"Ghastliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all! What if the world of beauty I had been content to live in was a Satanic show, and the real thing was that dead, topsy-turvy world down there in the cold, gray lake under the reeking mists? I sneaked back into the house to see if the streak hadn't dried yet; but no! it loomed in tell-tale ghastliness, a sort of writing on the wall announcing the wrath and visitation of heaven. I went outside again and smoked miserably on the little bench. Gradually I began to feel warmer, the mists seemed clearing. I rose and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... were the substitutes for all other social diversions or emotions. There was a revival preacher by the name of Knapp, whose lurid eloquence in this vein made him famous, and whose imagery was equal in ghastliness to anything that the Catholic Church could produce. I remember one of his most dramatic bits, borrowed from a much earlier preacher, a passage in his description of hell. In hell, he said, there was a clock, which, instead of "tick," "tick," said, "Eternity," "Eternity," ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... the distinguished Feathertop came in its proper place; nothing had been left rude or native in him; a well-digested conventionalism had incorporated itself thoroughly with his substance and transformed him into a work of art. Perhaps it was this peculiarity that invested him with a species of ghastliness and awe. It is the effect of anything completely and consummately artificial, in human shape, that the person impresses us as an unreality and as having hardly pith enough to cast a shadow upon the floor. As regarded Feathertop, all ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the daylight-world, with a dreary glimmer of gas among them all; so that they serve well enough to represent the dim, unsatisfactory remembrances that dead people might be supposed to retain from their past lives, mixing them up with the ghastliness of their unsubstantial state. I dwell the more upon these trifles, and do my best to give them a mockery of importance, because, if these are nothing, then all this elaborate contrivance and mighty piece of work has been wrought in vain. The Englishman has burrowed under ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... orange or red. Girtin, who saw Nature as she is, and painted what he saw, delighted in this effect of sunlight and shadow. As a ruling colour, whether in flesh or otherwise, purple is commonly too cold, or verges on ghastliness, a fault which is to be as much avoided as the opposite extreme of viciousness ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... flush of youth, wholly innocent, yet turning his footsteps to the great desert to get away from the scorn of lovers and friends, and when we realize that this which he dreads must continue to the last hour of his life, there is to my mind a ghastliness about it as if it were seen in the light of the pit which is bottomless. I have not recovered, and can never recover, from that experience. You will infer, however, that I did not remain in just the condition of mind which I have endeavored to describe. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... occasional whine of a dog. I was alone, and it grew toward the end of my watch, when Maitland would succeed me. My slow tread tolled like a passing-bell, and the mountainous ice lay vague and white around me, its sheeted ghastliness not less dreadfully silent ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... as if to begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dabbling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard's lank neck. Not unaffected by the close sight of the gleaming steel, Don Benito nervously shuddered; his usual ghastliness was heightened by the lather, which lather, again, was intensified in its hue by the contrasting sootiness of the negro's body. Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... sagging with a hideous load—a row of human skeletons, stark, fleshless, frightful in their ghastliness. All were headless. All, suspended by the cervical vertebrae, swayed lightly as the blue-green light glared on them with its weird, ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... like the stings of scorpions through Waverley's sensorium, the worthy divine was startled in a long disquisition on the battle of Falkirk by the ghastliness which they communicated to his looks, and asked him if he was ill. Fortunately the bride, all smirk and blush, had just entered the room. Mrs. Williams was none of the brightest of women, but she was good-natured, and readily concluding ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... spirit of King George. For ourselves, we should be sorry to lose the story. Neither the King nor the mistress could afford to part with any slight clement of romance wherewithal even legend has chosen to invest them. Another story, which probably has more truth in it, adds a new ghastliness to the circumstances of George's death. On November 13, 1726, some seven months before that event, there died in a German castle a woman whom the gazette of the capital described as the Electress Dowager of Hanover. This was ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... movement—and, shocked by this betrayed repugnance, he again stood irresolute. Then rushed back upon her heart, with all the horror of novelty, the renunciation of poor David, now it was on the point of being sealed for ever. Now father, mother, all beside, was forgotten—the ghastliness of a terrible struggle within, the stern horror of confirmed despair, began to disguise her beauty as with a death-pale mask—the features grew rigid, her heart beat audibly, her ears rang and tingled, and sight grew dim. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women more horrible than the men; besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness, in proportion to their number of years, which is not to be described; and among half a dozen, I soon distinguished which was the eldest, although there was not above a century or ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... his lips. I casually repeated the manoeuvre, and he just as casually repeated his. Then I glanced at the window—the door I knew was hopeless,—and it was iron barred. I gazed again at the man, and his eyes grinned evilly as they met mine. Without a doubt he meant to murder me. The ghastliness of my position stunned me. Even if I shrieked for help, who would hear me save desperadoes, in all probability every whit as ready as my companion to ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... now journeying forward, continually descending, along the wilderness of Destruction, through innumerable torments, eternal and not to be described—from cell to cell, from cellar to cellar, and the last always surpassing the others in horror and ghastliness; at last we arrived at a vast porch, more cheerless than any thing we had seen before. It was a very spacious porch, and the pathway through it, which was frightfully steep, led to a kind of dusky nook of incredible ugliness and horror, ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... ghastliness of the apparition, it seems it made so little impression in Lofthouse's mind, that he thought no more of it, neither did he speak to any body concerning it, 'till the same night as he was at his family duty of prayer, that ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... was it possible for him to go back to the ghastliness of the dugout, the bereft house, where it was as if the most precious inmate had suddenly died—to the place that had held Celia but would hold her ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... She must have stayed with us over night, for I went to sleep in her arms, and they were still around me when I awoke; and it seemed like a new day, for we had time for many cherished talks. She veiled from us the ghastliness of death, telling us Aunt Betsy and both our little cousins had gone to heaven. She said Lewis had been first to go, and his mother had soon followed; that she herself had carried little Sammie from ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... I wanted to. But, in any case, I did not want to. This would, no doubt, come in time. But till then I wished to dream on, as anyone does in a dream which can still be blissful though there be pauses of pain, or ghastliness, ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... a little higher than it was. The faces of the two men were now distinctly visible to each other, and the contrast between them was rather startling. Sir Allan's was placid, courteous, and inquiring. Mr. Brown's was white almost to ghastliness, and his eyes were ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... our frames, making us see, hear, and feel what was not? What was this, but the action of diseased imaginations and childish credulity? So might it be; but what was most real, was the existence of these very fears; the staring looks of horror, the faces pale even to ghastliness, the voices struck dumb with harrowing dread, of those among us who saw and heard these things. Of this number was Adrian, who knew the delusion, yet could not cast off the clinging terror. Even ignorant infancy appeared with timorous shrieks and convulsions to acknowledge the presence of ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... 'Faust' played at the little country theater: it was done with scarcely any means of pictorial effect, except a few old curtains, and a blue light or two. But the night on the Brocken was nevertheless extremely appalling to me,—a strange ghastliness being obtained in some of the witch scenes merely by fine management of gesture and drapery; and in the phantom scenes, by the half-palsied, half-furious, faltering or fluttering past of phantoms stumbling as into graves; as if of not only soulless, but ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... at her elbow, and with a start she turned to see Blair. As they looked at each other, these two unhappy beings, each felt a faint pity for the other. Blair's face was haggard; Elizabeth's was white to the point of ghastliness, but there was a smudge of crimson just below the glittering amber of her eyes. "Elizabeth!" he said, shocked, "what is it? You ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... quavering into a chuckle,—rises again to a wail, very much higher and wilder than before,—breaks suddenly into a kind of atrocious laughter,—and finally sobs itself out in a plaint like the crying of a little child. The ghastliness of the performance is chiefly—though not entirely—in the goblin mockery of the laughing tones as contrasted with the piteous agony of the wailing ones: an incongruity that makes you think of madness. And I imagine a corresponding incongruity in the soul of the creature. I know that she ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... hard against the smell of ether, and managed to hold herself quite firm against it. But there was a ghastliness in the whole ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... the room believed that Mrs. Hammond had only fainted. But the doctor's perplexed, troubled countenance, as he ordered her carried into another apartment, and the ghastliness of her face when it was upturned to the light, suggested to every one what proved to be true. Even to her obscured perceptions, the consciousness that her son was dead came with a terrible vividness—so terrible, that it ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... him, and restore him to us all!" said a woman who had pushed her way through the crowd, so as to catch a glance at his pale wasted face, one side of which was swathed in bandages, which greatly added to the ghastliness of his appearance. "We have lost our husbands, and our sons, and our sweethearts; but what matters, we do not begrudge them to our King. The life of Monseigneur is more precious than them all. La Vendee cannot afford to ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... of the New-Cut stands the Marsh-gate, which, at night, is all gas and ghastliness, dirt and dazzle, blackguardism and brilliancy. The illumination of the adjacent gin-palace throws a glare on the haggard faces of those who are sauntering outside. Having arrived thus far, watch your opportunity, by dodging the cabs and threading the maze of omnibuses, to effect a crossing, when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... spite of herself, a little pleased smile rippled over her face; and, noticing it, and the bow and speech, the prince suddenly and sharply set up such another screech of laughter as no steamboat or locomotive, in the present age of steam, could begin to equal in ghastliness. ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... blankly as she left him, her head poised high, her step as slow as dignity itself. His own face was cruelly drawn, with the first sickened ghastliness still on him. He stumbled to a bench, and sat down. But there was nothing to think about, nothing he could think about, just then. Yet his brain was full to throbbing, and he had no consciousness of where he was, nor of the passage ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... and color gained new meanings, I was almost false to Hawaii; I couldn't go on writing for the glory of the sunset, but went out and sat on a rock to see the deepening blue in the dark canyons, and the peaks becoming rose color one by one, then fading into sudden ghastliness, the awe-inspiring heights of Long's Peak fading last. Then came the glories of the afterglow, when the orange and lemon of the east faded into gray, and then gradually the gray for some distance above the horizon ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... blind for days. He heard Jesus calling to him from the clouds, "Why persecute me?" His natural hatred of the teacher for whom Sin and Death had no terrors turned into a wild personal worship of him which has the ghastliness of a beautiful thing seen ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... upon the tombstone. To say that she was green or yellow would ill describe the ghastliness of the tint that suffused her naturally bilious countenance; still speechless, she made a frantic plunge towards the great urn that adorned the head of the grave. Mr. Landale looked up from his reading again with a ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... wounded, had blinded his perceptions as to the true nature of the game of war. Now his eyes beheld the contorted form of one with whose manly aspect he had been familiar in the settlement, scarcely recognisable in its ghastliness, with blue lips, protruding eyeballs, and a horrid mass of coagulated blood where the once curling hair had been. Victor's ears were still ringing with the deadly shriek that had burst from Valle's wife when she heard the dreadful news—just as he and his party galloped out of the camp. He ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... broken-legged table. You have gone limping ever since I knew you; don't fail me tonight. Shine softly, Kerosena, next of kin to the sun, true monarch of mundane lights! calmly superior to the flickering of all the fluids, and the ghastliness of all the gases, though it must be confessed you don't hold out half as long as you used when first your yellow banner was unfurled. Shine softly tonight, and light my happy feet through the Walden woods, along the Walden shores, where a philosopher sits in solitary state. He shall keep ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... their townspeople killed by shells. The cornucopia of war's horrors was emptied at their door. And women of a provincial town, who had led peaceful, cloistered lives, they did not blench or falter in the presence of ghastliness which only men are supposed to have the stoicism ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... protest is at last made by the armed force of the Decembrists. The protest fails; five bodies swinging from the gallows, and a hundred exiles buried in Siberia alive, leave a monument of such failure terrible in its ghastliness even for Russian history. The iron hand of Nicholas now rests on the country, and for thirty years the autocrat can proudly say that now order reigns in Russia. Order? Yes; but it is the order and quiet of the graveyard, the ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... first place in the dislike of her husband and son with a more than usually offensive brand of imitation coffee. Mr. McCall was inclined to think that he loathed the imitation coffee rather more than the cereal, but Washington held strong views on the latter's superior ghastliness. Both Washington and his father, however, would have been fair-minded enough to admit that it was ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... this white mass in my arms? what do I hold? is it the corpse by my side, as it lay that long, long night? It is—it is. Cold, stiff, stirless as then. White—horribly white—as when the moon, that would not set, showed all its ghastliness. Ah! it moves, embraces me, stifles, suffocates me. Help! remove the pillow. I cannot breathe—I choke—oh!' And now I am coming to the strangest part of my story—and, strange as it may sound, every word is ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... on, and still there was a vacant wildness in his eyes, and a mortal ghastliness all over his face, inexpressive of a reasonable soul. It scarcely seemed that he knew where he was, or in what part of the earth, yet, when left by himself, he never sought to move beyond the boundaries of the Fold. ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... still in the sky, though it only appeared at long intervals. Strangely enough, at the moment when I addressed him, a flash came, and seemed to pass right over his face. It gave such a hideously livid hue, such a spectral look of ghastliness and distortion to his features, that he absolutely seemed to be glaring and grinning on me like a fiend, in the one instant of its duration. For the moment, it required all my knowledge of the settled calmness of his countenance, to convince me that my eyes must have ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... and manual dexterity. The Balaklava illustration is as striking in its way as Tennyson's lines, though containing less of poetic heroism and more ugly realism. Like the trained reporter that he was, Guys followed a battle, recording the salient incidents of the engagement, not overemphasising the ghastliness of the carnage, as did Callot or Goya or Raffet, but telling the truth as he saw it, with a phlegm more British and German than French. Though he had no Dutch blood in his veins, he was, like Huysmans, more the man of Amsterdam than the man of Paris. He noted the changing and shocking scenes ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... complied, he thought, "She has grown pale and thin even to ghastliness, yet I was sure she had color when I first came in. Poor little thing! perhaps her fears are well founded, and I may never see her again;" and the good-hearted fellow was full of tender and remorseful ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... business. Two years ago our women's fingers were busy making "Havelocks." It seemed to us then as if the Havelock made half the soldier; and now we smile to think of those days of inexperience and illusion. We know now what War means, and we cannot look its dull, dead ghastliness in the face unless we feel that there is some great and noble principle behind it. It makes little difference what we thought we were fighting for at first; we know what we are fighting for now, and what we ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... but also the fate of the civilized community at large. I see approaching him, when this war is over, an opportunity far greater than anything fate has yet placed in his way. The world will be shuddering at the ghastliness of its recent experiences and asking if there is no way of guarding against the possibility of such a catastrophe in the years ahead. Among all the nations lately at war there will be but one desire—namely, the ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... the same day blazed down upon a picture which for ghastliness surpassed even the horrors painted by the madman Werth, which, if your mind is steeped in morbidness, you can see for a franc, or for nothing, I really forget which, when next ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... into a heavy slumber, and did not wake till dawn. At first he did not know where he was, but by degrees his situation cleared to him, and he beheld it in all the ghastliness of a right mind. She knew the worst of him—the very worst. How could he face her now? She would soon be coming down to see about breakfast, as she had said, and there would he be in all his shame ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... ancient rooms. Modern paper-hangings are too superficial and wishy-washy for the purpose. Tapestry, it is true, there is now, completely covering the walls of several of the rooms, but all faded into ghastliness; nor could some of it have been otherwise than ghastly, even in its newness, for it represented persons suffering various kinds of torture, with crowds of monks and nuns looking on. In another room there was the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and other subjects not ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Grey Stone, and as they did the moon came out a little from her dark shrine of clouds, but merely with that dim and feeble light which was calculated to add ghastliness and horror to the wildness and desolation of ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... thrown into the sea at Kuana. Chilled with horror, he looked again, and saw that the priest was smiling in scorn. He would have fled into the house, but the ghost stretched forth its withered arm, and, clutching the back of his neck, scowled at him with a vindictive glare, and a hideous ghastliness of mien, so unspeakably awful that any ordinary man would have swooned with fear. But Tokubei, tradesman though he was, had once been a soldier, and was not easily matched for daring; so he shook off the ghost, and, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... that he should have three days unmolested; but perhaps the circumstances would have justified Hilary to any business man, and it could really matter nothing to the defaulter dead or alive. In either case he was out of harm's way. Matt, all the same, felt the ghastliness of being there on the same errand with these agents of his father, and reaching the same facts with them. At moments it seemed to him as if he were tacitly working in agreement with them, for the same purpose as well as to the same end; but ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... rays of the just-risen sun were striking strongly into the cave through its entrance-way; and much light came also through a crevice higher up, and through a great hole in the vastly high roof. Viewed in this clearer light, there was a horrible ghastliness about the mummies ranged in their orderly rows, and presided over by the coarsely carved, coarsely conceived stone figure that in life they had worshipped as their god. On this image the sunshine fell full, and we perceived that its position evidently had been chosen carefully, so that ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... Mr. Spinks, with a laugh which, to a stranger, would have sounded mild and real. Only the initiated body of men he addressed could understand the horrible bitterness of irony that lurked under the quiet words 'useless ones,' and the ghastliness of the laughter apparently ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... tragedy itself did not appeal to him. The fact that Wilson, the man who through the long years had been his enemy—yes, and his rival, too—was dead did not appeal to him. The ghastliness of the tragedy was not what he thought about at all. Ever and always his mind reverted to his ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking |
