"Weirdness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... year on Sullivan's Island. Professor C. Alphonso Smith, the well-known Poe authority, says, "So far as I know, this was the only tropical background that Poe had ever seen." That the susceptible nature of the young poet was vastly impressed by the weirdness and melancholy scenery of the Carolina coast country, there can be very little doubt. The dank tarns and funereal woodlands of his landscapes, or at least the strong suggestion of them, may all be found here, and the scene of The Goldbug is definitely laid ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... look upon the public and private life of this incredible world, your first sensation would be dizziness, not to mention the weirdness of all sights that would confront you at every turn. People would seem to be in a mad rush, and it would appear that all business is done with ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... sheer panic of surprise had worn away somewhat, the weirdness of the uncanny voyage came upon the crew with tenfold force. They stood gripping the rail, staring ahead with the feeling of condemned prisoners on their way ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... sudden scuffling fall against the door. Punch rasped at it with his front feet in strenuous silence. If he had been able to give voice it would have been a relief to both of them. His mute anxiety added to the weirdness of the proceedings, and Graeme experienced a novel creeping about the ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... when I knew what to expect, I soon grew used to the strange surroundings. The weirdness and the mystery wore off, and I began to enjoy myself tremendously. The conditions were simply ideal; indeed, they were perfect, for the sentimental songs that soldiers always like best. Imagine how "Roamin' in ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... hidden streams; its landscape sometimes bright, sometimes shadowy, but always delicate, exquisitely arranged for luxurious decorative effect. In his ballad-romances, to be sure, such as, 'The King's Tragedy,' there is much dramatic vigor; yet there is still more of medieval weirdness. Rossetti, like Dante, has much of spiritual mysticism, and his interest centers in the inner rather than the outer life; but his method, that of a painter and a southern Italian, is always highly sensuous. His melody is superb and depends ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... pitiable object of abject terror and cowardice. But the Indians did not seem in the least affected by their captive's misery. With stern, impassive faces they went on with their chanting, which steadily increased in weirdness as they continued. ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... white coat was almost entirely concealed by a thick covering of bright red paint. His head, with the exception of the ears, was untouched, and his serious, friendly eyes seemed to emphasise the weirdness of his appearance. He stood in the doorway, barking and wagging his tail, plainly puzzled at his reception. He was a popular dog, and was always well received when he visited any of the houses, but he had never before met ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... tense attitude of his waiting added to the weirdness of the picture which the old wanderer of the mountains made as Aldous faced him. MacDonald was tall; some trick of the night made him appear almost unhumanly tall as he stood in the centre of that tiny moonlit amphitheatre. His head ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... weirdness in the scenery here, Helga, as further north, on the west coast of Norway. The hills here are rounder in form, as if by the action of ice ages ago," said Hardy. "Your father has often explained to you the action of glaciers, and how the large stones or boulders ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... herself was one day in Venice, when a friend came for her to the hotel. She went out with the friend, or seemed to go out with her—and then suddenly she perceived that she was lying on her bed, and that the other Alice—had been John! He looks just like herself—but for the eyes. The weirdness of her look as she tells these things! But she expresses herself often with an extraordinary poetry. I envy her the words, and the phrases!—It seemed to me once or twice, that she had all sorts of things I wished to have. If one could only be a little mad—one might ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... often the case when he visited the cabin, for the apes had no love for it; the story of the thunder-stick having lost nothing in the telling during these ten years had quite surrounded the white man's deserted abode with an atmosphere of weirdness and terror for ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stood up as stiff as a church, but there was a certain indescribable hollowness in the sound of it—that is the only fitting term I can find to apply—that was quite unlike anything that I had heard before, and that somehow seemed, in its weirdness, to ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... menagerie passed the gates of Vine-Pits. She stood firm with the rest of them watching the great painted vans go by, and the droves of horses, and the tiny ponies; but when the elephants came she broke away. The size, the weirdness, the shuffling footsteps of these beasts made her beside herself. A lot of ragged children with great wicked-looking hobbledehoys from the Cross Roads, were trotting after the elephants; and Norah, joining this disreputable band, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... of rain brought us to ourselves. Rising to her feet, Lylda pulled me over to the window-opening, and together we stood and looked out into the night. The scene before us was beautiful, with a weirdness almost impossible to describe. It was as bright as I had ever seen this world, for even though heavy clouds hung overhead, the light from the stars was never more ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... it is extraordinary that I wish to tell you this story. I think mere weirdness, grotesque or unusual character, are not sufficient reasons for making public incidents in which there is an element of the superhuman. The world, in spite of its desire to understand the nature of the occult is sick of and refuses to listen to stories of apparitions which betray ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... spoke directly to them. Harley saw one of the group move as if about to leave, but the hand of Hobart fell upon his arm and he stayed. Harley, too, was conscious presently of an unusual effect having the quality of weirdness. The lights seemed to go down in the whole opera-house, except near the door. Jimmy Grayson and the correspondents were in a semi-darkness, but Hobart and his three new friends beside the door stood in a light that was almost ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... dream reader," and although Mrs. Irvin had seen him before, his statuesque repose and the weirdness of his ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... it is, having too this strange interest, that though mainly characterised by a great plainness and simplicity of thought, and, in the earlier stages, of expression, we feel, oftentimes, a sudden weirdness, a strange glamour shoots across the poem when the tale seems to open for a moment into mysterious depths, druidic secrets veiled by time, unsunned caves of thought, indicating a still deeper range of feeling, a still lower and wider reach of imagination. A ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... distinct and individual an effect, which remind us so constantly that we are in Iceland and not elsewhere. In pathos and variety of interest it cannot touch Njala or Laxdaela: in what is called "weirdness," in wild vigour, it surpasses, I think, all others; and the supernatural element, which is very strong, contrasts, I think, advantageously with the more business-like ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... feeling of awe that seemed to over-master everything, while the very fact that where he had plainly made out the movement of figures as they evidently sought concealment, all was now motionless, and not a leaf waved or was pressed aside, added to the weirdness of his position, and made him draw farther back in the full expectation that the next moment the vivid green of the surroundings would be cut by a flash of light and then turn dim as it was deadened by the rising ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... Bug," the other for the "Murder in the Rue Morgue." I do not see how either of those could be bettered. But I would not admit perfect excellence to any other of his stories. These two have a proportion and a perspective which are lacking in the others, the horror or weirdness of the idea intensified by the coolness of the narrator and of the principal actor, Dupin in the one case and Le Grand in the other. The same may be said of Bret Harte, also one of those great short story tellers who proved himself incapable of a longer flight. He was always like one of his own ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... weirdness of the scene. It all seemed unreal—the dim glow from the spluttering wood, freshly put on, the beautiful shining copper coffee-pot, the dark obscurity on the top of the oven. The low ceiling with its massive ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the heavens illuminated, with the moon in all her weirdness, unnatural stars and a red sun, or a golden one, you may look for distress in its worst form. Death, family troubles, and ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Fitz-James O'Brien, the weird tales of writers of all tongues have been thoroughly sifted by me in the course of my reading, and I say to you now that in the whole of my life I never read one story, one paragraph, one line, that could approach in vivid delineation, in weirdness of conception, in anything, in any quality which goes to make up the truly great story, that story which came into my hands as I have told you. I read it once and was amazed. I read it a second time and was—tempted. It was mine. The writer ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... mate was surely lost. The lonely feathered thing made us shiver with the weirdness of ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... over us; gigantic vines clambered everywhere and made huge hammocks of themselves; they bridged the bayous, and made dark leafy caverns wherein the shadows were forbidding; for the sunshine seemed never to have penetrated them, and they were the haunts of weirdness and mystery profound. ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... for a guest in that weird institution which she called her club. The weird institution, however, had lost some of its weirdness and gained in comfort and cachet. It now boasted many members of distinction, new decorations and enlarged subscriptions. Miss Julia Winter sat in the mauve drawing-room under soft light, in the delicate glow of which her face took on suave and gentle lines, and her eyes held hints of ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... ruined castle loomed darkly, a ghastly monument of evil deeds. I looked about for the madman but saw him not. The weirdness of the place, the horror of its secret, crept into my blood. I became afraid. Down the bleak road I picked my way, glancing fearsomely over my shoulder. I fain would have fled ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson |
