"Grotesqueness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whitewash, are squalid, cold and depressing; and at first sight the row of images looks nothing more than a somewhat vulgar exhibition of wax-work. But presently, as I lingered, the very poverty of it all touched me; and forgetting the grotesqueness, I perceived that some of the saints in their elaborate dresses were quite charming and graceful. In the church of Santa Maria la Mayor was a Saint Catherine in rich habiliments of red brocade, with a white mantilla arranged as only a Spanish ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... humor is rather latent than striking. It does not gleam through showy words, the paraphernalia of a harlequinade, but peeps out from the homeliest phrases, and convulses some simple law of our nature with laughter at its own grotesqueness. Formerly, imprisoned as it was within unyielding limits, it was as imposing as a miniature Gothic cathedral in a dark cave, but now the queen-rose of the architrave blows fresh and sweet in the sunny air. Step by step Emerson has traveled the great road worn by so many of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to what strange uses are you come. . . . This excess of grotesqueness in profanation is more insulting surely than to be sacked by barbarians! Behold a table set for some thirty guests, and the guests themselves—of both sexes—merry and lighthearted, belong to that special type of humanity ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... good looking—are thin, hungry, weird-looking animals, appear to have had a hard time of it somewhere, and to be doing their best to escape from the stone whence they are protruding. But the pinnacles placed above have completely taken away their grotesqueness, their malicious, suspicious appearance, and the tower now looks beautiful. There are three entrances to the church—one at the back, another at the north-western corner, and the third beneath the tower on the south- western side. If you please we will enter by the door on ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Marshall-Smith put her hand to the helm, and addressed herself to Morrison with a plain reminder of the reason for the grotesqueness of his irritability. "Where's Molly keeping herself nowadays?" she inquired. "She hasn't come over with you, to tea, for ever so long. The pergola isn't itself without her ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... libraries; and yet it is as true as ever that he is, if not the greatest of German writers, at least the most German among the great ones of his fatherland. And it is here that the drawback lies—he carried to such excess all the peculiarities of his very peculiar country, and was a giant of grotesqueness. No one can really know German literature ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... fellow-countryman's hand; but I judge otherwise: it is necessary to dissociate the two works and to regard Galland's paraphrase, which contains only a quarter of The Thousand Nights and a Night, as a wholly different book. Its attempts to amplify beauties and to correct or conceal the defects and the grotesqueness of the original, absolutely suppress much of the local colour, clothing the bare body in the best of Parisian suits. It ignores the rhymed prose and excludes the verse, rarely and very rarely rendering a few lines in a balanced style. It generally rejects the proverbs, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... in so tiny a frame! It was a revelation of the wonder of life. What a marvel to have helped to create that life and what a responsibility. And he was going away to destroy life, if possible. The grotesqueness of war had come upon him then, as he had built up the tower with Robin. And he had longed for a released world in which his boy might be allowed to walk as a man. The simplicity of Robin, his complete trustfulness, his eager appreciation of human nature, his constant reaching out after kindness ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... I calmly recall this scene in that sheep pasture, its dramatic grotesqueness rather appeals to me. Here were three young ladies, all of them pretty, all wealthy and holding high social positions, watching with bated breath a farmhand of unknown birth in the act of striking a golf ball. Surely golf is the great leveller! ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... readily believe," I replied, laughing heartily, nevertheless, at the grotesqueness of the whole proceeding, "though they might have proved rather incriminating documents if they had passed out ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... arises merely from a difference in the point of view. Mr. Gosse, regarding Browne's most important and general effects, rightly fails to detect anything funny in them. The Early Victorians, however, missed the broad outlines, and were altogether taken up with the obvious grotesqueness of the details. When they found Browne asserting that 'Cato seemed to dote upon Cabbage,' or embroidering an entire paragraph upon the subject of 'Pyrrhus his Toe,' they could not help smiling; and surely they were quite right. Browne, like an impressionist painter, produced his pictures ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... lyric which begins abruptly "Some people hang pictures up." These metres and manners were not accidental; they really do suit the sort of spiritual experiment Browning was making in each case. Browning, then, was not chaotic; he was deliberately grotesque. But there certainly was, over and above this grotesqueness, a perversity and irrationality about the man which led him to play the fool in the middle of his own poems; to leave off carving gargoyles and simply begin throwing stones. His curious complicated puns are an example of this: Hood had used the pun to make a sentence ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... fast nearing the conception of a God who was both personal and material, but who could not be made to square with pantheistic notions inasmuch as no provision was made for the inorganic world; and, indeed, they seem to have become alarmed at the grotesqueness of the position in which they must ere long have found themselves, for in the autumn of 1879 the boom collapsed, and thenceforth the leading reviews and magazines have known protoplasm no more. About the same ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... another reason that makes it almost inevitable that we should defend grotesquely what we believe seriously. It is that all grotesqueness is itself intimately related to seriousness. Unless a thing is dignified, it cannot be undignified. Why is it funny that a man should sit down suddenly in the street? There is only one possible or intelligent reason: that man is the image of God. It is not funny that anything else ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... child!" was the parrot-phrase flung in answer. The waving of crooked, false-jewelled fingers gave grotesqueness to the words. ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... useless lives in sight of the fields they had once tilled. Similar stories are told of the regions where natural gas has been found, and some day, when the chronicles of Findlay, in Hancock County are fully written we shall know all these romantic episodes in their grotesqueness and their pathos. It had been known from the earliest settlement of the country that the natural gas underlay the town, and fifty years ago two small wells were sunk. But it was not until after the discovery ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... easy to her, and there might have been a kind of impertinence in her air of not having suffered from an exertion which had wrought so powerfully on every one else. Ransom broke into a genial laugh, which he instantly swallowed again, at the sweet grotesqueness of this virginal creature's standing up before a company of middle-aged people to talk to them about "love," the note on which she had closed her harangue. It was the most charming touch in the whole thing, and the most vivid proof ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... artistic connection with Dickens came to an end so soon.[29] For both Browne and Cruikshank were pre-eminently caricaturists, and caricaturists of an old school. The latter had no idea of beauty. His art, very great art in its way, was that of grotesqueness and exaggeration. He never drew a lady or gentleman in his life. And though Browne, in my view much the lesser artist, was superior in these respects to Cruikshank, yet he too drew the most hideous ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... is no very uncomfortable resting-place. And thus we took leave of Dieppe, on the 4th day after our arrival there. As we were seated in the cabriolet, we could hardly refrain from loud laughter at the novelty of our situation, and the grotesqueness of the conveyance. Our Postilion was a rare specimen of his species, and a perfectly unique copy. He fancied himself, I suppose, rather getting "into the vale of years," and had contrived to tinge his cheeks with a plentiful portion of rouge.[34] His platted and powdered hair was surmounted ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... involuntarily to the portrait of the unsightly dwarf, painted by Velasquez. The broad shaft of sunlight had crept backward, away from it, leaving the canvas unobtrusive, no longer harshly evident either in violence of colour or grotesqueness of form. It had become part of the great whole, merely modulated to gracious harmony with the divers objects surrounding it, and like them softly overlaid by a diffused and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the necessity for scientific information, empirical if not rational, is still more conspicuous. What gives the grotesqueness of Chinese pictures, unless their utter disregard of the laws of appearances—their absurd linear perspective, and their want of aerial perspective? In what are the drawings of a child so faulty, if not in a similar absence of truth—an absence arising, ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... way of clapping his hands in applause. This description of the Foul Fiend has an element of grotesqueness which is ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... flash and was gone, for something else than extra years was counting, which had never counted before. He had turned over a new leaf, as he said. On it he had subscribed with docile alacrity to every ancient grotesqueness in Parson Tombs's science of God, sin, and pardon; and then had stamped Fannie's picture there, fondly expecting to retain it by the very simple trick of garlanding it round with the irrefragable proposition that love is the fulfilling of the law! But not many days had the leaf been turned when ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... its danger and practical unpleasantness; ... direct the attention to the features 'objectively' constituting the phenomena—the veil surrounding you with an opaqueness as of transparent milk, blurring the outlines of things and distorting their shapes into weird grotesqueness; observe the carrying power of the air, producing the impression as if you could touch some far-off siren by merely putting out your hand and letting it lose itself behind that white wall; note the curious creamy smoothness ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... enigmatic relations! That is exactly what happened. And how many odd and nightmare-like misunderstandings were engendered by the poisonous mist in which we all wandered, both friends and foes, and in which the outlines of the plainest objects and feelings assumed the dismal grotesqueness of phantoms. I cannot help recalling here the case of E.A. Chirikov, which at the time excited much comment: the noble and fervent champion of the persecuted race, the author of the drama "Jews," which has ...
— The Shield • Various
... snatches of sustained melody with the intervening airy interludes are very lovely. These are the principal features, to describe all the whims is of course impossible. You may call this work an extravaganza, and point out its grotesqueness; but you must admit that only by this erratic character of the form and these spasmodic movements, could be expressed the peculiar restiveness, fitfulness, and waywardness of thought and feeling that characterise ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of 1601 a very smart and fascinating performance, carried over almost to grotesqueness just to show it was not done for mere delight in the frank naturalism of the functions with which it deals. That Mark Twain had made considerable study of this frankness is apparent from chapter four of 'A Yankee At King Arthur's Court,' where he refers to the conversation ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mohammedanism has been far less bigoted. Buddhism has the proud distinction of never having persecuted one human being in twenty-four centuries. The Archbishop's third instance is fantastic to the point of grotesqueness. Both Christianity and the spirit of Inquiry, he says, are at one in "the demand for fruit." Does he mean to imply that other religions set their faces against "fruit"? Buddhism is quite imperative about moral duties. Mohammedanism ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... with me that night. I lay listening to the soughing of the wind, and thinking of Mr. Jaffrey's illusion. It had amused me at first with its grotesqueness; but now the poor little phantom was dead, I was conscious that there had been something pathetic in it all along. Shortly after midnight the wind sunk down, coming and going fainter and fainter, floating around ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with the singularity of Caleb's appearance, and later by the expression of his eyes. A very tall, big-boned, lean, round-shouldered man, he was uncouth almost to the verge of grotesqueness, and walked painfully with the aid of a stick, dragging his shrunken and shortened bad leg. His head was long and narrow, and his high forehead, long nose, long chin, and long, coarse, grey whiskers, worn like a beard on his throat, produced ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... achievement. The four angels keeping back the winds that they blow not, the four riders, the loosing of the angels of the Euphrates to slay the third part of men—these and others are conceptions of such force, such grave or tempestuous grandeur, in the midst of grotesqueness, as the art of no other ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... them were the prison cells and the clubs of the stupid policemen—paid and professional fighters and beaters-up of men. Yet he was not bitter. The grossness and the sliminess of it was forgotten in the simple grotesqueness of it, and he had the saving ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... with the domestic and nautical drama. On those stages the language struts and aspirates, and the effects are borrowed from Vauxhall and Cremorne for plays which are constructed to hold the greatest possible amount of cockneyism and grotesqueness, with the principal object of showing how villany and murder are uniformly overcome by virtue, whose kettle sings upon the hob above a pile of buttered muffins at last; and the pit, which came in for a shilling, pays the extra tribute of a tear. These shop-keepers of the Surrey side ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... spangled satin and contrasted charmingly with the pompous rigidity. Clad respectively in crimson, white and blue, these small scions stand up in their ruffs and fardingales in dimpled serenity, squaring their infantine stomachers at the spectator with an innocence, a dignity, a delightful grotesqueness, which make the picture a thing of close truth as well as of fine decorum. You might kiss their hands, but you certainly would think twice before pinching their cheeks—provocative as they are of this tribute of admiration—and would altogether ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... simply in kindness. Kate did not share her mother's sense of humour,—did not share it as yet. With the young the love of fun is gratified generally by grotesque movement. It is not till years are running on that the grotesqueness of words and ideas is appreciated. But Mrs. O'Hara would expend her art on the household drudge, or on old Barney Corcoran who came with the turf,—though by neither of them was she very clearly understood. Now and again she would have a war of words with the priest, and that, I think, ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... inhabitants of warmer regions, and it is there that they run out into the most remarkable eccentricities of structure. In Blainville's Bat, a small species inhabiting South America and the West Indies, these expansions of the skin of the face seem to have reached the utmost possible grotesqueness, but the membranous leaves are larger and the ears much more developed in many species allied to our own Horseshoe Bats, especially such as the Megaderms. We can hardly imagine that these great membranous expansions of the outer ears and the region of ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... these selections of the Psalms have been chosen for their crudeness and grotesqueness. I have tried in vain to find othersome that would show more elegant finish or more of the spirit of poetry; the most poetical lines I can discover are these, which are beautiful for the reason that the noble thoughts of the Psalmist cannot be hidden, even by the ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... and then decided to consult the cripple. As he made his way over to him he noted that Ernie was flashily dressed, almost to the point of grotesqueness. One might have forgiven the vivid checked suit on the person of a buoyant barber, but it was grewsome in its present occupation. Its gaudy, insistent cheapness leaped out at the observer with much the same appeal for favor that one imputes to the garments of ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... Pyecroft interrupted in his pleasant tone, "was due to his amazement at the utter grotesqueness of the situation. He was for a moment utterly taken aback. That's it, isn't ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... fierce-looking effigy of a daimio in armor. There is not the slightest hint of a mercenary thought about his actions; plainly enough, he hasn't the remotest wish to sell me anything—he merely wants to call my attention to the grotesqueness of this particular figure. He is only playing curio-dealer; he doesn't try to sell anything, but would do so out of the abundance of his good-nature if requested to, no doubt. A pair of little old-fashioned fire-engines repose carelessly against the side of a municipal building. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... Madame; it is all exceedingly painful to me, but I cannot help realizing the grotesqueness of the situation. Pardon me,—and ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... never confusing his directness and common sense. He was sorry for these two men, and would have fought to save them. But he had no imaginative ideas of death. And his keen perception of the truth was consequently sensitively alive only to that grotesqueness of aspect which too often the hapless victims of violence are apt to assume. He saw no agony in the vacant eyes of the two men lying on their backs in apparently the complacent abandonment of drunkenness, which was further simulated ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to-day, while listening to the poems, bad to the point of grotesqueness, that have been sent for the competition of 1847, M. de Barante remarked: "Really, in these times, we no longer know how to make ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... first sight the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street, some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say; but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows, so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt's window tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... lapped by the little waves that ruffle the surface of the river. The stokers and furnaces are hid from view, and the cabins appear to be floating on one huge cotton bale. Generally a great wooden stern-wheel propels this strange craft, adding to the grotesqueness of the sight. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... triumphal entry that she made among their household gods. The sheer grotesqueness of her home struck her painfully for the first time, as she was helped to an ancient chair that stood before the suspended Kirman rug—her throne John had always called it. As she once more occupied it, there came a curious ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... appeared to have extended itself on all sides, till he could not exactly see where the walls were; and all about it stood the Shadows motionless. They were tall and solemn; rather awful, indeed, in their appearance, notwithstanding many remarkable traits of grotesqueness, for they looked just like the pictures of Puritans drawn by Cavaliers, with long arms, and very long, thin legs, from which hung large loose feet, while in their countenances length of chin and nose predominated. ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... Street have palled upon the tired eye, when it is yet too soon to go home to such a prosaic thing as dinner, and one still wishes for novelty, then it is wise to go into the lower districts. There is fantasy and fancy and grotesqueness run wild in the costuming and the behaviour of the maskers. Such dances and whoops and leaps as these hideous Indians and devils do indulge in; such wild curvetings and long walks! In the open squares, where whole groups do congregate, it is wonderfully amusing. Then, too, there is a ball in every ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... pale, anguished. Happily, that struggle, which seemed of death, did not last very long. The worn old face, almost venerable at length in spite of the grotesqueness of its features, fell into calm. Then, almost as in a natural waking from sleep, the eyes opened and ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... for a woman, eh?" repeated Mrs. von Minden. "Why it's paradise compared to some of the places Otto von Minden has kept me in." She rose suddenly and began to pace the sandy floor, a majestic figure in spite of her grotesqueness. "What was I when he found me, an unsophisticated girl of twenty, living in my quiet New Hampshire home. He promised me everything—travel, court life, the emperor's favor. What does he give me but desert camps? Camps where he and I were the only human beings within a thousand miles. Camps where ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... bulls, the Assyrian arrangement of hair, Assyrian earrings, and wings nearly like those of the ordinary winged bull or lion. [PLATE CXLVI., Fig. 2.] The figures near the lions were mythic, and exhibited somewhat more than usual grotesqueness, as we learn from the representations of ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... surpassed. The use of the acanthus leaf conventionalized in a strictly primitive fashion characterizes most of the Byzantine work in Italy. With these are combined delightful stiff peacocks, and curious bunches of grapes, rosettes, and animal forms of quaint grotesqueness. Such work exemplifies specially what has been said regarding the use of flat thin slabs for sculptural purposes in the South of Europe. Nearly all these carvings are executed in fine marbles and alabasters. The chief works of this period in the round are lions and gryphons supporting ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... often highly inaccurate, but I will give them for what they are worth. On the first occasion I saw a small, sturdily built man, with a big, clerical sort of face with marked features, and, as far as I can recollect, rather coppery in hue. There was a certain grotesqueness communicated to the face by large, thin, fly-away whiskers of the kind that used to be known as "weepers" or "Dundrearies." He had then just dawned upon the world as a celebrity. I had myself as an ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... were not. With his cruelly true mental vision which pierced through shams, and his capacity for detached observation—which properly applied might have carried him very far, indeed—he perceived the grotesqueness, the artificiality of the emotion which in that moment he experienced, but by which he refused to be possessed. It sprang entirely from the consciousness that she was his mother; as if, all things considered, the more or less accidental fact that she had brought him into the world could establish ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... daughter, who was in love with the handsome captive. These fruits of his skill were less beautiful in workmanship, though marked by wonderful sweetness and power of tone. Mr. Charles Reade, a great violin amateur as well as a novelist, says of these "prison" fiddles, referring to the comical grotesqueness of their form: "Such is the force of genius, that I believe in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best, they are so full of chic." Paganini's favorite was a Guarnerius del Jesu, though he had no less than seven instruments of the ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... British ship with a scornful foot while his breast (and to a large extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior destiny. Later I could observe the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the Landwehr corps, that passed through Cracow to reinforce the Austrian army in Eastern Galicia. Indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an officer of the Landwehr; and perhaps those two fine active ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... little stupidly, Cobb thought, and suddenly smiled. He was bulky to the point of grotesqueness, with a huge white torpid face and a hypochondriac stoop of the shoulders, and the hand that traveled over his waistcoat, from pocket to pocket, looked as if it had been shaped ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... reached the top of the stairs leading to the garret, still on hands and knees, the old furniture, odds and ends piled around indiscriminately, took on the grotesqueness of imps, demons and other fantastic figures. So wrought up was his imagination that nothing but the fear of ridicule from his confederates forced him on. Crawling along the dirty, sooty, begrimed floor, he soon located ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... The grotesqueness of the arrangements of the berths and their occupants grew on me during the night, and the climax was put upon it when a gentleman coming down in the early morning asked me if I knew that I was using the Governor of Maui's head for a footstool, this portly native "Excellency" being in ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... a delicate delineation of the affections of the human heart, will love the poetry of CLARK. Those who would have a broader seal set upon manners, and the peculiarities of the mind set forth in pleasant grotesqueness, will smile at the 'Ollapodiana.' But all will profit by all; and we regard it as a literary obligation conferred upon the age, and carrying with it a moral obligation also, to multiply the copies of such writings as CLARK prepared. ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others; but, more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and her rig informed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian; with her grotesqueness accentuated by the fog pall, she seemed unreal—a ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... interesting, as it brought us unexpectedly upon several relics of antiquity,—a loop-holed and battlemented gateway; and at various points fragments of the old Gothic stone-work, built in among more recent edifices, which themselves were old; grimness intermixed with quaintness and grotesqueness; old fragments of religious or warlike architecture mingled with queer domestic structures,—the general effect sombre, sordid, and grimy; but yet with a fascination that makes us fain to linger about such scenes, and come ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... former much of their skill. In the costumes and in the faces of figures or busts, produced in the highly ornamental oak chimney pieces of the time, or in the carved portions of the fourpost bedsteads, the national characteristics are preserved, and, with a certain grotesqueness introduced into the treatment of accessories, combine to distinguish the English school of Elizabethan ornament from other ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... defiles, and gloomy woods, and broken, hilly spaces, where rent, bare rocks were thrown on one another in gigantic confusion, and the fantastic shapes of the wild fig and the dwarf palm gathered a hideous grotesqueness in the darkness. For there was no moon, and the stars were often hidden by the storm-rack of leaden clouds that drifted over the sky; and the only sound they heard was the cry of the jackal, or the shriek of the night bird, and now and then the sound of shallow water-courses, where the parched ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... influenced by polemical rancour, is no doubt honest in his quotations, and tells you that the persons who preached the passages quoted by him uttered them in all religious sincerity. Yet wide as the Christian world stretches beyond our corner of it, by so far does the Frenchman's book in grotesqueness and profanity out-shadow the attempts of ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... as we do; in reading their descriptions of Nature we are sometimes affected by a mysterious feeling of awe, like a reminiscence of the time when our ancestors lived in India. Their amorous hyperbole, too, despite its frequent grotesqueness, affects us perhaps more sympathetically than that of the Greeks. And yet the essentials of what we call romantic love are so entirely absent from ancient Hindoo literature that such amorous symptoms as are noted therein can all be readily brought under the three heads of artificiality, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it: superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain weakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wild and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... light diffused itself through the room, mingling ironically with the pretty glow cast by the pink-shaded electric globes, while the two forlorn grotesques regarded each other, unconscious of each other's grotesqueness, the girl disheveled and haggard, the man with rough gray coat unbuttoned, showing the rumpled evening dress; her toque miserably awry, his black tie riding above his collar, the bow somewhere behind his ear. And the tragedy of tragedies of a ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... version of "Vous m' avez fait trop attendre," which draws forth the natural excuse "I did can't to come rather." Passing by a number of good things which one would like to analyse if space permitted, we arrive at "For to ride a horse," a fine little bit of word painting almost Carlylean in its grotesqueness. "Here is a horse who have a bad looks. He not sail know to march, he is pursy, he is foundered. Don't you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? he is unshoed, he is with nails up; it want to lead to the farrier." "Let us prick (piquons) go us ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... and who looked up to him (for this was an essential condition), he was kind, hospitable, courteous, and even playful. His humour, which was of a crabbed kind quite peculiar to himself, found its best vent in his sermons. I often wondered whether he realized that the extreme grotesqueness of his preaching was the spell which drew undergraduates to the Sunday evening ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... aim of poetry, according to Poe, is not truth but pleasure—the rhythmical creation of beauty. Poetry should be brief, indefinite, and musical. Its chief instrument is sound. A certain quaintness or grotesqueness of tone is a means for satisfying the thirst for supernal beauty. Hence the musical lyric is to Poe the only true type of poetry; a long poem does not exist. Readers who respond more readily to auditory than ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Thomas '90, substitute guard, was highly indignant at the way some Boston newspaper described him. "The Princeton men were giants, one in particular was picturesque in his grotesqueness. He was 6 feet 5 and, when he ran, his arms and legs moved up and down like the ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... Bull-frog and the escape of her lover had been fully told that the listening crowd allowed themselves to do much more than breathe. Then there came a shout that nearly raised the roof. The peculiar sweetness of Oliver's voice, the quaintness of the melody, the grotesqueness of his gestures—for it was pantomime as well as music —and the quiet simplicity and earnestness with which it had all been done, had captivated every man in the room. It was Oliver's first triumph—the first ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... dragged, half carried to the shaft. It was as useless for him to struggle as it was for Nib. Both were powerless. But Jud's efforts to free himself were so frantic that the men laughed,—Lowrie grimly, the other two with a kind of malicious enjoyment of the grotesqueness of the situation. ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... long after, alluding to this period in his life, pays this characteristic acknowledgment: "Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found favor in the eyes of even some of the decentest people ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... might not be the vast Central Sun—the great sun, 'round which our universe and countless others revolve. I felt confused. I thought of the probable end of the dead sun, and another suggestion came, dumbly—Do the dead stars make the Green Sun their grave? The idea appealed to me with no sense of grotesqueness; but rather as something ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... manuscript he proceeded with fine courage to rewrite it, and he published the whole book in 1837. It brought him the recognition which he sought. Like 'Sartor Resartus' it has much subjective coloring, which here results in exaggeration of characters and situations, and much fantasy and grotesqueness of expression; but as a dramatic and pictorial vilification of a great historic movement it was and remains unique, and on the whole no history is more brilliantly enlightening and profoundly instructive. Here, as in ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... is barren because it is universal. It is useless to object to man being made ridiculous. Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is born. It is grotesque to drink beer, but it is equally grotesque to drink soda-water; the grotesqueness lies in the act of filling yourself like a bottle through a hole. It is undignified to walk with a drunken stagger; but it is fairly undignified to walk at all, for all walking is a sort of balancing, and there is always in the human being something of a quadruped ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... edifice, which was henceforth to assume its rank among the habitations of mankind. There it rose, a little withdrawn from the line of the street, but in pride, not modesty. Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with quaint figures, conceived in the grotesqueness of a Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the walls was overspread. On every side the seven gables pointed ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... all the state I could put into my dress. You know what the evening dress of men is here, from the costumes in our museum, and you can well believe that I never put on those ridiculous black trousers without a sense of their grotesqueness—that scrap of waistcoat reduced to a mere rim, so as to show the whole white breadth of the starched shirt-bosom, and that coat chopped away till it seems nothing but tails and lapels. It is true that I might go ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... moaned; but after a while turned his face towards Johnny's bed, to fortify himself with a view of the ark, and fell asleep. Over most of the beds, the toys were yet grouped as the children had left them when they last laid themselves down, and, in their innocent grotesqueness and incongruity, they might have stood for ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... stepped into the one that was to convey her and Peter to the boat, Nancy saw her stoop and lift a large bird-cage containing, of all things, an immense black cat, which mewed plaintively at sight of her. It was the final touch of grotesqueness upon her impossible wedding. The two Champneyses wrung hands silently. The older man said a few words to the colored woman, and shook hands ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... little hand in delineating the French heroine of all time as she is described in Hall and in Holinshed, and to believe that he left the play—originally written, we think, by Greene—very much as he found it. It is not indeed till the fifth act, when Joan is represented as a magician, and when the grotesqueness of the author passes even the limits of burlesque, that we fail to see a shred of the poet's skill. Nothing in Shakespeare is at once so unpoetical as well as so untrue to history as the last scene, in which ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... woman's suit makes your own look indecent. You appear as a creature shameful, under a grotesqueness of apparel striving to hide some ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... ceremonious, antiquated drawing-room into the open air. With the flood of new words, a thousand influences which had never been felt before came into operation. Strangeness, contrast, complication, immensity, curiosity, grotesqueness, fantasy—effects of this kind now for the first time became possible and common in verse. But, one point must be noticed. The abolition of the distinction between words that were 'bas' and 'noble' did not at first lead (as might have been expected) ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... shadows of his own mind become to him real existences. As it is affirmed that the human skin, sensitive to the effects of light, takes the photograph of the tree riven by lightning, so, on the pagan mind lie in ineffaceable and exaggerated grotesqueness the scars of impressions left by hereditary teaching, by natural phenomena and by the memory of events and of landmarks. Out of the soil of diseased imagination has sprung up a growth as terrible as the drunkard's phantasies. The earthquake, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... schools of rhetoric and has gained much. He is pointed and clear, without being either obscure[737] or mechanical. There is no vain striving after antithesis and no epigram for epigram's sake. Grotesque he is not seldom, but the grotesqueness is deliberate and effective, and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... partially judge of the impression made by this setting forth of seven centuries of a capital of Central Europe, and yet one can hardly tell, without the trial, whether he would rather smile at the grotesqueness of the pageant, or be lost in the profound contemplation of the magnificent march of history reenacted ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... picturesqueness of Mountain Street, and they both admired the huge shoulder of rock near the gate, with its poplars atop, and the battery at the brink, with the muzzles of the guns thrust forward against the sky. She could not move him to her pleasure in the grotesqueness of the circus-bills plastered half-way up the rock; but he tolerated the levity with which she commented on them, and her light sallies upon passing things, and he said nothing to prevent her reaching ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... I took my way was as lovely as it was unusual—I had almost said unearthly, for the plants, the trees, the blooms were not of the earth that I knew. They were larger, the colors more brilliant and the shapes startling, some almost to grotesqueness, though even such added to the charm and romance of the landscape as the giant cacti render weirdly beautiful the waste spots of the sad Mohave. And over all the sun shone huge and round and red, a monster sun above a monstrous world, its light dispersed by the humid air of Caspak—the ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Master does not require of us to dress grotesquely, or to attract notice by the singularity and grotesqueness of our attire. We must dress suitably and in conformity with that station in life to which He has called us. But what a difference there is between making our dress our main consideration, and considering first ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... Edward Johnson, one of the principal founders of Woburn. It is an extremely valuable history of New England from 1628 to 1651, and every page is alive with the virile energy of that stirring time. With narrative, argument, and apologue, abounding in honesty of purpose, sublimity of trust, and grotesqueness of fancy, wherein touching tenderness is often alternated with sternness most grim and merciless, yet now and then relieved by a sudden gleam of humour,—and all in a style that is usually uncouth and ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... in Bertha's interest, certainly, that she had despatched Dorset to consult with Lawrence Selden. Once the grotesqueness of the situation accepted, she had seen at a glance that it was the safest in which Dorset could find himself. Who but Selden could thus miraculously combine the skill to save Bertha with the obligation of doing so? The consciousness that much skill ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... provided a grateful interruption to a situation that was rapidly assuming in Sally's esteem the grotesqueness of a dream. Remembering that this was Gosnold House, the focal point of America's most self-sufficient summer colony, and that all these subdued and inarticulate masqueraders were personages daily exploited by the press as the brightest stars in the social firmament, the ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... lower regions to procure monsters to make us shudder. His own tremendous Revolution furnishes him with names before which Lucifer must hide his diminished head; and from this vast repertory of all that is horrid and grotesque—more horrid on account of its grotesqueness—the feuilletonists, or short story-tellers, are not indisposed to draw. We back Danton any day against Old Nick. And how infinitely better the effect of introducing a true villain in plain clothes, relying for his power only on the known ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... geography, costumes, and customs are as nothing in his eyes. His aim is human philosophy: he places his living creations before us, dressing them, as it were, in any garments most conveniently at hand. These lose their grotesqueness as his characters speak and act. Paternal love and weakness, met by filial ingratitude; these are the lessons and the fearful pictures of Lear: sad as they are, the world needed them, and they have saved many a later Lear from expulsion and storm and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... submersion, as from far back, had visibly begun to await him, he watched himself, in a cold lucidity, do punctually and necessarily each of the deplorable things that were inconsistent with his keeping afloat, so at present again he might have been held agaze just by the presented grotesqueness of that vigil. Such ghosts of dead seasons were all he had now to watch—such a recaptured sense for instance as that of the dismal unavailing awareness that had attended his act of marriage. He had let submersion final and absolute become the signal for it—a mere minor determinant having ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... extravagant whimsies, one of which persistently obsessed me: with these obviously compensatory differences, why might not the girl and I effect some sort of copulation? This fantasy, drawn exclusively from that unique experience, charmed with its grotesqueness only, for at that time my sense of sex was but inchoate and my knowledge of it was nothing. The bizarre conceit, submitted to the equally ignorant girl and approved, was borne to the paternal hay-loft and there, with much bungling, brought to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... at Tanjore the spirit and many of the same figures which were seen at Madura and Trichinopoly. As they are the temples of the same idolatrous race this is natural. All are many centuries in age, and are characterized by grotesqueness, lasciviousness, caricature, and infinite detail of finish. Though they are outrageously gaudy in colors, yet are they on so grand and costly a scale as to create amazement rather than disgust. It would ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... seat the actor kept a corner of one eye on Ramsey and as the hymn's last line rolled away he stood up. She had not sung, but neither had she laughed. No one could have seen the moment's huge grotesqueness larger, yet to the relief of many she had kept her poise. In her mind was the bishop, overhead in the texas, consciously imperilling his life to save her brother's soul, and in the face of all drolleries she strenuously kept her ardor ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... very nightmare of grotesqueness to Dorothy. The moonlight night, the black houses and pines looming up against the snowy landscape, the red glare in the immediate foreground caused by the burning buildings, the gesticulating figure of her half-breed partner, the excited, picturesque onlookers, the vagaries of the ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... by the dog-fancier are in good faith accounted beautiful by many. These varieties of dogs—and the like is true of other fancy-bred animals—are rated and graded in aesthetic value somewhat in proportion to the degree of grotesqueness and instability of the particular fashion which the deformity takes in the given case. For the purpose in hand, this differential utility on the ground of grotesqueness and instability of structure is reducible to terms of a greater scarcity and consequent expense. The commercial ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... at the grotesqueness of the affair, and the laughter mixed itself up with the choke—and the Major said that we both ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... sticks which they tore from the wayside bushes. At a little distance, a straggling troop of the believers followed, men and women, wailing and sobbing, and adoring and comforting their idol with promises of fealty, in terms of pathetic grotesqueness. A well-known voice called to him, "Don't you be afraid, God Almighty! They can't hurt a hair of your head," and the burst of savage mirth which followed Sally Reverdy's words, drowned the retort of a scoffer, "Why, there ain't hardly any left ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... billows upon enchanted mountains; valleys of the Shadow of Death; air-voyages and promenades in the abysses of ocean; the duello, the battle, and the siege; the wooing of maidens and the marriage-rite. All the splendor and squalor, the beauty and baseness, the glamor and grotesqueness, the magic and the mournfulness, the bravery and baseness of Oriental life are here: its pictures of the three great Arab passions—love, war, and fancy—entitle it to be called 'Blood, Musk, and Hashish.' And still more, the genius of the story-teller ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... Dear Lord! here was a mass of questions tumbling one upon the other in my head, while my heart thumped behind my waistcoat like a rubber ball to a prize-fighter's fist. Misfortunes may be so great and many that one may find grim humour and grotesqueness in their impossible conjunction and multiplicity. I remembered at that moment a friend of mine in Virginia, the most unfortunate man I ever knew. Death, desertion, money losses, political defeat, flood, came one upon the other all ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... untrammelled and prodigiously accomplished scion of a vulgar race. As a mere bachelor, isolated human, meeting him, I should have taken him joyously, if not to my heart, at any rate to my microscope and studied him and savoured him and got out of him all that there was of grotesqueness. But to every one of my household, save Susan who did not count, he was—I admit, deservedly—an object of loathing. So I squeezed ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... into uncontrollable laughter. "That is the best thing I ever heard in all my life. I don't think I ever heard anything that amused me more. The grotesqueness of the whole thing." Seeing that Mike was annoyed he hastened to explain his mirth. "The inexplicableness of human action always amuses me; the inexplicable is romance, at least that is the only way I can understand romance. When you reduce life ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... yielding like a sleep. The face has the natural ease of slumber, and not the rigid artificiality of death. 'Tis true there is no pulse, no beat of heart nor stir of breath, yet neither is there the sombre grotesqueness of the last pose. But the difference between life and death is here so small that it is incommensurable, the point of the mathematicians only. I shall hold this little hand in mine, and, with a hand upon her forehead, ...
— The Flutter of the Goldleaf; and Other Plays • Olive Tilford Dargan and Frederick Peterson
... for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain Peleg, many years her chief-mate, before he commanded another vessel of his own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the Pequod,—this old Peleg, during the term of his chief-mateship, had built upon her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be Thorkill-Hake's carved buckler or bedstead. She was apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... at the kitchen door, never to be heard of more, while Richie rises into Sir Richie of Castle-Collop—the reader may perhaps at the moment think by too careless grace on the King's part; which, indeed, Scott in some measure meant;—but the grotesqueness and often evasiveness of Richie's common manner make us forget how surely his bitter word is backed by his ready blow, when need is. His first introduction to us (i. 33), is because his quick ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... tors, and logging-stones of Bijanugger and Annegundi indent the horizon in picturesque confusion, and are scarcely to be distinguished from the more artificial ruins of the ancient metropolis of the Deccan, which are usually constructed with blocks quarried from their sides, and vie in grotesqueness of outline and massiveness of character with the alternate airiness and solidity exhibited by nature in the nicely-poised logging stones and columnar piles, and in the walls of prodigious cuboidal blocks of granite which often crest and top her massive domes ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... might have turned to old Greece, admired the fruits of the classic ages, and become one of those sparkling artistic Hellenists that are occasionally seen in modern times. He might have turned to the mediaeval period. He had an eye for cloisters and nuns. His fancy would have been struck with the grotesqueness of many of the ideas and institutions of those times. He would have got on finely with Gurth the swineherd and Burgundy the tusk-toothed, and one of his masterly witticisms would have upset Duns Scotus. Perhaps, of all the mediaeval characters, he would have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... entered, the fortune-teller raised her head, and, shading her eyes with one skinny hand, looked curiously at the new comers. Calton thought he had never seen such a repulsive-looking old crone; and, in truth, her ugliness was, in its very grotesqueness well worthy the pencil of a Dore. Her face was seamed and lined with innumerable wrinkles, clearly defined by the dirt which was in them; bushy grey eyebrows, drawn frowningly over two piercing black ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... and the commencing scenas. An ominous buzz circulated round the house: the singers, the orchestra,—electrically sensitive to the impression of the audience,—grew, themselves, agitated and dismayed, and failed in the energy and precision which could alone carry off the grotesqueness of the music. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... regeneration. "Amazing" is the only word for this glorious work of Nature. I could have bowed down with awe and prayed at one of its vast, inimitable doorways, but that the mystery of its creation, and the grotesqueness of even its most glorious statues, made one half dread lest it were some temple built by demon-hands for the worship of the Lord of Hell, and sealed in the stone-dream of petrifaction, with its priests struck dumb within it, by the hand of God, to wait the judgment of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... are going to say," she murmured, with a kind of nobleness which moved him even through his sense of its grotesqueness. "But you must see the distinction, because you first made it clear to me. I can take money earned in good faith—I can let Caspar live on it. I can marry Mr. Mungold; because, though his pictures are bad, he ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... out" completely. He adopted a sort of sketchy fashion; his figures became silhouettes and quite flat. There was also a singular carelessness in finish—a mere outline served for a face. The result was a monotony and similarity of treatment, with a certain unreality and grotesqueness which are like nothing in life. In this, however, he may have been inspired by the grotesque personages he was put to illustrate—the ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... followed the runner along the dark and tangled pathway. They had not gone far when they heard the sounds of a horse's hoofs behind them, and presently there dashed up to their side a singular-looking person, with extraordinary long thin legs, an emaciated body, and an enormous head. The grotesqueness of his figure was enhanced by a sky-blue coat and a soiled vest of embossed silk embroidered with tarnished silver lace. Coming up with the party, he declared his intention of accompanying them to Fort William ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... characteristics were such that many of his critics were unfair to him. Chesterton will never allow for an instant that Browning suffered from anything but an evident 'naturalness,' which expressed itself in a rugged style, concealing charity in an original grotesqueness of manner. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... had passed a corner of the house to another garden more ancient in aspect, and in some things quaint even to grotesqueness, she was in front of a portion of the house which indicated a far statelier past—closed and done with, like the rooms within those shuttered windows. The inhabited wing she had left looked like the dwelling of a yeoman farming his own land; nor did this appearance greatly belie ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... wishbone for target will make the sport, at fifty paces; if at home, some great extravagance or some humble gift or some poignant wish will point the day; if at church, then mass and carol; in certain hearts, reverence,—everywhere the time takes hold of folk and receives whatever of greatness or grotesqueness they choose to give it.... So, too, the actual and vital experience which it brings to humanity is universal, is offered with cosmic regularity, cannot be escaped. Through all the tumult of the time, Christmas Week and the time that lies near to it is always waiting to claim its own, to take ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... know that I cannot seem to you as other men of your own generation do, but as some strange uncanny being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlornness touches your compassion despite its grotesqueness. I have been so foolish, you were so kind, as to almost forget that this must needs be so, and to fancy I might in time become naturalized, as we used to say, in this age, so as to feel like one of you and to seem to you like the other ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... words! words! Charles Dudley Warner, versed in much and diverse world-scenery, mountain-sculpture, canyon-carvings, and plain-sweep, confessed: "I experienced for a moment an indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be alone in such a presence. With all its grotesqueness and majesty of form and radiance of color, creation seemed in a whirl." When the reader thinks of grotesqueness, what images come to his mind? A Chinese joss, perhaps; a funny human face on the profile ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... the obnoxious word should be spoken. Yet it was true that she had been married eighteen years. In another seven she would be able to celebrate her silver wedding, an anniversary she had always associated with old age. The horror of the situation was not lessened by its grotesqueness. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... to be Aunt Olivia; if she were being burned at the stake I verily believe she would have dragged some grotesqueness into ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... into the hall at midnight and, after blowing a preliminary signal on his horn, wished everybody a happy New Year. Then, as if by magic, my feeling of sentimentality vanished entirely, and I was carried away by the comic grotesqueness of the scene, and soon regained my freedom ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... looking forward with delight to the welcome which she would receive from her sisters. Presently Thurston House came in view, and, sure enough, there were four excited heads bobbing to and fro at the window, four broad beams of amusement to testify to the grotesqueness of her appearance. Nan lifted a solemn glance in return, and Chrissie, seized with a sudden demon of mischief, pointed a forefinger at the door opposite, and gesticulated violently in its direction. As plainly as words could ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... beside the couch, holding her hand; he was still in full fig as Polichinel; and the grotesqueness of his attire contrasted strangely with the anguish depicted on his countenance. As I came forward, he slowly made way for me—looked in my face imploringly, as if to gather from its expression some gleam of hope, and then stood aside, in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... true and perfect within its own sphere. De Quincey is perhaps the writer of the most ornate and elaborate English prose of this period. Thomas Carlyle, a great Scotsman, with a style of overwhelming power, but of occasional grotesqueness, like a great prophet and teacher of the nation, compelled statesmen and philanthropists to think, while he also gained for himself a high place in the rank of historians. Macaulay, also of Scottish descent, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... settlement. In the dim twilight, against a sunset sky, they beheld a pale-faced girl riding slowly toward them. With a delicate instinct, new to those rough men, they drew closer in the shadow of the bushes until she passed. There was no mistaking the familiar grotesqueness of Jinny; there was no mistaking the languid grace of Miss Lawton. But a wreath of wild roses was around Jinny's neck, from her long ears floated Miss Jessie's hat ribbons, and a mischievous, girlish ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... enter the University. He was sixteen years old, well-favored by nature, even handsome, and full of sensibility and enthusiasm. But he appeared to the inhabitants of Leipsic like a being from another world, on account of the grotesqueness of his costume. His father, who was of an economical turn of mind, always bought his own cloth, and had his servants make the clothing for the family. He usually bought good but old-fashioned materials, and trimmings from some forgotten epoch in the world's history. These trimmings, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... more convincingly, with his vivid ugliness. Sylvie's face turned up to him like a white flower to the sun it lives by, without seeing. It was strange to watch the adoration, the worship on that small face, and at the same time to behold the grotesqueness toward which it was directed. Bella was listening with her lowered eyes and tightened lips. She was interested in spite of herself; and Pete's inscrutable face followed ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... it went by. "I love that beast, grotesque as it is—perhaps all the more for its grotesqueness. But if I had children of my own, would I still love it? Which is best—to love two or three, or ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... its merits, its dialect wearies the modern reader, and gives it an air of grotesqueness which is very alien to the spirit of the Latin. One other sixteenth-century translation deserves notice, as it was written by one who was himself a distinguished poet; namely, the version of the second and fourth books of the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... like to scourge them out of this place." And then, half playfully, half seriously, and wholly conscious of the grotesqueness, he added: ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... the day preceding the grand event of the century. Mary Trigillgus and her mother were lingering at the breakfast-table. The girl seemed wild and hawk-like, startling her mother with her unnatural merriment, commenting with weird brilliancy and grotesqueness and sparkle on the various items as Mrs. Trigillgus read them. At length she read a paragraph about the eclipse. "'And we would advise every reader,'" she continued, "'to furnish himself with an eclipse-glass, which he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... cover themselves with pitch and roll on the ground. But no one can deny that, while that which Cusick narrates has much in common with the mythology of the Wabanaki, it is much less like that of the Edda; that Indian grotesqueness has in it greatly perverted an original: and finally, that it certainly occupies a position midway between the mythology of the Northeastern Algonquins and that of the Chippewas, Ottawas, and other Western tribes. Examination ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... poetry, and indeed in all poetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tend to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It is difficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness without becoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul's Cathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for the moment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... been twisted round in the reverse way to a European's. He was short of stature and still shorter of English. In conversation he made numerous odd noises of no known marketable value, and his infrequent words were carved and wrought into heraldic grotesqueness. Holroyd tried to elucidate his religious beliefs, and—especially after whiskey—lectured to him against superstition and missionaries. Azuma-zi, however, shirked the discussion of his gods, even though ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... This gymnastic dance was common to many tribes. The dances of the Moros and Igorrotes at the St. Louis Exposition partook, in a similar way, of the nature of the gymnastic dance. The war dances of the plains Indians of America are celebrated for their grotesqueness. The green-corn dance and the cachina of the Pueblos and the snake dance of the Moqui all have an economic foundation. In all, however, the play element in man and the desire for dramatic expression ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... their short necks were massive leather collars cut to fit closely over the shoulders and snugly to the lower part of the head. Their features were scarce discernible, but there was a suggestion of grotesqueness about them that carried to her ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Finally, they are brought back to the village with great pomp. For this solemn ceremony their faces, necks, and breasts are whitened with a thick layer of chalk, while red stripes, painted round their mouths and eyes and prolonged to the ears, add to the grotesqueness of their appearance. Their eyes are closed with a plaster of chalk, and thus curiously arrayed and blindfolded they are led back to the village square, where leave is formally given them to open their eyes. At the entrance ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... h, according to this rule, is a very good chimney. It is graceful without pretending, and its grotesqueness will suit the buildings round it—we wish we could give them: ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... words conveyed no meaning to Ralph; then they surged up into his brain and flung him forward with half-raised arm. But he felt the grotesqueness of the gesture and his arm dropped back to his side. A series of unimportant and irrelevant things raced through his mind; then obscurity settled down on it. "THIS man...THIS man..." was the one fiery point in his darkened ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... and grotesqueness of form, as well as for the exceptional conditions under which they grow to the best advantage, no class of plants is more remarkable than the Cactaceae. Of these, about a thousand species have been described by botanists; nearly all are indigenous to the New World, though but a small proportion ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... all the time have been under contract to furnish "humorous" matter, once a month, for this magazine. I am speaking the exact truth in the above details. Please to put yourself in my place and contemplate the grisly grotesqueness of the situation. I think that some of the "humor" I have written during this period could have been injected into a funeral sermon without disturbing the solemnity of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... shade the entrance, and a vine, climbing to the top of the house, makes a leafy arbor over the flat roof. The walls of the house are painted in horizontal bars of blue, white, orange and white—a gay grotesqueness of style which does not offend the eye under an eastern sun. On the southern side of the court is the liwan, an arrangement for which the houses of Damascus are noted. It is a vaulted apartment, twenty feet high, entirely open ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... definitor of his province. Having early gained a great reputation for pulpit eloquence, he was appointed court preacher at Vienna in 1669. The people flocked to hear him, attracted by the force and homeliness of his language, the grotesqueness of his humour, and the impartial severity with which he lashed the follies of all classes of society and of the court in particular. In general he spoke as a man of the people, the predominating quality of his style ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... astounded. I was also very near laughing, for there was a sort of importance in her plump countenance, and an indescribable grotesqueness in the fashion of her garments, which heightened the outlandishness of her talk, in a way which ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... me more wistfully, and his eyes grew more luminous than ever. This man, in spite of his grotesqueness, was quite in earnest, there was ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Once a great plain, then a group of mesas, now it has become a city of grotesque monuments. Those who have seen the Garden of the Gods near Colorado Springs can imagine it multiplied many times in size, grotesqueness, complexity, and area; such a vision will approximate the Colorado National Monument. The two regions have other relations in common, for as the Garden of the Gods flanks the Rockies' eastern slopes and looks eastward to the great ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... Margaret Murchie might regain her senses. And yet, when I had signaled to Estabrook, when he, without a word, had come, and when I felt the excitement most keenly, I found myself impressed not with the necessities of the moment, but rather with the extraordinary grotesqueness of ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... too "near to the bone" in point for an aristocrat, with his touch of the comedian and the peasant also. Besides, he was mysterious and picturesque, and this is alluring to women and to the humble, if not to all the world. It might be his was the comedian's fascination, but the flashes of grotesqueness rather pleased the eye than hurt the taste ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker |
