"Atrocious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and after thinking a little he said there must have been twice that number. At least fifty shells also went after it. I hope the aviator got a V.C. or its equivalent on his return to his own lines. Our shell fire was atrocious; I felt so thoroughly ashamed of it that I hoped the Turks were not watching the puffs of smoke as the shells burst a good quarter of a mile behind their mark. When the machine came within range again on its return journey ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... Portuguese monkey, and the one-eyed English convict with the gash across his face, that ought to have gashed his wicked head off? The worst men in the world picked out from the worst, to do the cruellest and most atrocious deeds that ever stained it? The howling, murdering, black-flag waving, mad, and drunken crowd of devils that had overcome us by numbers and by treachery? No. These were English men in English boats—good blue-jackets and red-coats—marines that I knew myself, and sailors that knew our seamen! At ...
— The Perils of Certain English Prisoners • Charles Dickens
... was followed by Scood, and, as the boat glided off, yielding to the stream and the impetus, a miserable yelp came from the rocks above, followed by two dismal howls in different keys. Then there was an atrocious trio performed by the three dogs, each of which raised its muzzle and its eyes skyward, and uttered an unmusical protest ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... King's favour too dear. In a letter to Carleton, Chamberlain says that, if he had not "stuck" at this, Coke might have been Lord Chancellor. As it was, he incurred the whole odium of having sold his daughter, while his wife, who had gained the credit of protesting against that atrocious bargain, quietly pocketed its price in the coin of royal favour. Lady Elizabeth not only embroiled her own family, but also brought discord about her affairs into the family of another, as may be inferred ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... more, numbered by our allies —yes, gentlemen, I must repeat it, 'allies'—though, as a Briton, I blush at the word. Shame and disgrace for ever be that man's portion, who first associated the honourable usages of war with the atrocious and bloody cruelties of the savage. Yet so it is: the Delawares of the hills"—here the Yankees exchanged very peculiar looks—"have this morning arrived at Fort Peak, with orders to ravage the whole of your frontier, from Fort George ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... the line, Colonel Schmidt marched against Perugia, where, in restoring the Papal authority, he used a ferocity which, though denied by clerical writers, was attested by all contemporary accounts, and was called 'atrocious' by Sir James Hudson in a despatch to Lord John Russell. The significance of such facts, wrote the English minister at Turin, could only be the coming fall of the ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... he cried. "The worst is the game which the rascal has been playing with me and my poor daughter since he came here. My poor child has been running to Waldhofen day after day to give what comfort and aid she could, and Willibald has always accompanied her to comfort Marietta too—oh, its atrocious! Your model son has turned out well, ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... remote in time and place, and because in them Flaubert indulges his passion for splendor—for oriental scenery, for barbaric characters, the pomp of savage war and more savage religion, events strange, terrible, atrocious. We may call the stories in the other group realistic, because the subject-matter is contemporary life in Paris and the provinces, and because in them Flaubert indulges his hatred for mediocrity—for the humdrum existence of ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... cry he swept the thought and the picture from him. It was an atrocious thing to conceive, impossible of reality. And yet the truth would not go. What would he have done in St. ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... population thought the French people were perfectly justified in revolting, and warmly espoused their cause. Later many changed their opinions, shocked, as every one was, at the death of the king and queen, and the atrocious massacres which took place in France. Yet some not only approved of the revolution abroad, but were so disgusted with our mal-administration at home, to which they attributed our failure in the war in Holland and elsewhere, that great dissatisfaction ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... Socialist, as to any one who has caught any tinge of the modern scientific spirit, these facts present themselves simply as an atrocious failure of statesmanship. Indeed, a social system in which the mass of the population is growing up under these conditions, he scarcely recognizes as a State, rather it seems to him a mere preliminary ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... before, among those burned on the champan, as related above. It seems that they have inherited such disasters, for their father—a Portuguese gentleman, and a gallant soldier—after serving his Majesty in Africa, had to flee to Ytalia, because of committing an atrocious crime, which was as follows. Another gentleman insulted a relative of this gentleman. The insulted man, either for lack of ability to do more, or because he was a good Christian, did not take vengeance for the insult. The father of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... there are big cafes in plenty, whose waiters must be smoothly shaven: and moreover, at the time when Hippolyte came into his own, the porte Maillot station of the Metropolitain had already pushed its entree and sortie up through the soil, not a hundred metres from his door, where they stood like atrocious yellow tulips, art nouveau, breathing people out and in by thousands. There was no lack of possible custom. The problem was to turn possible into probable, and probable into permanent; and here the seven wits and the ten thousand francs of Esperance came prominently to the fore. ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... cause was on the question of vivisection, in which a chivalrous feeling led him to intervene with the following letter to Professor Holmgren, of Upsala University, which was published in The Times of April 18, 1881. "I thought it fair," he wrote, "to bear my share of the abuse poured in so atrocious ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... that she had put from her came again upon her, no longer in its merciful immensity, faceless and formless (for she had shrunk from picturing Lady Cayley), but boldly, abominably defined. She grasped it now, the atrocious tragedy, made visible and terrible for her in the body of Lady Cayley, the phantom of ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... do full justice to Coronado's coolness and readiness. This atrocious idea had occurred to him the instant he heard the charging yell of the Apaches; and it had done far more than any weakness of nerves to paralyze his fighting ability. He had thought, "Let them kill the Yankees; then I will ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... said the squire, "you are a very noble fellow. And as for riding down that black, atrocious miscreant, I regard it as an act of virtue, sir, like stamping on a cockroach. This lad Hawkins is a trump, I perceive. Hawkins, will you ring that bell? Mr. Dance must ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his atrocious act; he carefully concealed that he had ever executed it, and gave out that the Spaniards themselves had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... with me. And she pitied him with eager kindness while predicting for him the fate of the Polish count. Now she has seen him at Monaco with the girl, and she is already marrying them. Oh! it is really atrocious—always conjectures! Ah! if I could know the truth. Have patience, that is easy to write. But to show it! Patience is the virtue of sluggish—but gentle, ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... and stalked tensely to the door. There he spun around and said, "But there is a branch of the military service designated as the Psi Corps, and if you wish to discuss it in the future, kindly refer to it by its official title or abbreviation, and not by that atrocious nickname of 'sick.' I am sure the Central Command Authority knows what it is doing, and if they did intend to assign such personnel they must have very ...
— Shock Absorber • E.G. von Wald
... "that was merely a beginning. The next day I received another letter, written and sent under the same conditions; the day after, a third. I have twelve of them—do you hear? twelve—in my portfolio, and all composed with the same atrocious knowledge of the circle in which we move, as was the first. At the same time I was receiving letters from my poor wife, and all coincided, in the terrible series, in a frightful concordance. The anonymous letter told me: 'To-day they were together two hours and a ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Hallam before sunrise, must have plenty of altitude in her composition. It is my belief she lives on Mount Shasta, in a moral sense, and I shouldn't be surprised to hear of her taking out a building permit at the North Pole, if she thought duty called her. But, Dick, how can you be such an atrocious sceptic as to doubt the possibility of one's living above the clouds when ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... funeral oration, the jailer took out a blue and torn handkerchief, and dried his eyes. The Count shuddered at this story. He understood the atrocious plan adopted by Pietro to get rid of a dangerous witness, and forgetful of his ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... sacrificed justice to bribery and low intrigues, gave himself up to the effeminate indulgence of his harem, and the society of eunuchs and fiddlers. His Majesty appears to have been governed by favourites of the hour selected through utter caprice, and to have permitted, if he did not order, such atrocious cruelties and oppression as rendered the kingdom of Oude a disgrace to the British rule in India, and called for strong interference, on the score of humanity alone, as well as with the ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... accordance with the character of savages than that of civilized white men. The story of the sack of Hampton forms no part of the naval annals of the war, and in its details is too revolting to deserve a place here. It is a narrative of atrocious cruelty not to be paralleled in the history of warfare ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... Sinai near by and did not warn against it. This occurred in the desert of Sinai near the mountain. It is in accordance with all the laws of divine providence recounted so far and with those to follow that Jehovah did not restrain the Israelites from that atrocious worship. This evil was permitted them that they might not all perish. For the children of Israel were brought out of Egypt to represent the Lord's church; they could not represent it unless the Egyptian idolatry was first rooted out of their hearts. This ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... men only were excepted from the Pontifical amnesty. These were the authors of that atrocious act, the blowing up of the Sorristori barracks. Their crime, indeed, could not be considered as anything connected with the war, but simply as cowardly assassination. Those two wretches, Monti and Tognetti, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Lupin, laughing heartily. "And I should not have known the cruel terrors which your wound caused me. I have had an atrocious time because of it, believe me, and, at this moment, your pallor fills me with all the stings of remorse. Can you ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... Poverty took him by the hand and explained patiently and with diagrams the hardness of the world, the atrocious position of the declasse, who has never studied the art of roguery so as to make a living by it, and the utter uselessness as friends of those good fellows who sat in the cafes and walked the boulevards ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... adaptation was checked by a look from his mother, and he relapsed into gloom. "It's a horrid, atrocious shame!" he said. "I can't help it, and Hilda needn't speak to me again if she doesn't want to; but I cannot tell a lie, and I am NOT glad that Mrs. Grahame has come home, and I never ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... well, somewhere far back in the late seventies, that the crew of that ship were, if anything, rather proud of her evil fame, as if they had been an utterly corrupt lot of desperadoes glorying in their association with an atrocious creature. We, belonging to other vessels moored all about the Circular Quay in Sydney, used to shake our heads at her with a great sense of the unblemished virtue of ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... that there is in blasphemy a certain discharge of power which solaces the burdened heart. When an atheist, drawing his watch, gave God a quarter of an hour in which to strike him dead, it is certain that it was a quarter of an hour of wrath and of atrocious joy. It was the paroxysm of despair, a nameless appeal to all celestial powers; it was a poor wretched creature squirming under the foot that was crushing him; it was a loud cry of pain. And who knows? In the eyes of Him who sees all things, it was ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... credit, and sink under the permanent and vindictive attacks of the calumniator." This is the politics of Satan—the evil principle which regulates so many things in this world. The enemies of the Jesuits have formed a list of great names who had become the victims of such atrocious Machiavelism.[47] ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... arrested, although he had in fact done his best to stop the rising. Tried before a court in which every rule of evidence was tyrannically set aside, he was convicted on hearsay and condemned to death. Before the atrocious sentence could be commuted by the home authorities, the fiery heat and noisome vapours of his prison killed him. The death of the Demerara missionary, it has been truly said, was an event as fatal to slavery in the West Indies, as the execution of John ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... but is without address. Postmark San Francisco. It is also quite illiterate. The spelling is atrocious. Here ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... apprehension and foreboding of the mind, when under the influence of remorse, are powerful, and every man, whether civilized or savage, has interwoven in his constitution a moral sense, which secretly condemns him when he has committed an atrocious action, even when he is placed in situations which raise him above the fear of ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... a habit, and intemperance will be hateful; make prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will be as contrary to the course of nature in the child, or in the adult, as the most atrocious crimes are ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin—the unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced. My dear Clemens, whatever you do, never sell your audience.' And that," continued Mr. Clemens, "was ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... coarseness that would have been cruel enough if she had been responsible for them and a gainer by them, but against one of her tender years, innocent toward both, and injured by both, it was inconceivably atrocious. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... suppose that the spectacle of Verona garbed in a gown of innocence, singing hymns and weaving chaplets of lilies, was to go unnoticed by the ruling power. Can Grande II. was lord of Verona, a most atrocious rascal, and one of many; but, like his famous ancestor and namesake, he had a gibing tongue, which was evidence of a scrutiny tolerably cool of the shifts of human nature. Human nature, he had observed, must ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... sprightly, as a page; And everybody but his mother deemed Him almost man; but she flew in a rage[45] And bit her lips (for else she might have screamed) If any said so—for to be precocious Was in her eyes a thing the most atrocious. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... struggle to forget the thought. The atrocious, monstrous desire, once awakened, resisted, refused to recede, to hide, to die in the windings of his brain whence it had arisen. In vain did he repent his villainy, or feel ashamed of his cruel idea, striving to crush it forever. It seemed as though a second personality had arisen within ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... despots. Abimelech thus became king, and extended his authority Over central Palestine. But his success was short-lived, and the subsequent discord between Abimelech and the Shechemites was regarded as a just reward for his atrocious massacre. Jotham, the only one who is said to have escaped, boldly appeared on Mount Gerizim and denounced the ingratitude of the townsmen towards the legitimate sons of the man who had saved them from Midian. "Jotham's fable'' of the trees who desired a king may be foreign to the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... preserving the peace of society, protecting life and property when endangered, and in arresting a rogue or murderer. For this reason laws relating to mutiny, piracy, and murder on the seas are punishable with death. In many atrocious cases it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to obtain proof sufficient to convict the offender; but whenever a violator of those laws, whether a principal or accessory, is arrested, tried, and convicted, THE PUNISHMENT ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... mind the points to which I have drawn your attention—that peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and that startling absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious as this—let us glance at the butchery itself. Here is a woman strangled to death by manual strength, and thrust up a chimney, head downward. Ordinary assassins employ no such modes of murder as this. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... having lost your faith, because I don't believe it. At the worst it has gone to sleep, and will wake up again one day. Possibly you may not accept some particular form of faith, but I tell you frankly that to reject all religion simply because you cannot understand it, is nothing but a form of atrocious spiritual vanity. Your mind is too big for you, Miss Granger: it has run away with you, but you know it is tied by a string—it cannot go far. And now perhaps ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... "By Jove! there she is—on a horse-car, too! How atrocious! One might as well expect to see Minerva driving in a grocer's wagon as Miss Hollister in a horse-car. Miserable, untactful world to compel Minerva to ride in a horse-cart, or rather Miss Hollister to ride in a grocer's ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... what he heard. What course was he to pursue? Should he at once make his way to the palace and give information of the atrocious plot? It was not at all likely, should he do so, that he would be believed. He lay on his bed in deep distress of mind. That his companion who had brought him to London was engaged in the plot, he had no ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... his hair and let it stay there, clasping his thick locks. "Beautiful?" he cried; "of course it 's beautiful! Everything is beautiful; everything is insolent, defiant, atrocious with beauty. Nothing is ugly but me—me and ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... direct dash for the narrow lane between the braced and watchful lines. Every warrior lifted his club; every copper face gleamed stolidly, a mask behind which burned a strangely atrocious spirit. The two savages standing at the end nearest Beverley struck at him the instant he reached than, but they taken quite by surprise when he checked himself between them and, leaping this way and that, swung out two powerful blows, left and right, stretching one of them flat and sending the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... undertook to tell in detail all the particulars of these martyrdoms, which we shall leave for a more extended relation, in which they may be viewed; and great consolation will be had from the fact that those Christians have endured such atrocious and unheard-of torments with such constancy, for the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XXII, 1625-29 • Various
... atrocious idea. You are worse than a savage to talk of such a loathsome prison to me. Ah! mon Dieu! what is to happen to me! would I were back again in ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... transgression. You natives must be taught once more that the life and property of British subjects are not to be lightly made away with. I wrote to the consul last night, directly I had news of this atrocious affair. Iskender, poor misguided boy, will bear the punishment. But in my opinion, and in the sight of God, there are others more to blame than he in the matter. I mean those who led him astray, who first suggested to him a life of fraud and peculation." The missionary looked straight ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... expression of the natural instinct due to the economic situation of the working classes, is properly to be designated as the principle of the working classes,—this is what the public prosecutor has construed into an atrocious crime, and has accused me of urging the working classes to aim at making their own class the masters of the other classes ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... is now delirious, and no longer knows what she says. She has just assailed me with the most atrocious abuse, upbraiding me as the vilest of mankind! I really believe she is going ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... that which called them forth, or impeded them in their development, consequently social bondage and the "anarch custom" being always present to Shelley, the great idea ever uppermost to him was that true happiness is only attainable in perfect freedom: the atrocious system of fagging, now almost extinct in the English Public Schools and the tyrannical venality of ushers, deeply impressed themselves on the mind of Shelley, and he tells us, in the beautiful lines to his wife, of the remembrance of his endeavors to overthrow these abominations having ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... a Yankee would say, Mr. Colquhoun. I'm sure I don't see what I've done to merit this mark of approval. Popular report says that I jilted Miss Murray in the most atrocious manner; but then you always wanted me to do that, ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... excuses were accepted. A considerable portion of the dominions that had been wrested from him were restored; and even Holkar, whose atrocious cruelties to all the British soldiers and officers who fell into his hands should have placed him beyond the pale of pardon, was again invested with most of his former possessions—with the object, ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... better known. Let us look first at the tribunal set up in Rome for the trial of all crimes against the State. And let the reader bear in mind, that offences against the Church are crimes against the State, for there the Church is the State. A secret, summary, and atrocious tribunal it is, differing in no essential particular from that sanguinary tribunal in Paris where Robespierre passed sentence, and the guillotine executed it. The Gregorian Code[6] enacts, that in cases of sedition or treason, the ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... departing from orders. But he was so eager to take a hand in proceedings that he felt it would be torture to stay behind. He was dressed in Von Arnheim's clothes. And his build was that of the German aviator. If he were observed, he would not be suspected. Even his atrocious Spanish would not betray him, as the German spoke the language almost ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... upstanding gent who gave out his name as Sam Welborn. In all my public career I've never met a person more honest in business or more fearless with thugs and undesirables. Ten devils couldn't stop him if he thought he was right and even a midget could, and did, shame him out of some of his atrocious efforts. When he reached a certain goal in his persistent activities he disclosed to us four at the home where he headquartered that he was going back to his old home town to find out just where he stood—criminal or ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... this atrocious calumny had been transmitted to the queen, whether she that invented had the front to relate it, whether she found any one weak enough to credit it, or corrupt enough to concur with her in her hateful design, I know not, but methods had been taken to persuade the queen so strongly of the truth of ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... their praise, and seldom trouble to inquire who wrote their stories or painted their pictures. Consequently those who work for them win neither much gold nor great fame; but they have a most enthusiastic audience all the same. Yet when we remember that the veriest daubs and atrocious drawings are often welcomed as heartily, one is driven to believe that after all the bored people who turn to amuse the children, like others who turn to elevate the masses, are really, if unconsciously, amusing ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... retorted Edgar; "he deals in them wholesale. Mother says it's a famous trade. He has a cigar-holder with an amber mouthpiece and a woman all naked carved in meerschaum. Just think, the other day he came and told mother his wife was making him atrocious scenes." ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... the entire truth, put some of them to the torture, and ultimately adjourned their trial [see ante, pp. 203-205]. The manner in which Greek and Latin writers mention the Christians goes far to show that they were guilty of the atrocious crimes laid to their charge. Suetonius (in Nero) calls them, 'A race of men of new and villainous superstition' [see ante, p. 201]. The Emperor Adrian, in a letter to his brother-in-law, Servianus, in the year 134, as given ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... return directly I call your Honor's attention to the flagrant nature of the prisoner's crime," said Linden—"a crime so utterly atrocious—" ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... Chet," Laura observed soberly. "I think your slang is becoming atrocious. So Janet ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... pain and pleasure, then our aim ought to be at all costs to learn the lesson of endurance; or rather, if we hold firmly to the sense of law, minute, pervading, unalterable law, to welcome every step we make in the direction of courage and hopefulness. In the midst of atrocious sorrow and suffering there is no sense so blessed as the sense that dawns upon the suffering heart that it can indeed endure what it had represented to itself as unendurable, and that however sharply it suffers, there is ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of some of the poor wretches who have suffered upon such charges is, that they had attempted to commit the crime, and thereby incurred the guilt and deserved the punishment. Of this indeed there have been recent instances; and in one atrocious case the criminal escaped because the statute against the imaginary offence is obsolete, and there exists no law which could reach the ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... "I won't, and I don't. I was thinking all through dinner about those girls down-stairs. Perhaps—perhaps I had better talk to them, eh? You are so awfully kind-hearted, and it does seem to me as though they imposed a little on you, that's all. The salad to-night was atrocious. It should have been kept on the ice, instead of which it comes to the table looking like ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... published that day. I skimmed it ower till I cam to a paragraph wi' the followin takin title—"Desperate Ruffian." This catched my e'e at ance; for I was aye fond o' readin aboot desperate ruffians, and horrible accidents, and atrocious murders, &c. &c. "So," says I to mysel', "here's a feast." And I threw up my legs on the firm on which I was seated, drew the candle nearer me, took a mouthfu' oot o' my tumbler, and made every preparation, in short, for a quiet, deliberate, comfortable ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... mulatto and the convict edged by imperceptible degrees farther and farther away from the others, until, within the shadow of a stack of grass, they lay side by side and commenced a muttered conversation. The countenance of the white man, atrocious villainy written large in every lineament, became horribly intent as his amber-hued companion talked in fluent low tones, emphasizing what he had to say by a restless, peculiar, and sinister motion ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... (leaving the Republicans to come in or stay out as they might choose), the Army could be relied upon to sustain such a movement. There is no doubt that many earnest Republicans were so impressed by the perverse course of President Johnson that they came to believe him capable of any atrocious act. They gave credulous ear, therefore, to these extravagant rumors; and in the end they succeeded in making a deep impression upon the minds of certain members of the Committee charged with the investigation into the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... fine-looking man, well dressed—even dandified—given to patent leathers, blue serge, white duck, and fancy striped shirts. Old for his years, he heightened his appearance at times by wearing his beard in the atrocious mutton-chop fashion, then popular, but becoming to no one, least of all to him. The pilots regarded him as a great reader—a student of history, travels, literature, and the sciences—a young man whom it was an education as well as an entertainment to know. When not at the wheel, he was likely ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Eure, from Brittany, from far and near; forward to Paris, and extinguish Anarchy! Thus at Caen, in the early July days, there is a drumming and parading, a perorating and consulting: Staff and Army; Council; Club of Carabots, Anti-jacobin friends of Freedom, to denounce atrocious Marat. With all which, and the editing of Bulletins, a National Representative has his ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... being placed before the door. About midnight a mob came, pushed open the door, and fired two volleys at the Negroes, killing four immediately and fatally wounding four more. The circumstances of this atrocious crime oppressed the Negro people of the state as few things had done since the Civil War. That it did no good was evident, for in its underlying psychology it was closely associated with a double crime that was now to be ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... of the old city known as Dry Pond, and, like the most of their kind, have accumulated their wealth from the patronage of the colored people, among whom they had ever lived. This makes the crime of George Bohn appear the more atrocious and cowardly. George joined the White Supremacy League during the uprising in Wilmington, and was one of its most active members. There was a certain colored citizen who knew of Bohn's secret relations to ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... towards them? Some means of reformation ought at least to have been tried, before sending seven families at once upon the wide world, and depriving them of a degree of countenance, which withheld them at least from atrocious guilt. There was also a natural yearning of heart on parting with so many known and familiar faces; and to this feeling Godfrey Bertram was peculiarly accessible, from the limited qualities of his mind, which sought its principal amusements among the petty objects around him. As he was about ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... water, and expected daily; that China had invaded and occupied England, and that only a small corner of that country still resisted. These are the men who are terrifying their own people. I could instance hundreds of cases to show their atrocious conduct. Notorious thieves and cowards are allowed to clear isolated farmhouses of every valuable. Widows whose husbands have been killed on commando are not safe from their depredations. They have even set fire to dwelling-houses while the ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... Sam grimly, as he made an atrocious joke; "not much profit for him, poor chap. Why, they'll bring all the sore places out of the town for him ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... brilliancy. He was pleased at this, and did not leave me all the evening. In the morning we were the best friends in the world. Some days elapsed, when comte Jean came to me, bringing two infamous articles which had appeared in the "<Nouvelles a la Main>," and were directed against me. They were atrocious and deeply chagrined me: I placed them on the mantel-piece, where all who came in could see them. The duc de Duras read them, and said, "Conceal these atrocities from the king." "No," was my reply, "I wish him to read them, that he may know how his affections are respected, and how ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... extort from the Maid some damaging confessions, or to entangle her with their sophistical and artful questions. Nothing perhaps on our earth has ever been done more diabolically than under the forms of ecclesiastical law; nothing can be more atrocious than the hypocrisies and acts of inquisitors. The judges of Joan extorted from her that she had revelations, but she refused to reveal what these had been. She was asked whether she was in a state of grace. If she said she was not, she would be condemned ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... slowly and very quietly. It took the women servants nearly two minutes to realize that he was using the most atrocious language. Then they fled. The three footmen stood their ground a little longer. Mr. Donovan raised his voice a little. He felt old powers returning to him. He became fluent. One by one the footmen slank away. Mr. Donovan went on, without ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... opposite the town, where I sat down by the fire exhausted in an old woman's shaky dwelling, and fed on aged sardines and hot rice (atrocious mixture), there is a plain extending for twenty li to Yuen-nan-i—flat as country in the Fen district. The road was good (in wet weather, however, it must be terrible), and I would drive a motor-car across, were it ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... days before the wedding," she complained. "There's the Twill luncheon to-day and a bridge and tea at Marion Kavanaugh's—I hate her, too. She gave me the most atrocious Chinese idol. I'm going to tell her I have no proper place for it, that it deserves to be alone in a room in order to have it properly appreciated." She laughed at herself. "So I'll leave it for papa. The apartment won't hold but just so much—it's a tiny affair." She laughed again, ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... of extreme cruelty do not live to tell of it; but German soldiers themselves have told the story. We have had here many hundreds of journals, taken from dead or imprisoned Germans, furnishing elaborate details of most atrocious acts. The government is keeping these journals. They furnish powerful and incontrovertible testimony of what happened in Belgium when it was swept over by a brutal army. That was, of course, during the invasion—such things are not happening now ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... I fell; but luckily against the door, so that in a moment or two I became conscious of Aunt Elizabeth standing over me and regarding me as a culprit caught red-handed in some atrocious crime. ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... examined by a magistrate," said Richard; "but, even then, woe betide her! When I think that Alizon Device is liable to the same atrocious treatment, in consequence of her relationship to Mother Demdike, I can ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Jewdwine. That was indeed what he ought to have done at the very first. He could see it now, the simple, obvious duty that had been staring him in the face all the time. He hardly cared to think what subtle but atrocious egoism of passion had prevented him from disclosing to Jewdwine the fact of his presence at Court House; even now he said nothing about the two weeks that he had spent working with Jewdwine's cousin. The catalogue raisonne was so bound up with the history of his passion that the thing ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... having, in the Lake district, under the assumed name of Hon. Alexander Augustus Hope, brother of the Earl of Hopetoun, forged certain bills of exchange. He was condemned to death at Carlisle on August 16, 1803. His atrocious treatment of a beautiful girl, known in the district as 'Mary of Buttermere,' had drawn more than usual ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... the hope of receiving tens of thousands when his accomplices should return, laden with the spoils of ruined merchants. It was fortunate for the Chancellor that the calumnies of which he was the object were too atrocious to ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Focaccia of Cancellieri, (the Pistoian family) whose atrocious act of revenge against his uncle is said to have given rise to the parties of the Bianchi and Neri, in the year 1300. See G. Villani, Hist. l, viii. c. 37. and Macchiavelli, Hist. l. ii. The account of the latter writer differs much from that given ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... drink in the world for an inventor or an author to work on. When I say an author I mean a poor writer of prose, for I have always been told that all poets are either mad, or bad, or both. Many of them must be bad, or they could not write such atrocious poems; but madness is different; perhaps they read ...
— The Little City Of Hope - A Christmas Story • F. Marion Crawford
... them by the government. The government pretended often that they were richer than they really were, while they themselves pretended that they were poorer than they were, and the government resorted to the most lawless and atrocious measures sometimes to compel them to pay. The following extract from one of the historians of the time gives an example of this cruelty, and, at the same time, furnishes the reader with a specimen of the quaint and curious style of composition and orthography ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... it. It was an atrocious crime; the count was an old man and feeble when we saw him the other day. He wasn't fair game for an assassin," ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... of bread as well as of the decay of a highway. It has against it the new humanity which, in the most elegant drawing-rooms, lays to its charge the maintenance of the antiquated remains of a barbarous epoch, ill-imposed, ill-apportioned and ill-collected taxes, sanguinary laws, blind prosecutions, atrocious punishments, the persecution of the Protestants, lettres-de-cachet, and prisons of State. And I do not include its excesses, its scandals, its disasters and its disgraces,—Rosbach, the treaty of Paris, Madame ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... to indicate that the new king was his father's murderer. Richard was very penitent, as his elder brother Henry had been, on his death-bed. They were very sorrowful, were those Plantagenet princes, when they had been guilty of atrocious acts, and when it was too late for their repentance ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... chaste Adeline Grew friends in this or any other sense, Will be discuss'd hereafter, I opine: At present I am glad of a pretence To leave them hovering, as the effect is fine, And keeps the atrocious reader in suspense; The surest way for ladies and for books To bait their ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... House of Commons in 1729 to inquire into the state of the gaols. The foundation of the colony of Georgia as an outlet for the population was one result of the inquiry. It led, in the first place, however, to a trial of persons accused of atrocious cruelties at the Fleet prison.[114] The trial was abortive. It appeared in the course of the proceedings that the Fleet prison was a 'freehold,' A patent for rebuilding it had been granted to Sir Jeremy Whichcot under Charles II., ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... I am sure would," Mr. Dobbin said, with atrocious astuteness. "And no man can pardon himself for giving a woman pain. What would you feel, if a man were faithless ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me, Basil! I never heard of anything so atrocious. Go on your knees to them if they refuse! They can sit here with me, and you and he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... $20 a copy, the number of copies to be limited to fifty. Of course I can't accede to the proposition. But I am thinking of publishing a volume of verse in some such elaborate style, for my verse accumulates fast, and I love to get out lovely books! The climate here in London is simply atrocious—either rain or fog all the time. Yet I should not complain, for it seems to do me good. Julia is well, and she joins me in wishing you and yours the best of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... attacks of Know Nothingism. It is seriously maintained in the public prints that our recent Eastern European, and particularly our Russian, immigration contains enormous numbers of murderers, thieves, counterfeiters, dynamiters, arsonists and other criminals of the most atrocious character. It is alleged that the lives and property of all of us are in imminent danger from these incredibly numerous blackguards, and that the only salvation lies in what is called the Americanization ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... an external point of view, does not belong to the history of the United States. Yet is it pertinent thereto, as showing of what enormities the English of that age were capable. Their entire conduct during this French war was dishonorable, and often atrocious. Forgetting the facts of history, we often smile at the grumblings of the Continental nations anent "Perfidious Albion" and "British gold." But the acts committed by the English government during these years fully justify every charge of corruption, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... the true God, they were Satan's slaves, and his works they must do. They seem indeed to be continually engaged with him, whenever they profess to perform any religious rite. They even ascribe the creation of the world to the Eewee, or wicked agent. If they do any thing wrong, or commit any atrocious crime, and are reproved for it, they immediately answer: "It was not me, it was the devil that did it." If you convince them, that they did it themselves, and with their own hands, their usual phrase is, "The Eewee did ...
— Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives • John Gottfried Haensel
... manner of a schoolmaster. "But it's bound to happen. Bolshevism is a logical evolution of democracy—another step downward in the descent of the individual. Until the arrival of Lenine and Trotzky on the field, there's no question but what American Democracy was the most atrocious insult leveled at the intelligence of the race by its inferiors. Bolshevism goes us one better, however. And just as soon as our lowest types, meaning the majority of our politicians, thinkers, and writers, get to realizing ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Belgic cantons took part in this struggle; the brave king of the Atrebates Commius, whose accession to the insurrection the Romans had least of all forgiven, and against whom recently Labienus had even directed an atrocious attempt at assassination, brought to the Bellovaci 500 German horse, whose value the campaign of the previous year had shown. The resolute and talented Bellovacian Correus, to whom the chief conduct of the war had ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in a secluded place in the mines, with the faint light of my miner's lamp falling on his hideous face, the cool, deliberate manner in which he related his atrocious doings, the fiendish spirit he displayed, led me to regard him as one among the most debased and hardened criminals I had met in the mines—a human being utterly devoid of moral nature—a very devil ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... about it, and said "as 'ow 'e'd 'ave a 'eavy 'eart for hever and hever, hamen," after he was gone. O'Riley remarked, in reference to his departure, that every man in the ship was about to lose a "son!" Yes, indeed he did; he perpetrated that atrocious pun, and wasn't a bit ashamed of it. O'Riley had perpetrated many a worse pun than that before; it's to be hoped that for the credit of his country he has perpetrated ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... had not the slightest objection to the great folks from the Hall deriving all the excitement and amusement they could from an airing through the village; and they were happily ignorant of the most atrocious stories about Hope which were now circulating from mouth ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... Whispering is atrocious, and cannot be tolerated. It is almost as bad to endeavor to draw one person from a general conversation into a tete-a-tete discussion. Private affairs must be delayed for ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... life lasts. No more shalt thou be loved and pitied by living hearts, till a new generation has been born, and thy own heart lies cold, cured of all its sorrows.—The Epigrams henceforth become, not sharp and bitter; but cruel, atrocious, unmentionable. On that 31st of May, 1786, a miserable Cardinal Grand-Almoner Rohan, on issuing from his Bastille, is escorted by hurrahing crowds: unloved he, and worthy of no love; but important since the Court and Queen are his ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... are right," said Goethe; "there are great and mysterious agencies included in the various forms of Poetry. If the substance of my 'Roman Elegies' were to be expressed in the tone and measure of Byron's 'Don Juan,' it would really have an atrocious effect."—Eckermann. ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... proverb of that day. After the Saint-Bartholomew the populace made a horrible jest on the body of Coligny, which hung for three days at Montfaucon, by putting a grotesque toothpick into his mouth. History has recorded this atrocious levity. So petty an act done in the midst of that great catastrophe pictures the Parisian populace, which deserves the sarcastic jibe of Boileau: "Frenchmen, born malin, created the guillotine." The Parisian of all time cracks jokes ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... results in disputes, fights, brawls, and murders—the legitimate consequences of which are misunderstandings, suits at law, criminal proceedings, imprisonment, and the gallows. It is, therefore, evident that the ultimate tendencies of these faculties are tyrannical, cruel, violent, and atrocious. They are opposed to the noble, moral faculties—Faith, Love, and Devotion—and, whenever temptation inordinately allures, the course of life is likely to be characterized by ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce |
