"Grisly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... determined to go and speak to the other ghost as soon as it was daylight. Accordingly, just as the dawn was touching the hills with silver, he returned towards the spot where he had first laid eyes on the grisly phantom, feeling that, after all, two ghosts were better than one, and that, by the aid of his new friend, he might safely grapple with the twins. On reaching the spot, however, a terrible sight met his gaze. Something had evidently ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... less than his friend's, was wrung by the horrors that surrounded them on every side, had preserved his mental balance amid the debilitating effects of famine, among the grisly visions of that existence than which none could approach more nearly the depth of human misery. And as his companion's frenzy continued to increase and he talked of casting himself into the Meuse, he was obliged to restrain him, even to the point of using violence, scolding and supplicating, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... idea, though a little grisly, struck Dan as a good joke. He hit the companionable Boardman on the shoulder, and then gave him a little hug, and remounted his path of air, and walked ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Fort. The worn remnant of the garrison, all told, was scarcely six hundred strong, and hardly a man was without a wound. The Grand Master and his few surviving Knights looked like phantoms from another world, so pale and grisly were they, faint from their wounds, their hair and beard unkempt, their armour stained, and neglected, as men must look who had hardly slept without their weapons for more than three memorable months. As they saw these gaunt heroes the rescuers burst into ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... with the sagacious knowledge of physiognomy peculiar to their race, forbore to intrude upon the moody silence of their master, apprehensive probably of a small white truncheon which lay by Cedric's trencher, for the purpose of repelling the advances of his four-legged dependants. One grisly old wolf-dog alone, with the liberty of an indulged favourite, had planted himself close by the chair of state, and occasionally ventured to solicit notice by putting his large hairy head upon his master's knee, or pushing his nose into his hand. Even he was ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... though my whole being revolted at the sight, I must needs turn to look at the thing—the tall, black shaft of the gibbet, and the grisly horror that dangled beneath with its chains and iron bands; and from this, back again to my companion, to find him regarding me with a curiously twisted smile, and a long-barrelled pistol held within a ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... fire—and she would fire at it. Marjorie made a guess at the range and aimed very carefully. She saw the snow fly two yards ahead of the grisly shape, and then in an instant the beast had vanished over ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... concluden all his wo, So mochel sorwe hadde never creature, That is or shall be, while the world may dure. His slepe, his mete, his drinke is him byraft. That lene he wex, and drie as is a shaft. His eyen holwe, and grisly to behold, His hewe salwe, and pale as ashen cold, And solitary he was, and ever alone, And wailing all the night, making his mone. And if he herde song or instrument, Than wold he wepe, he mighte not be stent. So feble were his spirites, and so low, And changed so, that no man coude ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... happened! Franklin had been the first to get large. And at once he had turned on them. Franklin, the weakling who dared not have any rivalry! And now Franklin was outside, out in the hills, a raging, murderous monster. For a moment, in the grisly shambles of the little cave Lee stood transfixed. Then his hand was fumbling at his belt. ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... medley miscreate, In masses lumped hideously, Wallowed the conger, the thorny skate, The lobster's grisly deformity; And bared its teeth with cruel sheen a Terrible shark, the ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... him, riding like the dawn wind, he seemed to feel the presence of a companion, of a silent rickshaw which rattled with a grisly occupant; and a voice, the voice of Romola Borria, shrill and terrible in his ear, cried: "Wait! ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... Gillis was dead. She had died in her sleep, painlessly and calmly, and on her face was a smile—as if, after all, death had come as a kindly friend to lead her over the threshold, instead of the grisly phantom ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Looking in and uttering the command, "Laukapalili!" a vision of her recreant husband appeared. The father and mother of the prince were joint witnesses with the wife of his faithlessness. As the picture vanished the air grew dark; faint, grisly shapes arose, and wailing voices sounded, "Heaven has fallen!" Standing on the rainbow bridge, the father, mother, and wife cast off their love for the prince, and condemned him to be a wandering ghost, living on butterflies. Then, having tired of ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... something that was being awakened in him, an image incarnate of outward conditions, as cruel, as ugly, as maleficent as were those outward conditions. But if the strike continued, then, she feared, with reason, would this other and grisly self of Billy strengthen to fuller and more forbidding stature. And this, she knew, would mean the wreck of their love-life. Such a Billy she could not love; in its nature such a Billy was not lovable nor capable of love. And then, ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... mansion; looked at it with a horrid expectation, as though it should have burst that instant into flames; drew out his key, and when his foot already rested on the steps, once more lost heart and fled for repose to the grisly ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... counterpart ambles leisurely along, as if time were for him a matter of entire indifference; his horse is loaded with a heavy pack, against which the rider comfortably leans, while he puts a long horn to his lips. He has no sword, or any weapon of defence; but the two grisly figures by the roadside dangling on a gibbet, and his own inimitable expression of contented ease, seem to imply that travelling is secure for him, and Justice ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... you ever caught a fowl and carried it to roost? You take it under the wings, and the feel of it sets one's teeth on edge. It is a grisly experience. All the time you are carrying it, it makes faint protesting noises and ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... and man, but O'Ryan found in this grisly contest a vaster trial of strength than in the fight upon the stage a few hours ago. The first lunge that Vigon made struck him on the tip of the shoulder, and drew blood; but he caught the hand holding the knife in an iron grasp, while the half-breed, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that memory, and the thought of how she had driven away into the night with, that grisly thing behind her on the car had never since left his mind by night or ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... slumbers were heavy, as the Zayla people say is ever the case at Saad el Din, and the sun had declined low ere we awoke. The tide was out, and we waded a quarter of a mile to the boat, amongst giant crabs who showed grisly claws, sharp coralline, and sea-weed so thick as to become almost a mat. You must believe me when I tell you that in the shallower parts the sun was painfully hot, even to my well tried feet. We picked up a few specimens of fine sponge, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... "Fight on! fight on!" Tho' his vessel was all but a wreck; And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was gone, With a grisly wound to be drest he had left the deck, But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly dead, And himself he was wounded again in the side and the head, And he said, "Fight ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... common belief in Scotland that the devil appeared as a black man. This appears in several witch trials and I think in Law's Memorials, that delightful store-house of the quaint and grisly. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sand was piled upon it, and then more sand must be dug, and gorse had to be cut to pile on that; and still from one end of the sordid mound a pair of feet projected and caught the light upon their patent-leather toes. But by this time the nerves of both were shaken; even Morris had enough of his grisly task; and they skulked off like animals into the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... windings of the grove, no more The hag obscene and grisly phantom dwell; Nor in the fall of mountain-stream, or roar Of winds, is heard the angry spirit's yell; No wizard mutters the tremendous spell, Nor sinks convulsive in prophetic swoon; Nor bids the noise of drums and trumpets swell, To ease of fancied pangs the labouring moon, Or chase ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... came on I coasted down a sharp pitch to a little brook. In the aspens that bordered the road was a range cow standing guard beside a newborn calf. Across the road, like grisly shadows among the trees, skulked several coyotes. The calf half rose, wabbled, and went down. Three times it attempted to rise, grew weaker, and at last gave up the struggle. With the waiting coyotes in mind, I leaned my wheel against a bowlder and went to its rescue. Several ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... no easy matter to get a promise from Agnes," he went on; "but when once given it is inviolate. This throws a grisly responsibility upon me. I must risk everything, if I am to do anything. You have expressed a dread which I have been endeavouring to stifle. I am making ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... he'll pay Hawkehurst a visit," thought George, as he bolted his door; and he had a kind of grim satisfaction in the idea that Valentine's Christmas peace might be disturbed by the advent of that grisly visitor. ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... prepared To prompt that vice thou shouldst reward, And by the terrors of thy grisly face, Make men turn rogues to shun disgrace; The end of thy creation is destroyed Justice expires of course, and law's ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... was known to have worn: and they who saw it (Hamlet's bosom-friend Horatio was one) agreed in their testimony as to the time and manner of its appearance: that it came just as the clock struck twelve; that it looked pale, with a face more of sorrow than of anger; that its beard was grisly, and the colour a sable silvered, as they had seen it in his life-time: that it made no answer when they spoke to it, yet once they thought it lifted up its head, and addressed itself to motion, as ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... propitious to her enterprise. And Aeson's son followed in fear, but the serpent, already charmed by her song, was relaxing the long ridge of his giant spine, and lengthening out his myriad coils, like a dark wave, dumb and noiseless, rolling over a sluggish sea; but still he raised aloft his grisly head, eager to enclose them both in his murderous jaws. But she with a newly cut spray of juniper, dipping and drawing untempered charms from her mystic brew, sprinkled his eyes, while she chanted her song; and all around ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... fields of grain came a ceaseless hail of fire, and there fell upon the ranks a doggedness, a quiet anger, which settled into grisly patience. These men had seen the stars go down, the cold mottled light of dawn break over the battered city and the heights of Charlesbourg; they had watched the sun come up, and then steal away behind slow-travelling clouds and hanging mist; they had looked over ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the place was so suggestive of murder that my soul sickened within me; and so much so, in fact, that when I saw several grisly forms gliding down the gloomy staircases and along the sombre, narrow passages, where X——'s immaterial personality was halting, apparently to greet it, I could look no longer, but shut my eyes. For some seconds ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... last, the ship ran ashore at the foot of a great castle; and it was midnight. Sir Launcelot waited not for the dawn, but, his sword gripped in his hand, sprang ashore, and then, right before him, he saw a postern where the gate stood open indeed, but two grisly lions kept the way. And when Sir Launcelot would have rushed upon the great beasts with his sword, it was struck from his hand, and a voice said: "Ah! Launcelot, ever is thy trust in thy might rather than thy Maker!" Sore ashamed, Sir Launcelot took his sword and thrust it back into the sheath, ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... expected, one of the signs of the times in literature, not of one country but of all, is a grim change in its attitude towards war. The era of pomp and circumstance, as of genial make-believe, is gone by; more and more are our writers beginning to give us militarism stripped of romance, a grisly but (I suppose) useful picture. I have nowhere found it more horrible than in a story called The Secret Battle (METHUEN), written by Mr. A.P. HERBERT, whose initials are familiar to Punch readers under work of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... fare, So if ye gallop to Fort Bukloh as fast as a bird can fly, By the favor of God ye may cut him off ere he win to the Tongue of Jagai, But if he be passed the Tongue of Jagai, right swiftly turn ye then, For the length and the breadth of that grisly plain is sown with Kamal's men. There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between, And ye may hear a breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen." The Colonel's son has taken a horse, and a raw rough dun was he, With the mouth of a bell and the heart of Hell, and the head ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... chances for the disposal of the Unwanted. More than once a slain man or woman has been sent along the line, in this grisly but effective fashion, far beyond the reach ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... with love, and then did sing or say; The noise was such as all the nymphs did frown, And well suspected that some ass did bray. The woods did chide to hear this ugly sound The prating echo scorned for to repeat; This grisly voice did fear the hollow ground, Whilst artless fingers did his harpstrings beat. Two bear-whelps in his arms this monster bore, With these new puppies did this wanton play; Their skins was rough but yet your loves was more; He fouler was and far more fierce ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... one of the weapons and patted the other with grisly affection. In the excess of my admiration I made bold to reach for it. He relinquished it to me with a mother's yearning. And all too legible in the polished butt of the thing were notches! Nine sinister notches I counted—not fresh notches, but emphatic, eloquent, chilling. I thrust ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... first ploughed field that you see sweeping up the hill sides in the sun, with its deep brown furrows, and wealth of ridges all a-glow, heaved aside by the ploughshare, like deep folds of a mantle of russet velvet—fancy it all changed suddenly into grisly furrows in a field of mud. That is what it would be without iron. Pass on, in fancy, over hill and dale, till you reach the bending line of the sea shore; go down upon its breezy beach—watch the white foam flashing among the amber of it, and all the blue sea embayed ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... generall, Or melts in womanish compassion: To see Pharsalias fieldes to change their hewe 270 And siluer streames be turn'd to lakes of blood? Why Caesar oft hath sacrific'd in France, Millions of Soules, to Plutoes grisly dames: And made the changed coloured Rhene to blush, To beare his bloody burthen to the sea. And when as thou in mayden Albion shore The Romaine, AEgle brauely didst aduance, No hand payd greater tribute vnto death, No heart with more couragious Noble fire And hope, did burne with ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... never showed it. Kate, with her tranquil and commanding beauty, wore a face as serene as a summer's sky; and her father playing whist, was laughing until all around laughed in sympathy. No, there could be no hidden skeleton, or the masks those wore who knew of its grisly presence ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... had roused a grisly bear, and Siegfried, seeing it, jumped from his charger, chased it, and having at length caught it with his strong right hand, bound it without receiving even a scratch from its claws or a bite from ...
— Stories of Siegfried - Told to the Children • Mary MacGregor
... madam,' answered her maiden, 'you are indeed a grisly ghost, and no man will dare to come near you. But now stand aside, ...
— The Red Romance Book • Various
... Came forth with pilgrim steps in amice gray, Who with her radiant finger still'd the roar Of thunder, chas'd the clouds, and laid the winds, And grisly spectres, which the Fiend had rais'd To tempt the Son of God with terrors dire. But now the sun with more effectual beams Had cheer'd the face of earth, and dri'd the wet From drooping plant, or dropping tree; the birds, Who all things now beheld more fresh and green, After a night of storm so ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... proper lung-room; but this was an old matter. He reflected on the various fatigues Mowbray had met with a smile, and the vitality which had finally pulled him loose from the cold clutch itself; standing him in stead through a journey so grisly that Boylan had not had the detachment so far to contemplate it from first to last. So he had been forced seriously to grant exceptions to the rule of chest inches and vitality. The soft winter air blew in from the ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... nearly all its terrors; even for the young it is no longer the grisly phantom it once was for ourselves, but rather of an aspect mellow and benign; for to the most sceptical he (and only he) has restored that absolute conviction of an indestructible germ of Immortality within us, born of remembrance made perfect and ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... bondage base existence lay, Bent down by Superstition's iron sway. She from the heavens disclosed her monstrous head, And dark with grisly aspect, scowling dread, Hung o'er the sons of men; but toward the skies A man of Greece dared lift his mortal eyes, And first resisting stood. Not him the fame Of deities, the lightning's forky flame, Or muttering murmurs of the threat'ning sky Repressed; ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... we skip. Probably—nay, certainly—Nature knows best, and is quite well aware what she is up to, and it is perhaps not meant that we should put her in the limelight in her grisly moods. Suffice it to say that Gulo seemed to stop at length, simply because even he could not "see red" forever, and with exhaustion returned sense, and with sense—in his case—in-born caution. He removed, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... Honeywood, and the seniors and chaperones of the party, reminded the younger people of the grisly head they had just seen hanging up in the lodge, and those straight sharp horns that had gored to death the brave keeper who had risked his own life to save his master's friend; it was in vain that Charles Larkyns, fearful for his Mary's sake, quoted the "Bride of Lammermoor," and urged the ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the exulting Redskins as with yells of gratified triumph, warriors and squaws, young men and children, gloated fiercely over the brutal torture and lingering death of eight English prisoners. It was a grim and grisly spectacle, for no form of torment—from the nerve-wracking test of knife and tomahawk, arrow or bullet, aimed with intent to graze the flesh and not immediately to kill, to the ghastly ordeal of red-hot ramrods and blazing pine-root splinters thrust into the flesh or under the nails —was omitted ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... waiting thirst Camels and merchants all were gone, while I Had been in my amazement. Was this not A sign? God with a vision tript me, lest Those tall fiends that ken for my approach In middle Asia, Thirst and his grisly band Of plagues, should with their brigand fingers stop His message in my mouth. Therefore I said, If India is the place where I must preach, I am to go by ship, not overland. And here my ship is berthed. But worse, far worse Than Baghdad, is this roadstead, the brown sails, All the enginery ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... that same grisly day, her father and herself had journeyed in a little old ramshackle vehicle, open to all the winds; passing, with the falling night, through dull villages, under ghostly trees, black-pearled with mist in drops. And ere long lanterns had to be lit, and she could perceive nothing ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... aspects of grief as there are persons to mourn. A quality of pathetic and rather grisly humor is to be found in the incident of an English laborer, whose little son died. The vicar on calling to condole with the parents found the father pacing to and fro in the living-room with the tiny body in his arms. As the clergyman spoke ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... of blood and life at the spring sowing. Ross recalled grisly details from his cram lessons. Any wandering stranger or enemy tribesman taken in a raid before that day would meet such a fate. On unlucky years when people were not available a deer or wolf might serve. But the best sacrifice of all was a man. So Lurgha had decreed—from ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... the man curiously, but without seeming to perceive the rather grisly similitude between the ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... pal—his bosom friend. So once again the phantom rider had brought its grisly message—played its ghoulish role. My brothers were both dead now, and only Beryl remained. Another year sped by and the last night in October—a Monday—saw me, impelled by a fascination I could not resist, once again in the wood. Up to a point ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... words to our mother, whom they pity, and it is rumored that they are collecting a purse to help us on our way. At last our father returns, striving to hide his solicitude in a smile, for no fate to which they could consign himself would scathe that grisly servant of his Master; but for his family, who do not altogether share the spirit of his mission, he has a little fear. He kisses us all in order, from the least to the biggest, commencing and ending with our ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... the lifeless girl out into the air, and returning, closed the door. He seized a brand, and with both hands levelled a fierce blow at the dog's neck. The stick shivered like glass, but the creature only shook his grisly head, but never quit his hold. With his bare hand he seized the live coals from the thickest of the fire and pressed them against the flanks and stomach of the tenacious animal; the brute howled and quivered in every limb, but still ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... jolly tavern, the bandits gayly drink, Upon the haunted highway, sharp hoof-beats loudly clink? Yea; past scant-buried victims, hard-spurring sturdy steed, A mute and grisly rider is trampling grass and weed, And by the black-sealed warrant which in his grasp shines clear, I known it is ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... little startled, for the spectacle was grisly enough. The dead lady was arrayed in this strange brown robe, and in her rigid fingers, as in a socket, with the large wooden beads and cross wound round it, burned a wax candle, shedding its white light over the sharp features of the corpse. Moll Doyle was not to be put ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... sit and thinke, And cast her eyen dounward fro the brinke; But whan she saw the grisly rockes blake, For veray fere so wold hire herte quake That on hire feet she might hire not sustene Than wold she sit adoun upon the grene, And pitously into the see behold, And say right thus, with careful sighes cold. 'Eterne God, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of blackest hue; In vain with cymbals' ring They call the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the dog ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... I related to my sweetheart all that had passed between Harry and myself, at the same time directing her attention to the fact that this grisly peril was still a long way ahead of us; that it was a far cry from where we were to the Horn; and that even after we had rounded that wild headland, practically the whole stretch of the eastern ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... down opposite the man who would have sent him to the executioner had he known the truth. After all, it was but a step from comedy to tragedy. And just now he was conscious of a bit of grisly ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... pleased on high 650 The Father has beheld you, while the might Of that stern foe with bitter trial proved Your equal doings: then for ever spake The high decree, that thou, celestial maid! Howe'er that grisly phantom on thy steps May sometimes dare intrude, yet never more Shalt thou, descending to the abode of man, Alone endure the rancour of his arm, Or leave thy ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... would have slept again, But the fair face which met his eyes forbade Those eyes to close, though weariness and pain Had further sleep a further pleasure made; For woman's face was never form'd in vain For Juan, so that even when he pray'd He turn'd from grisly saints, and martyrs hairy, To the sweet portraits ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... loud shouts of "Douglas! Douglas! English thieves, ye shall die!" his men fell on the sleeping army, and had slain three hundred in a very short time, while he made his way to the royal tent, cut the ropes, and as the boy, "a soldier then for holidays," awoke, "by his couch, a grisly chamberlain," stood the Black Lord James! His chaplain threw himself between, and fell in the struggle, while Edward crept out under the canvas, and others of the household came to his rescue. The whole army was now awakened, and Douglas fought ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... should come and feebly vitalize them into a spurious transient homeliness; and she saw George Cannon's bedroom—the harsh bedroom of the bachelor who had never had a home; and the bedrooms of those fearsome mummies, the Watchetts, each bed with its grisly face on the pillow in the dark; and the kennels of the unclean servants; and so, descending through the floors, to Sarah Gailey's bedroom in the very earth, and the sleepless form on that bed, beneath the whole! And the organism of the boarding-house ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... of the butt end of his revolver then. Like grisly phantoms, the thoughts chased one another through his brain. Should he shoot and end it—pass into black nothingness—escape disgrace, but die like a rat in a corner? His finger was upon the trigger. Then suddenly his heart ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... worms, writhing in slime Forth from skull-holes and scalps and tumbled bones. A burning forest shut the roadside in On either hand, and 'mid its crackling boughs Perched ghastly birds, or flapped amongst the flames,— Vultures and kites and crows,—with brazen plumes And beaks of iron; and these grisly fowl Screamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts, Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouths, Hungering, but hard to fill,—all swooping down To gorge upon the meat of wicked ones; ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... with a hag dressed all in armour. Behind her came eight others. And their eyes, from between the bars of their helms, shone with a horrible red fire, and from each point of their armour sparks flashed, and the swords in their grisly hands gleamed with a blue flame, so fierce and so terrible that it scorched the eyes to look ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... A grisly being haunted the neighborhood through which I had afterwards to pass to another school,—a great, hulking, brutal fellow, Tom Reddiford by name, from whom I apprehended unimaginable tortures. I crept back and forth in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... useless to regret, even were there cause to regret it, what should I do in future? Should I write another book like the Life of Joseph Sell; take it to London, and offer it to a publisher? But when I reflected on the grisly sufferings which I had undergone whilst engaged in writing the Life of Sell, I shrank from the idea of a similar attempt; moreover, I doubted whether I possessed the power to write a similar work—whether the materials ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... again and this time struck straight down for the town. They passed a number of houses built of logs and Nathaniel caught narrow gleams of light from between close-drawn curtains. In one of these houses he heard the crying of children, and with a return of his grisly humor Obadiah Price prodded him in ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... As the monster struggles toward the door, dragging the hero with him, a wide wound opens on his shoulder; the sinews snap, and with a mighty wrench Beowulf tears off the whole limb. While Grendel rushes howling across the fens, Beowulf hangs the grisly arm with its iron claws, "the whole grapple of Grendel," over the door where ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... shaker, squeamer, Blockhead, sluggard, dullard, dreamer, Shirker, shuffler, crawler, creeper, Sniffler, snuffler, wailer, weeper, Earthworm, maggot, tadpole, weevil! Set upon thy course of evil, Lest the King of Spectre-land Set on thee his grisly hand! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... shall never mo'. And shortly to concluden all his woe, So much sorrow had never creature That is or shall be while the world may dure. His sleep, his meat, his drink is *him byraft*, *taken away from him* That lean he wex*, and dry as any shaft. *became His eyen hollow, grisly to behold, His hue sallow, and pale as ashes cold, And solitary he was, ever alone, And wailing all the night, making his moan. And if he hearde song or instrument, Then would he weepen, he might not be stent*. *stopped So feeble were his ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... move In tribes innumerable; all the waste, Wide as their walks, a varying shadow cast. As airy shapes, beneath the moon's pale eye, People the clouds that sail the midnight sky, Dance thro the grove and flit along the glade, And cast their grisly phantoms on the shade; So move the hordes, in thickets half conceal'd, Or vagrant stalking thro the fenceless field, Here tribes untamed, who scorn to fix their home, O'er shadowy streams and trackless deserts roam; While others there in settled hamlets rest, And corn-clad ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... never could be forgotten—a long sierra of broken pinnacles and crags which had all the semblance of a weathered and dismantled castle. It stood out against the tender blue of the morning sky like the ancient stronghold of some grisly robber-baron of medieval days; towers of dark sublimity, battlements whence invaders might have been hurled a thousand feet to death, slender minarets, escarpments and rugged casements through which fleecy clouds ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... would have settled the freedom of Scotland forever, had not the strong arm of Frere de Briagny passed between Wallace and the king. The combat thickened; blow followed blow; blood gushed at each fall of the sword; and the hacked armor showed in every aperture a grisly wound. A hundred weapons seemed directed against the breast of the Regent of Scotland, when, raising his sword with a determined stroke, it cleft the visor and vest of De Briagny, who fell lifeless to the ground. The cry that ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... "Fight on! fight on!" Tho' his vessel was all but a wreck; And it chanced that, when half of the short summer night was gone, 65 With a grisly wound to be drest ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... little trying, a little perplexing; but it afforded wide scope for curiosity, and Apuleius, an African, brought up in Athens, and living in Rome, was endlessly curious. In his attraction to horrors, to bloodshed, and the shudder of grisly phantoms there was, perhaps, something of the man of peace. It is only the unwarlike citizen who could delight in imagining a brigand nurtured from babyhood on human blood. He was, indeed, writing in ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... distance on an indicator before the Admiral: whereupon he touches a button—many buttons—in intense succession: the Boodah bawls: and the thrust-back of her resentment becomes intolerable, the ships just like fawns under the paws of an old lion whose grisly jaws drip gore; the sharks that infest her will fare well of ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... last of the human race, and all the sins of their superiors (including the horses) can safely be visited on them. But the wretched look often more picturesque than their betters; and though all the world despise these poor Suridgees, their tawny skins and their grisly beards will gain them honourable standing in the foreground of a landscape. We had a couple of these fellows with us, each leading a baggage-horse, to the tail of which last another baggage-horse was attached. There was a world of trouble in persuading the stiff angular portmanteaus of Europe ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... their murderous deeds of old, The grisly story Chaucer told, And many an ugly tale beside Of children caught and crucified; I heard the ducat-sweating thieves Beneath the Ghetto's slouching eaves, And, thrust beyond the tented green, The lepers ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... an octopus, Dick," he muttered, turning the light now full upon the grisly object squatting on a rock at the farther end of the water cave and glaring balefully at the boys through his blood-red eyes, like some demon of the deep, the very mention of which might send terror to ...
— The Hilltop Boys on Lost Island • Cyril Burleigh
... starts, that hideous dwarf, Before Lord Richard stands, 60 And, as he crossed and blessed himself, "I fear not sign," quoth the grisly[13] elf, "That is ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... plunging in the stream, sported with the she-elephants and made the entire region resound with their roars. And the place also echoed with the loud roars of lions and tigers, while at intervals might be seen those grisly monarchs of the forest lying stretched in caves and glens and beautifying them with their presence. And such was the asylum, like unto heaven itself, of Dadhicha, that the gods entered. And there they ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... The incredible size of the creature was repellent enough, but it was the grisly head of the monstrosity that struck the final note of horror. That head was more ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... laughed. And they lay everywhere, here stark and stiff, with no pitiful earth to hide their awful corruption—here again, half buried in slimy mud; more than once my nailed boot uncovered mouldering tunic or things more awful. And as I trod this grisly place my pity grew, and with pity a profound wonder that the world with its so many millions of reasoning minds should permit such things to be, until I remembered that few, even the most imaginative, could realise the true frightfulness ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... the movement for safeguarding machinery and securing indemnity for industrial accidents proceeds all too slowly. At a recent exhibition in Boston the knife of a miniature guillotine fell every ten seconds to indicate the rate of industrial accidents in the United States. Grisly as was the device, its hideousness might well have been increased had it been able to demonstrate the connection between certain of these accidents and the complete moral ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... upset about it, he was such a cheery little chap. He was killed quite—nastily." She hesitated to give the grisly details, but Tam, who had seen the effect of high explosive bombs, had no difficulty in reconstructing the scene where Hector laid down his ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... Grimm, "he has names for them all. All neatly classified like so many germs in a bottle. Well, Andrew, how many ghosts did you see last night? He has only to shut his eyes, Katje, and along comes the parade. Spooks! Spooks! Spooks! Nice, grisly, shivering, spooky spooks! And now he wants me to put my house in order and settle up my affairs and join ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... with an apparent cordiality that contrasted strongly with his final innuendo, but now their hands fell apart with mutual repulsion. Leigh had been prejudiced against the lawyer beforehand, and his first remarks at their introduction contained a grisly jest and an implied slight. But these things only paved the way to the final cause of distrust—the fashion of the man himself. He was unprepossessing in every line. His thin, pale face widened rapidly, like a top, to a broad and shining pate, which looked not so much bald as ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... ground with his hoofs and waked his master. Then the hideous monster vanished; and the man, aroused from his sleep, saw nothing, although the evil smell still lingered in the sultry atmosphere. He lay down again once more, thinking that for once his steed had given a false alarm. Again the grisly dragon drew nigh, and again the courser notified its rider, and again the man could make out nothing in the darkness of the night; and again he was wellnigh stifled by the foul emanation that trailed in the wake of the misbegotten creature. He rebuked his horse ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... more important than attention to their spirit, and thus, while his hands held his rosary, his eyes were fixed upon the walls where was depicted the Dance of Death. In terrible repetition, the artist had aimed at depicting every rank or class in life as alike the prey of the grisly phantom. Triple-crowned pope, scarlet-hatted cardinal, mitred prelate, priests, monks, and friars of every degree; emperors, kings, princes, nobles, knights, squires, yeomen, every sort of trade, soldiers of all kinds, beggars, even thieves and murderers, and, in like manner, ladies ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the grisly word, not so much in mercy to the father, seated there before him, as because the old-time love for that father's son seemed to rise up and catch him by ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... change Self-fed and self-consumed. If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness, And earth's base built on stubble. But come, let's on! Against the opposing will and arm of Heaven 600 May never this just sword be lifted up; But, for that damned magician, let him be girt With all the grisly legions that troop Under the sooty flag of Acheron, Harpies and Hydras, or all the monstrous forms 'Twixt Africa and Ind, I'll find him out, And force him to return his purchase back, Or drag him by the curls to a foul death, Cursed ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton |
