Word: tormenting
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...these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is narrow, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticisms or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupulosity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment...
Living in terror to die in torment-Man's fate and theirs-and the island rocks and immense ocean beyond, and Lobos Darkening above the bay: they...
...Czar's torment is terrible-but is it madness or fatal grief? He lives out his last days in the hollow splendor of his Russian palace, haunted by the child king he has murdered, as frightened of his own evil as of the false pretender who is coming through the winter forests to kill him. At last he dies, and in dying Boris Godunov demands an all-but-impossible mystic triumph of the bassos who sing his tragic role: his final prayer must be torn from a soul already lost, from lips already dead. Yet in the last...
...German tank, hit by a shell, stops stunned, reels backward, writhes like a colossal metal insect in torment, the turret turning from side to side like a huge head and the tip of the long slender deadly gun glaring balefully in all directions like a big evil eye on a stilt...
...ENVY, writes Novelist Angus (Anglo-Saxon Attitudes) Wilson, is perhaps the dourest of sins, since "it knows no gratification save endless self-torment." Wilson finds the Green Evil everywhere, and suggests it is becoming more prevalent as examinations, from college boards to corporate psychological tests, determine who is up and who is down in life. Writers and actors are notoriously liable to envy and "ambitious clergymen, service officers and shop stewards appear to suffer most." But perhaps the most obnoxious form of the sin today is Western Europe's pervasive anti-Americanism. "There are grievances against America which deserve...