"Self-pity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the most fashionable of hours. It was indeed quite evening, almost twilight, when he made his way home at last. As he neared the scene of action, the tired man condoled with himself over the untimely excitement that awaited him. He said to himself with pathetic self-pity that it was hard indeed for a man who had earned a little repose to go in upon all the troubles of another man's family. He had denied himself—he had not undertaken upon his own shoulders that pleasing burden; ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... was delayed for a week and occasioned Lady Tamworth no small amount of self-pity. Here was noble work waiting for her hand, and duty kept her chained to ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... unfortunate rather than reprehensible when moral disaster overtakes him; which induces that condoning of the moral rebel which is born not of love for the sinner but of indifference to his sin; which issues in that last degeneration of self-pity in which individuals and societies alike indulge; and in that repellent sentimentality over vice and crime which beflowers the murderer while it forgets its victim, which turns to ouija boards and levitated tables to obscure the solemn ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... faster at the first sound of sympathy in Waitstill's voice, for self-pity is very enfeebling. She fairly sobbed as ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and convoyed them to the church, where Bonbright awaited them. She could not prevent a feeling of exasperation, especially toward Mrs. Frazer, who had moved from chair to chair, uttering words of self-pity, and pronouncing a constant jeremiad.... Such preliminaries to a wedding she had never expected to witness, and she witnessed ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... many days—he threw himself on the couch, dressed as he was in the dark mourning garments, which he had half torn off in his rage and despair, and broke out into such loud groans that he himself was almost frightened in the silence of the night. Full of self-pity and horror at his own deep grief, he turned his face to the wall to screen his eyes from the clear, full moon, which only showed him things he did not want to see, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... will avoid the hospital doors, the pale faces, the cripple, the sweet whiff of chloroform—for there, on the most thoughtless, the pains of others are burned home; but he will continue to walk, in a divine self-pity, the aisles of the forgotten graveyard. The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought. He cannot bear to have come for so little, and to go again so wholly. He cannot bear, above all, in that brief scene, to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the very depths of this strange self-pity. He was out of tune with everything around him. He had been thinking, through the dead night, of all that he had given up when he left the house of his father, the wealthy pagan Demetrius, to join the company of the Christians. Only two years ago he ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... nails over an inward wound: For that a something manlier than my years— Look, bearing, what-not—by the Duke not miss'd, Condemned me to promotion: I must bide At home, command the Guard! 'Tis an old hurt, But scalded on my memory.... Well, they sailed! And from the terrace here, sick with self-pity, Wrapped in my wrong, forgetful of devoir, I watch'd them through a mist—turned with a sob— Uptore my rooted sight— There, there she stood; Her hand press'd to her girdle, where the babe Stirred in her body while she gazed—she gazed— But slowly back controlled her eyes, met ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... she broke into hard dry sobs which rattled in her throat before they escaped. A spasm of self-pity worked convulsively in her bosom, and, turning away, she buried her face in her arms, while the long, agonized tremors shook her slender figure. Looking at her, he remembered bitterly that he had married Judy in order to make her happy. By the sacrifice of his own inclinations he ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... Self-pity filled the visitor's mind in place of the fury she had expended in her first outburst. She dared not attack the other with tooth and nail, for she saw now that this girl was as much her superior in physical strength as she was ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... to smoke companionably. "So few understand me," said she in subdued tones. "So many misunderstand! I ask you, what is life worth to a young woman in my position?" her chest heaved, her eyes filled with self-pity. "And who can stifle nature and be happy?—the ache for human sympathy—tenderness—love...." she brushed the moisture from her eyes with a diminutive handkerchief, and smiled a wintry smile. "I refuse to talk only of myself!—let us ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... obliged to introduce her. Even Talbot, the man who was getting rich upon the products of his enterprise, had a more impressive wife than he. And thus, with much reflection, this strange, easy-natured brute without a conscience, wrought up his soul into self-pity. In some way he had been defrauded. It never could have been intended that a man capable of winning so many of his heart's desires as he had proved himself to be, should be tied to a woman incapable of illuminating and honoring his position. If he only had a wife ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... and the quips and merry jests of Oscar Wilde, his artful artlessness, his insolence, his self-pity, his loyalty and fickleness, his sensuality and tenderness, only fill after all a small space in the heart's chamber of those who read him and stare at his ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... of time for self-pity. Annie was the very soul of sympathy, and it was a comfort to poor Nora and Hester to pour out their sorrows in her affectionate ears. As for Nan, she took refuge a good part of the time with Mrs. Martin, who shook ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... him for a half minute, stewing and helpless in his own self-pity. The Old Gentleman's eyes were bright with the giving-pleasure. His face was getting more lined each year, but his little black necktie was in as jaunty a bow as ever, and the linen was beautiful and white, and his gray mustache was curled carefully at the ends. And then Stuffy made a noise that ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... care not to meet Madame's kindly glance just then, for of a surety the tears would have rushed in a stream to her eyes. But she would not give way to any access of self-pity: she had chosen her part in life and this she meant to play loyally, without ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... unfamiliar. There were heavy oaken doors, always closed, and outside the windows, fastened into the thick stone walls, were iron bars, obviously (so she thought) a provision against Indians. All this she noted with an infinite self-pity, but without surprise—an emotion unknown in dreams. The child in the cradle was invisible under its coverlet which something impelled her to remove. She did so, disclosing the face of a wild animal! In the shock of this dreadful ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... word in richness and the elegance of perfection—clothes that no man can declaim over, stimulating himself the while with shot after shot of that most insidious of all dope, self-pity. You see, she earns them all herself, along with the Ming jars, the point de Venise, the country place, and countless other things. She is the funniest woman in the world—not in her press-agent's imagination, but in cold, sober ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... duty of emigrating to Kansas to prevent it from becoming a slave state. Dave, it appeared, had taken up the idea zealously, and had persuaded her to go with him. Her story became pathetic in spite of her self-pity as she related the hardships of that settlement in the wilds, and described her loneliness, her shivering terror when her husband was away hauling logs for their first home, and news came that the slave-traders from Missouri ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... natural to a land of ocean-like rivers and almighty tall pumpkins. No one has made such charming use of the trick as Mark Twain. The dryness of the story of a greenhorn's sufferings who had purchased "a genuine Mexican plug," is one of the funniest things in literature. The intense gravity and self-pity of the sufferer, the enormous and Gargantuan feats of his steed, the extreme distress of body thence resulting, make up a passage more moving than anything in Rabelais. The same contrast, between ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... after I received his letter. My youth grew dim; somehow I felt a self-pity. I found no chance to embalm those phases of sensation which belonged to my period, and I grew careless; Helen's influence went with her. The observances so vital to Veronica, so charming in her, I became utterly ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... Her moment of self-pity was gone in a flood of shamed indignation. She locked her hands round her knees and looked about her. "It is a beautiful world after all. And how near the beauty is to us; just over the fence and you are in the thick of it. Oh, but this is great!" Once more she rolled ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... Tears of self-pity stood in her eyes, and her face was now very white and tired, but very childish too. Dick was struck with some compunction. "I dare say you have had enough for the present," he said, not unkindly. "But how you could!—a ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... consciousness of a self which can and should hold itself to account despite the magnitude of its temptations is of special usefulness, in the years when a broadening altruism (and we might add, a tendency to self-pity) is likely to lead to loose notions ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... was rid of any self-pity. I think he was stunned by the horror of the thing, that he, a man of Chinese letters, who had departed from the centuried custom of his pundit caste of remaining in their own country, who had left his family or clan to increase his store of lesser knowledge, should be denied the door by ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... morning walk, and deepened as he had followed, during his narrative, the changing expression of Rena's face and noted her intense interest in his story, her pride in his successes, and the occasional wistful look that indexed her self-pity so completely. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... work and stand and strain and say 'yes,' and pretend stiffly that she was a sound, serviceable, thick-skinned imitation man among men! If Hilda had been a valkyrie or a saint she might have felt no envy and no pang. But she was a woman. Self-pity shot through her tremendous pride; and the lancinating stab made her inattentive even to her curiosity concerning ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... by her own self-pity and indignation, Patty got up and stalked about the room. She flung off her pretty summer frock, and slipped on a blue silk kimono. Then she sat down in front of her dressing-table to brush her hair for ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... he's forgotten all about me," she thought; and swept by an absurd emotion of self-pity, she kissed her own arms in the darkness to comfort herself, till her eyes, which never left his face, saw him turn warily and ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... people of Ziph, a small place on the edge of the southern desert, betray his haunt to Saul. The king receives the intelligence with a burst of thanks, in which furious jealousy and perverted religion, and a sense of utter loneliness and misery, and a strange self-pity, are mingled most pathetically and terribly: "Blessed be ye of the Lord, for ye have compassion on me!" He sends them away to mark down his prey; and when they have tracked him to his lair, he follows with his force and posts them round the hill where David ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... established a Kingdom, and rode Home in chariots of fire. Once you make a start, the world is at your command. Let go of the past. Stop the foolish thinking that conditions hold you, it is you holding onto conditions. Quit your self-pity, blaming others, and saying you are the victim of circumstances. Stop whining, and begin singing, then will your feet be loosed from the stocks and the iron gates open outward before you. ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... is worse in its long continuing and evil results. Lives are wrecked, brains shattered, happiness destroyed by this monstrous evil, and many a man and woman fastens it upon himself, herself, through indulging in anxious thought, or by yielding to that equal devil-dragon of self-pity. ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... honest men slay conspirators? Oh, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego!" wheezed Buonespoir with a grin. He placed his hand upon his head in self-pity. "Buonespoir, art thou damned ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... quite a fervor of self-pity. I was in one of those moods when life suddenly seems to become irksome, when the future stretches blank and gray in front of one. In such a mood it is imperative that one should seek distraction. The shining example of Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me. Taking to drink would be a nuisance. Work ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... instant he was on the point of breaking down, but he commanded himself, bravely dismissing the self-pity roused by her compassion. "How can I ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... family with a child of Nature like yourself would have given me the greatest joy. But—how shall I express my grief?" And here the old man struck a pathetically tragic attitude and drew out his handkerchief, weeping with a profound self-pity. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... letters—letters which come not within our terms of reference and from which, therefore, we cannot decently quote—is remarkable: only, even here, his intolerable virtue and vanity, his callous self-content, his miserable, misplaced self-pity and his nauseous sentimentality parade themselves on almost every page. For all his "Oh heavenses," "courageous little souls," and "ay de mis," he never once guessed the nature of his offence, never realized ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Oh, poisoned taunt! He repented it the moment after. He was seized with remorse of reason, of feeling, and of conscience. He saw her form shrink, as it were, at his cruel words. He saw the colour come and go, to leave the writhing lips like marble; and then, with a sad, gentle look of self-pity, rather than reproach, she pressed her hands tightly to ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... fellows took care of the man as though he had been a brother. They bathed his eyes, fed him, guided him, encouraged him. He was a bad lot—the worst that either of them had known. But he was in trouble and filled with self-pity. Never ill before, a giant of strength and energy, his condition now ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... spasm of involuntary self-pity. After dinner I returned for news of Madame de Mortsauf, who was already better. If such were the joys of marriage, if such scenes were frequent, how could she survive them long? What slow, unpunished murder was this? During that day I understood the tortures ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... the noise died away. Then she sank all limp in a chair and began to cry. There was wrath in her sobs, and bitter self-pity. She had made a fine tragedy scene, but the glory of it was short. She did not regret it, but an immense dreariness had followed on her heroics. Was there ever, she asked herself, a more ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... infinite labour from his room to the wide, pleasant verandah. And there he would pass his days, vacantly listening with dull ears to the cool sea-breeze whispering through the trees, or brooding over his misery. Sometimes, in his weak state, tears of self-pity would roll unheeded down his cheeks; he pined for the heather of his native hills, for the murmur of Tweed and Teviot, and for the faces of his own people. Never again could the happiness be his to live once more in the dearly loved Border ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... poor devil to think? You blow hot and cold all in a breath. I'm sick and ill and feverish," he continued with self-pity, "and now even you find me a trouble. I wish to God they'd shoot me and make an end. I'm sure it would ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... Lives, Volney's Ruins of Empire, The Sorrows of Werther, and Paradise Lost. The monster overhears the lessons, and ponders on this unique library, but, as he pleads his own cause the more eloquently because he knows Satan's passionate outbursts of defiance and self-pity, who would cavil at the method by which he is made to acquire his knowledge? "The cold stars shone in mockery, and the bare trees waved their branches above me; now and then the sweet voice of a ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... doctor who had promised to come—and yet might not come. The bitterness came back, the self-hate. He remembered a young man and promises made, but not kept; a girl who had believed and never lost faith even when he had retreated back to the land away from everything. Long sullen silences, self-pity, brooding over the news stories that got worse and worse. And the children—one born dead—two born ...
— Now We Are Three • Joe L. Hensley
... on to such and such an objective and have pushed forward three hundred yards here or have been bent back there. One thing you notice: every man forgets his own catastrophe in his keenness for the success of the offensive. Never in all my fortnight's journey to Blighty did I hear a word of self-pity or complaining. On the contrary, the most severely wounded men would profess themselves grateful that they had got off so lightly. Since the war started the term "lightly" has become exceedingly comparative. I suppose a man is ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... friendly intercourse with Phineas and Mo, that he found an anodyne, but in the consciousness of being magnetically affected by the crowd of his fellows. They offered him protection against himself. Whatever pangs of self-pity he felt, whatever wan little pleadings for the bit of fine porcelain compelled to a rough usage which vessels of coarser clay could disregard came lingeringly into his mind, he dared not express them to a living soul around. On the contrary, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... the scholiasts are right—who opened his eyes to the fact that there were themes for passionate poetry nearer home than the legendary love-tales; and when she forgot him, finding excitement elsewhere during his months of service with Octavian, he nursed his morbid grief in un-Roman self-pity, this first poet of the poitrinaire school. His subsequent career was meteoric. Octavian, fascinated by a brilliancy that hid a lack of Roman steadiness, placed him in charge of the stupendous task of organizing Egypt, a work that ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... unconscious, attempt to gain the pity of ourselves and others. There seems to be in undeveloped human nature something that really enjoys being pitied, and if we cannot get the commiseration of other people, we can, without much trouble, work up a case of self-pity. Most of us would have to acknowledge that we seldom find tears in our eyes except when our own woes are under consideration. "Whatever else the blues accomplish, they certainly afford us a chance to submerge ourselves in ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... told Maya, "all night. But what can you do? You've got to do something to get somewhere. And I'm not altogether satisfied with this pine; I should have tackled a fir-tree." He wiped his brow and smiled in self-pity. ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... he was down, Morganson was no longer afraid. He had a vision of himself being found dead in the snow, and for a while he wept in self-pity. But he was not afraid. The struggle had gone out of him. When he tried to open his eyes he found that the wet tears had frozen them shut. He did not try to brush the ice away. It did not matter. He had not dreamed death was so easy. He was even angry that he ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... as the boys say. If one is disappointed in one's wife or one's husband, if one's sex life in marriage is a failure, if one's in-laws intrude disastrously, if one's mate follows loves outside of marriage, or if any other catastrophe overtakes one's home, one can give way to hopeless lamentation and self-pity: "There's nothing I can do about it. It's just a rotten world. Nobody ever gives me a decent chance. I suppose I've got to live along and pretend I don't care. ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... the shadowed depths of her eyes. "I've never been treated so in my life!" she declared, overcome by the self-pity of a struggling soul trammeled by the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with the restless American nerves and that lack of doggedness which characterizes us. The picture Trollope gives of himself as a member of the English gentry, deprived of all the advantages of his caste except an inborn class feeling, is worth while, and the absence of self-pity is at once brave and pathetic. He knew very well what he wanted, and he secured it by the most honest and direct means. He knew he could get nothing without work, and he worked. His exercise of literature as an avocation did not prevent him ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp-light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of strong self-pity—and ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... Dunlavey had avoided looking at the outstretched hand. But now he looked at it, took it and held it for an instant, his bruised and swollen face taking on an expression of lugubrious self-pity. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Juliet drooped visibly. The bent little figure on the blanket was pathetic, but the twins were not given to self-pity. As time went on, the conversation lagged. They had both had a hard day, from more than one standpoint, and it was not surprising that by midnight, the self-appointed sentries were sound asleep upon one blanket, with Romeo's coat for a pillow ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... their own moods on others, or whether it was that, coming into such strange companionship after his long loneliness, his sympathies were the more easily awakened, Trenholme was suffering from a misery of pity; and in pity for another there weighed a self-pity which was quite new to him. To have seen the stalwart old man, whose human needs were all so evident to Trenholme's eyes, but to his own so evidently summed up in that one need which was the theme of the prayer he was offering in obstinate agony, was an experience which for the time ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... was drawn into a decided pout, and her blue eyes were full of self-pity. She had to be sorry for her own grievance, because nobody else had either time or much inclination to sympathize; they were all far too much ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... and, tired of standing, I sat down upon the floor, for there was nothing to sit upon besides. There I still sat, long after it was quite dark. All at once a surge of self-pity arose in my heart. I burst out wailing and sobbing, and cried aloud, 'God has forgotten me altogether!' The fact was, I had had no dinner that day, for Mrs. Conan had expected to return long before; and the ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... stout but impecunious horse-dealer of the name of Budgett, certainly in exile at Boulogne owing to a standing difference with the bankruptcy laws of his country, was alive still. But Arthur was very fond of himself, and once in the mood of self-pity, he could invent pathetic anecdote after pathetic anecdote of his privations which would have touched the heart of a hardened grandmother, much more of a susceptible girl. She fell into the way of calling ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... to play billiards all alone," he said; and though his self-pity was merely playful, it ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... supersensuous, but purely human and exclusive love. No suggestion of national inspiration; no broad human sympathies; no echo of the oppressed ones' cry; no stern challenge of wrong; only a hopeless, undying love, and an unspeakable self-pity. He wasn't even a lyre; he was a pipe for Fortune's finger to sound what stop she pleased; and, judging from the tone of his playing, and the selection of his songs, it had pleased that irresponsible goddess to attune the chords of his being to a love, pure as heaven, sad as earth, and hopeless ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... ended perforce the speech, which had been long for her, and the Paronsina burst into a passion of weeping,—not more at her mamma's words than out of self-pity and ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... a son." The father dies, and he records the fact with the remark that "the tears of a son are seldom lasting." The terrible spectacle of the French Revolution excited in his mind only a feeling of self-pity because his retreat in Switzerland was invaded by the unhappy refugees, just as a grumpy country gentleman in England might complain that he was annoyed by the trippers. There is a touch of dislike in all the allusions which Boswell makes to Gibbon—often without ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... make no answer. She had come on a sudden impulse to cheer the lonely leader of her people. Perhaps his need in this dark hour had called her. She thought of Socola's story of his mother's vision and wondered with a sudden pang of self-pity where the man ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... having offended. The man who disregards the law of gravitation and falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin, experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation—the sensation, not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is God's holiness against which he has transgressed; and that feeling finds utterance age after age in the agonised cry, "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... of the frontier towns and readiness of this particular frontier to ask appropriations for losses and wounds,[48:5] are abundantly illustrated in similar petitions from other towns. One is tempted at times to attribute the very frank self-pity and dependent attitude to a minister's phrasing, and to the desire to secure remission of taxes, the latter a frontier trait more often associated with riot than ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... officer's voice lost its belligerent tone. He spoke as man to man, with no hint of self-pity. Young Carmody was honestly sorry. Here was a man who, in the act of giving him a friendly warning, had been felled by a brutal and unexpected blow. A hot blush of shame reddened his cheeks. He was about to speak but was interrupted by the voice of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... Editha in the darkness which she felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in ...
— Different Girls • Various
... rose and went sadly to the window. Her eyes, full of self-pity, gazed with unwonted indifference at the passers-by. How thankful she would have been to have Mr. Delarayne at her side at this critical moment in her life. There were times when she was not unappreciative of the many advantages of widowhood; but ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... silence, this walking always in shadowed paths without a ray of light, without the certainty of arriving anywhere, though he plod onward for a lifetime—and the old feeling of savage resentment, the old sense of self-pity—the surest thing on God's earth to blaze a trail for the oncoming of the worst that is in a man—bit at the soul of him and touched him on the ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... his mustache with the little curling tongs, he observed with self-pity his increasing haggardness. He observed it also with dismay. Looks were as important to him as to an actress. His role being youth, high spirits, and the devil-may-care, the least trace of the wearing out would do for him. He ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... of the comforts of her young days, and of the mental stimulus of that contact of minds without which few can maintain intellectual life, she gave herself without stint to her husband's people, with never a thought of self-pity or self-praise. By day and by night she labored for her husband and family and for her people, for she thought them hers. She taught the women how to adorn their rude homes, gathered them into Bible classes and sewing circles, where she read and talked and wrought and prayed with them till ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... worries and disappointments. She suddenly realised now with a little surprised shock how bitterly she would miss it all were it to cease. In the darkened room, with the storm blowing outside, she felt her loneliness with an acute wave of emotion and self-pity that was very unlike her. If Peter were to go, she felt, she could scarcely endure to live on ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... Street, she remembered the scene of yesterday—the happy man with her, the noise of the vast happy crowd. She suffered in a worse form what she had suffered in the gallery of the Hall. For now—did I not say she was not without imagination?—her self-pity was sharpened by remorse for the hundreds of homes robbed. She realised the truth of what the poor Duke had once said to her: she was a danger in the world... Aye, and all the more dire now. What if the youth of all Europe were moved by Oxford's ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... know I don't claim to be any great moralist, Conward," he said, "and I have no pity for a gambler who deliberately sits in and gets stung. Consequently I am not troubled with any self-pity, nor any pity for you. And if you can get rid of our holdings to other gamblers I have nothing to say. But if it is to be loaded on to women who are investing the little savings of their lives—women like Bert Morrison ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... more pitiable! Constance never pitied herself. She did not consider that Fate had treated her very badly. She was not very discontented with herself. The invincible commonsense of a sound nature prevented her, in her best moments, from feebly dissolving in self-pity. She had lived in honesty and kindliness for a fair number of years, and she had tasted triumphant hours. She was justly respected, she had a position, she had dignity, she was well-off. She possessed, after all, a certain ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... so lonely in his life as he did this evening in the moving throng. He fancied that everybody was looking at him compassionately as he made his solitary way through the crowd, and almost gave way to self-pity. He would have liked to talk to the first comer, for the mere pleasure of hearing his voice, for in his loneliness he felt as if he were walking by the side of a stranger. And now his conscience smote him. He remembered the waiter Gustav, who had been unable to hide his pleasure at meeting ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... make it manifest, as an enlarged photograph magnifies its own defects. The "little more and how much it is" had come upon the unhappy Tristram, once the slimmest of the slim. Life had evidently not gone too well with him. Self-pity and the harassed look which comes of annoyance with trifles had set their mark upon him. His art had not taken possession of him. "High hopes faint on a warm hearthstone." But they sometimes faint also in bachelor ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... be very weak," she said to herself, "to cry because it's beautiful!" And sitting down on a rock by the road, she cried more, with a feeling of self-pity and a little self-contempt. An old woman came to the door of the house she had just passed with a dish-pan of water and looked curiously at the stranger. At first the countrywoman opened her lips as if she intended ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... saw himself in it, his name surrounded with a glamour of pathetic romance, as the sad widower with a mystery darkening his past and future. It was an agreeable gloom into which he fell. Self-pity warmed him and loosened his fierceness. He sighed with regret ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... himself with becoming 'a motley to the view' (cx. 2), and chides fortune for having provided for his livelihood nothing better than 'public means that public manners breed,' whence his name received a brand (cxi. 4-5). If such self-pity is to be literally interpreted, it only reflected an evanescent mood. His interest in all that touched the efficiency of his profession was permanently active. He was a keen critic of actors' elocution, and in 'Hamlet' shrewdly denounced their common failings, but clearly and hopefully ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... was beyond any perception of minor shades of feeling. She answered him in the same passionless tone in which she had greeted him, with no suggestion of self-pity, nor any claim for sympathy in her manner, as she motioned him to a seat ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... coming to this!" she would wail a dozen times a day—or, "Anna, I can't stand it another minute," and she would burst into paroxysms of grief, from which nothing could arouse her, and utterly exhausted by her own emotions, which were chiefly regret and self-pity, she would sink off to sleep. Anna had no difficulty in accounting to her mother for the extra comforts with which Lennox Sanderson's money supplied them. Mrs. Standish Tremont sometimes sent checks and Mrs. Moore never bothered about the source, ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... conscience—this being the test then being undergone by many men at the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Jimmie's conscience really was nothing like as strong as it ought to have been. Jimmie had moods of shameless self-pity, moods of desperate and agonizing doubt. He did not mean to let his dungeon-keepers know this, but they listened behind the door through a slot which the Tsar had had contrived for this purpose; it could be closed while the prisoner was ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... that was what he was saying to her. The injustice brought a lump of self-pity to her throbbing throat.... That he should not realize and honor the courage of her sacrifice.... That he should reproach, despise.... She had expected other entreaties ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... first time in her life, she pitied herself, not knowing that self-pity is the first step toward relief from overpowering sorrow. When detachment is possible, the long, slow healing has ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... she did not exert herself either to put him more at his ease or prevent him from losing himself frequently in the mazes of the dance. Once or twice he was oppressed by a painful suspicion that he had seen her making a little grimace of self-pity at the Countess Gaensehirtin. But elaborately engraved mirrors are not very trustworthy, and he might have been mistaken. Still, he was thankful when the dance, in which he was conscious of having done himself so little credit, came ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... wove strange lines of tragedy throughout the dreams, out of the threads of shadow that flitted across the sunshine of her life, she did not reject them. She felt they belonged there and did not shrink, even when her young face paled at the curious self-pity the passing of ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... over the failure of her plans had been swallowed up in resentment at the doer of the mischief, so her passion was swept away by a wave of self-pity. She turned ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... period, when all other activities were practically impossible to him, he fell into a state of letter-writing—for the most part long, wearisome complainings and explainings in which he poured out a copious flood of tears and self-pity for the loss of ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... uncompassioned woe Along that little span my unbelief Had fashioned in my vision as all life. Now even this so little virtue waned, For I became caught up into the strife That I had pitied, and my soul was stained At last by that most venomous despair, Self-pity. I no longer was aware Of any will to heal the world's unrest, I suffered as it suffered, and I grew Troubled in all my daily trafficking, Not with the large heroic trouble known By proud adventurous men who would ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... professions seems as great as ever. I fancy, though I may be as mistaken in this as I am in a good many other things, that most journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors. When an author is once warm in the saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is different: they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no longer ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... from the calendar. Had it been committed at a layman's house, say a merchant's or manufacturer's, a cheesemonger's' or greengrocer's, or, to go higher, a barrister's, a member of Parliament's, a rich banker's, I should have felt alleviation, a drop of self-pity. But to be seen deliberately to go out of the house of a clergyman drunk! a clergyman of the Church of England too! not that alone, but of an expounder of that dark Italian Hierophant, an exposition little short of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... jaw as hard and uncompromising as those of a skull. His eyes, which were strangely brilliant and young-looking, peered suspiciously from under ragged white eyebrows. But when they fell upon the doctor, the eyes became suddenly credulous, pleading, filled with self-pity. ...
— Vera - The Medium • Richard Harding Davis
... not tend to further individual grief. Constant devout contemplation of the Supreme Sorrow which wrought the world's salvation lessens the inclination to shed tears of self-pity. ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... tooth from the jaw. He must be expelled from our soul by violence as Christ expelled the money changers from the temple. And we shall need to steel ourselves against his piteous begging, and to recognize it as springing out of self-pity, one of the most reprehensible sins ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... knew what he was going to do. He had planned it years ago, when he first stood alone in the night and gazed upward at the glittering diamonds that lay beyond reach. Even then he had known what he would do if ever the opportunity presented itself. In those moments of self-pity that came too often, however, he had told himself that it was only wishful thinking and cursed himself for being a weakling and a dreamer who did nothing about his dreams. But he had resolved that someday he would go out among ...
— The Odyssey of Sam Meecham • Charles E. Fritch
... a pair of trousers, and rolled himself in his hammock, whence he stared at the roof and the moonlight streaming up there through the little trap-doors and chivying the layers of smoke. Whenever Lashman broke out into fresh quaverings of self-pity, Cooney's hands opened and shut again, till the nails dug hard into the palm. He groaned ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... following letter from Charles, which I transcribe because of the light which it throws on the King's character, a letter written in answer to a faithful and disinterested servant in a mood of petulant self-pity. ". . . Now, since the place is inconsiderable in itself, and yet may be of great advantages to you in respect of your mines, we do hereby give you leave to use your discretion in it, with this caution, that you do take example from ourselves, and ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... wickedness to accomplish an end, yet trivial enough to have no higher end in view than the reinvestiture of herself with social recognition; cold as snow; implacable as the grave; remorseless; wicked; but, beneath all this depravity, capable of self-pity, capable of momentary regret, capable of a little human tenderness, aware of the glory of the innocence she has lost, and thus not altogether beyond the pale of compassion. And she is, in externals,—in everything visible and audible,—the ideal ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... miserably, he drove himself out of the town, for a mile or more, on the desert, then plodded painfully back again, mauling and beating himself with the bludgeon of his awful self-pity. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... bathes together in sea and river, and all their happy holiday wanderings—they could not restrain their emotion, and wept uncontrollably. Neither of them could speak a word, or break the holy silence; and as he patted their heads and cheeks, his own tears flowed fast in sympathy and self-pity. But he felt the comforting affection which they could not utter; he felt it in his loneliness, and it ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... very funny to set me afoot away off from everywhere—" Her voice quivered and broke from self-pity; her head bent ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... more. No passionate regrets, no unavailing self-pity; nothing to tell her what it cost him to resign her; no word to comfort her for the hopelessness of his desertion; nothing but those ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... sunk in heavy, uncorseted despair upon the mess chest, gripped her children to her knees as though an army of ravishers menaced the house of McMurdo. Her words flowed with her tears, both together in a choked and bitter flood of wrath, sorrow, and self-pity. She bewailed Lucy, not only as a vanished relative but as a necessary member of the McMurdo escort. And doubts of Zavier's lawful intentions shook her from the abandon of her grief, to furious invective against the red man of all places ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... them, for instance, Bret Harte's Jack Hamlin, or even the Master himself in The Master of Ballantrae, one can feel a sincere affection or at least have a grudging sort of admiration, but it is not possible to even faintly like or hesitatingly pity a cowardly Robert Herrick, whose self-pity is so strong, and who from first to last is, as his creator intended him to be, a thorough inefficient. Half-hearted in his wickedness, self-saving in his repentance, he somehow fails to interest one; and even his lower-class associates, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... bad; the verse is generally very bad; and one turns with relief to the author's connecting links, wishing only at times that he would not worry about proving his point quite so thoroughly. The bombast and the bullying, the self-pity and the cruelty, and, most of all, the instinctive claim, typical of Germany to-day, to prescribe one law for themselves but something quite different for the rest of the world, run through all these quotations, even the earliest. But the particular value ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... his grief and wanhope might not rend his heart and slay him then and there, and lest all the deeds whereto he was fated should be spoiled and undone, self-pity fell upon him with the sweet remembrance of his love, and loosed the well of his tears, and he wept and wept, and might not be satiated of his mourning a long while. But when the night was yet dark and no sign of dawn in the sky, and, might he have seen it, the south-west was ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... and throbbed, her arm ached where Jude had crushed the tender flesh. She leaned against the tree that had added to her pain, and wept miserably for very self-pity. She was downed and beaten. After all she was to be like the ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... pipe-stems, and the flood and rush of the sunlit air dazzled him. He squatted by the white wall, the mind rummaging among the incidents of the long dooli journey, the lama's weaknesses, and, now that the stimulus of talk was removed, his own self-pity, of which, like the sick, he had great store. The unnerved brain edged away from all the outside, as a raw horse, once rowelled, sidles from the spur. It was enough, amply enough, that the spoil of the kilta was away—off his hands—out of his ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... however best it may be named, I first knew the song of the soul. Now, although it is better not to dwell upon the memory of past spiritual joys, lest we become greedy, and equally wise not to dwell upon the memory of anguishes, lest we fall into self-pity, which of all emotions is the most sickly and useless (and our wisest is to live only from hour to hour with all the sweetness that we can, leaving to Him the choosing of our daily bread, whether it be high joy or pain), still I confess that I have thought over ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... things. Then, presently, the headlong passion of them began to affect him, to set his pulses swinging. He fell to wondering at his own bygone facility, his own powers of expression. How did he ever write such a style! He, who could hardly get through a note now without blots and labour. Self-pity grew upon him, and self-admiration. By heaven! How could a woman treat a man—a man who could write to her like this—as ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... curious feeling overpowered him: a mixture of self-pity at the recollection of his love for her, and of fury against her for causing him ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... with nobody to care for him, no lessons; for the first time in his life forbidden to dart into his mother's room at any moment, with a rush against the door, in full certainty that there could never be a time when she did not want him. Self-pity is very strong and very simple in a child, and to see, as it were, a little picture in his mind of a little boy, shut out from his mother, and wanted by no one, was more poignant still than the reality. The world was out of joint: and Geoff felt ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... talk had, indeed, wearied him to faintness; but while his own tears rained down his cheeks in his self-pity, even as Jessica's in sympathetic sorrow, a cheerful and hearty voice ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... [Young [1]], and every young one hopes to be old, there seems to be a most unnatural Misunderstanding between those two Stages of Life. The unhappy Want of Commerce arises from the insolent Arrogance or Exultation in Youth, and the irrational Despondence or Self-pity in Age. A young Man whose Passion and Ambition is to be good and wise, and an old one who has no Inclination to be lewd or debauched, are quite unconcerned in this Speculation; but the Cocking ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... distinct value as an ornament. But now what was ordinarily enough for her failed to satisfy. She felt horribly alone in the world, as if she had slipped upon some terrible ledge of rock overhanging a sheer precipice, and there was no one—no one on earth to help her back to safety. Tears of self-pity rose hot in her eyes as she stood, not far from Virginia and the ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... the young fellow exclaimed, with a friendly shrug of his shoulders and a gleam of his white teeth; for it was easy to make friends with the genial artist. "And between the governors and the provveditori one may scarce draw breath! One's bread and onions—" he added, with a dramatic gesture of self-pity. "It ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... from his exertions, the captain moderated his pace after the first hundred yards, and went on his way in a state of mind pretty evenly divided between wrath and self-pity. He walked in thought with his eyes fixed on the ground, and glancing up, too late to avoid him, saw ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... a prude, Moya," Joyce snapped irritably. "I told you I was fond of him, didn't I? How could I help his kissing me ... or help liking to have him? He ought to be glad. Instead, he insults me." Miss Seldon's self-pity reached the acute stage of sobs. "I was in love with him. Why is ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... all I can say, then, is that the other New York hotels must be pretty mouldy, if this is the best of the lot! I took a room here last night," said Archie quivering with self-pity, "and there was a beastly tap outside somewhere which went drip-drip-drip all night ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... book there is also a corollary, "It is on the healthy in you you must live, it is the healthy that becomes great." The realization of the former has given, perhaps, a subdued tone to his canvasses; the recognition of the other has kept out of them weakness or self-pity. ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... him behind—that when he could be with them he was perhaps a drag on their pleasure. No doubt they would make a long day of it, this bright, bracing Saturday, for the persimmons and the fox-grapes were ripe and the chinquapin and chestnut burrs were opening. Tears of self-pity sprang to his eyes, but they were quickly dashed away as he heard his name called and saw his beloved Eddie, flushed and glowing with anticipated ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... han', Stephen Kennedy," she said. "My lord's naething to you—nor yet muckle to me!" she added, with sudden reaction and an outburst of self-pity, and again fell a ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... Duchess Johanna Elizabetha—a brand new dignity, complained this Oberhofmarshall of a sham court. He made himself mighty disagreeable to his sister, varying his behaviour by outbursts of despair and noisy self-pity, which would have been laughable had they not been so loud, violent, and disturbing. Wilhelmine informed him of her plan, and after many expressions of disapproval, when she had made it clear to him ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... coloured lines where deeds of flesh stand bald. True of the man, and of mankind 'tis true, Did we stout battle with the Shade, Despair, Our cowardice, it blooms; or haply warred Against the primal beast in us, and flung; Or cleaving mists of Sorrow, left it starred Above self-pity slain: or it was Prayer First taken for Life's cleanser; or the tongue Spake for the world against this heart; or rings Old laughter, from the founts of wisdom sprung; Or clap of wing of joy, that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her lip tremble and her eyes fill with tears; they were quite real tears. She felt the hardship of having to weary her brain with a new cypher, and self-pity inflames the ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... of a sanded face as Vanheimert saw himself adrift and drowning in the dust. He was a huge young fellow, and it was a great smooth face, from which the gaping mouth cut a slice from jaw to jaw. Terror and rage, and an overpowering passion of self-pity, convulsed the coarse features in turn; then, with the grunt of a wounded beast, he rallied and plunged to his destruction, deeper and deeper into the bush, further and ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... blind children rarely understand the importance of this early training. They are too often too absorbed in their own sorrow at having a child so afflicted, too sure that loss of eyesight means loss of mental vigor, to realize that their own attitude, their own self-pity, may prove a greater handicap to the child than blindness itself. If a child lives in a house where he is waited upon, and made to feel that mere existence and the ability to eat and sleep are all that may reasonably be expected of him, and that he must depend upon ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... was shut. A weak feeling of sorrow and self-pity came over Susan. What was wrong? Whom had she loved? And dawning, dawning, slowly rose the sun of her former life, and all particulars were made distinct to her. She felt that some sorrow was coming ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... so much philosophy if, as I ever feared, the closing years of my life had passed in helpless indigence? Should I not have sunk into lowest depths of querulous self-pity, grovelling there with eyes obstinately ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... sting her, when she jumped up and put her hand as usual in the hole of the wall: there was nothing there. She fell straight into one of her stupid rages; but neither her hunger nor the hole in the wall heeded her rage. Then, in a burst of self-pity, she fell a-weeping, but neither the hunger nor the hole cared for her tears. The darkness began to come on, and her hunger grew and grew, and the terror of the wild noises of the last night invaded her. Then she began to feel cold, and saw that the fire was dying. ...
— A Double Story • George MacDonald
... since become but a shadow and a name to Cally; she had willed it so, and so it had been. Now, in his own poor scrawl, the ghost of a lover too roughly discarded rose and walked again. And beneath the cheap writing and the unrestrained self-pity, she seemed to plumb for the first time the depths of the boy's present misery. The old story, having struck him down once, had hunted him out and struck him down again. Where ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... still be this evil in the world, of a certain necessary sorrow and desolation, felt, just in proportion to the moral, or nervous perfection men have attained to. And what we need in the world, over against that, is a certain permanent and general power of compassion—humanity's standing force of self-pity—as an elementary ingredient of our social atmosphere, if we are to live in it at all. I wonder, sometimes, in what way man has cajoled himself into the bearing of his burden thus far, seeing how every step in the capacity of apprehension his labour has won for him, from ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... hundreds doing exhibition work; that has had his picture on the front page of big city papers, and folks followin' him down the street just to get a look at him! Me—why, a yellow dawg has got the edge on me for luck! I might better be dead—" His loose lips quivered. Tears of self-pity welled up into his pale blue eyes. He turned away and stared across the barren calf lot that Johnny used for ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... wish For Life, and Peace.... Alas! it cannot be: To advance is to encounter dreadful danger; But to recede, inevitable death; His own associates would deal the blow: Thus led by Fate, behold upon the plain, The adverse bands in view, and in advance. Now Fear, Self-pity, and affected Courage, Speak in their hideous shouts with voice scarce human; Like that which issues from his hollow throat Who sleeping bellows in a frightful dream. More near their glaring eye-balls flashing meet; Terror ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... for an hour to teach the boys to write. As he was to be paid separately, I was not included. The feeling of envy, abasement, and self-pity with which I used to watch the other boys ply their quills is among the most painful ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... ailments, who appears at the breakfast table with a depressed and melancholy visage, who regales us with an account of how poorly she slept, the nightmares she experienced, the pain she suffers, and who puts into her inflection the poison of self-pity is an emissary of Satan. I have seen a whole family's happiness for the day destroyed by the meaningless ranting of a hysterical woman. Life is hard enough for all, for each of us to at least wish each ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... did ye an ill turn 'at I ken o'!' said Phemy, and burst afresh into tears of self-pity ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... descent, suddenly confronted us with a rough, perpendicular lane, overgrown with bushes, that seemed more like a cart-track to the stars than a sensible thoroughfare, we realized, with a certain indignant self-pity, that we were walking in real earnest, out in the night and the storm, far ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... it, although not quite so soon. Yet the certainty was none the less bitter. But this is no time for self-pity. It is of Sylvia I must think now. I shall go away at once, before the sweet fancy which is possibly budding in her virgin heart shall have bloomed into a flower that might poison some of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... touch of self-pity overcame her, as it is so apt to do those who indulge in that delightful misery, and she broke up badly, as a horse-fancier would say, so that it was some little time before she ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thing, the letter was the most childishly expressed, and the least childishly felt, she had ever written; its whole aspect was weak and wobegone; yet there was less self-pity, and more endeavour to make the best of it, than before. She had the dearest little baby in the world; but he was very delicate, and she wished mamma would send out an English nurse, for she could not bear that Italian woman—her black eyes ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a sudden he forgot self-pity and vain repining, in the discovery of the one particular woman swinging dizzily past in the arms of an Incroyable, whose giddy plumage served only to render the more striking her exquisite fairness and the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... the goods; he made his offer; whereat the wild man swung his boomerang disagreeably, and indicated that he must have "more, more." Tears of self-pity flooded Sinkum's eyes. He had no choice but to obey, and at last the black-fellow left with a sack containing ten times the value of the goods the storeman had been forced to buy. He had been cheated, cruelly used; he was a poor man, and could ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... and it looked at him so gently that his blue eyes trembled with self-pity. A fragment of scarlet geranium glanced up at him as he passed, so that amid the vermilion tyranny of the uniform it wore he could see the eyes of the flower, wistful, offering him love, as one sometimes see the eyes of a man beneath the brass helmet of a soldier, and is startled. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... Lois," he continued with a smile, "they try to get all that self-pity and pride in our own wills out of us right at the first. They put us to scrubbing floors—and other things. It's like that idea of saving your life by losing it. You see we sort of feel that the less human a man is, in your sense of human, the better ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... when life was dropping back into its old ways, that the greatness of their calamity became apparent. If Henry Hill had understood his opportunity, he might have stepped into his children's affections and been a true father to them. But he forgot them in his own self-pity. He was lonely, unspeakably lonely, and the house was dreary and dull without Mother. He who had always sought first of all his own pleasure and comfort now reached out for solace somewhere. And he found it with his old associates in his old haunts. When he returned to his home after ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... was afraid to look at me, but that is not all...." Alexey Alexandrovitch would have referred to the bill that had been brought him, but his voice shook, and he stopped. That bill on blue paper, for a hat and ribbons, he could not recall without a rush of self-pity. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... school girl; she was a woman of the world. The social and political atmosphere in which she moved seemed charged with dynamic possibilities. Her closed eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. Winifred let them fall unheeded, feeling miserable consolation in her self-pity, as women will. ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... almost endearing, emphasized the feeling of miserable self-pity that had taken hold of her and she suddenly ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... who were suffering, and weep beside them. His sympathy was always for their strengthening. He never encouraged exaggerated thoughts of pain or suffering—for in many minds there is a tendency to such feelings. He never gave countenance to morbidness, self-pity, or any kind of unwholesomeness in grief. He never spoke of sorrow or trouble in a despairing way. He sought to inculcate hope, and to make men braver and stronger. His ministry was always toward cheer and encouragement. He gave ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... the room restlessly, all the self-pity rising in him. He went on: "Good God! what nurslings we are when we first feel our feet! We're like children just loose from the leading-strings. Anything that glitters catches us. Every trap that is set for our ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... admission came without any self-pity or bitterness. It is doubtful if there was any shame in him at the acknowledgment. Bill marveled. He could not understand. He tried to picture himself making such an admission, and to estimate his feelings at it. Shame, unutterable shame, was all he could think of, and his good-natured ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... has. And Adair feels it as well, when he risks his good name for a little desperate comfort and is willing to clothe you, for whom he professes to care, with all the appearance of dishonor. You're no exception; it's the feeling that you are exceptional that makes you unscrupulous in your self-pity. Get that into your head, that you're not exceptional. Half the world's with you in the same box; but it smiles and doesn't own it. Have ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... in place of depression, self-pity, troubling self-consciousness, she found sparkle and joy. Miss Smithson gasped in astonishment and relief. With perfect abandon Suzanna moved through the dance; she seemed as one quite set apart from her companions; ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... quiver of fear went through her. If he should leave her? She sat conjuring fears and sufferings, till she wept with very self-pity. She did not know what she would do if he left her, or if he turned against her. The thought of it chilled her, made her desolate and hard. And against him, the stranger, the outsider, the being who wanted to arrogate authority, she remained steadily fortified. Was she not herself? How ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... convert sorrow into a medicine instead of a poison. Sorrow is deteriorating so far as it is selfish. The man who is occupied with his own interests makes grief an excuse for effeminate indulgence in self-pity. He becomes weaker and more fretful. The man who has learnt habitually to think of himself as part of a greater whole, whose conduct has been habitually directed to noble ends, is purified and strengthened by the spiritual convulsion. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Far off; muted by distance, but still unmistakable; he heard the baying of bloodhounds. Then this was the end. A sob broke from his throat. What was he, an animal; to be hunted down as a sport? Tears of self-pity welled to his eyes as he thought back to a party and a girl and laughter and cleanliness and the scent of magnolias, like a heady wine. But that was so long ago—so long ago—and now.... He looked down at his sweating, ...
— Faithfully Yours • Lou Tabakow
... A wave of self-pity enveloped the Judge. His voice broke as he answered: "George, I haven't any little girl—she never even has spoken to me about this affair that the whole town knows about. Oh, I haven't ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... absolute quietness. There was a way, just one, to thwart this adversary; she could destroy the body into which it thought to return. At the same moment there arose in her soul two opposing waves of emotion—one of passionate self-pity to think that she, so weak and timid, should be driven to destroy herself; the other of triumph over her mortal foe delivered into her hands. She felt a kind of triumph too in the instantaneousness with which she was able to make up her mind that this was the only thing ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... just as she and Hank were climbing the side of the gulley to the road. It was a glimpse that shocked him out of his youthful self-pity and stood him face to face with a very real hurt. They were climbing in plain sight, and so close to him that he could hear Hank's drawling voice telling Marion that she was a cute one, all right; he'd ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower |
