"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the mountain ridge whence the sun had dropped half an hour before. The view was uphill, and the sky-line of the hill was marked by two or three gibbet-like poles from which, on a now invisible line between them, depended certain objects—mere black silhouettes against the sky—which bore weird likeness to human figures. Absorbed as she was in her book, she nevertheless occasionally cast an impatient glance in that direction, as the sunlight faded more quickly than her fire. For the fluttering objects were the "week's wash" which had to be brought in before night ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... stranger than this world must seem To one who its vagaries first does scan; It is less weird than the enchanted dream Which life may change to ere you be a man. Such as it is, take it for this alone,— That it ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... death for witchcraft, without recognizing the well-marked features of the victims of cerebral disorder. In this way I have no doubt a considerable number of mad people were destroyed. Their very appearance suggested to their neighbours the notion of something weird and impish; the physiognomy of madness was mistaken for that of witchcraft, while the poor wretches themselves, conscious of unaccustomed sensations and singular promptings, referred them to the agency of demons. Strangely enough, even an inquisitor—Nider, who died in 1440—gives many instances ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... about to strike, when his eyes met Jeanne's. The young woman was smiling, happy to die for her lover. Her pale face beamed from out her black hair with weird beauty. Cayrol trembled. That look which he had loved, would he never see it again? That rosy mouth, whose smile he cherished, would it be hushed in death? A thousand thoughts of happy days came to his mind. His arm fell. A bitter ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... brush—a beard that got redder the longer it grew; he had a hooked nose, and his hair stood straight up (I never saw a man so easy-going about the expression and so scared about the head), and he was very tall, with long, thin, hairy legs. We must have looked a weird pair as we sat there, naked, on the low three-legged stools, with the billy and the tucker on the box between us, and ate our bread ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... passing silently along the streets, lighted by its weird red-and-black distinguishing lanterns, is a strange sight. Some of its members wear armour, with helmets and black-lacquered iron visors, and carry 'martoe,' or 'fire-charms,' and various necessary implements; others are clad in head-and-shoulder pieces and gauntlets of light chain-armour, ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... deal of this success was due to Poe's weird and wonderful stories; still more, perhaps, to his trenchant critiques and his startling theories anent cryptology. As regards the tales now issued in 'Graham's', attention may especially be drawn to ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... of candles only, leaving the greater part of it in gloom. Grim, fantastic shadows lurked in the corners, and lay across the bare floor. Even the tall figure of the priest, on his knees before a rude wooden crucifix, seemed weird and ghostly. The heavy, mildewed bed-hangings shook and trembled in the draughts which filled the room, and the candles flickered and burnt low in their sockets. Gomez watched them with a sort of anxious fascination. His master's life was burning out, minute for minute, with those candles. ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that Dante imagined them to be. Who can wander through the heaths and mountains of the Scotch Highlands, with their uncanny harmonies of silver mist and grey cloud and glint of water and bare rock and heather, and not see in the distance the Weird Sisters crooning over their horrible cauldron? In Germany the forests are magic-mad. Walking under the huge oaks of the Thuringian Forest or the Taunus, or in the pine woods of Hesse, one can see the flutter of airy garments in the chequered ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... lake's margin I mark'd her lie - The wide, weird lake where the alders sigh - A young fair thing, with a shy, soft eye; And I deem'd that her thoughts had flown To her home, and her brethren, and sisters dear, As she lay there watching the dark, deep mere, All ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... import a hundred London street boys, with their sense of ridicule and fearless tongue. At all times the world has possessed an army of geniuses whose greatness consists of faith and not of works—of faith in themselves which takes the outward form of weird clothing, long hair, and a literary or artistic pose. Paris streets were so full of such in 1870 that all thoughtful men could scarce fail to recognise a ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... there was no peace for that distracted, crouching figure, as long as the weird voice from that compact little mechanism was audible. He stood upon the framework and, reaching up, dislodged the harmless box. A last dying wail accompanied his act. Then the big winged fan revolved silently above ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... his stooping posture, took the verdict of the ring of faces and in a trice tugged open the two buckles. The central fastening was not locked, and yielded to a touch. The flannel shirt, the weird collar and a few other garments in the nature of a "top-dressing" were flung out and John's ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... after his permanent settlement, Mr. Puckey made a journey to the extreme north of the island and reached Cape Reinga. Standing on the black cliffs against which the sea was dashing with terrific force, listening to the scream of the sea-fowl and the weird noise produced by the waves in a hollow cave, the white man could easily understand how this dread place came to be regarded by the Maoris as the gateway into the unseen world. The masses of kelp which swung to and fro in the waves were believed to be the door through which ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... cried. The dog, a weird little figure leaning forward at a ridiculous angle against the tearing wind, obeyed instantly. "Now, you," he said to Elsie, "but wait until I pass you ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... that I spent in that house—more than weird—deadening. It had an extraordinary effect on me—an effect that my "sister," perhaps, had carefully calculated. She made pretensions of that sort later on; said that she had been breaking me in to perform my allotted task in the ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... hall—where they were clearing the willing professor out in favour of a "darnce"—and the other pubs decanted their contents, and chance souls skipped for the verandas of weather-board shanties out of which other souls popped to see the runaway. They saw a weird horseman, or rather, something like a camel (for Harry rode low, like Tod Sloan with his long back humped—for effect)—apparently fleeing for its life in a veil of dust, along the long white road, and some forty rods behind, an unaccountable tilted coach careered ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... spread a weird, unearthly light overhead, bluish-rose in colour, the cold blue night sank on the snow. In the valley below, behind, in the great bed of snow, were two small figures: Gudrun dropped on her knees, like one executed, and Loerke sitting propped up ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Amazon of never-dying fame, Virgin untouched by men and by men feared, Nor Venus in her eyes nor young Desire But Mars and Terror and the bloody Weird— France owes the Salic Law to her alone, And hers is the true king on the true throne. Let none lament her death who was all fire And never, or by fire ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... like men in doubt, nor as if they suspected they were followed, although in fact they were. Three Sikhs emerged from the corner by the Gate and strolled along behind them. Detailed preparations for the round-up had begun. The unostentatious mechanism of it seemed more weird and terrible than ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... of the women were engaged in milking the sheep and goats in an inclosure. Others were busy making butter in a churn which was nothing more than a skin vessel three feet long, of the shape of a Brazil-nut, suspended from a rude tripod; this they swung to and fro to the tune of a weird Kurdish song. Behind one of the tents, on a primitive weaving-machine, some of them were making tent-roofing and matting. Others still were walking about with a ball of wool in one hand and a distaff in the other, spinning yarn. The flocks stood ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... period never died. They grew up, instead, and proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunting are now the high-lights of vacation time. The crude call of the weird and the inexplicable has modulated into a siren note from the forgotten psychic continents which we Western peoples have only just discovered and begun to explore. As for the buried treasure craze—why, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... occurred to me that if old "Bless my soul—you don't say so" were to put his head up the companion and catch sight of us, he would think he was seeing double, or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft; the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own grey ghost. I became very much concerned to prevent anything of the sort. I heard the other's ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... a pair of "slaughter pen" boots and "jeans," and flung himself at his task. It was a weird sight, there on the killing beds—a throng of stupid black Negroes, and foreigners who could not understand a word that was said to them, mixed with pale-faced, hollow-chested bookkeepers and clerks, half-fainting for the tropical heat and the sickening ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... impressions of melancholy and mystery, he was endowed with an imagination abnormally active even for a child. It is customary to give prominence to De Quincey's pernicious habit of opium-eating, in attempting to explain the grotesque fancies and weird flights of his marvellous mind in later years; yet it is only fair to emphasize the fact that the later achievements of that strange creative faculty were clearly foreshadowed in youth. For example, the earliest ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... quarrelsome, and the greedy to enlist in the schemes for Cuba's liberation. Nanigo meetings were held in and near her house; there were wild dances and uncanny ceremonies, sacrificing of animals in the moonlight, baptisms of blood, weird chants and responses, and crime increased in the town. All this being reported to the military the guard lines were extended and a squadron was posted at a house not over a mile from Maumee Nina's, with Lieutenant Fernandez in command. Fernandez was a dashing fellow, with ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... was softly brushing the Foot-Board and the Motor was purring consistently beneath, Mr. Pallzey looked over into a close-cropped Pasture and became the alert Eye-Witness of some very weird Doings. ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... blazing their way to the palace steps. Weird figures sprang up from the muck, and ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... at that moment there was a weird flash of lightning, followed by an ear-splitting crash of thunder. Then came ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... fell to speculating upon the identity and appearance of this man who bore this weird name of Scobbs. She pictured him an elderly man with chin whiskers who wore his pants thrust into top-boots. And why was Red Horse Valley so called? These unexpected and, to her, hitherto unknown names of places and people set in train most interesting processions of thought that slid through ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... paused at the place under the stairs where the imperial Shirley had her fierce encounter with that almost human dog, Keeper; she stood in the drawing-room where the sainted three sisters, arm-in-arm, paced up and down plotting their weird stories. She walked through the same old gate, on the same single stone pavement and over the same stile out into the same heather fields, gazing on the same dreary sky above and the same desolate earth on every ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... declared. "Bless you, I know what nerves are! Out in India, thirty-five years ago, I've had to relieve men on frontier posts who hadn't seen a soul to speak to for six months! Weird places some of them, too—gives me the creeps to think of them sometimes! Now light up that cigar," he added, throwing one across, ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... murmurously through the September silence. His restless eyes flashed hither and thither over the quiet scene, taking in every detail, lingering nowhere. The pine trees stirred in the distance below him, seeming to whisper together, and an owl hooted with a weird persistence down by the lake. It was like the calling of a human voice—almost like a cry of distress. Then it ceased, and the ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... the Pastor. "But in Norway you will have found an even richer store. The grandness of nature there has influenced the imaginations of the people. Their legends, traditions, and stories are more romantic and weird. Their traditions of the Huldr are exquisitely fantastic and picturesque to a degree. Their Folke-Eventyr is rich in colour. There is a depth of thought and of the knowledge of human nature as it is that fills ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... leaving the wheel to Sam, he went below himself and had his own, talking freely, to the discomfort of the conscious-stricken cook, about his weird experiences ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... Americans, 9,000 men in blue and buff. In the centre came 6,000 British regulars in scarlet and gold, among them a thousand kilted Highlanders of the splendid 'Black Watch,' led by their major, Duncan Campbell of Inverawe, whose weird had told him a year before that he should fight and fall at a place with what was then to him an unknown name—Ticonderoga. The larger boats were in the rear, lashed together, two by two, with platforms ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood
... personality was clear-cut and outstanding. Men and women who met him for the first time felt that in conversation he held them by some curious, indescribable influence—held them as long as he cared, until by his will they were released from a strange thraldom that was both weird and astounding. ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... dark and sinister, and all the more so when the moon rose high and lightened its face and left them looking into weird, abysmal blackness between moonlit branches. Bell thought busily, trying not to become too conscious of the small ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... snow, who won and wedded a maiden, But, when the morning came, arose and passed from the wigwam, Fading and melting away and dissolving into the sunshine, Till she beheld him no more, though she followed far into the forest. Then, in those sweet, low tones, that seemed like a weird incantation, Told she the tale of the fair Lilinau, who was wooed by a phantom, That, through the pines o'er her father's lodge, in the hush of the twilight, Breathed like the evening wind, and whispered love to the maiden, Till she followed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... As a matter of fact the necessity of having to pay, to actually give money to people, infuriated the pious Therese. But the matter of this morning's speech was so extraordinary that it might have been the prolongation of a nightmare: a man in bonds having to listen to weird and unaccountable speeches against which, he doesn't know why, his ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... right is the silvery Animas River, which frets in its narrowing bed, and breaks into foam against the opposing boulders, beyond which rise the hills; to the left are mountains, increasing in rugged contour as the advance is made, and in the shadow of the rocks all is solitary, weird and awful; the startled traveler loses all apprehension in the wondrous beauty ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... It was as if he had just emerged from a nightmare. He was not sure whether four days or a week had passed. He had slept with the dogs, fought across a forgotten number of shallow divides, followed the windings of weird canyons that ended in pockets, and twice had managed to make a fire and thaw out frozen moose-meat. And here he was, well-fed and well-camped. The storm had passed, and it had turned clear and cold. The lay of the land ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... Halliwell-Phillipps, Knight, Sir Sidney Lee, Messrs. Gosse and Garnett, and Mr. J. C. Collins say that he is Will Shakspere. But Mr. Fleay and Mr. Castle, whose "mind" is "legal," have pointed out that this weird being cannot be Shake-scene (or Shakspere, if Greene meant Shakspere), attacked by Greene. For Chettle says that in the Groatsworth of Wit "a letter, written to divers play-makers, is offensively by one or two of them taken." The mysterious ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... a new working schedule that precluded labor in the middle of the day was inaugurated. The more intense the heat grew, the more intense, it seemed to Roger, grew the weird beauty of the desert. The midnight stars seemed hardly to have blossomed before dawn turned the desert world to a delicate transparent yellow, deepening at the zenith to blue and on the desert floor to orange. As the sun rose, the yellow changed suddenly to scarlet and for a few moments ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... message which bids them, with iron-girded breasts, and hooves which barely touch the earth as they gallop, fly forward on a mission of God? Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me! But no answer comes—only the weird sound of your collar-bells. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... look into that mystery ahead, toward which this universe and we within it are so prodigiously plunging on. Do we not often feel, upon this earth whirling through space, like men and women who by some weird chance have found themselves upon a ship, ignorant of their point of departure and of their destination? For all the busyness with which we engage in many tasks, we cannot keep ourselves from slipping ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... do we notice in dreams a particular CRESCENDO, a weird effect that grows more pronounced as we proceed. The first concession extorted from reason introduces a second; and this one, another of a more serious nature; and so on till the crowning absurdity is reached. Now, this ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... gone down—it was a cold night, and the wind howled dismally outside. The lamps grew dim and flared, casting weird shadows upon the wall. By and by I heard a smothered sob from the corner, then another. I looked in that direction. She had risen from her seat, and oh! the look of agony on the ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... of the same name at home. Among the most common were the box, wattle, and cherry; but undoubtedly the most prominent everywhere in the landscape were the old gum trees, and the huge iron stringy-bark trees, which, now with shattered and weird appearance, had braved the fierce storms of winter and the hot blasts of summer for centuries. Many strange birds flew by overhead, and still stranger wild animals started up from beneath some sheltering bush, and ran off along the fresh glades, all reminding the new-comers how ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... was building a car which would practically annihilate distance and time, and there were many weird pictures, showing him flying along without touching the ground, in a car, the pictorial construction of which was at once ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout - or, The Speediest Car on the Road • Victor Appleton
... of this great wealth was evidently an anxiety and a burden, but in her heart she believed that the greatest of his anxieties was caused by his doubt in regard to the construction she might now place upon that vague, weird ceremony on the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... go to Bond Street now," she said when we left, "I think it will be quite all right at this time in the afternoon, and there are some weird things to be seen there. Do ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... human nerves are human nerves. The irritability lurks in the shades of boundless forests where men may starve for want of animal sustenance; it hovers over the broad bosoms of a hundred slow rivers haunted by the mysterious crocodile, the weird hippopotamus. It is everywhere, and by reason of it men quarrel about trifles and descend to brutal passion over ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... I said, for his intention beneath the weird jargon was somehow benevolent. "And if you'll be good enough to wait until I have taken tea to ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... the river, And the river with the ocean; The lights of Boston mix forever With a jagged motion; Not a lamp-post near looks single; All things, when in town I dine, With weird, uncanny phantoms mingle, ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... term the crater-ring 'la caldera de los diablos en que se cuecen todas las provisiones del Infierno' (the Devil's caldron, wherein are cooked all the rations of the infernals). Seen by moonlight, or on a star-lit night, the scenery would be weird and ghostly enough to suggest such fancies, which remind us of ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... "There's something weird about you, Rex," he said. "You'll be a great success as a novelist; you know human nature. Yes—it's strange!—I'm longing to tell someone of the great happiness that has ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... with the Pope, Fra Diavolo; the telegraph, and two knights asking her to dance, is Dolly, if that's what you want to know. Go in and keep it up, Bopp, while you can; I am off for Fan;" and Mephistopheles departed over the banisters with a weird agility that delighted the beholders; while the gray friar stole into a corner and watched the pink domino for half an hour, at the end of which time his regards were somewhat confused by discovering that there were two pink damsels so like that ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... and gold lace, I maintained my innocence and heard Jack Herriott, on his opportune arrival, pour forth in weird, but fluent, Italian an account of me that must have surrounded me in the eyes of all present with a golden halo, and that firmly established me in their minds as the probable next President of the United States. Thanks to these exaggerations and to various confirmatory ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... too imaginative, and the earliest impressions I received were of a kind to stimulate the imagination abnormally. A long series of little misfortunes, connected with each other as to suggest a sort of weird fatality, so worked upon my melancholy temperament when I was a boy that, before I was of age, I sincerely believed myself to be under a curse, and not only myself, but my whole family, and every ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... laughing when he appeared, for disdaining the immaculate costume I had carefully laid out, he had put on a most disreputable-looking pair of trousers, and an old paint-stained Norfolk jacket. A faded flannel shirt and a silk bandanna tied about his throat completed this weird accoutrement, which was topped by a long-vizored cap and a dilapidated canvas gunny sack, the latter but half full and slung lightly over one shoulder. Anticipating my question, he explained that it was useless to throw away a perfectly new suit of clothes. When he should ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... serpent lifted up by Moses, signifies Christ, is taught by John iii. If it were not for that passage, my reasoning might evolve many strange and weird fancies out of that type. That Adam was a type of Christ, I learn not from myself, but from St. Paul. That the rock in the wilderness represents Christ is not taught by my reason, but by St. Paul. None other ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Marshall Pass The River of Lost Souls Riders of the Desert The Division of Two Tribes Besieged by Starvation A Yellowstone Tragedy The Broad House The Death Waltz The Flood at Santa Fe Goddess of Salt The Coming of the Navajos The Ark on Superstition Mountains The Pale Faced Lightning The Weird Sentinel at Squaw Peak Sacrifice of the Toltecs Ta-Vwots Conquers the Sun The Comanche Rider Horned Toad and Giants The Spider Tower The Lost Trail A Battle in ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... lady seated herself on a low chair close to Sydney's side. It was extremely weird, this confidential talk in ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... watched, and the woman danced. The lanthorn overhead threw a weird light on red caps and tricolour cockades, on the sullen faces of the men and the shoulders of the women, on the dancer's weird antics and her flying, tattered skirts. She was obviously tired, as a poor, performing cur might be, or a bear prodded along to uncongenial buffoonery. Every time that ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... dominoes, blue, red or black, many grotesque and bizarre costumes, and not a few sober claw hammers. The great flare of yellow light which bathed and flooded the shifting, many-colored throng, also lent a strangely weird effect to the now heavily falling snowflakes. Carriages and cabs kept arriving in countless numbers. It was half past two, and nobody who wanted to be considered anybody thought of arriving before that ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... the low hills across the water came the dull resonance of distant guns and a remote weird crying. Then everything was still. A cockchafer came droning over the hedge and past us. High in the west the crescent moon hung faint and pale above the smoke of Weybridge and Shepperton and the hot, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... above the feasters in the torchlight dim and weird, From his eyes hot tears were streaming, sparkling in his tawny beard; Shining in his sea-blue mantle stood he, 'mid that wondering throng, And each maiden thought him fairest, and each warrior ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... gotten a hold on Dorn's lower field. Here the wheat was blasted and so burned all the more fiercely. Horses and mowers had to be taken away to the intervening barley-field. A weird, smoky, and ruddy darkness enveloped the scene. Dim red fire, in lines and dots and curves, appeared on three sides, growing larger and longer, meeting in some places, crisscrossed by black figures of threshing men belaboring ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the general confusion by howling at random and asking irrelevant questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man a little on in years arrayed in a long night-shirt, pawing fiercely at the unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an unnatural, weird, wicked-looking jig by the dim, religious light of the night-lamp. And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib had put in the bottle for good measure ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... I went straight to the "George and Dragon," where a friend had assured me I could always find good accommodations. But he was wrong: there was no room for me, I was told by a weird-looking, lean, white-haired old woman with whity-blue unfriendly eyes. She appeared to resent it that any one should ask for accommodation at such a time, when the "shooting gents" from town required all the rooms available. Well, I had to sleep somewhere, I told her: couldn't she direct me to ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... the flutes whistle fine and clear, and the violins, with their tremulous, eager sweetness, seem dripping amber; viols and horns reply, shaking out quivering breaths to the summer night air, until it seems some weird, far-away world. Violet is so entranced that she almost forgets she is Floyd Grandon's wife, being made known ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... much more picturesque than any we had yet seen since leaving Bagamoyo. The ground rose into grander waves—hills cropped out here and there—great castles of syenite appeared, giving a strange and weird appearance to the forest. From a distance it would almost seem as if we were approaching a bit of England as it must have appeared during feudalism; the rocks assumed such strange fantastic shapes. Now they were round boulders ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... wrong. But as the lank hours of that vast schooltime drawled on, Mr. Sandsome lost energy, drooped like a flower,—especially if the day was at all hot,—his sandy hair became dishevelled, justice became nerveless, hectic, and hasty. Finally came copybooks; and yawns and weird rumblings from Mr. Sandsome. And so the world aged to ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... all the strings; And then a flash of music, swift and bright, Like a first throb of weird Auroral light, Then crimson coruscations from the wings Of the Pole-spirit; then ecstatic beat, As if an angel-host went forth on ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... clerk broke abruptly upon this daydream. He had a telegram in his hand, and Thorpe, rousing himself with an effort, took the liver-coloured envelope, and looked blankly at it. Some weird apprehension seized upon him, as if he belonged to the peasant class which instinctively yokes telegrams and calamities together. He deferred to this feeling enough to nod dismissal to the clerk, and then, when he was again alone, slowly opened the ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... not mean temptation, by any means. But careful inquiry has shown me that temptation assails working-women in any walk of life, and that the profession of acting has nothing weird or novel to offer in the line of danger; to be quite frank, all the possibilities of resisting or yielding lie with the young woman herself. What will tempt one beyond her powers of resistance, will be no temptation at all ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... free, the Church was devoted to closing, and holding fast shut every avenue of the human mind that might have a tendency to teach the people anything outside of their tenets which were the outcome of their weird imaginations. If anything could cause a doubt to arise in the Creative Mind as to the wisdom of letting loose on this small planet the pestiferous peoples that have swarmed over and possessed it, it must have been aroused by their demoniacal performances in the name of religion, that have disgraced ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... time in days I was thoroughly toasted on all sides at once. We had changed abruptly from the steam-heated Pullman to camping in snow, and it takes a few days to get used to such a shock. We told tales as weird as the scene, until far into the night. The next morning the sun was bright, but the cook had to cut a hole in the ice blanket over the brook to get water. We dared not linger at our robber camp, for at any time a big snowstorm might come that would ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... forth in the tops of the storm-beaten trees. Cold little waves lapped against the thin fringe of shore ice that crept day by day from the banks. The water itself turned black. Strange birds swirling down wind like leaves uttered weird notes of migration. The ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... accomplished in the brotherhood which is in the world.' He did not mean to say, 'Take comfort, for other people are as badly off as you are,' but he meant to call to the remembrance of the solitary sufferer the thousands of his brethren who were 'dreeing the same weird' in the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... see the nita huts of the Visayans, big handsome fellows they are and pretty refined wimmen, and hear their weird melodies as they are at work making their beautiful bamboo furniture, and weaving their handsome ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... as she has at every wedding for twenty years. Following her come three musicians; Pedro, in the center, his gray, thin hair straggling over the collar of his well-brushed long black coat, with young Vicente and Arturo, the bridegroom's brothers, one on either side, accompanying Pedro's weird, thin-blooded strain with thrumming mandolins. Next come, by two and two, six little girls, pretty as angels, with little wild sunflowers in their glossy tresses, and carrying, with conscious pride, large bunches of red roses. And here are the bride and bridegroom, Ysabel Alvarado, ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... whatever to do, he does it to the highest artistic perfection. At least one justification remains. Civilization has not done away with the moon. In the stillness of night, its great white face peeps over the hills at intervals no dog has yet determined. Under this weird light, strange shadowy forms trip across the fields. The watchdogs of each farm have given warning, and the whole countryside is ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... went in a steamboat up the St. John's River to Enterprise. Florida was the part of the United States to be first touched by the feet of white men, and yet it seemed to me to be the most backward in the march of progress. It was interesting chiefly from its weird and valueless swamps, its sandy reaches and its alligators. It is a peninsula, dividing the Gulf of Mexico from the ocean, and a large part of it is almost unexplored. The part we traversed was low, swampy, with dense thickets, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... dead crabs in his pockets said, after it was all over: "Well, they were alive when I put them in. You are wasting a lot of my precious time." These little brains have a way of working out combinations that seem weird ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... closely with their innumerable folds. Our curiosity was becoming feverish, and the mummy was being turned somewhat quickly. A Hoffmann or an Edgar Poe could have found here a subject for one of his weird tales. It so happened that a sudden storm was lashing the windows with heavy drops of rain that rattled like hail; pale lightnings illumined on the shelves of the cupboards the old yellowed skulls and the grimacing death's-heads ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... steel and smoke And Sleep Thousand-souled A quiver, A deadened thunder, A vague and countless creep Through the hold, The weird and dusky chariot lunges on Through Fate. From the lookout watch of my soul's eyes Above the houses of the deep Their shadowy haunches fall and rise —O'er the glimmer-gabled roofs The flying of their hoofs, ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... its fury. The upper air was black with staves, sticks, and umbrellas, mingled with the pallid hailstones of knobby fists. Yells and groans and hoots and battle-cries blent in grotesque chorus, like one of Dvorak's weird diabolical movements. Mortlake stood impassive, with arms folded, making no further effort, and the battle raged round him as the water swirls around some steadfast rock. A posse of police from the back fought their way steadily ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... but one occupant, for neither Jock nor his companion could talk German, and the idiocy of not carrying a more serviceable weapon than a pocket dictionary never occurred to the mad Scot until his companion began to make weird gurgling sounds, evidently intended for the language of the Hun, ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... too, a desire to know just how many of those weird stories he told were filched from Cap'n Abe's accumulation of nautical literature. When Cap'n Amazon had gained access to the chest of books Louise could not imagine; but the fact remained that he had at least two ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... direct rays of the sun, when he rode his lathered horse out of a cottonwood grove to gaze, from the edge of a deep draw, at Wade's ranch buildings. That very morning a gaunt, gray timber-wolf had peered forth at almost the same point; and despite Moran's bulk, there was a hint of a weird likeness between man and beast in the furtive suspicious survey they made of the premises. The wolf had finally turned back toward the mountains, but Moran advanced. Although he was reasonably certain that the place was deserted, a degree of caution, acquired overnight, ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird combination of stillness and havoc, the Verdun conflict viewed ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... but not for long. Soon a gradual lightening became visible in the east, and suddenly a flash of light glanced along the surface of the sea, as the moon slowly rose to give a weird aspect to the long row of dusky warriors sluggishly urging ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... Arthur Skelmerton," he said, and in a flash there flitted before Polly's mind the weird and tragic history which had broken this loving woman's heart. Lady Arthur Skelmerton! That name recalled one of the most bewildering, most mysterious passages in the ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... who laughed until their sides ached over the weird and wonderful adventures of Jerry Todd and his gang demanded that Leo Edwards, the author, give them more books like the Jerry Todd stories with their belt-bursting laughs and creepy shivers. So he took Poppy Ott, Jerry Todd's bosom chum and created ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... stretched in an easy-chair, which was covered with pillows and almost hidden under various woolen draperies. He was dressed in a long coat of coarse, pale-blue cloth. He was bareheaded, and his long, white hair formed a weird frame for a face of bloodless hue and meagre proportions, from which two vacant eyes stared fixedly. He sat immovable and his arms hung limply ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... chestnut harvesters. The blue smoke hung among the pines, and the air was filled with the odor of burning leaves. They passed a camp—a white-covered wagon, filled with bags of chestnuts, two mules tethered to saplings, and three or four forms in dusky blankets lying round a log fire. As the weird procession passed, the mules drew back on their halters and threw their ears forward, but the bodies at ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... listening to the seals just at nightfall, and did their weird, low call stir you to a feeling of kinship with all the creatures of the great deep, and did you lose yourself there out under the cold, dark water in that mysterious untamed world of the sea that is older ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... and gave one the idea of a lovely bit of world and sky turned upside down; it produced, moreover, a sort of fascination, as if one must dive down into its luring depths. No human sight or sound disturbed the weird beauty of this lonely spot. I longed at last to break the oppressive silence, and I fired off my revolver. This brought down a perfect volley of echoes, and at the same time, from the highest crags, out flew some half-dozen ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... advancing at a trot, the Mungana running after them like a dog, they had entered the bush pierced with a few wandering paths. Along these paths they sped for hour after hour, Jeekie leading them without a moment's hesitation. They met no man and heard nothing, except occasional weird sounds which Alan put down to wild beasts, but Jeekie and the Mungana said were produced by ghosts. Indeed it appeared that all this jungle was supposed to be haunted, and no Asiki would enter it at night, or unless he were very ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... T. D. McGee's "Penance of Don Diego Rias" and Calderon's "St. Patrick's Purgatory"—the two last named bearing on the same subject. Nevertheless, they all come within the scope of my present work and are, therefore, presented to the reader as weird fragments of ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... reply. Only from far away there came again the weird yell of a jackal. For a few seconds more Nick lay frowning. Then swiftly and quietly he arose, and stepped ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... midnight and one o'clock in the morning, and the scene was absurd beyond belief, though not without a touch of weird interest, imparted by the darkness of the night and the superstitious faith of the people. The lame, the old, and young were waiting for an immersion in Lochmanur or Lochmonaire. About fifty persons were present near one spot, and other parts of the loch were similarly ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... kitchen, where we would be alone, with a great, cracklin' fire in the stove to sit by. I gave her food and comforted her, an' tended the baby, while she told me about hersilf, with an occasional spell o' cryin' an' a wild, weird expression on her face that gave me bad dreams ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... brief digression, which we consider needed advice, we will resume our task, and attempt to usher our student into the weird labyrinth of Solomon's starry temple—"the house not made with hands, eternal ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... if the inspiration is not Taoist in the main rather than Buddhist. Side by side with ethics and ceremony, a native stream of bold and weird imagination has never ceased to flow in China and there was no need to import tales of the Genii, immortal saints and vampire beauties. But when any coherency unites these ideas of the supernatural, that I think is the work of Buddhism and so far as Taoism itself ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... Ligeia, which he regarded as his best tale The Descent into the Maelstrom, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Mystery of Marie Roget. The general character of his tales may be inferred from their titles. Poe delighted in the weird, fantastic, dismal, horrible. There is no warmth of human sympathy, no moral consciousness, no lessons of practical wisdom. His tales are the product of a morbid but powerful imagination. His style is in perfect keeping with his peculiar gifts. ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... Which far off my science witnessed, All these fatal auguries Seen though dimly in the distance, I resolved to chain the monster That unhappily life was given to, To find out if yet the stars Owned the wise man's weird dominion. It was publicly proclaimed That the sad ill-omened infant Was stillborn. I then a tower Caused by forethought to be builded 'Mid the rocks of these wild mountains Where the sunlight scarce can gild it, Its glad entrance ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted karoo bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and an almost oppressive beauty as they lay in ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... steel Where the fragile lights on the Jersey shore Tremble like drops of wind-stirred dew. The strident noises of the city Floating up to us Are hallowed into whispers. Ferries cross thru the darkness Weaving a golden thread into the night, Their whistles weird ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... and black, of the true Badawin, mere dots in the boundless waste of lion tawny clays and gazelle brown gravels, and the camp fire dotting like a glow worm the village centre. Presently, sweetened by distance, would be heard the wild weird song of lads and lasses, driving or rather pelting, through the gloaming their sheep and goats; and the measured chant of the spearsmen gravely stalking behind their charge, the camels; mingled with bleating of the flocks and the bellowing of the humpy herds; while the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... another, and yet another—long shafts of yellow light travelling through the murk; then you begin to perceive that the air is heavy with the smoke of extinguished camp-fires and suspended particles of dust; the ground, heaving, gives birth to dusky shapes; there are weird groans and gurglings of silhouetted apparitions; and still you cannot clearly distinguish earth from air—it is as if one watched the creation of a new ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... that would command a view of the open ground where the corroboree was being held. Of course Dot thought this would be great fun, so the Kangaroo took her to the rock, where they peeped through the trees and saw before them the weird ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... hairy tillandsia, like an old man's beard, three or four feet long, hung down from the topmost branches. The ground was carpeted with moss, interspersed with a few early spring flowers, and the whole scene, though utterly unlike that presented by any English forest, had a strange weird beauty of its own. Not a sound could be heard; not a bird, beast, or insect was to be seen. The larger trees were principally a peculiar sort of beech and red cedar, but all kinds of evergreens, known to us at home as shrubs, such as ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... tales to me; Seal not up thy lips forever—veiled in mist and mystery. I will sit and lowly listen at the phantom-haunted falls Where thy waters foam and glisten o'er the rugged, rocky walls, Till some spirit of the olden, mystic, weird, romantic days Shall emerge and pour her golden tales and legends ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... months Jefferson Hope lingered among the mountains, leading a strange wild life, and nursing in his heart the fierce desire for vengeance which possessed him. Tales were told in the City of the weird figure which was seen prowling about the suburbs, and which haunted the lonely mountain gorges. Once a bullet whistled through Stangerson's window and flattened itself upon the wall within a foot of him. On another occasion, ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as she thought. She knew there was some weird old legend associated with it, some old Indian folklore. But that left no impression of awe ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... off, spectators of a puppet show. To such I suppose the book may seem empty in the centre; to the others it is a room, a house of life, into which they themselves enter, and are purified. The Juge d'Instruction I thought a wonderful, weird, touching, ingenious creation; the drunken father, and Sonia, and the student friend, and the uncircumscribed, protoplasmic humanity of Raskolnikov, all upon a level that filled me with wonder; the execution, also, superb ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... side, now on that. His task was not an easy one, but he finished it with wonderful expedition. After the chopping was finished, the tree stood firm a moment; then, as the tensely-strained fibres began a weird moaning, he sprang aside, and stood waiting. In the distance he saw two men hewing a log. The axe-man sent them a shout and threw up his arms for them to look. The tree stood out clear and beautiful against the gray sky; the men ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... sinister, dropping spine that came down from the uplands outside where the real great world began, and lured those who traveled down it to crumbling precipice and yawning pit, to sliding slope and slant that, once ridden down, could never be scaled again, according to the weird stories ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... wore a long cloak made out of all sorts of bits, a weird Joseph's coat of many colours. His tall staff was hanging with tattered rags and his poor turban was in the last stages of decay." Millicent's voice betokened genuine pity. "He looked terribly thin and tired. I ought to have given him some food—he ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... ubiquitous, circumventing, with just a tinge of something inhuman and uncanny. His fiery red eyes gleaming forth from that jet-black head are full of meaning. Then his strange horse laughter by day and his weird, doleful cry at night, like that of a lost and wandering spirit, recall no other bird or beast. He suggests something almost supernatural in his alertness and amazing quickness, cheating the shot and the bullet of the sportsman ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... dreamier grew the maiden's watching eyes, As through and through her trembling soul and frame, The thrill of nature's beauty softly came; And while her eyes with love and rapture filled, Of all that weird and strangely splendid scene, All other thoughts within her soul were stilled, While o'er her head fair spirits ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... at the spirit of recklessness stealing over her, for there was, after all, a certain appealing glamour in the adventure. She was thrilled by the swift, gliding motion of the automobile, the weird and unfamiliar character of these upper reaches of a great city in the twilight, where new houses stood alone or m rows on wide levelled tracts; and old houses, once in the country, were seen high above the roadway behind crumbling fences, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... reader, resolute to believe no item of this weird adventure, what need to tell how the mutton was placed on the spit, and slowly unroasted—how the potatoes were wrapped in their skins, and handed over to the gardener to be buried—how, when the mutton had at length attained to rawness, the fire, which had gradually ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... alone before the open fireplace. It's a dangerous place to be! The glowing fire sends such weird shadows flickering up and down. Its living fire is sometimes an entreating Circe waking undesirable impulses, then again it's a spirit that heals and inspires. I love an open fire but to-day I should have fled from it and yet—I think I'm glad ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... "Go not without my thanks, though I must reject thy counsel. To-morrow I am admitted into the Brotherhood of Righteousness." In the fading light his face shone weird and unearthly amid the raven hair. "But why didst thou risk thy good name to tell me ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... sometimes only plaintive, but at other times as melancholy as the voice of a lost soul. When healthiest, as in his Harem picture in the Luxembourg Gallery, it is still in the minor key of that lovely Eastern color-work, such as we see in the Persian carpets, and to me always something weird and mysterious and touching, like the tones of an Aeolian harp, or the greetings of certain sad-voiced children touched by the shadow of death before their babyhood is gone. No color has ever affected me like that of Delacroix,—his Dante ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... disintegration of sycamore, and the steady and thorough combustion of soft apple wood soon become familiar characteristics to those who have the opportunity to lay the fire in variety. Then there is, of course, the fascination and the weird coloring in a driftwood fire—most spectacular of all but unfortunately ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor
... the river, and as he gazed his apprehension increased. But, as night closed in, a soft murmur floated down to the cramped, toil-worn travelers, and the old man, with a glad light in his eyes, announced that they were approaching the quebrada of Caracoli. A half hour later, by the weird, flickering light of the candles which Reed and Harris held out on either side, Rosendo turned the canoe into a brawling stream, and ran its nose into the deep alluvial soil. Plunging fearlessly through the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... a certain sunset hour when she came at Pierre's call out to the shed he had built at one side of their cabin. Its open side faced the west, and, as Joan came, her shadow went before her and fell across Pierre at work. The flame of the west gave a weird pallor to the flames over which he bent. He was whistling, and hammering at a long piece of iron. Joan came and ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... these crowding Peaks, region of mystery, Fed thy young spirit with broodings sublime; Each cairn and green knoll lingered round by some history, Of the weird under-world, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1875 • Various
... winter! the brightness that blinds you, The white land locked tight as a drum, The cold fear that follows and finds you, The silence that bludgeons you dumb. The snows that are older than history, The woods where the weird shadows slant; The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery, I've bade 'em ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... by an icy rain mixed with snow driven against the glass, and occasionally the howl of the wind, which penetrated the chimney and scattered the ashes. A single candle placed behind the curtains lighted this dismal scene, and the irregular flicker of its flame cast weird reflections and dancing shadows an the walls of the alcove. There came a lull in the wind, the rain ceased, and during this instant of calm someone knocked, at first gently, and then sharply, at the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... soul was stirred to its depths by the intensity of passion which rang through this delicate creature's words. What weird and awesome mystery of iniquity and of crime lay hid, I wondered, between these walls? In what tragedy had I thus accidentally become involved while fulfilling my prosaic duty in the interest of His Majesty's exchequer? As in ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy |
