"Misshapen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that seemed to assert equality with the queen of flowers, and would not be eclipsed by the fragrant loveliness of their beautiful dependents. The borders of box, which had once been trimmed and trained into fanciful points and tufts and convolutions of verdure, had grown into misshapen clumps; and the white, pebbly walks no longer ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... Clubbe's wife had given to Dormer Colville was handed from one to another. It was not of great value, but it was of gold with stones, long since discoloured, set in silver around it. It was crushed and misshapen. ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Bill. "Cur? Why you maul-headed, misshapen blotch on the face o' nature, what do you mean by callin' this dog a cur! I never saw this dog before to-day; but I'll bet ten to one that I can find out who his great-great-grandfather's great-great-grandfather ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... lakes of decidedly overdone toffee; and in similar fashion piled up sacks of coffee berries were roasting themselves not wisely but too well. Pyramids of flour were much in the same way baking themselves into cakes, monstrously misshapen, and much more badly burnt than King Alfred's ever were. "The Boers are poor cooks," laughingly explained our men; "they bake in bulk without proper mixing." Nevertheless, along that line everything seemed ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... venerable old age, possessing all its benevolent attributes without its natural infirmities. They were old and gray from their birth, and so they ever remained. In later times, however, they came to be regarded as misshapen females, decrepid, and hideously ugly, having only one eye, one tooth, and one gray wig between them, which they lent to each other, when one of them wished to ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... light overcoat, unfolded, on the overflowing, misshapen bundle of clothes that lay in the bag; then he jumped on the lid with both feet and kicked the hasp into the lock; a very elegantly laundered cuff and white sleeve dangling out from between the fastened lids. "I haven't one second ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... utterly remote from herself; and to her imagination the word "murderer" had connoted an eccentric, cunning, mentally misshapen monster, lacking all resemblance to the vast bulk of human kind. She tried to realize that, if Mark Gifford's tale were true, a man with whom she herself had long been in close sympathy, and whose peculiar character she had rather prided herself on understanding, ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... the chairs and tables queer, but, with due regard to the principle that a man's surroundings should bear the impress of that man's life and occupation, the chief ornaments of the dwelling were a curious collection of calcinations, that had been discovered from time to time in the lime-kiln—misshapen ingots of strange substance, some of ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... subtle, how appreciative it is!" Then the process of discovery begins. Instead of the fair distant city, all spires and towers, which we discerned in the distance in a sort of glory, we find that there are crooked lanes, muddy crossings, dull market-places, tiresome houses. Odd misshapen figures, fretful and wearied, plod through the streets or look out at windows; here is a ruin, with doleful creatures moping in the shade; we overturn a stone, and blind uncanny things writhe away from the light. We begin ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as he spoke. He pointed to a misshapen heap of something lying on the ground at his feet. "It ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... the bench for many years, trying with my imperfect intelligence to adjust the misshapen affairs of men and women," the Judge went on. "Never have I been forced to deal with so terrible a question ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... even the young men, looked worn and weather-beaten and some appeared both silent and sad. Laughter was curiously infrequent and I wondered whether in my days on the farm they had all been as rude of dress, as misshapen of form and as wistful of voice as they now seemed to me to be. "Have times changed? Has a spirit of unrest and complaining developed in the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... in a misshapen attic room which I rented of an Irish family in what was then a Gentile neighborhood. I had chosen that street for the English I had expected to hear around me. I had lived more than two months in that attic, and almost the only English ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... passed a place which was overgrown, in broad patches, with misshapen stunted bushes—a rare occurrence in this part of the country, where wood is scarce. My driver bestowed upon this tangled brushwood the high-sounding name of jungle. I should rather have compared them with the dwarfed bushes and shrubs of Iceland. The country beyond this woody district had ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... they have not been rolled; and the sandstone has taken their exact details, which are found in hollow form in the gangue. In other cases these fragments exhibit the aspect of genuine shingle or rolled pebbles. These pebbles of coal have not been misshapen under the pressure of the surrounding sandstone, nor have they shrunk since their burial and the solidification of the gangue, for their surface is in contact with the internal surface of their matrix. Everything leads to the belief that they were ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... him on here, I'd better tell him myself," Samms directed, and his face hardened in ruthless decision as the horny, misshapen face of the Martian lieutenant appeared upon the screen. "What do you think, Knobos? Shall they come ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... buffoon. It is difficult to summarize the legend, it varies so considerably in the versions. Marcolf in the best-known forms, which are certainly older than Zabara, is "right rude and great of body, of visage greatly misshapen and foul." Sometimes he is a dwarf, sometimes a giant; he is never normal. He appears with his counterpart, a sluttish wife, before Solomon, who, recognizing him as famous for his wit and wisdom, challenges him ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... that misshapen slave Told never of the thing he heard, And unto men their portraits gave, In likenesses of ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang
... the Fleet Already the vast bulk of the battleships oppressed our spirits. We looked up from the cockpit of our dancing pleasure boat and saw the huge misshapen iron monsters towering over us, minatory, terrible. We swept in and out, across the sharp bows, under the gloomy sterns of the ships of the first line. Ascher gazed at them. His eyes were full of sorrow, sorrow and ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... the contrary. Then come the anger and disgust which men ever visit upon those who deceive and disappoint them. Beauty is a dainty and exquisite vestibule to a temple; but when a worshipper is beguiled into entering, only to find a stony, misshapen idol and a dingy shrine, this does not conduce ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... similar manner those who enter new houses without making obeisance to the four corners, and paying them other kindly attentions; those who live in untidy houses are also likewise punished. The Kirkonwaeki (church-folk) are little deformed beings living under the altars of churches. These misshapen things are supposed to be able to aid their sorrowing ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... some time. When she came back again she bore in her arms a bundle, large, knobby and misshapen. It was wrapped in newspapers which had cracked away here and there over the end of a rib; but it was enclosed in a network of strings that crossed and crisscrossed ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... still counselled and controlled, and yet it was a kind of pride that inspires something like respect. It proved that there was much good metal in the crude, misshapen ore ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... night; busy hands were closing shutters, and drawing curtains, to exclude the dense fog, that crept slowly and silently, like an assassin, through the streets; the pavement was clammy, and the carriages rushing through the mist, like huge-eyed, misshapen spectres, proved how eager even the poor horses were to find shelter; yet for a long while we stood on the steps of this building, and at length retraced our steps homeward. Our train of thought, although checked, was not changed, when seated by a comfortable fire. We took down a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the slow growth of the crime, and its gradual development in the mind. More than this; a clue to the mental connection of the deed, with the punishment to which the doer of that deed is liable, until the two, conjoined, give birth to monstrous and misshapen Murder. ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... approached—a narrow, sinuous ribbon clinging to the side of the huge cliffs like a snake fastened to a rock. On the left side, immediately above us, was a precipice some thousand feet in height; on the right a series of massive boulders, of quartzite and granite, misshapen and lowering. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... people" or fairies, who in Ireland are supposed to delight in old, crazy, deserted mansions for their midnight revels. All attempts to repair it were in vain; the fairies battled stoutly to maintain possession. A huge misshapen hobgoblin used to bestride the house every evening with an immense pair of jack-boots, which, in his efforts at hard riding, he would thrust through the roof, kicking to pieces all the work of the preceding day. The house was therefore left to its ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... and the reflection from the gold upon the rock was soft and a beautiful greenish hue. The mermaids, all covered with iridescent scales from waist to tail, glimmered through the waters in a most entrancing way. In that shimmering, changeful light they were in amazing contrast with the slimy, misshapen Alberich, who came from that underworld where only half-blind, ugly, and treacherous creatures live. The mermaids disported themselves quite unconscious of the imp's presence, till he laughed aloud, and then, startled, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travelers from distant regions shall in vain labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief—shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple, and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts—the influence and glory of Athens will still survive, fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The pauses in Patmore, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... bonneted ploughboys, the voices of the blackbird and the mavis, made him sad, and pleased was Lemercier to leave behind him all such sounds of life, and reach the wild and solitary place where the obelisk stood—a grim and time-worn relic of the Druid ages or the Danish wars. A rough misshapen remnant of antiquity it still remains to mark the scene of this hostile meeting, which yet forms one of the most famous traditions ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... part of the whole morning's entertainment, was undoubtedly the dancing of the little Dwarf. When he stumbled into the arena, waddling on his crooked legs and wagging his huge misshapen head from side to side, the children went off into a loud shout of delight, and the Infanta herself laughed so much that the Camerera was obliged to remind her that although there were many precedents in ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... onward-creeping darkness added to the terrors of the scene. By the last rays of the lurid light we saw Ayesha rise and advance some few paces to that little tongue of rock at the edge of the pit off which the body of Rassen had been hurled; saw her standing on it, also, looking like some black, misshapen imp against the smoky glow which still rose from the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... rugged of any that they had seen since reaching Kentucky. Everywhere one saw caves, large and small, and unless one were vigilant he was quite likely to fall into one, for many were mere holes straight down through the rocks, and vine-covered at the top. The rocks themselves were misshapen, and in some instances hideous when the light ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... features, the beauty of the eyes, the wealth of the dark, clustering hair, were all as near artistic perfection as could be. But all else spoke of deformity—the badly bent back, the twisted body, the short leg, the misshapen foot. It was as if Nature had endeavoured in some wickedly mischievous freak to show how beauty and ugliness can be combined ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... the sky. There, blazing with light, like a great misshapen moon, was a giant airship moving swiftly over the city. As it sailed along, streams of fire fell from it, and immediately there followed the terrible thunder of bursting bombs. When it passed out of sight, it seemed as if the ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... their prizes to the house, great fun and much dirt were the result. Posy's eldest cousin had brought in a big crooked cabbage stalk, with plenty of mould hanging to its roots: he was to marry a tall, stout, misshapen wife with a large fortune. Miss Clara, the young lady of the house, brought in a tall and slender stalk, with little soil adhering to it; so by-and-by, as some one said, she would marry ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... through the well-to-do quarters of our city, and glance, perhaps a little enviously as they pass, toward the cheerful firesides, do not reflect that in almost every one of these apparently happy homes a pitiless tyrant reigns, a misshapen monster without bowels of compassion or thought beyond its own greedy appetites, who sits like Sinbad’s awful burden on the necks of tender women and distracted men. Sometimes this incubus takes the form of a pug, sometimes of a poodle, ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... beautiful valley of Aosta, as the transparent azure veil of the Italian dusk was drawn, and out of that dusk glimmered now and then, as if born of the shadows, strange, stunted, and misshapen forms, gnome-like creatures, who stood aside to let us pass along the road. It was as if the Brownie Club were out for a night excursion; and I remembered my muleteer's lecture about the cretins of this happy valley. ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... the intelligent foreigner, going about staring at the public buildings, and collecting curios—strangely marked pebbles, and a few military brass buttons, long shed by the garments they once made brave; rusty, misshapen bullets, mementoes of the immortal nine or ten years' siege which had won for Montevideo the mournful appellation of modern Troy. When I had fully examined from the outside the scene of my future triumphs—for ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... stared, took a golden box out of his waistcoat pocket, opened it, tapped it, and helped himself to a pinch of snuff. The habit explained his somewhat misshapen nose. It was tobacco, not alcohol, that lent its exaggerated lustre and hypertrophied outline to ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... dropped on to the floor, where he squatted like a huge misshapen toad, while Vandeloup, after going to the door to see that it was closed, returned to the bed, sat down again, and, having lighted another cigarette, began to speak. All this precaution was somewhat needless, ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... we have seen occasional individuals with abnormal foliage—somewhat mottled, usually curled and often misshapen. Thinking that a virus might be the cause of this trouble the senior author tried grafting some of the shoots on to healthy stocks. The grafts were in no case successful because the scions were too weak. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... not positively masculine articles, but were nevertheless made by a man's boot-maker, and there was only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently ugly to suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy, thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed and disfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep. Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as it was, was so by malice prepense on her part. And whereas the general result would have suggested a total disregard ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... him coolly and without alarm, though so weird an object might well have aroused a pardonable distrust, and even timidity. He saw a misshapen dwarf, not quite four feet high, with large, ungainly limbs out of all proportion to his head, which was small and compact. His features were of almost feminine fineness, and from under his shaggy brows gleamed a restless pair of large, full, wild ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... going to church very proud of themselves, when they heard a girl laughing at them, on which her companion rebuked her, saying, "You shouldn't laugh; you might be struck so!" She thought the dandies were two misshapen idiots.] ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... time Jason's servo-tracer on Lonnie hiccupped and dozed off was at 12:01 a.m., August 7th, 2008, just one day after the Diamond Throne arrived on Earth. The single, glittering diamond crystal, misshapen like an armchair and larger than one, had been mined out of the core of Tycho's crater. And it was also just two days before the Moon Throne would have been installed in the unbreakable safety of ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... are on the outside. One distinguishes questions and replies. One perceives, without understanding it, a hideous murmur, sounding almost like human accents, but more nearly resembling a howl than an articulate word. It is slang. The words are misshapen and stamped with an indescribable and fantastic bestiality. One ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... large misshapen masses had been forced up in a perpendicular position, while others had been balanced on their summits so evenly, that the slightest touch was sufficient to send them thundering down ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... embarked with his men and sailed down Chignecto Channel to the Bay of Fundy. Here, while they waited the turn of the tide to enter the Basin of Mines, the shores of Cumberland lay before them dim in the hot and hazy air, and the promontory of Cape Split, like some misshapen monster of primeval chaos, stretched its portentous length along the glimmering sea, with head of yawning rock, and ridgy back bristled with forests. Borne on the rushing flood, they soon drifted through the inlet, glided under the rival promontory ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... the great room was filled with eaters, just as the vast court was filled with vehicles of every sort—wagons, gigs, chars-a-bancs, tilburies, innumerable vehicles which have no name, yellow with mud, misshapen, pieced together, raising their shafts to heaven like two arms, or it may be with their nose on the ground and their rear in ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... upper camp of the Bostonians. They had profited by a hole in the rocks, and chopped away the stunted scrubs to enlarge it into a snug artificial abyss. It was snug, and so to the eye is a cell at Sing-Sing. If they were very misshapen Bostonians, they may have succeeded in lying there comfortably. I looked down ten feet into the rough chasm, and I saw, Corpo di Bacco! I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... so red, and so misshapen, under your coarse elf-locks, that they are revolting. I am not pretty myself, but I should die of shame if mine were like them." After this last blow, the old witch, having repeated what the queen had taught her, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... children, set fire to the castle, and perished in the flames. The Justiciars were too much occupied with their own quarrels to heed such matters. Hugh was a stately and magnificent prelate. William was lame and misshapen, quick of wit and unscrupulous. In a few weeks he had deprived his rival of all authority. His own power did not last long. He had a sharp tongue, and did not hesitate to let all men, great and small, know how meanly he thought of them. ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... the light beat strongly upon the harsh face and the high-drawn misshapen shoulders of the lord of the house. A tangle of black hair surmounted a high rounded forehead, the forehead of a thinker, with two deep-set cold gray eyes twinkling sharply from under tufted brows. His ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... leviathan, this monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, as I remember my old father used to call a certain gigantic and misshapen bull that we had on the Station, flapping a pair of ears that looked like the sides of a Kafir hut, and waving a trunk as big as a weaver's beam—whatever a weaver's beam may be—an appalling ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... the homely, good-natured, cell overseer whom he now saw for the first time—a large, heavy, lumbering man, rather dusty and misshapen-looking, whose uniform did not fit him well, and whose manner of standing made him look as though he would much prefer to sit down. He was obviously bulky, but not strong, and his kindly face was covered with a short growth of grayish-brown whiskers. His hair was cut badly and stuck out in odd ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... tall, broad woman's body with the same compactness as it was packed upon his, by the time I had reached my twenty-first birthday. By that time he and I had been alone together for eight long years, for my mother had left us with tiny, misshapen Pierre as a heart burden but with only each other ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... now completely assumed the form of a man, though of a monstrous and gigantic one! He could clearly perceive that the little blue lights were borne by dwarfs, whose pale clay-coloured faces, with their huge noses and red eyes, disfigured, too, by birds' bills and owls' eyes, were supported by misshapen bodies. They tottered and wobbled about here and there, so that they seemed to be, at the same time, merry and in pain. Suddenly the circle opened, the little ones retired on each side, and Guru, who was now much ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various
... as a woman; I see the bitterness and the sorrow of my sex through the ages. I have become physically misshapen, so that I am no longer attractive to him. I am no longer active and free, I can no longer go about with him; on the contrary, I am a burden, and he is a man who never tolerated a burden before. What this means is that I have lost the magic hold of ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... probably of length also) for all men and all nations, for all time,—and particularly for these latter profane times,—is, in simple truth, nothing more and nothing less than—an old and somewhat misshapen stone coffin. ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... season I found that he had hatched fifty cards of "seed." From the birth of the caterpillars to the formation of cocoons the casualties must be reckoned at ten per cent. daily. Not more than eighty-five per cent. of the cocoons which are produced are of good quality. The remainder are misshapen or contain dead chrysalises. As there are more than a thousand breeds of silk-worm, all cocoons are not of the same shape and colour. Some are oval; some are shaped like a monkey nut. Most are white but some are yellow and others ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... Misshapen ships stood on the deep Full of strange gold and fire, And hairy men, as huge as sin With horned heads, came wading in ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... between the devil and the deep sea—the floor was the sea, and the devil was assuredly advancing towards him. Never before had he set eyes on such a beast—ten inches from head to tail, brawny, misshapen, mangy, a veritable ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... flared into equal and opposite energy, so that matter was raised not to the twelve thousand Morey had estimated but nearer twenty-four thousand degrees. It was over in less than half an hour, and a broken, misshapen mass of blue incandescence floated in space. It would fall now, toward the sun, and it would, because it was motionless and the sun moved, take an eccentric orbit about that sun. Eventually, perhaps, it would wipe out the four inferior planets, or perhaps it would be broken ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... times its head was hidden in what appeared to be wings thrown upward from its shoulders; at times its broad-brimmed hat was cocked jauntily on one side, and again the brim was fixed over the face like a visor. At one moment a drifting misshapen mass of drapery, at the next its vague garments, beaten back hard against the figure, revealed outlines far too delicate for that rude enwrapping. For it was Mrs. Rylands herself, in her husband's hat and her "hired man's" old blue ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... drapes the rock, the grotto opens," writes Zola, "with its eternally flaming candles. From a distance it looks rather squat and misshapen, a very narrow and humble aperture for the breath of the Infinite which issued from it. The statue of the Virgin has become a mere speck, which seems to move in the quiver of the atmosphere heated by the little yellow flames. To see anything it is necessary to raise oneself; ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the tender's anchor from the sand and pulled sharply across the water to the Gar. A reddish, misshapen moon hung in the east, and when he had mounted to his deck it was suddenly obscured by a high, racing scud of cloud; the air had a damper, thicker feel. He instinctively moved to the barometer, which he found ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... chief opportunity of serving her King. The historian therefore turns to her sister Eleanor, who had been with her in the Fanny Shaftoe affair, but remained in France. Penniless as she was, Eleanor's beauty won the heart of the Marquis de Mezieres, a great noble, a man over fifty, ugly, brave, misshapen. Theirs, none the less, was a love match, as the French Court admiringly proclaimed. 'The frog-faced' Marquis, the vainest of men, was one of the most courageous. Their daughters became the Princesses de Montauban and de Ligne, whose brilliant marriages caused much envy. Of their sons ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... heaven; and returneth not again void, but gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater. But so it always has been. Men used to see God and His power and glory almost exclusively in comets, auroras, earthquakes. It was not so very long ago, that the birth of monstrous or misshapen animals, and all other prodigies, as they were called, were carefully noted down, and talked of far and wide, as signs of God's anger, presages of some coming calamity.—Atheists while they are in safety, superstitious ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... whilst from all about rose obscene sighings and murmurings in far-away voices—an uncanny, animal chorus. It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some Chinese Dante. But so close to us stood the newcomer that I was able to make out a ghastly parchment face, with small, oblique eyes, and a misshapen head crowned with a coiled pigtail, surmounting a slight, hunched body. There was something unnatural, inhuman, about that masklike face, and something repulsive in the bent shape and the long, yellow hands clasped one upon ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... to some trees—whence they descended with great risk, and were left squint-eyed, because of having looked at those enormous barbarians. Some years later, another eyewitness who had experience in the affairs of that island added that such monsters, called tecmas, had been seen with ears misshapen because of their size, and that their mouth was like that of a dog; while they were so hideous in face and teeth ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... a sprig of terebinth, his eye, armed with the magnifying glass, follows the slow manoeuvres of the terebinth louse, whose proboscis "cunningly distils the venom which causes the leaf to swell and produces those enormous tumours, those misshapen and monstrous galls, in which the young ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... it, dear wife, that your son is the child of a true man, and who, in his own respect, despiseth Death, and all his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time, when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue [yours], or in Exeter Church, by ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... into beauties, but there is certainly no court, of which the taste is so absurd, grotesque, and monstrous, as that to which Major Denham was now introduced. An enormous protruding belly, and a huge misshapen head, are the two features, without which it is vain to aspire to the rank of a courtier, or fine gentleman. The form, valued perhaps as the type of abundance and luxury, is esteemed so essential, that where ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... The Marquess was dying and his enemy could afford to be generous. He gave me a little money and the following year obtained from the Duke my appointment as assistant librarian. In this way I was able to give Momola a home, and to save her child from the Innocenti. She and I, cavaliere, are the misshapen offspring of that cruel foster-parent, who rears more than half the malefactors in the state; but please heaven the boy shall have a better start in life, and perhaps grow up to destroy some of the evils on which that cursed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... peasants drinking, dimmed and half obliterated. Beneath were legends and proverbs, printed in quaint, old-German characters; while across one end, like a frieze, ran a ledge carven with gargoyles, rude and misshapen. On the ledge were beer mugs of every size and description, with queer tops and crooked handles. Above, suspended from the ceiling by chains, hung a huge Fass; and from the throats of the gargoyles, dragon and devil alike, dripped the beer, turned on ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... time they put no women into nunneries but such as were either one-eyed, lame, humpbacked, ill-favored, misshapen, foolish, senseless, spoiled, or corrupt; nor encloistered any men but those that were either sickly, ill-bred, clownish, and the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... some; melancholy old rigging, like a heap of poor friars' girdles. There were also two long, sharp-ribbed settees of Malacca cane, black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors' racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber's crotch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque engine of torment. A flag locker was in one corner, open, exposing various colored bunting, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... last rise in Morning Gate Pass in the late afternoon. Cobre Basin spread deep and wide before him, ruddy in the low sun; Cobre town and mines, on his left, loomed dim and misshapen in the long dark shadows ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... and to be used and bestowed, not at the will and arbitriment of creatures, but to be absolutely and solely at his disposal who hath the sole sovereign right to them and, therefore, you may take up the heinousness of sin, how monstrous and misshapen a thing it is, that breaks this inviolable law of creation, and withdraws the creature from subjection to him, in whom alone it can subsist. O how disordered are the courses and lives of men! Men living to themselves, their own ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... and the other somewhat lower. It was inhabited by Papuans, whose mode of bedecking themselves, owing to their natural deformity, made them literally appear like monsters. Nearly the whole of them had their limbs fearfully misshapen, besides which they had strings of hogs'-teeth hung about their necks, rings in their noses, their hair frizzled, and their faces black and ugly. Their habitations were remarkable, being light structures of bamboo, mounted on stakes eight or nine feet above the ground, and close ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... cloth much wrinkled and patched; a twenty-five cent felt hat, Susan's adorned with a blue ribbon, Etta's with a bunch of faded roses; a blue cotton blouse patched under the arms with stuff of a different shade; an old misshapen corset that cost forty-nine cents in a bargain sale; a suit of gray shoddy-and-wool underwear; a pair of fifteen-cent stockings, Susan's brown, Etta's black; a pair of worn and torn ties, scuffed and down at the heel, bought for a dollar and nine cents; a dirt-stained dark blue jacket, Susan's ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... came to an immense Banana tree, out of which flew a cloud of blueish pigeons. The leaves of this Banana looked six or seven feet long and about one wide; the fruit was hanging in every direction, looking like large misshapen cucumbers. Benjie had taught us not to cut it crossways, but from end to end, as it tasted better when cut wrong. But it was curious when cut wrong what an exact cross was pictured in the middle. Twined in the Banana tree was an immense gourd plant. At this minute I shuddered with ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A homesickness for the past came over her. It was not ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... incessant ardour in the pursuit of them, advances the character to a dignity otherwise unattainable. How much humble piety has bloomed in the by-paths of life far from the crowded highway of the world, amidst the recesses of privacy! How often has the beauty of holiness adorned the most misshapen, or otherwise unattractive exterior! How many great and pious individuals have occupied the vale of poverty, the objects of divine approbation and of angelic joy; who, under different circumstances, might have been ornaments of the political world, or lights in the church of God; and will ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... They were squat, misshapen vessels, circling down like vultures, hissing, screeching, landing with a grinding crash in the tall thicket near the place where the city had stood. Ravdin's signal had guided them in, and the Hunters had seen them, standing on a hilltop above ...
— The Link • Alan Edward Nourse
... there is one surpassingly strange relic of the past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this grey-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... flaming of Akaaenga's torch drew near in the night; and the misshapen hands groped in the meshes of the net; and they took the missionary between the finger and the thumb, and bore him dripping in the night and silence to the place of the ovens of Miru. And there was Miru, ruddy in the glow of the ovens; and there sat her four daughters, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... vast and open sunshine. Look around us—how nobly simple is every line and shape! Far below the horizon nature is elaborate, full of fancies,—mazy watercourses, delicate dingles, fantastically gloomy ravines, misshapen woods, gibbering with diablerie; but here how simple, how great, how good she is! There is not a shape subtler than a common bowl, and the colours are alphabetical—and yet, by what taking of thought could she ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... the name applied by Virchow to a condition in which a limb is swollen and misshapen as a result of the extension of a neuro-fibromatosis to the skin and subcutaneous cellular tissue of the extremity as a whole (Fig. 89). It usually begins in early life without apparent cause, and ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... except that he took rather too much pleasure in tormenting an ugly monster called Caliban, for he owed him a grudge because he was the son of his old enemy Sycorax. This Caliban, Prospero found in the woods, a strange misshapen thing, far less human in form than an ape: he took him home to his cell, and taught him to speak; and Prospero would have been very kind to him, but the bad nature which Caliban inherited from his mother Sycorax, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... words in italics are written in strange, misshapen letters, inclining to the right hand, in imitation of Stella's writing" (Deane Swift). (Italics replaced by capitals for the transcription of ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... a babe "scarce half made up;" a child with a head so large that it was a dire deformity, with one foot sadly twisted, and with a tongue that was tied; in brief, an infant ogre born with teeth. So great was the chagrin of the father that he made no effort to conceal his dislike for the misshapen child. Hence, when at three years of age the little one was left wretchedly pitted by a severe attack of small-pox, its fate was listed. It must not, could not, bear the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... their husbands, fathers, brothers, and lovers; most of whom were sailors or owners of craft in the harbour. Their dress is very becoming, and some of them were pretty. The black silk mantilla is a very beautiful head dress, and much to be preferred to the misshapen bonnet with which fashion commands the fair to disfigure themselves in other parts of Europe. The petticoat is also of black silk, with the body of white muslin. Some one likened them to magpies: i'faith, they talked as fast; but who ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... to let it be done. Mother hearts cling to children, no matter how diseased, misshapen and miserable. Sons and daughters hold fast to parents, no matter how helpless. We do not allow the weak to depart; neither do we cease to bring more weak and helpless beings into the world. Among the dire results is war, which kills off, not the ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... to revenge myself upon your impudent mistress. Often she has made sport of me with her tricking shadows. Often she has even dared to make my own form flicker and dance before me—not as it is—indeed, but twisted and misshapen to please her own mischievous fancy." His eyes glinted with malice, and Black Shadow was well pleased to find him so willing ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... which had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head. Just at this moment a plashy tramp on the bank of the stream, by the side of the bridge, caught the sensitive ear of Ichabod. In the 15 dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the murmuring brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, black, and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathering up in the gloom, like some gigantic monster ready to spring upon the ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... aloft, worked by the gnomes from the mines of the mountains of Taunus; but of the strange inhabitants that from time to time they came upon. They found in one solitary cell, lined with dried moss, two misshapen elves, of a larger size than common, with a plebeian working-day aspect, who were chatting noisily together, and making a pair of boots: these were the Hausmannen or domestic elves, that dance into tradesmen's houses of a night, and play all sorts ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dog looked at it he thought that he had never seen anything so ugly and misshapen as the baby elk, with its long, shambly legs, which hung down from the body like loose stilts. The head was large, old, and wrinkled, and it always drooped to one side. The skin lay in tucks and folds, as if the animal had put on a coat that had not been made for him. Always ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... Ittlethwaite, a lively bachelor of sixty, and for his eldest sister Arabella, some ten years younger, a lady whose portly form was attired in a wonderful apple-green satin, trimmed with priceless lace, the latter entirely lost as an article of value, among the misshapen folds of the green gown, which had been created, no doubt, by some local dressmaker, whose ideas were evidently more voluminous than artistic. And presently, as he stood, a quiet spectator of the different types of persons who were mingling with each other in ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the lower deck was close and unhealthy, and the girl, pausing to listen to the subdued hum of conversation coming from the soldiers' berths, turned strangely sick and giddy. She drew herself up, however, and held out her hand to a man who came rapidly across the misshapen shadows, thrown by the sulkily swinging lantern, to meet her. It was the young soldier who had been that day sentry at the ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... there were three great projections which I can only describe as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked at them that they were charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy-up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along, keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce. Its method ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... twittering in an aviary. In the next room, on a threadbare divan, lay a man. He sat up to welcome Christophe. At once Christophe recognized the emaciated face, lit up by the soul, the lovely velvety black eyes burning with a feverish flame, the long, intelligent hands, the misshapen body, the shrill, husky voice.... Emmanuel! The little cripple boy who had been the innocent cause.... And Emmanuel, suddenly rising to his feet, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... together with Moslem Spain. It originated with Mahommed ibn Tumart, a member of the Masmuda, a Berber tribe of the Atlas. Ibn Tumart was the son of a lamplighter in a mosque and had been noted for his piety from his youth; he was small, ugly, and misshapen and lived the life of a devotee-beggar. As a youth he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, whence he was expelled on account of his severe strictures on the laxity of others, and thence wandered to Bagdad, where he attached himself to the school of the orthodox doctor ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... "So misshapen a figure, it may readily be supposed, made a very good target for the shafts of mockery. Nicholas, however, troubled himself but little about them; and it was small complaint you heard from him so long as he was well paid, got his savoury morsel, and, above ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... you knows not of such transformation? Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction? Half formed by the necessities of the time, a fact is hidden in the ground obscure and incomplete, rough, misshapen, like a block of marble not yet rough-hewn. The first who unearth it, and take it in hand, would wish it differently shaped, and pass it, already a little rounded, into other hands; others polish it as they pass it along; in a short ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... after the death of a member of Parliament, a prominent county magistrate, the owner of large estates, and an active, public-spirited man in all local and national matters, was it known by those who had not seen him, that it was but the misshapen block of a man that had lived ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... never be known what Cruise had heard or seen in the last moments of his life. No one on board the Doraine, however, doubted for an instant that he had discovered, too late, the truth about his misshapen assistant. They now knew with almost absolute certainty the identity of the odd man in that devilish trio, the man whose footsteps Percival had heard, the man who stayed behind to guarantee the consummation of the hideous plot. Coward in the end, he shirked the ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... the bushes, swamps, and lagoons, are too thickly intermingled with the better portions to render it either a safe or desirable grazing country. The timber is universally bad and small; a few large misshapen gum trees on the immediate banks of the river may be considered as exceptions. If however the country itself is poor, the river is rich in the most excellent fish, procurable in the utmost abundance. One man in less than an hour caught eighteen large fish, one of which was a curiosity ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... slowly up and down their channel. At a reckless speed motorcyclists, carrying urgent messages, swerved through it all; and in the ditches that ran alongside, refugees were stumbling on, fleeing from the new terror, their crouching, misshapen figures like players from a grotesque ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... prohibition came too late. Near a low truckle-bed, upon which Sir Robert sometimes slept, for he was a whimsical man, in a large armchair, sat, or rather lounged, the form of the valet Jacque, his arms folded, and his heels stretched forward on the floor, so as fully to exhibit his misshapen legs, his head thrown back, and his eyes fixed upon his master with a look of indescribable defiance and derision, while, as if to add to the strange insolence of his attitude and expression, he had placed upon his head the black cloth cap which it ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... induce them to sign the pledge. Some of them must have known that he was mad. But even they did not laugh at him. Into their own dark and formless thoughts there may have come the dim realization that they, too, were misshapen and outcast. The rain falling in long, slanting lines through the dingy lamplight seemed to merge them ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... communities either as a presage of misfortune (as being unusual and mysterious) or as a sign of conjugal unfaithfulness (as indicating two fathers, one of whom might be a god). Interpretations of births are given in Babylonian records.[1617] Everywhere monstrous births, misshapen forms, and abnormal colors in the bodies of men and beasts have been regarded as indications of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... Range. The sea-breeze that blew chilly over this bleak expanse added to that fancy, and the line of straggling whitewashed farm buildings, that half way across lifted themselves above it, seemed to be placed on an island in its midst. Even the one or two huge, misshapen agricultural machines, abandoned in the furrows, bore an odd resemblance to hulks or barges adrift ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... her misshapen head and scarred face down on his hand, where he could see them. If it had ever hurt her to be as she was, if she had ever compared herself bitterly with fair, beloved women, she was glad now and thankful for every fault and deformity that brought ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... monstrous and gigantic one! He could clearly perceive that the little blue lights were borne by Dwarfs whose pale clay-coloured faces, with their huge noses and red eyes, disfigured too by birds' bills and owls' eyes, were supported by misshapen bodies, and they tottered and wabbled about here and there, so that they seemed to be at the same time merry and in pain. Suddenly, the circle opened; the little ones retired on each side, and Guru—who ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... abruptly with a calculated embarrassment of manner, and his roving eye sought the floor, while an apologetic smile dwelt for a moment on his misshapen lips. Once or twice during this opening speech an amused expression flitted across Dain's face, soon to give way, however, to an appearance of grave concern. On Lakamba's brow a heavy frown had settled, and his lips moved angrily as he listened to his Prime Minister's oratory. In the ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... prefer to reside, she returned some very unexpected answer. She would say in Copenhagen, or in Barcelona; having, while making the tour of Europe, spent a couple of days at each of these places. On the whole, with her poetic furbelows and her misshapen, intelligent little face, she was, when you knew her, a decidedly interesting woman. She was naturally shy, and if she had been born a beauty, she would (having no vanity) probably have remained shy. Now, she was both diffident and importunate; ...
— The American • Henry James
... to successfully accomplish the adventure. In the second part of the "Envious Sisters," the girl, the youngest of the three children, plays the part of the usual hero of folk-tales of this class. There is, generally, a seemingly wretched old man—a hideous, misshapen dwarf—or an ugly, decrepit old woman—who is treated with rudeness by the two elder adventurers, so they do not speed in their enterprise; but the youngest addresses the person in respectful terms—shares his only loaf with ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... disproportion—whatever the interest may be—in a stone or a twig that has caught his ambiguous eye at the roadside, he carries it to his home to place it in its irregularly happy place. Dickens seems to have had a like joy in things misshapen or strangely shapen, uncommon or grotesque. He saddled even his heroes—those heroes are, perhaps, his worst work, young men at once conventional and improbable—with whimsically ugly names; while his invented names are whimsically perfect: that of Vholes for the predatory silent man in black, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... human, and her breast fair as a maiden's to the waist down; behind she is a sea-dragon of monstrous frame, with dolphins' tails joined on her wolf-girt belly. Better to track the goal of Trinacrian Pachynus, lingering and wheeling round through long spaces, than once catch sight of misshapen Scylla deep in her dreary cavern, and of the rocks that ring to her sea-coloured hounds. Moreover, if [433-466]Helenus hath aught of foresight or his prophecy of assurance, if Apollo fills his spirit with the truth, this ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... discontent and the waters of loneliness make fertile soil for the seeds of fear, even if those seeds be planted by the hand of a misshapen slave; but a little smile and a sigh of satisfaction had been the outcome of a prolonged scrutiny in a mirror, before which she had stood whilst quoting certain words ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... then tied to the tree, is now afloat, for the tide has risen, and the long stretches of yellow sandbanks which line the channel on the farther side are covered now with a foot of water. As we drift up the river, eating our lunch, and letting the boat take care of herself, a huge, misshapen thing comes round a low point, emitting horrid groanings and wheezings. It is a steam stern-wheel punt, loaded with mighty logs of black-butt and tallow wood, from fifty feet to seventy feet in length, cut far up the Hastings and the Maria and ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... mental faculty. The authors have found out the secret of being diffuse, even to wearisomeness, and at the same time so epigrammatically laconic, as to be often obscure and unintelligible. Their characters are neither ideal nor real beings, but misshapen gigantic puppets, who are set in motion at one time by the string of an unnatural heroism, and at another by that of a passion equally unnatural, which no guilt nor enormity ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... is put to no purpose, was wild At its work of destruction within him. The child Of an infidel age, he had been his own god, His own devil. He sat on the damp mountain sod, and stared sullenly up at the dark sky. The clouds Had heap'd themselves over the bare west in crowds Of misshapen, incongruous potents. A green Streak of dreary, cold, luminous ether, between The base of their black barricades, and the ridge Of the grim world, gleam'd ghastly, as under some bridge, Cyclop-sized, in a city of ruins o'erthrown By sieges forgotten, some river, unknown ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands and jerked her away from the bed. Old ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... has been the subject of many strange tales and apprehensions, being placed there when turned out of the house at Waddow, to allay the terrors of the domestics, who durst not continue under the same roof with this misshapen figure. It was then broken, either from accident or design, and the head, some time ago, we have understood, was in one of the attic chambers at ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... compare with him in prowess and in knowledge, and the master thinks that he is speaking the truth. That man does not know himself who takes another's word about qualities which he does not possess. For even if he is a wicked and insolent wretch, and as cowardly as a hare, mean, crazy, and misshapen, and a villain both in word and deed—yet some man will praise him to his face who behind his back will mock at him. But when in his hearing he speaks of him to some other, he praises him, while his lord pretends not to hear ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... tingled and itched intolerably; and he was alone upon the fairy hill, within the great mounds, within the ring of oaks, deep in the heart of the matted thicket. Slowly and timidly he began to untie his boots, fumbling with the laces, and glancing all the while on every side at the ugly misshapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not a branch was straight, not one was free, but all were interlaced and grew one about another; and just above ground, where the cankered stems joined the protuberant roots, there were forms that imitated the human shape, and faces and twining limbs that amazed him. ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... with his discarded fetish, and found her sitting upright, with her life-buoy on her knees. She smiled gladly as he approached, then pouted, as though remembering. Panting from his exertion, he humbly placed the faded, scarred, and misshapen ring on top of the brighter, better-cared-for possession of the girl, and stood, mutely pleading for pardon. It was granted. Smiling radiantly,—a little roguishly,—she arose and led him again to the cave, from which she brought forth another treasure. ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... they in silence awhile until they were come where the sedge grew thick and high above whispering ooze, and where trees, stunted and misshapen, lifted knotted arms ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance she considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's misshapen figure with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef Land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather |
