"Grotesquely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shadow of the bridge was just above him. He turned on his back for a second. There were lights on the bridge. A current swept him past one barge and then another. Certainty possessed him that he was going to be drowned. A voice seemed to sob in his ears grotesquely: "And so John Andrews was drowned in the Seine, drowned in the ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... in hand, watching through the windows, while the frenzied blacks drew cautiously nearer, spreading a cordon of hundreds all around the Sky-Bird, they could see in the moonlight that the Fulbees were grotesquely painted on arms and faces, while their bodies were entirely naked except for a dirty-looking cloth wrapped around their loins in the form of a short skirt. Every one of them was armed, and as they contracted ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... without stopping in his fiddling, scraped his bow harshly across the strings, and then instantly changed the tune to a lively jig. Blackbeard jumped up into the air and clapped his heels together, giving, as he did so, a sharp, short yell. Then he began instantly dancing grotesquely and violently. The woman danced opposite to him, this way and that, with her knuckles on her hips. Everybody burst out laughing at Blackbeard's grotesque antics. They laughed again and again, clapping their hands, and the negro scraped away on his fiddle like fury. The ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... men, even hands and faces are green; they wear greenstone sandals, they walk with knees extremely wide apart, as having sat cross-legged for centuries, their right arms and right forefingers point upwards, right elbows resting on left hands: they stoop grotesquely: halfway to the footlights they wheel left. They pass in front of the seven beggars, now in terrified attitudes and six of them sit down in the attitude described, with their backs to the audience. The leader stands, still ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... definite reason for pretending to be Leek—that it was an impulse of the moment—was received with mute derision. His explanation, when questioned as to the evidence of the hotel officials, that more than once his valet Leek had gone about impersonating his master, seemed grotesquely inadequate. ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... reach out and join hands with another man on the other side of the old man and together we held him in. He hung heavily over our arms, grotesquely grasping all he had saved from his stateroom—a gold-headed cane ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... house out of Japan seems but a dull and listless affair. We miss the idle, easy-going life and chatter, the tea, the sweetmeats, the pipes and charcoal brazier, the clogs awaiting their wearers on the large flat stone at the entry, the grotesquely trained ferns, the glass balls and ornaments tinkling in the breeze, that hang, as well as lanterns, from the eaves, the garden with tiny pond and goldfish, bridge and miniature hill, the bright sunshine beyond the sharp shadow of the upward curving angles of the tiled roof, the gay, scarlet folds ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... ponies and mounted on these they undertook to conduct the settlers to their destination. The caravan was grotesquely comical as it departed southward. The Indians upon their "Shaganappi ponies," as they are called, like mounted guards protecting the men, women and children of the Colony who trudged wearily on foot. The Indians were kind to their ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... was giving way to a faint purple. Up from the mystic spaces of the east rays of deep purple, of burnt umber, vermilion, scarlet and flame were leaping into the sky. Black dots began to appear on the horizon, keys and trees silhouetted against the rising light. A huge heron flapped grotesquely up from the top of a mangrove bush as the sun struck it; a flamingo flapped by, matching its dainty pink with the sun's best tints; a dolphin's fin broke the dark ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... and rivers cease to pour the arching crystal from their lips, I have always loved to explore the forsaken water-courses. An imprisoned fish, a shell with rainbow lining, a curiously-worn rock, a strangely-tinted and grotesquely-fashioned stone—these are always objects of interest. Then to sit down upon a ledge that has been planed off by ice, and smoothed by the tenuous passage of an ocean's palpitating volume, and watch the shrunken stream slipping around its feet, and hear the gurgle of the ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... fixedness—as if he might chance to catch a glimpse of the bridegroom with whom Julia would have it in her power to disturb the serenity of their prospective home. A steep white cliff, receding sullenly against the dim grey skyline; a farmhouse grotesquely low for its size, crouching under big shelving galleries heaped with snow; an opening in front, to the right, where vaguely there seemed to be a valley into which they would descend—he saw these things. They remained in his mind afterward as a part of something else that ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Bonaparte herewith presented, if judged from the viewpoint of the historian or the biographer, are absurdly and grotesquely untrue; but to the anthropologist and the student of human nature they are extremely valuable as self-revelations of national character; and even to the historian and the biographer they have some interest as evidences of the profoundly deep impression made by Napoleon's personality ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... round hand, gazing down at him with her deepset, clever eyes. When Swithin removed his hat, she clapped her hands. Again he had the sense of being admired, caressed. With a careless air, that sat grotesquely on his tall square person, he walked up to the door; both girls stood in the passage. Swithin felt a confused desire to speak in some foreign tongue. "Maam'selles," he began, "er—bong ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... shudder she dropped the bronze, and looked down. Victor lay at her feet, supine, grotesquely asprawl. His face was bruised and livid; the cheek laid open by the bronze was smeared with scarlet, accentuating the leaden colour of his skin. His mouth was ajar; his eyes, half closed, hideously revealed slender slits of white. More blood discoloured his right temple, welling from ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... his hands and closed his eyes. When he ventured again to look up, he observed that Pablo, in falling from his horse, had caught one huge Mexican spur on the cantle of his saddle and was suspended by the heel, grotesquely, like a dead fowl. The black mare, a trained roping horse, stood patiently, her feet braced a little, still keeping ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... and closed the glassy eyes. The bystanders had a momentary thrill. Death had lent dignity even to the old Jew. He lay there, felled by an apoplectic stroke, due to the forced heavy meal, the tinsel gleaming grotesquely on his white sodden cloak, his naked legs rigid and cold. From afar the rumors of revelry, the brouhaha of a mad population, saluted his deaf ears, the distant music of lutes and viols. The captain of the soldiers went hot and cold. He had harried the heels of the rotund ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... boy's prettiness, yet with the whiteness and slenderness of a girl's little finger. A back-yard boy, in baggy jacket and pants, gingham blouse, and cap whose lining oozed back over his ash-blond hair, which was tangled now like trampled grass, with a tiny chip riding grotesquely ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... remains unbroken. So that, strictly speaking, the imagination is never governed; it is always the ruling and Divine power: and the rest of the man is to it only as an instrument which it sounds, or a tablet on which it writes; clearly and sublimely if the wax be smooth and the strings true, grotesquely and wildly if they are stained and broken. And thus the "Iliad," the "Inferno," the "Pilgrim's Progress," the "Faerie Queen," are all of them true dreams; only the sleep of the men to whom they came was the deep, living sleep which ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... seriousness of spirit are united with the finest play of irony, and even with the temper of comedy. The supposed Louis de Montalte, seeking theological lights from a doctor of the Sorbonne, finds only how hopelessly divided in opinion are the opponents of Arnauld, and how grotesquely they darken counsel with speech. In the twelve letters intervening between the third and the sixteenth, Pascal takes the offensive, and deploys an incomparably skilful attack on the moral theology of the Jesuits. For the rigid they may have a stricter morality, ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... What's happened? Where's Captain Whidden? Bless my soul! Who are you?" The speaker was big, well dressed, comfortably well fed. He stared at the six of us sprawled out grotesquely on the deck, where we had thrown ourselves when the ship swung at her anchor. He looked up at the loose, half-furled sails. He turned to Roger, who stood gaunt and silent before him. "Bless my soul! ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... "peelers" were thought of, the historic statue would disappear sometimes for days together; and after having headed a noisy procession, decorated with bonnet rouge and one of those antique camloteen cloaks which our forefathers used to rejoice in, it would be found in the morning grotesquely propped up, either in the centre of the old Upper Town market, or in the old Picote cemetery in Couillard street [347], in that fanciful costume (a three-storied sombrero, with eye-glass and ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... and would give much offence if you went out of your house in clothes such as you would wear in England in the country. On Sundays and during all Easter week—when I was there—all the men went out in their frock-coats, top hats of grotesquely antiquated shapes, extra high starched collars, and, above all, patent leather shoes—with the sun scorching overhead. The women were amusing enough in their finery—which had been perhaps the fashion elsewhere fifty or sixty or more years ago. But they believed ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... in my anxiety about a borrowed animal, of which Mr. Austin makes a great joke, I put my saddle-bags on my own mare, in an evil hour, and not only these, but some fine cocoanuts, tied up in a waterproof which had long ago proved its worthlessness. It was a grotesquely miserable picture. The house is not far from the beach, and the surf, beyond which a heavy mist hung, was coming in with such a tremendous sound that we had to shout at the top of our voices in order to be heard. The sides ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... of applause which followed the first surprise was succeeded by a wave of laughter, Kate turned back to discover Peters, very red in the face, drawing on the board a picture. As she looked a grotesquely ugly face took shape. The face completed, there was a renewed burst of merriment when Peters topped it with a fool's-cap, and on ...
— The Young Railroaders - Tales of Adventure and Ingenuity • Francis Lovell Coombs
... all that time in his life, as we now look back upon it, he has for us the aspect of some lawless, unkempt genius, in untoward circumstances, groping in the dark, not without wild joy, towards his inconceivable, true vocation; set to tasks for which he was grotesquely unfit; blundering on from misfortune to misfortune, with an overflow of unemployed energy and vivacity that swept him often into rough fun, into great gusts of innocent riot and horseplay; withal borne along, for many days together, by the mysterious ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... character showed plainly in his dim blue eyes, which twinkled merrily. Moreover, there was a sure witness of worth in the empty sleeve, pinned to his left breast, on which showed the cross of honor. The humor lurking in the eyes was grotesquely manifested in his ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... and the missionaries gave me much valuable information about the natives and their customs. When the tone of the conversation in the evening threatened to become too serious, our jovial Captain S. speedily improved matters by his grotesquely comical sallies. A strenuous life was that of the missionary who was responsible for the organization of the voyage; he had to visit the native communities, and went ashore at every anchorage, sometimes through an ugly surf or dangerous shoals, generally with overcrowded whale-boats; and this ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... tables lay on their sides and upside down, their legs in the air. Most of the crockery—fortunately, so Blanche said to herself, kitchen crockery—off the big dresser lay smashed in large and small pieces here, there, and everywhere. A large copper preserving-pan lay grotesquely sprawling on the well-scrubbed centre table, which was the one thing which had not been moved—probably because of its great weight. And yet—and yet it had been moved—for it was all askew! The man who did that, if, indeed, one ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... He wears white clothes and a crown or turban. He is perhaps Kalki who, as suggested above, had some connection with the Kalacakra. The Eight Terrible Ones and their attendants are represented by grotesquely masked figures in the dances and mystery plays enacted by Lamas. These performances are said to be still known among the vulgar as dances of the Red Tiger Devil, but in the hands of the Yellow Church have become a historical drama representing the persecution ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... untruths as well; some of them so grotesquely false as now to cause amusement rather than anger. An article on Lockhart in Temple Bar for June, 1895 (vol. cv. p. 175), touches on some of these legends, and pleads for a memoir. Gratitude is due to the anonymous writer, for he was, says Mr. Andrew Lang, "the onlie ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... historian of the eighteenth century, however, few things can be more grotesquely absurd than to suppose that the merits or demerits, the failure or the successes of the Irish Parliament has any real bearing on modern schemes for reconstructing the Government of Ireland on a revolutionary and Jacobin basis; entrusting ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... their destiny. They had been so unhappy, such muddlers, so wrong-headed, it seemed to her. She could have told them what to do, and what not to do. It was a melancholy fact that they would pay no heed to her, and were bound to come to grief in their own antiquated way. Their behavior was often grotesquely irrational; their conventions monstrously absurd; and yet, as she brooded upon them, she felt so closely attached to them that it was useless to try to pass judgment upon them. She very nearly lost consciousness that ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... upon their black hair the hat made famous by John B. Stetson. You may meet them in town and think them tamed to stupidity. You may travel out upon their reservations and find them shearing sheep or hoeing corn or plodding along the furrow, plowing their fields; or you may watch them dancing grotesquely in their festivals, and still think that civilization is fast erasing the savage instincts from their natures. You will be partly right—but you will also be partly mistaken. An Indian is always an Indian, and a Navajo Indian ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... way to my room I came suddenly upon the Prince, in a recess of the upper hall, addressing somebody through an open door with a querulous protest, whose wild extravagance of statement was grotesquely balanced by its utter feeble timidity of manner. "It is," said the Prince, "indeed a grave affair. We have here hundreds of socialists, emissaries from lawless countries and impossible places, who travel thousands ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... shepherdess, could naturally find but little to her taste in the hierarchy of Hans Brewer and Hans Baker. Thus her Majesty and her courtiers, accustomed to the faded gallantries with which the serious affairs of State were so grotesquely intermingled, took it ill when they were bluntly informed, for instance, that the State council of the Netherlands, negotiating on Netherland affairs, could not permit a veto to the representatives of the queen, and that this ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... opposite corner the elderly man struggled to release his arm from the grip of a wedging timber. The body of the porter, doubled grotesquely, partially protruded from ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... blood. The material shapes attributed to these murderous beings were supposed to convey to the eye their perverse and ferocious characters. They were represented as composite creatures in whom the body of a man would be joined grotesquely to the limbs of animals in the most unexpected combinations. They worked in as best they could, birds' claws, fishes' scales, a bull's tail, several pairs of wings, the head of a lion, vulture, hyaena, or wolf; when they left the creature a human head, they made ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... with pale Indian matting, with a bit of strong colour, here and there, in the shape of a modern Turkish rug. For furniture, he had picked up some old chairs and a large straight-backed settee with grotesquely-carved legs, which, with the aid of a judicious arrangement of drapery, looked eminently attractive, and conveyed an impression of comfort which closer acquaintance did not altogether belie. Then there was the platform, covered with dark cloth, on which his models posed; ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... answered by an anxious bray from the fourth member of the party. The mule bearing the trail pack was in ludicrous contrast to his own aristocratic companions. His long head, with one entirely limp and flopping ear, was grotesquely ugly, the carcass beneath the pack a bone rack, all sharp angles and dusty hide. Looks, however, as his master could ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... portrayed on canvas, never presented an appearance half so ghastly. His bloated body and shrunken legs—their deformity enhanced a hundredfold by the fantastic dress—the glassy eyes, contrasting fearfully with the thick white paint with which the face was besmeared; the grotesquely-ornamented head, trembling with paralysis, and the long skinny hands, rubbed with white chalk—all gave him a hideous and unnatural appearance, of which no description could convey an adequate idea, and which, to this day, I shudder to think of. His ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... ceremonies which approximate in time to our New Year's Day and Christmas show the importance they attach to concentrated thought. Early in the morning of what corresponds to our New Year's Day, two young men, one of them grotesquely dressed in women's garments, visit every igloo and blow out each seal-oil lamp. The lights are afterwards renewed from a freshly-kindled fire. The chief, asked the meaning of the ceremony, replied, "New light, new sun," showing his belief that the sun was yearly renewed ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... them. Below the clear water lay a girdle of sunken rocks, pointed as needles, and with edges as sharp as swords, about which the waves fretted ceaselessly, drawing silvery lines about their notched and dented ridges. The cliffs ran up precipitously from the sea, carved grotesquely over their whole surface into strange and fantastic shapes; while the golden and gray lichens embroidered them richly, and bright sea-flowers, and stray tufts of grass, lent them the most vivid and gorgeous hues. Beyond the channel, against the clear ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... a signal as he spoke, and Cocardasse and Passepoil, descending from their post upon the bridge, advanced towards the brilliant group, bowing grotesquely as they did so, with their big hats in their hands and their long rapiers tilting up their ragged cloaks. All the party gazed in amazement at the whimsical apparitions, to the great indignation of Cocardasse, who whispered ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... cries very easily and readily, but her tears are easily dried and her joy is grotesquely childlike. She is readily frightened, worries without restraint and finds a melancholy satisfaction in the worst. At the same time, her fears do not persist and are easily dissipated by encouragement ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... chirped somewhere near the door. Green Valley turned and looked and froze with horror. For there, staggering grotesquely, came little Jim Tumley, a piteous figure. He had kept his promise to his new friend—he had come ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... misunderstanding, they were in perfect accord. The sun was setting by this time and the Abbe Bordier's shadow, grotesquely elongated, danced up and down the sandy floor of the shed, while the old, broken voice declaimed tags of verse that echoed to the furthest recesses of the court. But Jean Servien was smiling at the vision only his eyes could ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... shrank back as if she had been struck. She pressed her hands against her cheeks and stepped away with a look of horror and disgust as the Ramblin' Kid backed out of the stall with the Gold Dust maverick. Outside he fumbled grotesquely at the silky mane and climbed weakly ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... with his beloved banjo, was playing such music as put springs into their heels. Canadians and negroes were all dancing together—the Frenchmen with graceful agility, the negroes more clumsily, even grotesquely, but with a rhythm that proved their musical ear. Clotilde and a negress cook were the only women, and greatly in demand by both Frenchmen and negroes. Clotilde rather scorned partners of her own color, and was choosing only the best-looking ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... be needlessly lengthy and necessarily deficient. In general, it may be said that the designs are executed in longitudinal panels, of which there are several lateral and one central, all of which run parallel and warpwise. The main figures are four, two grotesquely suggestive of a crocodile but more nearly portraying a turtle, and two that delineate the fanciful figure of a woman. The intermediate parts of the panels consist of reticulations whose general design depends upon the skill ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... cabin roof-tree, where some of his goods were still stored. There was no sense of terror in this bland obliteration of the little settlement; the ruins of a single burnt-up cabin would have been more impressive than this stupid and even grotesquely placid effect of the rival destroying element. People took it naturally; the water went as it had come,—slowly, impassively, noiselessly; a few days of fervid Californian sunshine dried the cabins, and in a week or two the red ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... some satisfaction from this, when, turning a bend of the path within two hundred yards of the castle, behold an unmistakable enemy barred his way!—an ugly, hoggish, obese man, with bare legs most grotesquely like pillars of granite, and a protuberant paunch; but the devil must have been in his legs to carry him more swiftly than thoroughbred limbs had borne Count Victor. He stood sneering in the path, turning up the right sleeve of a soiled and ragged saffron ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... with a friend I asked him what was being said by two girls who were working among the mulberries and were hidden from us by a hedge (hedges only occur round mulberry plots). He told me that one was enhancing to her companion the tremendous dignity of the Crown Prince by exaggerating grotesquely the size of the house he lived in, which reminded me of the servant who told her friend that "Queen Victoria was so rich that she had a piano in her kitchen." Generally the conversational topics of the villagers seemed to be people and prices. Undoubtedly, I was told, the ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... his own face was a shock to him. If he was pale, the dust and grime of his fight in the cavern concealed his pallor. But the face that stared at him from out of the glass was haggard, wildly and almost grotesquely haggard, and he turned from it with a grim laugh, and set his jaws hard. He returned to the table, and bit by bit tore the photograph into thin shreds, and then piled the shreds on his ash-tray and burned them. He opened ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... satisfactorily answered. The charge of silliness, of being ridiculous, however, cannot be refuted by argument. There is no logical answer to a guffaw. This sense of the ridiculous is merely a bad, infantile habit, in itself grotesquely ridiculous. You may see it particularly in the theatre. Not the greatest dramatist, not the greatest composer, not the greatest actor can prevent an audience from laughing uproariously at a tragic moment if a cat walks across the stage. But why ruin ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... little animal, but Porthos—I want you to see Porthos. He has gigantic manners. He is so conscious of his bigness, and makes chests at you like a pouter pigeon. He has a bass voice like a war-drum. Things shake. Oh, I like Porthos. Pardon my nonsense, Greville, but the whole thing is so big, so grotesquely huge. Tell me about Athos, the count. Your cigars were not bought in France; may I have another? Thanks. You were to ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... directed to the bird-like creatures he had seen so abundantly present in each of his earlier visions. His first impression was soon corrected, and he considered for a time that they might represent a diurnal species of bat. Then he thought, grotesquely enough, that they might be cherubs. Their heads were round and curiously human, and it was the eyes of one of them that had so startled him on his second observation. They had broad, silvery wings, not feathered, but glistening almost as brilliantly ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... but a look at the curiously and grotesquely twisted neck of the animal to tell that it ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... began the imitation again, and the man's voice joined in grotesquely, exaggerating the imitation farcically and closing ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... trodden by the feet of evil-doers who had there been disciplined. At one corner of the meeting-house was the pillory and at the other the stocks, and, by a singular good fortune for our sketch, the head of an Episcopalian and suspected Catholic was grotesquely encased in the former machine, while a fellow-criminal who had boisterously quaffed a health to the king was confined by the legs in the latter. Side by side on the meeting-house steps stood a male and a female figure. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... by a short, important man in immaculate black, came along the path, and approached the open door of the vehicle. Nickie advanced carelessly, and intercepted them. He bowed grotesquely. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... back to me. Grotesquely distorted, blurred with tube-hum and interference crackle, they roared in my ear-grids so loudly that I saw the nearby guard turn his head as though ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... from this bank. It may be observed, respecting one of them, in latitude 23 deg 10', that if the promontory in latitude 24 deg were worn down to the level of the sea, and coated with corals, a very similar and grotesquely formed reef would be produced. Many of the reefs on this part of the coast may thus have originated; but there are some sickle, and almost atoll-formed reefs lying in deep water off the promontory in latitude 24 deg, which lead me ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... night so wrathfully that even the shadow that followed her seemed vital with hate. On they walked together—the girl and this weird shadow—blackening the snow with momentary darkness as they passed; the one tossing out her arms with unconscious gesticulation, the other mocking her, grotesquely, from the ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... the gloom the ape-man at first conceived the intruder to be an elephant; yet, if so, one of greater proportions than any he had ever before seen, but as the dim outlines became less indistinct he saw on a line with his eyes and twenty feet above the ground the dim silhouette of a grotesquely serrated back that gave the impression of a creature whose each and every spinal vertebra grew a thick, heavy horn. Only a portion of the back was visible to the ape-man, the rest of the body being lost in the dense shadows beneath the tree, from whence there now ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... all, which is the widest, too, and but a little space from high-water mark. What outlandish beings are these? Erect as men, but hardly as symmetrical, they stand all round the rock like sculptured caryatides, supporting the next range of eaves above. Their bodies are grotesquely misshapen; their bills short; their feet seemingly legless; while the members at their sides are neither fin, wing, nor arm. And truly neither fish, flesh, nor fowl is the penguin; as an edible, pertaining neither to Carnival nor Lent; without exception the ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Mr. Darwin's great essay on the "Origin of Species" by Natural Selection. This solemn and mysterious subject had been either so lightly or so grotesquely treated before, that it was hardly regarded as being within the bounds of legitimate philosophical investigation. Mr. Darwin, after twenty years of the closest study and research, published his views, and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... heard a loud boom and the sound of falling masonry as a shell struck the far end of the building. We hurried to the hotel, the shells screaming overhead. We saw the buildings tumbling into ruins, glass falling in fine powder and remnants of furniture hanging grotesquely ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... the store to reach the door meant stepping over the body—the grotesquely twisted body, with the white, upturned face and the little spot of red, near where the silver comb had fallen from the silvered hair. And so Darcy changed his mind—he ran to the side door, fumbled with the lock, flung back the portal, and then rushed out in the rain ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... Street one afternoon, I came upon a little crowd, and joining it I found that it was grouped in amused curiosity, and with a certain kindness, round an old hatless Irishman, who was leaning against a shop front, weeping bitterly, and, of course, grotesquely. The old man was very evidently drunk, but there was something in his weeping deeply pitiful for all that. He was drunk, for certain; but no less certainly he was very unhappy—unhappy over some mysterious something that one or two kindly questioners tried in vain to discover. As we ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... him for nearly an hour, but were unable to get off more than a certain portion of the paint. Harry was still grotesquely decorated when the boys arrived at the conclusion that further scrubbing with the materials at ...
— Frank Merriwell at Yale • Burt L. Standish
... opinion of the writer, has been greatly overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to the Florentines and the Sienese—both sculptors and painters—south of the Alps, and to the Netherlanders ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... Frenchwoman, Madame's business manager, a fat, voluble Italian, Madame's secretary, an olive-skinned South American youth in an evening coat with velvet collar, and Madame's principal male dancer in a scanty Egyptian dress with grotesquely painted face. They were all talking at the same time, and at intervals Fletcher muttered hotly: "This time she leaves the bill or I walk ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... seemed to Frederick to have gone mad. The Hamburg was entering the narrow harbour, the basin surrounded by skyscrapers, veritable towers of Babel, and alive with numberless grotesquely shaped ferry-boats. The scene, perhaps, would be a ridiculous monstrosity, were it not so truly gigantic. In that crater of life civilisation bellows, howls, screeches, roars, thunders, rushes, whizzes and whirls. Here ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... closely (arriving in 1600), and were themselves followed soon after by the Germans and Danes (whose activity soon subsided), and by the French. The German company, under whose protection stood Ziegenbalg, was one of the last to enter India, and first to leave it (1717-1726). The most grotesquely hideous era in India's history is that which was inaugurated by the supremacy of the Christian British. Major Munroe's barbaric punishment of the Sepoys took place, however, in Clive's absence (1760-1765). Marshman, I, p. 305, says of this Munroe only that he was "an officer ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... manage for yourself; and half way through Catherine had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her lips which smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone to stone could have lasted for ever. She was wrapped up grotesquely in his mackintosh; her hat was all bedraggled; her gloves dripped in his; and in spite of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that delicately cut, gravely smiling face, swaying above the rushing brown water, was never seen ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... no for us to complain. There's waur jobs oot in France for better men ... A word in your ear, Mr Brand. Could ye not look a bit more sheepish? Ye stare folk ower straight in the een, like a Hieland sergeant-major up at Maryhill Barracks.' And he winked slowly and grotesquely with ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... at it for a moment wonderingly as it lay absurdly curled in the palm of her hand, and then she burst into tears. The thing was so grotesquely trivial. It meant so much. It was a sign and a token falling, as it were, from the sky into the midst of her despairing mood, rebuking her, summoning her, declaring an unknown mission which she was bound to execute. It lay in her hand ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... which, setting no value upon human life, knew no respect for death. By virtue of the malady that had killed him, of his plethoric habit of body, and of the sweltering August heat, the corpse was decomposing rapidly, so that the face had become almost black and assumed an aspect grotesquely horrible, fully ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... glass, a font, some half-dozen pews, and perhaps a dozen seats for the poor; and also a vestry. The roof is high pitched, and of black old oak, and the three large beams which support it run down to the side walls, and terminate in grotesquely carved faces,—two devils and an angel on one side, two angels and a devil on the other. Such is the church of St Cuthbert at Barchester, of which Mr Harding became rector, with a clear income of seventy-five ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... the divan and buried her face in her hands. Her fat shoulders shook grotesquely; and Harley stood perfectly still staring across at her for fully a minute. I could hear voices in the street outside and the hum of traffic ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... ended; the happiest month of May that life had yet offered, fading behind the present, and probably beyond the past, somewhere into abstract time, grotesquely out of place with the Berlin scheme or a Boston future. Adams explained to himself that he was absorbing knowledge. He would have put it better had he said that knowledge was absorbing him. He was passive. In spite of swarming impressions he knew no more when he left Rome than he did when he ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... retired after midnight, leaving his lamp burning; and, wearied by the festivities, soon fell asleep. He was presently awakened by the sound of music, and, looking about the apartment, saw at the opposite end, three phantom ladies, grotesquely ...
— ZigZag Journeys in Northern Lands; - The Rhine to the Arctic • Hezekiah Butterworth
... of our neighbors. Kindly receive my book with the same indulgent smile, without seeking therein a meaning either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular fatherland of ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... Andriusha!" the mother said, heaving a deep sigh, as she looked at his thin face grotesquely covered with ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... hall-way into the kitchen. How dark it was! Her quick glance comprehended the whole scene, and the contrast between it and that other home-coming smote her with a keen sense of physical pain. She looked at the solitary lamp with its grotesquely hideous ornament of red flannel, at Susan's expressionless, freckled face, at the boys in their copper-toed boots and overalls, at the good-natured, but hopelessly common-place Martha Spriggs, with her thin hair drawn tight into a knob the size ...
— A Princess in Calico • Edith Ferguson Black
... sun rose, a kind of transformation-scene took place. The whole level land lifted at the horizon till the teams seemed crawling forever at bottom of an enormous bowl. Mystical forms came into view—grotesquely elongated, unrecognizable. Hills twenty, thirty miles away rose like apparitions, astonishingly magnified. Willows became elms, a settler's shanty rose like a shot-tower—towns hitherto unseen swam and palpitated in the yellow flood of light like ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... former ruler. To those impressed with the idea—and many there were who were so—the very stones of the convent church seemed dissolving into tears. The statues of the saints appeared to weep, and the great statue of Saint Gregory de Northbury over the porch seemed bowed down with grief. The grotesquely carved heads on the spouts grinned horribly at the abbot's destroyers, and spouted forth cascades of water, as if with the intent of drowning them. So deluging and incessant were the showers, that it seemed, indeed, as if the abbey would be flooded. All the inequalities ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... orange stabbed between Venusian and Earthling; sparks hissed out where it struck the tip of the helmet; and for an instant life and strength seemed to leave the grotesquely clad figure. Carse slumped down under a quick crushing weight. Weight! It bent him low, and it was only with a great effort that he was able to straighten again. For the suit's full load of metal and fabric was upon him now, its enormous boots binding him to the ground since their weight was ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... open the door, and without a moment's hesitation passed in with his sword advanced, to be followed quickly by the chamberlain, who raised the light above his head, to throw the King's shadow right before him, so that his mock semblance, looking black, solid, and grotesquely dwarfed, moved on in front till it struck against the angle of the wall where the passage ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... fire occupy the greater part of the surface of this wonderful sphere. In these great red-hot seas live the monsters of the deep, as well as a motley variety of other species, veritable salamanders, some grotesquely hideous, others surpassingly beautiful ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... the pictographic painting is a wolf grotesquely drawn. Within her body four young wolves are seen. Above the wolf is a killer whale surmounted by a second picture of the Thunder Bird, and in the left top corner of the pictograph is seen the face of a young ...
— Indian Legends of Vancouver Island • Alfred Carmichael
... desirous of disappearing for that evening, but Lady Glencora would not permit it. "She has seen you, my dear, and asked about you. If you hide yourself, she'll say all sorts of things." An introduction was therefore necessary, and Lady Hartletop's manner was grotesquely grand. She dropped a very low curtsey, and made a very long face, but she did not say a word. In the evening the Marchioness sat close to Lady Glencora, whispering many things about the Duke; and condescending at last to a final entreaty that she might be permitted to see him on ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... days. Like the provincial 'grandes seigneurs' of Louis XVI's reign, they were gay, dissipated and turbulent; "accomplished" in the superficial acquirements that made the "gentleman" one hundred years ago, but are grotesquely out of place in this sensible, solid age, which demands that a man shall be of use, and not merely for show. They ran horses and fought cocks, dawdled through society when young, and intrigued in politics the rest of their lives, with frequent spice-work of duels. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... not one alternative," I suggested, "grotesquely improbably, no doubt, but still just conceivable? Might the whole story of the cataleptic Russian and his son be a concoction of Dr. Trevelyan's, who has, for his own ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... enjoyed, and it is spoken of here because such an experience is a rara avis in the republic of Mexico. Among the numberless churches, a curious one will long be remembered, namely, the Santa Vera Cruz, the facade of which very much resembles that of a dime museum, having a lot of grotesquely-colored figures ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... who suffer from that weakness, people liked him. Nor, indeed, were his fibs, as a rule, made out of whole cloth. They usually had a basis of truth. When he told a story and he felt that it was producing no effect he would "play it up," as newspapermen would put it, often quite grotesquely. Altogether he was so inclined to overemphasize and embellish his facts that it was not always easy to say where truth ended and fiction began. Somehow it seemed to me as though the moistness and looseness of his lips had something to do with ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... props which awkwardly supported a hideous galvanised iron roof, on the top of which was erected a kind of tin hen-coop in which a sharp bell clanged with irritating rapidity for Sunday service. Outside, the building was thus rendered grotesquely incongruous,—inside it was almost blasphemous in its rank ugliness. There were several rows of narrow pews made of common painted deal,—there was a brown stone font and a light pine-wood pulpit—a small harmonium stood in one corner, festooned by a faded red woollen curtain, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of monsters swelled more and more; the bats and moths winged in mad frenzy about the open door of the radium shack. There were great beetles, centipedes, ants, crickets, hopping, crawling things, and grotesquely immense in size. Fights progressed here and there, but the majority of them were carried along in ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... and costermongers hawking their wares. They were jostling, pelting, and applauding a figure which at first Gemma could not see for the pushing and swaying of the crowd. The next moment, however, she saw plainly what it was—a hunchback, dwarfish and ugly, grotesquely attired in a fool's dress, with paper cap and bells. He evidently belonged to the strolling company, and was amusing the crowd with hideous ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... well-met within, the risen wind clamoring through the night, the rain lashing the black panes, the sea rumbling upon the rocks below, and, withal, a savory smell abroad in goodly promise. My uncle, grown fat as a gnome in these days, grotesquely fashioned, miscellaneously clothed as ever, stood with legs wide upon the black wolf's-skin, his back to the fire, his great hands clasped over his paunch, lying as upon a shelf; regarding the direct importation and myself, the rise of my admiration, the room, the whole world, indeed, visible ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... showed signs of tears, but concealed his weakness by performing a grotesque dance, dancing grotesquely by the side of the car, much to Shaver's joy—a joy enhanced just as the car reached the gate, where, as a farewell attention, Humpy fell down and rolled over and ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... haunt the barroom at all hours. And this is a custom which the gentlemanly and quiet proprietor, much as he evidently dislikes it, cannot possibly prevent. Some of these expressions, were they not so fearfully blasphemous, would be grotesquely sublime. For instance, not five minutes ago I heard two men quarreling in the street, and one said to the other, "Only let me get hold of your beggarly carcass once, and I will use you up so small that God Almighty himself cannot ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... in their amorous intrigues, and men, seemingly rational, resigned themselves to the wildest transports of passion for individuals whom, in some cases, they had never seen. Thus, religious enthusiasm, martial bravery, and licentious love, so grotesquely mingled, formed the very life of the Middle Ages, and impossible as it is to transfuse into a translation the harmony of Provencal verse, or to find in it, when stripped of this harmony, any poetical idea, these remains are valuable since ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... men lay down grotesquely on his oar. He fired again, and one of the remaining two stood up, shook a fist towards the shore and, staggering backwards, capsized the boat in the surf. He must have sunk like lead with his wound, for he never ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... slack hour when Private Wakeman, in his grotesquely tattered clothes, limped through the door. Only a few men were in the hut, writing or playing draughts. A boy at the piano was laboriously beating out a discordant version of "Tennessee." Mrs. Jocelyn ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... and the justice due to them in such cases stand these Lesdiguieres, these King's Lieutenants; not instruments of justice, but walls erected for the shelter of Privilege and Abuse whenever it exceeds its grotesquely excessive rights. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... York, and he was in the car the observed of all observers to an extraordinary degree. He sat down, took out an immense roll of proof, and said, "Lead pencil!" One was immediately handed to him by some stranger, who was by that one act ennobled, or, what amounts to the same thing in America, grotesquely charactered for life. He was the man who gave Horace Greeley a lead pencil! I, as his companion, was also regarded as above ordinary humanity. When the proof was finished "Horace" said ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... to a drawer by the bedside, and dragged out this further testimony to her claim—it was wrapped in layers of tissue-paper, like her father's valentine—and displayed it with a touching pride. Before handing it to Deb, she gazed at it with grotesquely distorted face, kissed it, pressed it to her bosom, kissed it again, and moaned over it, rocking to and fro; then, when she had pushed it from her, flung herself into her former attitude ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first. Now, as soon as she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the effort to strap up a great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic alligator. The key was in her hand. Her dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come down and covered her body and ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... him. Dr. Pocock, coming for a first visit, found the bed partly broken under the weight of the patient who was lying in a grotesquely awkward position, his ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the same circumstance. It is difficult to understand what effect, whether that of pity or of laughter, Shakspeare meant to produce;—the occasion and the characteristic speeches are so little in harmony! For example, what the Nurse says is excellently suited to the Nurse's character, but grotesquely unsuited to the occasion. ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... death; For death were bliss, and the convulsive wrath Of living torture peace, to the dread weight That pressed upon sensation, while the light Of reason gleamed but horror, and strange hosts Of hideous phantasies, like threatening ghosts. Grotesquely mingled, preyed upon his brain: Then would he dream of yesterdays again, Or view to-morrow's terrors thick surround His fancy with forebodings. While the sound Of his own breath broke frightful on his ear, He, bathed in icy sweat, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... minutes to eight, sir!" said Mr. Shrig, and rising to his feet, set off briskly along the path. We had almost reached the wood I have mentioned when Mr. Shrig raised his knobbed stick to point at something that sprawled grotesquely across the path. The hat had fallen and rolled away and staring down into the horror of this face fouled with blood and blackened with powder, I recognised the ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... the bell rang and the engine moved, off popped young Billy Lusk from his cow-catcher. With an exclamation of horror she sprang down, and Mr. McLean appeared, and, with all a parent's fright and rage, held the boy by the arm grotesquely as the sheriff ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... at her right and saw within a stone's-throw a man asleep. He was dressed in an ancient, greenish-brown suit, and was practically invisible. His arm was thrown over his weather-beaten face and he was sleeping soundly, lying in a position as grotesquely distorted as some old tree-root. He was, in fact, distorted by the storms of life within and without. He was evidently a tramp, and possibly worse. His sleeping face could be read like a page ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... advanced in the more formidable character of a huge dragon, with gilded wings, open jaws, and a scarlet tongue, cloven at the end, which made various efforts to overtake and devour a lad, dressed as the lovely Sabaea, daughter of the King of Egypt, who fled before him; while a martial Saint George, grotesquely armed with a goblet for a helmet, and a spit for a lance, ever and anon interfered, and compelled the monster to relinquish his prey. A bear, a wolf, and one or two other wild animals, played their parts with the discretion of ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... pleased. The women, with naked babies astride their hips, the usual way of carrying them, were particularly annoying. A little girl, however, perhaps ten years old, named Supupnik (Sawdust), made friends with me, and that friendship lasted during all my stay with them. Her face was always grotesquely painted, but she was a ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... farmers. In the crises of life and death, or under the desire for immediate and more liquor, they sold necessary slices. This continued until nothing remained for the present Gordon Makimmon but the original dwelling—now grotesquely misshapen from the addition of casual sheds and extensions—and a small number of acres ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... altogether a remarkable piece of work. The first was the novelty of the material; for the writer dealt not only with people who were not white, but with people who were not black enough to contrast grotesquely with white people,—who in fact were of that near approach to the ordinary American in race and color which leaves, at the last degree, every one but the connoisseur in doubt whether they are Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-African. Quite as ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... which commanded a view of this pass, some old trees, grotesquely twisted, seemed to have mounted with painful efforts, like scouts who had started in advance of the multitude heaped together in the rear. When we turned round we saw the entire forest stretched beneath our feet, like a gigantic basin ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... affected Woodell very much as what is known as a "knock-out" in sparring affects a man. Absolutely unconscious at first, he recovered intelligence slowly, though practically uninjured. Harlson stood beside the grotesquely trussed figure and watched the return to consciousness with curiosity. The cool ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... room enough for the vague conception to suggest itself, that the dying man had started from his bed and was approaching me. This belief was, at the same instant, confuted, by the survey of his form and garb. One eye, a scar upon his cheek, a tawny skin, a form grotesquely misproportioned, brawny as Hercules, and habited in livery, composed, as it were, the parts of ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... less tapering to the tail. Altogether, it impressed upon the mind a strong idea of a formidable monster, in spite of its relatively diminutive head; for its fearful tusks, and thick-set projecting whiskers, gave its visage a most truculent expression; and with its grotesquely fashioned ponderous carcass, provided with fin feet of strange formation, seemed to mark it as a personification of one of the fabulous ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... a yearning cry; Gray's streaked, swollen features were grotesquely contorted. "You won't be mad with me, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... new guard entered—two powerful young Indians with grotesquely painted faces. They loosened the bonds about his legs, but did so only that he might walk as they led him out into a lane broken through a dense crowd of excited braves and squaws and curious children, ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... widened and her mouth flew open, making her face grotesquely gaunt. Abruptly, she was most unpretty. For a few heartbeats, she stood rigidly, staring at Konar. Then she put her hands to her face, her fingers making a rumpled mess of her hair. Her eyes, fixed and with staring pupils, peered between ...
— Millennium • Everett B. Cole
... uncomfortable—the two old dower chests— the quaint three-legged stools and upright settles, were a collection that would have been precious to the art dealer and curio hunter, as would the massive eight-day clock with its grotesquely painted face, delineating not only the hours and days but the lunar months, and possessing a sonorous chime which just now struck eight with a boom as deep as that of a cathedral bell. The sound appeared to startle the old farmer with a kind of shock, for ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... impressing Biblical events in symbolical form upon the early converts to the Christian Church. These representations were entirely dramatic in character, and their subjects, though always sacred, were often grotesquely treated, and sometimes verged on buffoonery. Among the actors, God, Christ, Satan, Mary, and the angels nearly always appeared; later, the various virtues and vices were personified. The representations were usually given in the streets or in fields, and sometimes on the water. The highest ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... remember, with pleasure, that dinner-party at Redmoat, in the old-world dining-room; it was so very peaceful, so almost grotesquely calm. For I, within my very bones, felt it to be the calm before the storm. When, later, we men passed to the library, we seemed to leave that atmosphere ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... darkness into light. It was a terrible object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by a woman's head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a lizard, so that it glared upwards. The workmanship of the thing was rude yet strangely powerful. Whatever there is cruel, whatever there is devilish, whatever there ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... rooms in which most of the games are to be played should be decorated as grotesquely as possible with Jack-o'-lanterns made from apples, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, etc., with incisions made for eyes, nose and mouth and a lighted candle ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... seemed a little sadly, and advanced to the officer commanding the troops. Baudette was sitting up. Manson, his face gray with pain, was nursing a dangling arm, and round them the derelicts of battle were strewn grotesquely. But it was Fisette who ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... own unbridled sensuality shook with inarticulate rage. Choking and coughing he writhed in his chair—his emaciated limbs twisted grotesquely; his sallow face bathed in perspiration his claw-like hands opening and closing; his bloodless lips curled back from his yellow teeth, in a horrid grin of impotent fury. And all the while she lay watching him with that pitiless, mocking, smile. It was as though the malevolent devil and the tortured ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... men who looked and paused and leered in amusement at one another, and thrust out satirical tongues. Long after they had disappeared, the strains of the violin could be heard, filling the solemn, stricken, strangely stunted woods with a grotesquely ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... emotion of a disordered mind) glimpses of the face of one on whom Death was rapidly hastening. Beside this bed now stood Dummie, a small, thin man dressed in a tattered plush jerkin, from which the rain-drops slowly dripped, and with a thin, yellow, cunning physiognomy grotesquely hideous in feature, but not positively villanous in expression. On the other side of the bed stood a little boy of about three years old, dressed as if belonging to the better classes, although the garb was somewhat tattered and discoloured. The poor child trembled violently, and evidently ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in bed and looking grotesquely terrible, they discussed the event. Caroline, like Medusa, but with hair curlers instead of snakes sprouting from her head, and Sophia with her heavy plait hanging over her shoulder and defying with its luxuriance the yellowness of her skin, they sat side by side, propped up with pillows, ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... ghostly at all, nor did it fly. It was, from the royal box, only too plainly a ship which had length and height, without thickness. And instead of flying, after dreary aeons of singing, it was moved off on creaky rollers by men whose shadows were thrown grotesquely on ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... who had pranced down onto the coaching line back of third, and who was waving his long arms grotesquely. "Make it or bust! You ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... shapes came and went, their shadows grotesquely flung against the leafy screens. The figures quickened their paces and their gestures; then suddenly, with cries, flung themselves into wild activity. And all about the fire, Stern saw a wheeling, circling, eddying mob of black and ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... being, incarnate on earth, counselled them to compose their strife and unite in a league of defence and aggression. Another personage, wholly mortal, yet wonderfully endowed, a renowned warrior and a mighty magician, stands, with his hair of writhing snakes, grotesquely conspicuous through the dim light of tradition at this birth of Iroquois nationality. This was Atotarho, a chief of the Onondagas; and from this honored source has sprung a long line of chieftains, heirs not to the blood alone, but to the name ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... until the slope of the mound began to rise sharply and the runners of grass, instead of flattening obediently behind, curled and twisted grotesquely as the tracks passed over them, lightly slapping at the impervious steel sides. Small bunches, mutilated and crushed, sprang back into erectness, larger ones flopped limply as their ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the Invisible Man, "the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter—no covering—to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again." ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... from him, and the body of a woman crashed heavily into the sage. Levelling the gun, he fired. The shot rang loud, and upon the edge of the depression a horse snorted nervously. The man pitched forward and lay sprawled grotesquely upon the ground and Endicott saw that his ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... disinclined to action, who finds himself engaged in a fight. Lever has used him a score of times (beginning with Mr. O'Leary in the row at a gambling-hall in Paris), and whether he runs or whether he fights, his efforts to do either are grotesquely laughable. Shakespeare puts that view of Falstaff too: Prince Hal words it. But Falstaff, the humorist in person, rises on the field of battle over the slain Percy and enunciates his philosophy of the better part of valour. Falstaff's ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... Her smile of recognition as she caught sight of Professor Burgess, gave place to an expression of half-concealed ridicule, as she glanced down at Vic Burleigh, the big, heavy-boned young fellow, so grotesquely impossible to the harmony ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... is more than can be said of some humans. And the visitor was an old bear, and a sick bear as well. He stood almost as high as Thor, but he was so old that he was only half as broad across the chest, and his neck and head were grotesquely thin. The Indians have a name for him. Kuyas Wapusk they call him—the bear so old he is about to die. They let him go unharmed; other bears tolerate him and let him eat their meat if he chances along; the white ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... grand air—and on their way back they went into Saint Mark's for a hushed ten minutes. Later they took up and kept up the fun of it to the very end; and it seemed to Pemberton a part of that fun that Mrs. Moreen, who was very angry when he had announced her his intention, should charge him, grotesquely and vulgarly and in reference to the loan she had vainly endeavoured to effect, with bolting lest they should "get something out" of him. On the other hand he had to do Mr. Moreen and Ulick the justice to recognise that when on coming in they heard the cruel news they took it like ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... patches of dead men and reddish-brown patches of dead horses. One great horse stood out on a little cliff, black against the yellow of the descending sun. It furiously stank. Each time I passed it I held my nose, and I was then pretty well used to smells. The last I saw of it—it lay grotesquely on its back with four stiff legs sticking straight up like the legs of an overturned table—it was being buried by a squad of little black men billeted near. They were cursing richly. The horse's revenge in death, perhaps, for its ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... room were covered with grotesquely and elaborately figured hand-wrought tapestry. The musty ancient beds remained in the chambers, and their quilts and curtains and canopies were decorated with curious handwork, and the walls and ceilings frescoed with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of religion these barbarians may previously have had is beyond our accurate knowledge. They handed down a mythology not radically different from the Graeco-Roman, though more vaguely and grotesquely conceived; and they recognised tribal duties and glories from which religious sanctions could hardly have been absent. But a barbarian mind, like a child's, is easy to convert and to people with what stories you will. The Northmen drank in with pleased astonishment what the monks told them ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... she whispered, as we passed into the room. It was an incongruous remark, and stirred again an hysterical feeling that had been driving me to laugh when I felt most sad amid all the grotesquely dreary preparations for the "burying." But, like some other sayings that offend ears polite, it had the ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... at no matter what cost to himself, demanding nothing in return! For it had been a hard struggle to be constantly with the woman he loved and yet keep himself in hand. To Mallory, Rooke's return seemed grotesquely inopportune. ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... piece was, in general, grotesquely unhistorical. It exhibits Robespierre's colleagues in the Committee of Public Safety as noisy and dirty street blackguards. Now, bad as they were, they were not at all of that species, nor did their deliberations take place in the manner depicted. Billaud-Varennes ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... teachers except when obliged to do so. The other pupils thought them of outlandish accent and manners and ridiculously old to be at school at all,—being twenty-four and twenty-six, and seeming even older. Their sombre and grotesquely-ugly costumes were fruitful causes of mirth to the gay young Belgian misses. The Brontes were not especially brilliant students, and none of their companions had ever suspected that they were geniuses. Of the two, Emily was considered to be, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various |
