"Sinister" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... action, of error, of combination, and of possible corruption. Error, selfishness, and faction have often sought to rend asunder this web of checks and subject the Government to the control of fanatic and sinister influences, but these efforts have only satisfied the people of the wisdom of the checks which they have imposed and of the necessity of preserving ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... neighbourhood of a reptile, and shunning him unless to profit in some way by their superior strength. Never would he join their games without compulsion; his thin, colourless lips seldom parted for a laugh, and even at that tender age his smile had an unpleasantly sinister expression. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Coming on that sinister and ambiguous errand, how could he sleep under her roof? How could he eat her chicken, and drink her burgundy, and sit in her morning-room? And how could he explain that he could not? Happily she left him to settle the point ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... dealer in opium. It must dispose of this opium either for "medical purposes" or for smoking purposes. This will undoubtedly mean that poppy cultivation will again be resumed. It is not inconceivable that the same sinister pressure which was brought to bear upon the Vice-president may also be brought to bear upon planters in the interior provinces, should they be unwilling, which is unlikely, to raise once more these profitable crops. And if China goes back to poppy cultivation, Great ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... make him happy or miserable. All these important ideas were at once evoked in the mind of Maulear by the last sentence Signora Rovero had uttered. It was this hidden and sombre apparition which arose between Maulear and her he loved, the sinister aspect of which was reflected in a manner by ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the Witch's cottage, snuggled away in a hollow and hidden from the road by a tangle of witch hazel shrubs. The Boy rather expected a dark, forbidding hut of sinister outlines, but here was as pretty a cabin as ever you saw, weathered a pleasing gray, with green blinds and a tiny ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... family was not sentimental; it throve capitally in the sinister light that fell upon the farm from so many frightened minds, and felt it as power. The men were hard drinkers and card-players; but they never drank so much as to lose sight and feeling; and if they played away a horse early ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... streets one found the extremes of magnificence and misery, of civilisation and disorder. In one quarter, palaces of marble, laced and, crowned with light and flame and flowers, towered up into her marvellous twilights beautiful, beyond description; in another, a black and sinister polyglot population sweltered in indescribable congestion in warrens, and excavations beyond the power and knowledge of government. Her vice, her crime, her law alike were inspired by a fierce and terrible energy, and like the great cities of mediaeval ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... surprisingly large. By hundreds of thousands do the silent populations of the hakaba outnumber the folk of the hamlets to which they belong—tiny thatched settlements sprinkled along the leagues of coast, and sheltered from the wind only by ranks of sombre pines. Legions on legions of stones—a host of sinister witnesses of the cost of the present to the past—and old, old, old!—hundreds so long in place that they have been worn into shapelessness merely by the blowing of sand from the dunes, and their inscriptions utterly effaced. It is as if one were passing through the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the alarm-gun went on at intervals, low and sullenly, and their suspicions became a certainty. The sinister gentleman in cinder- gray roused himself. 'Is there a constable here?' he asked, in thick tones. 'If ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... quarrel with the individuals, whether public men, lawyers or editors, to whom I refer. These men derive their sole power from the great, sinister offenders who stand behind them. They are but puppets who move as the strings are pulled by those who control the enormous masses of corporate wealth which if itself left uncontrolled threatens dire evil to the Republic. It is not the puppets, but the strong, cunning men and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the work of the Tories upon a mere party question, and that a very unjustifiable one, and treated in a very unjustifiable manner. I met Ellice and Labouchere in the street, and found them full of menace and sinister prediction, and to my assertion that all would go well and easily, they shook their heads, and insisted that the conduct of their opponents entitled them to no forbearance, and that finding none, their difficulties and embarrassments would be very great; and I found in other quarters that there ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Miss Elting. She could not see the horses, but she could hear them crashing through the bushes whinnying in terror. There was something sinister in this sudden outbreak, something that neither Miss Elting nor Harriet Burrell understood. Jane, having crawled from beneath the overturned tent, ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge
... science of government. And why should not even Republican government take to itself other modes of administration without infraction of its fundamental liberties? Why should not large reductions transpire in those opportunities that invite the most sinister combination for offices and spoils? Is there any reason why the emoluments of place should more than repay the labor it calls for? Is there any reason why large abolitions of executive patronage may not transpire; why Government may ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... boat coming down the river, and on the point of being sucked in by the draught of the wheels, ran out in haste, several of them, with long poles to stop it, and being all mealy, with faces and garments covered with flour, they presented a sinister appearance. They raised loud shouts, crying, "Devils of men, where are you going to? Are you mad? Do you want to drown yourselves, or dash yourselves ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... that, beneath all my merry jests, you are beginning to recognise the sinister truth only too clearly—the picture of the decline of art, of the decline of the artist. The latter, which is a decline of character, might perhaps be defined provisionally in the following manner: the musician is now becoming an actor, his art is developing ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... the man's having been in prison gave a sinister turn to an affair regarded hitherto as merely sordid by Stephen's ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... as vexed as he dared, with the consciousness weighing heavily upon him that he was playing with frightfully keen edged tools. He did not know what to make of this persistent immobility; it was uncanny, sinister, portentous, almost appalling. He would try again. He did try again, not once but nearly a dozen times, varying the form of words, more or less, every time; and, of course, with the same ill success. At length, in chagrin and disgust, he gave ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... rough-looking fellow, his hat pulled over his eyes, half concealed behind a pile of lumber, was casting a sinister ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... bosom, or some look betrayed the horrid purpose of his deceivers. He sought to break from them; he screamed; and they, casting off the mask, seized him the more strongly and began to run. His cries were heard; his schoolmates, playing not far off, came running to the rescue; and the sinister couple fled and vanished in the woods. They were never identified; no prosecution followed; but it was currently supposed they had some grudge against the boy's father, and designed to eat him in revenge. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... comes to pass. Ambitious hypocrites will have some sinister purpose; for example, sowing national hatred in the public mind. This fatal germ may develop, lead to general conflagration, arrest civilization, pour out torrents of blood, draw upon the land the most terrible of scourges—invasion. In every case of indulgence ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat
... and were displayed from the top of the royal pole of the main, fore, or mizen mast, according to the rank of the admiral, thus indicating nine degrees. This diversity of colour has now been long done away with. The white field, with the red St. George's cross, and the sinister upper corner occupied by the union, is now alone used in the British navy—the blue being assigned to the reserve, and the red to the mercantile navy. An admiral still displays his flag exclusively at the main truck; a vice-admiral ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... arms now to this side, now to that. He was the chief of the heterodox Mohammedan sect of the Assassins (this word, I believe, is actually derived from his name); imagined himself to be an incarnation of the Deity, and from his inaccessible rock-fortress of Alamut in the Elburz exercised a sinister influence on the intricate politics of the day. The Red Cross Knights called him Shaikh-ul-Jabal —the Old Man of the Mountains, that very nickname connecting him infallibly with the Ul-Jabal of our own times. Now three well-known facts occur ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... I announced to Mr. Thompson, to Mr. Morley, and to Mr. Milner,[7] who was then on the staff, that Mr. Morley was going to be in Parliament before March next year, for I need hardly say that I never mentioned my first sinister intimation. I told Mr. Morley and the others exactly what had happened, namely, that I had received notice to be ready to take sole charge of the Pall Mall Gazette by March 16th next. They shrugged ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... shells: the heated throats Of thunderous cannon burst—and high Scales the fierce joy of bugle notes: The flame-dimm'd splendours of the sky. He, dying, lies beside his blade: Clear smiling as a warrior blest With victory smiles, thro' sinister shade Gleams the ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... Paris. In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hung with Red Crosses. Every other building showed the red and white band across its front, with "Ouvroir" or "Hopital" beneath; there was something sinister in these preparations for horrors in which one could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yet sound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carried high. But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warning signs did not deeply stir ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... party, no political leader would for a moment endorse any one of the principles or methods I have suggested, for this would be a suicidal act. The newspaper, irresponsible, anonymous, directed by its advertizing interests or by those more sinister still, yet for all that the factor that controls the opinions of those who hold the balance of power in the community as it is now constituted, would reject them with derision, while in themselves they are radically ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... proprieties in the case, he proceeds to dig, plough, drain, put in order and treat soil or water, tree or other growth as is most convenient for his purpose. His fetich is erected to "the honorable spirits." Were this not attended to, some known or unknown bad luck, sinister fortune, or calamity would befall him. Here, then, is a fetich-worshipper. The stick or stone is the medium of communication between the man and the spirits who can bless or harm him, and which to his mind are as countlessly ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... known to men as "Slippery," was the possessor of a biased conscience, if any at all. Tall, gaunt and weather-beaten and with coal-black eyes set deep beneath hairless eyebrows, he was sinister and forbidding. Into his forty-five years of existence he had crowded a century of experience, and unsavory rumors about him existed in all parts of the great West. From Canada to Mexico and from Sacramento to Westport his name ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... himself, and began to converse with the doctor, who let himself down squarely into a chair, with an affable manner. He started several topics, then in spite of himself returned to the sinister thing he carried within ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... said I; whereupon Mr. Petulengro, lifting his sinister leg over the neck of his steed, and adjusting himself sideways in the saddle, replied ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... countrymen ceased making just and equal laws, only occasionally penal enactments; but more frequently, on account of the differences between the two orders, decrees for attaining illegitimate honours and for banishing distinguished citizens, along with other sinister legislation:—"Compositae Duodecim Tabulae, finis aequi juris; nam secutae leges, etsi aliquando in maleficos ex delicto, saepius tamen dissensione ordinum, et apiscendi illicitos honores, aut pellendi ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... legitimate,[6] a regulation quite ignored when the duke proposed the names of his sons Cornelius and Anthony. For his obedient knights did not refuse to open their ranks to these great bastards of Burgundy, who carried a bar sinister proudly on their escutcheon. So, too, others of Philip's many illegitimate descendants were not rejected when their ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... Dance-hall girls, babbling incoherently, reeled in the passageways, danced on the cabin table, and were only held back from licentiousness by the restraint of their bullies. The day was one long round of revelry, and the night was pregnant with sinister sound. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose ever, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills. ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle
... Desmond's sword and revolver, laid ready on a small table. She regarded them with a kind of fearful fascination. They were no longer mere ornaments of his uniform, but actual death-dealers, going forth to do murderous work. The short blue muzzle of the revolver had a sinister look, and a point of light at the tip winked like a ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... spurted under our horses' hoofs, the sky was gray and drizzled moisture, and as we rose we plunged into ever deepening forests. We left behind us all hazel bushes, alders, wild roses, and grasses. Moss was on every leaf and stump: the forest became savage, sinister and silent, not a living thing but ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... tell. Treachery, so far from being a crime, almost amounts to a virtue, under certain circumstances, with all these African savages; and I must confess that I have noticed one or two little things that, to me, seemed to bear rather a sinister significance. But what can we do? We cannot take 'Msusa by the scruff of the neck and insist upon his becoming our ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... had grown to like Dextry, with his blunt chivalry and boyish, whimsical philosophy, but she avoided Glenister, feeling a shrinking, hidden terror of him, ever since her eavesdropping of the previous night. At the memory of that scene she grew hot, then cold—hot with anger, icy at the sinister power and sureness which had vibrated in his voice. What kind of life was she entering where men spoke of strange women with this assurance and hinted thus of ownership? That he was handsome and ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... civilization, all owed a deep debt to man, and it could not be ignored. She was the last person in the world to wish to ignore it. Properly governed, disciplined and educated, his development might outrun hope, defy prophecy. Out of his place he was a comet without an orbit. Drawn hither and thither by sinister stars, he was an eccentricity beyond calculation and full of harm. For this reason the interests of humanity demanded that the place of man in the conduct of affairs should be well defined and limited. It was well to look this matter ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... with pillared porticoes looked from their dizzy terraces across the stream to where soaring mosques and mystic domes of worship caught the sun. It was all like the visible dream of a master architect gone mad. Gaunt, sinister ruins of medieval castles sprawled down the slopes of unassailable summits. Grim brown towers, haughtily crenellated, scowled defiance on the unappearing foe. Titanic stools of stone dotted barren garden slopes, where surely gods had once strolled ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Slammerbogen; my mother delighted to receive me in any character, whether that of pedant or prodigal. Nicholas, my elder brother, I found as much attached, as when I left him, to practising "Dull Care", upon the violin. In Tom, however, there was a considerable modification, he having left his sinister arm at Hougomont, in exchange for a three months' campaign in country quarters and a Waterloo medal. In the following term I entered at Cambridge, as my father had originally planned; and in due time, upon obtaining my degree, was admitted into holy orders. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... was looking into a well; he was massacred. Another met the same fate, who was leaning over the door of a dealer in wine and spirits, in order to see what o'clock it was. A Jew in the market-place was thought to have a sinister laugh; they searched him, found a packet of white powder—it was camphor—they killed him, and set on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... structures under discussion, examples for which could easily be provided from the domestic animals, were put side by side with later passages in the book, such, for instance, as statements of fact as to the behaviour of severed nerves under irritation. A sinister inference was drawn from this combination, and published as fact without further verification. Of this he remarks emphatically in his address on "Elementary Instruction in Physiology," ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... knew what, driving the dreadful needle-pointed public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table: implements that symbolised for Strether's too interpretative innocence something more acute in manners, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the national life. After he had put in his paper he had ranged himself, he was really amused to think, on the side of the fierce, the sinister, the acute. He was carrying on a correspondence, across the great city, quite in the key of the Postes et Telegraphes ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... ribs. He was extremely thin and bony, with a long, drooping nose set very much to one side, and was possessed of a remarkable pair of eyes—that is to say, one eyelid hung continually lower than the other, thus lending to his otherwise sinister face an air of droll and unexpected waggery that was quite startling ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... did not quite share Gordon's sense of security. Barry was different. He was a dear, and trying so hard; but Jerry had always had some power to sway him from his best, a sinister inexplicable influence. ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... the bands of mercenaries kept in pay by overreaching kings. The bands of mercenaries brought over by John proved too strong for the patriot barons, and would have annulled the Great Charter, had not national liberty found a timely and powerful, though sinister, auxiliary in the ambition of the French. Prince Charles I. had no standing army, the troops taken into pay for the wars with Spain and France had been disbanded before the outbreak of the Revolution; and on that occasion the nation was able to overthrow the tyranny without looking abroad ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... enters on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy's office of entertaining, as a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the adjoining room to announce that his majesty the Emperor Napoleon was approaching. Louisa nodded, and, quickly crossing the anteroom, she went out into the corridor. Napoleon was just ascending the stairs. His face was illuminated with a triumphant expression, and a sinister fire was burning in his eyes, which he fixed on the queen with a strange mixture of curiosity and sympathy. Louisa looked at him calmly; a touching smile played on her lips; her beautiful face beamed with energy and ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... multitude. A boy went by, whistling; another passed, calling hoarsely the news from the afternoon papers. A muffin man rang his bell, a small boy clattered his stick against the area bailing. The whole world marched on, unmoved and unnoticing. In this sombre apartment alone tragedy reigned in sinister silence. On the sofa, Lord Dorminster, who only half an hour ago had seemed to be in the prime of life and ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... from the movements of students, customers and instructors, that the classrooms in which barbering was actually taught were all concentrated on the western side of the building. If there were any more sinister activities, they occurred on the opposite side. Having determined this, she planned her ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... overwhelming. The struggle against the 'Trade' and its Government backers is hard, but we must fight straight on, for the issue is of vital importance and we should be ready to make a determined and triumphant resistance to the Prime Minister's sinister and unashamed attempt to sell our immemorial rights to England's most dangerous foe, that gigantic Drink Trade, which lives and thrives on the sorrow and degradation of ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... a sinister look on him, and longed to strip him of his frock, and put him between ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... Prussian majesty took in his own justification, was that of publishing another memorial, specifying the conduct of the courts of Vienna and Saxony, and their dangerous designs against his person and interest, together with the original documents adduced as proofs of these sinister intentions. As a knowledge of these pieces is requisite to form a distinct idea of the motives which produced the dreadful war upon the continent, it will not be amiss to usher the substance of them to the reader's acquaintance. His Prussian majesty affirms, that to arrive ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... he had entered the room, he did not perceive either Father Time or the Masked Lady. He dropped one end of his bludgeon to the floor with a thump, and there he stood leering at Everychild with a sinister and triumphant expression. ...
— Everychild - A Story Which The Old May Interpret to the Young and Which the Young May Interpret to the Old • Louis Dodge
... can see now, and it is so because it reveres precisely what nobler ages contemned. If, therefore, it loots all the treasures of bygone wit and wisdom, and struts about in this richest of rich garments, it only proves its sinister consciousness of its own vulgarity in so doing; for it does not don this garb for warmth, but merely in order to mystify its surroundings. The desire to dissemble and to conceal himself seems stronger than the need ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... in their sinister and slimy habits of life by this outburst of Krakatoa—and no wonder, when it is recorded that in some places "the sea looked like water boiling heavily in a pot," and that "the boats which were afloat were swinging in all directions." At one place several of these monsters ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... at the court of Denmark, whose skull Hamlet apostrophises in the churchyard; also a sinister jester in "Tristram Shandy." ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long for it measured fully the length of the hearthrug as it passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... treated, to all appearance, by the two monarchs. Philip said he wished to discuss with him a new plan of crusade, and asked him to stand godfather to one of his children; and Molay was pall-bearer at the burial of the king's sister-in-law. Meanwhile the most sinister reports, the gravest imputations, were bruited abroad against the Templars; they were accused "of things distasteful, deplorable, horrible to think on, horrible to hear, of betraying Christendom for the profit of the infidels, of secretly denying the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... he got to The Pass, the sinister city where he'd seen men killed for a twenty-dollar bill, where girls had been sold over the counter for fifty. He knew better than to go directly to Netse, for the Jovian and the Uranian had a sort of throat-cutting partnership in the underworld, and while Grant was ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... startling, awe-inspiring apparition—a grimy old man of Mongolian aspect. He might have been frozen to stone, so immobile, so lifeless were his features. Belated visitors passed near the entrance of the shrine, peered within as at some outlandish and sinister freak of nature, and moved on with jocular words. Nobody ventured to overstep the threshold, whether from religious fear or because of something repellent, something almost putrescent, which radiated from his person. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... character, therefore, it is not at all surprising that the native meekness of the naturalist's disposition was a little disturbed, and that he watched the proceedings of the other with such a degree of vigilance as he believed best suited to detect his sinister designs. ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... now saw, was hatless, leered up at her, and something in his sinister eyes made the girl quail. She had been so quiet that he apparently was not prepared for any sudden movement. Her right hand, hanging down at her side, had grasped the short riding whip, and, with a swiftness that gave him no chance to ward off the blow, she struck him one stinging, blinding cut ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... Africans danced. Hamilton hardly noticed their dance, a curious barbaric performance that would have been alarming to the British matron, but was neither new nor interesting to Hamilton. He kept his eyes fixed on the white-clothed girl in the centre, and the sinister figure behind her chair. She seemed calm and indifferent, and when the negro put his hand on her shoulder looked up and listened to his words without fear or repulsion. Hamilton, keenly alive, with every sense alert, sat in his chair, a prey to the new and delightful ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... against cunning persons, for such enemies can only be defeated with their own weapons. The brotherly friendliness and respect with which Apollonius treated him was a mask behind which he thought he could certainly hide his sinister plans; he would pay him back and make him more easily harmless if he hid his watchfulness behind the same mask. Apollonius' good-natured willingness outwardly to subordinate himself to him appeared to his brother like derision in which the workmen, won over by the deceitful ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... before the actual outbreak of the Ghilzais, the Afghan hatred to our people had been showing itself with exceptional openness and bitterness. Europeans and camp followers had been murdered, but the sinister evidences of growing danger had been regarded merely as ebullitions of private rancour. Akbar Khan, Dost Mahomed's son, had moved forward from Khooloom into the Bamian country, and there was little doubt that he was fomenting the disaffection of the Ghilzai chiefs, ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... which the law of the maximum in general prevented them from obtaining. The farmers trembled to bring their fruits to the market, the shop-keepers to expose them to sale. The richest quarters of the town were deserted; no equipages of crowds of passengers were to be seen on the streets; the sinister words, Propriete Nationale, imprinted in large characters on the walls, everywhere showed how far the work of confiscation had proceeded. Passengers hesitated to address their most intimate friends on meeting; ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... arts. Necessarily it lags some years behind. And this tendency, which is a benefit in the dispensation of justice as between private litigants, becomes a menace when courts are involved in politics. A long line of sinister precedents crowd unbidden upon the mind. The Court of King's Bench, when it held Hampden to be liable for the Ship Money, draped the scaffold for Charles I. The Parliament of Paris, when it denounced Turgot's edict touching the corvee, threw wide the gate by which the ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... level expanse of the Calle Rivera clattered an unending stream of horsemen, their accoutrements jingling a sinister diapason as they poured helter-skelter across the plaza in the waning moonlight. Tatterdemalion as they were, the ragged army were well-organized as Thode saw at a glance; no haphazard, leaderless crew was this, for at their head rode a diminutive, jockey-like figure, ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... were received coolly from the outset. The outbreak of war on the Continent had caused almost a panic in the City. The Funds dropped sharply, and Pitt ordered an official denial to sinister reports of a forthcoming raid by the press-gang. A little later he assured a deputation of merchants that England would hold strictly aloof from the war. Chauvelin reported these facts to his Government ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... wealth, to rule on the estate as if he were its lawful owner. Like Curius at his Sabine farm, he had counted it his glory not to possess gold himself, but to have power over her who did. But at this hint of the lady's wish to take his wife under her wing also, he was perplexed: could she have any sinister motive in doing so? But he did not allow himself to be troubled with these doubts, which ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... Sinister and deceptive springs arise to my right and left and hurl their waters across my path.... A soft gurgling is heard and at last drowns ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... unselfishness, and public spirit, Bentham and his disciples had regenerated political opinion, and fought the battle against debt, pauperism, class-privilege, class-monopoly, abusive patronage, a monstrous criminal law, and all the host of sinister interests.[82] As in every reforming age, men approached the work from two sides. Evangelical religion divides with rationalism the glory of more than one humanitarian struggle. Brougham, a more potent force than we now realise, plunged with the energy of a Titan into a thousand projects, all ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Pius IX was branded with censure, not by laymen only, but by some bishops and high ecclesiastics. Monsignor Viale, nuncio at Vienna, and Monsignor Sacconi, nuncio at Munich, were assiduous and eager in detailing the sinister reports touching Rome and the Pope, and colored them in such a way as to create an apprehension of schism, the most serious one that could rise for a pope—and that pope, too, Pius IX. He had before this been greatly troubled by the proclamation of General Durando; still he had hoped that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... duly hanged and strangled at Quebec aforesaid, and his head affixed to the top of a pike-staff planted on the highest eminence of the Fort." The ghastly head of this traitor, on the end of a pike-staff, near Notre Dame street, must certainly have had a sinister effect ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... unresisting, by the high flood of the new day. This world now before his eyes acknowledged nothing of his agony but came mother-like to ease his fretting. She would have nothing of the heavy tossings inspired by her sinister sister, the Night. She was all for clean glad spirits, all for new hopes. So he who had first frowned at it, who had then watched passively, ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... a mournful cry went over us, followed by a crash in Sinister Street. My way home! Some masonry fell in sympathy ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... the slippery counter to address them, his weapons still in his hands. On one side was a solitary lamp that brought out dimly the faces upturned to him; on the other sat the little girl, facing the mob as it waited, sinister, determined, threatening, ready to act ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... happens, lady of the Carlton, that I have just been to Limehouse. You do not know where Limehouse is and I trust you never will. It is picturesque; it is revolting; it is colorful and wicked. The weird odors of it still fill my nostrils; the sinister portrait of it is still before my eyes. It is the Chinatown of London—Limehouse. Down in the dregs of the town—with West India Dock Road for its spinal column—it lies, redolent of ways that are dark and tricks that are vain. ...
— The Agony Column • Earl Derr Biggers
... fast, for the thought of the golden silence sprang to her mind. The gold did not burn with the fierce orange flames she had seen in her dreams—it was a bleached and faded gold, melancholy and almost sinister in colour; yet it would pass for gold; and a great silence brooded where prairie blended with desert. She asked no questions of Maieddine, for that was a rule she had laid upon herself; but when the ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... there appears the heading "Overdue"—an ominous threat of loss and sorrow trembling yet in the balance of fate. There is something sinister to a seaman in the very grouping of the letters which form this word, clear in its meaning, and seldom ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... admiring my cabinet, Sir Rowland," he remarked, with a sinister smile; "it is generally admired; and, sometimes by parties who afterwards contribute to the collection themselves,—ha! ha! This skull," he added, pointing to a fragment of mortality in the case beside them, "once belonged ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... bringing about a change of scale. If we grant that this "insurgent bigness" must conquer the world, the final result is only humanity in the same relation to life that it now occupies, and we are left to reflect with Bensington, after the vision had faded, on "sinister shadows, vast declivities and darknesses, inhospitable immensities, cold, wild ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... though wintertime was near. Nature seemed brooding, and the generous odour of ripened harvests came over the uplands to the watchers in the valley. All was dark and quiet in the sky and on the hills; but in the valley were twinkling lights and the stir and murmur of troubled life—that sinister muttering of angry and sullen men which has struck terror to the hearts of so many helpless victims of revolution, when it has been the mutterings of thousands and not of a few rough, discontented toilers. As Al'mah sat near to the entrance of the mine, wrapped in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... about ten o'clock a large part of the sky was lined with heavy clouds, shading from ashen-grey into iron-colour and perfect black; at times this sooty mass, seeking an outlet upon the earth, burst asunder, revealing a sinister light through the crevices. Then again the clouds lowered themselves and drowned the tops of the forest trees in mists. But a hot wind soon drove them upwards again and tore strips off them, so that they hung ragged ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... come to be raided again. The imperial blackmailer had possibly left a record of his presence and prowess on alien rocks, to be defaced at peril when his back was turned; but for the rest only a sinister memory. Early Babylonian and Early Assyrian "empire," therefore, meant, territorially, no more than a geographical area throughout which an emperor could, and did, raid without encountering ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... Spirit and Chorus of the Years, the Spirit and Chorus of the Pities, the Shade of the Earth, the Spirits Sinister and Ironic with their Choruses, Rumours, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... marred all that he did and said, his carriage would have been easy and graceful. His head was small and handsomely placed upon his shoulders, his features sharply defined and very prominent. His teeth were remarkably white, but so long and narrow, that they gave a peculiarly sinister and malicious expression to his face—which expression was greatly heightened by the ghastly contortion that was meant for a smile, and which was in constant requisition, in order to show off the said ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... dubious activity about Morris's. In the summer it impressed you with its look of cheapness. In the winter, squatted by the cold water amidst its huddle of unpainted outhouses, at the end of a stretch of desolate beach, the fancy gave Morris's a touch of the sinister. ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... that the sun had failed to dry, and upon the glistening hart's-tongue ferns, and they looked just the kind of snails that witches would collect to make a hell-broth. Dark ivy hung down from the rocks, and under the vaulted entrance of the cavern was a clump of elders, very sinister-looking, and giving forth when touched an evil narcotic odour. Near these forlorn shrubs was a solitary plant of angelica, now woebegone, its fringed leaves drooping, waiting for the rising water to wash it into the darkness. ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... many hours slipped away. Oh, what a night, what a night! It was cold. My fire had died out in the huge grate; and the wind, the winter wind, an icy wind, a winter hurricane, blew with a regular, sinister noise ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Hardy. The Immanent Will is God, as Hardy conceives Him, neither rational nor entirely conscious, frustrating His own seeming ends, without irony and without compassion, and yet perhaps evolving like His world, clearing like men's visions, moving towards consistency. The Sinister Angel and the Ironic Angel are moods well known to Hardy, but not loved by him. The Spirit of the Years that sees how poor human nature collides with accident, or the inevitable, and is bruised, is Hardy's reasoned philosophy. The Spirit of Pities ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... meditating his next words with a sudden and sinister change to self-restraint. Suppressed rage was in his rigidly set eyes, suppressed rage was in his trembling hand as he raised it emphatically while he spoke his ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins
... experience have brought me to the knowledge of) to express my sentiments, and if necessary, to suggest what may occur to me, under the fullest conviction that, although my judgment may be arraigned, there will be no suspicion that sinister motives had the smallest influence in the suggestion. Not content then with the bare consciousness of my having in all this navigation business, acted upon the clearest conviction of the political ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... day was comparatively easy going, though there were places enough for an amateur to wreck; but the real battle with the river began at the Pine Creek Rapids—the battle that no experienced boatman ever was rash enough to prophesy the result. The sinister stream, with its rapids and whirlpools, its waterfalls and dangerous channel-rocks, had claimed countless victims in the old days of the gold rush and there were years together since the white people had settled at Meadows that no boat had gone even a third of its length. Wherever ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... gestures of fairies, fluttering their flame-veined wings. The sad thoughts moved slowly with drooped heads and monotonous hands, and tears fell forever about their feet. The thoughts that were evil—and Julian had acknowledged them many, though combatted—were endowed with a strangely sinister gait, like the gait of those modern sinners who express, ignorantly, in their motions the hidden deeds their tongues decline to speak. The wayward thoughts had faces like women, who kiss and frown within ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... joy, the tumultuous joy of this hour of respite from a hope that in the end became harder to endure than despair, there is perhaps not a single heart in this Empire which does not at moments start as at some menacing, some sinister sound, a foreboding of evil which it endeavours to shake off but cannot, for it returns, louder and more insistent, tyrannously demanding the attention of the most reluctant. Once more on this old earth of ours is witnessed the spectacle of a vast people stirred by one ideal impulse, prepared ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... had failed to notice the body. (Such were the thoughts of Penrod and Sam.) But she might not have opened the closet door. And whether she had or not, Verman must still be there, alive or dead, for if he had escaped he would have gone home, and their ears would not be ringing with the sinister and melancholy cry that now came from the ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... Even the sinister undercurrent of antagonism against the Quirt could not whip her emotions feeling that she was doing anything more than live the restricted, sordid little life of a poorly equipped ranch. She had ridden ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... could be no doubt as to the fresh tracks he found in the snow. There they were,—the footprints of the pack, like those of so many big dogs,—and among them the huge trail of the great, far-striding leader. All the way, almost from his threshold, these sinister steps had paralleled those of the hurrying child. Close to the edge of the darkness they ran,—close, within the distance of one ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... probable?" said Barrington. "It may be that this man was not such a friend to the woman as we have imagined. He may have had sinister designs in bringing her ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... reasonings and calculations, they could at least whisper that Mr. Montague was very cunning, that it was not easy to track him, but that it might be taken for granted that for whatever he did he had some sinister motive, and that the safest course was to negative whatever he proposed. Though that House of Commons was economical even to a vice, the majority preferred paying high interest to paying low interest, solely because the plan for raising money at low ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... case. None of the family or friends of the defendant underestimated the impression created by the array of facts marshalled by the district attorney. The evidence, though wholly circumstantial, was nevertheless sinister and deadly. ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... hope to deceive free Russia or the Allies and lure them into concluding a premature peace if the reign of terrorism and absolutism still prevailed in the Dual Monarchy. For this reason Tisza, with his sinister reputation, was forced to go, and the Reichsrat was convened. Austria based her plans on the ignorance of some Allied politicians who really believed in the "new orientation" of the Vienna Government because of ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... now is that the men were stricken with awe. They remained in port for several days in the belief that their enemy was still on the rampage outside. Their deliverance had been miraculous; and no doubt much thanksgiving, and much petitioning for divine interposition, so that this visitor from a sinister world might be spirited away to some other locality, held their attention during the days that were spent under cover of a safe harbour. There can be little doubt that the cause of the fishers' frenzy was the quiet, inoffensive bottle-nosed whale, leisurely prowling ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... be most fortunate under the somewhat trying conditions presented by this invasion of American rights Had no movement theretofore taken place, and because of these events it had been necessary then to bring about the mobilization, it must have had sinister significance. On the other hand, the presence of the troops before and at the time of the unfortunate killing and wounding of American citizens at Douglas, made clear that the restraint exercised by ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the supper they had eaten. But unfortunately they had been observed. As they left the restaurant, they attracted the attention of Pietro, whom chance had brought thither at an unfortunate time. His sinister face lighted up with joy as he realized the discovery he had made. But he wished to make sure that it was as he supposed. They might have gone in only to play ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... conditions might have struck the popular imagination favorably. The delegates marched into the Convention Hall in pairs, one from the South arm in arm with one from the North, Massachusetts and South Carolina leading. But with the Memphis riot and the New Orleans "massacre" and Andrew Johnson's sinister figure in the background, the theatrical exhibition of restored fraternal feeling, although calling forth much cheering on the spot, fell flat, and even became the subject of ridicule, since it earned for the meeting the derisive nickname of the "arm-in-arm ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the streets there was great excitement. People ran to and fro pointing upwards. Searchlights, like huge fingers of flame, stole across the sky; guns boomed. At last, in the glare of a searchlight, we saw a long and sinister object floating high above us and gleaming as though it were made of silver. Flashes came from it followed by terrible booming reports that grew nearer and nearer. A house collapsed with ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... meaning grief, but Hebrew scholars at present explain it as meaning nothingness, vanity, frailty. The etymology of Abel's name shows conclusively that the story is a myth. Why should Eve give her second boy so sinister a name? How could she have so clearly anticipated his sad fate? Cain's name has, too, another significance besides that of "acquisition," for, as Kalisch points out, it also belongs to the Hebrew verb to strike, and ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... has recorded, "we ascended a staircase covered with a red carpet and encumbered with works of art, vases, statues, paintings, cabinets containing enamels; then another corridor, and I saw a door standing open. I heard a rattling breath, loud and sinister. I found myself ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... were few pedestrians about and no one seemed particularly to notice them. Yet somehow, the Big Business Man thought, there hung about the city an ominous air of unrest. Perhaps it was the abnormal quiet—that solemn sinister look of deserted streets; or perhaps it was an occasional face peering at them from a window, or a figure lurking in a doorway disappearing at their approach. The Big Business Man found his heart beating fast. He suddenly felt very much alone. The realization came to him that he was ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... The Prince told him to return later, and entered the dining-room. No shade of suspicion had passed through his mind. Louisa de Coligny, however, grown cautious and suspicious by her misfortunes, became anxious. That pale man, wrapped in a long mantle, had a sinister look; his voice sounded unnatural and his face was convulsed. During dinner she confided her suspicions to William, and asked him who that man was "who had the wickedest face she had ever seen." The Prince smiled, told her it was Guyon, reassured her, and ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... discarded their weapons and concealed their armour under the cloak and gown of ordinary life on entering the cathedral precincts, so that on their first appearance in the Archbishop's private room their aspect was sinister without being immediately threatening. Becket had just finished dinner, and was seated on his couch talking to his friends when the four knights were announced, and he pointedly continued, his conversation ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... relief, symbolizing Day Triumphant. Weinmann interprets this as the Spirit of Time, hour-glass in hand, followed by the Spirit of Light with flaming torch, while Energy trumpets the approaching day. Interwoven with these figures is an allegory of Truth with mirror and sword, escaping from the sinister power of Darkness, Falsehood shrinking from its image in the mirror of Truth, and Vice struggling in the coils of a serpent. It is not easy to read either series, or to disentangle one from ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... faces of the poor. I had heard described their dexterity in the substitution of colored glass and crystals, for gems, while pretending to examine articles of the latter description brought for pledges, and was prepared to encounter all that was sinister and heartless. But the one-half had not been told me, and I soon found that my previous conceptions fell far short of the reality. As I have already remarked, I had occasion to visit several of them, and was detained at each, by the delays ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... denounced the Acts as unconstitutional, cruel, and tyrannous. The Quebec Act, extending the Catholic religion and French law into the interior valley under despotic government, was regarded as scarcely less sinister than the ...
— The Wars Between England and America • T. C. Smith
... IN A THEATRE. SUICIDE OF A FAMOUS ACTRESS.— Last evening, the performance of the new and popular tragedy, Francesca, at the Coliseum, was interrupted by a scene perhaps the most awful that has ever been presented to the play-going public. A sinister fate seems to have pursued this play from the outset. It will be within the memory of all that its young and gifted author was, on the very night of its production, struck down suddenly in the street by an unknown hand which the police have not yet succeeded in tracing. Last night's ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I had first seen this man's haunting eyes gazing at me in the reception room of the Sydenham I had felt that a meeting with him was inevitable. How or where he would touch my life I did not know, but that he was destined to wield some influence, sinister or favorable, over me, I was sure, and I trembled with vague terror as I saw ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... of the spectators fell suddenly three sound strokes, distant, measured, sinister; the clang of a ...
— When William Came • Saki
... contribute to the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number,' were they not at once adopted? Because the rulers did not desire the greatest happiness of the greatest number. This, in Bentham's language, is to say that they were governed by a 'sinister interest.' Their interest was that of their class, not that of the nation; they aimed at the greatest happiness of some, not at the greatest happiness of all. A generalisation of this remark gives us the first axioms of all government. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... administration, whose hopes were founded on anarchy and intrigue. It was therefore my practice to exhort them to rely on His Imperial Majesty—it not being within the scope of my duty to draw the distinction between the Imperial wishes and the sinister practices of those by whom His ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... a wedge-shaped crystal be used, the bands, instead of being straight, will cross the spectrum diagonally, the direction of the diagonal (dexter or sinister) being determined by the position of the thicker end of the wedge. If two similar wedges be used with their thickest ends together, they will act as a wedge whose angle and whose thickness is double of the first. If they be placed in the reverse position they will act as a flat plate, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... banks of yellow and long streaks of black, and here and there, underneath, moving splashes of red. The thing did not stay still one instant. It changed so that I could not tell what it did look like. Them were life and movement in it, and something terribly sinister. I tried to calculate how far distant the fire was and how fast it was coming, but that, in my state of mind, I could not do. The whole sweep of forest below me was burning. I felt the strong breeze and smelled ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey
... walls and set in the citadel, whether in guile, or that the doom of Troy was even now setting thus. But Capys and they whose mind was of better counsel, bid us either hurl sheer into the sea the guileful and sinister gift of Greece, or heap flames beneath to consume it, or pierce and explore the hollow hiding-place of its womb. The wavering crowd is torn apart ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... The other, bearing the sinister Evesham crest, lay on the table unopened till she was undressed and ready to join Mrs. Lorimer. Then—for the first time in all that weary day of turmoil—Avery stole a few ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... and pouring out a torrent of words in a thin, piping voice. So much I perceived at a glance, then, into view at the distant end of the room, paced a tall, high-shouldered figure—a figure, unforgettable, at once imposing and dreadful, stately and sinister. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... prospect could he see but the prospect of making the disclosure when he looked to his own interests next, and thought of his wedding day? Again the sinister figure of Farnaby confronted him. How could he receive the wretch whom Regina would innocently welcome to the house? There would be no longer a choice left; it would be his duty to himself to tell his wife the terrible truth. And what ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... government, alarmed at the bold and heinous offences committed by the Indian pirates in the Colonies, issued to him letters of marque against the French and the ubiquitous rover of the coast, whose "Jolly Roger" floating from the mizzen, with its sinister portend, struck ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... thinking thereby to embark in a regular correspondence, but supposing the matter would thus end. I have had many scruples of conscience about this affair, though I really entered into it not with any sinister view, but purely to oblige——. I should be glad to know your opinion of it. You will readily observe the advantage I have over ——-. He is of an unsuspicious make, and this gives me an opportunity (if I had any inclination) to insert things which might draw from ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... knocked at the door, was a stout personage of middle height, aged about fifty: with shiny black hair, cropped pretty close; half-whiskers, a round face, and sharp eyes. The other was a red-headed, bony man, in top-boots; with a rather ill-favoured countenance, and a turned-up sinister-looking nose. ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... her way over buried wreaths, over the snowy pall, to a hole where the trench began. It was covered over with old rotten planks and a sheet of oxidized zinc on which a workman had thrown his blue blouse. The earth sloped away behind them to the bottom of the trench, where could be seen the sinister outlines of three wooden coffins: there were one large one and two smaller ones just behind. The crosses of the past week, of the day before, of two days before, extended in a line down the slope; they glided along, plunged suddenly downward, and seemed to be taking long strides as if they were ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... nothing but reproaches and threats. The only words in his Declaration which had any show of graciousness were those in which he promised to send away the foreign troops as soon as his authority was reestablished; and many said that those words, when examined, would be found full of sinister meaning. He held out no hope that he would send away Popish troops who were his own subjects. His intentions were manifest. The French might go; but the Irish would remain. The people of England were to be kept down by these thrice subjugated barbarians. No doubt a Rapparee who had run away ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... most generally happens that parents are prompted by sinister motives and a false pride, as that of wealth, honor, and social position. They do not consult the law of suitability, but that of availability. They think that wealth and family distinction will compensate for the absence of ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... solitary voice of the English horn, which gives a notable pathos (read Berlioz on this despairful elegist, and remember its haunting wail in the last act of "Tristan und Isolde"). The woeful plaint of this voice breathing above a low sinister roll of the tympanum establishes at once the atmosphere of melancholy. Other instruments join the wail, which breaks out wildly from the whole orchestra. Over a waving accompaniment of clarinets, the other wood-winds strike up a more lyric and hopeful strain, and a soliloquy ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes |
