"Blue devils" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... properties enough to drive half-a-dozen artists wild. In the centre of the crowd of furious half-naked men, the fat bare back of a Burman, tattooed from collar-bone to waist-cloth with writhing patterns of red and blue devils, holds the eye first. It is a wicked back. Beyond it is the flicker of a Malay kris. A blue, red, and yellow macaw chained to a stanchion spreads his wings against the sun in an ecstasy of terror. Half-a-dozen red-gold pines and bananas have been knocked down ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... you of myself, that I have been better since I wrote to you. Mazzinghi {14} tells me that November weather breeds Blue Devils—so that there is a French proverb, 'In October, de Englishman shoot de pheasant: in November he shoot himself.' This I suppose is the case with me: so away with November, as soon as may be. 'Canst thou my Clora' is being put in proper musical trim: and I will write it out ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... before now, drawn tears from the sensitive eyes of "the brother of the sun;" and the "sagacious and enlightened Lin" has already suggested to his celestial master the propriety of dispatching some of his invincible war-junks to effect the liberation of the degraded slaves of the "red and blue devils" who have so cruelly annoyed him. Every one has heard, and every one talks, of Irish grievances; but no one seems to know exactly what those grievances are: their existence appears to be so unquestionable, that to dispute it is not only useless but almost disreputable; and yet if one venture to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... and treated him as he treated others. Or perhaps Austin liked him because, although the Boy did a good deal of "gassin' with the gang," he had never hung about at clean-ups. At all events, he should stay to-night, partly because when the blue devils were down on Scowl Austin nothing cheered him like showing his "luck" off to someone. And it was so seldom safe in these days. People talked. The authorities conceived unjust suspicions of a man's returns. And then, far back in his head, ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... don't venture to ask you. First of all, we couldn't make you one-tenth part as comfortable as you are at home; secondly, there isn't the ghost of an amusement here, and if you came, you'd go back to Saint Winifred's with a fit of blue devils, as I always do; thirdly, the change from Semlyn to Fuzby-le-Mud would be like walking from the Elysian fields and the asphodel meadows, into mere borboros as old Edwards would say. So I don't ask you; and yet if you could ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... private means look down from a pinnacle of doleful experience on all the grown and hearty men who have dared to say a good word for life since the beginning of the world. There is no prophet but the melancholy Jacques, and the blue devils dance on all ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which he devoted himself with a real passion after his retirement from the army. Though not a writer himself, he brought out several books, among them a very droll one, made up of quotations of the most curious kind, and entitled, 'The Canister of the Blue Devils, by Democritus, junior.' Dr. Bell possessed a very large library, and spent a good part of his time in extracting, both from his books and the newspapers and periodicals of the day, all available paragraphs containing quaint sayings and doings, which he stuck upon ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... been confined for the last three days to a miserable dark room, in an old Spanish house, from the torrents of rain; I am not, therefore, in very good trim for writing; but, defying the blue devils, I will send you a few lines, if it is merely to thank you very sincerely for writing to me. I received your letter, dated December 1st, a short time since. We are now passing part of the winter in the Rio Plata, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... reached Bar. "Only one hour ago Father Joffre passed through here. How unfortunate! But I can tell you where you will find him. He has gone to Saint Die to present medals to a battalion of the 'Little Blue Devils' at that place. Lose no time, and you may assist at the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... soil as I could, to restore the normal tone and freshness of my system, impaired by the above-mentioned government mahogany. I have found there is nothing like the earth to draw the various social distempers out of one. The blue devils take flight at once if they see you mean to bury them and make compost of them. Emerson intimates that the scholar had better not try to have two gardens; but I could never spend an hour hoeing up dock and red- root and twitch-grass without in some way getting rid ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... loved powder from a boy. Used to make little cannons out of big keys, filing the bottoms to make a touch-hole. I was a don at squibs and crackers; and the games we used to have laying trains and making blue devils! Ha! It was nice to ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... acquisitive brain can toil arduously for a period of years and suddenly cease from troubling to find himself, as he expects, at rest. For then into the swept and garnished chambers of that empty mind enter seven or more blue devils. Depression marks him for its own; melancholy forebodings haunt him; remorse for past misdeeds long repented of is his daily companion. With these Erinnyes, more felt perhaps than any of them, comes the devastating sense that he is thwarting the best instinct of his own nature ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... replied, with the kind of joke one perpetrates under such circumstances, "we shall have plenty of blue devils without making ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... hard-headed client, into a condescendence of facts and circumstances, and thou shalt be, not my Apollo—QUID TIBI CUM LYRA?—but my Lord Stair, [Celebrated as a Scottish lawyer.] Meanwhile, I have written myself out of my melancholy and blue devils, merely by prosing about them; so I will now converse half an hour with Roan Robin in his stall—the rascal knows me already, and snickers whenever I cross ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... wahr?" laughed Von Gerhard. "But really quite simple. I come in on an earlier train than I had expected, chat a moment with sister Norah, inquire after the health of my patient, and am told that she is running away from a horde of blue devils!—quote your charming sister—that have swarmed about her all day. What direction did her flight take? I ask. Sister Norah shrugs her shoulders and presumes that it is the road which shows the reddest and yellowest autumn colors. That road will be ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... carefully preserved in my room; and like the gentleman who, when much tried by the shrewish heiress whom he had married, used to retire to his closet and read over his marriage settlement, I used, when blue devils haunted me, to unfold my newspaper and read ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... down in Hay the shearers come And fill themselves with fighting-rum, And chase blue devils up the wall, And fight the snaggers every day, Until there is the deuce to pay — There's none ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... seek For causes young or old: the canker-worm Will feed upon the fairest, freshest cheek, As well as further drain the wither'd form: Care, like a housekeeper, brings every week His bills in, and however we may storm, They must be paid: though six days smoothly run, The seventh will bring blue devils ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... although he did not consult the Doctor on his own case, was not particularly well. "That lonely place, those frightful mountains, and that damp black lake"—which features in the landscape he cursed all round—"are enough to give any man blue devils; and when a fellow's spirits go, he's all gone. That's why I'm dyspeptic—that and those d——d debts—and the post, with its flight of croaking and screeching letters from London. I wish there was no post here. I wish it was like Sir ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu |
