"Awful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to Ludovick. Ludovick sipped and coughed. It tasted as if it were well above the legal alcohol limit, but he didn't like to say anything. They were taking an awful risk, though, doing a thing like that. If they got caught, they might receive a public scolding—which was, of course, no more than they deserved—but he could not bear to think of Corisande exposed to such ...
— The Blue Tower • Evelyn E. Smith
... I understand myself, in uttering these words, not to condemn a fellow creature, but to acknowledge a truth of Scripture, GOD'S judgment namely on the sin of unbelief. The further question,—In whom the sin of unbelief is found; that awful question I leave entirely in His hands who is the alone Judge of hearts; who made us, and knows our infirmities, and whose tender mercies are ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... of nominal Christians. The state of the majority is unspeakably awful. Formality, worldliness, ungodliness, rejection of Christ's service, ignorance, and indifference—to what an extent does all this prevail. We pray for the heathen—oh! do let us pray for those bearing Christ's name, many in ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... endowed with life; these emblems of rural labor or rustic art transform themselves from the hard, chrysolitic shell and expand into the fully developed spiritual flowers of spiritual entities, revealing in their bright, radiating lines the awful mystery of the soul's genesis, its evolution and eternal progressive destiny amid the mighty, inconceivable creations yet to come; pointing out each step and cycle in the soul's involution from its differentiation as a pure spiritual ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... awful dangerous, Massa," he said, laying down the bag with a trembling hand, "dey's gone an' shot the stage drivah an' killed 'um dead on the spot. Las' night, sah, jes ober yondah in de road todder side o' Mars ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... the distant mountain-side, and there were seen the grand and awful features of the Great Stone Face, awful but benignant, as if a mighty angel were sitting among the hills, and enrobing himself in a cloud-vesture of gold and purple. As he looked, Ernest could hardly believe but that a smile beamed over the whole visage, with a radiance still brightening, ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... relieve the awful strain Of possessing such a brain William always used to play Eighteen holes each Saturday. But he scarce could see at all, And he often lost his ball, Plus his temper and his pelf, So he made a ball himself, Which, if ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... and now sat smoking their pipes and gossiping as usual, and the good-natured old landlady stood smiling and nodding in the doorway. Who was to take charge of the cariole? that was the question. Was I to go alone? Suppose I should miss the road and get lost in some awful wilderness? However, these questions were too much for my limited vocabulary of Norsk on the spur of the moment. So I mounted the cariole, resolved to abide whatever fate Providence might have in store for me. The girl put the reins in my hand and off I started, wondering ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... they bore their sufferings and their grief, he said, with much feeling, that he always considered silent despair the most painful description of misery to witness, in the same way that he thought mute insanity was the most awful form of madness. ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... little doubt that this attack on the concluding verse is an indirect blow at Hawkins, who had quoted the whole passage, and had clearly thought it the more 'awful' on account of the couplet. See ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... news to Rose. "I hoped it would be so," said she; "but you frightened me. My noble sister, were I ever to lose your esteem, I should die. Oh, how awful yet how beautiful is your scorn. For worlds I would not be that Cam"—Josephine laid her hand imperiously on Rose's mouth. "To mention his name to me will be to insult me; De Beaurepaire I am, and a Frenchwoman. Come, dear, let us go down and ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... churches each surrounded by its lowly flock of green graves and grey headstones.... some half sunk into the churchyard mould, many carved out into cherubins with their trumpeter's cheeks and expanded wings, or with the awful emblems, death's heads and bones ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... Numerius Vedius Vindex. He is asleep.' (They swallowed that awful lie, they did not realize how bad their own road was.) 'We are on our way to ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... his head as if he had his sword in it, and was leading a party of boarders. I heard a rattling sound. I looked at his countenance. An awful change had come over it. Before I could even support him he fell back in his bed and was dead. Adams and I stood for a moment like persons petrified, so sudden and shocking was the event. We bore him at sunset ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... every moment, piercing into his soul, into his consciousness. Suddenly Razumihin started. Something strange, as it were, passed between them.... Some idea, some hint, as it were, slipped, something awful, hideous, and suddenly understood on both sides.... ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... months passed, months of very low vitality in body and awful darkness of soul, during which he neither said Mass nor received Communion. The following memorandum describes how this period, perhaps the most painful of ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... brethren of the guilds, with all their archives and documents, perished in that hideous holocaust. All the wealth that rapacious kings and the troubles of the Civil War had spared was engulfed in that awful catastrophe. Again and again, when we try to read the history of a company, we meet with the distressing intelligence that all its records were destroyed in the Great Fire. Very few escaped. The leather-sellers, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... under the settle would emit many tigerish growls, and the children would scream with terror and delight, and other children, brown-legged, wearing no clothes to speak of, would come trooping in, and together they would manage, after an awful struggle, to capture the tiger, and with some in front and others behind and two or three on his back, would carry him ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... a spirit sighed, Float from the crimson battle-plain, As if a mighty spirit cried In awful agony and pain: Our friends we know there suffering lay, Our brothers, too, perchance, And in reproachful accents say, Loved ones, is this a time ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Gascony, Aunis, and Saintonge sent their wines to Flanders; Guyenne sent hers to England. Froissart writes that, in 1372, a merchant fleet of quite two hundred sail came from London to Bordeaux for wine. This flourishing trade received a severe blow in the sixteenth century; for an awful famine having invaded France in 1566, Charles IX. did not hesitate to repeat the acts of Domitian, and to order all the vines to be uprooted and their place to be sown with corn; fortunately Henry III. soon after modified this edict by simply recommending the governors of the ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... well, I suppose,' said Leonard; 'but he is an awful bother, and poor Ave gets the worst of it. One has no patience with finikin ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... enlightenment kept them degraded." The deliverance from these evils, he contended, could be effected not by such a fancied or artificial elevation as the mere diffusion of information by institutions beyond the immediate needs of the poor. The awful plight of the Negroes, as he saw it, resulted directly from not having the opportunity to learn trades, and from "narrowing their limits to earn a livelihood." Douglass deplored the fact that even menial employments were rapidly passing away from the colored people. Under the caption of "Learn Trades ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... waited to see if he could not tell the story. How rude you look, pushing and frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows! Cincinnatus, I am sure, would have been sorry to see his daughter behave so." (Mrs. Garth delivered this awful sentence with much majesty of enunciation, and Letty felt that between repressed volubility and general disesteem, that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... gentlemanly host as of yore, with the same dark cloud hanging over him, whatever might be its cause. Courteous by nature to an exceptional degree he could not assume a gayety he did not feel. There was some terrible weight bearing him down, some awful incubus of which he was unable to rid himself. The only person who did not notice it was Millicent, and the one it troubled most was Daisy, on whose sweet young face the share she had in her parent's griefs had already begun to leave ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... been down in the back-woods, if you'd lived in the thrifty way French Canadians have picked up from the Nova Scotians, and improved, if you were young and wanted to see something, you'd risk your soul to get away from it. You think a woman would have an awful life at sea. My mother jumped at it. She married a man who was sailing as skipper before she was born, and jumped at it! Taking everything into consideration, I don't blame her. You see, she had ambition, my mother had. Her education had ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... anon the thunder roared, And angry lightnings flashed across the gloom, Or blazing meteors fearful shot to earth. Regardless of these awful signs, the chiefs Pressed on to mutual slaughter, and the peal Of shouting hosts ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... to get his wind back. "My poor darling!" he said. "To think that you should have come to me at last—and in this awful hour!" ...
— Santa Fe's Partner - Being Some Memorials of Events in a New-Mexican Track-end Town • Thomas A. Janvier
... forgotten and cast aside without effecting any mission? Yet Ethel could not believe that the presence of the awful messenger was unfelt, when she heard poor George's heavy sigh, or when she looked at Flora's countenance, and heard the peculiar low, subdued tone of her voice, which, when her words were most cheerful, always seemed to Ethel the resigned ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... foaming madening river I never saw, & its banks being very low, & the water the color of soapsuds you cannot see the bottom where it is not more than six inches deep, consequently looks as deep as the Missouri when it is bank full, & the many islands & bars which obstruct this swift current makes an awful noise, you cannot make a person hear you, when you are in the river, at 5 yds. distant; and I call this one of the greatest adventures on the whole route, for from the quicksands giving away under the waggon wheels, there is danger of upsetting, which would be a ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... should I die here in this awful darkness? They are warm, they melt my frozen blood!" and he stretched out his ...
— Dreams • Olive Schreiner
... himself be dismayed before them, lest God make him dismayed. Under God, then, the Individual becomes everything. Here, at the start of his ministry, Jeremiah has pressed upon him, the separateness, the awful responsibility, the power, of the Single Soul. We shall see how the significance of this developed not for himself only, but for the ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... to the awful delight of the children, told them the most amazing and indeed horrible tales about the said horse. Whether it was all true or not I cannot tell; all I can say is that the major only told what he had heard and ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... imagination again!—Why, yes, someone is coming. I wonder who it is. A short man in a frock coat. Who can it be? Eh? The suspense is awful! Who can ...
— The Inspector-General • Nicolay Gogol
... compass. Think not that such tracks are easily traced. None but a practised and ready eye can follow them to any advantageous end. To trace them even at a snail's pace, for an unpractised eye, is like the child putting pen and ink to paper through his first copy-book of penmanship. Many and many an awful blot and horribly crooked line will doubtless carry the simile fully and strikingly to the mind. But the result which crowned Kit's effort showed conclusively that, notwithstanding he had followed the trail ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... to myself, my thoughts milling some as I tried to run 'em into the corral. 'Why not? There was sure angels in Pales—Why, yes, Uncle Emsley,' I says out loud, 'I'd be awful edified to meet ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... untamed nature, is above. The Grands Mulets formed the stopping place in some of the earliest attempts to climb Mont Blanc, more than a hundred years ago. Here Jacques Balmat, the hero of the first ascent, passed an awful night alone, amid the cracking of glaciers and the shaking of avalanches, before his final victory over the peak in 1786. In the spirit which led the Romans to surname the conqueror of Hannibal "Scipio ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... "I'd take a dollar dose right now! Gosh! What a clam I am! I give ye my word, Mandy, that the notion o' callin' the filly after you never entered my silly head. Never onst! Jeewhillikins! this makes me feel awful bad." ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Southey's political relations at that era; his sympathy with the French Revolution in its earlier stages had been boundless; in all respects it was a noble sympathy, fading only as the gorgeous coloring faded from the emblazonries of that awful event, drooping only when the promises of that golden dawn sickened under stationary eclipse. In 1796, Southey was yet under the tyranny of his own earliest fascination: in his eyes the Revolution had suffered a momentary blight from refluxes of panic; but blight of some kind is incident ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... recollection, the first evening I was at the Herberts. Justice Hare was there, smoking—half a dozen pipes there were going at once. I also saw Miss Barbara that evening at your park gates, and Tom told me of the murder. An awful calamity for the Hares. I suppose that is the reason the young lady is Miss Hare still. One with her good fortune and good looks ought to have changed her ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... army home! As you know, Fort Lyon is fifty miles from Kit Carson, and we came all that distance in a funny looking stage coach called a "jerkey," and a good name for it, too, for at times it seesawed back and forth and then sideways, in an awful breakneck way. The day was glorious, and the atmosphere so clear, we could see miles and miles in every direction. But there was not one object to be seen on the vast rolling plains—not a tree nor a house, except the wretched ranch ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... reproaching the tobacconist for the growing costliness of cigars He lies as naturally as an infant sucks I would cut my tongue out, if it did you a service Inferences are like shadows on the wall Marriage is an awful thing, where there's no love One learns to have compassion for fools, by studying them Principle of examining your hypothesis before you proceed to decide by it Rhoda will love you. She is firm when she loves Sort of religion with her to believe no wrong of you The ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... It's an awful thing to me, now I look back to it, to think how far apart we had grown, what strangers we were to each other. It seems, now, as though we had been sweethearts long years before, and had parted, and had never really ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... to reply. Was Rawson out of his mind? He could not be sure. Certainly he had got an awful bump, but there were no bones broken. However, it might be that he was still dazed—a crack on the head might ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... leave the wires that way," said Kate. "I sha'n't let Harry forget it. Why, it would be awful to have Aunt Judy and poor old Lewston banged out of their beds in the ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton
... him a beast, pointing out that he had not even got us a half-holiday; and, indeed, there seemed little to do but to pass sentence. We were about to put it, when Harold appeared on the scene; his red face, round eyes, and mysterious demeanour, hinting at awful portents. Speechless he stood a space: then, slowly drawing his hand from the pocket of his knickerbockers, he displayed on a dirty palm one—two—three—four half-crowns! We could but gaze—tranced, breathless, mute; never had any of us seen, in the aggregate, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... hand. At the touch of his fingers to hers the woman, already in a mood of grief bordering on hysteria, shrank back screaming out that his hand smelled of the soap with which he coated his gallows-nooses. She ran away from him, crying out as she ran, that he was accursed; that he was marked with that awful smell and could not rid himself of it. To those who had witnessed this scene the hangman, with rather an injured and bewildered air, made explanation. The poor woman, he said, was wrong; although in a way ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... hand from his pocket and pulled something out which was wrapped in tissue paper. This he carefully removed and the girl watched with fascinated gaze, and with an awful sense of apprehension. Presently the object was revealed. It was a pair of scissors with the handle wrapped about with a small handkerchief dappled with brown stains. She took a step backward, raising her ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... and we were left with the miserable illumination of one little swinging oil-lamp. Immediately the score or so persons in the saloon were afoot and rushing about, grasping their goods and chattels. The awful shuddering of the ship continued. ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... methought I saw the Holy Grail, All pall'd in crimson samite, and around Great angels, awful shapes, and ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... but the public prosecutor speaking from the eminence of his curule chair, who proclaims to the working classes the awful doctrine: You ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the Eagle, never dying, still is trying, still is trying, With its wings upon the map to hide a city with its gore; But the name is there forever, and it shall be hidden never, While the awful brand of murder points the Avenger to its shore; While the blood of peaceful brothers God's dread vengeance doth implore, Thou ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... darker charges insinuated—correspondence with the Persian against Greece—I know but one sentence for him—Death. And it is because I would have ye consider well how dread is such a charge, and how awful such a sentence, that I entreat ye not lightly to entertain the one unless ye are prepared to meditate the other. As for the maritime supremacy of Sparta, I hold, as I have held before, that it is not within our councils to strive for it; it must pass from us. ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... nations. The fiery valor of the assault, and the unshakable firmness of the resistance, are perhaps without parallel in the annals of war. The immense stake depending on the result, the grandeur of Napoleon's isolated efforts against the flower of the European forces, and the awful responsibility resting on the head of their great leader, give to this conflict a romantic sublimity, unshared by all the manoeuvring of science in a hundred commonplace combats of other wars. It forms an epoch in the history of battles. It is to the full as memorable, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... of three names, Mokiya, Sossiya, or that the child should be called after the martyr Khozdazat. "No," said the good woman, "all those names are poor." In order to please her, they opened the calendar at another place; three more names appeared, Triphily, Dula, and Varakhasy. "This is awful," said the old woman. "What names! I truly never heard the like. I might have put up with Varadat or Varukh, but not Triphily and Varakhasy!" They turned to another page and found Pavsikakhy and Vakhtisy. "Now I see," said the old woman, "that it is plainly fate. And since such is the case, it ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... from stone, his face deathly white, his lips compressed, his gray eyes burning, never wavering from that mocking face. With all his strength of will he battled back the first mad impulse to throttle the man, to crush him into shapeless pulp. For one awful moment his mind became a chaos, his blood throbbing fire. To kill would be joy, a relief inexpressible. Farnham realized the impulse, and drew back, not shrinking away, but bracing for the contest. But the ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... cliff that rears its awful form, Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm, Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... so that he could not see my face. What an awful situation! Unless we could somehow ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... They represent meaning, therefore, and just as money, their representative value goes up and down. The French word 'etonnant' was used by Bossuet with a terrible weight of meaning which it has lost to-day. A similar thing can be observed with the English word 'awful.' Some nations constitutionally tend to understate, others to overstate. What the British Tommy called an unhealthy place could only be described by an Italian soldier by means of a rich vocabulary aided with an exuberant mimicry. Nations ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... by awful sentence, God recalled us to repentance, Sending His only Son; Whom He loved He came to cherish; Whom His justice doomed to perish, By ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... how Judas the same night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to His tormentors. They took Him bound to the high priest and beat Him, while Peter, exhausted, worn out with misery and alarm, hardly awake, you know, feeling that something awful was just going to happen on earth, followed behind.... He loved Jesus passionately, intensely, and now he saw from far off ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... labour does this same system of retreat afford us! I am convinced that in three years I could do more than in the last ten, but for the mine being, I fear, exhausted. Give me my popularity—an awful postulate!—and all my present difficulties shall be a joke in five years; and it is not lost ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... not chosen to publish periodically, my reason for which was twofold. In the first place, I don't like to be hurried, and have had enough of duns in an early part of my life to make me reluctant to hear of or see one, even in the less awful shape of a printer's devil. But, secondly, a periodical paper is not easily extended in circulation beyond the quarter in which it is published. This work, if published in fugitive numbers, would scarce, without a high pressure on the part of the bookseller, ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... knight,' said the man, in awful tones, 'for courtesy and pity such as thine are rare. Whither ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... The awful sounds died away... then a muffled disturbance drew his attention to a sort of square trap which existed high up on one wall of the room, but which admitted no light, and which hitherto had never admitted any sound. Now, in the utter darkness, he ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... sir. I have a very nice room, number 17, and am all unpacked. Hunting your office I ran into the messhall, and Cookie told me about meal hours. I'm sure I'll get along fine here—as much as this awful heat'll let me. They sure weren't kidding when they said it was hot here. And I want to assure you, sir, that I'll work hard and tend strictly to ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... bright welcoming smiles and free talk of Italian domestics. Her recollections of the happy warm Continental manner, which so sets the bashful at their ease, made the stately and cold precision of all around her doubly awful and dispiriting. Lord Lansmere himself, who did not as yet know the views of Harley, and little dreamed that he was to anticipate a daughter-in-law in the ward whom he understood Harley, in a freak of generous romance had adopted, was familiar ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... poor people's houses and pull the children from under the beds, and ask why they were not at school; that he didn't care of what religion they were as long as they paid the rent; and that he wasn't going to have his life endangered for such nonsense. There was an awful row at home this morning. For my own part, I must say I sympathize with papa. Besides the school, Sarah has, you know, a shop, where she sells bacon, sugar, and tea at cost price, and it is well-known that those who send their children to the school will never ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... live to itself alone. We have learned that selfishness in the private family leads to social ills and weakness which society in general, which surrounds all private families, must correct and amend. Are we not learning in the awful light of the recent world conflagration that selfishness in nations leads to social ills and weakness which can be corrected only by ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... lower end of the vast apartment, a scrap of paper was thrust into her hand, which she received almost unconsciously, and continued to hold without examining its contents. The assurance that she possessed some friend in this awful assembly gave her courage to look around, and to mark into whose presence she had been conducted. She gazed accordingly upon a scene which might well have struck terror into ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... Gerry told him. "We might even be late to class. Now wouldn't that be awful? Some jerk wants to write up a bunch of lousy report slips, make him ...
— The Best Made Plans • Everett B. Cole
... her regret the determination of her husband. So when the flames had consumed the mother's share of Hercules, the diviner part, instead of being injured thereby, seemed to start forth with new vigor, to assume a more lofty port and a more awful dignity. Jupiter enveloped him in a cloud, and took him up in a four-horse chariot to dwell among the stars. As he took his place in heaven, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... have at last awakened to a sense of the awful penalties which they have paid for their ignorance of all those laws of nature which govern their physical being, and to feel keenly the necessity for instruction at least in the fundamental principles which underlie the various epochs of ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... Jephunny Snell. We amused ourselves catching trout in the mill-pond, and shooting king-fishers, about the hardest bird there is to kill in all creation, and between one and the other sport, you may depend we enjoyed ourselves first-rate. Towards evenin' I heard a most an awful yell, and looked round, and there was Eb shoutin' and screamin' at the tip eend of his voice, and a jumpin' up and down, as if he had been ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... "What an awful time Adam must have had of it before Eve came!" growled Clarence, that evening, as ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... allowed to tell them how best to prevent or to ameliorate the wretchedness of their lot—if, with all this, I may not speak to them of the true remedy, but the law is to step in and say to me, 'Your mouth is closed'; then, I ask you, what remedy is there remaining by which I am to deal with this awful misery?" ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... tissue in mean intrigues about ministries and bills. That he should have been fascinated by that splendid fellow, Fox, is quite right. That he should have thrown himself with all his heart into the storm of the Westminster election is most natural. But it is awful inverideed to find him, long after he had reached man's estate, indulging in back-stair intrigues with Whigs and Tories. It is, of course, absurd to charge him with deserting his first friends, the Whigs. His love and fidelity were given, not to ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... being in a violent quarrel, had rushed upon each other with knives. Margaret was called by the women bystanders, as the Signora who could most influence them to peace. She went directly up to the men, whose rage was truly awful to behold, and, stepping between them, commanded them to separate. They parted, but with such a look of deadly revenge, that Margaret felt her work was but half accomplished. She therefore sought them out separately, and talked with each, urging forgiveness; it was long, however, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... sovereign in his hand, but Stephen pushed it away, and, seizing his arm firmly, drew him, reluctant as he was, to the white-covered table in the corner. There was no look of pain upon the pale, placid little features before them; but there was an awful stillness, and all the light of life was gone out of the open eyes, which were fixed into an upward gaze. The Bible, which Stephen had not looked for that morning, had been used instead of a cushion, and the ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... thither rolled the fog, blotting out the enemy at one moment, at another disclosing swift and awful cataclysms. A British Cruiser, dodging and zigzagging through a tempest of shells, blew up. She changed on the instant into a column of black smoke and wreckage that leaped up into the outraged sky; it trembled there like a dark monument ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... and Annabella make love as if they were Romeo and Juliet: there is scarcely any struggle, and no remorse; they weep and pay compliments and sigh and melt in true Aminta style. There is in the love of the brother and sister neither the ferocious heat of tragic lust, nor the awful shudder of unnatural evil; they are lukewarm, neither good nor bad. Their abominable love is in their own eyes a mere weakness of the flesh; there is no sense of revolt against man and nature and God; ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... that likely creeter could be sot down in front of that long street of grog-shops, she would almost be sorry she ever sold her jewelry, she would be so sot back by seein' that awful sight." ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... brilliantly, and until we went to bed, at ten o'clock, the evening was as perfect as the day had been. At midnight, however, Tom and I were awakened by a knock at our cabin door, and the gruff voice of Powell, saying: 'The barometer's going down very fast, please, sir, and it's lightning awful in the sou'-west. There's a heavy storm coming up.' We were soon on deck, where we found all hands busily engaged in preparing for the tempest. Around us a splendid sight presented itself. On one side a heavy bank of black ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... happiest home and family in all the world, and lived as her people and mine have lived for generations, honest, God-fearing, law-abiding, neighbour-loving men and women, and then died as men should die? But now, Jim, I see a black, awful picture. No, I'm not morbid, I'm going to make a heroic effort to put the picture out of sight; but I'm ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... a few words," said the senator's son. "It is awful to be in a country when you're not able to speak a word of ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... was the washerwoman's kid. When we flushed her she probably vamped out and left it in the grass. Anyhow, it let up an awful holler." ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... begad." His chum nodded agreement. "Too awful much, sometimes. Why, he used to come into a rest billet almost every day after we'd come there all shot to bits with only a corporal's guard o' the whole battalion, muddy and tired and sleepy; yes, and what's the ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to her sins or her follies, has made Russia as a nation so difficult to understand by Europe. From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence as a State she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found nothing ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... coming in one ship at a time. I wondered if the Ravick-Hallstock gang would try to stop them at the water front, or concentrate at Hunters' Hall or the Municipal Building to stand siege. I knew one thing, though. However things turned out, there was going to be an awful lot of shooting in Port ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... Titian Sun had painted in the skies, And marveled at its wondrous hues and dyes And held my breath in silence at its glow; "The hand of God," I cried, "Divine, I know!" And at the thought the tears stood in my eyes. But when I heard that awful pack of lies About the pot of gold, I said, ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... cared for Miss Delamar, however, was an open question, and a condition yet to be discovered. That he cared for some one, and cared so much that his imagination had begun to picture the awful joys and responsibilities of marriage, was only too well known to himself, and was a state of mind already suspected by ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... the awful moment; and scarce a breast was there, but beat high with hope or fear, or dark ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... 'conduced to render me more and more unpopular, not only at the Lock, but in every part of London ... but my most distinguishing reprehensions of those who perverted the doctrines of the Gospel to Antinomian purposes, and my most awful warnings, were the language of compassionate love, and were accompanied by many tears and prayers.'[821] His printed sermons show us how strongly he felt the necessity of making a bold stand against the pernicious principles ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the fun of it is he's only a common Irishman, and he drinks whiskey, and has an awful brogue. Oh, it's such fun to listen to him! But the greatest fun of all is, auntie believes in him. She thinks he is really Don Carlos; and, best of all, she thinks he is making love to ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... unable to find words, and pointed, with a fierce expression, that seemed strange and awful on her gentle face, to the fragments of the broken bottle on the hearth. Jim nodded. She saw that he understood, and went on ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... of cloud; the wind increasing piped and whistled in strident threatening through the rigging; the ship vibrated to the concussive voice of the minute-gun. No murmurs but those of wind and water were heard among the throng; they drove forward in awful, pallid silence. Suddenly the shriek of one voice, but from fourscore throats, rent the agonized quiet. A red light was running along the deck, a tongue of flame lapping round the forecastle, a spire shooting aloft. Marguerite hid her face ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... in writing to the authorities to lock me up in an asylum, wouldn't you? But just consider what an awful condition of loneliness that poor wretch must be in by this time. You think I've been more alone than's good for me; think of him, shut up with an old woman in her dotage. He was awfully cut up about this affair of old Cameron and the girl, and he is losing all his winter's lumbering ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... is rather to escape certain dreadful evils to which our nature exposes us, — death, hunger, disease, weariness, isolation, and contempt. By the awful authority of these things, which stand like spectres behind every moral injunction, conscience in reality speaks, and a mind which they have duly impressed cannot but feel, by contrast, the hopeless triviality of the search for pleasure. It cannot but feel that a life abandoned to amusement ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Iuno! which with awful might 390 The lawes of wedlock still dost patronize, And the religion of the faith first plight With sacred rites hast taught to solemnize, And eke for comfort often called art Of women in their smart, 395 Eternally bind thou this lovely ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... warm tribute to Mr. Jackson's personal qualities and great learning, and quoting sacred texts to show that "such a murder is to be condemned the more when a Brahman commits it," and renders the murderer liable to the most awful penalties in the next world, the proclamation proceeded to declare that "his Holiness is pleased to excommunicate the wicked persons who have committed the present offence, and who shall commit similar offences against the State, and none of the disciples ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... de folks what don't care. De Lord's people is a little people yet, for sure; and de world's a big place. When de Lord come Hisself, to look for 'em, 'spect He have to look mighty hard. De world's awful dark." ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... sea— That awful mystery! Was there a time of old ere it was born, Or e'er the dawn of light, Coeval with the night— Say, slept it on, for ever ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... "I would pass him in a minute. He's had experience handling men and he's been in deep space before. He's logged an awful lot of ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... the great chain of mountains called the Caermarthen Hills, extending from north to south farther than the eye can reach. Here we paused, surveying 'the wild abyss, pondering over our voyage.' Before us lay the trackless, immeasurable desert in awful silence. At length, after consultation, we determined to steer west and by north by compass, the make of the land indicating the existence of a river. We continued to march all day through a country untrodden before by an European ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... olives, mulberry and palms, festooned with vines, mingled with the pastoral scenery, through with the rapid Po, after its descent from the mountains, wandered to meet the humble Doria at Turin. As they advanced towards this city, the Alps, seen at some distance, began to appear in all their awful sublimity; chain rising over chain in long succession, their higher points darkened by the hovering clouds, sometimes hid, and at others seen shooting up far above them; while their lower steeps, broken into fantastic forms, were touched ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... "The awful tow'rs which seem for science made; The solemn chapels, which to prayer invite, Whose storied windows shed a ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... of my family stuck his head out of the window but he got the hair snatched off it as smooth as a billiard-ball; and; if the reader will believe me, not one of us ever dreamt of stirring abroad. But at last the awful siege came to an end-because there was absolutely no more electricity left in the clouds above us within grappling distance of my insatiable rods. Then I sallied forth, and gathered daring workmen together, and not a bite or a nap did we take ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Phipps. "I must have gotten an awful hit on my right leg, for I can scarcely bear ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Ozarks • Frank Gee Patchin
... undergone Voltaire would never have drawn its sword upon quiet Saint-Martin. To make himself look still worse, he was only ph[ilosophe] Inc...., which is generally read Inconnu[372] but sometimes Incredule; [373] most likely the ambiguity was intended. There is an awful paradox about the book, which explains, in part, its leaden sameness. It is all about l'homme, l'homme, l'homme,[374] except as much as treats of les hommes, les hommes, les hommes;[375] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... antique could be no other than the declared foe of any change, and, of course, deemed the desertion of large sack gowns, monstrous Court hoops, and the old notions of appendages attached to them, for tight waists and short petticoats, an awful demonstration of the depravity of the time!—[The editor needs scarcely add, that the allusion of the Princess is to Madame ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... half-clothed Chinese bending over their open fires in the opium factory, to see children soldering the covers of the little boxes their brothers have just finished mixing and filling, will always be an awful, vivid ...
— The Log of the Empire State • Geneve L.A. Shaffer
... "I felt an awful fraud last night, letting you fuss over my supposed 'cold,' you dear thing. Do forgive me. And you must come and stay with us the minute we get back from our honeymoon. We are to be married ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... couldn't carry a tenth of them, so I decided to only take papa's. But I put yours up in my room, and shall keep them there." Then Peter had to give place to another, just as he had decided that he would have one of the flowers from the bunch she was carrying, or—he left the awful consequences ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... of today. As I told you, she knowed Boone an' Kenton an' Logan an' Henry Ware an' all them gran' hunters an' fighters. She was in Lexin'ton nigh on to eighty years ago, when she saw Dan'l Boone an' the rest that lived through our awful defeat at the Blue Licks come back. It was not long after that her fam'ly came back into the mountains. Her dad 'lowed that people would soon be too thick 'roun' him down in that fine country, but they'd never crowd nobody up here an' ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... "Isn't it awful! Isn't it dreadful!" she cried. "To think of that old witch of Endor saying all those horrible untrue things about poor lovely Marcia, and ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... seem that parish priests cannot lawfully enter religion. For Gregory says (Past. iii, 4) that "he who undertakes the cure of souls, receives an awful warning in the words: 'My son, if thou be surety for thy friend, thou hast engaged fast thy hand to a stranger'" (Prov. 6:1); and he goes on to say, "because to be surety for a friend is to take charge of the soul of another on the surety of one's ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas |
