"Unforgivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Paul Ellison, son and brother, and they had blotted him out of their lives by destroying all physical signs of him. There was something inhuman in the deliberateness of it, something unforgivable. ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... a matter, or as something so far removed from human affairs as to be mysterious and remote to a child. To mix Old and New Testament indiscriminately, as, for example, by taking them on alternate days, is unforgivable, and no teacher who has studied the Bible seriously could do so, if she cared about the religious training of her children, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... said Winter. "They disagreed, and she divorced him, thinking he would remain poor. The whirligig of time changed their relative positions, and to a jealous-minded woman that was unforgivable." ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... favorite month of June he does not dare return until the following June. Others who have never visited America must get their idea of American travel from some such account as that of Charles Dickens in his unforgivable American Notes (1842), in which he said, in describing ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... and his eyes fell, "please tell me. I suppose I have been unforgivable, but—well, there's nothing to say!" Northrup bowed his head to take ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... I ought not to have said a thing like that. It was unforgivable. But you do talk like an idiot. How on earth can one make mistakes in breeding? Oh, you and I talk different languages, that's all, and it's not any use at all trying to think ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... away with me.' I cannot trust myself to a love which has no standard of right and wrong. We look at it from different points of view. You see only the man and his temptation. I knew the priceless treasure of the love; therefore the sin against that love seems to me unforgivable." ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... metaphor be preferred) after the fashion of a family-tree involves of itself no inconsiderable call on the tale-telling faculties. That the writers pay little or no attention to chronological and other possibilities is hardly much to say against them; if this be an unforgivable sin it is not clear how either Dickens or Thackeray is to escape damnation, with Sir Walter to greet ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... of an object that could not possibly be attained; never was heard such a tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping,—as if one end of the ridiculous brute's body were at deadly and most unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round about went the cur; and faster and still faster fled the unapproachable brevity of his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of rage and animosity; until, utterly exhausted, and as far from the goal as ever, the foolish ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the South; vain every plea 'Gainst Nature's strong fidelity; True to the home and to the heart, Throngs cast their lot with kith and kin, Foreboding, cleaved to the natural part— Was this the unforgivable sin? These noble spirits are yet yours to win. Shall the great North go Sylla's way? Proscribe? prolong the evil day? Confirm the curse? infix the hate? In Unions ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... thereto in his hand. He had not been sure before Stephen arrived whether he should reveal the situation or not. But the temptation was too great. That the son's mind and soul should finally have escaped his father, "like a bird out of the snare of the fowler," was the unforgivable offence. What a gentle, malleable fellow he had seemed in his school and college days!—how amenable to the father's spiritual tyranny! It was Barron's constant excuse to himself for his own rancorous feeling—that Meynell had robbed ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I think our love for Dr. Hemingway in itself would have kept the Sabbath sacred. He never found fault with our Sunday visiting. All days were holy to him, and his evening sermons taught us that frivolity, and idle gossip, and scandal are as unforgivable on week days as on the Sabbath Day. Somewhere in the wide courts of heaven there must be reserved an abode of inconceivable joy and peace for such men as he, men who preach the Word faithfully through the years, whose hand-clasp means fellowship, and in whose tongue ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... by choice a warrior and a sailor, a wanderer to other lands, a plougher of the desolate places of the "vasty deep," yet withal a lover of home, who trod at times, with bitter longing for his native land, the thorny paths of exile. To him physical cowardice was the unforgivable sin, next to treachery to his lord; for the loyalty of thane to his chieftain was a very deep and abiding reality to the Anglo-Saxon warrior, and in the early poems of our English race, love for "his dear lord, his chieftain-friend," takes the place of that love of woman which ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... to keep reminding herself, it seemed, of Lawford Tapp's most glaring faults. Improvidence and a hopeless leaning toward extravagance were certainly unforgivable blemishes in the character of a young man in the position she ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... fete-days;[5336] eating meat on Friday or Saturday unnecessarily;" not confessing and communing at Easter, a mortal sin which "deprives one of the grace of God and merits eternal punishment" as well as "to slay and to steal something of value." For all these crimes, unforgivable in themselves, there is but one pardon, the absolution given by the priest, that is to say, confession beforehand, itself being one of the observances to which we are bound by strict obligation and at the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Colbert that it was the practice of the Jesuits to stir up strife in families, to resort to espionage, to abuse the confessional, to make the Seminary priests their puppets, and to deny the king's right to license the brandy trade. What seemed to the Jesuits an unforgivable affront was Frontenac's charge that they cared more for beaver skins than for the conversion of the savages. This {55} they interpreted as an insult to the memory of their martyrs, and their resentment ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... If it were simply a case of teasing me, I could let it pass, for I can take care of myself; but you have done your sister a wrong, and that is unforgivable. ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... avenging God, whose name had rung terribly from that rostrum for half a century: a God swift of anger and mighty to punish: an omnipotently jealous God. The Deity he served was one of infinite charity to whose forgiveness nothing was unforgivable—except unforgiveness. ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... slumber wherein he dreamily celebrated the superiority of "friendship"! The sleep-walker had wakened to bitter knowledge of love and life, finding himself a failure in both. He had made a burnt offering of his dreams, and the sacrifice had been an unforgivable hurt to Mary. All that was left for him was the work he had not chosen, but at least he would not fail in that, though it was indeed no more than "dust in his mouth." If there had been anything "to ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... remained imperturbably unastonished at its course. They judged it as they would have judged any reprehensible tendency to excitement or excess. You gave way to it or you did not give way. In Jane the thing was monstrous. She had sinned through it the unforgivable sin, the sin against the ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... But for an unforgivable error of tact I might have stood by the old brontosaurus to the bitter end. One evening he and I were listening to a concert given by the "Fluffy Furbelows" in the camp Nissen Coliseum, and a Miss Gwennie ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... She was not aware of this; she was only thinking that if he had not shot Halsey she would have been able to speak freely to him now. It was so wicked of Ephraim, above all others, to do such a thing. It was, in fact, unforgivable because of the stain upon Ephraim's own character more than because of Halsey's blood. But that again she did not analyse. She only knew that her feeling kept ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... to his character as a man. Has she not flung suspicion over his bones interred, that they are the bones of a—monster? . . . If Byron's sins or crimes—for we are driven to use terrible terms—were unendurable and unforgivable as if against the Holy Ghost, ought the wheel, the rack, or the stake to have extorted that confession from his widow's breast? . . . But there was no such pain here, James: the declaration was voluntary, and it was calm. Self- collected, and gathering up all her faculties and ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... put spur to the blood-bay's flank and rode straight for the Great House. The boy stood staring after him; he did not notice the trickle of blood from the cut in his ear; he was not even conscious that he was still in life. He remembered only the unforgivable affront which this man had put upon him, the mark which was the infamous badge of the bondman, the slave. Quinton Edge! Ah, yes; he would ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... Lady Agnes was the loss for the Dormer family of the advantages attached to the possession of Mrs. Dallow. The larger mortification would round itself later; for the hour the damning thing was that Nick had made that lady the gift of an unforgivable grievance. He had clinched their separation by his letter to his electors—and that above all was the wickedness of the letter. Julia would have got over the other woman, but she would never get over his becoming ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... through the kitchen, slammed the door of his room, turned the key in the lock and—stood still in the middle of the floor. Whipped by a girl not four years his senior! Whipped by a girl! It was an unforgivable outrage. He would get even for that. But what was he to do? Would could he do? She had beaten him at every turn, she had set Toady against him, she had made him the laughing stock of his cousins. He—he—he would do ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... and with Bob's upbringing and popularity, even though he said it rather scornfully in the fewest words. The scorn was really for himself, and I could well understand it. Nay, I was glad to have something to forgive in the beginning, I with my unforgivable mission, and would have laughed the matter off without another word if ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same; no one would think worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would turn round upon him; that was the one unforgivable sin—to be found out. But it was rarely that anyone was caught; and the descent was so easy. In his excitement he might perhaps ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... at the moment. But to fail to realize that between the daughter of the house of Saunders and the daughter of the house of Brown an unspanned social chasm must forever stretch would have been, indeed, the unforgivable offense. ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris |
