"Ghoul" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the distance moved him to remark that ghouls assume that shape at night to murder travellers. They come up close and rub against them like a loving cat; which contact robs the victims of their intellect, and causes them to follow the hyaena to its den, where the ghoul kills them and inters their bodies till the ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... answered the last advertisement just as the thousand windows sprang to renewed life. It was a position as shipping clerk in a large department store. After waiting an hour to see the manager, a double-chinned ghoul with the eyes of a pig, he had been ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... her with unflattering brotherliness. "And she had so much feeling, too, Mary Virginia! Why, when I was sick once, she wanted me to die, so she could ride to my funeral in the front carriage; she doted on funerals, the little ghoul! She was horribly disappointed when I got better—she thought it disobliging of me, and that I'd done it to spite her. Once, too, when I tried to reason with her—and Mary Virginia needed reason if ever a kid did—she bumped ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... a feast as the unconscious Hapsburg afforded the ghoul of a priest! It was a loathsome surgery; greedy fingers trembling on the knife, the victim's soul flayed, each nerve of a vanity, or tendon of an ambition, or full-throbbing vein of hope, each and all lifted one by ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... might hitherto have been the ardor of their guilty passion, their confinement together in this foul cell had resulted in a mutual loathing. Within the narrow limits of these walls neither seemed able to support the barest contact with the other. They glared at each other in the dim light with ghoul-like eyes, and at night they lay down at opposite sides of the floor on bundles of straw for beds. This straw, having served them in their poverty for weeks and even months, had fermented ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... help about a matter—say at four o'clock that afternoon. The note was dispatched, not by old Moses this time, but by the hand of an urchin in a blue uniform, who was deep in "Lady Helen, the Fair Ghoul," as he bicycled, but apparently reached his destination in ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... wouldn't listen! And you—you never have heard that desperate pounding and calling, not even to-night, though even so, with that woman out of the way, I made you feel me! But she'd heard me, the ghoul! She heard me again and again! I made her! I told her what she was, and that you knew it, and I meant it! Her marriage certificate was her license! She gave you a wanton's love, and you gave her just what you got! ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... wide sweep, measured and slow, bear him swiftly past. With a curve and a sweep he circles round, down come the long bony legs, the bald and hideous neck is extended, and with talons quivering for the rotting flesh, and cruel beak agape, he hurries on to his repast, the embodiment of everything ghoul-like and ghastly. In his wake comes another, then twos and threes, anon tens and twenties, till hundreds have collected, and the ground is covered with the hissing, tearing, fiercely clawing crowd. It is a horrible sight to see a heap of ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... Norwegian barque bound out with a cargo of pitch-pine had been given up as missing about that time, and it was just the sort of craft that would capsize in a squall and float bottom up for months—a kind of maritime ghoul on the prowl to kill ships in the dark. Such wandering corpses are common enough in the North Atlantic, which is haunted by all the terrors of the sea,—fogs, icebergs, dead ships bent upon mischief, and long sinister gales that fasten upon one ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... indeed hid her face, retreating once more behind the veils of mist. The breeze itself was lulled and the fog gathered itself together and wrapped the unavowable horrors of the night in a gray and ghoul-like shroud. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... the passage, in delicate health, and upon an abstemious regimen. He rarely tasted wine, nor more than half a glass, mingled with water, when he did. He ate little; no animal food, but only bread and vegetables. He reminded me of the ghoul that picked rice with a needle; for it was manifest, that he had not acquired his knowledge of the world by always dining so sparely. If my remembrance is not treacherous, he only spent one evening in the cabin with us—the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... by that writer quaint but grand, Who penned The Hunting of the Snark and Alice in Wonderland. And I thought I knew a thing or two, or might be even three, About a Ghoul, and a Fay or Troll, and a Brownie or Banshee. I knew that a Banshee always howled, whilst a Goblin might but yawn, I also knew that a Poltergeist was not a Leprechaun, But the Psychicals, I'm bound to say, had me on "buttered toastes" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... a grain of rice, like Amina in the "Arabian Nights," is absurd and unnatural; but there is a modus in rebus: there is no reason why she should be a ghoul, a monster, ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to tell us about the manners and customs of the Romans. Then again, for the translating of so delicate, so musical and so gracious a poet as Catullus he was absolutely and entirely unqualified. However, to Catullus he now turned. Sirmio and Rome succeeded to Baghdad and Damascus; jinni and ghoul fled before hoofed satyrs and old Silenus shaking his green stick of lilies. As we shall see, however, he did not begin the translation in earnest till January ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... Celtic Folk-Tales would be representative that did not contain some specimen of the gruesome. The most effective ghoul story in existence ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... beguiles the simple fool And binds with magic thongs the hapless wight; That like a moth lured by the candle-light, He hovers, helpless, round the heartless ghoul. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... The leaves they were crisped and sere,— " " " withering " " It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,— " " down " " dark tarn " " In the misty mid region of Weir,— " " ghoul-haunted woodland ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... establishing his authorship of "The Song of the Shirt" is recorded in its proper place; while, among other things, Mr. Milliken's "Childe Chappie" was claimed, as was afterwards ascertained, by a literary ghoul whose strange taste it was to batten upon the comic writings of others, and to use his borrowed reputation to ingratiate himself with the fair and ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... black-handled forks. It is true the steel was as bright as silver; but what were we to do? Miss Matty picked up her peas, one by one, on the point of the prongs, much as Amine ate her grains of rice after her previous feast with the Ghoul. Miss Pole sighed over her delicate young peas as she left them on one side of her plate untasted, for they WOULD drop between the prongs. I looked at my host: the peas were going wholesale into his capacious mouth, shovelled up by his large ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... of her life, the little woman had been a nurse, and it was told of her that she had frightened one of her patients into convulsions during the night by narrating to her the history of all the corpses she had laid out. This ghoul-like tendency in the end proved fatal ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... had washed in the Jihun when we bivouacked, but had not shaved; later on, my scalp had bled anew, so that in addition to unruly hair tousled and matted with dry blood I had a week-old beard to help make me look like a graveyard ghoul. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... ghost nor ghoul aghast He echoes voices of the past, And tones like melancholy knells Of years departed to his ear Are sweeter than of ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... over the abode. It was Hood's haunted house put in order and newly painted. The servants, too, were shadowy, and chary of their visits. Bells rang three times before the gloomy chambermaid could be induced to present herself; and the negro waiter, a ghoul-like looking creature from Congo, obeyed the summons only when one's patience was exhausted or one's want satisfied in some other way. When he did come, one felt sorry that he had not stayed away altogether, so sullen and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... he arrives at the conclusion that Conchita—long loved by him, long vainly solicited—has surrendered her heart to the gigantic Texan, who like a sinister shadow, a ghoul, a very ogre, has chanced across the sunlight of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... so suspicious,' said Miss Ponsonby. 'Do you think that ours is an Italian banquet? Is there poison in the dish? Or do you live only on fruit and flowers?' continued Miss Ponsonby. 'Do you know,' she added, with an arch smile, 'I think you must be a ghoul.' ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... smiling by me, full of anxious and affectionate enquiry, and smoothed the coverlet with her great felonious hand, I could quite comprehend the dreadful feeling with which the deceived husband in the 'Arabian Nights' met his ghoul wife, after his ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... of the involved angular corners, thug and ghoul lurked until midnight should bring them their prey, the careless roysterer, or the belated prosperous citizen. Out on Layte Street the flashy throng was still pouring toward ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... terror and surprise This gruesome shape which mocked before his eyes He could distinguish in its haughty mien A bearing, something as his own had been; Nor had its withered visage quite the look Of vampire, ghoul or evanescent spook; And as the apparition o'er him bent, He saw that every seam or lineament, Contour of feature, prominence of bone, Bore all a ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... is argued, to be sure, in extravagant terms. Wagner is a mere ghoul and impostor: "The Flying Dutchman" is no more than a parody on Weber, and "Parsifal" is "an outrage against religion, morals and music." Daddy Liszt is "the inventor of the Liszt pupil, a bad piano player, a venerable man with a purple nose—a Cyrano ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... face in one of the latter's illustrations to Un Voyage ou il vous plaira, which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should fancy a ghoul might be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... sound of her voice our fear of the supernatural vanished and we were back to reality again. We were lost on a lonely road, it is true, but it was a (more or less) solid dirt road in the misty mid-region of Indiana, and not a ghoul-haunted pathway in the misty mid-region ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... The significance of the name "El Ghoul" leaves little doubt that the Arab astronomers took note of this star's variability. E. M. Clerke, Observatory, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... perfect credence in their being really ghouls and ghosts, that it is not to be denied that strange feelings creep over one in reading their stories at the witching hour, when the fire is nearly out, and the candle-wicks are an inch and a half long. The Frenchman seldom introduces a ghost—never a ghoul; but he makes up for it by describing human beings with sentiments which would probably make the ghoul feel ashamed to associate with them. The utmost extent of human profligacy is depicted, but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... even painted. Skulls of sheep and cattle, and even of human beings were often carried on the saddlebows to add another element of terror. A framework was sometimes made to fit the shoulders of a Ghoul which caused him to appear twelve feet high. A skeleton wooden hand at the end of a stick served to greet terrified Negroes at midnight. For safety every man carried a small whistle and a ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... after the queen, he answered in the following terms, worthy of his ancestry—worthy of himself. It is difficult to say which was the most painful scene, that in the chamber where the queen lay in agony, or without, where the curse of family dissensions came like a ghoul to hover near the bed of death, and to gloat over the royal corpse. This was the royal dictum:—'If the puppy should, in one of his impertinent airs of duty and affection, dare to come to St. James's, I order you to go to the scoundrel, and tell him I wonder ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... out on either hand From that well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange; Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite Shall bear us company tonight, For we have reached the Oldest Land Wherein the Powers of Darkness range. —From the Dusk ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... "Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?" I mused. I had read of such hideous incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy, and watched him grow to youth, and followed him almost through ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... what men did when they robbed and murdered unprotected women. She had read of scores of such cases, and had often imagined herself as being stalked by this kind of ghoul. Now the thing which she had greatly feared having come upon her she was nearly hysterical. If she ran he would run after her. If she only walked on he would overtake her. Before she could reach the docks on one ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... was at his young master's unaccountable appearance and evident panic, nevertheless never moved a muscle of his face; he was one of those perfectly bred servants, who, if they chanced to open the door to a ghoul or a skeleton, would merely inquire, "What ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... ophidian as in fierce meridian of Afric ever lurked in swamp or brake; And yet Corinthian LYCIUS never doted on the white-throated charmer of his soul With blinder passion than our fools of Fashion Feel for this gruesome ghoul. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 4, 1891 • Various
... a minute Gavin stood stock still, like an intruder. Then he ran towards the singing, which seemed to come from Windy ghoul, a straight road through Caddam that farmers use in summer, but leave in the back end of the year to leaves and pools. In Windyghoul there is either no wind or so much that it rushes down the sieve like an army, entering with ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... meet a passing miner. Grasping his ponderous tools, he flits by like a phantom; even in the momentary glance, we can perceive how livid his sunless labor has left him; he is blanched as a ghoul, and moves as noiselessly, with feather-light step. Each with a motion salutes the Captain; but they do not heed the little group of strangers who have braved so many dangers to behold the wonders which to them are as commonplace as the forge to a blacksmith, or to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... this most disreputable of moneyless vagabonds. What added to the consternation of all who heard of it, was the sickening conviction that the extreme measures which they had resorted to in order to free the city from the ghoul, beyond which nothing could be done, had been utterly unavailing, successful as they had proved in every other known case of the kind. For, urged as well by various horrid signs about his grave, which not even its close proximity to the altar could render a place of repose, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... breathe, and toward the purple sky The pallid perfumes of their breath Ascend in spiral shapes, for there No wind disturbs the voiceless air— No murmur breaks the oblivious mood Of that tenebrean solitude— No Djinn, no Ghoul, no Afrit laves His giant limbs within its waves Beneath the wan Saturnian light That swoons in the omnipresent night; But only funeral forms arise, With arms uplifted to the skies, And gaze, with blank, cavernous ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... man has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or sister-image, even when he knows that the cause of the disturbing ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... accompanying orchestra moans forth a sinister strain given by the flutes, mingled with a rattling tremolo which sounds like the clatter of bones. This creature evidently plays an ugly part in the piece—that of a horrible old ghoul, spiteful and famished. Still more appalling than her person is her shadow, which, projected upon a white screen, is abnormally and vividly distinct; by means of some unknown process this shadow, which nevertheless follows all her movements, assumes the aspect of a wolf. At a given moment ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... are th' infernal powers moved for me, That all the hosts of hell me welcome give, And claim me comrade in their revelry? Abhorrent things, I am not yours, I live, I know I live because I think on death! I live, dead things, to revel among tombs, A ghoul, henceforth I feast on buried joys, My soul the burial-place, where lie, beneath A fearful night of cries and hellish spumes, My lovely youth with jovial convoys, Hopes, happy-eyed, and linked solaces, And in the lapse of hateful years they will— My guileless joys, my rose-hued ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... with teeth tight clenched, He told her he hated her,— That his love for her from his heart he wrenched Like a corpse from a sepulcher. And then she called him "a ghoul all red With the quintessence of crimes"— "But I know you love me now," she said, And kissed ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... human dwellings. In the evening light they catch the last rays of the sun and shine like diaphanous spectres upon the darkened ground, but at sunrise, when the yellow sands sparkle with light, they tower up grim and menacing: a mournful, ghoul-haunted region, like those veritable townships of the past, Dougga, Timgad and the rest of them, standing all forlorn in ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... Browning's monologues. His poetry usually is of the noonday and the market-place; but this might have been written by Coleridge, or Maeterlinck, or Edgar Allan Poe. It has indeed the "wizard twilight Coleridge knew." The atmosphere is uncanny and ghoul-haunted: the scenery is a series of sombre and horrible imaginings. No consistent allegory can be made out of it, for which fact we should rejoice. It is a poem, not a sermon; it is intended to stimulate the imagination, rather ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... Augustus, lay the house of Dea Flavia. Its gilded portals threw back with brilliant intensity the weird and elusive light of the waning moon, and high above, upon the balustrade of the roof, gigantic bronze groups of quaint and misshapen beasts looked ghoul-like against the canopy of ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... but irritated.] Did the sociology you took up at college teach you that—to play the ghoul on every possible occasion, excavating old bones? Why not let your ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... Suddenly illuminated, she lets him down abruptly with a bump, all the harder that she never meant to do it (the coquette does: but she is a horrible professional, methodising feminine instinct, for prey: a psychological ghoul, feeding on souls instead of bodies, and deserving extermination without benefit of clergy). The real crime of woman is not so much a crime as a defect: she is weak, as all the sages know, and all languages prove, though "democracy" ignores it; it is her strength, and half her charm, that she ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... coolly reloading his rifle, did not immediately reply. As the shaken and somewhat unmanned Coronado looked at him, he was afraid of him. The moonlight made Smith's sallow, disfigured face so much more ghastly than usual, that he had the air of a ghoul or vampyre. And when, after carefully capping his piece, he drawled forth the word "Patchies," his harsh, croaking voice had an unwholesome, unhuman sound, as if it were indeed the utterance of a feeder ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Here this hideous ghoul burst forth with a laugh so fearful and portentous that even the cavalier was startled by its peculiarly fierce and almost unearthly expression. The mouth drawn to one side, the wide flat forehead, projecting cheek-bones, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... exclaimed old Mr. Harding, looking in the moonlight like some hideous old ghoul. "What game of cross-purposes and ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... married Am[i]n[^e], a very beautiful woman, who ate her rice with a bodkin. Sidi, wishing to know how his wife could support life and health without more food than she partook of in his presence, watched her narrowly, and discovered that she was a ghoul, who went by stealth every night and feasted on the fresh-buried dead. When Sidi made this discovery, Amin[^e] changed him into a dog. After he was restored to his normal shape, he changed Amin[^e] into a mare, which every day he rode almost to death.—Arabian ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... locality had taken their place. Huge, black birds circled over the forest island. Gaunt, dusky forms sat ghoul-like on the stick platforms that had been nests filled with impatient, squealing young birds, or flapped heavily and ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... European ideas. The Sheykh-el-Arab (of the Ababdeh tribe), who has a sort of town house here, has invited me out into the desert to the black tents, and I intend to pay a visit with old Mustapha A'gha. There is a Roman well in his yard with a ghoul in it. I can't get the story from Mustapha, who is ashamed of such superstitions, but I'll find it out. We had a fantasia at Mustapha's for young Strutt and Co., and a very good dancing-girl. Some dear old ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Shaw might even have met the monstrous mother in The Devil's Disciple, the horrible old woman who declares that she has hardened her heart to hate her children, because the heart of man is desperately wicked, the old ghoul who has made one of her children an imbecile and the other an outcast. Such types do occur in small societies drunk with the dismal wine of Puritan determinism. It is possible that there were among Irish Calvinists people who denied that ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... ruthlessness is defended by the evidence of the "Scottish Worthies." As Dr. McCrie objects to his "buffoonery," it is odd that he palliates the "strong propensity" of Knox "to indulge his vein of humour," when describing, with ghoul-like mirth, the festive circumstances of the murder and burial of Cardinal Beaton. The odious part of his satire, Scott says, is confined to "the fierce and unreasonable set of extra-Presbyterians," Wodrow's High Flyers. "We have no delight to ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... crazy thoughts of air-pressure, condensation and compression, resistance, abstruse formulae. To him it seemed that some gigantic problem in stress-calculation were being hurled at him, to solve—it seemed that, blind, deaf, dumb, some sinister and ghoul-like demon were flailing him until he answered—and that he ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... brilliant uniform of the Spahis, half oriental, half French, with his lovely wife, and the low, swarthy little ex-Minister in complete black, with his huge round spectacles on his nose nearly twice the size of his eyes, and a wife on his arm nearly double his stature. Why, Thiers reminds me of a Ghoul gallanting a Peri." ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... Alec laughed. Yet, ghoul or not, there was something the huge beast seemed afraid of and hurried to get away from, or attempted to ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... tennis, or the hundred and one activities which help to keep young America employed in a great university, Galusha might have been, and was, seen hopping about some grass-grown graveyard, like a bespectacled ghoul, making tracings of winged death's-heads or lugubrious tombstone poetry. When they guyed him he merely grinned, blushed, and was silent. To the few—the very few—in whom he confided he made explanations which were as ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the goodliest fashion, with a face like the shining full moon, sitting talking with his daughter. At this sight he could not contain himself, of his jealousy for his daughter, and putting the curtain aside, rushed in upon them, like a Ghoul, with his drawn sword in his hand. When the prince saw him, he said to the princess, 'Is this thy father?' 'Yes,' answered she; whereupon he sprang to his feet and taking his sword in his hand, cried out at the King with such a terrible cry, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... enough, for there were but three of them, two hampered by their mail, they bore Sir Geoffrey across the Place of Arms. Save for the dead and dying, and some ghoul-like knaves who plundered them, by this time ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... stomach, I myself surely believed. Never was a fight for life a more awful thing to see. On the one hand a brave man gripping the rocks with hands and foot until the crags cut his very flesh; on the other that ghoul-like horror seeking to wind other claws about its prey and to drag it towards its gaping mouth. What miracle could save him, God alone knew; and yet he was saved. A swift act of his own, brave and wonderful, struck the sucker from the limb and set him free. Aye, what a mind ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in the direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one of those whom we have just described,—neither English nor French, neither peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scent of the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifle Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat; he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him. Who was this man? The night probably knew ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... occasion for the horse-laugh. In some of his works indeed (we might cite the poems named The Dead Robbery, The Forge, and The Supper Superstition) the horse-laugh almost passes into a nightmare laugh. A ghoul might seem to have set it going, and laughing hyenas to be chorusing it. A man of such a faculty and such a habit of work could scarcely, in all instances, keep himself within the bounds of good taste—a term which people ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... understand Catherine, and the part she played on the stage of French politics, her training and the position she held must be understood. It is one thing to look upon her on the obverse as wholly without heart, a trafficker in human life, a ghoul who smiled with complacency on the victims of her hate, and another to look on the reverse of the medal. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew is pointed to as a crime—a religious crime. But is this true? It may not have been an act in accordance with twentieth-century ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Veil now raised, Showed them as in death's agony they gazed, Not the long promised light, the brow whose beaming Was to come forth, all conquering, all redeeming, But features horribler than Hell e'er traced On its own brood;—no Demon of the Waste,[134] No church-yard Ghoul caught lingering in the light Of the blest sun, e'er blasted human sight With lineaments so foul, so fierce as those The Impostor now in grinning mockery shows:— "There, ye wise Saints, behold your Light, your Star— "Ye would be dupes and victims ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... fakir, "we were sitting here by this tomb worshipping Khuda, when a ghoul, dressed as a princess, came and exhumed a body that had been buried a few days ago, and began to eat it. On seeing this I was filled with anger, and beat her back with a shovel, which lay on the fire at the time. While running away from me her necklace got loose and dropped. You wonder at these ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... their flushed faces contrasted strongly with the cadaverous countenance of the husband, who leant over them, watching every motion, and intent upon the expected stroke of the shovel upon the coffin lid. The recollection of the attributes of the German ghoul came over me; nor did the difference between the beings, the motives, and the actions, prevent me from conjuring up the similitude, so unlike a human being did he appear in his complexion, his fixed, dead-like ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... stone's throw out on either hand From that well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange; Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite Shall bear us company to-night, For we have reached the Oldest Land Wherein the Powers of ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... thou wert England's Nature, Bard Supreme, To fashion kings and lordlings fit to rule; They would be flesh and blood, not fiend and ghoul; And would thou wert her Sun, that every beam Might not, for tally, show a youth's blood-pool, Choking blithe Spring, as, now, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... well-carved handle of her fan, Was the finger-bone of a Lincoln man. She turned aside a flower to cull, From a vase which was made of a human skull; For to make her forget the loss of her slaves, Her lovers had rifled dead men's graves. Do you think I'm describing a witch or ghoul? There are no such things—and I'm not a fool; Nor did she reside in Ashantee; No—the lady fair was ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... poked among the packs. There was little to see except gleaming teeth and the whites of eyes, set in hairy faces in the mist. But Ismail danced all by himself among the stones of Khyber road and he looked like a bearded ghoul out ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... leaves they were crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... bound from Gibraltar to Malta, affirms that Lord Byron, during the whole voyage, seldom tasted wine; and that, when he did occasionally take some, it was never more than half a glass mixed with water. He ate but little; and never any meat; only bread and vegetables. He made me think of the ghoul taking ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... in the darker dreams of poetry that stand out in the memory of generations. There is for instance Poe's "Dark tarn of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir''; there are some queer twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... be expected to-morrow?" inquired Isfendiyar. "To-morrow," replied the demon-guide, "thou wilt meet with an enchantress, who can convert the stormy sea into dry land, and the dry land again into the ocean. She is attended by a gigantic ghoul, or apparition." "Then thou shalt see how easily this enchantress and her ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... of this plant is frequently alluded to by our elder dramatists; and with one of the greatest of them, Webster—as might be expected from a muse revelling like a ghoul in graves and sepulchres—it is an especial favorite. But none have plunged so deeply into the subject as Sir Thomas Browne. He tears up the fable root and branch. Concerning the danger ensuing from eradication of the mandrake, the learned physician thus writes: ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... think, dear Roger, from this funereal introduction, that your friend became the prey of a ghoul or a vampire. The Marquise is handsome enough, after all. Her features are noble, regular, but a little Jewish, which induces her to wear a turban earlier and oftener than is necessary. She would not ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin |
