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Racking   /rˈækɪŋ/   Listen
Racking

adjective
1.
Causing great physical or mental suffering.  Synonym: wrenching.



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"Racking" Quotes from Famous Books



... racking cross, than bed of down More dear, whereon to stretch Myself and sleep: So did I win a kingdom,—share my crown; ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti

... been racking my brains to remember anything—surely I never gave you—I am perfectly convinced, I have the best reason for being absolutely certain, that I could not ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge

... his head and pretended to be racking his memory; for it would have been quite easy to say that the party had left on Saturday, on their way to Bologna. That was the answer the gentleman expected, and the innkeeper generally found that it served best to tell people what they expected to hear. But, on the other hand, there was ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... he was more sinned against than sinning. Every line in the boy's fragile, pathetic figure went straight to the older man's heart. It came to him, almost joyously, that there had been premonition in his strange mood of longing for a son. As an end to this nerve-racking night, there was work to do—for the remainder of it, at least for a brief moment, he had a companion ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... liberty; he desires only to live, and to be exempt from labour; nay, the ataraxy of the most confirmed Stoic falls short of his consummate indifference for every other object. On the contrary, the citizen always in motion, is perpetually sweating and toiling, and racking his brains to find out occupations still more laborious: He continues a drudge to his last minute; nay, he courts death to be able to live, or renounces life to acquire immortality. He cringes to men in power whom he hates, ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... terrible things amongst us, by lengthening the chain of the roaring lion in an extraordinary manner, so that the Devil is come down in great wrath (Rev. xii. 12), endeavoring to set up his kingdom, and, by racking torments on the bodies, and affrightening representations to the minds of many amongst us, to force and fright them to become his subjects. I may well say, then, in the words of the prophet (Mic. vi. 9), 'The Lord's voice crieth ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... two dollars each! Why, that would amount to two hundred dollars, and there would be no racking his ...
— Chester Rand - or The New Path to Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr

... in the West Side Boys' Lodging-house ticked out the seconds of Christmas eve as slowly and methodically as if six fat turkeys were not sizzling in the basement kitchen against the morrow's spread, and as if two-score boys were not racking their brains to guess what kind of pies would go with them. Out on the avenue the shopkeepers were barring doors and windows, and shouting "Merry Christmas!" to one another across the street as ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... driblets the following night. These gains were due to the work of the loyal Hugh as advertising agent, or to some desperate discount sale to a club on the part of Westervelt, who haunted the front of the house, a pale and flabby wraith of himself, racking his brain, swearing strange, German oaths, and perpetually conjuring up new advertising devices. His ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... him, probably, ten or fifteen days; and she parted with him, bestowing so affectionate, and apparently loving farewell, as almost to remove the bitter and heart-rending suspicions which were then racking the breast of the injured husband. But, resolved on carrying out his intent, he simulated departure; but instead of leaving the city he remained at the house of a trusty friend, deliberating upon and maturing plans for the ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... island of Marmora, who, climbing out of the trench in which he and his gang had been hiding, announced that he had lived in New York for five years, in Fortieth Street, and worked for the Morgan Line, and begged that I get, him out of this nerve-racking place and where he belonged, somewhere on board ship. There were crowds like him—Greeks, Armenians, Turks, not wanted as soldiers but impressed for this sort of work. They were unloading fire-wood long after dark that night, when our ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... raised herself at this reminder, then sank back to her original position with a fresh burst of racking sobs. Finding her good-natured ministrations ineffectual, the senior left Mignon to herself and began to change methodically to her peasant costume of the second act, the scene of which was laid in a village and in front of the cottage ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... flowers and kissed her, and said "Good-night" to them in a low tone. But he went home racking his brains to see if something could not be ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas

... forward on his pony's neck. Twenty leaps farther and the spiteful crack of a rifle echoed from where the foreman was painfully supporting himself on his elbows. The pony swept on in a spurt of nerve-racking speed, but alone. By-and-by shrieked again and crashed heavily to the ground, where he rolled inertly and then lay still. Men like Buck are dangerous until their hearts ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford

... little room upstairs in a noisy tenement house. A pale, thin woman on a shabby lounge vainly trying to quiet a fretful child. The child is thin and pale, too, with a hard, racking cough. There is a small fire in the stove, a very small fire; coal is so high. The medicine stands on the shelf. "Medicine won't do much good," the doctor had said; "he needs beef ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... these instances a scratch of the pen sufficed, and the deliberations which preceded the agreement were conducted in a decorous and businesslike manner. But to invoke Samiel and obtain his gifts was a body, mind, and nerve-racking business. In some particulars the details differed a little from those testified to by the Bohemian clerk. In the first place, the Devil's customer had to repair to a crossroads of a Friday between midnight and one o'clock when the moon was in an eclipse and the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... it; he waited until the tide floated it, then pushed it along the beach toward his store of food, arriving at high water too exhausted to do more that day than ground his capture and break hard bread. And as the afternoon drew to a close the fatigue in his limbs became racking pain; either as a result of his exposure, or as a later symptom of the fever, he was now in the clutch of ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

... never read. He had also a fine collection of paintings, of which he knew no more than his butler, nor perhaps so much. At once sensual, penurious, and bigoted, he spent his whole time in private profligacy—for he was a hypocrite, too—in racking his tenantry, and exhibiting himself as a champion for Protestant principles. Whenever an unfortunate Roman Catholic, whether priest or layman, happened to infringe a harsh and cruel law of which probably he had never heard, who so active in collecting his myrmidons, in order ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... never reach his destination that night. This irked his soul, unbearably, until he had recourse to his old briar pipe. In spite of the fact that his arm was beginning to hurt him badly he sat near the stove, where he had kindled a fire again, thinking hard. He was racking his brain to seek some motive that could have impelled any one he knew to play such a frightful joke. One after another he named every man he had ever known or even merely met in Carcajou and the surrounding, sparsely settled country. But they were nearly all friends of ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick

... rolled over and remained motionless. There he now lies where he was shot down in the dust and dirt, and his white beard and his rotting rags seem to raise a silent and eloquent protest to high Heaven against the devilish complots which are racking Peking. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... A generous though nerve-racking crash of thunder changed the current of conversation. It drifted from the weather immediately, however, to a one-sided discussion of the escaped ...
— The Day of the Dog • George Barr McCutcheon

... night in all apparent health; save from the flurry and excitement of an anxious mind, I was in no respect different from my usual mood; and yet when I awoke next morning, my head was distracted with a racking pain, cramps were in all my limbs, and I could not turn or even move without intense suffering. The long exposure to rain, while my mind was in a condition of extreme excitement, had brought on an attack of fever, and before evening set in, I was raving in wild delirium. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... they devour them with their clothes on? If not, how would they get them off? Then, filled with morbid curiosity, they strained their ears and listened. Again—this time nearer, much nearer—came that cry, dismal, protracted, nerve-racking. Nor was that all, for they could now discern the pat-pat, pat-pat of footsteps—long, soft, loping footsteps, as of huge furry paws or naked human feet. However, they could see nothing—nothing but blackness, intensified by the feeble flickering ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... Yes, of course. Aline, I've been racking my brain—I still am—and my heart—to divine what it is that separates us. I had come to believe you loved me. I can't quite stifle the conviction yet. I believe that in refusing me you're consciously refusing that which seems to you yourself a worthy source ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable

... off the harbor of Nombre de Dios and stealthily approached unseen. It was planned to make the landing in the morning. A long and nerve-racking wait ensued. As the hours dragged on, Drake felt instinctively that his younger men were getting demoralized. They began to whisper about the size of the town—'as big as Plymouth'—with perhaps a whole battalion ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood

... know that I care to hear. Why should I care. It's rather late in the day to hear now what everyone knows except me, what I've been breaking my heart over, racking my brains over as you well know for these two endless years, what you aren't even now telling me of your own accord, what you have been persuaded to by this—this"—Wentworth looked at the Bishop—"this ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... rushed ever nearer. Knowing that she had at last encountered a superior force, the sphere turned in mad flight; but, prodigious as was her acceleration, the torpedoes were faster and all three of them struck her at once. There ensued an explosion veritably space-racking in its intensity; a flash of incandescent brilliance that seemed to fill all space, subsiding into a vast volume of tenuous gas which, feebly glowing, flowed about and attached itself to Cantrell's Comet. And in the space where had been the enemy ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith

... went home; and he was racking his brain what excuse he could make to the cat for not bringing the shoes; and at last he hit one off, just as he saw her cantering up to him, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... so. Bless my insurance policy! I might as well take the same chance you do. But if you're going to have such a nerve-racking thing as that on the program, you'd better get to bed early and ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton

... against the masonry round the grating, and we could hear the nerve-racking sound of a file working on the iron bars; and farther away, below the window, those awful yells of human beings transformed by hate and fury into ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... a passionate gesture. 'Why did you not tell me? Why did you not confess to me, sir, even at the last moment? But, no more! No more!' she continued in a piteous voice; and she tried to urge her horse forward. 'I have heard enough. You are racking my heart, M. de Berault. Some day I will ask God to give me strength to ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman

... become a nerve-racking tragedy of mind and action. His desperate desire for success after his self-acknowledgment that he loved Miss Presby, and then the blows that had been rained on him and the mine, the failure of the green lead to hold out when it had at least promised and justified operation—all ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... still with signs of tension in his face, and it was clear that he was racking his befogged brain. The few weeks of abstinence and healthful toil had made a change in him, but one cannot in that space of time get rid of the results of years of indulgence; and under stress of excitement the man ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... And, after again racking his brain in an effort to suggest a really appropriate name, the old man finally slapped his ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard

... broom-shaped beard under his chin, which he now held in his hand. His thin, nasal voice was somehow absurdly penetrating as he addressed the chair. Mr. Sutton was apparently, for once, taken by surprise, and stared a moment, as though racking his brain for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... salt water made them very sick, while the hot stones restored their suspended circulation. Still, I would advise no one to depend on such remedies under similar circumstances. They got better; but still for many days were subject to racking pains, and remained weak and ill. While they were in this state, one morning, as Tom and I were at the top of the peak taking our usual survey of the horizon, in the hopes of a vessel appearing in sight, we saw a white speck to the westward, the rays ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... that all apparently hard work to be on an equality of unfitness for women. Country work is generally healthful; though hard work it is restful to the nerves. Every kind of nerve-racking work as in factories, heavy weight-lifting, long standing, and the tending of machinery without any kind of human interest, must be detrimental to women. Certain employments, consecrated by custom as comparatively womanly, yet, in their nerve-exhausting details mean ill-health. ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... suffered in consequence! I used to hide myself in corners, shedding many tears, and racking my brains to find some means of pleasing the obdurate fair one. Labour in vain, a thankless task, at eight years of age ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... had had a racking cough ever since I had known him, but I don't think I ever remembered his having a spasm of this ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed

... roots, a list of words derived from ancient British, and some account of the Norman-French period. The second and shorter question was simply a sentence to be parsed. No one in the class had a good memory for derivations. Fourteen out of the fifteen members spent the half-hour racking their brains and biting the ends of their pens in vain endeavours to complete their answers to Question 1, so that when it was time to hand in their exercise books, they had written very little, and that little was mostly wrong. The exercises were corrected and ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... upon thy venom'd stang, That shoots my tortur'd gums alang; And thro' my lugs gies mony a twang, Wi' gnawing vengeance; Tearing my nerves wi' bitter pang, Like racking engines! ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... the lees without racking and is drawn off and bottled. Frequently the wine does not become wholly clear and needs fining. Various substances are used for this purpose, as fish-glue, charcoal, starch, rice, milk, &c. The best ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... house, casting uneasy glances backward, forward, and sideways, as if she were expecting some goblin shape to rise suddenly before her and claim her for its own. They were wretched, uneasy days which followed that visit to Frankfort—days of racking headache to Mrs. Worthington, and days of anxious thought to Hugh, who thus was led in a measure to forget the pain he would otherwise have felt at the memory of ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes

... at the door in a kind of fury. "Something must be done for that girl. I have had a perfectly nerve-racking time. We must get her out of that house before they drive ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... Christ were not physical, but internal. Looking on that Face, we see the shadow of a deeper woe than smarting wounds and raging thirst and a racking frame—the woe of slighted love, of a heart longing for fellowship but overwhelmed with hatred; the woe of insult and wrong, and of unspeakable sorrow for the fate of those who would not be saved. Nor is even this the deepest shadow. There was then in the heart of ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... The lids had closed over his other eye; they were swollen; there was a big lump just over where the eye should have been. Then he saw that the beast's lips were cut and bleeding. There was blood on the snow; and suddenly the big brute covered his fangs to give a racking cough, as though he had swallowed a sharp fish-bone, and fresh blood dripped out of his mouth on the snow between his forepaws. One of these forepaws was ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood

... been less exhausted by long travail and racking thoughts, far different, perhaps, would have been the language of a man so stern. But circumstance impresses the hardest substance; and despite his native intellect and affected superiority over others, no one, perhaps, ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... atonement; and while on that blasted and corpse-like wreck two men fought, one in awful, cold, remorseless silence, the other with broken screams of insane fury that availed him nothing, Mrs. Goring murmured between racking sobs: ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle

... it's a great pity you waste your precious time bothering about what the weather is agoing to be, when we can't help it; and you might be racking that really stupendous brain of yours adoing other things worth while," Bumpus went on ...
— The, Boy Scouts on Sturgeon Island - or Marooned Among the Game-fish Poachers • Herbert Carter

... little older than she, could speak fluently seven languages, and carried about with her an exceedingly accurate knowledge, not merely of the administration of Egypt, but of the politics of Rome, and the details of the great contest racking the Republic. When Cleopatra asked questions concerning Roman affairs, Cornelia was fain to confess ignorance and be put to shame. And as the evening advanced, Cornelia found herself talking with more and more confidence ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... on your train about the time you did, though hardly in the same way. A ride on the trucks and brakebeams, while exhilarating in the extreme at the outset, soon becomes wearying and nerve-racking, so at the last water tank I made bold to take up my quarters on the rear platform, with an occasional climb to the roof for observation and change. But, my, it is cold out there! If it hadn't been for my friend here," exhibiting a flask, "I would have frozen to death. Alas, poor fellow, ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald

... the lad's face while the surgeon began the painful work of extracting another shell fragment. This one being more deeply imbedded, the surgeon was obliged to make a selection of scalpel and tissue scissors and do some nerve-racking cutting. But the seaman, his hands tightly gripped on the edges of the operating table, which he had termed a cot, did not once cry out, though ice-cold sweat beaded his forehead ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock

... the front-door lock, but his hand trembled so that it would not turn; and for a racking moment he stood there vainly pushing a weak knee against the panel, and his breath came out of his throat in ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... spirit a great calm. "Oh, God!" he said quietly and with the conviction in his soul that there was One listening, "help me now." He opened the matchbox, took out the match, struck it carefully and laid it among the birch bark. For one heart-racking moment it flickered unsteadily, then, catching a resinous fibre of the bark, it flared up, shot out a tiny tongue to one of the heavier bunches, caught hold, sputtered, smoked, burst into flame. With the prayer still going in his heart, "God help me now," Cameron fed the flame with bits of bark ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... night came, and thanks to the lasso, which kept my horse in awe, I managed to dismount and secure him. The whole night through I suffered from racking pains in head, limbs, and body. I felt as if I had been broken on the wheel; not an inch of my whole person but ached and smarted. My hands were grown thin and transparent, my cheeks fallen in, my eyes deep sunk in their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... to the last supreme eventful moment of our adventure. As I was racking my brain as to how I should best describe it, my eyes fell upon the issue of my own Journal for the morning of the 8th of November with the full and excellent account of my friend and fellow-reporter Macdona. What can I ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... might be due to her, since she had held him by land and water nearly ever since leaving Whitehall, but she was too much worn out by her nights of unrest, and too much battered and beaten by the tossings of her voyage, to feel anything except in a languid half-conscious way, under a racking headache; and when the curious old house where they were to rest was reached, and all the rest were eating with ravenous appetites, she could taste nothing, and being conducted by a compassionate Frenchwoman in a snow-white towering cap ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge

... walls. The crying of babies, the quarrels of a couple in the flat back of them, the wheeze of a rusty phonograph, and the thump-thump of a playerpiano, operated with every violation of the musical code, added to the nerve-racking din. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope

... been racking my brains over your fourth act, and have come to no conclusion except, perhaps, that you must not end it up with Nihilists. It's too turbulent and screaming; a quiet, lyrical, touching ending would be more in keeping with your play. When ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... tongue. The strain to keep his head above the waters was racking him like a torment of the Inquisition. The horror of the situation grew with every second. Why did they lower so slowly? Would release ever come in time to ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... unconsciously into another dream-land where another unreal inferno is dioramically revealed, and new agonies suffered. Oh! the many many hours, that I have groaned under the terrible incubi which the fits of real delirium evoke. Oh! the racking anguish of body that a traveller in Africa must undergo! Oh! the spite, the fretfulness, the vexation which the horrible phantasmagoria of diabolisms induce! The utmost patience fails to appease, the most industrious attendance fails to gratify, the deepest humility displeases. ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... own heart touched? Over that question Eleanor had been racking herself for days past. But if so it could be only a passing fancy. It made it only the more a duty to protect her from Manisty. Manisty—the soul of caprice and wilfulness—could never make a woman like Lucy happy. He would tire of her and neglect her. And what ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... else about the hotel was equally friendly, racking his brains to find a way of serving Monte by serving madame. It made him feel quite like those lordly personages who used to come here with a title and turn the place topsy-turvy for themselves and for their women-folk. He recalled a certain count of ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... persons had picked up the information that Napoleon had sent a messenger to Verona. Victor Emmanuel knew nothing of it, nor did any of the French generals except Marshal Vaillant, but such things leak out, and two or three individuals were aware of the journey to Verona, and spent that night in racking their brains as to what it might mean. Next day at eleven o'clock General Fleury returned; the Austrian Emperor had accepted the armistice. Further secrecy was impossible, and like lightning the news ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... tried. It tried first at Bethlehem. The first spilling of blood came there. There was the shedding of blood at both ends of Jesus' career, and innocent blood each time. It tried at the Nazareth precipice, and in the spirit-racking wilderness. It tried by stones, then in Gethsemane, ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon

... a yet more intimate claim upon her was the fact that his heart and lungs were still troublesome, and with any over-exertion on his part, or a sudden change in the weather, his chest became very sore and his racking cough returned. At such times Miss Isobel was in her glory. She would put him to bed with hot-water bottles and mustard plasters and feed him hot lemonade. Quin took kindly to the coddling. No one had fussed over him like ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... considerable number, came daily, and held their interviews in a room immediately below ours; so that Rondel could see through the window one of our acquaintances after another being brought across the court to be examined. My time did not come for many days, and I spent long hours racking my brain for the answers which I ought to give. The fear of the questions by torture began to force itself on my mind; and though I thought I could face pain or even death I was doubtful whether I should be able to keep ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... horses out of town, But there again! what an ungainly sight! A man lay on the road-side, weak and helpless, With trembling frame and feverish cramps. I shut mine eyes to so much racking pain, Still I could hear his groaning and his moaning. "Oh, Channa," said I to the charioteer: "Why does this happen? How deserves this man The wretchedness of his great agonies?" "How do I know?" ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus

... weeks came often to the sittings in that quiet room; for it grew more and more attractive to him, and while he painted the younger sister's changeful face he studied the beautiful nature of the elder and learned to love it. But no one guessed that secret for a long time; and Jessie was so busy racking her brain for a way to earn more money that she was as blind and deaf to much that went on before her as if she ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott

... the water was up to the coaming of the main hatch. But with way on her, her helm hard up, no after canvas set, and the hurricane dragging at her stout foresail, she could not help paying off, and after a long minute of heart-racking suspense, during which we momentarily expected her to keel-up with us, she suddenly righted and went flying away dead before the wind, with the water boiling under her bows up to the level ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood

... of solicitude upon her guest's features, Madame Vantrasson supposed he was racking his brain to discover some mode of escape from her present difficulties. "If I were in your place," he said, "I should try to interest his relatives and ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... eagerly yet cautiously. Then there were heavy steps, distinct yet slow, followed, after an interval, by the tramp of shuffling feet, like those of people carrying an awkward burden, and stumbling under it. But always, before Beth could think what the noise meant, the gust came again, racking her nerves, rattling the windows, making the doors creak; then dying away, to be followed by more mysterious ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... a pedant, and the whole crew of versifiers, from Lord Dorset (but he, poor man, has been past hanging some time since) to yourself! Why delude you into playing Procrustes as he does with the queen's English, racking one word till its joints be pulled asunder, and squeezing the next all a-heap as the Inquisitors do heretics in their banca cava? Out upon him and you, and Sidney, and the whole kin. You have not made a verse among you, and never ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... and sublime idea of the nature of man, to think with what composure and confidence a succession of persons of the greatest genius have launched themselves in illimitable space, with what invincible industry they have proceeded, wasting the midnight oil, racking their faculties, and almost wearing their organs to dust, in measuring the distance of Sirius and the other fixed stars, the velocity of light, and "the myriads of intelligent beings formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity," that people ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... It was a nerve-racking moment. It demanded the leadership of a strong man, and there are few gatherings in Anglo-Saxondom which cannot produce a ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... need much holding," Joe went on, all the while racking his brain to recall the voice. He wanted to have the man speak again, that ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick

... obtained, glass has not been introduced, so the holes are left as open spaces, across which, when the pampa wind blows, a hide is stretched. No hole is left in the roof for the smoke of the fire to escape, for this to the native is no inconvenience whatever. When I have been compelled to fly with racking cough and splitting head, he has calmly asked the reason. Never could I bear the blinding smoke that issues from his fire of sheep or cow dung burning on the earthen floor, though he heeds it not as, sitting on a bullock's skull, he ravenously eats ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... with distress, and his frame be exanimated with fear, though his safety be encompassed with impregnable walls! What are the bounds of human imbecility! He that warned me of the presence of my foe refused the intimation by which so many racking fears would ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... not weep, but just stood cowering, a chill of anguished horror racking her. All at once her teeth began to chatter, her body to shake as ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... trust that things will again assume their normal appearance. For the past month or so Barbara has been most distraite; uncle has so evidently tried to be cheerful that the effort has been distressing; and you, little Lady Betty, have been racking your precious brains for a scheme to make ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt

... That God took him, Savyeli,' I said,—'but the insult They did him torments me, It's racking my heart. Why did vicious black ravens Alight on his body And tear it to pieces? Will neither our God 450 Nor our Tsar—Little Father— ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov

... which was rather a sob, indicative of the inner throes that were racking the statesman's whole being, burst from his heart. His head fell upon his breast, and his whole body trembled. Joseph comprehended the immensity of his grief, and made no ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... had brought her face into order, a sharp racking trot came down a cross-road, and Kitty Fisher reined ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner

... of the day showed Denver's face weary and drawn. Those moments in the bank, surrounded by danger, had been nerve-racking even to his experience. But to him it was a business, and to Terry it was a game. He felt a qualm of pity for Lewison—but, after all, the man was a wolf, selfish, accumulating money to no purpose, useless to the world. He shrugged the thought of ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand

... sob. "She isn't a bit well. She has a cold and such a racking cough. I'm keeping her ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... had pictured himself sitting on the grass with his back against the trunk of a spreading chestnut-tree, with his arm round his Liza's waist, and her head resting affectionately on his manly bosom. Liza, too, had foreseen the separation into couples after dinner, and had been racking her brains to find a means of getting ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham

... outstretched hand. At another time she had been shut up in a dark closet, and again she had been tied in a chair for some hours. Any of these was bad enough. The first was soonest over, but was the most humiliating, the second was terrifying and nerve racking, while the third tediously long and hard to bear. For some time the child sat tremblingly listening for her grandmother's footsteps, but evidently Mrs. Otway did not intend to use undue haste in the matter. After a while the whistle of the evening train announced that those who had gone ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard

... they deemed was a deliberate insult to Molly. Several young men who had come from distances to attend the birthday party had stayed over Sunday at the farmhouse, where the revelry still continued in a fitful way, due to vain attempts to relieve racking headaches by further libations. Monday morning found the dissipated crew still the guests of the Sizers, and when big Bill slowly spelled out the assertion made by the Tribune that his sister had "a roughish smile" loud cries of indignation arose. Molly first ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne

... much about it at first—being of the sturdy type that makes light of a cold. But when Cash began to cough with that hoarse, racking sound that tells the tale of laboring lungs, Bud began to feel guiltily that he ought to ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... coffee upstairs, far removed from the onions. A racking headache set in. Never again will I go without my coffee so long. It always ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... "What a racking sort of tone, for all its sweetness!" said Average Jones. His delicate and fragile port glass evidently shared the opinion, for, without further warning, it ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... tired sigh, and then that racking, cruel cough that seemed to rend her whole frame. No, she would not finish for another hour yet. Really ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... and there are groanings diversified by sharp cries as some decayed branch is snapped or tree falls. It was amid these doleful sounds Archie swung his ax. He was not conscious of the bitter cold for his work kept him warm, but his brain was full of racking thoughts. He had toiled like a slave for nigh six months and had accomplished little, with every imaginable deprivation he had saved nothing, and for the next six months he foresaw cold and hunger, which he doubted he could survive. ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar

... and peevish, and they sleep little. He was born at the fall of Babel, the confusion of languages is only in his mouth. All the vacations he speaks as good English as any man in England, but in term times he breaks out of that hopping one-legged pace into a racking trot of issues, bills, replications, rejoinders, demures, querelles, subpoenas, &c., able to fright a simple country fellow, and make him believe he conjures. Whatsoever his complexion was before, it turns in this place to choler or deep melancholy, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... work every day with the passion and intensity that come to few men. Think of Emily, the eldest, with fierce pride refusing help to climb the steep stairway of the parsonage home when her strength was almost spent and her racking cough struck cold on the hearts of her sisters. And think of Charlotte in her terrible grief turning to fiction as the only resource from unbearable woe and loneliness. It is one of the great tragedies of literature, but out of it came the flowering ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch

... and sickly. As a full grown man he stood only four feet six inches high. His body was bent and deformed, and so frail that he had to be strapped in canvas to give him some support. His fine face was lined by pain, for he suffered from racking headaches, and indeed his life was one long disease. Yet in spite of constant pain this little crooked boy, with his "little, tender, crazy carcass," as Wycherley called it, wrote the most astonishing poetry in a style which in his own day was considered ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall

... explained Monkey with her usual exaggeration. 'She's gone for good now. She sleeps so badly. She's always waking up, you know.' Mother understood. Only too well she knew that her friend snatched sleep in briefest intervals, incessantly disturbed by racking pain. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... chance you happened to hit upon an article she thought she might happen to need, and it suited her, she would buy it. But it never occurred to her to thank you for your help, or to apologize for the nerve-racking strain ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... be made in that direction or force will ere long attempt it. The trouble with such convulsions is that they invariably produce temporary evil, but do not always compensate it with permanent good. They are a kind of social mania a potu, racking the whole organism, debilitating it—good chiefly as frightful examples of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... with his own. Immediately there arose in him a struggle between the idealist tendency, of which he had his share, and stubborn everyday sense, supported by his knowledge of the world and of his own being—a struggle to continue for months, thwarting the natural current of his life, racking his intellect, embittering his heart's truest emotions. Conscious of mystery in Snowdon's affairs, he had never dreamed of such a solution as this; the probability was—so he had thought—that Michael received an annuity under the will of his son who ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... their inn, poor Charlotte paid for the excitement of the interview, which had wound up the agitation and hurry of the last twenty-four hours, by a racking headache and harassing sickness. Towards evening, as she rather expected some of the ladies of Mr. Smith's family to call, she prepared herself for the chance, by taking a strong dose of sal-volatile, which roused ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... flocking: "'Tis clear," cried they, "our mayor's a noddy; And as for our corporation—shocking To think we buy gowns lined with ermine For dolts that can't or won't determine What's best to rid us of our vermin! Rouse up, sirs! Give your brains a racking To find the remedy we're lacking, Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!" At this the mayor and corporation Quaked ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey

... dinner the coalition weakened. Loiseau spoke three unfortunate sentences. Each was racking his brains to find new examples and did not find any, when the Countess, possibly without premeditation, prompted by a vague desire to render homage to religion, questioned the elder of the two nuns about the most noteworthy deeds in the lives of the Saints.—Now, ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... abundant in the eastern parts of its range. They are one of the most pugnacious and courageous of birds attacking and driving away any feathered creature to which they take a dislike, regardless of size. Before and during the nesting season, their sharp, nerve-racking clatter is kept up all day long, and with redoubled vigor when anyone approaches their nesting site. They nest in any kind of a tree, in fields or open woods, and at any height from the ground, being found on fence rails ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed

... pallid victims lay, Of racking pain and scorching thirst the prey; In anguish rolled upon the bloody ground, And wider still they tore each gaping wound; In concert joined their agonizing cries, Gnashed with their teeth and rolled their blood-shot eyes; With ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson

... She began to think that if she could devise a way of living by barter, without money at all, they might conceivably eliminate these fits of restlessness and petulance. And all the time, as there seemed no chance of getting work, she was racking her brains for some way of getting out of the city before his ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... Times Square. I see a fetid blonde, dangling a patent leather handbag, hurrying to an assignation in Forty-fifth Street. I see two actors, pointing their boasts with yellow bamboo canes. A chop suey restaurant flashes its sign. And I can hear the racking ragtime out of Shanley's. A big sightseeing bus is howling the fictitious lure of the Bowery, Chinatown and the Ghetto to gaping groups from the hinterlands. A streetwalker. Another. Another. In the subway entrance across the street, a blind man is selling papers. A "dip" calls a friendly ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... Bunn, generously, and he seemed to have added something to his nature through his nerve-racking experience. He had been near death, or at least the possibility of it, and it had meant much ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope

... of mine did not last long, for I soon understood what the matter with me was, and remained lying on the sofa with a racking headache and my limbs relaxed as I stared dully at the stamp on the package of tobacco, the Pipe-tube coiled on the floor, and the odds and ends of tobacco and confectioner's tartlets which were littered about. "Truly," I thought to myself in my dejection and disillusionment, "I cannot be quite ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... terrible temptation, his heart-racking struggle ceased. He lowered the long, black rifle. He took one last look at ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey

... on his lips. Steve Strong, Captain in the Solar Guard, gazed around the room at the backs bent over busy pencils. He did not smile, remembering how, only fifteen years before, he had gone through the same torture, racking his brains trying to adjust the measurements of a magnascope prism. He was joined by a thin handsome young man, Lieutenant Judson Saminsky, and finally, Warrant Officer McKenny. They nodded silently in greeting. It would be over soon. Strong glanced ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell



Words linked to "Racking" :   painful



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