"Ghostlike" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was quite unlike anything I have ever heard before. The beginning of each sentence was uttered in a rapid monotone, and towards the end it rose gradually till it ended in a prolonged, shrill wail, which floated overhead through the still air with an indescribably sad and ghostlike effect; heard at night, it would have thrilled one like the ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... footprints."[1] The graphic sense of analogy applies to a mountain such a name as "House of the sun"; to the prevailing rain of a certain district the appellation "The rain with a pack on its back," "Leaping whale" or "Ghostlike"; to a valley, "The leaky canoe"; to a canoe, "Eel sleeping in the water." A man who has no brother in a family is called "A single coconut," in allusion to a tree from which hangs a ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... forest ghostlike. And isn't that picturesque,' he said, pointing to a booth that had been set up by the wayside. On a tiny stage a foot or so from the ground, by the light of a lantern and a few candle ends, a man and a woman ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... had crept far across the lake and the darkening waters were still that we rose reluctantly to put the dishes in the tea basket and start on our homeward journey. The tawny fires of the sunset were dying down behind us, the mist stealing, ghostlike, into the valleys below; in the sky a little moon curled like a freshly cut silver shaving, that presently turned to gold, the white ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... calm rural home, this useful, innocent life, as if that ill-advised act of hers had never been acted—as if that autumn morning, that one half-hour in the modern Gothic church, still smelling of mortar and pitch-pine, set in flat fields, from which October mists were rising ghostlike, was no more than a troubled dream—a dream that she had dreamed and done with for ever. Could it be that such an hour—so dim, so shadowy to look back upon from the substantial footing of her present existence—was to give colour to all the rest of her life? No, it was the dark dream ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... upward, and the stars vanished. Here and there birds began to twitter. An old grouse scuttled away, wings a-trail, as if mortally hurt, to distract attention from her young brood hidden in the short grass. A huge owl sailed ghostlike on silent wings, homeward bound from midnight foray. A coyote yipped shrill protest against the day. Away to the west, where the mountains loomed grandly, bright lights lay on peaks still white with the remnants of winter snows. Suddenly, driving the shadows before ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... wearily; through the back-drifting smoke the long battle line of the Excelsiors wavered like phantoms in the mist. Six flags flapped ghostlike above them, behind them men writhed in the trampled, bloody grass; before them the sheeted volleys rushed outward into darkness, where the ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... lift her rifle, but the whir of wings told of a flight. From jagged rents in the cliffs, through which the horses passed, their hoofs ringing echoes from the iron-veined rock, they came to sleepy hollows where the Quaker Aspens stood ghostlike as sentinels on guard ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... Mountains extend out into the Pacific Ocean. The Cascade Mountains, lying dwarfed at our feet, could be traced northward into British Columbia and southward into Oregon, while above them, at comparatively regular intervals, rose the ghostlike forms of our companion volcanoes. To the eastward the eye ranged over hundreds of miles, over chain on chain of mountain ridges which gradually disappeared in the ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... mountains, shading her eyes with one spread palm. On a distant slope a small herd of cattle fed, scattered and at peace. Nearer, a great hawk circled slowly on widespread wings, his neck craned downward as if he were watching his own shadow move ghostlike over the grass. Annie-Many-Ponies, turning her eyes disappointedly from the empty mesa, envied the hawk his ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... Amenthe in the west may have arisen in the following way. Some superstitious Egyptians, travelling westwards, at twilight, on the great marshes haunted by the strange gray white ibis, saw troops of these silent, solemn, ghostlike birds, motionless or slow stalking, and conceived them to be souls waiting for the funeral rites to be paid, that they might sink with the setting sun to their ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... wind had abated somewhat, the Tiger still ploughed along into the obscurity at a fair rate of speed. Jeremy stayed forward with the lookout, peering constantly into the gloom ahead, and half expecting to see the ghostlike sails of the Revenge whenever for a moment a gray aisle opened in the mist. But there were only the grim, uneasy seas and the ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... had struggled up upon deck, looking white and ghostlike, for he had suffered much during the voyage; but when that word reached him, the fire leaped into his eyes, and he turned an exultant look upon his ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... has ever approached this degree of sovereignty. His kingdom pervades the world. It is a fact that challenges thought. No world conqueror has ever had such an empire. Beside this the royalty of men like Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, and more modern aspirants is shadowy and ghostlike. His is an abiding and a ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... met my gaze for a week, I see the steading of Waster Lunny sunk deeper into the waste. The schoolhouse, I suppose, serves similarly as a snowmark for the people at the farm. Unless that is Waster Lunny's grieve foddering the cattle in the snow, not a living thing is visible. The ghostlike hills that pen in the glen have ceased to echo to the sharp crack of the sportsman's gun (so clear in the frosty air as to be a warning to every rabbit and partridge in the valley); and only giant Catlaw ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... below the sound of the unearthly hurricane I heard Larry's voice, thin and ghostlike, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... far away. He could see the returning figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entire room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers which Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see the signatures, but they seemed unable to impart any clear-cut message to his brain. ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... Atwater. "My wife and I been just sittin' out here in our front yard, not doing any harm to anybody, and here it's nine times we've counted you passing the place—always going the same way!" He spoke as with complaint, a man with a grievance. "It's kind of ghostlike," he added. "We'd give a good deal to know what ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... extraordinary gift for evoking a certain sort of ecclesiastical scene, a chapel buried in spring-woods, seen in the clear and fresh light of the early morning, the fragrant air, with perhaps a hint of dewy chilliness about it, stealing in and swaying the flames of the lighted tapers, made ghostlike and dusky by the touch of dawn; the priest, solemnly vested, moves about with a quiet deliberateness, and the words of the Eucharist seem to fall on the ear with a soft and delicate precision, as from the lips of one who ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... loss, when, on the 2nd of August, about two hours before daylight, the shadowy outline of a ship was seen dead to leeward between us and the land, the wind being somewhere from the south-west. Now she was there, ghostlike and indistinct, a spirit gliding over the face of the waters; now as I looked she had disappeared and I could scarcely believe ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... missed nothing. They had seen Sheldon and Joan first, but they gave no sign. Where Gogoomy and his followers had emerged from the river, the canoe abruptly stopped, then turned and disappeared into the deeper mangrove gloom. A second and a third canoe came around the bend from below, glided ghostlike to the crossing of the runaways, and vanished ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... eye looks as if it had been painted, in the Eastern fashion, with antimony; the dark lashes, dark eyebrows, dark hair, crisped (as West-country hair so often is) to its very roots, increase the almost ghostlike paleness of the face, not sallow, not snow-white, but of a clear, bloodless, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... window, an open Bible on his knees. Slowly the shadows were falling about him, and to the man every shade had an entity of its own. First there trooped before him all the old memories of the many yesterdays—of Peg—his little dead lad—and Jinnie. And lastly, ghostlike, came the shattered hopes of to-morrow, and with these he groaned ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... detecting that he was tracked. "He'd murder me, for sure," thought Dorothea, trembling in every limb. Nevertheless, the love that is strong as death, the jealousy that is cruel as the grave, goaded her to persevere; and so she flitted in his wake with a noiseless step, wonderfully gliding and ghostlike considering the solidity of ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... fell upon the speaker, standing stockstill in the cloven path below him, not twenty feet away. In his relief, he laughed. He beheld a slim figure in riding-togs. Nothing formidable or ghostlike in that! Nevertheless, a pair of dark blue eyes transfixed him with indignation. They looked out from under the rim of a black sailor hat, and they ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... by Everett placing one hand quickly on her arm, and with the other pointing. In the uncertain moonlight she saw moving cautiously away from them, and unconscious of their presence, a white, ghostlike figure. ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... walked to the window and looked out on the darkness fast closing in on the lawn, clustering denser around the evergreens and creeping ghostlike toward the dim sky line which shone ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... Mont St. Michel is strange and weird in the extreme. A vast ghostlike object of a very pale pinkish hue suddenly rises out of the bay, and one's first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy palaces which will fly off, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... hundred feet in the air, with her nose pointing in the direction of M'Bongwele's village, and her propeller driving her ahead at full speed. The electric lights of the ship were all called into requisition for the illumination of the landscape, producing a weird and ghostlike effect as the trees and clumps of bush first caught the light and then brightened into full radiance as they flashed past, to instantly fade again into obscurity. A startled howl or two smote upon the ears of the travellers, and the forms of hastily retreating animals were momentarily ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... bird skims, no arrow pierces the air, without producing some change in the Universe, which will last to the day of doom. No coming and going is absolutely trackless; nor irrecoverable by Nature's law is any consciousness, however ghostlike; though many a one, even the most blissful, never does return, but seems to be buried among the dead. But they are not dead—but only sleep; though to us who recall them not, they are as they had never been, and we, wretched ingrates, let them lie for ever in oblivion! How passing sweet when ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... coming, sir," I whispered to the skipper, by whose side I was sitting, "and in another minute or two we ought to—ah! there she is. Do you see her, sir?" And I pointed in the direction of a faint, ghostlike blotch that had suddenly appeared at a spot some three points ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... with superb force—a capacity of which there is hardly a trace in Paracelsus. Sordello himself stands out less clearly than Paracelsus from the canvas; but the sympathetic reader finally admits that this visionary being, who gleams ghostlike at the end of all the avenues and vistas of the poem, whom we are always looking at but never rightly see, is ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... then, as though to veil the majestic sight from our curious eyes, strange vapours and clouds gathered and increased around the mountains, till presently we could only trace their pure and gigantic outlines, showing ghostlike through the fleecy envelope. Indeed, as we afterwards discovered, usually they were wrapped in this gauze-like mist, which doubtless accounted for our not having seen them ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... the guide into a small, vaulted room,—not a room, but an artificial cavern, remote from light or air, where Beatrice Cenci was confined before her execution. According to the abbe, she spent a whole year in this dreadful pit, her trial having dragged on through that length of time. How ghostlike she must have looked when she came forth! Guido never painted that beautiful picture from her blanched face, as it appeared after this confinement. And how rejoiced she must have been to die at last, having already been in ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the "khiva" resulted in disappointment. The immediate impression that the boys received was one of cave-like barrenness. In the half-light only a gray monotony met the eye. Yet under this ghostlike pall, forms soon began to appear. In the center of the chamber stood what was apparently an altar. In spite of its burden of dust an elevation could be seen about eight inches high and seven feet in diameter, on which was a boxlike structure ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... again a band of antelope swept ghostlike across a ridge. A great gray wolf stood contemptuously near on a hillock, gazing speculatively at the strange new creature, the white woman, new come in his lands. It was the wilderness, rude, ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... in drowsy undertones. In the moonlight the lamps on the fishing-boats and on the bridge, now locked against the outside world, burned mistily, and the deck of the steamer moored directly below him was as deserted and bare, as uncanny and ghostlike, as the deck of the ship of the Ancient Mariner. Except for the chiming of ships' bells, the whisper of the running tide, and the sleepy murmur of the longshoremen, the town of Willemstad was steeped in sleep and silence. Roddy, finding he could arrive ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... there was something funny about my fare. He jumped out, asked me the charge, and, in the moment I glanced at my taxi-meter, he disappeared. Yes, sir. Vanished, owing me four dollars, six bits. It was almost ghostlike, mister." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... rose ghostlike out of the gulf of the past, and cloudily possessed the stage where the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt was figuring, was called a romantic Hamlet thirty years ago; and so it was in being a break from the classic Hamlets of the Anglo-American theatre. It was romantic as Shakespeare himself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... them all until you're sane enough to know what you're doing. Give them to me." He took them back and crept quietly, ghostlike, about the room until he found a receptacle in which he knew they would be safe; then, removing one hundred francs from the amount, he brought it back and thrust it in his friend's pocket. "There—that's enough for you to throw away on us to-night. Why are you taking ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... placed himself in a position, remained a second or two, and then instantly closing his camera, surveyed the result of his operation. On bringing the picture out upon the plate, he was surprised to find a shadowy representation of a human being, so remarkably ghostlike and supernatural, that he became amused at the discovery he had made. The operation was repeated, until he could produce similar pictures by a suitable arrangement of his lenses and reflectors known to no other than himself. About ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... Isaac's white coat gleaming in the moon, ghostlike. On he went, his bundle strapped across his shoulder, leaning on his staff, along by the folded sheep and the sleeping cattle. But when he got into the high road, Gatesboro' full before him, with all its roofs and spires, he turned his back ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from the city, and those ghostlike forms made a deep impression, replied in a voice somewhat uncertain,—"I know not, lord; I have never been in Ostrianum. But they might praise God in some spot nearer ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... curbstone when the window behind which Isaac was crouching was suddenly smashed, and Isaac leaned out. The crowd, listening intently, could hear the crash of falling glass upon the pavement. They had their view of Isaac, too—a wan, ghostlike figure, with haggard cheeks and staring eyes, eyes which blazed out from between ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... chill in the air, and to Frances Durkin, sitting beside Keenan on the promenade deck, there seemed something restless and phantasmal and ghostlike in the thin, North Atlantic sunlight, after the mellow and opulent gold of the Mediterranean calms. It seemed to her to be a presage of the restless movement and tumult which she felt ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... lone—the wave was lone— The horizon lone; no sail Broke the dim line 'twixt sea and sky, Till slowly, slowly one came by, Half ghostlike, gray ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... that Ruth and Bab heard was not ghostlike. It was very human. First came a crash, then a ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... of the stairs, and heard a voice singing. It seemed strange and ghostlike in that dreary old house, perhaps because of the already tremulous state of his nerves. Hark! ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... had on light-colored outing shirts, and these, with the handkerchiefs over their faces, made them look quite ghostlike in the ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... places and lit their cigars. The train swayed gently along, its rattle muffled by the storm. Polished black squares represented the windows across which drifted hazy lights and ghostlike suggestions of snowflakes. Bob watched this ebony nothingness in great idleness of spirit. Presently one of the half-dozen men arose from his place, walked the length of the car, and dropped into the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... village. "But the strangest part of the affair is the effect of this vagary, even on a sober-minded man like myself. The black veil, though it covers only our pastor's face, throws its influence over his whole person, and makes him ghostlike from head to foot. Do you not ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... finally, and from my window I watched the trees along the drive take shadowy form, gradually lose their ghostlike appearance, become gray and then green. The Greenwood Club showed itself a dab of white against the hill across the valley, and an early robin or two hopped around in the dew. Not until the milk-boy and the sun came, about the same time, did I dare to open ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... side to side as if we were so much baggage. And there was a special horror in the darkness, as well as in the wind that hissed through the rigging, and in the waves that rushed past us, sheeted with foam that faded ghostlike as we watched it,—faded ghostlike, leaving the blackness of darkness to enfold us and swallow ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the faint harp, tremulous, combine Its ghostlike sounds with organ's mighty tone? Let my poor song be taken ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... wore my features, was a liquid presentation of my own proportions colossally enlarged; that I stood in the centre of a lunar rainbow, and that I was gazing on the reflection of myself in the mist. As I moved my arms, my body, or my head, the ghostlike figure moved, and I felt myself irresistibly changing my postures—oddly and nervously at first—then, with an awakening sense of the ridiculous in my actions—so as to make my image change and ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... don't say that you intend doing so, for you know you have no intention of the kind; nor indeed have I either. As for you, you will take your vows where they will result in something more substantial than the pursuit of such a ghostlike, ghastly love ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... they went, past the churchyard, with its marble slabs indistinctly outlined in the darkness, like a phantom graveyard, as immaterial and ghostlike itself as the spirits of the earliest settlers at rest there beneath the sod. This was the last indication of the presence of the town, the final impression to carry away into the wide country, where the road ran through field and forest. ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham |
