"Lacerate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... say, that my mind is incapable of feeling a greater degree of moral certainty, than that the people of Ireland are innocent of causeless discontent and of ingratitude; and that all the evils which now lacerate that unhappy country, (for the mere suppression of present discontents will not end the danger,) and threaten the mutilation of the empire, are the necessary and inevitable effects of the wicked system adopted by the weak, hot-headed, ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... the clouds overhead, since those words "two or three times" carved, as it were, a cross upon the living tissues of his heart. A strange thing, indeed, that those words, "two or three times," nothing more than a few words, words uttered in the air, at a distance, could so lacerate a man's heart, as if they had actually pierced it, could sicken a man, like a poison that he had drunk. Instinctively Swann thought of the remark that he had heard at Mme. de Saint-Euverte's: "I have never seen anything to beat it since the table-turning." The agony that he ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... where they were born. How strangely does it remind us of the poor shipwrecked mariner, who, touching in the midst of the storm the shore, lays hold of it, but is borne seaward by the receding wave; but struggling back, torn and lacerate, he grasps again the rock, with bleeding hands, and still clings to it, as a last and forlorn hope. Nor is this to be wondered at. Perhaps it was the home of his childhood—the habitation of his fathers for past generations—the ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... sunk on their knees; Jack alone remained standing at the bedside of his mother. The Jack of the past had entirely disappeared; he was somewhat pale, very grave, but collected, firm, and resolute. It was, perhaps, the first instance on record of a son being called upon to lacerate the body of his mother. But the moment that God imposed such a task upon one of His creatures, it is God himself that becomes ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... simply inherited the custom, not created it, while Cornell and his associates, having "Hank" Smith in mind, declared it impossible to avoid the custom without destroying the committee. To some of the Conkling leaders this seemed unnecessarily severe. Having showed their teeth they hesitated to lacerate the party, especially after the mad rush to the winning side had given them an overwhelming majority. At last, it fell to Hamilton Ward, a friend of the Senator, for six years a member of Congress, a forcible speaker, and still a young man of nerve, who was to ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... your beggar-clothes. I forgot to lacerate your beaver hats, but that is soon done. Well, what do you ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... was this sense of undefined dread that came upon me and would not let me rest? Why did I move from room to room? and what was goading me? Something was stirring like a blind creature across my brain, and it was too hideous to confront. Why should I confront it? Why scare one's soul and lacerate one's heart at every dark fear that peeps through the door of imagination, when experience teaches us that out of every hundred such dark fears ninety-nine are sure to ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... knows where you are now?" said her faithful maid, whose tears were flowing. "Perchance some enchanter compelled you to leave your palace through a spell in order to work his odious will on you. He will lacerate your fair body, will draw your heart out through a cut like that made by the dissectors, will throw your remains to the ferocious crocodiles, and on the day of reunion your mutilated soul will ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... friend, the Rev. Doctor Heavysterne from the Low Countries, had sustained much injury by sitting down suddenly and incautiously on three ancient calthrops, or craw-taes, which had been lately dug up in the bog near Bannockburn, and which, dispersed by Robert Bruce to lacerate the feet of the English chargers, came thus in process of time to endamage the sitting part of ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... her children, and harsh with her servants. In all ranks of her acquaintance (of course below that of a countess) she visits the slightest dereliction from female propriety with unrelenting bitterness. Woe be to the trespasser, high or low! The weapon is always ready to probe and gash and lacerate; the lash is constantly raised, "swift to smite and never to spare." But who would venture to speak a word against the decorum of Lady Straitlace? If she goes out in the dark, 'tis to visit a sick friend; if she ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... Oh, Cassy, Cassy, why are you such a girl? Why will you be so awfully headstrong?" But she hugged and kissed me. As I felt the irregular beating of her heart, a pain smote me. What if she should not live long? Was I not a wicked fool to lacerate myself with an intangible trouble—the ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... Some persons have imagined that this is done by a blow of the paw, but this is an error. The tiger does not usually strike (like the lion), but it merely seizes with its claws, and uses them to clutch firm hold, and to lacerate its victim. I have seen several examples of the tiger's attack upon man, and in no instance has the individual suffered from the shock of any blow; the tiger has seized, and driven deeply its claws into the flesh, and with this ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... succession. This amusing but disgraceful feud was burlesqued in a farce called "Contretemps, or The Rival Queens," which was performed at Heidigger's theatre. Faustina as the Queen of Bologna and Cuzzoni as Princess of Modena were made to seize each other by the hair, and lacerate each other's faces. Handel looks on with cynical attention, and calmly orders that the antagonists be "left to fight it out, inasmuch as the only way to calm their fury is ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... decks the mortar's bursting fires Sweep the full streets, and splinter down the spires. Blaze-trailing fuses vault the night's dim round, And shells and langrage lacerate the ground; Till all the tented plain, where heroes tread, Is torn with crags and cover'd with the dead. Each shower of flames renews the townsmen's woe, They wail the fight, they dread the cruel foe. Matrons in crowds, while tears bedew ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... stranger's hand A task as much within your own command, That God and nature, and your interest too, Seem with one voice to delegate to you? Why hire a lodging in a house unknown For one whose tenderest thoughts all hover round your own? This second weaning, needless as it is, How does it lacerate both your heart and his The indented stick that loses day by day Notch after notch, till all are smooth'd away, Bears witness long ere his dismission come, With what intense desire he wants his home. But though ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... they are forbidden pasture: either pining in progressive starvation, he must stand; or, in mad exasperation, must rush to and fro, leaping against sheer stone-walls, which he cannot leap over, which only lacerate and lame him; till at last, after thousand attempts and endurances, he, as if by miracle, clears his way; not indeed into luxuriant and luxurious clover, yet into a certain bosky wilderness where existence is still possible, and Freedom, though waited on by Scarcity, is not without sweetness. ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of ingratitude. For I am not a fool; I know my faults, I know they are ineluctable, I know they are growing on me. I know I may offend again, and I warn you of it. But the next time I offend, tell me so plainly and frankly like a lady, and don't lacerate my heart and bludgeon my vanity with imaginary faults of your own and purely gratuitous penitence. I might suspect ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... determined to be happy, to seek the good of every thing. This should be the first precept in their moral mode, the first article in their creed, the first resolution demanded by their religion. We have no confidence in a gloomy religion. Human souls were never made to do penance, to lacerate and torment themselves in worship or duty. Every truth in the theology of the Bible beams with a glory that ought to illuminate our minds with a light almost divine. Every principle of "the glorious Gospel of the ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... fight round Alcathous with long spears, whilst the brass resounded horribly on the breasts of them, aiming at each other through the crowd. But two warlike men, conspicuous among the rest, AEneas and Idomeneus, equal to Mars, longed to lacerate each other's flesh with the ruthless brass. But AEneas first hurled his javelin at Idomeneus; but he, perceiving it opposite, avoided the brazen spear; and the spear of AEneas sank quivering into the earth; ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... come from her," he cried, "she does not insult, she does not lacerate the heart, she would not purposely humiliate me. No, this last degradation could emanate only from one who has the soul of a servant. This is revenge! He hates me, but why? Good God! Why? I've done nothing to him," and the old man groaned ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... flirtation with Amy with jubilant self-satisfaction. And he kept drifting about to find Becky and lacerate her with the performance. At last he spied her, but there was a sudden falling of his mercury. She was sitting cosily on a little bench behind the schoolhouse looking at a picture-book with Alfred Temple—and so absorbed were they, and their heads so close together over the book, that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... that in condemning ourselves to desperate dullness we paid too high a price for the good opinion of our French friends. If they were really shocked at our levity in playing games during the war, it would have been better to lacerate their feelings a little. They would very soon have got accustomed to our ways and come to regard our excitement over a League match as nothing worse than a curious ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... bloody body ceased its titanic struggles. It stiffened spasmodically, twitched and was still, yet the bulls continued to lacerate it until the beautiful coat was torn to shreds. At last they desisted from sheer physical weariness, and then from the tangle of bloody bodies rose a crimson giant, straight as ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... with a degree of vigour that was absolutely awful—for Olaf's conscience was a tender one; and it is a strange, almost paradoxical, fact, that the tenderer a conscience is the more wrathfully does it stab and lacerate the heart of its owner when ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... so unexpected that it almost startled the man from Georgia. He pulled out one hand slowly, that a sudden jerk might not lacerate his wrist. Then he pulled out the other, resumed his shirt and hat, picked up the imaginary weight, and shuffled along slowly after ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... o'clock and at a quarter past eight Robinson was not there. Crowdy, not wishing to lacerate his foe till that foe should be there to feel the wounds, sat silent in his usual seat. Pancabinet, who understood well the beauty of silence, would not begin the fray. Buggins was ever ready to talk, but ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... involve a certain conscious continuity and organisation in the state not necessary for animal existence. It is not for man's interest to live unless he can live in the spirit, because his spiritual capacity, when unused, will lacerate and derange even his physical life. The brutal individualist falls into the same error into which despots fall when they declare war out of personal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, not discerning their country's interests, which they might have ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... fractured bone ends were situated too deeply to take part in the actual laceration of the skin, while the force transmitted to the bone fragments, although sufficient to cause them to widely destroy the first soft tissues met with, did not suffice to cause them to burst or lacerate the skin widely. ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... trusted, and one which she could not believe Mary would have withheld from her; and so, gauging her child's feelings by her own, she steadfastly refused to look at her lest the shocked surprise in her eyes might lacerate the girl she loved, and who she knew must at the instant be in a sufficient agony—— Undoubtedly the man was suggesting that he wanted to marry her daughter, and the unexpectedness of such a proposal left her mentally gaping; but that there must have been some preliminaries of meeting and ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... and that there are many with a superficial knowledge of the Scriptures and with no knowledge of science who would fain arrogate to themselves the power of decreeing upon all questions of nature. As St. Jerome writes: "The talking old woman, the dotard, the garrulous sophist, all venture upon, lacerate, teach, before they have learnt. Others, induced by pride, dive into hard words, and philosophate among women touching the Holy Scriptures. Others (oh, shameful!) learn of women ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... bitterness. We are dissatisfied with ourselves, and with others. We suffer, and feel at the same time that our suffering ought to increase, or at least terminate in a violent explanation, by which one of those two sentiments that lacerate the heart must ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... that has a difficult case will not only make preparations and adjustments before he begins to probe, lacerate, or cauterize, but will sometimes administer an opiate; to stupefy that sensibility which he apprehends is too keen. Glibly pursued much the same method; and, having exhausted nearly all his art, till he found he had produced as great a propensity to compliance and conciliation as he could reasonably ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... because every duty is a limitation of some power. Indeed, arbitrary power is so much to the depraved taste of the vulgar, of the vulgar of every description, that almost all the dissensions which lacerate the commonwealth are not concerning the manner in which it is to be exercised, but concerning the hands in which it is to be placed. Somewhere they are resolved to have it. Whether they desire it to be vested in the many or the few depends with ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... witness to untold sufferings which cruel, vindictive fathers have visited upon their helpless children? Who ever saw a human being that would not abuse unlimited power? Base and ignoble must that man be who, let the provocation be what it may, would strike a woman; but he who would lacerate a trembling child is unworthy the name of man. A mother's love can be no protection to a child; she can not appeal to you to save it from a father's cruelty, for the laws take no cognizance of the mother's most grievous wrongs. Neither at ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... slight, to neglect; feeble. some, a part; a portion. sleight, dexterity. tale, that which is told. soul, the immortal spirit. tail, terminal appendage. sole, bottom of the foot. tare, allowance in weight. sore, a hurt; painful. tear, to rend; to lacerate. ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... sweet stillness of summer-scented noons, in the solemn quiet of autumn nights. Her days were beset with visions like these—visions of a cool, quiet, tranquil world; of conditions of peace; of yearnings satisfied; of toil that did not lacerate. Yes! that world was, somewhere. Her heart was convinced of it, as her father's had been convinced of the reality of paradise. That which she had never been, that which she could not be now—it must exist somewhere. Singularly childish it seemed ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... with a shudder the sickening details of the African huntsman approaching behind the retiring animal, and of the torture inflicted by the shower of bullets which tear up its flesh and lacerate its flank and shoulders.[1] ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... "travelling between their own emptiness and Christ's fulness"—their own weakness and Christ's strength. But when the exigency comes, thou mayest safely trust an Almighty arm to bear thee through! Is there now some "thorn in the flesh" sent to lacerate thee? Thou mayest have been entreating the Lord for its removal. Thy prayer has, doubtless, been heard and answered; but not in the way, perhaps, expected or desired by thee. The "thorn" may still be left to goad, the trial may still be left to buffet; but "more grace" has ...
— The Faithful Promiser • John Ross Macduff
... the grasp of the forceps, the fluoroscope will not show whether there may not be included in the forceps' grasp a bronchial spur or other tissue, the tearing of which may be fatal. Therefore traction must not be sufficient to lacerate tissue. If the foreign body does not come readily it must be released, and a new grasp may then be taken. All of the cautions in faulty seizure already mentioned, apply with particular force to fluoroscopic bronchoscopy. The fluoroscope is of aid in finding foreign bodies ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... with their lithe brown muscular bodies, were three of these horrible larvae, their great jaws buried deep in his flesh and sucking for dear life. They had the grip of bulldogs, and Mr. Carrington's efforts to detach the monsters from his face had only served to lacerate the flesh to which it had attached itself, and streak face and neck and ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... prayers to his; share with him thy counsels: so that any prosperity which I may earn may redound to thy glory. Do not woo me in the only fashion in which I may not be won. Thine am I already in love, if thou sendest none of thy soldiers to lacerate my limbs. For if Africa has deserved through thee to recover freedom, it were hard that I should from the same hand lose that freedom which I have ever possessed. Control the emotions of anger, oh illustrious ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... "Why should I lacerate their little souls with a useless leave-taking? Go to them and comfort them; divert their minds with an ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg |
