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More "Monstrosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbor, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the description of such forms of disease, like ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... instruments of which are not in tune individually, and with each other, is a monstrosity; the conductor, therefore, should take the greatest care that the musicians tune accurately. But this operation should not be performed in presence of the public; and, moreover, every instrumental noise—every kind of preluding between the acts—constitutes a real offence to all ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... monstrosity, all toad-like head and eyes, swam into the light beam and bumped blindly against the glass ball. For an instant it goggled crazily at us. The Professor took its picture. It blundered away. As it reached the darkness ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... quotations in which my notes abound I have not thought it needful in the Index to refer to the book unless the eminence of the author required a separate and a second entry. My labour would have been increased beyond all endurance and my Index have been swollen almost into a monstrosity had I always referred to the book as well as to the matter which was contained in the passage that I extracted. Though in such a variety of subjects there must be many omissions, yet I shall be greatly disappointed if actual errors are discovered. Every entry I have made ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... gives birth to a child with two heads and two mouths, and the two hands and two feet are between them[637], disease will settle upon that city (where the monstrosity was born). ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... would despise them. It was not the shooting-galleries, nor the cocoanut shies. It was not the arrangements of the beersellers, which were formidably Bacchic. It was not the boxing-booths, where adventurous youths could have teeth knocked out and eyes smashed in free of charge. It was not the monstrosity-booths, where misshapen and maimed creatures of both sexes were displayed all alive and nearly nude to anybody with a penny to spare. What Mr Snaggs and the ministers of religion objected to was the theatre-booths, in which the mirror, more or less cracked and tarnished, was held ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... extravagance, drollery. farce, comedy; burlesque &c (ridicule) 856; buffoonery &c (fun) 840; frippery; doggerel verses; absurdity &c 497; bombast &c (unmeaning) 517; anticlimax, bathos; eccentricity, monstrosity &c (unconformity) 83; laughingstock &c 857. V. be ridiculous &c adj.; pass from the sublime to the ridiculous; make one laugh; play the fool, make a fool of oneself, commit an absurdity. Adj. ridiculous, ludicrous; comical; droll, funny, laughable, pour rire, grotesque, farcical, odd; whimsical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... your measly St. Bernard monstrosity out of the ring. This is a class for collies, not for freaks. I refuse to judge that pup ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... can a little Fritz be nourished into a Friedrich the Great; while irrational man-mountains, of the beaverish or beaverish-vulpine sort, take such a price to fatten them into monstrosity! The Art-manufacture of your Friedrich can come very cheap, it would appear, if once Nature have done her part in regard to him, and there be mere honest will on the part of the by-standers. Thus Samuel Johnson, too, cost next to nothing in the way of board and entertainment in this world. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... from some ancient edifice, for many of them bore the marks of the old cathedral or castle chisel. They were the foot-tracks of a ruined monument of dark and painful history. More than this might be said of them. They were the blood-drops of a monstrosity chased from its den and hunted down by the people, who shuddered with horror at its sanguinary record of violence and wrong. As I approached the quiet village, whose pleasant-faced houses, great and small, looked like a congregation of old and young sitting reverently around the parish church ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... the assemblage as if he were looking at some weird monstrosity. For up to that time he had seen only the child in each individual face. But now all the round baby cheeks, the soft baby curls, and the mild baby eyes had vanished, and he saw only a gathering of ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... albino. His gray skin, because of its lack of pigmentation, was splotched with eczema; his wool was a dirty, yellowish white; his features were permanently distorted because of his lifelong efforts to keep the light from paining his pink eyes. The askaris threw this monstrosity upon his face before Lilla's chair. He lay moaning and feebly moving his hands, as if he were caressing ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness there can be no salvation; and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who looks for the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... other half, got lost till the other night and left this aching, pitiful, womanly thing behind, that bleeds to the touch and has tears. Why, man, I am either an angel, a devil, or both. Don't you go there and touch that little child, nor thrust your damned moral Caliban monstrosity into that sweet isle, nor break up with your seared conscience the glory of that unselfish act. If you do I'll kill ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... I became an anchorite battling to save myself from the newly discovered monstrosity of the flesh.... For several days I would be the victor, but the thing I hugged to my bosom would finally win. Then would follow a terror beyond comprehension, a horror of remorse and degradation that human nature seemed too frail to bear. I grew thinner ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... there are ABNORMAL natures in which the ordinary measure of the organ of perception—that is, the brain—is exceeded, just as nature frequently forms monstrosities in which ONE ORGAN is developed at the expense of the others. Such a monstrosity, if it reaches the highest degree, is called GENIUS, which at bottom is caused only by an abnormally rich and powerful brain. This organ of perception, which originally and in normal cases looks outward for the purpose of satisfying the wants of the will of life, receives in the ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... and wide, and more or less soft brim, ornamented by a ribbon alone. The addition of a single flower may be permitted, though this is like the admission of the camel's nose into the tent,—it may lead to the entrance of the hump—the monstrosity of the modern woman's bonnet, which of late years has by terms imitated a flower garden, a vegetable garden, an orchard, and, finally, with ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... The monstrosity seemed amused at the expressions of blank surprise upon the faces of his captives. "I learned your crude language from your brain cells while you slept under the red ray," he explained. "Also I learned many other things ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything but attractive, relating, as it did, merely to the escapade of a monstrosity. The surroundings are ignoble, the language is illiterate, the narrative from first to last is characterised by its grotesque extravagance. Yet the whole is presented to view in so utterly ludicrous ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of the Sixth Century A.E., the representative of a civilized Chartered Company, dueling to the death with swords with a barbarian king for a throne he had promised to another barbarian, or of what could happen on Uller if he allowed this four-armed monstrosity to kill him. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... article in a German paper written by one of your professors of international law, in which he maintained, evidently quite unconscious of the incredible monstrosity of his logic, that, because the Russians in their invasion of East Prussia had acted like barbarians, you therefore had the unquestioned right, as a measure of reprisal, to bombard ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... the last half-hitch around the saddle horn. "Yuh needn't worry," he said. "This medical monstrosity is more valuable to me than he is to you, right now. I'll ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... moment, psychical or physical. I don't think there are many people like her. I don't think that from the broad human-natural point of view it matters a great deal how she decides. But I am sure of this—that the more that kind of small monstrosity is publicly analysed and anatomised and made much of, the more her morbidities will increase in her, and the more unbearable in real life she is likely to become. Mr. Hardy's labour in this particular is a direct incentive to the study of hysteria as a fine ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... conquer our repugnance to its ugly looks and savage mien, and contemplate the hideous monstrosity,—as it is useless to deny that it combines the graces of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dickens' Quilp, with certain features of its own,—for the ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... said to have an intimate friend at school, a little girl is a monstrosity who has neither a friend nor a disciple; she had her disciple, whose name was Gladys Mann. Gladys was herself a little outside the pale. Most of her father's earnings went for drink, and Gladys's mother was openly known to take in washing to make ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously marked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritable embodiment of nightmare. He had the body of a man—a short, stocky, sinewy body—but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish as any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect. His skull sloped back so abruptly that he could hardly ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... but quickened intelligence, a keener spiritual flame. Where perception is adequate, expression is so too, and if a man will only grow sensitive to the various solicitations which anything monstrous combines, he will thereby perceive its monstrosity. Let him but enact his sensations, let him pause to make explicit the confused hints that threaten to stupefy him; he will find that he can follow out each of them only by rejecting and forgetting the others. To free his imagination in any direction ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... full of theoretical, one-sided, impractical men, who have turned all the energies of their lives into one faculty until they have developed, not a full-orbed, symmetrical man, but a monstrosity, while all their other faculties have atrophied and died. We often call these one-sided men geniuses, and the world excuses their impractical and almost idiotic conduct in most matters, because they can perform one kind of work that no one else can ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... all the management of her family affairs, and a real delight in having all things well ordered and agreeable in her home. This is one of the most pleasing of the many revelations of this book. We love to know that she was a true woman, and no intellectual monstrosity. The glimpses that are given of her nursing her father through his long last sickness are very sweet and touching, and everything connected with her devotion to Mr. Lewes's children, down to poor Thornie's death, makes us love her more and more. Indeed, it is a strong, pure, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... eight feet in height, she has a woman's body, exquisitely slim and young, with the breasts of a virgin. Very chaste in attitude, she holds in her hand a long-stemmed lotus flower, but by a contrast that nonplusses and paralyses you the delicate shoulders support the monstrosity of a huge lioness' head. The lappets of her bonnet fall on either side of her ears almost down to her breast, and surmounting the bonnet, by way of addition to the mysterious pomp, is a large moon disc. Her dead stare gives to the ferocity of her visage something unreasoning and fatal; ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... evenings in a week would be as much as I should covet to be in company; but I assure you that is a wonderful week in which I can get two, or one, to myself. I am never C.L., but always C.L. & Co. He who thought it not good for man to be alone, preserve me from the more prodigious monstrosity of being never by myself! I forget bed-time; but even there these sociable frogs clamber up to annoy me. Once a week, generally some singular evening that, being alone, I go to bed at the hour I ought ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... very glum, grim, gruesome, gory, but connubially-minded gentleman, whose ugly blue beard was a perfect monstrosity! ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ancient times, we toil steeply up here, with the dead upon his bier; for not often in Tiverton do we depend on that uncouth monstrosity, the hearse. It is not that we do not own one,—a rigid box of that name has belonged to us now for many a year; and when Sudleigh came out with a new one, plumes, trappings, and all, we broached the idea of emulating ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... sky, may be said to have sprung; and, by law of Nature, must grow. To judge by the madness and diseasedness both of itself, and of the soil and element it is in, one might expect the rapidity and monstrosity would ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... studied through his almost opaque defenses that indescribably ravening fireball, that esuriently rapacious monstrosity which might very well have come from the deepest pit of the hottest hell of mythology, felt strongly inclined to agree with Carlowitz. It didn't seem possible that anything could get any worse than that without exploding. And such an ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... his ambition had been educated only by the opportunities of a clerk and accountant in the smaller commercial houses of a seaport. He thought the rural Featherstones very simple absurd people, and they in their turn regarded his "bringing up" in a seaport town as an exaggeration of the monstrosity that their brother Peter, and still more Peter's property, should have had ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... never remembered his tooth to have created such a sensation; and when at last it was returned to him, he turned it about in his own hand, and cast many fond glances at the monstrosity, before it was finally deposited in his waistcoat pocket. This was the most ridiculous part of the exhibition: to see a gentleman, with the use of his eyes, looking affectionately at a thumping horse's tooth, and believing it to be his own. Yet ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... and beautiful capped windows were tucked between ugly new buildings, and across the shaded avenue of a green park was flung an extraordinary, four-winged spiral staircase of iron. I groaned at the monstrosity, saying that Pedro himself had never perpetrated an act more cruel; and the Cherub excused it sadly, by saying that it was convenient for the crowds to pass from one side of the street to the other, as I should see if I stayed beyond ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of marriage is too apparent to be glossed over any longer. "A.Y.Z." and "A Woman of No Importance" deserve the thanks of every honest heart for their brave outspokenness. Too long has this mediaeval monstrosity cramped our lives. The beautiful word "Home" conceals a doll's house or whitewashes a sepulchre. Marriage is misery in two syllables. How can people be happy chained together like galley-slaves? It contradicts all we know of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... ten feet high, as he later learned, supported a metal framework upon which squatted two men and the driver of the monstrosity. With the ponderous solemnity of a tank it came on to ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... received than the drama, as is indicated by this criticism by Hanslick: "Perhaps in a few years Ibsen's Peer Gynt will live only through Grieg's music, which, to my taste, has more poetry and artistic intelligence in every number than the whole five-act monstrosity of Ibsen." Among other notable orchestral and chamber music numbers may be mentioned a setting of Bjoernson's Sigurd the Crusader, Bergliot, based upon the sagas of the Norse kings, a suite composed for the two hundredth anniversary of Ludwig Holberg, and ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... future held this: that my name would disappear from the papers as suddenly as it had arrived there. People would want to know why I had given up writing. "Written himself out," "No staying power," "As short-lived as a Barnum monstrosity": these would be the remarks which would herald ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... of a fine grotesque—a genuine Gothic monster—is, that he shall, in spite of his monstrosity, retain a certain anatomical consistency: it must be conceivable that the animal organism could have developed along these lines. In the thirteenth century, this is always possible; but in much later times, and in the Renaissance, the grotesques simply became comic and degraded, and ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... before they reach home, they meet one of their best friends, a person whom the lady regards most kindly, and the young man admires and respects, and he greets him with, "Why, Tom! have you got one of those rowdy hats?" And so the stiff, stove-pipe monstrosity keeps its place, and the only pleasant, sensible, graceful, becoming hat that the nineteenth century has known, is called all sorts of bad names, and quiet gentlemen ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... predicament I'm placed in by the more and more extraordinary development of English manners. Many things have altered, goodness knows, since I was Aggie's age, but nothing's so different as what you all do with your girls. It's all a muddle, a compromise, a monstrosity, like everything else you produce; there's nothing in it that goes on all-fours. I see but one consistent way, which is our fine old foreign way and which makes—in the upper classes, mind you, for it's with them only I'm concerned—des femmes bien gracieuses. ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... sensuality. We hardly recognize our friend Faust when we find him dancing with naked witches and singing lewd songs on the Brocken. The scene was written in 1800 when Goethe had become a little cynical with respect to the artistic coherence of Faust and looked on it as a "monstrosity." It was a part of the early plan that Faust should add to the burden of his soul by frivolously deserting Margaret in the shame of her approaching motherhood and spending some time in gross pleasures. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in human beings and in the conception of a deity. In other words, it was an attempt at recognition, in the objects worshipped, of that missing female element which had always been worshipped, and without which a Creator becomes a misnomer—a meaningless, unexplained, and unexplainable monstrosity. ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... the capacity for being tormented is the only faculty which remains to the children of that same Father who cares for the falling sparrow. The Deity has often been pictured as Moloch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repudiated him as a monstrosity. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... allied to greyhounds; at the later of these periods a dog resembling a hound is figured, with drooping ears, but with a longer back and more pointed head than in our hounds. There is, also, a turnspit, with short and crooked legs, closely resembling the existing variety; but this kind of monstrosity is so common with various animals, as with the ancon sheep, and even, according to Rengger, with jaguars in Paraguay, that it would be rash to look at the monumental animal as the parent of all our turnspits: Colonel Sykes[9] ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... language and besides the art of weaving cloth possessed that of paper-making. Could it be that such grotesque beings represented the high culture of the human race within the boundaries of Caspak? Had natural selection produced during the countless ages of Caspakian life a winged monstrosity that represented the earthly ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Rochester would care. And he, Jones, would become in her eyes a ghoul, a monstrosity, ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... door, clad in Sunday best; and the children approached nearer, that they might share in the excitement of the departure for "meeting." Gay clamored to go, but was pacified by the gift of a rag-doll that Samantha had made for her the evening before. It was a monstrosity, but Gay dipped it instantly in the alembic of her imagination, and it became a beautiful, responsive little daughter, which she clasped close in her arms, and on which she showered the tenderest tokens of ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... quite understand that," said Indiman, who had joined us at the window. "There is a distinct stimulus to the imagination in the picture before us. And what a picture!—this eyeless, gray-faced, architectural monstrosity, crowned with squat, domelike head of coppery red, and set in that gigantic cadre of fifty-foot ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... picture, and we miss that which would have taken away the effect of strangeness—the perfect balance of the parts and harmony of the whole? For instance, the blue eyes of the northerner would, when first described to the black-eyed inhabitants of warm regions, seem unbeautiful and a monstrosity, because they would vividly see with the mental vision that unheard-of blueness, but not in the same vivid way the accompanying flesh and hair tints ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Sir, that, according to my conscientious conviction, we are now fixing on the Constitution of the United States, and its frame of government, a monstrosity, a disfiguration, an enormity! Sir, I hardly dare trust myself. I don't know but I may be under some delusion. It may be the weakness of my eyes that forms this monstrous apparition. But, if I may trust myself, if I can persuade myself ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... my forehead! A monstrosity so unparalleled overcame and paralyzed me. Cabrion profited by my stupor to replace my hat on my head: then, with a blow on the crown, bonneted me as you saw. The last outrage quite overpowered me—the ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... the house, lofty and spacious enough, but as to outline just so many boxes, with four straight walls, and never a niche or an alcove to break the severity of line. The hall was another square, and the staircase ascended straightly to the first landing, where a monstrosity of a stained-glass window lighted the ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Nature had many critics in the stormy days that followed 1789. Delisle de Sales found it a monstrosity—a fratras; La Harpe called it an infamous book, "un amas de btises qu'on ose appeler philosophie, inconcevables inepties, un immense chafaudage de mensonge et d'invective"; M. Villemain is much more calm and fair; ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... undisguised form. Dominion of man over man in other modes, such as absolute monarchy, aristocracy, feudalism, ecclesiastical rule—all these justify their exactions under the plea of the welfare of the subject, or the salvation of souls. Slavery has nothing of the kind behind which to hide its monstrosity; nor does it care to do so, except when hard pushed, and then it feebly pleads the christianization of the negro! A plea at which the common sense of mankind and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... unlicensed opinions, and it crushed spontaneity and innocent frivolity. It aimed, in a word, to deform human nature, and make of it somewhat rigid and artificial. These were some of the faults of Puritanism, and it was these which made possible such a monstrosity as Cotton Mather. He was, in a measure, a creature of his time and place, and in this degree we must consider Puritanism as amenable, with him, at the bar of history. It is for this reason solely that the witchcraft episode assumes ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... sun and wind, Vermillion, the fungus of trees, burnt and ground, common charcoal, deer tallow, and spruce gum are used for this purpose. Labrets—pieces of wood, bone or shell, from 1.5 to 2.5 inches in length—are worn by a few old females, but this hideous, monstrosity is now never found upon the young women. Many of the middle-aged, however, pierce the centre of the lower lip and insert a small silver tube, which projects about a quarter of an inch. Both sexes perforate the septum of the nose for rings, but I have only seen two worn by the Hydas, and these ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... the girl, strove to consider her impersonally, for her youthful beauty began to disturb him. Then cold doubt crept in; something of the monstrosity of the proceeding chilled his enthusiasm for occult research. ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... impression. But I reflected that probably the censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a survival, since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved because of that weakness one has for one's old possessions apart ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... dote upon an interesting monstrosity—the worse portion. Women admire courage, because it is the quality they lack—I mean animal courage, the mere faculty of looking into a pistol-muzzle calmly; and their admiration is so great that ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... monster of the Greek mythology, with a goat's body, a lion's head, and a dragon's tail; slain by Bellerophon, and a symbol of any impossible monstrosity. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... only can express the countess's sensations at the dropping of such a "monstrosity" into the midst of her family circle,—she was appalled! Never had any one ventured to address her with such freedom; never before had she been treated by any one as though she were mere flesh and blood. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... her a little greyhound, but it sickened and died. Remembering that a comrade-in-arms possessed a Turkish dwarf with an abnormally large head, he cast about to procure some such monstrosity for her amusement. He sent her jewellery—necklaces torn by his soldiers from the breasts of ladies in surrendered towns, rings wrested from ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... not even to exist." Hence they cannot endure to see me face to face. That I may not infect the rest, they desire my non-existence; by fair means, if fair will succeed; if not, then by foul. And whence comes this monstrosity into such bosoms? Weakness of common sense, dread of the common understanding, an insufficient faith in common morality, are surely the disease: and evidently, nothing so exasperates this disease as consecrating religious tenets which forbid ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... reached its real height of monstrosity when, concealing its identity under an assumed name, it entitled itself capital. Then its action was not limited to individual incitation to theft and murder but extended to the entire human race. With one word capital decided monopolies, erected ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... But the very monstrosity of appearances silenced Anthony after the first exclamation; and young Powell felt himself pierced through and through by the overshadowed glance of his captain. Anthony advanced quietly. The first impulse of Mr Powell, when discovered, had been to dash the glass on the deck. He ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... doctrines make little allowance, of sacrifice, even up to the total immolation of individuals, in behalf of society; hence the true explanation of war, eternal law of mankind, interpreted by the liberal-democratic doctrines as a degenerate absurdity or as a maddened monstrosity. ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... Schindler wrote to Moscheles in London about Beethoven in the last weeks of his life: "He said much about the plan of the tenth symphony. As the work had shaped itself in his imagination it might have become a musical monstrosity, compared with which his other symphonies would have ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue, stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... and see the meanness of your intellect, the vulgarity of your character,—and tell me whether a woman like Aniela ought to remain true to you for an hour! How did you manage to get her, you spiritual and physical upstart? Is it not an unnatural monstrosity that you are her husband? Dante's Beatrice, marrying a common Florentine cad, would ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... to a child that was scarcely recognisable; it had been dead in its mother's womb for at least ten days, so the doctors averred. Monsieur le Duc d'Orleans, however, insisted upon having this species of monstrosity baptised. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the figure as that of the stranger at the Maori Hut, but there every point of resemblance ceased. Only the cleverest of facial masques and body padding could ever have enabled this monstrosity to pass unnoticed in a world of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... slavery untouched, and twenty years' respite given to the slave-trade to feed and foster it, there began, with 1787, that system of bargaining, truckling, and compromising with a moral, political, and economic monstrosity, which makes the history of our dealing with slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century so discreditable to a great people. Each generation sought to shift its load upon the next, and the burden rolled on, until a generation came which was both too weak and too strong to bear ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... they belong to a different class of cases from cleistogamic flowers. This deficiency seems to result from the conditions to which the plants have been subjected, and partakes of the nature of a monstrosity. All the flowers on the same plant are commonly affected in the same manner. Such cases, though they have sometimes been ranked as cleistogamic, do not come within our present scope: see Dr. Maxwell Masters 'Vegetable Teratology' 1869 page 403.) They are manifestly adapted for ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... that Spirit, the Ally, and many other things and conditions in Corinth, with the lack of as many other things and conditions, are all due to the influence of what he calls "that hideous, cast-iron monstrosity." By this it will be seen that the Doctor is ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... sang and said in the private gatherings of the Methodist Societies could only deepen and intensify the feeling of monstrosity. They ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... a Tartar; it was true nihilism pushed to extreme practical conclusions. It was, in a word, the applied philosophy of chance, the indeterminateism of anarchy. Monstrous it may be, but grand in its monstrosity. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... wandered from the hotel's android servants ... to the strictly utilitarian mechanical monstrosity at home, known affectionately as "Old John" ... to the android showroom where they had seen the one that ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm
... of hell," she writes, "is a monstrosity, an imposture, a barbarism. . . . It is impious to doubt God's infinite pity, and to think that He does not always pardon, even the most guilty of men." This is certainly the most complete application that has ever been made of the law of pardon. This God is not the God ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... defeated husband drove home along the leafy borders of the beautiful Central Park—the one lovely oasis in New York's scattered maze of brick and iron monstrosity—he saw his life lying sere and yellow around him, his bare uplands scorched before ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... mystery of the Night Land, which I viewed through the great embrasure. For on none did it ever come with weariness to look out upon all the hideous mysteries; so that old and young watched, from early years to death, the black monstrosity of the Night Land, which this our last refuge of humanity ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... "but I cannot help it. I was created part man, part bird, part fish, part beast and part reptile, and such a monstrosity could not be otherwise than wicked. Everybody hates me, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... Old Home' from England. It is laughable to see the innocent wonder with which they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice, insanity, jealousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting the least suspicion that there may be a particle of truth in them. The monstrosity of their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimited admiration impresses them as malicious caricature. But they do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them. I would as soon hate ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... armament manufacture has played in bringing about the present horrible killing, and no one who has read accounts of the fighting can doubt how much this industry has enhanced the torment, cruelty, and monstrosity of war. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... it came it found bolt nor bar on door or window, but had immediate entrance. The secret of this power of reception was, that to see a truth and to do it was one and the same thing with Gibbie. To know and not do would have seemed to him an impossibility, as it is in vital idea a monstrosity. ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... sculptors, or as sensitive as the saints; but if we admit that it is a barbarous thing to pass by the beauties of art without perceiving them; that it is the mark of defective civilization to confound horrible coarseness and monstrosity with ideal beauty, to be unable to distinguish the strident noise of the tram-car wheels, or the deafening crash of ill-tuned instruments from the harmonies of Bellini or Wagner; that each of us would blush for such insensibility, and would ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... quivering entrails or to conjure up ghosts. All the satanic refinement that a perverted imagination in a state of insanity could conceive[79] pleased the malicious evil spirits; the more odious the monstrosity, the more assured was its efficacy. These abominable practices were sternly suppressed by the Roman government. Whereas, in the case of an astrologer who had committed an open transgression, the law was satisfied with expelling him from Rome—whither he generally ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Madonna of the Uffizi—I gave her in Florence. We had ransacked London together to find the Chippendale bookcase; and on its shelves stood books that had formed a bond between us, and copies of old reviews containing my fugitive contributions. A spurious Japanese dragon in faence, an inartistic monstrosity dear to her heart, at which I had often railed, grinned forgivingly at me from the mantel-piece. I have never realised how closely bound up with my habits was this drawing-room of Judith's. I stopped once more by ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... faster, fluttered between light and extinction, ceased to flicker and became mere fading specks of glowing red in a vast obscurity. In ten seconds the extinction was accomplished, and there was only this roaring darkness, a black monstrosity that had suddenly swallowed up ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... thoroughfare, a man of the people remained motionless in front of him, with eyes of astonishment fixed upon him. "What seem I to thee?" asked the emperor, flattered, no doubt, by this attention of the mob. "A great monstrosity," answered the Gaul. And that, at the end of about four years, was the universal cry: and against a mad emperor the only resource of the Roman world was at that time assassination. The captain of Caligula's guards rid Rome and the provinces ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... rudimentary. I'm afraid they are spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather effective—but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... sir. It served his purpose for the moment, I grant you. I was unhinged. The indignity, the very monstrosity of it, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... being understood be hidden in the breasts of other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden in mine,—which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity,—it is the key to many reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham's as my eyes had seen it, I should not be understood. Not only that, but I felt convinced that Miss Havisham too would not be understood; and although she was perfectly incomprehensible to me, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... nation in the world. Having proceeded at great length in this strain, stating various particulars, some of which may be gathered from Mr. Adams' reply, he concluded by challenging opposition to the opinion that there was no right of search in time of war, and that such a claim was a monstrosity. The greatest question in the world, which now agitated nearly all Christendom, was this mixed question of the slave-trade and the right of visit and search. To statements and arguments of this force and nature Mr. Adams made a scrutinizing and unanswerable ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... don't think you are, but it is only my duty to put the case plainly before you. That man who was buried this afternoon was simply unspeakable. He was a monstrosity of perverted morality. I cannot even bring myself to tell you what I know of him. I cannot even bring myself to give you the least hint of what my poor young sister, Clemency's mother, suffered in her brief life with him. You may ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... It is a hideous monster made of wood, and has five heads; in its hand it holds a trident. I could hardly refrain from smiling when I first saw it. It was difficult to believe that any man, sane or insane, could hold faith in such a monstrosity. My object, however, was to draw the poor mad fellow out, and I begged of him to take what steps he considered necessary in order to induce the creature to speak. He willingly obeyed my desire, and with great solemnity went through ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... Ghazan was as notable for the reverse. After recounting with great enthusiasm instances which he had witnessed of the daring and energy of Ghazan, the Armenian author goes on, "And the most remarkable thing of all was that within a frame so small, and ugly almost to monstrosity, there should be assembled nearly all those high qualities which nature is wont to associate with a form of symmetry and beauty. In fact among all his host of 200,000 Tartars you should scarcely find one of smaller stature or of uglier ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... were flung wide to a new conception of the man, and of what he might have become. I was going to America, and I paid an angry and reluctant visit to my London tailor thirty-six hours before I was to start. A suit of clothes had been sent home which, after an effective trying-on, was a monstrosity. I went straight to my tailor, put on the clothes and bade him look at them. He was a great tailor-he saw exactly what I saw, and what I saw was bad; and when a tailor will do that, you may be quite sure he is a good and a great man. He said the clothes were as bad as they ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... said that Goethe's "Faust" does not derive its greatness from its conformity to the traditional standards of what a tragedy should be. He himself was accustomed to refer to it cynically as a monstrosity, and yet he put himself into it as intensely as Dante put himself into "The Divine Comedy." A partial explanation of this apparent contradiction in the author's attitude is to be found in what has been said of its manner of composition. Goethe began it in his ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... involuntarily forward, rested on something flat, round, grotesque, horrid, something I took for a face, but a face which I knew could not be human. Then I understood the shadows. Uniting, they formed the outline of something lithe and tall, the outline of a monstrosity with a growth even as I had felt it—flat, round, grotesque, and horrid. Was it the phantasm of one of those poor waifs and strays, having all their bestialities and diseases magnified; or was it the spirit of a tree of ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest—to recall—the perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed problems should ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... that certain kinds of animals would confer peculiar gifts upon the unborn, while others would leave so strong an adverse impression that the child might become a monstrosity. A case of hare-lip was commonly attributed to the rabbit. It was said that a rabbit had charmed the mother and given to the babe its own features. Even the meat of certain animals was denied the pregnant woman, because it was supposed ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... she said, turning suddenly to Miss Raeburn, "have you heard what a monstrosity Alice has produced this last time in the way of a baby? It ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... think that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is proved to be the ideal. Many, for example, avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had a vision. They might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man. People say of such a figure, in almost feverish whispers, "He knows his own mind," which is exactly like saying in equally feverish whispers, "He blows his own nose." Human nature simply cannot subsist without a hope and aim ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... outer margin of the hand—the gradation which can be traced from a mere loose rudiment of a single digit to a completely double hand—the occasional appearance of additional digits in the salamander after a limb has been amputated—these various facts appear to indicate mere fluctuating monstrosity; and this perhaps is all that can be safely said. Nevertheless, as supernumerary digits in the higher animals, from their power of regrowth and from the number thus acquired exceeding five, partake of the nature ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... by the monstrosity he had created, for it was a loathsome, repulsive creature. Its head was flat and broad and sat upon its sloping shoulders without a connecting neck. Its legs were short, but its arms were long, and when standing erect it carried them well in ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... common sense. They must disbelieve all rational explanations of thoroughly proved experiences (only) which appear supernatural, derived from the average experience and study of the visible world. They must disbelieve the speciality of the Master and the Disciples, and that it is a monstrosity to test the wonders of show-folk by the same touchstone. Lastly, they must disbelieve that one of the best accredited chapters in the history of mankind is the chapter that records the astonishing deceits ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... written testimony to them I possess. Lastly, that Mr. Edward Chapman (the survivor of the original firm of Chapman & Hall) has set down in writing, for similar preservation, his personal knowledge of the origin and progress of this book, of the monstrosity of the baseless assertions in question, and (tested by details) even of the self-evident impossibility of there being any truth in them." The "written testimony" alluded to is also in my possession, having been inclosed ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... This monstrosity emanated from the brain of Ivan Hrosnoj, "the Terrible John." When he saw the architect's work complete he was delighted, loaded him with praise, embraced him, and then ordered his eyes to be ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the room for a closer inspection of the safe, and, as his flashlight played over the single dial, he shook his head whimsically. No, it would be hardly true to call that modern; it was only an ancient monstrosity, a helpless thing at the mercy ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... evidence enough of having a mind and a way of his own. My mother took him at his mother's valuation, and both she and my father have expressed admiration of the whole Browning tribe in their published journals. Mrs. Browning seemed to me a sort of miniature monstrosity; there was no body to her, only a mass of dark curls and queer, dark eyes, and an enormous mouth with thick lips; no portrait of her has dared to show the half of it. Her hand was like a bird's claw. Browning was a lusty, active, energetic person, dashing and plunging this way and that with ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... MONSTROSITIES.—Monstrosity in the foal is an occasional cause of difficult parturition, especially such monsters as show excessive development of some part of the body, a displacement or distortion of parts, or a redundancy of parts, as in double monsters. Monsters may be ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... or bleaching white among the heath. The valley,—evidently a dangerous one to the night traveller, from its bogs and its tarns,—is said to be haunted by a spirit peculiar to itself,—a mischievous, eccentric, grotesque creature, not unworthy, from the monstrosity of its form, of being associated with the old monsters of the Lias. Luidag—for so the goblin is called—has but one leg, terminating, like an ancient satyr's, in a cloven foot; but it is furnished with two arms, bearing hard fists at the end of them, with which it has been known to strike ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... crooked or straight Were fingers signalling the sky; The dog that strayed across the street Seemed four-legged by monstrosity. ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... is found in the drama and in fictitious narrative. Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue, stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that the men who composed it were witnesses of His Resurrection, and saw Him floating upwards and received into the Shechinah cloud and lost to their sight. Peter's change, witnessed by the words of my text—these bold and clear-sighted words—seems to me to be a perfect monstrosity, and incapable of explication, unless he saw the risen Lord, beheld the ascended Christ, was touched with the fiery Spirit descending on Pentecost, and so 'out of weakness was made strong,' and from a babe sprang to the stature of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the public thoroughfare, a man of the people remained motionless in front of him, with eyes of astonishment fixed upon him. "What seem I to thee?" asked the emperor, flattered, no doubt, by this attention of the mob. "A great monstrosity," answered the Gaul. And that, at the end of about four years, was the universal cry: and against a mad emperor the only resource of the Roman world was at that time assassination. The captain of Caligula's guards rid Rome ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and said in the private gatherings of the Methodist Societies could only deepen and intensify the feeling of monstrosity. ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... on his chin and cheeks, a childish smile on his lips, frank, beautiful, pale violet-blue eyes, he had a most winsome countenance. But behind the angelic front was hidden a very demon. Jackson was a monstrosity if you will, a whited sepulchre, and one of the unaccountable freaks of nature. To those not knowing his habits, a handsome, affable, pleasing man of fine form and features; to those who knew him truly, a villain of the deepest dye, a very demon in ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... walls, and the slates on the roof to have turned pale with shame; but I was careful not to communicate these impressions to the aged artificer at my side; and when he would direct my attention to some fresh monstrosity—perhaps with the comment, "There's an idee of mine's: it's cheap and tasty, and had a graand run; the idee was soon stole, and there's whole deestricts near Glesgie with the goathic adeetion and that plunth,"—I would civilly make haste to admire and (what I found particularly ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... gave loud thanks that liberty and light were breaking in upon Sardinia. If there was an unsuccessful attempt to murder the Grand Duke, we lifted up our voices to celebrate the faith and sufferings of the dear persecuted Tuscans, and the record of some apocryphal monstrosity in Naples would only reveal to us a glorious opening for Gospel energy. My Father celebrated the announcement in the newspapers of a considerable emigration from the Papal Dominions by rejoicing at 'this outcrowding of many, throughout ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... little askew upon the ground, seeming to be partly buried in the earth. A hundred feet and more in length, it was even more obviously a monstrosity as he looked at it in the bright light of day. But now it was not alone. Beside it a white tower reared upward. Pure white and glistening in the sunshine, a bulging, uneven shaft rose a hundred feet sheer. It looked as solid as marble. Its purpose was unguessable. ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... ladies of Sancerre. And they ended by denying a superiority—after all, merely comparative!—which emphasized their ignorance, and did not forgive it. Where the whole population is hunch-backed, a straight shape is the monstrosity; Dinah was regarded as monstrous and dangerous, and she found ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... bottles, stolid curiosity, beery satisfaction, careworn stall-keepers with babies-in-arms and strange trust about their wares and honesty over change; giddy-go-rounds, photograph booths, marionettes, the fat woman, the double-headed monstrosity, ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Chinese love to paint on screens, or, more exactly, to the Hindoo idols which seem to be imitated from some non-existent type, found, nevertheless, now and again by travelers. Esther shuddered as she looked at this monstrosity, dressed out in a white apron over ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... York City in 1895, when Roosevelt took control, was a monstrosity which, in almost every respect, did exactly the opposite from what the Police System is organized to do. Moral values had been so perverted that it took a strong man to hold fast to the rudimentary distinctions between Good and Evil. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... territory, has grown to be one of the leading Powers of Europe by the gradual absorption of all the surrounding small States; therefore only great Powers have a right to exist (paragraph XXII.); therefore small States are a monstrosity (paragraph XXIII.). ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... can express the countess's sensations at the dropping of such a "monstrosity" into the midst of her family circle,—she was appalled! Never had any one ventured to address her with such freedom; never before had she been treated by any one as though she were mere flesh and blood. She had not believed it possible ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... travel from the manure and seed of the previous crop in the circulation of the plant to the capsule, and thus convert the grain into a puff-ball, so also the ears of corn, the oats, and rye. This monstrosity on the rye grains is called ergot, or spurred rye, and when it is eaten by chickens or other fowls their feet and legs shrivel or perish with dry gangrene, not because the spores of the fungus which produced the spurred rye ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... its strength be diminished, the feeling that the scandal is too good to be true—all these little hedges, and more, had to be broken through. To the Dinnafords, the unholy importance of what Noel had said to them would have continued to keep them dumb, out of self-protection; but its monstrosity had given them the feeling that there must be some mistake, that the girl had been overtaken by a wild desire to "pull their legs" as dear Charlie would say. With the hope of getting this view confirmed, they lay in wait for the old nurse who took the baby out, and obtained the information, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wind, Vermillion, the fungus of trees, burnt and ground, common charcoal, deer tallow, and spruce gum are used for this purpose. Labrets—pieces of wood, bone or shell, from 1.5 to 2.5 inches in length—are worn by a few old females, but this hideous, monstrosity is now never found upon the young women. Many of the middle-aged, however, pierce the centre of the lower lip and insert a small silver tube, which projects about a quarter of an inch. Both sexes perforate the septum of the ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... another; and further off a young Triton, with clotted hair and heavy eyes, seems ready to sink wounded below the rippling wavelets, with the massive head and marble agony of the dying Alexander; enigmatic figures, grand and grotesque, lean, haggard, vehement, and yet, in the midst of violence and monstrosity, unaccountably antique. The other print, called the Bacchanal, has no background: half-a-dozen male figures stand separate and naked as in a bas-relief. Some are leaning against a vine-wreathed tub; ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... cocoon and put it in his house where he could watch it develop. One day he saw a little insect struggling inside the cocoon. It was trying to get out of the envelope. It seemed in trouble and needed help. He opened the envelope with a knife and set the struggling insect free. But out came a monstrosity that soon died. It had an over-developed body and under-developed wings. He learned that helping the insect was killing it. He took away from it the very thing it had to have—the struggle. For it was this struggle of breaking its own way out ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... else. That these cries can be uttered together in the face of heaven, in the face of truth, proves at a stroke the monstrosity of the laws which rule us, and the madness ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... accentuated by the hideous little cupola—I hardly know how properly to call it—that squats, as though in derision, above the crossing; whilst even the natural meeting and intersection at this point of high roofs, which in itself would rise to dignity, is wantonly neglected to make way for this monstrosity. The church, in fact, looks, when viewed externally, more like four separate churches than one; and when we step inside, with all the best will in the world to make the best of it, it is hard to find, much to admire, ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... pad, three virgin quill pens (it was one of Adrian's whimsies to write always with quills), lying in a brass dish, and an office stationery case closed and aggressively new. The sight of this last monstrosity, I thought, would play the deuce with my imagination and send it on a devastating tour round the Tottenham Court Road, but not having the artistic temperament and catching a glance of challenge from Doria, I ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... dwell upon, barely endurable to look at. What interested me in her was her wonderful shamelessness, the desperately full measure of calculated sin which she had committed. She really occupied me too much, my brain was absolutely inflated by this singular monstrosity of a creature, and I worked for two hours, without a pause, at my drama. When I had finished half-a score of pages, perhaps twelve, often with much effort, at times with long intervals, in which I wrote in vain and had to tear ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... to study the facts of the case, and all these artificial clouds will roll away at once. We have an evil heredity behind us in this matter, for we have inherited all kinds of funereal horrors from our forefathers, and so we are used to them, and we do not see the absurdity and the monstrosity of them. The ancients were in this respect wiser than we, for they did not associate all this phantasmagoria of gloom with the death of the body—partly perhaps because they had a much more rational method of disposing of the body—a method ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... regularity of its unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weaker portions of Titus Andronicus and the First Part of King Henry the Sixth—the opening scene, for example, of either play. With Andronicus it has also in common the quality of exceptional monstrosity, a delight in the parade of mutilation as well as of massacre. It seems to me possible that the same hand may have been at work on all three plays; for that Marlowe's is traceable in those parts of the two retouched by Shakespeare which bear no traces of his touch is a theory ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... a woman gives birth to a child with two heads and two mouths, and the two hands and two feet are between them[637], disease will settle upon that city (where the monstrosity was born). ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... district{252}. Perhaps the immense class of double flowers chiefly owe their structure to an excess of food acting on parts rendered slightly sterile and less capable of performing their true function, and therefore liable to be rendered monstrous, which monstrosity, like any other disease, is inherited and rendered common. So far from domestication being in itself unfavourable to fertility, it is well known that when an organism is once capable of submission to such conditions fertility is increased{253} beyond the natural limit. According ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... the table before me and I watch him closely. With his gleaming eyes, overshadowed by his antennae, he also sees me; he watches me; he observes me, if I may so express myself. What can be the visual impression of the insect when face to face with that monstrosity, man? How does the pigmy measure the enormous monument that is the human body? Seen from the depths of the infinitely little, the ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... what now, I wonder?" he said. By his tone he seemed to be preparing to resent some new monstrosity in the way of dins and smashes. He shaded his eyes with his grimy hand and gazed ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... said Jean, "there was no thought of pleasing either you or me when she was christened—or rather when the late Mr. Duff-Whalley was christened. And I pointed out the house to you the other day. You asked what the monstrosity was, and I told you it was called ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... traced from a mere loose rudiment of a single digit to a completely double hand—the occasional appearance of additional digits in the salamander after a limb has been amputated—these various facts appear to indicate mere fluctuating monstrosity; and this perhaps is all that can be safely said. Nevertheless, as supernumerary digits in the higher animals, from their power of regrowth and from the number thus acquired exceeding five, partake of the nature of the digits in the lower vertebrate animals;—as they occur by no ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... anomaly; anomalousness &c adj.^; exception, peculiarity; infraction of law, breach, of law, violation of law, violation of custom, violation of usage, infringement of law, infringement of custom, infringement of usage; teratism^, eccentricity, bizarrerie^, oddity, je ne sais quoi [Fr.], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; salvo &c (qualification) 469. nonconformist; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Zog, "but I cannot help it. I was created part man, part bird, part fish, part beast and part reptile, and such a monstrosity could not be otherwise than wicked. Everybody hates me, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbor, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the description of such forms of disease, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... have no fear that the sons of men will ever forsake you because of your clothes. When you find a man dictating to the ladies what they shall wear you're pretty apt to see his head housed in a stove- pipe hat—the most inartistic and awkward monstrosity ever designed by the devil to make the Almighty ashamed of his masterpiece. In all history there's no record of a great idea being born in a beegum. I never saw a statue of a hero or picture of a martyr with a ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... never been heard to bark, where birds are found covered with hair, and where mammals jump about like frogs! If these are shown to be literal facts, the mind is thereby well prepared for any animal monstrosity: and it staggers not in unbelief (on evidence of honest travellers) even when informed of a creature with a duck's bill and a beaver's body: it really amounted in Australia to an ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... strove to consider her impersonally, for her youthful beauty began to disturb him. Then cold doubt crept in; something of the monstrosity of the proceeding chilled his enthusiasm for occult research. ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... of the execution and would put everything right—that Christophe must not show himself and that if he made any remark it would have a very bad effect. He made Christophe sit at the very back of the box. Christophe obeyed, but he beat his head with his fists; and every fresh monstrosity drew from him a groan of indignation ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... of what the world has worshipped, and of all the varieties of monstrosity, not the less monstrous because sometimes beautiful, before which men have bowed. Cruel, lustful, rapacious, capricious, selfish, indifferent deities they have adored. And then, 'God hath established,' proved, demonstrated 'His love to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... reason for his abhorrence of Antonio, whom he says he loathes with the inexplicable revulsion of nature that certain men feel toward certain animals; and the mastery of the poet shows itself in thus making Shylock's cruelty monstrous, and accounting for it as an abnormal monstrosity. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... be so? What should such a monstrosity produce but miseries and crimes? What is monarchy? It has been finely disguised, and the people familiarized with the odious title: in its real sense the word signifies the absolute power of one single individual, who may with impunity be stupid, treacherous, tyrannical, etc. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... charming spot on which it was erected. Across the way stood the other cottage, with the same number of rooms as its vis-a-vis, but really exquisite in its simple beauty. And the latter, I was told, though equally spacious, cost less than the monstrosity across the way! Into the one, there was put thought; into the other none. Can we resist an opinion as to which ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... But I reflected that probably the censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a survival, since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved because of that weakness one has for one's old possessions apart ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it conforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when nature suddenly astonishes us with a form of absolute beauty. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... test of a fine grotesque—a genuine Gothic monster—is, that he shall, in spite of his monstrosity, retain a certain anatomical consistency: it must be conceivable that the animal organism could have developed along these lines. In the thirteenth century, this is always possible; but in much ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... pursued in all ways, and, in case of success, the moment will soon arrive when many States will see themselves placed, as is the case already with South Carolina, in presence of a number of slaves exceeding that of free men. Such a social monstrosity never existed under the sun; even in Greece, even in Rome, even among the Mussulmans, the total number of free men remained superior; the colonies alone, through the effect of the slave trade, presented an inverse phenomenon, ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... more closely do some birds resemble mammals in the habit of secreting a sort of milk for the sustenance of their nestlings. Most people think the phrase "pigeon's milk" is much like the phrase "the horse-marines," a burlesque name for an absurd and impossible monstrosity. But it is nothing of the sort: it answers to a real fact in the economy of certain doves, which eat grain or seeds, grind and digest it in their own gizzards into a fine soft pulp or porridge, and then feed their young ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... tub. After the thaw all the artichokes were ruined. The cabbages gave him some consolation. One of them especially excited his hopes. It expanded and shut up quickly, but ended by becoming prodigious and absolutely uneatable. No matter—Pecuchet was content with being the possessor of a monstrosity! ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... honestly—that you did not dislike my asking questions on general points, you of course answering or not as time or inclination might serve. I find in the animal kingdom that the proposition that any part or organ developed normally (i.e., not a monstrosity) in a species in any HIGH or UNUSUAL degree, compared with the same part or organ in allied species, tends to be HIGHLY VARIABLE. I cannot doubt this from my mass of collected facts. To give an instance, the Cross-bill ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... of course very rarely, there are ABNORMAL natures in which the ordinary measure of the organ of perception—that is, the brain—is exceeded, just as nature frequently forms monstrosities in which ONE ORGAN is developed at the expense of the others. Such a monstrosity, if it reaches the highest degree, is called GENIUS, which at bottom is caused only by an abnormally rich and powerful brain. This organ of perception, which originally and in normal cases looks outward for the purpose of satisfying the wants of the will of life, receives in ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... and virtually expresses regret that he had not himself, from the beginning, imagined an earlier date for the action. But he fears that to change the time, now that the piece is finished, will result in making it a monstrosity, a ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... hues, his form, the crookedness of which he was as proud as any courtier of his symmetry and beauty, the while his dark, vain soul lay concealed behind the mask of merry deformity and laughing monstrosity. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... and, as anticipated, the butts we saw were of much larger dimensions, especially about the waist, than those we had seen farther north. If "Toby" was of the same proportions as one of these he must have been quite a monstrosity. ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Waters the sultan has his own kiosk, a gilded monstrosity of architecture, and at its window, worn, pallid, haggard, gazing out with lacklustre and indifferent eye upon the scene below, this shadow of the Prophet might frequently be seen a few years since. It ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... the Romish idol Maozim, Dan. 11, 38. (Tschackert, 510.) Frank remarks: "One must see this passage black on white in order to believe the Wittenbergers really capable of stultifying themselves in such an incredible manner. It is a monstrosity, a defense unworthy of an honest man, let alone an Evangelical ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... recognise the predicament I'm placed in by the more and more extraordinary development of English manners. Many things have altered, goodness knows, since I was Aggie's age, but nothing's so different as what you all do with your girls. It's all a muddle, a compromise, a monstrosity, like everything else you produce; there's nothing in it that goes on all-fours. I see but one consistent way, which is our fine old foreign way and which makes—in the upper classes, mind you, for it's with them only I'm concerned—des femmes bien gracieuses. ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... choking with rage. For awhile, in silence, the party gazed at the pitiful, hideous monstrosity that had once been a man. Then the ever-practical Redmond proceeded, with the aid of a large pebble, to burst, strand by strand, the wire which bound the ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... of again being able to take the sea for fishing, shooting, or sailing purposes. Alas! poor "Yellow Boy," I shall never see your like again! (neither probably will anyone else!) She answered my purpose admirably, but as a model of naval construction she was an absolute monstrosity, and would have made an object of great interest in a naval exhibition. I deeply regretted her loss, as I wanted to take her home as a great curiosity to open the eyes of the Yarmouth fishermen; but it was not to be, and I turned sadly away; my chief occupation (that ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... our repugnance to its ugly looks and savage mien, and contemplate the hideous monstrosity,—as it is useless to deny that it combines the graces of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dickens' Quilp, with certain features of its own,—for the good it ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... ceremony that went on down to Plutarch's time, and he tells us[24] it was "ancestral." It was called "the Driving out of Ox-hunger." By Ox-hunger was meant any great ravenous hunger, and the very intensity and monstrosity of the word takes us back to days when famine was a grim reality. When Plutarch was archon he had, as chief official, to perform the ceremony at the Prytaneion, or Common Hearth. A slave was taken, beaten with rods of a magical plant, and driven out of doors to the words: ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... pious dispute between Treves and Argenteuil as to which possesses the real seamless coat that was taken from him at the Crucifixion and raffled for by the Roman soldiers. No one but the second person of the Trinity, unless it be the first or third person of that three-headed monstrosity, is adequate to the settlement of this distracting quarrel. Even the Papacy, which represents the Holy Trinity on earth, is at variance with itself. Pope Leo favors Treves, and the wicked pilgrims who visit ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... hell," she writes, "is a monstrosity, an imposture, a barbarism. . . . It is impious to doubt God's infinite pity, and to think that He does not always pardon, even the most guilty of men." This is certainly the most complete application that has ever been made of the law of pardon. This God is not the God of Jacob, nor ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... for a closer inspection of the safe, and, as his flashlight played over the single dial, he shook his head whimsically. No, it would be hardly true to call that modern; it was only an ancient monstrosity, a helpless thing at the mercy ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... exactly what it is, is simply to ignore the facts of the case. John Bunyan is far more interesting just because his work is part of English literature, because it did feel the influences of his own time and of the past, than it could ever have been as the mere monstrosity of detachment which it has been supposed to be. The idealist who merely dreams and takes no part in the battle, refusing to know or utilise the writing of any other man, can be no fair judge of the life which he criticises, and no reliable guide ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... not, of course, presume to name, scarcely presumed to think, it seemed so like an unnatural monstrosity of my own mind. But when, one morning, the child died, holding in his hands the bonbons his mother had given him, and Madame C——, all agitation and frenzy and weeping, still contrived to extract them from the tightly closed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... child, the young man who doesn't plan to have a home of his own to which he can lead the choice of his heart and in which he may multiply, thru the development of his own offspring, his powers of usefulness,—such a young man is a selfish monstrosity. And the young woman who isn't longing for a home of her own—for a little kingdom in which as Queen, she may rule jointly with a chosen King in loving ministration to their natural subjects—such a young woman is an abnormal specimen. The desire of every ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn mower, drawn by a fat white horse, clinked across the green sward, and watering-carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives. Around the statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which in 1897 had replaced the monstrosity supposed to represent Garibaldi, children played in the spring sunshine, and nurse girls wheeled elaborate baby carriages with a reckless disregard for the pasty-faced occupants, which could probably be explained by the presence of half a dozen ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... five-dollar-a-day hotels well fill'd, artificial improvements, even books, colleges, and the suffrage—all, in many respects, in themselves, (hard as it is to say so, and sharp as a surgeon's lance,) form, more or less, a sort of anti-democratic disease and monstrosity, except as they contribute by curious indirections to that culmination—seem to me mainly of value, or worth consideration, only with ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... rhymer, as rhymers go, and, though we strongly object to his putting the Song of Solomon into bad blank verse, still we are quite ready to admire his translations of the Pervigilium Veneris and of Omar Khayyam. We wish he would not write sonnets with fifteen lines. A fifteen-line sonnet is as bad a monstrosity as a sonnet in dialogue. The volume has the merit of being very small, and contains many stanzas quite suitable ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... and at London, were provided for in foundling hospitals, by cooking and eating them. This was an extravaganza, though really bolder and more coarsely practical than mine, which did not provoke any reproaches even to a dignitary of the supreme Irish church; its own monstrosity was its excuse; mere extravagance was felt to license and accredit the little jeu d'esprit, precisely as the blank impossibilities of Lilliput, of Laputa, of the Yahoos, &c., had licensed those. If, therefore, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... my right. It grew, steadily, to a clot of blackness in the night. How long I watched, it is impossible to say; for time, as we count it, was a thing of the past. It came closer, a shapeless monstrosity of darkness—tremendous. It seemed to slip across the night, sleepily—a very hell-fog. Slowly, it slid nearer, and passed into the void, between me and the Central Suns. It was as though a curtain had been drawn before my ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... let him stick, by all means: and let his polity tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be abolished even from the history of man! For a fool of this monstrosity of dulness, there can be no salvation: and the fool who looked for the elixir of life was an angel of reason to the fool who looks for the ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... modern German philosophy of the State turns almost exclusively upon this idea; and here, as elsewhere, by giving to a passion an intellectual form, the Germans have magnified its force and enhanced its monstrosity. But the passion itself is not peculiar to Germans, nor is it only they to whom it is and has been a motive of State. Power has been the fetish of kings and emperors from the beginning of political history, and it remains to be seen whether it will not continue to inspire democracies. The passion ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the noble savage. They ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather effective—but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example, never altered in the ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... prominence in the picture, and we miss that which would have taken away the effect of strangeness—the perfect balance of the parts and harmony of the whole? For instance, the blue eyes of the northerner would, when first described to the black-eyed inhabitants of warm regions, seem unbeautiful and a monstrosity, because they would vividly see with the mental vision that unheard-of blueness, but not in the same vivid way the accompanying flesh and hair tints with which ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... Aylward, for he halted to stare at it, then stretched out his hand and switched on another lamp, in the hard brilliance of which the thing upon the pedestal suddenly declared itself, leaping out of the 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 ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... harebrained suggestion. Japan's advice received the secret blessing of both French and English who knew the situation, though in our case we had to admit that the British Premier had stood sponsor for this international monstrosity. This gave Japanese diplomacy its first clear hold upon Russian patriotism and enabled her to appear as a true friend of ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... He probably inherited a bias in this direction; we know that his father delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even "declared that he could not draw a pretty face."[104] But his grotesqueness is never the mere comic oddness which sometimes assumes the name. It is a kind of monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, but by a riot of exuberant power. And he has also a grave and tragic use of the grotesque, in which he stands alone. He is, in fact, by far the greatest English master of grotesque. Childe Roland, where the natural ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... as the sun slid into the position described, impressed me very much as I have been impressed, when a boy, by the concluding scene of some well-arranged theatrical spectacle or melodrama. Not even the monstrosity of color was wanting; for the sunlight came out through the chasm, tinted all orange and purple; while the vivid green of the grass in the valley was reflected more or less upon all objects from the curtain of vapor that still hung overhead, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... lighter when I crept through a broken wall and found myself in a stone courtyard, with gilded shrines and grinning Buddhas. One image more hideous than the rest, with eyes like glow-worms, untangled its legs and came towards me. I shook with fright. But it was only the dwarf priest—a monstrosity of flesh and blood, who kept the temple. I pointed to the light which seemed to be hanging to the side of the rocks above. He slowly shook his head, then rested it on his hands and closed his eyes. I pushed him aside ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... pretentious of all the imposing estates on the hillside, an object of never-failing interest and conversational speculation. "Adam Ward's castle," the people called it, smiling. And no visiting stranger of any importance whatever could escape being driven past that glaring architectural monstrosity which stood so boldly on its most conspicuous hillside elevation and proclaimed so defiantly to all the world its ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... Michaelis' freedom. It was a deep, calm, convinced infatuation. She had not only felt him to be inoffensive, but she had said so, which last by a confusion of her absolutist mind became a sort of incontrovertible demonstration. It was as if the monstrosity of the man, with his candid infant's eyes and a fat angelic smile, had fascinated her. She had come to believe almost his theory of the future, since it was not repugnant to her prejudices. She disliked the new element of plutocracy in the social compound, ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... The pictures seemed to light up, the Virgin's heads smiled on him, the statues seemed alive. Everything danced and swayed around him, with a motion due to the gloom and the tormenting fever that racked his brain; each monstrosity grimaced at him, while the portraits on the canvas closed their eyes for a little relief. Every shape seemed to tremble and start, and to leave its place gravely or flippantly, gracefully or awkwardly, according to ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... among the hasty thousands of the Parliamentary soldiers and the populace! Let it be shown what this monstrous notion really meant, what herds of strange creatures and shoals even of vermin it would permit in England; and would England ratify the monstrosity, or the Independency consociated with it, even for twenty Cromwells, or ten Marston Moors? So, in the fort-night's vacation, reasoned Messrs. Marshall, Lightfoot, Calamy, Palmer, Vines, Spurstow, Newcomen, Herle, Burges, and other English Presbyterians, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... quickened my pace she quickened hers, and kept easily ahead of me. At length I did begin to grow a little afraid. Why was she so careful not to be seen? Extraordinary ugliness would account for it: she might fear terrifying me! Horror of an inconceivable monstrosity began to assail me: was I following through the dark an unheard of hideousness? Almost I repented of ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... there is a subtle element of apology in it. These spiritual advantages may outweigh the secular pain; may even justify God's share in the great catastrophe. I have examined, and will discuss more fully in the next chapter, the theistic side of this plea. Intellectually, it borders on monstrosity: it is the survival of an ancient and barbaric conception. The notion that "the approach of Christ to the soul" is felt especially in time of affliction is merely a statement of a certain type of emotional experience, while ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... such a creature with monstrosity during the period of its power is simply to expose one's self to popular jeers. Having immense respect for majorities in this country, we only venture obscurely to hint, that, of all arts, none before has ever been so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... temperament, was intensely miserable. I thought about my male friends—sometimes boys of my own age, sometimes elder boys, and once even a master—during the day and dreamed about them at night, but was too convinced that I was a hopeless monstrosity ever to make any effectual advances. Later on it was much the same, but gradually, though slowly, I came to find that there were others like myself. I made a few special friends, and at last it came to me occasionally to sleep with them and to satisfy my imperious need by mutual embraces ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... pupil, of course, cannot tolerate this monstrosity. He indulgently corrects Giovanni, and Adam and Eve have entirely orthodox one-eighth ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped. He didn't care what awful crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet he associated—since he wasn't after all too utterly old to suffer—if it would only be decently proportionate to the posture he had kept, all his life, in the threatened presence of it. He had but one desire left—that he shouldn't ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... looking upon her as a poor, wild, foolish girl, unworthy of consideration. She magnified her faults and crudities, she paraded before her inner vision her fecent improprieties, as they had been disclosed to her, until she saw herself a sort of monstrosity at which all mankind was gazing with disgust. Life seemed dry and shriveled, a mere jaundiced shadow, while her love for Beverley took on a new growth, luxuriant, all-embracing, uncontrollable. The ferment of spirit going on in her breast ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... find the Chippendale bookcase; and on its shelves stood books that had formed a bond between us, and copies of old reviews containing my fugitive contributions. A spurious Japanese dragon in faence, an inartistic monstrosity dear to her heart, at which I had often railed, grinned forgivingly at me from the mantel-piece. I have never realised how closely bound up with my habits was this drawing-room of Judith's. I stopped once ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... age-period of 18 to 30 would fall that pseudo-educational monstrosity, the undergraduate university, and the degrading popular activities of 'beginning a business' or 'picking up a trade.' Much money must be spent here. Perhaps few fields of activity have been conventionalized as much as university education. Here, just where a superficial theorist ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... you stolid and flesh-fettered ox, you monstrosity of over-weening and perennial health and joy, what do you think ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... would see what persuasion could do—argument, eloquence, poured out upon the incorrigible captive from the mouth of a trained expert. That was his plan. But the reading of the Twelve Articles to her was not a part of it. No, even Cauchon was ashamed to lay that monstrosity before her; even he had a remnant of shame in him, away down deep, a million fathoms deep, and that remnant asserted itself now ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... abound I have not thought it needful in the Index to refer to the book unless the eminence of the author required a separate and a second entry. My labour would have been increased beyond all endurance and my Index have been swollen almost into a monstrosity had I always referred to the book as well as to the matter which was contained in the passage that I extracted. Though in such a variety of subjects there must be many omissions, yet I shall be greatly disappointed if actual errors are discovered. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... blandest essence of southern assurance,—extreme politeness, to deceive the lady. She, however, had long been laudably engaged in behalf of a down-trodden race; and her knowledge of the secret workings of an institution which could only cover its monstrosity with sophistry and fraud impressed her with the idea of some deception having been practised. She well knew that Mr. Seabrook was one of those very contented gentlemen who have strong faith in the present, and are willing to sacrifice the future, if peace and plenty ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... de Cristo, of the Virgin of Lluch, patron saint of the island, and of the powerful San Vicente Ferrer, who had wrought so many miracles when he ministered in Majorca—a final and prodigious saint, who might avert the monstrosity her master contemplated! Let a rock from the mountains fall and forever close the way to Valldemosa; let the carriage upset, and let Don Jaime be carried home on a stretcher by four men—anything rather than ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... fifth number, in which Sam Weller is introduced, began that popularity which did not decline until Dickens's death. In fact, as one writer has said, "In dealing with Dickens, we are dealing with a man whose public success was a marvel and almost a monstrosity." Every one, old and young, serious and flippant, talked of Pickwick, and it was actually reported, by no less an authority than Thomas Carlyle, that a solemn clergyman, being told that he had not long to live, exclaimed, "Well, thank God, Pickwick ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... beings? What was her language; how and how long did she live. Was she really alive in our sense of the word, that is, human with the exception of her transparency? and was her shape like that of ordinary mortals, or did she end in some monstrosity like a mermaid? Such were the questions agitating me when interruption came with a knock at the door. My captive awoke and instinctively started away, at the same time giving a low, articulate cry; but I held her firmly, and called to Rachel to bring ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... time I should have been glad to see him flying off with the whole thing, handle included. But now I felt the theft of that one feather as an added injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity. Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration. That was their idea clearly, a "Liberty interior." She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country one—had been born and bred ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... going to get that monstrosity out of our restroom," the little redhead in green coveralls was demanding. "If it wasn't for that thing, I'd be taking ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... some huge ungainly statue or some indifferently stained glass window, any seven-days' wonder in the way of marble, granite, or glass. They would like the Cenotaph to fill St. James's Park, and fondly believe that the "Glorious Dead" would find pride and pleasure in such a monstrosity. But it seems to me that any memorial to the dead heroes falls short of its ideal which does not, at the same time, help the living in some real practical and unsectarian way. Heroes didn't die so that the parish church should ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... than they, from six to eight feet in height, she has a woman's body, exquisitely slim and young, with the breasts of a virgin. Very chaste in attitude, she holds in her hand a long-stemmed lotus flower, but by a contrast that nonplusses and paralyses you the delicate shoulders support the monstrosity of a huge lioness' head. The lappets of her bonnet fall on either side of her ears almost down to her breast, and surmounting the bonnet, by way of addition to the mysterious pomp, is a large moon disc. Her dead stare gives to the ferocity of her visage ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... meanness of your intellect, the vulgarity of your character,—and tell me whether a woman like Aniela ought to remain true to you for an hour! How did you manage to get her, you spiritual and physical upstart? Is it not an unnatural monstrosity that you are her husband? Dante's Beatrice, marrying a common Florentine cad, would have been ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... those of an elephant. He was a grotesque in hideous green. The blue of the candlenut-ink, in bizzare designs upon body and legs, had turned a scaly greenish hue from age and kava excesses. Revealed in the yellow light, he was like a ghastly bronze monstrosity that had known the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... vain. Teresina appeared and fastened the hat of the period upon her mistress's head. The hat of the period chanced to be a one-sided monstrosity at that time, something between a cart wheel, an umbrella and a flower garden, depending for its stability upon the proper position of several solid skewers, apparently stuck through the head of the wearer. This headpiece ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... distinguish your tenor in the course of our conversation." I replied that I had but one voice, and that I had not been aware that his Royal Highness had two. "That confirms my impression," said the King, "that you are not a Man, but a feminine Monstrosity with a bass voice, and an utterly uneducated ear. But ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... same writer continues his analysis. He points out that the secret of the play is the curious interweaving of the real world with the supernatural. Forget this but for a moment, and the piece becomes an impossible monstrosity without motivation or meaning. Shakespeare preserves this unity in duality. The two worlds seem to meet and fuse, each giving something of itself to the other. But this unity was absent from the performance. The actors did not even know their lines, and thus the spell was ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... an expression of loathing as she looked at the huge misshapen monstrosity before her. The Viceroy forgot the momentary satisfaction of his triumph in his rage at her attitude. With a growl of anger he grasped at her. Lura avoided his rush and ran along the side of the room, Glavour ...
— Giants on the Earth • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... flickered, flickered faster and faster, fluttered between light and extinction, ceased to flicker and became mere fading specks of glowing red in a vast obscurity. In ten seconds the extinction was accomplished, and there was only this roaring darkness, a black monstrosity that had suddenly swallowed up those glittering myriads ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... one day when the end seemed perilously close, there was ushered into the presence of the remnant of the United States officials who had gathered in San Francisco, a twisted monstrosity of a man, fearfully scarred and deformed. He was closeted with them for two hours. At the end of that time an excited official communicated with the leader of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... us, but it was certainly a powerful factor in making fame for a composer. For, as has been said, while a modern composer writes two or three different operas, Hasse wrote one hundred versions of one. This also had its effect on instrumental music, and, in a way, is also the direct cause of that monstrosity known as "variations" (Haendel wrote sixty-six on one theme.) In our days we often hear the bitter complaint that opera singers are no longer what they used to be, and that the great art of singing has been lost. ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... not raised his voice while he spoke, nor in the recounting of such inhuman monstrosity, such vile and bloodthirsty conspiracy against the liberty, the dignity, the very life of an entire nation, did he appear to feel the slightest indignation; rather did a tone of amusement and even of triumph strike through his speech; and now he laughed good-humouredly like ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... upon an interesting monstrosity—the worse portion. Women admire courage, because it is the quality they lack—I mean animal courage, the mere faculty of looking into a pistol-muzzle calmly; and their admiration is so great that they are carried away by it. They admire in the same way a gay ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
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