"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was with weeds o'ergrown, And crumbling and shaky its walls of stone; Its roof of tiles, in tiers and tiers, Had stood the storms of a hundred years. An olden, weird, medieval style Clung to the mouldering, gloomy pile, And the rhythmic voice of the breaking waves Sang a lonesome dirge in its land of graves. As I walked in the Mission old and gray— The Mission ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... little face, that should have been on the pillow hours before, lighted up with triumph as the supposed guests departed; the dumb show of folding the dinner napkins belonging to myself and the master, and putting them in their respective rings, told us the ordeal was over. What a weird scene it was,—the dim light, the silent house, the spread table, and the empty chairs! One could imagine ghostly revellers, visible only to that one fragile attendant, who ministered so willingly to their numerous wants. ...
— J. Cole • Emma Gellibrand
... he mean? Was this some kind of spiritism? Had Kennedy turned medium and sought a message from the other world to solve the inexplicable problems of this? It was weird, uncanny, unthinkable. We turned to him blankly for an ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... nothing. Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand—she would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence—and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if she had been deaf. ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... corn-lands and was rich in minerals and cattle, from which the hides came regularly down the Rhone to be carried to the Mediterranean markets. "Long-haired" Gaul was at this date rude and superstitious, with that weird druidical religion which the Emperor Claudius had done his best to suppress. Its chief vice was that of drunkenness. As with the French, who have largely descended from them, the proverbial passions of the Gauls were ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... now that one ought somehow to have foreseen that the stamp of a sad end was impressed by nature on that rugged, haggard face. The exceeding sadness of the eyes and their strange sweetness were the one redeeming feature in a face of unusual plainness, and there was about them that odd, weird look, which some eyes possess, of seeming to see more than the outer objects of the ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... gold and silver money to be burnt at the grave and so wafted to the next world for use of the departed spirit, tablets embossed with golden Chinese characters, and lanterns of varied size and shape are carried in advance by an army of riffraff. A band of priests chanting, or playing weird dirges on instruments much resembling bagpipes in sound, immediately precedes the catafalque, an immense edifice from ten to fifteen feet in height, containing the coffin and covered with beautiful hangings of embroidered silk, and which is carried bodily on massive red poles some nine inches ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... Itika came to the valley of the Yukon the giant drove hunted with him. To this day they run through the mountains on cold, clear nights, in a multitude, while the light of the moon flickers from their white sides, flashing up into the sky in weird, fantastic figures. Some people call it Northern Lights, but old Isaac assured me earnestly, toothlessly, and with the light of ancient truth, as I lay snow-blind in his lodge, that it is nothing more remarkable than the spirit of Itika ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... his light course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity, with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a chill pass over me as I looked at the beautiful creature; there was something so unnatural, so weird about her actions, that I felt as if I were gazing upon a being from another world. Her eyes were brighter than ever before, but in them was no sight for what was near her; they seemed fixed upon objects far away. I could not speak, for when I tried ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... the romance was laid in Thessaly, the original land of witchcraft, and took one up and down its mountains, and into its old weird towns, haunts of magic and [58] incantation, where all the more genuine appliances of the black art, left behind her by Medea when she fled through that country, were still in use. In the city of Hypata, indeed, nothing ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... prophecy comes to pass and the gods enter their twilight. The apparition is sinking back into the earth. Wotan beseeches it to tarry and tell him more. But with the words, "You are warned.... Meditate in sorrow and fear!" it vanishes. The masterful god attempts to follow, to wrest from the weird woman further knowledge. His wife and her brothers hold him back. He stands for a time still hesitating, uncertain, wrapped in thought. With sudden resolve at last he tosses the ring with the rest of the treasure, and turns heart-wholly ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... find his clew as he had hoped, and instead of lifting the fog grew heavier. He found himself at last no longer striving for any end, but rambling along mechanically, feeling like a man in a dream—a nightmare. Once he recognized a weird suggestion in the mystery about him. To-morrow might one be wandering about aimlessly in some such haze. He ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... we lit one of our torches, and paddled on as long as we could keep our eyes open. During the time, we passed through another cypress swamp, when the light from the torch, as we twisted in and out among the stems of the trees, made them assume weird and strange forms; while the occasional cry of some night-bird or wild beast, coming sometimes from one side of us, sometimes from the other, had a very depressing effect, and I could have fancied, had I believed in the existence of such things, that the forest was the habitation of evil spirits ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... about it the more Tom Swift thought there was something queer in that weird cry for help on the lonely meadow in the darkness ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Scout - or, Uncle Sam's Mastery of the Sky • Victor Appleton
... boy in the woods holloas to another to say, "All's well! Here am I. Where are you?" A form of it they sing to the rising moon, for this is the time for good hunting to begin. They sing when they see the new camp- fire, for the same reason that a Dog barks at a stranger. Yet another weird chant they have for the dawning before they steal quietly away from the offing of the camp—a wild, weird, squalling refrain: Wow-wow- wow-wow-wow-w-o-o-o-o-o-o-w. again and again; and doubtless with many another change that man cannot distinguish any more ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... party was breaking up. The body had been burned and gifts were being distributed—bits of calico, handkerchiefs, blankets, etc., according to the rank and wealth of the deceased. The death ceremonies of chiefs and head men, Mr. Young told me, are very weird and imposing, with wild feasting, dancing, and singing. At this little place there are some eight totem poles of bold and intricate design, well executed, but smaller than those of the Stickeens. As elsewhere throughout the archipelago, the bear, raven, eagle, salmon, and porpoise are the chief ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... trees put on their winter shapes unduly early. The world was dark and sweated fungus. Uncouth children of the earth, whose hour is that which sees the leaf fall, sprang into short-lived being. Black goblins and gray, white goblins and brown, spread weird life abroad. With fleshy gills, squat and lean, fat and thin, bursting through the grass in companies and circles, lurking livid, gigantic and alone on the trunks of forest trees, gemming the rotten bough with crimson, twinkling like topaz on the crooked stems of the furze, battening upon death, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... clergyman always seeing visions and believing himself a descendant of the Druids, Sam Gardner told me; and his mother had either died long ago or had run away from her husband, I forget which. In a way, I'm sorry David's dead. He had a sort of weird talent and wild good looks. By the way, he wasn't altogether ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the minds of the conservative. I suspected the Reverend Mr. Goodloe of a great deal of worldly wisdom when I saw how he had been able to persuade the directors, Hampton Dibrell and Mark and Cliff, to let him do such a weird thing. Mrs. Sproul and Mrs. Cockrell and their friends had first been tolled out to prayer meeting and then had come to witness a tennis match. Billy, in great glee, recounted to me the first time they had stayed to dinner ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the shoulder, etc. No organically caused anaesthetic area ever does this, and so the neurologist is able, usually, to separate the two conditions. And the anaesthesias yield as do the hysteric paralyses to a variety of agents, from prayer and persuasion to a bitter tonic or a blow. I confess to a weird feeling in the presence of a hysteric whose arm can be thrust through and through with a needle without apparently suffering any pain, and it seems to me that this may be the explanation of the fortitude of those martyrs who have astonished and sometimes converted their ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... offers a quiet retreat. Following the wooded shores of Glena Bay, we pass Stags, Burnt, and other islands, and come to Glena Cottage, hiding in the foliage of leafy trees. Glena means "the valley of good fortune," and a name more suggestive of happier thoughts than weird Glownamorra across the lake—"the glen of ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... an electric torch on Dr. Mannering, and recognized him. It appeared that while one detective kept guard outside, the others watched within. At the sound of voices the door of the Grey Room opened, and in the bright light that streamed from it a weird figure stood—a tall, black object with huge and flashing eyes and what looked like an elephant's trunk descending from between them. The watchers, wearing hoods and gas masks, resembled the fantastic demons of a Salvator ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... mere fact of the Hall being illuminated at night was not enough to account for her extreme agitation, and that it must have derived its importance in her eyes from being one in a chain of incidents, all of which had left a weird or ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... furtively back across her shoulder—evidently the policeman had disappeared, for she released her slight grasp of my arm, although continuing to walk quietly enough by my side, her face partially averted. The night was deathly still, the sodden walk underfoot scarcely echoing our footfalls, the weird mist closing denser about us, as ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... spoke in Spanish to one of them, then the fellow began putting on the weird uniform. It made him look like a visitor from another world. The tremendous weight of his garb prevented him from moving at more than a slow shuffle across the deck, ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... cynical contempt, which has scarce its equal in the history of crime; and priest, as he was, he proved that he did not yield to the Marquis himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his vocabulary. He brought charges against the weird world of Presles with an insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim. He described the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in a slang which would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer than upon a pious Abbe. ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... or Alpleich, that weird music with which Bunting, the pied piper of Hamelin, led forth the rats into the river Weser, and the children into a cave in the mountain Koppenberg. The song of the sirens is ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... too. I knew Tusa hErin as a boy. It was then a weird old place. The yew-trees were unclipped, the turf riotous, the little lake ungraveled ... It had an eeriness. But now—it ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... kept that night as a precautionary measure, because it was not then known whether the group was inhabited or not; but nothing occurred to alarm the watchers, the only sounds heard being those made by the countless insects on shore or the weird cries uttered by the nocturnal birds. Some of the sounds and cries were certainly uncanny enough to send a creeping thrill through the frame of the listener, but with that exception the night passed peacefully away; and when the hands were turned up next morning to wash decks ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... syllable of them clear, though spoken in a voice shrill and cracked and strange, and such as neither of them had ever heard before, were beyond doubt. Close on them followed a shriek of weird laughter, and then the blasphemy repeated in the same tone of mockery. The hair crept on Claude's head, the blood withdrew to his heart. The key which he had drawn out of the lock fell from the hand it seemed ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... insomuch that Banquo would call Macbeth in jest king of Scotland, and Macbeth again would call him in sport likewise the father of many kings. But afterwards the common opinion was, that these women were either the weird sisters, that is (as you would say) the goddesses of destiny, or else some nymphs or fairies, endued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science, because every thing came to pass as ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... cavern cold, Like one who flies a crime, Fearful, and old as God is old, The spirit shrank from time; For a stifled scream was the angry gold Of the weird sunset, and the noonday bold Was the stare on ...
— Iolaeus - The man that was a ghost • James A. Mackereth
... a village in the Budweis neighborhood, 100 miles to south. There, for three centuries after him, stood "Zisca's Oak" (under shade of which, his mother, taken suddenly on the harvest-field, had borne Zisca): a weird object, gate of Heaven and of Orcus to the superstitious populations about. At midnight on the Hallow-Eve, dark smiths would repair thither, to cut a twig of the Zisca Oak: twig of it put, at the right moment, under your stithy, insures good ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... term of active service is completed. Besides the spear and shield they generally carry a sword or knobkerrie, suspended from a raw-hide waist-belt; and they certainly look very ferocious in their weird-looking headdress when on the warpath. Once or twice I met detachments out on these expeditions, but they were always quite friendly to me, even though I was practically alone. Before the advent of British rule, however, sudden raids were constantly being made by them ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... thing to remember—a weird and unearthly bit of living—that war-ruined church, strewn with straw, the wounded wrapped like mummies in dark blankets, their white bandages making high spots in the wavering, irregular lights of lanterns ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... of the room, looking behind and under the larger objects, lifting the lids of the marriage chests and opening the doors of the cupboard. Into the cellar, too, they descended, and made a careful search. The five candles produced a weird effect in their promenade along this subterraneous apartment, lighting up an astonishing medley of furniture, garden implements, empty bottles, the posts and side pieces of an extra bed, a broken statue, another wheelbarrow, a lot of ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... rushing sensation of one who is going to faint away. The wall behind the ornate Empire bed was covered with photographs, some in frames, others left, as they had been received, upon the large squares of weird cardboard which ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... in this respect on the native kinds. There are doves belonging to the same genus as stock-dove and wood-pigeon, that have exceedingly good voices, in which the peculiar mournful dove-melody has reached its highest perfection—weird and passionate strains, surging and ebbing, and startling the hearer with their mysterious resemblance to human tones. Or a Zenaida might be preferred for its tender lament, so wild and exquisitely modulated, like sobs etherealized and set to music, and passing ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... clean across the sky like an exaggerated Milky Way, suddenly caught fire at its eastern end. Rapidly the red flame along ran its entire length to the other horizon. Then countless unexpected shadows woke up on the rocks about me, weird, undefined shapes, which became clear-cut only when the rim of the sun came up over ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... a grand laddie, and buirdly, and no that thrawn, either—like ye, Dick, ye born deevil,' looking at me. 'But I misdoot sair ye'll die wi' your boots on. There's a smack o' Johnnie Armstrong in the glint o' yer e'e. Ye'll be to dree yer weird, there's nae help for't.' ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... earth in unspeakable misery till they can reclothe themselves in the body of some one else—generally a lunatic or weak-minded person, who cannot resist the hideous obsession. This is their only means of escape. Surely a weird and horrible idea! I wish I had slept all the time and not heard it at all. My mind is morbid enough without such ghastly fancies. Such mischievous propaganda should be stopped by the police. I'll write to the Times and suggest ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... the fashionable views of later England. I know that in Bleak House he treats the aristocracy far more tenderly than he treats them in David Copperfield. I know that in A Tale of Two Cities, having come under the influence of Carlyle, he treats revolution as strange and weird, whereas under the influence of Cobbett he would have treated it as obvious and reasonable. I know that in The Mystery of Edwin Drood he not only praised the Minor Canon of Cloisterham at the expense of the dissenting demagogue, Honeythunder; I know that he even took the last and most disastrous ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... short, and fixed his keen eyes upon the agitated girl, who stood in front of him. For at least two minutes the man and the girl stood face to face, motionless, and without exchanging a word. Through the dead, weird silence, the pulsations of their hearts were plainly audible. It seemed as if before speaking again each wished to fathom the depths of guilt that lay in the other's heart. It was a compact entered into by look and not by speech; and Daumon ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... world; in a few minutes after that he should be lying here still— for he meant to be killed; he had that planned. They should not take him—a wave of sick repulsion at that thought shook him. Nearer, nearer, right on his track came the riders pell-mell. He could hear their weird, horrible cries; now he could see gleaming through the dimness the huge head-dress of the foremost, the white coronet of feathers, almost the stripes of ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... this weird monstrosity the balance of the herd had fed quite close to me and I now saw that while many had the smaller specimens dangling from them, not all were thus equipped, and I further noted that the little ones varied in size from what appeared to be but tiny unopened buds an inch in ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water moccasins and brilliant ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... tour of the stalls on the arm of Anna, to admire them in their first freshness, and put finishing touches wherever solicited. The Rocca Marina conservatories were in rare glory, orchids in weird beauty, lovely lilies of all hues, fabulously exquisite ipomoeas, all that heart could wish. Before them a fountain played in the midst of blue, pink, and white lotus lilies, and in a flower-decked house the Seasons dispensed pot-flowers, bouquets, and button-holes; the Miss Simmondses ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... interbreed before the gap became too wide? Where are the descendants of the union between plants and animals? If animals were first developed from this first germ, what did they live on while there was no vegetation? What folly is like the folly of the evolutionist who claims that such weird speculation is science? ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... was stamped with the little passion peculiar to it—the mark of its peculiar spirit. The mouths, especially, betrayed the souls within. Somewhere Mr. Neal had once read weird stories of souls seen to escape from the bodies of dying persons, and always they had been seen to issue from the open mouths of the corpses. There was a singular appropriateness in this phenomenon, it seemed to Mr. Neal, for the soul stamped the mouth even before it marked the eyes. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a great deal of mystery and enchantment about this old house for the Lancians, who were endowed with imagination; more especially for the children, who are the only beings who are open to weird fancies ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... thought along these lines, an explanation slowly took form in Marsh's mind. In some of its features it seemed weird and unreal. This, perhaps, was due to the fact that the few definite pieces of information in his possession had to be largely supported and connected by theories and deductions. Strange as the explanation might seem, it nevertheless gave ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... don't intend to go beyond your power of control; neither did the drunkards who have gone before you. Do you suppose Edgar Allen Poe dreamt when he took his first drink in the social gathering of an old Virginia gentleman's home that it would bring from his brilliant brain the weird strain: ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... It has the ring and weird mystery of De Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. "Necropolis" is a strange affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing to the pale piles" is a hideous ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... Jimmy Grayson, coinciding so well with their own views. Harley saw a look of awe appear upon the faces of many—Sylvia's face was pale—and the house, save for the voice of Jimmy Grayson, was as still as death. Harley felt the effect himself, and the weird, unreal quality that he observed before increased. Once, when he went over to make some notes, he noticed that the words written a half-hour before were scarcely visible, but, when he glanced at the opposite ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... is the habit of wolves in this land to follow the trail of the caribou herds and prey upon the stragglers. And so it was that sometimes of a winter's night the silence of the hills was startled by the distant howl of wolves. And always Skipper Ed's dogs and Abel's dogs would answer the wild, weird cries of their untamed kin of the hills with equally weird cries, their muzzles in the air and the long-drawn notes rising and falling in woful and ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... floating in the wind, the bronzed naked figure, like some weird old Indian fakir, still climbed on steadfastly up the mizzen-chains of the Spaniard, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... thoughts, realized in all its intensity the depth of solitude from which Robinson Crusoe suffered on his lonely island. Illimitable as the ocean, the weary waste stretched away until lost in the purple of the horizon, and the mirage created weird pictures in the landscape, distorted distances and objects which continually annoyed and deceived. Despite its loneliness, however, there was then, and ever has been for many men, an infatuation for those ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... the pale-faced, blue-eyed Theo, likens it to a piece of shining satin. Now, as ever, the pet and darling of the household, she moves among them like a ray of sunshine; and the servants, when they hear her bird-like voice waking the echoes of the weird old place, pause in their work to listen, blessing Miss Margaret for the joy and gladness her presence has ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... shifted from place to place, and out of it came a medley of weird oaths, the dull thudding of a waddy, and the heavy breathing of men and animals in combat. Suddenly a lithe, sinewy black boy, dressed in a short blue shirt, bounded like a squirrel to the top of the fence and perched there; ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... specimen of the bottom in his hand, he said later, sand with black specks and broken shell—when something queer attracted his attention half a point on the starboard bow. It was a thick foggy night, ships bellowing all round, and a weird-looking tow coming up astern with a string of lights one over another like a lot of Chinese lanterns. It was probably these lights that had drawn the mate's attention away from the ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... had Brice studied that weird tree and its position. Now, standing beneath its black shade, he drew forth a matchbox he had taken from ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... to its depths by the intensity of passion which rang through this delicate creature's words. What weird and awesome mystery of iniquity and of crime lay hid, I wondered, between these walls? In what tragedy had I thus accidentally become involved while fulfilling my prosaic duty in the interest of His Majesty's exchequer? ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... precipitated war, she can hardly be surprised if the judgment of Europe (one may also say the world) is against her. If she has played her cards so badly as to put herself entirely in the wrong, she must naturally "dree her weird." ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... bestowed upon the town of the Ritualistic church. Let it stand in these pages as Bumsteadville. Possibly it was not known to the Romans, the Saxons, nor the Normans by that name, if by any name at all; but a name more or less weird and full of damp syllables can be of little moment to a place not owned ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... away she saw a weird scene about her: hundreds of Japanese men and women, speaking in low angry voices which somehow reminded her of the breaking of the surf on the beach—perhaps because the Japanese language has a sing-song rhythm. The little boy, apparently limp and lifeless, lay in his ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... of her companion. But about her slender, finely-proportioned figure there was an air of style and grace which lent an elegance even to her shabby and faded finery, and which was wanting in the owner of the fresher and more appropriate attire. Her face was beautiful, with a singular and weird beauty which owed nothing of its fascinations to the ordinary charms of delicate outlines and dainty coloring. Her features were small and attenuated, and her complexion was of a sallow paleness, whose lack of freshness seemed caused by dissipation and late ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... light, was like the rising and falling of billows—like the ebb and flow of the tide upon the stranded shore of the ocean. Close to the house the faces were plainly discernible, but they faded into mere ghostly outlines on the outskirts of the assembly; and what added to the weird, spectral beauty of the scene, was the confused hum of voices that rose above the sea of forms, sounding like the subdued, sullen roar of an ocean storm, or the wind soughing through the dark lonely forest. It was a grand and imposing scene, and when the President, with pale face ...
— Behind the Scenes - or, Thirty years a slave, and Four Years in the White House • Elizabeth Keckley
... plains, with sad and spectre-like memories—with the flutter of unseen eagle pinions. A land without the tall and sombre figure worshipping the Great Mystery; without suns and snows and storms—without the scars of battle, swinging war club, and flashing arrow—a strange, weird world, holding an unconquered race, vanquished before the ruthless tread of superior forces—we call them the agents of civilization. Forces that have in cruel fashion borne down upon the Indian until he had to give up all that was his and all that was dear to him—to ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... our parents' absence. The only remaining memory of that visit was that the old doctor brought down from one of his shelves a large jar, out of which he produced a pickled human brain. I was thrilled with entirely new emotions. I had never thought of man's body as a machine. That this weird, white, puckered-up mass could be the producer or transmitter of all that made man, that it controlled our physical strength and growth, and our responses to life, that it made one into "Mad G." and another into me—why, it was absolutely marvellous. It attracted ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... of her lovely bay tremblingly waited Mobile, never before so empty of men, so full of women and children. Southward, from two to four leagues apart, ran the sun-beaten, breezy margins of snow-white sand-hills evergreen with weird starveling pines, dotted with pretty summer homes and light steamer-piers. Here on the Eastern Shore were the hotels: "Howard's," "Short's," "Montrose," "Battle's Wharf" and Point Clear, where summer ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... great mistake, this worst blunder I have made. In spite of myself it will haunt me. And the curse! that awful curse! Gods! will it never cease ringing in my ears! night and day, sleeping and waking it never leaves me! I see her now! How weird-like her prophetic looks! How like the sentence of doom are her words, as, with flashing eye and quivering lip, she says: 'As you have wilfully, voluntarily, and wickedly called it down upon your own head, may the curse of God rest upon you in this world and the world to ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... Men All" has been reading and enjoying Mr. BARRY PAIN's Stories and Interludes. The book has a wondrously weird and heavily-lined picture in front, which is just a little too like a "Prophetic Hieroglyphic" in Zadkiel's Almanack. An emaciated and broken-winged devil is apparently carrying an engine-hose through a churchyard, whilst ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... views of all employers in the industrial world, and his fanatical ideas of class loyalty, were impressed with weird exaggeration upon the fertile minds of his children. From their father's conversation with his workmen neighbors, and from the suggestive expressions and epithets which Sam had gleaned from the literature upon which he fed ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... morning—for it was then near the end of October—the weird song of a solitary brave was heard. In an instant the camp was thrown into indescribable confusion. The meaning of this was clear as day to everybody—all of our war-party were killed, save the one whose mournful song announced ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... hour he paced slowly back and forth at the edge of the Barren, his senses still keyed to the highest point of caution. Then he rebuilt his fire, pausing every few moments in the operation to listen for a suspicious sound. It was very cold. He noticed, after a little, that the weird sound of the lights over the Pole had become only a ghostly whisper. The stars were growing dimmer, and he watched them as they seemed slowly to recede farther and farther away from the world of which he was a part. This dying out of the stars always ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... a draughty, unconsidered table by the door. Paragot looked at it, then at Madame Boin and then at his own private and particular table usurped by Monsieur Papillard and his associates, and swore a stupefied oath of considerable complication. A weird, pug-nosed, pig-eyed, creature with a goatee beard scarce masking a receding chin, sat in the sacred seat against the wall. His hat and cloak were hung on Paragot's peg. He was reading a poem to half a dozen youths who seemed all ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... at Newport, of horseback dinners and vegetable dances in New York. One heard of fashion-albums and autograph-fans and talking crows and rare orchids and reindeer meat; of bracelets for men and ankle rings for women; of "vanity-boxes" at ten and twenty thousand dollars each; of weird and repulsive pets, chameleons and lizards and king-snakes—there was one young woman who wore a cat-snake as a necklace. One would take to slumming and another to sniffing brandy through the nose; one had a table-cover ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... best impersonations it was. The actors too, with whom Mary Anderson rehearsed, looked forward to anything but a success. Nothing daunted, however, and confident in her own powers, she spent two hours in perfecting a make-up so successful, that even her mother failed to recognize her in the strange, weird disguise; and then, darkening her dressing-room, set herself resolutely to get into the heart of her part. Mary Anderson's Meg Merrilies was an immense success; Cushman herself never received greater applause, and the scene was quite an ovation. Hearing, on the fall of ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... flew over her head?" Sabrina interrupted, eyes glistening. "A bat—it's blind—stone blind!" the jilted girl echoed gleefully. "There's a sign for you, Mistress Jasper Tipton, to conjure with!" She let out a screech and then a weird laugh that echoed through Crockett's Hollow. She cast off the coverlid and in one bound was in the middle of the floor, though she had lain long weeks pining away. She clapped her hands high overhead like she was shouting at meeting. Sabrina laughed ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... well- known, and outside the masters' common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful popularity, or at any rate admiration. At football he was too erratic to be a really brilliant player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous pleasure, and his weird swear-words whenever he got hurt were eagerly treasured by those who were fortunate enough to hear them. At athletics in general he was a showy performer, and although new to the functions of a prefect he had already established a reputation as an effective and artistic ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... don't see him as he saw himself. He was a peaceful citizen from the law-abiding West. It was not until he had been flung into the whirlpool of New York that violent and melodramatic mishaps befell this innocent. The Wild East had trapped him into weird adventure ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... tempest; fluttering hymns, which seemed to be mounting to the throne of the Lord like a mixture of light and sound—all were expressed by the organ's hundred voices, with more vigor, more subtle poetry, more weird coloring, than ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... prayer. Between the words he interjected a number of strange trills and turns. How weird it all sounded, and yet how familiar to the wondering priest. Mikail found himself almost instinctively supplying the following word before it was uttered by the reader. Then the congregation arose and responded ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... contrast the scenes, for the Mate, and the Old Man himself, were at our backs, man-driving the few sober hands, to make up for their inability to handle the skulkers. They did not spare themselves in driving, and at salving the gear in the lamp-room the Captain made a weird picture, black and grimy, with a cloth over his mouth, passing the lamps out ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... returning from an afternoon's fishing, with a couple of weird-looking fish as his sole catch, found him and would have gone on with a ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... musician. In little more than a week's time he composed an opera, "Rodrigo," for which he obtained one hundred sequins. His next visit was to Venice, where he arrived at the height of the carnival. Whatever effect Venice, with its weird and mysterious beauty, with its marble palaces, facades, pillars, and domes, its magnificent shrines and frescoes, produced on Handel, he took Venice by storm. Handel's power as an organist and a harpsichord player was only second to his strength as a composer, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... bright sunshine and cheat each other throughout the course of an afternoon and lie out of it in the most obvious manner. The game was finally discontinued, owing to a shortage of checkermen which they had secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my instinctive sense of honor ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... down the shaft and enter the tunnel, and when it happened that the men were not at work I allowed visitors to go down and view this wonderful ice-cavern. The walls of the chamber appeared semi-transparent, and the light of the candles or lanterns gave the whole scene a weird and beautiful aspect. It was almost possible to imagine one's self surrounded by limpid waters, which might at any moment rush ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton
... Alloway that it is difficult to see it as it actually exists. By-the-by, I do not understand why Satan and an assembly of witches should hold their revels within a consecrated precinct; but the weird scene has so established itself in the world's imaginative faith that it must be accepted as an authentic incident, in spite of rule and reason to the contrary. Possibly, some carnal minister, some priest of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... distance. The sun shone hot, the wind blew hard; and over the boundless undulating expanse hovered a shadow that was neither hood of dust nor hue of gold. It was not physical, but lonely, waiting, prophetic, and weird. No wild desert of wastelands, once the home of other races of man, and now gone to decay and death, could have shown so barren an acreage. Half of this wandering patchwork of squares was earth, brown and gray, curried and disked, and rolled and ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... when nearly forty, Elizabeth Pilfold, reputed a great beauty. The first child of this marriage, born on August 4, 1792, was the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, born to all the ease and comfort of an English country home, but with the weird imaginings which in childhood could people the grounds and surroundings with ancient snakes and fairies of all forms, and which later on were to lead him far out of the beaten track. Shelley's ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... in no special danger. Even I could tell that the gale had gone down, the night was clear, and between the scudding of black clouds with silver linings, the moon and stars shone very beautifully, though it made one giddy to look at them from the weird way in which the masts and yards seemed ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a new working schedule that precluded labor in the middle of the day was inaugurated. The more intense the heat grew, the more intense, it seemed to Roger, grew the weird beauty of the desert. The midnight stars seemed hardly to have blossomed before dawn turned the desert world to a delicate transparent yellow, deepening at the zenith to blue and on the desert ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... the multitude accepted the responsibility has been only too completely fulfilled in the millennium-long Iliad of woes which has attended the Jews. Surely, the existence, in such circumstances, for all these centuries, of that strange, weird, fated race, is a standing miracle, and the most conspicuous proof that 'verily, there is a God that judgeth in the earth.' But it is also a prophecy that Israel shall 'turn to the Lord,' and that the blood which has so long been on them as a crime, carrying ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... to side, sometimes whirling around, but with feet always flat on the floor, often turning on her heels. All the time her arms were extended and her fingers snapping, and snapping also were the black eyes. She was the personification of grace, but the dance was weird—made the more so by the setting of bright evening dresses and glittering uniforms. One never sees a dance of this sort these days, even in the South, any more than one sees the bright-colored turban. Both have passed with the ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... chair and crossed over to the dying fire, so that no one could see the expression on his face as he stood with his back to the grate, and continued his weird tale. ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the brotherhood which is in the world.' He did not mean to say, 'Take comfort, for other people are as badly off as you are,' but he meant to call to the remembrance of the solitary sufferer the thousands of his brethren who were 'dreeing the same weird' in the same ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... "it was not for myself I grieved thus. But the pang is past, and the worst is known. Now, then, back to those things that never die—restless projects and daring schemes. That hag's curse keeps my blood cold still, and this solitude has something in it weird and awful. Ha!—what sudden ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... are said to have fed St. Paul, the first hermit,—he very clearly foretelleth unto everyone who is desirous to be certified of the condition of his lot what his destiny will be, and what future chance the Fates have ordained for him; for the Parcae, or Weird Sisters, do not twist, spin, or draw out a thread, nor yet doth Jupiter perpend, project, or deliberate anything which the good old celestial father knoweth not to the full, even whilst he is asleep. This will be a very summary abbreviation of our labour, if we but hearken ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... pickets shudderingly shrank away from the weird light that was streaming out to them and tinting their faces with a ghastly, greenish pallor, Farmer Burns' small boy, moved by some imp of perversity, did a characteristically childish thing. He picked up a good-sized stone and flung it straight ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... spirits and phantoms of night would mourn over him, but they would keep his secret. He peered across a shining lake, and tried to pierce the gloom. No living thing moved before his vision. Silver rippling waves shimmered under that starlit sky; tall weird pines waved gently in the night breeze; slender cedars, resembling spectres, reared their heads toward the blue-black vault of heaven. He listened intently. There was a faint rustling of the few leaves ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... with the sick, and long rows of them were stretched through the centre of the hall. A gallery ran around above the cases, and this was filled with cots. The clatter of the feet of passing surgeons and nurses over the marble floor added to the weird impression. ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... on discovering that the pale face of the white man had many years preceded him. "What, ho!" he muttered to himself; "methinks I see a paleface toying with a dusky maiden. I will have speech with him." On approaching near where the two were engaged in some weird incantation the voyageur overheard the dusky maiden impart a strange message to the paleface by her side. "From the stars I see in the firmament, the fixed stars that predominate in the configuration, I deduce the future destiny of man. 'Tis with thee. O Robert, to live ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird combination of stillness and havoc, the Verdun conflict viewed ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... arch-enemy of mankind—in plain English, that they were witches. The celebrated Three Witches who figure in Macbeth, "and palter with him in a double sense," had evidently this distinguishing mark, for says Banquo to the "weird sisters" (Act i, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... to bed greatly disturbed in mind as to whether she was doing well to marry the obstreperous Westerner. "He fascinates me in a wild, weird sort of a way when I'm with him," she had said to herself before going to sleep, "and the idea of him is fascinating in certain moods. And it is a temptation to take hold of him and master and train him—like broncho-busting. But is it interesting enough for—for ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... the lower part of the State, where Jack Agery, a noted plantation orator, was holding forth, denouncing the Democracy and rallying the faithful. He was a man of great natural ability and bristling with pithy anecdote. From a rude platform half a dozen candles flickered a weird and unsteady glare. Agery as a spellbinder was at his best, when a hushed whisper, growing into a general alarm, announced that members of the Ku Klux, an organization noted for the assassination of Republicans, were coming. Agery, a born leader, in ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... moonlight might stream in; and as the soft silvery beams stole silently into the room and laid their tremulous light on the young forms and awestruck faces, the flames leaping and crackling joined in enhancing the effect of the story by throwing on the walls weird shadows ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont |
