"Heartbreaking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other again and again, as if they had a presentiment that they should meet no more. Poor John was almost as violently affected: his master, as he always called Mr. Martin, was as dear to him as a father. He stood by, witnessing this heartbreaking struggle, overpowered with his own feelings, and wretched at seeing his dear respected master undergoing such a trial. "Ah, Miss Helen," whispered he, "what would I give to get one kiss of my master's hand before I leave him! But do not intrude ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... returned, with ill-concealed emotion, "how illy you could be spared by any of those who know and love you. Even I should feel it an almost heartbreaking thing to lose you out of my life, ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... present, you say, but it proved a very valuable one. It seems to us very cruel. One would think that if Naaman and his wife loved this little girl—and I am sure they did—they would have sent her back to her home, for she must have had a heartbreaking time of it at first; but people were not kind in that way in those days. Yes, I am sure they loved her and were kind to her, for the simple reason that she evidently loved them; and I am also sure that the reason they loved her was that ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... after this heartbreaking defection but two interesting things in life—the printing press and the Flobert Rifle. Somehow the week dragged through until Sunday, when Bobby duly scrubbed and dressed, had to go to church with his father and mother. Bobby, to tell the truth, did ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... fleet in "Botany Bay," as New South Wales was then called, he was sent with a detachment of Marines and a number of convicts to colonise Norfolk Island. His task was a hard one, but he accomplished it in the face of almost heartbreaking difficulties. ...
— The Beginning Of The Sea Story Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... was a pious spirit. For Swift could love and could pray." Left to himself and to the natural thoughts of his mind, without those "orders" to which he had bound himself as a necessary part of his trade, he could have turned to his God with questionings which need not then have been heartbreaking. "It is my belief," says Thackeray, "that he suffered frightfully from the consciousness of his own scepticism, and that he had bent his pride so far down as to put his apostasy out to hire." I doubt whether any ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... upon his wages alone, and the family could not live without hers. He could come and visit her, and sit in the kitchen and hold her hand, and he must manage to be content with that. But day by day the music of Tamoszius' violin became more passionate and heartbreaking; and Marija would sit with her hands clasped and her cheeks wet and all her body atremble, hearing in the wailing melodies the voices of the unborn generations which cried ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... past; dear such-an-one, whom we scarcely knew, barely more than face and name then, but know and have the right to care for now. So that I think that we might extract and take with happy interpretation those two last lines of the old, old Goethe's heartbreaking dedication to the generations ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... forget the terrible scene of heartbreaking desolation and destruction that I encountered in every direction on going down to office next morning. It seemed at first sight as if the town had suffered from the effects of a bombardment. As I slowly wended my way along ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey
... the two lads raced aft, where the cockpit was half full and the dunnage of the cabin all afloat. With a couple of buckets procured from the stern lockers, they proceeded to fling the water overboard. It was heartbreaking work, for many a barrelful was flung back upon them again; but they persevered, and when night fell the Dazzler, bobbing merrily at her sea-anchor, could boast that her pumps sucked once more. As 'Frisco Kid had said, the backbone ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... time came. And now to-night he comes to me with a face as long as a yard-arm, and says that Janter won't keep it at any price, and that he does not know where he is to find another tenant, not he. It's quite heartbreaking, that's what it is. Three hundred acres of good, sound, food-producing land, and no tenant for it at fifteen shillings an acre. What am I ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... spring advanced and Judge Emery's widow recovered a little strength, it became apparent that life in Endbury, with its heartbreaking associations, would be intolerable to her. In anxious family councils many futile plans were suggested, but they were all brushed decisively away by the unexpected arrival from Oregon of the ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... gone in the opposite direction. But he no longer had in him the desire to fight, even for himself. He followed the lines of least resistance, and these led him back to the scene of the tragedy. His grief, when he returned, was no longer the heartbreaking agony of that first night. It was a deep-seated, consuming fire that had already burned him out, heart and soul. Even caution was dead in him. He feared nothing, avoided nothing. Had the police boat been at the Chute, he would ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... the easiest way in the world of carrying a load. I ought to know something about carrying loads: I've carried babies, which are the heaviest and most awkward and heartbreaking loads in this world for a boy or man to carry, I fancy. God remember mothers who slave about the housework (and do sometimes a man's work in addition in the bush) with a heavy, squalling kid on one arm! I've humped logs on the selection, "burning-off," with loads of fencing-posts and rails and ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... wonderful the cannon, how devastating the shells, if the target at which they are aimed is sufficiently far away and sufficiently small, the result will be disappointing; and the Russians at Dvinsk saw to it that the Germans experienced a long series of costly and heartbreaking disappointments of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... in the shade, past Mataara crouched in the doorway of the Big House, he followed at the heels of Mauriri. At his own heels, doglike, plodded Hare-Lip. From behind came the cries of the hunters, but the pace Mauriri led them was heartbreaking. The broad path narrowed, swung to the right, and pitched upward. The last grass house was left, and through high thickets of cassi and swarms of great golden wasps the way rose steeply until it became a goat-track. Pointing upward to a bare ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... are emphatically "in prison," restrained by chains, goaded with whips, tasked, and under keepers. Not a wretch groans in any cell of the prisons of our country, who is exposed to a confinement so vigorous and heartbreaking as the law allows theirs to be ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... limping and cursing a little now and then because of his aches. Up a steep slope made heavy with loose sand that dragged at his feet; over the crest and down the other side among rocks and gravel that made harder walking than the sand. Up another steep slope: it was heartbreaking, unending as the toils of a nightmare, but Casey kept on. He was not worried over his own plight; not yet. He believed that William and his burros were somewhere ahead of him, since they could not cling ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... we've got it on the animal is that we've got brains? This is a game, Laura, not a sentiment. Do you suppose this Madison [LAURA turns to ELFIE.]—now don't get sore—hasn't turned these tricks himself before he met you, and I'll gamble he's done it since! A man's natural trade is a heartbreaking business. Don't tell me about women breaking men's hearts. The only thing they can ever break is their bank roll. And besides, this is not Will's business; he has no right to interfere. You've been with him—yes, ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... the other day that heartbreaking book, the LIFE OF SCOTT. One should read such works now and then, but O, not often. As I live, I feel more and more that literature should be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it cannot be made beautiful and pious and heroic. We wish it to be a green place; the WAVERLEY ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to them alone really know them to be, but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death, that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, "I wish I was with Livy." I do not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... known, indeed she did know, he intended to call and say good-bye to her. Each farewell had been harder than the last and now this absence of farewell was the hardest of all. There was one more—Lawyer Ed's. Like Old Angus, he was making an attempt at cheerfulness that was heartbreaking. He tramped about, singing loudly, scolding every one who came near him, and proclaiming his joy over the Lad's going in a manner that drove poor Roderick's sore heart to desperation. He drove with him to the station, carried his bag on board, loaded him with books and ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... by poisoned arrows, so that the ensign hastily abandoned the place, and moved with his sadly reduced force forty leagues toward Cibola, into a valley called Suya. From this point, he ultimately collected the best of his men, and marched on to Tiguex, to find Coronado already gone on his heartbreaking expedition to Quivera. ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... of the unhappy slaves who, on the two big committees of your Trade Union (the Society of Authors) drudge at the heartbreaking work of defending our miserable profession against being devoured, body and soul, by the publishers—themselves a pitiful gang of literature-struck impostors who are crumpled up by the booksellers, who, though small folk, are at least in contact with reality in the shape of the book buyer. It is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of reserves were recharging cases of artillery shells which had been sent back from the front in carload lots. There were horses here —a whole troop of draft horses which had been worn out in that relentless, heartbreaking labor into which war sooner or later resolves itself. The drove had been shipped back this far to be rested and cured up, or to be shot in the event that ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... they had found out what sorrow it brought, when they knew that there was only loss and shame in it for them—then it was too late! Then men, and women, too, expected them to go on giving; there was nothing else to do. Oh," said Julia, in a heartbreaking voice, bringing her locked hands down upon the table as if she were in physical agony, "if the law would only take a hand before and not afterward! Or if, when they are sick to death of men, they could believe that time would wash it all away; that there was clean, good ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... Blair had watched her niece with some anxiety. There was no violent bursts of grief, but there was a look of desolation on her face which it was heartbreaking to see. She was quiet and gentle through all; willing, indeed eager, to render assistance to her aunt when it was required; but as soon as she was free again she returned to the low stool beside the bed on which ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... would have it out—"grip hard, become a root ..." become men as trees walking, rooted in a quiet dream. Dream? No, reality. This was the dream, this world of slipping shadows and hurrying gleams of heartbreaking loveliness, through which one roamed, a child chasing butterflies which ever escaped, or which, if captured, crumbled to dust in one's clutching hands. Oh for something strong and firm to hold. Oh Barry, Barry, ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... would be no cause for regret if the wild life of our continent were not in such a grievous state. If we felt no conscience burden for those who come after us, we would not care where the millions go; but since things are as they are, it is heartbreaking to see the cause of wild-life protection actually starving, or at the best subsisting only on financial husks and crumbs, while less important causes literally flounder in ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... let this be a warning to you. Don't put your money in industries, dear old Captain Hamilton. What with the state of the labour market, and the deuced ingratitude of the working classes, it's positively heartbreaking—it is, indeed, ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... as the boat now was, she was liable to be swamped out of hand by some unlucky sea pouring in over her bows; the occupants, therefore, set to work with a will to bale her out, Stukely taking the bucket from Dick and handing him the baler instead. But it was both back-breaking and heartbreaking work; for, rendered heavy and sluggish by the large quantity of water in her, the boat frequently failed to rise to the lift of the seas, several of which poured in over her bows from time to time, filling her faster than she could be freed by the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... perhaps the most effective thing a woman ever did. It was so simple that it was heartbreaking. She could not have uttered a word, he was such a powerful and great person, and she was so ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... her with strangers, or with acquaintances who were little better than strangers—to rouse the painful impressions of her past life which we had so carefully hushed to rest—this, even in her own interests, we dared not do. Whatever sacrifices it cost, whatever long, weary, heartbreaking delays it involved, the wrong that had been inflicted on her, if mortal means could grapple it, must be redressed without her knowledge ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... seemed doomed to meet everywhere with discouragement; for no one wanted him, just as no one wanted his translations of the glorious Ab Gwilym. He appeared before the world as a failure, which probably troubled him very little; but there was another aspect of the case that was in his eyes, "the most heartbreaking of everything, the strange, the disadvantageous light in which I am aware that I must frequently have appeared to those whom I most love and ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... the cases that came to my notice during those twenty years, they would without exaggeration make a volume the size of the latest edition of the Standard Dictionary, printed in the same small type. Some of them are positively heartbreaking. They make you sick at the stupidity of the human race, at the stupidity and brutality of the lawgivers. But I do not wish to appeal to your emotions. I do not wish to take extreme and unique cases. I will therefore briefly relate a few everyday ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... so sensitive that I feared the shock would make him ill, but Allan came at last to the rescue. He had been called out of the room for a moment, and came back to find a scene of dire confusion—it took so little to upset mother, and really it was heartbreaking to all of us to see ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... few of which were less than a century old. The streets were narrow and crooked, mostly named after bygone admirals or forgotten sea-fights; the romantic and picturesque quarter of a great naval port to the casual glance of a passer-by, but heartbreaking to any except the most courageous resident on account of its overcrowded and tumbledown condition. Yet it lacked the dreariness of an East End slum, for the sea winds blew down the narrowest streets and alleys, sailors and soldiers were always in view, and the windows ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... rare distinction of the little Protestant cemetery at the Gate, lying in the shadow of the black sepulchral Pyramid and the thick-growing black cypresses. Bathed in the clear Roman light the place is heartbreaking for what it asks you—in such a world as this—to renounce. If it should "make one in love with death to lie there," that's only if death should be conscious. As the case stands, the weight of a tremendous past presses upon the flowery sod, and the sleeper's mortality ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... concerned—that is, all except the patient. To be taken without notice from one's home and by a deceitful, though under the circumstances perhaps justifiable strategy, placed in a ward with fifteen other men, all exhibiting insanity in varying degrees, is as heartbreaking an ordeal as one can well imagine. Yet such was this man's experience. A free man one day, he found himself deprived of his liberty the next, and branded with what he ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... instance some years ago of a man of character and property, who through unexpected losses had been condemned to a long and heartbreaking imprisonment, which he bore with exemplary fortitude. At the end of four years, by the interest and exertions of friends, he obtained his discharge, with every prospect of beginning the world afresh, and had made his arrangements for leaving his ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... heartbreaking to see the thousands and thousands of bright-eyed boys and girls growing up amid such hopeless surroundings. I shall not soon forget the picture of one little group whom I found squatted around a missionary's ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... great Nation voluntarily seeking something that we have to give, and all that we have to give is this: We cannot exempt you from work. No man is exempt from work anywhere in the world. We cannot exempt you from the strife and the heartbreaking burden of the struggle of the day—that is common to mankind everywhere; we cannot exempt you from the loads that you must carry. We can only make them light by the spirit in which they are carried. That is the ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... words the visitor gave a sketch of the circumstances, all the more heartbreaking for its very unpretentiousness. So many men dismissed, so many wives, so many children, so many parents and near relatives unable to support themselves. Of these so many were sick, so many women lately confined, so many cripples. ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... prevail for a time. It may prevail long enough to put out of gear the present affairs of the Irish world with which these statesmen will have tampered. But the long experience will come back, and bargains will again be made between man and man, though the intervening injuries will be heartbreaking. ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... They proceeded. For two heartbreaking hours Miki followed at Neewa's heels, the void in his stomach increasing as the swelling in his body diminished. His hunger was becoming a torture. Yet not a bit to eat could he find, while Neewa at every few steps apparently discovered something to devour. At the end of ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... Boone to his wife in that heartbreaking interview no one ever knew. When the scout rejoined the band, which now had assembled behind the protecting barricade, he said simply: "We must prepare for a hasty burial. These bodies must not be left for the wolves to maltreat." The leader spoke as quietly as if he were ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... Shortly afterwards I heard my husband come in too. I heard him say something to her in a low voice. And then I heard—(with a short laugh)—oh, it rings in my ears still, with its mixture of what was heartbreaking and what was so ridiculous—I heard my own servant whisper: "Let me go, Mr. ...
— Ghosts - A Domestic Tragedy in Three Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... her face swollen and stamped with the carpet-nap, squirming in a grief that was actually abashing before it was heartbreaking, Ann 'Lisbeth Connors, whose only epiphany of life was love, and shut out from so much else that helps make life sweet, was now shut out ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... at England's vitals. People fish out all sorts of wondrous and obscure causes for crime. As far as England is concerned I should lump the influences provocative of crime and productive of misery into one—I say Drink is the root of almost all evil. It is heartbreaking to know what is going on at our own doors, for, however we may shuffle and blink, we cannot disguise the fact that many millions of human beings who might be saved pass their lives in an obscene hell—and they live so in merry England. Durst any ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... Under the skin of the civilised being there lurks almost always the ancestor, the savage contemporary of the cave-bear. True humanity does not yet exist; it is growing, little by little, created by the ferment of the centuries and the dictates of conscience; but it progresses towards the highest with heartbreaking slowness. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... morning's work. Think what it must be to feel that you never can be uninspired, never to have a doubt or a shadowy misgiving. Neither you nor I nor Prothero will ever know a hundredth part of the rapture Nicky knows. We get it for five minutes, an hour, perhaps, and all the rest is simply hard, heavy, heartbreaking, grinding labour." ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... the simplicity of Lamb's subjects debar him from the rare effects. Ah! They little know! He can take the wistfulness of children, and the quaint gestures of dead Comedians, and the fantasies of old worm-eated folios, and the shadows of sundials upon cloistered lawns, and the heartbreaking evasions of such as "can never know love" and out of these things he can make a music as piteous and lovely as Ophelia's songs. It is a curious indication of the lack of real poetic feeling in the feverish art-neophytes ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... come to pluck up courage and begin to talk and write soberly about the war. At first the mere horror of it stunned the more thoughtful of us; and even now only those who are not in actual contact with or bereaved relation to its heartbreaking wreckage can think sanely about it, or endure to hear others discuss it coolly. As to the thoughtless, well, not for a moment dare I suggest that for the first few weeks they were all scared out of their wits; for I know too well that the British civilian does ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... plot, while, by the employment of bribes, they easily contrived to escape detection. Waller felt the matter very severely. To have the poor negroes, in whom he took so great an interest, carried into slavery, after all the toil and danger he had gone through, was almost heartbreaking. For long afterwards he could scarcely bear to speak ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... lay in undisturbed tranquillity, but little larger than when the Far West had brought the first recruits of the North West Mounted Police to its levees. To those who loved the place, who believed in it, the result caused by the changing conditions of Western life was well-nigh heartbreaking. ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... him, like a headstrong, restive horse. The notion suggested the colt that had fallen lame; he wondered if Elbridge would look carefully after it; and then he thought of all the other horses. A torment of heartbreaking homesickness seized him; his love for his place, his house, his children, seemed to turn against him, and to tear him and leave him bleeding, like the evil spirit in the demoniac among the tombs. He was in such misery with his longing for ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... us of the same thing. There was no fog to help the enemy, the condition of the moon was favourable to us, and we had pointed out to each other on maps various places where there must be British ships on the watch. It was a bitter disappointment to us that we saw none. It was heartbreaking. We had built so much on our hopes; it was galling beyond words for the enemy to be in the right and ourselves mistaken. But, after all, we reflected, what is one ship in this vast expanse of stormy seas? In vain we tried to derive some ...
— Five Months on a German Raider - Being the Adventures of an Englishman Captured by the 'Wolf' • Frederic George Trayes
... them. Others, whose husbands and sons had been absent in the forest at the time of the breaking out of the fire, over whose fate remained a terrible uncertainty, gathered in silence around lonely hearths. The terrors of the past night were, to such, supplemented by days and even weeks of heartbreaking anxiety and suspense, closed at last by the knowledge ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... for many years, yet no improvement resulted. As the Times pathetically observed: "At least it should not be taken for granted that improvement is impossible till improvement has been attempted. This much has been forced upon us by the painful knowledge of the many bitter, often heartbreaking, disappointments which cloud the opening of the Royal Academy Exhibition, when London looks bright and blooming, and everyone and everything around seems so full of life, and so eager and capable of enjoyment. ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... became an infernal ball. It became endowed with a fiendish propensity to run up a player's leg and all about him, as if trying to hide in his pocket. Grace's efforts to find it were heartbreaking to watch. Every time it bounded out to center field, which was of frequent occurrence, Tom would fall on it and hug it as if he were trying to capture a fleeing squirrel. Tay Tay Mohler could stop the ball, but that was no great credit to him, for his hands took no part in the achievement. Tay ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... Melissa shook her head, and said sadly: "He broke out yesterday against Apion, the dealer, and it was dreadful. For the fiftieth time he had waited supper for you two in vain, and in the twilight, when he had done work, his grief overcame him, and to see him weep is quite heartbreaking! The Syrian dealer came in and found him all tearful, and being so bold as to jest about it in his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... first passing weary days of bitter, heartbreaking despondency. His lost liberty he had borne without much complaint, for it was merely the fortune of war, and hundreds of his countrymen were sharing the same fate with him. But to lose that love upon which he had believed all the happiness of his life depended, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... danced. And then at last the great falls of the Rassini, beyond which no white man had gone. They hid the canoe in the bushes and placed beneath it the iron stove and half their supply of food. Then they plunged into the brush, eastward. Bennie had never known such grueling work and heartbreaking fatigue; and the clouds of flies pursued them venomously and with unrelenting persistence. At first they had to cut their way through acres of brush, and then the land rose and they saw before them ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... me from raising my voice in persuasion. It would be heartwearing to be left behind, never to know what was happening except from an occasional letter; but to be on the spot and see for myself would be heartbreaking. I wasn't quite sure which would be worse, so I left the decision to Fate; and as I said before, it was my Frenchified genius for doing hair which settled the matter. Di discussed it with Father ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Devant uneasily; "the library is yours, my child." The last words had a possible significance that was well-nigh heartbreaking ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... that he thought we would have more roomfor beds. The old woman herself said absolutely nothing, but looking on with that gripping fear of the poorhouse in her eyes, she was a living embodiment of that dread which is so heartbreaking that the occupants of the County Infirmary themselves seem scarcely less wretched than those who are making their ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... admit it? Do you not know that self-contempt is part of the price? ... I have no money. I know what you have. ... I asked. And it is enough for a man who remains unmarried. ... For I cannot 'make things do'; I cannot 'contrive'; I will not cling to the fringe of things, or play that heartbreaking role of the shabby expatriated on the Continent. ... No person in this world ever had enough. I tell you I could find use for every flake of metal ever mined! ... You see you do not know me. From my pretty face and figure you misjudge me. I am intelligent—not ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers |
