"Dead hand" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with at the time of his death, he had a great desire to see it, and commanded that his tomb should be opened. Accordingly, in the dead of night, by the light of torches, his desire was fulfilled. One of the pope's archdeacons descended into the vault, and in the dead hand of the bishop beheld the scroll: he endeavoured to take possession of it, but found it impossible to do so, so firmly was it grasped by the bony fingers. The pope ordered the archdeacon to enjoin the dead man to give it up on pain of punishment, which the other having done, and added, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... appoint to fight after me;' and he adds, 'I heartily salute and take my good-night of all the faithful of both realms ... for as the world is weary of me, so am I of it.' In those darkening days, even when he is merely to write his subscription, it is 'John Knox, with my dead hand but glad heart.' For in this inevitable anti-climax of failing life, Knox found his compensations not in the world, nor even in the Church. When he returned to Edinburgh, he had become unable for pastoral work. 'All worldly strength, yea, even in things spiritual,' he writes to his expected colleague, ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... King, because the dead hand of Baleka summoned her, as thou sawest. The song she sang was of things too high for me; and why she touched thee on the forehead with the spear I do not know, O King! Perchance it was to crown thee chief ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... of their lord's house. Whatever other aspects the Reformation may present, it gave at any rate emancipation to the one class of English to whom freedom had been denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the Church. None more heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks' nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St. Edmunds. The completeness of the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... days of St. Privat they had stormed a burning village, rushing through a fine field of ripe oats, and how a man had fallen next to him—a boyish drummer—with a bullet in his throat. In dying he had grasped and torn up the golden ears; and he held a bunch of them in his dead hand, all dyed in his blood like ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... a dead hand" as a cure for sickness, covering the mirrors in a house where one has just died, watching at the church door on Midsummer Night to see the souls of all the worshippers pass in, and those who will not live out the year remain behind ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... one the sailors died. Waking from a troubled sleep of short duration, Katharine one day found Chloe's dead hand around her feet, her cold lips pressed upon them. Some of the men grew mad before they died, and raved and babbled of green fields and running brooks until the end came, and still the little boat drifted on. Few and short were the prayers the living said as, day ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... a programme of action for the Sabbath. Church, social work, business, were to him very much one thing; all in need of organization to get results. He had no use for the idle church and less for what he called "the dead hand"—referring to the influence of his old adversary, Dr. Carman, who thought it presumption in a wealthy pork-packer to regard himself as a critic of ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... handed it to him, as he did so, bowing his forehead to the dust. Well I knew that weapon, since once before I had faced it in desperate battle for my life. It was the ivory-handled sword of the lord Deleroy which Kari had taken from his dead hand after I slew him in the Solar of my house in the Cheap at London. Then the servant came to me with the armour, but I sent him away, saying that as the Inca had none, I would not wear it, at which ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... his right arm lay or hung, as he was prone or erect, a strange right arm that did not belong to him. It did not even swell. When he touched it the fingers were cold and bluish. It felt like a dead hand. ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... she cried; "here is the handkerchief of which I told you. It is that which the judge seized when I tried to stop the blood flowing in his breast—look at the corner and you will see that a little bit has been torn off by his almost dead hand. And the revolver—it is that which I picked up on the floor near him. I have had it locked ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... his shoulder, prayed that my bullet might miss his ribs, summoned the last force at my almost dead hand, and fired. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... assure you I have nowhere found anything similar to what you describe. Go, my son, and tranquilize yourself; be assured that what you take for spots on the sun are the faults of your glasses, or of your eyes." The dead hand of Aristotle barred the advance in every department of research. Physicians would have nothing to do with Harvey's discoveries about the circulation of the blood. "Nature is accused of tolerating a vacuum!" exclaimed a priest when Pascal began his experiments on the Puy-de-Dome ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... has its absurd side; but it shows, by way of redemption, that Ducange, in one of the many agreeable phrases of his country, "did not go to it with a dead hand." He seems, indeed, to have been a thoroughly "live" person, if not a very wise one: and Ludovica begins with a rousing situation—a crowd and block in the streets of Paris, brought about by nobody quite knows what, but ending in a pistol-shot, a dead body, the flight of the assassin, the dispersal ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... were illustrated by half a dozen volumes upon the "Effects of Alcohol," including "Scriptural Testimony against Wine;" and a work or two upon the Tariff Question recalled many a Tribune editorial penned by the dear, dead hand. ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... must life always be like this? I could die—indeed, I would willingly jump into this cold and muddy river now, if by so doing I could stick a stiff dead hand through all these things—into the future; a dead commanding hand insisting with a silent irresistible gesture that this waste and failure of life should cease, and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... new day. This attempt, which has been made many a time before, 'to unify two ages,' did not carry men far in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless it were an idle dream to think that the dead hand of Dante's century, and all that it represented, is no longer to be taken into account by those who would be governors of men. Meanwhile, let us observe once more that the statesman who had drunk most deeply from the mediaeval ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley |
