"Nightmare" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his nightly speech, introducing the Love-r-ly Cup; and it meant that, for me, duty called. From where I sat I could see Izzy looking about the room, and I knew he was looking for me. It's the management's nightmare that one of these evenings Mabel or I won't show up, and somebody else will get away with the ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... agreed Tom, "I will. You see, when I got home and into bed, I had a sort of nightmare. Just suppose, for instance, that the mark on my face is where the nightmare kicked me and that I skinned my knuckles against the bedstead when I tried to jump over the bed to return the ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... slowly and increased in frequency, and I think in severity, as the time went on, until, to me at any rate, it became somewhat of a nightmare. Within a week of our arrival at Phalemphin the guard would rush at, beat, strike, or kick any man who had a pipe or cigarette in his mouth while we were ...
— The 23rd (Service) Battalion Royal Fusiliers (First Sportsman's) - A Record of its Services in the Great War, 1914-1919 • Fred W. Ward
... tell me they have 'come into my life to stay'—certainly not young men who come into my life by way of a trap-door, and without an introduction, without a name, without even a hat! It's absurd! It's not real! It's a nightmare!" ...
— The Lost House • Richard Harding Davis
... the strange life of the three went on unmarked by any unusual occurrences. At least without any occurrences that seemed unusual to the youth or the ape; but to the little girl it was a constant nightmare of horrors for days and weeks, until she too became accustomed to gazing into the eyeless sockets of death and to the feel of the icy wind of his shroud-like mantle. Slowly she learned the rudiments of the only common medium of thought exchange which her ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that Drusilla had been left a fortune and was going away. Some of the ladies were plainly envious and said spiteful, catty things, while others were glad that at least one of their number would be able to leave behind the "home"—the living on charity—that nightmare of the old. Drusilla had endeared most of them to her by her many kindly acts, prompted by a loving heart that even years of poverty and unappreciated labor for others had ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... said, "what a nightmare it has been! And what a fool, I, to think anything could come between us. Has she not been utterly mine since that sacred night spent here? And I have left her to loneliness and grief?.... I will arise and go to my beloved. No past, ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... distributed. America, England, Samoa, Sydney, everywhere I have an end of liability hanging out and some shelf of credit hard by; and to juggle all these and build a dwelling-place here, and check expense - a thing I am ill fitted for - you can conceive what a nightmare it is at times. Then God knows I have not been idle. But since THE MASTER nothing has come to raise any coins. I believe the springs are dry at home, and now I am worked out, and can no more at all. A holiday ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... like a change in a dream to Tessa—the escape from nightmare into floating safety and joy—to find herself taken care of by this lady, so lovely, and powerful, and gentle. She let Romola unfasten her necklace and clasp, while she herself did nothing but look up at the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the cure of toothache, and for expelling the particular disembodied spirit, or "mare," which visited our Saxon ancestors during their sleep after supper, being familiarly known to them as the "nightmare." The "Echo" was in like manner thought by the Saxons to be due to a spectre, or mare, which they called the "wood mare." The Water [51] Betony is said to make one of the ingredients in Count Mattaei's noted remedy, "anti-scrofuloso." ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... the kind. It was a nightmare which could only end in exasperating the two impassioned creatures, on whom the lawyer had something of the fascinating effect of a snake on a pair of birds; before long they would be driven to ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... a pleasant walk. Rations and carrying parties, though they have developed a rather peculiar gait, can progress at a reasonable pace, and have no need to wade so long as they keep to the boards. On either side, however, we still have a reminder of the nightmare that is past. The possibility of getting material up has a corresponding effect on the work in the trenches. The trench we were in on December 9th, which we could not conceive ever being anything but a drain, has now found its proper use. It ...
— Short History of the London Rifle Brigade • Unknown
... me, and I should have to yield to it in the end. The longer I struggled against it, the deeper the sleep that would follow; and perhaps I might fall into some profound slumber from which I might never awake—some terrible "nightmare" that would bind me beyond the power of moving, and thus render me an easy prey to the voracious ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... how quite a lot of people seem to imagine national bankruptcy: as a catastrophic jolt. It is a quite impossible nightmare of cessation. The reality is the completest contrast. All the belligerent countries of the world are at the present moment quietly, steadily and progressively going bankrupt, and the mass of people are not even aware of this ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... start. Perhaps without that fear upon us we might have reached the house, but as it was we felt as one feels in a nightmare, unable to run though in an agony of terror. Getting over the wall was the worst, for there Hugh stumbled badly, and I had to turn and help him, watching the man bounding ever nearer, signing to us to stay for him. A minute later, as we slipped and stumbled through the scrub of ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... body and chilled the very marrow of her aching bones. The little one lay a dead weight in her arms. The ceaseless attacks of the cruel wind sapped her strength. She wanted to rest, but she remembered it wouldn't do to stop. Every step was a nightmare ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... thousands who were thronging the streets and public places of London—brave, simple-minded young men, all of them, with tangled recollections in their brains of blood and fire and hell, and a game leg or a lost arm to remind them that the whole thing was not a nightmare. He looked a little disconsolately around, and was on the point of rejoining the others when the friend for whom he was searching came hurriedly through ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 28ft. above sea-level. Consequently the river's course is very easily altered. Look at Stanford's map of this region and see how the Euphrates has lost itself between Nasiriyah and Basra—"old channel," "new channel," creeks, marshes, lakes, flood-areas and so on; the place is a nightmare. That kind of thing is liable to happen anywhere if the river is neglected. So that our schemes for Lower Mesopotamia might be spoilt by the indolence of those in possession higher up the river: let alone the security of the trade-routes ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... many Burgs of wood and stone they built, in different parts; what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in woody boggy places, they had, no man has counted. Their life, read in Dryasdust's newest chaotic Books (which are of endless length, among other ill qualities), is like a dim nightmare of unintelligible marching and fighting: one feels as if the mere amount of galloping they had would have carried the Order several times round the Globe. What multiple of the Equator was it, then, O Dryasdust? The Herr Professor, little studious ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... guests in all the violence of rage, disorder, and fatigue: his nostrils were dilated more than one-half beyond their natural capacity, his eyes rolled, his teeth chattered, he snored in breathing as if he had been oppressed by the nightmare, and streams of sweat flowed down ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Christopher winced; the nightmare of his life had been the terror of boring Elisabeth, for he was wise enough to know that a woman may love a man with whom she is angry, but never one by whom ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... he felt as if he had been oppressed by a terrible nightmare; he opened his eyes and experienced an indescribable sensation of mental comfort, whilst a soft and most beautiful sensation of warmth pervaded his body. He lay on his own bed in his own room at home; ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... gaoler. A member of Parliament can be coughed down or counted out. Town-councillors can be tabooed. But no one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sindbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sunday's rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes God's service distasteful. We are not forced into church! No: but we desire more than that. We desire not to be forced to stay away. We desire, nay, we are resolute, to ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... that has stood in the way of resumption is the nightmare of things that have existence only in the brain, and not in fact. We can only deal with the current course of events based upon probabilities, and cannot provide for ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... dumb agony. Colette's foul walls and maculate table-linen, and even down to Colette's villainous casters, seemed like objects in a nightmare. And just then there came a knock and a scurrying; the police, so lamentably absent from the Calton Hill, appeared upon the scene; and the party, taken FLAGRANTE DELICTO, with their glasses at their elbow, were seized, marched ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dogs bark in Mackinac village, and leaves moving behind her, and the wash of water at the base of the island which always sounded like a small rain. Instead of feeling afraid, she was in a nightmare of sorrow. Pontiac had loved the French almost as well as he loved his own people. She breathed the sweetbrier scent, her neck stretched forward and her dark eyes fixed on him; and as his head turned back from St. Ignace ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... river; I see then small tugs that drag huge barges, floating beams.... All this is infinitely grey, damp, and dismal. When I run from the river I come across the fallen cemetery gates, funerals, my school-teachers.... And all the time I am cold through and through with that oppressive nightmare-like cold which is impossible in waking life, and which is only felt by those who are asleep. The first pages of "Karelin's Dream" vividly brought it to my memory—especially the first half of page five, where you speak of the cold ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... near enough to the town to hear,—only too much. They heard the tramp of men, shouts and yells. Then the shrill cries of women. All dull and muffled the sounds came to them through the still night; and they lay there spell-bound, as in a nightmare, as men assisting at some horrible tragedy, which they had no power to prevent. Then there was a glare, and a wisp of smoke against the black sky, and then a house began burning brightly, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... ate nothing but fish, of so many different kinds and some of them so strange, that I almost feared the dream might turn into a nightmare afterwards. I found the clams rather like olives; you hate the first, but when you have had three you feel you would like three dozen; and they are not at ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... shall I answer this man if he asks me why I continued to remain in a spot where I have so little business." The impulse came to go. But such was the effect of this strange convocation of persons, at night and in a mist which was itself a nightmare, that I failed to take action and remained riveted to my place, while Mr. Smead consulted his roll and finally asked in a business-like tone, quite unlike his previous sarcastic speech, the names of those whom he had the pleasure ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... charge! Betraying his country to Spain! Absurd—incredible—he would laugh it to scorn: but it is bitter earnest. There is no escape. True or false, he sees that his enemies will have his head. It is maddening: a horrible nightmare. He cannot bear it; he cannot face—so he writes to that beloved wife—'the scorn, the taunts, the loss of honour, the cruel words of lawyers.' He stabs himself. Read that letter of his, written after the mad ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... escapade that landed me in the Tolbooth there came an end to the nightmare years of my first youth. A week later I got word that my father was dead of an ague in the Low Countries, and I had to be off post-haste to Auchencairn to see to the ordering of our little estate. We were destined to be bitter poor, what with dues and regalities incident ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... in consultation, and a sense of hysteria that was always just a scratch beneath the surface of Mrs. Becker. She would break suddenly into loud and unexpected fits of crying, crushing her palms up against her mouth; would waken from a light doze beside the bed, on the shriek of a nightmare, and have literally to be dragged from the room. She harassed the doctors with questions that only the course of ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... the universe, in the various spectacle outside our minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard, against finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed in the balance and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... oppressive nightmare with which we have been loaded? Is it, then, all a frightful dream, and are there no regicides in the world? Have we not heard of that prodigy of a ruffian who would not suffer his benignant sovereign, with his hands tied behind him, and stripped ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... shape and colour—diminutive bodies ovate and round—brown, grey, glossy black with brown edgings, pink with grey quarterings and grey fringe, whence radiate five sprawling slender "legs," a foot or so long. Though doubtful in appearance, more in consonance with the creepy imagery of a nightmare than a reality of the better day, these are merely the shy and innocent brittle stars. They are endowed with such exquisitive sensitiveness that to evade capture they sacrifice, apparently without a pang, their wriggling legs piece by piece, and each piece, large or small, squirms ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... suffered, but nothing ever brought home to me so deeply, and with such cutting force, the hideous nature of war and the iron hand of discipline, as did that lonely death on the misty hillside in the early morning. (p. 215) Even now, as I write this brief account of it, a dark nightmare seems to rise out of the past and almost makes me shrink from facing once again memories that were so painful. It is well, however, that people should know what our men had to endure. Before them were the German shells, the machine-guns and the floods of gas. Behind them, if their courage failed, ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... breathing labored and difficult. And then they were in a lift that dropped into the depths of its shaft with dizzying speed. Antazzo's grin; Tom's eyes, dull and lifeless, floating there in the haze before his own—it was all a nightmare from which he ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... wake her, he might grabble at the counterpane with palsy- twitching fingers. As for the twins, he was quite determined to teach them a lesson. The first thing to be done was, of course, to sit upon their chests, so as to produce the stifling sensation of nightmare. Then, as their beds were quite close to each other, to stand between them in the form of a green, icy-cold corpse, till they became paralysed with fear, and finally, to throw off the winding-sheet, ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... up but could not move. His lungs labored as though they would burst. His legs refused to obey his will. He felt as if he were in the clutches of a nightmare. ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... talked on of my experiences and sensations, till suddenly I noticed, in the appearance of my charming neighbour, something—a slightly glazed look in her eyes, a just perceptible irregularity in her breathing—which turned that occasion for me into a kind of Nightmare. ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... had caused me to look upon meat very much as a necessary evil in the routine of life. While I was seated at the table, the old woman, who now dozed over her distaff in the chimneycorner, would start up every five minutes or so, as if from the beginning of a nightmare, and rush at the flies, which were ravenously busy upon the grapes and pears that I had set aside for them. She hated them with a hatred so fierce and bitter that I thought it rather unbecoming at ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... was irritated, for though that queer little man was making some pretence at dusting or replacing chairs, still his eyes never left me for a moment, and at last, being somewhat drowsy, I had the sensation that one experiences in a nightmare, and thought I had better resort to my room and make up for a shortened night. No sooner, however, had I got up from my chair than the waiter was entreating me to remain, offering to heap coals on the fire, to bring me another paper or a pillow if I was tired, and 'Did I wish to write ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... us, and provincial JOANS OF ARC going out fighting for Church and King; and then, just as we are hanging suspended in mid-air over an awful precipice, there is a last gallant effort, and we awake to find ourselves gasping for breath, and awake to the fact that "Q.'s Pegasus" is a nightmare. It recalls memories of LOUIS STEVENSON'S Black Arrow, but distances it by miles, while here and there its vivid descriptions are equal to some of the glowing pictures in SHORTHOUSE'S John Inglesant. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... taking expenses out of pocket and loss of time into account, cost me something over a hundred guineas, and all I got in exchange for them, was the reputation of a Munchausen whenever I dared to open my mouth on the subject, and a perennial liability to nightmare, with the repetition and aggravation of all the worst ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... the principal feature, and mechanically put his fingers, in search of the necessary money, where his waistcoat pocket should have been. But here the cotton gown, which had nobly stood by him so far, and which he had basely forgotten, intervened, and frustrated his efforts. In a sort of nightmare he struggled with the strange uncanny thing that seemed to hold his hands, turn all muscular strivings to water, and laugh at him all the time; while other travellers, forming up in a line behind, waited with impatience, making suggestions of more or less value ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... him a moment in consternation. The man was incredible, unreal, fantastic, a nightmare judge. Then he ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... in that silent house? He endeavoured to follow the direction of her gaze, but it seemed to be fixed on the row of bells behind the kitchen door. Then, like a half-awakened sleeper released from the horror of a nightmare, she sank back in her previous listless attitude, ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... their arms, their faces white under the moon, their eyes large and frightened like the eyes of little children. He tried to push their babel off from him. He could not understand.... Was this a continuation of the nightmare of the afternoon? There was a roar just behind their ears as it seemed. They saw a light flash upon the sky and fade, flash again and fade. With their faces towards the horizon ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... excellent nobleman, Lord Binning. The rejection of this Act arose, I believe, neither from the parsimony nor the poverty of the freeholders, but from a dread of introducing into the kingdom that system which has been denominated the nightmare of ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... I would distinguish,' answered Gotthold, leaning back and joining the tips of his fingers. 'There are various kinds of popularity; the bookish, which is perfectly impersonal, as unreal as the nightmare; the politician's, a mixed variety; and yours, which is the most personal of all. Women take to you; footmen adore you; it is as natural to like you as to pat a dog; and were you a saw-miller you would be the most popular citizen in Grunewald. As a prince - well, you are in the wrong trade. It is ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... during the first week or so of his sojourn in England he had refused to look at newspapers and—at least so it seemed to me—had sought to banish the Dreyfus affair and his own troubles from his mind, much as one might seek to drive away a hateful nightmare. But before long he again fell under the spell and followed the course of events with the keenest interest. And again and again, reading of the great battle being waged in France, he longed to return home, and grew ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... it like a beast, and with hands that trembled in a manner painful to behold, tore it open and unfolded the letter. As he read, terror seemed to mount upon him to the pitch of nightmare. He struck one hand upon his brow, while with the other, as if unconsciously, he crumpled the paper to a ball. 'My gracious powers!' he cried; and then, dashing to the window, which stood open on the garden, he clapped forth his ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... troubled years just past, America has been going through a long nightmare of war and division, of crime and inflation. Even more deeply, we have gone through a long, dark night of the American spirit. But now that night is ending. Now we must let our spirits soar again. Now we are ready for the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... What a condition for a country! And now France is fighting not so much to recover her lost provinces, she is fighting to recover her self-respect and her national independence; she is fighting to shake off this nightmare that has been on her soul for over a generation, [cheers,] a France with Germany constantly meddling, bullying, and interfering. And that is what would happen if Russia were trampled upon, France broken, Britain disarmed. We should be left ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... exclaimed eagerly. "Look! I will make you an offer. Free me from this horrible nightmare, give me your word that you will not persecute me further, and I ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... Moorish mosaic. Again we flashed past a troglodyte village in a hillside; crossed a magnificent bridge, which even Dick approved; wound through a labyrinth of strange streets like the streets in a nightmare, and roads to match; smelt mingled perfumes of incense, burning braziers, cigarettes, and garlic (the true and intimate smell of country Spain); saw Duenas, where fair Isabel la Catolica met Ferdinand in the making of the most romantic of royal courtships; spun through ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and her husband and boys came out to stay with Henrietta. The visits were not occasions of much happiness, and a certain day remained for years as a mild nightmare in Evelyn's memory. They were all in Milan one spring, when the patron of the hotel announced that his lady cousin, who lived at some out-of-the-way little country town, had heard from her friend, a priest in that same little town, that on Tuesday there was to be a special ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... a comfort to me," he said. "It means an end of every thing. It means annihilation; it means getting rid of this nightmare of existence. I can remember when I dreaded the idea of annihilation, but I have come to feel that it is the only good to be desired. To be done with every thing and to forget every thing! Don't you see, Helen; I should never be ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... now. "You are the only man left on Earth." That had been enough for him to hear. He didn't more than half believe it. His mind was too confused for conviction about anything. Everything he saw and felt and heard might be some kind of nightmare. But then it might all be real instead, and that was abysmal horror. Ned was no coward—death and danger of any ordinary Earthly kind, he could have faced bravely. But the loneliness here, and the utter strangeness, ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... how pure and sweet and remote from any suspicion of hovering harm! It unshackled him as from a dreadful nightmare. ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... almost invariably affected to tears by his reading. But, on the other hand, a scene which he saw, when he and certain other boys were waiting to have their exercises looked over, was for years a kind of nightmare to him. There was a slow and stupid boy in the class, whom Mr. Russell chose to consider obstinate, and who was severely caned, in the presence of the others, for mistakes in his exercise. Even ten years after, Hugh could remember with a species of ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... between the acts to waste money on high-priced refreshments, and remain in their places to the bitter end—unlike the cash patrons, so many of whom bustle away brutally towards the close of the entertainment for fear lest they should miss the chance of earning a nightmare at a fashionable restaurant. Seeing what service they render to the managers the deadheads are perhaps entitled to the protection of ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... hearts were very full of a possible separation, and for some days after it lay like a heavy nightmare on them. Then a letter arrived from Rob which turned the current of their thoughts. It was his first letter from India, and the boys looked at the foreign stamps and paper, as if it were the ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre
... is a nightmare of the mind, peculiarly unfavourable to success in business. The laws of games of chance are as inexorable as those of the universe. A skilful player will, in the long run, defeat a less skilful one; the bank at Monte Carlo will always beat ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... too, at Lynchburg, who sent me his "regards." Poor fellow! He says he still has "dreams"! He told her a few, but she says they were chiefly about meeting me at a ball, when I always treated him with the most freezing coldness. The same old nightmare. How often he has told me of that same dream, that tormented him eighteen months ago. He says he often thinks of me now—and he still "dreams" of me! "Dreams are baseless fabrics whose timbers are mere ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... the light, bounding, swaying life of a ship. But there are docks and docks. The ugliness of some docks is appalling. Wild horses would not drag from me the name of a certain river in the north whose narrow estuary is inhospitable and dangerous, and whose docks are like a nightmare of dreariness and misery. Their dismal shores are studded thickly with scaffold-like, enormous timber structures, whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by the infernal gritty night of a cloud of coal-dust. ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... mighty swirl on their right hand—or right paw, if you like—and the waters parted, with waves and the spouts of a geyser, to give up the monstrous nightmare head of a hippopotamus. Once something cold and leathery and ghastly touched the bottom of their padded feet; and once—but this was too awful for any expression by pen—something else, equally cold, but smooth, coiled, writhing, round the king's ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... for a moment while I start lifting the computer, carefully; its effective weight with the antigrav full on is only about twenty pounds but is has all its inertia. Then he says quietly, "Please, Lizzie—can't you understand that the worst nightmare in the whole affair has been the fear that one of you might get injured? Or even killed? When I realized that only one person was needed to pilot Gilgamesh—it was the greatest relief I ever experienced. Now you say...." His voice picks up suddenly. "Lizzie, you're beaten ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... her or bully her, but the subtle, silent influence went on so that the very stair-carpet, the very scuttles that held the coal, became secret messengers to hale her into the chapel and shut her in there for ever. After her first visit there the chapel became a nightmare to her—because, at once, she had felt its power. She had known—she had always known and it had not needed Mr. Magnus to tell her—that there was something in this religion—yes, even in the wretched dirt and disorder ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... irrevocably, slow motion in a nightmare. The bedroom door opens, the hall light dim on the bed and the child's face. Incubus in the ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Wesley Barefoot
... the past year. I've put all the little money my father gave me with every dollar I could save. It's paid for and here's the key. I meant to ask you out here to fix our wedding day. I ask you now. Forget the nightmare of the past two weeks and remember only that we love ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... what I think will be the verdict of posterity) the Witch in Coleridge's Christabel, may rank even with the creations of Shakespeare. It may be doubted, indeed, whether Shakespeare had bile and nightmare enough in him to have thought of such detestable horrors as those of the interchanging adversaries (now serpent, now man), or even of the huge, half-blockish enormity of Nimrod,—in Scripture, the 'mighty hunter' and builder of the tower of Babel,—in Dante, a tower of a man in his own person, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... he replied. 'I told you at the inn in London, I am heavy company for myself, sometimes. I have been a nightmare to myself, just now—must have had one, I think. At odd dull times, nursery tales come up into the memory, unrecognized for what they are. I believe I have been confounding myself with the bad boy who "didn't ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... obscurity. Underfoot was debris, rocky soil worn away from the cliffs throughout the ages, here and there fallen slivers and scale of rock. Shadows moved somberly, misshapen and grotesque, like brooding spirits of evil stirring in nightmare. ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... against the evils of solitude than I regard solitude as a relief from company. After all, what is it that we want with each other?—what do we expect to get from each other? I remember," he said, smiling, "a witty old lady saying to me once that eternity was a nightmare to her.—'For instance,' she said, 'I enjoy sitting here and talking to you very much; but if I thought it was going on to all eternity, I shouldn't like it at all.' Do we really want the company of any ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... April 20, 1843, no fiendish ingenuity could surpass the cruelty of the Cossacks. This ukase more than any other, it is claimed, embittered Lilienthal against Russia, and caused him to flee to where he could say as one awakening from a nightmare: "The horrible hatred against the Jews in Russia is nothing more to me than a hazy remembrance. My soul is no longer oppressed by frightful pictures of tyranny and persecution."[13] He was in the land ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... depressed, and the end turned up; the mouth puckered, and no chin whatever, or hardly any. The expression was not calm and happy; but rather as if he were in a perturbed slumber, perhaps nothing short of nightmare. I wonder that the family allow this cast to be shown,—the last record that there is of Scott's personal reality, and conveying such a wretched and unworthy idea ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I am sure that driver's worst nightmare is when he lives over again the time when he took a tenderfoot and his wife into Jackson's Hole, and, but for the tenderfoot, would have made them stay out overnight, wet, famished, frozen, within a stone's throw of the very house ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... senses or am I in a nightmare? (No, there's Mose as nateral as life.)" Then pointing her finger at the supposed culprit Mrs. Spriggins exclaimed: "I tell you what it is Moses Spriggins it's nothin' very good that you're ahidin' from your own mother. Got into them lawyer's clutches at last? Ye used ter say ye liked law ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... bodily pain in their last hours, suffer in mind. The effects of death on the frame do not necessarily disturb the tranquillity of the soul. The body may be in spasms while the soul is at peace; and the reverse is true;—as in nightmare, when the mind is distressed while the body sleeps. A Christian has nothing to fear in this respect. To die will not be—as in full health we suppose it is—a violent rending asunder of the soul from the unyielding grasp of the body; but the ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... liberties of all concerned; while the Chamber of Deputies, consisting of unpaid members, voted with much more care for the public weal than is possible in an assembly of men enslaved by their election committees, and perpetually haunted by the nightmare of re-election. An independent magistracy, according to President Seguier's fine expression, gave sentences, not services, "rendait des arrets, et non pas des services" while the administration, which was almost as permanent as ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... attempt to reach the mountain. Dreamer of great dreams though he was, how like a madhouse nightmare would have seemed to him a true prophecy of mighty engines whose like no human mind had then conceived, running upon roads of steel and asphalt at speeds which no human mind had then imagined, whirling thousands upon thousands of pleasure-seekers from ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... pages; they are turn by turn historical, narrative, descriptive, philosophical (with such philosophy as Hugo has to offer), humanitarian, lyrical, dramatic, at times realistic; a vast invention, beautiful, incredible, sublime, absurd, absorbing in its interest, a nightmare in ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... "A huge nightmare of indigestion, insomnia, and fits of black impatience with myself and others,—self chiefly.... I am heartily sick of my ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... rickets. Or it may be populous with germs and give him typhoid fever. If, on the other hand, he is dissatisfied with the drink of the beasts and takes to beverages the use of which distinguishes men from oxen, what a nightmare procession of potential ills lies in wait for him! You may read an account of them in any temperance tract. The very enumeration of them would drive a weak man to water, if water itself were not suspect. But, ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... figure filled him with a sickening repulsion and held him paralyzed so that he could only wait in passive, motionless expectation. Suddenly the hand sank to her side and he shook himself as though he had been awakened from a nightmare. ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... been greatly afflicted with nightmare; and, when residing with us, was frequently roused from this painful sleep by any one of the ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Mr. Author recalls it as a nightmare of changes. They cut out speeches, and changed speeches, and took out bits of business, and added new bits—they changed everything in the act, and some of the changes they changed back again, until by Saturday ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... slowly with a brutal headache and a conviction of nightmare heightened by the outlandish tone of his surroundings. He lay on a narrow bed in a whitely antiseptic infirmary, an oblong metal cell cluttered with a grimly utilitarian array of tables and lockers and chests. The lighting was harsh and overbright and the air hung ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... moment I woke up. The edge of the Road on which I was standing seemed to give way beneath me, and I fell into space as one does in a nightmare. It is a very ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... single bird. No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... and poor definitely settled? Charles Kingsley (of whom the moralist was writing) seems really to have believed it, and attributed the exulting affirmative to—the Crimean War! The Crimean War, after our five years of colossal nightmare, looks to us like a bicker of gnats in a beam; yet perhaps any war will do for a text, since any war will produce some moral upheaval in the generations concerned. Let us suppose, then, that the British ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... sin—tries to drown her child, to save it from misery; and the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for to-day in a quiet asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of Satan himself. Yet, after all, what can we say, who put Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," full of nightmare dreams of horror, into all our children's hands; a story in which the awful image of the man in the cage might well turn the nursery where it is read into ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... gave a little shiver. Nine years had passed since that day, but a man who has all but gone under in a big city does not readily forget the nightmare horror ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... dreaming," said my wife; "and I fear have had a nightmare." When I was thoroughly aroused, and had refilled my pipe, I told her ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... thousands of centuries of awful nightmare struggling—in which he was bound hand-and-foot and doomed to failure and torture from the outset, the sport, plaything, and victim of a fearful, intangible Horror—this would be sheer amusement and recreation. What could ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... walk'd, King Arthur panted hard, Like one that feels a nightmare on his bed When all the house is mute. So sigh'd the King, Muttering and murmuring at his ear, "Quick, quick! I fear it is too late, and I shall die." But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, Clothed with his breath, and looking, as he walk'd, Larger than human on the ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... dog howled without stirring; he howled as though in the anguish of a nightmare; and fear, horrible fear came over me. Fear of what? How can I say? It was fear, and that is all ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... conventional and shallow society the wish to commit a deed calling for the vigour and daring of some wilful child of nature? It was not to be thought of in this sober, reasoning hour. We had given ourselves over to a ghastly nightmare, and would ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... jumped into the cab and rattled off. It seemed to me, so anxious and terrified was I for my darling's safety, that we were fated never to get the information we wanted; the whole thing was like some nightmare, in which, try how I would to move, every step ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... they ought to increase the population. What a wonderful, noble thing to believe, at twenty, thought Neville, remembering the levity of her own irresponsible youth, when her only interest in the population had been a nightmare fear lest they should at last become so numerous that they would be driven out of the towns into the country and would be scuttling over the moors, downs and woods like black beetles in kitchens in the night. They were better than she had been, these children; ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... every sort, all depressed by excessive timidity, to such a degree as to be almost useless to himself and to others. Whenever he was, either for the business or pleasure of life, to meet or mix with numbers, the whole man was, as it were, snatched from himself. He was subject to that nightmare of the soul, who seats herself upon the human breast, oppresses the heart, palsies the will, and raises spectres of dismay, which the sufferer combats in vain—that cruel enchantress, who hurls her spell even upon childhood; and when she makes the youth her victim, pronounces, "Henceforward you shall ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... always before me, day and night, a horrible nightmare of the frightful scenes through which I knew my Princess might even then be passing—the horrid plant men—the ferocious white apes. At times I would cover my face with my hands in a vain effort to shut out the ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... good attorney napping, and leading him too, bound and docile, into his ergastulum, although he was himself just now in jeopardy from that quarter. James Dutton, too. Sooner or later he would get Master Jim into a fix, and hold him also spell-bound in the same sort of nightmare. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in his mind for some matter that would change the subject. Extraordinary how hard it was to find a new topic when some other infernal thing hung in the air. It was like, in a nightmare, trying with leaden limbs to crawl ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... The strike, or, rather, the lockout, because the workers of Rio Blanco had helped their striking brothers of Puebla. The hunger, the expeditions in the hills for berries, the roots and herbs that all ate and that twisted and pained the stomachs of all of them. And then, the nightmare; the waste of ground before the company's store; the thousands of starving workers; General Rosalio Martinez and the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz, and the death-spitting rifles that seemed never to cease spitting, while the workers' wrongs ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... shadowy glimpse which I had of them between the tree trunks could hardly have occupied more than five minutes of actual time. So sudden was it, and so strange, that when the drama was over and they were gone I could have believed that it was all some terrible nightmare, some delusion, had I not felt that the impression was too real, too vivid, to be ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hat. With a slight deprecatory laugh she removed it and went hurriedly down the stair. Whatever had she been doing with it, I thought, and settled with a sigh of satisfaction once more to my work, now that the nightmare in red, a kind of mute scarlet "Raven," was gone from my room. How very quiet it was. Not a single sleigh passed, no sounds came from the houses opposite or from next door, the whole world seemed smothered in the soft thick pillows of snow quietly gathering upon it. After a ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... have had a nightmare, M. le prefet," rejoined the Comte drily. "We have had news of the landing of Bonaparte at least once a month this ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... something vaguely familiar about it, something that roused old memories, and suddenly he thought of Cripp. He traced up the scent and as he topped the ridge he stopped short and bared his teeth, the hair rising along his spine. A horrid nightmare of a thing rose from its bed and leered at him. The hair had slipped from its body, leaving the skin shiny and slate-blue. The ears and head were furred, and the legs; tufts of hair sprouted from the shoulders ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... itself to be of a superior solidness of construction. But the hip, which at first had not given them a moment's uneasiness, steadfastly refused to mend. Dr. Benson looked puzzled; then grave. The splintered end of that hip bone began to be a nightmare to him. He called in another doctor for consultation. The new doctor set it in a different way, nearly killing Sahwah with the pain, although she struggled valiantly to be brave and bear it in silence. Nyoda never forgot that tortured ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... through the ordeal. But when I looked at the superhuman ugliness of some of the old ones—when I gazed at the immense, and in some cases toothless, chasms that were pressed to my senior's lips, and that gradually, like a hideous nightmare, approached towards me—and when I reflected that these same mouths might have, in former days, demolished a few children—my courage forsook me, and I entertained for a moment the idea of bolting. The doctor seemed to labour under ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... the brilliant white light of the lantern, is etched for ever upon my brain. He had reared up on his hind legs as a bear would do, and stood above me, enormous, menacing—such a creature as no nightmare had ever brought to my imagination. I have said that he reared like a bear, and there was something bear-like—if one could conceive a bear which was ten-fold the bulk of any bear seen upon earth—in his whole pose and attitude, in his great crooked forelegs with their ivory-white claws, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... signs of Leprosy are, a reddish colour of the face, verging to duskiness; the expiration begins to be changed, the voice grows hoarse, the hairs become thinned and weaker, and the perspiration and breath incline to foetidity; the mind is melancholic with frightful dreams and nightmare; in some cases scabs, pustules, and eruptions break out over the whole body; disposition of the body begins to become loathsome, but still, while the form and figure are not corrupted, the patient is not to be adjudged for separation; but is to be ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... preposterous abortion! With vacant stare, And ragged hair, And every feature out of all proportion! Embodiment of echoing inanity! Excellent type of simpering insanity! Unwieldy, clumsy nightmare of humanity! ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... in every letter, help him with the play until it was finished, and then have a glorious wedding, with Edith and Sue and Julia and all the girls. I must have fallen asleep then, for I dreamed that Julia was the bride at my wedding and that I couldn't get there. When I woke from that nightmare I decided to let Sam have the happiness of hearing Peter tell him of my submission to their wishes; and that time I sobbed ...
— Over Paradise Ridge - A Romance • Maria Thompson Daviess
... knew there was nothing underneath but clay, and his manner was so strange that the charwoman was frightened. He stood like one dazed by a dream. He could not believe in reality, it was too mad, too discordant, too much like a nightmare. He had ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... or horrible, are based on superficial appearances, misleading analogies, arbitrary fancies, perturbed sensibilities, not on a firm hold of realities, insight of truth, and philosophical analysis. They are all to be brushed aside as phantoms of nightmare or artificial creations of fiction. Poetry has mostly rested, hitherto, on no veritable foundation of science, but on a visionary foundation of emotion. It has wrought upon flitting, sensible phenomena rather than upon abiding substrata of facts. For example, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... writer. Result Jane and Mrs. Weatherbee become bosom friends. Jane is vindicated and her rights restored. Right in the middle of a happy reunion in bounces the tempestuous Miss Noble. Quite a little like a nightmare, isn't it?" ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... Its very quietness seemed a menace. Desperately she tore herself from his hold, and turned to escape. But it was as though she fled in a nightmare. Whichever way she turned she met only the impenetrable ramparts of the hedge that surrounded her. She could find neither entrance nor exit. It was as though the way by which she had come had ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... nightmare, and, unable to remain longer in the cottage, ran home with the speed of one distracted. There he rebuked his mother wildly, telling her that she had forced him into madness, and that he was free to execute her will—to marry or hang, whichever she pleased. His love of Anne now became entirely ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... period we speak of was truly melancholy. It was in the gloomy month of November,—that month in which it is said the suicidal propensities of the English nation are most strongly in force. The air was either filled with dull, sluggish, unwholesome fogs, which hung upon it like a nightmare, or soaked in a constant drizzle of small, annoying, contemptible rain-drops, which, without possessing the energy and dignity of a shower, were infinitely more disagreeable, and found their way to the flesh in spite of all the protective armoury of great-coats, hessian ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... on like one in a nightmare. His feet grew heavy like lead, he panted and gasped, his breath came hot and dry in his throat. But still he ran and ran until at last he found himself in front of old Matt Abrahamson's cabin, gasping, panting, and ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... wandered into the Unknown. Unwillingly, knowing full well what he was doing, but powerless to help—powerless to prevent—he had gone.... Sometimes it did not seem real to him. It was a nightmare— a horrid, horrible, awful, grewsome, rotten dream, a dream that brought to his nostrils a stench—to his soul a coldness unutterable—a coldness beside which that of death might seem a grateful warmth.... He would wake sometimes from his dreams, a cold sweat enveloping him like a pall, a ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... viewless, brutal hands had racked the emaciated form until intelligence was gone, and then, not content, would continue their vindictive work while breath remained in the body. As my watch was prolonged this impression grew into a nightmare of horror. The still house, the silent, white, beautiful world without, and that frail young girl tortured hour after hour under my eyes by fever and ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... Economics Seminar and favorably commented upon, she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she understood less than nothing about the underlying principles of the subject. This nettled her and gave her occasional nightmare moments of doubt as to the real fitness of women for public affairs. She read feverishly all she could find on the subject, ending by addling her brains to ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... as the coffee-leaf disease, and by this is meant the fungoid Hemileia vastatrix, which as told in chapter XV, destroyed Ceylon's once prosperous coffee industry. As it has since been found in nearly all coffee-producing countries, it has become a nightmare in the dreams of all coffee planters. The microscope shows how the spores of this dreaded fungus, carried by the winds upon a leaf of the coffee tree, proceed to germinate at the expense of the leaf; robbing ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... murderous rain of machine-gun and rifle bullets, a howling tempest of shells, an earth-shaking tornado of high explosives, can but long for the day when Peace will be declared and these horrors will be no more than a past nightmare. ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... horrible, Henri!" Victor de Gisons exclaimed. "I feel as if I were in a nightmare, not that any nightmare could compare in terror to this. Look at those hideous faces—faces of men debased by crime, sodden with drink, degraded below the level of brutes, exulting in the thought of blood, lusting for murder; and to think ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... two children awakened from a nightmare, we chattered over our food: we hunted mutual friends, we laughed together at my feeble witticisms, but we put the horror behind us resolutely. After all, it was the hat with the green ribbons that brought back the ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... When I am more of a Christian, I shall have learnt to be sorrier for the man whose end is money or social standing than for the drunkard. But now my heart, recoiling from the one, is sore for the other—for the agony, the helplessness, the degradation, the nightmare struggle, the wrongs and cruelties committed, the duties neglected, the sickening ruin of mind and heart. So often, too, the drunkard is originally a style of man immeasurably nobler than the money-maker! Compare a Coleridge, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... desire for her room and darkness. Lights, music, the scent of dying flowers, laughter, men, all had become abhorrent. Something within her lay bruised and stunned; and, as never before, the vast and terrible phantom of her loneliness rose like a nightmare to ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... in the Rue Saint-Antoine by the explosion of a shell, thrown by the insurgents from the heights of Pere-Lachaise. He thought that had he died then, Micheline would have wept for him. Then, as in a nightmare, it seemed to him that this hypothesis was realized. He saw the church hung with black, he heard the funeral chants. A catafalque contained his coffin, and slowly his betrothed came, with a trembling hand, to throw holy water on the cloth which covered the bier. And a ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... drunk, for I was greeted with howls and cheers, an inferno of cries and laughter; and the red-faced man stood up also and clung to me, and brought his queer face close up to mine. The girl also clung to me. Then it occurred to me, this was the crisis of a nightmare; in a moment these phantasmal restraints would burst, and I should ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... beautiful beyond description. And yet no human eye ever looked upon a face more hideously fearful than it was in reality. Even a momentary glance could not be cast upon it without a shudder, and a longer gaze involved a species of horrible fascination which affected one like a nightmare. You do not understand yet what was this remarkable and most hideous feature. I can scarcely find words to describe it to you so that you can catch the full force of the idea—I must try, however. You have often seen Mephistopheles ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Selby had completely forgotten Rue Barree. During the week he worked with might and main at the studio, and Saturday night found him so tired that he went to bed before dinner and had a nightmare about a river of yellow ochre in which he was drowning. Sunday morning, apropos of nothing at all, he thought of Rue Barree, and ten seconds afterwards he saw her. It was at the flower-market on the marble bridge. She was examining a pot of pansies. The gardener had evidently thrown heart ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... The dream was the first of many of its kind, and in my case they have never been accompanied by emission. They have always been of an 'inverted' character, though I have occasionally had dreams about women. These latter, however, have usually partaken somewhat of the nature of a nightmare! ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... much fear. Even if she had discovered the trick, a wife cannot give evidence against her husband, and often does not want to. I made none of the usual slips, but no man can guard against a girl's nightmare after a day up the river and a supper at the Star and Garter. I might have told the judge he was an ass, but then I should have had penal servitude for bank robbery, and that is worse than death. The only thing that puzzles me, though, ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... 1814, when victorious Peace unexpectedly arrived; and the gates of the Continent after five-and-twenty years of fierce closure were suddenly thrown open; and the hearts of all English and European men awoke staggering as if from a nightmare suddenly removed, and ran hither and thither,—Edward Sterling also determined on a new adventure, that of crossing to Paris, and trying what might lie in store for him. For curiosity, in its idler sense, there was evidently pabulum enough. But he had hopes ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... rose. The sky overhead was livening to turquoise light and here and there along the upper slopes were gossamer dashes of opal and amethyst, but this beauty of unveiling turrets and gold-touched crests was lost on eyes in which dwelt a nightmare from which there was no hope ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... The pictorial nightmare that bore evidence to the veracity of these assertions was indeed wonderful and convincing. A trapeze performer, describing a series of turns in the air that would clearly take him from one end of the long bill-board to the other, was ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... for, wearing their own helmets which made them look like horrible monsters out of a nightmare, the Germans charged against the French and Americans, whom they hoped to find disabled ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... speech of New York has it, I want to pay tribute to the sagacity, the clarity of vision, the sure divination of the truth amidst a fog of deceit, which has characterized almost the whole Press of the United States since those feverish days at the end of July, 1914, when the nightmare of war was so quickly succeeded by its dread reality. Efforts which might fairly be described as stupendous were put forth by the advocates of Kultur to win, if not the approval, at least the strict neutrality of America. That the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... flattened against the wall to stare, almost nose to nose, at the passing foreigner. With chairpoles backing into one shop or running ahead into another, with raucous cries from the coolies, he swung round countless corners, bewildered in a dark, leprous, nightmare bazaar. Overhead, a slit of cloudy sky showed rarely; for the most part, he swayed along indoors, beneath a dingy lattice roof. All points of the compass vanished; all streets remained alike,—the same endless vista of mystic characters, red, black, and gold, on narrow suspended tablets, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... pauses, breathes deeply, and lifts his figure as if to throw off another nightmare and slips ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... fellow that assaulted you?" asked the man at the desk, nodding his head toward Lemuel, who tried to speak; but it was like a nightmare; he could not ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... a moment longer, Sister Nightmare," answered Scarecrow "I thought I had a glimpse of ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... me." With one hand she hid her face, although it was bent to the ground, and with the other held up to him a bit of paper. He took it from the thin white fingers; it might explain something—help him out of this bewilderment, half nightmare, half heavenly vision. He opened it. Nothing but a hundred-pound note! The familiar sight of bank paper, however, seemed to ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... asked her which flower she loved best. It was "daffodil time," and every gold cup held nepenthe for the nightmare dream of winter. She glanced reprovingly at me ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... Manichean theosophies, pessimistic dualism of God and devil, in which God always got the worst of it, when God did not happen to be the devil himself. The ravening lions, the clawing, tearing griffins, the nightmare brood carved on the capitals, porches, and pulpits of pre-Franciscan churches, are surely not, as orthodox antiquarians assure us, mere fanciful symbols of the Church's vigilance and virtues: they express too well the far-spread occult Manichean spirit, the belief in a triumphant power ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... worse than a nightmare of one of the men, sentry. Don't call the guard until I look ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... boy ever wholly lost the nightmare memory of the next few days, for their search took them into every part of the reconcentrado districts. What they beheld aged them. Day after day, from dawn till dark, they wandered, peering into huts, staring into ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... morning of August 23rd I was sent out to find General Gleichen, who was reported somewhere near Waasmes. I went over nightmare roads, uneven cobbles with great pits in them. I found him, and was told by him to tell the General that the position was unfortunate owing to a weak salient. We had already heard guns, but on my way back I heard a distant crash, and looked round to find that a shell had burst half ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... which geologists trace this enormous glaciation of the northern hemisphere. There are a few works still in circulation in which popular writers, relying on the obstinacy of a few older geologists, speak lightly of the "nightmare" of the Ice-Age. But the age has gone by in which it could seriously be suggested that the boulders strewn along the east of Scotland—fragments of rock whose home we must seek in Scandinavia—were brought by the vikings as ballast for their ships. Even the more serious controversy, whether ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... that he is gone!" said Anna, drawing a long breath when the door closed behind him. "This old ghost-seer has tormented me for months with his strange vagaries, which weigh upon his soul like the nightmare! Happily, thy letter, my beloved, has filled my whole heart with the ecstasy of joy, else would his dark and foolish prophecies be sufficient ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... thus roused and deserted, put aside for the moment her nightmare, and started once more upon ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... hurt, cut; sore, soreness; discomfort, malaise; cephalalgia[Med], earache, gout, ischiagra[obs3], lumbago, neuralgia, odontalgia[obs3], otalgia[obs3], podagra[obs3], rheumatism, sciatica; tic douloureux[Fr], toothache, tormina[obs3], torticollis[obs3]. spasm, cramp; nightmare, ephialtes[obs3]; crick, stitch; thrill, convulsion, throe; throb &c. (agitation) 315; pang; colic; kink. sharp pain, piercing pain, throbbing pain, shooting pain, sting, gnawing pain, burning pain; excruciating pain. anguish, agony; torment, torture; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... my experience I could not have believed it possible for the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the clothes off our bodies. I say TORE THEM OFF, and I mean it. I am not asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One could not ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London |
