"Gargoyle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... asked. The other had been not merely forbidding, not merely repugnant, but alternately forbidding and repugnant—in daylight, an impeccable burgher sitting tall and righteous under a tall hat; in tunnels, a hunchbacked gargoyle picking its nose ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... people and save me from the boredom of dining alone. How's my handsome brother? Naughty boy! It's the first time you've looked yourself in weeks. They work him too hard down there, Mrs. Penny. I tell my fat brother he's become little more than an ornamental gargoyle. It's too sordid for this boy, and now you running away from him just when I had hoped the time was ripe for him to dabble in some of the things he's set his heart on. The kind of plays he reads all night until I have to turn his lights out. Shame ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... of the soul being near the surface of life. There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly enlightened men—the ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... he lighted the four lamps. Not until he had finished did he turn toward the bed. It was then that David had his first good impression of the man. He was not tall, but built with the strength of a giant. His arms were long. His shoulders were stooped. His head was like the head of a stone gargoyle come to life. Wide-eyed, heavy-lipped, with the high cheek-bones of an Indian and uncut black hair bound with the knotted red MOUCHOIR, he looked more than ever like a pirate and a cutthroat to David. Such a man, he thought, might ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... part of the light-headedness, thought Maggard, but instinctively he continued to simulate unconsciousness. This man had been his steadfast and self-forgetful friend. So the wounded man fought back the sense of clear and persistent reality, which had altered kindly features into a gargoyle of vindictiveness, and lay unmoving until Rowlett ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... in to Marraine," she choked. "Gargoyle, my dear," she whispered, "is what she meant—gargoyle. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... starting point for almost a new art in tonal combination, the effects of which are seen on every hand to-day. To realize its influence, one need only compare the graceful arabesques of the most simple piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors. We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those of the Englishman, John Field, though naturally Chopin's Polish temperament gave his work that grace and profusion ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... give the churchyard a foreign and outlandish look, I think, and harmonize less perfectly with the characteristically English architecture of the church than their neighbour, the old yew. The tower is battlemented, and has some individual gargoyle heads around its gutter, and the barrel roof of the interior has richly carved wooden bosses, with the remains ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... seemed as if he would come down into the boat, over which he hung, slanting down and clinging with both hands now, and glaring at them with his mouth open and his eyes starting, looking for all the world like some huge gargoyle on the top of ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... brown as a berry and ugly as need be. At forty you might say Jack Cobley couldn't be beat for plainness; and yet, after all, I've seen better-looking men that was uglier, if you understand me, because, though his countenance put you in mind of an old church gargoyle, yet it was kindly and benevolent in its hideousness, and he had good, trustful eyes; and, to the thinking mind, a man's expression matters more than the shape of his mouth or ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... was terrible. His huge bulk, his red face and bull neck, his eyes popping from behind their fleshy lids, and the dripping blade in the shapeless hulk of his hand gave him the appearance as he stood there of some monstrous gargoyle instead of a thing of flesh and blood. And Aldous was terrible to look at, but in a way that wrung a moaning cry from Joanne. His face was livid from the beat of the rocks; it was crusted with blood; his eyes ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... "afternoon, walk in Park, sometimes ride. Night, theatre or music-hall." He grins like an amiable gargoyle. In his own country African law-student must be quite a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... trade account. If I'm permitted to remain here after you've cleaned up, a similar sum will go down in the same column until what Leyden had is paid for. The rest of the dust is packed in bags. It was all ready for Leyden to call for. You get it now. The gargoyle-faced dwarf at the gate will show you where it is. Now, if that's all, I'll thank you both to get to blazes out of here and let me finish packing. I'm still trader ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... their beds, walked through the rain to the aerodrome, and sneaked to the flight shed. They returned two hours later, hungry, dirty, and flushed with suppressed joy. After breakfast we found that the crashed bus had lost a Scarff mounting, and the bus manned by the early risers had found one. The gargoyle shape of a discarded ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... diamond facets. It has only one clear story above the ground-floor; but the roof, rising steeply, has several projecting windows, with carved spandrels rather elegantly enclosed in oaken frames, and externally adorned with balustrades. Between each of these windows is a gargoyle presenting the fantastic jaws of an animal without a body, vomiting the rain-water upon large stones pierced with five holes. The two gables are surmounted by leaden bouquets,—a symbol of the bourgeoisie; for nobles alone had the privilege in former days of having weather-vanes. ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... is still most notable in the art of Flanders. All Gothic buildings are full of extravagant things in detail; but this is an extravagant thing in design. All Christian temples worth talking about have gargoyles; but Bruges Belfry is a gargoyle. It is an unnaturally long-necked animal, like a giraffe. The same impression of exaggeration is forced on the mind at every corner of a Flemish town. And if any one asks, "Why did the people of these flat countries instinctively raise these riotous and towering monuments?" ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... not quite natural, with a strange note half pathetic, half jeering. Her father tended to a supercilious, sneering tone. In Vina it came out in mad bursts of hilarious jeering. This made Miss Frost uneasy. She would watch the girl's strange face, that could take on a gargoyle look. She would see the eyes rolling strangely under sardonic eyelids, and then Miss Frost would feel that never, never had she known anything so utterly alien and incomprehensible and unsympathetic as her own beloved Vina. For twenty years the strong, protective governess reared and tended her lamb, ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Alcott. I imagined his slightly stooping, yet tall and well-grown figure, clothed in black, and with a picturesque straw hat, twining itself in and out of forest aisles, or craftily returning home with gargoyle-like stems over his shoulders. The magic of his pursuit was emphasized by the notorious fact that his handiwork fell together in the middle, faded like shadows from bronze to hoary pallor; its longevity was a protracted death. In short, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... I do think of them," she answered obediently, her eyes straying into the shadows of wynd or close, or tracing out the detail of some carved gargoyle on an old facade. ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... shaking his pencil at her as he sat perched, like a benign gargoyle, by his study table. "I'll not have Farwell defrauded while he cannot ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... found in most art shows a type of carved wood gargoyle where the work and the subject are at one, not only in the color of the wood, but in the way the material masses itself, in bulk betrays its qualities. We will suppose a moving picture humorist who is in the same mood as the carver. He chooses a story ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... the spectacles on his nose, and grinned. With that grin, and his spectacles, he was as surprising as a handsome gargoyle. His height compelled him to lean forward and to grin downward, even when speaking to a big man like Macandrew. He turned to his chief now, and both hands went up to his spectacles. In the way the corners of his mouth turned up before he spoke, whimsically ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... I'll hobble around all right. It isn't that, it's my face. Oh I know I'm a hideous sight, Hardly a thing in place; Sort of gargoyle, you'd say. Nurse won't give me a glass, But I see the folks as they pass Shudder and turn away; Turn away in distress . . . Mirror enough, ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... the end of the terrace and looked up at the dark massive pile of masonry above him. In every leering gargoyle and carved coping, he read the ruin of ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... he approached the proprietor, a man with a pale, gargoyle-like face, and unpleasant-looking, raggedy teeth, and showing him the bean, asked him ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... "Mayazib" plur. of the Pers. Mizab (orig. Miz-i-abchannel of water) a spout for roof-rain. That which drains the Ka'abah on the N.-W. side is called Mizab al-Rahmah (Gargoyle of Mercy) and pilgrims stand under it for a douche of holy water. It is supposed to be of gold, but really of silver gold-plated and is described of Burckhardt and myself. (Pilgrimage iii. 164.) The length is 4 feet 10 in.; width 9 in.; height of sides 8 in.; and slope ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... minor prophets," he would say carelessly. "I think Mr. So-and-So would be interested to hear how you came by these names." And thus encouraged, Malachi would twist his face knowingly, until it resembled a gargoyle rather than a human face, and start away as though he ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... monarch himself was the very caricature of a man, hideous and grotesque as a gargoyle. He was short of stature, spindle-shanked, rachitic and malformed, and of his face, with its colossal nose, loose mouth and shallow brow, Giovio says that "it was the ugliest ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... One grinning gargoyle looked in from beneath the roof through an opening in a stained window. It was the face of a mocking fiend, such as the old builders loved to place under the eaves to spout the rain through their open mouths. It looked at him, as he sat in his mitred chair, with its hideous grin growing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... from the lips of Obadiah Price than the old man straightened himself and stood as rigid as a gargoyle, his gaze penetrating into the darkness of the room beyond Captain Plum, his head inclined slightly, every nerve in him strained to a tension of expectancy. His companion involuntarily gripped the butt of his pistol and faced the narrow entrance through which they had come. In the ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... nervously over the title backs. A second man, figure short, squat, red-faced, crowds the erratic scholar. A third. The rain is bringing them in in numbers. These are the basement students of the gargoyle philosophies, the gargoyle sciences, the gargoyle religions. Perpetual motion machine inventors, alchemists with staring, nervous-eyed medieval faces, fourth dimensionists, sun worshippers, cabalistic researchers, voodoo authorities—the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... bedroom, and wondering if they had been having springs like this all the time he had lived in the city, heard a scuffle outside the door. His wife's voice inquired breathlessly of Wallis, "Can Mr. Allan—see me?... Oh, gracious—don't, Foxy, you little black gargoyle! Open the ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... to pick his way carefully over the slimy, ice-glazed cobble stones of the Cowgate. He could see nothing. The scattered gas-lamps, blurred by the wet, only made a timbered gallery or stone stairs stand out here and there or lighted up a Gothic gargoyle to a fantastic grin. The street lay so deep and narrow that sleet and wind wasted little time in finding it out, but roared and rattled among the gables, dormers and chimney-stacks overhead. Happy in finding his master himself again, and sniffing fresh ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... Why on earth do you think that you would have been happy with this girl? What do you know about her except that she is a beauty? I grant you she's that, but are you aware of the infinitesimal part looks play in married life? My dear chap, better is it for a man that he marry a sympathetic gargoyle than a Venus with a streak of hardness in her. You know—and you would admit it if you were honest with yourself—that this girl is hard. She's ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... Then the gargoyle came into her mind again. What a capital headpiece it would make for "Quigg's" next column! It was time this week's ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... at his face, grinning like an elated gargoyle; herself utterly limp, her every nerve a filament ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... referred either to the many sieges which the town suffered, or a pestilence which depopulated the whole region. A huge gilt clock face shone below the upper gallery, at each corner of which sprang a stone gargoyle. ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... were engaged upon this duty, it came on to rain in a manner worthy of the tropics. The vault reverberated; every gargoyle instantly poured its full discharge; we waded back to the inn, ankle-deep in impromptu brooks; and the rest of the afternoon sat weatherbound, hearkening to the sonorous deluge. For two hours I talked of indifferent matters, laboriously feeding the conversation; for two hours my ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... out services for fifty years in a hamlet, with a little square church like a wooden money-box. I was taught music so that I could - well - make the tin-pot organ groan, I used to call it. I had twenty-five years of that, with never a break. I got so that, to keep myself from turning into a stone gargoyle on the organ seat, I must have my little jest too. "One way I had it was by making the organ groan dismallest at weddings and christenings, and squeak hilariously at funerals. Father never noticed, he'd already turned gargoyle, ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... start. Grylls climbed in by the rear step, and sat next to Nell with a dogged air. This brought him opposite Garth, and very near Natalie. Albert and the half-breed following him, they started. Xavier, covered with dirt, snivelling, and nursing a split lip, was as ugly as a gargoyle. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... unrepaired, was of the remotest times, and everywhere were represented in stone beasts that have long since passed away from Earth—the dragon, the griffin, the hippogriffin, and the different species of gargoyle. Nothing was to be found, whether material or custom, that was new in Astahahn. Now they took no notice at all of us as we went by, but continued their processions and ceremonies in the ancient city, and the sailors, knowing their custom, took no notice of them. But I called, as we came near, to ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... but a glance told Brent that neither of them worked the key. The pair were gaunt and sinister of aspect and they were not town folk but creek-dwellers. One was evil-visaged to a point of gargoyle hideousness. The other was little better, and he raised a face to inspect the man in the door which some malignant sculptor might have modeled in pure spite, pinching it viciously here and there into sharp angles of grotesqueness. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... not the word," said Syme. "It was exactly the worst instant of my life. And yet ten minutes afterwards, when he put his head out of the cab and made a grimace like a gargoyle, I knew that he was only like a father playing ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... fluid, through the veins of your national and private life. Then, slowly, they froze hard, congealing the whole body into a kind of crystal. Your ethics are stereotyped in black-letter characters. A gargoyle morality." ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... culvert, cloaca, sough, kennel, siphon; piscina^; pipe &c (tube) 260; funnel; tunnel &c (passage) 627; water pipe, waste pipe; emunctory^, gully hole, artery, aorta, pore, spout, scupper; adjutage^, ajutage^; hose; gargoyle; gurgoyle^; penstock, weir; flood gate, water gate; sluice, lock, valve; rose; waterworks. pipeline. Adj. vascular ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Hinge answered, standing in attitude of attention, and smiling like a happy Gargoyle—"the news is, sir, as the Italians is playing Old Harry at Milan with them Austrians, and old Louis Philippe turned up at Newhaven, ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... Monsieur de Beaulieu, is very well in its way; but if you sprang from Charlemagne, you should not refuse the hand of a Maletroit with impunity - not if she had been as common as the Paris road - not if she were as hideous as the gargoyle over my door. Neither my niece nor you, nor my own private feelings, move me at all in this matter. The honour of my house has been compromised; I believe you to be the guilty person; at least you are now in the secret; ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the precious ore; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... flag from my pouch, tied it to the point of my sabre, and stepped out along the projecting snout of a gargoyle. Below, under my feet, the tree-tops ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... the little side-door, found his key, and entered the Cathedral, leaving the gargoyle to grin after him, growing more alive, and more malicious too, with every fading moment of ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... being established, and the nature of his service becoming apparent, Curtis Gordon took his hand in a crushing grip and thanked him in a way that might have warmed the heart of a stone gargoyle. The man was transformed, now that he understood; he became a geyser of eloquence. He poured forth his appreciation in rounded sentences; his splendid musical voice softened and swelled and broke with a magnificent and touching emotion. Through it all the Irish contractor remained uncomfortably ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... swinging his bell with lusty force. "No Christmas! No Christmas!" echoed through the darkening streets, and, as he passed, the girl contracted her features into a grimace that would have done credit to the wide-mouthed gargoyle of ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... one who has seen the rags of harlequinade stripped from that mummer Life, leaving only naked being. She had touched the limits of the endurable; her sordid little hopes had split into fragments. But when a human soul faces upon its past, and sees a gargoyle at every milestone where an angel should be, and in one flash of illumination—the touch of genius to the smallest mind—understands the pitiless comedy, there comes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of a flight of stone steps leading to the doors of an imposing mansion across the street from the Portman home a motionless figure sat, as bleak as the shadows in which it was shrouded. Like a malevolent gargoyle it glowered out upon the deserted street; a tense, immovable chin rested in a pair of clenched hands, knees supporting the elbows. This desolate, forbidding figure had been there for an hour or more—ever since Christine's ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon |
