"Heartbreaking" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... country places leaving behind him dead men looking sightlessly up to the sky. The hero will be the man or woman who knows and loves and serves. In the new histories we will be shown the tragedy, the heartbreaking tragedy of war, which like some dreadful curse has followed the human family, beaten down their plans, their hopes, wasted their savings, destroyed their homes, and in every way turned back ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... when seeing Di and Eagle March together, kept 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 frankly before me, and argued that not only was I cleverer than the average maid, but actually ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... so late, as she is very much hurt at it, I fear, by what I hear, and accuses me of it. But that will, I trust, be forgiven. You don't say that you sympathise with me in my present heavy trial,[66] the heaviest I have ever had to endure, and which will be a sad heartbreaking to me—but I know you do feel for me. I am quiet and prepared, but still I fell very sad, and God knows! very wretched at times, for myself and my country, that such a change must take place. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... hall, and making a note of them for future use. "What a magnificent old place!" he said to himself. "Trelawney says the man is at his last gasp, and will positively have to turn out before long. Poor beggar! I pity him. It must be heartbreaking to leave an old place like this, where one's ancestors have lived for generations, where every stone has its history, and the spirits of the departed seem still hovering in the air. Halloa, ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... may be. Her aunt has had a heartbreaking lesson. She may say a few words to unsay words that she ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... placed it on a table near the fire, beside his lamp, and sat down to reflect again. In the face of these papers, almost sacred, almost prohibited, which he would touch and which death alone could have placed in his hands, he had in this moment the consciousness, in a more heartbreaking manner, of the irrevocable departure of his mother; tears returned to him and he wept there, alone, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... has now 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 ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... School scholars, one on either side (for I had been to my Sunday School in the afternoon for the last time), loaded with large parcels of food, we passed down the street. How easy to write it down—how heartbreaking the experience! ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... pigments. I can think of no other assemblage of jungle creatures more fitted to impress one with the prodigality of tropical nature. Four years before, we set ourselves to work to discover the first eggs and young of toucans, and after weeks of heartbreaking labor and disappointments we succeeded. Out of the five species of toucans living in this part of Guiana we found the nests of four, and the one which eluded us was the big sulphur-breasted fellow. I remembered ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... thin brush of the creek bottom two feet to his one, because she ran more lightly and surely, and her endurance was not a matter for discussion. The question of second wind did not concern her any more than it does a child, whose ordinary mode of progression is heartbreaking. Bennington found that he was engaged in the most delightful play of his life. He shouted aloud with the fun of it. He had the feeling that he was grasping at a sunbeam, or a mist-shape ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... few steps, and stopped again to look about him. The utter misery of his existence seemed to be brought into full relief by the intense light which inundated the landscape. He saw his twenty years of cafe life—dull, monotonous, heartbreaking. He might have traveled as others did, have gone among foreigners, to unknown countries beyond the sea, have interested himself somewhat in everything which other men are passionately devoted to, in arts and science; he might have enjoyed life in a thousand forms, that mysterious ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... was a ship-builder. Marie Louise thought that his must be a heartbreaking business in these days when ships were being slaughtered in such numbers. She asked Polly and her husband if they knew him ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... down to eating lunch daily between Tessie and Mrs. Lewis, the Englishwoman. We do so laugh at one another's jokes. I know everything that ever happened to Tessie and Mrs. Lewis from the time they were born; all the heartbreaking stories of the first homesick months in this my land, all the jobs they have labored at. Mrs. Lewis has worked "in the mills" ever since she was born, it would seem, first in England, later in Michigan. Tessie and her husband mostly have hired out together in this country for housework, and she likes ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... company 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 ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... son. They clung to each 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 on him: I would ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford
... acknowledgment of defeat, indeed, and that is the sad result of so much living. The world has been too hard, we cry—there is so much heartbreaking, so much misery, so few arrive! We look to another world where all that will be made right, and where we shall suffer ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... goddess, hear that prayer of the people! for, as it is a heartbreaking to see a handsome man loose-wived, so it is a deadly sorrow to behold a foul knave uncuckolded: therefore, dear Isis, keep decorum, and fortune ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... rapid that it couldn't be counted, so faint that it couldn't be heard. His eyes were terrified as though he had been looking at unspeakable horrors; and by his face one could see that he was thinking of abominable things. Suddenly with an incredibly strong and heartbreaking ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... marionettes 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 miles of swamp and barren land dotted ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... muffled, heartbreaking moans, like those of a woman in dire pain, came to his ears. He felt the cold perspiration start over his body. His nerves grew tense with trepidation, his eyes wide with horror. Instinctively, his fingers clutched the revolver at his side and his gaze ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 the ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... 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
... 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
... Fermanagh. For Lady Fermanagh was only too anxious to get her orphan niece off her hands, not only because Myra was an expense, but because her madcap exploits occasionally drove her almost to distraction, while her heartbreaking flirtations were the cause ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... force of one determined will. You, young as you are, have persuaded France to listen to you,—I am doing my best to persuade England to hear me. We are only two—but others will follow. I know it is difficult!—it is harassing and often heartbreaking to insist on Truth when the whole world's press is at work bolstering up false gods, false ideals, false art, false sentiment,—but if we are firm- -if we hold an unflinching ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... atone for these more or less frequent lapses, there was something pathetic, even a little heartbreaking, in Carrie's zeal for his well-being. No duty too small. One night she wanted to unlace his shoes and even shine them—would have, in fact, except for his fierce catching of her into his arms and for some reason his tonsils aching as ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand, As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land; Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heartbreaking woes, And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows! North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain Passed like a dream I slept to lose and waked to dream again. River and plain and mighty peak—and ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... pick out a buck at a considerable distance, either in his solitary retreat, or with a band of deer; and we go after him. Here we figure out where he is traveling and make a detour to intercept him. This is often heartbreaking work, up hill and down dale, but all ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... was heartbreaking. After a heavy day or two of rain the parapets would fall down in hunks into the foot of water or so in the trenches, and would churn up into liquid mud, only to be removed by large spoons, of which ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... the one inter-tribal flag of truce likely to be respected, provided the bearer of it could prove his right to its possession. They stared in silence at the feverish youth as, with great effort he told them the story of the Black Phantom and of the heartbreaking weeks he had spent in ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... and when she found him so incredulous, she begged of him to believe her, for it had been, remarked, that those who had dared to question their existence, always had some proof given, which obliged them, with grief and heartbreaking, to confess it was true. She detailed to him the traditional appearance of these monsters, and his horror was increased, by hearing a pretty accurate description of Lord Ruthven; he, however, still persisted in persuading her, that there ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... in a second or two, understood. It was a band of Indians from our mission. Madly they dashed down to the shore, sprang from their horses, and fell on their knees—some on the beach, some half in the water, so great was the crowd—imploring, with heartbreaking cries, our padre to have pity on them and not leave them. There were nearly five hundred men, and their ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... manner, the gentleness, had a heartbreaking effect. In a moment the woman's eyes were flooded with tears, which coursed down her cheeks. It was the relief that her poor troubled brain and nerves ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... wistful mouth. And it seemed to Kate that she was looking, not at her, but at life, that life which had cast her out, looking, not with rage now, but with a hurt reproachfulness in which there was a heartbreaking longing. ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... wreck of his house was a grim, heartbreaking picture; a Frenchman of Lorraine repairing the wreck of his house had the light of hard-won victory, of confidence, of sacrifice made to a great purpose, of freedom secure for future generations, in his eyes. The difference was this: The Germans ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... 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
... once more, he curled himself in my hands, and put two little wet paws around a thumb and held on tight. It was raining, and he was soaking wet, so he must have been out of doors. It would have been heartbreaking to have been obliged to come away without finding that little grayback, and perhaps never know what became of him. I know where my dear dog is, and that is bad enough. We heard just before leaving the post that men of the company had put up a board at ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... of all, and one that brought convincing confirmation to what had at first been mere suspicion, at night there could be heard heartbreaking cries and sobs coming from the house of Baji Lal. The voice was not his, nor that of his wife; it was, in all truth, the wail of a spirit, plaintive at times, then angry as if shrieking aloud for vengeance. For I myself have heard these sounds ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... more than acting, as usually understood, something to class with great poetry, and all the spiritual exaltation which "great poetry" implies. From first to last, however associated with that whimsical comedy of which, too, he is appropriately a master, he has struck for me that note of almost heartbreaking spiritual intensity which, under all its superficial materialism and cynicism, is the key-note ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... saw Hal's mood. "Don't misunderstand us!" he cried. "It's heartbreaking—but it's not in our power to help. We are charged with building up the union, and we know that if we supported everything that looked like a strike, we'd be bankrupt the first year. You can't imagine how often this same thing happens—hardly a month we're not called ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... Oh! the long, heartbreaking, cruel Sundays! Consider that, mingled with all these perplexities in his mind, was the superstitious reverence of the common people for holy days, for the twenty-four hours of rest, wherein one recovers strength and courage. If he had gone out, the sight of a workingman with his wife and child would ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was forced to kneel in the swimming cockpit, steering with one hand, using the bailing-dish with the other, and keeping his eyes religiously turned to the bellying patch of sail. It was heartbreaking toil; he began reluctantly to concede that it could not last much longer. And if he missed the brigantine he would be lost; mortal strength was not enough to stand the unending strain upon every bone, muscle ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Elsie," Arthur 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 ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... king's crowns. This same Villon, who more than once outran the watch started in his pursuit, this noisy guest at the dens of the Rue Pierre Lescot, this spunger at the court of the Duke of Egypt, this Salvator Rosa of poesy, has strung together elegies the heartbreaking sentiment and truthful accents of which move the most pitiless and make them forget the ruffian, the vagabond and the debauchee, before this muse drowned ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... fetches of sobs, and dartings and gleamings of pearls from her shining eyelids. Her handkerchief was soon a little wad of wet lace, ridiculously pathetic; her lips were blubbered. She wept on and on till she just had to blow her little red nose. She blew it with exquisite candor, and it gave forth the heartbreaking squawk of the first toy trumpet a child breaks of a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... toward the tube, and nodded rapidly. And to the deep-throated roar of an unmuffled exhaust, the heavy car leaped, like a spirited animal stung by whip and spur, and settled into a stride to which what had gone before was as a preliminary canter to the heartbreaking drive ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... I warn you I never tire when I find any one who will study Browning with me. I tried to read The Ring and the Book with a dear friend once, and reading my favorite part, 'Giuseppe Caponsacchi,' as I raised my eyes after that heartbreaking finale, 'O, great, just, good God! Miserable me!' I saw she was dozing. Since then, I read ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... that kept repeating themselves. All the same words, and the worst, the most heartbreaking. 'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow!' They will drive a soul to perdition quicker than any in the English language. I am going to have them engraved on my tombstone, because I can only ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... side to side with a force which plucked the men off their legs several times. Again and again it appeared as if the smack must fall off the sides of the steep seas, as the long screw colliers sometimes do in the Bay of Biscay when the three crossing drifts meet. It was a heartbreaking day, and, at the very worst, a smack bore down as if he meant to come right into the Mission vessel. Sweeping under the lee and stopping his vessel, the smack's skipper hailed. "Got the doctor on board?" Down went the newcomer into the trough, leaving just a glimpse of his truck. Up again ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... 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
... 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... gift laid upon Thyrsis. He soon discovered that these visions of wonder came but once, and that when they were gone, they were gone forever. And he must learn to grapple with them as they fled, to labor with them and to hold them fast, at the cost of whatever heartbreaking strain. Thus alone could men have even the feeblest reflexion of their beauty—upon which to ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... Don't let her get beforehand with Paramore. She'll tell him the most heartbreaking stories about how she's been treated, and get ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 of the storm was broken, though the wind had veered ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... is heartbreaking, and night brings no forgetfulness. Those long voiceless nights of South Africa! Not a bird's call, nor a chirp from the tiny creatures which hide in the grass. A white moon, a wide heaven filled with strange stars, and the ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... telling how she had systematised the work of a household with two maids and a negro 'buttons.' She sold one or two of the poems for children and with a sense of guilt at the desertion of her family made a trip to New York. She made the weary rounds in one day, 'a heartbreaking day, going from publisher to publisher.' In two places she saw responsible persons and everywhere her verses were turned down. 'But one man was very kind to me, and to that publishing house I later sent The Circular Staircase, my first novel. They published it and some eight ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... 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 ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... little children, the barrier in my heart gave way, my tears gushed forth; my head lay on the window-sill at Magnolia, more hopelessly than in my childish sorrow it had ever lain at Melbourne. I kept my sobs quiet; I must; but they were deep, heartbreaking sobs, ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... as 'twas wont, my finger, and holds it: But the grasp is the clasp of Death, heartbreaking and stiff; Yet feels to my hand as if 'Twas still thy will, thy pleasure and trust ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... meek and tractable; she spoke not, nor could any ingenuity on their part extract the slightest reply from her. Neither did she shed a single tear, but the vacant light of her eyes had stamped a fatuitous expression on her features that was melancholy and heartbreaking beyond all power of language ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... 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 of our age that they should miss these things in ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... of life, for months or maybe years; here were they, with the familiar cliffs and downs under their hungry eyes, suddenly confronted with an alternative of the cruellest description, a Hobson's choice that left them no option but to submit or fight. It was a heartbreaking predicament for men, and more especially for sailor-men, to be placed in, and if they sometimes rose to the occasion like men and did their best to heave the gang bodily into the sea, or to drive them ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... a moment, and then he said: "No, we mustn't make terms with war, any more than we must do with cholera. It's a great, heartbreaking evil, and it puts everything back a stage. Of course it brings out fine qualities—I know that—and so does a plague of cholera. It's the evil in both that brings out the fine things to oppose it. But we ought to have more faith, and believe that the ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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
... ghostly, ominous. I find written in my Diary of Easter Day—exactly five weeks after the outbreak of the Revolution—these words: "From long talks with K. and others I see quite clearly that Russians have gone mad for the time being. It's heartbreaking to see them holding meetings everywhere, arguing at every street corner as to how they intend to arrange a democratic peace for Europe, when meanwhile the Germans are gathering every moment ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... Monsieur—(humming)—Heart-breaking, heartbreaking! (To the coachman.) Home again, quickly; I am all but asleep. (He stretches himself out and turns up his collar.) ( Aside.) After all, I am the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... she had seen in his eyes sometimes was heartbreaking. When Phil was younger, she used to ask about her mother, but later she had never referred to her. Her aunts had, after their fashion, not been above using her mother to point a moral. In their lack of appreciation of the keenness of the child's intuitions or her eager imagination, they ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Pelly one morning, as they were harnessing up, Dolly, who had never been conspicuous for anything, went suddenly mad. She announced her condition by a long, heartbreaking wolf howl that sent every dog bristling with fear, then sprang straight for Buck. He had never seen a dog go mad, nor did he have any reason to fear madness; yet he knew that here was horror, and fled away from it in a panic. Straight ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... inhabited and known by the various names of Hampreston, Parley Common, St. Leonard's Common and Holt Heath. There are few parts of Southern England where is so much idle land, apart from the New Forest, as in eastern Dorset. These moors are beautiful for rambling and camping, but heartbreaking to any one with the mind ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... dear fellow—Hooker," exclaimed my uncle, as we were starting, "do let me know as soon as possible if our treasures have escaped; it would be heartbreaking to lose them. Send up Walter as soon as possible. The knowledge that they are safe would bring me round quicker than anything else, and recompense me for ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... good job, my lad, for it would be heartbreaking to know that all we've done out there, planting fruit-trees and getting the place in such nice trim, should be 'lowed to go back again to ruin, and grow over into forest wilds, as it would ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... fugitives. I knew not whether from the good cause or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and, at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms and the features that were worth all the world to me, and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands, and heartbreaking partings, and then—everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of death—everlasting farewells! and again, and yet ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... officer," he said, after a solemn pause. "And 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, ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... upon superintending the building of the nunneries, in which he is so interested. As to the French, they paralyse all military operations. They regard us as an inferior race, and act as if, with their own five or six thousand troops, they could defeat all the power of England. It is heartbreaking ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... steep, and emerged at last upon the dizzy and breathless height above. Two men could scarce climb abreast in it; and even this was defended by fortifications, and at the summit, against the sky, tents could be seen. Yet this was the only way to victory: only by this heartbreaking path could England drive France from the western continent, and give a mighty nation to the world. Wolfe saw, and was content; where one man could go, thousands might follow. And he perceived that the very difficulty of the enterprise was the best assurance of its success. ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... had long been used to Labour meetings, but was then brought face to face with hopeless difficulties, heartbreaking to the organizer, because of a rooted disbelief among the workers in the possibility of improvement. There is a stage in which there is hope—hope for the improvement of wages and of conditions, possibly to be won by ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... me as I write. Let no one ever say that this is a dull world! It is anything but dull! It is a pitiful, heartbreaking world, full of injustice, misunderstandings, false standards, and selfishness, but it is never dull. Neither is it a lost world, for the darkest corners of it are illuminated here and there by heroic ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... of The Inca, and that heartbreaking episode where the Court Undertaker, in a morbid desire to increase his professional skill, deliberately accomplishes the destruction of his middle-aged relatives in order to inter them for the ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... working normally; he could govern it, but it was like something trying to get away from 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 his children, that he thought it ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... great many people will be killed in this war, John Joseph, and that is heartbreaking to think of; yes heartbreaking, although you with your warlike notions say ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... bear to hear her heartbreaking sobs. With the impulse of a father soothing a child he lifts her from the ground, and holding her in his strong embrace, strides on at the ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... could!' chuckled Sweetflower. 'But our queen has been cruel enough to strike her dumb, whilst she looks upon this heartbreaking spectacle. If she once wakes, she won't be troubled again with sleep ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... 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, was a blow to which, for a time, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... consolation 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 not care very much for church. ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... almost terrible consolation in such a heartbreaking record, terrible from the light it throws upon the constitution of human nature and the conditions of that supreme sympathy which is the noblest kind of fame. Had Sir Walter been able to throw his burdens from him, had he loosed the millstone from his neck and ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... and spent from that heartbreaking climb up the merciless acclivity of the Butte Montmartre—he staggered rather than walked past the sleepy verger and found his way through the crowding shadows to the softly luminous heart of the basilica of the Sacre-Cour, he found her there, kneeling, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... was in his mouth. What kind of a trick was fate playing on him? Was this to be the end of his heartbreaking struggle, his wild flight through the woods? Was he to get just a tantalizing glimpse of liberty to have it immediately snatched from him? At that moment he ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... sorrowful, and replied, "Noble stranger, it is too much to run a second risk, for this monster lived in a den under yon mountain, with a brother of his, more fierce than himself; therefore, if you go thither and perish in the attempt, it will be the heartbreaking of both me and my lady. Let me persuade you to ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... 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 ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... as Breaden said, looking "like a clown's cap." From the top of the highest, which I named Mount Ernest, after my brother-in-law, a dismal scene stretched before us, nothing but the interminable sand-ridges, the horizon as level as that of the ocean. What heartbreaking country, monotonous, lifeless, without interest, without excitement save when the stern necessity of finding water forced us to seek out the natives in their primitive camps! Every day, however, might bring forth some change, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... 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 younger son of ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... withered daisies had been scattered in the thin grass over the poet, and one hardly dared lift one's eyes from them to the heartbreaking epitaph which one could not spell ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... think not. I have a lot of things to do. All those letters to write." Barry shuddered as he spoke. For nothing in all his ministerial experience was to him a more exhausting and heartbreaking task than the writing of these letters to the relatives and friends of his ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... peacefully than I could have hoped; but my mind being somewhat relieved about my lady, I began to think a little of myself, and to wonder what the count meant to do with me. I felt certain he would never let me see her again if he could help it, and that alone was a heartbreaking grief to me; and then it came into my head that perhaps he would confine me somewhere for life—shut me up in a convent, perhaps, or a madhouse! As soon as this idea possessed me, it grew and grew till I felt as if I really was going mad with the horror ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... refuse is the curious part of it. Up it comes from the main shaft and is piled up into a series of large pyramids, visible for miles around. Many of the famous "redoubts" are coal-refuse pyramids really. And such nice little chimneys. Rinaldo—gone! Isn't it heartbreaking! An important person comes nosing round, and asks for him. Sir John doesn't like to refuse. I am powerless. Adieu, dear Rinaldo! One gets awfully fond of a horse. Rinaldo was very naughty sometimes, but I loved him all the more for it. ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... exertion and completely cooled down, he received the remaining water in silence, and, with a few words of admonition, was delivered over to his mother, in whose arms he stifled his sobs, until his heartbreaking grief and cares were drowned in sleep. What a devilish mixture ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... endless; one moment our course is due north, then east, then again north, and as suddenly due south; in fact, we face every point of the compass within an hour. Frequently the noggurs that are far in the rear appear in advance; it is a heartbreaking river without a single redeeming point; I do not wonder at the failure of all expeditions in this wretched country. There is a breeze to-day, thus the oppressive heat and stagnated marsh atmosphere is relieved. I have always remarked that when the sky ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me: and but a moment allowed—and clasped hands, with heartbreaking partings, and then—everlasting farewells! and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was reverberated—everlasting farewells! And again, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... It is the experiences of this latter party with which we are concerned. Misfortune came to them thick and fast from this time on. The wagons were stalled in Weber Canyon and had to be hauled bodily up the steep cliffs to the plateau above; some of their stock ran away, after heartbreaking struggles over the Salt Lake desert; mirages intensified their burning thirst by their disappointing lure; Indians threatened them, and finally, to add despair to their wretchedness, a quarrel arose in which Mr. Reed, in self-defence, killed one of the drivers, named Snyder. Reed was banished ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... it paid to amuse and to cringe. One particular black man set me crazy. He was intelligent and deft, but one day I caught sight of his face as he served a crowd of men; he was playing the clown,—crouching, grinning, assuming a broad dialect when he usually spoke good English—ah! it was a heartbreaking sight, and he made more money than any ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... 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. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 NOVELS are ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The delusive pleasures that follow in the train of dark-browed night, all told of Edwin. The unreal mockery of that capricious being, who cheats us with scenes of fictitious wretchedness, was full of the unmerited calamities, the heartbreaking woe, or the untimely death of Edwin. From Edwin therefore the language of love would have created no disgust. Imogen was not heedless and indiscreet; she would not have sacrificed the dignity of innocence. Imogen was ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... music, whose waking Makes the soul of the Swiss die away, Has a spell more adored and heartbreaking Than, for me, in that blighted ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... the painful duty of informing Mauperin of his son's death. The old man's grief was heartbreaking. When Denoisel was admitted to Renee, he found her sitting on a footstool, sobbing, with her handkerchief pressed ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... since that, papa has been very hopeful. I don't know exactly what his mind runs on, but I can see that he is making heaps of plans in regard to the future, and oh! You can't think how glad and how thankful I am for the change. The state of dull, heartbreaking, weary depression that he fell into just after getting the news of our failure was beginning to undermine his health. I could see that plainly, and felt quite wretched about him. But now he is comparatively cheerful, and ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... tent, a miserable gipsy thing compared with the proud pavilion of the days of the glory of Billy the pig, was pitched on the outskirts of a poor little town, they found Madame Rocambeau dead in the canvas box-office which she had occupied for fifty years, the heartbreaking receipts in front of her, counted out into little piles of bronze and small silver. The end had come. The circus could not be sold as a going concern. It crumbled away. Somebody bought the old horses, Heaven knows for what purpose. Somebody ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... His resentment against his friend was gone. Surely it was a wise physician who had given him that heartbreaking little scene to remember when he should be tempted to harden his heart against ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... to see the parting between Yves and Chrysantheme; I listen with all my ears, I look with all my eyes, it takes place in the simplest and quietest fashion: none of that heartbreaking which will be inevitable between Madame Prune and myself; I even notice in my mousme an indifference, an unconcern which puzzles me; I positively am at a loss to understand what it ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... gallant army, which under their chiefs had drawn to a head at Ruthven. They were to disperse, he wrote, and secure their own safety as best they could; they must wait for better times, when he hoped to return bringing foreign succours. Heartbreaking orders these were for the brave men who had lost all in the Prince's cause, and who were now proscribed ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... week I could not say; nor even now do I know. We became very tired and hungry; the hours dragged; we slept at least twice, and then we rose and stumbled on, always weaker and weaker. There were ages during which the trend of the corridors was always upward. It was heartbreaking work for people in the state of exhaustion in which we then were, but we clung tenaciously to it. We stumbled and fell; we sank through pure physical inability to retain our feet; but always we managed to rise at last ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... do it for Will, as is my own cousin, and who I love better than anybody else in the world? Don't you take on now, dear—don't you," for Bet had flung her head down on her hands, and was giving way to the most terrible, heartbreaking sobs. ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... of the country, summing up in two words all the heartbreaking labour that transforms the incult woods, barren of sustenance, to smiling fields, ploughed and sown. Samuel Chapdelaine's eyes flamed with enthusiasm ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... the town," the peasant put in. "Our cattle died last spring... the plague. All the beasts have died round us, all of them. There aren't half of them left, it's heartbreaking." ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... lacked neither courage nor persistence. His battle against heartbreaking disappointments shows him to have been a pioneer of high order. And with him sailed in 1604 Jean de Biencourt, Seigneur de Poutrincourt, whose ancestors had been illustrious in {29} Picardy for five hundred years. Champlain made a third, joining the expedition as geographer rather than ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby
... HILL [with a heartbreaking attempt at devil-may-care cheerfulness] I ain't miserable. [He sits down again, and stretches his legs in ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... found something wistful and appealing in his smile before, now it seemed to her heartbreaking. ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... have," replied Braxton. "And it's always been a treat to see the way he did his work. I saw him at the Polo Grounds when in that last, heartbreaking game he won the championship for the Giants. And I saw him, too, in that last game of the World's Series, when it seemed as though only a miracle could save the day. That triple play was the most wonderful thing I ever beheld. The way he nailed ...
— Baseball Joe Around the World - Pitching on a Grand Tour • Lester Chadwick
... kept to this day the heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that and to play with it. "And you can't say I've not been ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... himself upon the sofa by the window and wept, not as a boy weeps, but with the cruel, grinding sobs of a man. He wept for his stained pride, for his vain-glory, not because he had sinned and caused others to sin. The boy watching him, seeing the hero self-abased, hearing his heartbreaking sobs, interpreted very differently those sounds. Infinitely distressed, turning over and over in his mind some soothing phrases, some word of comfort and encouragement, Desmond waited till the first ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... here, dear. This husband of mine, the unknown great man whom I love more and more every day, as I discover moment by moment the wealth of his nature, leaves the printing-house more and more to me. Why, I guess. Our poverty, yours, and ours, and our mother's, is heartbreaking to him. Our adored David is a Prometheus gnawed by a vulture, a haggard, sharp-beaked regret. As for himself, noble fellow, he scarcely thinks of himself; he is hoping to make a fortune for us. He spends his whole time in experiments in paper-making; he begged me to take his place and look after ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... were still spared to us in the flesh, she really would have talked this way, except that she would have used a few more dots. But one is an idealist. One is jarred. If you could recite, in your soft, clear-cut voice that is so admirably adapted for poetry, a few stanzas of something heartbreaking——" voluntarily. ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... his little mind away in the future, living in the earthly paradise which had been conjured up before him by the warm, inspiring sentences of this miners' leader, and joyful in the contemplation of this paradise of happy humanity, he fell asleep. Could he have foreseen the terrible, heartbreaking ordeals through which Smillie often had to pass, still clinging with tenacity to the gleam that led him on, praying sometimes that strength would be given to keep him from turning back; of the strenuous battle he had, not only with those he fought against, but of the ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... the threshing crew were expected to keep abreast of each new lot of them day after day. At night the threshermen, too weary for talk, crept into the loft of a barn, slept until daylight and then began another day of heartbreaking toil. On Sunday morning they went for a swim in some creek and in the afternoon sat in a barn or under the trees of an orchard sleeping or indulging in detached, fragmentary bits of talk, talk that ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... him well—ah, terribly well! It was the tragedy of the man stopped in his course because of one mistake, though he had done ten thousand wise things. The power taken from his hands, the interrupted life, the dark future, the beginning again, if ever his sight came back: it was sickening, heartbreaking. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the other left." Here were persons of all ages—from six to eighty, I should guess—of all characters, ranks, experiences; of both sexes. Some were religious, some grocers, some of the nobility, a retired soldier or two, and so on. They were not distinguished for holiness, it seemed. I had heard heartbreaking little stories of the ten lepers over again—one grateful, nine selfish. One or two of the girls, I heard, had had their heads turned by flattery and congratulation; they had begun ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson |
