"Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... experienced a savage satisfaction because it had been sadly neglected. There was no headboard to mark the spot, no familiar mound of earth; only a sunken stretch, a pitiful little patch of sand, with a few weeds thrusting up out of it, nodding to the slight breeze and casting grotesque ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... include the large grey cricket (Pachytylus cinerascens, Fab.), which is larger than the creature which devours it; the white-faced Decticus, armed with powerful mandibles from which it is wise to guard one's fingers; the grotesque Truxalis, wearing a pyramidal mitre on its head; and the Ephippigera of the vineyards, which clashes its cymbals and carries a sabre at the end of its barrel-shaped abdomen. To this assortment of disobliging creatures let us add two horrors: the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul. The physical need for sleep began to overtake her; the exuberance which had sustained and exalted her spirit left her helpless and yielding to the conditions which crowded ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... crystallized by this untoward event. The absurdity of a man's having tramped twenty miles through an almost unbroken wilderness to preach the gospel to a garter snake, burst upon him with a crushing force. This grotesque denouement of an undertaking planned and executed in the loftiest frame of religious enthusiasm, shook the very foundation ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... grotesque fringe and tentacles, drifted down into the range of our light. Lower it floated until it hovered just above one of the larger mounds. The Professor got its portrait. At the same instant, as though it had heard the click of the shutter and been frightened by it, the thing dropped ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... was an admirable story-teller, told the story of his own siege, and adventures, and escapes with great liveliness and humor, and described the talk of the sheriff's officers at his door, the pretty little signals of Fanny, the grotesque exclamations of Costigan when the chevalier burst in at his window, and his final rescue by Altamont, in a most graphic manner, and so as greatly to ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous in the belief that slavery was right, righteous, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... little to the American driver where he sits; he is indeed, in all respects, a far different personage from his great-coated prototype in England. He is in general extremely dexterous in the art of driving, though his costume is of a most grotesque description. Figure to yourself a slipshod sloven, dressed in a striped calico jacket and an old straw hat, alternately arranging the fragile harness of his horses, and springing again upon his box with surprising agility; careless of the bones ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... Canal, and will check a coast-ways current that might, if uncontrolled, silt up the approach. The Canal is a triumph, not of man's hands, but of machinery. Regiments of steam shovels attack the banks, exhibiting a grotesque appearance of animal intelligence in their behavior. An iron grabber is lowered by a crane, it pauses as if to examine the ground before it, in search of a good bite, opens a pair of enormous jaws, takes a grab, and, swinging round, empties its mouthful ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... exposed to temptations of egotism and petulance, and least subjected to anything above them,—academics, artists, litterateurs, strong-minded women, 'debating' youths, Scotchmen of the phrenological grade, and Irishmen of the young-Ireland school."[164] There are very many beside this grotesque group, who exclaim, with one of his warmest admirers, "Carlyle is my religion!" There are others again who say gratefully what John Sterling wrote him in his last brief letter, "Towards me it is still more true than ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... there was no inland shore, nor any island to the left. On either side were great forests of mangrove trees, standing tiptoe on their myriad down-dropping roots, each root midleg in the water. As far as we could see among the trees, there was no sign of ground of any kind—nothing but a grotesque network of roots, on which the forest stood. In this green-bordered avenue of water, which extended nine or ten miles, the thick foliage shut out the breeze, and our boatman was obliged to go ahead in his little boat ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... of the history of Europe begins with Rome. All the roads of his speculation start from that nodal point in the story of man. Let us take a grotesque example: ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... of us were amusing ourselves with chalking outlandish beasts on the Museum blackboard. We drew prancing starfishes; frogs in mortal combat; hydra-headed worms; stately crawfishes, standing on their tails, bearing aloft umbrellas; and grotesque fishes with gaping mouths and staring eyes. The Professor came in shortly after, and was as amused as any at our experiments. ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... week: and to earn even that they had to work almost incessantly for fourteen or sixteen hours a day. There was no time for cooling and very little to cook, for they lived principally on bread and margarine and tea. Their homes were squalid, their children half-starved and raggedly clothed in grotesque garments hastily fashioned out of the cast-off ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... this cemetery and find scarcely anything beautiful, appropriate, or tender. A lion, ill done, and yet to some degree impressive, lies complacently above a menagerie keeper, and near this is a tomb of some imagination, with reliefs of the life of Christ. In one place a grotesque horse, with a head disproportionately vast, is to be seen. Perhaps among all these monuments the one to Mrs. Blake is the most pleasing. It is a simply and quaintly executed kneeling figure, with a certain quiet and pathetic reverence of pose that is strangely restful against the serried vulgarity ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... afterwards. At the theatre, at balls, at concerts; at the promenades in the gardens of San Georgio; at the grotesque exhibitions in the square of St. Mark; among the throng of merchants on the Exchange by the Rialto. He seemed, in fact, to seek crowds; to hunt after bustle and amusement; yet never to take any interest in either ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... windows, crying, "No quarter! Down with the Papists!" The bishop's servants were cut down, the bishop himself dragged out of the cellar and thrown into the street. There his rings and crozier were snatched from him; he was stripped of his clothes and arrayed in a grotesque and ragged garment which chanced to be at hand; his mitre was replaced by a peasant's cap; and in this condition he was dragged back to the palace and placed on the brink of the well to be thrown in. One of the assassins drew attention to the fact that it was already full. "Pooh!" ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... never shrunk or shivered, and on the bare, upturned features, blanched to the unnatural whiteness only found in corpses from which the life-blood has been drained away. Since then, I have tried to recall the face as I saw it often—round and ruddy, beaming with reckless joviality, and grotesque humor: it will only rise as I saw it once—white, and solemn, and still. When the crowd had satisfied their curiosity, the coffin was borne away, and everything fell back into the old groove ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... an advocate-general in the reign of Philippe de Valois, who stoutly opposed the encroachments of the Church. The monks, in revenge, nicknamed those grotesque figures in stone (called "gargoyles"), pierres du coignet. At Notre Dame de Paris there were at one time gargoyles used for extinguishing torches, and the smoke added not ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... of such extravagance that the brain was staggered with what the eye tried to register. Below the aviators, the shadow of their machine pursued them on white film like a grotesque gray bird of some supernatural region. The shadow followed tirelessly, gaining as the hour of noon approached, gaining still as afternoon began to gather, swell, and wane; and always it skipped from crest to crest ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... as a man being lifted into the air, for instance), and not be interested in it, is so foreign to the habits of my mind (which can't insulate a fact from an inference, and rest there) that I have not a word to say. Only I see that if this class of facts, however grotesque, be recognised among thinkers, our reigning philosophy will modify itself; scientific men will conceive differently from Humboldt (for instance) of the mystery of life; the materialism which stifles the higher instincts ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... her there, collapsed in her chair, a slim, gray-faced girl with the rouge giving a grotesque vitality to her bloodless cheeks. She got up very calmly and gave him the cablegram. Then she fainted in a crumpled heap at ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... He had squandered his whole life on a single act of insanity which even in the action had produced nothing but disgust. He hadn't merely swindled himself; he had committed a kind of suicide which made death silly and grotesque. The one thing that could save him a scrap of dignity—and such a sorry scrap!—would be going to the devil by the ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... an old wood, reputed for its age, And for its beauty wild and picturesque; The bound and goal of each day's pilgrimage, Where were all forms of graceful and grotesque; And countless hues, from the dark stately pine That whispered its wild mysteries to my ear, To the smooth silver of the birch-trees shine, Showing between the aspens straight and fair; With forest flowers, and delicate vines that crept From the rich soil far up among the trees, Seeking ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... The little lady looked at him dubiously and made a pull at the string of her night-cap, causing it to fall aside and give a grotesque appearance ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... no heed. They and the newcomers who had poured into the room were fascinated by the work of the giant rather than the giant's self. They had a lantern, swinging dull light and grotesque shadows across the place now, and by the illumination, two of the men went to the wall and picked up the great oaken chair. They raised it slowly between them, a battered mass of disconnected wood. Then they looked ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... coffin. It was a simple walking funeral, with nothing to grate on the feelings of any; far more in accordance with its purpose, to my mind, than the gorgeous hearses, and nodding plumes, which form the grotesque funeral pomp of respectable people. There was no "rattling the bones over the stones," of the pauper's funeral. Decently and quietly was he followed to the grave by one determined to endure her woe meekly for his sake. The only mark of pauperism ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the hand, and he would tell him all his mind, and together they would set up a printing press, with the types of diamonds, and print hymns, and send them back to the Isle of Man. Poor, 'wildered brain, haunted by "half-born thoughts," not all delusions, but quaint and grotesque. Full of valiant fury, Chaise was always ready to fight for his distorted phantom of the right. When an uncle of my own died, whose name I bear, Chaise shocked all the proprieties by announcing his intention of walking in front of the funeral procession through the streets and singing his terrible ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... forbade all pruning of trees as an act of insubordination to Nature, and delighted in rain but cowered in terror from thunder and lightning. He peered curiously at clouds to find strange shapes in them, and in his pursuit of the grotesque examined the spittle of sick persons on the walls or ground, hoping for suggestions of monsters, combats of horses, or fantastic landscapes. But why this should have been thought madness in Cosimo when Leonardo in his directions to artists explicitly advises ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... municipal magistrates presented her a sample of the wines of the district; and, as she tasted the luscious offering, the coopers celebrated what they called a feast of Bacchus, waving their hoops as they danced round the room in grotesque figures. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... the Springs, surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the afternoon looking ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... from Clarence's lips was so sincere and unaffected that the man was disconcerted, and at last joined in it, a little shamefacedly. The grotesque blunder of being taken as a fugitive from justice relieved Clarence's mind from its acute tension,—he was momentarily diverted,—and it was not until the boatman had departed, and he was again alone, that it seemed to have any ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... Paris, not being amused, prefers his mimicry. He is alone, mind you. No more Coincon combinations. If he is to be insulted, let the audience do it, or the vulgar theatre management; not his brother artists. Away from his imitations he tries to make the most of his grotesque figure. He invents eccentric costumes; his sleeves reach no further than just below his elbows, his trouser hems flick his calves; he wears, inveterate tradition of the circus clown, a ridiculously little ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... Bluebeard. But there is no communicable passion in it such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... It is grotesque. It is the ridiculous effrontery of men-maggots who think they can kill me. I cannot die. I am immortal, as they are immortal; the difference is that I know it and they ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... of rough-hewn red sandstone, combining solid dignity and some artistic merit, for Benham had not stood still architecturally speaking. The River Drive was a grotesque, yet on the whole encouraging exhibit. Most of the residences had been designed by native talent, but under the spur of experiment even the plain, hard-headed builders had been constrained to dub themselves "architects," and ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... tales of knighthood and chivalry that commemorate the romantic deeds of Charlemagne and his paladins. Written in various languages, and at periods widely separated, these tales present a curious mixture of fact and fiction, of the real and the marvellous, of the beautiful and the grotesque, of pagan superstition and Christian devotion. Although there were, in truth, no knights in the time of Charlemagne, and the institution of chivalry did not exist until many years later, yet these legends are of value as portraying life and manners in that period of ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... the plaster, on either side of the grated door, representing a select party of souls, frying. One of them has a grey moustache, and an elaborate head of grey hair: as if he had been taken out of a hairdresser's window and cast into the furnace. There he is: a most grotesque and hideously comic old soul: for ever blistering in the real sun, and melting in the mimic fire, for the gratification and improvement (and the contributions) of ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Sanskrit work Ananga-Ranga (Stage of the Bodiless One i.e. Cupido) or Hindu Art of Love (Ars Amoris Indica).[FN354] I have copies of it in Sanskrit and Marathi,Guzrati and Hindostani: the latter is an unpaged 8vo of pp. 66, including eight pages of most grotesque illustrations showing the various san (the Figurae Veneris or positions of copulation), which seem to be the triumphs of contortionists. These pamphlets lithographed in Bombay are broad cast over ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Kemble he knew there was 'a grotesque side' to his Society, etc., but he could not refuse the kind solicitations of his Friends, Furnivall and Co. Mrs. K. had been asked to join: but declined, because of her somewhat admiring him; nay, much admiring what he might ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... of considerable size. As the road was infested with robbers, they here procured an escort from the king of Yarriba, consisting of 200 horsemen, and 400 warriors on foot, armed with spears, bows, and arrows. The troops were dressed in a grotesque fashion, some wearing gaudy robes, while others were in rags. The whole cavalcade had a wild and romantic appearance as it wound along the narrow and crooked paths, to the sound of ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... narrow, upright frame, placed close to the wall, and holding a stout wooden panel. In the centre of this, at the height of a man's chest, was a stuffed leathern pad, on which was painted a grotesque face, evidently intended for that of a negro, and above it was a dial bearing numbers that ranged from 1 to 300. The single pointer on this dial indicated the number 173, a figure at ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... ambiguities, coarse rustic obscenities, ghosts frightening and occasionally devouring children, formed part of the entertainment, and offensive personalities, even with the mention of names, not unfrequently crept in. But there was no want also of vivid delineation, of grotesque incidents, of telling jokes, and of pithy sayings; and the harlequinade rapidly won for itself no inconsiderable position in the theatrical life of the capital and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... on the cushion and saw the ugly face of the old porter, who was bending down and examining the wounded foot while he steadily cursed everything in heaven and earth, with an earnestness that would have been grotesque had his language been less frightful. For a few moments Zorzi almost forgot that he was hurt, as he listened. Not a saint in the calendar seemed likely to escape the porter's fury, and he even went to ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... ingenious mind, over-packed with ideas, which he cannot be content to express in prose. He delights, as in an intellectual exercise, in the grapple with difficult technique, the victorious wrestle with grotesque rhymes. All the comic poems are unusually rich and fine in rhythm, which seems to exult in its mastery over material ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... committing faults was our wish to stand well with Jack: he never scolded, never gave advice, but if he were displeased with our conduct we could not eat or sleep. Once Harry committed a trifling error—to call it a wickedness seems a grotesque exaggeration now—and Jack did ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... not a single fact being, for an instant, conceived as tenable by any living faith. Dante's conception is far more intense, and, by himself, for the time, not to be escaped from; it is indeed a vision, but a vision only, and that one of the wildest that ever entranced a soul—a dream in which every grotesque type or phantasy of heathen tradition is renewed, and adorned; and the destinies of the Christian Church, under their most sacred symbols, become literally subordinate to the praise, and are only to be understood by the aid, of ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... motionless invalid. There he lay, with quiet breathing, ignorant of the fact that his own wife was wishing him out of the way, praying for death to claim him. Praying? What if the prayers of the wife had in some way wished an illness upon the unsuspecting old man? Of course that was purely grotesque, yet as the ghastly notion occurred to her, Esther felt a sudden longing to confide in someone—Miss Clifford, the son, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... see that wonderful thing, a man killed. Anyway, I would see a man-fight. Great was my disappointment. Black Matt and Tom Morrisey merely held on to each other and lifted their clumsy-booted feet in what seemed a grotesque, elephantine dance. They were too drunk to fight. Then the peacemakers got hold of them and led them back to cement the new ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... led me by the button to Stanwix Hall, which he said was the head quarters of his four hundred and forty president-makers. Here the glare of an hundred gas lights threw curious shadows over a throng of staggering and grotesque figures in toppling hats, broad, brown skirted coats, with brass buttons, and bright striped trowsers. 'These men,' said the Captain, introducing them to me, with an extension of his left hand, 'are made of better metal than they seem; you must not judge them by what you see on the surface. Keep ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... twisted round their heads like turbans, and pinned across their bosoms. I think it is absurd, though, to say that German peasants dance well. They enjoy the exercise immensely, but are heavy and loutish in their movements, and they flounder about in a grotesque way with their hands on each other's shoulders. At a Kirchweih they dance in ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... is true, a natural belief in deity, which we might think was implanted by his creator; but it is not found in all men, and in the lower races it assumes forms often so low and grotesque that we cannot imagine its origin to have been divine. Between the God of the Christian and the god of the red Indian there is, saving mere force, no affinity whatever. This we must frankly own to ourselves. The god of the ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... supplied the place of the political journal, the literary review, the popular caricature and the party pamphlet, of our own times. It combined the attractions and influence of all these; for its grotesque masks and elaborate 'spectacle' addressed the eye as strongly as the author's keenest witticisms did the ear of ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... hideous little fellow went out of the town, quite alone, to the deserted churchyard. The wreath of flowers on Columbine's grave was already faded, and he sat down there. It was a study for a painter. As he sat with his chin on his hands, his eyes turned up towards me, he looked like a grotesque monument—a Punch on a grave—peculiar and whimsical! If the people could have seen their favourite, they would have cried as ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... experiment had been succeeded by overwhelming consternation as he saw the thing which he had created gasp once or twice with the feeble spark of life with which he had endowed it, and expire—leaving upon his hands the corpse of what was, to all intent and purpose, a human being, albeit a most grotesque and misshapen thing. ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... had been said it was quite clear that the dark-eyed child who played the Indian King was the heart and fire of the piece. They were all clever children and well trained, but he alone lived his part. His small figure moved with a grace and dignity that even his grotesque apparel could not spoil. The costumer had evidently built his design for the costume of an Indian chief upon legends of wild men drawn from the history of Hanno and his gorillas, adding whatever absurdities he had gathered from sailors of the Gold Coast and ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... Speaker!" His dress was disordered and muddy; his eyes shone with a fierce, absurd, liquorish light; and with each syllable that he uttered his beard wagged to an unspeakable effect of comedy. He offered the most grotesque spectacle ever seen in that hall—a ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... the most unusual fiestas in all Spain is held every March in Valencia in honor of St. Joseph. It is called the "Fallas de San Jose" because of the huge, grotesque figures called "fallas" which are the main feature of the celebration. Every club and religious group in the city spends weeks in advance of St. Joseph's Day building these figures out of papier-mache, and each group tries to keep its design secret until the fiesta ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... scattered reports were followed by a furious burst of yells; there was the rush of feet, sounds as of blows struck against the stout poles, and directly after, dimly-seen against the starlit sky, dark grotesque-looking heads appeared as at least a dozen of the Indians gained the top of the defence, but only to be beaten back by the butt-ends of the men's fire-locks, all save two who dropped over in our midst, and fought desperately for a time before ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... on that he counted to subdue you; keep this carefully in your mind; in order to let you give him an easy throw, he will present you at need grotesque arguments, and so soon as he sees you confident, simply satisfied with the excellence of your replies, he will involve you in sophisms so specious that you will fight in ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... living. I do not think any man ought to live by an art. A man's art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... but more particularly the Killamucks and others of the coast. these are the largest canoes. B. is the bow and comb. C. the stern and comb. their immages are representations of a great variety of grotesque figures, any of which might be safely worshiped without committing a breach of ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... lay sleeping in various easy, off-hand attitudes on the schooner's deck, was one who merits special attention—not only because of the grotesque appearance of his person, but also because he is one of the ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... noise, appeared at the door of the tomb. The pen shrinks from the picture she presented. In the half-clad apparition, patched with scales, lividly seamed, nearly blind, its limbs and extremities swollen to grotesque largeness, familiar eyes however sharpened by love could not have recognized the creature of childish grace and ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... is such a jest, so grotesque; the player's arms jerk and wave continuously; his whole shoulder and head are in perpetual motion; whereas, with the piano, the five fingers do all; the artist's relation to the piano is that of my lord to his children, whom he addresses from a far-off height; the czimbalom-player ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... come and go; Only wraiths flit to and fro; And the bat, grotesque and blind, And ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... my head was then, and so empty now! A grotesque and dreadful suspicion took me. While Trewlove tortured himself to my model, was I, by painful degrees, exchanging brains with him? I laughed; but I was unhinged. I had been smoking too many cigarettes during these three weeks, and the vampire thought continued ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... last but few. Some of them had ornaments on their bones, some were clad in armour, and by all the men were swords, or spears, or knives, and here and there what she took to be primitive fire-arms. Certain of them also had turned into mummies in that dry air—grotesque and dreadful objects from which she ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning sense of her surroundings came with the sound of a voice, the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Embankment." Isn't it a pretty family history? He said nothing at the moment, but came back in half an hour to make some unnecessary remarks about the part. "Why did you say just now that I insulted you?" he asked. "Because you do," I replied. "Never, never!" he exclaimed, with most grotesque energy. "I have never insulted you." You know, my dear, he has twenty times endeavoured to kiss my hand, and once he saw fit to stroke my hair. Beast! If you knew the sort of feeling I have for him—such as you would have if you found a cockroach in ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... cuspidor, is a thing of intelligent and gratifying design—in brief, an objet d'art. The fact was curiously (and humorously) display during the late war, when great numbers of women in all the belligerent countries began putting on uniforms. Instantly they appeared in public in their grotesque burlesques of the official garb of aviators, elevator boys, bus conductors, train guards, and so on, their deplorable deficiency in design was unescapably revealed. A man, save he be fat, i.e., of womanish contours, usually looks better in uniform than in mufti; the tight lines set off ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... ridicule, and this ordeal was something outside the experience of his nineteen years. The worst he had expected was that she would be frumpish, or old-fashioned, or commonplace like these other women standing about, but it had not occurred to him that she might be conspicuously grotesque. ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... back at the other shed where men and horses stood in grotesque shadow shapes under the windy lantern light; then she looked cautiously around the ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... by the builders, must come to this country. With us in old Europe, they are either modernized or in ruins, and in many of them every tower and gate reflects the taste of a separate period; some edifices showing a grotesque progress from Gothic to Italian, and from Italian to Roman a la Louis Quinze: a succession which corresponds with the portraits within doors, which begin with coats of mail, or padded velvet, and end with bag-wigs and shoe-buckles. But ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... attention the most rustic nobles lose the rust still encrusting their brethren in Germany or in England. We find in France few Squire Western and Barons de Thunder-ten-Troenck; an Alsatian lady, on seeing at Frankfort the grotesque country squires of Westphalia, is struck with the contrast.[2182] Those of France, even in distant provinces, have frequented the drawing-rooms of the commandant and intendant, and have encountered on their visits some of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous gift as a story-teller," was Captain Stephen Burchmore, the public storekeeper. The stories of themselves were generally extravagant and grotesque. It was "the marvelous gift" of narration that carried people off their legs. I have known the company present to roar with laughter, and not one more convulsed than Mr. Hawthorne. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... thou art lovely World! That blue-robed sky; These giant rocks, their forms grotesque and awful Reflected on the calm stream's lucid mirror; These reverend oaks, through which (their rustling leaves Dancing and twinkling in the sunbeams) light Now gleams, now disappears, while yon fierce torrent, Tumbling from crag to crag with measured ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... heard, I had seen what he had seen, and yet from his words it was evident that he saw clearly not only what had happened, but what was about to happen, while to me the whole business was still confused and grotesque. As I drove home to my house in Kensington I thought it all over, from the extraordinary story of the red-headed copier of the "Encyclopaedia" down to the visit to Saxe-Coburg Square, and the ominous words with which he had parted from me. What was this nocturnal expedition, and why should I go ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... me of dwelling on the subject of Miss Torsen out of self-interest? In that case I must have concealed well in these pages that I never think of her except as an object, as a theme; turn back the pages and you will see! At my age, one does not fall in love without becoming grotesque, without making ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... in which the dancers join hands, 'Fantastic' full of fancy, unrestrained. So Shakespeare uses it of that which has merely been imagined, and has not yet happened. It is now used in the sense of grotesque. Fancy is a ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... evening, however, was the minstrel show. On a raised wooden platform sat the performers with blackened hands and faces. They wore grotesque garb and each one fingered ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... island of pipe-smoking, country-side philosophers and pampered, sport-loving youth—this was the country, heart of a crumbling empire, that had ordered the gray torrent of Germany to alter its course and flow back to its own confines. It was absurd. It was grotesque. It was a sporting thing to do, but would it mean the collapse of the sprawling, disjointed British Empire, linked together by a flimsy tradition ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... chill, Lilly peered out into the hallway, the grotesque procession returning down its length. Mr. Neugass bent to his tired angle, nightshirt striking him midships as it were, the two ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... profit out of whites and blacks. In the afternoon Mr. Graham brought me two neolithic stone-implements. We then set out for the 'palace,' a large congeries of houses and huts, guided by a mighty braying of horns and beating of drums, and by Union Jacks, with the most grotesque adjuncts of men and beasts, planted in the clean and sandy street-road. King Blay received us in his palaver-hall, and his costume now savoured not of Europe, but of 'fetish.' He had been 'making customs,' or worshipping after country-fashion, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... island like a large white patch, and the bridges like slim white spars on the black ground of the river. High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles had been transformed into great false noses, drooping toward the point. The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the intervals of the wind there was a dull sound dripping about the precincts of ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... once grouped themselves upon the main-hatch, as near the quarter-deck and officers' cabins as possible. I can hardly understand how Englishmen take a pleasure in 'chaffing' these grotesque beings, who usually reply with some gross, outrageous insolence. At the best they utter impertinences which, issuing from a big and barbarous mouth in a peculiar patois, pass for pleasantry amongst those who are not over-nice ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... of revelry below, mingled with shouts and the stamping of feet, together with the feverish condition of the lad, kept him awake another hour; but at last he fell into a light, uneasy sleep, haunted by all sorts of grotesque, ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... lifting his black felt hat with a graceful motion that seemed strangely out-of-keeping with his grotesque appearance. In the salutation he managed to include Malcolm Sage, who acknowledged it with ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... with "curious harness, as in saddles and bridles, cruppers, and breast-plates, covered with precious clothing, and with bars and plates of gold and silver." And though it is hazardous to stigmatize the fashions of any one period as specially grotesque, yet it is significant of this age to find the reigning court beauty appearing at a tournament robed as Queen of the Sun; while even a lady from a manufacturing district, the "Wife of Bath," makes the most of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the Highlanders were out in the courtyard again—two gigantic figures, grotesque and even fearful in the eyes of Arabs; but there were no Arabs to stare at them now. All had gone about their business in ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... body. The circumstances of the first—the address delivered at Sion College—had a certain piquancy: whether they had also sweet reasonableness and an entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold succeeded ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... girl went with the last snow, and on one of those midsummerlike days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisp locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train beside the desert, we should make to do our general housework forever, through the right of lawful purchase. But we knew that this was impossible, and ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... art, but this fact is remarkable, that in much the same way that the figure of the scarabaeus on an intaglio or cameo is a pretty infallible indication of an Egyptian hand, so is that of a priest or a grotesque animal a sure indication of a Persian. We may say, then, from that evidence alone—though there is more—that this gem was certainly Persian. And having reached that point, the mystery of "Has" vanishes: for we at once jump at the conclusion that that too is Persian. But Persian, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... voice grew cheery, his old face shone, and in a burst of hearty enthusiasm he flung up his cap and cheered like a boy. So did the others, and as the fairy shout echoed through the belfry a troop of shadowy figures, with faces lovely or grotesque, tragical or gay, sailed by on the wings of the wintry wind and waved their hands to ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... we come down from the clouds; the poetry is gone, taste is shocked, fancy uncharmed, the improbabilities become grotesque, and the whole is distorted and tedious. Madame Sand's personages are never weary of analyzing their sentiments. Her flowing style, so pleasant to read, carries us swiftly and easily through her dissertations ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... the justice to state that her gratitude for the King's liberality was well-nigh exaggerated, while no change was perceptible in her manners and bearing. She had, naturally, a grand, dignified air, which was in strange contrast to the grotesque buffoonery of her poet-husband. Now she is exactly in her proper place, representing to perfection the governess ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... of any significance had Borrow told us nothing himself. Some of the anecdotes lap a branch here and there; some disclose a little rotten wood or fungus; others show the might of a great limb, perhaps a knotty protuberance with a grotesque likeness, or the height of the whole; others again are like clumsy arrogant initials carved on the venerable bark. I shall use some of them, but for the most part I shall use Borrow's own brush both to portray ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the ground from the lowest platform. He looked around, dazed. The sky was pink in the east. It was dawn. Where had the night gone? He stared amazed at grotesque figures that waited, silent, patient, like beings from another world. Then he realized it was the fueling crew dressed in protective clothing, swathed like strange cocoons in plastic that would keep their vulnerable ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... sordidness of her surroundings, as when, an hour ago, he had stood at the grave-side, his eyes wandering from that long elm box with the silver plate and the wreath of flowers, to the mourners on the other side—her father in his broadcloth, his heavy, smooth face pulled in lines of grotesque sorrow; her mother, with her crimson, tear-stained cheeks, her elaborate black, her intolerable crape, and her jet-hung mantle. Even these people had been seen by him up to then through a haze of love; he had thought them simple honest folk, creatures of the soil, yet wholesome, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... the nature of the art, can only be explained when action is combined with words. Next follows dancing, which is of two kinds; imitative, first, of the serious and beautiful; and, secondly, of the ludicrous and grotesque. The first kind may be further divided into the dance of war and the dance of peace. The former is called the Pyrrhic; in this the movements of attack and defence are imitated in a direct and manly style, which indicates strength and sufficiency of body and ...
— Laws • Plato
... was pulling faces. As an artist will sketch everything he comes across, so Mike would endeavour to imitate any characteristic expression or attitude, animate or inanimate, in the world around him. Dogs, little boys, and grotesque old men were his special delight, and of all his elders he had, it goes without saying, a private gallery ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... through the hall the paroxysms of fright returned and with additional violence. The father perceived that the child was pointing at some object, and heard the old cry, "The man in the wood," and looking in the direction indicated saw a stone head of grotesque appearance, which had been built into the wall above one of the doors. It seems the owner of the house had recently made alterations in his premises, and on digging the foundations for some offices, the men had found a curious head, evidently of the Roman period, which had been placed ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... won by the kite which rose the highest, or rather, took out the longest line; the other prize was to be given to the owner of the kite which could pull the heaviest weights the fastest. Two other prizes were to be bestowed, one on the handsomest kite, and the other to the most grotesque, provided they were not ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... society, France was not yet cured of its revolutionary habits; it was only too clear that the constitution, codes, and admirable administrative system were operative, not from political habit, but by personal impulsion. This was the real sore; the conspiracy itself was a grotesque affair, the work of a brain-sick enthusiast, lightly ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... not likely to be rash, or impulsive, or hasty, or to stand in the way of political aspirants. He was eminently a safe man in an approaching crisis, with a judicial intellect, and above all a man without enemies, whom few envied, and some laughed at for his grotesque humor and awkward manners. He was also modest and unpretending, and had the tact to veil his ambition. In his own State he was exceedingly popular. It was not strange, therefore, that the Illinois Republican State Convention nominated him as their presidential candidate, to be supported in the larger ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... he went through Market Street to Fourth Street, and passed the house of Mr. Read, the father of his future wife. The girl was standing at the door, observed him, and thought with reason that he made a very singular and grotesque appearance, and laughed merrily. We repeat the many-times-told tale in nearly his ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... careless in his dress. This also is a mistake. His clothes could not fit smoothly on his gaunt and bony frame. He was no tailor's figure of a man; but from the first he clothed himself as well as his means allowed, and in the fashion of the time and place. In reading the grotesque stories of his boyhood, of the tall stripling whose trousers left exposed a length of shin, it must be remembered not only how poor he was, but that he lived on the frontier, where other boys, less poor, were scarcely better clad. In Vandalia, the blue jeans he wore was the dress of his companions ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... has a certain sense of humor which is not possessed by animals in general. He is very fond of imitating people, and sometimes acts in the most grotesque and amusing way, but, like many human wits of whom we read, his manner is always very solemn, even when ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... dance in an earthen hovel on a plank floor was the degenerate but lineal descendant of the splendid and formal balls which the Dons had held in the old days, when New Spain belonged to its proud and wealthy conquerors; it was the wistful and grotesque ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... ship until another thought wave ordered them to turn. Lura gave a cry of horror and Damis instinctively raised one of the Jovian ray tubes. Before them were huge figures which seemed to have stepped out of a nightmare, so grotesque were ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... and yellow, and in some places so transparent that it seemed surprising that any person, much less a horse or sleigh, could have passed over it without breaking through; then there were in the distance arches and columns, and whole buildings and statues, of every grotesque form imaginable, at least so my imagination carved out the excrescences and masses of ice I saw piled up in a long vista before me. I did not stay long without shouting again, and once more the voices ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... full vision, the three-fold vision we need and must have for true following: Himself, His world-plan, His plan for each one's life. This means seeing things as they are. They fall into true perspective. You see how disproportioned and grotesque the common perspective of earth is. You see things through His eyes. His eyes take out of yours the personal colouring, the colour blindness of personal interest and advantage which so strangely and strongly affect all ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... Ages this story put on a grotesque garb, by way of frightening us with the Devil Venus. On the finger of her statue a young man imprudently places a ring, which she clasps tight, guarding it like a bride, and going in the night to his couch, to assert ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... extreme eastern end of the island. On the way I discovered many little dead birds, and the farther I went the more I found. Among the low bushes were also many old rabihorcados, dead and dry. Some were twisted among the network of branches, and several were hanging in limp, grotesque, horribly suggestive attitudes of death. Manuel had all of the Indian's leaning toward the mystical, and he believed the rabihorcados had destroyed themselves. Starved they may very well have been, but to me the gales of that wind-swept, ocean desert accounted for the ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... lighted only by the embers of a fire that was dying on the large hearth at its farther extremity; the walls curiously papered, and the flickering firelight bringing out its grotesque pattern; somebody sitting in a large armchair by the fireplace. All this we saw as we crowded together into the room, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... followed him. . . . One by one they filed away. Indeed, there was not one shrub left to bar their path. But in this falling of calamity upon their so successful foolish plan, the mahouts were stricken—desperate. There was something grotesque about their hands, as they disappeared. With wild gestures and twisted-back faces many of them went out of sight. The elephants were surely ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... ahead, in the narrow apex of the converging rails, stood a black form, motionless, mysterious. McLeod grasped the whistle-cord. The black form loomed higher in the moonlight and was clearly silhouetted against the horizon—a big moose standing across the track. They could see his grotesque head, his shadowy horns, his high, sloping shoulders. The engineer pulled the cord. The whistle shrieked loud ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... good lately. You have heard that. And did you expect me to continue to be good when you returned to Paris and passed all your days in public with that antique and grotesque Monsieur Gilman? All the world sees you. I myself have seen you. It ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... at the Convent are beginning to show a little life now, though their poor, black faces are more grotesque than ever as an eye, here and there, begins to peep out from a crack in the crusted surface. They have begun to talk after a fashion, though their poor, dried lips can hardly accomplish the task. Jean, the ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... had been performed by James Ballantyne, who I was sure would not have permitted anything of this sort to pass.' 'Well,' I said, 'upon the whole, how did you like it?' 'Oh,' he said, 'I felt it monstrous gross and grotesque, to be sure, but still the worst of it made me laugh, and I trusted therefore the good-natured public would not be less indulgent.' I do not think that I ever ventured to lead to this singular subject again. But you may depend upon it, that what I have said is as distinctly reported ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... minor canon of St. Paul's. It is not, however, as a churchman that he is remembered, but as the author of the Ingoldsby Legends, a series of comic and serio-comic pieces in verse, sparkling with wit, and full of striking and often grotesque turns of expression, which appeared first in Bentley's Miscellany. He also wrote, in Blackwood's Magazine, a novel, My ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Grandfather Vine had done choking over his heel-taps, but Ellen had undoubtedly endured a good deal with remarkable patience—her virtue ought in justice to be rewarded. Also Joanna noticed for the first time that she was looking grotesque as well as uncomfortable, owing perhaps to the hat being still on hind part before. So the necessary dispensation was granted, and Ellen further refreshed by a ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... truth, a heartrending spectacle. All the wooded part of the island was now completely bare. One single clump of green trees raised their heads at the extremity of Serpentine Peninsula. Here and there were a few grotesque blackened and branchless stumps. The site of the devastated forest was even more barren than Tadorn Marsh. The irruption of the lava had been complete. Where formerly sprang up that charming verdure, the soil was now nothing but a savage mass of volcanic tufa. ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... closely to the idea of rewarding their humble mistresses, after testing them harshly and even brutally, with the gift of their love—though even this humility has a touching quality of beauty; but the supreme lover, Mr. Rochester, who, in spite of his ridiculous affectations, his grotesque hauteurs, his impossible theatricality, is a figure of flesh and blood, is absorbed in his passion in a way that shows the fire leaping on the innermost altar. The irresistible appeal of the book to the heart is due to ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... interesting things in the house—objects of art and of worship; things which told of distant lands and of hoary antiquity; engravings of a strange and disturbing character; variegated stones, turquoise, pearls; ugly, amorphous, and grotesque idols; representations of the god-child—there were many of these, but only ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... had always entertained for English history, English literature, and English public men—all these considerations naturally quickened the new ambassador's imagination and, at the same time, made his arrival in England a rather solemn event. Yet his first days in London had their grotesque side as well. He himself has recorded his impressions, and, since they contain an important lesson for the citizens of the world's richest and most powerful Republic, they should be preserved. When the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... seemed to squirm, like semi-paralysed eels, over the chancel arch and round the East window. The latter, off which Jimmy could hardly take his eyes, was a veritable triumph of the Victorian tradition. Its colouring was gruesome, its design grotesque; and yet it was a source of great pride to the congregation as a whole, having been put in to the memory of a banker who had left nearly a million. They no more dreamed of doubting its artistic merits than they did of questioning the religion it was supposed in ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... species of idealism that has rarely been known outside the Pale. What was the ultimate source of the pious enthusiasm that built my great-grandfather's house? What was the substance behind the show of the Judaism of the Pale? Stripped of its grotesque mask of forms, rites, and mediaeval superstitions, the religion of these fanatics was simply the belief that God was, had been, and ever would be, and that they, the children of Jacob, were His chosen messengers to carry His Law to all the nations. Beneath the mountainous ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... sums up all things—history, literature, politics, government, religion, military science. Is he not a living encyclopaedia, a grotesque Atlas; ceaselessly in motion, like Paris itself, and knowing not repose? He is all legs. No physiognomy could preserve its purity amid such toils. Perhaps the artisan who dies at thirty, an old man, his stomach tanned ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... was "a sorry scheme of things." It was grotesque with inequalities. He had no right to love her; it was wrong to give in to the impulses of the heart, the natural, human impulses. A man can beat down the stone walls of a fort, scale the impregnable heights of a citadel, master the earth and the seas, but he can not surmount the invisible barriers ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... used to think entertaining. It was to her a symbol that her daughter had escaped what had caused her so much suffering, the uneasy, self-distrusting dread lest she might still be finding pretty things that up-to-date people thought grotesque; lest suddenly what she had toiled so painfully to obtain should somehow turn out to be not the "right thing" after all. Marietta did not recall more vividly than did her mother the trying period that had ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... origin, Bonaparte had not a decided taste for the fine arts, and his taste in composition seems to have leaned towards the grotesque and the bombastic. He used always the most exaggerated phrases; and it is seldom, if ever, that his bulletins present those touches of sublimity which are founded on dignity and simplicity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... with her hands. Several physicians who had been interested in the case had found the symptoms strongly suggestive of brain-tumor. There were, however, certain unmistakable earmarks of hysteria, such as childlike bland indifference to the awkwardness of the gait which was a grotesque caricature of several brain and spinal-cord diseases, with no accurate picture of any single one. This was evidently a case, not of actual loss of power but a dissociation of the memory-picture of walking. The patient was a trained nurse and knew in a general ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... landing of the spiral ascent, he paused a moment before laying hold of a grotesque knocker which ornamented the door of the atelier where the famous painter of Henry IV.—neglected by Marie de Medicis for Rubens—was probably at work. The young man felt the strong sensation which vibrates in the soul of ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... basis, almost lost in the innumerable episodes and grotesque imaginings of the Hindu, is probably the conquest of southern India and Ceylon ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of a foggy night added to her depression. Why, in the tube railway, did all these people about her look so white and tired and lifeless? Did they just go on in their niches, in the same way that the grotesque music-teacher had gone on in hers for all those monotonous years; only to become like an uncared-for, unwanted letter of the alphabet pushed in to fill up a blank in ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... consisting either of uncouth expressions of illiterate origin, or of legitimate expressions used in grotesque or irregular senses. Though sometimes (witness eighteenth century mob, and nineteenth century buncombe) it satisfies a real need and becomes established in the language, in most instances it is short-lived (witness the thieves' talk in Oliver Twist, ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... hand upon the tweezer of his balance weights, would have again a flash of that adolescent vision, would have a momentary perception of the eternal unfolding of the seed that had been sown in his brain, would see as it were in the sky, behind the grotesque shapes and accidents of the present, the coming world of giants and all the mighty things the future has in store—vague and splendid, like some glittering palace seen suddenly in the passing of a sunbeam far away.... And presently it would be with him as though ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... photographs of his two children which he had sent her. I have not yet struck the true key-note of this Romance, and until I do, and unless I do, I shall write nothing but tediousness and nonsense. I do not wish it to be a picture of life, but a Romance, grim, grotesque, quaint, of which the Hospital might be the fitting scene. It might have so much of the hues of life that the reader should sometimes think it was intended for a picture, yet the atmosphere should be such as to excuse ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dear! You in the snow and I in fairyland! It's a comic opera Christmas here, but a very fetching one,—the pretty processions of singing children through the streets, the gay, grotesque pinatis—huge paper dolls filled with dulces, the childish and merry little people, the color, the music, the smile and ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... were animated by a common motion of rotation. As the action continued, paroxysms of motion were manifested; the various parts of the cloud would rush through each other with sudden violence. During these motions beautiful and grotesque cloud-forms were developed. At some places the nebulous mass would become ribbed so as to resemble the graining of wood; a longitudinal motion would at times generate in it a series of curved, transverse bands, the retarding influence of the sides the tube causing an appearance resembling, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... exclaimed, with an air of pride that was grotesque under the conditions. "Each cigar is a bomb, warranted to clear any ordinary room of its occupants. It does not discriminate. It will dismember the most ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... figure uncovered a shaggy head of hair, made us a grotesque bow with his right hand melodramatically buried in the folds of a voluminous cape, and stalked off in the starlight with much dignity. But we heard him running in the road before the gate had ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... wide vision is very likely to be edited by a man. It is a question, however, whether the day of the woman's magazine, as we have known it, is not passing. Already the day has gone for the woman's magazine built on the old lines which now seem so grotesque and feeble in the light of modern growth. The interests of women and of men are being brought closer with the years, and it will not be long before they will entirely merge. This means a constantly diminishing necessity for the distinctly ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... is presented of the Irish priest as a money-grabbing martinet, whom his flock regard with mingled sentiments of detestation and fear, is a caricature as libellous as it is grotesque. Even the high standard of sexual morality which prevails in the country is attacked as being merely the result of early marriages, inculcated by a priesthood thirsting for marriage fees, and virtue itself is in this way depicted as being nothing ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window, extended the trellice-work of an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and in jargon to boot. In real life you always get your drama mixed, and the sock of comedy galls the buskin of tragedy. It was an episode in the pitiful tussle of hunger and greed, yet its humors were grotesque enough. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and St. Paul are preserved here. The table upon which Christ celebrated the Last Supper is placed here, above the altar of the Holy Sacrament, a sacred relic that thrills the visitors. In one chapel is a curious and grotesque group of sculpture,—a skeleton holding up a medallion portrait, while an angel with outstretched ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... who were on familiar terms evidently, and, although he had not seen her for many a day, he at once recognised Mother Toulouche by her remarkable appearance and grotesque get up. He had had so many other irons in the fire, that he had not followed this smuggling case at all closely: he was surprised, therefore, to see Mother Toulouche in the little passage adjoining the court, for he had the impression that the old receiver of stolen goods ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... Day's cocoa, the lanterns were all lit now, and the effect, on fans and pictures and on brilliant bits of color, were grotesque and almost bizarre. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... country mason,—people of that kind I rather like to talk with. I could live a good deal with them. But the London vulgar I abominate, root and branch. The mere sound of their voices nauseates me; their vilely grotesque accent and pronunciation—bah! I could write a paper to show that they are essentially the basest of English mortals. Unhappily, I know so much about them. If I saw the probability of my dying in a London lodging-house, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... proportions of its chambers, the cavern is remarkable for the variegated beauty of its stalactite formations, some resembling transparent drapery, others waterfalls, trees, animals or human beings, the more grotesque being called by various fanciful appellations. These subterranean wonders were known as far back as 1213, but the cavern remained undiscovered in modern times until 1816, and it is only in still more recent ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia |
