"Horrific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I; "now heaven bless your common-sense! and I don't especially mind if heaven blesses your horrific painted hag of a mother, also, if they've a divine favor or ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... powerful, I am not sure whether he merits to be treated with the roughness with which some authors mention his labours. He had, certainly, a tolerable degree of strength in his English style; but he painted with a pencil which reminded us more frequently of the horrific pictures of Spagnoletti than of the tender compositions of Albano. That he idolized his master, Leland, so enthusiastically, will always cover, in my estimation, a multitude of his errors: and that he should leave a scholar's inventory (as Fuller saps [Transcriber's Note: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... made of bone, A war-conch brought me from the South Pacific, Which, by a leather-lunged performer blown, Is really quite horrific. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... so horrific that a German can scarcely conceive it. Five years ago, in a town of 40,000 inhabitants, it was impossible to find a single man, who, for payment, could read English correctly to an invalid.—H.S. ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... another upon the road. I knew I was in your debt; but I had nothing to say but what you know better than I; for you read all the French papers, and I read none, as they have long put me out of all patience: and besides, I hear so much of their horrific proceedings, that they quite disturb me, and have given me what I call the French disease; that is, a barbarity that I abhor, for I cannot help wishing destruction to thousands of human creatures whom I never ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... rearing misshapen out of the blur induced by an awful weakness. Sleep wrenched him for horrible dreaming minutes from his world of pain. Pain wrenched him back. At times a mammoth terror lay in his soul, undefined yet grotesquely positive, as if, pushing back, his consciousness foresaw that horrific catastrophe of noise and belching terror, and waited, unable to sense any of its details save the single one of personal tragedy and pain. There were cramped minutes when the rafters of the peaked roof seemed pressing down upon him . . . and minutes of a diffused reaching ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... grotesque yet homely poetic element. He remembered too the honour such a type of creature had had in being lapt around for ever in the airy folds of L'Allegro. And to think that Mistress Jean, for whom everybody had such a respect, should speak of the creature in such a tone!—it sent a thrill of horrific wonder and delight through the whole frame of the boy: might, could there be such creatures? And thereupon began to open to his imagination vista after vista into the realms of might-be possibility—where dwelt whole clans and kins ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... until they were in safety and made the standard take-off preparations. A horrific roaring started up outside. He touched controls and a monstrous weight pushed him back in his seat. The rocket swung, and lifted, and shot skyward ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... every meadow delicious; and the banks of the lowland streams were gorgeously gilded with king-cups. The mountains on fine days were blue and purple in the far distance; pale green and grey in the foreground. Under the April showers and sun-shafts they became tragic, enchanted, horrific, paradisiac. Even the mining towns were bearable—in the spring sunshine. If man had left no effort untried to pile hideosity on hideosity, flat ugliness on nauseous squalor, he had not been able to affect the arch of the heavens in its lucid blue, all smokes and vapours ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Under the Sea, and were introduced to horrific monsters, sailed up and down on switchbacks, which made Mrs. Ess Kay ill, but she nobly refused to desert me in such surroundings—a state of mind which made her chin look incredibly square. Eventually, after many adventures by the way, we arrived at the Moon, and not ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... its livid stare full upon my uncle with a hateful smile of significance, lifting up the little parcel of papers between his slender finger and thumb. Then he made a long, cunning wink at him, and seemed to blow out one of his cheeks in a burlesque grimace, which, but for the horrific circumstances, would have been ludicrous. My uncle could not tell whether this was really an intentional distortion or only one of those horrid ripples and deflections which were constantly disturbing the proportions of the figure, as if ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... Tales of Terror appeared in 1799, The Tales of Wonder in 1801. The rest of Lewis's work consists mainly of translations and adaptations from the German. He revelled in the horrific school of melodrama. He delighted in the kind of German romance parodied by Meredith in Farina, where Aunt Lisbeth tells Margarita of spectres, smelling of murder and the charnel-breath of midnight, who "uttered noises that wintered the blood and revealed sights that ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... a size unequaled, and those in the garden of the Annexe roused me almost at dawn. Their voices were horrific, and one that had fathered a quartet of ducks—an angry tourist had killed the drake because of his quacking—was a vrai Chantecler. When he waked me, the sun was coming over the hills from Hitiaa, brightened Papenoo and leaped the summits to Papeete, but it was long before the phantom of ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... pomps rush boundless on the gaze! What gallant navies ride the heaving deep! What glittering towns their cloud-wrapt turrets raise! What bulwarks frown horrific o'er the steep! ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... enormous. His description of this imaginary punishment presents more distinct pictures to the 295 fancy than the extract from Jeremy Taylor; but the thoughts in the latter are incomparably more exaggerated and horrific. All this I knew; but I neither remembered, nor by reference and careful re-perusal could discover, any other meaning, either in Milton or Taylor, but that good men will be rewarded, and 300 the impenitent wicked, punished, in proportion to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... inconclusive philosophy have created. Spinoza has his own technical philosophic style, inherited to some extent, but to a much larger extent transformed by him for original use. But technical as his style may be, it is simplicity itself when compared with the horrific styles which were, until the last few decades, alone thought adequate to express the profound and esoteric mysteries of modern philosophy. The philosophic jargon of the 18th. and 19th. centuries is now almost universally discarded, and with it preternaturally recondite ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... stage effect—for such merely, has the author evidently intended it; his arrangement of the machinery, such as it is, demands warm praise for its perspicuity and just order, and if the alarming and horrific be legitimate objects for a dramatist, Mr. ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... reluctance that youth consented to play his usual role, and to be put into a charmed sleep by Madame. This time he saw no Eleanor, and knew nothing of what happened until he awoke to be greeted by the horrific spectacle of Miss Ogilvy lying back in her chair bathed in blood. General confusion reigned in the midst of which Madame Riennes ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... and children should be forced to behold the last ebb of life, and to witness the struggle of the departing spirit of husbands and fathers, under such horrific circumstances, is shocking to humanity, and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... vessels, shipwrecked on some barbarous coast, are eaten alive like so many dainty joints by the uncivil inhabitants; and unfortunate voyagers are lured into smiling and treacherous bays; knocked on the head with outlandish war-clubs; and served up without any prelimary dressing. In truth, so horrific and improbable are these accounts, that many sensible and well-informed people will not believe that any cannibals exist; and place every book of voyages which purports to give any account of them, on the same shelf with Blue Beard and Jack the Giant-Killer. ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... achievements to look back upon. I do not care to boast, you understand, and to be forced into self-praise is abhorrent to me. Yet truthfulness is all important at this solemn hour, and anyone hereabouts can tell you it was I who climbed gray Vraidex, and dealt so hardily with the serpents and other horrific protectors of Miramon Lluagor that I destroyed most of them and put the others to flight. Thereafter men narrate how I made my own terms with the terrified magician, according him his forfeited life in exchange ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... drifted quietly on until they were aroused by an uncommon tossing and agitation of their vessels. For now the late dimpling current began to brawl around them and the waves to boil and foam with horrific fury. Awakened as if from a dream, the astonished Oloffe bawled aloud to put about, but his words were lost amid the roaring of the waters. And now ensued a scene of direful consternation. At one time they were borne with dreadful velocity among ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the first of Christian's journey, with the frog-like structure of the skull, the frog-like limberness of limbs—crafty, slippery, lustful- looking devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed of a dim, infernal luminosity. Horrid fellows are they, one and all; horrid fellows and horrific scenes. In another spirit that Good- Conscience 'to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in his lifetime,' a cowled, grey, awful figure, one hand pointing to the heavenly shore, realises, I will not say all, but some at least of the strange impressiveness of Bunyan's words. It is no easy nor pleasant ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spirit of the beatitudes, is supposed to build this mortal life in such fashion that only honesty and virtue shall prevail. Witness, then, the significant manner in which it has fashioned the black grouper. One might go far afield and gather less forceful indictments—the horrific spider spinning his trap for the unthinking fly; the lovely Drosera (Sundew) using its crimson calyx for a smothering-pit in which to seal and devour the victim of its beauty; the rainbow-colored jellyfish ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... well as he would have known it of the serf. The walls of mud are no longer round his boundaries, but only round his boots. The coarse, bristling hedge is at the end of his chin, and not of his garden. But mud and bristles still stand out round him like a horrific halo, and separate him from his kind. The Martian would have no difficulty in seeing he was the poorest person in the nation. It is just as impossible that he should marry an heiress, or fight a duel with a duke, or contest a seat at Westminster, ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... remained of Sebastian. Inasmuch as either of these sanguinary and successive measures might reasonably be expected to produce the desired result, it will be seen that Sebastian was doomed to experience at least six horrific deaths before the avenger got through with him. At any rate, if one could believe Manuel,—and there seemed to be no end of conviction in the way he expressed himself,—the luckless home-wrecker, if he lived long enough, was ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... but he replied in the tone of daily intercourse. "It is undoubtedly absurd to perish here, like some unreasonable adversary of the Borgias. Your device is rather outrageously horrific, Horace, like a bit out of your own romance—yes, egad, it is pre-eminently worthy of the author of The Vassal of Spalatro. Still I can understand that it is preferable to having fat and greasy fellows squander ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... into the gloomy forests, with their myriad forms of life, their gaudy birds and gorgeous insects, their lurking beasts and dense-packed horrors. Weird cries and terrifying howls rang out in imaginative sounds. And what horrific beings stalked in the dim alleys betwixt the giant trees, or peeped forth at the intrepid traveller from cave and den! One-horned beasts with fiery hoofs; dragons that had wings of brass, and vomited flames from cavernous throats; huge birds, enormous ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... the floor. Dropping off his clothes, he got into bed, and lay like a man suddenly overcome by drunkenness, the darkness lifting and plunging as if he were lying upon a black, giddy sea. He lay still in this strange, horrific reeling for ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... everlastingly in flaming oceans of burning sulpher; are to float to all eternity in the most excruciating agonies on seas of liquid brimstone, wailing and gnashing their teeth: what wonder, then, if man dreads to be cast into these hideous gulfs; if his mind loathes the horrific picture; if he wishes to defer for a season these dreadful punishments; if he clings to an existence, painful as it may be, rather ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... moment of the story (untold by Poe, who could be an artist in his tact of omission). The dental smile of the cataleptic Berenice as her necrophilic cousin bends over the coffin is a testimony to a needle that in this instance matches Goya's and Rops's in its evocation of the horrific. We turn with relief to the ballet-girl series. The impression gained from this album is that Legrand sympathises with, nay loves, his subject. Degas, the greater and more objective artist, nevertheless allows ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... eyes, but she could not. They were held as in horrid fascination upon the glittering, lidless orbs of the great brain that faced her. Slowly, every step a painful struggle of resistance, she moved toward the horrific monster. She tried to cry aloud in an effort to awaken her numbing faculties, but no sound passed her lips. If those eyes would but turn away, just for an instant, she felt that she might regain the power to control her steps; but the eyes never left hers. ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was to manage the miserable financial affairs of the chaplain, and lacking sufficient care, lacking playmates, lacking stimulation and love, the crippled child could not develop. Remained always dwarfish. He slunk around, pale and dreamy. Intimidated and timorous. Toward evening, bold shadows and horrific noises teemed on the twisty stairs with their grated windows, and in the great gloomy halls and passages. A more robust boy would have ignored such peripheral things, if he had noticed them at all. But on Kuno ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... the sorrows of those storms, His jaws horrific arm'd with three-fold fate, Here dwells the direful shark. Lured by the scent Of steaming crowds, of rank disease, and death; Behold! he rushing cuts the briny flood, Swift as the gale can bear the ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... man can produce the illusion that he is striving hopelessly to utter something which, really, he could say with perfect ease. Thus he forfeits the sympathy of the House. Members stroll listlessly out. There is a buzz of conversation along the benches—perhaps the horrific refrain ''Vide, 'Vide, 'Vide.' But the time will come when they shall hear him. Years hence—a beacon to show the heights that can be sealed by perseverance—he shall stand fumbling and floundering in ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... when our parson asks if there is any just cause I shall step forward to the rails, gayly flourishing the power of attorney, and not even the most hardened parson could continue in the face of that legal instrument. It is a mandamus, a caveat, and all sorts of horrific things." ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace
... awful enough when he heard that Burton had been asked. You see, the fact glared, and even he must have felt it—that he, with his tremendous, his horrific vogue, had not achieved what Grevill Burton had by his young talent. He had never known Ford Lankester. Goodness knows I didn't mean to rub it into him; but there ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair |
