"Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own part, and leaving others to play theirs, assured that for all and each this life is the trial-time and test of eternity, the rehearsal for the performance in a future world, and "Things rarely go smooth at Rehearsal." Browning's joy in difficult rhyming as seen in this serio-grotesque jingle was great; some readers may be permitted to wish that many of his rhymes were not merely difficult but impossible. At a dinner given by Sir Leslie Stephen he met successfully the challenge to produce a rhyme ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... fitting deerskin coats reaching half way to the knees and decorated with elaborately painted designs in many colours. Their heads were covered with hairy hoods, and the ears of the animal from which they were made gave a grotesque and savage appearance to the wearers. Light fitting buckskin leggings, fringed on the outer side, encased their legs, and a pair of deerskin mittens dangled from the ends of a string which was slung around the ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... sixteen years, since I was fourteen and she was a little maid of two, and I lived neighbour to her in Suffolkshire. I can see myself at fourteen and laugh at the picture. All of us have our phases of comedy, our seasons when we are out of perspective and approach the grotesque and furnish our own ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... bete noire wreathed in smoke, coming on top of the emotions of the night, was almost too much for Mr Abney. He gesticulated for a moment in impassioned silence, his arms throwing grotesque ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... on the right side, the steep limestone hill being all in shadow, and the rough blocks looked like grotesque creatures peering out from among the blackening bushes; and as he rode on, the lad could not help thinking that by night the place might easily scare ignorant, untutored, superstitious people, who saw, or fancied they saw, strange lights here ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... remarkable in the appearance of this splendid islander was the elaborate tattooing displayed on every noble limb. All imaginable lines and curves and figures were delineated over his whole body, and in their grotesque variety and infinite profusion I could only compare them to the crowded groupings of quaint patterns we sometimes see in costly pieces of lacework. The most simple and remarkable of all these ornaments was that which decorated ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... gone, Anna proceeded to take a more particular survey of her apartment. It was a large, but not very lofty room, panelled with oak, and having two windows looking across a wide lawn to the main road. The bright fire in the ample fireplace illuminated the richly-carved cornice, with its grotesque heads and fanciful scrollwork. It had evidently been a dining-room, for some of the heavy furniture, in the fashion of the period in which it had been last inhabited, still remained. There were the massive table and the old-fashioned ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... instance, at the last General Election, or for President Kruger's hat in the election before; their poetic sense is perfect. The Chinaman with his pigtail is not an idle flippancy. He does typify with a compact precision exactly the thing the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots, that it is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy and evil magic calling monsters from the ends of the earth. The people hate the mine owner who can bring a Chinaman ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... Honore, opposite the Oratoire and near the office of the Messageries, at the sign of the Amour peintre. The shop was on the ground floor of a house sixty years old, and opened on the street by a vaulted arch the keystone of which bore a grotesque head with horns. The semicircle beneath the arch was occupied by an oil-painting representing "the Sicilian or Cupid the Painter," after a composition by Boucher, which Jean Blaise's father had put up in 1770 and which sun and rain had been doing their best ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... man or woman who would have been satisfied with playing the piano enough to read a score or sing sufficiently to take part in a chorus, has, in the case of other arts, to undergo the training of a painter, sculptor or art critic, and often to delude himself or herself with grotesque ambitions in ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... mad girl in the next but one, and the woman and man on that camel have just eloped from a place sixty miles away," the hearer would not disbelieve because he would know that nothing is too wild, grotesque, or horrible to happen in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... shone forth in the darkness like an evil sort of beacon, its silly grotesque face grinning like a true hobgoblin of Hallowe'en; for, having scooped out its pulp and seeds, they had set a candle therein and lighted it just before they sent ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... Wetherbee?" exclaimed Barker, with a deep frown upon his rugged features, which looked almost grotesque in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... impart, if I say that St. Paul's always seemed a dispersed and interrupted St. Peter's in its structure and decoration, and a very hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster Abbey in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey are often grotesque enough, but where they are so they are in the taste of times far enough back to have become rococo and charming. I do not mind a bronze Death starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me with his dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century; but I do very much mind the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the world; but that too was far from perfection. Schiller's style in the Robbers is partly of a kind with the incidents and feelings which it represents; strong and astonishing, and sometimes wildly grand; but likewise inartificial, coarse, and grotesque. His sentences, in their rude emphasis, come down like the club of Hercules; the stroke is often of a crushing force, but its sweep is irregular and awkward. When Moor is involved in the deepest intricacies of the old question, necessity and free will, and has convinced himself ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... giving to the materials much elegance of form. With those inimitable models from the Greek and Roman vases, brought into modern use by the ingenious Mr. Wedgwood, they will not bear a comparison. And nothing can be more rude and ill-designed than the grotesque figures and other objects painted, or rather daubed, on their porcelain, which however are generally the work of the wives and children of the labouring poor. That they can do better we have evident proof; for if a pattern be sent out from England, the artists in Canton ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... Grotesque uncertain shapes infest the dark And wings of bats are heard in aimless flight; Discordant voices cry and serpents hiss, No friendly star, no beacon's ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... punch had gone round, she waxed inveterately eloquent, indeed, so much so that the mourner, the colleen dhas dhun, herself was more than once forced to smile, and in some instances fairly to laugh at the odd grotesque spirit ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... seemed unbearable. At length, however, the door of the room in which the jury sat opened, and one by one they returned. With strained eyes, all looked at their faces, trying to read there what their decision was. It seemed almost grotesque that these twelve, commonplace, unimaginative men, with no ability out of the common order, with little or no knowledge of the law, with minds unfitted to grasp the inwardness of the evidence which had been given, should have to pronounce the verdict of life or death upon the young man who stood ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... himself that things would seem different in the morning; but when he wakened from a restless sleep, crowded with dreams one more grotesque than another, he was still prone to be gloomy. He could think more clearly by daylight—that was all: his pitying sympathy for her had only increased. It interfered with everything he did; just as it had formerly done—just ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of attempts to negotiate a peace is grotesque, yet the conditions surrounding the North and the South and the stress of the times speak in defence of the ambitious spirits who came to the front and essayed, by negotiations, to put an end to the war. Providence ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... the tender to the grotesque—would it not have been agreeable to hear something more than two lines from the lips of a lover so stout-hearted, yet so ardent, in his own rough, blunt way, as he who has thus ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... to the ground from the lowest platform. He looked around, dazed. The sky was pink in the east. It was dawn. Where had the night gone? He stared amazed at grotesque figures that waited, silent, patient, like beings from another world. Then he realized it was the fueling crew dressed in protective clothing, swathed like strange cocoons in plastic that would keep their vulnerable human skins from the harm of ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... ruined. This has a good apartment, and a fine gallery, a hundred and twenty feet by eighteen, which takes up one side: the wainscot is pretty and entire: the ceiling vaulted, and painted in a light genteel grotesque. The whole is built for show: for the back of the house is nothing but lath and plaster. From thence we Went to Bocton-Malherbe, where are remains of a house of the Wottons, and their tombs in the church; but the roads were so exceedingly ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... useless apparel, they commenced their task. After much cautious labor they gained their point and stood among the animals. As soon, however, as they arrived, one of the young horses of the band became frightened at the grotesque figures cut by the two creeping men and exhibited his fear by snorting and kicking up his heels. This alarmed the remainder of the horses and caused quite a commotion among them, which had the effect to alarm the savages, who sprang for their arms. With ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... where the Empress, Prince Henri, and a hundred and fifty of the chief nobility and foreign ministers sat down to supper. The rest of the company went up, by stairs on the outside of the room, into the lofty galleries placed all around on the inside. Such a row of masked visages, many of them with grotesque features and bushy beards, nodding from the side of the wall, appeared very ludicrous to those below. The entertainment was enlivened with a concert of music: and at different intervals persons in various habits entered the hall, and exhibited Cossack, Chinese, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... such exaggerated politeness, and with such a cunning leer in his eyes, that his tone and manner were most grotesque; and as he concluded he took up the large Bible ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... "[s]exually explicit language." The "Sexuality/Pornography" category includes, inter alia, "hard-core adult humor and literature" and "[s]exually explicit language." The "Tasteless" category includes "hard-to-stomach sites, including offensive, worthless or useless sites, grotesque or lurid depictions of bodily harm." The "Hacking" category blocks "sites providing information on or promoting illegal or questionable access to or use of communications equipment and/or software." SmartFilter ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... no farther. At that, two odd little beings sprang to his side; the one brown as the earth itself, with eyes like diamonds for brightness, and deft little fingers, cunning in all works of skill. Pulling off his wisp of a cap, and making a grotesque little bow, he asked, "Will you take a guide for the under-world tour?"—"That I will," said Alba, "for I no longer find myself able to move a step."—"Ha, ha!" laughed the dwarf, "of course you can't move in that great body, the ways are too narrow; you must come out of yourself ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... street doors. There were beasts of all sorts; horses, in particular, of every breed, from the spotted barrel on four pegs, with a small tippet for a mane, to the thoroughbred rocker on his highest mettle. As it would have been hard to count the dozens upon dozens of grotesque figures that were ever ready to commit all sorts of absurdities on the turning of a handle, so it would have been no easy task to mention any human folly, vice, or weakness, that had not its type, immediate or remote, in Caleb Plummer's room. And not ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the Edda will deny that Wuchowsen, or the Wind-blower, as he appears in the Passamaquoddy tale, is far more like the same bird of the Norsemen than the grotesque Thunder Bird of the Western tribes. He is distinctly spoken of by the Indians of Maine as a giant and a bird in one, sitting on a high cliff at the end of the sky, the wind—not thunder—coming from ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... jaws, gleaming fangs, raised hackles, and straining limbs, the great Wolfhound had pitted himself, with roaring fury, against the leather-coated man who wielded the hot iron. To an observer who had known of this, there would have been something at once rather pathetic and a good deal grotesque about Finn's present kittenish play with Jess. To lend verisimilitude to the game Finn had to growl low down in his throat at intervals, while Jess snarled and barked; but when Finn laid one paw on the kangaroo-hound's curved back, as he frequently did at different ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... backwards and forwards a hundred times between two points within the sacred precincts, repeating a prayer each time. The count is kept either upon the fingers or by depositing a length of twisted straw each time that the goal is reached; at this temple the place allotted for the ceremony is between a grotesque bronze figure of Tengu Sama ("the Dog of Heaven"), the terror of children, a most hideous monster with a gigantic nose, which it is beneficial to rub with a finger afterwards to be applied to one's own nose, and a large brown box inscribed with the characters Hiyaku Do in high relief, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... of locomotion. Its head was disproportionably small to the size of its body, judged according to our usual ideas of the relative difference of bulk between these parts, while its whiskers were evidently larger and stronger than those of any other animal. These singularities gave it a grotesque appearance, not lessened by an approximation in its square short countenance to a caricatured resemblance of the human face, while the half stolid half ferocious stare, with which it regarded us, contributed to render it ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... presents that had been promised to the "afflicted circle," they came to them duly, and from London too. And they were rich gifts also; but such a collection of odd and grotesque articles, certainly are not often got together. Master Raymond had commissioned an eccentric friend of his in London to purchase them, and send them on; acquainting him with the peculiar circumstances. There were yellow birds, and red dragons, and other fantastic animals, birds and beasts. ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... an air of learned indifference. He wants, in one respect, grace, form, expression; but he has everywhere sense and meaning, perfect costume and propriety. His personages always belong to the class and time represented, and are strictly versed in the business in hand. His grotesque compositions in particular, his Nymphs and Fauns, are superior (at least, as far as style is concerned) even to those of Rubens. They are taken more immediately out of fabulous history. Rubens' Satyrs and Bacchantes have a more jovial and voluptuous aspect, are more drunk with pleasure, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... matched well their inhospitable stare. The Starvation Mountains had always been reputed rich in mineral and malevolent in their attitude toward man and beast. Even the Joshua trees stood afar off and lifted grotesque arms defensively against them. But Casey was not easily daunted, and eerie places held for him no meaning save the purely material one. If he could find water and the rich vein of ore some one had told him was there, then Casey ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... no care of his anger followed me. Alone, in the dark, I thought only of the scene placed by the poet before my eye, where the free flow of life, sudden and graceful dialogue, and forms, whether grotesque or fair, seen in the broad lustre of his imagination, gave just what I wanted, and brought home the life I seemed born to live. My fancies swarmed like bees, as I contrived the rest of the story;—what all would do, what say, where go. My confinement tortured me. I could ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... entertain her; but whatever you do, don't laugh! It's awfully bad form to make fun of a visitor." And Lilias left the room, to return followed by a tall female figure, which certainly approached perilously near the grotesque in appearance. ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... you, madam," he began with a grotesque echo of the ancient pompousness. "God knows I had never anticipated such ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... very noble falls of water near Quebec, la Chaudiere and Montmorenci: the former is a prodigious sheet of water, rushing over the wildest rocks, and forming a scene grotesque, irregular, astonishing: the latter, less wild, less irregular, but more pleasing and more majestic, falls from an immense height, down the side of a romantic mountain, into the river St. Lawrence, opposite the most smiling part of the island of Orleans, to the cultivated ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... all. But I vaguely felt he and I were at cross-purposes. I grew almost as uncomfortable under his gaze as if he had been examining me in the interest of the other side. He managed to fluster me. As a witness for Harold, I was a grotesque failure. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... Benson decided that he simply could not go to the Naval Academy presenting any such grotesque picture as he did now. Yet he had no money about him with which to purchase more presentable clothes in town. So ...
— The Submarine Boys and the Middies - The Prize Detail at Annapolis • Victor G. Durham
... below by the lighthouse and a point of land, whereon stands the elephant. This elephant is not indigenous, and he stands alone in the sand, a wooden sham without an explanation. Why the hotel-keeper's mind along the coast regards this grotesque structure as a summer attraction it is difficult to see. But when one resort had him, he became a necessity everywhere. The travelers walked down to this monster, climbed the stairs in one of his legs, explored the rooms, looked ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... dirty. He carried two English ration bags, besides his own rucksack, and they were all filled to bursting with loot. Evil beamed from his narrow, leering eyes; and when he smiled at Boudru it twirled his demon-like mouth into a grotesque shape. He looked both depraved and suspicious, a disreputable scoundrel with a gun, and that, you will find in the fullness of time, was ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... to-day the lions of Dantzig—the Exchange, the Cathedral, and the Armoury. The Exchange is a most curious building of great antiquity, and the hall is certainly the most curious and grotesque room in the world. The walls are covered with large pictures and wooden statues painted in colour. It is a Gothic edifice built in 1379, and the roof of the hall is supported by four slender pillars. ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... course powerfully assisted by the creative state of the eye under this nervous apprehensiveness, I continued to shape into images of Agnes forms without end, that upon nearer approach presented the most grotesque contrasts to her impressive appearance. But I had ceased even to comprehend the ludicrous; my agitation was now so overruling and engrossing that I lost even my intellectual sense of it; and now first I understood practically and feelingly the anguish of hope alternating with disappointment, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... believe in the pathos of provincialisms. There is, however, no doubt of Mr. Swinburne's mastery over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not. The Weary Wedding has the concentration and colour of a great drama, and the quaintness of its style lends it something of the power of a grotesque. The ballad of The Witch-Mother, a mediaeval Medea who slays her children because her lord is faithless, is worth reading on account of its horrible simplicity. The Bride's Tragedy, with its strange ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... a spree. He had rolled up his coat for a pillow, and had thrown one arm across his purple, bloated face. Only the weak, helpless, open mouth could be seen. His muscular hands were relaxed, and the whole prostrate figure was pathetic in its unconsciousness of will and grotesque unhumanness. Fate had been too strong for Tom Davis. His birth and all the circumstances of his useless life had brought him with resistless certainty to this level, and his progress in the future could only be an ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... charming teeth. The black-rimmed glasses she wore emphasized the clearness and candor of her eyes. Her thick, fair hair was firmly fastened in a group of knobs down the back of her head. There was an element of the grotesque in her appearance and in her careful, clumsy movements, yet, with it, a quality almost graceful, that suggested homely and wholesome analogies,—freshly-baked bread; fair, sweet linen; the safety and content of evening firesides. This ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... rubbing his arm. No serious injury seemed to be done to the man, and the couple presently turned their attention to the machine by the roadside. They were not in cycling clothes Hoopdriver observed. One wore the grotesque raiment for which the Cockney discovery of the game of golf seems indirectly blamable. Even at this distance the flopping flatness of his cap, the bright brown leather at the top of his calves, and the chequering of his stockings were perceptible. The other, the rear ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... passion in it such as we find in Agamemnon or Othello. We sympathize, indeed, with the fears, the bravado, the despair that succeed the crime. But when all is said, the central figure of the book is born out of fantasy. He is a grotesque made alive by sheer imaginative intensity and passion. He is as distantly related to the humanity we know in life and the humanity we know in literature as the sober peasant who cut his friend's throat, saying, "God forgive me, ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... John Rebstock's from Williams Cache," continued Sassoon. The yarn would have sounded decently well in the circumstances for which it was intended, but in the searching gaze of the eyes now confronting and clearly recognizing him, it sounded so grotesque that de Spain would fully as lief have been sitting between his horse's legs as ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... ends abruptly in a country which is a complexity of gasometers, canals, railway junctions, between which cabbage fields in long spokes radiate from the train and revolve. There is the grotesque suggestion of many ships in the distance, for through gaps in a nondescript horizon masts appear in a kaleidoscopic way. The journey ends, usually in the rain, among iron sheds that are topped on the far ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... real Gloria had a far different part to play. Every morning, with a terrible reality at her heart, she glanced over the newspapers for news of John Storm. She had not far to look. A sort of grotesque romance had gathered about him, as of a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills. His name was the point of a pun; there were cartoons, caricatures, and all other forms of the joke that is not a joke because it ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... The one thing that more than any other has helped them to conceive of the American situation is its being the gigantic joke which we often feel it to be; I don't know but it appears to them more grotesque than it does to us even. At first, when Aristides would explain some peculiarity of ours, they would receive him with a gale of laughing, but this might change into cries of horror and pity later. ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... were shown many interesting things in the house—objects of art and of worship; things which told of distant lands and of hoary antiquity; engravings of a strange and disturbing character; variegated stones, turquoise, pearls; ugly, amorphous, and grotesque idols; representations of the god-child—there were many of these, but only one face profoundly ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... was a flare of torches and the grotesque play of shadows between the grotto-like walls of an abandoned coal mine. About her too ranged in the spectral formality of masked faces and black rubber coats; of peaked hats with low turned brims, stood ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... kind of "walking gentleman"; Lydia, though enamoured, is modest and dignified; Clinker is a worthy son of Bramble, with abundant good humour, and a pleasing vein of Wesleyan Methodism. But the grotesque spelling, rural vanity, and naivete of Winifred Jenkins, with her affection for her kitten, make her the most delightful of this wandering company. After beholding the humours and partaking of the waters of Bath, they follow ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... viceroy fell wounded into their hands and Canterac surrendered. On receipt of the glorious news, the people of Lima greeted Bolivar with wild enthusiasm. A Congress prolonged his dictatorship amid adulations that bordered on the grotesque. ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... His choice of themes was dictated less by a careful search after what was most characteristic of each epoch than by his own strong predilections. He loved the picturesque, the heroic, the enormous, the barbarous, the grotesque. Hence Eviradnus, Ratbert, Le Mariage de Roland. He loved also the weak, the poor, the defenceless, the old man and the little child. Hence Les Pauvres Gens, Booz endormi, Petit Paul. He delighted in the monstrous, he revelled in extremes, ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... rivulet which entered it out of the mouth of a gigantic crocodile well executed in brick and stone. The edges of the pond were bricked, and in the centre rose a fantastic and picturesque pavilion ornamented with grotesque statues. The pond was well stocked with fine fish, which come every morning to be fed at the sound of a wooden gong which is hung near for the purpose. On striking it a number of fish immediately came out ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... meeting so color long years of acquaintanceship, that, should these circumstances be comic in their nature, the intercourse which follows partakes much of the grotesque. Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of Edward Martin, apart from the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my memory a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wet, and almost naked, quickly followed; the whole forming, in their haggard looks and the endless variety of their costume, an assemblage at once as melancholy and grotesque as it is possible to conceive. So eager did the people appear to be to pour out upon us the full current of their sympathies, that shoes, hats, and other articles of urgent necessity were presented to several of the officers and men before they had even quitted ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... smoke went out through a little hole in the roof. This hall has never been restored, you see. That's the best thing about it, most people think, lady. Here's the oak paneling, turned gray with age; there, up on the wall, are the original grotesque figures, carved in wood; here, are two of the old tables, as old as the hall; and there's the musicians' gallery, at ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... popular, with his grotesque descriptions of life, his exaggerations, his impossible characters and improbable incidents: yet so genial in sympathies, so rich in humor, so indignant at wrongs, so broad in his humanity, that everybody loved to read ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... mysterious light moving about the yard,—a light that fell now on the bare wall, now on the front steps, making threads of gold of the twisted iron railings, then on the posts of the leaning fence, against which hung three feathery objects,—grotesque and curious in the changing shadows,—and again on some barrels and boxes surrounded by ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... quaint old place and one of the oldest boroughs in England. It contained, both in its main street and the narrow passages leading out of it, many old houses with projecting wooden beams ornamented with grotesque gargoyles and many other exquisite carvings in a good state of preservation. Like Totnes, the town possessed a "Butter Walk," built early in the seventeenth century, where houses supported by granite pillars overhung the pavement. ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... almost unpaid. Over against him was Howe, with eleven thousand men in the field, and still more in the city of New York, well disciplined and equipped, well-armed, well-fed, and furnished with every needful supply. The contrast is absolutely grotesque, and yet the force of one man's genius and will was such that this excellent British army was hemmed in and kept in harmless quiet ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... character, in the different phases of life, from the horrible to the grotesque, the grand to the comic, attest the versatility of his powers; and, whatever faults may be found by critics, the public will heartily render their quota of admiration to his magic touch, his rich and facile rendering of almost every thought that stirs, ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous
... a silk hat, that he might go to Washington with head- gear equal to the occasion. A farmer's wife knit him a pair of yarn stockings. Hundreds of such attentions, kind in intent, grotesque in appearance, he received with that kindness which is the soul of courtesy. There was a woman at whose modest farmhouse he had once dined on a bowl of bread and milk, because he had arrived after everything else had been eaten up. She came into Springfield to renew her ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... apace, With wondrous speed to take his place; Costly, yet so grotesque his gear, All start amazed as he draws near. Crosswise the guards before his face, Entrance to bar, their halberds hold— Yet there he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... who were of both sexes and chiefly elderly, seemed to me at that first sight to be dressed in every variety of out-of-date clothes, many of them rather shabby and some almost grotesque. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... at a foot's pace, followed by his twin shadows; past the temples of Maha Deo, still rosy where they faced the west, still rumbling and throbbing with muffled music; past wayside shrines, mere alcoves for grotesque images—Shiva, Lord of Death, or Ganesh the Elephant God—each with his scented garlands and his nickering chiragh; past shadowy groups round the dinner fires, cooking their evening meal: on and out through the double fortified gateways into the deserted road, his whole ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... select here and there incidents illustrative of the whole. And here let me say that the frequent attacks made on myself and others, that we were attracted to Free-thought propaganda by the gains it offered, formed a somewhat grotesque contrast to the facts. On one occasion I spent eight days in Northumberland and Durham, gave twelve lectures, and made a deficit of eleven shillings on the whole. Of course such a thing could not ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... gnarled beech fuel, and at the wood-lice which ran out from beneath the bark to the extremity of the logs as the heat approached them. The low-down ruddy light spread over the dark floor like the setting sun over a moor, fluttering on the grotesque countenances of the bright andirons, and touching all the furniture ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... burst forth at fifty different points at once. Not a street, not a court but has its "case." Over a dozen of John's hands are down with it already. Two more have sunk prostrate beside their work within the last hour. The panic grows grotesque. Men and women tear their clothes off, looking to see if they have anywhere upon them a rash or a patch of mottled skin, find that they have, or imagine that they have, and rush, screaming, half- undressed, into the street. Two men, meeting in a narrow passage, both rush back, too ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... pen is the only tool you can handle, your only means of earning bread! Year after year the number of you is multiplied; you crowd the doors of publishers and editors, hustling, grappling, exchanging maledictions. Oh, sorry spectacle, grotesque ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... then, abruptly, the candle they were carrying gave a little flicker. This time they stopped in their tracks and shouted. Bill suddenly loosened his hold on the younger man's shoulder and began hopping forward, and the light threw huge, grotesque, strangely moving shadows on the wall ahead of them. Dick ran after him, crowding on his heels and shouting meaningless hopes. Abruptly they came to a right-angle drift, and then, but a few yards down it, they discovered an upraise, crude and uncared-for, but climbing ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... by her Christian name, too sensitive to call by her surname, so Miss Grieve she remained, as announced, to the end of the chapter, and our rosy little Jane died before she was actually born. The man took her grotesque luggage into the kitchen, and Salemina escorted her thither, while Francesca and I fell into each ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cried the driver, for the old white steed had caught sight of the car and was testifying to its dislike of it by grotesque prancings and sidlings that threatened to wreck the ramshackle trap. "Here, get out of my way!" he ordered Oliver, "that is, if you know how to handle that snorting locomotive ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... the cook who asks for twenty sous from the Limousin whose nose with inflated nostrils took in the perfumes of beauty. To saunter is to enjoy life; it is to indulge the flight of fancy; it is to enjoy the sublime pictures of misery, of love, of joy, of gracious or grotesque physiognomies; it is to pierce with a glance the abysses of a thousand existences; for the young it is to desire all, and to possess all; for the old it is to live the life of the youthful, and to share their passions. Now how many answers have not the sauntering artists heard to the categorical ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... This is in course of years, the real, the hidden condition of a nation, which has been bathed in Christian ideas, whether it be a young vigorous race, or an old and degenerate; and it will manifest itself socially and historically in those characteristics, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hideous, sometimes despicable, of which we have so many instances, medieval and modern, both in this hemisphere and in the western. It is, I say, the necessary result of the intercommunion of divine faith ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... of all feasts of the Church he held views of an almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as nugatory and worthless, but the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful, and nothing less than an act of idolatry. 'The very word is Popish', he used to ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... (Hong Kong, 1902, p. 28). A still more positive judgment on this matter is passed by MADROLLE (Chine du Sud et de l'Est, Paris, 1904, p. 17). "The attitudes of the Venerable Ones," he says, "are remarkable for their life-like expression, or sometimes, singularly grotesque. One of these personalities placed on the right side of a great altar wears the costume of the 16th century, and we might be inclined to regard it as a Chinese representation of Marco Polo. It is probable, however, that the artist, who had to execute the statue ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... specimen of Chinese embroidery, fig. 246, resembles the first, as far as materials and execution are concerned, but the design is different. The grotesque animals, flowers and shells it represents, can be worked separately, or connected together so as to form a ...
— Encyclopedia of Needlework • Therese de Dillmont
... for the highest reaches of impassioned prose. Nor is this all. His pages do not lack in humor—humor of the truest and most delicate type; and if De Quincey is at times impelled beyond the bounds of taste, even these excursions demonstrate his power, at least in handling the grotesque. His sympathies, however, are always genuine, and often are profound. The pages of his autobiographic essays reveal the strength of his affections, while in the interpretation of such a character as that of Joan of Arc, or in allusions like those to the ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... at night in the light of a bonfire this dance is most grotesque and terrible. The naked black bodies, gleaming in the fire, the blood-curdling yells, and the demoniacal figures of the howling, leaping dancers, remind one of ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... works. Certain it is that the appetite for all kinds of fun, verbal and other was a part of Hood's nature. We see it in the practical jokes he was continually playing on his good-humored wife—such as altering into grotesque absurdity many of the words contained in her letters to friends: we see it—the mere animal love of jocularity, as it might be termed—in such a small point as his frequently addressing his friend Philip de Franck, in ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition. Weatherbury tower was a somewhat early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parish as distinct from ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... variations being of no service to man, and not beneficial, far more often injurious, to the creatures themselves? Did He ordain that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary, in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds? Did He cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary, in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man's brutal sport? But, if we give up the principle in one case—-if we do not admit ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... beautiful creations of their art. Moldings and capitals, pulpits, altars, and choir screens, the wooden seats for the clergy and choristers, are sometimes literally covered with carving representing graceful leaf and flower forms, familiar animals or grotesque monsters, biblical incidents or homely scenes from everyday life. In the cathedral of Wells, in England, one capital shows us among its vines and leaves a boy whose face is screwed up with pain from ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... a man of the City, should come to me, another man of the City, with such an absurd idea in your head, is simply grotesque.' ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... returned them with the remark that "almost any young gentleman with a sweet tooth might be expected to write such things." Mrs. Carlyle was a very clever woman, but she was not quite "educated up to" Keats. The history of letters is full of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of great art which has not yet been "classed." But we are here considering the much stranger and indeed extremely disconcerting case of a product which has been accepted, with acclamation, by the judges of one generation, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... servant watched him closely, and upon receiving a sign from his master, he too put on his official costume, which consisted of a velvet robe and a helmet. The servant then struck up a tune on the richly-toned organ which always formed a part of Mangin's outfit. The grotesque appearance of these individuals, and the music, soon drew together an ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... resolved to abandon the struggle, and set up on a less ambitious footing in one of the cabins at Lisconnel. So he got ready for the move by selling off his little bit of live stock, all except Rory, the old black pony, who had a very large head and a white face like a grotesque mask, and with whom he would not have parted on the most tempting terms. As for his great-aunt Moggy, when she heard of this arrangement, she resigned herself to her fate, which was obviously the Union away at Moynalone. What ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... school girl she had certainly done the lady's part well. What she wore I do not exactly know; nor would it perhaps be well to describe what might seem grotesque to such prejudiced readers as have no judgment beyond the fashions of the day. But I will not let pass the opportunity of reminding them how sadly old fashioned we of the present hour also look in the eyes of those equally infallible judges who have been ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to do her some injury, to force her to keep some memory of me. I knew her to be so beautiful that I should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, "I think you are hideous, grotesque; you are utterly disgusting!" However, I walked away, carrying with me, then and for ever afterwards, as the first illustration of a type of happiness rendered inaccessible to a little boy of my kind by certain laws of nature which it was impossible ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to itself these grotesque fallacies till it lost sight of plain and simple truths. Seven o'clock in the morning is too early for any rational human being to be herded into a factory at the call of a steam whistle. Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... complete till Grandfather Vine had done choking over his heel-taps, but Ellen had undoubtedly endured a good deal with remarkable patience—her virtue ought in justice to be rewarded. Also Joanna noticed for the first time that she was looking grotesque as well as uncomfortable, owing perhaps to the hat being still on hind part before. So the necessary dispensation was granted, and Ellen further refreshed by a ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... took place on the 8th of September. The ceremony was shorn of the grotesque pageantry of chivalric times, and was confined to the interior of the abbey. The royal procession moved in state carriages from St. James's Palace, and was escorted by the cavalry. His majesty was saluted with hearty ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... we might have had a much more disagreeable voyage in a better ship. Captain Blethen is beyond all praise, and so is the chief engineer, whose duties are incessant and most harassing, owing to the critical state of the engines. The Nevada now presents a grotesque appearance, for within the last few hours she has received such an added list to port that her starboard wheel looks nearly out of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... struggling up from the small fire, and the light from the one tall candle flickering and growing unsteady as it flashed upon the two thin, sharp faces close beside it, while the antique furniture looked more grotesque and grim than ever in the deep shadow, and the never-wearying clock still ticked calmly on, regardless alike of the contending elements without and the wordy warfare within; true it is that the conversation between the sisters was divested of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... his voice grew cheery, his old face shone, and in a burst of hearty enthusiasm he flung up his cap and cheered like a boy. So did the others, and as the fairy shout echoed through the belfry a troop of shadowy figures, with faces lovely or grotesque, tragical or gay, sailed by on the wings of the wintry wind and waved their hands to the spirits of ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... the human race in these respects. Wherever the corruption of humanity manifested itself especially in the abuse of supersensible powers for the satisfaction of lower inclinations, desires and passions, unsightly human shapes, grotesque in form and size were the result. These were not able to survive the Atlantean period, and became extinct. Post-Atlantean humanity was formed physically from those Atlantean ancestors in whom such a solidification of the bodily form had taken place that ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... corrupted people whom we are civilising by teaching them our vices. The ferocious and uncontrolled authority of grotesque bashaws, who gravely use their grand cordons of the Legion of Honour as handkerchiefs, and for a mere yea or nay order a man to be bastinadoed. It is the justice of the conscienceless, bespectacled cadis under the palm-tree, Maw-worms of the Koran and ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... Johnson, and many years before, as I have been assured by those who knew him earlier, Mr. Levet had an apartment in his house, or his chambers, and waited upon him every morning, through the whole course of his late and tedious breakfast. He was of a strange grotesque appearance, stiff and formal in his manner, and seldom said a word while any ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Aubin in Normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. It is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque Zola. It has the fundamental weakness of "The Ring and the Book"—the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. It is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to a masterpiece ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... cages, household utensils, ovens, furniture, little earthenware dishes full of food or water for the dog and the cats, a wooden clock, bed-quilts, engravings of Eisen, heaps of old iron, all these things mingled and massed together in a way that produced a most grotesque effect,—a true Parisian dusthole, in which were not lacking a few old numbers of ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... was devoted to hardware of all sorts, from excellent Dutch delf to the coarse pottery furnished by Staffordshire, with occasional luxuries in the form of Chelsea tea-services, or costly jars of grotesque shapes from Pekin, sent by the London china-shops. All sorts of toys and fancy articles were to be found. Painted mirrors, which were then greatly in fashion, fans, long leathern gloves, jewelled snuff-boxes, wooden ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the proper set. Shouts of laughter greeted every ridiculous pose and awkward stumble, and certainly nothing could be more provocative of merriment than their appearance. They trailed the dresses over the stubble in mock dignity; they improvised a dance, and went through all the grotesque changes they could invent. Their comments and jokes were most spicy and personal, ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... silence—a strange, unforgettable moment for Francis Ledsam, who seemed by some curious trick of the imagination to have been carried away into an impossible and grotesque world. The hum of eager conversation, the popping of corks, the little trills of feminine laughter, all blended into one sensual and not unmusical chorus, seemed to fade from his ears. He fancied himself in some subterranean place of vast dimensions, through the grim ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... little Poem, with much of the grotesque in its half-dozen Embellishments, and some tripping work in its lines. "The End," with "Who danced at the Wedding?" and the tail-piece—a devil-bantling, rocked by imps, and the cradle lit ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... pacify him presently. Habit is a tenacious ruler and, grotesque figures though we were, the "zur" he had addressed to me brought out the officer in me. I talked to him as I would have done to one of my own men, and he quietened down at last and ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... scientific, natural, and sacred,—its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh's palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of Mediaeval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert Duerer's day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of Art, in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, and sublime, be imagined, to surpass the Day and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... elephant, about the size of a trolley car and with 15-foot tusks; the giant sloth which could look into a second-story window; here the saber-toothed tiger fought with the megatherium; mighty rhinoceroses sloshed their clumsy way, and huge and grotesque birds filled the ...
— The Industrial Canal and Inner Harbor of New Orleans • Thomas Ewing Dabney
... curtains in front of the doorway parted. My eyes, lifted to the height of fair tallness they expected to encounter, looked for an instant upon vacancy. Then they dropped to meet those of a grotesque and piteous little hunchback, whose agonized gaze cried to me, as did the hitching of her poor shoulders and the sudden trembling flutter of her hands to her mouth: 'For God's ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... is, unquestionably, not a little staggering to the modern civilised conscience; and this particular war possessed the additional unpleasantness of having in it, at first sight, an element of the grotesque. It is not too much to say that it struck the majority of the British public as being of the nature of a very bad joke. For it was as though a very small and very cheeky boy, after making offensive signs, had spat in the nation's face. Clearly ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... by the facts. It was about here that I found that my credulity with regard to Belle was becoming over-taxed, though it may be that Mr. ROY MELDRUM, her creator, believed in her; he has at least a solemnity and sincerity of style that carries him, apparently unwitting, through every peril of the grotesque. Of course Belle comes to town, smashes all booking records at the Basilica, and establishes herself as the idol of society. Later on, I regret to add, she becomes, so to speak, tinged with wine. Perhaps this unfortunate failing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various |
