"Distorted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in Company H, no voice would henceforth respond to my name distorted. My comrades would curse my memory. It must be my duty to battle against friends by whose sides I had faced danger and death. The glory of the Confederate victories would now bring me pain and not joy. Oh! the ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... of the burning bush appeared to Moses alone; the other shepherds with him saw nothing of it. He took five steps in the direction of the bush, to view it at close range, and when God beheld the countenance of Moses distorted by grief and anxiety over Israel's suffering, He spake, "This one is worthy of the office of ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... off the Appian Way and were crossing a corner of that unutterably hideous stretch of tortured and distorted waste known as the Campagna, which goes tumbling away to the blue Alban Mountains, when we came on the scene of an accident. A two-wheeled mule cart, proceeding along a crossroad, with the driver asleep in his canopied seat, had been hit by a speeding automobile ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... portray The giant thoughts of Otway. I was Pierre.— O, thou art Pierre's reality! a soldier, On whose manly brow sits fortitude enamour'd! A Mars, abhorring vice, yet doom'd to die A death of infamy; thy corse expos'd To vulgar gaze—halter'd—distorted—Oh!! [Pauses, and then adds in a low, hollow voice. Pierre had a friend to save him from such shame— ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... naughty child. In spite of my excitement, I could not help noticing his pitiful face ludicrously distorted by ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... his brain had reeled from the impact of the blows showered upon it and had staggered from its throne. Now the suspicion came to her that Drennen had come to her in his cups; that the thing which had loosened his tongue and distorted his vision was nothing more ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... I did not take an exaggerated or distorted view of the situation, as discussed between you and Mr. Bullen, when I reported that civil ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... power of intuition is the power which lies above and behind the so-called rational mind; the rational mind formulates a question and lays it before the intuition, which gives a real answer, often immediately distorted by the rational mind, yet always embodying a kernel of truth. It is by this process, through which the rational mind brings questions to the intuition for solution, that the truths of science are reached, the flashes ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... itself to eternal extinction. If she had been physically stronger, she might have tried to call this a foolish delusion; weak as she was, and growing daily weaker, it seemed as certain as that her body must perish instantly if she walked over a precipice. The past was distorted, the present had no meaning, and there was no future; she vaguely understood Dante's idea that the body may be left on earth, apparently alive, for years after the soul has departed from it, for ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... uncertain and untrustworthy all his present recollections are. I cannot tell you how strongly I feel that the best course is to leave his mind to its own natural development. It may even be that the partial and distorted images of events such as he has been speaking ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... the saloon on the corner with that feverishly distorted view of the world due to never going back home after dinner downtown, saw his coach come down upon him as if to demand the washing so long promised. If it had been morning, he would have been properly afraid of getting in the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... on his feet and thank the Burgomaster; who, on any other occasion, might have been tempted to suppose him an idiot, so white and distorted was the child's face, struggling through tears and smiles. He could not utter a word; a mist began to come before his eyes, through which the Burgomaster's head seemed to bob up and down, and then his father's, and his mother's, and Marie's, with a look ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Then there are always interested groups whose business it is to serve their ends by means of faul or food. And the honest Englishman wishing to vote for justice but swayed by conflicting opinions and dominated by distorted versions, often ends by becoming ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... of the commander in chief and his pals overbalancing the mirthful by their solemnly protesting against the exposure of the secrets of the prison house, which, in this instance, they contended, were violently distorted by some enemy to the modern accomplishment of pugilism. In a few moments all was chaos, and the stormy confusion of tongues, prophetk: of the affair ending in a grand display and milling catastrophe; the apprehensions of which induced John Long, and John Long's ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... and ran trembling into the darkness. A girl of Twenty-fourth Street was kicked and knocked into the gutter because when attacked by thieves she had but thirty-five cents in her purse. A professor of the University of Chicago addressing his class said that, having looked into the hungry distorted faces of five hundred men clamouring for a position as dishwasher in a cheap restaurant, he was ready to pronounce all claims to social advancement in America a figment in the brains of optimistic fools. A tall awkward man walking up State Street threw a stone through ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... declaration would at least express the view of the United States and justify the course which our nation would unquestionably follow if the basic purpose of the League were at any time distorted. It would also appear to be a simple matter to provide against any misunderstanding in the future and at the same time to meet the objections of those who believe that we might be inviting a controversy over our constitutional rights, by ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... comrades, started to their feet in horror. Blindly Cameron felt his way to them, shading his blood-shot eyes from the light. His face was blistered and peeled as if he had come through a fire, his lips swollen and distorted, his hands trembling and showing on every finger the marks of frost bite, and his feet dragging as ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... up into the pass. More often he tied his horse and took the steep rough trail afoot. The way was guarded by strange, distorted trees, and rocks carved into fantastic shapes. Some of them were piled high like temples. Others, round and squat, resembled the fat and obscene deities of Eastern religions. There were seals and elephants and crocodiles and allegorical monsters, ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... (Kriemhild's) revenge. In Norway and Sweden traces of the saga have recently been discovered; while songs that are sung on the Faroe Islands, as an accompaniment to the dance on festive occasions, have been recorded, containing over six hundred strophes in which is related in more or less distorted form ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... took the form of personal temptations;—it is surely, I say, sufficient warning against so mean a folly, to discern, as you may with little pains, that, of all human existences, the lives of men of that distorted and tainted nobility of intellect are probably the ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... were so distorted as to give reason to fear some accident; and at the same moment he was seized with a long and violent fit of coughing, which ended in a slight hemorrhage. He saw that Father Joseph, alarmed, was about ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... arbitrary precautions and violations of justice, the will of Louis XI. met, even in a parliament thus distorted, with some resistance. Three of the commissioners added to the court abstained from taking any part in the proceedings; three of the councillors pronounced against the penalty of death; and the king's own ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Mrs. Renshaw, is a graphic and enthralling venture into the realm of nocturnal unreality. The free play of active imagination, the distorted and transitory conceptions and apparitions, and the strangely elusive analogies, all lend charm and color to this happy portrayal of the vague boundaries of Somnus' domain. Mrs. Renshaw's rank as a poet is of very high tone, most of her productions involving a spiritual ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... extreme right of the sketch for the tomb. Upon this supposition, Michelangelo must have left it in a very unfinished state, with an unshaped block beneath the raised right thigh. This block has now been converted into a boar. Extremely beautiful as the Adonis undoubtedly is, the strained, distorted attitude seems to require some explanation. That might have been given by the trampling form and robes of a Genius. Still it is difficult to comprehend why the left arm and hand, finished, I feel almost sure, by Michelangelo, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... their victim, panting deeply from their exertions. Fraser looked round upon the circle of distorted faces, and stopped at one. Seen now, with the fury and malignancy of its triumph painted upon it, the face was one to bring ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... always have ample length, as the foot will always work forward fully a half a size in the shoe when walking, and sufficient allowance for this should be made. More feet are crippled and distorted by shoes that are too short than for any other reason. A shoe should fit snug yet be comfortable over ball and instep, and when first worn should not lace close together over the instep. Leather always stretches and loosens at instep and can be taken up by lacing. The foot should ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... some of the conversation," suggested Ingram, "and assume all that sort of thing to have been said. You are hurt because I showed your letter to a friend. Aren't you taking a distorted view of the matter? Recollect that at the time you were an utter stranger, and your letter was a bolt from the blue. I cannot see that I committed ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... view to becoming his senior curate if he thought fit, I felt some alarm. I had heard so much of his great energy and his remarkable talents. The day came. I paid my visit to Onslow Gardens. For the first time I saw—" Chichester paused. His face became distorted. He turned toward the window as if anxious to hide his face from the professor's small, keen eyes. "I saw—that man," he continued, in a withdrawn and husky voice, ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... skulls of the victims sacrificed on the death of their chiefs. At one end was a kind of scaffold, and on the opposite side, towards the sea, two small houses with a covered communication. At the entrance were two large wooden images, with features violently distorted, and on the head of each was a large piece of carved wood, of a conical form, inverted. The lower part was without form, and wrapped round with a red cloth. Not far off, in a retired grove by the side of a pool, was a ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... fastened to her seat. All her poor body trembled in the superhuman effort which she was making to cry for help, without being able to break the bonds of old age and madness which held her prisoner. Her face was distorted with terror; memory gradually awakening, she must have ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... wished to do a young person good while offering amusement, to improve the heart while engaging the attention, and to give him or her little books which convey no false or distorted notions of ...
— The Bracelets • Maria Edgeworth
... in the centre, is used, the man's head being passed through the aperture and then secured in it in such a way that he cannot remove it. Thus arrayed he is made to walk through the streets of the town, his head distorted by the weight he has to carry, and his body restrained by the dragging of the plank either in front of him or at his back. The passers-by point at him the finger of scorn, as, in his helpless state, he is ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... completed a fourth of the distance and looked back to see if my wife followed close to me, when I was horrified to see her standing in one spot and sinking gradually through the weeds, while her face was distorted and perfectly purple. Almost as soon as I perceived her she fell as though shot dead. In an instant I was by her side, and with the assistance of eight or ten of my men, who were fortunately close to me, I dragged her like a corpse through the yielding vegetation; and up ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... for different marbles. I should say mainly on the principle of sudden contrasts; that is, large members with very little curve bound with members very small in detail, thus obtaining sharp lines, having little surface to be influenced or distorted by the veined markings, and serving to sharpen up and give form to the broader members (which show the color qualities of the marble), much as you sharpen up an ink drawing by underlining. These small members serve the architect's purpose for the expression ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... seemingly unconscious of her surroundings—presented now, to the man's shocked and compassionate gaze, the other side of her face. It was hideously disfigured by a great scar that—covering the entire cheek and neck—distorted the corner of the mouth, drew down the lower lid of the eye, and twisted her features into an ugly caricature. Even the ear, half hidden under the soft, gray-threaded hair, had not escaped, but was deformed by the same dreadful agent that had wrought such ruin to one of the loveliest ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... perfect body there upon the rough branches. She saw the High Priest, he to whom custom would unite her—bent, crooked, gnarled, stunted, hideous—advance with the flaming torch and stand awaiting her command to apply it to the faggots surrounding the sacrificial pyre. His hairy, bestial face was distorted in a yellow-fanged grin of anticipatory enjoyment. His hands were cupped to receive the life blood of the victim—the red nectar that at Opar would have filled the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... exaggeration in what we have heard about the distressed condition of the people. But we forget that Misery is a most shrinking unobtrusive creature. It cowers out of sight. We may walk along the great thoroughfares of life without seeing more than the distorted shadow of it which mendicancy indicates. A little thought, however, will soon bring the matter home to us. It has been remarked of some great town, that there are as many people living there in courts and cellars, or at least in the state of destitution which that ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... imparted to us far above our ordinary thinking. Feelings nobler and wiser than any we have known thrill us between heart-beats. For one fleeting night a princelier nature captures us, and we become as great as our aspirations. I daresay we return to the little world of our daily activities with as distorted a half-memory of what we have seen as that of the African who visited England, and afterwards said he had been in a huge hill which carried him over great waters. The comprehensiveness of our thought, whether we are asleep ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... derives its colour from what is no ways contributed to from any external source. Like the plant which while it derives the accident of its size and shape from the soil in which it springs, and is cankered, or distorted, or inflated, yet retains those qualities which essentially divide it from all others; so that hemlock continues to be poison, and the violet does not cease to emit its odour in ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Buchanan was the spokesman, the advocate of the other party, whose conduct could only be justified by the establishment of her guilt. If she were not guilty, they were traitors. If all the proof against her was but a mass of distorted facts and false swearing, nothing in the way of punishment was too bad for her unfaithful subjects. A mistake was impossible, the struggle was one of life and death. The spokesman in such a tremendous issue, the narrator and ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... tumid; her complexion had a kind of withered glaze; her hair, very scanty, was drawn off her forehead a la Chinoise; she had no eyebrows, and her eyes seemed to stare, like those of a figure of wax. When she talked and wished to insist, and she was always insisting, she puckered and distorted her face, with an effort to express the inexpressible, which turned out, after all, to be nothing. She had a kind of doleful elegance, tried to be confidential, lowered her voice and looked as if she wished to establish ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... prohibition. To hold a slave is one thing, but to employ the labour of one who is a slave, and over whose hopes of freedom you have no control, is quite another thing; and I hold that, under the actual circumstances, the employment of another's slave could never he so distorted in argument as to bring home a charge of connivance in a system we so ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... ice was broken into thousands of confused shapes, but none, Hans thought like the ordinary forms of splintered ice. There seemed a curious expression about all their outlines—a perpetual resemblance to living features, distorted and scornful. Myriads of deceitful shadows, and lurid lights, played and floated about and through the pale-blue pinnacles, dazzling and confusing the sight of the traveller; while his ears grew dull and his head ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... Yogi Philosophy does teach that there is a real basis for the popular religious beliefs in "Heaven," and that there are states of being, the knowledge of which has filtered through to the masses in the more or less distorted theories regarding "heavens." ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... from her hold. Her distorted mouth and blazing eyes were close to the white young face. She could have spat upon it. But she snarled at her three words ... no more, and passed her, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of all his affected boldness, it was evident that the speaker was dreadfully agitated. His eyes were wild and bloodshot, his fine features swollen and distorted, and his face ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... viz. days, months, seasons, as one of the least clearly accounted for in our nomenclature, and cannot help thinking that the more copious examples which we find in French and German are largely distorted forms due to the imitative instinct, or are susceptible of other explanations. This is certainly true in some cases, e.g. Fr. Mars is the regular French development of Medardus, a saint to whom a well-known Parisian church is dedicated; and the relationship of Janvier to Janus may ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... that the spy was not a Russian; and that being the case he was presumably engaged in his present occupation for pay only, and I believed that I could turn what seemed to be a catastrophe into a decided advantage. Experience had taught me long ago that the Russian nihilist is a fanatic who possesses distorted ideas of patriotism upon which he builds a theory of government, and that nothing short of death can turn him from his purpose. But with the foreigners who ally themselves with the fortunes of the nihilists—Germans, Frenchmen, ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... forced to conclude an armistice, on no matter what terms. I happened to come across to-day a file of English newspapers up to the 22nd ult., and I fully realised how all intelligence from without has been distorted by the Government to serve its own purposes. Now a few days ago, these very papers had been lent to Trochu. He read them, kept them two days to show some of his colleagues, and then returned them. One single extract was published by the Journal Officiel—a German report upon the ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... equilibrium of his stomach. For, Sirs, the lanthorn did but show that which was there, both fair and foul, no more, no less; and though it is indeed true that Pranzo is upset, it was not because the lanthorn maliciously produced distorted images, but merely caused to be seen, in due proportions, things which Pranzo had not seen before. And surely, reverend Judges, being just men, you would not have this lanthorn turn its light away from what is ragged and ugly because there are also fair things on which its light may fall; how, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... be taken by surprise." The police possessed no foresight or faculty of prevention. Every silly thing that transpired was reported either from malice or stupidity. What was heard was misunderstood or distorted in the recital, so that the only result of the ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... I answered. "They say our bodies change entirely every seven years. Mark Hope, age fifty, will be a different man from Mark Hope, age twenty-three. He may have nothing to boast about himself, and his distorted mind may magnify the deeds of the younger man. Now the younger man refuses to commit himself. He will not be in any way ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... grief at this new calamity. He was seized with the convulsions to which he was subject when under any strong excitement, his face was distorted, and his neck was twisted and stiffened in a most frightful manner. In ordinary attacks of this kind Catharine had power to soothe and allay the spasmodic action of the muscles, and gradually release her husband from the terrible gripe of the disease, but now he would not suffer her to come ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... their way against our feeble defence, hurling us back, stumbling, fighting, cursing, until they also gained foothold with us on the bloody floor. The memory of it is but hellish delirium, a recollection of fiends battling in a strange glare, amid stifling smoke, their faces distorted with passion, their muscles strained to the uttermost, their only desire to kill. Uniform, organization, were alike blotted out; we scarcely recognized friend or foe; shoulder to shoulder, back to back we ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... day. They debated it fully. A delegation visited the goods, which were shown by an agent. They decline receiving them, but agree to receive the half annuity in coin, and wait, as requested, for the other half till the next payment. This proposition was called the "goods offer," and was much distorted by the public-press. I was blamed for having carried the offer into effect, whereas it was declined, and the half annuity in silver accepted, and the credit asked for, given for ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... large coffins—coffins for children, women and men. Oh! what a gloomy, horrible place. Stretched on these boards in this dismal room—what do you see? Corpses dragged from the river and from the debris. See how distorted and swollen are the faces. They are beyond recognition. Some have great bruises. Some are covered with blood. Some are black. Turn your head away. Such a sight you never saw before and pray God that you may never ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... This absurd and distorted type of the English church beadle, this colonial sleep banisher, was equipped with a long staff, heavily knobbed at one end, with which he severely and pitilessly rapped the heads of the too sleepy men, and the too wide-awake boys. From the other ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... correct an exaggerated statement of the circumstances attending the capture of Fort Pillow, relying solely upon the evidence of those who would naturally give a distorted history ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Clover Street was not the shortest way home; but he climbed the hill and passed the little house. He wished to rehabilitate in its pathetic beauty the image which his friend's conjectures had jarred, distorted, insulted; and he lingered for a moment before the door where this vision had claimed his pity for anguish that no after serenity could repudiate. The silence in which the house was wrapped was like another fold ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the big beach comber with whom Gavin had fought barely twenty-four hours earlier. The man bore bruises and swellings a-plenty on his rugged features, where Brice's whalebone blows had crashed. And they had distorted his face almost past recognition. He moved, too, with manifest discomfort, as if all his huge body were as sore ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... of praise, not so much by reason of the subject and of the invention, as because in it the craftsman has shown, in some heads that are weeping, that although the lineaments of those that are weeping are distorted in the brows, in the eyes, in the nose, and in the mouth, this, however, neither spoils nor alters a certain beauty which is wont to suffer much in weeping when the painters do not know well how to avail themselves of the good methods of art. But it is no great thing that Giottino should have ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... was speaking vehemently to Ruffo, gesticulating with her dark hands, on which there were two or three cheap rings, catching at her shawl, swaying her body, nodding her head, on which the still black hair was piled in heavy masses. And her face was distorted by an emotion that seemed of sorrow and anger mingled. In her ears, pretty and almost delicate in contrast to the ruggedness of her face, were large gold rings, such as Sicilian women often wear. They swayed in response to her perpetual movements. ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... soldiers; but his heart had begun to warm somewhat towards that nation. As he shambled to and fro, jerking out from time to time some necessary orders, he saw that he had the respect of all these fellows, even while they smiled at him. They felt that this distorted little framework held a man. He divined this with the quick sensibility that marks all deformed people. His green eyes kindled. In the pride of his soul he ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the "adverse faction," as it is clearly of such a nature as to convulse the country. To what meanness will not these Tories stoop, for the furtherance of their barefaced schemes of oppression and pillage! The facts they have so grossly distorted with their tortuous ingenuity and demoniac intentions, are simply these:—A saveloy was ordered by one of the upper servants (who is on board wages, and finds his own kitchen fire), the boy entrusted with its delivery mistook the footman for his lordship. This is very ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... low, mean devil, whom it was easy to circumvent, and fine fun to play tricks with. But, as is well and eloquently remarked by a modern writer,[23] the subject has also its serious side. An Indian deity, with its wild distorted shape and grotesque attitude, appears merely ridiculous when separated from its accessories and viewed by daylight in a museum; but restore it to the darkness of its own hideous temple, bring back to our recollection the victims that have bled upon its altar ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... that Locke and Eva had tracked him and on his departure would undoubtedly enter to investigate the place. Doctor Q, for such was his odd name, understood now, and an evil grimace distorted ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... touches the original foundation of all judgment, and where it exists is radically incapable of all cure from logic. I distinguish therefore in our author his craziness of sense from his crazy wits; and I pass over his absurd and distorted reasonings in those parts where he abandons his visions, for the same reason that in reading a philosopher we are often obliged to separate his observations from his arguments: and generally, delusive ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... vicious husband, are drawn tenderly and skilfully. Heywood's eyes were oftener dim with tears than radiant with laughter; yet, with all his sympathy for the afflicted and the fallen, he never took a distorted view of society, but preserved untainted to the end a ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... violation of this fundamental law is followed by moral or spiritual disorder, loss of balance, decline of power. To see the world with clear eyes, as Shakespeare saw it, instead of seeing it through distorted vision, as Paul Verlaine saw it, one must think, feel, and act. To compress one's vital power into any one of these forms or channels of expression is to limit growth, to destroy the balance and symmetry of development, to lose clarity of vision, and to invite that devastating disease ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... all the reality of another life, which to the Wanderer was but a dream. For the moment all his faculties had a double perception of things and sounds, distinguishing clearly between the fact and the mirage that distorted and obscured it. For the moment he was aware that his reason was awake though his eyes and his ears might be sleeping. Then the unequal contest between the senses and the intellect ceased, and while still retaining the dim consciousness that the source of all he saw and heard ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... prejudice which hid the truth for six hundred years. Not until the fifth century of our era did it timidly appear in the thoughts of Martianus Capella: then it was again lost to sight for a thousand years, until in the fifteenth century, distorted and imperfect, it appeared in the writings ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... had hitherto kindled the features of Mr. Sapling into a ray of chastened imbecility, was distorted in ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... their enemies loss, suffering, and even death. I had no doubt that many of the strange stories to which I had listened had originated in some very trivial and ordinary circumstance which had been magnified and distorted into a weird and supernatural happening by the superstitious credulity of the original narrator; but there were others of an equally weird and unaccountable character, which had been told by hard-headed, intelligent, unimaginative men as having come within the scope of their own personal experience, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... under a coverlet of pure white, with the mists from the river and the great falls above frozen upon the trees, clothing them as graciously as with white samite; so that far as eye could see there was a heavenly purity upon all, covering every mean and distorted thing. There were days when no wind stirred anywhere, and the gorgeous sun made the little city and all the land round about a pretty silver kingdom, where Oberon and his courtiers might have danced and been glad. Often, too, you could ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Milan, and the next day set forth in heavy rain towards Venice. The miserable ranks of distorted and pollarded trees stood sadly in pools of yellow-stained water, or stuck out of heaps of half-melted and ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... that produced upon the English stage the effect of language distorted and depraved by provincial or foreign pronunciations, I cannot certainly decide. This mode of forming ridiculous characters can confer praise only on him, who originally discovered it, for it requires not much of either wit or judgment: its success must be derived almost wholly from ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... queer to look at the hands spread on the table: the Englishwomen, having rings on their soft fingers; the large fresh hands of the elder boy, the brown paws of the younger; Paolo's distorted great hard hands of a peasant; and the big, dark brown, animal, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... to the hand and often into the arm. The condition affects the palmar surface of the fingers. If the felon results in the "death" of the bone, the last joint will have to be taken off and the hand may be distorted, crippled, and rendered permanently disabled. Blood poison may set in and death is possible as a ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... depend on effects of haziness and of the action of refracting media interposed between the eye and the object; in which cases, though there is some real thing corresponding to the perception, this is seen in a highly defective, distorted, and misleading form. In like manner, we can say that the images of memory often get obscured, distorted, and otherwise altered when they have receded into the dim distance, and are looked back upon through a long space of intervening mental experience. Finally, class ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... all exceeds In ardent sanctitude, in pious deeds; And chief in woman charities prevail, That soothe when sorrow or desire assail; Ask the poor pilgrim on this convex cast,— His grizzled locks, distorted in the blast,— Ask him what accents soothe, what hand bestows The cordial beverage, raiment, and repose. Ah! he will dart a spark of ardent flame, And clasp his tremulous hands, and Woman name. Peruse the sacred volume. Him who died Her kiss betrayed not, nor her tongue denied; While even the ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... session the present Congress enacted a new tariff law. The protection of the American standards of living demanded the insurance it provides against the distorted conditions of world commerce The framers of the law made provision for a certain flexibility of customs duties, whereby it is possible to readjust them as developing conditions may require. The enactment has imposed a large responsibility upon the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... ever come again?" They stood in the shadows on the lawn. He was minded to say, no, but as he took her hand the Ellwell carriage drove up the country road. After glancing at it she blanched. Ellwell got out of the carriage unsteadily, with his large handsome face flushed and distorted. He was half drunk, and in a great passion. Seizing the carriage whip in one hand and taking the bridle of the horse by the other, he lashed the trembling beast for some seconds. Mrs. Ellwell slipped out of the rear seat and half ran into the house. Bradley ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... the young princesses of France. [Footnote: Madame de Marsan was their governess.] I know that the saloons of Madame de Marsan are a hot-bed of gossip, and that every action of the dauphiness is there distorted into crime. [Footnote: "Memoires de Madame de Campan." vol. i., p. 65.] If my lord cardinal has nothing else to tell me it was scarcely worth his while to come to the palace in so pompous a manner, with ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... warned by some spectacle of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of this to her next morning as they were being whirled down to Longport on a trolley car along miles of smooth beach and stunted distorted pine trees. "I heard a woman on the piazza whisper that I was your fiance," ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... foreigners since her captivity in the Temple, and of having there treated her young son as King. We here observe how, on the terrible day of long-deferred vengeance, when subjects at length break forth and strike such of their princes as have not deserved the blow, everything is distorted and converted into crime. We see how the profusion and fondness for pleasure, so natural to a young princess, how her attachment to her native country, her influence over her husband, her regrets, always more indiscreet in a woman than a man, nay, even her ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... had opposed me was the body of the Italian, lying face downwards, upon the floor. I stooped and turned it over, and saw that the venomous spirit had flown. The face was purple and distorted; the lips were drawn back from the teeth in a dreadful smile. There was in the room a faint, peculiar, not unpleasant odor. It did not seem strange to me to find that serpent, which had coiled in my path, dead and ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... perused. Great as might have been the original errors of Herbert, awful as in her estimation were the crimes to which they had led him, they might in the first instance be traced rather to a perverted view of society than of himself. But self was the idol of Cadurcis; self distorted into a phantom that seemed to Lady Annabel pregnant not only with terrible crimes, but with the basest and most humiliating vices. The certain degradation which in the instance of her husband had been the consequence ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... the cover of the trunk so that it shut. Very demurely I sat down before the open fire by my grandmother's easy chair, rocking furiously, watching my own face in the bright andirons, whose convex surfaces reflected first a "small Nancy" far off, then as I rocked forward, a large and distorted figure. My rapid motions made such rapid caricatures that I remained absorbed and attentive. My grandmother, not seeing the cause of my content, decided (as she told my mother afterwards), "that the child was sick, or becoming regenerated." ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... locality before the clouds overtook me. In spite of my haste I had not gone half a mile when an edge of fog whisked and circled round me, and in a moment I could see nothing but a grey shroud of mist and a few yards of steep, slippery grass. Everything was distorted and magnified to an extraordinary degree; but I could hear the moan of the sea under me, and I knew my direction, so I worked along towards the village without trouble. In some places the island, on this southern side, is ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... they came to a crystal spring, and paused to drink at it for want of liquor which they liked better. Looking into its bosom, they beheld their own faces dimly reflected, but so extravagantly distorted by the gush and motion of the water, that each one of them appeared to be laughing at himself and all his companions. So ridiculous were these images of themselves, indeed, that they did really laugh aloud, and could hardly ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... daughter with a gay grin, which, distorted by her toothless gums and the wreathing steam from the kettle, enhanced her witch-like aspect and was spuriously malevolent. She did not notice the stir of an approach through the brambly tangles of the heights above until it was close at hand; as she turned, she thought only of ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... town-house, and had a convent built for his Order according to his wishes, that is to say, according to holy poverty; in which he placed some worthy subjects who had presented themselves to him. A child was brought to him who was quite distorted; he took it into his arms, and it forthwith became straight. This miracle, and several others which he performed during his stay, proved that God had given him as much power over bodily complaints as over ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... manner 'to prevaricate' was never employed by good writers of the seventeenth century without nearer or more remote allusion to the uses of the word in the Roman law courts, where a 'praevaricator' (properly a straddler with distorted legs) did not mean generally and loosely, as now with us, one who shuffles, quibbles, and evades; but one who plays false in a particular manner; who, undertaking, or being by his office bound, to prosecute a charge, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... seconds. He was continually running to the end of his chain and attempting to bite. He was eagerly and wildly watching some imaginary object. His voice was hoarser—more of the howl mixing with it. The lips were distorted, and the tongue very black. He was evidently getting weaker. After two or three attempts to escape, he would sit down for a second, and then rise and plunge to the end of his chain. He drank frequently, yet but little at a time, and that without ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... hunchback was a muscular little deformity and a wonder of good nature. His head looked unnaturally large, nestling grotesquely between the points of his lifted and distorted shoulders, like a shaggy black animal in the fork of a broken tree. He was bellicose in his amiable way and never knew just when to acknowledge defeat. How long he might have kept up the hopeless struggle with the girl's invincible grip would be hard to guess. His release was ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... effort to gain his brother's sympathy. But in the refusal of his application for a pardon he had believed certain, he had suffered a severe blow. Deep in his tortuous nature there existed at least one sincere and good quality, which was his passionate love for his native country. It had been distorted indeed, through the influence of another strong affection, the love for his wife while she had lived, and, being misdirected by her agency, the very strength of his patriotism had been the chief cause ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... whom ye will serve. All is subject to proof. Only that which is demonstrably true, not after the change which we call death, but here this side of the grave, can stand. The only test of a Christian is in the 'signs following.' Without them his faith is but sterile human belief, and his god but the distorted human concept whom kings ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... her face startled him. Never before had he seen her look like that. Never had he dreamed that she could look like that. It was as if womanhood surged up in her. Her face was distorted, was almost ugly. The features seemed suddenly sharpened, almost horribly salient. But her eyes held an expression of anxiety, of hunger, of something else that went to his heart. He dropped his hand from the piano and ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... separate the functions of a revealer of truly inspired truth from the vitiating influences of a fallacious logic. The 'heavenly vision,' however 'obedient' a Paul may be to it, will be but obscurely represented, and suffer egregiously from that distorted image which the ill-constructed mirror will convey to us. —But once more, I think you do not hold Paul's rhetoric to be always of ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... to be a lamp in her bridal chamber. How wonderful the stars were!... There was the Southern Cross with its pointers, and the Pleiades. And that bright star above the tops of the trees, which seemed to throw a distinct ray of light, must be Venus.... The moon was high enough to cast shadows—black—distorted. The low clumps of shrubs beyond the carpet of grass looked ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... that his finger-nails were seven or eight inches long, and were supported by bamboo splints. Indeed, they were no longer human nails, but twisted and distorted quills, giving him the appearance of having gigantic claws. "Velly big Chinaman," whispered my cheerful friend; "first-chop man—high classee—no can washee—no can eat—no dlinke, no catchee him own glub allee same nothee man—China boy must catchee glub for him, allee ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... rolled as if upon wheels of floss, shutting out the sun and smothering the bluffs. The gloom was now so great that they could not see more than twenty paces on any hand, and every object in view seemed many times greater than its natural size, and distorted in shape. Miles and miles they went through swamp and tangle, till they heard the far-off, sullen roar of water. The land now also began to dip, and fifteen minutes' ride brought them to a low-lying region ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... in which the cornea is usually at fault. In this defect of vision the curvature of the cornea is greater in one meridian than in another. As a result the rays from an object are not all brought to the same focus. Objects appear distorted or are seen with unequal clearness. Glasses of a peculiar shape are ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... think differently about the origin of the universe? Couldn't you roar with laughter when you've thought over it for a moment? "You be damned for your theory of irregular verbs!" is nothing to it.' And he uttered his croak of mirth, whilst Peak, with distorted features, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... They might have spared themselves the trouble of telling M. Fouche, that his report exaggerated the truth, and transformed private occurrences into public events: he knew this. Already devoted to the cause of the Bourbons, he had intentionally distorted facts, with the design of giving hope and consistency to the royalists, and of intimidating, cooling, and dividing, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... and his revenge. And he will not only send us from his roof, but he will seek to justify himself and further ruin us by blackening our names. Your wildness and eccentricity will be turned against us and so distorted and misrepresented as to ruin ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... get any news from you at Leipzig, dear Schober, as I expected. I am afraid I was very indiscreet in asking you to be so good as to undertake this work, which I should have valued so much, coming from you. [In answer to the distorted reports in various newspapers of Liszt's visit to Hungary (January, 1840), Schober, who had been an eyewitness, thought it right to clear up the misrepresentations, which he did in the form of "Letters about Liszt's Sojourn in Hungary"; these he published, but ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... mixture of truth and fiction indeed,' said the old lady, in a haughty voice. 'I am obliged to Mrs Pansey for the way in which she has distorted facts.' ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... energy, by the thinking of apparently disconnected thoughts and the feeling of apparently sporadic impulses; but if the thought and the impulse remained really disconnected and sporadic, half would be lost and half would be distorted. It is one of the economical adaptations of nature that every part of us tends not merely to be consistent with itself, to eliminate the hostile, to beget the similar, but tends also to be connected with other parts; so that, action coming in contact with action, thought in contact with thought, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... blind, but it was evident that smallpox had been the cause of her loss of vision. Her eyes were bound with a bandage, her features were entirely swollen, scarred and distorted by the horrible effects of the malady. She had been knitting in a corner when we entered, and was wrapped in a very dirty bedgown. Her voice to me was quite different to that in which she addressed her husband. She spoke to Haggarty in broad Irish: ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the woodwork of this period to which we have access are found to be mostly of Gothic pattern, with quaint distorted conceptions of animals and reptiles, adapted to ornament the structural part of the furniture, or for the ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... wistfully. "A Singhalusi would have wasted an hour telling me half-truths—distorted enough to confuse, but not sufficiently inaccurate to anger me if I had a spy-cell on ...
— Sjambak • John Holbrook Vance
... that, whatever his motive, he has managed to please his mother. She is sniffing loudly yet laughing also, and one could want no better picture of human affection than this of Bermondsey Bert and his shapeless, work-distorted, maybe bibulous-looking mother, exchanging that resounding and ungraceful kiss at the hospital gate. I have heard Bert shout "Mother!" from a hundred yards off, when he spied her coming through the gate. No false shame there! No smug "good form" in that—nor ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... believed it!" I said, remembering her swollen, distorted, sobbing face. "She believed nothing else; everything else ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... well! A gigantic trunk; and, yes, those marks; but I never before read them as letters. Yes, H.F., so they are—very odd I should not have remarked them. They are so large, and so strangely drawn-out in some places, and filled-in in others, and distorted, and the moss has grown about them; I don't wonder I took them for natural cracks and chasms in the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... narrator has sufficiently distorted the traditions to make them conform, as much as practicable, to the biblical story of the birth of Christ. No reference whatever is made in the Ojibwa or Menomoni myths to the conception of the Daughter of Nokomis (the earth) by a celestial ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... wandered here and there, he saw groups of people smelting the gold under the shadow of the trees, and he observed that a dancing, quivering vapor rose up from it which dazzled their eyes, and distorted everything that they looked at; arraying it also in different colors from the true one. He observed that this vapor from the gold caused all things to rock and reel before the eyes of those who looked through it, and also, by some strange affinity, it drew their hearts toward those who carried ...
— Wonder-Box Tales • Jean Ingelow
... had approached to within six inches of the stage-manager's broad and shiny features, and it had little resemblance to any of the various faces which audiences associated with the figure of Eliza Fiddle; it was a face voluptuously distorted by the violence of emotion. As Miss Fiddle appeared to be under the impression that she was alone with the stage-manager, Mr. Prohack rendered justice to that impression by softly departing. Ozzie followed. The stage-manager also followed. "Where are you going?" they heard Eliza's voice ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... the shaded lamp covered the table with light, and fearing she might be provoked into shrieks or some violent manifestation of temper, she went to bed as early as she could. But there her torments became still more intolerable. All sorts of ideas and hallucinations, magnified and distorted, filled her brain, rendered astonishingly clear by the effects of insomnia. She saw over again the murders she had read of in her novels, and her imagination supplied details the author had not dreamed of. The elopements, with all their ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... fact of her life distorted, perverted, reversed. As a child she had loved the fairies, she had spoken a pitying word for them when they were banished from their home, she had played under their tree and around their fountain—hence she was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... eyes. It was the beautiful and radiant creature who had kissed Bertie Lockman; her face was now flushed with drink and distorted with rage—her hair disheveled and her aspect wild; and she was screaming in the voice which had first startled Samuel. Bertie had grappled with her and was trying to push her out of the room, while she fought frantically, and screamed: ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... disposed them so that they seemed to separate the flowers and keep them apart from one another. Some imps were climbing up, others were slipping down; they peeped out from behind petals, climbed along stems, but all were malicious, distorted, capricious, and pushed the tops of the flowers apart in such fashion that they did not let the half-bending petals meet in kisses. Painting quickly, Irene laughed. She imagined Baron Emil saying at sight of this work: "C'est du nouveau! It is not a painted pot! ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... for two-thirds its length, crossing it by a fine stone bridge near its center. (All the Swiss lakes I have seen are very narrow for a good part of their length, of a greenish blue color, derived from the mountain snows, very irregular in their form, being shut in, narrowed and distorted by the bold cliffs which crowd them on one side or on both, often reducing them to a crooked strait, resembling the passage of the Highlands by the Hudson.) Threading the narrow streets of the pleasant village of Lugano, we struck boldly up the hill to the east, and over it into the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... into almost nothing, but that whatever was worthless and looked ugly became prominent and looked worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes seen in this mirror looked like boiled spinach, and the best people became hideous, or stood on their heads and had no bodies; their faces were so distorted as to be unrecognizable, and a single freckle was shown spread out over nose and mouth. That was very amusing, the demon said. When good, pious thoughts passed through any person's mind these were again shown in the mirror, so that the demon ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... effort: but in Northern latitudes, where heated air must be used for nearly three-quarters of the year, the neglect of ventilation is fast causing the health and beauty of our women to disappear. The pallid cheek, or the hectic flush, the angular form and distorted spine, the debilitated appearance of a large portion of our females, which to a stranger, would seem to indicate that they were just recovering from a long illness, all these indications of the lamentable absence ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... fault and failing which he recognised in after life, and which, as he tells us, was a source of inward suffering to him from childhood, was the distorted view, held up to him at school and from the pulpit, of the conditions of Christian salvation, and, consequently, of his own proper religious ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... reference to my warlike propensities. This sword was broad, and three-sided in the blade, and in shape resembled a moving snake. The hilt was formed of a hideous carved image of one of their war-gods; and a more villanous-looking wretch was never conceived by the most distorted imagination. He was represented in a sitting attitude, the eagle's claws, that formed his hands, resting upon his knees; his legs terminated in lion's paws; and his face was a strange compound of beast and bird—the upper part of his person being covered with feathers, the lower ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the indrawn movement of the green frogs' flanks. In particular, he saw her outlined against the deep green waters, in which squadrons of silvery fish wheeled incessantly, or ogled her for a moment, pressing their distorted mouths against the glass, quivering their tails straight out behind them. Again, there was the insect house, where she lifted the blinds of the little cages, and marveled at the purple circles marked upon the rich tussore wings of some lately emerged and semi-conscious butterfly, or at caterpillars ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... back to prison. As he travelled the streets he needed all his fortitude, for his fiery speech had gone abroad, distorted from its meaning, and the common folk railed at him. As chastening, it was good exercise; but when now and again the name of Sainte-Helene rang towards him, a cloud passed over his face; that touched him in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... debauch that was evidently being slept off. This, too, accounted for the persistence with which the flies clustered around the mouth, lured by the alcohol-laden exhalations. He was a powerfully built man, thick-necked, broad-shouldered, with sinewy wrists and toil-distorted hands. Yet the distortion was not due to recent toil, nor were the callouses other than ancient that showed under the dirt of the one palm upturned. From time to time this hand clenched tightly and spasmodically into a fist, ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London |
