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Frankenstein   /frˈæŋkənstˌaɪn/  /frˈæŋkənstˌin/   Listen
Frankenstein

noun
1.
An agency that escapes control and destroys its creator.
2.
The monster created by Frankenstein in a gothic novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (the creator's name is commonly used to refer to his creation).  Synonym: Frankenstein's monster.
3.
The fictional Swiss scientist who was the protagonist in a gothic novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; he created a monster from parts of corpses.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Frankenstein" Quotes from Famous Books



... colours,—I'd Titianesque 'em up: to mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine), and where tears should course I'd draw the waters down: to say where a joke should come in or a pun be left out: to bring my personae on and off like a Beau Nash; and I'd Frankenstein them there: to bring three together on the stage at once; they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... Reichstag no one great party, nor even any stable coalition of parties, upon which the Government could rely for support. For the time being, in 1879, Bismarck allied with the Centre to bring about the adoption of his newly-framed policy of protection and of the famous Frankenstein clause relative to the matricular contributions of the states.[343] The National Liberals, left in the lurch, broke up, and in 1881 the remnant of the party was able to obtain only forty-five seats. After the elections ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... restraint." Malone was snapping out his words with categorical crispness. "Do you realize the perilous scope of his dream? His overvaulting ambition looks to a one-man power of finance; a power vested solely in himself. We are rearing a Frankenstein, gentlemen. To overlook it means our ultimate ruin—and, what ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... went on I felt as if my soul were grappling with a palpable enemy; one by one the various keys were touched which formed the mechanism of my being; chord after chord was sounded, and soon my mind was filled with one thought, one conception, one purpose. So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley

... von Frankenstein, saying: "Pardon me if I recall to your memory the sum of one thousand louis d'ors, due for four black horses three ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... pacing along at the double, when a lighted window, a couple of hundred yards from the road, attracted my attention. Like Frankenstein's unhappy Monster, I had a hankering, just then, for human vicinity; though, like It, I met with nothing but horrified repulse. You will notice that Mrs. Shelley, with true womanly delicacy, avoids saying, in so many words, that the student ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... markets of the world. Think of it. We could see wonderful engines, put together by the hands of the workers in the factories, pushing out the useless laborer, pushing him out into the crowded avenues of unemployed. We could see this awful Frankenstein of machinery—a huge soulless metal monster, stalking through the world, bringing starvation, anarchy and destruction in its wake. 'It should not be—it must not be,' we ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor

... to create for myself a world within which I might love and hate—to be a God lost within his dream. Madness was necessary, so I embraced it. But my dream becomes the product of a Frankenstein. She—the hallucination—is more real to my senses than am I. And I can no longer control her. My senses are unfaithful to me. They philander clownishly with this mirage of my thought. Then what is there left? I. This grim ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht

... was confusing to simpletons, because according to tradition Adam was certainly the name of the natural man as created in the garden of Eden. It was as if a preacher of our own time had described as typically British Frankenstein's monster, and called him Smith, and somebody, on demanding what about the man in the street, had been told "Smith is the man in the street." The thing happens often enough; for indeed the world is full of ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... the Neanderthals had seemed to the twentieth century. And as man made progress so did he rarely outstrip it. So far he had done less for himself than for what passed for progress and the higher civilization. Naturally enough, when the Frankenstein monster heaved itself erect and began to run amok with seven-leagued boots, all the pigmies could do was to revert hysterically to Neanderthal methods and use the limited amount of brains the intervening centuries had given them, to scheme for victory. A thousand ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... has come re-enforcement to my belief in the essential greatness of the human stuff in all nations. Along with this goes a faith that in the New Internationalism mankind will lay low the military Frankenstein that he has created, and realize the triumphant brotherhood ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams

... Death on his Pale Horse, however, is very grand certainly-and some of the strange things they write remind me of Squoire Richard's visit to the Tower Menagerie, when he says "Odd, they are pure grim devils,"—particularly a wild and hideous tale called Frankenstein. Do you ever see any of the friends we used to live among? Mrs. Lambert is yet alive, and in prosperous circumstances ; and Fell, the bookseller in Bond-street, told me a fortnight or three weeks ago, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay

... of Anne Radcliffe, or rushed in horror from the apparition of the dead father of the Archivarius of Hoffman, tumbling his wicked son down stairs in the midst of the onyx quarrel, will willingly and with trembling fidelity bear witness to the intensity of Poe. He was indeed our Frankenstein (of whom many prototypes do abound), wandering in the Cimmerian regions of thought, the graveyards of the mind, and veiling his monstrous creations with the filmy drapery of rhyme and the mists of a perverted reason. In ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... reorganization of the industrial world, but this recognition has meant the sacrifice of individual life and development; it has come to mean in short the prostitution of a people and the creation of a Frankenstein. ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot

... pleasant to think of one's puzzling the organised wisdom of so superior a planet as this Utopia, this moral monster State my Frankenstein of reasoning has made, and to that pitch we have come. When we are next in the presence of our Lucerne official, he has the bearing of a man who faces a mystification beyond his powers, an incredible disarrangement of the order of Nature. Here, for the first time in the records ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... one Christmas, but never another. Mrs. Budlong gave heaps of presents. Christmas was an industry with her, an ambition; Christmas was her career. It had long ago lost its religious significance for her, as for nearly everybody else in Carthage. Even Mr. Frankenstein (the Pantatorium magnate) is one of the most ardent advertisers of Christmas bargains, while Isidore Strouther and Esau Streckfuss are "almost persuaded" every December. They might be entirely persuaded ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes

... on Friar's Park on behalf of Nahemah; for by this time I had fully recognized the fact that like a second Frankenstein, I had raised up a monster which sooner ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... failed to make progress over high drifts and against a heavy gale, what was to hinder her from perishing? Then, too, there was that villain, who had seemed to stalk forth from the isolated house afar into the howling night as easily as the Frankenstein demon, and might even now be skulking near—a dangerous devil—able to run where others must ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall

... lake, the Shelleys found M.G. Lewis established with Byron. This addition to the circle introduced much conversation about apparitions, and each member of the party undertook to produce a ghost story. Polidori's "Vampyre" and Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" were the only durable results of their determination. But an incident occurred which is of some importance in the history of Shelley's psychological condition. Toward midnight on the 18th of July, Byron recited the lines ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... death of his first wife Harriet. Two years previous to this she had eloped with Shelley (see Vol. XVIII) to Switzerland, and they lived together in Italy till his death in 1823, when Mrs. Shelley returned to England, and continued her literary work. "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus," the first of Mary Shelley's books, was published in 1818, and owed its origin to the summer spent by the Shelleys on the shores of Geneva when Byron was their neighbour. It was "a wet, ungenial summer," according ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... Unspeakable relief. Meet you at Sacramento." In Paris days I had a private name for Pinkerton: "The Irrepressible" was what I had called him in hours of bitterness, and the name rose once more on my lips. What mischief was he up to now? What new bowl was my benignant monster brewing for his Frankenstein? In what new imbroglio should I alight on the Pacific coast? My trust in the man was entire, and my distrust perfect. I knew he would never mean amiss; but I was convinced he would almost never (in my ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... same position was arrived at by Messrs. S. Loyd, E.N. Frankenstein, W.H. Thompson, and myself. So the following may be accepted as the best solution possible to this ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of Frankenstein's. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not forsake him ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... were too prolific, and were viewed as apologetic expedients to keep the relations between the two governments as smooth as possible in the face of conditions which were daily imperiling those relations. Germany appeared in the position of a Frankenstein who had created a hydra-headed monster of conspiracy and intrigue that had stampeded beyond control, and washed her hands of its depredations. The situation, however, was only susceptible to this view by ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... one of those nervous and fidgety persons who cannot understand their own children, looking on them as objectionable monsters whose next movements are uncertain—much as Frankenstein must have ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... still profitable, and could have been made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of inventions—that remorseless Frankenstein monster—the machine. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... with a look! It was weeks, I am not sure it wasn't months, before she took me back to her good graces. But Old Childe was magnanimous; he sent me a little pencil-drawing of his head, inscribed in the corner, 'To Frankenstein from his Monster.' ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland



Words linked to "Frankenstein" :   fictitious character, Frankenstein's monster, fictional character, agency, character



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