"Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sought—trampled bracken, a broken bush.... He followed the trail with a slow certitude of which ordinarily he would have been incapable.... It did not lead very far. The trees thinned abruptly. A rounded moss-covered rock rose up between him and the moon ... and on the rock, grotesque and darkly ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... written disclosures only that De Quincey could do much mischief; for it was scarcely possible to be prejudiced by anything he could say. The whole man was grotesque; and it must have been a singular image that his neighbors in the valley preserved in their memory. A frail-looking, diminutive man, with narrow chest and round shoulders and features like those of a dying patient, walking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... affair. True, Wilhelmine had taunted him cruelly with his failure, and the man always took her lightest word to heart. He had conceived an affection for her which was a trifle inconvenient—a jealous, fierce affection made grotesque by ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... apparently, was changed. At the sight of each dear and familiar object he was profoundly affected. His heart beat audibly, his emotion nearly suffocated him; an ache was in his throat. Unconsciously he quickened his pace until he almost ran, his long shadow making grotesque efforts to keep ...
— Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories • Ambrose Bierce
... from the tumult that drew together about the counter of the sturdy oak table in the centre of the room. She was sitting in the towering old settle by the fireplace, leaning a little forward as if she awaited her opportunity to spring in and determine the tumult when something of this grotesque male violence ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... scientific, natural, and sacred,—its reverence for the dead, and its dim and portentous traditions! and what a reflex of Nineveh's palmy days are the winged lions exhumed by Layard! What more authentic tokens of Mediaeval piety and patience exist than the elaborate and grotesque carvings of Albert Drer's day? The colossal Brahma in the temple of Elephanta, near Bombay, is the visible acme of Asiatic superstition. And can an illustration of the revival of Art, in the fifteenth century, so exuberant, aspiring, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... thought the West must be exile for a literary man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which our citizenship is ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Though the grotesque wording and droll errors of these old psalm-books can, after the lapse of centuries, be pointed out and must be smiled at, there is after all something so pathetic in the thought of those good, scholarly old New England saints, hampered by poverty, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... like Longfellow and most of the other American poets, wrote prose as well as poetry, having produced a number of wild, grotesque, and powerfully-imagined tales; unlike most of them he was a literary man pur sang. He depended for support entirely on his writings, and his career was more like the precarious existence of an author in the time of Johnson and Savage than the decent life of an ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... little child had forgot her loss in her interest in the bullock cart with its grotesque lure; and she climbed into the cart just as Kathlyn appeared, followed by the excited leopard. She saw the child and snatched her instinctively from the cart. The leopard leaped into the cart at the rear, while Kathlyn ran toward the chief's ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... a great rock jutted out above the lake, that same barren rock wherein I had sat the day I discovered this cataract; now as I viewed this rock I was struck by its grotesque shape and then, all at once, I saw it was hatefully like to a shrivelled head—there were the fleshless jaws, the shrunken nose and great, hollow eye-socket. And now even as I stared at the thing my companion spied it also, ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... singing, talking loudly. Stumbling over a log his burning eyes had not seen, he turned in grotesque humor to offer curtsy and abject apology, then hastened on upward. Later, carroming from a huge tree he had hit head on, he addressed it in grave good humor: "Please keep to the right." His flushed face purple in the green light of the deep woods, he hurried ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... caps of the "stream-lined" variety had all been sold, so the war baby was obliged to buy a general service hat. The only one that fitted him was shapeless as a Hausfrau, ponderous as a Bishop, unstable as a politician, grotesque as a Birthday Honours' List. It was a nice quiet hat, we assured Marmaduke—just the thing for active service. Did it suit him? Very well indeed, we replied—made him look like Lord Haldane at the age ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... had slumbered in his chair from time to time. But his sleeping had been of that painful, wakeful nature which brings with it no refreshment. It had been full of dreams, in all of which there had been some grotesque reference to the property, but in none of them had there been any memory of the Squire's terrible death. And yet, as he woke and woke and woke again, it can hardly be said that the truth had come back upon him as a new blow. Through such dreams ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... world—Jean de Charpentier, director of the mines at Bex, a skilled geologist who had been a fellow-pupil of Von Buch and Von Humboldt under Werner at the Freiberg School of Mines. Charpentier laughed at the mountaineer's grotesque idea, and thought no more about it. And ten years elapsed before Perraudin could find any one who treated his notion with greater respect. Then he found a listener in M. Venetz, a civil engineer, who read ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... bulwarks, and leaned there in uncontrollable sea-sickness. Until the gale was done I believe he had not felt a qualm. Now, on the top of his nausea, he had to endure the raillery of Mr. Fett, whose active fancy had already invented a grotesque and wholly untruthful accusation against his friend—namely, that when assailed by the Moors, and in the act of being kicked below, he had dropped on his knees ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Here and there, the fancy or interest of the owner had induced him to remodel the structure; and an ill-designed and ungraceful mixture of the modern with the ancient gave to the whole somewhat of a grotesque appearance, that was heightened by the noble trees, which had once towered in majesty and beauty, being in many places lopped and docked, as if even the exuberance of nature was a crime in the eyes of the present lord of ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... In grotesque juxtaposition he remembered, together with that picture of Sylvia as he had seen her last night, the case of a respectable old lady, named Mrs. Meeks, the widow of a clergyman who had had a living in ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... might not be approved by rigid lawyers as a faithful and felicitous indication of the manner of that mysterious growth of ages, from occult beginnings, that was never profaned by the invading wit of man 97; but it is less grotesque than it appears. Lord Halifax was the most original writer of political tracts in the pamphleteering crowd between Harrington and Bolingbroke; and in the Exclusion struggle he produced a scheme of limitations which, in substance, if ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... entirely without foundation. Why the man had uttered it was soon explained. The wild expressions that were pouring from his lips, with the grotesque gestures he was making with his arms proved that ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... into his folk-tales, and does so without the least idea of treating them disrespectfully. He makes them talk in his own language because he has no other language; and if the talk seems a little grotesque and irreverent, it is due to the low level of the narrator's literary culture, and not to any intention, on his part, of treating God and the angels with levity. The whole aim of the story is a moral and religious one. The narrator is trying to show that sympathy ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... railway." The domestic, with leisurely movement, left us in the hall, and dawdled upstairs to report the remarkable case of the importunate English. By-and-by he returned, and showed us into the saloon, a huge, bare, fireless room, with a few grotesque photographs and French prints on the walls, and a stiff green sofa and chairs. The Signor Conte kept us waiting twenty minutes, whilst he shaved and exchanged his dressing-gown for the suit of sables which is the correct raiment of the Latin race. Nothing could be more polished than his manners. ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... in its nimbus of prismatic spray; there was the swift, symbolic Aco. And then, at a half-hour's walk, there was the pretty pink-stuccoed village, with its hill-top church, its odd little shrines, its grim-grotesque ossuary, its faded frescoed house-fronts, its busy, vociferous, out-of-door Italian life:—the cobbler tapping in his stall; women gossiping at their toilets; children sprawling in the dirt, chasing each other, shouting; men drinking, playing mora, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... C. grandiflorus and C. Macdonaldiae, the famous Night-blooming cereuses, have white flowers which remain open only one night. They are, however, though so transient, a marvelous sight. Prone to strange tasks indeed is the hand of Nature which has fashioned these grotesque, clumsy, lifeless looking plants to accumulate nourishment and moisture for months from the niggardly desert sands, and to mature for a few hours' existence only these marvelously fashioned flowers which ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... immediately with a tart in his hand. An Italian was grinding an organ before the shop, and a miserable little shrivelled monkey was sitting on the instrument. The Count stopped, bit a piece for himself out of the tart, and gravely handed the rest to the monkey. "My poor little man!" he said, with grotesque tenderness, "you look hungry. In the sacred name of humanity, I offer you some lunch!" The organ-grinder piteously put in his claim to a penny from the benevolent stranger. The Count shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... from her hand, and the omelette rolled, a grotesque mass, upon the carpet. She swayed, dizzily, raising one hand to her brow, but had recovered herself even as Leroux sprang ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... of some adventures more or less grotesque, four monks are killed at one time near an inn. The old woman who keeps this hostelry, fearful of being implicated in a murder, wishes to get rid of the corpses. She hides three of the bodies, and has one buried by a monk who is passing by. She pretends that the dead man ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... effects of their efforts. A mob was raised in Edinburgh, but it was appeased without the loss of life and with no other casualty save the frightening of the provost's wife. There were some eccentric movements among the Cameronians, rendered all the more grotesque by the Jacobites taking the leadership in them; and some of the more vehement clergy betook themselves to their own special weapons in the holding of a day ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... shadow at the edge of the opening. The first arrival came in with a rush. There was a sudden scurry behind me, and over the log he came with a flying leap that landed him on the smooth bit of ground in the middle, where he whirled around and around with grotesque jumps, like a kitten after its tail. Only Br'er Rabbit's tail was too short for him ever to catch it; he seemed rather to be trying to get a good look at it. Then he went off helter-skelter in a headlong rush through the ferns. Before ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... and probably elsewhere, the old man was one of the principal grotesque characters. These things, as Rousseau pointed out, have a great effect upon morals. Once the old man became a recognised traditional stage-butt, his social authority had come to an end. In the de ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... dreams which may be history or may be allegory. There is in them nothing grotesque, nothing which could mar the feeling of authenticity, the sense of the actual occurence of the dream incident. The faces and figures perceived have the light shade and expression which seems quite proper to the wonderworld in which the eye ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... marriage in peasant life we may turn to a death and a burial. There are frequent allusions in the Skazkas to these gloomy subjects, with reference to which we will quote two stories, the one pathetic, the other (unintentionally) grotesque. Neither of them bears any title in the original, but we may ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... acknowledgment of a common danger, would crush the Radical force in an instant. These are valuable manifestations, and worth a hundred clauses in the Corporation Bill; for what matters it whether aldermen and town clerks are perpetuated or suppressed? and it really is grotesque to fight for these puerilities as if it was a contest pro aris et focis, and to hesitate one instant whether a collision should be provoked between the two Houses of Parliament, and the advantages both direct and collateral flowing from Peel's mediation be thrown away, for the sake of ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... It is our firm faith that bright solemn angels in celestial watchings were frequent guests in the homely room of the two sisters, and that passing by all accidents of age and poverty, withered skins, bony features, and grotesque movements and shabby clothing, they saw more real beauty there than in many a scented boudoir where seeming angels smile ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... as a moral monster, in which form she still treads the operatic stage, and this is the conception which mankind in general have of her. The lover of real poetry regards this romanticist's terrible drama of Lucretia Borgia as a grotesque manifestation of the art, while the historian laughs at it; the poet, however, may excuse himself on the ground of his ignorance, and of his belief in a myth which had been current since the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... as legitimate fields for wit and unrepressed jollity. Yet in the unbosoming of this cultivated "heathen" we see our fads and foibles held up as strange gods, and must confess some of them to be grotesque when ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... friends. Many of his pranks were mere whimsicalities, innocent pleasantries that hurt no one. He would spend three hours in illustrating a letter to a friend, filling the letter with gossipy trivialities and using six different kinds of ink to make it look grotesque. ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... detach themselves from the general stream of occurrences and seem to partake of the nature of revelations. Such was this Parsons affair. It began by seeming grotesque; it ended disconcertingly. The fabric of Mr. Polly's daily life was torn, and beneath it he discovered depths ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... Grotesque uncertain shapes infest the dark And wings of bats are heard in aimless flight; Discordant voices cry and serpents hiss, No friendly star, no ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... complete ruin could be imagined. If a cyclone had swept over the barn it could not have more certainly leveled it. And, not only was it leveled, crushed down in the center by the great weight of the tank, but the boards and beams were broken into small pieces. Parts of them clung in long, grotesque splinters to the ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... great : granda. "-coat," palto, gravitoj greedy : avida, mangxegema. green : verda. "-house," varmejo. greengage : renklodo. grey : griza. "-hound," leporhundo. grill : kradrosti. grin : grimaci, rikani. grind : mueli; pisti; grinci. gristle : kartilago. groan : gxemi. grocer : spicisto. grotesque : groteska. grotto : groto. ground : tero. "-floor," teretagxo. groundsel : senecio. group : grup'o, -igi. grouse : tetro. grub : larvo. guarantee : garantii. guard : gardi, (milit.) gvardio. gudgeon : gobio. guess : diveni, konjekti. guide : gvidi. guillotine : gilotino. gulf ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... was inconceivable, and they had mourned together over the grotesque possibilities of life. "But you will save her," he had said at last. "You will save her! You will point out to her all she would be giving up—the absurdity, the really ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... they ever had parents. It is quite the natural and proper thing, born as they were born,—it would never do for them to have any over-filial regard for us. Imagine Humphry weeping for my death, or yours! What a grotesque idea! And as for Rupert and Cyprian,—it is devoutly to be hoped that when we die, our funerals may be well over before the great cricket matches of the year come on, as otherwise they will curse us for having left ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... South Fork of the Price, is the equivalent of Echo Caon, and is equal or superior in everything except color. The brilliant red of the Echo cliffs is wanting. The towers and walls of Castle Caon are yellowish-gray. But their forms are incomparably various and grotesque—in some instances sublime. The valley of Green River at this point is a cheerless sage-brush desert, as it is further north. To be sure, this uninviting stream, a couple of hundred miles further south, having united with the Grande, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... veterans with flowers as they swung down the Avenue, both men and officers, until some were fairly hidden under their fragrant burden. There was laughter and applause; grotesque figures were not absent as Sherman's legions passed, with their "bummers" and their regimental pets; but with all the shouting and the laughter and the joy of this unprecedented ceremony, there was one sad and dominant thought which could not be driven from the minds of those who saw ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... were shiny and thick with grease, stretched over a small round body, that contrasted strangely with his lean and bony face. And all this formed a jovial, grotesque and rather ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... it is true, a natural belief in deity, which we might think was implanted by his creator; but it is not found in all men, and in the lower races it assumes forms often so low and grotesque that we cannot imagine its origin to have been divine. Between the God of the Christian and the god of the red Indian there is, saving mere force, no affinity whatever. This we must frankly own to ourselves. The god of the ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... kitchen, where we often saw her. The place itself is weird and terrible—low ceiled, with the stone hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it. When Giovanna's mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to do us reverence from the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her good wishes for our long life, continued health, and endless ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Hercules, which spouted water to cool the air from a serpent's throat, still asserting its aquatic supremacy, under the shade of a fine old medlar-tree; and all this too in the garden of a London parish workhouse! [Picture: Hercules fountain] Not less surprising was the aspect of the interior. The grotesque workshop of the pauper artisans, said to have been [Picture: Workshop] Lord Shaftesbury's dairy, and over which was his fire-proof library, was then an apartment appropriated to ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... course, a wide interval between the grotesque effrontery that wears the Hellenic crown and the undeviatingly decorous self-effacement of the Dutch sovereign; and yet there is something of a common complexion runs through the whole range of establishments, ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... 'The River Fight' and 'The Bay Fight,' which appear in his volume of collected works, 'War Lyrics,' his title to be considered a true poet does not rest upon these only. He was unequal in his performance and occasionally was betrayed by a grotesque humor into disregard of dignity and finish; but he had both the vision and the lyric grace of the builder ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... form of images is familiar. The rude and, to modern eyes, grotesque idols of the lower peoples gradually pass into the more finished forms of the civilized nations.[2010] Really artistic forms, however, were produced only by some Semites (Babylonians and Assyrians) ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around. They looked grotesque—unearthly—denizens of some underground pit. They were good-humoured and ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... of one book and a perfectly unconditional belief in it. Furthermore, as before said, Michael never corrected himself or preserved his sanity by constant intercourse with his fellows. He incessantly brooded, and the offspring of a soul like his, begotten on itself, is monstrous and grotesque. He questioned himself and his oracle further. What could Paul mean exactly? God could not curse him if he did no wrong. He could only mean that he was willing to sin and be punished provided Israel might live. It was lawful then to tell a lie or perpetrate any evil deed in order ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... the river, and then turned, still plunging, up a steep bank, when, finding that I must come off, I threw myself off on the right side, where the ground rose considerably, so that I had not far to fall. I got up covered with dust, but neither shaken nor bruised. It was truly grotesque and humiliating. The bear ran in one direction, and the horse in another. I hurried after the latter, and twice he stopped till I was close to him, then turned round and cantered away. After walking about a mile ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... said to be mightier than the sword, is enough to kill any one with a real sense of humour. Some of the literary productions which were to send the greatest of living men off the face of the earth are quite grotesque in their feminine, shrill advocacy of force towards the "eater of pigs"; the "Anti-Christ"; and the murderer of a kindly-disposed gentleman who was on an innocent visit to the frontier of France for the purpose of negotiating ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... to seek assistance, and left the dark room with the dead man lying in the pool of yellow light, and the parrot perched on the body, muttering to itself. It was a strange mingling of the horrible and grotesque, and the whole scene was hit off in the phrase applied to it by Vandeloup. It was, indeed, 'The ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... unwonted colour would come back to his pale cheek, and the smile to his lips, and while the ramble and the sunshine lasted he would be all jest and gaiety, pelting me with dead leaves, chasing me in and out of the plantations, and telling me strange stories, half pathetic, half grotesque, of Dryads, and Fauns, and Satyrs—of Bacchus, and Pan, and Polyphemus—of nymphs who became trees, and shepherds who were transformed to fountains, and all kinds of beautiful wild myths of antique Greece—far more beautiful and far more wild than all the tales of gnomes and witches in my book ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... library table apparently in rapt contemplation of a pair of sixteenth century bronze inkwells, strange twisted shapes, half man, half beast, bearing in their breasts twin black pools. But his thoughts were far from their grotesque beauty—centered on vast schemes of destruction and reconstruction. The room was still, so quiet, in spite of its proximity to the crowded life of Fifth Avenue, that one divined its steel construction and the doubled and trebled casing of its many windows. The walls, hung with green Genoese ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... defined these theories, of which there are seven, traced their origin, comprehended their significance and bearings, and dissected their supporting pretensions, then the whole field of our theme lies in light before us; and, however grotesque or mysterious, simple or subtle, may be the modes of thinking and feeling in relation to the life beyond death revealed in our subsequent researches, we shall know at once where to refer them and how to explain them. The precise object, therefore, of the present ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Archbishop Trench, has set those of the original forth with a judicious enthusiasm which cannot be bettered.[10] The point is, how these merits, these effects, are produced. The piece is a crucial one, because, grotesque as its arrangement would probably have seemed to an Augustan, its peculiarities are superadded to, not substituted for, the requirements of classical prosody. The writer does not avail himself of the new accentual quantification, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... such problems before the miscellaneous public of our theatres. No doubt a few of the social reformers are sprinkled over the audiences. There are a few in the boxes as well as in the galleries who discern the realities and who hear the true appeal, even through those grotesque melodramas. But with the overwhelming majority it is quite different. For them it is entertainment, and as such it is devastating. It is quite true that many a piquant comic opera shows more actual frivolity, and no one will underestimate the shady influence of such voluptuous vulgarities ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning sense of her surroundings came with the sound ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... gorgeous curtained litter drawn by camels, and a number of musicians with raeitas, darabukas, the "key and bottle," and other Eastern instruments which may have been ancestors of the Highlanders' bagpipes. The street crowd followed, enchanted by the plaintive, monotonous notes, grotesque to newcomers from the west, but enthralling to those who have fallen under the spell of their ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... week, but the most dangerous of all, presented himself yesterday at one of the entrances of the Tuilleries. Decked out in a grotesque costume, his eyes flashing, his hat cocked over his ear, and addressing the most respectable people with unheard-of rudeness, he attempted to force his way past the sentry, and thrust himself, for what purpose God only knows, into the presence of the ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... it has narrow loopholes up and down its front and sides, and an arched window over the low portal, set with small panes of glass, cracked, dim, and irregular, through which a bygone age is peeping out into the daylight. Some of those old, grotesque faces, called gargoyles, are seen on the projections of the architecture. The churchyard is very small, and is encompassed by a gray stone fence that looks as ancient as the church itself. In front of the tower, on the village-green, is a yew-tree of incalculable ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... their clothes; unless they die on the instant they have a way of tearing their coats open and gripping with their hands at their vitals, as though to hold the life in; they have a way of sprawling their legs in grotesque postures; they have a way of putting their arms up before their faces as though at the very last they would shut out a dreadful vision. Those contorted, twisted arms with the elbows up, those spraddled stark ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... his window jealously drawn. But at night his shadow, strongly projected on the curtain, was in incessant motion; and far into the morning hours a gigantic head and arms shifted and blended upon it in grotesque forms. At the other window of the workman's apartment the young girl often sat, book in hand, and moved her lips as if she were reading aloud. Her eyes were never seen to wander to the outer world with those longings for freedom and fresh air which are natural to the youthful heart, but were always ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Don't let go!" begged Dick of his pet, who swung to and fro, dangling like some grotesque pendulum over the side of ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis
... thirty thousand spectators, contained a semi-circle of marble seats built up against the cliff of the Acropolis, and was open to the sky. The large stage was built of marble and the front of it was carved with grotesque figures. The lower tiers of seats nearest the stage were marble chairs reserved for priests and other dignitaries. The names of the men who occupied the chairs were carved in the marble, and some of ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... mainly supplied arbitrarily compiled, if extended, catalogues of names. To each name were attached brief annotations, which occasionally offered a fact or a date, but commonly consisted of a few sentences of grotesque, uncritical eulogy. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... in copying a humorous picture from the last page of Harper's Weekly. It was an ambitious attempt on the part of so young a pupil, but he had succeeded remarkably well, reproducing with close fidelity the grotesque expressions of the figures ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... peculiar to French traffic; it had all at once assumed the aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in a blue shirt and a scarlet beret, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... casting-nets. It is customary for each to consider as his personal property all the fish he obtains. These gatherings afford much delight to the children, of whom a great number accompanied their elders in the prahus. Women and children were in holiday attire, and, in spite of the grotesque ornaments of big rings in the split, distended ear-lobes, the latter were unusually charming. They had bracelets of brass and silver around their wrists and ankles; some of them wore necklaces of antique beads in dull colors, yellow, ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... fiddle, and that splashed sheets of white paper, more or less, with sepia, and the other was president of a local agricultural society, or was gifted with a bass voice that rendered Se fiato in corpo like a war whoop —Mme. de Bargeton amid these grotesque figures was like a famished actor set down to a stage dinner of pasteboard. No words, therefore, can describe her joy at these tidings. She must see this poet, this angel! She raved about him, went into raptures, talked of him for whole hours together. Before two ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... of labour out of Nature, has rather enriched labour than that labour has enriched Carnegie and Krupp. Their wealth is not dead wealth; it produces wages and articles of use. The "Surplus-Value Doctrine" is a grotesque distortion of, and an unjustified protest against, the fact that manufacturers and other organisers and directors of labour ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... a pine box placed upon rude rockers, and he used it for a rocking-chair. His bare, fat legs hung out on one side of the box, and as he delightedly rocked back and forth, his grotesque little shadow waved to and fro on the wall, and mocked ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... utterances of the oboe is the melody of the funeral march in Beethoven's "Heroic" symphony, in which its tenderness has beautiful play. It is sometimes used effectively in imitative music. In Haydn's "Seasons," and also in that grotesque tone poem by Saint-Saens, the "Danse Macabre," it gives the cock crow. It is the timid oboe that sounds the A for the orchestra to ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of brutality, except as a formless menace born of his anger, the reason he flung at her for his marrying her conveyed nothing to her in its grotesque impossibility. Only the intentional coarseness of it was to be endured—if she chose to endure it; for the rest was empty of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... what I should do with my materials, denoting a kind of oral literature among the Chippewas and other tribes, in the shape of legends and wild tales of the imagination. The narrations themselves are often so incongruous, grotesque, and fragmentary, as to require some hand better than mine, to put them in shape. And yet, I feel that nearly all their value, as indices of Indian imagination, must depend on preserving their original form. Some little time since, I wrote to Washington Irving on the ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... And this, again, was not inappropriate—it was typical of all the ways of the city. It was a city which had grown up by accident, with nobody to care about it or to help it; it was huge and ungainly, crude, uncomfortable, and grotesque. There was nowhere in it a beautiful sight upon which a man could rest his eyes, without having them tortured by something ugly near by. At the foot of the slope of the River Drive ran a hideous freight-railroad; and across the river the beautiful Palisades ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... the same style, where you can see swillers and topers in three-cornered hats, distinguished by noses red, purple, or crimson; little women of Hundsruck, in velvet caps with long fluttering ribbons, some grave, some laughing, others queer and grotesque-looking; the hay-loft high up under the roof; stables, pigsties, cowsheds, all in picturesque confusion attract and confound your attention. It is a ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... after his arrival he was sitting on the shingle at Madame de Villegry's feet, both much amused by the grotesque spectacle presented by the bathers, who exhibited themselves in all degrees of ugliness and deformity. Of course Madame de Villegry did not bathe, being, as she said, too nervous. She was sitting under a large parasol and enjoying her own superiority over those wretched, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... face to the crowd, his features worked convulsively, but he could not speak. His grief was so grotesque, that the few who saw him laughed hysterically. He could not even go to Polly, his feet ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... other country where such vulgar and heartless curiosity, and even ridicule, is bestowed upon grotesque or unsightly types ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... had a war-dance on deck, which was a most ludicrous scene. The chief and two braves sat upon the deck, beating violently a small drum and howling forth their war-song, while the others in full dress, painted in a grotesque style, leaped about, brandishing tomahawks and spears, and terminating each dance with a terrific yell. Some of the men are very fine-looking, but the squaws are all ugly. They occupied part of the second cabin, separated only by a board partition from our room. This proximity was any thing ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... write a story than compose a picture." The final statement may be taken for what it is worth, written as it was at a time of disillusionment. The first part of Ruskin's analysis is certainly true and has been thus expanded by his biographer, Sir E. T. Cook: "The grotesque and the German setting of the tale were taken from Grimm; from Dickens it took its tone of pervading kindliness and geniality. The Alpine ecstasy and the eager pressing of the moral were Ruskin's ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... was with his awkward armor, he began executing a double shuffle on the beach, the sight was so grotesque that the captain came near going into convulsions. But the exercise was too exhausting, and the mate speedily sat down on the shore and also began opening oysters. His ardor was somewhat dampened when he failed to discover anything in ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... guess they weren't so cold and rusty-brown when the old demon spit fire at them from the active volcano," said Eleanor, gazing aloft at the grotesque ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... allusiveness, partly owing to their sound, possess a remarkable flavour which is totally absent from those of Saxon derivation. Such a word, for instance, as 'pyramidally,' gives one at once an immediate sense of something mysterious, something extraordinary, and, at the same time, something almost grotesque. And this subtle blending of mystery and queerness characterises not only Browne's choice of words, but his choice of feelings and of thoughts. The grotesque side of his art, indeed, was apparently all that was visible to the critics ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... away from her, blushing. The electric-light from the street shone full in the room, which was wavering with grotesque shadows. ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to the proscenium, but he is required to give animation to the background, and to be as easy and graceful as he may in his aspect and movements. The result is not satisfactory. He is more at home in less refined situations. He is prone to indulge in rather grotesque gestures, expressive of admiration of the brilliant decorations surrounding him, and profuse, even servile gratitude for the hospitality extended to him. He interchanges mute remarks, enlivened by surprising grimaces, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... surrounded her. Meanwhile her mother and I stood together, looking at each other by the light of the lamp, with an assumed composure which hid our true faces like a mask. In that horrible situation, the grotesque and the terrible, always together in this strange life of ours, came together now. On either side of us, the one sound that broke the sinister and threatening silence was the lumpish snoring of the sleeping ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... something indescribably weird and wild and grotesque in that prolonged cry of cackling, unnatural mirth. An Australian by my side said: "Well done! Exactly right!" and the Flemish children shrieked with joy, without understanding the meaning of the noise. Old, old songs belonging to the early Victorian age were given by the soldiers, who had ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... was as inarticulate as Cromwell. Like the great Protector he "lived silent," and like him he was often misunderstood. Stories which have been repeated by writer after writer attribute to him the most grotesque eccentricities of manner, and exhibit his lofty piety as the harsh intolerance of a fanatic. He has been represented as the narrowest of Calvinists; and so general was the belief in his stern and merciless nature that ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... saw these things stood looking up, enveloped in his ulster with the grey cowl thrust upon his forehead, like a monk. One candle cast a grotesque shadow of him on the plastered wall. And when his chance came, though he was but a weakling, he too climbed and for some moments hugged the beam, and felt the madness of the swinging bell. Descending, he wondered long and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... gone forth in the woods to help the German lad look for the missing horse. Mrs. Carleton smiled as she reflected upon a certain absurdity which marked the whole business, for, look at it as she chose, there was something grotesque in the project of two youths setting out to hunt for a horse that had been wandering for days in a limitless wood. But the smile quickly gave way to the serious expression which not often left the face of the mother since that awful ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... other hand, what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed face, turned-up ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... their death with such melancholy swiftness, but leaving—two of them, at least—imperishable work behind them. The old blind father and the bereaved husband read the confused eulogy and criticism, sometimes with a sad pleasure at the praise, oftener with a sadder pain at the grotesque inaccuracy. Small wonder that it became impressed upon Mr. Bronte's mind that an authoritative biography was desirable. His son-in-law, Mr. Arthur Bell Nicholls, who lived with him in the Haworth parsonage during the six weary years which succeeded Mrs. Nicholls's ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... presents itself in all it's magnificence; and the Gothic towers, with which it abounds, greatly engage the attention of every spectator, as well by the loftiness of their spires, as by the variety of their pleasingly grotesque decorations. The fortresss of Fredericstadt, supported on one side by the batteries of one of the arsenals, defends the entrance of the harbour: where there is, also, another battery; and where, as at this period, in case of necessity, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... rather grotesque band to whom we are principally indebted for a vindication of outraged common sense and insulted humanity in this instance, and whose vigorous exposition of the absurdities of the prevailing system, in combination with other lights and sources of intelligence, ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... artistic effects depend upon methods of verbal jugglery which cannot be explained without the help of numerous examples. The collection published by Takumi includes a good deal of matter in which a Western reader can discover no merit; but the best of it has a distinctly grotesque quality that reminds one of Hood's weird cleverness in playing with grim subjects. This quality, and the peculiar Japanese method of mingling the playful with the terrific, can be suggested and explained ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... two explorers when they walked inland with about eighteen most obliging and courteous natives—an open space with four hollowed trunks of trees surrounding two stones, the trees carved into the shape of grotesque human heads, and among them, a sort of temple, made of sloping bamboos and pandanus leaves meeting at the top, from whence hung a dead man, with his face painted in stripes of red and yellow, procured, it was thought, from the pollen of flowers. There was not enough ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... extravagant, if faithfully delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... spacious chamber, which served for the purposes of the apodyterium (that is, a place where the bathers prepared themselves for their luxurious ablutions). The vaulted ceiling was raised from a cornice, glowingly colored with motley and grotesque paintings; the ceiling itself was paneled in white compartments bordered with rich crimson; the unsullied and shining floor was paved with white mosaics, and along the walls were ranged benches for the accommodation of the loiterers. This chamber did not possess ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Neptune and his court—including an outsize animated picture of a mermaid ballet, quite an eye-catcher. But the broad quartz windows showed merely a shifting greenish-blue of seawater, and the only live fish visible were in an aquarium across from the bar. Pacific Colony lacked the grotesque loveliness of the Florida and Cuba settlements. Here they were somehow a working city, ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... to Plate II. (Lecture IV.), by Sandro; Venus in her planet, the ruling star of Florence. Anything more grotesque in conception, more unrestrained in fancy of ornament, you cannot find, even in the final days of the Renaissance. Yet Venus holds her divinity through all; she will become majestic to you as you gaze; and there is not a line of her chariot wheels, of her buskins, or of her throne, which you ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... James (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest—some kind of an ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... in its old, sinister expression of feature, the baby lay exposed. The face was grotesque in its weazened fixity; the little legs were twisted, and the thin body lay crooked among its blankets. The big eyes stared into the horrified ones above them as if pleading for mercy. The sight ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... or, indeed, to any reputable and industrious immigrant, the notion of settling a family in Hester Street could not seem other than grotesque. It is now the filthy and swarming centre of a very low population. The Jewish pedlar par eminence lives there and thereabouts. Signs painted in the characters of his race, not of his accidental nationality, abound on every side. Here a synagogue occupies the story ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Although it was past the midday hour, hardly a soul was to be seen moving about; and the western sun lighted up the green spires of the churches and red-tiled pointed roofs of the houses, glinting from the peculiar eye-shaped dormer windows of some of the cottages with the most grotesque effect and making them appear as if winking at the onlooker. It seemed like a scene of a bygone age reproduced on the canvas of some Flemish artist; and, but that Eric and his mother were accustomed to it, they must have rubbed their eyes, like Rip Van Winkle ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... their guns supplied them with an abundance of meat, of a flavor as delicious as the refined palate of a modern epicure could well wish. Their clothes were made chiefly of the skins of animals, and were easily procured: and although calculated to give a grotesque appearance to a fine gentleman in a city drawing room; yet were they particularly suited to their ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... every head turned squarely in my direction. Their eyes are closed to a mere black line; though this crack they are watching me, evidently thinking themselves unobserved. The spectacle is weird and grotesque. It is a new effect, the night side of the woods by daylight. After observing them a moment I take a single step toward them, when, quick as thought, their eyes fly wide open, their attitude is changed, they bend, some this way, some that, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... drift of his thought, or have disengaged his own conception from the tangled skein of elliptical and ungrammatical sentences in which he has enveloped it. The form of Campanella's poetry, though often grotesque, is always clear. Michael Angelo has left too many of his compositions in the same state as his marbles—unfinished and colossal abbozzi, which lack the final touches to make their outlines distinct. Under these circumstances, it can hardly happen that the translator should succeed ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... like that, when, for the gratification of a sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, born and bred of the stuff, you would risk everything. In excess it played hell with the nerves. That was why those eyes of hers.... Damn them! Why couldn't a man put them out of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the town. Thus we have a record of the cost of making a provisional altar to display Donatello's work at Padua—"per demonstrar el desegno ai forestieri."[46] No final definition of Gothic art, of the maniera tedesca is possible. Some of its component parts have been enumerated: rigidity, grotesque, naturalism, and so forth; but the definition is incomplete, cataloguing the effects without analysing their cause. Whether Donatello was influenced by the ultimate cause or not, he certainly assimilated some of the effects. The most obvious example of the ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... phantom (half person, half allegory) which he has placed at the gates of Hell. I 170 concluded by observing, that the poem was not calculated to excite passion in any mind, or to make any impression except on poetic readers; and that from the culpable levity betrayed at the close of the eclogue by the grotesque union of epigrammatic wit with allegoric personification, in the allusion to the 175 most fearful of thoughts, I should conjecture that the 'rantin' Bardie', instead of really believing, much less wishing, the fate spoken of in the last line, in application to any human individual, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... centuries on the lips of old wives, the narrative which has come down to us having done duty as a source of amusement in the fireside groups of preceding generations, may seem to some to afford slight matter for reflection, and may even appear so grotesque in its incidents as to be fitted only to excite a smile of wonder at the simplicity of those among whom such stories could obtain reception, and surprise at the fantastic imagination in which such tales could find their origin. Modern thought has, however, been busy asking ...
— Folk-lore and Legends: German • Anonymous
... your study a little imp of darkness,—of intellectual darkness, we mean,—whose efforts to imitate the gentle interference of fatigue are as grotesque as they are vexatious, and who does not succeed in deceiving, however readily one may sometimes fall in with his humor? The heavy pen, the dull page, the wandering thoughts, sometimes interrupt the most successful currents of labor, in those morning hours, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... may even temporarily comfort, the body after labor of brain; they do not help it—not even in the lighter kinds of labor. They unseat the judgment, pervert vision. Productions, cast off by the aid of the use of them, are but flashy, trashy stuff—or exhibitions of the prodigious in wildness or grotesque conceit, of the kind which Hoffman's tales give, for example; he was one of the few at all ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... that I have no right to enrol myself as one of the disciples of Epicurus, but when I think of myself, spontaneously there comes to my mind the grotesque epithet which Horace applied to the Epicureans in his Epistles, a characterization which for my part I accept and regard as an honour: "Swine of the herd of Epicurus, Epicuri ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... years, the real, the hidden condition of a nation, which has been bathed in Christian ideas, whether it be a young vigorous race, or an old and degenerate; and it will manifest itself socially and historically in those characteristics, sometimes grotesque, sometimes hideous, sometimes despicable, of which we have so many instances, medieval and modern, both in this hemisphere and in the western. It is, I say, the necessary result of the intercommunion of divine ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... below, mingled with shouts and the stamping of feet, together with the feverish condition of the lad, kept him awake another hour; but at last he fell into a light, uneasy sleep, haunted by all sorts of grotesque, awful visions. ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... laughing or screaming when she heard into whose service she was to go. I don't think she hated Lucy—yet. But for a woman who loved a man to take a place with the woman the man loved must have struck her as the most grotesque of propositions. But what could she do? Loyal to me, and to my secret, she wasn't going to give me ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... menacing looking man than this emperor, with his averted looks and his haughty contempt for the world and mankind; and yet there was something about him which made it difficult to take him seriously, especially to an Alexandrian. There was a touch of the grotesque in the Gallic robe with a red hood in which this ominous-looking contemner of humanity was wrapped. It was called a 'Caracalla', and it was from this garment that Bassianus Antoninus ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... refrain from laughter, his rage was so grotesque. He was making a mountain out of a molehill. In a moment, he ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... the bed, and saw that the mysterious and awful change, which tells that the inexorable decree is gone forth, and the "arrow fastened," was fast settling on old Mabel's features. Yet there was nothing uncouth or grotesque in that shrivelled and swarthy face, because FAITH, which leads death captive, had shed over them a supernatural calm, which ennobled them with a solemn sweetness. Her poor old hand, so long withered and helpless, dropped ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... region with which he was but little acquainted. It abounded, however, he knew, in game, and he hoped that water, sufficient for the wants of the oxen and horses, would be found. Scarcely half an hour passed, that a herd of grotesque gnus, with the heads of bisons and horns of oxen, or of graceful quaggas, swift blesbocs, or light and elegant springbocs, did not pass in sight, in hundreds, or rather in thousands, across the plain. Although it was no easy matter to get up with them, still Hendricks was too ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... overwhelms the wretch; he does not confess, but he is confounded. And how many secondary personages, accomplices, friends, enemies, witnesses are grouped about the principal criminal! Some are terrible, frightful, gloomy —others grotesque. And you know not what the ludicrous in the horrible is. My last scene is the court of assize. The prosecutor speaks, but it is I who furnished his ideas; his phrases are embroideries set around the canvas of my report. The president submits his questions to the jury; what emotion! ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... European galleries are several noted paintings in which the cat appears more or less unsuccessfully. Breughel and Teniers made their grotesque "Cat Concerts" famous, but one can scarcely see why, since the drawing is poor and there is no real insight into cat character evident. The sleeping cat, in Breughel's "Paradise Lost" in the Louvre, is better, being well drawn, but so small as to ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... long I lay there I don't know. A dim light was burning. I was in a room. The ceiling overhead was worked in a grotesque pattern; I could not make it out. My clothes were in tatters and my hand was covered with blood. Something warm was trickling down my face. What was it? The air was still and sodden. Who was this man beside me? And what was this smell ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... projecting over the other, till the pile seemed completely to overhang the street. The entire front, except the upper story, which was protected by oaken planks, was covered with panels of the same timber, and the projections were supported by heavy beams, embellished with grotesque carvings. Three deeply-embayed windows, having stout wooden bars, filled with minute diamond panes, set in leaden frames, were allotted to each floor; while the like number of gables, ornamented with curiously-carved coignes, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... device should have existed, and, secondly, that these ledges were carved and ornamented. These misericords, as they are called, were usually curiously, even grotesquely carved. Some of these carvings were founded on natural objects, some were grotesque heads, others represented subjects with man and animals. There were pews for the nobility, but, apart from the few old and weak people who used the rough bench or two in the body of the ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... me now. I can see the crowding Ottawas, their bodies painted red and black, their nose pendants—a pebble hung on a deer-sinew—swinging against their greasy lips as they shouted plaudits or derision. But best I can see Pemaou, dancing between me and the sun like some grotesque dream fantasy. He was in full war bravery, his body painted red, barred with white stripes to imitate the lacing on our uniforms, and his hair feather-decked till he towered in height like a fir tree. I say that he was grotesque, but at the time I did not think of his appearance; ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... century, or rather in a likeness of such dress; for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacra—phantasms; and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like stillness of the flitting wearer. Just as the male shape approached the female, the dark ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarranted usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit, but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand. As far as her experience went, the wise, the good, and the holy were unanimous ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of form. His style is highly finished, graceful and truly classical. It would be hard to find a living author who had displayed such varied powers. As an example of his style we would refer to one of his tales, "The House of Usher," in the first volume of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque." It has a singular charm for us, and we think that no one could read it without being strongly moved by its serene and sombre beauty. Had its author written nothing else, it would alone have been enough to stamp him as a man of genius, and the master ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... mixture of sagacity and instinct occurred to me one day as my people were pulling off the lining of a hot-bed, in order to add some fresh dung. From out of the side of this bed leaped an animal with great agility, that made a most grotesque figure; nor was it without great difficulty that it could be taken, when it proved to be a large white-bellied field-mouse with three or four young clinging to her teats by their mouths and feet. It was amazing that the desultory and rapid motions ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... up, like a calf, across the seas, I should cherish such a memory of my piteous looks in that coffer, and such an ugly animosity against him who had inclosed me in it, I should dread so greatly to see a sarcastic smile blooming upon the face of the malicious wretch, or in his attitude any grotesque imitation of my position in the box, that, Mordioux! I should plunge a good dagger into his throat in compensation for the grating, and would nail him down in a veritable bier, in remembrance of the false coffin in which I had been left to grow ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for a promising boy would be to start him as a local reporter and make him get his first experience of life in the collection of "city items." There is in all this the expression, though in a somewhat grotesque form, of a widespread popular feeling that nothing is worthy of the name of education which does not fit a man to earn his bread rapidly and dexterously. Considering with how large a proportion of the human race ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... unavailing cries and ignorant of answers to any. As the day wore on, and the voices grew hoarse, and hope declined, more violent bodily exercise was resorted to, and the shouting crowd danced (or, perhaps, as the margin says, 'limped,'—a picturesque and contemptuous word for the grotesque contortions around the altar), as if that might bring the answer. That again is a feature common to all heathenism. No wonder that Elijah's scorn broke forth vehemently at such a sight. Noon was the hour of the sun's greatest power, and, since Baal was ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... through the cement formation, working it into spires, pinnacles, towers and many other capricious objects. Many of these are of faultless symmetry, resembling the minaret of a mosque; others are so grotesque as to provoke merriment as well as wonder. One of this latter character we named "The Devil's Hoof," from its supposed similarity to the proverbial foot of his Satanic majesty. The height of this rock from its base is about ...
— The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... from real things, all he would need to know under the same circumstances. He should be encouraged to play Robinson Crusoe; to imagine himself clad in skins, wearing a great cap and sword, and all the array of that grotesque figure, down to the umbrella, of which he would have no need. If he happens to be in want of anything, I hope he will contrive something to supply its place. Let him look carefully into all that his hero did, and decide whether any of it was unnecessary, or might have been done in a better way. Let ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... whortle and meadowsweet, stumbling over peat-cuttings and the workings of forgotten tin-mines. An idiotic popular tune raced through his brain. He found himself trying to frame the words, but they broke into incoherent prayers, still to the same grotesque tune. ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... particular light cast upon them in their times, and it is quite possible that the truth may be entirely lost from want of power to recognize it under the disguise in which it comes. A certain motive, for instance, that is an overpowering one in a given period, subsequently appears grotesque, weak, or even powerless; the consequent action becomes incomprehensible, and the actor is contemned; and a simile that appeared most appropriate in the ears of the author's contemporaries, seems meaningless, or ridiculous, to ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... picturesque by-world, where there are many illuminated and splendid fragments of Nature's story. He who visits this section will first be attracted by an array of rock-formations, and, wander where he will, grotesque and beautiful shapes in stone will frequently attract ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... grotesque appearing birds attain a length of about 48 inches. The plumage varies from white to a deep rosy red. It requires several years for them to attain the perfect adult plumage, and unlike most birds, they are in the best of plumage during the winter, the colors becoming faded as the ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... clothes could not fit smoothly on his gaunt and bony frame. He was no tailor's figure of a man; but from the first he clothed himself as well as his means allowed, and in the fashion of the time and place. In reading the grotesque stories of his boyhood, of the tall stripling whose trousers left exposed a length of shin, it must be remembered not only how poor he was, but that he lived on the frontier, where other boys, less poor, were scarcely better clad. In ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... been un-politic to repulse the grotesque ape, and I said: "I will. I will even give you the preference over the Kaiser, who asked me the same ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... that the methods, or the opportunities, of naval biographers and historians of the past century have preserved to us little, in personal detail and anecdote, of a period the peculiarities of which, if not exactly picturesque, were at least grotesque and amusing. The humor of Smollett has indeed drawn in broad caricature some of the salient features of the seaman of his day, which was that of Howe's entrance into the navy; and those who are familiar with ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... with a sweep of his eagle-like eye, had scanned those huge, grotesque proportions, he threw up his hand with a gesture of surprise, and a look of recognition lighted up his handsome face. Whereupon, as if needing nothing more to tell him who had been the prime mover in the day's outrage, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... one nature out of two natures! Mysterious and extraordinary metamorphosis. She had brought her nature to his, and he his nature to hers, and they were to mingle and become one nature.... Absurdly and inappropriately his mind picked up and presented to him the grotesque words, "High Jinks and Low Jinks." A note of laughter was irresistibly ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... the Devil (adorned with a crown, sceptre, and tail) standing on the top of a high conical rock, and our Blessed Lord at a little distance from him. The appearance and attitude of the Apostles are somewhat grotesque. One of the best is St. Philip (No. 39.), who is represented as a wrinkled, bearded old man, contemplating a crucifix in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... frightful, grotesque, repulsive, uncouth, clumsy, ghastly, hideous, shocking, ungainly, deformed, grim, horrid, ugly, unlovely, disgusting, grisly, odious, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... will be to note most the large, the grotesque, or the startling aspects of nature. In time these will be desirable as studies, but at first she must try smaller and limited sketches. They are as difficult, but do not change as do the grander scenes and objects. I knew a sick girl, who, bedfast for years, used to ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell
... returning to the sleeper after an unsuccessful attempt at dining, Darrell sank into his seat, and, leaning wearily back, watched with half-closed eyes the rapidly changing scenes through which he was passing, for the time utterly oblivious to his surroundings. Gigantic rocks, grotesque in form and color, flashed past; towering peaks loomed suddenly before him, advancing, receding, disappearing, and reappearing with the swift windings and doublings of the train; massive walls of granite pressed close and closer, seeming for one instant a threatening, impenetrable ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... the steamship is a Circumstance, the telegraph is a Circumstance. They were mere happenings; and to the whole world, the wise and the foolish alike, they were entirely trivial, wholly inconsequential; indeed silly, comical, grotesque. No man, and no party, and no thought-out policy said, "Behold, we will build railways and steamships and telegraphs, and presently you will see the condition and way of life of every man and woman and child in the nation totally changed; unimaginable changes of law and custom will follow, ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... It was after midnight, and Stiffner lay dead-drunk on the broad of his back on the long moonlit verandah, with all his patrons asleep around him in various grotesque positions. Stiffner's ragged grey head was on a cushion, and a broad maudlin smile on his red, drink-sodden face, the lower half of which was bordered by a dirty grey beard, like that of a frilled lizard. The red handkerchief twisted ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... a strange creature, this little Maya of his. She had been born on Mars and, orphaned by some unknown disaster, had been cared for during her first years by the mysterious, grotesque native Martians. When they took her at last to one of the dome cities, she was sent to Earth for rearing. And now she was back on Mars as an undercover agent of the Earth government, seeking to ferret out the rebels known to be ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... on the keys with the lightness of a feather. They rose and flashed and twinkled, and ran along the keyboard with swift, steel-like touch. The door at the end of the room opened softly. A tall man entered. He looked inquiringly at the grotesque green-and-white figure seated before the piano, then his glance met his wife's, and he sank into a big chair by the door, a pleased look on his dark face. The younger child glanced at him shyly. He returned the look and smiled. ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... park, with a volume of Blackstone's Commentaries under his arm, on the fatal Monday morning, when Miss Gwilt's written engagement of marriage was placed in Midwinter's hands. Here again, in this, as in all other human instances, the widely discordant elements of the grotesque and the terrible were forced together by that subtle law of contrast which is one of the laws of mortal life. Amid all the thickening complications now impending over their heads—with the shadow of meditated murder stealing ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... rather dragged, off, she didn't know which, didn't care as long as she was off. The ground seemed to come up to meet her. Why didn't things stand still? Even the unsuspicious "Dolly" appeared to be performing grotesque antics. Mary took a step, just one. It was not necessary for her to take more to realize that she was very stiff. "Heavens!" She slowly gathered up her coat and hat, and limped painfully out of the Academy. Now she could realize that an amateur, in riding anyway, had ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... over the parchment, upon which the grotesque outline of a griffin began to grow, twisted round a very conventional tree, with the stem issuing from its mouth, and its elongated tail executing marvellous spiral curves. The illuminator was taken by surprise the next instant, ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... on to discuss the politics of Lockmanville, and to lay bare the shameless and grotesque corruption in a town where business interests were fighting. The trouble was, apparently, that the people were beginning to rebel—they were tired of being robbed in so many different ways, and they went to the polls to find redress. And time and again, after they ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... rarity. At each yard they advanced the wildness of the country increased, and although the landscape was hidden, its influence was felt. Paul Nicholas knew, as well as if he had seen them, that he was in the presence of grotesque, isolated boulders, wide patches of bare, desolate soil, gaunt trees, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... that begins life as a vine twining on another tree, which it finally strangles, using the dead trunk as a support until it is able to stand alone. When old it often covers a large space with gnarled and twisted trunks of varied shapes and sizes, thus presenting a weird and grotesque appearance. This tree was held in reverent awe by the primitive Filipinos, who believed it to be the abode of the nono, or ancestral ghosts, and is still the object ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... partner a talented young man who looked up to him, almost adored him, who was quite willing to be his man Friday. Fortunately, for all his adoration, Herndon had no desire to idealize his hero. He was not disturbed by his grotesque or absurd sides. ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson |
