"Writhen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... brought to an eternal end. She saw at a glance that something fatal, irreparable, had happened. There was blood upon his hands and wrist-bands! Oh, more—far more! There was the unmistakable mark of Cain upon his writhen brow! Before now she had seen him look pale and wild and haggard, and had known neither fear nor pity for him. But now! An exhumed corpse galvanized into a horrid semblance of life might look as he did—with just such sunken cheeks and ashen ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... pure and white, hung in great hideous folds, and grey elf-locks draggled over their wrinkled brows. On they came; and their eyes were circled with red, their lips drawn in upon the toothless gums. On they came, carrying dead roses in their arms, which were black and writhen as the old vine stocks the peasants of Chianti burn for firewood in the winter nights. On they came, with shaking heads and palsied thighs, ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... for mercy from the incessant surge Her forces mixed of craft and passion urge For the one whelming wave to spring aloof. She, tenderness, is pitiless to them Resisting in her godhead nature's truth. No flower their face shall be, but writhen stem; Their youth a frost, their age the dirge for youth. These miserably disinclined, The lamentably unembraced, Insult the Pleasures Earth designed To people and beflower the waste. Wherefore the Pleasures pass ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... No bosomed woods adorn Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs, But gnarled and writhen thorn— Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim, And through the gaps revealed Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... you for a moment think," he said with a strange, writhen smile, "dat all dis talk and domfoolery will a gruel murder undo, and the young man cut off in his brime restore? Weel those lips, so gold in death, stir, think you, in the box where we laid him? Will my dead wife's family be ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... square was a desk lodged to set books on, &c. The garde robe in the castle was exceeding fair, and so were the gardens within the mote and the orchards without; and in the orchards were mounts opere topiario writhen about with degrees like turnings of a cockle-shell, to come to top ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... length and munched his bread and cheese in perfect happiness. Goneril kept shifting about to get herself into the narrow shadow cast by the split and writhen trunk. ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... furnishes gallic acid. The decoction is to be made with an ounce of the bruised root boiled in a pint of water; one tablespoonful of this may be given every two hours in passive bleedings, and for simple diarrhoea. Other names for the [608] plant are Osterick, and Twice writhen (bis tort), Red legs, and Man giant, from the French ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... young men an' when he went to spy for them, behold! they were dead with their teeth locked tight an' their faces an' bodies writhen an' twisted as the whirlwind twists the cottonwoods. Then the Raven thought an' thought; an' he got very cur'ous to know why his young men died so writhen an' twisted. The fire-water had a whirlwind in it, an' the Raven was eager to hear. So ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... burden and the passion of mankind:—that is what they contain in their cold chisel-tortured marble. It is open to critics of the school of Lessing to object that here is the suicide of sculpture. It is easy to remark that those strained postures and writhen limbs may have perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen. Yet if Michelangelo was called to carve Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of Florence—if he was obliged in sober sadness to make sculpture a fit language ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds |
