"Contorted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with little coloured dots, which signify (as he will find at the margin) beds of volcanic ash. If he look below the little coloured squares on the margin, he will see figures marking the strike, or direction of the inclination of the beds—inclined, vertical, horizontal, contorted; that the white lines in the map signify faults, i.e. shifts in the strata; the gold lines, lodes of metal—the latter of which I should advise him strongly, in this district at least, not to meddle with: but to button ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... actor, many conflicting traditions; but, at the present day, there is not even a definite bad method, but mere chaos, individual caprice, in the speaking of verse as a foolish monotonous tune or as a foolishly contorted ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... black contours of the hills; and the dead leaves danced in spiral whirls under naked trees, till the wind, sighing profoundly, laid them to rest in the hollows of bare valleys. And from morning till night one could see all over the land black denuded boughs, the boughs gnarled and twisted, as if contorted with pain, swaying sadly between the wet clouds and the soaked earth. The clear and gentle streams of summer days rushed discoloured and raging at the stones that barred the way to the sea, with the fury of madness bent ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Survey his sleepless couch, and, standing there, Tell the poor pallid wretch that life is fair! Press thou the lonely pillow of his head, And ask why sleep his languid eyes has fled; Mark his dew'd temples, and his half shut eye, His trembling nostrils, and his deep drawn sigh, His muttering mouth contorted with despair, And ask if Genius ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... the base of the great cone. I made my way by tortuous walking round the erupted masses of lava, and also by portions of the lava streams, which, on losing their original fluidity, had become piled up and contorted into ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the surplus, now was a panic—a panic the more terrible in that it was solid, sullen, inert, motionless. Women fainted, and stood unconscious, erect. Men sank slowly from sight, agonized, their faces contorted, but unheard in the dull roar of the crowd, and were seen no more. Around the edges people fought frantically to get out; and others, with the blind, unreasoning, home instinct, fought as hard ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... see the sudden spasm that contorted Agony's face at the word "honorable." It suddenly came over Agony that she had no right to be calling other people cheats and liars and taking them to task about their sense of honor, she, who was enjoying ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... vanished, the cave shone silvery gray, with a faint moony sparkle, and out came the lovely carving of the rodent waves. All about, its sides were fretted in exquisite curves, and fantastic yet ever graceful knots and twists; as if a mass of gnarled and contorted roots, first washed of every roughness by some ethereal solvent, leaving only the soft lines of yet grotesque volutions, had been transformed into mingled silver and stone. Like a soldier crab that had found a shell to his mind, he gazed through the yawning mouth of the cavern ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... of those tears that made Daubrecq lose his head, with a brusque movement he clutched the woman and drew her to him. She repelled him, with a violence full of hatred. And, after a brief struggle, during which Lupin caught a glimpse of the man's bestial and contorted features, the two of them stood face to face, railing at each other like ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... care, preparatory to his last long sleep; whereas those who had died from the thrust of a pike, or the blow of a cutlass, however mild the living expression of their countenance might have been, were always fearfully contorted both in ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... face of an Apache Indian, smeared with paint and contorted with eager passion, slowly rose in the moonlight. The exhausted warrior, feeling that the critical moment was at hand, when all depended upon prompt and decisive work, made furious efforts to clamber out of the cavern before the ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... S. Antonio the trail ascended to a height of 3,100 ft. (41/2 kil. from the village), and we were then in a rich forest region, where the acaju—of the Terebinthaceae family—was plentiful, with its huge leaves and contorted branches. The acaju produced a refreshing fruit, either of a bright red or else of a yellow colour, not unlike a large pepper, outside of which was strongly attached a seed possessing highly caustic qualities. Many gordinha trees were also to ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... from all accounts, was that of the victim of some malignant sorceress; he seemed to have drunk of Circe's cup; beast-like; rags insufficient to hide his nakedness; his befreckled skin blistered by continual exposure to the sun; nose flat; countenance contorted, heavy, earthy; hair and beard unshorn, profuse, and of fiery red. He struck strangers much as if he were a volcanic creature thrown up by the same convulsion which exploded into sight the isle. All ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... The captain, the surgeon, and Congdon, the coxswain, landed. Captain Parkinson reached the spot first. Stooping, he thrust his head in at the orifice. A sharp exclamation broke from him. He rose to his feet, turning a contorted ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Miles Forman's Journey's End—serving as a book-mark, according to a not infrequent shiftless feminine fashion,—lay a handkerchief. It was a flimsy, inadequate trifle, fringed with a tiny scallopy black border; and in one corner the letters M. E. A. H., all askew, contorted themselves into any number of ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... an effort that contorted every muscle of his body—"oh! but I cannot." While saying these words, he fell upon his knees, but with his mighty hands he clung to the rocks, and raised ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Ransome's eyes burned into the crewman's. The latter looked away. Ransome tightened his grip, and pain contorted the gunner's features. ...
— Bride of the Dark One • Florence Verbell Brown
... heighten the reader's wonder? While writing these latter sentences, I happened to glance towards the large, round globe of one off the brass andirons, and lo! a miniature apparition of Monsieur du Miroir, with his face widened and grotesquely contorted, as if he were making fun of my amazement! But he has played so many of these jokes that they begin to lose their effect. Once, presumptuous that he was, he stole into the heaven of a young lady's eyes; so that, while I gazed and was dreaming only of herself, I found ...
— Monsieur du Miroir (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... helpless, staring, blinking, little blanket-framed face; but at first touch of those bristling moustaches a powerful spasm has convulsed the tiny features, and a vehement, plaintive, wailing protest bursts from the contorted lips, and then your son and heir is snatched away, and you stand like convicted felon, while nursey dandles and tosses and condoles and condones and cuddles. "Well, well, well, did it nearly fighten its pessus, pessus life out with its horrid, awful, uggy beard? Well, it never, never ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... was in shirt and trousers only, and he sat up with braced arms. For one half second he stared at them, his face a mask of horrible contorted terror. His upper lip was drawn back so that the gums of the teeth appeared, and his eyes were focused not on the two who approached him but on something quite close to him; his nostrils were widely expanded, as if he panted for breath, and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... this moment as a man may laugh in hell. He reeled. His lean face momentarily contorted, and afterward the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... soothing butter to our coarse dry bread. Besides, sentiment is to women what fun is to us. They do not care for our humor, surely it would be unfair to deny them their grief. And who shall say that their mode of enjoyment is not as sensible as ours? Why assume that a doubled-up body, a contorted, purple face, and a gaping mouth emitting a series of ear-splitting shrieks point to a state of more intelligent happiness than a pensive face reposing upon a little white hand, and a pair of gentle tear-dimmed eyes looking back through Time's dark ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... that she followed them almost immediately afterwards through the darkness and, a little later, she came running back to the hotel with that pallid face and the hand clutching her dress over her heart. It can't have been only Bagshawe. Her face was contorted with agony before ever her eyes fell upon me or upon him beside me. But I dare say Bagshawe may have been the determining influence in her suicide. Leonora says that she had that flask, apparently of ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... after her with a bound, his little eyes gleaming with a venomous expression, his face contorted with passion. She raised the revolver and fired. For a breathless instant she thought that she had hit him, for he sank almost to the floor. But she saw that it was only a trick for he was up again ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... took out these bodies are confident that 150 bodies are lying buried in the sand and under the debris on those low-lying bottom lands. Some of the bodies were horribly mangled, and the features were twisted and contorted as if they had died in the most excrutiating agony. Others are found lying stretched out with ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... opening of the door; and then, slow, terrible, wide-eyed, floating breast-high in the flood, a woman drifted out of the narrow room into the midst of the expectant men. Death had not been able to hide the agony in her staring eyes, or dull the lines of horror in her waxen, contorted face. She floated out to them, swaying and bowing, one hand clutched and fixed in the torn bosom of her dress, a pendant of gold and ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts
... was far less graceful, and at times bordered on the grotesque. They contorted and twisted themselves out of all semblance to the human body; they made their abdominal muscles rise and fall with the music; they seemed at times to put the body out of joint, and then reset it properly with jerks and jumps and sudden fierce movements; they twitched, ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... out over the cracked and contorted lava-beds, where no green thing was growing. The forms of the lava-flow suggested mailed and writhing dragons, with horrid, gaping mouths and vicious claws. The lava crunched beneath the horses' feet like shelly and brittle ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... whole poem there is a harshness and acerbity, combined with words and images all aglow, which might recall gorgeous blossoms rising out of a hard and thorny rind and shell, within which the rich fruit was elaborating. The language was not only peculiar and strong, but at times knotty and contorted, as by its own impatient strength. It not seldom, therefore, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... gruesome spectacle awaited them. The great fire that they had seen in the distance was blazing fiercely, and bending over it was the giant, his cruel and contorted features besmeared with the blood of swine, portions of which he was toasting on spits. Startled at the sight of the knights, the monster rushed to where his club lay. This purpose Arthur deemed ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... their head. For British dames new follies love, And, if they can't invent, improve. Some with erect pagodas vie, Some nod, like Pisa's tower, awry, Medusa's snakes, with Pallas' crest, Convolved, contorted, and compressed; With intermingling trees, and flowers, And corn, and grass, and shepherd's bowers, Stage above stage the turrets run, Like pendent groves of Babylon, Till nodding from the topmost wall Otranto's plumes envelop all! Whilst the black ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Have you ever seen stark, mad, infinite terror on a human face? That was what I saw in Denise's—inexpressible, unbearable horror, worse than the fear of death could ever be. Her green eyes were widened so that the whites showed around them; her perfect lips were contorted, her whole face strained into ...
— The Ideal • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... dancing over the ground with his head and his tail very near to each other. He gave vent to little sobs in a wild attempt to vocally describe his gladness. "Well, 'e was a dreat dod," said Hawker, and the setter, overwhelmed, contorted himself wonderfully. ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... barrier impenetrable. The Frenchman would not allow you to pass in your own interest; the Spaniard declined to admit you in his so-considered interest. To take the mountain-route was tedious, and in the case of Barbarossa not to be thought of; the bridge of Endarlasa was broken—a most contorted specimen of artistic dilapidation. To be sure, one could manage to creep to the other side by the submerged coping of the parapet, if endowed with the balancing powers of a rope-walker and the lustihood of the navvy. But Barbarossa was not a Blondin, and had not a physical ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... a corner of the sheet, disclosing the face, contorted and of a peculiar, purplish hue from the congested blood vessels. He bent over and I did so, too. There was an unmistakable odor of tobacco on him. A moment Kennedy studied the face before us, then ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... was shown into the study, and the little boy was left sitting in the hall, and a few minutes later, while the gentleman was giving W. his instructions, they were both horrified by a piercing shriek and the sound of a fall, and rushing out they found the child lying senseless on the floor, his face contorted with terror. The doctor was immediately summoned, and after some examination he pronounced the child to be suffering form a kind of fit, apparently produced by a sudden shock. The boy was taken to one of the bedrooms, and after some time recovered consciousness, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... wreath aside. It rolled, clattering and clinking, and settled down at the feet of the Midas of Medicine who stared at it with a contorted face. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... mystery and unreality stole over Mr. Chalk. He began to think that he must be dreaming. He turned and looked at Mr. Duckett, and Mr. Duckett, trying to smile at him, contorted his face so horribly that he shrank back appalled. He looked about him and saw that they were now in open water and drawing gradually away from the land. The stillness and mystery became unbearable, and with an air of resolution he cocked ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... the further slope by a narrow gulley. Here the shell-holes were less frequent. A miry path led through an abandoned camp—a chaos of riddled and shattered boards and contorted iron sheeting. Dead Frenchmen were lying everywhere. From a drab heap of mud and clothing a human arm projected. The terminal finger-joints had dropped off. The blackened skin was drawn tightly over the back of the hand which seemed to clutch ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... mortal hours they plodded on, a strange procession of muffled figures, leaving in their wake a dark, contorted track, as though some wounded thing had writhed its way upward ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... of Nefer-shem-em is of the ordinary type, with two niches on the east, two chambers filled with brick earth, and a central well. This well was filled with bodies, not buried with care, but thrown down in every contorted attitude. The position of twenty-three skulls and bodies was noted, and then, as no plan or arrangement appeared, the rest were left to be taken out by the men. A scarab of Amen-ankh-as, found in one of the bodies on the upper level, appears to give the late XVIIIth dynasty as the date ...
— El Kab • J.E. Quibell
... her soul at Sir Gilbert Gildersleeve. Her glance went through him. She sat like an embodied conscience before him. The judge rose slowly, his eyes riveted on hers. He was trembling with remorse, and deadlier pale than ever. An awful lividness stole over his face. His lips were contorted. His eyebrows quivered horribly. Still gazing straight at Elma, he essayed to speak. Twice he opened his parched lips. Then his voice ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... convinced of it. Your face is contorted with the anguish of mental stress. Let this be a lesson to you, Comrade Parker, never to embark on any enterprise of which you ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... cells, lie thousands of nymphs, whiter than milk, who with folded arms and head bent forward await the hour of awakening. In their uniform tombs, that, isolated, become nearly transparent, they seem almost like hoary gnomes, lost in deep thought, or legions of virgins whom the folds of the shroud have contorted, who are buried in hexagonal prisms that some inflexible geometrician has multiplied ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... personal appeal of the author, who was slightly deformed by one shoulder being a trifle higher than the other; this malicious suggestion reposed also on the fact that the quasi-hero of "Le Roi s'Amuse" (1832, a tragedy suppressed after one representation, for its reflections on royalty), was also a contorted piece of humanity. This play was followed by "Lucrezia Borgia," "Marie Tudor," and "Angelo," written in a singular poetic prose. Spite of bald translations, their action was sufficiently dramatic to make them successes, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... variety and exuberance of the evergreen foliage in Southern England and Northern France—the Spanish and Portuguese laurel, laurustinus, arbutus, occuba, bay, hollies in variety, tree-box, with scores of species of pines, firs, arborvitae and yews, relieved by the contorted foliage of the auraucarias, the sombre cedar of Lebanon and the graceful deodar cedar of the Himalayas. As already remarked, the tree-growth is small, as the ground was a blank and rocky hillside two years ago, and was quarried to make a site for the garden. The tree which seems ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... three principal groups, based upon the form of the foliage: (1) Plain varieties, in which the leaves are nearly as they are in nature; (2) moss-curled varieties in which they are curiously and pleasingly contorted; and (3) fern leaved, in which the foliage is not curled, but much divided ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... up frantically. Tom's face was contorted with pain when they finally got him aboard ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... first thing she saw was the sweetest, calmest, most motherly of faces bent over her, one arm round her, the other giving her the spoon of some cordial. She looked up and even smiled, though it was a sad contorted smile, which brought a tear into the good sister's eyes; but then she fell asleep, and only half awoke when the Countess came up to see her for the last time, and bade her farewell with a kiss on her forehead, and a charge to Sister Avice to ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... way down the precipitous slope and approached the body, black and clear against the silvered stones. The agony of those contorted limbs struck me with a spasm of pain and ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... an imaginary audience, his expressive young countenance contorted into a grimace of unholy glee, the listener flung aloft his arms and blithely executed a few noiseless ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... Italian frontier, though it lengthened their journey, somewhat mitigated its dreariness, and an hour after noon, after traversing some flinty fields, they observed in the distance an olive-wood, beneath the pale shade of which, and among whose twisted branches and contorted roots, they had contemplated finding a halting-place. But here the advanced guard observed already an encampment, and one of them rode back ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... sat, the withered body of this old man seemed to grow always more motionless, except for his hands. Resting on his thighs, his twig-like hands remained forever awake, their thin contorted fingers crawling vaguely about like the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... His broken arm was beginning to inflame his blood. He was, besides, much injured by some kicks from the crowd as he fell. As the old man looked sadly on the white, baked lips, and the flushed cheeks, contorted with suffering even in his sleep, Clement gave a sharp cry which disturbed his miserable neighbours, all slumbering around in uneasy attitudes. They bade him with curses be silent; and then turning round, tried again to forget their ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... which I, personally, am not capable. Aunt Dahlia, to my amazement, now did it apparently without an effort. She was well wedged into a deep arm-chair, but, nevertheless, she staggered like billy-o. A sort of spasm of horror and apprehension contorted her face. ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... you like, only let me—alone! I've posed and acted and otherwise contorted myself before at least five thousand feet of film today, and I'm not going to be disturbed now, just for the sake of a hat that is as good as paid for anyhow, so 'please go 'way and let me sleep,'" and Alice murmured the chorus of a ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Sea - or, A Pictured Shipwreck That Became Real • Laura Lee Hope
... the bloody froth that oozed from the gaping mouth, and tried to compose decently the contorted figure. I covered the face. Then I started on my last mission, for now I knew the door. I had bought the knowledge dearly, and I meant to use it for my own purpose, careless of what violence might be ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... now as the Luso steamed along shore, no external change appeared. A bird's-eye view of the islet suggests a podao or Madeiran billhook, about six miles by three. The tool's broken point is the Ilha da Cima, facing to north-east, a contorted pile which resembles a magnified cinder. The handle is the Ilheu Baixo, to the south; and the blade is the tract of yellow sandy lowlands—the sole specimen of its sort in the Madeiras—connecting the extremities. Three tall cones at once disclose vulcanism; the ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... He fell back wounded. Within three days he was back in England again, but with only one leg. Seven months of training, five minutes in action, then crippled for life! The writer saw one young fellow whose face was left contorted by shrapnel, which had carried away one eye and the bridge of his nose. He was a quiet, earnest Christian. He said, "Of course, they cannot send me back again into the line or compel me to go with only one eye, but I am going just the ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... I noticed, were sent back at this stage of the game. Then a cry went up from a group of privates standing near the line of contorted figures. "White, Purvis, white! Number Nine ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... Having duly contorted this note into all manner of painful meanings, Godwin occupied an hour in making himself presentable (scornful that he should deem such trouble necessary), and with furiously beating heart set out to walk through Twybridge. Arrived at the house, he was led by a servant ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... if I except the stoves; but still, if we chose, these two rooms could be Margaret's and mine, and the corridor as well, with a beautiful balcony which commanded an enchanting view of the rich Pusterthal up and down, right and left, with a row of jagged, contorted dolomite mountains thrown into the bargain. All this was to be ours if only the Hofbauer would have us. So down we went, casting longing looks around us—down into the entrance-hall, where a crowd of poor people were streaming out of the stube, the parlor of the family, such as in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... in the woods of several Brazilian provinces, as Pernambuco, Bahia and Rio Janeiro. It is found growing in moist shady situations, from 8 to 20 degs. south latitude. The roots, which are the officinal part, are contorted, knotty and annulated, and about the thickness of ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... a sudden realization of what meant to me a real catastrophe—Dian was gone, and with her a half-dozen other prisoners. The guards saw it too, and the ferocity of their rage was terrible to behold. Their awesome, bestial faces were contorted in the most diabolical expressions, as they accused each other of responsibility for the loss. Finally they fell upon us, beating us with their spear shafts, and hatchets. They had already killed two near the head of the line, and were like to have finished the balance ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... like that of the vessels in which the three Kings of the East are represented, bringing their offerings to Christ when he was newly born. On the upper part is graven the image of our Redeemer holding the world in his hand, and on the other the figure of a serpent marvellously contorted, per-adventure in token of the victory which Jesus atchieved over the enemy of the human race. That noble chess-board, the men whereof were of gold and silver, was also in the Monastery in the days of King Don Alfonso the Wise, but it hath ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... little they had died away, Raissa got up and nervously paced to and fro. At first she was pale, then she flushed all over. Her face was contorted with hate, her breathing was tremulous, her eyes gleamed with wild, savage anger, and, pacing up and down as in a cage, she looked like a tigress menaced with red-hot iron. For a moment she stood still and looked at her abode. Almost half of the room was filled up by ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... no quaint details to attract the eye; no gorgeous colour-patterns or pleasing irregularities of form; the frosted beauty of the scene appeals rather to the intelligence. Contrasted with the wanton blaze of green, the contorted trunks and labyrinthine shadow-meanderings of our woodlands, these palm groves, despite their frenzied exuberance, figure forth the idea of reserve and chastity; an impression which is heightened by the ethereal striving of those branchless columns, by their joyous and effective ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... which glowed in the sweet sunshine and the white rocks and lurked in the smoke puffs of the little olives. The olive-trees in Provence are half the landscape. They are neither so tall, so stout, nor so richly contorted as you have seen them beyond the Alps; but this mild colourless bloom seems the very texture of the country. The road from Nimes, for a distance of fifteen miles, is superb; broad enough for an army and as white and firm as a dinner-table. It stretches away over undulations which ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... and have translated the Greek of Mark xiii. 29, as they have done, unless they had gone to this text with the preconceived idea that a certain sin can never be forgiven, and therefore that the passage must be strained and contorted to endorse the idea? It is an instance, not of founding theology upon Scripture, but of twisting Scripture to suit theology. One thing is quite certain. It cannot be right to translate a word in some passages ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... revealed the fact that, besides having contorted her face into an unrecognisable shape, she had soiled it in several places with streaks of ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... the cry, and shivering with dread, rushed to the door and gazed in terror at the figure which stood leaning over the bedside. As she watched, it slowly removed the cowl and the napkin and exposed the fell face of Tabitha, so strangely contorted between fear and triumph that she hardly ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... person were to walk on his hands, or to walk not forwards but backwards,—then he would evidently appear to be flying from himself, and to be putting off his manhood, and to hate his own nature. On which account, also, some ways of sitting down, and some contorted and abrupt movements, such as wanton or effeminate men at times indulge in, are contrary to nature. So that even if that should happen through any fault of the mind, still the nature of the man would seem to ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... are those where ornamentations envelop and conceal line as in late Renaissance, the Italian Rococo, the Portuguese Barrocco (baroque), the curving and contorted degenerate forms of Louis XIV and XV and the Victorian—all examples of the same thing, i.e.: perfect line achieved, acclaimed, flattered, losing its head and going to the bad in extravagant ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... locality number three, Mr. Foote observes that the elevated tract of the auriferous rocks of which the Bababudan mountains form the centre is one well deserving great attention both from the geologist and the mining prospector, it being an area of great disturbance, the rocks being greatly contorted on a large scale and, the north and south sides at least of the area, much cut up by great faults. The whole of the auriferous areas here, he says, are deserving of close survey, for even the best of them are very imperfectly known, and much ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... behold, gaunt, yellow, tawny. Is not Paris a vast field in perpetual turmoil from a storm of interests beneath which are whirled along a crop of human beings, who are, more often than not, reaped by death, only to be born again as pinched as ever, men whose twisted and contorted faces give out at every pore the instinct, the desire, the poisons with which their brains are pregnant; not faces so much as masks; masks of weakness, masks of strength, masks of misery, masks of joy, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... skipper," he greeted them, with a contorted smile that puckered his face and made plainer the hideous inroads of a life's dissipation. "Shan't be able to keep that ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... stiffening fingers, crooked and contorted, worked nervously for a few minutes, scratching at the rough boards. Then all was quite still ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford
... journey's end. Jag Ear was standing beside P.D. and Prather's burro next to him, both unharmed. Nogales's horse had also been killed, but its rider was safe. Prather was crawling down the side of the arroyo on his belly, digging his hands into the dirt, his face white and contorted and his eyes shifting back and forth in ghastly incomprehension. His horse followed him and sank down in ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... some deep cave, and bear To us that gasp in this so meagre air Sweet ministerings And consolations of contorted sound, With agonies profound Of nobly warring and enduring chords That lie, close-bound, Unstirred as yet 'neath thy wide, wakening wings; So that our hearts break not in broken words. O music, that hast power This darkness to devour In vivid light; ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... word twired is not explained in Mr. Blunden's glossary and the meaning is not evident from the context, we guess that he is using it here of shape, in the sense of 'contorted', which would range with the quotation from Burton (given in some dictionaries) 'No sooner doth a young man see his sweetheart coming, but he ... slickes his haire, twires his beard [&c.]'. Here twires, as latest edition of O.E.D. suggests, may be a misprint for twirls. Older ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... fairly brief order; but if Bessie had watched him descend the stairs she would have been astounded at the remarkable caution he observed and at the twinges of pain that every now and then contorted his face. As it was, when she came upon him in the dining-room she uttered a frightened cry ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... I was not afraid: not in the least. I felt an inward power; a sense of influence, which supported me. The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm: such as the Indian, perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe. I took hold of his clenched hand, loosened the contorted fingers, and said ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... her, sir,' replied my uncle, in a very gentle and sarcastic tone, a smile on his thin lips, and his strangely-contorted eyebrows raised for a moment contemptuously. 'This gentleman, my dear Maud, thinks proper to insinuate that I am robbing you. It surprises me a little, and, no doubt, you—I've nothing to conceal, and wished you to be present while he favours me more particularly with his views. I'm right, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... Henry contorted himself on, inch by inch, for all the world like a great snake. Now he passed the sleeping Senecas, hideous with war paint, and came closer to the woman. She was not paying attention to anything about her, but was merely looking up at the pale, cold stars, as if everything in ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... had not been a shining light for years without learning how to control his expression. He had a second, too, while she contorted her face ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... hurried thither to behold a singular sight. There was one apple-tree in the yard,—an old, stunted, crooked thing; and in that tree I found my son and heir, Tip, tied fast with a small stout rope. "Tied" does not express it; he was gagged, manacled, twisted, contorted, wound about, crossed and recrossed, held without a chance of motion, ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... greater depths and subjected to more intense heat, the strata have been completely fused, and the liquid or pasty mass, invading the contorted strata above it, has formed perfectly ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... green color. The veins of minerals are about a half an inch to—in the case of druses of magnesite, which penetrate the rock in all proportions and directions—even six inches in thickness. They lie generally in a perpendicular position, but are frequently bent and contorted in every direction. They are the more abundant where the rock is soft, as veins, but included minerals are more plentiful in the harder rock. There is hardly any one point on the outcrop that may be said to be favored ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... and illiberal, another exhausts itself with its free-hearted bounties. Even the shapes of apple-trees have great individuality, into such strange postures do they put themselves, and thrust their contorted branches so grotesquely in all directions. And when they have stood around a house for many years, and held converse with successive dynasties of occupants, and gladdened their hearts so often ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... an aged Chinaman, dead, seated by a stove in which the fire had burned very low. Sprawling across the old man's knees was the body of a raven. Lying at his feet was a woman, lithe, contorted, the face half hidden in masses of bright ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... moderate-sized tree with a very contorted trunk and branches, which are beset with sharp thorns, and blooms with a yellow flower. It is a native of Central America and the West Indies. This valuable dye-wood is imported in logs; the heart-wood is the most valuable, which is cut up ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... Sporangia multilobate or compound-contorted, below obconic, gray, ribbed with calcareous thickenings; stem short, fuscous, longitudinally wrinkled; hypothallus distinct, black; columella none, although the lime massed at the centre of each sporangium simulates one; capillitium white, densely calcareous, with heavy angular ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... had approached still nearer: their contorted faces were already visible through the smoke, and amid the crash of the firing their savage and offensive shouts were audible, as they uttered insults, suggested a surrender, and threatened slaughter. ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... could not endure the imagination that the dead youth was turning his eyes towards him as he lay; so he came and stood beside him, looking down into his white, upturned face. But it was wonderful! What a change had come over it since, only a few moments ago, he looked at that death-contorted countenance! Now there was a high and sweet expression upon it, of great joy and surprise, and yet a quietude diffused throughout, as if the peace being so very great was what had surprised him. The expression was like a light gleaming and glowing within him. Septimius had often, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was covered with a mackintosh sheet, but the man's face was visible, and if he had not been so busily occupied, the ashen face might have upset him a little. It was absolutely calm, and its expression was contorted neither by pain nor hate nor fear—the face of one who was indifferent, and ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... rest of the island is now covered with hippo grass looking like a beautifully kept lawn. We lie up for a short rest at another island, also a weird spot in its way, for it is covered with a grove of only one kind of tree, which has a twisted, contorted, gray-white trunk and dull, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... walked more frequently with Mariposa along the banks of the river, by the thickets of young spruce, cedar, and manzanita with its oddly contorted red stems. At times, each vied with the other in bringing back echoes from the lofty granite walls ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... not understand what the young ensign said to them, they knew the drift of his jeering words. Their faces contorted with rage, they struck at him, Dave's arms working like piston rods in his efforts to ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... Chinaman (for a Chinaman it was) who lay at my feet, and directed the ray of my pocket-lamp upon his yellow and contorted countenance. I suppressed a cry ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the time, and, while pronouncing the four last words, absolutely touching the ground with a kind of contorted gesticulation. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... the room, his face contorted, one hand on his ribs. He got to his feet and walked unsteadily over to Scotty. He swung a roundhouse right. Scotty's head moved an inch. Carrots missed, and the force of his swing spun him around and ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... The taut body slumped against the bed and the contorted features relaxed. The eyes remained half open; and when Gefty came around to the side of the bed, they still seemed to be looking up at him, but they no longer moved. A thin trickle of blood started from the side of the ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... His figure was drooping; his face purple and contorted, for one of the troopers had crammed his scarf into the man's mouth, half strangling him. As he was led past us, with a sudden frantic effort, fit to dislocate his jaw, he disgorged the gag to ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... had fallen a woman and a young girl; the elder of the two, the mother, perhaps, was of humble birth, to judge by the size of her ears; on her finger she had only an iron ring; her left leg lifted and contorted, shows that she, too, suffered; not so much, however, as the noble lady: the poor have less to lose in dying. Near her, as though upon the same bed, lies the young girl; one at the head, and the other at the foot, and their ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... results: each district must be differently modified; each river must carry down a different kind of detritus; each deposit must be differently distributed by the entangled currents, tidal and other, which wash the contorted shores; and this multiplication of results must manifestly be greatest where the complexity ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... contorted, and deformed, until, in some mountain cabin, where rustics gather to the quilting or the apple-paring, there is more good cheer than in all the frescoed ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... show no treachery," muttered the warder, holding the lantern over a ghastly face contorted by agony. "Well, ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... hell!" cried a wild little man, his face contorted with rage and the lust which finds satisfaction in a blow. He went fiercely on, butting his shoulder against every woman he met. Nobody arrested him; nobody cried "shame." "Give 'em ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... surveying and considering his plans his thoughts reverted to other matters. This was the night of the half-breed pusky. His great face contorted into a sarcastic smile as he thought of Sergeant Horrocks. He remembered with vivid acuteness every incident of his interview with the officer two nights ago. He bore the man no malice now for the contradiction of himself, for the reason that he was sure his own beliefs ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... the ladder he may find carrots on the tiles," was the Paduan's reply. The weasel-like face of the Templar contorted in ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... were frightened by the effect of those words. The old seaman whirled about, his one black eye blazing weirdly and his face contorted. Then he collected himself with ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... add, the reform—of Christianity is more likely to proceed from St. Sulpice than from the teachings of M. Lacordaire or M. Gratry, and a fortiori, from that of M. Dupanloup, in which all its doctrines are toned down, contorted, and blunted; in which Christianity is never represented as it was conceived by the Council of Trent or the Vatican Council, but as a thing without frame or bone, and with all its essence taken from it. The conversions which are made by preaching of this kind do no good either to religion ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... to stretch, to contract, twine and writhe about his neck and person, thrusting out their tongues and erecting their heads. Their weight was as much as he could bear, and they hung down almost to the ground when not contorted,—as big round as a thigh, almost,—spotted and richly variegated. Then he put them into the box again, their heads emerging and writhing forth, which the showman thrust back again. He gave a descriptive and historical account of them, and a fanciful and poetical one also. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... recommending (they say) sheer September-methods, patience being worn out; and that the Jacobin Brethren should, impromptu, work the Guillotine themselves! One sees him still, in Engravings: mounted on a table; foot advanced, body contorted; a bald, rude, slope-browed, infuriated visage of the canine species, the eyes starting from their sockets; in his puissant right-hand the brandished dagger, or horse-pistol, as some give it; other dog-visages kindling under him:—a man not likely to end well! ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... of civility, from the conductor. The best thing I saw on the route was a rustic fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite sure. There was more genius in it than in any structure of the kind I have ever seen,—each length being of a special pattern, ramified, reticulated, contorted, as the limbs of the trees had grown. I trust some friend will photograph or stereograph this fence for me, to go with the view of the spires of Frederick already referred to, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... its devotion. He flung off his overcoat, letting it fall upon the floor, and he strode forward almost to the trough of the footlights; and then for a space he stood there on the rounded apron of the platform, staring out into the troubled, tossing pool of contorted faces and tossing arms below him and about him. Demagogue he may have been; demigod he looked in that, his moment of supreme triumph, biding his time to play upon the passions and the prejudices of this multitude as a master organist would play upon the pipes of an organ. Here was ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... silence, during which I was observing the very peculiar physiognomy of this misshapen being—those long deep wrinkles that moated in his wide mouth, his small eyes with the crow's feet at the outer corners, that contorted nose, bulbous at its end, and especially that huge double-storied forehead of his. The whole figure reminded me not a little of the received pictures of Socrates, and while warming myself and listening to the crackling of the fire, ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... the instrument so as to give a South-East and North-West direction to the needle it hung vertically. The position of the slaty strata of the magnetic ore is also vertical. Their direction is extremely irregular, being much contorted. ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... sudden terror which contorted the innkeeper's face was a revelation to the three men who ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... Glaciation of Scotland. Mammoth in Scotch Till. Marine Shells in Scotch Glacial Drift. Their Arctic Character. Rarity of Organic Remains in Glacial Deposits. Contorted Strata in Drift. Glaciation of Wales, England, and Ireland. Marine Shells of Moel Tryfaen. Erratics near Chichester. Glacial Formations of North America. Many Species of Testacea and Quadrupeds survived the Glacial Cold. Connection of the Predominance of Lakes with Glacial Action. Action of Ice ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... dilated with a fresh access of passion. At one moment bunched with clinging adversaries—his arms, legs, and shoulders a hanging mass of human bodies—at the next, free, desperate, alone in the midst of his foes, his hideous countenance contorted with hate and rage, the giant seemed less a man than a demon, or one of those monstrous and savage apes which haunt the solitudes of the African forests. Spurning the mob who had rushed in at him, he strode towards his risen adversary, and aimed at him one final blow that should ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... his fur cap, made a gesture, contorted his long, black face into a caricature of fright, and came loping across the street, looking back over his shoulder, mimicking a run for life His mummery set ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Laimont, a large village wiped out as if a cyclone had beheaded it; then comes Revigny, a town of over two thousand inhabitants, less completely levelled because its houses were more solidly built, but a spectacle of more tragic desolation, with its wide streets winding between scorched and contorted fragments of masonry, bits of shop-fronts, handsome doorways, the colonnaded court of a public building. A few miles farther lies the most piteous of the group: the village of Heiltz-le-Maurupt, once pleasantly set in gardens and orchards, now an ugly waste like the others, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... very ancient rocks which extends from the Arctic Ocean to the St. Lawrence River and Lake Superior, with small areas also in northern Wisconsin and New York. Throughout this U-shaped area, which incloses Hudson Bay within its arms, the country rocks have the complicated and contorted structures which characterize mountain ranges. But the surface of the area is by no means mountainous. The sky line when viewed from the divides is unbroken by mountain peaks or rugged hills. The surface of the arm west of Hudson Bay ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... late. Mellon, his face contorted with a mixture of anger and hatred, was standing just behind Jakob von Liegnitz. In one hand was a heavy spanner, which he was bringing down with deadly force on the ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett |
