"Unendurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... work in this. Women are on our National Committee and doing a great deal of its organization. Our men in the trenches, in the air, at sea, endure for us what we would have said before the war was humanly unendurable. They pay for our freedom with a great price—and we send them out to pay it—in death, disablement, suffering and sacrifice. To fail in our duty behind them would be ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... 493 the misery of the besieged city became unendurable, and Odovacar, with infinite reluctance, began to negotiate for its surrender. His son Thelane was handed over as a hostage for his fidelity, and the parleying between the two rival chiefs began on the 25th of February. On the following day Theodoric and his Ostrogoths entered ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... flee. But Aucassin beseeches her not to go, knowing a young maid is exposed to countless dangers out in the world, and vehemently declares he would die were any one to lay a finger upon her. He adds that she alone shall be his wife, and that the mere thought of her belonging to any one else is unendurable. This declaration of love cheers poor Nicolette, who is so entranced by her lover's words that she fails to notice the approach of a patrol. A young sentinel, however, peering down from the walls, touched by Nicolette's beauty and by the plight of these young lovers, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... midnight was passed by Dick in a state of feverish suspense, that toward the end became almost unendurable, causing him to start and jump at every trivial sound that reached his ear. A dozen times at least he sprang to his feet with the joyous exclamation of "Here he is!" when the flutter of a dry leaf falling from its parent bough, the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... moment had arrived when he must set his theories into motion, drive them out into the lives of the people, and get reactions. But how? In what way? His brain refused to think, and he felt nothing save a misery and poverty of the spirit that were unendurable. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... a tall badgir or a naked dervish lying in a scrap of shade asleep under a lion skin. It was as if Dizful drowsed sullenly in that July blaze brewing something, like a geyser, and burst out with it at the end of the unendurable day. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... from the blow. The circumstances of her son's death were too abominable, to unendurable. If he had risked his life in the conspiracy, she might have been reconciled to his losing it. But he was a mere child, who had sat at home, chafing but powerless, while his seniors plotted and fought. He had been sacrificed ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... his eyes again, but sleep was as far from him as ever. After another long and almost unendurable period he opened them once more, and it seemed to him that there was a faint tint of gray in the east. He sat up, and looking a long time, he was sure of it. The gray was deepening and broadening, and at its center it showed a tint of silver. The dawn was at hand, ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cause for itself, and hold life cheap if its sacrifice may in any way advance it. Blockade duty is perhaps a harder test of this love than actual field service; and as months pass on, it becomes almost unendurable. The first few days can be taken up in sight seeing on board, and the most novel of these said sights is the drill which follows the daily call to quarters. The rapid roll of the drum is the signal: here, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the marquis, finding it unendurable to be alone with his wife during the short spaces of time which he spent at home, invited his two brothers, the chevalier and the abbe de Ganges, to come and live with him. He had a third brother, who, as the second son, bore the title of comte, and who was ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... at any time, but that wouldn't do any good. The lowest, most ignorant laborer in their employ had power in this matter, but they had none. They had intellectual power enough, which, added to their utter helplessness, only made their burden more unendurable; for they comprehended to the full the knowledge of what was past, and what must come in the future unless help came quickly. They had the strength of devotion, the strength ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... in particular, on a hot, airless day in June, when Joan reached the last point of her endurance. Everything had combined to make the office unendurable. One of Mr. Strangman's most agitated moods held him. Early in the morning he had indulged in a wordy argument with Chester, the Literary Page editor, on the question of whether or not the telephone was to be used ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... Guardafui in a gale, a sticky hot gale which made life unendurable. The Red Sea was a relief and not too hot, but how we pitied the poor devils quartered at Perim, and the lighthouses seen at the Two Brothers. I would as soon camp for ever on the lee side of Tophet. But my first trip through the ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... to travel the distance by river, if time permitted I had rather adventure next time upon the Nile than ever go by train over that line again. I confess I have made the journey by rail frequently but it becomes really more unendurable each trip. Of course I laid in stores of liquids and solids for the voyage. I ought to have known better, but one thinks nothing of the toothache when it is past. The mineral waters became too hot to drink, and not ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... exclaimed the seer—"the wild, the dreadful, the undefinable, the unutterable, the shadowy forms and seemings of things and actions to be! They crowd upon me in powers and numbers unendurable, inconceivable! Words never formed by human breath sound within my heart, and tell of things that mortal tongue may never utter. Eyes, clear, cold, dead, bright, and chill as winter moonshine, look into my soul, and fill it with all their lucid meanings! Oh, scene of blood and ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... could lose self in a passion. But this was no dread god that demanded unlovely sacrifice. It was a glad creature that desired laughter, song, and dance. Priscilla had seen to that. A repetition of her father's creed would have been unendurable. ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... is that we must endeavour to bring this war to an end. If there was the least chance of our being able to maintain our independence, we would still fight on, and not even the bitterest sufferings would appear unendurable. But have we any such chance?—that is the question which ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... together and made a fire and camped among ruins. But La Salle lay awake all night, watching the sharp-pointed autumn stars march overhead, and suffering what must have seemed the most unendurable of ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... suspected it. Alan was over thirty, and was still "looking about him." That alone, you will admit, is a sufficiently grave condemnation. That a man should have arrived at the ripe age of thirty and not yet have lighted upon the elect lady—the woman without whose companionship life would be to him unendurable is in itself a strong proof of much underlying selfishness, or, what comes to the same thing, of a calculating disposition. The right sort of man doesn't argue with himself at all on these matters. He doesn't say with selfish coldness, ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... as he walked, was a blank white wall. He had forgotten Elbert Carstairs, forgotten the train he was to take, forgotten even the unendurable injury that Higginson had put upon him. His one blind instinct had been to get away as quickly and completely as possible. But now, slowly, it was borne in upon him that he knew this road, that he had walked it once before like this, at the end of the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... second-stage rocket-phase. The moon-rocket had blasted off at six gravities acceleration until clear of atmosphere and a little more. Acceleration-chairs of remarkably effective design, plus the pre-saturation of one's blood with oxygen, made so high an acceleration safe and not unendurable for the necessary length of time it lasted. Now, at three gravities, one did not feel on the receiving end of a violent thrust, but one did feel utterly worn out and spent. Most people stayed awake through the ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... book-reviews—were the revolt of an escaped angel against the limitations of a journalistic form. But Anatole France happens to be a man of genius, and genius is a justification of any method. In the hands of a pinchbeck Anatole France, how unendurable the review conceived as a causerie would become! Anatole France observes that "all books in general, and even the most admirable, seem to me infinitely less precious for what they contain than for ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Sahara, and are a terror to their settled neighbours and to caravans. On their raids they cover immense distances in a short time. To ride from the heart of their country to the Sudan after booty is child's play to them. They have made existence in many oases quite unendurable. What use is it to till fields and rear palms when the Tuaregs always reap the harvest? The French have had many fights with the Tuaregs, and the railway which was to pass through their country and connect Algiers with Timbuktu ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... could not remain where I was any longer, though the daylight was hateful to me, and the thought of the great, innocent, bold sunrise unendurable. Here there was no well to cool my face, smarting with the bitterness of my own tears. Nor would I have washed in the well of that grotto, had it flowed clear as the rivers of Paradise. I rose, and feebly left the sepulchral cave. I took my way I knew not whither, but still towards the sunrise. ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... the doctor, "all the scenes of which charity compels you to be a spectator; but you will get used to it in time, as we all do. It is the law of existence. The confessor, the magistrate, the lawyer would find life unendurable if the spirit of the State did not assert itself above the feelings of the individual. Could we live at all but for that? Is not the soldier in time of war brought face to face with spectacles even more dreadful than those we see? And every soldier that has been under fire is kind-hearted. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... sermon which in matter and style were really excellent made, to some hearers at least, almost unendurable by the accident that the preacher had got the habit of (needlessly) clearing his throat at the ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... softly going down in my stockinged feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet, beseeching her as a particular favor to give me a good slippering for my misbehavior; anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... without intention on your part. I am glad you have told me everything, for now I can better guard you from future mischances. My relations to this young man's father are such that it would make it very disagreeable, indeed, positively unendurable, if his son should seek your society. You should also remember that Mr. Houghton would be as bitterly hostile to any such course on his son's part as I am. Your pride, apart from my wishes, should lead you to repel ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... the more endurance can be made an element of satisfaction. A sick man cannot stand it. The line of enjoyable suffering is not a fixed one; it fluctuates with the perfectness of the life. That our pains are, as they are, unendurable, awful, overwhelming, crushing, not to be borne save in misery and dumb impatience, which utter exhaustion alone makes patient,—that our pains are thus unendurable, means not that they are too ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... his lips again. The tonal stairway which leads up to the chorus of Egypt rose in rasping wailfulness. It culminated in an excessive, unendurable, brazen shriek—and the Honorable William Linder experienced upon the undefended rear of his person the most violent kick of a lifetime not always devoted to the arts of peace. It projected him clear of the window-sill. His last sensible vision was the face ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his feeling of restlessness became quite unendurable, the ex-ambassador would wander round Fort Gayole and on some pretext or other demand to see one or the other of his prisoners. Marguerite, however, observed complete silence in his presence: she acknowledged his ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... complimentary remarks upon my assurance in offering him such securities. It made me so mad I could have choked him—it is bad enough to be treated with hauteur by a white man, but contempt from a nigger is almost unendurable." ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... Constitution subsequent to the fourth Presidential election. This was found to be necessary by the circumstances of the contest between John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr. It was then found that the complications in the method of election created by the original clause were all but unendurable, ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... hard to bear with those who sin through weakness, merely because they persist a long time in evil, wherefore it is said that they are borne with longanimity: whereas the very fact of sinning through pride seems to be unendurable; for which reason those who sin through pride are stated to be borne with ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... menaced wherever we meet the perception that the course of the world must in some way be helped, and wherever the contrast between reason and sensuousness, that the old Stoa had confused, is clearly felt to be an unendurable state of antagonism that man cannot remove by his own unaided efforts. The need of a revelation had its starting-point in philosophy here. The judgment of oneself and of the world to which Platonism led, the self-consciousness ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... administration of affairs at Vincennes did not put Hamilton into a good humor. He was overbearing and irascible at best, and under the irritation of small but exceedingly unpleasant experiences he made life well-nigh unendurable to those upon whom his dislike chanced to fall. Beverley quickly felt that it was going to be very difficult for him and Hamilton to get along agreeably. With Helm it was quite different; smoking, drinking, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... gentlemen are in luxury compared to me. Please listen to what I have to suffer. My wife and my mother can't hit it off anyhow. All day long they're like a couple of cows butting at one another with their horns. The house is as unendurable as if it were full of smoke. I often think it would be better to send my wife back to her village; but then I've got two little children. If I interfere and take my wife's part, my mother gets low-spirited. If I scold ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... enter the little chamber where I kept my treasures. I was hotly and tightly dressed in black, all day long, as though ready at any moment to attend a funeral with decorum. Sometimes, towards evening, I used to feel the monotony and weariness of my position to be almost unendurable, but at this time I was meek, and I bowed to what I supposed to be the order ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... him company, and throw in a remark from time to time. First he makes an entry, then a remark; then passes the back of his hand across his streaming forehead. The heat in the built-in street is fearful. Inside the shops it must be almost unendurable. But the work goes on steadily; entry, guttural growl, and uplifted hand-stroke succeeding each other with ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... if to sit longer inactive had become an unendurable torment, he stood upright, flung off his heavy overcoat and then whipped ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... Rockingham, but would not accept his terms. Three days later the government escaped a vote of want of confidence only by nine votes, and on the 20th North announced the resignation of the ministry. George was in great distress, and talked of retiring to Hanover, for life would be unendurable to him if he fell into the hands of the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... such 'fine little chaps' after all," I couldn't resist commenting. "Familiarity breeds contempt, you see. I am sorry Diogenes had so much of their society. He'll be unendurable tomorrow. Well, ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... thinking she might have considered you after all you've done for her. I can't say I'm much surprised myself." Mrs. Fillmore was talking rapidly, and dimly Sally understood that she was talking so that talk would carry her over this bad moment. Silence now would have been unendurable. "I was in the company with her, and it sometimes seems to me as if you can't get to know a person right through till you've been in the same company with them. Elsa's all right, but she's two people really, like these dual identity cases you read about. She's ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... city business was now quite well established, Darrell felt that life at The Pines was becoming unendurable. Walcott's visits were now so frequent it was impossible longer to avoid him. The latter's air of easy self-assurance, the terms of endearment which fell so flippantly from his lips, and his bold, passionate glances which never failed to bring the rich, warm blood to Kate's ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... name was Erris Boyne, and he had been debauched, drunken, and faithless; so at a time of unendurable hurt his wife had freed herself. Then, under her maiden name, she had brought up her daughter without any knowledge of her father; had made her believe he was dead; had hidden her tragedy ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... unendurable,—the pathos of the words! I was blinded, stifled,—I almost groaned aloud. If we had been alone, there our trial would have ended. I should have snatched her to my soul. But the eyes of others were upon us, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... lonely and grief-stricken life, which was darkened by a succession of family tragedies. It will help us to understand her work if we remember that both Charlotte Bronte and her sister Emily[242] turned to literature because they found their work as governess and teacher unendurable, and sought to relieve the loneliness and sadness of their own lot by creating a new world of the imagination. In this new world, however, the sadness of the old remains, and all the Bronte novels have behind them an aching heart. Charlotte Bronte's ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... captain of banditti, escaped with seventy comrades to the crater of Vesuvius, and organized an insurrection, and he was soon at the head of one hundred thousand of those wretched captives whose condition was unendurable. Italy was ravaged from the Alps to the Straits of Messina. No Roman general, then in Italy, was equal to the task of subduing them. But, in the second year of the war, Crassus, who was a great proprietor of slaves, and who had ably served under Sulla, undertook ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... out and there was silence, and privacy, and a faint, faint, almost unhearable series of background sounds which kept the Med Ship from being totally unendurable. ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... said, glancing up at him from under her long black lashes, "Papa grows unendurable. I have had to speak very plainly to him, and to make him understand that I am marrying for my own benefit and ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Connection altogether: What immensities it has cost poor England, and is like to cost, 'the Lord of the Manor' (great George our King) being the gentleman he is; and how England, or, as it is adumbratively called, 'the Manor of St. James's,' is become a mere 'fee-farm to Mumland.' Unendurable to think of. 'Bob Monopoly, the late Tallyman [adumbrative for Walpole, late Prime Minister], was much blamed on this account; and John the Carter [John Lord Carteret], Clerk of the Vestry and present favorite of his Lordship, is not behind Robin in his care for the Manor of MUMLAND' ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... mortifying, galling; unaccommodating, invidious, vexatious; troublesome, tiresome, irksome, wearisome; plaguing, plaguy^; awkward. importunate; teasing, pestering, bothering, harassing, worrying, tormenting, carking. intolerable, insufferable, insupportable; unbearable, unendurable; past bearing; not to be borne, not to be endured; more than flesh and blood can bear; enough to drive one mad, enough to provoke a saint, enough to make a parson swear, enough to gag a maggot. shocking, terrific, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... I was not a man of honour, here, right under your embedded eyes, I write the thing down—the plain truth about Pyecraft. The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me by making my club unendurable, absolutely unendurable, with his liquid appeal, with the perpetual "don't tell" of ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... legislation of the past, beginning with the time of Elizabeta Petrovna. What was favorable was suppressed; the unfavorable was most rigorously enforced. Jews living outside the Pale were driven back into it on the slightest pretext and in the most inhuman manner. To increase the already unendurable congestion, the Pale was made smaller than before. In accordance with the first clause of the "May laws," Jews were expelled from the villages within the Pale itself. In 1888 the districts of Rostov ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... be an unendurable bore as a continuance; but take my word for it, George, if you could bring yourself to do it for six months, by the end of that time you would have the ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... against civilization was still more extreme; for he did not wait to submit a new principle before condemning the old. Indeed, he felt that self-conscious existence for the individual, as he beheld it everywhere, was a tragic calamity, and altogether unendurable. Preferable would be the extinction utterly of all individualized selfhood. He would isolate the individual and submit him to a discipline, the object of which was escape forever from the wheel of existence. He advocated not mere individualistic anarchy, but ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... nor was man or woman left within the city, for upon all came unendurable grief. And near the gates they met Priam bringing home the dead. First bewailed him his dear wife and lady mother, as they cast them on the fair-wheeled wain and touched his head; and around them stood ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... Thomas Mugridge is becoming unendurable. I am compelled to Mister him and to Sir him with every speech. One reason for this is that Wolf Larsen seems to have taken a fancy to him. It is an unprecedented thing, I take it, for a captain to be chummy with ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... came hurriedly into the room and fell on his knees before the queen. For a long time past the young lady-in-waiting had perceived that Robert of Cabane had, through his own fault, lost the love of Joan; for his tyranny had indeed become more unendurable ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... contained constant trying paragraphs. Even my widow's weeds were sketched and copied. My nerves grew worse. Life seemed unendurable. ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... enough, no unhappy sound about it; the daughter's, cheerful, robust, and musical, rallying and encouraging her as a child, perhaps about some dress obstacle or mystery. The effect on Gwen of listening to them was painful. To hear them, knowing the truth, made that knowledge almost unendurable. Could she possess her soul in peace until what she supposed to be the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... and shrieks and orisons, its outcries of delight and of despair, rise never to the hearing of the Immortals but as a perfect harmony.... Wherefore they could not desire to hush the tones of pain: it would spoil their music! The combination, without the agony-tones, would prove a discord unendurable to ears divine. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... food but smoke and sulphur." Jeremy Taylor3 says, in that discourse on the "Pains of Hell" where he has lavished all the stores of his matchless learning and all the wealth of his gorgeous imagination in multiplying and adorning the paraphernalia of torture with infinite accompaniments of unendurable pangs and insufferable abominations, "We are amazed at the inhumanity of Phalaris, who roasted men in his brazen bull: this was joy in respect of that fire of hell which penetrates the very entrails without consuming them;" "husbands shall see their wives, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... pretext for sordid tyranny. So beware of offending Monsieur de la Baudraye; he would forgive an infidelity, because he could make capital of it, but he would be doubly implacable if you should touch him on the spot so cruelly wounded by Monsieur Milaud of Nevers, and would make your life unendurable." ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... Tanqueray watched her he was aware that the queer eyes of the man were turned on him, rather than on Nina. They looked through him, as if they saw with a lucidity even more unendurable than his, what was ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... We were certainly weaker. We had a little more than a tin of oil to get back on, and we knew the conditions we had to face on that journey across the Barrier: even with fresh men and fresh gear it had been almost unendurable. ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... Lord has shown that a great and blessed life is possible on conditions which the world pronounces simply unendurable. He would not accept the world's maxims, would not be ruled by the world's principles, did despite to the world's most favorite plans. He even tasted the dregs of reprobation that the world metes out to those who ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... with birch bark; sad species of fleecy hosiery; whence their nickname),—his Birkebeins I guess always to have been a kind of Norse Jacquerie: desperate rising of thralls and indigent people, driven mad by their unendurable sufferings and famishings,—theirs the deepest stratum of misery, and the densest and heaviest, in this the general misery of Norway, which had lasted towards the third generation and looked as if it would last forever:—whereupon they had risen proclaiming, in this furious ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... her control. The records of the servants' aid societies will show plainly that there are women against whose names a significant mark must be put, and the reason is that they turn away one girl after another with incredible rapidity, or that despairing girls leave them after finding life unendurable. I know that there are insolent, sluttish, lazy, and incompetent servants, and I certainly wish to be fair toward the mistresses; but I also know that too many of the persons who send wild and whirling ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... unendurable. The counter-irritant to grief is sanity, not emotion. When a woman is a little frightened the presence of the unafraid ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... was a working compromise that suited existing circumstances more or less, and that could be either mended or ended as time went on. But a general foreign monopoly—like Spain's monopoly of America—was quite unendurable. Could Spain not only hold what she had discovered and was exploiting but also extend her sphere of influence over what she had not discovered? Spain said Yes. England said No. The Spaniards looked ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... preposterous claim to the people. (86) The lowest depth of despair he reached, however, when he met some one who recognized him. The recollections and associations that stirred within him then made his present misery almost unendurable. ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... I began to perceive the same kind of fascination as that which its former owner had experienced. This gradually grew upon me, and presently led to trains of thought which became at first unwelcome, then worrying, and at last unendurable. I began by taking offence at the moon. I did not like to see that "something large and smooth and round," so like the skull which little Peterkin picked up on the field of Blenheim. "How many times," I kept ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... in the middle of the floor, a lamp in his hand, surveying the repellent confusion. It had accumulated without attracting his notice; but now, suddenly detached from the aimless procession of the past months, it was palpable to him, unendurable. "It's not fit ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... once-loved bride with a look of such unutterable tenderness that the heart's deep gush burst from his eyes, and he wept in that almost unendurable anguish. The sight was too harrowing to sustain. He was about to withdraw, when a convulsive tremor passed across her features—a trembling like the undulation of the breeze rippling the smooth bosom of the lake; a sigh seemed to labour heavily from her breast; her eyes opened; but as though ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... lodged in a flimsy tent pitched in the centre of the ruins. Half the houses were constructed of dried mud; the remainder, as at Gwarjak, of palm leaves. The village stands in a grove of date palms, and the swarms of flies were consequently almost unendurable. We encamped close to the village well, to which, during the afternoon, many of the female population came to draw water. Two of them, bright, pleasant-featured girls of eighteen or twenty, were the best-looking specimens of ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... was angry; so was Mrs. Formica when she received hers. An intuition that Osgood repented his rashness touched Lily's pride, and preserved her silence. When the second letter came, she thought he had the intention of experimenting with her; a test, she concluded, was unendurable, not to be submitted to. Should she test him, and proclaim the engagement she meditated? it would be a relief to do something. She could not reach him with a letter, for he had gone on a mackerel voyage beyond ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... on mine. She had never kissed me like this. It was like the touch of hot ice, freezing, then searing. Unendurable. I lay inert; I couldn't have moved if I wanted to. I could scarcely breathe. Then I felt the blood within me pounding, pulsing, beginning to answer in spite of myself. I tasted once more the warm, salty fluid on my lips. Eve's body was liquid in my arms; ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... for, had talked with just a few hours ago, lay dead in the bunk-house, she forgot that it was merely an expected incident of Western life. She lay in her bed shaking with nervous dread, and the shrill rasping of the crickets and tree-toads was unendurable. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... thenceforth experiences a craving for company and employment. He cannot endure silence or solitude. When he stands still, he seems to hear the throbbings of his own conscience terrible as the ticking of the clock in the chamber of death. To be alone is unendurable, because it is to be with God. To escape from this fiery furnace, he hastens to plough in his field or sell in his shop. In such a case, the worldliness, even when it runs to the greatest excess, is not the primary passion, but a secondary refuge,—the trees of the garden among ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... seized upon Elizabeth's feelings at all; now he was convinced that it would be no less hard for her than for Katie; hard through her friendship and her pride. But this one's tender little heart would break. After all, it was only of her that he could think. The waiting was growing unendurable. Yet he felt that his father was right when he said that the easiest way, the shortest in the end, was to prove if possible that Harwin's story of his vocation was fabricated. Indeed, there was no case for appeal to the Court unless that were established. Let that fall through, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... thus expended and exhausted their tortures against the firmness of the martyrs sustained by Christ, the devil devised other contrivances. They were cast into the darkest and most unendurable place in their prison; their feet were dragged out and compressed to the utmost tension of the muscles; the jailers, as if instigated by a demon, tried every sort of torture, insomuch that several of them, for whom God willed such an end, died of suffocation in prison. Others, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... ground, and Maori builders knew of no such thing as a chimney. Though neither cooking nor eating was done in their dwelling-houses, and offal of all kinds was carefully kept at a decent distance, the atmosphere in their dim, stifling interiors was as a rule unendurable by White noses and lungs. Even their largest tribal or meeting halls had but the one door and window; the Maori mind seemed as incapable of adding thereto, as of constructing more than one room under a single roof. On the other hand, the dyed patterns on the reed wainscoting, and the ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... and no sooner did they find themselves in the open air than an almost uncontrollable impulse seized them to go back again. The contrast between the warm comfortable temperature of the ship's interior and the bitter piercing cold without was so great that at first the latter felt quite unendurable. They, however, persevered; and, after perhaps ten minutes of intense suffering, the severe exercise of scrambling over the rotten slippery hummocks somewhat restored their impeded circulation, and they began to feel that, perhaps, after all, they might be able to ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... as ever. He was as ambitious as ever. But there it ended. He stood still in the House; he stood still in society; nobody liked him; he made no friends. It was all the old story over again, with this difference, that the soured man was sourer; the gray head, grayer; and the irritable temper more unendurable than ever. His wife had her rooms in the house and he had his, and the confidential servants took care that they never met on the stairs. They had no children. They only saw each other at their grand dinners and balls. People ate at their table, and danced on their floor, and compared notes afterward, ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... about his despair, in that of all the wonderful web of his dreams he had made no fine cloak to cover it. It shivered and suffered in a noble nakedness, absolutely unashamed. But one thing he knew also, that if Lucia did not love him, she loved his genius. Even when lucidity made suffering unendurable, he had still the assurance that his genius would never suffer at her hands. For did she not know that God gives the heart of a poet to be as fuel to his genius, for ever consumed and inconsumable? That of all his passions his love is the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... If they were truly alive to the duty of conclusiveness, or to the inexpressible magnitude of the subjects which nominally occupy their minds, but really only exercise their tongues, this elegant Pyrrhonism would be impossible, and this light-hearted neutrality most unendurable. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... once more set sail, with the imprisoned captain and crew in chains cast into the dark, foul hold of the ship. Immunity was sometimes granted the captives upon their taking the oath of allegiance to the piratical horde. Can we not imagine how the intense anguish and unendurable torture finally forced from the unwilling lips the ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... how you feel toward him? Are you by any chance assuming that he bears with your manner on account of his own comfort? You might at least be generous or acute enough to see that it is only for my sake that he exercises so much self-control. He does not want to make my position here more unendurable by quarrelling with you. It makes me furious to see what you force him to put up with, the way you speak to him, and look at him, as if he were your slave, or a disobedient dog. His self-control is wonderful. I admire him ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... famous depot of the fleecy tribe without adventure. I will not attempt to describe the tedium of that horrid voyage, for it has been often described before; and to Martin, who was in no ways fastidious, it was not so unendurable as it must always be to those who have been accustomed to more rapid movement. Nor yet will I attempt to put on record the miserable resources of those, who, doomed to a twenty hours' sojourn in one of these floating prisons, vainly endeavour to occupy or amuse their ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... The most Conservative English People, thickest-skinned, most patient of Peoples, is driven alike by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things 'spoken,' and by things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only felt and very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People. Their Life, as it is, has ceased to ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Louis! The two Vetos were so natural: are not the Priests martyrs; also friends? This Camp of Twenty Thousand, could it be other than of stormfullest Sansculottes? Natural; and yet, to France, unendurable. Priests that co-operate with Coblentz must go elsewhither with their martyrdom: stormful Sansculottes, these and no other kind of creatures, will drive back the Austrians. If thou prefer the Austrians, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... continental gendarme to heroic indignation. Mayors, Aldermen, and Justices of the Peace are comic, and take it not quite so well. Beadles were so wholly dedicated to the purposes of comedy that I suppose they found their position unendurable and went to earth; at any rate it is very difficult to catch one in his ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... rebellious, he unfolds to our horror-stricken gaze the terrors of this infernal region; its fiery deluge of ever-burning sulphur; its 'regions of sorrow;' its 'doleful shades'—the unhappy abode of fallen angels who 'in floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire,' alternated by exposure to unendurable cold and icy torment, experience the direful ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... course up into the mountains, began about three or four miles short of the inner extremity of Volcano Bay; and second, because within a mile or two of that extremity the water of the bay sometimes actually boiled, and the heat would there be quite unendurable." ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... out of the ground and carried to the refineries is not all of the business by any means. The early oils crusted on the lamp wicks, their smell was unendurable, and they were given to exploding. Evidently, if oil was to be used for lighting, it must be improved, and the first step was to distil it. To distil anything means to boil it and collect the vapor. If you hold a piece of cold earthenware ...
— Diggers in the Earth • Eva March Tappan
... awoke I found myself very cold. Then I became aware that my father was asleep, and for the first time began to be uneasy. It was not because of the cold: that was not at all unendurable; it was that while the night lay awful in white silence about me, while the wind was moaning outside, and blowing long thin currents through the peat walls around me, while our warm home lay far away, and I could not tell how many hours of cold darkness ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... of the fleshy women were unendurable. They all looked such good meat. Why were their haunches so prominent? It was a question Josephine could not solve. She scanned their really expensive, brilliant clothing. It was nearly right—nearly ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... tones. She had been given a hint of Ward's intentions by what the old man had said about the "canned thunder." She did not dare to be informed as to the probable details of those intentions; to know fully the nature of the risk he was running would have made the agony of her apprehensiveness unendurable. ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... her pocket, but she remembered her resolutions and for some time resented the impervious clutch of the temptation. But the sorrow that hung about her, that penetrated like a corrosive acid into the very marrow of her bones, grew momentarily more burning, more unendurable. Twenty times she tried to wrench it out of her heart. The landlady brought her up some tea; she could not drink it; it tasted like soapsuds in her mouth. Then, knowing well what the results would be, she resolved to ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... rigid, adamantine, dense, insoluble, flinty, indurate, indurated, infrangible; arduous, laborious, wearisome, onerous, burdensome, toilsome, tiresome, exhausting, difficult, knotty, intricate, puzzling, incomprehensible; irresistible, uncontrollable; severe, rigorous, unendurable, oppressive, unjust, grievous, calamitous, incompliant; stern, unyielding, obdurate, unfeeling, exacting, insensible, hard-hearted, callous, implacable, inflexible; repelling, constrained, inelegant; severe, inclement, rigorous; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... united in the one sole object of snubbing and worrying the unhappy curate. To live among them was like living in a cloud of poisonous flies. If Dante had known Fuzby-le-Mud, he could have found for a really generous and noble spirit no more detestable or unendurable inferno than ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... until some one mentioned me ez Chaplin to the expedition West, when the pressure becum unendurable. They sposed I was keeper uv the President's conscience, and I hed not a minit's peece after that. In vain I ashoored em that, there bein no consciences about the White House, no one could hold sich a offis; in vain I ashoored em that I hed no influence with His Majesty. Two ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... conscience was worked upon until she bound him to a cabinet maker in the city. To him, the restraint was unendurable, and he ran away. He came after dark to bid me good-bye, left love for mother and Elizabeth, and next morning left Pittsburg on a steamboat, going to that Eldorado of ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... abated in expectation of relief, began to rise once more. He was angry. Why didn't she do something? This delay was unendurable. His voice mounted in ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... and country houses, but paid little attention to cleanliness; and when the filth and vermin in one became unendurable, they left it "to sweeten," as they said, and went to another of their estates. The dress of the nobles continued to be of the most costly materials and ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... a keen look and wondered why she had a bright red spot in each cheek. He wondered more before they reached home, for his cousin laughed and sung in childlike glee, and was sad and silent by turns. Her restlessness could not wait until the Sabbath. The excitement and suspense were unendurable. ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... out as usual on the terrace, and the others followed. It began to grow dark. Clarissa's anxiety became unendurable; what could have happened ...
— Gritli's Children • Johanna Spyri
... such a scene that his mother had witnessed perhaps his only attempt at self-explanation. "I am sorry you were disturbed," he had pronounced, after standing and regarding her for a silent, frowning space; "but for me there is something unendurable in men herding like cattle, protecting their fat with warning boards and fences. I can't manage the fiddling lies that keep up the whole silly pretence of the stuffy show. If it gets much thicker," he had threatened, waving vaguely ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was blackened or partly covered with sand, and it fringed the distant uplands like a stubbly beard. The little ravines were darkened with hot shadows, but the bald slopes presented areas, shining with infinitesimal particles of quartz and mica, to a savage sun and an almost unendurable sky. From somewhere to the barren north the wind came like a breath of flame, ash-laden and drying. There was nothing of the cool, damp river breeze in this. They were in the hideous heart of the desert to whom death was monotony, resisting foreign ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... bombardment of the enemy's lines commenced punctually at 4.30 a.m. The Turkish guns replied almost at once, and the volume of fire on both sides rapidly increased until the din and vibration became almost unendurable. From our Headquarters at the junction of Oxford Street and the Old French Road little could be seen of what was going on. Our artillery was mainly concentrated on the trenches away on the right which were to be assaulted ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... dimensions were fitted for her mainmast and three topmasts.[410] By this means the British ship was to be enabled to sail for the attack on the American fleet, and by this only; for to drag spars of that weight up the rapids of the Richelieu, or over the rough intervening country, meant at least unendurable delay. "The turpitude of many of our citizens in this part of the country," wrote Macdonough, "furnishes the enemy with every information ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... of fearful anticipation, the horror of the impending trial had seemed unendurable to the proud and sensitive girl, whom the Sheriff placed on a seat fronting the sea of curious faces, the battery of scrutinizing eyes turned on her from the jury-box. Four months of dread had unnerved her, yet now ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... been brought away from his family and his friends, half-way across the American continent, and sold. He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing—it was maddening, devastating, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn't stand it, and wouldn't she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... and the poor; it increases vastly the ranks of the uneducated; and, finally, while most unnaturally forcing the increase of the already threatening African infusion, it also tends to make the servile condition more unendurable, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... conscience with the assurance that a letter from him was a necessary part of her cure. She felt that the mere sight of his handwriting on an envelope addressed to herself would transport her back to that hour in Dolores, and if she could correspond with him life would no longer be unendurable. But although he had casually alluded to his club in New York she could not recall the name, if he had ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... part of the Rhenish Provinces in case of the aggrandisement of Prussia has been denied by him, and is not in itself probable. But there are understandings which prove to be understandings on one side only; politeness may be misinterpreted; and the world would have found Count Bismarck unendurable if at every friendly meeting he had been guilty of the frankness with which he informed the Austrian Government that its centre of action must be transferred from Vienna to Pesth. That Napoleon was now scheming for an extension of France on the north-east is certain; that Bismarck treated ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... taken of food, so that one banana was given for breakfast, and for dinner a coconut, which O'olo found hard, he having always been a hearty eater, and accustomed to palusami and luxuries. The monotony also, was unendurable, especially when the tobacco was gone, and one was forbidden to move, being condemned to sit hungry and distressed for a whole day at a time, sucking a white stone by way of alleviation. To O'olo a white stone was very insufficient for nourishment, and so he tried grass and weeds ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... skin of his head seemed to tighten like a metal band, though his lungs stabbed within him as he breathed, though the pain in his feet was unendurable, Eric wrenched again and again at the handle, but the door would not budge. He called, but there was no answer. Almost delirious with baffled rage and excruciating suffering, the boy hurled himself against the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... wondering when you will go away. That you have in effect started to go away—and not gone away—and yet must go away some time—and may go away at any minute: this consciousness, to a person standing first on one tired foot and then on the other, rapidly becomes almost, but never quite, unendurable. Reason totters, but remains on the throne. One can almost lay down a law: Two persons who do not part with kisses should ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... Charlestown, was the owner of several slaves whom he employed either as mechanics, common laborers, or house servants. Three of the most trusted of these, Mark, Phillis, and Phebe,—particularly Mark,—found the rigid discipline of their master unendurable, and, after setting fire to his workshop some six years before, hoping by the destruction of this building to so embarrass him that he would be obliged to sell them, they, in the year 1755, conspired to gain their end by poisoning him ...
— The Trial and Execution, for Petit Treason, of Mark and Phillis, Slaves of Capt. John Codman • Abner Cheney Goodell, Jr.
... subject would have been too unendurable. But argument there was on it, by persons capable and willing, more than one: and in result this surprising brand-new London moon-calf of a MATINEES was smitten through, and slit in pieces, for the fifth time,—as if that could have hurt it much! "MIT DER DUMMHEIT," sings Schiller; "Human ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... going back to Julia's party was unendurable, yet a return was necessary on account of his new hat, the abandonment of which he did not for a moment consider. But about half way, as he walked slowly along, he noticed an old horse-block at the curbstone, and sat down there. He could hear the music at Julia's, sometimes loud and close at ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... safe, despite her vicissitudes made Halifax for refitting. Here, at the first suitable port she had touched, Adrian claimed and obtained his release from obligations which made his life almost unendurable. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... southern serfs was bad enough before America was "discovered"; and quite unendurable in earlier times. There is a village not many hours from Naples where, in 1789, only the personal attendants of the feudal lord lived in ordinary houses; the two thousand inhabitants, the serfs, took refuge ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the darkest days of Maurus Jokai's life, and reflects the depression of a naturally generous and sanguine nature bowed down, for a time, beneath an almost unendurable load of unmerited misfortune. The story was written shortly after the collapse of the Magyar Revolution of 1848-49, when Hungary lay crushed and bleeding under the heel of triumphant Austria and her Russian ally; when, deprived of all her ancient political ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... saying?' 'They are disputing, and mamma has just such a chance with Dr. Johnson as Presto (a little dog) would have were he to fight Dash (a big one).'" He adds that she left the room in a huff to the amusement of the party. If scenes like this were frequent, no wonder the "yoke" became unendurable. ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... man, and his love for her had never blinded him as to her faults; often he had corrected her for unfilial behaviour, for a too sharp word, for selfishness. But the one quality which to a strong and tender man is unendurable in the woman he loves, cruelty, he had never before realised in the girl, and his discovery that it lay in her to hurt him as she had done, had ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... I laugh. "On the contrary, it has so accustomed me to their friendship I would find life utterly unendurable ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... that she betrayed nothing to Father Szypulski, and still was delivered from her agony of mind? She did not know what to do. Her agony was so great, it seemed to grow and grow in spite of her prayers, until it was unendurable. If only she could find peace, peace—but she could only find that when Mr. Tiralla ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... Poppins' lodgings, and there quarrel with her old friend Polly. It may be that at this time she did not receive all the respect that had been paid to her some months back, and this reverse was, to her proud spirit, unendurable. "Polly," she said, "if you wish to turn your back upon me, you can do so. But I won't put up ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... material and surroundings. This is the point to which our prophets who pour their lamentations over advancing civilisation should direct their main attack, as, indeed, the best of them have done. For certainly it is an unendurable result if the enormous majority of civilised mankind are for ever to be debarred from the ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... and as the hours dragged on I began to grow dead tired. The awful noise and confusion, the terrific heat, the foul smell of the glue, and the agony of breaking ankles and blistered hands seemed almost unendurable. ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... she had heard in the next room was—as she now knew—the voice that haunted Romayne. Not the words that had pleaded hunger and called for bread—but those other words, "Assassin! assassin! where are you?"—rang in her ears. She entreated Madame Marillac to break the unendurable interval of silence. The widow's calm voice had a soothing influence which she was eager to feel. "Go on!" she repeated. ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... hope had gone from my life. I had no ballast, nothing to steady me in the tempest. My hope had been all in the present, and it perished with her. I cared for nothing, my little children were a misery to me, the old home was unendurable. I got leave of absence from my employers, and came up here—desperate. I dashed into every sort of dissipation and extravagance; I tried one excitement after another, if only I could drown every memory I had. I abandoned myself ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... moved to do it, but not the rest. Oh, no, not the rest. And on the whole he would rather not have the fatted calf. He would prefer any desolation to forgiveness. Forgiveness must be preceded by knowledge, and the thought of that was unendurable. ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... work she loved taken away from her, how could she bear the gnawing hunger at her heart for the presence of him unto whom was every thought of her brain and every throbbing pulse of her soul? The future seemed to stretch before her, a terrible, an unendurable blank. ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... away, for upon my heart there was pressing a burden of unendurable sorrow, and I was yearning, oh, so terribly, to see ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... that he wanted her daily companionship; her sympathy in all that interested him; her confidence with regard to all that concerned herself. He wanted all this; but he could do without it: he could love her and wait, if that were all. But what was hardest, nay, almost unendurable, was the anticipation of her day of disenchantment, when she must see the truth as he saw it now, and find herself thrown aside to learn, in solitude and suffering, how blindly she had suffered herself to be duped by a fair appearance. For, of course, Maurice was unjust. Seeing Lucia daily as ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the chill in Fownes' fingers was clearly not unendurable, for in a moment he came to the table, and putting his hand over that of Janice, which held the ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... genius had degenerated into mere eccentricity, never did anything for his own livelihood, but lived always upon John Gibson's generous bounty. In John's wealthy days, he and Mr. Ben used to escape every summer from the heat and dust of Rome—which is unendurable in July and August—to the delightfully cool air and magnificent mountain scenery of the Tyrol. "I cannot tell you how well I am," he writes on one of these charming visits, "and so is Mr. Ben. Every morning we take our walks in the woods here. I feel as if I were new modelled." Another passage ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... AND REBELLION.—Habit has been called the "balance wheel" of society. This is because men readily become habituated to the hard, the disagreeable, or the inevitable, and cease to battle against it. A lot that at first seems unendurable after a time causes less revolt. A sorrow that seems too poignant to be borne in the course of time loses some of its sharpness. Oppression or injustice that arouses the fiercest resentment and hate may finally come to be accepted with ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... with excitement. And the sound of Uncle Steve's voice giving orders as he came up on the far side of the water made the suspense almost unendurable. He talked to An-ina, who crouched at his side. He chattered incessantly. The splash of a canoe, dropped into the water, was exquisite torture. The dip of paddles set him well-nigh beside himself. Then, ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum |
