"Torturing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to say something more, but yielded to the gentle steadfastness with which Hilda declined to listen. She grew very sad; for a reference to this one dismal topic had set, as it were, a prison door ajar, and allowed a throng of torturing recollections to escape from their dungeons into the pure air and white radiance of her soul. She bade Kenyon a briefer farewell than ordinary, and went ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and his own youthful love. How happened it that this ring was on the finger of the young actress, who had been forcibly and shamefully abducted by Vallombreuse? From whom could she have received it? These questions were torturing to him. ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... torturing nights did I go up to that room alone, and, with no sound of human proximity to cheer me or to break the wretched feeling of utter solitude, I endured the same experience. At last I could bear it no longer, and determined to have ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... with her food. Her father tore open the covering of the letter. She was watching him covertly and silently whilst he read page after page. She was searching for confirmation of her worst fears. She was torturing herself. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... proportion as in Russia. The most prominent of these formed a directorate of five: Bela Kun, Bela Varga, Joseph Pogany, Sigmund Kunfi, and one other. Other leaders were Alpari and Samuely, who had charge of the Red Terror, and carried out the torturing and executing of the bourgeoisie, especially the groups held as hostages, the so-called counter-revolutionists ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... horrible power which blind fate has delivered into your hand, by sending him his card empty to remind him that the time is up. You would pardon him then too. But do so now. This man's life during its period of summer, has been clouded by this torturing obligation, which has hung continuously above his happiness; let the autumn sunbeams shine upon his head. Give, give him a hand of ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... gave an ugly laugh. "Do you think I lived on their bally pound a week? Why, I spent that in half a day! Sometimes I wouldn't call for it for five weeks. I'd go past the Post Office every day, knowing it was there, and torturing myself with the thought of what I could buy with it, and leaving it there till I'd got five pounds and could ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... pictures, and one of the same contracted character with those you so happily illustrate, it would be that of the want of breadth, and in others a perpetual division and subdivision of parts, to give what their perpetrators call space; add to this a constant disturbing and torturing of everything whether in light or in shadow, by a niggling touch, to produce fulness of subject. This is the very reverse of what we see in Cuyp or Wilson, and even, with all his high finishing, in Claude. I have been warning our friend Collins against this, and was also urging young Landseer ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... sir," returns the trooper, stopping short and folding his arms on his square chest so angrily that his face fires and flushes all over; "he is a confoundedly bad kind of man. He is a slow-torturing kind of man. He is no more like flesh and blood than a rusty old carbine is. He is a kind of man—by George!—that has caused me more restlessness, and more uneasiness, and more dissatisfaction with myself than all other men put together. That's the kind ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... passed without improvement, and with few gleams of consciousness, and even these were not free from wandering; they were only intervals in the violent ravings, or the incoherent murmurs, and were never clear from some torturing fancy that he was alone and ill at Broadstone, and neither the Edmonstones nor his brother-officers would come to him, or else that he was detained from Stylehurst. 'Home' was the word oftenest on his lips. 'I would not go home,' the only expression that could ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... clever why don't they put a stop to this torturing of poor dumb beasts?" cried the general indignantly. "I've shown them the man. It's Hinds; I know it. I've just been to see that fellow Wensdale. Why, dammit! he ought to be cashiered, and I ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... letters, as his elements, and a new connection of it by artificial transposition, without addition, subtraction or change of any letter, into different words, making some perfect sence applyable to the person named.'' Dryden disdainfully called the pastime the "torturing of one poor word ten thousand ways,'' but many men and women of note have found amusement in it. A well-known anagram is the change of Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum into Virgo serena, pia, munda et immaculata. Among others are the anagrammatic answer to Pilate's ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... vibration ran in torturing waves through its metal skeleton and skin. It passed the point of discomfort and became unbearable. Rick rocked his head from side to side, as though to get rid of the shattering howl, but it tore at his head, at his stomach, ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... sufferings and distraction occurring in the houses of Mr. Parris, Thomas Putnam, and others, and in the meeting-house, were topics of excited conversation; and every voice was loud in demanding, every mind earnest to ascertain, who were the persons, in confederacy with the Devil, thus torturing, pinching, convulsing, and bringing to the last extremities of mortal agony, these afflicted girls. Every one felt, that, if the guilty authors of the mischief could not be discovered, and put out of the way, no one was ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... reasonable. Brian would not hurt a hair of his head. Brian loves him,' urged Ida soothingly, yet with a torturing pain at her heart, remembering Brian's delirious raving ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... that she had been an artist, to copy some of the fine forms she saw among these fish-girls—forms which had been left as the great God of nature made them, uncrippled by torturing stays and tight vestments. How easy their carriage! with what rude grace they poised upon their heads their ponderous baskets, and walked erect and firm, filling the air with their mournfully-musical cry! The great resemblance between ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... and he put his hand over it as he said, "You are all torturing her; I shall write a letter and ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... fever, and you will be telling him no lie, for I am ill of this little priest who is torturing my brain." ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Edith's laugh ring out too loud and reckless to come from the lips of the exquisite ideal of his dreams. Though the others had spoken in thunder tones, he would have had ears for these two voices only. He rushed away from the spot, as one might from some torturing vision, exclaiming: ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... the heavily fringed lids quivered, drooped, the magnificent eyes closed as if to shut out some vision too torturing even for their brave penetrating gaze, and in her rigid whiteness she seemed some unearthly creature, who had done for ever with feverish life and the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... were female divinities who personified the torturing pangs of an evil conscience, and the remorse which inevitably ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... as much noise as would scare a deer, and then, each taking a rifle by the barrel, we were ready. Pedro was just telling a story of how he had forced an old man to say where his money was hid, by torturing his daughters before his eyes, and how, when he had told his secret, and the money was obtained, he had fastened them up, and set the house alight—a story which was received with shouts of approving laughter. As he finished down came the butt of Rube's rifle on his head with a squelch, while ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... eyes, golden-hazel and black-lashed, like his own, that were almost too beautiful to be a man's, people used to say, like the weak, passionate, gentle mouth under the heavy moustache, would bring back all the anguish of his loss, and waken anew that torturing voice that accused him of being false to his compact with the dead. Then he would call, and send the child away, borne in the arms of the Hottentot chambermaid to breathe the fresh air upon the veld. And, left alone, he would draw up the rough sheets over his head, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... I tell you," says the Hen, "is but to court the quicker coming of the torturing death to which we are doomed. It will come quick enough, anyway!"—and she handed out a fresh lot of shivers, and throwed in sobs. Then she give a jump, as if the notion'd just struck her, and says: "There is a chance for ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... who knoweth but it may be true? that spirits of wickedness and enmity may execute each other's punishment, as those of righteousness and love minister each other's happiness! that—damned among the damned—the spirit of a Nero may still delight in torturing, and that those who in this world were mutual workers of iniquity, may find themselves in the next, sworn retributors of wrath? No idle threat was that of the demoniac Simon, and possibly with no vain fears did the ghost of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... across the Bay of Katleean in the shadow of the great blue glacier which was discernible on sunny days, there had been a lonely Thlinget graveyard. Because of its isolation this burial place had been so riddled with re-opened graves and so much killing, torturing and fighting had ensued among the Indians in their efforts to detect and punish so-called witches that he, their White Chief, had been obliged to interfere. He had put an end to the reign of sorcery in that particular graveyard rather cleverly, Ellen was forced to admit, by having all the bodies ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... fairly got through, and after a torturing half-hour, the second course appeared, and James Kenny was intent upon one thing, and Larry upon another, so that the wine-sauce for the hare was spilt by their collision; but, what was worse, there ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... Thus for five years each of her words had been a lie. A thousand jealous thoughts took possession of me, and madly, hardly knowing what I was about, I entered the room in which she was dying. All the questions that were torturing me burst forth over that bed of suffering: "Why did you go to Saint-Germain on Sundays? Where did you spend your days? Where did you spend that night? Come, answer me." And I bent over her, seeking in the depths of her still proud and beautiful eyes answers that ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... And suddenly the latent fear that had been torturing him for the last two weeks died out utterly: this man would never need watching to prevent any attempt at self-destruction; this man before him was not of that caste. His self-centred absorption was ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... September was more than half over, I realized, because of the particularly torturing anxiety I felt when I waked, that I must no longer defer the matter—the term which I had allotted ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... to expect these visits, each time the bar rattled down he trembled with the hope that the jailer brought him freedom. Each successive disappointment was as acute as the last, made more poignant by the torturing certainty that his hopes were vain. The effect of one was not at all ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... upon her heart, which I was going to wring so unmercifully, did not meet with very brilliant success. To confess the humiliating truth, I soon found that I was torturing myself a good deal more than I was torturing her. As a last and desperate resort, what do you think ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... Europe, the same ingenuity is displayed in twisting and torturing the bee, to adapt her natural instinct to unnatural tenements; tenements invented not because the bee needs them, but because this is a means available for a little change. "Patent men" have found the people generally too ignorant ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby
... the same mercy-seat. The time is past for merely challenging the right to personal judgment of religious truths. In Britain the lions are securely chained, and the cruel giants disabled. The awful crime of imprisoning and torturing man for conscience' sake, exists only in kingdoms ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... had been fighting for life, against appalling odds; while the man, whose love for her almost amounted to a religion, did all that human skill could devise, which was pitifully little after all, to ease the torturing thirst and pain, to uphold the vitality that ebbed visibly with the ebbing day. But the very vigour of her constitution went against her; for cholera takes strong bold upon the strong. And Desmond never left her for an instant. He seemed ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... independent income, and a beloved and admiring circle of intimate friends, is not likely to be imaginatively equipped to explore the spiritual fastnesses of a sensitive and alien orphan. Beulah tried earnestly to get some perspective on the child's point of view, but she could not. The fact that she was torturing the child would have been outside of the limits of her comprehension. She searched her mind for some immediate application of the methods of Madame Montessori, and produced a lump ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... ire, And fierce Thalestris fans the rising fire. "O wretched maid!" she spread her hands, and cried, (While Hampton's echoes, "Wretched maid!" replied) "Was it for this you took such constant care The bodkin, comb, and essence to prepare? For this your locks in paper durance bound, For this with torturing irons wreathed around? For this with fillets strained your tender head, And bravely bore the double loads of lead? Gods! shall the ravisher display your hair, While the fops envy, and the ladies stare! Honour forbid! at whose unrivalled ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... thrown on the ground, and cruelly beaten and whipped, caesam fustibus flagellisque, &c. Jerom, tom. i. p. 121, ad Principiam. See Augustin, de Civ. Dei, l. c. 10. The modern Sacco di Roma, p. 208, gives an idea of the various methods of torturing ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... boats, with their cowering occupants, plunging and tossing in that frenzied sea. By contrast, she was far better off on the ship. Yet, were it not for the action of some cowardly Chilean, she must have gone with Isobel and the others. It was torturing to think that her fancied security was really more perilous than the more apparent plight of the storm-tossed boats. No wonder she could not read, though the words ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... longer, however,' Harland again replied, addressing the second. 'Besides,' he added, 'it might be'—and here stopped short with the manifest intention of torturing the cowardly wretch. It was noticed by Roland that Ham was constantly casting his eyes up the hollow, as if expecting somebody. At last a thought ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... Prince of Orange had landed in Devonshire. During the following week London was violently agitated. On Sunday, the eleventh of November, a rumour was circulated that knives, gridirons, and caldrons, intended for the torturing of heretics, were concealed in the monastery which had been established under the King's protection at Clerkenwell. Great multitudes assembled round the building, and were about to demolish it, when a military force arrived. The crowd was dispersed, and several of the rioters were slain. An ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... assemble the most frightful images to render it still more terrible; fire is of all things that which produces in man the most pungent sensation; not finding anything more cruel, the enemies to the several dogmas were to be everlastingly punished with this torturing element: fire, therefore, was the point at which their imagination was obliged to stop; the ministers of the various systems agreed pretty generally, that fire would one day avenge their offended divinities; thus, they painted the victims to the anger of the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... looks and stifled sighs, and was not to be deceived by his sickly and vapid attempts at cheerfulness. She tasked all her sprightly powers and tender blandishments to win him back to happiness; but she only drove the arrow deeper into his soul. The more he saw cause to love her, the more torturing was the thought that he was soon to make her wretched. A little while, thought he, and the smile will banish from that cheek—the song will die away from those lips—the lustre of those eyes will be quenched with sorrow—and the happy heart which now beats lightly in that bosom will be weighed ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... brighter sparkle to her brilliant eyes, and a richer bloom to her glowing cheeks, and thus she sat waiting for Arthur St. Claire, who felt his heart grow cold and faint as he looked upon her, and knew her charms were not for him. She detected his agitation, and as a kitten plays with a captured mouse, torturing it almost to madness, so she played with him ere suffering him to reach the point. Rapidly she went from one subject to another, dragging him with her whether he would or not, until at last as if suddenly remembering herself, she turned her shining eyes upon him, and said, ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... faced one another, of which the higher professed small concern for the amelioration of the lower, while amalgamation was excluded by the mutual pride of race and the instinctive enmity that divided them. There was no enslaving of Indians, and the torturing was done entirely by the savages, but, while the English method spared the individual Indian the suffering his defenceless brother in the south had to endure, the aboriginal races have everywhere receded before the relentless advance of civilisation. ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... his jaw set and every muscle taut, his eyes leaping from one meter to another, his right hand slowly turning up the potentiometer which was driving more and ever more of the searing, torturing output of his super-power tube into that stubborn brain. The captive was standing utterly rigid, eyes closed, every sense and faculty mustered to resist that cruelly penetrant attack upon the very innermost recesses of his mind. Crane and Dunark scarcely breathed ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... Tormented by torturing doubts, August Hermann Francke resolved to call upon God, a God in whom he did not believe, or rather in whom he believed that he did not believe, imploring Him to take pity upon him, upon the poor pietist Francke, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... at thirty-five she saw herself maturing into a gaunt and grizzled dame, incapable of all poetic and youthful impersonations. To be thus crippled was torture to her lively imagination, and in this danse macabre of thought, a grim procession of blasted hopes, withered ideals and torturing ambitions, her mind gave itself first to one issue, then to another, while it was clear that her position at St. Ignace was fast growing untenable and that something ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... philosopher-try again-here's a ten. Luck 'll turn," says Mr. Snivel, patting the deluded man familiarly on the shoulder, as he resumes his seat. "Will poverty never cease torturing me? I have tried to be a man, an honest man, a respectable man. And yet, here I am, again cast upon a gambler's sea, struggling with its fearful tempests. How cold, how stone-like the faces around ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... pressure of their common foe, Her sisters shun the Mother and disown, On pain of his intolerable crow Above the fiction, built for him, o'erthrown? Irrational he is, irrational Must they be, though not Reason's light shall wane In them with ever Nature at close call, Behind the fiction torturing to sustain; Who hear her in the milk, and sometimes make A tongueless answer, shivered on a sigh: Whereat men dread their lofty structure's quake Once more, and in their hosts for tocsin ply The crazy roar of peril, leonine For injured majesty. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for. What right have you to deny me, now, an hour's forgetfulness? When I think of what I might have been, but for you, I wonder that I have cared to live, and I would not—except for the poor sport of torturing you. ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... day, or the next, that the man fell and could not rise again? The woman did not know. Something had got into her brain and was dancing there and would not stop; something blent of sun and glare, sand, mirage, torturing thirst. There was a little gray scorpion, too—but no, that had been crushed to a pulp by the man's heel. Or had it ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... lady be-feathered, be-crimped, and be-ringed, wearing her huge hat cocked over one ear with a defiant coquetry above a would-be conquering smile. The unerring wits in the crowd had already picked her out for special attention, but her active 'public form' was even more torturing to the fastidious feminine sense than her 'stylish' appearance. For her language, flowery and grandiloquent, was excruciatingly genteel, one moment conveyed by minced words through a pursed mouth, ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... careful and circumspect and all that. I even believe as far as direct actions go, she may have been a virtuous woman, for she certainly, had no other lover when I knew her. She was a widow, enormously rich and nothing to do. Therefore, I suppose she went in for the torturing business as a profession. Her Frenchmen did not mind; that was the secret of her charm with them— so clever, they called her, but it nearly killed me, her cleverness. I grew pale and worn—sleep—I never slept. All my life ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... "You are torturing me, Chauvelin. I have helped you to-night . . . surely I have the right to know. What happened in the dining-room ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the governor was more than overbalanced by the torturing fear that it would all be too late. He believed they would be in time to stop Reedy from getting away with his four hundred thousand dollars' worth of cotton. Jenkins would not start until he had lost hope of getting that $150,000 from the ranchers for water. But Bob feared he was ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... infirmity," whispered accusing conscience, "even before you loved him; and have you not seen him writhing at your feet in agonies of remorse, for the indulgence of passions more torturing to himself than to you! It is you who have driven him from country and home, innocently, it is true, but he is not less a wanderer and an exile. Write and tell him the simple, holy truth, then folding your hands meekly over ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the British woman of the lower classes always rigidly observes. The room was, therefore, dimly dark. It was, however, light enough for our purposes. Van Helsing's sternness was somewhat relieved by a look of perplexity. He was evidently torturing his mind about something, so I waited for an instant, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... without bringing friends with them. Uncle Peter was seized with a fever, which grew and grew till his life was despaired of. He was very delirious at times, and then the strangest fancies had possession of his brain. Sometimes he seemed to see the horrid woman she called her aunt, torturing the poor child; sometimes it was old Pagan Father Christmas, clothed in snow and ice, come to fetch his daughter; sometimes it was his old landlady shutting her out in the frost; or himself finding her afterwards, but frozen so hard to the ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... panther, and the other a polar bear—for courtship, until one of them is crippled by a railway accident; or a long wrangle of married life between two unpleasant people, who can neither live comfortably together nor apart. I suppose, by what I see, that sweet wooing, with all its torturing and delightful uncertainty, still goes on in the world; and I have no doubt that the majority of married people live more happily than the unmarried. But it's easier to find a dodo than a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... most wicked creature that ever yet was born. He had no sooner committed one outrage, but he was in agonies till he could commit another; never satisfied, unless he could find an opportunity of either torturing or devouring some innocent creature. And whenever he happened to be disappointed in any of his malicious purposes, he would stretch his immense bulk on the top of some high mountain, and groan, and beat the earth, and bellow with such ...
— The Governess - The Little Female Academy • Sarah Fielding
... torturing me to death? Listen to this. He (pointing to DAVUS) never ceased to urge me to tell my father that I would marry her; to advise and persuade me, ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... can never be. You think it can, but it can't. You could not forget. I could not forget. We would both be thinking; always, always torturing each other. To you the thought would be like a knife thrust, and the more you loved me the deeper would pierce its blade. And I, too, can you not realise how fearfully I would look at you, always knowing you were thinking of THAT, and what an agony it would be to me to watch your ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... in the face, when I have not hesitated, out of selfish consideration for my own tranquillity, to forbid that frank avowal of the truth which her finer sense of duty had spontaneously bound her to make? Those were the torturing questions in Lady Janet's mind, while her arm was wound affectionately round Mercy's waist, while her fingers were busying themselves familiarly with the arrangement of Mercy's hair. Thence, and thence only, sprang the impulse which set her talking, with ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... as an amusing acquaintance and nothing more. He would have been spared, and she would have been spared, the shock that had so cruelly assailed them both. What had she gained by Mrs. Rook's detestable confession? The result had been perpetual disturbance of mind provoked by self-torturing speculations on the subject of the murder. If Mirabel was innocent, who was guilty? The false wife, without pity and without shame—or the brutal husband, who looked capable of any enormity? What was her future to be? How was it all to end? In the despair ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... Here the self-torturing sophist, wild Rousseau, The apostle of affliction, he who threw Enchantment over passion, and from woe Wrung overwhelming eloquence, first drew The breath which made him wretched; yet he knew How to make madness beautiful, and ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... no sound or movement to distract him, his imagination succumbed to torturing thoughts of Mara and sometimes of his wife, with whose sufferings he occasionally used to reproach himself. Now that Ingigerd Hahlstroem had dishonoured his love for her, his conscience smote him all the more. His whole mentality seemed to have entered a ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... across her forehead. The horrible scene was being reenacted within her and was torturing her. Germaine Astaing did not move, but stood with folded arms and anxious eyes, while Hortense Daniel sat distractedly awaiting the confession of the crime and the explanation of the ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... who meets her when, escaping from the Argus-eyes of her husband, she goes to the cathedral. But I receive only laconic replies. This woman is either incapable of genuine love, or she is a demon who delights in torturing me." ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... English, a great moralist and reformer, and the king of satire, all the weapons of which he managed with perfect skill. He had a rapier for aristocratic immunities of evil, arrows to transfix prescriptions and shams; and with snobs (we must change the figure) he played as a cat does with a mouse, torturing and then devouring. In the words of Miss Bronte, "he was the first social regenerator of the day, the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things." But this was his chief and glorious strength: in the truest sense, he was ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... him?" she breaks forth, advancing toward him, as though to compel him to give her an answer to the question that has been torturing her ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... I thinking of?" he cried in some astonishment. "I know well I could not endure that with which I have been torturing myself. I saw that clearly yesterday when I tried to rehearse it. Perfectly plain. Then what am I questioning? Did I not say yesterday as I went up the stairs how disgusting and mean and low it all was, and did not ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... thy whelps, fell curs of bloody kind, Have here bereft my brother of his life.— Sirs, drag them from the pit unto the prison: There let them bide until we have devis'd Some never-heard-of torturing ...
— The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... ventured outside the hut that day, and the longer they remained indoors the more they felt the cold. At five o'clock in the afternoon, when it began to grow dark, Katrina said they might as well "turn in"; it was no good their sitting up any longer, torturing themselves. ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... the sun began to throw elongated shadows, that one is seen there, upon horseback, and going in a gallop; but he is heading from the house, and not toward it. For the rider is Cypriano himself, who, no longer able to bear the torturing suspense, has torn himself away from aunt and cousin, to go in search of his uncle and another cousin— the ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... the horrors which his siege obliged him to inflict on Jerusalem. Nero was an artist, and fiddled while Rome was burning. Coddle your boys; you may keep them from wishing to fight their equals, but you will not cure them of torturing animals. Idleness means not only sluggishness, but a morbid and criminal desire for sensation, which honest industry would have sweated out of the flesh. Money often renders those who have it unconsciously impatient with the slowness ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... and down, picturing every sort of possibility. If he could not have her there, if he could not lawfully possess her, he would secure to her the possession of the property for her own. There she should live for herself, silently, independently; she should be happy in that spot—sometimes his self-torturing mood would lead him further—be happy in it, perhaps, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... were futile, Toni turned away and went home, there to spend a sleepless night torturing herself with all sorts of premonitions ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... same time check, to a certain extent, desertion, Theodore had a large stockade built around the foot of the hill on which his camp was pitched. A war of extermination on both sides now took place; Theodore showing no pity to the peasants whom he succeeded in capturing, and they, on their side, torturing and murdering any one who belonged to the Emperor's camp. A detailed account of the atrocities committed by Theodore during the last month of his stay in Begemder would be too horrible to narrate: suffice it to say ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... Belgium, the Red Cross following the armies in the field and ministering to the sick, the wounded and the suffering, regardless of their nationality, the general kind treatment to prisoners, accentuated by some very horrible exceptions, and all this contrasted with the enslaving, torturing, the crucifying, the flaying alive of prisoners captured in war by barbaric nations ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... all things: Why her Lord had sent her? What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her? Scornful as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... comfort, as they were meant to be; for, with the girl's supreme conscientiousness, she had been torturing herself for fear she had not done all that was possible for her dear one; and, as Miss Prue's word had always been law with her, so now she let it ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... our minds. The Chinaman, at the best of times, has no feeling of pity in his nature, and after their defeat it is certain they would have killed us at once had they not hoped to do better by us. If they had been Indians I should have said they had carried us off to enjoy the satisfaction of torturing us, but I don't suppose it is ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... sorrowing souls, and more, the King of Sorrows. Ay, pain and grief, tyranny and desertion, death and hell—He has faced them one and all, and tried their strength, and taught them His, and conquered them right royally. And since He hung upon that torturing cross, sorrow is divine, godlike, as joy itself. All that man's fallen nature dreads and despises, God honoured on the cross, and took unto Himself, and blest and consecrated for ever. And now blessed are the poor, if they are poor in heart as well as purse; ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... followed, some malignant spirit seemed to be torturing him with a slow realization of all he had lost; taunting him with the possibility of regaining it and the certainty of losing ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... and he was captured. The Indians hated him cordially and began to beat him unmercifully, calling him the "hoss-steal." They easily could have murdered Kenton on the spot, but since he had proved such a terrible foe to them in the past, they preferred to enjoy their capture all the more by torturing him for awhile. He was carried by the Indians to Chillicothe, where he was several times forced to run the gauntlet. Finally, when tied to the stake to be burned, he was recognized by his boyhood friend, Simon Girty, who sent him to Detroit, from ...
— The story of Kentucky • Rice S. Eubank
... lustrous butterflies I had never seen but in dreams; and not even dreams had prepared me for sand-flies. Almost too small to be seen, they inflicted a bite which appeared larger than themselves,—a positive wound, more torturing than that of a mosquito, and leaving more annoyance behind. These tormentors elevated dress-parade into the dignity of a military engagement. I had to stand motionless, with my head a mere nebula of winged atoms, while ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter? For all the deeper suffering, I am conscious of writhing under lacerated vanity when I think of that grotesque and humiliating blunder in the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... how much suffering bodies of a certain size and texture are capable of enduring? Now I don't doubt, Miss Hanson, being so wise in other matters, can tell you exactly how much pain is necessary to kill a slave, how many stripes a child can endure, and how long hunger, beating, and torturing, may be applied without producing death; and prove that in case they do destroy a few blackies, that don't signify, if they ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a person who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the words that Justice utters over its doomed victim,—The Lord have mercy on your soul! You will probably go mad within a reasonable time,—or, if you are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... her father's safety had relieved Inez from one cause of torturing anxiety, only to render her fears the more violent on her own account. Don Ambrosio, however, continued to treat her with artful deference, that insensibly lulled her apprehensions. It is true she found herself ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... waves, and assuming attitudes which the gods could not resist, but which saints withstood, and looks inflexible and ardent like those with which the serpent charms the bird; and then he gave way before looks that held him in a torturing grasp and delighted his senses as with a voluptuous kiss. It seemed to Franz that he closed his eyes, and in a last look about him saw the vision of modesty completely veiled; and then followed a dream of passion like that promised by the Prophet to the elect. Lips of stone ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... laying their ears alongside of their neighbours' faces—some saying, "That's a new note," others declaring that the two notes are the same.' Yes, I said; but you mean the empirics who are always twisting and torturing the strings of the lyre, and quarrelling about the tempers of the strings; I am referring rather to the Pythagorean harmonists, who are almost equally in error. For they investigate only the numbers of the consonances which are heard, ...
— The Republic • Plato
... their captain and his triumph, they were not only struck with admiration of so rare a virtue, but moreover inclined to mutiny, and were even ready to rescue the prisoner out of the hangman's hands, he caused the torturing to cease, and afterwards privately caused him to be thrown into the sea.—[Diod. Sic., ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... older authors like Mitchell,[1] Blumroder,[2] Friedreich,[3] have brought examples which are still of no little worth. They speak of cases in which many people, not alone men, use the irritation developed by greater or lesser cruelty for sexual purposes: the torturing of animals, biting, pinching, choking the partner, etc. Nowadays this is called sadism.[4] Certain girls narrate their fear of some of their visitors who make them suffer unendurably, especially at the point of extreme passion, by biting, pressing, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... lighted lamps, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful end. Half miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when they stop, backing when they back. Red hot embers showering out upon the ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beasts with horns entangled, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... You are a stranger, and have not seen the frenzies into which the Count sometimes works himself, torturing his mind by imagining actions of infidelity ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... same kind of warfare as the nomadic marauders; and such a body of men were the Free Cossacks. The sentiment of self-preservation and the desire of booty kept them constantly on the alert. By sending out small parties in all directions, by "procuring tongues"—that is to say, by kidnapping and torturing straggling Tartars with a view to extracting information from them—and by keeping spies in the enemy's territory, they were generally apprised beforehand of any intended incursion. When danger threatened, the ordinary precautions were redoubled. Day and night patrols kept watch at ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... sixteenth was as we have portrayed it. Of course there are exceptions to be admitted and qualifications to be made; but, upon the whole, the picture is faithful. Fortunately, intellect and soul could not slumber forever, nor the mediaval nightmares always keep their torturing seat on the bosom of humanity. Noble men arose to vindicate the rights of reason and the divinity of conscience. The world was circumnavigated, and its revolution around the sun was demonstrated. A thousand truths were discovered, a thousand inventions introduced. Papacy ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... head, as he had patted the dog's a little while ago. He was oddly moved; there was a knot in his throat. No home-coming could well have been more desolate. And yet, what home-coming could have brought him such a torturing joy as was now his? Oh, it is good to be loved, if it be by no more than a dog ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... voyages of the English East India Company have been detailed; and it is now proposed to conclude this part of our arrangement, by a brief narrative of the unjustifiable conduct of the Dutch at Amboina, in cruelly torturing and executing several Englishmen and others on false pretences of a conspiracy, but the real purpose of which was to appropriate to themselves the entire trade of the spice islands, Amboina, Banda, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... Alyosha went on with desperate haste, as though he were jumping from the top of a house. "Call Dmitri; I will fetch him—and let him come here and take your hand and take Ivan's and join your hands. For you're torturing Ivan, simply because you love him—and torturing him, because you love Dmitri through 'self-laceration'—with an unreal love—because ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is only when the storm is over and the calm has come, that we can look out again upon the broad and peaceful landscape. There are other trials that remind one of a nail in one's shoe: everywhere one goes, it is present, irritating, annoying, torturing. It hinders and detracts from all the common ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... come? Would it ever come? What would be the outcome? Jim tried to plan for the approaching emergency, but the best he could do was to struggle to conceal the acute case of chills and fever then torturing his weak body and adding confusion to his dazed mind. The ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... the wilds and love of barbarism is a wide difference. He had not been back for two weeks when that glimpse of crude civilization at Orange recalled torturing memories of the French home in Three Rivers. The filthy food, the smoky lodges, the cruelties of the Mohawks, filled him with loathing. The nature of the white man, which had been hidden under the grease and paint of the savage—and in danger of total eclipse—now came upper-most. ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... rest of the winter are tinged with the sadness caused by these and other distressing afflictions among friends at home. Her sympathies were kept under a constant strain. But her letters contain also many gleams of sunshine. Although very quiet and secluded, and often troubled by torturing neuralgic pains, as well as by sudden shocks of grief, her life at Montreux was not without its own peculiar joys. One of the greatest of these was to while away the twilight or evening hours in long talks with her husband about home and former days. Distance, together with the strange ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... no touch of feeling, that your eyes Gloat on a sight so horrible as this? Help me—take hold. What, will not one assist To pull the torturing arrow ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... for all this enormous number of animals, worth at least one hundred thousand rupees, the small sum of one hundred and thirty rupees was credited in the Nazim's accounts to the Rajah's estate. At Busuntpoor the force was divided into two parties, for the purpose of torturing the surviving prisoners till they consented to sign bonds, for the payment of such sums as might be demanded from them. Beharee Lal presided over the first party, in which they were tortured from day- break ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... Ethics,' stated the theory quite nakedly: The belief that the sight of suffering is pleasing to the gods,' He added: 'Derived from bloodthirsty ancestors, such gods are naturally conceived as gratified by the infliction of pain; when living they delighted in torturing other beings; and witnessing torture is supposed still to give them delight. The ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... the water ordeal. Up to this time it had not been employed in English witch cases, so far as we know. The first record of its use was in 1612, nine years after James ascended the English throne. In that year there was a "discoverie" of witches at Northampton. Eight or nine women were accused of torturing a man and his sister and of laming others. One of them was, at the command of a justice of the peace, cast into the water with "her hands and feete bound," but "could not sink to the bottome by any meanes." The same experiment was applied to Arthur Bill and his parents. He was accused ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... his cries by lifting him again. This time they held him up several seconds. His face turned black. His eyes bulged. His breast heaved. His legs worked with the regularity of a jumping-jack. They let him down and loosened the noose. They were merely torturing him to wring a confession from him. He had been choked severely and needed a moment to recover. When he did it was to shrink back in abject terror from that loop of ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... were active. One after another the swift-moving events of the night before came to her—a night of delightful happenings and torturing surprises. She recalled that the crowd had been unusually gay, but that Stephen had been unusually quiet and absorbed. She remembered the games, and the story-telling, and the toasting of marshmallows ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... head. "I fear not, Robin; at least, if I may judge from what I have read of these villains, they have only spared him for a time for the purpose of torturing him." ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... were destroyed through the mistake of the lewd multitude, who falsely deemed them to be my disciples. It may be thou knowest not of the banishment of Anaxagoras, of the poison draught of Socrates, nor of Zeno's torturing, because these things happened in a distant country; yet mightest thou have learnt the fate of Arrius, of Seneca, of Soranus, whose stories are neither old nor unknown to fame. These men were brought to destruction for no other reason than that, settled as they ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... the merits and demerits of suicide conceived in the spirit of the metaphysician. It is a dramatic description of a familiar phase of emotional depression; it explains nothing; it propounds no theory. It reflects a state of feeling; it breathes that torturing spirit of despondency which kills all hope of mitigating either the known ills of life or the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the entire of that day, the pain of my wounded limb had been excruciating; the fatigue of the road and the heat had brought back violent inflammation, and when at last the little village came in sight, my reason was fast yielding to the torturing agonies of my wound. But the transports with which I greeted my resting-place were soon destined to a change; for as we drew near, not a light was to be seen, not a sound to be heard, not even a dog barked as the heavy mule-cart rattled over the uneven road. ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... great pleasure lay in deeds of outrage, in striking and making them weep. Even in the seventeenth century the great ladies died with laughing, when the Duke of Lorraine told them how, in peaceful villages, his people went about harrying and torturing all the women, even ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... fall of reason would soon have ended it; that merciful potion of magic which can bring a torturing misery in the guise of a quaint conceit to a mind made simple as a little child's. Another day or so, and the frightened agony that glittered in her eyes—fusing slowly towards the last great conflagration—would ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... tilting drunkenly, gave color to our purpose. It became filled with greater promise of drama, more picturesque. I began to thrill with excitement. I regarded Edgar appealingly, in eager supplication. At last he broke the silence that was torturing me. ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... heavily moving lungs, aroused Garrison's struggling consciousness by slow degrees. Strange, fantastic images, old memories, weird phantoms, and wholly impossible fancies played through his brain with the dull, torturing persistency of nightmares for a time that seemed to ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele
... full hours had been spent in torturing the two, the spokesman announced that they were now ready for the final act. The brother of Sidney Fletcher was called for and was given a match. He stood near his mutilated victims until the photographer present could take a picture of the scene. This being over the match ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... sun out of heaven, but they are able to raise a smouldering smoke that obscures him from their own eyes. Not being able to revenge themselves on God, they have a delight in vicariously defacing, degrading, torturing, and tearing in pieces his image in man. Let no one judge of them by what he has conceived of them, when they were not incorporated, and had no lead. They were then only passengers in a common vehicle. They were then carried ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... is by this time at Wenbourne Hill. You will see him. Plead our cause, Louisa: urge him to remain among us. Condescend even to enforce my selfish motive, that he would not leave me under the torturing supposition of having banished him from a country which he was born ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... he, in a tone that made me start and wish I had not been so amenable to her wishes, "I thought I saw you glide in here, and my guests being now all arrived, I ave ventured to steal away for a moment, just to satisfy the craving which has been torturing me for the last hour. Irene, you are pale; you tremble like an aspen. Have I frightened you by my words—too abrupt, perhaps, considering the reserve that has always been between us until now. Didn't you know ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... looking about them for something to do, it is curious to see—especially when their tastes are of what is called the intellectual sort—how often they drift blindfold into some nasty pursuit. Nine times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling something—and they firmly believe they are improving their minds, when the plain truth is, they are only making a mess in the house. I have seen them (ladies, I am sorry to say, as well as gentlemen) go out, day after day, for example, with empty pill-boxes, ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... said Clare, "how can he be good-tempered with that torturing ring and chain! His unalterable position must make ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... moving that Tom felt as though an icy cold hand had reached out for him, taking away all his strength. The stark trees of the lonely, shadow-infested woods seemed to press in upon them like an army of fantastic giants. The fear which was torturing the negroes came over him in a ...
— Tom of the Raiders • Austin Bishop |
