"Eerie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... And,—what was more her fate than blame,— A nine months' widow was our dame. But toil was hard, for trade was good, And gallants sometimes will be rude. "And what can a lone woman do? The nights are long and eerie too. Now, Guillot there's a likely man, None better draws or taps a can; He's just the man, I think, to suit, If I could bring my courage to't." With thoughts like these her mind is crossed: The dame, they say, ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... climbing through the tangled undergrowth a dozen feet from the ground, they came to an immense banyan tree, half an acre in extent, that made in the innermost heart of the jungle a denser jungle of its own. From out of its black depths came the voice of a man singing in a cracked, eerie voice. ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... sound except the monotonous lap of the waves. The sea-gulls and cormorants had flown past at sunset and gone to roost. The absolute quiet, and the dark shadows, and the silver light of the moon gave such an eerie atmosphere to the scene that presently Fay could ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... wind, the place of perished tombs, the very wild-blown locks of this 'withered apple-john', were eerie accompaniments to the tale he piped in ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... in a scene of such eerie fascinations; especially as, when we discovered the cow with her calf, and endeavored to set the latter on its feet and lead it, the cow shook her horns at us with such an aggressive lunge, I fled without apology behind a tree, where ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... There was something eerie in the night, in the wreck and confusion of the storm, in our loneliness without father and mother, and in the possible awfulness and change that were so near,—over there in Grandfather ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... on our right hand. The little jackals they call foxes crossed our path at intervals. Owls the size of a robin, only vastly fluffier, screamed from the rocks as we passed them. Otherwise, it was like a soul's last journey, eerie, lonely and awful, down ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... expectations and the time of day. But that did not satisfy me. My aroused mind, casting about, soon struck it: I was missing the swarms of blackbirds, linnets, purple finches, and doves that made our own ranch trees vocal. Here were no birds. Laughing at this simple explanation of my eerie feeling, I passed under the gate ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... there wi' Something did forgather, That pat me in an eerie swither; An' awfu' scythe, out-owre ae shouther, Clear-dangling, hang; A three-tae'd leister on the ither Lay, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... the sky; their titanic walls, all of blood-red granite without stain or shadow, are so vertical and so high that they dizzy and appal. Only a fragment of the sky is visible, but its blueness is of a profound transparency, and the sun is magnificent. And still the same eerie silence envelops the phantom-like monastery, whose antiquity is accentuated under the cold, dazzling sunlight and the sparkling snow. One feels that it is verily "the habitation of solitude," encompassed by ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... which a physiognomist would have deduced uncomplimentary conclusions as to his character. Fenn had little skill in that way, but he felt that for some reason he disliked the man, whose eyes, which were small and extraordinarily bright, gave rather an eerie look to his face. ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... the window nearest to the fire-place, and drew back the heavy, silk-brocaded curtain. It was a wonderful night, with a promise, he thought, of fine weather—though one of the men who had stood outside with him had predicted snow. What a curious, eerie place this old Suffolk house was! Probably the landscape had scarcely changed at all in the last five hundred years. Below he could see ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... the drawing-room, she played the part of Jaffery's fairy mother. She discussed his homelessness—she had an eerie way of treading on delicate ground. A bed in a tent or a club or an inn. That was his home. He had ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... morning. The only thing I had to divert myself with was a little red rocking-chair, in which I used to sit in the evenings and doze and muse on all manner of things. When it blew hard, and the door below stood open, all kinds of eerie sounds moaned up through the floor and from out the walls, and the Morgenbladet near the door was rent in strips ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... continued. It was gentle as her own spirit tent there was this that was strange and eerie about her unconsciousness—that whereas she had been dumb while her mind in its dark cell must have been mistress of itself and of her soul, she spoke without ceasing throughout the time of her reason's vanquishment. Not that her poor tongue in its trouble uttered speech such as those that heard ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... the apple-tree had also completely vanished from the enchanted meadow. At that I began to suspect that in coming out of the forest I had somehow got into another and somewhat similar old field. I have never had a more confused or eerie sensation; not fear, but a sort of helplessness in which for an instant I actually began to doubt whether it was I myself, David Grayson, who stood there in the dark meadow, or whether I was the victim of a peculiarly bad dream. I suppose many other people have had these ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... then, just at the corner of the screen, from where he had been watching her, she saw Mr. Masters. Diana did not know whether to be sorry or glad. On the whole, she rather thought she was glad; the church was eerie ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... but she felt so unlike sleep that, finally, she crept out of bed, groped for her blanket wrapper, and went over to the window. It had stopped snowing and everything shone palely in ghostly white. The trees were white-armed, gleaming skeletons, the summerhouse an eerie pagoda or something, the scurrying clouds, breaking now and showing silver edges from an invisible moon, were at once grand and terrifying. It was all very beautiful and mysterious and stirring. And something in her stretched out, out, out—to the driving clouds, to the gleaming, brandishing boughs, ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... deadened by the impeding fog; but human voices they certainly were. Throwing off her robe she abruptly sat up, seeking, her features tensed with the strain. She beckoned to me. I scuttled over, as anxious as she. The voices might be far, they might be near; but it was an eerie situation, as if we were neighboring ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... several voices of the wilderness that cause some city people alarm and dread, and they are the voices of the owl, the loon, and the timber-wolf. But to me their voices bring a solemn, at times an eerie, charm, that I would gladly go miles to renew. Though much of the wolf-howling has been of little appeal, I have heard wolf concerts that held me spell-bound. On some occasions—but always at night—they lasted without scarcely any ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... approaching night. The grass beside the Government tents showed grey in the gathering dusk, while a blue haze of smoke, creeping upward, gently veiled the sheltering trees. But for the modulated chatter of servants, the stillness was eerie. The flat, low-lying fields, having yielded their corn to the harvester, were barren and without sign of life, for the cultivators had departed to their homesteads, and the roving ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... were leaning from your window now, Together calling to the eerie loon, The fresh wind blowing care from either brow, This sumptuous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... back a little, for the adventure was eerie, then, determined that she would show no fear in the presence of this old priest, took the thin hand he stretched out to her, and walked forward with head erect. The two men began to follow her, but the Molimo ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... oh, it's great to be here with danger, Here in the weird, death-pregnant dark, In the devil's pasture a stealthy ranger, When the moon is decently hiding. Hark! What was that? Was it just the shiver Of an eerie wind or a clammy hand? The rustle of grass, or the passing quiver Of one of the ghosts ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... waves of the forenoon had given place to a long, oily, sluggish swell, without a single ripple to disturb its surface, through which the Chih' Yuen's stem clove its way like a knife shearing through butter. The ship was rolling heavily; and in the queer, eerie stillness that fell with the disappearance of the sun, the usual ship-board sounds, the clank of machinery far below, and even the voices of the men, assumed so weird and unnatural a character that Frobisher felt himself gradually ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... started half an hour earlier and left Gertrude and Cecil to their own devices. Even when the moon, the great round moon, came up out of the sea and shone through the trees upon her path, it only seemed to make the shadows blacker and more eerie, till she remembered that it was the Easter moon, and thought of Him who had knelt beneath the trees of Gethsemane under that moon, on ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... truth, it was not difficult, for they were neither of them quick. He had a word of contempt for the whole crowd of poets, painters, fiddlers, and their admirers, the bastard race of amateurs, which was continually on his lips. "Signor Feedle-eerie!" he would say. "O, for Goad's sake, no more of ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... invalids declared that this was their good day. "Shucks! What's a little ague? Anyhow, it'll go away when we get back to the Valley. Going back to the Valley? Well, we should think so! This country's got an eerie kind of good looks, and it raises sweet potatoes all right, but for steady company give us mountains! We'll drop McClellan in one of these swamps, and we'll have a review at the fair grounds at Richmond so's all the ladies can see us, and then we'll go back to the Valley pike and Massanutton and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... the man who chooses passion rather than duty has slipped and stumbled, but his was the harder course and perhaps the better. Which of the two was sinner? which was saint? To be impeccable may be the most damning of offences. In St Martin's Summer the eerie presence of ghosts of dead loves, haunting a love that has grown upon the graves of the past, is a check upon passion, which by a sudden turn at the close triumphs in a victory that is defeat. Fears and Scruples is a ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Of course, there was the hunger for companionship; he had often known that. A drinking bout, a night at cards, a whirl into excess, and that would pass away. But this loneliness was different. The moan of the wind in the spruce trees communicated itself to him with an eerie oppressiveness. He sat up and lit a lamp. The light fell on the bare logs of his hut; he had never known before how bare they were. He got up and shuffled about; took a lid off the stove and ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... clew to go upon he stumbled and groped forward, now breathing more freely in the open places where there was a good slice of sky overhead, now feeling along the wall in stifling closes. It is an eerie and mysterious position to be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The silence is terrifying in its possibilities. The touch of cold window bars to the exploring hand startles the man like the touch of a toad; the inequalities of the pavement shake ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... through the thick woods was a foot deep in sand and before we had proceeded a hundred yards the car got stuck and all hands save Moody got out to push it on. Moody was the chauffeur and had to remain at the wheel. Draped in fog, the jungle about me had an almost eerie look. But aesthetic and emotional observations had to give way to practicality. Laboriously the jitney snorted through the sand and bumped over tree stumps. After a strenuous hour and when we had reached the open country, the machine gave a groan and died on the spot. We were on a broad plain ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... if anything becomes more intense. A chill nipping wind long since had caused the boys to unroll the rubber ponchos strapped to the back of their saddles, and drape them over their shoulders. As they stood now in the eerie darkness, striving vainly to locate the landmarks of tree and rock which Tom had given them, the howl of a hunting coyote floated down the wind. The sensitive ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... circumstances. Another, from the invisible horrors of a pen where he lay dog-sick upon the upper-shelf, found courage, in a blink of his sufferings, to give us several verses of the 'Death of Nelson'; and it was odd and eerie to hear the chorus breathe feebly from all sorts of dark corners, and 'this day has done his dooty' rise and fall and be taken up again in this dim inferno, to an accompaniment of plunging, hollow-sounding bows and the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has started laughing outside—phew!—what an eerie laugh—mad as can be—what horrid humour! I have mentioned a lady's husband was taken away from her and eaten by a tiger lately, somewhere about this country, so we begin to feel quite in medias res, though far from ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... gloaming, nae swankies are roaming 'Bout stacks wi' the lasses at bogle to play; But ilk ane sits eerie, lamenting her dearie— The Flowers of the ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... sometimes produced in personal intercourse; and the more varied the life, the more versatile the nature, the more readily in either case will a lately unused spring of emotion well up at the passing touch. We may even fancy we read into the letters of 1870 that eerie, haunting sadness of a cherished memory from which, in spite of ourselves, life is bearing us away. We may also err in so doing. But literary creation, patiently carried on through a given period, is usually a fair reflection of the general moral and mental conditions ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... speechless vast desires On the mountains and the hills Of the sea Till the sandy-buried heights And the sullen sunken vales And fire-defying barrens of the deep The hearth of souls shall be Beacons of Thought, And from the lurk of the shark To the sunrise-lighted eerie of the lark And where the farthest cloud-sail fills Shall be felt the throbbing and the sobbing and the hoping The might and mad delight, The hell-and-heaven groping Of our ...
— The Voice of the Machines - An Introduction to the Twentieth Century • Gerald Stanley Lee
... up. "I—I have taken the liberty to arrange the room as I should wish it to be," he said awkwardly. "You see, Mrs.—er—Bunting, I felt as I sat here that these women's eyes followed me about. It was a most unpleasant sensation, and gave me quite an eerie feeling." ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... "She won't tell me his name, so I call him the phantom lover, because I've got an eerie sort of feeling in my mind about him that he doesn't really exist. What do ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... remember the "Stalactite Caverns" which used to form one of the attractions at the Colosseum. It was there that I first studied the words of Juliet. To me the gloomy horror of the place was a perfect godsend! Here I could cultivate a creepy, eerie sensation, and get into a fitting frame of mind for the potion scene. Down in this least imposing of subterranean abodes I used to tremble and thrill with passion and terror. Ah, if only in after years, when I played Juliet at the Lyceum, ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... panic, realizing that some of those noises he could identify with confidence, while others remained mysteries. He bit down hard on the knuckles of his clenched fist, attempting to bend that discovery into evidence. Why did he know at once that that thin, eerie wailing was the flock call of a leather-winged, feathered tree dweller, and that a coughing grunt from downstream ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... And thin red orchid shapes of Death Peer savagely with twisted lips Sucking an eerie, phantom breath With that bright, spotted, fever'd lust That watches lonely ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... building. There I was joined by a stretcher-bearer and we went through the gate into the large garden where we saw the still smoking hole in the ground which the shell had made. I remember that, as I looked into it, I had the same sort of eerie feeling which I had experienced when looking down the crater of Vesuvius. There was something uncanny about the arrival of shells out of the clear sky. They seemed to be things supernatural. The holes made by the seventeen inch shells with ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... hoarsely; "I could not keep away. But nobody else has been there. The place is dark and perilous; there are rats, and bats, and eerie creatures all about it. And folks are afraid, because of the Dead Hand ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... on board the French ships saw a great black hulk loom silently up out of the darkness. It was followed by another and another. No word was spoken, and in eerie silence the strange ships crept stealthily onwards, and cast anchor beside the French. The stillness grew terrible. At length it was broken by a trumpet call from the deck of ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... murmur of women's voices or the echo of merry laughter, and the sleeping man stirred uneasily on his bed. An hour passed, and then from the ramada there came a sound of wailing. Hardy rose up on his bed suddenly, startled. The memory of the past came to him vaguely, like fragments of an eerie dream; then the world came right and he found himself in the bunk-house, alone—and Tommy outside, crying as if for the dead. Leaping up from his blankets Hardy opened the door and called him in—hoarse, black, distorted, yet overflowing with love and affection. Poor little Tommy! He ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... Occasionally a sentry popped up from apparently nowhere. A whispered word and then on we went again. I really can't say how far we walked like this; it seemed positively miles. Suddenly a light flared in the sky, illuminating the surrounding country in an eerie glare. It didn't take me many minutes, needless to say, to drop flat! Luckily it was pave, but I would have welcomed mud rather than be left standing silhouetted within sight of the German trenches on that shell-riddled ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... I did not stay. The Umuti had put me out of humor for fun and food. I lit my flambeau and plodded through the mape-wood in a brown study, in my ears the fading strains of the arearea, and in my brain a feeling of oneness with the eerie presences of the silent wilderness. I was with Meshack, Shadrach, and Abednego in their glorious trial in Nebuchadnezzar's barbaric court. I was among the tepees of the Red Indians of North America when they leaped unscathed through the roaring blaze of the sacred fire, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... on over the glowing ground, the black monsters grimacing and scowling at him as he passed. What a nice eerie place this would be thought he for witches, wizards, and all Satan's gentry, of every shape and hue, to hold their high revels in. And he actually began to shout the ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... in the dusk and looked out into the veiled and shadowy spaces and the dim singers lifted up their voices. The moon would rise late; there was no light save the tiny pin points of the cigarettes; it gave the music an elfin, eerie quality. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... things awake. No birds, beasts, flowers, insects; Just the shadows —moving; 'Ladies in grey!' Over that log they would climb; would whisper together. She and Bosinney! Funny thought! And the frogs and little things would whisper too! How the clock ticked, in here! It was all eerie—out there in the light of that red moon; in here with the little steady night-light and, the ticking clock and the nurse's dressing-gown hanging from the edge of the screen, tall, like a woman's figure. 'Lady in grey!' And a very odd thought beset him: Did she exist? Had she ever ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... falls and deeper glooms Close round the graying wood that dimmer grows As dies the Day's last yearning tint of rose, And Dusk spins shadows on her eldritch looms. The black bat flits, the eerie white moth flies— Wan ghost of yesterday's bright butterfly— The dusking forest pools uplooking lie Like graveless ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... musketry passed: blue dashes lighted the room with an eerie splendour, thunder clapped and rolled; died away toward the south as a fresh onslaught poured in ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... jungles of the interior are roamed by elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, panthers and occasional orang-utans, while in the scattered villages, with their straw-thatched, highly decorated houses, dwell barbarous brown men practising customs so incredibly eerie and fantastic that a sober narration of them is more likely than not to be greeted with a shrug of amused disbelief. One who has no first-hand knowledge of the Sumatran tribes finds it difficult to accept at their ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... wolf stands alone. Lee Haines reached for his gun, little Joan stood up silent on the hearth, but Kate and Buck Daniels sat listening with a sort of hungry terror, as the cry sobbed away to quiet. Then out of the mountains and the night came an answer so thin, so eerie, one might have said it was the voice of the mountains and white stars grown audible; it stole on the ear as the pulse of a ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... the old Indian legends,' she insisted, not more than half frightened but conscious of an eerie influence of the still loneliness and experiencing the first shiver of excitement as she stirred her own fancy. 'Who knows but there is some ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... to do it!" said Trenchard sharply, and the echo of the Austrian cannon, again as it seemed quite close at hand, emphasised his words. Except for this the silence of the world around them was eerie; only far away they seemed to hear the persistent rumble of carts on ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... the steep hill path that leads to Talland, the sun danced on the little harbour with its fishing-boats and its sad, crowding, crying gulls, and on the huddled white town with its narrow crooked streets and overhanging houses: Polperro had the eerie beauty of a dream or of a little foreign port. Such beauty and charm are on the edge of pain; you cannot disentangle them from it. They intoxicate, and pierce to tears. The warm morning sun sparkled on a still blue sea, and burned ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... Looking down from the piazza, over the expanse of tree-tops, all this was strangely like the sea; and it gave one, somehow, much the same sense of remote, unbounded spaces and of a beauty that was a little sinister. At times whippoorwills called to one another, eerie and shrill; and the distant dance-music was a vibration in the air, which was heavy with the scent of bruised growing things and was filled with the cool, healing ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... encounter reawoke all my previous apprehensions. The very fact that I had only an eerie suspicion on which to build increased my mental discomfort. There was something behind to which my watch and ward had afforded ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... be allowed chocolates," she murmured, "or hot peppermints, just to keep up their spirits. Ugh! How weird and eerie it all is! There isn't a sound anywhere. It's not an enlivening performance to keep ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... the mysterious sooth-sayer a proper setting, a veritable grotto had been arranged for her inside a small summer house at one end of the lawn, on which the light would shine only faintly, thereby according her the eerie environment so necessary to one whose business it is ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... from her. As he was going up the stairs to his chamber, something moved him—he could not tell what—to stop at the door of the drawing-room, and go in. It was flooded with moonlight, but he did not mind that, so long as he could keep out of her sight. Still it had a strange, eerie look, with its various pieces of furniture casting different shadows from those that by rights belonged to them. He gazed at this thing and that, as if he had never seen it before. The place seemed to cast a spell over him, so that he ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... sword. A great joy seemed to burn up in his soul. Men who watched him said he ran amok. His great voice rose high above the chattering machine guns in a beautiful Franciscan chant and the voice of the priest joined in. What O'Hagan, bearing his mighty cross, must have looked like in the eerie dawn mist, Heaven knows. But seeing such an apparition and hearing the strange chant, it is possible the Huns thought the devil had joined in the fight. Then a man in the rear trench pointed to the west, where a great image of the cross was shining against a blood red sky, and a voice cried ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... sweet. For sake of the old dumb fellow-servant which his farmer gratefully addresses on entering on another year of labour, how many of its kind have been fed or spared? In the winter storm 'tis useless to think of the sailor on his slippery shrouds; but the "outland eerie cattle" he teaches his feres to care for in the drifting snow. In what jocund strains he celebrates their amusements, their recreations, their festivals, passionately pursued with all their pith by a people in the business of life grave and determined as if it left ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... delightful view of innocent, well-pleased childhood? Well, these Japanese children, if they are in the least inclined to be timid or nervous, must have an awful time of it at night in the dark, and when they make that eerie "northwest passage" bedwards through the darkling house of which Mr. Stevenson sings the perils and the emotions. All of us who did not suffer under parents brought up on the views of Mr. Herbert Spencer have endured, in childhood, a good deal from ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... thin grass grew rankly here, and was beaded with moisture, but he pushed along with an eerie feeling at ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... put on his hat and laughed with an eerie and unpleasant stridency. He never said another word, but left the room. The sound of his unnatural merriment rang on the stair as ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... been asleep in the rocker. A cool night breeze, laden with the strong, pungent aroma of sage, sent a shiver over her and she awoke, to see that the lights of Manti had vanished. An eerie lonesomeness ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... settled into a valley which began with great width and narrowed to a canyon whose rocky sides were dressed out with shrubs and trailing vines and wet with trickling rivulets from the numerous springs that oozed and gushed from the black, glistening rocks. This canyon was an eerie place of which ghostly tales were told from the old Blackfeet times. And to this day no Blackfoot will dare to pass through this black-walled, oozy, glistening canyon after the moon has passed the western lip. But in the warm light of broad day the canyon was ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... rather awed. The sight was so unexpectedly grand and eerie; though this latter quality ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... sweet companions, loved with love intense, For your sakes, shall the tree be ever dear! Blent with your images, it shall arise In memory, till the hot tears blind mine eyes! What is that dirge-like murmur that I hear Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach? It is the tree's lament, an eerie speech, That haply to the unknown land ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... was confined, in its increasing exemplifications of how impossible he was to get on with, to the furiously exciting incidents of public affairs; but the result was the same; the result was that, just as, on opening his door on return home at night, he had that chill and rather eerie feeling of stepping into an empty house, so, on entering the office of a morning, he came to have again that sensation that it was a deserted habitation into which he was stepping; no welcome here; no welcome ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... little voices all a-quiver In the mushy little, rushy little, weedy, reedy bogs, Droning little, moaning little chorus by the river, In the croaking little, joking little cadence of the frogs. Eerie little, cheery little glowworms in the gloaming Where the clover heads like fairy little nightcaps rise, Creep! Creep! Creep! Time to go to sleep! Baby playing 'possum with his big ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... blue north was streaming forth Her lights, wi' hissing eerie din; Athort the lift they start and shift, Like fortune's favours, tint ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was already upon us as I stood there for a moment, contrasting the dead and almost eerie silence, with the lights and laughter that would so quickly ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... and spluttered an ugliness that was scarlet, green, brown and yellow. The sound of the steam blowing off was like the roar of the sea. The air was stifling. It was very hot, and there was a high eerie wind. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... 'And pleasant is the fairy land, But, an eerie tale to tell, Ay at the end of seven years We pay a tiend to hell; I am sae fair and fu' o' flesh, I'm fear'd it ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... an oppressor in the day of his need. Thus gigantic empires have crumbled into dust at the first touch of an invader's footstep. For petty, as for great oppressions, there is a day of retribution growing out of themselves. It is often long in coming. Ut sit magna, tamen eerie lenla ira Deoruni est.{1} But ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... The fantastic towers and trees of the distant city by the lake shone in his mellow lustre; the solitary island swam in a flood of gold, and the quaint edifice which crowned it blazed with insufferable splendour. As the eerie gloaming died in the west, and thin grey mists began to veil the outlandish scene, we realised to the full that we were all alone and friendless in an unknown world, and a deep sentiment of exile took possession of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... dry leaves 'neath his foot, And made an eerie sound, A neighboring owl began to hoot, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... have a fellow-witness," I said. "It's so eerie I might have concluded there was something ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... through the pine trees moan, The dying torch burns low; Ah me! 'tis eerie all alone! Say, ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... ready for him at the fire, to be put on the moment of his arrival; and exchanged again for his own, dry and warm, before he footed once more the ghostly waste. When neither moon was up nor stars were out, there was a strange eerie glimmer from the snow that lighted the way home; and he thought there must be more light from it than could be accounted for merely by the reflection of every particle of light that might fall ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... alive in the hearts of men. They are so young, so fresh, so full of the odors of the virgin forest untrod by the foot of white man! The thoughts of your people seem dipped in the colors of the rainbow, palpitant with the play of winds, eerie with the thrill of a spirit-world unseen but ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... glanced back. "Up there!" he whispered, gesturing to the trail above them. Pete had also been looking round, and before Bailey could speak again, a sliver of flame split the darkness and the roar of Pete's six-gun shattered the eerie silence of the hillside. Bailey's horse plunged off the trail and rocketed straight down the mountain. Pete's horse, rearing from the hurtling shape that lunged from the trail above, tore the rope from his hand and crashed down the hillside, snorting. Something was threshing about the trail and ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Suddenly, into this eerie silence, there broke a sound which set every heart leaping. It was the swift rattle of a pony's hoofs galloping towards them. The sound had broken out sharply and near, for the main street was paved, and the rider ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... us in these words is that of a company of belated travellers in some desert, lighting a little fire that glimmers ineffectual in the darkness of the eerie waste. They huddle round its dying embers for a little warmth and company, and they hope it will scare wolf and jackal, but their fuel is all burned, and they have to go to sleep without its solace ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... to me for absolute quiet. Directly afterward I heard the thing for which he listened—the sound of a horse galloping, out in the night. I think that I may say I fairly shivered. The sound died away and left a horrible, desolate, eerie feeling in the air, you know. I put my hand out to the bell cord, hoping Parsket had got it clear. Then I waited, glancing before ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... when the licht is spreadin' Chilly an' grey, An' the auld cock craws at the yett o' the muirland steadin' Cryin' on day; The hoose lies sound an' the sma' mune's deein' an' weary Watchin' her lane, The shadows creep by the dyke an' the time seems eerie, But the lad i' the fields he is whustlin' cheery, cheery, ...
— Songs of Angus and More Songs of Angus • Violet Jacob
... a ghost was certainly an eerie figure; for by means of a stick strapped to his back the sheet was raised to an abnormal altitude, while a couple of tennis rackets held in either hand, made extended wings, with which to swoop about, and raise warning signals to the onlookers. He chased Mark Antony until ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... treeless land, where beeves are good, And men have quaint, old-fashioned ways, And every burn has ballad lore, And every hamlet has its song, And on its surf-beat, rocky shore The eerie legend lingers long. Old customs live there, unaware That they are garments cast away, And what of light is lingering there Is ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... It felt very eerie to be alone in the National Gallery in the dead of the night with a tiny electric lamp in one's buttonhole and a sponge of alcohol and turpentine in one's hand. While he worked the little Madonna's eyes rested upon ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... he been far less the unusual, the great man, she would still have listened with a sense of delight, for in her mood that night his penetrating voice, which, in other moods, she found as insupportable as a needle-pointed goad, harmonized with the great, starry sky and the mysterious, eerie shadows of forest and mountain and lake close round their huge, bright fire. As they rose to go in, up came the moon. A broad, benevolent, encouraging face, the face of a matchmaker. Craig put his arm round Margaret. ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... eerie feeling of loneliness had a great deal to do with my sensations later on, which, on looking back in after-days, have often struck me as being more acute and nervous than they ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... my watch had come just before the dawn; for which I was full of thankfulness, being in that frame of mind when the dark breeds strange and unwholesome fancies. Yet, though I was so near to the dawn, I was not to escape free of the eerie influence of that place; for, as I sat, running my gaze to and fro over its grey immensity, it came to me that there were strange movements among the weed, and I seemed to see vaguely, as one may see things in dreams, dim white ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... in the depth of the valley in a most lonesome and eerie spot. The huge trees on each side formed an arch over the roadway and partially sheltered ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... running distance from the schoolhouse at noontime or recess, crawled the little river, with its inevitable "hole," which each mother's son was warned to avoid in swimming, lest he be seized with cramp there where the pool was bottomless. What eerie wonders lurked within the mirror of those shallow brown waters! Long black hairs cleaved and clung in their limpid flowing. To this day, I know not whether they were horse-hairs, far from home, or swaying ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made sepulchral grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper as the night went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the gust with something between a whistle and a groan. It was an eerie, uncomfortable talent of the poet's, much detested ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... this itinerary; and for the best part of three nights travelled on eerie mountains and among the well-heads of wild rivers; often buried in mist, almost continually blown and rained upon, and not once cheered by any glimpse of sunshine. By day, we lay and slept in the drenching heather; by night, incessantly clambered upon ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... The light of a small kerosene lamp flickered fitfully over the faces of a score of villagers squatting silently in the shadows. The darting glowworms and distant oil lanterns of the huts wove bright eerie patterns into the velvet night. It was the painful hour of parting; a slow, tedious journey ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... their work. The flames die out. An eerie gloom hangs over the ruins like a formidable, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... with a ceiling (unlike that of the other rooms in the house), out of all reach or sight, and so dark from various causes, that the candle seemed only to glimmer in it—indeed to add to the darkness by making it felt. Mr. Watts, as Rossetti told me, was entirely indifferent to these eerie surroundings, even if his fine subjective intellect, more prone to meditate than to observe, was ever for an instant conscious of them; but on myself I fear they weighed heavily, and augmented the feeling of closeness and gloom which had been creeping upon me since I entered the house. ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... Lindley saw, not a hundred yards ahead of him, a white horse, ridden negligently by a somewhat slovenly lad—hooded, cloaked and doubled up in the saddle, as though riding were a newly acquired accomplishment. The road was lonely enough to instill an eerie feeling in the stoutest heart, and yet the lad seemed quite unmoved when Lindley, after one or two vocal appeals, laid a heavy hand on ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... the appointed afternoon. There was a fire on her hearth and a March snow-squall tapped against the window panes. The crackle of the logs inside and that eerie, light sound outside were so associated with Prosper that, even before he came, Joan, sitting on one side of the hearth, closed her eyes and felt that he must be opposite to her in his red-lacquered chair, his long legs stuck out in front, his amused and greedy eyes veiled by a ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... than to afford the barest relief from complete darkness. The window was half overgrown with ivy, and he could see that it was filthily dirty. The light continually flickered, and once or twice it seemed to have died out altogether. An eerie sensation began to possess him. He felt very strongly the evil influence of the house. Curiosity to discover what sinister secret it really ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... in the gloomy room in Lincoln's Inn, and in spite of heart-sickness he worked on stolidly and well. The evenings were his worst time, when he went back to the empty house at Cheyne Walk and sat on the balcony brooding over his troubles, until the light faded and an eerie darkness ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey |
