"Grotesquely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... weakness, people liked him. Nor, indeed, were his fibs, as a rule, made out of whole cloth. They usually had a basis of truth. When he told a story and he felt that it was producing no effect he would "play it up," as newspapermen would put it, often quite grotesquely. Altogether he was so inclined to overemphasize and embellish his facts that it was not always easy to say where truth ended and fiction began. Somehow it seemed to me as though the moistness and looseness of his lips had something to do ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... coast of the Pacific to the south of the Russians. These pipes are made from a soft blue clay stone which is found only in slabs, and the sculptures are wrought on both sides, the pipes being generally covered with singular groups of human and animal forms, grotesquely intermingled. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... happiest month of May that life had yet offered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past, somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the Berlin scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself that he was absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better had he said that knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive. In spite of swarming impressions he knew no more when he left Rome ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... pictures complete, rhythmic pictures of streets and crowds, pleasantly blurred and in motion. Now he saw them as if life was in a state of continual pause—an arrested cinematograph; grotesquely detailed and with the meaning of motion out of it. A picture waiting something to set it moving. This something he could not give it. Helplessly his words continued to trace themselves over the outlines of scenes about him, as if trying to stir ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... correspondence as it actually existed, after long remaining in manuscript, has been published, and we have now the real letters and the sham letters side by side. The effect is grotesquely disgusting. For example, on September 20th, 1713, Pope undoubtedly ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... compensated for every drop of blood shed in those terrible days. Like the provincial 'grandes seigneurs' of Louis XVI's reign, they were gay, dissipated and turbulent; "accomplished" in the superficial acquirements that made the "gentleman" one hundred years ago, but are grotesquely out of place in this sensible, solid age, which demands that a man shall be of use, and not merely for show. They ran horses and fought cocks, dawdled through society when young, and intrigued ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... villages above Shimonoseki is strikingly artistic. The quaint gabled houses are painted a snowy white, and are roofed with brown glazed tiles of curious pattern, also rimmed with white. About the houses are hedges grotesquely clipped and trained in imitation of storks, animals, or fishes, miniature orange and persimmon trees, pretty flower-gardens and little landscape vanities peculiar to the Japanese. Circling around through little valleys, over small promontories and along smooth, gravelly stretches of sea-shore ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... and more elegant on account of superadditions of color—blue, green, Tyrian purple, and gold. Around the room ran a continuous divan of Indian silks and wool of Cashmere. The furniture consisted of tables and stools of Egyptian patterns grotesquely carved. We have left Simonides in his chair perfecting his scheme in aid of the miraculous king, whose coming he has decided is so close at hand. Esther is asleep; and now, having crossed the river by the bridge, and made way through the lion-guarded gate and a ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... ground, the tower being divided into stories about ten feet high, each story lighted by a single window, the highest compartment having invariably four lancet windows opening to the cardinal points of the compass. The roof is conical, made of overlapping stone slabs, and a circle of grotesquely carved heads and zigzag ornamentation is found beneath the projecting cornice. The masonry is of hewn stone, but not the least regularity is observable in the size or shape of the blocks, some being very large, others small, and every figure known to the geometrician can be found ...
— Irish Wonders • D. R. McAnally, Jr.
... as he spoke, and Cocardasse and Passepoil, descending from their post upon the bridge, advanced towards the brilliant group, bowing grotesquely as they did so, with their big hats in their hands and their long rapiers tilting up their ragged cloaks. All the party gazed in amazement at the whimsical apparitions, to the great indignation of Cocardasse, who whispered angrily to his companion: "Why the devil do they stare at us so?" While ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... closed lips; his lips as grey as those of the dead man on the floor. Rank Judge had not moved, but the harness on his wooden stump creaked softly as his weight shifted from leg to leg. Fat Buck Walker was perspiring almost grotesquely, like an earthenware pitcher. Great drops hung from his chin, from his uptilted nose, and his cotton shirt was dark. Slim Simpson, white before, was like a corpse; only his great boyish eyes stared out, as a somnambulist stares, as one hypnotised. ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... He smiled grotesquely as he staggered toward the car door. "About time you got here," he said. "A man could catch his death of cold standing out here in ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... from my reverie with a laugh at Thorndyke's quaint conceit and a glance at the grotesquely distorted reflection of my ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... chirped somewhere near the door. Green Valley turned and looked and froze with horror. For there, staggering grotesquely, came little Jim Tumley, a piteous figure. He had kept his promise to his new friend—he had come to sing the ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... Little Sorrel, up and down the forming lines, and he spoke only to give orders, quiet and curt, much in his class-room tone. He was all brown like a leaf with Valley dust and sun and rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... terror the remainder of the gorilla band instantly dashed up the rocky mountain-side dragging with them, in grotesquely human fashion some of their wounded. Several of these, however, still lay on the ground and the boys put them out of their misery with a few well-directed shots. A pathetically human look lingered in the eyes of some of the injured ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... the tobacco and lighted his cigarette, one of the men addressed him directly. Purdy noticed that he was a squat man, and that the legs of his leather chaps bowed prodigiously. He was thick and wide of chest, a tuft of hair protruded grotesquely from a hole in the crown of his soft-brimmed hat, and a stubby beard masked his features except for a pair of beady, deep-set eyes that stared at Purdy across the glowing brands of the dying fire. He tossed his cigarette into the coals ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... even hands and faces are green; they wear greenstone sandals, they walk with knees extremely wide apart, as having sat cross-legged for centuries, their right arms and right forefingers point upwards, right elbows resting on left hands: they stoop grotesquely: halfway to the footlights they wheel left. They pass in front of the seven beggars, now in terrified attitudes and six of them sit down in the attitude described, with their backs to the audience. The leader stands, still stooping. Just as they wheel left, OOGNO cries ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... wrong, we climbed with alacrity, not to alight till not only Elmira was left behind, but more weary suburbs, too, on the other side. That night, as old travellers phrase it, we lay at Waverly, on the frontier of Pennsylvania, a sad, dirty little town, grotesquely belying its romantic name, and only surpassed in squalor by the classically named Athens—beware, reader, of American towns named out of classical dictionaries! Here, however, our wanderings in the brick-and-mortar wilderness were ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... the wildness of Armstrong's youth had evidently become a family tradition, and even, by a familiar process, an article of belief in his own mind. It reminded me grotesquely of Justice Shallow's reminiscences with Sir John Falstaff: "Ha, Cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that, that this knight and I have seen.... Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... his own face was a shock to him. If he was pale, the dust and grime of his fight in the cavern concealed his pallor. But the face that stared at him from out of the glass was haggard, wildly and almost grotesquely haggard, and he turned from it with a grim laugh, and set his jaws hard. He returned to the table, and bit by bit tore the photograph into thin shreds, and then piled the shreds on his ash-tray and burned them. He opened a window to let out the smoke ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... are united with the finest play of irony, and even with the temper of comedy. The supposed Louis de Montalte, seeking theological lights from a doctor of the Sorbonne, finds only how hopelessly divided in opinion are the opponents of Arnauld, and how grotesquely they darken counsel with speech. In the twelve letters intervening between the third and the sixteenth, Pascal takes the offensive, and deploys an incomparably skilful attack on the moral theology of the Jesuits. For the rigid they may have a stricter ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the great "leviathan of literature," situate in Bolt-court, Fleet-street, was consumed by the fire which destroyed Messrs. Bensley's premises a few years ago; and that there are now no ostensible traces of the doctor's city retreat, save the site. The only vestige of the house is a piece of grotesquely carved wood, which ornamented the centre of the doorway, and which is now in possession of a gentleman in the neighbourhood. Part of the new printing-office, belonging to Messrs. Mills and Co., occupies a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 366 - Vol. XIII, No. 366., Saturday, April 18, 1829 • Various
... of peril in the Lydstep caves: Down the steep gorge, grotesquely boulder-piled And tempest-worn, as ocean hurrying wild Up it in thunder breaks and vainly raves,— My haste hath sped me to the rippled sand Where, arching deep, o'erhang on either hand These halls of Amphitrite, echoing clear ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... he set fire to the wood with his torch. Marie saw with terror that the man was the same Pille-Miche to whom her rival had delivered her, and whose figure, illuminated by the flame, was like that of the little boxwood men so grotesquely carved in Germany. The moans of his prisoner produced a broad grin upon features that were ribbed with wrinkles ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... thereafter hoisted the new flag on board that vessel at Portsmouth. The "Ranger" set out to sea about November 1st, her battery consisting of sixteen six-pounders, throwing only forty-eight pounds of shot from a broadside, an armament which appears grotesquely lilliputian in comparison with the thirteen-inch guns, firing projectiles of over half a ton from our steel-armored battleships of to-day, which cost as much as five million dollars and are of 16,000 tons burden. With this ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... were covered with grotesquely and elaborately figured hand-wrought tapestry. The musty ancient beds remained in the chambers, and their quilts and curtains and canopies were decorated with curious handwork, and the walls and ceilings frescoed with historical and mythological scenes in glaring ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the Squaline villagers appeared to be women, the men being engaged in making money elsewhere. Besides illicit trade, which has now become very dangerous, a little is done in the licit line: grotesquely carved sticks, calabashes rudely ornamented with ships and human figures, the neat bead-work grass-strings used by the women to depress the bosom, and cashimbos or pipes mostly made about Boma. All were re-baptized in 1853, but they show no sign of Christianity save crosses, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... same craft, was quite ready for an affair that could only increase his popularity. Catching up his jharroo, or broom, he began to shower blows upon the unfortunate Piroo, yet never ceasing to dance round him so grotesquely that the fight was too much of a farce for any one to think of interfering. Yet the blows went home pretty hard, and as the broom was a sort of besom made of the springy ribs of the palm-leaf it stung sharply where it found ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... exceeded in Old Mortality, and reached, within one or two, both in Waverley and Guy Mannering) that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least in the world's estimate respectable persons; and that they are all grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison. Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... my room I came suddenly upon the Prince, in a recess of the upper hall, addressing somebody through an open door with a querulous protest, whose wild extravagance of statement was grotesquely balanced by its utter feeble timidity of manner. "It is," said the Prince, "indeed a grave affair. We have here hundreds of socialists, emissaries from lawless countries and impossible places, who travel thousands of miles to fall ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... grotesquely, in an attitude of mirth, On a damask-covered hassock that was sitting on the hearth; And at a magic signal of his stubby little thumb, I saw the fireplace changing to a ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... this is very innocent and there are not many people who talk like that. Others, on the other hand, do not deny his acuteness, but point out that he was utterly ignorant of real life, that he was terribly theoretical, grotesquely and stupidly one-sided, and consequently shallow in the extreme. As for his moral qualities all are agreed; about that there are no ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... But the ruins thus far described are so numerous, their similarity is so evident, that we feel we have but little to hope from such undiscovered ruins. There are, doubtless, richly ornamented facades, grotesquely sculptured statues, and hieroglyphic-covered altars, but they would prove as much of an enigma as those already known. Our only hope is that some fortunate scholar will yet discover a key by whose aid the hieroglyphics now known may be read. Then, but not until ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... arch is a plain semicircle, but on its eastern side has a pointed Early English arch. The chancel rails are of modern oak, slightly carved; and there is a deal credence table. The 14th century font has a massive octagonal bowl, with large trefoils in each face, and grotesquely carved heads at the angles; the shaft being plain octagonal. The improvements were made in 1896, at the cost of ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... he answered. We dragged the body a little way; my hand clutched the thigh, which was hard and cold under the stuff of his clothing. His head rolled round, and his eyes now were covered with snow. We dragged him, and he bumped grotesquely. We had him under the wall, near the two women, and the blood welled out and dripped in a spreading pool ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... came upon him. Dr. Pocock, coming for a first visit, found the bed partly broken under the weight of the patient who was lying in a grotesquely awkward position, his hips ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... be helped over stepping-stones. You had much better manage for yourself; and half way through Catherine had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her lips which smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone to stone could have lasted for ever. She was wrapped up grotesquely in his mackintosh; her hat was all bedraggled; her gloves dripped in his; and in spite of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that delicately cut, gravely smiling face, swaying above the rushing ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... propelled by some citizen on a tour of inspection of his cabin roof-tree, where some of his goods were still stored. There was no sense of terror in this bland obliteration of the little settlement; the ruins of a single burnt-up cabin would have been more impressive than this stupid and even grotesquely placid effect of the rival destroying element. People took it naturally; the water went as it had come,—slowly, impassively, noiselessly; a few days of fervid Californian sunshine dried the cabins, and in a week or two the red dust lay again as thickly ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... his action and the fierceness of his tone and gesture—a fierceness so grotesquely ill-attuned to his slender frame and clerkly attire left the company for a moment speechless with amazement. Then a mighty burst of laughter greeted him, above which sounded the shrill voice of Tyler, ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... we make of it, we seniors who understood it best? We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... crouching shoulders, his furtive hand ever ready to snatch the weapon from concealment. This sinister aspect of wildness, intensified by straggling whiskers and uncombed locks, gave to his giant form a kinship to the huge grotesquely shaped rocks among which he had ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... again, and again, a fresh animal came up, seemed to be reasoned and certainly was fought with and overcome by Lina, until at last, before they were out of the wood, she was followed by forty-nine of the most grotesquely ugly, the most extravagantly abnormal animals imagination can conceive. To describe them were ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... pathetic interest which it derives from the fact of its author's repeated experience of the misery it expresses with such piteous yet such manful resignation. The style of these faultlessly simple devotions is almost grotesquely set off by the relief of a comparison with the bloated bombast and flatulent pedantry of a prayer by the late Queen Elizabeth which Dekker has transcribed into his text—it is hardly possible to suppose, without perception of the contrast between its hideous jargon and the refined purity of his ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... dance a short time after this took place in honour of those who had been killed in the late fight. The dancers were grotesquely got up, and are amusingly described by Mr Baker. "Each man had about a dozen huge ostrich feathers in his helmet, a leopard or monkey-skin hung from his shoulders, while a large iron bell was strapped to his loins like a woman's bustle. This he rang ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... well and happy, and they send loves to you by the bushel. We are in the agonies of house-hunting. The people are frightfully civil, and grotesquely extortionate. One man (with a house to let) told me yesterday that he loved the Duke of Wellington like a brother. The same gentleman wanted to hug me round the neck with one hand, and pick my pocket ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... in blue envelopes, pair of paste hair combs (in pocket), duster, tea-things, grotesquely big brown earthenware tea-pot, milk, sugar, cups and saucers, stale quartern ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... all the rest by beating upon his door and crying, "Get up! Get up! Your fifty-pound maskinonge is hooked, and by a boy!" No further call was needed, and the beach was soon lined with a score of fishermen and their wives, hastily and some of them grotesquely dressed. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... they were in perfect accord. The sun was setting by this time and the Abbe Bordier's shadow, grotesquely elongated, danced up and down the sandy floor of the shed, while the old, broken voice declaimed tags of verse that echoed to the furthest recesses of the court. But Jean Servien was smiling at the vision only ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... jaws. There was no nose, only slanted holes like the nostrils of an animal; and over these were set pale, expressionless, pupil-less eyes. The arms were short and thick and ended in bifurcated lumps of flesh like swollen hands encased in old-fashioned mittens. The legs were also grotesquely short, and the ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... an organ grinder with a chattering monkey or a clumsy bear, another sleepy negro with another load of hay, and a picturesque minstrel with an elaborate musical contrivance drawn by a horse. Now a capering Italian with a bagpipe, who danced grotesquely to his own piping, and piped the pennies out of rural pockets as if they had been so many copper rats ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... touch, though he laid no hand upon them? There must be some strange, invisible key-board, some secret system of communication between him and those various contrivances of wood and wire and sheep-skin and horse-hair and metal (so curiously and grotesquely fashioned, when one came to consider them) out of which he was to bring melody and harmony. How should one conceive of this mysterious key-board and ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... my feet fell noiselessly upon the sand, he was speaking rapidly in his own language, while the man who had approached him stood listening in meek, submissive attitude. Then, for the first time, I noticed that my friend held in his hand a grotesquely carved stick that had apparently been presented by the new-comer as his credential, together with a scrap of parchment whereon some curious signs, something like Arabic, were written. While Omar addressed him he bowed low from time to time, murmuring ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... of prickly pear scrawming about everywhere. But as a walled city its days are done. The massive gateway with its pitting of Saracen round-shot has no guard. The two fosses are planted thickly with grotesquely gnarled olive-trees. The streets are clean and the houses are in good repair, but there is a lazy old-time air about the place that would clog the hurrying feet of even ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... hideous breach of good manners and could never expect forgiveness from Miss Hawker-Sponge. She had really invited him into her home and he had preferred to hunt for a "policeman friend." Yet the tragedy of it was so grotesquely funny that Whitney Barnes laughed, and in laughing dismissed Miss ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... pine-knots cut from the forest close by. Yorke, set high on a pile of forage with his beloved banjo, was playing such music as put springs into their heels. Canadians and negroes were all dancing together—the Frenchmen with graceful agility, the negroes more clumsily, even grotesquely, but with a rhythm that proved their musical ear. Clotilde and a negress cook were the only women, and greatly in demand by both Frenchmen and negroes. Clotilde rather scorned partners of her own color, and was choosing only the best-looking and the best dancers of ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... made famous by John B. Stetson. You may meet them in town and think them tamed to stupidity. You may travel out upon their reservations and find them shearing sheep or hoeing corn or plodding along the furrow, plowing their fields; or you may watch them dancing grotesquely in their festivals, and still think that civilization is fast erasing the savage instincts from their natures. You will be partly right—but you will also be partly mistaken. An Indian is always an Indian, and a Navajo Indian carries a thinner crust of civilization than do some ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... snapped Smith, and grasping him by the shoulders, he sent him spinning along the hall-way, where he sank upon the bottom step of the stairs, to sit with his outstretched fingers extended before his face, and peering at us grotesquely through the crevices. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... Jove!' I said, and rose to my feet. Thus, I saw the thing more completely; but it was no pig—God alone knows what it was. It reminded me, vaguely, of the hideous Thing that had haunted the great arena. It had a grotesquely human mouth and jaw; but with no chin of which to speak. The nose was prolonged into a snout; thus it was that with the little eyes and queer ears, gave it such an extraordinarily swinelike appearance. Of forehead ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... novels, we find their tales of life and manners still more absurd in their total untrueness than the others were hateful in their design. There is a novel just now appearing in one of the most widely-circulated of the Parisian papers, so grotesquely overdone, that if it had been meant for a caricature of the worst parts of our own hulk-and-gallows authors, it would have been very much admired; but meant to be serious, powerful, harrowing, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... ringing in her ears: in jealous explosions on her husband's part; in corrupting advice on the part of the waiting-woman who brought letters supposed to be sent to her by him; in declarations of love which her first glance at his face told her he could not have written. This, too, has all seemed a grotesquely painful dream. But when she awoke on the April morning in that bounding of the spirit towards an unknown joy, the name assumed a new meaning for her, and she said, "Let ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... glance through the forward port showed they had but a few miles to go. They'd be in the clutches of the horror in minutes, seconds, at the rate they were traveling. Mado slumped in his seat, his proud head rolling grotesquely on his breast. He ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... minutes to eight, sir!" said Mr. Shrig, and rising to his feet, set off briskly along the path. We had almost reached the wood I have mentioned when Mr. Shrig raised his knobbed stick to point at something that sprawled grotesquely across the path. The hat had fallen and rolled away and staring down into the horror of this face fouled with blood and blackened with powder, I recognised the ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... into becoming folds and takes up the false nose. Dolly gazes admiringly at him.) The strength of their position lies in their being very agreeable people personally. The strength of your position lies in your income. (He claps on the false nose, and is again grotesquely transfigured.) ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... I have never grown old. Life translates itself into music—a wild "Invitation to the Waltz" by some Archangel Weber. I laugh out loud. Polyphemus, who has been regarding me with his one bantering eye from Carlotta's corner on the sofa, leaps to the ground and grotesquely curvets round the room in a series of impish hops. Heigh, old boy? Do the pulsations of the music throb in your veins, too? Come along and let us make a night of it. To the Devil with sleep. We'll go together down to the cellar and find ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... by court-martial in the Senate, on the Friday. He followed all the proceedings in a dazed condition. Everything was carried on in German, but the parts that most concerned him were grotesquely translated by a ferocious-looking interpreter, who likewise turned Bertie's stupid, involved, self-condemnatory answers into German—no doubt very incorrectly. Bertie however protested, over and over again, that Miss Warren knew nothing of his projects, ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... swinging after him, should shut her out from his presence; of her there remains in the German mediaeval poem only a virago (more like the giantesses of the Amadis romances) enraged at having been defeated and grotesquely and grossly pummelled into wedlock by a man not her husband, and then slanged like a fishwife by her ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... the suburbs, above the gas-works and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses—the painted surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... new guard entered—two powerful young Indians with grotesquely painted faces. They loosened the bonds about his legs, but did so only that he might walk as they led him out into a lane broken through a dense crowd of excited braves and squaws and curious children, ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... our neighbors. Kindly receive my book with the same indulgent smile, without seeking therein a meaning either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular fatherland ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... singing Yolande shivered, yet not with cold, and casting a cloak about her loveliness came and leaned forth into the warm, still glamour of the night, and saw where stood Jocelyn tall and shapely in the moonlight, but with hateful cock's-comb a-flaunt and ass's ears grotesquely a-dangle; wherefore she sighed and frowned upon ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... would steal noiselessly out of their cells, and hide themselves in that of one of the sisters who was much liked by all of them. There they would have cosy little chats, enlivened with sweetmeats, pasties, liqueurs, and girlish quarrels, worry their elders, imitating them grotesquely, innocently mocking them, telling stories that made them laugh till the tears came and playing a thousand pranks. At times they would measure their feet, to see whose were the smallest, compare the white plumpness of their arms, see whose nose had the infirmity of blushing ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... in hand, watching through the windows, while the frenzied blacks drew cautiously nearer, spreading a cordon of hundreds all around the Sky-Bird, they could see in the moonlight that the Fulbees were grotesquely painted on arms and faces, while their bodies were entirely naked except for a dirty-looking cloth wrapped around their loins in the form of a short skirt. Every one of them was armed, and as they contracted their circle, guns, spears, and bows were frequently raised in threatening position; ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... shoulders bare. From time to time these women come forward and sing—songs not always strictly adapted to the family circle, perhaps. But the favorite vocalist is a comic man, who emerges from behind the scenes in a grotesquely exaggerated costume—an ill-fitting, long, green calico tail-coat, with a huge yellow bandana dangling from a rear pocket; a red cotton umbrella with a brass ring on one end and a glass hook on the other; light blue shapeless trousers; a flaming orange—colored vest; a huge standing collar, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... of the sixteenth century was conducive to imperial expansion. The feudal fragments of kingdoms were being fused into a true nationalism. It was the day of the mercantilists, when gold and silver were given a grotesquely exaggerated place in the national economy and self-sufficiency was deemed to be the goal of every great nation. Freed from the restraint of rivals, the nation sought to produce its own raw material, control its own trade, and carry its own goods in its own ships to ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... at the company, and accepted credulously the counterfeit coin of grotesquely exaggerated ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... was pacified—trouble was a false note. Later he was on the point of asking her how she knew the objects she had mentioned were not in the house; but he let it pass. The subject was a profitless riddle—a puzzle that grew grotesquely bigger, like some monstrosity seen in the darkness, as one opened one's eyes to it. He closed his eyes—he wanted another vision. Besides, she had shown him that she had extraordinary senses—her explanation would have been stranger than the fact. Moreover ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... pleasure of being allied to a man of the Baron's high worth, and who was so much valued by his uncle Sir Everard, was also an agreeable consideration, had anything been wanting to recommend the match. His absurdities, which had appeared grotesquely ludicrous during his prosperity, seemed, in the sunset of his fortune, to be harmonised and assimilated with the noble features of his character, so as to add peculiarity without exciting ridicule. His mind occupied with such projects of future ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Lister, with incautious passion. "If I had killed the brute I'd have been justified! However, I threw him on to the aloe tub and ran off. The thing was grotesquely humorous. A ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... stages of his foolishness and, as he deemed it, of his dishonour. But he had lost the power to understand that phantasm of himself which pranked so grotesquely in the retrospect. Was it true that he had reasoned and taken deliberate step after step in the wooing of Lady Ogram's niece? Might he not urge in his excuse, to cloak him from his own and the world's contempt, ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... been disciplined. At one corner of the meeting-house was the pillory and at the other the stocks, and, by a singular good fortune for our sketch, the head of an Episcopalian and suspected Catholic was grotesquely encased in the former machine, while a fellow-criminal who had boisterously quaffed a health to the king was confined by the legs in the latter. Side by side on the meeting-house steps stood a male and a female figure. The man was a tall, lean, haggard personification of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... extraodinary as its situation. It was not only a city, but a state; not only a state; but an empire; and on the crest of its little mountain called itself sovereign of a territory, or at least of scattered towns and counties, with which its present aspect is grotesquely out of relation. The lords of Les Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles and Marseilles, paid ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... poet-prophets stood under the lavish sunshine of an Indian sky and greeted the world with the glad recognition of kindred. It was not an anthropomorphic hallucination. It was not seeing man reflected everywhere in grotesquely exaggerated images, and witnessing the human drama acted on a gigantic scale in nature's arena of flitting lights and shadows. On the contrary, it meant crossing the limiting barriers of the individual, to become more than man, to become one with the All. It was not a mere play of the ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... improved under the morphia treatment, I began to be disturbed by the horrible variety of suffering about me. One man walked sideways; there was one who could not smell; another was dumb from an explosion. In fact, every one had his own grotesquely painful peculiarity. Near me was a strange case of palsy of the muscles called rhomboids, whose office it is to hold down the shoulder-blades flat on the back during the motions of the arms, which, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... leaned against the mantel. He ran his fingers through his hair until it stood grotesquely on end. "Oh, that's the old argument. I've heard it debated in a hundred bull sessions. One fellow says it's all wrong, and another fellow says it's all right, and you never get anywhere. I want somebody to tell me what's wrong about it and what's ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... Death was rapidly hastening. Beside this bed now stood Dummie, a small, thin man dressed in a tattered plush jerkin, from which the rain-drops slowly dripped, and with a thin, yellow, cunning physiognomy grotesquely hideous in feature, but not positively villanous in expression. On the other side of the bed stood a little boy of about three years old, dressed as if belonging to the better classes, although the garb was somewhat tattered and discoloured. The poor child trembled violently, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to hear spoken. One was a very old Jivro, his skin ash-white and covered with a repulsive scale, like leprosy. The third was a mournful-eyed Schree, clad in an ornamented smock-like garment, from which his thin limbs thrust grotesquely. The fourth was a handsome, long-necked male who resembled the queen. He lounged negligently some distance from the three, as if in attendance upon her. I deduced he was her paramour, husband or ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... an oval basin, the inlet was again constricted, the bottle-neck entrance to a perfect haven being guarded by huge masses of limestone, weathered grotesquely, from the crevices of which sprays of peach-coloured orchids quivered, while the flora of land and sea commingled on the lustrous surface. Beyond again, the inlet wound round the base of it cliff vocal with the fugue of birds which flew from flowery ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... to-day differs but little from that of the Sixteenth Century. In the pottery villages the work is done mostly by men, who sit on the broad, shaded platform and shape their immense vessels in imitation of human beings and every imaginable animal shape. The grotesquely shaped mouth is generally intended for the opening, through which the water, ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... cosey enough, with good company well-met within, the risen wind clamoring through the night, the rain lashing the black panes, the sea rumbling upon the rocks below, and, withal, a savory smell abroad in goodly promise. My uncle, grown fat as a gnome in these days, grotesquely fashioned, miscellaneously clothed as ever, stood with legs wide upon the black wolf's-skin, his back to the fire, his great hands clasped over his paunch, lying as upon a shelf; regarding the direct importation and myself, the rise of ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... tried to imagine the voice of Guadagni, the soprano for whom Gluck had written Che faru senza Euridice, and the fiddle of Tartini, that Tartini with whom the devil had once come and made music. And the delight in anything so absolutely, barbarously, grotesquely, fantastically incongruous as such a performance in such a place was heightened by a sense of profanation: such were the successors of those wonderful musicians of that hated ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... before the king of France. Yet in and out of this gay throng of polite society went hundreds of copper-coloured braves; some of them more than half-naked; most of them ready, after a victory, to be cannibals who revelled in stews of white man's flesh; all of them decked in waving plumes, all of them grotesquely painted, like demons in a nightmare, and all of them armed to ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... Whilst Luther with the other teachers returned to the town, some hundreds of students remained upon the scene, and sang a Te Deum, and a Dirge for the decretals. After the ten o'clock meal, some of the young students, grotesquely attired, drove through the town in a large carriage, with a banner emblazoned with a bull four yards in length, amidst the blowing of brass trumpets and other absurdities. They collected from all quarters ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... the justice due to them in such cases stand these Lesdiguieres, these King's Lieutenants; not instruments of justice, but walls erected for the shelter of Privilege and Abuse whenever it exceeds its grotesquely excessive rights. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... its irrepressible humour, grew almost grotesquely solemn, while the habitual merriment faded slowly from his light-gray eyes, leaving them empty of expression. He was a short, rather thick-set man, not particularly good-looking, not particularly clever, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... face pale and her weak mouth foolishly agape. Cyrus Kilfane was indistinguishable from the pile of rugs amid which he sprawled by the table, and of Sir Lucien Pyne nothing was to be seen but the outstretched legs and feet which projected grotesquely from a recess. Seated, oriental fashion, upon an improvised divan near the grand piano and propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... was an odd resemblance between himself and Madam Death. He had been born to fulfill one function, it appeared. So had she. And now, in his case as in hers, death was immediately to follow. This was sentiment, not science—the blind lobe of the German brain balancing grotesquely the reasoning lobe. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... bright tapestry of fig trees and silver olives, dark karoubias (the wild locusts of John the Baptist) and climbing roses. Rough, coarse grass has eaten up the flowers, or winds sweeping down from the Col have killed them. Only a few stunted trees bend grotesquely to peer over the sheer sides of shadowed gorges as the road strains up and up, twisting like a scar left by a whip-lash, on the naked brown shoulders of a slave. So at last it flings a loop over ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the result that from a distance the gilded portions have the effect of hanging without visible agency in the air. And the whole—the three successive tiers of woodland, roofs, and crosses whole—lies exquisitely mirrored in the river below, where hollow willows, grotesquely shaped (some of them rooted on the river's banks, and some in the water itself, and all drooping their branches until their leaves have formed a tangle with the water lilies which float on the surface), seem to be gazing at the marvellous reflection ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... required was against nature. That is to say, that whatever the needed thing might be, my nature, habit, and breeding moved me to attempt it in one way, while some immutable and unsuspected law of physics required that it be done in just the other way. I perceived by this how radically and grotesquely wrong had been the life-long education of my body and members. They were steeped in ignorance; they knew nothing—nothing which it could profit them to know. For instance, if I found myself falling to the right, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stretching her face, feature for feature, as a dancer goes through limbering exercises in the wings. The woman had been a trouper in the old days of one-night stands. Just before she stepped in front of the camera you saw her drawing down her face grotesquely, stretching her mouth to form an oval, dropping her jaw, twisting her lips to the right, to the left, rolling her eyes round and round. It was a perfect lesson in facial calisthenics, and Harrietta was thankful for it. Harrietta was interested in such ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... rendered in this style. In front of the royal palace an immense transparent screen, mounted on great poles, is drawn across the esplanade, and behind this, at a moderate distance, great fires are lighted. Between the screen and the fire masked figures, grotesquely costumed, enact the story of Rama and Sita and the giant Rawuna, with Hanuman and his army of apes bridging the Gulf of Manaar and piling up the Himalayas, while the bards, in measured story, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... shores. The ceremonies which approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony, replied, "New light, new sun," showing his belief that the sun was yearly ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... influenced by the tradition and preaching concerning Jesus. Dositheus, Simon Magus, Cleobius, and Menander appeared as Messiahs or bearers of the Godhead, and proclaimed a doctrine in which the Jewish faith was strangely and grotesquely mixed with Babylonian myths, together with some Greek additions. The mysterious worship, the breaking up of Jewish particularism, the criticism of the Old Testament, which for long had had great difficulty in retaining ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... were a magician calling the demonstration into being at command, the shooting and shouting of the trio on the roof, which for the moment had died down, was now violently renewed. Ryan's lower jaw dropped open grotesquely. ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... that the dying man had started from his bed and was approaching me. This belief was, at the same instant, confuted, by the survey of his form and garb. One eye, a scar upon his cheek, a tawny skin, a form grotesquely misproportioned, brawny as Hercules, and habited in livery, composed, as it were, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... beautiful corpse," she whispered, as we passed into the room. It was an incongruous remark, and stirred again an hysterical feeling that had been driving me to laugh when I felt most sad amid all the grotesquely dreary preparations for the "burying." But, like some other sayings that offend ears polite, it ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of religion these barbarians may previously have had is beyond our accurate knowledge. They handed down a mythology not radically different from the Graeco-Roman, though more vaguely and grotesquely conceived; and they recognised tribal duties and glories from which religious sanctions could hardly have been absent. But a barbarian mind, like a child's, is easy to convert and to people with what stories you will. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... breast-deep in that stinking water, his head and face grotesquely masked in a vile green slime of putrid vegetation, Ercole Fortemani bellowed with horrid blasphemy that he would have his aggressor's blood, but stirred never a foot to take it. Not that he was by nature wholly a coward; ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... Athenian customs, Greek names, the plays of Euripides, above all, the plays of Aristophanes. "Every line of the poem," it has been truly said, "shows Mr. Browning as soaked and steeped in the comedies as was Bunyan in his Bible." The result is a vast, shapeless thing, splendidly and grotesquely alive, but alive with the obscure and tangled ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... is a rara avis in the republic of Mexico. Among the numberless churches, a curious one will long be remembered, namely, the Santa Vera Cruz, the facade of which very much resembles that of a dime museum, having a lot of grotesquely-colored figures of ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... halves of a coconut shell, which are fastened like sandals to her feet by creeping plants. During her seclusion she is in charge of her aunts or other female relatives. At the end of the time she bathes, her person is loaded with ornaments, her face is grotesquely painted with red stripes on a white ground, and thus adorned she is brought forth in public to be admired by everybody. She is now marriageable.[95] Among the Ot Danoms of Borneo girls at the age of eight or ten years are shut ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... next afternoon. It was raining, and the quiet procession followed Dick and the others who carried her light body under grotesquely bobbing umbrellas. Then he and David, and Minnie and Mike, went back to the house, quiet with that strange emptiness that follows a death, the unconscious listening for a voice that will not speak again, for a familiar footfall. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of the poet of Valladolid, on the other hand (How it Strikes a Contemporary), is not so much a study of a poet as of popular misconception and obtuseness. A grotesquely idle legend of the habits of the "Corregidor" flourishes among the good folks of Valladolid; the speaker himself, who desires to do him justice, is a plain, shrewd, but unimaginative observer ("I never wrote a line of verse, did you?"), and makes us acquainted with everything but the inner ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... conceit. For I looked back over time past and I said like Solomon—I don't know whether he ever said it, but he's the most blase Johnnie I remember—'All is vanity.' As it was in the beginning, so it ever shall be. We are not made in the image of God. We are made rather grotesquely out of dust, and to dust we shall return, all our hopes, all our aspirations, all the pretty plans we form for defeating death and time. And who made us and put us on this dark planet where it is next to impossible to see ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... weeks of painful travail, the suffrage committee presented an ordinance that filled the state with amazement, and was so palpably unconstitutional and so grotesquely absurd that according to United States Senator McEnery, it was regarded in Washington as a "joke." The committee quailed before the storm of popular indignation, and re-committed the ordinance to the suffrage committee. Yet the law which was finally passed, though lopped of ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various
... very easily and readily, but her tears are easily dried and her joy is grotesquely childlike. She is readily frightened, worries without restraint and finds a melancholy satisfaction in the worst. At the same time, her fears do not persist and are easily dissipated by encouragement ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... so unhappy, such muddlers, so wrong-headed, it seemed to her. She could have told them what to do, and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact that they would pay no heed to her, and were bound to come to grief in their own antiquated way. Their behavior was often grotesquely irrational; their conventions monstrously absurd; and yet, as she brooded upon them, she felt so closely attached to them that it was useless to try to pass judgment upon them. She very nearly lost consciousness that she was a separate being, with a future of her own. ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... it would therefore seem, was a picture-writing as rude as that of the Mexicans. Objects were themselves represented, but coarsely and grotesquely—and, which is especially remarkable, without any curved lines. This would seem to indicate that the system grew up where a hard material, probably stone, was alone used. The cuneiform writing arose when clay took the place of stone as a material. A small tool with a ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... and Ferdinands and Corombonas and Vindicis and Pieros of the "White Devil," of the "Duchess of Malfy," of the "Revenger's Tragedy," and of "Antonio and Mellida," are mere fantastic horrors, as false as the Counts Udolpho, the Spalatros, the Zastrozzis, and all their grotesquely ghastly pseudo-Italian brethren of eighty ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... from the mirror, placed the bottle and tumbler upon the bureau. As if compelled by those burning eyes that stared so fixedly at him, he leaned forward still closer to the glass. Then, as he looked, the distorted features twitched and worked grotesquely with uncontrollable emotions, while the quivering lips formed words that were not even whispered. With trembling fingers he felt the unshaven cheeks and touched the unkempt hair questioningly. Suddenly, as if to shut out the horror of that which ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... Board-school. I saw that he was excited, and he admitted that he was: he had waked out of a trance. He had been on the wrong tack; he had piled mistake on mistake. It was the vision of his remedy that now excited him: ineffably, grotesquely simple, it had yet come to him only within a day or two. No, he wouldn't tell me what it was; he would give me the night to guess, and if I shouldn't guess it would be because I was as big an ass as himself. However, a lone man might be an ass: he had room in his life ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... huge, but very different in proportions and character of its armor was the Ankylosaurus of the late Cretacic. This animal, a contemporary of the Tyrannosaurus and duck-billed dinosaurs was more effectively though less grotesquely armored than its more ancient relative. The body is covered with massive bony plates set close together and lying flat over the surface from head to tip of tail. While the stegosaur's body was narrow and compressed, in this animal it is exceptionally broad and ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... pleasure of making some interesting acquaintances, and the missionaries gave me much valuable information about the natives and their customs. When the tone of the conversation in the evening threatened to become too serious, our jovial Captain S. speedily improved matters by his grotesquely comical sallies. A strenuous life was that of the missionary who was responsible for the organization of the voyage; he had to visit the native communities, and went ashore at every anchorage, sometimes through an ugly surf or dangerous shoals, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... of Somerset was in many respects the most powerful nobleman in England. But all his rank, his dignity, and his influence, could not protect him against the ridicule and contempt which his feeble character, his extravagant pride, and his grotesquely haughty demeanor, invariably brought upon him. He was probably the most ridiculous man of his time; he had the pomp of an Eastern pasha without the grave dignity which Eastern manners confer. He was like the pasha of a burlesque or an opera bouffe. ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... him called, "Mister!" He looked up and saw Rozsi. She was leaning her round chin on her round hand, gazing down at him with her deepset, clever eyes. When Swithin removed his hat, she clapped her hands. Again he had the sense of being admired, caressed. With a careless air, that sat grotesquely on his tall square person, he walked up to the door; both girls stood in the passage. Swithin felt a confused desire to speak in some foreign tongue. "Maam'selles," he began, "er—bong jour-er, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... breaks in. "No grotesquely phrased effusions of gratitude. I am merely indulging Verona in one of her absurd whims. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... own unbridled sensuality shook with inarticulate rage. Choking and coughing he writhed in his chair—his emaciated limbs twisted grotesquely; his sallow face bathed in perspiration his claw-like hands opening and closing; his bloodless lips curled back from his yellow teeth, in a horrid grin of impotent fury. And all the while she lay watching him with that pitiless, mocking, ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... vague shapes came and went, their shadows grotesquely flung against the leafy screens. The figures quickened their paces and their gestures; then suddenly, with cries, flung themselves into wild activity. And all about the fire, Stern saw a wheeling, circling, eddying mob of black ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the song was familiar enough in Dublin; and he repeated some stanzas of it, which were considerably different from the version of W.A.G., and the chorus the same as in the common English version. I hope presently to receive a complete copy of it: which, by the bye, like everything grotesquely humorous in Ireland, was attributed to the ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... shadow of the bridge was just above him. He turned on his back for a second. There were lights on the bridge. A current swept him past one barge and then another. Certainty possessed him that he was going to be drowned. A voice seemed to sob in his ears grotesquely: "And so John Andrews was drowned in the Seine, drowned in the Seine, ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... certainty that he has sought by ceremonious language to realize more than he could grasp with the imagination. In his council of the powers of hell, for instance, he creates monsters of huge dimensions and statuesque distinctness; but these are neither grotesquely horrible like Dante's, nor are they spirits with incalculable capacity for ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... on him for nearly an hour, but were unable to get off more than a certain portion of the paint. Harry was still grotesquely decorated when the boys arrived at the conclusion that further scrubbing with the ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... tentacle wrapped itself about him; he was hurled to the floor, to sprawl grotesquely among ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... shoulders through her linsey dress, and pictured her, grotesquely foreshortened, upon the nail-drawn, warped, and beaten floor. Her hands, nursing her cheeks, chin pivoted in their palms, were large and toil-distorted, great-jointed like a man's, and all the feminine softness with which nature had endowed her ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... in slings; men with trousers torn away at the knee, and bandaged legs; men with brow, face, mouth, or throat swathed; men with no shirts, but a broad swathe around the chest or stomach—each bandage grotesquely pictured with human figures printed to show how the wound should be bound, on whatever part of the body the bullet entered. Men staggering along unaided, or between two comrades, or borne on litters, some ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... away, with a beaten droop of the proud little head, and again I was shamed. Never have I felt so grotesquely out of proportion with myself as at that moment. My stature seemed to increase from an even six feet to something like twelve, and my bulk became elephantine. She was so slender, so lissom, so weak, and I so gargantuan, so gorilla-like, ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... recall where you had a complete dinner for sixpence—I dare not try to remember the items. But well indeed do I see the faces of the guests—poor clerks and shopboys, bloodless girls and women of many sorts—all endeavouring to find a relish in lentil soup and haricot something-or-other. It was a grotesquely heart-breaking sight. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... the juicy meat into fine particles. This is done by means of a piece of mother-of-pearl shell, lashed firmly to the extreme end of a heavy stick, with its straight side accurately notched like a saw. The stick is sometimes a grotesquely-formed limb of a tree, with three or four branches twisting from its body like so many shapeless legs, and sustaining it two or three feet from ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... you'd 'tin' to yo' business betta 'an you does," replied Aunt Agnes, raising a very battered umbrella over her grotesquely apparelled figure, as she stepped from under the shelter of the tree to take her place in ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... clearly so as to remember him, a big negro employed upon one of my estates. He seemed to be a sort of high priest or president of the orgies. Attached to his arms were giant imitations of bat wings which he moved grotesquely as if in flight. There were many women in the throng, which numbered fully I should think a hundred people. But the final collapse of my brave, unhappy Valera at this point brought home to me the nature of the ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... refracted grotesquely the white shape behind it, but could not make its movement unfeminine; and, when the lower sash was slowly raised until it jammed about a foot above the sill, and two hands showed their fingers under the frame ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... It was grotesquely tragic, the leisurely tranquillity of this beast face to face with this girl who could count the seconds of life remaining ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... would give instructions to be called early in the morning, that they might go in the first boat to St. Petersburg, and neither would know what the other intended. When they met aboard the passenger boat they would lie to each other grotesquely about what was taking them to town. If they were unsuccessful in fixing, they rarely disclosed what had been offered; and this would go on for days, until they had to fix; then they would draw closer to each other, and relate in the ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... may say, of a smallish man, grotesquely pot-bellied, with very thin legs and arms. The eyes were disproportionately large and quite circular, with an expression that was at once both impish and pathetic. The ears were immense, and set at right angles to the head; the rest ...
— The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • J. D. Beresford
... affect the medulla oblongata principally, opium acts chiefly on the cerebrum, and excites reverie, dreamy ideality, optical delusions, and the creative powers of the imagination; some of these hallucinations are said to be grotesquely beautiful and enjoyable. The effects of this agent differ from those of alcoholic intoxication by not deadening the moral sensibilities, or arousing the animal propensities. Opium smokers are dreamy and abstracted, not quarrelsome or ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... bubbles as the sun shone on them. Below the clear water lay a girdle of sunken rocks, pointed as needles, and with edges as sharp as swords, about which the waves fretted ceaselessly, drawing silvery lines about their notched and dented ridges. The cliffs ran up precipitously from the sea, carved grotesquely over their whole surface into strange and fantastic shapes; while the golden and gray lichens embroidered them richly, and bright sea-flowers, and stray tufts of grass, lent them the most vivid and gorgeous hues. Beyond the channel, against the clear western sky, lay the island of Guernsey, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... all the horrible creatures!" cried Aunt Georgie, who stood there full in the firelight in happy unconsciousness of the fact that the scene was double, for the shadows of the two performers were thrown grotesquely but distinctly upon the wall ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn
... marvellous colours, yellow and gray, crimson and green piled one upon another, with the strange light of the noonday sun playing over them and turning their colours into a blaze of glory. Beyond was a stretch of sand, broken here and there by sage-brush, greasewood, or cactus rearing its prickly spines grotesquely. ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... repeated pulling and loosening the string, causes the jaw to rise and fall, and thus produces, by bringing the teeth in contact, a snapping noise, as he moves along; the rest of the party following in procession, grotesquely habited, and ringing hand-bells! In this order they proceed from house to house, singing carols and ringing their bells, and are generally remunerated for the amusement they occasion by a largess of money, or beer and cake. This ceremony is called "a hoodening." The figure which we have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 582, Saturday, December 22, 1832 • Various
... that evening, but Lady Glencora would not permit it. "She has seen you, my dear, and asked about you. If you hide yourself, she'll say all sorts of things." An introduction was therefore necessary, and Lady Hartletop's manner was grotesquely grand. She dropped a very low curtsey, and made a very long face, but she did not say a word. In the evening the Marchioness sat close to Lady Glencora, whispering many things about the Duke; and condescending ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... celestial being, incarnate on earth, counselled them to compose their strife and unite in a league of defence and aggression. Another personage, wholly mortal, yet wonderfully endowed, a renowned warrior and a mighty magician, stands, with his hair of writhing snakes, grotesquely conspicuous through the dim light of tradition at this birth of Iroquois nationality. This was Atotarho, a chief of the Onondagas; and from this honored source has sprung a long line of chieftains, heirs not to the blood alone, but ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman |
