"Ghastly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sitting still. It was a long fight between my pride and the money, but the dollars won at last, and I threw up reporting and sat day after day in the corner which I had first chosen, inspiring pity by my ghastly face and filling my pockets with coppers. Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper of a low den in which I used to lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could every morning emerge as a squalid beggar and in the evenings transform myself into a well-dressed man about town. This ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... varying them according to her humour,—now showing the Lord Francis in his panoply as a man of war, now in a court habit, now in an embroidered night-gown and Turkish cap, now leaning on the shoulder of her brother, the Captain, deceased. And anon she would make a ghastly image of him lying all along in the courtyard at Hampton Court, with the purple bullet-marks on his white forehead, and a great crimson stain on his bosom, just below his bands. This was the one she most loved to look upon, although her father sorely pressed her to put it ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... overcome with emotion to speak. Truly Mr. Ogren was in a terrible plight. His clothes hung in rags, and his head was bound with a piece of dirty, blood-stained linen. One of his ears was crushed, and there were ghastly wounds in his neck and shoulders. Even now he was not out of danger for as he stood at the gate Mrs. Ogren saw to her dismay a mob of infuriated Boxers rushing towards him, and it seemed as if he would be killed before her eyes. But the yamen servants ...
— Noble Deeds of the World's Heroines • Henry Charles Moore
... repeated in the quiet water. And there, beside a ruined shrine, two dead cactus bushes, with their stiff distorted limbs, made Roy think suddenly of two dead Germans he had come upon once—killed so swiftly that they still retained, in death, the ghastly semblance of life. Why the devil couldn't a man be rid of them? Dead Germans were not ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... overcome by the sudden and awful tragedy to which he had been an enforced silent witness, David Helmsley had now but one idea, and that was at once to leave the scene of horror which, like a ghastly nightmare, scarred his vision and dizzied his brain. Stumbling feebly along, and seeming to those who by chance noticed him, no more than a poor old tramp terrified out of his wits by the grief and confusion which prevailed, he made his ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... worthy to be ranked with the works of Edgar A. Poe. Many will say that it might better not have been written, so utterly repulsive is it, but others will value it as a striking, though distorted, expression of unmistakable genius. It is a ghastly and gruesome creation. Not one bright ray redeems it. It deals with the most evil characters and the most evil phases of human experience. But it fascinates. Heathcliff, the chief figure in the book, is one of the greatest villains in fiction,—an ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... author in the Contemporary Review, September, 1894, p. 365. For the papal condemnations of Lenormant and Bartolo, see the Index Librorum Prohibitorum Sanctissimi Domini Nostri, Leonis XIII, P.M., etc., Rome, 1891; Appendices, July, 1890, and May, 1891. The ghastly part of the record, as stated in this edition of the Index, is that both these great scholars were forced to abjure their "errors" and to acquiesce in the condemnation—Lenorment doing ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... and looked up. She had been standing against a post, not a tree—the moon was shining full on it now; and on the summit strangely distinct, and smiling ghastly, was a livid ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by hard riding. He had a sword by his side, and pistols in his belt. His slouched hat, which he had not yet removed at entrance, gave an additional gloom to his dark features, which, wasted by sorrow and marked by the ghastly look communicated by long illness, added to a countenance naturally somewhat stern and wild, a fierce and even savage expression. The matted and disheveled locks of hair which escaped from under his hat, together with his fixt and unmoved posture, made his head more resemble that ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... reached out ahead of them like a thin, dark ribbon. Scarcely had they reached this point when a rifle shot sounded not far behind. It was followed by a second and a third, and after that came a shout. It was not a loud shout. There was something strained and ghastly about it, and yet it came distinctly ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... the unfaithful lover espouses Creusa. In the next Creusa is seen burning in the poisoned shirt, given her by Medea. In another Medea is seen in a car drawn by dragons, bearing her two children by Jason, whom she has stabbed in revenge for his desertion. Nothing can exceed the ghastly reality of death, as shown in the stiffened limbs and sharpened features of those dead children. The whole drawing and grouping is exceedingly spirited and lifelike, and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to him from the bank. As the world faded from him, he still clutched them; handled and fondled them one by one,—and then he passed away,—his last effort being to finger his gold! Elwes the miser died shrieking, "I will keep my money!—nobody shall deprive me of my property!" A ghastly and humiliating spectacle! ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... tapping at the window an armless hand, beckoning. In the watches of the night fear is a panther across the chest sucking the breath; but his eyes cannot bear the light of day, and by dawn he has shrunk to cat size. The ghastly dreams of Orestes perished with the light; phosphorus is yellowish and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... ministrant, place implicit trust. Confession, the Eucharist, Extreme Unction,—these all inspire a confidence which without this symbolism is too apt to be wanting in over-sensitive natures. They have been peopled in earlier years with ghastly spectres of avenging fiends, moving in a sleepless world of devouring flames and smothering exhalations; where nothing lives but the sinner, the fiends, and the reptiles who help to make life an unending torture. It is no wonder that these images sometimes return to the enfeebled intelligence. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... me open the door for my little girl to come in; and she'll die if she is out on the Fells all night. Cruel, naughty Hester,' she said, slapping me; but she might have struck harder, for I had seen a look of ghastly terror on Dorothy's face, which made my ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... a death by crucifixion seems to include all that pain and death can have of horrible and ghastly—dizziness, cramp, thirst, starvation, sleeplessness, traumatic fever, tetanus, publicity of shame, long continuance of torment, horror of anticipation, mortification of untended wounds—all intensified just up to the point at which they can be endured at all, but all stopping ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... later the curtain stirred and the ghastly face of Scipio suddenly appeared. He moved out into the living-room and almost fell into the Windsor chair which had last been occupied by his wife. A sheet of notepaper was in his shaking hand, and ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... long hours of the night the scenes of the last few hours, of the last few days, came back to him and burnt into his soul. The gulf yawned before him now plain enough, open at his feet—black, ghastly. He shuddered at it, wondering if he should even yet fall in, felt wildly about for strength to stand firm, to retrace his steps; but found it not. He found not yet the strength he was in search of, but in the grey morning he wrote ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... of his soiled white tunic soaked and plastered against his breast-bone, staggered away from the water-pipe. Steadying himself on Ricardo's shoulder, he drew a long breath, raised his dripping head, and produced a smile of ghastly amiability, which was lost upon the thoughtful Heyst. Behind his back the sun, touching the water, was like a disc of iron cooled to a dull red glow, ready to start rolling round the circular steel plate ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... in direst terror. Her ghastly companion seemed to edge himself toward her, an illusion born in the changing position of the light as ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... spake and all indignantly, 'Fool, for thou hast, men say, the strength of ten, Canst thou not trust the limbs thy God hath given, But must, to make the terror of thee more, Trick thyself out in ghastly imageries Of that which Life hath done with, and the clod, Less dull than thou, will hide with mantling flowers As if for pity?' But he spake no word; Which set the horror higher: a maiden swooned; The Lady Lyonors wrung her hands and ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... moment the young officer gazed as though stricken with sudden horror, his blue eyes staring, his gaunt, pinched features ghastly white, and then Sergeant Haney and another trooper sprang from their horses and ran to his side. Weak, worn, starved, he had quailed at the dreadful sight, and was toppling head-foremost to the ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... the deaths of many of them. Women were ripped open, or carried about impaled on spikes; men, women, and children, were flung from precipices, hacked, tortured, roasted alive; the heads of some of the dead were boiled and the brains eaten; there are forty printed pages, and twenty-six ghastly engravings, by way of Protestant tradition of the ascertained variety of the devilry. The massacre was chiefly in the Valley of Luserna, but extended also into the other two valleys. The fugitives were huddled in crowds high among the mountains, moaning ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... shall be a different woman by that time." The contralto voice dropped oddly and suddenly with these words: an effect of the headache, of course. And the pallor of the dark face was almost ghastly. Angela thought that her hostess looked very ill. "You may expect ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... pap it went, Amid the lungs was fix'd the winged wood, And quivering in his heaving bosom stood: Till from the dying chief, approaching near, The AEtolian warrior tugg'd his weighty spear: Then sudden waved his flaming falchion round, And gash'd his belly with a ghastly wound; The corpse now breathless on the bloody plain, To spoil his arms the victor strove in vain; The Thracian bands against the victor press'd, A grove of lances glitter'd at his breast. Stern Thoas, glaring with ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... grew almost ghastly at these shocking disclosures, and when Uncle Mosha concluded his audacious creed with a furtive ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... Major led the way on Badshah, the ponies of his followers keeping at a respectful distance from the elephant. When nearing the scene of the fight the tracks of the avenging herd were plain to see, and soon the party came upon ghastly evidences of the tragedy. The buzzing of innumerable flies guided the searchers to spots in the undergrowth where the scattered corpses lay. As each was reached a black cloud of blood-drunk winged insects rose ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... offering to Priapus. With the perfume of the roses into the open window came the stench of this hideous parody, as if in mockery. I removed it, and another appeared in the same place shortly afterward. The earthman was rampant and insulting. Pan is not dead yet. At least he still makes a ghastly sign here and there ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... her, took her in his arms, resting her head against his shoulder, loosened her coat about her throat, and chafed her cold hands, drawing the robes closely about her slender shoulders, but she lay there white and without a sign, of life. He thought he never had seen anything so ghastly white as ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... with an expression of terror. That pallid, thin face, with ruddy whiskers, and a collar of silvery fur, was visible for a moment with eyes widely open, with raised brows, with the words hanging on his lips: "She knows everything!—ghastly!" and after a while it sank again into the darkness which ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... an interesting girl, Armitage could see even in the ghastly effulgence of the arc lamps. Slightly above the medium height, with a straight, slim figure, she was, he judged, about twenty-two or three years old. Her light hair flowed and rippled from under a smart hat; her face, an expressive oval; her mouth not small, the lips full and red. Armitage ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... I had brought myself, when I saw a white robe come round the corner, arm in arm with a frock coat of black broadcloth. Also there came Everett, looking still more ghastly, his nose and lip having become purple, and in places green. Also there was Korwsky, and two other men; Moneta, a young Mexican cigarmaker out of work, and a man named Hamby, who had turned up on the previous evening, introducing himself as a pacifist who ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... he shall shut his own eyes in death, shall first make him a ghost, and, smiting him on the crest, shall send him to Tartarus. We fear no camp of the Swedes. Why threaten us with ghastly dooms, maiden?" ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... there massacred to the last man, so that the clatter of arms and the groans of the dying were distinctly heard in the neighbouring temple of Bellona, where Sulla was just holding a meeting of the senate. It was a ghastly execution, and it ought not to be excused; but it is not right to forget that those very men who perished there had fallen like a band of robbers on the capital and the burgesses, and, had they found time, would have destroyed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... way to conquer our depression and cheer us up; and at last, when he had but three days to live, he fell upon the right idea and was jubilant over it—a boys-and-girls' frolic and dance in the woods, up there where we first met Satan, and this was to occur on the 14th. It was ghastly, for that was his funeral day. We couldn't venture to protest; it would only have brought a "Why?" which we could not answer. He wanted us to help him invite his guests, and we did it—one can refuse nothing to a dying friend. But it was dreadful, for really we were inviting ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... only a turmoil of eddying sensations which he could not name. He walked down to the huge dark pine, the pine which 'Gene Powers loved like a person, and which his wife wished were cut down. What a ghastly prison marriage was, he thought, a thing as hostile to the free human spirit ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... ghastly shortcoming of his letter as regards distinctness, and the prosaic misinterpretation it was open to, Wilfrid called his inventive wits to aid, and ran swiftly to the end of the street. He had become—as ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... how different from the girl described in the opening of this tale. Her cheek was pale and wan, and the flesh had gone, and the yellow skin fell in from her cheekbone to her mouth, giving her almost a ghastly appearance; her eyes appeared larger than ever, but they were quenched with weeping, and dull with grief; her hair was drawn back carelessly behind her ears, and her lips were thin and bloodless. Two or three times during the day Mrs. McKeon had given ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... the foul odor at least fifteen minutes before, and had dragged Jill back, and there had been no other sign of monsters or not-monsters upon the earth. Now he crouched down and crawled among the bushes. He came to the place where he'd smelled the ghastly smell before. He smelled it again. He drew back. It became fainter, though it remained disgusting. He moved forward, stopped, moved back. He went sideways, very, very carefully, extending his ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... house, to find her a corpse—laid out with all the ghastly ceremonial which Catholic fancy could devise—and to be told that his misconduct had killed her. The tribe of cousins, who had planned the coup de theatre, were there to enjoy its result. This did not fail them. Miranda fainted away. As soon as consciousness returned, he made his act of atonement. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the drawer of the table at which they were sitting, and drew out a pile of letters. "Here's your mail, Gracious. Go ahead and read it while I clear up the ghastly remains of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... people began to run to and fro; and then he saw men carrying a beautiful dead girl in bridal costume, and in the midst of them one, who by his Sabbath garments and his white shoes was evidently the bridegroom, mazed and ghastly pale. He heard people telling one another that death had seized her as she stood under the canopy, before the word could be said or the glass broken that should have made her the wife of the richest man in the capital. The innkeeper ran towards them ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... his losing, the Northerners at his defending, that both were determined to hang him; he was running for his life. He took me to a hill from which I could see the Garrison, and the American flag flying over it. I looked, and saw we were standing in blood up to our knees, while here and there ghastly white bones shone above the red surface. Just then, below me I saw crowds of people running. "What is it?" I asked. "It means that in another instant they will commence to shell the town. Save yourself." "But Will—I must ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... bursting of a Prussian shell. His whole face, including his two eyes, were literally blown away, some scanty remnants of the osseous and muscular systems, and the skull covered with hair being left. His wounds healed, giving him such a hideous and ghastly appearance that he was virtually ostracized from the sight of his fellows. For his relief a dentist by the name of Delalain constructed a mask which included a false palate and a set of false teeth. This apparatus was so perfect that the functions of respiration and mastication were almost completely ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... fall, then numbness, and the silence of the grave,—she had her distant memories; of waking on a sunny afternoon, in bed, with a little cracked glass upon the opposite wall; of creeping out and up to it in her night-dress; of the ghastly twisted thing that looked back at her. Through the open window she heard the children laughing and leaping in the sweet summer air. She crawled into bed and shut her eyes. She remembered stealing out at last, after many days, to the grocery ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... instant. There, at last, was that dreadful look—the very one he seemed to know so well and yet had never seen before—upon her face. There she stood, frozen to the ground, gazing with starting eyes, and livid cheeks, and every feature fixed and ghastly, upon the man he had encountered in the dark last night. His eyes met those of the locksmith. It was but a flash, an instant, a breath upon a polished glass, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... horrid apparition, tall and ghastly, That walks at dead of night, or takes his stand O'er some new-open'd grave; and, strange to tell, Evanishes ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various
... "The ghastly head became more of a mystery than before. The baffled Detectives could again only look at it helplessly, and send descriptions of it over the country. At last it was seen by a woman named Callahan, living in Boston, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... some startling and ghastly discoveries. He came upon a box containing human bones, and he was sufficiently experienced to recognize that, in the case of the remains, ordinary, decay had been supplemented by artificial processes, ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... which were large and dark and luminous, and which seemed to grasp the object upon which they rested and to hold it in physical embrace, the face might have been that of the dead, so ghastly and ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... General Havelock and his little band of heroes—some one thousand Englishmen who had marched with him from Allahabad, recaptured by Neill for England, and on to ghastly Cawnpore—arrived at Lucknow, and relieved the slender British force which since May had been holding the Residency against the fierce and ever-renewed assaults of the thousands of rebels who poured themselves upon it. He came in time to save many a brave life that should yet do good service; ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... Philippa, in honor of my uncle. I never loved or liked dolls, though I remember taking some pride in the splendor of this, my first-born. They always affected me with a grim sense of being a mockery of the humanity they were supposed to represent; there was something uncanny, not to say ghastly, in the doll existence and its mimicry of babyhood to me, and I had a nervous dislike, not unmixed with fear, of the smiling simulacra that girls are all supposed to love with a species of prophetic ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... different kind. Many readers must have compared with Dante's original (in canto 33 of the "Inferno") Chaucer's version in the "Monk's Tale" of the story of Ugolino. Chaucer, while he necessarily omits the ghastly introduction, expands the pathetic picture of the sufferings of the father and his sons in their dungeon, and closes, far more briefly and effectively than Dante, with a touch of the ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... down weary, but Steenie set about lighting the peats ready piled between the great stones of the hearth. The wind howled over the waste hill in multitudinous whirls, and swept like a level cataract over the ghastly bog at its foot, but scarce a puff blew against the ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... in the smoke. By degrees the heaps of ashes become about eight feet high; they are then used as sleeping-places and watch-stations by the natives, who, rubbing themselves all over with the ashes, have a ghastly and devilish appearance that is indescribable. The country is covered with old tumuli formed in this manner. A camp may contain twenty or thirty such, in addition to fresh heaps that are constantly burning. Fires of cow-dung are also made on the ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... her love within thy heart, Well may'st thou perform thy part, And to coming years proclaim Thou art worthy of her name. Home of the homeless!—friend to all Who suffer on this earthly ball! On thy bosom sickly care Quite forgets her squalid lair; Gaunt famine, ghastly poverty Before thy gracious aspect fly, And hopes long crush'd, grow bright again, And, smiling, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... news quickly reached the deck, It sped from lip to lip, And ghastly faces everywhere Looked from the doomed ship. "Is there no hope, no chance of life?" A hundred lips implore; "But one," the captain made reply, "To run the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... flash, and in the silence a sound. The flash was the flash of a knife which Leo had drawn. He was hacking at the cord with it fiercely, fiercely, to make an end. And the sound was that of the noise he made, a ghastly noise, half shout of defiance and half yell of terror, as at the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... had to sit with the coachman, thought that long drive would never end, and yet Dr. Abercrombie drove good horses. It seemed hours before they reached Mortimer Street, and the strain on his nerves made him look so ghastly as he went into the house to prepare Mrs. Blake, that she uttered a shriek as soon ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... was as some spirit calling, in wail and agony from the forlorn shades, to the angels it beheld afar beyond the Eternal Gulf. They exchanged glances of dismay. They hurried into the house; they hastened into the room. Pisani turned, and his look, full of ghastly intelligence and stern command, awed them back. The black mantilla, the faded laurel-leaf, lay there before him. Viola's heart guessed all at a single glance; she sprung to his knees; she clasped them,—"Father, father, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and the adults were hardly clothed with a rag of that bark stuff, produced by certain trees, and called "mbouzon" in the country. Thus the state of this troop of human beings, women covered with wounds from the "havildars'" whips, children ghastly and meager, with bleeding feet, whom their mothers tried to carry in addition to their burdens, young men closely riveted to the fork, more torturing than the convict's chain, is the most ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... when the sun shall set in Heaven, Dark with the clouds of steaming blood, A ghastly, woeful, dying murmur Will be the Briton's ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... agents in condemning to a fearful death an innocent man. But if you cannot at so dark a crisis take that oath, then, oh then, be generous, even in guilt, and let me not be haunted through life by the spectre of a ghastly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... effect was dazzling as it was refined. It was this peculiarity and their strong family resemblance which led their brother-in-law, the good-humored St. Addlegourd, to say that, "'Pon my soul, you know, the whole precious mob looked like a ghastly pack of court cards, you know." St. Addlegourd was a radical. Having a rent-roll of 15,000,000 pounds, and belonging to one of the oldest families in Britain, he ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... door opening into Mrs. Gibbons's quarters I went into Mrs. Cotter's room, but for a moment drew back. I had learned not to shrink at much that once I would have run from, but the gaunt body and ghastly face of the woman propped against pillows on the bed frightened me, and my feet refused to move. All the hardships and denials, the injustices and inequalities, of working womanhood, unfit to fight and unprepared for struggle, were staring at me, and on the open lips was something of ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... that taxed the strength of each to the uttermost. Those three puny creatures fighting against the might of the ocean for the body of a dead man! Dead the man seemed, at least, to the girls, who, after one glance into the drawn and ghastly face of their burden, dared not look again. The undertow writhed about their legs, jerked at them wrathfully. Waves crashed upon them with shattering force. Once, Florence was hurled from her footing, but her hands held their grip on the raft. The wrenching shock was sustained by Josephine and ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... how grim and ghastly looks her Grace, With both her knees drawn upward to her chin. There was an old-world tomb beside my father's, And this was open'd, and the dead were found Sitting, and in this fashion; she looks ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... said, peering at her uncertainly. "You're here—in the flesh? You've been having just a ghastly sort of game with me all these years, have you? Hang it, I didn't deserve quite that! And so the little newspaper chap spoke the ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... room to expand, and which the tyranny of nature or of man has condemned to disease through arrested growth. And where neither Christianity, nor any other religion conveying some moral help, has reached, the animal energy of such races necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of evil, and the grotesque or frightful forms assumed by their art are precisely indicative of ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... the mountains, and these last had, for the most part, fetters on their wrists, or were bound two and two together and guarded by the English, whilst many of them were drooping under the effect of ghastly wounds, and several forms lay stretched along the ground indifferent to, ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green
... villages. There were a few wretched survivors in a village above the Ruo; but the majority of the population was dead. The sight and smell of dead bodies was everywhere. Many skeletons lay beside the path, where in their weakness they had fallen and expired. Ghastly living forms of boys and girls, with dull dead eyes, were crouching beside some of the huts. A few more miserable days of their terrible hunger, and they would be with ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... anxiety lest any "hicht" should end in a "howe," but the parish had a genius for funerals. It was long mentioned with a just sense of merit that an English undertaker, chancing on a "beerial" with us, had no limits to his admiration. He had been disheartened to despair all his life by the ghastly efforts of chirpy little Southerners to look solemn on occasion, but his dreams were satisfied at the sight of men like Drumsheugh and Hillocks in their Sabbath blacks. Nature lent an initial advantage in face, but it was an instinct in ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... spite of Paul's cry for "silence," and then the crew scattered. The young commander looked very pale, and went below attended by Terrill, who had noticed his ghastly expression. He retired to his state-room, and but for his friend's efforts would have fainted away, so terribly had he ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... the tragic Muse, Rude were the actors, and a cart the scene, Where ghastly faces, smear'd with lees of wine, Frighted the children, and ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... scream of a horse came to him, and another lightning flash showed Conrad, ghastly and staring, leap from the saddle—in the middle of the little valley—and Tula ride down ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... her eyeballs rattled in her head. The doll fell to the floor and lay there with closed eyes. Her face was pallid and ghastly. Her bonnet had fallen off, and her hair stuck out wildly in every direction. Her legs were doubled under her in the most helpless fashion. She was the forlornest figure of a doll imaginable. Presently Mary drew her hands away ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... After that he became restless and increasingly snappish; his face darkened at "Fallen Leaves," and he began to look positively dangerous when a young man who was a railway porter in town, now home for a holiday, made a ghastly attempt at merriment by singing a low-class music-hall catch. What he would have done or said I do not know, for at that moment the announcement was made which the reader has been expecting—that Mrs. Abel would give ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... new-comer appeared in sight. It was Hoper, in his usual dress of velveteen, looking now seedy, poverty-stricken, and altogether in ill-case, trudging moodily along, with his hat pulled over his brows, so that he did not see the ghastly object before him till his foot absolutely trod upon the dead man's hand. Being thus made aware of the proximity of the corpse, he started back a little, yet evincing such small emotion as did credit to his English reserve; then uttering a low exclamation,—cautiously ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... already occupied. The exclamation of surprise he gave forth soon brought the others to his side; and to their horror, drunk as they were, they found that the body before them was that of a dead man, arrayed in all the ghastly pomp of a corpse. A little nearer inspection showed that he had been a priest, probably the Padre of the village; on his head he had a small velvet skull cap, embroidered with a cross, and his body was swathed in a vestment, such as priests ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... and astonishment. Sin and guilt bring weakness and faintness in this life; how much more when both, with all their force and power, like a giant fasten on them? As God saith, "Can thy hands be strong, and can thy heart endure in the day that I shall deal with thee?" Now will the ghastly jaws of despair gape upon thee, and now will condemnings of conscience, like thunderclaps, continually batter against thy weary spirit. It is the godly that have boldness in the day of judgment; but the wicked will be like the chaff which the ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... violent enemy to brave. The prospect of a slow and solitary expiation would have no congeniality with his wicked thoughts, but this throttling and strangling has. There is always before him, an ugly, bloody, scarecrow phantom, that champions her, as it were, and yet shows him, in a ghastly way, the example of murder. Is she very weak, or very trustful in him, or infirm, or old? It gives a hideous courage to what would be mere slaughter otherwise; for there it is, a presence always about her, darkly menacing ...
— Miscellaneous Papers • Charles Dickens
... generations of Casterbridge boys had thrown stones at the mask, aiming at its open mouth; and the blows thereon had chipped off the lips and jaws as if they had been eaten away by disease. The appearance was so ghastly by the weakly lamp-glimmer that she could not bear to look at it—the first unpleasant feature of ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... for a second that the ghastly thought attracted him. He was a true white man and would not stoop to any hidden revenge. It is a white man's way to face his enemy in the open and under the sun, not to kill him by putting strychnine in his food. So Mick turned away and rode back to camp, and did not tell the boys what danger ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... wearing out the victim so slowly that he dies after long suffering; others violent and so quick, that they kill like a flash of lightning, leaving not even time for a single cry. Little by little Sainte-Croix became interested in the ghastly science that puts the lives of all men in the hand of one. He joined in Exili's experiments; then he grew clever enough to make them for himself; and when, at the year's end, he left the Bastille, the pupil was almost as accomplished as ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... is subject to some slight attacks of mental derangement,' remarked Bob Sawyer, with a ghastly smile; 'I fear I ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... a tiger as make-believe war with an Indian. In both cases the fun may become ghastly earnest with no time for cry-quits. So it was with the great fur-trading companies at the beginning of this century. Each held the Indian in subjection and thought to use him with daring impunity against ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... suggesting that this man should be invited to dinner. Everything had gone wrong. George was an undoubted success. The majority of the company were solid for him. As far as exposing his unworthiness in the eyes of Maud was concerned, the dinner had been a ghastly failure. Much better to have left him to lurk in his infernal cottage. Lord Belpher drained his glass moodily. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... enough." There was growing impatience in Christopher's voice. "She inherits this ghastly temper as I've told you. It's like a sudden gust of wind if she's not warned. It takes her off her feet, as it were, but she's nearly learnt to stand firm. She ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... opened with a pause of mute amazement! then rising slowly, to a solemn, trembling voice, he made the ghost equally terrible to the spectator, as to himself! and in the descriptive part of the natural emotions which the ghastly vision gave him, the boldness of his expostulation was still governed by decency, manly, but not braving; his voice never rising into that seeming outrage, or wild defiance of what he naturally revered. But alas! to preserve this medium, between mouthing, and meaning ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... he exclaimed at last, as he dragged a round object from the coffin and let down the lid with a bang, at the same time placing the savage's head with its ghastly features full in the ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... and looked embarrassed. Who was there for him to talk to over the 'phone? And that brought another ghastly thought to mind. Who could he ask to give security for his or her appearance in the morning? He found words to say he would telephone to his friends, a bright idea suddenly coming to the rescue. Grace looked her amazement and alarm as he marched into the telephone booth. Bravely he called ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... which the Royal Servian Government made itself guilty, has lasted up to the moment in which the events of June 28th demonstrated to the entire world the ghastly consequences ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History
... at Leyden. It would be difficult to imagine two more entirely dissimilar individuals of the human family than this lunatic duke and that theological professor. And yet, perhaps, the two names, more concisely than those of any other mortals, might serve as an index to the ghastly chronicle over which a coming generation was to shudder. The death of the duke was at first thought likely to break off the negotiations for truce. The States-General at once declared that they would permit no movements on the part of the Spanish party to seize the inheritance in behalf of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... her large, languid eyes, and looked upon her, but did not speak. She gave a ghastly smile, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... I know. I will never forget that. He weighed only 195 pounds, but I am sure he had another couple of hundred tucked away somewhere. When I had finished counting a great variety and number of stars, it occurred to me that I had been in a ghastly railroad wreck, and that the engine and cars following had picked out my right knee as a nice soft place to pile up on. There was a feeling of great relief when I looked around and saw that the engineer ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... the morning he was awakened by the well-known signal. Descending to the door, he was filled with astonishment to find Macfarlane with his gig, and in the gig one of those long and ghastly packages with which he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sat mending bags. She wore a gray calico slip, tied in around the waist with her apron strings; both were ragged, abominably soiled. Her hair was white; strands of it hung around her neck from a little knot twisted tight on the back of her head. Her face was ghastly white, wrinkled, toothless, but the pale blue eyes, rolling wildly, senselessly, in the cavernous sockets, gave her an expression so terrible that Selah started back involuntarily as she lifted her head, stared at her, and went on with ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... discovered to my surprise, and—let me confess it—dismay, that my point of view has strangely altered. I still consider that I have been the victim of one of the cruellest deceptions which a woman could endure; I still believe that in that first ghastly hour of discovery, flight was justified and natural, but—Well, Evelyn, dear! I have been living for months in very close intimacy with a little girl who thinks no evil, and is always ready to find a good explanation for what may on the surface appear ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the 15th, when the defeat at Futtehpore was known, the Nana had given orders for a general massacre of his helpless prisoners. There, in this ghastly well, were the remains, not only of those who had so far survived the siege and first massacre of Cawnpore, but of some seventy or eighty women and children, fugitives from Futteyghur. These had, with their husbands, fathers and friends, ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... feeble muscles strike 'deep' by choice, that is to say with a pointed weapon and aiming at a vital organ, whereas powerful murderers have a predilection for blows dealt 'superficially,' and for broad, ghastly wounds. Besides, that is only following a natural law; a weak man finesses with death, tries to make sure of it at some precise point, penetrating the heart or severing an artery; a brutal man does not care ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... magenta dye shading into blue, with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the centre. When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, "Who's that for, Basil?" demanded his wife; "the cook?" But seeing his ghastly look at this, she fell upon his neck, crying, "O you poor old tasteless darling! You've got it for me!" and seemed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sham sprightliness and real anguish, "Thank you, sir; I only trust that you will always find servants as devoted to your interest as my gratitude would have made me. Good-morning, sir." He clapped his hat on with a sprightly, ghastly air, and marched ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... now began. The whole city was panic-stricken: nothing was talked of but the plague—nothing planned but means of arresting its progress—one grim and ghastly idea possessed the minds of all. Like a hideous phantom stalking the streets at noon-day, and scaring all in its path, Death took his course through London, and selected his prey at pleasure. The alarm was further increased by the predictions confidently made ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... the time was short. If they were to meet Nancy they must steal away almost at once. Pauline told her tale with scarcely any comment. When it was finished she looked at her sisters. The moonlight was in the room, and Pauline's face looked ghastly, but it looked beautiful also. Her eyes were very big and dark and solemn and beseeching. Briar and Patty glanced at ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... children. It is then that my feelings rise above my control. I meant to have said more with respect to my own prosperity and happiness, but thoughts and feel{335} ings which this recital has quickened, unfit me to proceed further in that direction. The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me; the wails of millions pierce my heart and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip; the death-like gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman; the appalling liability of his ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... that would not sleep. But the long unconsciousness, in which he had himself visited the regions of death, seemed to have restored him, in spite of his aching head, to perfect mental equilibrium. Or, at least, his brain was quiet enough to let his mind work. Still, he felt very ghastly within. He raised himself on his elbow, and looked into the room. Everything was the same as it had been the night before, only with an altered aspect in the dawn-light. The dawn has a peculiar ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... chain, And his clogged tongue, that still he strove to teach, Denied all answering speech! The monarch bade him mark The clotted blood that, dark, Distained his royal bosom, and that found Its way, still issuing, from a mortal wound, Ghastly and gaping wide, upon his throat! The shadow passed—another took his place, Of the same royal race; The noble Yumuri, the only son Of the old monarch, heir to his high throne, Cut off by cunning in his youthful pride; There was the ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... than painful. It's horrible! It's ghastly!" cried Mr. Finn, in sudden shrill crescendo, leaping to his feet. In an instant the man's demeanour had changed. The mournful apostle had become a wild, vibrating creature with flashing ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... I couldn't bear the thought of your moping here by yourself, and it was a ghastly shame of ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... had disappeared, and the old man became the centre of the terrible picture. Slowly, with ghastly groans; as the heat below him increased into a steady glow, the aged body rose in a curve of agony, resting on the iron frame only where the chains held wrists and ankles fast. Cries and gasps filled the air, and Jones felt exactly ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... down it, caught first the face of Eleanor Burgoyne, and in the distance Manisty's black head and absent smile. The girl's young mind was captured by a sudden ghastly sense of the human realities underlying the gay aspects and talk of the luncheon-table. It seemed to her she still heard that heart-rending voice of Mrs. Burgoyne: 'Oh! I never dreamed it could be the same for him as for me. I ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... people doomed to more bitter disappointment. The years which followed the Restoration were crowded with misfortunes greater than any that had befallen the colony since the ghastly days of the Great Sickness. Charles II, far from showing gratitude to his Old Dominion, overwhelmed it with injustice and oppression. The Virginians were crushed with tremendous duties on their tobacco and with ruinous restrictions upon their trade. The titles to their plantations were ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... to talk to Jane Nettles, and look out of the window. Those gossips in the nursery were a great source of disturbance to Beth when she ought to have been composing herself to sleep. She recollected nothing of the conversations more corrupting than that ghastly account of how the girl was exhumed, so it is likely that the servants exercised some discretion when they dropped their voices to a whisper, as they often did; but these whispered colloquies made her restless and cross, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the lives in peril, and what might have been their fate Had I sprung to the points that evening a tenth of a tick too late; And a cold and ghastly shiver ran icily through my frame As I fancied the public clamor, the trial, and bitter shame. I could see the bloody wreckage—I could see the mangled slain— And the picture was seared for ever, blood-red, on my heated brain. That ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... recoiled back into the boat, staggering down upon their seats. One alone remained standing, and with an expression upon his face as if he was desirous of again beholding the sight. It was not a look that betrayed pleasure, but one grim and ghastly, yet strong and steady, as if it penetrated the profoundest depths of the ocean. It was the ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... objects: they also saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... ride round in a circle, thinking he is advancing, till he dies. But it is as easy to be lost in a wilderness, where there is nothing to see, as in a wood where one can see nothing. And there is something even more ghastly in being lost below the broad heavens in the open face of day than 'in the close covert of innumerous boughs.' The monotonous swells of the sand-heaps, the weary expanse stretching right away to the horizon, no land-marks but the bleaching bones of former ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... minute the storm-light blazed up once more, and fell upon an object so fearful and startling that they both fell back amazed. A woman was standing before them, tall, upright, and bareheaded; her long black hair falling over a face as white and ghastly as a three days' corpse; her wild countenance rendered more terrible by the blue glare of the lightning shining on the rain that streamed from every lock of her hair and every shred of her garments. She looked like some wild daughter of the storm, who had lost her way, and came wandering ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... water like molten gold as they passed, and with tall buildings and chimney-shafts showing black against the calm night sky. Lefevre found it necessary at intervals to assure himself that he was not drifting in a dream, or that the ghastly, burning-eyed figure, wrapped in a dark cloak in the stern, was not a strange visitor ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... the savages made vigorous search for him, he remained undiscovered. You can imagine the horrible sight the fort presented when the sun went down, the soldiers in their red uniforms lying there scalped and mangled, a ghastly heap under the summer sky. And to just think it was only a short time ago, a little more than ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... servus est peccati, followed by the rendering in English, "Whosoever doeth sin is sin's bond thrall." The words answered well to the ghastly delineations that seemed stamped on Ambrose's brain and which followed him about into the nave, so that he felt himself in the grasp of the cruel fiend, and almost expected to feel the skeleton claw of Death about to hand him over to torment. He expected the consolation ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... at once, he said, he felt as if he were adrift in space—and he had a wild desire to get back home to the old planet and the companionship of fellow creatures. He soon got over that feeling, but he says his first flight alone was a nightmare to him because of that dreadful sensation of ghastly loneliness." ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... with tarnished gold. The mouldings and traceries sprang up from the four corners, and all terminated in the centre, in which grinned a Medusa's head, with her circling snakes, in high preservation, and of great and ghastly beauty. There were other grotesque visages, sprinkled here and there over that elaborate roof; but look at that Medusa from what point you might, the painted wooden eyes were cast with a stolid sternness upon you. When I had a bedfellow, it was ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... themselves—and who are in their way truly sincere. Joan, do you know, there were moments at the meetings I went to of those people—Christian Scientists, and my Spiritual Socialists, and all those philo-factory-girls and tramps, and philo-beasts, and philo-blacks and the rest of it—Moments when a ghastly wonder would come over me whether, if we were all stranded on a desert island with a shortage of food and water, it wouldn't be a case of fighting for bare existence and of Nature red of ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... Hugh Noland's appearance to terrify the girl as he lay before her, wasted and woebegone, his low forehead blue-veined and colourless, his hands blue-veined and transparent, and all his shrunken figure sharply outlined under the thin summer covering of the bed with ghastly and suggestive significance. Instantly she wanted to go down by his side and with her arms about him give him the sympathy and comfort his lonely heart craved, but because it was so deliciously tempting she distrusted the impulse ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... and turned his head with the idea of avoiding that ghastly nightmare of a pitiful little man falling down a fathomless gulf which had sprung up ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... the people, the great defender of liberty," switched their murderous vengeance on to their late idol, and ere many hours the widow Beauharnais was set free. The thought of the appalling end and the brevity of time that seemed left to her impressed Josephine with all its ghastly horror. She had shrieked and wept herself into a deathlike illness. The doctor predicted that she could not survive more than a week, and for this reason she escaped ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... beams are bright, And Earth reposes in a belt of light. Now stern as Vengeance shines the awful form, Armed with the bolt and glowing through the storm; Sets the great deeps of human passion free, And whelms the bulwarks that would breast the sea. Roused by its voice the ghastly Wars arise, Mars reddens earth, the Valkyrs pale the skies; Dim Superstition from her hell escapes, With all her shadowy brood of monster shapes; Here life itself the scowl of Typhon* takes; There Conscience shudders at Alecto's snakes; From Gothic graves at midnight yawning ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... him the other day, of the head of a Jacobin," he tells St. Vincent, "and makes an apology to me, the weather being very hot, for not sending it here!" Upon the copy of the letter accompanying this ghastly gift to him, Troubridge had written, "A jolly fellow. T. Troubridge." The exasperation to which political animosities had given rise may be gauged by the brutal levity shown in this incident, by men of the masculine and generous characters of Troubridge and Nelson, and ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... heads in his honour. Any person, not belonging to the place, whom the head-hunters come across will be killed by them and his or her skull added to the collection, which is neatly arranged on the shore. These ghastly trophies are believed to add fresh spiritual power (mana) to the ghost of the dead chief. Till they have been procured, the people of the place take care not to move about. The grave of the chief is built up with stones and sacrifices are offered ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... bridal chamber, Death! Come to the mother, when she feels, For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, 5 And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake's shock, the ocean's storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm With banquet song, and dance, and wine,— 10 And thou art terrible!—The tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier; And all we know, or ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... suppose we can find out soon, for tomorrow we have our next general meeting. You will excuse me," he said, with a rather ghastly smile, "for being well ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... moon, as if invoking that luminary to shed more of its beams upon him. Then the body moved slowly, like some one writhing in pain, and yet unable to move from the spot on which it lay. From the head to the foot, the whole frame seemed to be convulsed, and now and then as the ghastly object seemed to be gathering more strength, the limbs were thrown out with a rapid ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... repulsive, uncouth, clumsy, ghastly, hideous, shocking, ungainly, deformed, grim, horrid, ugly, unlovely, disgusting, grisly, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... wet this morning, and very dismal, for we are in a ghastly new Inn, the old one being shut up; and there is always a re-action after a strong excitement like the beauty of the Simplon yesterday, which leaves one very dull. But it is of no use growling or mewing. I hope to be at Milan to-morrow—at Verona for Sunday. I have been reading ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... if I had brutally struck him; I shall never forget the long, slow, almost ghastly look of pain, ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... Lizzie made a motion with her two hands upon her heart, and struggled, and gasped,—as though she wished to speak but could not. "I suppose it is that girl who has done it all," said Lucinda. Lizzie nodded her head, and tried to smile. The attempt was so ghastly that Lucinda, though not timid by nature, was frightened. She sat down and took Lizzie's hand, and tried to comfort her. "It is very hard upon you," she said, "to be twice robbed." Lizzie again nodded her head. "I hope it ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... covering that but half concealed its head. The newt had seen it all. The bunch of animated foliage carelessly advancing, the spider's leap from its bubble, the glint of its shears as they met in the wretched creature's neck, the ghastly quivering tremor of the case. Then the fierce eight-legged efforts to extract the victim, and finally the awful cunning that seemed intelligent of Nature's devices, and pulled it out, as any angler ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... death—every breath was hushed and the persons assembled stood immovable as statues! Still she spoke not; but the violent heaving of her breast evinced the internal working of some dreadful struggle. Her face before was pale—it was now ghastly; her lips became ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... these evicted tenants was the object of a well-meant but hastily drawn "Disturbance Bill," which the Government passed through the Commons. It was rejected by an overwhelming majority in the Lords, and the natural consequence of its rejection was seen in the ghastly record of outrage and murder ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... Garman's rage was ghastly to behold. The flesh of his face seemed to swell in puffs, his nostrils widened, his eyes seemed to recede beneath the fleshy brows. He held up his great hairy hands, closing and opening them; but enough reason remained in his rage-drunken mind to comprehend the iciness of the blue ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen |
