"Monstrous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... time to see the gate of a nearby cage thrown open and three monstrous white apes spring into the arena. The girls shrank in a frightened group in ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... "And yet she was his last thought. She ought to know it. It's monstrous that she should go on believing——" He broke off. And then, "She must be told. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... beside the shrine and there leaped from the darkness a monstrous gray Ape, who seated himself man-wise in the place of the fallen image, and the rain spilled like jewels from the hair of his ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... his masters are at war, seemingly to perpetuate his bonds. Such conduct deserves recognition. I would say that a system of rewards should be planned by which a worthy negro, ambitious to become free, could by meritorious conduct achieve his freedom. But this act of Lincoln's is monstrous. It is good for nobody. A race of slaves, suddenly become free, is a race of infants with the physical force of men. What would become of them? Suppose the North should succeed. Suppose the Confederate armies disbanded, and the States back in the Union or held as territories. Has anybody ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... lives and distressing the ships by sending officers and men away in captured vessels, we are sometimes informed, as a reward for the risk, anxiety and trouble, that instead of receiving we have to pay money." This most certainly cries aloud for reform, and it appears monstrous that sailors find so little support either in the House of Commons or at the Admiralty. Soldiers have many advocates in the former, but sailors few, and those few not worth having. The first Secretary of the Admiralty is generally a member of Parliament, but he only concerns himself with ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman
... she had last seen it, or—worse yet—stirred already with the first creeping pangs of consciousness: to have these images slowly, deliberately burn themselves into her brain, and to be aware, at the same time, of that underlying moral disaster, of which the accident seemed the monstrous outward symbol—ah, this was worse than ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... midst of this monstrous festivity and uproar, there came, all on a sudden, a reverberating double-knock at the hall-door, so loud and long that every hollow, nook, and passage of the old house rang again. Loud and untimely as was the summons, it had ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the future of the human race—a deed coldly planned, studiously matured, and deliberately and systematically executed, a deed so cruel that German soldiers are said to have wept in its execution, and so monstrous that even German officers are now ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... heights of sky, To the last chambers of the monstrous Dome, Where stars the brightest here to darkness die: Then, any spot on our own Earth ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... to me, in a confidential whisper, that Mr. Bullion is monstrous rich, and has made his fortune from small beginnings, by never letting a good thing go. I think of Uncle Jack's pickled onion and Mr. Speck's meerschaum, and perceive, with respectful admiration, that Mr. Bullion acts uniformly on one grand system. Ten minutes ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one-eleventh of the amount paid by Great Britain. Furthermore, the actual amount taken each year in the shape of overtaxation was variously estimated to be between two and three quarters and three millions. Instantly Ireland was up in arms against this monstrous exaction. For a time the country was roused from its torpor and anything seemed possible. All classes and creeds were united in denouncing the flagrant theft of the nation's substance by the predominant partner. By force and fraud the Act of Union was passed: by force ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... time during the voyage the half-caste missed striking his fish. Unable to sustain himself steadily, owing to his injured foot and the rough sea, he darted his iron a second or two too late. It fell flat on the back of the monstrous creature, which at once sounded in alarm, and next reappeared a mile to windward. For an hour Frewen kept up the chase, and then the ship signalled for all the boats to return, for the wind and sea were increasing, and it was useless ...
— John Frewen, South Sea Whaler - 1904 • Louis Becke
... sucked meditatively at his cigar. The new moon was just rising over the elephant's hindquarters, and the poetry of the incident appeared to move the manager profoundly. He turned and surveyed the dim bivouac, the two silent tents, the monstrous, shadowy bulk of the elephant, rocking monotonously against the sky. "Kind of Silurian an' solemn, ain't it," he murmured, "the moon shinin' onto the rump of that primeval pachyderm. It's like the dark ages of the behemoth an' the cony. I tell you, gentlemen, when them fearsome an' ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... men, immediately went in search of him; having found his track they followed him by the blood for a mile, found him concealed in some thick brushwood, and shot him with two balls through the skull. Though somewhat smaller than that killed a few days ago, he was a monstrous animal, and a most terrible enemy. Our man had shot him through the centre of the lungs; yet he had pursued him furiously for half a mile, then returned more than twice that distance, and with his talons prepared himself a bed in the earth two feet deep and five feet long; he ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... Discoveries, I must acquaint the Reader, that upon my walking behind the Scenes last Winter, as I was thinking on something else, I accidentally jostled against a monstrous Animal that extreamly startled me, and, upon my nearer Survey of it, appeared to be a Lion-Rampant. The Lion, seeing me very much surprized, told me, in a gentle Voice, that I might come by him if I pleased: 'For' (says he) 'I do not ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... went out to walk the night, blind envy in his brain and a hot hunger in his heart, moved as he had never been moved before at thought of Haney's nearness to that glowing girl. Their union was monstrous, incredible. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Si thirty and Murgh bird. In McClenachan's Addendum to Mackay's Encyclopaeedia of Freemasonry we find the following definition: "Simorgh. A monstrous griffin, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the man, Excellency," he said positively. "Here is no man of noble birth. This man is a serf—a mere scullery boy-who murdered his noble master to steal his insignia. We have searched for many years, for his crime was so monstrous that no effort could be too great to bring him to justice." He faced ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... clamour of British Columbia was in the air, and her suggestions, hotly opposed by the Company, had been brought before the House of Lords by another peer. In the discussion which followed, the Duke of Newcastle declared that "it seemed monstrous that any body of gentlemen should exercise fee-simple rights which precluded the future colonization of that territory, as well as the opening of lines of communication through it." The Minister's idea at the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... space, and so she overflowed and encroached. Lethbury struggled against the sense of submergence. He let down barrier after barrier, yielded privacy after privacy; but his wife's personality continued to dilate. She was no longer herself alone: she was herself and Jane. Gradually, in a monstrous fusion of identity, she became herself, himself and Jane; and instead of trying to adapt her to a spare crevice of his character, he found himself carelessly squeezed into the smallest ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... and high had been mine, I had first doubted the truth of the popular religion, and then soon rejected it, as what brought to me neither comfort nor hope, and was also burdened with things essentially incredible and monstrous. For many years, many weary years—for the mind demands something positive in this quarter, it cannot remain in suspense, and vacant—I was without belief. Why it was so long, before I turned to the Christians, I know not; unless, because of the reports which were so common to their ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... fanatic, a lunatic, and has put out monstrous and ridiculous predictions about the destruction of London, causing disorderly crowds to assemble about his church. The thoroughfares are blocked, and people are pushed about and assaulted. Indeed, things have come to ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... Liszt pupil, a bad piano player, a venerable man with a purple nose—a Cyrano de Cognac nose." Tschaikowsky is the Slav gone crazy on vodka. He transformed Hamlet into "a yelling man" and Romeo and Juliet into "two monstrous Cossacks, who gibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume." "His Manfred is a libel on Byron, who was a libel on God." And even Schumann is a vanishing star, a literary man turned composer, a pathological case. But, ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... that we believe in three gods; and they know it to be false. They might, with equal justice affirm that we believe in three suns. The meanest peasant, who has acquired the first rudiments of christianity, would shrink back from a thing so monstrous. Still the Trinity has its difficulties. It would be strange if otherwise. A Revelation that revealed nothing, not within the grasp of human reason!—no religation, no binding over again, as before said; but these ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... mercy! what be that, now? Look, cap'n, look overside, do 'e, and tell me, if you can, what monstrous thing we've a-run foul of now." And as he spoke ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... his consistency, his strength of will and highmindedness as they deserved, but he was never tired of preaching and demonstrating to Wilhelm that all these admirable qualities had been turned out of their proper course by a disturbing morbid influence. It was monstrous, he contended, that a system of philosophy should arm you for suicide. What if the premises should prove false? Then your voluntary death would be a frightful mistake which nothing could retrieve. One has no right to risk making such ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... a few alterations in the depth of my bait, finding the water far deeper than I expected. I renewed that bait, too, but no monstrous fish came to take it, to hook itself, and to make a rush and drag me off my ledge. The sounds buzzed and rattled overhead; there was the echoing plash of the water over the wheel, and the whispering echoes which did not sound at all terrible now, and above ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... after the manner of the Venetians, left no part of the world unsearched to obtain riches. Having fitted out two ships in England at his own expence, with three hundred men, he first directed his course so near the north pole, that on the 11th of July he found monstrous heaps of ice swimming in the sea, and a continual day, so that the land was free from ice, having been thawed by the perpetual influence of the sun. By reason of this ice he was compelled to turn southwards along the western land, till ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... appeared to him livid, dim, and menacing. The statues of basalt rolled their eyes and smiled hideously. The lamp flickered weirdly, and its flame dishevelled itself in red and sanguine rays like the crest of a comet. Far back in the dimly lighted corners loomed the monstrous forms of the Lares and Lemures. The mantles hanging from their hooks seemed animated by a factitious life, and assumed a human aspect of vitality; and when Nyssia stripped of her last garment, approached ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... he did," answered Janice, merrily. "Wouldst believe it, Lady Washington, though perhaps 't is monstrous bold of me to tell it, 't is he that has had to keep me at a distance, for I have courted ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... flesh wound in the arm and the ball came from the rear. Again was Conway behind him. The thought that he might be slain in this treacherous manner was distracting, but what could he do? He durst not complain; such a monstrous charge against a brother officer would have to be substantiated by the best of proof. He could only avoid Conway as much as possible during battle, and hope for the best. After the battle at Milton, by reason of losses ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... does, and consequently is distinguished from it; and so must it be also in practical matters. Now it is evident that what is beside the order of a lower principle or cause, is sometimes reducible to the order of a higher principle; thus monstrous births of animals are beside the order of the active seminal force, and yet they come under the order of a higher principle, namely, of a heavenly body, or higher still, of Divine Providence. Hence by considering the active seminal force one could ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... sudden apparition. What!—a boat—a small boat—passing beneath that arch into yonder roaring gulf! Yes, yes, down through that awful water-way, with more than the swiftness of an arrow, shot the boat, or skiff, right into the jaws of the pool. A monstrous breaker curls over the prow—there is no hope; the boat is swamped, and all drowned in that strangling vortex. No! the boat, which appeared to have the buoyancy of a feather, skipped over the threatening horror, and, the next moment, was out of danger, the boatman—a true boatman of Cockaigne ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... railroads, through pouring vast sums upon the stock market, through causing as vast sums to disappear from public use, stains them blacker with the proof of their horrible inhumanity. Even death does not always end their monstrous rapine, for when they pay what is called the debt of nature they too often fling, in their wills, a posthumous sneer at that still larger debt owed to their fellow-creatures, and make some eldest son their principal heir. Charity may get a few niggardly thousands from them, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... a Holy Ghost minister came to our place and held a short series of meetings. He taught us the way of God more perfectly. We entered the glorious experience of entire sanctification during this meeting. We also beheld the body of Christ, the one true church, and saw in a clear light the monstrous beast religion in all her evils. God soon after called us into his work. We sold our little home, all we had of this world, and used the means in the work of the Lord. Our work for God has been independent of the creeds of men, teaching a full salvation and trusting God for ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... all the modern conveniences by which he lives and thrives. So soon as civilising missions and missionaries have pegged out their claims, even the desert is deemed incomplete without a modern hotel or two, fitted with electric light, monstrous tariff, and served by a crowd of debased guides. In the wake of these improvements the tourist follows, finds all the essentials of the life he left at home, and, knowing nothing of the life he came to see, has no regrets. So ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... spectators, among whom were many Roman Catholics, eager to see the misery and humiliation of their persecutor. [270] A few years earlier his short neck, his legs uneven, the vulgar said, as those of a badger, his forehead low as that of a baboon, his purple cheeks, and his monstrous length of chin, had been familiar to all who frequented the courts of law. He had then been the idol of the nation. Wherever he had appeared, men had uncovered their heads to him. The lives and estates of the magnates of the realm ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... treatment of offspring depend their lives or deaths, and their moral value or ruin, yet not one word of instruction on the treatment of offspring is ever given to those who will hereafter be parents? Is it not monstrous that the fate of a new generation should be left to the chances of unreasoning custom, impulse, fancy . . . ?" The whole chapter is worth reading; the neglect of which Spencer complained still persists.] The dangers of sex indulgence-the greatest of all perils to youth, the poisonous effects of alcohol, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... renown, Patru is e'en by Scarron's name weighed down. The bar of Greece and Rome you point me out, A bar that trained great men, I do not doubt, For then chicane with language void of sense Had not deformed the law and eloquence. Purge the tribune of all this monstrous growth, I mount it, and my soul will sink, though loth, Will yield to fortune and will speak in prose. But since reform in this so slowly grows, Leave me my tastes, for I aspire to be By verse ennobled to posterity, To hold first place in arts above the law, More grave and noble than it ever saw. ...
— Briefless Ballads and Legal Lyrics - Second Series • James Williams
... chopped up the feather in Cherry-pie's new bonnet, and I told her she was a hideous, monstrous old donkey- hag." ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... present. Glory is succeeded by shame, and strength by weakness, and virtue by vice. The condition of the great mass is deplorable, and even the great and fortunate shine in a false and fictitious light. We see laws, theoretically good, practically perverted; monstrous inequalities of condition, selfishness, and egotism the mainsprings of life. We see energies misdirected, and art corrupted. All noble aspirations have fled, and the good and the wise retire from active life in despair and misanthropy. Poets flatter the tyrants who trample on human rights, and sensuality ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the state could scarcely digest as a senator, it should tolerate as king, possessing the ensigns and authority of Romulus their founder, who had descended from and had returned to the gods. This was to be considered not more criminal than it was monstrous: nor was it sufficiently expiated by his blood; unless the roof and walls within which so mad a project had been conceived, should be levelled to the ground, and his effects were confiscated, as being contaminated with the price of purchasing kingly domination. He ordered, therefore, that the ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... blood my ancient kindred spoke— Grotesque and monstrous voices, heard afar Down ocean caves when behemoth awoke, Or through fern forests roared the plesiosaur Locked with ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... headquarters tripled the swarm of interceptors and observation planes. Squadrons from Connecticut and southern New Jersey deployed to form a monstrous funnel, the small end before her, the large end pointing out to open sea. Heavy bombers closed in above, laying a smoke screen at 10,000 feet to discourage her from rising. The ground shook with the drone of jets, and ...
— The Good Neighbors • Edgar Pangborn
... may be sure he repented of it. Body and soul he gave to his vocation; and no one could bring more conscientiousness to the discharge of what he thought to be his duty. He was also inflexible. It was monstrous, in his eyes, to discuss an article of the code. The law spoke; it was enough; he shut his eyes, ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... that required every day a human victim for breakfast. You devour men and countries, and the wails of whole nations are music to your ears. You must die, also, because you look so horrible! God has marked you, and given you a monstrous body, because your soul is that of a monster. I will kill you, therefore, that you may no longer frighten mankind!" She put the arrow ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... crawl about, excited horror and compassion. Some were reduced to such mere skeletons that their skins seemed to cleave to their bones, and these had this consolation, that they gradually consumed away without pain. Others were swelled out to monstrous sizes, and were so tormented with excruciating pain, as to drive them to furious madness. Some were worn away by the dysentery, and others were racked with excruciating rheumatism, while others again dragged their dead limbs after them, having lost ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... it seemed monstrous that a man should play such tricks with other people's money; for after his death, of course, as she said, it was other people's. "Of course, you will dispute the will," she remarked, ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... Primate and of many of his most respectable suffragans. Could nothing be done to remedy this evil? [512] Another member complained of some pamphlets which had lately appeared, and in which the Convocation was not treated with proper deference. The assembly took fire. Was it not monstrous that this heretical and schismatical trash should be cried by the hawkers about the streets, and should be exposed to sale in the booths of Westminster Hall, within a hundred yards of the Prolocutor's chair? The work of mutilating the Liturgy and of turning cathedrals ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... monstrous lie!" exclaimed Fanfaro, beside himself with rage, while Irene de Salves rose upright and ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... all kinds has been pronounced by Mrs. Butler—herself in her own good day a rarely accomplished reader and a fine tragic actress—"a monstrous anomaly."{*} ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... had slid from its original position. The sight was a magnificent one; the accumulation of rocks, piled one on the other, had crushed down in their fall the trees that impeded their course. We saw before us an inextricable pile of trunks, monstrous roots, and masses of rock, suspended and apparently ready to fall. The catastrophe must have recently occurred; for here and there a branch was still covered with foliage, and the grass had not as yet carpeted the immense gap. Lucien was so astonished at the wild grandeur ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... monstrous charge my spirit almost went from me. That it should be this thing, above all others that should be brought against me! I glanced this way and that; and saw how even Chiffinch, who had fallen back a little as I advanced, ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... which came at intervals of two or three days from her loved friend. Even to her eyes they looked beautiful. The girl of the period, when she writes to her friend, usually dips the handle of her sunshade in a basin of ink, and scrawls characters monstrous in size and form, an insult to the paper-maker's art and shocking to man's aesthetic feelings. Now from the first Fan had spontaneously written a small hand, with fine web-like lines and flourishes, which gave it a very curious and delicate appearance; for, unlike the sloping prim Italian ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Strange monstrous men on fantastic war-mounts, long spears and fluttering pennons. Huge golden chariots with scythes flashing on the circling hubs and armored giants, the figments of ...
— The Hills of Home • Alfred Coppel
... screamed, for the little door of communication between that room and the inner one being wide open, there was a full disclosure of the sofa bedstead in all its monstrous impropriety. But she had the presence of mind to close this portal in the twinkling of an eye; and having done so, said, though not without confusion, 'Oh yes, Mr Pecksniff, you can come in, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... are going to marry that horrible man Mulready. It is monstrous, isn't it? I think they ought to be prosecuted and punished for such a wicked thing, and father only ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... fidelity bear witness to the intensity of Poe. He was indeed our Frankenstein (of whom many prototypes do abound), wandering in the Cimmerian regions of thought, the graveyards of the mind, and veiling his monstrous creations with the filmy drapery of rhyme and the mists of a perverted reason. In his sad world eternal night reigns and the sun ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... has kissed my daughter, and he has kissed her for the first time. It is monstrous that any girl, and especially my daughter, should be kissed for the first time. I have not been consulted, and I had not the slightest idea that matters had gone so far. Her mother has probably been here, with Charlie, and gone off ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... conquer; pass'd now o'er The Pyrrhene hills, the Alps with all its store Of ice, and rocks clad in eternal snow, —As if that Nature meant to give the blow— Denies him passage; straight on ev'ry side He wounds the hill, and by strong hand divides The monstrous pile; nought can ambition stay. The world and Nature yield to give him way. And now pass'd o'er the Alps, that mighty bar 'Twixt France and Rome, fear of the future war Strikes Italy; success and hope doth fire His lofty spirits with a fresh desire. ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... Indians. It perseveres in their hearts through the instructions of the masters of the sect, and there is scarcely a town in these provinces in which it has not been introduced. It is a superstitious idolatry, full of monstrous incests, sodomies ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... part of Europe, was a tranquil blue coral-ocean, the fringes of its islands girt with reefs such as we find now only three thousand miles further south, with vast shoals of Ammonites, sometimes of gigantic size, preying upon its living population or evading its monstrous sharks; while the sunlit lands were covered with graceful, palmlike cycads and early yews and pines and cypresses, and quaint forms of reptiles throve on the warm earth or in the ample swamps, or rushed on outstretched wings through the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... because, I repeat it, volumes might be filled with these details. I have said enough to show what was this monstrous personage, whose death was a relief to great and little, to all Europe, even to his brother, whom he treated like a negro. He wanted to dismiss a groom on one occasion for having lent one of his coaches to this same brother, to go somewhere ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... stuttering, or they may be seen in gait, handwriting, tics or tweaks, etc. Instead of disappearing with age, as they should, they are seen in the blind as facial grimaces uncorrected by the mirror or facial consciousness, in the deaf as inarticulate noises; and they may tend to grow monstrous with age as if they were disintegrated fragments of our personality, split off and aborted, or motor parasites leaving our psycho-physic ego poorer in energy and plasticity of adaptation, till the distraction and anarchy of ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... limbs seemed spurred to activity by the gallop of his thoughts. His reason would scarcely accept the evidence of consciousness that he had indeed just heard such things from Emily's lips; it was too monstrous for belief; a resolute incredulity sustained him beneath a blow which, could he have felt it to be meant in very earnest, would have deprived him of his senses. She did not, she could not, know what she had said! Yet she spoke with such cruel appearance of reasoning ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... lawn, and from there straight down to the sea. It was their custom to sit there in the evening and talk. The elder Mrs Ottley enjoyed these evenings, and the most modern conversation never seemed to startle her. She would listen impassively, or with a smile, as if in silent approval, to the most monstrous of paradoxes ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... uttered in any conversation and I had to head it off what the English call "things"—off love, poverty, crime, religion and the rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she was carried off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done. Good God, are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a freemasonry between all of them from end to end of the earth?... That is what makes me think of that fellow ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... right pappe: for thei were all Archers, and wonderfully excelled therein, but in the ende, [Sidenote: Thalestris.] thei came all to ruine. One of them, Thalestris their Quene in the tyme of Alexander the Greate, came to Alexander, thinkyng that he had been, some monstrous man of stature: [Fol. lvj.v] [Sidenote: The offer of a woman to Alexander.] whom, when she did beholde (for Alexander was of no migh- tie stature) did contemne hym, and offered him hand to hande [Sidenote: The answer of Alexander ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... inevitably springs up in the best minds at sight of the benevolent order of the world, and is soon diffused among all. The principles now enumerated will be found, though in varying proportions, among all men not plainly monstrous by accident, &c. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... Herr Anselmus!" cried Conrector Paulmann, "is there a crack in your brain? In Heaven's name, what monstrous stuff ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the Bill, I ask your Lordships to reject it." This too much even for House of Lords. That alleged luxury of two hundred people should weigh against convenience of the population of London was a little monstrous. BRAMWELL kept his countenance admirably. ...
— Punch, Vol. 99., July 26, 1890. • Various
... is in this country a monstrous inequality of law and right. What is a trifling fault in the white man, is considered highly criminal—in the slave; the same offences which cost a white man a few dollars only, are punished ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... more certain than that our religion will subdue the world, I own that it is with a somewhat saddened heart that I pass my thoughts around the globe, and consider how distant is yet that triumph. There are the realms on which the crescent beams, the monstrous many-headed gods of India, the Chinaman's heathenism, the African's devil-rites. These are, to a large extent, principalities and powers of darkness with which our religion has never been brought into collision, save at trivial and far separated points, and in these cases the attack has ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... whatever, either of this or any other blockade; that when, the year before, the agreement was made with Erskine, the President did not pretend that the orders in council included blockades; and that it was remarkable that he should forget his own declaration regarding the monstrous spoliation of a few months before by the French, under the Rambouillet decree, and yet remember this British order of blockade of four years before, which everybody else had forgotten. Indeed, so completely had it passed out of mind, that the American ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... floor and to the room they were assigned in common. Like the Astoria's rooms, in Leningrad, it was king-sized. In fact, it could easily have been divided into three chambers. There were four full sized beds, six arm chairs, two sofas, two vanity tables, a monstrous desk—and one wash bowl which gurgled ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... terrors of coming examinations. When it was over Joel crawled off of the scale with the emotions of a weary draught horse and took his way slowly toward home. In the square he ran against Outfield, who, armed with a monstrous bag of golf requisites, had just leaped ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... civilization. As Amelius eyed him, he drew the girl away a step or two. "You've got a gentleman this time," he said to her; "I shall expect gold to-night, or else—!" He finished the sentence by lifting his monstrous fist, and shaking it in her face. Cautiously as he had lowered his tones in speaking, the words had reached the keenly sensitive ears of Amelius. Urged by his hot temper, he sprang forward. In another moment, he would have knocked the brute down—but for ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... them, and soon separated him from the object of his care. As he was anxiously pressing on through the thickly-enveloping vapors, in the direction in which the latter had disappeared, he was suddenly confronted by a monstrous, black, and fearful living apparition, who stood before him in all the horrid paraphernalia ascribed to the prince of darkness, apparently ready to crush him to the earth, when a bright angel form swiftly interposed. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... administer stimulants to vice instead of anodynes; if they, in fact, create incitements to dishonesty too potent even for virtuous misery to withstand, are not they the authors of a system thus impregnated with corruption, virtually the parent of the monstrous litter to which it gives birth? And though according to the inflexible principles of justice, any violation of the property of another is not to be exculpated, humanity will always pity the distressed delinquent, and wish that she had the power of substituting the primary ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... From its active and unsteady motions, Jack knew it was making up its mind to attack us; so he urged us vehemently to paddle for our lives, while he himself set us the example. Suddenly he shouted, "Look out! there he comes!" and in a second we saw the monstrous fish dive close under us and turn half-over on his side. But we all made a great commotion with our paddles, which, no doubt, frightened it away for that time, as we saw it immediately after circling round ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... was still: nothing about him gave a hint of what was going on, darkly and dumbly, in the room he had flown from, and with the covering of his eyes oblivion and reassurance seemed to fall on him. But they fell for a moment only; then his lids opened again to the monstrous vision. There it was, stamped on his pupils, a part of him forever, an indelible horror burnt into his body and brain. But why into his—just his? Why had he alone been chosen to see what he had seen? What business was it of his, in God's name? Any one of the others, thus ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... charming view. To the south-east, and some three miles inland from the centre of the bay, we were shown "Looboo Wood," a thick motte conspicuously crowning a ridge, and forming a first-rate landmark. Its shades once sheltered the nyare, locally called buffalo, the gorilla, and perhaps the more monstrous "impungu" (mpongo). Eastward of the Factory appears Chomfuku, the village of Jim Potter, with a tree-clad sink, compared by old voyagers with "the large chalkpit on Portsdown Hill," and still much affected by picnickers. At Loanghili, or Loanguilli, south of Looboo Wood, and ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the tremendous struggle in which so many had gone overboard, but so dull was she of apprehension, and so little disposed to suspect anything one-half so monstrous as the truth, that she did not hesitate to comply. She was profoundly awed by the horrors of the scene through which she was passing, the raging billows of the Gulf, as seen from so small a craft, producing a deep impression on her; still a lingering of her most ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... there comes a change; war in a people's mind drives justice out.... Can soldiers fight without "seeing red"—can a nation? Not when nations have to fight on the tremendous scale of modern war. Then they are like those monstrous mechanisms of long-range destructiveness, which we so falsely call "weapons of precision," but which are in fact so horribly unprecise that, once let loose, we cannot know what lives of harmlessness, of innocence, of virtue, they are going to destroy. ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... and on the third day he came to a large and spacious forest through which his road lay. Scarcely had he entered the forest when he beheld a monstrous Giant dragging along by the hair of their heads a handsome Knight and his lady. Jack alighted from his horse, and tying him to an oak-tree, put on his invisible coat, under which he ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... for, as you see, the weight of the distemper lay upon those parts, that is to say, the city, the eight parishes over the river, with the parishes of Aldgate, Whitechapel, and Stepney, and this was the time that the bills came up to such a monstrous height as that I mentioned before, and that eight or nine, and, as I believe, ten or twelve thousand a week died; for it is my settled opinion that they[260] never could come at any just account of the numbers, for the reasons which I have ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe
... excellence of our constitution; but he feared that our nearness to France, and our zeal for liberty, would expose us to some danger. Why he should have cherished these fears is hard to say; for to him the French Revolution was "a wild attempt to methodize anarchy," "a foul, impious, monstrous thing, wholly out of the course of moral nature."[19] Surely if British and French principles were so utterly different, we were in no more danger of infection from the Jacobins than ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... under the surface. Carse's suit was still tight and he could breathe even while totally submerged in the water. He strained his left arm against the tentacle that looped it, worked the ray-gun still clasped in his hand in line with the thing's monstrous carcass, and at once, gasping and sick, ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... the thirty guineas for mourning to Mrs. Norton, with the recommendation of the good woman for housekeeper at The Grove, were thought sufficient, had the article of 600L. which was called monstrous, been omitted. Some other passages in the will were called flights, and such whimsies as distinguish people of ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... monstrous and incalculable amount of occupation that ever beset one unfortunate man, mine has been the most stupendous since I came home. The dinners I have had to eat, the places I have had to go to, the letters I have had to answer, the sea of business and of pleasure in ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... ce malheureux souverain n'a ete, des le commencement des troubles, qu'un tissu de faiblesse et de duplicite," etc. "Voila l'allie que le ciel a mis entre nos mains, et dont nous avons a retablir les interets!" Ferdinand was guilty of such monstrous perjuries and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... [Footnote: Grotesque] works; which are fantasticall pictures, having no grace, but in the variety and strangenesse of them. And what are these my compositions in truth, other than antike workes, and monstrous bodies, patched and hudled up together of divers members, without any certaine or well ordered figure, having neither order, dependencie, or proportion, but casuall and framed ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... that Welles indorsed the act of Wilkes in his report! Why couldn't we have been satisfied with the thing without making such a cackling over it? Apologies are cheap, and we could afford to make a very handsome one in this case. A war with England would ruin us. It is too monstrous to think of. May God in His mercy ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... the millions of dollars in grants made by NBSD. It was obvious that we were buying an impressive collection of shiny, glass and metal laboratories. We were buying giant pieces of laboratory equipment and monstrous machines of other kinds. We were getting endless quantities of fat reports—they fill thousands of ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... "It is almost as monstrous," Lutchester agreed, "as his daring to raise his eyes to you, although, so far as you are concerned, I believe that he is as honest as the man knows how ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... announced as she finished the pig with a round red pebble stuck in for the eye. "Let me see. What shall I draw? Oh, I know! A picture of Gran'ther Wattles! Look, Dan." She made a careful stroke. "Here 's his nose, and here 's his chin. They are monstrous near together because he has nothing but gums between! And here 's his long tithing-stick with the squirrel-tail ...
— The Puritan Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... like a weed; it now overtops and chokes the idea; it seems in these facades to exist by itself, like a monstrous and unnatural ivy, independent of support; and when expression outruns the thought, it ceases to charm. We admire the marvellous mastery with which Monet drew tower and portico: see that tower lifted out of blue haze, ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... this accursed fancy—yea, and Gilbert too, Gilbert whom I always looked to to stand by me; I have no one to send. If I go and attend upon her alone, as I have done a thousand times to my sorrow, it will but give colour to the monstrous tale; but if your good wife, an honourable lady of the Hardwicke kin, against whom none ever breathed a word, will go and give the daily attendance, then can not the Queen herself find fault, and ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... course. It's like wearing a crown of electric lamps—others see you as a dazzling thing; you are in the dark. It is my trade to use words to express my meaning, but I confess my hesitation in trying to make you see yourself as I saw you. You were like a baleful, purple star, something monstrous yet beautiful. Your fame filled the world and fell into my garret chamber like a lurid sunrise. With your coming, mysterious posters bloomed and crimson letters blazed on street-walls. Praiseful paragraphs appeared ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... proved a failure. Slavery was deplored, was denounced, and was retained. The absence of a definition of State Rights led to the most sanguinary civil war of modern times. Weighed in the scales of Liberalism the instrument, as it stood, was a monstrous fraud. And yet, by the development of the principle of Federalism, it has produced a community more powerful, more prosperous, more intelligent, and more free than any other ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... sheet of paper is torn, but from the words on the part left it is evident that there was a description of the frontispiece in the schoolmaster's book. Apparently the subject of the picture was allegorical, and the figures of "monstrous beasts" were interspersed with "devices" and "scrolls with inscriptions," ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... itself, And with full beams of majesty, the sun, Hath bless'd its fair nativity; when Heaven, Brave soldiers, and the cause of kings, Calls on the spirit of your loyalty, To chastise this rebellion, and tread down, Such foul ingratitude—such monstrous shape, Of horrid liberty, which spurns that love— That fond maternal tenderness of soul, Which on this dreary coast, first planted them: Restrain'd the rage, of murdering savages, Which, with fierce inroad, on their settlements, Made frequent war—struck down the arm of France, Just rais'd, to ...
— The Battle of Bunkers-Hill • Hugh Henry Brackenridge
... back like an unwinding reel and there are no secrets into which I may not look. And then the moment passes and I remember that this dry-as-dust world is shrieking always for proofs—this extraordinary conglomeration of human animals in weird attire, with monstrous tastes and extraordinary habits, who make up what they ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... communication already described, of the mysterious arrival in his dominions on the day previous; and had been so greatly disconcerted and enraged at the news that he had forthwith issued the most peremptory orders for the capture or slaughter of the monstrous visitant; and he was now, according to Lualamba, impatiently awaiting in his palace, a few miles distant, the intelligence that his order had been executed. The chief, during the conversation which elicited these facts, had so far recovered his self-possession ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... lad,' said Major Trenton, laughing, ''tis a monstrous fine joke, anyway, and, faith, I sent one of the copies to the Governor himself. 'Twill amuse ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... an about face. But this time to confront the enemy. There were three of them, as monstrous as those Vye and Hume had fought in the same place. And one of them was wounded, swinging a charred forepaw before it, and giving voice to ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... again takes up her brightly feathered arrows. "Nippon Kane ('the Japanese brass'); it is the Japanese brass that is sounding!" It is the monstrous gong of a monastery, situated in a suburb beneath us. It is powerful indeed, "the Japanese brass"! When the strokes are ended, when it is no longer heard, a vibration seems to linger among the suspended foliage, and a prolonged quiver ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... other cause who may say, but certain it is that the man and the boy, soaked to the skin and chilled to the marrow, triumphantly bore home that morning to the mill, where Purdie's father then lived, a most monstrous ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... do plainly prove. For who ever before that profane Pelagius presumed so much of man's free will, that he thought not the grace of God necessary to aid it in every particular good act? Who ever before his monstrous disciple Celestius denied all mankind to be bound with the guilt of Adam's transgression? Who ever before sacrilegious Arius durst rend in pieces the Unity of Trinity? Who ever before wicked Sabellius durst confound the Trinity of Unity? Who ever before cruel Novatian affirmed ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... forcing upon himself to offset the more reasonable supposition that, as in the case of the golden snare, she belonged to Bram. He tried to free himself of that thought, but it clung to him with a tenaciousness that oppressed him with a grim and ugly foreboding. What a monstrous fate for a woman! He shivered. For a few moments every instinct in his body fought to assure him that such a thing could not happen. And yet he knew that it COULD happen. A woman up there—with Bram! A woman with hair like spun gold—and that giant ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... returned. The sea, changing from the warm glitter of a gem, and attuned to the grays and blacks of space, resembled a monstrous cinder under a sky ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... but to require that gentlemen whose whole faculties should be bent upon the acquirement of a real knowledge of human physiology should worry themselves with getting up hearsay about the alternation of generations in the Salpae is really monstrous. I cannot characterize it in any other way. And having sacrificed my own pursuit, I am sure I may sacrifice other people's; and I make this remark with all the more willingness because I discovered, on reading the name-of your ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... they had a pactum with the devil; and that to him they seemed more worthy of pity than of punishment? Hereupon I answered that I had not indeed read any such book (for say, who can read all that fools write?), but that the appearances here and in all other places proved that it was a monstrous error to deny the reality of witchcraft, inasmuch as people might then likewise deny that there were such things as murder, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... choice. The great fight was over the Bank, and on that question Jackson was supported by the prejudices of the poor, who thought of the Bank merely as a rich men's institution, by the fears of the ignorant, who believed the Bank to be a mysterious and monstrous affair, and by the instinct of liberty in many others, who, though they did not believe the charges against Biddle, did feel that there was danger in so powerful a financial agency so closely connected with ...
— Andrew Jackson • William Garrott Brown
... their Aigle for full Freedom no more pants, And the Senator, he mutthers ov "degraded immigrants." Says they can't "assimilate" us; faix, the wurrud sounds monstrous foine, But Oi fancy that it's maning is, "We mane to draw ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, February 4, 1893 • Various
... LIVES, not only their souls. It is for active, service that soldiers are drilled, and trained, and fed, and armed. That is why you and I are in the world at all—not to prepare to go out of it some day, but to serve God actively in it NOW. It is monstrous, and shameful, and cowardly to talk of seeking the Kingdom LAST. It is shirking duty, abandoning one's rightful post, playing into the enemy's hand by doing nothing to turn his flank. Every hour a Kingdom is coming in your heart, in your home, in the world near you, be it a Kingdom ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... other hand, this war is no accident, but an inevitable result of long incubating causes; inevitable as the cataclysms that swept away the monstrous births of primeval nature; if it is for no mean, unworthy end, but for national life, for liberty everywhere, for humanity, for the kingdom of God on earth; if it is not hopeless, but only growing to such dimensions that the world shall remember the final triumph of right ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... with robes so glossy, and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast,—could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian Laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution! At an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never opened save for the three periodical egressions ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... such as might match grey hairs? Nay, the most offensive thing about him is that his pernicious deeds go scot free; he is too young to punish, yet old enough to do injury. Injury, did I say? No! crime, unfilial, black, monstrous, intolerable crime! ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... who is in that photo, I suppose—Leslie. He looked about a year old in the portrait, and it's thirteen years since Uncle Tristram died, so he's probably fourteen or so now. To think of a kid of fourteen taking my place here! It's monstrous!" ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... The which when Patrick heard, taught by the Divine Spirit, he knew that the vessel of evil was hardened in reprobation, prepared in no wise for correction, but rather for perdition; and thus he prayed unto the Lord: "O Lord God, as thou knowest this vulpine man to be monstrous in vice, do thou in a monstrous mode cast him forth from the face of the earth, and appoint an end unto his offences!" Then the Lord, inclining his ear unto the voice of his servant, while on a certain time the tyrant stood in the middle of his ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... him—a great bore for him, I suspect." We rode to the spot whence the sound came. There, sure enough, suspended from the low branch of a tree was a huge boa-constrictor, some twenty feet long, perhaps, which had just enclosed a wild pig in its monstrous folds. While we looked he descended, and lubricating the animal with the saliva from his mouth, and placing himself before it, took the snout in his jaws and began to suck it in. We had not time to wait, as our friend told ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... positive significance, like the beautiful, the sublime, the majestic, the solemn, the serious, the weighty, the noble, the elevated; others have a significance especially negative, like the ugly, the horrible, the dreadful, the tremendous, the monstrous, the foolish, the extravagant; in others prevails a mixed significance, as is the case with the comic, the tender, the melancholy, the humorous, the tragi-comic. The complications are infinite, because the individuations are infinite; hence it is not possible to construct the concepts, save ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... was thoroughly and terribly in earnest; secondly, he was entirely posted on all the arguments for and against this mammoth subject of temperance—he had studied it carefully and diligently; and, finally, he always grew so tremendously indignant and sarcastic over the monstrous wrong, and the ridiculous and inconsistent opinions held by the masses, that in ten minutes after he commenced talking about it he would have forgotten his audience in his massive subject, even though the President and his Cabinet had been among them. So on this particular evening, ...
— Three People • Pansy
... divorcing her husband in order to marry him. Then, just when she was ready, he had turned and told her in the most heartless way that it had been all play, and that he would not marry her under any circumstances. It seemed monstrous to the innocent girl that they should even have spoken of marriage, until the divorce was accomplished. Then, of course, it would have been all right. Clare had been brought up with modern ideas about divorce in general, as being a fair and just thing in certain circumstances. She had ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... him. Working within him the impression of vast, innumerable, fleeing shadows, thick-crowding memories of all the ways and deeds of an existence fallen from its early dreams and aims, poured across the midnight of his soul, and under the streaming melancholy of the dirge, his life showed like some monstrous treason. It did not terrify or madden him; he listened to it rapt utterly as in some deadening ether of dream; yet feeling to his inmost core all its powerful grief and accusation, and quietly aghast ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... justice? It was certainly an apparent vengeance on their crime of mutiny and piracy that brought them to the state they were in; and as they shewed not the least remorse for the crime, but added new villanies to it, such as particularly that piece of monstrous cruelty of wounding a poor slave because he did not, or perhaps could not understand to do what he was directed, and to wound him in such a manner as, no question, made him a cripple all his life, and in a place where no surgeon or medicine could be had for ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... victims had been the allies and dependants of Rome; they had drawn revenues from kings and free peoples, they had pillaged the public treasury. But they had not yet begun to put up for sale the security of the empire and of Rome itself. Now this last and monstrous stage had been reached. The authority of the senate, the power which the people had delegated to its magistrate, had been betrayed to the most dangerous of foes; not satisfied with treating the allies of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... of her every-day existence retained on its mighty face a wondrous serenity, unruffled by any emotion, as though it were but a mute witness of the laughter and the tears which the Seine seemed to roll in its flood. She had, according to her mood, endowed it with monstrous cruelty or almighty goodness. To-day she felt that she would be ever ignorant of it, in its indifference and immensity. It spread before her; it ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... the land, to every sacred principle of law and order, they could disappear at will, apparently invisible and invulnerable to the officers of the peace and the guardians of the public safety? It was incredible, it was monstrous, degrading, nay, intolerable, and a remedy would have to be found either in the reorganisation of an inefficient police force or in the resignation ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... received the barbed and poisoned arrow intended for his master, and died most impressively, with George and Honoria, and Richard Coeur de Lion, and most of the characters from "Ivanhoe," sobbing round his bed. There was a Blondel variant too, with George imprisoned in a high tower; and a monstrous conglomerate tale in which most of the heroes of history and romance played second fiddle to George, whose pre-eminence, though occasionally challenged by Achilles, Sir Lancelot, or the Black Prince, was regularly vindicated by Taffy's ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sternal notch to the navel, having one cord and one placenta. It was stillborn. The diagnosis was made before operation by vaginal examination. In a communication to Croston, Harris remarked that this was the first successful Cesarean section for double monstrous conception in America, and added that in 1881 Collins and Leidy performed the same ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... mystical regenerated Church. If he mean this, it is nothing to the argument in question; if not, then he must assert the monstrous absurdity of, No unregenerate ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... plague—when to my aching sight Appeared a scene of most terrific woe; Around me burnt one monstrous blaze of light, I warmed, and almost melted with its glow; I burst the chains,[6] which bound me fast, asunder, And now remain, to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... powers divine! spare all this noise, This rack of heaven, and speak your fatal pleasure. Why breaks yon dark and dusky orb away? Why from the bleeding womb of monstrous night, Burst forth such myriads of abortive stars? Ha! my Jocasta, look! the silver moon! A settling crimson stains her beauteous face! She's all o'er blood! and look, behold again, What mean the mystic heavens she journies on? A vast ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... walked home encouraged; his purpose of buying a horse had not seemed so monstrous, at least to this hardened offender. He now began to announce it more boldly; he said right and left that he wished to buy a horse, but that he would not go above a hundred. This was not true, but he wished to act ...
— Buying a Horse • William Dean Howells
... every one of that interesting series; and a statue or two, especially that famous one commonly called the Lahcoon, so as to rhyme with moon and spoon, and representing an old man with his two sons in the embraces of two monstrous serpents. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... rebellion against his authority, at all events; and her hands remained in his clasp until of his own accord he opened his fingers with an exclamation. "Do you wear bracelets for rings, my fair, or what? What!" From the monstrous bauble in his palm, he raised his eyes to hers, and if she had seen their look she might have answered differently. But her gaze was still on the ring; and as she felt him start, that impish dimple ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... that state became united in the emperor, these legacies followed the general current, and flowed in upon the common patron. In the will of every considerable person he inherited with the children and relations, and such devises formed no inconsiderable part of his revenue: a monstrous practice, which let an absolute sovereign into all the private concerns of his subjects, and which, by giving the prince a prospect of one day sharing in all the great estates, whenever he was urged by avarice or necessity, naturally pointed out a resource by an anticipation always in his power. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... moment, did he feel sure of the execution of his project. But even if every question had been settled, every doubt cleared away, every difficulty overcome, he would probably have renounced his design on the instant, as something absurd, monstrous, and impossible. But there were still a host of matters to arrange, of problems to solve. As to procuring the hatchet, this trifle did not trouble Raskolnikoff in the least, for nothing was easier. As a matter of fact Nastasia was scarcely ever at home, especially of ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... There is a frequent cry for a graduated income-tax; and surely if an unscrupulous demagogue in office were to contrive such a graduation as would subject a peer to three times the income-tax borne by a commoner, it would be a monstrous iniquity if the peers were to have no power of protecting themselves in their ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... down the hall, listened. He opened the door wide, but very softly, and came through it tiptoeing, a huge figure, almost shapeless in its monstrous rotundity. He moved with astonishing swiftness to the staircase, looked down, then fixed his black eyes with a kind of animal ferocity upon the closed door of the Judge's office until he reached it, and laid one of his little red ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... automobile standing askew across the road and panting. There was a low, semicircular seat with a man in it behind a large steering wheel, a seat so slanted that its occupant was practically recumbent. He had ear-flaps and monstrous goggles. I had a momentary mental picture of him as some Roman staff-officer rushing back to the base in his chariot. He had an imperious air as he glared at me and backed his machine with one hand to straighten it. I found my voice. I ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... shelf to shelf, where the rock had been blasted away so as to form a flight of the roughest of rough steps of monstrous size, while, trembling in every limb, ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... unwrought ore, within each vasty brain; And as a prejudice exists that those Who never do disclose The knowledge that they boast of, seldom have any, Each of his learned ancestors had died, By an ungrateful world belied, And dubb'd a Zany. That HE should be Denied a pedigree! Appeared so monstrous in this land of freedom, He instantly conceived the notion To go down to the House and make a motion, That all men had a right to those ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... and for that very reason he acquitted himself with more dignity and quiet calm than usual. He held himself with such a tight rein that his soul ached, but he never relaxed his hold. He told himself that it would be monstrous if by a word or gesture, by a tone of the voice, he betrayed anything to this little, innocent, timid, frightened girl on his arm. He never dreamed of the remotest possibility of dreams on her part. The soul beside him, seemingly separated only by thin walls of flesh, was ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... cried; "I will take the sour with the sweet. I will pay the penalty of having enjoyed God in this monstrous modern earth that cannot enjoy man or beast. I will die happy in your madhouse, only because I know what I know. Let it be granted, then—MacIan is a mystic; MacIan is a maniac. But this honest shopkeeper and editor whom I have dragged on my inhuman escapades, you cannot keep him. He will go free, ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... than usual as he crossed the kitchen floor. Undressing was a Titan's task, a monstrous futility, and he wept weakly as he crawled into bed, one shoe still on. He was aware of a rising, swelling something inside his head that made his brain thick and fuzzy. His lean fingers felt as big as his wrist, while in the ends of them was a remoteness ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... his blood-stained rifle; in another moment he would have been safe. But he was so chilled—so stiff from the cold, that he missed his hold when first he sprang to catch the lowest branch, and before he could try again, a monstrous gray wolf dashed toward him. With a hungry howl, its jaws dripping blood, it launched itself through the air, straight for ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... her innocence, and told the real cause of the shaving of her hair; when a universal burst of surprise took place, every one exclaiming, how monstrous it was that a married woman should be so degraded, without having committed the crime of infidelity. "Either this man," said they, "must be a liar, or he is the greatest fool on the face of the earth!" Such, I daresay, gentlemen, you will think me, and I am sure you will consider ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... snow. And hard aboord the shoare of this coast, there is 100 or 150 fadomes of water in depth. [Sidenote: Zenam Island.] Thus proceeding and sailing forward, we fell with an Island called Zenam, being in the latitude of 70 degrees. About this Island we saw many Whales, very monstrous, about our ships, some, by estimation of 60 foot long: and being the ingendring time they roared and cried terriblie. [Sidenote: Kettelwike Island.] From thence we fell with an Island, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... Substantially the whole propertied class obtained its wealth by methods which, if not the same, had a strong relationship. His methods differed nowise from those of many cotton planters of the South who stole, on a monstrous scale,[91] Government land and then with the wealth derived from their thefts, bought negro slaves, set themselves up in the glamour of a patriarchal aristocracy and paraded a florid display of chivalry ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... woman paused for breath, and in her horror, she hid her face in her hands. She had her faults, no doubt, and she knew that the world was bad, but she had never dreamt of such barefaced and utterly monstrous cynicism as Sabina's. If the girl had been overcome with shame and repentance, and had broken down entirely, imploring help and forgiveness, as would have seemed natural, the Baroness, for her own social sake, might have been at last moved to help her out ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... thought it a monstrous thing that the Sabines, because they had been admitted to a share of the city and the country, should propose to rule over it; while the Sabines not unreasonably urged that because, after the death of Tatius, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... been lost to him, and all resources for anything else had fled from his universe. Anon some wrinkled, fidgety, cogitative being in human form would add a new volume to some slope or tower of the monstrous omni-patulent mass, or some sharp-glancing youth, with teeth set unevenly on edge, would pull out a volume, look greedily and half-believingly for a few moments, return it, and slink away. "What is this world, and what means ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... was conscious of keeping it up, of ministering to an illusion as monstrous as it was absurd. She had married Mr. Ransome, believing with a final and absolute conviction in his wisdom and his goodness. What she was keeping up had kept up for twenty-two years, and would keep up forever, was the attitude of her undying youth. It ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... matter for speculation, whether any real meeting took place of any of the persons above enumerated, which gave occasion for the monstrous versions of the witnesses at this trial. It is far from unlikely, that on the apprehension and commitment of Old Demdike, Old Chattox, Alizon Device, and Anne Redfern to Lancaster, a meeting would take place of their near relations, and others who ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... his window at dusk moodily looking out while the invisible filaments that drew him to her tightened unbearably, he saw Jeff go past. At once Reardon knew Jeff was going to her, and he found it monstrous that the husband whose existence meant everything to him should be seeking her unhindered. He got his hat and coat and hurried out into the street in time to see Jeff turn in at her gate. He strode along that way, and then halted and ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... observer,[13] in which the fault lay in the offspring, and not in the mother: in a part of Yorkshire the farmers continued to select cattle with large hind-quarters, until they made a strain called "Dutch-buttocked," and "the monstrous size of the buttocks of the calf was frequently fatal to the cow, and numbers of cows were annually ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... and dark below the heavy sky, but light immediately above the horizon as the sun sank down; the appearance of her horse's ears—those ears and that tuft of wayward mane between them of which she had grown so weary; the lighted walls of the London streets; the monstrous shadows of the eaves; the flare of lights; the moving figures—these came first; and then faces—Father Campion's, smiling, with white teeth and narrowed eyes, bright against the dark chimney-breast; Alice's serene features, framed in flaxen hair; and then, as sleep ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... far more welcome, Miriam—more natural under the circumstances. This cool philosophy in one so young is monstrous! Mock me no longer with your calm compassion—it maddens ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield |
