"Hideousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she could bear it no longer; she put her hands to her ears to shut out the hideousness of it. After an interminable wait she took them down. He had stopped—there was silence—but she heard footsteps outside, and she literally cowered into the darkest corner of the spring house. But it was only Aunt Dolcey, her lips set ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... cave ceased. The rift in the earth was in plain sight from where they cowered, and the eyes of the men were upon it. One instant it was empty; the next, in uncanny silence, it was filled with huge hideousness—an ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... full of slaves and the children of slaves, Spartacus had little difficulty in obtaining recruits. Apulia was particularly fruitful of insurgents. In that country the vices of Roman slavery were displayed in all their naked hideousness, and the Apulian shepherds and herdsmen had a reputation for lawlessness that has never been surpassed. Yet this was the consequence, not the cause, of their bondage. It is related that some of them having asked their master for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... that there are absurdities in the works of the inventors of Utopias; nevertheless they deserve our sympathy. The hideousness of the world tormented them, and, in order to make it beautiful, they endured everything. Recall to mind More decapitated, Campanella put seven times to the torture, Buonarotti with a chain round his neck, Saint-Simon dying of want; many others. They might have lived ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... her character—perhaps it would be more strictly accurate to say, the change in her state of mind—is both inevitable, and the opposite of the development we traced in Macbeth. When the murder has been done, the discovery of its hideousness, first reflected in the faces of her guests, comes to Lady Macbeth with the shock of a sudden disclosure, and at once her nature begins to sink. The first intimation of the change is given when, in the scene of the discovery, she faints.[229] When next we ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... wit and humour; whose dialect is three-parts French pronounced as it is written; and whose force and frankness strike you with a special charm after the ha-haing of the Florentines, the sonorousness of the Romans and the sing-song of the Neapolitans; to say nothing of the hideousness of the Genoese and the chaos of the Sicilians; that city of kindly ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... mestizza; that is, the daughter of a genuine Spaniard, and an Indian mother. I shall call her simply a creole, [Footnote: 'Creole.'—At that time the infusion of negro or African blood was small. Consequently none of the negro hideousness was diffused. After these intercomplexities had arisen between all complications of descent from three original strands, European, American, African, the distinctions of social consideration founded on them bred names so many, that a court calendar was ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... made to speak and act naturally, which never fails to awaken a touch of sympathy in beings equally prone to err. I again repeat that few minds (if any) exist than can find beauty in deformity, or aught to admire in the hideousness of vice. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... bits of sea-weed, or any other stuff within his reach, and paddles about his tank self-satisfied and ridiculous. Women must and will trim, as spiders spin webs, and bees make honeycombs. They even trim bathing-dresses: one would think that nothing could redeem them from their hideousness. But they obey a law of their being. The special aptitudes of the lower animals are brought into play when no other reason can be given than the necessity for discharging an accumulation of the inward energy,—a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... be. Angels behold their own loveliness, because doing so makes them lovelier; but no devil could know his own vileness and live. They think their hideousness charming, and, when the darkness is thickest about them, most firmly believe themselves in Heaven. But the light of Heaven would be real darkness to them, for a ray of it would ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... cheerfully; and they and the guards and officials came up chatting quite friendly together, and gazed languidly over the portfolio, as I was endeavouring to get the likeness of one or two of these comfortable malefactors. One old and wrinkled she- criminal, whom I had selected on account of the peculiar hideousness of her countenance, covered it up with a dirty cloth, at which there was a general roar of laughter among this good- humoured auditory of cut-throats, pickpockets, and policemen. The only symptom of a prison about the place was a door, across which a couple of sentinels were stretched, ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on them, and then You started back in horror to survey The wondrous hideousness of those small men, Whose colour was not black, nor white, nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may; They were mis-shapen pigmies, deaf and dumb— Monsters, who cost a no less ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... worn-out theme. Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the middle ages, and with cynicism Degas has rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What Mr. Horsley or the British matron would say it is difficult to guess. Perhaps the hideousness depicted by M. Degas would frighten them more than the sensuality which they condemn in Sir Frederick Leighton. But, be this as it may, it is certain that the great, fat, short-legged creature, who in her humble and touching ugliness passes ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... afternoon. For there, right before them, was Granny Sanders's log-cabin, with its row of lofty sunflower stalks, now dead and dry, in front, with its rain-water barrel by the side of the low door, and its ash-barrel by the fence. In this cabin lived alone the old and shriveled hag whose hideousness gave her a reputation for almost supernatural knowledge. She was at once doctress and newspaper. She collected and disseminated medicinal herbs and personal gossip. She was in every regard indispensable to the intellectual life of the neighborhood. In the matter of her medical skill ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... after she has chased and coursed them from one place to another, flying yet not knowing where to fly for shelter and relief, plagued and tormented with a thousand miseries, she plunges them headlong into an invisible abyss, the hideousness of which no tongue can express." PLUTARCH: Morals, Vol. IV. p. 210. Ed. 1694. PLATO (Gorgias 525. c.d. Ed. Bip. IV. 169) represents Socrates as teaching that those who "have committed the most extreme wickedness, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... a different aspect of the garden. I, naked among the coral and the plants, must have looked to them like a frightful demon, white and without scales, a horrible devil-fish, my arms and legs glabrous tentacles, and the lunette and spears adding to my hideousness and foul menace. I know that was the impression I made on the rainbow-fish, for they fled within the caves, and only by peeping in through the glass could I see them to drive the spear into them. These slender spears were a dozen feet of light, tough wood, two of them with single iron points ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... commenced slowly vibrating from side to side, while a low, hissing sound proceeded from his open jaws. His horns projected out, adding to the hideousness of his appearance; and at intervals his forked tongue shot forth, glancing in the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... men living under the sky. Sure enough I have a fatal talent of converting all Nature into Preternaturalism for myself: a truly horrible Phantasm-Reality it is to me; what of heavenly radiances it has, blended in close neighborhood, in intimate union, with the hideousness of Death and Chaos;—a very ghastly business indeed! On the whole, it is better to hold one's peace about it. I flung myself down on sofas here,—for my little Wife had trimmed up our little dwelling-place into quite glorious order in my absence, and I had only to lie ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... by good men picturing the evils of the factory system. Comparisons were made between the old and the new, in which the hideousness of the new was etched in biting phrase. Some tried to turn the dial backward and revive the cottage industries, as did Ruskin a little later. "A Dream of John Ball" was anticipated, and many sighed for "the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... scarlet streamers overhead, and flanks her doors with legends in saffron and gold; even its window panes have a foreign look, and within is a glimmering of tinsel, a subdued light, and china lamps flickering before graven images of barbaric hideousness. The air is laden with the fumes of smoking sandal-wood and strange odors of the East; and the streets, swarming with coolies, resound with the echoes of an unknown tongue. There is hardly room for us to pass; we pick our way, and are sometimes curiously regarded ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... should do anything as 'they' do! This place, then, call it what you will, is inhabited by a lean, tall, sullenly silent race who live in preposterously ugly little wooden houses of the most naked cleanliness ... God of my Fathers! the hideousness of the huddle of those huts where I finally found the cousin! He was a seller of letter-paper and cheap chromos and he knew nothing of the picture except that it was brought to him to sell by the countryman who sold him butter. So I found the address of ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... was starting for the Church a letter was handed to me. I recognised in the shaky superscription (which seemed to tremble in every stroke) his handwriting. The envelope contained a printed paper! It was the Oxford Class List! Then the truth in all its hideousness dawned upon me. He knew at last that I had taken a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... heart, her entire being rose in revolt against her crime. Her oath, her life, her final denunciation appeared before her in all their hideousness. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... can do?" she cried. "O God! when did I ever commit a sin worthy of the punishment?" She raised her eyes to Garnet. "Even thou art pale to the lips from the hideousness of the thing." ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... alterations being from within, not from without—it was horrible. I do not know how to describe it. It caused a new sensation. Just as one cannot translate a horrible odour, or a ghastly pain, or a fearful sound, into words, so I cannot describe this new form of awful hideousness. I can only try to describe something that is not it, but seems somewhat parallel to it; or at least is suggested by it. It reminded me of what I had heard of vampires; for the face resembled that of a corpse more than anything else I can think of; especially when I can conceive such a ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... famous sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries. Perhaps it was human enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with oppression. Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those fanatic ill-smelling multitudes. Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred vessels of divine ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... point of marrying him, and might have had Fanny with her. Mary also speaks of her drawing lessons, and how (thank God!) she had finished "that tedious, ugly picture" she had been so long about. This points to that terrible way of teaching Art, by accustoming its students to hideousness and vulgarity, till Art itself might become an unknown quantity. Mary also tells, what is more interesting, that she has finished the fourth chapter, a very long one, of her Frankenstein, which she thinks ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... forgetting their ancient hate, stood before him with placid dignity. The man who built the Pyramids lifted his ungainly features from the ingulfing centuries; souls of blood—thirsty men, duly forced into the shape of fleas, lent their hideousness to his night; and the Evil One himself did not disdain to sit for his portrait to this undismayed magician. That these are actual portraits of concrete object? is not to be affirmed. That they are portraits of what Blake saw is as little to be denied. We are assured that his whole ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... with horns, cloven hoofs, goggle eyes, and scaly tail, that was held up to many yet living as the avenger of childish disobedience in their earlier days, together perhaps with some strength of conviction of the moral hideousness of the evil he was intended, in a rough way, to typify; but this hazily retained impression of the Author of Evil was the universal and entirely credited conception of the ordinary appearance of those bad spirits who were so real to our ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... to bestow some comfort upon her; but poor Matilda, who was ever violent, even in her better feelings, could not, for a long time, listen to the kind voice of her consoler—she could only repeat her own faults, recapitulate all the crimes she had been guilty of, and display, in all their native hideousness, such traits of ill-humour, petulance, ungovernable fury, outrageous passion, and vile revenge, as are the natural offspring of the human heart, when its bad propensities are matured by indulgence, particularly ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland
... workmanship many of these specimens disclose.) It is common for him, when at work upon the elaborate carving in wood that he practises, to engrave some hideous human figure, intended, obviously, to represent an idol. Does it not excite wonder with us that such refinements upon hideousness and repulsiveness could ever have provoked the worship or adoration of ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... butterfly; to-day he roams on gilded wings, to-morrow he will show his hideousness and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... And yet," he continued, as he walked rapidly along the by-ways and thoroughfares of the great city, "it is a wonder that I escaped it, for in my time we were just as degraded, only we disguised our hideousness under the garb of respectability." Then a look of bitter, almost hopeless disappointment came over his face, as he told himself secretly, "And I struggled against all these propensities, fought with and overcame all these follies for the sake of her, who has cast me so easily, so willingly ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... came to a part of the road where many men were engaged with pick and shovel; and here, on either side of the highway, I noticed many grim-looking heaps and mounds—ugly, shapeless dumps, depressing in their very hideousness. Beside one such unlovely dump our car pulled up, and F., ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... combined the attributes of Aphrodite with those of Ares. Her terrible aspect is not to be ignored or covered up with shams; but it is not the only one. If the optimism of Leibnitz is a foolish though pleasant dream, the pessimism of Schopenhauer is a nightmare, the more foolish because of its hideousness. Error which is not pleasant is surely the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... one face that had nothing on its flat surface but a pipe inserted where the nose had been. Another was so terrible that I did not dare to take a second look, and I have only a vague and mercifully fading impression of a hideousness never before ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... no station would have been possible between the Thames and Smithfield. The puzzled inhabitants, therefore, ended in despair by giving evidence in favour of the viaduct. The stolid hammermen went to work, and the iron nightmare was set up in all its Babylonian hideousness. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Think of it. Churches, comfort! Irredeemable hideousness and the comfort of congregations as a ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... more gloom and more dismal funeral pomp than have the votaries of any other creed. What can be more depressing than the darkness in which a house is kept shrouded, while the dead body is awaiting sepulture? What more repellent than the sweeping robes of lustreless crape, and the purposed hideousness of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the "deliverance" of her husband "from the burden of the flesh"? What more revolting than the artificially long faces of the undertaker's men, the drooping "weepers", the carefully-arranged white ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... that he would not condemn you, you have taken the risk. If so, then what do you take the President for? To go back on one's words is an act despised by a vagabond. To suggest such an act as being capable of the President is an insult, the hideousness of which cannot be equalled by the number of hairs on one's head. Any one guilty of such an insult should not be spared by the four hundred ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... and fatigued by the succession of revolting and sanguinary images which pollute the walls of every palace, church, gallery, and academy, from Milan to Naples. The splendour of the execution only adds to their hideousness; we at once seek for nature, and tremble to find it. It is hateful to see the loveliest of the arts degraded to such butcher-work. I have often gone to visit a famed collection with a secret dread of being led through a sort of intellectual shambles, and returned with the feeling of one ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... indispensable supports. They are too, for the most part, common and ugly to a degree that is most puzzling. Look at the greens: they range from boiled endive to olive, ending in the absolute hideousness of two steps of the throne which lie across the picture—two bars, two streaks of spinach dipped in tawny mud. The only tolerable green of them all is that of St. Agnes' mantle, a Parmigiano green, rich in yellow, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... beauty as he writes the most revealing and tragic satires on the population of the tavern in the world's literature. What more horrible portrait exists in poetry than that of "la belle Heaulmiere" grown old, as she contemplates her beauty turned to hideousness—her once fair limbs become "speckled like sausages"? "La Grosse Margot" alone is more horrible, and her bully utters his and her doom in the last three awful lines of the ballade which links her ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... confide it to the care of its own very life, the God conscious of himself and in himself conscious of it, I had been for months offering the sacrifices of despair and indignation, arose in spectral hideousness before me. I saw that I, a child of the infinite, had been worshipping the finite—and therein dragging down the infinite towards the fate of the finite. I do not mean that in Mary Osborne I had been worshipping the finite. It was ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... a courtesan opening in a cloud to clasp him to the bosom of a goddess, and that without degradation! Such majestic creatures cannot be sullied. The gods bathe themselves pure in light; and this goddess who came to him knew what she was doing. She was not ignorant of the incarnate hideousness of Gwynplaine. She had seen the mask which was his face; and that mask had not caused her to draw back. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... they certainly were, they yet had enough of human nature in them to be shocked at their own hideousness; and still intending to groan, they uttered a viler grunt and squeal than before. So harsh and ear-piercing it was, that you would have fancied a butcher was sticking his knife into each of their throats, or, at the very least, that somebody was ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... by the madness that twisted his face into gargoyle hideousness. But Allan's ray-gun stabbed ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... serious turn. The tone of light bantering in which the preceding conversation had taken place had been assumed on his part. For the last few weeks evil dreams had tortured his sleep and cast their shadow upon his waking hours. They had ever increased in reality, in intensity and in hideousness. Even now he could see the long, tapering fingers that every night were groping in the windings of his brain. It was a well-formed, manicured hand that seemed to reach under his skull, carefully feeling its way through the ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... viands on hangers-on and toad-eaters, though at the same time no man encouraged and required hangers-on and toad-eaters more. Lord Marney had all the petty social vices, and none of those petty social weaknesses which soften their harshness or their hideousness. To receive a prince of the blood or a great peer he would spare nothing. Had he to fulfil any of the public duties of his station, his performance would baffle criticism. But he enjoyed making the Vicar of Marney or Captain Grouse drink some claret ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... Roman Priestcraft," and each page would be as black as the shadows of hell, but I deem it unnecessary, as I have confidence in those who may read this book that they will believe every word of what I have written, therefore it is unnecessary for me to dwell longer upon the hideousness of celibacy. ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... own caning, deliberately lift up, suspend, and keep dangling in the air for the contempt of the public that auburn wig which was presumed by its wearer to be simular of native curls. The ugliness of that death's head which by this means was suddenly exposed to daylight, the hideousness of that grinning skull so abruptly revealed, may be imagined by poets. Neither was the affair easily redressed: the wig swung buoyantly in the playful breezes: to catch it was hard, to release it without injuring the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... other trenches later on, French and English. But only along the inundation was there that curious combination of beauty and hideousness, of rippling water with the moonlight across it in a silver path, and in that water things that had ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... waits the coming of a messenger of mercy. That system of cruelty to prisoners which so disgraced England during the last century, and which for her name she would were erased from her history, we preserve here in all its hideousness. The Governor knows nothing, and cares nothing about the prison; the Attorney-General never darkens its doors; the public scarce give a thought for those within its walls-and to one man, Mr. Hardscrabble, is the fate of these wretched beings entrusted. And so prone has ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... that he had never seen him with his eyes, never having gone down alive into Hell, like Messer Dante Alighieri; but that, in depicting him as he had done, he was for expressing in visible lines and colours the hideousness ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... to endeavour to make everything out of something else, and to rummage out a store of old rubbish, as the first step towards manufacturing a new garment! The treasures which were to contribute towards Esther's trousseau consisted of a moth-eaten Paisley shawl, a checked silk skirt of unbelievable hideousness, a muslin scarf; yellow with age, a broken ivory fan, and a pair of mittens. A vision of Esther figuring as a bride in this old- world costume, rose before Peggy's quick-seeing eyes, the checked silk transforming her slim figure ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... grant that mouth to smile! The minutes that Ye grant those eyes to weep! Whom will it not Deceive,—her laughter and her tears! Both you, And me, and God! But I will change her smiles To tears; her weeping to the bitter laugh Of hideousness, that we at last may rest, And be secure from all her woman's wiles! And since she shall not die, then I will give her As a gift! This surely is my kingly right, For I am Mark, her lawful spouse and ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... could have seemed more beautiful than this woman set thus on high in that dark place of blood and fear. Indeed, in the unearthly light she looked like a spirit, the spirit of beauty triumphing over the hideousness of hell, the angel of light trampling ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... desideratum. A city that should be a bazaar of all possible architectures, adding a multitude of new inventions to samples of every historical style, might have a certain interest; yet carnival can hardly be enjoyed all the year round and there is a certain latent hideousness in masquerades in spite of their glitter. Not only are the effects juxtaposed incongruous, but each apart is usually shallow and absurd. A perruque cannot bring back courtly manners, and a style of architecture, when revived, is never quite genuine; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... stake a few score years ago, as a sinful, presumptuous and sacrilegious witch—that of living for an hour or two out of its natural element. It deserves the bad eminence to which it has been raised by the blacks on accounts of looks alone, and if the poisonous qualities are in line with its hideousness, one can but pause and ponder why and wherefore such a creature has existence in "this best of all possible worlds." But it is known that to the Chinese it is dainty. They pay for it with good grace ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... frescoed curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it would be for them to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as they do at the same time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with its hideousness and levity. It stood formerly in the Church of San Benedetto, where it was erected shortly after the poet's death, and it was brought to the Library by the French, when they turned the church into a barracks for their troops. The poet's dust, therefore, rests here, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... at the distorted face, marred by a sabre to the hideousness of doom itself. "Yes, I think so. I want two troopers—Burke and Campbell, of the escort, ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... be difficult to convey an adequate idea of the hideousness of these people when their costume is thus complete; but the lips of the women, held out like a trough, and always filled with saliva stained with tobacco-juice, of which they are immoderately fond, is the most abominably revolting part of ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... heard of or could ever have conceived—no punishment, no agony, no Calvary ever has matched the hellish hideousness of the endless execution of this young man.... He was only twenty-two years old; only a lieutenant among the thousands who served their common motherland. No man who ever lived has died more bravely; none, perhaps, as horribly and as ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the seventeenth century, is a revelation, in its atmosphere of sleepy evening quiet, to those who rub their eyes with wonder, and find it hard to credit that London, "with its unutterable, external hideousness," was actually left behind them only that very morning, and is actually at present not two hundred miles distant. Furnes, in short, is an epitome, and I think a very charming one, of all that is most characteristic in Flanders; ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... the East, of the most unhealthy superstitions, and of the fanaticism of the orgy. The city was very literary, but literary only in the literature of rhetoricians. The beauty of works of art and the infinite charm of nature prevented this moral degradation from sinking entirely into hideousness and vulgarity. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... again,' cried Peg, with a malicious relish of her old master's defeat, which made her natural hideousness something quite fearful; 'let's hear it all again, beginning at the beginning now, as if you'd never told me. Let's have it every word—now—now—beginning at the very first, you know, when he went ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... is the natural evil of the human mind, and not the supernatural agency in the story of its development, that makes Macbeth so terrible; it is the hideousness of a wicked soul, into which enter more foul ingredients than are held in the witches' caldron of abominations, that makes the play so tremendous. I wish we had read that great work together. How it contrasts ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the verge of a yawning abyss, and began to descend between green-glancing walls of water, to vast depths, where undescribed sea-monsters, never seen upon the surface, glided about in an obscurity that increased their hideousness. Suddenly the feeble light that streamed down into the gulf through the green translucent sea, seemed to be cut off; the liquid walls closed above our heads; and we were whirled away, with the sound of rushing ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... forward for the rest of the way, the hideousness of their situation relieved only by the bank before their eyes and the hope of high ground held out by it. With the last bit of energy in them they freed themselves from the mud's suction and painfully crawled up ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... around with graceful drapery before they shall have audience. But do we not commit a trespass against virtue, when we demand the same soft disguises to drape facts whose disguise is the worst immorality, whose naked hideousness is the only decency, which must be seen disgusting to warrant their being seen at all? So Mr. Beecher has been censured for irreverence, when what was called his irreverence has seemed to us but the tenderness engendered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... obeyed his mother's parting injunction. As a British officer, he had fought for the Empire. As Roy Sinclair—son of Lilamani—he had fought for the sanctities of Home and Beauty—intrinsic beauty of mind and body and soul—against hideousness and licence and the unclean spirit that could defile the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... her husband. He was perhaps twenty-five years younger; a quarter-century less soaked in hideousness. Her yellow, concave-sided teeth were bared at him, her mouth drew up on one side above the gums. "Pete, if I hear one word more out of you, out you go. Lady! Huh! Where d' you ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... the sound of a hoarse human voice in the cabin where the remains of Frankenstein were lying. I entered, and there, over the body, hung a form gigantic, but uncouth and distorted, and with a face of appalling hideousness. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... themselves from those of their own lifelong associates who had reverses of fortune—what consideration could "Black Matt" expect from them? And she—The necessity and the ability to deceive myself had gone, now that I could not pay the purchase price for her. The full hideousness of my bargain for her dropped its veil and ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... known as the horned frog is harmless. He has the hideousness of the prehistoric monsters whose reduced descendant he is, but he ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... contemporary writers spoke upon this painful topic. It will scarcely be supposed that the picture has been overdrawn in the act books of the Consistory courts; and as we see it there it is almost too deplorable for belief, as well in its own intrinsic hideousness as in the unconscious connivance of the authorities. Brothels were kept in London for the especial use of priests;[199] the "confessional" was abused in the most open and abominable manner.[200] Cases occurred of the same frightful profanity in the ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... of St. Bernard's cloistered Meditationes Piissimae.[45] Sometimes, indeed, these mediaeval monks would admit that the skin possessed a certain superficial beauty, but they only made that admission in order to emphasize the hideousness of the body when deprived of this film of loveliness, and strained all their perverse intellectual acumen, and their ferocious irony, as they eagerly pointed the finger of mockery at every detail of what seemed to them the pitiful figure of man. St. Odo of Cluny—charming ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... batrachian family are known (irrespective of sex) as Pollywogs, and are the meanest of all the reptile race except the radical Scaliwags. They are all heads and tails, and then, not the toss of a copper to choose between the two ends, as regards hideousness. The manner in which the tails are gradually developed into legs is very curious, but, as this is not a Caudal lecture, it is ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... a picture of a different kind, and if the melancholy Jaques, or any other gentleman with a foible for thinking in a wood; had been there, methinks he had moralized very prettily on the hideousness of hate and the beauty of the sentiment it had interrupted so fiercely. But it escaped this sort of comment for about eight years. Well, all this woke the bairns; the lights dazzled them, the people scared them. Each hid a little face on the ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... talked to herself rapidly and in low undertones. What would I have given to be able to hear all she thus said! Her expression was one of deep mental agony, and I began to feel a growing confidence. How can words express the hideousness of the change of countenance, the indescribable horror and distress of a creature that is being pressed closer and closer toward a yawning gulf of blackness from which there is no escape? How relate the outward signs of an inward terror at which we can but vaguely guess? Would that I could have penetrated ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... were better that she should think of him as a spirit, divested of the covering that made him a loathsome mortal! Even if he could know that her every affection clung to him, he would pray to go hence before her eyes could be so cleared of the mists of love as to see the hideousness of his imperfections. He had seen her shudder as her cousin's arm was placed around her; and was he not more repulsive still? Oh, how could he ever dream of ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... Ben had boomed the hour which marked the rejection of the ultimatum, Bates was full of fire. He had bought a penny flag, and in a spirit of grim determination had walked the streets, processing with the processionists. There was no brag or bounce about him, no hideousness of noise or mafficking, no hatred of foreigners or cruelty of uncharity, but a grim steadfastness of determination which meant that, so far as he might, Bates ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... away into a heap of undiscoverable ashes! And Zephoranim's haughty spirit too had fled,—fled, stained with guilt and most unroyal dishonor, all for the sake of one woman's fairness—the fairness of body only—the brilliant mask of flesh that too often hides the hideousness ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... replied the Master, "than might have been expected from your conduct. It is too true, our vices steal upon us in forms outwardly as fair as those of the demons whom the superstitious represent as intriguing with the human race, and are not discovered in their native hideousness until we have ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... cried Frank, and he lifted his stick, and called sharply to a large black and white bull-dog that paddled about on its bow legs, saliva dripping from its huge jaws, looking in its hideousness like something rare and exquisite from Japan. He dismissed the porter and the carriage, which he had hailed with an arrogant wave of his stick. He was tall and he was thin. His trousers were extremely elegant, ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... for there was no comparison. How could one compare his beautiful coat with the smooth and naked hideousness of Tarzan's bare hide? Who could see beauty in the stingy nose of the Tarmangani after looking at Taug's broad nostrils? And Tarzan's eyes! Hideous things, showing white about them, and entirely unrimmed with red. Taug knew that his own blood-shot ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Solitary was one of mutual misfortune. Sorrow was the ligament that united them. For years had he known Holden, but it was only within a short time, namely, since an awakened conscience (so he judged, himself) had revealed to him his own hideousness, that he had been attracted to the Solitary. Should Holden recover his son, should his heart expand once more to admit worldly joys, would it not be closed to him? As he once felt indifference towards Holden, so would not Holden, by a change of circumstances, by the awakening of new desires ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... feeling of dissatisfaction. He had expected that this, his first service in England after ten years, would have carried him back to the days when he knew nothing of the Tree of Knowledge; but, instead of that, it had made no appeal to him. Its poetry was destroyed by the hideousness of the surroundings; whilst even the glorious words of the Benediction seemed but a perfunctory dismissal, giving the congregation leave to hasten away to the heavy dinners which were awaiting ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? .. With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... wrench herself free, two rabbits bolted, and hell broke loose. One would not have thought that the great calm evening under its stooping sky, the peaceful, omniscient trees, the grave, contented colours, could have tolerated such hideousness. The women and children shrieked with the best, and Hazel stood alone—the single representative, in a callous world, of God. Or was the world His representative, and she something alien, a ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... conceals the worm in its heart, will soon, like the overblown flower, reveal so clearly what mars its life that scarcely anything else will be noticed. What a fate for a man—to be tied for life to a woman who will, with sure gradation, pass from at least outward beauty to utter hideousness! Beauty, in a case like this, is but a mask which time or the loathsome fingers of disease would surely strip off; and then what an object would confront the disenchanted lover! It would be like marrying a disguised death's-head. Never before did I realize ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... resolved on a plan which they hoped might make the prisoners weaken. It was to have them look upon their murdered victim and have the crime recalled in all its hideousness. ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... clothes without complaint; but he could not bear having his hair cut, and so ran away to the bush. He belonged to the wandering tribe that daily visited the camp—a tribe of wretched famine-stricken "blacks," whose natural hideousness and filthy appearance were intensified by the dirty rags with which they made shift to cover their bodies. I should never have conceived it possible that such living skeletons could exist. Without begging from the diggers I fail to see how they could have lived, for not a ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... should differ somewhat from that entertained by the speculative author of "The Light of Asia." In brief Sir Edwin knows all about the beauty, wealth and success which make earth a Paradise for the few; I something of that hideousness, poverty and despair that make it a Purgatory for the many. That world to which Sir Edwin belongs, and which he contemplates so approvingly, is but the gold-leaf on the graven image, the bright foam on the bosom of a bottomless sea, a verdant crust cast over a chaos ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... better not see the dancing, for Zeyneb and Latefeeh are terribly fascinating, they are such pleasant jolly girls as well as pretty and graceful, but old Oum ez-Zeyn (mother of beauty), so-called on account of his hideousness, will want us to eat his ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... was smiling, so the auctioneer prattled on, and the deformed creature upon the catasta wound his ill-shapen body into every kind of contortion, grinning from ear to ear, displaying the malformation of his spine, and the hideousness of his long hairy arms, whilst he uttered weird cries that were supposed to imitate those of wild ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... lamplight, scattered and sick and pale, Shows like the leper's living blotch of bale: Uncoiling monstrous into street on street Paven with perils, teeming with mischance, Where man and beast go blindfold and in dread, Working with oaths and threats and faltering feet Somewhither in the hideousness ahead; Working through wicked airs and deadly dews That make the laden robber grin askance At the good places in his black romance, And the poor, loitering harlot rather choose Go pinched and pined to bed Than lurk and shiver and ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... tottering outbuildings, rusting machinery, and general litter that reveal the absence of all sense of beauty or even neatness, yet the farmer and his wife may be thrifty, hard-working people, and scrupulously particular indoors. Their minds have not been sensitized to outdoor beauty and hideousness. They forget that nature is aesthetic; they live in the midst of her beauty, but their eyes are dim and their ears are dull, and it is difficult to instruct them. Happily, recent years have brought with them a new sense of the possibilities of rural beauty. Children are learning ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the Band of the Academy pounding out a quick-step, and catch a glimpse of the long line of midshipmen passing in review, before some notable. The "custard and cream" of the chapel dome obtruded itself in all its hideousness; the long reach of Bancroft Hall glowed white in the sun; the library with its clock—the former, by some peculiar idea, placed at the farthest point from the dormitory, and the latter where the midshipmen cannot see it—dominated the opposite end of the grounds. Everywhere was ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott
... for the scenes which made Constable a painter, but down in the quiet hollow a mile and a half to the eastward on the banks of his much-loved Stour, and around the paternal mill of Flatford, not improved as is the one at Dedham into hideousness, but remaining much as it was in the artist's day. Both mills were the property of Golding Constable, witnessed thereto in the latter, the initials G.C., carved in irregular characters deep in the huge mill scales, still legible ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... one comfort, however, in the very hideousness of our statues. The fear of what the sculptors will do for them after they are gone may deter those who are careful of their memories from talking themselves into greatness. It is plain that Mr. Caleb Cushing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... the possibilities of human life, here and hereafter, came to Fillmore Flagg as a revelation of the most sacred and marvelous character: in the light of such a revelation, the hideousness of selfishness stood revealed like a grim and warning monster. Now he saw the path of duty plain before him. On the higher, broader plane of unselfishness, he must strive to develop new powers and new aspirations to aid him in making better conditions for a more ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... been a device for presenting the pathetic pictures of Little Nell and her grandfather, the wonderful and rapid learning of the marchioness, and the uncommon vitality of Mr. Richard Swiveller; and also the compound of will and hideousness in Quilp. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... traced for her the career of Buckhurst, sparing her nothing; I led up to my own appearance on the scene, reviewed briefly what we both knew, then disclosed to her in its most trivial detail the conference between Buckhurst and myself in which his cynical avowal was revealed in all its native hideousness. ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... time for her the sun had ceased to shine. She had counted each hour until his return and she could not waste the precious moments now that he had really come. The djinns and devils in the garden might present themselves in all their hideousness if it so pleased them but tonight she was heedless of them. She had eyes for nothing but the man she worshipped. Even in his silent moods she was content. It was enough to feel his arms about her, to hear ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... freshly whitened in warning to visiting pilgrims. In the sky—clear, fair, inviting—one would think she might have found some relief to her ache of mind; but, alas! in making the beautiful elsewhere the sun served her never so unfriendly—it did but disclose her growing hideousness. But for the sun she would not have been the horror she was to herself, nor been waked so cruelly from dreams of Tirzah as she used to be. The gift of seeing can ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... the producers could decide all questions of methods, conditions, hours of work, and so forth, there would be an almost boundless change for the better: grime and noise might be nearly eliminated, the hideousness of industrial regions might be turned into beauty, the interest in the scientific aspects of production might become diffused among all producers with any native intelligence, and something of the artist's joy in ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... I had once loved, dark with the blackness that went out from my very existence; then I should hate them, and my being would then be a hell to which the hell I now was would be a heaven! There was just grace enough left in me for the hideousness of the terror to wake me. I was cold as if I had been dipped in a well. But oh, how I thanked God that I was what I am, and might yet hope after what I ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... hideousness, And speak off half a dozen dang'rous words, How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst; ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... beautiful landscape, with its exquisite lawns and shrubbery, its picturesque hills, and romantic walks and drives, its sparkling lakes, cascades and fountains, it is hard to realize that so much loveliness was preceded by such hideousness. ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... before—that is, of the silken garments of his rich emotion and adventures. China somehow has understood this deep connexion between man and Nature; and that it is human thought molds the beauty and richness, or hideousness and sterility of the world. Are the mountains noble? They store the grandeur and aspirations of eighteen millions of years of mankind. Are the deserts desolate and terrible? It was man made the deserts: ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... don her hat and coat she was almost overwhelmed by a revulsion of feeling. Two days ago the world about her had seemed a carefree, pleasant, even if sometimes boresome place. Now she shudderingly saw it stripped of its mask and revealed for the first time in all its hideousness, a place of murders and spying and secret machinations. People about her were no longer more or less interesting puppets in a play-world. They were vivid actualities, scheming and planning to thwart and overcome each other. Almost she wished that her ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... to her in this experience, as seen through the lens of a quickened imagination, in all its hideousness. Never had she experienced such a sense of loneliness. Never had she realized so forcibly that she was without father and mother, without kin in a foreign country, without a true home and abiding-place. Never had it been brought ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller |
