"Living death" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... past. They say that nineteen hundred years ago a man was raised from the dead after having been buried for three days. They call it a great miracle. But I think the resurrection from the peaceful slumber of a three days' grave is not nearly so miraculous as the actual coming back to life from a living death of fourteen years duration;—'tis the twentieth century resurrection, not based on ignorant credulity, nor assisted by any Oriental jugglery. No travelers ever return, the poets say, from the Land of Shades beyond the river Styx—and ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... bivouac. Ant hills, ten and fifteen feet high, with dome-shaped roofs, dot the wild waste like pigmy houses, and sometimes they are the only dry land found to rest on. The horses flounder through the mire, or sink up to the belly in slime, while clouds of flies make the life of man and beast a living death. Keys rust in the pocket, and boots mildew in a day. At other seasons, as I know by painful experience, the hard-baked ground is cracked up into fissures, and not a drop of water is to be found in a three days' journey. The miserable savages either sit in utter dejection on logs of wood or tree ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... interested in his equiponderating description of the place of misery. Not once {did he even} attempt to give, or indeed could have given, the feeblest idea, to a single soul present, of the one terror of the universe—the peril of being cast from the arms of essential Love and Life into the bosom of living Death. For this teacher of men knew nothing whatever but by hearsay, had not in himself experienced one of the joys or one of the horrors ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... though he had never been? O, what mockery is this! Surely death is not death, and humanity is not extinct; but merely passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our perceptions. Death is a vast portal, an high road to life: let us hasten to pass; let us exist no more in this living death, but ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... to Strides Cottage again! Nearer and nearer now, that moment that must come, and put an end to all this puling hesitation. She could not help the thought that rose in her mind:—"This that I do—this reuniting of two souls long parted by a living death—may it not be what Death does every day for many a world-worn survivor of a half-forgotten parting in a remote past?" For, indeed, it seemed to her that these two had risen from the dead, and that for ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... hardly realize, unless you have almost lived their life, what the snow and the frost mean to all the thrush people, but more especially to the common song-thrush and the redwing. At the worst it means death; at the best, little more than a living death. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... under symbols of mighty abstractions the vision of the pariah world, and the world of health and outward fortune which scorns and excludes the other, and partly, at all events, actively dooms it to a living death in England of to-day, as in India of the past, and in Jewry of old, where the leper was thrust outside the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... long and well, Cleansing thy sight by prayer and faith, And thou shalt know what secret spell Preserves them in their living death: Through sevenfold flames thine eye shall see The Saviour walking ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... poor woman was sitting in the dark in the self-hypnotized condition of the utter emptiness of her living death, she heard Christophe playing. It was his habit to sit at the piano in the half-light, musing and improvising. His music irritated her, for it disturbed the empty torpor into which she had sunk. She shut ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... worse than ordinary death such as was credited me," huskily muttered the exile. "Ten years,—and ever since I have been here, helpless to extricate myself, doomed to a living death, which none other can ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... they were, that I might die at once; For now they kill me with a living death. Those eyes of thine from mine have drawn salt tears, Sham'd their aspects with store of childish drops: These eyes, which never shed remorseful tear, No, when my father York and Edward wept, To hear the piteous moan that Rutland made When ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... fire dulled by the dust of her last struggles. And though it is a whole month now since Eurypelma received his stab from the poisoned javelin of Pepsis, he has not recovered; nor will he ever. When you touch him, he draws up slowly one leg after another, or moves a palpus feebly. But it is living death; a hopeless paralytic is ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... punishment there can be no question. If the premium is high at the beginning, the penalty is terrible at the close. And this penalty is exacted equally from those who have deliberately said, "Evil, be thou my Good," and for those who have been decoyed, snared, trapped into the life which is a living death. When you see a girl on the street you can never say without enquiry whether she is one of the most-to-be condemned, or the most-to-be pitied of her sex. Many of them find themselves where they are because of a too trusting ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... half-drunken bridegroom comes leaping and reeling on, rushes into the chamber, suddenly seems transfixed to the floor, puts his hand to his sword, but not finding it at his side, looks back, calls aloud, but no one follows him. Horror, like living death, paralyzes the old man. The bridegroom throws himself upon the exile, who exclaims solemnly, as ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... honest subsistence for the future. It had none of the usual features of a prison; neither the hardened profligacy which scoffs down its own sense of guilt, nor the hollow-eyed sorrow which wastes away in a living death of unavailing expiation: there was neither the clank of chains, nor the yell of execration; but a hardworking body of men were seen, who, though separated by justice from society, were not supposed ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... in her memory. Perhaps not once since that terrible day in the Pentonville lodgings had he looked her straight in the eyes. Yes, her beauty appealed to him less than even a year ago; Adela knew it, and it was the one solace in her living death. Perhaps occasion could again have stung him into jealousy, but Adela was no longer a vital interest in his existence. He lived in external things, his natural life. Passion had been an irregularity in his ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... life of a man who has rent himself away from dependence upon God—however vigorous his brain, however active his hand, however full charged with other interests his life, in the very depth of it is a living death, and the right name for it is death. So this is Sin's gift—that over our whole nature there come mortality and decay, and that they who live as her subjects are dead whilst they live. Dear brethren, that may be figurative, but it seems to me that it is absurd ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... message from the far-away home where the birds sang for him, and the waves and the flowers spoke to him, and "Unclean" had not been written against his name. Of all on the Pest Island he alone is hopeless. He is a leper, and his sentence is that of a living death in a strange land. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... season; if the very core of life was decay; if life was because nobody could help its being; if it died because no one could keep it from dying; yet were there two facts fit almost to embalm the body of this living death: Barbara, and the world which was the body of Barbara! So life carried the day, if but the day, and the heart of Richard rejoiced in the midst of perishings. Only, the night was coming in ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... How, moreover, should the Levitical priests, had the disease been this creeping infection, have ever themselves escaped it, obliged as they were by their very office to submit the leper to actual handling and closest examination?... Leprosy was nothing short of a living death, a corrupting of all the humors, a poisoning of the very springs, of life; a dissolution, little by little, of the whole body, so that one limb after another actually decayed and fell away. Aaron exactly describes the appearance which the leper presented to the eyes of the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... cowpuncher would call a swell Easterner." Ignoring Gray's grimace of dislike she went on, deliberately exaggerating her musical Texas drawl. "You are a person of education and culture; you speak languages; you have the broad 'a,' and if you had to go unshaven it would be a living death. You are rich, too, and probably play the piano. People like that ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... all bored, The doctors sit in the glare of electric light Watching the endless stream of naked white Bodies of men for whom their hasty award Means life or death, maybe, or the living death Of mangled limbs, blind eyes or darkened brain: And the chairman, as his monocle falls again, Pronounces each doom with easy, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... chose to play the fool and into my hands. Now I guess you understand,"—and turning his head he fixed her with an inflexible glare, chill and heartless as steel,—"that one squeal out of you will be the last. Oh, I've got no scruples; arrest to me means a living death. I'll take a shorter course, by preference, and—I'll take you ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... known that the girl ceased to live, it would not have been difficult for one of her faith to have deposited her regrets by the side of hopes that were so justifiable, in the grave of the innocent. But the living death to which her offspring might be condemned, was rarely absent from her thoughts. She listened to the maxims of resignation, which were heard flowing from lips she loved with the fondness of a woman and the meekness ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... myself without proving my brother to have been guilty of the foulest crime which a gentleman could commit. For eighteen years I have screened him at the expense of everything which a man could sacrifice. I have lived a living death which has left me an old and shattered man when I am but in my fortieth year. But now when I am faced with the alternative of telling the facts about my brother, or of wronging my son, I can only act in one fashion, and the more so since I have reason to hope that ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the house was actually begun. I vowed before my Maker that I would never enter it: I had rather toil on the plantation from dawn till dark; I had rather live and die in jail, than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death. I was determined that the master, whom I so hated and loathed, who had blighted the prospects of my youth, and made my life a desert, should not, after my long struggle with him, succeed at last in trampling his victim under his feet. ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... the meanwhile half the crew are clothing, feeding, questioning, caressing those nine poor fellows thus snatched from living death; and Yeo, hearing the news, has rushed up on deck to welcome his ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... With the living death of Takeshi, there was no male heir. Several family councils were held in the presence of the two Mr. Fujinami generally in the lower-house, at which six or seven members of the collateral branches were also present. Grandfather Gennosuke, who despised Takeshi ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... crime to crime, doing from beginning to end what it is not her will to do. An unnatural and unholy bond cannot be severed even to make way for a natural and holy one. And the paths of glory lead not to the grave but to a living death in the consciousness of guilt and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... she said in a low voice, "means life to me instead of a living death; it means more than I can tell you, more than ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... witnessed this scene with gathering anger. The implied reproaches against her father—her father, who was lying there in a sort of living death—neutralized all her pity for griefs about tablecloths and china; and her anger on her father's account was heightened by some egoistic resentment at Tom's silent concurrence with her mother in shutting her out from the ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... or grew pallid in an instant; but scarcely were these simultaneous emotions recognized, when another phrase, life granted, called forth a cry as of one mighty voice. All were spared: but a sentence, to such as understood its meaning, of living death,—carcere duro in Spielberg and the Castle of Lubiano,—some for ten, others for fifteen, and the remainder ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... soft, pleasant voices, each with her market-basket over her arm, going homeward from shopping. It would be interesting to know their story—what it is that brings these daughters of a brighter world here into this valley of the living death. ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... This is the last time I shall ever bore you with my letters. You have forbidden me to see you again. Practically you have sentenced me to a living death, but as I prefer death shall not be partial, but full and complete oblivion, I take this means of letting you know that unless you revoke your cruel sentence of banishment, I shall make an end of it all. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... suffer me to speak, for, behold, I speak not to man who scorns me, but to Thy mercy. Even Thou perhaps dost scorn me, but Thou wilt turn and have pity. For what is it that I would say, O Lord my God, save that I know not whence I came hither into this dying life, shall I call it, or living death?... And, lo, my infancy has long been dead, and I live. But Thou, O Lord, who ever livest and in whom nothing ever dies—tell me, I beseech Thee, O God, and have mercy on my misery, tell me whether another life of mine ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... therefore, to the extent to which our idea of life has been centred in that body, we shall feel its loss. If our motto has been "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die" we shall feel very dead indeed—a living death, a consciousness of being cut off from all that constituted our enjoyment of life—a thirst for the satisfaction of our customary ideas, which we have no power to quench; and, in proportion as our habitual mode of thought is raised above that lowest level, so will our sense of loss be less. ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... it feel I then? If 'tis, how strange a thing, sweet powers above! If love be kind, why does it fatal prove? If cruel, why so pleasing is the pain? If 'tis my will to love, why weep, why plain? If not my will, tears cannot love remove. O living death! O rapturous pang!—why, love! If I consent not, canst thou o'er me reign? If I consent, 'tis wrongfully I mourn: Thus on a stormy sea my bark is borne By adverse winds, and with rough tempest tost; Thus unenlightened, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... To live in hell, and heaven to behold; To welcome life, and die a living death; To sweat with heat, and yet be freezing cold; To grasp at stars, and lie the earth beneath; To tread a maze that never shall have end; To burn in sighs, and starve in daily tears; To climb a hill, and ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... mine but in my dreams. O wretched dreams, that drive me mad. Pauline, they will tell us that we must not dream—we must not weep, we must be stocks and stones. We must wear this weight of living death till that good Lord that makes such laws shall send us death in mercy. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years of suffering: that might almost satisfy Him, one would think. Pauline! you and I are to say good-bye to-night. Good-bye! People talk of it as a cruel word. Think of ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... steamship Hoffnung greeted me upon his quarterdeck, and his men sent up rounds of cheers which echoed over the waters. I stood for some minutes forgetful of everything, save that I had been snatched from that prison of steel; brought from the shadow of the living death to the hope of seeing friends, and country, and home again. Now one man wrung my hand, now another brought clothes, now another hot food; but I stood as one stricken dumb, holding nervously to the taffrail as though none should drag me down again to the horrors of ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... a condemned man like? Did Graylock sleep? Did he suffer? Was the suspense a living death to him? Had he ever suspected him, Drene, of treachery after he, Graylock, had fulfilled his final ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... come and which he had extended to Aimee in that brief moment of fatuous triumph, and beyond it, across a chair, was the portiere which the black had torn down from the doorway to wrap about Ryder's helpless form as he had carried him down to living death. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... have given me, beside that? I want what the beggars in my books have—liberty. You are not young, you are no longer sanguine and hopeful, while my poor heart is bursting with the fullness you will not let me spend. A living death like mine's a cruelty, a tyranny that God and ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... but four days later, again at lunch, I outlined the whole story to him. I wrote the first eighteen chapters; Homer took up the tale as 'Hobart Fenton' and wrote the chapters about the house of miracles, the living death, the rousing of Aradna's mind, and so forth, up to 'The Man from Space,' where once ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... honoring her; Discharging a sweet office, sweeter none, Mother and child, friend, counsel and repose; Naught matches with her, naught has leave with her To highest human praise. Farewell to him Who reverences not with an excess Of faith the beauteous sex; all barren he Shall live a living death of mockery. Ah! had but words the power, what could we say Of Woman! We, rude men of violent phrase, Harsh action, even in repose inwardly harsh; Whose lives walk blustering on high stilts, removed From all the purely gracious influence ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the future. The steps of her tyrant's progress would be gradual, but terrible. First, perhaps she would be confined to the Hall, then to her own rooms, and finally perhaps to some small chamber—some cell—where she would live a living death as long as her ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... pounds, and even after he was answerable for two murders. That man never knew himself a villain, and it was only when the rope was gradually closing round his neck that the keen sleuth-hound remorse found him out, and he had the grace to save an innocent man from a living death. This monstrous hypocrite was another typical scoundrel, and his like people every ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Moors, who held to their bond "Ceuta or nothing"—and their wretched captive, treated to all the filthy horrors of Mussulman imprisonment and slavery and torture, died under his agony in the sixth year of his living death and the forty-first of his ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... earliest infancy their minds are taxed, though their bodies are neglected, and their souls forgotten. Nor is it unfrequent that their physical strength gives way under the constant pressure of intellectual studies. And thus they are subjected to all the evils of physical inability—the sufferings of living death, in consequence of an erroneous education. Besides, they are destitute of all those kinder feelings and sympathetic emotions which alone result from the cultivation of the moral susceptibilities, and become insensible to the more delicate affections of the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... love is not to live, or it is to live a living death. The life that goes out in love to all is the life that is full, and rich, and continually expanding in beauty and in power. Such is the life that becomes ever more inclusive, and hence larger in ...
— Thoughts I Met on the Highway • Ralph Waldo Trine
... appearance of effort. Every sentence tells, and the whole reads like one sentence. There is something sublime in Martin's sceptical indifference to moral good and evil. It is the repose of the grave. It is better to suffer this living death, than a living martyrdom. "Nothing can touch him further." The moral of Candide (such as it is) is the same as that of Rasselas: the execution is different. Voltaire says, "A great book is a great evil." Dr. Johnson would have laboured this short ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... sensual indulgence stupefy, blunt, and confuse together in lifeless meshes, the vital tenant and the mortal tenement; they grow incorporate, alike unclean, powerless, guilty, and wretched. Then "Man lives a life half dead, a living death, Himself his sepulchre, a moving grave." Active virtue, profound love, and the earnest pursuit, in the daily duties of life, of "Those lofty musings which within us sow The seeds of higher kind and brighter ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... much better, as it is, my child," said the old scholar. "You see, dear, they would have taken him away. Nothing could have saved him. It would have been a living death behind prison walls ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... the last day will make but few graves; at least quick resurrections will anticipate lasting sepultures. Some graves will be opened before they be quite closed, and Lazarus be no wonder. When many that feared to die, shall groan that they can die but once, the dismal state is the second and living death, when life puts despair on the damned; when men shall wish the coverings of mountains, not of monuments, and annihilations shall ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... profound relation in humanity! Its roots go down into the very deeps of God, and out of its foliage creeps the old serpent, and the worm that never dies! Out of it steams the horror of corruption, wrapt in whose living death a man cries out that God himself can do nothing for him. It is but the natural result of his making the loveliest of God's gifts into his God, and worshipping and serving the creature more than the creator. Oh my child, it is a terrible thing to be! Except he knows God the saviour, man stands ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... that followed was white and beautiful. On the other hand, if the contract had been neglected, and a woman had accepted a lover without it, then, however great their love, however fit their union in every natural way, the woman was cast out as unchaste, impure, and abandoned, and consigned to the living death of social ignominy. Now let me repeat that we fully recognize the excuse for this social law under your atrocious system as the only possible way of protecting the economic interests of women and children, ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... There were breaks and bruises, and a bad injury to the spine. It was doubtful if she would ever walk again. To the little woman lying back on the pillow it seemed a living death—this thing that ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... suffocating pressure upon my chest; I retain memory of glaring violently into the darkness; how I fondled the sharp edge of the hunting knife, crying and shouting impotent curses, which I trust God has long ago forgiven, at that incarnate devil who had hurled me down to such living death. Terror dominated my brain, pulsed like molten fire through my blood, until, as the desperation of my situation became more clearly defined, I tottered upon the very verge of insanity, feeling I should soon become a ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... anguish. She accepts the sacrifice, but it costs her infinite pangs. She is separated from her husband forever. Nor was the convent agreeable to her. It was dull, monotonous, dismal; imprisonment in a tomb, a living death, where none could know her agonies but God; where she could not even hear from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... you within the last forty-eight hours that will make her you love the pity of the world before her time. I see how it will happen, for the complaint I speak of is in the family. A living death she will have, and you yourself during the same time will ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... mother, and in cruel mockery cast in fragments on her pulseless and bleeding breast; rape joined to murder in one awful tragedy; young girls, even children of tender years, outraged by these brutal ravishers till death ended their shame; women held into captivity to undergo the horrors of a living death; whole families burned alive; and, as if their devilish fancy could not glut itself with outrages on the living, the last efforts exhausted in mutilating the bodies of the dead. Such are the spectacles, and a thousand nameless ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... him; but had to hit such blows as it could in the hope of checking him for the instant needed for escape. Sometimes the oncoming wave was so close that a small individual accident, the capture of one man, would mean the washing out of a whole battalion. For day after day this living death endured. And day after day a certain dark truth began to be revealed, bit by bit, certainly to the incredulous wonder of the Prussians, quite possibly to the surprise of the French, and quite as possibly to the surprise of themselves; that there was something singular about the British ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... power that he had over her mind. If he felt all this for Aunt Maria, what would he not feel for the world, and for that wife of his? If old Aunt Maria could so wake in him the love of life and the hatred of that living death to which he had been condemned, what passionate will to live would rise in answer to the world's wonder ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... loneliness, stared me in the face. The possibility of ever becoming anything but an abject slave, a mere machine in the hands of an owner, had now fled, and it seemed to me it had fled forever. A life of living death, beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field, and the sugar plantation, seemed to be my doom. The fiends, who rushed into the prison when we were first put there, continued to visit me,{233} and to ply me with questions and with their tantalizing remarks. I was ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... and Christian deception, the cunning advocates of regicide, the proud servants of the only salvation-dispensing Church!—there, with rage in their hearts, they meditated plans of vengeance against this criminal pope who had condemned them to a living death; who, like a wicked magician, had changed their sacred college into an open grave! He had killed them, and ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... fixed in slime and gurgle a dismal chant. The materialist and the heretic, whose existence, Dante holds, was only a living death, are confined in blazing tombs. Murderers and tyrants are immersed in ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... the blast, Of crash and jar, and shivering moan, As of rending earth; and all nature's groan Were sent to warn us the end was nigh. With awe-struck gladness we looked around, Waiting to hear the last trumpet sound. From living death in that desolate Bay, We had sprung to welcome the judgment day; Although in the pit should our lot be cast, So that this our great woe should end at last. The bleak spring came, the ice did part; Devils entered each sailor's heart; No blessed thoughts ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... Gannette. The latter, already tottering, soon fell before the subtle machinations of Hodson and his able cohorts. Then, as a telling example to the rest, Ames pursued him to the doors of the Lunacy Commission, and rested not until that body had condemned his victim to a living death in a state asylum. Kane, Fitch, and Weston fled to cover, and concentrated their guns upon their common enemy. The Beaubien alone stood out against him for three months. Her existence was death in life; but from the hour that she first read ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... whilst lying thus concealed the men of the party should be attacked and made captive or slain. Were such a catastrophe as this to befall them, the fate of those poor women and children would be little better than a living death; left as they would be to shift for themselves unaided, unprotected, and their hearts wrung with anguish for the loss of those to whom they were naturally in the habit of looking for help and protection, and with little ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... pledging myself to keep your counsel. Since that day, no man is so near to him as you. You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death; and still he knows you not. In permitting this, I have surely acted a false part by the only man to whom the power was left me to ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... always been kind to me, good to me, dear to me," she went on quickly. "It is only in this that you will not understand. Would it not hurt you a little to feel that you had sent me to a sort of living death from which I could never come back to life? That I was imprisoned for ever among people who looked down upon me and only tolerated me for my fortune's sake? Yet that would be the very least part of ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... the blessings of life?" Even in this last decade of the nineteenth century the priesthood of Bengal are defending against all humane legislation those old customs which render the girlhood of Hindu women a living death.[70] ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... however, from M. Renan's letter to his friend, M. Berthelot, written from Oxford on this occasion, he was not so much pleased as we thought he was, or as we were with him. He says, "Oxford is the strangest relic of the past, the type of living death. Each of its colleges is a terrestrial paradise, but a deserted Paradise." (I see from the date that the visit took place in the Easter vacation!) And he describes the education given as "purely humanist ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his time is near. So do I. But he shall not die in a second, as his victim did, I would prolong his agonies for years, if every hour was like a living death; a speechless misery. Let him go with Sam Chichester and his crowd. The avenger will be close at hand! His Truth-Teller will lie when he most depends on it. For I—I have sworn that he shall go where he has sent so many victims; go, like them all, unprepared, but not unwarned. No, ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... that were constantly bringing him in contact with this man and his family. The great troubled eyes of the sick man followed his every movement, and he could not resist the impression that at last they seemed to recognize him and take in some thought of hope. It seemed terrible, this living death, this unutterable silence, and yet those staring eyes, he did not know whether it was a hopeful indication or otherwise, but at last they closed and the sufferer seemed to sleep heavily. Wearily passed the hours; he ...
— Three People • Pansy
... himself in his utter need, as he wrestled to drive the awful darkness from his soul. But no answer came to his cry and the brave heart of him slowly sank. He was deserted then, hurled down into hell to die a living death. In a single flashing second he had been torn from the world he loved—that bright, gay world in which he had revelled all his life—and flung into this inferno of endless darkness. The iron began to bite into ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... increasing number of pines bordering the road and mingling with the distant forest. Very weird pines these were, chiefly covered with closely-packed dead foliage, with a living tuft of dark green at the end of each branchlet. A living death seemed to be their lot, and they moaned without moving as the light wind passed on ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... beautiful it drops. What a miserable world this is, with death making havoc everywhere! Then your theology exaggerates the evil a thousand-fold. If a man must die, let him die and cease to be. But your minister spoke to-day of a living death, in which one only exists to suffer. What a misfortune ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... regimen by which he succeeded, after a sickly youth, in reaching an advanced and healthy age, then of eighty- three years. He goes on to answer those who despise life after the age of sixty-five as a living death, showing them that his own life had nothing deadly about it. 'Let them come and see, and wonder at my good health, how I mount on horseback without help, how I run upstairs and up hills, how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am, how free from care and disagreeable ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to a living death in the sage-brush of the Black Hills. These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cow-punchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... characterises the outward life of nearly all the mystics, and while an almost morbid desire to suffer is found in many of them, there is nothing in the system itself to encourage men to maltreat their bodies. Mysticism enjoins a dying life, not a living death. Moreover, asceticism, when regarded as a virtue or duty in itself, tends to isolate us, and concentrates our attention on our separate individuality. This is contrary to the spirit of Mysticism, which aims at realising unity and solidarity ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... parents are much distressed about it. The common and foolish course is to lecture him on the sin of gambling and to tearfully urge him to associate only with very proper young men. But the young gambler is not in the least interested in that sort of a life, which appears to him to be a kind of living death, and such entreaty does not move him. His parents would do better by looking more closely into the case. Why is he a gambler? He desires money. He seeks excitement. He wants to live in an atmosphere ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... and hearty, sir, when you're gone yourself, I implore you, sir, by your hoary hairs and by the one you dread, your wife, sir—if you tell me any lie to-day, may she outlast you by years and years, yes, sir, and you die a living death with her alive. ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... situation. Every man of intelligence can trace the various steps that led him to the prison door, and he can feel, if he does not understand, how inevitable each step was. The number of "repeaters" in prison shows the effect of this kind of a living death upon the inmates. To be branded as a criminal and turned out in the world again leaves one weakened in the struggle of life and handicapped in a race that is hard enough for most men at the best. In prison and after leaving prison, the man lives in a world of his own; a world where ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... and revisit the country where he had spent a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor wrecked by bad whisky, nor ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... Arnold had here a fine opportunity to retrieve in some degree the bitter mischief of which he had been the occasion. Had he but come forth and suffered in Andre's place, the blackness of his crime would have almost disappeared in the brilliancy of his atonement; but he chose a living death instead, and his hapless victim went to his doom accompanied by the pity of every honest American heart. His manly figure affords a fine contrast to that of the traitor skulking down the lane (still shown as "Arnold's Path") at the back of the Robinson House in his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... my child was born. I appealed to Lawrence Newt, our old friend and playmate. He promised me faithful secrecy, and through him the child was sent where Gabriel was at school. Then I withdrew from both. I thought it was the will of God. I felt myself commanded to a living death—dead to every friend and kinsman—dead to every thing but my degradation and its punishment; and yet consciously close to you, near to all old haunts and familiar faces—lost to them all—lost to my child—" Her voice faltered, and the tears gushed ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... been engaged, the poor display of human character, the little low passions which bad been called up, even in himself, alike destitute of worthy cause and aim, and which had perhaps but just missed ending in the death of some and the living death of others,—it all wrought to bring him back to his old wearying of human nature and despondent eying of the everywhere jarrings, confusions, and discordances in the moral world. The fresh sea-breeze that swept by the ship, roughening the play of the waves, and brushing his own cheek with ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... it. Thou knowst it, Tibble. It seems to me that life is no life, but living death, without that freedom! And I MUST hear of it, and know whether it is mine, yea, and Stephen's, and all whom I love. O Tibble, I would beg my bread rather than not have that ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Aurelia. It seemed incredible that a man of much ability should have been content to spend all these years in the negro's sole society, but no doubt the injury done to the brain had been aggravated by grief and remorse, so that he had long lain, with suspended faculties, in a species of living death; whence he had only gradually, and as it were unconsciously, advanced to his present condition. Perhaps Mr. Wayland's endeavours to rouse him had come too soon, or in a less simple and attractive form, for they had been reluctantly received and had proved entirely unsuccessful; ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... assistant found the pulse in Leithgow's wrist, and another bent over him in such fashion that the prisoners could not see what he was doing. Ku Sui too bent over, something in his hands. The prelude to living death had begun.... ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... upholstered with cloth for winter, the other with tin for summer—on which he rested his gouty leg, and a low chair for a secretary,—this was all the furniture he used. The rooms are not larger than cupboards, low and dark. The little oratory where he died looks out upon the high altar of the Temple. In a living death, as if by an awful anticipation of the common lot it was ordained that in the flesh he should know corruption, he lay waiting his summons hourly for fifty-three days. What tremendous doubts and fears ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... year, but I had learned to love the man with a loyal affection and esteem, the like of which I never felt for any human creature, except my wife and my own children. It made for a good deal in my affection for him that I had been instrumental in rescuing him from that living death he had suffered for so many years, for I have found over and over again in my own experience that one of the surest ways of learning to love a man is to do him a good turn. And apart from my own affection ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... mourning and of woe, where life would be one blank of desolation and stupor, to be wakened to bitter consciousness by intelligence of our doom. The sense of my responsibility, the full appreciation of the living death which, through my agency, had fallen upon a home as hallowed as ever love and joy consecrated to happiness, had burned up my eyeballs and my brain. I went forth into the recommencing storm, utterly unconscious of its rage and equally indifferent to fate. My comrade, who had no life to lose but ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... like a tenth-rate city in America. And the business American has his claw into it for good. The Hawaiians, in truth, seem to care little. They go blithely in the streets crowned and garlanded with flowers, and even the leprosy that strikes one now and again with worse than living death seems ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... anger of the man whom we had both dreaded. Again I heard her gentle words of counsel, and the answering lies which should have blistered my lips. For I lied to her, not hastily or on impulse, but deliberately in cold blood. Anything, I cried to myself, to escape from this rock, this living death! So I lied to her, and she helped me. No wonder that I trembled. No wonder that I half made up my mind to flee away into the sheltering darkness ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that I ever felt as depressed as I did after that interview with one who had entered a living death to ambition, for while Craig had done all the talking I had absorbed nothing but depression. I vowed that if Gregory or anybody else was responsible I would do my share ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... strange thing to say," he went on, "that one does not know whether to call one's father's death ill news or not. But considering the living death he has led for twenty-three years, one can hardly call death and release a misfortune. The strange thing, the alarming thing about it, is the way Lady Helena takes it. One would think she might be prepared, that considering ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... time. I am now forty-four years old. I have spent the eight intervening years in the California State Prison of San Quentin. Five of these years I spent in the dark. Solitary confinement, they call it. Men who endure it, call it living death. But through these five years of death-in-life I managed to attain freedom such as few men have ever known. Closest-confined of prisoners, not only did I range the world, but I ranged time. They who immured me for petty years gave to me, all unwittingly, the largess of ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... top of the mill, and the feet came thundering down, and I stood as near that awful fire as I could, with uplifted sword to slay and be slain. The bolt was drawn. A tar-barrel caught fire. The door was opened. What followed? Not the men came out, but the fire rushed in at them like a living death, and the first I thought to fight with was blackened and crumpled on the floor like a leaf. One fearsome yell, and dumb for ever. The feet ran up again, but fewer. I heard them hack with their swords a little way up at the mill's ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... tomahawk in the Dakota's face. A burning rage darts forth from her eyes and brands him for a victim of revenge. Her heart mutters within her breast, "Come, I wish to meet you, vile foe, who captured my lover and tortures him now with a living death." ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... refused, the nation's doom was fixed and sealed, and down came the eagles of Rome, again God's scavengers, to sweep away the nation on which had been lavished such wealth of divine love, but which had now come to be a rotting abomination, and to this day remains in a living death, a miraculously ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... can I bear it? My life will be one long, living death, and I shall always want to shriek out the dreadful thing which father says I must keep! Can I? Ought I? And could they hang my father? I do not think so. They would call it manslaughter, and pardon him, ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... association with his, that caused the bitterness of his anguish. And I,—I knew that my father had robbed my husband in the vilest, most insidious manner; that he had drawn upon himself the awful doom of a forger, a dungeon home, a living death. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... high seas and in the British Channel they joined hands with godless freebooters to rifle her ships, kill her sailors, or throw them alive into the sea. Spain on her side seized English Protestant sailors who ventured into her ports, and burned them as heretics, or consigned them to a living death in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Yet in the latter half of the century these mutual outrages went on for years while the nations professed to be at peace. There was complaint, protest, and occasional menace, but no redress, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... means of saying. Once it had been covered with a trap-door, which could be worked from the Inner Citadel. Thus Christophe, if he pleased, could send a message of welcome to his visitors, and drop them to a living death with the words of hospitality ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... position, great love; and how can I let you throw yourself away at eighteen on a commonplace boy with a glib tongue and a high opinion of himself? Don't tell me that it will make you happy. That would be the worst of all, if you turned out to be so limited that you were satisfied,—that would be a living death. O my darling, I give you my word that if you will give up this idea, ten years from now, when you see this boy, still glib, still vain, and perhaps a little fat, you will actually shudder when you think how near he came to cutting you off from the wonderful, full ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... can't—I can't! My heart refuses and I cannot force it. All this—what is it to me?" She swept her hand at the glowing luxury around her. "Without love, what would such another home be to me? Worse than a prison-cell, I swear! A living death, to one like me! Barter and sale—cold calculation—oh, horrible prostitution, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... myself in your hands." Michael sighed. "This village makes me feel rather sick—the whole thing is too horrible, too sad—God's blue sky just up above, and His sweet, clean desert sand, and down here this living death, these idle, dirty women, these ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... was returning to his rooms from the foul haunts of squalid dissipation and living death, when the thought of his own intolerable condition pressed on him with a heavier than usual weight. It was a very cloudy night, and he had long exceeded the usual college hours. The wind tossed about his clothes, and dashed in his face a keen impalpable sleet, while nothing dispelled the darkness ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the prospector's horse and burro sprawled on the ground half a dozen yards away, both animals frozen in the same baffling condition of living death. Dixon's brain reeled as he tried to fathom the incredible calamity that had apparently overwhelmed the world while he had been hidden away in his subterranean laboratory. Then a new ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... mee. 'Twas an Angell Spoke in you lately not my Cheeke should bee Made pale with feare. Lay not a lasting blush On my white name:—No haire should perish here Was vowed even now:—Oh let not a blacke deed, And by my sworne preserver, be my death My ever living death. Henrico, call To mind your holy vowes; thinke on our parents, Ourselves, our honest names; doe not kill all With such a murthering piece. You are not long T'expect, with the consent of men and angells, That which to take ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... will never know anything more in this world"—she said, sorrowfully—"Neither man nor woman! Nor can he thank God for a life which will be long, living death! Unless ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... simply (to use his own words) has 'returned home to God like the prodigal son after a long tending of the swine.' It is delightful to go home to God, even after a tending of the sheep. Poor Heine has lived a sort of living death for years, quite deprived of his limbs, and suffering tortures to boot, I understand. It is not because we are brought low that we must die, my dearest friend. I hope—I do not say 'hope' for you so much as for ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... in Dr. Welldon's[42] words, addressed to the University of Cambridge, "have lost once for all time the rights of citizenship—who are nobody's wives, nobody's sisters, nobody's friends, who live a living death in the world of men. There are one hundred and fifty thousand such citizens,—perhaps far more, in England and ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... full of men whose spiritual energies have been lamed in kindred fashions, the terrible misadventure of Richard Strauss remains deeply affecting. However far the millions of bright spirits who have died a living death have fallen, their fall has been no farther than this man's. There can be no doubt of the completeness of Strauss's disaster. It is a long while since he has been much besides a bore to his once fervent admirers, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... when hope had sunk again to its lowest ebb, and all his worst apprehensions revived. It was like a living death; he was a close prisoner, and never a word reached him that any of his friends were concerning themselves with ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... pathetic letter which he addressed to Lady Raleigh just before he stabbed himself. This letter seems to close the real life of Raleigh. He was to breathe, indeed, for fifteen years more, but only in a sort of living death. He begins ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... appointed to all men to die once," said Bridgenorth; "my life hath been a living death. My fairest boughs have been stripped by the axe of the forester—that which survives must, if it shall blossom, be grafted elsewhere, and at a distance from my aged trunk. The sooner, then, the root feels the axe, the stroke is more welcome. I had ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... and Richards was astute, though perhaps he did not look it. So he began at once to shuffle his cards for the game he was about to play—a game which he rightly judged was to be one of life or death. For he shuddered to think of the living death to which the selfishness of her miserly, ambitious ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more, to change this terror of sick negation, of unspeakable death, for that region of painful hope. Imagination cannot mislead us into too much horror of being without God—that one living death. ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... not by bitter hemlock. By the living death of an issue of blood which is worse than leprosy hath Sara been buried from the clean, though she ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... at last?" I cried. "'Tis true I have somewhat altered. This hair of mine was black, if you remember—it is white enough now, blanched by the horrors of a living death such as you cannot imagine, but which," and I spoke more slowly and impressively, "you may possibly experience ere long. Yet in spite of this change I think you know me! That is well. I am glad your memory serves you ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... that they would die for each other any minute, so that without each other there was no meaning in anything. It would not help a single soul, for them to murder their love and all the happiness of their lives; to go on in a sort of living death. Even if it were wrong, he would rather do that wrong, and take the consequences! But it was not, it COULD not be wrong, when they felt ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the crime charged. And Jim Hall, on the other hand, did not know that Judge Scott was merely ignorant. Jim Hall believed that the judge knew all about it and was hand in glove with the police in the perpetration of the monstrous injustice. So it was, when the doom of fifty years of living death was uttered by Judge Scott, that Jim Hall, hating all things in the society that misused him, rose up and raged in the court-room until dragged down by half a dozen of his blue- coated enemies. To him, Judge Scott was the keystone in the arch of injustice, and upon Judge Scott he emptied ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... that this is not the truth about mysticism. Eckhart may have encouraged Schwester Katrei in her attempt to substitute the living death of the blank trance for the dying life of Christian charity; but none the less she caricatured and stultified his teaching. And I think it is possible to lay our finger on the place where she and so many others went wrong. The aspiration of mysticism is to find ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... lightly amid the palms. I found myself wondering if the lepers ever thought to contrast their lives with their surroundings, and I trusted they did not. Some few, probably, had not been lepers, but criminals, who preferred the horrid liberty of Elhara to the chance of detection and the living death of the Hib Misbah. Other beggars were not really lepers, but suffered from one or other of the kindred diseases that waste Morocco. In Marrakesh the native doctors are not on any terms with skilled diagnosis, and once a man ventures into ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... heart was dragged out of his breast, but he resisted her. "Choose!" he whispered. "A living death ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... no longer echoed to the tones of the sweet childish voice, and the silence of the grave settled over earth,—when the glare of day was hateful and the darkness of night fearful, and life, without the darling one, was living death,—had you not then a partner, a kind, tender, sympathizing partner, who took you to his heart, and bowed his head with you, and knit you closer to him by a bond the strongest life can weave, the bond of sorrow shared? And look farther back into the past, before sorrow came, and when light-hearted, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... form, stretched out under a white counterpane. All that showed of the face above the bushy whiskers was as waxen looking as if death had already touched it, but the sunken eyes half open, showed that they were still in the mysterious hold of what old Jeremy called a "living death." It was a sight which neither of them could put out of their minds for ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... graves of the departed, these tombs themselves are full of the hopeless cries of the entombed, praying for help, praying for some strong hand to reach down and lift them out of their reeking, polluted, living death. ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... narrow cell in which we dwell Is a foul and dark latrine, And the fetid breath of living Death Chokes up each grated screen, And all, but Lust, is turned to ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... summer the coyotes shunned the specter of living death that plodded silently up and down the valleys and the ridges. When it came suddenly through the trees, drawn by the scent of a fresh kill, some coyote family scattered swiftly and left the feast. Cripp was as apt to howl in broad daylight as at night, and the sounds were meaningless, ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... gleamed before his poor eyes was only a gleam, obscured by his ignorance of Jesus' disposition towards him. The lowly acquiescence, with which he leaves Jesus to decide whether he is to be freed from his horrible, living death, is very beautiful, and speaks of a patient, disciplined spirit, as well as of a profound insight into our Lord's authority. The leper does cling to the hope that Jesus does will to heal him, but he will not rebel if he is left shut up in his prison-house. Surely ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... relatives outside who have nothing the matter with them. The horrors of Molokai are all poppycock. I can take you through any hospital or any slum in any of the great cities of the world and show you a thousand times worse horrors. The living death! The creatures that once were men! Bosh! You ought to see those living deaths racing horses on the Fourth of July. Some of them own boats. One has a gasoline launch. They have nothing to do but have a good time. ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... mind, she still had some desire to be cured, if possible, and made a most pitiful appeal for help to escape from her loathsome condition. We gave her the best counsel we could under the circumstances, and did all in our power to rescue her from her living death; but whether in any degree successful we cannot tell, as we have never heard from ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... living death from sight That wounds our beauty-loving eye! The children turn in selfish fright, The ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Barty shook his fist at the Catholic University and its scientific priestly professors, who condemned one so lightly to a living death. He hated the aspect of the place, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis |
