"Fatality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him more steadiness; but would not this contorted position destroy all chance of shooting accurately? His own prophecy, made over the dead body of Hal Sinclair, that all three of them would see that face again, came back to him with a sense of fatality. Some forward-looking instinct, he assured himself, had ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... seemed to be too fond of the counsels of Spain and the Empire. Please to observe that these two Courts, which had made incredible solicitations to him while he wavered, began, as soon as his purpose was fixed, to draw back,—a fatality due to the phlegmatic temper of the Spaniard, dignified by the name of prudence, joined to the astute politics of the house of Austria. You may observe at the same time that the Count, who had continued firm and unshaken ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... will give some annoyance should they attempt to come off by either of these ways."—Tilghman to William Duer, October 13th, 1776. MS. Letter. On hearing that they had landed on the Neck, Duer replied from the Convention at Peekskill, on the 15th: "There appears to me an actual fatality attending all their measures. One would have naturally imagined from the Traitors they have among them, who are capable of giving them the most minute description of the Grounds in the county of Westchester, that they would have landed much farther ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... generally the central figure. The ward felt that Mr. Hendricks was already elected, and called him "Mr. Mayor." At the same time the steel strike pursued a course of comparative calm. At Friendship and at Baxter there had been rioting, and a fatality or two, but the state constabulary had the situation well in hand. On a Sunday morning Willy Cameron went out to Baxter on the trolley, and came home greatly comforted. The cool-eyed efficiency of the state police reassured him. He compared them, disciplined, steady, calm with the calmness of ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a kind of fatality inherent in his nature, loved "to circumscribe himself," according to the happy expression of Rousseau; and he profited, rather than otherwise, by living entirely to himself; for he had long been, indeed he always was, the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... ponder on the despair and deepen its incurable bitterness. Laziness, that brutish existence which had been his dream, proved his punishment. At moments, he ardently hoped for some occupation to draw him from his thoughts. Then he lost all energy, relapsing beneath the weight of implacable fatality that bound his limbs so as ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... By a strange fatality the confidence of the inarticulate millions upon which we have hitherto prided ourselves has been turned into bitterness and hatred hitherto unknown amongst large sections of them at the very moment when we have for the first time regained in a large ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... yet to be learned; that, as the bases of disease exist, untouched by civilisation, so the danger of disease is ever imminent, unless we specially provide against it; that the development of disease may occur with original virulence and fatality, and may at any moment be made active ...
— Hygeia, a City of Health • Benjamin Ward Richardson
... fifteen minutes she had ever known. She realised what a tremendous conflict was in progress in that quiet room. Garth was arriving at his decision without having heard any of her arguments. By the strange fatality of his own insistence, he had heard only two words of her letter, and those the crucial words; the two words to which the whole letter carefully led up. They must have revealed to him instantly, what the character of the letter would be; and what was the attitude of mind towards himself, ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... from the valley crept that low shiver of dread; the pale sun shed its listless light on the gray rocks and dusky cedars; the silent unexpectant earth seemed to have paused; all things were wrapt in vague awe and dim apprehension; some inexpressible fatality seemed to oppress life ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... latter was somewhat unsatisfactory, at least as far as I was concerned, for the eatables that reached me were not improved by passing through the hands of thirty or forty malodorous negroes. But the fatality that had at first appalled us had now been forgotten, and everyone kept a good heart. Led by Omar we were approaching a land hitherto unknown; a country reputed to be full of hidden wonders and strange marvels, and all were, hour by hour, eagerly ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... she has promised herself to you!" she exclaimed. "It is a fatality, a terrible fatality! Listen, Isabella! You are the Queen of the Red Chessmen; and he, Otho, is the King of the White Chessmen,—and I, their Queen. Can there be two queens? Can there be a marriage between two hostile ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... Lebon were of short duration. Enemies and competitors caused him a thousand troubles, and the elements themselves seemed to turn against him. During a hurricane, the humble house in which he dwelt was destroyed, and a fire shortly afterward consumed a portion of his works. Fatality, like the genius of old, seemed to be following up the unfortunate inventor; but sorrows and reverses could not have any hold on this invincible spirit, who was so well seconded by a wife of lofty character. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... Bailey are unable to find in Racine—they miss in him no less suggestions of the mysterious and the infinite. No doubt this is partly due to our English habit of associating these qualities with expressions which are complex and unfamiliar. When we come across the mysterious accent of fatality and remote terror in a ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... every side, the sullen muttering of their discontent exasperated by their fears. Yes, yes! they had been brought there to be sold, to be delivered over to the Prussians. In the baleful fatality that pursued them, and among all the blunders of their leaders, those dense intelligences were unable to account for such an uninterrupted succession of disasters on any other ground than that ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... preliminary to a clear exhibition of our special subject, is the doctrine of predestination, the unflinching fatalism which pervades and crowns this religion. The breath of this appalling faith is saturated with fatality, and its very name of Islam means "Submission." In heaven the prophet saw a prodigious wax tablet, called the "Preserved Table," on which were written the decrees of all events between the morning of creation and the day of judgment. The burning core of Mohammed's preaching was the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil; "following darkness ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... a fair landing and good welcome to them! Fraser "knows not whether they are bound or not"; but will soon know. The first cargo, of which I have a specimen here, contented him extremely; only there was one fatality, the cloth of the binding was multiplex, party-colored, some sets done in green, others in red, blue, perhaps skyblue! Now if the second cargo were not multiplex, party-colored, nay multiplex, in exact concordance with the first, as seemed almost impossible—?—Alas, in that case, one could not ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... a reference in a prize poem to the Philippines as his "patria," fatherland. This political heresy on the part of a native of the islands was given no very serious attention at the time, being looked upon as the vagary of a schoolboy, but again in the following year, by what seems a strange fatality, he stirred the resentment of the friars, especially the Dominicans, by winning over some of their number the first prize in a literary contest celebrated in honor of the author of ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... was enchanted with Maurice and hastened to show him his private museum, forgetting all about his pipe—he was smoking at present a Garibaldi—and presented him his last engraving, where one saw—it certainly was a fatality that pursued the old republican!—the Emperor Napoleon III, at Magenta, motionless upon his horse in the centre of a square of grenadiers, cut ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... fatality, like Jean Goujon, his master, died Antonin Moyne, a name which henceforward will bring to mind two things—a horrible ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... in publishing or in literature. To make money, Poe should have been a business man, and he was not so in any sense. Many another literary man, even in our own times, has had similar misfortunes, even without those faults of character and that fatality for falling out with everything ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... as follows:—Sir, I know not by what fatality it is, that all the motions made by one party are reasonable and necessary, and all that are unhappily offered by the other, are discovered either to be needless, or of pernicious tendency. Whenever a question can be clouded and perplexed, the opponents of the ministry are always mistaken, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... compulsion &c. 744; subjection &c. 749; stern necessity, hard necessity, dire necessity, imperious necessity, inexorable necessity, iron necessity, adverse necessity; fate; what must be. destiny, destination; fatality, fate, kismet, doom, foredoom, election, predestination; preordination, foreordination; lot fortune; fatalism; inevitableness &c. adj.; spell &c. 993. star, stars; planet, planets; astral influence; sky, Fates, Parcae, Sisters three, book of fate; God's will, will of Heaven; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... startled when she turned round, and I saw her face quite plainly. The same light that revealed her pretty little face and figure, threw a deeper shade over me. She looked anxiously up and down, yet by a singular fatality never looked at the corner of the wooden building where I sat. I have often wondered since that I did not cry out when I saw that face—so wonderfully beautiful, but so marble white, so sad, so intent, so earnest, the beautiful eyes wild with pain, the beautiful mouth quivering. I can ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... "It is a fatality," he said; "it is no good for me to think of it all day long, for I am sure to forget it in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... tragedies of Obed's life, for this of Miss Lorton was certainly not inferior in its effect upon his feelings to that old one of Lady Chetwynde. Yet how was it that he had become thus associated with two such events as these? By what strange fatality had he and Obed thus found a common ground of interest in one another—a ground where the one was the assailant and betrayer, the other the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... total mortality of 3,421 per million for the males and 3,328 for the females. The greater fatality of diphtheria and whooping-cough in the female is attributed to the smaller larynx of girls, and to their habit of kissing. In diphtheria, indeed, the number of girls attacked is in excess of that of the boys, and it does not appear that their mortality is higher when ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... attempts were made by the French to settle the country; but, by some unaccountable fatality, instead of seating themselves on the fertile borders of the Mississippi, they continually landed about the barren sands of Biloxi, and the bay of Mobile. It was not until the year 1722, that the miserable remnant of those who had been carried thither at ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her—it may seem marvellous that this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dishonoured his memory. Once he was dead the good King Macbeth was known only by the statements of his enemies. The genius of Shakespeare imposed these lies upon the human consciousness. I had long suspected that Bluebeard was the victim of a similar fatality. All the circumstances of his life, as I found them related, were far from satisfying my mind, and from gratifying that craving for logic and lucidity by which I am incessantly consumed. On reflection, I perceived that they involved insurmountable difficulties. There ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... support which the courts of Europe would condescend to extend to it. Among these governments, therefore, distracted as they were by mutual hostility, the pope was compelled to make his choice; and the fatality of his position condemned him to quarrel with the only prince on whom, at the outset of these complications, he had a ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... tunic through the transparent waters. His destiny is to devour, to be strong, and, if he should find himself disarmed, his defenses broken, to give himself up to misfortune without protest and to perish. Death is preferable to abdicating one's primal rights, the noble fatality of birth. For the strong of the land or of the sea there is no satisfaction nor life outside one's own sphere; they are slaves of their own greatness; birth brings them misfortunes as well as honors, and it will ever be ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that honor was what kept me from her? Such honor as a man feels when he knows that he is poised between a Scylla and a Charybdis of desperate fatality?" ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... lost her two sons by a strange fatality—both were drowned, the elder, Lockhart, while skating at Bath, about 1805-6, James, the younger, in crossing the river Dee in a boat rowed ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... but still it has happened twice or thrice—that a nation has compelled the course of fate to turn aside or to fall back. The nation congratulated herself, even as we believe that we have the right to do. But events were not slow in proving that she had congratulated herself too soon. Fatality, that is to say, the enormous mass of causes and effects of which we have no understanding, was not overcome; it was only delayed, it awaited its revenge and its day, or at least what we call its day, which may extend over a hundred years and more where nations ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the contractor's tool shed, had a sense of depressing fatality. From the moment that the first spadeful of ground had been dug, it seemed to him that the foundation of his domestic peace had begun to crumble. But this depression was only an attack of the grippe, he said to himself, and he tried to take an interest in the architect's description of how they ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... who cannot laugh, but these are not necessarily either morose or stupid. They may laugh in their heart, and with their eyes, although by some unlucky fatality, they have not the gift of oral cachinnation. Such persons are to be pitied; for laughter in grown people is a substitute devised by nature for the screams and shouts of boyhood, by which the lungs are strengthened and the health preserved. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... be talking here in New Orleans, in this little Spanish house, with a French vicomtesse brought up near the court of the unfortunate Marie Antoinette; nay, with Helene de St. Gre, whose portrait had twice come into my life by a kind of strange fatality (and was at that moment in my pocket), that I could scarce maintain my self-possession in her presence. I had given the portrait, too, attributes and a character, and I found myself watching the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... for Algiers. Being detained at Marseilles by some unforeseen circumstance, I had the pleasure of seeing these men shipped off on the first steamer. I took passage in the next. By some extraordinary fatality, for which there is no accounting, there were upward of five hundred additional troops shipped on this vessel. It was a consolation to know that a storm was brewing, and that they would soon be all sea-sick. Before ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... perverted minds which have no delight but in contemplating the supposed distress and predicting the immediate ruin of their country. These birds of evil presage at all times have grated our ears with their melancholy song; and, by some strange fatality or other, it has generally happened that they have poured forth their loudest and deepest lamentations at the periods of our most abundant prosperity. Very early in my public life I had occasion to make myself a little acquainted with their ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the idea of fatality and glance at some of the impressions which give rise to it, without asking at present whether this idea is their natural or fitting expression. There can be no doubt that they do arise and that they ought to arise. If we do ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... after dinner as usual, with a curious sense of fatality; addressed and stamped it. Then he went downstairs, in his ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... engineer, wrote to General Kellerman, "and I am much at a loss to account for it in a clear and distinct manner." This comes at the end of a mysterious sort of epistle, in which the engineer general talks of fatality, and seems to think that the British had no right to take Badajoz, defended as it was. But Wellington and his army were great despisers of that sort of right, and, in spite of the really glorious defence, in spite of the strategy of the governor and the valour of the garrison, of chevaux de frise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... other without collision outside; so that from morning to evening the only possible variation of the monotony of the hours, and lightening of the penalty of existence, must be some kind of mischief, limited, unless by more than ordinary godsend of fatality, to the fall of a horse, or the ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... as an eccentric commentator, who had divined the humour and the fervour of mind which lay hid in the remains of the huge lexicographer. And yet when we have once recognised his power, we can see it everywhere indicated in his writings, though by an unfortunate fatality the style or the substance was always so deeply affected by the faults of the time, that the product is never thoroughly sound. His tenacious conservatism caused him to cling to decaying materials for the want of anything better, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... by man's indulging too frequently in tobacco have been the subject of many a fierce debate between the friends and foes of the "great plant." Many, however, are not aware of the fatality attending its use by the brute creation. A modern English poet on hearing of the result produced on a cow from chewing tobacco, penned the following sad lines which he entitles—"An elegy on ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... it happened that no mischief was done for some time, though several bullets came thudding down in the midst of men and camels. At length, with the fatality which seemed throughout this campaign to attend upon non-combatants, a shot struck a poor Egyptian camel driver on the neck, passing through his spine, and shortly afterwards a surgeon was wounded in ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... Pearce and Frenchy and Beady Jones and Williams and the scout Blicky, were on the other side. There were two factions here, yet scarcely an antagonism, except possibly in the case of Kells. Joan felt that the atmosphere was supercharged with suspense and fatality and possibility—and anything might happen. To her great joy, Jim Cleve was ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... razed to the ground. In this Close the palace was afterwards built. The wise custom of Normandy was mooted on the spot where the law of Moses had once been taught; and, by a strange, perhaps an ominous, fatality, the judge held the scales of justice, where whilome the usurer ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... proves to be one of Hore's Crew, H[ore] one of Colonel Fletcher's Pyrates commissioned by him from New York; Dole is also committed to Goal. My taking of Gillam was so very accidentall that I cannot forbear giving your Lordships a narrative of it, and one would believe there was a strange fatality in that m[an's] Starrs. On Saturday the 11th Instant late in the evening I had a letter from Colonel Sanford,[6] Judge [of] the Admiralty Court in Rhode-Island, giving me an account that Gillam had been there, but was come towards Boston a fortnight before, in ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... said—but of many thoughts and wonderings too. She had always an excuse for Phil. He had meant until the last moment to come with her—some one had turned up, quite unexpectedly, who had prevented him. It was a fatality; especially when she came down in July did she insist upon this. He had been invited quite suddenly to a political dinner to meet one of the Ministers from whom he had hopes of an appointment. "For we find that we can't go on enjoying ourselves for ever," she ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... said Anna, shrugging her shoulders. "I read in one of my books lately a fairy tale, in which there was a young girl, of whom it was said that a bad fairy had bound her heart in iron, to prevent its full play; the girl was constantly bewailing this fatality, saying, 'I can only like, but never love.' Perhaps it is thus with me, but I do not weep over it, like the ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... good-natured impulses; a nature that could not bear to give pain, or to see it in others, but entirely destitute of any firm moral principle; she shows how such a being, merely by yielding step by step to the impulses of passion, and disregarding the claims of truth and right, becomes involved in a fatality of evil, in which deceit, crime, and cruelty are a necessity, forcing him to persist in the basest ingratitude to the father who has done all for him, and hard-hearted treachery to the high-minded wife who has given ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... under the guise of friendship, had stolen into the Eden of my love, and left it barren of affection. In a word, yon detested governor, to whose inhuman cruelty even the son of my brother has, by some strange fatality of coincidence, so recently fallen a second sacrifice. Curses, curses on him," he pursued, with frightful vehemence, half rising as he spoke, and holding forth his right arm in a menacing attitude; "but the hour of retribution is at hand, and revenge, the exclusive passion ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the king, gloomily, "for it is I alone who bring misfortune on my people. A sinister fatality pursues me, and has pursued me from my earliest youth. Only one star ever rose on my troubled firmament, and that was you, Louisa. But it will not set, even though I carry out my purpose. In solitude and sorrow it will still shine ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... scene of confusion prevailed that baffles description. By some strange fatality, the Horsley Hill had changed her position, and run foul of us in the dark. The Anne was a small brig, and her unlucky neighbour a heavy three-masted vessel, with three hundred Irish emigrants on board; and as her bowspirit was directly across the bows of the Anne, and she anchored, and unable ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Golden Medical Discovery has, unaided by other medicines, cured many cases of this disease. This class of medicines should be persistently employed, in order to obtain their full effects. It is a disease which progresses slowly and which is not easily turned from its course, and its fatality should warn the afflicted to employ the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Fatality had willed it! With the eyes of a mortal struck by the maddening thunderbolt of the gods, Renouard looked up to the sky, an immense black pall dusted over with gold, on which great shudders seemed to pass from the breath ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... were called 'triers,' and, being high Calvinists, were nick-named Dr. Absolute, chairman, Mr. Fatality, Mr. Fri-babe, Mr. Dam-man, Mr. Narrow-grace, Mr. Indefectible, Mr. Dubious, and others. They turned out of their livings those clergymen who were proved to be immoral in their conduct, and others who did not come up to the orthodox ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... uncertainties of life, they were yielding to a kind of irresistible folly, a mechanical impulse, a law of the species, a decree of nature, or to the force that for all creatures lies hidden in the revolution of time. It is our habit, in the case of the bees no less than our own, to regard as fatality all that we do not as yet understand. But now that the hive has surrendered two or three of its material secrets, we have discovered that this exodus is neither instinctive nor inevitable. It is not a blind emigration, but apparently the well-considered ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... again in this history, and still clinging to her you will find that same strange fatality which during all her life brought evils upon her that were infectious to her ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... strength of this addition to their former income he intended to increase the amount of his life insurance, but it had not yet been done when the sudden illness seized him, an illness that began so gently and innocently and terminated with such sudden and unexpected fatality. ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... her; I have never had one; they must be very delightful. But I shan't have one now, either—not if she can help it! Ask her what she thinks of me; see what she will say. I don't want to know; keep it to yourself. It 's too sad. So we go through life. It 's fatality—that 's what they call it, is n't it? We please the people we don't care for, we displease those we do! But I appreciate her, I do her justice; that 's the more important thing. It 's because I have imagination. She has none. Never mind; it 's her only fault. I do her justice; ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... God of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or, at length, by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality.' ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... unfortunate scene in the clerk's office,—the fatality which made me follow the man going to his death, and my known enmity of long standing, supported the hypothesis of my guilt. There was another, and even more fatal circumstance still,—the discovery of the knife with which George Conway had been slain. That knife ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... receipt of news which not only assured us of the old lady's recovery, but informed us also that she would be well enough to make one of the wedding party in a fortnight's time. The bride's dress was in the house; the bride's father was ready to officiate—and here, like a fatality, was the question of the operation unexpectedly starting up, and threatening another delay yet, for a period which could not possibly be shorter than a period of three months! Add to this, if you please, a new element ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... at Harvard University and the University of Paris. He did his first work in poetry at Harvard in the stimulating companionship of a little group of poets including Trumbull Stickney, William Vaughn Moody, and Philip Henry Savage, all of whom, by a strange fatality, died within a few years after leaving the University. Mr. Lodge was a poet whose gift followed classical lines, but was none the less individual and sincere. His complete work in lyric and dramatic poetry has been gathered ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... an army does not fall from its position of being the finest in the world. For if nations ascribe their victories to the ability of their generals and the courage of their soldiers, they always attribute their defeats to an inexplicable fatality. On the other hand, navies are classed according to the number of their ships. There is a first, a second, a third, and so on. So that there exists no doubt as to the result of ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... from the time of my poor grandmother's death, I, and those near to me, all those about me, were pursued, not only by a terrible fatality, but also by a being, who, for unknown motives, wished to sow perpetual death and terror among those intimately ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... stratagems of literature mark no longer a struggle between genius and the bailiffs. What was once a desperate venture is now a lucrative business. What was once a martyrdom is now its own reward. What once had saintly unearthliness is now a powerful motor among worldly interests. What was once the fatality of genius is now the aspiration of fools. The people have turned to reading, and have become a more liberal patron than even the Athenian State, monastic order, or noble lord. No longer does the literary class wander ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... self-respect would have acted in such delicate circumstances, and though I knew that Carlotta was no more in love with me than I was with her, this end to our engagement seemed even more humiliating to me than its beginning had seemed. It was one more instance of that wretched fatality which has pursued me through life, which has made every one of my triumphs come to me in mourning robes and with a gruesome face. In the glittering array of "prizes" that tempts man to make a beast and a fool of himself in the gladiatorial show called Life, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... sense of fatality bound up in these words of defiant pretense, once they had escaped him...a fatality which the blazing contempt of his wife's retort had emphasized. Even now his cheeks burned with the memory ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... she thought, for better or for worse. That Van would be the fine chivalrous gentleman she had felt him to be at the very first moment of their accidental acquaintance, she felt absolutely assured. She accepted a certain inevitable fatality in the situation—-perhaps the more readily now that she knew he knew, for she seemed ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... with fierce contempt and an angry tenderness, in mingled accents of envy and disdain. He was wearied by their folly, by their recklessness, by their impatience—and he seemed to resent these as if they had been gifts of which he himself had been deprived by the fatality of his wisdom. They would fight. When the time came Lingard had only to speak, and a sign from him would send them to a vain death—those men who could not wait for an opportunity on this earth or for ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... Just as he did before! Oh, Rule! what a fatality! That appearances should always be false and disastrous between ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... was his motive, undertook without solicitation to rescue Pope from the talons of Crousaz, by freeing him from the imputation of favouring fatality, or rejecting revelation; and from month to month continued a vindication of the Essay on Man in the literary journal of that time, called the Republick of Letters' Johnson's Works, viii. 289. Pope wrote to Warburton of the Essay on Man:—'You understand my work better than I do myself.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... is a fatality attends the actions of some men: Order them as they will, they pass thro' a certain medium, which so twists and refracts them from their true directions—that, with all the titles to praise which a rectitude of heart can give, the doers ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... properly, to assist in the shedding of no more blood. Girardin had been the originator of numerous other speculations besides the journal: the capital of these, like that of the journal, was raised by shares, and the shareholders, by some fatality, have found themselves wofully in the lurch; while Girardin carries on the war gayly, is, or was, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, has money, goes to Court, and possesses a certain kind of reputation. He invented, we believe, the "Institution ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... this handsome youth, admired him, and manifested a tenderness which he misunderstood for the emotion of love, Ninon, herself never contemplating such a fatality, and ended by becoming enamored of his own mother. Ninon thought nothing of his passion, believing that it would soon pass away, but it increased in intensity, becoming a violent flame which finally proved irresistible, forcing the youth to ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... positive and negative electrical point, and as each atom in turn obeys the same law, so we see the positive and negative poles of North and South again reflected in the rapidly increasing divisions among us of Conservatives, who, by a singular fatality, still indicate the plebeian origin which they would now so gladly disown by the term Democrats; and, on the other hand, of Republicans, nick-named at present Radicals—somewhat unjustly; since the term is strictly applicable only to a very limited portion ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... I have known an inoculator, whose practice was "to cut deep enough (to use his own expression) to see a bit of fat," and there to lodge the matter. The great number of bad Cases, independent of inflammations and abscesses on the arms, and the fatality which attended this practice was almost inconceivable; and I cannot account for it on any other principle than that of the matter being placed in this situation instead ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... as persons with overburdened hearts often make to children or dumb animals, or to holes in the earth, where they think their secrets may be at once revealed and buried. "Those who come too near me are in danger of great mischiefs, I do assure you. Take warning, therefore! It is a sad fatality that has brought you from your home among the Apennines,—some rusty old castle, I suppose, with a village at its foot, and an Arcadian environment of vineyards, fig-trees, and olive orchards,—a sad mischance, I say, that has transported you ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forgotten that along with the Jews there is another people concerned as illustrations of the same prophetic fatality—of that same inevitable eye, that same perspective of vision, which belonged to those whose eyes God had opened. The Arabs, as children of a common ancestor, ought not to be forgotten in this sentence upon their brother nation. They through Ishmael, the Jews through Isaac, and more ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... The only fatality of the flood occurred at six o'clock Sunday evening, when a boy who was paddling over the flooded meadow of the Genesee Valley Park was carried out into the river. The canoe was swept over the dam ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... of mortality did not originate from a decrease of the miasma, but from a decrease of population, and a consequent want of subjects to prey upon; and this indeed is a plausible idea; but admitting it to be just, how are we to account for the almost invariable fatality of the disorder, when at its height, and the comparative innocence of it when on the decline? for then, the chance to those who had it, was, that they would recover and ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... other coats; a gnat, a wandering hair left its location, swept by the angry brush from the broad-cloth of those who paid their bills—as far as I was concerned—all were inoculated with this strange blindness. It was an overwhelming ophthalmia! The chambermaid, through its fatality, never discovered that my jugs were empty, my bottle clothed with slimy green, my soap-dish left untenanted. A day before this time had been sufficient service for my hand-towel; now a week seemed to render it less fit to taste the rubs of hands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... remonstrated to the king on that subject. In consequence of his advice, a certain general was sent with a detachment to take possession of the heights that commanded the village of Hochkirchcn; but by some fatality he miscarried. Mareschal Keith was not in any tent, but lodged with prince Francis of Brunswick, in a house belonging to a Saxon major. When the first alarm was given in the night, he instantly mounted his horse, assembled a body of the nearest troops, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... am sorry that the house will again be occupied, for some mournful fatality seems to have attended all who ever resided there; and I have been told that the last proprietor changed the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... commenced that series of battles, unparalleled for bloody sacrifice of men and obstinacy of leader—a series of battles that should have written General Grant the poorest strategist who had yet inscribed his name on the long roll of reverses. And yet, by a strange fatality, they resulted in making him a hero to the ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... Josephine now endure! How courageous, yet how difficult, the struggle against the wretchedness of a rejected love! How angrily and scornfully she would rise up against her cruel fate! How lovingly, humbly, gently she would acquiesce in it, as to a long- expected, inevitable fatality! ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... aroused and will doubtless continue to excite a very general interest throughout the country. In its political, its commercial, and its military bearings it has varied, great, and increasing claims to consideration. The heavy expense, the great delay, and, at times, fatality attending travel by either of the Isthmus routes have demonstrated the advantage which would result from interterritorial communication by such safe and rapid means as ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... did not for one moment believe in his own mind that the mystery was, Ballard; his common sense suggested that it was impossible that the fellow could have escaped, unless by some strange fatality he had been picked up, and as there were no vessels near enough to see him at the time he went over from the yacht, the latter ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... like anything but a white mouse. When it was the others' turn to wave, he sat on the leads of the tower and held Alice's and Noel's hands, and said poetry to them—yards and yards of it. By some strange fatality it seemed to comfort them. It ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... she might conceivably know nothing of it herself—I mean by reflection. That young woman had been obviously considering death. She had gone the length of forming some conception of it. But as to its companion fatality—love, she, I was certain, had never reflected upon ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... of her original arrangement with Stephen. Some fatality must be hanging over her head. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... an expedition for the invasion of Ireland, nearly, if not quite, as formidable in men and ships as that which had left Brest in the previous year. Tone was on board the flag ship, even more joyous and hopeful than he had been on the preceding occasion. But again, as if by some extraordinary fatality, the weather interposed an obstacle to the realization of the design. The vessels were ready for sea, the troops were on board, nothing was wanted but a slant of wind to enable the fleet to get ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... quantity of oxygen which it contains greatly increases the combustion of ignited matter with which it may be brought in contact, and that this may evolve gases so rapidly as to cause an explosion.—The cholera is prevailing with a good deal of fatality in some of the western cities. In Cincinnati the number of deaths has averaged 20 to 35, and has been as high as 65: in St. Louis it has been still higher, and in Nashville, Tenn., it has been quite as large ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... still more than ever, did the horror of our situation stare us in the face. There was no doubt that the poisoned barrel had at some time or other contained copperas; but what strange fatality had converted it into a water cask, or what fatality, stranger still, had caused it to be brought on board the raft, was a problem that none could solve. Little, however, did it matter now; the fact was ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... stood still until she had disappeared, smitten by an inexplicable sense of the fatality of that meeting. Verging upon the sixth lustrum of his age, he had passed through that vernal period when the face of every woman of more than ordinary charm suggested possibilities of the heart's adventure. With him the main business of life was ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... bed early that night, and I sat up a long time by the fire, thinking over all that I had seen and heard. I felt that there was some mystery about the girl—some dark fatality so strange as to defy conjecture. I thought of Prescott's interview with her before their marriage, and the fatal termination of it. I coupled it with poor drunken Reeves' plaintive cry, "Why did she not tell ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Such was the fatality which influenced all the actions of the government, that all proceedings which in themselves were simple and reasonable, became venomous and corrupted when conducted by the ministry, and only added to the general disorder and discontent, instead ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... every slight prominence was gilded and transfigured by the golden glow which flooded from the west. The atmosphere had that peculiar brilliancy characteristic of the season, while the cool and bracing air was full of that champagne-like exhilaration in which lies at once the fascination and the fatality of the New ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... deservedly. But, in answer to the surprise in your former, my dear, that he has never engaged my affections, as well as to the cautionary kind hints in your two last, for so I understand them, let me say that, had I imagined love to be that unconquerable fatality of which I have been speaking, I do not know what might have happened: but, having been early convinced that a union between him and me must be attended with I know not what scenes of wretchedness, in short, knowing the thing in a certain sense to be impossible, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... Wishes." When the catastrophe was at hand Murphy whispered to Cumberland: "If they don't damn this, they deserve to be damned themselves!" No sooner were the words uttered than a turbulent mob in the pit broke out, and quickly put an end to the dire fatality with which Pantomime and its hero, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... had his name slipped into our biographical dictionaries. An author cannot escape the fatality of the alphabet; his numerous misdeeds are registered. It is said, that if he had not been so hungry, he would have given ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that you inhabit, my son!" said he, looking mournfully at the barred windows and wretched appearance of the room. "You travelled to seek happiness, but a fatality seems to pursue you. And ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... I am rather foolish about it," he continued; "but if I am superstitious, I have abundant reason. For more than a century and a half there has been a strange fatality about any Cressley occupying the Hall. This fatality was first exhibited in 1700, when Barrington Cressley, one of the most abandoned libertines of that time, led his infamous orgies there—of these even history takes note. There ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... argument, a physical action. He can show his readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat board - all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and what you do, re-echoing here, will make me raise new levies, and all that for mere phantoms! It is a repetition of what I did in 1807 in Prussia, and in 1809 in Austria. As for me, I shall remain your Majesty's friend even when that fatality which rules Europe will one day compel our two nations to take sword in hand. I shall regulate my conduct by your Majesty's; I shall never make the attack: my troops will advance only when your Majesty has ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... beginning my career as a country gentleman on the estate in Perthshire which I have inherited from Mr. Germaine. Mary is with her husband, enjoying her new privileges, learning her new duties, as a wife. She, too, is living in Scotland—living, by a strange fatality, not very far distant from my country-house. I have no suspicion that she is so near to me: the name of Mrs. Van Brandt (even if I had heard it) appeals to no familiar association in my mind. Still the kindred spirits are parted. ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... as we cannot escape the economic and the military reaction of European development, neither can we escape the moral. If European thought and morality did, by some fatality, really develop in the direction of a Nietzschean idealization of military force, we might well get in the coming years a practical submergence of that morality which we believe to be distinctively American, and get throughout the older hemisphere a type of society based upon ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Giovanna's children, Beppi and Nina, whom we had brought with us to give a first experience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped from the boat and took possession of land and water. By a curious fatality the little girl, who was bred safely amid the hundred canals of Venice, signalized her absence from their perils by presently falling into the only canal in Torcello, whence she was taken dripping, to be confined at a farm-house during the rest of our stay. The children ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... off the face of the earth. When the men to-day answered the notice that all should present themselves ready for work only 487 reported. That shows more clearly than anything else that has yet been known the terrible nature of the fatality of the Conemaugh. The mortality wrought among these men in a few hours is thus shown to have been greater than that in either of the armies that contended for three days ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... But what he loves, and what he admires, and what he aspires to, he MUST betray. It's his fatality. He lives for the moment when he can kiss Gerald in the Garden of ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... me," Fanfar said, and Monte-Cristo went away, confiding in himself, in everything, and still more in the strange fatality ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... and more favorable soil for the spread of this disease. This, unfortunately, is about the conclusion to which we are being most unwillingly driven. Almost every other known infectious disease is diminishing, both in frequency and in fatality, under civilization. Pneumonia alone defies our onslaughts. In fact, if statistics are to be taken at their surface-value, we are facing the appalling situation of an apparently marked increase both in its prevalence and in its mortality. ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... sunlight. On the other stands the Genius of the Republic, the embodied spirit of the sovereign people, who, accepting as literal truth the Christian principles that God is a Father, and men brothers and therefore equal, strive to take from political society the blindness and fatality of natural law, and to endow it with the divine and human attributes of justice, mercy, and intelligence. From the very beginning our American history is full of religious zeal, of high courage and strong endeavor. When Columbus, saddened by the frivolousness or the ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... ascent into the cart, if I might be allowed to mention a young lady's legs, on any terms, I would observe of her that there was a fatality about hers which rendered them singularly liable to be grazed; and that she never effected the smallest ascent or descent without recording the circumstance upon them with a notch, as Robinson Crusoe marked ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... sacrifice into heroism. In acknowledgment of my fatherly interest in her, she has often entertained me at her palace, and spoken her mind with fearless freedom, leaving me to think her pursued by presentiments of a fatality which is to try her with terrible demands, and that she is already ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... say—fortunes turn on strange trifles. The girl, under the influence of his masterful spirit and the rare charm of his manner, might have—as many another has —broken her troth. As it was, she wrote Iberville a letter and sent it by a courier, who never delivered it. By the same fatality, of the letters which he wrote her only one was received. This told her that when he returned from a certain cruise he would visit her again, for he was such an enemy to her country that he was keen to win what did it most honour. Gering had pressed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... politics and of her own wilfulness.... We have seen her take up arms, shake the atrocious power of Genoa, recover her independence, live happily for an instant; but then, pursued by an irresistible fatality, fall again into intolerable disgrace. For twenty-four centuries these are the scenes which recur again and again; the same changes, the same misfortune, but also the same courage, the same resolution, the same boldness.... If ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... one of the very many who appreciate the sterling value of Mr. Hallam's literary labors, and who feel a consequent interest in the character of those who would have sustained the eminence of an honorable name; no one who was affected by the striking and tragic fatality of two such successive bereavements, will deem an apology needed for ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... oyster-cellars. Indeed, if ocular evidence may be relied on, the best energies of the metropolis are given to the incessant consumption of "half a dozen raw," or "four fried and a glass of ale." The bar-rooms and eating-houses are always full or in the act of becoming full. By a fatality so unerring that it has ceased to be wonderful, it happens that you can never enter a Washington restaurant and find it partially empty, without being instantly followed by a dozen or two of bipeds as hungry and thirsty as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... did extricate himself and managed to reach the place where he had seen Antoinette, she was gone: she had struggled vainly against the human torrent that carried her along: then she yielded to it—gave up the struggle. She felt that she was dogged by some fatality which forbade the possibility of her ever meeting Christophe: against Fate there was nothing to be done. And when she did succeed in escaping from the crowd, she made no attempt to go back: she was suddenly ashamed: what could she dare to say to him? What had she done? What must he have thought ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... in all the Italian poets and romancers of the long period of the national resurrection ennobled their art in a measure which criticism has not yet taken account of. I conceived of its effect then, but I conceived of it as a misfortune, a fatality; now I am by no means sure that it was so; hereafter the creation of beauty, as we call it, for beauty's sake, may be considered something monstrous. There is forever a poignant meaning in life beyond what mere living ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... anxiety by the thought that if the door were discovered to be unlocked nobody would know how the unlocking came about. The inconvenient Isabel, like other offenders, did not foresee her own impulse to confession, a fatality which came upon her the morning after the party, when Gwendolen said at the breakfast-table, "I know the door was locked before the housekeeper gave me the key, for I tried it myself afterward. Some one must have been to my ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... lurking horrors filled the dismal hours for me, he would come soon. By some fatality I had drawn the body directly to the spot where the last fading shafts of light would hover about its face. Not for a paradise of peace would I touch the loathsome thing again to hide it in the shadows. I could neither take my eyes from it nor put my hands upon it. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... haven of refuge, and she loved them the more ardently for their forlorn condition. Her own as they had never before been! and if the tenure were uncertain, she prized it doubly, even though, by a strange fatality, she had never had so much trouble and vexation with them as arose at once on their being made over to her! When all was settled, doubt over, and the routine life begun, Lucilla evidently felt the blank of her vanished hopes, and became fretful and captious, weary of things in general, and ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cruel malady breaks out upon even those who administer remedies; and {their own} arts become an injury to their owners. The nearer at hand any one is, and the more faithfully he attends on the sick, the sooner does he come in for his share of the fatality. And when the hope of recovery is departed, and they see the end of their malady {only} in death, they indulge their humors, and there is no concern as to what is to their advantage; for, {indeed}, nothing ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso |
