"Remorse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... round-shouldered in his dusty homespuns. No one had offered to speak to him. It was he who had induced the patient woman to follow him on the long journey. They all knew this was now the matter of his thoughts. His ragged figure and down-drooped, miserable face were dignified with the tragedy of a useless remorse. As Lucy passed him he raised his eyes, but said nothing. Then, as the others drew together round the circle of tin cups and plates, a groan came suddenly from the tent. He leaped up, made a gesture of repelling something unendurable, and ran away, scudding across the ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... was turned into a green forest—birches and lilacs; the dinner at the festive table with relatives and friends; the afternoon in the park, with dancing and music, flowers and games! Oh, you may run and run, but your memories are in the baggage-car, and with them remorse and repentance! ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... the great conqueror lay, tossing with agony and remorse, upon his dying bed, haunted by the ghosts of his victims, the clerks of St. Saviour's in Bruges city were putting up a leaden tablet (which remains, they say, unto this very day) to the memory of one whose gentle ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... she had mixed the powder—it was empty! "The God of Righteousness hath punished him!" exclaimed Amine; "but, O! that this man should have been my father! Yes! it is plain. Frightened at his own wicked, damned intentions, he poured out more wine from the flagon, to blunt his feelings of remorse; and not knowing that the powder was still in the cup, he filled it up, and drank himself—the death he meant for another! For another!—and for whom? one wedded to his own daughter!—Philip! my husband! Wert thou not my father," continued ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Sue had opened and read the letter sent from the train and was surprised and hurt by the knowledge. The act seemed like a betrayal. He said nothing, going about his work with a troubled mind and watching with growing anxiety her alternate fits of white anger and fearful remorse. He thought her growing worse daily and became ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... "Thy bars and ingots, and the sums beside, Leave for thy children's lot. Thy Turnus broke All rules of war by one relentless stroke, When Pallas fell: so deems, nor deems alone My father's shadow, but my living son." Thus having said, of kind remorse bereft, He seiz'd his helm, and dragg'd him with his left; Then with his right hand, while his neck he wreath'd, Up to the ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... trespass against them "unto seventy times seven" is not to be outdone in generosity by man. But in order that sin may be forgiven it must be acknowledged as sin against GOD and treachery to Christ, and repented of with true sorrow of heart. Repentance is not mere self-contempt, self-pity, or remorse. It is sorrow for sin, which has for its motive the love of GOD and the realization that human sin meant and means in the ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... of festivity, but they were not glad; for I looked from the wreath into the head it encircled, and from the carcanet of gems to the heart which beat beneath—and I saw envy, and hate, and repining, and remorse. I turned my last glance on the palace within its walls; but there the purple was spread as a pall, and the voice of sorrow and the cry of pain were loud on the air. I bade the shadows roll away upon the winds, and rose depressed and in sorrow. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... to advise him not to think of leaving Texas for at least another year. To supplement this, the son wrote that he hoped to be able to go home in the early spring. This had the desired effect. Any remorse of conscience he may have felt over the deception resorted to was soon forgotten in following a pack of hounds or stalking deer, for hunting now became the order of the day. The antlered buck was again in his prime. His ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... protesting against attack, then in confession, till in ten minutes her white breast was heaving under the excitement of her own temerity and Wharton knew practically all about her, her mingled pleasure and remorse in "going out," her astonishment at the difference between the world as it was this year, and the world as it had been last, when she was still in the school-room—her Sunday-school—her brothers—her ideals—for she was a little nun at heart—her favourite clergyman—and ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... years has in it much of the pathos of a lost cause. It was remarked by Johnson that there is in the Paradise Lost little opportunity for the pathetic; only one passage, indeed, is allowed by him to be truly deserving of that name. But the description of the remorse and reconcilement of Adam and Eve, which Johnson doubtless intended, will not compare, for moving quality, with the matchless invocation ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... that it inspired old death with life in the lively expressing of slaughters, and rendered life so sweet and passionate in the hearers that all who heard felt it fleet from them in the narration: which made Ulysses even pity his own slaughterous deeds, and feel touches of remorse, to see how song can revive a dead man from the grave, yet no way can it defend a living man from death; and in imagination he underwent some part of death's horrors, and felt in his living body ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... body! Ah, boys, don't forget the dear mother in the old home. She never forgets you, but morning, noon, and night thinks and prays for her soldier-son. Mindfulness of her brings God's blessing; forgetfulness bitter remorse, when too late—after she's gone. There's something more in the breast-pocket. His parchment probably. No; something better still—a small copy of St. John's Gospel, with his name thereon. Let us hope that its presence there, when every extra ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... breakfast table every morning of my life. There, that is one of the entries I wouldn't want my descendants to read in this journal. But it is the humiliating truth; and perhaps it's just as well that thought did come or I might have been tricked by pity and remorse into giving him some rash assurance. If Fred's nose were as handsome as his eyes and mouth some such thing might have happened. And then what an unthinkable predicament I should ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... natural," said Mr. Pyecroft, with an air of pious remorse. "Matilda has been ashamed to speak of me. To be utterly frank—and it is meet that one who has been what I have been should be humble and ready to confess—for many years I was the black sheep of the family, my name unmentioned. But sometime since I ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... external appearance to his rival on the throne, and so far better qualified to win the good opinion of a semi-barbarous people; whilst his dark intellectual qualities of Machiavelian dissimulation, profound hypocrisy, and perfidy which knew no touch of remorse, were admirably calculated to sustain any ground which he might win from the simple-hearted people with whom he had to deal—and from the frank ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... disposal of this person been sufficiently enlarged he would not have omitted the various maxims arising from the tale," admitted Kai Lung, with a shadow of remorse. "That suited to the need of a credulous and ill-balanced mind would doubtless be the proverb: 'He who believes in gambling will live to sell his sandals.' It is regrettable if the well-intending Mandarin took the ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... remorse, the man had with Carl's help lifted the body and thrown it over the precipice, at the foot of which it was afterward found. He then endeavored to persuade the lad that it would never be discovered, and he might safely return to his employer's ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... perfectly aghast, the whole extent of her delinquency flashing upon her in that instant. "Oh, oh! what have I done! what a wicked, wicked girl I am! what will mamma say!" And she burst into an agony of grief and remorse. ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... of the nine Englishmen were shot, and amongst them was their leader, Fletcher Christian. Ever since he had come to Pitcairn's Island, he had appeared sunk in sorrow and remorse. All day long he had remained hidden among the rocks, away from his comrades, his eyes fastened on the wide ocean, the barrier which he knew must now divide him for ever from his home and from all he loved. In this solitude his companion was the Bible, brought ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... that beauty when you remembered. All the beauty of it from the beginning, taken up and held together, safe at the end. You wouldn't remember anything else. And he had killed it, with his conscience, suddenly sick, whining, slobbering, vomiting remorse—Turning on her. ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... which practice burns into the blood, And not the one dark hour which brings remorse Will brand us after of whose fold ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... a handsome present, locked the safe, and never discovered the theft. But time brought its revenge. Lieutenant Hervey succeeded unexpectedly to the title of the earldom of Bristol. His wife was overcome with remorse. By her foolish scheme she had sacrificed a coronet. That missing paper must be restored; and so the lady pays another visit to Lainston Church, on this occasion in the company of a lawyer. The old clerk unlocks again the ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... on the part of his wife failed to find him, and the Prince only broke the silence long enough to usurp a woman's privilege by telling a lie, and declaring he did not know where Rubens was, "but I believe he has committed suicide through remorse." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... carried me to the deserts where early Christian anchorites spent their lives, depicted to my mind a form more grandly religious nor more horribly repentant than that of this man. You, who have a life-long experience of the confessional, dear uncle, you may never, perhaps, have seen so awful a remorse,—remorse sunk in the waves of prayer, the ceaseless supplication of a mute despair. This fisherman, this mariner, this hard, coarse Breton, was sublime through some hidden emotion. Had those eyes wept? That ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... may not afflict you as it did me! Listen! you know that two days ago my servant Julio left my service because I severely reproved his irregularities. This disquieted me, because I had noticed that he was pursued by some secret remorse. Just now, hardly a half hour ago, I left my residence, and was going towards the Dominican church to pray for my poor friend. On the way I thought of my servant Julio, and feared that in his despair he might have taken ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... loss of the giraffes, their remorse seemed as if it would tempt them to suicide, and one of them, while tearing his wool-covered head, kept repeating the ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... long into the heart of the night, as it did in the long summer twilights. Love cools and the dews fall, and the winds sing dirges in the elms through the leaves they will so soon scatter about the world without remorse; and then one morning the grass is crisp with frost beneath the early riser's feet, and he finds the leaves of the ash all fallen since the dawn, a green, still heap below their old boughs stript and cold. ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... nine now! Priscilla, wear the roughest, heaviest things you've got. You always have your hours of remorse too late. The Ghost will chill ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... sounds poured upon him from all sides; he looked round the square, but there was no sign of any musicians. The melody brought visions of a distant heaven and far-off gleams of hope; but it also quickened the remorse that had set the lost soul in a ferment. He went on his way through Paris, walking as men walk who are crushed beneath the burden of their sorrow, seeing everything with unseeing eyes, loitering like an idler, stopping without cause, muttering to himself, careless ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... children are!" he said, as the Mother replaced the light covering, screening the sleeping face with tender, careful hands from sun and flies. "Imagine remorse for an act of selfishness leading a boy of six to such a determination—and a normal, healthy boy, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... done her wrong, in believing that she deserted me," he answered, "the heart-ache is but a poor way of expressing the remorse that I should feel." ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... was mighty pleasant for Master Tom, though perhaps not the most salutary experience for him. He had felt qualms of penitence and remorse as he rode homewards, thinking of his follies and weaknesses in the past, ashamed of the class of comrades he had affected then, ashamed of the fashion in which he had spent his days, and of the indifference he had ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... conveyance that I could find to take me, and this was the fear that Van Brandt might discover me if I remained in Perthshire. The letter that he had left on the table was full of expressions of love and remorse, to say nothing of excuses for his infamous behavior to me. He declared that he had been entrapped into a private marriage with a profligate woman when he was little more than a lad. They had long since separated by common consent. When he first courted ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... Conscience drew away and at once her cheeks grew hot with blushes and maidenly remorse. She had been reared in an uncompromising school of puritanism. Her father would have regarded her behavior as profoundly shocking. She herself, now that it was over, regarded it so, though she wildly and rebelliously told herself that she would not ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... some feeling, then! Her terror and remorse have maddened her. I can dwell upon her image with pity." The next, "Will they find her wet clothes and discover that she was out last night?" The latter possibility troubled me. My mind was the seat ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... York" as played by a band at a distance. Her sang-froid was extraordinary. It was while making the observation to herself that her question came out, before she had decided whether or not to utter it. She had no remorse for that, however, since she knew she couldn't have kept herself from asking it in the end. As well expect the man staggering to the outer edge of a precipice not ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... Charles IX. died two years afterwards, after having suffered agonies of remorse. Despite the massacre, the Huguenots were not all slain. Nor had the murder of Coligny robbed them of a leader. Henry of Navarre, who had narrowly escaped death on that fearful night, was in the coming years to lead the Protestants to many a victory, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... the bed. She had died before—died by her own act—leaving behind her another woman whose life was a living lie, who was so corrupt and worthless as to be unfit to live. It was that I was going to destroy. I felt no compunction—no remorse. As I placed the muzzle of the revolver against her breast, she opened her eyes in terror, and saw me. I pulled the trigger quickly.... As I did so I heard the ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... said Lester. "I'll see you from time to time." They shook hands and separated amicably. There was a sense of unsatisfied obligation and some remorse in Robert's mind as he saw his brother walking briskly away. Lester was an able man. Why was it that there was so much feeling between them—had been even before Jennie had appeared? Then he remembered his old ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... not seek to adorn and decorate. It nowhere pauses to analyze motives nor to give us a picture of inner conflict as modern authors are fond of doing. Its characters are impulsive and prompt in action, and when they have once acted, waste no time in useless regret or remorse. ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... flashed over him, and gravely, sadly, he watched the quivering face by his side. If she sought relief now in the exercise of her old faith, what would come as the years passed and heaped up the burden of remorse! ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... on his way to Vigours', and his mood was acute remorse. Of the transition there can be no telling in words, for thoughts are more subtle than words and emotions infinitely vaguer. But one thing at least is definite, that ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... inconstancy, nor cowardice. A child-like faith in the old creed is no longer possible, but it is equally impossible to surrender it. I refer now not to those who select from it what they think to be in accordance with their reason, and throw overboard the remainder with no remorse, but rather to those who cannot endure to touch with sacrilegious hands the ancient histories and doctrines which have been the depositaries of so much that is eternal, and who dread lest with the destruction of a story something precious ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experience very rarely inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare's sonnets proved no exception to the rule. A personal note may have escaped him involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and self-remorse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no proof that he is doing more in those sonnets than produce dramatically the illusion of a personal confession. Only in one scattered series of six sonnets, where he introduced a topic, unknown to other ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... plan, too, he laid aside, as savoring of enthusiasm. Meanwhile, this amiable and honest gentleman, whose every error was fairly attributable to the natural limitations of his mind or to the diseases that racked his body, was tormented by remorse, which would have been excessive if he had been a pirate. He says that, after three years of continual striving, he still dared not partake of the Communion, feeling himself "unworthy." "I was present," he writes, "when Mr. Hoge ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... of the struggle she witnessed, induced her to send for the chaplain of the Poughkeepsie. This divine prayed with the dying man; but even he, in the last moments of the sufferer, was little more than a passive but shocked witness of remorse, suspended over the abyss of eternity in hopeless dread. We shall not enter into the details of the revolting scene, but simply add that curses, blasphemy, tremulous cries for mercy, agonized entreaties to be advised, and sullen ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... who waited upon her, and steadily set herself against any communication with the world outside. Even her husband she would hardly speak to; and her child she would not see. The strain and stress of her remorse was more than she could bear. Before the week was gone, she had fled for forgetfulness to the vice which bound her in so heavy a chain. All the cunning of her nature, so strangely perverted, was put ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... observed that, after having knocked anybody on the head, I generally begin to dance and sing. This I do, not because I am troubled with any such weakness as remorse, but in order to instruct you. I do not mean to say that you are to conduct yourselves precisely in the same manner under similar circumstances; a pipe, or a pot, or a pinch of snuff—in short, any means of diversion—will answer your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... successful rival, had become precious, priceless, as that of the brother of his beloved. The conditions were desperate enough as they were. To have slain her brother would not only have rendered them hopeless, it would have condemned the survivor to a lifetime of remorse, unless, indeed, that life had not been ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... rugged dell, The gallant horse exhausted fell. The impatient rider strove in vain To rouse him with the spur and rein, For the good steed, his labors o'er, Stretched his stiff limbs, to rise no more; Then, touched with pity and remorse, He sorrowed o'er the expiring horse. 'I little thought, when first thy rein I slacked upon the banks of Seine, That Highland eagle e'er should feed On thy fleet limbs, my matchless steed! Woe worth the chase, woe worth the day, That costs thy ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... the past twelve years these two had stood shoulder to shoulder through both many times over. But their zeal produced no manifest results. Denvil's temperature rose steadily, and his stress of mind broke out in a semi-coherent babble of remorse and self-justification, of argument and appeal, of desperate reckonings in regard to ways and means. Desmond left his station by the bed and crossed over to his friend, who was noiselessly washing a cup ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... by their hearts to chests of burning coin, the rust of which was consuming them without end, just as they had never thought of an end to the piling of them, and now they were tearing themselves to pieces with more than madness through grief and remorse. Below this was a charnel vault where some of the apothecaries had been ground down and stuffed into earthenware pots with Album graecum, dung, and many a ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... vicious habits yielded a regular comedy of fun; and, in order to improve it, he would sometimes bribe Lord Westport's treacherous groom into misleading us, when floundering amongst bogs, into the interior labyrinths of these morasses. Deep, however, as the morass, was this man's remorse when, on leaving Westport, I gave him the heavy golden perquisite, which my mother (unaware of the tricks he had practised upon me) had by letter instructed me to give. He was a mere savage boy from the central bogs of Connaught, and, to the great ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... George Eveleth's death the two women who loved him found themselves separated by the very quality of their grief. While Diane's heart was clamorous with remorse, the mother's was poignantly calm. It was generally remarked, in the Franco-American circles where the tragedy was talked of, that Mrs. Eveleth displayed unexpected strength of character. It was a matter of common knowledge that she shrank from none of ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... been continued only by the fictitious rite of adoption, the Romans still revered, in the person of Nero, the grandson of Germanicus, and the lineal successor of Augustus. It was not without reluctance and remorse, that the praetorian guards had been persuaded to abandon the cause of the tyrant. [34] The rapid downfall of Galba, Otho, and Vitellus, taught the armies to consider the emperors as the creatures of their will, and the instruments of their license. The birth of Vespasian was mean: ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... every one has heard of the dog suffering under vivisection, who licked the hand of the operator; this man, unless the operation was fully justified by an increase of our knowledge, or unless he had a heart of stone, must have felt remorse to the last hour ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Here, I remember—remorse. I know well enough now, though I don't like owning it, that if I had done as you told me, and taken care always to lock it up, that belt wouldn't ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... face. For the first time he noticed how deep-cut were the lines that indicated care, anxiety and worry. A sudden remorse seized him. ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... Jardine, and she is not with him. She may be on her way to Germany; she may be concealed in the country near here; she may be in London. Unless we have news of her to-morrow I send for a detective. Oh, to hold her in my arms! I am crushed to the earth with sorrow and remorse. Show this letter to her husband. I ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... frightened Margarita even more than the first. Now, she thought, surely the dumb terror and remorse of one who belongs to the Devil had seized him, and her hands trembled as she went through the needful ministrations for him each day. Three months, at least, the doctor, who had come from Ventura to set the leg, had said he must lie still in bed and be thus tended. "Three ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... her, oppressed with an intense desire to hear her voice, if but for a moment, and to see once more her open arms, into which you can throw yourself sobbing, like a poor child bereft of comfort and protection. How you will then recall every bitterness that you have caused her, and with what remorse you will pay for all, unhappy wretch! Hope for no peace in your life, if you have caused your mother grief. You will repent, you will beg her forgiveness, you will venerate her memory—in vain; conscience ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... bedside. Something less foul it was than dung; 'Twas straw half rotten; yet, he as a Christian died. And sorely hath remorse his conscience wrung. "Wretch that I was," quoth he, with parting breath, "So to forsake my business and my wife! Ah! the remembrance is my death, Could I but have her pardon in ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... sight of a place of security which they cannot reach; they perish with the bitter remorse of having despised and rejected the means of escape, like the rich man in hell, whose torment was grievously augmented by the sight of Lazarus, afar off, in the bosom ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... about Arthur and what had become of him, and what he was thinking about her; and chiefest of all, because her cheeks and forehead had a fearfully conscious feeling, what he would think, could he know what she had just been doing. Thus it was that as the houses of Hilltown drew near, remorse and shame and terror were rising, and her frantic protests against them were weakening, until suddenly every emotion was lost in suspense, and the shadows of the great elm-trees that arched the main street of the town closed them in. ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... to reply that she gathered that, but a sudden embarrassment curbed her tongue. She had just remembered that at their last meeting she had been abominably rude to this man. She was never rude to anyone, without subsequent remorse. She contented ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... impudent being that had ever disgraced the human form. The sight of that brazen forehead, the accents of that lying tongue, deprived them of all mastery over themselves. Many of them doubtless remembered with shame and remorse that they had been his dupes, and that, on the very last occasion on which he had stood before them, he had by perjury induced them to shed the blood of one of their own illustrious order. It was not to be expected that a crowd of gentlemen under the influence of feelings like these would ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... no regular players near him, he would play with children at dice, at nuts, or bones. It has been suggested that this emperor gave in to the indulgence of gambling in order to stifle his remorse. If his object in encouraging this vice was to make people forget his proscriptions and to create a diversion in his favour, the artifice may be considered equal to any of the political ruses of this astute ruler, whose false virtues were for a long time vaunted only ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... Larochejaquelin, you now see to what your conduct has reduced me; and with my last breath I tell you that I owe my disgrace, my misery, and my death—ay, and the loss of my eternal soul, to you, and to you only. Ay, shudder and shake, thou lovely monster of cruelty. Shake and grieve with remorse and fear. You may well do so. My living form shall trouble you no more, but dead and dying I will be with you till the last trump sounds on ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... passion into captivity to the spirit of his sacred vows; but still, when a man has once lost that unconscious soul-purity which exists in a mind unscathed by the fires of passion, no after-tears can weep it back again. No penance, no prayer, no anguish of remorse can give back the simplicity of a soul that has never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... faithfully, with solemn energy, he adjured her, by all the sanctions of religion, to guard herself. He soon learned his error, and gracefully apologized: "When I read your perfect letter, lovely friend, remorse seized me, and now fills my soul. I am deeply touched by the proofs of your friendship, and by the triumphs of your reason. I am, for friendship's sake, proud of the exclusive privilege you accord to me of admission ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... that the one way to help Charley endure what's happened would be to have it make a man of me. Then perhaps in the years to come, she would grow to think of Felicia as if she were thinking of the ordinary death of a lovely little child and not with the hell of remorse she's having now. As for me, I'll always have that remorse. That's common justice. But there's no reason ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... all with the same appetite. Bareilles, silent, despairing, a prey to the bitterest remorse, sat low in his chair, and, if I read his face aright, had no thought but of vengeance. But, assured that by forcing him to that which must for ever render him odious—and particularly among his inferiors—I ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... BALDWIN'S revelations on the subject of "conscience-money." It seems that in one particular instance it cost the Treasury eleven shillings to acknowledge the receipt of half-a-sovereign; but that was because the dilatory tax-payer insisted that the depth of his remorse could only be adequately exhibited by a notice in the "agony-column." In ordinary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... Agricola's among them, it is supposed that he has always kept the plantation of Aurore Nancanou (or rather of Clotilde—who, you know, by our laws is the real heir). That is a mistake. Explain it as you please, call it remorse, pride, love—what you like—while I was in France and he was managing my mother's business, unknown to me he gave me that plantation. When I succeeded him I found it and all its revenues kept distinct—as ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... mother desolate. It does not occur to him that this is at all hard on her: he does it as a matter of course, and actually expects his mother to receive, on terms of special affection, the woman for whom she has been abandoned. If he shewed any sense of what he was doing, any remorse; if he mingled his tears with hers and asked her not to think too hardly of him because he had obeyed the inevitable destiny of a man to leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, she could ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... tongues, the imported sausages and fish, the jelly-inclosed paste of chicken livers, the bottles and jars of pickled or spiced meats and vegetables and fruits. The spectacle was adroitly arranged to move the hungry to yearning, the filled to regret, and the dyspeptic to rage and remorse. And behind the show-window lay a shop whose shelves, counters and floor were clean as toil could make and keep them, and whose air was saturated with ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... Fidelis, on his knees beside that silent, dim-seen form, heeded him not at all, and with reverent, folded hands, and soft and tender voice, spake a prayer for the departed soul. Now hereupon Beltane knew sudden shame and swift remorse, and bowed his head also, and would have prayed—yet could not; wherefore his black mood deepened and his ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... simile, I see. "And yet—Down, Pity! knock not at my breast, "Nor grope about for that dull stone my heart; "I'll stone thee with it, Pity! Get thee hence, "Pity, I'll strangle thee with naked hands; "For thou dost bear upon thy downy breast "Remorse, shap'd like a serpent, and her fangs "Might dart at me and pierce my marrow thro'. "Hence, beggar, hence—and keep with fools, I say! "He bleeds and groans! Well, Max, thy God or mine "Blind Chance, here play'd the butcher—'twas not I. "Down, hands! ye shall ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... night, at nine o'clock in the morning, Hermann repaired to the Convent of ——, where the last honours were to be paid to the mortal remains of the old Countess. Although feeling no remorse, he could not altogether stifle the voice of conscience, which said to him: "You are the murderer of the old woman!" In spite of his entertaining very little religious belief, he was exceedingly superstitious; and believing that the dead Countess might exercise ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... that he was goaded by remorse. His brutality did not lend itself to any shade of sentiment or of moral terror. A man of energy and even of violence, born to make war, to ravage conquered countries and to massacre the vanquished, ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... once strike him, Owen said in the most chill tone, "Barker, if you touch me, I shall go straight to Dr. Rowlands." The bully well knew that Owen never broke his word, but he could not govern his rage, and first giving Owen a violent shake, he proceeded to thrash him without limit or remorse. ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... for detachment, but he was so far advanced towards metaphysical speculation that he was engaged in an analysis of sensation. Off and on, ever since that day of unreasonable mirth and subsequent madness, he had been a prey to remorse. He had kept away from Audrey for a fortnight, during which time his imagination had run riot through past, present, and future. Audrey had been sweet and confiding from the first; she had believed ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... such a state of remorse about the fourpence, that I forgot the maternal joy and caresses, the tender paternal voice. I pull out the twenty-four shillings and ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lively appetite akin to hunger. His wife received him in a subdued manner bordering on obsequiousness; she was more than ever bent on anticipating any desire on his part. All the while afraid of detection, every kind word spoken to her caused remorse, every joke pained her in secret. It recalled what she had done to his companions, ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... weakness, thrilled his soul; and the touch of her hand was electric. When he returned to his studio, as he thought of the trustful, unsuspecting, generous heart of Alice, he was smitten with a pang of remorse too keen to be borne. He tried to look at her picture, but the face was to him like the sight of a reproving angel. He could not look steadily upon the placid features; the calm eyes turned his heart to stone; the sweet mouth was an accuser he dared not face. But when next he saw Marcia, all ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... her, shouldering the clumsy form of Mr. Augustus Hobson unceremoniously out of the way: the fellow had done his work for the time being, and this last piece of it so efficaciously indeed that his present employer felt, if not remorse, at least a certain pity stir within him at the stricken hopelessness of the girl's aspect. He passed his arm round her waist as she shivered and swayed. "Lean on me," he said, his fine eyes troubled with an ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... that to act in accordance with our duty makes it a painful task to our feelings. We—I may appeal to the court for corroboration—can scarcely pursue an analysation of these cases without pain; I may say, remorse of conscience." Mr. Petterwester, for such is his name, is evidently touched with that sense of shame which the disclosures of the black system bring upon his profession. This is aided by the fascinating ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... promised her, looking forward with real satisfaction to the solitude of his own house. So Eleanor, saying she couldn't understand why he was so awfully economical now that he had his own money!—came alone,—full of remorse at deserting him, and worry because of his loneliness, and leaving a pining Bingo behind her. But, to her silent annoyance, as soon as she arrived at Green Hill she encountered a new and tiresome attentiveness from ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... again. Meanwhile Andy Green went on with his work and scowled over his well-earned reputation that hampered him now just when he needed the confidence of his fellows in order to save their beloved Flying U from slow annihilation. Perhaps his mental suffering could not rightly be called remorse, but a poignant regret it most certainly was, and a sense of complete bafflement which came out ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... Angus for his Governor, Argyll for his Chancellor, and with the Kers and Hepburns in office, was crowned at Scone about June 25, 1488. He was nearly seventeen, no child, but energetic in business as in pleasure, though lifelong remorse for his rebellion gnawed at his heart. He promptly put down a rebellion of the late king's friends and of the late king's foe, Lennox, then strong in the possession of Dumbarton Castle, which, as it commands the sea-entrance ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... every one was so strangely, so absurdly silent, what he thought of his conduct to his dear little sister. He went away to Prince's Gate, when at last the summons came, bristling over with a quite delightful sense of power. How well he would speak! how cleverly he would insert the arrow of remorse into that cruel heart! As he entered the house he was met by Miss Harman. She held out her hand to him without a word, and led him to the door of her father's study. Her eyes, however, as she looked at him for a moment, were eloquent. Those ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... the creek on the dam head it was supper-time, and his mother had returned. The misery had now settled into dumb despair, both more and less agonizing than the acute remorse of the afternoon. What he needed to know was told in his mother's answer to his father's inquiry: "Yes; she is a very sick child. I'm going up again after supper to stay as long as I'm needed. It's a judgment on the Major; he has been setting ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... of a row) which by the exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hid from her own child a blush of remorse ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... followed the calm announcement. Then Diana rose. At the misery, the anguish that could impress so strange and white a look on Ruth's winsome face, she was smitten with remorse, her incipient satisfaction dashed. This was her work; the fruit of her scheming. But it had gone further than she had foreseen; and for all that no result could better harmonize with her own ambitions and desires, for the moment—under the first shock of that announcement—she felt ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... remorse and sympathy Anna pounced upon her and enfolded her in a great hug, realizing, for the first time, that, on entering, she had been too anxious to show her affection for her father, too full of worry over what she had, that day, to tell him, to ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... him deeply, and he was long before he could be reconciled to himself. "The rest of my time," said he, "has been lost by the crime or folly of my ancestors, and the absurd institutions of my country; I remember it with disgust, yet without remorse: but the months that have passed since new light darted into my soul, since I formed a scheme of reasonable felicity, have been squandered by my own fault. I have lost that which can never be restored; I have seen the sun rise and set for twenty months, an idle gazer ...
— Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia • Samuel Johnson
... fatigues without satisfying—that it knows no limits or bounds to gratify the restless and unfettered soul—that it is a feeble soil, which, without the sweat of labor and the tears of sorrow, produces nothing but the weeds of sin and the thorny briars of remorse? Have you learned all this, and are you not a wiser and a better man? Let all who have traveled for pleasure answer the question ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... young lady was experiencing some pangs of remorse; but before I confided anything, I learned how Genevieve came to be locked in ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... was, they didn't know exactly what was the matter with themselves. They could not pretend that it was remorse for the little amount of work they had done during the term, for they stoutly denied that they had done little. On the contrary, they insisted that they were being ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... Victor, but he did not hint at his new conclusions. "Well, I am glad," said he; "they left me but remorse last time; this time here's a souvenir," and he ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... certain peculiar happiness in the turn of his conversation, had spent the evening till eleven o'clock with the monarch, in pleasant familiarity; and had given a loose, with the utmost mirth, to the sallies of his imagination. The monarch felt some remorse, and being touched with a kind of compassion, bid him, two or three times, not to go home, but lie in the Louvre. The count said, he must go to his wife; upon which the king pressed him no farther, but said, 'Let him go! I see God has decreed his death.' And in two ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... certainly believed it completely and was filled with remorse on that afternoon when I sat dejectedly in Kensington Gardens and reviewed, in the light of the Registrar's pertinent questions my first two years ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... recognition by face and feature, because neither had ever seen the other before,—the heartless parent had never kissed or fondled his own child!—they had lived total strangers. There was no excitement at the moment, nothing that could be called a scene,—no symptom of remorse on the part of the one, nor of affectionate recognition by the other. I could know nothing, therefore, of their relations to each other, even though I saw them at the very moment the parent was identifying his daughter. All these curious facts were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... when I came to think of that rather too lively night, during which, as is generally the case, Love had routed Reason, I felt some remorse. M—— M—— wanted to convince me of her love, and for that purpose she had combined all the virtues which I attached to my own affection—namely, honour, delicacy, and truth, but her temperament, of which her mind was the slave, carried her towards excess, and she prepared everything in ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... in death caused by his base desertion, could forgive him his perfidy and carry his picture in a fond embrace down to the grave. As his guardian angel, she would bear it with her up to God's throne, and there plead his cause. Overcome at last by a flood of anguish and remorse, the guilty man cried aloud in his despair and fell prostrate beside the coffin, striking his head on its corner as he sank ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... one case of Remorse that is going to head off a Man who wants to be rejuvenated. He pulled himself together on the Second Day and resumed the Merry Clip and there was nothing doing in the Macaulay Line. Home did not get him until the Lights had winked out in the other Places. He ...
— People You Know • George Ade
... are troubled with remorse till the last act, and then you make up your mind to destroy yourself. But, just as you are raising the pistol to your head, a ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... blood rush to his face. Anger, shame, mortification, remorse, and fear alternately strove with him, but above all and through all he was conscious of a sharp, exquisite pleasure—that frightened him still more. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... did not quail. She advanced, on the contrary, feeling no remorse, her head erect, defending the sentence of destruction pronounced and executed ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... managed with effect; and the rising of the peasantry against the supposed bewitched beauty; the discovery of Pascal's love, and the consequent revolution the knowledge effects in the mind of the deserted girl; his tender devotion, her danger, and Marcel's subsequent remorse, are admirably told; and, on the whole, the story of Franconnette must be acknowledged as a great advance upon the "Aveugle;" and its superiority promises greater things yet from the poet ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... he exclaimed, in a fit of rage. "Only so many scraps of paper! I couldn't raise a sou on the whole of them! And you ask me if I have any remorse. THEY are the ones who should have remorse and pity. They played me for a simpleton; and I fell into their trap. I was their latest victim, their ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... from that night Margaret stood, with her brother, watching her father as the light from his eyes went out, and the tones of his voice ceased forever. Grief for the loss of his children, and remorse for the blight which he had brought upon his household, had undermined his constitution, never strong; and when a prevailing fever settled upon him it found an easy prey. In ten days' time Margaret and Walter alone were left ...
— Homestead on the Hillside • Mary Jane Holmes
... life, coldly serene of aspect, untroubled of manner, confronting fortune with his head erect, living quietly in the house where he had been wont to live, haunted by no dismal shadows, subject to no dark hours of remorse, no sudden access of despair, always equable, business-like, and untroubled; and she told herself that such a man could not be guilty of the unutterable ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... it, if he pleases, as a sign that Judge Harbottle was a good Christian, that he suffered nothing ever from remorse. That was undoubtedly true. He had, nevertheless, done this grocer, forger, what you will, some five or six years before, a grievous wrong; but it was not that, but a possible scandal, and possible complications, that troubled ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Osman met her and stabbed her to the heart. Nerestan was soon brought before him, and told him he had murdered his sister, and all he wanted of her was to tell her of the death of her father, and to bring her his dying benediction. Stung with remorse, Osman liberated all his Christian captives, and then stabbed himself.—Aaron ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... in the poem tells us that he "rudely shaped his life to his immediate wants"; this is intelligible, yet only vaguely intelligible, for we do not know what were these wants, and we do not see any rude shaping of his life. We are told of "deeds for which remorse were vain"; what were these deeds? did he, like Bunyan, play cat on Sunday, or join the ringers of the church bells? "Instance, instance," we cry impatiently. And so the story remains half a shadow. The poem is dramatic, yet, like so much of Browning's work, it is not pure drama ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... We need be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so little done—of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... was he cursed with a state of mind more wearing and more wearisome than remorse. He had no remorse; but the evildoer who can hold that avenger at bay, cannot escape the slower torture of incessantly doing the evil deed again and doing it more efficiently. In the defensive declarations and pretended confessions ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... and her children mourned piteously for lovely Maria: there seemed to be no solace for their grief. As for the Duke, he was a changed man, the bitterness of remorse had turned his natural reserve into moroseness. He was like one beside himself, his wonted firmness and self-control, at times, failed to stay him, and he preferred to shut himself up alone in one of the towers of the castle at Livorno, venting his passionate despair in fits of weeping ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... dreadful night. He heard her voice imploring him to kill her before the men should rush in upon them, saw the anguish in her eyes as she understood that no help was forthcoming from the world without; and he knew again the great and unavailing remorse which had filled his soul when he realized that Hilda ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... unchained, that he might clasp them in prayer. Both, as the smoke rose to their lips, as the fire crept up to their vital parts, continued solemnly to aver the innocence and the Catholic faith of the order. The King himself sat and beheld, it might seem without remorse, this hideous spectacle; the words of Du Molay might have reached his ears. But the people looked on with far other feelings. Stupor kindled into admiration; the execution was a martyrdom; friars gathered ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the law. A man cannot be condemned for a murder at which he was not present, and which he loathes and abhors as much as you do. The instant that he heard of it he made a complete confession to me, so filled was he with horror and remorse. He lost not an hour in breaking entirely with the murderer. Oh, Mr. Holmes, you must save him—you must save him! I tell you that you must save him!" The Duke had dropped the last attempt at self-command, and was pacing ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I mention this particularly, because it appears to be the habit, in books upon this subject, to regard the relation in question as pathological, and to select cases where those who are concerned in it are tormented with shame and remorse. In the cases to which I am referring nothing of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Winesburg things went well with Curtis Hartman. He was not one to arouse keen enthusiasm among the worshippers in his church but on the other hand he made no enemies. In reality he was much in earnest and sometimes suffered prolonged periods of remorse because he could not go crying the word of God in the highways and byways of the town. He wondered if the flame of the spirit really burned in him and dreamed of a day when a strong sweet new current of power would come like a great wind into his voice and his soul and the people would ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... to her relief. After her decease, the bird was never more seen. It became a popular opinion with her nation, that this mysterious bird had flown away with her soul to the land of bliss. But the bitter tears of remorse fell in the tent of Wanawosh, and he lived many years to regret his false pride and his harsh ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... how much more insupportable is the anguish of remorse than every other mental pang. Oh! could I but have cast off this crime that festered in my heart; could I but have regained the innocence that reigned in my breast as I entered the garden at Sestri; could I but have restored my victim to life, I felt as if I could look on ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... sins enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. And thereupon the unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten? "It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps." Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin;—that is death; the ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... had the most appalling yet darkly romantic conception of women. A "girl" was the most desired thing in the world, a prize to be worked for, sought for and enjoyed without remorse. She had no soul. The maid who yielded to temptation deserved no pity, no consideration, no aid. Her sufferings were amusing, her diseases a joke, her future of no account. From these men Burton and I acquired a desolating fund of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... going out was Leonela's lover and not hers; but when he saw how she wept and suffered, and begged him to help her, he became convinced of the truth, and the conviction completed his confusion and remorse; however, he told Camilla not to distress herself, as he would take measures to put a stop to the insolence of Leonela. At the same time he told her what, driven by the fierce rage of jealousy, he had said to Anselmo, and how he had arranged to hide himself in the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and pleasant, but—perhaps for that very reason—I feel that the time has come when I ought to confess the one great crime of my life. It happened a long time ago; but it is not uncommon for a belated burst of remorse to reveal such dark episodes long after they have occurred. It has nothing to do with the orgies of the Anti-Puritan League. That body is so offensively respectable that a newspaper, in describing ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... an unhappy woman," she stammered; "it is quite right of you to get angry. But I should feel too much remorse if I caused one of my sons to be sent to prison. No; I'd rather ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... following him to his grave, they pursued him after death with redoubled fury, and recounted with infinite gusto and satisfaction the supposed horrors of his death-bed: gloried in the fact that he was forlorn and friendless, and gloated like fiends over what they supposed to be the agonizing remorse of ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... that I possessed no influence to exert in his favor. 'If I was married to Neelie,' he said, 'she could do anything she liked with me; and I am sure, when you choose, you can do anything you like with Midwinter.' If the infatuated fool had actually tried to stifle the last faint struggles of remorse and pity left stirring in my heart, he could have said nothing more fatally to the purpose than this! I gave him a look which effectually silenced him, so far as I was concerned. He went out of the room grumbling and growling to himself. 'It's all very well to talk about manning the yacht. I ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... like an unruly horse Checked by a master's hand, fell slack; its force Unnerved, and stifling me with hot remorse; Frightened, despairing, "Love," I cried, ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... can't fence'—why, we might save the day. But our man won't even listen to that. Fight's the word. Chantel will see, on the spot, directly they face. But will that stop him? No fear: he's worked up to the pitch of killing. He'll lunge first, and be surprised afterward.—So regrettable! Such remorse!—Oh, I know him!" ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... At times Pierre's remorse is horrible. He thinks not of defrauded, murdered ward. Paul's victims raise no spectral hands of menace. To Pierre all other crimes shrink aghast at this most heinous incarnation of a father's guilt. He becomes indifferent to his own life. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee |
