"Grotesque" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surrounded by conventual buildings of modern date. It resembles the Abbaye aux Hommes in point of style, but the carving is more elaborate, and the transepts are much grander in design; the beautiful key-pattern borders, and the grotesque carving on the capitals of some of the pillars, strike the eye at once; but what is most remarkable is the extraordinary care with which the building has been restored, and the whole interior so scraped and chiselled afresh that it has the appearance of a building of ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... fleet-foot, winged messenger, humble slave," laughed Louis, with another grotesque bow; but the rogue had cleverly put himself between the ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the country, and in her present serious mood, all this seemed grotesque and amazing to Natasha. She could not follow the opera nor even listen to the music; she saw only the painted cardboard and the queerly dressed men and women who moved, spoke, and sang so strangely in that brilliant light. She knew what it was all meant to represent, but it was so pretentiously ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the mound swelled to resemble a paunchy trunk with sagging shoulders. This was topped by a huge, nearly round ball that looked for all the world like a head. There were even rudimentary features. It was grotesque—one of those freak sculptures of nature, Harley reflected, that made it seem as though the Old Girl had a mind and artistic ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity. Whatever else it is, it is the thing which a thousand poets and a million lovers have called the coldness of Chloe. It is akin to the classical, and is at least the opposite of the grotesque. And since we are talking here chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere for emancipation, that a little while ago it was common ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... been stated, it will be seen that the Printer's Mark plays a by no means unimportant part in the early history of illustration,—whether the phase be serious or grotesque, sublime or ridiculous, we find here manifold examples, crude as well as clever. Although it cannot be said with truth that the Mark as an institution reached, like typography itself, its highest degree ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... of the Brigadier-General in Chaotong, the entrance is guarded by the customary stone images of mythical shape and grotesque features. They are believed to represent lions, but their faces are not leonine—they are a reproduction, exaggerated, of the characteristic features of the bulldog of Western China. The images ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... are grotesque, or fanciful, or so descriptive that their mention is sure to provoke a grin, occur with pleasing frequency. Who can help but smile at "Hairpin Catcher," "Hearts and Gizzards," or "Tangled Garters?" Other grotesque names ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... Wayout-on-the-Hill the other day, we shall have to reconsider the entire lot proposition. We may as well face the fact that the house which is everything appropriate and artistic in one place may in another be simply grotesque. In this phase of the selective work we will profit by the advice of the architect, if he be something of an artist and not simply a draughtsman. At any rate, if we have the lot, let us decide what style of house ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... sublimated, metaphysical love was not without its caricatures and eccentricities. One of the most grotesque figures of the period of the troubadours was Ulrich von Lichtenstein, a German knight. As a page, we are told, he drank the water in which his mistress had washed her hands. Later on he had his upper lip amputated because it displeased ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... surrounded by the soft forest beauty; ate our dinner in the midst of grotesque ant-hill scenery, and spent the afternoon looking ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... of women—the merest slut at home, a milliner's lay figure out of doors—she had one square foot of looking-glass upon the chimneypiece, and therein tried effects, and conjured up grotesque simpers upon ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... hard to picture a more sinister and menacing looking man than this emperor, with his averted looks and his haughty contempt for the world and mankind; and yet there was something about him which made it difficult to take him seriously, especially to an Alexandrian. There was a touch of the grotesque in the Gallic robe with a red hood in which this ominous-looking contemner of humanity was wrapped. It was called a 'Caracalla', and it was from this garment that Bassianus Antoninus had gained ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to evade it, to stifle and smother it; an inward struggle ensued which brought the perspiration in beads upon my cheeks—a struggle short, sharp, decisive. It was useless—useless to try to put it from me—this idea so wretchedly bizarre, so grotesque and fantastic, so utterly inane—it was useless to deny that the cat bore a distinct ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... your mounted animals in easy natural poses unless you are making a grotesque, in ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... Italian origin, Bonaparte had not a decided taste for the fine arts, and his taste in composition seems to have leaned towards the grotesque and the bombastic. He used always the most exaggerated phrases; and it is seldom, if ever, that his bulletins present those touches of sublimity which are founded on dignity and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... southern frontier from Bahawalpur to Gurgaon. The infiltration of English words and phrases into the languages of the province is a useful process and as inevitable as was the enrichment of the old English speech by Norman-French. But for the present the results are apt to sound grotesque, when the traveller, who expects a train to start at the appointed time, is told: "tren late hai, lekin singal down hogaya" (the train is late, but the signal has been lowered), or the criticism is passed on a popular officer: "bahut affable hai, lekin hand ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... hatching by millions. Sometime will you read from Carlyle's "Past and Present" his chapters on work, particularly that on "Labor and Reward"? Mr. Carlyle has written much that is unintelligible to most readers. He has a very grotesque, volcanic style not good to imitate. He is often sad and hopeless about the human race, but he knew from hard experience what work could do against despair. So, in spite of his ravings, notwithstanding his eruptive ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... leather, iron, steel, brass, and every thing else that could by any possibility be used for the purpose; the queer-looking postillion, with his long cue, huge boots, and pipe, all combine with the grotesque appearance of the Diligence itself, to form an ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... at the moment, but came back in half an hour to make some unnecessary remarks about the part. "Why did you say just now that I insulted you?" he asked. "Because you do," I replied. "Never, never!" he exclaimed, with most grotesque energy. "I have never insulted you." You know, my dear, he has twenty times endeavoured to kiss my hand, and once he saw fit to stroke my hair. Beast! If you knew the sort of feeling I have for him—such as you would have if you found a cockroach in your dressing-case. Of course in our life ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... the most unusual fiestas in all Spain is held every March in Valencia in honor of St. Joseph. It is called the "Fallas de San Jose" because of the huge, grotesque figures called "fallas" which are the main feature of the celebration. Every club and religious group in the city spends weeks in advance of St. Joseph's Day building these figures out of papier-mache, and each group tries to keep its design secret until the fiesta takes place. The best falla ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... so if he had given me the chance I sought. It must be understood that my second attempt to photograph the flight of the soul had proved as great a fiasco as the first. Suddenly I hit upon a perfectly conceivable (even though it seem a wilfully grotesque) explanation of my failure. What if the human derelicts I had so far chosen for my experiments had no souls to photograph? Sodden with drink, debauched, degraded, and spiritually blurred or blunted to the last degree, these after all ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... thought of Milly's absurdities, to which, in description, I cannot do justice, simply because so many details have, by distance of time, escaped my recollection. But her ways and her talk were so indescribably grotesque that she made me again and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... postponed. It was suddenly precipitated on the arrival of Governor Rising, in 1654, by his capture of Fort Casimir, which the Dutch had built for the practical assertion of their claim. It seems a somewhat grotesque act of piety on the part of the Swedes, when, having celebrated the festival of Trinity Sunday by whipping their fellow-Christians out of the fort, they commemorated the good work by naming it the Fort of the Holy Trinity. It was ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... whoa!" cried the driver, for the old white steed had caught sight of the car and was testifying to its dislike of it by grotesque prancings and sidlings that threatened to wreck the ramshackle trap. "Here, get out of my way!" he ordered Oliver, "that is, if you know how to handle that snorting locomotive that you ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... the frequency of the swearing prevent its making its proper impression in the right place. And the name "Robert Herrick," bestowed on one of the three beach-loafers, might have been shunned. You may call an ordinary negro "Julius Caesar": for out of such extremes you get the legitimately grotesque. But the Robert Herrick, loose writer of the lovely Hesperides, and the Robert Herrick, shameful haunter of Papeete beach, are not extremes: and it was so very easy to avoid the association ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were shiny and thick with grease, stretched over a small round body, that contrasted strangely with his lean and bony face. And all this formed a jovial, grotesque and rather alarming picture. ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... to Sibou on the Rajah's promise to build a fort at Kenowit, are of the same tribe, and number about three hundred men. They speak the Milanow language, and have the same customs of burial. The men and some of the women are tattooed in the most grotesque patterns. When you look at them closely the invention displayed is truly remarkable; but at a distance they give a dingy, dusky appearance to the men, as if they were daubed with an inky sponge. Nature having denied them ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall
... excited by inspection of an exotic curio. In his dedication of the book the author begged Mme. la Duchesse de Richelieu not to look for any meaning in it, but to receive it in the same spirit in which she would receive "some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesque carved ivory idol, or some preposterous trifle brought back from the fatherland of all preposterousness." It is a record of a bit of the wandering life of a poet who makes himself a part of every scene into which fortune throws him. He has spent a summer with a Japanese mousme, whom he had married ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... convey a correct idea of the beauty, the magnificence, of some of the scenes through which we passed. Sometimes thousands of the most grotesque, fanciful, and beautiful icebergs and icefields surrounded us on all sides, intersected by numerous serpentine canals, which glittered in the sun (for the weather was fine nearly all the time we were in the straits), like threads of silver twining round ruined palaces of crystal. ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... many interesting things in the house—objects of art and of worship; things which told of distant lands and of hoary antiquity; engravings of a strange and disturbing character; variegated stones, turquoise, pearls; ugly, amorphous, and grotesque idols; representations of the god-child—there were many of these, but only one face ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... out of his waistcoat pocket, and waited till Lucilla had fairly exhausted herself with laughing. Then the examination—so cruelly grotesque in itself, so terribly serious in the issues which it involved—resumed its course: Herr Grosse glaring at his patient through his magnifying glass; Lucilla leaning back in the chair, holding the handkerchief ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... once a grand ducal residence there, which was famous in the later Medicean days for the multiplicity and ingenuity of its water-works. All kinds of surprises, picturesque and grotesque effects, and practical jokes, had been prepared by the ingenious, but somewhat childish skill of the architect. Turning the handle of a door would produce a shower-bath, sofas would become suddenly ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... his voice grew cheery, his old face shone, and in a burst of hearty enthusiasm he flung up his cap and cheered like a boy. So did the others, and as the fairy shout echoed through the belfry a troop of shadowy figures, with faces lovely or grotesque, tragical or gay, sailed by on the wings of the wintry wind and waved their hands to the ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... was protecting me!" he thought. "She is the man and rejoices that I, the weak comrade, should be protected from danger. . . . What a grotesque situation!" ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... so; at first earlier myths gathered around him, and then from time to time any unusual feats of skill or cunning shown off on one or another countryside, till many of the stories make him at the last grotesque, little more than a clown. So in Bible History, while lesser kings keep their dignity, great Solomon's wit is outwitted by the riddles of some countryman; and Lucifer himself, known in Kiltartan as "the proudest of the angels, ...
— The Kiltartan History Book • Lady I. A. Gregory
... (for his name was James Noble) made a curt and grotesque "boo," and said, "Maister John, this is the mistress; she's got a trouble in her breest—some kind of an income ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... surprise and amazement; others were agonized with sympathy for the poor minister; and others still were full of mirth, and would have laughed outright if they had not been in a religious meeting. As to myself, the whole matter took a mirthful turn. I had been in church before, when by some queer or grotesque conjunction of affairs, the whole audience lost self control. I had witnessed mistakes, blunders and accidents that would make even solemnity herself laugh, and remained serenely grave. But to see myself in the presence of that polite audience, standing at ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... existence. 'Its best works,' says this modern Scaliger, 'are scarcely more than a promise of excellence; the precursors of an advent; shadows cast before, and, like most shadows, they are too vague and ill-defined, too fluctuating and easily distorted into grotesque forms, to enable us to discriminate accurately the shape from which they are flung.... The truth is, that American literature, apart from that of England, has no separate existence.... The United ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... countries about this chasm of Hierapolis, and the part it played in the Deluge, in the enigmatic expressions of the Koran respecting the oven (tannur) which began to bubble and disgorge water all around at the commencement of the Deluge. We know that this tannur has been the occasion of most grotesque imaginings of Mussulman commentators, who had lost the tradition of the story to which Mohammed made allusion. And, moreover, the Koran formally states that the waters of the Deluge were absorbed in the bosom ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... the revealers not only of theology and the ritual, but of all human knowledge.[14] The names of the Oriental Hipparchi and Euclids who solved the first problems of astronomy and geometry were unknown; but a confused and grotesque literature made use of the name and authority of Hermes Trismegistus. The doctrines of the planetary spheres and the opposition of the four elements were made to support systems of anthropology and of morality; the theorems of astronomy were used to establish ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... very orthodox. Her daughter Miss Boyle(600) who has real genius, has carved three tablets in marble with buoys, designed by herself. Those sculptures are for a chimney-piece; and she is painting panels in grotesque for the library, with pilasters of glass in black and gold. Miss Crewe, who has taste too, has decorated a room for her mother's house at Richmond, which was Lady Margaret Compton's in a very pretty manner. How ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... forgotten all these preliminary attempts, crude and imperfect, to speak with force and truth, or to sing with measure and grace. There is no reason why they should be remembered, except by professed inquirers into the antiquities of our literature; they were usually clumsy and awkward, sometimes grotesque, often affected, always hopelessly wanting in the finish, breadth, moderation, and order which alone can give permanence to writing. They were the necessary exercises by which Englishmen were recovering the suspended art of Chaucer, and learning to write; and exercises, though indispensably ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... return with the news to Lady Chepstow, and was casting round in his mind for some excuse to avoid going indoors with him and wasting precious time in breaking bread and eating salt, when there lurched out of an adjoining doorway an ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese. The fellow had bent forward out of the deeper darkness of the house-passage into the murk and gloom of the ill-lit street, and was straining his eyes as if ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... knows what would have happened to Paul, after a year or so at the factory, if Barney Bill, a grotesque god from the wide and breezy spaces of the world, had ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... have the happy disposition of animal cubs,—once out of the nursing stage, they forget they ever had parents. It is quite the natural and proper thing, born as they were born,—it would never do for them to have any over-filial regard for us. Imagine Humphry weeping for my death, or yours! What a grotesque idea! And as for Rupert and Cyprian,—it is devoutly to be hoped that when we die, our funerals may be well over before the great cricket matches of the year come on, as otherwise they will curse us for having left the world at an inconvenient season!" He laughed. "How sentiment ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... man behind him, who did not recognize him, began to quicken with anger. Almost at the flute's first note the image on the window-shade started and hearkened. A moment later it expanded to grotesque proportions, the room swiftly grew dark, and in another minute the window of a smaller one behind it shone dimly as with the flame of a lamp turned low. The flutist fluted on. From the melody it appeared that the musician had at some date not indicated, and under some unaccountable influence, ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... were forced to go, Don Sanchez and I, and there being stripped we were given such dirty foul rags and so grotesque, that when we came down, Jack Dawson and Moll fell a-laughing at us, as though they would burst. And, in truth, we made a most ludicrous spectacle, —especially the Don, whom hitherto we had seen only in the neatest and most noble of clothes,—looking more like a couple of scarecrows than ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... hand on one of them, and feel that it was solid. I half groped my way through them, and got out into the open field, by creeping through between the stems of what had once been a hawthorn hedge, but had in the course of a hundred years grown into the grimmest, largest, most grotesque trees I have ever seen of the kind. I had always been a little afraid of them, even in the daytime, but they did me no hurt, and I stood in the vast hall of the silent night—alone: there lay the awfulness of it. I had never before known what the night was. The real sting of its ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... direction. These have been corroded by storms and worn smooth by time, until they present the appearance of half-baked images of clay molded by human hands, instead of sandstone rocks fashioned by wind and weather. Each grotesque and fantastic shape has received a name. One is here introduced to the "Washerwoman," the "Lady of the Garden," the "Siamese Twins," and the "Ute God," and besides these may be seen the "Wreck," the "Baggage Room," ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... in their hands; then saw his suspected slave enter through a back door, his black skin painted to represent a skeleton. The old man held up a fat toad, which, he said, was his familiar, and the company began to worship it with grotesque and obscene ceremonies. Though he felt a thrill of disgust and even a dim sense of fear at the spectacle, the planter broke in at the door and confronted the Obeah man. Had he ordered the old fellow to do any given task ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... of meat, of a flavor as delicious as the refined palate of a modern epicure could well wish. Their clothes were made chiefly of the skins of animals, and were easily procured: and although calculated to give a grotesque appearance to a fine gentleman in a city drawing room; yet were they particularly suited to their situation, and afforded ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Orders in Council, and often under British convoy.[269] The fact was noteworthy, as bearing upon the contention of the United States Government soon after, that the Non-Intercourse Law was adequate security for the action of American merchant vessels; a grotesque absurdity, in view of the embargo experiences. That it is not consonant with national self-esteem to accept foreign assistance to carry out national laws is undeniable; but it is a step further to expect another nation ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... continued Roland rising, "this is between ourselves, isn't it? Not a word to any one. The ghosts might be forewarned and act accordingly. It would never do to let those gay dogs get the best of us; that would be too grotesque." ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... any doubt, I am thought to be one of the most indifferent men in the world. I am sceptical, which is not the same thing, sceptical because I am clear-sighted. And my eyes say to my heart, Hide yourself, old fellow, you are grotesque, and it hides itself." ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... saving life made expiation. In dignity, simplicity, humor, in sympathetic etching of a sturdy fisher people, and above all in the echoes of the sea, Doctor Luke is worthy of great praise. Character, humor, poignant pathos, and the sad grotesque conjunctions of old and new civilizations are expressed through the medium of a style that has distinction and strikes a note of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... was insensibly led on. She still followed the course of the stream to where the deep shades retired, and the scene again opening to day, yielded to her a view so various and sublime, that she paused in thrilling and delightful wonder. A group of wild and grotesque rocks rose in a semicircular form, and their fantastic shapes exhibited Nature in her most sublime and striking attitudes. Here her vast magnificence elevated the mind of the beholder to enthusiasm. Fancy caught the thrilling sensation, and at ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... which, at the same time, has a greater proportion of impertinence. He has been vastly lavish of erudition, of smut, and insipid raillery. An agreeable tale of two pages is purchased at the expense of whole volumes of nonsense. There are but few persons, and those of a grotesque taste, who pretend to understand and to esteem this work; for, as to the rest of the nation, they laugh at the pleasant and diverting touches which are found in Rabelais and despise his book. He is looked upon as the prince of buffoons. The readers are vexed to think that a ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... this person draws an obliterating brush. As practically every traveller who has honoured our unattractive land with his effusive presence has subsequently left it in a printed record that our ceremonies are grotesque, our priesthood ignorant and depraved, our monasteries and sacred places spots of plague upon an otherwise flower-adorned landscape, and our beliefs and sacrifices only worthy to exist for the purpose of being made into jest-origins by more refined communities, the omission on this one's part may ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... roads became blocked with all manner of rickety vehicles, many of them of the most primitive description, filled with the families and furniture of peaceable farmers, who had left their homes in fear of the approaching rebels. A more grotesque picture than was presented by this anxious train it ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams
... restraint which made their predecessors, the Buccaneers, both formidable and respectable. These Ishmaels of the sea rendered an account to no man, and treated their prisoners according to the drunken whim of the moment. Flashes of grotesque generosity alternated with longer stretches of inconceivable ferocity, and the skipper who fell into their hands might find himself dismissed with his cargo, after serving as boon companion in some hideous debauch, or might sit at his ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... heartless f. Trifling f. Fooded f. Astrological and figure-flinging f. Thick and threefold f. Genethliac and horoscopal f. Damasked f. Knavish f. Fearney f. Idiot f. Unleavened f. Blockish f. Baritonant f. Beetle-headed f. Pink and spot-powdered f. Grotesque f. Musket-proof f. Impertinent f. Pedantic f. Quarrelsome f. Strouting f. Unmannerly f. Wood f. Captious and sophistical f. Greedy f. Soritic f. Senseless f. Catholoproton f. Godderlich f. Hoti and Dioti f. Obstinate f. Alphos and Catati f. Contradictory ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... |Changes in method of manufacture. |By adventition—|Changes in environment. |Changes of use. Modification of form—| |Lack of use. | Influence of new or exotic forms, etc. | | /To enhance usefulness. |By intention—| | To please fancy.—/For the beautiful. For the grotesque. ...
— Origin and Development of Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art. • William Henry Holmes
... races are most impressed by such qualities as lightness and delicacy of outline, round and softly-flowing curves and elegance of ornamentation, the German appears, to the Anglo-Saxon and Latin, to be more impressed by the elaborate, the gigantic, the Gothic, the grotesque, the hard, the made, the massive, and the square. In both styles are to be found "beauty and harmony, the aesthetic," to quote the Emperor, but they appeal differently to people of different national temperaments. To the Anglo-Saxon and ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... opened. The lights dazzled her. The doorway, as she stood faltering, almost fainting, before it, seemed to be full of grotesque dancing faces, some swathed in bandages, others powder-blackened, some hot with excitement, others pallid with fatigue. They were such faces, piled one above the other, as are seen ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... to spring up spontaneously in every quarter of the country, like the natural wild flowers of the soil. But the unaffected beauties of sentiment, which seem rather the result of accident than design, were dearly purchased, in the more extended pieces, at the expense of such a crude mass of grotesque and undigested verse, as shows an entire ignorance of the principles of the ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... books who had been in similar evil straits,—with Marc Antony, with King Arthur in Gwendolen's enchanted castle, and with Geraint the strong but slothful,—rather far-fetched this last comparison,—and of all the rest. It was a grotesque variety, but amid it all he really suffered. And he would make good resolves and, for the moment, firm ones, and return to town when the dew was falling and the moonlight coming, and the tale was but retold. And the woman was wise, ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... impatient amidst the heartless courtesies of society, and little practised in the minuter attentions, he has rarely sacrificed to the unlaughing graces of Lord Chesterfield. Plato ingeniously compares Socrates to the gallipots of the Athenian apothecaries; the grotesque figures of owls and apes were painted on their exterior, but they contained within precious balsams. The man of genius amidst many a circle may exclaim with Themistocles, "I cannot fiddle, but I can make a little village a great city;" and with Corneille, he may be allowed to smile at his own ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... world; and he was a quite undistinguished person until he found a way to produce some effect upon his grandmother the public by shocking her into attention. His method is to choose the ugliest models to be found; to put them into the most grotesque and indecent postures imaginable; to draw them in the manner of a savage, or a depraved child, or a worse manner if that be possible; to surround his figures with blue outlines half an inch wide; and to paint them in crude and staring colors, ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... what more natural, more comprehensible, Charles being who and what he was? Not that he would, in the faintest degree, lend himself to such misplaced affection. Of that he was incapable. The bare idea was grotesque. He, of course, was guiltless. But, assuming there was a feeling on Theresa's side, wasn't she equally guiltless? She could not help being fascinated.—Thus Miss Felicia was bound to acquit both. Alike they left the court without a stain on their ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... the table there should be a curious, grotesque, but very gay flower, standing upright in a pot of wood or heavy paper, which will not break when Thyrsis drops it. Concealed at the root of this plant there should be a small sack of black confetti, to be used ...
— Aria da Capo • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... which originated in the middle ages, in connection with the gross perversion of the truth of God, that this person is one of repulsive and grotesque countenance, with the figure of a monstrosity, is an invention and cannot be verified from Scripture. The Bible knows nothing of such a being with a horrible face and figure. The very opposite is the teaching of the Word of God. He was originally the greatest and most marvelous ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... majority—admired and even loved him, he died the death of a dog. Tremendous as was the power of imperialism, the Romans often treated their individual emperors as Nero himself treated the Syrian goddess, whose image he first worshipped with awful veneration and then subjected to the most grotesque indignities, for retribution did not linger, and the vengeance fell at once on the guilty Emperor and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... harm, therefore, I repeat, but, on the contrary, some wholesome stimulus to the fancy of men like Luca and Donatello themselves, came of the grotesque and ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... kept the lower curtain of his window jealously drawn. But at night his shadow, strongly projected on the curtain, was in incessant motion; and far into the morning hours a gigantic head and arms shifted and blended upon it in grotesque forms. At the other window of the workman's apartment the young girl often sat, book in hand, and moved her lips as if she were reading aloud. Her eyes were never seen to wander to the outer world with those longings for freedom and fresh air which are natural to the youthful heart, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... and it fitly prefigured the sight of that long file of tumbrils bearing to the Place de la Revolution the fairest scions of French aristocracy. On the other hand, 'God Save the King,' in its original, has one or two lines as grotesque as 'Yankee Doodle' itself; yet we have paraphrased it in 'America,' and made it a hymn meet for all our churches. But the 'Star-spangled Banner' combines dignity and beauty, and it would be hard to find a line of it that ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... imagined more graceful than the airy open colonnades of its two spires, light as a handful of wheat ears loosely bound together. The colour of the grey stone gives solemnity to the rest of the exterior, which is massive and astonishingly rich in the grotesque element. We carefully studied the gargoyles round the roof, and, in spite of defacements, made out most of them—here a grinning demon with a struggling human being in its clutch—there an odd beast, part human, part pig, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Cupido', and the idea is common. I have made no attempt to correct the tags of Latinity in this play. Mrs. Behn openly confessed she knew no Latin, and she was ill supplied here. I do not conceive that the words are intentionally faulty and grotesque. Lady Knowell is ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... concerning whom Hawthorne says, "scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvelous gift as a story-teller," was Captain Stephen Burchmore, the public storekeeper. The stories of themselves were generally extravagant and grotesque. It was "the marvelous gift" of narration that carried people off their legs. I have known the company present to roar with laughter, and not one more convulsed ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... blue sky; monstrous serpents coiled in groups like the spirals of a solomonic column; gigantic negroes, heads down and hands on the ground, the roots like fingers thrust deep into the soil, their feet in the air, grotesque stems with bunches of leaves springing from them. Some, vanquished by the centuries, were lying on the ground, sustained by forked branches, like old men trying to lift themselves with ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... inhabitants at many thousands; he was but newly dead, and in the same bay Stanislao Moanatini counted on his fingers eight residual natives. Or take the valley of Hapaa, known to readers of Herman Melville under the grotesque misspelling of Hapar. There are but two writers who have touched the South Seas with any genius, both Americans: Melville and Charles Warren Stoddard; and at the christening of the first and greatest, some influential fairy must have been neglected: 'He shall be able to see,' 'He ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chairs received them on the lower floor, carried them out into a chill rain that drummed overhead and splashed along the compound path in silver points. The sunken flags in the road formed a narrow aqueduct that wavered down a lane of mire. A few grotesque wretches, thatched about with bamboo matting, like bottles, or like rosebushes in winter, trotted past shouldering twin baskets. The smell of joss-sticks, fish, and sour betel, the subtle sweetness of opium, grew constantly stronger, blended with exhalations ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... grinning upon the cats, gathered them up, two under each arm, and bore them away, moving out of sight between the box borders like some queer monster, with her wide humping flanks of black bombazine enhanced by four angrily waving yellow cat tails, which gave an effect of grotesque ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... steps, placed in its centre and at the extremities, into what might be called the garden proper, and was fenced along the top by a stone parapet with a heavy balustrade, ornamented from space to space with huge grotesque figures of animals seated upon their haunches, among which the favourite bear was repeatedly introduced. Placed in the middle of the terrace between a sashed-door opening from the house and the central flight of steps, a huge animal of the same species supported ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... These remarkable and grotesque appearing birds attain a length of about 48 inches. The plumage varies from white to a deep rosy red. It requires several years for them to attain the perfect adult plumage, and unlike most birds, they are in the best of plumage during the ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... worthy of influencing us, is there any good in enquiring concerning them? Shall I mind a thing that is not worth minding, because it came to me in a dream, or was told me by a ghost? It is the quality of a thing, not how it arrived, that is the point. But true things are often mingled with things grotesque. For aught I know, at one and the same time, a spirit may be taking advantage of the door set ajar by sleep, to whisper a message of love or repentance, and the troubled brain or heart or stomach may be sending forth fumes that cloud the vision, and cause evil echoes ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... window, in a wide wooden arm-chair, sat a large woman about sixty, dressed in black. She wore on either side of her long white face two corkscrew curls, which gave her a somewhat ridiculous appearance. But she ceased to be ridiculous or grotesque when she rose from her chair to greet her son. Her face beamed, and she held out her hands in a beautiful gesture ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... while Schillie, Madame, and I worked for another half hour, and went through like ladies to see a sight which enchanted us. A most magnificent cavern, cool and dark, though some light penetrated in from above somewhere, the ground was covered with fine dry sand, the numerous grotesque shapes and oddities all around the cavern seemed almost made on purpose for little private habitations and snug corners. It was so large in size that it had nothing of the musty feeling of the little caverns ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... Stooping over the parapet of the stockade they look off over the sea. They see more than the thin blue line of boundary between the sky and sea. The ocean does not interest them for its fine changing colors, nor the sky for the huge grotesque shapes of its clouds. What they see off there in space is something more real to them than the tint of waters and the face of the clouds: something that they love. They look for the boats that sailed for the fishing grounds, and that must now soon appear on the ...
— Our Children - Scenes from the Country and the Town • Anatole France
... swine with two tails apiece. The knights are provided with shields, bearing Saint Andrew's cross and the thistle for a device, and would have been arrayed, without doubt, in kilt and tartan had it been possible. The bishops wear grotesque-looking cocked hats, intended for mitres, and their countenances are so singularly truculent and unprepossessing, that Max accuses the artist of having in this petty way, evinced "his Scottish and Presbyterian ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... Nature, however exalted or however grotesque, have their foundation in experience. The notion of personal volition in Nature had this basis. In the fury and the serenity of natural phenomena the savage saw the transcript of his own varying moods, and he accordingly ascribed these phenomena to beings of like passions ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... thus lost, the footnotes are, to a certain extent, progressive; that is to say, a word already explained in a foregoing ballad is not always explained again; and to the best of my ability I have freed the notes from the grotesque blunders observable in ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... A discord in music is felt to be a discord only as it is isolated; when it takes its fitting and inevitable place in the large unity of the symphony, it becomes full of meaning. The hippopotamus, dozing in his tank at the Zoo, is wildly grotesque and ugly. But who shall say that, seen in the fastnesses of his native rivers, he is not the beautiful perfect fulfilling of nature's harmony? To a race of blacks, the fair-skinned Apollo appearing among them could not but be monstrous. The smoking factory, sordid ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... From the narrowness of the enclosure, the house on each side seemed to be very high, and Linda, looking round with astonished eyes, could see that at every point the wood was carved. And the waterspouts were ornamented with grotesque figures, and the huge broad stairs which led to the open galleries on the left hand were of polished oak, made so slippery with the polishers' daily care that it was difficult to tread upon them without falling. All around the bottom of the court there ...
— Linda Tressel • Anthony Trollope
... on he rode, at a foot's pace, followed by his twin shadows; past the temples of Maha Deo, still rosy where they faced the west, still rumbling and throbbing with muffled music; past wayside shrines, mere alcoves for grotesque images—Shiva, Lord of Death, or Ganesh the Elephant God—each with his scented garlands and his nickering chiragh; past shadowy groups round the dinner fires, cooking their evening meal: on and out through the double fortified gateways into the deserted road, his whole being ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... man's. It was in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress; for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacra—phantasms; and there was something incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and ghost-like stillness ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... at the same time portend wind and storm. All Rome was early astir. It was ushered in by the criers traversing the streets, and proclaiming the rites and spectacles of the day, what they were, and where to be witnessed, followed by troops of boys, imitating, in their grotesque way, the pompous declarations of the men of authority, not unfrequently drawing down upon their heads the curses and the batons of the insulted dignitaries. A troop of this sort passed the windows of the room in which Julia and I were sitting at our morning meal. ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... anxious to be taught, and most docile under direction. Their ignorance previously was universal and extreme. It is no wonder that their religious camp-meetings had become associated with the most grotesque ideas and narrations. It is no wonder that their phraseology was a caricature of civilised language. For how could they be expected to manifest intelligence without any education? So deplorably destitute of instruction were they that ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... sat at too careless an angle; his black hair was a little too long. These eccentricities the cartoonists seized on and exaggerated so that most people who have not seen the man picture Bryan, not as a determined looking man with a piercing eye and tightset mouth, but as a grotesque frock-coated figure with the sombrero of a cow-puncher and the hair of a poet. If the delegates at the convention noticed any of these peculiarities as Bryan arose to speak, they soon forgot them. His undoubted power to carry an audience with him was ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... the cave lay only a few feet below, faintly discernible in the yellow light which issued from a hooded lantern. Gregory's eyes searched the grotesque shadows which fell ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... less ready and less able than Hellas and old England were to look through the insistent, and often grotesque, substance at the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... inspired yet eccentric and hardly likely to endure, attract our attention. In these eccentric movements the power of Christ's personality is manifest, and yet it appears amid circumstances so peculiar that the phenomena in themselves are grotesque. ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... ago—the earth, basking in the warmth of a tropical climate, had produced a luxuriant vegetation and a swarming progeny of gigantic small-brained animals for which the exuberant vegetation provided abundant and easily acquired sustenance. They were a breed of huge, clumsy, and grotesque monsters, vast in bulk and strength, but of little intelligence, that wandered heavily on the land and gorged lazily on the abundant food at hand. With the advance of the carnivora, the primitive forerunners ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... The dinner service was of white porcelain, edged with blue, and was in perfect order. The decanters were of the old-fashioned octagonal kind still in use in the provinces, though they have disappeared elsewhere. Grotesque figures had been carved on the horn handles of the knives. These relics of ancient splendor, which, nevertheless, looked almost new, seemed to those who scrutinized them to be in keeping with the kindly and open-hearted nature of ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... may be history or may be allegory. There is in them nothing grotesque, nothing which could mar the feeling of authenticity, the sense of the actual occurence of the dream incident. The faces and figures perceived have the light shade and expression which seems quite proper to the ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... entitled to notice in any sketch of her life, however meagre, he is the original of the "visionary boy" in "Oldtown Folks;" and "Oldtown Fireside Stories" embody the experiences of his childhood and youth among the grotesque and original characters ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... luniolatry, the parent tree. If the new moon, with its waxing light, may represent the primitive nature-worship which spread over the earth; and the full moon, the deity who is supposed to regulate our reservoirs and supplies of water: the waning moon may fitly typify the grotesque and sickly superstition, which, under the progress of radiant science and spiritual religion, is readier ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... deliberately assume a frightful, terrifying or grotesque appearance. This they do by inflating their bodies, by erecting hair, skin, or folds, or by unusual poses. Darwin speaks of the hissing of certain snakes, the rattle of the rattle-snake, the grating of ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... too grotesque marching to church like a lot of children, because he tells us to do ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... beautiful, in the dark style which I cannot help thinking has fallen into unmerited abeyance; and as she passed us I could see that she was very graceful. She was dressed in a lady's acceptance of the fashions of that day, which would be thought so grotesque in this. I have heard contemporaneous young girls laugh at the mere notion of hoops, but in 1870 we thought hoops extremely becoming; and this young lady knew how to hold hers a little on one side so as to give herself room in the narrow avenue, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... clothes could not fit smoothly on his gaunt and bony frame. He was no tailor's figure of a man; but from the first he clothed himself as well as his means allowed, and in the fashion of the time and place. In reading the grotesque stories of his boyhood, of the tall stripling whose trousers left exposed a length of shin, it must be remembered not only how poor he was, but that he lived on the frontier, where other boys, less poor, were scarcely better clad. In Vandalia, the blue jeans he wore was the dress of his ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... shadows of the trees were getting the grotesque and exaggerated forms which precede the last rays of the luminary, and while the people were still listening to their pastor, a solitary individual was placed on a giddy eyrie, whence he might note the movements of those who dwelt in the hamlet, without being the subject of ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... Jimsy King with emphasis but without passion. The statement was too grotesque for ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... cigarettes from a famous tobacconist. Beyond that little oasis, however, were all the evidences of a hired abode. A hole in the closely drawn curtains was fastened together by a safety pin. The horsehair easy-chairs bore disfiguring antimacassars, the photographs which adorned the walls were grotesque but typical of village ideals, the carpet was threadbare, the closed door secured by a latch instead of the usual knob. One side of the room was littered with golf clubs, a huge game bag and several boxes of cartridges. Two shotguns lay upon the remains of a sofa. It scarcely needed the costume ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... light coat that they had me put on, that covered my tunic and hose, and a hat of grotesque round shape that they put on my head. They led me then out of the building and ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton
... sit perfectly upright, some with their backs and some with their breasts toward me, but every head turned squarely in my direction. Their eyes are closed to a mere black line; though this crack they are watching me, evidently thinking themselves unobserved. The spectacle is weird and grotesque. It is a new effect, the night side of the woods by daylight. After observing them a moment I take a single step toward them, when, quick as thought, their eyes fly wide open, their attitude is changed, they bend, some this way, some that, and, instinct ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... is presented to our view. Shupaulovi is built in terraces about a central court, or plaza, and in the plaza about fifty men are drawn up in a line facing us. These men are naked except that they wear masks, strange and grotesque, and great flaring headdresses in ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... of William IV. took place on the 8th of September. The ceremony was shorn of the grotesque pageantry of chivalric times, and was confined to the interior of the abbey. The royal procession moved in state carriages from St. James's Palace, and was escorted by the cavalry. His majesty was saluted with hearty ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... being comparatively poor, while the two last are exceedingly fine. The story begins in the middle of the Saint's life. The first scene shows "How God punished Florenzo," a wicked rival abbot, who had tried to poison S. Benedict, and to lead his monks astray. In the background four grotesque devils are tearing down the walls of his convent, with extraordinary energy of action, and three others bear away the soul of the monk, whose body may be seen crushed beneath the ruins. In the foreground the Saint listens to the tale, told by ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... small and red, and that had added to her face a last touch of ruin which made it an unfavourable place for the struggles of an unspontaneous expression of amiability. Of course the girl was alarmed at being called down from her serene thoughts of Richard by grotesque wavings of a woman whose face was such a queer mask. But there was nothing to be said that would explain it all. She took refuge in silence; and knew as they walked home that that ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... had a far different part to play. Every morning, with a terrible reality at her heart, she glanced over the newspapers for news of John Storm. She had not far to look. A sort of grotesque romance had gathered about him, as of a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills. His name was the point of a pun; there were cartoons, caricatures, and all other forms of the joke that is not a joke ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the Baboo is merely a grotesque Bracken shadow, but in the course of geological ages it might harden down into something palpable. It is this possibility that leads Sir Ashley Eden to advise the Baboo to revert to its original type; but it is not so easy to become homogeneous after you have ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... off, followed by Baptiste and a short, square, old negro, very black and grotesque, who had introduced himself to the mulatto, with many glittering and cavernous smiles, as "d'body-sarvant of d'Rev'n' ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... then the fallen rider, being assisted, got up slowly and stood rubbing his arm. No serious injury seemed to be done to the man, and the couple presently turned their attention to the machine by the roadside. They were not in cycling clothes Hoopdriver observed. One wore the grotesque raiment for which the Cockney discovery of the game of golf seems indirectly blamable. Even at this distance the flopping flatness of his cap, the bright brown leather at the top of his calves, and the chequering of his stockings were perceptible. The other, ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... grotesque heaps—a woman's blouse was flung across the back of a chair and hung limply; a pair of shoes stood beside the bed in the attitude of walking—tired-looking shoes, run down at the heels and skinned at the toes. And on the far side of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... their officialism; for here and there in them you see exquisite bits of low relief carving, that a Greek would have been proud of, hidden away in interminable hieroglyphic histories spread indiscriminately over grotesque pillars and vast walls, as regardlessly of decorative effect as advertisements in a newspaper's columns. The open desert is the best of Egypt, and this thread of blue canal strung with lakes through its sand is very pretty and interesting all the way. We come to ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... the smooth slope leading down to the grotesque cedars and out to the Pass, Venters's cool nerve returned. One long survey to the left, then one to the right, satisfied his caution. Leading the burros down to the spur of rock, he ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... particoloured ends of ribands and poor glass toys completed the ornamental portion of his attire. The fluttered and confused disposition of all the motley scraps that formed his dress, bespoke, in a scarcely less degree than his eager and unsettled manner, the disorder of his mind, and by a grotesque contrast set off and heightened the more ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... revolutions, which, blind and fierce by nature, fell furiously upon it, rent its rich array of sculpture and carving, shivered its rose-windows, shattered its necklaces of arabesques and quaint figures, tore down its statues—sometimes because of their crown; lastly, changing fashion, even more grotesque and absurd, from the anarchic and splendid deviations of the Renaissance down to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... of the diatribe; she knew a flood of abuse was pouring from the lips of the Jewess, but she was too stunned to hear the details of the abuse. Joe, her Joe, was Joe Fleming the prize-fighter. It was abhorrent, impossible, too grotesque to be believable. Her clear- eyed, girl-cheeked Joe might be anything but a prize-fighter. She had never seen one, but he in no way resembled her conception of what a prize- fighter must be—the human brute with tiger eyes and a streak ...
— The Game • Jack London
... have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish figure, the magot chinois whom I believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers' mental aberration, that grotesque potiche, works! The absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be alive with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its traditions. It heaves its stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the censorship, like a Bravo of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... and the Goblin, tracing the history of the young miner and the princess after the return of the latter to her father's court, where more terrible foes have to be encountered than the grotesque earth-dwellers. ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... engaged in copying a humorous picture from the last page of Harper's Weekly. It was an ambitious attempt on the part of so young a pupil, but he had succeeded remarkably well, reproducing with close fidelity the grotesque expressions of the ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... my own, however, I call it goblin, because an odd aspect of the quaint in it yet never quite achieved the picturesque. Grotesque, probably, is the truer word, for everywhere I noticed, and for the first time, this slight alteration of the natural due either to the exaggeration of some detail, or to its suppression, generally, I think, to the latter. Life everywhere appeared ...
— The Damned • Algernon Blackwood
... dreadfully startled and the Mayor's obsequies were instantly suspended, while with pale faces and in trembling tones we begged her to say what had alarmed her. The younger children were so agitated that they held their candles unsteadily, and the waving shadows of our figures danced with uncouth and grotesque movements on the walls and flung themselves into the most uncanny attitudes. The face of the dead man, now gleaming ghastly in the light, and now extinguished by some floating shadow, appeared at each emergence to have taken ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... little harlots. Many are clowns. But many are of the highest respectability. Some are assassins. There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naive and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... which occurred in 1870 at St. Aubin in Normandy, where, indeed, the poet first heard of it in all its details. It is a story which, if the method of poetry and the method of prose could for a moment be accepted as equivalent, might be said to be of the school of a light and humorously grotesque Zola. It has the fundamental weakness of "The Ring and the Book"—the weakness of an inadequate ethical basis. It is, indeed, to that great work what a second-rate novelette is to a ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... in taking such liberties With every other chair in the house. Clara treated it with still greater reverence, often taking occasion to smooth its cushion, and to brush the dust from the carved flowers and grotesque figures of its oaken back and arms. Laurence would sometimes sit a whole hour, especially at twilight, gazing at the chair, and, by the spell of his imaginations, summoning up its ancient occupants to appear in ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... minute, or I shall give you somethin' worse than medicine. Open your mouth!" And Ephraim opened his mouth as if his mother's will were a veritable wedge between his teeth, swallowed the medicine with a miserable gulp, and made a grotesque face of wrath and disgust. Caleb, watching, swallowed and grimaced at the same instant that his son did. There were tears in his old eyes as he took ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... by the hissing flame; and Nick, the guide, as he leaned over, looking downward after it,—every one of the innumerable wrinkles in his black face made more distinct, with his white beard and mustache, and the whites of his eyes seeming to glow in the blue elfish light,—was a caricature, half grotesque, almost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... because he was adverse: it suffered rather from his favour: the extravagant tastes of the princeps and the many eccentricities of his life and character may perhaps find a reflection in some of the more grotesque extravagances of Lucan, such for instance as the absurdly servile dedication of the Pharsalia. But even in this direction his influence was ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... swelling buds of trees were visible against the sky, and the branches were like grotesque designs on a Japanese plate. There was a little clump of moss, very cool and soft, ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... distance from the half-open door lay Dainty Chase, clothed only in her night robes, her fair face upturned to the dim night light like the face of one dead, while over her bent the figure of old black mammy, grotesque in her red flannel petticoat, large-flowered calico sacque, and white turban, and pathetic in the grief with which she chafed Dainty's cold little hands, begging her to open her eyes and speak just one word to her ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... His choice of language, though often homely, and sometimes quaint or coarse, was always adapted to his purpose. He had a great command of racy phrases in common use, and frequently gave them an unexpected turn which enlivened his style as by a sudden stroke of wit or grotesque humor. But these touches were rapid, never detained him; he kept grappling with his argument, and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... an expression of distaste to cross his face. He looked at the chubby man across the desk and felt the distaste deepen and crystallize. John Hart's face was round, with little lines going up from the eyes, an almost grotesque, burlesque-comic face that belied the icy practical nature of the man behind it. A thoroughly distasteful face, Shandor thought. Finally he said, "The story, John. On Ingersoll. Let's have ...
— Bear Trap • Alan Edward Nourse
... themselves and their families by unsuitable alliances. The long confinement with all its inconveniences, produced the desired effect, in rendering the princess obedient to the wishes of her royal parent. This barbarous case, which is ornamented with much grotesque carving, still remains as a memento in terrorem to all the young ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... Titian. The handsome patrician, a little too proud of his rank, his magnificent garments and accoutrements, his virile beauty, stands fronting the spectator in a dress of crimson and gold, wearing a plumed and jewelled hat, which in its elaboration closely borders on the grotesque, and holding a hunting-spear. Still more astonishing in its exaggeration of a Venetian mode in portraiture[44] is the great crimson, dragon-crowned helmet which, on the left of the canvas, Cupid himself ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... the interview when I took down the will. I answered them all. But I vaguely felt he and I were at cross-purposes. I grew almost as uncomfortable under his gaze as if he had been examining me in the interest of the other side. He managed to fluster me. As a witness for Harold, I was a grotesque failure. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... inhuman wretch took up one of the round cushions from the nearest chair, held it up at arm's length, as if it were a head which he held by the hair, and then slapped it twice with the palm of his left hand. The gesture was so horrible and withal so grotesque, that Esther closed her eyes with a shudder, and her pale cheeks took on a leaden hue. Merri laughed aloud and ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the first rays of the sun lit up the Biggersbergen in all their grotesque beauty, I realised for the first time where I was, and found that I was considerably more than 12 miles from Elandslaagte, the fateful scene of yesterday. Tired out, half-starved and as disconsolate as the donkey in the ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... the Asika looked at this man in a reflective way, and Alan looked at him also through the eyeholes of his mask, finding him well worth studying. As has been said, notwithstanding his paint and grotesque decorations, he was very good-looking for a native, with well-cut features of an Arab type. Also he was tall and muscular and not more than thirty years of age. What struck Alan most, however, was none of these things, nor his jewelled chains, nor even his gilded pigtail, ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... wooden bridges, and were much struck with the brilliant fire-flies which were flitting about among the trees. On re-entering the town, we passed large arched gateways leading to particular quarters, and remarked in that inhabited by the Chinese, the grotesque-looking houses, lit up with large paper-lanterns, of gaudy colours, and Chinese inscriptions or monsters on them, and the long rows of Chinese characters up and down the door-posts, or over the windows. After the quiet of the sea, our senses were confused by the strange cries, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... finding names which really depict the animal, call the larva "the Devilkin." It is indeed a spectre, a diabolical phantom worthy of the pencil of a Callot. (Jacques Callot (1592-1635), the French engraver and painter, famous for the grotesque nature of his subjects.—Translator's Note.) There is nothing to beat it in the extravagant medley of figures in his "Temptation of Saint Anthony." Its flat abdomen, scalloped at the edges, rises into a twisted crook; its peaked head carries on the top two large, divergent, tusk-shaped horns; ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... man sat staring into the fire. The six-foot logs crackled and roared up the chimney, and the blaze lighted the wide, dignified room. From the high chimney-piece, that had been the feature of a great hall in Florence two centuries before, grotesque heads of black oak looked down with a gaze which seemed weighted with age-old wisdom and cynicism, at the man's sad face. The glow of the lamp, shining like a huge gray-green jewel, lighted unobtrusively ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... discontented Irishmen will demand either the extension of federalism or separation. In every federal government the tendency of the States is to diminish as far as possible the authority of the federal power. But this tendency will be specially strong in the grotesque Anglo-Irish federation, since the federal power will be nothing but the predominance of England. The mode of weakening the federal authority is only too obvious. 'The more there is of the more,' says ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... a husband and a father, for his effort of valor as a soldier, he had been rewarded with the most horrible punishment which can fall upon a man. Effort, therefore, on his part was useless; it was worse than useless, it was grotesque. Let others make ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... finish, which excited the envy of the Camel and made him desire to win the favour of the assembly by the same means. So he got up from his place and began dancing, but he cut such a ridiculous figure as he plunged about, and made such a grotesque exhibition of his ungainly person, that the beasts all fell upon him with ridicule and ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... is, in the track of his Leader, the only true Conqueror, so Hercules, in spite of all the grotesque adjuncts that the lower inventions of the heathen hung round him, is a far closer likeness of manhood—as, indeed, the proverbial use of some of his tasks testifies—and of repentant man conquering himself. The great crime, after which his life was a bondage ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the doorway, his lanky form with the red glare of the fire behind it casting a grotesque shadow on the interior wall of the cabin. He remained there on guard, lest any of ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... swear I have met with characters and figures that would be condemned as extravagant, if faithfully delineated by pen or pencil. At a watering-place like Buxton, where people really resort for health, you see the great tendency of the English to run into excrescences and bloat out into grotesque deformities. As to noses, I say nothing of them, though we had every variety: some snubbed and turned up, with distended nostrils, like a dormer window on the roof of a house; others convex and twisted like a buck-handled knife; and others magnificently eforescent, like a full-blown ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... his court—including an outsize animated picture of a mermaid ballet, quite an eye-catcher. But the broad quartz windows showed merely a shifting greenish-blue of seawater, and the only live fish visible were in an aquarium across from the bar. Pacific Colony lacked the grotesque loveliness of the Florida and Cuba settlements. Here they were somehow a working ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson
... returning on the stage, reined in with a sudden interest. Stover hastily executed a series of grotesque inclinations and, grasping the clumsy valise, disappeared behind the door, hearing; as he struggled up the stairs, the roar from without ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... the principles peculiar to French traffic; it had all at once assumed the aspect of dramatic complication. It had only been necessary for us to stop on our lounging stroll along the stone wharves, diverting our gaze for a moment from the grotesque assortment of old houses that, before now, had looked down on so many naval engagements, and innocently to ask a brief question of a nautical gentleman, picturesquely attired in a blue shirt and a scarlet beret, for the quays immediately to swarm with jerseys and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... observed, the grotesque is that which is most obviously distinctive in Hood's writings. But in different degrees it is combined with other elements, and in each combination altered and modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous. In this the genius ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... Materiam superabat opus, cannot be said of us. We may be accused of grossness, but not of flimsiness; of extravagance, but not of affectation; of want of art and refinement, but not of a want of truth and nature. Our literature, in a word, is Gothic and grotesque; unequal and irregular; not cast in a previous mould, nor of one uniform texture, but of great weight in the whole, and of incomparable value in the best parts. It aims at an excess of beauty or power, hits or misses, and is either very good indeed, or absolutely good for nothing. This ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... madness, catalepsy, premature burial, torture, mesmerism, and revengeful cruelty; tales of weird beauty; allegories of conscience; narratives of pseudo-science; stories of analytical reasoning; descriptions of beautiful landscapes; and what are usually termed "prose poems." He also wrote tales grotesque, humorous, and satirical, most of which are failures. The earlier tales are predominantly imaginative and emotional; most of the later ones are predominantly intellectual. None of the tales touches ordinary, healthy life; there ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... they will take the hint; but there is too much kindness underneath his wrath for him to be capable of murdering even a thievish sparrow. He likes to make others believe, however, that he is desperately in earnest. His keen sense of the comic and the grotesque in human nature makes him one of the raciest of story-tellers; but although he does not put his tongue in traces, he is none the less a worthy priest. There are many such as he in France—men who are really devout, but never ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the deep bass of his whilom accents? Where now the grotesque majesty of his bearing, and the impressive gestures that erstwhile had ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini |
