"Cursed with" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... appetite for the griddle-cakes his mother cooked him in lieu of the traditional veal,—but all undaunted. He never tried it again, yet people say he has thrown away all his chances of a thrifty living by perpetual wandering in the woods with gun and fishing-rod, and that he is cursed with a deplorable indifference to the state of his fences and potato-patch. No one could call him an admirable citizen, but I am not sure that he has chosen the worser part; for who is so jovial and sympathetic ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... to say that we have entered the Utopian age, for the present international situation is a peculiar one, since we are at the same time blessed with peace and cursed with militarism. This is not an age of war, yet we are burdened by great and ever-increasing armaments; the mad race for naval supremacy continues, while the relative strength of the powers remains practically the same; the intense and useless rivalry ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... tell her to name her price. And the price was none other than the head of John—John Baptist, who for defiling the name of Antipas' wife had been put in a dungeon under the castle of Machaerus. Antipas is not cursed with poverty. Yet are there prices too great, for since the head of the brawler came blinking on a platter, do the people declare he were Elias, and that he is not dead but walks the dungeon by day and whither he will ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... acquires fortunes, but preserves them after they have been acquired. The ruin which overtakes so many merchants is due not so much to their lack of business talent as to their lack of business nerve. How many lovable persons we see in trade, endowed with brilliant capacities, but cursed with yielding dispositions,—who are resolute in no business habits and fixed in no business principles,—who are prone to follow the instincts of a weak good-nature against the ominous hints of a clear intelligence, now obliging this friend by indorsing an unsafe note, and then pleasing that neighbor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... find no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blest with spontaneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private and social virtues: here are no Hottentots without ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... back, Veronica, that will show they are cursed with an argumentative temperament which must be rooted out at any cost," I agreed; "and if they don't say anything, that will prove them possessed of a surly disposition which must be checked at once, before ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... I have tried to sketch the Real He-man, the fellow with Zip and Bang. And it's because Zenith has so large a proportion of such men that it's the most stable, the greatest of our cities. New York also has its thousands of Real Folks, but New York is cursed with unnumbered foreigners. So are Chicago and San Francisco. Oh, we have a golden roster of cities—Detroit and Cleveland with their renowned factories, Cincinnati with its great machine-tool and soap products, Pittsburg and Birmingham with ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... your string then," said Mr. Best. "And long may your fine faith flourish. You're a great lesson to us people cursed with too ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... you? No wonder! I try to hide nothing—why should I? But tell me, I beseech you, why are we in this miserable department cursed with a ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... departs at length from Ovid in the beginning of his tale, where the Renaissance poet undertakes to explain why Mirrha is cursed with love for her father. While she listens to the sweet, sad songs of Orpheus, Cupid,[15] falling in love with her, courts her and is rejected; his parting kiss "did inspire/her brest with an infernall ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... know what you have to fight against. To be a Malincourt is at once to have a curse and a blessing hung round your neck. The Malincourts were originally of French extraction—descendants of the haute noblesse of old France—cursed with the devil's own pride and passionate self-will, and blessed with looks and brains and charm above the average. They never bend; they break sooner. And I think you've got the lot, Sara—the ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... malignant, and cruel. How far this will tend to confirm the assertion, that when a boy, he was an amateur of this royal sport, I do, says Mr. Ireland, not pretend to decide: but were a child, in whom I had any interest, cursed with such a propensity, my first object would be to correct it: if that were impracticable, and he retained a fondness for the cockpit, and the still more detestable amusement of Shrove Tuesday, I should hardly dare to flatter myself that he could become ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... the moans from the wards and private rooms where the maimed and the crippled and the incurable are faintly struggling in the grasp of death. I would like to lead them through the children's ward, where mites of humanity cursed with heredity's blight, removed from a mother's bosom, consigned to suffering throughout the span of their feeble days, lie faintly breathing their lives away. And then would like to say to them: "You contemptible cowards, you abominable fussers, you inexcusable kickers, see what ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... honour's curious behaviour, I knew him and distrusted him enough not to think much of it. He was a coward, cursed with a guilty conscience, and would fain have passed himself off as a righteous judge and powerful patron. He was anxious to conciliate me, not so much, I thought, because of my hint about the property, which he was satisfied ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... may have been—I have heard of such things"—and she laughed fearfully at the horrible thought a tempting devil was putting into her mind—"I have heard of young girls—poor desolate creatures, cursed with riches, and having no one to guard them—of some stranger coming and marrying them hastily, but not for love—oh, not for love!" And her laughter grew absolutely frightful in its mockery. "How do I know but that ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... child's coming with mingled feelings. His heart yearned for him, yet he dreaded to meet a second edition of Martin Moore. Suppose Margaret's son resembled his handsome vagabond of a father! Or, worse still, suppose he were cursed with his father's lack of principle, his instability, his Bohemian instincts. Thus Mr. Leonard tortured himself wretchedly before ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... married a white man. I implore you to convict me! Send me to prison! Let me wear a felon's garb! Let my son know that his mother is a convict, but in the name of heaven I ask you, send not my child and me into Negro life. Send us not to a race cursed with petty jealousies, the burden bearers of the world. My God! the thought of being called a Negro is ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... dead. He had no doubt that the human-like figure he saw running on foot towards the church was the spirit of the departed witch, and that the pursuers were demons. After condoling with the bereaved relations, he took his departure from an abode cursed with the presence of a witch's remains. Scarcely had he crossed the threshold before he observed the black horseman riding swiftly towards the house, with the woman lying across the saddle-bow, and the two dogs following close behind. In an instant, man, woman, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... cursed with acres fat (A Christian's direst ban), And gold—yet, notwithstanding that, ...
— More Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... grotto's gloom, All hope extinct, they wait their doom. Dire was the silence, till, at length, Even from despair deriving strength, 110 With bloody eye and furious look, A daring youth arose and spoke: "O wretched race, the scorn of Fate, Whom ills of every sort await! O cursed with keenest sense to feel The sharpest sting of every ill! Say ye, who, fraught with mighty scheme, Of liberty and vengeance dream, What now remains? To what recess Shall we our weary steps address, 120 Since Fate is evermore pursuing ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... him for nuthin'," said Lafitte. "He ain't worth nothin'. Besides, I can't charge a brother of the flag anything; anyhow, not you." I inferred that Jean Lafitte, also, was going to grow up into one of those men like myself, cursed with a reticence and shyness in some matters, and so winning a reputation of oddness or coldness, against all the real and passionate ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... step; but there are times when evil tendencies combine with adverse influences and circumstances to produce sudden and seemingly fatal havoc in character. As the world goes, Haldane was a well-meaning youth, although cursed with evil habits and tendencies, when he entered the isolated, half-finished house. He was bad and devilish when he came out upon the street again, and walked recklessly toward the city, caring not who saw or recognized ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... fatal. If the Christians' fables were true, we might say that Adam and Eve were originally in possession of Instinct and Reason, and fell by listening to the promptings of volition, instead of the unswerving powers of the brutes, and for a hereditary punishment was cursed with a superabundance of reason. For with all our intellectual prerogatives, we have yet failed to arrive at a definite course of action which should influence our conduct. The Essay, speaking ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... dulness of their stolid sires, And all the erring instincts of their tribe, Nature's own teaching, rudiments of "sin," Fell headlong in the snare that could not fail To trap the wretched creatures shaped of clay And cursed with sense enough to ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... thing were wanting to add to the melancholy of the scene, it would have been the stunted and withering leaves thus mournfully enshrouding the silent dead. There is something so unnatural in the conjunction of a scanty vegetation with a soil cursed with hopeless aridity, that the gardens and few green spots, occurring in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, detract from, instead of embellishing, the scene. Though pleasant and beautiful as retreats to those who can command an entrance, these circumscribed patches of verdure offend rather than please ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... once brought one of our Missionary Secretaries, the eloquent Reverend Lachlin Taylor, DD. The trip down had not been one of the most pleasant. The rains had drenched him, and the mosquitoes had plagued him with such persistency, that he loudly bemoaned his lot in being found in a country that was cursed with such abominable animals. ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... was he cursed with a state of mind more wearing and more wearisome than remorse. He had no remorse; but the evildoer who can hold that avenger at bay, cannot escape the slower torture of incessantly doing the evil deed again and doing it more efficiently. In the ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... encampment. But his caste was low, and he was drunken and careless and lazy beyond words, and the hunters had mostly only scorn for him. They called him Langur after a grey-bearded breed of monkeys along the slopes of the Himalayas, rather suspecting he was cursed with evil spirits, for why should any sane man have such mad ideas as to the rights of elephants? He never wanted to join in the drives—which was a strange thing indeed for a man raised in the hills. Perhaps he was afraid—but yet they could remember a certain day in ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... excellent accomplice and tool are not those which any party would consider desirable in a leader. Whatever office-seekers, partisans, traitors, and public enemies may find in Mr. Johnson, it is certain that they find in him nothing to respect. He is cursed with that form of moral disease which sometimes renders a man ridiculous, sometimes infamous, but which never renders him respectable,—namely, vanity of will. Other men may be vain of their talents and accomplishments, but he is vain of the personal pronoun itself, utterly regardless of what it covers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... and counselors, while to a great extent the semi-piratical sailors who infested the coast have been driven into other lines of dishonest endeavor. Perhaps not since the days of Lafitte and the pirates of Barataria has any part of the coast of the United States been cursed with so criminal and abandoned a lot of sea marauders as have for a decade frequented the waters off Alaska, the Pribylof Islands, and the sealing regions. The outlawry of a great part of the seal trade, and the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... and about the dead, until the day of the funeral. No one saw him shed a single tear, not even when the earth was thrown on to the coffins, and people wondered at his composure; he had clung so closely to them. He was probably one of those who were cursed with inability to cry, ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... maintain that a man is responsible for his own ailments?" said Mr. Harland—"That would be too far-fetched, even for YOU! Why, as a matter of fact a wretched human being is not only cursed with his own poisoned blood but with the poisoned blood of his forefathers, and, according to the latest medical science, the very air and water swarm with germs of ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... hashed Hadis (tradition), he derives the title of Widad or hedge-priest. His tongue, primed with the satirical sayings of Abn Zayd el Helali, and Humayd ibn Mansur [13], is the terror of men upon whom repartee imposes. His father was a wealthy shipowner in his day; but, cursed with Abdy and another son, the old man has lost all his property, his children have deserted him, and he now depends entirely upon the charity of the Zayla chief. The "End of Time" has squandered considerable sums in travelling far and wide from Harar to Cutch, he has managed everywhere ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... hand, would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions?—how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them, But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... men possessed of great intelligence. Every kind of felicity and auspiciousness becomes theirs in consequence of that intelligence with which they are born. Those men of foolish understandings who cast wicked eyes upon the wedded spouses of other men, become cursed with congenital blindness in consequence of that sinfulness of theirs. Those men who, impelled by desire in their hearts, cast their eyes on naked women, those men of wicked deeds take birth in this world to pass their whole lives ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... him with admiration, but he seemed to have lost all zest for the intoxicating wine of public favor. A profound gloom stole over him, and we even hear of hints at an attempt to commit suicide. Adam Liszt attributed it to the sad English climate, which Hein-rich Heine cursed with such unlimited bitterness, and took his boy back again to sunnier France. But the dejection darkened and deepened, threatening even to pass into epilepsy. It assumed the form of religious enthusiasm, alternating with fits of remorse as ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Street. If that could be proved, then the woman had been guilty of perjury, and her evidence would collapse altogether. Now there were some portions of her evidence which were most unsatisfactory. She had led a dissolute life, and was cursed with an ungovernable temper. But, on the other hand, she had told a consistent tale as to the occurrences of that fatal afternoon, and he could not go so far as to advise the jury to reject her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... knowledge, cursed with the rudiments of an imagination, hampered by the intense selfishness of the lower classes, and unsupported by any regimental associations, this young man is suddenly introduced to an enemy who in eastern lands is always ugly, generally tall and hairy, and frequently noisy. If he looks ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... sadly. "'My heart is on the ground,'" he answered, using an expressive Indian phrase. "I cannot be light and witty. I am cursed with seriousness." ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... at that time was the Duke's friend Baron Forstner, a man of excellent and sterling qualities, but one of those unfortunate mortals cursed with a lugubrious manner which makes their goodness seem to be but one more irritating characteristic of a tiresome personality. Forstner was genuinely devoted to the Duke; he had been the companion of the Prince's childhood, had shared his studies, and had followed him on his ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... continued. For offering to Him the lame and the blind, the Lord was displeased with Israel; but his blessing was promised to those who devoted liberally of their substance to Him. "Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a curse: for ye have robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... heart of East London, and there were tens of thousands of people abroad on it. I tell you this so that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe in the next paragraph. As I say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as an American waif would curse, stranded in a strange and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead them to believe, and succeeded in making them believe, they took me for a "seafaring man," who had spent his money in riotous living, lost his clothes (no unusual occurrence ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... establishment had exceeded his income; he had too much indulged his passion for all the fine arts, of which he was a liberal patron: he had collected a magnificent library, and had lavished immense sums of money on architectural embellishments. Cursed with too fine a taste, and with too soft a heart—a heart too well knowing how to yield, never could he deny himself, much less any other human being, any gratification which money could command; and soon the necessary consequence was, that he had no money to command, his affairs fell into embarrassment—his ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... pure fiction, and were not cursed with an obstinate inclination to write the truth, I might say that, after the advent of the Pretty Girl, the morals of Bourke improved suddenly and wonderfully. That One-eyed Bogan left off gambling and drinking and fighting and swearing, and put on ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... teaching has been handed down from mother to daughter through the ages, while the poor, misguided souls of expectant women have suffered untold remorse, heaped blame upon themselves, lived lives literally cursed with fear and dread—veritable slaves to superstition and bondage—all because of the simple fact that a certain percentage of all children born in this world have sustained some sort of an injury or "embryological accident" during the first days ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... not cursed with that blessing. But I've an old mother, a sister, and three nephews, who look to me for support. The old woman's too old to work; the lass is too lazy, and the little ones are too young. But they're none of them too old or young ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... Iron King and millionnaire of Pittsburg, has been addressing big audiences in Scotland. Amongst his remarks were the following:—"It is said that in America, although we have no aristocracy, we are cursed with a plutarchy. Let me tell you about that. A man who carries a million dollars on his back carries a load.... When I speak against the Royal Family I do not condescend to speak of the creatures who form the Royal Family—persons are so insignificant.... We laugh at your ideas in this ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., September 20, 1890 • Various
... or to smother the investigating spirit under the featherbed of respected and respectable tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive genius, which can only build on a secure foundation, or cursed with the spirit of mere scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of their own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... Let the man and woman see this, and let them know in the day that is at hand, how the challenge may come from some petty authority of the time that rules not by its integrity but by its favourites. We are cursed with such authority, and many a one drives about in luxury because he is obsequious to it: he prefers to be a parasite and to live in splendour than be a man and live in straits. He has what Bernard Shaw so aptly calls "the soul of a servant." If we are to prepare for a braver ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... complexion. On his left cheekbone was a large brown mole, covered with silky hair, and for some reason that seemed to make his face effeminate. It was easy to see why he had not been successful in private practice. He was like somebody trying to protect a raw surface from heat and cold; so cursed with diffidence, and so sensitive about his boyish appearance that he chose to shut himself up in an oscillating wooden coop on the sea. The long run to Australia had exactly suited him. A rough life and the pounding of bad weather had fewer terrors for him than an office in town, with ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... her chair; her eyes were gazing, with rapt attention, toward the purple dusk by the window. She was listening. Nurse, as she had often assured her friends, "was not cursed with imagination," but now fear held her so that she could not stir nor move save that her hand trembled against the wall paper. The chatter of the fire, the shouts of some boys in the Square, the ringing of the bell of St. Matthew's for evensong, all these things came into the room. ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... "Mr.") has very faithfully produced the exact translation of the original. To be hypercritical, I might suggest that perhaps occasionally the version is rather too literal. For instance, Torvald Helmer, although he is cursed with one of the most offensive wives known to creation, would scarcely call her "a little lark," which conveys the impression that he is a "gay dog," and one given to the traditional ways of that species ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., February 7, 1891 • Various
... they had hidden cunningly their four soft-bristled, helpless babies. What he thought he saw was the owl engaged in turning one of those same babies into nourishing infant owls' food, or "words to that effect." And the hedgehog, like most of the order Insectivora, is cursed with the temper of Eblis, too. Naturally, therefore, things happened, and happened the more hectically, perhaps, because Mrs. Hedgehog chanced at that moment to be away—attending to the last rites—shall we say?—over the form of ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... milled promiscuously among the groups, hail-fellow-well-met, drunk, blasphemous, and loud. These shouted, sang and cursed with vivid impartiality. The other half, keener-eyed, stern of face, capable, drew together in small groups of two or three or four, talking more quietly and ignoring all others except as they kept a general alert watch on what was going on. These were the old-timers, experienced men, who ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... whim; so that, before he had resided a fortnight at Bath, he had set all the ladies by the ears, and furnished all the hundred tongues of scandal with full employment. The splendour of his appearance excited the inquiries of envy, which, instead of discovering any circumstances to his prejudice, was cursed with the information of his being a young gentleman of a good family, and heir to ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... irresponsible private individuals whose aim is profit, not the fulfilment of a national demand. "The causes of commercial depression lie in the non-consumption of the incomes of our millionaires."[207] Another Socialist writer asserts: "Our era is cursed with crises occurring far more frequently than plagues and causing as much misery. Economists say that these crises are caused by over-production. Private enterprise compels every producer to produce for himself, to sell for himself, to keep all his transactions to himself, without regard to ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... cursed with the drought at its worst, And the cattle were dying in scores, Though down on my luck, I kept up my pluck, Thinking justice might temper the laws. But the farce has been played, and the Government aid Ain’t extended to ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... tone and manner told him that the boast of being "a man of the world" was not untrue. And of all kinds of men, a man of the world was the man of whom Trebooze stood most in awe. A small squireen, cursed with six or seven hundreds a year of his own, never sent to school, college, or into the army, he had grown up in a narrow circle of squireens like himself, without an object save that of gratifying his animal passions; and had about six years before, being then just of age, settled in life ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... that house she was a lanky, black-eyed creature, tall for her age, and endowed or, as she herself would have put it, cursed with an abundance of curly unmanageable hair, whereof the brushing and tending soon became to a nervous clumsy child, not long parted from her nurse, one of the worst plagues of her existence. During her home life she had been ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the hands of the compiler by a physician of Philadelphia who for many years had shown great kindness to its writer, in the endeavor to cure him of his pernicious habits. The writer seems from childhood to have been cursed with an excessive sensibility, and an unusual constitutional craving for excitement, coupled with an infirm and unreliable will. The habit of daily dependence upon alcohol appears to have been established for years before the use of opium was commenced; and the latter was begun ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... when they essayed to drink. God was their greatest enemy instead of their best friend. Their tortuous path across the wilderness was marked by a track of bleaching bones. All the evils which imagination can conceive fell on their devoted heads. Bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, cursed with famine and drought, swallowed by earthquake, slain by war, and robbed by priests, they found Jehovah a harder despot than Pharaoh. Death was to them a happy release, and only the grave a shelter from ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... the carriage. Some hours passed, and we began to be uneasy; for the life of the Emperor had been so often menaced, that it was very natural to fear some snare or surprise, and imagination takes the reins when beset by such fears. Prince Murat swore and cursed with all his might, sometimes the imprudence of his Majesty, then his gallantry, then the lady and her complaisance. I was not any better satisfied than he, but being calmer I tried to quiet him; and at last, unable longer to restrain his impatience, the prince sprang out of the carriage, ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... man does not usually strive to dishonour himself because he is in a rage. And this man is incapable of rage. He must be cursed with one of those dark gloomy minds in which love always leads to jealousy. She will ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... sentiments. To explain it, would be to give the reason of marriages which are constantly looked upon with surprise,—marriages between tall and beautiful women and puny men, or between ugly little creatures and handsome men. Every man who is cursed with some bodily infirmity, no matter what it is,—club-feet, a halting-gait, a humped-back, excessive ugliness, claret stains upon the cheek, Roguin's species of deformity, and other monstrosities the result ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... abstractedly upon the key-board, while the other executed, by itself, a passage of extraordinary difficulty and involution. Then, for the first time, the thought struck him that the musician was deaf.[17] Alas! the supposition was too true: Beethoven was cursed with the loss of his most precious faculty. Those who appreciate the full splendour of his gigantic genius, those who conceive, with a distinguished composer now living, that "Beethoven began where Haydn and Mozart left off;" those who coincide with an eminent critic, in saying ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... argue about nothing. I'm not cursed with nerves ordinarily, but there are times—" She arose slowly, stood there beside her chair, gracefully slender, gracefully imperious. "You've chosen ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... is well balanced, who is not cursed with some little defect or weakness which cripples his usefulness and neutralizes his powers. Wanted, a man of courage, who is not a coward in any ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... before I made that drive,—for two reasons. Biggest one was that I wanted to be sure of having it all made, in case something went wrong on that feature drive; get me? Other was plain, human bullheadedness. Some of the four-flushers I was cursed with in the company,—because they were cheap and I had to balance up what I was paying the Injuns,—they kept eyeing that bluff where I said I'd come down with the coach, and betting I wouldn't, and talking off in corners about me just stalling. I just ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... situation is, as I have spent so much of my life in trying to make the English understand, that we are cursed with a fatal intellectual laziness, an evil inheritance from the time when our monopoly of coal and iron made it possible for us to become rich and powerful without thinking or knowing how; a laziness which is becoming highly dangerous to us now that ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... it that any man should look so deeply into the heart of his fellow-man. That was indeed to know good and evil; and the thought stole over him that perhaps it was in degree as a man had eaten of the forbidden fruit of the tree of life that he was cursed with this bitter knowledge. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... The thought of a life lived in the shade, or of a definitely middle-aged life, prolonged in such sunshine as falls upon grey-haired heads, was terrible to her. She was not like the Duchess of Wellingborough. She was cursed with what was called in her set "a temperament," and she did not know how to conquer it, did not dare, even, to try to ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... most sensible (one a forger, the other a kleptomaniac on an important scale) are friends of mine. They are fairly well educated, respectable city men, clean, solemn, stodgy, punctilious, and resigned, but they are both unhappy; not because they are cursed with the double brand of madness and crime, and have forfeited their freedom in consequence; but because they find there are so few "ladies and gentlemen" in a criminal lunatic asylum, and they have always been used to "the society ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Here is Lemuel—cursed with a lean run and yet trying to maintain at least an appearance of geniality. Lemuel runs on a "differential" between New York, Chicago and St. Louis. Every passenger-traffic man knows that most of the differentials—as the roads that take longer hours, and so are permitted to charge ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... learnt to read the words that are written by the hand of Fate. And here—here is the open book. It is all here. The storm of disaster that brought you into the world will dog your footsteps. You are cursed with the luck that leads to disaster. Wherever you go men will bless your name, and, almost in the same breath, their blessings shall turn to the direst curses. It is not I who am speaking. My tongue utters the words, but the writing of Fate has been set forth ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... discomfort. He accepted the most nerve-racking situation with the even-tempered calmness of one who had foreseen it and to whom it was but a trivial incident, inevitable to his far-reaching plans. When others—their tempers tried to the breaking point—cursed with dry, high-pitched, querulous curses the heat, the land, the sun, the dust, the Company and their fellow-sufferers, Jefferson Worth's cool, even tones and unruffled spirit helped them to a needed self-control and gave them a new and stronger grip on things. And many a ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... there probably remain few such epithets in the English language which have not already been applied to him by one writer or another. Yet it is hard to hold one's hand, although humanity would perhaps induce us to pity rather than to revile a man cursed with so unhappy a temperament. But whatever may be said or left unsaid about him personally, the infinite disturbance which he caused cannot be wholly ignored. It was great enough to constitute an important element in history. Covered by the ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... with tears, which he manfully wiped away with a sneaking little movement of his left hand, as he pretended to look out of the window toward the distant lights. A man whose tear-ducts have dried with adolescence is cursed with a shriveled soul for the rest ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... Gipsies were now the only persons addicted to such wickedness; but this is not the case; for it is well known that almost every town is cursed with an astrological, magical, or slight-of-hand fortune-teller. There are two now in Southampton; and their wretched abodes are visited not only by vain and ignorant servants, but often by those who belong to the higher circles, and ...
— The Gipsies' Advocate - or, Observations on the Origin, Character, Manners, and Habits of - The English Gipsies • James Crabb
... in the world's history that was when the ladies had no nerves! Alas! I was born too late instead of too early, as the complaint of some is. I am cursed with nerves, and, as a consequence, am ever and anon distressed with nervous fears of some direful calamity or painful affliction. I am a simpleton for this, I know; but then, how can I help it? I try to be a woman of sense, but my nerves are too delicately ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... with American society, but here his background is the consideration of the evil influences of inheritance in old families. The scene is still New York and Long Island, full of the charm of outdoor life and hunting episodes. The principal male character Siward is cursed with the inheritance of drink. Siward's struggles to conquer his Enemy, and the fighting chance he sees at last in the affection of a girl, carry on the story to a hopeful finish. The novel has been published two years and a few months and more ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... you the pity you pretend to entertain toward me. Yes, I pity you. But what would you have? Frankly, while in many ways an estimable man, you are no fit mate for Patricia. She has the sensitive, artistic temperament, poor girl; and only we who are cursed with it can tell you what its possession implies. And you—since frankness is the order of the day, you know—well, you impress me as being a trifle inadequate. It is not your fault, perhaps, but the fact remains that you have ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... not even the last extremity of danger would force a tear from those proud eyes, nor bow that haughty head an inch. How this wild, fierce worship maddened him! So longing, yet so slavish—so reckless, so debased, yet all the while cursed with a certain leavening of the true faith, that drove him to despair. But come what might, in a few minutes he would see her again. Even at such a time, there was something of repose ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... severe critics of the doings of their family; and Balzac, cursed with the sensitiveness of genius, and smarting under the bitter disappointment of disillusionment and of thwarted and compressed powers, was not likely to be an indulgent critic; but making due allowance for these facts, it does not appear that his home was a particularly comfortable ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the bar, he was without friends, without connections, without fortune, conscious of talents far above the mob by which he was elbowed, and cursed with sensibility, which rendered him painfully alive to the mortifications he was fated to experience. Those who have risen to professional eminence, and recollect the impediments of such a commencement—the neglect abroad—the poverty, perhaps, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... "Why am I, he exclaimed, recalled to this dungeon of torment? Why was not my spirit permitted to take its flight to regions where my guardian is gone? Why am I cursed with memory? O that I might be blessed with forgetfulness! But why do I talk of blessings?—Heaven never had one in store for me. Where are fled my anticipated joys? To the bosom, the dark bosom of the oblivious tomb! ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... and the Mediterranean—of greatest commercial importance in the world. And its people, especially those in rural parts, are exceptionally frugal and industrious. But France as a nation has not made the progress in the world that its natural advantages call for. It has been cursed with expensive and unstable governments and sanguinary wars. Its upper classes, the natural leaders of its peoples, are excessively fond of pleasure and military glory, and the energies of the nation have been much misdirected. As a consequence, despite its natural advantages, France is losing ground ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... cursed with her whole heart now the coldly practical, utterly self-interested side of Baroudi's nature. But she was afraid to defy it. She remembered ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Hesperian fruit of old, Whose golden shadow wont to quiver In the stream of Guadalquiver, Glowing, waving as they hung Mid fragrant blossoms ever young, In gardens of romantic Spain,— Lovely land, and rich in vain! Blest by nature's bounteous hand, Cursed with priests and Ferdinand! Lemons, pale as Melancholy, Or yellow russets, wan and holy. Be their number twice fifteen, Mystic number, well I ween, As all must know, who aught can tell Of sacred lore or glamour spell; Strip them of their gaudy hides, Saffron ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... men, women, and children, not cursed with the fatuity that would become a vice-president of the Phrenological Society, must by this time be about heartsick of what are called Novels of Fashionable Life. Only two men of any pretensions to superiority of talent ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various
... Sartoris said. "Only a few minutes now. It's a good thing for you, and it's a good thing for Mary, who has been cursed with a ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... independent lives, in close contact with civilisation, and enjoying all the rights of manhood under British laws. From their earliest infancy they have known no language but the English, and no religion but Christianity; while the former are still barbarians, grovelling in fetishism, cursed with slavery, ignorant, debased, and wantonly cruel. The West India negro has so much contempt for his African cousin, that he invariably speaks of him by the ignominious title of "bushman." In fact, the former considers himself in every respect an Englishman, and ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... in the world more cursed with worthless curs than that of Mexico and the other southern republics; the cities and villages actually swarm with these animals, and produce no little vexation to travellers, who speak of their eternal yelping and barking in the most ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... my attention elsewhere for half an hour!" he cried angrily. "I seem to be cursed with fools for assistants!" ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... nest, the work-bees of the hive, come, in truth, of those here who still be men and women of a sort, but toilers only; unknown in love, unregretted in death—those who dangle all children but their own—slaves cursed with the accomplishment of their ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... time that I fell in love. In this as in everything through life I have been cursed with the foulest luck, but in this as in everything else my patience has won in the end. Lucy Luttrell loved another man called Railton—John Railton. He was another fool—you are all fools—but she married him and had a daughter. I wonder if you can guess ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... himself? 'Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have roosting-places': why is it that amongst all God's happy creatures, and God's shining stars, men stand 'strangers in a strange land,' and are cursed with a restlessness which has not 'where to lay its head'? The consciousness of unrest is but the agitation of the limbs which indicates disease. That disease is the twitching paralysis of sin. Like 'the pestilence that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... well for us that we are no seers! Were we cursed with prevision, could we know how, when the idle trifle of the present hour shall have been forged into a link of the past, it will stretch out and bind captive the whole future in its bonds, we should be paralysed, hopeless, powerless, old ere we were ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... elder brother, who was living inexclusive pride and narrow economy on the ancient but diminished ancestral estate, ever received him graciously. This brother had married, but had not been blessed or cursed with children, for the German baron, with his limited finances, could never decide in what light to regard them. Too poor to mingle with his equals, too proud to stoop to those whom he regarded as inferiors, he had lived much alone, and grown narrower ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... not differed widely. A spot eminently fruitful has never been discovered. That there are many spots cursed with everlasting and unconquerable sterility no one who has seen the country will deny. At the same time I am decidedly of opinion that many large tracts of land between Rose Hill and the Hawkesbury, even now, are of a nature sufficiently favourable to produce moderate crops of whatever ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... escape his vengeance. I loved thee; and, in spite of thine offence, My heart is troubled by anticipation For thee. But thou hast earn'd thy doom too well. Had father ever greater cause for rage? Just gods, who see the grief that overwhelms me, Why was I cursed with such a ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... And they all teach us that he is the wisest of men who has the worst opinion of his own heart, as he is the foolishest of men who does not know his own heart to be the worst heart that ever any man was cursed with in this world. 'Here is wisdom': not to know the number of the beast, but to know his mark, and to read it written so ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... fault always. The home folk like the figures; they imagine they stand for progress, and they know nothing about the conditions. Many missionaries are very fine men, and they would do even better work if left a little more to their own initiative, and not cursed with this atmosphere of competition in figures. It isn't fair to damn the whole flock because a few of the sheep ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... privileges, as far as they are extended to any portion of the population; and he has there advantages which the people of this country have not yet gained, because we are but gradually making our way out of the darkness and the errors and the tyrannies of past ages. But in America he finds the land not cursed with feudalism; it is free to every man to buy and sell, and possess and transmit. He finds in the town in which he lives that the noblest buildings are the school-houses to which his children are freely admitted. And among those twenty millions—for I am now confining ...
— Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Volume 1 • John Bright
... blue sky, her grand old woods, her fertile fields, her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes, and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked, my joy is soon turned to mourning. When I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding, robbery, and wrong; when I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... right to do so," and "no inclination to do so." He said that his declarations as to the right of the negro to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" were designed only to refer to legislation "about any new country which is not already cursed with the actual presence of the evil,—slavery." He denied having ever "manifested any impatience with the necessities that spring from the ... actual existence of slavery among us, where ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... half-breed Cree, from the boat to the bar they leap; And then when the long flotilla goes, and the last of their pay is done, The boys from the banks of Lac Labiche swing to the heavy sweep. And oh, how they sigh! and their throats are dry, and sorry are they and sick: Yet there's none so cursed with a lime-kiln thirst as that ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... should a woman with her graceful carriage and pretty vivacity have been cursed with such an ill-assorted lot of features! Especially when certain boorish young husbands have expressed an admiration for pink-and-white ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... the wish only of the young or the ignorant; to every one else, a perpetual vigil will appear to be a state of wretchedness, second only to that of the miserable beings, whom Swift has in his travels so elegantly described, as "supremely cursed with immortality." ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson |
