ALLONBY. If we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer all about ourselves. He should invariably praise us for whatever qualities he knows we haven't got. But he should be pitiless, quite pitiless, in reproaching us for the virtues that we have never dreamed of possessing. He should never believe that we know the use of useful things. That would be unforgiveable. But he should shower on us everything we don't want.英文原著 · 《A Woman of No Importance》
Now, a semi-detached villa is an impregnable stronghold. Respectability oozes from the dusky mortar of its bricks, and escapes in clouds of smoke from its soot-grimed chimneys. No policeman ever detects a desperate ruffian in a demure black-coated gentleman who day after day turns an iron gate upon its rusty hinge. And thus, wrapt in a cloak of suburban piety, Peace waged a pitiless and effective war upon his neighbours.英文原著 · 《A Book of Scoundrels》
As he rode into the valley the rays of the moon fell fully upon him, and exposed him to the outpost as pitilessly as though he had been held in the circle of a search-light.英文原著 · 《A Charmed Life》
These reflections soon gave me the resolution which I had wanted at first. I was ashamed to ask the nuns for an instrument of flagellation; so I made one for myself of stout cord, pitilessly knotted at very short intervals. This done, I shut myself up while the nuns were at prayer, uncovered my shoulders, and rained such a shower of lashes on them, in the first fervour of my newly-awakened zeal, that I fairly flogged myself down on the ground, flat on my nose, before I had repeated more of the Miserere than the first two or three lines.英文原著 · 《A Fair Penitent》
He awakened by the sun, whose pitiless rays fell with all their force on the granite and produced an intolerable heat--for he had had the stupidity to place himself adversely to the shadow thrown by the verdant majestic heads of the palm trees. He looked at the solitary trees and shuddered--they reminded him of the graceful shafts crowned with foliage which characterize the Saracen columns in the cathedral of Arles.英文原著 · 《A Passion in the Desert》
"La Palferine, ferocious though he was, had tears in his eyes; but what a look there was in Claudine's face, what a note in her voice! I have seen nothing like the thing that followed, not even in the supreme touch of a great actor's art; nothing to compare with her movement when she saw the hard eyes softened in tears; Claudine sank upon her knees and kissed La Palferine's pitiless hand. He raised her with his grand manner, his 'Rusticoli air,' as he calls it--'There, child!' he said, 'I will do something for you; I will put you--in my will.'英文原著 · 《A Prince of Bohemia》
...and then to have that love stolen cruelly from you by a pitiless God, and then maybe, just maybe, you'll remember this day and your father's anguish and you'll be ashamed of the lack of compassion you showed him in his time of need.美剧 · 《Shameless》