"Deformity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Preraphaelite one. It was the great virtue (or limitation) of William Morris that the Dark Ages were to him a time of special light and illumination. Life then was simple. Men worked for the love of it, and if they wanted things they made them. "Every trade exclusively followed means a deformity," says Ruskin. Division of labor had not yet come, and men were skilled in many ways. There was neither poverty nor riches, and the idea of brotherhood was firmly fixed in the minds of men. The feverish desire for place, pelf and power ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... not save you without it. He never will polish your soul into a jewel fit for heaven, in spite of yourself. You must, therefore, co-operate with Him, and do his holy will in all things. However painful may be the trials He sends you, they are all so many strokes to take away some roughness or deformity which would prevent your soul from being perfectly like Him. Every act you perform, while in the state of grace, adds a new feature of beauty to your soul, and therefore prepares her the better to receive the finishing touch in the Beatific Vision, and to shine with greater splendor as ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... peek at. He has a vast knowledge of the arts. His real name nobody seems to know. He can make himself very likable to men and attractive to women. The sort of women he seeks do not mind his physical deformity. His face and his intellect draw them, and he is as cruel as a wolf. It never occurred to me until last night that men like me create his kind. But I don't understand him in this instance. A play like this, with all the future ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... that the man was dumb. He hardly knew why it was so ugly an idea, but it affected his imagination in a dark and disproportionate fashion. There seemed to be something creepy about the idea of being left in a dark room with a deaf mute. It was almost as if such a defect were a deformity. It was almost as if it went with other and worse deformities. It was as if the shape he could not trace in the darkness were some shape that should not ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... obstinate, self-willed, and difficult to get along with, while the blind are not infrequently distinguished for qualities quite the reverse. It is worthy of remark that the eye is that organ of sense which is most ornamental as well as useful, and the deprivation of which constitutes the most visible deformity. But it is unnecessary to enter into a comparison of the relative value of our senses or the relative misfortune of our loss of any one of them. We need them all in our daily struggle for existence, and it is necessary to our physical and mental ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... guinea-pigs) has been discussed by Professor Weismann and shown to be not conclusive. The mutilation itself—a section of certain nerves—was never inherited, but the resulting epilepsy, or a general state of weakness, deformity, or sores, was sometimes inherited. It is, however, possible that the mere injury introduced and encouraged the growth of certain microbes, which, spreading through the organism, sometimes reached the germ-cells, and thus transmitted ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... had deemed a man of men Faulty, as great men are, but with no taint Of baseness,—with those faults that shew the saint Of after days, perhaps,—wert even then When first I loved thee but a spreading tree Whose leaves shewed not its roots' deformity; ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... his shoulder, with either a mistrustful snarl or a woe-begone, piteous, mute aspect; but no assumed expression could conceal this innate irremediable abjectness of his nature, any more than an arrangement of clothing can conceal some monstrous deformity of the body. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... which filled up the whole period of the Twelve Years' Truce. His words had a direct influence on great events. He was a man of unquestionable erudition, of powers of mind above the average, while the absolute deformity of his moral constitution made him incapable of thinking, feeling, or acting rightly on any vital subject, by any accident or on any occasion. If there were one thing that he thoroughly hated in the world, it was the Reformed religion. If in his thought there were one term of reproach ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... inherited. "In a family," says Sir H. Holland (12/15. 'Medical Notes and Reflections' 3rd edition page 33.) "where the father had a singular elongation of the upper eyelid, seven or eight children were born with the same deformity; two or three other children having it not." Many persons, as I hear from Sir J. Paget, have two or three hairs in their eyebrows much longer than the others; and even so trifling a peculiarity as this certainly runs ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... The moon was up, and the wide, leafy landscape was spread out in utter silence for miles around him. For a brief space, while collecting his thoughts, he saw everything as it was. Then, as if at the stroke of a wand, horrible deformity appeared to fall upon the whole scene; the thousand trees below him writhed as if in multitudinous agony; and, where the thick moonlight touched house or road, or left patches of white on river and pool, there the earth seemed smitten ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... miscreate, In masses lumped hideously, Wallowed the conger, the thorny skate, The lobster's grisly deformity; And, baring its teeth with cruel sheen, a Terrible shark, the ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... Aethiopia. The number of the Blemmyes, scattered between the Island of Meroe and the Red Sea, was very inconsiderable, their disposition was unwarlike, their weapons rude and inoffensive. [46] Yet in the public disorders, these barbarians, whom antiquity, shocked with the deformity of their figure, had almost excluded from the human species, presumed to rank themselves among the enemies of Rome. [47] Such had been the unworthy allies of the Egyptians; and while the attention of the state was engaged in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... his noble descent, is obliged to follow the trade of a blacksmith. On account of his deformity, he was cast down from heaven into the isle of Lemnos. His leg was broken by the fall. He erected a forge, where he makes thunderbolts for his father Jupiter and armour for the other gods. His servants are called Cyclops, because they have but one eye. ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... false and present it as a proposition, and ask an ingenious person to prove it, and he will do so to the complete extinction of the light of truth; but set aside his confirmations, return and view the proposition itself from your own rationality, and you will see its falsity in all its deformity. From all this it can be seen that man is able to abuse these two capacities, which he has from the Lord, to confirm evils and falsities of every kind. This no beast can do, because no beast enjoys these capacities. Consequently, a ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... conspicuous window, in the pavilion that caps the entrance to the Carrousel, is unglazed, the weather being actually excluded by the use of coarse unplaned boards, precisely in the manner in which one is apt to see a shingle palace embellished at home. One hundred francs would conceal this deformity. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... which have attracted our attention, chiefly in its situation. He describes it as an ulcer, soon becoming black and foetid, corroding the inside of both lips, separating them widely from the gums and allowing them to fall outwards upon the face; thus producing a horrible deformity. Besides this, the author states, that a deep fissure usually extended down each half of the inside of each lip; thus adding four deep and ghastly ramifications to the ulcer. This shocking affection is stated to have prevailed extensively, both in ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... you know they keep off Monaco territory by half an inch or so, because begging is forbidden in the principality. There's an old white-haired man with rather a sinister face. I'm not sure if he's deformed in any way, or if he just produces on the mind an odd effect of some obscure deformity. He's one of the beggars; and the other's a little humpbacked elf of a creature, hardly human to look at, with his big head and ragged red eyelids; but he's always smiling and gay, bowing and beckoning. It's his metier to be merry, just as it's the other's ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... above (I, Q. 48, A. 1, ad 2; I-II, Q. 18, A. 5): for an act is said to be deformed through being deprived of an intrinsic form, viz. the due commensuration of the act's circumstances. Hence we cannot say that God is the cause of a deformed act, for He is not the cause of its deformity, though He is the cause of the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... symptom of the disease, as tooth-ach, head-ach, heart-burn; in which the pain is only a concomitant circumstance of the excess or deficiency of fibrous actions, and not the cause of them. Others again are taken from the deformity occasioned in consequence of the unnatural fibrous motions, which constitute diseases, as tumours, eruptions, extenuations; all these therefore improperly give names to diseases; and some difficulty is thus occasioned to the reader in endeavouring ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... that man is a responsible being. This is not at all strange; the wonder is, that after having demonstrated that "the prejudice of men concerning good and evil, merit and demerit, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and deformity," are nothing but dreams, he should have felt bound to defend the position, that we may be justly punished for our offences by the Supreme Ruler of the world. His defence of this doctrine we shall lay before the reader without a word of comment. "Will you say," he ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... dulness and all unfaithfulness. He suffered unjustly, but bore all wrong in silence. He never lost his temper. He never grew discouraged, though all his work seemed to be in vain. He never despaired of making beauty out of deformity in his disciples. He never lost hope of any soul. Had it not been for this quality of unwearying patience nothing would ever have come from ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... we sometimes see in the face of the young that is sadder than the ravages of any disease or the disfigurement of any deformity. Shall I tell you what it is? It is the mark that an impure thought or an unclean jest leaves behind it. No serpent ever went gliding through the grass and left the trail of defilement more palpably in its wake than vulgarity ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... that they differ in nowise from the other natives in complexion, strength, or health. Instances of great age occur amongst them; and they are subject to no more nor less infirmities than others. Beauty or ugliness, weakness or strength, deformity or straightness, are common to the Cagots as to the rest of the human race. This, however, is certain, that in some villages the richest persons are of the proscribed order; but they, nevertheless, are held in a certain degree of odium, and their ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... them in all divine and human excellence. No one taught us that goodness was beauty, that goodness was greatness, that goodness was glory, that goodness was happiness, that goodness was heaven. The truth was never pressed on us that the want of goodness was deformity, dishonor and shame,—that it was pain, and wretchedness, and torment, and death,—that goodness in full measure would make earth heaven—that its decline and disappearance would make earth hell. Yet a careful and long-continued perusal of the Scriptures ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... was a citizen of Athens; so he is sometimes called an Athenian, and again a Lemnian. His statues were numerous, and most of them represented the gods. One of Hephaestus, or Vulcan, was remarkable for the way in which his lameness was concealed so skilfully that no deformity appeared. ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the quick-glancing intricate flights of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue, angularity, and grotesque deformity all at ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... inhabitant. Her woolly head was enveloped, after the fashion of her people, in the folds of a gigantic and flaming red turban constructed of an entire pocket handkerchief. Her face was pock-pitted to an incredible degree, so that what with this deformity, emphasized by the pouting of her prodigious and shapeless lips, and the rolling of a pair of eyes as yellow as saffron, Jonathan Rugg thought that he had never beheld a figure at once so ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... return an answer to a charge of obscenity. It was urged in his defence, that obscenity was only criminal, when it was intended to promote the practice of vice; but that Mr. Savage had only introduced obscene ideas, with a view of exposing them to detestation, and of amending the age, by shewing the deformity of wickedness. This plea was admitted, and Sir Philip York, now lord Chancellor, who then presided in that court, dismissed the information, with encomiums upon the purity and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Swift. Pope's face, as given in Kneller's portrait, (which recalls the poet's stolen complimentary verse to the painter,) has a sad and weary look, and is marked by that pallor, and that peculiar hollowness of eye and cheek, which often accompany bodily deformity. Swift's face betrays but little of the bitterness of his soul; but it was painted in his best days, before the cloud of darkness had begun to settle down upon him. It is the portrait of him as he was in London, among his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the bust. The forehead is but moderately developed, and retreats somewhat, the upper part of the skull rising pyramidally; the eyes are prominent almost beyond the penthouse of the brow; the upper lip is so long that it must have been almost a deformity, unless the sculptor artistically exaggerated its length, in consideration, that, on the pedestal, it must be foreshortened by being looked at from below. On the whole, Shakespeare must have had a singular rather than a prepossessing face; and it is wonderful how, with this bust before its ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lots are being led out of the city by the magistrates, so that at all times the women who are suitable should fall to their lot, not those whom they desire. This shrewdness, however, is not necessary among the inhabitants of the City of the Sun. For with them deformity is unknown. When the women are exercised they get a clear complexion, and become strong of limb, tall and agile, and with them beauty consists in tallness and strength. Therefore, if any woman dyes her face, so that it may become beautiful, or uses high-heeled ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... beak of some bird of prey. A characteristic of the face—and an uncomfortable one!—was that, practically, it stopped short at the mouth. The mouth, with its blubber lips, came immediately underneath the nose, and chin, to all intents and purposes, there was none. This deformity—for the absence of chin amounted to that—it was which gave to the face the appearance of something not human,—that, and the eyes. For so marked a feature of the man were his eyes, that, ere long, it seemed to me that he was nothing ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... what they did, provided money could be made, or power be obtained. Strife had introduced a disposition to intrigue; political cunning had become fashionable; and political duplicity had lost much of its deformity in the United States. The finger of derision was no longer pointed at meannesses; the love of honor, and manliness of conduct, was blunted; cunning began to take the place of wisdom; professions took the place of deeds, and duplicity stalked forth ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... old skin and bones? It haint nothin' pretty anyway. And as fer the waists bein' all girted up and drawed in, that is nothin' but crushed bones and flesh and vitals, that is just crowdin' down your insides into a state o' disease and deformity, torturin' your heart down so's the blood can't circulate, and your lungs so's you can't breathe, it is nothin' but slow murder anyway, and if I ever take it into my head to kill myself, Alminy Hagidone, I haint a goin' to do it in a way of perfect torture ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... wi' mony crosses and sair trials in my day; but few o' them made me shed bitterer tears than that proud, handsom' young leddy's speech on the deformity o' my ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... joys as well as of all the attractions of childhood. He was oppressed because he was weak, and laughed at for his deformity. In vain the little hunchback opened his arms to the world: the world scoffed at him, ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... the clamour, which has continued till now. Those who had undertaken to oppose the ministry, having no grievance of greater magnitude, endeavoured to swell this decision into bulk, and distort it into deformity, and then held it out ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... circumstances. She was at the time thirty-six years old. She was deformed, having in her infancy slipped off her nurse's lap into the fireplace, and getting her face so shockingly burned that it ever afterwards presented a frightful appearance. This deformity had made her resolve not to marry, for she did not want any man to marry her for ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... one time in the old chateau of Kerouez, in the commune of Loguivy-Plougras, a rich and powerful seigneur, whose only sorrow was the dreadful deformity of his son, who had come into the world with a horse's head. He was naturally kept out of sight as much as possible, but when he had attained the age of eighteen years he told his mother one day that he desired to marry, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... Princess from thy longing arms,— Not unrevenged shall thou my fury dare, For by that violated tail I swear, From your unhappy nuptials shall be born A Prince, whose Nose shall be thy subjects' scorn. Bless'd in his love thy son shall never be, Till he his foul deformity shall see, Till he with tears his blemish shall confess, Discern its odious length, and ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... liked to bring forward a miracle which she was acquainted with. Only she spoke with so much difficulty owing to the deformity of her mouth, that she had not yet been able to secure a turn. Just then, however, there was a pause, and drawing the wrap, which concealed the horror of her sore, slightly on one side, she profited by the opportunity ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... books have never been opened, and where the savage does not pause to inquire from what source he has derived relief. No improvement in the physical sciences can bear a parallel with that which ministers in every part of the globe to the prevention of deformity, and, in a great proportion, to the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... hands holding hers. In each of the little fingers there was a small amusing deformity—a slight crook or twist—which, as is the way of lovers, was especially dear to her. She remembered once, before they were engaged, flaming out at Bridget, who had made mock of it. She stooped now, and kissed the fingers. Then she bowed her ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... so: in them the world swerves upside down, and vice looks like virtue. But I will tell you what may seem to you a strange and wonderful thing! There is no mean animal, no loathsome object, no horrible deformity of nature so utterly repulsive to a true man as a faithless wife! The cowardly murderer who lies in wait for his victim behind some dark door, and stabs him in the back as he passes by unarmed—he, I say, is more to be pardoned ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... at all, will soon be established and confirmed. Custom has robbed this relict of a former age of much of its repulsiveness; but it is not the less hurtful on that account. Were we to run a parallel with it in any other matter, its true nature and deformity would at once appear. For example, were we to suppose ourselves listening to an imperative message from a superior, by a messenger with whose language we were but partially acquainted, we would not allow him to proceed with his communication ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... us his gods, what more can he do? And yet, it seems, he may be the richer for the loss. Never was a question more senseless than that of the idolatrous fool,—"Ye have taken away my gods, and what else have I left?" His godship was a little injured in his transit; but he was very perfect in deformity before, and his ugliness could not, by any accident, be improved. I have put him into a glass case with some stuffed birds, at which he ogles, with his great eyes, in a manner not altogether divine. His condition, therefore, is pretty nearly that to which prophecy has doomed all ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... angelic by the ineffable touch of goodness, the family as a rule despised her, teased her, sometimes went near to torment her; for the Wesleys, like many other people of iron constitution, had a healthy impatience of deformity and weakness. Hetty alone treated her always gently and made much of her, not as one who would soften a defect, but as seeing none; Hetty of the high spirits, the clear eye, the springing gait; Hetty, the wittiest, ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... house of eight rooms, set on a bleak fell-side where the sun never shone, where no fruits ripened, no flowers bloomed and no trees grew, save here and there a dwarfed and twisted thorn covered with pale gray lichen and bent by the wind into painful deformity of growth—a house which had no garden, only a strip of rank, coarse grass before the windows, with a potato-patch and kail-yard to the side; where was no adornment within or without, no beauty of color, no softness of line, merely a rugged, lonesome, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... MR. IFFLAND, in all his Dramatic Productions, is to render the Theatre what it was in the palmy Days of Terence—a School of Morality, by exhibiting Virtue in all her native Charms, and Vice in all her Deformity; or, ...
— The Lawyers, A Drama in Five Acts • Augustus William Iffland
... is merely a deformity, and like many others in various breeds of animals, was solely the result of accident in the first place; and as we often see, even in the human species, the deformities and infirmities of our ancestors entailed upon their progeny, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... front of S. Mark's Cathedral. It attains a height of upwards of three hundred feet, and is used for various purposes, which, however, it could serve equally well in some other part of Venice. It strikes one the more, that it is the one deformity of the place. It reminded me of the entrance of a clown at a royal levee, or the appearance ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... deformity of the body is an idea we attach to the deformity of the mind, the vulgar must acknowledge; but surely it is unpardonable in the enlightened philosopher thus to compare the crookedness of corporeal matter with the rectitude of the intellect; yet Milbourne and Dennis, the last a formidable ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... is to procure your Pleasure, by exposing the little Embarrassment of a Person; But the Intention of Satire, is to raise your Detestation, by exposing the real Deformity of his Vices. ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... Portugal, and even taking part of it away for the Queen of Etruria and the Prince of the Peace [Godoy]." Duroc was also to point out the difficulty, now that "all Italy" belonged to Napoleon, of allowing "that deformity," the kingdom of Etruria, to disfigure the peninsula. The change would in fact, doubly benefit the French Emperor. It would enable him completely to exclude British commerce from the port of Leghorn, where it was trickling in alarmingly, and also to place the mouths of the Tagus ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... which religion and science shall stand together as allies, not against each other as enemies. Let the fight be for truth of every kind against falsehood of every kind—for justice against injustice—for right against wrong—for beauty against deformity—for goodness against vice—and the great warfare which has brought so many sufferings, shall bring to the earth God's ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... is a matter of mere curiosity, or whether it tends to any beneficial purpose? I should answer, that notwithstanding the happy effects of Inoculation, with all the improvements which the practice has received since its first introduction into this country, it not very unfrequently produces deformity of the skin, and sometimes, under ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... "Prudence," the only example of a female nude in Bellini's works, holds a looking-glass. Hypocrisy or Calumny is torn writhing from his refuge. The Summa Virtus is an ugly representation of all the virtues; a waddling deformity with eyes bound holds the scales of justice; the pitcher in its hand means prudence, and the gold upon its feet symbolises charity. The landscape, both of this and of the "Fortune," resembles that which he was painting in his larger works at the end of the century. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... laddies, with their short jackets and wide white collars; they all look so jolly, and rosy, and clean, and kissable! I should like to kiss the chambermaid, too! She has a pink print dress; no bangs, thank goodness (it's curious our servants can't leave that deformity to the upper classes), but shining brown hair, plump figure, soft voice, and a most engaging way of saying, "Yes, miss? Anythink more, miss?" I long to ask her to sit down comfortably and be English, while I study her as a type, but of course I mustn't. Sometimes I wish I could retire from the ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... a scene entirely different from that which had marked the tempestuous deformity of the night. The whole fury of the winds appear ed to have been expended in their precocious effort. From the moderate gale, to which they had fallen by the end of the middle watch, they further altered to a vacillating breeze; and, ere ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... rooted me to the spot. The servant was an old woman, thin and wrinkled and bent, a common deformity in people who have worked in the fields. I found her shaking a cooking utensil over a filthy sink. A dirty candle fluttered in her trembling hand; about her were pots, kettles, and dishes, the remains of dinner that a dog sniffed at, from time to time, as though ashamed; ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the departure of these unfortunate creatures a relief. He could not, from their language, manners, and appearance, doubt that they belonged to the degraded class of beings whom deformity of person and weakness of intellect recommended to the painful situation of appendages to great families, where their personal appearance and imbecility were food for merriment to the household. Superior in no respect to the ideas and manners ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... he told them, had come to him with a great light, "on the road to Damascus," and by that light he saw, as he implored them to see, the hideous deformity of the life he and they and the young fellows of their usual companionship had been living. Even Ramsey knew, he continued as she and their old nurse silently reappeared, that by the plainest laws of the land, they were not too good for the penitentiary. An overweening ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... insisted. Half fearing to be thought a fool, half stirred to hopes by their petition and by the flattery of his courtiers, he eventually told the doctors to form an opinion whether such cases of blindness and deformity could be remedied by human aid. The doctors talked round the question, saying that in the one case the power of sight was not extinct and would return, if certain impediments were removed; in the other case the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... days before Mrs. Rothesay recovered from the shock occasioned by the tidings—to her almost more fearful than her child's death—that it was doomed for life to suffer the curse of hopeless deformity. For a curse, a bitter curse, this seemed to the young and beautiful creature, who had learned since her birth to consider beauty as the greatest good. She was, so to speak, in love with loveliness; not merely in herself, but in every human creature. This feeling sprang more ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... She knew, too, his powers of intrigue; that they were enlisted against her; and a glance sufficed to show the path to be pursued. Long ago her penetrating eye had probed the mask of dissimulation which concealed, like the "silver veil" of Mokanna, a great deformity: how much greater ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... perfect a beauty might be bestowed on one of their race I could have pointed proudly to you, my faithful boy and have said, 'Beauty like that of the gods.' Now the crown is cut off from the trunk of the palm and the maimed thing can only be ashamed of its deformity; and if all humanity were but one man it would look like one who has had his right eye torn out. I will not look on the monsters, lean and fat, that they may not spoil my taste for the true type! Oh faithful, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be, Thy dreadful mission cannot reach to me. By parents taught still to mistrust mine eyes, Still to approach each object of surprise, Lest fancy's formful vision should deceive In moonlight paths, or glooms of falling eve, 'Tis then's the moment when my mind should try To scan the motionless deformity; But oh, the fearful task!—yet well I know An aged ash, with many a spreading bough, (Beneath whose leaves I've found a summer's bow'r, Beneath whose trunk I've weather'd many a show'r) Stands singly down ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... every newer thing rests on the older," replied Erasmus eagerly. "What we cast aside and refuse to take into the new home with us is not the holy faith, but merely its deformity, abasement, and falsification." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and diffusive benignity; that this was the quality which survived all others, notwithstanding the bitter trial which his benignity must have stood through life, and the excitement to a spiteful reaction of feeling which was continually pressed upon him by the scorn and insult which his deformity drew upon him from ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... column, in a costume so contrary to all that is graceful and dignified; a little cocked hat with its horrid stiff angles, a great coat with another angle sticking out, the tout ensemble presenting a deformity rather than an ornament: however there he stands on the pinnacle of what he and men in general would call the monument of his glory, a memento of blood, of tears of widows and orphans. Could the names of those ruined and heart broken beings be inscribed ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... Louis-le-Gros, which, having been burned down by the English, was thus raised anew from its ruins. Charles V., Francois II., Henry IV., Louis XIII., and Louis XIV., all exercised their taste upon it, and all added to its general deformity. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... St. Mark's Square, overlooking the Carnival. Here his power of artistic divination—alias of human sympathy, is called into play; for the men and women below him all wear the semblance of some human deformity, of some animal type, or of some grotesque embodiment of human feeling or passion. He throws himself into their midst, and these monstrosities disappear. The human asserts itself; the brute-like becomes ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... splitting the limb, and splintering the bone from the elbow-joint to the wrist to such an extent that by degrees the fragments had sloughed away, and the arm had become shrivelled and withered. It now resembled a mass of dried leather twisted into a deformity, without the slightest shape of an arm; this was about fourteen inches in length from the shoulder. The stiff and crippled hand, with contracted fingers, resembled the claw of ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... lovely dancer, appearing hollow (a thing Miss Gay did not doubt), like an India rubber ball in flounces; she is said to have a beautiful hand, so small as to require only No. 6. gloves—as if a pigmy hand could not be a deformity. She is invited, in a hope that young Brown may make her a partner, for the dance of life; and is said to be worth L150,000—not by the pound weight, as the envious Miss Gay hinted.—No! No! naughty Miss Gay, be satisfied with Nature's gifts, and ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... desire order and justice, everywhere necessary. Is it graceful, I ask, to walk on one leg? Men, since the beginning of history, have had the bad taste to prefer a lame society to one that is healthy and beautiful. We women have really too much taste to yield longer to such deformity. In law, in institutions, in every social and political matter, there are two sides. Up to the present day, man has usurped what belongs to woman. That is the reason why we have injustice, corruption, international ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... vnfashionable, That dogges barke at me, as I halt by them. Why I (in this weake piping time of Peace) Haue no delight to passe away the time, Vnlesse to see my Shadow in the Sunne, And descant on mine owne Deformity. And therefore, since I cannot proue a Louer, To entertaine these faire well spoken dayes, I am determined to proue a Villaine, And hate the idle pleasures of these dayes. Plots haue I laide, Inductions dangerous, By drunken Prophesies, Libels, and Dreames, ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the west-north-west, they anchored on the 8th about a cannon-shot from the shore between two islands, one lofty and the other somewhat lower. It was inhabited by Papuans, whose mode of bedecking themselves, owing to their natural deformity, made them literally appear like monsters. Nearly the whole of them had their limbs fearfully misshapen, besides which they had strings of hogs'-teeth hung about their necks, rings in their noses, their hair frizzled, and their faces black and ugly. ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... "Life of Garrick," says of Peg Woffington that "in Mrs. Day, in the 'Committee,' she made no scruple to disguise her beautiful countenance by drawing on it the lines of deformity and the wrinkles of old age, and to put on the tawdry habilaments and vulgar manners of an ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... sitting in the lap of John Wilkes, and the majority of the house as being turned into a state engine. He added, in conclusion, "I am afraid this measure originated too near the throne. I am sorry for it; but I hope his majesty will soon open his eyes, and see it in all its deformity." Lord Mansfield opposed the Earl of Chatham. He contended that the house had no right to interfere with the decisions of the commons; that those decisions were legal; that in consequence of previous votes and sentences, Wilkes was nobody in the eye of the law; and that, though ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... themselves, and to account those things the best of all which have the most beneficial effect on mankind. Further, they were bound to form abstract notions for the explanation of the nature of things, such as goodness, badness, order, confusion, warmth, cold, beauty, deformity, and so on; and from the belief that they are free agents arose the further notions of praise ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... degree in New York City, but I do know that I have as yet found only one working girl who has had the benefit of any such training in childhood. She was "Lame Lena" at Springer's box-factory; and in spite of her deformity, which made it difficult for her to walk across the floor, she was the quickest worker and made more money than any other ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... work deliberate to get a man into a state that is jest as likely as not to end in a murder, or any crime, for gain to himself." Says I, "Think of the different crimes you commit by that one act, Josiah Allen. You make a man a fool, and in that way put yourself down on a level with disease, deformity, and hereditary sin. You steal his reason away. You are a thief of the deepest dye; for you steal then, from the man you have stole from— steal the first rights of his manhood, his honor, his patriotism, his duty to God and man. You are ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... objections, it would be without personalities. Pope had already assailed Dennis in 1711 in the Essay on Criticism, as Appius. Dennis retorted by Reflections, Critical and Satirical ..., a scurrilous production in which he taunted Pope with his deformity, saying among other things that he was "as stupid and as venomous as a hunch-backed toad." He also wrote in 1717 Remarks upon Mr Pope's Translation of Homer ... and A True Character of Mr Pope. He accordingly figures in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... the same paint; not for beauty or ornament, one would think, but as some wild Indian warriors are said to do, he seemed thereby to design the looking more terrible; this his painting adding very much to his natural deformity; for they all of them have the most unpleasant looks and the worst features of any people that ever I saw, though I have seen great variety of savages. These New Hollanders were probably the same sort of people as those ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... poet or the artist when men are hidden away under their roofs. Then they do not break its calm with either their mirth or their brutality; then the vile and revolting coarseness of their works, that blot it with so much deformity, is softened and obscured in the purple breaths of shadow, and the dim tender ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... honest black face rubbing against the upper part of people's thighs as he made shift to shuffle about, making music, such as it was, and raising a smile even from the gravest. It was curious to see him, out of his very deformity, indigence, and houselessness, so cheerily endured, raising mirth in some of that crowd, whose own purses, hearths, hearts, all their possessions, sound limbs ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... become an organiser or inspector to an education committee, a trainer in an elementary training college or physical training college, the head of the gymnastic department of a school clinic, or she may prefer to start a private practice, holding classes, treating cases of deformity, and also acting as visiting gymnastic teacher or games-coach ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... the genuineness of the threat against him. The brutal reference to his lameness roused the girl's soul. When the old man, crushed by Phil's desertion, broke down the last reserve of his strange cold nature, tore his wounded heart open to her, cried in agony over his deformity, his lameness, and the anguish with which he saw the threatened ruin of his life-work, she threw her arms around his neck in a ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... (1612) Dr. William Laud presiding at that house, he had a very great affection for Shirley, especially for the pregnant parts that were visible in him, but then, having a broad or large mole upon his left cheek, which some esteemed a deformity, that worthy doctor would often tell him that he was an unfit person to take the sacred function upon him, and should never have his consent to do so.' Thus treated, Shirley left Oxford, that 'home of lost causes,' but not apparently of large moles, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... always asked, "Can Conception be prevented at all times?" Certainly, this is possible; but such an interference with nature's laws is inadmissible, and perhaps never to be justified in any case whatever, except in cases of deformity or disease. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... is the blossom of good-sense; The last result of an accomplished mind, With outward grace, the body's virtue, joined. A violated decency now reigns; And nymphs for failings take peculiar pains. With Chinese painters modern toasts agree, The point they aim at is deformity: They throw their persons with a hoyden air Across the room, and toss into the chair. So far their commerce with mankind is gone, They, for our manners, have ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... the frame of his mind, and a necessity in the frame of his body, the stars of natural inclination are sometimes obscured, by the sun of discipline and virtue. Therefore it is good to consider of deformity, not as a sign, which is more deceivable; but as a cause, which seldom faileth of the effect. Whosoever hath anything fixed in his person, that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself, to rescue and deliver himself from scorn. Therefore all deformed persons, are extreme bold. ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... an uncanny manner, and smiled, showing strong, white, even teeth—the most marvellous teeth I have ever beheld—so even as to constitute almost a deformity. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... away of evil; and there are two kinds of evil in the soul,—the one answering to disease in the body, and the other to deformity. Disease is the discord or war of opposite principles in the soul; and deformity is the want of symmetry, or failure in the attainment of a mark or measure. The latter arises from ignorance, and no one is voluntarily ...
— Sophist • Plato
... her heart. She had never as yet packed up her widow's weeds. She had never as yet even contemplated the necessity of coming down to dinner in them before other eyes than those of her father and brother. She had as yet made none of those struggles with which widows seek to lessen the deformity of their costume. It was incumbent on her now to get a ribbon or two less ghastly than those weepers which had, for the last five months, hung about her face and shoulders. And then how should she look if ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... a proper sort of love for the young lady—not exactly such as would seek her for a wife, however, and succeeded in satisfying, after a while, the scruples of one who, in addition to deformity, he also discovered to labor under the more serious curse of partial idiocy. Having done this, and flattered, in sundry other ways, the peculiarities of his companion, he pursued his ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... until they were both old men, but of whom he speaks with great admiration. In spite of his hump-back, Claranus appeared even beautiful in the eyes of those who knew him well, because his virtue and good sense left a stronger impression than his deformity, and "his body was adorned by the beauty of ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... first saw it, he said it wanted only une boete d'or pour le defendre des injures de l'air; and it certainly has received no other, than such as rain, and wind, and heat, and cold, have made upon it; and those are rather marks of dignity, than deformity. What reason else, then, can be assigned for its preservation to this day; but that the savage and the saint have been equally ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... deigned to address. He was fleshy, but his movements were nevertheless elastic and suave. Behind him stood First Lieutenant Leimann, under-sized and prematurely bent, with a neck several sizes too short for him and a suspicion of deformity between the shoulders. A pear-shaped head protruded from between them, fitfully lit up by a pair of pig's eyes, which either restlessly shot glances or else were so completely buried under their lids as to become invisible. A monocle hung down his bosom from a broad ribbon, but he ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... ever it was in Shakespeare's time "with such waterflies"—"diminutives of nature"—as excited the scorn of his moralizing cynic, Velasquez is as unquestionably condemned as is Raphael or Titian. It is true that this miraculous power of hand (?)[35] makes beautiful for us the deformity of dwarfs, and dignifies the degradation of princes; but that is not the question. It is true, again, that Mr. Whistler's own merest "arrangements" in colour are lovely and effective;[36] but his portraits, to speak ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... by drudgery, Will be the first that, like that foolish bird, Will follow him with yelling and false cries. Well[99] sung a shepherd, that now sleeps in skies,[100] "Dumb swans do love, and not vain chattering pies." In mountains, poets say, Echo is hid, For her deformity and monstrous shape: Those mountains are the houses of great lords, Where Stentor, with his hundred voices, sounds A hundred trumps at once with rumour fill'd. A woman they imagine her to be, Because that sex keep nothing close they hear; And that's the reason magic writers ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... the Princess with a horrible fiendish laugh. She averted her face with disgust, and stretched out her arms, motioning him away. And now courage returned to Haschem. Resolved to venture all, he stepped before the Princess, and gave the deformity such a blow that he reeled. He instantly assumed the form of a terrible dragon; but Haschem, drawing a scimitar which he still wore, cut him down. He fell with such violence on the corner of the pedestal of one of the marble pillars that it was broken to pieces: ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... in a dike like a dog." This circumstance is recorded in a contemporary document of unquestionable authenticity (vide extracts from York Records in the Fifteenth Century, p. 220.); and must remove all doubt as to the fact of Richard's bodily deformity. The conjecture of Dr. Wallis, quoted by G. F. G., can have no weight when opposed by clear evidence that the word "crouchback," as a term of reproach or contempt, was applied to King Richard within a few years after ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... the uttermost. You would think, perhaps, pitifully, that not much pleasure or warmth would ever go down so low, within her reach. Now that she stood on the ground, she scarcely came up to the level of the wheel; some deformity of her legs made her walk with a curious rolling jerk, very comical to see. She laughed at it, when other people did; if it vexed her at all, she never showed it. She had turned back her calico sun-bonnet, and stood looking up at Mrs. Howth and Joel, laughing ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... attempted to finish the details with more precision, it was only substituting ornament for simplicity; and the endeavor to bring the proportions of the human figure nearer to nature, with the retention of its conventional type, only made its deformity greater, and showed how incompatible the Egyptian ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... those epitomes are more, some less, worthy; sometimes there appears only a poor deformity or a feeble-minded attempt, sometimes a strong and vigorous embodiment ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... trouble in our nation? I will answer you in the burning words of a Northern clergyman in his speech at a meeting called to sympathize with the family of John Brown, after his death by martyrdom: "The Slave-Power itself, standing up there in all its deformity in the sight of Northern consciences,—that is the cause, [applause] and there the responsibility belongs."[2] Yes, you are sinning against the Northern conscience! It is settled forever that you are evil-doers in holding your present relation ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... to see an inauspicious and ill-looking person, the ugliness of Anthony Foster considerably exceeded what Tressilian had anticipated. He was of middle stature, built strongly, but so clumsily as to border on deformity, and to give all his motions the ungainly awkwardness of a left-legged and left-handed man. His hair, in arranging which men at that time, as at present, were very nice and curious, instead of being carefully cleaned and disposed into short curls, or else set up on end, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... sinner shivers and hastens to turn away from a book whose lightest denunciation of sin has in it the menace of eternal judgment. Like a great fiery eye it looks into the very recesses of the heart and reveals its intents and purposes. It sees lust hiding there in all its lecherous deformity and says, he who exercises it solely in his mind is as guilty in God's sight as though he had committed the act. It looks into the heart and sees hate crouching there with its tiger-like fangs and readiness to spring, and says that he ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... would imagine, might have rather vanquished her disgust. Her second son Gam, who was now in the fourth year of his age, had been rickety from the cradle, and as remarkably unpromising in appearance as Perry was agreeable in his person. As the deformity increased, the mother's fondness was augmented, and the virulence of her hate against the other son seemed to ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... susceptibility which charms, interests, captivates.—Believe me, our amiable defects win more than our noblest virtues. Love requires sympathy, and sympathy is seldom connected with a sense of superiority. I envy none their "painful pre-eminence." Alas! whether it be deformity or excellence which makes us say with ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... even without the tan, would have been very dark. His eyes, narrow and oblique, were almost Oriental in cast and his face was disfigured by a hideous harelip. The whole effect was sinister to the last degree, but Henry and his comrades were fair enough to credit it to a deformity of nature and not to a wicked soul behind. The two with him were a little older. They were short, thickly built, and without anything ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... unwelcome thoughts of a new sort of Cupid—deformed, evil, and hideous—typifying the degenerate passions of Rome. There were in the quiver of this Cupid arrows which carried the venom of the asp. Some at the table mocked his grinning face and made a jest of his deformity. When he could be heard he mimicked the speech ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... Rosamond or Gaveston Ope their sweet lips without detraction? But must our modern critticks envious eye Seeme thus to quote some grosse deformity, Where art not error shineth in their stile, But error and no art doth ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... second day in the factory, as he sat with his parents in their pleasant home, and the thought of Carl and of his sad deformity and still sadder story recurred to him, he could not help contrasting the circumstances of the little humpback with ...
— Under Fire - A Tale of New England Village Life • Frank A. Munsey
... unto her is to devolve the honour of the prin- cipal agent upon the instrument; which if with reason we may do, then let our hammers rise up and boast they have built our houses, and our pens receive the honour of our writing. I hold there is a general beauty in the works of God, and therefore no deformity in any kind of species of creature whatsoever. I cannot tell by what logick we call a toad, a bear, or an elephant ugly; they being created in those outward shapes and figures which best express the actions of their inward forms; and having passed that general visitation of God, who saw ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... politeness take possession of the heart; but ridicule and censure seldom rise against them, unless they appear associated with that confidence which belongs only to long acquaintance with the modes of life, and to consciousness of unfailing propriety of behaviour. Deformity itself is regarded with tenderness rather than aversion, when it does not attempt to deceive the sight by dress and decoration, and to seize upon fictitious claims the prerogatives ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... 2. Excision for deformity (generally speaking for bony anchylosis) will require for decision the consideration of many points, i.e. the joint affected, the nature of the disease or injury which has caused the anchylosis: and in each case—(1.) the state of ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... not annihilate your feelings, my child, I would only teach you to command them; for whatever may be the evils resulting from a too susceptible heart, nothing can be hoped from an insensible one; that, on the other hand, is all vice—vice, of which the deformity is not softened, or the effect consoled for, by any semblance or possibility of good. You know my sufferings, and are, therefore, convinced that mine are not the light words which, on these occasions, are so often repeated to destroy ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... countenance is much handsomer and more spiritualized in expression than any portrait of him extant. I noticed that the deformity of his foot, which had been a severe affliction to him on earth, was no ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... friends (as one must sometimes study their tastes and appetites as well as one's own), I trust that no very serious conclusions will be drawn about the probable fatality of my own case. As to uncut copies, although their inconvenience [an uncut lexicon to wit!] and deformity must be acknowledged, and although a rational man can want for nothing better than a book once well bound, yet we find that the extraordinary passion for collecting them not only obtains with full force, but is attended with very serious consequences ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... have had such a brother, who by his own example might stir me up to think of myself; and by his respect and love, delight and please me. That I have got ingenuous children, and that they were not born distorted, nor with any other natural deformity. That I was no great proficient in the study of rhetoric and poetry, and of other faculties, which perchance I might have dwelt upon, if I had found myself to go on in them with success. That I did ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... a new injury in this way, his value in the beggar market would be increased. I do not mean to do this exemplary wife any injustice; and I only suggest the idea in this land, where every beggar who is born with a deformity has something to thank the Virgin for. This custom of carrying your husband on your head in a basket has something to recommend it, and is an exhibition of faith on the one hand, and of devotion on the other, that is seldom met with. Its consideration is commended to my countrywomen at home. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... chair, her cheeks tingling, her hands locked. Hugh had thrown himself into the action of his story; his face was slightly contorted as though sighting along a gun-barrel, his arm raised, the ungainliness of his deformity strongly accentuated. He was not looking at Sylvie; true to his nature and his habit, he had forgotten every one but that Hugh of adventure and of romance, the one companion of his soul. None of them was watching Sylvie, and when she gave a sharp, little cry, a queer start and then sat utterly ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... already given, was their desire to obtain healthy well-formed children in the place of their own puny ill-shaped offspring, but this is hardly a satisfactory explanation of such conduct. A mother's love is ever depicted as being so intense that deformity on the part of her child rather increases than diminishes her affection for her unfortunate babe. In Scotland the difficulty is solved in a different way. There it was once thought that the Fairies were obliged every seventh year to pay to the great enemy ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... other part of Guinea, for their hardiness, intelligence, integrity, and zeal. Those benefits are felt by us in the general healthiness of the people, and in their vigour and activity; I might have added too in their comeliness. Deformity is indeed unknown amongst us, I mean that of shape. Numbers of the natives of Eboe now in London might be brought in support of this assertion: for, in regard to complexion, ideas of beauty are wholly relative. I remember while in Africa to have seen three ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... leg bones had been fairly shattered. Eight pieces, the surgeon said there had been. Two linear incisions, connected by a centre one, like a letter H, had been made. The boy showed me the leg himself, and a mighty proud and happy youngster he was. There was no vestige of deformity, no shortening. The incisions had healed by first intention, and the thin, white lines of the H were all that ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... any sign of brain disorder, but tending nevertheless to issue in great permanent impairment of the power over the affected limb or limbs, and eventually to interfere with their growth and thus to produce serious deformity. ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can't describe him. And it's not want of memory; for I declare I can see him ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... glanced now and then at them with her pleasant and sardonic smile and with an unruffled patience. She seemed either to look up from the depths of, or down from the heights of, her deformity upon them, and to hardly sense them at all. None of the men returned until a large city was reached, where some of them were to get off. Then they lounged into the car, were brushed, took their satchels, and when the ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... comparison with the geometrically true rectangled triangle, or circle, we estimate the error of these forms when they have become distorted; and in the same way, by a knowledge of what is the healthy normal standard of human form, we diagnose correctly its slightest degree of deformity, produced by any cause whatever, whether by sudden accident, ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... among a family of children reaching maturity one helpless from deformity, and another from feebleness, and are told that the parents, by employing surgical skill, might have removed the deformity, and overcome the weakness by tonic treatment, but had neglected to do so, we should ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... been comparatively unknown or little understood. Many and disastrous months were yet to elapse, before the letters of the Orleans Princes could tear away the curtain of mystery and show the official action in its naked deformity of malice and misjudgment. McClellan had left Manassas with a gallant army of immense force, whose numbers had no doubt been all the while exaggerated to the popular ear. They had proved themselves soldiers and heroes, and had won whenever and wherever brought to the test. The young ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... but unconnected; and ever and anon there sounded a discordant note, like a smirch upon a fair picture. The execution, however, showed a master hand, and the themes betrayed the soul of a true musician, albeit tainted with some subtile deformity. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... afflicting and more stupid. And what would you have these workingmen do? The Irish came: should they have been massacred? Wages were reduced: should death have been accepted in their stead? Necessity commanded, as you say yourselves. Then followed the interminable hours, disease, deformity, degradation, debasement, and all the signs of industrial slavery: all these calamities are born of monopoly and its sad predecessors,—competition, machinery, and the division of labor: and you blame ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... perplexing to the eye from its undulating richness: with which the sober gray of distant ranges of mountains contrasts well. One cannot form a better idea of this part of the view, than by fancying the most hilly parts of the country near Bath, clothed in a lively French dress; the only deformity of which consists in the high stone walls that enclose every tenement, and whose long white lines cut the eye unpleasantly. Most persons can point out the Chateau Duchere, which is visible from this spot at the distance of about a mile on the north-west side, and was the scene of a sharp action ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... our communications with the coast, the rebels, &c. In his youth his left leg had been broken and badly set; and though Theodore liked him, he did not give him a military command, but always employed him in a civil capacity. He did not like to speak of the accident that occasioned his deformity, and would, if asked, always give an evasive answer. Pietro, the Italian, was a great gossip, and his stories could not always be relied upon. His account of the broken leg was that when Samuel ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... thinking, as every one has thought (though not, perhaps, said), that it is built in defiance of all decencies of architecture. It is made in deliberate disproportion to achieve the one startling effect of height. It is a church on stilts. But this sort of sublime deformity is characteristic of the whole fancy and energy of these Flemish cities. Flanders has the flattest and most prosaic landscapes, but the most violent and extravagant of buildings. Here Nature is tame; it is civilisation that is untamable. Here the fields are as flat as a paved square; but, ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever way ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... tucker, sinking my stays—Rhadamanthus, without hearing her out, gave the sign to take her off. Upon the approach of the keeper of Erebus her colour faded, her face was puckered up with wrinkles, and her whole person lost in deformity. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... plays were published in 1628 and 1634; the most famous of these is La Verdad sospechosa, which was adapted by Corneille as the Menteur. Alarcon had the misfortune to be a hunchback, to be embittered by his deformity, and to be constantly engaged in personal quarrels with his rivals; but his attitude in these polemics is always dignified, and his crushing retort to Lope de Vega in Los pechos privilegiados is an unsurpassable ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... uncomforted And friendless solitude, groaning and tears, And savage faces, at the clanking hour, Seen through the steams and vapour of his dungeon, 15 By the lamp's dismal twilight! So he lies Circled with evil, till his very soul Unmoulds its essence, hopelessly deform'd By sights of ever more deformity! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... leaned over her while they read together some passionate stanza from a hymn that was as much like a love-song as it dared to be in godly company? A shadow of disgust—the natural repugnance of loveliness for deformity-ran all through her, and she shrieked, as she thought, and threw herself at the feet of that other figure. She felt herself lifted from the floor, and then a cold thin hand seemed to take hers. The warm life went out of her, and she was to herself ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... presence spoils the attractive grace That plays around the most bewitching face. Where'er she reigns, beneath her magic sway Each charm, each envied beauty melts away. Where'er she governs, WISDOM will descry In the fair form a foul deformity. —There tottering Old Age essay'd to prance With feeble feet, and join'd th' imperfect dance. There supercilious Youth assum'd the air And reverend grace which hoary Sages wear. There I beheld full many a youthful Maid, Like colts for sale to public view ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... burst of demoniac laughter rung in their ears. A very demon, a breathing spirit of evil, had witnessed all their preparations, and had learned, from its shape, the contents of the box; the idea of what they meditated caused him to utter this shout of laughter. This demon was Scorpione. This deformity was the rival of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... war for the suppression of the rebellion, shall be eligible for appointment up to the age of twenty-four years. They must be at least five feet in height, and free from any infectious or immoral disorder, and, generally, from any deformity, disease, or infirmity which may render them unfit for arduous military service. They must be proficient in Reading and Writing; in the elements of English Grammar; in Descriptive Geography, particularly of our own country, and in the History of ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... and a fine sward below, and an atmosphere free from dust, such as we find in and around all the residences of Muhammadan princes. On reaching my tents I found them pitched close outside the flower-garden, in a small dusty plain, without a blade of grass or a shrub to hide its deformity—just such a place as the pig-keepers occupy in the suburbs of other towns. On one side of this little plain, and looking into it, was the summer-house of the prince, without one inch of green sward or one small shrub ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... to do, though?" said Grandcourt. "He must ride. I don't see what else there is to do. And I don't call it riding to sit astride a set of brutes with every deformity under ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... street. One of the great men of the present dynasty, a prime minister and intimate friend of the emperor, goes by the name of Humpbacked Liu. Another may be Cross-eyed Wang, another Club-footed Chang, another Bald-headed Li. Any physical deformity or mental peculiarity may give him his nickname. Even foreigners suffer in reputation from ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... to a man of very small stature, whose bare head shone with hair-oil, and whose tight-fitting, light-coloured coat showed in all its elegance the deformity of his back. Their words were not audible, but Astier seemed much excited. He brandished his stick and bent himself forward over the face of the little creature, who for his part was perfectly calm, and stood, as if his mind was made up, with his two large hands behind ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... limbs, but was further afflicted by the insupportable name of Miserrimus Dexter. Stevenson, however, has used the effect so often, and with such telling results, that he may be said to have made it his own. To say nothing of Hyde, who was the very impersonation of deformity, there is the horrid blind Pew, Black Dog with two fingers missing, Long John with his one leg, and the sinister catechist who is blind but shoots by ear, and smites about him with his staff. In "The Black Arrow," too, there is another dreadful creature who comes tapping ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... every favourable circumstance of excuse, and broods over them with parental partiality, until it becomes not only satisfied, but even enamoured of their beauty and complexion, like a doating mother, blind to the deformity of her own offspring. Whatever Mr. Byng's internal feelings might have been, whatever consequences might have attended his behaviour on that occasion; as the tribunal before which he was tried acquitted him expressly of cowardice ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett |
