"Appalling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... difficulties with the Western Indians swelled into importance, General Scott was dispatched to the scene of hostility. There rose up before him then, in the ravages of a frightful pestilence, a form of danger infinitely more appalling than the perils of the field. How he bore himself in this emergency, how faithfully he became the nurse and the physician of those from whom terror and loathing had driven all other aid, can not be forgotten by a just ...
— General Scott • General Marcus J. Wright
... any moment the fiend of delirium might spring upon him, and then this tender child would be left alone with him in his awful conflict. The bare possibility of such a thing made him shudder, and all his thought was now directed toward the means of saving her from being a witness of the appalling scene. ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... to you in the name of my as yet unwritten poems, my masterpieces for which France, for which the whole brotherhood of letters, so anxiously waits, to put a term to this appalling chastisement!" ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... our Thid fled, spurred by the knowledge that his life was forfeit. For a time, he was naturally thought dead. Who could survive unprotected the extremes of heat and cold? And if by a miracle he triumphed over the elements, how survive the appalling enmity of the Termans, whose rudimentary brains conceived ...
— Walls of Acid • Henry Hasse
... the convict set himself at the climb. His haste, the swift glances shot behind him, the appalling dread that made his nerves ragged, delayed his speed by dissipating the singleness of his energy. His face and hands were torn with catclaw, his knee bruised by a slip against a sharp ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... he cautiously approached the window. He was no longer guessing at an elusive truth. He knew what Graham was thinking, what he was planning, what he intended to do, and the thing was appalling. Both he and Rossland knew there would be some way of sheltering Mary Standish in Sokwenna's cabin; they were accepting a desperate gamble, believing that Alan Holt would find a safe place for her, while he fought until he fell. It was the finesse ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... without beholding either majesty or divinity in humanity, surely the best emotion that our natures know—pity—must be large enough to draw us to console where we can, and sustain where we can, in view of the endless suffering, the continual injustice, the appalling contrasts, with which the world is full. Whether man be the vibrion or the heir to immortality, the bundle of carbon or the care of angels, one fact is indisputable: he suffers agonies, mental and physical, that are wholly out of proportion ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... all these; nor are the Russians wanting, though they get more and more astonished: Tempelhof, who was in it, says he never, except at Torgau next Year, heard a louder cannonade. Loud exceedingly; and more or less appalling to the Russian imagination: but not destructive in proportion; the distance being too considerable,—"1,950 paces at the nearest," as Tempelhof has since ascertained by measuring. Friedrich's two batteries, however, as they took the Russians in the flank or by enfilade, did good execution. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... direful, frightful, majestic, solemn, appalling, dread, grand, noble, stately, august, dreadful, horrible, portentous, terrible, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... sort aver, is to say nothing—less than nothing. In the absence of your beloved house-master, for whom no one has a higher regard than myself, I will, if you will allow me, explain the grossness—the unparalleled enormity—the appalling fetor of the stenches (I believe in the good old Anglo-Saxon word), stenches, sir, with which you have seen fit to infect your house... Oh, bother! I've forgotten the rest, but it was very beautiful. Aren't you grateful to us for laborin' with you this way, Rattray? Lots of chaps 'ud ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... the magnificent brilliance of that ancient world, its fulness of speech and action, its copiousness of life, made the contrast more sudden and appalling; and it seems to be only at a later period, when the brightness was a little dimmed and the tide of life did not run so full, that the feeling grew up which regarded death as the giver of rest. With a last word of greeting to the bright ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... omnipotent being who had detected a malefactor in a criminal act. Was Steynholme and its secret felon being regarded in that way by the providence which, for some inscrutable purpose, permitted, yet would infallibly punish, a dreadful murder? She was a girl of devout mind, and the notion was appalling in its ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... point out the person who ate the greater portion of him when transformed into a pie; but it so happened that the next morning, about seven bells, the ship was alarmed by the cry of "A man overboard!" This is an appalling sound at any time; but when the ship is making ten knots, with a heavy sea on, the chances for a fellow-creature's fate, make the moment one of dreadful anxiety, and especially to the commander, one of fearful responsibility; as to save one life, that of ten or more must be risked. ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... were lined with the villages of the Indians. Their wigwams were of a great variety of structure. The scenes presented were astonishing in their wild and picturesque aspect. Crowds of weird-like savages would often be collected on the bluffs, watching the appalling phenomenon of ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... was first worked in these comedies. All these excellences are summed up in the incomparable wealth and flexibility of his vocabulary. He has a Shakespearean mastery of the technicalities of every art and mystery, an appalling command of billingsgate and of the language of the cuisine, and would tire Falstaff and Prince Hal with base comparisons. And not content with the existing resources of the Greek vocabulary, he coins grotesque or beautiful compounds,—exquisite epithets like "Botruodoere" ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... great statesman be raised up in our hour of need to undeceive this unhappy multitude, now eagerly rushing or heedlessly sauntering along the pathway of revolution, as an ox goeth to the slaughter or a fool to the correction of the stocks, what is it but a symptom as infallible as it is appalling, that the day of our greatness and stability is no more, and that the chill and damp of death are already creeping over England's glory.' These dolorous spectres haunted him incessantly, as they haunted so many who had not the sovereign excuse ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... everybody was on his legs; lights were lit; the house-steward, his face deadly pale with fright and terror, came up panting with his keys; but as they proceeded through the passages and halls and rooms, suite after suite, and found all safe, and heard in the appalling silence nothing except the creaking rattle of the locks, which occasioned some difficulty in opening, and the ghost-like echo of their own footsteps, they began one and all to be utterly astounded. Nowhere was there the least trace of damage. The old house-steward ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... times long past some intriguing aunts tried very hard to arrange a marriage between my father and the deaf young lady who had about 600 pounds a year in land in and near Melrose. She might have been my mother! The idea was appalling! None of her children inherited the deafness, and they took a fair proportion of good looks from their father, for the mother was exceedingly homely. A brightlooking grandson was on the rug looking through a bound volume of Punch, as my nephew ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... couple of hours to see what her fate would be. At the end of that time, the dense smoke which had nearly hidden her from our view, suddenly became one enveloping mass of flame. It was a beautiful, yet appalling sight, to see that noble vessel thus burning upon the breast of the sea! For nearly an hour her form, sheeted in fire, stood out distinctly against the face of the sky, and then she went down, and left only a few charred and mutilated fragments ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... out together. The thing raised its head and looked about until its eyes rested upon us; then it gave vent to a most appalling hiss that rose to the crescendo of a terrific shriek and came ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... complex vision is the vision of the soul, if the soul uses its bodily sensation as only one among its other instruments of contact with life, then it is obvious that between the soul of a man and the soul of a planet or a plant there need be no such appalling and desolating gulf as that which fills us with such profound melancholy when we refuse to let the complex vision have its complete rhythmic play and insist on sacrificing the revelations made by instinct and intuition to the falsifying conclusions of reason and sensation, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of this vast wilderness is appalling. From our lofty post on the mountain-top, we obtain a view over the rugged and chaotic masses of the stupendous chain, and the vast deserts which stretch away far from its eastern base; while on all sides are broken ridges and chasms and ravines, with masses of piled-up rocks and ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... "David, it is appalling to hear you speak," said Mrs. Dolman. "Orion, I hate to pronounce your name, but listen to me, little boy. I forbid you to go if you are ...
— A Little Mother to the Others • L. T. Meade
... fairly gained his seat in the saddle, a ball with a rustling hum carried off the head of the unfortunate colonel. It was an appalling sight, and George Fairburn was forced to turn away ...
— With Marlborough to Malplaquet • Herbert Strang and Richard Stead
... she said, decisively. "What is one of the strangest diagnostics of madness—what is the first appalling sign of mental aberration? The mind becomes stationary; the brain stagnates; the even current of reflection is interrupted; the thinking power of the brain resolves itself into a monotone. As the waters of a tideless pool putrefy by reason ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... the skill with which he managed to introduce himself into the salons of Paris, this story would not have been colored by the tones of truth which it certainly owes to him, for they are entirely due to his penetrating sagacity and desire to fathom the mysteries of an appalling condition of things, which was concealed as carefully by the victim as by those who ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... Russian service, and one of the most noble and generous as well as her officers, Mouravieff. The Russians were repulsed again and again by the townspeople and their rude and undisciplined assistants from the country. The army of Mouravieff was punished with appalling slaughter, and had food been sent to the garrison, which the Turkish pashas could have effected, General Williams would not only have saved Kars, but have driven the Russians back upon the line of the Caucasus. Famine, however, conquered the heroic ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... down; still holding the papers. He must clear his brain; and how was that possible with the images flashing through it in endless and vivid succession? For a while he could not steady himself; the shock was bewildering; he could think of nothing but the appalling drama. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... in the dictionary there is surely none worse than this one. The suggestions of stodginess are appalling, including, even at best, hints of overweight, general uninterestingness, and a disposition to sit at home in smoking-jacket and slippers after one's evening meal. As my guardian suggested, my first youth was over. I held ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... stopped, convulsed by such a fit of rage that he had to relieve himself by a volley of appalling oaths. Finally he resumed: "It isn't the swindle that angers me; it is his disgusting behavior to me. He has gammoned me, Madame Burle. By God! Does he take me for an ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... her and her child as barnacles with such appalling adhesive powers that even his ingenuity at "crowding out" had been baffled. In justice to him, it must be admitted that Mrs. Mumpson was a type of the poor relation that would tax the long suffering of charity itself. Her husband had left her scarcely his blessing, and if ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... The circumstances of life of child and youth are such that we become familiar with sin before we have the intelligence to understand the need of resisting, even if we are fortunate enough to have such an education as to awaken a sense of sin as opposition to God. There is nothing more appalling than the tragedy of life thus defiled and broken and put at a disadvantage before it even understands the ideals that should govern its course. When the vision of perfection comes and we face life as the field where we are to acquire eternal values, we face it with a poisoned imagination ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... had his full share of mediaeval mischievousness, replied that the physique of the lower middle classes was improving at a most appalling rate. She saw that he was laughing at their harmless neighbour, and roused herself ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... the like, but confined themselves to punishing men who had committed intolerable crimes. Theft was as serious as murder, perhaps more so, in the creed of the time and place. The list of murders reached appalling dimensions. The times were sadly out of joint. The legislature was corrupt, graft was rampant—though then unknown by that name—and the entire social body was restless, discontented, and uneasy. Politics had become a fine art. The judiciary, lazy and corrupt, ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... 1914 had witnessed an appalling degree of frightfulness in eastern Belgium, the Wallon or French-speaking part of the country more especially. The Germans seemed to bear a special grudge against this region, regarding it as doggedly opposed to absorption into a Greater Germany; whereas they ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... leave on any pretext whatever. This was his policy of "reconcentration." Deficient food supply, lack of sanitary precautions, and absence of moral safeguards made conditions of life in these camps appalling. Death was a welcome relief. Reconcentration, combined with executions and deportations, could have but one result—the "pacification" of Cuba by converting it ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... mountain to its base, so that the ocean flowed in, and a fearful fight of fire and sea began. Steam shot for miles into the air, with vast geysers leaping through it, and the hiss and screech and bellow were appalling. The crater filled with water, so that Pele and her brothers had to drink it dry, lest the fires should be quenched. When they had done this they resumed the attack on Kamapua, emptying the mountain of its ash and molten rock, and hurling tons of stone ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... Dr. Pendegrast had been so severe a shock to Lynde that he could not straightway recover his mental balance. The appalling shadow which the doctor's presence had for the moment thrown across him had left Lynde benumbed and chilled despite the reassuring sunshine of the doctor's words. By degrees, however, Lynde warmed to life again; his gloom slipped off and was lost in the restless tides ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... of Dominichino and of the Caraccis, of which there are a very great number, incline, in general, to the representation of what is dark or gloomy in character, or what is terrific and appalling in suffering. The subjects which the first of these masters has in general selected, are the cells of monks, the energy of martyrs, or the sufferings of the crucifixion; and the dark-blue coldness of his colouring, combined with the depth of his shadows, accord well with the gloomy character ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Blackwood; I shall never see you more." He had a presentiment that, while he was certain of victory, it would, nevertheless, be gained at the price of his own life. Yet, with this prospect before him, appalling as it must have been to his mind, he was calm and serene. His whole attention was fixed on Villeneuve, who was wearing to form the line in close order upon the larboard tack, thereby to bring Cadiz under his lee, and to facilitate, if necessary, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... rushing air: the tempests were abroad. But amidst the mingling of the mighty sounds, she heard distinctly the ringing of a horse's hoofs; and presently a wild cry, in which she recognised the voice of Godolphin, rang forth, adding to the wrath of nature the yet more appalling witness of a human despair. The cry was followed by the louder dashing of the waves, and the fiercer turmoil of the winds; and then her anguish and horror freeing her from the ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... on a meeting-place and I hung up the receiver, went upstairs to my room, sat down, and opened the paper. I found the article Edith referred to easily enough. It was on the inside of the front page printed underneath large letters. It was appalling! The third sentence of the headlines contained my sister's name. There must be some mistake. Wasn't such news as this borne by a lawyer with proper ceremony and form, or at least delivered by mail, inside an envelope sealed with red wax? Ruth had known nothing ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... in the homes and parks of the wealthy, as pictured by the sycophantic fashion magazine and cast with the people of its gallery of photographs—sublimely smart women in frocks of marvellous inspiration, and polo-playing, motor-driving, clothes-mad men of an insouciance appalling. ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... soul of loveliness; and, although from henceforth the precept to 'Work while it is day' will doubtless gain an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words that 'the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it,—at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... and its pastoral tributary valleys. To the south, the stern limestone peaks of the dolomite region; the Vedretta Marmolata, with its breastplate of ice, king of these barbaric giants, the splintered pinnacles of the Drei Zinnen, the pyramidal Antalao, and many another jagged, appalling mountain, stern as the bewildering doctrines of election and reprobation, whilst the pure glistening snow, green meadows and pleasant woods opposite seemed to breathe forth the gentle, winning truths of the glad ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... get carried out; in the twinkling of an eye I am stung all round the neck, and recognise there are lots too many mosquitoes and sandflies in the scenery to permit of contemplation of any kind. Never have I seen sandflies and mosquitoes in such appalling quantities. With a wild ping of joy the latter made for me, and I retired promptly into a dark corner of the verandah, swearing horribly, but internally, and fought them. Mr. Hudson, Agent-general, and Mr. Cockshut, Agent for the Ogowe, walk up and down the beach in front, doubtless ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... was with the Roman Republic. As soon as this stage was reached it began to "stew in its own juice" with appalling rapidity. Reformers, like the Gracchi, were crushed; and the commonwealth went to pieces under the shocks and counter-shocks of demagogues like Clodius, conspirators like Catiline, and military adventurers such as Marius ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... intensely dark, but away on the starboard-quarter the heavens appeared of an ebony blackness that was quite appalling. This appearance, that rose on the sky like a shroud of crape, quickly spread upwards until it reached the zenith. Then a few gleams of light seemed to illuminate it very faintly, and a ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... me it appears perfectly clear that the interest of that country requires that the violence of the spirit by which those parties are at this time governed must be greatly mitigated, if not entirely extinguished, or consequences will ensue which are appalling to ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... in each particular day. 'Babylon in ruins,' says a great author, 'is not so sad a sight as a human soul overthrown by lunacy.' But there is a sadder even than that,—the sight of a family-ruin wrought by crime is even more appalling. Forgery, breaches of trust, embezzlement, of private or public funds—(a crime sadly on the increase since the example of Fauntleroy, and the suggestion of its great feasibility first made by him)—these ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... take up half the passage-way, directly you get past the drawing and dining-room doom doors. The cottage is not high enough to strike the eye, but the squareness, or more properly the cubeness, of these two-storied houses is appalling. They look for all the world like houses built of cards, except that the cards are uncommonly solid. For my own part, I should never care to live in a two-storied house again, after experiencing the comfort of never having to go upstairs, ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... the usual way of execution for women murderers should be altered in her case to beheading by "the Maiden.'' Had she been of lesser rank she would certainly have been burned, after being strangled at a stake, as were her nurse and the serving-woman. This was the appalling fate reserved for convicted women[4] in such cases, and on conviction even of smaller crimes. The process was even crueller in instances where the crime had been particularly atrocious. "The criminal,'' says the Pitcairn account of such ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... not know the meaning of fear. With a wound in his shoulder McKessock took one gun out of the forward line, mounted it in rear of a ruin about two hundred feet behind its original position and began ripping holes through the German ranks that were appalling. He was finally overcome from loss of blood. Major Osborne, badly gassed, fought on with a wound in the shoulder till a bullet caught him in the face. He was put into a communication trench from which ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... giant figure Sheila could scarcely discern—so dark was the night—Grainger soon had the tent prepared to resist the storm. As they worked, there came such an appalling thunderclap that it shook the ground beneath her, and for some minutes she was unable to hear even the droning roar of the rain-laden tornado that came tearing down from the mountains, snapping off the branches of the gum-trees, bending low the ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... crushing captivity? Some must agonize and spend their strength unavailingly, like birds beating their wings against the bars of a cage for freedom. To the man who had roamed through all the continents of the world this forced inactivity seemed appalling—stultifying. The hampering of personal freedom, the forcing of independent minds into one narrow prescribed channel that admitted of no individual expansion, the waste of material and the fettering ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... place as juror of the Tribunal for the second time. Before the opening of the sitting, he discussed with his colleagues the news that had arrived that morning. Some of it was doubtful, some untrue; but part was authentic—and appalling; the armies of the coalition in command of all the roads and marching en masse on Paris, La Vendee triumphant, Lyons in insurrection, Toulon surrendered to the English, who were landing fourteen thousand ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... her mercy? He might be sure that she would long ago have stood in the dock but for her ability to make scandalous and ruinous revelations. Did Redgrave know that he had a high-class criminal in his employment? Possibly he knew it well enough. There was no end to the appalling suggestiveness of this discovery. Hugh remembered what he had said in talk with Harvey Rolfe about the rottenness of society. Never had he felt himself so much a coward as in face of this woman, whose shameless smile covered secrets ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... on the couch, awake and fully dressed, heard the door of his cabin open. He did not move in the least, waiting to recognize the voice, with an appalling ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... difference is your highest charm. And now, love, we had better go down whichever side of the hill is easiest, for this fog is rather appalling. I forgive the wind, because it blew you against my heart just now, and that is where I want you ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... world's means for what spiritual operation we undertake. And so content have we grown with things as they are, that what they might be comes only as a dream that passes away quickly with the night; blind to our appalling money-dependency in modern religion, satisfied that the Kingdom of Heaven is as nigh to us as is possible under present conditions of society, we practically have substituted for the theological virtues, Faith, Hope and Charity, the ascending ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... festal treat. Their places taken, they, with eyebrows rais'd, Sit patiently, and fain would be amaz'd. I know the art to hit the public taste, Yet ne'er of failure felt so keen a dread; True, they are not accustomed to the best, But then appalling the amount they've read.. How make our entertainment striking, new, And yet significant and pleasing too? For to be plain, I love to see the throng, As to our booth the living tide progresses; As wave on wave successive rolls along, And through heaven's narrow portal forceful presses; Still in ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may, certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... in the past, before you and I had ever met? Ah, how little you men understand a woman's heart! Shall I tell you what I felt when Billy told me, after the first bewildering shock was over? First: sorrow for you, my dearest; a realisation of how appalling the mental anguish must have been, at the time. Secondly: thankfulness—yes, intense overwhelming thankfulness—to know at last what had come between us; and to know it was this thing—this mere ghost out of the past—nothing tangible or real; no wrong of mine against you, or of yours against ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... at the season when his favourite prey, the salmon, comes up the river to spawn, is another high excitement to dwellers on the Trent. I remember well the almost appalling interest with which, in childhood, I beheld some huge specimen of this marine visitor, drawn up by crane on a wharf, after an enthusiastic contest for his capture ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... landscape, drier indeed than that to which Northerners are accustomed, but still surrounded by trees, and with a distance that could render things lightly blue. Instead of that this large building stood in the complete waste which I have already described at such length, which is so appalling and so new to an European from any other province of Europe. As I approached the building I saw that there gathered round it a village, or rather a group of dependent houses; for the church was so much larger than anything in the place, and the material ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... most of all was the appalling havoc which these clay and iron industries are making with the once beautiful banks of the river. Each of them has a large daily output of debris, which is dumped unmercifully upon the water's edge in heaps from fifty to a hundred feet high. Sometimes for nearly ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... kept many pupils away. Nothing could be more terrible to a shrinking awkward boy or girl from a farm than this requirement, to stand upon a raised platform with nothing to break the effect of sheer crucifixion. It was appalling. It was a pillory, a stake, a burning, and yet there was a fearful fascination about it, and it was doubtful if a majority of the students would have voted for its abolition. The preps and juniors saw the seniors winning electrical ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... minutes are considered a long time to be submerged, but some divers can hold out four or five minutes. When his strength is exhausted, he gives a signal by pulling the rope, and is drawn up with his bag of oysters. Appalling dangers compass him about. Sharks watch for him as he dives, and not infrequently he comes up maimed for life. It is recorded of a pearl-diver, that he died from over-exertion immediately after he reached land, having brought up with him a shell that contained ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... long war. The dead of that war make a mournful long list—an interminable list. Of men slain in the field the count goes by tens of thousands; of innocent women and children slain by bitter hardship and hunger it goes by that appalling term, millions. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was nothing but one vast charnel-house, being literally full of thousands of human skeletons, which lay piled up in an enormous gleaming pyramid, formed by the slipping down of the bodies at the apex as fresh ones were dropped in from above. Anything more appalling than this jumbled mass of the remains of a departed race I cannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful was that in this dry air a considerable number of the bodies had simply become desiccated with the skin ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... away in the darkness the ranger began to fear—not for himself, but for Helen. The unreasoning ferocity with which the valley still pursued her was appalling. For the first time in his life he strongly desired money. He felt his weakness, his ignorance. In the face of the trial—which should mean complete vindication for the girl, but which might prove to be another hideous miscarriage of justice—he was of no more value ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... educated Frenchman as to an Englishman. The bulk of French slang is never heard by the ears of educated people nor uttered by their lips: it circulates among the classes which create it; and the size of this dictionary is therefore not necessarily appalling to a Frenchman's eyes: it does not represent the corruption of the language, because slang does not taint the speech of those classes who control and make the standard speech and literature of the nation. If a dictionary of English slang were published now, how many young ladies and gentlemen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... antediluvian chuckle that sounded like a magical and appalling rattle from the inner recesses of his person. He was getting brighter and brighter, as the stars appear to do when ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... we were within two cables' length of the beach, and even at this distance from it we were surrounded with the breakers; the surf broke many feet high, and roared as it rushed up with a velocity that was appalling, dashing the foam right to the door of Bramble's cottage, which was forty or fifty yards higher than it generally gained to even in very bad weather: we now lowered our sails, stowed them in the boat, and got our oars to pass, backing against ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... to be dreaded as a possible (though involuntary) agent of evil; especially perilous was it, these venerable dames would affirm, to become the object of his affection or caresses—a dogma which received appalling confirmation in the fate of the brindled cat, who, after having been caught by the leg in a trap intended for a less respectable robber of hen-roosts, was finished by a bull-terrier, who took advantage of her embarrassed circumstances to pay ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... succeeded my first alarm. I sat down upon the step of the door, and watched the awful scene in silence. The fire was raging in the cedar swamp immediately below the ridge on which the house stood, and it presented a spectacle truly appalling. ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... gripped my hand tight and did not say a word. The next phase I remember only too vividly. When the flat door opened, in a blaze of electric light, it was like a curtain being lifted on a scene of appalling tragedy. As soon as we entered we were sucked into it. A horrible hospital smell of anaesthetics, ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... familiar with the aspect of the Rocky Mountains are aware of the singular lack of dignity in those enormous elevations. They are merely big, without any superior beauty, until you come to the favoured spots of nature's art, where some great contrast throws out into appalling relief the gulf between the high and the low. It is so ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... for the world; delighted, in his malice, to insinuate grim expressions into the faces of brown-paper farmers who drove pigs to market, bellmen who advertised lost lawyers' consciences, movable old ladies who darned stockings or carved pies; and other like samples of his stock-in-trade. In appalling masks; hideous, hairy, red-eyed Jacks in Boxes; Vampire Kites; demoniacal Tumblers who wouldn't lie down, and were perpetually flying forward, to stare infants out of countenance; his soul perfectly revelled. They were his only relief, and safety-valve. He was great in such inventions. ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... Drink-sodden men and screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him. The noise from within was appalling—cries, groans, uproar—all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall—then the sound of a voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying piteously ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... engine of destruction seemed suddenly to be in the grip of some vastly greater Colossus—a clutching hand that closed! The plane jumped back with an appalling crash, a roar of rending metal. For an instant there came the sound like a mighty buzz-saw as the giant propellers of one wing cut into the body of the careening plane. In that instant, the great power storage tank split open with an impact like the bursting ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... five and six hundred, was almost inevitable. The captain had been landed on account of indisposition on the preceding day, and his absence could not fail to increase the confusion of a large and crowded transport under such appalling circumstances. The officers had succeeded in getting a hawser to the shore, by which several of the people landed; but this was a slow operation; and none but a bold and active person could avail himself of this means of escape, for the rolling ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... over the animal though Leonie stood on one foot, bit her underlip, and squeezed the puppy to suffocation in a valiant effort to restrain this appalling sign ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... freedom from caste prejudices he not only ate with Europeans, but even showed no objection to beef, much to the horror of all orthodox Hindus. That a Brahmin, of all men, should partake of the sacred flesh of the almost divine cow was an appalling sacrilege in ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... moral effect would be that the pauper would regard his vice as acknowledged and approved by society. To say that there are no other remedies, remedies which would compel the pauper to earn his living, is an appalling confession of failure on ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... stuck the bowl and some two inches of the shank of a well-sooted pipe. An old red handkerchief was twisted rope-wise about his lean and scraggy neck, but it by no means sufficed to hide the scar of what had evidently been a most appalling gash, extending right across his throat, almost from ear to ear, the great cicatrix clearly visible like a white line through the thick stubble of some ten days' standing that ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... the river itself was an appalling thing; its bends swept miles long in giant arcs. But bend after bend they spanned, bar after bar they skirted, bank after bank they conquered—and went on. In the water as much as out of it, drenched, baked, gaunt, ragged, grim, they paid ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... that their prisoner began to rage out abusive words in Dutch, so loudly that in the exasperation he felt, Ingleborough raised his right foot and delivered four kicks with appalling vigour and rapidity—appalling to the receiver, who uttered a series of yells for help in sound honest English, struggling the while to escape, but with his progress barred by West, who closed up and seized him by ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... terrifying. He carved with appalling courtesy. "Is there another chicken, Genevieve?" he asked, as if he had only an impersonal interest in her kitchen. No, there was only the one. And plenty, too, said the guests pleasantly. Genevieve hoped there were eggs and bacon for Marie ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... person who would not know how to take care of money if she had it, and although everybody knew that if Mrs. Cliff made a will she would never think of leaving her property to Willy, still, everybody who thought or talked about the matter saw the appalling fact staring them in their faces—that if Mrs. Cliff died without a will, ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... I saw no signs of what might be called sorrow. Yet his appearance was one to wring the heart and rouse the most contradictory conjectures as to just what chord in his evidently highly strung nature throbbed most acutely to the horror and astonishment of this appalling end of so short ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... actual happenings in the underworld of vice and crime in the metropolis, that gives an appalling insight into the life of the New York criminal. It contains intimate, inside information concerning the gang fights and the gang tyranny that has since startled the entire world. The book embraces twelve stories of grim, dark ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... the ordinary, as wheel locks go; a long Flemish weapon of about 1640, the type used by the Royalist cavalry in the English Civil War. There were two others almost like it, but this one was in simply appalling condition. The metal was rough with rust, and apparently no attempt had been made to clean it in a couple of centuries. There was a piece cracked out of the fore-end, the ramrod was missing, as was the front ramrod-thimble, both the trigger-guard and the butt-cap ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... among the frontiersmen, in less than a minute. Now they wheeled about, and, with rifles loaded freshly, faced the foe who pressed forward in a great horde, yelling and firing. Well it was for the white army that it was composed of veteran borderers. The sight was appalling to the last degree. The defenders were ringed around by flashes of fire, and hundreds of hideous forms leaped as if in the war dance, brandishing their tomahawks. But Colonel Clark was everywhere ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... all things. I do not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is, and that very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects upon every thing and upon itself, and is no better acquainted with itself than with any thing else. I see these appalling spaces of the universe which enclose me, and I find myself tethered in one corner of this immense expansion without knowing why I am stationed in this place rather than in another, or why this moment of time which is given me to live is assigned me at this point rather ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... in Latin rhyme. Two of them are especially attributed to Mapes. One is "on not marrying;" Golias here sets forth a very appalling catalogue of the miseries of matrimony. The husband is a donkey who is spurned by his wife. Her tongue is a sword. He thanks heaven he has escaped from the danger he was once in from the fascinations of a beautiful lady. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... I lay shivering in my blanket and could not get warm. The guns were continually crashing out. Shells were bursting just outside with appalling regularity. Suddenly they seemed to quieten down, as if by some means the Germans had got to know of our great plans and were preparing for the blow. Presently everything was comparatively quiet, except for the scurrying ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... came into the room he divined that a change had come over the spirit of the dream. Out of the corners of his eyes he caught a glimpse of an appalling beauty standing behind a sewing machine. His face fired up, his legs began to quiver, he wished the ground would open and swallow him as ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the control of some species of discipline and moved toward the houses of the condemned, of whom printed catalogues had been furnished the officers. The shouts, the yells, the delight were appalling. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... daughter who could resist it? It would not be many minutes before the head would find a happy resting-place upon the shoulder beside it, and all the little trials and troubles—trials so very real and very appalling to young hearts—would be put into words, and lose half their bitterness in the telling just because love—that mighty magician—had ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... The powers of disintegration that haunt a tropical forest seemed to be devouring certain spots of the room. Here, in the midst of bright marble, was a section of wall that seemed as old as the pyramids. The surface of the stone had an appalling mouldiness, as though it had been lifted from an ancient graveyard where it had lain in the festering ground ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... child forgot her pain for a moment and smiled. At that instant there was a blinding flash of lightning, and the appalling ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... back up the slope in a diagonal direction to where the rift opened, to sink down at last, breathless and thankful, in the narrow way; glad even to be beyond reach of the influence of the horrible gulf, which had for me an attraction that was appalling. ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... Jeannie's bed was on the other side of the room, and she could generally hear her movements plainly enough, for the sick child was a restless sleeper. But now she could hear nothing, not even the faint vibration of her sister's breath. The silence was absolute and appalling; it struck tangibly upon her sense, as the darkness struck upon her eye-balls and filled her with a numb, unreasoning terror. She slipped out of bed and struck a match. In another few seconds she was standing by Jeannie's white little bed, waiting for the wick of the ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... intense sunlight. It was a third as tall again at the shoulders as the biggest Himalayan tiger, its head was flat-skulled like a tiger's, and its upper jaw was armed with two long, yellow, saber-like tusks, projecting downwards below the lower jaw. This appalling monster started after Bawr with a swift, crouching rush, as silent, for all its weight, as if its ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... fun in merely being able to move about and do things. For this reason I am overwhelmed with gratitude whenever I think that, through some slight error in the cosmic process, the life forces that glow in me might have been flung into a turnip—but weren't! The thought is truly appalling—isn't it? The avoidance of that one awful possibility is enough to make any man feel lucky all his life. It's such fun to awaken in the morning with all your legs and arms and eyes and ears about you, waiting to be used again! So strong was this thought in me when we cast off, that even the memory ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Colonel Donald McLeod took the place of his sick commander, General McDonald, and fell upon what he had been led to believe was Colonel Caswell's camp; but his spies had been misled, and his foes were to be reached only by crossing the bridge before him. The prospect was appalling, but McLeod was brave, and putting himself at the head of a picked band of broadswordsmen, he charged across the remaining two logs of the bridge. It was a terrible moment when the Whigs saw these dauntless Highlanders, who had so often broken the strongest lines of troops in Europe, rushing ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... broken—with the harsh accents of wrath. Gentleness never accomplished more, as to taste and pathos, than in McCullough's utterance of "I gave you all," and "I'll go with you." The rallying of the broken spirit after that, and the terrific outburst, "I'll not weep," had an appalling effect. The recognition of Cordelia was simply tender, and the death scene lovely in pathos and solemn and affecting ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... among the greatest in any view, and positively the greatest for scenical grandeur, and in that respect makes the nearest approach of all English tragedies to the Grecian model;) he does not fear to introduce, for the same appalling effect as that for which Aeschylus introduced the Eumenides, a triad of old women, concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque peculiarity in the popular creed of that day,—that although potent over winds and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... almost appalling in it, and at first Mabel had blanched under its force, but her own ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... began to appear in the newspapers with appalling frequency. He leaped to instant fame by being the first man in California who paid ten thousand dollars for a single bull. His livestock specialist, whom he had filched from the Federal Government, in England outbid the Rothschilds' Shire farm for Hillcrest Chieftain, quickly ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... wish to make his phrases about his like, to reproduce their effect in composite portraiture? Eugenio fell into a state so low that nothing but the confession of his perplexity could help him out; and the friend to whom he owned his mystifying, his all but appalling, experience did not fail him in his extremity. "No," he wrote back, "it is not that you have seen all these people, and that they offer no novel types for observation, but even more that they illustrate ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... eyes were filmed by a growing drowsiness when Wapi drew silently away and slunk suspiciously into the night. There was no yapping foxes here, forty miles from the coast. An almost appalling silence hung under the white stars, a silence broken only by the low and distant moaning the wind always makes on the barrens. Wapi listened to it, and he sniffed with his gray muzzle turned to the ...
— Back to God's Country and Other Stories • James Oliver Curwood |
