"Tragically" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steadily on from note to note as she listened... no trills and no tune... saying something. It stood in the air. All the audience were saying it. And then the fair-haired woman had sung the second verse as though it was something about herself—tragically... tragic muse.... It was not her song, standing there in the velvet dress.... She stopped it from going on. There was nothing but the movement of the lace round her shoulders and chest, her expanded neck, quivering, and ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... a soul," I whispered, tragically, "but eggs, and eggs alone, are turning my love for my sister into bitterest hate. She stalks me the whole day long, forcing egg mixtures down my unwilling throat. She bullies me. I daren't put out my hand suddenly without knocking over liquid refreshment in ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... Eternal Anarch, with his old waggling addle-head full of mere windy rumor, and his old insatiable paunch full of mere hunger and indigestion tragically blended, and the hissing discord of all the Four Elements persuasively pleading to him;—he, set to choose, would be very apt to vote for such a set of demigods to you.—Carlyle's ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... suppose anybody has been back in the room since we got up." And I was downright scared, she looked at me so strangely and began to tremble all over. "What IS the matter?" I cried. "Do come into the house again!" But she only grasped my arm and said, tragically: ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... said Amoret, tragically. 'It's impossible to suggest any revision in the marriage system that isn't instantly quashed by the ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... which, one above either ear, was a great scarlet and black wing, like that of a flamingo, beckoned the two prisoners forth. Hitherto they had been treated fairly well, having been supplied with three good meals per day; but no food was now offered them, and both thought the omission tragically ominous. ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... Barney, in his moment of doubt, had spoken more soundly than he had imagined when he had said that it was easier to fool a man about a woman than it was to fool a woman. How tragically true that was! While trying to learn to be a lady by working in smart shops, she had learned that the occasional man who had ventured in after woman's gear was hopelessly ignorant and bought whatever ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... not one of his quiet days which is dull. You will find in them a love-story not made up, the coup-de-foudre, the lightning-stroke of Spanish love; and you will marvel how a spell so sudden and vehement can be at the same time so tragically delicate. You will find there landladies devoured with jealousy, astute housekeepers, delightful boys, wise peasants, touchy shopkeepers, all the cosas de Espana—and, in addition, the pale girl Rosario. I recommend that pathetic and silent victim of fate to your benevolent compassion. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... children!" he continued tragically. "Why did you knock at this unhappy door and ask your foolish question here? Are there no other houses in Cirencester? No ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... after year, has always done what she's told,—when she was told,—and the exact way she was told,—without questioning anything, without protesting anything, without supplementing anything with some disastrous original conviction of her own—and look at her now!" Tragically the Superintendent rubbed her hand across her worried brow. "Coffee, you said it was?" she asked skeptically. "Are there any special ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... tragically. "They come!" for footsteps were heard ascending the staircase, and the assistants flew to their posts, while the hostess endeavoured to hum a tune in a light and ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... by inches to keep what bores her to death to have—a social position in Endbury's two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord's sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the time when Lydia's got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that's what she wants? It's like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... time which hurries us so tragically along; the eternal drudge and drone, now bursting into fiery flame like those brief balls of yellow among green leaves (she was looking at orange trees); kisses on lips that are to die; the world turning, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... three weeks to find out why your books don't balance, and to prove that you are not a defaulter; the time is up—find me the missing property or you go to prison as a thief." Bookkeeper: "I have found it." "Where?" Bookkeeper (sternly—tragically): "In the bridegroom's pile!—behold the thief—see him blench and tremble!" [Sensation.] Paul Hoch: Lost, lost!"—falls over the cow in a swoon and is handcuffed. Gretchen: "Saved!" Falls over the calf in a swoon of joy, but is caught in the arms of Hans Schmidt, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... I made sure of was that the two deaths which had followed his so tragically had awakened on all sides the deepest interest and pity, but nothing more. That although the general features of Mrs. Pollard's end were well enough known, no whisper of suspicion had been breathed against her or hers, that showed in the faintest way ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... General, you are so tragically sincere, but in Italy we are a race of actors. The King, the Parliament, the ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Coolly had set forth what was practically his own experience in its account of a heroine—not hero—who leaves her native farm to go first to a country college and then to Chicago to pursue a wider life, torn constantly between a passion for freedom and a loyalty to the father she must tragically desert. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... big gun capable of throwing a thirty-pound shell and it gave the besiegers a big and destructive surprise. This gun, which was called "Long Cecil," was built and booming in exactly twenty-eight days. Tragically enough, Labram was killed by a Boer shell while shaving in his room at the Grand Hotel exactly a week after the first ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... in realization of his lapse, Terry had sprung astraddle the corner of the billiard table, where, absurdly solemn, he declaimed tragically, combing the classics for sepulchral passages, plunging the intent listeners into deepest melancholy but concluding with a droll extemporization that swept them from verge of ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... honest. But it will not bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience. Even before the lowest of all tribunals,—before a court of law, whose business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand miles of right, but to withhold them from going so tragically wrong that they will pull down the whole jointed fabric of society by their misdeeds—even before a court of law, as we begin to see in these last days, our easy view of following at each other's tails, alike to good and evil, is beginning to be reproved and punished, and declared no honesty ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Miss H. (tragically). Look at this room,—look at this room! It is a disgrace to a Christian community! Think of the breakfast we had—or rather, that we didn't have! And yesterday! And now you down sick—down sick! Does it take a month to graduate? (dusts an upholstered chair vigorously). It's such ...
— The Sweet Girl Graduates • Rea Woodman
... and thrift in the young man's composition so commanded his heart that Farfrae could play upon him as on an instrument. So thoroughly subdued was he that he remained on the sacks in a crouching attitude, unusual for a man, and for such a man. Its womanliness sat tragically on the figure of so stern a piece of virility. He heard a conversation below, the opening of the coach-house door, and the putting in of a ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... along with her in her wild aberrations. Her aversion to Orestes, after he had made himself the instrument of her revenge, and her awaking from her blind fury to utter helplesssness and despair, may almost be called tragically grand. The male parts, as is generally the case with Racine, are not to advantageously drawn. The constantly repeated threat of Pyrrhus to deliver up Astyanax to death, if Andromache should not listen to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... got over his republicanism. In fact Byron himself lived long enough—though he died at thirty-six—to outgrow his purely "Byronic" phase, and to smile at it as knowingly as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period as a romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats and Shelley had the good fortune to die in the fulness of their romantic glory. They did not outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder and mystery of the world. Yet many an old poet like Tennyson and Browning ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... no doubt, rather than tragically. In Modern Love and Richard Feverel he reveals himself as by no means a laughing philosopher; but he strove to make fiction a vehicle of philosophic laughter rather than of passionate sympathy. Were it not that a great poetic imagination ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... them, although never without profound emotion. Two hundred girls, ranging in years from ten to twenty, with roughly clipped hair, and the hideous gray-green checked aprons of the institution. Two hundred faces, sullen or vacuous, pretty, silly faces, hard faces, faces tragically hopeless and pale. These young things were offenders against the law, shut away here behind iron bars for the good of the commonwealth. Julia, whose life had made her wise beyond her years, watched them and pondered. Here was an almost babyish ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... stares at us from the map of Europe today. To the west of the line that tragically divides Europe we see nations continuing to act and live in the light of their own traditions and principles. On the other side, we see the dead uniformity of a tyrannical system imposed by the rulers of the Soviet Union. Nothing ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... from being blazoned abroad?" she appealed to him. "Mrs. Fulham will suffer more if he has to undergo public shame than she possibly could suffer from her own desertion. She's tragically angry, but that wouldn't keep her from wanting to protect him. We must try to prevent public exposure. It will save her the worst of torments." She brooded sadly over the idea, her aspect ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... the general tragically; and rising to the occasion, he said hurriedly: "By the way, Chris, they told me at the post-office to-day that old Dr. Smith was dead. It was only last week that I met him on his way to town with his niece's daughter, and he told me that he had never been in better ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... bring home to oneself the nature of the tragic character is to compare it with a character of another kind. Dramas like Cymbeline and the Winter's Tale, which might seem destined to end tragically, but actually end otherwise, owe their happy ending largely to the fact that the principal characters fail to reach tragic dimensions. And, conversely, if these persons were put in the place of the tragic heroes, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did we find her more comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw her. The place itself is weird and terrible—low ceiled, with the stone hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it. When Giovanna's mother, then ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Day was duly kept by the Gordon Highlanders, and Scottish compliments, appropriately seasoned with whisky—now getting tragically scarce—were passed round. Sir George White dined with the gallant regiment. Now that the town was in heliographic communication with Sir Redvers Buller, and military intelligence was received regarding the movements of the relieving ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... was doubly a pity that such a controversy had been aroused, for, as most intelligent people in Dublin had begun to admit, it had been a heroic if tragically ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... proof of the manifold interest of London, or else of our own inadequacy to our opportunities, that in all our sojourns we had never yet visited what is left of that famous Whitehall, so tragically memorable of the death of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the noble remnant of that ancient palace of the English kings which the fire of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece of Inigo Jones would be the fittest witness of its highest, saddest event. Few, if any, of the tremendous issues ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... himself the most dangerous task that any man could assume, and he had lost. But had he known in advance exactly what was going to happen to him, he would have stuck to his word, anyhow. And since there was a sporting risk attached to it, since the thing was not perfectly sure to end tragically, he probably enjoyed the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... familiar with the great writer. It is thus that we know Hugh Vereker, throughout whose twenty volumes was woven that message, or meaning, that 'figure in the carpet,' which eluded even the elect. It is thus that we know Neil Paraday, the MS. of whose last book was mislaid and lost so tragically, so comically. And it is also through Paraday's disciple that we make incidental acquaintance with Guy Walsingham, the young lady who wrote OBSESSIONS, and with Dora Forbes, the burly man with a red moustache, who wrote THE OTHER WAY ROUND. These two books are the only inferior ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... romance. Mistral's poem has, after all, scarcely any more real local color; the rustic life of the two poems is similar, allowing for geographical differences, and we carry away quite as real a picture of Hermann's home and the fields about it as of the Mas of Meste Ramoun. Mistral's idyll terminates tragically in that Mireio dies of sunstroke, leaving her lover to mourn, but the tenor of the German poem is more serious and moves us more deeply; the background of war contributes to this, but the source of our emotion is in the deep seriousness of the ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... but he will reside in Europe and wear a sword; he will enjoy some moments of good fortune. A sad legal proceeding will separate you from him, and after many great troubles, which are to befall the kingdom of the Franks, he will perish tragically, and leave you a widow with two helpless children. Your second husband will be of an olive complexion, of European birth; without fortune, yet he will become famous; he will fill the world with his glory, and will subject ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... Christian's life, she deserted her benefactor at the first sign of his coming ruin and ended her days in her native Holland, bemoaning to the last the loss of her "little dove," whom she had seen raised almost to a throne and had lost so tragically. ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... main army of five thousand men. "When your enemies blunder, {271} don't interrupt them," Napoleon is reported to have advised. If some one had not blundered badly now, it might have been a second Ticonderoga with Wolfe; but some one did blunder most tragically. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... cheek; and anon, absolutely without motive, he would rise, creep, and peep through a keyhole at Hogarth, then on stalking, bowing tiptoe, grinning a rancid grimace of stealth, get back to his seat, and read—the tutor falling over head and ears in love with his pupil: one of those passions that end tragically. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the book an Italian actress tells her friend how she played the part when she was a girl of fourteen in an open-air theater near Verona. Could a girl of fourteen play such a part? Yes, if she were not youthful, only young with the youth of the poet, tragically old ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... of a criminal are as charming to us tragically as those of a virtuous man; yet here is the idea of moral impropriety. The antagonism of his conduct to moral law, and the moral imperfection which such conduct presupposes, ought to fill us with pain. Here there is no satisfaction in the morality of his person, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... and character he is a barbarian, and a barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century. A giant with the face of a "Tartar," pitted with the small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a growling "bull-dog,"[3157] with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried under the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice and moving and acting like a combatant, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... brushing her skirts against great rows of the vagabonds sunning themselves on the banquettes, says to the police: 'Catch 'em all,' and the police catch a dozen or two, and the remaining three or four thousand overflow up and down the levee, and madame there,"—pointing tragically with the carving-knife at her—"feeds them. They won't work; they defy my overseers, and they make friends with my dogs; and you, madame, feed them before my eyes, and intimidate me when I would interfere. Tell us, please, ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... not for a moment be supposed that Mr. Opp was a stranger to the fascinations of femininity. He had been inoculated at a tender age, and it had taken so completely, so tragically, that he had crept back to life with one illusion sadly shattered, and the conviction firm within him that henceforth he was immune. His attitude toward the subject remained, however, interested, but cautious—such as a good little boy ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... take things strangely (The comic is experienced tragically. The representation is "grotesque"), to notice the unbalanced, incoherent nature of things, arbitrariness, confusion... is not, in any case, the characteristic of "style." Proof is: Lichtenstein writes poems in which the "grotesque" ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... incident occurred, which came so near to ending tragically for me, we had been trying to drive the government troops out of the cathedral of Comyagua. It was really a church and not a cathedral, but it was so much larger than any other building we had seen in Honduras ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... so silently, her one arm wound around the light tree trunk, her head leaning against it in the most matter-of-fact attitude, almost caressing the gray button ball wood, while even in the dark those two dark braids of hair were tragically outlined against the white ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... reality; they see beautifully gowned women in drawing-rooms; they see the King reviewing his regiments; they see wild and free cowboys chasing Red Indians. For two hours they live . . . and then they go out again into their world of mere existence. And it is all wrong, tragically wrong. The cinema craze means that life is too ugly to face; it means that the masses are fleeing from reality and to flee from reality is fatal. Day-dreams are laudable only when they come true. If the masses day-dreamed of an economic Utopia and forthwith set ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... let them prevail. He speaks as the stainless, incarnate Son of God. He speaks also as Captain of 'the noble army of martyrs,' and His question may be extended to include the truth that force is in its place when used against crime, but ludicrously and tragically out of place when employed against any teacher, and especially against Christianity. Christ, in His persecuted confessors, puts the same question to the persecutors which Christ in the flesh put to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... that our poor wit knows nothing off!" Cailte was a great lover of the supernatural, yet there was in him also a vein of sentiment, shown in his poem on the death of Clidna—"Clidna the fair-haired, long to be remembered," who was tragically drowned at Glandore harbor in the south, and whose sad wraith still moans upon the bar, in hours of fate for ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... Isabella are all, not without a tinge of knight-errantry that does not do the least violence to the conception of tender, delicate womanhood, the good geniuses of the little worlds in which their influence is made to be felt. Events must inevitably have gone tragically but for their intervention. But with the advent of the second period all this changes. At first the women, like Brutus' Portia, Ophelia, Desdemona, however noble or sweet in character and well meaning in motive, are incapable of grasping the guiding threads of the events around ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... was too much for Gabrielle. She broke down, sobbing so tragically in Mrs. Payne's arms that the older woman was almost ashamed of her victory. She knew that she could afford to be kind. She felt that she would like to tell her that under any other circumstances she knew none whom she would rather trust as Arthur's wife; but to say so would have been a bitter ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... Arabian idiot in his expedition to purchase pease present a close analogy to those of the typical English booby, only the latter end tragically: ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... menace to society," said Robert Cairn. "When I meet the reptilian glance of those black eyes of his and reflect upon what the man has attempted—what he has done—my blood boils. It is tragically funny to think that in our new wisdom we have abolished the only laws that could have touched him! He could not have existed in Ancient Chaldea, and would probably have been burnt at the stake even ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... to her, too, that perhaps it was not tactics; perhaps he genuinely quested in other directions; perhaps, already, she had driven him elsewhere. And still she was unmoved; she could not care. She longed to care very deeply, tragically, to thrill to the pulse of life again, but she could not. She even told herself that she was a little glad on his behalf and her own, if such was the solution. As she went in to dinner, and seated herself at the ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... friend, can our gymnasium be builded upon ten cents? Is there no one here who is thinking of our late, lamented gymnasium? Have we already forgotten that dear, departed hall of youthful pleasures, cut down in the flower of its youth so tragically?" ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... the public, she yielded to this hunger for spicy happenings, and did what was expected of her: clapped her hands, one over the other, to her breast, and cast her eyes heavenwards. Curiosity and anticipation reached a high pitch; while Laura, by tragically shaking her head, gave it to be understood that no signs could transmit what she had been through, since seeing her ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... circumcision and Sabbath rest. Moreover, in the period following close upon the fall of the Temple, a part of the people still nursed the hope of political restoration, a hope repudiating in its totality the proclamation of quite another Messianic doctrine. The delusion ended tragically in Bar Kochba's hapless rebellion (135 C. E.), whose disastrous issue cut off the last remnant of hope for the restoration of an "earthly kingdom." Thereafter the ideal of a spiritual state was replaced by the ideal of a spiritual nation, rallying about ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... you shall have no steak!" she said tragically, "instead, a dungeon shall be your doom. We will let the Duchess remain as a receiver of odds and ends. I suppose her suspicions were excited by the sight of these articles. A rare cat! a learned cat! now please set the table, for ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... coffee, hot milk, whipped cream, bread, figs, apricots," he enumerated. "And if it had n't been for my talk with the landlord's daughter, do you know what we should have had? We should have had coffee and bread and praeterea nihil. That's what we should have had," he pronounced tragically, shaking his head in retrospective consternation at the thing escaped. "Oh, these starveling Continental breakfasts! But I threw myself upon Pia's clemency. I paid her compliments upon her hair, upon her toilet. I called her Pia mia. I ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... I know very well you had to pay him that ten dollars, and I have robbed you of your last cent," said Bessie tragically. ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... reached the point not only of admitting in others tendencies of mind that he had once combated, but also of rejoicing in them, for they seemed to him to contribute to the fecundity of the universe. He loved Georges the more because he did not take life tragically, as he did. Humanity would be too poor and too gray in color if it were to be uniformly clad in the moral seriousness, and the heroic restraint with which Christophe was armed. Humanity needed joy, carelessness, irreverent audacity in face of its ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... any lunch!" Arethusa raised her head and looked tragically up into the kind face which was bending over her, "I want to go home now, today. I want," and a deep sob shook her voice again, "I want ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... Having done so much, he undertook to obtain a view of the strike from the other side; visited the wretched tenements of the laborers, sought out the sullen and distrustful strike-leaders, heard much fiery oratory and some veiled threats from impassioned agitators, mostly foreign and all tragically earnest; chatted with corner grocerymen, saloon-keepers, ward politicians, composing his mental picture of a strike in a minor city, absolutely controlled, industrially, politically, and socially by the industry which had made it. The town, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... being rared? I didn't ask 'em to rare me. I didn't make meself a little baby that couldn't help itself, and they needn't have rared me unless they liked. Goodness knows, I'd have rather died like a little pup before his eyes were opened," he continued so tragically that I took the opportunity of smiling behind his back as he threw out ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... of the fourteenth century the decaying of the flower was tragically apparent. New elements of cruelty tolerated, of mere intrigue successful, of emptiness in philosophical phrase and of sophistry in philosophical argument, marked the turn of the tide. Not an institution of the ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... that! And he grunted aloud, with wheezing and voluptuous grunts of gratification, as he saw the white face alter and the wide eyes darken with terror. He was making her suffer. He was no longer enveloped by that mild and tragically inquiring stare that had so discomforted him. He was no longer stung by the thought that she was good to look on, even with her head pinned down against a beer-stained card-table. He was converting ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... Sir Chichester came down the stairs to them. He was shaken and trembling. He, the spectator of dramas, was now a character in one most tragically ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... He did nothing. He went away. The police were on that man's side," she murmured tragically. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... than the lady, and he seemed to lay special stress on the fact that the great saloon in the castle was hung with a faded tapestry. The story seemed to Evelyn a little obscure, but she gathered that Ulick had been tragically separated from her, whether by the intervention of another woman or through his own fault did not seem clear. The story was vague as a legend, and Evelyn was not certain that Ulick had not invented the park and the tapestries as characteristic decorations of a love story ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... women has been mainly immoral, her innocence and wilfulness, and her instinctive dislike of him, serve as a strong attraction. Though he becomes her husband by means of a cruel fraud, he never fully gains her trust, and the estrangement so tragically sealed in the last chapter of the novel comes almost as a relief to the sympathetic reader of her sad history. Sylvia Vickers, despite the gloomy environment of her youth, is throughout an intensely womanly woman, the delicate conception of whose character ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... his proboscis. On emerging from the great Elgumi forest, we, still steering northwards, in accordance with the information Mr Mackenzie had collected from the unfortunate wanderer who reached him only to die so tragically, struck the base in due course of the large lake, called Laga by the natives, which is about fifty miles long by twenty broad, and of which, it may be remembered, he made mention. Thence we pushed on nearly a month's journey over great rolling uplands, something like ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... Imperial Highness, which did not, indeed, end tragically, was related last night, at the tea-party of Madame Recamier. A man of the name of Deroux had lately been condemned by our criminal tribunal, for forging bills of exchange, to stand in the pillory six hours, and, after being marked with a hot iron on his shoulders, to work in the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... king went hunting for some one who would consent to be his prime minister. He was determined not to submit to the coalition. He was naturally enraged at Lord North for turning against him. Meeting one day North's father, Lord Guilford, he went up to him, tragically wringing his hands, and exclaimed in accents of woe, "Did I ever think, my Lord Guilford, that your son would thus have betrayed me into the hands of Mr. Fox?" He appealed in vain to Lord Gower, and then to Lord Temple, to form a ministry. Lord ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... is a saying with the common sort of people that in California elopements become epidemic at certain seasons of the year—like earthquake shocks or malaria. The man was handsome in a primitive way—worlds beneath the girl, who was simply and tragically a lady. Father sat in the same car with them, opposite their section. It grew upon him by degrees that she was slowly awakening, as one who has been drugged, to a stupefied consciousness of her situation. He thought there might ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... and pageantry made the Court of Hsuan Tsung brilliant, but the splendour faded and his reign ended tragically in disaster and rebellion. The T'ang dynasty seemed in danger of collapse. But it emerged successfully from these troubles and continued for a century and a half. During the whole of this period the Emperors with one exception[655] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... common with ruins and white peacocks?" Peter demanded tragically, when Marietta had brought her much-gesticulated exposition to a close. "Let me impress upon you once for all that I am not a tripper. As for your castle—you invite me to a banquet-hall deserted. As for your park, I see quite as much of it as I wish to see, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... help of comfort. She tortured herself with thoughts of the ambitions she had held, and which had been so cruelly mocked that very morning; of the chivalric love that had been hers, of the life even that had been hers, and which had been given up for her so tragically. When she spoke at all, it was to murmur her sorrow that Hope had exposed herself to danger on her poor account, and that her life, as far as she loved it, was at an end. Only once after the men had parted the curtains and asked concerning her comfort with grave solicitude ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... inquired Jean, laughing, for she was accustomed to Polly's moods, and was by no means angry at the alarming frankness of her reply, as she said tragically,— ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... don't trust her—not in such a storm as that's going to be." He waved his arm toward the harbor. The greyness was shifting rapidly. It moved in swift green touches, heavy and clear—a kind of luminous dread. In its sallow light the man's face stood out tragically. "I ...
— Uncle William - The Man Who Was Shif'less • Jennette Lee
... child were linked together by a garland of flowers partially broken and faded. Her entreating attitude,—the sleeping child's helplessness—her worn face,—the perishing roses of earth's hope and joy,—all expressed their meaning simply yet tragically, and as the Divine Hand supported and drew her up out of the universal chaos below, the hope of a new world, a better world, a wiser world, a holier world, seemed to be distantly conveyed. But the eyes of the Christ were full of reproach, and were bent on the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... her that he had changed, yes—tragically. Pleydon, in every way, was years older. His voice, less arbitrary, had new depths of questioning, his mouth was more repressed, his face notably sparer of flesh. He was immediately aware of the result of her scrutiny. "I have been working like a fool," he explained. "A ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... body, by every curve of its cheek and throat you know it is adorably, pitifully young. By its carmined lip, its near-smart hat, its babbling of "him," and by the knowledge which looks boldly out of its eyes you know it is tragically old. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... you suppose is happening to Hannah with a Christian Science family on one side and Roman Catholics on the other?" she demanded tragically. "She's decided not to take any more medicine, because Virginia Lawrence doesn't. And she has Nellie Halloran's every expression about the Virgin and the Saviour. Not only that, but she has made friends with a Christian ...
— The Little Mixer • Lillian Nicholson Shearon
... opened the sitting-room door and stood watching at the sound of footsteps. His rather bony fists were clenched beneath his loose shirt-cuffs, his eyebrows tragically lifted. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... "But they're terribly, tragically true," Monohan returned. "Look at me, Stella. Don't turn your face away, dear. I wouldn't do anything that might bring the least shadow on you. I know the pitiful hopelessness of it. You're fettered, and there's no apparent ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... involuntarily, but speaking to himself—very seriously, almost tragically.] Playing ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... must either win all along the line or we must be completely defeated and our empire destroyed. Our allies fully share the same conviction. The thousands of lives already lost, and, alas! still to be lost, will have been tragically wasted if the German menace remains to terrorize Europe and to stunt the progress of civilization. In order to convince public opinion that the only peace worth having is a peace absolutely on our own ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... she was very young. And now she's aware that the lack of comprehension suits her. Now, perhaps, she doesn't know on purpose," said Betsy, with a subtle smile. "But, anyway, it suits her. The very same thing, don't you see, may be looked at tragically, and turned into a misery, or it may be looked at simply and even humorously. Possibly you are inclined to ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... some more tremendous force behind both, such as later on was to give depth to his view of the world conflict. The loves and the virtues of Laon and Cythna, the gifted beings who overthrow the tyrant and perish tragically in a counter-revolution, are too bright against a background that is too black; but even so they were a good opportunity for displaying the various phases through which humanitarian passion may run—the first whispers of hope, the devotion ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... timber vessel, with adequate stiffening in the framework, would meet the case. The construction being of wood imparts a certain elasticity, which is of great advantage in easing the shock of impacts with floating ice. As has been tragically illustrated in a recent disaster, the ordinary steel ship would be ripped on its first contact with the ice. Another device, to obviate the shock and to assist in forging a way through the floe-ice, is to have the bow cut away below the water-line. Thus, instead of presenting to the ice ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... poet of considerable genius tragically disappeared, and the authorities or the newspapers circulated a photograph of him, so that he might be identified. The photograph, as I remember it, depicted or suggested a handsome, haughty, and somewhat pallid man with his head thrown back, with long ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... priests, fresh from the seminaries—I grant you, they're a nuisance! They swarm over us like locusts, ready for any bit of mischief against the Government. But the Government will win!—Italy will win! Manisty first of all takes the thing too tragically. He doesn't see the farce in it. We do. We Italians understand each other. Why, the Vatican raves and scolds—and all the while, as the Prefect of Police told me only the other day, there is a whole code of signals ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Gabriella's reasons for postponing her coming to New York, she was beginning somewhat plaintively to question. She had made little effort to hide her disappointment at not being with her daughter when her grandchild was born, for, in spite of the fact that she had tragically assisted at the entrance of Jane's six children into the world, she still possessed an insatiable appetite for the perpetually recurring scenes of birth and death. Then only did her natural bent of mind appear to be justified ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... had sexual interest in women. Once I had a great friendship with a beautiful and noble woman, without any mixture of sexual feeling on my part. I was ignorant of my condition, and I have the bitter regret of having caused in her a hopeless love—proudly and tragically concealed to her death. My friendships with men, younger men, have been colored by passion, against which I have fought continually. The shame of this has made life a hell, and the horror of this abnormality, since I came to know it as such, has been an enemy to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... broke in Lydia tragically, "that is frivolous! These are grave matters, and I thought—oh, I thought certainly—that I was deserving your good opinion in this charitable work if ever I deserved such a thing ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... Chiefly I use it as an ingredient for happiness, sometimes to remind people, and sometimes to make them forget. It seems to me that some people take happiness rather tragically." ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... not at all sorry, after their hard day's work, to find that Juno had prepared coffee for them; and while they were drinking it, they narrated to Mrs Seagrave the tragically death of the poor pig by the shark. Poor Juno appeared quite frightened at the danger which the children had been in, even now that it ...
— Masterman Ready - The Wreck of the "Pacific" • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Alexia gave a little scream, and nearly fell backward. "Look—it's on your own head! Oh, girls, I shall die." She pointed tragically up to the hat, then gave a sudden nip with her long fingers, and brought out of a knot of ribbon, a gilt, twisted affair with pink stones. "You had it all the time, Sally Moore," and she went into peals ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... that which makes him so miserable. At first, you understand, he could lay the entire blame on the De Brezes; he was sure they had in some mysterious way constrained her, and though he was angrily, tragically, suicidally wretched, it was one kind of woe—a clean, classic woe, I will call it. He believed it shared by her in the secret of her uncongenial conjugal life. 'Ich grolle nicht,' he could say, and ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... further afield through Italy we find in 1303 another scene tragically expressive of the changing times. The French King, Philip the Fair, so called from his appearance, not his dealings, had bitter cause of quarrel with the same Pope Boniface VIII who had held the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... over the small body; Joan's lips were moving in some weird incantation, and then with the light all gone from her pretty face she came out of the basin, pulled her clothing on as best she could, and flung herself tragically in ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... said tragically, "you can imagine what it has been like. All those girls waiting for music-hall engagements and impossible to ship them owing to the fleets. I must have lost thousands ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... many young people go to the theater if only to see represented, and to hear discussed, the themes which seem to them so tragically important, there is no doubt that what they hear there, flimsy and poor as it often is, easily becomes their actual moral guide. In moments of moral crisis they turn to the sayings of the hero who found himself in a similar plight. The sayings may not be profound, but at least they are applicable ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... quite earnestly, and many times, to write to her about it; "for," she added, "you would be surprised if you knew how much I pick up in this way." "The story," she said, "must begin lightly, and the early instances of mistake might be comic, but it must end tragically." I told her I was sorry for this. "Well," said she, "I can't help it, it must be so. The best I can do for you is, to leave it quite uncertain whether it is possible the man who is to be my victim can ever ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... broke in Deb, tragically stern and determined—"if you don't take it and buy your first clothes with it, I will never forgive you as long as I live. Child, ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... wait. Oh, dear! Isn't this a queer predicament to be in, and not a chocolate left?" she wailed, as she looked in the box. "Empty!" she cried quite tragically. ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... saying that most poor mortals were forced to get on without this magic atmosphere. They had never been goddesses; they did not know what they were going without. But her child, who had been, as it were, born a fairy, would miss tragically the delicate beauty of her every-day life, would fade under the ugly monotony ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... have me!" says Gower tragically. "I've hinted all sorts of lovely things to her during the past week, but she has been apparently blind to the brilliant prospects opened to her. It has been my unhappy lot to learn that she prefers lollipops ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... Mr Blewcome, tragically, as usual. "I must not quit my post!" and, with the air of a martyr, he motioned to Jemima to start on her mysterious errand. And so the obedient Mrs Blewcome followed Boots as fast as her ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... down the first law of his creed. The law might catch him, and probably would, and when it caught him the law might hang him—and probably would. But it would never know him. There was something grimly and tragically humorous in this. It would never know of the consuming purity of his worship for little children, and old people—and women. It would laugh at the religion he had built up for himself, and it would cackle tauntingly if he dared to say he was not wholly bad. For it believed he ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... from her husband, was astir from end to end. From every corner came the brisk insistent tapping of hammers on tent-pegs; the shrill neighing of ponies, and shriller chatter of coolies, bargaining for payment in advance; repudiating loads a few ounces overweight, and tragically prophesying death on the road if the illegal ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... wink that gives way, to a last fascinated look at LADY WILLIAM, he passes out. All gaze after them, except THE PRESS, who is tragically consulting ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stalked tragically and frowningly to the hearth-rug, and stared at the apparently peaceful sleeper, and then flung himself out of the room, very much as he was accustomed to when a spoiled and ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... at the Baths, for that season at least, ended tragically enough; and whenever I have since visited that singularly romantic glen of Turrite Cava, its deep rock-sheltered shadows have been peopled for me by the actors in that day's ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... in time, like them, she would grow accustomed to it; but now it took all her determination to maintain the smallest daily amenities. It was not that her actual condition was unbearable, but only that it was so tragically removed from what she had imagined; she had dreamed of romance, it had been embodied for her eager gaze—and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... lonely furrow of the farm a man often thinks out conclusions that are gloriously right in themselves, but in the chequered and cynical experiences of men in office tragically impossible. Mr. Drury was no stranger to Ottawa. He had been there on deputations; and on tariff commissions; and each time he came back he had a stronger determination to go there some day as the voice of the more or less united farmer against the tariff that had sterilized ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... beautiful figure in this romance; a faithful, diligent, loving man, unable, as the event proved, to do great deeds by himself, but inspired with a great idea by contact with a mightier spirit, to whom he clings through evil report, and poverty, and prison, careless of self to the last, and ends tragically, 'faithful unto death' in ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... prose. To attack the widespread fashion of gaming which he regarded as a "vice", Moore attempted to present "a natural picture" in language adapted "to the capacities and feelings of every part of the audience" (Preface, 1756). That he should have treated this social problem tragically is to be explained, perhaps, by his sources and by his religious background. He justified the "horror of its catastrophe" on the grounds that "so prevailing and destructive a vice as Gaming" warranted it. The Gamester has been justly credited with superior dramatic qualities in comparison ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore |
