"Distorted" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in your study a picture by Raphael that you consider perfect. Let us say that upon a close examination you discover in one of the figures a gross defect of design, a limb distorted, or a muscle that belies nature, such as has been discovered, they say, in one of the arms of an antique gladiator. You would experience a feeling of displeasure, but you would not throw that picture in the fire; you would merely say that it is not perfect, but ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... compose a Character must be bold, but not extravagant. Nature must not be distorted, to excite either Ridicule or Admiration. Reason must hold the Reins of the Imagination: Judgment must direct the Fancy; otherwise we shall be apt to miscarry, and connect inconsistent Ideas, at the very Time, when we think we hit the Point ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... heavy wooden plank, about twelve feet long and two feet wide, with an aperture in the centre, is used, the man's head being passed through the aperture and then secured in it in such a way that he cannot remove it. Thus arrayed he is made to walk through the streets of the town, his head distorted by the weight he has to carry, and his body restrained by the dragging of the plank either in front of him or at his back. The passers-by point at him the finger of scorn, as, in his helpless state, he is made to swing from one side of the road to the other with the slightest push, or ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... error are almost exactly the same as in the case of the usual Frenchman; that is to say, a very just and wholesome preference for order, proportion, literary orthodoxy, freedom from will-worship and eccentric divagations, unfortunately distorted by a certain absence of catholicity, by a tendency to regard novelty as bad, merely because it is novelty, and by a curious reluctance, as Lamb has it of another great man of the same generation, to go shares with any ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... flowers and the snow, on the pail in which our cocoa was cooking, on the barrels of our unused guns and the buckles of the saddles. We watched the pack-horses coming down, tiny pin-point figures, oddly distorted by the great packs. And we ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... those of the face are subject to local cramps. The upper lip may become distorted, convulsive smiles have been observed, also peculiar sucking motions. The children point their lips and flatten them again, sometimes for ...
— Prof. Koch's Method to Cure Tuberculosis Popularly Treated • Max Birnbaum
... life preferred by the wisest, the most favoured of mankind? Does it not afford health and peace? Are not our cares innocent, our enjoyments unenvied? We do not anticipate, with aching hearts, the fall or the death of a rival; neither do we, after having distorted our faces with the hilarity of forced merriment in public, meet, in our privacies, with anger and fear; reproaching each other for some neglect, and commenting on the frowns of royalty. We need not study ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... say, by Jove! Head turned, eyes distorted, heart generally upset, circulation brought up to fever point, peace of mind gone, and a general mania in the place of ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... us; why not also from Ireland, perhaps not quite so distant? It is undoubted that the Canary Islands were never really altogether forgotten, and the same is probably true of the Madeiras and all three groups of Azores, though the knowledge that lingered in Ireland was a distorted glimmering tradition of old voyages, occasionally inciting to new ventures in ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... I've been putting two and two together concerning them again and again until I'm uncertain whether I've got the proper answer or have got everything distorted by long brooding over them. I want to know what the conclusion would be to a ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... man thunderstruck. His face was distorted, and his head seemed to turn about upon his neck, like a weather-cock in a hurricane, to all points of the compass; his hands clenched as in a passion, and yet shame and confusion struggling in every limb and feature. ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... agonies of nearly two years. The bladder had been perforated by a bullet going entirely through him. Not long since I sat a good part of the morning by his bedside, ward E, Armory square. The water ran out of his eyes from the intense pain, and the muscles of his face were distorted, but he utter'd nothing except a low groan now and then. Hot moist cloths were applied, and reliev'd him somewhat. Poor Mahay, a mere boy in age, but old in misfortune. He never knew the love of parents, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Otway. I was Pierre.— O, thou art Pierre's reality! a soldier, On whose manly brow sits fortitude enamour'd! A Mars, abhorring vice, yet doom'd to die A death of infamy; thy corse expos'd To vulgar gaze—halter'd—distorted—Oh!! [Pauses, and then adds in a low, hollow voice. Pierre had a friend to save him from such shame— And so ...
— Andre • William Dunlap
... of the upper segment of the outer perianth together with the complete absence of the lower one. In the second or inner whorl of the perianth the lip is merely a little oblique on one side, but the lateral petals are distorted, displaced, and adherent one to the other and to the column, while the posterior shield-like rudimentary anther is ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... Keene's character—the real offender was not a man, but a woman. It was a chivalrous practice of Charles Keene's never to show a woman in a really undignified position; and when he was remonstrated with on the subject, on the ground that he distorted the truth unnecessarily, he would reply that "he could not be hard on the sex." But though "bang went saxpence" is a notable Punch joke—and it may be remarked that it is not less beloved of the political economist than of the Saturday Reviewer—it is not quite the best known. That position ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... her hand to her heart and closed her eyes, her features were distorted with pain; she did not perceive Scherau's return, she did not hear him call her name, or see that, when she did not answer him, he left her again. For an hour or more she remained unconscious, then her senses returned, but ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in so extraordinary a manner. He was clean shaven, his features were good; his face, under ordinary circumstances, might have been described as almost prepossessing. Just now it was whitened and distorted by fear to such an extent that it gave to his expression a perfectly repulsive cast. It was as though he looked beyond death and saw things, however dimly, more terrible than human understanding can fitly grapple with. There were subtleties ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... all. Everything the barrow held seemed to them rich and rare. But what they coveted most of all were those mysterious articles whose meaning and use they could make nothing of. For instance, there were polished globes like mirrors that reflected their feces with the features ludicrously distorted. There were Epinal wares with figures in impossibly vivid colours; there were little cases and boxes with nobody ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... oracles of Loxias such as these, unwilling did me expel and exclude me unwilling from his dwelling: but the bit of Jupiter[53] perforce constrained him to do this. And straightway my person and my mind were distorted, and horned, as ye see, stung by the keenly-biting fly, I rushed with maniac boundings to the sweet stream of Cerchneia, and the fountain[54] of Lerna; and the earth-born neatherd Argus of untempered fierceness, kept dogging me, peering after my footsteps ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... got their living? What were the parcels she always kept locked up in the trunk in the closet? Events, little heeded at the time of occurrence, began to fall into place, making a hideous and convincing pattern. Dim memories of men stole out of the past and threw distorted shadows on his troubled brain. There was Bob who had once given him a quarter, and Uncle Dick who always came after he was in bed, and Newt—his neck stiffened suddenly. Newt, whom his mother used always ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... grave monks, ancient knights in silver armor, castle dames, and veiled nuns. It was a magnificent spectacle to behold, these splendidly decorated saloons, filled with so great a variety of elegant costumes; and had it not been for the lifeless, grinning, and distorted faces, one might have imagined himself transported to Elysium, where all nations and all races are united in unclouded bliss. But the cold, glittering masks which concealed the bright faces, sparkling with animation and pleasure, ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... lined by granulation tissues are thus formed. In the pus are found yellow particles likened to fish-roe, or black pigmented granules like gunpowder. Sinuses form, and the whole foot becomes greatly swollen and distorted by flattening of the sole and dorsiflexion of the toes. Areas of caries or necrosis occur in the bones, and the disease gradually extends up the leg (Fig. 32). There is but little pain, and no glandular involvement or constitutional disturbance. The disease ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... as regular as that of a well-ordered household. The weather-beaten old tree was in the center; our rifles generally rested against its vast trunk, and our saddles were flung on the ground around it; its distorted roots were so twisted as to form one or two convenient arm-chairs, where we could sit in the shade and read or smoke; but meal-times became, on the whole, the most interesting hours of the day, and a bountiful provision was made for them. An antelope ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... a gyrating movement to and fro, which imparted to the disc of the umbrella the hesitation of a wave. He followed the Queen with a strange slow stride. For long seconds he would pause with one foot held aloft in the attitude of a high-stepping horse, which distorted his dwarfish body into a diabolic convulsion, like Durer's angel of horror. He seemed a familiar spirit, a mocking devil, the wicked Spielmann of the "Miracle" play, whose harsh laughter echoes through the empty room when the last cup is emptied, the last shilling gone, and the dreamer ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... to recollect himself and dropping into a chair he buried his passion-distorted face in his arms and so awaited ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... her. The lovely dark face had become extraordinarily distorted and anguished, and seemed actually to age under Kitty's eyes. The girl put up her hands and pressed them ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Walter said, quietly; and his lopsided smile distorted his livid cheek. "Look here: I expect YOU wouldn't give me three hundred dollars to save ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... rational lines. Barring two exceptions, there is no trustworthy detailed description of the ancient table by an objective contemporary observer. To be sure, there are some sporadic efforts, mere reiterations. The majority of the ancient word pictures are distorted views on our subject by partisan writers, contemporary moralists on the one side, satirists on the other. Neither of them, we venture to say, knew the subject professionally. They were not specialists in the sense of modern writers like Reyniere, ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... drew after it a cloud of prejudice which hid the truth for six hundred years. Not until the fifth century of our era did it timidly appear in the thoughts of Martianus Capella: then it was again lost to sight for a thousand years, until in the fifteenth century, distorted and imperfect, it appeared in the writings ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... it preferred to hop away instead of being made into a dirt pie, and I saw the truth of what he said. The seven-year-old child who went to riding school, dancing school, and a military drill, did not know how to express his emotions in play, and frozen snowballs and other cruelty was his distorted idea of amusement. Poor rich boy, sad little only son, he was not allowed the freedom to respond to the voice of nature even as the tenement children that dance in the streets to the hand-organs or stir ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... illness, Dove had called every morning at the PENSION, to make inquiries and to leave his regards. But when the story leaked out, as it soon did, in an exaggerated and distorted form, he straightway ceased his visits. Thus he was wholly unprepared for the family's hurried departure, the news of which was broken to him by Maurice. Dove was dumbfounded. Not a single sententious phrase crossed his lips; and he remained ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... that remained me of my illusions was shivered in that hour. There was, I swore, no good in all the world; for even where goodness sought to find a way, it grew distorted, as in my mother's case. And yet through all her pietism surely she had been right! There was no peace, no happiness save in the cloister. And at last the full bitterness of penitence and regret overtook me when I reflected that by my own act I had rendered myself for ever unworthy ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... from her hold. Her distorted mouth and blazing eyes were close to the white young face. She could have spat upon it. But she snarled at her three words ... no more, and passed her, and got into ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... with her hot hand she turned the door handle and opened a small chink that fortunately allowed her to look along the passage towards Gabrielle's room. Through a window halfway down the corridor moonlight cut across it, throwing on the floor the distorted shadow of an Etruscan vase. She remembered that Arthur's father had bought it in Italy on their honeymoon, yet, while this thought went through her mind, her ears were strained to listen. She could do no more, for ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... by conditions, physical and mental. There still existed, at Hatfield House, documents which contained the signature of the historical Guy Fawkes. A photograph projected on the screen showed a sinister variation in those signatures. The crabbed and distorted characters of the last words which Guy Fawkes wrote on earth told their own tale of that fateful night. Such was the tale that might be unfolded by the lines and curves of a human autograph. Could plants be made similarly to write their own autographs revealing their hidden story? Storm ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... sickening conviction that although living, he was dead,—dead in so far as the common, casual intimacies of daily intercourse with his fellows went. It was as if men and women were universally repulsed by that grotesquely distorted mask which served him for a face, as if at sight of it by common impulse they made off, withdrew to a safe distance, as they would ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... overcast sky, the view was not a great deal more enlightening than that which we had had from below. The Denman Glacier swept down for forty miles from over three thousand feet above sea-level. For twenty miles to the east torn ice-masses lay distorted in confusion, and beyond that, probably sixty miles distant, were several large stretches of bare ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... unmix'd the breed, in sexual tribes Parental taints the nascent babe imbibes; Eternal war the Gout and Mania wage With fierce uncheck'd hereditary rage; 180 Sad Beauty's form foul Scrofula surrounds With bones distorted, and putrescent wounds; And, fell Consumption! thy unerring dart Wets its broad wing ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... detective studied his countenance. It was a good one, but just now so distorted by suffering that only such as were familiar with his every look could read his character from his present expression. Would a more direct question rouse him? Possibly. At all events, Mr. Gryce decided to make ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... officer leaned forward, looked at her in his turn, and appeared surprised to see that face, just before so beautiful, distorted with passion and almost hideous. The artful creature at once comprehended that she was injuring herself by allowing him thus to read her soul; she collected her features, and in a complaining voice said: "In ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... inhuman face and bloodshot eyes, the woman writhed like a strip of birch bark in a wood fire. Indeed, by this time a little head was coming into view, and it needed all my efforts to quell the twitchings of her legs, to help the child to issue, and to prevent its mother from thrusting grass down her distorted, moaning throat. Meanwhile we cursed one another—she through her teeth, and I in an undertone; she, I should surmise, out of pain and shame, and I, I feel certain, out of nervousness, mingled with a ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... had promised himself to inquire of her calmly, he pressed his head with his hands again, and said, with a face distorted by pain and anger,—"She is gone. She was taken from ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... forgot for the moment that within the next few days an unlucky sword-thrust might suddenly determine Lionel's interest in lemonade, as in all other earthly things; these trivial matters grew large in this distorted land of waking dreams; nay, she began to think that if she were to leave England altogether, and go away back to Naples, and perhaps accept an engagement in opera at Malta, then matters would be as before ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... the Emperors stared down at him, their faces more than ever tragically cavernous and distorted. They saw and read in that moonlight the symbols on his breast. As he stood on his doorstep, waiting for the door to be opened, he must have seemed to them a thing for infinite compassion. For were they not privy to the doom that the morrow, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... cause was yet apparent for such extraordinary greeting. At last one showed itself, in the person of a man who tottered slowly and feebly into the room, supported on the arms of two attendants, his livid and bloated countenance distorted by a smile as painful to behold as if compelled by thumbscrews. The face of the new comer, who nodded in reply to the humble salutation of the camarilla, might once have been handsome, but it could never have been intellectual or prepossessing, and now it was hideously cadaverous and ghastly. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... and watching her beautiful face distorted out of all loveliness, secretly congratulated himself upon the fact that he was not her prospective bridegroom. He wondered how Sir Frank, who was a mild, good-tempered man himself, could dare to make such ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... dramatist were to eschew all crises that could not be made to resolve themselves with specifically dramatic crispness and decisiveness, he would very seriously limit the domain of his art. Many excellent themes would be distorted and ruined by having an emphatic ending forced upon them. It is surely much better that they should be brought to their natural unemphatic ending, than that they should be either ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... for three successive days, at nightfall, showed himself in the sky surrounded by strange appearances which heralded the death of a king in Elam, and foretold calamity to that country. Then Assur and Ishtar struck Tiumman with violent convulsions; they caused his lips and eyes to be horribly distorted, but he despised their warning, and as soon as his seizure had passed, set out to assume command of his army. The news of his action reached Nineveh in the month of Ab, on the morning of the solemn festival of Ishtar. Assur-bani-pal ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... literature, and the daily papers—to keep them from the theatre, and from the study of nature—in fact to bring them up in a world which does not exist. For in all the ways I have suggested do boys and girls now collect garbled, half-true, and distorted notions about sexual life. And even if it were possible to carry out the policy it would still not be desirable. Marriage is not the simple and easy thing which the policy would imply. Mother Nature does not teach young couples all that they need to know. Often ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... of Paris, I know. No historian of the United States has, so far as I am aware, presented it. Yet I think it is not a distorted vision which enabled me, looking in from the old fortifications, to see Paris not merely as the capital of art and of a great modern language and literature, as those who live there see her, nor as the centre of gayety and frivolity, as so many ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... enough, "sticking" is the best method of storage, i. e., narrow strips of wood are placed at short intervals between the pieces which are piled flat. The weight of the boards themselves helps to prevent warping. Boards set upright or on edge are likely to be distorted soon. It is often wise to press together with weights or to clamp together with handscrews boards that show a tendency to warp, putting the two concave sides together. Then the convex side is exposed and the board may straighten thus: ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... silent and endure whatever may happen. The Soldiers, discovering Jesus, rush upon him and bind him. The Disciples express their apprehension that they too will suffer; but Jesus uncomplainingly surrenders himself, and a chorus of rejoicing completes the work. From this brief sketch the artificial and distorted manner of treating the solemn ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... lay, That pictures, on no perishable page, Thy beauties, rescued from the spoils of age, To live and blossom with thy poet's bay: For when remorseless Time brings on decay, When the loath'd mirror shall no more engage Thy smiles, distorted into grief and rage, Alas! to think that youth must pass away— Then in these lines contented shall thou trace, As in a lovelier glass, thy lasting charms, Not as they shall be, but as now they grace, Fresh in the bud of youth, these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... this was the case. For a moment or two the man's face was distorted with a strange look and he made a hoarse sound in ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... and thousands of bleeding victims to the ground, was now entirely deserted. Night had thrown its pall over the horrors of this Calvary of Prussian glory: the howling storm alone sang a requiem to the unfortunate soldiers, who, with open wounds and features distorted with pain, lay in endless ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... tho' he was no very great Scholar, yet had a happy way of Expressing himself: He was a Man of the most Engaging Address, and never fail'd to draw Attention: Plenty and Good-Nature smil'd in his Face; his Muscles were never distorted with Anger or Contemplation, but an eternal Smile drew up the Corners of his Mouth; his very Eyes laugh'd; and as for his Chin it was three-double, a-down which hung a goodly Whey-colour'd Beard shining with the Drippings of his Luxury; for you must know he was a great ...
— A Learned Dissertation on Dumpling (1726) • Anonymous
... she would sit in the Methodist chapel, with her dimpled chin resting upon an iron hoop, and her finely formed shoulders braced back with straps so tightly, as to thrust out in a remarkable manner her swanlike chest, and her almost too exuberant bust. This instrument for the distorted, with its bright crimson leather, thus pressed into the service of the beautiful, had a most singular and exciting effect upon the beholder. I have often thought of this girl in my maturer years, and confess that no dress that I ever beheld gave a more piquant interest to the wearer, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... they had! Did ever any one see features so distorted by wicked passions? How he would have liked to drive them all away! But he must not. They were evidently in a fury; and what might they not ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and grave-digger, was going a sweethearting. He took off slowly the leathern "breeks" of his craft, sloughing them as an adder casts his skin. They collapsed upon the floor with a hideous suggestion of distorted human limbs, as Saunders went about his further preparations. Saunders was a great, soft-bodied, fair man, of the chuby flaxen type so rare in Scotland—the type which looks at home nowhere but along the south coast of England. Saunders ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... girl's language. Distorted and crude as it often was, it was never positively illiterate. This ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... you want to know how to account for yourself, study the characters of your relations. All of our brains squint more or less. There is not one in a hundred, certainly, that does not sometimes see things distorted by double refraction, out of plumb or out of focus, or with colors which do not belong to it, or in some way betraying that the two halves of the brain are not acting in harmony with each other. You wonder ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... us that the island temple, far from being damaged by its flooding, is benefited thereby; and on the other hand there are persons who urge that the engineers concerned in the making of the reservoir should be tarred and feathered to a man. Both these views are distorted and intemperate. Let us endeavour to straighten up our opinions, to walk them soberly and decorously before us in ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... no interest for me, I naturally dropped into mischief, and being caught one day with a distorted picture of the teacher on my slate with the following suggestive poem lines beneath it:—"Savage by name and savage by nature, I hope the Lord will take your breath before you lick us all to death,"—I was chased about the room by the angry pedagoguess until I leaped through the back window, ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... permitted to sit in Parliament. It may be doubted whether any dispute has produced stranger perversions of history. The whole past was falsified for the sake of the present. All the great events of three centuries long appeared to us distorted and discoloured by a mist sprung from our own theories and our own passions. Some friends of religious liberty, not content with the advantage which they possessed in the fair conflict of reason with reason, weakened their case by maintaining ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... perhaps it is like wind, an anima, a Geist, a ghost. But again it comes back in a dream, only looking shadowy; it is not the man's life, it is a thin copy of the man; it is an "image" (eidolon). It is like that shifting distorted thing that dogs the living man's footsteps in the sunshine; it is a "shade" (skia). (The two conceptions of the soul, as a life-essence, inseparable from the body, and as a separable phantom seem to occur in most primitive ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... nobleman would think of it—a heavy farm wagon jolted over the country roads towards the little county seat. Sitting beside the driver and riding about the wagon were armed peasants. The figure of a man, securely bound, his face distorted by rage and fear, lay in the wagon. It was Gyuri Kovacz, who had murdered by the hands of another, and who was now on his way to meet the ...
— The Case of The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study • Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner
... imagine, hasheesh, a preparation of hemp. A few puffs, and I felt a drowsiness creeping over me. I saw, as through a mist, the fakir swaying himself backwards and forwards, his arms waving and his face distorted. Another minute, and the pipe slipped from my fingers, and I ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... the satyr masks, and had anyone been present in the room, that one would have seen that her lovely face became gradually distorted until the expression it wore was precisely the same as that upon the masks—an expression that had its audible equivalent in the laugh which ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... it their business to conceal the facts, and politicians violently denounce the politicians of other countries. There is a long beating of tom-toms by the press and all other agencies for influencing public opinion. Facts are distorted and lies invented until the common people cannot get at the truth. Yet, when the war is over, if not before, we always find that "a place in the sun," "a path to the sea," "a route to India" or something of the sort is at the bottom of the trouble. ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... guilty of deliberate cruelty to another, and on account of it suffered great mental and emotional distress afterward, it would be no remarkable thing if the mental images of the injuries inflicted on his victim are reproduced in himself. In idiocy we have apparently merely a distorted brain so that the consciousness cannot function through it. Might not that distortion of the physical brain easily be the result of violent reaction from cruelties in a past life? The consciousness that can be ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... beautiful statue conceived by a sculptor who was so poor that he lived and worked in a small garret. When his clay model was nearly done, a heavy frost fell upon the city. He knew that if the water in the interstices of the clay should freeze, the beautiful lines would be distorted. So he wrapped his bedclothes around the clay image. In the morning he was found dead, but his idea was saved, and other hands gave ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... also to be found in the Prophets, and even in the Jewish tradition of their time. The Pharisees themselves were in possession of it; but, unfortunately, they were in possession of much else besides. With them it was weighted, darkened, distorted, rendered ineffective and deprived of its force by a thousand things which they also held to be religious, and every whit as important as mercy and judgment. They reduced everything into one fabric; the good ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... and the notion of her insanity returned to him, strongly. But those were strange things she had said about Stefan and that message. As soon as possible he would go over to Carcajou and interview his friend the Swede. The girl's disordered mind must have distorted something that he said. He began to wonder whether there was any truth at all about her story, whether she really came from New York, whether she was not some poor creature escaped from some place for the care of the insane. But then how had she got hold of his ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... bad as that," moaned the poor fellow; and as just then Jack Penny threw some light twigs upon the fire, the blaze showed me the swollen and distorted countenance of my poor companion, and a strange chill ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... they think differently about the origin of the universe? Couldn't you roar with laughter when you've thought over it for a moment? "You be damned for your theory of irregular verbs!" is nothing to it.' And he uttered his croak of mirth, whilst Peak, with distorted features, laughed in rage ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... youth, ascribing to every incomprehensible effect an arbitrary, poetical cause. Goethe's Mephistopheles, lastly is the truthful conception of evil as it really exists in a thousand forms, evolved from our own misunderstood and artificially and dogmatically distorted nature. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... are great and noble in all the elements of their nature—such are never pugilists, and never fight: it is those of distorted and defective development—those who have not completeness and integrality within themselves, that are turbulent and break ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... by drugs. A diseased mind which spoke the naked truth, which caught at no deception, which was tormented by its own gnawings and cravings to such an extent that it had lost the function of suspecting. Suspicion of a low, distorted sort might come later; but at its present ebb this mind was far too greedy to gain its own small ends to ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... nodded. She was curling her hair before the tiny mirror that hung on the whitewashed wall and distorted her round, pink-and-white face into a ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... have they left me? the mist which obscures my sight allows me to distinguish nothing; the objects which surround me seem all confused; a thousand wild distorted images distract my brain— I ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... doggerel verse, and he did not neglect the opportunity of practising his penmanship in such impromptus. Tradition also relates that he added to his list of stories and jokes humorous imitations from the sermons of eccentric preachers. But tradition has very likely both magnified and distorted these alleged exploits of his satire and mimicry. All that can be said of them is that his youth was marked by intellectual activity far ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... floor with her bare palms, her face so distorted that the mouth drawn tight over the teeth was as wide and empty as a mask's, and sobs caught and ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... and satins flaunting in the fact of want. The words of Rybin occurred to her: "They have mutilated even our God for us, they have turned everything in their hands against us. In the churches they set up a scarecrow before us. They have dressed God up in falsehood and calumny; they have distorted His face in order ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... as the ghastly, distorted face in the corner rose, and the shrieks began to fill the hut, the dog paused by the door, with the thick hair about his neck bristling up till the animal looked double his former size, and a low, muttering, thunderous growl came ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... want," says he. "It is for that very purpose I want you to go around among these distorted marbles and things. Your Reports may do ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... The fragmentary and distorted form in which the letter ascribed to Verrazzano, appeared in the collection of Ramusio, and was thence universally admitted into history, rendered it necessary that the letter should be here given complete, ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... had sailed all oceans, seen all lands, and borrowed a tint from all climates. When a man has been fifty years at sea, he necessarily knows nothing of men, nothing of the world but its surface, nothing of the world's thought, nothing of the world's learning but it's a B C, and that blurred and distorted by the unfocussed lenses of an untrained mind. Such a man is only a gray and bearded child. That is what old Hurricane Jones was—simply an innocent, lovable old infant. When his spirit was in repose he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sometimes, but not always, by a momentary cry, and then the convulsive twitching of one limb, followed in a minute or in less time by convulsions of the whole body as well as of the limbs. The upturned eyes, which do not see, are horribly distorted, the child foams at the mouth, it is insensible, and the insensibility deepens into stupor, or is followed by heavy sleep, for a quarter of an hour, or an hour or more, from which the patient arouses feeling tired and bruised, ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... reeling almost to my knees, taxing my agility and my every muscle to keep her from tripping me flat and recovering her knife. At length she began to sway; her dark, defiant eyes narrowed to two flaming slits; her distorted mouth weakened into sullen lines, through which I caught the flash of locked teeth crushing back the broken, panting breath. I held her like a vise; she could no longer move. And when at last she knew it, her rigid features, convulsed with rage, relaxed into a ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... to meet him," continued Philippa. "I should so like to ask him why he wrote The Millstone, for, although I won't let any one say a word against him, I do think in my heart that he made a mistake—that his point of view was a little distorted, I mean. ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... rudest outlines of their meaning and principles of interpretation can be attempted. To put it very roughly, the main underlying principle of interpretation is that we make our first instinctive judgment of the site of the disease from noting which of the three great orifices is distorted furthest from its normal condition. Then by constructing a parallel upon the similarity or the difference of the lines about the other two openings, we get what a surveyor would call our "lines of triangulation," and by following these to their converging point can ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... her past while her sight was yet distorted, it might be, or quickened to clearer vision, by a new pulse of feeling; and, arrested, glanced again and again until she looked clearly, steadily, at the retrospect. The lonely farm in the hills was again present ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... Clara, she saw with pain that the sufferer was all unconscious of the tardy blessing. She kissed the hot, dry brow; but no token of recognition greeted her anxious gaze. The fever was at its height; the delicate features were strangely sharpened and distorted. Save the sound of her labored breathing, the room was silent, and, sinking on her knees, Beulah prayed earnestly that the gentle sufferer might be spared. As she rose her guardian entered, and she started at the haggard, wasted, harassed look of the noble face, which ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... stabbed Susan to the heart. What had Isabel done, Susan asked herself bitterly, to have every path in life made so lovely and so straight, while to her, Susan, even the most beautiful thing in the world had come in so clouded and distorted a form. ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... of maternal impressions, however, seems to be more firmly established by facts of a substantial nature. There is a natural desire to explain any abnormality or anomaly of the child as due to some incident during the period of the mother's pregnancy, and the truth is often distorted and the imagination heavily drawn upon to furnish the satisfactory explanation. It is the customary speech of the dime-museum lecturer to attribute the existence of some "freak" to an episode in the mother's ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... substances puts them in a condition of strain which causes them to exert a pressure (called elastic force) that tends to restore them to their former condition. Energy stored by this means becomes active as the distorted or compressed substance returns to ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... other, because the formality of supplication is not employed when anything of moment is to be put into execution. The notion that intelligence was put in man only to be shattered, a will given him only to be forthwith distorted by passion or blinded by ignorance, and that "there is no health in us" unless we abase ourselves to the dust and proclaim our utter worthlessness, is to men and women of this time wholly inconceivable. That ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... they made a little grave beneath the same pine tree where Hester Hamilton lay sleeping, and, while they dug that grave, old Hagar sat, with folded arms and tearless eyes, gazing fixedly upon the still white face and thin blue lips which would never again be distorted with pain. Her habit of talking to herself had returned, and as she sat there she would at intervals whisper: "Poor little babe! I would willingly have cared for you all my life, but I am glad you are gone ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... definition given above, p. 17: "Dogma in its conception and development is a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the Gospel," has frequently been distorted by my critics, as they have suppressed the words "on the soil of the Gospel." But these words are decisive. The foolishness of identifying dogma and Greek philosophy never entered my mind; on the contrary, the peculiarity ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... scribbling—our garden—our unique mode of life—I must not talk to you now, now that your mind, thoughts, views, and wishes are all distorted from themes of peace, domestic life, and literary pursuits; yet time, I hope, reflection, your natural philosophy of accommodating yourself to your fate, and your kindness for those who are wholly devoted to you, will bring you back to the love of those ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... awoke the sea was pink with the sunrise, and one of the bay heads was all distorted and stratified by a mirage. It was hot already. Moran was sitting a few paces ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... sham has a more intimate relation to morality than has an ugly truth. Yet so unconscious were they of weaving this elaborate tissue of illusion around the world they inhabited that they called the mental process by which they distorted the reality, "taking a true view of life." To "take a true view" was to believe what was pleasant against what was painful in spite of evidence: to grant honesty to all men (with the possible exception of the Yankee army and a few local scalawags known ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... after-castle lay the captain; he had fallen desperately wounded. Two officers alone remained on their feet, while fore and aft a sickening sight met our view. The ship was a perfect shambles; the dead and dying lay everywhere, the countenances of many distorted with agony; the decks slippery with blood, and covered with blocks, ropes, torn canvas, and shattered spars, while several guns had been dismounted, and every boat knocked to pieces. The master ...
— The Boy who sailed with Blake • W.H.G. Kingston
... course, as becomes the denizen of the Desert, but "hard as nails," he has straight comely features, a clean dark skin, and a comparatively full beard, already, like his hair, waxing white, although he cannot be forty-five. A bullet in the back, and both hands distorted by sabre-cuts, attempts at assassination due to his own kin, do not prevent his using sword, gun, and pistol. He is the 'Agd of the tribe, the African "Captain of War;" as opposed to the civil authority, the Shayhk, and to the judicial, the Kzi. At first it ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... conception of the common or Burlington House desert has been unduly influenced for evil by the accessibility and the poetic adjuncts of the Egyptian sand-waste, which, being situated in a great alluvial river valley is really flat, and, being the most familiar, has therefore distorted to its own shape the mental picture of all its kind elsewhere. But most deserts of actual nature are not all flat, nor all sandy; they present a considerable diversity and variety of surface, and their rocks are often ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... How wonderful the stars were!... There was the Southern Cross with its pointers, and the Pleiades. And that bright star above the tops of the trees, which seemed to throw a distinct ray of light, must be Venus.... The moon was high enough to cast shadows—black—distorted. The low clumps of shrubs beyond the carpet of grass looked like strange ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... than accurate, since of the two women who had loved him best, his mother and his wife, he had broken the heart of the one, and ruined the happiness of the other. And yet it was not without its grain of meaning, however false and distorted; for M. Linders, who was not more consistent than the rest of mankind, had, by some queer anomaly, along with all his hardness, and recklessness, and selfishness, a capacity for affection after his own fashion, and an odd sensitiveness to the praise ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... Blasts of wind from the abyss; sightless and raging forces issuing from the seething depths of animalism; a mad impulse towards destruction and self-destruction; the crude appetites of the herd; distorted religion; mystical erections of the soul enamoured of the infinite, and seeking the morbid assuagement of joy through suffering, through its own suffering, and through the suffering of others; the pretentious despotism of reason, claiming the right to impose on others the ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... echoed down the passage. The Olema, his face suddenly distorted with a passion of hate, snatched a ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... grrand,—far more original! Ze acid may burn ze finger,—ze vire vill become rrusty,—ze isolation subject always to ze atmosphere. Ah, bah! Vat make you in zat event? As ze pure lustre of ze diamant of Golconde to ze distorted rays of a morsel of bottle-glass, so my grrand invention to ze modes of ze telegraph ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... of an hour we had reached the extremity of the "Salt Mountain," with all its distorted, sometimes even perpendicular stratification. By this time we were convinced that the whole of the mountain is not salt, but that a good deal of the upper length of it is a mixture of salt and marl or sand. Between it and the water's edge we frequently saw blocks and spires ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... should be perverted to 345 an occasion of bitterness among us, who are enjoying that happy mean which the human too-much on both sides was perhaps necessary to produce. 'The tangle of delusions which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite-weeds that fed on its very roots have been 350 plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
