"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hair from thy veiled eyes, show thy face as thee beseems, For yet is starlight in the skies, weird woman piteous through my dreams, 'Nay,' she mourns, 'forsooth not now, veiled I sit for evermore, Rose is shed, and charmed prow shall not touch ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... the use of this enigmatical anointing for an undisclosed purpose? It is Samuel's last act, and his last appearance, except for the mention of David's flight to him from the court of Saul, and that weird scene of Saul prophesying and lying naked before Samuel and David for a day and a night. It was therefore the solemn final act of the prophet,—transferring the monarchy; but it was for David the beginning ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... come to Golden Gate Park. It seemed as if we had started for there. By this time the darkness was settling. But it was a weird twilight. The glare from the burning city threw a kind of red flame and shadow about us. It seemed uncanny; the figures ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... by greenwood tree, It is thy weird to follow me— To follow me through the ghastly moonlight— To follow me through the shadows of night— To follow me, comrade, still art thou bound; I conjure thee by the unstaunch'd wound— I conjure thee by the last words I spoke When the body slept and the ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... had passed away, long secret labour had been expended in the erection of this weird and tottering structure; but it was all the work of one hand. Night after night had the Pagan entered the deserted temples in the surrounding streets, and pillaged them of their contents to enrich his favoured shrine: the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... rustle, like a wood when the wind suddenly catches the leaves. And then the tall, weird minister got to his feet, and in his strong, bell-like, beautiful voice—the only beautiful thing about him—he said with ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... noticed in a quiet manner by the father of Mrs Anthony. Youth appreciates that sort of recognition which is the subtlest form of flattery age can offer. Mr Smith seized opportunities to approach him on deck. His remarks were sometimes weird and enigmatical. He was doubtless an eccentric old gent. But from that to calling his son-in-law (whom he never approached on deck) nasty names behind his back was a ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... to freedom. Getting the other men up to the floor was the work of but a few moments. They were a weird-looking crew in the torn fragments of clothing that remained to them. Foster stationed them beside the locked cavern door so that they would be hidden behind it when ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... jackets, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched up to ears. Farther aft an iron door clanged heavily behind a sailor emerging from an alleyway; he approached the ship's bell, with practised hand sounded two double strokes, then turned and sang out in the weird minor traditional ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... sensitive to impressions of melancholy and mystery, he was endowed with an imagination abnormally active even for a child. It is customary to give prominence to De Quincey's pernicious habit of opium-eating, in attempting to explain the grotesque fancies and weird flights of his marvellous mind in later years; yet it is only fair to emphasize the fact that the later achievements of that strange creative faculty were clearly foreshadowed in youth. For example, the earliest incident in his life that he could afterwards ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... the retreat was one day broken by a huge procession which wound its way along the mountain path leading to the monastery doors. On looking out, Chan saw that many of the men in this procession were dressed in sackcloth, and that in front of it was a band of musicians producing weird, shrill notes on their ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... where'er my finger led! Once said a Man — and wise was He — 'Never shalt thou the heavens see, Save as a little child thou be.'" Then o'er sea-lashings of commingling tunes The ancient wise bassoons, Like weird Gray-beard Old harpers sitting on the high sea-dunes, Chanted runes: "Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss, The sea of all doth lash and toss, One wave forward and one across: But now 'twas trough, now 'tis crest, And worst doth foam and flash to ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... Volktman. He was by birth a Dane; and nature had bestowed on him that frame of mind which might have won him a distinguished career, had she placed the period of his birth in the eleventh century. Volktman was essentially a man belonging to the past time: the character of his enthusiasm was weird and Gothic; with beings of the present day he had no sympathy; their loves, their hatreds, their politics, their literature, awoke no echo in his breast. He did not affect to herd with them; his life was solitude, and its occupation study—and ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bad sort of a fellow, you know—and the soul of hospitality." In addition, he was an incorrigible drunken bully, and broke his wife's heart within four years after she married him. Amona was his cook. Denison was one of his supercargoes, and (when a long boat of drunkenness made him see weird visions of impossible creatures) manager of the business on shore, overseer, accountant, and Jack-of-all-trades. How he managed to stay on with such a brute I don't know. He certainly paid him well enough, but he (Denison) could have got another berth from other people in Samoa, Fiji, ...
— Amona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... the Colorado rise in lakes in the enchanted Wind River Mountains. Mr. Stuart mentions the weird tales, told by trappers and hunters, of places—avoided, if possible, by man and beast—in these mountains where trees and game and even Indians are petrified, and yet look natural as in life. These trappers are accustomed to exaggerate. I remember hearing a very serious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... wish," said Siegfried at last. "You think that I am the prince of whom the weird sisters spoke; and you would have me slay the dragon Fafnir, and win for you the ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... trunk deal I shall be duly punished. That the good Lord who looks after the fathers of willful, old-maidish daughters will see to that. Why, he has gone so far as to say that he wouldn't be surprised if I wound up by marrying some weird country minister. Fancy that! Why, that from father is almost a curse. And he's worried sick about my riding Gunshot. But I shall manage. So expect to see me dash up to your gate in ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... composed the only surviving members of the fisherman's family, were strangely and wildly lit up by the blaze of the fire and by the still brighter glare of a resin torch stuck into a block of wood in the chimney-corner. The red and yellow light played full on the weird face of the old man as he lay opposite to it, and glanced fitfully on the figures of the young girl, Gabriel, and the two children; the great, gloomy shadows rose and fell, and grew and lessened in bulk about the walls ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... treated the singular mystery which he had been called upon to fathom. Once only had I known him to fail, in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of the Sign of Four, and the extraordinary circumstances connected with the Study in Scarlet, I felt that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... No other light pierced the sullen, apprehensive flood that rolled past in tranquil gloom, leaden from the skies above, and without ripple or fall to break its glassy quiet. Beside the wall grew a witch-hazel; in my vague grasp at outside objects I saw it, full of wrinkled and weird bloom, as if the golden fleece had strayed thereby, and caught upon the ungainly twigs of the scragged bush, and left glittering curled threads in flecked bunches scattered on every branch; the strange spell-sweet odor of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... chief's right side stood Swift Arrow; at the left was a figure that formed a weird contrast to the other two. This one was lean, bent, and twisted like a gnarled tree that had been starved and warped in the forest. His dress was alike native, but the grotesque ornaments of animals' skulls, tails, dried monkeys' hands, and other ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... seen a Paris ball before. She was enchanted. The sumptuous, lofty rooms, with their perfect Louis XV gilt boiseries, the marvellous clothes of the women, the gaiety in the air! She was accustomed to the new weird dances in England, but had not seen them performed as she now ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... brush—a beard that got redder the longer it grew; he had a hooked nose, and his hair stood straight up (I never saw a man so easy-going about the expression and so scared about the head), and he was very tall, with long, thin, hairy legs. We must have looked a weird pair as we sat there, naked, on the low three-legged stools, with the billy and the tucker on the box between us, and ate our bread and ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... back to me also many memories; the scouting of the Valley, the hard combats of the Lowland, Cold Harbor, Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, and that last greeting between Jackson and the great commander of the cavalry, on the weird ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... roots extend to all the worlds; its branches spread even over heaven. Under it is the fountain Mimir, spring of wisdom, from which Odin drinks daily. Near it is the dwelling of the Norns, fates or weird sisters, who establish laws and uphold them by their judgments, and allot to every man his span of life. They are named Urd the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuld the future. Daily do they water the ash from the spring to keep its leaves fresh, and help ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... a strange and weird fire, enough to frighten any man, but the still, dark-robed figure standing beside it never moved, not even when a number of tiny little imps appeared, clad in scarlet, and green, and blue, and purple, and danced round and round it on the table, tossing their tiny arms, ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... savored always of the sea. His hens "turned in," at night. He was full of sayings and formulas of a maritime nature; there was one which always seemed to me to have something of a weird and mystic character: "South moon brings high water on Coast Island Bar." In describing the transactions of domestic life, he used words more properly applicable to the movements of large ships. He would speak of a saucepan as if it weighed ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... emerge and speed down the narrow hall in full and limping flight, pursued by Mrs. Charlton Denyse clad in inconsiderable pink, and shrieking vengeance as she splashed. Relieved, through this unexpected alliance, of further interference, the messenger collected a weird assortment of his liege's clothing and an article or two of his own and returned to her. There was no mistaking the gladness of ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... house—pieces of furniture, broken or too worn for use; pictures, some with frames and some without; toys, a nursery chair, and who knows what beside. Mrs. Goodman laid her hand on a rocking-horse which peered out of the gloom like some weird monster, head upreared ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... the contrary, with infinite polish and grace asked pardon for the flying words of debate, and drew easy forgiveness from the member whom a few hours before he had mocked as 'a weird sibyl'; the other member whom he would not say he greatly respected, but whom he greatly regarded; and the third member whom he bade learn that petulance is not sarcasm, and insolence is not invective. Lord John Russell congratulated him on the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... might look like—for to one who has come out of the eternal shadows the world is ever strange—was drowned in the supreme indifference of absolute ease and rest. It seemed to him as though he were floating midway between the earth and the sun, not in a weird dream wherein the subconscious mind says, "This is not real; I know that I dream"; but actual, in that Pete could feel nothing above nor beneath him. Being of a very practical turn of mind he straightway opened his eyes and was at once conscious of the arm of the wheel-chair ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... last weird battle in the west, There came on Arthur sleeping, Gawain kill'd In Lancelot's war, the ghost of Gawain blown Along a wandering wind, and past his ear Went shrilling, "Hollow, hollow all delight! Hail King! tomorrow thou shalt pass away. Farewell! there is an isle of rest for thee. And I am blown ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... scarcely anything in that rocky waste but the dwarf trees of olive; a poetic fantasy woven about that war in after ages described them as hindered even in their wood-cutting by the demons of that weird place. And indeed the fancy had an essential truth, for the very nature of the land fought against them; and each of those dwarf trees, hard and hollow and twisted, may well have seemed like a grinning goblin. It is said that they found timbers by accident in a cavern; they ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... a million country cock-crows if each particular cock were as big as the mythical rooster of antiquity and could crow in proportion to his size. My readers who dwell on the hills and in dales and wheat-fields, and who are unfamiliar with the wild, weird early morning din of the city, may not know that the metropolitan cock-crow is made up of the jingle and jangle of a million tin milk cans jolted over a million blocks of stone to the tune of thousands of steel-shod ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of a man, without any body; with eyes in it that scintillate and see; a mouth that opens, and shows teeth; a throat from which issue sounds of human intonation; around this object of weird supernatural aspect, a group of wolves, and over it a flock ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... own rashness, and very much relieved to find she had been kept from being as foolish as she had intended. I got in beside her, and let her have her cry out in comfort. After that we ate some sandwiches and took heart. It was weird work, in the dead of night and along the lonely roads; but we pushed on, and crept into Philadelphia between one and two ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... here an extract from an introduction by Denis Florence MacCarthy to his translation of Calderon's "Purgatory of St. Patrick." It will be of interest as following the thread of this weird legend: ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... still following us?" asked Betty, after an interval of weird flashes, crashing thunder, and rain beating relentlessly against the glass in front and turning the road to a sea of mud. "If she should get stuck I don't know ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... into huge icicles that hung like a great white shroud over the bier of the two dead heroes. It was a gas-fixture factory, and the hundreds of pipes, twisted into all manner of fantastic shapes of glittering ice, lent a most weird effect to the sorrowful scene. I can still see Chief Gicquel, all smoke-begrimed, and with the tears streaming down his big, manly face,—poor Gicquel! he went to join his brothers in so many a hard fight only a little while after,—pointing back toward the wreck with the choking words, "They are ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... through holes in their lips did not seem to bother them, and they laughed at the suggestion of removing them; evidently to have done so would have been rather bad manners—like using a knife as an aid in eating ice-cream. They held two or three dances, and we were again struck by the rhythm and weird, haunting melody of their chanting. After supper they danced beside the camp-fire; and finally, to their delight, most of the members of our own party, Americans and Brazilians, enthusiastically joined the dance, while the colonel and I furnished ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... Baboo passes in or out through the great gate, the solemn coachman whips up the spanking Arabs, and the syces bawl louder than ever, and Kalidas Ramaya Mullick turns away his eyes. But for all that, the durhna woman heaps dust upon her head, which he sees, and mutters a weird warning, which he hears; and though the lawn is wide, and the banian topes are leafy, and a gilded temple, the family shrine, stands between, and the marble veranda is spacious, and the state apartments are remote, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... extreme. The agile movements of the lean forms, black as night, reflected by the radiance of their gleaming torches, the yells and frantic gestures, together with the fierce onsets of the combatants with spear and tomahawk, present a spectacle of weird interest, quite in keeping with the wild scenery of the defiles and ravines where ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... the breath of God, thou spirit wild, For thine own weird to wail, Like to that winged voice, that heart so sore Which, crying alway, hungereth to cry more, "Itylus, Itylus," till it sing her child ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... of the moon, and a most wild-looking evening; the sun sets with a fiery forge glowing about it, and fringing with an angry border the banks of darksome clouds that mingle their weird shapes with the mountain masses to the west, the wind sighs and moans through the archways and menzils of the huge caravanserai, breathing of rain and unsettled weather. These warning signals are not far in advance, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... British nation. The world's knowledge was increased. There was something put down on the map which was not there before. The contact with the islanders in the Strait gave a brisk element of adventure to the expedition; and certainly Papuan warriors are foes as wild and weird as any adventurer can desire to meet. The rescuing of wrecked mariners at Tahiti added a spice of adventure of another sort. From beginning to end, indeed, this voyage must have been as full of ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... to the ship's control-room were weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-out sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one's self weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... everything with clear-eyed frankness. Every subject was proper ground for legitimate study, even the sombre facts of death and burial, and the unknown life beyond. She touches these themes sometimes lightly, sometimes almost humorously, more often with weird and peculiar power; but she is never by any chance frivolous or trivial. And while, as one critic has said, she may exhibit toward God "an Emersonian self-possession," it was because she looked upon all life with a candor as unprejudiced as ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... visage reappeared behind a spring of flame. Her black hair was scattered over her shoulders and fell half across her brows. She moved slowly, and came up to him, fastening weird eyes on him, pointing a finger at the region of witches. Sepulchral cadences accompanied the representation. He did not listen, for he was thinking what a deadly charming and exquisitely horrid witch she was. Something in the way her underlids worked seemed to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Where this is damp, it leads not alone to disease among the inmates, but to the disintegration of the house itself, through what is called "dry rot," but is paradoxically the result of dampness. Edgar Allan Poe, in his weird story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," has given a mystical interpretation of the dissolution of an old homestead which really has a scientific explanation that might be ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial theme of modern times? Born as lowly as the Son of God, in a hovel; of what real parentage we know not, reared in penury, squalor, with no gleam of light, nor fair surrounding; a young manhood vexed by weird dreams and visions; with scarcely a natural grace; singularly awkward, ungainly even among the uncouth about him: it was reserved for this remarkable character, late in life, to be snatched from obscurity, raised to ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... motor-car, and Letton by himself in another. Daylight, with still in the forefront of his consciousness all that had occurred in the preceding hour, was deeply impressed by the scene at the moment of departure. The three machines stood like weird night monsters at the gravelled foot of the wide stairway under the unlighted porte-cochere. It was a dark night, and the lights of the motor-cars cut as sharply through the blackness as knives would cut through ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... was treed; then the wild scramblings and stumblings through briars and bushes and over roots to get to the spot; then the lighting of a fire and the felling of the tree, the joyful frenzy of the dogs and the negroes, and the weird picture it all made in the red glare—I remember it all well, and the delight that every one got out ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... his yet published gives a better illustration of his genius, and of the weird charm which has given his stories such ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... "I could think like Socrates and never come close to...." He stopped and stared at Jed with a half-smile. "You know, Jed, you're kind of weird sometimes. 'Think the bullets.' Come to think of it, though, that's not the only weird thing. Did you know that everytime you were getting ready to shoot ...
— Sonny • Rick Raphael
... long time nobody spoke—they were too busy listening to the weird meanings of the fog horns and wondering how they could have escaped a collision so long. For a while Paul had kept the engine running in the hope that he might be able to keep to his course and eventually get to Lighthouse Island. But he had ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler
... how distant the ceiling, How weird were the voices that whispered around, What dreams would come flocking, as rocking and rocking, We floated ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... pollards of the Steenbeek are left behind and flickering Verey lights cast into weird relief the rugged surface of the earth. At Pommern Castle our front trenches, in which figures of men loom indistinctly, are reached. At one corner, where the trench is littered with fragments, we are cautioned by ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... side door, now became the most excited, and perhaps the boldest, under the reaction which set in. Even the wood, which was comparatively dark, with only patches of moonlight here and there, and queer weird shadows where the trees were thinnest, ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... busy. He had often told himself that it was the part of prudence to burn those documents, yet some jackdaw quality of setting store by weird trinkets had always saved them from destruction. In a fashion they were trophies of triumph. With indefinable certainty he felt that some time—somehow—their possession would be of incalculable value. They constituted his birth certificate ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... sad end was impressed by nature on that rugged, haggard face. The exceeding sadness of the eyes and their strange sweetness were the one redeeming feature in a face of unusual plainness, and there was about them that odd, weird look, which some eyes possess, of seeming to see more than the outer objects of the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... who screech out the name and title of their wares at the top of their voices. But even there where the crowd is thickest, one feels as if there were a void. The two contrary ideas of multitude and solitude seem to present themselves at once in one's mind. A weird impression! Imagine a vast desert with a crowd ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... forest country Nature seemed to brood in a deep hush which but gathered accentuation from the raucous bass of the bullfrogs and occasional weird night sounds of birds and animals in the depths of the woods. The deep quiet was oppressive after the city's multitude of noises. Earlier in the evening while he talked with his aunt he had remarked upon the great distinctness with which the putt-putt ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... fifteenth of March and the Merivales' "Musical" was to commence at eight o'clock. The wind blew fiercely through the stiff, naked boughs of the giant maples, and drifted the light powdery snow madly on before it. I had been in-doors all day listening to the weird wailing of the ceaseless wind as it whistled down the chimneys and swept past the house corners. I had written and read and stitched until my eyes were wearied and my fingers numb, and it was only four o'clock, that turning-point on a March day from ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... ship in the process of coaling, every porthole and doorway closed, and heavy canvas hung to protect as far as possible the clean decks. Two barges were moored alongside. Two blazing braziers lighted them with weird red and flickering flames. In their depths, cast in black and red shadows, toiled half-guessed figures; from their depths, mounting a single steep plank, came an unbroken procession of natives, naked save for a wisp of cloth around the loins. They ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... green, and tawny brown. The smoky atmosphere, which had hung all day in purple folds around the distant hills, took a golden haze as the sun sank rapidly; and to Irene's gaze river and woodland, hill-side and valley, were brimmed with that weird "light which never was on sea or land." Her almost "Brahminical" love of nature had grown with her years, but a holier element mingled with her adoration now; she looked beyond the material veil of beauty, and bowed reverently before the indwelling ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... this difficulty, he was passing along, suddenly he saw a man in black standing right in his path, about fifty yards distant, in a field of some growing barley or wheat. The gloomy stranger was standing stock-still; one outstretched arm, with weird intimation pointing towards the deceased Squire's abode. To the brooding soul of the now desolate Israel, so strange a sight roused a supernatural suspicion. His conscience morbidly reproaching him ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... Oriental romance is full of stories of violators of graves. Eastern superstition attributes to certain individuals a passion for unearthing corpses and mangling them. Of a moonlight night weird forms are seen stealing among the tombs, and burrowing into them with their long nails, desiring to reach the bodies of the dead ere the first streak of dawn compels them to retire. These ghouls, as they are called, are supposed generally to ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... waylay the lonely wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... nights that us benight!' 'Tis for that sleep like hood enveils their eyes * Right soon, but from our eyes is fair of flight: When night-falls, dread and drear to those who love, * We mourn; they joy to see departing light: Had they but dree'd the weird, the bitter dole * We dree, their beds like ours ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... The weird call for help brought Scraggs around to a fuller realization of the enormity of the disaster which had overtaken him. In his agony, he forgot to curse his navigating officer for the latter's stubbornness in refusing to turn back when the fog threatened. He clutched Mr. Gibney by ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... tour of the stalls on the arm of Anna, to admire them in their first freshness, and put finishing touches wherever solicited. The Rocca Marina conservatories were in rare glory, orchids in weird beauty, lovely lilies of all hues, fabulously exquisite ipomoeas, all that heart could wish. Before them a fountain played in the midst of blue, pink, and white lotus lilies, and in a flower-decked house the Seasons dispensed pot-flowers, bouquets, and button-holes; ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... It was weird to crouch there alone, with the great balloon swaying over my head, each plunge threatening to dislodge me from the seat to which I clung, the cords and the wicker-work straining and creaking, and the swish of the silk sounding like the hiss ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... coloured lights cast a lurid glare over their hideous den that is full of dead men's bones, out of which roses, poppies and other flowers have sprung into bloom. The sirens try to attract Odysseus and his companions by singing sweetly, and playing enticing music on weird instruments made out of the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... impressed with the greatness of the Roman Church. Of old it had seemed to him great with the greatness of Antichrist. Now it seemed great with the strange weird greatness of a wonderful mixed system, commanding from its extent of sway and its imperial authority, complicated and mysterious in its organisation and influence, in its devotion and its superstitions, and surpassing every ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... wall, giving it a hollow-eyed appearance. The whole quartier in which they now are, presents a dilapidated front. But when they enter the old, mouldy apartment, lit up with so much of the beautiful, they forgot the gloomy, damp street; the uninviting exterior of the building; the weird old man in charge; everything but the gems by which they are surrounded. Here were some rare bits of Sevres and Dresden china, there some modern tile painting, here some old Roman jugs, jars, and vases; there the sweet face of a Madonna looks down, as if in pity, on a ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... had we not been in charge of Kouaga, I should have feared to trust myself among that shouting cut-throat crew of grinning blacks. Clinging to a rope I stood watching the strange scene, rendered more weird by the flickering uncertain light of the torches falling upon the swarm of natives who manned ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... paraphernalia of the peripatetic Jadugar. While Siddeshur was looking on, and in the broad, clear light of the afternoon, a man was shut up in a box, which was then carefully nailed up and bound with cords. Weird spells and incantations of the style we are all familiar with were followed by the breaking open of the box, which, "to the unqualified amazement of everybody, was found to be perfectly empty." All this is much in the usual style; but what followed was so much superior to the ordinary run ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... something more than a pair of sandals on the towel above him, something that crouched in an attitude of tense hostility, daring him to approach. It was only a small creature that thus challenged him, only a weird black terrier of doubtful extraction, but he bristled from end to end with animosity. Quite plainly he regarded the sandals as his responsibility. With glaring eyes and gleaming teeth he crouched, prepared ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... time care is taken to preserve all the features and the hair intact. By repeating the process with the hot pebbles many times the head finally becomes shrunken to that of a small doll, though still retaining its human aspect, so that the effect produced is very weird and uncanny. Lastly, the head is decorated with brilliant feathers, and the lips are fastened together with a string, by which the head is suspended from ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... more agony to the next few minutes it was the sight of Tricky. That ever gay animal was careering down the hill straight towards the feeding sheep. The pump-handle was still tied to its neck, and it clattered over the stones with a noise weird enough to drive the whole flock into the sea. The shepherd knew there must be a catastrophe, but he was powerless to avert it. He was too sore to follow, so he slowly limped towards the hut, to nurse his ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... the father often took little Gustave with him, and the lad came to know each wild crag, and crowning fortress, and bend in the river where strong men with spears and bows and arrows used to lie in wait. In imagination Gustave repeopled the ruins and filled the weird forests with curious, haunting shapes. The Rhine reeks with history that merges off into misty song and fable; and this folklore of the storied river filled the day-dreams and night-dreams ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... strange-looking being stretched in an easy-chair, which was covered with pillows and almost hidden under various woolen draperies. He was dressed in a long coat of coarse, pale-blue cloth. He was bareheaded, and his long, white hair formed a weird frame for a face of bloodless hue and meagre proportions, from which two vacant eyes stared fixedly. He sat immovable and his arms hung limply over ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... he shrieked, and ran from the room; and Polidori writes that he brought him to by throwing water in his face. Upon his reviving, they agreed to write each a supernatural tale. Matthew Gregory Lewis, the author of The Monk, who visited at Diodati, assisted them with these weird fancies. ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... trail was solved at last. In fact, not to state a paradox, there had been no mystery at first—at least to the Desert Rat. The moment he saw the bones he guessed the answer to that weird puzzle. ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... library, Andrew Fraser pored over the weird stories of Runjeet Singh, of Aurung zebe, of King Dharma, and the Cashmerian priest who came with Buddha's first message to Thibet! The story of the marvelous royal babe found floating in the Ganges, in a copper box, a century before Christ, the tales of the "Konchogsum," ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... tales, Mr. Poe has chosen to exhibit his power chiefly in that dim region which stretches from the very utmost limits of the probable into the weird confines of superstition and unreality. He combines in a very remarkable manner two faculties which are seldom found united; a power of influencing the mind of the reader by the impalpable shadows of mystery, and a minuteness of detail which does not leave a pin or a button unnoticed. Both ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... hung round with Chinese lanterns throwing weird lights and shadows over the mysterious forms of men and beasts that moved therein. It was fascinating to watch the stately entrance into the field, Lancers, Irish Rifles, Welsh Fusiliers, Grenadiers and many another gallant regiment, each marching into the field ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... our decks presented, with huge fires blazing away under our pots, and the men with the ladles skimming off the scraps, or baling out the oil into the coolers, was strange and weird in the extreme. Had I been suddenly introduced among them, I should not have recognised them as my shipmates, begrimed as they were with smoke and oil. I was, however, much in the same condition. Dr Cockle had become accustomed to ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... sunshine and cheat each other throughout the course of an afternoon and lie out of it in the most obvious manner. The game was finally discontinued, owing to a shortage of checkermen which they had secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my instinctive sense of honor ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... useful cattle medicine—so these stones are said to be the work of the devil. A friend tells me that in his childhood his nurse used to frighten him by saying that the devil lurked in a dolmen which stands near his father's house in Oxfordshire; and many weird traditions cluster round these ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... indefinite time. Viewed against the sunset yellow, the figures of the dragoons stood up black and clean, as conventionalized and regular as though they had all been stenciled on that background. Seeing next the round, spiked helmets of the cannoneers outlined in that weird half-light, I knew of what those bobbing heads reminded me. They were like pictures of ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... it was then near the end of October—the weird song of a solitary brave was heard. In an instant the camp was thrown into indescribable confusion. The meaning of this was clear as day to everybody—all of our war-party were killed, save the one whose mournful ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... Itika came to the valley of the Yukon the giant drove hunted with him. To this day they run through the mountains on cold, clear nights, in a multitude, while the light of the moon flickers from their white sides, flashing up into the sky in weird, fantastic figures. Some people call it Northern Lights, but old Isaac assured me earnestly, toothlessly, and with the light of ancient truth, as I lay snow-blind in his lodge, that it is nothing more remarkable than the spirit of Itika and ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... again as she thought. She knew there was some weird old legend associated with it, some old Indian folklore. But that left no impression of ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... said I. "Anyhow, I must dree my own weird—whatever that means. I don't know, and never heard of anyone who did, but it sounds appropriate. I should like to do a walking tour alone in the desert, if it were not for the annoying necessity to eat and drink. ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... twenty yards and more beyond. I stood for a moment struck by the grotesque effect of his soaring figure—his dirty cricket cap, and spiky hair, his little round body, his arms and his knicker-bockered legs tucked up tightly—against the weird spaciousness of the lunar scene. A gust of laughter seized me, and then I stepped off to follow. Plump! I dropped ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... character. With nothing to say of David, it has countless stories of his gifted son. One alone, called "Solomon-Nameh," fills eighty books. Arabia also claims Solomon as the Father of her kings, and to this day, under the eastern sky dusky Arabs sit around the lonely tent-fire and tell weird and wonderful tales of the wit, wisdom, and wealth of Solomon. Legends of which he is the hero are also preserved not only in Asia and Africa, but also in the remotest corners of Europe. According to these ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... lifted up by Moses, signifies Christ, is taught by John iii. If it were not for that passage, my reasoning might evolve many strange and weird fancies out of that type. That Adam was a type of Christ, I learn not from myself, but from St. Paul. That the rock in the wilderness represents Christ is not taught by my reason, but by St. Paul. None other explains the type but the Holy Spirit ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... trunks run straight up to a great height without a branch, and then form a thick leafy canopy far overhead; a canopy so dense that even the blaze of the cloudless blue sky is subdued, one might almost say into a weird gloom, the effect of which is enhanced by the solemn silence. At first such a forest gives the impression of being more open than an English wood, but a few steps are sufficient to correct this error. There is a thick undergrowth ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... brought it up, and after some delay a place for it was found. The two lights now plainly showed a sudden enlargement in the area of the cave, and above them hung what appeared to be huge icicles, giving the interior a weird appearance. Still no ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... 1840; and some one arises to show that when he was Governor of Indiana, when it was a territory, he tried to introduce slavery, contrary to the Ordinance of 1787. I wrote you of this Ordinance before. Then there are the most numerous groups of people of every sort of weird convictions; some organized to oppose Masonry; others to curb the Irish and the Catholics; others to prohibit the use of wine and all intoxicants; others to advance the cause of free love; others to socialize the state. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... hour later, the pipal was surrounded by thousands of Mahratta sepoys, for word had gone forth,—the mysterious rumour of India that is like a weird static whispering to the four corners of the land a message,—had flashed through the tented city that the men from Karowlee were to take the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... would wonder what had become of me. I thought of my friends of the outer world, and of how they all would go on living their lives in total ignorance of the strange and terrible fate that had overtaken me, or unguessing the weird surroundings which had witnessed the last frightful agony of my extinction. And with these thoughts came a realization of how unimportant to the life and happiness of the world is the existence of any one ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... philosophy of the Hindus. He laid aside all his old notions when he came to encounter the metaphysical subtleties of Hindu thought, when he learned something of the immense Hindu literature, the voluminous ethics, the mystical and weird mythologies, the tremendous power of tradition and social customs—when, in short, he found his way hedged up by habits of thought wholly different from his own; and he resolved to know something of the religion which the people ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... autumn yet remain, and e'er stern winter has usurped the sway,—one wide-wide field of death and desolation is all that's left for man to ponder over;—fading flowers, trembling and shrinking in the raw cold blast;—half naked trees, that day by day present a more weird aspect—fields still green, but stripped of every gem;—whilst still some russet warbler may be heard chirping in sorrow and distress, and heavy looking clouds anxious to screen the cheering ray, which now and then bursts forth ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... Something strange and weird was happening in the house. Every morning, when the servants came down-stairs, they found the front door wide open. At first everybody had thought that the house must have been robbed, but nothing was missing. Every ...
— Heidi - (Gift Edition) • Johanna Spyri
... dazzling light and the same clangor of trumpets, the shaded path that skirts the edge of the meadows. Having reached the little bridge, it stopped; I saw the torches rise, wave, and cast showers of sparks; the horns sounded a weird and prolonged blast; then suddenly every light disappeared, every noise ceased, and the valley was again wrapped in the darkness and the deep silence of the night. That is what I saw and heard. You who have just arrived from ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... aim was the amassing of quick fortunes were virtual rulers of Cape Colony, with more power than the Government to whom they simulated submission. All sorts of weird stories were in circulation. One popular belief was that the mutiny of the Dutch in Cape Colony just before the Boer War was at bottom due to the influence of money. This was followed by a feeling that, but for the ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... jolted through thick clumps of scrub palmetto. Before nightfall we reached the district occupied by the Indians, passing there into what is called the "Bad Country," an immense expanse of submerged land, with here and there islands rising from it, as from the drier prairies. We had a weird ride that afternoon and night: Now we passed through saw-grass 5 or 6 feet high and were in water 6 to 20 inches in depth; then we encircled some impenetrable jungle of vines and trees, and again we took our way out upon a vast expanse of water and grass. At but one place in a distance ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... wear weather Wednesday week weird welfare where wherever whether which whole wholly who's whose wintry wiry within without women world ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... weapon, he was about to strike, when his eyes met Jeanne's. The young woman was smiling, happy to die for her lover. Her pale face beamed from out her black hair with weird beauty. Cayrol trembled. That look which he had loved, would he never see it again? That rosy mouth, whose smile he cherished, would it be hushed in death? A thousand thoughts of happy days came to his mind. His arm fell. A bitter flood rushed from his heart ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... church in the air, and church-steeple piercing ever so high; and out of the heart of the mist leaped a brook, and to hear it at one moment, and then to have the sharp freezing silence in one's ear, was piercingly weird. It all tossed the mind in my head like hay on a pitchfork. I forgot the existence of everything but what I loved passionately,—and that had no shape, was like ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... off, cut glass with cracked edges, and fragments of artistic teacups and saucers on a tumbled tablecloth, have a peculiarly dismal appearance. In fact, we had really occasion to wonder at the perfectly weird and bewitched effect which one of our two Hibernian successors to the pretty Alice succeeded in establishing in our table department. Every caprice in the use and employment of dishes, short of serving cream in the gravy-boats and using the sugar-bowl for pickled oysters and the cream-pitcher ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the village I went straight to the "George and Dragon," where a friend had assured me I could always find good accommodations. But he was wrong: there was no room for me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She appeared to resent it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time, when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her: couldn't she direct ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... you thought we simply steered Great motor-cars to champagne dinners And bought tiaras and were cheered By hopes of breeding Epsom winners; Eh, lad, you little knew the weird Dreed by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... every word throbs with the pulse of one controlling passion. The epithet fatal makes us feel the implacable resolve of the speaker, and shows us that she is tampering with her conscience by putting off the crime upon the prophecy of the Weird Sisters to which she alludes. In the word battlements, too, not only is the fancy led up to the perch of the raven, but a hostile image takes the place of a hospitable; for men commonly speak of receiving a guest under their roof ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... offered every hour of the day and night to the twin idols. When men and women away back in the dim past laid their children in the hands of Baal they made their weird music, sang their wild songs and shouted aloud that they might drown the appeal of the sacrifice. The dark ages have passed. It is the enlightened age—and yet with music and shoutings, weird dancings and songs men and women today drown the appeal of the costly ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... There's no' much the nicht, onyway,' answered Teen; and her weird black eyes wandered restlessly through the hall, as if looking in vain for an absent face. So the three quitted the place in less than half an hour after they had ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... up the mandolin with a swish of its red ribbons, and laid it upon the piano, where it quivered and thrummed again like a living thing, awaking weird echoes from the ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... Troznow, is a village in the Budweis neighborhood, 100 miles to south. There, for three centuries after him, stood "Zisca's Oak" (under shade of which, his mother, taken suddenly on the harvest-field, had borne Zisca): a weird object, gate of Heaven and of Orcus to the superstitious populations about. At midnight on the Hallow-Eve, dark smiths would repair thither, to cut a twig of the Zisca Oak: twig of it put, at the right moment, under your stithy, insures good luck, lends pith to arm and heart, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Michigan's sylvan shore, we saw the bickering flames of a ravaging forest fire; dyeing all the surrounding air and landscape crimson, while dense clouds of smoke hung over the burning land like a pall upon which the sun-rays were reflected with weird effect. It was, indeed, an unusual sight, exhibiting ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... the sound of a troop train stirred her heart to untold depths. There is something so weird and sorrowful about its going, as if the very engine sympathized, screaming its sorrow through the night. Ruth felt she never would forget that sound. Out there in the dark Cameron might be even then slipping past them out into the great future. She ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... where weird branches let the pale moon through in splashes and patches, and grim moving figures seemed to chase them from every shadowy tree-trunk. It was a terrible experience to the girl. Sometimes she shut her eyes and held to the saddle, that she might not see and be ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... electric handlight, attached to a long wire, which lay handy, and, waving it about, disclosed the dimensions of the place. By that flashing illumination the subterranean chamber looked unutterably weird and mysterious, with its rows of numbered bins, stretching away into the distance till the radiance was reduced to the occasional far gleam of the light on the shoulder of a bottle. Then Babylon switched on the fixed ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... than I could describe. They varied like the colours in a kaleidoscope with the wavering and increasing light. At one time it seemed to me that one of the trees was a gipsy woman enveloped in a cloak, extending her arm towards me threateningly; at another, two weird dogs seemed to be fighting together; but however fantastic and fearsome had been these strange effects of light and fancy mingled together, I should not have minded—I knew what they were; it was a relief to have anything ...
— Four Ghost Stories • Mrs. Molesworth
... broom-rape, brown and leafless, growing on the roots of the gorse; the curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a violet, ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... them like a shock. Outside, the wind howled through the trees and dashed the rain spitefully against the tent. The water dripped through on us, and the candle flickered and sputtered and almost went out. In the weird light I could see the faces of the men work with emotion. For a moment no one spoke. Finally Richards, in a tone of reproach that made me feel sorry for the very suggestion, asked: "Do you think there's a ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... little of man and who regard him with more of curiosity than of fear. Woodland ponds, whose placid waters have never reflected the dark lines of a canoe, lie like jewels in their setting of green hills; ponds where soft-eyed deer come down to drink at twilight, and where the weird laughter of the loon floats through the morning mists. Toward the south, however, man is fast penetrating the secrets of the forest, blazing dim trails and leaving fear and destruction in the wake of his ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... on up the great winding stairs, past the drawing-room, from whence came the low buzz of voices, to a door at the back of the house, beside a great stained-glass window, whose weird lights shone down ...
— The Dark House - A Knot Unravelled • George Manville Fenn
... on to his back, and laughed a weird low laugh, that was pleasantly like a chuckle and disagreeably ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows—impalpable, fantastic shadows—that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain- eye-and-stomach chimera." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... with the sick, and long rows of them were stretched through the centre of the hall. A gallery ran around above the cases, and this was filled with cots. The clatter of the feet of passing surgeons and nurses over the marble floor added to the weird impression. ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... uxoris (quae omnium consiliorum ei erat conscia) stimulabatur."—This is the whole that Buchanan says of the Lady; and truly I see no more spirit in the Scotch than in the English Chronicler. "The wordes of the three weird Sisters also greatly encouraged him [to the Murder of Duncan], but specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, brenning in unquenchable desire to beare the name of a Queene." Edit. 1577. ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... flames. Yet the faces of all three were turned towards the little man, who did no more than shriek and gesticulate and sway his body wildly up and down. He was tanned and ragged and bearded and thin, and there was a weird brilliance in his eyes, which ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... calisthenic, and even gymnastic exercises; the hands in particular were used very gracefully, and they often took off their hats and waved them to and fro. But they also climbed on each other's shoulders, and did other strange things. After dancing for some time, they sang songs to us in a curious, low, weird kind of crooning. Altogether it was a strange sort ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... with the beloved in all that thou feelest elevated above thee." So it is written by one of those weird Germans who search in our bosoms for the seeds of buried truths, and conjure them into flowers before we ourselves were even aware of ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dark and sinister, and all the more so when the moon rose high and lightened its face and left them looking into weird, abysmal blackness between moonlit branches. Bell thought busily, trying not to become too conscious of the small ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... "A weird magician, weary of the world, In sullen humor locked his charms all up Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped, And threw the key into the sea, and died. The manikins here tried with all their might; In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock; His magic arts still ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... ruins, for by this time the sun was sinking, giving the plain on which so many important events had occurred a more weird and deserted look than ever. The cavass in charge of the servants was beginning to be fussy, in fear that while we were dawdling about the one train might come and go, and the sitts and effendis be ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the Marina several evenings each week. Here, however, a distinct advance has been made upon the familiar pyrotechnic display of former events. The use of powerful scintillators with their colored rays playing upon smoke clouds and flying devices from exploded bombs high in the air, or upon weird shapes of steam sent out by the engine on the border of the yacht harbor, lends infinite variety and beauty. In several of the numbers the scintillators secure the effects unaided, their lights making strange figures in the heavens. "Spooks' Parade," "Aurora ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... were witnesses of this weird ceremony. They saw the naked Indians going about their task in the pit in the glare of torches, like veritable imps of hell. It was a discouraging scene. But a greater trial than the Feast of the Dead was in store for them. By a pestilence, a severe form of dysentery, ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... appear surprised at that demand—the Medic of a Free Trading spacer was never surprised at anything. He had his surfeit of shocks during his first years of service and after that accepted any occurrence, no matter how weird, as matter-of-fact. In addition Tau's hobby was "magic," the hidden knowledge possessed and used by witch doctors and medicine men on alien worlds. He had a library of recordings, odd scraps of information, of certified results of certain very peculiar ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... Other essentials are a kettle and tripod. Three rough poles are made to form a tripod and the kettle is suspended from the vertex of the angles or the crossing point of the poles. Music, in which string instruments figure most conspicuously, should be selected, as this lends itself best to the weird effect which should be sought. Three or four pieces will generally be sufficient and they may consist of a violin, guitar, banjo and snare drum or the drum may be omitted if not convenient. The committee appointed to gather the refreshments must have the assistance of all the other ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... A weird sound arose. The high walls echoed it, the dark ceiling flung it back. It went trembling into far places and returned, shattered yet ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... the noise of one's motor deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird combination of stillness and havoc, the Verdun conflict viewed ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... as large and of the same lovely tints, but I could recall nothing that was quite American when once we had plunged into the shadow of these great yews, and I could not even find their like in the English literature which is the companion of American nature. I could think only of the weird tree-shapes which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and then so mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave Dore, used to draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as if we were walking through any of the loneliest of his illustrations. He knew how to be true to such mediaeval ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... man had so much relish for the supernatural, and so little faith in it. One must confess, however, that the most sceptical might have been overcome at Glamis Castle, for its appearance, by all accounts, is weird and strange, and ghostly enough to start ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... M. le Marquis?" repeated the old man mechanically. "I have the right to know," he added with sudden, weird energy. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... touch with his Goettingen friends, and when the "Goettinger Bund" or "Hain" was formed, Buerger, though not himself a member, kept in close touch with it. In 1773 the ballad Lenore was published in the Musenalmanach. This poem, which in dramatic force and in its vivid realization of the weird and supernatural remains without a rival, made his name a household word in Germany. In 1774 Buerger married Dorette Leonhart, the [v.04 p.0813] daughter of a Hanoverian official; but his passion for his wife's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... always a time for enjoyment in the days of old Guernsey, when evening after evening, people met together at the Veilles, to knit and sing and to tell stories of witchcraft and weird ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin |
