"Gruesome" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dashwood, with a wry face. "But never mind, keep on rubbing. I'm feeling more life in it already. But, I say, Den, this is a weird place we're in. These German fellows don't seem to take their gruel like our chaps. It's a gruesome thing to hear ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... and was amazed at the character and standing of the latter. He had a number of those buyers who lived in adjacent cities, privately approached and interviewed, and ascertained that, save in two instances, they were all his readers, had seen the gruesome pictures he had presented, and then had deliberately purchased ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... for the same cause. The boys at Centralia were conspired against because they too stood "for the solidarity of labor." It is simply lying and camouflage to attempt to trace such persecutions to any other source. These are things America will be ashamed of when she comes to her senses. Such gruesome events are paralleled in no country save the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm or ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... hobbies," Heneage answered. "Take the Colonel, for instance, the most harmless, the most good-natured man who ever lived. Nothing in the world fascinates him so much as the details of a tragedy like this, however gruesome they may be. I have seen him handle a murderer's knife as though he loved it. His favourite museum is the professional Chamber of Horrors in Scotland Yard. My own interests run in a slightly different direction. I like to look at an affair of this sort as a chess problem, and to set myself ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his contemplation of the gruesome object by a sharp exclamation from Mary. Looking up, he saw Clare a quarter of a mile away, hastening to them along the ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... clear, sparkling, with a greenish cast, and it deposited a white crust on the margins. Nielsen, kicking around in the sand, unearthed a skull, bleached and yellow, yet evidently not so very old. Some thirsty wanderer had taken his last drink at that deceiving spring. The gruesome and the beautiful, the tragic and the sublime, go hand in hand down the naked ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... of infusing knowledge he has not unjustly satirised in his poem, entitled "Recollections of Auld Lang Syne." Norval was a model among the tyrant pedagogues of the past; and as an illustration of Scottish school life fifty years since, we present our author's reminiscences of the despot. "Gruesome in visage and deformed in body, his mind reflected the grim and tortuous aspects of his person. The recollection of his monstrous cruelties,—his cruel flagellations,—is still unaccountably depressing. One day of horrors I shall never cease to remember. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his chair and watched his tea getting cold. The suggestion of something having happened to Bobby had changed his anger to sharp solicitude. Gruesome tales of brutality toward foreigners in Eastern ports came back ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... cutting up seals is a gruesome but very necessary business, and the provision of suitable implements is humane as well as economic in time and labour. The skin is first cut off with the blubber attached: the meat is then cut from the skeleton, the entrails cleaned out, the liver carefully excised. The whole is then ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... and whose religions and political ideas are purely conventional and superstitious. To them it is a struggle between half a dozen fairytale personages for a ring, involving hours of scolding and cheating, and one long scene in a dark gruesome mine, with gloomy, ugly music, and not a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman. Only those of wider consciousness can follow it breathlessly, seeing in it the whole tragedy of human history and the whole horror ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... at the gruesome results of his marksmanship, then he turned back to the body of his beloved mare. Ricardo noticed at length that he was crying; as the Ranger knelt beside the dead thoroughbred the old Mexican whispered ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... incongruous thoughts leaped through her brain. Perhaps they were this moment going down. Now she knew what it was like! This thing she had read of in newspapers! Now she was going down in mid-ocean, she, Betty Vanderpoel! And, as she sprang to clutch her fur coat, there flashed before her mental vision a gruesome picture of the headlines in the newspapers and the inevitable reference to the millions ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... think, of all "shop," ours is the most unsuitable for general conversation because of the morbid fascination it has for most people. Ladies especially will listen with avidity to medical matters, perceiving nothing gruesome in the details at the moment; but afterward developing nerves on the subject, and probably giving the young practitioner good reason to regret unwary confidences. I tried to stave off the topic, but the will-power of the majority was against me, and finally I found myself submitting, and ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded me of gruesome things we had lived ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... comfortable, and the only drawback lay in the fact that one sometimes found it objectionable to have to look at these poor old creatures, dragging themselves around. They had nothing to do, it seemed, but to wait and die. One old man was a gruesome sight. He was about ninety years old and spent his days walking about the courtyard, wearing a cigarette tin hung around his neck, into which he used to cough with such terrible effort that it seemed as if he would die every time the spasm shook him. As a matter of fact, he and many ...
— Life in a Tank • Richard Haigh
... my self-control, I had looked upon many a gruesome sight during my somewhat chequered career, though scarcely one more hideous than this which ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... of Edward Crown wedged in at the bottom of Quill's Chimney, weighted down with stones and earth, alone served as an obstacle to the enterprise. He shrank from certain gruesome possibilities,—such as the dislodgment of stones at the bottom of the crevice and the consequent exposure of a thing that would haunt him forever. And even though the stones remained in place there would still remain the fact that almost within ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... tenderness and pathos, with men and women of such loving hearts and devoted spirits, with the profusion of gay, kindly, childlike love of innocent fun, that we find all through Thackeray's work, he does not belong to the order of the Jonathan Swifts, the Balzacs, the Zolas, the gruesome anatomists of human vice and meanness. On the other hand he does not belong to the order of the Shakespeares, Goethes, and Scotts, to whom human virtue and dignity always remain in the end the supreme forces of human life. Thackeray, with a fine and sympathetic soul, had ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... he greeted the little fellow; "you've got me a lawyer," and the pale features lighted with a smile of such radiance as seemed incongruous in this gruesome place. He held out his hand to the man who swung toward him, looming mountainous behind his brother's slight figure. "Thank you for coming," he said cordially, and in his tone was the same air of a grand seigneur as in the lad's. Suddenly ...
— The Perfect Tribute • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... justice, not expediency. Is there a man who would dare say that if Christianity—the Christianity of the Christ—had been actually in vogue, in practice in all the countries of Christendom during the last fifty years, during the last twenty-five years, that this colossal and gruesome war would ever have come about? No clear-thinking and honest man would or could say that it would. We need again the voice of the prophet, clear-seeing, high-purposed, and unafraid. We need again ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... half-hearted chuckle over his gruesome suggestion, and lazily getting to his feet, selected another tune for ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... debonair aristocrat of the race-courses and the boulevards. The shadows under his eyes were deeper, his cheeks more sunken. He had lost something of the sprightliness of his bearing. His attitude, indeed, was almost dejected. He was like a man who sees into the future and finds there strange and gruesome things. ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... room, divided into unequal portions by the four wide, massive pillars that supported its arched roof. A smell of damp and mildew came from its walls and from its flags moistened by the water that trickled from without. Its appearance at any time must have been gruesome. But, at that moment, with the tall figures of Sebastiani and his sons, with the slanting gleams of light that fell between the pillars, with the vision of the captive chained down upon the truckle-bed, it assumed a ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... escort were pelted with stones and, on arriving in the Piazza, he beheld the gruesome human decoration of the Campanile. Without a moment's hesitation, spurring his horse, he rode swiftly towards the Porta della Croce, and set off into the ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... lay a dead Marine, and beside him stood a French surgeon, who greeted them warmly. The wounded were in a cellar, and if they were not got out soon, it was obvious that they would be burned alive. Inside the hall were piles of bicycles, loaves of bread, and dead soldiers, all in gruesome confusion. In the cellar dead and wounded were lying together. The wounded had all to be carried on stretchers, for everyone who could crawl had fled from that ghastly inferno, and only those who have shifted wounded on stretchers ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... had remained perfectly quiet in the room crouching at Jacqueline's feet and beside the bed. It had not attempted to molest me, as I had feared might be the case during the course of my gruesome work. ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... the young man. "Things are not often so serious as they are supposed to be. It's like being in a house that's supposed to be haunted—on All Hallow E'en, for instance—it's awfully gruesome and creepy at night when the wind moans and the owls screech. And then, the next morning, one wonders how one could have been such an idiot. Other things are often like that. You think the world's coming to an end—and ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... '64 and '66, came strains of 'The Watch on the Rhine.' Every now and then my mother would lean back in her chair and close her eyes, and I knew intuitively she was thinking of me. Mein Gott! If she had only known the truth. These tableaux faded away, and the gruesome awfulness of my surroundings thrust themselves upon me. A damp, foetid smell, suggestive of the rottenness of decay, assailed my nostrils and made me sneeze. I choked; the saliva streamed in torrents down my chin ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... so that she could hear what every one was saying. The dinner indeed had been prepared amid much merriment; it had been both good and abundant, for they had sacrificed many victims; but the supper was yet to come, and nothing can be conceived more gruesome than the meal which a goddess and a brave man were soon to lay before them—for they had brought their doom ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... horrible and excruciating shriek I had ever heard in my life. If anyone by a refinement of cruelty were to compound a torture for the ears, I do not think he could produce anything half so piercing, gruesome, and discordant. ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... chapels of St. Faith and St. Blaise, in the south transept. The latter was taken down long ago, but in Scott's time the frame, which still had some skin adhering to it, was extant, but it was then carried off by the Abbey master-mason and has been since entirely lost sight {130} of. The gruesome relics on the south transept door were traditionally supposed to be the skins of the Danes, but the one here was said to be that of a man flayed alive for robbing the royal treasury in the time of Edward I., which was fixed upon the treasury entrance as a warning to the monks, who were implicated ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... balancing myself with a khudstick. The men came prancing over as if they were on a good high-road, the careless ease with which they made the passage bordering on impertinence! I reflected, however, that sheep, and such like beasts of humble brain, can stroll upon the brink of gruesome precipices without any fear of falling, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... at my eyes—been snow-blind twice; look where my foot's half gone; And that gruesome scar on my left cheek where the frost-fiend bit to the bone. Each one a brand of this devil's land, where I've played and I've lost the game, A broken wreck with a craze for 'hooch,' and never a ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... that this space was literally covered with the Confederate dead, and one could have walked all over it on their bodies. Gen. Grant, in substance, makes the same statement in his Memoirs. It was a fearful sight. But not far from the Peach Orchard field, in a westerly direction, was a still more gruesome spectacle. Some of our forces were in line on an old, grass-grown country road that ran through thick woods. The wheels of wagons, running for many years right in the same ruts, had cut through the turf, so that the surface of the road was somewhat ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... was nearly full of rain water, which they were likely to need, since their only supply of fresh water was contained in a five-gallon can, which would hold about two days' requirements. The rain water was good and would have been better but for Ned's gruesome inquiry: ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... blamed if my suddenly aroused and somewhat bemused senses played tricks with me, and my startled imagination began to conjure up the gruesome stories I had heard of weird visitants, and ghostly beings, heard but seldom seen, on the East Anglian meres and broads? Then again came the remembrance of the shriek or cry I had fancied I heard earlier in the night, and with a shudder I thought: "How ghastly if it should be ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... awoke in his heart the passionate longing to help her; he saw now her whole story in the most pathetic light, from the little child deserted by her mother, to the woman scorned and suffering, left by the same mother in such a gruesome temptation. The greatness of the sin provoked the passionate longing to save her. The man who had given up Groombridge Castle and all it entailed had not one harsh thought for the woman who had fallen into crime to avoid the poverty he had chosen ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... over her left shoulder and as she played she was holding forth animatedly to a girl friend who had evidently dropped in from some store or office during the lunch hour. Now and again the fat man paused in his vocal efforts to reprimand her for her slackness. She paid no heed. There was something gruesome, uncanny, about the way her fingers went their own way over the defenseless keys. Her conversation with the frowzy little ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... The barge which so often carried its owner to pleasure or business lay moored on the river ready to carry him that last sad journey to the Tower; and sadder still, to bring back the devoted daughter when the execution was accomplished, and later also when she bore her gruesome burden of a father's head, said to have been buried with ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... poverty. The fearful state of things in American cities was brought about in a very few years, whereas the gradual extension of our poverty-stricken classes has been going on for centuries. To us poverty, besides being a horror, was more or less of a mystery; but America exhibited the development of the gruesome monster with lurid distinctness. In the old countries the men who first were able to seize the land gradually sublet portions either for money or warlike service; the growth of manufactures occupied a thousand years before it reached its present extent; and ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... up the paper which he had thrown back to me, and read the paragraph indicated. It was headed, "A Gruesome Packet." ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... effects. For instance, nothing more delights him than to 'lothfully' consent to answer a request, at The Mite Society, some evening, for 'an appropriate selection,' and then, with an elaborate introduction of the same, and an exalted tribute to the refined genius of the author, proceed with a most gruesome rendition of 'Alonzo The Brave and The Fair Imogene,' in a way to coagulate the blood and curl the hair of his fair listeners with abject terror. Pale as a corpse, you know, and with that cadaverous face, lit with those malignant-looking eyes, his slender figure, ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... almost equally stalwart woman were both caught by one gigantic Quabo which had a tentacle around the throat of each. The man and woman were chopping at the viscous, gruesome head. One of the Thing's eyes was gashed across, giving it a fearsome, blind appearance. It heaved convulsively, and the three struggling figures toppled into the water ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... and Emmeline Lestrange, stranded on a remote island with a beautiful lagoon. As children, they are cared for by Paddy Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to death after only two and a half years in paradise. Frightened and confused by the man's gruesome corpse, the children flee to another part of Palm Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and eventually fall in love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they manage to copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth is especially remarkable: ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... original version of a book by Paracelsus. I have not read it yet, for the writing is most difficult to decipher, but one point caught my eye on turning over the pages. That is the gruesome fact that Paracelsus fed the homunculi he manufactured on human blood. One wonders how he ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... of a somewhat gruesome turn of mind. My sympathies are always with the melancholy side of life and nature. I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet, and a low sound as of stifled sobbing is heard in the damp woods—the evenings in late autumn time, ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... another of the lower jaw series at Teddington, which is also, in all probability, the only instance of a man's nightcap figuring in such gruesome circumstances. ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... then I sat down on the broad top of the ladder and forgot everything. It was a savage history of ferocious hate and barbarous reprisals. It had been a feud waged between two clans for three generations. The story of Dark Malcolm and Ian Red Hand was only part of it, but it was a gruesome thing. Pages told of the bloody deeds they wrought on each other's houses. The one human passion of Dark Malcolm's life was his love for his little daughter. She had brown eyes and brown hair, and those ...
— The White People • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... seven hundred years, the finest inhabited chateau in the Soissonnais, and as, by a curious throw of the dice of Destiny, it now belongs to a fair compatriot of mine, perhaps I may be allowed to tell this somewhat gruesome tale, which has a flavour rather ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... that gruesome land of swamps and sand, which, when we at last escaped from it, we learned was Florida, I must not write here. It was months before such of us as were left crawled through into civilisation, and it is not ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... 24th September. It was a matter of regret to me that I was unable to pay a last tribute of respect to my loved and honoured friend and Commander by following his body to the grave, but I could not leave the column. That march through Delhi in the early morning light was a gruesome proceeding. Our way from the Lahore gate by the Chandni Chauk led through a veritable city of the dead; not a sound was to be heard but the falling of our own footsteps; not a living creature was to be seen. Dead bodies were strewn ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the polluted stream and held in their finger-like drooping branches human bodies in all shapes and attitudes with a semblance of naturalness which made an everlasting picture on my distraught mind. Of this pitiful gruesome company I ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... I preen my faith in sea-bogles an' the like, though there's a mony as claims to ha' seen a' that and waur. I'm no easy feared, but maybe your ain bluid would run a bit cauld, mun, if instead o' speerin' aboot it in daylicht ye were wi' me last night, an' seed an awfu' like shape, white an' gruesome, whiles here, whiles there, an' it greetin' and ca'ing in the darkness like a bit lambie that hae lost its mither. Ye would na' be sae ready to put it a' doon to auld wives' clavers then, I'm thinkin'." I saw it was hopeless to reason with him, so contented myself with begging him as a personal ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... only about two minutes, because his spirit came upon him, and he fell down upon one knee, unable to rise. I never saw a more gruesome spectacle. A bright unnatural light gleamed in his eyes, his countenance became livid, the eyeballs protruded, a copious perspiration streamed from his body, the muscles of his face twitched, and his whole frame shook more and more vehemently as the intensity ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... poor honest soldier of the Fatherland; but thou canst face him as boldly as thou hast faced the foe, with the help of the little book of which thy frost-chilled fingers have never lost the grip. The gruesome bird falls back as ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... of ruler perfectly exemplified by Duke Karl of Wuerttemberg, up to about the year 1770; 'In a Battle', a powerful description of the rage of combat, with all its sickening and inspiring details; 'The Pestilence', a gruesome tribute to the power of God as manifested in the horrors of the plague, and 'Count Eberhard the Quarreler', a patriotic battle-ballad in honor of a locally renowned Suabian fighter. Better than ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... struggle five years ago in the ancient Manchurian city to which I have come. What Gettysburg was in our Civil War, that Mukden was in the first great contest between the white race and the Mongolian. Here covetous Death for once was satisfied, his gruesome garnering seen at each wintry nightfall in the {71} windrows of bloody and mangled bodies strewn along miles ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... was the same gruesome story. The sufferings of the pressed man went for nothing so long as the pressed man was kept. Provided only the bars were dependable and the bolts staunch, anything would do to "clap him up in." The town "cage" ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... house was a gruesome place. Everything in it and for yards around it, was covered with a yellow blight, as if the slight beard of some pestilential fungous were sprouting ... the only people the company could induce to work there were foreigners who knew little ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... exertion of the rowers reached a position from which it could drift to leeward of the point and its deadly maelstrom. With rowers bailing and the white-faced woman seated, fastening the child in the life-buoy, the boat, gunwale-deep, and the gruesome guard of sharks drifted out of sight behind the point. The boy had not understood; but he had seen his kind, and from association of ideas appreciated again his loneliness—crying and wailing for a week; but not for his mother: he had ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... met her, and beat against her face like a black wing that brushed it. It had a mouldy smell. Holding up the lantern, Hildegarde crept as best she could through the narrow opening. A gruesome place it was in which she found herself. Grim enough by daylight, it was now doubly so; for the blackness seemed like something tangible, some shapeless monster which was gathering itself together, and shrinking back, inch by inch, as the little spark of light moved forward. The ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... fetch it. I also brought out from the dresser a few raw eggs, to break into a tumbler and swallow whole; for Hilda and I needed food almost as sorely as the poor beast herself. There was something gruesome in thus rummaging about for bread and meat in the dead woman's cupboard, while she herself lay there on the floor; but one never realises how one will act in these great emergencies until they come upon one. Hilda, ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for a moment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is a ridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. A clergyman's female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday night reading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing at the door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, and the hour ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... formed is punished as a crime? In connection with this, we also recalled the mediaeval controversy about the moment of time at which the soul is really lodged in the foetus, since the concept of murder becomes admissible only from that point on. Doubtless you also know the gruesome poem by Lenau, which puts infanticide and the prevention of children on the same plane." "Strangely enough, I had happened to think of Lenau during the afternoon." "Another echo of your dream. And now I shall demonstrate to you another ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... on der tip-toes, en dey'll set dar en run over de ole times wid one er n'er, en crack der jokes same ez dey useter. En den ag'in," continued the old man, shutting his eyes and giving to his voice a gruesome intonation quite impossible to describe,—"en den ag'in hit look lak dat Brer Rabbit'll gin de wink all 'roun', en den dey'll tu'n in en git up a reg'lar juberlee. Brer Rabbit, he'll retch up en take down de trivet, en Brer Fox, he'll snatch ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... most terrible spots in Ypres. People were killed there every day. To go past the Menin Gate was considered to be asking for it. So a terror of the Menin Gate was bred in me before I had ever seen the gruesome, stinking spot. And the Menin Gate had taken its ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... fondness for the morbid and the abnormal. This is revealed in 'Le Horla,' the appalling story in which he took for his own Fitzjames O'Brien's uncanny monster, invisible, and yet tangible. In the hands of the clever Irish-American this tale had been gruesome enough; but the Frenchman was able to give it an added touch of terror by making the unfortunate victim discover that the creature he feared had a stronger will than his own and that he was being hypnotized to his doom by a being whom he could not see, but whose presence he could ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... buffaloes were killed near Fort Dodge in three months. During the summer of 1874, an expedition composed of sixteen hunters killed 2,800 buffaloes, and during that same season one young trapper boasted of having killed 3,000 animals. The sight of such a slaughter scene was gruesome to behold. Colonel Dodge writes of it: "During the fall of 1873 I rode across the prairie, where a year ago I had hunted several herds. At the time we enjoyed the aspect of a myriad of buffaloes, which were grazing peacefully over the prairies. Now we rode past myriads of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... murders in Newf'un'land. They shock us. They're never forgotten. An' there was a deal made o' that one, an' 'twas still the latest murder—news o' the trial at St. John's spread broadcast over the three coasts; an' talk o' the black cap an' the black flag, an' gruesome tales o' the gallows an' the last prayer, an' whispers o' the quicklime that ended it all. Sammy Scull could go nowhere in Newf'un'land an' escape the shadow an' shame o' that rope. Let the lad grow ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... could see the fields strewn with the bodies of dead cattle. Here and there, at the doors of farmhouses, the inmates could be seen, lying together in gruesome heaps, caught and killed instantaneously as they attempted flight. Here, too, were figures on the roads. But they were figures of dead ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... a dark region where, from a careening building, a dozen gruesome doorways gave up loads of babies to the street and the gutter. A wind of early autumn raised yellow dust from cobbles and swirled it against an hundred windows. Long streamers of garments fluttered from ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... on, till at last we ran into a great lake, where water-lilies rocked on the water and dragon-flies hummed on their great stiff wings. Up on the surface the lake was clear as a mirror. But whether we wished it or not, we had to run right down by the bottom, where it was dark and gruesome. And this I could not endure. I longed for the sunbeams. I knew them so well from the time I used to run in the brook. There they used to peep down through the leaves and pass over me in fleeting gleams. I longed so much to see them again that I stole up to the surface, and lay ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... but it was late before he had it skinned and dressed. When the carcase was hoisted to the gallows—and it seemed gruesome enough as it hung there in the pallid light of the moon, with the night birds dismally wailing like mourners from the lonely trees—we ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... clank. The bad burn waits with his head unbandaged. My neighbour chokes in the clutch of chloral . . . O, a gruesome world! ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... some reverence for a corpse, but none whatever for a ghost. His mind had undergone a change concerning the dead the moment he had heard him move, and he looked upon his charge now as equally despicable and gruesome. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... handle was burnt. He groped about near it and uncovered, one after another, a gold-washing dish, a pick-head, a couple of wedges, and a hammer. The sand had drifted over them and made a mound. Then he laid bare a truly gruesome sight—charred embers of wood and half-burnt ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... Poe, as a personal discovery, four and a half centuries later; it survives them all. It attains, in addition, the crowning glory, coveted by Stevenson, of appearing typical. There may never have been a Christian child who was martyred by the Jews in the particularly gruesome way described—probably there never was; but, in listening to the Prioress, it does not enter into our heads to doubt her word—the picture which she leaves with us of how the Christian regarded the ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... There are six subjects, the most remarkable being the huge dragon with a long curly tail in the act of swallowing St. Margaret, whose skirts and feet are shown inside the capacious jaws, while the head is beginning to appear somewhere behind the dragon's neck. To the right is shown a gruesome representation of the martyrdom of St. Lawrence, and then follow Adam and Eve by the Tree of Life (a twisted piece of foliage), the martyrdom of St. Andrew, and what seems to be ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the island of St. Thomas in the West Indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... causeway, and where Dickens placed that amphibious creature, "as slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water mark too", who exhibited a bloated pair of shoes "as interesting relics that he had taken from the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore". This type of the gruesome long-shoremen whom Dickens had encountered in his waterside rambles, as he collected the materials for Great Expectations, was afterwards elaborated in the Rogue Riderhood ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... He described in his own fashion the finding of Archibald McBride's body. Then a few skilful questions by Moxlow brought out the fact of his having met John North on the Square immediately before his own gruesome discovery. The little lamplighter was excused, and Colonel Harbison took his: place. He, in his turn, quickly made way for Andy Gilmore. Moxlow next interrogated Atkinson, Langham's client, who explained ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... of high-explosive shells, and the drone and whirr of flying splinters, you get labour conditions removed to the utmost limit from ideal, and, to any but the men of the Sappers, well over the edge of the impossible. The work at any other time would have been gruesome and unnerving, because the gasping and groaning of the wounded hardly ceased from end to end of the captured trench, and in digging out the collapsed sections many dead Germans and some British were found blocking the ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... by cigars, Simms having begun to smoke of late years to discourage a tendency to stoutness. Then all would join in the diversions of the afternoon, which sometimes led to the "Edge of the Swamp," a gruesome place which the poet of Woodlands had celebrated in his ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish^; lumbering; hulky^, hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; grisly, ghastly; ghost like, death like; cadaverous, grewsome^, gruesome. frightful, hideous, odious, uncanny, forbidding; repellant, repulsive, repugnant, grotesque, bizarre; grody [Coll.], grody to the max [Coll.]; horrid, horrible; shocking &c (painful) 830. foul &c (dirty) 653; dingy &c (colorless) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... evening: up he bounded, grasped firm his foe, whose fingers cracked. The fiend made off, but the earl close followed. The monster meant — if he might at all — to fling himself free, and far away fly to the fens, — knew his fingers' power in the gripe of the grim one. Gruesome march to Heorot this monster of harm had made! Din filled the room; the Danes were bereft, castle-dwellers and clansmen all, earls, of their ale. Angry were both those savage hall-guards: the house resounded. Wonder it was the wine-hall ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... of the Mannings in 1849, his going so often to the Morgue in Paris, his visit to America to 'the exact site where Professor Webster did that amazing murder', may seem legitimate for one who had to study crime among the other departments of life; but at times he revels in gruesome details in a way which jars on our feeling, and betrays too theatrical a love of sensation. However, no one could say that Dickens is generally morbid, in view of the sound and hearty appreciation which he had for all that is wholesome and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... from here, I suppose, until your gruesome visit is accomplished. What makes you think that I would give up Sheila ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... help it, Joan?" he pleaded. "You saw how it was?" As she grew quieter, he talked. "I heard you scream like a person being tortured to death—twice—a gruesome enough sound, let me tell you, to hear in the dead of a white, still night. I didn't altogether want to break into your house. I've heard some ugly stories about men venturing to disturb the work of murderers. But, you see, Joan, I've a fear of myself. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... Bill's failings might have been, he was no faint heart, and despite the shock of the gruesome discovery he continued his investigation of the silent ship. Apparently some attempt had been made when first the Buena Ventura was caught in the deadly embrace of the Sargasso to convey her treasure to the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... son, he has a sneer and a spite such as never his father had. He is never a one to sit still and let things gang their gate; but he has as little pity or compassion as his father, and if King Charles will not stir a finger to hinder a gruesome deed, Dauphin Louis will not spare to do it so that he can gain by it, and I trow verily that to give pain and sting with that bitter tongue of his is joy ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... space on the side of the bed next the fire. The bed itself—not to mention the shadowy region beyond it—on which the body of the pirate had lain, he could not regard without a sense of the awfully gruesome: itself looked scared at its own consciousness of the fact, and of the feeling it ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... cringed to their prophetess, Magdalen Brant. Perhaps it was there that this man had met his match in the lithe young animal whelped by the Toad-Woman—this slim, lawless, depraved child, who had led the False Faces in their gruesome rites and sacrifice! ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... way we knew it would. I heard it all. It wasn't gruesome, as you might imagine. I spoke with Lynds the whole time. It was sort of a resigned horror. The initial countdown went off without a hitch and the hissing of the escape valves on the carrier ...
— What Need of Man? • Harold Calin
... delicate health at the time, I need hardly say that I knew nothing of these gruesome details until afterwards. Henry (that is my husband), after entering my room with a robust and sunburned appearance that did my heart good, merely observed—as soon as we had exchanged greetings—that he had ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... ride of Richard Bullen! Sing, O Muse, of chivalrous men! the sacred quest, the doughty deeds, the battery of low churls, the fearsome ride and gruesome perils of the Flower of Simpson's Bar! Alack! she is dainty, this Muse! She will have none of this bucking brute and swaggering, ragged rider, and I must fain follow him ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... the gruesome sight until he had impressed its every detail on his memory, he turned to his assistant. "Get ahead with your flashlight, Kirby," he ordered. "Take views from all the angles you can. The constable will give you a hand. Meantime, sergeant, give me an idea of ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... "Well, but that sense of duty is hardly gruesome; it would have been horridly gruesome to have left ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... New York to live, I had explored the Eden Musee. One of the most gruesome of the spectacles which I had seen in its famed Chamber of Horrors was a representation of a gorilla, holding in its arms the gory body of a woman. It was that impression which now revived in my mind. But by a process strictly ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... the fin now and involuntarily a shiver passed over most of those on the little boat. The great black fin sailed easily and steadily along, just cutting the top of the water. Gruesome and forbidding it looked and straightway recalled to the minds of the four boys the stories they had so often heard of the hordes of man-eating sharks that infested the waters of ...
— The Go Ahead Boys and the Treasure Cave • Ross Kay
... supreme agony appeals to Heaven, is an academic and conventional rather than a true one based on natural truth. Allowing for the point of view exceptionally adopted here by Titian, there is, all the same, extraordinary intensity of a kind in the dramatis personae of the gruesome scene—extraordinary facial expressiveness. An immense effect is undoubtedly made, but not one of the highest sublimity that can come only from truth, which, raising its crest to the heavens, must ever ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... the gruesome setting and the gory antics of the bull, the story is amusing in a way quite harmless. Similarly, too, there is only wholesome amusement in the woman's response to a vegetarian, who made her a proposal of marriage. She did, ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... almost before the old gentleman was cold in his grave! It was contemptible. In no little dread he wondered if his uncle would come back to haunt him. There was, at any rate, no getting away from the gruesome conviction, ludicrous as it may seem, that he would be responsible for the brisk turning over of ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... or tights, they too must have an application of liquid white. To look right, any flesh that is exposed must be made up, because the lights bleach the exposed flesh, making it appear bloodless and giving one a gruesome, corpse-like color. ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... through pity, and a few through a vague sense of loss; for, henceforth, the Vier Marchi would lack a familiar interest; but mostly the people of Mattingley's world were wakeful through curiosity. Morbid expectation of the hanging had for them a gruesome diversion. The thing itself would break the daily monotony of life and provide hushed gossip for vraic gatherings and veilles for a long time to come. Thus Elie Mattingley would not die ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the same moment Manisty was beside her again, and the gruesome sounds above were ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and made very presentable pancakes. John Harris, too, was a great forager—he knew exactly where to put his hand on decent biscuits, and the smile with which he landed his booty made the goods toothsome in the extreme. Harris had a gruesome experience. One day he was seated on a hill, talking to a friend, when a shell took the friend's head off and scattered his brains ...
— Five Months at Anzac • Joseph Lievesley Beeston
... Man with the Broken Ear)—the story of a mummy resuscitated to a world of new conditions after many years of apparent death—shows his freakish delight in oddity. So does 'Le Nez du Notaire' (The Notary's Nose), a gruesome tale of the tribulations of a handsome society man, whose nose is struck off in a duel by a revengeful Turk. The victim buys a bit of living skin from a poor water-carrier, and obtains a new nose by successful grafting. But he can nevermore get rid of the uncongenial Aquarius, who ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... do?" she queried weakly. "Don't tell me anything gruesome, please, aunt, because I feel so low-spirited this morning that I ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... may say so, I think the picture of Catherine is the gem of the book. She reminds me of her namesake of Siena—and would as little have failed in any duty, however gruesome. You ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... lady sweet, whose lord lay slain, The robbers into gruesome durance drew. Swift should her hero come, like lightning's blue! She prayed for him, as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... near by while he harnessed the dogs; he accompanied every step the woodsman took—wild horses could not have dragged him away in his present frame of mind—and finally, when they set out back toward the Canadian Line, he shambled along ahead of the team with head down and eyes averted from the gruesome bundle that lay in the sled. His punishment had overtaken him and he ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach |
