"Ghoul" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... make way; of course, they paid no heed to such impertinence, and then he rode among them. Ma sh' Allah! And Mitri too! To hear them talk of Mitri, any one would suppose the poor, good priest some dreadful ghoul. . . . All that was empty talk, however spiteful, and Allah knows I am well seasoned to it. But when they came to speak of thy Emir, and swore to turn his mind against thee, I saw danger. What ailed ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... last advertisement just as the thousand windows sprang to renewed life. It was a position as shipping clerk in a large department store. After waiting an hour to see the manager, a double-chinned ghoul with the eyes of a pig, he had been dismissed ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... down to the door, which she had left half open, and followed her by moonlight, till I saw her enter a burying- ground just by our house. I got to the end of the wall, taking care not to be seen, and looking over, saw Ameeneh with a ghoul. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... crisped and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir:— It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... if Samoa didn't do, you needn't stay beyond the month, and I should have had another pleasure in my life, which is a serious consideration for me. I take this as the hand of the Lord preparing your way to Vailima—in the desert, certainly—in the desert of Cough and by the ghoul-haunted woodland of Fever—but whither that way points there can be no question—and there will be a meeting of the twa Hoasting Scots Makers in spite of fate, fortune ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... orchestra moans forth a sinister strain given by the flutes, mingled with a rattling tremolo which sounds like the clatter of bones. This creature evidently plays an ugly part in the piece—that of a horrible old ghoul, spiteful and famished. Still more appalling than her person is her shadow, which, projected upon a white screen, is abnormally and vividly distinct; by means of some unknown process this shadow, which nevertheless ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... is plain that a Scot who can blindly dote On the face of an Eastern ghoul, And a ghoul who was worth not a silver groat, Is a Scot ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are th' infernal powers moved for me, That all the hosts of hell me welcome give, And claim me comrade in their revelry? Abhorrent things, I am not yours, I live, I know I live because I think on death! I live, dead things, to revel among tombs, A ghoul, henceforth I feast on buried joys, My soul the burial-place, where lie, beneath A fearful night of cries and hellish spumes, My lovely youth with jovial convoys, Hopes, happy-eyed, and linked solaces, And in the lapse of hateful years they will— My guileless ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... woman who loved Rochester would care. And he, Jones, would become in her eyes a ghoul, a monstrosity, ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... smoke cleared, there was such a scene as I may not paint; for you must know that your Indian hero is not content to kill. Like the ghoul, he must mutilate. Of all the Indian band attacked by our forces, not one escaped except the girl, whose form I could descry nowhere on ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... by the spots of blood on the table-cloths. It was horrible to see him rubbing his hands there like a ghoul! ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... was at his young master's unaccountable appearance and evident panic, nevertheless never moved a muscle of his face; he was one of those perfectly bred servants, who, if they chanced to open the door to a ghoul or a skeleton, would merely inquire, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... Johannot, never conceived anything so horrible. There is a face in one of the latter's illustrations to Un Voyage ou il vous plaira, which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should fancy a ghoul might be. It looked as if it was capable of ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... one of the low wings of the house, a bended and decrepit form: it supported its steps upon a staff; and, as now entering the garden, it stooped by the side of a fountain to cull flowers and herbs by the light of the moon, the Moor almost started to behold a countenance which resembled that of some ghoul or vampire haunting the places of the dead. He smiled at his own fear; and, with a quick and stealthy pace, hastened through the trees, and, gaining the spot where the old man bent, placed his hand on his shoulder ere his ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... But this fat ghoul, Langley, sickened me. This shame of the Builder race, this atavism—this beast—rubbed his fat, impractical hands together with an ungod-like glee. "Excellent," he said. "Far, far better, in fact, than I had ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns
... have been the ardor of their guilty passion, their confinement together in this foul cell had resulted in a mutual loathing. Within the narrow limits of these walls neither seemed able to support the barest contact with the other. They glared at each other in the dim light with ghoul-like eyes, and at night they lay down at opposite sides of the floor on bundles of straw for beds. This straw, having served them in their poverty for weeks and even months, had fermented and ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... big and strong; then, in his superb manhood, it had taken him back again for itself alone. Profoundest mystery had surrounded this unhallowed union. While it went on, dark curtains hung pall-like over it as if to conceal the ceremony, and the ghoul howled in an awful deafening voice to stifle his cries. He, thinking of Gaud, his sole, darling wife, had battled with giant strength against this deathly rival, until he at last surrendered, with ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... discover. Nor can it matter to them whether they lie about singly as they died or were placed after death, or piled together in a corner. Our fears were mere churchyard superstitions, which we have caught from that ghoul of a Molimo. Don't you agree ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... hard-working man. By night and by day did that faithful servant of his Queen and country tramp through the streets of London with the letters of the lieges in his care. The dim twilight of early morning found him poking about, like a solitary ghoul, disembowelling the pillar posts. The rising sun sent a deflected ray from chimney-pot or steeple to welcome him—when fog and smoke permitted. The noon-tide beams broiled him in summer and cheered him in winter ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... alarm. 'You can have no conception of the misery the whole thing causes me. I cannot understand it. What possible affinity there can be between myself and that disgusting little snob passes my comprehension. I assure you, my dear Mac, the knowledge that I was a ghoul, or a vampire, would cause me less nausea than the reflection that I am one and the same with that odious little Whitechapel bounder. When I think of him every nerve in ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... and while attempting to whistle a light air, was carelessly taking in the surroundings, and conjecturing, as best I might, the reasons which had induced the old ghoul to make use of this spot for his diabolical business, and had about decided that it was because he was a ghoul, and thus felt at home among the symbols of mortality, when I caught sight of two or three young fellows, who were lounging on the other ...
— The Staircase At The Hearts Delight - 1894 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... can be told by their earnest speechifying, and the gesticulation that accompanies it. Without comprehending a word that is said, Seagriff knows too well what they are talking about; their gestures are too intelligible with the lurid glare in their ghoul-like eyes. All that he sees portends a danger that he shrinks from declaring to his companions. They will doubtless learn it ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... strongly with the cadaverous countenance of the husband, who leant over them, watching every motion, and intent upon the expected stroke of the shovel upon the coffin lid. The recollection of the attributes of the German ghoul came over me; nor did the difference between the beings, the motives, and the actions, prevent me from conjuring up the similitude, so unlike a human being did he appear in his complexion, his fixed, dead-like stare into the grave, and the perfect stillness of his body, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... before him an immense gate of copper. He went up and tried to push it open, but finding it immovable, he knocked loudly upon it with the hilt of his sword. Directly, a small window at one side of the gate was opened, and a ghoul put his head out. Seeing that it was a Prince who knocked, he drew in his head, and opened the gate. The Prince quickly entered. "I wish," said he, in an imperious voice, "to see the Princess whom the wicked Mahbracca has doubtless imprisoned ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton
... but Dickens who has a style that can drag these things into light. His style shrieks sometimes like a ghoul tugging at the roots of a mandrake. At other times it wails like a lost soul. At other times it mutters, and whimpers, and pipes in its throat, like an old man blinking at the moon. At other times it roars and thunders like ten ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... in au'gu rate joust sut'ure ce ru'le an guide pup'pet vi tu'per ate yours su'mac ac cu'mu late ghoul ful'some co ad ju'tor gi'aour con'duit pu'pil la ry de but cu'cum ber in'sti tute duc'at tru'cu lent eu re'ka U'lan con nois seur' cae su'ra sup'ple ju'gu lar con'sti tute ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... Gibraltar to Malta, affirms that Lord Byron, during the whole voyage, seldom tasted wine; and that, when he did occasionally take some, it was never more than half a glass mixed with water. He ate but little; and never any meat; only bread and vegetables. He made me think of the ghoul taking rice ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Assuredly no corpse, either here or elsewhere, has ever preserved such an expression of intense life, of ironical, implacable ferocity. Her mouth is twisted in a little smile of defiance; her nostrils pinched like those of a ghoul on the scent of blood, and her eyes seem to say to each one who approaches: "Yes, I am laid in my coffin; but you will very soon see I can get out of it." There is something confusing in the thought that ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... has, the moment he awakes, a hatred of his dream, and a great desire to be free of the dream, free of the persistent mother-image or sister-image of the dream. It is a ghoul, it haunts his dreams, this image, with its hateful conclusions. And yet he cannot get free. As long as a man lives he may, in his dreams of passion or conflict, be haunted by the mother-image or sister-image, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... he said hoarsely. "I don't want to travel with that man! I won't associate with a ghoul! My God, I'm ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... tradesman ghoul will not leave us; he follows us up and down, indecently clamouring his name and address, and at last turns our meditation to despair. Certain stock devices become as painful as popular autotypes. There is the lily broken on its stalk; we meet it here ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... across the teeming graves of Russian people. This dreaded and strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images; that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a blind Djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the Old Man of the Sea, still faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance, stamping its shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already cracked ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... after sundown, deserted you may say, your legs shaky with being wet, and your heart hot and mad as fire because you couldn't digest the things you had to put into your stomach, and if you'd heard that the beach was the most malodorous, ghoul-haunted beach of the seas, and if just as you were saying to yourself that you for one didn't believe a word of it—if, I say, just then It began to cut loose—back of you—way off to the left—way off to the right—why you'd have ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... floating derelict probably. I myself remember that a Norwegian barque bound out with a cargo of pitch-pine had been given up as missing about that time, and it was just the sort of craft that would capsize in a squall and float bottom up for months—a kind of maritime ghoul on the prowl to kill ships in the dark. Such wandering corpses are common enough in the North Atlantic, which is haunted by all the terrors of the sea,—fogs, icebergs, dead ships bent upon mischief, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... a minute Gavin stood stock still, like an intruder. Then he ran towards the singing, which seemed to come from Windy ghoul, a straight road through Caddam that farmers use in summer, but leave in the back end of the year to leaves and pools. In Windyghoul there is either no wind or so much that it rushes down the sieve like ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... is just an old body snatcher that snoops round robbing the graves of antiquity and setting up his loot in their museum at the university. No good telling that old ghoul to let the dead rest. He simply won't hear of it. He wants remains. He wants to have 'em out in the light of day and stick labels on their long-peaceful skulls. He don't act subdued or proper about it either, or kind of buttery sad, like a first-class undertaker. He's gleeful. Let him find the ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... throw out on either hand From that well-ordered road we tread, And all the world is wild and strange; Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite Shall bear us company to-night, For we have reached the Oldest Land Wherein the powers of ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... the Captain, turning to look at him, "I'm in up to my neck, and getting deeper. Owe! B'gad, Beverley—I believe you!" But now, at sight of gravefaced Barnabas, he laughed again, and this time it sounded less ghoul-like. "Debt is a habit," he continued sententiously, "that grows on one most damnably, and creditors are the most annoying people in the world—so confoundedly unreasonable! Of course I pay 'em—now and then—deserving cases, y' know. Fellow called on me t' other day,—seemed to ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... grow, its abominable famine gorged from the store of that in him which he felt to be the purest, the cleanest, and the best, its bulk fattened upon the rot and the decay of all that was good, growing larger day by day, noisome, swollen, poddy, a filthy inordinate ghoul, gorged and bloated by feeding on the good things ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... 143 excluded by Pride's Purge and seventy more who had been excluded at various times before for Royalist contumacy. Finding the doors open, three of these unwelcome visitors went in, of whom two came out again and were not re-admitted, but one remained. That one was William Prynne. He sat like a ghoul among the Rumpers. No persuasion on earth could induce him to leave. Hasilrig stormed at him, and Vane coaxed him; but there he sat, and there he would sit! He was a member of the Long Parliament, and no other Parliament was or could be rightfully in existence ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Guy across the Sea, And the "Devil's own" is he. Death! Destruction! Misery! That's the Kaiser. Don't you fancy he's a fool. Satan ne'er had such a tool— Whether demon, fiend or ghoul As ...
— Rhymes of the Rookies • W. E. Christian
... you haven't. You've been slaving at those wretched notes. We don't very often see the papers, at least we don't take them in, but Miss Oman has kept us supplied during the last day or two. She is a perfect little ghoul; she delights in horrors of every kind, and the more horrible ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... Sunaisil, and the other Rabab. Now the Nanny Goat went out every morning to the pasture, leaving her twin kids in the cave. She shut the door carefully, and they locked it on the inside through fear of the Ghoul, for her neighbor in the next house was a Ghoul who swallowed little children alive. Then at evening when she came home, she would stand outside the door, and sing to her ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... mountains on the Overland stage line would hear stories about the desperate character of Slade. These stories grew by newspaper multiplication, until at length the man was owner of the reputation of a fiend, a ghoul, and a murderer. There was a wide difference between this and the truth. As a matter of fact, there were many worse ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... The ghoul-like fever was not to be braved with impunity, and balked of its prey. The widow had reclaimed her children; her neighbours, in the good-Samaritan sense of the word, had paid her little arrears of rent, and made ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... inquired Isfendiyar. "To-morrow," replied the demon-guide, "thou wilt meet with an enchantress, who can convert the stormy sea into dry land, and the dry land again into the ocean. She is attended by a gigantic ghoul, or apparition." "Then thou shalt see how easily this enchantress and her mysterious attendant can ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... the woman who had left him a moment before on her knees on the grass, with long thin fingers digging like a ghoul in the earth. He had scarce time to notice her eager face and eyes, cast now and then back toward the spot where she had left him, before there was a crash in the bushes, and a man,—the stranger of the road,—leaped to her side. "Run," ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... on by the saddle and by belts, and sometimes the animals were even painted. Skulls of sheep and cattle, and even of human beings were often carried on the saddlebows to add another element of terror. A framework was sometimes made to fit the shoulders of a Ghoul which caused him to appear twelve feet high. A skeleton wooden hand at the end of a stick served to greet terrified Negroes at midnight. For safety every man carried a small whistle and ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... very outset of our interview, and your once reputed skill as a Seer goes for naught! To me the world is a graveyard full of dead, worm-eaten things, and its supposititious Creator, whom you have so be praised in your orisons to-night, is the Sexton who entombs, and the Ghoul who devours his own hapless Creation! I myself am one of the tortured and dying, and I have sought you simply that you may trick me into a brief oblivion of my doom, and mock me with the mirage of a life that is not and can never be! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Marney last night at Lady St Julians," said Mr Egerton, "and congratulated him on his brother's speech. He looked daggers, and grinned like a ghoul." ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... deep in the sand, And around it have piled with deftly hand The rosined staves of the Noraway wood, Four feet high and four feet broad, To burn, amidst flames of burning pitch, So rare a chimera yclept a witch— Born of a fancy wild and camstary, Like ghost or ghoul, brownie or fairy. The prickers are there, each with long-pronged fork, Yearning and yape for their hellish work, And the priests and friars, black, white, or grey, All ready to preach the black devil away. Yea, devils are there, more than ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... Browning's monologues. His poetry usually is of the noonday and the market-place; but this might have been written by Coleridge, or Maeterlinck, or Edgar Allan Poe. It has indeed the "wizard twilight Coleridge knew." The atmosphere is uncanny and ghoul-haunted: the scenery is a series of sombre and horrible imaginings. No consistent allegory can be made out of it, for which fact we should rejoice. It is a poem, not a sermon; it is intended to stimulate the imagination, rather than awaken ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... Here is enough of genius to convert Vile dung to precious diamonds and to spare, Then why transform the diamond into dirt, And change thy mind, which should be rich and fair, Into a medley of creations foul, As if a Seraph would become a Ghoul?" ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... he was. The days—the interminable days! In his unbroken strength and the glare of the noonday sun, he forgot to take account of the nights looming in black and endless procession before him. It was from the day phantom he shrank, and not from the ghoul which works in the darkness and makes a grave of the heart while happier ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... the long promised light, the brow whose beaming Was to come forth, all conquering, all redeeming, But features horribler than Hell e'er traced On its own brood;—no Demon of the Waste,[134] No church-yard Ghoul caught lingering in the light Of the blest sun, e'er blasted human sight With lineaments so foul, so fierce as those The Impostor now in grinning mockery shows:— "There, ye wise Saints, behold your Light, your Star— ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... man was prowling about, or rather, climbing in the direction of the hollow road of Ohain. To all appearance he was one of those whom we have just described,—neither English nor French, neither peasant nor soldier, less a man than a ghoul attracted by the scent of the dead bodies having theft for his victory, and come to rifle Waterloo. He was clad in a blouse that was something like a great coat; he was uneasy and audacious; he walked forwards and gazed behind him. Who was this man? ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... by the church," he thought, and he climbed the cliffs to look out. A line of fir-trees grew there, a comb of little misshapen ghoul-like things, stunted by the winds that swept over the seas in winter. In a fork of one of these a bird's nest of last year was still hanging; but it was now ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... credence in their being really ghouls and ghosts, that it is not to be denied that strange feelings creep over one in reading their stories at the witching hour, when the fire is nearly out, and the candle-wicks are an inch and a half long. The Frenchman seldom introduces a ghost—never a ghoul; but he makes up for it by describing human beings with sentiments which would probably make the ghoul feel ashamed to associate with them. The utmost extent of human profligacy is depicted, but still the profligacy is human; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... menace until, through a fortunate set of circumstances, we managed to secure a compensating hold over him. Undoubtedly Talpers had been first on the scene after the murder. He had robbed my brother's body, and was caught in his ghoul-like act by his partner, Jim McFann. The half-breed believed Talpers when the trader told him that a watch was all he had found on the dead man. The later discovery that Talpers had deceived him, and had really taken a large sum of ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... they were crisped and sere,— " " " withering " " It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year; It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,— " " down " " dark tarn " " In the misty mid region of Weir,— " " ghoul-haunted ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... uniform of the Spahis, half oriental, half French, with his lovely wife, and the low, swarthy little ex-Minister in complete black, with his huge round spectacles on his nose nearly twice the size of his eyes, and a wife on his arm nearly double his stature. Why, Thiers reminds me of a Ghoul gallanting a Peri." ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... men did when they robbed and murdered unprotected women. She had read of scores of such cases, and had often imagined herself as being stalked by this kind of ghoul. Now the thing which she had greatly feared having come upon her she was nearly hysterical. If she ran he would run after her. If she only walked on he would overtake her. Before she could reach the docks on one side or Broadway on the other, where she might find possible defenders, he ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Shakespeare and Rabelais than any deity ever imagined out of Europe, there are found strange giants: some literal Jotuns of stone and ice, sorcerers who become giants like Glooskap, at will; the terrible Chenoo, a human being with an icy-stone heart, who has sunk to a cannibal and ghoul; all the weird monsters and horrors of the Eskimo mythology, witches and demons, inherited from the terribly black sorcery which preceded Shamanism, and compared to which the latter was like an advanced ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... at the conclusion that Conchita—long loved by him, long vainly solicited—has surrendered her heart to the gigantic Texan, who like a sinister shadow, a ghoul, a very ogre, has chanced across the ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... abode. It was Hood's haunted house put in order and newly painted. The servants, too, were shadowy, and chary of their visits. Bells rang three times before the gloomy chambermaid could be induced to present herself; and the negro waiter, a ghoul-like looking creature from Congo, obeyed the summons only when one's patience was exhausted or one's want satisfied in some other way. When he did come, one felt sorry that he had not stayed away altogether, so ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... Custer of Beatrice. When the command to fire had been given to the squad of riflemen, a single bullet had creased the top of his head, stunning him. All day he had lain there unconscious. It had been the tugging of the ghoul at his ring that had roused him to life ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... write a brief note instead, and did, asking her friend if he could come and give her his help about a matter—say at four o'clock that afternoon. The note was dispatched, not by old Moses this time, but by the hand of an urchin in a blue uniform, who was deep in "Lady Helen, the Fair Ghoul," as he bicycled, but apparently reached his destination in ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Ash-tree. My beauty was the Maid of the Alder! and she was giving me, spoiled of my only availing defence, into the hands of bent his Gorgon-head, and entered the cave. I could not stir. He drew near me. His ghoul-eyes and his ghastly face fascinated me. He came stooping, with the hideous hand outstretched, like a beast of prey. I had given myself up to a death of unfathomable horror, when, suddenly, and just as he was on the point of seizing me, the dull, heavy blow of an axe echoed through the ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... chapter for me. I had washed in the Jihun when we bivouacked, but had not shaved; later on, my scalp had bled anew, so that in addition to unruly hair tousled and matted with dry blood I had a week-old beard to help make me look like a graveyard ghoul. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... wouldn't! You didn't want to! You wouldn't listen! And you—you never have heard that desperate pounding and calling, not even to-night, though even so, with that woman out of the way, I made you feel me! But she'd heard me, the ghoul! She heard me again and again! I made her! I told her what she was, and that you knew it, and I meant it! Her marriage certificate was her license! She gave you a wanton's love, and you gave her just what you got! And I made her understand that! I made her ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the passage, in delicate health, and upon an abstemious regimen. He rarely tasted wine, nor more than half a glass, mingled with water, when he did. He ate little; no animal food, but only bread and vegetables. He reminded me of the ghoul that picked rice with a needle; for it was manifest, that he had not acquired his knowledge of the world by always dining so sparely. If my remembrance is not treacherous, he only spent one evening in the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... house stands considerably above the church. There was the house before us, a small oblong stone house, with not a tree to screen it from the cutting wind; but how were we to get at it from the churchyard we could not see! There was an old man in the churchyard, brooding like a Ghoul over the graves, with a sort of grim hilarity on his face. I thought he looked hardly human; however, he was human enough to tell us the way; and presently we found ourselves in the little bare parlour. Presently the door opened, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... cells of Venice and the bigot's rack? Harden the softening human heart again To cold indifference to a brother's pain? Ye most unhappy men! who, turned away From the mild sunshine of the Gospel day, Grope in the shadows of Man's twilight time, What mean ye, that with ghoul-like zest ye brood, O'er those foul altars streaming with warm blood, Permitted in another age and clime? Why cite that law with which the bigot Jew Rebuked the Pagan's mercy, when he knew No evil in the Just One? ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... meet a passing miner. Grasping his ponderous tools, he flits by like a phantom; even in the momentary glance, we can perceive how livid his sunless labor has left him; he is blanched as a ghoul, and moves as noiselessly, with feather-light step. Each with a motion salutes the Captain; but they do not heed the little group of strangers who have braved so many dangers to behold the wonders which to them are as commonplace as the forge to a ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... discordant cry could be heard somewhere in the distance, ending in a spasmodic jerk. It was like nothing human. Yet strangely it suggested something human. As if some unearthly ghoul were trying to simulate the wailing of human anguish.... Then again it was quite grotesque, bearing no resemblance to the cry ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... 'round, finally, and Billy Getz went to the window to see that no ghoul was lurking in the street, ready to murder Philo Gubb when he went out. As he turned away from the window the toe of his shoe caught in the fringe of the couch-cover and dragged it partially from the odd-shaped ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... man written by a private detective from the reminiscences of under-servants. The worst of it is that such a compilation brings a man money, because there are always plenty of people who like to dabble in mud; and a ghoul is the most impervious of beings, probably because a ghoul of this species regards himself merely as an unprejudiced seeker after truth, and claims to be what he would call ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... through the poor woman's frame at this confirmation of the awful revealment of the previous night; but she replied calmly, though with added sternness,—"He was my husband. How dared you disturb his bones? Are you a ghoul, that you burrow among graves and steal from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... had taken their place. Huge, black birds circled over the forest island. Gaunt, dusky forms sat ghoul-like on the stick platforms that had been nests filled with impatient, squealing young birds, or flapped heavily and clumsily ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... to be sure, in extravagant terms. Wagner is a mere ghoul and impostor: "The Flying Dutchman" is no more than a parody on Weber, and "Parsifal" is "an outrage against religion, morals and music." Daddy Liszt is "the inventor of the Liszt pupil, a bad piano player, a venerable man with a purple nose—a Cyrano de Cognac nose." Tschaikowsky ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... unequivocal, betray the Snake; As fell ophidian as in fierce meridian of Afric ever lurked in swamp or brake; And yet Corinthian LYCIUS never doted on the white-throated charmer of his soul With blinder passion than our fools of Fashion Feel for this gruesome ghoul. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 4, 1891 • Various
... and appointed her her vice-queen and how she was thus become ruler over all the kings of the Jinn; and she showed him the patent of investiture that Queen Es Shuhba had written her and told him that which had betided her with the Ghoul-head, whenas it appeared to her in the garden, and how she had despatched it to her palace, beseeching it to bring her news of the Commander of the Faithful and that which had betided him after her. Then she described to ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... have. Every time I get some money ahead I quit it and try something else. Writing isn't a man's exercise, anyhow, and journalism is just a form of body- snatching. The average reporter is a ghoul." ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... art great. Stand up straight for blessing us, like the god Savitri, straight a winner of booty, when we with our worshippers and with ointments call thee in emulation with other people. Standing straight, protect us by thy splendor from evil; burn down every ghoul. Let us stand straight that we may walk and live. Find out our worship among the gods. Save us, O Agni, from the sorcerer, save us from mischief, from the niggard. Save us from him who does us harm or tries to kill us, O youngest god with bright splendor! As with ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... was coolly reloading his rifle, did not immediately reply. As the shaken and somewhat unmanned Coronado looked at him, he was afraid of him. The moonlight made Smith's sallow, disfigured face so much more ghastly than usual, that he had the air of a ghoul or vampyre. And when, after carefully capping his piece, he drawled forth the word "Patchies," his harsh, croaking voice had an unwholesome, unhuman sound, as if it were indeed the utterance of a ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Mathilde had finished by reducing him to the frightened obedience of a little boy. The once dissolute she-ghoul had become a dictatorial spouse, eager for respect, and consumed with ambition and love of money. She showed, too, every form of sourish virtue. It was said that they had been seen taking the Holy Communion together at Notre ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... sir," said the intruder, addressing Theydon, but allowing his eyes to roam furtively about the room as though he expected to see something ghoul-like and sinister, "Mr. ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... to be written, in 1847, Thackeray had his worst years, in a worldly sense, behind him. They were past: the times when he wrote in Galignani for ten francs a day. Has any literary ghoul disinterred his old ten-franc articles in Galignani? The time of "Barry Lyndon," too, was over. He says nothing of that masterpiece, and only a word about "The Great Hoggarty Diamond." "I have been re-reading ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Dick, very soberly. "I haven't robbed a treasure ship, but I've been prowling with success over a lost battlefield—a ghoul I believe they call such a person, but it had to be done. I've enough food here to last a week at least, and we ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... And I have knelt 'Mong myriads in Thy house of prayer; And still sad desolation felt, Though heavy freighted was the air With litanies of love: one ghoul Cried, "No man careth for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... could have been more ghastly or absurd. How could any one have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man's ear? What sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in Salem, too, the home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone well with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... my pretty passenger pigeon," replied the elder with a ghoul-like grin; "you will not require to find your way back this year." And the foaming, exhausted animals, relieved from the trying gallop, dropped into a feeble trot or lazy canter, whilst Amanda gazed wistfully around to discover some glimpse ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... noble Marquis of Carabas? At night, when all the house is asleep but you, don't you get up and peep into yours? When you in your turn are slumbering, up gets Mrs. Brown from your side, steals downstairs like Amina to her ghoul, clicks open the secret door, and looks into her dark depository. Did she tell you of that little affair with Smith long before she knew you? Psha! who knows any one save himself alone? Who, in showing his house to the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to shun me as a pest. Often, when I was creeping upon them like a melancholy ghoul, I would hear them say to each other: "Here comes papa," and they would gather their toys and scurry away to some safer hiding place. Miserable wretch that ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... think that ours is an Italian banquet? Is there poison in the dish? Or do you live only on fruit and flowers?' continued Miss Ponsonby. 'Do you know,' she added, with an arch smile, 'I think you must be a ghoul.' ...
— Sketches • Benjamin Disraeli
... make his sordid aureat or argent bid therefor. Well do I remember how his nose, which he could not, if his worthless life had depended upon it, render retrousse, grew sublimely curvilinear in its contempt, as his hawk-eyes estimated my pitiful family. I will not name the sum which he offered, the ghoul, the vampire, the anthropophagous jackal, the sneaking would-be incendiary of my little Alexandrian, the circumcised Goth! He left me, like Churchill's Scotch lassie, "pleased, but hungry"; and I found, as Valentine did in Congreve's "Love for Love," ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... your humour as you patrol the reefs, it is liable to be changed in a flash into clashing tints by inadvertent contact with a warty ghoul of a sea-urchin, a single one of whose agonising spines never fails to bring you face to face with one of the vividest realities of life. A slim but shapely mollusc known as Terebellum or augur, to mention another conceited little disturber of your ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... which people in society are naturally inclined, produced a large and growing crop of the most amusing ideas, the most curious expressions, the most absurd fables concerning this mysterious individual. Without being precisely a vampire, a ghoul, a fictitious man, a sort of Faust or Robin des Bois, he partook of the nature of all these anthropomorphic conceptions, according to those persons who were addicted to the fantastic. Occasionally some ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... table-beer—he poured it out so superbly!" We had Dr. Blimber himself, besides, with his learned legs, like a clerical pianoforte—a bald head, highly polished, and a chin so double, it was a wonder how he ever managed to shave into the creases. We had Miss Blimber, in spectacles, like a ghoul, "dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages." We had Mrs. Blimber, not learned herself, but pretending to be so, which did quite as well, languidly exclaiming at evening parties, that if she could have known Cicero, she thought she could have died contented. We ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... look into the woods and see his fancies of Spring, the things that he will some day write. These pageants might be longer. They furnish the great climax. They make a consistent parallel and contrast with the ghoul-visions that end with the confession to the detective. They wipe that terror from the mind. They do not represent Poe. The rabbits, the leopard, the fairies, Cupid and Psyche in the clouds, and the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... time he was too tired to go on again, he had come to the beginnings of fertile land. He passed a village, but it had been looted, and he skirted around it rather than stare at the ghastly ghoul-work of the looters. The world was ending, but civilization seemed to have ended already. Beyond it, he came to a rude house, now abandoned. He ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... squatted or lying prone on their respective mats or mattresses, were the yet breathing corpses of lepers in the last stages of various forms of the disease, who glanced inquisitively at us for a moment out of their ghoul-like eyes—those who were not already beyond seeing—and then withdrew within their dreadful selves. Was there ever a more ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Doubtless the ghoul (for he that rifles tombs is none other) who perpetrated this enormity described himself as an archaeologist. Possibly he was of gentle birth and had received a University education. If so, so much the greater his crime, for he could not plead ignorance. Surely no seriously minded person ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... of China languished! Far away Was marriage, with a Vizier and a Chief Of Eunuchs and the privilege Of going out at night To play—unkenned, majestical, secure - Where the old, brown, friendly river shaped Like Tigris shore for shore! Haply a Ghoul Sat in the churchyard under a frightened moon, A thighbone in his fist, and glared At supper with a Lady: she who took Her rice with tweezers grain by grain. Or you might stumble—there by the iron gates Of the Pump Room—underneath the limes ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... period of her life, the little woman had been a nurse, and it was told of her that she had frightened one of her patients into convulsions during the night by narrating to her the history of all the corpses she had laid out. This ghoul-like tendency in the end proved fatal ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... of terror happily endured but a moment. The sound of his departing footsteps took the ghoul from their hearts; they began to breathe, and to hope that the danger was gone. But they waited long ere at last they ventured, like wild animals overtaken by the daylight, to creep out of their shelter and steal back like shadows—but separately, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... something preternatural in the persistent vitality and industry of this man. Only forty years of age when the Long Parliament released him from his second imprisonment and restored him to society, a ghoul-like creature with a scarred and mutilated face, hiding the loss of his twice-cropped ears under a woollen cowl or nightcap, and mostly sitting alone among his books and papers in his chamber in Lincoln's Inn, taking no regular meals, but occasionally munching bread and refreshing himself with ale, ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the fakir, "we were sitting here by this tomb worshipping Khuda, when a ghoul, dressed as a princess, came and exhumed a body that had been buried a few days ago, and began to eat it. On seeing this I was filled with anger, and beat her back with a shovel, which lay on the fire at the time. While running away from me her necklace got loose ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... an urn. There is the hand pointing upward, here balanced on the top of an obelisk and there upon a cross. The white-robed angel, free from the remotest shadow of expression, meets us again and again. "All this is mine," says the tradesman ghoul. "Behold the names of me—Slap & Dash here, the Ugliness Company there, and this the work of the Cheap and Elegant Funeral Association. This is where we slew the art of sculpture. These are our trophies that sculpture is no more. All this marble might have been beautiful, all this sorrow ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... normal-minded Harvard men were busy with baseball or track or tennis, or the hundred and one activities which help to keep young America employed in a great university, Galusha might have been, and was, seen hopping about some grass-grown graveyard, like a bespectacled ghoul, making tracings of winged death's-heads or lugubrious tombstone poetry. When they guyed him he merely grinned, blushed, and was silent. To the few—the very few—in whom he confided he made explanations which were as curious as ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... more face to face Beside Christ's Mother in the blessed place! But while you dream, they carry her from here, The black bells toll and toll. Oh God! if only she cannot see or hear, Not hear those ghoul-like bells that crowd so near, Not see ...
— The Rainbow and the Rose • E. Nesbit
... more hateful than even the biblioklept. The Book-Ghoul is he who combines the larceny of the biblioklept with the abominable wickedness of breaking up and mutilating the volumes from which he steals. He is a collector of title-pages, frontispieces, illustrations, and book-plates. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... fair son with a king's fair daughter, And full three hundred beside, they say, — Revelling on for the lone, cold slaughter So soon to seize them and hide them for aye; But they danced and they drank and their souls grew gay, Nor ever they knew of a ghoul's eye spying Their splendor a flickering phantom to stray Where the bones of the brave in the ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... wire-worm; locust, Colorado beetle; alacran^, alligator, caymon^, crocodile, mosquito, mugger, octopus; torpedo; bane &c 663. cutthroat &c (killer) 461. cannibal; anthropophagus^, anthropophagist^; bloodsucker, vampire, ogre, ghoul, gorilla, vulture; gyrfalcon^, gerfalcon^. wild beast, tiger, hyena, butcher, hangman; blood-hound, hell- hound, sleuth-hound; catamount [U.S.], cougar, jaguar, puma. hag, hellhag^, beldam, Jezebel. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... (He's a raven, don't you know?) He's a greedy glutton, also, and a ghoul, And his sanctimonious caw Rubs my temper on the raw. He's a demon, and a most ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... my pyjamas whilst I slept, and nibbled my chest. When I awoke, I could feel him hurrying off by way of my arm or leg. The moment worn-out nature reasserted itself in me, and I dozed again, that ghoul of a cockroach came back and proceeded with its fell banquet. At length, weakened no doubt by loss of blood and frantic with the thought that a mere piece of determined vermin should thus habitually sup off me, I rose in the dead of a moonless night, turned on the electric light, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... with Cleve half supporting her she backed off the road to a seat on the bank. She saw the bandits now at business-like action. Blicky and Smith were cutting the horses out of their harness: Beady Jones, like a ghoul, searched the dead men; the three bandits whom Joan knew only by sight were making up a pack; Budd was standing beside the stage with his, expectant grin; and Gulden, with the agility of the gorilla he resembled, was ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... of Tiberius and of Augustus, lay the house of Dea Flavia. Its gilded portals threw back with brilliant intensity the weird and elusive light of the waning moon, and high above, upon the balustrade of the roof, gigantic bronze groups of quaint and misshapen beasts looked ghoul-like against ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... by right, In filling up a vacancy; Then Phantom, Goblin, Elf, and Sprite - If all these fail them, they invite The nicest Ghoul that they can see. ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... in his superb manhood, it had taken him back again for itself alone. Profoundest mystery had surrounded this unhallowed union. While it went on, dark curtains hung pall-like over it as if to conceal the ceremony, and the ghoul howled in an awful, deafening voice to stifle his cries. He, thinking of Gaud, his sole, darling wife, had battled with giant strength against this deathly rival, until he at last surrendered, with a deep death-cry like the roar of a dying bull, through a mouth already ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... A busy digger paused in his work. He was a sottish-looking fellow, and there was something of the glare of a ghoul in his eyes. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service |
