"Eyeless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ago it was a living man, with a voice, and eyes, and brain—and that is what makes me uncomfortable. If it were an old skull, it would be different. But it is a new skull. Almost I fancy at times that there is life lurking in the eyeless sockets, where the red firelight from the pitch-weighted logs plays in grewsome flashes; and I fancy, too, that in the brainless cavities of the skull there must still be some of the old passion, stirred ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... impression on my mind; For clouds lay o'er the ocean of my thoughts In vague and broken masses, strangely wild; And grim imagination wander'd on 'Mid gloomy yew-trees in a churchyard old, And mouldering shielings of the eyeless hills, And snow-clad pathless moors on moonless nights, And icebergs drifting from the sunless Pole, And prostrate Indian villages, when spent The rage of the hurricane has pass'd away, Leaving a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... the brown hills and the sombre woods of the farther coast, it was scarcely a wonder that his eye had failed at first to find it. Here were no pomps of lord or baron; little luxuriance could prevail behind those eyeless gables; there could be no suave pleasance about those walls hanging over the noisy and inhospitable wave. No pomp, no pleasant amenities; the place seemed to jut into the sea, defying man's oldest and most bitter enemy, its gable ends ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the whole untidy apartment into the narrow cluttered room. It appeared that the children were not yet dressed nor had their beds been put in order and they sat, two weedy pallid- looking mites, in the midst of a tremendous heap of broken toys and fought desperately for the possession of an eyeless, hairless carcass of a doll. A sewing machine piled high with garments was in front of the one broad window that opened on the gloomy whiteness of the court. An overturned basket, from which oozed tangled spools and myriads of buttons, lay on the floor in front of the machine. A stiff-backed ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... from the Idalian star by faery wings: Each tender pledge of sacred Faith he join'd, Each gentler Pleasure of th' unspotted mind— Day-dreams, whose tints with sportive brightness glow, And Hope, the blameless parasite of Woe. 10 The eyeless Chemist heard the process rise, The steamy Chalice bubbled up in sighs; Sweet sounds transpired, as when the enamour'd Dove Pours the soft murmuring of responsive Love. The finish'd work might Envy vainly blame, 15 And 'Kisses' was the precious ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... them cover their Eyeless Sockets with their Fleshless Hands and fade forever from the ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... his wretched corse with sorrow worn, His squalid limbs with pond'rous fetters torn; Those eyeless orbs that shock with ghastly glare, Those ill-becoming rags — that matted hair! And shall not Heaven for this its terrors show, 35 Grasp the red bolt, and lay the guilty low? How long, how long, Almighty God of all, Shall wrath vindictive ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... would least expect to find treasure, inasmuch as it is mostly found just there. Presently the most hideous of faces was turned up at me from the threshold of a humble lodge. It was of a dead green color, with blood trimmings; the nose beaked like a parrot's, the mouth a gaping crescent; the eyeless sockets seemed to sparkle and blink with inner eyes set in the back of the skull; murderous scalp locks streamed over the ill-shapen brow; and from the depths of this monstrosity some one, or something, said, "Boo!" I sprang ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... softer strata; and wherever a thin layer of muddy sand intervenes between two slabs, long Annelid worms of quaintest forms and colours have their horizontal burrows, among those of that curious and rare radiate animal, the Spoonworm, (8) an eyeless bag about an inch long, half bluish grey, half pink, with a strange scalloped and wrinkled proboscis of saffron colour, which serves, in some mysterious way, soft as it is, to collect food, and clear its dark passage ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... may suppose a soul in the rough to be before it has received the ear-marks, the individualizing touches which make it a person. Strange that the sense of this inability should be such anguish! but so we are constituted. There are no words for the mental torture I endured during this helpless, eyeless groping for myself in a boundless void. No other experience of the mind gives probably anything like the sense of absolute intellectual arrest from the loss of a mental fulcrum, a starting point of thought, which comes during such a momentary obscuration of the sense of one's ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... Sycamores. That fitted the requirements exactly. It was eleven miles distant—Blake had a cabin there—the place was deserted at this season of the year. Nothing could be safer than for two men, coming in different vehicles, from different points perhaps, to meet at that retired spot at such an eyeless hour. ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... a theory about the physiognomy of houses. Some have a forbidding, sick-the-dog-on-you aspect about them, not at all due, I am sure, to architectural design. Experience has taught me to be suspicious of such houses. Some houses have the appearance of death—their windows strike you as eyeless sockets, the doors look like mouths that cannot speak. The great houses along Fifth Avenue seemed like that to me. I could walk past them in the night and feel like a ghost. I have seen cottages that I wanted to kneel to; and ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... North to South, and bells rang, and editors wrote leading-articles, and the just thing lay trampled out of sight, to all mortal eyes an abolished and annihilated thing. Success? In a few years thou wilt be dead and dark,—all cold, eyeless, deaf; no blaze of bonfires, ding-dong of bells or leading-articles visible or audible to thee again at all forever: What kind of success ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... appropriately named "The Bay of Bulls." Also, I hope the reader sees that the alphabet can be understood by any intelligent being who has any one of the five senses left him,—by all rational men, that is, excepting the few eyeless deaf persons who have lost both taste and smell in some complete paralysis. The use of Morse's telegraph is by no means confined to the small clique who possess or who understand electrical batteries. It is ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... clung to the heights and looked with eyeless windows at the past. Somehow I found it infinitely pathetic; the very faith it expressed is dead in India, and none left so poor to do ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... hides his weeping eyeless head, Sick with the helpless hate and shame and awe, Till food have choked the glutted hell-bird's craw And the foul cropful creature lie as dead And soil itself with sleep and too much bread: So the man's life serves under the beast's law, ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... polish as of pearl. Shoulder to shoulder, arm against arm, they stood, placed upright, and as close together as possible,—every bony hand held a rusty spear,— and on every skull gleamed a small metal casque inscribed with hieroglyphic characters. Thousands of eyeless sockets seemed to turn toward him in blank yet questioning wonder, suggesting awfully to his mind that the eyes might still be there, fallen far back into the head from whence they yet SAW, themselves ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... monopoly. The most celebrated are the grotto of Antiparas, in Greece; the Adelsberg caverns in Carniola, and the Mammoth in Kentucky. The latter is the largest in the world, the windings of which extend forty miles and through which is a subterranean river. In the river are eyeless fish, and fish with eyes, but sightless. Others are the Luray, in Virginia; the Wyandotte, in Indiana; Weir's, in Virginia; the Big Saltpeter, in Missouri, and Ball's, in New York. Of seashore caverns, the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... and he went from the shielded door, And aloft in the desert of wonder the Light of the Branstock he bore; And he set his face to the earth-mound, and beheld the image wan, And the dawn was growing about it; and, lo, the shape of a man Set forth to the eyeless desert on the tower-top of the world, High over the cloud-wrought castle whence the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... eaten out with flame, Back to the land from where she came, A skimming horror, an eyeless shame. ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... lessons; each contains Some emblem of man's all-containing soul; Shall he make fruitless all thy glorious pains, Delving within thy grace an eyeless mole? Make me the least of thy Dodona-grove, Cause me some message of thy truth to bring, Speak but a word through me, nor let thy love Among my boughs ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... There is no God, I had proclaimed; no God in high heaven, no God with the world, no spirit ever moved upon the vasty waters, no spirit ever travailed in the womb of time and conceived the cosmos. There is no God and man is not made in his image; eternity is an eyeless socket—a socket that never beheld the burning splendors of the Deity. There is no God, O my God! And my cries are futile, for have I not gazed into my mirror, gazed with clear ironic frantic gaze and missed my own image! There is no God; yet has my denial been heard in blackest Eblis, and has ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... room and then flung himself forward with all his strength against the painted panel. Instantly, and before the crash came, the eyes were withdrawn, and two black spaces showed where they had been. The old huntsman was eyeless. But the panel cracked and split inwards like a sheet of thin cardboard; and Shorthouse, pistol in hand, thrust an arm through the jagged aperture and, seizing a human leg, dragged out into ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... fling Your spirit into everything!" The Master's hand here dealt a whack Upon the Deputy's bent back, When straightway to the floor there fell A shrunken globe, a rattling shell A blackened, withered, eyeless head! The man had been a ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... beginning of the Grand Army of the Republic. There was, early enough after the close of the war, another reason beyond all questions of sentiment or association, demanding some form of organization among the returned soldiers and sailors. Empty sleeves, single legs, eyeless sockets, and emaciated bodies were too often coupled with personal necessities, and the maimed and diseased in need of charity or employment began to point out the larger and growing demand for organized work in behalf of suffering and dependent ones; and to what hands could this be so well committed ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... and will never look upon the stars again. But I was minded to know the assegai or the kerrie; nor would I perish more slowly beneath the knives of the tormentors, nor be parched by the pangs of thirst, or wander eyeless to my end. Therefore it was that, since I had sat in the doom ring looking hour after hour into the face of death, I had borne this medicine with me by night and by day. Surely now was the ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward from eyeless sockets; his gutted carcass, flattened into a shapeless streak, shrinks towards the earth, as if asking to be veiled from the laughter of the skies. But there is neither pity from above nor shelter from below as the red wave of war, like the curse of the white Christ, sweeps over the ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... group of Spiritual Reformers, declared that there is a witness to God in the soul of every man, and that without this inward Word it would be as impossible to bring men to God by outward means as it would be to show sunlight to eyeless men. He anticipated the great saying of Pascal in these words, "Apart from God no one can either seek or find God, for he who seeks God already in truth has Him."[18] "We are," says Jacob Boehme, who belongs in this ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... intermittent senses, is converted into motion, and the mind, yielding utterly to its environment, knows the happiness of faith, the ecstasy of compliance, the rapture of congruity. And this the dull dunces—the eyeless, earless, brainless and bloodless callosites of cavil—are ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... legions. Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position or blew up a ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... artist, Kin Hubbard, 's so keerless He draws Abe 'most eyeless and earless, But he's never yet pictured him cheerless Er with fun 'at he tries to conceal,— Whuther on to the fence er clean over A-rootin' up ragweed er clover, Skeert stiff at some "Rambler" ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... straw replacement of derby had been noted by press. The city itched in its last days of woolens and drank sassafras tea for nine successive mornings. A commuter wore the first sweet sprig of lilac. The slightly East Sixties took to boarding up house-fronts into bland, eyeless masks. The very East ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... Ball Room; squeezed through Fat Man's Misery, that zig-zag passage so narrow and winding that the one behind cannot see his neighbor a yard ahead; and then out into the ample comfort of Great Relief. Merrily they filled the little boats and sailed down Echo River, where abound the eyeless fish; crossed Lake Lethe, where all care is said to be left behind; passed the huge Granite Coffin; stood wondering before the Great Eastern; shuddered beside the Dead Sea and the Bottomless Pit; climbed Martha's Vineyard, where ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... that herd of desolate houses had wanted to cry out too, but, being dead, were dumb. And I knew then that it had yet been well with the forgotten drifting things if they had wept, but they were eyeless and without life. And I, too, tried to weep, but there were no tears in my dead eyes. And I knew then that the river might have cared for us, might have caressed us, might have sung to us, but he swept broadly onwards, thinking of nothing but ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... heredity through thousands of years; automatic painters, whose storks are similar to those of M. Sucre, with the inevitable little rocks, or little butterflies eternally the same. The least of these illuminators, with his insignificant, eyeless face, possesses at his fingers' ends the maximum of dexterity in this art of decoration, light and wittily incongruous, which threatens to invade us in France, in this epoch of imitative decadence, and which has become the great resource ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti |
