"Uncanny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which his mouth terminated worked so curiously,—like those of a bellows, where they run together towards the nozzle,—and the two movable fingers on each hand opened and shut with such a menacing, clutching motion, that for one moment the Doctor felt a chill, uncanny creep ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... as bare as a desert and almost as uninhabitable. A room without furniture is a ghostly place. Sounds made therein are uncanny, even the voice puts off its humanity and rings back with a bleak and hollow note, an empty resonance tinged with the frost of winter. There is no other sound so deadly, so barren and dispiriting as the echoes of an ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... dead silence over all the place, and it was uncanny. It seemed impossible that all men should sleep in peace in the palace where such a deed had been wrought at our feet. I had rather the rush and yell of the Welsh over these ramparts they hated than this stillness ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... time by thousands of people; yet I never heard it mentioned in conversation or saw it in print. I allude to the extraordinary sympathy the features of a portrait are capable of assuming towards the expression of countenance of the man who is looking at it. There is something at times almost uncanny in it. Stand opposite a photograph of a friend when you are feeling sad, and the picture is sad. Laugh, and the mouth of your friend seems to curl into a smile, and his eyes twinkle merrily. Relapse into gloom and despondency, and the smile ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... from Illinois Be vindicated by fat kings of gold? And must he be belauded by the smirched, The sleek, uncanny chiefs in lies ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... slightest attention to her when she wandered about among them. We are camped on the edge of a lake. This morning before breakfast I had a good swim in it, the water being warmer than the air, and this evening I rowed on it in the moonlight. Every night we hear the great owls hoot and laugh in uncanny fashion. ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... in view, whiter than common with excess of snow. This is the Balaitous, craggy, irregular and weird, too far off to be imposing, yet one of the highest of the range. It is not an easily accessible mountain, nor is it often climbed. There is deemed to be something uncanny about it. Its ascent is very dangerous, they say. Accidents have occurred there; a strange ill omen, it is believed, invests those ghostly snows; the death-clutch of the Balaitous holds many a brave mountaineer. As ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... the walls that divide every soul from every other soul were made of some thin and porous stuff that let things through. And in this life of yours, for the moments that she shared it, she lived intensely, with uncanny delight and pain that were her ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... quite uncanny about the silence of the place. The monotonous ripple of the burn below seemed to intensify it. I stood in hesitation for a moment or two before venturing to knock at the door. When at last I had done so, shuffling footsteps sounded ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... thousands of subjects in nature in many. The Mariana of TENNYSON surpasses anything known to me in any language as conveying the reality of feeling alone in a silent old house, where everything is a dim, uncanny manner, recalled the past—yet suggested a kind of mysterious presence—as in ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... from under the stove, languidly stretching himself, and yawning until all the red cavern of his mouth and throat was revealed. At the moment he had an uncanny resemblance to Elder Joseph Blewett of White Sands—Roaring Joe, the irreverent boys called him—when he grew excited and shouted. Mrs. Bell saw it—and then reproached ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and yet it had a wild, airy, mocking quality, that seemed hardly human at all, or not, at any rate, characteristic of a being of affections and limitations like unto ours. But this impression of mine was fostered, no doubt, by the unusual and uncanny circumstances of ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... one day in 1812 in an arbour in the old school garden at Enfield, and lent him a copy of "The Faery Queene" to take home with him. "He romped through the scenes of the romance," reports Mr. Clarke, "like a young horse turned into a spring meadow." There is something almost uncanny—like the visits of a spirit—about these recurrent appearances of Spenser in English literary history. It must be confessed that nowadays we do not greatly romp through "The Faery Queene." There even runs a story that a certain professor of literature in an American college, being ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... hard on Mother Garth was Wilson," continued Matthew; "I nivver could mak ought on it. He called her a witch, and seurly she is a laal bit uncanny." ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... of the birth of his son, there was a very strange—almost what a Highlander would call an "uncanny"—sequence of dates in the I.G.'s own life. The year that he himself was born, the 20th of February—his birthday—fell on the 23rd day of the Chinese First Moon. Once more it fell on the 23rd of the First Moon ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... sorrow is not so much remembering happier things as remembering that the happy state came to an end by one's own wrongdoing. Still, most modern readers will think that Goethe, in elaborating the Brocken scene as an interesting study of the uncanny and the vile, let his hero sink needlessly far into ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Mignon. Her black eyes sparkled with triumph. At last she had found a way to even her score with Marjorie Dean. With almost uncanny shrewdness she had divined what Marjorie herself had not discovered. This blue-eyed baby of a girl, for Mignon mentally characterized her as such, was jealous of Marjorie's friendship with the Stevens girl. Very well. She would take a hand and help matters along. ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... nowhere in particular, between two lamp-posts before a large drapery establishment—a long range of shops already lapped up in sheets of corrugated iron for the night. Tendering a coin through the trap door the fare slipped out and away, leaving an effect of uncanny, eccentric ghastliness upon the driver's mind. But the size of the coin was satisfactory to his touch, and his education not being literary, he remained untroubled by the fear of finding it presently turned to a dead leaf in his pocket. Raised above the world of fares by the nature ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... gentlemen" in a private home. "I had not played three seconds," he says, "before a profound silence reigned among the people, seeing which, and dreaming wildly, and feeling somehow in an eerie and elfish, and half-uncanny mood, I flew off into all manner of trills, and laments, and cadenza-monstrosities for a long time, but finally floated down into 'La Melancolie', which melted itself forth with such eloquent lamenting that it ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... combined with the rattle and creak of the branches, and the drip, drip of water, dropping from the many crevices into the old cellar, unite to form a fitting requiem for an occasion so strange, so uncanny. ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... person!" she whispered, "there is something positively uncanny about him. I feel cold all over ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... waiting in the darkness below, the Turkish muezzins ascended the many minarets, and began the evening call to prayer. The weird chanting from so many voices (there are seven mosques in Dulcigno) in the otherwise utter stillness had a most uncanny effect. ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... ugliness of the human male when, on the other side of the tapestry curtain, the spectacle of the servants gave place to that of the guests. But even this ugliness of faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new and uncanny, now that their features,—instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after, boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... demoralizes those who practice it and destroys the faith of those who suffer by it in the efficiency of the law as a safe protector. The man in whose breast that faith has been darkened is naturally the subject of dangerous and uncanny suggestions. Those who use unlawful methods, if moved by no higher motive than the selfishness that prompted them, may well stop and inquire what is to be the ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... where the first fight came off, and who was sent with the despatch," demanded the general of the new-comer, upon whom the Hualpai looked in recognition, but with neither light nor welcome in his piercing eyes. Question and answer in halting, uncanny speech progressed fitfully a moment. Then ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... and unreality. Hoffmann, with all his North German power of reasoning and his zeal and conscientiousness in public office, was emphatically that Romanticist associated with the night-sides of literature and life. There is something uncanny both in the man and his writings. His power of putting the scene of his most unreal stories in the midst of well-known places, his ability to shift the reader from the real to the unreal and vice versa, make some of ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... munching a slice of toast, that he appealed to me only as something to be taken care of. That sinister element which I've seen in him of late had gone altogether, leaving nothing but his old, faded, dreamy mildness, contented and appeased. That is the really uncanny thing, that he seems satisfied. He showed no fear of us at all, nor the slightest nervousness, not even when Thor came. Thor was startled to see him there at first, but I managed to whisper a word or two in French, so that he went straight up to Fay and shook hands. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... spoke. They stared at me as if I were something uncanny. I, a raw country boy, disclosing a perfect knowledge ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... story that the Misticot walks," said Edie; "it's an awesome nicht and an uncanny to be meeting the like of him here. Besides he might not be best pleased to come upon us when we were trying ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... opinion. The tendency of the people who have voiced the ideas of democracy, even when they have not managed its action, the tendency of students, orators, editors, has been to look upon Public Opinion as men in other societies looked upon the uncanny forces to which they ascribed the last word in ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... sometimes she could fancy she saw dark shadows moving amidst the trees, and the whisper of the foliage seemed to her to hide voices at times, even as its shadow concealed forms. It was indeed an uncanny place to be alone in even under the broad light of day. All across the Pacific for thousands of miles you find relics of the past, like ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... is uncanny," he thought. "Can there be anything in that old theory that tormented and erring souls come back to make their last expiation in children? That means early death!" He dismissed the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... ajar and Archie took the liberty of looking into the room. Roseleaf lay stretched out in a great chair, and Gouger leaned over him, appearing for all the world like some sinister bird of prey. Mr. Weil felt for the first time in his life that there was something uncanny in the aspect of the book reviewer. He did not think he could ever be close friends with him again. And what did Shirley mean by saying that Lawrence had "agreed" with him when he heard such ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... kris in her spangled sash, exhibits wonderful skill in the supple play of wrist and fingers, through the process known as devitalization, a form of drill which gives to the arm a plastic power of detached movement, fascinating but uncanny. The dusky garden is filled with a native crowd, moved alternately to tears and laughter by exploits unintelligible to the European spectator, for the story of every national hero is known to the poorest and most ignorant of the people, from perpetual attendance on theatrical ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... said Mr. Brewster, still with the same uncanny amiability. "He's a dabbler in a good many things—science, phrenology, antiques. I asked him to bid for me at a sale yesterday. There was ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... that swinging one's self out on Eternity, which make Upward a typical man of genius, would have been lacking. K—— (whose criticisms of books are the most creative ones I know) said of Upward's book that he felt very happy and strangely emancipated when he read it, but that it was an uncanny experience, as if he had been made of thin air, had become a kind of aerated being, a psychic effect that genius often has; and K—— admitted to me confidentially that he felt that possibly he and Upward were being a little crazy and happy together by themselves, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... her whole appearance, and especially in the peculiar expression of her eye, that awakened the strangest feelings and produced even in the minds of those who saw her engaged in the most ordinary occupations of life an impression of remoteness that almost amounted to the uncanny. The fact that she affected brilliant colors and clothed both herself and brother in garments of a wellnigh fantastic make, added to this impression, and gave perhaps some excuse to those persons who regarded her as being as abnormally constituted as her brother, finding it impossible, ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... the way,—and then took place the most surprising incident of all. The clock had struck ten some time before. Since before the striking of the hour nothing and no one had passed along what was evidently the little frequented road in front of that uncanny house. On a sudden two sounds broke the stillness without,—of someone running, and of cries. Judging from his hurrying steps someone seemed to be flying for his life,—to the accompaniment of curious cries. It was only when the runner reached the front of the house that, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... I had no fear of him, and I waited for him to speak, just as though he had been before me in the flesh, for there seemed naught uncanny about the matter to me. And yet even at the moment that seemed strange, ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... The uncanny, misbehaved, and outrageous harridans advanced then to meet the son of Morna, and when he saw these three Goll whipped the sword from his thigh, swung his buckler round, and got to them in ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... His body! How uncanny it sounded! "Andy," that bunch of muscles who had made such short work of the circus wrestler in Gatun and whom I had seen not twenty-four hours before bubbling with life was now a "body." Things happen quickly on the Zone, and he whom the fates have picked to go generally shows ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... agreeable as possible. The door to her room opened and there entered a young man of medium height with delicate, almost feminine features. His face was covered with a full beard that was so black as to appear almost uncanny, and it seemed so much out of place on one so young, the wearer not being over twenty-five ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... and asked, "Is you cole?" as he saw the Colonel shiver. He knew the Harrises were quar, and this dark-haired, dark-eyed child singing in a shrill, high-pitched, but very sweet voice, seemed to him uncanny, and he shrank from her as she said. ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... all subsequent populations. Naturally the natives were hostile to our work. They thought that we were measuring them for their coffins; that they would be forced into the army; that disease would result; that an uncanny influence was laid upon them; that witchcraft might be worked against them. After having had a lot of trouble with many of our subjects, we were surprised one day to have the oldest man of the village, Antonio Calistro, born ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... jagged, precipitous cliffs, intersected here and there by deep, narrow ravines and creeks, soon showed indistinctly, a black streak on the right. Low bushes nestled by the hollows, looking like sitting figures. It was uncanny. I looked sideways suspiciously at the cliffs, and the murmur of the sea and the stillness of the country alarmed my imagination. Kisotchka did not speak. She was still trembling, and before she had gone half a mile she was exhausted with walking ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... no great lover of the country. Nature made her feel small; she found the woods uncanny, the lake made her shudder, there was danger hidden in the tall meadow-grass. She regarded the peasants as cunning and rather filthy beasts. They had so many children, and she had no doubt that both boys and girls were full ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... at the Black Cat—a real pianist, not just a person who plays the piano. She is a striking figure in a quaint, tunic-like dress, greying hair and a keen face, and a personal friend of half the frequenters. She has an uncanny instinct for the psychology of the moment. She knows just when "Columbia" will be the proper thing to play, and when the crowd demands the newest rag-time. She will feel an atmospheric change as unswervingly as any barometer, and switch in a moment from "Good-bye Girls, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... uncanny thing happened to Rosalind. The figure of her mother went out of her mind and she was in fancy again a young girl and had gone with other young girls to visit a friend about to be married. With the others she stood in a room where white dresses lay on a bed. One of her companions, ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Charley," said Walter, nervously, "this thing is getting positively uncanny. I declare I am beginning to feel a ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... a strange creaking and scratching on the roof above his head. It had aroused him, and now as he listened to it, and tried in vain to catch a single gleam of light through the intense darkness, it was so incomprehensible and uncanny, that brave boy as he was, he felt shivers creeping ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... luckily as he thought, by the scut; when lo! up started something black and "uncanny," with glaring eyes, making mouths, and grinning at him, as though in mockery. He felt stupefied and bewildered. Fascinated by terror, he could not refrain from following this horrible appearance, which, as if delighted to have ensnared him, frisked away with uncouth and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... venture to say that Newhall farm-house is the dearest old place in the world. Such delightful old rooms, with the deepest window-seats, the highest mantelpieces, the widest fireplaces possible in domestic architecture; such mysterious closets and uncanny passages; such pitfalls in the way of unexpected flights of stairs; such antiquated glazed corner-cupboards for the display of old china!—everything redolent ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... up to the pen, and the last wrestle began. The crowd, silent and motionless, craned forward to watch the uncanny, white-haired little man and the huge dog, working so close below them. M'Adam's face was white; his eyes staring, unnaturally bright; his bent body projected forward; and he tapped with his stick on the ground like ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... my own, have a drink! It certainly does seem uncanny at night-time. But wait a bit. When the day breaks, you know, and one day and another passes, you'll forget even to think of it. Wait a bit; when the girl's married we'll even forget to think of it. But you go and have a ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... in spring, year after year, three ghosts revisit that old room and (without, I hope, inconvenience to Lord Northcliffe, who may happen to be there) sit rocking and writhing in the grip of that old shared rapture. Uncanny? Well, not more so than would have seemed to Byron and Moore and Rogers the notion that more than a hundred years away from them was some one joining ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... "That was an uncanny exhibition for a girl of fourteen, you know, Roger," said Aunt Olivia musingly. "What is in store ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... roof of our chamber. We heaved down our gas bombs and covered over our shaft. Within a few hours the light below went out and our microphones failed to detect any sound from the rocks beneath us. It was then perhaps that I should have called for military aid, but the uncanny silence of the lower workings proved too much for my eager curiosity. We waited two days and still there was no evidence of life below. I knew there had been ample time for the gas from our bombs to have been dissipated, as it was decomposed by contact ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... ministers as high priest, and offers the souls of the pious as sacrifices. In the fifth heaven, the angel hosts reside, and sing the praise of God, though only during the night, for by day it is the task of Israel on earth to give glory to God on high. The sixth heaven is an uncanny spot; there originate most of the trials and visitations ordained for the earth and its inhabitants. Snow lies heaped up there and hail; there are lofts full of noxious dew, magazines stocked with storms, and cellars holding reserves of smoke. Doors of fire separate these celestial ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... his retreating footsteps quickly died away in the darkness, and Bright Sun, too, slid among the shadows. He was gone so quickly and quietly that it gave Dick an uncanny feeling. ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... this visually, and it was not exactly pleasurable. It was rather startling like the discovery of a new faculty in himself. There are faculties one would rather do without—such, for instance, as seeing through a stone wall or remembering a person with this uncanny vividness. And what about those two people belonging to her with their air of expectant solicitude! Really, those figures from home got in front of one. In fact, their persistence in getting between him and the ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... But Ham Burton's uncanny powers of divination were at work, and out of his seat he slipped unobserved. Through the door he flitted shadow-like and strolled along in the wake ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... fade from our ken into the dimness below. Well I knew it was only driftwood, the gnarled trunk of uprooted tree made sport with by mad waves, yet more than once I shrank backward, my unstrung nerves tingling, as such shapeless, uncanny thing was hurled past like an arrow. Nor were the noises that broke the silence less fearsome. Bred to the wilderness, I little minded loneliness when in the depths of the backwoods, but this was different. I cared nothing for the honk of ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... Yellow, uncanny, mummified, Like to a Pharaoh's hand it lay, And stretched its faun-shaped fingers wide, Crisp with ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... am a living man that enormous animal, uncanny looking creature, walked up to me and shook hands. The Conjure man had not spoken to him, that was certain. If any one had told him to do this it must have been Europa. The demands of politeness satisfied, the strange couple went to the farther side of the verandah and squatted ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... morning which had stuck just as Costanza was sticking; only one, but it might have been a myriad it was so tiresome from daylight on. It was determined to settle on her face, and she was determined it should not. Its persistence was uncanny. It woke her, and would not let her go to sleep again. She hit at it, and it eluded her without fuss or effort and with an almost visible blandness, and she had only hit herself. It came back again instantly, and with a loud buzz ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... of which the coal was delivered at the bottom of the shaft. The experience was a novel one to them. The dark walls of the passage, the echoes which came from the counter gangways, the monotonous dripping of water, as it seeped through seams and crevices in the rock, all gave a weird and uncanny ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... him. Sir Ulric thought he had never seen so hideous a hag as she who now stood gazing at him. She was wrinkled and toothless, and bent with age. One eye was shut, and in the other was a leer so horrible that he feared her some uncanny creature of the wood, and crossed himself ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... anything else superlative; but we do say, and this with sure confidence, that no one who begins it will leave it till the narrative ends, or doubt for an instant, whether he knows Defoe or not, that he has been enchained by something separate and distinct in literature, something almost uncanny in the way it has gripped him, and made him see for ever a scene he never expected ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... 16th? Why, it may have been—yes, it was the 16th—that is our lady's birthday. He went away that day." Franz bowed a farewell to this stranger who began to appear uncanny in his eyes, and shutting the gate carefully he returned ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... beginning to feel the same way even about Ibsen. Time was when he had an uncanny power over my imagination. He had the wand of a disenchanter. Here, I said, is one who has the gift of showing us the thing as it is. There is not a single one of these characters whom we have not met. Their poor shifts at self-deceit are painfully familiar to us. In the company of this ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... are ill, surely," said Richard, putting his arm around her. "What has put such uncanny ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... from the devil's clutches, if I freed Lord Farquhart on such evidence? The whole affair from the beginning has savored of the devil's mixing. Who else would have driven his majesty on to demand such hot haste against the fellow? 'Tis all most uncanny and most unwholesome. I'll be thankful, for one, when my part ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... uncanny way in which his guest heard of things the chief sent his son to forestall any tale-bearer. "No one has been injured," she was assured. "Only one worthless slave woman has been sold to the Inokon." As it was ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... go on an excursion to a small island, Kambang, where there are a number of monkeys to whom Malays who desire children sacrifice food. On our arrival the animals came to meet us in a way that was almost uncanny, running like big rats in the tall grass on the muddy beach. Many remnants of ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... in very inadequate apparel. The circumstances which attend Mrs. B.'s alarms are generally of the following kind. I am awakened by the mention of my baptismal name in that peculiar species of whisper which has something uncanny in its very nature, besides the dismal associations which belong to it, from the fact of its being used only ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... or Kaffir, not even a tree to be seen. Nothing in every direction but a monotonous waste of yellow sand, rough stones and stunted grass. An unnatural stillness filled the air, making the silence oppressive, and uncanny. The soil was so poor that cultivation was impossible. The ground, strewn with broken rocks and sharp stones which cut the shoes and hurt the feet, suggested that in prehistoric times the plateau had been swept by a volcanic tempest. The slopes of the few scattered kopjies ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... body still in the companion-way. His attitude was of one looking forward the length of the schooner, or staring, rather, for his eyes were fixed and unblinking. I was only five feet away and directly in what should have been his line of vision. It was uncanny. I felt myself a ghost, what of my invisibility. I waved my hand back and forth, of course without effect; but when the moving shadow fell across his face I saw at once that he was susceptible to the impression. His face became ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... man, she did not like him, because of his sharp face, uncanny eyes, and smooth tongue, and she prayed Eric to have nothing ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... heavy grief of the men. The half-asleep listeners were moved by its weirdness to vague and sinister fancies. The dolor veered away from what the Anglo-Saxon knows as grief and was shot through with the uncanny and the terrible. White children crawled out of their small beds and groped their way to their parents. The women shivered and asked of the darkness, "What makes the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... precipitously from the floor of the Sacramento valley; in fact, their bases are only a mile or two from the river. They have every indication, even to the unscientific eye, of having been upheaved by volcanic action. Perhaps that accounts for the uncanny ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... motor-supply columns and ammunition-dumps were organized to the last item. Our map department was magnificent, and the admiration of the French. Our Intelligence branch became valuable (apart from a frequent insanity of optimism) and was sometimes uncanny in the accuracy of its information about the enemy's disposition and plans. So that the Staff was not altogether hopeless in its effect, as the young battalion officers, with sharp tongues and a sense ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... ultimately into the furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by itself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these stoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators. The lowest horror of the steamship ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... Norman, "I forgot! It's lucky you put me in mind. I must make a fresh beginning. There go my six best lines! However, it was an uncanny place, fit for hobgoblins, and shades, and funny customers, which will do as well for my purpose. Ha! that's grand about its being so much better than the vana gloria triumphalis—only take ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... wicked slate-coloured cloud, which looked as though it were rising straight up into the western heavens, while the wind whirled along and twisted into quaint shapes a ragged rift of white vapor, which went hurrying by, almost touching the tops of the moaning firs,—altogether an uncanny evening to be keeping tryst at the top of a wild knoll; and so thought our friend with the horses, and showed it, too, clearly enough, had anyone been there to put a construction on ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... from the Austrian yoke and added to United Italy. She was speaking of this one evening to Shield and he said, "It rained very heavily that day, didn't it?" Whereat the old lady, much astonished and evidently suspecting him of some uncanny gift of second sight, replied that indeed it did. But the truth was that he had been reading an account of this historic occasion in a local guide book, which related that, just as Garibaldi came out on a balcony to address the crowd, a heavy thunderstorm broke and the Hero of ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... put such thoughts behind me. My brain was awhirl, nay, even aflame, for gradually there crept over me a strange, uncanny feeling of giddiness such as I had never before experienced, a faint, sinking feeling, as though the chair ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux
... sound in the house save the ticking of an invisible clock. It might have been a place bewitched, so intense and so uncanny was the silence, broken only by that grim ticking that sounded somehow as if it had gone on exactly the same for ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... her breast, and then again laughing, rushed into every kind of danger with the reckless daring of despair. She rescued, extinguished, and was an object at once of surprise, admiration, and uncanny mystery to all the others. At last they despaired of being able even to arrest the fire, which, continuing to spread, threatened to reduce the whole village to ashes. It was then that they saw her sink ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... when the sun was near set, which wasna early, for the days were near their langest. But I made the fire burn up, and b'iled the kettle to be ready, and made the tea. And then wha' should I see but Brownrig himsel', riding on his black horse and followed by his uncanny tyke. I had only time to draw thegither the doors o' my press-bed ere ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... at him, nonplussed. There was surely something uncanny in this boy, who always seemed to know what people were doing, had done or ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... a uncanny night, black as chaos; and with my mind excited by these horrid tales, I hurried along to the chemist's, whose man was outside putting up the shutters. I stated my errand to the doctor, who said he would carry the medicine himself, as Mr. Pitcairn's ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... simple gowns and Fluff's frocks, and taught the child the little she could be persuaded to learn, for Fluff was a spoiled child and very backward for her age; and one or two people, Mrs. Watkins among them, had given it as their opinion that little Florence was not all there, rather odd and uncanny ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was a curiosity. It bore the Englishman's signature, and hinted at cats—at a Sending of Cats. The mere words on paper were creepy and uncanny to behold. ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... hobgoblins. And they are well named, for they look like creatures of a distorted imagination more than real, living animals. They travel only at night, and so superstitious are the natives of their evil influence that if one of these uncanny little creatures appears near their rice fields, the plantation is immediately abandoned. However, these small creatures are no larger than squirrels, and are perfectly harmless. They are very rare even in their native lands—the ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Count Henry II. and his wife Adelaide, walking here by night, saw the whole lake lighted up from within in uncanny fashion, and founded a monastery in order to counteract the spell. This deserted but scarcely ruined building still exists, and contains the grave of the founder; the twelfth-century decoration, rich and detailed, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... through so many bat-generations that it has become blind, but it has remarkable ears, and nature has grown for it an abnormal sense of touch, and a peculiar sensitiveness even where there is no contact, so that it avoids obstacles in flying with a skill that seems uncanny, incredulous. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... Ellis, in a suit of the same undignified brevity and ease as Miss Hopkins's, sat on the bench supporting her own wheel. Shuey Cardigan was drawn up to his full six feet of strength, and, one arm in the air, was explaining the theory of the balance of power. It was an uncanny moment to Lorania. She eyed the glistening, restless thing that slipped beneath her hand, and her fingers trembled. If she could have fled in secret she would. But since flight was not possible, she assumed a firm expression. Mrs. Ellis wore a smile ...
— Different Girls • Various
... uncanny sight, and though it might certainly be as the wise Mira Khabur had stated, the purely natural effect of purely natural causes, still those natural causes were not as yet explained satisfactorily. An earthquake or land-slip ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the dead woman, thus called upon to be a silent witness for or against the living. Joan drew a sigh of relief and let fall the blind. There could be no misreading the evidence. Death had smoothed away the lines, given back youth. It was almost uncanny, the likeness between them. It might have been her drowned sister lying there. And they had never known one another. Had this also been temperament again, keeping them apart? Why did it imprison us each one as in a moving cell, so that we never could stretch out ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... hill-tops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis's ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighbourhood. There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with especial awe. The manse stood between the high-road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was towards the kirktown of Balweary, nearly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he had received this important charge, Szilard took horse and set off at the head of his four and twenty pandurs. First of all he went in the direction of the Alps of Bihar and along a narrow mountain path and through a melancholy, uncanny, region with not a living plant by the wayside and not a morsel of moss on the naked rock. No sound is to be heard there but the eternal sighing of the wind, and in the dizzy depths below the traveller sees ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... the canal, and the water seemed to catch his attention. At last red circles flashed before his eyes, the houses seemed moving, the passers-by, the canal banks, the carriages, all danced before his eyes. Suddenly he started, saved again perhaps from swooning by an uncanny and hideous sight. He became aware of someone standing on the right side of him; he looked and saw a tall woman with a kerchief on her head, with a long, yellow, wasted face and red sunken eyes. She was looking straight at him, but obviously she saw nothing and recognised no one. Suddenly she ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... had its door sealed; poor Dowdney lost at sea in a schooner. The place is haunted. The vast empty sheds, the empty store, the airless, hot, long, low rooms, the claps of wind that set everything flying - a strange uncanny ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nothing uncanny in Martha Eggers' deduction that a young man who wears white hose, miraculously darned, is a self-respecting young man, brought up by a worshiping mother who knows about ginger cookies and winter ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... act belied the words, for as they passed his lips he rose erect, with a smothered exclamation and startled face, as if a ghost had suddenly confronted him. The throng had thinned, and as his wife followed the direction of his glance, she saw no uncanny apparition to cause such evident dismay, but a woman fair-haired, violet-eyed, blooming and serene, sweeping down the long hall with noiseless grace. An air of sumptuous life pervaded her, the shimmer of bridal snow surrounded her, bridal gifts shone on ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... speechless, and poetic knowledge of her moods, is one of the earliest and most interesting of his long novels. He excels in the short story. Some of his finest work in this field is in The Sin Eater (1895), which contains uncanny tales of quaint, strongly-marked highland characters with their ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of the party were rather pleased with the spectacle, though they had had enough of it; while the ladies, whose flesh had been "crawling" at the uncanny sight, were glad to escape. They all reached the hotel, and were hungry enough after the long jaunt of the forenoon to ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... application of the practice of prize-giving. I recall an occasion indeed, I must in justice mention, when the jam really was thick—my only memory of a schoolfeast, strange to say, throughout our young annals: something uncanny in the air of the schoolroom at the unwonted evening or late afternoon hour, and tables that seemed to me prodigiously long and on which the edibles were chunky and sticky. The stout red-faced lady must have been Irish, as the name ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... wise ones know just where to throw their lines and the kind of bait that is sure to lure the denizens of that particular spot. For fishing is a science, as well as a sport requiring skill and judgment. The born fisherman seems to have an uncanny sense of piscatorial thoughts and almost instinctively can determine just the right thing to do and the right time to do it, while the mere amateur fisherman who only wets a line occasionally guesses whether to use a fly ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... positively uncanny in the way misfortune lies in wait for that girl. You would think that after causing her to break two full breakfast services it would leave her alone for a while. But no; she was half-way through the third before her luck showed any ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... tragically petty, inasmuch as it saw itself great. In Fairbridge narrowness reigned, nay, tyrannised, and was not recognised as such. There was something fairly uncanny about Fairbridge's influence upon people after they had lived there even a few years. The influence held good, too, in the cases of men who daily went to business or professions in New York. Even Wall ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the eyes of the vulgar, a man possessed of supernatural power. Common fame paid David Ritchie a similar compliment, for some of the poor and ignorant, as well as all the children, in the neighbourhood, held him to be what is called uncanny. He himself did not altogether discourage the idea; it enlarged his very limited circle of power, and in so far gratified his conceit; and it soothed his misanthropy, by increasing his means of giving terror or pain. But even in a rude Scottish glen thirty years back, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... feel him drawin' me out after him the very same way. And last night, as sure as death, I heard the same uncanny air singin' in my ears, and it seemed to be callin' me ...
— The Turn of the Road - A Play in Two Scenes and an Epilogue • Rutherford Mayne
... calls him a descendant of the Genoese Frescobaldi, and I'm sure his black eyes were never made for an English head. Terry has always haunted those uncanny wares of his, and has pursued them to the museum. ''Tis not every young gentleman I would wish to see there,' says the old man, 'but the Honourable Mr. De Lancey has the soul ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... It was uncanny. It shook the mayor's nerve. 'My dear Mrs Halloran, if you will let me have a word or ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... serve to identify the two ancient goddesses Frigga and Freyja with all these leaders of a midnight host. Just as Odin was banished from day to darkness, so the two great heathen goddesses, fused into one 'uncanny' shape, were supposed to ride the air at night. Medieval chroniclers, writing in bastard Latin, and following the example of classical authors, when they had to find a name for this demon-goddess, chose, of course, Diana the heathen huntress, the moon-goddess, and the ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... send him on his way rejoicing. Thereafter he was never again heard of in Wiltshire or in the pages of history, and with his disappearance came an end to the knockings, the corpse candles, and all the other uncanny phenomena that had made life a ceaseless nightmare ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... broken by rocks. Now and again high mounds of earth, mossy and green, rose on either side, and the wood grew denser. He was uneasy, and half wished he had kept to the edge of the cliff, where the way was clear, for he seemed to have left the world behind him. There was something uncanny in the dead silence, and he quite startled when a rabbit jumped across his path into a hole. But the next moment, boy-like, he wished he had had the dogs with him that he might ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... watched I could not escape observing that Miss Lowe followed Burke furtively now, as though he had some uncanny power. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... to you," was the almost rude answer. He felt quite disconcerted; he hardly knew what to say next. This certainly was an odd contretemps, to say the least. "You are here to learn the whereabouts of—a woman?" she whispered, in a deep, uncanny voice. "Is it ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... again! This was uncanny. Probably this girl had been to the movies and seen the same picture that Ryan had told him about. But he smiled gravely and answered, watching ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... ventured to say that it could not be Satan, for he was never known to do anything good. Another said there must be something uncanny about it, for she had experienced the most peculiar sensations when shaking ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... hair hung over his shoulders almost to his waist, and on his head was placed a high round black-cloth cap. He was like no class or form of sailor we had ever seen before. He was something weird and uncanny. His face was neither bronzed by the sea nor tanned by the sun, but had an unhealthy pallor about it, and his sunken eyes looked wistfully over a world of which he seemingly knew nothing. Yet he was a sailor, this antithesis of a Jack Tar, and he was also—a Russian monk! His hands ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... have sworn it wouldn't do more than my usual fifteen or eighteen hundred, and I cursed myself for having been such a besotted fool as to pin my faith to it. [Sitting upright.] And then, suddenly, a rush—a tremendous rush! Twenty-four thousand went off in less than six weeks. Almost uncanny, eh? [Touching the tobacco-jar.] Oh, lord, sometimes I think I've been putting opium into my pipe instead of this innocent baccy, and that I shall wake up to the necessity of counting my pence again and apologizing to John for being in arrear with ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... don't see what good can come of it, and it's all very strange and uncanny. I don't know how to explain it; but, indeed, it isn't anything personal. It's because you are of a state of things so utterly opposed to human nature that I don't see how—I ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... me that they've putt the wee laddie Splint into blue tights wi' brass buttons. He just looks like an uncanny sort o' speeder! It's a daft-like dress for onything but a puggy, but the bairn's as prood o't as if it was quite reasonable. It maitters little what he putts on, hooiver, for he wad joke an' cut capers, baith pheesical an' ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... is strange! I dreamed I know not what, It seemed that certain apparitions were, Which sang uncanny words, significant And yet ambiguous—half-understood— Portending evil; and an awful spook, Even as I stood with my accomplices, Counted me out, as children do in play. Is ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... not have said whether she was relieved or more frightened than ever. True, that numbing sense of the uncanny had ceased to grip her, for Reason told her that spectres do not sing rag-time songs. On the other hand, owners of apartments do, and she would almost as readily have faced a spectre as the owner of this apartment. Dizzily, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... seconds later, however, he forgot his aches. Appearing with uncanny and inexplicable suddenness, there was the big pioneer again, sitting up by the edge of the canal. As before, he sat absolutely motionless for a minute or two, sniffing and listening. Then, satisfied once more that ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... at once subtly aware of the fact that he was being deliberately conducted from the grounds. Moreover, he was now convinced that O'Dowd had been close upon his heels from the instant he entered them. There was something uncanny in the feeling that possessed him. Such espionage as this signified something deep and imperative in the presence not only of O'Dowd but the Jack-in-the-box gardener a few minutes earlier. He had the grim suspicion that he would later ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... relief, he wouldn't talk to her about Mrs. Newsome, wouldn't work off on her the anxiety produced in him by Sarah's calculated omissions of reference. The effect she produced of representing her mother had been produced—and that was just the immense, the uncanny part of it—without her having so much as mentioned that lady. She had brought no message, had alluded to no question, had only answered his enquiries with hopeless limited propriety. She had invented a way of meeting them—as if he had been a polite perfunctory poor relation, of distant degree—that ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... a man, is thus busy with his primer, his copy-book, and "four rules," let us reflect upon the uncanny circumstances of his early life. He had no luxuries, few real comforts. The people around him lived half the time underground in mines that were dark, damp, and dangerous—in constant war with water and a poisonous, explosive, natural gas, known as "fire-damp." Above ground ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... despair. What could this mad giant tell him? But almost before the thought had escaped him his companion read his thought with uncanny precision. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... whole had a sense of unbearable reality. Under the increasing sunlight the colours of the Doctor's complexion, the pattern of his tweeds, grew and expanded outrageously, as such things grow too important in a realistic novel. But his smile was quite slight, the pose of his head polite; the only uncanny thing was ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... eyes reverted to Miss Walton, and dwelt with increasing interest on her. There at least were youth, health, and something else—what was it in the girl that had so strongly and suddenly gained his attention? At any rate there was nothing about her uncanny and spirit-like. ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... beauty, it struck me that, on the whole, I had never seen a more evil-looking set of faces. There was an aspect of cold and sullen cruelty stamped upon them that revolted me, and which in some cases was almost uncanny in ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard |
