"Torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lips. The possibilities paraded before him; on one hand, success. On the other there was the torture and death of the Inquisition. Jonas took a deep breath; there was no way to back out now. Heroism looked a ...
— Wizard • Laurence Mark Janifer (AKA Larry M. Harris)
... escorted by the despairing grief of Risler, to whom his dear master's death was an irreparable loss. On her arrival, she was compelled to describe her visit to the smallest detail; discuss the inmates of the chateau, the guests, the entertainments, the dinners, and the final catastrophe. What torture for her, when, absorbed as she was by a single, unchanging thought, she had so much need of silence and solitude! But there was something even more ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... thee is she not a servant of Satan?—dost thou not know it?—canst thou not prove it?" cried the knight. "Shall we put him to the torture to ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... barbarization of the public mind by the sight of the wrong inflicted on them with impunity. This savage condition still persists in the toleration of anonymous criticism, an abuse that ought to be as extinct as the torture of witnesses. It is hard enough to treat a fellow-author with respect even when one has to address him, name to name, upon the same level, in plain day; swooping down upon him in the dark, panoplied in the authority of a great journal, it ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... more mysterious and the more cruel are the rites. The more cruel the rites, the less is the civilisation. The red-hot poker with which Mr. Bouncer terrified Mr. Verdant Green at the sham masonic rites would have been quite in place, a natural instrument of probationary torture, in the Freemasonry of Australians, Mandans, or Hottentots. In the mysteries of Demeter or Bacchus, in the mysteries of a civilised people, the red-hot poker, or any other instrument of torture, would have been out of place. But in the Greek mysteries, just as in ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... Earl reckoned without his host. It is true his presence and his communications were gall and wormwood to his once partial mistress. But barred from every other and more direct mode of revenge, the Queen perceived that she gave her false suitor torture by these inquiries, and dwelt on them for that reason, no more regarding the pain which she herself experienced, than the savage cares for the searing of his own hands by grasping the hot pincers with which he tears the flesh ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Grotius, who was Pensionary of the Magistrates of Rotterdam, and at present a prisoner before the Commissaries appointed by the States General to try him, has acknowledged without being put to the torture. ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... of the loving father at these words! Had the oracle but threatened punishment to him, he would have endured any torture before subjecting his child to such a fate; but as a king, he dared not bring ruin on all his people, who trusted him. Psyche, herself, numb with horror, commanded quietly that preparations be made for the procession ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... their breaths, waiting to see this fool led away to die by torture of the ant-heap or some other dreadful doom. But ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... Tartars, a hot valiant inroad, and then they scour off again. Equally painful is self-examination, for if the wretch be 'callous', the 'facts' of psychology will not present themselves—if not, who could go on year after year in a perpetual process of deliberate self-torture and shame. The very torment of the process would furnish facts subversive of the system, for which the process was instituted. The mind would at length be unable to disguise from itself the unequivocal 'fact' of ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... in men, or "in the children of men, in whom there is no salvation."(89) The peace and blessedness which we seek are "not as the world giveth;"(90) and unless we turn away from the world and cease to torture our lives with its vanities, our portion can never be other than heartaches, secret loathing, consuming thirst. "For many friends cannot profit," says Thomas a'Kempis, "nor strong helpers assist, nor prudent counsellors ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... guillotine—an awful instrument in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its blade—which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement placed there by Signor P——. Yet my credulity was so strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as well preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton beneath it—found as we saw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... without a struggle?" she vehemently asked, after a moment or two of this silent torture "Look at me. Am I a woman to listen to the passionate avowals of the first man that happens to glance my way and imagine he would like to have me for his wife? Is a handsome face and honeyed tongue sufficient to gain ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... full, and that Mr. Puddleham's first Sunday would be a success. And the chapel, of course, had a bell,—a bell which was declared by Mrs. Fenwick to be the hoarsest, loudest, most unmusical, and ill-founded miscreant of a bell that was ever suspended over a building for the torture of delicate ears. It certainly was a loud and brazen bell; but Mr. Fenwick expressed his opinion that there was nothing amiss with it. When his wife declared that it sounded as though it came from the midst of the shrubs ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... the master, when he uttered these words, wrenched by despair from the very bottom of his chest. Pain shot through his own heart, as if it had been touched by a knife. Paul, the well-beloved comrade of his youth, captured and subjected to the torture! His blood turned to ice in his veins. How could they ever have missed the boy? Paul now seemed to Henry at least ten years younger than himself. It was not merely the fault of a single man, it was the fault of them all. He stared back ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... have been his fate! But to live alone! to have no companions but his own thoughts! amid the dash of waves, the cry of birds, the bleating of goats, incessantly to imagine the sound of a human voice, and incessantly to experience the torture of being undeceived! What elements of happiness has he ever met in this miserable island? When he dreamed of creating resources for a long and peaceful future, he lied to himself. A life favored by leisure would but crush ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... a moment. I had hopes in the hypocrisy of the sex; but perseverance makes it as bad as a fixed aversion. I desire your opinion, Whether I may not lawfully play the inquisition upon her, make use of a little force, and put her to the rack and the torture, only to convince her, she has really fine limbs, without spoiling or distorting them. I expect your directions, ere I proceed to dwindle and fall away with despair; which at present I don't think advisable, because, if she should recant, she may then hate me perhaps in the other extreme for my tenuity. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... recollection of some unbearable pain. "Have I not been snatched from the very jaws of death? Has not mine been a living death, a hideous grave, for these four years?" And then, hurriedly and almost disconnectedly, as though the mere recalling the past was torture to him, he poured into the girl's shrinking ears fragments of a story so stern in its reality, so terrible in its details, that, regardless of the children that played on the margin of the water, Phillis hid her face in her hands and ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... resolute bearing, his gentleness and patience, his steadfast adherence to the truths he had taught, and his heroic endurance of the fiery ordeal through which he had to pass to his rest and reward." The harrowing details of his six long hours of torture have been preserved for us by his friend Alesius, himself a sorrowing witness of the fearful tragedy. "He was rather roasted than burned," he tells us. It may be that his persecutors had not deliberately planned thus horribly to protract ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... comrades may fire the blood. It may lead men to risk their own lives in a desperate charge to get even. But it is a pain that does not rankle and that does not fester like a sore that will not heal. It is the tales the Canadians have to tell of sheer, depraved torture and brutality that has inflamed them to the pitch of hatred that they cherish. It has seemed as if the Germans had a particular grudge against the Canadians. And that, indeed, is known to be the case. The Germans harbored many a fond illusion before the war. ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... not follow that no one is ever in the right!" returned Donal. "Does your lordship think you were in the right—either towards me or the poor animal who could not obey you because he was in torture?" ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... sawmill, which is a little farther away?' 'You may make light of my words, if you choose,' replied he; 'but I am in no mood for jesting. The truth is, Miss Adams, that I can no longer endure this life of suspense and torture, and it is evident you care more for a giddy throng of admirers than for the love of one who has loved you from childhood. I leave here to-morrow morning, trusting to time and distance to assist me in forgetting you.' He looked earnestly in my face, in the bright ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... manoeuvre the mule's body is kept at full stretch, and the rider is obliged to lean forward over the animal's neck to avoid being thrown head-foremost by the violent jerks when the mule springs from step to step. It is absolute torture to ride down a descent of five or six leagues, along a road such as I have just described: willingly would the harassed rider dismount and pursue his course on foot; but were he to attempt to do so, the mule would stand stock still. I have already remarked the singular obstinacy with ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... I killed that man," she answered, deliberately. "I placed the infernal machine by his door, and so took the vengeance which I swore to take a year ago, when he took prisoner and gave to torture and death my lover. I failed once, I failed twice; last night I succeeded. ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... felt in strikes, in the 1st of May demonstrations, where they promoted the idea of a general strike for an eight hours' day, and in the anti-militarist propaganda in the army, violent prosecutions were directed against them, especially in the Latin countries (including physical torture in the Barcelona Castle) and the United States (the execution of five Chicago Anarchists in 1887). Against these prosecutions the Anarchists retaliated by acts of violence which in their turn were followed by more ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to wondering how many poor creatures had been murdered by them in their bloodthirsty career, and why it was that there should be such indifference to death, and so horrible a love of cruelty and torture, in the Chinese character. All at once came the shout, and we ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... everything, while intelligence frequently counted nothing. Looking at those mailed figures makes one almost feel ashamed of his ancestry. Besides one of the blocks upor which were beheaded both the innocent and the guilty in former times, there are also on exhibition the Collar of Torture, 14 pounds in weight, the Thumb-screw, the Stocks, &c., a collection of instruments of torture well calculated to restore in the mind of the beholder, a vivid picture of the dark and wretched past, when man's greatest and most dangerous enemy was his brother. It ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... sold my honor, the love of my country, the freedom of my brothers. For your sake I risked an awful death. For your sake I have lived like a hunted man, with the cry of the wolves always in my ears, and the fear of death and of eternal torture with me day by day. No other man since the world was made has done ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flames and smoke of Tartarus. Wistful glances back at all we have lost are embodied; and all these long, agonizing appeals of the eye against that fate of separation which cannot be longer combated with tongue or hand, are made over again for our torture. ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... evidently gave him pleasure, and there was scarce a back in Congress that did not at one time or another feel the score of his cutting lash; though it was the Southerners and the Northern allies of Southerners whom chiefly he singled out for torture. He was irritable and quick to wrath; he himself constantly speaks of the infirmity of his temper, and in his many conflicts his principal concern was to keep it in control. His enemies often referred to it ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... says they were greatly disturbed in the night, by the irregular behaviour of one of the seamen, named Connell, which made them suspect he had got drunk with some wine that had been saved; but it turned out that the excruciating torture he suffered from thirst had induced him to drink salt water; 'by which means he went mad, and died in the sequel of the voyage.' It seems, a small keg of water, and some biscuits, had been thrown into one of the boats, which they found, by calculation, would be ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... answer the purpose; they selected these by lot, marched them to the gate and delivered them over to Barrett, who thereupon ordered the rations to be sent in. He was considerate enough, too, to feed the men he was going to torture. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... There was torture in the words, in the fierce grip on the arm. The promised assistance had arrived and the boys were powerless to make ...
— Boy Scouts on Motorcycles - With the Flying Squadron • G. Harvey Ralphson
... when I come up, it de Lord's truth, I ain' know nothin but a decent livin all de time. My old Missus was a dear old soul en I been raise dat way. I hear talk bout how some of de white folks would bout torture dey niggers to death sometimes, but never didn' see my white folks allow nothin like dat. Dey would whip dey niggers dat runaway en stay in de woods, but not so worser. No, mam, my Missus wouldn' ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... and every eager villain in the band knew now what fate awaited Rufe. The schooner, not being square-rigged, was badly fitted for the operation of keel-hauling; but Dolores's inventive brain had devised a refinement of even that refinement of torture. She waited for the rope end, and when Spotted Dog brought it aft, on the weather side, passing clear from the gaff to leeward, under the keel and up to windward, she stood aside so that the yachtsmen ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... too dreadful and too many in the last few days to be separated and assimilated. He had been like a man stunned by a fall—paralyzed by a blow. Now the agonizing tingle of memory and despair made his thoughts an exquisite torture. He tried to put Alma Marston out of those thoughts. He did not dare to try to find a place for her in the economy of his affairs. However, she and he had been down to the gates of death together, and he realized ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... Ghent, however, the movement acquired more threatening proportions, the magistrates being overwhelmed by the crowd and the workmen seizing the direction of affairs. Charles, who had obtained from Francis I permission to cross France with an army, condemned to torture most of the leaders of the movement, suppressed all the town's privileges by the "Caroline concession" (1540), and even ordered that the well-known bell "Roland" should be unhung. This last punishment remained in the ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... favourite show bullock for a year, thinking I would improve him, and given him everything he would take; and when that day twelvemonth came round, he was worse than a twelvemonth before. You can only torture nature so far; and if you force a yearling bullock, he will never come to the size that he will attain if kept on common fare. If you wish to bring a bullock to size for exhibition, give him as ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... inquiries into the horrors of war, surely they would cry aloud for some better provision against their extremity after battle,—for some regulated and certain assistance to the wounded and agonized,—so that we might hear no longer of men left in cold and misery all night, writhing with torture,—of bodies stripped by prowlers, perhaps murderers,—and of frenzied men, the other day the darlings of their friends, dying, two and even several days after the battle, of famine! The field of Waterloo was not completely cleared of its dead and dying till nearly a week! Surely large companies ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... parasites which her good nature had attracted to her had been paid, or thrown, off; and the books and the mutilated manuscripts packed up. Every day she had visited her "beloved in the chapelle ardente." "I never rested," she says, "and it was a life of torture. I used to wake at four, the hour he was taken ill, and go through all the horrors of his three hours' ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... never given up her soul's secret until now; never until now had it so much as hinted that Violet had any soul at all. The comparative fineness and sharpness of outline might have reminded him of his wife as she had looked when she came out of her torture after the birth of her first child, but that no implacable resentment and no revolt was there. It was plainly to be seen (nor did Ransome altogether miss it) that here were a body and a soul that had suffered to extremity, and were now ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... committed every possible absurdity in the way of preparation for this blessed event. I turn hot when I remember the cravat I bought. My boots might be placed in any collection of instruments of torture. I provided, and sent down by the Norwood coach the night before, a delicate little hamper, amounting in itself, I thought, almost to a declaration. There were crackers in it with the tenderest mottoes that could ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the other. The councillor was in a violent fever, agitated unceasingly both in body and mind: he could not bear any position of any kind for more than a few minutes at a time. Bed was a place of torture; but if he got up, he cried for it again, at least for a change of suffering. At the end of three months he died. His stomach, duodenum, and liver were all in the same corrupt state as his brother's, and more than that, the surface of his body was burnt away. This, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... darkling swim, and fix their closing beams; Now in short gasps his lab'ring spirit heaves, And weakly flutters on his falt'ring tongue, And struggles into sound. Hear, monster hear, With his last breath, he curses purjured Phaedra: He summons Phaedra to the bar of Minos; Thou too shalt there appear; to torture thee Whole Hell shall be employ'd, and suff'ring Phaedra Shall find some care to see thee still ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... has, the privilege, called for one of the liveliest tunes then known. The parson's attempt to keep time made the uproar still greater; but at length it ceased, for neither the philosopher nor the parson could hold out any longer, and each retired in a state of torture to his seat. The mirth having now subsided, a gentleman entered the room, admirably dressed, on whom the attention of the whole company was turned, He was tall, elegantly formed, and at a first glance was handsome. The expression of his eyes, however, was striking—startling. ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... off, arms and legs torn from the body in presence of the victims' children or wives, whose agony was thus begun before their own turn came. Men and women and infants were burned alive. Chinese executioners were specially hired to inflict the awful torture of the "thousand slices."[281] Officers had their limbs broken and were left for hours in agonies. Many victims are credibly reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down to the present ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Thaumacia dwelt, In Meliboea and Olizon's rock; These Philoctetes, skilful archer, led. Sev'n ships were theirs, and ev'ry ship was mann'd By fifty rowers, skilful archers all. But he, their chief, was lying, rack'd with pain, On Lemnos' sacred isle; there left perforce In torture from a venomous serpent's wound: There he in anguish lay: nor long, ere Greeks Of royal Philoctetes felt their need. Yet were his troops, their leader though they mourn'd, Not leaderless: Oileus' bastard son, Medon, of ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... know, dearest, how much I lost in losing you, and that the manner of it put me to double torture. You only can comfort me. By you I was wounded, and by you I must be healed. And it is only you on whom the debt rests. I have obeyed the last tittle of your commands; and if you bade me, I ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was torture to the boy. The restricted life of a great city orphanage was the other extreme of the world compared with the Limberlost. He was afraid for his life every minute. The heat was intense. The heavy wading-boots rubbed his feet until they bled. He ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... roasting, frying, scorching, blazing, burning, but ever-consuming hell, sir, I say, in full operation—the whole dark and penal machinery in full play—open it up—there they are—the yell, the scream, the blasphemy, the shout, the torture, the laughter of despair—with the pleasing consciousness that all this is to be eternal; hark ye, sir, open me up a view of this aforesaid spectacle upon the very brow of perdition, and having allowed me time to console myself by a contemplation ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... occurrence for which it could be considered a sufficient atonement that some miserable criminals under sentence of death, or some desperate individuals anxious to secure the worldly prosperity of their families, should undergo painful torture and public execution in order to shield official falseness and infamy. Although no one ever suspected the Pekin government of having directly instigated the outrage, the delay in instituting an impartial and searching ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... calculated to torture the jealous heart of a lover. Several times Drew observed Ruth and Parmalee engaged in what seemed to be a peculiarly confidential talk. Their heads were close together and their voices low. They seemed to be talking of ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... the Northern Railway is the tsetse fly: especially was he to be found at a place called Same, and during the long trek from German Bridge on the Northern Railway to Morogoro in the south. At one place there is a belt thirty miles wide, and our progress was perpetual torture, unless we passed that way at night. For the Glossina morsitans sleeps by night beneath leaves in the bush, and only wakes when disturbed. For this reason we drive our horses, mules, and cattle ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... the deadly certainty that every nightfall was bringing it one step nearer. What an agony of apprehension we would be in as the month approached—then the week, the day, and finally the hour! What man could stand the strain of such prolonged torture? ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... voice called out threats and warnings to the Spaniards, saying, 'Huitzel is hungry for your blood, ye Teules, ye shall surely follow where ye have seen your fellows go: the cages are ready, the knives are sharp, and the irons are hot for the torture. Prepare, ye Teules, for though ye slay many, ye ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... be inflicted, but who is to decide what is cruel and what is unusual? * * * Each officer may define cruelty according to his own temper, and if it is not usual, he will make it usual. Corporal punishment, imprisonment, the gag, the ball and chain, and the almost insupportable forms of torture invented for military punishment lie within the range of choice. The sentence of a commission is not to be executed without being approved by the commander, if it affects life or liberty, and a sentence of death must be approved by the President. This applies to cases in which there has been ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... in particular, as described in the Eclogue, lost both his eyes. It would be policy and humanity to employ means of destruction, could they be discovered, powerful enough to destroy fleets and armies, but to use any thing that only inflicts additional torture upon the victims of our war systems, is ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... Wickens, the banker. He married her for her money, and lives upon it religiously. By now, I should think, he has dragged her through every torture that marriage ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with him—he was too plainly in the right. Lady Lydiard submitted; she concealed the torture that her own resolution inflicted on her with an endurance which was, indeed, worthy of herself. Taking Isabel in her arms she kissed her in a passion of sorrow and love. "My poor dear! My own sweet girl! don't suppose that this is a parting kiss! I shall see you again—often ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... Martha," the Poor Boy murmured, "to look for me at such a time. Why break her heart for a pair of bright eyes and a glass of hot grog? Why not keep my word? It's only two or three days of torture." ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris
... discontent with Russian rule. Women, ay, and ladies, are publicly flogged. Priests are massacred, our churches closed, our very language proscribed. Death is a thousand times preferable to the living torture we undergo, and when we at last rise, it is vengeance and death that we seek rather than with any thought of finally freeing Poland from her oppressors. And now," he said, "you will excuse me if I suggest that we follow the example of my comrades, and turn off to sleep. We have ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... "Why do you torture me so? Sometimes I think you care for me; sometimes that you hate and detest me. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... immerse an infant, was fixed to a board, a fascinating, blackened old bracket, carved with the instruments of torture, the nails, the spear, the scourge, and thorns. Ivory and pearl, stained by a century or more, were inlaid. As I dipped my hand in the shell a huge lizard that made his nest in the hollow of the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... out of reach. The cattle made a few surges, but once the remuda was safe, there was an abundance of help in holding them, and they quieted down before sunrise. The Comanches had no use for cattle, except to kill and torture them, as they preferred the flesh of the buffalo, and once our saddle stock and the contents of the wagon were denied them, they faded into ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... there, but had behaved with cheerfulness and freedom. Mentally I had accused her of slightness, and inability to talk upon the subjects which interested Mardon and myself; but when I knew she had been in torture all the time, my opinion was altered. I thought how rash I had been in judging her as I continually judged other people, without being aware of everything they had to pass through; and I thought, too, that ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... eighty-seven of the applicants being chosen. The hall has, on three sides, little box-like slates about six by eight feet, furnished with only a plank on which the student must sit and sleep. He is shut in there for three days, food being given him on entering for the entire time. This torture is repeated three times, so that nine days of purgatory have to be endured ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... regarding religion which were the very reverse of orthodox, he was summoned before the tribunals of the Inquisition to answer for his crimes as a heretic and a sorcerer. He loudly protested his innocence, even upon the rack, where he suffered more torture than nature could support. He died in prison ere his trial was concluded, but was afterwards found guilty. His bones were ordered to be dug up and publicly burned. He was also burned in effigy ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... might as well be other things. No appellation could be so terrible as that first. He would take the thirty thousand dollars if it should be forthcoming, vote and take the first train west the same day. In the Orient he could lose his identity as a bribe-taker and a murderer. The torture never relaxed during the days ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... to death. But Bolivar was not only a man of genius but one of equanimity, poise, deep thought and attention. He did not want to carry out his threats immediately, but decided to think at length over the transcendent step he was considering. The night of the 14th of June was a night of torture for the Liberator. On the morning of the 15th he himself wrote the decree of War to Death, and then called for an assembly of his officers to hear their opinions of this decree. Not one of them dissented. At the close of the meeting Bolivar ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... my right arm and affecting an expression of torture. I am not a physical coward, kind reader. The fact that young Mr. Titus carried in his hands a set of formidable looking boxing-gloves did not frighten me. Heaven knows, if it would give him any pleasure to slam me about with a pair of gloves, I am not without ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... interest for the arrival or for news of this vessel, and are only now slowly and reluctantly abandoning all hope, while the wretched parents have been for weeks past agitated with all the alternations of hope and despair, and suffering a protracted torture worse than any certainty. So much for ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... requires a conscience, or nothing can be more unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... it," she said gravely and quietly. "Do you think I could face my father and mother, knowing I was about to wound them to the heart? Each day of delay would be torture to me. Oh, why is religion such a curse?" She paused, overwhelmed for a moment by the emotion she had been suppressing. She resumed in the same quiet manner. "Yes, we must break away at once. We have kept ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... jealousy can inspire hatred, then Ward must feel toward his successful rival all the ferocious hatred of a man resenting a great deprivation. And that vengeful passion must not be permitted to expend itself in profitless inward torture. It was a potent force for Britz's dexterous hands to manipulate, a destructive fury that should annihilate Beard—if Beard was ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... oh! of all tortures That torture the worst Has abated—the terrible Torture of thirst, For the naphthaline river Of Passion accurst:— I have drank of a water ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... Horatio, even Muscovites would chuse to have some pretence for what they do; and sure the first favourite and generalissimo of a prince, who boasts an inclination to civilize his barbarous subjects, will not, without any cause, torture them whom chance alone has put into his power, and who have never done him any personal injury.—By heaven, pursued he, turning to the prince, we all are innocent of any part of those crimes laid to our charge:—time, ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... fell his pride, that he let drop The instrument of torture at his feet, And to the rest exclaim'd: "We have no power To strike him." Then to me my guide: "O thou! Who on the bridge among the crags dost sit Low crouching, safely now to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... the city and prepared to defend Bogota. There was fighting in several sections, accompanied by much sorrow, for it was believed that Bolivar had been killed. Bolivar had not been killed, but he would have preferred death to the torture which he experienced at this reward of his eighteen years of service in the interest of his country. Seeing some soldiers pass discussing the defeat of the mutineers, Bolivar joined them and soon presented himself ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... understand!" Darrell exclaimed; then continued, passionately: "The last three weeks have been torture to me if I but allowed myself one moment's thought. Wherever I look I see life—life, perfect and complete in all its myriad forms—the life that is denied to me! This is not living,—this existence of mine,—with brain shackled, ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... "Don't torture me, good people," said the cat. "I am a human being like yourselves, and have been changed into the shape of a cat by witchcraft, though it was a just return for my wickedness. I was the housekeeper in the palace of a great king a long way from here, and the old woman was the queen's ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... way of showing a thing is right; but why I can't see. If you did hate me, it might be all very well to throw me over; but if not, why torture two as well as one? Are you afraid of my people? ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... woman, who had previously shown me great attention, persuaded me to send for a physician; and my husband, distracted at seeing me in such agony, ran off to seek for the best medical aid. After some little delay a physician was found. I was then in extreme torture; but was relieved by bleeding, and by the violent fits of sickness that ensued. I will not dwell minutely on my sufferings, suffice to say, they were intense; but God, in his mercy, though he chastened and afflicted me, yet gave me not over unto death. From the females of the house ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... is well to remember that torture was not abolished in France until the Revolution. A Catholic writer makes the following judicious remark: "We cannot study the eighteenth century without being struck by the immoral consequences ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... frenzy for work, I will compare it to an attack of herpes. I scratch myself while I cry. It is both a pleasure and a torture at the same time. And I am doing nothing that I want to! For one does not choose one's subjects, they force themselves on one. Shall I ever find mine? Will an idea fall from Heaven suitable to my temperament? ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... are more frequently opposed to each other in the New Testament than happiness and misery. The Supreme Being would appear to us in a very different view if we were to consider him as pursuing the creatures that had offended him with eternal hate and torture, instead of merely condemning to their original insensibility those beings that, by the operation of general laws, had not been formed with qualities suited to a ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... than did most of the warriors. He prudently uttered some words of sympathy, but they hardly deceived those who heard them. They agreed with him, however, in declaring that his fall must be avenged, and that the boy who had caused his death, as well as his little sister, must suffer torture-punishment for the deed. ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... at the door as judge; retains Charon in his old office of boatman over the Stygian lake; puts fabulous people with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus, and Ephialtes, with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth; and associates the Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. It has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of warder of purgatory, though the censor's poor good wife, Marcia, is detained in the regions below. By these and other far greater inconsistencies, the whole place of punishment becomes a reductio ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... now high, and it shone with dazzling brightness upon the bleached bones which lay upon the road. Again the torture of thirst fell upon the little group of survivors, and again, as they rode with withered tongues and crusted lips, a vision of the saloon of the Korosko danced like a mirage before their eyes, and they saw the white napery, the wine-cards by the places, the long necks of the bottles, the siphons ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... available. Behind Margaret's forehead a monster crouched and crunched. That was nothing. It was in the tender places of her heart that the girl agonised and by comparison to the torture there, the monster ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... poisoner; against the flower-girl of the Palais-Royal, who, two years before, had mutilated her lover, a French guardsman, in a fit of jealousy. Ferocity here is associated with lewdness to add debasement to torture, while life is violated through outrages on modesty. In Madame de Lamballe, killed too quickly, the libidinous butchers could outrage only a corpse, but for the widow,[31109] and especially the flower-girl, they revive, like so many Neros, the fire-circle of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... alien scenes, amid the strife Of urban odors to ungladden life— Where gas and sewers and dead dogs conspire The flesh to torture and the soul to fire— Where all the "well defined and several stinks" Known to mankind hold revel and high jinks— Humbled in spirit, smitten with a sense Of lost distinction, leveled eminence, She suddenly resigns her baleful trust, Nor ever ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... I want to forget! To forget for ever! My shame, my terrible torture. You're a cruel lot! I shall go away, and stay away for ever! I can't ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... short years ago this black people was drove about like dumb cattle,—bought and sold, hunted by blood-hounds; the wimmen hunted to infamy and ruin, the men to torture and to death. The wimmen denied the first right of womanhood, to keep themselves pure. The men denied the first right of manhood, to protect the ones they loved. Deprived legally of purity and honor, and all the rights of commonest humanity—worn with unpaid toil, beaten, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... little wearily). Well, Masha, after all, you've got all I can give, the best I've ever had to give, perhaps, because you're so strong, so beautiful, that sometimes you've made me know how to make you glad. So why torture yourself? ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... said Kasia, calmly; "and I shall not speak; or, if I do, it will be to urge him to continue to defy you. Do you imagine that any threat, any torture, could compel him to place the world at the mercy of your Kaiser? You do not know him, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... intercede with the Marquis to change the manner thereof from hanging, or simple suspension, to breaking your limbs on the roue or wheel, with the coulter of a plough, or otherwise putting you to death by torture, surpasses my comprehension. Were I you, Ranald, I would be for miskenning Sir Duncan, keeping my own secret, and departing quietly by suffocation, like ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... this was not worthy of one look from his eye, it all lied, it all stank, it all stank of lies, it all pretended to be meaningful and joyful and beautiful, and it all was just concealed putrefaction. The world tasted bitter. Life was torture. ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... against my analysis of the historical situation and remind me of Booker Washington. They will say, "He was not lynched. He was accepted. Any Negro like him is safe, if he behaves himself." I answer that I have no fancy for mob murder or torture of any human being, ignorant or wise, good or bad. There are, moreover, other answers to the riddle of that great constructive educator's career. One is creditable to the white southerners. They are not all eager for Negro blood. There is yet another solution. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Ormonde I That would have been a greater folly than anything yet. No irreparable harm was as yet done; to confess a mere state of mind would have been to fill his friend with fears wholly groundless, and to fix a lasting torture in his own memory. It would have been to render impossible any future work in Lambeth. Yet upon the continuance of such work practically depended Grail's future. To Gilbert Grail he had solemn duties to ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... had been cut off, and the blood was streaming down each side of his face. A terrible scene of torture now commenced. The warriors shot charges of powder into his naked body, commencing with the calves of his legs, and continuing to his neck. The boys snatched the burning hickory poles and applied them to his flesh. As fast as he ran around the stake, to avoid one party of tormentors, he was ...
— Heroes and Hunters of the West • Anonymous
... within myself; Lucifer keeps his court in my breast; Legion is revived in me. There are as many hells as Anaxagoras conceited worlds. There was more than one hell in Magdalene, when there were seven devils; for every devil is a hell unto himself. He holds enough of torture in his own ubi, and needs not the misery of circumference to afflict him. And thus, a distracted conscience here, is a shadow or introduction unto hell hereafter. Who can but pity the merciful intention of those hands that do ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... "With all imaginable torture, cruelly break my limbs, but do not keep me waiting, for of all torments disappointed expectation is the most painful. I expected thee all yesterday afternoon until six o'clock, but thou didst not come, thou witch, and I grew almost mad. ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... unceasing pain, borne with that fortitude which could make her an entertaining and interesting companion even while the sweat of mortal agony was starting from her brow. Her own room she kept as a last asylum, to which she would silently retreat when the torture became too intense for the repression of society, and there alone, with closed doors, she wrestled with her agony. The stubborn independence of her nature took refuge in this final fastness; and she prayed only that she might go down to death with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... uprising of the Iroquois in 1649, there was a massacre of the Hurons at the little mission village of St. Louis upon the shores of Georgian Bay. There Jean de Breboeuf, refusing to leave his people, met death by torture at the hands of the conquering Iroquois. Lalement, his friend, a priest of the same order, was also martyred by these Indians upon the ...
— The Miracle and Other Poems • Virna Sheard
... piece of mechanism. A knise, then, is neither more nor less than a false print in the Edinburgh Review for a knife; and from this blunder of the printer has Mr. Styles manufactured this Ddalean instrument of torture called a knise.'' A similar instance occurs in a misprint of a passage of one of Scott's novels, but here there is the further amusing circumstance that the etymology of the false word was settled to the ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... operator unrolls before us the long panorama of wars and plots and bribes and murders: his pictures speak, but he himself seldom interjects a word. Sometimes the lack of comment seems almost brutal, but what need to darken the torture-chamber in the ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... made the acquaintance of an outlaw; an unfortunate fellow-creature under the ban of condemnation, burdened with an opprobrious name, and by general consent given over to the tender mercies of any vagabond who chooses to torture him or take his life. One would naturally sympathize with the "under dog," but when, instead of one of his peers as opponent, a poor little fellow, eight inches long, has arrayed against him the whole human race, with all its devices for catching and killing, his chances for life and the pursuit ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... piece. So in music it rejects a wholly perfect harmony, and for this reason musicians deliberately intercalate discordant sounds—what are technically called dissonances. So, finally, it happens that physical exercise, even if it was at first undertaken for pleasure, becomes a torture when ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... much liked in America, that the St. Louis Mercantile Library made a liberal offer for some other statue. Accordingly, two years after, "Beatrice Cenci" was sent. The noble girl lies asleep, the night before her execution, after the terrible torture. "It was," says Mrs. Child, "the sleep of a body worn out with the wretchedness of the soul. On that innocent face suffering had left its traces. The arm that had been tossing in the grief tempest, had fallen ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... and order. The provinces were filled with foreign adventurers and fugitives; generally men bound by no ties of country, family, or property, who had brought with them from their unhappy homes the seeds of insubordination and rebellion. The repeated spectacles of torture and of death had rudely burst the tenderer threads of moral feeling, and had given an unnatural harshness to ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Contentment perished, for the vision of perfection ever haunted him. At first Christ's words and look of earnest affection filled his heart with a tumult of joy: but having fallen back into the old sordid self, the very memory of his master's face became a curse and torture. And so the vision blighted ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... master, held out till the threat of torture and the appeals of his friend Henriet broke him down. But the attitude and bearing of the chief culprit deserve that the historian should ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... two passes the deer would choose. As it was a physical impossibility to have his eyes on both passes at once, the old gentleman soon found that turning his head every few seconds from one side to the other became irksome. Then it became painful. At last it became torture, and then he gave up this plan in despair, resolving to devote a minute at a time to each pass, although feeling that by so doing his chances were ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... A long, slow shudder, as of one confronting unheard-of torture, went over his big frame. The fringe of hair on his bald head rose, his beard bristled. Sparks seemed to shoot from his eyes, burning ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... They were once more indifferent to all that was not their affection; they no longer remembered that they had lost their fortune; that they might have to hunt up a friend on the morrow in order to be able to dine in the evening. Why torture themselves with fears of coming want, when all they required to enjoy the greatest possible happiness was ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... inscription on the Italian tombstone, "What I gave away, I saved; what I spent, I used; what I kept, I lost." "Giving to the Lord," says another, "is but transporting our goods to a higher floor." And, says Dr. Barrow, "In defiance of all the torture and malice and might of the world, the liberal man will ever be rich; for God's providence is his estate; God's wisdom and power, his defense; God's love and favor, his reward; and God's ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... a group of five virgin martyrs, with St. Cecilia in the centre, wearing a crown of roses; St. Lucia holds the awl, the instrument of her torture, looking down at St. Catherine, who leans against her terrible wheel; St. Agnes, on the other side, reads quietly from a book while she caresses her lamb, and St. Barbara stands behind her, with eyes lifted to ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... into insignificance compared with the mosquitos. There are very few places on earth where these pests are so formidable as in the bottom lands of the Missouri, and for weeks and even months they made the lives of our explorers a torture. No other danger, whether from hunger or cold, Indians or wild beasts, was so dreaded by the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... telling her how my sister and I had been brought up, and what a senseless torture our childhood had really been. When she heard how my father had so lately beaten me, she shuddered and ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... powerful nobles who controlled the power of the throne. At fourteen years of age his enemies were driven out and his kinsmen came into power. They, caring only for blood and plunder, prompted the boy to cruelty, teaching him to rob, to torture, to massacre. They applauded him when he amused himself by tormenting animals; and when, riding furiously through the streets of Moscow, he dashed all before him to the ground and trampled women and children under his ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... when they can, avert the torture by killing themselves. Remy, that excellent judge of Lorraine, who burned some eight hundred of them, crows over this very fear. "So well," said he, "does my way of justice answer, that of those who were arrested ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... felt that return was impossible. He would rather wander to the ends of the earth than shut himself up with his mother and sisters, for he foresaw that their daily moans and repinings would be daily torture. It would be even worse to appear among his old acquaintances and companions, and be taunted with the fact that his first venture from home ended in a common jail. The plan of drifting away to parts unknown, and of partially losing his identity by changing his name, made a cold, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... reception at the French Academy, Condamine consoled himself by composing songs; and maintained until his death, which was hastened by all he had undergone, the zeal for information on all subjects, even torture, which led him to question the executioner on the scaffold ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... correspond with each other, I stood and watched while he rode rapidly back down the road we had traversed together. At the summit of the hill he turned and waved his cap, then disappeared, leaving me alone, with Edith's face more clearly than ever a torture to my memory of defeat,—her face, fair, smiling, alluring, yet the face ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... tatooer might tumble, helter-skelter, from their topmost perch into the very lowest depth, if there be one lower than another, of the orchestra; and thereby sustain such a compound fracture, attended by loss of substance, as should put it out of their power, for that night at least, to torture our fastidious ears. Being of a melancholy temperament, we are unfortunately, at times, subject to most ludicrous fancies; and as these ungainly instruments loom on our disgusted eye, we cannot, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... spent the night in fear and perplexity. Sometimes he resolved to go into Caesar's house privately, and there kill himself upon the altar of his household gods, to bring divine vengeance upon him; but the fear of torture restrained him. And after passing through a variety of confused and uncertain counsels, at last he let his servants carry him by sea to Capitae, where he had a house, an agreeable place to retire to in the heat of summer, when the ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... knife. Thus they hold them by terror. But the result of this system is, that on the arrival of the caravan, fifty out of a hundred slaves are missing from the trader's list. A few may have escaped, but the bones of those who died from torture mark out the long routes from the interior ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... Miagh which liethe here alone That fain wold from hence begone By torture straunge my trouth was tryed Yet of my ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... eternal death? Truly, my beloved, all that can be spoken of torments and miseries in this life, suppose we could imagine all the exquisite torments invented by the most cruel tyrants since the beginning, to be combined in some one kind of torture, and would then stretch our imagination beyond that, as far as that which is composed of all torments surpasseth the simplest death, yet we do not conceive nor express unto you that death to come. Believe it, when the soul is out of the body it is a most pure activity, all sense, all ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... mill-owner and pioneer of the place, was also its magistrate. He was tall, thin, blacklooking, a sort of Abe Lincoln in type, physically, and in some sort, mentally. He heard the harrowing tale of terrible crime, robbery, and torture, inflicted on poor harmless Hoag by these two ghouls in human shape; he listened, at first shocked, ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... to meet for worship anywhere (their churches had of course all been pulled down) was a crime punishable with death; and any Huguenot caught whilst attempting to escape from the country was sent to the galleys—a fate worse than mere death, for it meant death by slow torture. And every child was forcibly taken from its heretic parents at the age of five, and ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... the type of human features and human contact clearly enough to place this man in his rightful page and column of life. He recognized an honesty and sincerity that might be trusted under the test of torture itself, purposes undeviatingly true—and the narrow intensity of fanaticism. He would have liked to make an ally of this man, and a friend, yet the question that had been raised ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... doctrine of the Mahayana is that everyone should strive for the happiness and salvation of all beings, but this beautiful truth may be sadly perverted if it is held that the endurance of pain is in itself meritorious and that such acquired merit can be transferred to others. Self-torture, seems not to be unknown in the popular forms ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... good hap as ever could be, for this is he that slew my brother, Sir Caradoc of the Dolorous Tower; and for revenge of that, I would have this knight taken to my tower and torture him before ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... three different kinds of these tormenting insects, viz. the mosquito, the black-fly, and the gnat—the latter the same as the midge in N. Britain—who relieve each other regularly in the work of torture. The mosquitoes continue at their post from dawn to eight or nine o'clock, A.M.; the black-flies succeed, and remain in the field till near sunset; the mosquitoes again mount guard till dark, and ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... life instead of the right are our chief mental resources after forty, and they tell me that we men only know half the poignancy of these miserable recollections. Women have a special adaptiveness for this kind of torture—would seem actually ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... said he, "not to torture me if my words should ill express my feelings, understand that my love is perfect; it carries with it ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... Dreiser," Peter said to me one day with the most delicious gleam of semi-malicious, semi-tender humor, "I am really doing all this just to torture Dick. He doesn't know a damned thing about it and neither do these Chinese, but it's fun to haul 'em out there and make 'em sweat. The museum sells an illustrated monograph covering all this, you know, with pictures of the genuinely historic pieces ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... the officer who accompanied her was too polite, too affable. She seemed not to understand, shrank from him, withdrew her hand. What torture! But the most terrible moment of all was the arrival in Rue de Braque, where the whole house was in a state of commotion, and the inquisitive curiosity of the neighbors must be endured. Early in the morning the whole quarter had been informed of her disappearance. It was rumored that she ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... affirmed that in former times the law would have instituted an inquiry as to what Boulatruelle did in the forest, and that the latter would have been forced to speak, and that he would have been put to the torture in case of need, and that Boulatruelle would not have resisted the water test, for example. "Let us put him to the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... extreme. The air is crowded with pestiferous insects, the glare of the sand weakens most men's eyes, and blinds many; water is scarce and bad: and the country had been swept clear of man, beast, and vegetable. Under this torture even the gallant spirits of such men as Murat and Lannes could not sustain themselves:—they trod their cockades in the sand. The common soldiers asked, with angry murmurs, if it was here the General designed ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart |
