"Monstrosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were—no, not a truer, for the other is false, but—a true type of our God beside that monstrosity ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... insufficient nutriment, and are old and decrepit while yet in the bud of youth; the tenements are crowded to suffocation, breeding pestilence and death; while the wages paid to labor hardly serve to satisfy the exactions of the landlord—a monstrosity in the midst of civilization, whose very existence is a crying protest against our pretensions ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... flowers when cultivated in a lowland district{252}. Perhaps the immense class of double flowers chiefly owe their structure to an excess of food acting on parts rendered slightly sterile and less capable of performing their true function, and therefore liable to be rendered monstrous, which monstrosity, like any other disease, is inherited and rendered common. So far from domestication being in itself unfavourable to fertility, it is well known that when an organism is once capable of submission to such conditions fertility is increased{253} beyond the ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... has furnished the most peccant exemplar—a compendium of extravagances and incongruities the farthest removed from the models of a pure age, and resembling rather the grylli or conceits of a period when mystic meaning was held a warrant for monstrosity of form; with this difference, that while the monstrosity is retained, the mystic meaning is absent; in contemptible contrast with the great poem of Virgil, who, as I long held with Filelfo, before Landino had taken upon him to expound the same opinion, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... in faith and love, which charity will prefer to its own private interest. Addictedness to our own apprehension, and too much self overweening and self pleasing is the grand enemy of that place to which we are called into one body. Since one Spirit informs and enlivens all the members, what a monstrosity is it for one member to seek its own things, and attend to its own private interest only, as if it ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... marriage is too apparent to be glossed over any longer. "A.Y.Z." and "A Woman of No Importance" deserve the thanks of every honest heart for their brave outspokenness. Too long has this mediaeval monstrosity cramped our lives. The beautiful word "Home" conceals a doll's house or whitewashes a sepulchre. Marriage is misery in two syllables. How can people be happy chained together like galley-slaves? It contradicts all we ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... supporting the bony hand upon his palm, so that all its fingers were spread out and Cleek might get a clear view of the monstrosity. "What a trial he must have been to the glove trade, mustn't he?" laughing gaily. "Fancy the confusion and dismay, Mr. Rickaby, if a fellow like this walked into a Bond Street shop and asked for a pair ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Wallower in carrion!" And then, with hardly a break: "Allah, All-Merciful, All-Compassionate! Have mercy on Thy servant! I swear by the beard of Thy holy Prophet that I will attend more closely to my duties to Thee if Thou wilt get me loose from this ill-begotten monstrosity! Help me or I perish!" The last words ...
— Hanging by a Thread • Gordon Randall Garrett
... would see what persuasion could do—argument, eloquence, poured out upon the incorrigible captive from the mouth of a trained expert. That was his plan. But the reading of the Twelve Articles to her was not a part of it. No, even Cauchon was ashamed to lay that monstrosity before her; even he had a remnant of shame in him, away down deep, a million fathoms deep, and that remnant asserted itself now ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... do assure you, Nelly, that, until you leave off that monstrosity of steel and cordage, your sense and taste, so far as costume is concerned, must be taken on credit, as well ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... once. We have an evil heredity behind us in this matter, for we have inherited all kinds of funereal horrors from our forefathers, and so we are used to them, and we do not see the absurdity and the monstrosity of them. The ancients were in this respect wiser than we, for they did not associate all this phantasmagoria of gloom with the death of the body—partly perhaps because they had a much more rational method of disposing of the body—a method ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... recognition of this vital truth brought her into sympathy with a world-wide movement. The new woman is no monstrosity, no sporadic creature born of intellectual fermentation and unrest, but the rise and development of a better, nobler type of womanhood the world over. Jenny June's eminent distinction was that she was a leader in ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... as the sun slid into the position described, impressed me very much as I have been impressed, when a boy, by the concluding scene of some well-arranged theatrical spectacle or melodrama. Not even the monstrosity of color was wanting; for the sunlight came out through the chasm, tinted all orange and purple; while the vivid green of the grass in the valley was reflected more or less upon all objects from the curtain of vapor that still hung overhead, as if loth to take its total departure ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... preoccupation of his affections was genuine. According to her theory of life—and there is much to be said for it—a full-blown Adonis, that is to say, a lovable man, refusing to love any woman on any terms, was a sort of monstrosity. The original Adonis of Art and Song was merely an homme incompris, according to this young lady. He hated Venus—odious woman!—and no wonder. She to claim the rank of a goddess! Besides, Gwen suspected that Adrian was only prevaricating. Trothplight was one thing, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... come from time to time to find out if she has any fresh monstrosity, and if it meets with their approval they carry it away with them, paying ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... to the total immolation of individuals, in behalf of society; hence the true explanation of war, eternal law of mankind, interpreted by the liberal-democratic doctrines as a degenerate absurdity or as a maddened monstrosity. ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... which are not in tune individually, and with each other, is a monstrosity; the conductor, therefore, should take the greatest care that the musicians tune accurately. But this operation should not be performed in presence of the public; and, moreover, every instrumental noise—every ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... slough. He had been born there, of a negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of the big fish, so that the child came into the world most hideously marked. Anyhow, Fishhead was a human monstrosity, the veritable embodiment of nightmare. He had the body of a man—a short, stocky, sinewy body—but his face was as near to being the face of a great fish as any face could be and yet retain some trace of human aspect. ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the devil; or so at least abhor anything but that we might come to composition. If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do contemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue, and religion—the multitude: that numerous piece of monstrosity which, taken asunder, seem men and the reasonable creatures of God, but confused together, make but one great beast and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra: it is no breach of charity to call these fools; it is the style all holy writers have afforded ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... secreting a sort of milk for the sustenance of their nestlings. Most people think the phrase "pigeon's milk" is much like the phrase "the horse-marines," a burlesque name for an absurd and impossible monstrosity. But it is nothing of the sort: it answers to a real fact in the economy of certain doves, which eat grain or seeds, grind and digest it in their own gizzards into a fine soft pulp or porridge, and then feed their young with ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped. He didn't care what awful crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet he associated—since he wasn't after all too utterly old to suffer—if it would only be decently proportionate to the posture he had kept, all his life, in the threatened presence of it. He had but one desire left—that he ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... result from partial dichotomy or cleavage of the trunk axis of the embryo, and is found exclusively in connection with the skull and vertebral column. It may take the form of a monstrosity such as conjoined twins or a parasitic foetus, but more commonly it is met with as an irregularly shaped tumour, usually growing from the sacrum. On dissection, such a tumour is found to contain a curious mixture ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... carefully considers them, to form an estimate, for himself, of the respective character and conduct of these young persons. It is almost beyond belief that they were wholly actuated by deliberate and cold-blooded malignity. Their crime would, in that view, have been without a parallel in monstrosity of wickedness, and beyond what can be imagined of the guiltiest and most depraved natures. For myself, I am unable to determine how much may be attributed to credulity, hallucination, and the delirium of excitement, or to deliberate malice and falsehood. There is too ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... monstrosities; hence, the labours of experimentalists, such as those of M. Camille Dareste, are full of promise for the future. In general we can only say that the cause of each slight variation and of each monstrosity lies much more in the constitution of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions; though new and changed conditions certainly play an important part in exciting organic ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... every sort, that the best wish one could make for the good people of Nice is that the next earthquake that visits the Riviera may shake this wretched structure to pieces, so as to give them an opportunity of erecting another in its place which is not a monstrosity. ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... from the hotel's android servants ... to the strictly utilitarian mechanical monstrosity at home, known affectionately as "Old John" ... to the android showroom where they had seen the one that Dad said ...
— Native Son • T. D. Hamm
... were ruined. The cabbages gave him some consolation. One of them especially excited his hopes. It expanded and shut up quickly, but ended by becoming prodigious and absolutely uneatable. No matter—Pecuchet was content with being the possessor of a monstrosity! ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... powers, and in Die Walkuere he is like a man trying to break away from the path which he has laid down for himself, to get rid of the cumbersome spectacular element and let the action develop itself naturally from within. With all its unrivalled beauties the Ring as a drama is a monstrosity. It turns upon motives which are not apparent from the actions and have to be explained in dreary and most undramatic length. Its very foundation is wrong; its central figure, the prime author of the new and more blessed world which is to ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... are those of the archaic village state of "culture," more ancient, more savage, than literary narrative. Very frequently the local legends were subjected to the process of allegorical interpretation, as men became alive to the monstrosity of their unsophisticated meaning. Often they proved too savage for our authorities, who merely remark, "Concerning this a certain holy chapter is told," but decline to record the legend. In the same way missionaries, with mistaken ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... days; a priest, who had been a favourite of the exemplary Dubois, and by turns used to tickle him by the imposition of penance, or by the repetition of a tale from the recueil of Noce, or La Fare. All his appetites were wasted and worn; only some monstrosity would galvanise them into momentary action. He was in that effete state to which many noblemen of his time had arrived; who were ready to believe in ghost-raising or in gold-making, or to retire into monasteries and ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stretched out his hand and switched on another lamp, in the hard brilliance of which the thing upon the pedestal suddenly declared itself, leaping out of the darkness into light. It was a terrible object, a monstrosity of indeterminate sex and nature, but surmounted by a woman's head and face of extraordinary, if devilish loveliness, sunk back between high but grotesquely small shoulders, like to those of a lizard, so that ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... put out with the tailors, and could rarely get suited, on account of the loose cutting and the want of "style." But "style" is the hiatus that threatens to swallow us all one of these days. About the only monstrosity I saw in the British man's dress was the stove-pipe hat, which everybody wears. At first I feared it might be a police regulation, or a requirement of the British Constitution, for I seemed to be about the only man in the kingdom with a soft hat on, and I had noticed that before leaving the steamer ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... sera republicaine ou cosaque." [1 Within fifty years Europe will be either republican or Cossack.] It found the solution in the "republique cosaque." [2 Cossack republic.] No Circe distorted with wicked charms the work of art of the bourgeois republic into a monstrosity. That republic lost nothing but the appearance of decency. The France of to-day was ready-made within the womb of the Parliamentary republic. All that was wanted was a bayonet thrust, in order that the bubble burst, and the monster ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... with our burden of flesh and circumstance we were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it conforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when nature ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... despise, as well as to fear, a spy; educated in utter abhorrence of everything that pertains to that class, at the Russian capital, she could look upon me, now, only with horror and loathing. I was that thing she had most despised. I was that monstrosity of creation, which, calling itself a man, was, according to Zara's lights, without principal, honor, integrity, ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... thus conversing, this clever man stalked in, much to the surprise of every one present, though it was said of him, that he could smell a monstrosity at the distance of a hundred miles. After fixing his scrutinizing eye upon the animal, and witnessing several of his tricks, which he performed with great agility, he commenced casting reflections upon his performances, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... questioning, the reason came out. The king and queen had both had exactly the same curious dream, and this strange occurrence had upset their majesties very much. They both dreamt that one of the princesses, as they believed them to be, had six toes on each foot; and as no monstrosity could ever share the throne of Silverland they demanded to see the princesses' little feet with their own eyes, so as to be quite sure they all had only the ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... the Romish idol Maozim, Dan. 11, 38. (Tschackert, 510.) Frank remarks: "One must see this passage black on white in order to believe the Wittenbergers really capable of stultifying themselves in such an incredible manner. It is a monstrosity, a defense unworthy of an honest man, let alone an Evangelical Christian." ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... that Spirit, the Ally, and many other things and conditions in Corinth, with the lack of as many other things and conditions, are all due to the influence of what he calls "that hideous, cast-iron monstrosity." By this it will be seen that the Doctor is ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... Mr. Blacker. Don't get the wrong idea about our city ordinances. We got statutes that cover this kind of thing. If you don't want to be a victim of one of them, turn that damned monstrosity off!" ...
— Get Out of Our Skies! • E. K. Jarvis
... would knock off the top part of Antwerp Cathedral spire. Nothing can be more gracious and elegant than the lines of the first two compartments; but near the top there bulges out a little round, ugly, vulgar Dutch monstrosity (for which the architects have, no doubt, a name) which offends the eye cruelly. Take the Apollo, and set upon him a bob-wig and a little cocked hat; imagine "God Save the King" ending with a jig; fancy a polonaise, or procession ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at the girl, strove to consider her impersonally, for her youthful beauty began to disturb him. Then cold doubt crept in; something of the monstrosity of the proceeding chilled his enthusiasm for occult research. Should ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... woman," he said to himself—"she's a terror. However, I suppose I've got to be thankful she didn't try to get any of that off her chest in Court—she's quite capable of it. Damn it all! She's a monstrosity—and going to be married too ... well, there are some heroes ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... Rosenkavalier," essentially coarse and boorish and insensitive as it is beneath all its powdered preciosity, that wearies one with Strauss's "Musical Comedy"; or the hybrid, lame, tasteless form of "Ariadne auf Naxos" that turns one against that little monstrosity. It is the generally inexpressive and insufficient music in which Strauss has vested them. The music of "Salome," for instance, is not even commensurable with Wilde's drama. It was the evacuation of an obsessive desire, the revulsion from a ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... go away and take your monstrosity with you," said the mother, pushing away her daughter with pretended sternness, and turning to the visitor she added: "She is my ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... their ambitions after a dose of that. Yet there must be a way to get inside the case and service the engine, they aren't just going to throw them away after a few months' use. And considering the level of technology displayed by this monstrosity I should be able to find the tricks and get around any other built-in traps. I think I'll take ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... the two passages and miss to see that they belong to two different kingdoms of poetry? I lay no stress here on 'architectonics.' I waive that the "Iliad" is a well-knit epic and the story of "Beowulf" a shapeless monstrosity. I ask you but to note the difference of note, of accent, of mere music. And I have quoted you but a passage of the habitual Homer. To assure yourselves that he can rise even from this habitual height ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... short-haired women who wish to see how British babies are reared, peace cranks and freaks of other kinds[73]. Our Government apparently won't let plain, honest, normal civilians come over, but if a fellow comes along who wants to investigate some monstrosity then one half of the Senate, one half of the House of Representatives, and a number of the executive offices of the Government give him the most cordial letters. Now there are many things, of course, that I don't know, but it ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... of what he might have become. I was going to America, and I paid an angry and reluctant visit to my London tailor thirty-six hours before I was to start. A suit of clothes had been sent home which, after an effective trying-on, was a monstrosity. I went straight to my tailor, put on the clothes and bade him look at them. He was a great tailor-he saw exactly what I saw, and what I saw was bad; and when a tailor will do that, you may be quite sure he is a good and a great man. He said the clothes ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... even discarded her shoes, and wore the aboriginal costume almost in full, moccasins and all, her gloves and hat alone remaining to distinguish her in appearance at a distance from a native woman of the Plains. The voluminous and beruffled skirts of the period, and that feminine monstrosity of the day, the wide spreading crinoline, she had left far behind her at the Missouri River. Again the long curls, which civilization at that time decreed, had been forgotten. Her hair at the front and sides half-waved naturally, but now, instead of neck curls or the low dressing ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... increased by modern fashions; for the apology for a bonnet that leaves brow, cheek, and head fully exposed,—the rustle and dimensions of crinoline,—the heavy masses of unctuous false hair attached to the back of the head, deforming its shape and often giving a coarse monstrosity to its naturally graceful poise and proportions,—the inappropriate display of jewelry and the long silk trains of the expensive robes trailing on the dirty walk, and continually caught beneath the feet of careless ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... glowing eyes identified the figure as that of the stranger at the Maori Hut, but there every point of resemblance ceased. Only the cleverest of facial masques and body padding could ever have enabled this monstrosity to pass unnoticed in a world of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... tells us that the son Ghazan was as notable for the reverse. After recounting with great enthusiasm instances which he had witnessed of the daring and energy of Ghazan, the Armenian author goes on, "And the most remarkable thing of all was that within a frame so small, and ugly almost to monstrosity, there should be assembled nearly all those high qualities which nature is wont to associate with a form of symmetry and beauty. In fact among all his host of 200,000 Tartars you should scarcely find one of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... St. Bernard monstrosity out of the ring. This is a class for collies, not for freaks. I refuse to judge that pup as ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue, stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature, endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... made her tell all; she let her know that she had money enough now for all three, and promised that Brigaut should live with them. The poor girl admitted her martyrdom, not imagining the events to which her admissions would give rise. The monstrosity of two beings without affection and without conception of family life opened to the old woman a world of woe as far from her knowledge as the morals of savages may have seemed to the first discoverers who ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... of life there is a weed; a hideous monstrosity, shaped something like an octopus, and capable of the most horrible—" He stopped abruptly, remembering that one of his hearers was a woman. "Never mind ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... careful consultation of all attending circumstances, gave it as their opinion that the occurrence was an unfortunate impurity, and that it could only result to the disadvantage of Rome, unless she at once took steps to purify herself of such a monstrosity, with the conclusion that the androgyne should be first exiled from Roman soil, and then drowned in the depths of the sea. The unfortunate being was accordingly inclosed in a chest and put on board a galley, which put immediately to sea; when the vessel ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... mud and blood and blackness. In Lamiel there is little else. Moreover, that unchallengeable "possibility of humanity" which redeems not merely Le Rouge et le Noir but the less exciting books, is wanting here. Sansfin, the doctor, is a mere monstrosity in mind as well as in body, and, except perhaps when she ejaculates (as more briefly reported above), "Comment! ce fameux amour, ce n'est que ca?" Lamiel herself ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... London, were provided for in foundling hospitals, by cooking and eating them. This was an extravaganza, though really bolder and more coarsely practical than mine, which did not provoke any reproaches even to a dignitary of the supreme Irish church; its own monstrosity was its excuse; mere extravagance was felt to license and accredit the little jeu d'esprit, precisely as the blank impossibilities of Lilliput, of Laputa, of the Yahoos, &c., had licensed those. If, therefore, any man thinks it worth his while to tilt against ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... days, mostly off-duty time, visiting and working on the asteroid he had adopted, his two miles of irregular monstrosity. In his spurt of activity to install the drive unit, he had over-calculated a charge of explosives and blown out too much of the end section of the asteroid. That caused him some concern for a little while. In ...
— Jack of No Trades • Charles Cottrell
... and saw Him floating upwards and received into the Shechinah cloud and lost to their sight. Peter's change, witnessed by the words of my text—these bold and clear-sighted words—seems to me to be a perfect monstrosity, and incapable of explication, unless he saw the risen Lord, beheld the ascended Christ, was touched with the fiery Spirit descending on Pentecost, and so 'out of weakness was made strong,' and from a babe sprang to the stature of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... affect to aid the poor brute by laying idle hands on the barrow behind, as I would unnatural parents. Pegasus harnessed to the Thracian herdsman's plough was no more of a desecration. I fancy the poor dog seems to feel the monstrosity of the performance, and, in sheer shame for his master, forgivingly tries to assume it is PLAY; and I have seen a little "colley" running along, barking, and endeavoring to leap and gambol in the shafts, before a load that any one ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... became her best, made with a long pointed bodice and paniers, and lace that had been worn by the wife of the first patroon. She had risen to the dignity of a wig, and her mass of black hair was twisted mercilessly tight under the spreading white monstrosity to which her veil was attached. Hamilton wore a black velvet coat, as befitting his impending state. Its lining and the short trousers were of white satin. His shapely legs were in white silk, his feet in pumps ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the most remarkable productions in this way was the ponderous monstrosity invented by one Dr. Nicholson (Fig. 43). This hideous and unwieldy weapon was put forth by its inventor as the only correct form for a violin bow! It had to be haired with precisely 150 horse hairs dyed red. The reasons for this and the eccentric curve ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... the long, spiked spine of the big fish: down from the other side of that ferocious head dangled the fish's tail, and from above the remarkable effect thus produced shot the intolerable glare of two yellow eyes. To the gaze of Duke, still blurred by slumber, this monstrosity was all of one piece—the bone seemed a living part of it. What he saw was like those interesting insect-faces which the magnifying glass reveals to great M. Fabre. It was impossible for Duke to maintain the philosophic calm of ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... pursued in all ways, and, in case of success, the moment will soon arrive when many States will see themselves placed, as is the case already with South Carolina, in presence of a number of slaves exceeding that of free men. Such a social monstrosity never existed under the sun; even in Greece, even in Rome, even among the Mussulmans, the total number of free men remained superior; the colonies alone, through the effect of the slave trade, presented an inverse phenomenon, and the colonies were consolidated with their metropolises in the ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... drawing-room. At any other time I should have been glad to see him flying off with the whole thing, handle included. But now I felt the theft of that one feather as an added injury. Mrs. Sparrow chirped with delight at sight of the gaudy monstrosity. Having got the house cheap, they were going to spend their small amount of energy upon internal decoration. That was their idea clearly, a "Liberty interior." She looked more like a Cockney sparrow than a country one—had been born and bred in ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... rudiment of a single digit to a completely double hand—the occasional appearance of additional digits in the salamander after a limb has been amputated—these various facts appear to indicate mere fluctuating monstrosity; and this perhaps is all that can be safely said. Nevertheless, as supernumerary digits in the higher animals, from their power of regrowth and from the number thus acquired exceeding five, partake of the nature of the digits in the lower vertebrate animals;—as they ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... abhorrence of Antonio, whom he says he loathes with the inexplicable revulsion of nature that certain men feel toward certain animals; and the mastery of the poet shows itself in thus making Shylock's cruelty monstrous, and accounting for it as an abnormal monstrosity. ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... through these comic recollections of Mr. Magsman, yet, when rattled through by Dickens, the laughter awakened seems now in the retrospect to have been altogether out of proportion. In itself the subject was anything but attractive, relating, as it did, merely to the escapade of a monstrosity. The surroundings are ignoble, the language is illiterate, the narrative from first to last is characterised by its grotesque extravagance. Yet the whole is presented to view in so utterly ludicrous an aspect, that one needs must laugh just as surely ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when Antonia screamed. When I turned, he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter 'W.' He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I thought—he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... witchcraft increase, however, the details grow more and more revolting; and in the year 1590 we find a most extraordinary batch of cases—extraordinary for the monstrosity of the charges contained in them, and also for the fact that this feature, so insisted upon in Macbeth, the raising of winds and storms, stands out in extremely bold relief. The explanation of this is as follows. In the year 1589, King James VI. brought ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... expresses regret that he had not himself, from the beginning, imagined an earlier date for the action. But he fears that to change the time, now that the piece is finished, will result in making it a monstrosity, a 'crow ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... "But this monstrosity, Mrs. Irwin, will be past and gone as soon as you indignantly repudiate the suggestion of your ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... This monstrosity emanated from the brain of Ivan Hrosnoj, "the Terrible John." When he saw the architect's work complete he was delighted, loaded him with praise, embraced him, and then ordered his eyes to be put out, that no such second masterpiece ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... of our conversation." I replied that I had but one voice, and that I had not been aware that his Royal Highness had two. "That confirms my impression," said the King, "that you are not a Man, but a feminine Monstrosity with a bass voice, and an utterly uneducated ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... in the direction of the sound and presently there hove in sight a colossal something of behemoth proportions;—something the like of which I had never seen or heard of in all my life, and I was stricken dumb with amazement. A monstrous monstrosity climbed its way without let or hindrance, up, over, along and across every obstacle in its path. Presently it reached the top of Pozieres Ridge; every man who could see had his eyes glued on it. It came down the ridge at about five miles an hour with two ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... father-in-law of an Ardea, he triumphs, the thief who should by rights be a convict!... But we shall see. Will not all the other Roman princes who have no blots upon their escutcheons, the Orsinis, the Colonnas, the Odeschalchis, the Borgheses, the Rospigliosis, not combine to prevent this monstrosity? Nobility is like love, those who buy those sacred things degrade them in paying for them, and those to whom they are given are no better than mire.... Princess d'Ardea! That creature! Ah, what a disgrace!... But we must remember our engagement relative to that brave ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... System in New York City in 1895, when Roosevelt took control, was a monstrosity which, in almost every respect, did exactly the opposite from what the Police System is organized to do. Moral values had been so perverted that it took a strong man to hold fast to the rudimentary distinctions between Good and Evil. The ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... the largest landholder and the richest citizen of Prussia. We have seen what he expects of his navy and of his army. Speaking on the 6th of September, 1894, he says: "Gentlemen, opposition on the part of the Prussian nobility to their King is a monstrosity." ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... shores. As I remember Jersey City and Hoboken in my boyhood, they were only small clusters of buildings, with a ferry-house at the water's edge. Now they have crept along from the Palisades to the Kill van Kull, overflowed the Bergen Hills, reared giant structures which rival New York's in monstrosity, and extended their railroad-wharves and steamship-piers over the Arcadian haunts of the Elysian Fields and the primitive meadows of Communipaw and Paulus Hook. And on the East River Brooklyn, joined to New York by its Siamese ligament of the Bridge, seems the bigger twin of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in a certain sense, worth study in their monstrosity: they have accordingly developed a corresponding science of fiction, concerned mainly with the description of such forms of disease, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... his voice while he spoke, nor in the recounting of such inhuman monstrosity, such vile and bloodthirsty conspiracy against the liberty, the dignity, the very life of an entire nation, did he appear to feel the slightest indignation; rather did a tone of amusement and even ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... more cordially received than the drama, as is indicated by this criticism by Hanslick: "Perhaps in a few years Ibsen's Peer Gynt will live only through Grieg's music, which, to my taste, has more poetry and artistic intelligence in every number than the whole five-act monstrosity of Ibsen." Among other notable orchestral and chamber music numbers may be mentioned a setting of Bjoernson's Sigurd the Crusader, Bergliot, based upon the sagas of the Norse kings, a suite composed for the two hundredth anniversary of Ludwig Holberg, ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... the original, if she bore any resemblance to her monkish portraiture, excite the envy or the admiration of the present age, or bear comparison with her fair posterity. Her physiognomy is anything but fascinating, and her figure is a repulsive monstrosity, adorned with a profusion of luxurious hair ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... Paris. And at last he came to the dusk, and to that Paris-Sodom and Paris-Gomorrah before him, which was lighting itself up for the night, for the abominations of that accomplice night which, like fine dust, was little by little submerging the expanse of roofs. And the hateful monstrosity of it all howled aloud under the pale sky where the first pure, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... they sang and said in the private gatherings of the Methodist Societies could only deepen and intensify the feeling of monstrosity. They sang frequently:— ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... ferocious brutality of the dead monster, except—von Horn's brain came to a sudden halt at the thought. Could it be? There seemed no other explanation. Virginia Maxon had been rescued from one soulless monstrosity to fall into the hands of another equally ...
— The Monster Men • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hand, although of course very rarely, there are ABNORMAL natures in which the ordinary measure of the organ of perception—that is, the brain—is exceeded, just as nature frequently forms monstrosities in which ONE ORGAN is developed at the expense of the others. Such a monstrosity, if it reaches the highest degree, is called GENIUS, which at bottom is caused only by an abnormally rich and powerful brain. This organ of perception, which originally and in normal cases looks outward for the purpose of satisfying the wants of the will of life, receives in the case of an abnormal ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... had many critics in the stormy days that followed 1789. Delisle de Sales found it a monstrosity—a fratras; La Harpe called it an infamous book, "un amas de btises qu'on ose appeler philosophie, inconcevables inepties, un immense chafaudage de mensonge et d'invective"; M. Villemain is much more calm and ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... ill-fitting basque, which failed to accomplish a meeting with the skirt at the usual trysting-place. Over this she had a shawl of the most royal shade of purple imaginable, and instead of looking like a pretty, graceful Indian girl, she appeared to be a variegated monstrosity. ...
— Six Days on the Hurricane Deck of a Mule - An account of a journey made on mule back in Honduras, - C.A. in August, 1891 • Almira Stillwell Cole
... that," said Indiman, who had joined us at the window. "There is a distinct stimulus to the imagination in the picture before us. And what a picture!—this eyeless, gray-faced, architectural monstrosity, crowned with squat, domelike head of coppery red, and set in that gigantic cadre ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... Every reader will be treated to special revelations of this sort, some more, some less, some one and some another. For our individual share we are favored with enlightenment as to three of our private possessions. One of these is the Dog Fo, a little white Chinese monstrosity. We have been familiar from childhood with two of him, seated in unspeakable but complacent hideousness at the opposite ends of the chimney-piece. No. 2 is a gallon pitcher, sacred to the gingerbread of two generations, and ornamented with a ship under full sail on one ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Beverley could not love her, could not help looking upon her as a poor, wild, foolish girl, unworthy of consideration. She magnified her faults and crudities, she paraded before her inner vision her fecent improprieties, as they had been disclosed to her, until she saw herself a sort of monstrosity at which all mankind was gazing with disgust. Life seemed dry and shriveled, a mere jaundiced shadow, while her love for Beverley took on a new growth, luxuriant, all-embracing, uncontrollable. The ferment ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... Pilgrim's Progress would have been exactly what it is, is simply to ignore the facts of the case. John Bunyan is far more interesting just because his work is part of English literature, because it did feel the influences of his own time and of the past, than it could ever have been as the mere monstrosity of detachment which it has been supposed to be. The idealist who merely dreams and takes no part in the battle, refusing to know or utilise the writing of any other man, can be no fair judge of the life which he criticises, and no reliable ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... not be so? What should such a monstrosity produce but miseries and crimes? What is monarchy? It has been finely disguised, and the people familiarized with the odious title: in its real sense the word signifies the absolute power of one single individual, who may with impunity be ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... now, I wonder?" he said. By his tone he seemed to be preparing to resent some new monstrosity in the way of dins and smashes. He shaded his eyes with his grimy hand and gazed over ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... dream of a Tartar; it was true Nihilism pushed to extreme and practical conclusions. It was, in a word, the applied philosophy of chance, the indeterminate end of anarchy. Monstrous it may be, but grand in its monstrosity! ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... Child" opening (see Macculloch, 415 ff.). This formula of a childless couple finally promising in despair to let their child serve even the Devil if they are granted offspring, or to be satisfied with an animal-child or some other monstrosity, is a favorite one in Filipino Maerchen (cf. Nos. 3 and variants, 19 and variant, and 23), and its use here may have been influenced by the ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... and the wrists laden with bracelets. She was adorned indeed with a great deal of jewellery, including some startling earrings of a bright green stone. The hat, which she had carefully placed on a chair beside her, was truly a monstrosity!—but, as Doris guessed, an expensive monstrosity, such as the Rue de la Paix provides, at anything from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty francs, for those of its cosmopolitan customers whom it pillages and despises. How did the lady afford it? ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... appalled by the monstrosity he had created, for it was a loathsome, repulsive creature. Its head was flat and broad and sat upon its sloping shoulders without a connecting neck. Its legs were short, but its arms were long, and when standing erect it carried them well in front of an enormous torso. Its short hands and feet were ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... a centre for the arrangement of many other musical instruments—a viol, mandolins gay with ribbons, a theorbo, flutes and clarinets. Through the curtains, draped across an alcove, could be guessed the modern monstrosity of a grand piano. One tall closed cabinet was devoted to his collection of wall-papers. Another, open, to a collection of little dogs in china, porcelain, faience; thousands of them; he got them through dealers from all ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... default. Country printers were allowed fourteen days instead of six. This act, as may easily be imagined, spread confusion and dismay in all directions. Half-penny and farthing newspapers fell at once before the fierce onslaught of the red oppressor—a vegetable monstrosity, having the rose, shamrock, and thistle growing on a single stalk, surmounted by the royal crown. All the less important and second-rate journals withered away before the deadly breath of the new edict, and a few ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... story, and changed the roof to one of flat pitch crowned by a hideous cupola. Still a third meddler had tried to make it over into a colonial homestead by painting the stucco white and joining on an enormous columned porch. The final result could hardly have been otherwise than an artistic monstrosity, yet the old house had acquired that certain unanalyzable dignity which time confers, and the gentle fingers of the years had softened down insistent angles and smoothed out unlovely curves. It was a house with a soul, for men had lived ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... 'learning,'—namely, a wise heart. In the former view, it teaches us our solemn obligation not to hide our light under a bushel, but to speak boldly and lovingly all the truth which God has taught us. A dumb Christian is a monstrosity. We are bound to give voice to our 'Wisdom.' In the other aspect, it reminds us that there is a better way of getting Wisdom than by many books,—namely, by filling our hearts, through communion with God, with His own will. Then, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... there is a little ceremony. The babe is brought and laid upon the hearth or floor before the household gods for the father to inspect it. As has been said already, if it is a monstrosity, he may order it to be made away with. Otherwise it is still open to him either to acknowledge the infant or to refuse to have anything to do with it. The act of acknowledgment consists in stooping down and lifting up the child from the ground. For this reason the expression ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... askew upon the ground, seeming to be partly buried in the earth. A hundred feet and more in length, it was even more obviously a monstrosity as he looked at it in the bright light of day. But now it was not alone. Beside it a white tower reared upward. Pure white and glistening in the sunshine, a bulging, uneven shaft rose a hundred feet sheer. It looked as solid as marble. ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... course, something to do with it,—a form that seems almost a departure from natural laws. But the form alone does not produce the full effect, which is only experienced when you see the creature in motion. The true horror of the centipede, perhaps, must be due to the monstrosity of its movement,— multiple and complex, as of a chain of pursuing and inter- devouring lives: there is something about it that makes you recoil, as from a sudden corrupt swarming-out. It is confusing, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... brick-bats; and the Reverend Mr. Arnold shrank into the furthest corner of Surgeon-Major Livingstone's box, and knew all the misery of outrage. Pilate and the slave-maidens, Pilate's fat wife and an unspeakably comic centurion, offered as yet hardly more than a prelude, but the monstrosity of the whole performance was already projected upon Arnold's suffering imagination. This, then, was what Patullo had done with it. But what other, he asked himself in quiet anger, could Patullo have been expected to do—the fellow ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... territory, has grown to be one of the leading Powers of Europe by the gradual absorption of all the surrounding small States; therefore only great Powers have a right to exist (paragraph XXII.); therefore small States are a monstrosity ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... and would put everything right—that Christophe must not show himself and that if he made any remark it would have a very bad effect. He made Christophe sit at the very back of the box. Christophe obeyed, but he beat his head with his fists; and every fresh monstrosity drew from him a groan of indignation ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... pronounced upon the four other cases, laboured under antecedent improbabilities so great as to vitiate, or to load with suspicion, the entire case of the Privy Council. But, on the contrary, the shocking monstrosity of the charge strengthens the anti-Boleyn impeachment. As a means for getting rid of Anne, the Rochford case was not at all needed. If it could even in dreams be represented as false, the injury offered ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... taken away the effect of strangeness—the perfect balance of the parts and harmony of the whole? For instance, the blue eyes of the northerner would, when first described to the black-eyed inhabitants of warm regions, seem unbeautiful and a monstrosity, because they would vividly see with the mental vision that unheard-of blueness, but not in the same vivid way the accompanying flesh and hair ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... conquer our repugnance to its ugly looks and savage mien, and contemplate the hideous monstrosity,—as it is useless to deny that it combines the graces of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Dickens' Quilp, with certain features of its own,—for the ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay elsewhere. He was not responsible. The clay of him had been so moulded in the making. He did the cooking for the other men in the fort, the dish-washing and the drudgery. They did not despise him. Rather did they tolerate ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... drifted in the chaos of the everyday world. He remarked that heaven was in his dreams, hell in his association with men. And how dead everything about him seemed to be! It was all like a cemetery; it was a cemetery. His doughtiest life was gradually transformed into a shadow and lacerated into a monstrosity. But that he was aggrieved at men he felt full well; for they lived more innocent lives than he, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... and ground, common charcoal, deer tallow, and spruce gum are used for this purpose. Labrets—pieces of wood, bone or shell, from 1.5 to 2.5 inches in length—are worn by a few old females, but this hideous, monstrosity is now never found upon the young women. Many of the middle-aged, however, pierce the centre of the lower lip and insert a small silver tube, which projects about a quarter of an inch. Both sexes ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... delighted, and never remembered his tooth to have created such a sensation; and when at last it was returned to him, he turned it about in his own hand, and cast many fond glances at the monstrosity, before it was finally deposited in his waistcoat pocket. This was the most ridiculous part of the exhibition: to see a gentleman, with the use of his eyes, looking affectionately at a thumping horse's tooth, and believing it to be his own. Yet this was a key ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... first," said Jean, "there was no thought of pleasing either you or me when she was christened—or rather when the late Mr. Duff-Whalley was christened. And I pointed out the house to you the other day. You asked what the monstrosity was, and I told you it was ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... Chicago, and the last, is of an unfinished monstrosity. It might be a vast railway station, built for men and women twenty feet high. The sky-scrapers, in which it cherishes an inordinate pride, shut out the few rays of sunlight which penetrate its dusky atmosphere. They have not the excuse ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... held this: that my name would disappear from the papers as suddenly as it had arrived there. People would want to know why I had given up writing. "Written himself out," "No staying power," "As short-lived as a Barnum monstrosity": these would be the remarks which would herald ridicule and ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... uncouth. In a field, as Millet has shown us, he possesses a beauty, dignified and touching. It is not impossible, therefore, that an artist who had the opportunity of entering into the life of a rhinoceros, as Millet had of entering into the life of a peasant, might discover beauty even in that monstrosity. This, however, I allow is an ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... ride of the suburbs. The very idea seems preposterous, for one cannot but associate the charms of a "find" with the horrors of "going to ground" in an omnibus, or the fox being headed by a great Dr. Eady placard, or some such monstrosity. Mr. Mayne,[6] to be sure, has brought racing home to every man's door, but fox-hunting is not quite so tractable a sport. But ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... height, she has a woman's body, exquisitely slim and young, with the breasts of a virgin. Very chaste in attitude, she holds in her hand a long-stemmed lotus flower, but by a contrast that nonplusses and paralyses you the delicate shoulders support the monstrosity of a huge lioness' head. The lappets of her bonnet fall on either side of her ears almost down to her breast, and surmounting the bonnet, by way of addition to the mysterious pomp, is a large moon disc. Her dead stare gives to ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... dote upon an interesting monstrosity—the worse portion. Women admire courage, because it is the quality they lack—I mean animal courage, the mere faculty of looking into a pistol-muzzle calmly; and their admiration is so great that they are carried away by it. They admire in the same way a gay wild fellow; ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... broken wall and found myself in a stone courtyard, with gilded shrines and grinning Buddhas. One image more hideous than the rest, with eyes like glow-worms, untangled its legs and came towards me. I shook with fright. But it was only the dwarf priest—a monstrosity of flesh and blood, who kept the temple. I pointed to the light which seemed to be hanging to the side of the rocks above. He slowly shook his head, then rested it on his hands and closed his eyes. I pushed him aside and painfully crawled up the shallow stone stairs, ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... glorying is idle vanity and unadulterated blasphemy. The moment we abase ourselves and give in to the rage of our opponents, Papists and Anabaptists grow arrogant. The Anabaptists hatch out some new monstrosity. The Papists revive their old abominations. What to do? Let everybody become sure of his calling and doctrine, that he may boldly say with Paul: "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than ye have received, let him ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... without the joys and companionship of wife and child, the young man who doesn't plan to have a home of his own to which he can lead the choice of his heart and in which he may multiply, thru the development of his own offspring, his powers of usefulness,—such a young man is a selfish monstrosity. And the young woman who isn't longing for a home of her own—for a little kingdom in which as Queen, she may rule jointly with a chosen King in loving ministration to their natural subjects—such a young woman is an abnormal specimen. The desire of every little girl ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... Asie bore a likeness to the grotesque figures the Chinese love to paint on screens, or, more exactly, to the Hindoo idols which seem to be imitated from some non-existent type, found, nevertheless, now and again by travelers. Esther shuddered as she looked at this monstrosity, dressed out in a white apron ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... are more that way than my hands," replied Richard. "Only some of my fingers have got the web between them. My mother made me promise to put up with the monstrosity till I came of age. She seemed to think some luck ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald |
