"Gargoyle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... purling eaves of his home in Baalbek. And once in a pinch,—they are labouring under a peltering rain,—he stops as is his wont to remind Shakib of the Arabic saying, "From the dripping ceiling to the running gargoyle." He is labouring again under a hurricane of ideas. And again he asks, "Are you sure we are ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... in to Marraine," she choked. "Gargoyle, my dear," she whispered, "is what she meant—gargoyle. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... on which the colossus stalked like a moving stone tower—a body resembling an enormous boulder carved by an amateurish hand to portray the trunk of a human being—a craggy sphere of rock for a head, set directly atop the deeply riven shoulders—a face like the horrible mask of an embryonic gargoyle—a mouth that was simply a lipless chasm that opened and closed with the sound of rocks grinding together in a slow-moving glacier—the whole veiled thinly by trailing lengths of snapped vines, great shattered tree boughs, bushes, all uprooted in its stumping march through the forest! Harley ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... with the luggage, and needed to be overawed), walked Professor Schillingschen and Lady Isobel Saffren Waldon. They seemed in love—or at any rate the professor did, for he ogled and smirked like a bearded gargoyle; and she made such play of being charmed by his grimaces that the Syrian maid fell behind to hide ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... him the hushed and darkened town, the master rode into his castle. The Wolf was in his lair. But in the streets many a burgher's wife trembled on her bed, while her goodman peered cautiously over the leads by the side of a gargoyle, and fancied that already he heard the clamor of the partisans thundering at his door with the Duke's invitation to meet him in the Hall ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... nervously over the title backs. A second man, figure short, squat, red-faced, crowds the erratic scholar. A third. The rain is bringing them in in numbers. These are the basement students of the gargoyle philosophies, the gargoyle sciences, the gargoyle religions. Perpetual motion machine inventors, alchemists with staring, nervous-eyed medieval faces, fourth dimensionists, sun worshippers, cabalistic researchers, voodoo authorities—the old-book store is suddenly alive ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... "As for you, little Sir Lily Liver, leaning out there, and, I frankly tell you, looking like nothing so much as a gargoyle hewn by a drunken stone-mason for the adornment of a Methodist Chapel in one of the vilest suburbs of Leeds or Wigan, I do but felicitate the river-god and his nymphs that their water was saved to-day by your cowardice from the contamination ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... fountains continued to gurgle and murmur complacently, prattling with soothing insistence of the days of their youth, when men still had the time and the care for noble lines and curves, and war was the affair of princes and adventurers. Legend popped out of every corner and every gargoyle, and ran on padded soles through all the narrow little streets, like an invisible gossip whispering of peace and comfort. And the ancient chestnut trees nodded assent, and with the shadows of their outspread fingers stroked the frightened facades to calm them. The past grew so lavishly out of the ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... his face, grinning like an elated gargoyle; herself utterly limp, her every nerve a filament of ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... is not so much a culture as a temperament, and Bladery—if the thing may have the name—a code of sentiments rather than a ritual. It is the rococo school of behaviour, the flamboyant gentleman, the gargoyle life. The Blade is the tribute innocence pays to vice. He may look like a devil and belong to a church. And the clothing of the Blade, being symbolical, is a very important part of him. It must show not only a certain tastiness, but also decision in the accent, courage in the pattern, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... bedroom, and wondering if they had been having springs like this all the time he had lived in the city, heard a scuffle outside the door. His wife's voice inquired breathlessly of Wallis, "Can Mr. Allan—see me?... Oh, gracious—don't, Foxy, you little black gargoyle! Open the door, ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... which was a hard wooden knot. Half of the bullet stuck in the wood and half stuck out, so it had been the jar and the sudden noise that had knocked the creature down, more than the fact that it was really hurt. Before this crowned Gargoyle had recovered himself Zeb had wound a strap several times around its body, confining its wings and arms so that it could not move. Then, having tied the wooden creature securely, the boy buckled the strap and tossed his prisoner into the ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... pathetic, half jeering. Her father tended to a supercilious, sneering tone. In Vina it came out in mad bursts of hilarious jeering. This made Miss Frost uneasy. She would watch the girl's strange face, that could take on a gargoyle look. She would see the eyes rolling strangely under sardonic eyelids, and then Miss Frost would feel that never, never had she known anything so utterly alien and incomprehensible and unsympathetic as her own ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... familiar things of the room, the simple, companionable furniture of that known place, with the geometrically tempestuous ocean framed beyond, were resolved into a background of mysterious shadows as I stared; there was nothing left within the circle of my vision but a scared gargoyle, leaning into the red glow of the fire. My uncle's round little eyes protruded—started from the bristles and purpling scars and brown flesh of his broad face—as many a time before I had in sad bewilderment watched them do. Paid for—all the pride and comfort and strange ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... severely broke in, shaking his pencil at her as he sat perched, like a benign gargoyle, by his study table. "I'll not have Farwell defrauded while he ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... One grinning gargoyle looked in from beneath the roof through an opening in a stained window. It was the face of a mocking fiend, such as the old builders loved to place under the eaves to spout the rain through their open mouths. It looked at him, as he sat in his mitred chair, with its hideous grin growing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... whiteness, the thing leered and peered at me with a look that seemed to have about it all the fragrance of all the lilac-blossoms in the world, mixed with all the piety of all our race's children and the wantonness of all old heathen dreams. It is like Socrates, that head; and like a gargoyle on the tower ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... at the end of the terrace and looked up at the dark massive pile of masonry above him. In every leering gargoyle and carved coping, he read the ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... saw the donkey I saw him in the sunlight as the unearthly gargoyle that he is. My friend had met me in his car (I repeat firmly, in his car) at the little painted station in the middle of the warm wet woods and hop-fields of that western country. He proposed to drive me first to his house beyond the village before starting ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... was the convulsed countenance of Captain Candage. Choler seemed to be consuming him. The freakish light painted everything with patterns in arabesque; the captain's face looked like the countenance of a gargoyle. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... for almost a new art in tonal combination, the effects of which one sees on every hand to-day. To realise its influence one need only compare the easy mastery of the arabesque displayed in the simplest piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors. We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those of the Englishman, ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... but a glance told Brent that neither of them worked the key. The pair were gaunt and sinister of aspect and they were not town folk but creek-dwellers. One was evil-visaged to a point of gargoyle hideousness. The other was little better, and he raised a face to inspect the man in the door which some malignant sculptor might have modeled in pure spite, pinching it viciously here and there into sharp angles of ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... time there was a sharp tinkling, as the higher windows cracked, broke, and fell upon the stones. Then came pouring down a spouting torrent of silver fire, shooting right out of a stone gargoyle-mouth as the molten lead from one part of the roof, dammed up by other lead which had not melted, at last forced its way spattering on to ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... was by no means over. With five feet of steel piercing it through, it whirled with hardly abated vitality toward Dennis. Its gargoyle head came ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... He grinned like a gargoyle. "You hear those boy, senor?" he reiterated happily. "I tell you those boy he like ol' Pablo. The night he come back he rub my head; yesterday he poke the rib of me with the thumb—now pretty soon he ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... always had faces to me; they had definite expressions, and certain faces made me think of certain words. The words had no connection with these except sometimes by accident. The instances I give are few and ridiculous. When I think of the word Beast, it has a face something like a gargoyle. The word Green has also a gargoyle face, with the addition of big teeth. The word Blue blinks and looks silly, and turns to the right. The word Attention has the eyes greatly turned to the left. It is difficult to draw them properly because, like Alice's 'Cheshire cat,' which at ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton |
