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ruinous
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  • This was no fine-spirited gesture to clear the record: He charged Lovering with infidelity, a ruinous accusation.†   (source)
  • Certainly little or no resentment attaches to the College-on-the-Hill as an emblem of ruinous influence.†   (source)
  • Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative).†   (source)
  • I felt like I was in one of those classic cartoon moments, suspended in midair for an endless second before falling to ruinous injury.†   (source)
  • They were both afraid that the silence might presage a ruinous outburst and a sudden change of mind on their trip.†   (source)
  • A turn in the road brought the Nooning-Spring cabin in sight, a tiny, one-roomed log structure, ancient and ruinous; and in its door a young woman standing, with a baby in her arms, staring with all her eyes at them and at their approaching couriers.†   (source)
  • He wanted the story badly, but it was more than clear to me that intimacy with a guard would be ruinous for me—or for any prisoner.†   (source)
  • The ruinous decade had scarred the city, as it had everyother: poor boxes on the street, people living on railcars.†   (source)
  • Many of them looked to have been worked by hands, though now they lay tumbled and ruinous in a bleak, barren land.†   (source)
  • What frightened Cedric about this place, what kept him away all year, went beyond a lifetime of admonitions from Bishop Long about black . people ruinously giving in to temptation or Barbara's zero tolerance for alcohol and sexual indiscretion.†   (source)
  • She knew that her failure to withstand it would have ruinous consequences.†   (source)
  • The measures recommended from the throne, warned the Marquis of Rockingham, were "big with the most portentous and ruinous consequences."†   (source)
  • Could her son, Celia wonders, have inherited her habit of ruinous passion?†   (source)
  • Try as she might, she couldn't see anything but the ruinous building before her.†   (source)
  • Cavernous halls and ruined towers, ghosts and draughts, ruinous to heat, impossible to garrison …. and there's that small matter of a curse."†   (source)
  • We will learn every lesson of accent and idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as well as ruinous.†   (source)
  • Its effects on marksmanship were ruinous, but that hardly mattered, for the distances were so great that most gunfire was merely to let the enemy know that a height or ridge had been reached or occupied: the war was not so much between the two armies as between each army and the terrain, and the test lay not so much in combating one's opponent as in reaching him.†   (source)
  • They say commercial republics will not waste themselves in ruinous wars with each other, but will promote peaceful relationships.†   (source)
  • She had done him great harm, repeatedly — she'd torn him open, thrown all kinds of terrible ruinous stuff inside him, and then had sewn him back up — but Kit couldn't know that.†   (source)
  • For so boyishly idealized and ruinously romantic had been my longing for Sophie all summer that, in truth, I had never really allowed a fully contoured, many-dimensioned, vividly tinted fantasy of sex with her invade or bother, much less take command of, my mind.†   (source)
  • He acted for his conscience and with a lofty patriotism, regardless of what he knew must be the ruinous consequences to himself.†   (source)
  • Also, sodas were a ruinous indulgence and would rot your teeth.†   (source)
  • Their metal bodies re-form, weaving together at the seams, into a ruinous, smoking beast.†   (source)
  • The cost of rebuilding was going to be ruinous, but there was no help for that.†   (source)
  • You will need to pay them far more than I do, and all of Qarth laughs at my ruinous generosity.†   (source)
  • If the States become separate nations then form alliances, it would be ruinous.†   (source)
  • The Tower of Ghosts was the most ruinous of Harrenhal's five immense towers.†   (source)
  • We had not yet given thought to the fate of the palantari of Gondor in its ruinous wars.†   (source)
  • And, thank heavens, on the right side of the castle; the City Ruinous was in sight.†   (source)
  • The growing light revealed to them a land already, less barren and ruinous.†   (source)
  • "We had been told to look for a message on the stones of the City Ruinous," said Scrubb.†   (source)
  • The distance to the City Ruinous seemed longer than Jill would have believed possible.†   (source)
  • Then among the greater casts there fell another hail, less ruinous but more horrible.†   (source)
  • The ruinous evidence.†   (source)
  • He took care to do this in a hopeless voice: being loved by him was a poison pill, it was spiritually toxic, it would drag them down to the murky depths where he himself was imprisoned, and it was because he loved them so much that he wanted them out of harm's way, i.e., out of his ruinous life.†   (source)
  • Ruinously young.†   (source)
  • Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells awaited them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital.†   (source)
  • Sympathy from strangers can be ruinous.†   (source)
  • She loved the washed blue light of the film, a kind of crepuscular light, a tunnel light that suggested an unreliable reality—not unreliable at all in fact because you have no trouble believing what you see but a subversive reality maybe, corruptive and ruinous, a beautiful tunnel blue.†   (source)
  • There's a cross wrinkle in her brow, but she somehow sloughs off my likely ruinous charge and asks instead if the turkey sandwich is all right for me.†   (source)
  • In December, Federalists from the five New England States, led by Timothy Pickering, met at Hartford to denounce the "ruinous war."†   (source)
  • 'These are the strangest trees that ever I saw,' he said; 'and I have seen many an oak grow from acorn to ruinous age.†   (source)
  • While she's become something of an expert on how teenage boys search ruinously for approval from their wayward fathers, she also knows that standing between a father and son can be a disastrous move-the kind of thing that often makes a boy want the companionship of his father even more, as a form of rebellion.†   (source)
  • It was an intricate architecture of daily meals, appointments, check-ups, rules enacted and enforced, sympathy begged for and granted, frustration felt, ruinously, and stamped down.†   (source)
  • The war with "our brethren" in America was "unjust …. fatal and ruinous to our country," he declared.†   (source)
  • Had the foulest heart and the basest head in the world been permitted to select the most embarrassing and ruinous measure, perhaps it would have been precisely the one which has been adopted.†   (source)
  • The United Netherlands repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to reform the ruinous and notorious vices of their constitution.†   (source)
  • "I t is desirable to put a stop to these ruinous extremities, as well for the sake of our country as yours," said the resplendently uniformed admiral.†   (source)
  • If they conspired with the Executive to betray the interests of the nation in a ruinous treaty, would they get the punishment they deserved if they were the impeachment court?†   (source)
  • And all about, stone, cracked and splintered into countless jagged shards, was scattered far and wide, or piled in ruinous heaps.†   (source)
  • Just three days earlier, at Staten Island, Admiral Lord Howe had spoken solicitously of putting "a stop to these ruinous extremities," if only the Americans would give up "independency."†   (source)
  • The army, dispersed as it was from one end of York Island to the other, could not possibly stop an attack, and another such defeat as at Brooklyn could be ruinous.†   (source)
  • And in Harfang you may or may not hear tidings of the City Ruinous, but certainly you shall find good lodgings and merry hosts.†   (source)
  • "I have no doubt but the nation at large sees the conduct in America in its true light," he had written to his Prime Minister, Lord North, "and I am certain any other conduct but compelling obedience would be ruinous and …. therefore no consideration could bring me to swerve from the present path which I think myself in duty-bound to follow."†   (source)
  • I have often heard the name of the giantish City Ruinous, but never met any who would tell me the way thither.†   (source)
  • No doubt, if we'd had our minds on our job when we were at the Ruinous City, we'd have been shown how — found a little door, or a cave, or a tunnel, met someone to help us.†   (source)
  • They now realized, too, that the road on which they were, and indeed all the ground between them and the City Ruinous, didn't offer as much cover as would hide a fox; it was all coarse grass and pebbles and flat stones.†   (source)
  • Jill had just time to see that it was a tower — a partly ruinous tower, with a lot of ivy on it, she thought — when she found herself ducking to avoid the archway of a window, as the Owl squeezed with her through the ivied cobwebby opening, out of the fresh, grey night into a dark place inside the top of the tower.†   (source)
  • Partly ruinous it seemed, but already before the night was passed the sound of hurried labour could be heard: beat of hammers, clink of trowels, and the creak of wheels.†   (source)
  • When Jefferson on September 18, 1807, called upon Congress to retaliate against the British by enacting an embargo effectively shutting off all further international trade—a measure apparently ruinous to Massachusetts, the leading commercial state in the nation—it was John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts who rose on the Senate floor and called for referral of the message to a select committee; who was appointed Chairman of the committee; and who reported both the Embargo Bill and a bill…†   (source)
  • And it was her knowledge that Sophie, too, had an inbred command of German but refused to place this gift at the service of the Resistance that at first caused Wanda to lose patience with her and then later brought the two friends to the edge of ruinous discord.†   (source)
  • Then suddenly something about the entire situation—Sophie's imminent departure, but also the handbag and the near-empty room with its associations of Nathan and the days of the recent past, the music and the high hilarity and all the glorious times we had had together—filled me with such ruinously enervating gloom that I let out another groan, loud enough that I saw a startled light like a flash of beads come to Sophie's eyes.†   (source)
  • Between them and the smoking mountain, and about it north and south, all seemed ruinous and dead, a desert burned and choked.†   (source)
  • But deep in his heart there was something that restrained him: he could not strike this thing lying in the dust, forlorn, ruinous, utterly wretched.†   (source)
  • The Enemy has found it, and now his power waxes; he sees our very thoughts, and all we do is ruinous.†   (source)
  • Far above a great cloud streamed slowly westward from the Black Land, devouring light, borne upon a wind of war; but below the air was still and breathless, as if all the Vale of Anduin waited for the onset of a ruinous storm.†   (source)
  • The Towers of the Teeth swayed, tottered, and fell down; the mighty rampart crumbled; the Black Gate was hurled in ruin; and from far away, now dim, now growing, now mounting to the clouds, there came a drumming rumble, a roar, a long echoing roll of ruinous noise.†   (source)
  • " Tom took off his cloth cap, dirty now, and ruinous, the visor pointed as a bird's beak.†   (source)
  • He was able to buy a great deal of land for very little money, but that little had to be borrowed from banks at a ruinous rate of interest.†   (source)
  • But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears.†   (source)
  • So Scarlett reluctantly stayed away from Johnnie's mill, fearing that if she came too often he might quit and that would be ruinous.†   (source)
  • He could face Hiroshima now, because a gaudy phoenix had risen from the ruinous desert of 1945: a remarkably beautiful city of more than a million inhabitants — only one in ten of whom was a hibakusha — with tall modern buildings on broad, tree— lined avenues crowded with Japanese cars, all of which had English lettering on them and appeared to be brand-new; a city of strivers and sybarites, with seven hundred and fifty-three bookstores and two thousand three hundred and fifty-six…†   (source)
  • This confirms me in my instinctive notion—it is irrational; it will not stand argument—that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene—for they would not survive entire so many ruinous years unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of their "reality".†   (source)
  • ;' the archetype Body of life a beaked carnivorous desire Self-upheld storm-broad wings: but the eyes Were spouts of blood; the eyes were gashed out; dark blood Ran from the ruinous eye pits to the hook of the beak And rained on the waste spaces of empty heaven.†   (source)
  • Now I fear disturbance of the quiet seasons : Winter shall come bringing death from the sea, Ruinous spring shall beat at our doors, Root and shoot shall eat our eyes! and our ears, Disastrous summer burn up the beds of our streams And the poor shall wait for another decaying October.†   (source)
  • But Father Vaillant had been plunged into the midst of a great industrial expansion, where guile and trickery and honourable ambition all struggled together; a territory that developed by leaps and bounds and then experienced ruinous reverses.†   (source)
  • That was in another hiding-place known to Julia, the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier.†   (source)
  • He seemed to see a vision of London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair, fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe.†   (source)
  • It crept onward among ruinous house and over the twinkling river.†   (source)
  • Its apple-trees were stunted, its castle ruinous.†   (source)
  • The cost of transporting him would make him ruinously expensive.†   (source)
  • "If you liked," he said, "a lesson from time to time, that wouldn't after all be very ruinous."†   (source)
  • But this incurable loitering beside Bathsheba Everdene stole his time ruinously.†   (source)
  • It was getting crazy and ruinous now, from long neglect.†   (source)
  • So this oddly composed little social party used to assemble under the ruinous arbor.†   (source)
  • If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances, which are as ruinous as guilt.†   (source)
  • They saw a weed-grown, floorless room, unplastered, an ancient fireplace, vacant windows, a ruinous staircase; and here, there, and everywhere hung ragged and abandoned cobwebs.†   (source)
  • You remember I told you I had been struck at the distance by certain attempts at ornamentation, rather remarkable in the ruinous aspect of the place.†   (source)
  • George William, who was sometimes known as "Old Jeo Win" and sometimes as "The King of the Ice House" (that enticing and ruinous bar), had been born behind a Little Bethel in Lancashire.†   (source)
  • …of society as an organic whole nowhere, may muddle successfully through the comparatively tribal stages of gregariousness; but in nineteenth century nations and twentieth century empires the determination of every man to be rich at all costs, and of every woman to be married at all costs, must, without a highly scientific social organization, produce a ruinous development of poverty, celibacy, prostitution, infant mortality, adult degeneracy, and everything that wise men most dread.†   (source)
  • On the other hill, two hundred yards across a sombre precipice, I saw a line of high blackened stakes, showing here and there ruinously—the remnants of Sherif Ali's impregnable camp.†   (source)
  • She did not, indeed, know what hostages Lily had already given to expediency; but she saw her passionately and irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of "keeping up."†   (source)
  • This it was which had caused the regular beating noise, and the rhythmic shocks that had kept our ruinous refuge quivering.†   (source)
  • His only hope was to plead again with May, and on the day before his departure he walked with her to the ruinous garden of the Spanish Mission.†   (source)
  • 'As I walked I was watching for every impression that could possibly help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I found the world—for ruinous it was.†   (source)
  • When giving audience he would clamber upon a sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a rotten bamboo floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or fifteen feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying under the house.†   (source)
  • I went through gallery after gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher.†   (source)
  • I am no specialist in mineralogy, and I went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I had entered.†   (source)
  • One day, as he went prancing down a quiet street, he saw at the window of a ruinous castle the lovely face.†   (source)
  • He was about to throw himself on the ground, and make one struggle for his young life, when he saw that they stood before a solitary house: all ruinous and decayed.†   (source)
  • In August he was at Smolensk and thought only of how to advance farther, though as we now see that advance was evidently ruinous to him.†   (source)
  • Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous buildings, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, open country, avenues of leafless trees.†   (source)
  • In its centre was a grass-plat, surrounding a ruinous little structure, which showed just enough of its original design to indicate that it had once been a summer-house.†   (source)
  • The old gentleman had been talking with Godfrey about the increasing poor-rate and the ruinous times, and had not heard the dialogue between his daughters.†   (source)
  • The notion that Mrs Warren must be a fiend is only an example of the violence and passion which the slightest reference to sex arouses in undisciplined minds, and which makes it seem natural for our lawgivers to punish silly and negligible indecencies with a ferocity unknown in dealing with, for example, ruinous financial swindling.†   (source)
  • 'No, I mean mine, ma'am,' said Pancks,'for it was my misfortune to lead him into a ruinous investment.'†   (source)
  • 'tis ruinous.†   (source)
  • Jo lives—that is to say, Jo has not yet died—in a ruinous place known to the like of him by the name of Tom-all-Alone's.†   (source)
  • But the measures passed for the relief of the workers, though to the upper classes they seemed ruinously revolutionary, were not thorough enough to give the people food and a decent life, and they had to be supplemented by unwritten enactments without legality to back them.†   (source)
  • These ruinous huts seemed to solicit charity from passers-by; and on very small provocation we should have given alms for the relief of the poor inmates.†   (source)
  • "It is the mere wantonness of insult," said one of the oldest and most important of Prince John's followers, Waldemar Fitzurse, "and if your Grace attempt it, cannot but prove ruinous to your projects."†   (source)
  • 2 We must infer that the ends of thought were peremptory, if they were to be secured at such ruinous cost.†   (source)
  • They had had a great many dealings together, and he may have gone on some of those, or to patch up his client's affairs, which were in a ruinous state; of course he went for profit.†   (source)
  • The Rector was obliged to take up the money at a ruinous interest, and had been struggling ever since.†   (source)
  • …half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a broad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant; the hollow and lichen-covered apple trees, nawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have; but above all,…†   (source)
  • In the meanwhile, Malluch, acting for Ben-Hur, who could not longer endure the emptiness and decay of his father's house, had bought it from Pontius Pilate; and, in process of repair, gates, courts, lewens, stairways, terraces, rooms, and roof had been cleansed and thoroughly restored; not only was there no reminder left of the tragic circumstances so ruinous to the family, but the refurnishment was in a style richer than before.†   (source)
  • Few of the men she saw seemed worth a ruinous expenditure, and it made her smile to think that one of them should present himself as an incentive to hope and a reward of patience.†   (source)
  • What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish?†   (source)
  • From this secret conflict, always muzzled, but always growling, was born armed peace, that ruinous expedient of civilization which in the harness of the European cabinets is suspicious in itself.†   (source)
  • This old stone tower was very massive—and rather ruinous, too, for it was Roman, and four hundred years old.†   (source)
  • Wandering, I found on my ruinous walk, By the dial stone, aged and green, One rose of the wilderness, left on its stalk, To mark where a garden had been.†   (source)
  • …with deep interest, caressed pointers and poodles without a murmur, agreed heartily that "Tom Brown was a brick," regardless of the improper form of praise, and when one lad proposed a visit to his turtle tank, she went with an alacrity which caused Mamma to smile upon her, as that motherly lady settled the cap which was left in a ruinous condition by filial hugs, bearlike but affectionate, and dearer to her than the most faultless coiffure from the hands of an inspired Frenchwoman.†   (source)
  • He not merely did nothing of the kind, but on the contrary he used his power to select the most foolish and ruinous of all the courses open to him.†   (source)
  • According to the signal-man, it was in a ruinous condition, several of the iron wires being broken; and it was impossible to risk the passage.†   (source)
  • And now, fragments of ruinous enclosure, yawning window-gap and crazy wall, deserted houses, leaking wells, broken water-tanks, spectral cypress-trees, patches of tangled vine, and the changing of the track to a long, irregular, disordered lane where everything was crumbling away, from the unsightly buildings to the jolting road—now, these objects showed that they were nearing Rome.†   (source)
  • She, the daughter of a petty baron, who boasted for all his domains but a ruinous tower, and an unproductive vineyard, and some few leagues of the barren Landes of Bourdeaux, her name was known wherever deeds of arms were done, known wider than that of many a lady's that had a county for a dowery.†   (source)
  • Ma's ruinous to everything."†   (source)
  • It was before this ruinous building that the worthy couple paused, as the first peal of distant thunder reverberated in the air, and the rain commenced pouring violently down.†   (source)
  • Happy as we are, times may alter; we may be bitten with some impulse towards change, and many things may seem too wonderful for us to resist, too exciting not to catch at, if we do not know that they are but phases of what has been before; and withal ruinous, deceitful, and sordid.†   (source)
  • Out of the open country, in again among ruinous buildings, solitary farms, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, cottages in twos and threes, avenues of leafless trees.†   (source)
  • A plain, but handsome, dark-green barouche had now drawn up in front of the ruinous portal of the old mansion-house.†   (source)
  • In an upper room of one of these houses—a detached house of fair size, ruinous in other respects, but strongly defended at door and window: of which house the back commanded the ditch in manner already described—there were assembled three men, who, regarding each other every now and then with looks expressive of perplexity and expectation, sat for some time in profound and gloomy silence.†   (source)
  • Paler than she had been at home, and a little quieter than I had thought natural when she was yet so cheerful and hopeful, her face was so unshadowed that I half believed she was blinded by her love for Richard to his ruinous career.†   (source)
  • Despite all Kutuzov's efforts to avoid that ruinous encounter and to preserve his troops, the massacre of the broken mob of French soldiers by worn-out Russians continued at Krasnoe for three days.†   (source)
  • When they had reached the little moonlight glade, having in front the reverend, though ruinous chapel, and the rude hermitage, so well suited to ascetic devotion, Wamba whispered to Gurth, "If this be the habitation of a thief, it makes good the old proverb, The nearer the church the farther from God.†   (source)
  • The clouds, which had been threatening all day, spread out in a dense and sluggish mass of vapour, already yielded large drops of rain, and seemed to presage a violent thunder-storm, when Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, turning out of the main street of the town, directed their course towards a scattered little colony of ruinous houses, distant from it some mile and a-half, or thereabouts, and erected on a low unwholesome swamp, bordering upon the river.†   (source)
  • And it is even more difficult to understand just why they think that this maneuver was calculated to save Russia and destroy the French; for this flank march, had it been preceded, accompanied, or followed by other circumstances, might have proved ruinous to the Russians and salutary for the French.†   (source)
  • But the girl seldom failed to propose a removal to the garden, where Uncle Venner and the daguerreotypist had made such repairs on the roof of the ruinous arbor, or summer-house, that it was now a sufficient shelter from sunshine and casual showers.†   (source)
  • On either side extended a ruinous wooden fence of open lattice-work, through which could be seen a grassy yard, and, especially in the angles of the building, an enormous fertility of burdocks, with leaves, it is hardly an exaggeration to say, two or three feet long.†   (source)
  • At length they turned into a very filthy narrow street, nearly full of old-clothes shops; the dog running forward, as if conscious that there was no further occasion for his keeping on guard, stopped before the door of a shop that was closed and apparently untenanted; the house was in a ruinous condition, and on the door was nailed a board, intimating that it was to let: which looked as if it had hung there for many years.†   (source)
  • It betokened that his spiritual part had returned, and was doing its best to kindle the heart's household fire, and light up intellectual lamps in the dark and ruinous mansion, where it was doomed to be a forlorn inhabitant.†   (source)
  • And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon—after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and this present happiness, of her kindred mortals—had given one farewell touch of a spirit's joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward from the HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES!†   (source)
  • Or the member of Parliament, now at the head of the English branch of the family,—with which the elder stock, on this side of the Atlantic, had held little or no intercourse for the last two centuries,—this eminent gentleman might invite Hepzibah to quit the ruinous House of the Seven Gables, and come over to dwell with her kindred at Pyncheon Hall.†   (source)
  • It is not feasting that concerns us now, however, but a ruinous defeat.†   (source)
  • Ruinous Folly, eldest daughter of Zeus, beguiles us all.†   (source)
  • These opposed it, and held out, since Ilion and Priam and his people had incurred their hatred first, the day Alexandras made his mad choice and piqued two goddesses, visitors in his sheepfold: he praised a third, who offered ruinous lust.†   (source)
  • Neither considered ruinous flight.†   (source)
  • Think: Hektor is your man this time: being crazed with ruinous pride, believing there's no fighter equal to him among those that our ships brought here by sea, he'll put himself in range!†   (source)
  • BOOK ONE Quarrel, Oath, and Promise Anger be now your song, immortal one, Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous, that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss and crowded brave souls into the undergloom, leaving so many dead men—carrion for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.†   (source)
  • Imagine at each end of a rich man's field a line of reapers formed, who cut a swath in barley or wheat, and spiky clumps of grain are brought low by the scything: even so those armies moved to cut each other down, and neither Trojans nor Akhaians thought of ruinous retreat.†   (source)
  • These opposed it, and held put, since Ilion and Priam and his people had incurred their hatred first, the day Alexandras made his mad choice and piqued two goddesses, visitors in his sheepfold: he praised a third, who offered ruinous lust.†   (source)
  • Upon the threshold of my age, in misery, the son of Kronos will destroy my life after the evil days I shall have seen—. my sons brought down, my daughters dragged away, bedchambers ravaged, and small children hurled to earth in the atrocity of war, as my sons' wives are taken by Akhaians' ruinous hands.†   (source)
  • It would be as burdensome and injurious to the public as ruinous to private citizens.†   (source)
  • O thou that dost inhabit in my breast, Leave not the mansion so long tenantless, Lest, growing ruinous, the building fall And leave no memory of what it was!†   (source)
  • We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.†   (source)
  • Though the savages had nothing to boast of in this adventure, (several canoes being driven ashore, followed by two drowned creatures, having undoubtedly met with a storm at sea that very night they departed) yet it was natural to be supposed, that those whose better fortune it was to attain their native shore, would inflame their nation to another ruinous attempt, with a greater force, to carry all before them.†   (source)
  • …forbear admiring at these odd appearances, both in town and country; and I made bold to desire my conductor, that he would be pleased to explain to me, what could be meant by so many busy heads, hands, and faces, both in the streets and the fields, because I did not discover any good effects they produced; but, on the contrary, I never knew a soil so unhappily cultivated, houses so ill contrived and so ruinous, or a people whose countenances and habit expressed so much misery and want.†   (source)
  • The first part of her lewd life with the young gentleman at Colchester has so many happy turns given it to expose the crime, and warn all whose circumstances are adapted to it, of the ruinous end of such things, and the foolish, thoughtless, and abhorred conduct of both the parties, that it abundantly atones for all the lively description she gives of her folly and wickedness.†   (source)
  • So under fiery cope together rushed Both battles main, with ruinous assault And inextinguishable rage.†   (source)
  • Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other.†   (source)
  • However, at last I put him so out of humour, that he took up a rash and fatal resolution; in short, I should not go to England; and though he had promised me, yet it was an unreasonable thing for me to desire it; that it would be ruinous to his affairs, would unhinge his whole family, and be next to an undoing him in the world; that therefore I ought not to desire it of him, and that no wife in the world that valued her family and her husband's prosperity would insist upon such a…†   (source)
  • Nor was his ear less pealed With noises loud and ruinous (to compare Great things with small) than when Bellona storms With all her battering engines, bent to rase Some capital city; or less than if this frame Of Heaven were falling, and these elements In mutiny had from her axle torn The steadfast Earth.†   (source)
  • Being in the inn, I told him I had but one favour more to ask of him, and that was, that since he could not go any farther, he would give me leave to stay a week or two in the town with him, that we might in that time think of something to prevent such a ruinous thing to us both, as a final separation would be; and that I had something of moment to offer him, that I had never said yet, and which perhaps he might find practicable to our mutual advantage.†   (source)
  • Hence, slow and scanty levies of men, in the most critical emergencies of our affairs; short enlistments at an unparalleled expense; continual fluctuations in the troops, ruinous to their discipline and subjecting the public safety frequently to the perilous crisis of a disbanded army.†   (source)
  • After having combined with the Executive in betraying the interests of the nation in a ruinous treaty, what prospect, it is asked, would there be of their being made to suffer the punishment they would deserve, when they were themselves to decide upon the accusation brought against them for the treachery of which they have been guilty?†   (source)
  • These considerations, and the influence of personal confidences and attachments, would be likely to induce every new President to promote a change of men to fill the subordinate stations; and these causes together could not fail to occasion a disgraceful and ruinous mutability in the administration of the government.†   (source)
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