"Ghoulish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indeed as to startle her. Had this man been seen in ordinary daylight, he would no doubt have looked nothing worse than a familiar type of the fat black-a-vised Italian—not a very comely person, it is true, but not in any way horrible—but now these dusky shadows lent something ghoulish-looking to his bushy head and greasy ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... weird, almost appalling prologue. Those laughs!—they are a study—they fairly chill the blood—they would make the fortune of a comic actor—so intense, thrilling, surprising, and seemingly filled with a ghoulish glee. Over and over they would break out clear and distinct above the tintamarre. I have never been able to find out whether it belongs to the Malay or ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... shadow, trailing behind her in the water, passed on to the beach, wrinkled itself up over the dunes and slid across the sand-drifts where little flutters of cloth, uncovered by the ghoulish jackals, showed from the burning ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... stars. More than once in the past months he had listened to the sobbing of little children, the agony of weeping women, and the taunting of wind voices that were either tormenting or crying out in a ghoulish triumph; and more than once in those months he had seen Eskimos—born in that hell but driven mad in the torture of its long night—rend the clothes from their bodies and plunge naked out into the pitiless gloom and cold to die. Conniston would never know how near the ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk—a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust their way into the ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... lettered—on many of the lodges and totem poles: "In memory of" some one or another chief or notable red-man. Over one door was this inscription: "In memory of ——, who died by his own hand." The lodge door was fastened with a rusty padlock, and the place looked ghoulish. ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... it above-ground with them, shovel it up. Ursula, it's marvellous, it's really marvellous—it's really wonderful, another world. The people are all ghouls, and everything is ghostly. Everything is a ghoulish replica of the real world, a replica, a ghoul, all soiled, everything sordid. It's ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... In Mat Lewis' ghoulish romance, The Monk (1796) it will be remembered that Ambrosio, after having enjoyed Antonia, to whose bedchamber he has gained admittance by demoniacal aid, discovers that she is his sister, and heaping crime upon crime to sorcery and rape ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... ugly end; and with morning a group of gossips stood about the drawn blinds, licked their lips over the details, and generally derived that satisfaction from death common to their class. Indeed, this ghoulish gusto is not restricted to humble folk alone. The instinct lies somewhere at the root of human nature, together with many another morbid vein and trait not readily to be analysed or understood. Only ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... Elsie gloomily, and wagged her head in the hopeless manner of one who has tasted deeply of the world, and knew its hollowness by heart. If there was by chance a cheerful and a melancholy view to be taken on any subject, Elsie invariably chose the melancholy one, and gloated over it with ghoulish enjoyment. She was never so happy as when she was miserable,—as an Irishman would have had it,—and hugged the conviction that she was "unappreciated" by her family, and a victim of fate. She shed tears over Misunderstood ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... nothing happened, save that my sense of loneliness increased. I felt that I was being hemmed in by barbarism, and cut off in a ghoulish land from the succour of my own kind. I only kept my courage up by the necessity of presenting a brave face to Mr Wardlaw, who was by this time in a very broken condition of nerves. I had often thought ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... shadows were creeping from one hut to another did Bakahenzie and his satellites return from the ghoulish offices of the dead. Zalu Zako, the chiefs and magicians arose to the wild beating of the drums and the wailing chant of the hereditary troubadour with the five stringed lyre. With Kingata Mata carrying a brand of the newly lighted sacred fire, ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... experts in evil, most of these men here. Their hands were indelibly stained with some of the foulest crimes ever recorded in history. But there was something ghoulish in this attempt to plunder that awful thing lying there, helpless, in the water. There was also a great relief to nerve-tension in shouting Horror and Anathema with self- righteous indignation; and additional excitement in ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... his kin to avenge their death. Hence he was intensely interested to know how the preacher would treat his subject. On account of the crowd he sat a little within the doorway, while the monster dwarf contented himself with a position just outside, where his ghoulish and malignant face was lighted up by candle rays and ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... may abandon the task undone. I have bored through the dreariest mountains of rubbish; I have visited Naseby Field, and how many other unintelligible fields and places; I have &c., &c.:—alas, what a talent have I for getting into the Impossible! Meanwhile my studies still proceed; I even take a ghoulish kind of pleasure in raking through these old bone-houses and burial-aisles now; I have the strangest fellowship with that huge Genius of DEATH (universal president there), and catch sometimes, through some chink or other, glimpses into blessed ulterior regions,—blessed, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... immediately heated the poker and terminated his career, for which she was taken to King George upon his throne, and received the compliments of royalty on her great discretion and valour. This same narrator, who had a Ghoulish pleasure, I have long been persuaded, in terrifying me to the utmost confines of my reason, had another authentic anecdote within her own experience, founded, I now believe, upon Raymond and Agnes, or the Bleeding Nun. She said it happened to her brother-in-law, who was immensely ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... specimens, viewing instantaneous photographs, hiding bedraggled clothing, casting away tattered mufflers, and telling of hair-breadth escapes from peril and death. Many a tired head sought an early pillow, and floated away in dreams of ghoulish icebergs, until the call for breakfast disclosed to opening eyes that the ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax
... Boise Bill had a strong sense of humour, albeit of a somewhat ghoulish brand, usually. As he rode back to report to Canby, the ludicrous side of the encounter grew on him until it outweighed the chagrin he first had felt at ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... in total darkness and a very frightened state of mind. For my imagination, which had been greatly stirred by my own vague thoughts of the forbidden room, immediately began to people the space about me with ghoulish figures. How should I escape them, how ever reach my own little room again, undetected and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... nothing how she lies, This old mother of you all, You great cities proud and tall Towering to a hundred skies Round a world she never knew, Is it nothing, this, to you? Must the ghoulish work go on Till her very floors are gone? While there's still a brick to save Drive these ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... railroad was being built through here, the men discovered this rude head-board all alone on the bleak hill-top, and were moved by worthy sentiment to build a rough stone wall around it to keep off the ghoulish coyotes; and, later on, the superintendent of the division erected a large white cross, which now stands in plain view of the railroad. On one side of the cross is written the simple inscription, "Maiden's Grave;" on the other, her name, "Lucinda Duncan" ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... opinions on R.A.M.C. orderlies, and also those of an R.A.M.C. orderly on Tommy, or perhaps rather on his own status and grievances in general. Inside the tent Tommy was free and unequivocal about the whole tribe of orderlies, the criticism culminating in a ghoulish story from my right-hand neighbour, told in broadest Yorkshire, about one in Malta, "who stole the —— boots off the —— corpse in the —— dead-'ouse." Outside the tent a communicative orderly poured into my ear the tale of Paardeberg, and its unspeakable horrors, the overwork ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... wood is still, the moon grows wan and old, White marsh-mists wreathe like clammy arms, death-cold, And moth-wings like dead fingers sweep my face; The bittern wailing leaves the sombre pool, Voicing the world-old pain that never dies; The owl with ghoulish laughter outward flies Like some weird ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... the foliage of which the victorious monkey had flung his antagonist, I was told that it, like the monkeys, was indigenous to Bandokolo, and that one of its most gruesome peculiarities was the ghoulish avidity with which it enveloped any unfortunate individual or animal in its tentacle-like leaves and forthwith proceeded to absorb its victim into itself. These trees, Pousa added, were sometimes employed instead of the monkeys as a means for the disposal of criminals. "A truly charming ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... far side of the Square newspaper boys were calling their evening wares, and the ghoulish cries mingled and jangled with the sound of those ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and revealed every hideous form beneath it. Coiled in spires, folded in layers, knotted on themselves, or "extended long and large," they weltered in motionless heaps—shapes more fantastic in ghoulish, blasting dismay, than ever wine-sodden brain of exhausted poet fevered into misbeing. He who dived in the swirling Maelstrom saw none to compare with them in horror: tentacular convolutions, tumid bulges, glaring orbs of sepian ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... seek! Some other scent allures the ghoulish horde. On, on, poor trembler! life for life it is, If I ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... conceivable form of vehicle, including a private barouche, lay heaped together in monstrous confusion; and when night fell ragged, half-starved Bedouins descended upon the stricken valley, stealing from pile to pile of debris in search of loot, nor could the rifles of the guards deter them from the ghoulish task. It took an entire division three weeks to clear the roads ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... of colour on the brown leaves and dead green moss, the slender spruce needles and straight-standing trunks. Nature was in a gentle glow; the pure clear air of falling evening draped the earth in sweetness. Yet through it wound long lines of ghoulish men who felt it not, held to fiendish things by mistaken ambitions, by an unjustified bitterness that fed on its own helplessness. For, after all, the varying moods of nature are but constituents of a formula of which each man provides for ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan |
