"Grotesquely" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... expression whatever, save one of cool interest, just touched with a craftsman's confidence. His barrel was steady as his head. The little figure below was moving over the rough ground towards the black spot. They could see its legs working grotesquely, like ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... first and truest of our Cambridge friends was that exquisite intelligence, who, in a world where so many people are grotesquely miscalled, was most fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven is of than Francis J. Child. He was then in his prime, and I like to recall the outward image which expressed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the frantic demon with his hood full of latch keys, the impassible, bearded faces were watching the painted women who, in their red garments and their golden crowns, promenaded down the earthen floor, between the divans, fluttering their dyed fingers, smiling grotesquely like idols, bending forward their greasy foreheads to receive the ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... grotesquely in his toweling bathrobe and a pink and white couch-cover, and sat lumpishly in a wing-chair. The bedroom was uncanny in its half-light, which turned the curtains to lurking robbers, the dressing-table to a turreted castle. It smelled of cosmetics, of linen, of sleep. He napped and woke, ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... This room was grotesquely latter-day in its appointments. In the centre was a bright oval lit by shaded electric lights from above. The rest was in shadow, and the double finely fitting doors through which he came from the swarming Hall of the Atlas made the place very still. The dead thud of these as they closed behind ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... and tubes and drums answer to his touch, though he laid no hand upon them? There must be some strange, invisible key-board, some secret system of communication between him and those various contrivances of wood and wire and sheep-skin and horse-hair and metal (so curiously and grotesquely fashioned, when one came to consider them) out of which he was to bring melody and harmony. How should one conceive of this mysterious key-board and ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... contempt for a dreamer, and half-pitying wonder at such lofty claims from such a helpless enthusiast, prompted his question, 'Art Thou a king then?' One can fancy the scornful emphasis on that 'Thou.' and can understand how grotesquely absurd the notion of his prisoner's being a king ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... lay down grotesquely on his oar. He fired again, and one of the remaining two stood up, shook a fist towards the shore and, staggering backwards, capsized the boat in the surf. He must have sunk like lead with his wound, for he never rose to the surface; ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... his fingers at him grotesquely]. Only one eye, darling. Cross eye. Sees everything. Read lerrer inceince—istastaneously. Kindly give me vinegar borle. Green borle. On'y to sober me. Too drunk to speak porply. If you would be so kind, darling. Green borle. [Edstaston, still suspicious, ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... sandals, they walk with knees extremely wide apart, as having sat cross-legged for centuries, their right arms and right forefingers point upwards, right elbows resting on left hands: they stoop grotesquely: halfway to the footlights they wheel left. They pass in front of the seven beggars, now in terrified attitudes and six of them sit down in the attitude described, with their backs to the audience. The leader stands, ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... attack by the Welsh; but according to others they originated with the Romans, and were used as the vestibules of the houses; and this seems to be the more popular theory with the townsfolk. Under the "Rows" are shops of all sizes, and some of the buildings are grotesquely attractive, especially the curious one bearing the motto of safety from the plague, "God's providence is mine inheritance," standing on Watergate street, and known as "God's Providence House;" and "Bishop Lloyd's Palace," which is ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... remarking that she should belong to the force; and as the bell rang and the engine moved, off popped young Billy Lusk from his cow-catcher. With an exclamation of horror she sprang down, and Mr. McLean appeared, and, with all a parent's fright and rage, held the boy by the arm grotesquely ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... Lister, with incautious passion. "If I had killed the brute I'd have been justified! However, I threw him on to the aloe tub and ran off. The thing was grotesquely ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... came and went, their shadows grotesquely flung against the leafy screens. The figures quickened their paces and their gestures; then suddenly, with cries, flung themselves into wild activity. And all about the fire, Stern saw a wheeling, circling, eddying mob of black and ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... Benedetto we were gratified by a deep tragedy entitled "Gabrielle Innocente," so exquisitely absurd, and so grotesquely acted, that the best comedy could scarcely have afforded us more amusement,—certainly not more merriment. In the course of the evening, coffee and ices were served in our box, as ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... heart breaking at the sight of the terrible procession on its way to the rear. Men with arms in slings; men with trousers torn away at the knee, and bandaged legs; men with brow, face, mouth, or throat swathed; men with no shirts, but a broad swathe around the chest or stomach—each bandage grotesquely pictured with human figures printed to show how the wound should be bound, on whatever part of the body the bullet entered. Men staggering along unaided, or between two comrades, or borne on litters, some white and quiet, some ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... rested at midnight, and rested better. The fourth night found them still on the sand-dunes, and by this time the weird journey was beginning to tell upon the white men. The silence and mystery of the night, the vast expanse of sand shown so vaguely in the moonlight, the soft-treading, grotesquely-shaped camels, which seemed far less real and tangible than the black shadows thrown by them across the sand, and by day the blinding glare of the sun thrown back from the all-surrounding sand so fiercely that ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... blameless as Stransom held her, he couldn't rid himself of the sense that he had been, as who should say, swindled. She had imposed upon him hugely, though she had known it as little as he. All this later past came back to him as a time grotesquely misspent. Such at least were his first reflexions; after a while he found himself more divided and only, as the end of it, more troubled. He imagined, recalled, reconstituted, figured out for himself the truth she had refused to ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... question of instinctive language and self-expression. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or German. Whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. The question of whether Swift was funny in his irony is quite another sort of question to the question of whether Swift was serious in his pessimism. Surely even Mr. McCabe would not maintain that the more funny ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... cream-colored oxen in the suburbs: but we saw also in the highways, small, rough-coated donkeys overburdened with panniers of fruit; tall, bony horses mismatched with diminutive donkeys; incongruous teams composed of a cow and a donkey, or a large ox and a small cow; and a team even more grotesquely made up of a horse, a cow, and a donkey. We saw the elite of the city elegantly dressed in the latest fashion promenading in the shopping districts; but on the sidewalks of the tenement district we saw slovenly barefooted women washing clothes, cooking ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... following with the former. Again, and yet again, and again, a fresh animal came up, seemed to be reasoned and certainly was fought with and overcome by Lina, until at last, before they were out of the wood, she was followed by forty-nine of the most grotesquely ugly, the most extravagantly abnormal animals imagination can conceive. To describe them ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... carnival of confusion, for some one or two hours. Instead of making the bed, she would amuse herself with pulling off the pillowcases, butting her woolly head among the pillows, till it would sometimes be grotesquely ornamented with feathers sticking out in various directions; she would climb the posts, and hang head downward from the tops; flourish the sheets and spreads all over the apartment; dress the bolster up in Miss Ophelia's ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... half-dozen pews, and perhaps a dozen seats for the poor; and also a vestry. The roof is high pitched, and of black old oak, and the three large beams which support it run down to the side walls, and terminate in grotesquely carved faces,—two devils and an angel on one side, two angels and a devil on the other. Such is the church of St Cuthbert at Barchester, of which Mr Harding became rector, with a clear income of seventy-five ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... took it down and handed it to her, and she hugged it to her in an ecstasy of delight. Then she held it off and looked at it, and hugged again, and for very joy she wept. It was only a poor little rag doll with face and hair grotesquely painted upon the cloth, and dressed in printed calico—but it was a doll—a real one—the first that Emily had ever owned. It had been the dream of her life that some day she might have one, and now the dream was a blessed reality. ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... the divan and buried her face in her hands. Her fat shoulders shook grotesquely; and Harley stood perfectly still staring across at her for fully a minute. I could hear voices in the street outside and the hum of traffic in ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... with streaming, darting lances of black and green, flamed inside his bursting eyeballs. The Universe spun and whirled in mad gyrations about him as he reeled drunkenly to his feet, staggering and sprawling. He fell. He realized that he was falling, yet he could not fall! Thrashing wildly, grotesquely in agony, he struggled madly and blindly across the room, directly toward the thick steel wall. The tip of one hair of his unruly thatch touched the wall, and the slim length of that single hair did not even bend as ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... running down her cheeks, she reached to a drawer by the bedside, and dragged out this further testimony to her claim—it was wrapped in layers of tissue-paper, like her father's valentine—and displayed it with a touching pride. Before handing it to Deb, she gazed at it with grotesquely distorted face, kissed it, pressed it to her bosom, kissed it again, and moaned over it, rocking to and fro; then, when she had pushed it from her, flung herself into her former attitude of complete ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... the broken turret room. We passed the body of that steward who just at the end had appealed to me and I had left dying. The legs of the forward look-out still poked grotesquely up from the wreckage of the observatory tower where it lay smashed down against the roof of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... to get some satisfaction from this, when, turning a bend of the path within two hundred yards of the castle, behold an unmistakable enemy barred his way!—an ugly, hoggish, obese man, with bare legs most grotesquely like pillars of granite, and a protuberant paunch; but the devil must have been in his legs to carry him more swiftly than thoroughbred limbs had borne Count Victor. He stood sneering in the path, turning up the right sleeve of a soiled and ragged saffron shirt with his left hand, the right being ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... by beating upon his door and crying, "Get up! Get up! Your fifty-pound maskinonge is hooked, and by a boy!" No further call was needed, and the beach was soon lined with a score of fishermen and their wives, hastily and some of them grotesquely dressed. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... peered from the window of his little room. By the dim starlight—it was just before dawn—he could see all of the open yard and roadway before the house, with the great barn looming like a black and sinister shadow as its farther barrier. Crossing this space, he saw the figure of Peter Creed, grotesquely stooped and old in the obscuring gloom, moving slowly, almost gropingly, and yet directly, as though impelled, toward the barn's overwhelming shadow. Slowly he unbarred the great door, swung it open, and entered the blacker shadows it concealed. The ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... shadow that followed her seemed vital with hate. On they walked together—the girl and this weird shadow—blackening the snow with momentary darkness as they passed; the one tossing out her arms with unconscious gesticulation, the other mocking her, grotesquely, from the crusted snow. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... magnanimous desire to give him a chance for escape, he persisted in his offer, and she in her refusal. When the matter had ended in this perfectly satisfactory manner to both of them, he sat down and wrote, by way of epilogue to the play, a grotesquely comic account of the whole affair to Mrs. O. H. Browning, one of his intimate ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... working in the front room. Philpot made a little ball of paper and threw it at him to attract his attention. Owen looked round and Philpot began to make signals: he pointed downwards with one hand and jerked the thumb of the other over his shoulder in the direction of the town, winking grotesquely the while. This Owen interpreted to be an inquiry as to whether Hunter had departed. He shook his head and shrugged his shoulders to intimate that he ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... in my long-since-read volume of Sismondi, I find a cross-fleury at the bottom of the page, with the date 1254 underneath it; meaning that I was to remember that year as the beginning of Christian warfare. For little as you may think it, and grotesquely opposed as this ravaging of their neighbours' territories may seem to their pacific mission, this Florentine army is fighting in absolute good faith. Partly self-deceived, indeed, by their own ambition, and by ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... on her round hand, gazing down at him with her deepset, clever eyes. When Swithin removed his hat, she clapped her hands. Again he had the sense of being admired, caressed. With a careless air, that sat grotesquely on his tall square person, he walked up to the door; both girls stood in the passage. Swithin felt a confused desire to speak in some foreign tongue. "Maam'selles," he began, "er—bong jour-er, your ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... involves, all this is so far apart from what we know of actual life, the life not merely of work and business, but the life of affection, and even of passion, that it makes the picture of which it is so necessary a part, seem to us in the last degree, unreal, unimaginable, grotesquely ridiculous. The quaint love sometimes found among children, so quickly kindled, so superficial, so violent in its language and absurd in its plans, is transferred with the utmost gravity to the serious ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... that Lord Northallerton had recently invited me to his October pheasant-shooting. During the last few days a youth, who grotesquely reproduces Mrs. Smith's most prominent features, has mysteriously tenanted the kitchen, ill-cleaned my boots, and bungled over the studs in my shirts. This morning a letter came with the crest and the Northallerton ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... slack hour when Private Wakeman, in his grotesquely tattered clothes, limped through the door. Only a few men were in the hut, writing or playing draughts. A boy at the piano was laboriously beating out a discordant version of "Tennessee." Mrs. Jocelyn sat on a packing-case, a block of paper on her knee, ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... had much better manage for yourself; and half way through Catherine had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her lips which smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone to stone could have lasted for ever. She was wrapped up grotesquely in his mackintosh; her hat was all bedraggled; her gloves dripped in his; and in spite of all he could have vowed that anything so lovely as that delicately cut, gravely smiling face, swaying above the rushing brown water, was never seen in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had committed a hideous breach of good manners and could never expect forgiveness from Miss Hawker-Sponge. She had really invited him into her home and he had preferred to hunt for a "policeman friend." Yet the tragedy of it was so grotesquely funny that Whitney Barnes laughed, and in laughing dismissed Miss Hawker-Sponge ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... number of revolutions will grow till we lose count of them, and each, however strenuously it may profess its horror of bloodshed, will have only one hope and possibility: that of defending itself by armed force against its successor. The game is a grotesquely dishonest one, because every aspirant movement will cast against its forerunner the charge of ruling by bloodshed, while it itself is already preparing its armed forces ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... came upon a Madonna by Raphael, but he was tired of Raphael; a figure by Correggio never received the glance it demanded of him. A priceless vase of antique porphyry carved round about with pictures of the most grotesquely wanton of Roman divinities, the pride of some Corinna, scarcely drew a ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... glorified memories. How could these people reconstruct the torn carpets and tin cans and waste-paper of their lives into mythology? How could memories of Ladies' Entrance squalor be made into Castles in Granada or Carcassonne? The things they drank to see, and saw but grotesquely, and paid for terribly, now roll before them with no after pain or punishment. The mumbled conversation, the sociability for which they leaned over the tables, they have here in the same manner with far more to talk about. They come, they go home, men ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... the light blinded Wayland's sight; for the sun had come up in an orange fan; and the sky was not blue: it shone the dazzling silver of mercury. Against the high rarefied air came in view the figure of a man, grotesquely exaggerated, head and shoulders first, then body, riding a heavy horse, saddleless, hatless, coatless, white of hair, heels pressed to his horse's flanks, bent far over the animal's neck as Indians ride, galloping for the Rim Rock trail, or a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... from the wardrobe a hooded cloak, put it about her, and left the room. The hallways were strewn with straw and the litter of packing. Doors of half-denuded rooms hung open. In the corridor below two negroes lay asleep, snoring grotesquely, beside some chests at which they had worked. There was no one to speak to her or bar her passage. The door was unbolted. She passed listlessly out, and down the path toward ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... rang with tumultuous plaudits as her song ended. I could feel Tom's grasp at my elbow, but I could neither echo the applause nor answer him. It was all so wildly, grotesquely improbable. ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... served, but it cost him a lot of twisting of his body and some pain to his mistreated wrist bones to bring forth the contents of his trousers' pockets. The chain kinked time and again as he groped with the undermost hand for the openings; his dumpy, pudgy form writhed grotesquely. But finally he finished. The search produced four cigars somewhat crumpled and frayed; some matches in a gun-metal case, a silver cigar cutter, two five-dollar bills, a handful of silver chicken feed, the leather case of the eyeglasses, a couple ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... at his assistant warden and saw that the man was deadly serious. Then the general looked at Clarens sprawled grotesquely on his back, with his shattered head resting against the dead night watchman's feet, with his right ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... brutal face. He had a bullet-shaped head, with fine, soft, reddish brown hair; a round, stubbly beard shot with gray; and small, beady eyes set close together. He was clothed in an old, black, grotesquely fitting cutaway coat, with coarse trousers tucked into his boot tops. A worn visored cloth cap was on his head. In his right hand he carried an ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... poet-prophets stood under the lavish sunshine of an Indian sky and greeted the world with the glad recognition of kindred. It was not an anthropomorphic hallucination. It was not seeing man reflected everywhere in grotesquely exaggerated images, and witnessing the human drama acted on a gigantic scale in nature's arena of flitting lights and shadows. On the contrary, it meant crossing the limiting barriers of the individual, to become more than man, to become one with the All. It was not a mere play ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... refinement of presence are something of incomparable value; it is more than a liberal education to have been admitted to it, but it is as inaccessible to the working-man as—what shall I say? The thing is too grotesquely impossible for any sort of comparison. Merely to conceive of its possibility is something that passes a joke; it ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... it with him either in foreign countries or in his own. The pleasure of being allied to a man of the Baron's high worth, and who was so much valued by his uncle Sir Everard, was also an agreeable consideration, had anything been wanting to recommend the match. His absurdities, which had appeared grotesquely ludicrous during his prosperity, seemed, in the sunset of his fortune, to be harmonized and assimilated with the noble features of his character, so as to add peculiarity without exciting ridicule. His mind occupied with such projects of future ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... voice; he stretched his mouth to its utmost reach and lowered the extremities of his lips; he turned his toes inward (naturally his feet described an abnormal angle) and bowed his arms. Brought up in the school which teaches that to make others laugh one must never smile one's self, he wore a grotesquely lugubrious and changeless countenance. Such was Newgag in his every impersonation. When he thought he was funniest, he appeared to be in most pain ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... hand which the financier extended toward the card shook grotesquely; the diamonds which adorned it sparkled and twinkled starrily. Before his eyes a red mist seemed to dance; but, through it, Rohscheimer made out ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... very stones of the convent church seemed dissolving into tears. The statues of the saints appeared to weep, and the great statue of Saint Gregory de Northbury over the porch seemed bowed down with grief. The grotesquely carved heads on the spouts grinned horribly at the abbot's destroyers, and spouted forth cascades of water, as if with the intent of drowning them. So deluging and incessant were the showers, that it seemed, indeed, as if the abbey would be flooded. All the inequalities of ground within ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... must be real For Harlequin is still clowning, He waves his arms grotesquely To make ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... stood up and leaned against the mantel. He ran his fingers through his hair until it stood grotesquely on end. "Oh, that's the old argument. I've heard it debated in a hundred bull sessions. One fellow says it's all wrong, and another fellow says it's all right, and you never get anywhere. I want somebody to tell me what's wrong about it and what's right. God knows you don't ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... had time to reflect upon it all next day; for, meanwhile, to see the proportions he had known since childhood alter thus before his eyes was unbelievably dreadful. To see your friend sufficiently himself still to be recognizable, yet in essentials, at the same time, grotesquely altered, would doubtless touch a climax of distress and horror for you. The changing of these two things, so homely and well-known in themselves, into something that was not themselves, involved an idea of destruction that was worse than even death, for ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... barbarians may previously have had is beyond our accurate knowledge. They handed down a mythology not radically different from the Graeco-Roman, though more vaguely and grotesquely conceived; and they recognised tribal duties and glories from which religious sanctions could hardly have been absent. But a barbarian mind, like a child's, is easy to convert and to people with what stories you will. The Northmen drank in with ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... hour. He came into the old refectory, and the kitchen with its immense chimney, passed in and out of the little chapels, exploring almost mechanically, yet remembering what he saw, and everything was mingled almost grotesquely with three scenes in his life—two of which we know; the other, when his aged father turned from him dying and would not speak to him. The ancient peace of this place mocked these other scenes and places. He came into the long, unroofed aisle, ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... the unconsciousness of rest. Tavish filled his mind—Tavish and the girl—and along with them the mysterious woman in the coach. He struggled with himself. He told himself how absurd it all was, how grotesquely his imagination was employing itself with him—how incredible it was that Tavish and the girl in the picture should be associated in that terrible way that had occurred to him. But he failed to convince himself. He fell ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... went, they were, if not tattered, not very far from it; but the coat he wore was not only trim but made of the finest cloth and without the smallest sign of wear. It was so conspicuously fine, and looked so grotesquely out of place on the man wearing it, that he could pass no one without rousing curiosity, and he probably had all he wanted to do for the next few days in explaining how a fine gentleman's coat had ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... situation. It was not only a city, but a state; not only a state; but an empire; and on the crest of its little mountain called itself sovereign of a territory, or at least of scattered towns and counties, with which its present aspect is grotesquely out of relation. The lords of Les Baux, in a word, were great feudal proprietors; and there was a time during which the island of Sardinia, to say nothing of places nearer home, such as Arles and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... table—the curious chairs, picturesque, but uncomfortable—the two old dower chests— the quaint three-legged stools and upright settles, were a collection that would have been precious to the art dealer and curio hunter, as would the massive eight-day clock with its grotesquely painted face, delineating not only the hours and days but the lunar months, and possessing a sonorous chime which just now struck eight with a boom as deep as that of a cathedral bell. The sound appeared to startle the old farmer with a kind of shock, for ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... wavered in the room which he had made a place of murder, there rose out of them taunting, accusing figures. He seemed to see Hagan, the detective, grotesquely converted into an executioner clad in red and Sam Haymond launching against him the anathema of the Church. There were shapes of strange things neither human, animal nor reptile—but wholly monstrous—emerging greedily from filthy lairs and creeping toward ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... broom fight with some brother of the same craft, was quite ready for an affair that could only increase his popularity. Catching up his jharroo, or broom, he began to shower blows upon the unfortunate Piroo, yet never ceasing to dance round him so grotesquely that the fight was too much of a farce for any one to think of interfering. Yet the blows went home pretty hard, and as the broom was a sort of besom made of the springy ribs of the palm-leaf it stung sharply where it ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... dress. Our Master does not require of us to dress grotesquely, or to attract notice by the singularity and grotesqueness of our attire. We must dress suitably and in conformity with that station in life to which He has called us. But what a difference there is between making our dress our main consideration, and considering ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... grotesquely, preluded by a cry from the woman, the tragedy which death had once cut short was enacted out, there on the rough ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... of the wildness of Armstrong's youth had evidently become a family tradition, and even, by a familiar process, an article of belief in his own mind. It reminded me grotesquely of Justice Shallow's reminiscences with Sir John Falstaff: "Ha, Cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that, that this knight and I have seen.... Jesu, Jesu, the mad days ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... not cared to look round Maisie's rooms at first. Now, as soon as she came in, she perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a small pair of feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had died in the effort to strap up a great portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely that her little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and it had closed upon her, like the jaws of a gigantic alligator. The key was in her hand. Her dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come down and covered her body and ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... his face hidden from her, and his words seemed to release some bond in Helen's heart. The worst of the bitterness against him passed away. The tragedy, after all, was not his fault, but Fate's, and to suggest that he was accountable was to be grotesquely stupid. That he had not loved her was the tragedy; that he had never seen was, in reality, the tragedy's alleviation. Absurd to blame poor Gerald for not seeing. When she spoke again it was ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... days I observed the characteristics of Coriander's African gorilla with new interest. He performed wonderfully well; it was difficult to realize that the hairy, ravening, agile, and grotesquely-moving beast, from which every visitor shrank back aghast, was only jolly Jack Gale serving out his hard servitude for an anticipated bride, very much after the ancient fashion of Laban's kinsman. The ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... reached, within one or two, both in Waverley and Guy Mannering) that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least in the world's estimate respectable persons; and that they are all grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison. Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... pins from the privileged stationer. There was a strong representation of new hands, the paying students, youths and young men in black coats and silk hats or tweed suits, the scholar contingent, youngsters of Lewisham's class, raw, shabby, discordant, grotesquely ill-dressed and awe-stricken; one Lewisham noticed with a sailor's peaked cap gold-decorated, and one with mittens and very genteel grey kid gloves; and Grummett the perennial Official of the Books was busy ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... that enigmatic lattice-work of structural steel and stopped. Five grotesquely armored figures wafted themselves forward on pencils of force. Their leader, whose suit bore the number "14", reached a mammoth girder and worked his way along it up to a peculiar-looking bulge. The whole immense structure vanished, leaving men ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... to me, you'd 'tin' to yo' business betta 'an you does," replied Aunt Agnes, raising a very battered umbrella over her grotesquely apparelled figure, as she stepped from under the shelter of the tree to take her ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... the chart-room was altered, our artificial gravity cut off. I felt the sudden lightness; I gripped the window casement and clung. Carter was startled into incautious movement. It flung him out into the center of the chart-room, his arms and legs grotesquely flailing. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... of these islands you may observe that the trees—when there are any trees—all bend away from the sea; and, even of bright, hot days when the wind sleeps, there is something grotesquely pathetic in their look of agonized terror. A group of oaks at Grande Isle I remember as especially suggestive: five stooping silhouettes in line against the horizon, like fleeing women with streaming garments and wind-blown hair,—bowing grievously and thrusting out arms desperately ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... Hlwot-dau, or Hall of the Supreme Council, before entering the Palace itself. The Hlwot-dau was a detached structure on the right front of the Palace as one entered by the eastern gate. It was the Downing Street of Mandalay. Its sides were quite open, and its fantastic roof of grotesquely carved teak plastered with gilding, painting, and tinsel, was supported on massive teak pillars painted a deep red. Taking off our shoes we ascended to the platform of the Hlwot-dau, where we found the Menghyi surrounded ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... it were made of Berlin wool. Though she was not yet forty-five, she wore a bonnet with violet velvet strings, and had a very long waist. Also, her skirt, in reality quite normal, looked, to the eye used to contemporary fashion, grotesquely ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... gay as he used to be, I should not mind," she said, lifting a grotesquely stained face. "But when he goes drinking, drinking so as to drown his love for another woman, c'est plus fort que moi. It is more than ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... year of their lives they come more distinctly into conscious participation with our efforts. Those soft little creatures that we have figured grotesquely as dropping from an inexorable spout into our world, those weak and wailing lumps of pink flesh more helpless than any animal, for whom we have planned better care, a better chance of life, better conditions of all sorts, those laval souls who are at first helpless ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... a short time after this took place in honour of those who had been killed in the late fight. The dancers were grotesquely got up, and are amusingly described by Mr Baker. "Each man had about a dozen huge ostrich feathers in his helmet, a leopard or monkey-skin hung from his shoulders, while a large iron bell was strapped to his loins like a woman's bustle. ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... dark, wet, gloomy night in autumn, when in an upper room of a mean house situated in an obscure street, or rather court, near Lambeth, there sat, all alone, a one-eyed man grotesquely habited, either for lack of better garments or for purposes of disguise, in a loose greatcoat, with arms half as long again as his own, and a capacity of breadth and length which would have admitted of his winding himself in it, head and ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... a page, her painfully thin legs looking like sticks of peppermint in their parti-coloured tights, and either was, or pretended to be, terrified of her minute and tubbily good-natured mount. At its first move forward she fell upon its neck with shrill screams and clung on grotesquely, righting herself at last to make mock faces ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... alternative," I suggested, "grotesquely improbably, no doubt, but still just conceivable? Might the whole story of the cataleptic Russian and his son be a concoction of Dr. Trevelyan's, who has, for his own ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... dwarf is repellent because that which Mallare so fondly called his own—his desires—is revealed to him as grotesquely promiscuous. Yes, the penis is the democratic tabernacle of Life. Under its little Moorish roof, the senses of the ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... mysterious shake of the head as he led the way down the village street, his rags flapping grotesquely in the dawn wind. ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... face pale and her weak mouth foolishly agape. Cyrus Kilfane was indistinguishable from the pile of rugs amid which he sprawled by the table, and of Sir Lucien Pyne nothing was to be seen but the outstretched legs and feet which projected grotesquely from a recess. Seated, oriental fashion, upon an improvised divan near the grand piano and propped up by a number of garish cushions, Rita beheld Mrs. Sin. The long bamboo pipe had fallen from her listless fingers. Her face wore an expression of mystic rapture like that characterizing ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Jasper Suggs lay in front of the tumble-down fireplace, his long body twisted grotesquely by the final spasm of pain that carried him off. The lower part of his body was covered by a filthy strip of rag carpet which some one had hastily thrown over him as Rachel Carter was on the point of entering the house. His ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... when we started I was disgusted to find that Chalmers was on what should have been the pack animal, and that two thickly-quilted cotton "spreads" had been disposed of under my saddle, making it broad, high, and uncomfortable. Any human being must have laughed to see an expedition start so grotesquely "ill found." I had a very old iron-grey horse, whose lower lip hung down feebly, showing his few teeth, while his fore-legs stuck out forwards, and matter ran from both his nearly-blind eyes. It is kindness to bring him up to abundant pasture. My saddle is an old McLellan ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... same impetuosity. The characters have more the appearance of being broad caricatures from real life, than the creatures of a rich and teeming invention. They seem rather the representation of individuals grotesquely designed and extravagantly coloured, than of classes ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... cup of crystal, Pompton Lake, the sweet singing Wanaqua River, and lovely Pequannock Park. They have made homes for themselves, quite wonderful in beauty, and never pretentious; never a staring house or grotesquely expensive gates to shock the dear little childlike mountains and shady river. Along the winding roads, where trees trailed shadows like dragging masses of torn Spanish lace, there were fine stone walls draped with woodbine, and among the folding hills were orchards like great flower-beds, surrounding ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... my head cautiously. Upon the very edge of the flying blocks squatted Drake and Ventnor, grotesquely frog-like. I crawled toward them—crawled, literally, like a caterpillar; for wherever my body touched the surface of the cubes the attracting force held it, allowed a creeping movement only, surface sliding upon surface—and ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... voice chirped somewhere near the door. Green Valley turned and looked and froze with horror. For there, staggering grotesquely, came little Jim Tumley, a piteous figure. He had kept his promise to his new friend—he had come to ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... did not finish. Quick staccato footsteps were heard. Then a strange vision burst upon them—Jonathan Radbourne accoutered for motoring, in visored cap and duster, with a huge pair of shell-rimmed goggles that sat grotesquely athwart his beaming countenance. On one arm he carried a ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... is always the ruling and Divine power: and the rest of the man is to it only as an instrument which it sounds, or a tablet on which it writes; clearly and sublimely if the wax be smooth and the strings true, grotesquely and wildly if they are stained and broken. And thus the "Iliad," the "Inferno," the "Pilgrim's Progress," the "Faerie Queen," are all of them true dreams; only the sleep of the men to whom they came was the deep, living ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... was as if she saw the face of a stranger. His eyes were half closed and glittering fiercely; his lips protruded as if grotesquely pouting to express scorn, and on each side of the distended nostrils a deep vertical wrinkle showed like the blackened gash ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... much of a garden about the place, but there was a little lawn amongst the pines, in the midst of which stood a huge old patriarch, with red stem and grotesquely contorted branches: beneath it was a bench, and there, after their return from their two hours' ride, the ladies sat, while the sun was at its warmest, on the mornings of their first and second readings: Malcolm ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald |
