"Painfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Walter Mayton, seeing that the painfulness of the meeting was nearly over, "now let us proceed to business. First of all, will you allow me to ring the bell for some dinner, as I can tell my story while it is getting ready, and we must leave immediately after." That matter ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... say about Satan and the Sons of God. But I think a certain painfulness about such portions of Holy Writ—does not come from (1) Unwillingness to lay one's hand upon one's mouth and be silent before God. (2) Or difficulty about the Personality of Satan. I fancy it is because in spite of oneself it is painful ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... as well of the tediousness of the way, as of the pleasant lodging you shall have when your journey is ended, as of the many by-turnings that may divert you from your way. But this is to no man but to him that will read him, and read him with attentive studious painfulness. Which constant desire, whosoever hath in him, hath already passed half the hardness of the way, and therefore is beholding to the philosopher but for the other half. Nay truly, learned men have learnedly thought, that where once reason hath so much overmastered passion, as that the mind ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... I. 'That is, if it's a mutual case. Does he return the sentiment according to the specifications and painfulness you have described?' ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... view of the matter continued to be marked by extreme distaste for the whole situation and its disturbing and irritating possibilities. The coming of the American heir to the estate of Temple Barholm had been trying to the verge of extreme painfulness; but, sufficient time having lapsed and their client having troubled them but little, they had outlived the shock of his first appearance and settled once more into the calm of their accustomed atmosphere and routine. That he should suddenly reappear upon their dignified ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... defence ceased rapidly to be in any sense ladylike, and became vigorous and effective; a strand of black hair that had escaped its hairpins came athwart Ramage's eyes, and then the knuckles of a small but very hardly clinched fist had thrust itself with extreme effectiveness and painfulness under ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and inflexible in his integrity, who never dissembled, never professed what he did not feel, never hated, never spoke evil of his neighbor, and could and did say that he was never angry at his brother; the faithful man, who was true to his engagements, kept his post, and, in weariness and painfulness, performed his appointed work till he was struck with death; the husband, father, friend, of whom, in these relations, it were impertinent to speak particularly, while wounded spirits are already telling, too much, how great ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... of the bunk and sat up. He was feeling very tottery, and the painfulness of his head did not improve his temper. "Look here," he said, "I've had enough of your airs and graces. I've paid for my passage on this rubbishy old water-pusher of yours, and I'll trouble you to keep a civil tongue in your head, or I'll report you to your owners. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... me he could not help me, and I left him. I was sorely ashamed, but made a strong effort to conceal the painfulness of my situation. My other undertakings turned out equally hopeless, and after having been kept waiting for hours at Schlesinger's, listening to my employer's very trivial conversations with his callers—conversations which he seemed purposely to protract—I reappeared under the ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... "Thenceforward," says Mr. Whittier again, "her life was a battle, a constant rowing hard against the stream of popular prejudice and hatred. And through it all, pecuniary privations, loss of friends and position, the painfulness of being suddenly thrust from the still air of delightful studies into the bitterest and sternest controversy of the age, she bore herself with patience, fortitude, and unshaken reliance on the justice and ultimate triumph of the ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... chiefly remarkable for the fine power of analysis which distinguishes his "London", and other of his later compositions. In this power of discriminating and distinguishing— carried to a pitch almost of painfulness—Lloyd has scarcely ever been equalled, and his poems, though rugged in point of versification, will be found by those who will read them with the calm attention they require, replete with critical and moral ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... age of puberty approaches, both boys and girls have their teeth ground. The process is very simple but extremely painful, so much so that the operation can not be completed at one sitting. I think, however, that the painfulness of the process depends on the quality of the stone used, for the Mandyas of the upper Karga River claim that there is a species of stone that does not cause ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... given it in mistake for sixpence at that pub where you rushed in to have a beer—and then you calculate the chances against getting it back again. The last of these reflections is apt to be painful, and the painfulness is complicated and increased when there happen to have been several pubs and a like number of hurried farewell beers in the ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... meaningless facts dulls and wearies the brain. Few men can do the work with pleasure or profit, and consequently the schedules are often filled up, not indeed with deliberate carelessness, but with that heavy painfulness which, taking no interest in the work, often produces as pitiful a result as downright carelessness. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn" is a maxim which has a great application here. The man who provides ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... going back reluctantly to the jealous remarks of her sister, and did not feel disposed to listen patiently to criticisms on her nephew's character and conduct or on mine. From her letters afterwards she had not a pleasant time of it, but relieved the painfulness of it as much as possible by accepting at intervals several invitations from her friends in the neighborhood. This state of affairs made my husband very miserable, for he would have done anything to secure his Aunt Mary's happiness and tranquillity ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... or lying like Lazarus at the gate of the rich man, diseased in body, and suing for the crumbs from off his table; or suppose him, as St. Paul himself, in peril of foes, and even doubtful of friends; in weariness and painfulness oft, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness. These last were exactly the circumstances under which the very text was indited by the apostle himself: he saw, what you may see, that trials like these, when tempered ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... words of consolation forced from him by the painfulness of the situation. The young man did not seem to hear them. The only sign of life he gave was to rush away the moment the coroner had taken his leave, and regain his seat within sight and hearing of his still unconscious sister. As he did so, these words came to ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... obeyed her own injunction. With slow deliberation she crushed her lips, full and voluptuous, into mine. The warmth of them seemed to catch hold of something deep down in me, and, with exquisite painfulness, draw it out. Blinded with emotion, I clutched close to her. She laughed. I put one hand over her full breast as infants ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... his hand for answer. But the intensity of his joy, as she read it in his eyes, had in it—for her—and for the moment—just a shade of painfulness. It seemed to claim something from her that she could not quite give—or that she might not be able to give. Some secret force in her cried out in protest. But the slight shrinking passed almost immediately. She ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... largely into its details, but the feeling of the whole is as yet unaffected. Like all the lovely tombs of Venice and Verona, it is a sarcophagus with a recumbent figure above, and this figure is a faithful but tender portrait, wrought as far as it can be without painfulness, of the doge as he lay in death. He wears his ducal robe and bonnet—his head is laid slightly aside upon his pillow—his hands are simply crossed as they fall. The face is emaciated, the features large, but so pure and lordly in their natural chiselling, that they must have looked like marble even ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... hunger as well as of thirst is liable to acquire habits in respect to the times of its returning painfulness, as well as in respect to the quantity required to satiate its appetency, and hence may become diseased by indulgence, as well as by want of its appropriate stimulus. Those who have been accustomed to distend their stomach by large quantities of animal and vegetable food, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... (and this is the more important point), when we speak of pain we may mean one of two things: we may mean the object of the sensation or other experience which has the quality of being painful, or we may mean the quality of painfulness itself. When a man says he has a pain in his great toe, what he means is that he has a sensation associated with his great toe and having the quality of painfulness. The sensation itself, like every sensation, consists in experiencing a sensible object, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... that I was depriving my young friend of a pleasure, and would have gone, but he told me to stay. I passed an hour which interested me in spite of its painfulness. The voice of Menicuccio's sister sent a thrill through me, and I fancied that the blind must fall in love through their sense of hearing. The governess was a woman under thirty. She told me that when the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of his own alacrity until he had passed the iron post Dave fell off—you remember?—and was opposite to his own family residence at the head of the Court. His intention had been to pass it, and go straight on to No. 7. Something made him change his mind; perhaps the painfulness of his task dawned on him. His mother was surprised to see him. "There now," said she. "I thought you was going to be out all day, and your father he'll want all the supper there is ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... cell that day; and every face I saw, or word I heard, or incident I noted, is present to my mind in all its painfulness. But let me pass them by, for one, more pleasant, glance of a prison on the same plan which ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... uninterrupted silence has given me any claim to your attention, I now ask it in the name of our afflicted country. Were I to continue silent any longer, I should render myself as culpable as those who never hold their tongues. I see we are all sensible of the painfulness of our situation. Every day dissatisfied with ourselves, we come to the debate with the intention of doing something, and every day we return without having done any thing. The people expect from us wise laws, and not storms and tumults. How are we to make these wise laws, and keep twenty-five millions ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... his temperament does not lightly undertake even a companioned isolation in a winter land. To picture what place of torment this well-appointed cabin was to him before he brought to it Joan, as a lonely man brings in a wounded bird to nurse and cherish, stretches the fancy on a rack of varied painfulness. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... madness! He made no answer to Sah-luma's remark,—but fixed his gaze wistfully on the tall, melancholy Shape that like a black shadow darkened the whiteness of the Obelisk,—and his sense of hearing became acute almost to painfulness when once more Khosrul's deep vibrating tones peeled ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... of respectability; and as the spectacle of a ruined and broken life is infinitely more discomforting than that of a noble death, I take it that Mr. Meredith was right to prefer his present ending to the alternative, inasmuch as the painfulness of that impression he wished to produce and the potency of that moral he chose to draw are immensely ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... proposition that our sympathy with sorrow, although more lively than our sympathy with joy, falls short of the intensity of feeling in the person concerned. It is agreeable to sympathize with joy, and we do so with the heart; the painfulness of entering into grief and misery holds us back. Hence, as he remarked before, the magnanimity and nobleness of the man that represses his woes, and does ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... of parts of the tibia, i.e., noting the amount and painfulness of swellings, exploration with the probe, and observations of the course taken in any given case, will determine the exact nature of injuries. Such examination needs to extend over a period of a week or in some instances two ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... pray more, you instruct them more, you guard them more. And your children, therefore, are more likely to become the children of God. And remember, further, that your Heavenly Father knows just what solicitudes you feel, their weight, their painfulness; and just so long as you feel them, and in consequence of them, act in the use of those legitimate means which God has instituted for the restraint and conversion of your children, you have reason to hope. The very end and object of those Christian anxieties are just what you desire, ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... friend, as to one who had known and loved her sisters, she writes still more fully respecting the painfulness of ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... separation took place, our hearts were melted in tears. And we were frightened at their return, with fears of what might happen to them upon a high sea in so small a boat. Every rising wave gave the greatest pain to our anxiety, and the extreme painfulness of our alarm even increased when we were so far off that we could ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... thorn in the flesh of the annexed Alsatians is, however, as I have before pointed out, military service, and the enforced German education. All who have read Alphonse Daudet's charming little story, La derniere lecon de Francais, will be able to realize the painfulness of the truth, somewhat rudely brought home to French parents. Their children must henceforth receive a German education, or none at all, for this is what the law amounts to in the great majority of cases. Rich people, of course, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... food that Elsie hastened to serve him and Cochise. While he plied knife and spoon he chaffed the blushing girl with a familiarity that made Lennon's blood boil. Elsie's forced smile and murmured responses did not conceal the painfulness of her embarrassment. ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... legal protection, affluence, splendour, or even a competency. The slights, and hatred of men, and even pretended friends, gloomy prisons, and tortures, the society of barbarians of uncouth speech, miserable accommodations in wretched wildernesses, hunger, and thirst, nakedness, weariness, and painfulness, hard work, and but little worldly encouragement, should rather be the objects of their expectation. Thus the apostles acted, in the primitive times, and endured hardness, as good soldiers of Jesus Christ; and though we, living in a civilised ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... often, in perils of water, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... back what I said. Don't let us speak of it any more now," she continued, struggling for her lost composure, with what success appeared in the fresh outburst with which she recognized his forbearance to hint at any painfulness to himself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... beauty and perfection, did, with much painfulness and faithful diligence, labor after a more full establishment of the house of GOD, in all its privileges, until, by perfecting the second book of discipline, they completed the exact model of presbytery, which, though ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... priest's body that had not been at some time shattered with service. It had never occurred to Granger that Pere Antoine, like most other men in the district, had a past which did not belong to Keewatin—memories of a happier time to which he might sometimes look back with the painfulness of regret. Antoine had been there so long that there was no man who remembered the day when first he arrived. He seemed as natural to the landscape as the Last Chance River itself. And now suddenly, in an electric moment of sympathy, his ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... successfully lifted their towers of plates to within half an inch of the desired shelf, and then the chairs began to show signs of insecurity. By this time the audience was stimulated to an ecstasy of expectation, whose painfulness was only equalled by its extreme delectability. The sole unmoved persons in the building were the customers awaiting attention at ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... face grown grimmer he went without further delay to the bureau of a firm he knew by repute. In the private room of the Chef de Bureau he detailed his requirements with national brevity and conciseness. His knowledge of the language stood him in good stead and the painfulness of the interview was mitigated by the businesslike and tactful manner in which his commission was received. The keen-eyed man who sat tapping a gold pencil case on his thumbnail in the intervals of taking notes had a reputation to maintain which he was not unwilling to increase; ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... leave to pluck out his beard, hair by hair; with this vaunt he departed, bearing off Quibian bound hand and foot. On arriving at the boat, he secured him by a strong cord to one of the benches. It was a dark night. As the boat proceeded down the river, the cacique complained piteously of the painfulness of his bonds. The rough heart of the pilot was touched with compassion, and he loosened the cord by which Quibian was tied to the bench, keeping the end of it in his hand. The wily Indian watched his opportunity, and when Sanchez was looking another way, plunged into the water ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... On his return at dark, he receives a pressing summons to his uncle's room, and hastens to obey it without pausing to lay aside his rifle. The commission is explained, and well understanding the painfulness of the cause, he discreetly asks no questions, but prepares to execute it. The sum of L124 12s. is taken from the drawer of the desk, the odd money assigned to travelling expenses, the L120 placed in ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... spend their days among soft substances most beautiful to touch; and sometimes they sell honest-smelling soaps; and sometimes they chop cheeses, and thus reach the glory of the butcher's calling, without its painfulness. Also they handle shining ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... bent over the table and took up a novel. This novel, written by a woman, dealt with the painfulness of the irregular position of a society lady who was living under the same roof with her lover and her illegitimate child. Vladimir Semyonitch was pleased with the excellent tendency of the story, ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... blew not now in their faces, but against their backs, helping them on. Still the snow continued to fall very fast, and already lay thick upon the ground; every half hour increased the heaviness and painfulness of their march; and darkness gathered till the very fences could no longer be seen. It was pitch dark; to hold the middle of the road was impossible; their only way was to keep along by one of the fences; and, for fear of hurting themselves against some outstanding ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of cause and effect, while it lessens the painfulness of life, adds to life's picturesqueness. The man to whom evolution is but a name looks at the sea as a grandiose, monotonous spectacle, which he can witness in August for three shillings third-class ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... leave the body that they love," they are generally quite as loath to return to it, when once they have left it, though whether it is the process of returning or the continuance of a life which they have left that is distasteful to them is not very clear. The painfulness of the process of restoration to life after drowning seems to ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... reflections, as she stands in silence by her sister's side, their conversation for the time suspended. Oppressed by their painfulness, she retires a seep, and sinks down into one of the chairs; not to escape the bitter thoughts—for she cannot—but to brood on ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... not alone to such specific emotions as those above-mentioned that we apply the term feeling. Thoughts are agreeable or disagreeable, pleasurable or painful. So are emotions. The agreeableness or disagreeableness, pleasantness or painfulness, which are the accompaniments of thoughts and emotions, have been called by modern psychologists their feeling-tone. It is not out of harmony with common usage to give them the name of feelings. In so doing we contrast them with knowledge and ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... think it would perhaps be cruel to Brenda?" she laid before him another difficulty in the way of making up her mind. "Mightn't it just ruin the evening for her, with the painfulness of good-bys? Or, if she doesn't in the least expect him, the shock ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall |
