"Monstrously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comprehend how a handful of men should have been able to resist such a number so monstrously insane. We are sure we were not more than twenty to combat all these madmen. Let it not, however, be imagined, that in the midst of all these dangers we had preserved our reason entire. Fear, anxiety, and the most cruel privations, had greatly changed our ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... in any wise reflect his monstrously heaving, oil-dripping surroundings. He was a small, deliberate man, with oceans of repressed energies. His skin had the waxy whiteness of a pond lily. An exquisitely trimmed black moustache adorned his mouth. The deep brown eyes of a visionary ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... will be very different. I know he'll—well, he'll be abrupt and—and excited, and will—his sentences will not be well thought out before-hand. Now Penrhyn would have spoken at length and feelingly. 'T would have been monstrously enjoyable." ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... to chant this ditty to his loving subjects, was a monstrously fat old man, with only one eye; and a nose which bore evidence to the frequency, strength, and depth of his potations. He wore a murrey-coloured plush jerkin, stained with the overflowings of the tankard, and much the worse for wear, and ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... acting thus. He was tyrannical, insolent, and corrupt enough, if need be he was inexorable, but he was not Tigellinus or Nero. Military life had left in him a certain feeling of justice, and religion, and a conscience to understand that such a deed would be monstrously mean. He would have been capable, perhaps, of committing such a deed during an access of anger and while in possession of his strength, but at that moment he was filled with tenderness, and was sick. The only question for Vinicius ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... them, having no strength to struggle, with a mixture of curiosity and disgust. He did not understand what was happening in himself. His whole being was disintegrated. He spent days together in absolute torpor. Work was torture to him. At night he slept heavily and in snatches, dreaming monstrously, with gusts of desire; the soul of a beast was racing madly in him. Burning, bathed in sweat, he watched himself in horror; he tried to break free of the crazy and unclean thoughts that possessed him, and he wondered if he ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... call them, coming out of the cold and barren mountains of the Highlands in Scotland, feed so eagerly on the rich pasture in these marshes, that they thrive in an unusual manner, and grow monstrously fat; and the beef is so delicious for taste, that the inhabitants prefer them to the English cattle, which are much larger and fairer to look at; and they may very well do so. Some have told me, and I believe with good ...
— Tour through the Eastern Counties of England, 1722 • Daniel Defoe
... ways in which he might have satisfied it. He could have obtained a square meal any day from Mrs. Downey or the Spinkses; but now that the value of a square meal had increased so monstrously in imagination, his delicacy shrank from approaching his friends with conscious designs upon their hospitality. Spinks was always asking him to dine at his house in Camden Town; but he had refused because he would have had abominable suspicions of his own ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... its way into the hands of a money-lender. With that man, who lived in a little street near Mecklenburgh Square, I formed a most heart-rending but a most intimate acquaintance. In cash I once received from him (pounds)4. For that and for the original amount of the tailor's bill, which grew monstrously under repeated renewals, I paid ultimately something over (pounds)200. That is so common a story as to be hardly worth the telling; but the peculiarity of this man was that he became so attached to me as to visit me every day at my office. For a long period he found it to be worth his while to walk ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... said; "the village is full of Germans. There must—as far as we can see—be seventy or eighty of them, at the very lowest; and there are probably a hundred. We have been prisoners, or something very like it, and have had a monstrously close ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... tongue, too, you possess a clear right to exercise, if necessary, some controul; for if she use it in an unjustifiable manner, it is against you, and not against her, that the law enables, and justly enables, the slandered party to proceed; which would be monstrously unjust, if the law were not founded on the right which the husband has to control, if necessary, the tongue of the wife, to compel her to keep it within the limits prescribed by the law. A charming, a most enchanting, life, indeed, would be that of a husband, if he were bound ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... this phenomenon of the perfect union of three persons; but finally the mysterious conjugal trinity appeared to them so rare and pleasing a spectacle, that if M. du Hautoy had shown any intention of marrying, he would have been thought monstrously immoral. Mme. de Senonches, however, had a lady companion, a goddaughter, and her excessive attachment to this Mlle. de la Haye was beginning to raise surmises of disquieting mysteries; it was thought, in spite of some impossible discrepancies in dates, that Francoise de la Haye ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... analysis; for it will fit in with, and explain his outside observation of those Catholics with whom he has actually come in contact, far better than the preposterous notions that were in vogue fifty years ago. It represents them not as monstrously wicked and childishly idolatrous; but as narrow, extravagant, out-of-date, albeit, well-meaning ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... some extent did. He described the Harz Mountains in the Fourth Book of his Earthly Pleasure in God (Irdisches Verguengen in Gott); and in his Observations on the Blankenburg Marble he said: 'In many parts the rough mountain heights were monstrously beautiful, their size delights and appals us'; and wound up a discussion of wild scenery in contrast to cultivated with: 'Ponder this with joy and reverence, my soul. The mountain heights wild and ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... another Reading-was immediately to be given, by Mr. Dickens, in behalf of the Mechanics' Institution. It is characteristic of him that he, thereupon, wrote to the Chatham newspaper, "I know nothing of your 'best authority,' except that he is (as he always is) preposterously and monstrously wrong." Eventually this Reading was arranged for, nevertheless, and came off at the date already mentioned. A third Reading at Chatham, comprising within it "The Poor Traveller" (the opening of which had a peculiar local interest),"Boots" at the "Holly Tree Inn," and "Mrs. Gamp," ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... branches had already forced their way through the broken windows under the vaulted roof, rushed in violently with its formidable stream of greenery. It planted itself in the centre of the nave and grew there monstrously. Its trunk expanded till its girth became so colossal that it seemed as though it would burst the church asunder like a girdle spanning it too closely. Its branches shot out in knotted arms, each one of which broke ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... it is only possible within the limits of the brief span allotted to us upon earth to acquire a certain number of facts. It is monstrously absurd to sacrifice our best years in stuffing so many facts into the brain, in order to avoid being laughed at by a few thin-minded pedants as an ignoramus. Some consolation, at least, might surely be derived from the reflection that many of the greatest ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... due course. They were provincial people of the middle class, accounted monstrously genteel in their own neighbourhood, but in nowise resembling ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... intended to have commenced this book with something quite terrific, a murder or a marriage; and all our great ideas have ended in a lounge. After all, it is, perhaps, the most natural termination. In life, surely man is not always as monstrously busy as he appears to be in novels and romances. We are not always in action, not always making speeches or making money, or making war, or making love. Occasionally we talk, about the weather generally; sometimes about, ourselves; oftener about our friends; as often ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... and church must be slowly replaced by higher forms of faith, if not also by more effective organisations; then, all who hold such views as these have as distinctly a function in the community as the ministers and upholders of the churches, and the zeal of the latter is simply the most monstrously untenable apology that could be invented for dereliction of ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... in the world for her," he cried, "and she had the heart to treat me like this. How cruel, how monstrously cruel!" ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... take up exactly the number of pages I mentioned, and I am extremely anxious to have the work as perfect as possible, and which I cannot do, if it be finished immediately. The "Religious Musings" I have altered monstrously, since I read them to you and received your criticisms. I shall send them to you in my next. The Sonnets I will send you with the ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... way about there all the same. He was well aware of the exact locality of the best cask of beer, and lost no time in staving in the top of it, found a pitcher in a niche close at hand, filled it with fresh beer, sat him down by the side of the barrel, and took a monstrously long pull at his pitcher. After that he moistened well his head and face, and then he replenished his pitcher and took another ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... talk became serious; and once again Ridgett saw in Mrs. Dale's white face, trembling fingers, and narrowed eyes, the deadly anxiety that she was suffering. With that face opposite to one, it would have been monstrously cruel not to offer the wisest and best considered advice that one could ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... ("Se il mio nome saper"), protesting the honesty and ardor of his passion, but still concealing his name and station. He is delighted to hear his lady-love's voice bidding him to continue his song. (It is the phrase, "Segui, o caro, deh segui cosi," which sounded so monstrously diverting at the first representation of the opera in Rome.) After the second stanza Rosina essays a longer response, but is interrupted by some of the inmates of the house. Figaro now confides to the Count a scheme by which he is to meet his fair enslaver face to face: he is to assume the role ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... thickness, like crooked fingers, heavy and solid. The shaggy whiskers, almost bare in places, and in others massing into bunchgrass-like clumps, were plentifully splashed with gray. They rioted monstrously over his face and fell raggedly to his chest, but failed to hide the great hollowed cheeks or the twisted mouth. The latter was thin-lipped and cruel, but cruel only in a passionless sort of way. But the forehead was the anomaly,—the ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... the strangest pair at such a time that ever fire-light shone upon. Dombey so erect and solemn, gazing at the blaze; Paul with an old, old face peering into the red perspective with the fixed and rapt attention of a sage, the two so much alike and yet so monstrously contrasted. On one of these occasions, when they had both been perfectly quiet for a long time, little ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... called up out of senseless material. What we see is not imaginary motion represented, but real motion arrested, as it were, in its very act, and ready to move again. Many have said that the man's work was monstrous. It was monstrously alive, monstrously vigorous; at times over-strong and over-vital, exaggerative of nature, but never really unnatural, and he never once overreached himself in an effort. No matter how enormous the conception might be, he never lacked the means of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... put in Madame la Marquise—a fleshly lady monstrously coiffed. "If we allow such men as thus to live in France our ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... of Soldiers' Rights represented a violent reaction. Under the old regime the army was a monstrously cruel machine; the soldiers were slaves. At the first opportunity they had revolted and, as invariably happens, the pendulum had swung too far. On May 28th the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates issued a declaration in which it was said: "From now on the soldier-citizen is free from ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... and confusedly written, and so interlarded with numerous letters about the subject of these differences with the Dutch, that we have been reluctantly under the necessity of omitting them, being so monstrously inarticulate as to render it impossible to make them at all palatable to our readers, without using freedoms that were altogether inadmissible in a work ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... the procession swam into the chamber. Monstrously large as the place was, the floor soon was filled with the thick flood of cuttlefish which swarmed in from many doors. Keith, held with the other captives just to one side of the hole he had entered by, began to think that ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... Capel's Shakspeare, he said, "If the man would have come to me, I would have endeavoured to endow his purposes with words; for as it is, he doth gabble monstrously[15]."' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the car a storm hardly made itself felt; in the cab she seemed under the open sky. The wind buffeted the glass at her side, rattled in its teeth the door in front of her, drank the steaming flame from the stack monstrously, and dashed the cinders upon the thin roof above her head with terrifying force. With the gathering speed of the engine the cracking exhaust ran into a confusing din that deafened her, and she was shaken and jolted. ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... advanced on his predecessors in many respects. He was a clumsy writer, and Johnson declared, with some justice, that he 'gabbled monstrously,' but his collation of the quartos and the First and Second Folios was conducted on more thorough and scholarly methods than those of any of his predecessors not excepting Theobald. His industry was untiring, and he is said to have transcribed ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... "How strangely and monstrously unnatural all that kind of talk is when you come to put it into plain English!" proceeded Lottie after a moment, tapping the floor impatiently with her foot. "If you must preach such doctrines as you did this morning, I am sorry for you; and, if they are true, I am sorry for the world, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... really impressive visions of the moving millions of England. You are the only man alive who can make the map of England crawl with life; a most creepy and enviable accomplishment. Why then should I trouble you with a book which, even if it achieves its object (which is monstrously unlikely) can only be ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... we take it we are to understand, for an unbridled surrender to the life of the senses; whereby it is primarily a picture of that life that the story gives us. He is represented as inordinately, as quite monstrously, endowed for the career that from the first absorbs and that finally is to be held, we suppose to engulf him; and it is a tribute to the truth with which his endowment is presented that we should scarce know where else to look for so complete and convincing an account of such adventures. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... wall against another; in one corner lay his eyes, in another his teeth; a pittifull and fearefull sight to behold. Then began the students to waile and weepe for him, and sought for his body in many places. Lastly, they came into the yard, where they found his body lying on the horse-dung, most monstrously torne and fearefull to behold, for his head and all his joynts were dashed in peeces. The fore-named students and masters that were at his death, have obtained so much, that they buried him in the village where he was so grievously tormented. After ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... us know when we enter a drawing-room whether it is a pretty room or no; but how few of us know how to make a drawing-room pretty! There has come up in London in these latter days a form of room so monstrously ugly that I will venture to say that no other people on earth but Londoners would put up with it. Londoners, as a rule, take their houses as they can get them, looking only to situation, size, and price. What Grecian, what Roman, what Turk, what Italian would endure, or would ever have endured, ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... of which I opposed a stern continence,—one of those loves possessed of overwhelming charm, an electricity of their own, which lead us to the skies through the ivory gates of slumber, or bear us thither on their powerful pinions. A love monstrously ungrateful, which laughs at the bodies of those it kills; love without memory, a cruel love, resembling the policy of the English nation; a love to which, alas, most men yield. You understand the problem? Man is composed of matter and ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... hanging from a nail, and she went to it, patted her grey hair to neatness, and re-established her felt hat on top of it. The place was as still as the grave; no noise reached it from without. The one candle at the bedside threw her shadow monstrously up the wall; while she fumbled with her hatpins it pictured ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... moment Shorty swung from his horse and joined the group. He gained his nickname from his excessive length, being taller by an inch or two than Jim Silent himself, but what he gained in height he lost in width. Even his face was monstrously long, and marked with such sad lines that the favourite name of "Shorty" was affectionately varied to "Sour-face" or "Calamity." Silent went ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... Medium—"the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea." To me, these lines on the purple lily are not only ugly and grotesque—in that kind of ugliness which "was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite unnecessary luxury, to be enjoyed for its own sake"—but are monstrously (more than any other instance I can recall) unsuited to the mind from which they are supposed ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... her shoes. There's an expression of great malice and humour in her physiognomy, and a kind of devil-may-care haughtiness in the poise of her head. She's a bit of a grande dame, into the bargain—something like an Anglo-Italian duchess, for example; she's monstrously rich; and she adds, you'll be surprised to learn, to her other fascinations that of being a widow. Faith, the men are so fond of widows, it's a marvel to me that we're ever married at all until we reach that condition;—and there, if you like, is another Irishism for you. But what's ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... itself, is not unworthy of notice. Last year two theatrical shows visited us, displaying their "Red Barn" tragedies, and illuminated ghosts, at threepence per head, at which they did well; as also did a tremendous giantess, a monstrously fat boy, and several other "wonderful works of nature:" this year only one show of any description attended, and that, with kings and queens, and clowns, as well dressed and efficient, and ghosts, as white and awe-inspiring as ever paraded before an audience, has reaped but an indifferent ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when I see a raw youth and a green girl fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debasing vice; what is to her the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... house, and believed in its being haunted; and yet he would play false on the haunting side, so surely as he got an opportunity. The Odd Girl's case was exactly similar. She went about the house in a state of real terror, and yet lied monstrously and wilfully, and invented many of the alarms she spread, and made many of the sounds we heard. I had had my eye on the two, and I know it. It is not necessary for me, here, to account for this preposterous state of mind; I content myself with remarking that ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the little hill, with a hand on its top, his huge bulk dwarfing it! Franklin, a titan, his head and shoulders looming monstrously against the ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... monstrously quick. When the rockets began to blow up and sprinkle around balls of red and blue and green fire, the boats were emptied in a moment or two. Wildly shrieking, the naked savages sprang overboard and swam back ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... indefinitely, immeasurably; beyond compare, beyond comparison, beyond measure, beyond all bounds; incalculably, infinitely. [in a supreme degree] preeminently, superlatively &c. (superiority) 33. [in a too great degree] immoderately, monstrously, preposterously, inordinately, exorbitantly, excessively, enormously, out of all proportion, with a vengeance. [in a marked degree] particularly, remarkably, singularly, curiously, uncommonly, unusually, peculiarly, notably, signally, strikingly, pointedly, mainly, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... patient industry, was a lost art in this second-hand age. She had made Barbara's grandfather practise it, so that at Catton (her country place) and even at Ravensham, the trees were worth looking at. Here, at Monkland, they were monstrously neglected. To have the finest Italian cypress in the country, for example, and not take more care of it, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... these opinions, I have no doubt that Mr Mitford was influenced by the same love of singularity which led him to spell "island" without an "s," and to place two dots over the last letter of "idea." In truth, preceding historians have erred so monstrously on the other side that even the worst parts of Mr Mitford's book may be useful as a corrective. For a young gentleman who talks much about his country, tyrannicide, and Epaminondas, this work, diluted ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... more attractive. At the great hotels in the neighbourhood of London where rich, or at all events prodigal people, go to dine in the summer months, this is especially the case. All these establishments affect fine dinners, yet how seldom it is they give you good ones! Their wines, though monstrously dear, are very fair; indeed, of the champagnes at least you may make certain by looking at the corks; but the food! How many of their fancifully named dishes might be included ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... veritable witch; but horrors! a witch with whiskers. This old woman, as I mistook her to be, was attired in an Empire gown, with crinoline under-attachments. Around the neck was an Elizabethan ruff, and on the head was a bonnet of the vogue of 1840; huge, monstrously trimmed and bedecked with a perfect garden of artificial flowers. The color of the dress was salmon-blue, with pink ribbons. Altogether it was a fearful get-up, and, involuntarily, I looked about me expecting to see people stopping, a crowd forming. But no one appeared to notice the little old ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... in murderers, as you are in poets," he answered, "and I assure you they are of all colors in hair as well as temperament. I suppose it's inhumane, but mine is a monstrously interesting trade, even in a little place like this. As for that girl, of course I've known her all her life, and—but—but that is just the question. Have I known her all her life? Have I known her at all? Was she even there to ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... success now dearly enough, but not at the price of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social reconstructions on which ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... made out by the Clearness of their Understanding: It must be owned however, that (as it generally happens) they had each a Perverseness of Humour suitable to their Distortion of Body. The eldest, whose Belly sunk in monstrously, was a great Coward; and tho' his splenetick contracted Temper made him take fire immediately, he made Objects that beset him appear greater than they were. The second, whose Breast swelled into a bold Relievo, on the contrary, took great pleasure in lessening every thing, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... wasnt my appearance ... or was it? That monstrously outsized pump! Who wanted to listen to a salestalk from a man apparently prepared for an immediate gasattack? There is little use in pressing your trousers between two boards under the mattress if you discount such neatness with the accouterment of an invading Martian. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... occasionally govern either the nominative or [the] objective case, after them."—Alexander's Gram., p. 54. "The verb to be, always governs a Nominative, unless it be of the Infinitive Mood."—Buchanan's Gram., p. 94. This latter assertion is, in fact, monstrously untrue, and ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... to be sure, was monstrously hot and stuffy. Not a breath of wind ruffled the waters of the dock, around the head of which we trudged to a recently erected church on the opposite shore. I remember observing, on our way, the ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nine this morning; and the Dean of Carlisle and I crossed the water to Battersea, and went in his chariot to Greenwich, where we dined at Dr. Gastrell's, and passed the afternoon at Lewisham, at the Dean of Canterbury's;(15) and there I saw Moll Stanhope,(16) who is grown monstrously tall, but not so handsome as formerly. It is the first little rambling journey I have had this summer about London, and they are the agreeablest pastimes one can have, in a friend's coach, and to good company. Bank Stock is fallen three or four per cent. by the whispers about the ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... a projecting piece of the rock, at the corner of one of these murky entrances, moved on a sudden, and proved to be a human figure, that beckoned to him. He approached, and saw his father. He could barely recognise him, he was so monstrously altered. ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... ceremony was much too long, and some parts of it were carelessly performed. The Archbishop mumbled. The Bishop of London preached, well enough indeed, but not so effectively as the occasion required; and, above all, the bearing of the King made the foolish parts of the ritual appear monstrously ridiculous, and deprived many of the better parts of their proper effect. Persons who were at a distance perhaps did not feel this; but I was near enough to see every turn of his finger, and every glance of his eye. The moment of the crowning was extremely fine. When the Archbishop ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... the shot with a smile. "No—she's a monstrously perfect result of the system: the completest proof of its triumph. It's Ralph who's the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... But the remembrance of the scene in the Baron's bedroom at the Badischer Hof was too vivid to leave the slightest ground for this theory. He was obliged to be content with the thought that he should soon place the broad Atlantic between himself and a creature so unnatural, so dangerous, so monstrously impossible as the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... the burning match was unsteady. "Strange, very strange," he was saying, as if to himself. And then: "Preposterous! I will go back and tell Mukoki. He is shivering. He is afraid. He believes that Tavish is in league with the devil. He says that the dogs know, and that they have warned him. Queer. Monstrously queer. And interesting. Eh?" ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... likeness to the catastrophe of 'Jane Eyre.' I have sent to the library here for 'Jane Eyre' (but haven't got it yet) in order to refresh my memory on this point; but, as far as I do recall the facts, the hero was monstrously disfigured and blinded in a fire the particulars of which escape me, and the circumstance of his being hideously scarred is the thing impressed chiefly on the reader's mind; certainly it remains innermost in mine. Now if you read over again those pages of my poem, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Bill seated at the editor's table of the editor's room of a monstrously successful monthly magazine of most monstrous fiction that Mr. Bitt's directors have started; Margaret, that sentimental young woman, by her husband's side is correcting the proofs of a poem signed "Margaret Wyvern." It is of ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... me, at which the other ladies, even my dear friend and chaperon, looked rather green. The weather was glorious, and off we went with a flourish of trumpets and whips, and I knew I should enjoy myself monstrously. ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... to convince anybody today that our system of distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have million-dollar babies side by side with paupers worn out by a long life of unremitted drudgery. One person in every five dies in a workhouse, a public hospital, or a madhouse. In cities like London the proportion is very nearly one ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... was not as easy as I had hoped. Communists with gun on shoulder stopped the trains and searched in all our bags and pockets, and even under the cushions of the railway carriages. They were afraid that the passengers were taking newspapers to Versailles. This was monstrously stupid. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... room dedicated to paintings of the Barbizon school, and of this I would advise instant search. I rested my eyes here for an hour. A vast scene of cattle by Troyon (who, such is the poverty of the Dutch alphabet, comes out monstrously upon the frame as Troijon); a mysterious valley of trees by Corot; a wave by Courbet; a mere at evening by Daubigny—these are like cool ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... that they were in the habit of taking them, created considerable coolness, not to say irritation, between the ghosts of the readers of "The Vicar of Wakefield," or "Werther," or the "Nouvelle Heloise" and ourselves. Besides, they would be monstrously shocked at our ways. They would think us marvellously ill-bred. While we! I dare scarcely harbour the thought, much less express it. Anyway, it is certain that they occasionally allowed Sheridan and Miss Burney (I am not even ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... could have afforded some of the plate, Rawdon," the wife continued sentimentally. "Five-and-twenty guineas was monstrously dear for that little piano. We chose it at Broadwood's for Amelia, when she came from school. It ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... for Lydia to analyse her own feelings. She knew that Jack Glover was wrong, monstrously wrong. She was perfectly confident that his fantastic theory had no foundation, and yet she could not get away from his sincerity. Remembering Jean's description of him as "a little queer" she tried to fit that description into her knowledge of him, only to admit to herself that he had been ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... visitants, as the favourite place of rendezvous, where predominated the recreation of manly exercises, and shows, gambols, and merriment were the orders of the day. The present is an age of improvement,—and yet I cannot think, in an already monstrously overgrown metropolis, the substitution of bricks and mortar an equivalent for green ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Press emerged. It does not want much pluck to hang about and sneak secrets. It is the pure negation of humour to preach Socialism in the name of the criminal and degenerate. To judge America by this product would be monstrously unfair, but it corresponds perforce to some baser quality in the cosmopolitans of the United States, and it cannot be overlooked. As it stands, it is the heaviest indictment of the popular taste that can ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... that I had been hoping for; and with these neatly strung together by the feet, and slung across Jack's shoulders in front of the saddle, I was just preparing to mount and canter away back to camp when, looming monstrously through the thin, grey mist that was insidiously rising from the veld, I beheld a long procession of enormous forms gradually resolving out of the fog wreaths about half a mile away. Vague and shapeless as ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... enemies to which he gave insulting names. He had always admired the hard bark and metallic resonance of the ironwood, but he hated the poplar—"popple" it is called in Joralemon, Minnesota. Poplar becomes dry and dusty, and the bark turns to a monstrously mottled and evil greenish-white. Carl announced to one poplar stick, "I could lick you! I'm a gen'ral, I am." The stick made no reply whatever, and he contemptuously shied it out into the chickweed which matted the grubby back yard. This necessitated ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... happened?" repeated John with monstrously dilated eyes. "What marvel do you expect ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... she got anything more than a very small salary—governesses in those days were shockingly remunerated—and I know,—poor soul, she had to work monstrously hard. Drumming Latin and Greek into heads as thick as ours was no ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... and walked with a stride which was as long as it was stately. He went in for dressing himself beautifully, strummed on the banjo, and had a playful little habit of arranging his tie in any mirror which he saw. His pride in himself was so monstrously open that no one with a grain of humour could be angry with him. He talked about every game under the sun as if they were all equally easy to him, but I should not think that any one was ever found who believed ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... to offer him instead. The campaigns of Napoleon, with their atmosphere of glory, illustrate this. In the Russian campaign Napoleon's marshals achieved miracles of bluff, especially Ney, who, with a handful of men, monstrously outnumbered, repeatedly kept the Russian troops paralyzed with terror by pure bounce. Napoleon himself, much more a realist than Ney (that was why he dominated him), would probably have surrendered; for ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... on board ship), addressing sundry remarks to the stove upon the slowness of seafaring men in general, and skippers in particular. In a few minutes the skipper appeared in a similar costume, with a monstrously long gun over his shoulder, and under his arm a pair of snow-shoes gaudily painted by himself; which snow-shoes he used to admire amazingly, and often gave it as his opinion that they were ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... small sitting-room! Whenever that was Cicely's mood she lisped; and as often as Marsworth, who was sitting far away from her, talking to Bridget Cookson, caught her voice, it seemed to him that she was lisping—affectedly—monstrously. She was describing for instance a certain ducal household in which she had just been spending the week-end, and Marsworth heard ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... beneath his armpits, but the tails reached to the ground, and the collar was so large that you could scarce distinguish its wearer inside it. He also had double and triple shirt frills, and while the brass buttons of his coat were no larger than cherry pips, the monstrously puffed sleeves rose as high as his shoulders. The wax-yellow waistcoat was almost half concealed by the huge projecting ruffles. The whole costume was set off by hose a la cosaque, which appeared to amplify downwards, bulged over the boots, and were slit up in front so ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... after what you have related, William,—can you seriously meditate the destruction of a fond woman, who has generosity enough to lay down her life for you? This is more incredible than the rest—more monstrously wicked." ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... occurred to Septimus that he had done a quixotic thing in marrying Emmy, any more than to pat himself on the back for a monstrously clever fellow when he had completed a new invention. At the door of the Registry Office he took off his hat, held out his hand, and ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... apricot, with the bodice cut low and the skirt gathered in loops to show her white silk petticoat, which swelled from under a flowered stomacher so monstrously, that the tiny blue-heeled slipper upon the second stair seemed smaller than ever. Deep frills of lace fell from her short sleeves and a little lace cap was set on ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... into the hall—the old eighteenth-century hall which was so exquisitely proportioned, but the walls of which were covered with the monstrously ugly mid-Victorian marble paper she much disliked, but never felt she could afford to change as long as it still looked so irritatingly "good" and clean. She opened the front door on to the empty, darkened street; ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... is very well pleased with his bargain, whilst the rival is laughed at by the whole nation, for carrying on his intrigue with no better conduct, than to be discovered, and pay so dear for his pleasure." In this, however, we differ; our cuckolds are laughed at as fools, which is monstrously absurd, whilst the transgressor is denominated a fine fellow, no less monstrously unjust. How far the laws of England may be accessary to such glaring perversity of sentiment, it is difficult to say; but if one were disposed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... and a great criminal, all in one, and he was as pitiless as a panther, more deadly than a moccasin. What influence had perverted such intellect into a weapon of iniquity? What evil of the blood, what lesion of the brain, had distorted his instincts so monstrously? ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... of any high ideals; his bad influence on the child; his luxurious self-indulgent habits, the lies he had told, the insults he had offered her. By now the story had grown to a lurid whole in her imagination, based on a few distorted facts, yet radically and monstrously untrue. Generally, however, when she dwelt upon it, it had power to soothe any smart of conscience, to harden any yearning of the heart, supposing she felt any. And by now she had almost ceased to ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is correct not because it has been proved by the best methods to be so, but because, of all possible explanations, this is the only one that meets the general position in a satisfactory manner. In many cases, however, it is monstrously incorrect, and it is the incorrect conclusion which weighs far more against the acceptance of the results of folklore than do the ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... a love-scene was coming on as a pendant to that monstrously ridiculous affair of half-an-hour back? To know that she had sufficient sensibility was gratifying, and flattering that it aimed at him. She was really a darling little woman: only too absurd! Had she been on the point of saying that she would always like to be where he, Wilfrid, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this condition of affairs will be adequately appreciated when it is remembered that every popular movement to right public wrongs must have the fullest publicity or the effort is doomed to failure. The patent medicine business has been shown to be a monstrously evil institution, yet every effort to enlist the public press in an effort to arouse the necessary degree of indignation which precedes every public demand for the righting of a wrong has failed, because, "it is agreed that the —— Company may cancel this contract ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Peter's, where, set on trestles, it was exposed to public view; but the body had become so black, so deformed and swollen, that it was horrible to behold; from its nose a bloody matter escaped, the mouth gaped hideously, and the tongue was so monstrously enlarged that it filled the whole cavity; to this frightful appearance was added a decomposition so great that, although at the pope's funeral it is customary to kiss the hand which bore the Fisherman's ring, not one approached to offer this mark of respect and religious reverence ...
— The Borgias - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... head I tried to compress into a little hat, my objectively large hands concealed themselves in subjective pockets, my poor generous feet went the way of the author of Pilgrim's Progress. The result is a lop-sided mind, developed monstrously in certain sensitive directions, otherwise not at all. A born stumbler in this world, I naturally lurched up against society—but, as often happens I have lost the thread of my thought: my thoughts, at the critical ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... and its associated cloisters, set far away from any population as it seemed in a flat wilderness of reedy ditches and patchy cultivation. The distilleries and outbuildings were deserted—their white walls were covered by one monstrously great and old wisteria in flower—the soaring marvellous church was in possession of a knot of unattractive guides. One of these conducted them through the painted treasures of the gold and marble chapels; he was an elderly ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... the very thing," cried Peggy. "Of course her mother would send for her on such a night. Only I like not to send her away before she hath finished her supper. 'Tis monstrously inhospitable." ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... is incredible, yet not a single detail have I distorted. With a quite devilish ingenuity they had fastened upon some true bits: I had suggested the change of hats with the cabby, I had wished to ride the giraffe, and the Tuttle person had secured my knife, but how monstrously untrue of me was the impression conveyed by these isolated facts. I could believe now quite all the tales I had ever heard of the queerness of Americans. Queerness, indeed! I went to bed resolving to let the ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... succeeded in drawing it out on to the middle of his cheek from the rear of his skull. Its mate sprang forth till it came out on his cheek, [1]so that it was the size of a five-fist kettle, and he made a red berry thereof out in front of his head.[1] His mouth was distorted monstrously [2]and twisted up to his ears[2]. He drew the cheek from the jaw-bone so that the interior of his throat was to be seen. His lungs and his lights stood out so that they fluttered in his mouth and his gullet. He struck a mad lion's blow with the ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... which the fiend, the negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view.[20] We shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have literally fed on the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering and death—their souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... other, 'however serious to the persons concerned. The mere fact of grave issues in life depending on such paltry things is monstrously ludicrous. Life is a huge farce, and the advantage of possessing a sense of humour is that it enables one to defy fate with ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... without any ridge running from the umbo to the apex, and with the occludent margin reflexed. This seemed caused by the shell having been attacked by some boring animal, and from having supported Balani. In the same specimen the first cirrus on one side was monstrously thick and curled; the second cirrus had its posterior ramus in a rudimentary condition. In Mr. Cuming's Collection, there are small specimens with the zones of growth overlapping each other, with thick irregular margins, ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... influence." And as Lady Tranmore caught the glitter of the diamond crescent, and beheld the small divinity beneath it, she, too, smiled with pleasure, like the other spectators on Kitty's march. The dress was monstrously costly. She knew that. But she forgot the inroad on William's pocket, and remembered only to be proud of William's wife. Since the Parhams' party, indeed, the unlooked-for submission of Kitty, and the clearing of William's prospects, Lady Tranmore had been sweetness itself ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of justice exact discrimination of judgment according to deeds and character is monstrously violated and all differences blotted out by the common dogma of hell. A better thought is shown in the old Persian legend which tells that God once permitted Zoroaster to accompany him on a visit to hell. The prophet saw many in grievous torments. Among the rest, he saw one who was deprived ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... accounts of travellers; that they are easily seen through, and greatly inferior to the jugglers' tricks seen every day in European capitals. The eminent Prof. De Gubernatis, who also had witnessed the Hindu performances, assured the present writer that the current accounts of them were monstrously exaggerated. As to the miraculous in general, the famous Essay of Hume holds a most important place in the older literature of the subject; but, for perhaps the most remarkable of all discussions of it, see Conyers Middleton, D. D., A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of deep concern. The wind had thrown its weight on the ship, trying to pin her down amongst the seas. They made a clean breach over her, as over a deep-swimming log; and the gathered weight of crashes menaced monstrously from afar. The breakers flung out of the night with a ghostly light on their crests—the light of sea-foam that in a ferocious, boiling-up pale flash showed upon the slender body of the ship the toppling rush, the downfall, and the seething ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... sufficient money to satisfy the brewer, and to get my soul out of the snares of the man in black; and sure enough the next morning the two young ladies brought me the fifty pounds, which I forthwith carried to the brewer, who was monstrously civil, saying that he hoped any little understanding we had had would not prevent our being good friends in future. That a'n't all; the people of the neighbouring country hearing as if by art witchcraft that I had licked Hunter, and was on good terms with the brewer, forthwith began to come in crowds ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... something in that spot was alive. At one time she saw it plainly and at other times it vanished, because her fixture of gaze caused her occasionally to greatly tangle and blur those peculiar shadows and faint lights. At last, however, she perceived a human head. It was monstrously dishevelled and wild. It moved slowly forward until its glance could fall upon the prisoner and then upon the sentry. The wandering rays caused the eyes to glitter like silver. The girl's heart pounded so that she ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... mantles from the Scythians. He says—"The Irish have from the Scythians mantles and long glibs, which is a thick curled bush of hair, hanging down over their eyes, and monstrously disguising theme." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... a person driving an aeroplane, able to move in all three dimensions. Pretty soon, of course, she'd have to come hack to earth, where certain monstrously terrifying questions ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... noble mind, he collected the legs of the Turkish trousers, straightened himself on his knees, and called out to Riah in the next room, 'Halloa, you sir!' At sight of the old man re-entering with a gentleness monstrously in contrast with the character he had given him, Mr Fledgeby was so tickled again, that he exclaimed, laughing, 'Good! Good! Upon my soul it ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... author terms witch-mongers; and several chapters are devoted to a descriptive catalogue of the charms in repute and diabolical rites of the most extravagant sort. On the accession of James I., whose 'Demonologie' was in direct opposition to the 'Discoverie,' it was condemned as monstrously heretical; as many copies as could be collected being solemnly committed to the flames. This meritorious and curious production ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... which the Caetanis erected on the top of its circular summit six hundred years ago. After passing it, we saw an interminable line of tombs on both sides of the way, each of which might, for aught I know, have been as massive as that of Cecilia Metella, and some perhaps still more monstrously gigantic, though now dilapidated and much reduced in size. Mrs. Jameson had an engagement to dinner at half past six, so that we could go but a little farther along this most interesting road, the borders of which are strewn with broken marbles; ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... divan. Mustapha's little girl found her way here when she heard I was come, and it seemed quite pleasant to have her playing on the carpet with a dolly and some sugar-plums, and making a feast for dolly on a saucer, arranging the sugar-plums Arab fashion. She was monstrously pleased with Rainie's picture and kissed it. Such a quiet, nice little brown tot, and curiously like ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... conclave over the matter for nearly three years, deliberating in every possible way how to avoid suspicious management and faulty performance: consequently, the forgery is anything but plain and palpable; nay, it is wonderfully obscure and monstrously difficult: nevertheless, like all forged documents, it is bungled—ay, in spite of the pains taken to keep free from bad and blundering work, it is, occasionally (as will be seen in the present book, from this point until the close), ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... world, in the year 1909, refusing to supply an established, world-admired, classical work of genius because its title contains the word "harlot"! In no other European capital, nor in any American capital, could such a monstrously idiotic and disgusting thing happen. It is so preposterous that one cannot realize it all at once. I am a tremendous admirer of England. I have lived too long in foreign parts not to see the fineness of England. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... were the persons,—the two extremities of exalted and forlorn humanity, its vanward and its rearward man, a Roman consul and an abject slave. But their natural relations to each other were, by the caprice of fortune, monstrously inverted: the consul was in chains; the slave was for a moment the arbiter of his fate. By what spells, what magic, did Marius reinstate himself in his natural prerogatives? By what marvels drawn from heaven or from earth, did he, in the twinkling ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... hurts me but little; what shocks me is that those treacherous Burneys should abet and puff him. He is a most ungrateful because unprincipled wretch; but I am sorry that anything belonging to Dr. Burney should be so monstrously wicked." ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... of always wearing a thick and impervious veil, by which, according to his followers, he covered the dazzling splendour of his countenance, which was so great that no mortal could behold it and live, but that, according to his enemies, only served to conceal the hideousness of his features, too monstrously deformed to be contemplated without horror. One of his miracles, which seems the most to have been insisted on, was that he nightly, for a considerable space of time, caused an orb, something like the moon, to rise from a sacred well, which gave a light scarcely ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... what wild fancies, half-formed thoughts, and wandering speculations. Mr Dombey stiff with starch and arrogance; the little image by inheritance, and in unconscious imitation. The two so very much alike, and yet so monstrously contrasted. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... mother to help look at some houses in New King Street, towards which she felt some kind of inclination, but their size has now satisfied her. They were smaller than I expected to find them; one in particular out of the two was quite monstrously little; the best of the sitting-rooms not so large as the little parlour at Steventon, and the second room in every floor about capacious enough to admit ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... hammering it to pieces. Already tilted down the slope of sand, its end was imminent. Here and there in the cocoanut trees people had lashed themselves. The trees did not sway or thresh about. Bent over rigidly from the wind, they remained in that position and vibrated monstrously. Underneath, across the sand, surged the white spume of the breakers. A big sea was likewise making down the length of the lagoon. It had plenty of room to kick up in the ten-mile stretch from the windward rim of the atoll, and all the ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... Charley; so was mine. This is monstrously strange, to say the least of it. However, you tell your story first, and then I ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... into rippling lakes of decidedly overdone toffee; and in similar fashion piled up sacks of coffee berries were roasting themselves not wisely but too well. Pyramids of flour were much in the same way baking themselves into cakes, monstrously misshapen, and much more badly burnt than King Alfred's ever were. "The Boers are poor cooks," laughingly explained our men; "they bake in bulk without proper mixing." Nevertheless, along that line everything seemed very ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... number,—but, much to the vexation of the host, the Chateau-Margaux did not arrive until a late hour, and when the sumptuous supper supplied by "Old Charley" had been done very ample justice by the guests. It came at length, however,—a monstrously big box of it there was, too—and as the whole party were in excessively good humor, it was decided, nem. con., that it should be lifted upon the table and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... immobility they moved with a certain amazing monstrousness, interminably. No, they were never still. One wondered what they could be at. Surely he could not have had enough work now to keep those insatiable hands so monstrously in motion. Even far into the night. Tap-tap-tap! Blows continuous and powerful. On what? On nothing? On the bare iron last? And for what purpose? ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... rather tall, like you, and she had gray eyes, and a nice voice, and a laugh that was sweeter than the singing of nightingales. She was monstrously clever, too, with a flow of language that would have made her a leader in any sphere. She was also a perfect fiend. I have always been anxious to meet her again, in order that I might ask her to marry me. I'm strongly disposed to believe ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... was good, as usual; in Elizabeth's eyes, monstrously good. There was to her something repellent in such luxurious fare enjoyed by strangers, on this tourist-flight through a country so eloquent of man's hard wrestle with rock and soil, with winter and the wilderness. ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the intellectual destitution of mankind. Ah! he had confessed everything, this fractious Jew, this bribon. Good! Then he was no longer wanted. A sudden dense guffaw was heard from the senior captain—a big-headed man, with little round eyes and monstrously fat cheeks which never moved. The old major, tall and fantastically ragged like a scarecrow, walked round the body of the late Senor Hirsch, muttering to himself with ineffable complacency that like this there was no need ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... distress of mind since, after hearing Camusot's order, he had been taken back to the underground cell—an anguish such as he had never before known in the course of a life diversified by many crimes, by three escapes, and two sentences at the Assizes. And is there not something monstrously fine in the dog-like attachment shown to the man he had made his friend by this wretch in whom were concentrated all the life, the powers, the spirit, and the passions of the hulks, who was, so to ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... was sixteen I was much disappointed that I could not go to college, and almost the whole winter, when I was not diverted, I would brood over this habit. As I grew older, it would come to me in spasms, and it seemed to my dawning sense so monstrously child- like, so insane, that I was aghast that it had power to affect me. I can find no words to tell you of the unspeakable horror with which I saw, in my older days, that a thought could so torment me; the mere fact of its being able to torment I could never forget. I know it ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... to fight while the seas were still monstrously swollen and their crests were breaking across the decks of these vessels of less than five hundred tons burden. Wildly they rolled and pitched, burying their bows in the roaring combers. The merchant ships which watched this audacious ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... cattle-like minds, the life we have been born into is a thing simple and natural enough. To Pascal it was monstrously and insolently unnatural. He had that species of grand and terrible imagination which is capable of piercing the world through and through; of rising high up above it, and of pulverising it ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... doing more than half the rowing myself. I don't suppose he would exert his precious self to pull an oar more than five minutes at a time. Amy tried her best to get Mr. Halloway, and so did the Dexters. The way those girls run after him is a caution even to me; but they didn't get him. He's monstrously clever in keeping out of people's clutches. I gave him up long ago as a bad job. Well, good-by, Phebe. Awfully sorry you can't go. Everybody'll be there, and it's to be ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... relation who plans deliberate robberies against those of his blood, and trudges hundreds of weary leagues to put them into execution, is surely a little on the wrong side of toleration. The uncle at Angers may have been monstrously undutiful; but the nephew from Paris ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Fanny, 'and so will you, Pet, when I enlighten you. Amy, has it never struck you that somebody is monstrously polite to ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... whom his lordship's speech appeared monstrously weak and pointless, drew nigh, and gave the widow, in her ear, his version, namely, his sister's embellished. It was briefly this: That the gentleman was a daft lord from England, who had come with the bank in his breeks, to remove poverty from Scotland, beginning ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... a storm of passion, monstrously childish and dreadful. She beat her hands upon the coffin. She wept loudly and ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... moment or two longer there was no response other than the same cold, questioning scrutiny, as if, instead of a sweet-faced woman, something monstrously unnatural was present. At last, in slow, icy utterance, came the ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... was monstrously lonely when Kedzie turned back to her widowhood. Jim's mother and father and sister were touched by her grief and begged her to make their home hers, but she shook ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... nothing but cars and stages at hand to carry us to our own doors. I see clearly there are great disadvantages in city life. If a friend and his wife drop in suddenly in the evening or to dine, it is monstrously inconvenient to have an oyster-shop round the corner whence to improvise a supper or a dinner. It would be so much better to have nothing but the village grocery a mile or two away. The advantages are conspicuous. I wonder the entire population ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... and green," I put in, eagerly, "and where there will be an ingrowing sideboard in the dining-room that won't fit in with the quaint old dinner-set at all, and a kitchenette just off that, in which the great iron pots and kettles that used to hold the family dinners will be monstrously out of place—" ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... imposed upon, and generally gave liberal compensation, altogether apart from the market value. Experts, such as land agents and surveyors, were always in request, and indeed these experts in value caused the most extravagant amounts to be awarded. Even the mean sum between highest and lowest was a monstrously unfair guide, for one old expert used to instruct his pupils that the only true principle in estimating value was to ask at least twice as much as the business or other property was worth, because, he said, the other side will be sure to try and cut you ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... monstrously, for each five-ton truck load added several thousand dollars to his bank account, but the time was getting short. Less than three weeks remained before the bond and lease expired, and still Wiley was playing to win. He crammed his mine with men, snatching the ore from the stopes as the bonanza ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... Deluge is a pure fiction; but I have no hesitation in affirming the same thing of the story of the Creation. [12] Between these two lies the story of the creation of man and woman and their fall from primitive innocence, which is even more monstrously improbable than either of the other two, though, from the nature of the case, it is not so easily capable of direct refutation. It can be demonstrated that the earth took longer than six days in the making, and that the Deluge, as described, ...
— The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science - Essay #6 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... monstrously depraved imagination," says M. Henri Martin, "never could have conceived what the trial reveals." M. Lacroix has been obliged to draw a veil over much that transpired, and I must draw it closer still. I have, however, said enough to show that this memorable trial presents horrors ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould |
