"Grimness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the least surprised," Mary assented, as she finished buttoning her gloves. She smiled, but there was a hint of grimness in the bending of her lips. That grimness remained, as she glanced at the clock, then went toward the door of the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... with delicate sprays of white blossoms. This forest is beyond all my expectations of tropical luxuriance and beauty, and it is a thing of another world to the forest of the Upper Calabar, which, beautiful as it is, is a sad dowdy to this. There you certainly get a great sense of grimness and vastness; here you have an equal grimness and vastness with the addition of superb colour. This forest is a Cleopatra to which Calabar is but a Quaker. Not only does this forest depend on flowers for its illumination, for there are many kinds of trees ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... for a moment longer than he could help. It always looked horribly final and as if it never would come up again. Big and bare, with his name staring at him from the middle, it thus offered in its grimness a turn of comparison for Miss Cookham's ominous visage. She never wore pretty, dotty, transparent veils, as Nan Drury did, and the words "Herbert Dodd"—save that she had sounded them at him there two or three times more like a Meg Merrilies ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... humorous face had hardened into grimness, and in his eyes there was the light of a fierce purpose. The sight of him comforted me, in ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... woman accepted this explanation of the tears with a murmured sound of somewhat enigmatic intonation. Her thin dark face settled into a repose that had a little grimness in it. She began putting the flowers into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery watched ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... long, long time without moving after Mrs. Peck's departure. Her brain felt unutterably weary, but it was clear, and she was able to face the situation in all its grimness. Mr. Knight had gone. Mr. Knight had had enough of it. Had he really left without a word? Was she, then, so little to him as that? She, who had clung to him, had offered him unconditionally and without ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... assumption of grimness, which was evidently meant for sarcasm, "not well. Every one knows the Pollards, but I never heard any one say they ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... the man (and the horses), who remarked with a certain grimness, in Italian, "Buon arrivato," and we staggered into a meal which our eight-hour fast and torture had ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... then, somehow, the note of mystic exaltation died away, to be succeeded by a period of realism. Read "Le Feu," which is most typical, which has sold in numberless editions. Here is a picture of that other aspect—the grimness, the monotony, and the frequent bestiality of trench life, the horror of slaughtering millions of men by highly specialized machinery. And yet, as an American, I strike inevitably the note of optimism once more. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... excuse me," he said, getting back to his characteristic grimness with surprising suddenness, when once he began to recover himself. "I've been through a good deal lately; and sometimes it ketches me round the heart ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that grimness that appears in the face of persecutors, Satan can tell how to lessen, and make to dwindle in our apprehensions, those truths unto which our hearts have joined themselves afore, and to which Christ ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... boards. At one of the doors was a poor-box,—an elaborately carved little box, of oak, with the date 1648, and the name of the church—St. Oswald's—upon it. The whole interior of the edifice was plain, simple, almost to grimness,—or would have been so, only that the foolish church-wardens, or other authority, have washed it over with the same buff color with which they have overlaid the exterior. It is a pity; it lightens ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a three-year old son," Mary said with equal grimness. "That's why I'm here. I want to destroy the thing that killed my family. I want to do something. ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... the grimness of the situation for Maurice lightened for a ridiculous moment. Jacky, breathing very hard, peered from behind his mother, and stretched out to Maurice an extremely dirty, tightly clenched fist. "I got a—a pre-present for you," he explained, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... woman termed "plain," and I expected bony harshness and grimness—something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... long time afore I'm wanted!" exclaimed Miss Lavender, with assumed grimness, as she obeyed the call. "I s'pose you thought there was no watch needed, and both ends o' the path open to all the world. Well—what am I to do?—move mountains like a grain o' mustard seed (or however ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... incomparable, the finest of all mounted figures, unless that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol, be finer: but I was not thinking of that; I only found myself staring at the triumphant captain as if he had an oracle on his lips. The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully personal. But he continued to look far over my head, at the red immersion of another day—he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries—and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... Scotchman with a new child a year. Yes, my certie," offered Nanny, with an acrid grimness. Mrs. Muir's hands clasped strongly as they lay on the table ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... ruthless, a procession in which the grotesque and the pitiable were always occurring. She thought of John standing over Meshach with the cold towel, and of Meshach passing the flame across John's dying eyes, and these juxtapositions appeared to her intolerably mournful in their ridiculous grimness. ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... said we shed all the worst on the way. They don't realise that by the time they get to the base these men are beyond complaining; each stage is a little less infernal to them than the one they've left; and instead of complaining, they tell you how lovely it is! It made one realise the grimness of our stage in it—the emergencies, the makeshifts, and the little four can do for nearly 400 in a train—with their greatest output. We each had 80 lying-down ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... the thought of the horseless-carriage widower's daughter, his grimness returned, and he resolved upon a line of conduct for the evening. He would nod to her carelessly when he first saw her; and, after that, he would notice her no more: he would not dance with her; he would not favour her in the cotillion—he would not ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... the forecastle head and lowered the lantern, clapped his sou'wester over it, and snuffed the flame out between his fingers. Trask observed the grimness of his face as the light played on it during the brief instant the lantern was coming down and the determined set of his jaw as his ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... at his moustache with a lean weak hand. "I don't think you would have cared for its DENOUEMENT," he said with sudden grimness. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... solid rock on which the waves of rebellion or invasion would have dashed and broken. It is easy to believe the saying of Lambarde, in his Perambulation of Kent, that "from time to time it had a part in almost every tragedie". But the grimness of its grey walls is relieved by a green mantle of clinging ivy, and though it can no longer be said of the Castle that it is "bathed, though in ruins, with a flush of flowers", the beautiful single pink ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... cook, has given tales of his "grimness" to the cottages where her comfortable presence is welcomed on Sunday and Thursday afternoons. She believes, however, that he must be a "religious gentleman," because (so she says) "he talks ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... write." The fact of his fear Maisie already knew; but her companion's mention of it had at this moment two unexpected results. The first was her wondering in dumb remonstrance how Mrs. Wix, with a devotion not after all inferior to her own, could put into such an allusion such a grimness of derision; the second was that she found herself suddenly drop into a deeper view of it. She too had been afraid, as we have seen, of the people of whom Sir Claude was afraid, and by that law she had had her due measure of latest apprehension of Mrs. Beale. ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... spoke the piece of an old cord. "I was made in a place of doom, and doomed men made my fibres, working without hope. Therefore there came a grimness into my heart, so that I never let anything go free when once I was set to bind it. Many a thing have I bound relentlessly for months and years; for I used to come coiling into warehouses where the great boxes lay all open to ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... at a loss what to say, decided to say nothing. The sight of John, discreetly gazing at the roof of the chicken house, the grimness of Grandfather's face, the discomfort of the choking smoke, urged a dignified retreat. She turned abruptly and left them, overwhelmed at the exhibition furnished by Mr. McBride, confounded at his sudden leap into activity after years of serene floating and absolutely in the ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... been kind in their rough way, those companions of her brother. They had stayed and done all that was necessary, had dug the grave, and stood about their comrade in good-natured grimness, marching in order about him to give the last look; but, when the sister tried to utter the prayer she knew her mother would have spoken, her throat refused to make a sound, and her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She had taken sudden refuge in the little shed that was her own ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... dark and turning slightly grey, while Kerry was as red as a man well could be, that they possessed several common traits of character was a fact which the dissimilarity of their complexions wholly failed to conceal. But while Seton Pasha hid the grimness of his nature beneath a sort of humorous reserve, the dangerous side of Kerry was displayed ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... believe it." There was a sudden grimness to Spawn's tone at the thought. "I do not believe ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... what it looks like outside," he said with a certain grimness. "I don't quite believe what the ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster
... mountain in Europe, because one knows that upon their scorching sides there is no verdure and no fountain breaks from beneath their crags. Beautiful as they are, they are repellent; they invite no familiarity; they speak of the hardness, the grimness, the silent aloofness of nature. It is only when they form the distant background of a view, and especially when the waning light of evening clothes their stern forms with tender hues, that they become elements of ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... intently, Mr. Goodworth was thinking profoundly, the rain was falling inveterately, the fog was thickening dirtily, and the austerity of the severe-looking parlor was hardening apace into its most adamantine Sunday grimness, as Zack was brought to say his lesson at his father's knees. He got through it perfectly again; but his childish manner, during this third trial, altered from frankness to distrustfulness; and he looked much oftener, while he said his task, at Mr. Goodworth than at his father. ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... you are brave but I'd just like to hold your hand or look steadily into your eyes, to tell you that you have the best thing that this world gives—friends who are one with you. I can see old Adolph with his grimness and his great love, which makes him more grim and far more mandatory, what a sturdy old Dutch Calvinist he is! He really is more Dutch than German—Dutch modified by the California sun—and Calvinist ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... with some grimness. "There must be no frolicking. And mind this, Jimmie: the more good American citizens who don't speak English that you can corral the better. We don't want intelligence. We want blind obedience with a hope of gain. And they mustn't ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... paper into his pocket he took up his food and water, made certain of his bearings and went on. It was a gamble, but a gamble his life had always been, and a fair gamble, an even break, is all that men like Alan Howard ask. He realized with a full measure of grimness that never until now had he placed a wager like this one; he was betting heavily and he knew not against what odds that at the end of twenty ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... for the kick-off with Mooney sobbing like a baby at his failure. Delmar kicked ... and the ball settled into Mooney's arms. He started down the field with a grimness born of despair. Past chalk mark after chalk mark he ran while the words of the song, now sung in frenzied ...
— Interference and Other Football Stories • Harold M. Sherman
... beside all the above about Argentina's coast trade, that Tugg kept his seamen at work through fear. He never changed his drawl in speaking; but when he gave an order there was a grimness about his mouth and a flash in his gray-blue eyes that gave one a cold, creepy feeling in the region of the spine. I don't know that Captain Tugg went armed. But if an order had been neglected by any man aboard I had the feeling that a weapon would appear in the skipper's hand and that the mutineer ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... the ageless noises of the bazaar, with its chaffering and cheating, its primitive crudities, and its changeless wares. Certainly, a Cawnpore mill is not the ideal industrial commonwealth, but without men like Abraham to alleviate its grimness the coming of larger opportunities through work like this might well lay a heavier burden on men's lives than the primitive and costly toil which it ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... coming fresh and brisk along the crests and ridges. The trail wound about the slopes and steadily ascended. Vegetation ceased, and before them stretched the bare rocks. Harley knew very well now that only the sunshine saved them from grimness and desolation. The loneliness became oppressive. Even Sylvia was silent. It was the wilderness in reality as well as seeming; nowhere did they see a miner's hut or a hunter's cabin, only nature in her ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... astonished to see a short little man with shiny black hair deftly removing the linen covers from chairs and tables and statuary. The little man had his back to Phelan as the policeman stepped inside, but he turned in a flash and confronted the intruder with the peculiar glazed grimness of the Japanese. ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... victim to the kindly society in which he himself had moved—a society produced by that free labour which had degraded the white workman to the level of the serf. At the instant the truth pierced home to him, and he recognized it in all the grimness of its pathos. Beside that genial plantation life which he had known he saw rising the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not change—born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught intellect, ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... inspired soliloquist, and supplied both objection and repartee out of his own mind. I think it probable that Carlyle was a typical Scotchman; he was more impassioned in his seriousness than Johnson, but he had a grimness which Johnson did not possess, and he had not Johnson's good-natured tolerance for foolish and well-meaning people. Carlyle himself had a good deal of Boswell's own gift, a power of minute and faithful observation, and a memory which treasured and reproduced characteristic ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... large and rambling jungle with the rest of the five-year-olds. There was something a bit humorous, yet sad, about their unchildlike grimness. Though they still might laugh in their quarters, they realized there was no laughing outside. To them survival was linked up with social acceptance and desirability. In this way Pyrrus was a simple black-and-white society. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... the silence. "I wouldn't call it exactly a fight," he said, dwelling somewhat on the last word. "Far from it," he repeated, with a touch of grimness. "There was some shooting. And some running." She could see how he paused between sentences. "But if the other fellows ran it must have been after me. I didn't pay much attention to who was behind. I had to make a tolerable steep grade down the Falling Wall Ladder ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... mind asserted itself more and more. His vigorous intellect, strengthened by long years of training, caused him to grasp the whole situation more and more clearly. He began to take a practical view of everything, and to form plans as to what must be done in the future. And even as he did so the grimness of the tragedy faced him. Throughout the day he knew that he had, to a large extent, prejudged Paul's case. His own inherent dislike of the man had caused him to feel sure he was guilty. Of course there ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... still talking in English, and Suzanne's customary look had returned to her face in all its grimness, but they went on, unmindful ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the atmosphere that surrounded the Circle L seemed to be filled with a strange depression. There had come a cold grimness into Blackburn's face, a sullenness had appeared in the eyes of the three men who had survived the fight on the plains; they were moody, irritable, impatient. One of them, a slender, lithe man named Sloan, voiced to Blackburn ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... than roll along. All of us have, at one time or another, experienced in nightmares, the agony of attempting to fly from some pursuing phantom, when our limbs refuse to serve us. This, I fancy, is much what a fox suffers, only his pains are intensified by the grimness of stern reality. If he stops, he loses his life, therefore he rolls, and flounders, and creeps along when every movement has become a fresh torture. The cock, quail, dove, bull, ram, or fish, on the other hand, fights because it is his nature to do so, and when he has ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... the muscles of her square, almost masculine jaw hardened ominously as she looked the intruder up and down. Then a flicker of contempt modified the grimness of her countenance. She took three steps forward, pausing on the other side of the desk, her ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... . ." Incipient grimness vanished out of Renouard's aspect and his voice, while he hesitated as if reflecting seriously before he changed his mind. "No. ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... were gone since Imogen's reporter-haunted nuptials had been celebrated in the bland little country church that raised its white steeple from the woodlands. Jack had been present at them; decency had made that necessary, and a certain grimness in his aspect was easily to be interpreted in a dismal, defeated rival. It was as such, he knew, ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... although it had nothing of the savage grandeur Agatha expected, she thought it forbidding. Its influence was insidious; one was not daunted by a glance, but realized by degrees its grimness and desolation. The North was not dramatic, except perhaps when the ice broke up; the forces that molded the rugged land worked with a stern quietness. It looked as if they also molded the character of the men ...
— The Lure of the North • Harold Bindloss
... springs; and comes a Man And mounts our Signal Hill; A quiet Man, and plain in garb— Briefly he looks his fill, Then drops his gray eye on the ground, Like a loaded mortar he is still: Meekness and grimness meet in ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... The fool alone fears not their fatal spears; But he perishes too if the true God send 55 Straight from above in streams of rain, Whizzing and whistling the whirlwind's arrows, The flying death. Few shall survive Whom that violent guest in his grimness shall visit. I always stir up that strife and commotion; 60 Then I bear my course to the battle of clouds, Powerfully strive and press through the tumult, Over the bosom of the billows; bursteth loudly The gathering of elements. Then again I descend ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... to call for a final climax. The ex-valet cleared his throat. And it was to his ex-valet that Tabs listened; he had forgotten the General. It was as though the grimness of reality had interrupted a piece of play-acting. There was less heat in Braithwaite's voice now and more reproach. "You said nothing about caste in those days, when you hurried us to the shambles. You promised us—— What was it that ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... was come upward almost to the top of the hill, the which took me nigh three hours. And surely, when I was come that I could see the grimness of the Pyramid, going upward very desolate and silent into the night, lo! an utter shaking fear did take me; for the sweet cunning of my spirit did know that there abode no human in all that great and dark bulk; but that there did await me there, monstrous ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... was startled by the set grimness of his face and the thunderous lowering of the black smudge of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... wouldn't, but I've made it a rule never to let strange hands touch that rifle," said the strange man, and there was a grimness about his tone that ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... the man has been found in Petain. As to the truth of all this I do not pretend to know. I did not see Joffre, but all that I have read of Joffre suggests that Petain is of his sort, the same quiet, silent man, with a certain coldness of the North, a grimness of manner that ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... scaffolding of his frame. He had gray hair retiring above a high brow, but worn long and untidily at the back; a wire-like straight-cut mustache, also streaked with gray, which served to accentuate the grimness of his mouth and slightly undershot jaw. A massive head, with tawny, leonine eyes; indeed, altogether a leonine face, and a frame indicative ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... it's a little world and a little game when Fate takes a hand in it. I told you a while ago that Fate had a queer way of shuffling us around. That's a fact. And Fate is running this game." His mocking laugh had a note of grimness in it, which brought a chill over Sheila. "Just now, Miss Sheila, Fate is playing with brides and bridegrooms and marriages and parsons. That's what is so odd. Fate has supplied the parson and the license; we'll supply the names. Look at the bridegroom, Sheila," he ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... ought to talk to Bill Belllounds," declared Mrs. Andrews with a grimness that boded ill for the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... indomitability; the quiet fearlessness, indicated by his steady, serene eyes; the rugged, sterling honesty that radiated from him, she saw—and admired. But above all she saw the boy in him—the generous impulses that lay behind his mask of grimness, the love of fun that she had ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... for she made no answer, merely clutching Betty's shoulder more tightly and holding on with a grimness born of terror. ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... been willing to acknowledge. The boy brought so much brightness and pleasant life into the gloomy stone house that the stern master, as week after week passed by, visibly began to lose something of his grimness and gloominess, and to take something like a faint interest in what was passing around him. And, after a time, he himself began to be sensible of this gradual change which was stealing over his thoughts and actions, and, vexed with himself, strove to check these new emotions, and wrap ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... his shoulder, and turning, found himself face to face with the small man who had touched his hat to the woman in the carriage. The stranger's countenance was stern in its outlines, and his military cut of beard added to his grimness, but his eyes were surrounded by fine lines of ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... wounded. Colonel Aldworth of the Cornwalls died at the head of his men. A bullet struck him dead as he whooped his West Countrymen on to the charge. Eleven hundred killed and wounded testified to the fire of our attack and the grimness of the Boer resistance. The distribution of the losses among the various battalions—eighty among the Canadians, ninety in the West Riding Regiment, one hundred and twenty in the Seaforths, ninety in the ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... survives, in remote parts of our country, even now. It aided, perhaps, to train the race of pioneers and frontiersmen who later became one of the most remarkable features of our early population. Contact with the savage races inoculated us, perhaps, with a touch of their stoicism and grimness. But in our conflicts with them there was nothing noble or inspiring; and there could be no object in view on either side but extermination. Our Indian fighters became as savage and merciless as the creatures they pursued. The Indian must be fought by the same tactics he adopts—cunning, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... he had not the heart to destroy—all belonging to his youth—and placed them there. As he looked at them, a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and a wave of emotion passed over his face, softening its hardness for an instant. But the grimness came back. He made a quick movement back to Lady Bridget's room; and when, after a minute or two, he came out again, he was carrying a curious object which he had taken out of the deep drawer beneath her hanging ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... without saying good-bye, in answer to Madame Beattie's oblique nod over her shoulder and the farewell wave of her hand. For an instant Anne felt like slipping the bolt lest her adversary should return, but she reflected, with a grimness new to her gentle nature, that if Madame Beattie did return her own two hands were ready. She stood a moment, listening, and when the carriage wheels rolled away down the drive, she went to the big closet under the stairs and caught at her own coat ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... Mr. De la Roche as a journeyman bookbinder; but the situation did not suit him. His master appears to have been an austere and passionate man, and Faraday was to the last degree sensitive. All his life he continued so. He suffered at times from dejection; and a certain grimness, too, pervaded his moods. 'At present,' he writes to Abbott, 'I am as serious as you can be, and would not scruple to speak a truth to any human being, whatever repugnance it might give rise to. Being in this state of mind, I should have refrained from writing to you, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... hint—no more—of a fairy-land of shelter and fountains within. I have seen such palaces stand in quiet and stately parks, as old, as majestic, as finely proportioned as the buildings of Oxford; but the very blackness of the city air, and the drifting smoke of the town, gives that added touch of grimness and mystery that the country airs cannot communicate. And even fairer sights are contained within; those panelled, dark-roofed halls, with their array of portraits gravely and intently regarding the stranger; the chapels, with ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to have read. But Marbot and Vitrolles are dead, and what has become of the living? It seems as if literature were coming to a stand. I am sure it is with me; and I am sure everybody will say so when they have the privilege of reading THE EBB TIDE. My dear man, the grimness of that story is not to be depicted in words. There are only four characters, to be sure, but they are such a troop of swine! And their behaviour is really so deeply beneath any possible standard, that on a retrospect ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... contrasting, fair and bright, It made me of my fancy ask If half earth's wrinkled grimness might Be but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... a word that's no in it on its ain accoont," she replied with uncompromising grimness. "Business is just business, an' my son diz nae business ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... still tied, neither side having scored, the time keeper warned the rival teams that only three minutes remained for play. His warning served to cause a tightening of muscles and a grimness of countenance in a last final effort to put over a score and avert a tied score. The huge crowd prayed fervently for a score—a touchdown—a safety—a goal ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... failure in kidnapping strangers, he now pursues a quite different plan. When seamen come ashore, he makes up to them like a free-and-easy comrade, invites them to his hut, and with whatever affability his red-haired grimness may assume, entreats them to drink his liquor and be merry. But his guests need little pressing; and so, soon as rendered insensible, are tied hand and foot, and pitched among the clinkers, are there concealed till the ship departs, when, finding themselves entirely dependent ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... adequate instruction in the schools on this basic subject. These journals are supported by men and women anxious for light for the sake of their children. Some of them were first stirred to action by Wedekind's powerful drama "The Awakening of Spring," which, with Teutonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the lesson that death and degradation may be the fate of a group of gifted school-children, because of the cowardly ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... were the exception, after all. As a general rule the village character was genial, steadfast, self-respecting; one could not but recognize in it a great fund of strength, a great stability; nor could one help feeling that its main features—the limitations and the grimness, as well as the surprising virtues—were somehow closely related to that pleasant order of things suggested by the hay-making sounds, by the smell of the wood-smoke, by the children's May-day garlands. And, in fact, the relationship was essential. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... out-of-door life in which he had always found his greatest pleasure; light blue eyes that shone with straightforwardness and that on this occasion were somewhat pensive with anxiety; thin, ascetic lips that could smile in the most confidential manner or close tightly with grimness and fixed purpose. He was a man who was at the same time shy and determined, elusive and definite, but if there was one note in his bearing that predominated all others, it was a solemn and quiet sincerity. He seemed utterly without guile and ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... close of the week the men in Watkins's shoe-shop had struck. There was quite an army of them now. The saloons were filled daily and nightly. Jack thought, with a little grimness, that they might better save their money ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... cold and the rain and the grimness of everything, I think Jacinth felt happier that day than since they had come ...
— Robin Redbreast - A Story for Girls • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... longer went near the saloon. He had paid dearly for his stubbornness and would continue to pay to the end of his days. Billy Evans had swung around and was fighting the saloon now with a grimness that was terrible in one so ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Man stopped, overwhelmed by the awful majesty of the Doctor, on whose face still sat the grimness of the past conference. ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... Stumpy concealed his uneasiness, yet his eyes searched Dolores's face questingly. None truly believed in the queen's magic powers; yet none was bold enough to openly avow his unbelief; and the added grimness of the storm, assisted by the unearthliness of that howl of anguish, brought the four godless pirates to the verge ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... struck him as on the whole taller than the English, and their faces were not brown, but grey. He admired their coats, there was a martial air in the long sweep of them. And he confessed that one looked far more of a soldier in a helmet. There is a ferocity about the things, a grimness well suited to a soldier.... Not that clothes make ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... sweating mules pulled strongly up the heavy grades the man on the high seat of the wagon repaid the indifference of his surroundings with a like indifference. Unmoved by the forbidding grimness of the mountains, unthoughtful of their solemn warning, he took his place as much a part of the lonely scene as the hills themselves. Slouching easily in his seat he gave heed only to his team and to the road ahead. When he spoke to the mules his voice was a soft, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... offspring of Ymir, born of the ice of Niflheim, which the warmth exhaled from the sun-lit land of Muspelheim caused to drop off into the great Ginnunga-gap, the void that once was where earth is now. In his "Frost Spirit" Whittier has preserved something of the ancient grimness. ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... like a "refined" Irishman. What had happened was that shortly before, at three o'clock, his fate had practically been sealed, and that even when one pretended to no quarrel with it the moment had something of the grimness of a crunched key in the strongest lock that could be made. There was nothing to do as yet, further, but feel what one had done, and our personage felt it while he aimlessly wandered. It was already as if he were ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... crooks would like to." There was a trace of grimness in the old man's tone. "Pettigrew won't stand for no monkey business, pullin' a boss's head off on Monday and cuttin' him loose on Tuesday. They've got to be middlin' consistent p'formers to get by the major, and if ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... a variant upon Bluebeard and the giant who fed upon bread made with the bone-flour of Englishmen; whereas the story of Chips introduces infernal elements and makes rats too horrible to be thought about. So I feel; but if anyone complains of the grimness of the Captain I shall have, I fear, only a very ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... there a woman went off her head. One such instance was productive of a piece of unconscious humor that, in its grimness, was in key with the rest of ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... the effects of drink on the moral and social condition of the working-class in Paris. There is probably no other work of fiction in which the effects of intemperance are shown with such grimness of ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... which he answered, and the words and the grimness of his face, impressed Hamilton somehow with a new and keener sense of the seriousness ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... downward turn at its corners that hinted at a vein of humour lying hid somewhere. The hint was well-sustained, for underneath all his sternness and severity the doctor concealed a playful humour, that at times came to the surface, and gratefully relieved his ordinary grimness. ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... sisters he had longed for all his life. "Well, you better be thinking how you'll get out of the scrape you're in," he advised, with a little of Bill Wilson's grimness. "I'm afraid I'm to blame, in a way; and yet, if I hadn't mixed into the fight, you'd be dead by now. Maybe that would have been just as well, seeing how things have turned out," he grinned. ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... feebly to prefigure this face, but never had his visioning approached the actual in its majestic, still beauty. The brow was nobly broad, the nose straight and purposeful, the chin bold yet delicate. The grimness of the mouth was relieved by a faint lift of the upper lip, perhaps an echo of the smile with which he greeted death. There was a gleam of teeth from under the lip. The eyes had closed peacefully; the lids lay light upon their secrets as if they might flutter and open again. On ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... A very fantastic one, you will say—the illusion of a self-tormentor. It was the face of Uncle Silas which haunted me. Notwithstanding the old pale smile, there was a shrinking grimness, and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... he slept again, but lightly, for the sun came in through the deep, unshaded window and fell on his face and on the rushes that covered the floor. And in his sleep the grimness was gone, and the pride. And his mouth, which was sad, contended with ...
— The Truce of God • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... responsible but for one of 'em," replied Mrs. Pember with some grimness, but with her eyes averted from Mellony's ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... few provision stores. In the daytime there is no noisier nor livelier place than this same Quai; but nothing could be more gloomy at night-time when the shops are closed, when the few gas-lamps only increase the grimness of the shadows, and when the only sound that breaks the silence is the rippling of the water as its smooth surface is ruffled by some boatman propelling his skiff through ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... voice low and controlled, but deadly in its icy grimness, "we won't detain you but a moment, for we are going to get right ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... surface the more was he dependent; so that when the measure of the water exceeded the length of his failing support on land, there was no help for it: he pitched in. His grimace of chagrin at the sight of Beauchamp securely established, had scarcely yielded to the grimness of feature of the man who feels he must go, as he took the plunge; and these two emotions combined to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... straightening. He suddenly held out a hand to Leviatt. "I'm thanking you," he said steadily. "It's rather late for you to be telling me, but I think it's come in time anyway. I'm watching him for a little while, and if things are as you say——" He broke off, his voice filled with a significant grimness. "So-long," he added. ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of his gaze slowly softened to a smile compound both of humor and grimness. He was a man to appreciate a piquant situation, none the less because it was at his expense. The spark that gleamed in his bold eye held some ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... perplexing phases, so that she herself began to feel that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands. His initial grimness she could understand, and partially its breakdown into irritability. But she was puzzled by his laughter. For ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... in the choir, and we became hidden from the rest by the forest of candles round the catafalque. Up the centre of the great church, and high over the heads of the kneeling people, came the great coffin, swaying, its bearers robbed of half their grimness by the blaze of lights. Tomas Castro suddenly caught at my sleeve whilst they were letting the coffin down on to the bier. He drew me unnoticed into the shadow behind the bishop's stall. In the swift transit, I had a momentary glance of a small, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... its pitfalls after you get there," said Mrs. Nat with a grimness born of experience. "Don't look for too much. It isn't human nature to be perfect. Besides, it ain't religious. If this good old earth of ours was just one little mite better none of us would be hankering so very ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... gently with his foot; he bent down to touch his face. A grimness came over his merriment. The man ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... humming as she put on her berry cap and pulled it over at a rakish angle. She had spent a very profitable afternoon laughing at herself. At first the laughter had been a little too grim, but before long the grimness had disappeared and only a good-natured ridicule was left. It is good to be able to laugh at yourself once in a while, but Janet was glad that ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... piquant savour and quaint originality of style are good for jaded brains, buy and read In a Canadian Canoe.... There is in these stories a curious mixture of humour, insight, and pathos, with here and there a dash of grimness and a sprinkling of that charming irrelevancy which is of the essence of true humour. As for 'The Celestial Grocery,' I can only say that it is in ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... fit again for active service, went out with a draft to France, and joined Phineas and Mo, almost the only survivors of the cheery, familiar crowd that he had loved, and the grimness of battles such as he had never conceived possible took him in its inexorable grip, and he lost sense of everything save that he was the least important thing on God's earth struggling ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... stoned and lanced at, when, at fall of night, It darted forth with ghastly—spreading wing, It found in fresh, wide, royal ravishing, New hollows, dark with horror and sad plight, To dash in and live on. Oh, to my sight, How grows its grimness, while eternaling! ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... character of the country changed suddenly, and we found the landlord's promise in some part fulfilled. Rich meadow-slopes were broken by solitary trees arranged in Nature's happiest style, and grey precipices of Jurane grimness and perpendicularity encroached upon the woods and grass. We were coming near the source of the Loue, M. Paget said, which it would be necessary for us to visit. He told us that we must leave the carriage at an auberge on ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... The grimness, the subtle blend of merciless derision and reproach in which it was uttered completely escaped her. She cried out at the new name. For her in that moment time and the world stood still. Her peril there in Paris as the wife of an intriguer at Coblenz was blotted out, together ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Scandinavian countries, has made her pavilion characteristic of her own national architecture. Though not in any sense a reproduction, the building finds its motive in Hamlet's Castle of Kronberg at Elsinore. The architect has softened the grimness and bulk of the ancient fortress into a pleasing building, that has the spirit of the gray land by the German Ocean, and the solid character of the Danes. The dim past appears in the great gravestones on the grounds, copies of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... speech. All his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who they may, to this complexion must they come at last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat; kings, counselors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II., Mahomet, or whosoever, and all gather one grimness of hue and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle seer sticks a little at saying he talked with Cicero, and, with a touch of human relenting, remarks, "one whom it was given me to believe was Cicero;" and when the soi disant Roman opens his mouth, Rome and eloquence have ebbed away,—it ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... little promise or hope in it, and a great deal of blood and suffering between the world and its doubtful reward; but Sarah Newbolt lived according to its stern inflexibility, and sang its sorrowful hymns by day, as she moved about the house, in a voice that carried a mile. But for all the grimness in her creed, there was not a being alive with a softer heart. She would have divided her last square of corn-bread with the wayfarer at her door, without question of his worth or unworthiness, his dissension, or ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... house in the village on the road to Economy was the Harricutt's. It was built of gray cement blocks that the elder had taken for a bad debt, and had neither vine nor blossom to soften its grimness. Its windows were supplied with green holland shades, and its front door-yard was efficiently manned with plum trees and a peach, while the back yard was given over to vegetables. Elder Harricutt walked to Economy every day to his office in the Economy bank. He said it kept him in good condition ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... the day's work, a thing not to talk about but to do. But my frequent meetings with British soldiers, naval men, members of the flying contingent and the army medical service, revealed under the surface of each man's quiet manner a grimness, a red heat of patriotism, a determination to fight fair but ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... surgery with it," said Miss Pole, with a little dry laugh at her own joke. But, like many people who think they have made a severe and sarcastic speech, which yet is clever of its kind, she began to relax in her grimness from the moment when she made this allusion to the surgery; and we turned to speculate on the way in which Mrs Jamieson would receive the news. The person whom she had left in charge of her house to keep off followers from her maids to set up a follower of her own! And that follower a man ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... weightier matters. To quote again from the tribute of a fellow-student: "On everything he said or wrote there was stamped the impress of a forcible individuality, a mind that thought for itself, and whose thoughts had the rugged strength of an original character wherein grimness was mingled with humor, and practical shrewdness with a love for abstract speculation." In the end, his solid qualities of mind and character made so strong an impression upon the University authorities that in ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... impatient, both with fate and with himself. He felt that he'd made Jill face reality when—if this S.O.S. signal brought help—it wasn't necessary. And there was enough of grimness in the present situation to ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... seemed to him that she was the happier for it. He even fancied that her mirth at such times had an undue nervousness; that her pluck—which was undoubted—had something of the defiance of despair, and that her persistence often had the grimness of duty rather than the thoughtlessness of pure amusement. What was she trying to do?—what was she trying to UNDO or forget? Her married life was apparently happy and even congenial. Her young husband was clever, complaisant, yet honestly devoted to her, even to the ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... evil-doers, a hard man to cross, and too grim and sour to be any one's companion. But no man doubted his honesty, and those who had no call to fear him entertained a certain respect for him, even though they could not like the man. In addition to his grimness he had a stingingly bitter tongue. He was not a fluent speaker; but most of his words had an edge to them, and he dealt not at all in compliments, never going beyond a curt nod by way of response to another ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... call you in here to be Mr. Povey's valet," said Mrs. Baines to herself with mild grimness; and aloud: "I can't stay in the shop long, Constance, but you can be there, can't you, till Mr. Povey comes back? And if anything happens run upstairs ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... tints of turquoise and opal crept into the shadows and gold into the greens: the night-dews gleamed upon the firs and grasses, while a luminous haze dimmed the dark glint of the waters to pearly gray, softened the grimness of the mountain-faces and wrapped them—sea and mountains, as soul and body in a vision of mystery, a prelude to the blaze of golden glory that was suddenly ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... sent him, To West-Dane warriors, I ween, for to render 'Gainst Grendel's grimness gracious assistance: I shall give to the good one gift-gems for courage. 15 Hasten to bid them hither to speed them,[2] To see assembled this circle of kinsmen; Tell them expressly they're welcome in sooth to The men of the Danes." To the door ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... feeling to walk down the row of cubical rooms with their barred doors. The whole area reminded him of a historical novel, of the prisons of early human history where men confined other men for infractions of social customs. The grimness of the place was appalling. The male Lani—impressive in their physical development—were in miserable condition, nauseated, green-faced, retching. The sickening odors of vomit and diarrhea hung heavily on the air. Douglas coughed and held a square ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... W. de S. Smythe went to look over "—— House," in the neighbourhood of Blythswood Square, Glasgow, the only thing about the house he did not like was the bathroom—it struck him as excessively grim. The secret of the grimness did not lie, he thought, in any one particular feature—in the tall, gaunt geyser, for example (though there was always something in the look of a geyser when it was old and dilapidated, as was the case with this one, that repelled him), ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... wholly bewitching, as even Flora Schuyler, who fancied she understood the grimness in the man's face, felt just then. He, however, looked away across the prairie, and the movement had its significance to one of the company, who, having less at stake, was the more observant. When he turned again, however, he ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... least have something.' He spoke with a grimness which was a little startling. He held the silken tresses at arm's length. 'This points to murder,—foul, cruel, causeless murder. As I live, I will devote my all,—money, time, reputation!—to gaining vengeance on the wretch ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... grimness—there is no other word—in the faces of almost all the people Veronica now met, as the road wound higher and then descended through Oliveto, the first of the mountain villages. There was in them all the look of men and women who know that the struggle is hopeless, but who will not, ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... putting the finishing touches to the erection of a tall, gaunt gallows with its steps and platform, which occupied a space midway between the gateway and the grey old Gothic church. In curious contrast to the sinister grimness of the gibbet, there rose opposite to it on the side of the church a dais, richly draped with royal velvet, splendidly spangled with fleur-de-lis ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... kept beating up against him. There were cheek-bones, oddly high, that made him think involuntarily of the well-advertised Pharaoh, Ramases; a square, deep jaw; and an aquiline nose that gave the final touch of power. For the power undeniably was there, and while the general effect had grimness in it, there was neither harshness nor any forbidding touch about it. There was an implacable sternness in the set of lips and jaw, and, most curious of all, the eyelids over the steady eyes of black were level as a ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... this ruler of millions the policy of an insignificant score, and Brant listened to his patient, practical response of facts and logic, clothed in simple but sinewy English, up to the inevitable climax of humorous illustration, which the young brigadier could now see was necessary to relieve the grimness of his refusal. For the first time Brant felt the courage to address him, and resolved to wait until the deputation retired. As they left the gallery he lingered in the ante-room for the President to appear. But, as he did not come, afraid of losing his chances, he returned to the gallery. ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... our side must have seen the whole thing, jumped on his bicycle and brought in the account before they went to press. They make no imputation on the lady—simply state the facts. Quite enough," he added with impersonal grimness; "I think he's done for ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... no long absence. He was cheerful, even rudely merry; himself pale and ill, his poor Mother's cough audible occasionally through the wall. Very kind, too, and gracefully affectionate; but I observed a certain grimness in his mood of mind, and under his light laughter lay something unusual, something stern, as if already dimmed in the coming shadows of Fate. "Yes, yes, you are a good man: but I understand they mean to appoint you to Rhadamanthus's post, which has been vacant for some time; ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... Gilligan, with a grimness that left no room for doubt. "And I'm not given to imagining ...
— Billie Bradley and Her Inheritance - The Queer Homestead at Cherry Corners • Janet D. Wheeler
... but Mrs. Carbuncle quite understood that to persons situated in great difficulty things might be grim. A certain amount of grimness must be endured. And she knew, too, that Lucinda was not a girl to be driven without showing something of an intractable spirit in harness. Mrs. Carbuncle had undertaken the driving of Lucinda, and had been not altogether unsuccessful. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... you up for that kind of rat and was watching you," continued Joe in his same awful grimness. "I'm not going to shoot you, unless you make me. I'm going to twist that pretty neck of yours. But first, out with anything you've got to ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... am," replied the other with some grimness. "But I know the game. Well, let's get down to cases. What do you want ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... often that they hang with the picturesque lines of the best tailor-made garments. That is why well-fed artists of pencil and pen find in the griefs of the common people their most striking models. But when the Philistine would disport himself, the grimness of Melpomene, herself, attends upon his capers. Therefore, Danny set his jaw hard at Easter, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... of stony grimness, colouring slightly, and in French, "Ce n'est peut etre qu'une habitude." ("It may be ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Bud's voice had a grimness in it that spelled trouble for the lady laid out in a faint "She can be his mother a ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... some courage from the relaxation in the savage grimness of his captors, which seemed implied by this rough pleasantry, and with him such recuperation of spirits naturally took the ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... a sudden grimness which had not been present before. "I'll do all I can," he said soberly. "If the information is there I'll ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones |
