"Heartbreaking" Quotes from Famous Books
... white man to cross the northern continent. Paddling for life through swirling rapids on rivers which rushed madly through sheer rock-bound canyons, swimming for shore when rock or sand bar had wrecked the precious bark canoe, struggling over heartbreaking portages, clinging to the sides of precipices, contending against hostile Indians and fear-stricken followers, and at last winning through, Mackenzie summed up what will ever remain one of the great achievements of exploration in the ... — The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... won't: you'll throw it in my teeth afterwards and accuse me of disrespect. I say it's a heartbreaking falsehood that I don't respect you. It's true that I didn't respect your old pride: why should I? It was nothing but cowardice. I didn't respect your intellect: I've a better one myself: it's a masculine ... — You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... papa has been very hopeful. I don't know exactly what his mind runs on, but I can see that he is making heaps of plans in regard to the future, and oh! You can't think how glad and how thankful I am for the change. The state of dull, heartbreaking, weary depression that he fell into just after getting the news of our failure was beginning to undermine his health. I could see that plainly, and felt quite wretched about him. But now he is comparatively cheerful, and so gentle too. Do you know, I have ... — Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... long fight," she began, as we talked in her modest little sitting-room, into which the sun streamed brightly with no thought of the cold shadows in the grim building below. "Oh, and such a hard, heartbreaking fight! Often it seems as if we had exhausted every means at our disposal, and yet we shall never give up. Why cannot we make the world see our case as we see it? Everything seems to have conspired against us—and yet I cannot, I will not believe that the law and the science that have condemned ... — The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... player whose handicap was several strokes removed from scratch, and who, having become badly bunkered on one occasion, tried nearly every iron club in his bag in a vain endeavour to get out. The case was heartbreaking, and he turned despairingly to his caddie with the question, "What on earth shall I take now?" There was little encouragement in the answer, "Take the 4.5 train." There is a good story also of a certain Welshman of title who became enthusiastic ... — The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... object was to answer those signals, but it proved heartbreaking work at first. We could not produce a radio wave of great enough length to pierce out through earth's insulating layer and across the gulf to Mars. We used all the power of our great windmill-dynamo hook-ups, but for long could not make it. Every few hours like clockwork ... — Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... Cousin Elsie," Arthur returned, with ill-concealed emotion, "how illy you could be spared by any of those who know and love you. Even I should feel it an almost heartbreaking thing to lose you out of my life, and your ... — Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... stumbled back across the breaks to the charred ashes of our labors. Apart from the tangible losses that lay in coals, the newspaper, the voice of the Brule, was gone. "Down into frontier history," Senator Phillips said. Into it had gone the ambitions, the heartbreaking labor, the vision of ... — Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me: and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands, with heartbreaking partings, and then—everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! And again, and ... — The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... be any red-handed assassin who goes through peaceful country places leaving behind him dead men looking sightlessly up to the sky. The hero will be the man or woman who knows and loves and serves. In the new histories we will be shown the tragedy, the heartbreaking tragedy of war, which like some dreadful curse has followed the human family, beaten down their plans, their hopes, wasted their savings, destroyed their homes, and in every way turned ... — In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... advanced and Judge Emery's widow recovered a little strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the younger ... — The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... silhouette against the leading glow, bent toward the tube, and nodded rapidly. And to the deep-throated roar of an unmuffled exhaust, the heavy car leaped, like a spirited animal stung by whip and spur, and settled into a stride to which what had gone before was as a preliminary canter to the heartbreaking drive down ... — Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the favorable summer season, but Harrison was unable to transport the food and war material needed by his ten thousand men. A million rations were required at the goal of the Maumee Rapids, and yet after two months of heartbreaking endeavor not a pound of provisions had been carried within fifty miles of this place. Wagons and pack-trains floundered in the mud and were abandoned. The rivers froze and thwarted the use of flotillas of scows. Winter closed down, and the American army was forlornly mired and blockaded ... — The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... future, living in the earthly paradise which had been conjured up before him by the warm, inspiring sentences of this miners' leader, and joyful in the contemplation of this paradise of happy humanity, he fell asleep. Could he have foreseen the terrible, heartbreaking ordeals through which Smillie often had to pass, still clinging with tenacity to the gleam that led him on, praying sometimes that strength would be given to keep him from turning back; of the strenuous ... — The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... his horse for a last, heartbreaking burst of speed and the dun made good. At the beginning of the slope to the ridge, Rathburn veered sharply to the right and burst through the trees a scant rod or two from his man. His gun was leveled straight ... — The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... repaired by the invaders. In another place a company of reserves were recharging cases of artillery shells which had been sent back from the front in carload lots. There were horses here —a whole troop of draft horses which had been worn out in that relentless, heartbreaking labor into which war sooner or later resolves itself. The drove had been shipped back this far to be rested and cured up, or to be shot in the event that they were ... — Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... had been given more lines, more scenes, Phillips had seen to it that Norma was the one to really profit by the changes. Author and star had been upon the verge of rupture more than once during that heartbreaking period of preparation, but Phillips was supremely glad now that he had held himself in control. Leontine's constant nagging had borne fruit, after all, in that it had at least taught him to bite down on his words, and to ... — Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Her aunt has had a heartbreaking lesson. She may say a few words to unsay words that she never ... — The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... appeal to the readers' passions. Not infrequently, while the editorial page is mourning the prevalence of homicide, the front columns are bristling with sensational accounts of the home-coming of the injured husband, the heartbreaking confession of the weak and erring wife, and the sneering nonchalance of the seducer, until a public sentiment is created which, if it outwardly deprecates the invocation of the unwritten law, secretly avows that it would have done the same thing in ... — Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... and they were all waiting. Thomas Jefferson had never seen any one die, only a dog that Tike Bryerson had shot on one of his drunken home-goings. But death was death, to a dog or to a girl; and vivid imagination supplied the appalling details. Over and over again in pitiless minuteness the heartbreaking scene was repeated: the little twitchings of the bed-clothing, the tossing of the girl's arms in the last desperate struggle for breath, his mother's low sobs, and the haggard face of ... — The Quickening • Francis Lynde |