"Irretrievable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that they have lost his favour, and that looking upon themselves as driven by him into the wrong road, they may fall into the belief, that they are among the condemned reprobate, and pine away, deprived of their senses, in a state of irretrievable misery and despair? ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... conspiracy was all planned; each one's part had been carefully mapped out, and a thousand times Virginia had gone through the ordeal of this day in her mind. Yet now the beating in her temples confused her thoughts. She was afraid that she should forget, that she should make some irretrievable blunder, and that everything would be ruined by her fault. But much might depend now upon a look or a gesture, and she held herself in a vice of self-control, fearing that her smile on greeting the courteous old Commandant was suspiciously ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... well: after thirty they cease to follow visions; they seek tangible things. . . . No, they must never meet again. It would not be wise. Her heart, lonely, disappointed, galled as it were by disillusion, might not withstand much storming. And she had no wish to add this irretrievable folly to the original blunder. Too late, too late! Decidedly they must not meet again. She ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... Is he to become a member of the luckless crews that man those dark, ill-starred ships called prisons?... I urge you, gentlemen, do not ruin this young man. For as a result of those four minutes, ruin, utter and irretrievable, stares him in the face.... The rolling of the chariot wheels of Justice over this boy began when it ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... they were able to save and withdraw all their stores, while the total of their casualties did not exceed 3,500, a very moderate loss under the circumstances. In less skillful hands the retreat might easily have developed into an irretrievable disaster. In its main object, saving Serbia from being crushed, the campaign had certainly been a failure, but this was rather the fault of the allied governments, and not because of the inefficiency of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... was now fairly cast. In a general rising lay the only hope of safety for Sharp's murderers. Desperate themselves, they determined to carry others with them along the same path, and by some signal show of defiance commit the party to immediate and irretrievable action. The occasion for this was easily found. May 29th, the King's birthday, had been, as already mentioned, appointed as a general day of rejoicing for his restoration. This had from the first given offence as well to those members of the Presbyterian Church who saw in his Majesty's return no ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... devoted to her service; and a fugitive, at the hazard of her life, driven, with a few attendants, to lurk in a corner of her kingdom. Still anxious and agitated in her retreat, she was impelled by her fears to an irretrievable step, fatal to all her future hopes. In vain her attendants, with the lords Herries and Heming, implored her on their knees not to confide in Elizabeth, her resolution was not to be shaken, and to England she fatally resolved to fly. No longer an ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... contained nothing but despair and the pain of irretrievable loss. If his brain had been completely the master of his body he would have died there, for at that moment there was no will to live. Unaware of this, his heart continued to beat and the regular motion of his lungs drew in ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... authority of this kingdom in Bengal may be traced in a great measure to that very natural source of independence. In many cases the instant removal of an offender from his power of doing mischief is the only mode of preventing the utter and perhaps irretrievable ruin of public affairs. In such a case the process ought to be simple, and the power absolute in one or in either hand separately. By contriving the balance of interests formed in the act, notorious offence, gross error, or palpable insufficiency ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... matters, and also teach you how to make new and powerful weapons, by means of which you will be able effectually to subjugate the nations which now threaten you. Say, then, will you destroy us, and so involve yourselves in irretrievable ruin? Or shall we teach you how to emerge victoriously from the coming ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... picture of old age at its best, as he smiled gallantly at the extremely pretty girl behind the table. Unlike Sylvia he knew exactly why he did not like her and he wasted no time in thinking about it. "What were you laughing about, so delightfully, as I came in, eh?" he asked, after the irretrievable first moment of joy in gratified appetite ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... every day, are dreadful to relate; and no punishment can be too great for those whose wilful conduct becomes the occasion of such catastrophes. Parents are deeply laden with guilt, who by this means plunge their children into irretrievable ruin; and lovers are deserving of no forgiveness, whose treacherous conduct annihilates the hopes and even the ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... Hercules, from his place on Olympus, heard the prayer, and knowing that the decree of Fate was otherwise, answered with heavy groans and unavailing tears. These were not unseen by Jupiter, who strove to console his immortal son. "To every one," he said, "his day is fixed; a short and irretrievable term of life is given to all; but to lengthen out fame by heroic deeds is the best that man can do. Under the lofty walls of Troy many sons of gods themselves perished,—among them the heroic Sarpedon, my own offspring, perished; ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... the slow revelation in return, bringing with it all the misery of an explanation which comes too late. The question whether Miss Aldclyffe were schemer or dupe was almost passed over by Cytherea, under the immediate oppressiveness of her despair in the sense that her position was irretrievable. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... geographical position the one where British and French troops could most easily be assembled, and it was the one on which a serious defeat to the enemy necessarily threatened that enemy with a grave, if not an irretrievable, disaster. It is true that for the comparatively short period during which Russia really counted, that is to say during the early months before Russian munitions gave out, the Eastern Front—the Poland Front—was a weak point for the Germans. But ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Mrs. Yeobright went in, and Venn sadly retraced his steps into the heath. When he had again regained his van he lit the lantern, and with an apathetic face at once began to pull off his best clothes, till in the course of a few minutes he reappeared as the confirmed and irretrievable reddleman that he ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... said she, smiling at him. "Money matters can always be arranged somehow or other; nothing is irretrievable ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... least analogy to each other. In order to the forming a right judgment, it is absolutely necessary to observe this distinction, which will effectually secure you from the dangerous error of taking the shadow for the substance, an irretrievable mistake, pregnant with innumerable ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... acute. He drank a little coffee, and then went upstairs to see his wife. Outside the bedroom door he stood hesitant. A desolating sadness of disappointment suddenly surged over him. He had destroyed his ambitions, he had transformed all his life, by a single unreflecting and irretrievable impulse. What he had done was terrific, and yet he had done it as though it were naught ... The mood passed as suddenly as it had come, and left him matter-of-fact, grim, as it were swimming strongly on and with the mighty current ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... a fellow able to scintillate like that at his own wedding," remarked the son of the Bishop to the best man's sister. "Usually they are so completely dashed by their own temerity in getting into such an irretrievable situation that they sit with their ears drooping and their eyes bleared. Do you suppose it's getting married in tennis clothes that's ...
— The Indifference of Juliet • Grace S. Richmond
... veil, in fact. You must give me time to become accustomed to a whole heap of things: if we were to do anything suddenly now, we might blunder into some great mistake, perhaps irretrievable. I must train myself by degrees for another kind of life altogether; and I am going to surprise you, Keith—I am indeed. If papa takes me to the Highlands next year, you won't recognize me at all. I am going to read up all about the Highlands, and learn the tartans, and the names of ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... of them gradually, with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only from his silence. He returned to that city where he had lorded it in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his friend's successes; his laugh still ready, but with a kindlier music; and over all his thoughts the shadow of that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who perceived he had not long to live, told him the reason was very plain: the air of Montpellier was too sharp for his lungs, which required a softer climate. "Then you're a sordid villain (cried the young man) for allowing me to stay here till my constitution is irretrievable." He set out immediately for Tholouse, and in a few weeks died in ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow could there have been a more terrible picture of hopeless and irretrievable defeat. In this area alone, eighty-seven guns of various calibres, and fully a thousand horse and oxen-drawn vehicles, nearly a hundred motor-lorries, cars, field-kitchens, water carts, and a mass of other impedimenta blocked the ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... buffetings of life,—not for three days, as Burke withdrew in order that he might read "Evelina," and be rested and refreshed thereby; but long enough to permit of the notion that immunity from buffetings is a possible condition of existence,—of all errors, the most irretrievable. ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... thinkers rarely succeed in becoming leaders of men. A watchword or a catchword is more potent with the people than logic, especially if this be the least metaphysical. When a political prophet arises, to stir the dreaming, stagnant nation, and hold back its feet from the irretrievable descent, to heave the land as with an earthquake, and shake the silly-shallow idols from their seats, his words will come straight from God's own mouth, and be thundered into the conscience. He will reason, teach, warn, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... irresistibly fascinating a manner that within two minutes she succeeded in not only making me feel absolutely welcome and at home in her house, but also in some subtle fashion imbued me with the conviction that, serious as my misfortune undoubtedly was, it was by no means irretrievable. We could not talk confidentially at luncheon, the servants being present, but afterward, the weather being fine and the air warm for the time of year—it was the first day of December 1903—we adjourned to the garden, and there I told my tale all over again, this time ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... accident. A young man who entered the coach at eight o'clock in the morning at Brighton took his seat perhaps opposite a young lady whom he thought pretty and interesting. When he arrived at Cuckfield he began to be in love; at Crawley he was desperately smitten; at Reigate his passion became irretrievable, and when he gave her an arm to ascend the steep ridges of Reigate Hill—a just emblem, by the way, of human life—he declared his passion, and they were married soon after. Nothing of this sort ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... emblem of "a great millstone cast into the sea," is a very striking indication of the sudden and irretrievable ruin of mystic Babylon, and contains an allusion to Jer. li. 63, 64.—The removal of "musicians, craftsmen, candles, etc.," from this devoted city, as they plainly point to the statuary, music and paintings which have attracted multitudes to the idolatry, superstition and harlotry of antichristian ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... it is all right. Life is of inestimable value, and nothing can compensate a corpse for the loss of it. Falstaff knew that, and, like the Magpie Moth, wisely counterfeited death to avoid the irretrievable step of dying. Our prudent livers display an equal wisdom, not exactly counterfeiting death, but living gingerly—living, as it were, at half-cock, lest life should go off suddenly with a flash and bang, leaving them nowhere. Of course, they are ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... field of battle and extend its front beyond that of the troops we had still in line without making the least attempt to impede its progress. The reason of Kellerman's not charging it sooner was that it was too serious a movement, and the consequences of failure would have been irretrievable: that charge, therefore, could only enter into a general combination of plans, to which he was necessarily a stranger" (Memoirs of the Duke of Rovigo, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... they attacked the entrenchments of the enemy with so much vigour that at length they forced their way into the camp of the Araucanians. Antiguenu exerted his utmost efforts to oppose the assailants; but he was at length forced along by the crowd of his soldiers, who were thrown into irretrievable confusion and fled. During the flight, he fell from a high bank into the river and was drowned. The Araucanians were defeated with prodigious slaughter, many of them perishing in the river in their attempt to escape by swimming. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... She wept for a few minutes bitterly, and without attempting to refrain from this indulgence of passion. But a moment's recollection induced her to check herself for a grief selfish and proper to her own affections, while her father and sister were plunged into such deep and irretrievable affliction. She drew from her pocket the letter which had been that morning flung into her apartment through an open window, and the contents of which were as singular as the expression was violent and energetic. "If she would save a human ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the whistling screams of the allosauri and the saurean bellows of the diplodoci rose above the shouts of the soldiery to fill the dust-laden air with a dreadful clamor. The battle now swayed critically; a feather's weight on either side and one army would roll back in red, irretrievable ruin. It was the psychological instant. Nelson sensed ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... wind-washed countryside, between Warminster, Andover, Stockbridge, and Salisbury. Yet always they will be associated in my mind with a bowing down sense of loneliness, of empty, unredeemed sadness, and of irretrievable loss. I cannot pretend that I experienced any sense of remorse or penitence, where my abortive attempt to win another man's bride was concerned. I had no such feeling. But, discreditable as that fact may be, it ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... of a woman who, of her own free will, truly loving one man whom she can marry if she will sit, deliberately gives herself to another. It is not only a folly, it is a crime, and, like most crimes, for this life, an irretrievable mistake. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... which was the most important event in George Eliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so, and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad, have taken this particular law into their own hands ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... his staunch friend Bolivar, and accepted the comparatively insignificant appointment of Minister Plenipotentiary to the Governments of Chili and Buenos Ayres. In 1829, a serious rebellion, that threatened irretrievable disasters, having broken out in the Republic of Bolivia, the friends of order appealed to their old friend General Santa Cruz as being the only man capable of re-establishing public tranquillity. His firmness and mercy had the rapid effect of calming ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... we would fain believe, when our laws may spare the life of a guilty man, and suffer him to atone for his errors or his crimes by repentance. Such a law would respect the life which can never be restored; and while another exists which casts an irretrievable stain upon our honour, there would be a law of restoration capable of raising the man sanctified by repentance to the dignity which punishment ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... actually occurred in the present instance. But to the point. I am willing to do what I can to extricate you from your situation. Your first scheme[114] I was considering; but your own impatience appears to have rendered it abortive, if not irretrievable. I will deposit in Mr. Murray's hands (with his consent) the sum you mentioned, to be advanced for the time at ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... moment of shock Mrs. Mathusek took courage and begged the gentleman to sit down. There are always two vultures hanging over the poor—death and the law; but of the two the law is the lesser evil. The former is a calamity; the latter is a misfortune. The one is final, hopeless, irretrievable; from the other there may perhaps be an escape. She knew Tony was a good boy; was sure his arrest was a mistake, and that when the judge heard the evidence he would let Tony go. Life had dealt hardly ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... one may do to his system through the practice of masturbation may not be very serious, in many cases that have come under the author's observation in which the habit has reached extreme limits, very serious, sometimes irretrievable damage has been done, yet the encouraging feature of this whole matter is, that if the adolescent youth, who is practicing this habit, is warned of its danger and stops at once absolutely, nature comes to his rescue, and gradually, step by step, but surely, rebuilds the whole fabric ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... penalty of all tender entanglements. Women treat love as if it were an extremely tenuous wire that can be drawn out indefinitely. This is a very expensive process. It costs us the most precious, the only irretrievable thing in the universe—time. And to him time was song; for money he did not care. The Lord had hallowed his lips with rhythmic speech; only in the intervals of his singing might he listen to the voice ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... brother to enter Bristol, he had given to all the diverse elements of opposition in England the only thing they still needed; a natural leadership, and from an impregnable position. Either of these mistakes alone might not have been fatal. Their coming together as they did made then irretrievable blunders. ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... you had been given special leave of forty-eight hours to make all necessary preparations, would not you have gone where your more impressionable acquaintances and friends were gathered together in the greatest numbers, informing them of the position and doing, on the strength of it, a quiet but irretrievable swank? No ostentation, mark you, and nothing approaching a boast, but just a suspicion of a brave careless laugh, a voice just slightly choked with emotion and but a formal reluctance to accept the numerous and costly gifts proffered by relatives ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... the letter in the grate. It was victory of a sort, but she realized very well that the ultimate issue was more doubtful than ever. In her room Jeanne would have time for reflection. If she chose she might easily decide upon the one step which would be irretrievable. ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... me not. It is time that this ignorance should vanish. The knowledge of me and of my actions may be of use to you. It may teach you to avoid the shoals on which my virtue and my peace have been wrecked; but to the rest of mankind it can be of no use. The ruin of my fame is, perhaps, irretrievable; but the height of my iniquity need not be known. I perceive in you a rectitude and firmness worthy to be trusted; promise me, therefore, that not a syllable of what I tell you shall ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... he had waited for this awful moment, forgetting his own misery, his own agonised feeling of an irretrievable loss, in the horrible thought of what she would endure, what she would think, when first she realised the terrible indignity, which was ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... your views now, says the planter: but for emancipation, your colonies would have sunk to irretrievable destruction. That measure has prepared the way for the coolie system; and under its operations the prosperity of your islands is on the increase. But what is the character of this coolie system, that is working such wonders? ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... and spoiled all of them. Wilhelmina still remembered how the great flood had passed the town, moving boulders as if they were pebbles; but not until it reached the place where she stood had it done irretrievable damage. The roadbed was washed out, but the streambed remained, and the banks from which to fill in more dirt; but when the flood struck the Gorge it backed up into a lake, for the narrow defile ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... invincible, now clamored for "invasion" and the capture of Washington. Apparently General Lee, too, had drunk the poison of triumph, and dreamed of occupying the national capital, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and dictating the terms of peace to a disheartened North. The fascinating scheme—the irretrievable and fatal ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... know, Sir, that I have never been faulty in my will; that ever since my calamity became irretrievable, I have been in a state of preparation; that I have the strongest assurance that the Almighty has accepted my unfeigned repentance; and that by this time you will (as I humbly presume to hope,) have been the means of adding one to the number of the blessed; you ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... but fall into heaps and gaps: Seidlitz, with a swiftness, with a dexterity beyond praise, has picked his way across that quaggy Zabern Hollow; falls, with say 5,000 horse, on the flank of this big buffalo stampede; tumbles it into instant ruin;—which proves irretrievable, as the Prussian Infantry come on ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... from it, saying, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you; while from that throne the direful thunderbolts will be hurled upon the despisers of divine grace, and they will hurry into irretrievable misery. The safety of the Christian entirely depends upon his being found 'looking unto Jesus': his glorified human body is the throne of grace—the source of all blessedness to his worshippers—the gate of heaven—the way, the truth and the life. Yes, proud nature, HE who was the babe at ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... she have sat there, pouring Oliver's coffee and talking to him about insignificant things, when her heart was bursting with this sense of something gone out of existence, with this torturing realization of the irretrievable failure ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... it goes, it confirms a general impression that Lawrence's eagerness prevented his making due allowance for the way of the "Chesapeake," causing him to overshoot his aim; an error of judgment, which the accidents to the headsails converted into irretrievable disaster. The general testimony agrees that the crew, though dissatisfied at non-receipt of pay and prize money, behaved well until the moment of boarding. Four witnesses, all officers, stated as of their own observation that the "Shannon" received several shot between wind and water, and used ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable and draws on the rest. And this is to lose consciousness of oneself. In the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is clear, strong and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that we enjoy communion ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the lean years had cost them their reputation. Each season they had needed smaller bands of "hoppers," and their standard had been lowered. It had been his habit to think of them gloomily, as of hopeless and irretrievable loss. Because this morning, for a remote reason, the pulse of life beat strong in him he was taking a new view. Might not study of the subject, constant attention and the application of all available resource to one end produce appreciable results? The idea presented itself ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is that terrible "NEXT MORNING," when reason is wide awake, upon which remorse fastens its fangs. Has a man gambled away his all, or shot his friend in a duel—has he committed a crime or incurred a laugh—it is the next morning, when the irretrievable Past rises before him like a spectre; then doth the churchyard of memory yield up its grisly dead—then is the witching hour when the foul fiend within us can least tempt perhaps, but most torment. At night we ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Darwin met with an accident of irretrievable injury to the human frame. His propensity to mechanics had unfortunately led him to construct a very singular carriage. It was a platform with a seat fixed upon a very high pair of wheels, and supported in the front upon the back of the horse, ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... discovery of a profession in the sense in which Columbus discovered America when he touched its shores. Future explorations of an indefinitely more detailed and extensive sort remain to be made. When educators conceive vocational guidance as something which leads up to a definitive, irretrievable, and complete choice, both education and the chosen vocation are likely to be rigid, hampering further growth. In so far, the calling chosen will be such as to leave the person concerned in a permanently subordinate position, executing the intelligence of others who have a calling which permits more ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... ruin. He had only to look across the floor of the House, and he could see the pallid face of that mighty statesman who lives so high in the hearts and affections of the people whom Mr. Sexton represents, and who at that moment was in his hour of agony, if not of final and irretrievable ruin. Behind the Prime Minister were other men—equally eager to hear what he had to say—that sturdy band of Radicals, mostly from Scotland, who only wanted the word to desert their own leader and follow the guidance of the Irish members. And ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... a long time in the window staring out at the fading water. The sight of it had roused her for the first time to a realization of what she had done. Even the feeling of the ring on her hand had not brought her this sharp sense of the irretrievable. For an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the lift of a broken wing. She heard the door open behind her, ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... pity,—a great pity. I have done myself an injury that is quite irretrievable;—I know that, and am prepared to bear it. I have done him, too, an injustice which I regret with my whole heart. I can only excuse myself by saying that I might have done him a ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... agitation. The train had left the metals, so to speak, and the result was confusion dire. A great shame held her, a dislocation of mind. She suffered that loneliness of soul which forms so integral a part of the misery of all apparently irretrievable disaster, whether moral or physical, and places the victim of it, in imagination at all events, rather terribly beyond ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... circumstances mistakes may easily escape notice altogether, or at all events pass unpunished, and the reputation of the leader who commits them will remain untarnished. But if he is pitted against a master of war a single false step may lead to irretrievable ruin; and he will be classed as beneath contempt for a fault which his successful antagonist may have committed with impunity ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... desire to condole with him. I expressed my regrets, therefore, as succinctly as possible, encouraging him with the hope of seeing a new covering of down before long, but delicately abstaining from any allusion to the cauda, whose loss I knew was irretrievable. To my great surprise, however, the judge answered cheerfully; discarding, for the moment, every ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... life; because it is just as possible to forfeit salvation irrecoverably, as to forfeit that earthly good which is the prize of well-doing here, with this infinite difference, that the last forfeit is not only irretrievable, but fatal; it can no more be made up for, than it can be regained. Here, then, your present condition is a type of the complete truth of the text: but there are other points, to which I alluded before, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... word is impossible to recall, how much more irretrievable the word that is printed in millions of newspapers. The name of Dyckman was a household word. It resounded now in every household throughout the country, and across the sea, where the name had become familiar in all the nations from ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... which death seems to menace irretrievable and final disaster. But it is personal love to which comes the divinest presage. Some voice says to our yearning heart, "Fear nothing, doubt nothing, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... would certainly have been given up, even if she had been mistress of Priam himself instead of Paris: the Trojan king, with all his family and all his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her; their misfortune was, that while they did not possess, and therefore could not restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the Spirit. The former class, that is psychical men, are of the earth earthy; they are, as we should say to-day, empirical, parts of a vast nature-system, doomed, as is the entire system, to constant flux and mutability and eventually to irretrievable wreck and ruin; the natural, psychical, corruptible man cannot inherit incorruption.[1] On the other hand, the pneumatical or spiritual man {xii} "puts on" incorruption and immortality. He is a member of a new order; he is "heavenly," ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... cannot be denied that there are life-long burdens and griefs,—incurable illnesses, irretrievable losses, bereavements that will never cease to be felt, and cannot be replaced. Especially in advanced years there are infirmities, disabilities, and privations, which cannot by any possibility have a resultant revenue equivalent ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... kindness, a generosity of disposition that made his influence over man or woman most perilous to both. Then he was one of the most accomplished of students in history and general letters; and to his studies he could even devote himself after irretrievable losses at play. Topham Beauclerk, after having passed the whole night with Fox at faro, saw him leave the club in desperation. He had lost enormously. Fearful of the consequences, Beauclerk followed him to his lodgings. Fox was in the drawing-room, ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... Of absolute and irretrievable black,—black's soul of black Beyond white's power to disintensify,— Of that I saw no sample: such may wreck My life and ruin my philosophy ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... she wore for him the elemental guise of a supernatural vision. When the prompter's bell tinkled and the curtain descended for the last time, he had a feeling as though the universe had collapsed in irretrievable ruin. ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... rose to confront him. Again he saw before him the irascible employer, pointing with relentless finger at the deficiency in the accounts, again he saw his weeping mother, his stern father,—the disgrace, the irretrievable past. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... not expected to find the despised "outcast" there. For once her admirable self-control was near to being shattered. If she had been permitted to exercise the right of speech at that crucial moment, she would have committed the irretrievable error of denouncing the brazen creature in the presence of disinterested persons. Afterwards she thanked her lucky stars for the circumstances which compelled her to remain angrily passive, for she was soon to realise what such an outburst would ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... fellow-citizens, these Frenchmen omitted to perceive that a great part of their devotion to Toussaint was loyalty to their race. Proceeding on this mistake, Leclerc and his council, sanctioned by the First Consul, ruined their work, lost their object, and brought irretrievable disgrace upon their names—some of which are immortalised only by the infamy of the ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... Othello comes to grief through mad jealousy. Antony fails and falls through excess of lust; Lear through trust in men, and Timon through heedless generosity. All these are separate studies of Shakespeare's own weaknesses; but the ruin is irretrievable, and reaches its ultimate in Timon. Trust and generosity, Shakespeare would like to tell us, were his supremest faults. In this he deceived himself. Neither "Lear" nor "Timon" is his greatest tragedy; but "Antony and Cleopatra," for lust was his chief weakness, and the tragedy of lust ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... being so close, yet he desired flight because it seemed to bring him aid, and to be the nearer way to safety; and he cast aside delay, which seemed to be an evil bringing not the smallest help, but perhaps irretrievable ruin. But just as he gained the threshold, the old man watching at the door smote him through the hams, and there, half dead, he tottered and fell. For the smiter thought he ought carefully to avoid lending ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... motive more palpably defined. "The Haunted Palace" is just as definite to the select reader, but Poe scarcely would have taken that subtle allegory for bald analysis. The Raven is wholly occupied with the author's typical theme—the irretrievable loss of an idolized and beautiful woman; but on other grounds, also, the public instinct is correct in ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... to herself she had no knowledge of where she had been, or for how long her mind had been astray; all was irretrievable confusion, crossed with cloud-like trails of blotted dreams, and vague survivals of gratitude for bread and pieces of money. Everything she became aware of surprised her, except the child in her arms. Her story had ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... Chaucer in Westminster Abbey is fast mouldering into irretrievable decay. A sum of One Hundred Pounds will effect a perfect repair. The Committee have not thought it right to fix any limit to the subscription; they themselves, have opened the list with a contribution from each of them of Five Shillings; but they will be ready to receive any amount, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... was so shocked that her bodily faculties seemed to have ceased, and her mind to have remained sorrowing and awake. This lapse was even worse than that of Sir Richard's son, because it seemed irretrievable. Then, too, it had happened before she knew anything about it, whereas, in the other case, she had been active, and able to expostulate and screen the young man's fall. And then, too, there was the surprise of a middle-aged woman at the lapses ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... but rather would they make, enforce, and maintain such laws themselves if absolutely free to regulate the subject? We can not afford to experiment with this subject, for when a State is once constituted the act is final and any mistake irretrievable. No compact in the enabling act could, in my opinion, be binding ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... prophet Jeremiah, but Jeremiah started his religious experience, not with a sense of individual need, but with a burning, patriotic, social passion. He was concerned for Judah. Her iniquities, long accumulating, were bringing upon her an irretrievable disaster. He laid his soul upon her soul and sought to breathe into her the breath of life. Then, when he saw the country he adored, the civilization he cherished, crashing into ruin, he was thrown back personally on God. He started with social passion; he ended with social passion ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... Moment came, with sacramental cup Lifted—and all the vault of life grew bright With tides of incommensurable light— But tremblingly I turned and covered up My face before the wonder. Down the slope I heard her feet in irretrievable flight, And when I looked again, my stricken sight Saw night and rain in a ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... it impossible to submit any longer to the insulting tyranny of Wilder; he determined, therefore, to leave, not merely the college, but also his native land, and to bury what he conceived to be his irretrievable disgrace in some distant country. He accordingly sold his books and clothes, and sallied forth from the college walls the very next day, intending to embark at Cork for—he scarce knew where—America, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... tried to stem the current of affairs, but she had proved as powerless to deflect it as a dried stick tossed on to a river in spate. And now, whether the end were ultimate happiness or hopeless, irretrievable disaster, Michael and Magda must still fight their way towards it, each alone, by the dim light of that "blind Understanding" which is all that ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... it was a false step—the first false step of his public career. When made it was irretrievable, and it ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... projecting. There are few artists who have not, at times, experienced in themselves a more than ordinary disposition or aptitude, for this operation of the mind; and it is these critical moments, which may otherwise be irretrievable, they ought particularly to improve, with as little diversion from them as possible. They should pursue a thought, or a hint of a thought, from its first crudity to ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... History at Sydney—to my great sorrow—I have gone in as a candidate for a Professorial chair at the other end of the world, Toronto in Canada. In England there is nothing to be done—it is the most hopeless prospect I know of; of course the Service offers nothing for me except irretrievable waste of time, and the scientific appointments are so few and so poor that ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... body insures health, long life and happiness. When the whole of | | the machinery, mental and physical, is clean, its strength and | | elasticity is so much better, its retentiveness is much more vivid and | | comprehensive that one is mostly spared the pain of irretrievable | | errors. | | | | If instead of exerting reflection in so critical a moment you deliver | | yourselves up to levity, sloth and slavery of habit and poison, what | | can you expect to follow? Will wisdom tread the path of folly? Can you | | thus abuse both the mind and body, and call yourselves ...
— Vanity, All Is Vanity - A Lecture on Tobacco and its effects • Anonymous
... was now become too intense for outward shew; he stood dumb and motionless, with his eyes fixed and rivetted upon her, in whose death he felt that he had sustained an irretrievable loss. We had both still hold of her hands; his mute, immovable figure looked like a statue; and I fancied that his heart was breaking. I seized him by the hand, and in the most supplicating manner implored him ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... league to enforce peace would have to begin its regime with enforcing peace on terms of the unconditional surrender of the formidable warlike nations; which could be accomplished only by the absolute and irretrievable defeat of these Powers as they now stand. The question will, no doubt, present itself, Is the end worth the cost? That question can, of course, not be answered in absolute terms, inasmuch as it resolves itself into a question of taste ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... not only held his fate in her hands, but that she possessed some unknown power over his destiny, that she knew something which, if spoken, might blast the bright promise of his life and overwhelm him in irretrievable ruin. ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... I have no wish for health without Luscinda; and since it is her pleasure to be another's, when she is or should be mine, let it be mine to be a prey to misery when I might have enjoyed happiness. She by her fickleness strove to make my ruin irretrievable; I will strive to gratify her wishes by seeking destruction; and it will show generations to come that I alone was deprived of that of which all others in misfortune have a superabundance, for to them the impossibility of being consoled is itself a consolation, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... side as indicating a closer feeling of brotherhood, a more efficient sense of neighborhood, than exists among ourselves, although, perhaps, we are more careless of a fellow-creature's ruin, because ruin with us is by no means the fatal and irretrievable event that it is ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... firmly seated, firmly established &c. v.; deep-rooted, ineradicable; inveterate; obstinate &c. 606. transfixed, stuck fast, aground, high and dry, stranded. [movable object rendered unmovable] stuck, jammed; unremovable; quiescent &c. 265; deterioration &c. 659. indefeasible, irretrievable, intransmutable[obs3], incommutable[obs3], irresoluble[obs3], irrevocable, irreversible, reverseless[obs3], inextinguishable, irreducible; indissoluble, indissolvable[obs3]; indestructible, undying, imperishable, incorruptible, indelible, indeciduous[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the ruin which threatened them. It was useless for them to go on manufacturing goods which might prove worthless at any moment; and, as their capital was already taxed to its utmost, it was plain that unless a better process should be speedily discovered, they must become involved in irretrievable disaster. Their efforts were unavailing, however. No better process was found, and the disgust of the public with their goods was soon general and unmitigable. India-rubber stock fell rapidly, and by the end of the year 1836 there was not a solvent company in the Union. The loss of the stockholders ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... the door, Mr Twemlow, attending on her, expresses his soothing hope that the condition of Mr Lammle's affairs is not irretrievable. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... seldom see Oswald, though upon good terms with him; and have seen Franklin, since Oswald's coming, but once, when he was as silent as ever, notwithstanding my reminding him of his promise; so that I cannot help thinking that business altogether irretrievable. But neither do I know what you will gain by forcing Oswald's return; indeed I am inclined to think it might be much more prudent to save appearances by leaving him here, till you shall have completed your purpose of receiving the propositions you wish or the refusal you wish from Versailles. Perhaps, ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... had precisely the opposite effect to that he had anticipated. Adam thought he perceived in them that notion of compensation for irretrievable wrong, that self-soothing attempt to make evil bear the same fruits as good, which most of all roused his indignation. He was as strongly impelled to look painful facts right in the face as Arthur was to turn away his eyes from them. Moreover, he had the wakeful suspicious pride ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... of the time I want to lie down and cry. Everything seems to me so impossible. I do not make things go very well, and I feel that my life is an absolute and irretrievable failure. Perhaps I am thankless, but I so often feel that I should like to give it up and die. However, I presume that if I could have the opportunity I should at ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Oxford has arrived, he has just left me. We have gone over the chart of the way before us, weighed the worth of every name, for and against; and, alas! I cannot but allow that all attempt to place the younger brother on the throne of the elder would but lead to bootless slaughter and irretrievable defeat." ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... obvious precautions were not taken. In truth, the separation of the allies was dictated more by political jealousy than by military motives. To these political affairs we must now allude; for they had no small effect in leading Napoleon on to an illusory triumph and an irretrievable overthrow. We will show their influence, first on the conduct of the allies, and then on ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... to his office. A cold, caused by the exposure of two nights previous, and accompanied by a rising temperature, kept him confined to his room, though not to bed. The occurrence, by maintaining the situation where it was, rendered it impossible to take any irretrievable step that day. ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... mamma and Flora. Up through the windows came the twilight and the rumble of the vast heedless city. Carlisle snapped on the lights. And then all at once, without warning, there closed down upon her an enormous depression, a sense as of standing on the brink of irretrievable disaster. Or it was as if she had run away, indeed, but had not escaped. Or as if, in cutting herself off from the past, she had cut away something important, which something here gave notice that it would not be peacefully abandoned. And mixed with this there was again that sense ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... might have been, as distinguished from that heartfelt sorrow for the man who had perished which had not been incompatible with a religious life. Recalling the Mother Superior's words of warning, she recorded her failure, as the first of its kind, and prayed that it might not be irretrievable, and that resentment and regret might ebb away and leave her again as she had been before the unforgettable voice had pierced her ears with the ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... glorious beauty, and making her aged before her time. Perchance she mourned the absence of one she loved, and was wearied with anxiety for his return; perhaps the canker-worm of remorse was at work within her, for a fault committed and irretrievable; perhaps she was the victim of lawless outrage, a captive against her will; perhaps she had been severed from all she loved on earth, and the bright hopes of life had been blasted for ever. At last she closed ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... readers on reading thus far will, I am afraid, prepare themselves for the arrival of a faithful cashier with news of irretrievable ruin, or a mysterious and cynical stranger threatening disclosures of ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... what I do, and, after all, perhaps, lose my character.' Again: 'Our affairs are in a more distressed, ruinous, and deplorable condition than they have been since the commencement of the war,' and he adds that unless congress comes valiantly to his assistance at once the country will sink into irretrievable ruin. Again he writes: 'Every idea you can form of our distresses will fall short of the reality. I have almost ceased to hope.' These were dark days, and the winds of adversity were beating mercilessly against the man into whose hands had been placed the cares of the great ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... source; that no man who is ignorant of Arabic or Sanskrit can write Hindustani or Bengali with elegance, or purity, or precision, and that the condemnation of the classical languages to oblivion would consign the dialects to utter helplessness and irretrievable barbarism."—H. H. Wilson, Asiatic Journal, Jan., 1836; ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... equally disastrous to the invaders. As for the despots of Ionia, who had through selfishness lost the chance of freeing their native land, they were to live to see, before many years, Ionia desolated by the Persian tyrant whom they had saved from irretrievable ruin. We shall tell how this came about, as a sequel to the story of ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... The only way of hastening his return to England and to Miss Elmslie, who was pining for that return, was the way I had taken. It was not my fault that a disaster which no man could foresee had overthrown all his projects and all mine. But, now that the calamity had happened and was irretrievable, how, in the event of his physical recovery, was his moral malady to ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... down the paper with a thrill of horror. Poor Edie! How absolutely his own small difficulties with Lord Exmoor faded out of has memory at once in the face of that terrible, irretrievable calamity. Harry dead! The hope and mainstay of the family—the one great pride and glory of all the Oswalds, on whom their whole lives and affections centred, taken from them unexpectedly, without a chance of respite, without a moment's warning! Worst of all, they would probably ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... turned to cultivation of their crops in the hope that a bountiful nature might restore somewhat their broken fortunes. The bitter cup had been drained. The cause of the planters had gone down in irretrievable disaster. For forty years they had contended with their rivals of the North, and having staked all on the wager of battle they had lost. Just four years before they had entered with unsurpassed zeal ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... shattered with feeble and inexpressive demands, but all the same it is gone, and it is unreturning. Whether freighted richly with the essential, or merely burdened with the ineffectual, it is equally irretrievable. ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... to how to lead it. Your work is all that I can claim to criticise. Of course I see, with Major Hunt, the difficulty that will arise over the lady's remaining in this small station, where her presence must become known to the Staff. If you are both resolved on taking the irretrievable step it would be wiser to defer it until you were elsewhere. I don't offer to blame either of you; for I don't know ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... glad to hear it. But, speak to me freely, Charles: do not conceal the real state of your affairs from your best friend. What tendency could this have but to plunge you into irretrievable ruin?" ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... Gaston—better than that. By means of the duke I will discover the place of your exile, and instead of joining you there, I will be there to meet you. As you step from the carriage which brings you, you shall find me waiting to soften the pain of your adieux to France; and then, death alone is irretrievable; later, the king may pardon you; later still, and the action punished to-day may be looked upon as a deed to be rewarded. Then we will return; then nothing need keep us from Bretagne, the cradle of our love, the paradise of our memories. Oh!" continued she, in an accent ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... would tramp pleasantly along the river trail. Of course, a dry year would make necessary a larger crew and more labour; of course, a big flood might sweep the logs past all defences into the lake for an irretrievable loss. But such floods come once in a century, and even the dryest of dry years could not now hang the drive. As Orde sat in his buckboard, ready to go into town for a first glimpse of Carroll in more than two months, he gazed with an immense satisfaction over the broad river moving brown and ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... image, effigy imaginary, imaginative impending, approaching imperious, imperial imply, infer in, into inability, disability ingenious, ingenuous intelligent, intellectual insinuation, innuendo instinct, intuition involve, implicate irony, sarcasm irretrievable, irreparable ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... captive and drawn him by an ever-shortening cord of attraction, yet she was sure that none other had any influence over him, that, as he had looked at her in those short-lived days of his first devotion, he looked at no other. The way was clear yet. There was nothing irretrievable, nothing irrevocable, which would for ever stain the memory and tarnish the gold of life when the perfect love should be minted. Whatever faults of mind or disposition or character were his— or hers—there were no sins against the pledges they had made, nor the bond into which they had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... were safe from their attacks, perished from age, seems clearly made out. Goats were introduced in the year 1502; eighty-six years afterwards, in the time of Cavendish, it is known that they were exceedingly numerous. More than a century afterwards, in 1731, when the evil was complete and irretrievable, an order was issued that all stray animals should be destroyed. It is very interesting thus to find, that the arrival of animals at St. Helena in 1501, did not change the whole aspect of the island, until a period ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the woods side by side, the two officers ignored each other; this not so much from inimical intention as from a very real indifference. All their store of moral energy was expended in resisting the terrific enmity of nature and the crushing sense of irretrievable disaster. To the last they counted among the most active, the least demoralized of the battalion; their vigorous vitality invested them both with the appearance of an heroic pair in the eyes of their comrades. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... letter reached England, she would, in all human probability, be dead. It conveyed the impression of a soul resigned indeed, and humble, but crushed down to the very earth with the load of mysterious bereavement, and irretrievable sorrow. ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... about them, and cared less: we met during the holidays, and separated, without regret, after a month's quarrelling. When I went to sea, I ceased to think about them, concluding there was no love lost; but when I found that death had for ever robbed me of two of them, I felt the irretrievable loss. I reproached myself with my coldness and neglect; and the affection I had denied to them, I heaped threefold on my remaining sister: even before I had ever seen her on my return, the tide of fraternal love flowed towards her with an uncontrollable violence. ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... envy. The cool bracken grove on the top of the hill, with the oak boughs for roof, where the pigeons were raising an endless wedding hymn, and the autumn, humming, whispered to the ears of lovers in the fern, while the deer stole by. The bracken grove of irretrievable delights, of golden minutes in the long marriage of heaven and earth! The bracken grove, sacred to stags, to strange tree-stump fauns leaping around the silver whiteness of a birch-tree nymph at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... The enemy charged us, and for the first time were repulsed. We pressed on determined to win. The success of the morning turned to a most irretrievable and disastrous defeat to the enemy. They were completely routed, suffering a terrible slaughter. Twenty-four guns captured in the morning were retaken, besides a large number of prisoners, and most of the enemy's artillery, numbering over fifty pieces. Our Regiment took 16 officers and 34 men ...
— History of the 159th Regiment, N.Y.S.V. • Edward Duffy
... lady—greatly like. Your mother was very kind to me, and I fear I abused her kindness; abused it by misunderstanding it. There was a great deal of misunderstanding; and I was proud, and my friend was proud, and so the misunderstanding continued, until now it has become irretrievable." ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... married life March had learned not to censure the irretrievable; but this was just what his wife ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... rooting up the dead man from the earth which covers him, nor that the executioner should now brand the mouldering bones with dishonour. No; the beloved of my soul will weep for me as one who has fallen innocent, and time will soften her sorrow; but how irretrievable a shock would it be if she learnt of the fearful and diabolical deeds of her ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... that death shall put the final seal of irretrievable ruin on all this uncompleted effort? Can it be that the grave shall whelm all this unuttered love in endless silence? Ah, what a wild waste of precious treasure, what a mad destruction of fair designs, what an utter failure, life would be if death ...
— What Peace Means • Henry van Dyke
... left the room to fulfil the Governor's instructions, while Basilivitch remounted his horse and returned to his kretschma, to serve, with smiling countenance and friendly mien, the men whom he had devoted to irretrievable ruin. ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... set I left Brakfontein and started on my road to Kalkkrans, with the firm determination to force my way through there, cost what it might. If I failed in the attempt I knew that it would mean an irretrievable loss, for not only should I myself be captured, but also President Steyn and the ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... more light upon earth than any ten, and that the eyes of all terrestrial stargazers are upon us. Adventurers, pretenders, and quacks, are our meteors, our aurorae, our comets, our falling-stars, shooting athwart our hemisphere, and exhaling into irretrievable darkness: our tuft-hunters are satellites of Jupiter, invisible to the naked eye: our clear frosty atmosphere that sets us all a-twinkling is prosperity, and we, too have our clouds that hide us from the eyes of men. The noonday of our own bustling time beholds us dimly; but posterity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... it come! to this!—Treacherous, contemptible spirit, and thou hast concealed it from me!—Stand, then,—stand! Roll the devilish eyes wrathfully in thy head! Stand and defy me with thine intolerable presence! Imprisoned! In irretrievable misery! Delivered up to evil spirits, and to condemning, unfeeling Man! And thou hast lulled me, meanwhile, with the most insipid dissipations, hast concealed from me her increasing wretchedness, and suffered her to go ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... father hath placed me in a situation wherein, from the magnitude and delicacy of the concern, every hour may afford an important crisis; and in which a single omission, a momentary absence, may entail consequences irretrievable, in matters wherein the result to me and mine is to be conjoined reputation and affluence, or disgrace and penury. I cannot, under impression of such alternatives, delegate an iota of conduct to a second person. I have laid down ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... nods, but Furneaux had erred three times in as many seconds. He had switched on the light prematurely, and his ready banter had warned the parricide that a well-built scheme was crumbling to irretrievable ruin. Moreover, he had underrated the nervous forces of the man thus trapped and outwitted. Fenley knew that when his feet touched the earth he would begin a ghastly pilgrimage to the scaffold. Two yellow orbs of light were already springing up the slight incline from the rock, betokening the ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... was followed by a full acknowledgment. Nothing but this hostile conduct would have afforded so indubitable a proof of the thing impugned. While the ancient patriarchates which had formed the substructure of the triple dais on which the Apostolic See rested were falling into irretrievable confusion, while the new State-made patriarch at Constantinople was trying to nominate and, if he could, to consecrate his elders and superiors at Alexandria and Antioch, who descended from Peter, the essential ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... peasants' insurrections in Germany alone, but as well the excesses of the iconoclasts, and the imprudence of the authors of the famous placards of 1534, although their acts were distinctly repudiated by the vast majority of the French reformers, inflicted irretrievable damage, by furnishing plausible arguments to those who accused the Protestants of being authors or abettors of ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... believed that an immediate marriage would, from every point of view, be best. It was not advisable that it should be long delayed, if to happen at all, for the health of Miss Barrett was so poor that another winter in London might, probably would, mean irretrievable harm. ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... conscious of the crime he was about to commit against discipline; as a faithful subject, he felt that he ought to commit it if he wished to avoid plunging a corps of ten thousand men, belonging to your majesty alone, into utter and irretrievable destruction." ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... Repented soon severely, and himself Sunk in his guilty solitude, devoid Of friends, of succor, hopeless and forlorn; While those who nursed them, to the pious task Roused by their prayers, with piteous moans commixt, Fell irretrievable: the best by far, The worthiest, thus most frequent met their doom. —Trans. by J. ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... that miserable sum only four thousand dollars that fellow Schwiden asked to borrow it of me for a few days, and to refuse would have been to confess all. I dared not try my credit, and I just madly took that step that proved irretrievable. I counted at the moment upon funds that were coming to me only the next week sure, I thought, as possible but the man cheated me, and our embarrassments thickened from that time; that thing has been a weight oh, a weight of deadening power! round my neck ever since. I have ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... for the advanced guard of rangers were too perfect in their knowledge of woodcraft to lead the whites into any situation that shut off escape. The Shawanoes knew enough of Kenton, Boone and their rangers to hold them in respect, and not presume upon their committing any irretrievable error. ...
— The Phantom of the River • Edward S. Ellis
... doubt, and what remained to be done presented no difficulty. Nevertheless, it was essential that he should perform these final actions with promptness, decision and infallible perspicacity. The smallest blunder was irretrievable. Lupin knew this; but his strangely lucid brain had allowed for every contingency. And the movements and words which he was now about to make and utter were all fully prepared ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... did ye do unto me than all manslaughter; the irretrievable did ye take from me:—thus do I speak unto you, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... progressively to the needs of his situation. He cursed Archie for a cold-hearted, unfriendly, rude, rude dog; and himself still more passionately for a fool in having come to Hermiston when he might have sought refuge in almost any other house in Scotland. But the step, once taken, was practically irretrievable. He had no more ready money to go anywhere else; he would have to borrow from Archie the next club-night; and ill as he thought of his host's manners, he was sure of his practical generosity. Frank's resemblance to Talleyrand strikes me as imaginary; but at least ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... select my pleasures with care, that I may not plunge into joyful moments that are irretrievable. May I indulge in the pleasures that bring happiness and not weariness. Grant that I may have the honor to protect others from harm and loss, as I engage in my pleasures ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... statement of my present situation; it is, as I before told your Lordship, in every respect an untenable one. I must relinquish it, and throw myself an outcast on society. Can you, will you, my Lord, exert your influence to save me from irretrievable ruin? Can you, my Lord, in any possible way, afford employment to me? Can you take me into your service—a young man, not totally destitute of talents, eager to exert them, and willing to do anything or be anything in his power? If you can, my Lord, I will promise to serve you not servilely, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron |
