College could be thought of. Lamentable ignorance of the world and all therein was and yet is the direct curse of the land. The natives have had no opportunity of learning anything beyond the parrot-smattering of the Koran, the one book of Moslem schools. The rudimentary knowledge common to British schoolboys transcends all the learning of the wise in the Soudan. The people, Arabs and blacks, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... he, "when it is free from all extraneous substances, is the purest thing in the world. The curse that fell upon the ground, whereby it would no longer yield its spontaneous increase to support and comfort man, doomed it to bring forth thorns and thistles instead. 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread.' 'Dust thou art, and unto ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... on the eve of entering a privileged class, you will be one of the hundred persons who tell France what to think. In three days' time, if all goes well, you can, if you choose, make a man's life a curse to him by putting thirty jokes at his expense in print at the rate of three a day; you can, if you choose, draw a revenue of pleasure from the actresses at your theatres; you can wreck a good play and ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... manifestations of godliness, if exhibited outside their own denomination, only roused their jealousy or provoked their uncandid and malicious criticisms. The Catholic bishops acted as if they moved within something like a charmed circle, and as if a curse rested upon everything not under their own influence. Their proceedings often displayed alike their folly and inconsistency. Tertullian, for example, was a Montanist, and yet he was the writer from whom Cyprian himself derived ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... and economic problem that now confronts the entire world with an insistence that is not to be denied, is contingent on the restoration, first of all, of the holiness and the joy of work. Labour is not a curse, it is rather one of the greatest of the earthly blessings of man, provided its sanctity is recognized and its performance is accomplished with satisfaction to the labourer. In work man creates, whether the product is a bushel of potatoes from a space of once arid ground, or whether it ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... Canterbury and Abbot of Peterborough; built at both those places as well as at Rochester; famous for saintliness, and a great authority on canon law; perhaps best known generally by Sterne's comments in "Tristram Shandy" on the terrible excommunication curse contained in his "Textus Roffensis"; died ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Rochester - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See • G. H. Palmer
... Not that little Tamerlane, as his father called him, should die just to be out of her path. It was no fault of his that he was his father's son, with—how could she doubt after what Sally had just said?—the curse of his father's form of manhood or beasthood upon him. And yet, might it not have been better that he should have died, the innocent child she knew him, than live to follow his father's footsteps? Better, best of all that the whole ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... at last. The night came on. I had been sitting for a long while alone in my tent. It was dark outside. It struck two in the town. I was beginning to curse the Jew.... Suddenly Sara came in, alone. I jumped up took her in my arms... put my lips to her face.... It was cold as ice. I could scarcely distinguish her features.... I made her sit down, knelt down before her, took her ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... of criticism. Even those who do their best to resist the temptation, yield to it almost unconsciously and become the tools of toadies and flatterers. "Authorities," "disciples," and "schools" are the curse of science; and do more to interfere with the work of the scientific spirit ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... treat me cruelly, Moo Moo. You don't understand me. No man ever really understands a woman. There are terrible depths to my nature. I had a long talk with Dr. Aesculapius only last week, and he told me I'm too introspective. It's the curse of us emotional women. I'm really quite worried, but much you care, much you care. [A note of tears comes into her voice.] I'm sure you don't love me any more, Moo Moo. No! No! Don't answer me! If you did you couldn't speak to me the way you do. I've never ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... desired effect of angering them. "Curse your money," one cried. "You damned traders think that you can buy a gentleman. Take that for your insult." And he aimed a blow with the flat of his sword, which Ringan ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... Egypt once, and there are plagues in Egypt still. The wilder the people we meet, the less likely they will be to interfere with a learned Hakim. They will come to him for help. They know that he can take away disease, and they will think he can give disease amongst them like a curse. I know what the people fancy, and what they will do. No, the caravan is not too large, Excellencies. I should have liked it to be larger, for there are many things that would have been useful when we are far away where food and water are scarce; but there are the camels ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... I could curse circumstances, and the coarse tie of human laws which keeps fast what common-sense would loose, and which bars that happiness it cannot give—happiness which otherwise ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... same men to public offices. "You will appear," said he, "either to think that the office is not worth much, or else that there are not many worthy to fill it." Alluding to one of his enemies who led a dissolute and discreditable life, he said: "That man's mother takes it as a curse rather than a blessing if any one hopes that her son will survive her." When a certain man sold his ancestral estate, which was situated by the seashore, Cato pretended to admire him, as being more powerful than the sea itself, "for this man," said he, has "drunk ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... has he cursed me! Every word he speaks is a curse. If all took effect, there would be no thunder left in Heaven or devil in Hell. I ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... 'Though they curse, yet bless thou,' had of necessity been her rule while clinging to this brother; a mental ejaculation had become habitual, and this time it brought reaction from her forlorn despondency. She could do something. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... know—or perhaps you didn't know, for we don't talk of these things often, especially when they are in one's family—but there is a bad strain in her blood and they are always looking for it to crop out somewhere. Her mother married happily—and escaped the curse—but for several generations back the women of her family have been of peculiar temperament and—they've usually gone wrong sometime in their lives. It seems to be in the blood. They can't help it. Mr. Ledoux told Amy all about it at the time of their marriage, ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... shot was heard in the immediate neighbourhood—it was heard, alas! by two only, for the third was dying, and in the act of falling from her seat in the saddle. She was caught by a servant, and by her lover; but she could only say—"I am gone—I am gone!" before breathing her last. Oh, curse upon the hand that fired the shot? It was, indeed, an accursed hand, but a fatal mistake. It was one of the bloody persecutors of Lag's troop, who, having been appointed to watch at this spot for some Covenanters who were expected ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... sin—that he presumed to depart from the explicit directions that God had laid down as to the times, places and manner of His worship, and gave the people instead inventions of his own. To say the least, he had no business to do this, and he exposed himself to the curse that comes upon those who take from ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XII, Jan. 3, 1891 • Various
... late he had taken to sleeping in the hay-loft, and if he came into the house, it would be on the opposite side to that from which David was making his exit. There was no need to think of Jacob; yet David was liberal enough to bestow a curse on him—it was the only thing he ever did bestow gratuitously. His small bundle of clothes was ready packed, and he was soon treading lightly on the steps of the horse-block, soon walking at a smart pace across the fields towards the thicket. It would take him no more than two minutes to ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... it disappeared and there was nothing left for the brothers to do but make their way back to the roadside grumbling and cursing. In their absence some shepherd dogs had found their open wallets and eaten all their food. So now they really had something to curse about. ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... and decidedly—"never will I abandon my religion and prove recreant to my faith, to which my family and my tribe have faithfully adhered for thousands of years. The curse of my parents and ancestors would pursue the renegade daughter of our tribe and cling like a sinister night-bird to the roof of the house into which the faithless daughter of Judah, the baptized Jewess, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... had never been written before, might tell the story of the first discovery of America, myself the discoverer. But I was entirely at Charlie's mercy, and so long as there was a three-and-six-penny Bohn volume within his reach Charlie would not tell. I dared not curse him openly; I hardly dared jog his memory, for I was dealing with the experiences of a thousand years ago, told through the mouth of a boy of today; and a boy of today is affected by every change of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him; and they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... three pilgrims began to curse women, saying that they were the cause of all the evils ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... itself as the means of staving off so evil a day would be acceptable; and therefore he gave his sister the commission of making this second proposal to Miss Dunstable. In cursing the duke—for he did curse the duke lustily—it hardly occurred to him to think that, after all, the duke only asked for his own. As for Mrs. Harold Smith, whatever may be the view taken of her general character as a wife and a member of society, it must be admitted that as a ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... in the Venetian, but a coloured richness as of the fruit and flower of a new Eden. The Holy Families of Correggio are in fragrant repose. The earth pays the homage of her profusion, and, as conscious of the presence of him that shall remove her curse, puts on her gorgeous apparel. The next descent from this grade of art would be to the pastoral. M. de Burtin objects to the airs of the heads, "graceful and smiling felt not to be altogether appropriate when the action is sad or violent." We can imagine that he alludes to the picture ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... shape and color and feel. You fit 'em this way and that and turn 'em and—all at once, they shine and sing. God! I never knowed what was the matter with me till I began to work with words—and that is work. Sheila! Lord! How you hate them, and love them, and curse them, and worship them. I used to think I wanted whiskey." He laughed scorn at that old desire; then came to self-consciousness again and was shamefaced—"I guess you think I am plumb out of my head," he apologized. "You see, it was because I was a—a reporter, Sheila, that I happened ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... him to the place; but the old Vicar, seeing Walter's bright eye, and knowing something of the difficulties, said that the legend was that it would be ill to disturb a thing that had cost so many warriors their lives; and that a curse would rest upon one that did disturb it. The old scholar laughed and said that the curses of the dead, and especially of the heathen dead, would break no bones—and he went on to say that doubtless there was a whole hen-roost of curses hidden away in the mound ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... say such dreadful things to me. I am still your obedient child. Indeed, I am. However stupid I may be, I should never be able to curse any one who belonged to you, much less pray for the death of one you love. Surely some one has been telling you lies, and you are dazed, and you know not what you say—or some evil spirit has taken ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... aged twenty-four. Wants Princess who doesn't object to a christening curse. Nature of curse only revealed in the strictest confidence. Good tempered. Comfortably off. ...
— The Magic World • Edith Nesbit
... all beg and bettle, and have scarce anything for themselves, much less for me whom they know to be a foreign man. O the misery of Galicia. When I arrive at night at one of their pigsties, which they call posadas, and ask for bread to eat in the name of God, and straw to lie down in, they curse me, and say there is neither bread nor straw in Galicia; and sure enough, since I have been here I have seen neither, only something that they call broa, and a kind of reedy rubbish with which they litter the horses: all my bones are sore since I ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... The curse of railways is competition. Governments can and have endeavored to adjust rates so as to cheapen the cost of service and at the same time put a stop to rate cutting, but there is such a thing as competition in service or operation which means ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... with a sarcastic smile; 'it is exile to Europe, then, that is the curse: well, I think you have some reason. I do not know much of your quarter of the globe: Europe is to Asia what America is to Europe. But I have felt the winds of the Exuine blowing up the Bosphorus; and, when the Sultan was once going to cut off our heads for helping the Egyptians, I passed ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... further, we witness the same wise arrangement, and the same incomprehensible skill and goodness of the Author of our being in the constitution of our mental natures. In these also he has wholly united our duty, happiness and longevity in one. Jesus says, "Love your enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you, that ye may be the children of your Father in heaven." Paul says—"Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking be put away ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... terminate our narrative, for the bright days that had begun to dawn on Madagascar have never since been darkened by persecution—though they have not been altogether cloudless or free from the curse of war; for, with its enormous capacities and important position, the island has long been a morsel, coveted by some of what ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... country is sunk down in superstition and ignorance and moral depravity, so that the people know not right from wrong, there is only one cure for her,—the Bible. Religion here is a mockery and a shame; such as, if it were better known, would make the heathen laugh in scorn. The priests are a curse to the land, not a blessing. Perhaps they are better in other lands,—I know not; but well I know they are many of them false and wicked here. No truth is taught to the people,—no Bible is read in their ...
— Martin Rattler • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... reads again the chapter containing the dead-ass episode; he spends much time in determining which event was the more affecting, and tears flow at the thought of both animals. In the midst of his vehement curses on "unempfindsame Menschen," "acurse upon you, you hard-hearted monsters, who treat God's creatures unkindly," etc., he rebukes the gentle advances of his pet cat Riepel, rebuffs her for disturbing his "Wonnegefhl," in such a heartless and cruel way that, through ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... picture of these fifth and sixth and seventh centuries of battle full before us, we are not tempted to glory overmuch even in such victories as Tours and Chalons. We see war for what it has ever been—the curse of man, the hugest hinderance to our civilization. While men fight they have small time for thought or art or any soft or kindly sentiment. The survivors may with good luck develop into a stronger breed; ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... the great call of God to the duty of the hour. At the close the men pressed forward to grip the speaker's hand, and as we walked out under the stars, a widow's only son acknowledged that he had long been the victim of the drink curse and had broken his mother's heart. "I have taken my last drink," he said; "I will write to my mother, but she cannot believe me. Won't you write her too and tell her that her son has given himself ...
— The Fight for the Argonne - Personal Experiences of a 'Y' Man • William Benjamin West
... an intense hatred of the very name of royalty. Kings and princes could be good men personally, but as he saw its work upon the huge battle fields of Europe he felt that the institution itself was the curse ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse; for ye have robbed ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... home, lady Feng assured herself that there was no one about. "How is it," she next asked, "that I'm like a queen of hell, or like a 'Yakcha' demon? That courtesan swore at me and wished me dead; and did you too help her to curse me? If I'm not nice a thousand days, why, I must be nice on some one day! But if, poor me, I'm so bad as not even to compare with a disorderly woman, how can I have the face to come and spend my life ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... place where it was used. I have devoted much attention to the subject, and have spent some twelve months in the opium provinces of China, you understand. I know how insidious a thing it is, this opium, and how dreadful a curse it may become when it gets a hold upon a community. I was formerly engaged upon a most sensational case in San Francisco; and the horrors of the discoveries which we made there—the American police and myself—have remained with me ever since. Pardieu! I cannot forget them! Therefore when ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... was unbearable tyranny was really a step in the great march of civilization and progress, and that the centralization and consolidation of the royal authority, according to Charlemagne's system, was in time to be a blessing to the kingdoms of the north. But to the freeman it was a curse. He fought against it as long as he could; worsted over and over again, he renewed the struggle, and at last, when the isolated efforts, which were the key-stone of his edifice of liberty, were fruitless, he sullenly withdrew from the field, and left the ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... many countries did primitive Christianity soon degenerate into such odious idolatry, that even the delusions of the "false prophet" have been considered (like the doom to "labor") as a sort of beneficent curse in comparison! What, again, for ages, was the history of those "Shemitic races," in which, of all "races," was found, according to Mr. Parker, the happiest "religious organization," by which they discovered, earlier than other "races," the great truths ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... takes a grim delight in smashing the English language into microscopic atoms at a single blow. He is more fond of women, horses, and prize-fighting than is good for him. He will steal when he is hungry, lie to save his skin, curse most terribly on trifling provocation, and spend, to his last sou markee, his hard-won wage ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... it the moment I had yanked them up," said he, "and heard that fat swine curse his wife for dropping them. He told her she'd done it on purpose, too; he hit the nail on the head all right; but it was her poor head, and that showed me my unworthy impulse in its true light, Bunny. I ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... kill the Christ-principle in their hearts, and use their intellectual powers merely for selfish purposes, they will become accursed. A system of medicine or theology which is based upon self-interests of the privileged class of doctors and priests is a curse to humanity. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... "'The curse of the crows on my tongue,' she said. 'Is himself out there in the sun the way he'd be hearing me? No? Glory be to God then, he's off to the Crossroads, to be picking up a copper maybe and the people going by ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... his father. Oh, that you could learn to see clearly! that the film might be removed from your eyes! But your indulgence must confirm him in his vices! your assistance tend to justify them. Doubtless you will avert the curse of Heaven from his head, but on your own, father—on yours—will ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... if old Mr. Las Casas was any relation to the archdeacon here. They both preach a good deal alike, it seems to me. He says, 'The system of oppression and cruelty in dealing with the natives makes them curse the name of God and our holy religion.... For should God decree the destruction of Spain it may be seen it is because of our destruction of the Indians, and that His justice ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... be, in search of the spring), should see a speck in the air—a mere dot—which, growing larger and larger by degrees, appears in course of time to be an eagle (chain and all) in a light cart, accompanied by a raven of uncommon sagacity, curse that good-nature which prompted you to say it—that you would give them house-room. And do ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... first sentence is, "No man may put off the law of God," it takes a very few pages for the child to reach the very practical passage, "As for those boys and girls that mind not their books, and love not church and school, but play with such as tell tales, tell lies, curse, swear, and steal, they will come to some bad end, and must be whipt till they mend their ways." The child brought up on Dilworth is practiced until nearly the last page of the work upon the lesson of the first sentence, with variations. Other differences ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
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