"Misshapen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before the doctors came, I held in my arms that merry baby, all lilies and roses, the blossom of my life, my pride, and my joy, lifeless as a piece of wood; and his eyes! I cannot think of them without horror. My pretty Armand was a mere mummy—black, shriveled, misshapen. ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Avenel, sitting close to an iron candlestick, which supported a misshapen torch of domestic manufacture, read small detached passages from a thick clasped volume, which she preserved with the greatest care. The art of reading the lady had acquired by her residence in a nunnery during her youth, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... unsanctified church dishonors the Lord, especially by its incongruity. A noble head, lofty-browed and intellectual, upon a {60} deformed and stunted body, is a pitiable sight. What, to the angels and principalities who gaze evermore upon the face of Jesus, must be the sight of an unholy and misshapen church on earth, standing in that place of honor called "his body." Photographing in a sentence the ecclesia of the earliest centuries, Professor Harnack says: "Originally the church was the heavenly ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... with a suddenness that had nearly sent his rider sprawling over his head. Just at this moment a plashy tramp, by the side of the bridge caught the sensitive ear of Ichabod. In the dark shadow of the grove, on the margin of the brook, he beheld something huge, misshapen, black, and towering. It stirred not, but seemed gathered up in the gloom like some gigantic monster ready to ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... 1050 Yet still the daubing pleased, and great and small, To view the monster, crowded Pigeon Hall. There Chanticleer was drawn upon his knees Adoring shrines, and stocks of sainted trees: And by him, a misshapen, ugly race; The curse of God was seen on every face: No Holland emblem could that malice mend, But still the worse the look, the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... and of a higher type, much in you is crooked and misshapen. There is no smith in the world that could hammer you right ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... very words, Excellent Princess; but he answered nought; And no man answered, out of all the throng Ofttimes addressed. But when I had my leave And was withdrawn, a man accosted me Privately—one of Rituparna's train, Vahuka named, the Raja's charioteer (Something misshapen, with a shrunken arm, But skilled in driving, very dexterous In cookery and sweetmeats). He—with groans, And tears which rolled and rolled—asked of my health, And then these verses ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... Launay was vaguely dissatisfied. It seemed to him that there was something in these two misshapen bullets that should be investigated. He took one of Solange's cartridges from his pocket and looked at it. Then, with strong teeth, he jerked the ball from the shell and compared the bullet with those he held in his hand. To all seeming ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... houses, they became greatly interested in inventing plans of their own, which gave an opportunity to the teacher to point out difficulties and defects. Had this part of domestic economy been taught in schools, our land would not be so defaced with awkward, misshapen, inconvenient, and, at the same time, needlessly expensive houses, as it ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... answering to the plans and specifications. It was shoved jam-up against the road, as is the French custom; and it was surrounded by a high, broken wall, on which all manner of excrescences in the shape of tiny dormers and misshapen little towers hung, like Texas ticks on the ears of a quarantined steer. Within the wall the numerous ruins that made up the inn were thrown together any fashion, some facing one way, some facing the other way, and some facing all ways at once; so that, for the ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... braced, she leaned and looked far backward, and far forward, and now for a long time saw nothing. The distance was empty. The glare of arc-lights showed her the shadows of her own progress—the shadow of her vehicle shooting huge and misshapen now on the cobbles, now along a blank wall, wheels, body and driver, all lurching like one; now heaped on each other, now tenuously drawn out, now twisting themselves into shapes the mind could not account for. For here, ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... its light we discovered, through the open door, the "load" huddled confusedly on the floor of the hack, face upward, his chin compressed upon his breast by his leaning against the further door, and looking altogether vulgar, misshapen, and miserably unlike a soldier. He neither moved nor spoke when we called. We hastily clambered within and lifted him upon the seat, but his head rolled about with an awful looseness and freedom, and another match disclosed ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... proportion, as the fastenings run in and out. So our life is in this world. The arras shall only be turned the right way above, when the angels of God shall see it, and marvel at the fair proportions and beauteous colours of that which looked so rough and misshapen here below. ...
— The Well in the Desert - An Old Legend of the House of Arundel • Emily Sarah Holt
... more than I did, and he was even wilder about strange countries. He had as adventurous a spirit as any lad in the school, cramped up as it was in that misshapen body. I knew he'd have liked to go round the world as well as I, and he often laughed and said—"What's more, Jack, if I'd the money I would. People are very kind to poor wretches like me all over the world. I should never want a helping hand, and the only difference ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Bostonians. They had profited by a hole in the rocks, and chopped away the stunted scrubs to enlarge it into a snug artificial abyss. It was snug, and so to the eye is a cell at Sing-Sing. If they were very misshapen Bostonians, they may have succeeded in lying there comfortably. I looked down ten feet into the rough chasm, and I saw, Corpo di Bacco! I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... oblivion's flood, Such names as Morton, Reynolds, Dibdin, Cherry. Morton a melancholy wight, whose muse, Now sighs and sobs, like newly bottled ale, Now splits her ugly mouth with grinning.[10] Reynolds,[11] whose muse most monstrous and misshapen, Outvies the hideous form that Horace drew. Dibdin[12] a ballad monger—and for Cherry— But Cherry ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... misshapen masses had been forced up in a perpendicular position, while others had been balanced on their summits so evenly, that the slightest touch was sufficient to send them thundering down on ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... and a placid grief that comes over you,—not crushing, but bringing to life from the grave of boyhood all its better and nobler instincts. In their light your wild plans of youth look sadly misshapen and in the impulse of the hour you abandon them; holy resolutions beam again upon your soul like sunlight, your purposes seem bathed in goodness. There is an effervescence of the spirit that carries away all foul matter, and leaves you in a state of calm that seems ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... Moles of April, the Necrophori, when June approaches, become odious to look upon. A layer of parasites envelops them; insinuating itself into the joints, it forms an almost continuous crust. The insect presents a misshapen appearance under this overcoat of vermin, which my hair-pencil can hardly brush aside. Driven off the belly, the horde runs round the sufferer, perches on his back and refuses ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... person of one so dear, flamed round him like some hideous blast from the hot furnace of an accepted hell, and he realized the terrors of things he had read about and seen depicted—lost souls, dark and yet lurid pits of destruction, misshapen beasts and angry angels—the blood flowed from his arteries and from his stricken heart up to his frightened brain, and surged there while he stood, not raising his eyes to this ill-starred woman. It was child's play to read one's ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... shrouds floating in the wind, while behind all, goading them on with cracking whip, ran a many-colored harlequin—and I was the harlequin! Suddenly from the black waves the sea monsters raised their misshapen heads, snatched at me with extended claws, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in every house in the kingdom until the terms of such a peace have been imposed which ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... believed most piously in a remote past; some might call it a mythical past. For some strange reason man must always thus plant his fruit trees in a graveyard. Man can only find life among the dead. Man is a misshapen monster, with his feet set forward and his face turned back. He can make the future luxuriant and gigantic, so long as he is thinking about the past. When he tries to think about the future itself, his mind diminishes to a pin point with imbecility, ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... misshapen cook-boy. He was an odd fellow, all long limbs and broad smiles, who, when his time arrived, shambled forward, cast himself in lowliest reverence full length on the ground and blubbered out his delight—now that the princely baby could really eat—at being able to supply all sorts of toothsome stews ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... dream: he was living in a country where there were no cats, nor any other living things but slugs, snails, and grubs; while all kinds of fruit grew in profusion, so that there was no difficulty in obtaining any amount of food; but one great drawback to his happiness was an ugly, misshapen little bird, which would keep running after him, and crying, "Peedle-weedle-wee, peedle-weedle-wee," or else shouting at ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... King, huge and fierce-eyed, surrounded by the misshapen Spirits of the Mines, sat upon a block of pure silver, with a pile of shining gold lying ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... swampy, and the bushes, swamps, and lagoons are too thickly intermingled with the better portion to render it a safe or desirable grazing country. The timber is universally bad and small; a few misshapen gum trees on the immediate banks of the river may ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... hills, bathed in a vast and open sunshine. Look around us—how nobly simple is every line and shape! Far below the horizon nature is elaborate, full of fancies,—mazy watercourses, delicate dingles, fantastically gloomy ravines, misshapen woods, gibbering with diablerie; but here how simple, how great, how good she is! There is not a shape subtler than a common bowl, and the colours are alphabetical—and yet, by what taking of thought could she have achieved an effect so grand, at once ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne
... "So misshapen a figure, it may readily be supposed, made a very good target for the shafts of mockery. Nicholas, however, troubled himself but little about them; and it was small complaint you heard from him so long as he was well paid, got his savoury morsel, and, above all, a liberal supply of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... contained more first-class horrors than any one of his beloved dime novels. As a finishing touch the narrator turned back the grizzled hair on his forehead and showed a three-inch scar, souvenir of a first mate and a belaying pin. He rolled up his flannel shirtsleeve and displayed a slightly misshapen left arm, broken by a kick from a drunken captain and badly set by ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... A small, misshapen figure, with the face of a Byron—Apollo on the bust of a Satyr—came in from behind the folding doors at the back of the dining-room carrying some letters in his hand. The stranger's dark, piercing eyes were fixed inquiringly ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... of this stamp. He persevered, and succeeded after a couple of hours in producing a sort of misshapen bee-hive about six feet in diameter, and four feet high. The slabs of snow of which it was composed were compact and solid, though easily cut with his scalping-knife, and formed bricks that could resist the influence of the fiercest ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... light beat strongly upon the harsh face and the high-drawn misshapen shoulders of the lord of the house. A tangle of black hair surmounted a high rounded forehead, the forehead of a thinker, with two deep-set cold gray eyes twinkling sharply from under tufted brows. His nose was curved and sharp, like the beak of some cruel bird, but below the ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... good gifts, so necessary to our comfort and happiness. Think what you would be, if, through infirmity, you were not at liberty to go hither and thither at will like the young hart or gazelle! We grieve naturally if our children's feet are deformed or misshapen at birth, but what a crime it is to destroy the form and strength of the foot as God has made it! It is true that the Manchu women in China rejoice in the feet which the beneficent Creator has given them. The Dowager Empress—of ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands and jerked her away from the ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... glow she saw that she was in the midst of trees! Some were tall and slender and clean-barked; others were low and thick of trunk, but with the wide shapely spread of the great banyan in her geography; and, towering above the others, were the giants of that forest, unevenly branched, misshapen, aslant, and rugged ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... delicious liquor which he sometimes tasted after dinner. The little fellow was quite astonished on hearing his father talk thus; but he was far more surprised, when Mr. Jackson told him, that all those fine leaves, and delicious fruit grew from that very crooked and misshapen stump, with which he had been so angry in the spring. His father then asked him, if he should now order the gardener to pluck it up, and make firewood of it. Junius was much confused; but, after a short silence, told his papa, that he would rather see every other tree in the ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... then go forth on my fruitless perambulations about the town. At first I only acted the intelligent foreigner, going about staring at the public buildings, and collecting curios—strangely marked pebbles, and a few military brass buttons, long shed by the garments they once made brave; rusty, misshapen bullets, mementoes of the immortal nine or ten years' siege which had won for Montevideo the mournful appellation of modern Troy. When I had fully examined from the outside the scene of my future triumphs—for I had now ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... touch and beautiful to the eye, had become shrivelled and hard; their dark and beautiful hair had become grey or fallen off, deprived of the nourishment which had been prodigally wasted, and the undulating and elegant form had often sunk into a misshapen mass. ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... fond of men's society; but at least I like them to be unmistakably men of my own sex, manly men, and clean; not little misshapen troglodytes with foul minds and perverted passions, or self-advertising little mountebanks with enlarged and diseased vanities; creatures who would stand in a pillory sooner than not be stared at or talked about ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... the character to a dignity otherwise unattainable. How much humble piety has bloomed in the by-paths of life far from the crowded highway of the world, amidst the recesses of privacy! How often has the beauty of holiness adorned the most misshapen, or otherwise unattractive exterior! How many great and pious individuals have occupied the vale of poverty, the objects of divine approbation and of angelic joy; who, under different circumstances, might ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... to his labors. She could hear his voice in the distant furnace room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt or growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer reappeared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of chemical products and natural treasures ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... finds equally legitimate whatever affords recreation to the Humanity-God, in the great variety of its tastes. Then high aspirations are extinguished, the beautiful gives place to the agreeable; and since the ugly and misshapen please a vicious taste, room must be made for the ugly in the Pantheon of beauty. Art despoiled of its crown becomes the sad, and often the ignoble slave of the tastes and caprices of the public. I do not insist ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... indifferently muffled it over, like graves in an old cemetery. In the centre of this waste stood, the picture of dejection, an Indian-bred cayuse, miserable burlesque of the equine species, no bigger than a donkey, and incredibly hairy and misshapen. His back was galled; and one leg, which he painfully favoured, puffed to treble its size at the hock. Even the great cottonwood trees springing beyond the hut, with their shattered branches, and blotched and greenish trunks, breathed decay. An ancient dugout, lying at the ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... vegetable—sprawling, large framed, later maturing, longer yielding, vigorously rooting. However, many of these old-timers have not seen the attentions of a professional plant breeder for many years and throw a fair percentage of bizarre, misshapen, nonproductive plants. These "off types" can be compensated for by growing a somewhat larger garden and allowing for some waste. Dr. Alan Kapuler, who runs Peace Seeds, has brilliantly pointed out to me why heirloom ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... English housewife. A group of amphibious-looking beings, who might be either fishermen or sailors, were regaling themselves in one of the boxes. As I was a visitor of rather higher pretensions, I was ushered into a little misshapen back room, having at least nine corners. It was lighted by a sky-light, furnished with antiquated leathern chairs, and ornamented with the portrait of a fat pig. It was evidently appropriated to particular customers, and I found a shabby gentleman in a red nose and oil-cloth hat seated in one ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Daisy's voice, clear and without a tremor, call out to the blacks that their master had been brought as far as the gulf beyond, and needed assistance. They started off helter-skelter at this, with many exclamations of great surprise, a bent and misshapen figure dragging itself with a grotesque ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... or buffoon. It is difficult to summarize the legend, it varies so considerably in the versions. Marcolf in the best-known forms, which are certainly older than Zabara, is "right rude and great of body, of visage greatly misshapen and foul." Sometimes he is a dwarf, sometimes a giant; he is never normal. He appears with his counterpart, a sluttish wife, before Solomon, who, recognizing him as famous for his wit and wisdom, challenges him to a trial of wisdom, promising great rewards as the ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... ire of William the Testy on hearing of the catastrophe at Fort Goed Hoop. For three good hours his rage was too great for words, or rather the words were too great for him (being a very small man), and he was nearly choked by the misshapen, nine-cornered Dutch oaths and epithets which crowded at one into his gullet. At length his words found vent, and for three days he kept up a constant discharge, anathematising the Yankees, man, woman, and child, for a set of dieven, schobbejacken, deugenieten, twist-zoekeren, blaes-kaken, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... position which she was designed fully and nobly to fill. The place is not too high, too large, too sacred for woman, but the type that you have chosen is far too small for it. The woman we declare unto you is the rude, misshapen, unpolished object of the successful artist. From your stand-point, you are absorbed with the defects alone. The true artist sees the harmony between the object and its destination. Man, the sculptor, has carved out his ideal, and applauding thousands welcome ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... carefully, Madden could follow the slender outline of the mysterious craft that had towed the Vulcan to this uncanny spot. It had now left the tug and was gliding away to the great misshapen fabric that sprawled ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... motion in a mute inquiring way from side to side of the pail that contains them. Looked at closely with an attentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself into two parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating the weed itself in form and colour. When removed from the water, this queer pipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-known hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... extremely rare to find a woman who shows even the modest sightliness that her sex is theoretically capable of; it is only the rare beauty who is even tolerable. The average woman, until art comes to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and crudely articulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she is almost sure to be bow-legged. If she has good legs, she is almost sure to have bad teeth. If she has good teeth, she is almost sure to have scrawny hands, or muddy eyes, or hair like oakum, or no chin. A woman ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... stared, took a golden box out of his waistcoat pocket, opened it, tapped it, and helped himself to a pinch of snuff. The habit explained his somewhat misshapen nose. It was tobacco, not alcohol, that lent its exaggerated lustre and hypertrophied outline ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... nice-looking!" he said of a girl, and "That one's ugly!" he said of another. He wondered why it was that all the older women of the working-class were so misshapen and lacking in good looks, when so many of the girls of the working-class were shapely and pretty. Mr. Cairnduff had told him that Belfast girls were prettier than London girls. "London girls aren't pretty at all," Mr. Cairnduff had said. "You'd walk miles ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... [lxxix] Shall drag my Journal from the desk's recess; Let coxcombs, printing as they come from far, Snatch his own wreath of Ridicule from Carr; Let ABERDEEN and ELGIN [161] still pursue The shade of fame through regions of Virtu; Waste useless thousands on their Phidian freaks, Misshapen monuments and maimed antiques; 1030 And make their grand saloons a general mart For all the mutilated blocks of art: Of Dardan tours let Dilettanti tell, I leave topography to rapid [162] GELL; [163] And, quite content, no more shall interpose To stun ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... some time. When she came back again she bore in her arms a bundle, large, knobby and misshapen. It was wrapped in newspapers which had cracked away here and there over the end of a rib; but it was enclosed in a network of strings that crossed and ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... His hand fell to his side; then fastened mechanically on the railings of a house near him. His rough, misshapen fingers trembled round the iron. Recollections that had slumbered for years and years past, were awakening again awfully to life within him. Through the obscurity and oblivion of long absence, through the changeless darkness of the tomb, there was shining out now, vivid and solemn on his ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... Sunday afternoon had not left the party at the cottage unscathed, as the acute observer would have immediately seen on penetrating into the pretty shady garden, with its formal rose walks, and its delightful misshapen yew trees. Madame Valtesi, for instance, was knitting, a thing she had scarcely ever been noticed to do within the memory of man. Mrs. Windsor was going about in garden gloves, with a spud and a pair of clippers, damaging the flower-beds, with an air of duty and almost sacred ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... supposed to have been invented to represent to us ambitious men, whose minds, doting on glory, which is a mere image of virtue, produce nothing that is genuine or uniform, but only, as might be expected of such a conjunction, misshapen and unnatural actions. Running after their emulations and passions, and carried away by the impulses of the moment, they may say with the herdsmen, in ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... report, but at the same time I took his address—Eugene Falloon, Rue Pre Fleuri—where I could give him an appointment in case I missed him at the terminus. He was a long, lean, hungry-looking fellow, clumsily made, with an enormous head and misshapen hands and feet; but he was no fool this Falloon, and his local knowledge ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... came to an immense Banana tree, out of which flew a cloud of blueish pigeons. The leaves of this Banana looked six or seven feet long and about one wide; the fruit was hanging in every direction, looking like large misshapen cucumbers. Benjie had taught us not to cut it crossways, but from end to end, as it tasted better when cut wrong. But it was curious when cut wrong what an exact cross was pictured in the middle. Twined in the Banana tree was an immense gourd plant. At this minute I shuddered ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... me that he is wholly right in saying so. The difference between the two is an essential one. In Patmore the cadence follows the contours of the thought or emotion, like a transparent garment; in Cowley the form is a misshapen burden, carried unsteadily. It need not surprise us that to the ears of Cowley (it is he who tells us) the verse of Pindar should have sounded 'little better than prose.' The fault of his own 'Pindarique' verse is that it is so much worse than prose. The pauses in Patmore, left ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... offer to supply their place. But the lady was not so easily won; and though she did not absolutely reject him, gave him very slight hopes. Mr. Marvel, therefore, remained on his probation. Behind Mrs. Spurling stood her negro attendant, Caliban; a hideous, misshapen, malicious monster, with broad hunched shoulders, a flat nose, and ears like those of a wild beast, a head too large for his body, and a body too long for his legs. This horrible piece of deformity, who acted as drawer and cellarman, and was ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... as you are pleased to call his gang of thugs, is that hideous, misshapen monster that shrieks like a ghoul. I suppose that he too was hunting for the ruby Friday night—after having stolen it the night before." My sarcasm failed to touch Burke. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... let thy spirit be lifted up in pride, and let it contemn the tear, and that for which it falls, saying: "Thou art much too insignificant, thou every-day life, for the inconsolableness of an immortal,—thou tattered, misshapen, wholesale existence!" Upon this sphere, which is rounded with the ashes of thousands of years, amid the storms of earth, made up of vapors, in this lamentation of a dream, it is a disgrace that the sigh should only be dissipated ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... that time they put no women into nunneries but such as were either one-eyed, lame, humpbacked, ill-favored, misshapen, foolish, senseless, spoiled, or corrupt; nor encloistered any men but those that were either sickly, ill-bred, clownish, and the trouble ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... the squadrons of horse came on. But, as soon as they came near the camels, it happened that, either from the influence of the antipathy above referred to, or from alarm at the novelty of the spectacle of such huge and misshapen beasts, or else because of the substantial resistance which the camels and the spears of their riders made to the shock of their charge, the horses were soon thrown into confusion and put to flight. In fact, ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... him sate his favourite Norway falcon unhooded, for it had been taught the finest polish in its dainty education—viz., "to face company undisturbed." At a kind of easel at the farther end of the hall, a dwarf, misshapen in limbs, but of a face singularly acute and intelligent, was employed in the outline of that famous action at Val des Dunes, which had been the scene of one of the most brilliant of William's feats in arms—an outline intended ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... in that shack room where the noise of forest trees mourned always at the window. Only pain was sharp . . . colossal, rearing misshapen out of the blur induced by an awful weakness. Sleep wrenched him for horrible dreaming minutes from his world of pain. Pain wrenched him back. At times a mammoth terror lay in his soul, undefined yet grotesquely positive, as if, pushing back, ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... nevertheless made by a man's boot-maker, and there was only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently ugly to suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy, thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed and disfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep. Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as it was, was so by malice prepense on her part. And whereas the general result would ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... throughout the dialects at present in use. The radical appears to be snag, knag, or nag (Knoge, Cordylus, cf. Knuckle), a protuberance, knot, lump; being a term chiefly applied to knots in trees, rough pieces of wood, &c., and in its derivatives strongly expressive of (so to speak) misshapen lumpiness. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... easily note, in occasional gleams from the fire, which, falling upon the rude and misshapen lodge, revealed its features obscurely to the eye. It bore an air of solitude that became the dwelling of a chief. The soil around it, as if too sacred to be invaded by the profane feet of the multitude, was left overgrown with weeds and starveling bushes; and an ancient elm, rising among them, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... starry night. The black horse and his rider wound up a deep ravine. To one side a bold mountain tumbled up to an infinite height, bristling with misshapen trees here and there, and losing its head against the very stars. On the other side were jagged hills, all carved in the solid rock. And down the valley, between the mountains and the stars, blew a soft wind; as if that wind made the music. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... and the deep sea—the floor was the sea, and the devil was assuredly advancing towards him. Never before had he set eyes on such a beast—ten inches from head to tail, brawny, misshapen, mangy, a veritable ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... the poor creature's age might have been anywhere from fifteen to thirty-five; for the twisted and misshapen body, angular and hard; the scrawny, wry neck; the old-young face, thin and sallow, with furtive, beady-black eyes, gave no hint of her years. As a matter of fact, I happened to know that Judith Taylor, daughter of the notorious Ozark moonshiner, Jap Taylor, was just ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... this hell hole Father Damien was left to his own devices and surrounded by the misshapen and hideous creatures for whose lives he had sacrificed his own. Bishop Maigret accompanied him to Molokai, and told the lepers he had brought them a new Father, who loved them so much that he was willing to live with them and become one of them. Then the good ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... constructed to shelter us. I went in, and as we had nearly an hour to wait before the wandering birds would awake, I rolled myself up in my rug in order to try and get warm. Then, lying on my back, I began to look at the misshapen moon, which had four horns through the vaguely transparent walls of this polar house. But the frost of the frozen marshes, the cold of these walls, the cold from the firmament penetrated me so terribly that I began to cough. My cousin ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... at the map, which showed a misshapen sprawling Africa, but with a clear ocean way round the south of it. His interest quickened. He peered at the queer ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... There was a smell of scorched rubber and hot oil. Great loops of wire sagged down from above. Several nondescript heaps stood about that might once have been machinery, but now suggested melting snow-men, all fused into heaps. At a table sprawled a queer, misshapen figure that suggested human origin. Both of its hands were burned to cinders to the elbows. Great holes were scorched into the clothes. But the face was recognizable. Tony's playthings had ...
— The Einstein See-Saw • Miles John Breuer
... gag around his face and in his mouth. We were in a huge dim open space. Presently, as my vision cleared, I saw that the dome was overhead. This was a circular, hundred-foot-wide room. It was dimly lighted. The figures of men were moving about, their great misshapen shadows shifting with them. Twenty feet from me there was a pile of golden rock—chunks of gold the size of a man's fist, or his head, and larger, heaped loosely into a mound ten ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... fresh eggs; it was on a horizontal limb of a large oak, at a bifurcation about eight feet from the trunk and about the same from the ground. The nest was more substantial than that of G. lanceolatus, much more moss having been used in the outer casing, but the lining was similar; it was a misshapen nest, and appeared, in the distance, like an old deserted one; the bird was sitting at the time; I took one egg, hoping more would be laid, but the other was deserted and destroyed by vermin. Another nest I found on the 2nd June; it contained ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... stirred, she uttered a throaty chuckle, and her weary face, lined with the marks of toil and hardship, flushed faintly. Her misshapen hands tightly clasped themselves and her faded eyes began to sparkle. Gray felt a warm thrill of compassion at the agitation of this kindly, worn old soul, and he rose quickly. As he gained his feet that amazing chair behaved in a manner ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... dear wife, that your son is the child of a true man, and who, in his own respect, despiseth Death, and all his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time, when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it at Sherborne, if the land continue [yours], or in ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... he said, wrathfully. "I'd like to break it over your misshapen back! Here, Margery, don't fret. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... time they put no women into nunneries but such as were either purblind, blinkards, lame, crooked, ill-favoured, misshapen, fools, senseless, spoiled, or corrupt; nor encloistered any men but those that were either sickly, subject to defluxions, ill-bred louts, simple sots, or peevish trouble-houses. But to the purpose, said the monk. A woman that is neither fair nor ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... and one other—that, David Rizzio, who from an errant minstrel had risen to this perilous eminence, a man of a swarthy, ill-favoured countenance redeemed by the intelligence that glowed in his dark eyes, and of a body so slight and fragile as to seem almost misshapen. His age was not above thirty, yet indifferent health, early privation, and misfortune had so set their mark upon him that he had all the appearance of a man of fifty. He was dressed with sombre magnificence, and a jewel of great price smouldered upon the middle ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... present on business I would put such a face on you that yir mother wouldna know you; but I'm here wi' my friends" (great applause from the doorway, where the crowd was listening to the interview) "for a commercial transaction. Div ye no ken, ye misshapen object, that we're here on a special invitation of yir master, sent this mornin' to the Vennel?" (strong confirmation given under oath by Jess Mitchell), "and I'll juist give you the terms thereof, ye two-faced, leein', unprincipled wratch" ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... misstep into the mud, but he quickly regained the ill-paved sidewalk and continued his course with unbroken cheerfulness. The night was dark, the few and widely scattered street lamps burned dimly, and the city loomed through the dusk, misshapen and obscure. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... an excellent time to show the necessity for bone-building mineral in the diet of babies and young children. If they do not get this mineral substance during the growth period, they cannot have hard, rigid bones, and their bodies are apt to become misshapen—bow legs, curved spines, etc. This substance is also necessary ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Management • Ministry of Education
... to the misshapen little gold legs which were yet so designed that it could be stood up upon them, "when anyone wear Little Bonsa, tie her on head behind by these legs; look, here same old leather string. Now I put her on, for she like to be worn again," and with a quick movement he clapped ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... between the well and the shacks which halted the pursuit dead in its tracks. One of the shacks was wrapped in darting tongues of flame, and a woman was screaming, and a man close to her was grappling with something huge and misshapen which loomed starkly against ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... the ivy which draped the rock, the Grotto opened, with the eternal flaring of its candles. From a distance it looked rather squat and misshapen, a very narrow and modest aperture for the breath of the Infinite which issued from it, turning all faces pale and bowing every head. The statue of the Virgin had become a mere white spot, which seemed to ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... eighteenth century, and so lightly esteemed by some that Hume could doubt if he were a poet "capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined and intelligent audience," and attribute to the rudeness of his "disproportioned and misshapen" genius the "reproach of barbarism" which the English nation had suffered ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... to the sky. There, blazing with light, like a great misshapen moon, was a giant airship moving swiftly over the city. As it sailed along, streams of fire fell from it, and immediately there followed the terrible thunder of bursting bombs. When it passed out of sight, it seemed as if the voice of the city ...
— The Belgian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... was clear and the stars were unusually brilliant. Not a cloud appeared and the long lines of troops resting on their arms looked like misshapen hedgerows in the faint light. The roar of the French artillery came distinctly to the ears of these men who stood and waited. Every man knew why it was that its activity was so greatly increased that night. Their guns were playing a stream ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... character, and played with such tremendous energy that, on more than one occasion, he brought on a fit of sneezing, which of course interrupted the music, and put the clarionet in a passion. A stout old misshapen gnome, or some such creature, with an enormous head, served for the big drum. Four fairies held him down, and a fifth belaboured his head with a drumstick. It sounded wonderfully hollow, and convinced the old man that it was destitute of brains, and ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... 1930's we have seen occasional individuals with abnormal foliage—somewhat mottled, usually curled and often misshapen. Thinking that a virus might be the cause of this trouble the senior author tried grafting some of the shoots on to healthy stocks. The grafts were in no case successful because the scions were too weak. Finally he succeeded in grafting a branch from an affected tree on to a branch of a normal ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... wise resolve, can match thy worth. Thou art alone with constant zeal Devoted to thy lady's weal. Dear girl, without thy faithful aid I had not marked the plot he laid. Full of all guile and sin and spite Misshapen hump-backs shock the sight: But thou art fair and formed to please, Bent like a lily by the breeze. I look thee o'er with watchful eye, And in thy frame no fault can spy; The chest so deep, the waist so trim, So round the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... has been the subject of many strange tales and apprehensions, being placed there when turned out of the house at Waddow, to allay the terrors of the domestics, who durst not continue under the same roof with this misshapen figure. It was then broken, either from accident or design, and the head, some time ago, we have understood, was in one of the attic chambers ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... crooked streets, amidst several poor-looking houses, stood a narrow high tenement, run up of framework that was much misshapen, with corners and ends awry. It was inhabited by poor people, the poorest of whom looked out from the garret, where, outside the little window, hung in the sunshine an old, dented bird-cage, which had not even a common cage-glass, but only the neck of a bottle ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... proportions. The lighting, purposely subdued, consisted of twelve enormous copper lamps, placed column-like upon the ground and burning with brilliant red flames. As we entered, the wind from the corridor made the flames flicker, momentarily casting about us our own enlarged and misshapen shadows. Then the gust died down, and the flames, no longer flurried, again licked up the darkness with ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... quietly. And the poor old soul is excited by the noise made by the children, and partly aware of what is going to happen with her. She too begins to count—one, two, three, five—on her trembling fingers, misshapen by ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... big, so red, and so misshapen, under your coarse elf-locks, that they are revolting. I am not pretty myself, but I should die of shame if mine were like them." After this last blow, the old witch, having repeated what the queen had taught her, hobbled ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the tender's anchor from the sand and pulled sharply across the water to the Gar. A reddish, misshapen moon hung in the east, and when he had mounted to his deck it was suddenly obscured by a high, racing scud of cloud; the air had a damper, thicker feel. He instinctively moved to the barometer, which he found depressed. The wind, that ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... chant we could hear the striking of the city clocks, and the occasional rattle of a cart in the street overhead. The absolute watchfulness and expectation, the dim, mysterious half-light of the cellar falling in a grewsome way upon the misshapen bulk of a Chinese deity in the back ground, a faint smell of opium-smoke mingling with spice, and the dreadful uncertainty of what we were really waiting for, sent an uncomfortable thrill down our backs, and made us ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... and the few lights he had previously noted in warehouses and shops were extinguished. It had grown darker with the storm; the incongruous buildings on either side had become misshapen shadows; the long perspective of the wharf was a strange gloom from which the spars of a ship stood out like the cross he remembered as a boy to have once seen in a picture of the tempest-smitten Calvary. It was his only fancy connected with the future—it might have been his last, ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret who ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... gliding quickly across the sunny floor, or creeping up to him over the polished table. All his former air of humility and shabby respectability was gone. His disordered dress, his straggling grayish hair that hung from beneath the dirty black skullcap around his misshapen ears, his face, yellow in parts and irregularly flushed in others, as though it were beginning to be scorched from within, his unwashed hands, every detail of his appearance, in short, proclaimed his total degradation. But hitherto no ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... the window as they passed in the street below, and listened. Trent was pronouncing an encomium upon his wife, and they were both wondering by what enchantment she had been brought to marry such a misshapen wretch as he. The dwarf after watching their retreating shadows with a wider grin than his face had yet displayed, stole softly in the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens |
