FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • More 'Gargoyle' Quotes from Famous Books

... nervously over the title backs. A second man, figure short, squat, red-faced, crowds the erratic scholar. A third. The rain is bringing them in in numbers. These are the basement students of the gargoyle philosophies, the gargoyle sciences, the gargoyle religions. Perpetual motion machine inventors, alchemists with staring, nervous-eyed medieval faces, fourth dimensionists, sun worshippers, cabalistic researchers, voodoo authorities—the old-book store is suddenly alive ...

— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... "As for you, little Sir Lily Liver, leaning out there, and, I frankly tell you, looking like nothing so much as a gargoyle hewn by a drunken stone-mason for the adornment of a Methodist Chapel in one of the vilest suburbs of Leeds or Wigan, I do but felicitate the river-god and his nymphs that their water was saved to-day by your cowardice from the contamination ...

— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... fountains continued to gurgle and murmur complacently, prattling with soothing insistence of the days of their youth, when men still had the time and the care for noble lines and curves, and war was the affair of princes and adventurers. Legend popped out of every corner and every gargoyle, and ran on padded soles through all the narrow little streets, like an invisible gossip whispering of peace and comfort. And the ancient chestnut trees nodded assent, and with the shadows of their outspread fingers stroked the frightened facades to calm them. The past grew so lavishly out of the ...

— Men in War • Andreas Latzko

... his face, grinning like an elated gargoyle; herself utterly limp, her every nerve a filament of ...

— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott

... is not so much a culture as a temperament, and Bladery—if the thing may have the name—a code of sentiments rather than a ritual. It is the rococo school of behaviour, the flamboyant gentleman, the gargoyle life. The Blade is the tribute innocence pays to vice. He may look like a devil and belong to a church. And the clothing of the Blade, being symbolical, is a very important part of him. It must show not only a certain tastiness, but also decision in the accent, courage in the pattern, ...

— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... bedroom, and wondering if they had been having springs like this all the time he had lived in the city, heard a scuffle outside the door. His wife's voice inquired breathlessly of Wallis, "Can Mr. Allan—see me?... Oh, gracious—don't, Foxy, you little black gargoyle! Open the door, ...

— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer

... which was a hard wooden knot. Half of the bullet stuck in the wood and half stuck out, so it had been the jar and the sudden noise that had knocked the creature down, more than the fact that it was really hurt. Before this crowned Gargoyle had recovered himself Zeb had wound a strap several times around its body, confining its wings and arms so that it could not move. Then, having tied the wooden creature securely, the boy buckled the strap and tossed his prisoner into the ...

— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.

... pathetic, half jeering. Her father tended to a supercilious, sneering tone. In Vina it came out in mad bursts of hilarious jeering. This made Miss Frost uneasy. She would watch the girl's strange face, that could take on a gargoyle look. She would see the eyes rolling strangely under sardonic eyelids, and then Miss Frost would feel that never, never had she known anything so utterly alien and incomprehensible and unsympathetic as her own ...

— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... familiar things of the room, the simple, companionable furniture of that known place, with the geometrically tempestuous ocean framed beyond, were resolved into a background of mysterious shadows as I stared; there was nothing left within the circle of my vision but a scared gargoyle, leaning into the red glow of the fire. My uncle's round little eyes protruded—started from the bristles and purpling scars and brown flesh of his broad face—as many a time before I had in sad bewilderment watched them do. Paid for—all the pride and comfort and strange ...

— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... severely broke in, shaking his pencil at her as he sat perched, like a benign gargoyle, by his study table. "I'll not have Farwell defrauded while he ...

— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... One grinning gargoyle looked in from beneath the roof through an opening in a stained window. It was the face of a mocking fiend, such as the old builders loved to place under the eaves to spout the rain through their open mouths. It looked at him, as he sat in his mitred chair, with its hideous grin growing ...

— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... whiteness, the thing leered and peered at me with a look that seemed to have about it all the fragrance of all the lilac-blossoms in the world, mixed with all the piety of all our race's children and the wantonness of all old heathen dreams. It is like Socrates, that head; and like a gargoyle on the tower ...

— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... at the end of the terrace and looked up at the dark massive pile of masonry above him. In every leering gargoyle and carved coping, he read the ...

— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... saw the donkey I saw him in the sunlight as the unearthly gargoyle that he is. My friend had met me in his car (I repeat firmly, in his car) at the little painted station in the middle of the warm wet woods and hop-fields of that western country. He proposed to drive me first to his house beyond the village before starting ...

— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... was the convulsed countenance of Captain Candage. Choler seemed to be consuming him. The freakish light painted everything with patterns in arabesque; the captain's face looked like the countenance of a gargoyle. ...

— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... for almost a new art in tonal combination, the effects of which one sees on every hand to-day. To realise its influence one need only compare the easy mastery of the arabesque displayed in the simplest piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors. We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those of the Englishman, ...

— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... but a glance told Brent that neither of them worked the key. The pair were gaunt and sinister of aspect and they were not town folk but creek-dwellers. One was evil-visaged to a point of gargoyle hideousness. The other was little better, and he raised a face to inspect the man in the door which some malignant sculptor might have modeled in pure spite, pinching it viciously here and there into sharp angles of ...

— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... time there was a sharp tinkling, as the higher windows cracked, broke, and fell upon the stones. Then came pouring down a spouting torrent of silver fire, shooting right out of a stone gargoyle-mouth as the molten lead from one part of the roof, dammed up by other lead which had not melted, at last forced its way spattering on to ...

— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... was by no means over. With five feet of steel piercing it through, it whirled with hardly abated vitality toward Dennis. Its gargoyle head came ...

— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst

... He grinned like a gargoyle. "You hear those boy, senor?" he reiterated happily. "I tell you those boy he like ol' Pablo. The night he come back he rub my head; yesterday he poke the rib of me with the thumb—now pretty soon he ...

— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... always had faces to me; they had definite expressions, and certain faces made me think of certain words. The words had no connection with these except sometimes by accident. The instances I give are few and ridiculous. When I think of the word Beast, it has a face something like a gargoyle. The word Green has also a gargoyle face, with the addition of big teeth. The word Blue blinks and looks silly, and turns to the right. The word Attention has the eyes greatly turned to the left. It is difficult to draw them properly because, like Alice's 'Cheshire cat,' which at ...

— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... hardly reached to my hips, so there was no bravery in the feat, and I felt a fool as I went wading out to the spot where, by this time, the dog's head had again appeared among the water-lily pads, the living image of a gargoyle. But as I hauled him out, with a word of encouragement, the poor chap's gratitude repaid me. Looking like a vert-de-gris statue of a dog, he licked such portions of me as he could reach with a green tongue, and blessed me ...

— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... starting-point for almost a new art in tonal combination, the effects of which one sees on every hand to-day. To realise its influence one need only compare the easy mastery of the arabesque displayed in the simplest piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors. We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those ...

— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... houses, which, when age had broken it, remained unrepaired, was of the remotest times, and everywhere were represented in stone beasts that have long since passed away from Earth—the dragon, the griffin, and the hippogriffin, and the different species of gargoyle. Nothing was to be found, whether material or custom, that was new in Astahahn. Now they took no notice at all of us as we went by, but continued their processions and ceremonies in the ancient city, and the sailors, knowing their custom, took no notice of them. But I ...

— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany

... Take this swift sketch, among others: "I imagine his slightly stooping, yet tall and well-grown figure, clothed in black, and with a picturesque straw hat, twining itself in and out of forest aisles, or craftily returning home with gargoyle-like stems over his shoulders."] ...

— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... that he had given me grounds for suspicion. He was as touchy about his blessed principles as an old maid about her age. I was feeling rather extra buckish myself and that didn't improve matters. His face was like a gargoyle as we went down to the beach to bathe, so I held my tongue. He was chewing the cud of his ...

— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... is, sir," Hinge answered, standing in attitude of attention, and smiling like a happy Gargoyle—"the news is, sir, as the Italians is playing Old Harry at Milan with them Austrians, and old Louis Philippe turned up at ...

— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray

... and the sculpture was reserved always, as in Greek and Roman work, for the plane surfaces of the building, with, as far as I recollect, two exceptions only, both in St. Mark's; namely, the bold and grotesque gargoyle on its north-west angle, and the angels which project from the four inner angles under the main cupola; both of these arrangements being plainly made under Lombardic influence. And if any other instances occur, which I may have at present forgotten, I am very sure the Northern ...

— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... "Not now, Gargoyle, old man." Taking the flowers from the thin hands, he laid them on the rug at his wife's feet, then gently motioned the intruder away. Gargoyle flitted contentedly down the broad steps to the smooth drive, and was soon hidden by masses of ...

— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the Mendips was shipped for export. The church is early Victorian Gothic, with a new chancel. The old ruined church on the hill is a conspicuous landmark from Weston. It is a Norm. building, altered in Perp. times, with a low central tower. Note (1) the restored Norm. N. doorway; (2) three-faced gargoyle on S. side of tower. Near the church is the shell of a watch-tower. The old Roman road which ran across the Mendips from Old Sarum had its terminus here. Uphill was once notable for a bone cavern, but this has now been destroyed by the encroachments of a quarry. The contents, which included ...

— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... senses was preternaturally acute. While all the church and the people swam in misty haze, one point in a dark corner grew clearer and clearer till she saw (what at another time she could not have discerned at all) a face—a gargoyle I think they call it—at the end of the arch next to the narrowing of the nave into the chancel, and in the shadow of that contraction. The face was beautiful in feature (the next to it was a grinning monkey), but it was not the features that were the most striking part. There was ...

— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... plur. of the Pers. Mizab (orig. Miz-i-abchannel of water) a spout for roof-rain. That which drains the Ka'abah on the N.-W. side is called Mizab al-Rahmah (Gargoyle of Mercy) and pilgrims stand under it for a douche of holy water. It is supposed to be of gold, but really of silver gold-plated and is described of Burckhardt and myself. (Pilgrimage iii. 164.) The length is 4 feet 10 in.; width 9 ...

— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... lacking here. Or, to be more accurate, something jars. The orchestra plays Grieg and Moszkowski; a smell of chocolate is in the air; that tall, pink lieutenant over there, with his cropped head and his outstanding ears, his backfisch waist and his mudscow feet—that military gargoyle, half lout and half fop, offends the roving eye. No doubt a handsome man, by German standards—even, perhaps a celebrated seducer, a soldier with a future—but the mere sight of him suffices to paralyse an American esophagus. Besides, there is the smell ...

— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright

... by, hunched like a gargoyle, with her vague face nested in the palms of her thin hands, sat the girl he had noted in the yellow house the day of his arrival. One glance at her and she seemed to bring the scene back. The sunny room, the children, the dogs, and the girl ...

— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... gate, built across the narrow road between the cliff and the river, and we enter the town. It has been raining and the cobblestones are slippery. They shine in the gleams of pale light that come from the top-heavy street lamps. Gargoyle water spouts drip drainage from the gables of ...

— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons

... road widened out and came abruptly to an end. A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet. It was down this that they poured the precious ore; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it millward down ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... heavy; then he began casting plates in copper, but they were hollow behind, and he could not get the effect he wanted, so after several wasted months he began again with olive wood. Often he would work all night; and no trouble was too much for his inexhaustible patience. Each statue, each gargoyle was copied, first in a drawing, then with the carving tools, and no hand but that of the artist ever touched the work. At the end of twenty-two years it was completed; not a detail missing inside or out; and then when all was done ...

— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... hairy, bloated, sinister, with the shadow of evil impulses worked into the mouth and eyes. For a moment he wagged at her in silence, and in the flickering radiance she saw each swollen vein, each gloomy furrow, with exaggerated distinctness. He reminded her vaguely of some hideous gargoyle she had seen hanging ...

— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... for you, little Sir Lily Liver, leaning out there, and, I frankly tell you, looking like nothing so much as a gargoyle hewn by a drunken stone-mason for the adornment of a Methodist Chapel in one of the vilest suburbs of Leeds or Wigan, I do but felicitate the river-god and his nymphs that their water was saved to-day by your cowardice from the ...

— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... he continued to simulate unconsciousness. This man had been his steadfast and self-forgetful friend. So the wounded man fought back the sense of clear and persistent reality, which had altered kindly features into a gargoyle of vindictiveness, and lay unmoving until Rowlett rose ...

— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... facets. It has only one clear story above the ground-floor; but the roof, rising steeply, has several projecting windows, with carved spandrels rather elegantly enclosed in oaken frames, and externally adorned with balustrades. Between each of these windows is a gargoyle presenting the fantastic jaws of an animal without a body, vomiting the rain-water upon large stones pierced with five holes. The two gables are surmounted by leaden bouquets,—a symbol of the bourgeoisie; for nobles ...

— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... was a sharp tinkling, as the higher windows cracked, broke, and fell upon the stones. Then came pouring down a spouting torrent of silver fire, shooting right out of a stone gargoyle-mouth as the molten lead from one part of the roof, dammed up by other lead which had not melted, at last forced its way spattering on to the paved ...

— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... the hushed and darkened town, the master rode into his castle. The Wolf was in his lair. But in the streets many a burgher's wife trembled on her bed, while her goodman peered cautiously over the leads by the side of a gargoyle, and fancied that already he heard the clamor of the partisans thundering at his door with the Duke's invitation to meet him in the ...

— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... man bent forward, glaring like a gargoyle, and his first attempts to speak were choked into inarticulate rumblings by his rage. His face reddened with a fever of passion which threw the veins on his temples into ...

— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... But when they did draw close to a dahabiyeh upon whose deck she saw some white-clad loungers, the Nubian gave a low order to the old woman who rose and gripped Arlee on the wrist and led her to the stateroom, sitting in silence opposite her like a squat gargoyle, till the Nubian's voice permitted ...

— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... the crowd, there sprang up a great male creature with the face of a gargoyle and the body of a jungle giant. Just once he reeled on his feet, as though black alcohol had befuddled him, then he steadied himself, flung both arms above his head, and rolled out a command which burst upon Kirby's ears ...

— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various