"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... composer for the violin was the German Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859), who was born the same year as the wizard Paganini, and who, although having less scintillant genius than the weird Italian, is believed to have had a more beneficent influence over violin playing in his treatment of the instrument. He set an example of purity of style and roundness of tone, and raised the violin ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... listens and her weird gray eyes Grow weirder in their pensive gaze. The sea birds toss her tangled curls, The skiff lights ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... in full and limping flight, pursued by Mrs. Charlton Denyse clad in inconsiderable pink, and shrieking vengeance as she splashed. Relieved, through this unexpected alliance, of further interference, the messenger collected a weird assortment of his liege's clothing and an article or two of his own and returned to her. There was no mistaking the gladness of ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... any Englishman must long to import a hundred London street boys, with their sense of ridicule and fearless tongue. At all times the world has possessed an army of geniuses whose greatness consists of faith and not of works—of faith in themselves which takes the outward form of weird clothing, long hair, and a literary or artistic pose. Paris streets were so full of such in 1870 that all thoughtful men could scarce fail to recognise a nation in ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... on long humming notes, chiefly, it seemed to me, upon two notes with the occasional interjection of a third and fourth, and, at long and rare intervals, of a fifth. It was harmonious beyond all description, just as it was weird and unearthly; but now that I heard it more distinctly it had much more the sound of bells—very ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... moments I stood still on the ridge, struck by the somewhat weird aspect of the shadowed scene before me—the long strip of dull uniform green, with here and there a slender palm lifting its feathery crown above the other trees, standing motionless, in strange relief against the advancing blackness. Then I set out once more at a run, taking advantage of the downward ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... card, why, you can go ahead with your boom," and the old man tied his necktie so it looked like a scrambled egg, and he and the boy went in to breakfast, the boy opening the outside door and whistling a weird whistle, which brought three boys up on the porch, when he said ...
— Peck's Uncle Ike and The Red Headed Boy - 1899 • George W. Peck
... and weird and slow, came a "boom!—boom!—boom!"—a distant bell tolling midnight. When the last stroke died, that depressing stillness followed again, and as before I was staring at those waxen faces and feeling those airy touches on my hair ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... the same name at home. Among the most common were the box, wattle, and cherry; but undoubtedly the most prominent everywhere in the landscape were the old gum trees, and the huge iron stringy-bark trees, which, now with shattered and weird appearance, had braved the fierce storms of winter and the hot blasts of summer for centuries. Many strange birds flew by overhead, and still stranger wild animals started up from beneath some sheltering bush, and ran off along the fresh glades, all reminding ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... stature, wearing coarse, dusty felt hats or peaked caps, with shaggy beards or faded scarfs around their throats. Here and there, too, was a woman of comely face and figure, but for the most part it was a collection of crones, prematurely aged, with weird, wan, old-world features, slip-shod and draggle-tailed, their heads bare, or covered with dingy shawls in lieu of bonnets—red shawls, gray shawls, brick-dust shawls, mud-colored shawls. Yet there was an indefinable touch of romance and pathos about the tawdriness and witch-like ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... veiled prophetess herself, will arise to lift the veil of her sex. Woman, let us hope, will at last unriddle woman. Smit by the sunbeams, or rather by the moonbeams, of self-discovery, the Sphinx of modern times will reveal in weird and superhuman music the mystery ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... poetry, and commemorates the lineage of the Argive kings. After Io's departure, Prometheus renews his defiance to Jupiter, and his stern prophecies, that the son of Saturn shall be "hurled from his realm, a forgotten king." In the midst of these weird denunciations, Mercury arrives, charged by Jupiter to learn the nature of that danger which Prometheus predicts to him. The Titan bitterly and haughtily defies the threats and warnings of the herald, and exults, that whatever be his tortures, he is at least immortal,— ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... procession followed, still in the same order, amid the same dazzling light and the same clangor of trumpets, the shaded path that skirts the edge of the meadows. Having reached the little bridge, it stopped; I saw the torches rise, wave, and cast showers of sparks; the horns sounded a weird and prolonged blast; then suddenly every light disappeared, every noise ceased, and the valley was again wrapped in the darkness and the deep silence of the night. That is what I saw and heard. You who have just arrived from Germany, did you meet the ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... the sheepmen drove their animals nearer and nearer to the pits, they urged them faster until the unhappy creatures, besides themselves at the weird occurrences of a night of terror, were ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... ringing, jingling bells of mules ahead, and the voices of their drivers: turn a corner, and the bright light of torches flashes in your eyes. Look again and earnestly at the beautiful scene: mules, drivers, black rocks, olive trees above, all flamboyant in the ruddy light, appearing and disappearing; a weird, wild scene. Up, up, long is the way; past the fountain where the stars are flashing in the splashing waters; past gardens; past the mountain path at last. Ecco, the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... they were assembled outside the ship, fully armed and armored, and with full field gear. The sun, a yellow G-O star, hung hotly just above the towering mountains to the east. The alien air smelled odd in the men's nostrils, and the weird foliage seemed to rustle menacingly. In the distance, the shrieks of alien fauna occasionally echoed ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... many an Orcadian who, in attempting to reach the innermost recesses of such caverns, had been taken possession of by the evil spirits that were commonly believed to inhabit these places; and the strangely-echoing sounds we heard were exaggerated in her imagination, and became to her as the weird voices ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... catalogue of calamities, I never dreamt that among other claims to distinction he might have been billed as The Fractured Man, principal attraction in a travelling show, eclipsing the One-Legged Camel, the Tinted Zebra, and the Weird-Eyed Wanton from the Crusty North, who can sing in five languages "It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary." Ignoring the monotony of experience suffered by the ribs, and noting the obtrusiveness of one collar-bone, we may, with slight variation from a formula in use by the SPEAKER in the House ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... to win him from that self-analysis which later enabled him to mystify a world that rarely pauses to take heed of the ancient exhortation, "Know thyself." In the depths of his own being he found the story of "William Wilson," with its atmosphere of weird romance and ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... linden," reported Marion in a low voice, "a little Jewish boy was standing. He had very large black eyes, two tightly twisted black curls hung down over his ears, and he wore a long coat like a grown man; he brought the letter. It was awfully weird." ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the blinded moths, Roused by a lantern in old palaces Among the mouldering tapestries of thought, Weird fables woke and fluttered to and fro, And wild-eyed sages hunted them for truth. The Italian, Frangipani, thought the star The lost Electra, that had left her throne Among the Pleiads, and plunged ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... profounder. Wherein such diversities, coupled with a general resemblance to man, might consist, whether in mere physical differences or in different mental laws, in the lack of certain of the great passional motors of men or the possession of quite others, were weird themes of never-failing attractions for my mind. The El Dorado visions with which the virgin mystery of the New World inspired the early Spanish explorers were tame and prosaic compared with the speculations which it was perfectly ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... round the weird spot as the noise of their spades became monotonous, relieved only by the throwing aside of the great lumps of moist earth; a mist was rising from the river flowing near, of which in the first stillness of our coming I could just catch the ripple of ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... faster in spite of that tranquillizing assurance. She heard an unaccustomed hand trying the fastening of the gate, then a bolt withdrawn, the sharp light step upon the turf behind her, and in the next moment George Fairfax was by her side, among the weird shadows ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... wilderness; it was the expression of the influence of the vast, desolate, and lonely nature amid which they passed their lives. It is true that Lincoln was never a backwoodsman, and never roved alone for long periods among the shadowy forests and the limit-less prairies, so that their powerful and weird influences, though not altogether remote, never bore upon him in full force; yet their effect was everywhere around him, and through others he imbibed it, for his disposition was sensitive and sympathetic for such purposes. That there was also a simple prosaic physical inducement cannot ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... in Macbeth as the Weird Sisters; and it is probably from this connexion that weird has become an adjective for ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... position on the central figure of the dry-painting, facing the east. The effort this night is to frighten the patient and thus banish the evil spirits from his body. The two maskers come running in, uttering weird, unearthly howls, in which every spectator in the hogan joins, feigning great fear. The masked figures make four entries, each like the other. In many cases the patient either actually faints from fright or feigns to do so. The patient then leaves the dry-painting and ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... impression of the man from the West did nothing to contradict the expectation of something weird, rough, and uncultivated. The long, ungainly figure upon which hung clothes that, while new for this trip, were evidently the work of an unskilful tailor; the large feet, the clumsy hands of which, at the outset, at least, the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... order of their ages, were Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends. These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political questions as ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... even account for Huntingdon in poor Anne's novel. He accounts only for himself. He is important chiefly in relation to the youngest of the Brontes. Oddly enough, this boy, who was once thought greater than his sister Emily, was curiously akin to the weak and ineffectual Anne. He shows the weird flickering of the flame that pulsed so feebly and intermittently in her. He had Anne's unhappy way with destiny, her knack of missing things. She had a touch of his morbidity. He was given to silences ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... mysterious, dark recesses of the Highlands on either hand, the waters turned to a livid gray under the feeble light of the waning moon. No part of our voyage was more impressive, no scene more awe-inspiring. It was a region of such weird lights and gruesome shadows as no fancy could people with aught but gaunt goblins and dread demons, come down to us through generations untold, an unspent legacy of terror, from ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... hovered and began to settle nearby, and there was Van Artevelde leaning over its rail and fiddling frantically with whatever it was that stuck up on it—a weird, angled contraption of pipes and belts topped by a whirring blade. A boy stood at his shoulder and tried to help him. As the platform descended to a few meters above ground, the Dutchman slashed at the contraption, the cut ends of belts whipped out wildly ...
— Wind • Charles Louis Fontenay
... large house moved the figure of Porportuk, ominous, with shaking head, coldly disapproving, paying for it all. Not that he really paid, for he compounded interest in weird ways, and year by year absorbed the properties of Klakee-Nah. Porportuk once took it upon himself to chide El-Soo upon the wasteful way of life in the large house—it was when he had about absorbed the last of Klakee-Nah's wealth—but he never ventured so to chide again. El-Soo, like her father, ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... the white hills and towers and gorgeous battlements of cloud-land rose into the bright blue sky. Around me were groups of flowering mimosa bushes, with thorns from three to six inches long, interspersed with which were curious aloes, whose weird leafy tops gave them the aspect of shrubs growing upside down with their roots scrambling aimlessly in the air. In front stood the native hut, the wretchedness of whose outside was only equalled by the filth and poverty-stricken aspect within. Near to this were several native children, as ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the picturesque incidents that Sturt has introduced in his narrative, and that help to fix on our memory the strangely weird picture of the lonely band of men confronted with the unaccustomed forces of nature in ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... difficulty, he was passing along, suddenly he saw a man in black standing right in his path, about fifty yards distant, in a field of some growing barley or wheat. The gloomy stranger was standing stock-still; one outstretched arm, with weird intimation pointing towards the deceased Squire's abode. To the brooding soul of the now desolate Israel, so strange a sight roused a supernatural suspicion. His conscience morbidly reproaching him for the terrors he had bred in making his escape from the house, he seemed to see in the ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... can give to its fairies that incorporeal shape, that purity of essence, of which the heathen nymphs fall so far short? The antique Venus is beautiful, admirable, no doubt; but what has imparted to Jean Goujon's faces that weird, tender, ethereal delicacy? What has given them that unfamiliar suggestion of life and grandeur, if not the proximity of the rough and powerful ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... officer, after him came the band, and then, four abreast, a long line of warriors; in their centre two ensigns, and on their flanks, officers and non-commissioned officers with swords and pikes; more mounted men bringing up the rear. On they came, the fifes and flutes ringing out with a weird clearness in the hushed mountain air. I could hear the ground vibrate, the gravel crunch and scatter, as they steadily and mechanically advanced—tall men, enormously tall men, with set, white faces and livid eyes. Every instant I expected they would see me, and I became sick with terror at the ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... of the gloomy hall was not pleasant. The red wall-paper was soiled and torn, and weird shadows flickered from the small gas taper that blinked from the ceiling. There were suggestions of old dinners, stale fried potatoes and pork in all the corners, and one moving toward the stairs seemed to stir them up and set them going again like ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... therefore "varium et mutabile semper," should suddenly deceive her followers, as did Zamiel's seventh charmed bullet (which ought always to have been kept up Caspar's sleeve—but Caspar was an idiot), and the Weird but Larky ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... 128: The old Norse word is rlg, which is plural, (from r Ger. ur, and lg, laws,) and means the primal law, fate, weird, doom; the Greek moira. The idea of predestination was a salient feature in the Odinic religion. The word rlog, O.H.G. urlac, M.H.G. urlone, Dutch orlog, had special reference to a man's fate in war. Hence Orlogschiffe in German means ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... nearly finished his work when he heard a loud bellowing from the wooded heights! It sounded so weird and awful he began to be alarmed. He stood still a moment and listened. Soon he heard it again. Then he knew it was nothing to be afraid of, but on the contrary, it seemed to be a cry ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... Peter forgot to thank the stranger in his haste to overtake Jesus. He rounded the next corner, running, then stopped short. Flickering straight ahead of him were torches. Soon he was close enough behind the men who carried them to see more clearly. The yellow flames threw weird patterns on the houses: shadows of men twisted and dodged on the walls as the torchbearers swung the lights to and fro. Peter followed cautiously, coming no closer than necessary. His heart leaped ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... strange and weird depression of the earth's crust about fifty miles long and ten wide, the deepest part of which is more than two hundred and fifty feet below sea level. Once upon a time, it is thought, the Gulf of California reached so far inland that it included this gash. Then the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... entitled: "The Night of the Dead"; i. e. the eve of All Saints' Day. A servant girl, rising early one morning as she supposed (it was really midnight), witnesses a weird procession, which she unwittingly disturbs by lowering her candle and asking the last passer-by to light it. This he does; but when she pulls up her basket she finds in it, besides the lighted candle, a human arm. Her confessor ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... when he played, the atmosphere Was filled with magic, and the ear Caught echoes of that Harp of Gold, Whose music had so weird a sound, The hunted stag forgot to bound, The leaping rivulet backward rolled, The birds came down from bush and tree, The dead came from beneath the sea, The ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... trespassing, and clutching Terry's collar, he stood rigid, while the whip-like shadow of death writhed across a strip of moonlight—and disappeared. There was life,—of a sort, in Chitor. So Roy trod warily as he passed from room to room; dread of dark forgotten in the weird fascination of foreknowledge verified ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... together to look into that mystery ahead, toward which this universe and we within it are so prodigiously plunging on. Do we not often feel, upon this earth whirling through space, like men and women who by some weird chance have found themselves upon a ship, ignorant of their point of departure and of their destination? For all the busyness with which we engage in many tasks, we cannot keep ourselves from slipping back at times to the ship's stern to ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... They slept well on board the Annihilator, which was speeding so swiftly through space—slept as comfortably as they had on earth. Each hour brought them nearer the moon, and they figured on landing on the surface of that wonderful and weird body ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... had been at Rome and received the Pope's blessing. But to-day he had spoken of long journeyings by sea and land; of perils by fire and flood; of wolves and bears and fierce snowstorms and black nights in the lonely forest; of dark altars of heaven gods, and weird, bloody sacrifices, and narrow escapes from ...
— The First Christmas Tree - A Story of the Forest • Henry Van Dyke
... most barren, desolate parts of the earth, cursing the gods and hating himself. At length he found a spot which he felt sure would be hidden even from Odin's eyes. It was in a steep, rocky valley, where nothing grew, and where no sound ever came except the weird noise of the wind as it swept through the narrow passes, and the chatter of a mountain stream as it ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the suggestion of contrast still farther one should read Hugo's "Notre Dame" on the spot. It will give a wonderful and whimsical conception of those weird gargoyles and devils, which have only to be seen to awaken a new interest in what this great writer has put forth. For another sensation, pleasant or otherwise, one might look up a copy of Meyron's wonderful etching of the same subject, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... less about this weird, disappearing fleet of vessels that, for some time now, had been acting so mysteriously along the coast of the big bay. Like most of his class, he believed that they were unreal, and possibly but the ghosts of ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... and the other men clambering over the neighboring wrecks seemed weird figures in their bulky suits and transparent helmets. Kent looked back at the Pallas, and then along the wreck-pack's edge to where he could glimpse the silvery side of the Martian Queen. But now Krell and Liggett were descending into the ship's interior ...
— The Sargasso of Space • Edmond Hamilton
... ventured to communicate the fact that a very old and strange-looking man, who did not appear to be quite right in his wits, together with a. slightly younger, though equally weird-looking companion, craved an audience with ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... finds that the end is upon him. Swiftly, like some wild hunt of shadows, the generations fleet away—nothing stays their frantic speed; and to the true observer no fictitious flight of spirits on the Brocken could be half so weird as the passage of one generation of the children of men. As we grow old, the appalling brevity of time impresses itself more and more on the consciousness of calm and thoughtful men; yet nine-tenths of our race spend the best part of their days in trying to ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... Nappy and Pop and every one of the millions of people looking silently on around the world. But most of all, he hated Milt. It was a weird, sickening thing, that hatred. But only a mentally sickening thing. Physically, it seemed to make Frankie stronger, because when the bell rang and he got up and walked into a straight right, it didn't ...
— Vital Ingredient • Gerald Vance
... he appreciated the warm magenta coloring of gorgeous poinsettias and bougainvillea, the glowing-hearted, waxy white flowers of frangipani; not until now did he realize the prodigality of Nature towards Java in the matter of weird ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... down the entry on to the quay. The river was there, and waters, they say, have a luring power, and a weird promise of rest in their perpetual monotony of sound. But many people were there, if such a temptation presented itself to Philip's mind; the sight of his fellow-townsmen, perhaps of his acquaintances, drove him up another entry—the town is burrowed with ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... it permeates the whole house. Where this is damp, it leads not alone to disease among the inmates, but to the disintegration of the house itself, through what is called "dry rot," but is paradoxically the result of dampness. Edgar Allan Poe, in his weird story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," has given a mystical interpretation of the dissolution of an old homestead which really has a scientific explanation that might be found in ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... in search of adventures in the thick of a 'London particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head, and the air is full of a kind of ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... but a child have taken that soft-tongued wanton to her bosom, and not have seen through acting so transparent? Would any but the veriest child that never ought to have been let out into the world by itself have thought to dree her weird in such folly? Children! poor babies they were, both ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... won't mind being offered a coffee and liqueur. We can give him something decent—Where's the waiter?" Angus lifted his pinched, ugly bare face and looked round with weird command for the waiter. The waiter, having not much to do, and feeling ready to draw these two weird young birds, allowed himself ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... grounds. But on the main point our correspondent is begging the question, or at least assuming as fully proved a conclusion which is very far from being so. Is he quite sure that the only explanation of these strange sights and weird noises is that they are brought about by the action of departed spirits (we naturally exclude cases of deliberate fraud, which in reality are very unusual)? And if so, what meaning would he put upon the word "spirits"? And even if it be granted that the phenomena are caused by the inhabitants ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... sorry to hear that the moon which looks so lovely to our sight, is found by those who can get a nearer view to be such a weird and desolate place that it seemed as if only death reigned there? I know I was, when first I read about it, and saw a picture of the moon, and wondered at its bare mountain peaks, with their rugged craters and dreadful precipices, and its "Ocean of Storms" ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... SO HAPPY, BUT MUCH HAPPIER! and prophesied that though he should never reign, yet his sons after him should be kings in Scotland. They then turned into air and vanished; by which the generals knew them to be the weird sisters, ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... time they sat there, now dozing by the stove, and anon starting up as some unusually weird contortion on the part of the boat gave them the impression that the end had come, and they were about to be ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... that these pence I had procured with so much toil were always expended in the public-house by both the man and his wife who were supposed at that time to provide me with the weird accommodation they were pleased to call home. My particular portion of this edifice was a dirty mat by way of a bed, which I shared with a rough-haired terrier dog called Sam. We two, Sam and I, were roofed in with ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... was sweeping along below them, its mangroved shores gloomy and desolate-looking, not to say weird, in the pale moonlight. Among those dense forests and thickets the flyers knew many a wild animal was prowling at that very moment, and in the thatched huts in the glens slept many a fierce-visaged savage with weapons close ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... fierce flame, sudden crashing arcs that glowed and snapped in the steady light of the laboratory, and glimpses of white-hot metal supported on beams of force. The sputter of welding, the whine of transmuted air, and the hum of powerful generators, blasting atoms were there. All combined to a weird symphony of light and dark, of sound and quiet. About F-1 were clustered floating tiers of ...
— The Last Evolution • John Wood Campbell
... win her name? Well, in the first place, "the nut-browne mayd" and she were near of kin. But whether her parents, as they looked into the baby's clear dark eyes, saw there anything weird or elfish,—or whether the name 'grew,'—of that there remains no record. She had been a pretty ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... nor less than an expedition to Oak Ridge, that lay some ten miles back from the lake, amid the Sunset Mountains. Report had it that there was a real ghost to be seen there, and the boys were bent on discovering the truth of this weird story. It can be easily understood that they must have had a glorious time on that trip, viewed from the standpoint of an eager, adventure-loving boy. But the story is set down in full in the third volume, and you can read it for yourselves in "The Outdoor Chums in the ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... strange, wild formula of induction. From time to time he was interrupted by loud expressions of approval and assent from the vast throng of encircling braves, but apart from this no sound was heard but the low, weird monotone of a ritual older than the white man's ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... effect of such a faith upon the sensitive nerves of the women of those days? Viewed in its larger aspects this was an objective, not a subjective religion. It could but make the sensitive soul super-sensitive, introspective, morbidly alive to uncanny and weird suggestions, and strangely afraid of the temptation of enjoying earthly pleasures. Its followers dared not allow themselves to become deeply attached to anything temporal; for such an emotion was the device of the devil, and God would surely remove the object of such affection. ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... profound consolation hidden in the old Egyptian inscribed rocks. They show us that the weird figures, half man and half beast, which we find carved and painted there, were not the true gods of Egypt, but politico-religious masks, concealing the true godhead. These rocks teach that the real object of worship was ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... rich in flavour. The city was a marvel of many terrors, a place of weird sounds, strange shapes and swift movements, among which—having been made timid by much adversity—you had need to be very, very careful if your hand was in no one's. The house itself was wonderful: ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... quay was reached. The river was covered with all sorts of odd craft, and George gazed with astonished eyes at the scene before him. The moon was just rising, and the great golden globe shone over the river, causing the boats of varying build to cast weird and fantastic shadows on ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... some quaint old tale, or writing furiously upon a composition of his own. When he looked at the boys, he did not seem to see them, but would gaze beyond them—the pupils of his full, soft, grey eyes darkening and dilating as if they were held by some weird vision invisible to all eyes save his own; and indeed the belief was general among his friends that he was endowed with the power of seeing visions. This impression had been made even upon his old "Mammy," when he was a mite of a lad. Many a time, when he turned that abstracted gaze ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... with the framework, and even details, of stories which from time to time I have contributed to various magazines. A ghost story,* published some years ago in a London magazine, and much commented on because of its peculiarly weird and startling character, had this origin; so had a fairy tale,** which appeared in a Christmas Annual last year, and which has recently been re-issued in German by the editor of a foreign periodical. ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... far green depths of the forest glade, Where the hunter's footsteps but rarely strayed, Was a darksome dell, possessed, 'twas said, By an evil spirit, dark and dread, Whose weird voice spoke in the whisperings low Of that haunted wood, and the ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... these anomalies in public life chafed the eager spirit of Nelson, but we can never know the extent of the suffering it caused except during the Neapolitan and Sicilian days. This lonely soul lived the life of a recluse for months at a time. The monotony of the weird song of the sea winds, the nerve-tearing, lazy creak of the wooden timbers, the sinuous crawling, rolling, or plunging over the most wondrous of God's works, invariably produces a sepulchral impression even ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... growth and acquisition of wealth. Three famous streets in New Orleans bear testimony to the importance of the colored people in the life of the city. Congo Square, one of the great open squares in the old Creole quarter, was named for the slaves who used to congregate in its limits and dance the weird dances to the tunes of blood-stirring minor strains. Those who know the weird liet-motif of Coleridge-Taylor's Bamboula dance have heard the tune of the Congo dance, which every child in New Orleans could sing. Gottschalk's ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... A weird imprisoned panic seized upon the men with cries inarticulate and gestures stillborn. They writhed upon the spot. But little shelter as the incipient trench afforded, no one dared leave the ditch that saved us from protruding above the level of the ground, no one ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... had passed away, long secret labour had been expended in the erection of this weird and tottering structure; but it was all the work of one hand. Night after night had the Pagan entered the deserted temples in the surrounding streets, and pillaged them of their contents to enrich his favoured shrine: the removal of the idols from their appointed ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... at illustrations in the margin. They were quite understandable, although the perspective was all wrong. "Weird beasts they seem to have had knocking about the country in those days. Whacking big size too, if one may judge. By Jove, that'll be a cave-tiger trying to puff down a mammoth. I shouldn't care to ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... auroral cloud now began to assume the shape of a mighty umbrella, the enormous ribs of weird light forming in an apex above the heads of the party, and radiating towards all points of the compass. Sometimes these ribs would all shake, and then blend; but they would speedily rearray themselves in perfect and majestic symmetry. It was ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... opened with that timorous eagerness and that species of terror which the supreme elegance of one of society's queens generally inspires in our sex. For the first time, Madame de Palme appeared handsome to me; the expression of her countenance was wholly novel to me, and a weird animation gleamed in her ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... don't think I am complaining, do you? I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Blunt in a ragged old jacket and a white tie and that incisive polite voice of his seemed strange and weird. It seemed as though he were inventing it all rather angrily. I had doubts as to ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... ordinary small hut. Outside the hut was what he took for a curiously shaped log of wood. The inside of the hut was in shadow, but as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness, he saw something in one corner. It was a weird-looking ...
— Divinity • William Morrison
... what you are. I've got the impression that you are something, that there's a real 'you' in your inside. But you don't let me see it. You send a polite servant to the door when I knock. Probably this sounds very weird and un-English to you. But to my mind it is much more weird to behave as you are behaving. Come out, can't ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... weird scene, and the flickering firelight added to its strangeness. Silent and still as statues the warriors stood. Then as John Smith was led before the chief they raised a wild shout. As that died away to silence one of the Powhatan's squaws rose and brought a basin of water to Smith. In this he washed ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... a scratching of matches, and the sea-lamp flared up, dim and smoky, and in its weird light bare-legged men moved about nursing their bruises and caring for their hurts. Oofty-Oofty laid hold of Parsons's thumb, pulling it out stoutly and snapping it back into place. I noticed at the same time that ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... friend Peggotty tells me, in a quiet, matter-of-fact manner, a story much more weird than this. He says that after we watchers had left the scene, the divers got fairly to work and attained a fair run of the ship. They found she lay broadside on to a bank of sand, by the edge of which she had sunk till it overtopped her decks. By the action of the ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... at the other end, though it looked so simple, was full of weird pitfalls, into one of which Chatty fell an easy victim. She played too soon at a short-pitched ball, and spooned a catch to mid-on, who took good care not to drop it. Chatty retired rather ruefully, but was consoled by the applause she ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... dripping tangle of leaf-thick branches, and stillness Keeps in the strange-coiled stems, ferns, and wet-loving weeds. Hither comes Pan, to this pregnant earthy spot, when his piping Flags; and his pipes outworn breaking and casting away, Fits new reeds to his mouth with the weird earth-melody in them, Piercing, alive with a life able to mix with the god's. Then, as he blows, and the searching sequence delights him, the goat-feet Furtive withdraw; and a bird stirs and flutes in the gloom Answering. Float with the stream the outworn pipes, with a whisper,— ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of ascending to the ship's control-room were weird in the extreme. Cochrane had just been wakened from a worn-out sleep, and it was always startling on the moon to wake and find one's self weighing one-sixth of normal. It took seconds to remember ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... campaigns had already smashed her flabby fleets and driven the remnants from space, but the Council, faced with the destruction and casualties from just a few days of the weird surprise ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... decks presented, with huge fires blazing away under our pots, and the men with the ladles skimming off the scraps, or baling out the oil into the coolers, was strange and weird in the extreme. Had I been suddenly introduced among them, I should not have recognised them as my shipmates, begrimed as they were with smoke and oil. I was, however, much in the same condition. Dr Cockle had become accustomed to it, but I cannot ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... his eyes and strange, weird ideas and images floated through his brain. When he regained some part of his senses he saw ahead of him a long, curling crest of yellow water and foam, and he knew, vaguely, that it was pouring over ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... generation that smile is irresistibly funny. He recalls the year 1836, when the Union was founded as one of meteorological oddities. "Tradition preserves the record of the season under the designation of the cold summer. Weird auroras did not forbear to lift themselves in mountains of fire along the north, even in July; and more than once the canopy-aurora hung like a mock sun in the very centre of the heavens. People predicted strange things; but the strange ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... particular wish to sell them myself,' answered the ogre, with equal indifference. 'But I have a necklace of shining stones which was left me by father, and one, the largest engraven with weird characters, is missing. I have heard that it is in your husband's possession, and if you can get me that stone you shall have any of these jewels that you choose. But you will have to pretend that you want it for yourself; and, above all, do not mention me, for ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... of the Thessian fleet had already fled, but there remained half a hundred great battleships. And now, within half a million miles of the planet, there began a battle so weird that astronomers who watched ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... with the riot and tumult of the night. A thousand lamps and coloured lanterns flashed like fireflies along the way, and under them the crowd had gathered, and was flowing back and forth. It was a weird and fantastic sight—this one strange and almost uncanny street that was there largely for the play and the ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... experienced that sympathetic American kindness can realise what it is. It is all that gives me courage to face the reading public as a writer of fiction and attempt to depict to it the fascinating world of an Indian jungle, the weird beasts that people it, and the stranger humans that battle with them in it. The magic pen of a Kipling alone could do justice to that wonderful realm of mountain and forest that is called the Terai—that fantastic region of woodland that stretches for hundreds of miles along the foot of ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... wailing of women broke upon the utter silence which ensued, and nearer and nearer came that weird singing as it approached the summit. The women were chanting Marko's death dirge. At last, as they passed the little window, we went outside and saw four women, dishevelled and weeping, approach the grave, kneeling ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... leafless, growing on the roots of the gorse; the curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... looked at him in sleepy wonder as he tiptoed into the barn and lit the lantern. To be led out of his stall at "midnight's solemn hour" and harnessed was more than George's equine reasoning could fathom. The harnessing was a weird and wonderful operation. Caleb's trembling fingers were all thumbs. After a while, however, the harnessing was accomplished somehow and in some way, although whether the breeching was where the bridle should have been or vice versa was more than the harnesser would have dared swear. After several ...
— Thankful's Inheritance • Joseph C. Lincoln
... upward, brick buttresses appear constantly, but always with the courses of brick laid slanting to the earth's level, and perpendicular to the thrust of the dome. Every possible effect of light and obscurity makes the strange vistas yet more weird, and, now and then, there is a feeling of standing upon the vast, rounding slope of some planet that shines at one's feet, then gradually falls ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... English shell-cases. These cases are made of brass, and the four-fives, especially, in the opinion of some people, make very nice rose-bowls when they are polished, with wire arranged inside to hold the blossoms. Weird music could be heard issuing from our dugout at times, when we gave an impromptu concert, by putting several of these shell-cases on a log of wood and playing elaborate tunes on them with ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... signified that they were in league with the 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
... five acts of piffle that was mostly talky junk to me. And, at that, I wa'n't sufferin' exactly; for when them actorines got too weird, all I had to do was swing a bit in my seat and I had a side view of a spiffy little white fur boa, with a pink ear-tip showin' under a ripple of corn-colored hair, and a—well, I had something worth watching ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... little cockney. Henry Woods stood fifth in line. They were a motley lot, adventurers every one of them, and some were obviously afraid as they stood before that column of light, with only a few seconds of the third dimension left to them. They had answered a weird advertisement, and had but a limited idea of what they were about to do. Grimly, though, they accepted it as a job, a bizarre job, but a job. They faced it as they had faced other equally dangerous, but less ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... is safe," said the leader. By this time it was quite dark. At a word from him two or three men lighted lanterns. The picture was more weird than ever in the fitful glow. "May I ask, your highness, how do you intend to reach Edelweiss in your present condition. You cannot manage those horses, and besides, you do not know ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... son, M. le Marquis?" repeated the old man mechanically. "I have the right to know," he added with sudden, weird energy. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Goethe to fill his carriage with every variety of plant and mountain flower. Hence Davy, and the late lamented Samuel Brown, analysed, in the spirit of poets as well as of philosophers, and gave to the crucible what it had long lost, something of the air of a weird cauldron, bubbling over with magical foam, and shining, not so much in the severe light of ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... sentencing of the criminal was merely the beginning of a weird life of horror. It was customary at that period to immure prisoners in solitary confinement. There, in their small and reeking cells, filled with damps and pestilential odors, they were confined day after day, year after year, condemned to perpetual ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... childhood, full of weird, fantastic impressions and contradictory influences, stimulating alike to the imagination and that embryo philosophy of life which begins almost with infancy. John Clemens seldom devoted any time to the company of his ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... that he is his father's spirit by stroking HAMLET'S face, and then his own, and then shrinks about the stage to weird music, descriptive of his prison-house. He concludes by appealing to HAMLET'S love for him by pressing his clasped hands to his own heart, and then pointing towards the left-hand side ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... shore, we saw the bickering flames of a ravaging forest fire; dyeing all the surrounding air and landscape crimson, while dense clouds of smoke hung over the burning land like a pall upon which the sun-rays were reflected with weird effect. It was, indeed, an unusual sight, ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... 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 made of woven roses, and another was wearing perfumed ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... a quiet manner by the father of Mrs Anthony. Youth appreciates that sort of recognition which is the subtlest form of flattery age can offer. Mr Smith seized opportunities to approach him on deck. His remarks were sometimes weird and enigmatical. He was doubtless an eccentric old gent. But from that to calling his son-in-law (whom he never approached on deck) nasty names behind his back was ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... crowded together under a grey, pitiless sky, with here and there a patch of trailing-pine, or a black pinnacle of trap-rock, to intensify by contrast the ghastly whiteness and desolation of the weird snowy mountains. In front, but far below, was the troubled sea, rolling mysteriously out of a grey mist of snowflakes, breaking in thick sheets of clotted froth against the black cliff, and making long reverberations, and hollow, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... pass by the weird sisters pale![29] 7 Marked ye the lowering castle on the heath! Hark, hark, is the deed done—the deed of death! The deed is done:—Hail, king of Scotland, hail! I see no more;—to many a fearful sound The bloody cauldron sinks, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... little commercial and social barques of men; it was a miasma of misinterpretation where the ills of life festered, and also a place where the accidentally wounded were ground between the upper and the nether millstones of force or chance; it was a strange, weird, interesting, and yet futile battle of wits where the ignorant and the incompetent and the shrewd and the angry and the weak were made pawns and shuttlecocks for men—lawyers, who were playing upon their moods, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... from Jersey City, by the fleeting magic voice on the wire. Even his iron composure was stirred by this weird complication. ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... starting and at every pause he has something to say that is apposite and suggestive. His country's wintry state is the key-note of the first Introduction, which is an appropriate prelude to a great national tragedy; weird Border legends and the touching and mysterious silences of lone St. Mary's Lake fitly introduce the 'mysterious Man of Woe'; the third and the fourth Introductions, with their features of personal interest and ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... speeding on her way. The road wound for some distance through a wooded region and over several hills. At length it entered upon a settlement where the land was lean and rocks lifted their frowning heads above the surface. The few houses were poor, standing out grey and gaunt in the midst of this weird barrenness. But at every door Midnight was accustomed to stop. Well did she know the little voices which welcomed her, and the tiny hands which stroked her soft nose, or held up some dainty morsel of bread, potatoes or grass. But to-day there was none of this. She ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... rigging on the starboard side, there was another glow of yellowness in the night. Apart from these, all was blackness. And then from above—high above—there wailed down through the darkness a weird, sobbing cry. What it was, I do not know; ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... deadly barrages; I can see shells tearing up great holes in the earth, and scattering mud and stones around them. I can see, too, where trenches were levelled, just as I have seen pits which children make on the seashore levelled by the incoming tide. Now and then there come back to my mind dim, weird pictures of Germans crawling out of their dug-outs, holding up their hands, and ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... golden crescent just above the horizon, look down upon a sleeping world; yet not all asleep, for far down the road skirting yonder wood, a strange procession approaches;—goblin-like figures, hideous with enormous horns, glaring eye-balls and lolling red tongues, and mounted upon weird-looking steeds, are ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... down across the waters from the tug. There was a loud splash beneath the bows, while shadowy figures that howled a weird ditty as they hove the hawser in, rose and fell black against the foam-flecked sea on the dripping forecastle. Nobody had missed Black, who now sat astride the yard watching the tug, as the ship, listing over further ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... Burnbrae, an' yon shepherd's wife Dunleith wy; an' we were a' sae prood o' ye, an' pleased tae think that ye hed keepit deith frae anither hame. Can ye no think o' somethin' tae help Annie, and gie her back her man and bairnies?" and Tammas searched the doctor's face in the cold, weird light. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various |
