"Weird" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the low wail of the sad music is in our ears, the scene changes to a weird world of faery, the story merges in a dream, and Rip Van Winkle smiles at us from a realm beyond the diocese of conscience. If conscience, indeed, will obtrude, conscience shall be satisfied. It is a sermon if you will, but if you will, also, it is ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... while the whip-like shadow of death writhed across a strip of moonlight—and disappeared. There was life,—of a sort, in Chitor. So Roy trod warily as he passed from room to room; dread of dark forgotten in the weird fascination ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... he murmured over and over again. "The thoughts that well up in my bosom at such a sight as this are beyond the power of words to express. When I view these immense plains, these mountain tops fading away in the distance, these wild and weird torrents rushing over the rocks, and these trackless forests with often not a human abode in sight, ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... this guise it was, stumbling awkwardly over his unaccustomed skirts, shouting womanly imprecations upon his own head in a weird falsetto to sustain his part, and to the roaring note of a crowd bent upon lynching him, that the original discoverer of Herakleophorbia IV. proceeded down the corridor of Chesterfield Mansions, mingled with that inflamed disorderly multitude, ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... wherein to dwell upon this amazing tragedy, for scarcely had the boatswain been restored to his senses and conveyed below to his hammock to recover from the shock of his terrible adventure, when a low, weird, moaning sound suddenly became audible in the air all about the ship, the canvas of the close-reefed topsails, which had been flapping monotonously with the heave and roll of the ship, shivered and slatted violently for a moment, and a gust ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... dark lowering faces skulked about. Even when we felt no personal danger this incubus of savage life all around weighed on our hearts. Thus it was day and night. Even those hours of twilight, which brood with sweet influences over so many lives, bore to us, on the evening air, the weird cadences of the heathen dance or the ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... receive them. I have seen at times hundreds of squaws and children wading about in Yaquina Bay taking crabs in this manner, and the reflection by the water of the light from the many torches, with the movements of the Indians while at work, formed a weird and diverting picture of which we were ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... effective. And they certainly give your face a truly weird expression, in addition to its ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... satyr, faun; manito[obs3], manitou, manitu. possession, demonic possession, diabolic possession; insanity &c.503. [in jest, in science] Maxwell's demon. [person possessed by a demon] demoniac. Adj. demonic, demonical, impish, demoniacal; fiendish, fiend-like; supernatural, weird, uncanny, unearthly, spectral; ghostly, ghost-like; elfin, elvin[obs3], elfish, elflike[obs3]; haunted; pokerish [obs3][U.S.]. possessed, possessed by a devil, possessed ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... made Peggy forget her question, and listen in the same way. She wanted to do everything in the same way that Georgina did it, and from that moment that piece of music held special charm for her because Georgina called it weird. ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and beard floating in the wind, the bronzed naked figure, like some weird old Indian fakir, still climbed on steadfastly up the mizzen-chains of the Spaniard, ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the prisoners, turned upon the braves, with blazing eyes, violently throwing out his hands with the gesture of breaking bonds. Like all sudden demonstrations of undemonstrative men, it was extravagant, weird, and theatrical. But it was more potent than speech—the speech that, even if effective, would still have betrayed him to his countrymen. The braves hurriedly cut the thongs of the prisoners; another impulsive ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... brief digression, which we consider needed advice, we will resume our task, and attempt to usher our student into the weird labyrinth of Solomon's starry temple—"the house not made with hands, eternal in ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... Jeremiah xxxi. 16, requires a brief consideration. The original is still less a prophecy than was the passage in Hosea. It is a highly imaginative and grandly weird personification of the mighty mother of three of the tribes, stirring in her tomb, and lifting up the shrill lamentation of Eastern grief over her children carried away to captivity. That hopeless wail from the grave by Bethlehem is heard as far ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the world except what can be gotten from an expurgated edition of the classics. He wants him brought to manhood as nearly as can be made, a perfect specimen of the human male animal without one thought of sex. It's a weird experiment, but I don't see why ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... gorse; the curious dodder spreading a tangled red skein of thread over it gemmed with little round white balls, the rare marsh cinquefoil, the brilliant yellow asphodel, the delicate, exquisite, bog pimpernel, the blue skull-cap, the two weird and curious sun-dews, and even in former times the beautiful dark blue Gentiana Pneumonanthe, as well as the two pinguiculas—Vulgaris, like a violet, and the ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... first sight of Monument Valley came with a dazzling flash of lightning. It revealed a vast valley, a strange world of colossal shafts and buttes of rock, magnificently sculptored, standing isolated and aloof, dark, weird, lonely. When the sheet lightning flared across the sky showing the monuments silhouetted black against that strange horizon the effect was marvelously beautiful. I watched ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... went, down through the park, and on and on by ways the attorney did not know, until at last they arrived at a little dell. The night was pitchy dark, and nothing could Ezekiel see but the ghostly figure gliding along ahead of him, all lit by a weird phosphorescent light. In the dell was a small granite cairn, and here the ghost stopped and looked ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... years ago, as she would, likely, in years to come, sunk in a reverie, watching the leaves fall, as they fell a twelve-month since; the leaves were just the same, the sky seemed still unchanged, the wind chanted the same weird, lonely lamentation, only she was different, something had come into her life in that interval of years, and had gone out of it again, leaving it so desolate, so aimless, so blank! She had had a good draught from the cup of life, since that other autumn ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... and—not the least interesting—the mess cooks preparing the evening meal at the crackling camp-fires, with the huge, canvas-covered wagons encircling them like ghostly sentinels; the ponies and oxen blinking stupidly as the flames stampeded the shadows in which they were enveloped; and more weird than all, the buckskin-clad bullwhackers, squatted around the fire, their beards glowing red in its light, their faces drawn in strange black and yellow lines, while the spiked grasses shot tall and ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... and 'me.' Christ meets him with, Who is the 'I'? and the very effort to answer would facilitate the deliverance. But for the moment the foreign influence is still too strong, and the answer, than which there is nothing more weird and awful in the whole range of literature, comes: 'My name is Legion; for we are many.' Note the momentary gleam of the true self in the first word or two, fading away into the old confusion. He begins with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... Most weird and fantastic are these nightly visits to West Indian harbours. Above, the black mountain-depths, with their canopy of cloud, bright white against the purple night, hung with keen stars. The moon, it may be on her back in the west, sinking like a golden goblet ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... was then near the end of October—the weird song of a solitary brave was heard. In an instant the camp was thrown into indescribable confusion. The meaning of this was clear as day to everybody—all of our war-party were killed, save the one whose mournful song announced the ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... itself frivolous, and submitted meekly to hearing itself decried as vain, fluttered through the Paris Exposition, jogging the futilities of St. Gaudens, Rodin, and Besnard, the world that thought itself serious, and showed other infallible marks of coming mental paroxysm, was engaged in weird doings at Peking and elsewhere such as startled even itself. Of all branches of education, the science of gauging people and events by their relative importance defies study most insolently. For three or four generations, society has united in withering ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... a touch of frost in the air, yet with the feeling in it of approaching spring. A dim light fell over the forest from the half-moon and the stars, and seemed to fill up the little clearing in which the manse stood, with a weird and mysterious radiance. Far away in the forest the long-drawn howl of a wolf rose and fell, and in a moment sharp and clear came an answer from the bush just at hand. Mrs. Murray dreaded the wolves, but she was no coward and scorned ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... expression of the influence of the vast, desolate, and lonely nature amid which they passed their lives. It is true that Lincoln was never a backwoodsman, and never roved alone for long periods among the shadowy forests and the limit-less prairies, so that their powerful and weird influences, though not altogether remote, never bore upon him in full force; yet their effect was everywhere around him, and through others he imbibed it, for his disposition was sensitive and sympathetic ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... go every little while just for fun. We all pretend that we don't believe in it, but we do. I'm scared blue every time I go to a new one—they're all such creepy creatures. The last one I went to was positively weird." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... god moved slowly on To gain his own dominions dim, Leaving the body there—anon Savitri meekly followed him, Hoping against all hope; he turned And looked surprised. "Go back, my child!" Pale, pale the stars above them burned, More weird the scene had grown and wild; "It is not for the living—hear! To follow where the dead must go, Thy duty lies before thee clear, What thou shouldst do, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... at the weird countenance, distorted and made unhuman by long torment of body and mind, and found in it something to trust; yes, even signs of that sympathy which she so sorely needed. So she told her all the tale from the first word of ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... with a yell, Tore from the branch, and cast on earth, the shield, Drove his mailed heel athwart the royal crown, Stampt all into defacement, hurled it from him Among the forest weeds, and cursed the tale, The told-of, and the teller. That weird yell, Unearthlier than all shriek of bird or beast, Thrilled through the woods; and Balan lurking there (His quest was unaccomplished) heard and thought 'The scream of that Wood-devil I came to quell!' Then nearing 'Lo! he hath slain some brother-knight, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... noted half-breed, Peter Erasmus, as the capable interpreter. Those present who had not been accustomed to the plains witnessed a spectacle of wild splendour, as preceding the treaty, over a thousand Indians, brilliantly and fantastically painted, chanting a weird song, firing rifles, exhibiting marvellous horsemanship, beating drums and giving strange yells, advanced in a semi-circle near to the Commissioner's tent. All this was preparatory to the famous dance of the stem, where ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... horizon, look down upon a sleeping world; yet not all asleep, for far down the road skirting yonder wood, a strange procession approaches;—goblin-like figures, hideous with enormous horns, glaring eye-balls and lolling red tongues, and mounted upon weird-looking steeds, ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... is round, do roll over, and does not spill off the sea in doing so. At last came shrill head winds, and as we added fifteen miles an hour to this speed, the harp strings in the rigging were touched with weird music, and we filled our lungs consciously and conscientiously with American air, experiencing one of the old sensations, better than ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... so ghostly has it grown, and that they would be ashamed to offer their dinner to the beasts which perish. They will write such descriptions home, and hold such conferences with friends spending the holidays with them, and they will all vie with one another in applying such weird and fearsome adjectives to the butter, milk, coffee, meat, potatoes, and pudding—but at the mention of pudding they will simply look at one another and be silent, despairing of the English language—that their horrified parents will take counsel ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... green color extended upward for perhaps fifty feet, then it shaded into red. The farmer noticed, too, that the fire did not leap and dance with flames, but seemed rather to glow—a steady light like the burning of colored powder. In the morning half-light it threw a weird, unearthly reddish-green ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... tale, told dramatically in the dark, I had next morning blamed the weird waking nightmare that I had suffered after her visit. The horror of the night could not endure the strong sun and wind of the March morning that followed. Like Scrooge, I analyzed my ghost as a bit of undigested ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... a certain sunset hour when she came at Pierre's call out to the shed he had built at one side of their cabin. Its open side faced the west, and, as Joan came, her shadow went before her and fell across Pierre at work. The flame of the west gave a weird pallor to the flames over which he bent. He was whistling, and hammering at a long piece of iron. Joan ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... wearing a belt which brought him these sensations. He could have no idea, however, who was communicating with whom, and pattings and scratchings would have no meaning at all. He could only know that the weird experience stopped when someone shook hands with himself and that ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster
... flashing lights and flaunting shadows, while low masses of torn vapor drifted overhead, hiding, then revealing the stars, and all in absolute silence, not even the sounds of the streets entering this prison-like place, was weird and uncanny in the extreme. I must confess that already I began to feel a slight disposition towards the horrors, but with that curious inconsequence which so often happens in the case of those who are deliberately growing scared, I could think of nothing more reassuring than those delicious ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... trustless, timorous lease of human life Warns me to hedge in my diplomacy. The sooner, then, the safer! Ay, this eve, This very night, will I take steps to rid My morrows of the weird contingencies That vision round and make one hollow-eyed.... The unexpected, lurid death of Lannes— Rigid as iron, reaped down like a straw— Tiptoed Assassination haunting round In unthought thoroughfares, the near success Of Staps the madman, argue to ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Faith, traced as with a gold pen dipped in melted pearls on black enamel. My seal was an emerald, Faith also, impaled. I snatched it up and laid it by the ring on her hand. She smiled—such a smile! intensest sympathy, deepest! Could it be? to love the same old symbols, the same weird music? I caught her close, and bent over her lips. The gold hair waved over my shoulder; the great, glittering eyes foamed into mine, then melted and swam into deep, quivering seas of dreams. I whispered, 'Zoe mou!' Oh, the quick, golden whisper, the flash of genial heartiness, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... children among children can express with a very small vocabulary what they want to say to each other, whereas an only child who lives with its elders has usually a larger vocabulary than it can manage, which makes the sayings of only children quaint and almost weird, as the perfection of the instrument persuades us that there is a full-grown thought within it, and a child's fancy suddenly laughs at ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... and smooth that her sister, the pale-faced, blue-eyed Theo, likens it to a piece of shining satin. Now, as ever, the pet and darling of the household, she moves among them like a ray of sunshine; and the servants, when they hear her bird-like voice waking the echoes of the weird old place, pause in their work to listen, blessing Miss Margaret for the joy and gladness ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... all dead, and there was no chance of their returning to plague them, the people of Hamelin refused to pay the reward, and they bade the piper do his worst. He took them at their word, and a few moments later the weird strains of the magic flute again arose, and this time it was the children who swarmed out of the houses and merrily followed ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... window; but there were evidences that the owner possessed more hobbies than one, for a piece of copper was in process of being beaten into a pattern of pomegranates and leaves, a work-table was littered with odds and ends, and on an old black tray was a weird medallion portrait of a gentleman, manufactured out of plasticine, a lump of ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... greater skill with another instrument only less powerful. He was seated on two reversed buckets, pyramidally balanced, at a small table which had the air of wide capabilities in some other sphere of usefulness. There was a weird cunning in the legs of this table indicative of subtle change into a camp-bed ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... Call it anything you like, but the castle is haunted, just the same. My grandfather was one of the wealthiest nobles in Spain. When he died my father went to take possession of his estate in Segura. He found the town full of weird stories of uncanny happenings—the castle was deserted, everyone had fled and all told of something in armor that stalked ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Melodramatic Farce in Four Acts • Paul Dickey
... brings! But tell me, Master, what means this minor chord,—this undertone of sadness and of pathos that flows like a deep, unfathomable current throughout it all, and wailing, weaves itself about thy theme of love and happiness with its weird and ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... Lucille, the girl he loved ... with whom he had dined in New York only a day or two before ... this unconscious form, stretched out on the deck of the weird ship that was rushing through eternity? Or, rather, it was they who were rushing through space and time upon a stationary ship! What was reality, and what was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... found little to win him from that self-analysis which later enabled him to mystify a world that rarely pauses to take heed of the ancient exhortation, "Know thyself." In the depths of his own being he found the story of "William Wilson," with its atmosphere of weird romance and its heart of ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... girl started, opened wide her eyes, threw up her arms, and began in weird, passionate tones, as if it were a stage declamation. Oh the lurid thought that seemed to travel from regions of bliss to the nethermost hell; to display a boundless capacity for enjoyment, for pleasure or pain, for tenderness and bitter, brilliant satire, a keen knowledge of the ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... busy making butter in a churn which was nothing more than a skin vessel three feet long, of the shape of a Brazil-nut, suspended from a rude tripod; this they swung to and fro to the tune of a weird Kurdish song. Behind one of the tents, on a primitive weaving-machine, some of them were making tent-roofing and matting. Others still were walking about with a ball of wool in one hand and a distaff in the other, spinning ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... he reached the tavern. He went inside, saw men and women dancing in a dim light, and there was a huge, rainbow-colored musical instrument by the door which startled him by its resonance. The music was wild, weird, a ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... with his eyes as he made off towards Waterloo Bridge, the bewildered pressman all but came to the conclusion that he was the victim of a weird hallucination. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... be: and on the answer depended his acceptance or declination. Dining with him one night, I was fascinated by his wife; it seemed to me that I had never seen a woman of such wonderful and almost weird powers: there was something exquisitely beautiful in her manner and conversation; and, on my afterward speaking of this to another guest, he answered: "Why, of course; she is the daughter of Goethe's Bettina, to whom he wrote the 'Letters to ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... financier seized either species of weird leisure. (Also a few uncommon words, like ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... see blackguards; but these men were something worse. There is a comic side, more or less appreciable, in all blackguardism—here there was nothing but tragedy—mute, weird tragedy. The quiet in the room was horrible. The thin, haggard, long-haired young man, whose sunken eyes fiercely watched the turning up of the cards, never spoke; the flabby, fat-faced, pimply player, who pricked his piece of pasteboard perseveringly, to register ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... glasses were gathered before it in great easeful chairs, and the wild weather outside and the comfort that was within, and the season of the year—for it was Christmas—and the hour of the night, all called for the weird or uncanny, then out spoke the ex-master of foxhounds ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... our weird. You are a canny Scotch-woman, and know what that means. Come, you must cheer up, for I have brought a young lady with me who is going to put your daughter-in-law a little more comfortable and see after her from time ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... announced him. But they made a tour of the room, looking behind and under the larger objects, lifting the lids of the marriage chests and opening the doors of the cupboard. Into the cellar, too, they descended, and made a careful search. The five candles produced a weird effect in their promenade along this subterraneous apartment, lighting up an astonishing medley of furniture, garden implements, empty bottles, the posts and side pieces of an extra bed, a broken statue, another ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... suffered a direct hit. In front of the big white house there had once been an asphalt tennis court—there was now a plain pitted at every few yards by huge shell holes. The summer-house at the edge of the wood—once the scene of delightful little flirtations in between the games of tennis—was now a weird wreck, consisting of three tottering walls and a broken seat. Oddest of all, there lay near the white marble steps an old, tyreless De ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... but a sudden turn, almost at right angles with their course, presented an obstacle which the driver hesitated whether or not to encounter; but it was impossible to return, though they were not without serious fears that the weird woman might lead them on to a situation from which they could not extricate themselves. Still she beckoned them forward, until they emerged into another and a wider road, on which ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... at either end with massive towers. More picturesque, but less majestic are the neighbouring ruins of Spesburg, mere tumbling walls wreathed with greenery, and many another castled crag we see on our way. We are indeed in the land of old romance. Nothing imaginable more weird, fantastic and sombre, than these spectral castles and crumbling towers past counting! The wide landscape is peopled with these. They seem to rise as if by magic from the level landscape, and we fancy that they will disappear magically as they have come. And here again one wild visionary ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... period never died. They grew up, instead, and proved serviceable friends. Fishing and hunting are now the high-lights of vacation time. The crude call of the weird and the inexplicable has modulated into a siren note from the forgotten psychic continents which we Western peoples have only just discovered and begun to explore. As for the buried treasure craze—why, my life-work practically amounts to a daily search for hidden valuables in the cellars and ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... hill rose up on one side, gloomy and stern, but the reflection of the fires reached it, and made its sides quiver—the rock itself seemed trembling. The sombre pines showed up, a wall all round, and in the open space, turreted with fantastic fires, the Indians swayed in and out with weird chanting, their bodies mostly naked, and painted in strange colours. The earth itself was still and sober. Scarce a star peeped forth. A purple velvet curtain seemed to hang all down the sky, though here and there ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... kept up to the mark in these matters. The marching Frenchmen were singing—but singing in a fashion quite novel to the British. Throughout their column there were anything up to a dozen songs in progress, some as choruses and some as solos, and the effect was certainly rather weird. The Tower Bridge officers, knowing their own men's fondness for swinging march songs, expected, and, to tell truth, half hoped that they would give a display of their harmonious powers. They did, but ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... and the scenery became more weird and depressing. The few who watched him remarked that there were three places where Peter seemed to be more than usually moved. For a time he hurried past them, whistling as he rowed; but gradually he seemed to be fascinated. The idle loungers in the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... said! It has the ring and weird mystery of De Quincey. There are phrases that Thackeray would not have used, such as jar on the ear and betray an immature taste. "Necropolis" is a strange affectation when "City of the Dead" was at hand; and "pointing ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... connection with the burning of a witch. The traditionary story makes out Kate M'Niven to have been a nurse in the family of the Grammes of Inchbrakie, and as a proof that she was a member of the weird sisterhood, a story is told of her in connection with a visit which the Laird of Inchbrakie made to Dunning on the occasion of some festivity. According to the fashion of the time, he took with ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... was a weird rustle, there rose all about them the squeak of piping little voices, and the sounds of a confused scampering. At the crosspaths there darted in all directions, as thick as dust, countless hordes of grey sprites and evil spirits. Their running was so impetuous ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... until he went down on the Isle of Haut. The events of that brief and thrilling period are unfortunately obscure, with only a ray of light here and there. But the story of his passing is the most weird of all the strange yarns that are spun about the "Island of ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... involuntarily seeks a firmer footing and clings to a projecting rock. The height of the Gulf is ninety-five feet and the distant sound of falling water is not reassuring. The walls are not smoothly worn away, but have the rough and weird appearance of having been torn by a torrent in a narrow mountain gorge, and are stained with the ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... which I can only describe as an attempt at the ordinary barnyard rooster's "cock-a-doodle-do" combined with the scream of a cat when its tail is trodden upon by a heavy-booted foot. Here in these silent, darkened aisles of the forest it sounded weird and uncanny in the extreme, and aroused an intense desire to knock the creature over; but I forebore to fire, although we once had a view of a fine bird, attended by a hen and chicks, scurrying across the leaf-strewn ground not fifty ...
— "Martin Of Nitendi"; and The River Of Dreams - 1901 • Louis Becke
... save for the other, alone. The dog, his saturnine expression glazed and ghastly in the fixedness of death, propped up against that humpbacked boulder beneath which, a while before, the Black Killer had dreed his weird; and, close by, his master lying on his back, his dim dead eyes staring up at the heaven, one hand still clasping a crumpled photograph; the weary body at rest at last, the mocking face—mocking no longer—alight ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... kind of cresset protected by a wire globe, was suspended from the roof by a string. It shed a faint and wavering light, creating weird shadows in that far-stretching space, too vast for the ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... was endowed with an imagination abnormally active even for a child. It is customary to give prominence to De Quincey's pernicious habit of opium-eating, in attempting to explain the grotesque fancies and weird flights of his marvellous mind in later years; yet it is only fair to emphasize the fact that the later achievements of that strange creative faculty were clearly foreshadowed in youth. For example, ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... the sense that Mavering professed to have received from it, when he jumped out of the beach wagon in which he had preceded the other carriages through the weird forest lying between the fringe of farm fields and fishing-villages on the western shore of the island and these lonely coasts of the bay. As far as the signs of settled human habitation last, tho road is the good hard country road of New England, climbing steep little ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... through the house, paused at the place under the stairs where the imperial Shirley had her fierce encounter with that almost human dog, Keeper; she stood in the drawing-room where the sainted three sisters, arm-in-arm, paced up and down plotting their weird stories. She walked through the same old gate, on the same single stone pavement and over the same stile out into the same heather fields, gazing on the same dreary sky above and the same desolate earth on every side. She dined in the same old "Black Bull"; ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... accomplished in the brotherhood which is in the world.' He did not mean to say, 'Take comfort, for other people are as badly off as you are,' but he meant to call to the remembrance of the solitary sufferer the thousands of his brethren who were 'dreeing the same weird' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... of the Steenbeek are left behind and flickering Verey lights cast into weird relief the rugged surface of the earth. At Pommern Castle our front trenches, in which figures of men loom indistinctly, are reached. At one corner, where the trench is littered with fragments, we are cautioned by a sentry, whose voice is a little shaken, not to linger; the entrance ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... scene vanished like silver fumes of smoke, and this continued for one hundred years. This most unlikely legend has been told in beautiful Spanish and English poetry, and for all its unlikelihood has found its way with its weird charm into many homes. ...
— Chimes of Mission Bells • Maria Antonia Field
... at the mere multitudinousness of the curios he had contrived to crowd into the space around him. Side by side rested a palaeolithic implement, a Chinese 'wise man,' a Gnostic gem, an amphora of Graeco-Etruscan work. The general effect was a bizarrerie of half-weird sheen and gloom. Flemish sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets, miniature paintings, a winged bull, Tamil scriptures on lacquered leaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmin gods. One whole side of the room was occupied by an organ whose thunder ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... noon of December 31, 1960, when the series of weird and startling events began which took me into the tiny world of an atom of gold, beyond the vanishing point, beyond the range of even the highest-powered electric-microscope. My name is George Randolph. ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... "Scarlett, it was a weird sight. I never saw tents struck so quickly. Kelly Eyre, Horan, and I harnessed up; Grigg stood guard over the props with a horse-pistol. The ladies worked like Trojans, loading the wagons; Byram raged ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... Burton, who called them the eighth wonder of the world, always assumed that Dante got his ideas of the Inferno. Lighted by a million candles, and crowded with peasants in their picturesque costumes, which made wondrous arabesques of moving shadows, the caves presented a weird and unearthly appearance, which the music and dancing subsequently intensified. Shortly afterwards Drake left for Palestine. In May (1874), Burton was struck down by a sudden pain, which proved to arise from a tumour. An operation was necessary, and all was going on well when a letter ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... West, yes—but a most unusual one, touched with an almost weird poetic fancy from the very first page, when over the sandy wastes sounds the clear sweet whistling of Pan of the desert, to the very last paragraph when the reader, too, hears the cry and the call of the ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... 'cease to be,' And empires rise and grow and fall; But the weird music of the sea Lives, and outlives ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... winds, and evil spirits of all sorts, worship the high-souled lord of Uma, possessed of diverse characteristics. And there, O king, the adorable god sports with the wild and playful followers of Kuvera, possessed of weird and ghostly appearances. Glowing with its own splendour, that mountain looks resplendent as the morning sun. And no creature with his natural eyes made of flesh, can ever ascertain its shape or configuration, and neither heat nor cold prevails there, nor ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Mont St. Michel is strange and weird in the extreme. A vast ghostlike object of a very pale pinkish hue suddenly rises out of the bay, and one's first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy palaces which will fly off, or gradually fade away, or sink bodily through the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... streaked his jacket front and stained its sleeves to the elbows. He was bare-headed, for his cap had remained in the moat at Blentz, and his disheveled hair was tousled upon his head, while his full beard had dried into a weird and tangled fringe about his face. At his side still hung the sword that Joseph had buckled there, and it was this that caused the two men the greatest suspicion ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... companies of soldiers at the farther end,—a different regiment to each hall. For six hours these men and their officers stand motionless as statues. Not a movement, except now and then of the eyelid, can be detected: even their respiration seems to be suspended. There is something weird and uncanny in such a preternatural silence and apparent death-in-life. I became impressed with the idea that some form of catalepsy had seized and bound them in strong trance. The eyeballs were fixed: they stared at me and saw ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... before theirs a distant wail, proceeding from some distance in front, apparently—weird and wild as it could be, dying away or surging upon the ear as the wind swept it hither or thither. Arthur shrugged his shoulders. 'You have no ghosts in these ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Yellowstone and the Colorado rise in lakes in the enchanted Wind River Mountains. Mr. Stuart mentions the weird tales, told by trappers and hunters, of places—avoided, if possible, by man and beast—in these mountains where trees and game and even Indians are petrified, and yet look natural as in life. These trappers are accustomed to exaggerate. I remember hearing a very serious account from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... lingered over the silent moor, with its old Pictish mounds and burial places, giving them an indescribable aspect of something weird and eerie. No one could have been insensible to the mournful, brooding light and the unearthly stillness, and Margaret was trembling with a supernatural terror as she stood amid the solemn circle of gray stones and looked over the lake of ...
— Winter Evening Tales • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... reveal the half effaced inscriptions and pictures on the tablets of memory. Snatches of dialogues once held are recalled, faint recollections of old friendships return, and fragments of landscapes beheld and deeds performed long ago pass in weird procession before the mind's half opened eye. We know a professional gentleman of unimpeachable veracity, of distinguished talents and attainments, who is a firm believer in his own existence on the earth previously to his present life. He testifies ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... spine, and formed this system of lakes. Another break occurs on the high plateau, from Portuguese East Africa in the south to British East Africa in the north, along the Great Rift Valley, with its magnificent escarpments and weird scenery, prolonged through Lake Rudolf to the Red Sea and on to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley. Great volcanoes, now mostly extinct, though some to the north of Kivu are still active, are a still later ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... not up thy lips forever—veiled in mist and mystery. I will sit and lowly listen at the phantom-haunted falls Where thy waters foam and glisten o'er the rugged, rocky walls, Till some spirit of the olden, mystic, weird, romantic days Shall emerge and pour her golden tales and legends through ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... beckoned to the figure, and opened a half-concealed door which led into his study. The strange but opportune visitant seemed to motion to me with a gesture of his hand, which I felt I must obey, and I followed in this weird procession. From the study we mounted by a private staircase to a large, well-furnished bed-chamber. Here we paused. Mr. Maryon looked tremblingly at the stranger, and said, ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... strange and weird fire, enough to frighten any man, but the still, dark-robed figure standing beside it never moved, not even when a number of tiny little imps appeared, clad in scarlet, and green, and blue, and purple, and danced round and round it on the table, tossing their tiny arms, and twisting ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... rolled such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing. Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand—she would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence—and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered nothing. ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... summer continued on,—the long, beautiful, glaring, implacable summer; its heat quaking on the low roofs; its fig-trees dropping their shrivelled and blackened leaves and writhing their weird, bare branches under the scorching sun; the long-drawn, frying note of its cicada throbbing through the mid-day heat from the depths of the becalmed oak; its universal pall of dust on the myriad red, sleep-heavy blossoms of the oleander and the white tulips of the lofty ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... he gripped too tightly with the right he would pull. Pulling in the hands was an error, so he did not pull in his hands. Gripping too tightly was a defect, so he did not grip too tightly. With that weird concentration which had served him so well in business he did precisely what he had set out to do—no less and no more. Golf with Vincent Jopp was ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... of girls and boys, Their rainbowed cloud of glooms and joys Born with their songs, gone with their toys; Nor ever is its stillness stirred By purr of cat, or chirp of bird, Or mother's twilight legend, told Of Horner's pie, or Tiddler's gold, Or fairy hobbling to the door, Red-cloaked and weird, banned and poor, To bless the good child's gracious eyes, The good child's wistful charities, And crippled changeling's hunch to make Dance on his crutch, for good ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... native kinds. There are doves belonging to the same genus as stock-dove and wood-pigeon, that have exceedingly good voices, in which the peculiar mournful dove-melody has reached its highest perfection—weird and passionate strains, surging and ebbing, and startling the hearer with their mysterious resemblance to human tones. Or a Zenaida might be preferred for its tender lament, so wild and exquisitely modulated, like sobs ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... leaves. Then he fished out the most horrible, woolly, many-legged little animal I ever saw in my life. He said it was a giminythoraticus billyancibus, and he was as tickled over it as though he had just picked up a million-dollar diamond. And what do you suppose the weird creature did with it? He wrapped it in a couple of leaves, and put his handkerchief around it and put it in his pocket!—Do you remember when we were eating by the creek, and I got jam on my fingers? He offered me his handkerchief to wipe it off? Do you ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... when the 'Flying Saucer' craze first started. Or when Fantafilm put on their big publicity stunt for the improved 3-D movie, 'The Outsiders', and people saw the aliens over Broadway and heard them address the populace in weird, booming tones. ...
— The Fourth Invasion • Henry Josephs
... waists, tufts of feathers in their hair, and carrying in their hands painted wands. Heading the procession as the men filed out from the scrub into a cleared space in front of the women, came Narahdarn. The light of the fires lit up the tree tops, the dark balahs showed out in fantastic shapes, and weird indeed was the scene as slowly the men danced round; louder clicked the boomerangs and louder grew the chanting of the women; higher were the fires piled, until the flames shot their coloured tongues round the trunks of the trees and high into the air. ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... to see the inside of this mysterious dwelling, and yet now that the moment had come, how gladly would they have found themselves safely at home in the Vicarage! Pennie and Ambrose had vied with each other in providing strange and weird articles of furniture and ornaments for it; but the reality was almost startlingly different. When, after several knocks, the boys were told to "come in," they entered a room which was just like that in any other cottage, except that it was barer. There was, indeed, scarcely any furniture at all, ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton
... us, and we passed westward along a broken, irregular valley. The vivid turf was sown with all the flowers of spring,—primrose, violet, buttercup, anemone, and veronica,—faint, but sweetest-odored, and the heralds of spring in all lands. So I gave little heed to the weird lines of cloud, twisting through and between the severed pyramids of the Sentis, as if weaving the woof of storms. The scenery was entirely lovely, and so novel in its population and the labor which, in the long course of time, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... weird, unearthly light overhead, bluish-rose in colour, the cold blue night sank on the snow. In the valley below, behind, in the great bed of snow, were two small figures: Gudrun dropped on her knees, like ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... to do with this. Of course there was nothing we could talk of but the strange experience by virtue of which I was there, but they talked of it with an interest so naive and direct in its expression as to relieve the subject to a great degree of the element of the weird and the uncanny which might so easily have been overpowering. One would have supposed that they were quite in the habit of entertaining waifs from another century, so perfect was ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... worked in your own parlor, will produce as much sensation as a fake "medium." In all appearance, a violin, mandolin or guitar, placed on a table, will begin to produce music simply through stamping the foot and a few passes of the hand. The music will not sound natural, but weird and distant. ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... had a fine view of Boston harbor. Sitting there late one moonlight night, admiring the outlines of Bunker Hill Monument and the weird effect of the sails and masts of the vessels lying in the harbor, we naturally passed from the romance of our surroundings to those of our lives. I have often noticed that the most reserved people are apt to grow confidential ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... enough to discourage the most brilliant and observant of writers; with an occasional note of a visit on shore, generally reached by a walk of half a mile over sand, and of talks with shop people and fishermen. But such lighter relief was rare. The bulk dealt with channels and shoals with weird and depressing names, with the centre-plate, the sails, and the wind, buoys and 'booms', tides and 'berths' for the night. 'Kedging off' appeared to be a frequent diversion; 'running aground' was of almost ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Suddenly a weird cry, shrill and piercing, broke the silence. It seemed to come from just in front of them, and sounded awful; as if a baby were being murdered. The children clutched hold of father's hand. "It was all right as long as father and mother were there," they thought with ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt
... Strewn upon a rosewood, inlaid table were a hundred and more etchings. Many were quite small, heads of men and women minutely and beautifully wrought; others, larger in size, were Biblical subjects; some were weird and fantastical; one, for example, showed a foreshortened figure lying before an erection, upon which a skinny bird stood with outstretched wings, flanked by ugly angel boys ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... returning to this place, which, so far as we could see, was absolute desolation, without a neighbor, but which to him was bristling with memories and associations and old friends across the intervale and over the mountain and round the spur. There was something weird to me, as I looked out at the flying whiteness of the moonlit storm, in those acquaintances of his among the hollows of these pallid hills; it seemed as though they must partake of the coldness and whiteness, and as if they ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... enough. There was a long bar, against which were lounging half-a-dozen typical Mexican cowpunchers. There was a small space cleared for dancing, at the further end of which two performers were making weird but vehement music. Three girls were dancing with cowboys, not ungracefully considering the state of the floor and the frequent discords in the music. One of them—the prettiest—stopped abruptly and pushed her partner away ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... trolls tobogganing down the highest peaks of Norway; in some we feel human souls hovering over reefs; in others, memories of the old sun-lit land flit before us; but in none do we meet with sentimentalism, despondency, or disconsolateness." But with their weird and minor strains, and their odd jumps from low tones to high, on first acquaintance they strike the ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... transparent roofing we saw clearly the bottom, one forest of soft, undulating weeds, which, catching the sunlight through the crystal-clear water, looked like golden woods of some enchanted world within its depths; and it looks just as weird and lovely when folks go drowning down there, only they don't see it. I sang Mrs. Hemans's "What hid'st thou in thy treasure-caves and cells?" and sang and sang till, after rowing for an hour over the hardly heaving, smooth surface, we reached the foot of the barren ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Nappy and Pop and every one of the millions of people looking silently on around the world. But most of all, he hated Milt. It was a weird, sickening thing, that hatred. But only a mentally sickening thing. Physically, it seemed to make Frankie stronger, because when the bell rang and he got up and walked into a straight right, it didn't hurt ...
— Vital Ingredient • Gerald Vance
... vague sense of change struck him. The roads were better. There was an odd little building near the yellow house. It was the new school, but of that Northrup had not heard. From the distance the chapel bell sounded. It did not have that lost, weird note that used to mark it—there was definiteness about it that suggested a human hand sending ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... the inhabitants had fled from it, as from many others in the neighbourhood, had it not been for the shouts of abuse that answered his thumping. In his feverish and enfeebled state the angry screaming seemed to him part of a hallucination belonging to the weird, dreamlike feeling of his unexpected condemnation to death, of the thirst suffered, of the volleys fired at him within fifteen paces, of his head being cut off at a blow. "Open the door!" he cried. "Open in the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... dim mists had a certain weird quality and Robert's imaginative mind heightened its effect. It was almost like the blind shooting at the blind. A pink dot would appear in the fog, expand a little, and then go out. There would be a sharp ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... And the weird evening, Karshish thinks, had something to do with the strange impression the man has made on him. Then we are placed in the dreamy village of Bethany. We hear of its elders, its diseases, its flowers, its herbs and gums, of the insects which ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... flared up as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Presently they were left alone. The heavy breath of the palm trees floated in upon them; the fruit of the passion-flower hung temptingly at the window; they could hear the sound of a torrent just behind the house. The day was droning luxuriously, yet the eyes of both, as by some weird influence, were fastened upon the hill; and presently they saw, at the highest point where the road was visible, a horseman. He came slowly down until he reached the spot where the road was barricaded from the platform of the cliff. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... modes, and manners,—the stranger beasts, immense, and alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... the policeman had disappeared, for she released her slight grasp of my arm, although continuing to walk quietly enough by my side, her face partially averted. The night was deathly still, the sodden walk underfoot scarcely echoing our footfalls, the weird mist closing denser about us, ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... gruff voice of a man bade me enter. I found myself in a small room, blue with smoke and poorly furnished. An old man was cooking supper, as he hummed some weird old gypsy tune. He seemed scarcely to notice me and displayed neither surprise nor dissatisfaction at my sudden appearance. I murmured some excuse about being in the wrong house, that I was looking for Nancy Turner in order to learn about some of ...
— Futurist Stories • Margery Verner Reed
... that night upon his bed of buffalo skins in the corner, listening to the weird sounds of the night without, he knew that for the present at least that haunting terror of the unknown and that disturbing sense of his own insufficiency would not trouble him. That dwelling place, quiet and secure, of the McIntyres' ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor |
